Filmmaker links island to '63 killing of Kennedy

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BERLIN -- Cuba's secret service was behind the assassination of President Kennedy, according to a German filmmaker who claims to have eyewitness evidence solving one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

Wilfried Huismann, director of a documentary to be screened on German public television tonight, said he has witnesses saying Lee Harvey Oswald, was acting on behalf of G2, Cuban President Fidel Castro's foreign intelligence service.

Mr. Castro, said Mr. Huismann, had found out that Mr. Kennedy wanted to have him assassinated and decided to pre-empt him. Cuba's involvement was covered up by Mr. Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, because that revelation could have led to war, according to Mr. Huismann's documentary. Mr. Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

"We found direct witnesses, former officers of the Cuban state security, who knew about the contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald," Mr. Huismann, who spent three years researching the film, "Rendezvous With Death," told Deutschlandfunk radio in an interview on Wednesday.

Mr. Huismann interviewed aides of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson, including Alexander Haig, a military adviser to both Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Johnson who became secretary of state in 1981. The film is based on testimony from former U.S., Cuban and Russian agents, as well as KGB and Mexican files.

Mr. Huismann said he spent two years convincing his most important witness, Oscar Marino, a former agent of the Cuban secret service, to break his silence.

According to Mr. Huismann, Mr. Marino saw a list in November 1962 of names of foreign employees of the Cuban secret service. The list included Oswald. Mr. Marino lives in exile somewhere in Latin America.

Oswald, a Communist who spent three years in the Soviet Union, was chosen because he hated the United States, Mr. Marino said.

"There wasn't anyone else. You take what you can get. ... Oswald volunteered to kill Kennedy," Mr. Marino said.

Mr. Huismann said Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Castro were locked in a "kind of duel to the death" after the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Cuba's secret service also found out about a separate CIA-inspired plot to overthrow and kill Mr. Castro in 1963, said Mr. Huismann.

"Alexander Haig or Joseph Califano, his main adviser, have confirmed to me [on] camera that Johnson was convinced Kennedy wanted to kill Castro and that Castro was quicker," he said.

Mr. Huismann cites a retired FBI agent, Lawrence Keenan, who was sent to Mexico after the assassination to find out what Oswald had been doing there a few weeks beforehand. Evidence he found there linking Oswald with the Cubans prompted Mr. Johnson to have him withdrawn from Mexico after three days, according to Mr. Huismann's film.

"[Mr. Castro] bested us," says retired CIA officer Sam Helpern at the end of Mr. Huismann's film. "He came out on top. And we lost."