The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Henry’s enemy was dead, but there were few in Christendom who did not condemn the king. In the end he would put to death the loyal men who had done the deed, walk a gauntlet of monks who whipped their king, and see his wife and sons turn against him. The Mafia chieftains recruited by the CIA were unlikely readers of royal history, but they proceeded against Castro in such a desultory way that they might as well have read about the fate of those who served King Henry too well.

  Senator Smathers of Florida recalled walking with his friend the president on the White House lawn in March, when Kennedy told him that “someone was supposed to have knocked him [Castro] off and there was supposed to be absolute pandemonium.” Smathers’s recollection is not definitive either, but there are several other reasons to suspect that Kennedy knew.

  The CIA was not immune to the bureaucratic imperatives of Washington, and a bureaucrat’s highest imperative is to protect himself and his agency. This was a major long-term operation involving a number of CIA operatives, technicians, outside advisers, and mobsters; by the spring of 1961, at least twenty people knew of the Mafia plots, and many others were aware of the other plots.

  As early as October 1960, Giancana openly talked about the assassination at a dinner at LaScala Restaurant in New York City with his mistress Phyllis McGuire and her sister, Christine, another of the three famous singing McGuire Sisters. The FBI learned about the discussion from Christine’s husband,

  John H. Teeter, a confidential source. Teeter told the FBI that Giancana said “he had met with the ‘assassin’ on three occasions … [and] that he last met with the ‘assassin’ on a boat docked at the Fontainbleau [sic] Hotel.” Teeter told the FBI that “neither he nor his wife could vouch for the truth of the information.” Hoover religiously read FBI reports and memos, and even before Kennedy took office, he would have already suspected the mob’s involvement with the assassination plots.

  Although it began during the Eisenhower administration, the assassination plotting had become part of the Kennedy administration’s policy toward Cuba. “There’s a question in my mind as to whether John F. Kennedy generated that and under no circumstances do I think he did,” said the FBI’s former deputy director Cartha DeLoach, who religiously mirrored Hoover’s opinions. “I think that Bobby Kennedy, in conjunction with the CIA, generated that and told the president about it, and the president went along with it. I think that Bobby, who was almost willing to play any game to accomplish a purpose, regardless of who it involved, went along with that very willingly and involved the president himself.” Bobby’s defenders state adamantly that he would not have countenanced employing the very Mafia figures he was attempting to put in prison; they ignore the reality that most of the assassination attempts did not involve mobsters.

  Assassinating Castro was the crown jewel of the CIA’s policy toward Cuba. Would the agency have run the risk of Kennedy’s finding out about the assassination plots? And if he did so, and if this was the man the president’s admirers proclaimed him to be, what revenge would he have enacted on those who betrayed his fundamental beliefs? Beyond this, could the agency afford not to tell the skeptical president about a crucial element of their plans that made this operation so much more plausible?

  That, however, is little more than knowledgeable speculation. The extent of Kennedy’s knowledge and approval of the assassination attempts are matters of endless debate and uncertainty, with no definitive proof offered or presumably available. That is the very nature of the most sensitive covert operations, hidden finally not only from others in government, but also from history itself.

  Kennedy’s overwhelming concern was not the probability of the invasion’s success or the moral efficacy of America staging an undeclared war, but the secrecy of the administration’s involvement. Kennedy concluded the first NSC meeting on the proposed Cuban operation by saying that he “particularly desires that no hint of these discussions reach any personnel beyond those most immediately concerned within the Executive Branch.”

  Kennedy hardly had to remind these men to remain silent. The free press, however, was another matter. In his obsession with keeping the Cuban business confidential, Kennedy devoted much of his energy to a cause that had already been lost. Articles about the training had appeared in such diverse publications as La Hora, a leading Guatemalan newspaper, The Nation, a liberal weekly, the New York Times (“U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Air-Ground Base”), and the New York Herald Tribune (“Invasion Is Planned in Spring”). Beyond the CIA employees, there were 124 members of the National Guard from Alabama, Arkansas, California, and Washington, D.C., directly involved in training the Cubans and working with military supplies. They could not be expected to be quiet forever. Beyond that, the president had memos on his desk telling him that journalists such as Howard Handleman of U.S. News & World Report and Joseph Newman of the Herald Tribune knew specific details of the American involvement. Though the reporters promised not to reveal anything now, that pledge was not open-ended.

  The president could look at the headlines on a front page and read the words on a memo and seem to deny what was before his eyes. It was unthinkable that an operation of such magnitude could take place without the United States’ involvement becoming known, and it was the immense failing of the former journalist who sat in the White House to believe otherwise.

  Kennedy had concerns far greater than those of the men who advised him. The CIA focused on bringing down Castro. The Joint Chiefs directed their attention to ensuring that the military plans were plausible. The State Department occupied itself primarily with the ramifications of an invasion on the rest of Latin America, world opinion, and the United Nations. The president had to think not only about all those matters but also about the broadest geopolitical concerns. He was hoping that the United States and the Soviet Union might walk at least a few steps back from the nuclear brink, forestalling the confrontation that he had prophesied so long before. In Laos, however, Communist insurgents threatened the government of Prince Souvanna Phouma, and in Vietnam the Communists pressed forward too. West Berlin was, to the president’s mind, the West’s most vulnerable outpost, held hostage behind 110 miles of East German Communist territory. If Kennedy moved too strongly or too obviously against Cuba, Khrushchev could be expected to make his own bold move, and the prospect for detente might well be doomed.

  Kennedy also had domestic political issues that hardly concerned the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, or the State Department. During the campaign he had accused Eisenhower and Nixon of not daring to stand up to Castro. If he brought Castro down, he would be lauded by most Americans. If he backed away from plans instigated by the Republican administration, he would surely hear Nixon’s and other Republicans’ righteous rebukes. They would probably point out Kennedy’s duplicities and seeming cowardice, as would many of the presidenr’s former colleagues in Congress.

  Dulles and Bissell sensed Kennedy’s political vulnerabilities and his reluctance to approve their plans. Bissell tried to put the president’s very manhood in play, warning that if the United States turned away from the invasion, “David will again have defeated Goliath.”

  At another meeting after the president left, Dulles commented about the brigade training in Central America: “Don’t forget that we have a disposal problem. If we have to take these men out of Guatemala, we will have to transfer them to the U.S., and we can’t have them wandering around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.” Dulles played the games of power astutely, and he surely realized that his comments would get back to the president, their power resonating even louder because they were passed on to him. And so they were in a memo written by Schlesinger, who had attended the meeting.

  Dulles had presented a bitter prospect: fifteen hundred disgruntled Cubans of Brigade 2506 and their colleagues and friends condemning a craven president for being afraid to let them fight the tyrant who controlled their beloved land. “I would have called them some bad words and said w
e are not going anywhere,” asserts Erneido Oliva, deputy military commander of the brigade training for the invasion at a secret Guatemalan base. “But the problem that we would have created in Guatemala would have been so great, Cubans fighting the Guatemalan army, taking over Guatemala … the Americans were the advisers and they were 15, maybe 20. That would not stop us, because we were the guys with the weapons…. I am telling you that the disposal problem was more than a problem. It was a BIG problem.”

  A great leader in a democracy must be a great politician, but a great politician is not always a great leader. As Kennedy contemplated his actions in Cuba, he was thinking preeminently not as a world leader, or as a military strategist, but as a politician who had just won the closest presidential election in American history. He was obsessed by the fear that if he did not allow the exile force to invade Cuba he would be considered a cowardly appeaser, and that view would be amplified by disgruntled brigade members shouting their slogans.

  22

  The Road to Girón Beach

  On March 11, the CIA presented Kennedy with its detailed plans for a daytime amphibious invasion with tactical air support at Trinidad, on the south coast of Cuba. The area was supposedly full of anti-Castro Cubans who might be expected to join Brigade 2506, but if they did not and the invaders were unable to hold even a few acres of Cuban territory, they could disappear into the Escambray Mountains, where guerrillas were already operating.

  To the president, this operation appeared to have all the hallmarks of a World War II-type amphibious invasion and looked nothing like a guerrilla infiltration masterminded by the Cubans themselves. He called, instead, for a much less spectacular plan in which the Cuban brigade would disembark at night without air support on an area that included an airfield from which brigade planes could be launched.

  Kennedy’s concern was more than a spineless reluctance to give the Cuban exiles the support they needed to end Castro’s reign. The CIA director may now have been soft-pedaling the possible American military effort, but it was assumed by almost everyone involved on the operational level from the CIA officers to the brigade members that the American government would not allow the fighters to die alone on the beach. Kennedy was trying to back off from the possibility of direct American intervention, not simply in his disavowals but by structuring the plan in such a way that he would not possibly be called upon to send in Americans to save beleaguered Cubans.

  The CIA had spent months planning the Trinidad operation, but four days later the agency returned with revised plans for a less “noisy” operation to take place roughly one hundred miles to the west in the Zapata region at Baia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs.

  Bundy enthusiastically reported to the president that the agency had “done a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials.” The lightly populated Bay of Pigs was one of the most remote parts of Cuba and had a landing field within reach of the beaches. The chartered ships bearing the brigade would drop them at night and be gone before the first light of day. The forces would move largely unopposed to take over the airfields, from which “Free Cuban” planes could be launched, or at least said to have been launched, on strikes against Castro’s air force. The Bay of Pigs lay so distant that it would take Castro twenty-four to forty-eight hours to counterattack along roads that could easily be defended.

  One of the major criteria for the revised plan was that the terrain be “suitable for guerrilla warfare in the event that an organized perimeter could not be held,” a crucial matter for both military and political reasons. On that point Bissell was strangely silent; as he knew, an immense sea of swamps surrounded the Bay of Pigs. “We were standing in the hall, and I told Bissell we could capture the airfield but that it would be hard for the landing force to get out of there through the swamps that surround the area, and moreover they would not be able to reach the Escambray Mountains eighty miles away,” recalled Colonel Hawkins, the paramilitary head of the operation. “He said it’s the only place that satisfies the president’s requirements, and that’s what it has to be.”

  As Kennedy saw it, the CIA had come up with an alternative that answered all of his concerns. He was nonetheless still so uncertain that even while he gave his tentative go-ahead, he insisted that he “have the right to call off the plan even up to 24 hours prior to the landing.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff gave their considered opinion that in the absence of major elements of Castro’s army, “the invasion force can be landed successfully in the objective area and can be sustained in the area provided resupply of essential items is accomplished.” The Joint Chiefs, like the CIA, did not mention that in a losing engagement the forces would die, surrender, or be hunted down in the trackless swamps. Admiral Arleigh Burke told the president that the operation had a fifty-fifty chance of success, odds that probably would not have been considered good enough if Americans had been landing on those uncharted shores.

  Of the voices that Kennedy heard those days opposing the invasion, none was listened to more closely than that of Thomas C. Mann, the assistant secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Mann was probably the lowest-ranking State Department official who knew about the invasion plans. A career diplomat, he had served as ambassador to El Salvador and had a hard-won, gritty sense of Latin American realities. Mann was perhaps the only diplomatic exception to what Robert A. Hurwitch, then the Cuban desk officer, called “a divorce between the people who daily, or minute by minute, had access to information, to what was going on, and to people who were making plans and policy decisions.”

  Bundy sensed that the president sided with the diplomat’s position more than with Bissell’s hawkish views. “Since I think you lean to Mann’s view, I have put Bissell on top,” Bundy wrote in a memo to the president. Mann believed that the fragile, embryonic laws that sought to govern the actions between sovereign nations could not be ignored or a great and terrible price might have to be paid. He pointed out that the OAS charter, the United Nations Charter, and the Rio Treaty all “proscribe[d] the use of armed force with the sole exception of the right of self-defense ‘if an armed attack occurs.’” He envisioned that in the case of an obvious invasion the “Castro regime could be expected to call on the other American States … to assist them in repelling the attack, and to request the Security Council … to take action to ‘maintain and restore international peace and security.’ “Mann told the president bluntly that most Latins would oppose the invasion, and that “at best, our moral posture throughout the hemisphere would be impaired. At worst, the effect on our position of hemispheric leadership would be catastrophic.”

  Kennedy’s insistence on downscaling the invasion was in part an attempt to deal with such criticisms. On March 29, Kennedy had what was supposed to have been the last major meeting before the April 5 invasion. When the president asked Bissell whether the Cuban brigade would be able to fade into the bush, the CIA covert chief told the president that the soldiers would have to embark again on the ships that had brought them.

  Kennedy insisted that the brigade leaders be told that U.S. forces would not be taking part and then be asked whether they still wanted go ahead. It was not until the day before they set out for Cuba, however, that the leaders were told that the Bay of Pigs was surrounded by swamps and that in a failed invasion they would either die, be captured, or would have to reembark. For “morale reasons,” the CIA decided not to tell the volunteers themselves that trackless swamps surrounded their destination, and the brigade members packed their kit and shouldered their rifles with no idea that in defeat they would be unable to join their guerrilla comrades by disappearing into the foreboding wilderness.

  Mann was not the only disapproving voice that Kennedy heard. When the president flew down on Air Force One to Palm Beach for Easter, he invited Senator J. William Fulbright to join him. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was the most articulate student of foreign policy in Congress, and a persiste
nt critic of America intervention. On the flight down Fulbright handed the president a lengthy memo opposing the operation, arguing in part that “to give this activity even covert support is of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union.” Kennedy said nothing, but he surely weighed not simply the words but the political weight of their author, an acerbic intellectual who was perfectly capable of standing up in the Senate to condemn him.

  For Kennedy, Palm Beach had always been a respite from the work and woes of politics, but the obligations of the presidency never left him even there. He had feared that he might be shut out from a wide range of counsel, but he was hearing at times a cacophony of voices. He had lengthy conversations over the weekend with Smathers, who was in favor of any action that would unseat Castro. Former ambassador to Cuba Earl Smith was at the Kennedy house as well. He was an equally strong supporter of military action against Cuba. Joe talked to his son as well.

  On the flight back to Washington on April 4, Kennedy was still so unsettled regarding his course of action that he invited Fulbright to go with him to what would prove to be the decisive meeting of his foreign policy advisers at the State Department. They were all there in the drab meeting room, including three members of his cabinet: Rusk, McNamara, and Douglas Dillon, the secretary of the Treasury; Dulles, Bissell, and Colonel Jack Hawkins, chief of the CIA’s paramilitary staff; and General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

  Most major presidential decisions are funnel-shaped. If broad philosophical issues are debated, they are debated first. Then the discussion is limited to general policy matters. In the end, the participants focus on the narrow details of the agreed-upon plan. In this instance Fulbright was bringing up grand moral and political questions that had never been placed openly on the table before, while the military brass and CIA officers sat restlessly wanting to go over the specific derails of an operation that they had believed was already largely decided. To many of the policymakers, it appeared self-indulgent and sloppy that Fulbright should not only be present but endlessly pontificating.