Reclaiming History
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It may not have been intentional misrepresentation on the part of those like “Frank” who were dealing directly with the brigade. Virtually no one, including the exiled leaders, believed that an operation organized and directed by the CIA, and sponsored and almost completely funded by the U.S. government, one that had been originally approved by President Eisenhower and then by President Kennedy, would not have American military might behind it. This is why, notwithstanding Kennedy’s press conference statement on April 12 that the United States would not be involved militarily, he nonetheless dispatched a contingent the very next day to meet with Miro Cardona, the president of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, to make sure he understood. But even that wasn’t enough. Schlesinger writes that Cardona “displayed resistance and incredulity at the statement that no United States troops would be used. He waved the President’s news conference disclaimer aside as an understandable piece of psychological warfare…‘Everyone knows,’ Miro said, ‘that the United States is behind the expedition.’”132 The exiles were not the only ones who did not believe the president. CIA agent Howard Hunt, who worked at the operational level of the Bay of Pigs project, spending much time with exile leaders at his safe house in Miami, and also visited the brigade at the training camps in Guatemala, said that when the president made his April 12 declaration, “my project colleagues and I did not take him seriously. The statement was, we thought, a superb effort in misdirection.”133
In Bay of Pigs, Haynes Johnson writes,
From the beginning, the Cuban counter-revolutionists viewed their new American friends with blind trust…Virtually all of the Cubans involved believed [so] much in the Americans—or wanted so desperately to believe—that they never questioned what was happening or expressed doubts about the plans. Looking back on it, they agree now their naivete was partly genuine and partly reluctance to turn down any offer of help in liberating their country. In fact, they had little choice; there was no other place to turn…To Cubans, the United States was more than the colossus of the north, for the two countries were bound closely by attitudes, by history, by geography and by economics. The United States was great and powerful, the master not only of the hemisphere but perhaps of the world, and it was Cuba’s friend. One really didn’t question such a belief. It was a fact; everyone knew it. And the mysterious, anonymous, ubiquitous American agents who dealt with the Cubans managed to strengthen that belief.134
Johnson quotes Pepe San Román, the brigade military commander, as saying that “most of the Cubans [in the brigade] were there because they knew the whole operation was going to be conducted by the Americans, not by me or anyone else. They did not trust me or anyone else. They just trusted the Americans. So they were going to fight because the United States was backing them.”135
In Dagger in the Heart, Cuban attorney Mario Lazo writes, “The Bay of Pigs defeat was wholly self-inflicted in Washington. Kennedy told the truth when he publicly accepted responsibility…The heroism of the beleaguered Cuban Brigade had been rewarded by betrayal, defeat, death for many of them, long and cruel imprisonment for the rest. The Cuban people…were left with feelings of astonishment and disillusionment, and in many cases despair. They had always admired the United States as strong, rich, generous—but where was its sense of honor and the capacity of its leaders? The mistake of the Cuban fighters for liberation was that they thought too highly of the United States. They believed to the end that it would not let them down. But it did.”136
Lest there be any doubts that the invasion brigade expected U.S. military help, the anguished cry of Pepe San Román at the Bay of Pigs to the American military, “Do you back us up or quit?…Please don’t desert us,” should dispel all of them. So the motive to kill Kennedy would seem to be there. But there is more to the story (see later text).
In a June 1, 1961, memorandum, RFK said that his brother “felt very strongly that the Cuba operation had materially affected…his standing as president and the standing of the United States in public opinion throughout the world…The United States couldn’t be trusted. The United States had blundered.”137
Though it is stated in all the books that Kennedy publicly acknowledged full responsibility for the failure of the invasion (e.g., “In the orgy of national self-recrimination that followed the Bay of Pigs operation, President Kennedy took the full blame”),138 considered by many to be the most humiliating incident during the Kennedy presidency, the authors139 normally give Kennedy’s remark to the press on April 21 that “victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan” as their support for this. But this remark could just as well be construed as a reference to an unfortunate fact of public life than as an acknowledgment of responsibility or blame. However, on April 24, Kennedy removed all ambiguity about responsibility for the Bay of Pigs by authorizing the release of a White House statement that said, “President Kennedy has stated from the beginning that as President he bears sole responsibility…and he restates it now…The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility.”140
But privately Kennedy was incensed at the CIA for misleading him by its gross miscalculation that the invasion would succeed, even without U.S. military participation, and at himself for being naive enough to believe the spy agency. One of the elements in the CIA’s calculus that was sold to Kennedy was that the invasion would trigger an insurrection by the Cuban people against Castro that would aid and coalesce with the invading force. That didn’t, of course, happen. Was CIA intelligence unaware of the popularity Castro enjoyed at the time among the Cuban masses?
The defeat at the Bay of Pigs had another consequence. In August 1961, four months after the invasion, Richard Goodwin, assistant special counsel to the president, reported back to President Kennedy on his return from a meeting of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, on August 17, that he had spoken to Castro’s chief lieutenant, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the latter “wanted to thank us very much for the invasion…It had been a great political victory for them, enabled them to consolidate, and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal.”141 Apparently unwittingly, the invasion had succeeded in transforming a revolution merely to overthrow Batista and capitalism into one now identified with Cuban nationalism.
Though Kennedy did not want to make his displeasure with the CIA a public matter, it was clear that the CIA leadership behind the disastrous invasion would have to go. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs he called CIA Director Allen Dulles, Lieutenant General Charles Cabell, the deputy director of the CIA, and Richard Bissell, the CIA deputy director for plans, into his office. (Bissell was the brainy former professor of economics at Yale who developed the U-2 spy plane, was one of the key formulators and implementers of the Marshall Plan, and, as indicated, the architect behind the Bay of Pigs invasion.) “Under the British system,” he told them with a smile, “I would have to go. But under our system, I’m afraid it’s got to be you.”142 After the intentional passage of a decent amount of time following the failure at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy accepted the resignation of Dulles on September 27, 1961, the retirement of Cabell on January 31, 1962, and the resignation of Bissell on February 17, 1962.
Kennedy redeemed himself, in part, with the exiled Cuban community by eventually giving more support, in every way, to the anti-Castro movement than ever before, though again, there was no promise that U.S. forces would fight Castro. “Before the invasion when we asked for arms it was difficult to get them, but now it’s easier,” said Cuban exile leader Manolo Ray.143 “Cuba must not be abandoned to the Communists,” Kennedy told the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 20, the day after the Bay of Pigs debacle, adding that with respect to his administration’s policy of nonintervention, “Our restraint is not inexhaustible.” He spoke of the “new and deeper struggle.”144* The exiles, still wanting to believe that Kennedy’s heart was in the right place, dug in even harder.
In the latter part of
1961, the Special Group (formally called NSC 5412, the secret, informal, National Security Council subcommittee that approved or disapproved of all proposed CIA covert activities) was augmented by two new members, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor, for the express purpose of overseeing Operation Mongoose, the government’s plan established after the Bay of Pigs to remove Castro from power.145 That the new group, called “Special Group (Augmented),” and Operation Mongoose were a presidential initiative was made clear by the creating document, a November 22, 1961, memorandum from presidential assistant Richard Goodwin to the secretaries of state and defense, the director of the CIA, attorney general, General Edward Lansdale, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Paragraph one of the memorandum stated that the object was “to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime and establish a free Cuba. All available assets will be directed to this and as a matter of urgent national priority.” The effort was to be “under the general guidance of the Attorney General [RFK], with [Air Force] General [Edward] Lansdale as his chief of operations. The NSC 5412 group will be kept informed of activities.” Though the CIA would be more heavily involved in carrying out the mission than any other federal agency, JFK had shifted the primary supervision of the effort away from the CIA, which had failed him so badly in the Bay of Pigs, to the Department of Defense at the Pentagon, a clear slap in the face to the CIA.
Lansdale was a counterinsurgency specialist in the Office of Special Operations of the Defense Department who had worked in U.S. covert operations in the Philippines (where he successfully helped put down a growing Communist insurgency with what some felt were “brilliant” counterrevolutionary tactics) and Vietnam, and became the model for the hero in the best-selling novel The Ugly American who courageously fought against Communist guerillas in these two nations. President Kennedy once called Lansdale America’s answer to James Bond. Although raids on Cuban installations by exile groups were to continue vigorously under Mongoose, the main part of Lansdale’s plan to overthrow Castro, which he presented on January 18, 1962, was to organize anti-Castro Cubans (both exiles and those still living in Cuba) into “a movement within Cuba to the point where it could mount an insurrection” against Castro’s regime. A plan, by the way, that the CIA felt was unrealistic from the beginning.146 As Lansdale told the Church Committee, he wanted “the [Cuban] people themselves [to] overthrow the Castro regime.”147 Severely disrupting the Cuban economy (by an economic embargo, commando raids blowing up oil refineries, chemical plants, etc., and sabotaging cargo to Cuba from other countries) would supposedly incite discontent by the Cuban people with Castro.148†
The next day, January 19, at a meeting of principal Mongoose participants held in Robert Kennedy’s office, Kennedy said that the solution to the Cuban problem was a “top priority,” and that “no time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared.”149 Robert Kennedy was, by all accounts, not just a figurehead in the administration’s efforts to overthrow Castro. “Bobby Kennedy was running it, hour by hour,” Alexander Haig says. “I was a part of it, as deputy to Joe Califano and military assistant to General Vance. We were conducting two raids a week at the height of that program against mainland Cuba…Weekly reports were rendered to Bobby Kennedy. He had a very tight hand on the operation.”150 Sergio Arcacha, an anti-Castro Cuban exile heavily involved in the effort to overthrow Castro, told Life magazine reporter Holland McCombs, “We used to call Bobby Kennedy and he would take care of it.”151 Richard Helms, who as the CIA’s deputy director of plans had overall supervision of the CIA’s Mongoose effort, told the Church Committee that he and RFK “were constantly in touch with each other” with respect to Mongoose, even down to details like RFK asking him if a particular land sabotage effort was organized yet and had it left. “The Attorney General was on the phone to me, he was on the phone to Mr. Harvey [operational head of Mongoose]…He was on the phone even to people on Harvey’s staff, as I recall it.”152 An October 4, 1962, “Memorandum for Record” of the minutes of a meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) on that day starts by saying, “The Attorney General opened the meeting by saying that higher authority [presumably the president] is concerned about progress on the Mongoose program and feels that more priority should be given to trying to mount sabotage operations…He urged that ‘massive activity’ be mounted within the entire Mongoose framework.”153*
Called by many the “secret war” to overthrow Castro, Mongoose, which it should be repeated commenced after the Bay of Pigs invasion, was the best example of the CIA becoming a paramilitary organization. Buying its own fleet of ships and boats, even planes, the CIA registered its ownership under fictitious companies, altered them for combat, and employed civilian mercenaries and Cuban exiles to operate them.154
The HSCA wrote that the nerve center of Operation Mongoose, the United States’ new and deeper struggle against Castro,
was established in the heartland of exile activity, Miami. There, on a secluded, heavily wooded 1,571 acre tract that was part of the University of Miami’s south campus, the CIA set up a front operation, an electronics firm called Zenith Technological Services. Its code name was JM/WAVE and it soon became the largest CIA installation anywhere in the world outside of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The JM/WAVE station† had, at the height of its activities in 1962, a staff of more than 300 Americans, mostly case officers. Each case officer employed from four to ten Cuban “principal agents” who, in turn, would be responsible for between ten and thirty regular agents…It was the JM/WAVE station that monitored, more or less controlled, and in most cases funded the anti-Castro groups. It was responsible for the great upsurge in anti-Castro activity and the lifted spirits of the Cuban exiles as American arms and weapons flowed freely through the training camps and guerilla bases spotted around South Florida. Anti-Castro raiding parties that left from small secret islands in the Florida Keys were given the “green light” by agents of the JM/WAVE station. The result of it all was that there grew in the Cuban exile community a renewed confidence in the U.S. Government’s sincerity and loyalty to its cause.155
And from February of 1962 on, JM/WAVE and the Cuban exiles it managed conducted a great number of missions against mainland Cuba with varying degrees of success.156*
But a second betrayal awaited the Cuban exiles. As the major U.S. concession in the agreement between Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to resolve the Cuban missile crisis (and in return for the Soviets’ withdrawing from Cuban soil their missiles with nuclear warheads targeted on U.S. cities), in late October of 1962 Kennedy, in addition to secretly agreeing to withdraw fifteen Jupiter missiles of ours from Turkey, made a “no invasion” pledge regarding Cuba.157 The missile crisis started at 9:00 a.m. on October 14, 1962, when a CIA U-2 spy plane and low-level reconnaissance flights confirmed what CIA informants in Cuba had been reporting: the existence of launching pads and Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, installed that summer, as well as medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) bases under construction. (Later, two intercontinental-range ballistic missile [IRBM] bases were found to be under construction.) At the time, the CIA estimated that ten thousand Soviet troops were in Cuba. The actual number, the Soviets would later admit, was forty thousand.
The first major meeting of the Kennedy administration on the ominous missile sightings was in the Cabinet Room on the morning of October 16, when the CIA made a formal presentation, with photographs and charts, of its findings to the president and eleven key advisers, including several members of his cabinet, who would meet regularly with him or RFK throughout the crisis as an ad hoc group called “Ex Comm” (the Executive Committee of the National Security Council). The group consisted of Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon, RFK, CIA Director John McCone, Undersecretary of State George Ball, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn Thompson, special presidential counsel Ted Sorenson, special assistant to the president for national securi
ty affairs McGeorge Bundy, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor. The group, which lived and worked together almost around the clock during the crisis, heard the advice of others and was sometimes joined in its deliberations by people like former secretary of state Dean Acheson and UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson.158 No corresponding special policy group was created by the Kremlin to deal with the crisis, Khrushchev relying on his existing foreign policy advisers.159
For thirteen tense days and nights thereafter, Kennedy and his top advisers deliberated on how to handle the world’s closest brush with a nuclear holocaust, the group predictably breaking down into hawks and doves. Would it be a blockade, or air strikes to knock out the missile sites, or an outright invasion of Cuba—air strikes or an invasion carrying a possible risk of the Soviets retaliating militarily and triggering an eventual nuclear war? “I guess this is the week I earn my salary,” JFK would say.160
With World War III hanging in the balance, not all of “the President’s men” were urging a peaceful resolution. In an October 19, 1962, exchange with the president, General Curtis LeMay, air force chief of staff, said, “This [proposed] blockade and political action, I see leading into war…This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich…I just don’t see any other solution except direct military action right now.”161 Indeed, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a military invasion, not a blockade, was called for.162* Not only called for, but, per JFK assistant Arthur Schlesinger, desired. “Some of them [members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] were quite disappointed when a…peaceful settlement came about.”163