The National Security Agency, in declassified documents released Tuesday, reported that Castro feared the United States would use the Kennedy assassination as an excuse to oust his communist government.

Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested for Kennedy's killing, had been to the Soviet Union and was active in a pro-Castro group in the United States.

The agency documents quoted an unnamed American ambassador as believing that Cuba and the Soviet Union were behind Kennedy's killing. Castro tried to counter with allegations that Oswald really was a spy for the CIA or FBI.

``This caused Castro to wonder whether the assassin was . . . the mere instrument of a monstrous plot of American militarists, who, by eliminating Kennedy, would put [President] Johnson in a position from which there would be only one way out: to drain off anti-Cuba hysteria by an action of declared war,'' the security agency reported.

In another NSA report, Cuban officials suggested that ``ultrarevolutionary circles'' in the United States engineered the assassination because they believed Kennedy had failed to strongly confront Havana.

``They [the Cuban officials] are concerned with the anti-Cuban and anti-Soviet past which will exert a substantial influence on the foreign and domestic policy of the USA,'' the National Security Agency report said.

Castro responded to Kennedy's death by quickly going on television to discuss the assassination and to dispute allegations that Oswald was a communist supporter of Cuba.

In addition, Cuban forces were put on alert and shifted to strategic positions around the capital and the northern coast.

``Castro feared that the assassination would unleash passions and violent and blind hysteria of the American people against Cuba and Russia,'' the NSA reported. This would ``provide the excuse which up to now was lacking to justify internationally an invasion of Cuba.''

Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald