Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  later

  There is a lull in the evening, and I am closeted in the john again, adding to these notes. Soon the local legend will have it that Hubbard doesn’t keep a tight sphincter. If my absences every few hours are noted, and my hope is that in the general intensity and confusion they are not, all good and well. If, on the other hand, I get to be known as Shit-House Harry, that will establish the cost of this journal. I wish, by now, that I had not started. If they taught us one principle at the Farm over and over, it was to take no unnecessary notes. Even as I write, I feel constrained. I am careful not to speak in any too great detail about our War Room personnel and their specific tasks, I try to describe no more than historical moments and, of course, the divagations of my own mood, but I still have to marvel at the basic impropriety of my father’s makeup. He encouraged me to do this journal, knowing full well that such activities are, at best, professionally inappropriate. I marvel at myself. I obey him. How great is my need to get a little nearer to him.

  All the same, these hours of writing, these meditations on whether or not I am preparing myself for the incalculable pressures of a beachhead headquarters and a conceivable visit to eternity, would be close to intolerable without this journal. And the risk is small. Every time I write a few pages, they are enclosed in an envelope and dropped in the mail slot in Cal’s safe. I assume he collects them every few days for deposit in one of his secure boxes. In fact, as if it would compound the trespass, we do not talk about it.

  Hunt has just informed me of the latest update on our itinerary. If by dawn the supplies are landed and the beachhead is secure, then we will be on our way to Miami to join the exile leaders. In another twenty-four hours, or less, we will be on the beachhead. Indeed, in the early hours of this morning, the CRC left New York for Opa-Locka. So soon as they debarked from their plane, they were immediately installed—I will not say incarcerated—in one of the barracks on the old air base. Naturally, they are in a half-boiled state; half-simmering, half–boiled over. I have never been able to come to terms with the all too readily available hysteria of the Cuban temperament, but I can appreciate their feelings in this situation. After all, they are on the outskirts of Miami, not ten miles away from their wives and families, yet they cannot get out. Being politicians, they would love to join the festivities. What we hear from every side is that the Cubans in southern Florida have taken off on a nonstop fiesta ever since the air attack Saturday. The recruiting offices have long lines. Everyone in Miami now wants a chance to join the battle against Castro. At Opa-Locka, however, the exile leaders are suspended between high elation at the commencement of war activities, and the quintessential Cuban gloom that comes from regarding their immured impotence in the face of events.

  I find an ax-hewn poetic justice in the fact that Frank Bender is the Agency man shut up with them at this point. Bender, from the little I saw of him when he would fly down occasionally to Miami, never got along well with Hunt or the Frente. An East European street man with tradecraft forged and annealed in the espionage mills of Vienna and Berlin, Bender has one principle from which he works backward—results. He is bald, wears eyeglasses, chews cigars, is abrasive as a corncob, and for months, whenever Hunt was speaking to him on a nearby phone, I would wait for the crash of the receiver when Howard’s end of the phone came slamming down. Now, however, they are almost friendly. Bender, after putting up for three days with six Cubans in a hotel suite, and contained with them now in a barracks, is suffering from enough claustrophobia to metamorphose Howard’s voice into a friendly sound. Sometimes, Bender even talks to me. “Give me some news, boy-chick,” he says. “Something to divert these guys. They’re ready to eat the rug.”

  “Tell them,” I answer, “that Castro said the American news services purvey fantasy. ‘Even Hollywood,’ and I quote him, ‘would not try to film such a story.’”

  “Ha, ha, the son of a bitch is right,” says Bender.

  Howard yells over to me, “Tell Frank to inform them that things are going according to plan.”

  “They hate the plan,” says Bender. “They want to be in the action.” “Tell him,” yells Hunt, “that I sent his regards to his wife.”

  “Bring down a box of cigars,” says Bender. “I’m running low.”

  Two hours later, he calls again. Barbaro wishes to speak to me. “I have three words for you to pass on to your father,” he says. “These three words are Mario García Kohly. Kohly, Kohly, Kohly. Ask your father if Kohly is under observation as fully as we are.”

  “Kohly can do nothing now,” I say. “Masferrer has been arrested.” “There are many Masferrers, and only one Kohly. He is a bomb, and we will all be exterminated in the blast,” says Barbaro.

  A little later, Cal, on being asked, remarks that Kohly is merely a single cannon among 184 pieces of loose ordnance below decks. (This is the number of separate refugee groups in Miami.)

  late Sunday night, close to midnight

  We are trying to catch a few hours of sleep before the landing begins. The prepared text of the Cuban Revolutionary Council Communiqué Number 1, carefully crafted by Hunt and Phillips, is now complete. In a few minutes we will phone it in to Lem Jones, and he will mimeo it, get into a taxi, and start distribution to the news services. They should have it by 2:00 A.M.

  THE CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL WISHES TO ANNOUNCE THE PRINCIPAL BATTLE OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION AGAINST CASTRO WILL BE FOUGHT IN THE NEXT FEW HOURS. THIS TREMENDOUS ARMY OF INVINCIBLE SUPERPATRIOTS HAS NOW RECEIVED ITS INSTRUCTIONS TO STRIKE THE VITAL BLOW FOR THE LIBERATION OF THEIR BELOVED COUNTRY. OUR PARTISANS IN EVERY TOWN AND VILLAGE IN CUBA WILL RECEIVE, IN A MANNER KNOWN ONLY TO THEM, THE MESSAGE WHICH WILL SPARK A TREMENDOUS WAVE OF INTERNAL CONFLICT AGAINST THE TYRANT. OUR INFORMATION FROM CUBA INDICATES THAT MUCH OF THE MILITIA IN THE COUNTRYSIDE HAS ALREADY DEFECTED.

  I have had no time to think, but I have to wonder if we have any partisans left. This afternoon there were reports from Reuters of Castro’s response to the Saturday air raid. Huge roundups of Cubans are taking place in Havana and Santiago. I am beginning to wonder all over again at the wisdom of our first air raid. I suppose we were afraid that Castro’s reconnaissance planes might spot the approach of the Brigade’s rusty freighters if we waited too long and so Fidel would have time to disperse his air force, but how much has been lost by not striking everywhere at once? Well, I will not question my military superiors.

  12:30 A.M., April 17, 1961

  I am back in the loo, writing away. The paratroop contingent of the Brigade, 176 men strong, took off a while ago from Happy Valley after a steak dinner. Their breakfast will be an apple. Now they are due to land in a couple of hours to set up roadblocks. For days I have been looking at a wall-sized map in the War Room of an area forty miles high and eighty miles wide, and it occupies the inner panorama of my mind. Perhaps I should describe the projected beachhead. Once action starts, there will not be time.

  Our landing will occupy an L-shaped line of coast. The Bay of Pigs is a narrow body of water running from north to south for twenty miles down to the shore of the Caribbean, which is on an east-west axis. One part of our force (two battalions) will sail up the Bay of Pigs to the head of this body of water and debark at Playa Larga (Red Beach). Our main force will come in at Girón on the Caribbean shore some ten miles around the bend. Playa Larga and Girón are thus thirty miles apart on a good road newly built by Castro. Further to the east, another twenty miles along the Caribbean coast, is Green Beach. There, a third force will come in later. Within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, it is expected that our forces will link up and we will have fifty miles of shore protected by the Bay of Pigs and the Caribbean to one’s rear, and the great swamp of Zapata three miles to the fore. Miles ahead of our main body, the paratroopers will be sitting astride the three roads that traverse the swamp.

  I think of the paratroopers flying from Nicaragua to Cuba. The droning of C-46 motors mixes in my mind with muttered outcries from the dreams of men asleep on co
ts beside me even as I stir and get up and walk to a stall in the men’s room to pen this entry.

  6:15 A.M., April 17, 1961

  Much has happened in the last six hours.

  The invasion force succeeded in getting ashore at Playa Larga and Girón by 2:30 in the morning, but little else followed by plan. We are receiving messages from the area through roundabout means—the command post at Girón radios back to the Brigade’s command ship, the Blagar, and thence to an American destroyer twenty miles offshore which relays the same communication to the Pentagon and to us in the War Room. It is hard to determine how much is fact, how much is false report, but after confirmations and refutations, this much I now know. The landing beaches were not sloping sandy aprons as expected, but jagged coral pocked with underwater rocks. In the dark, it took longer than expected to set out luminescent buoys on the sea lanes of approach. Most of the supply launches assigned to the troops could not reach the shore because they grounded on the coral; the men, holding rifles overhead, had to walk in through chest-deep water. Much equipment was soaked, including many radios. Their temporary (we hope) loss of function accounts for the slowness of our communications with the Brigade.

  There was also an unforeseen hurdle. A small detachment of Castro militia were on shore, and a few firefights took place before the locals surrendered or decamped. Several microwave radio transmitters were still warm when our Cubans captured the equipment. So Castro will be heard from earlier than expected. Cal, passing me in the corridor, said, “He will try to mop up the operation before there is enough of a beachhead for us to be able to justify flying in the provisional government.”

  All the news arriving now becomes a function, therefore, of that race to build up the beachhead. The paratroops are in varying degrees of peril. On the eastern front, out toward San Blas to the north, the roadblocks are well armed and supplied. Some of the citizens of San Blas are even carrying supplies and volunteering as nurses. On the western front, however, at the roadblock north of Playa Larga, the paratroopers’ supplies landed in the swamp (once again, we trained the troops better than the pilots) and the men have had to fall back to the beach.

  So, at Playa Larga, Tony Oliva, the Commander of the Second Battalion on the western front, has been engaged in combat ever since he landed. It has been mess, horror, and some success. Both landings, Playa Larga and Girón, were supposed to be unopposed, both met fire from small detachments of militia stationed near the beach. Both Brigade battalions prevailed and are now dug in, but hours have been lost. The cheap, second-hand landing craft that we chose to camouflage the operation seem to have functioned badly. What radio traffic we receive from the combat area offers repetitive messages of outboard motors failing, boats wallowing through delays in the dark, and time-consuming imbroglios with the coral reefs. From something Cal said a couple of days ago, I believe the Agency was warned by Naval Intelligence that the Girón coast could present many such obstacles, but we chose to ignore those briefings. Once we lost Trinidad as a landing site, the Agency must have decided that we could afford no more such shifts or there would be no plan to execute. We are obviously on a do-what-it-takes program. Is there trouble landing?—get the stuff ashore any way you can. That is why the supplies are now coming in too slowly. It looks like no tanks will get onto the beach before daylight when the supply ships must move away from shore.

  I have to cease this entry. I can hear commotion in the hall.

  11:30 A.M.

  It is five hours since the last entry, and much has taken a turn for the worse. The remains of Castro’s air force appeared over Girón at 6:30 this morning, just six planes, and one was shot down, but we, in turn, lost one supply ship, and another is now foundering in shallow water three hundred yards offshore.

  Some frightful facts appear. The Houston did succeed in getting all of the Second Battalion off at Playa Larga by dawn, but the Fifth Battalion, full of green recruits, was still on board when the Houston took a direct rocket from one of Castro’s planes. Since the ship was also carrying ammunition and gasoline, it was a miracle that none of the inflammables were struck. The vessel did suffer a serious hole below the waterline, however, and headed for shore where it grounded less than a quarter mile out and began to sink like a dying bull (or so I see it), oil and bilge seeping out of its wounds, even as the Fifth Battalion jumped into the sea and swam to shore. They were strafed from the air. Reports put their deaths between twenty and forty, and other casualties are as yet uncounted. Tony Oliva, Commander of the Second Battalion at Playa Larga, needs those Fifth Battalion troops to back his advance, but they are at present ten miles south and presumably regrouping.

  Just a few minutes later came a larger disaster. Another of Castro’s planes hit the Río Escondido with another rocket, and that boat suffered a large explosion and sank. The survivors are still uncounted (although many were rescued by the Blagar which steamed up to help), but the real damage, as we have been learning over the last couple of hours, is that the Río Escondido carried most of the necessities for the first ten days of fighting—ammo, food, medical supplies, fuel—nearly all of it.

  Now we are receiving reports that the Brigade has succeeded in unloading only 10 percent of its ammunition, probably enough for today, but the supply ships have fled out to sea and will not be able to come in again until tonight. The Third Battalion, which was supposed to land at Green Beach, twenty miles to the east, had to be diverted instead to the base at Girón. It is now set up on the right flank, just two miles to the east of town. If Playa Larga on the western front does not hold, and Oliva’s Second Battalion has to retreat all those thirty miles back to Girón, the beachhead will be only a few miles wide. In such a worst-case scenario, it is crucial that supplies get in.

  That leads to the next problem. The freighters were told to rendezvous with the U.S.S. Essex in order to be protected from further air raids, but the ships’ captains are not responding to radio instructions. Their merchant crews, while Cuban, obviously do not have the same high motivation as the Brigade. Result: The Blagar, the Caribe, the Atlántico, and the Barbara J. are scattered all over the Caribbean.

  The only good news is that we have a small airfield in the environs of Girón, and it is in decent condition. One drop of sweat goes right down my spine when I tell myself that that is the airfield where I will be landing. Hunt, however, comes by to say that our flight down to Florida to join up with the Cuban Revolutionary Council has been delayed by the bad news. In the interim the CRC has dealt out its portfolios. Cardona is, of course, the President, and Manuel Artime (at present with the Brigade) is called “Delegate in the Invading Army,” but Toto Barbaro, a genius at checks and balances, is Secretary of Defense. Manuel Ray has received Chief of Sabotage and Internal Affairs, just the post he would seek if Hunt’s suspicions of him as a Communist are accurate.

  Hysteria, nonetheless, reigns at Opa-Locka. One of the Ministers (Barbaro, I suspect) has sworn to kill himself unless he is released. He keeps telling Bender that he must speak to Allen Dulles. Bender has been on the telephone to Dick Bissell adjuring him to send a couple of impressive Kennedy people down to Opa-Locka to calm these putative statesmen’s nerves. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Adolf Berle are mentioned.

  Work at Quarters Eye has come to a standstill for many of us. Occasionally a cable comes to the War Room and its contents activate a few people into intense activity for a period—we are all eager to do something—but for the most part, we are like idle gears waiting to be engaged. The B-26s stationed in Nicaragua are constantly in the air, but the three-and-a-half-hour flight from Happy Valley to Girón and the equally long flight back consumes so much fuel that they can put in no more than fifteen minutes over the beachhead. Carrying 3,000 pounds of bombs and eight rockets and eight .50-caliber machine guns plus fuel, these bombers manage to lift 40,000 pounds into the air. Which happens to be 4,000 pounds of overload. And all this is achieved by not carrying a tail gunner inasmuch as the weight of his machine gun, ammo
boxes, firing rig, etc., would come close to an additional thousand pounds, and that is enough weight to consume the fifteen extra minutes of gasoline made available for air time over the battlefield. How vulnerable these B-26s, bereft of a tail gunner, must be, however, to Castro’s remaining fighter planes.

  One unreflective fellow here—how happy I am that I am not speaking of myself!—asked why the B-26s weren’t kept on the local airfield. Answer: They would be destroyed by Castro’s planes.

  3:00 P.M., April 17, 1961

  Tempers are drawing fine. David Phillips, who obviously prides himself on his urbanity, is beginning to get downright testy. We are in an outright cauldron of indecision about what kind of CRC bulletins to release to Lem Jones Associates. Are we to acknowledge any difficulties in the operation?

  We come up with the following: THE CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL WISHES TO ANNOUNCE THAT ACTION TODAY WAS LARGELY OF A SUPPLY AND SUPPORT EFFORT TO FORCES WHICH HAVE BEEN MOBILIZED AND TRAINED INSIDE CUBA OVER THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS.

  We added a “quote” from an unnamed statesman: “I PREDICT THAT BEFORE DAWN THE ISLAND OF CUBA WILL RISE UP EN MASSE IN A COORDINATED WAVE OF SABOTAGE AND REBELLION . . .. MUCH OF THE MILITIAIN THE COUNTRYSIDE HAS ALREADY DEFECTED.”

  Actually, the Brigade had so far captured a hundred militia, of whom half subsequently defected to us. We extrapolated the future of Cuba from that ratio.