Introduction

In the early morning hours of January 1^st, 1959, the U.S. backed dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista,[1] along with 40 family members and close associates, boarded a plane and fled the island nation, taking with him $300-$400 million in mostly ill-gotten funds acquired through graft and payoffs across the prior 6 years. Seven days later Fidel Castro led his rebel troops into Havana, thus completing his overthrow of the corrupt Batista government. The sudden success of Castro’s revolution in Cuba caught many off guard. Among those who misestimated the Cuban revolutionary were the CIA officers assigned to monitor him and his activities and estimate his chances for success. Over the next few months they would also severely misestimate his inclination toward communism, a circumstance which set in motion a sequence of events that reverberates to this day. One of those events was the assassination of the 35^th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

In my research into JFK’s assassination, from all the data I have seen, what follows is at once some of the most interesting and startling. The information comes from three books, the first written by House Select Committee on Assassinations[2] investigator Gaeton Fonzi [3]entitled “The Last Investigation; “ the second written by Mark Lane entitled “Plausible Denial,” and the 3^rd the recently published (2017) autobiography of the protagonist of this story, ex-CIA operative and Fidel Castro’s one time lover, Marita Lorenz, who passed away in 2019. Lane, of course, is the author of “Rush to Judgement,” one of the first major works published in the U.S. challenging the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of the president. He is also the author of several other books on the Kennedy assassination, but the most important of them, in my opinion, including “Rush to Judgement,” is “Plausible Denial.”

The reason I say that will become apparent soon enough, but before I launch into the story a little preamble is in order. As stated earlier, Mark Lane, who passed away in 2016, was an attorney; initially attracted to the JFK case because he observed the evidence presented against Oswald in the Warren Commission Report was incredibly weak, and could be picked apart easily by any competent defense attorney. Of course, with Oswald being dead, having been shot and killed by Jack Ruby on national TV two days after Kennedy was killed, the necessity of a trial was obviated. Thus, after his own thorough investigation of Kennedy’s murder, Lane wrote “Rush to Judgement;” in effect his posthumous defense of Lee Harvey Oswald.  

After “Rush to Judgement,” Lane’s reputation as one of the foremost critics of the Warren Report grew rapidly. He gave many talks around the country, wrote several other books, and co-wrote the screen play for a movie, “Executive Action,” a 1973 [4]drama describing a conspiracy of right wing businessmen who plotted to kill the president. He also assisted New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in his investigation and trial of Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman Garrison charged with conspiring to kill Kennedy.[5] His renown thus established, when the publisher of Spotlight magazine, a man named Willis Carto, and his company, Liberty Lobby, lost a libel suit brought against them by none other than famous Watergate/CIA spook E. Howard Hunt,[6] Carto knew who he had to call. Hunt had sued Liberty Lobby due to an article published in Spotlight authored by a disaffected CIA Officer named Victor Marchetti. In 1974 Marchetti had written “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” a book intensely critical of the CIA and its practices.[7] The article he wrote for Spotlight, published in August of 1978, stated that with the CIA being scrutinized by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigations, the decision had been made by Agency senior officers to, in effect, sacrifice Hunt by acknowledging that he was in Dallas on November 22^nd, 1963, and was involved in the Kennedy killing. Apparently, the Agency was furious with Hunt for dragging it into Nixon’s Watergate mess and for blackmailing attempts afterwards in which he threatened to reveal all he knew of Nixon, Watergate, and the CIA’s involvement in JFK’s assassination. The CIA’s sacrifice of him would be their “payback.”

On hearing of the Spotlight article and reading it, Howard Hunt launched his libel suit, claiming that he was not in Dallas that day, and had witnesses to prove it. The case went to trial in 1981 and resulted in a verdict FOR Hunt, awarding him $650,000 in damages, an amount that would break Liberty Lobby. It was for the appeal of the case that Carto and Liberty Lobby retained Lane, who immediately set to work to prove that Hunt had indeed been in Dallas, and, while working for the CIA, WAS involved in JFK’s assassination. That he succeeded is a matter of historical record, for in January of 1985 a new jury threw out the earlier guilty verdict, instead finding Liberty Lobby not guilty of libel. After the verdict, the jury foreperson, a woman named Leslie Armstrong, was asked by reporters why she and the jurors had found against Hunt. In response, she stated that it was clear from the evidence that the CIA had killed President Kennedy, and that Hunt had been part of the plot. She then said that the evidence should be submitted to the appropriate United States government institutions so that those responsible for the assassination might be brought to justice.

Just what was the evidence presented at the second Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby libel trial that resulted in the jury overturning the guilty verdict and award against Liberty Lobby? Essentially Howard Hunt’s case, the reason why he said he sued in the first place, was that he claimed his relationship with his 3 children and wife had been damaged by the article in Spotlight, which stated that he had been involved in the assassination of the president. For some reason, they (Hunt’s family) apparently had a hard time believing Howard when he told them he wasn’t involved, and they wouldn’t quit asking him if he had helped to kill President Kennedy. In the second trial Hunt asserted under oath that from Thursday, November 21^st, 1963, through the subsequent weekend, while the whole drama of Kennedy’s assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest for killing JFK, and then Oswald’s murder by Jack Ruby, played out, he was at home in Washington DC watching the unbelievable happenings on TV with his family. The jury in the first trial had bought Hunt’s claim and, based on the lack of trust this caused within the spy’s family, had found in his favor and awarded the damages.

In the second trial, Hunt’s assertion of the “lack of trust” damage caused by Marchetti’s article did not survive an expert two-hour cross examination of the former CIA officer by Lane. In the first part of his “cross” of Hunt, Lane meticulously established with the spy that he was with his wife and children the whole time of that weekend, in their basement recreation room glued to the TV, and that on Thursday the 21^st he had gone to work at the CIA office building following his usual routine. After establishing all of that, Lane sprung his trap, which consisted of a simple question: If Hunt was with his wife and 3 children the whole time from Thursday, November 21^st through Sunday, November 24^th, as he claimed, why, then, would his wife and kids not believe him when he said he wasn’t in Dallas and did not participate in the assassination?

Howard Hunt, on registering Lane’s question, looked stricken—the obvious underpinning lie of his assertion now obvious for everyone, especially the jury, to see. The spy dissembled for a few more minutes on the stand, trying to salvage something from what was now a lost cause, but the damage was done. Lane, to all intents and purposes, had just won the case for Liberty Lobby, but the attorney was not about to stop there. He then established that not only Hunt, but other elements of the CIA as well, were involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. To do this he presented in court the deposition testimony taken from an eyewitness claiming that she saw Hunt and several others, Jack Ruby among them, in Dallas on the day before the assassination. The eyewitness who gave that testimony was Marita Lorenz[8]. Mostly taken from her own words, this is her story…

__________________

I have recently read Marita Lorenz’s autobiography, and I can tell you that if even half of what she says in her book is true, she has lived an astonishing life. The part that is relevant to Lane and the Liberty Lobby case starts in 1959 when she was 19 years old. In late February of that year, approximately 6 weeks after Batista’s overthrow, Lorenz states that she sailed to Cuba with her father, a German national, who was the captain of the German passenger liner Berlin. After dropping anchor in Havana harbor, it wasn’t long before two harbor patrol boats approached the Berlin full of well-armed, uniformed soldiers. One of these soldiers, bearded and taller than the rest, said they wanted to come aboard and look around the ship. If you don’t know the story already, perhaps you are guessing that the tall bearded one was Fidel Castro, and if you did, you would be correct. According to Marita, upon seeing Castro for the first time she was instantly smitten with him, and the rebel leader was equally enamored with her. As she toured him around the ship they exchanged their first caresses and kisses, and on meeting her father, captain Lorenz, Castro asked if Marita could stay in Cuba to assist him in establishing his government. Captain Lorenz declined the offer, telling Castro that Marita had been enrolled in a school in New York and that classes would be starting soon. On leaving Havana that evening, that is where the Berlin would be headed, he said.

Reluctantly, Castro acceded to the captain’s wish, though if Marita would have had her way she definitely would have stayed. Nevertheless, within several days after returning to New York she received a long-distance phone call from Castro asking her if she would like to come stay with him in Havana. Marita jumped at the chance, and soon two Cubans were knocking at the door of her brother’s apartment (where she was staying) to accompany her on a flight to Havana, arranged by Fidel himself. Thus began Marita Lorenz’s love affair with Fidel Castro; the first step of a journey that led to her recruitment by the CIA, her eventual involvement in an assassination attempt on Castro, and ultimately the murder of JFK.

Marita stayed with Castro at his headquarters in the Havana Hilton hotel for the next couple of months, enduring his frequent absences due to his newly acquired duties and pressures of having to run a country. In May of 1959 her residence was changed to one of the newer hotels in town, the Hotel Riviera; built a couple of years earlier and opened in 1957. In the two years since, the Riviera had become the main Mafia run establishment on the island; their biggest outside of Las Vegas, managed by none other than the legendary racketeer, Meyer Lansky[9]. The Mafia had been doing business in Cuba since the 1930s, but had flourished during the Batista regime, as the Cuban dictator, so long as the government got its cut, allowed the Mafia hotels and casinos to operate free from police interference—a tidy arrangement for both. All of that was ending with the advent of Castro, however. After his revolution had expelled Batista from the country, the rebel leader had flirted briefly with the idea of allowing the Mafia to continue its casino/hotel business in order to keep up the robust tourist trade and the tax revenue garnered from it. But that soon changed, and Castro began to crack down on the career criminals, throwing them in jail and nationalizing their establishments; in response igniting the Mafia’s enmity toward the Cuban leader, in which they would soon have an unlikely ally—the CIA.

It was while she was living at the Riviera that Marita first met another man who would have a profound effect, not only on her life, but on events that would take place in the United States across the next two decades. According to Marita, one day while at the Riviera she saw a dark haired, Italian looking man in a military uniform whom she recognized as an officer in Castro’s air force. The officer approached her, and without giving her his name told her, “I know who you are. I know that you’re Fidel’s girlfriend. If you need help, I can give it to you. I can take you away from here. I’m American.”

Being in love with Castro at the time, Marita refused his offer, telling him that she didn’t need any help and didn’t want to leave the island. Later she found out that the officer’s name was Frank Fiorini,[10] and that is how she knew him for the next 13 years, until June of 1972. It was then that she saw him on TV as one of the five men arrested for bugging the Democratic Party national headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington DC, at which time he gave his name as Frank Sturgis.

The life of Frank Fiorini/Sturgis is as astonishing as that of Marita Lorenz, if not more so. An American, born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1924, at the time he approached Marita with his offer of help he was the security chief of Castro’s small air force. He ascended to that role after serving as a messenger between Castro’s rebel forces in the Sierra Maestra and rebel operatives in the Cuban cities of Santiago and Havana. He was also an arms trader, running weapons and munitions from the United States to Castro’s strongholds in the mountains. Unbeknownst to the Cuban rebel leader, while Fiorini was doing this for Castro, he was also operating as part of a plot to gain Castro’s trust in order to acquire information for the former Cuban president, Carlos Prio, who had been ousted by the 1952 coup that brought Batista to power. Prio, who apparently still had designs on his old job in Cuba, at one time had been considered a progressive politician, but after cutting a deal with Lucky Luciano and the Mafia he’d been corrupted. Consequently, his 4-year reign as Cuba’s president (1948-1952) was marked by much violence and official criminality, setting the stage for his overthrow and exile by Batista. After fleeing Cuba, Prio took up residence in Florida, which is where he and Fiorini met.

Compounding Frank’s complicated allegiances in mid-1959, was the fact that he had recently established relationships with two other organizations that would play prominent roles across the next few years for both Cuba and Castro, and for Frank himself: the Mafia and the CIA. Most likely his frequent presence at the Riviera during Marita’s time there was, at least partially, due to his efforts at doing favors for the criminal organization. According to Marita’s book they met several more times at the Riviera, with Fiorini on each occasion pressing her to relay messages or requests to Castro on the Mafia’s behalf. At some point before this, as Marita would later discover, Frank had an interview with a CIA officer in which he volunteered to provide information for the Agency. Both the FBI and the CIA wanted all knowledge Fiorini could deliver on the growth of communism in Cuba; on the possible infiltration of communists in the Cuban army; on possible Cuban plans to collaborate with other Latin American countries in their own revolutions; and on any possible movements or disaffection against Castro within Cuba.

Thus, Frank Fiorini embarked on his career as a CIA asset and spy, and it wouldn’t be long before he involved Marita Lorenz in the world of espionage as well. That involvement started when she gave in to insistent requests from Frank that she provide information to him on Castro and the new Cuban government by the seemingly innocent means of collecting and relaying discarded messages, despatches and documents that Castro left lying around their apartment; items in which she felt he had no interest and which in no way could harm him. In her book, she says she did this merely to get Fiorini to quit asking her, not out of any desire to undermine the Cuban leader, with whom she was still very much in love.

Complicating things for her in the summer of 1959 was the fact that she had become pregnant. On informing Castro of her condition he expressed surprise, but was not disappointed, assuring her that everything would be alright. As for Marita, she was happy about her pregnancy, and very much looking forward to her baby. As the months of 1959 went by and summer gradually merged into fall, she busied herself preparing for the baby while continuing to provide information to Fiorini from time to time. Meanwhile, the political situation between the United States and Cuba was worsening. Following Castro’s successful revolution, the United States was one of first countries to grant the new Cuban government diplomatic recognition, but as the Cuban leader’s communist leanings became more obvious, his country’s relations with its giant neighbor to the north became worse. Whether this had anything to do with the tragic situation in which Marita soon found herself is uncertain, but considering the weird circumstances of what happened, one must wonder.

Tragedy in Havana

Marita’s tragedy started one morning in mid-October, 1959, in the hotel room she and Castro shared at the Havana Hilton. At the time the Cuban leader was away, dealing with situations in an outlying province. As she states in her book, she awoke that morning, had breakfast, and then drank a glass of milk, shortly after which she became groggy, eventually passing out. She states that while unconscious she vaguely recalls hearing a siren and lying on a stretcher with an IV in her arm; and that at one point she, “heard a cry, like a mewing kitten.” When she finally awoke, Marita found herself lying on a bed in a different room at the Havana Hilton, in pain and bleeding. She had no idea how long she had been out, but quickly realized that she no longer carried her baby; the child had either been aborted or born by pre-maturely induced labor. Lying on the bed trying to figure out what had been done to her, Marita was emotionally distraught and feels she would have died then and there but for the intervention of one of Castro’s right hand men, Camilo Cienfuegos,[11] who miraculously appeared and helped her. Cienfuegos was one of Fidel’s key rebel army lieutenants, having been with the Cuban leader from the beginning of the revolution. According to Marita, on seeing the condition she was in he exclaimed, “Oh my God—fuck! Baby, what happened to you?”

He proceeded to procure some medication for her, and then called her brother, Joe, who was attending school in New York, and made arrangements with him for her to leave Cuba immediately. She knew she needed to get medical attention for the pain and bleeding, and she didn’t know any competent doctors in Cuba. At that point, except for Cienfuegos, she didn’t trust anyone either. The one thing she was certain of was that Castro was not behind what had happened to her, stating in her book, “Fidel would never have done anything like that.”

Cienfuegos assisted Marita with getting dressed and took her down to the street, where a jeep picked her up and took her to the airport. A short while later she was back in the United States, where she re-located to New York to live with her mother. As for the man who rescued her, Camilo Cienfuegos, after helping Marita he didn’t have long to live. A friend and comrade of his, a man named Huber Matos,[12]whom Cienfuegos had fought with in the revolution, had been accused of treason by Castro, which brought Cienfuegos to the central Cuban town of in the Camagüey to arrest him. On October 28^th, 1959, for his return trip to Havana, Cienfuegos boarded a Cessna light aircraft, but the plane never made it to the Cuban capital city, vanishing somewhere in route; a disappearance that has never been explained.

With the information provided by Marita, it’s hard to know what happened that day when her baby was taken from her. Obviously, other than the fact the baby was gone and that she was in bad shape physically, she didn’t know. She didn’t think Castro was behind it, but it is possible that he discovered she was sharing information with Fiorini and no longer trusted her, so he arranged to have the baby’s birth induced and for her to be flown out of the country. That would explain the somewhat miraculous appearance of Cienfuegos. Or, it’s possible the whole thing was a CIA inspired plot involving Cienfuegos, designed to convince Marita that Castro had her baby aborted, thus turning her into a pawn to use against the Cuban leader. Castro becoming aware that his comrade in arms had turned against him, could also explain Cienfuegos’ disappearance. Either option is speculation, but if I had to pick one, knowing the CIA and its bag of dirty tricks, I would be inclined to pick the latter. Validating that conclusion is the fact that, as we shall see, Marita did indeed become a pawn in the CIA’s anti-Castro covert operations.

Marita Lorenz spent most of the rest of 1959 living with her mother in New York, recovering and trying to come to grips with what had happened. She states that she was not in a good place mentally at the time, which is understandable, considering the circumstances. She describes herself as being tired, confused, and unable to trust anyone. She says that some people, without saying who, told her that her baby was alive, while others assured her the baby was dead, insinuating that Castro had done it. A short while after returning to New York, FBI agents started coming to their apartment regularly, questioning her about her time in Cuba with Castro. In addition, she was being given regimens of strong drugs, though she doesn’t say by who, which caused a rollercoaster ride of “euphoric highs and desperate lows.”

Of the FBI agents that came to see her, the two that ended up being the most frequent were named Frank Lundquist and Frank O’Brien, otherwise known to her as “Frank and Frank.” She states that the two were courteous and had good manners and that she gradually developed a good relationship with them; but that she was also aware they had other intentions. “From the beginning,” she says in her book, “I knew that they were trying to educate me in their way of thinking, brainwashing me and taking advantage of my emotional fragility at the time. They talked incessantly about the evils of communism and how important it was to destroy it to save Americans.” She goes on to say that they told her discrediting things about Castro, and that something had to be done so that the world would see him in a bad light. She also said that her mother would visit the FBI offices quite often, and she got the sense that she was working with them to turn her against Castro.

Another person she met shortly after returning to New York, was a man named Alex Rorke.[13] Introduced to Rorke by her mother, he was described to Marita as a “Jesuit from a very good family with close links to the Kennedys,” and he would go on to become a significant influence in Marita’s life. Alex Rorke was the son of a New York City DA and had graduated from the Georgetown University Foreign Service School. He served in the Second World War as a specialist in military espionage, and after the war worked as a freelance journalist. With his intelligence background, as it became obvious that Castro was becoming a problem in Cuba, he collaborated with both the FBI and CIA on their various anti-Castro schemes, which is how and why he came into Marita’s life. He was Catholic, and they spent a lot of time together having long discussions in an obvious attempt to convert her. Ultimately, while not becoming Catholic herself, she says she came to relate to Rorke as she would a big brother.

Frank Fiorini and the Anti-Castro Cubans

Along with Rorke’s efforts to convert her to Catholicism, he was also urging her to get involved in the anti-Castro groups that were beginning to spring up at the time, mostly at FBI and CIA urging. In the process, she met men who would play prominent roles in the upcoming covert war against Castro, including a native Cuban who would go on to become something of a legend, Manuel Artime.[14] Like many of those who would become anti-Castro Cubans, Artime had once been an ardent Castro supporter and fought in several battles with Fidel’s rebel army against Batista’s forces. In late 1959, as with Camilo Cienfuegos, he got caught up in the Huber Matos treason investigation and trial, and was targeted by Castro’s security forces as being counter-revolutionary. He ended up fleeing to the American embassy in Havana, and with CIA help secured passage to the United States. Once in the U.S. he began to organize with other Cubans who had fled Castro’s revolution, and it was early in this process that Marita met him for the first time. With CIA backing, he would go on to become the political leader of Brigade 2506: the 1400 or so anti-Castro Cubans who would hit the Cuban beaches in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961.

It was around the time that Marita met Artime, nearly two months after she had lost her baby and left Cuba, that Frank Fiorini walked back into her life. With his CIA and Mafia connections, leaving Cuba had become prudent for him as well, and he found a natural landing spot in the anti-Castro operations being promoted by the Agency. On seeing her again, Fiorini told Marita that he was sorry about what had happened to her, somewhat cryptically adding that “they would compensate” her, whatever that meant. He also spoke to her excitedly about the developing plans to overthrow Castro, stating that they had an “army to carry them out,” though leaving unsaid exactly what that army was supposed to do.

Marita acknowledges that at this point in her life she was conflicted emotionally, and very easily manipulated; something Fiorini and his Agency cohorts took full advantage of. In developing their plans to assassinate the Cuban leader, as Marita points out in her book, “They had few people available to them with such personal access to Fidel and getting close to him was a fundamental part of more than one of their sinister plots.” To determine how Marita could be of use to them, Fiorini and those with him needed to know if she would still enjoy free access to Castro if she returned to Cuba. So, in late 1959 a test was arranged, with Marita taking a one day excursion back to Havana. On arriving in the Cuban capital, she made her way to room 2408 at the Havana Hilton, the room she and Castro used to share, and discovered that her key to the room still worked. Though Fidel wasn’t there at the time, to prove to Fiorini and the others that she had been there she took a few letters and documents she found lying around the room and on returning to the U.S. delivered the evidence. This successful “test” ultimately led to what likely is the most famous of the many CIA failed attempts at killing Castro—and it easily could have worked.

Before that happened however, Michael Rorke, Marita’s mother and whatever FBI and CIA people they were working with, took it upon themselves to publish a propaganda broadside against Castro in a tabloid mag with several million readers called Confidential. Loosely based on Marita’s affair with the revolutionary, the story, contrived by Rorke, was written from Marita’s mother’s perspective and entitled “Castro Raped My Teenage Daughter.”  The sensationalized story, almost all lies, claimed that Castro had deceived Marita, taken her prisoner, drugged her, raped her, and basically used her as a sex slave. It also claimed that Castro, on finding out that Marita was pregnant, arranged for a doctor to abort the baby, after which he had the doctor murdered.

Disgusted by what Rorke and her mother had done, and with all the unwanted publicity, Marita determined it would be best if she went to live with her father in Germany. After arriving there and re-uniting with her dad, she tried to establish herself in a job and start living a normal life, but it wasn’t long before the Confidential story made its way to the German tabloids. That ended any chance for anonymity and a peaceful existence for her in Europe. In addition, Michael Rorke was persistently writing her, urging that she come back to the U.S. and re-connect with the anti-Castro elements there; in the end, with Germany not working out, that’s what she decided to do. Thus, in September of 1960, Marita returned to the United States.

Once back in the U.S. she hooked up again with Rorke, and it wasn’t long before she found herself involved in running guns and weapons to the Florida Everglades, delivering them to anti-Castro Cubans in training there as part of the CIA sponsored Operation 40[15] project. Approved by President Eisenhower in March of 1960, and run by CIA Director Allen Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon, Op 40’s purpose was to train a special group, the job of which would be to take over the Cuban government once the invasion by the CIA trained anti-Castro Cubans took place and was successful. The ubiquitous Frank Fiorini, who was also involved in the overall Bay of Pigs operation, came back into Marita’s life around this time, along with another man, a soldier of fortune type, named Gerry Patrick Hemming.[16] Like Fiorini, Hemming originally had supported Castro and his revolution, but turned against it when it became obvious the dictator was going communist. From that point on he devoted his energies to overthrowing Castro, which is why he was involved in Op 40 as a military advisor.

Two Poison Pills

It was out of this environment and people that the plan was born for Marita to travel back to Havana and murder her former lover, Fidel Castro. The idea was originally proposed to her in late 1960 or early 1961 by Michael Rorke in the New York FBI office. Across several separate meetings, the plan was divulged to her: she was to go back to Havana to the suite she and Castro shared at the Hilton hotel, poison his food using two specially provided pills she was to take with her, and once the deed was done return to Miami. The poison pills were to be provided by the Mafia’s Johnny Roselli[17], whom Marita had been introduced to earlier by Frank Fiorini. (Months earlier the suave Roselli, who was famous for being a well-dressed, good looking guy, had been approached on behalf of the CIA by Howard Hughes’ attorney and business agent, Robert Maheu,[18] to get Mafia help on assassinating Castro.) Initially Marita was resistive, telling Rorke that she couldn’t do it. Being Catholic, he ironically leaned on her with religious logic; telling her that the Lord works in strange ways; that it was God’s will that Castro should die, and so on. Subsequently, as a result of several more meetings with Rorke and others from CIA, including the two “Frank and Frank” FBI agents, she gave in and agreed to carry out the assassination of Fidel Castro.

A couple of months later Marita met with the men that would be operating her mission at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. The group included Maheu and Roselli, along with Frank Fiorini, Alex Rorke, and a couple of others she did not know. By then she’d had several months to think about what she’d agreed to do, and had developed severe misgivings about carrying out the plan, which she confided to the men, telling them, “I don’t know if I can do it.”

“You’ll do it for your country!” was Fiorini’s curt response.

“What happens if I fail?” Marita asked.

“You won’t fail.” Frank said, after which he handed her a small box, inside of which was a packet with the two poison pills. He then told her: “This is going to change history.”

The next day Marita boarded the flight for Havana, but by then had decided that she would not be able to carry out her mission—murdering someone just wasn’t in her moral make-up. While on the plane she became very concerned that on landing in Cuba she’d be searched, so she took the pills from her pocket and stashed them in a jar of Pond’s face cream. As it turned out she was not searched, and she made it from the airport to Castro’s 24^th floor room at the Havana Hilton without incident. Using her key she let herself in; on noticing that Fidel wasn’t there she took out the jar of face cream and opened it, only to find that the pills had nearly dissolved completely into the cream and were now unusable. That was fine with Marita, since she had decided she could not use the pills anyway. She then disposed of the poisoned goo, tossing it down the bidet. A few minutes later Castro walked into the room, and the two former lovers were reunited.

For Marita, it was an emotional reunion for several reasons. She’d never really stopped loving the Cuban dictator, but also had a desperate need to know what had happened to her baby. On seeing her, according to Marita, Castro seemed distant and preoccupied.

“Where have you been?” he asked. “With those people in Miami, the counter-revolutionaries?”

Marita understood that she didn’t need to respond to the questions, as Castro already knew the answers. Instead she told him that the main reason she had come to Havana was to find out what had happened to her baby.

“Not to kill me?” he replied, looking her straight in the eye.

Unable to lie to him, Marita acknowledged the fact that she’d been sent to kill him with a one word answer: “Yes.”

As Marita tells it, Castro, who was lying on the bed before her, then took his pistol from its holster and handed it to her. Closing his eyes, he said, “No one can kill me. No one. Ever.”

“I can.” Marita responded.

“You won’t do it.” he said.

Knowing that Castro was right; that she couldn’t kill him, Marita put the gun down and began to cry while “demanding answers about our child.”

She says that initially Castro simply tried to assure her that everything was all right; that he knew all that had happened, but was not forthcoming about the fate of her baby. Ultimately, however, she says Castro acknowledged to her that their child was a boy; that he was all right, and that he was “in good hands,” even telling her the name of the family (Fernandez) that was caring for him.

A short while later, Marita states, Castro got up from the bed, went into the bathroom to wash up, put on a fresh pair of boots, and left the hotel room to attend a meeting and deliver a speech. She says that he asked her to stay, but that she knew she could not; she believed if she didn’t go back to the U.S. that Fiorini and the CIA/FBI people she was associated with would come looking for her. At the same time, confronting them with the fact that she had failed to kill Castro was equally daunting to her. Emotional, and caught in a situation for which there seemed no solution, Marita left the hotel and went back to the airport to catch her return flight to Miami. Prior to departing she says she left a note and $6,000 cash for Castro, asking him to invest it for their son. The money had been given to her by her handlers to be used to buy or bribe her way out of any tough spot she may encounter; under the circumstances, she thought it the best use for the cash.

Living With Failure

Exhausted, Marita arrived back in Miami later that evening. On getting off the plane she was greeted by Frank Fiorini, Alex Rorke and a dozen others, some in military uniform and the rest in civilian dress. She states that after telling them that she did not kill the Cuban leader they at first responded with disbelief, followed almost immediately by insults and cursing. She says that Fiorini grabbed her, put her in a van and drove her to a safe house on the outskirts of town; displaying his anger with her the whole way, as did the others who met her as she got off the plane. Marita states in her book, that from that moment on she has had to live with her failure to kill Castro, and that she has never been able to put it behind her; that even today they still say, “that I’m notorious for having failed not only in one of the first attempts to kill Fidel but the one that had the most chance of success.” In her book, she goes on to sum up her situation at that point as follows:

“I was back in Miami and once again trapped. I couldn’t do anything but go with the flow, conscious that the only thing I had achieved in trying to swim in the murky waters was to drown. Everyone implicated in Operation 40, and the numerous organizations with similar intentions against Fidel, loathed and despised me and didn’t have any problem about letting me know. At the same time, they couldn’t let me go because I was too involved and knew too much by now.”

Despite having failed to kill Castro, Marita stayed with Fiorini, Rorke and their anti-Castro operations for the next few months. Operating from south Florida, where the CIA was establishing its now famous JM Wave station[19] in Miami, she assisted in gun running operations and disbursing anti-Castro leaflets from light aircraft flying over Cuba. She also spent time in camps in the Everglades, where the CIA was training some of the anti-Castro Cubans destined to take part in the upcoming Bay of Pigs operation. While in one of the training camps she was nearly killed when someone took a shot that grazed her neck, causing a wound that, while not serious, bled profusely. The anti-Castro Cubans in the camp knew who Marita was and were well aware of her failure to kill Castro, prompting her to wonder if someone was deliberately trying to kill her. It was during this time that she first saw two men who would play significant roles in the future of the United States. The first of these was a man that, though she did not know it then, she later found out was Lee Harvey Oswald. She says she saw him on three or four occasions in the camps and eventually came to refer to him as “Ozzie.” The other man, whom she only knew as “Eduardo,” she saw meet with Frank Fiorini on numerous occasions, always for the purpose of delivering to Fiorini envelopes full of cash to fund his operations. It would be a full decade later, during the Watergate scandal, that Marita would at last learn the true identity of “Eduardo”, who was none other than Nixon’s point man for the White House plumbers: long time CIA officer, Howard Hunt.[20]

The Bay of Pigs

On April 17, 1961, one of the pivotal moments in U.S. Cold War history took place when Brigade 2506, the 1400 CIA trained and equipped anti-Castro Cubans, launched an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on the island’s southern coast. As Marita reports in her book, while in the training camps with the Cubans she heard the expectations that once the anti-Castro Cubans hit the beaches the freedom loving people of Cuba would rise up to support them and Castro would be overthrown. Having lived in Cuba for as long as she did, she knew the claim to be false, as by her personal observation most Cubans supported the dictator. Of course, as it turned out, Marita was right—the disaster of the CIA’s anti-Castro Cuban brigade was the worst Cold War failure in U.S. history, resulting in in the outright deaths of 106 of the invaders and the capture of 1100 more. Moreover, the debacle was a huge black eye on the world stage for the fledgling Kennedy administration, as, despite the supposed “plausible deniability” of the operation, everyone knew that the brigade was a U.S. and CIA creation. Lastly, and most importantly, the CIA officers in charge of the anti-Castro Cuban brigade, and many of its members, never forgave JFK for his supposed “failure”[21] to intervene with U.S. air power when the brigade found itself trapped by Castro’s forces on the swampy beaches at the Bay of Pigs—a fact that would ultimately have a profound effect on our nation.  

Following the Bay of Pigs, Marita tried to separate herself from the espionage world of Frank Fiorini and his associates. Wanting to start an actual career, she started training to be a stewardess, but those plans were derailed when she met and became romantically involved with a man named Marcos Perez Jimenez, who, from 1952-1958 had been the “president” of Venezuela—in this case a euphemistic title for “dictator.” When Jimenez was forced from office in 1958 he fled Venezuela with $200 million in illicit funds and settled in Florida. Marita ended up having a child with him, which she was very happy about, but her world came apart once again when the former dictator was extradited from the U.S. and sent to Spain. Destitute, and now with a child to care for, she appealed to Fiorini for assistance and once again started helping him in his various operations. Thus, in September of 1963 she found herself sitting in on a most significant meeting at the Florida home of one of the most ardent of anti-Castro Cubans, Orlando Bosch[22], who a few years hence would be labeled a terrorist by the U.S. government.

As relayed by Marita in her book, those at the meeting at Bosch’s house included Orlando Bosch himself, Frank Fiorini, and the man she had come to know as “Ozzie,” which is how she referred to Lee Harvey Oswald. (At this point it is important to keep in mind that the big picture of JFK’s assassination is replete with the appearance of “Oswald doubles,” that is, someone who looks like Oswald showing up at different times and places when the real Oswald was somewhere else. There are many examples of this, and it is one of the major failures of the Warren Commission that they did not investigate this “double Oswald” phenomena and get to the bottom of it. Instead, when they encountered it they simply assumed whoever was reporting seeing Oswald somewhere that conflicted with the known whereabouts of the “real” Oswald, was mistaken. It is hard to say for sure, but it is very possible that the “Ozzie” Marita describes was one of these Oswald doubles.) Marita’s role at the meeting was limited to helping Bosch’s wife serve coffee, but on several occasions when in the meeting room she observed maps spread out on the table, the men drawing circles and marking various spots on the maps, and the word “Dallas” written on them. She got the impression the men were planning another gun running trip and beyond that didn’t think too much about it.

About six weeks later, in mid-November, Fiorini contacted Marita and told her it was time for the trip they’d been planning back in September. At the appointed time, she rendezvoused once again with him and the others taking the trip at Bosch’s house, where they piled into two cars and started traveling west to Dallas. Besides Marita, Fiorini and Bosch, she says the traveling group included, Oswald, another extreme anti-Castro Cuban named Pedro Diaz Lanz[23], and Gerry Patrick Hemming, the American she’d met before in the Everglades training camps. In her book, she reports that she was in a car with Fiorini and Hemming, and that the trunk and the floor of the back seat were packed with weapons, thus restricting the leg room for Hemming, a tall man, causing him to complain. She says that for this trip everything seemed more rigorous than usual, that they were instructed to wear normal clothes; no camouflage or military garb, and that they were forbidden to speak Spanish. She says it was stressed over and over that they needed to drive very carefully, so as not to be stopped for traffic offenses, and that for meals they could only go to drive-ins—no restaurants. As they would be driving straight through to Dallas, there would be no stopping at hotels; any sleeping would need to be in the car, with drivers changing to allow it. Ordinarily on trips like this, the weapons they were transporting would be dropped at various points on the way, but not so this time, which prompted Marita to ask why all the guns were needed.

“Oh! They’ll be useful.”, someone answered.

 Someone else then quipped, “We’re going to kill Kennedy.”

Marita, of course, thought they were joking. As she would soon come to know, they weren’t.

Dallas  

Note: The timeline of Marita’s trip to Dallas as described in her book varies somewhat from the timeline she described in her deposition taken for the Liberty Lobby vs. Howard Hunt defamation trial, as related in Mark Lane’s book, “Plausible Denial.”  For the purposes of this article I am relating the timeline described in her testimony, as it was accepted by the court, subjected to cross examination, and is also subject to perjury laws.    

After a two day trip the group arrived in Dallas and settled into two rooms at a hotel on the outskirts of town. Their arrival date would have most likely been Wednesday, the 20^th of November. She states that they brought the bags of guns in to the rooms and stored them next to the double beds in each room. She also states that she spent the first night at the hotel sleeping on the floor, as the beds were occupied by the men. As already noted, to Marita, due to the imposed restrictions on dress, language (no Spanish), the fact they could not go in to restaurants etc., this was already an unusual trip. Making it even more unusual were the very precise instructions they had to adhere to in Dallas. No one was permitted to leave the hotel rooms for any reason, and they were forbidden to make or receive phone calls or, except for a couple of pre-arranged visits, bring anyone to the room. If food was needed special arrangements would be made to bring it to the room. Like the trip from Florida, there would be no restaurants, and English only was to be spoken, all of which must have made Marita wonder: just what had she gotten herself into.

In the end, she wasn’t allowed to stick around to find out, which was fine with her, as she wanted to get back to her baby daughter, whom she’d left with a friend back in Florida. The incident that precipitated her departure occurred on Thursday, 21 November. On that day she witnessed two prearranged visits to their hotel room—the first occurring when the ubiquitous Eduardo (Howard Hunt) arrived and delivered an envelope full of cash to Frank Fiorini, who counted it and acknowledged it was sufficient. Hunt’s visit lasted about 45 minutes, and a short while later another man came to the room to speak to Fiorini. Marita describes the man as “middle-aged…somewhere between stocky and tubby, wearing white socks and a dark jacket and trousers.” She then goes on to say, “His face was familiar and he looked like a gangster type, a bit of a thug compared to the people I was with. I realized that I had seen this man before in Cuba at the Hotel Riviera. I didn’t know his name then in Havana nor when I saw him at the motel in Dallas but I found out a few days later: it was Jack Ruby.”

On stepping into the room and seeing Marita, Ruby, in a hostile manner, immediately challenged Fiorini on her presence there: “What’s the fucking broad doing here?” he asked. The two men then stepped out into the hallway and shut the door. Even so, she could hear them arguing and could follow their conversation. When the argument ended, Frank came back into the room and approached Marita, telling her:

“I think I made a mistake. They don’t want a woman involved.”  

In a weak effort to stay, Marita responded that she had taken part in similar jobs.

“Not like this.” Fiorini said.

And with that, Marita made the decision to leave Dallas. Frank gave her money for a plane ticket and then drove her, along with Gerry Hemming, who was also leaving, to the airport. She boarded a plane for Miami, retrieved her daughter, and then flew to New York on the morning of Friday, November 22^nd, where she intended to stay with her mother. During the flight the captain informed the passengers that due to something that happened in Dallas, an emergency of some kind, their plane would be redirected to Newark. On hearing this, Marita’s heart sank. “Oh, my God!” she thought, “I hope not.”

But, when she and her daughter landed, her mother met them at the airport and confirmed Marita’s fear. “Someone shot Kennedy.” she said.

Epilog

As she testified in the Liberty Lobby trial, years after JFK’s murder Marita Lorenz would again encounter Frank Fiorini. In trying to recruit her for yet another CIA operation he was involved in, Frank told her that she had missed “the really big one” in Dallas. He then went on to explain: “We killed the president that day. You could have been a part of it, you know, part of history. You should have stayed. It was safe. Everything was covered in advance. No arrests, no real newspaper investigation. It was all covered, very professional.”

Ultimately the world would come to know Howard Hunt for his role in the Watergate scandal. As the point man for the White House plumbers, the covert operations group run out of the Nixon White House in 1971-72, he was indicted for his illegal activities, convicted, and ended up serving 33 months in a low security prison. The same was true for Frank Fiorini, who by the time of Watergate was calling himself Frank Sturgis. As one of the five Watergate burglars, he was also indicted and convicted; serving 14 months in a low security prison.

Shortly before his death, in 2004 Howard Hunt gave a filmed confession to his son, St. John Hunt, in which he finally admits his role in JFK’s assassination, describing himself as a benchwarmer in what he called the Big Event, thus corroborating the testimony of Marita Lorenz. In the confession, he also names Frank Sturgis as being involved, further corroborating her testimony, along with one of the more notorious of CIA hit men of the time, a man named David Morales.[24] In his confession he lays the ultimate responsibility for the assassination plot on Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, whom he describes as having a pathological desire to be president. He further states that to manage the plot LBJ retained the services of a senior CIA officer named Cord Meyer, whose ex-wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer[25], was one of JFK’s last and, in terms of influence on him, most important lovers. He also implicates two other CIA men in the plot: David Atlee Phillips[26], who in 1963 was chief of station for the CIA in Mexico City, and William Harvey[27], a long-time intelligence officer who had most recently been active in the CIA’s Operation Mongoose[28]. If you have yet to listen to or watch Hunt’s confession, you can do so on You Tube. Just keep in mind that Hunt has a long history as a pathological liar, though his confession, to me, does have the ring of truth.

Lastly, further confirmation of Marita’s tale of the trip from Florida to Dallas prior to the assassination comes from a most unlikely source: Gerry Patrick Hemming. In 1992, shortly after Mark Lane published his book “Plausible Denial,” he was doing a radio show in Los Angeles on KPFK-FM radio. The host of the show was Roy Tuckman, who was something of a legend in late night LA radio, often featuring intriguing and unique guests, of which Lane was one. On the show Lane relates how he had very recently found the phone number for Gerry Patrick Hemming in the phone book and decided to call him on the phone. Amazingly, when Lane called Hemming answered, and the following conversation ensued:  

Lane: (explains to radio audience: “Hemming didn’t have to talk to me; I thought he might hang up…” then Lane described the phone call…)

“Is this Gerry Patrick Hemming?”

Hemming: “Yes”

Lane: “This is Mark Lane.”

Hemming: “Hi, Mark! How ya doin’?”

Lane: “I guess you didn’t read my book.”

Hemming: “I read your book! I read it!”

Lane: “What did you think?”

Hemming: “I liked it a lot!”

Lane: “Well, Gerry, did you like the part where Marita said it was a two-car caravan, and that you were in it and that you guys went to Dallas and killed John Kennedy?”

Hemming: “She was a little bit wrong about that.”

Lane: “In what way?”

Hemming: (pauses and thinks it over) “It was a three-car caravan.”

Lane: “Were you in it?”

Hemming: “I know about it; I’m not saying I was in it. I wasn’t in it, but I know about it.”

Lane: “Do you know anything else about the Kennedy assassination?”

Hemming: “Yes! Guy Bannister (special agent in charge of the FBI in Chicago, later retired, went to New Orleans and worked for the CIA) offered me a contract in September of 1962, to kill John Kennedy on behalf of the CIA.”

Lane: “If there were a special prosecutor…?”

Hemming: “Yes, if there were one I would come forward; I would testify, I would make that known; it’s time the American people learned everything that happened that day.”

After relaying the substance of his conversation with Hemming, Lane then stated the following to the radio audience:

 “What we need now, is a special prosecutor. I’m not sure George Bush (then US President) is going to rush out and appoint one for us, but we need a special prosecutor…freeing the files is just the first step, it’s not the last step. We must force the government to appoint a special prosecutor. If that process took place tonight, by the end of this year the people who killed John F. Kennedy would be indicted, and prosecuted and probably convicted; because the evidence is there; a lot of it is there in ‘Plausible Denial,’ and there’s a lot of additional information. If you’ve got Gerry Patrick Hemming, Marita Lorenz, Frank Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, to start out with, and present them to the grand jury, we would learn a lot about how the President was killed, and why he was killed.”

Mark Lane passed away in May of 2016.

His wish for the appointment of a special prosecutor in the JFK case never came to pass.

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[1] Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar (January 16, 1901 – August 6, 1973) was the military leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1940. A farm worker from eastern Cuba, and moved to Havana where he became a stenographer and a sergeant in the Army, becoming a leader of a group of sergeants who wanted better pay. With others they overthrew President Gerardo Machado in 1933 and Batista ended up commanding the Army. In 1940 he won election and was President of Cuba until 1944. In 1952 he staged his own coup and ruled the country until 1959. His authoritarian government during this time caused opposition despite his attempt to placate critics with a ‘show’ election in 1954 where he ran without opposition. In the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro’s guerrilla movement overthrew Batista, who fled Cuba on January 1, 1959 and went to the Dominican Republic before moving on to Portugal and finally to Spain where he died of a heart attack in 1973.

[2] In the wake of Watergate and President Nixon’s resignation in 1974, a reform minded Congress undertook investigations of the FBI and CIA. One of these investigations, chaired by Senator Frank Church (Democrat from Idaho) resulted in 14 separate reports containing much criticism of CIA and FBI actions. Those reports, plus the release of the Zapruder film on network television in 1975, which appears to show JFK being shot from the front, resulted in the formation of the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 and 1968, respectively. The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and issued its final report the following year, which concluded that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.

[3] Gaeton Fonzi (October 10, 1935 – August 30, 2012) was an American investigative journalist and author known for his work on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was a reporter and editor for Philadelphia magazine from 1959 to 1972, and contributed to a range of other publications, including The New York Times and Penthouse. He was hired as a researcher in 1975 by the Church Committee and by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977, and in 1993 published a book on the subject, The Last Investigation, detailing his experiences as a Congressional researcher as well as his conclusions. In his book, Fonzi details how the HSCA investigation was ultimately derailed by the CIA and subverted in its mission.

[4] Mark Lane (February 24, 1927 – May 10, 2016) was an American attorney, New York state legislator, civil rights activist, and Vietnam war-crimes investigator. Lane is best known as a leading researcher and author on the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. Lane authored 10 books on the JFK assassination, including Rush to Judgment, the 1966 number-one bestselling critique of the Warren Commission and Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK, published in 2011. Executive Action is a 1973 American conspiracy thriller film about the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy, written by Dalton Trumbo, Mark Lane, and Donald Freed, and directed by David Miller. It stars Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan. 

[5] James Carothers Garrison (born Earling Carothers Garrison; November 20, 1921 – October 21, 1992) was the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, from 1962 to 1973 and later a state appellate court judge. He is best known for his investigations into the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the prosecution of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw in 1969 for conspiracy to kill JFK, which ended in Shaw’s acquittal. He wrote three published books, one of which became a prime source for Oliver Stone’s film JFK in 1991, in which Garrison was portrayed by actor Kevin Costner, while Garrison himself also made a cameo appearance as Earl Warren.

[6] Everette Howard Hunt Jr. (October 9, 1918 – January 23, 2007) was an American intelligence officer and author. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where he was a central figure in U.S. regime change in Latin America including the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état and the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration’s so-called White House Plumbers, a team of operatives charged with identifying government leaks to outside parties. Hunt and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries and other clandestine operations for the Nixon administration. In the Watergate scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping, and was sentenced to 33 months in prison. After his release, Hunt lived in Mexico and then Miami until his death in January 2007.

[7] Victor Leo Marchetti Jr. (December 23, 1929 – October 19, 2018)was a special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency who later became a prominent critic of the United States Intelligence Community. In 1974 he released The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence after much wrangling in court with the Agency, which claimed that Marchetti was violating his secrecy oath in publishing some of the material in the book. Ultimately the courts sided with the CIA, which resulted in the removal from the text of the banned passages, replacing where they were with blanks.

[8] Ilona Marita Lorenz (18 August 1939 – 31 August 2019) was a German woman who had an affair with Fidel Castro in 1959 and in January 1960 was involved in an assassination attempt by the CIA on Castro’s life. In the 1970s and 1980s, she testified about the John F. Kennedy assassination, stating that she was involved with a group of anti-Cuban militants, including Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt of CIA and Watergate infamy, shortly before the assassination. Her autobiography “Marita: The Spy Who Loved Castro” was published in 2017.

[9] Meyer Lansky (born Maier Suchowljansky, July 4, 1902 – January 15, 1983), known as the “Mob’s Accountant“, was an American organized crime figure who, along with his associate Charles “Lucky” Luciano, was instrumental in the development of the National Crime Syndicate in the United States. A member of the Jewish mob, Lansky developed a gambling empire that stretched around the world. He was said to own points (percentages) in casinos in Las Vegas, Cuba, The Bahamas, and London. Lansky had a strong influence with the Italian-American Mafia. He played a large role in the consolidation of the criminal underworld by introducing money laundering and offshore banking in 1932, used in the 1950s for cash from heroin trade. The full extent of this role has been the subject of some debate, as Lansky himself denied many of the accusations against him.

[10] Frank Anthony Sturgis (December 9, 1924 – December 4, 1993), born Frank Angelo Fiorini, was one of the five Watergate burglars whose capture led to the end of the presidency of Richard Nixon. He served in several branches of the United States military and in Castro’s Cuban Revolution of 1958, worked as an undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, and was alleged to be involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

[11] Camilo Cienfuegos Gorriarán (6 February 1932 – 28 October 1959) was a Cuban revolutionary. One of the major figures of the Cuban Revolution, he was considered second only to Fidel Castro among the revolutionary leadership. The son of Spanish parents, Cienfuegos engaged with left-wing politics from an early age, going on to join the opposition movement against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He joined Castro’s 26th of July Movement on its expedition to Cuba and quickly distinguished himself as one of the top commanders of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and a popular leading figure of the revolution, becoming close friends with Che Guevara. After the capture of Havana Cienfuegos was appointed as commander-in-chief of the armed forces by the new revolutionary government. He oversaw the reorganization of the armed forces, in order to purge leading figures of the Cuban National Army and replace them with guerrilla commanders more loyal to Fidel Castro. When Huber Matos objected to Castro’s consolidation of power, he was arrested by Cienfuegos. While flying back from Matos’ former headquarters at Cienfuegos’ plane disappeared over the Straits of Florida. After a few days of an attempted search and rescue operation, he was presumed dead by the Cuban government. His disappearance quickly spawned a number of conspiracy theories, many of which speculated Fidel or Raúl Castro to have been responsible, but no proof of such has been discovered. Cienfuegos has since become known as a revolutionary martyr in Cuba, with a number of institutions being dedicated to his name, including a Military Schools System and an Order of Merit.

[12] Huber Matos Benítez (26 November 1918 – 27 February 2014) was a Cuban military leader, political dissident, activist, and writer. He opposed the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista from its inception in 1952 and fought alongside Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and other members of the 26th of July Movement to overthrow it. (The 26th of July Movement was a Cuban revolutionary organization and later a political party led by Fidel Castro. The movement’s name commemorates the failed 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, part of an attempt by Fidel Castro and his followers to overthrow Batista) Following the success of the Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, Matos criticized the regime’s shift in favor of Marxist principles. Convicted of treason and sedition by the revolutionary government, he spent 20 years in prison (1959–1979) before being released in 1979. He then divided his time between Miami, Florida, and Costa Rica while continuing to protest the policies of the Cuban government.

[13] Alexander Irwin Rorke, the son of Alexander Rorke, a Manhattan district attorney, was born on 9th August 1926. After graduating from St. John’s University he attended the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. During the Second World War Rorke served as a military intelligence specialist in the U.S. Army. He was responsible for the security of five German provinces and participated in the first postwar roundup of Communist agents in the Allied military zones of Germany. After the war Rorke married Jacqueline Billingsley, the daughter of Sherman Billingsley, the owner of the New York Stork Club (a famous, prestigious New York nightclub). Rorke became a freelance newsman, and according to a declassified FBI document began working for the CIA in 1960. His contact officer was Commander Anderson of the United States Navy who was assigned to the CIA office in New York City. Rorke later joined Frank Sturgis, in attempts to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. It was in that capacity that he came to know and work with Marita Lorenz. On 24th September, 1963, a plane carrying Rorke and two associates took off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Later that day their aircraft disappeared while flying over Cuba and was never found. For a while it was suspected that Rorke had been captured and was being held in Cuba, but ultimately he was declared legally dead in 1968.

[14] Manuel Francisco Artime Buesa, M.D. (29 January 1932 – 18 November 1977) was a Cuban-American who at one time was a member of the rebel army of Fidel Castro but later was the political leader of Brigade 2506 land forces in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. In December, 1958, he joined Castro’s rebel army and took part in offensives against the forces of the Batista regime. In October 1959, after the arrest and trial of Commander Huber Matos of the Cuban revolutionary army, the Cuban intelligence unit G-2 began searching for other counter-revolutionaries. By then Artime was having misgivings about Castro’s communist leanings and was in the G-2 crosshairs. He took asylum with the Jesuits in Havana, ultimately contacting the U.S. embassy, where he got CIA help in fleeing Cuba for the U.S. With the CIA plan to invade Cuba in the planning and training stage, on 22 June, 1960, Artime and 27 others were taken by land and air to Fort Gulick in Panama for paramilitary training. On 22 August, 1960, he flew via CIA C-54 transport aircraft to San Jose, Guatemala.On 15 April, 1961, two days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Artime was confirmed as Economic Administrator and “Delegate in the Invading Army”, and on 17 April, 1961, he went ashore with Brigade 2506, the assault brigade of Cuban exiles, in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. After the Brigade had ceased fighting on 19 April, 1961, he and others scattered into the woods and swamps and on 2 May he was captured by Cuban forces with 21 other members of the Brigade. Artime, along with everyone else captured in the failed invasion, was sentenced to 30 years in a prison during a mass treason trial. He was finally released from prison and flown to Miami on 24 December, 1962. On 29 December, 1962, Manuel Artime was on stage next to US President John F. Kennedy at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, during the ‘welcome back’ ceremony for captured Brigade 2506 veterans.

[15] Operation 40 was the code name for a Central Intelligence Agency sponsored counterintelligence group composed of Cuban exiles. The group was formed to seize control of the Cuban government after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Operation 40 continued to operate unofficially until disbanded in 1970 due to allegations that an aircraft that was carrying cocaine and heroin in support of the group crashed in California. It was approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in March 1960, after the January 1959 Cuban Revolution, and was presided over by Vice President Richard Nixon.

[16] Gerald Patrick “Gerry” Hemming, Jr. (March 1, 1937 – January 28, 2008) was a former U.S. Marine, mercenary and Central Intelligence Agency asset within the Domestic Contact Division. (the domestic wing of the CIA. Although the CIA is focused on gathering intelligence from foreign nations, it has performed operations within the United States to achieve its goals. Some of these operations only became known to the public years after they had been conducted, and were met with significant criticism from the population as a whole, with allegations that these operations may have violated violate the Constitution.) Like many who ultimately ended up opposing Castro, Hemming initially supported him, becoming disaffected with him as his communist leanings became apparent. Beginning in 1960, using the aliases Jerry Patrick, Gerry Patrick, Heming and Hannon,he was primarily involved in covert operations against Cuba. One of eleven children, Hemming was born in Los Angeles, California on March 1, 1937. He attended El Monte Union High School in California before joining the United States Marine Corps in 1954. Hemming left the Marines in October 1958 and the following year traveled to Cuba where he gave help to Fidel Castro and his revolutionary forces.

[17] John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli (born Filippo Sacco; July 4, 1905 – August 7, 1976), sometimes spelled Roselli, was a mobster for the Chicago Outfit who helped that organization exert influence over Hollywood and the Las Vegas Strip. Roselli was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. After the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, Fidel Castro closed down the casinos that the Mob operated in Cuba, and attempted to drive the mobsters out of the country. This made Roselli, Chicago Outfit boss Sam Giancana and Tampa boss Santo Trafficante amenable to the idea of killing Castro. This led to the contact with Robert Maheu and the CIA collaboration to kill Castro. On June 24 and September 22, 1975, Roselli testified before the 1975 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCIA) led by Idaho Senator Frank Church about the CIA plan to kill Castro, Operation Mongoose. On April 23, 1976, Roselli was called before the committee to testify about a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Three months after his first round of testimony on the Kennedy assassination, the Committee wanted to recall Roselli. However, at this point, he had been missing since July 28. On August 7, 1976, ten days after his disappearance, Roselli’s decomposing body was found by a fisherman in a 55-gallon steel fuel drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, Florida.

[18] Robert Aime Maheu (October 30, 1917 – August 4, 2008) was an American businessman and lawyer, who worked for the FBI and CIA, and as the chief executive of Nevada operations for the industrialist Howard Hughes. In the summer of 1960, the CIA recruited Maheu to approach the West Coast representative of the Chicago mob, Johnny Roselli. When Maheu contacted Roselli, Maheu hid the fact that he was sent by the CIA, instead portraying himself an advocate for international corporations. He offered to pay $150,000 to have Castro killed, but Roselli declined any pay. Roselli introduced Maheu to two men he referred to as “Sam Gold” and “Joe.” “Sam Gold” was Sam Giancana; “Joe” was Santo Trafficante, Jr. the Tampa, Florida boss and one of the most powerful mobsters in pre-revolution Cuba.Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post explained: “After Fidel Castro led a revolution that toppled a friendly government in 1959, the CIA was desperate to eliminate him. So the agency sought out a partner equally worried about Castro—the Mafia, which had lucrative investments in Cuban casinos.” In testimony before the Church Committee in 1975, Maheu confirmed his role in the assassination plot against Castro, saying that he thought the United States “was involved in a just war.”CIA documents released in 2007 provided additional details of the plot.

[19] JMWAVE or JM/WAVE or JM WAVE was the codename for a major secret United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station operated by the Central Intelligence Agency from 1961 until 1968. It was headquartered in Building 25 at the former Naval Air Station Richmond, an airship base in Miami, about 12 miles south of the main campus of the University of Miami on what is the university’s present-day South Campus. The intelligence facility was also referred to as the CIA’s “Miami Station” or “Wave Station.

[20] Everette Howard Hunt Jr. (October 9, 1918 – January 23, 2007) was an American intelligence officer and author. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where he was a central figure in U.S. regime change in Latin America including the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état and the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration’s so-called White House Plumbers, a team of operatives charged with identifying government leaks to outside parties. Hunt and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries and other clandestine operations for the Nixon administration. In the Watergate scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping, and was sentenced to 33 months in prison. After his release, he lived in Mexico and then Miami until his death in January 2007. In 2004 Hunt recorded a “confession” for his son St John Hunt in which he describes who was behind the plot to kill JFK and the people involved, including himself. The confession can be watched or listened to on You Tube.

[21] For the full story of the Bay of Pigs and President Kennedy’s supposed failure to provide air support for anti-Castro invasion, please see “The Hidden Story of the Bay of Pigs” linked here:

JFK and the Road to Dallas: The Hidden Story of the Bay of Pigs—by Mark Arnold

[22] Orlando Bosch Ávila (18 August 1926 – 27 April 2011) was a Cuban exile militant, who headed the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), described by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation as a terrorist organization.Born in Cuba, Bosch attended medical school at the University of Havana, where he befriended Fidel Castro. He worked as a doctor in Santa Clara Province in the 1950s, but moved to Miami in 1960 after he stopped supporting the Cuban Revolution. Between 1961 and 1968 Bosch was arrested several times in the United States for attacks directed at the Cuban government, and briefly collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency. He was jailed in Florida in 1968 for a bazooka attack on a Polish freighter, but violated parole and fled to Venezuela in 1974. While there he was arrested for a bombing, was released in exchange for surrendering his munitions, and moved to Chile. The US government considered him to have been involved in multiple bombings while in Chile. In 1976 he was arrested for an assassination attempt in Costa Rica; the US declined an extradition offer, and he was sent to the Dominican Republic. Bosch founded CORU in 1976 along with other Cuban exiles. The group was responsible for a number of attacks in 1976, including the assassination of Orlando Letelier, who was a significant opponent of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, in Washington, D.C. CORU is also considered to be responsible for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455, a Cuban civilian airliner, on 6 October 1976 in which all 73 people on board were killed. Bosch and three others were arrested and tried for the bombing in Venezuela, though Bosch was ultimately acquitted. In his later years Bosch raised money to support resistance to the Cuban government, and died in Miami aged 84. He remains a controversial figure, with former US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh describing him as an “unreformed terrorist”.

[23] Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz (July 8, 1926 in Havana, Cuba – June 26, 2008 Miami, U.S.) was Chief of the Revolutionary Air Force of Cuba under Fidel Castro, before and after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. He is great-grandson of a sister of the Cuban national hero José Marti. In 1957, Lanz joined Fidel Castro’s rebel group in Santiago, Cuba. He was employed as a commercial pilot with the airline Aerovías Q. He later acted as head of the Revolutionary Air Force, and during 1958 he smuggled weapons and ammunition from Costa Rica and Florida into Cuba by air. After the Cuban Revolution on 1 January 1959, he was confirmed as head of the new Revolutionary Air Force as well as Castro’s personal pilot. Within months, he became vocal about his opposition to the influence of communists on the new revolutionary government. On 29 June 1959, Fidel Castro relieved him of his post, and he left immediately by boat for Florida with his second wife and 3 of his six children, and reportedly with Frank Fiorini, a fellow anti-communist. On 14 July 1959, Díaz was interviewed by the US Senate Internal Security subcommittee, where he gave out the first account of Fidel’s planned move towards communism. On 21October 1959 he carried out one of his most notorious acts, flying a twin-engined bomber (variously reported as a B-25 or B-26) over Havana while dropping anti-communist leaflets, along with his brother Marcos Diaz Lanz. Pedro Diaz Lanz piloted and Marcos Diaz Lanz threw the leaflets down from an open bomb hatch. The unsuccessful gunfire from armed forces on the ground caused injuries and deaths, leading to unsubstantiated reports of bombs being dropped from the aircraft. By April 1960, he was recruited by the CIA and became a member of Operation 40, a group of CIA operatives who specialized in carrying out secret anti-Castro assassinations and acts of sabotage. Then on May 27 of 1960, the Miami Herald published a list of names of pilots who were placed on a U.S. Government ‘Blacklist’ thereby prohibiting them from flying to Cuba; on that list was Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz Díaz committed suicide with a gunshot wound to the chest in 2008 at the age of 81 after years of poverty and depression.

[24] David Sánchez Morales (August 26, 1925 – May 8, 1978) was a Central Intelligence Agency operative who worked in Cuba and Chile. Morales, of Cuban-Mexican descent, spent his early life in Phoenix, Arizona, and attended school at Arizona State College in Tempe (now Arizona State University) and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles before joining the Army in 1946. He served in the 82nd Airborne, and was recruited into US Army intelligence during that time. Morales maintained an Army ‘cover’ even after joining the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951.Shortly after joining the CIA, Morales became an operative for the CIA’s Directorate for Plans. It is alleged that he was involved in Executive Action, a series of projects designed to kill foreign leaders deemed unfriendly to the United States, with evidence indicating possibly the JFK assassination as well. Morales reportedly was involved in the CIA covert operation that overthrew the democratically elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Through the 1960s and mid-1970s, Morales was involved at top levels in a variety of covert projects, including JMWAVE, the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs Invasion operation, the CIA’s secret war in Laos, the capture of Che Guevara, and the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, the president of Chile.

[25] Mary Eno Pinchot Meyer (October 14, 1920 – October 12, 1964) was an American painter who lived in Washington D.C. She was married to Cord Meyer from 1945 to 1958, and became involved romantically with President John F. Kennedy after her divorce from Meyer. Cord Meyer was recruited into the CIA in 1951 by Alan Dulles, which ultimately was one of the factors leading to Mary and he divorcing, as Mary was becoming more and more disaffected with the intelligence community. She and JFK shad known each other since their prep school years, but it wasn’t until 1961, with Kennedy in the White House, that they started their affair. A little less than a year after JFK was assassinated, in October of 1964 Mary Pinchot Meyer herself was shot and killed while taking a walk along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath in Georgetown. The man arrested for her murder was acquitted, and her killing remains an unsolved crime to this day. Much evidence indicates that Pinchot-Meyer’s killing was a professional hit, and a book entitled “Mary’s Mosaic” by Peter Janey has been written about the case. I have read the book, and highly recommend it. Many others peripherally involved as witnesses in JFK’s killing have been killed as well, with Mary Pinchot Meyer being one of the most high profile.

[26] David Atlee Phillips (October 31, 1922 – July 7, 1988) was an American Central Intelligence Agency officer of 25 years and a recipient of the Career Intelligence Medal. Phillips rose to become the CIA’s chief of operations for the Western hemisphere. Phillips was repeatedly accused of involvement in the JFK assassination, named by both investigators and Agency family members. The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated accusations from Cuban exile Antonio Veciana that Phillips had met Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1980, a book by Donald Freed and Fred Landis was released also accusing him of involvement. Phillips joined the CIA as a part-time agent in 1950 in Chile and became a full-time operative in 1954. He operated a major psychological warfare campaign in Guatemala during the US coup and its aftermath. He rose through the ranks to intelligence officer, chief of station and eventually chief of Western hemisphere operations, serving primarily in Latin America, including Cuba, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. Phillips retired from the agency in 1975. In his book, “The Last Investigation” House Select Committee researcher Gaeton Fonzi tells of being told by anti-Castro paramilitary organization Alpha 66 founder Antonio Veciana that in September of 1963 he arrived for a meeting in Dallas and witnessed Phillips meeting with Lee Harvey Oswald. The HSCA investigator claimed Veciana knew Phillips as “Maurice Bishop,” the CIA contact who supported him with Alpha 66, but in testimony before the Committee Veciana twice denied that Phillips was Bishop. In Fonzi’s book it’s pretty clear that he didn’t believe Veciana was being truthful in his testimony.

[27] William King “Bill” Harvey (September 13, 1915 – June 9, 1976) was an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, best known for his role in the terrorism and sabotage campaign known as Operation Mongoose; a CIA operation run from Miami that ran various attempts to undermine or overthrow the Cuban Revolution. In 1960 Harvey was tasked with a project to organize “executive actions” (a euphemism for the assassination of foreign political leaders) under the codename ZR/RIFLE. To eliminate Fidel Castro, Harvey decided he needed to employ the resources of the American Mafia. He drew on the connections of businessman and CIA asset Robert Maheu, who had cultivated relationships with Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante Jr., Johnny Roselli and other figures. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Harvey, in an unauthorized operation, he sent ten intelligence operatives into Cuba to gather intelligence and prepare for an invasion Harvey thought inevitable. With his knowledge of the CIA’s “executive action” capabilities there are many who think Harvey was a central figure in the plot to assassinate JFK. In the April 5, 2007, issue of Rolling Stone, E. Howard Hunt’s son, Saint John Hunt, detailed a number of individuals implicated by his father in Kennedy’s murder, including Harvey, Lyndon B. Johnson, Cord Meyer, David Sánchez Morales, David Atlee Phillips, Frank Sturgis, and an assassin he termed “French gunman grassy knoll”, who many presume was Lucien Sarti. Bill Harvey died of a heart attack on June 9, 1976.

[28] The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba. It was officially authorized on November 30, 1961 by U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The name “Operation Mongoose” was agreed to at a White House meeting on November 4, 1961. Mongoose was run out of JMWAVE, a major secret United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station on the campus of the University of Miami. The operation, which was implemented in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, was led by United States Air Force General Edward Lansdale on the military side, and William King Harvey at the CIA.