Whiteout

by Alexander Cockburn

  On February 2, 1959, Cuban security guards arrested Allan Robert Nye, an American, in a hotel room facing the presidential palace. Nye had in his possession a high-powered rifle equipped with a telescopic scope, and had been contracted to shoot Castro as he arrived at the palace. A month later Rolando Masferrer, a former leader of Batista’s death squads, turned up at a Miami meeting with American mobsters and a CIA officer. There this deadly conglomerate planned another scenario to kill Castro outside the presidential palace.

  The agency tried to devise a way to saturate the radio studio where Castro broadcast his speeches with an aerosol form of LSD and other “psychic energizers.” Another plan called for dousing Castro’s favorite kind of cigars with psychoactive drugs. The doped cigars were kept in the safe of Jake Easterline, who headed the anti-Cuba task force in the pre–Bay of Pigs days, while he tried to find a way to deliver them to Castro without risking “serious blowback” to the Agency. The ingredients for both of these schemes were developed in the labs of Sydney Gottlieb. In 1967, Gottlieb told Inspector General Earman of another scheme in which he was asked to impregnate some cigars for Castro with lethal poisons.

  During Castro’s trip to New York for an appearance at the United Nations in 1960, CIA agents attempted to pull off what is referred to as the “depilatory action.” The plan was to place thallium salts in Castro’s shoes and on his night table in the hope that the poisons would make the leader’s beard fall off. In high doses, thallium can cause paralysis or death. This scheme collapsed at the last minute.

  By August 1960, the elimination of Castro had become a top priority for the leadership of the CIA. Allen Dulles and his deputy Richard Bissell paid Johnny Roselli, a Hollywood mobster and buddy of Frank Sinatra, $150,000 to arrange a hit on Castro. Roselli swiftly brought two more Mafia dons in on the plot: Sam Giancana, the Chicago gangster; and Santos Trafficante, the overseer of the Lansky/Luciano operations in Havana. Initially, the CIA recommended a gangland style hit in which Castro would be gunned down in a hail of machine-gun fire. But Giancana suggested a more subtle approach, a poison pill that could be slipped into Castro’s food or drink. Six deadly botulinum pills – “the size of saccharin tablets” – were cooked up in the CIA’s TSD labs, concealed in a hollow pencil and delivered to Roselli. On February 13, 1961, only a month after JFK’s inauguration, Trafficante took the botulinum pills to Havana and gave them to his man inside the Cuban government, Jorgé Orta, who worked on Castro’s executive staff and owed the mobsters large gambling debts.

  Along with the pills, Trafficante also delivered a box of cigars soaked in botulinum toxin, which kills within hours. The cigars were prepared by Dr. Edward Gunn, chief of the CIA’s medical division. Gunn kept one of the cigars in his safe as a souvenir. He tested it for the Inspector General in 1967 and found it to have retained 94 percent of its original level of toxicity. The cigar was so deadly, Gunn said, that it need only be touched, not smoked, in order to kill its victim.

  Trafficante later reported back that the pills and cigars weren’t given to Castro because “Orta got cold feet.”

  In April, Roselli approached his CIA handlers with a new plan, demands for $50,000, and a new batch of pills. This time the operation would be carried out by Trafficante’s friend Dr. Manuel Antonio de Varona, leader of the anti-Castro Democratic Revolutionary Front. Verona and Trafficante had met through Edward K. Moss, the Washington, D.C. political fundraiser and influence peddler. Moss was pushing the cause of the Cuban exiles on the Hill, and he was sleeping with Julia Cellini, sister of the notorious Cellini brothers, Eddie and Dino, who were executives in Meyer Lansky’s gambling operations in the Caribbean. Varona smuggled the botulinum pills to a waitress at a restaurant frequented by Castro. But, according to CIA man Sheffield Edwards, the scheme failed when the Cuban leader suddenly “ceased to visit that particular restaurant.”

  These mobsters are often referred to in CIA documents as the Havana gambling syndicate, after the casino hotels they ran there during the Batista regime. But the Mafia dons were also involved in a much more lucrative venture – drugs. Havana had become the key transfer point into the United States for much of the heroin produced by Lucky Luciano and by the Corsican syndicates in Marseilles. Lansky, who was Luciano’s money man in the States, offered to put out a $1 million contract on Castro’s head shortly after the revolution.

  Over the next year, in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA targeted Castro through its Executive Action Capability program, code-named ZR/RIFLE. This operation was headed by William “the Pear” Harvey, a former FBI man whom some suspected of being J. Edgar Hoover’s mole inside the CIA. Harvey, one of the real characters of the Agency’s formative years, was known for wearing his pistols to work at the office, slumbering through staff meetings and for his special animus toward Robert Kennedy, who he called “that little fucker.”

  It was in late 1961 that Sam Giancana approached his CIA contact, a D.C.-based private detective named Robert Maheu, with a personal problem – he suspected his girlfriend, Phyllis McGuire, one of the McGuire Sisters singing group, of having an affair in Las Vegas with comedian Dan Rowan, of Rowan and Martin. In return for his assistance in the Castro assassination plots, Giancana wanted the Agency to bug Rowan’s Vegas hotel room. Rowan’s phone was duly wiretapped, but the recording device was discovered by a hotel maid, who informed the police. The Vegas police turned the matter over to the FBI, which wanted to prosecute Giancana for wiretapping. Ultimately, Robert Kennedy had to be told of the affair in order to call off the FBI.

  Years later, Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director for plans and architect of the Bay of Pigs disaster, said he regretted some of the Cuban ventures. Bissell told Bill Moyers, “I think we should not have involved ourselves with the Mafia. I think an organization that does so is losing control of its information. I think we should have been afraid that we would open ourselves to blackmail.” Moyers asked Bissell if it was only the association with the mobsters that troubled him, not the capability of the CIA to assassinate foreign leaders. Bissell replied: “Correct.”

  Robert Kennedy, for one, didn’t share Bissell’s squeamishness. Kennedy, who was obsessed with the elimination of Castro, told Allen Dulles that he didn’t care if the Agency employed the Mob for the hit as long as they kept him fully briefed. Robert Kennedy would go to his grave defending the Agency. “What you’re not aware of is what role the CIA plays in the government,” RFK told Jack Newfield of the Village Voice shortly before his assassination. “During the 1950s, for example, many of the liberals who were forced out of other departments found a sanctuary, an enclave, in the CIA. So some of the best people in Washington, and around the country, began to collect there. One result of that was the CIA developed a very healthy view of Communism, especially compared to State and some other departments. They were very sympathetic, for example, to nationalist, and even socialist governments and movements. And I think now the CIA is becoming much more realistic, and critical, about the war, than other departments, or even the people in the White House. So it is not so black and white as you make.”

  By 1963, Robert Kennedy’s friend Desmond Fitzgerald had taken over the Cuba operations from Harvey. Fitzgerald wasted little time in going after Castro. One of Fitzgerald’s first schemes was to have James Donovan, then negotiating the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, unwittingly deliver as a gift to Castro expensive scuba-diving gear. Sid Gottlieb treated the lining of the suit with a Madura fungus and implanted tubercle bacilli – a lethal concoction. At the same time Fitzgerald had been reading up on deep sea clams and had asked Gottlieb’s lab to rig some exceptionally attractive specimens with high explosives. The clams would then be dropped in an area were Castro frequently dived and rigged to explode when lifted.

  In November 1963, the CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald was in Paris to meet Rolando Cubela, an anti-Castro Cuban who is referred to in CIA documents as AM-LASH. Fitzgerald portrayed himself as an emissary of Robert Kenne
dy and asked Cubela for help in killing Castro. On November 22, Cubela was given a ballpoint pen rigged as a syringe filled with deadly Blackleaf-40, a high-powered insecticide composed of 40 percent nicotine sulfate. As the Inspector General’s report dryly notes, “It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot a CIA agent was meeting with a Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro.”

  Fidel Castro was not the only target. There were also repeated attempts to assassinate his brother Raúl and Che Guevara. The CIA’s J. C. King pleaded with Allen Dulles to adopt a plan that would kill Fidel, Raúl and Che at the same time, “as a package.” Ultimately, Che, whom the Agency chased around the globe, was tracked down in the jungles of Bolivia. Present at his execution in 1967 was the CIA’s Fé1ix Rodríguez, an old Cuba hand who would later become a central figure in the Contras’ drugs-and-weapons operations at Ilopango air base in El Salvador.

  Jimmy Carter’s CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, was reviled by many inside the Agency for purging some of the old guard. But Turner wasn’t really much of a reformer, and he had his own problems with truth-telling. In 1977, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by investigative journalist John Marks, the CIA was forced to disclose the existence of seven boxes of information on the Agency’s twenty-year research program into psycho-active drugs and behavior modification, known as MK/ULTRA.

  The discovery of the records by the Agency’s archivist came as a something of surprise to the CIA’s leadership, since Richard Helms in his last days as director had ordered the destruction of all of the MK/ULTRA documents. When Turner briefed congressional committees and the press, he insisted that the program had been phased out in 1963 and had only involved drug experimentation. In fact, MK/ULTRA and a host of similar projects persisted until at least 1973 and involved a quest to develop techniques for mind control, including electro-shock and psychosurgery. The CIA wanted to create a kind of “Manchurian candidate,” a roster of chemically and psychologically programmed assassins and spies.

  Turner, who talked of bringing about a new openness at the Agency, quickly proved he was no friend of free speech when he attempted to suppress the publication of Decent Interval, a book by former CIA officer Frank Snepp. The CIA claimed Snepp had violated his employment agreement by not submitting the book to the Agency for approval prior to the publication. The CIA’s lawyers subsequently won a suit requiring Snepp to hand over all of his royalties to the government.

  For pure thuggishness and criminality, it’s hard to find a better specimen than William Casey, the CIA’s director during most of the Reagan years. Casey went straight from the management of Reagan’s campaign into CIA headquarters at Langley, where he brought in some of the top public relations firms in the nation to advise him on how to sell his two pet projects, the Contras and the Afghani mujahedin, to a dubious American public. Casey called this work “perception management,” but it was really a domestic propaganda campaign, a psy-ops for the home folks.

  On December 4, 1981, Reagan signed Executive Order 12333 on assassinations. It reads, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the U.S. government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassinations.” This legal restriction didn’t deter the new CIA leader, who at that very moment was busy advocating the elimination of Desi Bouterse, the leader of Suriname, a South American country that had entered in “the Cuban orbit.”

  Likewise, Casey and his underlings were superintending the production of an assassination manual for the Nicaraguan Contras called Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare. The manual, which reads like an update of the Phoenix Program, called for the use of violence “to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges, police and state security officials, etc.” It advised the Contras to develop “shock troops” to infiltrate Sandinista rallies. “These men should be equipped with weapons (knives, razors, chains, clubs, bludgeons) and should march slightly behind the innocent and gullible participants.” In an echo of the Mafia operations against Castro, the manual also called for the Contras to hire organized crime figures to carry out many of these delicate operations. “If possible,” the manual advised, “professional criminals will be hired to carry out selective ‘jobs.’ ” Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare wasn’t just an academic exercise: it was put into action. Twice the agency sent teams to assassinate Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel d’Escoto, a Catholic priest. On one occasion the would-be assassins tried to poison him with a bottle of Benedictine liqueur spiked with thallium, a favorite toxin of the agency. CIA agent Michael Tock was arrested by the Sandinistas for his role in one of the plots. When the New York Times finally got around to running a story on the murder manual, Reagan himself came to his old friend Casey’s defense, dismissing the matter as “much ado about nothing.”

  Casey also put a $3 million bounty on the head of Sheikh Fadlallah, a Lebanese Shi’ite. Casey paid for the Saudis and a British arms technician to put a bomb in a car outside the mosque where Fadlallah was overseeing religious observances. They detonated it on March 8, 1985, at a moment when the bombers assumed that the shiekh had emerged. In fact he had dallied to talk with some of his congregation inside the mosque. The bomb killed 80 people, many of them schoolchildren, and wounded 200. The CIA and Saudis later paid Fadlallah a $2 million bribe not to retaliate.

  The following year Casey took personal control of an effort to kill Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, an obsession of the Reagan men. Casey’s deputy, Robert Gates, developed a plan for a US/Egyptian military takeover of Libya, a bold move that would “redraw the map of North Africa.” In the end, Casey went after Qaddafi himself. The Libyan leader’s movements were closely tracked in early April 1986 with the assistance of the Israeli Mossad. A pretext for a move against Qaddafi was confected in alleging Libyan responsibility for a bomb set off in the La Belle nightclub in Berlin that killed an American soldier, Sergeant Kenneth Ford. On April 14, nine F-111s were sent to attack Qaddafi’s compound with a payload of thirty-six laser-guided 2,000-pound bombs. The raid was timed to narrowly precede the evening news and a news release had been prepared to announce that Qaddafi’s death had been an accidental byproduct of this “act of self-defense.”

  But the Libyan leader escaped, though two of his sons were maimed and his daughter and a hundred nearby residents were killed by the strikes. There were immediate denials that the Libyan ruler had been personally targeted. “There was no decision to kill Qaddafi,” Casey mumbled. “There are dissident elements inside Libya. They might have seen their chances to rise and launch a coup. I’m sorry that didn’t happen.” Casey later said that the raid on Libya was meant to send a message. “Like Castro and Ortega got the message when we hit Grenada, this attack will scare the hell out of Qaddafi.”

  In subsequent years no CIA director has quite matched the appalling Casey. After Casey the job went to William Webster, who promptly certified Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega as an ally in the drug war. Webster, who spent much of his time on the tennis court, looked on as the collapse of the Soviet Union confounded half a century of CIA intelligence analysis. Bush’s choice to head the Agency was Casey’s deputy Robert Gates, who barely survived a contentious confirmation hearing after senators were told by Iran/Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh’s investigators that Gates probably lied to Congress about his knowledge of the Iran/Contra arms deals. Gates stood by as CIA-trained thugs overthrew the government of Haitian president Jean Baptiste Aristide and replaced him with a gang of military officers headed by Gen. Raoul Cédras. Gates’s CIA called Cédras one of the most promising “Haitian leaders to emerge since the Duvalier family dictatorship was overthrown in 1986.” Cédras and his colleagues proceeded to slaughter their political enemies and make millions from the drug trade.

  With Clinton eventually came MIT academic and defense contractor John Deutch and his passionate defense of the Agency as the redoubt of honorable folk. Deutch was in more or
less permanent denial during his tour at the Agency. Not only did he disclaim CIA involvement in the drug trade, but with equal heat he denied any Agency role in the murders in Guatemala of American Michael DeVine and rebel leader Efraín Bámaca. DeVine was kidnapped and beheaded in 1990. Bamaca was captured, tortured and killed in 1992. Both assassinations were ordered by Col. Julio Roberto Alpírez, who was on the CIA payroll. When State Department official Richard Nuccio attempted to investigate the matter, Deutch revoked his security clearance. Deutch also helped conceal information collected by his own analysts that more than 100,000 soldiers had been exposed to chemical weapons during the Gulf War and instead helped concoct the ruse that the Gulf War illnesses were merely the result of psychological stress.

  In 1997 George Tenet assumed the helm of the Agency after Anthony Lake was forced to withdraw after failure to fully disclose his stock holdings in oil companies with a financial interest in Agency actions. Tenet is best known for his efforts to secure the assassination of Saddam Hussein. For this task Tenet employed a group known as the Iraqi National Accord. Failing to get anywhere near Saddam himself, this group took the easier road of leaving bombs in cinemas in Baghdad, killing a large number of people.

  As such vignettes remind us, the Central Intelligence Agency is exactly what one would expect of an organization with a mandate stretching from the collection and analysis of intelligence data to the undertaking of subversion, manipulation of elections, assassination and the running of secret wars. Lying is part of the job description at the CIA, where falsehoods are regularly peddled to allies, the press, other federal agencies and Congress. “We’d go down and lie to them consistently,” says former CIA officer Ralph McGehee. “In my 25 years, I have never seen the agency tell the truth to a congressional committee.”