On January 1, 1959, Richard Bissell became the chief of the clandestine service. That same day, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. A secret CIA history unearthed in 2005 described in detail how the agency took on the threat.
The agency took a long hard look at Fidel. It did not know what to make of him. "Many serious observers feel his regime will collapse within a matter of months," predicted Jim Noel, the CIA's station chief, whose officers had spent too much time reporting from the Havana Country Club. At headquarters, some argued that Castro deserved the agency's guns and money. Al Cox, chief of the paramilitary division, proposed to "make secret contact with Castro" and offer him arms and ammunition to establish a democratic government. Cox told his superiors that the CIA could ship weapons to Castro on a vessel manned by a Cuban crew. But "the most secure means of help would be giving the money to Castro, who could then purchase his own arms," Cox wrote to his superiors. "A combination of arms and money would probably be best." Cox was an alcoholic, and his thinking might have been clouded, but more than a few of his fellow officers felt the way he did. "My staff and I were all Fidelistas" at the time, Robert Reynolds, chief of the CIA's Caribbean operations desk, said many years later.
In April and May 1959, when the newly victorious Castro visited the United States, a CIA officer briefed Castro face-to-face in Washington. He described Fidel as "a new spiritual leader of Latin American democratic and anti-dictator forces."
"OUR HAND SHOULD NOT SHOW"
The president was furious to find that the CIA had misjudged Castro. "Though our intelligence experts backed and filled for a number of months," Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, "events were gradually driving them to the conclusion that with the coming of Castro, Communism had penetrated this hemisphere."
On December 11, 1959, having reached that conclusion, Richard Bissell sent Allen Dulles a memo suggesting that "thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro." Dulles penciled in a crucial correction to the proposal. He struck outelimination, a word tinged with more than a hint of murder. He substituted removal from Cuba--and gave the go-ahead.
On January 8, 1960, Dulles told Bissell to organize a special task force to overthrow Castro. Bissell personally selected many of the same people who had subverted the government of Guatemala six years before--and had deceived President Eisenhower face-to-face about the coup. He chose the feckless Tracy Barnes for political and psychological warfare, the talented Dave Phillips for propaganda, the gung-ho Rip Robertson for paramilitary training, and the relentlessly mediocre E. Howard Hunt to manage the political front groups.
Their chief would be Jake Esterline, who had run the Washington "war room" for Operation Success. Esterline was station chief in Venezuela when he first laid eyes on Fidel Castro in early 1959. He had watched the young commandante touring Caracas, fresh from his New Year's Day triumph over the dictator Fulgencio Batista, and he had heard the crowds cheering Castro as a conqueror.
"I saw--hell, anybody with eyes could see--that a new and powerful force was at work in the hemisphere," Esterline said. "It had to be dealt with."
Esterline returned to CIA headquarters in January 1960 to receive his appointment as Cuba task force chief. The group took shape as a secret cell inside the CIA. All the money, all the information, and all the decisions for the Cuban task force came through Bissell. He had little interest in the work of his spies, much less gathering intelligence from inside Cuba. He never stopped to analyze what would happen if the coup against Castro succeeded--or if it failed. "I don't think these kinds of things were ever thought about in any depth," Esterline said. "I think their first reaction was, God, we've got a possible Communist in here; we had better get him out just the way we got Arbenz out" in Guatemala.
Bissell almost never talked about Cuba with Richard Helms, his second-in-command at the clandestine service. The two men disliked and distrusted one another intensely. Helms did weigh in on one idea that filtered up from the Cuba task force. It was a propaganda ploy: a Cuban agent, trained by the CIA, would appear on the shores of Istanbul, claiming to be a political prisoner who had just jumped from a Soviet ship. He would proclaim that Castro was enslaving thousands of his people and shipping them to Siberia. The plan was known as "The Dripping Cuban." Helms killed it.
On March 2, 1960--two weeks before President Eisenhower approved a covert action against Castro--Dulles briefed Vice President Nixon on operations already under way. Reading from a seven-page paper initialed by Bissell, titled "What We Are Doing in Cuba," Dulles specified acts of economic warfare, sabotage, political propaganda and a plan to use "a drug, which if placed in Castro's food, would make him behave in such an irrational manner that a public appearance could well have very damaging results to him." Nixon was all for it.
Dulles and Bissell presented their plans to Eisenhower and Nixon at the White House in a four-man meeting at 2:30 p.m. on March 17, 1960. They did not propose to invade the island. They told Eisenhower that they could overthrow Castro by sleight of hand. They would create "a responsible, appealing and unified Cuban opposition," led by recruited agents. A clandestine radio station would beam propaganda into Havana to spark an uprising. CIA officers at the U.S. Army's jungle warfare training camp in Panama would school sixty Cubans to infiltrate the island. The CIA would drop arms and ammunition to them.
Fidel would fall six to eight months thereafter, Bissell promised. The timing was excruciatingly sensitive: election day was seven and a half months away. Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon had won by wide margins in the New Hampshire presidential primaries the week before.
Eisenhower's staff secretary, General Andrew Goodpaster, took notes on the meeting. "The President says he knows of no better plan.... The great problem is leakage and security.... Everyone must be prepared to swear that he had not heard of it.... Our hand should not show in anything that is done." The agency should have needed no reminder that, under its charter, all covert action required secrecy so secure that no evidence would lead to the president. But Eisenhower wanted to make sure the CIA did its best to keep this one under cover.
"WE WERE GOING TO PAY FOR THAT LIE"
The president and Dick Bissell were locked in an increasingly intense struggle over the control of one of the biggest secrets of all--the U-2 spy plane. Eisenhower had not allowed any flights over Soviet terrain since his talks with Khrushchev at Camp David six months earlier. Khrushchev had returned from Washington praising the president's courage in seeking peaceful coexistence; Eisenhower wanted the "spirit of Camp David" to be his legacy.
Bissell was fighting as hard as possible to resume the secret missions. The president was torn. He truly wanted the intelligence that the U-2 gleaned.
He longed to bury the "missile gap"--the false claims by the CIA, the air force, military contractors, and politicians of both parties that the Soviets had a widening lead in nuclear weaponry. The CIA's formal estimates of Soviet military strength were not based on intelligence, but on politics and guesswork. Since 1957, the CIA had sent Eisenhower terrifying reports that the Soviet buildup of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles was far faster and much greater than the American arsenal. In 1960, the agency projected a mortal threat to the United States; it told the president that the Soviets would have five hundred ICBMs ready to strike by 1961. The Strategic Air Command used those estimates as the basis for a secret first-strike plan using more than three thousand nuclear warheads to destroy every city and every military outpost from Warsaw to Beijing. But Moscow did not have five hundred nuclear missiles pointed at the United States at the time. It had four.
The president had worried for five and a half years that the U-2 itself might start World War III. If the plane went down over the Soviet Union, it could take the chance for peace with it. The month after the Camp David dialogues with Khrushchev, the president had rejected a newly proposed U-2 mission over the Soviet Union; he told Allen Dulles once again, bluntly, that divining the intentions of the Soviets through espionage was more important to him than discovering details about their military capabilities. Only spies, not gadgets, could tell him about Soviet intent to attack.
Without that knowledge, the president said, the U-2 flights were "provocative pin-pricking, and it may give them the idea that we are seriously preparing plans to knock out their installations" with a sneak attack.
Eisenhower had a summit meeting with Khrushchev set for May 16, 1960, in Paris. He feared that his greatest asset--his reputation for honesty--would be squandered if a U-2 went down while the United States was, in his words, "engaged in apparently sincere deliberations" with the Soviets.
In theory, only the president had the power to order a U-2 mission. But Bissell ran the program, and he was petulant about filing his flight plans. He tried to evade presidential authority by secretly seeking to out-source flights to the British and to the Chinese Nationalists. In his memoirs, he wrote that Allen Dulles had been horrified to learn that the first U-2 flight had passed directly over Moscow and Leningrad. The director had never known; Bissell never saw fit to tell him.
He argued for weeks with the White House before Eisenhower finally gave in and agreed to an April 9, 1960, flight over the Soviet Union from Pakistan. It was, on the surface, a success. But the Soviets knew their airspace had been violated once again, and they went on high alert. Bissell fought for one more flight. The president set a deadline of April 25. The date came and went with clouds covering the Communist targets. Bissell pleaded for more time, and Eisenhower gave him six days' reprieve. The following Sunday was to be the final date for a flight before the Paris summit. Bissell then tried to circumvent the White House by going to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to win their backing for yet another flight. In his zeal, he had neglected to plan for disaster.
On May Day, as the president had feared, the U-2 was shot down in central Russia. The CIA's pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive. C. Douglas Dillon was the acting secretary of state that day. "The President told me to work with Allen Dulles," Dillon recounted. "We had to put out some sort of announcement." To the shock of both men, NASA announced that a weather plane had been lost in Turkey. That was the CIA's cover story. The director of central intelligence either never knew about it or had forgotten all about it.
"We couldn't understand how this had happened," Dillon said. "But we had to get ourselves out of it."
That proved difficult. Hewing to the cover story, the White House and the State Department deceived the American people for a week about the flight. Their lies grew more and more transparent. The last one came on May 7: "There was no authorization for such a flight." That broke Eisenhower's spirit. "He couldn't allow Allen Dulles to take all the blame, because it would look like the President didn't know what was going on in the government," Dillon said.
Eisenhower walked into the Oval Office on May 9 and said out loud: "I would like to resign." For the first time in the history of the United States, millions of citizens understood that their president could deceive them in the name of national security. The doctrine of plausible deniability was dead. The summit with Khrushchev was wrecked and the brief thaw in the cold war iced over. The CIA's spy plane destroyed the idea of detente for almost a decade. Eisenhower had approved the final mission in the hope of putting the lie to the missile gap. But the cover-up of the crash made him out to be a liar. In retirement, Eisenhower said the greatest regret of his presidency was "the lie we told about the U-2. I didn't realize how high a price we were going to pay for that lie."
The president knew he would not be able to leave office in a spirit of international peace and reconciliation. He was now intent on policing as many parts of the planet as possible before leaving office.
The summer of 1960 became a season of incessant crisis for the CIA. Red arrows signifying hot spots in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia multiplied on the maps that Allen Dulles and his men brought to the White House. The chagrin over the U-2 shootdown gave way to a murderous anger.
First Dick Bissell redoubled the CIA's plans for overthrowing Cuba. He set up a new CIA station in Coral Gables, Florida, code-named Wave. He told Vice President Nixon that he would need a force of five hundred trained Cuban exiles--up from sixty men a few weeks before--to lead the fight. But the army's jungle warfare center in Panama could not handle hundreds more raw recruits. So Bissell sent Jake Esterline down to Guatemala, where he single-handedly negotiated a secret agreement with President Manuel Ydigoras Fuentes, a retired general and a skilled wheeler-dealer. The site he secured became the main training camp for the Bay of Pigs, with its own airport, its own brothel, and its own codes of conduct. The CIA's Cubans found it "entirely unsatisfactory," reported marine colonel Jack Hawkins, Esterline's top paramilitary planner. They lived "in prison-camp conditions," which produced "political complications" that were "very difficult for C.I.A. to handle." Though the camp was isolated, the Guatemalan army was well aware of it, and the presence of a foreign force on its soil very nearly led to a military coup against their president.
Then, in mid-August, courtly, charming Dick Bissell put out a Mafia contract against Fidel Castro. He went to Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the CIA's chief of security, and asked the colonel to put him in touch with a gangster who could carry out a hit. This time he briefed Dulles, who gave his approval. An agency historian concluded: "Bissell probably believed that Castro would be dead at the hands of a CIA-sponsored assassin before the Brigade ever hit the beach" at the Bay of Pigs.
Bissell's men, knowing nothing of the Mafia plan, worked on a second murder plot. The question was how to put a trained CIA killer within shooting distance of Fidel: "Can we get a Rip Robertson close to him? Can we get a really hairy Cuban--I mean a gutsy Cuban?" said Dick Drain, the Cuba task force's chief of operations. The answer was always no. Miami was crawling with thousands of Cuban exiles ready to join the CIA's increasingly well-known covert operation, but Castro's spies were rife among them, and Fidel learned a fair amount about the CIA's plans. An FBI agent named George Davis, after spending a few months listening to loose-lipped Cubans in Miami coffee shops and bars, gave a CIA officer at the Wave station some friendly advice: it would be impossible to overthrow Castro with these chatty Cuban exiles. The only hope was to send in the marines. His CIA colleague relayed the message to headquarters. It was ignored.
On August 18, 1960, Dulles and Bissell discussed the Cuba task force in private with President Eisenhower for less than twenty minutes. Bissell asked for another $10.75 million to begin the paramilitary training of the five hundred Cubans in Guatemala. Eisenhower said yes, on one condition: "So long as the Joint Chiefs, Defense, State and CIA think we have a good chance of being successful" in "freeing the Cubans from this incubus." When Bissell tried to raise the idea of creating an American military force to lead the Cubans in battle, Dulles twice cut him off, evading debate and dissent.
The president--the man who had led the biggest secret invasion in American history--warned the CIA's leaders against "the danger of making false moves" or "starting something before we were ready."
"TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA"
Later that same day, at a meeting of the National Security Council, the president ordered the director of central intelligence to eliminate the man the CIA saw as the Castro of Africa--Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Congo.
Lumumba had been freely elected, and he appealed to the United States for assistance as his nation shook off Belgium's brutal colonial rule and declared its independence in the summer of 1960. American help never came, for the CIA regarded Lumumba as a dope-addled communist dupe. So when Belgian paratroopers flew in to reassert control in the capital, Lumumba accepted Soviet planes, trucks, and "technicians" to bolster his barely functioning government.
The week that the Belgian soldiers arrived, Dulles sent Larry Devlin, the station chief in Brussels, to take charge of the CIA post in the capital of the Congo and assess Lumumba as a target for covert action. On August 18, after six weeks in the country, Devlin cabled CIA headquarters: "CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER.... WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUAL COMMIE OR PLAYING COMMIE GAME.... THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TO TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA." Allen Dulles delivered the gist of this message at the NSC meeting that same day. According to secret Senate testimony delivered years later by the NSC's notetaker, Robert Johnson, President Eisenhower then turned to Dulles and said flatly that Lumumba should be eliminated. After a dead silence of fifteen seconds or so, the meeting went on. Dulles cabled Devlin eight days later: "IN HIGH QUARTERS HERE IT IS THE CLEAR-CUT CONCLUSION THAT IF LLL CONTINUES TO HOLD HIGH OFFICE, THE INEVITABLE RESULT WILL AT BEST BE CHAOS AND AT WORST PAVE THE WAY TO COMMUNIST TAKEOVER OF THE CONGO.... WE CONCLUDE THAT HIS REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE AND THAT UNDER EXISTING CONDITIONS THIS WOULD BE A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION. HENCE WE WISH TO GIVE YOU WIDER AUTHORITY."
Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's clubfooted master chemist, brought an airline carry-on bag containing vials of lethal toxins to the Congo and handed it to the station chief. It held a hypodermic syringe to inject the lethal drops into food, drink, or a tube of toothpaste. It was Devlin's job to deliver death to Lumumba. The two men held a nervous conversation in Devlin's apartment on or about the night of September 10. "I asked on whose orders these instructions were issued," Devlin said under oath in secret testimony declassified in 1998. The answer was "the President."
Devlin testified that he locked the toxins in his office safe and agonized over what to do. He remembered thinking: I'll be damned if I'm going to leave that lying around. In time, he took the poison vials out to the banks of the Congo River and buried them. He said he was ashamed of the order to kill Lumumba. He knew there were other means at the CIA's disposal.
The agency had already selected the Congo's next leader: Joseph Mobutu, "the only man in the Congo able to act with firmness," as Dulles told the president at the NSC meeting on September 21. The CIA delivered $250,000 to him in early October, followed by shipments of arms and ammunition in November. Mobutu captured Lumumba and, in Devlin's words, delivered him into the hands of a "sworn enemy." The CIA base in Elizabethville, deep in the heart of the Congo, reported that "a Belgian officer of Flemish origin executed Lumumba with a burst of submachine gun fire" two nights before the next president of the United States took office. With the unwavering support of the CIA, Mobutu finally gained full control of the Congo after a five-year power struggle. He was the agency's favorite ally in Africa and the clearinghouse for American covert action throughout the continent during the cold war. He ruled for three decades as one of the world's most brutal and corrupt dictators, stealing billions of dollars in revenues from the nation's enormous deposits of diamonds, minerals, and strategic metals, slaughtering multitudes to preserve his power.
"AN ABSOLUTELY UNTENABLE POSITION"
As the 1960 election drew nearer, it was clear to Vice President Nixon that the CIA was far from ready to attack Cuba. At the end of September, Nixon nervously instructed the task force: "Don't do anything now; wait until after the elections." The delay gave Fidel Castro a crucial edge. His spies told him an American-backed invasion might be imminent, and he built up his military and intelligence forces, cracking down hard on the political dissidents whom the CIA hoped would serve as shock troops for the coup. The internal resistance against Castro began to die that summer, though the CIA never paid much heed to what was actually happening on the island. Tracy Barnes privately commissioned a public-opinion poll in Cuba--and it showed that people overwhelmingly supported Castro. Disliking the results, he discarded them.
The agency's effort to drop arms to rebels on the island was a fiasco. On September 28, a pallet of machine guns, rifles, and Colt .45s for a hundred fighters floated down to Cuba from a CIA plane flying out of Guatemala. The drop missed its target by seven miles. Castro's forces seized the arms, captured the Cuban CIA agent set to receive them, and shot him. The pilot got lost on his way back and landed in southern Mexico, where the local police seized the plane. In all, thirty such missions were flown; at most three succeeded.
By early October, the CIA realized that it knew next to nothing about the anti-Castro forces inside Cuba. "We had no confidence that they weren't penetrated" by Castro's spies, Jake Esterline said. He now was certain that Castro could not be overthrown by subtle subversion.
"We had made a major effort at infiltration and resupply, and those efforts had been unsuccessful," Bissell recalled. He decided that "what was needed was a shock action"--a full-scale invasion.
The CIA had neither presidential approval nor the troops needed to carry out that mission. The five hundred men undergoing training in Guatemala were "a preposterously inadequate number," Bissell told Esterline. Both men realized that only a far larger force could succeed against Castro, who had a sixty-thousand-man army with tanks and artillery, along with an increasingly cruel and efficient internal-security service.
Bissell had the Mafia on one phone line, the White House on another. The presidential election was looming. Sometime during the first week of November 1960, the core concept of the Cuban operation cracked under the pressure. Esterline pronounced the plan unworkable, and Bissell knew he was right. But he told no one. In the months and weeks and days before the invasion, he retreated into deception.
"He was lying down and he was lying up," Jake Esterline said--down to the CIA's Cuba task force, up to the president and the new president-elect.
John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in November by fewer than 120,000 votes. Some Republicans thought the election was stolen in the political precincts of Chicago. Others pointed at vote buying in West Virginia. Richard Nixon blamed the CIA. He was convinced, wrongly, that "Georgetown liberals" like Dulles and Bissell had secretly aided Kennedy with inside information on Cuba before a crucial televised presidential debate.
President-elect Kennedy immediately announced the re-appointments of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles. That decision came from his father, and it was made for political and personal protection. Hoover knew some of the deeper secrets in the Kennedy family--including the president-elect's sexual dalliances during World War II with a suspected Nazi spy--and he had shared that knowledge with Dulles. Kennedy knew all this because his father, a former member of Eisenhower's board of foreign intelligence consultants, had told him on good authority.
On November 18, the president-elect met Dulles and Bissell at his father's retreat in Palm Beach, Florida. Three days before, Bissell had received a conclusive report from Esterline on the Cuban operation. "Our original concept is now seen to be unachievable in the face of the controls Castro has instituted," Esterline said. "There will not be the internal unrest earlier believed possible, nor will the defenses permit the type of strike first planned. Our second concept (1,500-3,000 man force to secure a beach with airstrip) is now also seen as unachievable, except as a joint Agency/DOD action."
In other words, to overthrow Castro, the United States would have to send in the marines.
"I sat there in my office at CIA," Esterline recounted, "and I said, 'Goddamn it, I hope Bissell has enough guts to tell John Kennedy what the facts are.'" But Bissell never breathed a word. The unachievable plan became a can-do mission.
The Palm Beach briefing placed the CIA leaders in "an absolutely untenable position," Bissell told an agency historian. Their notes for the meeting show that they had intended to discuss their past triumphs--particularly Guatemala--and a multitude of covert operations under way in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Central and South America, and Asia. But they did not. Before the meeting, President Eisenhower told them to hew to "a narrow agenda" they interpreted that as a ban on discussing anything that had transpired in the meetings of the National Security Council. As a result, crucial information about the CIA's covert operations was lost in transition from one president to another.
Eisenhower had never approved an invasion of Cuba. But Kennedy did not know that. What he knew was what Dulles and Bissell told him.
"AN EIGHT-YEAR DEFEAT"
For eight years, Allen Dulles had fended off all efforts by outsiders to change the CIA. He had a reputation to protect--the agency's and his own. Denying everything, admitting nothing, he had hidden the truth to conceal the failures of his covert operations.
From at least 1957 onward, he had shunned voices of reason and moderation, ignored the increasingly urgent recommendations of the president's intelligence consultants, brushed aside reports by his own inspector general, treated his underlings with contempt. "He was, by that time, a tired old man," whose professional conduct "could be, and usually was, trying in the extreme," said Dick Lehman, one of the best analysts the agency ever had. "His treatment of us reflected his sense of values. He was wrong, of course, but we had to live with it."
In his last days in office, President Eisenhower came to understand that he did not have a spy service worthy of the name. He came to that conclusion after reading through a thick stack of reports he had commissioned in the hope of changing the CIA.
The first, on December 15, 1960, was the work of the Joint Study Group, which he had created after the U-2 shootdown to survey the landscape of American intelligence. It was a terrifying picture of drift and disarray. It said Dulles never had addressed the problem of a surprise attack by the Soviets. He had never coordinated military intelligence and civilian analysis. He had never created the capability to provide warning in a crisis. He had spent eight years mounting covert operations instead of mastering American intelligence.
Then, on January 5, 1961, the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities issued its final recommendations. It called for "a total reassessment" of covert action: "We are unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk of the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved." It warned that "CIA's concentration on political, psychological and related covert action activities have tended to distract substantially from the execution of its primary intelligence-gathering mission."
The board urged the president to consider the "complete separation" of the director of central intelligence from the CIA. It said Dulles was incapable of running the agency while carrying out his duties to coordinate American intelligence--the code making and code breaking of the National Security Agency; the dawning capabilities of spy satellites and space photoreconnaissance; the endless squabbles of the army, the navy, and the air force.
"I reminded the President that many times he had addressed himself to this general problem," his national-security aide, Gordon Gray, wrote after reviewing the report with Eisenhower. I know, Ike replied. I've tried. I cannot change Allen Dulles.
"A great deal has been accomplished," Dulles insisted to the president at the final gatherings of Eisenhower's National Security Council. Everything is well in hand, he said. I have fixed the clandestine service. American intelligence has never been more agile and adept. Coordination and cooperation are better than they ever have been. The proposals of the president's intelligence board were preposterous, he said, they were madness, they were illegal. I am responsible under the law for intelligence coordination, he reminded the president. I cannot delegate that responsibility. Without my leadership, he said, American intelligence would be "a body floating in thin air."
At the last, Dwight Eisenhower exploded in anger and frustration. "The structure of our intelligence organization is faulty," he told Dulles. It makes no sense, it has to be reorganized, and we should have done it long ago. Nothing had changed since Pearl Harbor. "I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this," said the president of the United States. He said he would "leave a legacy of ashes" to his successor.