Washington
That very same day, 27 October, even as Kennedy was giving the commitment not to invade Cuba, Harvey gave orders for three of the clandestine teams to set off for Cuba with instructions to support any United States military operation against Cuba through acts of sabotage.
He also decided to revitalise the ‘executive action’ against Castro because he now believed that its success would avert the need for military action in Cuba. He spoke again to Mafia godfather, Johnny Roselli, drawing his attention to the situation in Cuba as described by the President on television. He asked Roselli to consult with his friends and come up with new ideas to assassinate Castro. They had to redouble their efforts, because that was the best way to prevent outright war.
Roselli said they were doing their best, but they were surprised how difficult it was. He suggested that if they could somehow lure Fabian Escalante – Castro’s personal bodyguard – away from Castro’s camp they would have a better chance. Santo Trafficante was – said Roselli – already working on that.
Trafficante continued to back both sides, just as he had done in Cuba before Castro had come to power. If Castro were to be overthrown, he had many influential friends among the exile groups who would help him to re-establish the casinos under a new non-Communist government. Should Castro remain in power he would continue to spy on his behalf, thus – hopefully – avoiding an unexpected and unwelcome visit from Cuban intelligence officers.
Havana
Castro was away from Havana when news of Khrushchev’s ‘capitulation’ was announced. Again, he was furious; not with Khrushchev’s agreement to remove the offensive weapons – he thought Khrushchev had made the correct decision on this under the circumstances – but because it had been a unilateral Soviet decision. The Soviet Union had broken the terms of the Soviet– Cuban defence pact by not consulting Castro before making the deal. Castro also thought Khrushchev could have made a better bargain by, for example, insisting that America give up their sovereignty over the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in south-eastern Cuba. And Castro was, of course, also of the opinion that this situation would never have arisen if the existence of the Soviet-Cuban defence pact had been made public at the outset.
On 1 November the Hungarian Ambassador in Havana sent a long telegram to his country’s Foreign Minister reporting that:
… since 20 October I have not once managed to talk to any Cuban leaders. Since then, no ambassadors of the friendly countries [Eastern Bloc countries] including Czechoslovakia have managed to contact any Cuban leaders. As for the Czechoslovak ambassador, who is the first representative of the socialist countries to Havana, he used to meet Foreign Minister Roa several times a day and often other leaders as well. In the United States, Cuban interests are represented by Czechoslovakia. In this period he has not been able to get in to see any Cuban leaders [the Castro brothers and Guevara]. Foreign Minister Roa, who had the closest and most confidential relationship with him, has behaved towards him coolly and has not been willing to say anything important to him.
Che Guevara, who, unlike Castro, had all along been a Marxist–Leninist, took stronger and more fundamental issue with Khrushchev’s decision. He felt that Khrushchev had let world Communism down; that he could have advanced the cause of socialist liberation by firing the nuclear missiles that were in Cuba. Such an attack against global imperialist aggression would ultimately have been worth, in his eyes, the resulting devastation and deaths. He maintained that if the Cuban Army had controlled these weapons they would have fired them. This is a disturbing insight into the mind of someone who is generally romanticised as a heroic cavalier and revolutionary, rather than the murderous – and in this case, explicitly genocidal – anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist fanatic that he really was.
West Germany and Berlin
Throughout the crisis, President Kennedy was deeply concerned that the Cuban situation had the potential to spark Soviet retaliation. The West Germans – more frightened than most for their own security during the Cuban crisis – gave strong support to Kennedy’s tough response. Perhaps it was perceived as a relief that ‘at last they’re doing something to put Khrushchev in his place’. At the same time, they were fearful of how the Soviets might respond in West Berlin.
Within West Berlin, the Wall – now more than a year old – offered a small, somewhat ironic sense of physical protection. Overall, however, the feeling was of courage and hope for a peaceful settlement, tinged with fear.
China
The Sino-Soviet relationship had been frosty before the Cuban Missile Crisis and the events of 1962 did nothing to improve it. China watched carefully as events unfolded, keeping their own counsel. When the crisis ended, China’s leader Mao Zedong denounced Khrushchev for yielding to the Americans and offered strong support to Castro.
This was another nail in Khrushchev’s political coffin. It would also have given Serov a sense of vindication.
Washington
On 30 October, three days after the three submarine teams had set sail for Cuba, the Attorney-General gave instructions for all Mongoose operational activities to cease, but it was too late to abort the mission because the teams – for security reasons – carried no communications equipment that could link them to the CIA or US military. However, the leader of one of the teams did manage to send a message to the Attorney-General asking if, in view of the apparent settlement of the crisis, there was still a need to carry out their assigned operation.
Robert Kennedy was incensed. He told McCone to reprimand Harvey and get rid of him without delay.
McCone pulled no punches. He asked Harvey what he thought he was doing. Did he have a vendetta against the Attorney-General and was he taking it out on him by defying his orders?
Harvey denied any vendetta or grudge: that was not how he operated. When he had sent those teams to Cuba there was a strong possibility that America would be invading or at least striking the island and the members of the team could have proved extremely useful.
McCone accepted Harvey’s reasoning but told him that, nevertheless, the Attorney-General insisted on him being moved out of his sight. He told Harvey he was sending him to Rome as head of the CIA station.
Harvey was not interested in Rome. He had been head of station in Berlin ten years earlier, when there was a real job to do. A posting to Rome, he felt, was an insult to an agent of his standing. McCone told him it was not a matter for debate. If he did not accept the post in Rome, he would have to be retired from the CIA.
Harvey must have wondered what had become of his world. He had no time for either the President or Robert Kennedy. The President had been responsible for the failure of the Bay of Pigs landing. He had prevented the CIA from taking the level of action required to do the job and then blamed the CIA for the failure. Whatever had happened to ‘the buck stops here’?
And now, for the past nine months, Robert Kennedy had acted in a similar manner by preventing Harvey and his team from taking decisive action to end the Castro regime, and he was blaming Harvey. A plague on both the Kennedys, he thought.
Harvey reluctantly accepted the posting to Rome.
London
MI6 were, and continue to be, extremely secretive about their agents and their work. In the 1960s, their chief – Sir Dick White – was known only as ‘C’. Even within the organisation individual projects were ring-fenced and this was particularly so with the Penkovsky case.
In the early days of running Penkovsky, when the quality, quantity and value of the military intelligence he was able to produce became apparent, White had expanded MI6’s Ministry of Defence liaison section and brought them into the ring. After initial assessment, the material had been sent to scientific and technical research experts – without reference to its source – for detailed analysis, interpretation and comment.
Anyone leaving the Penkovsky case ring on transfer to other duties was warned never to say anything about Penkovsky or the case, not even to their new bosses.
One of the drawbacks of this level of secrecy is that there can be no public praise, award or reward for their achievements. White was determined, nevertheless, to use the Penkovsky case to boost the morale of his troops and stress the importance and practical value of their work.
Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he took the possibly unprecedented step of assembling MI6 London staff in the headquarters cinema room and addressing them thus:†
I have been asked by the CIA to let you know of the absolutely crucial value of the Penkovsky intelligence we have been passing to them. I am given to understand that this intelligence was largely instrumental in deciding that the United States should not make a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, as a substantial body of important opinion in the States has been in favour of doing. In making known this appreciation of our contribution, I would stress to all of you that, if proof were needed, this operation has demonstrated beyond all doubt the prime importance of the human intelligence source, handled with professional skill and expertise.
It is irrelevant whether or not the CIA actually asked White to thank his staff. White was trying to draw a line under the disasters of the Burgess, Maclean and Philby, the Blake, and other cases that had been blighting the relationship between the CIA and MI6. MI6 were now in the ascendancy; they had done a grand job with Penkovsky and, using the lessons learned from it, should look forward with enthusiasm to a new and successful world of greater coordination and cooperation with the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the CIA.
On 10 November the British Ambassador in Havana, Herbert Marchant, sent his first post-Crisis dispatch to the Foreign Office. He analysed the critical events and the failure of the intelligence community to foresee them:
Most Cubans have now been waiting – some hopefully, some fearfully – for at least two years for ‘something to happen’. All this time we have lived in an atmosphere of the wildest rumours, 90 per cent of them totally without foundation and many of them specifically about gigantic nuclear missiles. Intelligence agencies must therefore be excused if they tended to discount the hundreds of recent rocket stories from their usually unreliable sources. The arrival of much of the Russian equipment, the daily movement of technicians, of the sand and cement, all this was cheerfully accounted for by the generally accepted fact that the Russians were known to be busy building ground-to-air rocket sites all over the country. What we did not see anything of until too late was the vital equipment and the larger missiles which were almost certainly moved only at night.
My own early disbelief, shared by most of my colleagues, was based on the contention, which I still hold to be true, that Castro’s first principle in all his thinking and doing has been to survive and ‘defend the Revolution’. It was consequently our opinion, and we thought it was also Castro’s opinion, that the installation of offensive missiles in Cuba was the one thing that would justify United States invasion. We therefore believed that neither Castro nor Khrushchev would consider such a move. Although we still do not know exactly where our reasoning went astray it seems probable that the fault lay in not realising how high the stakes were that Khrushchev was prepared to play for.
The Ambassador’s final sentence strongly supports Penkovsky’s regular warnings, during his debriefing sessions, about the danger of underestimating Khrushchev’s military ambitions and determination.
‡
The United States lifted the naval quarantine on 20 November 1962, in recognition of the progressive removal of Soviet armaments from Cuba.
† See Anthony Verrier, Through the Looking Glass: British Foreign Policy in an Age of Illusions (London: Cape, 1983).