Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

Lansdale’s grotesque vampire stunt later became notorious in the Philippines, with one journalist writing in 1986 that the tale “makes Filipinos vomit. Lansdale would never dare desecrate the body of a white American…. But not the Filipinos, who are dung, who are of an inferior race and whose bodies may be desecrated, drained of blood and left to rot in the jungles.”

  Lansdale never attempted anything so grisly in Cuba. But his grab bag of raids, propaganda tricks, and psychological war stunts—including his plan to stage a Second Coming of Christ by having a U.S. submarine off the Cuba coast fire some star shells into the sky, thereby inciting Catholics on the island to rise up and overthrow Castro—fell ludicrously short of endangering the Havana regime. It was one thing to send the primitive Huks scurrying in the Philippines jungle. It was quite another to unseat the brilliant and charismatic Fidel Castro, whose rule was growing steadily stronger through his popular social reforms and his increasingly sophisticated repressive machinery.

  CIA officials loathed Lansdale, whom they derided as a “con man” and a “mystic,” fearing that he would cut them out of the Cuba account, which was becoming the government’s biggest, most lavishly financed battlefront in the Cold War. They connived to find ways of bringing him down, and were quick to point out Mongoose’s notable lack of results.

  Bobby Kennedy was forced to acknowledge Mongoose’s obvious misfires, but he stuck with the program through most of 1962, until the October missile crisis highlighted its utter failure. The operation served the Kennedys’ purpose that year. As the Democrats headed toward the midterm congressional elections in November, the brothers were under sharp pressure to prevent Cuba from becoming an explosive issue. The Luce press, the media’s leading champion of Cold War machismo, kept up a steady drumbeat that year to get tough on Castro, starting with a January 19 Life magazine editorial that warned JFK he must take strong unilateral action against this “captured beachhead [of] Communist imperialism” if our Latin allies proved too timid to act. Meanwhile, Barry Goldwater was denouncing the administration’s “do-nothing policy toward Cuba,” and restive Cuban exiles were charging that President Kennedy was secretly settling for coexistence with Castro. As his brother’s political guardian, Bobby realized that Mongoose at least provided the president some cover. It gave the appearance that the administration was not simply ignoring Castro, as Goodwin had advised, but was now taking the offensive.

  The Kennedys were aware that the calls for an all-out U.S. military invasion of Cuba would grow louder as the November elections drew closer. As Admiral Burke prepared to leave the Navy in summer 1961, eased out by the administration he had come to revile, JFK had called him into the Oval Office to debrief him about Cuba. The president surely realized that Burke was soon to become a political thorn in his side and he wanted to hear what his line of attack on Cuba would be. “He asked me if I thought we would have to go into Cuba,” Burke later recalled. “I said yes. He asked whether we could take Cuba easily. I said yes, but it was getting more and more difficult. He asked what did I think would happen if we attacked. I said all hell would break loose but that some day we would have to do it.” By the following year, Goldwater was declaring that “something must be done about Cuba…if it takes our military, I wouldn’t hesitate to use it.”

  President Kennedy had no intention of invading Cuba. But he and his brother knew that to do nothing in the fevered climate of the day would be political suicide. So they settled on the middle option, Operation Mongoose, as the safest. Picking an ad man like Lansdale to run it made perfect sense. The operation was “mostly for show,” griped the CIA’s point man on Cuba, Bill Harvey. As the more savvy CIA officials undoubtedly realized, that was the point. Lansdale’s Cuba show, starbursts and all, was supposed to dazzle the American people. It would reassure them that something was being done. Polls showed that the public—poked and prodded by a media whose belligerence rivaled that of the Hearst press in the “Remember the Maine!” era—did indeed want something done. But, fortunately for the Kennedys, Americans stopped short of demanding war. So the Kennedys kept the Pentagon and CIA in check, while assuaging the public’s vague anxieties about Cuba by fruitlessly harassing the Castro regime.

  CIA and Pentagon officials were not fooled or assuaged. They knew that Operation Mongoose had no chance of succeeding and that a military invasion was the only way to remove the “humiliating” Communist outpost in the Caribbean, as Goldwater called it. For the rest of the Kennedy administration, military leaders and intelligence officials would strain and conspire to force the president to take this drastic step, as they had during the Bay of Pigs debacle. And their anger and frustration steadily grew as the Kennedys kept deflecting their bellicose pressures.

  On July 18, 1962 CIA director John McCone dined with Bobby, using the occasion to urge tough action on Cuba. McCone had already advised RFK that “Cuba was our most serious problem. I also added, in my opinion, Cuba was the key to all of Latin America; if Cuba succeeds, we can expect most of Latin America to fall.” Over dinner, the CIA chief drove home these points. But Kennedy was not buying McCone’s argument. Bobby acknowledged that the Mongoose effort was “disappointing” so far, but he could not be persuaded that the United States should unleash its full military might against Havana. “He urged intensified effort but seemed inclined to let the situation ‘worsen’ before recommending drastic action,” a discouraged McCone later wrote in his notes on the dinner.

  In the ideological war to define the Kennedy administration, which broke out soon after the president was laid to rest in Arlington and continues to this day, national security officials insisted that the Kennedy brothers were “out of control” on Cuba, pushing them to take absurd measures against Castro like the Mongoose folly. This would become the standard version of the Kennedys’ Cuba policy in countless books, TV news shows, and documentaries—it was rash, obsessive, treacherous, even murderous. But this is not an accurate picture of Kennedy policy. What in truth bothered national security hard-liners was not how “out of control” the brothers were on Cuba—it was how in control they were. They were enraged by the way that Bobby Kennedy, and eccentric lieutenants like Lansdale, were installed over them. And they were infuriated by the restrictions imposed on their military ambitions. Frustrated in their campaign to declare war on Cuba, intelligence officials declared war instead on the Kennedys, particularly the insufferable kid brother who was put in charge of supervising them. And without telling either the president or the attorney general, they took another ominous step. They renewed their sinister contract with the Mafia to eliminate Fidel Castro.

  ON A BRIGHT SPRING afternoon, Cynthia Helms sits in the sunroom of her comfortable home in a leafy Washington neighborhood near Battery Kemble Park. She is surrounded by photos of her late husband, Richard, who died in his sleep in their upstairs bedroom in 2002 at age eighty-nine. There are framed shots of Helms with every president he served—with the notable exception of Kennedy. Late in the administration, the CIA man realized he didn’t have one of the “customary” autographed pictures of JFK, and he phoned Kenny O’Donnell at the White House to get one. But three days later, Kennedy was dead.

  Cynthia Helms’s hair, once a striking red, is now cloud white. She wears a no-nonsense outfit this afternoon—light cotton blouse and tan slacks. She is a bright, well-read, unflappable woman. On a side table is a copy of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Saturday.

  During World War II she served her native England as a WREN (Women’s Royal Naval Service). Afterward she married a Scottish surgeon and “went directly with him to the Mayo Clinic, where I cried for months” when she realized she had made a mistake. She gave birth to four children, then divorced her husband, and moved to Washington, D.C., where she met Helms at a party at the Lebanese embassy, marrying him in 1968. She remained married to Helms the rest of his life, throughout his controversial career as CIA director and later ambassador to Iran—no easy task. “I nearly wrote a book about CIA wives,” she says. “I think they
had a really difficult time. You go to a foreign country and your husband’s gone all night and you don’t know where he is. And you can’t ask. There were many divorces.”

  But she learned to accommodate her husband’s private ways. She knew when to press him and when not to—like the days he came home from the office with what she called his “Oriental look—totally inscrutable.” It was better not to ask him anything those evenings. Her husband was “terribly discreet.” And drinking wouldn’t loosen his tongue, as it did with many ginswilling CIA old boys. “He just had a martini on Friday nights—one martini,” she says. “Very disciplined.”

  But Helms did not conceal his true feelings from his wife about Robert Kennedy, even though the spymaster had long since stopped working for him when they met and Kennedy would die the year the couple was wed. “My husband was not particularly an admirer of Robert Kennedy’s,” says Cynthia Helms with British understatement. “He felt he was obsessed with Cuba. He was just obsessed. It was very hard for people in the government to handle.” Helms also thought Kennedy was a phony, says his widow. By the end of his life, Kennedy was widely admired for being one of the few white politicians in racially polarized America who could cross lines and appeal to diverse audiences. But Helms was disdainful. “He really didn’t feel that Bobby was—how can I put it? He thought his interest in civil rights was political.”

  So strong was the animus of top CIA officials like Helms against Robert Kennedy that it outlasted both men’s lives. Revulsion for the Kennedys, and for Bobby in particular, would be channeled by aging Helms associates like CIA veteran Sam Halpern, whose disparaging remarks about the reign of Camelot were widely quoted in history books and documentaries until his own death in 2005.

  Richard Helms effectively took over the CIA in February 1962 when his bitter rival, Dick Bissell, finally walked the plank for the Bay of Pigs and Helms replaced him as covert operations chief. It was the agency’s number two post, but Helms—who had served under Allen Dulles in the OSS—had the same proprietary sense about the CIA that his old boss did and he quickly overshadowed Dulles’s replacement, John McCone, as the real center of power at Langley. For the rest of the Kennedy presidency, Helms was the key intelligence figure with whom Robert Kennedy engaged. While Helms treated McCone as a harmless front man—a white-haired, well-groomed CEO type who “stepped straight from central casting in Hollywood,” as he later wrote in his posthumously published 2003 memoir—he regarded Bobby as his true rival for leadership of the spy agency.

  Like most of the CIA’s upper ranks, Helms was a product of WASP affluence and entitlement. The grandson of a prominent international banker and the son of an Alcoa executive, he was raised in Europe and educated alongside the future shah of Iran at the fashionable Le Rosey School in Switzerland. After graduating from Williams College as “the most likely to succeed,” he married the heiress to the Barbasol shaving fortune, but this first match ended in divorce. He was pursuing a career in journalism, the highlight of which was landing an interview with Hitler as a young Berlin correspondent for the United Press, when World War II broke out and he was recruited into the intelligence world. Tall, well-dressed, his thinning hair slicked straight back, Helms carried himself with a supremely self-confident air. He was a fixture of the Georgetown salons and tennis courts, where he worked the Washington press and charmed his dinner partners. “A former foreign correspondent, he observes much and can recall precisely what few American husbands ever note in the first place—what gown each woman wore to dinner and whose shoulder strap was out of place,” noted the New York Times.

  Helms viewed the younger Kennedy as a cunning political enemy who had to be carefully monitored and managed. He smoldered as the attorney general poked his nose into agency affairs and barraged him with directives. Helms resented it when Kennedy abruptly ordered him to drive in to Washington from Virginia to attend Mongoose meetings at 9:30 every morning. “Given the travel time involved in getting about in Washington at that hour,” he later sniffed, “there seemed to be more than a whiff of a disciplinary flavor in this decision.”

  Helms dismissed the Mongoose sabotage efforts as no “more than pinpricks” against Castro and he bridled at Kennedy’s “hammering us for results.” He later complained that under Bobby’s “relentless” reign, he was “getting my ass beaten. You should have enjoyed the experience of Bobby Kennedy rampant on your back.” While thrashing the spymaster’s behind, Kennedy had only “a slight idea what was involved in organizing a secret intelligence operation,” Helms bitterly concluded. The espionage chief grimly considered his dilemma: He was saddled with an obnoxious brat of an overseer who had a direct line to his older brother in the White House—and both of them seemed determined to “upend” the intelligence agency he was dedicated to protect, while leaving Castro safely in power.

  RFK had a similar disregard for Dick Helms. “I didn’t trust Helms and I don’t think Bob did either,” said John Seigenthaler. “Bob would make snide remarks about him. I think the Kennedys thought they could energize and breathe fresh air into damn near every agency in the government. Maybe it was idealistic. But I think Bob in particular believed it. He was shaking up everything. Still, there were a couple places where the bureaucracy was entrenched and impenetrable. Bob didn’t think there was any way to break through the crust of the CIA. That only meant to him that they should not be trusted.”

  Dick Helms was a smooth enough bureaucrat to know how to contain his bitter resentment of the president’s meddling brother. But the man he put in charge of the agency’s Cuba operations lacked Helms’s knack for dissembling. Bill Harvey was a hard-drinking, ill-tempered former FBI man from the Midwest known for strutting around with a revolver stuffed in his waistband. When he took over the CIA’s Miami-based Cuba operation, he named it in typically cocky fashion “Task Force W” after the nineteenth century soldier of fortune William Walker who seized Nicaragua as his private empire and was later executed by a Honduran firing squad. Squat-figured and bug-eyed, due to a thyroid condition, and often drunk, Harvey had nonetheless made a name for himself as a daring spymaster in postwar Berlin by digging a tunnel underneath Soviet lines to eavesdrop on the enemy. (The fact that the Russians discovered the tunnel before they suffered a significant intelligence setback did not tarnish Harvey’s reputation within a Cold War Washington hungry for espionage heroes.) When the James Bond–bedazzled JFK asked to meet the CIA agent who came closest to 007, Lansdale walked Harvey over to the White House. The bemused president asked the pear-shaped, pigeon-toed, balding agent if he had as much luck with women as Bond.

  Privately, Harvey called the Kennedy brothers “fags” but he reserved a special loathing for Bobby, whom he routinely referred to as “the little fucker.” Often admonished by the attorney general for making too much “noise” with his Cuba raids, he considered the Kennedys cowards who were not serious about removing Castro. “After Bill Harvey takes over in early ’62, we did have a small success…maybe we knocked out a transformer,” recalled Sam Halpern, who served as Harvey’s Task Force W assistant. “It was a minor thing but it made headlines in Cuba and it made the headlines in Miami…and the attorney general gets on the phone to Bill Harvey…Bill gets chewed out by Bobby Kennedy on the phone. Harvey tells the attorney general that people are going to talk about it; it’s going to be on radio, it’s going to be on television. That’s the facts of life. You can’t hide these things.”

  As time passed, Harvey grew increasingly irritated by Kennedy’s hands-on management and was not afraid to show it. RFK and Lansdale, whom Harvey and his aides dismissed as a “screwball,” sometimes paid visits to Task Force W’s headquarters, which were housed in former Navy barracks on the University of Miami’s secluded south campus. Harvey made it clear that they were not welcome. During one of his visits to the JM/WAVE station, as the sprawling center of covert anti-Castro operations was codenamed, Kennedy ripped a piece a paper out of an office teletype, but Harvey immediately grabbed it from
his hands. “You have no right to read that,” he growled at Kennedy in his gravelly voice. On another occasion, an impatient Kennedy complained that Harvey’s station was not infiltrating enough operatives into Cuba, offering to train more men himself at his Hickory Hill estate if necessary. “What will you teach them, sir?” the CIA man shot back. “Babysitting?”

  Nothing the Kennedys did, short of launching a massive U.S. military invasion of the island, would have pleased CIA officials like Helms and Harvey. This was, they believed with good reason, the only certain way of ousting the Castro regime. But the Kennedys would do little more than engage in pointless “boom and bang” exercises, in Halpern’s dismissive phrase, and play around with far-fetched coup schemes involving exile leaders who had no serious chance of replacing Castro. Bobby had a weakness for these brave if deluded Don Quixotes, often driving CIA officials to distraction by going around them and conferring directly with these Cuban plotters. And he was especially fond of exile leaders who rejected CIA sponsorship, vowing to take back their country by themselves.

  One such man was Ernesto Betancourt, the former Washington emissary of Castro’s revolutionary movement who had tried to warn JFK against the doomed Bay of Pigs mission through Kennedy press pal Charles Bartlett. In 1962 Betancourt fell in with one of many Cuban exile groups with visions of toppling Castro before Christmas, the ELC (Ejercito Libertador de Cuba). That September he met with Bobby Kennedy, exciting the attorney general with his talk of sparking a popular uprising in Cuba by the end of the month. And yes, this remarkable feat could be accomplished without the CIA, an agency, he bitterly told a receptive Bobby, that has typically “relegated Cubans to the status of tools, while the Americans called the signals.” Betancourt painted a picture of a Cuba in full revolt: ELC slogans splashed on walls all over the island, bridges and factories blown to pieces, Castro’s militia under fire throughout the countryside. It was then that Betancourt’s guerrillas would land on Cuba’s beaches and infiltrate the island, to begin coordinating the final assault on Havana. And this time they would be successful, unencumbered by the inept leadership of the CIA.