There, behind the desk, sat a bulldog of a man, who upon first meeting, instantly gave you the impression you were on his bad side, if for no other reason than there was no good side to him. There was another man sitting on a couch who had a high receding hairline; he might have been the manager of a clothing store. Neither one of them stood when we entered, nor offered their hands when introductions were made by Bannister.
And that is how I met Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante, the “assets” who were in a position to do the United States government a big favor, and who expected a big favor in return. There were two other men in the room as well, I recognized Frank Ragano’s name as Trafficante’s lawyer, while the other’s name, David Ferrie, was familiar, only later would I remember where I’d first heard it. Bannister, Ragano and Ferrie, remained standing after I was beckoned to a seat, it was clear by their body language who was in charge. They did the talking, while Marcello and Trafficante sat and occasionally nodded as terms and conditions for a deal was laid out, if anything needed to be clarified with the bosses, it was done in hushed whispers.
The bottom line was this: the employees at the Capri hotel in Havana, formerly the property of Marcello, Trafficante and their many associates, and who were still receiving stipends from their former bosses, would lend their valuable assistance to the United States government in an attempt to contact one of the hotel’s present guests, General Alexander Andreyev, commander of all Soviet forces in Cuba. In this way, these mobsters were helping to mitigate the loss of life, both American and Soviet, when, due to recent events, the imminent American invasion occurred. For their patriotic service, the United States government would make sure Marcello, Trafficante and their many associates got back all the property stolen from them by Fidel Castro, property which included not only the Capri, but the Tropicana nightclub, the Havana Hilton, and a sugar plantation near Camagüey, which Marcello insisted be included on the list; all to be returned once the island was liberated from the Communists by the US military. Not only that, but the United States Justice Department and all of its many branches would cease all of its myriad investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Marcello, Mr. Trafficante, their families, friends, business partners and associates immediately upon the freeing of Cuba from the vile Communist tyrant presently oppressing the island.
That was it in a nutshell.
When these terms were agreed to at last, and Marcello and Trafficante had nodded their assent, everyone stood and the two mobsters walked to the middle of the room, where Marcello thrust his hand forward. “You tell that Goddamn Bobby he gonna be able to slip a message to those fuckin’ Russian bastards just fine, just fine,” he said as I pumped his hand. “We got our own private line to de island, we know more than those CIA Boy Scouts. And when all dis is over, and Castro is in hell, we all gonna get together in Havana, have a high old time and drink mojitos. Let the bygones be bygone.” There was the merest of a smile as he spoke, with absolutely no mirth in it.
Then it was Trafficante’s turn to shake my hand. “Bobby will leash his dogs, and all stolen property will be returned,” he said as he leaned in close. “Everyone gets what they want; everyone go home happy. You understand?”
“Yes, sir, I do understand completely.” Mr. Trafficante very much liked being referred to as “Sir and it was true, I completely understood, but not in the way they thought. This whole Devil’s deal was predicated on an American invasion of Cuba, and Commander Almeida’s coup would make such a possibility a moot point. Marcello and Trafficante would make good on their half of the deal on the eve of the coup, while we would never have come through on our part because all those lucrative properties in Havana would never be ours to hand over. We were coming out of this thing a winner all the way around…or so I thought at the time.
Marcello insisted we have a glass of J.T.S. Brown to celebrate everybody getting what they wanted and he refused to let us leave without dinner at the Town and Country’s restaurant on the house. That is where I found Harlow when my business was done, enjoying a drink. I wanted to leave right away, but he insisted I sit and enjoy Marcello’s hospitality - the man would be insulted if I didn’t. So I sat there and dined among the oblivious tourists and watched the TV above the bar; Walter Cronkite was giving the news and even though the sound was muted, I was able to follow the stories on the latest fruitless negotiations with Castro to extradite the three conspirators; images of President Kennedy and the Beard making speeches suddenly gave way to tape of the Beatles, whose recording sales were breaking all records. As well I knew, my twelve-year old daughter had cried for days when we refused to buy their album for her, but that age is just too young to be exposed to rock and roll so much; but the story on the British invasion made me realize how this thing had taken me far from home.
Harlow got back to business once we were back on the road. “What you have to keep in mind, Colonel, is plausible denial; there’s no record of this meeting, and there will be no record of the meeting you will have with the Attorney General tomorrow when you brief him on what has transpired today. I’ve already told you to pick your words carefully, but I am sure he will have no trouble getting the picture, Bobby has always been perceptive.”
I got back to DC the same way I’d come, not getting home until almost sunrise; after a shower and a shave I was in the office of the Attorney General. “I guess some old sons of bitches are going to piss themselves good when they don’t get their casinos and whorehouses back. Some things are just too damn bad.” That was the comment I remember most from our meeting of March 10th; he was on the phone to his brother as I was leaving.
The plan arrived at was this, two CIA teams would be deployed into Cuba on the eve of the coup and make contact with General Andreyev at the Capri in the early hours of April 1st. Andreyev would be told that the situation of the Soviet contingent in Cuba was about to become untenable, and that the American government did wish see them lose their lives for a lost cause. The United States would guarantee the safe conduct of a Russian transport to Cuba for the purpose of evacuating Andreyev and his men; a secure radio frequency by which he could make contact with Guantanamo Bay would be given him. This offer was only good if Andreyev kept his men out of Cuban internal affairs.
I was feeling quite satisfied with my job at this point, even the “negotiations” with the Mafia Kingpins; I was working to rid the Western Hemisphere of the Communist menace and free an enslaved people, a noble goal which I defended then and still defend today. While the invasion planning was underway, efforts to resolve the crisis diplomatically continued without success; the Swedish Ambassador to Havana tried to negotiate the extradition of the three suspects to a third party country; the President of Mexico offered to have the three tried in his country; the Secretary General of the UN made three futile trips to Cuba, hoping to leave with Vargas, Bermudez and Lopez each time. It all got nowhere as Castro was making daily speeches and pronouncements denouncing the United States. “I may die, but I will never be put in chains by the Yankees,” he proclaimed. It was music to our ears as a belligerent Castro played right into our hands.
The military buildup in the Southeast hardly escaped the notice of the press, which was also part of the game plan. For weeks on end, there were front pages stories in every daily paper on military options being weighed by the Kennedy Administration, movements of troops and ships duly noted. It gave the impression something big was about to happen.
On March 19th, Secretary of State Rusk called a press conference and announced that all of the diplomatic efforts had come to naught; the Castro government had consistently refused even to discuss the possibility of turning over the three men to any third party. Henceforth, the Secretary said, the United States government would no longer be a party to any proposed diplomatic solution. It now considered the Cuban regime to be an outlaw nation. One whose members were guilty of criminal acts perpetrated on American soil, so therefore, the Cuban government had three weeks to resolve the current crisis to the
satisfaction of the American government or face “dire consequences.”
It was an ultimatum pure and simple, one designed to bring the utmost pressure to bear on Castro and give Commander Almeida the justification and cover for his coup. The term “dire consequences” was just vague enough to give us some room to maneuver; two days later the New York Times had a headline story on plans to mine Cuban harbors and ground all air traffic commencing on April the 9th, the day the ultimatum expired. There were similar stories in other papers and magazines filled with speculation on what was likely to happen in a little less than two weeks.
I attended the Oval Office meeting on March 23rd where the plan for C-Day was discussed and debated; my job was to brief the NSC on the status of Op Plan 365 and what the endgame might be. It began with a rundown of C-Day, a little more than a week away at that point, and by all reports, things were proceeding according to the plan. On April 1st, Commander Almeida and a loyal cadre of officers would seize control of the necessary government buildings in Havana, along with the state-controlled radio in the early hours before dawn. Fidel and Raul Castro would be “isolated” so as not to rally the faithful while Almeida would go on the radio and announce the formation of a provisional government - an act justified after Fidel Castro turned their beloved homeland into a colony of the Soviet Union, so much so that he had invited an invasion by the United States, bringing death to hundreds of thousands of Cubans while trading one foreign master for another. Thus Almeida’s actions would be framed as an act of true Cuban patriotism. It was estimated that Almeida would need ten days to three weeks to establish firm control over the island, as there was sure to be die-hard resistance from hard core Communists; small units of American Special Forces would be inserted into the country to help subdue the resistance and help protect against an attack on Guantanamo. In preparation, Commander Almeida’s wife and children had discreetly left for Europe, a signal he was truly committed to the coup, while a large sum of money had been deposited in a Bahamian bank for him to draw on once he had assumed power in Havana.
There were already a dozen CIA teams on the island and the six more slated to go in just before the coup. Harry Williams and Manual Artime were already in Nicaragua where they would join a force of nearly 500 exiles who would sail for Cuba the night of the coup. Both men were slated for high positions in Almeida’s provisional government.
What most of the meeting was spent on was the possible reaction of the Soviet Union to the coup, an action they would most certainly blame on the United States. President Kennedy was adamant on this point, “It profits us nothing,” he said, “to rid ourselves of Castro only to end up with a bigger problem in Europe or Asia; West Berlin, the Dardanelles, what’s to keep Khrushchev from going for one of them if we grab Cuba.”
Secretary Rusk and Director McCone argued that as long as there were no American boots on the ground in Cuba and Almeida was not seen as a puppet; Khrushchev had no case. Secretary McNamara and the Joint Chiefs countered that there was no way the Kremlin would not see Almeida as a tool of America and not respond in some way. Secretary Rusk answered that Almeida was a legitimate hero of the Revolution, someone who fought at Castro’s side against Batista; unlike the Miami exiles, his credentials as a patriot in the eyes of the Cuban people were beyond reproach.
The Attorney General took exception to this, perhaps because he thought the Secretary’s remarks were a dig at Harry Williams and Manual Artime. He pointed out that there was no intelligence indicating the Soviets were preparing a military response to an American move on Cuba; nothing from the CIA station chiefs in West Germany or Moscow, nothing untoward to report from any “unofficial” channels – he was referring to Vladimir Roykov. As far as anyone knew, Khrushchev himself was still on a long vacation in the Crimea. Furthermore, the Attorney General asserted, during the Missile Crisis, the Soviets did not put their military forces on high alert anywhere, even as the United States was preparing to launch the biggest invasion since Normandy. There was no reason to believe they would do any different now.
This was when the President spoke up. “We’re walking a fine line here gentlemen,” he said. “Any stumble and things could spin out of control, and God only knows what might happen, all I know is that it would be a shit storm, with no telling how many lives, American and otherwise, being lost. But recent events have proven there is no making peace with Castro, though many have said otherwise, and as long as he remains in power, he will be an obstacle to finding any path to peace with the Soviets. And that is the greater good which must be served here, the survival of the human race in the nuclear age. We simply cannot afford to indulge strutting tin pot tyrants anymore and allow the lives of hundreds of millions be hostage to their whims and conspiracies. Whatever the risk there might be in going forward with this plan for a coup, it is nothing compared to the risk of simply going on as before.” John F. Kennedy had made up his mind.
The meeting ended with me giving a report on the expected status of our forces on the last day of the month, which would be on the eve of Almeida’s coup, when there would be nearly 100,000 men ready for battle, including units from the 101st and 82nd Airborne, along with an additional division of Marines; I made a point of mentioning the extra fighter wings the President had requested along with the extra destroyers and cruisers from the Atlantic Fleet, which would put a solid ring of steel around Cuba by C-Day.
“That ought to convince them we’re coming and we mean business,” was Robert F. Kennedy’s comment when I was done. The meeting ended on that note of triumph: this time there would be no defeat and humiliation like the Bay of Pigs and a last minute deal like the Missile Crisis. This time there would be nothing short of victory.
We would not have been so exuberant if we had only known what was going on half a world away behind the walls of the Kremlin, for our intelligence was dead wrong when it came to the complacency of the Soviets - it was a false face indeed.
It was true Nikita Khrushchev was at his dacha at Pitsunda, but it was no vacation, for he was confined to his house and under guard by the KGB, all power having been stripped from him except in name. On March 10th, the Soviet Premier had been handed a report from the head KGB officer inside the embassy in Washington stating unequivocally that the United States was preparing to invade Cuba within 30 days; the report noted troop movements, the positioning of the Atlantic Fleet, and the stationing of extra fighter wings in the Southeast and Caribbean - their spies had been awfully busy. Khrushchev immediately called a meeting of the Politburo where he went into a tirade, denouncing the personal betrayal by John F. Kennedy after the man had agreed not to invade Cuba in return for Khrushchev’s agreement to pull the missiles out. “If he thinks a few gunshots fired at him by outlaws in the Wild West have nullified his pledge to keep his hands off Cuba and its revolution, then he will have to be taught different.” Khrushchev then pointed his finger at the Defense Minister, Marshall Radion Malinovsky and ordered him to begin preparations to send the 9th Rifle Division, one of the crack units of the Red Army, to Cuba so that if Kennedy dared to invade “he would find the bravest men in the Soviet Union waiting for him on the beaches, standing side by side with their Cuban brothers in defense of the socialist revolution.” And he wanted them there as soon as possible.
Marshall Malinovsky saluted like a good soldier, but as soon as Khrushchev was out of the room, voiced his concerns to other members of the Politburo, chief among them being the fact that he would be sending the best men in the Red Army on a virtual suicide mission which would ultimately accomplish little or nothing – once hostilities commenced, there was no way to support or reinforce a Soviet division in Cuba, the distance was simply too great. They would fight bravely and then be killed or taken prisoner by the Americans, and the prospect of Soviet POWs in American hands was an intolerable sight to imagine for a Russian commander. If sending the 9th to Cuba was a bluff, then it was one surely to be called, Malinsovsky complained.
The Marshall’s words
fell upon receptive ears, for some among Khrushchev’s right-hand men had been actively plotting for some time to oust him from power. In another failure of US intelligence, the fact that by early 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was an aging and ailing leader, with a cadre of younger men behind him and ready to shove him aside at the first opportunity had completely escaped notice. One such man was Leonid Brezhnev, who had actually been working on a plan to blow up Khrushchev’s plane, but upon hearing Malinovsky’s complaint, realized he could rally his fellow members of the Politburo behind a grand scheme to seize power for themselves and deal a blow to the West at the same time.
Brezhnev approached Nicolai Suzlov, a fellow Politburo member who wielded much power behind the scenes and enlisted him in the plot; Suzlov was a real Communist hard-liner and a true Stalinist at heart, and the thought of landing a knockout punch against the West after years of Khrushchev and his seeming accommodation to US Presidents had a lot of appeal. If Cuba were to be lost, then the Western Imperialists would be made to pay a heavy price somewhere else, but first, they had to gain the authority to make it so. To do so, they enlisted Alexander Shelepin and Vladimir Semichastny, the former and present head of the KGB; with these two signed on, the success of the plot was guaranteed, providing they moved quickly enough. On the night of March 12th, a detachment of security officers surrounded Khrushchev’s dacha in Moscow and informed him that he had been “temporarily” relieved of his official duties by a secret vote; the reason he was not sacked altogether was that the plotters did not want tip off their counterparts in Washington that there was a change in Moscow and possibly ruining the opportunity the Cuban invasion was availing them. According to reports, the old Bolshevik greeted this development with an outburst of true fury, cursing and spitting at the KGB officer who ordered him to pack his bags so he could leave the capital for a “holiday” in Pitsunda. The old man refused, relenting only when a pistol was drawn and pointed at his wife’s head; Khrushchev must have had real guts, from all accounts he then stepped between the KGB man and his wife so that the pistol was pointed at his forehead and said he had never stooped so low as to treat a woman is such a way.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 7