The Age of Eisenhower
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Castro gave his critics in the United States plenty of ammunition. On July 18 he forced the moderate president Urrutia to resign after he mildly criticized communist activities in Cuba. More shocking to American observers, Castro replaced Urrutia with Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, a longtime leader of the Cuban communists. The U.S. press howled. Life, once so enamored of Castro, now asserted that he had “clobbered democracy” and “by his violent and irresponsible attacks against a moderate anti-Communist like Urrutia had served the Kremlin beautifully.” Castro seemed set on a confrontation with the United States.37
The breaking point came in late October 1959. On October 21, in an act of defiance and desperation, Major Díaz Lanz, who had denounced Castro before the Senate Judiciary Committee, commandeered a B-25 aircraft from an airfield at Pompano, Florida, flew it to Havana, and dropped thousands of anti-Castro leaflets over the city. (How he pulled this off, with no evident U.S. government support, remains a mystery.) Cuban anti-aircraft fire from the ground missed Díaz Lanz’s plane but fell onto the crowded streets below, killing three people. The leaflet-dropping, which embarrassed American officials, gave Castro more fuel for his anti-American campaign. He denounced this “bombing” of Havana and alleged that a conspiracy was afoot in the United States to overthrow the Cuban government.
On October 26 Castro staged a mass “loyalty rally” in Havana. Before hundreds of thousands of listeners, he mocked the official denials from Washington. “How is it possible,” he wondered aloud, “that the authorities of a nation so powerful, with so many economic and military resources, with radar systems which are said to be able to intercept even guided missiles, should admit before the world that they are unable to prevent aircraft from leaving their territory in order to bomb a defenseless country like Cuba?” Hailing his own reforms and likening the “attack” to that on Pearl Harbor, Castro incited roars of anti-American hatred among his adoring audience. The once-sympathetic American ambassador, Philip Bonsal, found Castro’s foaming, screeching performance “reminiscent of Hitler at his most hysterical and most odious.”38
The events of that week in October marked a decisive turning point. American officials now irreversibly shifted against Castro and his government. Allen Dulles asserted in an NSC meeting on October 29 that “the threat of extremist control is worse than ever,” that Raúl Castro had taken over the armed forces and all moderate voices had been snuffed out. In early November, Secretary Herter summarized the state of U.S.-Cuban relations in a memo for Eisenhower. He claimed that while Washington had shown great “restraint in the face of provocations,” Castro had gone too far. He fomented anti-American sentiment across the Caribbean, allowed the infiltration of communists into his government, imposed statist economic doctrines on the country, and held out a model of defiance toward the United States that could inflame other Latin American countries. Herter proposed a new “basic policy” toward Cuba: the encouragement of an anti-Castro opposition that could in due course unseat the Cuban strongman. Eisenhower approved the plan on November 9, 1959.39
The wheels now began to turn quite rapidly within the CIA. On December 11, Allen Dulles received a memo from J. C. King, his chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, describing a plan to bring about “the overthrow of Castro within one year, and his replacement by a junta friendly to the United States.” The program would rely on clandestine radio propaganda, the jamming of Cuba’s own radio broadcast capabilities, and the formation of anti-Castro groups that would “establish by force a controlled area within Cuba.” King went one step further, asking that “thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro.” Allen Dulles personally edited this memo, deleting the word elimination and inserting “removal from Cuba.” The modification is significant, but the conclusion remains the same: by December 1959 the United States had settled on a plan to oust Castro by covert means.40
On January 8, 1960, Allen Dulles directed Richard Bissell to organize a special task force to implement the Castro operation. Bissell, the well-heeled Yale man who had earned plaudits for successfully directing the U-2 spy plane operation, had recently been named deputy director for plans—the director, in effect, of all the covert activities around the globe. To mount the Cuba operation, Bissell created Branch 4 of the Western Hemisphere Division and tapped Jacob D. Esterline, an OSS veteran and a leading player in the 1954 Guatemala coup, to run it. As they hammered out the details, the plotters focused on infiltrating specially trained Cuban exiles into Cuba, where they would set up underground networks along the lines of those in Europe during World War II, Bissell later recalled. They wanted to establish safe houses, supply depots, and a reliable network of operatives to sustain the budding resistance movement. Initially the CIA thought they could make this work with 100 to 200 trained operatives who could in turn teach sympathetic Cubans the necessary techniques of subversion and sabotage.41
How much did Eisenhower know about these plans? It is tempting to assume that Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell were pushing ahead on their own, hoping to shape the Cuba operation and present it more or less fully formed to the president at the appropriate moment. But the recently declassified minutes of the 5412 Committee suggest that Ike was in the know all the way. The regular meetings of the 5412 Committee obliged Dulles to update Gordon Gray, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, about ongoing covert plans. Gray then informed the president. Gray frequently told the members of the committee that he had spoken to his “associate” about the topics the group had covered, careful never to mention the president by name. This created a protective buffer around Eisenhower, allowing him to deny direct knowledge of the committee’s discussions while remaining firmly in control.
Eisenhower knew, then, that the group had discussed the start of an anti-Castro radio propaganda operation, using transmitters that would be installed on the American-controlled Swan Island in the Caribbean Sea. Eisenhower also knew that in January 1960 the anti-Castro programs picked up speed, moving from propaganda to coup plotting. On January 13 Dulles announced to the 5412 Committee that “over the long run the U.S. will not be able to tolerate the Castro regime in Cuba, and suggested that covert contingency planning to accomplish the fall of the Castro regime government might be in order.” (In fact this planning was already under way.) Dulles said he did not have in mind “a quick elimination” of Castro; he wanted to “enable responsible opposition leaders to get a foothold.” The 5412 Committee approved and the planning went into high gear.42
This scheme to promote opposition to Castro, and eventually to oust him from power, met with Eisenhower’s approval. Speaking privately with Herter on January 23, Eisenhower said Castro was “going wild and harming the whole [Latin] American structure.” Perhaps a blockade of the island might be needed. He went on to say, “Dictators devoted to fomenting disorder can have a terrible influence on our affairs.” If it were not for the sensitivity of other Latin American states to U.S. intervention, Ike said, he would like to begin “building up our forces at Guantanamo.” Such remarks indicate Eisenhower’s eagerness for a confrontation with Castro. Two days later, in a conversation with Ambassador Bonsal, who had been recalled from Havana, Eisenhower responded to the litany of Castro’s anti-American actions by saying “Castro begins to look like a madman.”43
In February the CIA planners tried to give more precise detail to their plans to destabilize Cuba. They proposed intensified radio broadcasts, sabotage of sugar mills by Cuban “assets,” the interruption of Cuba’s oil supply, and additional U.S. forces at Guantanamo in case the president ordered direct intervention to save American lives and property. Gordon Gray reported these measures to Eisenhower, who “wondered why we were thinking of something on such a narrow basis. He said he wondered why we weren’t trying to identify assets for this and other things as well across the board, including things that might be drastic.” Eisenhower wanted a bolder plan for Cuba—and he wanted to approve it personally. Before any plans were launched, he said, the 5412 Com
mittee had to fully approve and he himself “would like to be involved.” Far from delegating these matters, Eisenhower had taken a personal interest in the Cuba operation.44
At the end of February 1960 Eisenhower undertook a two-week tour of Latin America, with visits to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. This trip formed part of the Hagerty plan for exposing Eisenhower to the world and demonstrating his global prestige. Ike came bearing promises of increased American aid, and he quietly stressed to his hosts his displeasure with trends in Cuba. In Rio he met with a roaring welcome, but his heart sank when he saw a placard reading “We Like Ike! We Like Fidel Too!” Wherever he went, crowds swelled as people strained to get a glimpse of him. But he also sensed “the seething unrest not far beneath the surface.” In Montevideo, Uruguay, his motorcade drove down a main avenue whose air was filled with tear gas that had been used to chase away unruly protesters.45
During his trip Eisenhower insisted to his hosts that the United States “would not intervene in their local affairs.” As he put it in his 1965 autobiography, he knew that memories of such interventions in the era of “gunboat diplomacy” still burned red-hot, and he asserted that since the 1930s, “intervention as an American policy had gone into the discard, replaced by the policy of the Good Neighbor.” This statement is wholly false. The Guatemala intervention against Arbenz in 1954 contradicted Ike’s claim; so too did his Cuba policy, whose details were being hammered out at the very moment he was on his tour of Latin America.46
Three days after his trip he met with the National Security Council to review the Cuba planning. Once again Allen Dulles went through a long list of Fidel’s anti-American activities, concluding that the United States could never hope to work with a Cuba “dominated by Castro and his associates.” Douglas Dillon, the undersecretary of state, chimed in: “Our objective is to bring another government to power in Cuba.” However, Dillon cautioned the group that an overt U.S. intervention in Cuba would help the Soviets and be held up as a “counterpart of Soviet intervention in Hungary.” The implication was clear: America’s role in the anti-Castro plot had to remain invisible.47
One week later the president gave formal approval to a CIA plan to oust Castro from power and replace him with a pliant pro-American junta. At a meeting at 2:30 p.m. on March 17, 1960, following a briefing by Allen Dulles, Eisenhower approved “A Program of Covert Action against the Castro Regime,” a policy memorandum dated March 16 that had been drafted and vetted in the CIA and in the 5412 Committee while the president was on his Latin American trip. The memo was not lengthy. It outlined four parts of the anti-Castro program: to create a popular Cuban opposition as an alternative to Castro; to develop an extensive broadcasting capability within Cuba so the opposition could communicate with the Cuban people; to build a covert network inside Cuba to assist in destabilizing the regime; and to prepare a paramilitary force, assembled outside Cuba, “to be available for immediate deployment into Cuba to organize, train and lead resistance forces recruited there both before and after the establishment of one or more active centers of resistance.” Ike approved the plan, saying “he [knew] of no better plan for dealing with the situation.” He demanded the strictest security: “Everyone must be prepared to swear that he has not heard of it.” He wanted to be kept informed of every detail, but he insisted, “Our hand should not show in anything that is done.”48
This was a fateful moment. The plan marked the start, and only the start, of a long campaign of deception and subversion in an effort to destroy Castro and his regime. Certainly the plan did not yet envision an amphibious landing on Cuban beaches of the kind that was eventually attempted at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961 in Kennedy’s first months in office. However, it put into motion a planning structure that led directly to that botched and tragic event. Eisenhower failed to anticipate that covert operations, once started, have a curious way of expanding until they take on a life and momentum of their own. Under pressure of world events, the small-scale infiltration operation sketched out in March 1960 soon grew into something bigger—and altogether more dangerous.
CHAPTER 18
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U-2
“The embarrassment to us will be so great if one crashes.”
I
EISENHOWER HAD COME TO RELY heavily on the cia to implement actions that he believed would serve American interests. Arming friends and destroying enemies: that is what the CIA could and did do, and Eisenhower fully supported these actions. Signing off on the ambitious Cuba operation, he demonstrated his confidence in his spies and saboteurs. As it turned out, this confidence was misplaced, for in the spring of 1960, just as Eisenhower approved the Cuba plan, he received another CIA request: to launch a series of overflights of Soviet territory by a U-2 spy plane. Against his better judgment, and under intense and sustained pressure from his intelligence and military advisers, he allowed the flights. It was a disastrous decision, perhaps the worst of his presidency, and it requires a careful explanation.
Ever since he took office, Eisenhower had accepted, but never resolved, the fundamental tension between his covert operations and his foreign policy. He wanted to pursue a bold public agenda of peacemaking and détente with the USSR. He and his advisers had made great efforts in laying the groundwork for a summit meeting of the four Great Powers that was scheduled for May 16, 1960, at which he hoped to win agreements on the thorny issues of disarmament, nuclear weapons testing, and Berlin. He wanted to “thaw out the rigidity between the two sides,” he told his defense officials in February, “or there would be a disaster in the world.” Khrushchev’s visit to America set the stage, and Ike had traveled across the globe in 1959 and early 1960, to Asia, India, the Near East, and Latin America, spreading the gospel of peace and understanding. His own trip to the Soviet Union had now been scheduled for June 10, and it would surely be the crowning achievement of his presidency.
At the same time Eisenhower built a huge nuclear deterrent, ordered hundreds of nuclear-armed bombers into production, approved aggressive covert actions across the world, and allowed numerous overflights of the USSR that violated Soviet airspace—a defiant intrusion that he himself had said was tantamount to an act of war. How could Eisenhower square these two sets of policies? Was he a man of peace or a man of war? He refused to settle the question, and on May 1, 1960, he paid the terrible price.1
While Eisenhower actively supported the use of aggressive covert operations to destabilize unfriendly governments around the world, he had always been deeply cautious about the use of the U-2 airplane over Soviet territory. From its first flight over Russia on July 4, 1956, Eisenhower recognized that the U-2 flights were intrusive and illegal. If ever one of the aircraft was intercepted and shot down, the cold war might take a sudden, sharp turn for the worse, possibly even toward war.
Yet the U-2 flights supplied invaluable and extraordinary intelligence about Soviet military capabilities. In the era of intercontinental ballistic missiles, Eisenhower feared the possibility of a surprise attack, a nuclear Pearl Harbor that could wipe out the country in a single strike. The U-2 provided the best available means to learn about Soviet missile and bomber production, and to gauge the Soviet ability to harm the United States. Eisenhower accepted overflights of the USSR because he believed the benefits of having detailed knowledge of Soviet missile capabilities outweighed the risks. And so in 1956 he permitted six U-2 flights over Russia. In 1957, as the Soviets were making their great breakthroughs in missile technology, he approved 13 more U-2 flights there—flights that yielded a trove of data proving that the Soviets had not yet developed an operational ICBM. Through 1957, then, the U-2 had been a huge success. In fact it was the greatest American intelligence achievement since the cracking of the Japanese codes on the eve of the Battle of Midway in 1942.
Even so, Eisenhower grew increasingly anxious about the overflights. Although the planes flew too high to be intercepted by Soviet missiles or fighter planes, Soviet radar did locate and track each of these fligh
ts. The Soviet government privately protested these overflights each time they occurred, making it impossible for the Americans to pretend these were simply off-course weather aircraft. Eisenhower knew that each flight provoked deep resentment in the Kremlin and surely egged on the Soviets to improve their air defenses. It was a matter of time, he knew, before something went wrong.
At the start of 1958 Eisenhower therefore put the brakes on U-2 overflights of Soviet territory. (The air force continued to fly regular missions just off the Soviet border, gathering electronic intelligence.) In January he told Foster Dulles and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Nathan Twining, that he was worried overflights could lead to a serious and justifiable Soviet reaction, perhaps an attack on Berlin. Eisenhower approved one flight in March 1958, and then refused to allow any further flights for a full year. Meeting with his board of consultants on foreign intelligence activities in December, at the start of the Berlin Crisis, he said he doubted that the “intelligence which we receive from this source is worth the exacerbation of international tensions which results.” By late 1958 the United States knew a great deal about Soviet missiles—enough to rebut the panicky congressional claims of a “missile gap.” Ike concluded that there should be “a re-evaluation of the U-2 program.”2