On the same day, a report reached my desk stating how a former waiter at the Capri Hotel, who’d just reached Miami by way of a crowded rowboat, was telling interrogators Castro had established a command post in the basement of the hotel. When I showed this to the Attorney General, he was quite adamant that the Capri be bombed immediately. I had my doubts as to the veracity of this intelligence, we had knowledge of a number of Castro’s hidden bunkers command posts in the city, all of them in more secure sites than a hotel on the waterfront; my hunch was that the Beard had hightailed it into the countryside because that was how he’d beaten Batista. The Capri was leveled by bombers before the end of the day anyway, which underscored a mission objective not written down in black and white and not spoken about openly - Fidel Castro was not to be taken alive. There were three CIA teams on the island tasked with making sure this goal was achieved as quickly as possible. I thought about the deal struck with Marcello and Trafficante and concluded, too damn bad.
The fall of Havana was a moment of supreme satisfaction for all of us in the White House, the picture of American GI’s standing on the city’s famous seawall on the front page of the New York Times May 10th edition made even the Attorney General smile, even though he was a realist like the rest of us and knew there was a lot of fighting left to do along with a lot of loose ends to be tied off.
One of those loose ends was taken care of the next day when a call from General Abrams himself informing the President of the capture of a wounded Fidel Castro in a Havana suburb, the apprehension accomplished by a squad of American Infantrymen after an intense house to house firefight. Castro had been wounded in a bombing attack two days before and was discovered in the back room of a house, attended by two nurses. A piece of shrapnel had ripped a hole in his right thigh, and he was lying unconscious on a cot after being injected with morphine. The aide who swore to put a bullet through the Maximum Leader’s head rather than let him fall into the hands of the Yankee Imperialists simply could not do it when the time came, he broke down and wept uncontrollably as Castro was put on a stretcher and loaded onto the back of a Jeep for a trip to the nearest field hospital.
“This is not how it was Goddamn well supposed to have happened,” the Attorney General snarled when he got the report on Castro’s capture. “The bastard was never supposed to be taken alive. NEVER! Those sons of bitches should have been told to finish Castro off then and there. Nobody would have asked any questions; we’d made sure of it.” It was then pointed out to the Attorney General that it was illegal to directly order an American soldier to commit cold-blooded murder. That did not ease his disposition in the slightest.
There were still an estimated 50,000 well-armed Castro loyalists in the field despite Fidel’s capture, a figure that would later be revealed to be laughably low. Then there was the matter of a post Communist government; the plans for C-Day were now utterly moot, for when the 1st Armored reached the center of Havana, they learned the sad fate of Juan Almeida; this brave man had been shot in the back by officers he thought were loyal to him in a desperate attempt to save their own necks, not unlike the German conspirators who turned on Von Stauffenberg after the plot to kill Hitler failed. And those brave patriots Harry Willams and Manual Artime hadn’t made it either, both went down fighting in a sugar cane field two days after walking off that beach into the countryside, betrayed by a man they’d trusted who turned out to be one of Castro’s spies. I am told that both the President and his brother wiped away tears when informed of the circumstances of their friend’s deaths.
We’d put all of our eggs in General Almeida’s basket and were now left in charge with no one to take the lead. The best we could do in the wake of events was to set up a military administration to try and get the electricity back on and take care of basic needs, but to the rest of the world, we looked exactly like military occupiers, which in truth we were.
Then there was the problem of the Russians at Camaguey, they had kept up their end of the bargain and stayed out of the actual fighting; the only Soviets taken prisoner were a few stragglers who appeared to have gone native after enjoying the company of the local females, along with a squad of KGB agents attempting to pass among the population, who were turned in by a civilian who’d once been one of Batista’s policemen.
More than one ranking officer over at the Pentagon wanted to demand surrender from Andreyev or at the least, the laying down of his soldier’s arms. President Kennedy would have none of it. “I told Andreyev that Camaguey would be treated as neutral territory,” he firmly reiterated at one Oval Office meeting, “and that no surrender would be required of him if he did as I requested. He has lived up to this end of our agreement. I can do no less.”
If only it could have been so simple, but there are always complications, and as the days of May 1964 passed, the complications in Cuba multiplied. The story surrounding the Soviet fallback to Camaguey began leaking out to the press, the original sources being officers in the Pentagon and Southern Command who were not happy with the situation and the deal that had been struck between our side and the Soviets. SOVIET MILITARY OUT OF FIGHT IN CUBA was the headline for a story in the Washington Star on May 7th, its sources being frontline Army officers and men. The networks did similar stories that evening, with all of their correspondents in Cuba making mention of Camaguey for the first time. The next day Walter Cronkite, reporting from Cuba, and citing local informants and sources in Washington, said that an apparent “truce” was in effect around the Soviet “zone” because of express orders not to bomb the area or approach it from the ground. The enterprising Cronkite was somehow able to get through the lines and get an interview with a Soviet officer who confirmed as much - it was the lead story on the May 10th broadcast of the CBS Evening News. Within 24 hours there were stories in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Post asserting that Camaguey had become a safe haven for members of Castro’s government, among them Raul Castro himself and Manual Piniero. The story firmly implied that the three men named as Oswald’s co-conspirators could be found there as well.
Equally troubling in the story were charges that the Russian military on the island had been freely sharing arms and ammo with Cuban forces as they were killing and wounding American GIs. It hardly painted the picture of a truce.
Overnight, Camaguey became a problem, so much so that an NSC meeting was called on the morning of the 11th of May to deal with it. “This thing is being made to look like something it’s not,” Secretary McNamara said first thing. “It’s being made to look as if we’re going easy on the Soviets down there while they have been backing Castro in every way except to shed their own blood. They‘d all be dead or prisoners now if we had not reached out to them and they need to appreciate that.” It was a pretty fair picture of how it was playing out in the press and on the campaign trail, which though it was seldom mentioned, was always a consideration with the politicians in the room. General Taylor said the only acceptable solution was some kind of formal acquiescence by Andreyev to American authority on the island, Mr. Bundy and Secretary Rusk agreed with him.
“That would be suicide for Andreyev,” the President said, “he’s already done enough to warrant a firing squad back home; if he so much as mentions surrender, it’s not only his death but probably exile to a Siberian work camp for all the men in his command.”
The President had a point; Stalin had not dealt kindly with any of the returning Red Army POW’s who’d had the misfortune of being captured by the Germans in WWII.
“This is going to be untenable very soon,” the Attorney General said. “We have to formalize the relationship with the Russians down there as soon as possible, but it has to be on our terms and they have to agree.”
I believe it was the President who first came up with the term “armistice” which is a truce by any other name, but one which implies cessation of hostilities among equals. “We treat Andreyev as if he is the true power on the island,” the President said, “as if he is the Kremlin itself. That sho
uld take care of any problems with his pride.” It was agreed that General Abrams would request a face to face meeting with Andreyev to discuss terms, among them being a list of Cuban nationals they might be harboring. My group was tasked with coming up with a list of points for Abrams to bring up at the meeting. “Getting those Russian bastards out of there,“ Ralph Gillison observed, “is going to be one damn hard nut to crack.“
Later, President Kennedy would be faulted for not using Luciano’s “hot line” to negotiate directly with General Andreyev, but it was decided that having Andreyev meet with a fellow commander in the field was the way to go; then there was the political risk to the President, who could be charged with selling out American interests while American boys were dying on a battlefield. There would later be harsh questions and criticism that the President did not try hard enough to open a dialogue with Moscow during these tense days as both countries plunged deeper into troubled waters. My answer would be that there needed to be someone on the other end willing to pick up on the other end of the line; from mid-March on, every request to talk to Chairman Khrushchev directly had been rebuffed for reasons which became clear later on. As I have noted, there were a number of meetings with Ambassador Dobrynin, but he was a much out of the loop as to what was happening in Moscow as we were.
The work on the armistice terms would prove to be the last chore we would do on the Cuban operation for some time, for while all our focus had been on the island, others had been watching every move we’d made and biding their time. And they were not just eyeballing Washington, but Moscow as well. In Peking, Hanoi, Pyongyang, events had been monitored, moves had been noted, debates had been waged and decisions made. If the Americans and the Russians were going to bog themselves down in foreign conflicts in an effort to spite the other, then an opportunity was at hand, one they could not afford to let pass.
But it was not only men of power watching things unfold, for there were men and women in Eastern Europe, trapped for nearly 20 years behind the Iron Curtain who watched and waited as well for just the slightest lifting the Soviet boot heel. These people were listening to Radio Free Europe and hoping against hope they might be like the Cubans and also be freed from a tyrannical system. And in the rumors drifting back from the fighting in Iran and the reports heard on illicit foreign radio broadcasts, they believed they heard a chink being hammered into the Soviet armor.
What happened over the second half of May would seem like the falling of dominos, one crisis tumbling into another, and looking back afterward, it would all seem inevitable. Not so at the time, and really not so at all.
The first crisis would come from Southeast Asia, where the nasty bush war between the South Vietnamese and the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas had been raging for years, with the latter getting the full support from the Communist government in the North. The South had really been on the ropes since an army coup had deposed and then executed President Diem the previous November. Diem had been losing the support of his own people and was suspected by a lot of men in the Administration of secretly going behind our backs to make a deal with the Communists after America sent a lot of aide, money and advisors to his country to prop him up - so I thought it was no great loss when the ingrate went down on November 2nd of ‘63. And for a few weeks, South Vietnam was a big story; it looked as if it would be the next big test of our resolve to stop the spread of Communism in Asia.
Then came the events in Dallas and South Vietnam disappeared from the front pages and the evening newscasts. It also ceased to be anything close to a priority for the Administration as the assassination conspiracy investigation led back Havana and the ensuing confrontation with Castro. Still, the brush war in the countryside of Vietnam simmered and spewed; more than once during the winter, there were reports of intense fighting in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam which got the attention of the Pentagon and the State Department for a day or so before some development elsewhere, almost always Cuba, grabbed the spotlight.
Vietnam came back into focus on May 16th when General William Westmorland, the newly installed commander of the American mission in South Vietnam, sent an urgent cable to the Pentagon informing them that not only had the Viet Cong captured two provincial capitals in the critical Central Highlands, but they had also wiped out a large contingent of the South Vietnamese Army just outside of Saigon. Not only that, but there were a number of details concerning these defeats which were especially ominous, not the least of them being the latest version of the Type 56 variant of the AK47 the Viet Cong irregulars were armed with, along with the short range surface to surface missiles they used as well. Somebody was sending their best arms and ammo to Ho Chi Minh. Equally bad was the report from the Highlands that Russian advisors were spotted on the ground, aiding the Viet Cong in battle; if true, this was a serious escalation; it could also mean Moscow was fishing in more troubled waters than just Iran.
In tandem with Westmorland’s message was one from Ambassador Lodge, stating that the junta in Saigon which had replaced Diem was in disarray and on the verge of collapse, completely unable to mount an effective defense of the country. In unusually blunt words, Lodge said that if the present circumstances did not change, the whole country would likely be past the point of saving within 30 days.
An emergency meeting was called by the President on May 17th in response to these developments. John Kennedy was not a happy man at the prospect of yet another foreign policy crisis; his frown grew even more pronounced when Walt Rostow, an assistant to the NSC director, made an impassioned talk on the strategic importance of Southeast Asia as it fit into the Cold War and as a roadblock to Communist expansion. Rostow urged the President to immediately bomb the port of Haiphong to prevent the Soviets and the Chinese from resupplying Hanoi, while sending at least an infantry combat brigade to take on a combat role until the South Vietnamese Army could get back on its feet.
“I wasn’t aware they were ever on their feet to begin with,” was the President’s comeback to Rostow.
What was unspoken at this meeting was the immense political liability the President would face if another Asian nation fell to the Communists the same way China did under Truman in 1949. That memory must have been on the minds of Secretaries Rusk and McNamara and General Taylor when they concurred with Rostow’s reasoning.
President Kennedy mentioned that such actions might require Congressional authorization, which would take too long. The Attorney General interjected that any action taken in South Vietnam could fall under the resolution passed by both Houses of Congress in February approving military action against Cuba, since the new problems in Southeast Asia were simply an expansion of an already ongoing crisis.
“That’s a real stretch there, Bobby,” the President said, “a real stretch indeed.”
In the end, President Kennedy didn’t have much choice, the Soviets were expected to reach the Persian Gulf by the end of the month, completing their conquest of Iran; there was no way he could sit by and allow another Communist triumph over an ally. He signed the orders for the bombing of the port of Haiphong and the deployment of a Marine infantry brigade to South Vietnam before the day was over. In the early hours of the next morning, he stood in the White House press room and made the announcement, during which he referenced his own inaugural. “I said we would have to ‘bear any burden’ and I was talking about times such as these when our foreign enemies test our resolve; whether it will be found wanting in South Vietnam is entirely up to us.”
On May 20th, the day General Abrams finally met face to face with General Andreyev at a sugar refinery outside of Camaguey, reports began flooding in from the Korean peninsula alerting us that North Korean military units were massing just above the DMZ. It seemed Kim Il Sung was emulating his fellow Asian Communist, Ho Chi Minh, and getting in on the act while the United States and the Soviet Union were otherwise engaged. I can’t possibly describe my own reaction to the news from Korea; I couldn’t get the faces of the good men I had seen die in the cold an
d snow there, out of my mind.
The North Korean mobilization made it clear that our other enemies and rivals had been busy while our attention had been focused on Castro and Cuba.
The bad news coming from Korea required an immediate response, this time there would be no emergency meetings of the NSC, instead Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, along with the Joint Chiefs gathered in the Cabinet Room with the President to lay out a course of action. I was in the basement looking over the latest cables from Cuba and not present, although I heard an account almost immediately afterward and I trust its accuracy over some other versions which turned up in memoirs many years later.
The stark reality of the situation was laid out for the President: the plan in place called for the 60,000 American troops stationed in South Korea to hold off the combined might of the People’s Republic until reinforcements from Japan and the United States could arrive and turn the tide. But that plan was now defunct because most of those reserves were now in Cuba, while the others would be needed in Europe if the very real threat of open warfare between NATO and the Warsaw Pact became a reality. In short: America could simply not afford to commit the necessary reinforcements to Korea; we were rapidly getting ourselves into more wars than we had resources to fight them.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 14