The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by William Manchester

  ***

  They did not identify themselves as CIA agents, of course. Neither did they admit it if asked. Their cover story was that they were employed by a great American corporation which was determined to solve the Cuban problem. Their leader was particularly anxious to preserve this facade. He was tall and expensively dressed, and he was the only agent with a first and last name: “Frank Bender.” “Remember, Manolo,” Frank kept reminding Artime, “I am not a member of the United States government. I have nothing to do with the United States government. I am only working for a powerful company that wants to fight Communism.” Later the Americans tried to give the impression that a Cuban millionaire was backing them. The Cubans winked at one another and joked that the “millionaire” was named “Uncle Sam.” “At that time we were so stupid,” one of them said long afterward. “We thought that Uncle Sam was behind us. He wanted to do this secretly. That was all right because he was Uncle Sam, and he is strong.” The CIA agents solemnly told them that they all risked jail if the FBI found out what was going on. That, they explained, was why they could not disclose their real names. It was also given as the reason for a great deal of such hokey-pokey as blindfolds, passwords, and countersigns. The Americans were haunted by the fear that the operation might be penetrated by double agents. The Cubans were required to submit to lie detector tests, Rorschach tests, and lengthy interrogations by a genial, bespectacled psychiatrist with a heavy German accent. (He was “Max.”) Those who passed were dispatched on mysterious errands—typically, one of them entailed flying to New York, registering at the Statler Hilton as “George L. Ringo,” and following telephoned instructions from a series of callers—until their hosts’ suspicions were allayed.

  Those who had passed muster were divided into two groups. The younger men, who would do the actual fighting, were recruited for a brigade—La Brigada, as it was henceforth known. In Miami the older group formed a united political front, the Frente, which would eventually replace Castro’s government. As an effective apparatus the Frente was a sieve, but it couldn’t reveal much about its young soldiers because it wasn’t told much. Not that that would have mattered. Had Fidel been told the strength of the tiny force to be sent against him, he wouldn’t have believed it. He assumed it must have about 20,000 men. As late as November 1960 the actual figure was 450, and it never exceeded 1,200. To deceive the enemy if prisoners were taken, serial numbers began with 2500. When one recruit died in training, the brigade took its name from his number, 2506. Its emblem was the figure 2506 superimposed on a cross. They wore this on their uniforms and on a battle flag.

  Later, after the agents’ cover had been blown, it turned out that the operation had been guided by orders from the highest levels in Washington. Day-by-day supervision was the responsibility of the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles; overall planning came from what was called “the special group”—a high command of officials from the White House, the Department of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA. President Eisenhower did not attend their meetings, but he knew of them, and when Castro rejected the administration’s last attempt to reach an understanding on March 17, 1960, the President approved a recommendation that the Cuban exiles be trained for possible use against Castro.

  Many of La Brigada’s operational details might have been lifted from one of Ian Fleming’s bizarre spy novels about James Bond, which were then coming into vogue. The American officers who supervised the training of the exiles were borrowed from the Army and Marine Corps more or less on an old boy basis; frequently decorated in World War II and Korea, they tended to be high in personal courage and low in good judgment. Selecting sites for the training seems to have been almost haphazard. At first one of the Cubans used CIA money given to him by Frank Bender to lease the resort island of Useppa in the Gulf of Mexico; the Cubans were comfortably billeted at the Useppa country club, and the golfers among them improved their strokes. Next a C-54 transport plane flew them to the U.S. Army jungle warfare training camp at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone. They weren’t supposed to know where they were, but one of their CIA instructors left a Panama City newspaper around, and the canal itself was clearly visible from a hill in the camp.

  After eight weeks of lessons in guerrilla warfare—skills which, they were told, they would teach to a Cuban liberation army—they were transferred again, this time to Guatemala. Here, too, it was intended that they would be kept ignorant of their location. Leaving Panama, they were given only the code name of their destination, “little farm.” But they knew what it meant soon after the two buses carrying them left Guatemala’s San José Airport. The level of trainee sophistication was high. Many of them had traveled widely. The cobblestone streets and dirty adobe buildings in the Indian villages bespoke Central America, and the profusion of signs of American influence—Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola signs along the highway, and the number of filling stations selling Texaco, Shell, American or Esso gasoline—could only mean Guatemala. Soon the buses began climbing through the tropical foliage of the surrounding mountains, the Sierra Madre ridge on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. They were on their way to a vast coffee plantation, a finca belonging to Roberto Alejos, the brother of the Guatemalan ambassador to Washington. Alejos had given CIA operatives permission to use part of it for training after Miguel Ydígoras, the president of Guatemala, had agreed to look the other way. (In a sordid epilogue to the operation, Ydígoras would insist that the United States had agreed to press his claim for territory in British Honduras; Washington would vehemently deny it.) The camp there was christened Base Trax. It was characteristic of the operation that it was in the least desirable part of the finca. The volcano Santiaguito, still active, could be seen from base headquarters, and the camp’s soil was volcanic ash. In some places the ash was six feet deep. Rainfall turned it into a thin porridge. The rains that year were the heaviest in memory. Much of the time the Cubans wallowed around in slime.

  At this point some of them began to wonder aloud about the CIA’s omniscience. They were hooted down by the others. The majority’s trust in their yanqui advisers was complete. Surely, they reasoned, the mighty conquerors of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan must know what they were doing. They agreed that La Brigada’s strength was slight, but Castro, after all, had started his 26th of July movement with only a dozen guerrillas. At that time the parallel between them and him could be justified; their CIA advisers were planning to divide them into small guerrilla bands, each of which would be trained to infiltrate one of Cuba’s six provinces. They were to be ready to go before the American presidential election; the deadline was September 19. It might have worked. Even if it hadn’t, the consequences would have been bearable. Defeated bushfighters can usually fade away; small stigma is attached to their failure. Castro would be hard put to prove that the United States was behind them, and they might return to fight another time.

  In August the special group in Washington began to doubt the wisdom of establishing guerrilla forces in the new Cuba. Castro’s troops were far more formidable than Batista’s had been. State Department figures put them at about 400,000 troops and militiamen, ten times his strength. A long bushwhacker campaign directed from the Sierra Maestra no longer seemed feasible. Moreover, Castro’s men had been superbly equipped by his new friends in Moscow and Peking; the State Department study estimated that they had sent him 28,000 tons of military supplies. On top of all this, the vigilance and disposition of his coast watchers and aircraft spotters indicated that he had profited from Batista’s mistakes in that regard, so that supplying guerrilla forces by airdrops now would be exceedingly difficult.

  If these reasons were sound—and events the following year were to prove that they were, eminently so—then it would seem that they ought to have discouraged any military expedition. Not so; the men directing the operation from Washington began weighing the advantages of an amphibious landing by the Brigada with tactical air support provided by Cubans in American warplanes. Ship-to-shore invasions had been very eff
ective in Europe and the Pacific in World War II, it was pointed out, and MacArthur had ravaged the North Korean supply lines by landing the 1st Marine Division at Inchon. No one appears to have pointed out to the group that La Brigada was the size of an American infantry battalion, and that no major amphibious operation had been attempted with fewer than nine battalions backed by artillery, air supremacy, and an armada of warships—1,200 of them at Okinawa, World War II’s last ship-to-shore attack.

  Confident that the key to victory had been found, Washington abandoned plans for guerrilla activity, certain that once La Brigada had established a bridgehead all Cuba would flock to its standard. In a long cable to Base Trax, CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, ordered that the number of bushfighters be reduced to sixty; the agents in Guatemala were to “use conventional arms and training for everyone else.” The Cubans took this to mean that once they were ashore an American army would land behind them, that being the only circumstance, they reasoned, which could justify the change. Their CIA advisers not only failed to correct them; “Frank Bender,” the leader, told Pepe San Román and his fellow Cuban officers that they were “going to have protection by sea, by air, and even from under the sea.” All the CIA operatives were enthusiastic about the new plan, and from that day forward they made it plain that they looked upon expression of doubt that it would succeed as a sign of weakness. Frank Bender came to believe that it superseded his loyalty to the President of the United States. He told Pepe San Roman that powerful figures in Washington were trying to call off the invasion, and that it was conceivable that orders to that end might arrive from the White House. “If this happens,” he said, “you come here and make some kind of show, as if you were putting us, the advisers, in prison, and you go ahead with the whole plan, even if we are your prisoners.” To make sure that the amazed Cuban understood him, he became more specific. He explained that they would have to put an armed member of La Brigada at the door of each CIA adviser, cut communications with Washington, and go ahead with the invasion. He would tell them when and how to leave Base Trax for the staging area. He laughed and said, “In the end we will win.”

  Doubtless Frank’s superiors in Washington knew nothing of this. Like everyone else who was involved, they couldn’t piece together the whole picture until long afterward. To varying degrees it was a muddle to Dwight Eisenhower in the White House, Fidel Castro in Havana, Allen Dulles in Virginia, Frank Bender in Guatemala, the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, the Frente in Miami, and the brave men drilling on the coffee plantation beneath the Sierra Madre. Communication was faulty. The special group had neglected to tell Eisenhower of the switch from guerrilla tactics to plans for an amphibious landing. The Cubans in La Brigada continued to believe that they would constitute only the first wave of an invasion, and the Frente had understood the Americans to say that no attack would be mounted with fewer than five thousand men.

  The CIA was trying to recruit as many fighters as possible. Wages were paid—$175 a month for a man, $50 for his wife, and $25 for each child. In this situation it was inevitable that security would be compromised. The word was out, and it was out everywhere. Castro was regularly predicting the imminent arrival of the “mercenaries,” but his people didn’t need him to tell them it was coming. The lowliest guajiro cutting sugar cane knew that counterrevolutionaries were on their way. Articles about La Brigada appeared in the city of Guatemala in La Hora and had been reprinted in most of the Spanish-language press, including some newspapers circulating in Cuba. Militiamen of the new Cuba slept with their rifles, and artillerymen beside their guns.

  Americans could read accounts in English in the Miami Herald and the New York Times, though on the whole people in the United States were less interested than Cubans in the coming battle. They knew that something was going on down there, but they were distracted by other matters. It was not their country which was going to be invaded. They were likelier to be preoccupied by the dramatic struggle for the Democratic presidential nomination and the approaching climax to Eisenhower’s White House years—the great Paris summit, to be followed by his tour of the Soviet Union. Advance parties of Secret Service men were already checking security arrangements in the Elysée Palace when, on May 1, sixteen days before the conference was to begin in France, a strange aircraft appeared high in the skies over Sverdlovsk, an industrial complex in the Ural Mountains some 1,200 miles inside Russia. Like the brigade in Guatemala, the flight was part of a CIA operation; the airplane had been built to CIA specifications by Lockheed. Its official designation was U-2. Presently the entire world would know it as “the spy plane.”

  ***

  Long and black, with a high tail, wide wings, and a single turbojet engine, the U-2 was piloted from a one-man cockpit. In the strict sense of the word, it was not a warplane. There were no guns. Instead it was equipped with sensitive infrared cameras aimed through seven portholes under the fuselage. They could photograph a strip of earth 125 miles wide and 3,000 miles long, producing prints in 4,000 paired frames. The detail was almost unbelievable. Photo interpreters studying huge enlargements could actually read a newspaper headline that had been nine or ten miles below the aircraft. Other instruments could test the air for evidence of secret nuclear tests and measure the efficiency of Russian radar. The U-2’s protection was its height. Efficient cruising performance at very high altitudes had been achieved by careful aerodynamic and structural details; it was believed to be beyond the reach of Soviet radar. All in all it was the most sophisticated espionage device the world had ever seen. Its pilot that May Day was named Francis Gary Powers.

  Powers was one of a new breed of soldiers of fortune. He flew, not for love of country, but for money. It was a job to him, and a good one; he was earning $30,000 a year as against an $8,400 combined income for him and his wife before he went to work for the CIA. That had been four years earlier, when he had been a twenty-seven-year-old Air Force first lieutenant. Beefy, thickset, and with a crew-cut, he looked like a professional football player—a defensive tackle, perhaps, with diligence and reliability, but little imagination.

  He was not stupid, however. Earlier in the year he had asked an intelligence officer, “What if something happens and one of us goes down over Russia? That’s an awfully big country and it could be a hell of a long walk to a border. Is there anyone there we can contact? Can you give us any names and addresses?” According to Powers this was the first time the question had been asked, despite the fact that Operation Overflight, as it was called, was about to enter its fifth year. The reply was “No, we can’t.” He persisted: “All right, say the worst happens. A plane goes down and the pilot is captured. What story does he use? Exactly how much should he tell?” It is Power’s recollection—and no one has corrected him—that the intelligence officer’s exact words were: “You may as well tell them everything because they’re going to get it out of you anyway.”

  The lack of a well-rehearsed cover story is by no means the least credible aspect of the affair. Sherman Adams had been in the White House when Operation Overflight began in 1956, and he knew that none of the flights were made without the President’s approval. Visiting Eisenhower after the Powers debacle, he asked him about it. “You’re right,” Ike said. “I made the decision, just as I have known about and personally approved every one of those flights. When they brought me the plan for this particular flight over Russia, I approved it as one among several within an intelligence policy already adopted. I had no thought of it having any possible bearing upon the summit meeting or on my forthcoming trip to Moscow. Except for unforeseen circumstances, it would not have had any.”

  Doubtless Eisenhower believed that, but it is untrue. The circumstances were foreseeable, or, at any rate, sufficiently within the range of possibilities to be weighed carefully. Powers’s last trip was not routine. It was the first of two overflights after a long period without any, and it was the first attempt to cross the entire Soviet Union. From an American base in Peshawar, Pakistan, Powers was to f
ly 3,800 miles to Bodo, Norway. Taking off from one country and landing in another required two ground crews. That, too, was unprecedented. It was judged to be worth chancing because, by going deeper into Russia than ever before, the U-2 would pass over important targets never before photographed.

  There was considerable speculation among the U-2 pilots over the timing of the mission. One theory was that the Russians were on the verge of a missile guidance breakthrough and that the CIA was trying to crowd in as many targets as possible beforehand. Another was that Eisenhower wanted the latest available data before sitting down with Khrushchev, and still another that an approaching detente with the Russians would make any covert operations unwise in the future. The fliers were well aware that they were part of a shady business. The suspicion had been growing among them that Soviet radar had been developed to the point where it was possible to track them. The possibilities of mechanical failure were also discussed. “One loose screw, in just the right place,” as Powers put it, “could bring an aircraft down.” In fact, this had happened. A U-2 had crash-landed near Tokyo the previous autumn. A Japanese journalist had inspected it, concluded that its mission was espionage, and reported that finding at length in the next issue of his magazine.

  The designers of the plane had known it would run unusual risks, and they had equipped it with timed destruction mechanisms. Later the “granger,” a device designed to throw off radar, had been installed as a further precaution. Despite the intelligence officer’s rather casual answer to Powers’s question about contingency planning, some thought had been given to forced landings. Colonel William M. Shelton, the Air Force officer commanding the Operation Overflight unit, told Powers that if he found he was running low on fuel over the Soviet city of Landalaksha, in the Murmansk region, he could take a shortcut to alternate landing fields in Finland and Sweden. He added, “Any place is preferable to going down in the Soviet Union.”