CUBAN INFORMATION ARCHIVES
DOCUMENT 0025
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Cuban Documentary
on
Castro Assassination Plots
"ZR RIFLE" Televised in Havana
27 November 1993
Documentary on Castro Assassination Plots
FL0112202493 Havana Cuba Vision Network in Spanish 0207 GMT
27 Nov 93[Part Three of a three-part documentary. "ZR-Rifle (Executive Action)." incorporating historical film clips: Rolando Cubela Secades' part is read by an announcer as archival video clips and still photos are shown--recorded]
[Text] [Fidel Castro] Recently, someone was upset. He was speaking with one of our comrades who was visiting the United States and angrily protested. He said: You have said that there were 30 assassination plots. But there were not 30, there were only six plots.
Not 30, but six. In reality there were neither 30 nor six, but 300. We have to count not only the plots organized by the CIA, the acquisition of bombs or elephant rifles, a pen that shot a poisoned dart, a mask that produces who knows what fungus, and others.
[President john F. Kennedy, in English, at news conference on 22 April 1961] I feel it can be usefully said, by me, in regard to the events of the last few days [words indistinct].
[Castro, in Presidential Palace speech] It does not matter if any one of us falls; what matters is that that flag remains high, that the idea continues, and that the fatherland lives.
[Senator Christopher J. Dodd, in English with Spanish subtitles} It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro. I read this and, again, I am reading from the same report that we read from earlier. They are calling it an assassination device. Are we getting semantic here again?
[Former CIA Director Richard Helms, in English with Spanish subtitles] I believe it was a hypodermic syringe that they gave him with something called Black Leaf No. 40 in it. T his was in response to Am-Lash's request that he be provided some sort of a device whereby he could kill Castro.
[CIA agent Rolando Cubela Secades, identified by caption] They showed me a pen with a very fine tip. The pen could be filled with poison as if it were a syringe. [pause] My resentment toward the Revolution arose in the first years after its triumph. The Communists began to occupy positions in the government and I felt cast aside. Also, several laws promulgated did not meet my political expectations and I was sure that confrontation was unavoidable. The Americans were not going to allow it. Afterwards, the divorce from the Cuban political class took place. I am referring to people such as Rio and Tony Varona, who had fought against the Batista regime and had to go into exile once more.
[Juan C. Rodriguez, Interior Ministry investigator] From 1953 on the CIA and the FBI, from their positions in the U.S. Embassy in Havana, followed the course of events in Cuba very closely. On several occasions and through various means, they tried to infiltrate the revolutionary groups, in particular the 26 July Movement because of its energy. As the revolutionary energy grew, analysts in Langley began to seek candidates within the ranks of the Revolution who might someday be useful. Among others, they focused on a man who had distinguished himself in the fight against Batista, a power-hungry man, volatile and easily influenced. It was Commander Rolando Cubela.
[Narrator] Some of Cubela's traits the CIA considered were personal courage; constitutional ideals: egocentricity: leadership qualities, and ambitions to match: unstable and highly emotional, likes the good life in style, cabarets, parties, drinking; has excellent relations with members of the Autentico Party.
[Cubela] Pepe Aleman, the son of the education minister in the first Autentico Government, is my friend. Toward the end of 1959, he invited me to lunch and told me of the properties he was losing because of the revolutionary laws.
[Narrator] Jose Braulio Aleman Gutierrez, alias Meneito. Son of the corrupt education minister during the government of Ramon Grau San Martin from 1944 to 1948, an FBI informant, close friend of Rolando Cubela and closely linked to Santos Trafficante, one of the top Mafia bosses of Florida.
[Cubela] Tepedino was also very upset by the path the Revolution had taken. He had a jewelry shop at the Hilton, near Trafficante's restaurant. As for Trafficante: I remember that while I was government vice minister, we jailed him in Discornia at the request of Interpol. Around that time, his daughter was getting married and several mutual friends asked me to issue him a permit so he could attend the wedding. I agreed but was only able to give him a pass for a few hours. On that occasion Tepedino told me: See, here you do not have any authority, even if you are a commander.
[Rodriguez] Carlos Tepedino was an Italian who lived in Cuba, a friend of Trafficante and Cubela, who on occasion helped Cuberla through economic difficulties. Tepedino worked for CIA officers in the U.S. Embassy in Havana.
[Cubela] It was in 1962, when I went to Paris, that I committed myself to them. They suggested organizing a military coup.
[Narrator] This fragment of a document recently declassified by the U.S. Government sheds some light: 18 January 1962: The United States' goal is to help Cubans overthrow the Communist regime in Cuba and install a new government. Basically, the operation should result in the uprising of the Cuban people.
[Rodriguez] The military coup was a part of Operation Mongoose, a project in which the CIA invested $100 million and to which it assigned over 400 officials to work with over 3,000 Cuban agents living in Florida. The station in Florida became the most important cia station in the world to conduct an unprecedented subversive was project. In October 1962, the October Crisis takes place, there is no invasion of Cuba, and Operation Mongoose ends without glory. A short time later, Cubela is discharged from the Army as a result of his lack of discipline; but he is still a prominent figure in Cuba and has access to the commander in chief.
[Caption: August 1963, Rolando Cubela travels to Sao Paulo, Brazil]
[Narrator] He immediately makes international calls: the first to Tepedino, the second to Neneito Aleman in Miami. He told both that he wanted to defect; they convinced him not to rush and told him to go to Paris.[Claudia Furiatti [Furiati], Brazilian writer and researcher, identified by caption] What was the Cubela plan, or Operation Am-Lash? It was to eliminate Fidel Castro and create conditions to destabilize the revolutionary regime in Cuba. The Cubela plan was not lined to a operation commanded by (Mario Vastini) in Central America. (Words indistinct) trained back then groups of [word indistinct] to attack Cuba. This was to be done at a specific time, once the Cubela plan was fulfilled. That was the first part: the elimination of Fidel Castro. The Oswald plan is going on, simultaneously, to eliminate Kennedy. What was the goal? To invade Cuba, eliminate Fidel Castro, eliminate Kennedy, and invade Cuba. In other words, there are three plans.
[Narrator] In Paris, the CIA case officer contacted Cubela. According to the Church Committee report. Am-Lash, who was voluble expressed that he would remain in Cuba; he could do something significant toward the creation of a new Cuba.
[Cubela] Although we spoke about it, the issue of the assassination was not finalized. The CIA official mentioned it. They pressured me to kill Fidel.
[Dodd, in English with Spanish subtitles] Okay, but for purposes of discussion: The officer gave this Cuban, this agent in Paris, a device with that material you described which I presume, if injected into a human being, would kill him. Is that correct?
[Helms, in English with Spanish subtitles] I would think so. Yes.
[Dodd] So the agent gives the Cuban agent the device to kill somebody.
[Helms] I am sorry he did not give him a pistol because that would have made the world thing a lot simple and less exotic.
[Dodd] Well, whether it is a pistol or a needle, if Am-Lash is a political plot to destabilize the government, why in blazes are we giving an agent a device that would kill Castro if it is not an assassination plot?
[Helms] Well, if you want to have it that way, why don't you just have it that way.
[Dodd] It is not a question of what I want.
[Helms] Oh. I think is what you want, Mr. Dodd.
[Dodd] Mr. Helms, I am reading to you from reports here, prepared at your request by the Inspector General.
[Helms] I understand that.
[Dodd] I am not fabricating this, I am quoting.
[Helms] I understand that.
[Dodd] It is not a question of what I want It a question of what this committee would like to know and if the committee is not satisfied, I do not believe at this point as to what exactly what the characterization of Am-Lash was.
[Helms] Well, I told you what I believe the characterization of Am- Lash to be---
[Dodd] Well, how does the jibe with this?
[Helms] If you want to...[pauses] If, because we gave him a gun or a hypodermic syringe or whatever the case might be at his request because he had aims on Castro, if that is your definition of an assassination plot, then have it that way. That is quite satisfactory with me.
[Furiatti] New Orleans at that time represents aa confrontation with Kennedy's policies and the far Right is behind them because in August alone and [words indistinct] when Kennedy tells the FBI finally to go to [word indistinct] and this camp is put under vigilance, the far Right, which was behind it, decides that Kennedy ultimately is not going to accept that parallel operation. Then was New Orleans mean? A direct confrontation against Kennedy.
[Cubela] In Paris I met another CIA case officer and I asked for military supplies and a meeting with Robert Kennedy.
[Narrator] Richard Helms, CIA deputy director for operations, authorized Desmond Fitzgerald, chief of the special affairs team who managed the entire anti-Cuban operation, to meet with Am-Lash as Kennedy's envoy. [footage of Helms] Am-Lash as Kennedy's envoy. [footage of Helms] Am-Lash believed the lie.
[Cubela] The Kennedy envoy gave me assurances that the United States would support a coup against Fidel: then we talked in detail about how to assassinate him. [still shot of Robert Kennedy]
[Narrator] Following Kennedy's assassination, Cubela returns to Havana without the fountain pen. He had thrown it into the Seine River.
[Cubela] I had asked for a FAL rifle with a scope and silencer. That would be enough for my task. The CIA promised to get it for me.
[Juan Felaifel, Cuban agent, identified by caption as having infiltrated CIA from 1963 to 1966, in archive film clip] I was told of this plan by CIA agent Anis, my brother, who at the time was also the intelligence chief of the counterrevolutionary organization directed by Artime. He, with Artime and the Galician Sainz, made the silencer for the 7.62 FAL rifle, identical to the one Cubela had here in Cuba.
[Narrator] Upon his arrival in Havana, Cubela realizes that he had overestimated his possibilities. He was not able to recruit any men within the Cuban Armed Forces.
(Felaifel, present day footage) Cubela had the assassination planned and had planned to conduct in from an apartment in a building located practically in front of the steps of the university. Based on this attempt, they had a plan drafted by Cubela, the Galician Sainz, and Artime in a meeting in a hotel in Spain. The plan had two phases. Following the assassination, in case there was no immediate supporting coup, they were planning to start an uprising in the Escambray with the support of approximately 1,000 mercenaries Artime had in Central America.
They were planning to bring them through Punta Icacos, dividing the road and establishing there a beachhead in order to create a government supported and approved by the Organization of American States. To that end, Artime had already contacted several Central American governments, four or five Latin American governments that were going to support them. Now the time came to put together the final information and this is when we discovered the entire plan of the attempt, which we were able to dismantle practically before it was conducted.[Narrator] On 26 February 1966 Rolando Cubela and his accomplices were arrested. The rifle and the telescopic scope are today museum pieces. [footage of Kennedy's funeral stills]
Millions of American saw the Dallas assassination, thanks to an amateur cameraman, Abraham Zapruder. Many may have thought that it was another violent TV program, but it was real. They had destroyed the affable smile and the cordial greeting of the charismatic and reformist John Fitzgerald Kennedy [footage of Kennedy's assassination]
[Senator Dodd, in English with Spanish subtitles] It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro.
[Narrator] A simple coincidence, or was it a trap linking plots for the assassination of two presidents?
As in a thriller, the already shaken American sensibility witness on TV the murder of the prime suspect, despite his being guarded by more than 70 policemen.
President Kennedy was buried with appropriate honors. On his tomb, an eternal flame at times scrawls capricious question marks. Who, and why?
Following the failure of various homicidal plots against the Cuban president, the CIA and its associates started another project to force the hand of the Kennedy administration: An aerial expedition would depart from Florida [words indistinct] later to bomb Havana's Presidential Palace and Castro's residence in Cojimar. Simultaneously, an autoprovocation at Guantanamo Naval Base was to take place [footage of U.S. military exercises, stills]
The autoprovocation would be justified: The Cubans were attacking the base in response to the assassination of their president.
But why did the CIA, Mafia, and counterrevolution machinery want to force the hand of the Kennedy administration?
[Graciela Challaioux, researcher at the Center for U.S. Studies, Havana University, identified by caption] The fact that the policy conceived within the broader framework of a flexible response could lead one to think that the U.S. President's policy was ambivalent and contradictory. However, if we examine the different aspects of this policy, we realize that it was perfectly in keeping with the strategic objective of destroying the Cuban Revolution.
Under that policy, it was considered necessary to intensify the economic blockade of Cuba and the political pressure against the island. Another group of measures had to do with the sabotage of important sectors of the economy; electric power, oil refining and storage, rail and highway transportation, and also production on the island [footage of results of sabotage]
As a third point of this policy, diplomatic actions were also contemplated, sending the Cuban authorities, especially Fidel Castro, a message about President Kennedy's interest in talking, in establishing a negotiation agenda for solving the conflict between the two countries. However, the establishment of an agenda for negotiations was based on the premise that Fidel Castro would be forced to make essential concessions because the results of the policy of sabotage, political pressures, and economic blockade were going to put him at a disadvantage and he was then going to have to accept U.S. demands.
However, it happened that the President then had to confront the objections of the U.S. Establishment [previous word in English], the real power in the United States, to a policy that, in the midst of a cold War climate, rejected the use of the violent operations that the United States had traditionally conducted against any country that contradicted its interests. It was not only the problem of a policy toward Cuba that did not seem the most appropriate in addition, there were the objections of the Establishment to Kennedy's domestic policies and U.S.-USSR relations.
[Narrator] Racial integration; anti-Mafia policies; restrictions on monopolies; differences with the military-industrial complex; friction with traditionally privileged investor sectors; the U.S.- USSR accord; and the projected withdrawal of the Vietnamese plot placed Kennedy in confrontation with what President Eisenhower had envisioned years before.
[President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in English with Spanish subtitles] We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process.
[Narrator] Among domestic contradictions, he inherited the so- called Cuban problem.
Early this morning, Doctor Jose Miro Cardenas announced in a communique his resignation from the presidency of the Cuban Revolutionary Council in exile. In his communique, Miro practically accuses President Kennedy's administrator of treason to the cause of the anti-Castro sector. [footage of Miro's resignation speech in Miami in April 1963]
The policy of the U.S. Government has changed abruptly, violently, and unexpectedly in a dangerous manner, as during the sad occasion of the Bay of Pigs, without the slightest reasonable explanation.
[Unseen interviewer, in English with Spanish subtitles] Did you resent the United States and President Kennedy?
[CIA Agent Armando Lopez Estrada, in English with Spanish subtitles] At the time, yes, I highly resented it.
[Interviewer} Did you tell him?
[Lopez] Yes, I did because I wanted to know why we were abandoned inside Cuba.
[Narrator] The differences with the far right in exile and the terrorists reached its peak.
[Rodriguez] The Cuban counterrevolution, by unconditionally serving the CIA and the U.S. Government, tried to gain political ground from which to pressure the President to implement an immediate and drastic solution to the Cuban Revolution. At the same time, the Mafia was anxious to reclaim the juicy business of its emporium in Havana. When both realized that the policy of the Democratic administration, the dual solution, was to destroy the Revolution but not in the short term, among other reasons because they were not able to, then the two groups claimed that they had been betrayed.
Allow me to say that we have an example of this in (Bob's) attitude. He was a top level leader of the CIA's Miami operations unit. Of Sicilian ancestry, his way of talking was even very similar to that of the Mafia people. While at the safe house together with the team which I had infiltrated, and watching television at the moment the assassination occurred, in an outburst of passion such as we ourselves had never seen--because his temperament was not like that --he could not contain himself and said: We have finally eliminated the pinko from the White House.
[Narrator] It is really surprising that those who investigated the Dallas assassination gave such little credence to the report of an FBI agent like Jose Aleman. However, there is one explanation.
[Rodriguez] Days after the murder of the U.S. President, an FBI agent of Cuban origin, Jose Aleman, son of an old political intriguer and thief in Cuba before 1959, confessed to his FBI case officer that in June of that same year, 1963--that is, five months before the murder of the President--Trafficante, who was his friend, had confessed to him that Kennedy would get what was coming to him.
He was referring, of course, to the harassment and the persecution to which the Democratic administration had subjected the Mafia, and to what the Mafia considered the President's weakness in the Cuban matter.
There is no doubt as to Jose Aleman's ties with the CIA and the FBI. Aleman was a friend of Cubela, and facilitated or was involved in recruiting him. Moreover, Aleman was the man who supplied the bombs with which they planned to attack the Presidential Palace and the house in Cojimar where they assumed that the commander in chief was staying.
[Division General Fabian Escalante Font. Cuban Interior Ministry; identified by caption] In the spring of 1963, in Hugh Bannister's offices in New Orleans, where the splinter group Friends of Democratic Cuba was based a momentous meeting took place. There, the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy was planned.
[Narrator] In order to achieve it, they needed a man with a past to accuse of having pulled the trigger and who could lead to blaming Fidel Castro.
[Rodriguez] Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited by the Navy's intelligence services while he was in the Navy, with a view to his carrying out a mission in the Soviet Union. [still of Oswald] In order to put him into the sights, into the sphere of interests, of the KGB they assigned him to Atsugi military base in Japan, as a radar operator on one of the projects of the most secret U.S. technical intelligence of the time: the project for the U-2 spy flights over Soviet territory.
Shortly after that in 1959, he is transferred to the El Toro base in California--also belonging to the Navy--where he learns Russian; and in October of that same year, he travels to the Soviet Union...[pauses] he is hastily discharged, and travels to the Soviet Union as a tourist. And shortly afterward, in a gesture of apparent identification with the Soviets, with Socialist ideas, he tears up his passport. He practically exiles himself there. He marries a Soviet citizen, Marina Pruskaya and has a daughter. And in 1962, he returns to the United States with a new passport and with his fare paid for by the Department of State.
[Narrator] The past, in the Oswald legend, was already constructed. Now all that had to be done was to bring it up to date in pro- Castro terms.
[Furiatti] When he goes back to his country, another phase begins, and the first part of that phase is New Orleans, May-August 1963. Oswald shows up there with a cover; a Cuban sympathizer who distributes pro-Cuba leaflets in the street. He gets in a quarrel with the leader of a counterrevolutionary organization. Carlos Bringuier, who was the leader of the (DRE) in New Orleans.
[Rodriguez] He then works as an FBI agent, number 179, with a salary of $200, until the spring of 1963.
[Narrator] In the spring of 1963, Oswald visits exiled Cuban (Sylvia Odio)[Silvia Odio] in Dallas. The purpose of the visit--which he is not aware of--is to find a witness who will be able to identify him later, after the assassination. [still of Oswald and (Novo Saint- Paul) brothers] He is accompanied by two Cubans, brothers (Ignacio and Guillermo Novo Saint-Paul)[Novo Sampol], who, taking advantage of the fact that Oswald does not know Spanish, introduce him as Leon Oswald, a former Marine and expert sharp-shooter who affirmed that Cuba could be freed by killing Kennedy.
[Rodriguez] In 1978, (Antonio Veciana), a former CIA agent involved in several assassination attempts against the commander in chief, such as, remember, the one involving the north terrace at the Presidential Palace, the one in Chile, told a U.S. Government investigator, (Gaeton Foncy)[Gaeton Fonzi], that in the first week of September of 1963 he went to a rendezvous for a meeting with him for the past 20 years and who operated under the pseudonym of Maurice Bishop.
The meeting took place in a public building in Dallas, and upon arriving in the lobby of the building, he immediately saw his case officer, Bishop, with a pale, bland-faced young man. Two and a half month later, from the pictures in the press and over television, he recognized Lee Harvey Oswald as having been the man he had seen talking to his case officer Maurice Bishop.
Actually, that was not the way things really were. The said encounter was not a casual one. No CIA officer, no professional intelligence officer arranges a rendezvous for two agents for the same place at the same time.
According to our investigations, the truth of the matter was that at that meeting, Oswald, (Veciana), and his case officer Bishop were to arrange details related to Oswald's trip to Mexico, which was to take place weeks later and in which (Veciana) was involved.
Maurice Bishop was the CIA case officer for the anti-Cuba groups in Mexico.
[Major Nicolas Sirgado, identified by caption as having infiltrated the CIA for 10 years] It was precisely in the last quarter of 1967 that Harold Benson and I met. Back then, in London, he introduced himself as a CIA case officer, although certain bits of information coming from his own colleagues already indicated the prominence of the high position he held. Over time...[pauses] then I did not see him for quite a long time, and after the case on which we worked together was over, certain Cuban counter-intelligence officials showed me pictures of U.S. CIA officers and chief, so I could try to pick Harold Benson out from among them. It was not difficult, of course, from the pictures I saw to select, to find, Harold Benson's. Except that in this case, it just so happened that the name under the photograph in question was: David Atlee Phillips.
[Furiatti] Mexico is decisive. The Mexico episode is decisive. As of that time, Oswald is already the man who has been chosen to be accused of the assassination of Kennedy.
What was Oswald doing in Mexico, monitores by David Phillips, who was the head of the CIA in Mexico back then? He was there to obtain a transit visa at the Cuban Embassy, for the Soviet Union. But he did not obtain the visa, and that was his big mistake-- because he was instructed to be convincing, and he was not.
[Sirgado] I remember that during the time that Harold Benson and I worked together, a number of aspects of his background, of his character, began emerging. He was extraordinarily reactionary. And I recall, as something that could serve as an example of all this, the anecdote he told me to the effect that on the occasion of a visit he made to Arlington Cemetery to visit former President John F. Kennedy's tomb, he had seized the opportunity to urinate on Kennedy's grave, since he considered Kennedy a damned Communist.
[Narrator] A pro-Castro activist and a furious enemy of the pinko in the White House, all that remained for the chosen scapegoat Oswald to do was to obtain evidence of the complicity of the Cuban Government. Marina Pruskaya told the Warren Commission that her husband Lee Harvey Oswald had not wished to travel to the Soviet Union but rather to Havana.
[Rodriguez] One of the key pieces in the plot to blame the Cuban Government for the killing was Oswald's visit to Havana-- undoubtedly, a well-thought-out maneuver. For the reason, between 25 and 26 September 1963. Oswald appeared at the Cuban consulate three times, asking for a visa: Four people saw him there; the consul, Eusebio Azcue; the vice-consul, Mirabal; the Mexican secretary, Sylvia Duran; and the trade attache, Guillermo Ruiz, who on one occasion even served as a translator for Oswald.
[Guillermo Ruiz, identified by caption as the trade attache in Mexico in 1963] Sometime in late September, as I was entering the trade office which was upstairs in the consulate, the consul asked me to help him translate for a man, an American, with whom he was talking at that moment.
That Consul told that American that it was not possible to give him a visa because it was not known...[pauses] not possible to give him a visa to transit through Cuba, because his final destination was not known; and that, therefore, the consul was refusing to give him a visa. After telling the American this, I went up to the trade office to go about my business. Later, after President Kennedy's assassination, I learned that this man for whom I had translated the consul's words was Lee Harvey Oswald.
[Escalante] Oswald filled out an application form at our consulate and gave us six photographs. [still of visa application] Cuba gave copies of these photos to the Warren Commission and to the committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. The signature on the application form is Oswald's, and picture were also of Oswald.
All our embassies are watched by the CIA, and Mexico was no exception. From a building in front of our embassy, CIA agent Alberto Rodriguez Gallego photographed everybody who entered and exited our embassy. [stills of Cuban consulate in Mexico] How did it come to be possible, if Oswald was there on three occasions on different days, for him not to have gotten his picture taken? There is only one explanation: With the failure of the plan [words indistinct].
[Narrator] Weeks before the president assassination in Dallas, the U.S. police authorities had sufficient evidence of what was being prepared. Two signs, one from Miami, and another from Chicago:
[Castro caption reads: Havana, 24 November 1963] The Associated Press on the 19th of this month, three days before the assassination of Kennedy, from Miami Beach, in reference to this man said: This man...[pauses] The editor of the confiscated Havana daily said: I believe that a looming and grave event will force Washington to modify its policy of peaceful coexistence.
What is the meaning of this three days before the assassination of Kennedy?
[Narrator] The Secret Service, which was in charge of Kennedy's security, learned on 21 November that in the city of Chicago, a Cuban named Homero S. Echevarria who was in contact with a group of arms traffickers had said that his group had a great deal of money and that they were going to buy the arms after they took care of the Kennedy thing.
[Video shows the following telegram over still of Kennedy:
"11-17- 63. URGENT"
"TO: SPECIAL AGENTS
"FROM: FBI DIRECTOR "...INFORMATION RECEIVED REVEALS THAT A GROUP MIGHT ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE PRESIDENT KENNEDY DURING HIS TRIP TO DALLAS "CONTACT HOSTILE GROUPS AND FIND OUT ANY GROUNDS FOR THREAT."[Narrator] After Oswald's failure in Mexico, the CIA fabricated some letters addressed to him from Havana in which, in a conventional manner, guidance regarding the assassination of President Kennedy was given. The purpose was so that they could seize the letters from Oswald following the presidential assassination, thus obtaining the so-eagerly-desired incriminating evidence.
[Video shows highlighted portion of text typed letter, in Spanish:
["AFTER THIS THIS I WILL RECOMMEND YOU TO THE BOSS, WHO WILL BE INTERESTED IN MEETING YOU SINCE THEY NEED MEN LIKE YOU. I TOLD HIM YOU CAN SHOOT OUT A CANDLE'S FLAME AT A DISTANCE OF 50 METERS. HE REFUSES TO BELIEVE ME BUT I CONVINCED HIM BECAUSE I SAW IT WITH MY OWN EYES".]
[Escalante] The homicidal mechanism was in place on 22 November 1963. In reality, it was a conspiracy of national proportions, in which many knew what was going to happen, while others were in charge of pulling the trigger. The idea was cooked up at the top levels of the so-called invisible government; transnationals, the military industrial complex, the Pentagon, the Ku Klux Klan, Texan oil barons, the Mafia, the CIA, the FBI, and the Cuban counterrevolution. Its highest representatives were: [Video shows sequence of stills identified by caption as: Richard Nixon, George Bush, Allen Dulles, Tony Varona, Richard Bissell, Sam Giancana, Richard Helms, Santos Trafficante, and Carlos Prio]
The planners were the same people who met in 1963 in Hugh Bannister's New Orleans office [over stills]: John Rosselli [John Roselli], Frank Sturges [Frank Sturgis], Gary Yen, General Cavell, David Phillips, Howard Hunt, Clyde Chow, and Robert Mayhew.
Two groups were in charge of coordinating the presidential murder: one consisting of Jack Ruby, while the other was directed by Frank Sturges and made up of Orlando Bosch, Jose Berman, brothers (Ignacio and Guillermo Novo Saint-Paul), and (Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz)--all CIA agents.
According to the investigations carried out, there were some four or five shots fired in Dallas on 22 November 1963 from several different positions. According to our investigations, the participants in the shooting were: Lenny Patrick, David Yaras, and Richard Gaines, all members of the Chicago Mafia, and Eladio del Valle Gutierrez and Herminio Diaz Garcia, Cubans and CIA agents.
[Castro; caption reads: Havana, 24 November 1963] We are not worried for our sake. We worry for more than ourselves. We worry for the interests of mankind.
[Narrator] ZR-Rifle, the CIA, the Mafia, and the counterrevolutionary machinery whose main target was Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, against whom they prepared hundreds of homicidal plots, ended up shooting the heart of the American nation.
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