The Ghost

by Jefferson Morley

  CUBA

  ANGLETON WAS MORE INTERESTED in Cuba. It was closer to home and more pressing. In his view, Israel was a friendly country, while Cuba had fallen to the enemy. Fidel Castro, the leader of the national uprising that ousted pro-American dictator Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, had been consolidating power ever since. Unlike his liberal friends, Angleton was immune to the idea that Castro was a nationalist and a social reformer with whom the United States could do business. Angleton thought Castro was a Marxist-Leninist who predictably dispensed with bourgeois formalities like due process and jury trials in favor of putting his class enemies before a firing squad en masse.

  The CIA had been expelled from Havana, a city where the Agency had once had a free hand. David Phillips, a rising star of the clandestine service, had to flee the island when the Cubans learned he was a CIA man. Havana, once a playground for American tourists and investors, had become inhospitable to the CIA, while the KGB was building an operational platform in the western hemisphere for the first time.

  In the last year of the Eisenhower administration, Angleton argued for a more aggressive U.S. policy. He found a sympathetic audience in Vice President Richard Nixon.

  “Nixon is taking a very dominating position on Cuba,” Angleton told an FBI friend in January 1960. He reported that he had “held lengthy discussions with Nixon and other officials concerning a ‘getting tough’ policy, which will be centered around possible U.S. Government refusal to purchase Cuban sugar.”90

  The struggle for Cuba was a turning point for the CIA. For perhaps the first time in the Agency’s thirteen-year history, the CIA men faced organized public opposition from their fellow citizens. On April 6, 1960, The New York Times published a full-page advertisement with the headline WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING IN CUBA?

  The ad criticized U.S. news coverage of the Cuban Revolution as biased. Signatories included French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as novelists Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Dan Wakefield, and Truman Capote, the poet Allen Ginsberg, and the scientist Linus Pauling. The letter was also signed by leading African American intellectuals, among them historian John Henrik Clarke and civil rights activist Robert F. Williams.

  The advertisement announced the creation of a Fair Play for Cuba Committee, dedicated to the proposition that the Cuban revolution posed no threat to the United States. The FPCC was the brainchild of Robert Taber, a CBS news correspondent who had obtained a rare exclusive interview with Castro in 1957,91 and Richard Gibson, an African American CBS correspondent who was also sympathetic to Castro.92

  The FPCC was inundated with more than a thousand letters from people ready to take action. Across the South, black college students fighting Jim Crow–era laws were inspired by Castro’s summary abolition of racial segregation laws in Cuba. Within six months, the FPCC had an estimated seven thousand members in twenty-seven chapters and forty campus affiliates.93 The FPCC was one of the first manifestations of the popular oppositional movements that would become known as the New Left.

  The CIA was roused to action. Two days after the ad appeared, Bill Harvey, who had been called back from Berlin to take over the anti-Castro operation, bragged to FBI liaison Sam Papich that “this Agency has derogatory information on all individuals listed in the attached advertisement.”94

  From the start, the CIA targeted the FPCC. Within four years the Agency would succeed in destroying it.

  * * *

  WHEN ANGLETON RETURNED TO his desk in early 1961, he was apprised of the latest development in the Cuba operation. The Agency was training a brigade of fifteen hundred exiles at a ranch in Guatemala. They would sail to Cuba, declare a beachhead, and call on the people to rise up against the Castro government. Under the combination of military attack and diplomatic isolation, the CIA expected the young Cuban leader would fold, as Arbenz had in Guatemala in 1954.

  President Kennedy had been briefed on the plan by Allen Dulles and the deputy director of the CIA, Charles Cabell. Preoccupied with confronting the Soviet Union in Europe, Kennedy’s only questions were whether the United States would be blamed for overthrowing Castro and whether the invaders would need U.S. air support. The answer on both points, he was told, was no. The rebels were indigenous Cubans and they needed no outside military help to prevail. JFK asked for the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who pronounced the plan sound from a military point of view.

  In the United States, public support for the Cuban leader seemed to be growing. Suddenly, Cuba was not just an issue, but a cause. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee announced the formation of a San Francisco chapter at a street rally in January 1961. To a crowd of thousands, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti read an apocalyptic homage to the young Cuban leader, whom he expected would soon be dead at the hands of the CIA. It was entitled “One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro.”95

  It’s going to be a tragedy

  I see no way out

  among the admen and slumming models

  and the brilliant snooping columnists

  who are qualified to call Castro psychotic

  because they no doubt are doctors

  and have examined him personally

  and know a paranoid hysterical tyrant when they see one

  because they have it on first hand

  from personal observation by the CIA …

  it looks like Curtains for Fidel.

  This was not Jim Angleton’s kind of poetry.

  * * *

  THE MEN OF THE CIA always underestimated Fidel Castro. In their Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, many thought he was a Latin hysteric who could be easily disposed of. This view was not held by Angleton’s colleague Dick Helms, however. As top deputy to Richard Bissell, the brainy deputy director of plans, Helms was quietly skeptical about the Agency’s plans for a coup in Cuba. Castro was no Arbenz, he said.

  “His well-propagandized enthusiasm for land reform, universal education and social change had a significant appeal to Cuban peasants and the urban working class,” Helms wrote later. “He was young, energetic, forceful and without question possessed a considerable romantic charisma.”96 Helms thought the CIA plan to overthrow him with a small invasion force was doomed to fail and that the United States would have to intervene with its own armed forces.97

  Castro had studied the CIA. His comrade in arms, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine doctor, had lived in Guatemala during the 1954 coup and seen the CIA’s tactics close-up. Castro and Guevara fully expected the United States to mount a Guatemala-style operation against them. So they took every defensive measure that Arbenz had not. They shut down radio stations and newspapers that did not support the government. They organized and armed civilian militias and neighborhood watch groups. They mobilized the population against the American invaders with a nationalist battle cry, “Patria o Muerte” (“Fatherland or Death”). They were waiting for the CIA.

  CUBAN INTRIGUE BOILING IN MIAMI AS CASTRO FOES STEP UP EFFORTS, ran the headline for an article by Tad Szulc in The New York Times in early April 1961.98

  On April 17, the ships of the CIA-trained brigade landed at a remote coastal area of Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, or Playa Girón. Castro ordered his army to the area. A Cuban air force plane bombed the ship disgorging the rebels. The invaders lost the element of surprise and were pinned down on the beach by gunfire.

  In Washington, the CIA men were frantic and disorganized. Allen Dulles had arranged to be out of the country to enhance the cover story that the Agency was not involved. Deputy Director Cabell appealed to President Kennedy for help. Kennedy, attending a gala ball in the White House, was called away from the festivities for a conference. Cabell told the tuxedo-clad president that only U.S. air support could ensure the rebels’ survival. Recalling that President Eisenhower had authorized air support in Guatemala in 1954, Angleton and most other CIA men assumed JFK would do the same.99

  Kennedy said no. He had been told no U.S. air support would be needed, and he would not authori
ze it now.

  One hundred and seventeen of the CIA-trained Cuban men were killed in the fighting. A handful escaped into the mountains. The rest, more than eleven hundred men, were taken prisoner. The battle was over less than seventy-two hours after it had begun.

  The Cuban David had defeated the American Goliath. Castro exulted and Communists crowed. The Cubans paraded the captured rebels before TV cameras. It was the most humiliating defeat in the history of the CIA and arguably the worst blow to U.S. geopolitical credibility since World War II. It was, in the words of one Agency postmortem, a “perfect failure.”100

  Publicly, Angleton would attribute the defeat to the work of Castro’s intelligence service in South Florida.

  “I think the whole Bay of Pigs failure was because of penetration,” he said. “In other words, I think that when you’re running an operation as massive as the Bay of Pigs, where journalists like Tad Szulc can learn the secrets and publish them in the New York Times, and where everybody and his mother down in Miami knew something was going on … obviously, they sent provocateurs and agents into the United States.”101

  It was a counterintelligence failure.

  * * *

  KENNEDY WAS ANGRY WITH the CIA for presenting him with an operational plan that had proved so weak, and at his generals for endorsing it. Mostly, JFK berated himself for trusting the soldiers and the spies. “I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards,” he moaned. “How could I have been so stupid?”102 In a moment of venting, he vowed “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces.”103

  For the first time since 1947, the men of the CIA had reason to fear the man in the White House. Dick Helms recalled the spring and summer of 1961 as “a busy interregnum marked with flashes of abrupt change, dampened by the anxiety most of us shared about the shape and future of the Agency.”104

  Fortunately for the CIA, Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother and now the attorney general, did not regard the defeat as insuperable. He wanted revenge.105 Upon reflection, President Kennedy rejected proposals for abolishing the clandestine service. Instead, he created a new planning cell for overthrowing Castro and assigned RFK as a member.106 As Robert Kennedy learned about the workings of the CIA’s covert operation directorate for the first time, he became convinced that the Bay of Pigs defeat could be avenged before the 1964 election. Overthrowing Castro, he told a well-attended Pentagon meeting in early 1962 “is the top priority of U.S. government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared.”107

  “HIT HIM”

  AS KENNEDY’S GOVERNMENT REGROUPED, Angleton was drawn deeper into Cuban operations. On May 4, 1961, the National Security Council tasked the Counterintelligence Staff with a new job: to cooperate with the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the coalition of anti-Castro organizations funded by the CIA. The CRC was supposed to unify the opposition to Castro’s one-party government and, when Castro was overthrown, establish a pro-American government in Havana.

  Angleton’s assignment was to “create, train, and support a highly motivated and professionally competent apolitical and career security service which will be dedicated to the preservation of the democratic form of government.” He was asked to “assign carefully selected and qualified Agency personnel to work with the service during the current and post-Castro eras.”108

  Angleton wanted to make a difference in Cuba, just as he had in Italy and Israel. Among other things, he wanted to assassinate Castro.

  * * *

  “WOULD YOU HIT HIM?” asked Bill Harvey.109

  Angleton was sitting with his longtime colleague in the familiar confines of Harvey’s Seafood Grill, along with a British friend named Peter Wright, a scientist at MI5, who would go on to write a best-selling memoir. Wright was visiting Washington on official business, and Angleton was his escort. As the three men poked at their food, they discussed the merits of murdering the president of Cuba.

  Would you hit him?

  The mood was businesslike. While Angleton and Harvey were not exactly friends, they had settled into a wary respect. Their guest, Wright, had been invited to Washington for a meeting at the National Security Agency. When Wright shared the latest innovation in British wiretapping capabilities, Harvey cursed him for not providing the information sooner. Harvey demanded to know why the CIA should trust him. The memory of being fooled by Angleton’s phony friend Kim Philby still rankled Harvey. He was a man who nursed his grudges.

  Now they were talking about the assassination of an impudent demagogue, and Harvey could not help but wonder if his guest was serious. He put it to him straight.

  Would you hit him?

  “I paused to fold my napkin,” Wright later recounted. “Waiters glided from table to table. I realized now why Harvey needed to know I could be trusted.”

  “We’d certainly have that capability,” Wright told him, “but I doubt we would use it nowadays.”

  “Why not?” Harvey asked.

  “We’re not in it anymore, Bill,” he replied, referring to the assassination business. “We got out a couple of years ago, after Suez.”

  “We’re developing a new capability in the company to handle these kinds of problems,” Harvey explained. “We’re in the market for the requisite expertise.”

  The capability was known in the CIA by the code name ZR-RIFLE, and Dulles had put Harvey in charge. With his contacts in the European crime syndicates, Harvey was thought to be most qualified for the job. In his notes for ZR-RIFLE, discovered years later by Senate investigators, he stressed that the CIA should recruit a gunman from the ranks of organized crime, and an assassin should have no roots or contacts in the place where he did the killing.110 Harvey, often caricatured as a drunken oaf, was, in fact, a meticulous planner.

  Wright, suddenly uncomfortable, tried to deflect their interest.

  “I began to feel then I had told them more than enough,” Wright wrote. “The sight of Angleton’s notebook was beginning to unnerve me. They seemed so determined, so convinced this was the way to handle Castro, and I was slightly put out that I could not help more.”

  Wright was not a sentimental man. A scientist, he had no patience for liberal pieties. As a Catholic, he had no interest in Marxist-Leninist materialism. He admired the determination of Angleton and Harvey to get rid of Castro. He also had misgivings.

  “There was a streak of ruthlessness and lawlessness about the American intelligence community, which disturbed many in the senior echelons of British intelligence,” Wright said.111

  * * *

  THE STORMY INTERREGNUM AT the CIA ended in November 1961. President Kennedy fired both Dulles and Richard Bissell for their leading role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Angleton understood the need for change, but he hated to see Dulles go.

  To replace Dulles, President Kennedy brought in an outsider, John McCone, a Republican, a corporate executive, and the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. McCone had a reputation as a no-nonsense administrator. His conservative politics would help insulate the liberal president from Republican criticism while taking final decisions out of the hands of the CIA veterans, whom Kennedy no longer trusted.

  The only consolation for Angleton was that his friend Dick Helms would succeed Bissell as deputy director of plans. As they had risen in the ranks since their OSS days, Helms had gained a reputation as a plodder, at least compared to activist officers like Frank Wisner and Bill Harvey. But his doubts about the Bay of Pigs operation had been wholly vindicated. Like many a CIA hand, Angleton thought the prudent, steady Helms would establish the sort of discipline the Agency badly needed.

  As Angleton’s stature grew, so did his penchant for running agents and operations outside of normal CIA reporting channels. Cuba was no exception. In the spring of 1961, the Israeli government sent a diplomat named Nir Baruch to serve in Havana.112 He was also an intelligence officer reporting to Amos Manor back in Israel.

  Baruch soon became Angleton’s man in Havana.

  “At a ce
rtain stage, in order to shorten the processes, the Americans supplied me with a more sophisticated coding device,” Baruch recalled. “A few times I flew to Washington and met with Angleton. On several occasions he asked me to be a courier and meet with CIA agents in Cuba, but I declined. I thought this was too dangerous.”

  * * *

  WASHINGTON CIRCA 1961 WAS a unique place in the history of the world. Never had there been a country so dominant, so wealthy, so influential, so attractive, and so feared as the United States of America. Never had the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, as well as the new multibillion-dollar intelligence agencies, the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA, been so fully funded. Never had the corporations that built the planes, submarines, and aircraft carriers been so large or so profitable. Never had the press been so trusting of the government. Never had the men who led these organizations felt so confident, so powerful.

  Yet even the most conventional and dependably conservative man in the country perceived a problem. In his farewell address on January 17, 1961, outgoing president Dwight Eisenhower talked about what he called “the military-industrial complex.” Dull as Kansas and pale as a pickle, Eisenhower looked back on the events of his own lifetime and forward to events to come. Like the man, his words were plain:

  We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts, America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

  In taking his leave, Eisenhower warned Americans of a new threat born in America’s Cold War prosperity. He referred to the network of arms manufacturers and military officers that had elevated him to supreme power. All the same, he didn’t trust it.