The Assassination Plot That Failed

Of all the charges of wrongdoing by the Central Intelligence Agency, the most disturbing are those that implicate the agency in plots to assassinate foreign rulers who were deemed inimical to U.S. interests. Among the putative targets were Congolese Nationalist Leader Patrice Lumumba and Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who were assassinated in 1961; South Viet Nam President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was murdered in 1963; and Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. The allegations are being investigated by a Senate committee, which last week continued to question past and present CIA officers about the alleged plots. At TIME'S request, Charles J. V. Murphy, a former editor and Washington correspondent of FORTUNE, talked with his long-time sources in the U.S. intelligence field about the charges and sent this report:

The suspicion is that two Presidents--Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy --authorized or condoned foul plots by the CIA to do in several foreign leaders. Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who heads the Senate investigating committee, has claimed to have "hard evidence" of the agency's complicity but nothing that would implicate any President. Still, in the singular relationship of the agency to presidential authority, evidence of a CIA assassination plot would seem to implicate one President or the other, even both, unless, of course, the CIA had become a law unto itself. What the Rockefeller commission report revealed was "in all likelihood just the tip of the iceberg," according to Church. The real likelihood is that so far as the actual assassinations are concerned, there was never much more to this floating body than a deceptively shimmering tip. Castro, however, was another matter. The agency version of the charges is this:

TRUJILLO. Former senior officers of the CIA maintain that neither the agency nor Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy had anything directly to do with the dictator's death. Officials in the American embassy had tried to persuade Trujillo to resign to end the domestic unrest that the U.S. feared might make the country ripe for Communism. They had also been gingerly in touch with leaders of the political opposition and as a token of the American interest in seeing a change, had provided one faction with three rifles. A group of seven or eight men ambushed Trujillo on the road from his house to the presidential palace. Whether any of the U.S.-supplied rifles were used in the killing has never been determined to the senior CIA men's satisfaction.

LUMUMBA. The Soviet Union supported him with money and arms in the contest to take the former Belgian Congo out of the West's orbit. While the CIA supported President Moise Tshombe of Katanga against Lumumba, it had no part in Lumumba's arrest and murder by Katanganese soldiers. He was a casualty of African tribal politics.

DIEM. The coup against Diem was planned with the knowledge of Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman at the State Department, Robert S. McNamara and Roswell Gilpatric at the Defense Department and the late Edward R. Murrow at the U.S. Information Agency. The U.S. hoped Diem's overthrow would halt the domestic turmoil that had weakened South Viet Nam. But the CIA's director, John A. McCone, vigorously opposed the overthrow of Diem on the reasoning that none of the generals enlisted in the coup would be half as effective a leader as the man they wanted to bring down. After the coup, Diem was murdered. Former senior CIA officials insist that the slaying was the private work of the Vietnamese generals' junior officers and was done without the U.S. Government's foreknowledge.

CASTRO. Though Castro is still alive, it is not because the CIA did not consider various ways of doing him in. The design on the "maximum leader's" life burgeoned over a span of some two years into a corpus of schemes. As best the principals remember, the idea first emerged in the late spring or early summer of 1960 as a simple, even simple-minded plot to poison Castro's food or slip him a poisoned cigar. By some accounts, the notion originated with a senior officer in the agency's Western Hemisphere division whose ideas interested Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the agency's Office of Security. Edwards passed the idea on to Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr.

He instructed Edwards to explore the feasibility of the project. For help, Edwards turned to a former FBI agent and later Howard Hughes associate, Robert A. Maheu. Maheu, then a private consultant and investigator, was believed to have a line to Mafia interests that had operated gambling casinos in Havana. Through the connection, Edwards sought to find out whether the Mafia could produce, if need be, a man in Havana in a position to liquidate Castro.

Through Chicago Mafia Chieftain Sam Giancana, who was murdered last week in his suburban Chicago home, and his lieutenant, John Roselli, the CIA recruited a gangster reputed to be in Castro's entourage of bullyboys. In late September Bissell and Edwards informed Director Allen Dulles of the results of their tentative explorations. Bissell maintains that his discussion with Dulles was in the most general terms; he was merely encouraged to test the ground further.

The medical section of the CIA produced some exotic pills and even "fixed" a box of fine Havana cigars. The cigars seem never to have left the laboratory, but the pills were turned over to the Mafia. The would-be assassin was to have been paid $150,000 if he succeeded; some earnest money, "a few thousand dollars," was turned over to him. Giancana and Roselli expected something more important than money: both were under investigation by the Department of Justice and hoped to escape prosecution. In due course, the pills moved to Miami but no farther.

No one seems to know why nothing happened. Perhaps the man in Havana got cold feet. Or he may have been eased out of his former close proximity to Castro. By some accounts, Giancana and Roselli found a replacement for the original assassin and turned the pills over to him. The substitute later claimed to have put two separate three-man teams of infiltrators ashore in Cuba. If he did, nothing more was ever heard of them.

There is a further mystery as well. It would scarcely have been in character for Dulles to proceed in such a delicate, potentially notorious enterprise without Eisenhower's sanction or at least the authorization of the National Security Council. But there is no record of such authority.

Problem of Amnesia. One of Bissell's senior lieutenants in the Cuba business later stated he was advised by Bissell on two different occasions that the plan had White House authority. Bissell claims to have no memory of making such a statement. But he has also said he would not dispute his colleague's memory. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller has described "a real problem of amnesia" that pervades the recollection of the principals still alive. Bissell swore an oath to keep secret whatever they were called upon to do in the national interest. In their view, amnesia may well be another word for integrity in these times of damaged vocabularies.

With the advent of the Kennedy Administration, the CIA plainly assumed that the new President would favor the enterprise against Castro. In February 1961 Bissell brought a new personality into the plan: a CIA officer named William K. Harvey. Long retired and living now in Indianapolis, Harvey was a pear-shaped fellow with a swinging stride. An intelligence officer of the direct-action school, he habitually carried a revolver in his belt.

Bissell charged Harvey with the responsibility for preparing the ground for what in the jargon of the intelligence trade is called an "executive action." That is the term for an action calculated to neutralize an adversary. The means may include defamation of character by propaganda or luring a leader out of his post of influence with the promise of a fine villa on the Cote d'Azur and a bottomless Swiss bank account. The form, in theory, also includes assassination, though the CIA possessed no machinery for this kind of executive action. Harvey had no authority to act, only to explore, assess and advise.

In the wake of the failure at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 Dulles and Bissell both left the agency. They were succeeded by McCone as director and Richard M. Helms as deputy director for plans. Helms, who had known nothing about the schemes against Castro until he succeeded Bissell, did not inform McCone about them until some months after McCone took charge. His reasoning: "Harvey was merely looking into various possibilities. If he came up with anything realistic, that would be the time to bother John with the decision."

By then, of course, the Mafia connection was dormant, but a blunder threatened to blow its cover a year later because of an unrelated bit of skulduggery in October 1960. As TIME has reported, Giancana became upset because his girl friend, Singer Phyllis McGuire, took up in Las Vegas with Comedian Dan Rowan. It was arranged to have Rowan's hotel room bugged. Through ill chance, the snooper was caught in the act of planting his gear. The investigation progressed slowly, but eventually the Las Vegas police insisted on putting the evidence before the FBI, and Maheu informed Colonel Edwards that Giancana and Roselli expected to be protected. By May 1962 the FBI got in touch with Edwards about the matter.

With Edwards in tow, CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston warned Assistant Attorney General Herbert J. Miller Jr. that the CIA'S connection with the Mafia faced exposure if the snoopers were prosecuted. A day or so later, Houston and Edwards met with then Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He was upset but apparently not unduly alarmed. There would be no prosecution. His parting words were: "If you people want to get involved again with Mafia types, I want you to consult me first." It was Houston's impression that Kennedy had not known of the operation until that afternoon but had no objection to its going forward.

Special Meeting. In August 1962 the assassination project came under discussion at the highest levels of the Government. McCone called a special meeting of officials--among them Rusk, McNamara and Murrow--to discuss the growing Soviet activities in Cuba. McCone and another man present remember that McNamara raised the question of disposing of Castro. Murrow at once objected to any discussion on that point. McCone echoed the protest. Nevertheless, a memorandum circulated two days later by Air Force Major General Edward Lansdale, a counterinsurgency expert attached to McNamara's office, included a mention of a plan for "eliminating" or "liquidating" or otherwise doing Castro in--no one remembers the exact phrase.

When the memo was hand-carried to McCone, he hit the roof. He telephoned the Pentagon and demanded that the memo be withdrawn at once. That was done, but a copy, with the objectionable terms blanked out, somehow survives, and was the object of much speculation among the Rockefeller and Senate panels. Two months after the August meeting, the Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba. In the turmoil, Harvey's executive action and the Mafia connection all disappeared into the void, never to be revived.

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