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between
    Fidel and the Soviets in the second half of 1963. As head of the army,
    Almeida knew the locations of all Soviet forces in Cuba, as well as Fidel’s
    security plans. Almeida had enough personal prestige that if he went on
    Cuban TV and announced that their beloved Fidel had been killed by a
    Russian or Russian sympathizer, the people would accept his word, the
    same way most US citizens at that time would accept a pronouncement
    by a trusted figure like J. Edgar Hoover.
    Remembering the debacle of the CIA-run Bay of Pigs, JFK and Bobby
    restricted the CIA to only a supporting role in the JFK-Almeida coup
    plan. This consisted primarily of providing secret support to a handful
    of trusted exile leaders, and getting additional US intelligence assets
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    LEGACY OF SECRECY
    into Cuba prior to the coup. The largest part of the exile support opera-
    tion, AMWORLD, was run largely out of Washington, with only a small
    component at the CIA’s huge Miami station. Even within that facility,
    AMWORLD had its own separate communications operation, code-
    named LORK.19 The exile leaders were supposed to all be based outside
    the United States so that the United States could publicly deny sup-
    porting them. Though AMWORLD itself was relatively secret within
    the CIA, as a program with a budget of over $7 million, more than a
    dozen CIA officials and their aides had to be told about it. However,
    most of those officials knew only that AMWORLD was a secret way
    for the CIA to provide JFK-approved funding and support to a select
    few exile leaders. Only a handful of CIA leaders, including Director
    McCone and Helms, knew about Almeida and the full plan to eliminate
    and overthrow Fidel.
    The CIA was also responsible for helping Harry arrange an initial
    payment of $50,000 to Almeida (out of a promised $500,000, almost
    $3 million in today’s dollars), and for helping to get Almeida’s wife
    and children out of Cuba on a seemingly innocent pretext, prior to the
    coup. The US military would officially have the lead role in the coup
    operation and its aftermath, though in actuality Bobby would be calling
    the shots.
    Historians have long known that the Kennedys initiated two sepa-
    rate back-channel attempts to negotiate with Fidel in the fall of 1963,
    one using pioneering TV journalist Lisa Howard and special UN envoy
    William Attwood, and the other through French journalist Jean Daniel.
    The JFK-Almeida coup plan finally explains the reason for the urgency
    of those efforts. As Dean Rusk explained to Vanity Fair magazine, when
    talking about the Kennedys’ pursuit of peace negotiations with Fidel
    while they were also planning a violent coup to eliminate him: “There’s
    no particular contradiction there. . . . It was just an either/or situation.
    That went on frequently.” However, Rusk added that by doing so, JFK
    and Bobby “were playing with fire.”
    While the Kennedys wanted to avoid “a bloody coup” if possible,
    neither of their secret peace efforts had produced any breakthroughs
    by November 22, 1963. To maintain deniability in case the secret talks
    were exposed, JFK had to work through William Attwood, who in turn
    talked to Fidel’s doctor, who dealt with Fidel. The parties were wary
    of each other, and the negotiations slow. Fidel also had to deal with
    factions within his own regime. A November 8, 1963, Attwood memo
    to JFK notes that Fidel didn’t want Che Guevara to find out about the

Chapter One
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    secret talks, because “there was a rift between Castro and the Guevara
    [and] Almeida group on the question of Cuba’s future course.”20 JFK
    kept his own secrets from Attwood, not telling him that, barring some
    dramatic breakthrough in the secret talks, JFK and Bobby planned to
    allow Almeida to overthrow Fidel on December 1, 1963.
    Frustrated by the slow pace of the Attwood negotiations, yet anxious
    to avoid a violent coup if possible, in late October 1963 JFK had asked
    French journalist Jean