General admits anti-Castro plot

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33858, 2 June 1975, Page 13

General admits anti-Castro plot

(By NICHOLAS HORROCK. of the “New York Times." through N.Z.P.A.) WASHINGTON, June 1.

A “frantic” search for "ays to remove the ( üban Prime Minister (Dr Fidel Castro) followed the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, former senior intelligence officers have told the Rockefeller Commission in Washington.

This rearch, the officers sax, might have engendered several" plans to assassinate the Cuban leader.

According to these intervfjwed over the last several -i.ys, the contingency plans formula.ed by » retired Ma j or .

General, Edward Lansdale, were oniy one “track” of the planning in the Central Intelligence Agc..cy and the Department of Defence.

General Lansdale said on Friday that in November, 1961, the then AttorneyGeneral, Robert Kennedy, ordered him to prepare a secret contingency plan to idepose Dr Castro.

General Lansdale confirmed that Robert Ken(n'dv "'as acting on behalf of President John Kennedy.

In a telephone interview, General Lansdale confirmed that at Robert Kennedy's orders he had prepared a plan that envisioned slipping a group of exiles back into Cuba in the hope they might be able to start a popular uprising against Dr Castro, in much the same wav as Dr Castro himself had overthrown the Government of General Fulgeneio Batista, the previous Cuban dictator. In preparing this plan General Lansdale acknowledged assassination may have been contemplated.

He said tha* he knew as he prepared the plan that "operationally down the pike something like this could emerge — not only assassination, but other things such as defamation of character.”

But he ruled out any notion that he received specific orders from either Robert Kennedy or President Kennedy to prepare a plan to assassinate Dr Castro. He said that after considerable work on the plan, it became clear that it was not feasible to find the 20 or 30 Cubans to the nucleus of a popular political movement.

General Lansdale said he could not recall writing a memorandum in August, 1962, asking the C.I.A. to prepare a contingency plan for assassinating Dr Castro, but he said he could not njle out that such a memo had been written or existed. According to some press reports, a "lot against Dr Castro involving a Chicago

rackets boss, Sam Giancana and, a gangster, John Roselli, was actually launched but failed. There is no public confirmation of this. However, the “New York Times" reported that the Rockefeller Commission had obtained a 1962 memorandum signed by J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F. 8.1., in which he reports that Robert Kennedy told him the C.I.A. was working with Giancana and would be in a position to “blackmail the United States Government.” One former senior intelligence officer said that the 1961-1962 period must be viewed as a time “when the risks faced by our Government because of Cuba were accelerating.” After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, he said, the United States at first could consider relatively long-term schemes, but when it became clear that Soviet missiles might well be based in Cuba, “time for us was running out."