23. Jacqui Goddard, ‘Man who killed Che to avenge father’s death awarded $2.8bn’, The Times, 25 August 2011, p. 39.
24. Michael Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions. Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War (Lawrence, Kan. 2008), p. 32.
25. Thomas, Cuba, p. 729.
26. Abedul and Hughes, ‘The Comandante’, pp. 548–9, is good on US attitudes to Cuba.
27. Skierka, Fidel Castro, p. 82.
28. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’. Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy 1958–1964. The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York 1997), p. 12, and Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets. The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine (New York 2012) for the KGB and the Cuban secret service.
29. Tunzelmann, Red Heat, p. 179.
30. Skierka, Fidel Castro, p. 87.
31. Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions, pp. 41–2.
32. Skierka, Fidel Castro, p. 95.
33. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’, p. 45, report one $8,000 payment for his recent speeches in February 1961. Capable of speaking for four or six hours at a stretch, Castro hoped he might be paid by the word.
34. Ibid., p. 52.
35. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War. The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York 2006), pp. 429–30.
36. Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions, p. 49.
37. Skierka, Fidel Castro, pp. 103–4.
38. Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions, pp. 26 and 91.
39. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, pp. 378–9.
40. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba’, p. 129, citing Walter Lippmann’s shrewd remark
41. Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions, p. 50.
42. Robert Dallek, John F. Kennedy. An Unfinished Life 1917–1963 (London 2003), p. 31.
43. Ibid., p. 118.
44. Ibid., pp. 165–8.
45. Ibid., p. 225.
46. Ibid., p. 235.
47. Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy. Building America’s Embassies (New York 1998, revised edn Princeton 2011), pp. 131–2, citing her interview with Crockett
48. Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions, pp. 52–4.
49. Paterson, ‘Fixation with Cuba’, pp. 134–5.
50. The best account of the invasion is by Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (Oxford 2008).
51. Phillips, The Night Watch, pp. 106–8.
52. Jones, The Bay of Pigs, p. 107.
16: To the Brink: The Missile Crisis
1. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes. The History of the CIA (London 2007), p. 180.
2. Cecil B. Currey, Edward Lansdale. The Unquiet American (Boston 1988, reprinted Washington, DC 1998), p. 242.
3. Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars. Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (Oxford 2000), pp. 154–6.
4. Bayard Stockton, Flawed Patriot. The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey (Dulles, Va 2006), pp. 143ff.
5. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men. The Daring Early Years of the CIA (New York 1995, reprinted 2006), pp. 289–90.
6. Gerald Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Mich., ‘Minutes of Meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) on Operation MONGOOSE’, 4 October 1962. This document was declassified in 1997.
7. Taylor Branch and George Crile, ‘The Kennedy Vendetta: Our Secret War on Cuba’, Harpers Magazine (August 1975), p. 60, is based on interviews with many participants in these ventures.
8. Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets. The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine (New York 2012), p. 99.
9. Kai Bird, The Color of Truth. McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy. Brothers in Arms. A Biography (New York 1998), p. 244.
10. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’. Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy 1958–1964. The Secret History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York 1997), pp. 149–51.
11. Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War. From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven, Conn. 2011), pp. 196–9, has much valuable Soviet material.
12. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (Cambridge 2007), pp. 160–7.
13. William Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and his Era (London 2003), pp. 532–3, is very convincing on Khrushchev and his inner circle during the missile crisis.
14. George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower. US Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford 2008), p. 707.
15. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’, pp. 188–9.
16. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War. The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York 2006), p. 451.
17. Robert Dallek, John F. Kennedy. An Unfinished Life 1917–1963 (London 2003), p. 537.
18. George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern. Memoirs (New York 1982), p. 287.
19. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’, pp. 221–2.
20. Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, p. 206, and Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, p. 169.
21. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’, pp. 229–30.
22. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 4: The Passage of Power (New York 2012), p. 222.
23. Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy. His Life (New York 2000), p. 213.
24. Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares. A Memoir (New York 1972), pp. 267–8.
25. Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, p. 207.
26. Dallek, John F. Kennedy, p. 368.
27. Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow (eds), The Kennedy Tapes. Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York 2002), p. 117.
28. Warren Kozak, Lemay. The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Washington, DC 2009), pp. 332–54.
29. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern, p. 291.
30. L. Douglas Keeney, 15 Minutes. General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation (New York 2011), pp. 282–3.
31. Fursenko and Naftali, ‘One Hell of a Gamble’, p. 247.
32. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, p. 483.
33. Bird, The Color of Truth, pp. 238–9.
34. Thomas, Robert Kennedy, p. 231.
35. Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight. Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (London 2008), pp. 204–5.
36. Ibid., pp. 284–5.
37. Volker Skierka, Fidel Castro. A Biography (Cambridge 2004), p. 138.
38. Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (Oxford 2008), p. 164.
39. See former CIA officer Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets, which I first read in serialized form in the Miami Herald, 1–5 May 2012.
40. Piero Gleijeses, ‘Cuba’s First Venture in Africa 1961–1965’, Journal of Latin American Studies (1996) 28, pp. 171–81.
41. Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, pp. 532–8.
17: Overreach: Vietnam
1. William Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and his Era (London 2003), p. 341.
2. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine (London 2011) is the definitive account of these horrors.
3. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC 2001), p. 77.
4. See Harold P. Ford, ‘Calling the Sino-Soviet Split’, CIA Library, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Studies in Intelligence 1998/99, pp. 57–71 (pdf), accessed at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter98_99/art05.html, pp. 1–14.
5. Kay Möller, Die Aussenpolitik der Volksrepublik China 1949–2004. Eine Einführung (Wiesbaden 2005), p. 59.
6. George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern. Memoirs (New York 1982), p. 364.
7. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War. The United States
and Vietnam 1950–1975 (Boston 2002), p. 94.
8. Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares. A Memoir (New York 1972), p. 228.
9. Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars. Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (Oxford 2000), p. 311.
10. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men. The Daring Early Years of the CIA (New York 1995, reprinted 2006), pp. 282–3.
11. Randall B. Woods, LBJ. Architect of American Ambition (Cambridge, Mass. 2006), p. 389.
12. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam. A History (London 1983, revised edn 1994), p. 266, makes this crucial point.
13. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, pp. 238ff.
14. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, p. 326.
15. John Prados, William Colby and the CIA. The Secret War of a Controversial Spymaster (Lawrence, Kan. 2009), pp. 74ff.
16. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men. Six Friends and the World They Made (New York 1986), p. 637.
17. Like US Foreign Service officer Charles T. Cross, the author of the revealing Born a Foreigner. A Memoir of the American Presence in Asia (Lanham, Md 1999), who was far more generous to Thompson than he was towards the Americans. Cross was born in Nationalist China, and then served in Indonesia, Malaya, London, Hong Kong and Vietnam.
18. Robert Thompson, Make for the Hills. Memories of Far Eastern Wars (London 1989), pp. 124–8.
19. Karnow, Vietnam, p. 274.
20. Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 105–6.
21. Robert Dallek, John F. Kennedy. An Unfinished Life 1917–1963 (London 2003), p. 450.
22. Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, p. 636.
23. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, p. 355.
24. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York 1969), p. 213, for an astute assessment of McNamara.
25. The classic account of Ap Bac is in Neil Sheehan’s marvellously intelligent A Bright Shining Lie. John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York 1988), pp. 203–5.
26. Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution. Vietnam 1945–65 (London 1966), pp. 191–2.
27. See the valuable passages in Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake. The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York 1972), pp. 130–4.
28. Karnow, Vietnam, pp. 317ff, on the key conspirators.
29. Dallek, John F. Kennedy, p. 677.
30. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, pp. 278–84.
31. Ibid., pp. 284–5.
32. Herring, America’s Longest War, pp. 134–5.
33. Dallek, John F. Kennedy, pp. 693–4.
18: Watershed of the American Century
1. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York 1969), p. 298.
2. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. 4: The Passage of Power (New York 2012) p. 115.
3. Randall B. Woods, LBJ. Architect of American Ambition (Cambridge, Mass. 2006), p. 433.
4. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations. The United States 1945–1974 (Oxford 1996), p. 598.
5. Ibid., p. 508.
6. Kai Bird, The Color of Truth. McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy. Brothers in Arms. A Biography (New York 1998), pp. 276–7.
7. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, pp. 370–1.
8. Ibid., p. 530.
9. Patterson, Grand Expectations, p. 608.
10. Woods, LBJ. Architect of American Ambition, p. 510.
11. Bird, The Color of Truth, p. 281.
12. Woods, LBJ. Architect of American Ambition, p. 540.
13. Gordon M. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster. McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam (New York 2008), p. 123.
14. Bird, The Color of Truth, pp. 286–9.
15. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao. The Unknown Story (London 2006), pp. 586–7.
16. Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War. From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven, Conn. 2011), pp. 222–3.
17. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC 2001), pp. 207–29.
18. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, pp. 532–3.
19. Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War. A Concise International History (Oxford 2008), p. 91.
20. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 590.
21. Jim Mann, ‘US Considered ’64 Bombing to Keep China Nuclear Free’, Los Angeles Times, 27 September 1998.
22. Francis Gavin and James Steinberg, ‘The Unknown Unknowns’, Foreign Policy, 14 February 2012, pp. 1–3.
23. Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pp. 176–7.
24. Woods, LBJ. Architect of American Ambition, p. 605, for the exchange with McGovern.
25. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War. The United States and Vietnam 1950–1975 (Boston 2002), p. 179, for these statistics.
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