Surrounded by Enemies by Bryce Zabel Page A

inner circle just one week after the shooting.
    Lee Harvey Oswald
    Hardly anyone in the post-Thanksgiving huddle believed Oswald had acted alone. The information they heard from internal reports and the media shouted otherwise. Emerging facts included Oswald’s working with U2 intelligence at the Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan, which was the CIA presence in the Far East. The fact that he had renounced his U.S. citizenship to live in the Soviet Union, then returned and was never arrested for treason seemed to be of key importance. His contradictory work with the violent anti-Castro Cuban community while making public appearances supporting Castro raised another red flag. There were already rumors that Oswald had been on the FBI payroll at $200 a month.
    From his jail cell in Dallas, Oswald had found himself a fire-breathing New York attorney by the name of William Kunstler. Kunstler was making a name for himself by defending clients no other lawyer wanted to take on. Oswald phoned Kunstler — he was given free access to a telephone by the Dallas Police Department — and Kunstler agreed to defend him pro bono for as long as his case lasted. In conducting the Oswald legal update, RFK referred to him as “Kuntsler,” deliberately transposing the “t” and “s” in the attorney’s name.
    The consensus among the group was that there was a great deal more to this Oswald than met the eye. The fingerprints of the intelligence community were all over him. Even so, it was clear that there was a powerful counter-narrative at work that claimed he had acted alone.
    The Soviet Union
    In the minutes and hours after the shooting in Dallas, suspicion had focused on the Soviet Union. The fear, not unfounded, was that the Soviets might try to decapitate the American government as a distraction for a nuclear showdown. After President Kennedy’s peace speech before the American University on June 10, 1963, both sides had feared that such an overt peace feeler could trigger a counter-reaction from hard-liners on either side of the Iron Curtain.
    As the facts came in, however, and the Soviet leadership, particularly Chairman Khrushchev, seemed genuinely shocked, it appeared less and less likely that the Soviet Union was directly involved. There was Cold War suspicion, but the evidence just wasn’t there. With arsenals on both sides pushing toward fifty thousand nuclear weapons, the fact that the Soviet Union was not a prime suspect in an attack on a U.S. President was good news.
    The Hyannis Port assembly gave Soviet involvement a very small likelihood and moved on quickly.
    Cuba
    Fidel Castro, however, was another matter. So was his country. And so were the Cubans who hated Castro and had come to hate Kennedy with the same vehemence. This island nation, just ninety miles away from the Florida Keys had become a centerpiece of Cold War sound and fury since the Cuban revolution had toppled Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
    No one doubted for a moment that Cuba was involved in some way. Mutual antipathy and mistrust had dogged the U.S. and Cuba since the Kennedy administration's disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The only question was whether Cuban hostility was the organizing principle behind the Dallas attack or whether our Communist neighbor was being used as a smokescreen by other adversaries.
    Certainly, Oswald’s membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee alarmed both John and Robert Kennedy. With covert help from the Mafia (which was highly involved in Cuban gambling before the Cuban revolution), the CIA had unsuccessfully sought to murder the new Cuban strongman. Was Castro trying to pay the Americans back in the same coin? Or were angry anti-Castro Cubans, based in New Orleans and Miami, the ones who wanted Kennedy to pay the price for not fully supporting the Bay of Pigs fiasco and for taking an invasion of Cuba off the table during the Missile Crisis the previous year?
    As recently as the previous month, the