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

by Talbot, David

  Kennedy immediately called Helms and told him of the Betancourt plan. One can only imagine the delight with which the consummate CIA bureaucrat greeted this latest Bobby scheme to “work outside the framework” of the agency to unseat Castro. Helms and Harvey promptly moved to squelch the plan, dispatching an agent named Charles Ford to assess the Betancourt brainstorm and to inform Kennedy of its futility. Ford told RFK that “in the frank opinion of the CIA, there is little likelihood of there being 15,000 persons ready to carry out even a partially successful revolt; that CIA does not believe such a revolt will take place, and that in the unlikely event that it does occur, it will be ruthlessly and totally suppressed.” It was a harsh but accurate assessment and Kennedy was forced to accept the agency’s logic. Meanwhile, Ford reported to his CIA superiors that one of the ELC men surrounding Betancourt was tied to a suspected Castro spy who had been sent to the United States to penetrate the group and kill its leaders. This undoubtedly confirmed Helms’s and Harvey’s view of Kennedy as an amateur spook whose antics only distracted the professionals from their real work.

  Despite the enthusiasm of CIA officials for a military assault on Cuba, the agency’s own analysts took a dim view of the prospects for such an invasion. In an April 10, 1962, memo to Director McCone, Sherman Kent, chairman of the CIA’s Board of National Estimates, drew a sobering picture of what would likely happen if U.S. troops stormed the island. Over four decades later, the Kent memo still has a startling, revelatory power.

  The good news, Kent wrote McCone, is that initial resistance from Castro’s forces would melt within a few days of the U.S. invasion. Euphoria would reign as Washington promised to turn over control of the nation as soon as possible to a government that was representative of the Cuban people. Then the situation would quickly deteriorate, Kent predicted. “Substantial numbers” of Castro’s forces would survive the initial U.S. assault and “would continue a guerrilla resistance” in the country’s interior. Much of the Cuban population would support this resistance against what they would perceive as a U.S. attempt to “reimpose upon the Cuban people the yoke of ‘Yankee imperialism.’” Establishment of a pro-U.S. government would be “greatly hindered by the persistence of terroristic underground resistance in the cities” and guerrilla resistance in the countryside. “Pacification of the country, to the extent necessary to permit the development of a credible…regime, might be long delayed,” Kent noted. As a result, the U.S. military would be forced into a “prolonged” role as an occupation force, which would become a sitting target for terrorist violence. This would provoke American soldiers to take “arbitrary measures against the general population,” deepening resentments against the U.S. occupation and adding fuel to the resistance. Meanwhile, the United States’ international standing would suffer badly as a result of its unilateral military action, isolating the country from its allies in NATO and Latin America and heightening suspicions about U.S. power in the rest of the world.

  It was a nightmare scenario that would be played out more than once in America’s future. And it was precisely the quagmire that President Kennedy feared would suck him down if he followed his national security officials’ advice, first on Cuba and later on Vietnam.

  But buckets of cold water like the Kent memo did nothing to dampen the Cuba war fever in the Pentagon and CIA headquarters. The Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to have contingency plans for a Cuba invasion drawn up, none of which had the same bad ending as the Kent scenario. One of the most insidious documents ever produced by the U.S. government was delivered by General Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962. The top-secret memo, which was signed by the country’s highest military commanders, urged the administration to stage a variety of shocking incidents to create a rationale for invading Cuba. Among these were faking attacks on the U.S. military base at Guantánamo and on Latin countries such as the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua and blaming the Castro government; simulating Cuban shoot-downs of U.S. civilian and military aircraft (phony “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation,” noted the memo); and blowing up an American ship in Guantánamo Bay and pinning it on Cuba, an incident the memo compared to the mysterious explosion of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898, which helped spark the Spanish-American War.

  But the Joint Chiefs’ most cold-blooded suggestion was to mount a terror campaign in Miami and other Florida cities “and even in Washington” that would create international revulsion against the Castro regime. This violent campaign would be directed at Cuban refugees in America, the chilling memo read. “We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” The military leaders did not spell out how their exploding bombs would be limited to only wounding, not killing, their unsuspecting victims and how they could be assured that the only casualties would be innocent Cuban refugees, and not American bystanders. But the U.S. military has long been overly confident in its precision.

  There is no record of how McNamara responded to this cynical proposal by his top military officers when Lemnitzer met with him that Tuesday afternoon. But the sinister plan, which was codenamed Operation Northwoods, did not receive higher approval. When I asked him about Northwoods, McNamara said, “I have absolutely zero recollection of it. But I sure as hell would have rejected it…. I really can’t believe that anyone was proposing such provocative acts in Miami. How stupid!”

  Like the president, McNamara regarded Lemnitzer with barely disguised contempt. “McNamara’s arrogance was astonishing,” said a Lemnitzer aide. “He gave General Lemnitzer very short shrift and treated him like a schoolboy. The general almost stood at attention when he came into the room. Everything was ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir.’”

  Lemnitzer even fell afoul of fashion-conscious Jackie Kennedy. “We all thought well of him until he made the mistake of coming into the White House one Saturday morning in a sport jacket,” she contemptuously remarked, underlining how class and culture, not just politics, divided the Kennedy White House from the military.

  Lemnitzer, a far-right ideologue whose endorsement of General Edwin Walker’s paranoid indoctrination of Army troops had raised the suspicions of Senator William Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee, was equally dismissive of the Kennedy crowd. He thought their administration “was crippled not only by inexperience but also by arrogance arising from failure to recognize [their] own limitations…. The problem was simply that the civilians would not accept military judgments.”

  On March 16, three days after his meeting with McNamara, Lemnitzer was summoned by President Kennedy to the Oval Office for a discussion of Cuba strategy that was also attended by McCone, Bundy, Lansdale, and Taylor. At one point the irrepressible Lansdale began holding forth, as usual, on the improving conditions for popular revolt inside Cuba, adding that once the glorious anti-Castro revolution began, “we must be ready to intervene with U.S. forces, if necessary.” This brought an immediate reaction from Kennedy, ever alert after the Bay of Pigs about being sandbagged into a military response in Cuba. The group was not proposing that he authorize U.S. military intervention, was it? “No,” Taylor and the others immediately rushed to assure him.

  But Lemnitzer could not restrain himself. He jumped in at that moment to run Operation Northwoods up the flagpole. The general spared the president the plan’s more gruesome brainstorms, such as blowing up people on the streets of Miami and the nation’s capital and blaming it on Castro. But he informed Kennedy that the Joint Chiefs “had plans for creating plausible pretexts to use force [against Cuba], with the pretexts either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.�
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  Kennedy was not amused. He fixed Lemnitzer with a hard look and “said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of U.S. military force,” according to Lansdale’s notes on the meeting. The president icily added that Lemnitzer might find he did not have enough divisions to fight in Cuba, if the Soviets responded to his Caribbean gambit by going to war in Berlin or elsewhere.

  Despite the president’s cold reaction, the Joint Chiefs chairman persisted in his war campaign. About a month after the White House meeting, Lemnitzer convened his fellow service chiefs in “the tank,” as the JCS conference room was called. Under his direction, they hammered out a stern memo to McNamara insisting “that the Cuban problem be solved in the near future.” That would never be accomplished by waiting around for Ed Lansdale’s fairy-tale popular uprising, the memo made clear. There was only one way of getting the job done: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States.”

  Lemnitzer was wearing out Kennedy and McNamara’s patience. After a National Security Council meeting in June, the president took the general aside and told him he wanted to send him to Europe to become NATO’s new supreme allied commander. Kennedy would replace Lemnitzer as the nation’s top military man with the more amenable Max Taylor. He would have one less warmonger to harass him about Cuba.

  WHEN IT BECAME CLEAR to Richard Helms that President Kennedy was not going to take Cuba by military force, “the gentlemanly planner of assassinations,” as biographer Thomas Powers anointed him, took it upon himself to rekindle the Mafia plots against Fidel Castro. Helms did not tell the Kennedy brothers, nor did he notify his nominal superior at the CIA, John McCone. He simply ordered his Cuba man, Bill Harvey, to renew the contract on Castro. Equally frustrated by the Kennedys’ cautious handling of the Havana regime, Harvey lost no time in re-contacting his friend, Mafia emissary Johnny Rosselli.

  Just days before the agency’s Lawrence Houston and Sheffield Edwards assured Bobby Kennedy that the CIA-Mafia collaboration had been shut down, Harvey handed poison pills prepared in CIA labs to Rosselli. But the plotters apparently decided that firing at Castro with long-range rifles during one of his public appearances had more chance for success than an attempted poisoning. So soon afterwards, Harvey and Ted Shackley, head of the JM/WAVE station, rented a U-Haul truck, packed it full of rifles, handguns, and explosives, and drove it one night to a dark parking lot in Miami, where Rosselli stood waiting in the shadows. The CIA men handed the mobster the keys to the truck. He in turn passed the weapons to henchmen from the Cuban exile world, including men he had done business with ever since the lurid glory days of Batista. The assassination conspiracy against Castro—a three-headed Gorgon featuring the CIA on top, flanked by the Mafia and its Cuban accomplices—was again in motion.

  This time Harvey cut out Chicago godfather Sam Giancana and Florida godfather Santo Trafficante, both of whom had been involved in the original Mafia plot. But he felt he could trust Rosselli, whose contacts with the CIA dated back to Guatemala in the 1950s, where the gangster got involved in political intrigues on behalf of gambling interests and the powerful fruit companies. Rosselli was a smooth operator, a polished link between the criminal underworld and the above-ground world of power. The two men made an odd couple—the sharply groomed and deeply tanned mobster with his alligator shoes and $2,000 watch and the rumpled, frog-faced government man in his drab brown suits. But Harvey convinced himself that Rosselli was not just a slick hoodlum from the mean streets of East Boston, but an American patriot. He gave Rosselli the false cover of an Army colonel and granted him complete access to the JM/WAVE headquarters, where the gangster met on a daily basis with CIA assassin David Morales.

  Testifying before the Church Committee, Harvey got defensive when Rosselli’s name came up. “I was not dealing with the Mafia as such, pardon my saying so,” the CIA man insisted. “I was dealing with, and only dealt with, an individual who allegedly has had contacts with the Mafia. He is charged, but not provably charged, with having been a part of the so-called Chicago Family.” Harvey sounded more like his old friend’s Mafia lawyer than a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official. He seemed all too comfortable in the criminal world. Bill Harvey was a “thug” in the blunt assessment of CIA colleague John Whitten. Former Senator Gary Hart, one of the more active members of the Church Committee, is still unnerved by the ease with which Harvey crossed into the underworld. “He became best friends with Rosselli and they vacationed together,” Hart recalled. “I find this totally bizarre…. I don’t like CIA agents who become family friends with the Mafia.” While growing up, Sally Harvey, the spy’s adopted daughter, learned to call her father’s gangster friend “Uncle Johnny.”

  In his 2003 memoir, Helms seemed to hang the CIA-Mafia rap on the conveniently deceased Harvey. Helms claimed that he was as flabbergasted as anyone else when he first heard about the plot. “After checking into it, I told Bill Harvey—who agreed entirely—to close it down,” wrote Helms. This assertion was false from beginning to end, and Helms provided no evidence to support it.

  Blaming Harvey seemed to be Helms’s fall-back position. In 1975, when Helms was brought first before the Rockefeller Commission and then the Church Committee to testify about the Castro plots, he tried to pin the blame, as he had threatened to do over breakfast with his friend Henry Kissinger, squarely on Robert Kennedy. Helms was treated gently by the Republican-run Rockefeller panel, which was stocked with members—like the resilient General Lemnitzer—who were perfectly happy to hear the Kennedys charged with Cuban treachery. But the spymaster came under tougher questioning from the Democratic-controlled Church Committee, and he was compelled to bob and weave before the senators.

  Helms appeared before the panel headed by Idaho Democrat Frank Church on a sweltering July afternoon. His testimony, which was delivered in a closed session in the Russell Senate Office Building, was a masterpiece of evasion, innuendo, and deception. “I don’t want anybody on this committee to think I am being slippery,” Helms told the senators at one point. But this is precisely what he was, as he feigned ingratiating cooperation with the legislators while twisting them into knots with bureaucratic doublespeak.

  “I never liked assassination,” Helms assured the senators, in a bid to claim the moral high ground. But they could not imagine how much pressure that Bobby Kennedy was bringing down on the agency to do something—anything—to get rid of Castro.

  “Since he was on the phone with you repeatedly, did he ever tell you to kill Castro?” Senator Church asked him point blank. “No,” Helms admitted. But he could not leave his answer as simple as that. “Not in those words, no.” He never received a direct assassination order from Kennedy, that is true, Helms acknowledged. And far be it from him “to put words in a dead man’s mouth”—that would not be “fair of me,” he said. Nonetheless, Helms got the distinct impression in conversation with Kennedy that “we have to find a way to…get rid of this fellow.” Helms simply got the “feeling that [Kennedy] would not be unhappy if [Castro] had disappeared off the scene by whatever means.”

  Helms’s testimony was filled with winks and nods about Robert Kennedy, but no proof. When pushed by the committee, Helms admitted that Kennedy had been kept in the dark about Harvey’s poison pills and guns and was deceived by the CIA when its emissaries told the attorney general that it was no longer working with the Mafia. (Harvey himself conceded to the Senate panel that if RFK had wanted to kill Castro, he, Harvey, would have been the last person that Kennedy would have put in charge of the operation.) The CIA death plots against Castro preceded the Kennedy administration, Senate investigators would conclude, and they continued long after the Kennedy presidency ended.

  When his Bobby-made-me-do-it defense began to crumble, Helms fell back on Plan B, which was apparently throwing Harvey over the side. The truth, Helms confided to the Church Committee, was that he had “very grave doubts about the wisdom” of the whole Mafia scheme.
But Harvey “tried to convince me that he had been in the FBI a long time” and this is the way G-men “handled these matters and so forth.” Besides, he really didn’t take the Harvey-Rosselli cloak and dagger stuff all that seriously anyway. “I thought that Harvey was sort of on a wild good chase, frankly.”

  As his usual mask of self-assurance began to wilt under the questioning, Helms even began to point a finger at his oblivious former boss, John McCone. Helms admitted that he and Harvey had decided to keep McCone blissfully ignorant about the Castro plots—because McCone was “taking over a new job” and the murderous intrigue was “going to look very peculiar to him.” But then he contradicted himself by charging that McCone “was involved in this up to his scuppers just the way everybody else was that was in it. I have no reason to impugn his integrity. On the other hand, I don’t understand how it was he didn’t hear about some of these things that he claims he didn’t.”

  McCone did not know about the CIA’s dark side because he did not look hard enough. But Helms also did not want him to know. This was the secret core of the agency, the inner sanctum to which only Helms—and a few other top officials whose spy service dated back to the OSS days—had access. The intelligence world was a unique realm with its own rules and codes of behavior. Helms, in his patronizing way, tried to explain this to the senators on the Church Committee. “When you establish a clandestine service [like] the Central Intelligence Agency,” he enlightened them, “you established something that was totally different from anything else in the United States government. Whether it’s right that you should have it, or wrong that you should have it, it works under different rules…than any other part of the government.”