The next day there was a brief item in Pravda and on Soviet radio announcing the Premier’s “holiday,” otherwise, life in the Russian capital appeared perfectly normal, with none of the Kennedy’s back-channel intelligence sources the wiser. We were utterly in the dark on one of the biggest power shifts behind the Iron Curtain since Stalin’s death and it was likely that while we were meeting in the Oval Office on March 23rd, making plans for the liberation of Cuba, there was a similar meeting in the bowels of the Kremlin, where very different plans were being made to best exploit the loss of Cuba to the Western Imperialists.
The last days of March were filled with reports and briefings as the final pieces of Op Plan 365 fell into place: daily General Abrams sent cables from HQ at Southern Command, giving us updates on troop readiness and the movement of units; the goal was to have 25,000 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st ready to drop into Cuba by the first week of April. Nearly 200 naval landing craft were loaded onto transports at Norfolk-a picture of one of them being hoisted by crane graced the front pages of the Washington Star and the Richmond Times-Dispatch on March 26th. The same day, a number of destroyers and cruisers began patrolling right up to the Cuban territorial limits; all these things gave the world the clear impression we were ready to go into Cuba as soon as the ultimatum expired on the ninth day of April.
Only a few knew that the real go date was the first day of the month; preparations were well underway as March ran out. Teams of CIA infiltrators were landed on secluded beaches, something that had become increasingly perilous as Cuban gunboats stepped up their patrols. The operatives tasked with making contact with General Andreyev made it onto the island under cover of being Mexican importers, accompanying them was one of Trafficante’s enforcers from the Batista days; he knew everyone in Havana still connected to the Mafia. It would prove to be a most dangerous mission. In the Nicaraguan exile camps, Williams and Artime were telling their compatriots they would be taking part in a gunrunning operation on the night of March 30th, what they didn’t tell was that the trip would be one way. At the White House, everyone was sweating bullets that somehow Castro would be tipped off to Almeida’s coup ahead of time; as far as we knew, the conspiracy was confined to a small group of officers loyal to the Commander, but there was always the possibility that one of them would lose their nerve at the last minute. The island had become one big prison under Communist rule and pulling off something like this was enormously risky.
It really caught our attention when, four days prior to C-Day, Castro had another one of his interminable press conferences where he gave a detailed recounting of Operation Mongoose’s Keystone Cops attempts to assassinate him, backed up with confessions by those unlucky enough to fall into the hands of Castro’s police. The American government has shown its true face when it sends gangsters and murderers to shed my blood. “They dare to slander the Revolution with accusations of murder and think it an excuse to wage war against the Cuban people; I spit their lies back in their faces.” This got no attention in the United States, mainly because there were no members of the American press present, but it made the front pages in France, Italy and West Germany, where there was a lot of public skepticism that Castro was behind the events in Dallas-many newspapers there were openly speculating how it was a conspiracy of right-wingers and segregationists who wanted Kennedy dead.
There were still efforts being made to reach a diplomatic solution: envoys from Canada, Sweden, and Norway flew to Havana and then Washington in vain attempts to get one side or the other to soften their stances. A group of college professors from Berkley got to Cuba through Mexico and declared their solidarity with Castro, but no one paid them any attention here, from Gallup to Harris, in every poll taken, the American people overwhelmingly backed the President’s ultimatum to Castro.
There were standing orders for the week running up to C-Day that everyone in the White House was to carry one like normal, do nothing which would tip off the ever watchful press that something might be up. So after putting in a fourteen hour day, I went home where I sat at the kitchen table and made calls into the wee hours, checking in with the Situation Room as a steady stream of cables and communiqués rolled in from the Southern Command and the Atlantic Fleet.
My home rang at three in the morning on the eve of C-Day, it was the officer on duty in the Situation Room with a report from the captain of the destroyer Lawrence saying the boat delivering Williams and Artime to the island had been captured by the Cuban navy. I rushed to my basement office and spent three frantic hours trying to confirm the report; in the end, it proved to be erroneous after I got the CIA station chief in Managua to break radio silence with the ship tasked with delivering the exiles to Cuba. The mission had gone off without a hitch; the two men were safely on the island; turns out the captain of the Lawrence had witnessed a fishing boat filled with fleeing Cubans being captured by Castro’s navy. I’ll admit to having a few nervous moments there, contemplating Williams and Atrime being tortured under Fidel’s personal direction. I’m sure neither of them would have told them anything, but there was enough information on their boat to have blown the whole operation and forced the President to pull the plug at the last moment. Later in the day, the Attorney General came down to my office and put me through a pretty icy interrogation about the event which might have gotten C-Day scrubbed; both of the Kennedy brothers detested failure. If I learned anything during my time in the White House, I learned that much.
I would like to take this opportunity to say there was no premature celebration of Castro’s fall in the Oval Office, with the champagne flowing, on the night before Almeida’s coup where a number of the NSC staff got quite drunk. I know that differs greatly with what Seymour Hersh wrote in his book on the Kennedy Administration, but it’s what I remember, and Hersh never bothered to interview me.
Those last hours before things were supposed to pop in Cuba were spent in the White House watching the clock, whatever was going to happen was out of our hands; I wasn’t the only one in town doing the same thing, from the Pentagon to Langley, men like myself were waiting to get the word from far to the South. I would spend much time later in my life making it up to my wife and children for all the days I wasn’t there for them.
Everyone began Wednesday, April 1st, 1964 with great expectations; I was in the Situation Room before dawn, even though no one thought we’d hear anything from Cuba for hours. The coup was set to begin in the predawn hours when troops loyal to Almeida would surround key buildings in Havana, the most important of them being the Directorate of Intelligence, on the pretext that canopies had been sighted in the night sky to the west of the city, which surely meant the American invasion had commenced.
In Washington it was to be business as usual on the surface, only more so as to give the impression the actions in Cuba were totally spontaneous and had come as a total surprise to the American government; President Kennedy boarded Air Force One at Andrews just after 9:00 a.m. for a flight to Cincinnati, Ohio for an afternoon speech to the convention of the American Medical Association, followed by an appearance at a Democratic campaign rally, he was not expected to be back in the White House until early evening, when, if all went well, he would make a brief statement welcoming the turn of events in Cuba. The Attorney General would be at the Justice Department all morning in a lengthy meeting with the Federal Prosecutors who were pursuing a perjury indictment against Teamsters President, Jimmy Hoffa. As I said, it was business as usual and designed as a defense against the inevitable accusations of complicity in C-Day.
The signal we were all waiting for was to come by way of Radio Havana, the official voice of the Revolution, when Almeida was to take to the airwaves and announce the overthrow of Castro and the assumption of authority by the army to forestall a foreign invasion. Naval cruisers just outside the territorial limit were listening intently for anything which might indicate the coup’s time was at hand, and not only them but listening posts inside Guantanamo Bay were tuned in as well. At
9:40 a.m., Radio Havana’s Spanish-speaking announcer began reading a translated copy of a North Korean government propaganda screed; he read no more than a few lines on the cruelty of the American occupiers and their puppets in Seoul before a loud exclamation was uttered by somebody in the studio and then nothing…dead air. Minutes went by, then an hour, then another, then two more. One of the CIA infiltration teams in Havana broke radio silence to report gunfire in the city, most of it around the harbor area and the national capital building.
By now we were starting to sweat because that old saying about no news being good news is really just horseshit. It was just before noon when the Secretary of Defense called an impromptu meeting of the NSC council in the Executive Office Building to come up with a plan or plans to deal with an unknown and fluid situation in Cuba. “We don’t know something until we do,” Ralph Gillison told me as I left the basement office, “and you know what happens when we assume.” If he was trying to buck up my spirits, he failed, because as I walked from the White House to the EOB, my worst fears enveloped me: the coup had utterly fallen apart and we were looking at the mother of all foreign policy disasters; in my head I could envision our sworn enemies behind the Iron Curtain and in Asia laughing at John F. Kennedy.
It was a hateful prospect, but then we got word that Commander Almeida was speaking on the radio at last, announcing that he had taken control of the government in the name of the Cuban people in order to spare them invasion and occupation by the United States. He did so because Fidel Castro and his brother had pursued a course so reckless as to provoke such an attack, no doubt at the behest of a foreign power to which Fidel had mortgaged the future of their homeland.
Those words were music to my ears, although to remember them now is bittersweet. We all breathed a sigh of relief; the President was notified in Cincinnati, where he was between events. A debate immediately broke out over how long we should wait before recognizing Almeida’s provisional government; at the same time a statement was being prepared for the President to give that evening at Andrews AFB when arrived back from his Midwest trip, one which said he “welcomed this turn of events in Cuba.” The Attorney General arrived at the EOB around two o’clock; for once he looked happy and made a point to go around the room and personally congratulate everyone on a job well done. “Colonel Maddox, you’ve been a rock through all of this,” he said when it was my turn, “an absolute rock.”
If ever there had been a moment to pop the champagne corks, this was the one, and it went by incredibly fast, for at five minutes past the four o’clock hour on that Wednesday afternoon we received word from the Situation Room that Fidel Castro had just spoken to the Cuban people by way of Radio Rebele, a station set up by the rebels when they were fighting Batista. The Beard was not only alive, he was in a fighting mood on this day: “Brothers and sisters, the Revolution has been betrayed by a nest of imperialist vipers clutched close to its heart; the streets of our cities, the lanes and fields of our countryside, the valleys of the mountains must run red with the blood of traitors before they can deliver our homeland to their imperialist masters. We must kill them all if necessary or Cuba shall again be put in chains.”
I had to admit, the Beard’s call to arms beat Almeida’s justification for the coup against him; the minute I heard Castro’s words, my heart sank as all our hard work was apparently slipping away. Then I remembered what I’d learned the hard way in Korea: an enemy may beat you and defeat you, but only you can give up…and I wasn’t about to give up yet. Castro’s resurrection had the expected effect on everyone else in the room, especially the Attorney General, who - although he did his best to hide it - looked absolutely crestfallen at the news. “We have to get planes in the air, Sir,” I remember saying to Robert Kennedy, “we need reconnaissance because we have no idea what’s happening on the island and we have to learn fast, the President is going to have to make decisions, and he’s going to need the right intelligence.” My words had some effect, two minutes later, Secretary McNamara was on the phone, issuing orders for two immediate surveillance flights over Cuba and within the hour, a pair of U-2’s took off from a base in Orlando.
At the same time, phones were ringing, and reporters were scrambling in every newsroom across the country and at the networks in New York, a huge story had just broken, the biggest since the attempted assassination in Dallas the past November, a story which had also seemingly come out of nowhere in the middle of a weekday afternoon.
Everyone was scrambling to answer one question? What the hell was going on in Cuba?
“So here we are again.” Those were President Kennedy’s words in the Oval Office to his National Security Council that evening, less than an hour after Air Force One had touched down at Andrews, returning from the trip to Cincinnati under circumstances much less triumphant than originally hoped. And by “again.” he meant his third Cuban crisis. His voice was calm and even, but he must have been feeling the same crushing disappointment the rest of us were experiencing at the possibility Castro might have wriggled off the hook one more time. The first thing he asked for was an assessment of the situation on the island, and I’m glad to say I was able to give him a detailed report on what was happening right up to the hour. Commander Almeida’s forces appeared to be in control of most of Havana, having caught Castro’s loyalist by surprise there, units loyal to the Commander appeared to have established perimeters of control around Santiago and Cienfuegos. Aerial reconnaissance showed troop movements from one end of the country to the other, whether to rally to the rebel cause or back Castro it was impossible to tell. Castro and Almeida had been back on the radio right after sundown, both claiming to have the upper hand and exhorting their supporters to show no mercy to the other side. The disposition of Russian forces in Cuba was not known; so far, Soviet state radio had yet to comment on the day’s events. One CIA infiltration team was reporting constant gunfire could be heard in Havana, where a total curfew had been announced.
In short, the situation in Cuba was in flux, while a civil war was rapidly engulfing the country. That was the situation at 9:00 p.m. on C-Day.
“It’s is a hell of a long way from where we wanted this thing to be, a Goddamn hell of a long way,” the President said when I was done, “but be that as it may, the question is: what do we do next?” On this matter, the room seemed almost of one mind: Secretaries Rusk and McNamara felt the President had all the justification he needed to officially intervene against Castro since he was officially implicated in what happened in Dallas; General Taylor said his people at Southern Command and the Atlantic Fleet were ready to move at a moment’s notice; Director McCone raised the possibility of mining the harbors and ports as a means of cutting off Castro from his ally, the Soviet Union; McGeorge Bundy and Adlai Stevenson cautioned against any military moves at the moment, Almeida might yet pull it out.
Then the Attorney General spoke up. “Almeida’s ace card is that he appears to have no strings on him, any aggressive move by us now will make him look like another Batista in waiting.”
When they were done, the President weighed in. “What my brother says is true, if we go in there tomorrow, Castro becomes a victim of the Colossus of the North, an instant martyr, and Almeida instantly becomes a pawn of the Yankee Imperialists. It doesn’t matter if it can be justified by drawing a direct line between Dallas and Cuban Intelligence; Castro has to go by the hand of his own people. For that reason, we are going to stay our hand for the moment, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give Almeida covert help, there’s a lot of good people fighting down there, some of them personal friends of ours.
“Then there is the matter of the Soviet troops…I mean we tried to send General Andreyev a message which would allow us to open up a line of communication to him, but we don’t know for sure if he got it. The fact remains that if we start bombing tomorrow, Soviet soldiers will be in the crosshairs and that will be taken as an act of war by Moscow, making it a hell of a risk.”
The meeting broke up with
plans to reconvene in the morning and reassess the situation. The President would wait to make a decision, but events would rapidly begin making decisions for him.
The first reports of refugees fleeing Cuba came in around noon the next day when two dozen fishing boats arrived at Key West, later in the afternoon a cramped motorboat came ashore at Miami Beach, soon followed by a hundred more. This turned into thousands as desperate Cubans began taking advantage of the turmoil on the island by grabbing anything that would float and taking to the sea. A flyover of the Florida strait at midday, Friday, April the 3rd showed the water dotted with anything from inner tubes tied together to yachts; all of them filled to overflowing and heading for the United States.
At the same time, there was a reverse flotilla heading south, as thousands of members of the exile community in Miami took up arms and began sailing back to liberate their homeland. On the CBS newscast that same Friday, Bob Scheiffer interviewed a garage mechanic from South Florida who was preparing to sail back to Cuba in a motor launch, armed with nothing more than a .22 rifle. There were thousands more like him.
Overnight, this became a political issue for the Kennedy administration: Governor Rockefeller said the United States needed to go into Cuba if only to stop the influx of refugees; Senator Goldwater echoed his comments, adding that Castro’s Communism alone had justified military action for the past three years; in a Senate speech, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi decried the hundreds of Communist spies slipping into the country under the guise of being refugees and that all of them needed to be put behind barbed wire in detention camps.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 8