The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  Especially damning was an “example of Lansdale’s perspicacity” sarcastically cited by the CIA veteran Thomas Parrott. He related to incredulous committee members a plan Lansdale had developed for a U.S. submarine to surface near the Cuban coast and fire star shells into the sky in order to convince Cubans “that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and that Christ was against Castro.” Parrott said that “by this time Lansdale was something of a joke in many quarters and somebody dubbed this Elimination by Illumination,” a catchy nickname that stuck to Lansdale thereafter like a tropical rash.39 In response, Lansdale indignantly wrote to Senator Church, “I assure you that this is absolutely untrue. I never had such a plan nor proposed such a plan.”40 In private, he called Parrott a “jerk” and a “real psycho case” for spreading this “weirdo” tale.41

  However, a document declassified long after Lansdale’s death and not previously cited by any other author makes clear that, notwithstanding Lansdale’s protestations, this story was mostly true. On October 15, 1962, Lansdale wrote a memorandum on “Illumination by Submarine.” It proposed firing “star shells from a submarine to illuminate the Havana area” after dark on November 2, All Souls’ Day, in order “to gain extra impact from Cuban superstitions.” The memo did not mention the Second Coming, but it did suggest that the star shells could be coupled with a CIA-generated “rumor inside Cuba, about portents signifying the downfall of the regime and the growing strength of the resistance.”42

  By the time this and other Cold War schemes were exposed in the 1970s, at a time of détente with the Soviet Union and an opening to China, they seemed ludicrous and inexplicable. How could grown men seriously have considered such puerile ideas? The answer can be found in the history of the OSS, which gave Lansdale his start in intelligence work. The ethos of the OSS, as we have seen, was “Woe to the officer who turned down a project because, on its face, it seemed ridiculous,” and that was Lansdale’s motto too. His deputy Sam Wilson recalled that Lansdale “was always coming up with outlandish ideas. He would release them like clay pigeons, and they’d systematically get shot down. One of them would sprout wings and fly away and be a real pigeon.”43 But while Lansdale dreamed up a few madcap schemes for Mongoose, he was hardly the only or even the main culprit.

  Long before Lansdale was assigned to work on Cuba, CIA officers in 1960 had come up with brainstorms such as slipping Castro a box of cigars contaminated “with some sort of chemical” that would lead him to “make a public spectacle of himself” or feeding him a depilatory drug to make his beard—supposedly a source of his power—fall out.44 It was almost as if the Marx Brothers had been put in charge of America’s premier intelligence agency. Once Mongoose got under way, the flow of far-fetched ideas turned into a deluge. Among the discarded ideas was a plan submitted on January 30, 1962, by Brigadier General William H. Craig, the Defense Department representative to Mongoose, for Operation Bounty, “a system of financial rewards commensurate with position and stature, for killing or delivering alive known Communists.” The proposed bounty system was $100,000 for Cuban government officials, $97,950 for foreign Communists, $45,000 for block leaders, and so on down the line, culminating in an offer of a mere two-centavo reward “for the delivery of Castro.” This was not a serious assassination or kidnapping plan but rather a propaganda ploy to indicate how worthless the Maximum Leader was.45 “I tabled it,” Lansdale later said. “I did not think that was something that should be seriously undertaken.”46

  Undeterred by Lansdale’s failure to embrace Operation Bounty, General Craig submitted numerous other brainstorms, each complete with its own catchy code name. Operation Free Ride: “Create unrest and dissension among the Cuban people . . . by airdropping valid Pan American or KLM one-way airline tickets good for passage to Mexico City, Caracas, etc.” Operation Good Times: “To disillusion the Cuban population with Castro image by distribution of fake photographic material . . . such as an obese Castro with two beauties in any situation desired, ostensibly within a room in the Castro residence, lavishly furnished, and a table brimming over with the most delectable Cuban food with an underlying caption (appropriately Cuban) such as ‘My ration is different.’ ”47 An Air Force lieutenant colonel assigned to work with the CIA in Miami came up with an even more outlandish idea in response to news that there was a shortage of toilet paper and sanitary napkins in Cuba. He suggested that the CIA air-drop toilet paper into Cuba with pictures on alternate sheets of Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev to “drive Castro mad.”48

  A more sinister plot, known as Operation Northwoods, was submitted by General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It laid out a host of “pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba,” such as having friendly Cubans in Cuban army uniforms attack the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; sabotaging an empty U.S. ship in the harbor and blaming Cuba in a “ ‘Remember the Maine’ incident” (the United States had declared war on Spain in 1898 after a naval ship called the Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana harbor); or carrying out “a terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington” that could be blamed on Castro. The U.S. armed forces could respond to such provocations, the chiefs gleefully recommended, by commencing “large scale United States military operations.”49 It is hard to imagine a more outlandish or distasteful document, redolent of the ruse that Hitler used on August 31, 1939, to start World War II: Wehrmacht soldiers in Polish uniforms attacked a German radio station on the border with Poland. That the Joint Chiefs would seriously offer these suggestions shows that Lansdale was neither the only one to fall victim to the fevered atmosphere of the day nor even the worst sufferer.

  AFTER HAVING sifted through various ideas to topple Castro, Lansdale on February 20, 1962, produced a detailed, if delusional, plan.50 The operation was supposed to start in March and culminate in October with what Lansdale described as the “touchdown play”: 51 Castro’s overthrow. How on earth could Lansdale expect the weak and divided opposition to prevail within less than a year? He prided himself on being unafraid to tell unpleasant truths “point blank” to his superiors,52 and he often had in Vietnam, but when it came to Cuba he succumbed to the temptation to tell his superiors what they wanted to hear. In his own defense, the best that Lansdale could say was: “I was hopeful and I put it down as a date without believing myself that it was a firm date—it was a prospective date of the early fall of 1962.”53

  The only realistic way that Castro could have been toppled that fast was through an American military intervention. That is why Lansdale demanded an “early policy decision” on the fundamental question: “If conditions and assets permitting a revolt are achieved in Cuba, and if U.S. help is required to sustain this condition, will the U.S. respond promptly with military force to aid the Cuban revolt?”54 The answer was that President Kennedy was no more willing in early 1962 than he had been a year earlier, during the Bay of Pigs invasion, to wage open war against Castro. Therefore the Special Group (Augmented) directed that Lansdale scale back his plans, putting the focus for the time being on “the acquisition of intelligence.”55

  Assigned to take charge of intelligence gathering was one of the CIA’s oddest officers: William King Harvey.

  PRESIDENT KENNEDY had teased Ed Lansdale about being in the mold of James Bond. Lansdale told the president that he was no James Bond, but he had the “American 007” available if the president wanted to meet him. Not surprisingly, JFK did. So Lansdale brought Bill Harvey to the White House. Just as they were about to enter the Oval Office, Lansdale remembered that Harvey always went about heavily armed. “Are you carrying a gun?” he asked. Harvey said he was. Lansdale told him not to pull it out; he was liable to be shot by the Secret Service. Lansdale discreetly went over to a Secret Service agent and told him about the situation. Harvey then slowly pulled his pistol out of a shoulder holster and handed it to the Secret Service man. “Wait!” Lansdale said. “Don’t you usually carry another gu
n too?” Harvey thereupon pulled out an automatic that had been tucked into his waistband in the small of his back.

  When Harvey finally entered the Oval Office, JFK must have wondered whether there had been some mistake. Was it possible that, as the journalist David Martin wrote, “this red-faced, pop-eyed, bullet-headed, pear-shaped man advancing on him with a ducklike strut that was part waddle and part swagger” was really the “American 007”?56 The disparity with the British super-agent, who was portrayed on the screen for the first time that year by the suave Scottish actor Sean Connery, was striking. But there was a deeper similarity that even Kennedy might not have recognized. And it was not just that Harvey, like Bond, was a prodigious drinker and womanizer—he liked to brag that he never went a day without “having” a woman.57 Like 007, Bill Harvey also had a “license to kill,” granted to him, perhaps unwittingly, by the president himself.

  Harvey was a small-town lawyer from Indiana and a former FBI agent. The trim and elegant Ivy Leaguers who dominated the CIA looked down upon him as an ignorant and uncultured gumshoe.58 But his police skills came in handy when he uncovered the British double agent Kim Philby, precisely the sort of upper-class snob whom he resented.59 On the strength of this achievement, he was transferred in 1952 to become chief of the CIA’s base in West Berlin, on the front lines of the Cold War. He didn’t speak a word of German and drank so heavily that he served martinis in water goblets, but he pulled off one of the CIA’s most celebrated intelligence coups when he supervised the construction of a secret tunnel into East Berlin designed to tap into Soviet communications. Operation Gold operated for eleven months in 1955–56, producing warehouses full of intercepts. Only later did the CIA learn that the KGB, because of a mole in MI6, knew about the operation the whole time, raising the disquieting suspicion that the tunnel had been used to feed the CIA disinformation. But even if the Berlin tunnel, known internally as “Harvey’s hole,” was not quite the success it had seemed at first blush, its inglorious end did not hurt Harvey’s career. He returned to Washington in 1959 to become head of the CIA’s Division D, charged with breaking into foreign embassies to steal secret codes.60

  Early in 1961, Harvey was approached by Dick Bissell, the CIA’s operations chief, and told to develop “Executive Action capability,” a euphemism for assassination. Bissell made clear that this request came from the top. Harvey knew better than to inquire too closely. (Years later, Bissell testified that his orders had come from McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and that they “would not have given such encouragement unless they were confident it would meet with the president’s approval.”)61 Harvey duly developed a program known as ZRRIFLE to give the White House what it wanted. In the process, he inherited an ongoing plot to use mobsters with Cuban business interests—specifically Johnny Rosselli of Las Vegas and Salvatore “Sam” Giancana of Chicago—to bump off Castro. To make the situation even more bizarre, Giancana shared a mistress with the president, Judith Campbell Exner, until J. Edgar Hoover found out and made Kennedy end the relationship.62

  Harvey ran this troubled, and troubling, operation once he became the CIA’s representative to Mongoose and the head of the CIA’s Task Force W, charged with overthrowing Castro. (The W—Harvey’s choice—was in honor of William Walker, an American adventurer who had ruled Nicaragua in 1856–57.)63 But Harvey did not tell Lansdale what he was up to. Everything was on a strictly “need to know” basis, and Harvey did not think that Lansdale, as an outsider, needed to know. When Lansdale tried to get information, the CIA man turned “monosyllabic”—“I got yes and no types of answers and very brief ones,” Lansdale said.64 All Harvey would tell him was “Everything’s under control.” In frustration, Lansdale would say to Harvey, “I’m not the enemy. You can talk to me.” Once, when Lansdale was talking with Harvey and a phone call came in, Harvey began talking on the phone in code. “After a while I caught on and realized he was talking about me,” Lansdale said. “The son of a bitch.”65

  Such was the cult of secrecy that Harvey was mortified when Lansdale sent around a Mongoose policy paper that, among other options, listed the “liquidation of leaders.” This was done in response to a suggestion made at an August 10, 1962, Special Group (Augmented) meeting by Robert McNamara, who subsequently was to deny knowledge of any assassination plots.66 As soon as he saw the memo, Harvey immediately called Lansdale’s office and lectured a CIA liaison officer on “the inadmissibility and stupidity of putting this type of comment in writing in such a document.” Shortly thereafter Lansdale sent around a revised copy of the memo that excluded the offending words.67 Needless to say, Harvey objected not to assassinating Castro but rather to mentioning the operation in print.

  This episode confirms what earlier experience in Vietnam, where Lansdale had delivered $57,000 to Diem to “get rid of” the sect leader Ba Cut, had already indicated: Lansdale was not averse, if necessary, to assassination as a tool of foreign policy. But in this case he did not know that an assassination plot was already under way and was dubious about its utility; he feared that if Fidel were killed, he would be replaced by Raúl Castro or Che Guevara, both doctrinaire Marxists, and “we might very well [wind up] in something much worse.”68 Years later, Lansdale was to write, probably truthfully, to one of his brothers, “On the Castro assassination thing, my conscience was very clean.”69

  The obsession with “deniability” ensured that there was never anything in writing tying the Kennedys to the planned assassination of Castro, but all of the CIA officers involved were convinced that they were carrying out the White House’s sotto voce desire. Richard Helms said, “I believe it was the policy at the time to get rid of Castro and if killing him was one of the things that was to be done in this connection, that was within what was expected. . . . No member of the Kennedy administration, as I recall it, ever told me that it was proscribed.”70 In the climate of the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, that which was not expressly prohibited was implicitly permitted.

  THE CIA’s Miami station, JMWAVE, became in short order its second-largest outpost in the entire world, behind only the new headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which had opened in the fall of 1961. Housed on the University of Miami’s sprawling South Campus, under the cover name of Zenith Technical Enterprises, JMWAVE grew to as many as six hundred personnel headed by the “blond ghost,” as the young and dashing station chief, Ted Shackley, would be nicknamed. Another two hundred or so CIA employees toiled for Task Force W at Langley.71

  JMWAVE had more than a hundred cars under lease and so many boats, used to ferry agents and supplies to Cuba, that it controlled the third largest navy in the Caribbean, after the United States and Cuba. It operated an archipelago of safe houses and training sites across south Florida. Some fifteen thousand Cubans were connected with JMWAVE.72 Dozens of Cuban exile groups were setting up shop in the Miami area, many with CIA backing. Miami came to resemble “wartime Casablanca,” in the words of two reporters, who noted that it “swarmed with spies, counterspies, exiled dictators, Mafia executives, refugees, entertainers, countesses, smugglers, gamblers, fortune-tellers, gun runners, soldiers of fortune, fugitives, and loudly dressed tourists—many pursuing possibly criminal ends against the garish backdrop of Miami Beach.”73

  Lansdale was impressed by the CIA’s operations when he visited Miami in June 1962. He called it “a splendid effort . . . within present guidelines.”74 But while Mongoose was generating considerable activity, its operational results were more meager.

  AT THE end of July 1962, Lansdale took stock of Phase I. William Harvey reported that the CIA had met its intelligence targets by establishing “inside Cuba 59 controlled Cuban agents and 31 third country controlled agents.” In addition, 169 lower-quality agents were “producing intermittent intelligence reports,” and an interrogation center set up in Opa-Locka to debrief Cuban refugees was generating eight hundred reports a month. No sabotage had taken place to date, but the CIA had infiltrated eleven sabotage teams into Cuba.75 The Defens
e Department, for its part, had completed detailed contingency planning for a military intervention that would involve a quarter of a million troops.76

  Under Lansdale’s prodding, the CIA had come up with a symbol for the Cuban resistance: Gusano Libre (Free Worm). Castro had denigrated his enemies as “worms”; the CIA hoped to turn a term of derision into “a symbol of resistance and pride.” Cartoons were commissioned and mailed to Cuban households showing a smirking worm cutting electrical wires and spilling tacks in front of a jeep carrying Castro’s troops.77 Soon to come were “Gusano Libre pins, armbands, seals, pencils, balloons, etc.,” which could be delivered to Cuba via helium-filled balloons launched from a chartered ship in international waters.78 A State Department official expressed well-justified skepticism about “whether ‘worms of the world unite’ will cause people to revolt,” but such doubts were ignored in the heat of the moment.79

  Bill Harvey concluded that, based on what the CIA now knew, it would be feasible to incite a revolt by late 1963, a year behind Lansdale’s original schedule, “provided the Cubans could be assured . . . their revolt would be supported by U.S. intervention.”80 But there was still no sign that the Kennedy administration would make such a commitment. In planning for Phase II of Operation Mongoose, the Special Group (Augmented) ruled out options that “would commit us to deliberate military intervention,” while acknowledging that absent such intervention “we perceive no likelihood of an overthrow of the government by internal means.” “For the time being,” Maxwell Taylor wrote, “we favor a somewhat more aggressive program than the one carried out in Phase I, wherein we continue to press for intelligence, attempt to hurt the local regime as much as possible on the economic front and work further to discredit the regime locally and abroad.” “Higher authority,” meaning President Kennedy, approved these guidelines on August 20, 1962.81