CHAPTER 11:
CUBA IS DRAWN DEEPER INTO THE COLD WAR

In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, Attorney General Robert Kennedy became President Kennedy’s most trusted adviser on Cuba policy. John Kennedy did not always agree with his younger brother, but, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. later wrote, “The President trusted him more than anyone else to get to the bottom of an idea or project, to distinguish what was operational from what was literary, to anticipate consequences, to ride herd on execution, to protect the presidential interest and, above all to be candid.”454

Robert Kennedy outlined three possible Cuba policy options for the United States in an April 19 memorandum to his brother: (1) intervene in Cuba with U.S. troops; (2) set up a naval blockade around the island; (3) call on member states of the Organization of American States (OAS) to support an arms embargo of Cuba. Then he evaluated each option. The president, he noted, had already rejected Number (1) “for good and sufficient reasons although this might have to be reconsidered.” Number (2) would be “a drawn-out affair which would lead to a good deal of worldwide bitterness over an extended period of time.” And the third option, “concerted action” by the OAS, he felt was unlikely, unless there was an aggressive Cuban incident, like an attack on the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, in which case the United States could “make noises like this was an act of war.”

Still, Robert Kennedy concluded, “Something forceful must be done.” It was no longer possible to “wait for the situation in Cuba to revert back to a time of relative peace and calm with the U.S. having been beaten off with her tail between her legs…. The time has come for a showdown for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse. If we don’t want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba we had better decide what we are willing to do to stop it.”455

On April 20, President Kennedy requested a detailed plan for U.S. military intervention in Cuba from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who passed it on to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making sure to note: “The request should not be interpreted as an indication that U.S. military action against Cuba is probable.” The Joint Chiefs recommended, “The creation of an incident which will provide the justification for the overthrow of the Castro government by the United States.” The incident, of course, must be “carefully planned and handled to insure that it is plausible and that it occurs prior to any indication that the United States has decided to take military action against Cuba.”

On April 29, McNamara and Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke met with President Kennedy to discuss Operational Plan 312 (OPLAN 312), the Pentagon’s contingency plan for intervention in Cuba, which called for approximately 60,000 troops, plus naval and air units. McNamara wrote, “It was estimated that complete control of the island could be obtained within eight days, although it was recognized that guerrilla forces would continue to operate beyond the eighth day in the Escambray Mountains and Oriente Province.”

On May 5, the NSC considered the possibility of military intervention in Cuba, and ruled it out for the immediate future. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reported to President Kennedy, “[T]he U.S. should retain the right to intervene if (a) Castro’s Cuba should become a direct military threat to the U.S., or (b) if Castro commits aggression against any American Republic.”456

A paper prepared by an inter-agency task force on Cuba, chaired by Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Paul Nitze, worried about the substantial price of a unilateral U.S. invasion of Cuba. This high cost included not just significant loss of life, but also a loss of credibility on the world stage. “It would severely impair the general international image of a non-aggressive, non-imperialist nation, which we have tried to build up over the past fifteen years.”

Unilateral U.S. military intervention in Cuba would effectively end the Good Neighbor era in Latin America. “It would revive fears, especially in Latin America about our intention to dominate and direct the affairs of all American States,” the Cuba Task Force paper stated. “It is our judgment that the costs outweigh the advantages.”457

Nitze told the NSC that the Navy could blockade the island, but the results would not be immediate and “unfavorable world reaction would probably accrue.” Admiral Burke noted the Navy would be able to intercept all shipping headed to Cuba. Secretary of State Dean Rusk replied that a naval blockade “would be an act of war and was wholly impracticable.” President Kennedy asserted, “There would be no Navy blockade.”458

CIA analysts concluded that U.S. military intervention would be required to overturn the Cuban revolution, according to a May 1961 analysis paper. The CIA analysts wrote that the Castro regime “has been significantly strengthened by the failure of the mid-April invasion.” The paper added, “The opposition has lost some of its strongest forces, its factionalism is greater, and its confidence in the United States has been shaken.”459

As the Kennedy Administration debated what to do next in Cuba, details began to leak from the seams of the covert CIA-Mafia operation to assassinate Castro.

Robert Kennedy was caught on the horns of dilemma in the turbulent period after the Bay of Pigs. As one of his brother’s most trusted foreign policy aides, he was an aggressive advocate of the overthrow of the Cuban revolution. However, as attorney general, his top priority was his war on organized crime in the United States. So when he learned, as a member of the Taylor Board of Inquiry on the Bay of Pigs, the CIA had plotted with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, he found himself in a compromised position.

According to a May 22, 1961 FBI report, Bissell “told the Attorney General that some of the CIA’s associated planning included the use of [Sam] Giancana and the underworld against Castro.”460 Kennedy also got a heads-up from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who informed Kennedy that the CIA and Mafia were working together covertly in Cuba. He included a memorandum with a summary of an FBI interview with CIA Director of Security Sheffield Edwards, who had supervised the CIA-Mafia plotting to assassinate Castro in 1960–1961, which he referred to as “dirty business.”

Edwards had explained to the FBI, “Since the underworld controlled gambling operations in Cuba under the Batista government, it was assumed that this element would still continue to have sources and contacts in Cuba which could be utilized successfully in connection with CIA’s clandestine efforts against the Castro government.” And the memorandum cautioned, “Several of the plans still are working and eventually may ‘pay off.’”461

Meanwhile, an FBI investigation in a wiretap case in Las Vegas threatened to expose the CIA-Mafia collaboration to kill Castro to the public. A maid had discovered a “bug” in comedian Dan Rowan’s apartment in Las Vegas in October 1960. CIA cut-out Robert Maheu had the bug installed in Rowan’s phone to placate an irrationally jealous Sam Giancana, who suspected Rowan was having an affair with his mistress, singer Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire Sisters.

The Agency worried that details of the CIA-Mafia assassination operation would spill into the public square if the wiretap case went to trial, and no one wanted that to happen.462 Attorney General Kennedy was particularly concerned since he had been further drawn into the CIA-Mafia collaboration in June when his aides met with Mafia gambler Norman Rothman to assess a possible quid pro quo. According to Hoover, Kennedy’s close aide and personal friend John Seigenthaler asked the FBI’s C.A. Evans about Norman Rothman. Rothman was the personification of gangsterismo. The former manager of the Sans Souci nightclub in Havana, he was reported by the FBI to be “very close to Santo Trafficante.” The Mafia gambler had also served as a “former witting collaborator” of the CIA, and as a “source” utilized by Army intelligence in the 1950s.463

In a May 18, 1961 memorandum, Hoover supplied Kennedy with a summary of Rothman’s criminal history. Rothman had been found guilty in two recent trials tied to Mafia gun running in Cuba: theft of weapons from a National Guard armory in Ohio, and a scheme to sell stolen bonds for money for arms destined for Cuba. He had been sentenced to five years imprisonment in the Ohio case but was out of prison on a $50,000 appeal bond. A sentence had not yet been handed down in the bank case.464 Rothman had also worked with Batista’s brother-in-law General Roberto Fernández Miranda organizing paramilitary operations against Cuba from the Biltmore Terrace Hotel in Miami Beach in 1959–1960.465

On June 29, 1961, Rothman was invited to a meeting in Deputy Attorney General Byron White’s office with Attorney General Kennedy’s aides. According to Rothman, John Seigenthaler was one of several Department of Justice officials who met with him. An unnamed CIA officer from the Western Hemisphere Division was also present to evaluate Rothman’s bona fides. According to a CIA memorandum, Rothman offered to make assets available to the United States “in return for the dropping of federal charges” against him. Rothman claimed that he had “an operational base” in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula and “personnel and capabilities” to carry out “sabotage raids inside Cuba.” He also had a “basic plan” for assassinating Castro in a napalm attack as he spoke at a mass rally in Havana.

Rothman told House Select Committee on Assassinations investigators that Kennedy’s aides brought up the assassination of Castro. “They wanted me to give them names,” Rothman said, “people that can go there, that can get in and out.” He refused to turn over names of associates in Cuba. “One of them approached me and discussed about what method would I suggest or use if it were me.” He added, “They wanted to know who would do it, how it would be done, where, etcetera, etcetera. I told them then I was not at liberty to involve others with them.”

However, the CIA officer present at the meeting was not persuaded by Rothman’s pitch. In a June 30, 1961 memorandum he wrote, “Rothman did not satisfy me that he has or controls those agent and material assets to which he lays claim.”466 The attorney general’s aides’ interest in Rothman appears to have ended with the CIA officer’s critical assessment of Rothman’s offer. Nonetheless, the meeting with such a prominent Mafia gambler further compromised Kennedy with regard to the CIA-Mafia assassination plotting. Robert Kennedy’s attention would shift abruptly from Cuba to preparations for the Vienna summit.

As President Kennedy prepared for his Cold War summit meeting with Chairman Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June, he recalled former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s well-known comment: “We arm to parley.” Kennedy wanted to negotiate from a position of strength at the summit.

Kennedy believed that U.S. strategic nuclear superiority would strengthen his hand in Cold War diplomacy with Khrushchev. He increased Department of Defense spending on strategic nuclear forces, especially Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and nuclear-missile-equipped Polaris submarines. According to the Pentagon, U.S. strategic nuclear superiority served as an “umbrella,” which “shielded” U.S. conventional forces engaged in combat. Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay told the Senate Appropriations Committee in 1962, “You cannot fight a limited war except under the umbrella of strategic superiority.”467

Meanwhile, a back-channel line of communication was set up to prepare for the summit. Attorney General Kennedy and Georgi Bolshakov, a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officer, met near the Department of Justice on the National Mall, where they discussed the agenda for Vienna. President Kennedy’s top priority was a nuclear test-ban treaty. Khrushchev, who had been pushing for negotiations with the United States on the status of Berlin since 1958, insisted that Berlin be on the agenda. But Kennedy was reluctant to talk about Berlin and did not want to discuss Cuba either. Robert Kennedy told Bolshakov, “Cuba is a dead issue.”468 On the eve of the Vienna summit, Khrushchev informed the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that he planned to push Kennedy hard.469 The negotiations in Vienna would be fiery.

Kennedy was the first to speak in Vienna. The United States and the Soviet Union must learn to avoid direct military confrontations with each other in situations that could escalate into nuclear war, he said. An abrupt move, or a “miscalculation,” in a tense situation, could trigger a nuclear war

Kennedy cautioned Khrushchev about taking sides in anticolonial wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. “In some cases,” he said, “minorities seize control in areas associated with us, minorities which do not express the will of the people. Such groups associate themselves with the USSR. This brings in conflict the USSR as center of Communist power, and the U.S. as the center of our power.”

Khrushchev exploded, “Miscalculation! Miscalculation!” He angrily charged Kennedy with defending the global status quo. A memorandum on the meeting paraphrased Khrushchev saying, “It looked to him as if the United States wanted the USSR to sit like a school boy with his hands on his desk. The Soviet Union supports its ideals and holds them in high esteem. It cannot guarantee that these ideas will stop at its borders.”470

In the next session, Khrushchev returned to the subject, telling Kennedy that he did not understand the dynamic of revolution in the third world. “Although the Soviet Union does not participate directly, it supports such wars,” he asserted. “The President… believes that when people rise up against tyrants, that is the result of Moscow’s activities. That is not so. Failure by the United States to understand this generates danger.” According to Khrushchev, the United States posed a danger to world peace by intervening against liberation wars. He declared, “If the United States supports old, moribund, reactionary regimes, then a precedent of internal intervention will be set, which might cause a clash between our two countries.”

Khrushchev cited Cuba. “A mere handful of people, headed by Fidel Castro, overthrew the Batista regime because of its oppressive nature,” he said. “During Castro’s fight against Batista, U.S. capitalist circles… supported Batista, and this is why the anger of the Cuban people turned against the United States. The President’s decision to launch a landing in Cuba only strengthened the revolutionary forces and Castro’s own position, because the people of Cuba were afraid they would get another Batista and lose the achievements of the revolution. Castro is not a Communist but U.S. policy can make him one.”

Kennedy conceded that he “made a misjudgment with regard to the Cuba situation.”471 Near the end of the summit, Khrushchev issued an ultimatum on Berlin, threatening to sign a separate peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (East Germany) by the end of 1961. The treaty would effectively end the West’s occupation rights in Berlin deep inside the GDR. Occupation troops of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union established zones of control in Germany at the end of World War II.

Khrushchev’s top priority was a Soviet peace treaty with East Germany. He said his decision to sign the treaty was “irrevocable,” adding provocatively, “If the U.S. wants to start a war over Germany let it be so.” Khrushchev saw a separate treaty with East Germany as a means by which to counter the rearming and incorporation of West Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO discussions about sharing nuclear weapons with West Germany made the Kremlin even more anxious.

But Kennedy dug in his heels. “The United States cannot accept an ultimatum,” Kennedy replied. “Today is not the right time now to change the situation in Berlin and the balance [of power] in general.”

Khrushchev’s reply was chilling. “If the President insisted on U.S. rights [in Berlin] after the signing of a peace treaty and that if the borders of the GDR—land, air, or sea borders—were violated, they would be defended.” He added ominously, “It’s up to the U.S. to decide whether there will be war or peace.”

“It would be a cold winter,” Kennedy replied as the summit ended abruptly.472 Kennedy left Vienna shaken by his encounter with Khrushchev.

At the end of the summit, President Kennedy did an interview with New York Times columnist James Reston. “He [Khrushchev] just beat the hell out of me,” Kennedy told Reston. “He did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anybody who got into it, and didn’t see it through, had no guts…. Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”

Over the next several weeks, Kennedy met with his advisers to plan a response to Khrushchev. The linchpin of Kennedy’s plan was a $3.25 billion supplemental budget request for the Department of Defense. Kennedy announced his post-Vienna military buildup in a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office on July 25. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin.” He continued, “We will at all times be ready to talk, if talk will help. But we must be ready to resist force with force, if force is used upon us.”

Kennedy’s arms buildup included more funds for ICBMs. He also augmented U.S. conventional forces. The army would be increased to one million soldiers, up from 875,000. New airlift and sealift capabilities were added, and six army divisions were readied for deployment to Europe. Draft calls were tripled and reserve forces were called up to meet the new military personnel needs. The plan included $207 million for civil defense.473

In his televised speech, Kennedy discussed the dangers of nuclear war. He explained, “In the thermonuclear age, any misjudgment on either side about the intentions of the other could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all the wars in history.” Kennedy did not share with the public the Department of Defense’s estimate of U.S. casualties in a nuclear war with the USSR. The Pentagon predicted there would be seventy million deaths in the United States, or forty percent of the U.S. population. He was informed that 600,000 would be killed if just one Soviet missile slipped through the North American defense system.474

Kennedy requested funds from Congress for civil defense to “identify and mark space” for “fallout shelters” in case of a nuclear attack. He said somberly, “The lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved—if they can be warned to take shelter, and if that shelter is available.”475

Congress approved Kennedy’s supplemental appropriations request. In his first six months as President, Kennedy made sharp increases in military spending totaling $6 billion in new funds. The Pentagon budget grew to $47.5 billion.476 Kennedy’s Cold War brinkmanship was designed to test Khrushchev. And Khrushchev would do the same in return.

Chairman Khrushchev’s belligerent diplomacy in Vienna was the result of the interplay of his Cold War strategy of “peaceful coexistence” and the heavy-handed imperiousness for which he was notorious. He rattled nuclear sabers to further his objectives.477 Khrushchev had learned about the transformative nature of atomic weapons from a report he received from leading Soviet scientists in 1954, which described the weapons’ unprecedented destructive power and deadly radioactive fallout. Convinced that nuclear weapons were too dangerous to be used in war, Khrushchev developed his Cold War strategy of peaceful coexistence, which he unveiled at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

“Either peaceful coexistence or the most destructive war in history,” Khrushchev declared in a speech at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. “There is no third option.” The United States posed a threat to the Soviet Union, but the USSR’s “formidable means” would deter a nuclear attack. The Soviet Union must avoid a direct military confrontation with the United States but would continue the struggle for socialism by other means.

Khrushchev predicted that the gathering momentum of decolonization and wars of liberation in the third world would weaken the United States and the West. That way, the USSR and its socialist allies could ultimately prevail over the United States. By avoiding war, the Soviet Union would gain time to prove the superiority of its centrally planned Marxist economy—but Khrushchev would soon push the limits of his own peaceful coexistence strategy.478

In the weeks following the Vienna summit, the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union over Berlin steadily worsened. When Kennedy returned to Washington, he sought advice from leading Democrats. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson recommended an armed probe of West Berlin by conventional U.S. forces if Khrushchev blocked the West’s access to West Berlin. Acheson believed that it was necessary to demonstrate U.S. willingness to risk war before entering into negotiations with Khrushchev.

The tensions over Berlin reached a turning point on August 13 when Soviet troops suddenly sealed off West Berlin, blocking streets with barbed wire and obstacles, and soon, a concrete wall. Khrushchev agreed to the construction of the Berlin Wall under pressure from East German leader Walter Ulbricht, who was desperate to stop the migration out of East Berlin. By July 1961, nearly 1,000 East Germans, most of them skilled workers and professionals, crossed into West Berlin every day as refugees, a serious drain on the GDR’s already distressed economy.479

According to Khrushchev’s foreign-policy aide Oleg Troyanaovsky, Khrushchev saw it as an alternative to an armed clash with the United States. “It offered him a… possible way out of his predicament without loss of face or armed conflict.”480 Kennedy, too, saw the Berlin Wall as an acceptable alternative to a military confrontation. Kennedy asked his advisers, “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” Kennedy noted, “There wouldn’t be any need for a wall if he occupied the whole city. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”481

Then Khrushchev shifted the focus of the Cold War confrontation by authorizing a new series of nuclear weapons tests. On October 31, 1961, a Soviet TU-95 dropped a 50-megaton nuclear warhead from 4,000 meters above the Arctic Circle in northern Russia.482 The Soviet atomic tests violated the voluntary ban observed by the United States and the USSR since 1958. On September 5, Kennedy responded to the Soviet nuclear tests by signing National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 87, which ordered the resumption of U.S. underground atomic testing.483

On October 21, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric called Khrushchev’s nuclear bluff in a speech in Hot Springs, Virginia. Gilpatric announced that there was no “missile gap.” He asserted that the U.S. nuclear capacity was many times bigger than the Soviet atomic arsenal. “The fact is that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on its part,” Gilpatric told a National Business Advisory Council meeting. “Our forces are so deployed and protected that a small attack could not effectively disarm us… In short, we have a second-strike capability which is at least as extensive as what the Soviets can deliver by striking first. Therefore, we are confident that the Soviets will not provoke a major nuclear conflict.”484

Although John Kennedy campaigned on the missile gap in 1960, McNamara had learned in January 1961 there was no gap. But the president insisted on going ahead with his planned missile buildup. Historian John Lewis Gaddis describes the magnitude of the Kennedy Administration’s expansion of U.S. strategic nuclear forces: “The result, by mid-1964, was an increase of 150 percent in the number of nuclear weapons available, a 200 percent increase in deliverable megatonnage, the construction of ten additional Polaris submarines (for a total of twenty-nine) and of 400 additional Minutemen missiles (for a total of 800) above what the previous [Eisenhower] administration had scheduled.”485

At the same time, U.S. intelligence greatly expanded its photographic coverage of the USSR by earth satellites, resulting in a more accurate assessment of the Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear arsenal. Estimates of the Soviet Union’s ICBM capability were revised downward. McNamara biographer Deborah Shapely points out, “Analysts were certain of only four operational Soviet ICBMs. Most classified estimates at the time pegged the number of operational Soviet ICBMs at 35, compared with 12 Atlas and Titan missiles then in the U.S. force…. U.S. analysts were having difficulty finding hard evidence of a crash [Soviet] program.”486

By the end of 1961, Kennedy had laid the foundation for his Cold War strategy of “flexible response,” predicated on U.S. nuclear weapons superiority. But Kennedy also developed conventional military forces, capable of intervention in trouble spots around the world.487 As Kennedy gained confidence he could meet Khrushchev’s Cold War challenge, he passed up an opportunity to begin secret diplomatic discussions with Cuba.

In August 1961, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon and Che Guevara faced off at an Interamerican conference in Punto del Este, Uruguay. Dillon, scion of the founder of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Company, outlined the Kennedy Administration’s Alliance for Progress to a meeting of Latin American finance ministers. Dillon called it a blueprint for “a decade of democratic progress.” He noted that Latin American countries would have to reform their semi-feudal agricultural policies and backward tax systems in order to participate in the Alianza para el Progreso.

Dillon, elegantly attired in a dark pinstripe suit, promised that the United States would provide $1 billion in economic aid within six months, and another $20 billion in private and public capital over the next 10 years. The infusion of aid and capital would spur economic growth. Economic growth would create jobs and money for housing, education, and public health, and lift Latin America out of poverty.

The Latin American finance ministers endorsed the Alliance for Progress in the Declaration of Punta del Este, but with little enthusiasm. White House aide Richard Goodwin recalls, “There was… no outpouring of pledges to specific measures of social reform.”488

Guevara, in his customary fatigues, combat boots, black beret, and a Cuban cigar in his hand, mesmerized the staid gathering of Latin American officials. He told the delegates that the real purpose of the Alliance for Progress was to contain the political appeal of the Cuban revolution in Latin America. The handsome, bearded revolutionary asserted that the Alianza was conceived “under the sign of Cuba, a free land in America,” as a conspicuously bored Dillon looked up at the ceiling and yawned. “This conference and the special treatment your delegates received and whatever loans are approved, all bear the name of Cuba, whether their beneficiaries like it or not.”

But Guevara also held out an olive branch. “We cannot stop exporting an example, as the United States wishes, because an example is something that transcends borders,” he asserted. “What we do is give a guarantee that we will not export revolutions, we guarantee that not a single rifle will leave Cuba for battle in any other country of America.” Guevara announced Cuba was willing to negotiate with the United States “on any issue, without preconditions.” He said Cuba asked only to be free to develop along a different path from the rest of the Western Hemisphere without the threat of U.S. intervention.489

In the meantime, Guevara followed up with a personal diplomatic initiative. Through an Argentine diplomat, Guevara sent a message to Goodwin, whom he had observed smoking cigars in Punta del Este. The diplomat told Goodwin, “Che… bets you wouldn’t dare smoke Cuban cigars.” Goodwin replied, “You tell him that I’d love to smoke Cuban cigars.” The next day, two boxes of Cuban cigars were delivered to Goodwin’s hotel room. One was for Goodwin. The cigars for Kennedy came in a large, polished mahogany box, inlaid with the official seal and flag of Cuba, with a note from Guevara. Word was passed to Goodwin by a third party, from Guevara, suggesting a meeting.

Guevara’s diplomacy by cigar was a stroke of creative statecraft. Photographs of bearded guerrillas and their cigars had become an icon of the Cuban revolution. The popularity of Cuban cigars also gave them diplomatic value. Both Fidel Castro and Jack Kennedy had been introduced to Cuban cigars by their fathers when they were boys.490

When they did meet, Guevara thanked Goodwin for the Bay of Pigs operation, calling it “a great political victory” for the Cuban revolution. Guevara said that the Bay of Pigs enabled the revolution to further consolidate its hold on power and transformed Cuba “from a little aggrieved country to an equal.” Guevara said the Cuban revolution was socialist, stressing it was “irreversible” and could not be “overthrown from within.” He also noted that Cuba’s ties to the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc did not come about as the result of subversion but out of “natural sympathies and common beliefs.”

Guevara’s main reason for reaching out to Goodwin was to broach the idea of secret back-channel discussions with the United States. He suggested discussions to ease tensions between the two countries. Acknowledging that a formal diplomatic “understanding” might not be possible, he proposed subjects for discussion that might open up larger issues. Guevara said Havana would not return expropriated properties to U.S. owners, but would compensate the owners from Cuban exports to the United States. Cuba would not enter into a formal military or political alliance with the USSR and Eastern Europe and would not launch an attack on the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo. He also said Cuba was willing to discuss its “activities in other countries.”491

When Goodwin returned to Washington, he informed President Kennedy about his meeting with Guevara, and recommended continuing the dialogue with Cuba. But Goodwin also interpreted Guevara’s willingness to initiate diplomatic talks as a sign of Cuba’s weakness, a weakness that he advised the administration to exploit. He urged President Kennedy to step up the CIA’s clandestine sabotage operations against economic targets on the island. Goodwin recalled, “[It] would have been politically difficult, perhaps impossible” to have negotiated “a deal with Castro, any kind of deal.”492 President Kennedy still had old scores to settle stemming from the Bay of Pigs.

Allen Dulles biographer Peter Grose put it succinctly. “Allen had to go,” Grose writes. “As the new administration surveyed the political wreckage of the Bay of Pigs, none of the key policymakers were in any doubt of that.” Kennedy asked Dulles for his resignation in a meeting in the Oval Office in August 1961. Dulles stayed on as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) until the Agency moved into its new headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in November. At the November 28 dedication ceremony for the new campus, Kennedy pinned a National Security Medal on Dulles, and chose John A. McCone to replace him.493

Kennedy also relieved Richard Bissell of his duties, telling him, “If this were a parliamentary government, I would have to resign and you, a civil servant, would stay on. But being the system of government it is, a presidential government, you will have to resign.” Which he did, in February 1962. On March 1, he was awarded the National Security Medal, and went on to lead the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), which provided the Pentagon with weapons-development evaluations from university-based engineers and scientists.494

Kennedy also exacted his revenge on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When their two-year appointments expired, Kennedy simply did not renew them.495