I was a naive young reporter from South Dakota by way of Arizona, and had just begun work for the Miami Herald in the Hollywood, Florida, bureau a few miles north of Miami. Having arrived in South Florida with an interest in Latin America, I had more than a passing, but not intimate, awareness of events unfolding in Cuba. The newspaper itself carried a daily diet of stories that reflected the growing concern about Cuba in the Cold War context. “No Aid? So what—Cuba,” read a page-one headline July 10, 1959, my first day at work. “Says It Gets None Anyway,” added a subhead. An adjacent story from Guatemala proclaimed: “Guatemala Has Open Door for Commies—Jail.” Soon to come was the Bay of Pigs, then the missile crisis. The Hollywood office fronted the railroad tracks. From there we watched an endless string of southbound freight trains passing by with military equipment headed to Miami and the Florida Keys for a possible invasion of Cuba. But it wasn’t until the spring of 1964, when I began work on the Herald ’s Latin America desk, that I realized how much more bubbled beneath the surface. This book is a result of a latent but lingering curiosity to know more about what was happening in that period, abetted by several fortuitous events years later.

It was not uncommon in those earlier days for reporters on certain beats involving foreign affairs to talk with CIA officers, much as one would talk to the political officer in a U.S. embassy. The Herald’s executives were aware of the contacts. In the interest of full disclosure, the first CIA official I ever knowingly met was John Dimmer. Dimmer succeeded Ted Shackley in mid-1965 as chief of JMWAVE, the Miami Station that was located on the University of Miami’s South Campus and served as the frontline command post for the secret war against Cuba. Dimmer stayed only briefly. Paul Henzie, later to serve on Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council staff, succeeded Dimmer. Jake Esterline took over in early 1968 to complete the dismantling and relocating of JMWAVE. By the time Esterline departed in 1972, we had become friends, and we kept

in touch after his retirement. I later learned from another source that he had been chief of the CIA’s Cuba Project, that resulted in the Bay of Pigs. Esterline retired, first to the U.S. Virgin Islands, in part because he had been told he might be on a Cuban hit list for his role in the Bay of Pigs, an apparently erroneous warning. He then moved to North Carolina in the 1980s.

I wanted to do a story about his career for the Herald. He agreed to talk. The story appeared in the Herald’s Sunday magazine in January 1995. That prompted a telephone call from Jim Blight, a professor of international relations at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Blight, working with Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, a private, Washington-based research organization, was preparing a conference on the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose in the spring. He had seen the story, and he wanted my assistance enlisting Esterline’s participation. Sam Halpern, another CIA veteran actively involved in the post-Bay of Pigs covert war, also participated. I was invited to the conference as an observer. I realized then how much was not known about the covert campaign against Cuba. Even today, no comprehensive chronology of events is available for the six years from 1959 to 1965, the period of the most intense covert activity. This book is an attempt to fill that historical void.

The initial idea had been to collaborate with Esterline on a book about his career, focusing heavily on the Bay of Pigs, with the cooperation of Jack Hawkins, the Marine colonel and paramilitary chief for the Cuba Project. I hat approach changed suddenly on a Saturday afternoon in mid-October 1999 when Esterline died of a heart attack. The scope of the project was broadened to cover the period from pre-Bay of Pigs until the mid-1960s. Thousands of pages of declassified documents had become available over the previous decade; many of them were made available to me by the National Security Archive. And a few of the key participants were still alive and willing to talk. This book relies heavily on both interviews and documents to help the reader understand the context in which decisions were made.

While Esterline’s untimely death changed the focus, his contributions, along with those of Jack Hawkins, provide new insights into the Bay of Pigs failure. I am particularly grateful to Jack Hawkins for the many observations he provided in interviews, letters, and written analyses. Peter Kornbluh and Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive were invaluable in making available documents and conference invitations. The staff

PREFACE

at the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, and particularly Senior Archivist Regina Greenwell, were most helpful and courteous.

Sam Halpern, executive assistant to both Bill Harvey and Desmond FitzGerald in the post-Bay of Pigs period, willingly consented to two informative interviews and proved an essential and willing contact for fact checking. Other former CIA officials who made themselves available include Ted Shackley, who I met for the first time in 1999, and who consented to two interviews before his death in December 2002; Tom Parrott, an aide to Gen. Maxwell Taylor when Taylor served as President Kennedy’s military representative in the White House, and who kept minutes for the Special Group that approved covert proposals; Nestor Sanchez, case officer for Rolando Cubela, the temperamental revolutionary “asset” inside Cuba who the CIA hoped would lead an internal coup against Castro; Robert Reynolds, sent to Miami as CIA station chief before the Bay of Pigs and who arranged for JMWAVE’s location on University of Miami property; Jim Flannery, an aide to Richard Bissell at the time of the Bay of Pigs; Justin Gleichauf of the agency’s overt office in Miami and the first real CIA man to arrive in South Florida permanently after Batista’s fall on New Year’s Day, 1959; and Manuel “Manny” Chavez, the Air Force intelligence officer detached to Gleichauf’s office in Miami.

This account would have been woefully inadequate without the Cuban exile perspective from Erneido Oliva, Rafael Quintero, and Carlos Obregon. All three dedicated a big chunk of their lives to serve as soldiers in the secret war. Oliva distinguished himself as the second in command of the Bay of Pigs brigade. He later became the highest-ranking Cuban in the U.S. Army Reserve as a major general and deputy commander of the Washington, D.C., National Guard. Quintero was among the first to join the ranks of exiles for what was to become the Bay of Pigs, was infiltrated into Cuba to report in advance of the invasion, and returned again during Operation Mongoose. As deputy to exile leader Manuel Artime, he provided invaluable insight for understanding the little-known “autonomous operations.” Obregon, today the Miami representative for a South American publishing company, joined the CIA in the fall of 1961, becoming an infiltration team leader with numerous missions to Cuba.

John Crimmins, the State Department’s coordinator of Cuban affairs and an acquaintance since the 1960s, provided a copy of the unpublished manuscript written by his late colleague, Robert Hurwitch, as well as his own observations. George Volsky, the enigmatic Polish-born exile from Cuba who worked for both the United States Information Agency and

PREFACE

the New York Times in Miami during the period covered in this book, helped with local flavor.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to several people at the Miami Herald for giving me the opportunities that made this book a reality, among them Lee Hills, George Beebe, Al Neuharth, John McMullan, Larry Jinks, and Jim Buchanan. Special appreciation also goes to former Miami Herald researcher Liz Donovan for her invaluable assistance, not only during my years at the newspaper, but after my retirement. Last, but certainly not least, I am grateful to George McGovern, my college adviser, who made me aware of a world beyond South Dakota.

From Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba on New Year’s Day of 1959 until the mid-1960s, the U.S. government resorted to economic and political destabilization, propaganda, manipulation, sabotage, and assassination plots to remove him. It was one of the most extensive, sustained, and ultimately futile covert action programs by one country against the government of another in the post-World War II era. Instead of ridding the hemisphere of Castro, the covert campaign undoubtedly contributed to maintaining and consolidating his control over Cuba. During more than forty years, he has outlasted nine U.S. presidents, from Eisenhower to Clinton.

The failed attempts to rid Cuba of Castro also transformed the face of South Florida, which became an area of anti-Castro ferment and upheaval. By the end of 1962 the CIA station at an abandoned Navy air facility south of Miami had become the largest in the world outside its Langley, Virginia, headquarters. Thousands of Cuban exiles were on the payroll. Thousands of others who weren’t, attempted to give the impression they were. It gave them cachet and helped them raise funds. The same applied to scores of would-be soldiers of fortune who drifted in and out of the area, hoping to get a piece of the anti-Castro action. Some had previously fought with Castro against Fulgencio Batista, the corrupt Cuban dictator who fled the island on the first day of 1959.

The American public saw only the tip of the covert iceberg. The broader outlines emerged piecemeal in newspapers, magazines, and books over the ensuing decades. But only in recent years—with the declassification of thousands of once-secret documents and, as time passed, a greater willingness by surviving participants to talk about their actions—has the depth and extent of Washington’s anti-Castro covert activities become apparent.

Drawing on those documents, the work of previous researchers, and scores of interviews since 1995 with people involved, this book is an effort

to provide a comprehensive account of what happened, how it happened, why it happened, and how, after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, antiCastro activities gradually lost momentum as President Johnson turned his attention to Vietnam.

Even now, four decades later, there remain questions to be answered, decisions to be explained, “facts” to be corrected, lessons to be learned, and information yet to be revealed about the secret war against Castro. Some of the details may never be known, not having been committed to paper but taken to the grave by those involved.

In hindsight, given what is known today, some may wonder how our leaders could have sanctioned such activities in good conscience. The answer is simple. The tenor of the times was vastly different. The Cold War was at its hottest. Almost uniformly, the American mentality toward the Communist threat was one of “us against them.” The media, opposition politicians, dissidents, and virtually anyone else who today would openly challenge such activities were, with rare exceptions, quiet. The prevailing atmosphere among policy makers and the public was that communism had to be stopped. And to do so, the ends justified the means, covert action among them.

Such was the case with Cuba under Castro. He was seen as another enemy in the war against communism. But he was much closer to home, and that made him, and Cuba, even more dangerous.

The war against Castro was a secret war that would have been impossible to wage just a few years later. As the United States became enmeshed in Vietnam, the antiwar movement exploded in streets and on campuses across the country. Then came U.S.-supported efforts in 1970 to prevent Marxist Salvador Allende from becoming president of Chile, followed in 1973 by a U.S.-encouraged coup in which Allende died, apparently by his own hand. In between, Watergate occurred. The times had changed, helped along by congressional hearings in the mid-1970s that exposed both the U.S. role in Chile and officially sanctioned assassination plots against foreign leaders, including Castro. With the media and the public less tolerant of such activities, the hearings made it more difficult for Washington to justify and wage secret wars. America and Americans had lost their innocence.

It wasn’t until 1975 that the scope of covert efforts to oust Castro became publicly exposed in Senate hearings led by the late senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat. The hearings were closed, but the commit

tee subsequently published an interim report entitled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. The Church Committee report, as it became widely known, remains among the most useful and authoritative documents available on not only the assassination attempts but also the framework within which they occurred citing “concrete evidence of at least eight plots involving the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro from 1960 to 1965.Among these plots was the Bay of Pigs, for which assassination was a closely held part of the plan, though unknown even to its project director and paramilitary planner.

And for the first time, the public heard of Operation Mongoose, code name for the initial post-Bay of Pigs attempt by the Kennedy administration to remove Castro. Its arsenal ran the gamut of dirty tricks: from paramilitary activities and sabotage to psychological, political, and economic warfare; all aimed at provoking an internal uprising.

The Church Committee report defined covert action as an “activity meant to further the sponsoring nation’s foreign policy objectives, and to be concealed in order to permit that nation to plausibly deny responsibility.” 2 From 1955 to 1970, it noted,

the basic authority for covert operations was a directive from the National Security Council, NSC 5412/2. This directive instructed the CIA to counter, reduce and discredit ‘International Communism’ throughout the world in a manner consistent with United States foreign and military policies. It also directed the CIA to undertake covert operations to achieve this end and defined covert operations as any covert activities as related to propaganda, economic warfare, political action (including sabotage, demolition and assistance to resistance movements) and all activities compatible with the directive. In 1962, the CIA’s General Counsel rendered the opinion that the Agency’s activities were ‘not inhibited by any limitations other than those broadly set forth in NSC 5412.’ 3

The committee, too, noted the prevailing atmosphere in which the alleged assassination plots and other covert activities occurred.

It was considered necessary to wage a relentless cold war against Communist expansion wherever it appeared in the ‘back alleys of the world.’ This called for a full range of covert activities in response to the operations of Communist clandestine services. 4

Suddenly, with Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, the Cold War and the Communist threat it posed could no longer be viewed in the abstract of

some faraway place; it was at America’s doorstep. Cuba had become one of the battlefields in the “back alley” war against communism, a responsibility that fell largely to the Central Intelligence Agency, created by President Truman in the immediate post-World War II period. And at the time, it was a war that had overwhelming popular support.

As the late Jake Esterline, the CIA’s project chief for the failed Bay of Pigs, summarized in a 1995 interview with the author, communism was considered the mortal enemy of America, to be confronted at every turn. Dictators and human rights were secondary considerations. This attitude, in his view, didn’t really change until the last half of the 1960s when protests began to build against Vietnam.

For Esterline, the CIA’s activities in Latin America during his heyday were a logical follow-up to World War II and the spreading fear of communism. “When the Second World War ended and the Cold War started, the issue of survival was more clearly drawn” than it is today. “There may be just as many enemies today but the issues are not clearly drawn.” 5

It’s also important to remember, said Esterline, that the CIA “was simply an agency of U.S. policy,” and not the rogue elephant it has sometimes been described as. “They never did these things on their own. They were an instrument of U.S. policy from beginning to end” and as “a secret arm of U.S policy could not respond as to why they were doing these things.”

By the time Castro and Cuba came along, the CIA was already flying high, responsible for “regime changes” in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), and savoring other lesser-known successes. Esterline, himself a veteran of guerrilla warfare in Burma during World War II as a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, describes this atmosphere:

I really guess that as a result of our [the United States’s] success in the Second World War there was kind of a ... I’ve heard the word John Wayne used ... derring-do, and maybe that is a good way to sum it up. There was quite a derring-do attitude, ‘Well, hell, we can do anything if we want to.’ And I feel that related to people like our elitist group in the agency headed by Allen Dulles and his boys.

I think those that left at the end of the war and returned to private life, then were jerked back suddenly, as I was, from other endeavors, probably had lost a little bit of their derring-do but the enthusiasm of others caused us to be swept up in it again. And I suppose that the happenstance of the

Guatemalan success, plus apparently some successes in other parts of the world that I was not necessarily familiar with, made this in a certain group of people within the DDP (as the CIA’s clandestine service was known at the time) kind of fashionable . 6

So again, as he had done earlier with Jacobo Arbenz, the left-leaning president of Guatemala in 1954, President Eisenhower turned to the CIA to deal with Castro and Cuba.

The single concern—and debate—in Washington, even before Castro came to power, was whether he was a Communist. The people who thought he was were enough in number to warrant two feeble attempts to prevent him from taking power. William D. Pawley, a Miami businessman who owned the Havana bus company, who had been U.S. ambassador to Peru and Brazil under Eisenhower, and who was a friend of Batista, initiated the first effort. With Batista’s collapse imminent, Pawley received State Department approval to go to Cuba. There, he tried to persuade Batista to turn power over to a junta that “would be unfriendly to him, but satisfactory to us.” Pawley met with Batista for three hours in Havana on December 9, 1958, offering, among other things, exile for the Cuban leader and his family in Daytona Beach, Florida, where Batista had a home. Batista rejected Pawley’s entreaties. 7 The next effort came in the waning days of December, shortly before Batista fled. It involved a CIA subsidized and supported plan by anti-Batista exile Justo Carrillo and his small Montecristo Movement to spring Col. Ramon Barquin from a Cuban jail on the Isle of Pines. Barquin, a popular and liberal officer, had been imprisoned after an unsuccessful coup d’etat against Batista. The plan was that, once freed, he would head a provisional government to forestall a Castro takeover. That attempt fared no better than had Pawley’s. 8

Still, after taking control in January 1959, enough uncertainty remained in Washington to give Castro the opportunity to prove he wasn’t a Communist. But by the fall of 1959, most U.S. officials had been convinced that if he wasn’t a Communist, he was increasingly under Communist influence, and so the plotting began. On March 17, 1960, Eisenhower approved an elaborate covert action plan designed to oust him. It culminated some thirteen months later—after a change of administrations and many modifications to the original plan—in the Bay of Pigs invasion by a U.S. trained and supported Cuban exile brigade.

The invasion’s failure fell like a cold shower on the CIA. The inevitable

bureaucratic recriminations erupted. There was plenty of blame to go around. President Kennedy publicly accepted the blame, but privately blamed the CIA and the military Joint Chiefs. They, in turn, blamed the president, along with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his State Department, for imposing too many limitations on the operation in an attempt to make U.S. involvement “plausibly deniable,” another catch phrase in the lexicon of covert action.

Again, the Church Committee report offers an authoritative definition of “plausible deniability” and how its interpretation is twisted to satisfy needs of the moment.

Non-attribution to the United States for covert operations was the original and principal purpose of the so-called doctrine of ‘plausible denial.’ Evidence before the Committee clearly demonstrates that this concept, designed to protect the United States and its operatives from the consequences of disclosures, has been expanded to mask decisions of the President and his senior staff members. A further consequence of the expansion of this doctrine is that subordinates, in an effort to permit their superiors to ‘plausibly deny’ operations, fail to fully inform them about those operations.

‘Plausible denial’ has shaped the processes for approving and evaluating covert actions. For example, the 40 Committee and its predecessor, the Special Group, have served as ‘circuit breakers’ for Presidents, thus avoiding consideration of covert action by the Oval Office.

‘Plausible denial’ can also lead to the use of euphemism and circumlocution, which are designed to allow the President and other senior officials to deny knowledge of an operation should it be disclosed. The converse may also occur; a President could communicate his desires for a sensitive operation in an indirect, circumlocutious manner. An additional possibility is that the President may, in fact, not be fully and accurately informed about a sensitive operation because he failed to receive the ‘circumlocutious’ message. The evidence . . . reveals that serious problems of assessing intent and ensuring both control and accountability may result from the use of ‘plausible denial.’ 9

The doctrine of “plausible denial” has kept alive one of the lingering questions of Kennedy’s attempts to rid the Caribbean of Castro; Did the president and/or his brother Bobby know and approve of the assassination efforts?

Kennedy loyalist and historian Arthur Schlesinger, a special assistant

to President Kennedy, insists that the Kennedys did not approve, and were not even aware, of the assassination plots, most of which came during the Kennedy administration. Others, including many within the CIA, are just as certain that the Kennedys not only had knowledge of the assassination plots, but encouraged them, perhaps in an “indirect, circumlocutious manner.”

Whether they did or did not know of the assassinations, it is clear that failure at the Bay of Pigs intensified, rather than ended, the covert antiCastro effort, with Bobby Kennedy, the president’s brother and attorney general, leading the charge. There seems little doubt that the intensified effort was fueled, at least in part, by the Kennedys’ desire to extract revenge for the Bay of Pigs defeat.

Bobby, in a memo to the president written the day the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed, was already urging a new campaign to deal with Castro. 10 The next day, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in a memo to Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that the president had asked the Defense Department to “develop a plan for the overthrow of the Castro government by the application of U.S. military force.” McNamara cautioned, however, “the request for this study should not be interpreted as an indication military action against Cuba is probable.” 11

Next, the National Security Council [NSC] “agreed that the United States should not undertake military intervention in Cuba now, but should do nothing that would foreclose the possibility of military action in the future.” The NSC also named White House aide Richard Goodwin to head a Cuba Task Force. 12

The Cuba debate, led by Goodwin’s task force, received substantial input from Bobby Kennedy, who by now was aggressively involved in the Cuba problem. Low-level covert operations continued, including assistance to the Cuban underground, pretty much on automatic pilot throughout the summer of 1961. A detailed plan to overthrow Castro finally emerged in early November. Under the code name Operation Mongoose, all the relevant U.S. government departments and agencies— not only the CIA—were mobilized for the renewed anti-Castro campaign.

Reflecting his distrust of the CIA after the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy named Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale the Mongoose Operation chief. Lansdale, then working from the Pentagon, was a quirky and flamboyant officer with a reputation for expertise in counterinsurgency. Bill Harvey, almost as notorious as Lansdale in his own right, was to take charge of

THE CASTRO OBSESSION

the CIA’s Cuba Task Force under Mongoose. The president’s ubiquitous brother, Bobby, took on the dual roles of attorney general and Mongoose czar. He made sure Cuba became the administration’s highest priority.

Under Lansdale’s grand scheme, everything that came under the Mongoose umbrella was to be done by the numbers, including Castro’s fall the following October. The basic concept of the entire operation was to “bring about the revolt of the Cuban people. The revolt will overthrow the Communist regime and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.” 13

At the Pentagon, Operation Northwoods, apparently the code name for the Defense Department’s slice of Mongoose, produced a flurry of sometimes-bizarre proposals designed to provide an excuse for deposing Castro.

Reading the documents some forty years later, it’s difficult to see how grown men could have taken either Lansdale or Mongoose seriously. Yet, until November 1962, they constituted the Kennedy administration’s Cuba policy. Mongoose culminated, not with the popular revolt Lansdale envisioned, but with resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The missile crisis and the end of Mongoose also brought an end to Cuba policy involvement by Lansdale and Harvey. As part of the crisis resolution, Kennedy secretly pledged that the United States would not invade Cuba, but there was no such restriction on the covert campaign against Castro.

Desmond FitzGerald, an elitist Ivy League veteran of the OSS [SP], took over the CIA’s Cuba program, renaming it the Special Affairs Staff, or SAS. The CIA s operational activities (i.e., intelligence gathering, psychological warfare, underground support, and even sabotage) continued, much as they had under Mongoose and with no greater success.

This time Bobby Kennedy took direct charge of the war against Cuba, with the CIA as his principal operational weapon. The new program had no known code name, instead relying heavily on Bobby’s philosophy to let Cubans be Cubans. In addition to its own efforts, the CIA provided the intelligence, the logistical support, and the cash while Bobby provided the supervision for two selected exile organizations led by Manuel Artime and Manuel Ray. In the bureaucratic jargon of declassified documents, these organizations are known as the “Autonomous Groups.”

The CIA’s post-Mongoose program under FitzGerald also had an assassination component. As with the other assassination plots, no

INTRODUCTION

“smoking gun” has yet been found to show that either of the Kennedys was aware of it, but FitzGerald certainly was.

Ironically, while the administration was still trying to overthrow Castro, back-channel discussions were under way to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations, only to be abruptly interrupted by Kennedy’s assassination. With Kennedy’s death and Lyndon Johnson’s swearing in, covert activities began to languish, although the so-called Autonomous Groups continued to operate. Exile frenzy surrounding the Ray and Artime ventures reached a crescendo as May 20, 1964, the anniversary of Cuban independence, approached. But nothing happened. With the Johnson administration showing little enthusiasm, covert activity—except for intelligence gathering—gradually sputtered to a halt over the next year or so.

In April 1965, Johnson—albeit under different circumstances—did what Kennedy had declined to do at the Bay of Pigs for fear of the wrath of the hemisphere. He ordered U.S. troops into the Dominican Republic, ostensibly to protect Americans and end the bloodshed of a civil war, but primarily to halt what Johnson viewed as the possibility of a Communist takeover of another Caribbean island nation.

CONTENTS