Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Having suffered this fate through no fault of his own, Kirkpatrick was left with what one colleague called “a streak of bitterness, an attitude of vindictiveness toward the whole Clandestine Service operation as it evolved.” By 1961 the Clandestine Service operation had evolved to the Bay of Pigs, and it fell to Kirkpatrick as Inspector General to determine what had gone wrong. By his own account, he produced “a very severe report,” concluding that “the operation had been very badly handled in almost every respect.” The report was immediately perceived by his detractors, who were legion, as “a hatchet job … reflecting his continuing ambition.” It “was designed to be damaging to Richard Bissell and to be damaging to Allen Dulles,” one officer directly affected said. The report’s unstated premise seemed to be that things would not have gone so badly had Kirkpatrick been in charge. McGeorge Bundy, the President’s national security adviser, who was so dispirited by the Bay of Pigs that he had offered to resign, took one look at the report and said, “Well, that casts quite a different light on things.” But when Kirkpatrick tried to use the report to curry favor with McCone, it blew up in his face.

  Angleton, who monitored the entire affair closely, described what happened. Kirkpatrick “either went to National [Airport] or he sent somebody” to give the report to McCone before he boarded a plane for Los Angeles, where he was still winding up his business affairs prior to assuming the directorship. McCone “read it on the way back to California, and when he got off the plane he obviously began to see that something was up.” The Inspector General was attempting, in Angleton’s words, to “double-cross his Director, carrying on a feud with the clandestine side.” From California, Angleton continued, McCone “called Kirkpatrick and asked whether he had given a copy to Dulles. When the answer came ‘No,’ he became quite rude and ordered him to give a copy to Dulles since he was still the Director.” A chastened Kirkpatrick admitted that “I probably handled it the wrong way.” When McCone officially succeeded Dulles, he ordered all copies of Kirkpatrick’s report destroyed and kept the original locked in his private files.

  Even so decisive an executive as McCone could not easily rid himself of the enduring legacy of the Bay of Pigs. A secret postmortem said that the invasion had been approved because “it offered what appeared to be a last chance to overthrow Castro by Cubans before the weapons and technicians acquired from the Communists and the repressive internal measures would make the task too hard without overt U.S. intervention.” That “last chance” had been missed, but failure only intensified the President’s determination to rid himself of Castro, despite the fact that the Bay of Pigs had crippled what small capability the CIA had for conducting covert operations inside Cuba.

  The Agency had never been very successful at establishing a network of agents on the island. It was the inability to establish a working underground that had prompted the decision to attempt the Bay of Pigs invasion. “We never got to first base in Cuba in building an underground organization,” Richard Bissell said. Supplies were parachuted in, but out of a half-dozen drops “we only had one where we were reasonably sure that the people the supplies were intended for actually got them.” Agents were slipped in by boat under cover of darkness, but their survival rate was “appallingly small.” Any agents who did survive were wiped out in the mass arrests and executions—Castro’s “war on traitors”—that followed the Bay of Pigs.

  The President was not interested in the CIA’s problems. He wanted results. “The White House is always under enormous political priorities which completely obscure the long-range purposes of an intelligence service,” one CIA officer grumbled. “They don’t want to hear about how difficult spying is or how long it takes. They all want it done yesterday. As a result, you expend decades of assets for short-term gains.” Bill Harvey, recently returned from the front lines in Berlin, was to become one of those expended assets.

  Smarting from a tongue-lashing by the two Kennedy brothers for “sitting on his ass and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro,” Bissell turned in November of 1961 to Harvey and the “application of ZR/RIFLE program to Cuba.” Harvey had been working on the concept for ZR/RIFLE for several months in deepest secrecy under cover of his official title as head of Staff D, a small Agency component responsible for communications intercepts. D was the perfect cranny in which to tuck a particularly nasty piece of business like ZR/RIFLE, and Harvey was just the man to make sure that no one came poking around. At one time, all of the CIA’s covert staffs had been designated simply by letters. Staff A was Foreign Intelligence, B was Operations, and C was Counterintelligence. The other staffs, even Angleton’s Counterintelligence, gradually acquired more descriptive titles, but D retained its anonymity behind a door barred twenty-four hours a day by a Marine guard. There were three combination safes along the wall in Harvey’s office, but that was not secure enough for him, so he brought in a one-ton safe of his own. At the outset of the Kennedy administration, Bissell assigned Harvey the task of creating a new capability for the Agency. “The White House had twice urged me to create such a capability,” Harvey’s notes quoted Bissell as saying. Bissell called it “executive action.” Harvey called it “the magic button” and the “last resort beyond last resort and a confession of weakness.” He made a note to himself never to call “executive action” by its true name. “Never mention word ‘assassination,’ ” Harvey scribbled.

  The CIA had tried once before to kill Castro—at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion—but the attempt had disintegrated into what one of the plotters called “a Keystone Comedy Act.” Colonel Sheffield Edwards, head of the Agency’s Office of Security, had enlisted Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent turned private detective, to recruit members of the underworld for the job. Maheu turned to Johnny Rosselli, a former member of the Capone gang who had done time for a Hollywood shakedown scheme, and Rosselli contacted Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante, two Mafia “dons” who had been singled out by the Attorney General as targets in his war on organized crime. Maheu soon suspected, however, that Giancana had bragged about the plot to his girl friend, singer Phyllis McGuire, who in turn might have gossiped to another boyfriend, comedian Dan Rowan. At that rate of exposure, the assassination plot would soon become a major motion picture. Maheu dispatched a private investigator to Las Vegas to install a wiretap on the phone in Rowan’s hotel room, but he was discovered by a maid and had to be bailed out of jail by Rosselli. Meanwhile, the CIA’s Technical Services Division was experiencing some difficulties in concocting the right weapon to be used against Castro. The first batch of poison capsules refused to dissolve in water.

  The farce would have been laughable had not the plotters left a trail leading directly into the Oval Office and even the President’s bedroom. Kennedy had actually met personally and publicly with one of the plotters, a Cuban exile leader named Tony Varona. The President’s only purpose had been to assure Varona and several other leaders of the exile community that every effort would be made to rescue their comrades left stranded at the Bay of Pigs. But the mere fact that he had met with Varona would forever rob the administration of any moral authority should the plot become known. At the same time, Kennedy was carrying on an affair with a woman named Judith Campbell, who counted among her other beaus both John Rosselli and Sam Giancana. Not only was the liaison less than presidential in image, but it would also create the appearance that Judith Campbell was being used as a courier to shuttle information between the White House and the Mafia on the progress of the assassination plot.

  The much more stringent requirements laid down for Harvey’s “executive action” program were designed to avoid all such complications. “Maximum security” and “nonattributability” were the primary guidelines specified in the executive-action file. “KUBARK only,” the file commanded, employing the cryptonym used internally to identify the CIA. There could be “no approach to other Govt. agencies” for assistance. Inside KUBARK, everything must be done by “word of mouth,” “strictly person-to-person,
singleton ops,” “no projects on paper.” Executive action would “require most professional, proven operationally competent, ruthless, stable, CE [counterespionage]-experienced ops officers.” There were “few available,” but Harvey was one of them. His first step would be the “search”—find and recruit the assassin—“Pretext: KUTUBE/D search.” KUTUBE/D, the Agency’s cryptonym for Staff D, was already conducting a search for agents who could be recruited to steal the code books of other nations. That would be used as the cover for the search for a killer. The KUTUBE/D search had been given the code name RIFLE, which, now that it served the ends of “executive action,” was an entirely appropriate description of what was involved.

  It would not be easy to find the right man. “No chain of connections permitting blackmail,” the executive-action file directed. Extreme caution would be exercised so that no assassin could be traced back to the United States government. “No American citizen or residents or people who ever obtained U.S. visas” could serve as assassins. “Corsicans recommended,” but not Sicilians. “Sicilians could lead to Mafia.” It was imperative to “exclude organization criminals, those with records of arrests.” As an added precaution, “planning should include provisions for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow. Should have phony 201 in RG to backstop this, all documents therein forged and backdated.” The 201—the basic personnel folder kept in Central Registry (“RG”) on anyone, friend or foe, of interest to the Agency—would be “forged and backdated” so that the file of an agent recruited for murder would look like that of an enemy assassin in the hire of the “Sovs or Czechs.” To further support the fiction that the CIA’s assassin was an enemy agent, the 201 “should look like a CE [counterespionage] file.” Harvey made a note to himself to talk with “Jim A.”

  To conduct the search, Harvey already had the perfect asset. “QJ/WIN is under written contract as a principal agent, with the primary task of spotting agent candidates.” WIN, a European of a more than checkered past, had begun his government career in the late 1950s as an informant for the Bureau of Narcotics. “Files of this Bureau reflect an excellent performance by QJ/WIN,” the CIA noted. He was, one of his CIA handlers said, a man capable of anything. “If you needed somebody to carry out murder,” Richard Helms said, “I guess you had a man who might be prepared to carry it out.” All for an annual salary of $7,200. According to a CIA memo, “QJ/WIN was recruited in Frankfurt 1 November 1960 to undertake a one-shot mission to the Belgian Congo,” a mission that “potentially involved great risk.” The memo was characteristically vague about what exactly the mission had been, although the author must have chuckled over his reference to “one-shot,” since other documents left no doubt that WIN had been dispatched to arrange “the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.”

  The initial plan had been to inject a deadly virus into Lumumba’s food or toothpaste. A syringe, a surgical mask, and rubber gloves were sent to the Congo through the diplomatic pouch, and an Agency scientist flew in with the virus in a vial. But the scheme foundered for lack of access to Lumumba’s entourage. By the time WIN arrived on the scene, Lumumba had been ousted from his post in the Congolese government and was in the protective custody of United Nations guards. WIN was instructed to lure Lumumba out of UN custody so that he could be turned over to his Congolese rivals, who would surely do him in. WIN’s control officer had serious moral qualms about poisoning Lumumba but had no objections to arranging his execution. “Murder corrupts,” he said, but “I am not opposed to capital punishment.” Lumumba died exactly as the CIA had planned, but the Agency for all its scheming, was not responsible. Lumumba evaded the UN guards by his own devices and was captured by his Congolese enemies, who, according to one version, ran him through with a bayonet.

  The Agency had not had such good luck with Castro, and Bissell hoped Harvey could change that with ZR/RIFLE. On the day after he and Bissell discussed “the application of ZR/RIFLE program to Cuba,” Harvey would have been somewhat bemused to hear President Kennedy tell an audience in Seattle, Washington, that “we cannot, as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises.”

  ZR/RIFLE was only a small portion of what the Kennedy administration proposed to throw against Castro. Two weeks earlier, a twenty-nine-year-old White House aide named Richard Goodwin had written a memo to the President urging a major new covert action program against Cuba. The objective, said Goodwin, would be to build a revolution inside Cuba. Agents would be infiltrated to make contact with what few pockets of political resistance remained after the Bay of Pigs and to build an insurgent movement gradually that would gather support from a population increasingly disgruntled with Castro’s mismanagement of the economy, a mismanagement aided and abetted by economic warfare waged overtly with a trade embargo and covertly with sabotage. The program would require a government-wide effort, for which the President’s brother “would be the most effective commander,” Goodwin wrote.

  Instead, Kennedy chose Brigadier General Edward Lansdale as his Cuba commander. Lansdale was a romantic figure of considerable proportions—the stuff of which two novels, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and William Lederer’s The Ugly American, were made. Nominally an Air Force officer, Lansdale had been a CIA operaive waging unconventional war against Communist insurgents in the Philippines and Vietnam. He had returned to Washington the week before Kennedy’s inauguration to write a gloomy twelve-page memo on “the downhill and dangerous trend in Vietnam.” New departures were needed, Lansdale wrote, and they were needed at once. “The U.S. should recognize that Vietnam is in critical condition and should treat it as a combat area of the Cold War, as an area requiring emergency treatment.” The memo so struck the President’s fancy that he wanted to name Lansdale as his ambassador to Saigon, an appointment that Secretary of State Dean Rusk managed to block by threatening to resign. Now Kennedy needed to administer “emergency treatment” to another “combat area of the Cold War,” and Lansdale was his man.

  On November 30, 1961, the President secretly directed his cabinet to “use our available assets … to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime.” Lansdale was placed in command, and a special panel chaired by the President’s military representative, General Maxwell Taylor, was created to oversee the operation. The roster of the Special Group—national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, CIA Director John McCone, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer, Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell Gilpatric, and Under Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson—clearly signaled that this was not just another box on the organization chart. The panel was augmented by the addition of one other member, the President’s brother. Bobby Kennedy would give the panel both its official title—Special Group (Augmented)—and its sense of urgency.

  In an effort to give the new Cuba operation an extra measure of protection from public disclosure, it was assigned a deliberately misleading CIA cryptonym. All Agency cryptonyms began with a two-letter “diagraph” that served as a geographic designator for the operation. “AM” was the diagraph for Cuba, but the CIA’s cryptic reference officer was asked for a list of names beginning with “MO,” the geographic designator for a part of the world far removed from Cuba. MONGOOSE was chosen. Apart from its descriptive merits, MONGOOSE would assure the curious that this was not another ill-fated Cuba operation.

  No sooner had MONGOOSE been christened, one CIA officer recalled, than “out of the clear blue sky McCone suddenly names Helms as his new man on Cuba with Bissell sitting right there in the room.” The time had come to cut Bissell loose. He was too closely associated with the previous Cuba fiasco. Helms, who had managed to stay clear of the Bay of Pigs, and had made no secret of his distaste for Bissell’s methods, was not tainted by failure. Moving with sure bureaucratic instinct, Helms plucked Cuba from the doldrums of the Caribbean Division, where it had been languishing ever since the Bay of Pigs, and established a new Cuba task force. “Helms always managed to set up ad hoc task forces
so when they blew up they didn’t blow up in his face,” an admiring colleague said. “He could see there was no profit whatever for the Agency in this thing.”

  MONGOOSE was doomed to fail from the start. The CIA’s Board of National Estimates had already concluded that “it is highly improbable that an extensive popular uprising could be fomented” against Castro. Even Castro’s death “would almost certainly not prove fatal to the regime.” But the administration’s obsession with overthrowing Castro was beyond the reach of reason. “We were hysterical about Castro,” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged. The CIA’s pessimism was viewed as foot-dragging, one more indication that the Agency had not regained its nerve since the Bay of Pigs. The estimate “seems to be the major evidence to be used to oppose your program,” Lansdale warned Bobby Kennedy.

  Lansdale apparently envisioned Cuba as another Vietnam, a country where the insurgent forces could establish sanctuaries from which they would roam the countryside, offering a political alternative to the disaffected peasants. But Cuba was not Vietnam. As Lansdale himself pointed out, the Communists had spent decades preparing the battlefield in Vietnam, infiltrating their first agents into the stream of laborers imported by French plantation owners from Singapore in the 1920s. No such groundwork had been laid in Cuba. To think that it could quickly be laid down now was folly, for the island was rapidly becoming a satellite state of the Soviet Union. “Cuba had essentially the same type of controls, perhaps in some ways even tighter controls, over the people than does the Soviet Union,” McNamara said. “The thing Lansdale couldn’t realize was that he wasn’t operating anymore in friendly territory,” a member of the CIA’s new Cuba task force said. “He was operating in enemy territory without a goddamn asset in the place.”