This comment to the Washington Post
article repeats a mistake many people make in thinking about spies,
particularly assassins: “Lee Harvey was not the kind of guy I’d want on my
conspiracy team.” I made the same mistake in the early stages of the Church
Committee investigation. Troubled by the fact Oswald had met a KGB officer in
Mexico City who was in Department 13 of the KGB, the section that dealt with
assassination and sabotage, I arranged a briefing by a witness who was an
expert on the KGB. Skeptical of claims of a conspiracy, I asked the witness the
leading question: “Lee Harvey Oswald was hardly the type of person the KGB
would pick as an assassin?” To which the witness immediately answered: “He was precisely the kind of man they would choose." Assassinations are usually suicide
missions, which sane men won’t undertake. Experience in World War II led the
KGB to look for misfits and others that could be manipulated into taking such missions.
This is the difference between the real
world of espionage and assassination and the highly romanticized world of James
Bond and other fictional spies. True, there are men who sell their killing
skills for money, but they are few. This
is the subject of Chapter 8 of Murder, Inc. in which I compare the Soviet’s
General Sudoplatov’s advice about what to look for in an assassin, someone with
an inferiority complex who thinks assassinating an important figure will make
him superior to others, with the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald sought
for himself “a role as the ‘great man.’”
This is also the reason I included
so much of the spy craft of the AMLASH operation in the book. I wanted to show
that the CIA’s approach was not so different. After the case officer had met
with Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) in Brazil on September 7, 1963, he cabled
headquarters, complaining that Cubela was a “spoiled brat” and a control
problem. He had no interest in learning the details of good spy work. Desmond
FitzGerald at headquarters cabled back the admonition that Cubela was a “bird
in the hand.” Being an armchair critic is different from being a government
official charged with carrying out an order. As Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld said to critics about being unprepared for the invasion of Iraq: “You
go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have
at a later time.”
Finally, to those who think the
underworld was involved in Kennedy’s death, I point to the CIA’s experience
with using the underworld to assassinate Fidel Castro. It discovered that the
underworld’s hit men could not be used to machine gun Fidel Castro on the
streets of Havana because that would be a suicide mission. The underworld might
employ goons, but they were rational men who wanted a reasonable chance to escape
alive. As a result, the CIA had to supply the underworld with various poisons
to put in Castro’s food or drink, giving the assassin time to escape before the
victim showed symptoms.
