Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case

by DiEugenio, James

  There can be little doubt that Lovett’s testimony and his relationship with Kennedy’s father helped convince JFK to fire Dulles, along with Cabell and Bissell.

  But was there something even more nefarious buried deep inside the Bay of Pigs? Something that Dulles could never, ever admit to? There were hints of it in Kirkpatrick’s report and in Arthur Schlesinger’s book A Thousand Days. In Kirkpatrick’s report he writes that the CRC (the ultimate council Hunt had formed—and then temporarily left) was held up during the invasion at an airfield in Miami, Florida. The author says they were held under “strong persuasion” while the CIA wrote the bulletins sent out under their name.99 In his book, Schlesinger is more straightforward since, on Kennedy’s orders, he actually visited them there when the operation appeared to be failing. They were held inside a safe house while, “Young American GIs, their revolvers conspicuous in holsters, were patrolling their grounds.”100 But further, as Manolo Ray told Schelsinger, they were being held incommunicado with the outside world. No information was coming into them, and they were not allowed to talk to anyone outside. When Kennedy learned of this house arrest, he was shocked. Like many other things, neither Dulles nor Bissell had told him about it.101 It was only when Schlesinger told Kennedy about their detention that they were released under his orders.

  It turns out Schlesinger was not revealing all he knew about the Cuban detention in his book. On June 9, 1961, a little less than two months after the disaster, Schlesinger wrote a memo to Richard Goodwin, another liberal White House aide whom Hunt detested. Schlesinger had been talking to Sam Halper, a New York Times journalist who specialized in Latin America at the time and had excellent contacts with the Cuban exiles. Halper told Schlesinger that the CIA had set up something called Operation 40 to run parallel with the Bay of Pigs. It was to be helmed by one Luis Sanjenis. It was named after the 40 original operatives assigned to it. But it later expanded to 70 persons. The ostensible purpose of it was to administer liberated territories inside Cuba after the invasion succeeded. But Halper had learned something different about it. The man in charge, a CIA officer named Felix, had trained the operatives in methods of third degree interrogation, torture and general terrorism. The Operation 40 group consisted of the most conservative members of the exile community. The liberal exiles came to believe that “the real purpose of Operation 40 was to ‘kill Communists,’ and”—reminiscent of the death lists in Guatemala in 1954—“after eliminating the hard-core Fidelistas [on the island], to go on to eliminate first the followers of Ray, then the followers of Varona and finally to set up a right-wing dictatorship, presumably under [Manuel] Artime,” who, as we have seen, was the one exile leader closest to Hunt both personally and politically. These suspicions were so well founded that Tony Varona later fired Sanjenis. But Sanjenis then set up his own office with CIA support.

  Picking up on Operation 40, Larry Hancock writes that Sanjenis was closely associated with David Morales and the counterintelligence group he had set up against Cuba. Morales, as we shall see, was a veteran black operator who worked with both Theodore (Ted) Shackley at the Miami CIA station and David Phillips. Morales’s job was also to create an intelligence force for the new government of Cuba. Sanjenis had been trained under Morales and his so-called AMOT group. This group had prepared files on all the CRC leaders and all the brigade members. But further, they had also gone into Cuba to do surveillance work on the leaders of Castro’s government.102 If Hunt was to supervise the construction of a post-Castro government the CIA was to set up in Cuba, then there can be little doubt that he knew about Operation 40. As mentioned above, we have seen that in the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, which Hunt and Phillips participated in, lists of those to be killed afterwards had also been assembled. The two, who were now much higher in the command chain, were repeating a pattern. In fact, in a memo written by CIA Officer J. C. King on May 19, 1961, Ray told King that he was afraid if the invasion was successful, his followers would also be killed in the mopping up operation code named Operation 40. It may be that this deep and hidden agenda is what made Hunt discount all of Ray’s appeals to use his underground forces in the invasion. In fact, Hunt actually belittled that underground by saying it did not exist. And he also admitted in his book that he was writing the communiqués for the sequestered CRC, and further, the house arrest was aimed at Ray.103

  If this information is accurate, and among others, Trumbull Higgins, Warren Hinckle and William Turner stand by it, then Kennedy was not just being lied to about the actual operation and its chances for success.104 He was also being betrayed about who would be running Cuba if the invasion succeeded. Under Hunt and the CIA, it was not going to be his favorite, Manolo Ray. It was to be Hunt’s favorite, the much more conservative Manuel Artime.

  There is no doubting the personal impact of the failed operation on Kennedy. He incriminated himself afterwards: “How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?” He also called it, “the worst experience of my life.”105 According to James Blight in the film, Virtual JFK, Kennedy afterwards went through a period of mild depression. In a surprisingly candid series about the CIA, Tom Wicker of the New York Times quoted Kennedy thusly: “President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his administration that “he wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”106 He did not go that far of course. But he did take steps to try and bring the CIA under control. First, after firing Dulles, he pointedly brought in someone from outside the Agency to take his job. He appointed John McCone as CIA Director. McCone had been a businessman who made a fortune in the steel industry and in ship building. He then worked as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, which is where President Kennedy got to know him. In other words, he had no ties to the so-called Old Boys network which had helped form the Agency in the forties. Second, Kennedy also sent out diplomatic orders that the highest ranking official in any foreign country was to be the ambassador, and policy was to be run through him and not the CIA. Kennedy felt that he would now control things abroad through the State Department, bypassing the CIA, which he did not trust, since as Lovett had told him, the Agency would not clear its clandestine operations either with State or the ambassador in the field.107

  Third, as John Newman notes, National Security Action Memoranda (NSAM’s) 55, 56, and 57 were the direct result of the Taylor Report. Kennedy approved of their drafting on June 28, and they were worked on by Taylor himself.108 NSAM 55 was directly delivered to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lyman Lemnitzer. JFK was angry that the Pentagon had not delivered a trenchant critique of the Dulles-Bissell invasion plan. So from here on in he wanted their advice “to come to me direct and unfiltered.” He also added that he wanted their input into military and paramilitary operations of the Cold War.109 As both John Newman and Fletcher Prouty have noted, this was a real cannon shot across the bow of the CIA. Allen Dulles had instituted these types of paramilitary operations previously, and the CIA had run them almost exclusively. As Newman describes it, NSAM 55 was “the opening shot in Kennedy’s campaign to curtail the CIA’s control over covert paramilitary operations.”110 The other two national security memoranda flowed from the first one. NSAM 56 was an order to make an inventory of paramilitary assets and equipment the Pentagon had on hand and then to measure that against the projected requirements across the world and make up any deficit. NSAM 57 stated that all paramilitary operations were to be presented to the Strategic Resources Group. That group would then assign a person and department to run it. The CIA was only to be involved in paramilitary operations “wholly covert or disavowable,” and then only if they were within the Agency’s “normal capabilities.”111 Clearly, Kennedy never wanted the CIA to touch a project the size and scope of the Bay of Pigs again. As Newman then sums up, “The consequence of these presidential directives was the first significant chink in the CIA’s covert armor since its creation.”112

  Fourth, Kennedy de
cided to move his brother in as a kind of ombudsman over certain CIA operations dealing with Cuba. Any offical CIA action against Cuba had to be ultimately approved by a Special Group on which Robert Kennedy served. As we will see, certain CIA officers did not appreciate this at all.

  David Phillips described his reaction to the Bay of Pigs in his 1977 book called The Night Watch. He said he came home from headquarters, and his wife tried to feed him, but he couldn’t eat. He then fell asleep. He woke up but still could not eat. He went outside with a portable radio and listened to reports about the invasion disaster. He then began drinking. With nothing in his stomach, he began to vomit. He then began weeping. His wife called him inside, but he would not go. She brought a blanket out for him, and he wrapped himself in it. Phillips said he cried for two hours before vomiting again.113

  Phillips went further about what he really thought in his discussions of the matter with his Cuban recruit Antonio Veciana. Veciana described Phillips—who he knew as Maurice Bishop—as extremely frustrated. He stated that the disaster at the Bay of Pigs was caused by President Kennedy because he had withheld air support for the invasion force.114

  Hunt was less melancholy and more condemnatory. He began Give Us This Day with this blast, “No event since the communization of China in 1949 has had such a profound effect on the United States … as the defeat of the U.S.-trained Cuban invasion brigade at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.”115 He then went on to say, “Still, and let this not be forgotten, Lee Harvey Oswald was a partisan of Fidel Castro and an admitted Marxist who made desperate efforts to join the Red Revolution in Havana.” Hunt then says if Castro had been toppled, there would have probably been “no assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald.”116

  Hunt had nothing but scorn for the Maxwell Taylor investigation. He said its aim was “to whitewash the New Frontier by heaping guilt on the CIA.”117 At this point in his career, Hunt was now detailed to Dulles’s personal staff. His job was to help answer queries from Taylor’s committee. In describing the firings of Dulles and Bissell, Hunt said they were made “scapegoats to expiate administration guilt.” And after watching Dulles go through this investigation, Hunt described Dulles’s fate at the hands of Kennedy’s investigation as that of a “remarkable man whose long career of government service had been destroyed unjustly by men who were laboring unceasingly to preserve their own public images.”118 Hunt went so far as to admit that he and Dulles reviewed the proofs of the above mentioned Fortune article by Charles Murphy on the Bay of Pigs before it was published. And further, that Hunt actually worked on the article for two days and furnished Murphy with classified background information for the piece.119 And what an article it was.

  The Murphy-Dulles-Hunt piece begins by stating that Kennedy had been an ineffective president so far. The reason being because, unlike Eisenhower, he did not know how to manipulate the levers of power.120 Although the article is supposed to be about Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, Murphy and his (secret) co-authors spend the first few pages discussing Laos. They clearly believe that Kennedy erred in seeking a diplomatic solution there. They call the fact that he did not take a military stand there, a “reversal.” To top it off, they then say that Laos is now “finished”—when in fact the Pathet Lao did not take power there until fourteen years later. They then imply that because of the Laos diplomacy, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, a stout friend of the USA, is now under siege by “murderous communists.” In pure Eisenhower-Dulles Domino Theory hyperbolic style, the article then states that because of this “loss of face,” from the Philippines to Pakistan, the world is now under challenge. In one of the most jarring statements in this startling article, the authors then write that because Kennedy took the diplomatic route in Laos, he then had to take the military alternative in Cuba. As we have seen, this is specious. For, from the beginning, Kennedy was not going to commit American forces into Laos. And the Bay of Pigs operation is something that he had to be deceived into going along with. But there is one more statement in the beginning which should be noted. The authors write that it was really Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, while on vacation in Key West, who convinced Kennedy not to commit to Laos.121 This is a key point of the essay. The idea is to paint Kennedy as a man who can be easily influenced by advisers who really are not up to fighting the Cold War against the communists. In other words, Kennedy is really a man who had no backbone on this issue since he had no vision of the actual conflict. The author has been at pains in the preceding pages to show this is wrong. He did have a vision, except it was not Allen Dulles’s vision.

  The article now goes on to strike at two targets. First, quite naturally, it states that Kennedy reneged on the D-Day air strikes.122 As we have seen, in light of the declassified record, this is simply not supportable today. But what is interesting is that in his later book, Give Us this Day, Hunt writes something different. There he says that Deputy Director Charles Cabell actually stopped the D-Day strike from proceeding.123 In fact, he writes that Cabell stopped that sortie because the operation was only granted one air strike! The discrepancy between his two versions labels Hunt’s work with Murphy as “black propaganda”—that is, a deliberate deception—which is what he and Phillips specialized in. And this stroke appears to have been directed by Dulles since, on his own, Hunt wrote something different, and more true to the facts.

  The second target of the piece is the liberal coterie around Kennedy—Richard Goodwin, William Fulbright, Adlai Stevenson, and Arthur Schlesinger. In other words, the bunch that made Hunt swallow Manolo Ray. In fact, what the trio does here is insinuate that the original Dulles-Bissell plan was tactically sound and approved by the Pentagon.124 When, as we have seen, Bissell deliberately kept the White House in the dark about a memo saying that the military chiefs believe the plan would not succeed without direct American intervention. Then the essay states that this original plan was “dismembered” by Kennedy’s liberal advisers.125 (They actually include Dean Rusk in this group.) They then say it was Rusk who caused the original plan to be moved from Trinidad to Playa Giron. They also say that Kennedy had actually approved limited direct American air power from a carrier task force to be used.126 Towards the end, the piece actually tries to say that it was Adlai Stevenson who caused the D-Day strike to be called off. At the very end, when they quote Kennedy saying that there were sobering lessons to be learned from the episode, they clearly insinuate that the president should not have let his “political advisers” influence operational decisions. Since Dulles later confessed that he never thought the operation could succeed on its own, but he thought Kennedy would save it when he saw it failing, this appears to be nothing but pure deception on his part, delivered through his instruments Hunt and Murphy.

  This was clearly the beginning of the CIA’s counterattack—led by the man who would now be fired for his prime role in that deception—against Kennedy for finding out the truth about the operation. Kennedy now ended Dulles’s intelligence career, which extended back to World War I. The article is crucial in two ways. First, from where it was published. Henry Luce’s Wall Street–aimed magazine had clear influence on the Power Elite, the wealthy classes who had so much influence over politics and communications. Second, extending downward, people like Hunt and Phillips would now use this disinformation scenario to influence the Cubans against Kennedy by depicting him as an amateur who let himself be buffeted about by some unrealistic dreamers who had no idea of the stakes involved in the Cold War against communism. As we shall see, in that regard, the essay turned out to be all too effective.

  The reader will note that the author has spent some time and length in reviewing the Bay of Pigs debacle. This has largely been done in light of the declassified information now available. In addition to showing how the CIA manipulated Kennedy, how the inquiry afterward resulted in the ending of three intelligence careers, how Kennedy then tried to take control of the CIA, and how certain Agency officers were emotionally impacted by the aftermath, there is one more reason this author dev
oted this much length in chronicling the episode. That is because many of the characters we will soon encounter were either directly or indirectly involved in that operation. In addition to Dulles, Hunt, and Phillips, there are David Morales, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Bernardo DeTorres, Sergio Arcacha Smith, and Guy Banister. And as we shall see, in the famous Sylvia Odio incident—which the Warren Commission unsuccessfully tried to deny—the Cubans attempting to frame Lee Harvey Oswald told Sylvia that Oswald thought that the exiles should have killed Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. The person they were telling this to, Odio, was a follower of Manolo Ray. In telling the true story of Kennedy’s murder in light of the declassified record, it is hard to overestimate the importance of the failed invasion at Playa Giron. Because of the cover story that Dulles and Hunt circulated, many of the operatives involved never forgave Kennedy. And as we shall see, there is evidence that some of them were in Dallas that day, perhaps in Dealey Plaza.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kennedy De-escalates in Cuba

  “This blockade and political action, I see leading into war. I don’t see any other solution. It will lead right into war. This is almost as bad as appeasement at Munich.”

  —General Curtis LeMay

  After the Bay of Pigs debacle, there was a flurry of memoranda concerning what to do about the “Cuban problem.” The military disaster, and its attendant huge international embarrassment, now created something that likely would not have existed if the invasion had not occurred. The blizzard of memoranda began on April 20, the day after the defeat. McGeorge Bundy’s assistant Walt Rostow wrote to Kennedy and Secretary of Defense McNamara and stated the problems the USA now faced on the island. Two days later, on April 24, Rostow again sent a memo to McNamara pressing him on solutions to the “Cuba problem.” He listed all the perceived dangers, but now he appended possible solutions to these problems. His solutions included a blockade of the island and “an invasion of one sort or another” as a way to unseat the regime. He also asked that contingency plans be written up for an American invasion. Two days after this, McNamara received a memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff about various military options against Cuba, including a blockade and an invasion. This memo contained a rough outline for a plan to invade Cuba. Similar memos followed from the CIA and presidential assistant Richard Goodwin. The two Rostow memos set the tone for the ratcheting up of armed resistance to the “Castro Problem.” On May 2, 1961, Tracy Barnes sent a memo to Dulles in which he outlined a possible program of “infiltration and exfiltration of individuals” into Cuba and “sabotage of shipping and small raider operations.” This last was the option the administration eventually settled upon: the beginnings of the “secret war” against Cuba, which would eventually be called by its code name, Operation Mongoose.