Everything about the case has remained highly secret, until this book. One of the three agents, David L. Christ, was perhaps the CIA's most sophisticated electronic eavesdropper. He worked for a top-secret unit in the agency---the D branch of foreign intelligence (FI-D). One of the essential missions of D branch was to penetrate foreign embassies---those friendly to the United States or otherwise---and obtain up-to-date codebooks. Christ was the best breakin man the CIA had; by some accounts, he had successfully penetrated dozens of European and Asian embassies. In a CIA internal critique of the New China News Agency mission, prepared in the fall of 1960, Christ was described as "probably the most knowledgeable officer in the Agency of world-wide audio operations"; he had been briefed on the Eisenhower administration's invasion planning for Cuba. If the Cubans learned who he was and, as was feared, compelled him to talk, the agent could provide Castro with extremely damaging information. David Christ was as potentially lethal to American interests as Francis Gary Powers had been after he was shot down over Russia, displayed on television, and tried for espionage. No one in Washington wanted to see David Christ put on public trial or displayed by Castro's side at a public rally.* To the CIA's relief, no one ever did.
The arrests increased the CIA's sense of purpose. "There was such hatred for Castro," one senior CIA official told me. "Word kept on filtering down that the honorable thing for an intelligence officer to do was to think of ways to get rid of Castro."
Ten days after the September arrests of the CIA operatives in Havana, Maheu flew to Miami, where he met Giancana for the first time and discussed the ground rules for working with him and Rosselli. "I made an agreement with them," Maheu told me. "This was a one-shot deal, and I would not discuss anything [about their organized crime business] that I happened to overhear." Giancana's assignment was to find someone close to Castro who could do the killing.
In interviews in 1995 and 1996, Maheu insisted that the recruitment of Rosselli---and the subsequent involvement of Sam Giancana---was sheer happenstance triggered by the chance meeting of Rosselli and O'Connell, the CIA's security officer, at a cocktail party. "It was so logical," he explained to me. "I'm having a party. Johnny is in town. I invite him over. I know Jim O'Connell was there. It was soon afterward that Shef [Edwards, O'Connell's boss] got in touch with me." Maheu, Giancana, and Rosselli ended up working closely together for the next eight months---both before and after the presidential election---until the failure at the Bay of Pigs. In all that time, Maheu told me, Giancana gave no hint that he knew Joe and Jack Kennedy.
But the FBI wiretap logs and the recollections of Robert McDonnell, Jeanne Humphreys, and Frank Sinatra through his daughter Tina provide indisputable evidence that since mid-1960 Giancana had been secretly working on behalf of Kennedy's election. By early fall, when the CIA's plotting with the Mafia was intense, Giancana was also playing a major role in persuading his organized crime and Teamsters Union associates in Chicago to campaign, legally and illegally, for Jack Kennedy against Richard Nixon.
Giancana was thus theoretically in position to affect, perhaps irrevocably, the outcome of the 1960 election. Did Giancana do everything in his power to murder Castro before the election in November, which would have given a boost to Richard Nixon in the very close presidential campaign? This question is crucial.
Giancana certainly seemed to understand what the Republicans wanted him to do---and when they wanted him to do it. In early October of 1960, according to the Church Report, Giancana bragged over dinner with some mob associates in a New York restaurant, according to an FBI informant, that he had already met three times with Castro's would-be assassin, and the Cuban leader would be "done away with ... in November." But nothing happened before the November 8 election, despite the boasting.
As the election neared, Nixon was frantic about Cuba. Getting rid of Castro, by overthrow or murder, he thought, would give him the presidency. The CIA's planning for Cuba, which had begun with the idea of training and infiltrating a few dozen guerrilla cadres who would spark an overthrow, had evolved into the landing of a six-hundred-man force that would hit the beaches at the town of Trinidad and move inland to the Escabray Mountains, to be supplied by airdrop. In an interview years later, the vice president's national security aide, Marine Corps general Robert E. Cushman, Jr., told the author Peter Wyden that Nixon had repeatedly nagged President Eisenhower to get the job done in Cuba. "The Vice President regarded the operation as a major political asset," Wyden wrote in Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, published in 1979. "He was eager for the Republican administration to get credit for toppling Castro before the election. 'How are the boys doing at the Institute?' he asked Cushman, always careful not to discuss sensitive matters openly, even in the office. 'Are they falling dead over there? What in the world are they doing that takes months?'"
By November 1960 CIA operations in Guatemala, where the invasion force was being trained, were behind schedule, and the method for killing Castro was undecided. Giancana and his gang weren't doing much---at least not in the weeks before the election, according to the reports of the only two official investigations into the Castro plotting. Both the 1975 Church Report and a top-secret study prepared in 1967 by the CIA's inspector general (the IG Report) said that the assassination plotting was barely in the planning stage by the late fall of 1960. There were some false starts. The CIA's internal report, made public in 1993 under the Freedom of Information Act, noted that in the summer a batch of poisoned cigars, obviously meant for Castro, a heavy smoker, had been concocted by the agency's office of medical services and was ready for delivery by October 7, 1960. But the cigars were not actually delivered for operational use, according to the report, until February 13, 1961---three weeks after Kennedy's inauguration---and were never sent into Cuba. According to the IG Report, there was also talk in the fall of 1960---before the elections---"of a typical, gangland-style killing in which Castro would be gunned down. Giancana was flatly opposed to the use of firearms," the report continued. "He said that no one could be recruited to do the job, because the chance of survival and escape would be negligible. Giancana stated a preference for a lethal pill that could be put into Castro's food or drink."
It took months of trial and error before the CIA's scientific experts could develop a lethal pill that would dissolve in either cold or hot water with the same efficacy. One early batch of pills had been rejected; according to the Church Report, it was "probably" not until the February after the elections that a suitable assassination product was given to Rosselli. "The record clearly establishes that the pills were given to a Cuban for delivery to the island some time prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion in mid-April, 1961," the Church Report stated. By then, Giancana and a colleague, Santos Trafficante, a Florida Mafia boss who controlled much of the casino activity in Havana, had found a Cuban official who agreed to drop the poison in Castro's drink.
The record thus is clear that Giancana made no attempt to assassinate Castro before the election and, in fact, did nothing until Kennedy was in the White House. His failure to move quickly raises a second crucial question: Did Giancana tip off the Kennedys about what the Republicans were trying to do in Cuba in the fall of 1960?
No published evidence definitively proves that Jack Kennedy knew from Giancana about the planning for Castro's overthrow and assassination. But the fact is that a warning from Giancana wasn't needed. As interviews for this book reveal, the candidate was told before the election about the activities against Castro by at least three other involved sources---including Richard Bissell, who originated and led them.
It must have been reassuring for the young senator to learn that his presidential campaign, with its reliance on secret family money and assistance from organized crime, had met its moral equivalent in the Republicans, who were seeking to murder a foreign political leader before the election and using the very same Chicago mobsters in the effort. America's Cuba policy became the most important, yet most secret, issue of the Kennedy-Nixon campaign.
* * *
* There were the usual sexual shenanigans. Commander Lionel Krisel, a former American naval attaché in Havana, recalled in a 1995 interview for this book being told that the U.S. Embassy had been visited by the Cuban police and military intelligence officials during one of Kennedy's stays in the late fifties and put on notice that the senator was of concern to them "for security reasons." The Cubans reported, Krisel told me, that Kennedy had been "going to bed with the wife of the Italian ambassador and 'You know those Italians.' They would hate" to have the young senator shot while on a visit to Havana. An embassy representative was assigned to tell Kennedy "to cut it out." Kennedy was staying at the home of Earl Smith, the American ambassador to Cuba, who was a social friend of the Kennedys and a strong Batista supporter. Many historians have said that Kennedy had a long-standing romance with Smith's wife, Florence. Krisel retired in 1975 from the navy as a captain and was living in Bel Air, California, when interviewed.
* In his memoir, RN, published in 1978, Nixon described the 1952 political crisis over the fund in full, but did not mention the two elements for which his televised speech remains famous: his wife's cloth coat and the dog, Checkers.
* In its after-action assessment, the CIA depicted Christ's mission as full of ineptness and miscalculations. Most significantly, Christ had been in Cuba in August 1960, under cover as a tourist, and went home for a week before beginning his fateful mission. While at home, he told a colleague that he "believed he had been under surveillance during the first trip." Nonetheless, he returned to Havana once again as a "tourist," at a time, the CIA report noted, when "few genuine tourists were traveling." There were many other mistakes. Christ and his colleagues, Thornton J. Anderson, Jr., and Walter E. Szuminski, all of whom were assigned to the agency's technical services division, had not coordinated plans for a story to be used in case of arrest and interrogation; they failed to provide a lookout during the critical phase of the breakin; they did not adequately coordinate the operation with the CIA station in Havana; and the operation, in general, "did not receive the careful analysis and thorough action that an activity of this sensitivity requires." After their release from prison in 1963, the three men, who insisted to the Cubans throughout that they were merely tourists, quietly returned to their CIA careers. There was no evidence that the Cuban government learned of the immense importance of Christ, who died in 1970.
12
TRAPPING NIXON
Richard Bissell never told it all.
The patrician Bissell, with his academic background and his passion for sailing, was the prototypical CIA man in the early 1960s, as America began its love affair with the novels of Ian Fleming and his dashing British spy hero, James Bond, the martini-sipping Agent 007. Bissell, handsome and tall, was the man in charge of the CIA's get-Castro planning. He also helped elect John F. Kennedy by meeting with him before the 1960 election and briefing him about the CIA's ever-expanding plans for the overthrow of the Castro regime.
The original covert CIA schedule, as endorsed by Eisenhower, called for military action: the training of exile guerrilla teams was to be completed before the November elections. By midsummer of 1960, with training falling behind schedule, and with Castro becoming more entrenched in power and more hostile to Washington, Bissell and his CIA colleagues escalated to invasion and assassination. Knowing the CIA's plans was essential to Kennedy's political well-being.
No preelection Kennedy-Bissell meeting appears in the official records. CIA files released in 1995 show that Allen Dulles, following the common practice during presidential campaigns, gave Senator Kennedy top-secret briefings in the summer and fall. On July 23, 1960, Dulles flew to Hyannis Port for a meeting of more than two hours with Kennedy. The Cold War dominated the session, according to the CIA file reports; Dulles described Soviet progress in strategic missile capabilities. The agency's files show that the second briefing took place, on short notice, on September 19, when Dulles gave Kennedy a thirty-minute update on world trouble spots. General Charles P. Cabell, the deputy CIA director, provided Kennedy with a third briefing, on November 2---less than a week before the election---which was officially said to have focused on world tensions. A CIA internal review of the available records, made public in 1995, concluded that there was no evidence that either Dulles or Cabell specifically briefed Kennedy on the Cuban invasion planning.
But Clarence B. Sprouse, an army sergeant who was recruited by the CIA in mid-1960 to help train the Cuban exile forces, vividly recalled in a 1995 interview for this book that he helped Bissell arrange a private briefing on the Cuba plans for Senator Kennedy months before the election. Sprouse, who retired near San Antonio, Texas, after a thirty-year army career, was the command sergeant major for the Eighty-second Airborne Division in 1960---the division's highe-stranking enlisted man---when he was reassigned to the exile training camp, in Guatemala. Late that summer he was sent to CIA headquarters in Washington, where he did nothing "but hang around ops"---the headquarters of Bissell's invasion force, which was focused on training small-unit guerrilla teams. There was a flurry of activity, Sprouse recalled, over scheduled briefings for both Vice President Nixon and, a day later, Senator Kennedy. Sprouse specifically recalled preparing charts for a "very detailed briefing" for Kennedy on the Cuba planning, which took place in a safe house in northwest Washington, near CIA headquarters. "I went over and set it up," he told me. "The briefing was on the Trinidad landing. The initial thing was to go in, like Castro had gone, and fight his guerrillas in the mountains." Sprouse said he was not allowed to attend the briefing and did not actually see Kennedy at the safe house, but he was told that Bissell personally briefed the senator. There is no official record of the meeting in the CIA files. Such a briefing, if it did take place, would have caused an uproar in the Eisenhower White House.
Sprouse's account is made more credible by Bissell's acknowledgment, in his posthumous memoir, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, published in 1996, that he had met informally with Kennedy during the campaign. "About a month before the election," Bissell wrote,
I received a call from an intermediary of Kennedy's who said that the senator would like to talk to me about general issues raised during the campaign. It was probably Joe Alsop who suggested to Kennedy that as a well-informed Washington insider I was someone he should get in touch with. I am sure I told Dulles about the planned meeting, and I probably reported to him about it afterward. I found Kennedy to be bright, and he raised a number of topics on which I had something to say. I made it clear to him, however, that I was still working for Eisenhower and therefore could not do anything of an active nature for him.
Bissell gave a different and probably misleading account of his initial campaign meeting with John Kennedy in his oral interview for the John F. Kennedy Library. In that interview, conducted in April 1967, at the height of reverence for the memory of Camelot, Bissell told of being summoned by Senator Kennedy to his office on Capitol Hill not a month before the election but "at a fairly early stage in his campaign." The meeting had nothing to do with CIA business, Bissell insisted. Kennedy "invited me to contribute, in writing, any ideas that I might have that could be fed into the campaign that would be valuable to him in the campaign. I was eager to do so," Bissell added, "but the press of business kept me fairly busy, and I think, as it turned out, I never did make such contributions. I may have seen him once or twice more during the campaign." Asked why Kennedy had sought the meeting, Bissell responded vaguely that "I'm inclined to think he was more interested in economic policy [than in the CIA], but we didn't really bring it to the point of sharply defining a field." What the two men really discussed is, of course, impossible to determine, but there is no reason to believe the conversation focused on economic policy. Significantly, there is no record that Bissell officially reported to the CIA the astonishing fact that a presidential candidate had asked him---the CIA's director of clandestine and covert operations---to contribute ideas to his campaign while Bissell was still serv
ing the rival party's administration.
Bissell's varying accounts in his memoir and his oral history for the Kennedy Library were at best incomplete. Until his death in 1994 he provided journalists, academics, former colleagues, and others who sought him out in retirement with a seemingly unending maze of conflicting descriptions of his role in the Bay of Pigs. Eventually Bissell began acknowledging that he and Jack Kennedy had begun meeting secretly early in 1960, when it was clear that the young senator had a strong chance to win the Democratic nomination. In an interview in the 1970s with R. Harris Smith, a former CIA analyst who in 1972 published a well-researched history of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Bissell said that he "was meeting as far back as February of 1960" with Kennedy. In an interview for this book, Smith said that Bissell had described those meetings as social.* In the year before his death, Bissell told a former CIA colleague from the Bay of Pigs, Grayston Lynch, that he and Kennedy were "friends from before"---as Lynch recalled in a 1997 interview for this book. Bissell made it very clear, Lynch said, that the personal relationship had existed long before Kennedy got to the White House.
Bissell's implication in his memoir, therefore, that he or Jack Kennedy needed the services of a third party in the late fall of 1960, in the person of columnist Joseph Alsop, to get "in touch" with each other is ludicrous. Bissell and Alsop had been friends since childhood, and stayed close as their careers in Washington progressed. Alsop had also been an intimate of the Kennedys---one biographer said he was "smitten" with the family---since the end of World War II. He would become one of JFK's confidants after the election, a reporter who understood that the friendship depended on knowing what to write and what not to write. Kennedy surely did not need Joe Alsop to tell him in mid-1960 that Bissell was important.
The Dark Side of Camelot Page 20
