Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  It was vintage Bobby Kennedy, turning the bureaucracy upside down and shaking it by the heels. Such tactics served him well in most endeavors, but not when it came to the business of spying, with all its reverence for “tradecraft.” Even the unorthodox Lansdale was taken aback by Kennedy’s antibureaucratic instincts. Lansdale had taken some top-secret documents to Hickory Hill, where Kennedy lay sick in bed with the flu. Kennedy spread the papers over the covers, and the two men discussed the latest plans for Castro’s overthrow while children played with a train set under the bed. “We were discussing these very sensitive matters,” Lansdale recalled, shaking his head, “and this kid was going ‘Choo-choo’ around my feet.”

  To Harvey, it was all so much amateurish meddling. Soon he started referring to Kennedy in private as “that fucker” and began suggesting that some of the Attorney General’s actions bordered on the traitorous. It usually happened after he had been drinking, and it made his friends wince. “He had some things that he said of Bobby Kennedy that were unwise, which he couldn’t support, but which were part of his dislike for the man,” a friend said. “Bobby was wielding so much power, and Bill distorted this into intent to do harm.” In short, the friend said,“he hated Bobby Kennedy’s guts with a purple passion.” For his part, Kennedy thought that Harvey was “not very good.” The Berlin tunnel “was a helluva project,” Kennedy conceded, “but he did that better than he did this…. [Harvey had] this great achievement and then he ended in disaster by working out this program.” Stories began to circulate. One had it that Harvey had flatly refused a direct order from Kennedy, then slapped his gun down on the conference table and spun it around so the barrel pointed at the Attorney General. The story was almost certainly apocryphal, but its very existence signaled that something was drastically wrong.

  Relations with Lansdale were no better. A clash between Lansdale, the guerrilla fighter, and Harvey, the espionage agent, was inevitable. Their instincts were as far apart as the jungles of Vietnam and the back alleys of Berlin. “People who’d been up against the Soviet types were always very strange to me,” Lansdale said. “I’m sure they thought I was strange.” Despite his long and storied background in Asian intrigue, Lansdale had an irrepressible naiveté about him. He could give such trailwise advice as “In a campfire, dry bamboo gives light, dry coconut shells (not husks) give cooking heat but little light,” and in the next breath pronounce, “One of the precepts I wanted American officials to follow was the Golden Rule.” James Symington, who in 1962 served as Bobby Kennedy’s administrative assistant, came back from his first meeting with Lansdale and wrote a memo saying, “I have now met the All-American Boy Guerrilla Fighter.” He meant it as a joke, but Kennedy didn’t think it was funny. “Bob gave me a rather dour look and said, ‘You don’t seem to understand. This man is a very great warrior.’ ” After that, Symington kept his opinion of Lansdale to himself. “It just seemed to me he was a little wacky,” he said.

  To Harvey, Lansdale was worse than wacky. He was a security risk. “Harvey seldom really talked to me,” Lansdale said. “He would never initiate conversations. It was very hard to get information from him…. I’d ask him for a full explanation, and I’d get one sentence back, and I’d say, ‘You mean that’s full?’ He’d say, ‘I’m trying to answer your question…. Everything’s under control.’ When I’d ask a question, he’d say, ‘I just told you. Everything’s under control.’ Or, ‘Well, I’m very busy here, and I can’t go into details on every last thing.’ … It used to burn me up…. If I was talking to Harvey and he got a phone call, he’d start talking code. After a while I caught on and realized he was talking about me. The son of a bitch. Why couldn’t he have just told me he had something he wanted to discuss in private and ask me to step out for a moment? I would have understood that.” Harvey displayed his contempt in other ways as well. At meetings he would “lift his ass and fart and pare his nails with a sheath knife,” Helms’s aide said. One day at the Pentagon, Harvey took his gun from his pocket, emptied all the ammunition on the table, and began playing with the bullets in an elaborate show of boredom. The incident caused such a ruckus that the CIA issued new regulations regarding the carrying of firearms by employees.

  The final break with Lansdale came on August 13, 1962. Lansdale sent a memo to State, Defense, the CIA, and the USIA, laying out plans for the next phase of operations against Cuba. There, in black and white, Lansdale wrote, “Mr. Harvey: Intelligence, Political (including liquidation of leaders), Economic (sabotage, limited deception), and Paramilitary.” Three days before, Harvey had sat silent in Dean Rusk’s office while fifteen or so of the administration’s leading lights—McNamara, Taylor, Bundy, McCone, Gilpatric, Lansdale, Goodwin, and others—briefly discussed the “liquidation of leaders,” Castro in particular. “It was the obvious consensus of that meeting … that this was not a subject which has been a matter of public record,” Harvey reported afterward to Helms. All mention of the liquidation of leaders had been expunged from the official minutes of the meeting, but three days later, Lansdale put it in writing and sent the memo all over town. As soon as McCone saw it, he called Harvey in and told him, “If I got myself involved in something like this, I might end up getting myself excommunicated.” Harvey listened with a straight face, then stormed back to his basement office, scratched out the offending words from the memo, and called Lansdale to rage against “the inadmissability and stupidity of putting this type of comment in such a document.” The CIA “would write no document pertaining to this and would participate in no open meeting discussing it,” Harvey told Lansdale. Lansdale didn’t know it, but he had stuck his big foot right in the middle of ZR/RIFLE.

  Lansdale was the least of ZR/RIFLE’s problems. At Helms’s urging, Harvey had abandoned the intricate stratagem of using QJ/WIN in the KUTUBE/D search for a suitable assassin as the original executive-action file had specified. Instead, he had reverted to a more tightly controlled version of the “Keystone Comedy Act” that had been concocted for the Bay of Pigs. “This is an ongoing matter which I was injected into” on “explicit orders” from Helms, Harvey insisted. Helms acknowledged that “I had very grave doubts about the wisdom of this,” but “we had so few assets inside Cuba at that time I was willing to try almost anything.” Harvey summed up the liabilities of this “damned dicey operation” by saying that it carried the “very real possibility of this government being blackmailed either by Cubans for political purposes or by figures in organized crime for their own self-protection or aggrandizement.”

  To limit the potential damage as much as possible, Harvey dropped the ex-FBI agent Maheu and the two Mafia “dons,” Trafficante and Giancana, as “surplus” and “untrustworthy” and began working exclusively with Johnny Rosselli. On April 21, 1962, Harvey and Rosselli met in the cocktail lounge at the Miami airport. The bulbous Harvey gulped his double martini while the sleek Rosselli, wearing a custom-tailored suit, alligator shoes, and a $2,000 watch, sipped Smirnoff on the rocks. Suddenly Harvey slapped his revolver down on the table between them. From now on, he commanded, Rosselli would be working for him and him only. He was to maintain contact with the Cuban Tony Varona but have no further dealings with Maheu, Giancana, or Trafficante. Harvey handed Rosselli four poison capsules and assured him that they would “work anywhere and at any time with anything.” Rosselli said that Varona planned that the new pills would be used not only on Fidel Castro but also on his brother Raul and on Ché Guevara. “Everything is all right,” Harvey responded. As a backup, Harvey and Ted Shackley, the JM/WAVE station chief, rented a U-Haul truck, filled it with $5,000 worth of explosives, detonators, rifles, handguns, radios, and boat radar, dropped it off in a parking lot, walked across the street, and handed the keys to Rosselli.

  When Harvey returned to Washington, he reported to the Special Group that three more teams of agents had been infiltrated, bringing to seventy-two the number of CIA assets in place in Cuba, but he made no mention of Rosselli, Varona, the pills, or the U-Hau
l truck. Harvey kept the assassination plot “pretty much in his back pocket,” Helms said. “There was a fairly detailed discussion between myself and Helms as to whether or not McCone should at that time be briefed concerning this,” Harvey related. “For a variety of reasons which were tossed back and forth, we agreed that it was not necessary or advisable to brief him at that time.” Helms explained that “Mr. McCone was relatively new to the Agency, and I guess I must have thought to myself, well this is going to look peculiar to him. It was a Mafia connection … and this was, you know, not a very savory operation.”

  Something more than mere silence was required to keep the Attorney General ignorant of the plan. Kennedy had only just learned about the original “Keystone Comedy Act” after the CIA explained to him the very compelling reasons why it would be unwise for the Justice Department to proceed with a prosecution of Giancana, Rosselli, and Maheu in connection with the abortive attempt to place a wiretap on Dan Rowan’s telephone. That unenviable chore had fallen to Sheffield Edwards, the orchestrator of the plot, and Lawrence Houston, general counsel for the CIA. “I trust that if you ever do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the Attorney General know,” Kennedy glowered. “If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness,” Houston recalled. Houston and Edwards assured Kennedy that the plot to kill Castro had been terminated, a statement that Edwards knew to be a lie. To back up his lie, Edwards returned to the CIA and wrote a memo for the record stating that “Mr. Harvey called me and indicated that he was dropping any plans for the use of Subject [Rosselli] for the future.” The memo “was not true,” Harvey conceded, “and Colonel Edwards knew it was not true.” But then, as General Carter, the Agency’s Deputy Director, once said, “Memorandums [sic] for the record have very little validity in fact.”

  Rosselli soon reported to Harvey that the pills and guns had arrived in Cuba. They waited, but nothing happened. In June, Rosselli told Harvey that a three-man team was on its way to Cuba to do the job. Still Castro flourished. It had been a full eight months since Bissell had first mentioned to Harvey the “application of ZR/RIFLE program to Cuba” and since the President had recorded his decision to “use our available assets … to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime.” During that time, the only result that could be discerned was that the Russians had begun shipping vast quantities of military supplies to Cuba.

  On August 8 the Special Group met to consider “stepped-up Course B plus,” which was nothing more than a reversion to Lansdale’s original “Basic Action Plan” for inspiring an internal revolt within Cuba by October. This time the Special Group reached the same conclusion that the CIA’s Board of National Estimates had reached nearly a year before. It was no longer possible to overthrow Castro by clandestine means. On August 20 Maxwell Taylor told the President that the Special Group saw no likelihood that Castro could be overturned without direct United States military intervention. But MONGOOSE was not abandoned. On August 22, when the S.S. Streatham Hill, bound for the Soviet Union with 800,000 bags of Cuban sugar aboard, put into San Juan harbor in Puerto Rico for repairs, CIA agents contaminated the cargo with a harmless but unpalatable substance known as Bitrex. The next day, August 23, Bundy issued an action memorandum stating that at the President’s direction “the line of activity projected for Operation MONGOOSE Plan B plus should be developed with all possible speed.” Harvey was ordered to submit a list of all possible sabotage targets. Lansdale urged hitting “the Matahambre mine and various refineries, nickel plants.” The CIA’s agents should encourage “destruction of crops by fire, chemicals and weeds, hampering of harvest by work slowdown, destruction of bags, cartons and other shipping containers.” The Pentagon began laying plans for “Contingency II”—a paratroop assault on Cuba. On Sepember 7 Harvey met again with Rosselli in Miami to find out what was holding up Castro’s death.

  A day later, on September 8, a naval reconnaissance aircraft on routine patrol over the Atlantic approaches to Cuba snapped a photograph of the Soviet freighter Omsk steaming toward Havana harbor. The pictures revealed two-and-a-half- and five-ton cargo trucks lashed to her decks, but tarpaulins stretched over her hatches concealed the cargo below. Built with extra-large hatches, the Omsk was designed to carry lumber, but lumber was not among the supplies that Russia was shipping to Cuba. Analysts decided the Omsk had been pressed into duty as a bulk carrier because of a shortage of ship bottoms. But there was something else about the ship. She was riding high in the water. Either her holds were partly empty beneath those tarpaulins—extremely unlikely, given the shortage of bottoms—or she was carrying a space-consuming cargo of large volume and low density.

  On September 12, three days after the Omsk unloaded her mysterious cargo under cover of darkness, a forty-four-year-old Cuban accountant in a small town southwest of Havana looked up from his desk to see a large missile being towed through the streets. By coincidence, the accountant was wrestling with a problem that hinged on the dimensions of the property across the street. As the missile passed by, he was able to gauge its precise length. The accountant packed his bags and headed for Florida.

  On September 18 the CIA’s Board of National Estimates issued a secret report concluding that the Soviets would not install offensive missiles in Cuba. “The establishment on Cuban soil of a significant strike capability … would represent a sharp departure from Soviet practice, since such weapons have so far not been installed even in Satellite territory,” the report said. “Serious problems of command and control would arise. There would have to be a conspicuously larger number of Soviet personnel in Cuba.”

  McCone disagreed. Ever since he had seen surveillance photographs of surface-to-air missiles (SAM) sites being erected in western Cuba, he was convinced that they were there for one reason only: to protect Soviet nuclear missiles from an American air strike. An ocean away, on the French Riviera where he was honeymooning with his second wife, McCone bombarded headquarters with messages—“the honeymoon cables”—urging that more weight be given to the possibility of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

  On September 20, eight days after he had spotted the oversized missile outside his office window, the Cuban accountant reached the CIA’s refugee-debriefing center at Opa-Locka, Florida. The dimensions he gave his interrogators matched exactly those of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM). The interrogators, who had been listening to exiles tell of Soviet missiles in Cuba for more than a year, were doubtful. The accountant was shown photographs and drawings of all types of missiles from around the world. The pictures had all been reduced to the same size so that he would have to rely on characteristics other than length in attempting to identify the missile he had seen. Without hesitation, he pointed to a picture of a Soviet MRBM.

  The report was forwarded to Washington, where it was greeted with the same weary skepticism born of a thousand false missile sightings. “Doubt that this should be in meters, probably ought to be in feet,” one analyst noted in the margin of the report, downgrading the missile from an offensive weapon capable of striking targets in the United States as far west as the Mississippi to a defensive SAM. But soon another agent’s report reached CIA headquarters, this time in the form of a message in secret writing sent through the international mails, warning that all civilians had been evacuated from the area of San Cristóbal, fifty miles southwest of Havana. The timing and location were consistent with the accountant’s sighting.

  Early on the morning of October 14, a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft left the airspace over Florida, proceeded to the Isle of Pines, fifty miles off Cuba’s southern coast, turned, and headed north across Cuba. Within five minutes it had traversed the island. The U-2’s cameras had picked out a total of fourteen, 73-foot MRBMs lying in various stages of readiness in a heavily wooded area near San Cristóbal. When the photos came back from the National Photographic Interpretation Center, Walter Elder, McCone’s executive assista
nt, immediately dialed a number in Seattle, Washington, where McCone was attending the funeral of his stepson, who had been killed in an automobile accident. Speaking guardedly over the long-distance connection, Elder told McCone, “That which you and you alone said would happen, did.”

  On October 16 the photos were shown to the President and his advisers. “I for one had to take their word for it,” Bobby Kennedy said. “I examined the pictures carefully, and what I saw appeared to be no more than the clearing of a field for a farm or the basement of a house.” The photo analysts could both pick out the missiles and judge with considerable precision their readiness. Working with Russian maintenance and operations manuals that had been provided to the CIA by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, the analysts estimated that the first MRBM could be ready for launch within eighteen hours. It was Penkovsky’s last and greatest service.

  The presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba signaled the final futility of MONGOOSE. Yet on the same day he saw the photographs, Bobby Kennedy told Helms that he was going to give MONGOOSE “more personal attention in view of the lack of progress.” According to Helms’s notes, Kennedy expressed the “general dissatisfaction of the President” with MONGOOSE and “pointed out that [MONGOOSE] had been underway for a year … that there had been no acts of sabotage and that even the one which had been attempted had failed twice.”

  There had been acts of sabotage, but nothing that amounted to much. The Agency had tried twice to knock out the Matahambre copper mines, developing elaborate plans that included the erection of a full-scale model in the Florida Everglades. Both times the operation had been aborted—once because the boat had conked out on the way to Cuba, and the second time because the raiders had encountered a Castro patrol. On October 16, even as Kennedy complained about these past failures, a team of eight commandos left their base at Summer Land Key for Cuba and another raid on the Matahambre. They hit the beach on the nineteenth but again were spotted by a Cuban patrol. Six of the commandos made it back to the boat. For three nights they hovered close to shore, looking for the two who were missing. On the third night their vigil was broken by the voice of President Kennedy coming loud and clear over the boat’s radio as he informed the nation of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba and of the blockade that he had ordered against the island. The team returned to Florida minus two of their comrades but jubilant that Kennedy, at long last, was really going to do something about Castro.