AT DAGGERS DRAWN
ASPILLAGA’S ADVANCED TRAINING PROPELLED HIM IN VARIOUS directions. He studied counterintelligence tradecraft for nearly a year, becoming expert in the arcane and technically challenging work of communications intercept and direction finding, known as radio localizador. Under the tutelage of KGB instructors and using World War II–era Soviet equipment, he learned Morse code and wireless telegraphy, burst communications, the workings of shortwave radio, and the fundamentals of counterespionage.
Graduating in October 1963, he immediately began work in two primitive little commo huts. The secret installation was adjacent to what was later known as Punto Cero, Fidel’s isolated family compound at the beachside hamlet of Jaimanitas, near Siboney, on Havana’s western fringe. The area is more developed today; the fashionable Hemingway Marina is just a little farther to the west.
Tiny was sixteen, several months shy of his seventeenth birthday. Like so many of Piñeiro’s boys, he was trusted with significant responsibility from the start; at first his main duty was to pinpoint the source on the island of covert CIA communications. About a dozen agents were in radio contact with the Agency, using miniaturized modules, each about the size of a carton of cigarettes. Applying direction-finding skills, Tiny became proficient at locating the agents’ positions while they broadcasted, which sometimes resulted in their apprehension by security forces.1
That year the CIA introduced two faster and more secure wireless telegraphy systems for their agents to send and receive ciphered messages. The first, a oneway voice link known as OWVL, is used over standard shortwave frequencies. It relies on the transmission of a series of seemingly random numbers. The numerical “soup” could be deciphered only if the agent on the receiving end had a onetime pad corresponding to one used by the CIA sender. Somewhat later, burst transmissions added another layer of protection by mechanically accelerating the speed of messaging. In burst transmissions, an encoded tape is fed through a small transmitter at a speed so fast that direction finders less adept than Aspillaga were generally stymied. The principle is simple: the more rapid the transmission, the smaller the chance that it will be detected and the sender put in jeopardy.2
Tiny told me that the popping electronic bursts he was taught to track rarely lasted more than eight seconds. He claimed exceptional skills at locating the senders within that brief window of opportunity. Proud of his work at Jaimanitas, in time he eventually became the Cubans’ foremost expert at tracking CIA communications, including those with the double agents he went on to expose.3
He told me: “I was the only one who knew all about the CIA, all about CIA communications.”
Seining the airwaves, he was quick at tweaking the dials and sliding the needles of his equipment until he got a “lock.” He was like the young chess masters and math and musical geniuses—and today, computer programmers—who astound their elders by performing breakthrough feats at tender ages. Chopin, Mozart, and Mendelssohn all reached heights of extraordinary musical creativity in their mid- and late-teenage years. Tiny was an equivalent, a radio counterintel-ligence prodigy.
He was assigned to track maritime targets too. Exile infiltrators launching from CIA ships off Cuba’s coast radioed onshore collaborators to arrange rendezvous and deliveries. These were regular occurrences in the fall of 1963. Ted Shackley, chief of JMWAVE, the giant CIA station in Miami, revealed in his memoirs that “our paramilitary teams and boat operators were in and out of Cuban waters all the time.”4
Tiny labored alone. Other than Castro’s large security detail, he was the only person allowed on the dusty lane that some years later led to the commander in chief’s secluded residence. There was a second building nearby, used by Fidel’s security, and beyond, nothing but vacant fields clogged with marabu, a thick and spiny tropical bush. Earlier, the undeveloped land had been the location of a capitalist-era golf course. Tiny traveled to Jaimanitas daily by bus along Quinta Avenida, Fifth Avenue, a major artery roughly paralleling the north coast, then walked the short distance from the bus stop to his listening post.
He rarely saw Fidel during the many years he worked there and then only from a distance as Castro raced by, slouched in an armored vehicle or in a convoy at the wheel of a jeep. The two had no contact. I heard much more from Aspillaga about Castro’s paramour, the young and strikingly beautiful Dalia Soto del Valle.
Mother of five of Fidel’s sons, all now in their thirties and forties, she has been described in recent years as his wife. Tiny admired her, and he was smitten during the years he worked nearby. He described Dalia warmly, as an exceptional beauty, a “good and noble person.” She lived modestly and inconspicuously, never seen in public with Fidel, and she has always remained all but invisible to the Cuban people.
Dalia often walked alone along the same short route Tiny took to the bus stop on Fifth Avenue, sometimes at the same time he did. Fidel would not provide her with a car and driver, so instead she stoically took public transportation into Havana where she worked or studied anonymously at the university.
She and her youthful admirer spoke only to greet each other, always formally. “Buenos días, cómo está?” “Good morning, how are you?” Hardly anything more.
“I never tried to talk too much because I knew who she was . . . and you know . . . he can kill you.”
Aspillaga smacked the palm of his hand hard on the table where we were meeting, dramatizing how Fidel was to be feared and never crossed. The memory was electrifying. He was reminded of the close call in London with Miguel Perez Medina and the other attempts on his life. Flirting with Fidel’s much younger lover could have been recklessly dangerous.
Young and unattached, enthusiastic and determined to succeed, Tiny toiled fourteen and fifteen hours most days in a small, windowless space crammed with electronic gear. As a youth, a journeyman at his counterintelligence trade, he believed fanatically in the revolution and the doctrinaire Marxism passed down by his father. José Maragon, who also began in the DGI as a teenager, remembered his colleague unfavorably. Aspillaga, he told me, was “a true believer, harsh, didactic.” He castigated other Cuban agents when they secretly kept small amounts of hard currency acquired during overseas missions. He “was a radical communist, given to preaching vows of poverty,” a “tipo duro,” a hard-liner. Maragon could not explain why Aspillaga later changed so fundamentally.5
Tiny was doing everything by the revolutionary book and succeeding. His direction-finding equipment was connected to a thicket of antennas arrayed in a treeless field nearby, close to the sea, and with unobstructed sight lines to the north. The antennas usually were oriented toward Agency facilities outside of Washington and at JMWAVE in Miami. After dark they also monitored a wide arc of the waters in the Florida Straits, off Cuba’s northwestern coast. The charge was to catch American spies and infiltrators in the act.
THAT GENERALLY HAPPENED ON MOONLESS NIGHTS when the tides were right. CIA mother ships—most often the Rex and the Leda out of West Palm Beach—silently approached the island, lurking several miles offshore, in international waters. The Olga Patricia and the LCI, christened the Barbara J during her Bay of Pigs service, sometimes substituted. Between 150 and 200 feet at the waterline, they discharged smaller fast boats that sped close to isolated beaches and mangrove swamps with Cuban exile commandos and saboteurs on board. The final leg to shore was usually on small, black inflatables propelled by nearly silent motors.6
Ted Shackley’s JMWAVE operated the third largest navy in the Caribbean, including a midget submarine, tenders, patrol boats, and a swarm of high-powered intermediate-size craft. They were crewed exclusively by Cuban exiles, sailing from the Miami River, the Keys, and Florida ports as far north as Tampa and Fort Pierce. All hands were experienced seamen; three of the ship captains were 1960 graduates of the Cuban naval academy who defected and took to sea against their loyalist classmates.
“Five hundred people were involved in maritime operations,” Shackley told the Church Committee. The CIA navy was about the same size as Castro’s Soviet-supplied fleet, but generally it was faster and more skillfully manned. The cover stories used to camouflage its operations were not compromised until many years later. Shackley’s stealth naval force and his sprawling Miami station remained secret to all but a few outside the clandestine fold.7
Their “charter was to conduct offensive operations against Cuba,” according to a top CIA manager at the time. The battles with Castro’s forces were even more aggressive than the ambitious but failed campaigns based in western Europe during the early cold war years, when rolling back communism in Stalin’s satellite states was a top Agency priority. Sam Halpern was a ranking CIA officer on the front lines of the Kennedy-era Caribbean conflict, a scrappy, fast-talking New Yorker who was always brutally candid with his bosses. He later described what he experienced without circumspection. “We were fighting a war against Cuba, undeclared or otherwise, but we were fighting a war.” Castro and his policies were anathema to the Kennedy administration because of the subversion he sponsored in Latin America and his military alliance with the Soviet Union.8
Always reluctantly and elegantly, Richard Helms made clear in numerous sworn testimonies in the 1970s, after he had stepped down as CIA director, that the authority to wage this war came straight from President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general. “The Kennedy brothers wanted to unseat Castro by whatever means,” he told a commission chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. There was “a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the President and Bobby Kennedy . . . to unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device.” Helms went slightly further in testimony before the Church Committee, saying “[N]o limitations were placed on the means.”9
Under oath he also said, “Let us not for a moment think the Kennedy administration wasn’t dead serious about getting rid of Castro’s government. Certainly President Kennedy wanted to get rid of him.” Helms testified that in 1963, almost “the entire energy” of the clandestine operations directorate he headed from 1962 to 1965 was devoted to ousting Castro. “That was the reason for mounting the large operation in Miami.”10
The Cuban exile mecca so close to the target was the obvious place to locate the JMWAVE station. But there was no precedent for mounting peacetime paramilitary operations from anywhere on American soil. A much smaller station had operated in Puerto Rico for a while, with a mission that is still shrouded in secrecy, but it closed in 1958. Larry Houston, the CIA’s general counsel, was consulted; would a booming covert installation in Miami violate the laws that established the Agency and assigned it to operate exclusively abroad?11
Houston was a refined old hand, admired in Washington social circles and close to the seventh-floor leadership at headquarters in Langley. He was regularly in touch with Bobby Kennedy and therefore knew how important overturning Castro was to the White House. He never said so, but it may have been the attorney general who gave him the go-ahead to establish the station. “You guys are responsible and reporting to the President,” Houston told the Cuba team, “so set it up any way you want to.” With that blank check, JMWAVE quietly opened in September 1961, structured and treated just like the Agency’s overseas stations, although soon it was vastly larger than all of them.12
Shackley in Miami reported to Desmond FitzGerald, chief of the cryptically named Special Affairs Staff at headquarters at Langley. SAS had no responsibilities other than to run espionage, paramilitary, and other intelligence operations against Castro from Washington, Florida, and a number of CIA stations around the world. Jim Angleton, the venerable counterintelligence czar, told the Church Committee that SAS handled its own affairs and was a power unto itself. He surely resented that it had its own large counterintelligence staff and maintained independent liaison with the FBI.13
Angleton managed to keep a hand in Cuban operations nonetheless. He arranged for Israeli intelligence to install one of its own experienced agents in Havana, a young man “born in Bulgaria . . . a source totally unknown to everybody,” Angleton recalled. Only Helms and one other CIA officer knew of “his existence or identity.” The Israeli spoke Russian and other languages and later rose to a senior position in Mossad. Whatever intelligence he collected was communicated securely to Tel Aviv and then immediately passed on to Angleton.14
FitzGerald’s SAS quickly grew into the CIA’s largest geographic entity with more than 150 headquarters staffers, bigger than regional divisions responsible for a dozen or more countries, bigger even than the Soviet division. Cuba was that important to the Kennedys.15
The budget was enormous, four times the total spent in all twenty of the other Latin American and Caribbean countries combined. According to an Agency assessment from that era, Cuba would continue to be “the highest priority for all components of the clandestine services.” That meant other divisions and staffs were also expected to seize every opportunity to recruit agents and run operations that could hurt Fidel. There were many and far-flung successes. But as late as July 1962, CIA director McCone told the attorney general and others in a White House meeting that “no high level penetrations of the Cuban government have yet been attained.”16
A declassified covert planning document dating to late 1963 or early 1964 revealed, however, that many Cuban diplomatic and commercial missions abroad had been compromised. The report cited fifteen recruited agents, eleven audio operations, and fourteen telephone taps in Cuban legations. Mexico City and Paris were the most thoroughly penetrated, but Cuban diplomats and intelligence officers in a total of seventeen other world capitals were also being heard or monitored clandestinely. The hope in Langley was that “some of those now recruited will be returned to Havana to a high level foreign office or other government post.”17
SAS teams were posted to several CIA stations where Cuban targets were plentiful. The busiest by far was in Mexico City. Dave Phillips remembered that nearly every Cuban embassy officer there had been targeted for a recruitment pitch. They were mistakenly believed by the CIA to be all but naked to intrusive prying. Agents intercepted their mail, photographed people going in and out of their facilities, and snatched and picked over their trash. Embassy telephones were tapped—“covered completely,” according to an Agency history completed under Phillips’s auspices when he was Latin America division chief, following his service in Mexico. But the boast turned out to be exaggerated in several historically important respects.18
Seven microphones hidden in the Cuban embassy were pumping out sensitive conversations, one of them from the leg of a coffee table in the ambassador’s office. Through one or more of these technical operations, the CIA unmasked a spy reporting to the Mexico station—really a double agent working for the DGI. The Agency bombarded Cuban officers in the Mexican capital and three regional consulates with disinformation and propaganda.
FitzGerald managed all this from a maze of cubicles and dark little offices in the basement at headquarters, the “G,” or ground-floor, level. A Harvard graduate and transplanted Park Avenue socialite, he was known to all as “Des.” Close to President Kennedy and his brother, the men supposedly were distantly related through Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Kennedy family matriarch. Helms recalled that Des and Bobby “got along well; they had no difficulty communicating.” In fact, the younger Kennedy stayed at the FitzGerald home in the exclusive Georgetown neighborhood of Washington during his brother’s inauguration.19
Shortly after taking over SAS early in 1963, Des traveled to the front lines in Miami to get acquainted with the burgeoning station. Shackley commanded six hundred Agency staff employees and as many as a thousand contractors. In an interview after he retired, he said that up to fifteen thousand Cubans “were connected to us in one way or another.” They were supported by three or four hundred cover companies, including boat maintenance providers, arms dealers, real estate firms, and travel agents. JMWAVE’s own uniformed guard force protected the facilities. More than a hundred cars were leased.20
Shackley, who seemed sinister to some of his colleagues, was the perfect field adjutant. Abrasive, cold, and impatient, he demanded more than most of his subordinates could deliver. His Agency alias was appropriately Teutonic: Andrew K. Reuteman. For some obscure reason, the Miami Cubans nicknamed him “Tequila.” His biographer David Corn adds that he was also known by a melodramatic moniker that he hated, the “Blond Ghost.”21
A University of Maryland graduate, fluent in his mother’s native Polish, Shackley and the debonair, white-shoe FitzGerald were incompatible opposites. Des surely was pleased therefore that their offices were a thousand miles apart; small talk or cocktails together in Georgetown would have been unimaginable for him. But Shackley did not hesitate to do the dirty work that was demanded. Unabashedly ambitious, he was aware of his place as the saluting subordinate to a much higher-ranking FitzGerald. Their mission was simple, Des told him in Miami: “regime change in Havana.”22
Nearly everything was permissible toward that end. Shackley was smug when he told the Church Committee, “[I]t would not have been contrary to our policy to supply weapons to someone who might have access to Castro.” He admitted too that exile revolutionary groups he supported and militant refugees on the Agency payroll might have independently carried out assassination attempts. He was right about that.23
As JMWAVE’s maritime operations accelerated in 1963, both sides were taking heavy casualties. The CIA was losing many of its frogmen, saboteurs, and reporting agents behind enemy lines on the island. It was getting progressively harder to protect and exfiltrate them safely. Tiny and other young Cuban intercept operators were getting better at their craft, so the CIA’s clandestine communications were no longer as secure as they had been. Frequent firefights lit the Caribbean night as exile intruders were intercepted by Cuban security forces.
Losses in October 1963 appear to have been higher than during any month since the Bay of Pigs debacle two and a half years earlier. Understandably, Aspillaga has not told me whether he had a hand in those or any other fatal successes against the CIA and its Cuban exile operatives. But the chances are that on occasion he had intercepted agent communications and alerted security forces in time for them to take defensive measures. That, after all, was his principal responsibility. And his location at Jaimanitas was ideal for detecting CIA communications in western Cuba and the surrounding waters.24
By November 1963 it was known that at least twenty-five JMWAVE contract agents had been captured or killed that year. The actual number, including many others missing in action, was likely much higher. No one in the Agency or the high policy circles where the sabotage and penetration operations were approved in advance could have had illusions about the fates of those captured. Few would have been spared summary execution. To survive meant agreeing to be doubled and turned back against the CIA, all the while not knowing how long the diabolical pardon would be honored.25
Many of the men in Miami and Langley who were sending courageous young exiles to their deaths were torn, morally confounded. It was “enormously frustrating. You have no idea how frustrating,” Helms told the Church Committee, “trying to find people who could . . . land on the coast and be alive the next day.” But the pressure from the Kennedys to get Castro was overwhelming, irresistible. In another testimony, the proud and dignified former director and ambassador was forced to admit: “If the attorney general told me to jump through a hoop, I would have.”26
No one knew the ugly innards of post-Bay of Pigs covert Cuba policy better than Helms. His preeminent role began when he was surprised by McCone at a morning staff meeting in December 1961 and learned that he would be the Agency’s new “man on Cuba.” Sam Halpern remembered that his admired boss “looked like a thunderbolt had hit him.” It was the last thing he had wanted. Helms was a supple survivor, graduate of a Swiss boarding school and Williams College, a journalist who interviewed Hitler in Nuremberg in 1936, and a veteran of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He joined CIA at its inception and began his rise to the top. A tall, thin patrician presence in the CIA rough-and-tumble, his alias, Fletcher M. Knight, suited him well.
Helms’s operator’s instincts rarely failed him; they had screamed to steer clear of the Bay of Pigs, and he did. Countless CIA careers were ruined in that disaster. He had hoped also to avoid the Kennedy brothers’ punitive Operation Mongoose, their successor to the Bay of Pigs, the second chapter in their bloody covert war against Fidel. It was a yearlong campaign of paramilitary and espionage operations that geared up in November 1961 under Bobby Kennedy’s command. This new effort was brutally contentious, and Bobby was at Helms’s throat.
The attorney general lived a mile or so from headquarters and liked to drop in unexpectedly to confer on Cuban operations. Helms said he “regularly called middle- and lower-level CIA officers” he knew by name to “give instructions.” Incredibly, Kennedy’s secretary at the Justice Department sometimes called on his behalf to issue orders to case officers. SAS leadership invariably acquiesced in those interventions.27
Helms, who dealt with Bobby constantly, described him as the president’s always-demanding “right hand man in these matters.” He was constantly “putting pressure to get more action, and I’d be the one to try to think up excuses” when we could not meet his expectations for boom and bust in Cuba.” They were “adversary proceedings.” Though they were friends, Bobby also hectored FitzGerald. Tom Parrott, who worked at the White House and knew them both, recalled that Bobby was “a thorn in FitzGerald’s side.” Des “would just be seething sometimes.” Marshall Carter, the army general who was McCone’s deputy at the Agency, recalled that the attorney general was the president’s “hatchet man” who “operated as a sort of rat terrier.”28
In the administration there was a prevailing “hysteria” about Castro after the Bay of Pigs, according to Robert McNamara, the defense secretary. The Kennedys were unaccustomed to losing, he said, and they wanted to avenge their humiliation. Helms remembered it the same way. He testified that the foiled exile invasion had “whetted the appetite of the administration to get rid of Castro by some other device.” The author Garry Wills has written that “Castro brought out every combative instinct of the Kennedys.” He quotes the president’s most trusted advisor and ghostwriter, Ted Sorensen, saying that “Castro made Kennedy lose his normal cool.” Helms’s new assignment as McCone’s chargé d’affaires for ridding Cuba of Fidel meant there would be no shirking the White House’s demands.29
DURING DOZENS OF HOURS of sworn testimony on fourteen occasions in the 1970s, Helms was the essential witness about his Cuba work for the Kennedys. Testifying was always agony for him. He was accustomed to doing his most sensitive business in private and off the record. So, with members of Congress, he was elegantly evasive when he needed to protect CIA and administration secrets.
Senators and senior staff of the Church Committee were once caught on tape commenting on Helms’s forensic skills as they prepared to begin another hearing. The committee staff chief noted dryly that “yesterday, trying to hold him onto a question was difficult.” The senior counsel chimed in: “[H]e is a very, very intelligent witness and if you ever want to pin him down on precise facts, he knows very well how to make that difficult.” Seeming to enjoy the contest about to be joined, chairman Frank Church fired the starting gun: “Alright, let’s have him in.”30
Helms was the repository of the most intimate knowledge of Cuba. FitzGerald and Shackley worked for him, and his only superiors, McCone and General Carter, were content to have handed off the Cuba hot potato to him. He was always especially uncomfortable, though, when pressed to testify under oath about the Kennedys. By the time of the Senate hearings, it was no secret that the CIA had orchestrated murder plots against Castro in the early 1960s. It also became known that FitzGerald had dreamed up other bizarre killing schemes that never made it beyond back-office brainstorming.
Helms had to volley questions about what the Kennedy brothers knew of the attempts against Castro. Had they mandated them? Did they know the details? No one other than Helms could provide the answers. McCone and Carter had been cut out of the assassination planning, probably on Bobby Kennedy’s orders, and Des was dead by the time of the hearings.
Helms, the loyal presidential servant, refused to implicate either Kennedy brother in assassination plots. And in his otherwise thorough posthumously published memoirs, he glides right over the subject. But there was no misunderstanding what he kept saying between the lines when he was pressed and under oath in congressional hearing rooms. “Getting rid” of Fidel was his preferred evasion. It hovered somewhere between a clever euphemism and a flat-out admission that murdering Castro was indeed the administration’s goal.
Senator Church summarized what he thought he had learned about that in one session of his hearings:
Our testimony from Mr. Helms shows two things . . . that he believed the policy of the government was to bring down Castro by whatever means, and he himself was satisfied that this included assassination. The testimony also shows that Helms was never . . . instructed to assassinate Castro by Robert Kennedy.31
Still, in another of Helms’s appearances, Church had asked whether the attorney general “ever [told] you to kill Castro?” “No,” Helms responded, “not in those words. I don’t want to put those words in a dead man’s mouth. It’s not fair of me.” The inference was clear enough. It was the closest Helms ever came to implicating Bobby.
The Rockefeller and Church investigations, and another investigation a few years later by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, never got any closer to the raw truth. By protecting the attorney general, Helms was also immunizing the president. That has always been the “eleventh commandment” in the executive suites on the seventh floor at CIA headquarters. To implicate one Kennedy brother was to involve both.
Everyone who worked with them understood how Bobby mirrored and mimicked the president. There was never any doubt either about who made all of the most important foreign policy decisions. Jack Bell, a journalist friend, once asked the president who in the administration made foreign policy. “It’s made right here,” Kennedy responded, pointing down at the floor of the Oval Office. That was especially true regarding decisions about Cuba.32
Several CIA officials told the Church Committee that they knew or believed from whispered conversations in Langley that the attorney general’s demands to get rid of Castro originated with his brother. “We were keeping those things out of the Oval Office,” Helms confessed. The committee obliged by doing so as well.33
But if he had been asked by a subsequent president where the assassination authority had come from, Helms undoubtedly would have told the truth. The distinguished historian Max Holland suspects that such a conversation did occur between the then CIA director and President Lyndon Johnson during a White House meeting on May 10, 1967. Helms was there to inform the president about the CIA inspector general’s ultra-sensitive report cataloging CIA plots and schemes to assassinate Castro. There were eight of them, described in flat bureaucratic prose that hinted at just how mortified the authors had been when reporting on their colleagues’ behavior.34
Helms’s meeting with Johnson lasted nearly an hour, but almost nothing of what was said was recorded. Yet Holland writes that if Johnson had asked under whose authority the CIA acted, Helms would have said Robert Kennedy “personally managed the operation” to assassinate Castro. In 1975, Helms used similar language in a meeting with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A document stating that, perhaps the only one surviving anywhere that explicitly ties Bobby to the Castro assassination planning, is stored at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Michigan.35
OPERATION MONGOOSE WAS TERMINATED during the missile crisis when wiser heads feared that some errant JMWAVE sabotage raid might be misunderstood as the opening shots of an American invasion of Cuba. Yet Castro was not off the hook. After a pause of several months, the third stage of the Cuba wars was launched. Helms testified that it began in spring 1963. Tom Parrott had been an Agency man since 1949 and had served in the Kennedy White House as secretary of the secretive committee that approved covert actions. He testified that Mongoose had been designed “to keep the pot simmering” in Cuba. The following spring, the pot would be brought to a boil.36
In an internal Agency interview in 1988 that was declassified eleven years later, Sam Halpern, the perennial special assistant to the Agency’s top brass, remembered the ratcheting up. “After the missile crisis everything was just dead in the water.” But soon the pressures built again. “‘Castro is still there. Do something.’ So that’s when we started all over again.”37
The Kennedys were outraged that Fidel had given Cuban territory over to Khrushchev to install nuclear missiles. The president had no knowledge of the Armageddon letter, but if it somehow was leaked as he was preparing for reelection in 1964, his Republican opponents would have had a devastating issue to raise against him. It was bad enough that Cuban subversion in Latin America was reaching new intensity and that the Kremlin was refusing to remove the several thousand stay-behind troops it kept on the island. If Kennedy had lived, these would have been white-hot campaign issues.38
The president’s journalist friend Charles Bartlett, who was often privy to his thinking, remembered in an oral history interview that Kennedy “really did not think it was going to be easy” to be reelected. “It would have been an interesting campaign . . . I think he would have debated Cuba.” Some opinion polls were showing distinct vulnerabilities. A Harris survey taken in October showed that only 42 percent of the respondents believed that Kennedy was doing an excellent or fairly good job at “handling Castro.” Still in power, still goading, denouncing, and confronting the “imperialist enemy,” Fidel would have been a delicious Republican campaign issue, just as he had been for Kennedy in the 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon.39
So, the war to rid Cuba of Castro was renewed in March and April 1963. On balance, this third and final thrust to oust Fidel proved to be the most ambitious, and the most sinister.
“There’d have to be something more sophisticated,” Helms testified. And, recalling those days, he said again that “no limits were placed on what we were attempting to do. We were never told, don’t do this, or that.” He understood the enmity that had grown between Castro and Kennedy like an abscess. Their rivalry for influence in Latin America, the many forms of subversion each practiced against the other’s interests, and the vivid memories of the missile crisis kept them in a state of virtual war.
Their priorities collided in Latin America. Kennedy devoted more time to that region than to any other part of the world and obsessed about another country falling under Fidel’s sway. During his truncated presidency he managed to meet face-to-face with fifteen of the eighteen Latin American chief executives beyond Cuba, travel three times to the region, and consult in the White House with countless Latin ambassadors, politicians, and intellectuals. He met twice with his favorite among them, the endangered Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt. Kennedy established the Alliance for Progress, a massive aid program that urged social and economic reforms on regional leaders as a means of shoring them up against Cuban subversion.
Kennedy and Castro vied for influence, especially among the younger generation of Latins. There were few remote corners anywhere that Fidel’s name and image were not familiar, even among the poorest and least educated. But Kennedy also fared well. The journalist Laura Bergquist recalled that during her frequent travels, she talked to “barn-burning young revolutionaries who were pro-Castro” but found that, surprisingly, they also empathized with Kennedy. She said it “was amazing how he got across to people, not only in the United States, but all over the world.”40
Thomas Mann was the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and hosted the president’s state visit there in June 1962. He too was impressed with Kennedy’s enormous appeal. Mann wrote in unpublished memoirs that Kennedy’s visit was an unparalleled success. He had never seen “anybody make such an impression on the people of another country, anytime, anywhere,” as Kennedy did with the masses of rapturous Mexicans who greeted him. C. Allan Stewart, the American ambassador to Venezuela, remembered the “electrifying effect” Kennedy’s inaugural address had there and more widely throughout Latin America.41
Because of the Cuban threat, Kennedy once referred to the region as the “most dangerous area in the world.” Egged on by McCone and gloomy CIA assessments, the president did not doubt that one or more Latin American countries were immediately vulnerable to Cuban inroads. A Special National Intelligence Estimate issued in mid-November 1963 warned that “Castro will not reduce to any significant degree his incitement to subversion.” In short, Helms believed, as he once testified, that Castro and Kennedy “were at daggers drawn.” They were like street brawlers, each prepared to inflict a fatal blow or, if they knew one were coming, to look the other way.42
ON NOVEMBER 12, 1963, the president was updated on the progress of the new covert campaign against Cuba. Just ten days before he was assassinated in Dallas, it was the last of the many high-level meetings on Cuba he attended. FitzGerald sat in the briefers’ chair at the long, ornate table in the White House Cabinet Room, a civilian general reporting to his commander in chief.
The Kennedy brothers were joined by seven cabinet and ranking sub–cabinet-level officials, including the secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Such a top-heavy turnout was unusual. The Pentagon’s McNamara, for example, rarely attended such sessions on Cuba. But this one was billed as of crucial importance. The White House and the CIA believed that D-Day was approaching in the covert war against Castro. A number of operational plans were converging, and there was a palpable sense of urgency.43
It was CIA’s show, so five top Agency officers were also in the room. McCone and Helms, and Bruce Cheever, FitzGerald’s deputy in SAS, were there. Shackley flew up from Miami. It was a full-court press because the stakes were so high.
McCone opened and FitzGerald took over a few minutes later. He stated, “Cuban counterintelligence efforts have intensified during the past months. Our losses have increased. This is particularly true with regard to the ‘black’ (covert) teams. The Cuban control system and ration system make the teams’ continued existence more and more precarious.”44
Agency spies and intruders faced a survival problem similar to those that felled Cuban volunteers fighting with foreign guerrilla groups: hunger. Finding sufficient food while on the run was nearly impossible without betraying one’s subversive purposes. The official White House transcript of the meeting emphasized that. “The reasons for these casualty figures are the increasing effectiveness of Castro’s internal security forces and discovery brought about when agents try to obtain food.”
Regardless, FitzGerald assured the Cabinet Room gathering, SAS would “press forward with all the other types of intelligence operations.” They ran the gamut of everything CIA had learned and practiced all over the globe, as well as tricks and feints that had never been tried before. The plan was described as a “six-point integrated program against Cuba.” Meeting participants knew its general parameters and purpose, but most of the details would have been new to most of them.
Cheever was the Agency’s note taker; his SECRET memorandum, now fully declassified, is a comprehensive record of what was discussed. No other CIA document reveals so dramatically the magnitude of the undeclared war against Cuba on the eve of John Kennedy’s death. It leaves no doubt about the president’s complicity in that brutal and violent campaign. Ironically too, his brother, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, was its most demanding advocate.45
Covert collection of intelligence was the first item on FitzGerald’s brief. He felt reasonably good about how SAS was performing. Despite the losses to Cuban security, there was still a diverse complement of spies on the island. He mentioned seventy-four singleton agents operating alone and “reporting directly to us.” Those communicating by radio were the main targets of Aspillaga’s direction-finding efforts. Another seventy-nine subagents residing in Cuba worked in espionage networks. A commando “black” team with fifty-five subagents in its net was operating in the westernmost province of Pinar del Río.46
Two other items, propaganda and sabotage programs, were intertwined in FitzGerald’s brief. Programming was not crafted around passive, high-minded themes of democratic values and human rights or how Cuba had become a vassal of the Soviet Union. It was calculated instead to incite the populace, “to stimulate low-risk sabotage” and resistance. Radio Swan, broadcasting from a small western Caribbean island later ceded by the United States to Honduras, was on the air thirteen hours daily. Programming was focused on specific groups: students, the Cuban military, workers, and others.
The effort was considered a success. There had been “a slight upturn” in sabotage. The Agency had reports of 109 such acts perpetrated since the previous April, including “derailing locomotives, destroying high tension poles, burning trucks and factories.” Des said that some of the recent attacks had been successful against “a power plant, oil storage facilities, and a sawmill. An underwater demolition operation was run against a floating crane” in a Cuban harbor. The propaganda seemed to be working; Cubans on the island were stimulated to mount their own destructive attacks against the Castro regime independently. But there was another reason for the upturn in sabotage that Des did not acknowledge.47
In his memoirs, Shackley told of creating from scratch an exile paramilitary group he dubbed the Comandos Mambises, after the late nineteenth-century Cuban guerrillas who fought for independence against Spain. The Miami station designed a shoulder patch for them depicting a stylized Cuban flag and a guerrilla fighter on horseback. Shackley’s Comandos specialized in underwater demolition techniques and were run out of JMWAVE. They began attacking Cuban targets in late summer 1963, ferried by the covert navy. In April, Shackley had approved the use of limpets—five-pound explosive devices that exile frogmen attached magnetically to the sides of ships below the water line.48
Over the next few months, a number of hits were scored, including on an oil storage depot and pipelines, a sawmill, and coastal patrol boats. Some of the targets were among those FitzGerald had mentioned. But Shackley wrote that it was difficult to distinguish between the sabotage operations run by his new teams and violence carried out independently by disaffected people on the island. He did claim that “spontaneous events tended to occur shortly after a Comando Mambises operation.”49
Des was particularly pleased with the efforts devised to squeeze life out of the Cuban economy, the fourth item on his list. He told the White House gathering that, on balance, this “government-wide program probably had a greater impact” than anything else being done to topple Castro. Most provisions of the economic embargo—including a travel ban affecting most Americans—are still in effect at this writing, fifty years later, reinforced and extended twice by legislation during the 1990s. No other country has ever been targeted by the United States with such punishing economic sanctions and aggressions as Castro’s Cuba was during the Kennedy years.
Covert programs complemented the many declared ones to economically strangle the regime. In polite policy circles it was all referred to as “economic denial.” Cruder language was used in SAS’s gray-painted corridors. The gruff General Carter used the term “testicular grip” in a congressional hearing. Among friends he and others probably preferred more commonplace, locker-room versions of that phrase.50
Almost nothing was off limits. There was high-level talk about using biological agents to eradicate Cuban crops. Carter remembered that McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national security advisor, told the Agency there was “no worry” about that. I know of no evidence that any such plans were ever carried out, although to this day Fidel has not ceased insisting that they were implemented on a ravenous scale.
Still, many cruel and petty acts of terrorism were routinely inflicted. It was bandied about in Langley that stray cats were dunked in gasoline and set afire to run crazily torching dry sugarcane fields. Agents in many countries were tasked to foul the engines and gas tanks of vehicles purchased by the Cuban government before they could be loaded on to freighters.51
Bill Sturbitts, a World War II veteran and desk analyst in the CIA’s analytic directorate, was recruited by FitzGerald to stir this witches’ brew. Some of the punishing initiatives the two came up with were conducted within the bounds of American law; others were criminal by any measure.
One effort consisted of selling sabotaged and defective industrial replacement parts to Cuba through third countries. “We had our agents get the Cuban orders all over Europe,” Sturbitts later admitted. He also mentioned a “target of opportunity”—a freighter hauling Cuban sugar to the Soviet Union that accidentally took a hole in its hull and had to put in to Puerto Rico for repairs. SAS arranged for a harmless substance to be applied covertly to the sugar, turning it sour and worthless. The Agency was commended for its initiative and daring.52
Sturbitts ran what he called a preemptive purchase program. “If there was a single source of supply for a particular good, we would go in and buy it to deny the Cubans that market.” One such operation blocked the purchase of a badly needed heavy oil, known as bright stock. Agents approached more than six hundred American companies to persuade them not to sell spare parts to Cuba through their foreign subsidiaries. Sturbitts remembered that not one refused to cooperate. He also told of successful efforts to prevent Cuban government auctions in Europe and Canada of valuable art collections and racehorses that had been confiscated from wealthy families. “We ran legal operations, got the owners and had them hire attorneys and bring them (the Cuban government) to court.”53
FitzGerald also professed to be pleased with the progress of so-called autonomous anti-Castro groups—another of the euphemisms used by the Agency and in policy councils. Two prominent exile leaders—both favorites of Bobby Kennedy—had been encouraged, with substantial arms and financial support from JMWAVE, to run sabotage attacks and espionage from bases in Central America. Their activities would, therefore, be easily deniable. Des was upbeat. He told the president and the others gathered in the Cabinet Room that “these groups will relieve some of the pressure on our operations which we believe will be most beneficial.”
Shackley, however, was a skeptic from the start, in no small measure because the “autonomous groups” operated beyond his control. One of them, he explained in his memoirs, was never able to do much of anything. The other, led by Manuel Artime, a Bay of Pigs survivor, initially seemed more promising, but Shackley sneered that the support he provided Artime “turned out to be a labor of love that produced no tangible results.” He told author Don Bohning that it was a Bobby Kennedy operation, “an exercise in futility.”54
Shackley again was right. Fidel revealed in a speech in March 1966 that the DGI had penetrated the heart of Artime’s group at its inception three years earlier. The admission was a rare example of Castro publicly boasting of Cuban intelligence triumphs. He said all of the arms caches covertly delivered to the island by Artime, in seventeen different infiltration operations, were retrieved and later used by Cuban security forces. With a Delphic swipe at CIA and a rhetorical bow, he added, “No one knows how we know, but we know, and we know how we know.”55
The last of FitzGerald’s briefing items was intended to be the coup de grace. It was the covert initiative in which he had made the greatest personal investment, putting both himself and the attorney general at considerable risk. SAS and JMWAVE were endeavoring on several fronts to sow discontent and rebellion in Raúl Castro’s armed forces. That had been a major policy goal, approved at the highest levels, since earlier in the year. The objective, of course, was a coup.
“Slow but encouraging progress is being made,” FitzGerald intoned. His staff, working jointly with the Defense Intelligence Agency, had completed detailed biographic studies of 150 Cuban military officers. Forty-five of them were of “particular interest,” and FitzGerald added that “we are currently in direct contact with three ‘Heroes of the Revolution.” That was not a title in use in Cuba at the time, but Des was correct; SAS indeed had contact with a few military leaders, who “need[ed] to be reassured . . . that, ‘should they overthrow Castro’ they will be viewed favorably in the United States.”56
The most important of these men was Rolando Cubela, a prominent if eccentric revolutionary hero. A wounded veteran of the anti-Batista insurgency, admired leader of revolutionary students, and a medical doctor, he wore the insignia of a comandante—literally a major or commander—which, until the 1970s when general officer ranks were introduced, was the highest in the armed forces.
Cubela had been meeting secretly with CIA case officers in foreign capitals since early 1961 and recruited as a trusted agent in August 1962. As noted, until then the Agency had no high-level sources in the Cuban regime. Shackley admitted in his memoirs that “our assets were NCOs [noncommissioned officers], logisticians, and food handlers, useful in the past but hardly what we would need for a coup.” Another Agency document from that period revealed that none of the assets “is high level or privy to the basic political and military decisions.” Cubela was thought to be pure gold.57
The White House war council lasted little more than a half hour. The president asked if the maritime attacks were worthwhile and were contributing to the objective of routing Castro. Robert Kennedy was supportive of the raids. He believed the Agency’s efforts “had produced a worthwhile impact.” Defense Secretary McNamara agreed. It was Secretary of State Dean Rusk who expressed the only reservations about what he preferred to call “the hit-and-run raids.” In the end, the president authorized additional sabotage attacks. One would target a wharf and another a sawmill. They were scheduled for the next weekend, November 16 and 17.
Thus, the president of the United States, his brother—the attorney general— and the national security cabinet had all calmly listened to and, without objecting, collectively became complicit in acts that constituted a deliberate and massive campaign of international terrorism. Historians have written of the president’s silent confidence that he would get Fidel. Garry Wills noted that “the one option the Kennedys never considered . . . was leaving Castro alone.”58
TINY ASPILLAGA WAS AT WORK alone in his little hut in Jaimanitas ten days later, early Friday morning, November 22, 1963. Around nine or nine-thirty, as he still vividly recalls, he received a coded message by radio from his jefatura, or headquarters. There was no phone in the building where he did most of his work. The message instructed him to go over to the second little structure he used, a hundred yards away, and use the secure phone there to call back for instructions.
He was ordered to stop all of his CIA tracking efforts. During the month or so of his work there, and for the next dozen years, his only targets had been the Agency’s spies on the island and incursions by sea. Nothing else mattered. That morning in November 1963 would be the only exception he later remembered.
“The leadership wants you to stop all your CIA work, all your CIA work.” He was told to redirect his antennas away from Miami and Agency headquarters in Virginia. It was broad daylight so he did not need to monitor seaborne incursions by JMWAVE saboteurs that always occurred after dark.
He was ordered instead to listen to communications from Texas.
“I was told to listen to all conversations, and to call the leadership if I heard anything important occur,” Aspillaga told me. “I put all of my equipment to listen to any small detail from Texas. They told me Texas.”
He said, “It wasn’t until two or three hours later that I began hearing broadcasts on amateur radio bands about the shooting of President Kennedy in Dallas.”
Kennedy was shot at about 12:30 P.M. Dallas time, or 1:30 P.M. Havana time. Aspillaga told me he had tuned in to Texas frequencies about three hours earlier.
“Castro knew,” he said. “They knew Kennedy would be killed.”