The obsession with “deniability” ensured that there was never anything in writing tying the Kennedys to the planned assassination of Castro, but all of the CIA officers involved were convinced that they were carrying out the White House’s sotto voce desire. Richard Helms said, “I believe it was the policy at the time to get rid of Castro and if killing him was one of the things that was to be done in this connection, that was within what was expected. . . . No member of the Kennedy administration, as I recall it, ever told me that it was proscribed.”70 In the climate of the early 1960s, at the
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