Dousing a Popular Theory

"United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe." This warning, voiced by Cuban President Fidel Castro just ten weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, has long fed a theory that the Cuban leader was behind the killing of the President. Indeed, even Lyndon Johnson used to tell intimates that he blamed Cubans for Kennedy's death. Last week, the Castro connection was the chief topic of testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations from an all-star cast that included, remarkably, Castro, ex-CIA Director Richard Helms, former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and the three surviving members of the Warren Commission: former President Gerald Ford, former Kennedy Adviser John J. McCloy and former Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky.

The suspicion that Castro or his agents could have conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill Kennedy rests chiefly on the fact that the Cuban leader had reason to be angry with the President. There had been the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Additionally, the CIA tried to assassinate Castro in the 1960s, using U.S. mobsters as hit men. There is also some slight circumstantial evidence for the theory. In September 1963 Oswald sought a visa to enter Cuba at the country's consulate in Mexico City. That same year, Oswald was arrested in New Orleans while passing out leaflets in support of a committee called Fair Play for Cuba.

The most eloquent testimony against the theory came from Castro himself, who talked for 4 1/2 hours with committee members in Havana last April. Tape-recorded portions of the interview were played last week and translated. Said Castro: "Who here could have operated and planned something so delicate as the death of the United States' President? That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years, in every possible sense. What could we gain from a war with the United States? The destruction would have been here."

What of his 1963 statement on assassination plots? Castro said it was only a signal to the U.S. that he was aware of the attempts on his life and they should be stopped. He added: "I said something like 'Those plots start to set a very bad precedent, a very serious one, that could become a boomerang against the authors of those actions.' But I did not mean to threaten by that. I did not mean by that that we were going to take measures --similar measures--like a retaliation."

There have been reports that Oswald, when seeking his visa to Cuba, told Cuba's Mexican Consul, Eusebio Azcue, of his plans to kill Kennedy and that the information was relayed to Castro, who did not take it seriously. This was contained in a National Enquirer article by British Journalist Comer Clark. Castro scoffed at the report as fictitious. Azcue recalled Oswald as having been "discourteous" when his visa application was rejected but said that they never talked about Kennedy. Nonetheless, the House committee staff cryptically reported to the Congressmen that "the substance of the Clark article is supported by highly confidential, but reliable, sources available to the United States Government."

Ford acknowledged that the CIA had never told the Warren Commission about its attempts to assassinate Castro. "Why we weren't given it, I frankly don't understand," he said. Yet he insisted that the information would not have changed the commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone, because the members had thoroughly studied the possibility of Cuban involvement anyway. Ford said the idea was presented in strong arguments by the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, who felt that Castro was somehow involved.

Helms, who was CIA liaison to the Warren Commission, admitted to the committee that he had not told the commission about the Castro assassination plots, but, noting that John McCone was then CIA director, he asked: "Why single me out as the guy who should have told the Warren Commission?" Did he now believe that he should have informed the commission? Helms, who grew short-tempered as the committee grilled him for seven hours, replied: "Yes, I should have backed up a truck and taken all the documents down to the commission."

Former FBI Agent James R. Malley, who was the bureau's emissary to the Warren Commission, was just as forceful in disputing claims that the FBI's assassination investigation had been deficient. Said he: "You have had the benefit of the Rockefeller Committee, the Church Committee, all of our files. Maybe you could tell me what you think we did wrong."

Still, Malley conceded that even he had not been kept fully informed by agents investigating the assassination. Not until 1977, for instance, did he learn that the Dallas FBI office had received a note from Oswald one week before the assassination, threatening to blow up a federal building unless agents stopped trying to interview his wife Marina.

While the House committee last week was dousing old conspiracy theories, a new one was being lighted--and in the unlikeliest of places: Moscow--by Author Julian Semyonov. His theory, published in the Russian weekly Ogonyok: Lee Harvey Oswald was a Chinese agent, and the conspiracy to kill the President was a joint effort of American gangsters and anti-Soviet strategists in Peking.

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