B obby Kennedy was angry. The Bay of Pigs invasion effort had collapsed a day earlier. The Kennedy Cabinet meeting in an April 20, 1961, emergency session at the White House “was about as grim as any meeting I can remember in all my experience in government, which is saying a good deal,” Chester Bowles, the undersecretary of state who was sitting in for Dean Rusk, recorded in his notes of the meeting.
“Lyndon Johnson, Bob McNamara and Bobby Kennedy joined us. Bobby continued his tough, savage comments, most of them directed against the Department of State for reasons which are difficult to understand. When I took exception to some of the more extreme things he said by suggesting that the way to get out of our present jam was not to simply double up on everything we had done, he turned on me savagely,” according to Bowles’s notes. 1
The outburst came, according to RFK biographer C. David Heymann, after Bowles—described by Heymann as Kennedy’s favorite whipping boy—read a State Department paper saying that Castro couldn’t be ousted from office with anything less than a full-scale invasion.
“That’s the most meaningless, worthless thing I’ve ever heard,” Bobby said. “You people are so anxious to protect your own asses that you’re afraid to do anything. All you want to do is dump the whole thing on the president. We’d be better off if you just quit and left foreign policy to someone else.” 2
Bobby’s tirade continued two days later at a National Security Council meeting on Cuba, according to Bowles, when again Bobby “took the lead as at the previous meeting, slamming into anyone who suggested that we go slowly and try to move calmly and not repeat previous mistakes.
“The atmosphere was almost as emotional as the Cabinet meeting two days earlier, the difference being that on this occasion the emphasis was
on specific proposals to harass Castro. . . . The President limited himself largely to asking questions—questions, however, which led in one direction.” Bowles said he “left the meeting with a feeling of intense alarm, tempered somewhat with the hope that this represented largely an emotional reaction of a group of people who were not used to setbacks or defeats and whose pride and confidence had been deeply wounded.” 3
As subsequent events were to suggest, no one’s pride and confidence were more deeply wounded by the Bay of Pigs than the Kennedy brothers’.
Preoccupied with his duties as the new attorney general, Bobby had been absent from preinvasion decisions involving Cuba and the Bay of Pigs. His only exposure came in a January briefing by the Pentagon and the State Department just after his brother’s inauguration and, at the request of the president, a briefing by Richard Bissell a week before the invasion. 4 Bobby’s role changed dramatically with the brigade’s defeat.
“To understand the Kennedy administration’s obsession with Cuba, it is important to understand the Kennedys, especially Robert. From their perspective, Castro won the first round at the Bay of Pigs,” Bissell reflected in his memoirs. “He had defeated the Kennedy team; they were bitter and could not tolerate his getting away with it. The president and his brother were ready to avenge their personal embarrassment by overthrowing their enemy at any cost.” 5
Six months later that obsession culminated with Operation Mongoose, a multiagency covert action program of propaganda, economic sabotage, and infiltration of exile units to foment an uprising in Cuba, directed by Air Force Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, a somewhat quirky and flamboyant officer who had made a reputation in the Philippines as a counterinsurgency expert. But the last word on Mongoose—and everybody involved knew it—rested with the attorney general.
Bobby had given the first clue of his new role in formulating Cuba policy on April 19, a day before the brigade’s collapse was a fait accompli, in a handwritten memo to the president, planting the seeds for a new secret war—and what many people view as the beginning of a Kennedy vendetta—against Castro. The memo declared in part:
The alternative to the steps that were taken this past week [Bay of Pigs] would have been to sit and wait and hope that in the future some fortuitous event would occur to change the situation. This, it was decided, should not be done. The immediate failure of the rebels’ activities in Cuba
does not permit us, it seems to me, to return to the status quo with our policy toward Cuba being one of waiting and hoping for good luck. The events of the last few days make this inconceivable.
Therefore, equally important to working out a plan to extricate ourselves gracefully from the situation in Cuba is developing a policy in light of what we expect we will be facing a year or two years from now ! Castro will be even more bombastic, will be more and more closely tied to Communism, will be better armed, and will be operating an even more tightly held state than if these events had not transpired. . . . Something forceful and determined must be done. Furthermore, serious attention must be given to this problem immediately and not 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.
What is going on in Cuba in the last few days must also be a tremendous strain on Castro. It seems to me that this is the time to decide what our long-term policies are going to be and what will be the results of these policies. 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 now what we are willing to do to stop it. 6
In the same memo, hoping to galvanize concerted hemisphere action, Bobby wondered “if it was reported that one or two of Castro’s MIGs attacked Guantanamo Bay and the United States made noises like this was an act of war and that we might very well have to take armed action ourselves, would it be possible to get the countries of Central and South America through OAS to take some action to prohibit the shipment of arms or ammunition from any outside force into Cuba?” 7
By the time the National Security Council met again April 27, Bowles observed that the “climate is getting considerably better, and the emotional attitudes are falling back into line. If anyone had not attended the previous meetings, he would have thought the NSC meeting this morning
had its share of fire and fury. However, it was in far lower key_At this
stage plans continue for all kinds of harassment to punish Castro for the humiliation he has brought to our door. However, the general feeling is that all this should be handled carefully, that there should not be too much publicity, that attitudes of others should be taken into account.” 8
President Kennedy had already asked the Defense Department to “develop a plan” for overthrowing Castro by military force, but he cautioned that his request “should not be interpreted as an indication that
U.S. military action against Cuba is probable.” The request to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came the same day, April 20, that the president was telling the American Society of Newspaper Editors “our restraint is not inexhaustible.” 9 All this occurred with the ultimate fate of the Cuban Brigade, how many had escaped, been captured, or killed, unknown.
Walt Rostow, then the deputy national security assistant, followed with his own advice to the president, warning “right now the greatest problem we face is not to have the whole of our foreign policy thrown off balance by what we feel and what we do about Cuba itself. We have suffered a serious setback; but it will be trivial compared to the consequences of not very soon gaining momentum along the lines which we have begun in the past three months.”
Rostow then offered his assessment of the administration’s existing foreign policy and his recommendations for regaining initiative and momentum. It came with what appeared to be implicit advice for Bobby to calm down, when he noted, “as I said to the Attorney General the other day, when you are in a fight and knocked off your feet, the most dangerous thing to do is to come out swinging wildly.” 10
Not only was Bobby taking control of the new clandestine effort against Castro, the president also named him to the Taylor board of inquiry into the Bay of Pigs. Presumably the appointment was made, in part, to assure that the board’s findings, if not favorable, were at least acceptable to the White House. In its mid-June final report, the Taylor group reinforced the views of those like Bobby Kennedy who were all for action now. The report noted “the general feeling that there can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor.” It recommended that “the Cuban situation be reappraised in the light of all presently known factors and new guidance be provided for political, military, economic and propaganda action against Castro.” 11
As Heymann observed, “on the [Taylor] committee and off, RFK took it upon himself to shift fault for the failure.” Hanson Baldwin, then military editor of the New York Times, told Heymann about a telephone conversation he had with the attorney general: “I talked to Bobby Kennedy over the phone and, of course, he was trying to get the onus off his brother.... He said: ‘Well, have you looked at the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in this? They’re the ones to blame. You ought to investigate that.’ And I said ‘I have and I will.’ In fact, I’d talked to all the Joint Chiefs . . .
and it was pretty clear that it was a botched-up operation all around. [John] Kennedy had lost his nerve. He never really understood what he was doing, I guess. He took it on too soon.” 12
The next significant date in the evolution of the administration’s postBay of Pigs Cuba policy came at a May 5 meeting of the National Security Council, during which it was formally agreed, and later approved by the president, that “U.S. policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro.” The National Security Council also decided “that the United States should not undertake military intervention in Cuba now, but should do nothing that would foreclose the possibility of military intervention in the future.” Richard Goodwin, assistant to the special counsel to the president, was to continue as chairman of the Cuba Task Force. Notes of the meeting recorded that “it was decided that sooner or later we probably would have to intervene in Cuba, but that now is not the time.” Secretary of State Rusk “wanted to hold off on covert actions a little while at least. CIA and the task group will look at all covert proposals for Cuba.” The formation of a Cuban Freedom Brigade was rejected, but approval was given for “the induction of Cuban volunteers into the U.S. military forces.” 13
The historical record indicates that the drafting of, and reaching agreement on, a new covert action plan against Cuba occupied much of the rest of the spring and summer. Bissell, still in charge of the CIA’s covert operations, convened his agency troops on May 9, telling them “there is an urgent need to decide what we are going to do next—what people and facilities we are going to use . . . planning and carrying out sabotage operations which would call for the use of a minimum of people . .. also think of training programs for resistance and underground types.” He cited the need for “an outline proposal for covert action” to be drafted within a week. 14 The result was a May 19 document, entitled “Program of Covert Action Aimed at Weakening the Castro Regime,” premised on three basic assumptions: (1) There would be no intervention of U.S. armed forces except in response to aggressive military action by Cuba directed at the United States; (2) There would be no organizing and training of a Cuban exile military force for action against Cuba; but (3) The United States would permit and provide “covert support of Cuban clandestine activities and the carrying out of covert unilateral activities . . . including the use of maritime and air facilities within the United States as the bases for staging sabotage, in-exfiltration, supply, raider and propaganda (including leaflet dropping) operations.”
The objective was to “plan, implement and sustain a program of covert action designed to exploit the economic, political and psychological vulnerabilities of the Castro regime. It is neither expected nor argued that the successful execution of this covert program will in itself result in the overthrow of the Castro regime” except “only as the covert contribution to an overall national program designed to accelerate the moral and physical disintegration of the Castro government.”
The proposal broke the covert program into Short Term Tasks and Long Term Tasks. Identified as Short Term Tasks were: Operational Intelligence Collection; Sabotage Operations against Selected Targets; Operations in Support of Guerrilla Activities; Operations Directed at Defection of Castro Officials; Operations Directed at Destroying the Popular Image of Castro; and Operations Aimed at Strengthening the Prestige and Acceptability of the Revolutionary Council. The Long Term Tasks were: Political Action, Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and Psychological. 15
Even as the debate over a covert action plan continued, “occasional operations were mounted during the summer but there was no overall strategy and little activity.” 16 Bobby’s impatience and frustration were growing with the lack of progress toward an acceptable plan. He reflected his unhappiness in a June 1 memorandum complaining: “The Cuba matter is being allowed to slide, mostly because nobody really has an answer to Castro. Not many are really prepared to send American troops in there at the present time but maybe that is the answer. Only time will tell.” 17
In July a refined covert action program was presented to the Special Group, the select high-level committee representing State, Defense, CIA, and the White House that dealt with and approved covert activities. The paper cited as its basic objective: “to provide support to a U.S. program to develop opposition to Castro and to help bring about a regime acceptable to the U.S.” The Special Group agreed that “sabotage operations, particularly, require a close policy look” and that “any major operations in this field would be subject to further approval by the Special Group.” 18
Richard Goodwin followed with an August 22 memo to President Kennedy, recommending that the United States “continue and step up covert activities, aimed, in the first instance, at destruction of economic units, and diversion of resources into anti-underground activities. This would be done by Cuban members of Cuban groups with political aims and ideologies.” 19 Another Goodwin memo followed after a meeting of his task force, citing among the decisions taken: “Covert activities would now be directed toward the destruction of targets important to the economy, e.g.,
refineries, plants using U.S. equipment, etc. This would be done within the general framework of covert operations—which is based on the principle that paramilitary activities ought to be carried out through Cuban revolutionary groups which have a potential for establishing an effective political opposition to Castro within Cuba. Within that principle we will do all we can to identify and suggest targets whose destruction will have the maximum economic impact.” 20
An irritating distraction from the efforts to develop a new covert plan arrived at the White House with the September 1961 issue of Fortune magazine, which carried a lengthy article by Charles J. V. Murphy, Fortune’s Washington bureau chief, titled “Cuba: The Record Set Straight.” The story essentially shifted blame from the CIA to the White House for the Bay of Pigs failure. The White House was furious. President Kennedy wanted the article rebutted and to find out the source of the story, said Tom Parrott, a CIA official transferred to the White House from the agency to serve as an aide to General Taylor. 21
Parrott described the president’s reaction to the Murphy article:
Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, told people in the White House to go over the thing, very, very carefully and note all the mistakes. Taylor was then supposed to take that thing [the list of mistakes] and go up and see Time and Life and make the case that Murphy’s thing was wrong. It’s the kind of thing that ordinarily I would have gone along with Taylor because he was quite meticulous about division of labor and anything that had to do with intelligence or Cuba, I was in on it. But in that one he recognized I couldn’t because of my association with Dulles ... so he took his executive officer, a colonel, up to New York. The colonel told me afterwards it was pathetic; that this list was so trivial that it just didn’t make any sense. Taylor was very embarrassed, he felt, trying to make this case. And obviously the Time and Life people didn’t think it was a very good case, but Taylor had to go through with it but he didn’t like it.
The source of the story remains a matter of speculation. Dino Brugioni, a CIA photo interpreter, wrote that Murphy told Brugioni and his boss, Art Lundahl, while they were working with Murphy on another story, that the leaker was Admiral Burke, a member of the Taylor Commission on the Bay of Pigs. “The admiral felt that the president had ‘chickened out’ in not calling for Navy fighter aircraft to cover the Bay of Pigs invasion,” wrote Brugioni. “Murphy said that Burke had nothing but contempt for President Kennedy and his ‘bagman’ at the Department of
Defense, McNamara.” According to Brugioni, President Kennedy was “furious” with the story, suspecting General Cabell as the source of the leak and “asked for his resignation. Cabell tried to explain that he was not the source of the leak, but to no avail.” Cabell resigned January 31, 1962. 22
Tom Parrott believed Bissell “may have supplemented” the information Burke provided to Murphy. Parrott said he had
discovered that Bobby K. had written a memo to brother Jack, saying Murphy’s source undoubtedly was Cabell, and perhaps Bissell. I wasn’t supposed to have been privy to this memo, but I felt it was so vindictive that I should alert the suspects. Cabell’s response was that he had had no contact whatever with Murphy. Bissell’s was ‘I didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.’
I was so fed up at one point with all the false and exaggerated venom that was coming out of the White House crew, that I stuck my neck out with Taylor. I said that I understood that Admiral Burke had said that Murphy’s article was an accurate depiction of what had happened. Taylor fixed me with an icy stare, and I figured I was on my way out of the White House and back to CIA. Then he said, ‘It was pretty accurate.’ 23
By the fall of 1961, Goodwin also was reflecting frustration in the slow development of an acceptable covert action operation. In a November 1 memorandum to the president that had obviously been influenced by Bobby Kennedy, Goodwin expressed his belief that “the concept of a ‘command operation’ for Cuba, as discussed with you by the Attorney General, is the only effective way to handle an all-out attack on the Cuban problem. Since I understand you are favorably disposed toward the idea I will not discuss why the present disorganized and uncoordinated operation cannot do the job effectively.
“The beauty of such an operation over the next few months is that we cannot lose. If the best happens we will unseat Castro,” said Goodwin. “If not, then at least we will emerge with a stronger underground, better propaganda and a far clearer idea of the dimensions of the problem.” And, said Goodwin, the “most effective commander of such an operation” would be the attorney general. The only downside to having Bobby Kennedy head it, he added, “is that he might become too closely identified with what might not be a successful operation.” 24
Two days later, November 3, President Kennedy convened a meeting of about twenty people dealing with Cuban matters at the White House, at which he authorized development of the new covert program. Bobby
Kennedy’s handwritten notes of the fifty-five-minute session are the only known record of the meeting. In the notes, he wrote that McNamara had said he would make Lansdale available to him, who he then “assigned ... to make survey of situation in Cuba—the problem and our assets. My idea is to stir things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites [sic] & Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.” 25 The same day a National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba began by stating that “the Castro regime has sufficient popular support and repressive capabilities to cope with any internal threat likely to develop within the foreseeable future.” 26
The next day, November 4, a top level meeting was convened in the White House attended by Bobby Kennedy, Defense Secretary McNamara, Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Secretary of State Rusk, Lansdale, Alexis Johnson, the deputy undersecretary of state for security affairs, Goodwin, and Bissell. A memorandum for the record written by Bissell, reported that “there seemed to be general acceptance” of (a) the “need for close operational coordination of all arms of the U.S. government that could contribute to the operation,” and (b) “that responsibility for its direction should be lodged in a task force . . . partly for the express purpose of making possible denial that this was another exclusively CIA undertaking.”
Bissell presented a rundown of current and planned CIA activities against Cuba, noting, among other things, that “our approach to date has been to build up competent CIA controlled and independent Cuban capabilities and to set as their priority task the creation of one or more competent resistance organizations within the Island. . . . Meanwhile, however, we are encouraging minor sabotage and planning for larger scale action.” 27 The CIA gave a further indication of what was to come in a November 8 paper, which said, “It is now planned to support in the next few months larger scale infiltrations of men and arms for sabotage and perhaps ultimately guerrilla activities when well-conceived operations are proposed by reputable opposition leaders now outside the country or are requested by the resistance leadership from within. In most cases the sponsorship and ultimate responsibility for such operations will rest with Cubans and the Agency’s role will be that of furnishing support in the form of funds, training, equipment, communications, frequently the
BOBBY TAKES CHARGE
facilities to conduct the actual infiltration itself, and resupply following infiltration if required and feasible.” 28
What became Operation Mongoose was born, but the man who may have inspired its conception —New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc—wasn’t in attendance at its birth. Bob Hurwitch, the State Department official with the Cuba portfolio and among those at the briefing, gave the following account of Szulc’s role in his unpublished memoirs, made available by John Crimmins, one of Hurwitch’s former State Department colleagues. Much of Hurwitch’s attention at the time had been devoted to working with Bobby Kennedy on the release of more than eleven hundred Bay of Pigs Brigade members still in Cuban prisons. But as he wrote in his memoirs:
While our operation [prisoner release] was quietly moving ahead, my journalist friend, Tad Szulc of the NY Times, surprisingly telephoned to ask if he could drop by our home in the Virginia suburbs the next evening. Puzzled, for we had always met before in my office or for luncheon in town, I wondered what he was up to. Tad is an excellent newspaperman, a creative writer, who had especially good contacts with the Cuban exiles. His understanding of the ‘art of the possible,’ however, sometimes became distorted by some strong romantic notions. I have always liked Tad, and found him to be a decent, warm human being. Over a drink the next evening, Tad revealed some thinking he had been doing about the Cuban situation. ‘If the communists could successfully launch wars of national liberation, why couldn’t we, the U.S.?’ he enquired. Wars of national liberation, to be successful, I countered, required highly motivated, well-organized, armed opposition from within which was not the case in Cuba. Tad countered that some of his Cuban exile contacts believed that the time was ripe, and that he was trying the thought out on several people, including Dick Goodwin at the White House. I paid little attention to Tad’s proposal, which I thought impractical in the absence of a situation in Cuba warranting such action. Tad followed this visit by another several days later, on the same theme. Tad reported that he was making good progress with his project, and might even have a meeting with President Kennedy on the subject. Foolishly, I thought he was boasting, and concentrated upon liberating the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Within a week, there was a high-level, inter-agency meeting at the White House which I attended. There, we were given a recital of Tad’s project (without identifying it as such), and informed that a Task Force would be established under the overall supervision of the Attorney General, and under the daily operational control of Air Force General Lansdale. Flabbergasted by this turn of events, I was speechless and
regrettably failed to object to what had seemed to me a doomed, romantic
adventure. 29
Hurwitch’s account of the origins of Mongoose suggest it was more than a coincidence that Goodwin asked Szulc to meet with Bobby Kennedy on November 8, five days after the White House meeting, to discuss the Cuba situation “off-the-record.” Szulc did so “as a friend of Goodwin’s, not as a reporter,” Szulc told the Church Committee in 1975.
During the meeting with Robert Kennedy, the discussion centered on ‘the situation in Cuba following the [Bay of Pigs] invasion [and] the pros and cons of some different possible actions by the United States Government in that context.’ ” according to the committee report.
“At the close of the meeting, Robert Kennedy asked Szulc to meet with the President. The next day Szulc, accompanied by Goodwin, met with President Kennedy for over an hour in the Oval Office. Szulc recalled that the President discussed ‘a number of his views on Cuba in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, asked me a number of questions concerning my conversations with Premier Castro, and . . . what the United States could [or] might do . . . either in a hostile way or in establishing some kind of dialogue.’”
Although the meeting lasted an hour, the only public attention it received was the widely reported question to Szulc by Kennedy: “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?” 30
Neither Goodwin nor Szulc, who died in 2001, acknowledged his role in inspiring Mongoose, although Goodwin related in his 1988 book sentiments regarding Mongoose similar to those Szulc expressed to Hurwitch.
Bobby,” Goodwin said, “was also the point man for his brother’s desire to construct an apparatus to counter what was then perceived as the newest technique in the communist arsenal—subversion, guerrilla armies, wars of national liberation.’ (Not wholly an illusion, proclaimed by Chairman Khrushchev himself as the way to mastery of the third world.) Operation Mongoose, the virtual apotheosis of the Special Forces with their distinctive green berets, a strengthened capacity for covert operations—all these reflected the optimistic, unshakable confidence of the early Kennedy days.” 31
I n a fitting irony, the University of Miami’s sprawling 1,572-acre South Campus research center that once housed the CIA’s forward outpost for Operation Mongoose among its nondescript wood office buildings is now home to the Miami-Dade County Metrozoo.
Attorney General Bobby Kennedy served as the chief Mongoose zookeeper, overseeing the clandestine, interagency war against Fidel Castro from Washington, through his designated surrogate and the project’s chief of operations, Air Force Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale. Mongoose lasted a year—from the end of November 1961 until the missile crisis of 1962 condemned it to an unmourned death. It achieved little for the estimated $50 million that was spent on it.
In retrospect, virtually everything about Mongoose was shrouded in a zoolike atmosphere, beginning with its conception, perhaps from the seeds of a journalist’s idea, to its cryptonym to the unrealistic and often zany proposals to rid Cuba of Castro, which were put forward under pressure by otherwise serious and intelligent officials. Two of its most significant players—Lansdale and the CIA’s Bill Harvey—came to the project with controversial and flamboyant reputations; reputations which they upheld during the course of Mongoose.
But even today, more than four decades and thousands of declassified documents later, Operation Mongoose retains an oddly mystifying quality of a bygone era, cloaked in hyperbole by some and romanticism by others, both of which belie the facts.
There is still a perception in some quarters that it was solely a CIA operation when, in fact, it was seen with disdain by not only many of those in the agency who were privy to Mongoose secrets, but elsewhere in the government as well. Bob Hurwitch, the State Department’s representative to the so-called Caribbean Survey Team [Mongoose] wrote that “the entire operation was pathetic, and I ruefully longed for a way to turn it off.” 1 At the conclusion of a 1996 conference on the Bay of Pigs and
Mongoose attended by former CIA and Kennedy administration officials and academics, Arthur Schlesinger was asked if he had learned anything new. Yeah, he responded, “the CIA didn’t like Mongoose any better than we did,” referring to himself and some other White House aides. 2
In February 1962, just as Mongoose was becoming operational, CIA Director john McCone designated Dick Helms as the agency official responsible for Cuba. Helms offered this assessment of Mongoose in his posthumously published memoirs:
We had been busting our britches on the MONGOOSE operation, but aside from a marked improvement in intelligence collection—which was a considerable achievement—there was damn-all to show for it. Despite our maximum effort we had not inspired any resistance activity worth the name in Cuba; the—in my opinion—ill-advised sabotage operations were but pinpricks. The political emigration was less than unified. Propaganda was, at the least, ongoing. It was the ouster of Castro and his unelected government that interested the President; the increase in intelligence was a by-product, no matter how helpful it was to the all-important production of sound National Intelligence Estimates. The agency’s operational arm was stretched taut and thin. Our response to President Kennedy’s demands had already resulted in what must have been the largest peacetime secret intelligence operation in history—some four to five thousand staff and contract personnel, acres of real estate, and a flotilla-size private navy.
Concluded Helms: “For all the White House pressure, and the combined efforts of everyone involved, Operation MONGOOSE never quite lived up to the dictionary definition, ‘an agile mammal.’ ” 3
The creation of Mongoose, by most accounts, except those from a handful of Kennedy loyalists, came in response to the obsession of the Kennedy brothers with exacting revenge from Fidel Castro for the defeat at the Bay of Pigs.
As Sam Halpern, a veteran of the OSS assigned as deputy director of the CIA’s Caribbean Desk in October 1961, just before Operation Mongoose became official policy, put it: “One thing that I am still kind of confused about and I’ve tried for a long time to figure out the answer—is what made these two gentlemen—both the president and the attorney general—so full of hysteria, paranoia and obsession about Cuba.
. . . It seems to me there has got to be something more to this, other than the fact that they got bloody noses at the Bay of Pigs. Maybe their father convinced them to. . . . Don’t get mad, get even. I mean: to make Cuba
the number-one priority of the agency, at the expense of everything else; then to put Bobby in charge of the operation and this—this boy, really, this hot-tempered boy—to try to run it and do the personal bidding of his brother. Unbelievable.” 4
To Halpern goes credit, or blame, for the code name Mongoose. A short time after he arrived at the CIA’s Cuba Desk, he received a request from Lansdale, who knew Halpern from the Philippines in the 1950s. Lansdale wanted a cryptonym for the new operation, telling Halpern it was easier for him to get one from CIA than to go through the bureaucracy at the Pentagon, where Lansdale was located. 5
“So I picked up the phone and called an old friend of mine from OSS days in World War Two who was the cryptic reference officer in charge of cryptonyms and pseudonyms,” Halpern recalled. “I said ‘Charlotte [Gilbert], I need a cryptonym from the other side of the world. I want to confuse people in the building for about 30 seconds.’ She said, ‘how about the MO diagraph?’ I said ‘that’s fine with me.’ The MO diagraph indicated Thailand in those days. She sent me a list of about a half a dozen ... from the dictionary at random that weren’t being used at that moment.” Mongoose was among them.
“I didn’t know what the hell a mongoose was and I didn’t bother to look it up. ... I had no idea of the legend about the mongoose and the snake. I picked mongoose. It sounded good to me and it makes good sense. I picked up the phone and called Ed [Lansdale] and said ‘the crypt you want is mongoose.’ He said ‘spell it,’ so I spelled it for him and then Ed began to use it. We named it but we in the agency never used it internally ... but he used it for every other part of the government and he used it when he sent papers to us, all stamped Operation Mongoose.”
Mongoose, said Halpern, “was a special activity and from that point of view, whoever knew about Mongoose was kind of in a club all by themselves . . . the Mongoose brotherhood. . . . You could talk about it. Ed used it with the Special Group [high-level group that approved covert activities] and everybody started talking about Mongoose. It could have been any other name ... but it just happened to be Mongoose.”
The name itself had “no relation to anything,” Halpern said, except that “Thailand is on the other side of the globe and I figured if we had wanted to use a crypt for Cuba at that time we would have had to use AM, like the AMLASH Operation. That identifies the crypt as belonging to the Cuba activity. It doesn’t tell you what it is, but you look at it out of the blue, if somebody throws AMLASH at you, the AM means it has to
do with Cuba.” According to Halpern, the first time the name Mongoose surfaced publicly was during the Church Committee’s 1975 Senate hearings on alleged assassinations.
Shortly after his arrival on the Caribbean desk, or Branch 4, of the Western Hemisphere Affairs Division, Halpern and his boss, Ghosn Zogby, were called in by Bissell, who was in his last weeks as head of the clandestine services. He told them he “had just been chewed out in the Cabinet room of the White House by the president and the attorney general for sitting on his ass and doing nothing about Cuba.” 6
“The new marching orders,” said Halpern, “were to get rid of Castro and the Castro regime. I asked Dick Bissell, ‘what are the limitations?’ Bissell said very clearly, as far as I know, none.’ As far as I was concerned there were none. The whole idea was to come up with some ideas how to get rid of him. The first thing we had to do was start writing papers for the Special Group.”
The Special Group consisted of the number-two men in all the agencies involved. It met in the White House as necessary to approve covert action programs. When Bobby Kennedy and General Taylor were added solely for Cuba matters, it became the Special Group Augmented, or SGA.
“The problems of trying to write papers ... at that point were innumerable and I told Helms, ‘Look, we don’t have a pot to piss in. We don’t know what the hell’s going on in Cuba. How the hell can we do something about it until we get some intelligence? We’ve got to find out what’s going on. . . . We need answers before you can plan anything. We just can’t plan in a vacuum. I kept yelling like that. ... I don’t know what
kind of an impact I made, maybe none, but we were still told to write papers.”
The one thing they did not have a problem with, said Halpern, was funding. “When you are running an operation and the president of the United States is personally, directly involved . . . money is no object. We never had to worry about money. If we wanted to spend a half-million bucks on something, we spent it. We never worried about where it was coming from. Nobody knows where the hell it’s coming from. Nobody cares. The president directs it; you do it. So when somebody asks how much does Mongoose cost, there’s no way to tell.” 7
It was nearing the end of 1961. The program had been approved, but it was still very much in its embryonic stages. Lansdale had taken over as its chief of operations, working from the Pentagon, in part to keep him
from being “tainted” by the CIA, which he already had alienated with criticism of the Bay of Pigs.
“Ed Lansdale was a great sparkplug on this but basically it was Bobby Kennedy who did everything. Bobby Kennedy was a guy who was pushing, pushing Ed for all of this kind of stuff,” said Halpern. “And the thing is that Mongoose, or what later became Mongoose, was never, never, never designed, either by Ed Lansdale or Bobby Kennedy, to be solely a CIA operation. Every agency in town had their Mongoose compartment, all very highly secret. You know, don’t touch; burn before reading and all that kind of nonsense.” Those agencies directly involved in Mongoose were the CIA, the State and Defense Departments, and the United States Information Agency, with the Department of Justice (FBI) participating as required. 8
Kennedy and Lansdale, according to Halpern, had expected each of the participating agencies to detail men, money, and material to the operation, but McCone, the new CIA director, Secretary of State Rusk and Secretary of Defense McNamara, all resisted. “Ed didn’t like it because his responsibilities and authority would be diminished.”
During this same late 1961 time frame Ted Shackley—an up-and-coming young CIA operative who had returned from Europe to agency headquarters, where he was dealing with Eastern Europe—was told by his boss to talk to Bill Harvey. Although Harvey did not formally take charge of the CIA’s Cuba task force until February 1962, Cuba already was in his sights.
Shackley had worked for Harvey in Berlin, where the hard-charging, heavy-drinking CIA veteran made his reputation by engineering a sixhundred-yard tunnel into East Berlin to spy on the Soviets. And he was about to work for him again. When he met with Harvey in 1961, said Shackley, “He said, ‘Do me a favor. Go to Miami. Spend whatever time necessary. Write me a report. Tell me with no BS what it is one needs to do from a tactical operational level if we’re going to design a program for Cuba.’ I think by December of 1961, somebody already was talking with Harvey about doing something on Cuba,” and he wanted an assessment “to see if it was something he should tackle.” Shackley went to Miami that same month, where he spent three weeks working on his report. 9
Shackley said he looked at Cuba as a “new problem” in terms of an intelligence collection target, asking himself: “What do we know? What do we need to know? What are we doing operationally? What should we
do that we are not doing? And what would it take in terms of manpower and money to do it?” Shackley wrote his report, went back to Washington, edited it, and turned it in to Harvey. “He read it. I chatted one day on it with him, and I said good-bye. My job was over. I went back to what I was doing.”
For Shackley, the return to his old position at headquarters was shortlived. “In late January 1962 my boss said I had two calls, one from Harvey and one from McCone. I think that was a Friday afternoon.” Both callers said they wanted Shackley in Miami the following Monday morning to begin a new assignment as deputy station chief. The old station chief departed shortly after Shackley arrived, and he became head of JMWAVE, code name for the Miami Station, a position he kept until June 1965.
During the short lifetime of Mongoose, JMWAVE grew to be the largest station in the world outside headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Eventually some four hundred clandestine service officers toiled there, overseeing the activities of thousands of Cuban exiles added to the payroll for everything from propaganda to sabotage. Some three to four hundred front companies were created throughout South Florida. The agency owned or leased marinas, boats, planes, “safe houses,” and scores of other properties in addition to operating the third largest navy in the Caribbean, after the United States and Cuba.
For Bissell, it was hard to understand decades later that the cautious president, who canceled the air strikes at the Bay of Pigs, had aggressively, through his brother, hammered on the CIA to do more. “If the Kennedys felt this strongly about waging war against Castro,” wrote Bissell, “relaxing the constraints that crippled the planners at the Bay of Pigs would have been much easier in the long run . . . than undertaking a successor project in the hope of achieving the same results.” Bissell concluded that the debate was still open on whether Mongoose was a good operation and served the long-term interests of the United States. 10
History suggests that Mongoose was neither a “good operation” nor “served the long-term interests of the United States.” And it certainly did not achieve its objective, as stated by Lansdale, of bringing about the downfall of Castro by “a popular movement of Cubans from within Cuba,” with support from the United States. The option of U.S. military intervention, if necessary, always loomed in the background.
I guess I would describe it as really an amorphous exercise that wasn’t going to go anywhere and it didn’t go anywhere,” said Tom Parrott, who
kept minutes for the high-level SGA that had Mongoose oversight responsibilities. “The objective was once described, I think, to keep the pot simmering, or something like that. But nothing really concrete came out of it that amounted to anything. Lansdale was totally incompetent in that job. He sold himself to the Kennedy boys as the greatest thing since James Bond . . . [but] they were just spinning their wheels.” 11
The passage of time exposed the folly of the operation, but in late 1961 Mongoose was still in its early stages of development. Reservations about the operation never reached the top, or if they did, they were ignored. Declassified documents reflected widespread skepticism, however. Asked how enthusiastic the CIA was about Mongoose, Halpern replied: “We weren’t, from the director on down, we weren’t, I’ll tell you. Hell, I fought it all I could. You do what you’re told to do, but the thing was silly.” 12
Bissell recalled that when the “Kennedys wanted action, they wanted it fast.” Looking for a quick solution, Bobby “was impressed by Lansdale’s name and reputation, more so than any concrete plans Lansdale evolved.” Bissell remembered attending Mongoose meetings “where Lansdale outlined his approach, but... I thought his ideas impractical and never had much faith they would be successful. I was under a stern injunction, however, to do everything possible to assist him.” 13
Halpern described Lansdale as a “con man, absolutely perfect. He’s the man in the gray flannel suit from Madison Avenue in New York. I think he could sell refrigerators to Eskimos or ... the Brooklyn Bridge to people who don’t have cars. I betcha he could sell that, too. He was very good. You got to give him credit for that.” 14
Parrott, as White House keeper of the minutes for the Special Group, said that he “had a little network of people that I dealt with in State, Defense, and CIA on coordinating things before these meetings. And we ... I guess about four of us ... came up with a name for Lansdale because we didn’t want to use the name so much on a lot of nonsecure phones. So we called him the FM, the Field Marshal. It was really pretty bad and it [Mongoose] was not effective, obviously.” 15
One of the more colorful assessments of Lansdale came from Al Haig, who became involved with Cuba post-Mongoose, in February 1963, as an aide to Army Secretary Cyrus Vance and working directly for Joe Califano, the Army’s general counsel. “I was told to go up and see Ed Lansdale when I joined Vance. I went up to see him and he’s the strangest duck I ever talked to. It was something else. He was telling me about the Philippines. That’s all he wanted to talk about. I didn’t get anything on Cuba. I
went back to Joe and said, ‘That’s a complete waste of time.’ I said, ‘That guy’s a dingbat.’ I thought he was then, and to this day, I think he was.” 16
But Lansdale moved ahead, self-confident and unfazed. In a December 7 memorandum—referring to an earlier presidential memorandum— Lansdale noted it had been decided “that the United States will use all available assets in a project to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime.” He complained that the past “orientation and programming” of the CIA regarding Cuba had been “definitely out of phase with the objective of establishing a popular movement within Cuba to overthrow Castro and the Communist regime. In the main, CIA thinking has been to apply militant force covertly (such as action teams for ‘smash and grab’ raids on up to armed resistance groups), in the hope that a popular uprising would possibly harass the regime. The early task, then, has been to reorient this 180°, with militant (sabotage, etc.) actions to be considered as part of the support of the popular movement we are generating. The basic strategy of building our action upon a genuine internal popular movement is underlined; this will apply the major lesson to be learned from earlier operations in Indonesia and Cuba.”
Lansdale then listed four “tasks assigned to the representative of the Director of Central Intelligence” along with four “bold new actions to help the popular movement for CIA executive follow through.” Included among the tasks were tightening and reorienting its Cuba activities “with a hard look at operational effectiveness, especially the management and programs of the field station in Florida.” Another task was the formation of a “nucleus for a popular Cuban movement” and a “program for this Cuban nucleus to use.”
The final task called for “special support projects” to be “readied for use on call. These projects (such as operations to scuttle shipping and otherwise hamper the regime) will be timed to support actions by the movement and to permit the movement to take credit for them.” Lansdale’s memo also cited what he expected of the State and Defense Departments and the U.S. Information Agency for the Mongoose program. 17
As described by Halpern, it was a time of both frenzy and frustration for the CIA operatives involved with Mongoose.
We were struggling like hell over the Thanksgiving holiday and Christmas and New Year’s trying to make sense out of these vague ideas about how to get rid of Castro. ... It was murder. It was just flat out trying to make
sense out of what the hell we could offer them, and I kept saying, ‘All we can offer them is we’ll get some intelligence and when we get the intelligence, after that then maybe we can come up with a plan, but not before.’
I remember arguing, I think with Bissell, before we got Ed’s papers . . . and we could have done a better job than Ed on that ... if you want just talk and smoke and mirrors, we can do it, but it’s silly if we sit down and write a piece of paper for the president of the United States, which is who you’re writing for when you write for the Special Group, and we can’t produce. I said, ‘We’ll be in worse shape than we are now. This is crazy. Nobody likes us anyway. After the Bay of Pigs, we’re all a bunch of dummies. And if we promise something and can’t produce it, this is going to be a garden tea party compared to what will happen to us afterwards. . . . They’ll cut us to ribbons.’ 18
In a January 11, 1962, progress report to the Special Group, Lansdale indicated problems with recruiting “suitable Cubans to accomplish the initial task of infiltration.” He also reported that “the prevailing policy on sabotage is still in effect, i.e., that no actions which would be dangerous to the population will be undertaken, nor will major demolitions be done at this stage.” 19 On the diplomatic and economic side, the State Department was laying the groundwork for hemisphere isolation of the Castro government at an upcoming OAS foreign ministers meeting and preparing for the imposition by President Kennedy of a full trade embargo against Cuba, both overt elements of Operation Mongoose, which occurred in February 1962. 20
In a January 18 “Program Review” of Mongoose, Lansdale laid out a “target schedule” for thirty-two “tasks” to be achieved by the CIA, State and Defense Departments, and the U.S. Information Agency in the areas of intelligence, political, economic, psychological, and military action. Many of them were creative, others obviously unrealistic, unachievable, and even idiotic. Some examples:
Task 5: CIA to submit plan by 1 February for defection of top Cuban government officials, to fracture the regime from within. The effort must be imaginative and bold enough to consider a ‘name’ defector to be worth at least a million U.S. dollars. This can be a key to our political action goal and must be mounted without delay as a major CIA project. . . .
Task 17: State to report by 15 February on feasibility of harassing Bloc shipping by refusing entry to U.S. ports (statedly for security reasons), if vessels have called at Cuban ports. . . .
Task 25: USIA to submit plan by 15 February for the most effective psychological exploitation of actions undertaken in the Project, towards the end result of awakening world sympathy for the Cuban people (as a David) battling against the Communist regime (as a Goliath) and towards stimulating Cubans inside Cuba to join ‘the cause.’. . .
Task 28: By 15 February CIA will report on plans and actions for propaganda support of the popular movement inside Cuba. Included will be exactly what is planned for use by the movement inside Cuba, and feasibility of using smuggled food packets (such as the ‘I Shall Return’ cigarette packets to Philippine guerrillas in World War II) as morale boosters in generating popular support. . . .
Task 29: Defense to submit contingency plan for U.S. military force to support the Cuban popular movement, including a statement of conditions under which Defense believes such action would be required to win the Project’s goal and believes such action would not necessarily lead to general war. Due 28 February.
In the same paper, Lansdale gave several further indications that U.S. military intervention—a theme that runs continuously through the life of Mongoose—was seriously contemplated under the right conditions. He concluded a section headed “Concept of Operation” by declaring: “The climactic moment of revolt will come from an angry reaction of the people to a government action (sparked by an incident), or from a fracturing of the leadership cadre within the regime, or both. (A major goal of the Project must be to bring this about.) The popular movement will capitalize on this climactic moment by initiating an open revolt. Areas will be taken and held. If necessary, the popular movement will appeal for help to the free nations of the Western Hemisphere. The United States, if possible in concert with other Western Hemisphere nations, will then give open support to the Cuban peoples’ revolt. Such support will include military force, as necessary.” 21
A day later, on January 19, Bobby Kennedy convened a meeting with CIA and Defense Department representatives, telling them in no uncertain terms that solving the Cuba problem “carries the top priority in the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared. There can be no misunderstanding on the involvement of the agencies concerned or on their responsibility to carry out this job. The agency heads understand that you are to have full backing on what you need.”
He then noted, ominously, that “yesterday ... the President indicated
to the Attorney General that ‘the final chapter on Cuba has not been written’—it’s got to be done and will be done.” He concluded by exhorting those present to address themselves “unfailingly” and “with every resource at your command” to the “32 tasks” given them by Lansdale. 22
At the CIA Halpern’s ongoing insistence on the need for intelligence before planning was beginning to bear fruit. “We’re in January of’62 and we’re still trying to come up with some decent papers for the Special Group Augmented,” said Halpern. “We’re going crazy trying to write something people will accept without promising the moon. . . . We just can’t do it. First of all, we have got to have intelligence. That’s what we kept on screaming bloody murder on. I kept saying to Dick Helms [the CIA’s Cuba representative for Mongoose] particularly, that we need some senior people in this operation. This is a political operation in the city of Washington, D.C. It’s got nothing to do with the security of the United States. We need somebody with some whammy up on the Hill.” 23
By mid-January, Helms agreed that they needed more clout in dealing with Cuba, said Halpern, “but he also takes a look at the [internal bureaucratic] problem and he says, ‘What else do you have besides Cuba?’ And we told him we had all the other islands. He picked up the phone and he called J. C. King and right then and there Cuba was taken out of Branch 4, which made sense, particularly with the pressure from outside. Cuba was now alone and organized as a one-country task force.”
The clout arrived in early February 1962 in the form of Bill Harvey, who took charge of the agency’s Cuba operation, under Helms. “Lansdale was very happy that somebody with Bill Harvey’s background and name . . . was in charge and not a Zogby or a Halpern. Bill comes over and sets up Task Force W, and we send out a book message to all stations that by presidential order ‘Cuba is number one priority around the world. And fellows you need to put your shoulder to the wheel kind of thing. Cuba was number one as far as the president was concerned. Cuba was it.” Shackley arrived in Miami and, said Halpern,
We start building what amounts to an intelligence collection activity plus some sabotage that goes along with it, simply because the powers that be wanted ‘boom and bang’; that was the phrase used by everybody. Finally,
I think, and the record is quite clear on this, the Special Group itself, after looking at Lansdale’s original charges to all of the various agencies in town, also decides that it ought to be basically intelligence operations with sabotage in there but not the major activity, just secondary.
The Special Group says, let’s turn this into basically an intelligence collection operation first. We’ll worry about sabotage second, instead of the other way around. So we start getting and using, not only people in Miami whom we recruit and send back into the island to collect intelligence. We also use every other possibility . . . foreigners from around the world visiting Cuba . . . diplomats who travel, diplomats who stay in . . . everything. We were able, over a period of several months, to start getting some decent information about what was going on.
On March 2, the Special Group agreed that “the immediate objective of the U.S. during March, April, and May will be the acquisition of intelligence and that other U.S. actions must be inconspicuous and consistent with the overall policy of isolating Castro and of neutralizing his influence in the Western Hemisphere.” 24
By February 20, Lansdale was ready to unveil the “firm time-table” he had promised in his January 18 paper assigning tasks. It was a doozy, containing a thirty-nine-page action plan to begin in March and neatly divided into six phases. They were:
Phase I, Action, March 1962. Start moving in.
Phase II, Build-up, April-July 1962. Activating the necessary operations inside Cuba for revolution and concurrently applying the vital political, economic, and military-type support from outside Cuba.
Phase III, Readiness, 1 August 1962, check for final policy decision.
Phase IV, Resistance, August-September 1962, move into guerrilla operations.
Phase V, Revolt, first two weeks of October 1962. Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime.
Phase VI, Final, during month of October 1962. Establishment of new government.
Lansdale again raised the question in the paper on U.S. intervention, noting “a vital decision, still to be made, is on the use of open U.S. force to aid the Cuban people in winning their liberty. If conditions and assets permitting a revolt are achieved in Cuba, and if U.S. help is required to sustain this condition, will the U.S. respond promptly with military force to aid the Cuban revolt?” 25
So unrealistic does Lansdale’s plan appear—at least outside the netherworld of spooks and spies anybody reading the plan today might wonder if he were living on another planet or perpetrating a joke. The plan is
MONGOOSE
divided into seven categories, entitled: (A) Basic Action Plan Inside Cuba; (B) Political Support Plan; (C) Economic Support Plan; (D) Psychological Support Plan; (E) Military Support Plan; (F) Sabotage Support Plan; and (G) Intelligence Support Plan. Each category is then broken down by months into descriptions of project actions within Cuba, their purpose, and considerations.
In April, for example, the first action listed under Operation in Cuba reads:
“Establish up to five more agent operations in key areas selected by CIA.” The purpose: “Report on resistance potential and lay groundwork for additional agent operations.” Considerations: “These additional teams should provide current reporting on major Cuban areas, so broad political action program can be planned. Risk to teams will continue high, but mission is essential.”
And the next to last action cited for August: “Cuban paramilitary teams infiltrated to bases in the hills.” The purpose: “To provide a trained guerrilla cadre upon which to form guerrilla units.” Considerations: “The paramilitary teams must be capable of initiating minor harassment and reprisal actions, as well as organizing and training guerrilla units. Popular support is essential.” 26
Again, from Halpern’s view, “We took one look at this list of stuff we had to do ... the CIA had its part, the military had its part, and everybody else had their parts to do, and it made no sense at all. But that’s a beautiful plan on a piece of paper. It looks marvelous, except it has no relation to reality. If you take a look at that thing, and you’re supposed to recruit ten agents this week and fourteen new sources and you’re going to get sabotage sources and psychological warriors. . . . You don’t find people overnight in blocs of ten, ten there and fifteen here, twenty there. Look at the plan. Just look at that. . . . It’s crazy. And we were under orders and we had to write papers.” Neither did Halpern see it as a coincidence that under Lansdale’s by-the-numbers schedule, the climax was to come in late October. Lansdale “just thought that because there were elections for Congress the next week in this country. . .. You don t have to be a magician or brain surgeon to figure [the connection between] a big victory parade in Havana and the next week elections come on.” 27
On the same day Lansdale was unveiling his plan, a State Department official, in a memo to a superior, dared question the entire concept as outlined in Lansdale’s January 18 “Program Review.” Roger Hilsman, director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, in
a memo to Alexis Johnson, the deputy undersecretary of state for political affairs, expressed “serious misgivings.” Hilsman questioned whether the CIA could build up the popular movement within Cuba called for by Mongoose, observing “on the contrary, the evidence points toward the present regime’s tightening up its controls. This leads me to conclude, as others have, that unless a popular uprising in Cuba is promptly supported by overt U.S. military action, it would probably lead to another Hungary. Briefly, I do not believe we can unseat the present regime in Havana by anything short of outright military intervention.” There is no indication Hilsman’s warning was heeded. 28
Mongoose moved ahead. For those involved, the pressure from the top to produce was becoming intense. As Bissell noted, so great was Bobby’s involvement in supervising Mongoose “he might as well have been director for plans for the operation.” 29
Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in 1975 testimony before the Church Committee, remembered “we were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter, and there was pressure from JFK and RFK to do something about Castro.” Helms characterized the atmosphere surrounding Mongoose as “pretty intense, and I remember vividly it was very intense. . . . [N]utty schemes were born of the intensity of the pressure. And we were quite frustrated.” 30
I n his Church Committee testimony Richard Helms didn’t elaborate what he meant by the “nutty schemes” he said the pressure to rid Cuba of Castro engendered, but the historical record provides abundant examples. They ranged from the silly to the sublime, with the outrageous sandwiched among them, and they did not include the numerous assassination plots against Castro, which the author dealt with separately. Some proposals now seem more like practical jokes than ideas that were seriously contemplated. Many, but not all, were encompassed within Operation Mongoose. Of those under Mongoose, a large number originated within the Pentagon—under the code name Operation Northwoods—as justification to invade Cuba. The CIA, too, offered its share of schemes, beginning well before and continuing well after Mongoose, but apart from the assassination schemes, most were markedly subtler in their approach than proposals from the Pentagon. Such “nutty schemes” were embodied in, but not necessarily born of, the character of their leaders— from the Kennedy brothers to Mongoose Operations chief Ed Lansdale, from the CIA’s Bill Harvey to the generals at the Pentagon—and a mentality shaped by the Cold War.
Bob Hurwitch, the State Department’s representative to the Caribbean Survey Group, a more sedate title for the multiagency Mongoose working group, saw Lansdale as “a graduate of the Madison Avenue advertising world. He had achieved fame, probably justifiably so, for a successful, innovative program in the Philippines, working closely with President Magsaysay. 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.”
Hurwitch noted that, “Although he is said to have failed in his efforts in Vietnam, he had sufficient support to obtain his assignment despite his
total lack of experience in Latin America, in general, and Cuba, in particular. One of Lansdale’s more ‘imaginative’ ideas was to put someone to work to write a stirring song in Cuban rhythms that would be smuggled into Cuba and adopted by the opposition to Castro as a stimulus to morale. Every advertising man seems to believe that human beings can be motivated to do anything provided the correct influences are brought to bear. But wars of national liberation succeed when political convictions are strong; to attempt to inculcate such motivation from the outside seemed futile to me.” 1
Historian Ronald Steel, in a profile of Bobby Kennedy, described Lansdale as Bobby’s kind of man. He combined anti-communist fervor with a skill for knocking heads together and spilling blood in a noble cause.” 2
Tom Parrott spoke of Lansdale with considerable disdain, calling him “a creature of the Kennedy brothers. They thought he was God . . . just the greatest thing that ever happened. He really didn’t come through on anything. 3
111 give you one example of Lansdale’s perspicacity,” Parrott said in his 1975 testimony before the Church Committee. “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 the word around Cuba, and then on whatever date it was, that there would be a manifestation of this thing. And at that time—this is absolutely true— and at that time just over the horizon there would be an American submarine which would surface off of Cuba and send up some star shells. And this would be the manifestation of the Second Coming and Castro would be overthrown. . . . Well, some wag called this operation—and somebody dubbed this—‘Elimination by Illumination.’” 4 Lansdale was later to refer to Parrott as a “jerk,” claiming the story was “absolutely untrue.” 5
As for Harvey, he was nearing the end of his run after the Berlin Tunnel operation, which turned out not to be the success it had initially appeared. It was disclosed in 1997 that the Soviet KGB had known about the tunnel from the beginning, thanks to George Blake, the British intelligence traitor. Harvey reflected his “cowboy” character in Task Force W, the name he gave the CIA’s reorganized Cuba unit. The W, according to Sam Halpern, referred to William Walker, the mid-nineteenth-century American freebooter who took over Nicaragua and was eventually cap
tured and executed by a Honduran firing squad. Parrott, who had known Harvey in Germany, says that by the time he took over the Cuba operation, “poor guy, he was on his way to becoming an alcoholic, a real alcoholic, which he did become. And if the meetings were after lunch . . . these high-powered meetings with the [Cabinet] Secretaries there and everything, he was plastered at that time. They didn’t know it but I knew it.
“I remember one time my boss, Max Taylor, said ‘will you tell your friend Harvey to cease, desist, from mumbling into his umbilicus’ and he [Taylor] would go ‘xewhfuwtrd xneytgnectya, uygngkhy .’ Another time I was coming back from a meeting with [McGeorge] Bundy and Bundy said ‘your friend’... it was always my friend ... said ‘your friend Harvey does not inspire confidence.’ He was way over his head in many ways.
Parrott recalls the time in Germany when Harvey—well known for having at least one pistol, and sometimes two, stuck in his pants—was leaning over in a Berlin nightclub “and a gun fell out on the table. The waitress said, ‘Sir, I think this is yours.’ ” 6
Sam Halpern, who worked with both Lansdale and Harvey during his CIA career, had this to say about their roles in Mongoose: “On the main characters of this soap opera: Ed Lansdale and Bill Harvey never saw eye to eye. Then nobody I know ever saw eye to eye with Ed Lansdale on anything. Ed realizes right away that, in Bill Harvey, he has a tough guy to work with. No love is lost between the two. They somehow work together, though, and as the documents show, we did produce what Ed asked for—in terms of paperwork at least.” 7
In this milieu, under the trickle down pressure from above, numerous “nutty schemes” were hatched; that is, “nutty” as seen from the perspective of historical hindsight. Most found their way to, and some originated with, Lansdale, as the chief operations officer for Mongoose.
For example, a day after he outlined his “32 tasks” to the various agencies involved in Mongoose, he added Number 33, which called for the use of chemical warfare to immobilize Cuban sugar workers during harvest with a nonlethal chemical that would sicken them for up to forty-eight hours. According to the Church Committee, this task was initially approved for planning purposes with the notation that it would require “policy determination” before final approval. A study showed the plan was not feasible, and it was canceled without ever going before the Special Group Augmented for debate. 8
It was neither Lansdale nor Harvey, but Bobby Kennedy who was
responsible for what folks at the CIA considered one “nutty” scheme. “We had one officer assigned to do nothing but meet members of the Mafia, who Bobby would identify and tell the officer, in effect, where the meeting was and what time, what place, and everything else,” according to Halpern, Harvey’s executive assistant. “And that was kind of a ‘no no’ most of the time because we want to control the meeting place . . . who the hell we see and where we see ’em. But in this case Bobby insisted that we meet Joe Pacachaluka or whoever at such and such a place. Bobby’s idea was that the Mafia must have left ‘stay behinds’ in Cuba and as a result they must know what is going on. So it would be a good intelligence source. It was nonsense. This was simply, allegedly, intelligence collection. We assigned a case officer who dutifully went where he was told and we never disseminated a single solitary line from any of the stuff that this guy picked up. It was hogwash.” 9 It was Bobby Kennedy, as well, who was the first to suggest—in a handwritten note to his brother as the Bay of Pigs collapsed—the possibility of a staged attack on Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to help rally hemisphere support against Cuba with the Organization of American States.
By far the most bizarre proposals were spawned by the Pentagon in response to the pressures of Lansdale and Mongoose, as indicated by documents released in 1997 and 1998 by the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. Their proposals also reflected the Pentagon’s gung ho attitude regarding Cuba at the time. Many of the ideas were generated in response to Lansdale’s January 18, 1962, dictum outlining his “32 tasks” for the various agencies involved in Mongoose.
On January 30, Brig. Gen. William H. Craig, the Defense Department representative to the Caribbean Survey Group offered up for Lansdale’s consideration the first of his numerous “nutty schemes,” Operation Bounty, to create distrust and apprehension in the Cuban Communist Hierarchy.” The concept called for “a system of financial rewards, commensurate with position and stature, for killing or delivering alive known Communists.” Craig’s idea consisted of dropping leaflets in Cuba offering rewards ranging from $5,000 for an “informer” to $100,000 for “government officials,” but only two cents for Castro. Lansdale testified before the Church Committee that the price on Castro’s head was intended to “denigrate” him “in the eyes of the Cuban people.” Lansdale told the committee he “tabled” the idea because he “did not think it was something that should be seriously undertaken or considered.” 10
That didn t inhibit Craig. Three days later, in a February 2 memoran
dum to Lansdale, he proposed another dozen “nutty” ideas for “further consideration in furtherance of the objectives of the Cuba Project,” to which he added: “I think some of them have promise and should you desire our group to develop them in more detail, they will do so.” 11
Each of the proposals came complete with an operation code name, objective, and concept. Among the rather exotic code names offered were: Operation ‘NO LOVE LOST,’ Operation SMASHER, Operation FREE RIDE, Operation TURN ABOUT, Operation DEFECTOR, Operation BREAK-UP, Operation COVER-UP, Operation DIRTY TRICK, Operation FULL-UP, Operation PHANTOM, Operation BINGO, Operation GOOD TIMES, Operation HEAT IS ON, Operation INVISIBLE BOMB, Operation HORN SWOGGLE, and Operation TRUE BLUE. Each suggested operation came complete with a blurb about its “objective” and its “concept.” Some examples:
Operation NO LOVE LOST
Objective: To confuse and harass Castro Cuban Pilots by use of radio conversations.
Concept: Fly Cuban refugee pilot in sterile aircraft in proximity of Cuba at periodic intervals while communication monitoring Cuban air/ground frequencies used for airdrome control. Cuban refugee pilot in sterile aircraft would personally know many of the pilots still flying for Castro. Refugee pilot would get into argument with Castro pilots over radio thus distracting, confusing, etc. Would be real trouble for Castro pilots in actual weather conditions. Argument could go, ‘I’ll get you, you Red son-of-agun,’ and call by name if appropriate. . . .
Operation FREE RIDE
Objective: The objective is to create unrest and dissension amongst the Cuban people.
Concept: This is to be accomplished by airdropping valid Pan American or KLM one-way airline tickets good for passage to Mexico City, Caracas, etc. (none to the U.S.). Tickets could be intermixed with other leaflets to be dropped. The number of tickets dropped could be increased. The validity of the tickets would have to be restricted to a time period.
Operation DIRTY TRICK
Objective: The objective is to provide irrevocable proof that should the
MERCURY manned orbit flight fail the fault lies with the Communists et al. in Cuba.
Concept: This to be accomplished by manufacturing various pieces of evidence that would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.
Operation GOOD TIMES
Objective: To disillusion the Cuban population with Castro image, by distributing fake photographic material.
Concept: Prepare a desired photograph, such as an obese Castro with two beauties in any situation desired, ostensibly within a room in the Castro residence, lavishly furnished, and a table brimming over with the most delectable Cuban food with an underlying caption (appropriately Cuban) such as “My ration is different.” Make as many prints as desired on sterile paper and then distribute them over the countryside by air drops or agents. This should put even a Commie Dictator in the proper perspective with the unprivileged masses.
“These and other suggestions were passed along to Brigadier General Lansdale, who was in charge of Mongoose,” observed historian and scholar Anna Nelson, a member of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board. “They were far too unrealistic to be taken seriously, but are instructive for what they reveal about the pressure on the military services and others in the Survey Group to come up with new ideas.”
“A quite different plan was also presented to the Survey Group by the Defense Department,” Nelson noted. “This plan relied on the Defense Department to harass Castro by using the technique of ‘cover and deception’ C&D. The cover and deception plans were designed to piggy-back on military exercises so they could provide credible evidence of the possibility of military intervention.” 12
Defense s plan came as a collection of far more serious “nutty schemes as contained in a March 13, 1962, memorandum prepared by the ubiquitous Craig and transmitted by Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to the secretary of defense. The subject: “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba.” 13
The memorandum, as Lemnitzer described in his cover letter, responded to a request from Lansdale for a brief but precise description of pretexts which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.” The paper and its enclosures, prepared some days earlier by
Brigadier General Craig, contained a litany of overly imaginative suggestions.
“The suggested courses of action ... are based on the premise that US military intervention will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances,” Craig said. “World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.” He added that “harassment plus deceptive actions to convince the Cubans of imminent invasion would be emphasized. Our military posture throughout execution will allow a rapid change from exercise to intervention if Cuban response justifies.”
It is obvious from the preliminary context in which the proposals were presented that the “pretexts for invasion” were far from ever being realized, but the fact these proposals were even considered at an official level is mind-boggling in itself. Among Craig’s ideas were:
■ A series of coordinated incidents in and around Guantanamo Naval Base that appeared to be carried out by “hostile Cuban forces.” Incidents could include such staged activity as an attack on the base by friendly Cubans in uniform; the capture of “saboteurs” inside the base; the detonation of ammunition inside the base; and sink a ship near the harbor entrance complete with funerals for mock victims.
■ A “Remember the Maine” incident, which could take several forms, including the blowing up of a US ship in Guantanamo Bay, and blaming of Cuba; the blowing up of a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in Cuban waters, followed by an air/sea rescue operation covered by U.S. fighters to “evacuate” remaining members of nonexistent crew. “Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” “Remember the Maine” became a rallying cry when the United States went to war against Spain in 1898 and blamed Spain for sinking an American warship in Havana Harbor.
■ A “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington” aimed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States or “we could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated.) We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.”
■ A “Cuban-based, Castro-supported” filibuster against a neighboring country. “We know that Castro is backing subversive efforts clandestinely.” and “these efforts can be magnified and additional ones contrived for exposure.”
■ The use of MIG type aircraft piloted by Americans to provide “additional provocation, harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions.”
■ An elaborate scheme for a simulated attack on a passenger plane “which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela.” Such a flight plan would route the plane over Cuba. “The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a nonscheduled flight.”
The plane itself would be a drone “painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in Miami.” It would be a duplicate “substituted for the actual civil aircraft . . . loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida.”
The passenger-carrying plane would then descend to minimum altitude and go to an auxiliary field at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle “where arrangements will be made to evacuate the passengers.” The drone would fly the filed flight plan and, when over Cuba, transmit a distress message saying it was under attack by a Cuban MIG. That would, in turn, be interrupted with destruction of the aircraft by radio signal.“This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] radio station in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to ‘sell’ the incident.”
Craig concluded by noting that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had cited the need for a provocation to justify intervention if “covert efforts to foster an internal Cuban rebellion are unsuccessful.” He referred to a March 7, 1962, document by the Joint Chiefs declaring that if there is a “determination that a credible internal revolt is impossible” during the coming months a decision will be needed “to develop a Cuban ‘provocation’ as justification for positive US military action.”
Not long after Craig’s proposals came a campaign designed to turn the symbol of internal resistance from a fish to a worm, an idea that apparently originated with the CIA’s Harvey. Described by author Jon Elliston, as gleaned from Assassination Records Review Board documents, the CIA decided its propaganda slogan should be Gusano Libre, or Free Worm. The CIA had used the fish as the symbol of internal resistance at the time of the Bay of Pigs. Gusano was a derogatory term used by the Castro Cubans for “counterrevolutionaries.” Lt. Col. James Patchell, an army officer who helped plan propaganda for Mongoose, suggested ways the agency could exploit the worm idea, such as “relating it to such expressions as the ‘worm will turn.’ ” That still left the problem of gaining acceptance of the symbol by the internal Cuban opposition. 14
Harvey, in an August 1962 memorandum to Lansdale, said the “CIA plans a coordinated campaign to popularize, exploit and encourage the use of ‘Gusano Libre ’ as the symbol of the resistance to the Castro regime,” but he wanted to leave the impression it was a “spontaneous internal development and not an exile one.” Therefore, Harvey said, the CIA wanted the next “Voice of Free Cuba” submarine operation planned for mid-August “to announce that the ‘Gusano Libre’ has become the symbol of popular resistance to the Castro regime, calling upon the people of Cuba to show their defiance of the government by scrawling this symbol in public places.” After the warmup, said Harvey, “actions will be taken to provide the people in Cuba with pictures of ‘El Gusano Fibre’ as well as instructions on how to draw” the symbol. “A small bulletin entitled ‘El Gusano Fibre’ will be prepared for inside distribution. Gusano Fibre pins, armbands, seals, pencils, balloons, etc., can obviously be produced for inside distribution via mail, legal travelers and propaganda balloons.” The new symbol didn’t sell. 15 The State Department, in a briefing paper apparently prepared by Hurwitch for Secretary Rusk in advance of an SGA meeting, derisively noted that “the Agency is pushing ahead with its ‘Gusano Fibre’ theme. ... I doubt whether ‘worms of the world unite’ will cause people to revolt; I should put it in the nuisance category at this stage.” 16
Ft. Col. Manuel “Manny” Chavez, an Air Force intelligence officer assigned to the overt CIA station in Miami, but also a regular commuter to Washington to confer with Fansdale on Mongoose, offered one of the more innovative ideas. Chavez said he had been interviewing a recently arrived female Cuban refugee in midsummer 1962 who described the
increasing shortages on the island, among them toilet paper and sanitary napkins.
“This interview prompted me to come up with a brilliant idea,” wrote Chavez. “It was true, we had been receiving many reports about the drastic shortage of paper. Within a few days, I had to go to Washington, so I wrote down my idea and presented it at one of the [Mongoose] conferences. . . . My idea was simple. Because there was a shortage of toilet paper, which was the result of government inefficiency, I suggested that we send in black (covert) flights and airdrop cases of toilet paper to the interior towns. The people would cheer and know that they were getting support from outside the island. However, to make it an effective psychological impact, my recommendation was to print a picture of Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev on alternate sheets. This would absolutely drive Castro mad, knowing that the suffering Cuban people were finally smiling. The idea was accepted and plans were made to carry it out, until President Kennedy put the squash on it.” 17
The CIA came along with another rather strange request to Lansdale seeking approval “to establish a sea borne balloon launching facility” to bomb Cuba with anti-Castro and anti-Soviet propaganda. The idea had been floated some months earlier, but more fully detailed in a memo dated September 17, 1962 (but stamped October 10). The memo described the project as one in which “helium-inflated balloons will be launched at night from a foreign flag ship in international waters at least ten miles off the coast of Cuba.” The ship would avoid U.S. ports to “the extent practicable and will particularly avoid the Miami area.” It would be chartered by a respected Cuban exile “politically acceptable to a broad segment of the Cuban exile community” with the CIA selecting a candidate who met the criteria. While a “respected Cuban exile” would be the ostensible sponsor of the operation, the CIA was to make all the arrangements and set the guidelines. The CIA cautioned, however, that meeting their guidelines “may not be possible in view of the extent of Cuban exile participation.”
The estimated cost of getting the balloon off and running was $50,000 (1962 prices). The subsequent cost would be $22,000 for a six-month period to “launch 1,000 balloons per month exclusive of the propaganda material to be delivered. Each balloon ready for launching, including the balloon itself, timer, ballast and helium, but exclusive of the propaganda material to be delivered, cost approximately $15.50. The one-time cost of
the chartered vessel is estimated at approximately $10,000. The recurring monthly costs for operation of a type of vessel as will be required for this operation amounts to approximately $11,000.”
The project proposal warned “there is a remote possibility that a child could be injured by a free falling timer which weighs two-tenths of a pound, an empty cardboard container which carries the leaflets or by a four pound bundle of leaflets.” And, finally, as a precaution against aircraft being brought down, “it is contemplated that the propaganda balloons will be launched only during hours of the night when there are no scheduled aircraft in flight over Cuba.” 18
This project was slowed, but not halted, by the missile crisis. During a September 27, 1962, meeting of the Special Group Augmented, “the Group concluded that the concept as outlined could be considered approved, subject to the presentation of a detailed plan of action in line with today’s discussion.” 19 At the SGA’s October 16 meeting “the balloon proposition was approved, subject to resolution of what flag the vessel would sail under.” 20 The balloon project remained on the SGA agenda as late as October 26, as the missile crisis neared a climax. Minutes of the meeting noted, “CIA should continue to develop the balloon propaganda facilities, although it was recognized that by the target date of 1 December this capability might no longer be needed because of other methods of delivery.” 21
Although Mongoose effectively died during the missile crisis, the balloon idea did not, resurfacing at a January 25, 1963, meeting of the National Security Council’s Executive Committee. A record of the meeting by Bromley Smith, the council’s executive secretary, reports that there was a “discussion of the dropping of propaganda leaflets from free traveling balloons,” despite the facts that it had no apparent advocates and President Kennedy “decided that balloons should not be used.” 22
By April 3, however, the balloon proposal had been resuscitated once again, topping the agenda for the new Cuban Coordinating Committee, which had replaced the Mongoose Cuban Survey Group. The first item, “Balloon Operations Over Havana,” referred to a CIA proposal to release balloons “containing 300,000 to 500,000 leaflets on May Day (before daylight).” The leaflets would “(1) attack Castro’s henchmen, and (2) contain cartoons illustrating sabotage techniques.” A final decision on balloon operations was scheduled for another review the week before May Day. 23 But again President Kennedy stepped in, according to an April 9 presidential action memo from Joseph Califano, special assistant to Army
Secretary Cyrus Vance, that said “the President rejected the balloon item on the recommendation of Ed Murrow,” then director of USIA. 24
Not all the “nutty ideas” were confined to Operation Mongoose. One of the most bizarre came in a memorandum dated—presumably by coincidence—Valentine’s Day 1963, from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations to Califano. Responding to Califano’s “verbal request” of the previous day, the memo offered suggestions on how to “Restrict Travel to Cuba for Subversive Training,” providing seven possible actions, each followed by a consideration of the consequences.
The first action went directly to the point, proposing under action: “Liquidate selection trainees after return from Cuba.” It was tempered by the consideration: “Value of this action lies in destroying a potentially dangerous individual while simultaneously serving a warning to other potential trainees. It is politically risky and contrary to our morale [sic] precepts. Could boomerang by creating martyrs.”
One of the more novel suggestions under action was to: “Attach incendiary device to bats and drop over training centers. Bats retire to attics during daylight. Incendiaries ignite by timers and start fires.” And under consideration: Politically risky. Since bats would have to be air dropped, risk of retaliatory action against essential U.S. photo recon aircraft is increased.”
And, finally, under action came this possibility: “Substitute aerosol insecticide bombs with aerosol bombs containing phosphorescent dyes which are very difficult to remove from skin. Individual travelers would be marked for a significant length of time.” The consideration: “This has some psychological and intelligence value. Should be relatively simple and inexpensive to accomplish. Probably effective on a one-time basis only unless dye effect could be delayed and spray otherwise be made to look and smell like real insecticide.” 25
Perhaps the nuttiest scheme of all was a proposal entitled “War Between Cuba and Another LA [Latin American] State,” which appears to be part of a broader Defense Department document of uncertain date in 1963. Also unclear is the context in which the proposal was made. The objective, as outlined, was to capitalize on the contingency of war breaking out between Cuba and another LA state by using the ‘obligation’ to support an ally to overthrow Castro.” Next came the scenarios under which “the war or outbreak of hostilities between Castro and another state could come.” Five were cited:
‘ ‘NUTTY SCHEMES’ ’
■ A contrived “Cuban” attack on an OAS member could be set up and the attacked state could be urged to “take measures of self-defense and request assistance from the U.S. and OAS. . . .
■ “An actual Cuban attack or Cuban identified subversive action could trigger the same response.”
■ “A contrived Cuban attack on Jamaica, one of three Guineas [sic], or Trinidad-Tobago could be set up and the U.S. and the mother country come to the defense of the attacked state while referring the political action to the UN.”
■ “An actual attack on one of the foregoing states could result in similar action.”
■ “A revolution in Haiti could be set up with the assistance of Cubansin-exile masquerading as Haitians (or with other appropriate commitment) in exchange for the understanding that the new regime would recognize and provide a base for a Cuban government and would provide assistance including use of force in support of action against the Castro regime.”
After going into detail regarding the possible scenarios and how the United States might react, the document concluded “that any contrived situation carries greater risks than benefits.... This course should probably only be pursued when the situation vis-a-vis Cuba had preceded [sic] to the point that two-thirds of the OAS membership were judged ready to authorize such covert action. Manifestly that time has not arrived.” 26
Lieutenant Colonel Patchell’s imaginative mind went to work again in a May 13, 1963, paper proposing “the creation of an imaginary Cuban leader,” in part to fill the vacuum created by the end of U.S. support to the Cuban Revolutionary Council, originally set up as a front for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Such a fictional leader, Patchell argued, would “serve to reduce the bickering among exiles” and “as a focal point for resistance directed against Castro by Cubans and Latin Americans.” Virtually any name would do, said Patchell, as long as it was “acceptable and meaningful in Spanish.” Among those suggested were “The Little Bull,” “The Friendly Worm,” or “The Tough Peasant.”
It’s possible, said Patchell, that the Castro regime might claim capture or pursuit of the imaginary leader or even suggest he was a fraud. “Such action would only serve to further publicize the actions of the individual and so long as resistance in general continued the fame of our ‘Cuban Kilroy’ would spread. Humorous antics could be credited to our imaginary friend and rumors of his exploits of bravery (ala Zorro) could be circulated.”
“Eventually,” predicted Patched, “a member of the resistance in Cuba may gain sufficient stature to assume or be given the title of this imaginary hero,” depending “in large measure on individual leadership ability to fill the boots’ of this anti-Castro image.” 27 There is no indication such a leader ever emerged.
Nutty schemes” preceded Mongoose, as well, dating back to the March-August 1960 pre-Bay of Pigs period. The early schemes apparently were “aimed only at discrediting Castro personally by influencing his behaviour [sic] or by altering his appearance,” according to the CIA Inspector General’s report on assassination plots prepared in 1967. One such scheme cited was to “contaminate the air of the radio station where Castro broadcast his speeches with an aerosol spray of a chemical that produces lysergic acid (LSD). Nothing came of the idea . . . because the chemical could not be relied upon to be effective.”
lake Esterline told the inspector general’s investigators that he recalled a plot involving a “box of cigars that had been treated with some sort of chemical. ... His recollection was that the chemical was intended to produce temporary personality disorientation. ... The thought was to somehow contrive to have Castro smoke one before making a speech and then to make a public spectacle of himself.” Although Esterline said when he was interviewed a second time by investigators that he “no longer remembered the intended effect of the cigars, he was positive they were not lethal.”
Another scheme involved “thallium salts, a chemical used by women as a depilatory—the thought being to destroy Castro’s image as ‘The Beard’ by causing his beard to fall out.” The plan apparently originated in connection with a trip Castro was expected to make abroad. The idea was to dust thallium powder—which can be administered either orally or by absorption through the skin—“into Castro’s shoes when they were put out at night to be shined. The scheme progressed as far as procuring the chemical and testing it on animals,” but Castro didn’t make the trip and the plan was abandoned.
The inspector general s investigators said they found “no evidence that any of these schemes was approved at any level higher than division, if that. We think it most likely that no higher-level approvals were sought, because none of the schemes progressed to the point where approval to launch would have been needed.” 28
A ided by Sam Halpern’s constant prodding, the original emphasis for Operation Mongoose underwent an overhaul in March 1962. The Special Group dictated that focus of Phase I be intelligencecollection. At Phase I’s end in July a decision would be made on the details for Phase II, although Mongoose’s underlying premise remained one of igniting a popular revolt within Cuba. As Mongoose moved forward, the suggestion of overt U.S. military intervention increasingly laced the debate. And since the Soviets and Cubans surely were listening to and watching Mongoose’s progress, the greater threat of intervention undoubtedly helped fuel Moscow’s decision to install missiles in Cuba.
As Halpern remembered it, “the Special Group says ‘let’s turn this into basically an intelligence collection operation first. We’ll worry about sabotage second, instead of the other way around.’ So we start getting and using, not only people in Miami whom we recruit and send back into the island to collect intelligence. We also use every other possibility to collect intelligence . . . foreigners from around the world who visit Cuba, travel to Cuba, diplomats who travel, diplomats who stay in .. . everything. But we were able over a period of several months to start getting some decent information.” 1
Lansdale was not pleased, said Halpern. The Special Group “limited Ed basically to an intelligence operation with some sabotage thrown in here and there and everywhere . . . nickel and dime stuff.”
Lansdale issued the new Mongoose Phase I guidelines in mid-March, saying the operation would now “be developed on the following assumptions:
a. In undertaking to cause the overthrow of the target government, the U.S. will make maximum use of indigenous resources, internal and external, but recognizes the final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention.
b. Such indigenous resources as are developed will be used to prepare
for and justify this intervention, and thereafter to facilitate and support it.
The guidelines declared that the “immediate priority objective of U.S. efforts during the coming months will be the acquisition of hard intelligence on the target area. . . . All other political, economic and covert actions will be undertaken short of those reasonably calculated to inspire a revolt within the target area, or other development which would require U.S. armed intervention.” 2
Lansdale clearly was not happy with the emphasis on intelligence collection and away from that of fueling a popular revolt. In a memorandum for the record of a March 16 Special Group meeting with President Kennedy, Lansdale reported that McCone, the CIA director, “asked me if I were in agreement with the concept contained in the ‘Guidelines.’ I commented that they didn’t fit the conditions inside Cuba that were becoming more apparent to the operational people. ... I felt we needed much more freedom to work on the revolutionary possibilities than is possible under the guidelines.”
The issue of military intervention again came up at the same session as Lansdale briefed the president and suggested that if “conditions [in Cuba] arose that would need quick exploitation ... we would have to be ready ... to supply arms and equipment; it is possible that this could be done without U.S. military intervention, but we must be ready to intervene with U.S. forces, if necessary.”
General Lemnitzer of the Joint Chiefs chimed in that “the military had contingency plans for U.S. intervention” and plans “for creating plausible pretexts to use force, with the pretexts either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.” To that, wrote Lansdale, the President said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of U.S. military force, that General Lemnitzer might find the U.S. so engaged in Berlin or elsewhere that he couldn’t use the contemplated 4 divisions in Cuba. So, we cannot say that we are able now to make a decision on the use of U.S. military force.” 3
The Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs, too, were unhappy about the new Mongoose guidelines, as indicated in a briefing paper prepared for Bobby Kennedy. It was presented to Kennedy on March 21 by Brig. Gen. William H. Craig, the Pentagon’s representative to the multiagency Mongoose working group. It declared in part: “We feel that there is an alarming lack of appreciation that time is running out. . . . We are
concerned that the new proposal de-emphasizes the time factor by waiting until July before the decision is made as to what to do next.” 4
At the CIA, which now had the lead role in Phase I, there also was grumbling—from Harvey in particular—about a limitation that any “major operation going beyond the collection of intelligence be approved in advance by the Special Group.” In a memorandum to McCone, Harvey complained that the “tight controls exercised by the Special Group and the present time-consuming coordination and briefing procedures should, if at all possible, be made less restrictive and less stultifying.”
Sam Halpern, Harvey’s executive assistant, was asked in his 1975 Church Committee testimony to describe the degree of detail required in papers forwarded to the Special Group. “Well, to use my word, it was nauseating details,” Halpern replied. “It went down to such things as the gradients of the beach, and the composition of the sand on the beach in many cases. Every single solitary thing was in those plans, full detail, times, events, weaponry, how it was going to happen, who was going to do what, when it was going to happen, and what contingency plans were for emergencies, the full details of every single thing we did.” 5
In Miami Ted Shackley echoed similar sentiments. Washington and the Kennedys, said Shackley, “wanted things in excruciating detail, dates, times, everything, and it was unnecessary. You could never tell when they were going to inject themselves.” 6
Tom Parrott had a different take. Parrott said Harvey “complained bitterly to Dick Helms ... that Taylor was a ‘dead hand’ who wouldn’t allow him to do anything. I was called in and asked if I couldn’t do something to goose Taylor up. Well, point of fact was that Taylor, being a good military guy, wanted to just have the facts. He didn’t want to approve a concept. He wasn’t going to approve a concept. He wanted to know what kind of beach they were going over and what their exit plan was and all the rest of it. Well, Harvey didn’t think that way; Harvey just thought in concepts. . . . Taylor would not approve a lot of these operations because he said they just weren’t staffed out. The committee’s [Special Group] job was to weigh the political risks, plus the other risks, and he said he couldn’t do that until he had a better idea of what they were going to do.”
At the same time, said Parrott, the Mongoose objective “was always a little foggy to me other than the feeling that Jack [Kennedy] had been humiliated by Castro. And he was just damn well going to get back at him so Bobby rushed off with the ball, which he was very inclined to do. I think there was a certain amount of flailing around. Not a great deal was
accomplished under Mongoose. I don’t think anybody was really happy with it.” 7
Although the emphasis of Phase I was intelligence collection, it did not preclude sabotage operations. But those few approved by the Special Group Augmented were largely futile efforts, often criticized by Bobby Kennedy for making too much “noise,” even as he pressed for more of them. According to Sam Halpern:
If you look back at that program, boom and bang [sabotage] seemed to be the order of the day. We eventually did organize teams that could do sabotage. Cuban exiles were recruited and sent back in. We never did anything major.. . . We tried to do some damage. The Matahambre Mine [a copper mine in western Cuba, the target of three failed sabotage attempts] is one of the things he [Lansdale] finally picked on. When Ed was targeting stuff like that, we had to come up with a sabotage team, and we did but, again, the first thing was getting intelligence. . . .
After Bill Harvey takes over in early ’62, we did have a small success, in a culvert we blew up or something .. . maybe we knocked out some transformer. It was a minor thing but it made headlines in Cuba and it made the headlines in Miami . . . and the attorney general gets on the phone to Bill Harvey. . . . This is to give you some idea of sabotage operations directed by the White House. . . . Bill gets chewed out by Bobby Kennedy on the phone. Harvey tells the attorney general that people are going to talk about it; it’s going to be on the radio, it’s going to be on television. That’s the facts of life. You can’t hide these things. What we keep secret is how it happens and who did it, not the fact of an explosion. It finally sunk in somewhere along the way over a period of time. Intelligence collection is one thing. You can do that quietly and nobody is any wiser, if it works right, but not if you are going out to do boom and bang. Boom and bang means publicity and you better be ready for it. 8
It was obvious by April that Mongoose—except for the intelligence collection element—was treading water with the guidelines under which it was operating and the limitations set by the Special Group Augmented. McCone raised the issue at an April 12 meeting, noting that the “original concept was to have a situation within Cuba developed by August, and that the present plan of action would not bring this about.” Rather than expanding the program, the SGA “decided to eliminate the August date but not to eliminate the original intention of the effort.” 9
At another meeting two weeks later, McCone “expressed dissatisfac
tion with progress; stated nothing had been accomplished in putting Cubans in the Army for training and that no actions had been taken on matters decided two weeks ago.” McCone added that he “was very disagreeable.” He recommended “more action, acceptance of attribution if necessary; establishment of training facilities; training of guerrillas and a more dynamic effort in the infiltration of both agents and guerrillas.” 10
In an apparent response to McCone, Lansdale issued an “Operation Mongoose Priority Operations Schedule” of “tasks” for the May 21-Jiine 30 period. One of these tasks called for many more activist undertakings by the various agencies involved. For the CIA, he wanted “a sabotage operation ... to make a psychological impact upon the regime and public, which symbolizes popular resistance to the regime and which causes talk encouraging to resistance.” The agency should, said Lansdale, “select a feasible sabotage operation, a ‘showy’ one against the regime but not against the people, and present a specific proposal for approval.” The CIA also was to “make a special effort to step-up the infiltration of teams” and “penetrate black market operations in Cuba for economic sabotage.”
Around this time—May 29, 1962—a high-ranking Soviet delegation, posing as an agricultural mission, but including Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, head of the USSR’s Strategic Rocket Forces, and two nuclear ballistic missile specialists, arrived in Havana. They were there to propose installation of strategic missiles on the island. The Cuban leadership agreed to the plan. Raul Castro and Che Guevara went to Moscow in early July to formalize the agreement. 11 Missiles began to arrive in Cuba secretly during the first half of September under a Moscow project code-named Operation Anadyr.
A plethora of books has appeared during the intervening four decades, each providing ever more detail on the missile deployment, crisis, and withdrawal, as greater information is gleaned from newly declassified documents and various forums bringing participants and scholars together. Among the more revealing works are One Hell of a Gamble, by scholars Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali; Operation Anadyr, by Gen. Anatoli I. Gribkov and Gen. William Y. Smith, military men directly involved in either side of the crisis; and Cuba and the Missile Crisis, by Carlos Lechuga, Cuba’s UN ambassador at the time.
All three accounts cite a fear in both Moscow and Havana of a U.S. invasion of Cuba coupled with a Soviet effort to redress the nuclear missile imbalance that, by then, was seventeen to one in favor of the United States, as major reasons for the deployment of missiles. Although Opera
tion Mongoose did not become public until years later, there is little doubt the activity it generated contributed to the invasion fears.
Mongoose was getting well under way when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, after a stop in Cuba, met with President Kennedy in Washington on January 30, 1962. Kennedy hinted in their conversation that the United States might show force in Cuba as the Soviets had done in Hungary in 1956, when they forcefully put down an anti-Russian rebellion. Adzhubei reported on the meeting to Khrushchev, raising concerns that had been allayed earlier, when Kennedy told Khrushchev at their June 1961 Vienna summit that the Bay of Pigs had been a mistake. “It was this report [by Adzhubei] which triggered the whole [missile crisis] situation,” Castro told French journalist Jean Daniel during a November 1963 interview in Havana, an account of which appeared in that year’s December edition of The New Republic.
“Six months before these missiles were installed in Cuba, we had received an accumulation of information that a new invasion was being prepared under sponsorship of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Castro told Daniel. “We also knew the Pentagon was vesting the CIA preparations with the mantle of its authority, but we had doubts as to the attitude of the president.” Then came Adzhubei’s report, which Castro said he had received a week after the Adzhubei-Kennedy meeting.
“To be sure,” Castro told Daniel, “the actual word ‘invasion’ was not mentioned and Adzhubei, at the time, lacking any background information, could not draw the same conclusions as we did. But when we communicated to Khrushchev all our previous information, the Russians too began to interpret the Kennedy-Adzhubei conversation as we saw it and they went to the source of our information. By the end of the month, the Russian and Cuban governments had reached the definite conviction that an invasion might take place from one moment to the next.” 12
An instant analysis of Daniel’s article by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, noted, “Castro’s remarks to Daniel regarding the origins of the missile deployment, in our view, tend on the whole to confirm our reconstruction of it.
“We have no doubt that Castro, and probably the Soviets too, were increasingly worried in the late winter and spring of 1962 about the possibility of a new US invasion attempt. Castro, as the more directly involved party, may well have placed an ominous interpretation on President Kennedy’s remarks to Adzhubei . . . regarding the parallelism between the Soviet attitude toward Hungary and ours toward Cuba.” The assessment
concludes that the decision to deploy missiles “almost certainly goes back to the spring, which was a time of heightened Cuban concern about invasion, of Soviet-Cuban efforts to agree on what to do about the danger and of Soviet wrestling with the larger strategic issue of the US-Soviet military balance.” 13
As part of Mongoose, the Pentagon had begun to formulate contingency plans for invading Cuba, including the February revision of OPLAN 314-61 by the Atlantic Command. As Fursenko and Naftali, who had access to declassified Soviet documents, wrote in One Hell of a Gamble, a KGB report went almost immediately to top Soviet officials warning that “military specialists of the USA had revised an operational plan against Cuba, which, according to this information, went to Kennedy.” The report did not specifically refer to OPLAN 314, “but stated that activity of the land forces would ‘be supported by military air assets based in Florida and Texas.’ ” 14
“If Soviet agents picked up rumblings of these [invasion] plans, perhaps they, and Nikita Khrushchev, would consider them evidence of intent. So much the better,” concluded Gen. William Gray. “Pleased at the Kremlin’s attention focused on Castro’s survival rather than on exporting revolution, the Pentagon made no effort to hide the two-week, 40,000-man Marine and Navy maneuvers that engaged forces from North Carolina to the Caribbean in April 1962. The action culminated with an amphibious assault on the island of Vieques off the coast of Puerto Rico. . . . U.S. press accounts of these maneuvers alone would give Soviet intelligence enough information to feed Kruschchev’s anxiety about American plans and Castro’s future.” 15
Mongoose had helped trigger the law of unintended consequences. Khrushchev moved to consider the installation of missiles in Cuba, as early as March or April, depending on which account one reads. He convened a May 20 meeting with ranking Kremlin officials and Alexsandr Alekseev, the Soviet ambassador-designate to Cuba who was close to Castro. The Defense Council approved the decision the next day, a decision Khrushchev himself apparently had already made. 16 The Soviet delegation went to Havana the following week to discuss and reach agreement with Cuban officials over the deployment.
Castro, at a 1992 missile crisis conference in Havana, offered his rationale for accepting the missiles: “If it had involved only the defense of Cuba, we wouldn’t have agreed to having the nuclear missiles installed— not out of fear of the dangers that might ensue, but because of how they
might harm the revolution, the image [the Cuban] revolution had in Latin America, since the installation of those weapons would turn Cuba into a Soviet military base. However, I believe that the installation of those missiles in Cuban territory strengthened the socialist camp and helped to even up the balance of power.” 17
No one knew it at the time, but Khrushchev’s May 1962 decision to deploy the missiles meant the effective end of Mongoose five months later, without the Havana victory parade Lansdale had envisioned.
But Lansdale had more immediate problems. The State Department’s lack of enthusiasm for Mongoose had become increasingly apparent. In a petulant May 31 memorandum to the SGA, Lansdale complained that the State Department reaction to the latest assigned tasks “has been disappointing to me so far. Apparently, my schedule of targets for special efforts is accepted only as it may fit into long-range, existing programs already underway.” 18
The State Department’s Hurwitch complained a week later, in his notes of a Mongoose meeting, that “Lansdale and to a greater extent General Craig harbor notion that we can order other nations to do our bidding. When we point out reluctance certain governments follow our lead, they urge a major psychological and political campaign within the country among labor, student and political groups to ‘force’ the government to change its mind.... General Craig particularly remains convinced that Department is emphasizing ‘long range goals in the hemisphere’ as compared to ‘priority for Cuba.’” 19
As might be expected, of the agencies involved in Mongoose, the Defense Department—with the high-level exception of Secretary Robert McNamara, who publicly expressed his misgivings much later—was by far the most gung ho. The Pentagon apparently saw a potential opportunity to resolve the “Cuba problem” by an invasion, especially if a rationale, manufactured or otherwise, could be found. The State Department, as reflected in Hurwitch’s comments, was by far the least enthusiastic and most cautious, as it had been with the Bay of Pigs. In Mongoose and the Bay of Pigs, it is apparent that State was worried about how unilateral actions against Cuba would impact on the department’s broader diplomatic mission in the rest of Latin America and the world. The CIA— despite its desire to bring down Castro—appeared to be ambivalent toward Mongoose. Working level personnel, such as Sam Halpern, viewed the operation from the beginning as an exercise in futility. Many
in the agency also resented Lansdale and, particularly, Bobby Kennedy, who the professional spies regarded as an unwanted and overbearing interloper. At the White House, Arthur Schlesinger made it clear that he thought the whole operation was stupid. But, as noted, it was his colleague, Richard Goodwin, who emerged as the principal architect of the program. At an October 2002 conference in Havana on the missile crisis, Schlesinger characterized Mongoose as “silly and stupid,” adding, “it’s well understood as a consequence of Operation Mongoose that the Cubans had a legitimate fear of an American invasion.” McNamara, at the same conference, conceded that he “didn’t think Mongoose was worth a damn, but I didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ” 20
In any event, Lansdale finally enlisted Bobby Kennedy to bring the recalcitrant State Department into line. A June 8 memorandum of a Mongoose meeting notes that Lansdale, “with certain support from the Attorney General, requested more active participation by the Department of State. The meeting agreed that the Department would furnish real support, appoint a full-time senior officer, and present action proposals.” 21
In mid-July “four possible courses of action regarding Cuba” were presented for consideration by agencies involved in Mongoose. They were:
a. Cancel operational plans; treat Cuba as a Bloc nation; protect hemisphere from it or
b. Exert all possible diplomatic, economic, psychological, and other pressures to overthrow the Castro-Communist regime without overt U. S. military commitment, or
c. Commit U.S. to help Cubans overthrow the Castro-Communist regime, with step-by-step phasing to ensure success, including the use of U.S. military force if required at the end, or
d. Use a provocation and overthrow the Castro-Communist regime by U.S. military force. 22
Hurwitch recommended State Department support for Course B. He also complained, “preliminary discussion of these courses of action . . . reveals that the CIA and Defense representatives favor prior commitment to employ U.S. military force.” In his opinion, Hurwitch said, “the concentration of attention upon the employment of U.S. military force against Cuba runs counter to the basic concept of Mongoose, which is to bring down the Castro regime from within.” 23
At dinner the same evening, Bobby Kennedy told John McCone “the
last six months’ effort had been worthwhile inasmuch as we had gained a very substantial amount of intelligence which was lacking, but that the effort was disappointing inasmuch as the program had not advanced to the point we had hoped. He urged intensified effort but seemed inclined to let the situation ‘worsen’ before recommending drastic action.” 24
The time arrived for a Mongoose report card on Phase I. The four agencies directly involved—CIA, State, Defense, and USIA—were asked to submit to Lansdale a review of their activity and comment on the four possible courses of action for the next phase. The Phase I results were obviously disappointing.
“At the close of Phase I my concern is strong that time is running out for the U.S. to make a free choice on Cuba, based largely on what is happening to the will of the Cuban people,” Lansdale wrote in the covering memo of his review. “Rightly or wrongly, the Cubans have looked to the U.S. for guidance on what to aspire to and do next. . . . We have been unable to surface the Cuban resistance potential to a point where we can measure it realistically. The only way this can be done, accurately, is when resistance actually has a rallying point of freedom fighters who appear to the Cuban people to have some chance of winning, and that means at least an implication that U.S. is in support. . . . There was little opportunity for the Cuban people to join an active resistance in April 1961; there is less opportunity today.” 25
In a memo to Assistant Secretary of State Ed Martin accompanying Lansdale’s Phase I review and comment on the four possible future courses of action, Hurwitch made clear the differing positions of the agencies involved. He began by telling Martin “you will be interested to see that DOD would like to see the Monroe Doctrine re-affirmed,” adding:
I think the essence of the positions [on the four possible courses of action] lies in the following:
1. CIA believes that if assurances were given of US intervention, a revolt could be mounted by late 1963, but would be destroyed at best within a matter of a few days if it is not supported by substantial military force. No mention is made of the nature or magnitude of the revolt.
2. Defense states it needs eighteen (or perhaps twelve) days of preparation, although some units might be available in as soon as five days.
3. State believes it needs a virtual civil war situation in Cuba before
intervention in Cuba with US military force might be considered politically feasible.
These three conditions do not appear to be easily reconciled. 26
In response to a request from the SGA, on August 8 Lansdale submitted a paper for a “possible stepped up Course B” as Phase II of Mongoose. The basic Course B called for increased “diplomatic, economic, psychological, and other pressures to overthrow the Castro-Communist regime without overt U. S. military commitment.” As Lansdale described the stepped up Course B under Phase II, “the major difference from Phase I . . . would be the removal of the restrictions . . . which kept our actions ‘short of those reasonably calculated to inspire a revolt within the target area.’ ”
What this essentially meant was that the heavy load would fall to the CIA, with accelerated covert actions. But, as Lansdale also noted, “the CIA operational people who would implement a stepped up Course B as Phase II of Operation Mongoose, do not believe this course of action by itself would bring the overthrow of the regime in Cuba; they believe that the use of military force in the final stage must be anticipated, for success.” 27 The CIA estimated it would need a $40 million budget for 1963 to implement its role in Phase II, and another $60 million in fiscal 1964, with CIA personnel assigned full-time to Mongoose increasing to six hundred. None of the estimated budget would be reimbursable to the Defense Department for its support role. 28
The initial SGA action was to decide, instead, on a “CIA variant,” or modified Course B, proposed by McCone, which “posted limited actions to avoid inciting a revolt and sought a split between Castro and ‘old-line Communists’ rather than Castro’s overthrow.” 29 The SGA—presumably under Bobby Kennedy’s influence—also made it clear to Lansdale that Phase II should “afford full attention to the desirability of the Cubans liberating Cuba with our help . . . distinguished from the concept of our employing the Cubans in programs where we are seeking to liberate Cuba.” This, added Lansdale in a memorandum to Harvey, “will require an imaginative and bold approach to the whole concept of the management, use, and potential values in the Cuban exiles in the U.S. and other countries.” 30 The initial action hinted at things to come and Bobby Kennedy’s “let Cubans be Cubans” approach to post-missile crisis covert anti-Castro activity.
In advising President Kennedy of approval for Phase II, General Taylor made two things clear: it was not designed with U.S. military intervention in mind, barring “an unanticipated revolt,” and there was “no reason to hope” it would bring about Castro’s overthrow from within. “As we look ahead in the Mongoose program,” said Taylor, “we have considered several alternative courses of action. . . . For the coming period, we favor a somewhat more aggressive program than the one carried out in Phase I.” He noted also that “from what we know now we perceive no likelihood of an overthrow of the [Cuban] government by internal means and without the direct use of military force.” 31
In hindsight—given Castro’s crackdown, including decimation of existing internal resistance and stepped up internal security measures in the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs—it should have been evident that anything short of direct U.S. military intervention to oust the dictator was likely to fail. In fact, Jack Hawkins warned three weeks after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs, in his May 5, 1961, after-action report, that: “A Communist-style police state is now firmly entrenched in Cuba, which will not be overthrown by means short of United States military power. Further efforts to develop armed internal resistance, or to organize Cuban exile forces, should not be made except in connection with a planned overt intervention by United States forces.”
The Phase II guidelines retained the “eventual objective” of overthrowing Castro but had only the immediate goal of “containment, undermining ... discrediting [and] isolating” Cuba. They called for selective sabotage, continued efforts to create friction among the Cuban leadership, and a continued priority on intelligence collection. They acknowledged that the “noise level” might rise, but also emphasized “the importance of maintaining non-attributability remains unchanged.” The guidelines said, “a revolt is not sought at this time,” even as they declared that the Joint Chiefs would “maintain plans for U.S. military intervention.” 32
Approval of Phase II brought with it even greater skepticism and friction among the various Mongoose players, who disagreed over the use of Guantanamo, the “noise level,” the degree of sabotage, and what actions needed prior approval. “In general,” McCone wrote in a memorandum of an August 16, 1962, Special Group Augmented session, “the meeting [at which Phase II was discussed] was unsatisfactory, lacked both purpose and direction and left me with the feeling that very considerable reservation exists as to just where we are going with Operation Mongoose.” Fur
ther reflecting the acrimony among participants, he concluded, “a detailed plan of operation specifying the acts of sabotage, planned infiltrations, propaganda effort, etc., should be presented by Lansdale at the earliest moment. Harvey should straighten out any differences between Lansdale and CIA, with the assistance of Helms or others. McCone should discuss this subject privately with the Attorney General.” 33
Days later alarm bells sounded over intelligence reports of a massive Soviet military buildup in Cuba and the interconnected implications for other Cold War pressure points such as Berlin. Soon after, on August 31, Senator Kenneth Keating, a respected New York Republican, began an ongoing barrage of public attacks on what he called “a look-the-otherway” policy by the Kennedy administration on Cuba. He first cited refugee reports, then “reliable reports,” on the flow of Soviet military equipment and personnel into Cuba, as well as “ominous reports” of “missile bases.” According to General Smith, an aide to General Taylor, “his [Keating’s] information corresponded very closely to the reports the administration was receiving through regular intelligence channels. The Senator never revealed his sources ... but there can be little doubt that he had solid, inside information, far more complete than what government channels were providing to officials such as myself.” 34
“There was general agreement that the situation was critical and the most dynamic action was indicated,” wrote McCone of an August 21 meeting in the secretary of state’s office. And “there was discussion of various courses of action open to us in case the Soviets place MRBM missiles on Cuban territory.” Bobby Kennedy “queried the meeting as to what other aggressive steps could be taken, questioning the feasibility of provoking an action against Guantanamo which would permit us to retaliate, or involving a third country in some way,” suggestions previously considered under Mongoose to justify military intervention.
McNamara urged more “aggressive action in the fields of intelligence, sabotage and guerrilla warfare, utilizing the Cubans and do such other things as might be indicated to divide the Castro Regime.” McCone countered, “all of these things could be done” but “efforts to date with agent teams had been disappointing. Sabotage activities were planned on a priority basis and in all probability, we would witness more failures than successes.” 35
In Miami Ted Shackley had been working hard to increase the CIA station’s intelligence collection and improve the paramilitary capability. “While all this was unfolding,” Shackley said, “we were in fact successful
in collecting intelligence and detailed the Soviet building up in Cuba. We did not start out looking for the Soviet buildup but detected it and focused on it. In the early days we saw cruise missiles coming in, then detected bigger missiles, then SAMS [surface-to-air-missiles]. And we also picked up shipments of manpower into Cuba, ostensibly for the agricultural sector as opposed to troops. That was rubbish.
“We in Miami were closer to being right about the Soviet building up and the number of troops in Cuba. We did produce the agent report that described this trapezoid [-shaped restricted area]. . . . When this report came in it added to the fire for the U-2 flights and a guy in the Pentagon interpreted it.” 36
The Soviets, said Shackley, “started building up in early 1962 with socalled agricultural technicians. We were concerned early on that these were Russian military and not agricultural technicians. We got into a polemic with DDI [Deputy Director of Intelligence Ray Cline]. They couldn’t see the Russians doing that. It was a never-ending battle with DDI; a constant never-ending battle. In hindsight, we [Miami Station] were more correct than they were. We estimated forty-five thousand to forty-eight thousand Russian military in Cuba and it turned out there were about forty-five thousand. The first missiles were cruise missiles for coastal defense and they [U-2s] were able to get pictures to make the case that missiles were there and the photo interpreters supported it.” 37
On the night of August 24, Shackley suddenly had another problem to deal with. As tensions over Cuba escalated with the discovery of the Soviet military buildup, a group of young Cubans from the exile Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE by its Spanish acronym) penetrated Havana harbor in two motorboats armed with .20 caliber guns. Getting within a half-mile of shore, they opened fire for several minutes against seaside buildings in the Miramar section of the city, before fleeing back out to sea.
Cuba protested the attack to the United Nations as an instance of U.S.sponsored aggression and “within the senior levels of the Kennedy administration a debate developed involving President Kennedy, the attorney general, and Under Secretary of State Ball, and others over whether to arrest and prosecute the Cuban exiles involved after they returned to Florida. President Kennedy decided to issue a statement deploring such ‘spur of the moment’ raids as counter-productive, and warning against any future raids.” 38
Although the raid was not U.S. sponsored, the CIA had been support
ing the DRE. The raid, said Shackley, “came at a time when we were in talks separating ourselves [the CIA] from them. The DRE was an uncontrollable group. These guys were not disciplined. It was in the process of parting company with them when the raid on Havana occurred. We could not work with the DRE, which also was getting a lot of help from the private sector.” 39 A CIA document dated April 22, 1963, shows the DRE receiving a $51,000 subsidy during an uncertain time frame. 40
The late Enrique Baloyra, a former DRE militant, recalled the attack at a 1996 conference, noting that there was a “payroll” for members “and each person was supposed to be getting x number of dollars per month. But what happened is that we would be paid half of that, and the other half would be used to buy weapons and organize things on our own. This is how in August of 1962—the 24th to be exact—that the directorate was able to shell Havana from the harbor. There was a big brouhaha in the station in Miami because, obviously, somebody got on the phone and asked what the hell was going on. And the poor bastard who was on the Miami side had no idea. And the organic matter hit the fan. There was much confusion about that.” 41
Ultimately, the missile crisis brought Mongoose to an end, but the initial reaction to Soviet military buildup gave the operation new impetus. A National Security Action memorandum of August 23 said the “line of activity projected for Operation Mongoose Plan B plus should be developed with all possible speed.” It ordered “a study of the advantages and disadvantages of action to liberate Cuba by blockade or invasion or other action beyond Mongoose B plus, in the context of an aggravated Berlin crisis.” 42 A State Department intelligence analysis of August 25 suggested that the “most likely Soviet motivation in providing military assistance and personnel to Cuba is to enhance the Cuban regime’s defense capabilities against an external threat.... It is fairly certain that the Cuban regime fears more than anything else an attack by the US, or other forces strongly, if indirectly supported by the US.” 43 Still, no one at the time, it seems, even considered that the activities of Mongoose might have been at least partially responsible for the Soviet military buildup in Cuba.
Arthur Schlesinger weighed in with a September 5 memorandum to President Kennedy expressing his concern about reports of an “internal uprising” in Cuba and the impact on upcoming midterm elections if the CIA were allowed to run amok. “All this points to the absolute importance of making sure that there is no premature insurrection in Cuba,”
warned Schlesinger. “I would therefore hope that CIA be given the clearcut and definite responsibility to make sure that no such premature insurrection takes place. I think that the instruction should be issued in these terms, so that the top leadership of CIA will be impelled to check the situation all the way down the line. ... It is indispensable to be sure that no one down the line is encouraging Cubans into rash action.” 44
CIA Director John McCone appeared to be the only one at the top levels of the U.S. government who believed installation of medium-range ballistic missiles would follow soon as part of Soviet military buildup. He was on a honeymoon in France when a U-2 flight on August 29 confirmed construction of SAM sites. He expressed his concern in a series of cables to CIA Deputy Director Marshall Carter, but analysts concluded the Soviets wouldn’t risk such an action. 45
Mongoose activities during late August and through September focused mostly on intelligence collection activities related to the Soviet military buildup. At the same time, the operational schedule Lansdale had laid out in mid-August for Phase II was fine-tuned, and various contingencies began preparation. According to notes of a September 14 Mongoose meeting, “the Attorney General expressed concern that activities by certain Cuban exiles are reaching the point where the Government may be forced to take action against them rather than to simply state that we are investigating.’ The Agency is requested to see what it can do to help reduce the noise level of these activities.” 46
The Mongoose emphasis on intelligence collection was paying off, said Halpern. “I’d like to pat myself on the shoulder from time to time and say I held out long enough that finally people agreed, and Harvey and Shackley were the right guys for an intelligence operation. We did a fine job of finding out what was going on inside, leading up to the fact that by September of ’62 we had an agent . . . who was able to tell us about strange goings on in a certain part of Pinar del Rio province,” recalled Halpern. “The report simply said ‘there are between four little towns, which he plotted on a map, where there are strange goings on. Everybody is being moved out, men, women, and children.’ The report we got from this agent naming those four towns was disseminated September 18.” After bureaucratic delays, a U-2 reconnaissance flight was made directly over western Cuba from south to north on October 14, providing the first verification of offensive missiles on the island. “That’s the only decent thing Mongoose ever did ... because we turned it into a decent collection
operation, and Shackley and his people get full marks for this as far as I’m concerned,” said Halpern. The agent report—apparently the same one referred to by Shackley—was declassified and released in 1992 for a thirtieth anniversary missile crisis conference. 47
With confirmation of the missiles still ten days away, Bobby Kennedy was back on the warpath at an October 4 Mongoose meeting, complaining bitterly about the lack of sabotage, according to a memorandum of the session by McCone. “The Attorney General reported on discussions with the President on Cuba; dissatisfied with lack of action in the sabotage field, went on to stress that nothing was moving forward, commented that one attempted effort had failed, expressed general concern over developing situation.” McCone countered that he, too, had “observed a lack of forward motion due principally to ‘hesitancy’ in government circles to engage in any activities which would involve attribution to the United States.” Kennedy, according to McCone, “took sharp exception, stating the Special Group had not withheld approval of any specified actions, to his knowledge, but to the contrary had urged and insisted upon action by the Lansdale operating group.” A heated exchange followed “which finally was clarifying inasmuch as it resulted in a reaffirmation of a determination to move forward.” Lansdale was told to come up with some ideas, despite their noise level; among them were a plan for mining harbors and a study of “the possibility of capturing Castro forces for interrogation.” 48 A week later Lansdale followed up with a memorandum to the SGA with “action proposals,” including one for sabotage of Cuban-owned ships. 49
The October 14 U-2 flight dramatically changed the dynamics of the operation, although it did not initially alter Bobby Kennedy’s aggressive approach toward Castro and Cuba, as indicated by a Mongoose meeting on the afternoon of October 16. Invoking his brother’s position again and repeating his earlier message, “the Attorney General opened the meeting by expressing the ‘general dissatisfaction of the President’ with Operation Mongoose,” recorded Richard Helms. “He pointed out that the Operation had been underway for a year, that the results were discouraging, that there had been no act of sabotage and that even the one which had been attempted had failed twice. He indicated there had been noticeable improvement during the year in the collection of intelligence but that other actions had failed to influence significantly the course of events in Cuba. . . . The Attorney General then stated that in view of this lack of
progress, he was going to give Operation Mongoose more personal attention.” To do so, he said he would begin daily Mongoose meetings. 50
Later the same day, at a high-level White House meeting on the crisis, Bobby hinted at the possibility of a provoked or staged attack to justify removing the missiles from Cuba: “One other thing is whether . . . whether there is some other way we can get involved in this through, uh, Guantanamo Bay, or something, er, or whether there’s some ship that, you know, sink the Maine again or something.” 51
During the same time frame, Rafael Quintero was among sixty CIA exile operatives trained in radio communications waiting in Miami-area safe houses to be parachuted into Cuba to report on troop movements, missiles, and other information if an invasion order was given. Quintero had previously come to know Bobby Kennedy through Roberto San Roman and the efforts to obtain the release of Bay of Pigs invasion troops still imprisoned in Cuba. The imprisoned troops included Roberto’s brother, Pepe San Roman, the Brigade 2506 commander. Quintero and Roberto San Roman had, at Bobby’s request, gone to New York to make the first contact with attorney James Donovan and then put Donovan in touch with Ernesto Freyre, who headed the Families Committee. After that, again at Bobby’s request, they traveled to Latin America to make the exile case for release of the prisoners. Quintero had met and briefed Kennedy previously on the situation in Cuba after slipping in and out of the island twice between December 1960 and April 1962.
While in the safe house, said Quintero, he received a call from Roberto San Roman, telling him that the attorney general wanted to see them in Washington. “We personally talked with [Bobby] Kennedy,” said Quintero, “and he told us that ‘this time it’s for sure ... and you Cubans, if you really want to help . . .’ Nobody will believe this, but this is true. Roberto and I were present. He [Bobby] said ‘what you have to do is get yourself a boat and try to sink one of those Russian ships trying to break the blockade ... on your own.’ Not CIA. You guys. You Cubans do it, which was impossible really. San Roman didn’t have the capability to do it, really, so he thought I could get the people together. So we came back and I said to my guy [CIA case officer] this is what I had been told.” Quintero is still puzzled by what the intent was, except possibly for the exiles to provoke a confrontation such as Bobby had suggested by “sinking the Maine again or something.” 52
According to author Evan Thomas, a provocation is exactly what Bobby had in mind. Bobby had called San Roman earlier in the crisis
without telling him about the Soviet missiles, sounding him out about the “sinking the Maine” provocation. San Roman told Thomas that he and Bobby had “discussed creating a provocation, a way of drawing in the Cubans and the Americans. Bobby asked me, ‘What do you think you can do to provoke a situation?’ I said we could badly damage a Russian ship approaching port.” 53 San Roman apparently never told Quintero the full story. The attack never materialized.
Events of the next few days leading up to the peaceful resolution of the crisis are well chronicled, including the month of wrangling over details and Castro’s resistance of resolution through late November. There is no need to repeat them here. What is worth repeating, however, is Kennedy’s pledge, in an October 27 letter to Khrushchev, not to invade Cuba, part of the agreement for a verified withdrawal of the missiles. The pledge reads: “We, on our part, would agree ... to give assurances against an invasion of Cuba and I am confident that other nations of the Western Hemisphere would be prepared to do likewise.” 54 Although never formalized in a written agreement, the no-invasion pledge, with its post-missile crisis implications for Cuba, U.S. policies toward Cuba, and Cuban exiles, was kept. There are those who argued that the agreement was voided by Castro’s refusal to allow on-site inspections, but its validity has never been tested.
For Quintero, and many Cuban exiles, Washington’s action in the missile crisis was a greater betrayal than the Bay of Pigs. The exiles were convinced that this conflict would be the end of Fidel Castro. “Talk about the word treason at the Bay of Pigs, this was even bigger for us, the people involved,” said Quintero. “It was even bigger because we knew that maybe we were not going to come out alive from this one. Right in the middle of a fight, nobody is going to make a point of saving the life of one guy, but we didn’t mind. Remember, at that time I was 22, 23 years old, full of patriotism. ... I lost a lot of my idealism. That was bigger for me than the Bay of Pigs, because the Bay of Pigs I could understand.”
As for Mongoose, the missile crisis brought it one step closer to an agonizingly slow but unlamented end. Bob Hurwitch at the State Department tried to give the operation a push into the grave during the height of the crisis. He had become personally close to Bobby Kennedy as a result of their efforts to gain freedom for the Bay of Pigs prisoners in Cuba, whose plight became subsumed by the threat of nuclear war.
As Hurwitch recounted in his unpublished memoirs, “I saw [Bobby]
Kennedy in the State Department on his way to see Rusk. After coming out, I took Bob aside and observed that we should shelve Operation Mongoose. He looked at me first, blankly, and then suspiciously. I elaborated this was not the time to risk muddying the waters of our head-to-head showdown with the Soviets by encouraging exile raids against Cuba. If we were caught, the Soviets would gleefully justify their missile actions as reasonable defense measures to protect their Cuban ally. Bob saw the point, and Mongoose eventually died, without ceremony or mourning.” 55
President Kennedy, at an October 26 meeting of the Ex Comm, the high-level group dealing with the crisis, suggested “the Mongoose operation be reconstituted, possibly as a subcommittee of the Executive Committee, and oriented toward post-Castro Cuban problems. The President stressed the importance of tying together all existing groups engaged in covert activities in order to integrate our planning.” At the same meeting McCone said he “had stood down a CIA operation which involved sending into Cuba by submarine ten teams involving fifty people. He said he did not believe it should be done by CIA unilaterally.” 56 But Harvey, the chief of Task Force W, had already dispatched three agent teams, an action which was to bring down the wrath of Bobby Kennedy and cost Harvey his job.
At a Mongoose meeting later the same day, there was considerable discussion of the dispatch of agent teams into Cuba. “As a result ... it was agreed that all plans for dispatch should be suspended pending further examination; instructions were issued during the course of the meeting designed to recall the three teams already on the way.” McCone and Harvey said during the discussion that dispatching the teams had been a “unilateral decision by the CIA,” regarded as “within its sphere of responsibility, and particularly with respect to the first three teams had considered that it was a continuation of previously approved operations.” 57 That didn’t satisfy Bobby Kennedy.
Harvey recounted to the Church Committee in 1975 that he had a “confrontation” with Bobby Kennedy at the height of the missile crisis concerning his order that agent teams be sent into Cuba to support any conventional military action that might occur. Harvey told the committee that Kennedy “took a great deal of exception” to the order and McCone ordered him to halt the agent operations. McCone’s assistant, Walter Elder, told the committee that although Harvey had attempted to get guidance from top officials during the missile crisis, he “earned another black mark as not being fully under control.” 58 Shortly after the crisis
MONGOOSE REDUX
ended, McCone posted Harvey to Rome as the agency’s station chief there.
“I thought it was quite unfair to Harvey at the time,” Tom Parrott said. “That was the approximate cause of his getting fired, but I thought that particular thing was not fair to him because he had dispatched this team before the ban was on and there was no way for him to recall them. But it was a good excuse. They were fed up with Bill by that time. Poor guy.” 59
On October 30 Lansdale ordered a halt to all sabotage operations by Task Force W, effectively ending Mongoose, 60 although it resurfaced November 29 in discussion at the end of an Ex Comm meeting. McCone, in a memorandum for the record, said he thought that the operation’s “future activity should be restricted to intelligence gathering ... in a most intense manner.” To do so, he said the CIA was prepared to present a plan utilizing the Caribbean Admission Center, a refugee interrogation center opened near Miami earlier in 1962 as part of Mongoose. McCone added, “the form of Mongoose organization should be modified and this was agreed, but no new organization was discussed.” 61
Even without the missile crisis, it seems likely that Mongoose eventually would have floundered to an ignominious and unmourned end. It had failed to achieve even minimal expectations, outside of intelligence gathering. Many of its participants, institutional and individual, had little enthusiasm for the Mongoose program. And there was a general antipathy among them for Ed Lansdale and Bobby Kennedy, its two leaders and principal proponents.
If there was a burial for Mongoose, it came in a January 4, 1963, memorandum by McGeorge Bundy to President Kennedy, responding to a request for a reorganization plan to deal with Cuba. “The time is ripe for such a reorganization,” wrote Bundy, “because we seem to be winding up the [missile crisis] negotiations in New York, the [Bay of Pigs] prisoners are out, and there is well nigh universal agreement that Mongoose is at a dead end.” The reorganization, as suggested by Bundy, was to result in a coordinator for Cuban affairs within the State Department, with a deputy coordinator based in Miami. “If a Coordinator for Cuban Affairs is established, then we think the Mongoose office should be disbanded and responsibility for covert operations should be a part of the work of the Coordinator and his associates from other departments, reporting on covert activities to the Special Group in the normal way. . . . Such a
change,” Bundy concluded, “would liberate General Lansdale for many other tasks in which his services are uniquely valuable.” 62
Meanwhile, as Bob Hurwitch observed, “one of the consequences of the Cuban Missile Crisis and of the demise of Mongoose was the virtual shutdown of exile anti-Castro activities such as infiltration of agents into Cuba and coastal raids.” 63 It was but a temporary lull, however, for the Kennedys were not about to let Castro off the hook.
I
F or South Florida, first Mongoose and then the Cuban Missile Crisis intensified a frenzied decade that began in the mid-1950s when Castro’s eighty-two-member guerrilla band landed in southeastern Cuba. Mongoose increased the already substantial population of CIA agents, Cuban exiles, wannabe soldiers of fortune, and assorted other adventurers who were involved—or wanted to be—in the secret war against Castro. Then along came the Cuban Missile Crisis to make Miami the hottest spot in the Cold War—apart from the three capitals involved—and further fuel the perpetual intrigue simmering beneath the city surface.
An alphabet soup of Cuban exile groups numbering in the hundreds had sprung up, each trying to outdo the other in anti-Castro militancy. A handful of such organizations had no more members than the leader who announced its existence. To fuel fund-raising, the groups called press conferences and issued war communiques proclaiming actions against Cuba that most often never occurred. Stirring an already boiling pot was JMWAVE, the secluded Miami headquarters of the CIA’s frontline command post in Washington’s “back alley” war against Castro.
JMWAVE’s activities reached a peak in late 1962 and early 1963, before and during the missile crisis and its immediate aftermath. Functioning under the cover of Zenith Technical Enterprises, Inc., IMWAVE operated from Building 25 at the University of Miami’s secluded South Campus, a former U.S. Navy installation. Ted Shackley, a rising CIA star, was in charge as station chief from early 1962 through mid-1965. Some three hundred to four hundred agents toiled under Shackley’s leadership, making IMWAVE the largest CIA station in the world after the headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Additional CIA officers worked the Cuba account at Langley and elsewhere.
With its estimated budget of $50 million a year (in 1960s dollars), the Miami Station’s economic impact on South Florida was tremendous. CIA front companies numbered “maybe three hundred or four hundred at one time or another. . . . We had three or four people working on real estate to manage those companies designed to hold properties,” said Shackley. “We could only use properties for short periods of time. We couldn’t stay in any one place very long.” The properties included marinas, hunting camps, merchant shipping, airlines, a motel, leasing and transportation firms, exile-operated publishing outfits, “safe houses” strung throughout the area, and, of course, Zenith Technical Enterprises. The station itself had more than a hundred cars under lease. It ran the third largest navy in the Caribbean, after the United States and Cuba. Shackley estimated there were up to fifteen thousand Cubans “connected to us in one way or another.”
The tenor of the times and the threat next door contributed to a tolerant, and even cooperative, South Florida attitude toward JMWAVE activities. “There was, first and foremost, a great deal of patriotism in South Florida,” recalled Shackley. “When we needed things, we were dealing with people who had a memory of the Korean War and World War II. There was a strong anti-Castro feeling among Americans. And the influx of Cubans in late 1961 and early 1962 were the cream. What’s important to understand is that it made it easy to work in that environment, a progovernment environment. I can’t remember going to a businessman and asking him for cooperation who was not pleased to cooperate with the government and help.” 1
When authors David Wise and Thomas B. Ross blew the Zenith cover, identifying the company as a CIA front in the June 16, 1964, edition of Look magazine—a prelude to their book The Invisible Government , published later the same year—the agency promptly changed the station’s cover name to Melmar Corporation and went about business as usual from the same location. 2 “We couldn’t hide. We were stuck with the plant at the South campus,” said Shackley. “We made other changes [in addition to the name] that reduced efficiency but enhanced security.” He cited as an example the shifting of a “mother ship” used in actions against Cuba to Tampa from Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach ports.
Gene Cohen, University of Miami vice president and treasurer at the time, denied knowing that Zenith was a CIA cover. “As far as we’re concerned, the university is leasing space to an organization we consider a good tenant which pays rent promptly,” said Cohen. “There’s nothing to
indicate a connection with the CIA.” 3 As the still naive young reporter who spoke with Cohen and wrote the story appearing in the Miami Herald, the author typed notes showing that Cohen added “off the record” that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if the university did know Zenith was a CIA operation since “we’re all on the same side,” reflecting the near-universal South Florida attitude at the time.
Maybe Cohen didn’t know, but university president Henry King Stanford certainly did, said Shackley. “He knew who we were and what we were doing. I would meet him occasionally but only when we had a problem. I didn’t see him often.” 4
The Look article identified three other Miami corporations as CIA covers. They were Double-Chek, Gibraltar Steamship, and Vanguard Service. Double-Chek recruited the Alabama Air National Guard pilots for the Bay of Pigs. Gibraltar Steamship operated Radio Swan, the clandestine CIA station broadcasting to Cuba from Swan Island in the western Caribbean. It was listed under the same telephone number as Vanguard Service in a downtown Miami office building.
Bradley Ayers, an Army Ranger captain detached to the JMWAVE station in the spring of 1963 to help with training commando teams, later described its activities in a “tell all” book entitled The War That Never Was. He recounted the first meeting with Shackley in his office at Zenith.
Monday morning we met the station chief, Ted Morley [Shackley]. As we sat in his outer office, waiting a little nervously, I saw that they had missed no detail in setting up the false front of Zenith Technical Enterprises. There were phony sales and production charts on the walls and business licenses from the state and federal government. A notice to salesmen, pinned near the door, advised them of the calling hours for various departments. The crowning touch was a certificate of award from the United Givers’ Fund to Zenith for outstanding participation in its annual fund drive.
When we were finally shown into Morley’s office, I was immediately impressed by the tall young executive. The wisdom and professional skill demanded by his post and the strategic and diplomatic delicacy of the station’s mission made it imperative that the position be filled by someone attuned to the political goals. The station chief would have to be close to the President, a member of the inner circle; and Morley seemed the kind of man Kennedy might have personally appointed. 5
Ayers was to become so emotionally involved, both in the Cuban exile cause and with a Cuban refugee woman, that Shackley terminated him.
However, according to Cuban exiles who were trained by the agency, his book offers an accurate portrayal of CIA operations in South Florida at the time. Shackley, in an interview, recalled Ayers as a “strange guy,” although acknowledging that Ayers’s portrayal of the station activities was generally accurate as far as it went. “He was assigned to do training . . . real gung ho. He came with the impression he was going to train and then lead a team into Cuba. That was always a problem with the Special Forces. When they found they were not going to lead a team they became enamored of the Cuban cause. He started messing around with some female down there. We could see problems and ordered him to return to his parent unit. He was basically a good guy, but they go native.” Shackley said that the station “maybe had fifteen or so military trainers at any one time.” 6
While JMWAVE was by far the biggest, it was not the first CIA presence in Miami. That distinction belonged to Justin F. “Jay” Gleichauf, who arrived shortly after Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled into exile on New Year’s Day of 1959. Gleichauf told his story more than forty years later in an unclassified edition of a CIA publication. 7 “I had no inkling [when Batista fell] that within two weeks I would be in Miami as head— and sole staffer—of a newly authorized office of the Domestic Contacts Division in the Directorate of Intelligence,” Gleichauf wrote. “The Headquarters briefing was short and not particularly enlightening as to my new duties: ‘Basically, use your own good judgment.’ ”
Gleichauf opened an overt CIA office at 299 Alhambra Circle, a wellknown, east-west street in Coral Gables, an upscale area abutting Miami on the south, and adjacent to what later would become known as Little Havana because of its overwhelmingly Cuban population. When he arrived in Miami, Gleichauf said, the first wave of Cuban refugees had landed, some on their yachts, with jewels and objets d’art. Palm Beach became a'safe haven for ‘Batistianos,’ including Batista’s son-in-law. In contacts with them, I was never impressed with their opposition to Castro, although one offered the services of the captain of his yacht, who said he would ‘do anything’ CIA desired.”
The basic function of the new office was to be a Cuba “listening post.” To aid his effort, Gleichauf listed a CIA number—but no address—in the phone book and passed out business cards with his home number, resulting in calls from a motley collection of weirdos” as well as some irate Castro supporters.
With no direct air service from Cuba to Central or South America, said Gleichauf, “all shipments to the area had to pass through the Pan American Airways base in Miami. Every night I would head for the PAA base warehouse and pick up 17 copies of every newspaper, magazine, or other printed matter en route [from Cuba] south. . . . Nothing could be done with the many tins of propaganda film heading south, but I was informed that quite a number were ‘accidentally’ run over by a fork-lift truck.”
Representatives of companies that had business interests in Cuba, including an aircraft maintenance and repair firm that still held a contract to service Cuba’s air force and Cubana, the country’s national airline, were also a fertile field for cultivation. Gleichauf put out the word and shortly thereafter Pedro Diaz Lanz, commander of the Cuban Air Force, became one of the first major defectors from the Castro regime in July 1959, as did his brother, the Cuban Air Force inspector general, and several top Cubana pilots.
“Initially, Headquarters directed me to contact a number of selfproclaimed influential political figures who boasted strong support which could be converted into armed resistance once CIA gave them the ‘green light’ (read dollars),” Gleichauf recalled.
“There were scores of other opportunists in the Miami area, including gun merchants eager to sell equipment to the literally hundreds of ‘resistance’ groups in the area. Newsphotos were common of grim-faced men in fatigues, holding rifles. There were also lots of would-be Mata Haris, eager to do anything for the cause. And I ran across a lot of soldiers of fortune looking for a fast buck.”
Many of those soldiers of fortune found the Time-Life bureau, in a downtown Miami office complex overlooking the mouth of the Miami River, a hospitable place to hang out. One, Gerry Patrick Hemming, a sixfoot five-inch ex-Marine, had fought with Castro’s rebels before breaking with Fidel and organizing a shadowy outfit called Intercontinental Penetration Force based in the Florida Keys. At one point, Hemming contacted the president’s military aide in a letter written on the Time-Life bureau’s stationery, seeking “advice and constructive criticism.” There is no indication any was forthcoming. 8
Among the more notorious of the would-be adventurers to surface was Frank Fiorini, another onetime fighter with Cuban rebels who switched sides to join the battle against Castro. He later changed his name to Frank Sturgis and become nationally infamous as one of the 1972 Watergate burglars. Sturgis, remembered Gleichauf, “was held in low esteem.” 9 He
generally had a reputation among those who dealt with him as being one of the more reckless and least credible of the freelance warriors who invaded South Florida for the war against Castro.
Robert K. “Bob” Brown, a U.S. Army Special Forces officer who seemed to come and go from military service with regularity, was another to appear on the local scene. Brown, with a master’s degree in political science from the University of Colorado, delighted in ferreting out and exposing CIA front companies. He wrote an unpublished manuscript on the subject that circulated widely in certain local circles. Brown went on to found Soldier of Fortune magazine in 1975.
For most adventure seekers, the greatest adventure—meriting a badge of honor—was arrest by U.S. officials for violation of the Neutrality Act or on customs or immigration charges. John Dorschner later wrote of the adventurers collectively in a 1976 article for the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, observing: “They are romantics, and they tell fantastic stories of adventure, perhaps half of which are true. The fabricated escapades, the dreams, are as much a part of their milieu as the adventure themselves. ‘One wonders where fact and fantasy divide,’ a Washington Star reporter wrote about the life of Watergate burglar Frank Fiorini Sturgis, and the comment holds true for the group as a whole.” 10
Many made their local home at Nellie Hamilton’s boardinghouse on Southwest Fourth Street in what is now the heart of Miami’s Little Havana. “In Nellie’s side yard,” as Dorschner recounted one story, “Jerry [sic] Patrick Hemming used to drill commandos, and the men hid weapons in her storage shack. Once, Nellie emerged carrying a hand grenade by the ring. ‘What’s this, boys?’ she asked. [Ralph] Edens [one of her tenants] gingerly took the grenade away from her. Nellie professed not to know what the ‘boys’ were up to, but a Herald writer once quoted an unnamed CIA agent as calling her ‘Mother Hubbard and her commandos.’ ”
The American freelancers, as did many of the multitude of Cuban exile groups, often tried to leave the impression they were connected with the CIA, which would give them cachet in the Miami community. Few of either the soldiers of fortune or the exile groups actually were subsidized by—or even worked with—the agency as an institution. Some, however, may have had links with individual CIA case officers who were working with or encouraging them. A declassified CIA document dated April 23, 1963, shows eight exile organizations were receiving money, and only two—the Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE) and the Movement
for Revolutionary Recovery (MRR)—were engaged in paramilitary activities against Cuba. The biggest recipient was the Cuban Revolutionary Council, formed by the CIA as a front group for the Bay of Pigs invasion. It broke with the agency in April 1963. 11
Among the more widely known militant Miami exile groups of the day, in addition to the DRE and the MRR, were Alpha 66, the Second National Front of the Escambray, Commandos L, the Insurrectional Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MIRR), the Thirtieth of November Movement, and the Peoples Revolutionary Movement (MRP), which later was joined with other groups to become the Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE). The JURE, headed by Manuel Ray, and the MRR, headed by Manuel Artime, were both supported by the U.S. government in the post-missile crisis period but operated as so-called autonomous groups.
Many exiles would travel to Washington, seeking to meet with anybody involved in Cuban affairs, starting with the president. “That was kind of amusing in a way,” recalled Tom Parrott of the exile delegations constantly knocking on the White House door. “They would come in to see Taylor. . . . They wanted to see the president, of course. And lacking the president, they wanted to see Bobby, and they ended up seeing Taylor and they’d end up seeing me. They were all saying ‘we don’t want to have anything to do with the CIA; absolutely nothing to do with the CIA at all. So, of course, I would find out what they had. . . . None of them turned out to have anything. They all professed all kinds of assets inside of Cuba and so forth but you could tell that they were phonies. But of course the minute they left, I’d get on the phone to the CIA and ask, ‘What do you have on these people?’ ” 12
Parrott recalled a visit by one exile in particular, Marcos Garcia Kohly. “He claimed to have all kinds of support and he came to see Taylor. We talked to him for a little bit and then I took him over. He had a big scrapbook to show all the people supporting him inside Cuba and if he came back he could be the leader. He could replace Castro. It was pretty ridiculous. He had things like the Women’s Club of Santiago and, you know, the Boy Scouts of some other place, that kind of thing. There was nothing. I do remember that in this scrapbook as we leafed through, there was a ten-peso note.... It was there to keep in touch and this was the currency they had in Cuba. Well, the next thing I know he is being prosecuted in New York for counterfeiting Cuban currency and he said I had authorized him to do it. I wasn’t aware that I was authorized to let anybody counterfeit any kind of currency. It got to be quite a thing, and it [Parrott’s
alleged authorization] was part of his defense,” said Parrott, who doesn’t know how the case turned out. 13
There was “something like seven hundred exile groups,” recalled Gleichauf. “One guy was head of something called AAA, and claimed they had five thousand men under arms. They were ready to go as soon as they got the green light . . . made a lot of promises. It turned out to be completely ineffectual. It was all bull. The green light was money. It was a racket, one guy and his brother-in-law and existed only on paper. Most existed only to raise money.” 14
George Volsky, employed by the U.S. Information Agency’s Miami office in the early 1960s and also as a local correspondent for the New York Times, had similar recollections. “There were Cuban groups which did all kinds of things which were not very effectual at all. And the CIA knew exactly what they were doing and let them do it so the government could say ‘well, we allowed Cubans to do it.’ Otherwise they would be ... the usual big mouth . . . they would say ‘the United States doesn’t let us do anything against Castro. . . . They are keeping Castro in because they don’t allow us to do anything.’ ”
Volsky, a Polish-born refugee who wound up in Cuba in the late 1940s, then fled to the United States after being jailed in Havana during the Bay of Pigs, cited, as an example, a boat seizure on the Miami River that he witnessed. “It was laughable,” he said. “There was a boat full of weapons, hundreds. Maybe 10 percent were operational and all the others were some old revolvers and rifles bought by these people. The operation worked like this. They would go around [in the exile community] and say we are going to Cuba, we are going to invade and so on. They would get, say, $10,000 and buy for $2,000 all this junk then call the Coast Guard and tell them a boat is leaving for Cuba. The Coast Guard would seize them and then they would say ‘the United States doesn’t allow us to go to Cuba and all the money was there [for purchase of the seized weapons]’ when it actually was only a fraction. So it was a big joke.”
Volsky recalled a visit to the offices of Alpha 66, one of the more militant exile groups, not long after an action that involved an arrest for an aborted raid against Cuba. “As a result they started getting money . . . one, two, five dollars in letters because they had asked for support. I went to their office and they were actually putting money into a sock. I saw it. There were a lot of those kinds of operations. A lot of loud mouths, but they were just like mosquitoes biting Castro and maybe even less.” 15
Volsky was himself involved in one unsuccessful clandestine anti
Castro operation, led by a Cuban exile, Nestor Moreno, and reluctantly supported by Shackley’s JMWAVE, on orders from Washington. Codenamed AMTRUNK, the aim was for exile infiltrators to subvert and organize Cuban military officers. It had no known success. 16
Those Cuban exiles recruited and trained by the CIA as part of infiltration and commando teams or as support personnel for JMWAVE operations were much more discreet. Typical is the experience of Carlos Obregon, today the Miami representative for a Venezuelan publishing firm, who toiled in the shadows for the CIA from 1961 to 1970. A native of Havana, Obregon arrived in Miami in January 1961 on a commercial flight from Cuba. In late summer of the same year his CIA career began with his recruitment as a militant young exile member of the DRE, a group of mostly ex-university students active first against Batista and then against Castro.
The CIA had asked the DRE leadership to select some fifteen members for training in clandestine warfare, and Obregon was among those selected. In early October of 1961 the CIA trimmed the group to about a dozen, and Obregon was among them too. They were taken to a motel near Homestead, just south of Miami on the fringe of the Florida Everglades, to begin their training. There, CIA-trained Cuban instructors taught the group infiltration and exfiltration procedures; recruitment, training, and handling of agents; basic map reading; and small weapons and explosives. The course was cut short after two weeks, with the CIA complaining that the local press had been nosing around.
The trainees were temporarily relocated to the Miami Beach area. A short time later they were taken to a site near North Key Largo at the top of the Florida Keys where training resumed in what was then a much less populated area. The training site, said Obregon, consisted of a fourbedroom stucco house located along the highway and two smaller wooden buildings, next to the Atlantic Ocean, a hundred yards or so from the main house.
On some days during the latter stages of the Key Largo exercise, the group was split into smaller units and taken for a full day’s training at a site in the Everglades. To get there, they were driven by car to an abandoned U.S. Navy airfield southwest of Fort Lauderdale—now the campus of Nova Southeastern University—then flown to the site by small plane. There they received instructions in the operation and use of various types of pistols, submachine guns, and C3 and C4 explosives. An American
named Larry, and Roy, a Cuban assistant, conducted the training. Training ended in mid-December and the group was put on standby through the holidays. Most were housed at a DRE “safe house” near downtown Miami, doing very little until early 1962, when Obregon’s first direct involvement with the CIA began. He successfully underwent a polygraph test before reporting to a CIA “safe house” on Krome Avenue near Homestead. Then he was assigned to a radio operator course and spent two months learning Morse code and the operation of two radios, the RSI and RS6. Finishing the course in the second quarter of 1962, Obregon was assigned to a team and flown to what he later learned was “The Farm,” the CIA’s super-secret training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia. At the end of six weeks’ classroom and field training at “The Farm,” a team “was well-prepared to begin to operate in Cuba,” Obregon said.
Then it was back to Miami for maritime training, including learning to operate small boats, rubber rafts, and electronic navigational equipment; and the uses of infrared light and the metascope in infiltration and exfiltration operations. Classroom training was at a “safe house” near the main entrance to Everglades National Park. Field training was in the Flamingo area at the park’s southernmost land tip and it included nighttime infiltration and exfiltration exercises under circumstances that might be encountered in Cuba.
By late summer 1962 training was completed and the team was put on standby, meeting occasionally with its CIA case officer to discuss the situation in Cuba while awaiting the first infiltration assignment. On October 21, 1962, the team was told to report to a “safe house” in the Homestead area and await instructions. They did not yet know that Soviet offensive missiles had been detected in Cuba. Their case officer joined them that night, as President Kennedy announced the discovery and the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded.
The next morning the team was told it would be landed in Cuba “within the next two or three days.... The team was very eager and ready to move” in anticipation of a U.S. invasion. A recent Cuban arrival in Miami was to return to Cuba with them and act as guide in the Camaguey area. But the next day, a Friday, the case officer arrived to tell them the infiltration was on hold. The following Sunday the case officer “told us bluntly that all operations against Castro had been put on hold and we should pack up and go home. If there were a need for us, we would be contacted.”
Disgusted, the other team members broke with the agency. “Although disappointed,” Obregon decided to stay to do what he could to “unseat Castro.” From then until 1967 he was a member of CIA infiltration teams that “periodically were sent to the island to build intelligence gathering networks, and to develop a paramilitary capability that would be available in case instructions were given to start a guerrilla operation.” As both a radio operator and team leader, he estimated he made at least ten infiltration runs into Cuba.
“Most of the CIA infiltration teams that operated between late 1962 and 1967 were extremely well trained and had full support of the Agency,” said Obregon. Most teams, of two to five members each, operated in the Cuban countryside, “setting up intelligence gathering networks. .. . The teams were built around a team leader and radio operator [who] were relatively well educated with at least a high school education. Many team leaders “had been small land or business owners,” whose properties had been confiscated. Others were ex-university students. Many of the team members had been fishermen and/or farmers in Cuba.
“The team contact with the CIA was the case officer,” said Obregon. With few exceptions, the case officers were Americans and career CIA employees, some of whom spoke Spanish, “although the majority did not. Assisting the case officer was a so-called principal agent (PA), who in all likelihood was a Cuban national.”
The infiltration teams operated from “safe houses,” mostly located in the Perrine-Homestead-Florida City areas, all immediately to the south of Miami en route to the Florida Keys, in the same general geographic area as JMWAVE. The “safe houses” were used as meeting places and sometimes for team training. On the day of an operation, team members would be picked up at their homes in the Miami area and taken to the “safe house.” There, operational plans were reviewed and the latest U-2 photos of the infiltration area were examined. Required documentation and Cuban currency were provided.
From the “safe house” the team would be driven to the Florida Keys and taken in a small boat to the larger so-called mother ship, which, in turn, would tow an “operational vessel that would take the team to the actual infiltration point. The operational vessels, all part of the CIA navy, were V-20s, Sea Crafts, Formulas, and Boston Whalers, said Obregon. During the latter stages of his participation in the CIA’s Cuba covert action program, Obregon commanded a six-member team that was selfcontained to include the operational vessel. Obregon and two others—a
fisherman and a farmer—would “enter the island to run the networks that we had established” in Cuba’s Las Villas Province. The other three members of the team would crew the operational vessel. Once it had dropped off the team, the operational vessels would return to the mother ship and head back to the Florida Keys.
Obregon’s team operated on Cuba’s north coast, not far from Florida, so they could leave the Florida Keys in the morning and be at the operational vessel’s drop-off point by about 11 p.m. the same day. The trip from the drop-off point to the infiltration point usually took about an hour, said Obregon. The operational vessel would take him and his team about fifty yards from shore and drop them off. “After reaching shore, the team would move about 200 yards inside and wait for the following day to start moving inside in order to make contact with members of the networks,” said Obregon. “The movement from the shore to the general area where the team would establish contact was very difficult through heavy mangroves, requiring extreme physical effort from team members.” Each team member had a thirty-pound pack on his back. As the radio operator, Obregon’s was even heavier. Team members also carried submachine guns and 9mm pistols.
When exfiltration was “called up,” said Obregon, “the operational vessel would go to the exfiltration point to pick up the team, rendezvous with the mother vessel and head back to the [Florida] Keys. Sometimes the operational vessel could not make the rendezvous with the mother ship and had to get back to the Keys on its own.” The length of time the team remained on the island varied, said Obregon, ranging from a couple of weeks to a month or more, depending on the operation.
“Central to every operation, once the locals had been recruited, was the establishment of a communication link between the local underground group and the CIA station in Miami. In order to establish this link, at least one member of the recently recruited group would be trained in the use and operation of a high speed radio to send coded messages to the CIA communication base.”
During his nine years with the agency, said Obregon, he was “always paid in cash.” But, in an indication of the cooperative local atmosphere described by Shackley, Obregon said that during 1962 and 1963, “I was advised to use M. R. Harrison Construction Company [a large and wellknown Miami company] on credit applications as my place of employment. My position was timekeeper and interpreter. During this time and up to 1964, I was never issued a W-2 form for tax purposes.” He began
receiving W-2 forms in 1965, which continued until he left the agency in 1970. From 1965 through 1967, the W-2s came, as best he could recall nearly four decades later, in the name of South Allapattah Properties Incorporated, where he was again listed as timekeeper and interpreter. From 1968 to August 1970, he received the W-2s from a company named Marine Research. 17
From the time of his arrival in January 1959 until the spring of 1960, Jay Gleichauf did double duty for the CIA on the overt and covert side. When President Eisenhower authorized the covert operation that evolved into the Bay of Pigs, a CIA colleague from the clandestine service joined him in Miami to open the Western Flemisphere Division’s new Forward Operating Base (FOB). His duties were to coordinate all support, training and preparatory activities for operations against Cuba,” according to a heavily censored and undated CIA record of the Miami Station declassified in 1995. 18
In describing the new covert operation, the document notes that the new Miami Station “simultaneously supported our busy Havana Station which was operating under difficult circumstances, including inhibiting surveillance of our officers by Castro security services. After the Station was closed in Havana when US diplomatic relations were broken with Castro’s government in January 1961, it was envisioned that selected personnel assigned to the Miami Base would, upon the overthrow of the Castro government, become a nucleus to reopen the Havana Station. During the Bay of Pigs landing, the FOB provided support for the operation.”
Bob Reynolds, Jake Esterline’s deputy in Washington as the Cuba Project got under way in early 1960, remembered the decision to open the Miami Station. “Jake said to me one day, I want you to go to Miami. There was a real need for a station in Miami. Too many people from too many different organizations were sending people to Miami to meet this guy or that guy, to make this or that plan. . . . There was zero coordination ... all within the agency_” remembered Reynolds. “We definitely
had to have a permanent representation down there. So we put one together under the temporary leadership of Ray O’Mara, who we called back from Bogota ... a senior member of the agency ... very good man. He had FBI experience during World War II and was now living in Bogota.” O’Mara set up the new station and took initial charge of it, but with his temporary arrangement expiring, Reynolds said, Jake needed
somebody to go down and replace him on a permanent basis and he chose me.”
Reynolds arrived in September 1960 and left a year later. The covert office, too, was initially in Coral Gables with “very thin cover,” although Reynolds said he did not recall the address nor did he think it was then named JMWAVE. “We had no problems operating from this tiny office we had in Coral Gables. . . cars coming and going night and day, people dealing with members of the Cuban exile community all over the area, including down in the Keys . . . with our own little navy. It was amazing how freely we were able to operate without detection, and by that I mean you folks [the press].”
Reynolds said he had “not a clue” about the timing for the Bay of Pigs invasion “until the day after” it happened. “Why would they tell the Miami station? Our role involved recruiting brigadistas to go for training. Once we put them on an airplane for Guatemala, that was it.” In addition to recruiting brigade members, Reynolds said the station was involved in propaganda, counterintelligence, and intelligence collection and “would occasionally send people in and out [of Cuba].”
By the time he departed Miami in the fall of 1961, the Bay of Pigs had failed. Tentative planning for a new covert campaign against Castro—one that became Operation Mongoose—already was under way. Before his departure, Reynolds said he arranged to relocate the covert office from Coral Gables to the old Richmond Naval Air Station, by then the University of Miami’s secluded South Campus. 19
Reynolds said he did not recall who at the University of Miami handled the arrangements with the agency to relocate the station there. “I had some very competent administrative people down there who set it all up and I’ve forgotten how the arrangements were made or with whom.” By that time, said Reynolds, “we had a huge communications component and it seems to me that if I counted those in as being part of my command, we had about 160, of whom about half were communications people.”
Bob Davis, the CIA station chief in Guatemala at the time of the Bay of Pigs, succeeded Reynolds for a brief period. When Reynolds left Miami he said he had an “extremely good working relationship” with Gleichauf, head of the overt office in Miami, “which I understand deteriorated after I left. I don’t know if he [Davis] intentionally left relations with Jay’s office slag or whether it was his successor.”
After Davis’s departure as chief, the covert station suffered from lead
ership and organizational problems. In December Bill Harvey sent Shackley, his Berlin protege, to Miami to do a report. Six weeks later, Shackley was back in Miami as deputy station chief and became station chief shortly thereafter. Gleichauf suggested that the deterioration in the relationship between the two Miami CIA operations coincided with Shackley’s arrival, describing his new clandestine counterpart as “a cold person . . . [who] delighted to drive around with his telephone in his ear dealing with manufactured crises.” 20
The declassified Miami Station review document described the change in locations only by noting: “In September 1961, the Miami Station was established at a new location, replacing the FOB. About 300 persons were assigned to the Station at one time; Headquarters responsibility was in an autonomous group until 1965, when the Western Hemisphere Division resumed charge.” 21
The station review does offer some insight as to JMWAVE activities, noting:
Utilizing former Cuban assets in Havana who had fled to the United States, indigenous Cuban organizations were formed to continue the overt struggle against the Castro government. In addition, a Cuban Intelligence Organization in exile was formed to collect information on the activities of militant autonomous Cuban exile groups in the United States who were not affiliated with the US Government effort against the Cuban regime.
The Cuban intelligence organization in exile participated in a number of activities including the issuance of anti-Castro publications, maintaining relations with anti-Castro governments and groups in the Caribbean and Latin American countries, and debriefing Cuban exiles arriving in the United States for positive foreign intelligence and counterintelligence to identify Cuban agents being infiltrated into the United States via the Cuban Freedom Flights and small boats. Allied with this effort [words blacked out] directed at Cuban government [words blacked out], which was manned by indigenous Cuban exiles. Close working relations were maintained with US Government agencies in the Miami area such as the FBI, INS, Coast Guard, Customs, Navy, Air Force, etc., to coordinate activities. A small support base was established in Key West.
During the period 1962-66 the Miami Station engaged in classical intelligence operations directed against the Cuban regime. Radio Americas was established and broadcast daily from Swan Island in the Caribbean. Psychological, economic and political activities were undertaken in an effort to undermine confidence in the Castro government and underscore the
Soviet presence and total Cuban dependence on the USSR. Maritime operations were also undertaken. Among other missions, Cubans who desired to escape from the Cuban mainland were assisted.
The Cuban Intelligence Organization was more commonly known within the local Cuban community and intelligence circles as Operation 40, a quasi-independent group headed by Joaquin Sanjenis, who gained somewhat of a legendary and controversial reputation among some exiles. The group was created in March 1961 and trained in intelligence matters by the CIA as part of the planning for what was to become the Bay of Pigs.
According to a Cuban exile who worked for Operation 40 for three years in the late 1960s, the group’s initial objective was to take over administration of “the towns and cities liberated by the invasion force, roundup government officials and sympathizers and secure the files of the government’s different intelligence services.” Sanjenis was the overall boss. The top field officer was Vicente Leon, who was believed to have been a colonel in Cuba’s pre-Castro police. Leon killed himself rather than surrender when he landed with the Bay of Pigs invaders as part of an Operation 40 advance team.
After the Bay of Pigs, Operation 40 turned its attention more to counterintelligence activities directed at suspected Castro agents who might have infiltrated into the local exile community. More controversially, it provided intelligence on the activities of local exile groups, some of which allowed local or federal authorities to thwart unsanctioned exile raids. Numerous declassified CIA Intelligence Information Cables on file at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, included the “source and appraisal of the cables.” A variation of the following was often cited: “A member of a group of Cuban emigres trained in the techniques of information collection. The group has provided useful reports for over two years. The information was obtained from a local representative of the JURE who has access to members of the JURE executive committee.”
The exile who worked for the unit in the late 1960s said Operation 40 was “fairly compartmentalized,” but “foremost to its existence was the collection of intelligence on Cuba. . . . Most of the information collected was from overt sources . . . primarily the hundreds of Cuban refugees coming to South Florida on Freedom Flights.” The refugees were screened as they arrived. Those that might have useful information were interviewed separately. Intelligence reports were prepared on the basis of
the information provided. Additional information was gleaned from Cuban publications arriving in the Operation 40 offices. The group monitored the activities of local Cuban exile groups as well. A large database of index cards was maintained, containing the names of Cubans both inside and outside the island. The database information was “extremely helpful” in determining recently arrived refugees who might have had a close association with the Castro government, said the exile that worked with the unit.
There were those in the exile community who held a darker view of the operation. One exile familiar with the operation said that “when the Bay of Pigs went kaput, they stayed as a group and Sanjenis became a very, very dangerous and powerful guy in Miami because he had a file on everybody . . . whose wife was whose lover, how much money, etc. . . . Some people tried to use that for blackmail. Actually, nobody knows where those files are. It’s a big question mark.” He said he had heard, without knowing whether it was true, “that they had something like 50,000 files on people and names.” Operation 40 was shut down in late 1972 or early 1973, and the files were reportedly packed up and sent to Washington. 22
For both Gleichauf and Shackley, activity in their respective offices reached a crescendo during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which both facilities played a critical role.
Virtually since his arrival, Gleichauf had been pressing headquarters for “establishment of a formal reception and interrogation center similar to the Camp Kilmer [where Gleichauf had served] operation in 1957, where Hungarian Freedom Fighters and refugees were processed and interrogated.”
His effort got a big push shortly before Christmas 1961 when George McManus, special assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles visited Miami. By then, “refugees were coming in at the rate of 1,700 per week, via air, small boats and even raffs made of old truck-tire inner tubes.” McManus told Gleichauf that Dulles wanted to know why there was so little reporting on Cuba. Gleichauf responded that with only four interrogators and no interviewing facilities, “we could not begin to cope with the influx.” Manny Chavez, who was detached to Gleichauf s CIA office as one of the four interrogators, recalled that they had to await incoming refugees as they cleared customs and then hand them a card with a telephone number, asking them to call if they had information they wanted to relay.
Two weeks after McManus’s visit, Gleichauf was in Washington working on the details for a processing center in Miami. President Kennedy approved the project, and it became one of the many “tasks” assigned to the CIA by General Lansdale as part of Operation Mongoose. The socalled Caribbean Admissions Center opened in the spring of 1962, at a former World War II military airbase in Opa-Locka, a northwest Miami suburb. Although operating under the direction of Gleichauf’s office, it became a cooperative effort of numerous federal agencies and included a military staff of about fifty, many of Hispanic heritage.
“We operated on a seven-day-a-week basis,” Gleichauf said. “One team screened arrivals for knowledgeability, and a second team conducted interrogations in depth.” They were soon averaging 150 interrogations a day. By late summer, the Soviet military buildup was becoming apparent from the questioning, and reports were beginning to surface of “Soviet ships carrying large objects in crates, unloaded at night under strict security. Frequently, regular Cuban stevedore crews were dismissed and ordered out of the area, and the ships were unloaded by special stevedores.”
By September, Gleichauf recounted, increased reports of missiles were being forwarded to Washington, “scoffed at by analysts who judged that, even if true, they would represent only defensive missiles. In their view Khrushchev would never risk introducing offensive missiles in Cuba.” But, recalled Gleichauf,
On a Sunday afternoon in mid-September, a new arrival reported that six days before his departure he had observed a large Soviet truck convoy at night leaving the Havana dock area under tight security. The trucks towed 65-to-70-foot trailers carrying objects so large they extended over the trailers. The objects were covered, but they had large fins. One of our best men, an army lieutenant colonel, was conducting the interview and immediately recognized the potential significance of the information. He asked the refugee to sketch the object he had seen.
It compared with photos of the SS-4, a medium range ballistic missile capable of hitting most of the eastern United States. He then asked the refugee to identify the missile he had seen from various photos of several types of Soviet missiles, and the refugee picked the SS-4. It was decided to put the report, identifying a possible SS-4, on the teletype to Headquarters immediately. It created a sensation. President Kennedy ordered a U-2 reconnaissance mission over the area, but heavy cloud cover hampered visibility until 14 October, when a flight proved conclusively that offensive
missiles were indeed present in Cuba, and that missile-site construction was proceeding on a crash basis.
“On September 17,” said Gleichauf, “we obtained a second refugee report of the sighting of a large convoy in Pinar del Rio province, carrying several possible missiles. It dovetailed with the original report and helped to trigger the targeting of the 14 October U-2 flight. The Cuban missile crisis was on.
“Following confirmation of offensive missiles in Cuba, Florida quickly became an armed camp,” said Gleichauf. “Military convoys clogged highways, the railroad line to Homestead Air Force Base was jammed with military supplies, and rockets sprouted along the Overseas Highway [to the Florida Keys]. The 82nd Airborne took over Opa-Locka Airbase, and we moved elsewhere on twenty-four-hours notice. As one of my last support activities for an expected invasion, I obtained 6,000 local road maps of Cuba from a major oil company, ideal because of detailed local information. But Khrushchev backed down, and the maps were not needed.” 23
Shackley, too, found himself preoccupied with the missile crisis, describing the ten days from October 21 to October 30 as one of three phases into which he divided his nearly three and a half years as JMWAVE station chief. The other two phases were from his takeover of the station in early 1962 until the missile crisis and the period from November 1, 1962, until his departure in June 1965. 24
The first phase, said Shackley, began by
cleaning up the debris from the Bay of Pigs. There were a lot of unfinished administrative things ... a nightmare of administrative things and housekeeping chores. Also within the general rubric of intelligence collection we had to find out what was happening in Cuba, to produce positive intelligence, and put the paramilitary program into shape to do what we perceived to be the mission of the time, to take in supplies, bring people out and put them back in and carry out a certain amount of sabotage operations.
At first the notion and scope of what Washington wanted in terms of paramilitary operations skewered the operation. They wanted X. If we did X, we could not do other things needed to keep the intelligence collection operation going, and at that time intelligence was the primary mission.
Then we had to reorganize the psychological warfare campaign against Cuba and create an effective counterintelligence program. And there were
THE CASTRO OBSESSION
other things. . . . We had to come up with an assessment of prospects for overthrowing Castro; could it be done by exiles, popular revolt, military coup or somebody assassinating Castro, at some point? Then we had to engage in contingency planning . . . what to do if Castro is overthrown.
During this period, cleanup work probably was about 10 percent and 80 percent went toward positive intelligence, bringing the paramilitary program up to snuff and counterintelligence and the other 10 percent looking at the prospects of overthrowing Castro and developing contingence plans.
While all this was unfolding, what in fact happened is that we were successful in collecting intelligence and detailing the Soviet buildup in Cuba. We didn’t start out looking for the Soviet buildup but we detected it and then focused on it. In the early days, we saw cruise missiles coming in, and the SAMs and we also picked up shipments of manpower into Cuba, ostensibly for the agricultural sector as opposed to troops. That was rubbish.
The first phase also meant playing a key role in Operation Mongoose under the leadership of Harvey, Lansdale and, at the top, Bobby Kennedy, all in Washington. In contrast to many other participants, Shackley said he did not detect skepticism about Mongoose among Miami Station personnel, “but I can see where they might in Washington where they may have had more interference.”
He did, however, describe Lansdale as a “strange duck. He came to Miami on two or three occasions. One time we met most of the day. Another time he called and said he was coming down and would like to meet senior guys [of JMWAVE]. I had a dinner for him and he didn’t show up. I found out he went to Homestead Air Force Base [near Miami] and met with some of his Air Force buddies. At seven the next morning he called to see if he could come by for breakfast. He never said a word about dinner the night before or what had happened.”
The brief but hectic and intense second phase covering the immediate period of the missile crisis, said Shackley, consisted of an “all out effort to get intelligence on chances of hostilities; planning with the military what role we would play if U.S. troops went into Cuba; to put in pathfinders to mark beaches and drop zones for airborne troops; counterintelligence deployment with military police for prisoner of war and identifying Cuban intelligence agents; and bringing in people who could function in civil administration.”
In the third phase, said Shackley, “the task was really to keep intelli
MIAMI: PERPETUAL INTRIGUE
gence going; to see if the Soviets were really pulling out; what was happening inside; and expanding counterintelligence efforts. The Cubans were dispatching more and more agents to the United States. We were looking for information. And we were going to honor the agreement, the no-invasion pledge.” At the same time, said Shackley, the “operational environment” had become much more difficult. “In the early days of 1962, Cuba was in a permissive operational environment. By the time I left in 1965 it had ceased to be a permissive environment. When we first started, there was a large refugee outflow and no dearth of material to work with. Castro had not yet created coastal defenses. Radars, boats and internal population controls including the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and other programs borrowed from the Soviet system, increased. 25
Despite the many constraints, the Kennedy brothers’ continuing effort to rid Cuba of Castro didn’t slow.