Reply #16: Hi. She was a reporter for ABC, I believe. She did interviews with

[Judi Lynn]

a lot of world figures. Her biography has been on cable tv channels.

Here's a simplified look at some of her work:

Carlos Lechuga was born in Cuba. He worked as a journalist. A supporter of Fidel Castro, he became Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations. He has carried out many diplomatic missions representing Cuba in numerous international forums and conferences, including the UN Committees on Human Rights, Disarmament and Racial Discrimination.

In May, 1963, Lisa Howard published an article in the journal, War and Peace Report, Howard wrote that in eight hours of private conversations with Fidel Castro he had shown a strong desire for negotiations with the United States: "In our conversations he made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel and military hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for expropriated American lands and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for Communist subversion throughout the Hemisphere." Howard went on to urge the Kennedy administration to "send an American government official on a quiet mission to Havana to hear what Castro has to say." A country as powerful as the United States, she concluded, "has nothing to lose at a bargaining table with Fidel Castro."

William Attwood read Howard's article and on 12th September, 1963, he had a long conversation with her on the phone. This apparently set in motion a plan to initiate secret talks between the United States and Cuba. Six days later Attwood sent a memorandum to Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Attwood asked for permission to establish discreet, indirect contact with Fidel Castro.

On September 20, John F. Kennedy gave permission to authorize Attwood's direct contacts with Carlos Lechuga. According to Attwood: "I then told Miss Howard to set up the contact, that is to have a small reception at her house so that it could be done very casually, not as a formal approach by us." Howard met Lechuga at the UN on 23rd September 23. Howard invited Lechuga to come to a party at her Park Avenue apartment that night to meet Attwood.

The next day William Attwood met with Robert Kennedy in Washington and reported on the talks with Lechuga. According to Attwood the attorney general believed that a trip to Cuba would be "rather risky." It was "bound to leak and... might result in some kind of Congressional investigation." Nevertheless, he thought the matter was "worth pursuing."
(snip/...)

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKlechuga.htm



LISA HOWARD

Lisa Howard, one of the first women to have her own television news show, became the central intermediary in the Kennedy-Castro dialogue. Howard had been an actress and soap opera star before she broke into journalism in 1960 by scoring the first major interview with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations. She was hired by ABC news as a reporter and subsequently became the anchor for ABC's noontime news broadcast, "The NewsHour with Lisa Howard." Her two specials on Cuba, in 1963 and 1964, were the most substantive coverage of Castro's revolution in the early 1960s. She died in 1965.