The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Kennedy distrusted the outspoken Burke. In his memoir, A Thousand Days, Arthur Schlesinger provided one reason why: Burke "pushed his black-and-white views of international affairs with bluff naval persistence ... and he took every opportunity to advocate full support for all anti-communist regimes, whatever their internal character." But Burke had also been one of the very few to directly challenge the president when, during a panic-filled meeting on the second day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy refused to authorize a navy counterattack on Cuba, saying, "I don't want the U.S. to get involved." "Hell, Mr. President," Burke responded. "We are involved."

  Burke remained troubled by the Bay of Pigs. After retiring from the navy, in 1962, he conducted a private inquiry into the president's decision-making, a study he never published. Burke's documentation included a transcript of a telephone call he made in June 1961, as the Taylor Report was being written, to General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The transcript, never published until now, shows that Lemnitzer was enraged because Taylor was planning to conclude in his report that "the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved the plan" for the Bay of Pigs. "I've got a bone to pick with him," Lemnitzer told Burke. "I don't agree with that statement ... and he insists on putting it in his report." Burke reminded Lemnitzer that he had told President Kennedy that the plan "had a fifty-fifty chance."

  Lemnitzer: "Damned right and he just put it out loud and clear that we approved it. We didn't do any such thing."

  Burke: "Did I ever tell you why I went along with it finally? ... This is the reasoning. I went as far as I could until Bobby said, 'We will put out the whole thing about the alternative landing sites [to the Bay of Pigs] mentioned earlier ... that the Joint Chiefs considered these three alternatives for twenty minutes.'"

  Lemnitzer: "That's not correct. He's wrong.... I, individually, considered them longer than that."

  Burke: "... He said he would spread it out [in the press] and if he does do that, we are in worse shape because these things---although they aren't true---are hard to refute."

  Lemnitzer: "But he had no business in stating it the way he does---that the Joint Chiefs gave de facto approval [for the invasion]. That is a damned erroneous statement."

  Burke: "Yes, that is right. But they said, why did you not object to it?"

  Lemnitzer: "Well, to hell with that."*

  Like Burke, Lemnitzer remained silent. The Taylor Report came out the way the Kennedys wanted it to. No one in the military dared cross the popular president, even in private.

  In September 1961 Kennedy announced that Allen Dulles would be replaced as CIA director by John A. McCone, a rich California Republican known as a rigid Cold Warrior. McCone shared the Kennedys' hatred for the Cuban premier. In 1975 he told the Church Committee that Castro was "a man who had spent a couple of years abusing our country, our government, our people in the most violent and incredible and unfair way.... [H]e turned over the sacred soil of Cuba to plant missiles."* But when it came to Cuba, Walter N. Elder, McCone's executive assistant at the CIA, recalled in an interview for this book, even McCone "always regarded Bobby as looking over his shoulder." Robert Kennedy, Elder added, "decided that Castro had rendered a personal insult to the Kennedy family by the action of the Bay of Pigs and so Bobby led the charge. And he was the spirit behind the founding of Mongoose and he went into the agency, through back channels. It was really almost an act of revenge for the humiliation, not only to the United States but to the Kennedy family. That was sacred to Bobby."

  By late fall, after his success with the Taylor Report and in Berlin, Bobby Kennedy was more assertive than ever. "We had the impression," Walter Elder told me, "that Bobby was simply Jack's ruffian. Jack could sit above it. Bobby was the one who wanted action. There was an intense dislike in CIA for Bobby."

  "Bobby, in my view, was an unprincipled sinister little bastard," Thomas A. Parrott, a CIA official who worked on intelligence matters in the office of Maxwell Taylor, recalled in a 1995 interview for this book. In early 1962 Taylor, whose advocacy of counterinsurgency was viewed with disdain by his four-star peers in the Pentagon, was made chairman of what would become the most important foreign policy entity in the Kennedy administration---the Special Group for Counterinsurgency (CI). "Both brothers got enamored of counterinsurgency," Parrott told me. "Everything had to be CI. I was the secretary." Bobby Kennedy was also a member of Special Group (CI). The attorney general, Parrott said, would invariably arrive late at the highly classified meetings and put his feet up on the table "so others had to look at the soles of his shoes." At one point, Parrott told me, Kennedy was adamant that Arthur Goldberg, the secretary of labor, be allowed to join the counterinsurgency group. Goldberg had attended an earlier meeting and, Taylor and Parrott thought, talked too much. Taylor said no. Kennedy then said, in essence, "I'll have to take this up with my brother." To Parrott's chagrin, the members of the group---who included McGeorge Bundy, of the White House; Roswell Gilpatric, of the Pentagon; General Lyman Lemnitzer, of the Joint Chiefs; General Charles Cabell, of the CIA; and Edward R. Murrow, the former CBS correspondent who was director of the United States Information Agency---backed down one at a time, saying, in effect, Parrott recalled, "'Yes, maybe you have a point there.' Even Ed Murrow went along. Cabell ducked it, saying he had not been at the earlier meeting. Every one of them folded after Bobby made his threat. It got back to Taylor and he said, 'Well, we're not going to have him.' Whereupon Bobby pushed his notebook closed, said, 'Oh shit, the second most important man in the country loses another one,' and flounced out of the room, like a child, slamming the door."*

  The concept for Operation Mongoose, which became the focal point of the Kennedy brothers' war against Castro, originated not in the Oval Office or during a Situation Room meeting but in the fertile imagination of Tad Szulc, the New York Times reporter who in January 1961 had published an early account of the plans for an exile invasion of Cuba. Szulc was considered an expert on Latin America and known to be close to the anti-Castro Cuban community in Miami; appropriately, he made it his business to be close to senior officials in the Kennedy administration. Szulc was perhaps closer than many of his colleagues at the Times knew; in fact, he had turned down an offer from Murrow, the USIA director, to be one of his assistants. In October 1961 Szulc paid a late-night visit to the home of Robert A. Hurwitch, the deputy director of the office of Cuban affairs in the State Department. As Hurwitch recalled in interviews and in a privately published memoir he made available for this book, Szulc said that he had been "thinking about the Cuban situation. 'If the communists could successfully launch wars of national liberation, why couldn't we, the U.S?"'

  Hurwitch dismissed the idea, telling Szulc that successful wars of national liberation "require highly motivated, well-organized armed opposition from within, which was not the case in Cuba." Szulc insisted that his Cuban exile contacts "believed that the time was ripe." He told Hurwitch that he had tried the thought out on several people, including Richard Goodwin, who had been named White House coordinator of Cuban affairs after the Bay of Pigs. A few days later, Szulc visited Hurwitch again and reported that he "was making good progress with his project, and might even have a meeting" with President Kennedy on the subject. "Foolishly," Hurwitch wrote in his memoir, "I thought he was boasting."

  Goodwin, as Szulc and Hurwitch did not know, had fallen out of favor and was soon to be reassigned from Kennedy's personal staff in the White House to the State Department. With his unkempt hair, gleaming eyes, and swarthy complexion, Goodwin was an anomaly among the buttoned-down Kennedy men. His brilliance as a speechwriter was widely recognized: Goodwin had been editor of the Harvard Law Review and a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. But in the eyes of those close to the president, this did not compensate for his independence, ambition, and lack of reverence for those above him. Goodwin understood that Jack Kennedy did not stand on protocol when it came to plotting against Fidel Castro; he also understood the power of careful fla
ttery. His praise, in a series of job-enhancing memoranda to Kennedy, was aimed not at the president but at his brother. On November 1, in an "eyes only" memorandum released years later under the Freedom of Information Act, the young aide appropriated Szulc's ideas as his own, endorsing the concept of a "command operation" to handle an "all-out attack on the Cuban problem ... I believe that the Attorney General would be the most effective commander of such an operation. Either I or someone else should be assigned to him as Deputy for this activity." On the next day Goodwin tried again in a second memorandum, and dropped the name of Tad Szulc. "As for propaganda, I thought we might ask Tad Szulc to take a leave of absence from the Times and work on this one," Goodwin wrote. A week later Szulc met with Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department and spent more than an hour afterward with the president and Goodwin in the Oval Office.

  Szulc's typed notes of the meeting, provided by him to the Church Committee and published in scores of books, say nothing of a job offer from Jack Kennedy. The president was discussing the general need to control the CIA, Szulc wrote, when he suddenly "leaned forward and asked me, 'What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?' I said this would be a terrible idea because a) it probably wouldn't do away with the regime ... and b) I felt personally the U.S. had no business in assassination. JFK then said he was testing me---that he felt the same way---he added, 'I'm glad you feel the same way'---because indeed U.S. morally must not be part [of] assassinations." Kennedy said he had raised the question because he was "under terrific pressure from"---Szulc was unsure whether he said advisers or intelligence people---"to okay a Castro murder. Said he was resisting pressures."

  In a 1994 interview for this book, Goodwin asserted that "Tad was auditioning for a job, and Kennedy was recruiting him." Goodwin added that the president trusted Szulc "well enough to bring up" the subject of political murder; Goodwin also conceded that the president, as was much more likely, "may have been laying down a disclaimer." Goodwin told me that he had no knowledge of Jack Kennedy's involvement in the murder plots against Castro. "The only explanation" for the president's bringing up the subject with Szulc, Goodwin added, "is that he didn't want Tad to think he was involved"---if the president did know of the assassination planning. In other words, JFK was setting Szulc up to write in case of Castro's death an authoritative account of a president who had not wanted the murder to take place.*

  Neither Goodwin nor Szulc got a job with Mongoose. In November 1961, shortly after his second visit from Szulc, Hurwitch told me, there was a top-secret conference at the White House and Jack Kennedy began it by saying, "I've just had a meeting with a well-known journalist." The president then gave the group what amounted to a summary of Szulc's project to initiate an insurgency against Castro, and told them that a task force would be established under Bobby Kennedy. Daily supervision of the task force would be the responsibility of General Lansdale. "I was speechless," Hurwitch wrote in his unpublished memoirs, "and regrettably failed to object to what had seemed to me to be a doomed, romantic adventure." In an interview, Hurwitch said what he chose not to write: "What the hell do you do with the brother of the president of the United States? I've got four kids." Hurwitch understood that anyone who objected to any aspect of the secret war on Cuba would be deemed "soft" and would suffer professionally. He was assigned as the State Department's representative to what became Operation Mongoose. "After the first meeting," he wrote in his memoir, "I regretted more than ever not having objected at the White House meeting.... Cutting a dashing Air Force figure, very clever about imagery including his own, Lansdale became the darling of many who became 'experts' in foreign affairs vicariously.... He had sufficient support to obtain this assignment despite his total lack of experience in Latin America, in general, and Cuba, in particular."*

  At his death in 1987, Edward Geary Lansdale was eulogized as "one of the greatest spies in history" by William Colby, the retired CIA director. Walter Rostow, the Kennedy administration aide, depicted Lansdale in a 1972 book as a "unique national asset" who "knew more about guerrilla warfare on the Asian scene than any other American." The journalist David Halberstam similarly saw Lansdale, who returned to Saigon after Kennedy's assassination, as "the classic Good Guy, modern, just what Kennedy was looking for."

  During his year as head of Operation Mongoose, Lansdale would work to turn the Cuban exile community into a political force that could mobilize widespread opposition to Castro. But the widespread opposition never materialized---what there was of it languished in Cuban jails or lived comfortably on CIA stipends in Miami. The operation failed to spark an internal political movement against Castro, but it succeeded, with its propaganda and sabotage raids, in creating a siege mentality among the population of Cuba and helped to drive the nation into the arms of the Soviet Union. In April 1962 Castro overcame the final remnants of political opposition to his leadership---much of it from old-line communists---and signed a $750 million trade agreement with the Soviet Union.

  In interviews for this book, former CIA officials were emphatic in saying they knew of no national security basis for Mongoose. "None of us that I know of," Sam Halpern told me in 1997, "thought that Cuba was all that important in terms of the national security of this country. We've lived now for thirty-five or more years with Castro in charge. We're still here; he's still there. The only thing I can figure is they [the Kennedys] probably felt some remorse that they cut the air support" at the Bay of Pigs. "I guess they felt that they had to go after it and show their manhood. I have no plausible explanation other than that." Walter Elder recalled that John McCone's private view "was that this whole thing [Mongoose] was doomed from the beginning." There is no evidence that the usually outspoken McCone said as much to the president. CIA files made public in 1996 show that even McCone chose to be upbeat when he was asked by Bobby Kennedy in January 1962 for his "frank and personal" opinion of Lansdale and the Cuban effort. He assured Kennedy that his agency was giving "every effort and all-out support" to Operation Mongoose, although such an operation "has never been attempted before" and would be "extremely difficult to accomplish."

  Halpern, Elder, and other former operations officers who voiced their private complaints about Mongoose in 1962 were powerless when it came to conveying their views to the White House. None of their superiors had the courage to tell the president or his brother that the operation was nearly certain to fail. Not even Lansdale, who had his own doubts.

  In an interview Richard Goodwin revealed that he and Lansdale had discussed the difficulty of invoking counterinsurgency in Cuba. Lansdale was delighted to be working for the Kennedy administration; but, as he explained to the less-experienced Goodwin, "there were no guerrillas in the hills, no rebel force. Not even any underground movement of any substance. Without that, you wouldn't hope to do anything through counterinsurgency." Lansdale, Goodwin told me, "was Lansdale. He wasn't in charge. He just had an opinion."

  Operation Mongoose was a monumental failure. Its ambitions, outlined by Lansdale in a series of top-secret documents in early 1962, were simply unachievable. There were to be six phases to the elimination of Castro and his regime, moving from guerrilla operations by midsummer to open revolt in the first two weeks of October. In one paper Lansdale set a target date of October 20, 1962, for the installation of a new Cuban government. "It was nonsensical," Sam Halpern told me. "We were supposed to be able to plan for a victory march down the streets of Havana the last week of October of 1962. And if you look at the calendar, you'll notice that there was a congressional election coming up. In the clandestine intelligence business," Halpern told me, "you don't set up a plan which says you're going to recruit three by Wednesday, five by Friday, and ten by Sunday. How the heck can you do something like that? Some of his directives were laughable. But those were the kind of orders we got from Ed. My lord, Ed was nothing more than a man in a gray flannel suit off Madison Avenue. I think he could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. I personally didn't have much faith or belief in his abil
ity. We tried a lot of stuff but nothing worked. We used to hold meetings about how many leaflets we'd dropped, how many ships we'd tampered with."

  There was no correlation between Lansdale's ambitious plans and what the CIA could actually do in Cuba. "I told Helms," Halpern recalled, "'Dick, we haven't got a pot to piss in in Cuba. Everybody we know was rolled up when Castro came in. We need a year to build up a base.' We didn't know what was going on. We had no intelligence. Dick didn't believe me, saying, 'It can't be that bad.' Helms's problem was that he's got to handle the White House. The Kennedys were sold a bill of goods by Lansdale. We [in Task Force W] would refer to Lansdale on the telephone as the FM---for field marshal."

  Mongoose, including Task Force W, cost American taxpayers at least $100 million. The operation did nothing to jeopardize the security of Fidel Castro or his standing with the Cuban population. Many Mongoose operations defied common sense. After a Soviet freighter malfunctioned and was forced to pull into a Caribbean port to offload its cargo of Cuban sugar, a CIA scientist broke into a warehouse and injected the sugar with a chemical to ruin the taste. "It was childish," Halpern says now. "But we were doing something under the pressure."