by Larry Tye
President Kennedy read the situation differently, telling Bobby that “I’d rather be an aggressor than a bum.” And so it was that at dawn on April 15, eight B-26 bombers from the anti-Castro Cuban Expeditionary Force took off from a friendly airfield in Nicaragua under orders to disable Castro’s air force before the ground invasion got under way two days later. That was half the number of attacking aircraft that was originally planned, and they missed most of their targets. The media published pictures of the thinly disguised planes, which were obsolete CIA-supplied B-26s painted to look like Cuban Air Force jets, and an embarrassed President Kennedy canceled the second and third air strikes. The invaders, fourteen hundred CIA-trained exiles that Castro called gusanos, or worms, were doomed the moment they came ashore at the Bay of Pigs shortly after midnight on April 17. Not only were they strafed by the real Cuban Air Force and pursued by twenty thousand ground troops, but the anticipated popular uprising never materialized. By the time JFK sent in six unmarked fighter planes to provide air cover, it was too late and too little. Nearly twelve hundred of the attackers surrendered, more than a hundred were killed, and the rest got away by boat. The Cuban émigré community blamed the Kennedys for failing to back up the invaders even as much of the world condemned them for underwriting the assault on a sovereign nation. Not even the skeptics had dreamed things could go this badly.
The first eighty-five days of the Kennedy administration had been a cakewalk for the young and handsome president. He and his brain trust promised not just new faces but can-do thinking that reminded many of the breathless early days of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs, however, John Kennedy seemed more green than fresh, and perhaps in over his head. Cuba was the Kennedys’ problem now, and they’d made a mess of their first bid to intervene. Nobody had to remind JFK of all he’d done wrong or that the buck stopped with him. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” the president said at a press conference on April 20. What matters, he added, is “I am the responsible officer of the government.”
As for Bobby, he had played little part in planning or executing the Bay of Pigs raid. The CIA briefed the attorney general days before the assault, and as it started going sour, Jack called him in Williamsburg, Virginia, where Bobby was giving a speech to journalists. “Why don’t you come on back,” the president said, “and let’s discuss it.” RFK remained at JFK’s side as things played out during those tense days in the spring of 1961. He assured his brother he was doing the right thing (“there really wasn’t any alternative”), vacillated along with everyone else over whether to approve the CIA’s request for air cover for the invaders (“we didn’t really have enough information to know”), and could be heard muttering to himself as it became clearer that things were going very wrong (“we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something”). Edwin Guthman, Bobby’s press aide, ran into him the afternoon of the April 17 landing and asked whether there was anything he could do. “Well, there’s one thing you can do,” Bobby said. “You can start praying for those poor fellows on the beach.” He was more explicit when he encountered Senator Smathers the next evening at the White House congressional reception: “The shit has hit the fan. The thing has turned sour in a way you wouldn’t believe!”
Immediately after the invasion, Bobby assigned himself a familiar task: doing whatever was needed to protect his brother’s flank. JFK had accepted full blame, but the way Bobby saw it, everyone on the team shared responsibility whether or not they had supported the incursion. That posed a problem for Chester Bowles, the former governor of Connecticut now serving as number two at the State Department. First, he “came up in a rather whiny voice and said that he wanted to make sure that everybody understood that he was against the Bay of Pigs,” Bobby recalled. A week or so after the invasion, Bowles presented the National Security Council with a go-slow plan on Cuba that Bobby branded as “worthless.” What, he asked Bowles in front of their colleagues, “can we do about Cuba? This doesn’t tell us.” Bowles agreed the encounter was a travesty, but he pinned the fault on an out-of-control attorney general who was “slamming into anyone who suggested that we go slowly….I left the meeting with a feeling of intense alarm, tempered somewhat with the hope that this represented largely an emotional reaction of a group of people who were not used to setbacks or defeats and whose pride and confidence had been deeply wounded.” It wasn’t just Bowles. Walt Rostow, another senior JFK adviser, was alarmed by Bobby’s combativeness. “If you’re in a fight and get knocked off your feet,” he advised, “the most dangerous thing to do was to come out swinging. Then you could really get hurt.” Bobby, Rostow added, “looked up expressionless. He finally said: ‘That’s constructive.’ ”
The Kennedys’ pride had been wounded at the Bay of Pigs, and they were determined to find out what had gone wrong and ensure the mistakes weren’t repeated. Bobby started referring to his brother as “the President before Cuba and after Cuba,” saying he now was “a different man.” JFK named a four-member investigatory panel chaired by retired General Maxwell Taylor, with Bobby second in charge and acting as pseudo-prosecutor. Their Cuba Study Group interrogated close to fifty witnesses over a six-week stretch in the spring of 1961, piecing together for the first time a more complete story of an invasion plot that had been deliberately compartmentalized to maximize secrecy. “Never would have tried this operation if knew that Cuba forces were as good as they were and would fight,” Bobby noted in longhand. “Political limitation on military activity. This should be known and understood by those who are planning project. If impossible to succeed with these limitations project should be canceled…19 requests for help from guerrillas which were not satisfied because of lack of planes…Amazing that [Joint Chiefs of Staff] approved plan with no air strikes prior to D day.” To Bobby, that lack of planning and follow-through was a personal affront.
Taylor worried that the panel would sugarcoat its findings, since its other members represented the very people who had blundered—Bobby, as a proxy for his brother, along with the director of the CIA and the chief of naval operations. Compared to his fellow panelists, however, “Bob was in favor of bearing down harder on the misdeeds committed,” Taylor concluded. “There was no question of his wanting to participate in a snow job or a whitewash of any sort.” That, the general learned to his delight, wasn’t how this unbending attorney general worked. Yet rather than questioning the goals or ethics of the invasion, the committee zeroed in on the narrower questions of flawed tactics and slack bureaucracy, then it encouraged the president to redouble his engagement in the Cold War. “We feel that we are losing today on many fronts,” Taylor wrote, “and that the trend can be reversed only by a whole-hearted union of effort by all Executive departments.” Bobby agreed, and he told JFK and anyone else who asked “that a good deal of thought has to go into whether you are going to accept the ideas, advice and even the facts that are presented by your subordinates.” President Kennedy embraced that advice and never again fully trusted his generals and spies, which proved wise during the Cuban missile crisis. The one aide the president would rely on more than ever, in the most sensitive foreign as well as domestic affairs, was his brother. Jack talked about making Bobby director of the CIA, replacing Eisenhower holdover Allen Dulles. But Bobby, whose Hickory Hill estate was around the corner from the new CIA headquarters, already had a seat at the spy agency’s table and “thought it was a bad idea…because I was a Democrat, and [JFK’s] brother.” He ended up adding unofficial job functions that mattered even more, as the president’s personal envoy and troubleshooter.
Those weren’t easy roles for him to play. Bobby’s strong suit was domestic affairs, and the extra workload couldn’t have come at a more harried time for him or the country. That spring and summer of 1961 he was consumed by dealing with the Freedom Riders, even as the Justice Department’s war on organized crime was going full throttle. In Vienna in June, Jack had his first face-to-f
ace meeting with Khrushchev, and afterward he confided to the New York Times columnist James Reston that the older, more battle-tested Soviet leader had “savaged me.” Two months later East Germany began installing an eighty-seven-mile barbed-wire fence separating socialist East Berlin from the democratic West—the East called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, while the West would know it as the Berlin Wall—that constituted an overt challenge to America and its allies. Bobby’s six weeks studying the Bay of Pigs established a work pattern that allowed him to juggle his expanded portfolio, and it helped explain why issues like civil rights never became the priority they might have in the early Kennedy administration. He met his fellow invasion panelists early every morning, working out of a special office at CIA headquarters. Then he’d stop by the White House to consult with the president or attend a policy briefing. Late in the afternoon, when other bureaucrats were plotting ways to beat rush hour traffic home, he headed to the Justice Department and stayed until ten, with a lineup of aides briefing him on decisions that had piled up there. He was learning to get by with less sleep. His seven children were learning that when Daddy wasn’t home for dinner, it probably meant the country was facing some new crisis.
It might also have meant he was meeting with his curious new friend Georgi Bolshakov, a faintly cloaked Soviet spy posted to the USSR’s embassy in Washington as bureau chief for the Tass news agency. Theirs was one of the most beguiling relationships of the Cold War. The buttoned-down attorney general and the hail-fellow secret agent got together an average of three times a month for a year and a half, starting in the spring of 1961. They conferred sitting on the lawn near the U.S. Capitol, in the back office at the Justice Department, and at Hickory Hill, where the Russian dazzled the Kennedy children by dancing on his haunches, Cossack-style. The subject of conversation ranged from crises in Berlin and Laos to the upcoming superpower summit in Vienna. Why, agents at the FBI and elsewhere wanted to know, was the president’s brother risking these unprecedented cloak-and-dagger encounters with a known Soviet spy? To the Kennedys, however, they were just the thing. What better conduit for messages to be passed between JFK and Khrushchev without the misinterpretation, second-guessing, and risk of leaks of regular diplomatic channels? Who better to do it than Bobby, who wasn’t bound by rules of spycraft or diplomacy yet could be trusted with anything? No need to share any confidences with J. Edgar Hoover, or to write anything down. Politics had always been personal for Bobby, no matter that the arena now was the globe. This informal channel of exchange with the Soviets worked brilliantly until the missile crisis in 1962, when Bolshakov either didn’t know about Khrushchev’s true plans for Cuba or lied about what he did know.*3
Bobby, meanwhile, had taken a different message than Jack from the Bay of Pigs rout. To him, the solution was fighting back the way the enemy did, furtively and strategically. He became such a believer in this so-called counterinsurgency that a senior national security aide credited him with coining the term, which Bobby defined as “social reform under pressure.” He saw counterinsurgency as embracing everything from land reform to building schools, roads, clinics, labor unions, and an impartial judiciary. He also was convinced that butter like that could only work if it was backed up by guns. To better understand his revolutionary enemies, he plowed through the writings of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. Green Berets came to Hyannis Port to show rather than just tell the attorney general about their unconventional warfare techniques such as swinging through trees and climbing over barricades. Bobby and Jack were both leery of the American military and intelligence brass, but they believed in military force and espionage as practical tools. The younger brother was determined to make Khrushchev pay for daring to bully America and the Kennedys. He knew that, having blamed Vice President Nixon for the loss of Cuba in 1960, Jack would be blamed in 1964 if his administration didn’t do more to take it back. Castro may have won Round 1, but the Kennedys weren’t paper tigers, no matter what the Republicans said, and they didn’t give up that easily. Paying Castro back would become Bobby’s obsession.
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THE KENNEDYS’ CLANDESTINE war against Castro’s Cuba needed a name, and a CIA officer had just the one: Operation Mongoose. It was proposed as a handle without a point, but to the men involved, it conjured up the image of a sleek and agile carnivore out to catch a cobra. Every agency that mattered in Washington had a part to play, but nobody could breathe a word to anyone outside the brotherhood. It officially lasted just a year, from the fall of 1961 to shortly after the missile crisis, although it didn’t truly cease operations until the end of the Kennedy administration. On paper, it was overseen by a committee of the president’s senior military, intelligence, and foreign policy advisers, with day-to-day control in the hands of Edward Lansdale, a brigadier general who had earned his anticommunist stripes in the jungles of the Philippines and Vietnam.*4 In practice, Mongoose was Bobby’s operation. He left no doubt what he had in mind at a January 1962 meeting of the Operation Mongoose team, according to CIA notes on the session: The “Cuban problem” is “the top priority in the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.”
Bobby got what he asked for. Two weeks after that meeting, the Defense Department started proposing a series of increasingly outlandish schemes for undermining the Caribbean nation. Operation Free Ride would airdrop into Cuba one-way plane tickets on Pan American or KLM to Mexico City, Caracas, and other “free-world” destinations. Operation No Love Lost called for harassing Cuban Air Force pilots by having refugees contact them by radio. “Argument could go, ‘I’ll get you you Red son-of-a-gun.’ ” Operation Good Times imagined undermining Castro’s domestic support by disseminating fake pictures of him with “two beauties” in a room “lavishly furnished, and a table briming [sic] over with the most delectable Cuban food.” The caption would read, “My ration is different.” Another U.S. military official offered up an even quirkier scheme. Knowing Cuba’s shortage of toilet paper, he wanted to airdrop across the island cases of the white rolls. “To make it an effective psychological impact, my recommendation was to print a picture of Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev on alternate sheets,” he recounted. “The idea was accepted and plans were made to carry it out, until President Kennedy put the squash on it.”
While most of the bizarre blueprints met that same fate, some were embraced by the CIA, which knew it had a lot to make up for after the Bay of Pigs. It assembled its largest peacetime spy operation ever, with six hundred agents and nearly five thousand contract workers devoted to Mongoose. The agency’s relatively modest Miami station became its biggest, with its own polygraph teams, gas station, and warehouse stocked with everything from machine guns to caskets. Every major CIA office worldwide had one or more case officers specializing in Cuba. The agency’s secret flotilla of yachts, fishing craft, speedboats, and other vessels—all modified for spying or sabotage, and docked in Florida—qualified as the region’s third-largest navy. Agents were recruited on the island and an interrogation center was established in Florida to pry information from Cuban refugees. (The U.S. government maintained a similar operation in West Germany.) Some of what this army of spies did was merely annoying, like pouring untraceable chemicals into lubricating fluids bound for Cuba to make equipment wear out faster. But there were paramilitary missions, too, which got bigger, more frequent, and grizzlier, targeting resources critical to the Cuban economy such as sugar mills and petroleum refineries. In one raid, commandos blew up a railroad bridge and watched a train careen off the ruptured rails. In another, a CIA handler joked to Ramon Orozco, a commando recruit, that he’d pay fifty dollars “if you bring me back an ear” of a Cuban. “I brought him two,” remembered Orozco, “and he laughed and said, ‘You’re crazy,’ but he paid me $100, and he took us to his house for a turkey dinner.”
Bobby pushed ahead like a man possessed. However much the CIA bosses promised in their efforts to undermine the Cuban leader, this truer
believer wanted more, and he wanted proof that the operations were more than just smoke and mirrors. “Every time we didn’t succeed we got blasted by Robert Kennedy,” said Samuel Halpern, a CIA Mongoose organizer who was convinced the attorney general was beyond his portfolio and out of his depth. “To make Cuba the number-one priority of the agency, at the expense of everything else; then to put Bobby in charge of the operation and this—well, this boy, really, this hot-tempered boy—to try to run it and do the personal bidding of his brother. Unbelievable.” Traditionally the CIA had been the one hatching harebrained schemes, with civilian administrators restraining the gung-ho agency. Mongoose reversed those roles. Richard Helms, the agency’s chief of clandestine services, said he tried to explain the difficulties to Bobby but “his consistent response was, ‘Yes, Dick, I do understand.’ A short pause would follow, and then, ‘But let’s get the hell on with it. The President wants some action, right now.’ ”
And it wasn’t just Cuba. Bobby worried about Communism spreading across Latin America. He recognized sooner than most that long-term solutions depended on solving underlying social problems, from poverty so severe that children scavenged at landfills to the inevitable disenfranchisement that followed when oligarchs owned the land and monopolized the government. In the short run, however, he put his faith in strong-arm tactics such as arming the police so they could control rioting leftists and supporting leaders, including dictators, who stood firm against Communism. In places such as Brazil, Venezuela, and Bolivia, Bobby saw the dissidents as proxies for Castro. His suspicions were right sometimes, but not always. The subtly nuanced perspective that would become a hallmark of his approach to the region when he was a U.S. senator, and would make him a hero among its poor, hadn’t fully developed in the early 1960s. Instead, he was the administration’s ramrod and enforcer. He played those roles with special relish in the Dominican Republic when, a month after the Bay of Pigs, strongman Rafael Trujillo was assassinated. Bobby saw an opening for the United States to ensure that Trujillo’s successors were not just democrats but anti-Castro. With the U.S. president and secretary of state both in Europe, the attorney general stepped in and advocated a limited but direct intervention in the Dominican Republic by U.S. troops. Chester Bowles, his old adversary and now the acting secretary of state, advised that such a move would be illegal and imprudent. Bobby again verbally assaulted Bowles, calling him a “gutless bastard.” Bowles got the last word when JFK, reached by telephone in Paris, sided with him, opposing such an intemperate intervention. Told by the president that he was in charge, Bowles replied, “Good. Would you mind explaining it to your brother?”
