CHAPTER 30

SEND IN THE CLOWNS

On September 9, 1960, Nikita Khrushchev sailed to New York on the steamer Baltika for meetings of the UN General Assembly. Before he departed, U.S. officials had instructed him that he would not be able to leave the New York City area without permission, an indication of the growing breach in relations between Moscow and Washington.

When the ship arrived ten days later, it was pouring rain. In New York harbor, longshoremen on a chartered sightseeing boat waved such placards as ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE, STALIN DROPPED DEAD, HOW ABOUT YOU? No U.S delegation was present to greet the Soviets as the Baltika docked at shabby Pier 73 on the East River. One of the Soviet sailors immediately defected.

The travel restrictions didn’t ban Khrushchev from going uptown for his first face-to-face meeting with Fidel Castro, who was staying at the black-owned Hotel Theresa in Harlem. The encounter produced borderline chaos. In one of the photos, the two men are on the sidewalk outside the hotel, side by side. They look relaxed and chummy while being encircled by a small army of stone-faced New York City cops who are fitfully holding back a throng packed together like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The bearded Castro is wearing fatigues, a look he’d model for the next several decades, seeking to immortalize his revolutionary moment. A head shorter and far rounder, Khrushchev is the Costello to Castro’s Abbott.

Khrushchev had recently indicated that the USSR would come to Cuba’s aid in the event of a U.S.-sponsored invasion—a plot already in motion at CIA training camps in South Florida and Guatemala. “It should be borne in mind,” Khrushchev said at a public event in the summer of 1960, “that the United States is now not at such an unattainable distance from the Soviet Union as formerly.… We have rockets we can land precisely in a preset square target 13,000 kilometers away. This, if you want, is a warning to those who would like to solve international problems by force and not by reason.”

From the U.S. point of view, Castro’s transition to the dark side was all but complete. He had nationalized American businesses, invited the Soviets to open an embassy in Havana, sent his brother Raúl on an official trip to Moscow, and begun receiving Soviet-made weapons. Internally, Castro had launched a crackdown on political dissent, and encouraged neighbors to begin spying on one another, instituting the kind of block surveillance system used by the East Germans. While in New York, he’d further exploit the Harlem locale to decry the U.S. record on civil rights and, in another incendiary move, entertained Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X, who, in contrast to Martin Luther King’s profession of nonviolence, had begun to wage a far more militant campaign for black equality.

In his memoir about his career at the New York Times, Max Frankel wrote about first meeting Fidel Castro during the 1960 UN sessions. At the coffee shop of the Hotel Theresa, Frankel informed Castro he was heading to Havana for his new assignment with the Times and began an interview. He asked only one question. Castro spent the next hour in a “recitation of soothing platitudes” and concluded by telling Frankel that he would find much to teach the people about La Revolución. It was during this same New York visit that the new Cuban leader set a new UN record with a nearly five-hour speech.

Castro would ultimately be upstaged by his new friend in the Kremlin. Just before the conclusion of his nearly monthlong stay, Khrushchev uncorked a soon-to-be-legendary tantrum. Being caged had been detrimental to the mental health of the frenetic Soviet leader, who at one point appeared on the second-floor balcony of the Soviet mission on Park Avenue and sang a verse of “The Internationale” to a gathering of journalists below. On October 12, 1960, while Khrushchev was attending a UN session in the General Assembly Hall, Filipino delegate Lorenzo Sumulong said that “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere… have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union.” This instantly infuriated Khrushchev, who had spent the previous three weeks claiming that the USSR was leading the way on decolonization and self-determination.

The red-faced Soviet leader began pounding his fists on the table area in front of him and then took off his right shoe and began banging that instead. A noticeable buzz started in the hall. Next to Khrushchev, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko felt obliged to take off one of his shoes, although he gently tapped it on the desktop. Khrushchev’s performance soon included a long denunciation of Sumulong, whom he branded “a jerk, a stooge, a lackey, and a toady of American imperialism.” Disorder continued until Ireland’s Frederick Boland, the Assembly president, abruptly declared the meeting adjourned and slammed his gavel down so hard that it broke, sending the head flying.

Frankel’s assignment in Cuba would be relatively brief. By the end of 1960, Castro had ordered the U.S. ambassador to shrink his staff to a few clerks, assuming, fairly, that many of the people he was booting were CIA agents helping to plan an invasion. Eisenhower retaliated by breaking off diplomatic relations. Frankel, like all Americans, was suddenly required to apply for a visa. He applied, and was predictably denied.

After having seen La Revolución up close, Frankel was less than impressed: “Fidel… so despised Cuba’s oligarchy of wealth that he drove out its talent and settled for an equality of privation. He so resented Cuba’s exploitation by North Americans that he delivered the country for a pittance to their Soviet adversaries. A brilliant orator and a genius in mob psychology, Castro turned out to be the most durable autocrat in a time of autocrats because he was blessed with a foolish enemy.”

During the 1960 Christmas holiday, when President-elect Kennedy and key members of his transition team were staying at his father’s estate, in Palm Beach, Florida, Frankel and two other reporters were summoned to the compound by Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary in waiting. Salinger wanted to hear their thoughts on what the United States should do about Castro, which in turn would be relayed to a “grateful” Kennedy.

In short, the reporters urged engagement instead of isolation. The Kennedy administration, the reporters said, should “educate the Cuban people in the joys of democracy,” a small lift since the residents “already worshiped baseball and Hollywood, drank Coke, and smoked Camels.” When Salinger asked if the United States had a duty to keep Castro from stirring up revolution all over Latin America, the reporters told him to “just accept the fact” that revolutions were “not exported but homemade.” Frankel and his colleagues explained to Salinger that “Cuba wasn’t communized by the Soviet Army, like Poland or Hungary. It was ripe for revolution because [the United States] indulged its dictators.… Until Fidel appeared,” they noted, “[the United States] never gave a damn for Latin American democracy.”

Looking back, Frankel determined that “where Cuba was concerned, Kennedy’s head was no match for his gut. Nothing we could have said in Palm Beach would have offset the agitations of his family, his friends, and his virile ego.… John Kennedy visited Cuba two or three times in the year before Castro came to power. He went not to study conditions there but to go whoring around Havana with Sen. George Smathers of Florida.… Smathers was the ambassador of the American mobsters and sugar barons dispossessed by Castro.”

As Frankel suspected, Kennedy began his presidency by laying the predicate for removing Castro, claiming he was “no mere petty tyrant” but rather a dictator who “had transformed the island of Cuba into a hostile and militant Communist satellite—a base from which to carry Communist infiltration and subversion throughout the Americas.” Diplomacy, from day one, was apparently not an option.

For Khrushchev, Castro was a timely gift. With the ever more defiant Mao Zedong muttering that the Kremlin had become a timid steward of the international socialist gospel, Castro was loud proof of Soviet sway. Cuba’s revolution was also testimony to the inevitability of the Marxist dialectic, and a stinging rebuke to America’s hubristic attempt to contain communism. In the next two years, as heated rhetoric, cheap demonization, and cynical political calculations supplanted fact, reason, and prudence, Kennedy and Khrushchev proceeded inexorably on a collision course over Cuba that would produce the most dangerous event of the entire Cold War, a very real “missile crisis” that nearly started World War III.

On April 19, 1961, after sixty hours of fighting, a brigade of CIA-trained Cuban refugees was routed by Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs. Of the 1,500 men involved in the amphibious assault, 114 were killed and 1,189 captured. It was the definition of a debacle.

For starters, the covert operation, months in the planning, may have been the worst-kept secret of the entire Cold War. For example, New York Times reporter Tad Szulc heard all about the pending invasion without even asking. The information was volunteered by Cuban and American friends when Szulc was passing through Miami. Szulc’s story about the covert operation ran in the Times twelve days before the Bay of Pigs landing, on April 7, 1961, although watered down; Kennedy had succeeded in convincing the publisher to delete references to the CIA and the time of the attack. Even if Castro had missed that day’s Times, his new friends at the KGB had given him a heads-up, courtesy of Communist Party members in Guatemala, the other training site of the Cuban exiles.

Following the humiliating failure, the Kennedy administration intensified anti-Castro efforts with threatening military maneuvers and new plots to assassinate the Cuban leader. Attorney General Robert Kennedy told the CIA that it was a top priority to eliminate Castro with swift, silent sabotage. “Let’s get the hell on with it,” RFK told new CIA director John McCone. The plan was given the code name Operation Mongoose. One of the men in charge was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the very same man who was running the LSD MK-ULTRA mind control explorations.

The schemes targeting Castro included (1) spraying his television studio with LSD (of course); (2) saturating his shoes with thallium to make his beard fall out (the element was typically used as a rat poison and insect killer); (3) lacing one of Fidel’s cigars with a disorienting chemical; (4) putting poison in a fountain pen; (5) secreting a fungus in his wetsuit (Castro liked to dive); (6) planting a bomb inside a conch shell in the area where Castro was known to dive; and (7) hiring a mob hit man. Fabián Escalante, in charge of protecting Castro as chief of Cuba’s counterintelligence, would later estimate that from 1959 to 2000, the total number of assassination attempts on Castro by the CIA was 638.

As the CIA was pushing forward on Operation Mongoose, the Pentagon had formulated Operation Northwoods, a plan that envisioned U.S.-backed false flag terrorist operations to provide a pretext to take out the Cuban leader by military force. “Using phony evidence,” James Bamford wrote in Body of Secrets, “all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving [General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs] and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.”

Seeking to avoid comparisons to the USSR’s behavior in Hungary, the Joint Chiefs had ruled out a full-scale U.S. invasion of Cuba. Instead, as Bamford detailed, Operation Northwoods “called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked.”

Some of the Operation Northwoods proposals called for killing U.S. troops, such as bombing the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the Cuban coast. The Joint Chiefs also saw the potential of blowing up a U.S. Navy ship in Cuban waters in the hope that history would repeat itself. In 1898, the explosion of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor was blamed—immediately and falsely—on the Spanish, inciting the Spanish-American War.

Until his support of the exceedingly fucked-up Operation Northwoods, General Lyman Lemnitzer had had a storied career as a daring soldier with the capabilities of a diplomat. During World War II, when he became a protégé of Eisenhower’s, he took part in a secret submarine mission to North Africa that succeeded in convincing French forces to defy the Nazi-controlled Vichy regime. Later in the war, Lemnitzer was a key party in negotiating the surrender of Italian and German forces in Italy. But by September 1960, when Eisenhower, his idol, elevated him to chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lemnitzer was among a growing wave of virulently anticommunist officers way right of the political center.

In the wake of Sputnik, a 1958 National Security memorandum recommended uniting all branches of the government with the citizenry in the cause of national unity. This resulted in a network of cooperative ventures between military and business. Public seminars were held on a “strategy for survival” and “fourth dimensional warfare,” meaning that the United States had to defeat the Soviets on land, sea, air, and the so-called fourth dimension of psychological warfare. Inadvertently, this seeded a movement that opposed any compromise with communism. Giles Scott-Smith, a Cold War historian, wrote, “What was meant to be an effort to unite civilian-military interests in a moment of concern for national security and resolve instead became a stimulus for right-wing critics to push a militant vision of national identity at the grassroots level.”

The emerging antidétente caucus wanted the demonization of communism intensified, supported a virtual blank check for the military, and opposed anything that reeked of collectivism, such as New Deal–style interventions by the federal government or any empowerment of the United Nations. “The uncompromising right-wing anti-communism was aimed not so much at the Soviet Union as the root of all evil, since that was a given,” Scott-Smith wrote. “The real threat came from communist infiltrators and their hood-winked or ‘soft allies’ on the liberal left. Liberalism was equal to self-destruction due to lack of political will and a rejection of fundamental American values.”

Emerging ultra-right institutions included the fanatical John Birch Society (established in 1958 by Massachusetts candy maker Robert Welch); the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania (an ultra-conservative think tank founded in 1955, with nuclear war rationalizer Henry Kissinger as a member); the Richardson Foundation (a right-wing corporate philanthropy funded by the Vicks Chemical Company); the Christian Crusade (started by fundamentalists who were dedicated anticommunists); and the Minutemen (a shadowy militia group formed by Robert DePugh, who thought of himself as a twentieth-century Paul Revere).

General Edwin Walker, who commanded a force of ten thousand servicemen in West Germany, drew congressional notice for openly espousing ultra-right propaganda. He was a member of the John Birch Society, publicly questioned the loyalty of Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt, and had initiated a “Pro-Blue” campaign in which he extolled the values of Americanism and advised his troops on how they should vote, violating the Hatch Act. After being formally admonished by the Joint Chiefs, Walker became the only U.S. general in the twentieth century to resign his commission.

In 1961, an investigation by Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, provided evidence of military-sponsored programs that linked liberalism with socialism and attacked foreign aid, cultural exchanges, and disarmament negotiations. Fulbright wrote, “We must overcome the ‘cold war’ mentality that has persuaded millions of sensible and intelligent citizens that the prosecution of the Cold War is our only true essential national responsibility.”

General Lemnitzer considered Kennedy a poor substitute for Ike, dismissing the president’s military service in the South Pacific by calling him “a patrol-boat skipper.” His negative opinion of the new commander in chief was amplified when the forty-three-year-old Kennedy expressed great reluctance to use nuclear weapons. Bamford wrote, “Outwardly, Lemnitzer remained stiff and correct. But deep inside he was raging at the new and youthful Kennedy White House. He felt out of place and out of time in a culture that seemed suddenly to have turned its back on military tradition. Almost immediately he became, in the clinical sense, paranoid; he began secretly expressing his worries to other senior officers.”

As Lemnitzer and the nation’s top generals were contriving to tilt Kennedy’s foreign policy with frightening false flag proposals, journalists Charles Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel published Seven Days in May, a novel about a military-political cabal that plots to take over the U.S. government when the president begins negotiating a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Knebel’s urge to write the book followed an interview with Curtis LeMay, during which LeMay made off-the-record remarks critical of Kennedy, calling him cowardly for his handling of the Bay of Pigs.

In the film, Burt Lancaster plays General James Mattoon Scott, chairman of the Joint Chiefs and an ideological zealot leading a brewing military coup. He’s no loonier than General LeMay, or Edwin Walker, or Lyman Lemnitzer. “We’re asked to believe that a piece of paper will take the place of missile sites and Polaris submarines,” the fictional General Scott says contemptuously to a congressional committee, “and that an enemy who hasn’t honored one solemn treaty in the history of its existence will now, for our convenience, do precisely that.”

Back in the real world, as the plotting of Operation Northwoods continued without Kennedy’s knowledge, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs saw an opportunity to blame the death of an astronaut on the new Soviet foothold in Cuba. Such a ploy had the possibility of exploiting a raw national mood. Americans were still being reminded that the Soviets were winning the space race, which was the same thing as saying the United States was losing the Cold War.

On April 12, 1961, the country had experienced Sputnik déjà vu when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and the first to orbit the planet. On August 6, 1961, Gherman Titov became the first man to make multiple orbits, a total of seventeen. (He was also the first person to sleep in orbit, photograph the Earth, and vomit in space.) Meanwhile, America’s two manned missions had been suborbital—they went up and came down, only reaching the fringe of space. John Glenn—Mercury astronaut number three—had been scheduled to make another suborbital flight, on a Redstone booster, just like predecessors Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. But Titov’s flight compelled a change in plans. In the interest of national pride, Glenn’s mission was upgraded. He was instead going to be put into orbit.

This required a bigger rocket, the nine-story-tall Atlas, which still had a habit of blowing up. On September 9, 1959, the first Atlas to fly as part of the Mercury program, carrying an unmanned capsule, exploded fifty-eight seconds after launch due to structural failure. Glenn was an eyewitness to that disaster, and as he prepared for his December 1961 launch date atop another Atlas, he was keenly aware that the rocket still only had a 50 percent success rate; there had been propellant feed failures, propulsion failures, electrical failures, hydraulic systems failures, and launch systems failures.

This information was well known to the plotters of Operation Northwoods. If the Atlas booster failed, the Joint Chiefs were going to blame it on “radio interference” from the Russian trawlers typically anchored off Cape Canaveral during U.S. spaceflights. If the Soviets could be credibly accused of murdering Glenn, a combat hero turned sexy astronaut, an outcry for revenge had the prospect of not only wiping out the communists in Cuba, but also starting World War III.

Ultimately, there was no opportunity for scapegoating. After the launch was delayed ten times over the course of two months, an Atlas rocket, topped by John Glenn in his Friendship 7 capsule, bolted into the Florida skies on the morning of February 20, 1962. In offices, schools, and homes, millions were glued to the TV coverage. Five hours later, when Glenn’s capsule plopped down in the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda, the country cheered for days. It was truly a moment of national catharsis.

Glenn, the clean-cut, apple-pie, good-natured midwesterner, debriefed JFK at the White House, spoke to a joint session of Congress, and was treated to a ticker tape parade up Broadway. Wrote Tom Wolfe, “And what was it that had moved them all so deeply?… They knew it had to do with the presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty-five years before to Lindbergh—except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism seen since the end of World War II.”

General Lyman L. Lemnitzer formally discussed Operation Northwoods with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962. On March 16, President Kennedy told the general that there was no chance the United States would take immediate military action against Cuba. A few months later, General Lemnitzer was reassigned to Europe, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.