In a remarkably short time after his return to Cuba, Castro managed to convince Washington’s policymakers and other Western observers that he was indeed a communist and that his freely chosen political and military ally was the Soviet Union. It was also soon apparent that Castro intended to use Cuba as a base from which to mount political and paramilitary activities in the Caribbean and Latin America wherever the prospects seemed favorable. The notion of tolerating a dictatorship openly dedicated to these objectives and located a ninety-mile hop and skip from the Florida coast was not acceptable to President Eisenhower.
In January 1960 the Special Group—the National Security Council element responsible for authorizing covert action—formally instructed CIA to develop an operational plan. Some three months later, President Eisenhower approved the Agency plan involving propaganda, the creation of a unified Cuban opposition to Castro, and the formation of a cadre of some twenty Cuban exiles trained in guerrilla tactics—infiltration, sabotage, and communications. This group was, in turn, to develop a hundred or more Cuban agents who were to be infiltrated into Cuba where they would “be placed” within “various dissident groups” and in enclaves in the Escambray Mountains. By any standard, this would have been an ambitious—and most probably impossible—assignment for a secret intelligence service.
As Richard Bissell expresses it in his book: “Our immediate goal … was to model the guerrilla organization along the lines of the underground organizations of World War II.”* The assumption—unknown to me at the time—that the operation was to resemble the World War II organizations cannot have been made on the basis of even a rudimentary knowledge of their activity. Without exception, the European resistance was primarily directed against a brutal, foreign—and, in many cases, traditional—enemy. There were quisling governments of varying strengths in each of the German-occupied countries, but the root enemy was Nazi Germany. Whatever else may be said about Castro, his government—though not elected—was Cuban.
The first step in the initial covert action plan was to be the creation of a command and control net on the island with the mission to establish safe houses, receive supplies, and accommodate infiltrated agents. This considerable task was seen to require upwards to “200 highly disciplined members … rigidly trained … compartmented in such a way that they would not know one another.” There was, Bissell writes, “a firm belief [emphasis added] within the agency that it would be possible to build up this kind of underground mechanism in Cuba.”†
Here I must say that insofar as any such firm opinion may have existed within the Agency, it could have been held only by those who had little knowledge of the underground work in Europe during World War II, and perhaps even less understanding of CIA’s more recent resistance efforts in Eastern Europe and the USSR. The romantic notion that some two hundred agents could be “rigidly trained” and compartmented so that “they would not know one another” would have been beyond the resources of any intelligence service known to me. Indeed, the security and logistics problems involved in training and handling a score of agents in this fashion would have strained the Agency’s facilities. The only venue for a plan of this scope is a Hollywood motion picture studio.
Allen Dulles had as good a grasp of underground resistance operations as anyone at his level in Washington. I cannot understand Dick Bissell’s and Dulles’s failure to look more deeply into the facts bearing on this proposed plan. The best I can suggest is that Bissell’s great success with the U-2 and CORONA projects, and Dulles’s determination to prove the Agency’s capability, resulted in a collective suspension of judgment.
I saw some of the initial cable traffic but was not consulted on any aspect of the planning or the personnel staffing of the project, nor did the ever-increasing daily operational traffic cross my desk. The command channel for the Cuban undertaking, code name ZAPATA, ran from the DCI, Allen Dulles, to the deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell, and Tracy Barnes, Bissell’s special assistant for the operation. At the lower level, staff, branch, and section chiefs were assigned operational and administrative responsibility.
I am, of course, acutely aware that I write this some four decades after the fact, and that errors are always most clearly to be seen in the rearview mirror. There is no need here to rehash the complex émigré political aspects of the operation; all of the appropriate documents are available for study. The most I can contribute is an explanation of my role and a comment on the operation itself.
In concept, Operation ZAPATA was the outgrowth of what were perceived by some to have been the successful tactics involved in the ousting of Mossadegh in Iran and the overthrow of Arbenz and his government in Guatemala. To a lesser degree, the romantic view of the wartime resistance activity in much of Europe appears also to have contributed to the notion that covert action could be used as an all-purpose foreign policy tool. It seemed to me and to many others—notably Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, who engineered the operation in Iran—that while covert political action was useful, it should not necessarily be applied to foreign policy problems that might plausibly be handled through diplomatic channels or, in extreme situations, by military intervention. Kim’s observation, made after he had ousted Mossadegh, had been forgotten.*
The Iranian operation was a squeaker. The situation was much in our favor, but even a bit of bad luck might have undone the intended result. At least as much can be said for the operation in Guatemala, where the prevailing conditions were less favorable. It, too, was a near thing. In planning secret operations, it cannot be assumed that any move will go unchallenged, that no misstep will occur, and that luck will always be on our side. In operations of a high level—and the ousting of Castro certainly qualified—contingency planning must take the possibility of failure, bad luck, or otherwise fully into account.
As I saw it at the time, the Agency’s most appropriate role was to penetrate the Castro government, and to contain, and in time destroy, its capacity to export the Cuban revolution, and the ability to engage in paramilitary activity in our hemisphere. This was within our competence, and in fact we were subsequently to break Castro’s paramilitary sword at the hilt by seizing his weapons caches in Venezuela and elsewhere, and by quietly penetrating and exposing Cuba’s inimical political and intelligence activity.
As Bissell puts it in his book: “By late 1960 the agency had received a thorough education in the difficulty of establishing an effective guerrilla organization.”* Sadly, this was one of the lessons that many of us had already learned and not forgotten. Insofar as the learning might not have been universal, there were many in the Agency who between them could surely have foreseen the nearly insuperable problems the operation faced. There was no way that a paramilitary force a thousand strong could be secretly recruited, trained, and armed with an air force and the naval support necessary to ensure a successful landing. Aside from that, the island’s geography did not lend itself to a broad scale of guerrilla activity. Equally to the point, the likely response of the Cuban people had not been thoroughly explored.
Allen Dulles had more than enough professional experience and operational judgment to have refused rather than encouraged Washington policymakers to assume the obvious risks of such an ambitious effort. Bissell did not have the experience to know this, or to select the Agency staff best suited to work with him.
Tracy Barnes might by a stretch have been assumed to have the requisite background to serve as Bissell’s deputy for the operation. In fact, Tracy was, to some degree, a man of Allen Dulles’s imagination. If one were to create a colleague who would appeal to Dulles’s every enthusiasm, Barnes would have been a perfect construct. He was a wellborn product of the eastern establishment—graceful, well educated, fearless, patriotic, and engaging. Unfortunately, like those who no matter how great their effort seem doomed never to master a foreign language, Barnes proved unable to get the hang of secret operations. Even worse, thanks to Allen Dulles’s constant praise and pushing, Tracy apparently remained unaware of h
is problem.
Dulles met Tracy in Switzerland when he was assigned to the OSS station after his parachute mission in France. After the war, Dulles recruited Tracy for CIA and sponsored and furthered his career from that point to his assignment as Agency chief in Germany—where he left no identifiable footprint—and subsequently to a parallel post in the United Kingdom, a job for which he was equally unqualified. Had it not been for Dulles’s continuing sponsorship, no matter how hard Tracy worked at each of these assignments, he might have moved laterally and effectively into more suitable Agency work of a nonoperational nature.
As DCI, Dulles was in a position to insist that the ZAPATA operation have the best possible support from within the Agency. But in an effort to protect security, Allen kept the operation compartmented from other CIA elements which could have been useful to him. He made this decision despite the fact that more than a thousand Cubans and dozens of American contract personnel had knowledge of the plan.
Cuban intelligence was not world class, but it had the significant advantages of area knowledge, a level of domestic political support, the latent ethnic loyalty of some Cubans living abroad, and the excellent help offered by the KGB and GRU officers on assignment in Havana. There could be little doubt that Castro and his Soviet advisors were kept reasonably informed on the ZAPATA project as it developed. On our side, a single CIA officer was assigned the vast counterintelligence responsibility for the project. At no time was Jim Angleton’s CI staff asked for support in coping with the obvious security problems.
Because the limited invasion force could succeed only if the Cuban military failed to resist the invasion, and if the Cuban population rallied to the Brigadistas, an estimate of the level of support Castro enjoyed within Cuba, and the likelihood of the population rising to join forces against Castro, was of critical importance. The preparation of such estimates was a primary responsibility and daily activity of the Directorate for Intelligence (DI). These essential estimates were well within the DI’s ability to provide. High-level scuttlebutt being what it is, Robert Amory, the deputy director for intelligence, was certainly aware that Dulles and Bissell were heavily occupied with a high-security operation and that the target was Cuba. Given the fact that knowledge of the operation was also scattered throughout the Cuban émigré communities, there seemed no reason Dulles should not have consulted Amory and his staff under whatever security restrictions the DCI might have mandated. No such consultation occurred and no estimates were requested.
It was Dulles’s intention to staff the task force with competent personnel, and instructions were issued for the various divisions to supply competent officers at the various grade levels. CIA was a well-disciplined organization, but it takes little bureaucratic experience to suspect that while some well-qualified personnel would be made available by the various division chiefs, there was the chance that some officers less well qualified for such a high-risk operation might also be transferred. Within the Agency, personnel are annually ranked in order of perceived competence at their respective grade levels. Even if one had no hands-on knowledge of various officers, it would have been possible to use the personnel ranking charts as a guide. In this fashion a requirement might have been leveled on a division chief to make “two GS-15 officers within the high 20% bracket of the ranking profile immediately available for reassignment.” Draconian perhaps, but a reasonable substitute for personal knowledge of the employees. This was not done.
More important was the fact that the constant high-level nibbling at the Agency’s original assumptions and plans for logistic and military support had so altered the final plan that the original concept had all but disappeared.
Even though I was not directly involved in or consulted on any aspect of the activity, I had by osmosis gained a reasonable idea of what was going on. My impression that the project was entirely too ambitious to be considered a secret activity was partially offset by my assumption that if the Brigadistas appeared about to be overwhelmed, President Eisenhower, the old soldier who had initiated the operation, would think—in for a dime, in for a dollar—and provide sufficient U.S. military muscle to carry the day. After all, Eisenhower had reversed his policy in Guatemala when it appeared that Operation PBSUCCESS would fail, and at the critical moment had provided the military aircraft needed to ensure victory.
In clinging to this assumption, I failed to consider the important fact that the Kennedy administration was very new to the game. Coincidentally, I also neglected to consider the possibility that the new administration might not have been sufficiently alerted to the need for an agreed plan of action in the event that the Brigadistas might be overwhelmed before they could be reinforced by an American military force. No matter how well qualified the individual members of a new administration may be—and President Kennedy took office with a very strong staff—the first few weeks before any incoming administration settles down are not the most propitious time to risk radical foreign policy undertakings.
In the early morning of April 17, 1961, the ZAPATA Brigade force seized a beachhead along the Bay of Pigs—the original and more feasible landing area having been vetoed by President Kennedy. Two days and some hours later, the surviving 1189 members of the attack force were still contained within the beachhead. After President Kennedy refused to provide the desperately needed additional air support and their ammunition was almost exhausted, the men had no choice but to surrender. Although strenuous and gallant individual efforts were made to pick up the few Brigadistas escaping from the beachhead, an organized evacuation of the survivors was impossible.
In December 1962 the prisoners were ransomed at the cost of $53 million worth of medical and food supplies.
The specific tactical reasons for the military failure of the operation have been thoroughly and publicly explored, and there is no need to detail them here. Except for the bravery of the Brigade and the beyond-the-call-of-duty dedication of the Americans who were involved, Operation ZAPATA as it developed was in most of its aspects much as one writer describes it, “the perfect failure.”*
*Reflections of a Cold Warrior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 154.
†Ibid.
*See this page.
*Reflections of a Cold Warrior, p. 154.
*Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure (New York: Norton, 1987).
Chapter 17
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FALLOUT
It was twenty-four hours before the full impact of the surrender at the Bay of Pigs, and the collapse of the ZAPATA operation registered with President Kennedy and the new administration. When it did, the effect was no less than stunning. With the apt quotation, “Victory has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan,” President Kennedy rallied and gamely took the blame for the failed operation.
No matter that President Eisenhower had directed the Agency to prepare a plan for Castro’s overthrow, or that the Pentagon had failed accurately, and loudly enough, to assess the possibility of a failed invasion, or that President Kennedy had at the last moment denied the planned aerial support. ZAPATA was a CIA operation, a foreign policy disaster, and a humiliating experience for the country.
At the Department of State the whispered reaction was, “We told you so.” In the inner circle at the Pentagon, senior officers sniffed and reminded one another that it takes more than an Ivy League diploma to execute a successful military action. At the White House, President Kennedy asked rhetorically how he could have been so stupid, and speculated on how he might correct things at the Agency.
Allen Dulles had planned to remain as DCI for another two years, but this was clearly not to be. He offered his resignation to the President. Kennedy accepted it but asked Dulles to remain in place for some time to come. There would be no public reference to the resignation until the President appointed a replacement. The President’s decision was based on a genuine regard for Dulles and respect for his achievements, as well as a desire to avoid anything resembling an after-action scalding of scapegoats.
Kennedy then called Dick Bissell to the White House and informed him that he could not continue as deputy director for plans. He explained—perhaps a bit gratuitously—that in a parliamentary government, the prime minister would have had to resign, while the senior civil servant would have remained in place. In our government, Kennedy said, the President is elected for four years and is expected to complete his full term. He then asked Bissell to remain in place until another CIA assignment could be found for him. Bissell was later offered another deputy directorship—in the scientific field—but he declined and left the Agency in February 1962 to become president of the Institute for Defense Analyses.
President Kennedy was not accustomed to defeat. He had no intention of allowing the likes of Castro to hand him his hat, and did not hesitate to move ahead without waiting for the after-action studies. On May 5, the National Security Council, as always precisely reflecting the President’s position, noted that there would be no change in the administration’s position on Cuba, and that U.S. policy would continue to “aim at the downfall of Castro.” The council also stated that although “the U.S. would not undertake military intervention in Cuba now,” it would not “foreclose the possibility of military intervention in the future.”
Kennedy had climbed back into the ring swinging.
—
While Bissell remained in place, he was heavily occupied with the political fallout and operational problems left in the wake of the surrender at the Bay of Pigs. This left me to cope with much of the responsibility Bissell had previously allocated to himself. These were a variety of sensitive, often ambitious, covert action operations which required careful monitoring from my desk. This was not the time for any operational blunders. Even the most routine intelligence collection operations, recruitment attempts, and counterintelligence activity required the closest headquarters scrutiny. More than once I reflected on Dulles’s comment that I was to “soldier on” when Bissell became deputy director for plans. The weeks following the ZAPATA debacle more nearly resembled an Iron Man marathon than any moments of mere soldiering.
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 22
