Friend of Castro, plotted to kill him
Rolando Cubela, who has died aged 89 or 90, was a veteran of the guerrilla war that toppled the Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He held high military rank under Fidel Castro and frequented a beach house next to one that Fidel used at Varadero, a resort a couple of hours east of Havana, yet in 1961 he was recruited by the CIA and, two years later, tasked with Castro’s assassination.
The Kennedy administration was desperate to eliminate Castro. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion had been a fiasco and by August 1963 senior figures at the CIA were said to be receiving almost daily phone calls from Attorney General Robert Kennedy demanding to know what they were doing to remove Castro from power.
Cubela had first approached the CIA about defecting in March 1961, his ostensible reason being that he believed that by establishing a dictatorship, Castro had betrayed the revolution. Given the code name AMLASH, he agreed to work undercover in Cuba. Some CIA staff, however, suspected he was a “dangle” (a double agent).
On Oct. 5, 1963, Cubela was said to have met his CIA handler in Paris to tell him he wanted “to undertake the big job.” But, claiming he needed to be sure of American bona fides, he demanded a face-to-face meeting with Robert Kennedy.
That would have breached the CIA principle of “plausible deniability,” so it was decided that a senior agency official would meet Cubela. On Oct. 29, Desmond Fitzgerald, head of the CIA’S Special Affairs Staff and friend of the Kennedys, met Cubela in Paris. Cubela agreed to go ahead with the assassination, and on Nov. 22 a high-ranking CIA officer handed him the murder weapon — a ballpoint pen filled with Black Leaf 40 (a deadly poison) and “containing a hypodermic needle so thin that the victim would not even feel its insertion.”
By some extraordinary coincidence, however, during the meeting John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The poison-pen plot was subsequently aborted.
In June 1965, the CIA terminated its relationship with Cubela “for reasons related to security.” Claims that Cubela was a double agent who kept Castro informed of CIA assassination plots circulate to this day.
In 1966, Cubela was convicted of plotting to kill the head of state and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was pardoned and released in 1979. He went into exile in Madrid, where he worked as a doctor and in 1988 obtained Spanish citizenship. He retired in Miami.