Mongoose, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley

  Raúl’s rage was more expressive than his older brother’s, and uncontained. He swore at the Kennedy administration, reminded the room that he had predicted their troubles would only be beginning with the end of the missile crisis and the pledge by President Kennedy made to Khrushchev. That pledge—that the U.S. would not invade Cuba nor seek to overthrow Castro’s regime—was not to be trusted. Something dramatic had to be done. It was only after he was pressed to suggest just what might be done that he had said it, said it in sepulchral tones designed to enhance the drama he wished to invest in his proposal:

  “We should commission the assassination of the mayor of Miami.”

  There was silence. Raúl took advantage of it. “I know Mayor Robert Tinhigh is not involved with the CIA operation, and he is not even of Cuban descent. But he is the mayor of the city that is becoming a garrison for aggressive operations against our country. He is a symbol, and he is responsible for what goes on in his own city. His assassination, with just enough of a trail to make unmistakable the motives of the people who ordered his death, would suddenly register with the Kennedy administration that we simply will not—not”—Raúl’s voice was by now high-pitched, “tolerate what the Kennedy people are sponsoring.”

  It was at this point that Castro exploded. “A ridiculous idea! Stupid! Asinine!”

  There was silence. Raúl did not reply.

  “What is the point in shooting someone completely unattached to the anti-Cuban enterprise? I don’t care if the sharks eat Mayor Tinhigh tomorrow morning. But I care about the political significance of an assassination that traces to me. If it does not trace to me, it accomplishes absolutely nothing. The mayor might have been killed by his wife’s lover, for all that that would prove. But if it is traceable to us, then we have reached out and killed an elected American public official. Terrorism is a useful weapon, but it is not useful unless it accomplishes a political purpose. If it is traced to my government, the United States then has in its hands a weapon it can publicly use to justify counteraggression. Kennedy is always complaining that we are attempting to spread the Communist message throughout Latin America. Let him complain. Spreading the revolution is our business. But to reach within the United States and assassinate a mayor—that is the beginning of wholesale terrorist warfare. Algeria versus France, all over again, but we do not have the advantages that Algeria had in its quarrel with France. No. Stupid. Childish.”

  There was discussion, after a diplomatic interval, of alternatives. “For instance,” Valdés said, “we could track down as many relatives as we can of the Cubans Alejandro has identified, and he will be identifying many more. Arrest relatives, charge them with complicity, execute a few, maybe quite a few, send the rest to prison camps—that would pour a little cold water on the movement, no, Fidel?”

  Fidel merely nodded his head. Not the executive nod, always distinctive with Castro. Rather, the nod that signified that he had heard the proposal and would weigh it.

  Dorticós suggested the possibility of a dramatic arrival in New York by Fidel himself. A speech before the Security Council denouncing the aggressive plans of the United States government via the CIA station in Miami.

  Again Castro listened, giving the same nod.

  “Or if your own presence would lend more weight than we want in this situation, we could have Carlos Lechuga—as our U.N. ambassador, he is on the spot in New York—summon the Security Council and let him give the speech, exposing the activities of JM WAVE.”

  “What exactly would he use for documentation?” Fidel asked. “Alejandro has told us what is going on, what is planned, but we do not have the kind of documentation that would make it clear that this is a U.S. operation, not merely an operation by Cuban traitors.”

  The talk continued, and Castro ordered beer and fruit and rum brought in. He poured rum into a glass—unusual for Castro, who although he drank occasionally, seldom drank in tense situations in which his leadership was critical. After downing half his glass, he addressed his brother with some calmness.

  “I do agree with you that a gesture of some kind is important. The complaining public gesture we cannot make without documentation. Random terrorism is not useful at this moment. Something else.”

  “Why not,” Dorticós suggested, “assassinate one of the CIA leaders involved in the operation? There are a half-dozen prominent CIA-affiliated people attached to JM WAVE, if Alejandro is correct. We could pick off one of those. No?”

  “Why not,” Fidel said suddenly, “Blackford Oakes?”

  His eyes brightened, and he took another swig of his rum. “Oakes is very close to the President. I released him last October as the result of a direct appeal from the President.”

  Castro did not rehearse the details of the episode—the telegram that had come in from the Attorney General. A telegram that had been less an appeal than a threat of dire retaliation if Oakes was harmed.

  Castro continued, “We let him go because it is true that he came to Cuba originally at the invitation of Che Guevara, authorized by me. But the point is that Kennedy took a personal interest in him. When the agent Oakes left Cuba, he had been sentenced to execution by a Cuban military court for acts of subversive interference in Cuban internal affairs. To carry out that sentence now would certainly be a way of saying to the President: You had your chance to live up to your promises during the missile crisis, and you have not lived up to those terms.” Castro rose. He was giving a speech now.

  “You have planned secretly to make war against my government. Well, the gesture of conciliation that I made to you in October is now null and void!” Fidel’s right hand was outstretched, his fingers tightly closed—except for his middle finger, stiff in the international sign of challenge and mockery. “This to you, Mr. President!” Fidel Castro’s facial muscles were white, and he was sweating. He sat down.

  “That”—his voice was changed; he was the legal scholar, lecturing to his students—“what Kennedy is doing in Miami is the unilateral nullification of a contract, which leaves the other contracting party free to proceed unencumbered by the terms of the original contract.” He turned his head triumphantly to Dorticós. “I find that very appealing; what do you think, Osvaldo?”

  “I like it, Fidel. But there is of course a problem. If Oakes were here, convicted of violating Cuban laws, he would be subject to Cuban justice. But there is this problem: He is in Miami, where United States law applies.”

  “There is no point, Osvaldo, in being legalistic, just because I introduced a few legal principles into our discussion. True, Miami does not operate under Cuban law. But Miami—and this would be our larger point in executing Oakes—is engaged in plans to aggress against Cuba, so that there is a sense in which hitting back would be a form of … hot pursuit, no?”

  Fidel very much liked his metaphor, and used it several times. “Hot pursuit,” he lectured, “defines the right of the power being aggressed against to pursue the aggressor into his own country. Only last week, Senator—what’s his name? The militarist from Georgia?—Senator Richard Russell, the Southern warmonger, asked President Kennedy to exercise the right of hot pursuit against our MIGs when they fire on vessels in international waters. Well, there is a sense in which that is what we would be doing. Blackford Oakes leaves Cuba and resumes aggression, so we visit Cuban justice on him as though we were pursuing him in retaliation against his act of aggression.”

  Dorticós said that was true, but that the events of the past year—the random attempts on Castro himself, mostly designed by the Mafia though commissioned by the CIA—were perhaps a part of history, not a part of the contemporary problem. “Perhaps we should wait until JM WAVE stages its first assault. According to Alejandro these assaults will begin any day now. Then, after the first such assault, we could take the position that a fresh war of aggression has begun, and that we intend to take symbolic recognition of this by carrying out last year’s sentence against an agent obviously involved in that aggression.”

  �
�I like that,” Fidel said. “Yes, Osvaldo, I think you reason well.” He turned to Valdés.

  “Tell Alejandro to spare no pains in attempting to discover exactly what the agent Oakes is doing. See that he is very well observed, so that when I give the order to execute sentence, we can strike quickly. Quickly. Neatly. And I will give thought to what kind of … coincidental communications we would make to the U.S. government following our … reciprocal gesture.”

  Raúl began asking a question, but Fidel raised his hand. “Enough. Enough on this subject. I wish to discuss now another item on the agenda, the length to which our initiatives toward Mao Tse-tung will go forward. For that we want two or three people who are waiting below. You, Valdés, are excused. Raúl, call in Roa and Rodríguez.”

  8

  Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev tapped on his desk with impatience. “Aleksei, you are driving me crazy. But you would drive anyone crazy. How it is that you have not already driven crazy my beloved Rada? I cannot understand. You call me about this ‘explosive interview’ Castro has given to the French journalist, I tell you to come here to read it to me, and for one hour now—”

  “I have been here only for ten minutes, Nikita Sergeyevich—”

  “Well it feels like one hour, mother of God. You want to show off that you can read French? Well I know that you can read French. I know big assholes who can read French. Like De Gaulle. Yes. He is the best example of an asshole who can read French. But what I want is not the French, I want the Russian, and at the rate at which you are translating it, Castro will die of old age before I learn what it is that he told the French reporter. Why did you not have it translated before you came?”

  “The newspaper came by pouch only this morning, an early edition secured by our correspondent in Paris. And you told me to come immediately with it. I could have had it translated first, and if you wish, Nikita Sergeyevich, I will leave here now and have it translated for you and come back in an hour or two—”

  “An hour or two!” Khrushchev screamed. “An hour or two! That bearded madman in Cuba is making fun of me in front of the entire world, is misrepresenting me before the entire world, is—don’t deny this, Aleksei—is making a mockery of the mother country of socialism which saved his Cuban ass just three months ago and which has been feeding his miserable little island for three years now, and you want to postpone telling me exactly what he said! Mother of God.”

  Khrushchev picked up his telephone. “Ring Kosygin.”

  Aleksei Adzhubei said nothing. Khrushchev tapped his fingers on the desk, stopped, wrested the newspaper from Aleksei’s hand, and stared at the pictures of Castro in various heroic poses. The phone rang and he picked it up. “Aleksei Nikolaevich. Have you heard of the Le Monde Castro interview?… You know nothing about it?… Don’t your embassies keep you informed? Never mind. Kindly send to my office immediately a simultaneous translator, French-Russian.” He slammed the phone down.

  He turned to his son-in-law. “You may go. I will call and tell you how to handle this in Izvestia.”

  “Thank you, Nikita Sergeyevich.” Aleksei reached for the issue of Le Monde. His hand flattened under the crashing force of Khrushchev’s right hand.

  “You idiot! You heard me call for a translator. What is he going to translate from? This morning’s edition of Izvestia? Not that you don’t need a good translator to understand the manure you manage to put into that paper. How do you manage, Aleksei, to cram so much shit into such little space? Maybe I should cut your paper allowance. No, you would leave out, then, the few things that are interesting.”

  Khrushchev sighed at his son-in-law. “Please go away, Aleksei.”

  Khrushchev sat in stony silence while the young bilingual clerk from the foreign office read from the interview in Le Monde.

  Castro had said that Khrushchev “should not have removed his missiles without consulting us.” Castro had said that “Cuba does not want to be a pawn on the world’s chessboard.” Castro had said, “Cuban sovereignty is a reality.” Castro had said, “I cannot agree with Khrushchev promising Kennedy to pull out his rockets without the slightest regard to the indispensable approval of the Cuban Government.” And Castro had said that although the Soviet missiles were not under direct Cuban control, they were “on Cuban territory and nothing should have been decided without consulting us. We are not a Soviet satellite.”

  He dismissed the clerk. Then he summoned a meeting for two that afternoon with Foreign Minister Kosygin, Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky, and Vladimir Semichastny, Chairman of the KGB.

  It was a long afternoon, but in the end Kosygin had his way. There is no point, he had stressed and restressed, in permitting the alienation of Fidel Castro. He had, yes, been very provocative, first with his public gestures toward Mao Tse-tung, his public references to him as the true follower of Lenin and Marx—“Yes yes, the meaning of that was unmistakable, Nikita Sergeyevich”—but the Cuban revolution remained, notwithstanding the missile fiasco of last October. (This reference was artfully used. The idea of the missiles had been Khrushchev’s; Kosygin had always been skeptical; but now Khrushchev took inward solace from what Kosygin did not know about the missile crisis.)

  Kosygin went on. Cuba was an outpost of incredible value to the Soviet offensive in Latin America and it would be folly to run the least risk of simply handing Castro over to Mao Tse-tung.

  Khrushchev had argued that Castro was hardly in a position to spurn Moscow for very long. “Who is going to give him his jets and his guns, and, for that matter, his bread?” Kosygin replied that there were two possibilities there, both to be avoided. One was that China would take on the economic and military responsibilities of feeding and caring for such a geopolitically valuable satellite, never mind the strain on China’s economy. “After all, Nikita Sergeyevich, China is spending billions in Africa already.” And then—and this, really, was the argument that conclusively won the day—“And then there is the third possibility. A detente between Castro and Kennedy.”

  Obviously to be avoided at all costs, said Malinovsky. Semichastny added his voice to the small chorus. “Obviously to be avoided. At all costs.”

  The decision was made.

  Fidel Castro would be personally invited by Khrushchev to come to the Soviet Union on a state visit. It would coincide with the May Day celebrations. He would be lionized. “He will go back a tame donkey,” Kosygin assured Khrushchev.

  Khrushchev, though he had begun the session steaming against Castro, was captured by the very idea of taming the Cuban tiger, and when he rose he was in a good mood. “Good day, Aleksei Nikolaevich. Good day, Vladimir Yefimovich.” To Malinovsky he said, “Rodion, kindly stay for a minute. I have one or two items …” He saw his other two consultants fraternally to the door, smiled, and closed it.

  He returned to his desk. “My Tass digest reports, I read them this morning—I was interrupted by the Le Monde business—bring me this.” Khrushchev shuffled through the papers on his desk. He put on his glasses and began to read: “‘Washington. Cuban refugee reports that some Soviet missiles are still in Cuba denied today. Major General Alva R. Fitch of U.S. Army Intelligence testified before a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee and said, “It is our belief that the Soviets did in fact remove all strategic weapons systems that were in Cuba at the time the U.S. quarantine was imposed.” But Fitch conceded that thousands of Cuban caves probably were stocked with Soviet “ammunition, supplies, vehicles, and even aircraft.”’”

  Khrushchev put down his glasses. “Rodion, do you know anything about this Cuban refugee report that claims we still have missiles in Cuba?”

  Malinovsky leaned back in his easy chair and lit a cigarette. Yes, he said. He had the story. Still missing a few details, but essentially it was this. “I had the coded message from Major Kirov only last night.”

  What happened, he explained to the General Secretary, was as follows. As Khrushchev knew, the arrangements, to which maximum secrecy had been attached, were for the hidden
missile to rest under one of those vast caves described by the U.S. Army Intelligence officer. The cave itself was filled with Soviet equipment designed for Cuban use: trucks, ammunition, three tanks, and six MIGs in various stages of assembly. The missile beneath it, Kirov reported, needs its regular maintenance. “In order to accomplish this, it is necessary—I can imagine it, can you not, Nikita Sergeyevich?—to make one’s way through all that stored equipment, to a manhole cover which is kept locked with a padlock. There is nothing suspicious about it, Kirov assures me: it is simply assumed by the Cuban military that it leads to a ventilating device or whatever the engineers installed under the steel flooring.

  “Well, Kirov went down there for his January check, with his flashlight and his electrical and radioactivity kit, and when an hour later he came up, he found someone staring at him, even though it was after midnight. He flashed his light on him and it turned out to be a very drunk Cuban soldier who, wandering home from La Cuesta—a bar—to the garrison, decided to have a look inside the cave. He came in through the door in the aluminum siding that covers the entrance to the cave at night. Kirov admits he left the door open; often it is open. It should of course have been locked. The soldier had his own flashlight and had begun snooping around the stored military equipment, which is not, of course, a secret. The Cuban garrison at the other end of the field is substantially maintained by what we continue to pour into that depot. The soldier was quite drunk and even had trouble speaking, Kirov reported, and he laughed a great deal. But he did say, ‘I swear, comrade, that looked like a fucking missile you were fussing with down there.’ Kirov just laughed, and said that underground ventilators made in Kiev tend to look not unlike the cone of a missile. He had just gone down to check it, Kirov told the Cuban, because it had not been working properly. He found that it was merely a matter of needing a little extra oil.