The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  As Mongoose failed to achieve a breakthrough, tempers flared and relations frayed among everyone involved. Bill Harvey was drinking more and becoming steadily more obstreperous. At meetings, Harvey would “lift his ass and fart and pare his nails with a sheath knife.” During one gathering at the Pentagon, he “took his gun from his pocket, emptied all the ammunition on the table, and began playing with the bullets in an elaborate show of boredom.” Harvey was no more respectful to Robert Kennedy, whom he privately referred to as “that fucker.” As far as Harvey was concerned, the Kennedys were “fags” for not having the guts to take on Castro directly; the CIA wouldn’t be in this mess, he crudely claimed, if the president had displayed some “balls” during the Bay of Pigs.82

  The relationship between Bill Harvey and Bobby Kennedy, a CIA officer recalled, was “bad from the beginning, and then it deteriorated steadily.”83 At Langley, a story was making the rounds that when Kennedy demanded to know why a team of exiles had not yet been infiltrated into Cuba, Harvey replied they had to be trained first. “I’ll take them out to Hickory Hill and train them myself,” Kennedy snorted. “What will you teach them, sir?” Harvey shot back. “Baby-sitting?”84 During a meeting where the attorney general said he had ten minutes to hear the CIA’s plan, Harvey droned on and on. He was still not finished when, after ten minutes, Kennedy abruptly got up and left.85 “Your friend Mr. Harvey does not inspire confidence,” McGeorge Bundy drily told Thomas Parrott, a CIA liaison officer working for Maxwell Taylor.86

  It became apparent that confidence was also faltering in Lansdale. By the fall of 1962, Parrott recalled, “all the members of the [Special] Group were quite disaffected with both Lansdale and with Harvey.”87 In a contemporaneous memorandum, another CIA officer wrote, “Practically everyone at the operating level agrees that Lansdale has lost his value. Bundy and Taylor are not impressed with him.”88 It was hardly Lansdale and Harvey’s fault that they had not been able to achieve the impossible results demanded of them, but they were set to become the fall guys.

  ROBERT F. KENNEDY’S office at the Justice Department was so big that sometimes he tossed a football in there with Deputy Attorney General Byron “Whizzer” White, the former Rhodes Scholar and professional football player and future Supreme Court justice.89 It was, in Arthur Schlesinger’s description, “a vast, somber, walnut-paneled chamber” enlivened with, inter alia, “a varnished sailfish over the mantelpiece,” “a stuffed tiger standing near the fireplace,” and, affixed to the walls by Scotch tape, “an ever-changing montage of children’s drawings.” Amid this “genial clutter,” the attorney general could be found leaning back casually in his armchair, “foot propped on an open drawer, jacket off, tie yanked aside, trousers rumpled, hair uncombed,” often with his “large and ill-tempered” Labrador, Brumus, lounging at his feet.90

  At 2:30 p.m. on October 16, 1962, an unseasonably warm autumn day, the attorney general’s cavernous office was the setting for yet another Mongoose meeting. Present along with Robert Kennedy were Edward Lansdale, Richard Helms, and four staff members. Kennedy opened the meeting by expressing the “general dissatisfaction of the president” with the state of anti-Castro plotting. He lamented that Mongoose “had failed to influence significantly the course of events in Cuba” and vowed to give the operation even more of his “personal attention.” Helms and Lansdale could barely pay attention to the by now familiar hectoring. They knew before the meeting had convened that the situation in Cuba was about to change in ways that would have the most far-reaching consequences, not just for Operation Mongoose but for all of mankind.91

  For some time, the CIA had been receiving reports about the installation of Soviet medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. This was part of the intelligence haul generated by Mongoose, even if it was not initially believed by CIA analysts in Washington. These reports were finally confirmed on October 14 by a U-2 overflight that photographed three ballistic-missile sites near San Cristóbal. Two more U-2 missions on October 15 revealed three more missile sites. When Richard Helms broke the news to Robert Kennedy on the morning of October 16, 1962, the attorney general stared for a minute out the window and then, “raising both fists to his chest as if he were about to begin shadow boxing,” exclaimed, “Shit! Damn it all to hell and back.” “Those were my sentiments exactly,” Helms drily noted. Although Kennedy proceeded with the previously scheduled Mongoose meeting that afternoon, it was obvious that Lansdale’s project would have to wait while the president and his advisers tried to figure out how to avert Armageddon.92

  JOHN F. KENNEDY has been applauded by historians for his coolness under pressure during what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The president wisely rejected advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his more hard-line civilian advisers in the NSC’s ExComm (Executive Committee), including Robert McNamara and Robert Kennedy, to undertake military action against Cuba. The president rightly called this option “one hell of a gamble.”93 Unbeknownst to the CIA, the Soviets had already shipped tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba, along with 42,000 Red Army troops, and given their commanders authority to launch the weapons in the event of an American assault.94 An American attack on Cuba could have precipitated World War III, which is why the attorney general and the defense secretary later adjusted their recollections to excise their hawkish proposals.

  As an anxious nation held its breath, Kennedy opted for a more prudent response. He declared an air and naval “quarantine” of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from delivering more weapons, while pursuing a secret diplomatic channel to Moscow. Eventually, Kennedy quietly reached a deal with Nikita Khrushchev to remove the Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and to remove obsolescent Jupiter missiles from Turkey.95 On October 28, 1962, Khrushchev announced he was withdrawing the Soviet missiles from Cuba. The world exhaled. A nuclear war had been averted.

  But while President Kennedy deserves considerable credit for walking away from the precipice of thermonuclear conflict, he can also be blamed for helping to cause the crisis in the first place by trying to topple Castro. Castro later said, “Six months before these missiles were installed in Cuba, we had received an accumulation of information that a new invasion was being prepared under the sponsorship of the Central Intelligence Agency.”96 “It was clear to me,” Khrushchev said, “that we might very well lose Cuba if we didn’t take some decisive steps in her defense.”97 Although Mongoose helped to precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis, it also made possible its peaceful resolution by providing the intelligence that allowed Kennedy to act before the Soviet missiles were operational. “That’s the only decent thing Mongoose ever did . . . because we turned it into a decent collection operation,” concluded the CIA officer Sam Halpern.98

  OPERATION MONGOOSE was not revived after the end of the crisis. On January 4, 1963, McGeorge Bundy wrote to President Kennedy, “There is well-nigh universal agreement that Mongoose is at a dead end.” 99 Efforts to overthrow Castro resumed shortly thereafter, with Bobby Kennedy as eager as ever to topple the Cuban strongman, but Lansdale was no longer in charge. A new Cuba Coordinating Committee, headed by Sterling J. Cottrell, a deputy assistant secretary of state, replaced the Caribbean Survey Group.100

  Among the ideas explored in 1963, after Lansdale’s removal from the project, was a plan to give Castro a skin-diving suit contaminated with “a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin condition” and another one to plant an “explosives-rigged sea shell” in an area where he liked to go skin diving. This plan was called off, the CIA inspector general wrote, when it was determined that “none of the shells that might conceivably be found in the Caribbean area was both spectacular enough to be sure of attracting attention and large enough to hold the needed volume of explosives.”101 The most that the CIA accomplished in 1963 was to stage a few attacks on Cuban infrastructure. But such sabotage—“boom and bang,” in CIA parlance—“never amounted to more than pinpricks,” Richard
Helms conceded. “The notion that an underground resistance organization might be created on the island remained a remote, romantic myth.”102

  IT WAS unfair to blame Edward Lansdale for not toppling Castro when no one else had any better luck. And yet Mongoose had been a failure, and he had been responsible. His reputation inside the government went from that of a can-do covert-action specialist to a “nut,” “a fantasist, a lucky amateur.”103 This was the view pushed in particular by Sam Halpern and Tom Parrott of the CIA, the sources of these damning descriptions. They nurtured a long-standing loathing of the “Ugly American,” whose lack of traditional espionage credentials and disdain for CIA “tradecraft” was seen as an affront to career intelligence officers. Halpern had spent much of the 1950s working in the Far East Division alongside George Aurell, who resisted Lansdale’s forays into nation building as an unwelcome diversion from traditional spying. Lansdale’s apostasy grated all the more because of the high-level backing that he enjoyed. The very establishment of Mongoose outside the CIA’s control was seen as a challenge to the entire intelligence establishment, whose competence had been called into question by the Bay of Pigs. If Lansdale succeeded where the CIA had failed, the CIA’s very future could be in jeopardy. Mongoose’s failure, therefore, occasioned some unseemly celebration at Langley.

  Just days after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, George McManus, an aide to Richard Helms, wrote on November 5, 1962, “With a political solution to the Cuban problem in hand reflecting great credit on the part of the President, the A.G. [attorney general] will drop Lansdale like a hot brick.” He professed himself delighted that Task Force W would no longer be “available to Lansdale as a ‘whipping boy’ ” and would instead become “a normal part of our monolithic Agency structure.” His only concern: “Lansdale’s reaction to any reassignment is apt to be a violent one. He undoubtedly realizes that he never again will be in the position of a special adviser to the most powerful men in the country. Therefore . . . he might be able to inflict serious damage to CIA’s standing before his eventual demise.” Psychologists would call this a case of projection. In reality, there was no evidence that the easygoing Lansdale ever displayed such vindictiveness—in contrast to his bureaucratic foes, who pursued their vendetta against him with increasing success.104

  Having failed to achieve the Kennedys’ most cherished desire, Lansdale lost their favor. He was left naked before his bureaucratic enemies, including his own boss, Robert McNamara. It was probably no coincidence that his military career ended less than a year after Mongoose did. “I think the thing that hurt me the most in the long run was the task that Kennedy gave me on Cuba,” he reflected decades later. “I’m sorry I ever got mixed up in those Cuban things.”105

  His Cuban failure proved historically significant, not just for the future of that island nation but also for Indochina, because it ensured that he was cut out of American policymaking toward Vietnam even as relations between the Kennedy administration and the Diem government were reaching their sordid denouement.

  24

  “Washington at Its Nuttiest”

  We essentially are pointing a gun at Diem’s head and are asking him to commit suicide.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  THERE is not infrequently a disconnect, sometimes a large one, between developments on a distant battlefield and perceptions back home. Such divergence is especially prone to occur in a guerrilla war, where progress is notoriously difficult to measure. President George W. Bush earned widespread mockery for proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq on May 1, 2003, just before the start of a massive insurgency. So, too, President Barack Obama was derided for claiming, in an interview published in early 2014, that the Islamic State was a “jayvee team,” in no way comparable to Al Qaeda, just a few months before its black-clad fighters conquered Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

  The disparity between perception and reality would prove especially acute during the Vietnam War, with the optimistic assessments of American political leaders and military officers often starkly at odds with the dismal reality that American correspondents could perceive with their own eyes. But in 1962–63, before America had sent hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers to fight in Vietnam, the problem was the reverse: not excessive official optimism but rather excessive pessimism. In those years, the Saigon government was making real progress against the Vietcong while also encountering undeniable problems, yet most American journalists and policymakers could perceive nothing but the shortcomings of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime while simply taking it on faith that any alternative would be preferable. This one-sided outlook—too distrustful of the incumbent president, too trusting of his would-be successors—would ultimately prove fatal to Diem’s chances of survival.

  IN 1962, while Edward Lansdale was mired in his futile efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro, Ngo Dinh Diem launched an ambitious initiative to secure the countryside. The Strategic Hamlets program was overseen by the president’s erudite brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the family intellectual, who had been inspired by the tactics employed by British counterinsurgents in Malaya and French counterinsurgents in Algeria to separate insurgents from villagers. Unlike agrovilles, a previous initiative that had failed because it required wrenching population resettlements, this program was designed to defend villagers where they lived. Hamlets would be surrounded by moats and barbed wire, and a hamlet militia would be armed to resist insurgent incursions. If the hamlet came under heavy attack, it would have a radio or field telephone to call for reinforcements from the Civil Guard, a regional militia that later became known as the Popular Forces, or from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Inside the hamlets, villagers would be able to elect their own leaders so that they would have greater legitimacy, reversing a decision that Diem had made in 1956, without Lansdale’s knowledge, to suspend village elections. The Ngos hoped that the hamlets would not only stymie Communist advances but also galvanize a new base of support for their regime among villagers, allowing them to lessen their reliance on the United States and the urban, Francophone elite, both of which they distrusted.1

  Four thousand Strategic Hamlets were erected by the end of 1962—well short of Nhu’s goal of sixteen thousand but a substantial achievement nonetheless.2 Not all of these hamlets were model developments; in many cases, local officials claimed more progress than they delivered, and sometimes they inflamed tensions by forcibly conscripting farmers to work on hamlet defenses. Moreover, many of the hamlet elections were rigged and many of the hamlets infiltrated by the Vietcong. Nevertheless, North Vietnamese historians later acknowledged that the Strategic Hamlets allowed Saigon to “gain control over more than two-thirds of the rural population.”3

  While these hamlets were blunting the efforts of the Vietcong to infiltrate villages, their fighters were coming under unrelenting assault from a South Vietnamese army newly equipped with advanced American military equipment. Their new arsenal included hulking M-113 armored personnel carriers weighing ten tons and capable of a top speed of thirty-seven miles per hour. Nicknamed the Green Dragon, each one was armed with a .50-caliber machine gun whose rounds could literally cut enemy fighters in half.4 Also joining the ARVN arsenal were helicopters such as the H-21 Flying Banana (so called because of its awkward, angled shape) and the UH-1 Huey. The latter was to become a ubiquitous utility chopper that could transport an eleven-man infantry squad or six wounded soldiers on stretchers while also serving as a formidable gunship; its Gatling gun was capable of firing six thousand rounds a minute.

  Airlifted by Flying Bananas and supported by M-113s and Huey gunships, South Vietnamese troops stormed through insurgent-controlled areas as if “hunting wild birds or driving rats from their holes,” a South Vietnamese officer recalled.5 Hanoi’s official military history later lamented that “the enemy” had been able to launch a “vicious counterattack” utilizing “large numbers of troops, superior mobility, and heavy firepower” to occupy “portions of our liberated areas in the lo
wlands” and to “constantly” attack “our bases in the mountains.”6

  AND THEN came the Battle of Ap Bac.

  On January 3, 1963, readers of the New York Times awakened to read a front-page article by a skinny, bespectacled young reporter named David Halberstam: “Communist guerrillas armed with automatic weapons inflicted a major defeat today on United States helicopters carrying troops into an operation in the Mekong Delta.” The next day, Halberstam wrote that, under “awesome air attacks,” the “Vietcong simply refused to panic and they fired with deadly accuracy and consistency. The Vietnamese regulars, in contrast, in the eyes of one American observer, lost the initiative from the first moment and never showed much aggressive instinct.”

  The unnamed observer was Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, a maverick officer assigned as an adviser to the ARVN’s Seventh Division. Outspoken and opinionated, Vann was a favorite source for American reporters who did not know that he was about to be forced into retirement after perjuring himself to escape conviction on a statutory rape charge. (He had seduced a fifteen-year-old babysitter in Germany—a revelation made public only decades later with the publication of Neil Sheehan’s blockbuster book A Bright Shining Lie.) He told Halberstam, Sheehan (then with the Associated Press), and other correspondents that the battle at Ap Bac had been “a miserable damn performance” on the part of South Vietnamese troops—they had lost at least eighty men killed and a hundred wounded against a smaller Vietcong force. Three American advisers also had died. Vann passed along rumors that Ngo Dinh Diem had told his commanders to avoid casualties at all costs, so as to maintain support among the troops for his government, even at the risk of letting the Vietcong escape. The events at Ap Bac seemed to confirm Vann’s accusations, making this, as Sheehan would later write, “a decisive battle that would affect the course of the war.”7