JFK’s point, of course, referred only to his reputation in the intelligence community, and in that context, it made a little more sense. As noted by Dino A. Brugioni, “It was Harvey, not James Angleton, who fingered Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean as British agents in Washington working for the Soviet Union. He also pointed to Kim Philby as ‘the third man’ when Burgess and Maclean defected to the Soviet Union.”34 Harvey had a swaggering flamboyance and brashness, but possessed an agile mind with a photographic memory for things he had been involved in; his briefings would last for hours, recited extemporaneously from memory recall.35 According to Noel Twyman, “His capacity for planning and carrying out intricate master schemes of a covert, illegal nature was legendary. He knew every detail of his projects”36 (emphasis added). Those skills were exactly what Lyndon Johnson would value, as they were similar to his own. There are reasons, as we will see, that Johnson (and/or Hoover or Angleton) would have tapped Harvey at the operational level of his own plan. The communication linkage, of course, connected Harvey to the higher levels through his own direct, daily ties to Angleton. Angleton, in turn, was directly tied to J. Edgar Hoover: A high-level CIA officer (code-named John Scelso) said that “Angleton had ‘enormously influential contacts with J. Edgar Hoover,’ that he had his own direct line” to Hoover’s office37 (which was doubtlessly put to considerably more use than Hoover’s other direct line to Bobby Kennedy).
Moving on to the CIA, Harvey must have seemed to some like an oversized round peg being made to fit into a small square hole. Most of his colleagues in the higher echelons of the CIA, having come from the Ivy League colleges and/or earlier experience in the OSS, were of a decidedly different culture, in terms of physical appearance, mannerisms, and educational background. Dino Brugioni’s first impression* of Harvey was illuminating: “In addition to the ubiquitous pistols, he had in his hand a foot-long stiletto. He cleaned his nails and then hurled the stiletto at a target hung on the wall of his office.”38 Not exactly the image one conjures up as being like the dashing ladies’ man, “Bond … James Bond.”
Harvey earned his reputation as a covert operator in Berlin, 1960–1962, successfully tapping into the main Moscow-Berlin underground communication lines. Using a radar station as a cover, he masterminded the digging of an eighteen-hundred-foot tunnel, twenty-five feet underground from West Berlin to East Berlin.39 The tunnel was very elaborate, designed to be properly ventilated to avoid overheating the electronic equipment needed to tap the East German telecommunications line. A huge warehouse was built along the border with a basement having a twelve-foot ceiling to accommodate the 3,100 tons of dirt removed from the tunnel. The entire project took eighteen months to complete under the noses of the Vopos, the East German border guards, and produced reams of solid intelligence. The wiretaps worked for almost one year before they were discovered, but the volumes of information they produced took over two more years to process.40 As David C. Martin noted, “The Russian Army could not have made a military move anywhere in Europe without tipping its hand via the tunnel. When the CIA was set up in 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall was reported to have said, ‘I don’t care what the CIA does. All I want from them is twenty-four hours’ notice of a Soviet attack.’ ‘Harvey’s Hole,’ as the tunnel became known, had put the CIA in a position to do just that, and had done it at a time when the Agency had virtually no other assets behind the Iron Curtain.”41
As good as his career had been, Bill Harvey was not adept at maintaining cordial relations with everyone with whom he worked. This proved to be his undoing when he went to work with Robert F. Kennedy as the head of Task Force W. From their first meeting, a hateful relationship formed that would continue until well after Harvey was fired in January 1963. Harvey questioned Bobby’s judgment and considered him to be an amateur. When the author and longtime senior intelligence official Dino Brugioni visited him in his office during the Cuban Missile Crisis to review the results of one operation, he was greeted by a less-than-warm greeting: “What in the hell does a bunch of quacks know about covert operations?”42
The Special Group concentrated on covert operations, but there were two other groups related to Cuba that liaised together: One was called the Interdepartmental Committee on Cuba and the other was the Standing Group, which was responsible for longer-range policy objectives. All of these groups reported to Bobby Kennedy. The idea behind these divisions was to keep each one small enough to be more effective and to minimize the scope of overall knowledge of the participants, except for Bobby, who would be the only one understanding the big picture. Bobby’s senior staff included Cyrus Vance, Joseph Califano, and Alexander Haig; his special envoy with the anti-Castro Cubans was Harry [Enrique Ruiz] Williams.43 Bobby took care to keep his own name out of most of the documents created, but his position as the creator of the Cuban Coordinating Committee (CCC) had left enough evidence to allow his presence to be traced. According to General Al Haig, who was a CCC staffer, “‘Bobby Kennedy was running it—hour by hour … We were conducting two raids a week at the height of that program against mainland Cuba. People were being killed, sugar mills were being blown up, bridges were demolished. We were using fast boats and mother ships and the United States Army was supporting and training these forces. Cy Vance, the Secretary of the Army, was [presiding] over the State Department, the CIA, and the National Security Council. I was intimately involved. It was wrong-headed, I’m sorry to say. Weekly reports were rendered to Bobby Kennedy—he had a very tight hand on the operation.’”44 In 1998, General Haig was shown an organizational chart of the numerous Cuban committees at various government agencies. At the top was the president; nowhere on it did the attorney general, Robert Kennedy, appear. “Viewing the chart, Haig chuckled and exclaimed, ‘Bobby was the President!’ as far as Cuban operations were concerned. For emphasis, Haig repeated to the interviewer, ‘He was the President. Let me repeat, as a reasonably close observer, he was the president!’ [emphasis in original] Haig said his time on one of those Cuba committees involved the ‘impatient prodding of Robert Kennedy and the frequent invocation of the President’s name.’”45
At the same time that Bobby Kennedy was guiding the CIA—through his new group, the CCC, to conduct clandestine activities, including economic sabotage, raids, the destruction of key electric plants, sugar mills, and oil refineries—he was also forming allies among the Cuban exiles, often bringing them to his Hickory Hill home in Virginia, the Kennedy villa in Palm Beach, or even taking some of them on a ski trip to New Hampshire. The three closest to him were Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams, Manuel Artime, and Rolando Cubela. It was Harry Williams, a former friend of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who would be used to recruit Cuban exiles for training, most of which was done either in the Florida Keys, at the CIA’s Miami station, or outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, near Lake Pontchartrain—the same camp that Lee Harvey Oswald attempted to infiltrate.46 Bill Harvey had made many of the same contacts during the period he was running his Cuban task force; in fact many of his contacts still hated both Kennedys so much that they would have never cooperated with Bobby in this way. Harvey’s attitude regarding Bobby’s competence in this field did not change; in fact, he complained to his superiors about Bobby trying to conduct covert operations with little knowledge or experience, while Bobby complained to JFK that not enough covert action was being taken to unseat Castro. Bobby insisted on micromanaging the operations to the extent that he talked directly to the Cuban exile leaders and often met and socialized with a number of them. Harvey violently disagreed with RFK’s actions, telling him that someone of his position should not even be known to the covert operatives, much less talk to them and, worse, be seen with them.47
By January 1962, Task Force W was already engaged in a wide range of projects, mostly against Cuban ships and aircraft outside Cuba and non-Cuban ships engaged in Cuban trade. Small-time operations came first, things like contaminating shipments of sugar from Cuba and tampering with industrial products import
ed into the country. The intention was to develop a “strongly motivated political action movement” within Cuba, creating conditions to spark a revolt which would eventually cause the downfall of Castro and his government. Robert Kennedy stated early on that “‘no time, money, effort—or manpower … be spared.’ Mongoose was ‘top priority.’”48 Lansdale quickly developed a plan to incite open revolt among the masses leading to the overthrow of the Communist regime. In late February 1962, Edward Lansdale presented a six-phase plan for effecting political and psychological sabotage through military and intelligence operations, in addition to proposing “attacks on the cadre of the regime, including key leaders.” Lansdale noted that a “vital decision” had not yet been made regarding possible U.S. military actions in support of plans to overthrow Fidel Castro. The Lansdale plan included many ideas that appeared to be the result of a “brainstorming session,” which were not uncommon in the business field at the time; apparently, the technique was used in the intelligence community as well, given that many of the ideas were clearly “off the wall.” The plan called for “nonlethal chemicals to incapacitate sugar workers; ‘gangster elements’ to attack police officials; defections ‘from the top echelon of the Communist gang’; even spearing [sic, ‘spreading’] word that Castro was the Antichrist and that the Second Coming was imminent—an event to be verified by star shells sent up from an American submarine off the Cuban coast (‘elimination by illumination,’ a waspish critic called it).”49
At a meeting of the SGA, the scale of Lansdale’s Cuba Project was sharply reduced, and Lansdale was directed to develop a detailed plan for an intelligence-gathering program only. On March 1, the SGA confirmed that the immediate objective of the program would be intelligence collection and that all other actions would be inconspicuous and consistent with the United States’ overt policy of isolating Castro and neutralizing Cuban influence in the hemisphere. The guidelines were approved by the SGA in mid-March; they specifically noted that “the United States would attempt to ‘make maximum use of indigenous resources’ in trying to overthrow Fidel Castro but recognize that ‘final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention.’” In mid-June 1962, U.S. intelligence received reports of a pending revolt by Cubans against the Castro government, even without sponsorship by the United States. The SGA, upon learning of the reports, requested studies be undertaken to prepare for such a contingency. Lansdale subsequently ordered General Benjamin Harris to develop a contingency action plan designed for that scenario; this contingency plan, disseminated in July, outlined a program for the United States to “support and sustain the rebellion in Cuba through all its resources, including the use of U.S. military force.”50 In July, Edward Lansdale wrote an evaluation of phase 1 of Operation Mongoose, noting some successes, including the infiltration of eleven CIA guerrilla teams into Cuba, one team of which had grown to as many as 250 men. Lansdale warned that “time is running out for the U.S. to make a free choice on Cuba” and outlined four different ways in which the United States could proceed:
a. Cancel operational plans; treat Cuba as a bloc nation; or
b. Exert all possible diplomatic, economic, psychological, and all other pressures except the overt use of military forces;
c. Commit the United States to fully support Cubans to overthrow the Castro regime, including the use of U.S. military force, if the situation required it at the end; or
d. Overthrow the Castro-Communist regime by U.S. military force.
At a meeting of the SGA on August 10, the discussion centered on a course of action for Operation Mongoose following the intelligence collection phase scheduled to conclude in August. The SGA initially chose a plan advanced by John McCone that called for limited actions, including economic sabotage, to force a split between Fidel Castro and “old-line Communists.” But President Kennedy rejected that and called for a more ambitious plan aimed expressly at overthrowing Castro. During the meeting, the possibility of assassinating Castro was raised. According to William Harvey, “The question of assassination, particularly of Fidel Castro, was brought up by Secretary McNamara. It was the obvious consensus at that meeting … that this is not a subject which has been made a matter of official record.”51
Kennedy’s instructions were formalized in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 181, issued August 23, 1962, yet otherwise based on “option B.”52 Kennedy directed that several additional actions and studies be undertaken “in light of the evidence of new bloc activity in Cuba:” an examination of the pros and cons of a statement warning against the deployment of any nuclear weapons in Cuba; the psychological, political, and military effect of such a deployment; and the military options that might be exercised by the United States to eliminate such a threat. Regarding Operation Mongoose, Kennedy ordered that Plan B Plus, a program aimed at overthrowing Castro without overtly employing the U.S. military, be developed “with all possible speed.”53 A few days after NSAM 181 was signed, Fidel Castro angrily attacked gunboat raids on Cuba in a formal protest to the United Nations, saying that Cuba held the United States responsible for the raid. U.S. officials denied involvement, but the U.S. Coast Guard impounded the two speedboats used in the attack. Although the CIA’s Task Force W was behind several harassing attacks, U.S. officials stated they did not sanction this raid; yet it is known that Bill Harvey was by then operating quite independently of Foggy Bottom (as the State Department building is referred to in Washington) and the Pentagon. The CIA also allowed the exile group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil) to base itself in Florida, and had previously trained the group in demolition techniques and donated the speedboats used in the attack.54
By the summer of 1962, Bill Harvey had grown increasingly angry at Bobby Kennedy’s continuing interference in his efforts to build a resistance movement inside Cuba. Bobby couldn’t understand why it took so long to get this task done, which Harvey felt was just one of the problems caused by Bobby’s inexperience with respect to covert operations. Harvey regarded Bobby’s naïveté as a reckless disregard for all of the fundamental precepts of covert operations work. That was bad enough, as it presented a great personal risk to himself on multiple levels; but he sensed that it was the presence of Harry Williams and other exile leaders, anxious to retake control of their homeland, that was the real cause of Bobby’s unrelenting pressure to attain results.55 More than one person in the intelligence division of the CIA was convinced that Bobby had actually been put in charge of Cuban operations for the purpose of dismantling that part of the agency. JFK’s famous statement to Mike Mansfield after the Bay of Pigs that “I will tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind” had not been forgotten by those who heard it. According to Ray Cline, the deputy director for intelligence, “Both of the Kennedy brothers, and particularly Bobby, felt they had been booby-trapped at the Bay of Pigs, and it became a constant preoccupation, almost an obsession, to right the record somehow.”56
Harvey had organized three types of operations against Cuba: (1) infiltration of agents, (2) the logistical operations of delivering supplies, and (3) sabotage operations. The last of these was dependent upon the first two, and they required the most lead time to complete. Bobby was only interested in the last one, however, and because he measured success based only on it, he was constantly frustrated. Harvey, for his part, was not happy with this or any other facet of the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy; he referred to Bobby as a “fag” and complained that Bobby “was carving a path in the operations so wide that a Mack truck could drive through.”57 Bobby felt that the key to unseating Castro was through the destruction of key industries, through sabotage operations. Harvey had promised the Special Operations Group that this would be done, including some formerly U.S.-owned operations such as the Esso oil refinery in Havana and another at Santiago de Cuba, a nickel-mining operation at Moa Bay, a number of large railroad bridges, and oil and gas storage facilities. His failures at these sabotage attempts soon showed up on the aerial photogr
aphs being taken shortly after the operations, infuriating Kennedy. Many times, secondary targets were hit instead of the primary ones; others were missed completely. Harvey became embittered and defensive and often denied the obvious failures. As Dino Brugioni observed firsthand, “Once, while showing him that there was no visible damage to a building that was supposedly bombed, he remarked the damage was all inside.”58 Harvey did not think Kennedy appreciated the great obstacles that had to be overcome; Kennedy did not think Harvey or his operatives were competent to accomplish the objectives. Others who attended meetings between them would report that “there was a chill between Kennedy and Harvey—that Kennedy avoided speaking to Harvey directly and that Harvey avoided eye contact with Kennedy.”59
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