—ARTHUR KROCK, THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 3, 1963
Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.
—JAMES ANGLETON, CIA CHIEF OF COUNTERINTELLIGENCE
Transitional Government
The Shift of Administrations: Eisenhower to Kennedy
During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy needled Richard Nixon on the Eisenhower administration’s ineffectiveness to stabilize Cuba, knowing that he had cornered Nixon because he could not reveal the secret plans then under development to invade Cuba. Kennedy took advantage of Nixon’s forced reticence and advocated strongly that the United States openly aid anti-Castro forces inside and outside Cuba—putting himself on the record as an advocate of aggressively helping the exiles in their fight against Fidel Castro while putting the hapless Nixon on the defensive side of the issue—even though he had personally helped develop the plan that Kennedy was advancing. During their last debate, Nixon was forced to argue on national television that the United States was barred by international law from helping Cuban exile groups.1 Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric would come back to bite him within three months of his inauguration.
In his farewell address of January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower had warned the entire nation about what he considered were very dangerous trends associated with the buildup of military powers, which had been going on during the eight years of his administration. He was originally planning to describe the phenomenon as the “military-industrial-congressional complex”; unfortunately, the most critical component of this complex, congressional, was dropped from the speech at the last minute, and it was simply referred to as the military-industrial complex:
We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal Government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist … We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
Kennedy had probably taken President Eisenhower’s warning more seriously than any of the military or intelligence leaders already in place, or even many of his own appointments in the highest reaches of the executive department. Before long, he had become disappointed by a number of his early appointments; however, he always tried to be supportive of his own men in order to keep them pulling in the same direction as the course he had plotted. On January 19, 1961, in one of his last actions as president, Dwight Eisenhower briefed his successor John F. Kennedy on numerous “items of unfinished business” as part of the presidential transition. As author/historian Richard Reeves described it, there was a built-in wall between them, which impeded the development of any mutual agreements:2
They talked for more than an hour, mostly about national security and foreign affairs. Eisenhower realized quickly what was on Kennedy’s mind and he didn’t like it. His questions were about the structure of decision making on national security and defense. It was clear to Ike that Kennedy thought his structure was too bureaucratic and slow—with too many debates and decisions outside the President’s reach and control. Eisenhower thought Kennedy was naïve, but he was not about to say that, and so he began a long explanation of how and why he had built up what amounted to a military staff apparatus to collect and feed information methodically to the Commander-in-Chief and then coordinate and implement his decisions.
Eisenhower was more interested in the situation in Laos than Vietnam, which he said was the most dangerous trouble spot in Southeast Asia. He mentioned South Vietnam only as a secondary issue since it would be one of the nations that would fall into the Communist side if the United States failed to support the regime in Laos. Kennedy was shocked by what Eisenhower told him. He later told his two aides, Kenneth O’Donnell and David Powers, “There he sat, telling me to get ready to put ground forces into Asia, the thing he himself had been carefully avoiding for the last eight years. And he was very calm about it. I was finding out that things were really just as bad as I had said they were during the campaign.”3 Another of these items was Cuba, and the issue was the plans for an invasion at the Bay of Pigs, “The rebel force that was being trained by the CIA in Guatemala to invade Cuba.” O’Donnell and Powers claimed that “Eisenhower urged him to keep on supporting this plan to overthrow Castro.”4
JFK Confronts the CIA
For the first twenty-five years of its existence, the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to grow in every way imaginable: the number of people employed; the physical acreage and buildings required to house it, both home and abroad; its reach into other cultures and governments around the world; and its autonomy and independence, uncontrolled by the congressional committees, which dutifully exercised oversight of all other—less dangerous, more easily managed—agencies and departments of the government. Its budget was secret, unauditable, and seemingly unlimited; thus, even the term “budget” was, if not an oxymoron in this context, at least an overstatement.
The CIA was established in 1947, but its mission was not defined until 1949 when Public Law 81-110 was passed; the prevailing attitude in Congress and the other branches of government was that an open-ended license to conduct its shadowy business was necessary in order to match the capabilities of the Soviet Union’s secret intelligence agency, the KGB, which operated similarly. Thus, “the Agency” was free to use confidential fiscal and administrative processes to achieve its ends. The act exempted it from having to disclose anything about its organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries, whatever. Given such a broad mandate, it is not surprising that congressional scrutiny was, for practical purposes, nonexistent. The director of central intelligence during most of this period, Allen Dulles, fostered the sense of autonomy and independence throughout all of its sections. Its leaders, including Dulles, Richard Helms, Richard Bissell, James Jesus Angleton, William Colby, and Cord Meyer, were all conscious of one caveat, however: Just as it had been created out of carefully crafted legal language, so too could it be destroyed. In 1961, John F. Kennedy promised to do just that, but it was understood that doing so in his first term would risk his not being reelected, so it would have to wait until his second—presuming that he could have outlived the realization of his promise.
Many historians agree that the real founder of the CIA was Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, even though his tenure did not begin until 1950. The Agency he inherited from William J. Donovan had been in a continuing fight with the State Department and the FBI over defining its turf, and the morale within the Agency had been faltering since the end of World War II. Beetle Smith is credited with finally bringing the disparate parts of the CIA together, and with establishing effective command and control throughout the organization. Smith established three branches in the CIA:
• The Office for National Estimates, to develop estimates of other countries’ capabilities, pertaining to military defenses, natural resources, etc.
• The Office for Research and Reports (ORR), to monitor and report on economic developments, focused primarily on the Soviet Union and its allied countries
• The Dire
ctorate for Intelligence (DDI), to produce intelligence reports
For the last sixty-odd years, the CIA has somehow managed to maintain its reputation despite its checkered past—mostly buried in top secret archives—at a huge, practically unquantifiable cost. Although there were undoubtedly many successful and legal operations in those early years, the unfortunate fact is that its record was replete with numerous instances of its going well outside the charter to obtain knowledge of the world and to take aggressive action to stop threats to the nation. Its global reach enabled it to extend its umbrella over the entire hemisphere and attempt to reshape the world by discreetly manipulating—and worse, forcefully changing—the ideologies of sovereign nations. Even when it operated within its mandate, its history is blemished by deadly mistakes made on the basis of bad intelligence, philosophical flaws and structural failures which, as now well established, have continued into the twenty-first century. Those mistakes have negatively redounded on its reputation, even to the point of exposing itself to baseless and unscrupulous charges from politicians willing to take a swipe at an easy target for narrow and selfish purposes. The errors made and opportunities lost continue to leave the country vulnerable.
The worst of the mistakes were related to its operations within the United States, clearly in violation of its charter. Closely next to that—arguably tied for first place—were the attempts to overthrow foreign governments and assassinate their leaders, essentially putting the United States in charge of how other countries would be run and making murder an official policy of the United States government. Among the worst of those mistakes was an illegal program code-named HTLINGUAL under which the mail for certain individuals and/or organizations was opened, read, and copied before being resealed and delivered.5 Arguably worse than that was Project MK/ULTRA, the code name for a covert interrogation research program involving the surreptitious use of drugs, as well as hypnosis and other methods, to manipulate people against their conscious will.6 As noted in later chapters, there were indications that Lee Harvey Oswald was one of the subjects involved with this program.
The 1953 coup that installed the shah of Iran, the 1954 overthrow of the Guatemala government, the assassinations of other heads of state, such as Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo were all examples of overreaching its originally authorized intelligence mission. In the 1950s it was political suicide to ignore the “international Communist conspiracy,” which threatened to take over the world; this was exemplified by the picture flashed across American television sets of Nikita Khrushchev slamming his shoe repeatedly at a meeting of the UN Security Council, while shouting “We will bury you!” Neither John Kennedy nor Richard Nixon ignored it; in fact, they actively competed for the strongest position against the young revolutionary Fidel Castro. As noted earlier, Kennedy even took advantage of Nixon’s need to be circumspect regarding his own knowledge of a pending attack against the island in an obscure location named the Bay of Pigs.
Another of the CIA’s more questionable projects involved the use of Mafia figures against Castro; during 1960, before the presidential election came into full swing, the CIA—acting at the behest of Vice President Nixon (as proxy for President Eisenhower)—recruited ex-FBI agent Robert Maheu, who would later become a top aide to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, to ask Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana for help in murdering Castro. Although the Mafia did not manage to successfully kill Castro with the poison pills they were given by the Agency to accomplish this, that proved to be only the start of an association between the nation’s leading intelligence agency and an underworld organization that the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation claimed did not even exist.7 Richard Helms would later say that collaborating with the Mafia was “one of the greatest regrets of my life. It was a mistake, a case of poor judgment.”8 He also admitted the CIA’s failure “to inform the Warren Commission about the agency’s anti-Castro machinations. ‘If I had to do it over again, I would’ve backed up a truck, taken all the documents down, and shoved them onto the Warren Commission’s desk.’”9
Cuba: America’s Playground Becomes America’s Nemesis
Until December 1959, the island of Cuba had been considered a playground for wealthy Americans, where gambling and prostitution were legal, the weather was always warm, and the finest rum and cigars in the world were plentiful and cheap. This was a convenient arrangement for the Mafia because it was safely outside the reach of American law enforcement; they had invested millions in building casinos, nightclubs, and brothels that would also keep their fortunes away from the IRS. Of course, to do so, they had paid off the Batista regime under the table, though only for a fraction of the amount of U.S. taxes they would have otherwise had to pay. American corporations owned most of the mining industry as well as the utilities and other businesses that kept the Cuban economy alive.
Several months before the presidential campaign heated up and Fidel Castro’s real agenda became known, he had been welcomed to Washington and applauded by many for his overthrow of the evil dictator Batista. Castro even double-talked his way around a question asked of him by Nixon, on what he thought of the difference between dictatorships and democracy; Castro’s curious response was, “Dictatorships are a shameful blot on America, and democracy is more than just a word.”10 During 1960, his revolution against Batista’s tyranny morphed into a new form of totalitarianism, becoming merely another socialist dictatorship. In the process, he expropriated hundreds of American-owned facilities, nationalized all industries, did away with the free press, and shut down the bordellos and gambling casinos. The total number of people he tortured or murdered on the way to creating his workers’ paradise will never be known, but hundreds of suspected Batista-era agents, policemen, and soldiers were put on public trial for war crimes; most of those convicted were executed by firing squad, and the rest received long prison sentences.
According to Henry Hurt, in Reasonable Doubt, a sea change was occurring in the attitudes of Cubans toward the revolution:
By the end of Castro’s first year, the honeymoon with the United States was long over. There was a general sense of horror at Castro’s mass executions of former officials, and there were early signs that the new premier had no genuine interest in developing a good relationship with the United States. By the summer of 1960 Castro had seized more than $700 million in U.S. property and was openly dealing with the Soviets. During this metamorphosis, thousands of Cubans, increasingly disenchanted with Castro, were fleeing in waves to the United States. By the end of 1960, 100,000 Cuban refugees were in the United States. They continued to pour in at the rate of 1,700 each week. Finally, on January 3, 1961—just two years after Castro came to power—the United States formally broke diplomatic relations with Cuba. That was the sorry state of affairs between the two countries when, less than three weeks later, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president.11
The Cuban exiles began forming their own coalitions to plan their recapture of Cuba; however, there was no single strong leader until a powerful coalition of several groups was formed for them by the CIA. “It was this coalition, eventually known as the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) that was to coordinate with the CIA the fateful Bay of Pigs invasion.”12
The Disaster at the Bay of Pigs
Kennedy’s narrow victory over Nixon took many of the top officials of the CIA and Pentagon by surprise, but the planning for the secret Cuban invasion proceeded with Kennedy’s acquiescence. In short, the plan was to train Cuban exiles, who were recruited and armed by the CIA with aircraft and ships disguised to hide their U.S. ownership. The original beach at which the CIA-trained Cuban brigade would land was known as Zapata; it had an airstrip that was suitable for B-26 bombing operations against Castro’s military. Kennedy instructed the CIA to make certain changes in the plan, including moving the beachhead farther west on the island, to the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs), which
was more lightly populated. There was a reason fewer people lived there, which paralleled the reason why it was uniquely unsuited for such an invasion: The bay featured many dangerous underwater reefs, then unnavigable swamps; the narrow shore was shadowed by a looming mountain range that impeded a quick invasion.
The model used by the CIA was the 1954 Operation Success in Guatemala, which the CIA considered aptly named despite the fact that it had led to a civil war that lasted decades and ended up costing over two hundred thousand lives. The scale would need to be much larger and adapted to the fact that the original version was designed for use in Central America and that Cuba was surrounded by water. The same men who had executed the original plan were named to the new one, which was given the aggressive moniker Operation Zapata after the name of the beach originally planned for the invasion. After its abject failure, the operation would become ignominiously known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco.13 Some of these same swashbucklers would reemerge over the next few years, as a result of other misadventures, in such places as Miami, New Orleans, Mexico City, and Dallas, Texas: E. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips were two;14 Bill Harvey and David Morales were others.
Exactly three months after Kennedy took office, on April 17, 1961, the CIA’s invasion of Cuba was executed. It was an unmitigated disaster. Getting word of the impending invasion, Castro’s army routed the fifteen hundred Cuban exiles that landed at the Bay of Pigs. On the eve of the invasion, JFK cancelled a scheduled second air strike intended to destroy the Cuban air force. The first bombing, carried out two days earlier by eight unmarked WWII B-26s gifted to the Cuban Expeditionary Force, failed after JFK had reduced the number of bombers by half. Kennedy thought a second attempt would more likely implicate the United States, which he had warned the CIA from the beginning would not be done. His cancellation of that mission inevitably led to the disaster when the landing party proceeded into the ambush that awaited them. The plan for the invaders to establish a beachhead and announce the creation of a counterrevolutionary government that would appeal for assistance from the United States and the Organization of American States, while Castro was simultaneously being terminated, came to a halt.15
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