The Company

by Robert Littell

  “I can see I’ve come to the right place with my little problem,” Torriti said.

  “You have,” Rosselli said. “Mooney here does not fuck around.”

  “I do not fuckin’ fuck around,” Giancana agreed.

  3

  PALM BEACH, TUESDAY, JANUARY 10, 1961

  ASWARM OF SECRET SERVICE AGENTS, WEARING DARK GLASSES AND distinctive pins in their lapels, descended on the visitors as they walked up the gravel driveway.

  “Would you gentlemen kindly identify yourselves,” the section leader said.

  Allen Dulles, hobbling along because of an attack of gout, seemed insulted not to have been recognized. “I’m the Director of Central Intelligence,” he said huffily. “These gentlemen and I have an appointment with the President-elect.”

  “We’d appreciate it if you produce IDs,” the section leader insisted.

  Dulles, Dick Bissell, Leo Kritzky, and the Sorcerer all dragged laminated identity cards from their wallets. The section leader studied each photograph and then looked up to compare it to the face in front of him. “Anyone here carrying?” he wanted to know.

  DCI Dulles looked bewildered. Dick Bissell said, “They’re asking if we’re armed, Allen.”

  “Holy cow, I haven’t had a weapon on me since the war.”

  Both Bissell and Leo Kritzky shook their heads. Torriti, a bit shame-faced, plucked the pearl-handled revolver from under his armpit and handed it, grip first, to one of the agents, who deposited it in a brown paper bag. Bissell coughed discreetly to attract the Sorcerer’s attention. “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot,” Torriti said. He pulled the snub-nosed Detective Special from its makeshift ankle holster and gave it to the astonished agent.

  At the end of the driveway, a young aide holding a clipboard checked off their names and then led them through Joseph Kennedy’s rambling house, across a very manicured garden toward the summer pavilion in the back of the compound. From behind a high hedge came the peal of female laughter and the sound of people splashing in a pool. Passing a gap in the hedge, Leo caught a glimpse of a very slim and suntanned young woman, wearing only the bottom half of a bikini, sunning herself on the diving board. Up ahead he could see Jack Kennedy sitting in a wicker rocking chair, his shirt sleeve rolled up, looking off to one side as a woman administered an injection.

  Bissell, trailing behind with Leo, murmured, “Penicillin shots for chronic nongonorrheal urethritis.”

  “That’s a venereal disease,” Leo whispered. “How do you know that?”

  “Keep my ear to the ground. Want to wager the first words out of his mouth have to do with the New York Times?”

  “It’s a sucker’s bet.”

  The doctor who had given Kennedy the injection said, “See you next Tuesday in Washington, then” as she turned to leave.

  Kennedy rose from the chair to greet Dulles. “I take it you saw the article in the Times,” he said, clearly peeved. He pulled a copy off a stack of newspapers on a low wicker table. “Front page, no less. ‘US Helps Train Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Base.’ My God, Allen, they’ve even printed a map of the camp! Castro doesn’t need spies in America. He’s got the New York Times!” He shook hands with the CIA men. “Dick, good to see you again. Kritzky, I remember you briefed me last summer.”

  Bissell introduced the Sorcerer. “This is Harvey Torriti, a key member of our team.”

  Kennedy held on to Torriti’s hand. “I’ve heard about you—you’re supposed to be our James Bond.”

  The Sorcerer laughed under his breath. “As you can see, Mr. Kennedy, I am not equipped for some of Bond’s more daring sexual escapades.”

  Kennedy waved the CIA people to seats. His brother Bobby and his father, Joe Kennedy, wandered over from the pool. Jack bunched his hand into a fist and his father wrapped his fingers around it. The two smiled into each other’s eyes. Joe Kennedy took the last folding chair. Bobby sat on the ground with his back against one of the pavilion stanchions. Jack settled into the wicker rocker. “Why don’t you begin, Allen,” he said.

  “Mr. President-elect,” Dulles said, opening the briefing, “ten days from today you will be taking the oath of office as President of the United States, at which point, as Harry Truman liked to say, the buck will stop at your desk. It’s obviously vital to bring you up to snuff on the details of the operation that General Eisenhower”—Dulles’s use of the word General, as opposed to President, wasn’t lost on anyone—“authorized.”

  “It’s my understanding, Director, that President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to work up plans and an infrastructure for an operation, as opposed to actually authorizing the operation itself,” commented Kennedy.

  Dulles cleared his throat. “I thought that that was what I conveyed, Jack.”

  Kennedy, rocking gently in his chair, said softly, “I wanted to be sure we’re on the same wavelength, Allen.” He motioned for Dulles to go on.

  Dulles, rattled, looked at the notes he had jotted on the back of an envelope. “Make no mistake about it, Mr. President-elect, Moscow has installed a Communist puppet regime ninety miles off the coast of Florida. Castro has rigged elections, muzzled the press and nationalized sugar plantations and industry, most of which, I might add, belonged to Americans. He has executed more than five hundred political opponents and jailed thousands of others, he’s surrounded himself with Marxist advisors and turned to the Soviet Union for weapons. He currently has fifty Cuban pilots training to fly Soviet MiGs in Czechoslovakia. These planes are expected to become operational by next summer. And if all this isn’t reason enough to go after him, the CIA has developed intelligence proving that Castro is dispatching teams to stir up revolutions in the Dominican Republic, in Panama, in Haiti and in Nicaragua. Working hand in glove with the Kremlin, Castro’s ultimate aim is to surround the United States with a string of Communist satellites and isolate us in our own hemisphere.”

  Bobby Kennedy rubbed at an eye. “No one doubts that Castro’s a pain in the butt, Mr. Dulles,” he said, dragging out the vowels in a lethargic New England drawl. “Question is: What is the Kennedy administration”—Bobby managed to linger over the words Kennedy administration—“going to decide to do about it?”

  Dulles said, “The anti-Castro operation, code named JMARC, is directed by Dick Bissell here. Dick, why don’t you run with the ball.”

  Bissell, in his element, casually uncrossed his legs and, speaking without notes, his toe drumming impatiently on the floor, began walking the three Kennedys through what he called “the new paramilitary concept of the Trinidad plan.” “We are thinking along the lines of putting somewhere between six and seven hundred fifty men from the brigade ashore at Trinidad, a shore city in southern Cuba that has a reputation as a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment. The dawn landing will be preceded by a series of air strikes starting on D-day minus two. The strikes will be flown by Cuban pilots now being trained to fly surplus B-26s out of a secret airfield in Guatemala.”

  Bobby mumbled, “The airstrip’s less secret today than it was yesterday.”

  Bissell wasn’t accustomed to being interrupted. He turned toward Bobby, who at thirty-five had honed the fine art of playing bad cop to Jack’s good cop, and asked coolly, “Did you say something, Mr. Kennedy?”

  Jack Kennedy said quickly, “Please go on, Dick.”

  Bissell kept his gaze on Bobby for a moment, then turned back to Jack. “As you are surely aware, Mr. President-elect, we don’t expect the brigade, even with tactical air support, to defeat Castro’s two-hundred-thousand-man army in combat. But we do expect the landing, which will coincide with the establishment of a provisional government on Cuban soil, to spark a general uprising against the Castro regime. It’s our estimate that the brigade will double in size in four days, at which point it will break out of the beachhead. We have intelligence estimates that seventy-five to eighty percent of Cuban army personnel disagree with Castro’s political system. A great percentage of the officers are believed to be ready to rebel again
st the government and take their troops with them. The peasant populations of several provinces, especially in western Cuba, are likely to rise up as soon as the first shots are fired. Castro’s political prisoners on the Isle of Pines can be counted on to join the brigade.”

  “How are you going to arm all these peasants and political prisoners if they do rise up?” Jack Kennedy asked.

  Leo Kritzky, who was monitoring the brigade’s logistical profile for Bissell, said, “The ships carrying the Cuban exiles to the landing site will be crammed with arms packages—there’ll be enough recoilless rifles, mortars, ammunition, grenades, walkie-talkies to supply fifteen hundred men.”

  “How long can the brigade survive if it doesn’t double in size and break-out?” the President-elect wanted to know.

  “We figure that, with the air umbrella overhead, it could hold out on its own for four days,” Bissell said.

  Jack Kennedy abruptly stopped rocking. “Then what happens?”

  “You’re talking worst-case scenario,” Dulles put in.

  “Expect the worst, that way you’re tickled pink when it doesn’t happen,” Joe Kennedy snapped.

  “In the worst case, Mr. President-elect,” Bissell said, “the brigade will take to the hills—in this case the Escambray Mountains—and go guerrilla. We’ll be able to keep them supplied by air. They’ll join forces with existing bands of guerrillas. If nothing else, Castro will have difficulty exporting his revolution to Latin America if he’s putting down a counterrevolution in Cuba.”

  Jack Kennedy resumed his rhythmic rocking. The CIA men exchanged looks; it was hard to judge how the briefing was going. From beyond the high hedge came the shriek of someone being thrown into the pool, and then the splash. “Teddy’s pushing the girls in again,” Jack Kennedy said with a chuckle.

  “Naturally we don’t expect you to react until you’ve had an opportunity to mull JMARC over,” Dulles said.

  Kennedy kept the rocker in motion. He nodded to himself. He looked down at Bobby, who raised his eyebrows. “Too noisy,” the President-elect finally said.

  Dulles leaned forward. “How’s that, Jack?”

  “I am fully aware that the smaller the political risk, the greater the military risk,” Kennedy said. “The trick is to find the prudent balance between the two. Trinidad is too spectacular, too loud. The whole thing sounds too much like a full-fledged World War II invasion. I want you to reduce the noise level. I would feel more comfortable signing off on this if it were a quiet landing on a remote beach, and preferably at night. By dawn I’d want the ships that brought them there to be out of sight over the horizon. That way we can plausibly deny any American involvement—a group of Cuban exiles landed on a beach, some war surplus B-26s flown by pilots who defected from Castro’s air force are providing them with air cover, that sort of thing.”

  Joe Kennedy shook his head. “What are you people doing about Castro? He ought to be assassinated before the invasion or it will fail.”

  There was an embarrassed silence. Torriti opened his mouth to say something but Bissell touched his arm and he shut it. Jack Kennedy told his father, very gently, “Dad, that is just not the kind of thing we want to get into.”

  Joe Kennedy got the message. “Of course, of course. I withdraw the question.”

  The President elect asked about the nuts and bolts of JMARC. Bissell provided answers. The few details he couldn’t come up with, Leo Kritzky had at his fingertips. Yes, Castro had a small air force, he said: a few dozen planes that could get off the ground, old Sea Furies and a few T-33 jet trainers, possibly jury-rigged with cannon, that the United States had given to Batista. Absolutely, the brigade’s B-26s could be expected to control the skies over the invasion beaches without assistance from American jets flying from aircraft carriers. No question about it, brigade morale was high and the exiles’ combat proficiency excellent; each recruit had fired off more rounds than the average GI in an American army boot camp. Yes, it was true that there had been a minor uprising in Oriente province but it had been crushed by the Cuban army. Yes, the CIA did have raw reports from Camaguey Province that the Castro regime was on the ropes, that civil strife and even anarchy were a real possibility, which is why they believed that the brigade landing and the establishment of a provisional government would lead to a massive uprising.

  As the briefing dragged on, Bobby looked at his watch and reminded his brother that, in ten minutes, he would be talking on the telephone with Charles de Gaulle. Kennedy thanked the CIA men for coming down and asked Allen Dulles to accompany him back to the main house. “Eisenhower urged me to go ahead with this,” he told Dulles, who limped along beside him. “But I want you to remember two things, Allen. Under no circumstance will I authorize American military intervention. Everything we’re trying to do in Latin America, my entire Alliance for Progress initiative, will go down the drain if we’re seen beating a tiny country over the head. The brigade has to sink or swim on its own. Also, I reserve the right to cancel the landings right up to the last moment if I judge the risks unacceptable.”

  “When the time comes to decide, Jack, bear in mind that we’ll have a disposal problem if we stand down.”

  “What do you mean, a disposal problem?”

  “What do we do with the brigade if we cancel? If we demobilize them in Guatemala, it could turn into a nightmare. They might resist being disarmed, they might invade on their own. We can’t have them wandering around Latin America telling everyone what they’ve been doing. If word got around that we’d backed down it could trigger a domino effect—Communist uprisings elsewhere.”

  Kennedy stopped in his tracks and touched Dulles’s shirtfront with a fingertip. “You’re not going to back me into a corner on this, Allen.”

  “That wasn’t my intention, Jack. I’m only alerting you to problems that we’ll have to deal with if you decide to cancel.”

  Across the garden Bobby led Bissell, Leo and the Sorcerer through his father’s house to the bar and offered them one for the road. He knew that Bissell was being groomed to step into Dulles’s shoes as DCI when the veteran spy master retired, which made Bissell a mover and shaker in Washington. Bobby didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with him. At the same time he wanted to make sure that Bissell, like the Washington pundits, understood that he was the second most important man in the capitol. “I think your briefing was effective,” he told Bissell now. “My brother likes the CIA—he always says, if you need something fast the Pickle Factory is the place to go. The pencil pushers over at the State Department take four or five days to answer a question with a simple yes or no.”

  Through a partly open door, Jack Kennedy could be seen talking animatedly on the telephone while his father stood by, his arms folded across his chest, listening to the conversation. “Let’s be clear about one thing,” Bobby went on. “Cuba is my brother’s top priority. Everything else plays second fiddle. No time, no money, no effort, no manpower is to be spared. We want you to get rid of Castro one way or another.” Bobby’s eyes suddenly turned to ice; his voice became soft and precise. “We’re in a hurry, too. We want to start the Kennedy administration off with a grand slam.” He looked hard at Bissell. “Frankly, we’re concerned that the CIA will lose its nerve.”

  The Sorcerer, feeling better with alcohol in his veins, let a satanic smile work its way onto his lips. Bobby’s arrogance had rubbed him the wrong way. “We won’t lose our nerve,” he muttered, crunching ice between his teeth. “But we’re worried you might.”

  Bobby’s eyes narrowed. “Iron the wrinkles out of your plan, my brother will sign off on it. Like my father suggested, it’d certainly make the decision easier if Castro were out of the picture.”

  In a Company limousine on the way to the airport, where a private plane was waiting to fly them back to Washington, the four CIA men were lost in contemplation. Leo finally broke the silence. “Bobby sure is a sinister little bastard.”

  “Trouble is,” Dulles remarked, “every time he uses
the imperial we, you don’t know if he’s speaking for Jack or just trying to sound important.”

  “I thought I was brought along so I could brief Jack on Executive Action,” the Sorcerer said.

  “Jack obviously doesn’t want to talk about Executive Action in front of witnesses,” Bissell said. “In any case, your presence on the team was more eloquent than a briefing.”

  “Bobby didn’t mince words,” Dulles noted. “Get rid of Castro one way or another. It’s evident the Kennedys won’t shed any tears if we can manage to neutralize Fidel.”

  “I hope to hell that that’s not a condition for giving the green light to JMARC,” Bissell said.

  “Jack’s nobody’s fool,” Dulles told him. “Getting rid of Castro would certainly be the icing on the cake. But I can’t believe he’s counting on it.”

  Bissell, worried sick about his project, gazed out the window of the speeding car. After a while Dulles said, “I remember dining with Jack in his home on N Street right after he was elected to the Senate. After dinner the men went off to smoke cigars. The conversation turned to American presidents—it turned out that Jack was especially fascinated with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. My brother, Foster, asked him, why these two. Jack replied that they were the two greatest presidents. Then he said”—Dulles shut his eyes in an effort to recapture the scene—“he said, ‘In order to be a great president you have to be a wartime president.’” He opened his eyes and punched Bissell playfully in the elbow. “He’ll go ahead with JMARC, Dick. Mark my words.”