I had to think fast as I listened to the one man who had the authority to pull the plug on a sure career-making assignment. That’s when I managed to remember a pertinent piece of information. Without mentioning the names of Vance Harlow or any Mafia kingpin, I told the President there were CIA “assets” capable of contacting the Soviet commander in Cuba, if possible we could reach him at a critical moment, maybe with an appropriate message from the President himself that would minimize the possibility of bloodshed. It was worth putting out there.
“Any Russian officer who’d even consider receiving a communication from the American President would end up in front of a firing squad faster than the time it would take him to read a communication from me. Then again those troops in Cuba are going to be cut off from Moscow and totally dependent on the US Navy to allow a ship through if they ever want to get back to the Motherland; it might be worth a try. Work up a plan and run it by the Attorney General.” I think my little impromptu scheme of contacting General Andreyev appealed to the President’s love of cloak and dagger style operations; whatever, Operation 365 was still alive.
“And I want you to expand this plan, what you’ve given me will only cover things up to C-Day, but the situation may be dicey after April the 1st even under the best of circumstances. It may well be days, if not weeks, before the Provisional Government has complete control of the island, and I want to plan for the worst case.
There was one immediate problem which came to mind if even limited American forces were to go in post-coup: “Sir, what will be our policy if any ranking member of Castro’s government or even one of the Castro brothers themselves were to be captured by American military personal?”
The President fixed me with a particularly steely look and believe me, you did not want to be on the receiving end of an expression like that from John F. Kennedy. “They are not our concern, Colonel Maddox, and what happens is not on our heads.” What I took from this was that the fate of the Cuban leadership had already been decided: the Beard and his brother Raul would not survive General Almeida’s coup and the blood would strictly be on Cuban hands
The President’s secretary, Mrs. Lincoln, called from her outer office to let him know that his next appointment was there, I believe it was a group of Senators from the Armed Services Committee, because she mentioned the name of Senator Russell of Georgia who was the Chairman. Our meeting was over and I told President Kennedy the changes he wanted were as good as done, a revised version of Operation 365 would be ready within 24 hours. He said that was good. Time was of the essence and April 1st would come quick.
“Yes, sir, unless Castro decides to turn those three over to us; in which case, we’ll just file this plan away with all the other contingencies that were never needed.”
I will never forget the President’s reply. “Colonel Maddox, there is absolutely no chance of that; absolutely no chance.”
Only later, after much water under the bridge, would I come to see the President’s final words to me at that meeting on the first Monday in February of 1964 in a different light.
The final version of Operation 365 was handed to the Attorney General two days later; he read it over and took it to his brother, the next thing I knew I was scheduled to make a full presentation to the National Security Council at 1:00 p.m. in the Cabinet room on February 7th. Remembering what the President had said, I went in there prepared for tough questions and hard criticism. I was not disappointed, and despite being forewarned about the Secretary of State and the UN Ambassador, they were far from the only ones expressing sharp skepticism as to merits of 365, to say nothing of its outcome. Everyone in the room - except for the Vice President, who sat with his chin against his chest the whole time - voiced some doubt that General Almeida could actually pull off a coup against Castro, especially Ambassador Stevenson, which didn’t surprise me, the man was known to be the squishiest of liberals, but the Defense Secretary, Mr. McNamara, was almost as bad, specifically saying a coup by a heretofore loyal Cuban General was a thin twig on which to rest the solution of America’s thorniest foreign policy problem.
By far the biggest sticking point was the Soviet Union and what their reaction would be to losing their foothold in the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of State Rusk was adamant on this point, explaining it was not just West Berlin or West Germany at risk, but all of Western Europe could be put in peril. General Maxwell Taylor, the head of the Joint Chiefs, was worried about Asia, more to the point, the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia, two opportunities for the Russians to make a lot of trouble if they so choose. The only ones who could be considered whole-heartedly in favor of the plan were the Attorney General, along with John McCone at the CIA and McGeorge Bundy, the head of the NSC and my old boss, said this could well be our last chance to resolve the Cuban problem.
Throughout the meeting, I did my best to inform on each point of the plan and answer every question thrown in my direction. My toughest moment came when Secretary Rusk asked what would happen if the Soviet military forces already on the island intervened on Castro’s behalf. There was a contingency plan, I replied, one which could greatly mitigate the possibility of Soviet intervention. This prompted the CIA Director and General Taylor to start grilling me on specifics.
They were cut off by the President himself, who said he had faith that the Soviets in Cuba could be handled, “The risks of this plan are great and cannot be dismissed lightly, but the events in Dallas prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no living with this government in Cuba. This is not a personal matter with me, even though I’m the one the shots were aimed at; the American people know who the guilty parties are concerning Dallas and they expect justice. Prepare the necessary orders. I’ll put my signature on them; we will go forward from here.”
The meeting ended with a stern warning from the Attorney General about leaks. “That’s how they found out about the Bay of Pigs ahead of time, and we damn well don’t want a repeat of that again.”
I walked out to the meeting with a true sense of triumph; I went back to my basement office and heartily shook Ralph Gillison’s hand. I made a short speech to the rest of my group, telling them how proud I was of all their hard work and how the pay-off would come soon when all of us would gather in a free Havana.
I thought the tough part was done.
I was never more wrong about anything in my life.
Operation 365 officially got underway the next day when the President signed orders directing units from the 101st Airborne to deploy from their home at Fort Campbell, Kentucky to staging areas in Florida. The same day two destroyers from the Atlantic Fleet, that had been patrolling in the eastern Mediterranean, turned around and headed due west for the Caribbean, ostensibly to take part in “exercises.” On the same day Gromyko was scheduled to touch down at Washington National, the appointment of General Creighton Abrams to the Southern Command was announced; Abrams, who had been deputy to the Army Chief of Staff, and who had seen plenty of action with Patton in Europe, was a born battlefield commander, the kind of guy you called on when it looked like the shit was about to hit the fan. All things which received due coverage in the press and were sure to get noticed in Havana.
And they were picked up on in the American press: SHOWDOWN LOOMING WITH CUBA was the headline in the New York Times on February 10th; the following story detailed the military deployments to Florida. A cover story in Newsweek asked the question: Diplomacy or War? An important pundit, Joseph Alsop, wrote that nothing short of unconditional surrender by Castro would be an acceptable resolution of the crisis. An editorial in the Chicago Tribune called for an immediate ultimatum to Cuba demanding the handing over of the three Intelligence officers, if not, then invade. The Los Angeles Times stated we should just hit Castro with everything we had right away. There were a few dissenting voices on the far left, to whom Castro was a hero, mostly among intellectual elites like the faculty at Harvard, who sponsored a “peace” gathering.
We paid no attention to suc
h noise in the basement of the White House, what we did pay attention to was Andrei Gromyko’s arrival in Washington on February 13th, for a two-hour meeting in the Oval Office with the President. Gromyko was one stone-faced bastard, never letting on what he was thinking; less than two years earlier he had sat in the same room and denied there were missiles in Cuba.
This time it was John Kennedy who was holding cards he wasn’t showing.
The Soviet Foreign Minister sat there and listened as the President prevailed upon him to pressure their fellow Communist to turn over the three suspects in the assassination attempt and come clean about its complicity in the crime. Over and over he made this point so no one would ever say that the President did not go the extra mile for a peaceful resolution.
Gromyko told the President the Soviet government expected the United States to abide by all agreements made concerning Cuba-period. If the United States wanted to take the matter to the United Nations, all well and good, it was none of Moscow’s concern - otherwise hands off.
The meeting in the Oval Office solved nothing, but to the world, it appeared as if President Kennedy was searching for a peaceful solution. But as the days ticked by, more of Operation Plan 365 went into effect: General Hamilton Howze, whose father had charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, was given command of the 101st Airborne the day after Gromyko left Washington; Howze had previously been in charge of the 82nd and would have been the senior officer in command on the ground if we’d gone into Cuba in October of ’62. Now it appeared as if he would be given a second chance and to those watching in Havana, there was now another combat ready officer added to the Southern Command. By the 25th of February, there were twice the number of destroyers and cruisers in the Caribbean as had been the first of the month; more would arrive by the first day of March. By then at least three more fighter wings had moved to bases in Texas and Florida. Day by day, the unmistakable military buildup proceeded.
None of this escaped notice in Havana, between New Year’s 1964 and early March, Fidel Castro gave a score of interviews to the European press where he often rambled for an hour or more, all of them filled with vitriolic denouncements of “Yankee Imperialism,” and pronouncements on how the Revolution were not the ones with “blood on their hands.” Even before the first of the year, the entire country was on a state of high alert; by late winter, the number of mounted artillery and machine gun emplacements on the beaches had doubled, same with anti-aircraft batteries stretching from one end of the island to the other. I couldn’t look at these developments and not believe things were coming together just fine.
My contacts with the Attorney General consisted of daily phone calls and in-person meetings at least four times a week in his office in the Justice Department. I have worked for many demanding superiors in my career, but none more so than Robert Kennedy, a man who was on the job 24 hours a day. Over the course of February and March his attention to the implementation of Op Plan 365 grew to a near obsession. No detail was too small it couldn’t be run through my office in the basement: the number of B-52’s at Barksdale AFB; how many extra fighter wings from the West Coast could be accommodated at bases in Florida; how many of our destroyers and cruisers were being dispatched to Cuban waters; the battle worthiness of the Marine Brigades en route to the staging areas. I’m proud to say he got a satisfactory answer to his every question. Robert Kennedy was a man who thrived on challenge and truly enjoyed doing the dirty work for his brother. There are many pictures of the President and Robert Kennedy during those years, in many of them, the President has a radiant smile on his face, few, if any, show the same for Robert Kennedy.
On the morning of March 8th, I got a call from the Attorney General concerning the CIA “assets” and the possibility of using them to make contact with the Russian commander in Cuba. I included it as an option when we reworked Op Plan 365 by request of the President. The possible high loss of life from Soviet contingent was still a problem, the Attorney General said, one that had to be solved. He was asking me to exercise the option to make contact with General Andreyev. I told him to consider it done, hung up and called the Florida number Vance Harlow had given me and left a message for him to call me back right away.
True to his word, Harlow called me back exactly fifty-three minutes later. “Colonel Maddox, where the hell have you been?” he said by way of a greeting, “Been expecting your call for at least two weeks. What can I do for you?”
I explained to him that we needed the “assets” he’d told me about at our previous meeting to arrange for a message to be delivered to General Andreyev on the night of March 31st. This was top secret information being discussed on an open line, but time was of the essence, and it couldn’t be helped.
“Let me get on it,” was Harlow’s reply and he hung up.
I thought that was it; the deal was done, and the “assets” and the CIA would simply take it from there; I said as much when Robert Kennedy called me late in the afternoon, and I was able to tell him what he wanted to hear. Driving home late in the evening, I was a happy man, satisfied with a good day’s work done, but when the phone on the wall in the kitchen rang as I was eating a late dinner, the muscles in my back tensed; some inner radar told me I wouldn’t like what I was about to hear.
It was Harlow - I never learned how he got my home phone number - saying it was imperative I meet him in the parking lot of the Tastee Freeze across from the main gate at Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi, Mississippi at 3:00 p.m. the next day. “Sorry about this, Colonel,” Harlow said, “but there’s been a last-minute knot in the plan and, I need you here to get it untied. And be sure to bring a civilian suit and tie with you. Also use military transportation only, don‘t want your name on any passenger lists.” The man didn’t apologize for the inconvenience, and I didn’t ask him any questions; if the mission required me to be in Biloxi by the next afternoon and avoid the airlines, then that is what I would do.
I told Harlow I’d be there, hung up the phone, told Betty an urgent matter demanded I hit the road and then went upstairs to pack.
An early a.m. military transport to Warner Robins in Georgia was my ride to Keesler after pulling rank to get a seat; the main gate was right on the Gulf, Harlow was waiting for me. I changed out of my uniform into a civilian suit inside the Tastee Freeze bathroom and then we off, heading west in a rented black Ford Fairlane.
“Some people know an opportunity when they see one,” Harlow said as we drove down Highway 90. “And the really smart sons of bitches know when they got you over a barrel and when they can drive a hard bargain. If you want this deal bad enough, then you are going to have to agree with the terms, shake the hands and seal the deal yourself. This is too important for a middle man like me to finalize, it has to be someone who walks into the White House every day. That’s you, Colonel; you still want to do this?”
I knew my mission and I was a good marine. That was my answer.
“Good enough, Colonel, consider whatever message you want to send to General Andreyev at the Havana Capri as good as done.”
We drove along the Mississippi Gulf coast into Louisiana and then across Lake Ponchatrain and into the suburbs of New Orleans, talking about the season’s prospects for the Yankees and the Dodgers and our mutual hope that Jim Brown would keep setting records as a running back in football for years to come.
Only when we were in New Orleans proper did Harlow talk business again. “You’re here because I’m working for hire and they’re not going to simply take my word for anything, and they don’t trust the Agency because they’re not the ones who can throw their asses in the Federal pen for the rest of their lives. You have an office in the White House and talk to Bobby Kennedy on a daily basis, as far as they are concerned, it’s the same as talking to the President himself. You and I know that’s not the case, but sometimes it’s all about perception. It should go without saying, but I‘ll say it anyway, nothing about this trip and nothing said on this trip will ever appear in any official rep
ort. Any references to matters discussed and agreed to must be done through the use of distinct euphemisms, such as ’our mutual friends’ and ’independent associates’ and if need be, ’assets,’ but absolutely nothing specific - it’s for the protection of all concerned.”
A few minutes later Harlow steered the car into the parking lot of a roadside motel; it was the kind of place where tourists of moderate means and looking for a good deal would stay. The tall sign next to the office with the obligatory carport proclaimed it the Town and Country Motel and Restaurant.
“I’ve done my part, Colonel,” Harlow said as he eased the car into a parking space. “Now you need to go in there and do your part: go to the front desk and ask for Mr. Bannister, he will take you to the ‘assets,’ you will listen to what they have to say, and when they are done, hands will be shaken, and then you come over to restaurant and get me, and we’ll be on our way. That’s all you have to do, any questions or concerns?”
I asked Harlow why he was not coming inside with me. “My job by was to get you here, and these people don’t like to have too many witnesses in the room when they conduct business.”
It wasn’t the same as charging a Red Chinese machine gun nest in Korea, but walking into the lobby of the Town and Country Motel and Restaurant was putting it on the line just the same. The lobby appeared busy for late in the day; there were a number of men sitting around, Latin in appearance and a few of them well dressed, all looking bored as if they were waiting for a taxi to come. The desk clerk nodded when I asked for Mr. Bannister and then slipped to the back. I could feel every eye in the lobby on me as I waited. Clearly this was a place where strangers were watched; the desk clerk returned after a few minutes, with him was another man, older than me, but wearing a dark suit similar to mine. He introduced himself as Guy Bannister, and after confirming that I was Colonel Martin Maddox, he led me back to the manager’s office.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 6