“Which is?”
“One of Castro’s key supports, in my opinion, is the identification he so cleverly cultivates between Jesus Christ and himself. To his advantage is the spelling. Castro and Cristo. You may notice that the consonants are the same, C, S, T, R. Only the A and the I differ, and they are vowels. It is an advertising principle,” said Lansdale, “that consonants repeated in two words produce subliminal link-up.”
Kittredge, I took a chance and tested the waters. “In addition,” I broke in, “there is Hernando Cortés and Castro. C, S, T, R appear again.”
“Yes,” said Lansdale, “a good point. Castro/Cristo can also be seen as Castro/Cortés, a great general.”
“To the degree that this concept is full of merit, you have taken on more difficulties,” said Hugh. “How will motivational research obviate these mystical links?”
“We will find our route,” said Lansdale. “It’s never the way it looks. For example, the depilatory powder that was discussed for possible use on Castro’s beard?”
“Of course,” said Hugh.
“I gather that discarded attempt is now a subject of some hilarity in the top echelons of the Agency.”
“There’s been a grimace or two.”
“Too bad I wasn’t in on it. I might have convinced a few. It sounds foolish, but I would have looked at the depilatory as a viable option.”
“If I may say so,” I said, “I don’t understand why. Even if the attempt worked, and Castro’s weak chin was revealed, wouldn’t he have been able to conceal the loss with a false beard and wait until his hair grew back?”
“I can’t agree,” said Lansdale. “If a beautiful woman loses her locks and has to wear a wig, golly, you can count on it—word will get out. Word always gets out. Secret knowledge carried in whispers from person to person has more power to convince than active denunciations. Besides, a false beard can always come loose by accident. Castro would certainly have been ill at ease in anticipation of such an event.”
“Do you know, it’s been fascinating to dine with you, General,” said Hugh. “I anticipate with interest your task ahead with Bill Harvey. It will go well, doubtless.”
“I hope so,” said Lansdale.
“If,” said Hugh, “he gets too Bolshy, call on me. I won’t promise the moon, but I am able, occasionally, to muscle Wild Bill over a millimeter or two.”
We all laughed somewhat cautiously, I thought. I didn’t know whether to be in awe of General Lansdale or to feel sorry for him.
He surprised me, however, by his next remark, which was in my direction. “As liaison,” he said, “you will have to be a translator and a diplomat. Explain to me: What is your friend Hugh Montague trying to tell me?”
I was on the spot, Kittredge. I knew Hugh would not take to being translated. Nonetheless, the job gets first call. “At the risk,” I said, “of speaking on my own, I would say that Bill Harvey is only ready to deal with those Cubans he can control completely.”
Hugh gave a small nod of approval as if the godson’s intelligence might be presenting a few hopeful signs.
Lansdale said, “We will see about that.”
It was the moment when I arrived at my first real insight concerning the General. He was not ready to go into detail about what he was going to do in Cuba because he suspected that his principles were never going to be applied here. I think the only reason he took this job is that it is the largest ever offered him. He has, by what I have picked up in the last day or so, been kicking around the edges of big-time military for fifteen years now. He may be a celebrated maverick, but he now wants open respect from his peers and superiors. So he is going to be engaged in what he sneers at most—running an operation from a desk. We will see. I am curious.
To end the evening, Lansdale told a pretty good tale. It seems that at their first meeting, President Kennedy said, “From what they tell me, General, you are America’s answer to James Bond.”
Lansdale shook his head. “I assure you, I got off that mark as quickly as I could. The last thing in the world to have to live up to. James Bond! I suggested to the President that a closer candidate could be found in the very fellow the CIA has put in charge of Mongoose for field operations, William King Harvey. ‘You,’ replied the President, ‘have me curious now. Could you bring this fellow, Harvey, around to the White House? I would like to meet him.’
“Well,” said Lansdale, “two days later, I transported Bill Harvey from his basement at Langley clear over to the White House. While we were sitting in the anteroom to the Oval Office waiting to be called in to the President, I had an intuition. Thank my stars! I turned to Harvey and said, ‘You are not carrying a handgun by any chance?’ to which he replied, ‘Yes. I’m armed,’ and proceeded to withdraw a particularly hefty piece of Magnum-cum-what-all from a shoulder holster. By Jesus Christ and Castro, I almost dived through the floor. How would the Secret Service react to a strange man waving his howitzer in the White House? ‘Please,’ I said to Harvey, ‘keep your thing hidden.’
“Most quietly, I assure you, I then took a stroll over to the Secret Service desk and informed the young man sitting there that my companion wondered if he could check his firearm while we were closeted with the President. Then, as if that hadn’t been a near-enough deal, just as we were about to enter the Oval Office, I suppose Harvey decided that he had better divulge the existence of what he called his ‘hole card.’ There it was, another gun in another holster belted to the small of his back. He dug under his suit coat, whipped out a .38 Special, and proferred it to a couple of most discombobulated Secret Service agents. From there, we actually reached the Oval Office. I had time to whisper, ‘Why, for God’s sake, all the ordnance?’ His reply: ‘If you knew as many secrets as I do, you too would carry a gun.’
“Well, once the meeting began, it certainly proved an odd one. Right off, the President started kidding Bill about the sexual exploits of 007, and Harvey muttered something to the effect of being a little over-weight these days. ‘As you can see,’ he said to the President, ‘I don’t fit the description anymore. I guess I was more like 007 in my salad days. Different-girl-every-night sort of thing.’
“‘Well,’ said the President, ‘General Lansdale did single you out.’
“‘Yessir,’ said Harvey. After our audience was concluded, Bill said to me on the way out, ‘I acted like an asshole, but, my God, dammit, it was the President.’”
In a couple of days, Kittredge, I’m due to report. I’ll close my desk, take the elevator down, and locate Bill Harvey in his bunker. Presumably, he will provide another desk.
Incidentally, Hugh told me on the way home from dinner that Harvey is considerably depressed these days. The Agency found out recently that the Berlin tunnel was blown even before it was completed. All the while that Harvey thought he had been on top of it, there was a British officer working for the Russians. I don’t want to think of what’s now going on in the Hosiery Mill. “The damage may be an order of magnitude worse than the Bay of Pigs,” said Hugh. “In fact, it’s so bad, I expect we will not only sweep it under the carpet, but burn the rug.”
Well, I don’t know that this letter equips you to run the Agency and the nation, but it is fun writing again. There’s nothing so good for my soul as a long letter to you.
Devotedly,
Harry
7
THROUGH THE FALL OF 1961 AND THE WINTER OF 1962, CORRESPONDENCE with Kittredge continued. I would write at least twice a week, and although she did not reply as often, she frequently had more to say. For that matter, her information was probably more reliable: Mongoose was a much compartmented operation. While I was prepared to describe its properties, I could never be wholly certain of distinguishing fact from hearsay. Whispers circulated ceaselessly in JM/WAVE, and that was inevitable. Before we were done, more Agency personnel had come down to Miami than were ever assigned to Pigs. Indeed, our CIA portion of Mongoose, JM/WAVE, became the largest CIA station in the world.
Given our size, therefore, and the speed with which we had been put together, rumors abounded, security was weak. That was hardly surprising. The highest standards of secrecy in CIA were usually exercised by Agency scholars exploring land grants in Manchuria in the seventeenth century. They could be depended upon not to breathe a word of their discoveries. We, however, in Harvey’s basement at Langley, or spread out once more over half of southern Florida with JM/WAVE projects, gossiped unconscionably. How was Lansdale hatching his eggs for Mongoose? What was coming down from General Maxwell Taylor, or Bobby Kennedy? What was the real stance of the White House? Florida brought one close to those questions, whereas at Langley the recognition could not be avoided that one was merely a part of government instead of an agent of History.
I was quartered in Washington; I was stationed in Miami: It is hard to say where I lived. I soon suspected that my job had been manufactured by Lansdale out of no greater need than to keep on pleasant terms with my father. The duties (or lack of them) revealed the superficial aspects of the new position. Lansdale did not need me very often. He had his own cadre, and trusted them.
Before long, I was down in the basement with Harvey. We took the first steps toward crossing an abyss of distrust. All the same, we did our best to get along. Maybe I reminded him of heroic days in Berlin. Indeed, our relations were not all that dissimilar even now. He ruminated aloud, he clammed up, he confided in me, he withdrew. After a while, I began to feel like the young and unfaithful spouse of an older man with settled habits. He could never forgive me for my transgressions, but he did enjoy my company. I even rode with him again in the backseat of his bulletproof Cadillac while he slugged his martinis and I took notes en route to the airport. Before long, he had me jumping down to Miami with him. Since his corpulence could no longer be wedged into an Economy seat, he flew First Class, one of the few Agency officers allowed such a perk, and thereby allowed me the rare luxury of my own First Class seat whenever he needed me along.
Often, I stayed over in southern Florida to oversee a subproject that he had initiated. Each week I was further away from liaison with Lansdale, and the General didn’t seem to care. When I would report in, he would usually meet me in the anteroom to his office on his way to a meeting with officials from State, Defense, or Special Group, Augmented, and say in passing, “Are you keeping Harvey happy?”
“Doing my best.”
“Keep it up. That’s useful work,” and he would be gone.
Harvey was not particularly suspicious of my relation to Lansdale. It was Montague’s shadow that prevailed. Harvey’s assumption was that I had been assigned to him in order to report back to Harlot. In substance, that was true. If Harlot had asked me for information, I would have supplied it, I suppose. I did not really know. I wanted to be my own man. I even confess to feeling injured, at least to some small degree, that Harvey did not trust me more; I was putting in twelve-hour days for him, and work provides its own sense of integrity. The irony is that in my letters to Kittredge I was, objectively speaking, reporting every last matter of interest on Harvey, but then, I did not believe she would pass it on to Harlot. Indeed, how could she account to her husband for such pieces of information?
All the while, I wondered at the force of Montague’s grip on Wild Bill and thought often of my last couple of days in Berlin, and the four-page transcript of which Harlot had shown me but the first two pages. Harvey was not certain how much I knew, but he would make his references, and they were not oblique. “I don’t care what kind of grip you think that prick has on me, he can go fuck himself.” About once a week, Harvey would drop such tantrums in the manner of a black Florida cloud delivering itself of a squall, after which, back to work we would go.
There was enough to do. Lansdale had landed in his job running at full speed. Before a month was out, he had assigned thirty-two planning tasks to the Agency, the Pentagon, State, and whoever else was cooperating on Mongoose. Among the tasks was collection of intelligence; defection of Cuban officials; propaganda operations; sabotage operations; and an invasion scenario for U.S. forces whenever the new Cuban movement would be ready to overthrow the government. Lansdale sent out one memo calling for “a revolution that would break down the police controls of the state. Reliance is to be placed on: (a) professional anti-Castro emigrés, (b) labor leaders, (c) church groups, (d) gangster elements, if necessary, for certain tasks.”
The memo concluded with a peroration. “It is our job to put the American genius to work quickly and effectively. The conclusive overthrow of Fidel Castro is possible. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.”
“Who is he kidding?” asked Harvey. “Everybody knows that is Lansdale taking dictation from Bobby Kennedy. Nothing spared! Yes. They give us the language, and we can do the dirty work. Thirty-two tasks!” said Harvey, getting ready for his own peroration. “Somebody ought to tell Lansdale that the labor leaders in Cuba are gangsters, the gangsters buy out the churches, and the priests spend their money on fortune-tellers. You don’t look for a, b, c, and d categories. You look for people who can do the job. I don’t care if you bring me a one-eyed Martian with a longshoreman’s hook on his cock and the guy drinks cat piss at midnight, I’ll take him if he’s a stand-up Joe who likes to blow bridges and can obey my orders. This Lansdale, with Bobby Kennedy in back of him, is talking about revolution? He better get it straight. Any Cuban I do not control will have nothing to do with my operation. Leave it to Lansdale, and we’ll have a revolution which will bring in a new kind of Communist who wears his insignia on the right tit instead of the left. Screw that noise. I say, fuck Cuba up good. Stuff the worst shit you can find into the economic gears. Wound the cocksuckers. Demoralize them. The only thing I agree on with Lansdale is that we will destabilize Cuba. But, I tell you, that candy General is a goddamn hypocrite. Yesterday, there were Thirty-two Tasks. Today, he gives us a new one. Task Thirty-three: Incapacitate the sugar workers during the harvest. The son of a bitch knows just enough to cover his ass. ‘It will require,’ he says, ‘policy determination before final approval.’ Well, even I, who am no internationalist, thank you, can see what is wrong internationally. Listen to his take: ‘The chemicals employed are to be guaranteed by priority studies to do no more than sicken Cuban sugar workers temporarily’—italics are mine, Hubbard—‘and keep said sugar workers away from the fields without permanent ill effects. Nonlethal incapacitating chemicals.’ Brother, I have heard everything now—can you imagine what we could look like to the rest of the world? Depend on it—Special Group, Augmented, is going to table Task Thirty-three.”
Special Group, Augmented, did. A week later, Harvey read the refined Thirty-two Tasks with a bilious eye. One phrase stated, “Gangster elements might provide the best potential for attacks against Cuban Intelligence officials.” Harvey was on the boil. “You are not supposed to put things like this on paper,” he said. “Gangster elements! Hubbard, I am aware of the principle that in combat, men die, but this happens to be Murder, Incorporated. Who, presumably, will handle it? Why, our friend Bill Harvey with his Task Force W will do the wet jobs. Bill Harvey can catch it if something goes wrong. I’ll say this for Lansdale. He is a complex individual. He doesn’t want a poor innocent Cuban killed unless we can show a real purpose behind it. Then he takes a sip of water and asks me to target a couple of hundred Soviet-bloc technicians. Add them to the hit list. I am somewhat underwhelmed by his plans, the cocksucker.”
Harvey dictated a memo to SGA: The emphasis for Mongoose, in his opinion, ought to be placed on acquiring more intelligence. I had learned by now that such memos had nothing to do with Harvey’s real intentions, indeed, they could have served as model form letters in our unwritten Book of Agency Etiquette. By now, I could put the book together myself. If you had to perform a task that strayed beyond the limits of our charter, it was crucial to establish a trail of paper that would confuse anyone trying to follow what you had done. The rule of thumb was to commit to writing the opposite of w
hat you were intending. If Harvey was sending out saboteurs to wreck factories, he called, on paper, for the intensification of our intelligence efforts.
Lansdale had been a solitary operator for too long, Harvey decided, so he now had a tendency to put everything in writing. Harvey said: “I knew a whore once up in Alaska. One big fat old Eskimo mama with a cunt as wide and comfortable as the rear seat of a Cadillac. That’s Lansdale’s mouth—just as big.”
The real problem, I soon concluded, was that Lansdale might have compromised some of his ideas, but he had not given them up. Lansdale wanted real underground organizations; he was searching for autonomous Cubans looking to obtain their own real intelligence. Which, presumably, they would share with us. He did not seem able to recognize that Harvey, when it came down to it, preferred to have no underground rather than one over which you could only exercise sporadic control. Therefore, Harvey was building up cadres with trustworthy exiles that he could use in paramilitary operations. How else could JM/WAVE maintain any kind of security in the open atmosphere of Miami? “The emphasis,” said Harvey, “is going to be on the case officer, not the agent. The case officer here is going to be equal in importance to a priest. Our exiles have got to be ready to tell him everything. Read me? Hubbard, you had that job for a couple of years. How feasible would that relationship be for you?”
“Fifty percent probability,” I replied.
“Good.” He grunted. “I like your answer. You must have been one soft case officer.”
“Not as soft as you think,” I said back, and he laughed. “Shit, you merely got your toes wet in Uruguay. You were tooling around with the tulips.”
Lansdale finally took me into his office one day and asked, “Do you have any input with Bill Harvey?”
“I can get a personal message to him. In fact, I think he would prefer to hear from you that way.”
“Not in writing?”
“Not in writing, sir.”
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