A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  This raises an interesting point. The affinity that Colonel Lansdale effected with Magsaysay was not unique. In some areas, in developed countries and otherwise, a few of our people were also able to create equally rewarding relationships with senior political or military figures. It was my experience that no matter how successful these few operatives were in one assignment, when transferred to another country, they were never able to repeat their success. Obviously a fluent language, depth of area knowledge, and a natural affinity for the local cultures played roles. But even in situations where our officer had the necessary language and reasonable area knowledge, it proved impossible to duplicate the close ties which existed in the earlier assignment.

  Logic notwithstanding, at least two of the closest relationships flourished without the benefit of a truly common language. One senior foreign official was reduced to pleading with our man to forget about any more lessons in the local language and simply speak English. Despite months spent in intensive language study, our officer was another of the unfortunates who regardless of effort can never communicate in anything but their mother tongue. The depth to which this level of rapport can be developed often seems more the result of some indefinable social, political—conceivably even biological—chemistries than operational wizardry.

  General Lansdale’s appointment as chief of operations for MONGOOSE immediately raised jurisdictional problems. The notion that the various agencies were simply to detail men, money, and matériel to Lansdale was dead on arrival. Despite the attorney general’s expectations and his persistent exhortations, none of the cabinet secretaries or department chiefs were able to skip lightly over the existing rules and practices of their own organizations.

  The custom of appointing a “czar” to command an urgent, government-wide program can be counted on to comfort the less discerning members and supporters of a new administration and to play well at the call-in, talk-show level. In practice, I’ve noticed that the freshly ennobled czars are likely to find themselves entangled in the same administrative and fiscal procedures that confront the existing agencies. Worse, few newcomers have the experience to maneuver around the snarls which the old-timers have learned to avoid. As it happened in MONGOOSE, most department and agency chiefs were to learn that they had little choice but to make their contribution to the project according to prescribed procedures and, as a rule, at a tempo only marginally accelerated. The time lost in this process was one of the least problems the Kennedy administration faced in its struggle with Castro.

  On January 18, 1962, General Lansdale assigned thirty-two tasks to the Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, and Treasury, as well as to CIA, USIA, the FBI, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the last being a newcomer in the covert action field.

  The following morning, senior representatives of the various agencies and I were summoned to the attorney general’s office for an initial discussion of the Lansdale directive. None of us had had time to respond to the specified activities—an entirely conventional listing of almost every variety of espionage and covert action technique.

  As McCone’s man for everything Cuban, the load landed right in my lap.

  Despite the fanfare, the marching orders bore a discouraging resemblance to Dick Bissell’s and Tracy Barnes’s initial proposal to re-create their version of a European, World War II resistance movement in Cuba. The directive appeared no less of a pipe dream the second time around. The meeting did provide Bob Kennedy the opportunity to underline the President’s position. With all of the customary Kennedy “vigor,” and in the most forceful language, Bob informed us that Castro’s removal from office and a change in government in Cuba were then the prime foreign policy objectives of the Kennedy administration.

  The repeated blunt references to “eliminating” Castro brought us once again to the moral aberration of political assassination in peacetime. The details are to be found in the Senate Report No. 94-465, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, dated November 20, 1975. This is not an easy document to fathom, but the basic data can be winnowed out. None of these efforts, which were first considered under the Eisenhower administration, offered anything but the slightest promise and, predictably, none went more than a step beyond the initial proposals.

  The first approach of any consequence to eliminating Castro occurred in 1960, when the chief of the CIA Security Staff, who served in a separate CIA directorate, was authorized to contact Mafia members with the proposition that they arrange Castro’s removal. The syndicate’s presumed motive for engaging in this operation was to regain their properties in Cuba and, perhaps not incidentally, to gain some goodwill from the federal authorities who otherwise were intent on breaking up the Mafia and convicting its leadership. Although many promises were made, and planning went on for some time, the effort came to naught. As might have been predicted, none of the criminals ever got around to taking any action.

  There is little to be said for intelligence agencies attempting to work clandestinely with organized crime—that is, all manner of racketeering and any aspect of the narcotics trade. Nor is there any reason to attempt to involve lower-level individual criminals in secret activity. Without exception in my experience, the criminals, organized or otherwise, who offer their services—or when solicited, agree to cooperate—have their own overriding agendas and motives. Aside from a romantic, if transient, glow of patriotism, the underworld invariably expects to be rewarded with an unwritten hunting license—in effect, an informal federal tolerance for some level of ongoing criminal activity. If this doesn’t suffice, a bundle of $100 notes might be expected to seal the bargain.

  The legends that OSS went about learning its business by employing second-story men to teach otherwise innocent college graduates the trade are nonsense. Professional criminals tend to spend their salad days in jail and their sunset years mousing about at the bottom of the employment market. There is nothing any of them might be able to accomplish in a foreign environment, and no “street smarts” they can pass along—except perhaps to suggest that low-level crime doesn’t pay. When exposed to daylight, the so-called professional hit man is most often a thug who can only practice his trade at point blank, has never spent any time on a firing range, or even learned how to clean his weapons.

  The approach to the Mafia began before I became DDP, and I was unaware of it until I replaced Bissell. After checking into it, I told Bill Harvey—who agreed entirely—to close it down.

  Under relentless pressure from Bob Kennedy, we went to work. Before MONGOOSE had run its course, some 600 CIA staff employees and between 4000 and 5000 contract personnel were involved. Our activity ranged from establishing a refugee interrogation center—based on the model of the highly productive center we had earlier established in Germany—to a variety of sabotage and collection operations. Agents were established in Cuba; operations against Cuban installations abroad and efforts to recruit or defect Cuban officials were undertaken. Extensive propaganda operations were also initiated, but our attempts to create a unified émigré political movement were only marginally successful. The support structure for a nominally clandestine activity of this size was as complex as it was huge. At one point, the secret CIA navy was the third largest in the area. Yachts, fishing craft, speedboats, and supply vessels were modified for our purposes.

  The steady flow of intelligence data and National Estimates showing that Castro’s military and the internal security and foreign intelligence services were continuing to gain strength did not lessen the Kennedys’ determination to even the score with Castro. However ambitious, our sabotage efforts never amounted to more than pinpricks. The notion that an underground resistance organization might be created on the island remained a remote, romantic myth.

  Within a few weeks of Bob Kennedy’s hammering us for results, I realized that he had but a slight idea of what was involved in organizing a secret intelligence operation. He appeared to equate the director of Central Intelligence position with that of
the chief of the General Staff. If the President were to telephone the Pentagon and explain that he had urgent need for a hundred military officers—three generals, and an assortment of colonels and captains—chances are that a roster of professionally well qualified officers, unquestionably loyal to this country and prepared for immediate assignment anywhere in the world, would reach the White House by the close of business. I tried several times to convince the attorney general that the DCI would have rather more of a problem attempting to assemble a half dozen operationally and linguistically qualified, highly mobile secret agents.

  Spies do not have any shelf life; they cannot be warehoused. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a spy is recruited for a specific assignment, usually to steal secret data, or to report on activity in which he is involved, or may observe. Other agents may be used to take some clandestine action. As a rule, a spy who has lost the insights for which he was hired is soon to become an ex-spy. He may be retained briefly while he tries to uncover access to something else of importance, but there is no way in which he can be held in readiness for a different assignment. One of the benchmarks of a well-run station is that it does not cling to spent spies. For deserving ex-agents—and as appropriate—a pension, severance pay, a Christmas gift, and a sterile, distant letter drop in the unlikely event something does come up are all to the good. Loyal and effective collaborators deserve to be left with a smile. Time spent attempting to retool a spy is better used in finding new sources.

  A second category of agents is engaged in operational support. These activists may be used for surveillance—on the street, manning a photographic facility, planting and maintaining audio devices. Others might troll for new sources, or serve as a letter drop, a front for a safe meeting place—there are scores of clandestine support tasks that these agents perform. The most important strength of support agents is their knowledge of exactly how things work in their neighborhood, and their ability to slip quietly about their business without attracting so much as a glance. This ingrained area knowledge cannot easily be shifted to another city, and is quite impossible to export across a border. The little old ladies who may be convinced that they are serving as a drop for love letters or neighborhood busybodies who may think they are helping a private detective keep an eye on a straying husband obviously cannot be transplanted.

  The point I repeatedly tried to make with Bob was that few shortcuts can be taken in recruiting agents. If even a reasonable level of security is to be maintained, recruitment can be a long process. The prospective agent has to be identified, and his apparent access to the information we are after must be determined before security checking can begin. In the sabotage and paramilitary operations which the President was most urgently pressing, agent selection was less complex. A politically motivated and physically fit young man able to undertake a paramilitary assignment did not need to be examined as carefully as someone involved in the penetration of a sensitive office. Even in MONGOOSE we had to collect enough personal data to permit records searches and background checks to be made before the candidate could be made aware of our interest. With luck and extra effort, these procedures might be pushed through in a ballpark average of about a month.

  If this initial checking is satisfactory, a contact man has to be chosen and provided with cover. Cover was a persistent problem. These activists could not be grouped under a common cover—if one were blown, all would be compromised. Dozens of separate covers had to be devised and monitored. If the candidate accepted our initial proposal, he would then prepare a lengthy personal history statement that would be balanced against the data we had already assembled. The Cuban émigré community in Florida is closely knit, and at times seemed more nearly to be an extended family with long-standing interest in knowing how everyone is getting along.

  If everything, or almost everything, checked out, only then could we begin recruitment discussions.

  The six hundred Agency personnel we rallied in the course of Operation MONGOOSE were not spies as such, but operations officers and contract employees with varying stakes in career employment. Agency people can be moved on relatively short notice. This often creates serious problems for families with children in school, but it is a fact of life in our trade. The remaining people were agents or paramilitary activists of one sort or another—and had nothing but a passing, and usually parttime, relationship with the Agency. They could not be moved about or relocated without a commitment to future employment.

  Bob Kennedy and I must have gone through this dialogue a dozen times. His consistent response was, “Yes, Dick, I do understand.” A short pause would follow, and then, “But let’s get the hell on with it. The President wants some action, right now.”

  And back to my office I would hustle.

  For all the White House pressure, and the combined efforts of everyone involved, Operation MONGOOSE never quite lived up to the dictionary definition, “an agile mammal.”

  —

  However shortsighted it now seems, there can be no denying that from the late 1940s until the advent of Castro, the Agency had neglected Latin and Central America and the Caribbean area. The fact that in World War II the area had been an FBI responsibility was only a small part of the problem. The root causes were the lingering momentum of the war in Europe and Asia, and the Cold War consensus that the basic national security threat was the USSR, China, Southeast Asia, and international communism. The Agency’s relatively belated attention to the Western Hemisphere also reflected Washington’s long-standing on-again, off-again concern for our southern neighbors. Only when the Soviet Union began to exploit the situation did things change. At the time Castro seized Cuba, the Agency was adequately, if thinly, represented throughout the area. As Castro’s impact became apparent, it was clear that immediate buildup was necessary. Even before Operation ZAPATA began to take shape, we also realized that we had too slight a reserve of deep area knowledge. After the Bay of Pigs, reinforcements came rapidly throughout the hemisphere.

  —

  After almost a year of intense effort, Bob Kennedy, as always speaking for his brother, scheduled the first annual review of the MONGOOSE operations. The timing could scarcely have been less fortunate.

  CIA had within the previous twenty-four hours found the undeniable facts against which we could test all of our previous reports and estimates. A flight of a CIA U-2 high-altitude photoreconnaissance aircraft over Cuba had shown beyond doubt that Khrushchev had established, and was probably in the process of arming, a number of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba.

  This opinion was based on the first interpretation of the U-2 films at about 7 p.m. on October 15, 1962. McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, was alerted, and informed that it would be impossible to prepare a detailed briefing—with enlarged photographs, maps, and backup data—for President Kennedy before breakfast time. Kennedy was in New York, engaged in whirlwind political campaigning, and was not expected to be back at the White House until after midnight. Bundy decided to wait until morning to brief the President.

  Kennedy was bedside, reading the New York Times, when McGeorge gave him the news.

  Until President Kennedy and his closest advisors could be fully briefed and the congressional leaders informed, the knowledge was rigidly confined to the handful of persons with an absolute need to know. Of those who would attend the MONGOOSE meeting, only Bob Kennedy, General Lansdale, and I met that definition. We decided that the abrupt cancellation of the annual review would tip too many people to the looming crisis.

  The other participants, all painfully aware of how far short of the President’s directives the MONGOOSE operation had fallen, were probably further depressed by what seemed to me to be the transparently nervous preoccupation of Bob Kennedy and General Lansdale. I suspect that my own appearance was also less than reassuring. Aside from my having to wrestle with the political and operational implications of the situation in Cuba, my wife, Julia, was being readied for a bout of serious and extremely del
icate surgery in a New York hospital. There was one final irony: John McCone, the only senior member of the Kennedy administration who was convinced that Khrushchev had been lying in his teeth, was in California attending the funeral of his stepson, killed in a motor racing accident. An Agency plane was dispatched to bring McCone back to Washington. General Marshall Carter, his deputy, represented him.

  Bob Kennedy opened the MONGOOSE annual review by expressing the President’s general dissatisfaction with the operation. He pointed out that although the project had been under way for a year, the results were very discouraging. There had been no successful acts of sabotage, and one such effort had failed twice. The President had acknowledged that there had been “a noticeable improvement … in the collection of intelligence but that other action had failed to influence significantly the course of events in Cuba.” The attorney general went on to point out that despite the fact that Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, General Taylor, McGeorge Bundy, and he personally had been charged by President Kennedy with finding a solution, only small accomplishments had been made.

  Bob Kennedy then announced that henceforth he would meet at nine-thirty every morning with senior representatives of each agency involved in MONGOOSE. Given the travel time involved in getting about in Washington at that hour, and the impossibility of measuring progress on such a broad range of operations on a twenty-four-hour basis, there seemed to be more than a whiff of a disciplinary flavor in this decision.

  It was almost three hours before the meeting disbanded and I could get back to the Agency for a reprise of the program with my own staff.

  Despite my suspicion that rumors of the red-hot Cuban situation might have leaked, no indiscreet questions were raised, and no reference was made to what I knew would within hours become a gut-wrenching doomsday confrontation.