There was further humiliation for the men of Task Force W. Bobby Kennedy, increasingly impatient with the lack of progress in Cuba, decided in the early spring of 1962 to run his own operation. He once again moved into the back channel, as he had done with the Soviets, this time working with the Mafia. On his orders an experienced clandestine CIA operative named Charles Ford was assigned as the attorney general's personal agent. Kennedy's unprecedented request went up the chain of command to General Marshall Carter, the new deputy CIA director, for approval. Ford spent the next eighteen months, until the assassination of President Kennedy, making secret trips, at Bobby Kennedy's direction, to Mafia chieftains in the United States and Canada, while continuing to serve with Harvey and Halpern on Task Force W. "Bobby was absolutely convinced," Halpern told me, "that the mob had a stay-behind system in Cuba since they had so many assets left there. There were the casinos and gambling dens and prostitution rings and God knows what else. Kennedy thought that by tapping into those stay-behind units we could get some decent intelligence on what's going on in Cuba. The concept was crazy. The Mafia couldn't have set up a stay-behind system; it's too hard. Also, Castro had a great internal security system and you couldn't work contacts in the cities. That's why we"---in Task Force W---"operated in the countryside."
It was also possible, Halpern said, that Bobby Kennedy's primary purpose in dealing with Charles Ford was to do what Bill Harvey was not doing---find someone to assassinate Fidel Castro. "Charlie saw Kennedy in his office and of course talked to him on the phone quite regularly," Halpern told me. "Charlie was a good officer, and Bobby was his case officer. Charlie never reported that kind of information to me. He may never have reported it to anybody. He was Bobby's man. Nobody's going to touch him."
Kennedy initiated some of the telephone calls to Ford, Halpern said, but they were usually made on his behalf by Angie Novello, his longtime personal secretary. Novello, interviewed for this book briefly by telephone in 1994, said she remembered Halpern but had "no memory" of ever calling CIA operatives, including Ford.* Halpern told me that Ford would make it a point to stop by his cubicle in the Task Force W offices and say, "See you again, Sam. I'm off again." Ford averaged two trips a month for the attorney general, and would dictate reports for Kennedy upon his return. "I know," Halpern said, "he went to places like Chicago, San Francisco, Miami---wherever Bobby sent him---including one trip to Canada." Ford, obviously following instructions from Kennedy, relayed nothing to his nominal superiors in Task Force W. "We never got a single solitary piece of [written] information," Halpern said. Charlie Ford's reports, if they still exist, presumably are among the millions of pages of Robert F. Kennedy papers that have yet to be released by the John F. Kennedy Library.†
Halpern said he and his colleagues had an ongoing concern for Ford's security. "We like to control our meeting places," he explained. "We don't like to walk into an unknown place." The husky and dark-skinned Ford, who had served in Japan and knew a great deal about the CIA's extensive operations there, was given identity papers and a careful cover story in the hope that his identity as a clandestine CIA officer would not become known to the Mafia.
"I don't know how Bobby Kennedy squared that in his own mind," Halpern said. "On the one hand, he allegedly was going after the Mafia to destroy them; on the other hand, he was using them for information about Cuba. Maybe it was a deal he made with them. Who knows?" Ford, who died in the late 1980s, never discussed---even years later---his missions for Kennedy, Halpern said.
Bobby Kennedy was doing more than "allegedly" going after the Mafia. Within days of taking office in January 1961, the attorney general had announced what the Wall Street Journal approvingly depicted as the "most sweeping campaign against gangsters, labor racketeers and vice overlords that the country has ever seen." His goal, Kennedy said, was to jail top criminals by bringing them up on whatever charges could be proven in a court of law. Kennedy backed up his words by invigorating the Justice Department's organized crime division and decreeing that he would make war on crime his priority as attorney general. He took the fight to Congress and won legislation making it a federal crime to transmit gambling information from state to state by telephone or telegraph, cutting deeply into the main profit center of organized crime. In his speeches and congressional testimony, Kennedy repeatedly insisted that fighting crime was a moral issue that could not be successful without fundamental changes in society. "The paramount interest in self, in material wealth, in security must be replaced by an actual, not just a vocal, interest in our country, by a spirit of adventure, a will to fight what is evil, and a desire to serve," he had said in The Enemy Within (1960), his account of the McClellan Committee investigation. "It is up to us as citizens to take the initiative as it has been taken before in our history, to reach out boldly but with honesty to do the things that need to be done."
Robert Kennedy's previously unrevealed involvement with Charles Ford provides new insight into a May 1962 meeting in the Justice Department. Arthur Schlesinger and other Kennedy admirers have repeatedly cited the meeting as evidence of both the attorney general's innocence of the CIA's assassination plotting and his adamant disapproval of any collaboration with organized crime.
At issue was a year-old dispute between the CIA and the FBI over the FBI's insistence on prosecuting Sam Giancana on wiretap charges that stemmed from Giancana's jealousy. The incident took place in October 1960, when Giancana and Robert Maheu, the private investigator who was then serving as a CIA cutout, were sharing a hotel suite in Miami while trying to find a way to assassinate Castro. Giancana became convinced that his girlfriend, the singer Phyllis McGuire, was having an affair in Las Vegas with Dan Rowan, of the comedy team of Rowan and Martin. Maheu, eager to keep Giancana in Miami---and perhaps seeking to ingratiate himself with his Mafia collaborator---got approval from his CIA handlers, along with some necessary cash, and arranged to have Rowan's hotel room bugged and wiretapped. Maheu's man, a private investigator named Arthur J. Balletti, gained entrance to the room and, believing Rowan would not be back soon, left his wiretap equipment in it, unattended. A maid discovered the equipment and called the local sheriff, who arrested Balletti.
The case was turned over to the FBI, whose agents were told in late April 1961 that the CIA was working with Sam Giancana and the mob. Their informant was none other than Maheu, who---distressed at what he perceived as President Kennedy's cowardice at the Bay of Pigs---began talking to his former FBI colleagues. The FBI was "madder than hell," according to Sam J. Papich, a Hoover aide who handled liaison between the FBI and CIA, one of the most sensitive jobs in the American intelligence community. Papich told investigators for the Church Committee in 1975, according to a summary made available under the Freedom of Information Act, that the CIA's involvement posed a huge stumbling block to any possible prosecution of Giancana for illegal wiretapping. Papich, who was a reluctant witness, further told the committee that Bobby Kennedy "was concerned that this operation would become known, and didn't want it to get out." The flap went to the top of both agencies. Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA's office of security, spent the winter and spring of 1961--62 trying to convince the FBI and Justice Department to drop the case and keep what they knew secret.
Nothing was resolved until April 1962, when Lawrence Houston, the CIA's general counsel, met with Herbert J. Miller, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's criminal division. Miller told him, Houston recorded in a memorandum obtained by the Church Committee, that he envisioned "no major difficulty in stopping action for prosecution," thus protecting the secrecy of the CIA's use of the Mafia. Three weeks later, on May 7, Houston and Sheffield Edwards, representing the CIA, met with Bobby Kennedy in his office and---as Edwards told investigators for the CIA inspector general's 1967 assassinations report---"briefed" the attorney general "all the way."
Houston, who was also questioned for the IG Report, described Bobby Kennedy as saying that "he could see the problem and that
he would not proceed against those [Giancana et al.] involved in the wiretapping case." Kennedy added, speaking "quite firmly, 'I trust that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again---with gangsters---you will let the Attorney General know before you do it.'" At the time, of course, as Houston and Edwards apparently did not know, Kennedy---aided by Charles Ford---was himself trying to do business in Cuba with organized crime. Kennedy also was goading the agency to get on with getting rid of Castro and knew, as did his brother, that a pretty California woman named Judith Campbell was carrying messages to that effect between the president, Sam Giancana, and Johnny Rosselli. In the meeting with Edwards and Houston, the IG Report noted, Bobby Kennedy brought up the subject of Johnny Rosselli and his motivation: "The Attorney General had thought that Rosselli was doing the job (the attempt at assassination of Castro) for money. Edwards corrected that impression; he was not." Four days later, Kennedy asked Houston and Edwards for a memorandum of the meeting. That summary, delivered on May 14, gave Kennedy an invaluable document for the record, stating that he had been angered upon hearing---presumably for the first time---of the Mafia's use in activities against Castro and had ordered the CIA to check with him before dealing again with criminals. It made no mention of Castro assassination planning---past, present, or future. Such actions, as Kennedy surely was aware, were never to be put in writing.
Thus, the 1967 CIA report, made public in 1993, concluded that although Houston and Edwards had fully briefed Kennedy on the CIA's use of the Mafia in the fall of 1960 and spring of 1961, they had left the impression that the operation "presumably was terminated following the Bay of Pigs fiasco." What Houston and Edwards did not do, the IG Report added, was tell the attorney general that the assassination plotting was continuing, even as their meeting took place. "As far as we know," the IG Report added, Kennedy was never told that the CIA "had a continuing involvement with U.S. gangster elements."
Both the IG Report and Church Committee report eight years later concluded that Edwards knew about the continuing assassination operation and had deliberately misled Kennedy at their meeting and in his follow-up written report.* They may have been wrong. By the fall of 1961---several months before Edwards's meeting with Kennedy---the Castro assassination effort was in the hands of Bill Harvey's task force. Harvey, as many witnesses testified, was well known for keeping his operations to himself. In 1975 Edwards, then seriously ill, had it both ways when he testified before the Church Committee. He told the senators that he "did not know" when he met with Kennedy that the plotting against Castro had been revived. But he also said, "I thought Mr. Harvey was pretty foolish to continue this thing." The retired CIA officer was candid about his reluctance to discuss the assassination plotting before the committee, saying, "I am not prepared to testify to that under oath. Please understand me. I am not trying to fight the battle, see." Frank Church, the committee chairman, tried to be helpful: "I think if you say it [assassination] once you will get over the difficulty." Edwards replied, "Well, what do you want me to say, Senator? What do you think I should say?" Edwards clearly intended to take his secrets to the grave with him.
The gist of the IG Report and Church Committee testimony is this: On May 7, 1962, the attorney general, having learned for the first time that the CIA had retained Giancana and Rosselli to murder Castro before the Bay of Pigs, did nothing more than tell the agency not to use the Mafia without clearing it with him first. He took no names, began no inquiry, and did nothing to make sure that such efforts never took place again. The incomplete and possibly false Edwards-Houston account of their meeting with Kennedy became the basis for Schlesinger's conclusion, in Robert Kennedy and His Times, that "the Kennedys did not know about the Castro assassination plots before the Bay of Pigs or about the pursuit of those plots by the CIA after the Bay of Pigs."
There was another consideration, Schlesinger wrote: "No one who knew John and Robert Kennedy well believed they would conceivably countenance a program of assassination. Like McCone, they were Catholics."
Sam Halpern believes that he understands the import of the May 7 meeting: "Bobby was not telling us to stop, but [was telling us] not to do it again without checking with him." If that interpretation is correct, Kennedy's goal in the meeting with Houston and Edwards was twofold: to get on the record a statement that the CIA had ended its assassination plotting and, much more important, to ensure that the agency did not authorize a future clandestine operation that could compromise or endanger Charles Ford's continued meetings with the Mafia.
The most effective participant in Operation Mongoose was the Pentagon, whose planners had been instructed to prepare for a pitched battle in Cuba in the fall of 1962, in the event Lansdale's schemes paid off and Cuba was in revolt. As part of that planning, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and sailors took part in military exercises in the Caribbean, under the watchful eye of Cuban intelligence. In August more than 65,000 men participated in Operation Swift Strike II, obviously meant to simulate an attack on an island like Cuba. Later, 7,500 U.S. Marines conducted a mock invasion of an island near Puerto Rico named "Ortsac"---Castro spelled backwards. In the fall of 1962 the Pentagon was ordered to begin prepositioning troops and matériel for a massive invasion of Cuba. If the president so ordered, an estimated 100,000 troops in military bases along the East Coast could hit the beaches of Cuba in eight days.
The military planning was being led by Admiral Robert Dennison, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, and he took his mission seriously. "I had five army divisions and the Second Marine Division, reinforced by elements of the First Marine Division," Dennison said in a 1973 oral history for the U.S. Naval Institute. "And there were operations planned for the use of these forces against various landing areas in Cuba. All these would require naval and air force support ... My plans were approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, of course, were known to the president. He had to know what we could do, and how we were going to do it. We were up against some pretty strong ground forces, so some very drastic preparation would have to be made in the way of our bombing, gunfire. A great many people would have been killed. It would have been quite a bloody affair. And then, once having captured Cuba and occupied it, the United States would have had a terrible problem in rehabilitation, establishing a government. We would have been in there for years."
All of this---the helter-skelter sabotage, the continued assassination efforts, and the military planning and exercising---was seen and fully noted by the Cubans and their benefactors in the Soviet Union. The American aggression played a role in Nikita Khrushchev's decision to move Soviet nuclear missiles and launchers into Cuba, triggering the missile crisis of October 1962. It "now seems likely," the renowned Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University wrote in 1997, that "Khrushchev's chief purpose had not been to shift the strategic balance," as the White House claimed it was at the time,
but rather to save the Cuban revolution.... There has long been ample evidence that the Kennedy administration was trying to get rid of Castro by all means short of an invasion. Given the unprecedented level of American military activity in the Caribbean in the months and particularly the weeks before the crisis broke, it seems foolish to claim that the next step would never have been taken---especially if one of the CIA's many assassination plots against Castro had actually succeeded.
* * *
* As noted earlier, the attorney general's files included the October 18, 1960, memorandum from Hoover reporting that Sam Giancana had been overheard bragging in a suburban Chicago bar that Castro would be "done away with ... in November." That document was uncovered in 1975 by the Church Committee.
† In his oral history for the Kennedy Library, Bobby Kennedy constantly confused loyalty with competence. He praised the faithful Taylor as being one of the "two people who have made the greatest difference as far as the government is concerned"---the other was Robert McNamara. Once Taylor officially joined the White House in mid-1961 as JFK's military adviser,
Kennedy added, "every decision that the president made on foreign policy" was cleared through him. "I was really terribly impressed with him," Kennedy said, "his intellectual ability, his judgment, his ideas." Taylor's fellow generals were less impressed. Air force general Nathan Twining, who served from 1957 to 1960 as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was especially bitter, and would later claim that Taylor's rise to prominence in the Kennedy administration was a turning point in Vietnam policy. In an oral history interview with Columbia University, Twining said he and his fellow officers "couldn't understand" how Kennedy and Taylor "were putting so many troops" into Vietnam. "We used to fight with him all the time," Twining said, but "got euchered" into intervention because of Taylor's optimistic assessments about the progress of the war. "I've always felt sorry for him," Twining said in the oral history interview. "He must have a hard time living with himself. He always goes over there [to Vietnam] and says they're doing fine. Well, sure ... but my God, how long does it go on?" Twining's interview was cited in Masters of War, a 1996 study of military politics in the Vietnam era by Robert Buzzanco, a history professor at the University of Houston. Buzzanco noted that Twining's charges about Taylor's decisive role in policy, while "exaggerated," accurately reflected the deep divisions inside the military about the war during the Kennedy administration.
* Jack Kennedy, nonetheless, added Burke to his list of military officers who had assured him in advance that the Bay of Pigs would work. Jack L. Bell, who covered the White House in 1961 for the Associated Press, told the Kennedy Library in 1966 that he had asked the president, in the "gloomy" days after the Bay of Pigs, "How did you get yourself in this mess?" Kennedy blamed everyone else. "I had believed those things I'd read in the magazines about all these people in government," he told Bell. "I didn't really know them. I didn't know how good they were, but everything I read said they were tremendous. Arleigh Burke came in, sat down by my desk. I said, 'Will this thing work?' He said, 'As far as we have been able to check it out, this is fine. The plan is good.' Hell," Bell quoted Kennedy as adding, "I'd been reading about 'Thirty Knot' Burke for a long time. I thought he was tremendous."
The Dark Side of Camelot Page 34
