by Max Boot
Lansdale had been among a minority of officials who opposed the invasion plans. In November 1960, in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, Allen Dulles had presented the CIA’s proposal for Operation Zapata to the senior interagency group charged with approving all covert actions. After analyzing the proposal, Lansdale later said, he concluded that “too little attention was being paid to the political preparation in Cuba and that too small a force was being utilized for what had turned into an over-the-beach invasion.” “We are going to get clobbered,” he warned, much to Dulles’s consternation. Lansdale even tried and failed to block the assignment of two dozen army sergeants to work as trainers for Brigade 2506.1
When the operation went ahead anyway, it would amply vindicate Lansdale’s warnings. The plan had been for brigade B-26 bombers flying out of Nicaragua to destroy Castro’s air force on the ground. But at the last minute President Kennedy became worried about exposing American complicity and ordered three-quarters of the initial air strikes canceled. Lacking air cover, the invaders were trapped in the open on a beach where, as Lansdale had predicted, they were “clobbered” by twenty thousand Cuban troops equipped with tanks, machine guns, artillery, and aircraft. On April 17, Kennedy relented and allowed the B-26s to fly again, but many of these slow, propeller-driven aircraft were blasted out of the sky by Castro’s T-33 jet trainers, which, unbeknownst to the Americans, had been equipped with 20-mm cannons. On April 19, after the invaders had already suffered a shellacking, Kennedy reluctantly authorized six unmarked Navy jets to spend exactly one hour over the beachhead without, however, giving them authorization to shoot down Cuban aircraft.
By April 20, it was all over. Only a few of the exiles escaped to sea to be rescued by the U.S. Navy; 114 men were killed, and almost all of the rest (1,189) captured. That Castro’s forces suffered heavier casualties was no consolation. It was, as the historian Theodore Draper wrote a few weeks later, “one of those rare politico-military events—a perfect failure.”2
JUST TWO days after Operation Zapata’s failure, a National Security Council meeting convened on April 22, 1961, to consider next steps. Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles read aloud a State Department paper concluding—correctly, as it turned out—that Castro was secure absent an American invasion. As soon as Bowles finished, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy exploded, “That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard. You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is to dump the whole thing on the president. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.”
A twenty-nine-year-old White House aide named Richard Goodwin noted that, “as the embarrassing tirade continued, the president sat calmly, outwardly relaxed, only the faint click from the metallic pencil cap he was tapping against his almost incandescently white, evenly spaced teeth disrupting his silence—a characteristic revelation that some inner tension was being suppressed.” Gradually it dawned on Goodwin “that Bobby’s harsh polemic reflected the president’s own concealed emotions, privately communicated in some earlier, intimate conversation.” When Robert Kennedy was done, “the group sat silently, stunned by the ferocity of his assault.” Then the president calmly appointed a task force to take charge of Cuba policy from which the State Department “was pointedly omitted.”3 Bowles left the meeting lamenting that the “fire eaters” were in charge.4
Far from dissuading the Kennedys from further plots, the Bay of Pigs operation had only made them more determined to oust Castro. In the judgment of the CIA’s deputy director for operations, Richard Bissell, who was soon forced into retirement along with Allen Dulles, the Kennedys developed an “obsession with Cuba”: “From their perspective, Castro won the first round at the Bay of Pigs. He had defeated the Kennedy team; they were bitter and they could not tolerate his getting away with it. The president and his brother were ready to avenge their personal embarrassment by overthrowing their enemy at any cost.”5
Not only was this Caribbean island emerging, improbably enough, as the administration’s “highest priority project” (in Robert Kennedy’s words),6 but, just as improbably, Robert Kennedy was emerging as the administration’s point man on this issue. It was not a role that might have been expected for the attorney general but one that made perfect sense, given his long-standing role as his older brother’s keeper and protector.
Robert Francis Kennedy had been, in his father’s description, the “runt” of the litter.7 He was a mediocre student and too young to see combat in World War II as his older brothers Jack and Joe Jr. did (Joe Jr. was killed on a bombing mission in 1944). Bobby made up for his perceived shortcomings with obnoxious aggressiveness in defense of his family. “Desperate to win his father’s attention and respect,” the biographer Evan Thomas wrote, “Kennedy became a hard man for a long while, covering over his sensitivity and capacity for empathy with a carapace of arrogance.”8
Eventually another side of RFK would be revealed; as the sixties progressed, many would come to see him, in Thomas’s words, as “the gentle, child-loving, poetry-reading, soulful herald of a new age.”9 But in 1961 few could have imagined the transformation that would occur in Bobby’s image. At the dawn of Camelot, RFK was known, as he had been since he was a schoolboy, for having “a chip on his shoulder” and “a short fuse.”10 He showed his pugnacity when he served as campaign manager during his brother Jack’s Senate campaign in Massachusetts in 1952. JFK, eight years older, was cool, elegant, and above the fray. His younger brother played the heavy to make sure that crucial tasks were accomplished.11
Bobby’s reputation as a bully grew in 1953 when he joined the staff of soon-to-be-disgraced Senator Joe McCarthy. He did not last long in that job—not because he disapproved of “Tailgunner Joe’s” Red-baiting tactics but because he did not get a promotion he was seeking. Two years later, with Democrats in control of the Senate, he became chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In charge of a staff of a hundred investigators, Kennedy sought to uncover links between mobsters and labor leaders. That, in turn, led him to pursue a relentless vendetta against the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, whose “absolute evilness” he was determined to expose by any methods necessary.12 To Bobby’s fury, Hoffa beat all the charges until finally, in 1964, he was convicted of jury tampering. “For him,” Bobby’s wife, Ethel, said, “the world is divided into black and white hats. Bobby can only distinguish good men and bad.”13 Fidel Castro was a bad man, and Bobby, a latter-day Torquemada,14 was determined to go after him as he had previously gone after Hoffa: all-out, no holds barred.
AT NOON on November 3, 1961, just a few hours before the Taylor-Rostow group was to deliver its report on Vietnam, the president convened a White House meeting to consider Cuba. The only record of what was said is a handwritten note from Bobby Kennedy. “My idea,” he wrote, “is stir things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites & Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.” (His breezy assurance that there was “nothing to lose” would be proven disastrously wrong less than twelve months later.) To “stir things up,” Bobby continued, McNamara had agreed to make Edward Lansdale, who was sitting in the back, “available for me—I assigned him to make survey of situation in Cuba—the problem and our assets.”15
It was not hard to see why Lansdale was chosen, even if, in hindsight, the reasons do not look like good ones. “Lansdale had a great reputation because of his work in Southeast Asia,” Dick Goodwin recalled. “If you were going to mount a covert campaign against Cuba, he seemed the logical choice.”16 The very fact that Lansdale had not previously worked on Cuba policy was seen as a plus: he was not tainted by the Bay of Pigs. No one was daunted that, while Lansdale had enjoyed considerable success with counterinsurgency and nation-building operations in the Philippines and South Vietnam
, he had not notched any comparable achievement in his efforts to undermine North Vietnam and that, moreover, he had no personal acquaintance with the people of Cuba. The aura of the “Ugly American” was strong enough to override any objections.
Lansdale thus became chief of operations of the Caribbean Survey Group. Soon it would be dubbed Operation Mongoose. This was an arbitrary cryptonym generated by the CIA to fool those without the proper clearances into thinking that it designated an operation in Thailand. (The “MO” digraph was used to denote Thailand; “AM” was the designation for Cuba. Thus Castro’s cryptonym was AMTHUG and Che Guevara, a physician, was AMQUACK.)17 Although picked randomly, the name seemed appropriate: not only had Lansdale once kept pet mongooses in Saigon—his gift from Trinh Minh Thé—but mongooses were known for killing venomous snakes. That is exactly how U.S. officials viewed Castro, as a serpent that had to be exterminated for the good of the entire neighborhood.
Lansdale answered to a high-level interagency committee called Special Group (Augmented). Maxwell Taylor was designated chairman, but there was no doubt who the real boss was. The attorney general was, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted, “wildly busy in 1962,” with an around-the-world trip in February, a fight in April with the steel companies over alleged price fixing, a battle in September to desegregate the University of Mississippi, constant pressure against Jimmy Hoffa, and incessant feuding with Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover about various matters. Yet he still found time to check in on Mongoose regularly in order “to needle the bureaucracy.”18 At meeting after meeting, the attorney general stressed that there had to be “maximum effort” and that “there will be no acceptable alibi” for failure.19 “Let’s get the hell on with it,” he would say. “The President wants some action, right now.”20 His performance at Mongoose meetings reminded the CIA’s deputy director, Marshall Carter, of “the gnawing of an enraged rat terrier.”21
The full weight of all that pressure fell directly on Edward Lansdale. When he first saw the attorney general at a meeting, Lansdale recalled, he “wondered what the youngster was doing sitting in the meeting talking so much.” He didn’t connect the man before him “with the pictures of him on TV.” The mistake was understandable, given that Robert Kennedy was still only thirty-seven years old (to Lansdale’s fifty-three). As Evan Thomas noted, “With his buck teeth and floppy hair and shy gawkiness, he sometimes came across like an awkward teenager.”22 But there was nothing diffident about the way Bobby threw his influence around in meetings. Bobby, Lansdale said, “was the most interested of anyone in the room of what I would say on things and would plague me with many questions.”23 It was hardly surprising that Lansdale chafed under this constant harassment. His friend Rufus Phillips recalled, “While Ed respected the president, he didn’t like Bobby worth a damn.”24
LANSDALE WAS under no illusion about the enormity of his task as chief of operations for Operation Mongoose. After a week on the job, while Lansdale was sitting in Dick Goodwin’s office at the White House, he turned and said, “You know, Dick, it’s impossible.”
“What’s impossible?” Goodwin asked.
“There is no way you can overthrow Castro without a strong, indigenous political opposition. And there is no such opposition, either in Cuba or outside it.”25
Despite his doubts, Lansdale threw himself into his new assignment. Why did he so eagerly embark on such a dubious project under such a disagreeable taskmaster? In the recent past, he had turned down assignments that he did not believe in, such as the mission to pressure Diem. Like most other government officials, however, he was susceptible to the lure of high-level access, of working directly for the president and his brother on a high-priority project. Much as he might pretend otherwise, Lansdale was not free of ego or ambition. “He was proud,” Sam Wilson recalled, “that he was talking to the president and Robert Kennedy.”26 Lansdale would later regale his sons with tales of how he would discuss top-secret plans at Bobby’s Hickory Hill mansion in McLean, Virginia, while Bobby’s small children played “choo-choo” and other games around them.27
Beyond the dictates of duty and the desire for enhanced status, Lansdale also had a more practical reason for embracing his new assignment. He was determined to give the Kennedys what they most wanted—a plan to overthrow Castro—in the hope that in return they would give him what he most wanted: a return ticket to Saigon.28
TO ACCOMPLISH his objective, Lansdale had to rely on liaison officers from the State Department, the CIA, the U.S. Information Agency, and other government agencies that were supposed to voluntarily cooperate with him. That ideal was not easy to achieve in practice, given the level of skepticism especially within the CIA toward the project in general and to Lansdale in particular. “The notion that the various agencies were simply to detail men, money, and material to Lansdale was dead on arrival,” said Richard Helms, the CIA’s deputy director for plans.29
“It was the most frustrating damn thing I’ve ever tackled,” Lansdale wrote two years later. “I was given full responsibility for a US effort, but had no say on disciplining or giving orders to US personnel working in this effort. Most of these were State and CIA folks who made it plain to me that they hated my guts. So about once a week I would formally request relief from this duty, and be told that this was unacceptable.”30
The more that other agencies resisted Lansdale’s dictates, the more he blustered to get his authority respected—and the less respect he commanded. In an uncharacteristically pompous memorandum referring to himself in the third person, he demanded “that all plans and actions with operational aspects hereafter be made known to the Chief of Operations at the very earliest time feasible.”31 Such diktats led CIA operatives to mock him behind his back as “the FM,” short for field marshal.32
Lansdale was annoyed by the CIA’s tendency not only to ignore his authority but also to focus on covert actions such as “smash and grab raids.” He believed, as he informed the Special Group (Augmented) on December 7, 1961, that the CIA had to be reoriented “180 degrees,” relegating “militant (sabotage, etc.) actions” to a secondary role in support of building up a “genuine internal popular movement.”33 “I remember thinking at the time,” he was to say years later, “I have to start back in kindergarten with these people and start teaching them.”34 Lansdale’s condescending attitude toward his CIA colleagues—similar to his attitude toward his French colleagues in Vietnam—did not help to win them over.
BY JANUARY 18, 1962, less than three months after his appointment, Lansdale had come up with a preliminary “concept of operation” to “bring about the revolt of the Cuban people.” This required the creation of a “political action organization . . . in key localities inside Cuba, with its own means for internal communication, its own voice for psychological operations, and its own action arm (small guerrilla bands, sabotage squads, etc.).” This organization would have to gain, Vietminh-style, “the sympathetic support of the majority of the Cuban people.” The “climactic moment of revolt,” he predicted, “will come from an angry reaction of the people to a government action (sparked by an incident), or from a fracturing of the leadership cadre within the regime, or both.” The task of Mongoose would be to “bring this about.” Once a popular revolt had broken out, it could ask for international assistance, and the U.S. could then provide open support, including “military force, as necessary.” Lansdale recognized that American military intervention would be needed to push Castro out; the job of the internal resistance movement was merely to legitimate such an intervention.
To bring about the Cuban people’s revolt, Lansdale assigned thirty-two operational tasks to various government agencies. The first priority was to increase intelligence collection in Cuba. Under “political tasks,” the CIA was to submit a plan “for defection of top Cuban government officials, to fracture the regime from within”; a “name defector” would be “worth at least a million U.S. dollars”—an indication that money was no object for Mongoose. The U.S. Information
Agency and CIA jointly were assigned psychological warfare tasks “toward the end result of awakening world sympathy for the Cuban people (as a David) battling against the Communist regime (as a Goliath) and towards stimulating Cubans inside Cuba to join ‘the cause.’ ” The Pentagon was “to submit contingency plans for use of U.S. military force to support the Cuban popular movement.” The “economic” provisions included various ways to disrupt Cuban trade, including a requirement that the CIA “submit plan by 15 February for inducing failure in food crops in Cuba.”35 The next day, Lansdale sent around another memorandum shedding light on how he hoped to induce failure in food crops: it called for developing “a plan for incapacitating large segments of the sugar workers by the covert use of BW [biological warfare] or CW [chemical warfare] agents.” The idea was to employ some kind of bug or chemical that would make the sugar workers sick enough to stay home from work but that would not cause any lasting damage.36
No such capacity was ever developed. This was typical of what the CIA’s Richard Helms described as “very nutty schemes [that] were born of the intensity of the pressure” applied by the Kennedys to produce results.37 “We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter,” Robert McNamara was later to say.38
THESE “NUTTY schemes” were exposed publicly for the first time thirteen years later by the Church Committee—the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. Its hearings in 1975 would do irrevocable damage to Lansdale’s reputation.
