Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  At headquarters, Dulles asked his most senior officers where exactly he had to go to find intelligence on the Soviet Union. At a deputies’ meeting on June 23, 1958, he said he was “at a loss as to what component of the Agency he can turn to when he desires specific information on the USSR.” The agency had none to speak of. Its reporting on the Soviets was pure wind.

  The CIA’s Abbot Smith, one of its best analysts and later the chief of the agency’s Office of National Estimates, looked back on a decade’s work at the end of 1958 and wrote: “We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.”

  On December 16, Eisenhower received a report from his intelligence board of consultants advising him to overhaul the CIA. Its members feared that the agency was “incapable of making objective appraisals of its own intelligence information as well as of its own operations.” Led by former defense secretary Robert Lovett, they pleaded with the president to take covert operations out of Allen Dulles’s hands.

  Dulles, as ever, fended off all efforts to change the CIA. He told the president there was nothing wrong with the agency. Back at headquarters, he told his senior staff that “our problems were getting greater every year.” He promised the president that Wisner’s replacement would fix the missions and organization of the clandestine service. He had just the man for the job.

  16. “HE WAS LYING

  DOWN AND HE WAS

  LYING UP”

  On January 1, 1959, Richard Bissell became the chief of the clandestine service. That same day, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. A secret CIA history unearthed in 2005 described in detail how the agency took on the threat.

  The agency took a long hard look at Fidel. It did not know what to make of him. “Many serious observers feel his regime will collapse within a matter of months,” predicted Jim Noel, the CIA’s station chief, whose officers had spent too much time reporting from the Havana Country Club. At headquarters, some argued that Castro deserved the agency’s guns and money. Al Cox, chief of the paramilitary division, proposed to “make secret contact with Castro” and offer him arms and ammunition to establish a democratic government. Cox told his superiors that the CIA could ship weapons to Castro on a vessel manned by a Cuban crew. But “the most secure means of help would be giving the money to Castro, who could then purchase his own arms,” Cox wrote to his superiors. “A combination of arms and money would probably be best.” Cox was an alcoholic, and his thinking might have been clouded, but more than a few of his fellow officers felt the way he did. “My staff and I were all Fidelistas” at the time, Robert Reynolds, chief of the CIA’s Caribbean operations desk, said many years later.

  In April and May 1959, when the newly victorious Castro visited the United States, a CIA officer briefed Castro face-to-face in Washington. He described Fidel as “a new spiritual leader of Latin American democratic and anti-dictator forces.”

  “OUR HAND SHOULD NOT SHOW”

  The president was furious to find that the CIA had misjudged Castro. “Though our intelligence experts backed and filled for a number of months,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, “events were gradually driving them to the conclusion that with the coming of Castro, Communism had penetrated this hemisphere.”

  On December 11, 1959, having reached that conclusion, Richard Bissell sent Allen Dulles a memo suggesting that “thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.” Dulles penciled in a crucial correction to the proposal. He struck out elimination, a word tinged with more than a hint of murder. He substituted removal from Cuba—and gave the go-ahead.

  On January 8, 1960, Dulles told Bissell to organize a special task force to overthrow Castro. Bissell personally selected many of the same people who had subverted the government of Guatemala six years before—and had deceived President Eisenhower face-to-face about the coup. He chose the feckless Tracy Barnes for political and psychological warfare, the talented Dave Phillips for propaganda, the gung-ho Rip Robertson for paramilitary training, and the relentlessly mediocre E. Howard Hunt to manage the political front groups.

  Their chief would be Jake Esterline, who had run the Washington “war room” for Operation Success. Esterline was station chief in Venezuela when he first laid eyes on Fidel Castro in early 1959. He had watched the young commandante touring Caracas, fresh from his New Year’s Day triumph over the dictator Fulgencio Batista, and he had heard the crowds cheering Castro as a conqueror.

  “I saw—hell, anybody with eyes could see—that a new and powerful force was at work in the hemisphere,” Esterline said. “It had to be dealt with.”

  Esterline returned to CIA headquarters in January 1960 to receive his appointment as Cuba task force chief. The group took shape as a secret cell inside the CIA. All the money, all the information, and all the decisions for the Cuban task force came through Bissell. He had little interest in the work of his spies, much less gathering intelligence from inside Cuba. He never stopped to analyze what would happen if the coup against Castro succeeded—or if it failed. “I don’t think these kinds of things were ever thought about in any depth,” Esterline said. “I think their first reaction was, God, we’ve got a possible Communist in here; we had better get him out just the way we got Arbenz out” in Guatemala.

  Bissell almost never talked about Cuba with Richard Helms, his second-in-command at the clandestine service. The two men disliked and distrusted one another intensely. Helms did weigh in on one idea that filtered up from the Cuba task force. It was a propaganda ploy: a Cuban agent, trained by the CIA, would appear on the shores of Istanbul, claiming to be a political prisoner who had just jumped from a Soviet ship. He would proclaim that Castro was enslaving thousands of his people and shipping them to Siberia. The plan was known as “The Dripping Cuban.” Helms killed it.

  On March 2, 1960—two weeks before President Eisenhower approved a covert action against Castro—Dulles briefed Vice President Nixon on operations already under way. Reading from a seven-page paper initialed by Bissell, titled “What We Are Doing in Cuba,” Dulles specified acts of economic warfare, sabotage, political propaganda and a plan to use “a drug, which if placed in Castro’s food, would make him behave in such an irrational manner that a public appearance could well have very damaging results to him.” Nixon was all for it.

  Dulles and Bissell presented their plans to Eisenhower and Nixon at the White House in a four-man meeting at 2:30 p.m. on March 17, 1960. They did not propose to invade the island. They told Eisenhower that they could overthrow Castro by sleight of hand. They would create “a responsible, appealing and unified Cuban opposition,” led by recruited agents. A clandestine radio station would beam propaganda into Havana to spark an uprising. CIA officers at the U.S. Army’s jungle warfare training camp in Panama would school sixty Cubans to infiltrate the island. The CIA would drop arms and ammunition to them.

  Fidel would fall six to eight months thereafter, Bissell promised. The timing was excruciatingly sensitive: election day was seven and a half months away. Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon had won by wide margins in the New Hampshire presidential primaries the week before.

  Eisenhower’s staff secretary, General Andrew Goodpaster, took notes on the meeting. “The President says he knows of no better plan…. The great problem is leakage and security…. Everyone must be prepared to swear that he had not heard of it…. Our hand should not show in anything that is done.” The agency should have needed no reminder that, under its charter, all covert action required secrecy so secure that no evidence would lead to the president. But Eisenhower wanted to make sure the CIA did its best to keep this one under cover.

  “WE WERE GOING TO PAY FOR THAT LIE”

  The president and Dick Bissell were locked in an increasingly intense struggle over the control of one of the biggest secrets of all—the U-2 spy plane. Eisenhower had not allowed any flights over Soviet terrain sinc
e his talks with Khrushchev at Camp David six months earlier. Khrushchev had returned from Washington praising the president’s courage in seeking peaceful coexistence; Eisenhower wanted the “spirit of Camp David” to be his legacy.

  Bissell was fighting as hard as possible to resume the secret missions. The president was torn. He truly wanted the intelligence that the U-2 gleaned.

  He longed to bury the “missile gap”—the false claims by the CIA, the air force, military contractors, and politicians of both parties that the Soviets had a widening lead in nuclear weaponry. The CIA’s formal estimates of Soviet military strength were not based on intelligence, but on politics and guesswork. Since 1957, the CIA had sent Eisenhower terrifying reports that the Soviet buildup of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles was far faster and much greater than the American arsenal. In 1960, the agency projected a mortal threat to the United States; it told the president that the Soviets would have five hundred ICBMs ready to strike by 1961. The Strategic Air Command used those estimates as the basis for a secret first-strike plan using more than three thousand nuclear warheads to destroy every city and every military outpost from Warsaw to Beijing. But Moscow did not have five hundred nuclear missiles pointed at the United States at the time. It had four.

  The president had worried for five and a half years that the U-2 itself might start World War III. If the plane went down over the Soviet Union, it could take the chance for peace with it. The month after the Camp David dialogues with Khrushchev, the president had rejected a newly proposed U-2 mission over the Soviet Union; he told Allen Dulles once again, bluntly, that divining the intentions of the Soviets through espionage was more important to him than discovering details about their military capabilities. Only spies, not gadgets, could tell him about Soviet intent to attack.

  Without that knowledge, the president said, the U-2 flights were “provocative pin-pricking, and it may give them the idea that we are seriously preparing plans to knock out their installations” with a sneak attack.

  Eisenhower had a summit meeting with Khrushchev set for May 16, 1960, in Paris. He feared that his greatest asset—his reputation for honesty—would be squandered if a U-2 went down while the United States was, in his words, “engaged in apparently sincere deliberations” with the Soviets.

  In theory, only the president had the power to order a U-2 mission. But Bissell ran the program, and he was petulant about filing his flight plans. He tried to evade presidential authority by secretly seeking to out-source flights to the British and to the Chinese Nationalists. In his memoirs, he wrote that Allen Dulles had been horrified to learn that the first U-2 flight had passed directly over Moscow and Leningrad. The director had never known; Bissell never saw fit to tell him.

  He argued for weeks with the White House before Eisenhower finally gave in and agreed to an April 9, 1960, flight over the Soviet Union from Pakistan. It was, on the surface, a success. But the Soviets knew their airspace had been violated once again, and they went on high alert. Bissell fought for one more flight. The president set a deadline of April 25. The date came and went with clouds covering the Communist targets. Bissell pleaded for more time, and Eisenhower gave him six days’ reprieve. The following Sunday was to be the final date for a flight before the Paris summit. Bissell then tried to circumvent the White House by going to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to win their backing for yet another flight. In his zeal, he had neglected to plan for disaster.

  On May Day, as the president had feared, the U-2 was shot down in central Russia. The CIA’s pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive. C. Douglas Dillon was the acting secretary of state that day. “The President told me to work with Allen Dulles,” Dillon recounted. “We had to put out some sort of announcement.” To the shock of both men, NASA announced that a weather plane had been lost in Turkey. That was the CIA’s cover story. The director of central intelligence either never knew about it or had forgotten all about it.

  “We couldn’t understand how this had happened,” Dillon said. “But we had to get ourselves out of it.”

  That proved difficult. Hewing to the cover story, the White House and the State Department deceived the American people for a week about the flight. Their lies grew more and more transparent. The last one came on May 7: “There was no authorization for such a flight.” That broke Eisenhower’s spirit. “He couldn’t allow Allen Dulles to take all the blame, because it would look like the President didn’t know what was going on in the government,” Dillon said.

  Eisenhower walked into the Oval Office on May 9 and said out loud: “I would like to resign.” For the first time in the history of the United States, millions of citizens understood that their president could deceive them in the name of national security. The doctrine of plausible deniability was dead. The summit with Khrushchev was wrecked and the brief thaw in the cold war iced over. The CIA’s spy plane destroyed the idea of détente for almost a decade. Eisenhower had approved the final mission in the hope of putting the lie to the missile gap. But the cover-up of the crash made him out to be a liar. In retirement, Eisenhower said the greatest regret of his presidency was “the lie we told about the U-2. I didn’t realize how high a price we were going to pay for that lie.”

  The president knew he would not be able to leave office in a spirit of international peace and reconciliation. He was now intent on policing as many parts of the planet as possible before leaving office.

  The summer of 1960 became a season of incessant crisis for the CIA. Red arrows signifying hot spots in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia multiplied on the maps that Allen Dulles and his men brought to the White House. The chagrin over the U-2 shootdown gave way to a murderous anger.

  First Dick Bissell redoubled the CIA’s plans for overthrowing Cuba. He set up a new CIA station in Coral Gables, Florida, code-named Wave. He told Vice President Nixon that he would need a force of five hundred trained Cuban exiles—up from sixty men a few weeks before—to lead the fight. But the army’s jungle warfare center in Panama could not handle hundreds more raw recruits. So Bissell sent Jake Esterline down to Guatemala, where he single-handedly negotiated a secret agreement with President Manuel Ydigoras Fuentes, a retired general and a skilled wheeler-dealer. The site he secured became the main training camp for the Bay of Pigs, with its own airport, its own brothel, and its own codes of conduct. The CIA’s Cubans found it “entirely unsatisfactory,” reported marine colonel Jack Hawkins, Esterline’s top paramilitary planner. They lived “in prison-camp conditions,” which produced “political complications” that were “very difficult for C.I.A. to handle.” Though the camp was isolated, the Guatemalan army was well aware of it, and the presence of a foreign force on its soil very nearly led to a military coup against their president.

  Then, in mid-August, courtly, charming Dick Bissell put out a Mafia contract against Fidel Castro. He went to Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the CIA’s chief of security, and asked the colonel to put him in touch with a gangster who could carry out a hit. This time he briefed Dulles, who gave his approval. An agency historian concluded: “Bissell probably believed that Castro would be dead at the hands of a CIA-sponsored assassin before the Brigade ever hit the beach” at the Bay of Pigs.

  Bissell’s men, knowing nothing of the Mafia plan, worked on a second murder plot. The question was how to put a trained CIA killer within shooting distance of Fidel: “Can we get a Rip Robertson close to him? Can we get a really hairy Cuban—I mean a gutsy Cuban?” said Dick Drain, the Cuba task force’s chief of operations. The answer was always no. Miami was crawling with thousands of Cuban exiles ready to join the CIA’s increasingly well-known covert operation, but Castro’s spies were rife among them, and Fidel learned a fair amount about the CIA’s plans. An FBI agent named George Davis, after spending a few months listening to loose-lipped Cubans in Miami coffee shops and bars, gave a CIA officer at the Wave station some friendly advice: it would be impossible to overthrow Castro with these cha
tty Cuban exiles. The only hope was to send in the marines. His CIA colleague relayed the message to headquarters. It was ignored.

  On August 18, 1960, Dulles and Bissell discussed the Cuba task force in private with President Eisenhower for less than twenty minutes. Bissell asked for another $10.75 million to begin the paramilitary training of the five hundred Cubans in Guatemala. Eisenhower said yes, on one condition: “So long as the Joint Chiefs, Defense, State and CIA think we have a good chance of being successful” in “freeing the Cubans from this incubus.” When Bissell tried to raise the idea of creating an American military force to lead the Cubans in battle, Dulles twice cut him off, evading debate and dissent.

  The president—the man who had led the biggest secret invasion in American history—warned the CIA’s leaders against “the danger of making false moves” or “starting something before we were ready.”

  “TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA”

  Later that same day, at a meeting of the National Security Council, the president ordered the director of central intelligence to eliminate the man the CIA saw as the Castro of Africa—Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Congo.

  Lumumba had been freely elected, and he appealed to the United States for assistance as his nation shook off Belgium’s brutal colonial rule and declared its independence in the summer of 1960. American help never came, for the CIA regarded Lumumba as a dope-addled communist dupe. So when Belgian paratroopers flew in to reassert control in the capital, Lumumba accepted Soviet planes, trucks, and “technicians” to bolster his barely functioning government.

  The week that the Belgian soldiers arrived, Dulles sent Larry Devlin, the station chief in Brussels, to take charge of the CIA post in the capital of the Congo and assess Lumumba as a target for covert action. On August 18, after six weeks in the country, Devlin cabled CIA headquarters: “CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER…. WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUAL COMMIE OR PLAYING COMMIE GAME…. THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TO TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA.” Allen Dulles delivered the gist of this message at the NSC meeting that same day. According to secret Senate testimony delivered years later by the NSC’s notetaker, Robert Johnson, President Eisenhower then turned to Dulles and said flatly that Lumumba should be eliminated. After a dead silence of fifteen seconds or so, the meeting went on. Dulles cabled Devlin eight days later: “IN HIGH QUARTERS HERE IT IS THE CLEAR-CUT CONCLUSION THAT IF LLL CONTINUES TO HOLD HIGH OFFICE, THE INEVITABLE RESULT WILL AT BEST BE CHAOS AND AT WORST PAVE THE WAY TO COMMUNIST TAKEOVER OF THE CONGO…. WE CONCLUDE THAT HIS REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE AND THAT UNDER EXISTING CONDITIONS THIS WOULD BE A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION. HENCE WE WISH TO GIVE YOU WIDER AUTHORITY.”