Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder

Wading through so much detail almost made this a four star for me but the crux of the matter was so valuable that I gave it a five anyway. Having just read Lies My Teacher Told Me this made a great supplemental text. I was especially struck by the complexities of the characters and how different aspects of their personalities came out, especially RFK, LBJ, and Raul Castro. As Lies... points out, our heroes are not without fault and neither are our demons without good qualities.

This may or may not be "the last word" on the Kennedy Assassination (is it possible to have "the last word" on such a subject?). But it is a deeply convincing look at connections between Oswald and the Cuban government and how those connections may have led to the assassination. The authors contend that Oswald was a "self-generating agent" -- in other words, a person who was not recruited or trained by Cuba, but who sympathized deeply with the Cuban cause and brought himself to the attention of Cuban authorities. The Cubans, recognizing that he was a) sincere and b) not entirely sane, gave him some money, some encouragement, even some sex with young women working at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City. And what do you know, he actually *did* manage to kill JFK. I'm sure the first reaction was something pretty close to "Wow, who woulda thunk it!" It was a strange time. Ten thousands of criminals, fanatics, fantasists, and peculiar characters were engaged on all sides of the Cuban issue. The U.S. was both trying to sponsor further invasions of Cuba and to have Fidel murdered. The Castros saw themselves as revolutionary heroes who would soon spread violent upheaval throughout Latin America, fulfilling the promise of communism in a way that their Soviet sponsors had not. On to this stage walked Lee Harvey Oswald, a half crazy malcontent who wanted to do something consequential, but lacked the education, the connections, and for the most part the ability. The intelligence world is not an easy one for researchers (or anyone else) to navigate, but I felt the authors did a good job of making their case -- with the caution that they base a lot of their story on interviews with surviving players in that drama, who may have their own agendas, and that definitive documented truth is hard to come by. While not an assassination buff, I've certainly read the major theories, and this one strikes me as the best fit in terms of accounting for every aspect of the strange story, including why the U.S. government would have moved so energetically to cover up the truth (to prevent World War III). The book is also notable for the number of questions it opens up, including the degree to which the American left of the 1960s was influenced by Soviet disinformation about the assassination.

I can highly recommend this book to be of compelling interest to any researcher on JFK. It's thesis is well-laid out and even though well-documented, you still have to take a certain amount of it on faith, as the story it reveals was meant to stay covered-up so we dont see a smoking gun, just as lot of things that are meant to dove-tail. Nevertheless, taken as gospel, or just to take a different angle, this is one of the most interesting and well-written books on the assassination. You will not be disappointed if you have an open mind. The authors write with great style and and grab your attention all the way through. Now if only we could verify every last morsel of "evidence." No, it will not be the last book on the assassination no matter what other reviewers may say. By the way, the logic for this type of conspiracy via Cuba "is that it is so outrageous as to be all the more unbelievable and therefore feasible" to paraphrase one conversation in the book. Was Castro so desperate to defend himself against CIA plots that he would use someone who had FPCC advertized all over himself and would lead right back to Havana? That is why people look for a conspiracy over on the right. Would a real conspiracy have so many witnesses? But go ahead, feed your head with a good read and reach your own conclusions. No book I have read over the past thirty years has been free of loose ends. This one definitely, has a fresh perspective and will be worth your time.

With Brothers In Arms, Russo and Molton have taken the principle of Occam's Razor and deftly applied it to the chimera of Kennedy assassination theory. Presented is the thesis of the lone gunman, rifle in hand, in an era of hyper-political anxiety, global ideological battlegrounds, and the reality of revolution and nuclear war. The Castro brothers and the Kennedy brothers become the primary players in this political drama, as well as the embodiments of the forces that work to pull Oswald apart and fashion him an assassin. The prose of the book is nimble, the scope and the research is expansive. Oswald's erratic behavior in the years leading up to the assassination; his army record, his defection to the U.S.S.R., his time in Dallas and New Orleans, and his flirtation with Castro's intelligence service is thoroughly analyzed. The psychology of the killer is described as not that of an adept agent of greater powers maneuvering through various intelligence apparatus, or a mere pawn of the same entities, but more so a man hollowed out by his personal history, the anxieties of the age, and an overwhelming need for recognition and inclusion in the selective club of those who make history. With such limited skill and power at his disposal, Oswald turns to murder; the "wannabe" seeks to be initiated, and the president dies. Meanwhile the Kennedys and the Castros; whose very names have become iconic, are revealed as mere men, at times stumbling through history, trudging along in their own self-made morass, and caught up in a 20th century Hatfield and McCoy blood feud that would be the Kennedys undoing. The popular myths of the Castros as revolutionary heroes and leaders of a quasi utopian, socialist Cuba, and the Kennedys as liberal demigods of a fallen Camelot, become the tattered backdrop as the book navigates through the underbelly of global politics and the Machiavellian darkness of the times. With Brothers In Arms, political history is made personal history, and our understanding of the assassination and the turmoil of the era is more vivid from it.

This book is a jaw dropper. From Cuban intelligence agent Maria Luisa Calderon's intercepted telephone conversation (tape recorded just ninety minutes after the shots in Dallas and best appreciated in its original audio form) to multiple reports of Cuban agents stationed at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City packing up and blowing town shortly after the Kennedy murder, "Brothers In Arms" doesn't just light a powder keg under the question of Cuban complicity in the Kennedy assassination, it sets off a nuclear explosion. If anyone else had authored this book, I might have had considerable doubts about the veracity of the remarkable new information presented. The material presented in "Brothers In Arms," however, comes largely from the work of investigative journalist Gus Russo, who I've known and admired for many years and who has had far more face-to-face time with officers of the Dallas Police, FBI, CIA, and Secret Service, as well as presidential advisers, U.S. congressional investigators, and numerous foreign intelligence service officers than anyone I know. In some paranoid corners of the so-called "JFK assassination research community," Russo's contacts and connections make him the enemy. The reality, of course, is that Russo's connections give him unprecedented access to perhaps the only people who can still shed light on the questions surrounding Oswald's horrific deed. One person who proved central to Russo's research was German documentary filmmaker and investigative reporter Wilfried "Willi" Huismann, who persuaded the German television network WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln) to underwrite new research into the labyrinth of foreign intrigue surrounding the Kennedy case. The result was the 2006 German television documentary "Rendezvous with Death" which received rave reviews in Europe but was never broadcast in the United States. Huismann, Russo, and their collaborators assembled a treasure trove of documentation from KGB, Cuban, Mexican Secret Police, and recently unredacted U.S. government files to support the film's thesis. The essence of that documentation is presented in "Brothers In Arms" - all of it intriguing and delivered in a richly readable form. There will no doubt be cynics and others who will point to the inconsistencies in the various accounts presented in "Brothers in Arms;" eager to dismiss Russo and Molton's work as too fantastic to believe, or worse, an effort by "the enemy" to once again blame Kennedy's death on the Fidel Castro. That would be a mistake. The conspiracy zanies are already out in force condemning Russo and Molton's work as preposterous poppy-cock because it dares to cross their own zealous agenda - Oswald was used (wittingly or unwittingly) by rogue elements of the CIA to assassinate Kennedy and blame the crime on the Castro regime. This has been a common theme in conspiracy literature since first suggested, oddly enough, by Soviet Radio TASS in the hours after the assassination, and later embra