Robert Kennedy, fresh from his crucial back-channel role in the Berlin crisis, took on yet another assignment in the fall of 1961: he became the driving force in a renewed American effort to murder Fidel Castro and overthrow his government. His enthusiasm for the assignment and his insistence on getting it done made the thirty-five-year-old attorney general the most feared, and despised, official in the government—especially at the Central Intelligence Agency. But everyone involved understood that Bobby Kennedy was doing his brother’s bidding.
“The Kennedys were on our back constantly to do more damage to Cuba, to cause an uprising, to get rid of Castro and the Castro regime,” the CIA’s Samuel Halpern, who served as the executive assistant to three deputy directors for clandestine operations, told me in one of our interviews for this book. “They were just absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Castro.… I don’t know of any senior officer that I talked to who felt, aside from the pressure from the Kennedys, that Castro had to go. Me and my buddies kept asking over and over again, ‘Why are we doing this? We’re not getting anywhere.’ We didn’t know why we were doing what we were doing, but we were told to do it, so we did it. We were good soldiers.”
Halpern, who began his intelligence career with the OSS in 1943, was brought to Washington from the Far East in the fall of 1961 and was eventually designated executive officer for the Cuba task force, as the CIA’s bureaucracy grew in response to the White House’s demand to oust Castro. Within months what soon became the largest CIA station in the world was in operation on the campus at the University of Miami, with six hundred American case officers monitoring the activities of an estimated three thousand Cuban exiles on the payroll. Scores of guerrilla teams infiltrated Cuba by boat, collecting intelligence and attempting to carry out hit-and-run sabotage. The Kennedy administration had changed its approach. The Bay of Pigs had called for a military invasion by a large and well-armed exile force and the murder of Castro, provoking an uprising on the island. The new plan, which became known as Operation Mongoose, relied on propaganda, economic sabotage, and the infiltration of small-unit exile teams to create the conditions for an internal revolt. To run the operation, Jack Kennedy sought out Edward G. Lansdale, an air force general famed for his exploits as a covert operator in the Philippines and South Vietnam (he was said to be the model for The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s 1955 novel about Saigon). William Harvey, still responsible for executive action (ZR/RIFLE), was the CIA’s point man on Mongoose—and the revived assassination plotting against Castro. Johnny Rosselli and his friends in the Mafia would now be working directly for Harvey and once again trying to get poison pills into Havana.
The pressure was on at the CIA, whose anti-Castro operatives the Kennedys held in contempt after the failure at the Bay of Pigs. Bobby made plain his feelings about the agency in a 1964 interview with the Kennedy Library: “The people the CIA had originally were not very good … I was trying to do things, mostly trying to get them to come up with some ideas about things to be done.”
The people in the CIA saw it differently. “You don’t know what pressure is until you get those two sons of bitches laying it on you,” Halpern told me. “We felt we were doing things in Cuba because of a family vendetta and not because of the good of the United States.” The Kennedys were taking on Castro “for personal reasons—because the family name was besmirched by the Bay of Pigs. Cuba stained the Kennedy escutcheon. It wasn’t national security. It was like their father always said: ‘Don’t get mad; get even.’ We knew we were in a political operation inside the city of Washington.”
Even as the Mongoose project was taking form, the CIA’s Richard Bissell, soon to leave the agency’s payroll, was given his marching orders: get on with eliminating Castro. There was a brutal meeting in the White House, Bissell later confided to Halpern. “Bissell said he had been called over to the White House and met with the president and his brother,” Halpern told me. “He was chewed out and told to get off his ass and do something about the Castro regime—and Castro. What they said was, in effect, that he hadn’t done anything since the Bay of Pigs and it was time to get back into action. They expected him to continue to do the same kinds of things that the Bay of Pigs was supposed to do—to get rid of Castro.”
Halpern, the new man on the team, asked Bissell what the words “get rid of” meant. “He said, ‘Use your imagination.’ There were no holds barred.” Of course, Halpern added, no one talked about murdering Castro “in so many words, and nobody was about to in those kinds of operations. It just doesn’t happen that way. I’ll bet even the Mafia doesn’t have pieces of paper on that kind of stuff. We knew what we were doing, because that’s what they wanted.”
Bill Harvey certainly understood his orders. A few weeks after Bissell’s meeting at the White House, he attended a five-day conference on a British breakthrough in code-breaking in a secure room at the National Security Agency’s headquarters, in suburban Maryland. Also at the conference was Peter Wright, one of Britain’s most experienced intelligence operatives and an advocate of using intelligence, rather than force, to combat political insurgencies. During a break, Wright wrote in his 1987 memoir, Spycatcher, Harvey sought him out and asked what “the Brits” would do about Castro. Wright was apprehensive about being drawn into “the Cuban business,” he wrote, because he and his colleagues were convinced that “the CIA [was] blundering in the Caribbean.”
“Would you hit him?” Harvey asked. “We’re not in it anymore, Bill,” Wright responded. “We got out a couple of years ago.” Harvey, dropping his voice and speaking very slowly, explained, Wright said, that “we’re developing a new capability in the Company to handle these kinds of problems, and we’re in the market for the requisite expertise.” The agency needed “deniable personnel and improved ‘delivery mechanisms,’” he said. The conversation was unnerving, Wright added: “I began to feel I had told them more than enough … They seemed so determined, so convinced that this was the way to handle Castro, and slightly put out that I could not help them more.”
Bill Harvey, as a professional intelligence officer, had not told Wright about the pressure from the Kennedy brothers. But he did tell all he knew to the Church Committee fourteen years later. In an interview with a committee aide, unpublished until this book, Harvey was asked about the White House pressure on the agency. Was it possible that the Kennedys, in their tough talk with Bissell, merely wanted to topple Castro’s government? “Harvey said, ‘No,’” according to the previously secret committee summary of the interview. “Bissell,” the summary paraphrased, “clearly said that the White House had reiterated its interest in executive action capability.” Harvey added, when questioned further, that it “was possible” that the president and his brother had approved Castro’s assassination again that fall without being told any details. “It would not have been good form,” a committee summary quoted Harvey as explaining, for the agency to give the president and his brother “the actual specifics of the plot, or the day-by-day account of its going forward.”
Jack and Bobby Kennedy were not being subtle about what they wanted done to Castro. On January 19, 1962, with Operation Mongoose finally in place, Bobby Kennedy convened what he called a “How it all got started” meeting. Careful notes, later declassified, were taken by the CIA’s Richard Helms, soon to be named to replace Bissell as deputy director for plans, in charge of clandestine operations. Kennedy was quoted as saying that Cuba carried “the top priority in the U.S. government. All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared. Just the day before,” Bobby added, according to Helms’s notes, the president had told him that “the final chapter [on Castro] has not been written. It’s got to be done and will be done.” In his carefully hedged Senate testimony Helms told the Church Committee that Kennedy’s impassioned talk reflected the “kind of atmosphere” in which Helms perceived that assassination was authorized.
There is evidence that Operation Mongoose had its own assassination component, separate from the ongoing CIA effort. One of the CIA men who worked with Lansdale told me in an interview for this book that Lansdale’s planning documents initially included the concept that Castro would “die during fighting for the island.” At President Kennedy’s request, the former intelligence operative said, such language was removed from all future Mongoose papers. The operative, who did not wish to be named, shrugged at the memory: “Would Castro be killed in the overthrow? Yes. He wasn’t going to accept a golden invitation to leave the island.” This understanding about Castro’s fate helps explain a handwritten note later in 1962 from Lansdale to Bobby Kennedy, made public by the Church Committee, in which Lansdale told the attorney general that a packet of enclosed documents “does not include the sensitive work I have reported to you; I felt that you preferred informing the President privately.” A few days later, Lansdale alerted Kennedy to the possibility that “we might uncork the touchdown play.”
Bill Harvey formally took over the CIA’s Cuba task force in February 1962, renamed it Task Force W, and began running what he always thought, he told the Church Committee, was a continuation of the ongoing Castro assassination operation that had started before the Bay of Pigs. In early April, Harvey met with Johnny Rosselli in New York and gave him CIA-produced poison pills intended for Castro. Rosselli told the committee he informed Harvey at the meeting that the Cuban exile operatives had expanded the hit list to include Che Guevara and Castro’s brother, Raul. Rosselli testified that Harvey approved the targets, saying, “Everything is all right.” The CIA also arranged for a shipment of long-range rifles with night scopes and other equipment, including radios and ship radar, to be delivered in May to the Cuban hit team in Miami. The murder plotting continued unabated until February 1963, Harvey testified, although he had grave doubts by September whether the assassination would ever take place. The Mafia’s delivery man, once again, was Tony Varona. And, once again, the mob did not deliver.
“Bill Harvey was a rough and tough SOB,” Sam Halpern told me, “but when push came to shove, he couldn’t deliver either. He had no more expertise than you and I in eliminating anybody. We never killed anyone,” Halpern added, “but not for lack of trying.”
Until his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy repeatedly denied that he or his brother had anything to do with the Castro assassination attempts. The most explicit denials came during his taped interviews in April and May 1964 at the Kennedy Library. Asked whether there had been any direct attempts on Castro’s life during his brother’s administration, Kennedy said, “No.”
“No one tried?”
“No.”
“Contemplated?”
“No.”
By mid-1961 the president and his brother had gained complete control of military operations and foreign policy. The military chiefs were mute; Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, was loyal, almost slavish, in his admiration for the president. The Kennedy brothers terrorized the CIA.
Bobby Kennedy had gotten his first insight into the clandestine world of the CIA while spending two months on the four-man study group to investigate the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, headed by the retired Maxwell Taylor. The dapper and well-spoken Taylor, a former army chief of staff, had won the president’s admiration by breaking with his fellow generals in the Eisenhower administration and advocating “flexible response”: the ability to fight communist insurgencies locally instead of relying on massive retaliation to deter Nikita Khrushchev’s support for wars of liberation.
The other two members of the study group were Allen Dulles, at that time still director of the CIA, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations. There is evidence that Taylor quickly learned what Kennedy and Dulles already knew—that assassination plotting had been an integral part of the failed invasion.
The evidence came in a memorandum from the ever-methodical J. Edgar Hoover. On May 22, 1961, while the Taylor panel was still interviewing witnesses, Hoover sent Bobby Kennedy a memo putting on record, among other things, the fact that the FBI had received a briefing on Richard Bissell’s testimony before the panel. The disgraced Bissell, still in charge of the assassination plotting, had been permitted to testify, so Hoover learned, before only two members of the panel, Taylor and Bobby Kennedy. Bissell subsequently described his testimony to Sheffield Edwards, of the CIA’s office of security (it was Edwards who talked to the FBI, Hoover said), and claimed to have told Taylor and Kennedy about “the use of Giancana and the underworld” in the agency’s “dirty business” against Castro.*
Max Taylor, like many men instinctively loyal to the president, included no hint of assassination plotting against Castro in his final report. He also did not tell what he knew to Admiral Burke, who was suspected of being more loyal to the truth than to Jack Kennedy.† But Hoover’s memorandum about Bissell’s revelatory testimony remained in Justice Department files—yet another problem for the Kennedys.
Taylor’s highly classified report on the Bay of Pigs, whose conclusions were leaked in part to the press in the summer of 1961, was everything Jack Kennedy could have wanted. It was unrelenting on the threat posed by Castro. “There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor,” the report concluded. “His continued presence within the hemispheric community as a dangerously effective exponent of communism and anti-Americanism constitutes a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more of the weak Latin American republics.” The report, which was not declassified for two decades, criticized the CIA for not making the need for two air strikes before the landing at the Bay of Pigs “entirely clear in advance” to the president; it also criticized the Joint Chiefs of Staff for not making clear their overall doubts about the invasion. “By acquiescing,” the report said, the Joint Chiefs “gave the impression to others of approving it.”
The report was a cover-up, and known to be one by many in the CIA and the military. Grayston Lynch, a CIA operative who went ashore at the Bay of Pigs with the first wave of Cuban exiles, waited more than thirty years before writing a memoir recounting the testimony he gave the Taylor panel. In his manuscript, made available for this book, Lynch reported that Taylor had seemed to be seeking the facts; during his questioning, the retired general allowed Lynch to complain that the collapse of the invasion “goes back to the planes”—the failure to destroy the Cuban air force. Bobby Kennedy was not interested in testimony about his brother’s decision-making, Lynch wrote. The attorney general posed questions that were narrowly focused, he noted, and meant “to show that the invasion would have failed, even with the air strikes. This was something that was impossible to prove.” Lynch, like many in the CIA, was convinced that the president had doomed the Cuban freedom fighters by his last-minute cancellation of the second air strike. After Bobby Kennedy’s questioning, Lynch asked permission to make a statement and told the panel that, in his opinion, “had the Castro planes been destroyed on the ground, as planned,” the operation would have succeeded. Lynch was quickly excused and was not surprised, he wrote, when the Taylor Report not only deflected “the blame” for canceling the air strike from the president but placed it “on the shoulders of the very persons [in the CIA] who had warned them against canceling the air strikes.”
Admiral Burke also kept his distress at the Taylor Report to himself. Burke was a strong believer in the presidency, and had been stunned by the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. “When the news started coming in that it was a disaster,” Gerry M. McCabe, a navy officer who was one of Kennedy’s military aides, said in a 1995 interview for this book, “all the civilians“—including McGeorge Bundy—”folded up their desks and went home by four-thirty [P.M.]. The president stayed in his office until six. Nobody was around.” Burke arrived at the White House Situation Room moments later, “slammed down his briefcase and“—with McCabe’s help—began coordinating rescue efforts for the remnants of the defeated Cuban exile army. McCabe recalled his astonishment at how thoroughly Burke knew the waters: “He was able to tell those guys [the captains] how close to come offshore. Those who got out got out because of him.” A week or so later, McCabe told me, Burke gathered his top admirals and ordered them not to talk about what had really happened in Cuba. He also wrote a private letter to Kennedy, telling him, in essence, that “the navy and the military had broad shoulders” and would accept the blame for the invasion “for the good of the presidency and the good of the country.”
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 flattery. 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 ability. 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.”
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.”
* There is no evidence that McCone, a devout Catholic, knew—or wanted to know—about the long-standing assassination plotting against Castro. The murder attempts, prodded by Bobby Kennedy, probably went on behind his back. Sam Halpern, asked in a 1993 interview for this book whether McCone had a “need to know” about the assassination plotting, said scathingly: “Need to know? Who knew what he needed to know? McCone was an outsider and he didn’t know and nobody would tell him.” Halpern added that at the time he thought “McCone was a tough son of a bitch and I didn’t want to work with him.” Years later, Halpern said, he changed his mind and concluded that McCone, who died in 1991, was “one of the best [Directors of Central Intelligence] ever.”
* Special Group (CI) had a broad mandate from the president to ensure that the U.S. armed forces and all U.S. agencies abroad were trained to combat subversion and “wars of liberation” around the world. Some members of the group were asked to leave when the discussion turned to covert operations in Cuba. The pared-down committee, including Taylor and the attorney general, then became Special Group (Augmented), responsible for Operation Mongoose.
* In a 1994 interview for this book, Szulc acknowledged that Goodwin told him after the meeting with Kennedy that the White House was “trying to put together some kind of a task force.” There was a subsequent meeting with an official at the State Department, Szulc said, but nothing came of it: “I said, ‘I’m really not interested.’” A year later, however, according to declassified CIA files, Szulc was the linchpin of a long-running CIA operation, code-named Operation Leonardo, that was aimed at an attempt to create dissent inside Castro’s military. A CIA summary, released under the Freedom of Information Act, described the Leonardo plan as resulting from pressure “by Higher Authority [State Department and the White House] to consider a proposal for an on-island operation to split the Castro regime. The proposal was presented to Hurwitch, the State Department Cuban Coordinator, by Tad Szulc of the New York Times.” Szulc was quoted as saying he “first thought of bringing the plan to the attention of President Kennedy, as he had had a standing invitation, since November 1961, for direct contact.” The CIA document depicted Szulc as attending meetings at agency safe houses in Washington with a clandestine officer from Task Force W. In the interview with me, Szulc dismissed the meetings as the routine workings of a Washington newspaperman, and said he had cleared his participation in advance with the late Emanuel Freedman, then an assistant managing editor of the Times. In interviews for this book, James Reston, chief Washington correspondent in 1962, and Clifton Daniel, then assistant managing editor, told me that they had no knowledge of Szulc’s contact with the CIA.
* One of Lansdale’s early schemes, Hurwitch wrote, was to have someone write a stirring song to Cuban rhythms which would be smuggled into Cuba and adopted by the Cuban opposition. Hurwitch claimed that he “longed for a way” to “turn off Mongoose.” In 1975 Tom Parrott, the CIA official, told the Church Committee of another bizarre Lansdale scheme: “He had a wonderful plan for getting rid of Castro. This plan consisted of spreading the word that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and that Christ was against Castro [who] was anti-Christ. And you would spread this word around Cuba and then on whatever date it was, there would be a manifestation … At that time—this is absolutely true—… just over the horizon there would be an American submarine which would surface off Cuba and send up some starshells. And this would be the manifestation of the Second Coming and Castro would be overthrown … Somebody dubbed this ‘Elimination by Illumination.’” In a January 1976 letter to Frank Church, the committee chairman, Lansdale, who had been linked in the committee’s published report to political assassination and sabotage, chose to heatedly deny only the Parrott allegation. “I never had such a plan nor proposed such a plan,” he wrote. Lansdale added, however, that “it is possible that such a plan was submitted to me … and was tabled by me. It is possible, also, that I mentioned the plan to Parrott as an example of unrealistic proposals given to me.” Lansdale’s letter is on file with his archived papers at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace in Stanford, California.
* Halpern’s recollection of conversations between Kennedy and Ford is supported in part by Robert Kennedy’s telephone logs and appointment book for 1962, as made public by the Kennedy Library in 1994. They show that Kennedy met twice with Ford in September and also received a telephone call that month from Ford. In his 1993 memoir CIA and the Cold War, Scott D. Breckinridge, who was one of the authors of the CIA inspector general’s 1967 report on assassination plotting, cryptically described the Ford assignment. As part of Mongoose, the CIA “was directed to provide an operations officer to meet with Mafia figures identified by Kennedy under circumstances over which CIA had no control.” Breckinridge acknowledged in an interview for this book that he had been told the story by Halpern, and others, during the 1967 inquiry. Breckinridge did not identify Ford in his book, even after Ford’s death, in keeping with the CIA practice of not naming previously unidentified clandestine agents. Halpern himself did not confirm Ford’s involvement for this book until he was shown Ford’s name and title on the attorney general’s office logs.
† In a 1993 compilation, the Kennedy Library reported that its collection of RFK papers totaled 1,541 linear feet, of which 440 feet have been released for research. Few of Kennedy’s working papers from his days as attorney general have been made available.
* William Harvey, in his 1975 testimony before the committee, said that Edwards’s suggestion that the assassination plotting had ended “was not true, and Colonel Edwards knew it was not true.” He explained that Edwards chose to “falsify” the record to insulate himself from any possible damage and from prosecution. “If this ever came up,” Harvey said, “the file would show that on such and such a date … he was no longer chargeable with this.”