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Bay of Pigs until he was grievously
    wounded by an exploding shell, and Almeida had visited the recover-
    ing Harry in a field hospital. Harry was one of sixty injured prisoners
    released by Fidel in April 1962, to persuade JFK to free the remaining
    1,113 Bay of Pigs prisoners from their deplorable prison conditions.
    Harry grew close to the Kennedys, especially Bobby, while working
    to get the prisoners released by Christmas Eve 1962. After the prisoners’
    triumphant return and welcome at a huge ceremony at Miami’s Orange
    Bowl, Bobby began to work with Harry on ways to deal with Castro. In
    Bobby’s oral history at the Kennedy Presidential Library, Bobby says that
    Harry was “very brave” and “very bright,” and had “very good judg-
    ment.”14 Their mutual friend, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Haynes
    Johnson, said that “Bobby trusted Harry. He loved it that Harry was full
    of shrapnel from the Bay of Pigs.” Haynes, and no doubt Bobby as well,
    liked the fact that “Harry was bluff, candid, blunt.” In addition, unlike
    many Cuban exile leaders in the US, who were content to sit safely in
    offices and collect support from the CIA and their fellow exiles, Haynes
    said that “Harry was willing to die at any moment.”15
    When Commander Almeida learned from the May 1963 news-
    paper article that his old friend was working for the Kennedys to topple
    Castro, he decided to contact Harry. Initially, Bobby and Harry had been
    angry the article had revealed so much information, but that changed
    when they learned of Almeida’s interest. Thus began several months of
    secret negotiations and planning, with Harry acting as an intermediary
    between Bobby and Almeida, while Bobby kept JFK (and a handful of
    other officials) up to date. Bobby’s official phone logs document some
    of these calls. For example, on May 13, 1963, at 5:50 PM, Bobby took a
    call from JFK. The next call Bobby took, at 6:05 PM, was from Harry. On

Chapter One
13
    June 25, 1963, Bobby answered a call from CIA official Richard Helms
    at 10:15 AM, followed by a call from Harry at 10:25 AM.16 Three days
    later, the CIA issued a memo establishing their largest operation to sup-
    port the JFK-Almeida coup plan, code-named AMWORLD, a name so
    secret it had never appeared in any government report or book until we
    revealed it in 2005 in our previous book, Ultimate Sacrifice .
    The JFK-Almeida coup plan was designed to avoid the main prob-
    lems that befell the Bay of Pigs operation, which had been a relatively
    open secret known to dozens of officials, aides, agents, and military
    officers in the US government, as well as to numerous journalists and
    even partially to Fidel. This time, any knowledge of the coup plan would
    be tightly held and only about a dozen people—including JFK, Bobby,
    CIA Director John McCone, and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard
    Helms—would know the full plan. The United States’ leading role in
    the coup plan was never supposed to be revealed, even after the coup
    succeeded—and not even years later, since US officials hoped Almeida
    and trusted exiles might play roles in Cuba’s new government for many
    years to come. If things worked as JFK and Bobby hoped, it would
    simply appear as if JFK had responded well to the unexpected situation
    of Fidel’s assassination (a term the Kennedys never used with their
    aides; they preferred “elimination”).
    Almeida would not take public responsibility for Fidel’s death, and
    neither would Harry. The Cuban populace could hardly be expected
    to rally around new leaders who boasted of having killed Fidel, still
    admired by many on the island, so Harry made it clear that a patsy,
    someone to take the fall, would be used.17 Evidence indicates that Fidel’s
    death would have been blamed on a Russian or a Russian sympathizer,
    as a way to help neutralize the thousands of Soviet personnel still in
    Cuba.18 Many newspaper accounts noted increasing tension