Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  In September 1953 the youngest Senator acquired another political asset – his attractive wife Jacqueline Bouvier. The wedding was the society event of the year, though the groom did not suspend his incessant philandering even on the day itself. Jack was packaged for high office as no one had ever been packaged before. As a sceptical journalist wrote: ‘This man seeks the highest elective office in the world not primarily as a politician, but as a celebrity. He’s the only politician a woman would read about while sitting under the hair dryer, the subject of more human interest articles than all his rivals combined.’45 Since he needed to correct the impression of being a rich playboy dabbling in politics, it helped when in April 1957 Joe bought a Pulitzer Prize for Jack’s ghost-written Profiles in Courage, just as he had made London embassy staff available to ‘research’ Jack’s youthful venture into print.

  Following his impressive re-election in 1958, which cost Joe a further $1 million, Jack’s by now impressive journalistic claque, who never shared with the public their intimate knowledge of his hedonistic lifestyle, were already speculating where he would put Bobby or his youngest brother Ted after he entered the White House. His nomination as the Democratic candidate and, indeed, his victory in the 1960 presidential election itself, was swung by a back-room deal between Joe and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who delivered the crucial Illinois vote. The Kennedys dramatized Jack’s Catholicism to win ethnic votes. As Harry Truman tartly observed of Joe’s influence: ‘It’s not the Pope I’m afraid of. It’s the pop.’46 There was much portentous talk too during these campaigns of global nuclear annihilation, and of the need for ‘new men to cope with new problems and new opportunities’ to neutralize those who thought JFK (as he became known) too young for the job, or who, like Eisenhower, thought him a hyper-privileged ‘Little Boy Blue’. After defeating the rebarbative, sweaty Dick Nixon by a tiny margin (0.2 per cent) of the popular vote that was delivered by late returns from Illinois, JFK was sworn in as the thirty-fourth President on a chill day in January 1961. His inaugural address is deservedly celebrated for the soaring rhetoric that lit up the occasion.

  Playa Girón

  When William Crockett was appointed assistant secretary of state for administration he was summoned by Bobby Kennedy, the new Attorney-General. Without looking up, Bobby snapped, ‘You work for my brother, the President of the United States, and you do whatever he says. Your job in the State Department is to make sure that all the personnel in the Department understand that they work for the President and that they are loyal to him. So now you know what your job is. Do you know how to do your job? You kick people in the ass so hard that teeth will rattle in all the embassies. That’s what you will do. That is how to get your job done!’ And the interview was over. Bobby was his elder brother’s rat-catching terrier.47

  Operation Zapata was posited on delusional thinking by Cuban exiles and CIA agents on the island about the degree of local support that an invading force might receive. CIA planning was well under way by early 1960, with exiles training in Guatemala and a powerful fifty-kilowatt medium-wave radio transmitter to broadcast propaganda installed on tiny Swan Island midway between Florida and Cuba. CIA veterans of the successful coup in Guatemala were thick on the ground; indeed the facility of that operation encouraged the new administration to take this further step in Cuba. The tough-talking intellectuals around Kennedy lacked the old soldier’s caution instilled in Eisenhower and JFK thought the NSC ‘a waste of time’. Having made so much of the Communist menace emanating from Cuba, JFK himself could not afford to be seen as soft seventy days after entering the White House. For as Allen Dulles reminded the new President in briefing sessions, if the invasion was called off the 1,500-strong Cuban exile force assembled in Guatemala would disperse to bruit JFK’s weakness across the entire continent. The Republicans would undoubtedly exploit the issue in the elections in 1962.48

  The CIA bounced the new administration into backing what ceased to involve landing a guerrilla force and became a pathetic replica of a Second World War amphibious invasion, albeit without superior air cover. To the horror of CIA planners in their Quarters Eye barracks near Washington’s reflecting pool, Secretary of State Dean Rusk vetoed a landing near the town of Trinidad because of concern with civilian casualties. The alternative chosen was Playa Girón, a beach on the Bay of Pigs (Bahía de Cochinos) on the southern coast of Cuba. This was surrounded by crocodile-infested swamps that spawned clouds of mosquitoes. It was chosen because the swamps would make it difficult to snuff out the beachhead. JFK was also ill served by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who signed off on a night amphibious landing by a bunch of civilians that, as experienced soldiers, they surely knew had zero chance of success. For reasons of operational secrecy, no attempt was made to co-ordinate the landings with the heavily penetrated resistance inside Cuba. Finally, the keystone assassination of Fidel failed. Shortly before Zapata was launched Juan Orta lost his nerve and sought asylum in the Mexican embassy. What the CIA did not count on was that JFK would demonstrate a totally unexpected willingness to live with the political fall-out of letting the botched operation fail rather than doubling up on the gamble by committing US armed forces.49

  Operations began with raids on Cuban airfields by B-26 bombers painted in Cuban air force colours operating from bases in Nicaragua. They were supposed to be flown by Cuban defectors. When one of these planes made an allegedly emergency landing in Miami, an alert journalist paid less attention to the bullet holes in the fuselage than to the plane’s aluminium nose, when the noses of all Cuban air force B-26s were of Perspex. He might have noticed that the machine guns were taped up to protect them from Nicaragua’s dust. The raids disabled 60 per cent of the small Cuban air force, but the remaining 40 per cent included the British Sea Furies. Brigade 2506 steamed from Nicaragua in the name of Catholic Cuba, with Latin crosses on their badges and bidden Godspeed by Luis Somoza, son and heir of ‘our son-of-a-bitch’ Anastasio, who requested some hairs from Castro’s beard. Cuban intelligence analysts would subsequently declare that between them the men on board the CIA-chartered freighters had owned a million acres of land, 10,000 houses, seventy factories, five mines, two banks and ten sugar mills.

  The invasion force received the go signal from CIA officer Howard Hunt, later to figure as the organizer of the Watergate burglary that brought down Nixon in 1974: ‘Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The first will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red.’50

  The second fateful decision occurred when Rusk telephoned Kennedy, who was at his new Virginian horsey retreat of Glen Ora near Middleburg, on the night of the invasion. Kennedy agreed to rescind his earlier authorization of air strikes by USAF and US Navy pilots to support the invaders. These men died on the beaches as Castro’s forces closed in and the Sea Furies blew up the ammunition ship Rio Escondido.51

  Apart from the heroism of the young exiles left stranded by a US administration that had lacked the moral courage to call the whole thing off, there was nothing remotely redemptive about the fate of Assault Brigade 2506, whose designation honoured an exile who fell during a training accident in Guatemala (2506 had been his membership number). The CIA even managed to contaminate their patriotism by including 194 batistianos in their ranks, fourteen of them sufficiently notorious to be put on trial afterwards, with nine shot and the remainder sentenced to long prison terms. Castro subsequently exchanged the survivors for $53 million in food and medicine.52

  In August 1961, during a meeting of the Organization of American States in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Guevara gave a White House secretary a note for JFK. ‘Thanks for Playa Girón,’ it said. ‘Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it’s stronger than ever.’ Truer words were never spoken. Castro was justified in proudly proclaiming it ‘the first defeat for Yanqui imperialism in Lat
in America’, and it cemented the revolution in the hearts of the great majority of Cubans. For the rest, thousands of suspects were rounded up and hundreds shot, including all the CIA infiltrators and the extraordinarily brave internal resistance members they had made contact with. No wonder the CIA team at Quarters Eye used wastepaper baskets as they threw up.

  On 29 December 1962, JFK and Jackie attended a welcoming ceremony for Brigade 2506 survivors at the Orange Bowl stadium in Miami. The President was wise to bring his wife, as she spoke charmingly in Spanish and those present who believed he had betrayed them were constrained to be polite. But the poison contaminated US politics for decades to come, with undying conspiracy theories linking Cuban exiles in the CIA with the assassinations of both JFK and his brother. In fact the Cuban with the most reason to want them dead was Fidel, who became the target of a highly personal vendetta pursued by the Kennedy brothers for making them lose face at the Bay of Pigs. As a result of this, they would pursue Castro with a vengeance, up to and including repeated conspiracies to murder him, and when he and his Soviet patrons went to the brink of war they would match them move for move during the most deadly moment of the entire Cold War.

  16. TO THE BRINK: THE MISSILE CRISIS

  A Maze of Options

  During the Bay of Pigs fiasco Khrushchev exclaimed, ‘Can he [JFK] really be that indecisive?’, forgetting his own dithering over Hungary in 1956. It is worth bearing in mind that a broad range of people who knew JFK well, including his father, judged him to be a lightweight. He was in some respects a silver screen on which others projected their yearnings, which helps to explain his lasting status as a liberal icon. Another reason is that he also grew in an office that has diminished many of those who have occupied it. In the minds of those who revere his memory, the violently attenuated promise outweighs the amorality of his private life and of his secret conduct as president.

  Although he took public responsibility for the Bay of Pigs, JFK seethed with hostility towards the CIA, sacking Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell shortly afterwards. The Republican John McCone replaced Dulles and the suave Richard Helms, known to his detractors as the ‘Eminence Grease’, took over from Bissell. But instead of reining in the paramilitary side of the CIA in favour of humdrum intelligence collection and analysis, the gung-ho Kennedys expanded it. They were admirers of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, in which a suave Brit saves the world with fancy gadgets. Whereas Eisenhower had authorized 170 CIA covert operations in eight years of office, the Kennedys licensed 163 in less than three. Top of the list was revenge on Castro, for the Kennedys were unaccustomed to failure.1

  To ensure that the CIA did the President’s bidding, Bobby Kennedy was effectively put in charge of its operational division. Thus was created the paradox of the top law officer in the country directing an organization whose activities were legal only on rare occasions. He brought in Brigadier-General Edward Lansdale, whose legendary status had survived his lacklustre period in Diem’s turbulent Saigon. It was naively assumed that as an expert in counter-insurgency he should also be able to mount a grassroots rebellion. Lansdale devised a thirty-two-point plan, adding as an afterthought point 33 – to use chemicals to temporarily incapacitate all Cuban plantation workers during the sugar harvest.2 Though formally based in the Pentagon, Lansdale took charge of Special Group Augmented, which ran CIA operations in Cuba. CIA analysts were justly sceptical that Lansdale’s uprising, codenamed Touchdown Play, could be triggered in a popular police state like Cuba.3

  Although forbidden by law to operate in the US, the world’s largest CIA station, codenamed JMWAVE, mushroomed on the south campus of the University of Miami, with an annual budget of $50 million. This was four times the total the CIA spent on spying in twenty Latin American countries. Disguised as Zenith Technical Enterprises, it housed 300 CIA officers, who recruited thousands of Cuban exiles as agents. The officers all acted as though they were above the law, whether driving around with sub-machine guns and explosives in their cars or being quietly released from jail after being caught driving under the influence. Indiscriminate recruiting saw the ranks swelled by fantasists and psychopaths, and even the sane and sober recruits knew less and less about life in Cuba, creating a shadow country full of repressed people yearning to be free that simply did not exist. Of course, they and the Miami Cubans ignored the really repressed people in the new Cuba, the blacks who had overwhelmingly supported Batista against these middle-class Hispanic revolutionaries.

  JMWAVE’s major project was dubbed Operation Mongoose. Implementation was assigned to the CIA’s Task Force W under a tough ex-FBI man called William Harvey.4 Bug eyed, purple faced and pear shaped, Harvey went around with a pistol in a holster and another clipped to his belt in the small of his back. He hated Lansdale, whom he contemptuously called ‘FM’, short for field marshal. He also despised the Kennedys, calling them ‘fags’ and ‘fuckers’.5 In meetings Harvey liked to annoy Bobby Kennedy by loading and unloading his gun on the table, and on occasion ostentatiously raised a leg to fart. Bobby was present at all Mongoose planning meetings, like one in October 1962 where the minutes read, ‘General Lansdale said that another attempt will be made against the major target which has been the object of three unsuccessful missions, and that approximately six new ones are in the planning stage.’ Harvey was appalled to find himself named and linked in a memo with the word ‘liquidation’.6

  JMWAVE ran a number of operations against the Castro regime. The CIA soon had command of the third largest navy in the Caribbean. Large CIA mother ships such as the Rex and Leda towed smaller swift boats within range of Cuba, where they launched black inflatables with teams of saboteurs. Their targets included setting fire to sugarcane plantations and timber yards, and blowing up bridges and rail lines as well as such talismanic sites as the Patrice Lumumba Sulphuric Acid plant. In a raid on 24 August 1962, a thirty-foot boat called the Juanín entered the harbour at Miramar, a Havana suburb. On board were six Cuban exile commandos equipped with two .50-calibre machine guns and a 20mm cannon, acquired from a Mafia gun dealer in Miami. For five minutes they poured fire into the illuminated ballroom of the Blanquita Hotel, where Czech and Russian military personnel liked to party on Friday nights. The boat then sped back into the night.7 Underwater demolition teams were also used to attach limpet mines to ships or to the country’s largest floating crane.8

  All overseas CIA stations were required to establish a Cuban desk, responsible for misinformation and sabotage. Large sums of money were disbursed to European industrialists to damage equipment sent to Cuba, such as lubricants doctored to wear out engines or slightly misshaped ball bearings. A Japanese ship’s captain was bribed to collide with a vessel on the River Thames taking Leland buses to Havana. Enormous sums were expended by CIA purchasing agents to deny the Cubans such items as bright stock, a heavy viscous lubricating oil used in engines. As Mongoose seemed not to be delivering the uprising Lansdale had promised, Helms and Harvey decided to re-explore the Mafia connection they had opened during the Eisenhower administration. They were warned off by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hated Harvey from his time in the Bureau and was fully cognizant of the CIA’s links with the Mafia. Hoover also possessed a political nuclear weapon in the shape of proof that Judith Campbell, one of JFK’s favourite sexual partners, had served as his confidential link with Sam Giancana since JFK first became a senator. After Hoover had presented JFK with a top-secret FBI memo on the subject, he ended his affair with Campbell and also the long and close relationship between his family and the Mob.

  While the tide of sleaze flowed on in the secret world, in public JFK initiated the economic quarantine of Cuba whose tattered legacy persists to this day. By executive decree in February 1962 he banned most Cuban imports, notably cigars and tobacco products – having first stocked up his personal supply. The US also arm-twisted the OAS to expel Cuba, and fifteen Latin American states broke off diplomatic relations with the Castro regime. That year, 82 pe
r cent of Cuban exports went to Communist countries, which supplied 65 per cent of the island’s imports.

  Despite all this activity, voters still thought JFK and the Democrats were most weak on the subject of Cuba, leading to enhanced sabre-rattling in the weeks before the mid-term polls in 1962. JFK may have ruled out an unprovoked invasion, but he ordered contingency plans should a viable excuse for a successful invasion arise – which is to say if Mongoose finally produced Lansdale’s ‘spontaneous’ uprising. The plan was for a combined operation known by its February 1962 planning title OPLAN 314-61. On 1 October army and navy commanders were ordered to prepare to execute Operation Ortsac (Castro cunningly spelled backwards), a large-scale amphibious exercise in the Caribbean to begin on 15 October.9 The KGB knew about this in general terms, and connected it with Castro’s public declaration on 1 December that he was a Communist bent on building a Marxist-Leninist society.10

  The US also resumed atmospheric nuclear tests after Khrushchev had refused site inspections that might have revealed Soviet strategic weaknesses. The GRU (the foreign military intelligence directorate of the Soviet General Staff), usually more dependable than the politicized KGB, falsely reported that only the Soviet test of a fifty-megaton Tsar hydrogen bomb in October 1961 had deterred the US from launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Actually, both sides knew that the colossally destructive weapon was unusable. What really worried Khrushchev was that following the installation of highly accurate Minuteman missiles in blast-proof silos in Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming, the US had a nine-to-one superiority in Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles over the USSR, whose meagre arsenal of SS-7s were relatively inaccurate and required larger warheads. Also, the solid-fuel Minuteman could be launched much more rapidly than liquid-fuelled SS-7s, making them highly vulnerable to a US first strike. The British SIS confirmed much of this detail through GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who began spying for them in late 1960.11