LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  The CIA had begun plotting the assassination of Castro in August 1960, headed by Richard M. Bissell Jr. Moreover, Allen Dulles had gone to see President Eisenhower as early as March 1960 seeking approval to develop a plan to overthrow Castro. The original idea for using Mafia figures to assist the CIA in this plan originated as early as 1960 as well, in a proposal code-named JMARC. Dulles and Bissell briefed president-elect Kennedy on the pending invasion in November 1960; according to Bissell, Kennedy was generally passive, but expressed surprise at the scale of the operation. In March 1961 Kennedy asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to vet the JMARC project, but they were not given details of the plot to kill Castro. The JCS analyzed the project and reported that if the invaders were given four days of air cover and sufficient support by the people of Trinidad, Cuba, where the invasion was originally designed to occur, and if the invaders were able to join with the guerrillas in the Escambray Mountains, the potential for success was 30 percent. The JCS could not recommend that Kennedy go along with the JMARC project. At a meeting on March 11, 1961, Kennedy rejected Bissell’s proposed scheme and told him to revise it to be “less spectacular” and move the landing site away from the town of Trinidad. Kennedy had evidently misunderstood the projections of the report from the JCS, but it is not clear whether the miscommunication was the fault of the information transmitters or of the recipient.16

  As Allen W. Dulles would later remark, “We felt that when the chips were down, when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail.” In other words, he acknowledged that the new plan was seriously flawed and unlikely to be successful. But the question of whether it would be a complete disaster hung on his belief that Kennedy would order a full-scale invasion when he realized that failure was imminent; Bissell essentially set a trap for Kennedy to force U.S. intervention; however, his quarry refused to take the bait. Bissell met on April 10 with Robert F. Kennedy, telling him that the new plan had a two out of three chance of success. Kennedy agreed to the latest scheme and pressured others to do so as well. On April 14, John Kennedy asked Bissell how many aircraft would be involved; he replied sixteen. Kennedy told him to use only eight. Bissell knew that this would further jeopardize the invasion, yet he accepted the downsizing based on the assumption that Kennedy would later change his mind “when the chips were down.”17

  After the invasion of Cuba commenced, at the United Nations, Cuban foreign minister Raul Roa denounced “this act of imperialistic piracy of the United States.” Adlai Stevenson angrily protested this charge and categorically denied U.S. involvement. When he learned that his categorical denial of Roa’s charge—and his claim that the attack was the work of Cuban defectors—was a lie, he became incensed at not being briefed earlier on the situation. Author Victor Lasky wrote that Stevenson demanded of Kennedy that there be no more air strikes; it was this gaffe with his own U.N. representative that led to his decision to cancel the second air strike.18 The consensus of many authors is that the cancellation of the second air strike was due to Stevenson’s intimidation of Kennedy from taking measures to ensure the exiles and their CIA-trained leaders could overthrow the Castro regime and restore their country to them. To save face for Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy reneged on a key part of the invasion plan he had previously approved. The man who would lose the most, however, was CIA Deputy Director General Charles Cabell. He had arrived at the Air Operations Center just as the cleanup air strike was about to be launched and decided to routinely alert the White House; to his surprise and chagrin, clearance for the operation was denied. He repeated his request three more times, all of which were denied.19

  As the above events played out, later that evening Kennedy was caught up in his first big White House reception—a traditional white-tie affair for members of Congress, cabinet members, and their wives. The president and Mrs. Kennedy made their entrance down the grand stairway to the four sets of ruffles and flourishes, followed by “Hail to the Chief,” played by the U. S. Marine Corps Band; then, as they mingled with the twelve hundred guests, the band struck up Mr. Wonderful, and Jack and Jackie whirled around the East Room, smiling graciously at the applauding guests. One of the old-time servants said it was the most elaborate buffet he had seen in forty years of service. During the course of the dinner, the president was informed that Richard Bissell wished to see him immediately; calls went out to others not already there, including Dean Rusk, General Lemnitzer, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations. As soon as the guests were whisked out the front door, an intense meeting began in the cabinet room, which lasted into the early-morning hours; Bissell presented the account of a military and intelligence operation already overtaken by disaster. He made a strong case to the president to permit the use of U.S. air power to save the otherwise-doomed invaders. Admiral Burke concurred, but Dean Rusk—not the most innovative thinker there—vigorously dissented, referring to the president’s earlier pledge against direct intervention. By the end of the meeting, nothing had changed; Kennedy declined to authorize any further air strikes in the face of certain defeat and loss of the fifteen hundred invaders then under attack.20

  In a last-ditch effort to persuade the president to reconsider his orders, General Cabell drove to Secretary of State Rusk’s hotel, where he again expressed his fears. Despite the hour, 4:00 a.m. of the second day of fighting, Rusk called the president once more, but still the answer was no. Kennedy would never concede that withholding the air strike had caused the failure of the invasion, though the military had pleaded with him, using that very argument. It is easy to see, from different prisms, how Bissell and Cabell could blame Kennedy for the failed mission because he did not act as they assumed he would, yet understand how JFK instinctively knew that he had been sabotaged into not only authorizing the project but being outmaneuvered in its execution. The infuriated president promised to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces directly in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster.21

  Despite the uniformly negative reaction to the Bay of Pigs failure, Kennedy’s popularity remained positive; in fact, his Gallup poll approval rating soared to 83 percent as the country rallied to his side.* While JFK publicly took responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation, he privately blamed the CIA and the military brass for the debacle and subsequently withdrew any remaining confidence he had given to many of the decision makers who he felt had misled him.22

  The CIA men, of course, portrayed the debacle quite differently. In their view, JFK had interfered with the operation both in its planning stage and again in the middle of its execution. They felt that his changes—to the location of the invasion, the cuts in the number of exiles deployed, and the 50 percent reduction in the number of aircraft authorized for the first bombing raid—and the commitments he broke, including his failure to authorize the second wave of air strikes, were the reasons that the operation failed. This reaction resonated loudly throughout the higher reaches of the military and intelligence communities and beyond, through all tiers of officers and many enlisted men as well. The recriminations echoed through the exile communities in Miami and New Orleans, sharply hostile in a demographic which had previously been favorable to Kennedy’s public statements. Now he denied that the United States was involved; this provoked insurrection by the exiles and their counterparts in Cuba and discouraged resistance to Castro. There were many other people who were upset that the invasion failed to remove Castro; chief among them were Mafia heads such as Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, who had invested so much in the casinos and nightclubs, followed by the owners of other businesses large and small that Castro had expropriated. In the months following the Bay of Pigs, JFK attempted to reassert control over his military and intelligence apparatus; he appointed Robert Kennedy to the Special Operations Group (RFK became the “augmented” part of the “SOG augmented”) to conduct a critical inquiry of the experience, and by November he would fire the primary original architects: Allen Dulles,
Richard Bissell, and General Charles Cabell (who was, coincidentally, the brother of the mayor of Dallas, Texas, Earl Cabell).23

  Despite the stupendous failure at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Revolutionary Council remained a unifying force for the exile community until the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy’s concession with the Soviets to drop the idea of invading Cuba caused a reversal in the administration’s official policy toward the Cuban exiles, even though there remained, under Bobby Kennedy’s direction, renewed efforts to dispatch Castro by one means or another. During 1963, an intense bitterness developed within the community of anti-Castro Cuban exiles toward the man they believed betrayed them, John F. Kennedy; it was a hatred at least as intense as their hatred of Fidel Castro.24 The CRC, being a creature founded and supported by the CIA, was a conduit for many officials to nourish the hate and give it a firm foundation. Years later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) found that the exiles might have been involved in the assassination, since they “had the motive, based on what they considered President Kennedy’s betrayal of their cause, the liberation of Cuba from the Castro regime; the means, since they were trained and practiced in violent acts …; and the opportunity, whenever the President … appeared at public gatherings, as in Dallas on November 22, 1963.”25 The biggest impact of the failure at the Bay of Pigs was the untenable position it left the Kennedy administration in with its own military and intelligence organizations: They became increasingly isolated from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the senior CIA officers. The incident occurred so early in their term that the “honeymoon” was over almost before it started, resulting in a breakdown that quickly became a significant impediment in effectively dealing with the smoldering relationships between America and many of its adversaries, especially with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Vietnam; neither the president nor the “assistant president” (RFK) were widely respected at the Pentagon or in Langley.

  That vacuum was filled, somewhat, by the vice president, someone who better “understood” the military mentality not through his own expertise so much as his deference to theirs: He was easier to deal with because of his inclination to let them establish policy, not lead them to a point at odds with their conventional positions. This allegiance to the vice president by the military and intelligence leadership of the country came at the expense of their relationship to the president. Over the course of the next two years, those relationships would continue growing even farther apart and become so well established that it could be argued that in the larger scheme, Lyndon B. Johnson had assumed the mantle of commander in chief. This phenomenon was probably something that Johnson had carefully planned since accepting the vice presidential nomination. Consider that one of his favorite mantras throughout his lifetime was, “Power is where power goes.”26 Another one, even more troubling in retrospect, was, “Behind every success there is a crime.”27

  Operation Mongoose

  Although inexperienced in foreign policy, the Kennedys began secretive back-channel communications directly with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and spent the next eighteen months negotiating foreign policy independently of the existing diplomatic apparatus. Having already been deceived by the CIA and manipulated by the Pentagon, the start of the “back channel”—which will be examined further in the pages ahead—marked the point at which they would find an alternative to the staid and feckless State Department. Bobby Kennedy, just thirty-five years old, within the first six months of JFK’s presidency had become the president’s legal adviser, political adviser, protector, best friend, and now his primary foreign affairs adviser. This was all on top of his familial responsibility to keep his brother out of personal trouble, which was proving to be a full-time job of itself.

  John and Bobby Kennedy were devastated and humiliated by the failures of the Bay of Pigs misadventure and sought revenge on Castro. Four U.S. pilots based in Nicaragua were shot down by Castro’s forces. Kennedy had denied any direct U.S. involvement and hoped the pilots were dead; he initially refused to pay their families the military pensions they were due because he was upset about their actions and feared the potential fallout if their involvement was revealed. The families eventually received the pensions after threatening to reveal the real story. But that was only one of a number of duplicitous acts and one of a series of contradictions the Kennedys were involved in during the administration of their government. The Cuba situation would not remain settled for long, either in the USA or in the USSR. Sometime in the fall of 1961,

  • the Soviets realized they were failing in Berlin and began quietly pushing it onto the back burner, simultaneously moving Cuba to the front burner as they decided to begin planning the installation of nuclear weapons there;

  • the Kennedy administration, with help from the CIA, created a new and aggressive program aimed at overthrowing the Cuban government.

  The name Lyndon Johnson will now become, temporarily, more scarce in the narrative because he had been relegated to other noncritical duties to keep him out of town and out of Kennedy’s hair. In the thirty-five months of his vice presidency, he visited an average of almost one country every month. Whenever he traveled, he had a constant alcohol buzz, taking dozens of cases of Cutty Sark with him.28 Braced with whiskey and armored with the euphoric confidence of a manic at the height of his delusion, Johnson ran through the streets of far-off places such as Senegal, passing out souvenir pens and making speeches in English to people who never had the slightest idea of what he was babbling. It is difficult to apportion how much of his ecstatic elation was the result of his mania and how much was the result of his scotch whiskey. During his term as the vice president, he generally had very little to do with anything related to Cuba, though he sided with General LeMay and the Joint Chiefs regarding the need for an invasion to take out the missiles being installed by the Soviet Union. He had aggressively involved himself with military and intelligence officials regarding Vietnam, and he had made it known to them that he, Lyndon Johnson, fundamentally disagreed with Jack Kennedy on that issue, and in fact he agreed with all of the hawks in these organizations that, in order to save Western civilization from the peril of peasants fighting between themselves in a civil war on the other side of the world, the United States should join that war.

  The review which follows of John and Robert Kennedy’s handling of Cuba, and their efforts to displace Fidel Castro, is essential to the story for two reasons: (1) to understand the explosive relationship between the Kennedys and key military and intelligence officials, especially Bill Harvey; and (2) how their handling of the missile crisis rebounded back to them vis-à-vis the Cuban exiles as well as those same key military and intelligence officials.

  After the Bay of Pigs disaster, in November 1961 the president had decided that he could not countenance the ineptitude that he felt was prevalent at the CIA. His solution was to appoint Bobby to another role unrelated to his AG responsibilities: the head of the Special Operations Group—Augmented, which was linked to the National Security Council.”29 The Special Group included, as chairman, Maxwell Taylor, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, John McCone of the CIA, chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lyman Lemnitzer, Roswell Gilpatric from the Pentagon, and U. Alexis Johnson from the State Department.30

  A new program, code-named Operation Mongoose, was assigned to counterinsurgency specialist Edward G. Lansdale, which was overseen by the Special Group—Augmented—“SGA.” President Kennedy signed the authorization formally establishing Mongoose as a top secret operation on November 30, 1961, “to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime.” Lansdale was given the assignment of developing a program to spark a revolution within Cuba. Shortly afterward, William K. Harvey was put in charge of Task Force W, created by the CIA to execute Operation Mongoose. The task force operated directly under the authority of the SGA, but in many ways, as will be seen shortly, it operated almost autonomously under Harvey and his superiors at Langley, Richard Helms and James Jesus Angleton. It also grew into a very large entity
, clearly expedited by the high priority assigned to it by the White House, including four hundred Americans at CIA headquarters and JM/WAVE, its Miami station, plus about two thousand Cubans and a fleet of speedboats. It also grew in other, more insidious ways as the plans being made to deal with Castro became a blueprint that could be cloned and applied to John F. Kennedy.

  William King Harvey was a Hoosier (i.e., Indiana native) with a law degree and a Kentucky wife who liked to drink almost as much as her husband. He started his government career with the FBI, but a combination of his drinking and extramarital activities cost him that job when he stayed out one night and his wife called the bureau the next morning inquiring about his whereabouts, which reportedly did not sit well with J. Edgar Hoover. While his ties with the FBI—and Hoover—may have been erased on paper, others have suggested that they were as strong as ever, that Harvey continued, covertly, reporting to Hoover as his mole within the CIA.31

  John Kennedy, as many people know, was a fan of Ian Fleming’s novels about the superagent 007, the legendary James Bond. Once in a lighthearted comment, JFK referred to Edward Lansdale as America’s answer to Bond; Lansdale demurred, saying that would probably be Bill Harvey, whom he would shortly bring to the Oval Office so they could meet. Later, when Lansdale brought Harvey with him to meet the president and his brother, Bobby, in the Oval Office, he turned to him as they were entering the White House and said, “You’re not carrying your gun, are you?” His answer was, “Yes, of course.” After Lansdale explained to the Secret Service agent that his friend would like to check his firearm, Harvey pulled a revolver from his pants pocket, then, as an afterthought, reached behind his back and pulled out a .38-caliber Detective Special from a holster. In greeting him, Kennedy said, “So you’re our James Bond,”32 but when Harvey conceded that he was really not quite in that league, at least regarding Bond’s sexual escapades, he probably did not realize that JFK’s own prowess in that area could not be equaled even by the fictional superspy. Bill Harvey was the embodiment of a lot of things, but a “James Bond” would not be the first figure most people would think of, even with his long and storied career in covert operations. His appearance was striking because of his bulging eyes, a result of a thyroid condition he had since birth. He was a huge, obese man with a big round head, a permanently angry-looking facial expression, and a shock of hair surrounding an otherwise bald head. He wheezed and grunted as he talked, and his voice was sometimes compared to the sound of a frog; his belches and other bodily sounds punctuated his utterances but otherwise did not affect his verbal aptitude. Despite his hard-drinking ways, he reveled in the world of covert operations, especially those requiring large-scale planning and audacious execution.33