the plot to kill jfk – the cuban connection: revealed(6/8)
20.00–21.00

The historical documentary strand revisits one of the most shocking events of the 20th century with a fresh examination of the assassination of John F Kennedy. A three-year investigation across four countries by award-winning German filmmaker Wilfrid Huismann has revealed what may be the missing link between JFK’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Cuban secret service.

With the help of newly released documents and eyewitness testimony, this film presents a startling new insight into the events of November 22, 1963. Wilfrid Huismann has persuaded key figures in the US and Cuban intelligence services to talk for the first time about their role in JFK’s story. The documentary also explores the volatile relationship between the US and Cuba, demonstrating a link between the CIA’s plots to remove Fidel Castro and the death of Kennedy.

Among the new evidence is a top-secret US memo which reveals that a high-ranking member of G2 – the Cuban secret service – flew out of Dallas airport hours after JFK’s death. The film tracks down this man, Fabien Escalante, 40 years on to hear his story for the very first time. Escalante denies any involvement in Kennedy’s assassination, but Huismann soon finds other exCuban agents who are prepared to talk.

Huismann travels to Madrid to meet Rolando Cubela, a disaffected Cuban who was apparently hired by Kennedy’s brother, Robert, as part of a covert CIA operation to kill Castro – who was perceived to be a grave threat to US security. Huismann also tracks down former Cuban agent Oscar Marino, who reveals that G2 regarded Cubela as a traitor. “We knew that Cubela wanted to kill Castro,” he says. “He was a double agent.”

In a bid to learn more about the plot against Kennedy, Huismann goes on the trail of Lee Harvey Oswald. He discovers that Oswald, an ardent Marxist, went to live in the Soviet Union in 1959, where he was spied on by the KGB. In Russia, Huismann tracks down a former KGB agent who claims to have a telegram that proves that, when Oswald returned to the US in 1962, the Cuban secret service asked to take over surveillance of him from the KGB. This telegram is described as “completely false” by Fabien Escalante. However, Oscar Marino confirms that G2 contacted Oswald in November 1962 – one year before Kennedy was killed.

Huismann suspects that Oswald was enlisted by the Cubans while he was in Mexico City in 1962. After Kennedy’s assassination, the FBI sent a team there to investigate Oswald’s movements. Huismann meets the leader of this team, former FBI agent Laurence Keenan, in Mexico City, where they are able to study secret Mexican documents for the first time. There they find strong evidence that Oswald did indeed meet with G2 agents at the Cuban embassy – but this was never fully investigated by the FBI.

Keenan claims this is because the consequences of proving Cuba’s involvement in JFK’s death would have been devastating. “They didn’t want to know the truth for fear we would go to war,” he says of the FBI. The question remains: if Oswald were recruited in Mexico City, who recruited him? Huismann contacts one eyewitness who alleges that it was Fabien Escalante who met with Oswald – another claim that the former agent denies. Oscar Marino, meanwhile, indicates that it was none other than Rolando Cubela who recruited Oswald. If this is the case, it suggests that the man hired by Robert Kennedy to kill Castro was in fact a double agent who enlisted JFK’s killer. Did Castro sanction the G2 operation against Kennedy? And was this his retaliation to the CIA plots against him? To find out the truth of these extraordinary claims, Huismann challenges Cubela to give his side of the story. Will the truth finally emerge?