Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  The lament fell on deaf ears. “Overthrow of Castro is possible,” Bobby Kennedy told Helms amid the controlled chaos of his fifth-floor office at the Justice Department. An aide to Helms wrote rapidly to keep up with the Attorney General’s staccato cadence. “A solution to the Cuban problem today carried top priority in U.S. Govt. No time, money, effort—or manpower is to be spared…. Yesterday … the President had indicated to him that the final chapter had not been written—it’s got to be done and will be done.”

  Helms’s response was to place Harvey in charge of the Cuba task force. Two-gun Bill Harvey, foreman of the Berlin tunnel, that covert masterpiece of daring and imagination, was the CIA’s heaviest hitter. Never mind, as Helms now realized, that the tunnel had been blown from the start. That little detail was best left in the files. Harvey’s appointment, more than anything else Helms could do, would convince the Kennedy administration that the CIA meant business. Harvey would also serve as a buffer between Helms and the impatient demands of the White House. “Harvey didn’t recognize until it was too late that he was being had by Helms,” a CIA officer said.

  Harvey welcomed the challenge. He was not happy in Staff D, which did little more than provide technical assistance for eavesdropping operations requested by the National Security Agency and run by the CIA’s various geographical divisions. Although Staff D was a perfectly logical assignment for the man who had supervised the biggest wiretap operation in the CIA’s history, Harvey thought he deserved better. He longed to become head of the Soviet Bloc Division and made no secret about it. Perhaps if he performed well on the Cuba task force, his wish would not be denied a second time.

  Helms sent out a “book message”—an all-points bulletin to every CIA installation in the world—announcing Harvey’s appointment to what would be known within the Agency as Task Force W. Harvey, who had walked point for so many years against the Russians in Berlin, was once again at the CIA’s cutting edge. Lansdale, for one, was suitably impressed. He introduced Harvey to the President as the American James Bond.

  The President’s enthusiasm for Ian Fleming and the improbable escapades of his British superagent, 007, was well publicized. After Life magazine listed Dr. No—an adventure in which Bond disposes of the diabolical dictator of a tiny Caribbean island—as one of Kennedy’s ten favorite books, 007 was on his way to becoming the most popular fictional character of the decade. Bobby Kennedy was also a fan. After Fleming autographed his copy of From Russia with Love, he wrote a short thank-you note saying, “We can all hardly wait for your next contribution to our leisure hours.” Lansdale must have been more than a little flattered when John Kennedy remarked to him one day that he was America’s answer to Bond. Lansdale, with all due modesty, demurred, suggesting that the real American 007 was this fellow Harvey whom Helms had just put on the Cuba case. Naturally, the President wanted to meet the man, and before long Harvey and Lansdale were sitting outside the Oval Office, waiting to be ushered in.

  As Lansdale told the story, he turned to Harvey and said, “You’re not carrying your gun, are you?” Of course he was, Harvey replied, starting to pull a revolver from his pants pocket. Aghast at what the Secret Service might do if this strange-looking man were suddenly to draw a gun, Lansdale quickly told Harvey to keep the damn thing in his pants until he could explain to the agents that the gentleman would like to check his firearm. Harvey turned over the gun and was about to enter the Oval Office when suddenly he remembered something. Reaching behind him, he whipped out a .38 Detective Special from a holster snapped to his belt in the small of his back and handed it to the startled Secret Service agents.

  The President left no record of his reaction to the sight of his American Bond—this red-faced, pop-eyed, bullet-headed, pear-shaped man advancing on him with a ducklike strut that was part waddle and part swagger. Harvey’s deep, gruff voice must have restored the President’s faith in 007 somewhat, but Ian Fleming would never read the same again. It was a light moment, Harvey later recounted. Kennedy said, “So you’re our James Bond,” and Harvey, acknowledging the disparity between fact and fiction, chuckled that as the President could see, he was not equipped for some of Bond’s more daring sexual escapades. The President welcomed him aboard the Cuba operation, and the encounter ended.

  Operation MONGOOSE had just begun. Harvey moved Task Force W into the basement of the CIA’s new headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and set up the command bunker for operations against Cuba. Lansdale had already drawn up a list of thirty-two planning tasks that contemplated a spectrum of activities ranging from intelligence collection to developing a “schedule for sabotage operations inside Cuba” and the “use of U.S. military force to support the Cuban popular movement.” To all that he added Task 33, a plan to “incapacitate” Cuban sugar workers with biological warfare agents during the upcoming harvest.

  “He was an idea man,” Maxwell Taylor said of Lansdale, “but to find an idea that was feasible was a different proposition.” The CIA had been through this once before with Lansdale in Vietnam, where, among other things, he had conceived a plan to neutralize the Vietcong’s communications network. The idea was to use direction-finding equipment to pinpoint an enemy transmitter and then send in a helicopter to wipe it out. The CIA dispatched a man from Japan to assist in the project, but his first briefing by electronics experts convinced him it wouldn’t work. The direction-finding equipment could locate the Vietcong transmitters but only to within a two-mile radius. That meant the helicopter would have to search more than twelve square miles of jungle for a transmitter the size of a suitcase.

  “He used to drive everybody crazy with his ideas,” an aide to Helms said. “He’d bombard Harvey with a million goddamn papers all the time.” Task 33 was typical Lansdale, a member of Task Force W recalled. The CIA didn’t have a single agent in place who could perform the task by covert means, and any overt effort, such as spraying the sugar workers from the air like so many insects, would be traced immediately to the United States. “Reaction to such an attack would probably result in demonstrations and riots … throughout the world,” a memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff predicted. Another invasion of Cuba “could conceivably cause less furor in the international forum and perhaps be less detrimental to the long-term interests of the United States” than Lansdale’s Task 33.

  Lansdale’s brainstorms spawned ever more fanciful schemes as CIA planners racked their brains for ways to implement his grandiose ideas. Operation BOUNTY called for a “system of financial rewards, commensurate with position and stature, for killing or delivering alive known Communists.” Leaflets would be dropped over Cuba listing rewards ranging from $5,000 for an “informant” to $10,000 for “government officials.” Castro would be worth only “2¢.” Another plan, dubbed “Elimination by Illumination,” called for nothing less than a reenactment of the Second Coming. According to Thomas Parrott, a CIA officer who served as secretary to the Special Group (Augmented), “This plan consisted of spreading the word that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and that Christ was against Castro [who] was anti-Christ. And you would spread this word around Cuba and then … just over the horizon there would be an American submarine which would surface off of Cuba and send up some starshells. And this would be the manifestation of the Second Coming and Castro would be overthrown.”

  Undaunted, Lansdale turned out a “Basic Action Plan” for MONGOOSE designed to culminate in the “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime”—“the touchdown play,” as he liked to call it—by the end of October of 1962. The timetable was preposterous, especially coming from a man who lectured others on how long it had taken the Communists to build an insurgency in Vietnam. Members of Harvey’s Task Force W decided that Lansdale’s October deadline had more to do with the November elections than with the realities of insurgency. Even the Special Group (Augmented) found Lansdale’s “Basic Action Plan” excessive and issued guidelines stating that simple intelligence collection would be the “immediate priority ob
jective of U.S. efforts in the coming months.” Covert actions should be kept on a scale “short of those reasonably calculated to inspire a revolt.” Since there was virtually no chance that any covert action could inspire a revolt against Castro, the guidelines countenanced almost any havoc the CIA could wreak.

  A total of four hundred CIA officers were assigned to Task Force W. Foreign diplomats and businessmen traveling to Cuba were recruited as spies; Cuban officials traveling abroad were pressured to defect; and political-action programs were mounted to provoke other nations into severing diplomatic ties with Cuba. One member of Task Force W went around the world attempting to persuade firms whose products reached Cuba despite the trade embargo to sabotage their wares. Two other officers, outfitted with phony Italian names, roamed the United States in search of members of the Mafia who had had gambling interests in Cuba in the days before Castro. “Task Force W was all out of proportion,” one member said. “We had a force working on Cuba that was the equivalent for an entire area of the world. I specifically was told that I could have as many people as I wanted when I got my job.”

  JM/WAVE, the CIA’s forward operations base in Florida, was revitalized under the command of Ted Shackley, a thirty-four-year-old protégé of Harvey’s from Berlin. Unlike CIA stations overseas, JM/WAVE did not have the benefit of an American embassy to provide diplomatic cover for its operations, so it had to be run under commercial cover. The sign over the entrance to the weatherbeaten clapboard building located in an abandoned corner of the University of Miami’s campus read “Zenith Technical Enterprises Inc.” Inside, the walls were cluttered with sales charts, business licenses, even an award certificate from the United Givers’ Fund citing Zenith for its contributions to the annual fund-raising drive.

  JM/WAVE soon became the largest CIA station in the world. “You can’t imagine how many people were involved,” an aide to Helms said. Operations included the overt interrogation of the three thousand refugees who arrived each week from Havana; the thinly veiled activities of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, which broadcast propaganda and coded messages over Radio Swan; and the secret training of commandos for missions into Cuba. Bases were scattered throughout the Everglades and Florida Keys; high-speed boats disguised as pleasure craft were moored at marinas up and down the peninsula; and safe houses were located in some of the poshest neighborhoods of Key Biscayne and Coral Gables. Scores of proprietary firms with such names as Paragon Air Service provided logistical support for the vast complex, while literally thousands of Cuban exiles worked for JM/WAVE as drivers, cooks, informants, boat captains, commandos, and case officers. It was impossible to tell where JM/WAVE left off and the myriad anti-Castro groups operating out of Miami began. If JM/WAVE did not actually direct their activities, its money made them possible. “As you look back upon the goddamn thing, so much of the goddamn stuff was really juvenile,” an aide to Helms said. “And what it cost.”

  “We were running a ferry service back and forth to the island with agents,” a member of Task Force W recalled. Teams of Cuban exiles were dispatched in the dark of the moon, setting out in 150-foot-long “mother ships” for the 90-mile run to Cuba. While still in international waters, the teams transferred to 20-foot fiberglass boats powered by twin 100-horsepower engines for the high-speed run to the beach, covering the last stretch of water in a rubber dinghy outfitted with a heavily muffled 25-horsepower motor. Once ashore, the teams sank the dinghies among the mangroves or deflated and buried them in the sand. Some of the teams simply left weapons caches for agents already on the island. Others headed inland toward their native provinces, where they could seek out relatives who might give them food and shelter while they went about the tedious task of building an underground network. The exiles sent out radio reports on the condition of the transportation and food-distribution systems, the status of power and water supplies, the schedules of police patrols, and all the other measures of Castro’s grip on the island. They distributed leaflets informing the populace that the worm—or gusano, as Castro called the exile community—had turned. They urged their compatriots to commit minor sabotage such as leaving the lights on and the water running. They carried condoms filled with graphite to dump into an engine’s oil system.

  But minor sabotage “didn’t appeal to the Cubans,” Maxwell Taylor said. “They wanted to go in there and throw a bomb at somebody.” The official records of Operation MONGOOSE contained only the slightest hint of the ferocity with which this secret war was waged. The code names the CIA assigned to some of its agents inside Cuba—names like BLOOD, WHIP, and LASH—were more expressive of the mayhem involved. “This demands a change from business-as-usual and a hard facing of the fact that we are in a combat situation,” Lansdale said. “Cut off their heads and leave them in the trails,” an aide to Lansdale chanted.

  Sabotage missions were launched against bridges, power transformers, microwave towers, tank farms, and railroad lines within reach of the beach. The commandos set their mortars in the sand, lobbed a few shells inland, and retreated to sea. “Sometimes mortar rounds go long and they land in a village,” the chief of Task Force W’s paramilitary operations said philosophically. “People died,” Harvey’s executive assistant said, “no question of that.” All to no avail. “To the best of my knowledge, there wasn’t one damn thing that was accomplished of any note at all,” the paramilitary chief said. “Absolute failure.”

  The rationale behind the sabotage was that it would result in economic dislocations that would sow discontent among the people and provide fertile ground for nurturing a resistance network. But the Special Group (Augmented) repeatedly balked at approving the kind of assault that would work any real economic hardship. As Tom Parrott, the secretary to the Special Group, explained, “Nobody knew exactly what they wanted to do. It had only been a year since the Bay of Pigs and nobody wanted to get into another one of those. What was our policy toward Cuba? Well, our policy toward Cuba was to keep the pot simmering.” Over and over the phrase was used. “Keep the pot simmering.” After a while, Harvey’s paramilitary aide said, “it began to dawn on us that we were involved in a random event.”

  “What’s the matter with these bastards?” Harvey groused to Parrott. “Why don’t they get off their duffs and do something?” The matter was that the Special Group didn’t trust Harvey. “Your friend Harvey doesn’t inspire much confidence,” Bundy snapped at Parrott. Harvey was terribly long-winded. He would drone on and on in his low-pitched monotone, oblivious to the fact that the Attorney General, whose own clipped phrases were the epitome of terseness, was drumming his fingers on the table. “Tell him not to mumble so much,” one member of the Special Group said to Parrott. For all his mumbling, Harvey was not telling the Special Group what it wanted to know. “Bill had trouble getting down to the specifics some of the military people were demanding,” Parrott said. “They would want to know exactly ‘What are these guys going to do—what night are they going, what time, what are they going to hit, what’s their disaster plan?’ ” Harvey preferred to talk concepts. “Look, Mr. Harvey,” Maxwell Taylor interrupted, “we’ve got to have more specifics.”

  Everything had to be laid before the Special Group in “excruciating detail,” Harvey griped. “It went down to such things as the gradients on the beach and the composition of the sand,” Harvey’s executive assistant said. The Special Group even wanted to know what rations the raiders would carry. “It was almost as if Bill and the rest of us were accused of trying to sucker them into another Bay of Pigs,” Harvey’s paramilitary aide said. “It was an insult to our professionalism,” the executive assistant added, “and it was a useless exercise. What difference did it make if they were carrying a .38 or a .45?” Exasperated, Harvey complained to McCone. “To permit requisite flexibility and professionalism for a maximum operational effort against Cuba, the tight controls exercised by the Special Group and the present time-consuming coordination and briefing procedures should, if at all possible, be made less restrict
ive and less stultifying,” he wrote in his typically long-winded fashion. “You could see trouble coming,” Helms’s assistant said.

  Bobby Kennedy browbeat Harvey and his aides so relentlessly that after one session Taylor turned to him and said, “You could sack a town and enjoy it.” The Attorney General would call a junior officer in the Task Force W bunker at Langley, bark out an order, and hang up, leaving the CIA man wondering whether he had just talked to the President’s brother or a prankster. He gave one officer the name of “a man who was in contact with a small group of Cubans who had a plan for creating an insurrection.” When the officer reported back that the Cubans did not seem to have a concrete plan, Kennedy ordered him to fly to Guantánamo and “start working and developing this particular group.” The officer protested, saying that the CIA had promised the Defense Department not to work out of Guantánamo. “We will see about that,” Kennedy snapped. Sometimes the Attorney General would take things into his own hands, and the CIA would not find out about it until after the fact. He sent Lansdale down to Miami in a futile effort to form a cohesive government-in-exile and kept the trip a secret from the CIA. “I felt you preferred informing the President privately,” Lansdale said in a handwritten note to Kennedy. The Attorney General frequently dealt directly with some of the Cuban exiles who were supposed to be Harvey’s agents. They would troop in and out of the Justice Department bearing firsthand reports of CIA ineptitudes. “One of these Cubans told him we were asking the refugees questions about what they thought of President Kennedy,” Helms’s aide said. “RFK raised a stink that this was getting JFK too closely involved.”