The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  Many later misunderstandings—including the whole Manchester affair—could have been avoided if the grieving Kennedy people had not taken the presidential plane back with Lyndon Johnson. One must sympathize with the shocked mourners, whose reactions showed a charismatic set of expectations. They held on to the White House as their man’s personal shrine. It is impossible to imagine them acting otherwise under the pressure of their sorrow.

  The charismatic protection of Edward Kennedy at Chappaquiddick was less defensible, but also understandable. To contain problems within the family, to cover up, to arrange appearances, was the instinct built into real and honorary Kennedys. They made up, in their own minds, a world within a world, a government within (and over against) the “regular” government. The weaknesses of that position did not seem obvious while Kennedy held the presidency, or even when the life had gone out of his body. The dead end of charismatic leadership within a legal order was not finally revealed until Burke Marshall came to contain, arrange, and cover up for the least charismatic of the Kennedys, the one who most wanted to be ordinary, the man to whom loose talk of charisma has been an almost unmixed bane, not a blessing. If it is hard to be an American prince, it is even harder to be an ordinary politician treated part-time as a prince.

  V

  POWER

  It was, after all, Greeks who pioneered the writing of history as what it has so largely remained, an exercise in political ironies—an intelligible story of how men’s actions produce results other than those they intended.

  —J. G. A. POCOCK

  18

  Bulldog! Bulldog!

  When the reading [of the battle plan] which lasted more than an hour was over, Langeron again brought his snuffbox to rest and, without looking at Weyrother or at anyone in particular, began to say how difficult it was to carry out such a plan in which the enemy’s position was assumed to be known, whereas it was perhaps not known, since the enemy was in movement.

  —War and Peace (the eve of Austerlitz)

  Many jokes, and some serious comments, were devoted to the Harvard presence on Kennedy’s Potomac. But the first team to move out aggressively on the New Frontier came largely from Yale. Its captain was Richard Bissell, class of 1932—class of 1928 at Groton, where his best friend was Joseph Alsop. Bissell stayed at Yale for his doctorate, and to teach economics. Two of his students were the Bundy brothers. Two of his colleague-followers were the Rostow brothers. Walt Rostow was a teaching assistant for one of the Bissell courses McGeorge Bundy took. Even at that time, Bissell was an innovator, introducing mathematical economics to an old-fashioned department. For special students he offered an “underground” seminar—guerrilla teaching; he gave the course pacing a small room, overpowering his awed students.

  Even President Kennedy felt some of that awe before his own bright aides’ brightest teacher. When Chester Bowles (Yale ’24) tried to recruit Bissell for the State Department, Kennedy said no—he meant to keep Bissell at the CIA, to replace Allen Dulles as its Director. Bissell had directed two of the most successful operations in CIA history—development of the U-2 reconnaissance plane and launching of the “spy satellite” in space. Now he was working on a plan worthy of the legendary Dulles himself; and his deputy on this project was Tracy Barnes, who had followed a year behind him at Groton and Yale. Great excitement traveled through what Peter Wyden calls “the Yale-OSS-old-boy-network connection between the holdover CIA operators and many of the incoming New Frontiersmen.”

  Bissell had not shared the OSS experience of Dulles and other old-timers—including Barnes, who observed Dulles directing resistance inside Hitler’s Germany from the famed house in Berne, Switzerland. But Dulles, who knew of Bissell’s brilliant record in running Marshall Plan programs, recruited him in 1953 to save, if that was possible, resistance-building behind the Iron Curtain. In 1947, as soon as the CIA came into existence, its covert action counterpart—euphemistically named the Office of Policy Coordination—began to drop agents, supplies, and weapons in countries occupied by Russia after the war. Frank Wisner, who had worked with Dulles during the occupation, getting German intelligence on the Russians, ran the new resistance, recruiting heavily in refugee camps, spreading American money around to make up for a late start in the intelligence game.

  The massive recruiting alerted Russian agents and developed what Thomas Powers calls a whole new class of espionage entrepreneurs. The supply of money created a demand for resistance centers and proliferating governments in exile. Guerrillas equipped with American gadgets were dropped into the waiting arms of Russian agents in Albania (“killed or arrested with eerie efficiency,” says Powers), the Ukraine, Georgia, Yugoslavia, Poland. One of the most promising programs was the Home Army in Poland, which sent back encouraging reports as supply drops increased. But then, in 1952, General Eisenhower was elected; so Russian intelligence officers, afraid that a Republican might believe his own party’s propaganda about freeing the captive nations, revealed that they had been running the fictitious Home Army all along. Eisenhower folded the resistance-building program his first year in office.

  Allen Dulles hoped something could be salvaged from the scheme. What, after all, was America to do when exiles and refugees came to them bringing information, promising contacts behind the Iron Curtain? Even if most of the agents were sent to their death, resistance networks of any sort could be a nuisance to Russia when World War III broke out (as Dulles was expecting it to), and then they might breed true resisters of the sort Dulles used in World War II. Dulles would like to find some scaled-back way of continuing the work for resistance centers. Bissell was brought in as an outside efficiency expert to study the program. It was Bissell’s first experience with the CIA, with the dream of running far-flung governments-within-governments. While going over the records, he came upon a plan for escalating guerrilla war in Albania to the point where a full invasion could be supported from within that country. He concluded that America could never mount a secret assault halfway around the world; but the plan bears a striking resemblance to one he came up with, seven years later, for invading a country in our own hemisphere.

  After finishing his report, Bissell joined the CIA and, at once, had his first experience in overthrowing a government. Frank Wisner, who ran the unsuccessful operations Bissell had been studying, made the Guatemalan coup look easy. Bissell would later use directors of its various parts to help him overthrow Castro—Tracy Barnes, for instance, and David Phillips, and E. Howard Hunt. In Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz had been accepting Soviet support, so the CIA came up with a handpicked successor for him, one trained like other Latin American military men at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who was given a little army in Honduras, provided with American air cover, and hailed as Guatemala’s savior from radio stations at fake exile centers. Arbenz, uncertainly supported, grounded his whole air force after one pilot defected. Listening to CIA broadcasts as a nonexistent uprising tightened around his capital city, Arbenz resigned in panic before the broken-down trucks of Castillo Armas could drive all the way to Guatemala City.

  Coming soon after the 1953 coup that returned the Shah of Iran to the Peacock Throne, Guatemala bred in the CIA an illusion that it could make and unmake governments around the globe. Even the coldly efficient Bissell, who as a child made toy and imaginary trains run accurately on complex schedules, shared this exhilaration. The beauty of the coup in Guatemala was that it could be held so secret. No great army had to be recruited; no exile communities tingled with rumors; no governments in exile competed for future leadership. The “bugs” of the resistance movement in Europe had been eliminated. An operation could be improved as it was trimmed back. Less was more. “Psywar” had replaced real war. Armies could be routed with radios expertly used. Modern technology and expertise could undo fumbling large administrations, brains defeating brawn.

  These were the lessons Bissell took to heart. He ran his own major projects for the CIA—the U-2 and the spy satellite�
��out of his own hat. Secrecy became his passion; no other parts of the CIA itself should know what he was up to—or as few as possible. He was beginning to run a secret government within the secret government, a guerrilla intelligence force in the counterguerrilla service. Sticklers for orderly procedure—mainly Richard Helms—resented the way Bissell cut them out of his growing personal sphere. Even before Kennedy arrived on the scene, Bissell had created a proto-New Frontier operation—relying on the intelligent shortcut, on impatience with bureaucracy, on the brilliance of a few amateurs and “generalists,” on contempt for company men and committees and the military.

  And so the Bay of Pigs was born. Kennedy legend put this failure down to the incompetence of Kennedy’s predecessor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Neither the military nor the bureaucracy misled Kennedy into the invasion of Cuba. Bissell cut all of them out, and convinced Kennedy because he embodied the ideals of the new administration. Bissell was proposing just what Kennedy had dreamed of doing from the White House. Peter Wyden describes early days on the New Frontier:

  Soon Mac Bundy told [Robert] Amory that the President had said, “By gosh, I don’t care what it is, but if I need some material or an idea fast, CIA is the place I have to go. The State Department takes four or five days to answer a simple yes or no.” This was music to the ears of Amory and his [CIA] colleagues, and they reciprocated: “People were willing to come in at three o’clock in the morning, because they knew damn well that what they produced was read personally by the President immediately.” Eisenhower’s cumbersome coordinating committees were scrapped. The intelligence business was fun again. And for Bissell, in particular, the stakes were suddenly soaring.… Unlike the military and the State Department, the CIA got things done without so many committees, concurrences and pyramiding delays. It did not shirk tricky, nasty jobs. It didn’t bellyache and constantly say that something was too audacious or couldn’t be done.

  The distinctive note of the Bay of Pigs invasion was that it was a military operation run without the military’s control, an invasion force created specially by the CIA itself, a combination of every weapon in Bissell’s private arsenal—assassination of a leader, propaganda war, guerrilla uprising, and coup from outside. Its success depended on a coordination of all these things in the mind of the master train-scheduler. Later, the plan would look so crazy that people could not credit its acceptance in the first place. But it made sense to a James Bond fan.

  The origins were comparatively simple. Emigres from Cuba presented the CIA with the same set of problems and opportunities that European refugees had. Some exiles brought valuable information about the Castro regime; rumors of resistance had to be confirmed; agents planted by Castro in Miami had to be smoked out. Hotheads needed controlling—the men who wanted to rent a single fishing boat and “invade” their homeland. The wilder sort could make more trouble for America if left alone than if the CIA harnessed their energies to some larger purpose. Howard Hunt, who thought that anything opposed to Castro must be praiseworthy, regretted the CIA effort to check extremists: “Jimmy [pseudonym for an agent] charged the Cubans with being inefficient and insecure, said giving them boats and ordnance was tantamount to letting them kill themselves. I replied that much as he might be right, our policy was to help the exiles do what they thought they themselves could do. Jimmy said the exiles were needed in the training camps, not floundering around in the Florida Straits.”

  Bissell’s job, then, was to take a situation like that which led to the inefficient resistance-building program in Europe and turn it into another Guatemala. No long buildup of internal resistance could be attempted; Castro would track agents down and kill them as the Albanians had. A short quick elimination of the whole regime was called for, using surgical tools of modern psywar. Bissell was engaging Fidel Castro in a mental game of chess, a test of comparative sophistications. That is why the first thing Bissell asked for was propaganda experts. Radios send out the first waves of attack in a modern war of the minds.

  Since David Phillips had run the Guatemalan radios, he was called in, during the spring of 1960, to set up a studio for bringing down Castro. A fifty-kilowatt transmitter was rushed from Germany to Swan Island, off Honduras, for this purpose. Forty Cubans were trained as radio operators, twenty at Useppa Island off the Florida coast and twenty on the plantation of Robert Alejos in Guatemala—the plantation that would become a training camp for the invading army.

  The propagandists began with great confidence, and expended sophisticated hours making the project look unsophisticated enough to be authentic—they removed rugs from the Great Swan studio so chairs could be heard scraping the floor, as in some crude hideout. A Madison Avenue advertising firm was hired to produce mimeographed releases with an amateur look. While this elaborate playacting went on in Phillips’s Washington apartment and New York offices, Castro’s own propaganda operation ridiculed the American tricks. This was just one of the differences between the Cuban and the Guatemalan projects, differences the CIA resolutely ignored. Propaganda unbalanced Jacobo Arbenz because he was teetering already. Not a revolutionary, Arbenz was a reformist trying to keep his original military backing—the arms he got from the Soviets had to be wielded, after all, by rightist colonels in his own country. Working to placate both sides, he formed no comprehensive program or aggressive propaganda of his own; the distrust among his own followers could be exploited. But Castro was the master of a revolutionary regime with its own propaganda strength. Phillips did not radio his “disinforming” messages into a vacuum but into a country with the high morale of a revolution in its moment of success, where resistance was easily branded as treason (when genuine), or as United States aggression (when false).

  In such a situation, the American propaganda operation’s only success was in persuading itself that resistance to Castro existed on a scale sufficient to cause an uprising with only a little encouragement from the outside. That is always the danger with propaganda, that it becomes at last more credible to its disseminators than to its targets. This was increasingly true of the Cuban effort, as handling the fractious exiles became more difficult. The propaganda was used to convince the refugees, though the refugees were supposed to be the operation’s own source of information! Exiles and agents drifted, without realizing it, into a relationship that involved constant fooling of each other—a pattern that would be repeated, up the rungs, into the White House itself.

  If Cuba was not Guatemala, Castro was even more emphatically not an Arbenz. Eisenhower approved the Guatemalan operation when he was convinced that Arbenz was weak and could easily be toppled. But the CIA put Castro in its sights precisely because he was strong; he had not only created a discipline for Cuba, but had revived the failed hopes of Latin American Communists for a wider revolution. The campaign against Cuba was personal from the outset. Castro’s jaunty defiance of the United States had made him a great villain to the American public—more resented, according to the polls, than Khrushchev himself. When Howard Hunt went to Havana to scout the possibilities of a coup, he came back with one overriding recommendation: the revolution was Castro, so Castro must be removed. Hunt later chafed and fumed that his recommendation was being neglected. But it wasn’t. Acting on a suggestion from Colonel J. C. King, Bissell and Barnes made their first overture to potential assassins in July of 1960. When that failed, they got Colonel Sheffield Evans to approach underworld figures as “hit men.” Meanwhile, the CIA’s technicians were working on strange new devices to humiliate Castro if they could not kill him—make his beard fall out or garble his speech. Sophisticated “psywar” was the magic new destroyer of the opposition’s chessmen.

  Allen Dulles was relying on the power of such dirty tricks when he approached Eisenhower on the subject of Cuba. In February of 1960, early in the primary season of that election year, he suggested that Castro’s sugar crop be sabotaged. Eisenhower, as usual, wanted a “program” within which such isolated acts could be judged; so the CIA framed one i
n a matter of weeks. On March 10, the President approved a four-point program setting up a government in exile (Eisenhower’s own first priority—a moderate leadership was to be found, excluding veterans of Castro’s revolution and Batista’s regime), launching a propaganda campaign (the CIA’s darling scheme), encouraging internal resistance, and training guerrillas outside American territory.

  This initial agreement was rich with possibilities of future misunderstanding. The CIA was counting on its own tricks to unseat Castro before the election, despite what Bissell considered Eisenhower’s lack of real interest in the plan. The President would be saved despite himself. Thus longer-range planning was given low priority; it served merely as a cover for Bissell’s quick-fix approach. Two bunglers were assigned the important task of forming a government in exile: Gerry Droller (known to the exiles as Frank Bender) was a German with no sympathy for Cubans, and Howard Hunt was a right-winger with no sympathy for anti-Batista reformers. Far from seeking out moderate leadership, the two men exacerbated political conflicts in the exile community, and made noises that advertised the CIA plot. By neglecting long-range aspects of the plan he had given to Eisenhower, Bissell sabotaged his own quick “surgical” kill of Fidel.

  Guerrillas were sent to the Guatemalan plantation where radio operators had been trained—first fifty, then a hundred more. While the search went on for resistance centers where they could be dropped, the secret army grew and its secrecy evaporated. Political differences among the exile fighters led to greater effort at control by the Americans, with decreasing success. Finally, when mutiny broke out and split the camp in two, the CIA rounded up a dozen “troublemakers” and held them in a prison camp till after the invasion. The political side of the operation was even messier. When Miami’s Cuban leaders continued their feuding, the CIA appointed its own leaders, moved them up to New York (away from the squabbling in Miami), held them in the dark about the invasion, and issued statements in their name. If the Cubans would not act like Castillo Armas, voluntarily, they must be forced to.