In truth, most of the meeting between the President and the Joint Chiefs concerned coordination in the landing of ground forces on the island in accordance with Op Plan 365, and on this matter I am proud to say there was little in the way of dissension, the only real back and forth was over timing as General Taylor wanted the bombing to continue for a week to thoroughly degrade the Cuban military before our boys went up against them. But the President was wary of letting it go that long for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was the flow of refugees fleeing the fighting and flooding into Florida by the day - they were rapidly becoming a political matter as camps to house them were being built all over the southern part of the state.
Then there was the internal situation on the island; during the first week of April, the CIA station in Miami had taken advantage of the turmoil and aggressively landed a number of covert intelligence teams on the beaches and from them we had learned that the opposition to Castro was being decimated on the ground, if we did not act soon, there would be nobody left alive to form a provisional government. In other words, there were a lot of brave patriots counting on us now to come to their rescue, and if we didn‘t move soon, there would be no one left alive when we finally got there.
For these reasons, President Kennedy pushed the Chiefs to have the air campaign concluded by Wednesday with the invasion to follow immediately. General Taylor proposed doubling up on the bombing runs and insisted on an extra day in which to fully hit all the targets; the President agreed to this and before the meeting adjourned, he signed the orders for General Abrams to commence ground operations no later than midnight Thursday, the 17th of April.
Within hours, Army units and Marine Brigades began loading aboard transports in Miami, Charleston, Savannah, and Norfolk, while paratroopers from the 101st Airborne began preparations at Fort Benning to be dropped in country prior to the first landings.
No one made note that the 17th was the third anniversary of the Bay of Pigs.
It was not part of my concern at the White House, but I could not help but be aware of how the new Cuban crisis was being perceived among our allies abroad and among the American people at home. While at the house to catch a shower and change into a fresh uniform, I caught a Huntley-Brinkley Report feature on a march in Paris where nearly a hundred thousand people took to the streets to protest American “aggression” against Cuba, I remember thinking those people needed to be reminded of just who saved them from Nazi Germany’s “aggression” not that long ago. It didn’t help that General De Gaulle’s public support for our policy was less than ringing, privately he was even more dismissive of “America’s inability to stay out of trouble.” or so I was told. Nor did we get much support from Great Britain, which I know was a big disappointment for the President, but the Tory government there had been brought to its knees by the Profumo scandal the year before, and it was clinging to power by its finger nails, which left no political capitol for rallying the British public in support of a war against a Communist tyrant. As Britain saw it, Castro and Dallas was solely an American problem; they just wanted to be left alone so they could listen to their Beatles records.
South America was much worse; Communists and leftists staged demonstrations which escalated into riots from Caracas to Buenos Aries, all of them bloody with loss of life; the State Department feared the Cuban crisis might result in multiple countries in Latin America going Red before the end of the year.
“Jesus Christ,” the President supposedly said when he’d finished reading this depressing forecast, “I might as well start packing my bags right now because this will elect Goldwater in a landslide.”
At the time, I was most disappointed at the sniping which occurred right here in America; a bunch of students at the university in Berkley, California actually held signs saying “Viva Fidel” at a rally protesting the bombing campaign, while others carried posters with Che Guevara’s face on them. That rally was probably the first time the President was compared to Hitler. On the other hand, there was the Senator from South Carolina who wanted all the Cuban refugees to be herded into barbed-wire compounds and then shipped off to Central America before the “Communist vermin among them had a chance to infect the rest of the country.”
As preparations went forward for the ground invasion, I found the President to be tough questioner during my briefings, constantly questioning the sources of intelligence as to their veracity, and to the faith they had in what they were saying, pointing out the hazards of proceeding through the fog of war. “Most of what we know about Waterloo today,” he said at the end of one of my more positive reports, “was completely unknown to Napoleon and Wellington on the day of battle; same can be said of Grant and Lee at The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House.”
The Attorney General was at most of these briefings; his main concern was the whereabouts of the Castro brothers, Commander Almeida along with Williams and Artime. He clearly wanted to salvage something after the disappointment of C-Day. At one point, he expressed hope that both Fidel and Raul Castro would end up in unmarked graves. When I cautioned him that we might be making Socialist martyrs out of the pair, he replied, “I can live with it.”
The opening of ground operations in Cuba called for paratrooper units from the 101st Airborne to size the harbor at Mariel in the predawn hours of April 17th; there was a high degree of fear that one or more of the C-130’s would be shot down before the men could make the jump, but that part of the operation went off flawlessly, and every plane got back to base without incident.
Not so the docks at Mariel, where as the first soldiers to come ashore on Cuban soil immediately came under sustained sniper fire. The first American to die in country was Cpl. Douglas Dixon of Burlington, Vermont, killed when a Kalashnikov round severed an artery in his leg, causing him to bleed out right there on the pier. I was in the room when the President called Dixon’s parents the next day.
There was a fierce firefight at Mariel while the sun rose as the 101st went about securing the docks, in the end, it would take six and half hours to clear the buildings overlooking the port and secure its approach at a cost of twenty seven more paratroopers killed and twice that many wounded - in the end more than a hundred purple hearts would be awarded for action on April 17th alone. Mariel was the Cuban port closest to the United States, and it had a natural harbor, making the ideal point to launch ground operations; General Howze himself stepped ashore at noon on the first day and took command; the picture of him on the docks at Mariel was on every front page the next day. It was a reassuring sight to most Americans - the General confidently issuing orders on enemy soil, but I think it gave a false impression that taking Cuba would be easy.
But there would be no denying our success on the first day: by evening, units of the 1st Armored Division would start coming through Mariel, while at the other end of the island, a full Army division began off loading at Guantanamo Bay and heading in country with their first destination being the port city of Santiago de Cuba. The timeframe was to complete full ground operations and end all organized opposition within three weeks, and on that day I certainly believed we would meet our goal. To his credit, President Kennedy did not share my optimism. “The hardest part is in front of us,” he reminded me more than once in those early days.
Yet the first days in Cuba really was the story of one success after another; despite tough initial opposition, Mariel was taken, and troops and material began pouring in through the port; Army units reached the outskirts of Santiago within 24 hours, taking little hostile fire along the way, a Marine Brigade easily secured Tarara beach east of Havana, a point from which an advance on the capital could be attempted. We were taking casualties, but in numbers far less than any of our worse case scenarios; there were some members of the NSC were openly speculating about having military operations completed by the first of May, after which, hopefully, a short occupation would begin. The evening news showed video tapes of happy Cuban civilians greeting American soldiers shouting “
Kennedy Si!,” reinforcing the image of us as liberators.
On the third day of the invasion, while I was at home taking a shower and grabbing a quick nap, the White House received news that the forward advance of American troops had run into heavy opposition on the main highway outside of Havana and on the outskirts of Santiago, suffering three hundred casualties in two hours; later in the evening, two surface to surface missiles hit the Marine beachhead at Tarara. By the fourth day, every ground unit in the island was engaged in combat with Cuban regulars; Castro had been holding back.
It had gone from “Kennedy Si!” to “Die Yankee Pig” within a day, dashing any and all hopes of an easy victory by the first of May. This prompted a tense meeting in which Robert Kennedy asked very pointed questions as to why Cuban defenses were still so effective after days of aerial bombing; many thought he was speaking for his brother who didn’t want to appear petty by having the Commander in Chief criticize his officers to their faces while their men were under fire. President Kennedy promptly approved a request by Secretary McNamara to send General Abrams units from the 1st Infantry Division, “The Big Red One,” stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas; in a matter of hours these men received orders to prepare to deploy to Cuba. The next week consisted of brutal house to house fighting all the way into Havana; one of my best friends in the Corp would later tell me of a harrowing encounter with a half dozen T=54 Soviet tanks in which my fellow Marines stood their ground and took them out one by one. We were giving as good as we were taking.
President Kennedy grasped quicker than anyone that the fight in Cuba had turned into a slog; I also want to say that at no time during these days was a withdrawal ever discussed, much less mentioned. I do not know who Seymour Hersh’s sources were for his account stating that such a thing was debated by the NSC in the White House on April 23rd of 1964, but whoever it is, they are out and out liars.
In the meeting on April 29th, I cautiously predicted May 15 as the earliest possible date when all organized resistance in Cuba might end; the 1st Armored and the Marines had reached Havana and were preparing to occupy the city. The President’s comment, “I’ll be happy if it’s done by Memorial Day.” He also mentioned how Ambassador Dobrynin had requested another meeting later in the day, no doubt to deliver another protest note over Cuba.
“What’s to protest,” General Taylor commented, “we haven’t dropped one bomb anywhere near Camaguey, all of his Russians are safe and sound. We‘ve kept our word, and they‘ve kept theirs.”
But Dobrynin’s meeting with the President had nothing to do with another “protest” note; instead, the Soviet Ambassador delivered a message of a different kind, one from the Soviet government demanding an immediate cease-fire in Cuba and a pledge to end to all military operations within 24 hours. Dobrynin punctuated this ultimatum by announcing that he had been instructed by his government not to leave the White House without a yes or no answer from the American President. John Kennedy rejected the Soviet demand on the spot without equivocation and politely showed Dobrynin out; the Ambassador was simply following the instructions he’d received from Andrei Gromyko in Moscow, in no way was he aware of the developments behind the closed doors of the Kremlin.
In the language of diplomacy, ultimatums mean war; everyone instantly grasped that we were about to hear the sound of the Russian Bear dropping the other shoe. And everyone scrambled to figure out where it would land. An attack on West Berlin was the most likely move for the Soviets to make, or in the worst case scenario, an all-out invasion of West Germany, sometime in the next 48 hours. But Director McCone countered that there was absolutely no intelligence indicating any unusual activity in Moscow or troop movements behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet plans for war with NATO were well known by both the CIA and the Pentagon, and there were no signs of the mobilization necessary to put them into effect.
The only unusual thing noted was the continued absence of Khrushchev from Moscow, as far as anyone knew he was still on vacation in the Crimea, same as he had been for a month. Now his long disappearance from public view took on a decidedly ominous overtone. “Gentlemen,” the President said at the end of another long Oval Office meeting, “it appears the ball is in the Soviet court.” He promptly issued orders putting all American forces in Europe on the highest state of alert short of war, same for the Strategic Air Command.
It was simply not possible for the Soviets to launch a successful assault on NATO without some kind of prior preparation; a war machine like the Warsaw Pact just couldn’t go from zero to all-out offensive warfare in a day. It was Ralph Gillison who woke me up to the obvious reality when he said, “They’re going to hit us somewhere else and leave Europe alone for right now.”
I could have kicked myself for not seeing it sooner, and promptly got on the phone, requesting every cable from every CIA station in the Middle East and the rest of Asia; anything and anyone who might have put something in an intelligence report which would tip us as to what the Soviets were planning - a troop movement or a MIG flyover which would have allowed the President to order an adequate response in time. But all I and my group did was flail and accomplish nothing.
That I was seeing through a glass darkly was the problem. We’d known nothing of the coup to oust Khrushchev, even the President’s back channel informant, Vladimir Roykov, had not caught wind of it, he’d been going about his business of providing cases of Coca-Cola for members of the Politburo along with the latest issue of Playboy none the wiser.
But in the preceding weeks, as meetings in Washington planned for the liberation of Cuba, similar gatherings were happening inside the Kremlin as the secret cabal running the Soviet Union were making their own plans to exploit the situation. They looked at the inevitable loss of the socialist paradise in the Caribbean as a great potential triumph if things went right.
The first instinct of the hardliners, led by Nicolai Suzlov, was to go for the obvious: not only move on West Berlin, but West Germany as well and deal NATO a fatal blow in one lighting fast massive attack. It would all be over in a matter of days while the United States was tied down in Cuba and unable to organize an effective response. Defense Minister Malinovsky argued for an attack on Turkey, where the United States had placed missiles aimed at the Motherland not long before; the big prize here would be control of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, the straits between the Mediterranean and the Black seas, an objective of Russian governments all the way back to Peter the Great.
Though both plans invited a nuclear response from the Americans as soon as the military situation went against them, Suzlov brushed these concerns aside, declaring that Kennedy was like all Americans, he would lack the nerve and never give the orders go nuclear; America had not suffered during World War II like the Russian people, all they cared about was making money and living a soft life. At different times it appeared as if an attack on West Germany or an assault on Turkey would carry the day, only to be shot down by Brezhnev and Gromyko, who would make the point that if Kennedy hesitated to use the nuclear option, he would surely be overthrown by his own Generals in the same way they pushed Khrushchev aside and bombers loaded with nuclear payloads would be on their way into the Soviet Union with little or no warning.
It was just too great a risk to take.
Fortunately, there was one objective which was completely outside of NATO’s nuclear umbrella and right on the Soviet Union’s southern perimeter: Iran. The conquest of Persia had been a dream of the Tsars and now was the time to make it happen, Brezhnev argued. The Shah was an American puppet who was allowing his territory to used by the CIA to spy on Soviet territory, already at least three secret listening installations had been built in the northern end of the country, and new construction had commenced in the last few weeks, possibly an air field from which spy planes impervious to Soviet radar could be launched into the country. Far worse, the American might be planning to build secret missile sites the northern mountains, a reverse of what Khrushchev had attempted to accomplish in Cuba in
the fall of 1962. The rewards for conquering Iran, while not as great as what might be obtained by forcibly reuniting Germany and defeating NATO, were still quite tangible and held the promise of paying off big time for the Soviet Union in the decade ahead. Foremost among these rewards were Iran’s oilfields sitting atop some of the world’s largest reserves of crude; control of them would give the Soviet Union virtually a free supply of oil as far into future as could be seen and a valuable commodity to sell on the world market. Furthermore, the occupation of Iran would put Soviet guns on the Straits of Hormuz, giving them control of the Persian Gulf and the ability to choke off oil exports from Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. This fact alone would give the Soviet Union tremendous influence in the Arab world and surely lead to the recruiting of more client states like Nasser’s Egypt. It was not inconceivable that in ten year’s time, the entire Middle East, stretching from Pakistan to Morocco, could become a second Soviet bloc like Eastern Europe.
It was this scheme which carried the day in the Kremlin; plans were quickly drawn up and the invasion of Iran proceeded to the implementation stage within 48 hours.
I will say this much, the Kremlin did a masterful job during March and April of 1964 at not showing their cards; they must have known our primary attention would have been on Europe and Berlin, so they were able to go about making preparations for military action in their far southern military districts. At some point, Khrushchev was brought back from Pitsunda and put under house arrest in his official dacha in Moscow-it seemed the men who’d usurped him still had use for their former leader. He was handed a speech and told to make a recording of it, said speech being an address to the Soviet people and the world announcing the invasion of Iran and defending it as a justified response to “lawless American provocation and aggression.” The Premier read over the copy and exploded in rage, observing that his erstwhile comrades on the Politburo had “shit for brains” or whatever the Russian equivalent of that phrase might be and how their plan to invade Iran was potentially as colossal a blunder as Hitler’s decision to attack in the East on June 22, 1941.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 12