Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  CHAPTER 17

  THE WILL ROGERS OF COVERT OPERATIONS

  Ronald Reagan was “the Will Rogers of intelligence,” said one high-ranking official with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). “He never met a covert operation he didn’t like.” Of John F. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning national security reporter and author Thomas Powers said, “No other Western leader shared [his] intense interest in secret operations, with the possible exception of Winston Churchill”—who, not coincidentally, was a political hero to both Kennedy and Reagan.

  The CIA was a favored agency of both presidents. The importance Kennedy assigned to the CIA is demonstrated by his request to his brother Robert that he head the CIA. RFK declined, saying he did not want the job and was a poor choice because “I was a Democrat and brother.” RFK would, however, oversee the committee tasked to seek ways to overthrow or assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Reagan as president increased the CIA’s budget by 50 percent between 1981 and 1983, increased the agency’s staffing by a third, and authorized a fivefold increase in the number of covert operations undertaken by the CIA—the greatest such expansion in the agency’s history.

  Kennedy and Reagan’s weakness for cloak-and-dagger operations, coupled with their obsessive concern about the spread of Communism in the developing world, but especially in Latin America, led to two of the biggest mistakes of their presidencies: the Bay of Pigs fiasco during Kennedy’s first few months as president and the Iran-Contra scandal that partially derailed the final two years of the Reagan presidency.

  The Bay of Pigs debacle cast a large shadow over much of Kennedy’s presidency. It was a severe emotional blow, and his desire to erase the failure from public consciousness was a significant motivation for his waging an even more aggressive foreign policy, which included deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

  The Iran-Contra scandal both badly damaged Reagan’s reputation for integrity and raised significant questions about his management style, specifically his supposed lack of attention to detail. As presidential scholar Richard Neustadt observed, had it not been for Iran-Contra “our business schools and others now might be extolling Reagan’s clean-desk management, and its mythology might have bedeviled presidential studies for years to come.”

  Kennedy and Reagan’s use of covert operations was driven in part by their shared view of world Communism as being essentially monolithic and determined to dominate the world. Kennedy may have given many speeches as senator that expressed sympathy for anticolonial sentiments in the Third World, but he, like Reagan, still saw many independence movements and reform-minded governments as Communist inspired, whether they were or were not.

  Determined to contain or roll back Communist gains in the world, Kennedy and Reagan struggled to find creative new ways to wage the Cold War that would not lead to direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. Covert actions generally involved surrogates, limited direct conflict with the USSR, and promised few American casualties. In assessing why the presidencies of Kennedy and Reagan are so fondly remembered, it is critical to remember that for all the bellicosity of their words and foreign policy aims, there were fewer than two hundred U.S. military deaths during the Kennedy administration and fewer than three hundred during the Reagan years—and the bulk of deaths that occurred under Reagan were the result of a single incident, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut while the troops were on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

  Covert activities, then, appeared to offer potentially high rewards with relatively low risks—so they thought. And if covert actions subverted duly elected governments in other countries, it could be justified on the grounds that the Communists behaved with even greater ruthlessness. Tough times demanded tough measures.

  They also required tough men, and Kennedy and Reagan were each temperamentally inclined to support secret operations and to admire the romanticized image of spymasters and their spies that appeared in popular culture. Whether or not Kennedy actually read Ian Fleming’s novels, by listing them as among his favorite books, he understood the allure of British superagent James Bond with his license to kill. Reagan’s delight in quoting movie characters such as Clint Eastwood‘s “Dirty Harry” or Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo to demonstrate how he would really like to conduct policy if he only had the chance also shows a love of the lone hero setting the world’s wrongs to right.

  Reagan had, of course, himself played such a hero in the role of secret agent Brass Bancroft in four movies. But Reagan was also a real-life informant for the FBI in the years after World War II when there was concern about Communist infiltration of Hollywood, and he worked with the FBI while governor of California to help tamp down student unrest on college campuses. Reagan was comfortable with this type of espionage, which may explain why he gave his CIA director, William Casey, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), such wide latitude and authority. Casey had many admirers, including Senator Barry Goldwater, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee and who gushed that Casey had been “a real spy when he was with the OSS, a real guy with a dagger.” And despite all the problems Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North caused the administration managing the Iran-Contra scheme, Reagan still told North, on the very day he fired him, that he was a “national hero” whose clandestine work “would make a great movie someday.”

  Kennedy, too, sometimes seemed hazy as to where the fictional and real worlds of spying began and ended. Even before he became president, he became enamored with the exploits of Brigadier General Edward Geary Lansdale, a CIA operative who was reputedly the real-life model for two of the most popular novels about foreign intrigue during the 1950s. One was Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The other was The Ugly American, which was advertised as “fiction based on fact” by its authors, Eugene Burdick, a political science professor, and William Lederer, a captain in the U.S. Navy.

  Kennedy was particularly taken by the story of The Ugly American, whose theme is that Americans were losing the Third World to the Communists because of our clumsiness in dealing with foreign cultures. The book has two heroes. One is an engineer who actually takes the time to learn about the people of the fictional Asian country of Sarkhan and who wins their gratitude and loyalty by helping them meet their everyday needs for clean water and abundant crops. The other hero is a Colonel Hillandale who is an expert in counterinsurgency. In real life, Lansdale had advised the Philippine government in how to prevent a Communist takeover of the country, and he later became a special advisor to Vietnamese President Ngo Dien Diem.

  Kennedy had, of course, worked briefly for the Office of Naval Intelligence during the war, until his affair with Inga Arvad, who had been suspected of but was never charged with being a Nazi spy, led to his transfer to a different branch of the service. He had also been a loud critic of U.S. foreign service officers who failed to learn a foreign language or anything about the cultures of the countries in which they served. The plot of The Ugly American verified Kennedy’s concerns, and he was one of six prominent Americans who signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to announce that copies of the novel had been purchased and sent to every U.S. senator. The book resonated with U.S. policymakers; in 1959 twenty-one pieces of legislation referenced the The Ugly American and its message as one rationale for the proposed law.

  Based partly on Lansdale’s report on Vietnam that Kennedy read just after taking office, the new president decided to make Lansdale one of his chief advisors on both Vietnam and Cuba. He apparently missed one of Greene’s descriptions of the Lansdale-based character in The Quiet American: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

  If the glamour of spying were not enough, covert operations also strongly appealed to Kennedy and Reagan’s mutual hatred of bureaucracy. Covert operations cut through the red tape, and both men found the CIA unusually responsive to presidential requests. The launch of a covert operation was a relatively simpl
e process that the president could undertake without consulting Congress beforehand. The president simply signed a “finding” that described the nature of the proposed mission and which certified that, in the president’s opinion, the venture in question was important to national security. The director of the CIA was required to keep the relevant congressional intelligence oversight committees informed of covert operations in a timely manner, but these committees seldom second-guessed the president or the agency.

  The CIA had enjoyed such dramatic early successes during the Eisenhower administration that it almost came to seem as if the agency could do no wrong. Under Eisenhower, left-leaning governments in Iran and Guatemala had been overthrown in less than a week’s time, each with minimal investment of money or lives. In Iran, the CIA spent just $100,000 to “rent” a street mob that drove left-leaning Prime Minister Mohammad Mosadegh, who had nationalized Iranian oil interests, from office in 1953, restoring full power to the Shah. In Guatemala the rebel force trained and equipped by the CIA numbered only 150, but the CIA controlled all radio broadcasts and sent out false bulletins that the rebel force was much larger and that the Guatemalan army was surrendering en masse. Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, whose greatest sin was confiscating United Fruit Company property for redistribution to Guatemalan peasants, fled into exile in 1954. These two extraordinarily easy coups gave many in the U.S. government an unfortunate overconfidence that all such operations could be as readily achieved.*

  * The “successes” in Iran and Guatemala were not long-term. The Shah of Iran was deposed in 1979 in a revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, while the overthrow of Arbenz was the prelude to a bloody civil war that ran from 1960 to 1996 and which left two hundred thousand Guatemalans dead or missing.

  When the CIA began plotting the overthrow of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, a CIA agent who had been involved in the Guatemalan operation said, “It was easy then and it’ll be easy now.” He was wrong. Cuba was a much different country than Guatemala, far wealthier and more sophisticated, and Castro a much more formidable leader. And Kennedy—or, for that matter, Reagan—was not Eisenhower, a former military senior commander who was used to thinking in broad strategic terms but also with attention to detail in tactics and who, perhaps most importantly, possessed the military stature to confidently overrule his military advisors.

  Fidel Castro overthrew the unusually corrupt and brutal dictatorship of Juan Batista in January 1959, even though Batista’s forces outnumbered Castro’s rebels by more than ten to one. Batista had made a fortune skimming millions of dollars each month from Havana casinos operated by American mobsters, and he was nothing more than a tool of U.S. interests. His departure was welcomed throughout Cuba, and Castro enjoyed strong popular support.

  Once it became clear that Castro was a Communist, however, Eisenhower directed the CIA to develop a covert operation that might overthrow Castro. But Eisenhower did not approve the operation before he left office. He was wary of its chances for success and worried action against Cuba might turn into “another black hole of Calcutta.”

  During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy had taunted Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president, about tolerating a Communist government just ninety miles from Florida. “If you can’t stand up to Castro, how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?” Kennedy said. Having won the election, Kennedy now had Castro as his problem, and he felt pressure from his own rhetoric to act.

  One problem was that he had inherited a secret operation that was far from secret. The Cuban exiles had boasted to relatives of their intentions, and overconfident CIA operatives made minimal effort to conceal their activities. Stories of the impending invasion began appearing in American newspapers, including a page-one report in the January 10, 1961, New York Times headlined U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Base. An amphibious landing is one of the riskiest of all military maneuvers, and it is far more so without the element of surprise.

  On March 11, the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed Kennedy on a plan to have up to 1,500 Cuban exiles, being trained by CIA operatives at the recently disclosed base in Guatemala, invade Cuba with American air support. Kennedy was shocked that the covert plan was not more covert. He had no intention of using American planes. “Too spectacular. It sounds like D-Day. You have to reduce the noise level of this thing,” he told the CIA.

  As the invasion planning proceeded, Kennedy was also expanding American diplomacy in Latin America. He unveiled his Alliance for Progress program on March 23, 1961, and hoped the program might isolate Castro diplomatically. But CIA director Allen Dulles told Kennedy that Castro needed to be taken care of much more swiftly because his influence was growing throughout the region.

  Kennedy was aware of the risks—both in proceeding with the operation or by calling it off. Canceling the invasion would leave him open to the same charges of appeasement he had leveled at Nixon, but a U.S.-backed invasion would show his Alliance for Progress was a farce, that there would be no new era in the relationship between the United States and Latin America. The United States would continue to intervene militarily in Latin America whenever it felt the need—which had been nearly seventy times during the previous one hundred years.

  The CIA, however, assured Kennedy that Eisenhower had signed off on the plan, which was untrue, and they also assured Kennedy that it would succeed even without American air support. They offered this assurance even after they changed the landing site from Trinidad, which would have been an excellent site for an amphibious landing, to the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy had assumed that if the invasion stalled, the force of exiles would disappear into the mountains to wage guerilla warfare against Castro, but the Bay of Pigs was far from the mountains and surrounded by marshes. The exiles would have nowhere to go. The CIA’s “Plan B” was that if the invasion was stopped on the beach, Kennedy would agree to send in U.S. troops to finish the job.

  Further, the success of the plan actually depended on its triggering a popular revolt against Castro. The U.S. government remained as clueless about local sentiment as any character in The Ugly American. Not only was Castro still personally popular, the leaders of the exiles were mostly former administrators from the still-despised Batista government who had virtually no popular support from citizens on the island.

  When Kennedy explained the plan of operation to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, he exclaimed, “Are you serious?” Learning that an estimated force of fifteen hundred Cuban exiles would eventually have to confront a force of twenty-five thousand Cuban troops, Acheson said, “It doesn’t take Price-Waterhouse to figure out that fifteen hundred aren’t as good as twenty-five thousand.” The CIA understood the odds too, but they were certain that if the invasion faltered, Kennedy would cave and authorize the use of American forces to prevent failure.

  Dulles knew how to manipulate Kennedy by comparing him to Eisenhower. He had assured Eisenhower of success in Guatemala, and he told Kennedy the chances for success in Cuba were even better, so Kennedy gave the order to proceed. Historian Theodore Draper would call the ensuing debacle “one of those rare events in history—a perfect failure.”

  The invasion began April 15, 1961, with a total lack of surprise. Already aware of the impending invasion from previous news reports and the work of his own agents, Castro knew the invasion was imminent when CIA-owned planes, eight old B-26 bombers flown by exile pilots, had bombed Cuban airfields two days before. Not only did the bombing runs tip off Castro that the invasion was imminent, they failed in their task; only five of Castro’s three dozen combat planes had been destroyed, which meant Castro’s air force was free to harass the exiles before and after the landing. And awaiting the exiles’ little brigade at the Bay of Pigs were twenty thousand Cuban troops.

  There was no popular uprising, and the terrain prevented the exiles from escaping into the mountains where they might have survived to fight another day. Instead, one hundred of t
he exiles were killed and the rest were captured and jailed. It was all over by April 20, barely forty-eight hours after the invasion began.

  Throughout the debacle, Kennedy had resisted repeated calls by the CIA and the military to send in American planes to support the exiles. He was proud that he defied their expectations. “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face,” Kennedy said. “Well, they had me figured all wrong.” Eisenhower, however, privately chided Kennedy for proceeding at all if he did not intend to do whatever was necessary to ensure success. As Eisenhower had once said of his philosophy behind covert actions, “When you commit the flag, you commit to win.”

  Publicly, Kennedy took full responsibility for the fiasco, and the public rallied to his side. His approval rating jumped to 83 percent. Privately, he was furious. “I’ve got to do something about those CIA bastards,” he fumed. He vowed never to listen to “the experts” again. But he did not force Dulles to resign until September.

  Kennedy was deeply depressed by the Bay of Pigs failure. His press secretary, Pierre Salinger, said he found Kennedy crying in his bedroom the day after the exiles surrendered to Castro’s forces. He was unable to sleep, explaining, “I was thinking about those poor guys down in Cuba.” And periodically, in the weeks and months following the incident, Kennedy could be heard to spontaneously mutter, “How could I have been so stupid?”