PART
THREE
Lost Causes
The legacy was handed down on the morning of January 19, 1961, when the old general and the young senator met alone in the Oval Office. With a sense of foreboding, Eisenhower gave Kennedy a glance at the stratagems of national security: nuclear weapons and covert operations.
The two men emerged and met in the Cabinet Room with the old and new secretaries of state, defense, and the treasury. "Senator Kennedy asked the President's judgment as to the United States supporting the guerrilla operations in Cuba, even if this support involves the United States publicly," a note taker recorded that morning. "The President replied Yes as we cannot let the present government there go on.... The President also advised that the situation would be helped if we could handle the Dominican Republic at the same time." Eisenhower's idea that one Caribbean coup could counterbalance another was an equation no one in Washington had worked out.
As Kennedy arose the next morning for his swearing-in, the corrupt right-wing leader of the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, had been in power for thirty years. Support from the U.S. government and the American business community had helped keep him in office. He ruled by force, fraud, and fear; he took pleasure in hanging his enemies from meat hooks. "He had his torture chambers, he had his political assassinations," said Consul General Henry Dearborn, the ranking American diplomat in the Dominican Republic at the start of 1961. "But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works and he didn't bother the United States. So that was fine with us." But Trujillo had become intolerable, Dearborn said. "About the time I got there his iniquities had gotten so bad that there was a lot of pressure from various political groups, civil rights groups and others, not only in the U.S., but throughout the hemisphere, that something just had to be done about this man."
Dearborn was left in charge of the American embassy in Santo Domingo after the United States severed diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic in August 1960. All but a few of the American diplomats and spies left the island. But Richard Bissell had asked Dearborn to stay on and serve as the acting CIA station chief. The consul general agreed.
On January 19, 1961, Dearborn was advised that a shipment of small arms was on its way to a group of Dominican conspirators who aimed to kill Trujillo. The Special Group, Allen Dulles presiding, had made the decision one week before. Dearborn requested the agency's approval to arm the Dominicans with three carbine rifles left behind at the embassy by navy personnel. Bissell's covert-action deputy, Tracy Barnes, gave the green light. The CIA then dispatched three .38-caliber pistols to the Dominicans. Bissell authorized a second shipment of four machine guns and 240 rounds of ammunition. The machine guns remained at the American consulate in Santo Domingo after members of the new administration questioned what the world reaction might be if it were known that the United States was delivering murder weapons via diplomatic pouch.
Dearborn received a cable, personally approved by President Kennedy, which he read to say: "We don't care if the Dominicans assassinate Trujillo, that is all right. But we don't want anything to pin this on us." Nothing ever did. When Trujillo's killers shot him two weeks later, the smoking gun might or might not have been the agency's. There were no fingerprints. But the assassination was as close as the CIA had ever come to carrying out a murder at the command of the White House.
The attorney general of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, jotted down some notes after he learned of the assassination. "The great problem now," he wrote, "is that we don't know what to do."
"I WAS ASHAMED OF MY COUNTRY"
As the CIA catapulted toward the invasion of Cuba, "the thing started to steamroller and get out of control," said Jake Esterline. Bissell was the driving force. He forged on, refusing to acknowledge that the CIA could not topple Castro, blinding himself to the fact that the secrecy of the operation had been blown long ago.
On March 11, Bissell went to the White House with four separate plots on paper. None satisfied President Kennedy. He gave the chief of the clandestine service three days to come up with something better. Bissell's brainstorm was his choice of a new landing zone--three broad beaches at the Bay of Pigs. The site satisfied a new political requirement from the administration: the Cuban invaders had to capture an airstrip upon landing, to establish a political beachhead for a new Cuban government.
Bissell assured the president that this operation would succeed. The worst that could happen was that the CIA's rebels would confront Castro's forces on the beaches and march on into the mountains. But the terrain at the Bay of Pigs was an impassible tangle of mangrove roots and mud. No one in Washington knew that. The crude survey maps in the CIA's possession suggesting that the swampland would serve as guerrilla country had been drawn in 1895.
The following week, the CIA's Mafia contacts took a swipe at killing Castro. They gave poison pills and thousands of dollars to one of the CIA's most prominent Cubans, Tony Varona. (Described by Esterline as "a scoundrel, a cheat, and a thief," Varona later met President Kennedy at the White House.) Varona managed to hand off the vial of poison to a restaurant worker in Havana, who was to slip it into Castro's ice cream cone. Cuban intelligence officers later found the vial in an icebox, frozen to the coils.
By spring, the president still had not approved a plan of attack. He did not understand how the invasion would work. On Wednesday, April 5, he met again with Dulles and Bissell, but could not make sense of their strategy. On Thursday, April 6, he asked them if their planned bombing of Castro's small air force would eliminate the invaders' element of surprise. No one had an answer.
On Saturday night, April 8, Richard Bissell answered the insistent ring of his home phone. Jake Esterline was calling from Quarters Eye, the CIA's Washington war room, saying he and Colonel Hawkins, his paramilitary planner, needed to see Bissell alone as soon as possible. Sunday morning, Bissell opened his front door to find Esterline and Hawkins in a state of barely controlled rage. They marched into his living room, sat down, and told him that the invasion of Cuba had to be called off.
It was too late to stop now, Bissell told them; the coup against Castro was set to begin in a week. Esterline and Hawkins threatened to resign. Bissell questioned their loyalty and patriotism. They wavered.
"If you don't want a disaster, we absolutely must take out all of Castro's air force," Esterline told Bissell, not for the first time. All three knew that Castro's thirty-six combat aircraft were capable of killing hundreds of the CIA's Cubans as they went ashore. Trust me, said Bissell. He promised to persuade President Kennedy to wipe out Castro's air force. "He talked us into continuing," Esterline recalled bitterly. "He said, 'I promise you that there will be no reductions of air raids.'"
But at the crucial hour, Bissell cut the American force sent to destroy Castro's aircraft in half, from sixteen to eight bombers. He did it to please the president, who wanted a quiet coup. Bissell deceived him into believing the CIA would deliver one.
On Saturday, April 15, eight American B-26 bombers struck three Cuban airfields as the CIA's brigade of 1,511 men headed for the Bay of Pigs. Five Cuban aircraft were destroyed and perhaps a dozen more damaged. Half of Castro's air force remained. The CIA's cover story was that the attacker was a sole Cuban air force defector who had landed in Florida. That day, Bissell sent Tracy Barnes to New York to peddle the tale to the American ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson.
Bissell and Barnes played Stevenson for a fool, as if he were their agent. Like Secretary of State Colin Powell on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Stevenson sold the CIA's story to the world. Unlike Powell, he discovered the next day that he had been had.
The knowledge that Stevenson was caught lying in public riveted Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who already had good reason to be enraged with the CIA. Only hours before, on the heels of another blown operation, Rusk had to send a formal letter of apology to Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore. The secret police in Singapore had burst into a CIA safe house, where a cabinet minister on the CIA's payroll was being interrogated. Lee Kwan Yew, a key American ally, said that the station chief offered him a $3.3 million bribe to hush up the matter.
At 6 p.m. on Sunday, April 16, Stevenson cabled Rusk from New York to warn of the "gravest risk of another U-2 disaster in such uncoordinated action." At 9:30 p.m. the president's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, called Dulles's deputy director, General Charles Pearre Cabell. Bundy said the CIA could not launch air strikes on Cuba unless "they could be conducted from a strip within the beachhead" at the Bay of Pigs. At 10:15 p.m., Cabell and Bissell rushed to the elegant seventh-floor offices of the secretary of state. Rusk told them the CIA's planes could go into battle to protect the beachhead, but not to attack Cuban airfields or harbors or radio stations. "He asked if I should like to speak to the President," Cabell wrote. "Mr. Bissell and I were impressed with the extremely delicate situation with Ambassador Stevenson and the United Nations and the risk to the entire political position of the United States"--a situation created by Bissell and Barnes's lies--and so "we saw no point in my speaking personally to the President." Trapped by his own cover stories, Bissell chose not to fight. In his memoirs, he attributed his silence to cowardice.
When Cabell returned to the CIA's war room to report what had happened, Jake Esterline seriously considered killing him with his own hands. The agency was going to leave its Cubans to die "like sitting ducks on that damn beach," Esterline said.
Cabell's cancellation order caught the CIA's pilots in Nicaragua in their cockpits, revving their engines. At 4:30 a.m. on Monday, April 17, Cabell called Rusk at home and pleaded for presidential authority for more air power to protect the CIA's ships, which were loaded to the gunwales with ammunition and military supplies. Rusk called President Kennedy at his Virginia retreat, Glen Ora, and put Cabell on the phone.
The president said he was unaware that there were going to be any air strikes on the morning of D-Day. Request denied.
Four hours later, a Sea Fury fighter-bomber swooped down on the Bay of Pigs. The American-trained pilot, Captain Enrique Carreras, was the ace of Fidel Castro's air force. He took aim at the Rio Escondido, a rust-bucket freighter out of New Orleans under contract to the CIA. Below him to the southeast, aboard the Blagar, a converted World War II landing craft, a CIA paramilitary officer named Grayston Lynch fired at the Cuban fighter with a defective .50-caliber machine gun. Captain Carreras let loose a rocket that hit the forward deck of the Rio Escondido six feet below the railing, striking dozens of fifty-five-gallon drums filled with aviation gasoline. The fire ignited three thousand gallons of aircraft fuel and 145 tons of ammunition in the forward hold. The crew abandoned ship and started swimming for their lives. The freighter exploded in a fireball that sent a mushroom cloud rising half a mile high above the Bay of Pigs. From sixteen miles away, on a beach newly littered with the brigade's dead and wounded, the CIA commando Rip Robertson thought Castro had dropped an atomic bomb.
President Kennedy called on Admiral Arleigh Burke, the commander of the U.S. Navy, to save the CIA from disaster. "Nobody knew what to do nor did the CIA who were running the operation and who were wholly responsible for the operation know what to do or what was happening," the admiral said on April 18. "We have been kept pretty ignorant of this and have just been told partial truths."
For two miserable days and nights, Castro's Cubans and the CIA's Cubans killed one another. On the night of April 18, the commander of the rebel brigade, Pepe San Roman, radioed back to Lynch: "Do you people realize how desperate the situation is? Do you back us up or quit?...Please don't desert us. Am out of tank and bazooka ammo. Tanks will hit me at dawn. I will not be evacuated. Will fight to the end if we have to." Morning came and no help arrived. "We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help. We cannot hold," San Roman shouted through his radio. His men were massacred standing knee-deep in the water.
"Situation for air support beachhead completely out of our hands," the agency's air operations chief told Bissell in a cable at noon. "Have now lost 5 Cuban pilots, 6 co-pilots, 2 American pilots, and one copilot." In all, four American pilots on contract to the CIA from the Alabama National Guard were killed in combat. For years the agency hid the cause of their deaths from their widows and families.
"Still have faith," said the air operation chief's cable. "Awaiting your guidance." Bissell had none to offer. At about two in the afternoon on April 19, San Roman cursed the CIA, shot his radio, and gave up the fight. In sixty hours, 1,189 members of the Cuban brigade had been captured and 114 killed.
"For the first time in my thirty-seven years," Grayston Lynch wrote, "I was ashamed of my country."
That same day, Robert Kennedy sent a prophetic note to his brother. "The time has come for a showdown, for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse," he wrote. "If we don't want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it."
"TAKE THE BUCKET OF SLOP AND PUT ANOTHER
COVER OVER IT"
President Kennedy told two of his aides that Allen Dulles had reassured him face-to-face in the Oval Office that the Bay of Pigs would be a sure-fire success: "Mr. President, I stood right here at Ike's desk and told him I was certain that our Guatemalan operation would succeed, and Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one." If so, it was an astonishing lie. Dulles in fact had told Eisenhower that the CIA's chances in Guatemala were one in five at best--and zero without air power.
At the hour of the invasion, Allen Dulles was making a speech in Puerto Rico. His public departure from Washington had been part of a deception plan, but now it looked like an admiral abandoning ship. Upon his return, Bobby Kennedy recounted, he looked like living death, his face buried in his trembling hands.
On April 22, the president convened the National Security Council, an instrument of government he had disdained. After ordering the distraught Dulles to start "stepping up coverage of Castro activities in the United States"--a task outside the CIA's charter--the president told General Maxwell Taylor, the new White House military adviser, to work with Dulles, Bobby Kennedy, and Admiral Arleigh Burke to perform an autopsy on the Bay of Pigs. The Taylor board of inquiry met that same afternoon, with Dulles clutching a copy of NSC 5412/2, the 1955 authorization for the covert operations of the CIA.
"I'm first to recognize that I don't think that the CIA should run paramilitary operations," Dulles told the board--a puff of smoke obscuring his decade of unblinking support for such operations. "I think, however, that rather than destroying everything and starting all over, we ought to take what's good in what we have, get rid of those things that are really beyond the competence of the CIA, then pull the thing together and make it more effective. We should look over the 5412 papers and revise them in such a manner that paramilitary operations are handled in some other way. It's not going to be easy to find a place to put them; it's very difficult to keep things secret."
The Taylor board's work soon made it clear to the president that he needed a new way of running covert operations. One of the last witnesses before the board was a dying man who spoke with a grave clarity on the deepest problems confronting the CIA. The testimony of General Walter Bedell Smith resounds with chilling authority today:
QUESTION: How can we in a democracy use all our assets effectively without having to completely reorganize the Government?
GENERAL SMITH: A democracy cannot wage war. When you go to war, you pass a law giving extraordinary powers to the President. The people of the country assume when the emergency is over, the rights and powers that were temporarily delegated to the Chief Executive will be returned to the states, counties and to the people.
QUESTION : We often say that we are in a state of war at the present time.
GENERAL SMITH : Yes, sir, that is correct.
QUESTION : Are you suggesting that we should approximate the President's wartime powers?
GENERAL SMITH : No. However, the American people do not feel that they are at war at the present time, and consequently they are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to wage war. When you are at war, cold war if you like, you must have an amoral agency which can operate secretly.... I think that so much publicity has been given to CIA that the covert work might have to be put under another roof.
QUESTION : Do you think we should take the covert operations from CIA?
GENERAL SMITH : It's time we take the bucket of slop and put another cover over it.
Three months later, Walter Bedell Smith died at age sixty-five.
The CIA's inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, ran his own postmortem on the Bay of Pigs. He concluded that Dulles and Bissell had failed to keep two presidents and two administrations accurately and realistically informed about the operation. If the CIA wanted to stay in business, Kirkpatrick said, it would have to drastically improve its organization and management. Dulles's deputy, General Cabell, warned him that if the report fell into unfriendly hands, it would destroy the agency. Dulles wholeheartedly agreed. He saw to it that the report was buried. Nineteen of the twenty printed copies were recalled and destroyed. The one that survived was locked away for almost forty years.
In September 1961, Allen Dulles retired as director of central intelligence. Workers were still putting the finishing touches on the grand new CIA headquarters he had fought for years to build in the Virginia woodlands above the west bank of the Potomac River, seven miles from the edge of the capital. He had commissioned an inscription from the Gospel of John to be engraved in its central lobby: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free." A medallion in his image was hung in the same soaring space."Si monumentum requiris circumspice," it reads: If you seek his monument, look around you.
Richard Bissell stayed on another six months. He later confessed in secret testimony that the vaunted expertise of his clandestine service was a facade--it was "not the place where one would expect to look for professional competence." When he left, the president pinned the National Security Medal on his lapel. "Mr. Bissell's high purpose, unbounded energy, and unswerving devotion to duty are benchmarks of the intelligence service," he said. "He leaves an enduring legacy."
Part of that legacy was a broken confidence. For the next nineteen years, no president would place his full faith and trust in the Central Intelligence Agency.
"YOU ARE NOW LIVING ON THE BULL'S EYE"
In his wrath after the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy first wanted to destroy the CIA. Then he took the agency's clandestine service out of its death spiral by handing the controls to his brother. It was one of the least wise decisions of his presidency. Robert F. Kennedy, thirty-five years old, famously ruthless, fascinated with secrecy, took command of the most sensitive covert operations of the United States. The two men unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity. Ike had undertaken 170 major CIA covert operations in eight years. The Kennedys launched 163 major covert operations in less than three.
The president had wanted to make RFK the new director of central intelligence, but his brother thought it best to choose a man who could afford the president political protection after the Bay of Pigs. After casting about for months, they settled on an Eisenhower elder statesman: John McCone.
Almost sixty years old, a deeply conservative California Republican, a devout Roman Catholic, and a fiery anticommunist, McCone would very likely have been secretary of defense had Nixon been elected in 1960. He had made a fortune building ships on the West Coast during World War II, then served as a deputy to Defense Secretary James Forrestal, ham mering out the first budget of the new Department of Defense in 1948. As undersecretary of the air force during the Korean War, he had helped create the first truly global military power of the postwar world. As chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, he had overseen the nation's nuclear-weapons factories and held a seat on the National Security Council. McCone's new covert operations chief, Richard Helms, described him as "straight from central casting in Hollywood," with "white hair, ruddy cheeks, brisk gait, impeccable dark suits, rimless glasses, aloof manner, and unmistakable self-confidence."
The new director was "not a man that people were going to love," said Red White, his chief administrator, but he quickly became "very close with Bobby Kennedy." McCone first bonded with Bobby as a coreligionist and fellow anticommunist. The attorney general's big white clapboard house, Hickory Hill, was only a few hundred yards from the agency's new headquarters, and Kennedy often stopped by the CIA in the morning on his way to work downtown at the Justice Department, dropping in after McCone's daily 8:00 a.m. staff meeting.
McCone left a unique and meticulous daily record of his work, his thoughts, and his conversations, many first declassified in 2003 and 2004. His memoranda provide a moment-to-moment account of his years as director. Along with thousands of pages of conversations secretly recorded by President Kennedy inside the White House, many not accurately transcribed until 2003 and 2004, they detail the most dangerous days of the cold war.
Before his swearing-in, McCone tried to get the big picture of the agency's operations. He toured Europe with Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, went on to a Far East station chiefs' meeting at a mountain retreat north of Manila, and immersed himself in paper.
But Dulles and Bissell left out some details. They never saw fit to tell McCone about the CIA's biggest, longest-lasting, and most illegal program in the United States: the opening of first-class mail coming in and out of the country. From 1952 onward, working at the main postal facility at the international airport in New York City, the CIA's security officers opened letters and Jim Angleton's counterintelligence staff sifted the information. Nor did Dulles and Bissell tell McCone about the CIA's assassination plots against Fidel Castro, temporarily suspended after the Bay of Pigs. Almost two years would pass before the director learned of the murder plans; he never found out about the mail openings until the rest of the nation did.
After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy was persuaded to rebuild the clearinghouses for covert action that he had torn down after his inauguration. The president's foreign intelligence board of advisers was reestablished. The Special Group (later renamed the 303 Committee) was reconstituted to oversee the clandestine service, and its chairman for the next four years would be the national security adviser: cool, clipped, correct McGeorge Bundy of Groton and Yale, the former dean of the arts and sciences at Harvard University. The members were McCone, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and senior deputies from Defense and State. But until very late in the Kennedy administration it was left to the CIA's covert operators to decide whether to consult with the Special Group. There were more than a few operations that McCone and the Special Group knew little or nothing about.
In November 1961, in the greatest secrecy, John and Bobby Kennedy created a new planning cell for covert action, the Special Group (Augmented). It was RFK's outfit, and it had one mission: eliminating Castro. On the night of November 20, nine days before he took the oath of office as director, McCone answered his home telephone and heard the president summoning him to the White House. Arriving the following afternoon, he found the Kennedys in the company of a gangly fifty-three-year-old brigadier general named Ed Lansdale. His specialty was counterinsurgency, and his trademark was winning third-world hearts and minds with American ingenuity, greenback dollars, and snake oil. He had worked for the CIA and the Pentagon since before the Korean War, serving as Frank Wisner's man in Manila and Saigon, where he helped pro-American leaders take power.
Lansdale was introduced as the new chief of operations at the Special Group (Augmented). "The President explained that General Lansdale had been engaging in a study of possible action in Cuba, acting under the direction of the Attorney General, and he, the President, desired an immediate plan of action which could be submitted to him within two weeks," McCone recorded in his CIA files. "The Attorney General expressed grave concern over Cuba, the necessity for immediate dynamic action." McCone told them that the CIA and the rest of the Kennedy administration had been in a state of shock ever since the Bay of Pigs--"and, therefore, were doing very little."
McCone thought nothing short of a shooting war would knock out Castro. And he believed that the CIA was unfit to run a war, secret or not. He told President Kennedy that the agency could not continue to be seen as "a 'cloak and dagger' outfit...designed to overthrow governments, assassinate heads of state, involve itself in political affairs of foreign states." He reminded the president that the CIA had one fundamental responsibility under law--"to assemble all intelligence" gathered by the United States, and then analyze it, evaluate it, and report it to the White House. The Kennedys agreed, in a written order drafted by McCone and signed by the president, that he would be "the Government's principal intelligence officer." His job would be "the proper coordination, correlation, and evaluation of intelligence from all sources."
McCone also believed he had been hired to shape the foreign policy of the United States for the president. This was not, nor should it have been, the role of the nation's chief intelligence officer. But though his judgment often proved sounder than that of the Harvard men at the highest levels of the government, he quickly discovered that the Kennedys had a number of novel ideas about how he and the CIA were to serve American interests. On the day President Kennedy swore him in, he found out that he and RFK and the unctuous General Lansdale were in charge of Castro.
"You are now living on the bull's eye, and I welcome you to that spot," the president told McCone at his swearing-in.
"OUT OF THE QUESTION"
The president asked McCone from the outset to find a way to pierce the Berlin Wall. The wall had been erected--first barbed wire, then concrete--in August 1961. It could have been an enormous political and propaganda windfall for the West, hard evidence that the exorbitant lies of communism no longer served to keep millions of East German citizens from fleeing. It could have been a golden opportunity for the CIA.
The week that the wall went up, Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to Berlin, where he received a top secret briefing from the CIA's base chief, Bill Graver. LBJ gazed upon an impressively detailed chart showing all the CIA's agents in the East.
"I saw this briefing map," said Haviland Smith, then a rising star at the Berlin base. "If you listened to what Graver said, we had agents in the Karlsruhe compound"--the Soviet intelligence center--"agents in the Polish military mission, the Czech military mission--we had East Berlin absolutely penetrated up to the goddamn eyeballs. However, if you knew what we had, you knew that the penetration of the Polish military mission was the guy who sold newspapers on the corner. And you knew that this big penetration of the Soviet military compound was a Dachermeister--a master roofer, who fixed roofs."
"Berlin was a sham," he said. The agency was lying about its achievements to the next president of the United States.
David Murphy, then chief of the CIA's Eastern Europe division, met with President Kennedy at the White House the week after the wall went up. "The Kennedy administration pushed us very hard to persuade us to devise plans for covert paramilitary action and the fomenting of dissidence" in East Germany, he said, but "operations in East Germany were out of the question."
The reason finally emerged in a document declassified in June 2006, a devastating damage assessment drawn up by Dave Murphy himself.
On November 6, 1961, the West German chief of counterintelligence, Heinz Felfe, was arrested by his own security police. Felfe had been a hard-core Nazi who had joined the Gehlen organization in 1951, two years after the CIA took charge of it. He had risen rapidly through its ranks and kept rising after it became the official West German intelligence service, the BND, in 1955.
But Felfe had been working for the Soviets all along. He had penetrated the West German service and, through it, the CIA's station and bases. He was able to manipulate and deceive the CIA's officers in Germany until they had no idea whether the information they had gathered from behind the iron curtain was true or false.
Felfe could "initiate, direct, or halt any BND operations and later some of CIA's," Murphy noted glumly. He had revealed to the East German intelligence service the essential details of every important CIA mission against Moscow from June 1959 to November 1961. These included roughly seventy major covert operations, the identities of more than a hundred CIA officers, and some fifteen thousand secrets.
The agency was all but out of business in Germany and across Eastern Europe. It took a decade to repair the damage.
"THE PRESIDENT WANTS SOME ACTION, RIGHT NOW"
The Berlin Wall--and all else--paled before the Kennedys' desire to avenge the family honor lost at the Bay of Pigs. The overthrow of Castro was "the top priority in the United States Government," Bobby Kennedy told McCone on January 19, 1962. "No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared." But the new director warned him that the agency had little real intelligence on which to proceed. "Of the 27 or 28 agents CIA now has in Cuba, only 12 are in communication and these communications are infrequent," he told the attorney general. Seven of the CIA's Cubans had been captured four weeks before, after infiltrating the island.
On RFK's orders, Lansdale drew up a to-do list for the CIA: recruit and deploy the Catholic Church and the Cuban underworld against Castro, fracture the regime from within, sabotage the economy, subvert the secret police, destroy the crops with biological or chemical warfare, and change the regime before the next congressional elections in November 1962.
"Ed had this aura around him," said Sam Halpern, the new deputy chief of the Cuba desk, an OSS veteran who had known Lansdale for a decade. "Some people believed Ed was a kind of magician. But I'll tell you what he was. He was basically a con man. A Madison Avenue 'Man in the Grey Flannel Suit' con man. You take a look at his proposed plan for getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime. It's utter nonsense." The plan boiled down to an empty promise: to overthrow Castro without sending in the marines.
Halpern said to Richard Helms: "This is a political operation in the city of Washington D.C., and has nothing to do with the security of the United States." He warned that the CIA had no intelligence about Cuba. "We don't know what is going on," he told Helms. "We don't know who is doing what to whom. We haven't got any idea of their order of battle in terms of political organization and structure. Who hates whom? Who loves whom? We have nothing." It was the same problem the CIA would face when it confronted Iraq forty years later.
Helms agreed. The plan was a pipe dream.
The Kennedys did not want to hear that. They wanted swift, silent sabotage to overthrow Castro. "Let's get the hell on with it," the attorney general barked. "The President wants some action, right now." Helms saluted smartly and got the hell on with it. He created a new freestanding task force to report to Ed Lansdale and Robert Kennedy. He assembled a team from all over the world, creating the CIA's largest peacetime intelligence operation to date, with some six hundred CIA officers in and around Miami, almost five thousand CIA contractors, and the third largest navy in the Caribbean, including submarines, patrol boats, coast guard cutters, seaplanes, and Guantanamo Bay for a base. Some "nutty schemes" against Fidel were proposed by the Pentagon and the White House, Helms said. These included blowing up an American ship in Guantanamo Harbor and faking a terrorist attack against an American airliner to justify a new invasion.
The operation needed a code name, and Sam Halpern came up with Mongoose.
"THERE IS NOTHING ON PAPER, OF COURSE"
Helms chose William K. Harvey, the man who had built the Berlin Tunnel, to lead the Mongoose team. Harvey called the project "Task Force W," after William Walker, the American freebooter who led a private army into Central America and proclaimed himself the emperor of Nicaragua in the 1850s. It was a very odd choice--unless you knew Bill Harvey.
Harvey was introduced to the Kennedys as the CIA's James Bond. This seems to have mystified JFK, an avid reader of Ian Fleming's spy romances, for the only thing Bond and Harvey had in common was a taste for martinis. Obese, pop-eyed, always packing a pistol, Harvey drank doubles at lunch and returned to work muttering darkly, cursing the day he met RFK. Bobby Kennedy "wanted fast actions, he wanted fast answers," said McCone's executive assistant, Walt Elder. "Harvey did not have fast actions or fast answers."
But he did have a secret weapon.
The Kennedy White House twice had ordered the CIA to create an assassination squad. Under very close questioning by Senate investigators and a presidential commission in 1975, Richard Bissell said those orders had come from national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and Bundy's aide Walt Rostow, and that the president's men "would not have given such encouragement unless they were confident that it would meet with the president's approval."
Bissell had handed down the order to Bill Harvey, who did as he was told. He had returned to headquarters in September 1959 after a long tour as chief of the Berlin base to command Division D of the clandestine service. The division's officers broke into foreign embassies overseas to steal codebooks and ciphers for the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency. They called themselves the Second-Story Men, and their skills ran from locksmithing to larceny and beyond. The division had contacts with criminals in foreign capitals who could be called on for cat burglaries, the kidnapping of embassy couriers, and assorted felonies in the name of American national security.
In February 1962, Harvey created an "executive action" program, code-named Rifle, and retained the services of a foreign agent, a resident of Luxembourg but a man without a country, who worked on contract for Division D. Harvey intended to use him to kill Fidel Castro.
In April 1962, the CIA's records show, Harvey took a second approach. He met the mobster John Rosselli in New York. He picked up a new batch of poison pills, designed to be dropped into Castro's tea or coffee, from Dr. Edward Gunn, the chief of the operations division of the CIA's Office of Medical Services. Then he drove to Miami and delivered them to Rosselli, along with a U-Haul truck filled with weapons.
On May 7, 1962, the attorney general was briefed in full on the Rifle project by the CIA's general counsel, Lawrence Houston, and the agency's security chief, Sheffield Edwards. RFK was "mad as hell"--not mad about the assassination plot itself, but about the Mafia's role in it. He did nothing to stop the CIA from seeking Castro's death.
Richard Helms, who had taken command of the clandestine service three months before, gave Harvey the go-ahead on Rifle. If the White House wanted a silver bullet, he believed it was the agency's job to try to find it. He thought it best not to tell McCone, correctly judging that the director would have the strongest religious, legal, and political objections.
I once put the question to Helms personally: Did President Kennedy want Castro dead? "There is nothing on paper, of course," he said evenly. "But there is certainly no question in my mind that he did."
Helms thought political assassination in peacetime was a moral aberration. But there were practical considerations as well. "If you become involved in the business of eliminating foreign leaders, and it is considered by governments more frequently than one likes to admit, there is always the question of who comes next," he observed. "If you kill someone else's leaders, why shouldn't they kill yours?"
"A TRUE UNCERTAINTY"
When John McCone took over as director of central intelligence, "CIA was suffering" and "morale was pretty well shattered," he recounted. "My first problem was to try to rebuild confidence."
But CIA headquarters was in an uproar six months into his reign. McCone started firing hundreds of clandestine service officers--aiming first to purge the "accident-prone," the "wife-beaters," and the "alcohol-addicted," noted his deputy director, General Marshall S. Carter. The dismissals, the aftershocks from the Bay of Pigs, and the almost daily beatings from the White House over Cuba were creating "a true uncertainty as to what the future of the Agency may be," McCone's executive director, Lyman Kirkpatrick, told him in a July 26, 1962, memorandum. He suggested that perhaps "something should be done immediately to restore morale in the Agency."
Helms determined that the only cure was a return to the basics of espionage. With some misgivings, he took his best men out of the paralyzed Soviet and Eastern Europe divisions and turned them on Castro's Cuba. He had a handful of officers under his command in Florida who had learned how to run agents and couriers in and out of communist-controlled zones such as East Berlin. The CIA set up a debriefing center in Opa-Locka to interview thousands of people who had left Cuba on commercial airliners and private boats. The center interrogated some 1,300 Cuban refugees; they provided the agency with political, military, and economic intelligence along with documents and the detritus of everyday life--clothes, coins, cigarettes--to help disguise agents infiltrating the island. The Miami station claimed to have forty-five men running information out of Cuba in the summer of 1962. Some arrived in Florida for a ten-day CIA crash course and returned by speedboat under cover of night. The small spy network they built inside Cuba was the sole achievement of the $50 million Mongoose operation.
Bobby Kennedy kept calling in vain for commandos to blow up Cuba's power plants, factories, and sugar mills in secret. "Can CIA actually hope to generate such strikes?" Lansdale asked Harvey. "Why is this now called a possibility?" Harvey replied that it would take two more years and another $100 million to create a force capable of overthrowing Castro.
The CIA was so busy carrying out covert action that it failed to see a threat to the national survival of the United States gathering in Cuba.