Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Cuba’s turn to the Soviets for aid provided a solution for both Washington and Bogotá. When Berle arrived in Bogotá to line up support for U.S. policy against Cuba, Lleras Camargo was ready with a quid pro quo. He wanted small arms and helicopter gunships, as well as some practical U.S. help. Berle noted from his conversation with Lleras Camargo:

  The danger to Colombia is not, he said, formal invasion but guerrilla attacks.… We talked of the enclave cities—the bandit-held towns.… It was a situation wide open for Communist infiltration—easy from the Cuban side—and he [Camargo] was worried.… His army was being trained by the American mission to study the invasion on the Normandy Beach, but this had nothing whatever to do with meeting bandits in the high hills.9

  Berle left Colombia with the impression that “if we had to confront the [Cuban] situation,” Lleras Camargo could be counted on for at least sympathy. “But he said he was in no position to head a movement to deal with the situation—if the OAS would go along, or a consultation of foreign ministers evidenced substantial support, something could be done.” This would depend on Brazil, where President Quadros was “a mystery.”

  THE BRAZILIAN COG

  Brazil should have been Berle’s strongest card in this diplomatic game. In no other country besides his own did Berle feel more at home. He moved easily through the Brazilian businessmen’s network that Nelson Rockefeller had organized into joint Brazilian-American advisory councils. He depended on his friends. They had served him well in past confrontations with independent-minded nationalists like former president Getúlio Vargas. He had always won, and he expected he would win now, too.

  Berle showed up at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, initiating discussions in a now-familiar pattern: first money, then Cuba. The new foreign minister had his own shopping list ready in the form of a memorandum of what he needed, which was considerable. Berle moved on to the Caribbean crisis. “I made the same presentation I had in Colombia and Venezuela,” Berle said, adding local punch with the claim that “much of Uruguay had become Communist and was about to take over Paraguay.” But Brazil was not flushed out by Berle’s claim of a threat on its border. “It really added up that they did not feel they wanted to do anything [about Cuba] though they were in agreement that something had to be done.”10

  Berle next met with Jânio Quadros, president of Brazil for only a few months, who had won the largest vote ever accorded a presidential candidate.

  Berle later denied press reports that he and Quadros quarreled during their meeting, but he noted in his diary that they “sparred a bit” at the beginning of their talks. Quadros was aware that most Brazilians wanted no part of the Cold War. A public opinion poll taken before Quadros took office reported that 63 percent of the Brazilians who were questioned favored neutrality. Over 83 percent of the legislators who were questioned in another poll at that time favored increased trade with the Soviets. Moreover, Quadros did not share most American investors’ enthusiasm for the Kubitschek years. Quadros “said he had inherited Brazil in a shocking condition; the government was insolvent. Worse, it was demoralized. There was corruption everywhere you looked.… He was prepared to sacrifice everything to get this situation turned around.11 But he wanted U.S. financing without the political tar of lining up behind U.S. foreign policy to Cuba.

  Berle later said he offered $100 million in loans. Ambassador John Moors Cabot, who was present at the meeting with Quadros, reportedly said that the offer actually went as high as $300 million; he even termed it a “bribe.”12

  Quadros rejected it all and begged off from signing up against Cuba, claiming that the Brazilian Left “could put on an opposition which would paralyze his government. He therefore could not do very much,” Berle recorded. “I said that I hoped we could count on his sympathy.” According to Berle, Quadros pledged cooperation, said he was sending banker Walther Moreira Salles to Washington “to break ground” on aid, and bade his Americans farewell “on the most friendly terms.”13 But when Berle went to the airport, he went alone, without the customary send-off by Brazilian officials.

  Berle arrived in New York in time to catch headlines in the New York Times announcing that Brazil had invited Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Tito to visit, hinting of a neutral foreign policy in the making. Moreira Salles arrived for a meeting, and Berle resolved to help him with the State Department. Then rumors that Berle had had a row with Quadros also hit the news. All the bad press about Brazil began to get to him.

  A month later, Berle, eager to tell Kennedy his overall judgment on whether the invasion should proceed, took the step that would end his career. The CIA had abandoned the “noisy” heavily populated Trinidad invasion site in Cuba and delayed the attack until the Bay of Pigs was selected from 70,000 feet of film from U-2 flights. Everything was set to go. Berle said to the president, “Let ’er rip!”14

  BETRAYAL AT BAY

  President Kennedy gave the final go-ahead for the Bay of Pigs invasion after being convinced by U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Jack Hawkins and the CIA’s Richard Bissell that “the exiled brigade did not expect U.S. armed forces support.”

  “The Castro regime,” they further assured him, “is steadily losing popularity … the Cuban army has been successfully penetrated … it will not fight in a showdown.”15

  Kennedy’s approval included the fateful proviso that the CIA’s first air strike against Castro’s air force must be with a “minimal” number of planes. Bissell did more than offer the president reassurances. He reduced the invasion’s air force, from sixteen to an inadequate six planes. Colonel Stan Beerli, the CIA air operations chief who had overseen the CIA’s use of Helio Couriers in Cuba and Montgomery’s mission in the Congo, telexed the targets, selected from U-2 photographs, to Nicaragua.

  On April 17, 1961, these six specially modified, heavily armed B-26s, flown over from Puerto Cabezas on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast with Somoza’s blessing and personal send-off, bombed and strafed Cuban military airfields. But they failed to knock out some of Castro’s rocket-firing Sea Furies and the T-33 jet trainers stationed at another air base near Santiago. The element of surprise was now lost. Meanwhile, the ruse of a Cuban exile pilot flying a B-26 into Miami Airport posing as a Cuban air force defector was quickly exposed. His plane had a steel nose; all Castro’s planes had plastic noses. U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, tricked into using a picture of the plane released from Washington as proof that the United States was not involved, had claimed that the raid on Cuban airfields was by defectors from the Cuban air force; now he began to worry about his own credibility. Stevenson’s worrying, in turn, caused Kennedy to worry about his credibility. On Rusk’s suggestion, he canceled the CIA’s second air strike until a beachhead could be secured and the local airstrip taken, so that it could at least appear to be the launch site for the B-26 raids, unless “overriding circumstances” developed.

  The fact that Castro with his jets still had air superiority over the invasion force was just such an overriding circumstance. The B-26s were supposed to bomb and strafe any of Castro’s ground forces that attempted to use the causeways to reach the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. The success of the invasion hinged on taking out Castro’s jets.

  CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell, suddenly taking responsibility for the prestigious operation while Director Allen Dulles was in Puerto Rico, shared his anguish with invasion planner Richard Bissell. Despite protests from CIA operations officers, Cabell had waited too long to get the president’s authorization to send the first air strike from Nicaragua to hit Castro’s plans before the invasion brigade was to reach the beaches of the Bay of Pigs at dawn. Cabell, known more for grunts than articulation, also made the bad decision of channeling the CIA’s protests over the invasion’s inadequate air support through Secretary of State Dean Rusk. If Cabell was grandstanding, as some claimed, it backfired. Rusk was known more for being a good listener and consensus reporter than for moving quickly into action. Now, with the first raid having failed and Cabell asking
for the second raid, Rusk called Kennedy’s weekend Virginia estate, Glen Ora, and reported the CIA’s protests to the president. “But I am still recommending in view of what is going on [at the United Nations] in New York that we cancel,” Rusk advised Kennedy. Cabell, also not known for making waves, shrugged off Rusk’s offer that he state his case directly to the president over the phone; he knew that Kennedy did not like him. Bissell, whom Kennedy did like, wondered if the president was aware that he, too, was worried. But he let the matter pass.

  The military were aghast when they were informed of the canceled second strike. Their reactions ranged from “criminally negligent” to “absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.” J. C. King, the CIA’s chief of Western Hemisphere Operations, had been bypassed. The old spy watched from the sidelines as Bissell, having gotten the Cuban exiles into a jam, expected Kennedy to bail them out with U.S. armed forces.

  Kennedy was awakened sometime after 4 A.M. on April 18, by the CIA’s request for direct U.S. intervention. The Agency had expected that the president, faced with the fait accompli of an inadequately equipped invasion force, would acquiesce. But Kennedy refused. He would not break his public pledge at a press conference to keep U.S. forces out of any invasion of Cuba. The CIA’s covert operation was one thing. It had promised deniability. U.S. jets did not. World opinion did not agree with arguments by Cold War hardliners like Berle that Castro was just a Soviet puppet. Although he was a communist of some sort, international law on the sovereignty of nations fell on his side. Kennedy hoped that the CIA’s own pledge to him that the Cuban people would arise, stripping Castro of his legitimacy as the leader of a popular revolution, would be fulfilled.

  The CIA’s pledge proved false. The Cuban armed forces did not revolt. In Cuba, unlike in Guatemala, the revolution had been against the army, not by it. It was not just government that had changed, but the old state apparatus. Batista’s army, air force, judges, and police had been smashed by a popular armed revolution. The new state apparatus, including the local citizenry’s 200,000-man militia that replaced it, was loyal to the new regime that had created it. As Naval Intelligence could have told Kennedy had they been asked, the Cuban people were more concerned about the poverty Batista had imposed than the political democracy that Washington now suddenly claimed it was willing to bring them.16

  Unknown to Bissell’s computers or King’s rightist network, the impoverished local population at the Bay of Pigs had been helped by Castro’s reforms. And unlike the U-2 cameras that hovered above and the CIA operatives who chose the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro knew every detail, every back road, every path of that area’s terrain. The invaders’ landing crafts were ripped apart by reefs the CIA did not know about. But Castro knew. It was his favorite fishing spot.

  Pounded on the beaches by what remained of Castro’s air force, members of the brigade watched their supplies sink with the ships that carried them into the Bay of Pigs. They also found themselves surrounded by swamps. The only routes out were by three causeways that Castro, personally leading his forces into battle, had already captured. News of the brigade’s entrapment soon reached Washington and the Cuban exile community’s Revolutionary Council in Miami. At the White House, the Pentagon and Bissell insisted that Kennedy should send in the air force. But he had warned them he would not engage in a direct U.S. military intervention, and he remained adamant. The option of turning the operation into a guerrilla action by escaping into the hills was mentioned. Only then did Kennedy learn from Bissell that “they were not prepared to go guerrilla.”17

  Kennedy kept his composure. Walt Rostow realized then that the president had not been given “a very good visual picture of the whole thing.” No one had told him that the Escambray Mountains were too far away or that the brigade would be surrounded by impassable swamps. Faced with the gory details in dispatches from the beach and with news that the Revolutionary Council was in revolt, Kennedy finally acted. He believed that he had no choice but to order the Essex, hovering off the coast of Cuba, to send six jets to fly cover for another B-26 strike from Nicaragua. The jets were not to bomb ground targets and would have to fly without U.S. insignias. Plausible deniability was incredibly still in effect. Presidential Assistant Arthur Schlesinger worried that the restriction was “a somewhat tricky instruction.” Rusk, on the other hand, backed the CIA and the Pentagon. The mission, he argued, required a deeper commitment.

  Kennedy would be pushed in no deeper. “We’re already in it up to here,” he said with his hand raised to just below his nose.18

  To calm the Cuban exile leaders, Kennedy sent for Berle. Berle had worked with Schlesinger in selecting the group of Cubans who were expected to take over the reins of “New Cuba” once Castro was overthrown. Kennedy did not know that Berle had pledged that 15,000 troops would back the invasion.19 This pledge stood in direct contradiction to what Bissell had told the president, that no U.S. support was expected. The president was also unaware that King’s original suggestion that Castro should be assassinated20 had been included in the CIA’s invasion plans.21 Florida Mafia chieftain Santos Trafficante, who hoped to regain the gambling, narcotics, and prostitution rings he had created in Havana during the Batista regime, had given a top Cuban exile some of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb’s poison pills for use at Castro’s favorite restaurant at the same time as the invasion.22 Castro was supposed to have been dead by now. But like so much the CIA planned for Cuba that year, this plan failed as well. Castro had stopped eating at the restaurant. Eventually, after the invasion failed, the exile leader had to return the $10,000 advance from the $50,000 King had allocated for a successful murder.23

  Arriving at the White House, Berle encountered a wake in the Oval Office. Kennedy told him the bad news about the exiles’ Revolutionary Council. “All are furious with CIA. They do not know how dismal things are. You must go down and talk to them.”

  Seeing that Berle needed shoring up himself, Kennedy turned to Schlesinger. “You ought to go with Berle,” he said. Visibly upset, Kennedy abruptly left to walk alone and coatless on the White House grounds. Later, he told his brother Robert that he would have done more if he had known “what was going on.”24

  By the time Berle and Schlesinger arrived the next morning at the CIA’s secret base at Opa-Locka, Florida, the six authorized U.S. Navy jets had lifted off from the Essex and flown to their scheduled rendezvous at the Bay of Pigs with the CIA’s B-26s from Nicaragua. They found the B-26s not there, waited, then left. An hour later, the B-26s arrived, flown (without presidential authorization) by Alabama National Guard pilots recruited by the CIA. Lacking air cover for their bombing and strafing runs, four of them were quickly shot down by Cuban Sea Furies and antiaircraft fire. The others limped back to Nicaragua. Radio Havana announced that the downed American pilots were proof of U.S. involvement. Meanwhile, the brigade’s ships had either been sunk or had fled to sea.

  Berle found the Cuban exile leaders in tears and inconsolable. They were being held incommunicado and unconsulted by the CIA. “We don’t know whether we are your allies or your prisoners.” They begged for more pilots; if not, at least let them die on the beaches with the troops. Hearing of their despair from Schlesinger, Kennedy asked that the exile leaders be flown to the White House. He assured them of his resolve to remove Castro and expressed compassion for three of their sons in the brigade. Schlesinger believed that the Cubans were impressed with Kennedy’s gracious performance—at least, he was.

  After accepting full responsibility for the disaster at a press conference, Kennedy phoned retired Army General Maxwell Taylor, like Nelson Rockefeller, an advocate of “limited war,” who was then serving as Laurance Rockefeller’s successor as head of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Yes, Taylor told Kennedy, he could come to Washington to help. The president had admitted he was in “deep trouble,” and Taylor always answered his commander in chief’s call to duty.

  In the Oval Office the next day, Taylor accepted Kennedy’s appointment as chairman o
f a special commission to investigate the Bay of Pigs failure. Kennedy also appointed Allen Dulles; Admiral Arleigh Burke (who had advocated sending the air force to back the invasion); and his brother Robert, the attorney general. But everyone knew it would be Taylor’s show.

  Kennedy next phoned Eisenhower, Senator Barry Goldwater, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller.25 Of the three, Rockefeller was the most powerful office holder in the opposition party. The president wanted him to understand what had gone wrong. Nelson pledged his public support during the crisis, but if Nelson shared the views of his own adviser, Henry Kissinger, he undoubtedly thought that Kennedy should have invaded Cuba with U.S. forces. Queried by his Harvard students when news arrived of the invasion, Kissinger had thought long. Then he said, “Well, as long as we’re there, I don’t think it would do us any good to lose.”26

  In these early months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy was blaming the Eisenhower legacy, not the military-industrial complex or the “technological elite” that Eisenhower had warned about in his Farewell Address. Even before the Bay of Pigs, the president had planned to replace the aging sage of intelligence, Allen Dulles, with the less legendary and thus more controllable Richard Bissell. Now it looked like Bissell, too, would have to go, as well as those top advisers who had been so enthusiastic about the Bay of Pigs: the amiable chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer, and the chief of the Latin America Task Force, Adolf Berle.

  But not right away. The connection between the dismissals and the Bay of Pigs defeat should not be so obvious. A facade of confidence and stability was crucial.