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A Thousand Days

Page 29

by Arthur M. Schlesinger


  The relationship is degrading for them and demoralizing for the agent. CIA’s main contact with the exile leaders was a ubiquitous operative who went under the name of Frank Bender. His real name was Droller; he was a German refugee who had come to the United States before the war, entered the Army and moved into intelligence. He knew little Spanish and even less about Latin America (he once horrified Justo Carrillo by describing Haya de la Torre as a Brazilian labor leader). But he had money and authority, and he fell easily into habits of command. His power appears to have gone to his head; he liked to say that he was carrying the counterrevolution around in his checkbook. The older exiles disliked and feared him, but they felt they had no choice but to obey him.

  Ray and his people proved different. When Bender told him to bring the MRP into the Frente, he refused. His personality, his politics and his advocacy of the underground thesis posed a threat both to the status of the more conservative exiles and to the control of the CIA. Accordingly the older exiles and the Agency were ready to collaborate in an attempt to discredit him. His policy was denounced as Fidelismo sin Fidel—Castroism without Castro. His group was denied access to CIA’s secret radio transmitter on Swan Island and other forms of support. The more reactionary exiles called Ray a communist.

  But the arbitrary CIA control was beginning to cause resentment even within the Frente itself. Bender, finding it inconvenient to deal with five men, insisted that the Frente appoint a coordinator. When Tony Varona was chosen in September, one member resigned. This was Dr. Sánchez Arango, who had been foreign minister under Prio; he later said, “The CIA wanted to control everything. . . . The members who . . . were willing to accept their commands, their orders, their provisions, such as Artime, who was called the Golden Boy, were the ones in the best kind of relationships with them.”* Justo Carrillo voted against Varona on the ground that the revolution had made the traditional parties and politicians obsolete. He argued that the Frente should take in people “with a revolutionary background” and declare itself unequivocally on social issues. His arguments were ignored. Requests by the Frente to visit the training camp in Guatemala were turned down.

  By November 1960 the CIA operation had taken on a life of its own. The agents in the field were shaping it to meet their own needs. In favoring the ‘reliable’ exiles—those who would take orders—they were conceivably endangering the whole project; for the men most capable of rallying popular support within Cuba against the Castro regime were bound to be more independent, more principled and more radical than the manageable types whom the intelligence agency preferred for operational reasons. As for the nominal Cuban leadership in the Frente, it was growing uneasily aware that it lacked authority; that, as it accepted its instructions and its cash from Bender and his associates, it lacked dignity; that it did not even know what was going on.

  Meanwhile in the camps of Guatemala the Cubans were turning with enthusiasm from the idea of a guerrilla operation to the idea of an amphibious invasion. The new training and the new weapons filled them with sudden hope. Their American officers—or so the Cubans later told Haynes Johnson—assured them that they were only one of many such groups, one-tenth of the force, and that they would have all the support they needed.* Supposing that everyone they had left behind hated Castro as much as they did, they genuinely believed that a mass landing on the Cuban beaches might set off a general revolt. The CIA and Army officers, knowing less about Cuba, were even more sanguine. Once possessed of this dream, neither the Cubans nor their American colleagues were disposed to retreat to the more modest idea of a guerrilla infiltration. As for demobilizing the operation, this would have been unthinkable.

  Macaulay wrote of the followers of the Duke of Monmouth:

  A politician driven into banishment by a hostile faction generally sees the society he has quitted through a false medium. Every little discontent appears to him to portend a revolution. Every riot is a rebellion. He cannot be convinced that his country does not pine for him as he pines for his country. . . .

  This delusion becomes almost a madness when many exiles who suffer in the same cause herd together in a foreign country. . . . They become ripe for enterprises which would at once be pronounced hopeless by any man whose passions had not deprived him of the power of calculating chances.

  This was the way matters stood when John F. Kennedy learned of the project on November 17, 1960.

  X

  The Bay of Pigs

  ON NOVEMBER 29, 1960, twelve days after he had heard about the Cuban project, the President-elect received from Allen Dulles a detailed briefing on CIA’s new military conception. Kennedy listened with attention, then told Dulles to carry the work forward. The response was sufficiently affirmative for Dulles to take it as an instruction to expedite the project.

  Dulles understood, however, that interest did not mean commitment. All Kennedy wanted at this point was to have the option of an exile attack on the Castro regime. Let the preparation go on for the time being: there would be ample opportunity after the inauguration for review and reconsideration. In the meantime, there was a legislative program to develop and those 1200 jobs to fill . . . Kennedy saw the Cuban project, in the patois of the bureaucracy, as a ‘contingency plan.’ He did not yet realize how contingency planning could generate its own momentum and create its own reality.

  1. CONFUSION IN THE INTERREGNUM

  In the next weeks government floated as in a void. Neither the outgoing nor the incoming administrations wanted to make fundamental decisions, and most matters continued to move along existing tracks. Early in December the new CIA plan went in a routine way before the Special Group, the secret interdepartmental committee charged with the supervision of special operations. The lieutenant colonel in command of the training in Guatemala came along to offer his personal testimony about the Cuban Brigade.

  The plan was taking definite shape. Its sponsors said little now about the old ideas of guerrilla infiltration or multiple landings except as diversionary tactics. Instead they envisaged 600 to 750 Cubans coming ashore in a body at a point still to be chosen along the southern coast of Cuba. Air strikes from Nicaragua in advance of the attack would knock out Castro’s air force. These strikes, along with supply flights, would continue during the landing. The invaders would also have artillery. The mission would be to seize and hold an area sufficiently large to attract anti-Castro activists, induce defections in Castro’s militia and set off a general uprising behind the lines. As for the Brigade itself, the lieutenant colonel assured the Special Group that his charges were men of unusual intelligence and ‘motivation’ and that their morale was superb. They would have no trouble, he said, in taking care of much larger numbers of Cuban militia.

  The Special Group itself was infected with interregnum uncertainties. Not wishing to anticipate the new administration, it did not formally approve the new scheme or even subject it to very severe scrutiny. Instead, it encouraged the CIA to press on with the training in Guatemala and start work on operational planning in Washington.

  In particular, the Special Group seems not to have confronted the dilemma created by the change in military plans—the dilemma of the United States role. So long as the guerrilla thesis prevailed, this had not been a problem. CIA then contemplated an orthodox clandestine operation—an undertaking, in other words, which the United States would be able, if necessary, to disown. This meant, as a ‘ground rule’ for planning, that the operation had to look to the world like one which the Cuban exiles would be capable of organizing and carrying out on their own. If it failed, only Cubans would be held accountable. Nor was the Eisenhower administration, in observing the ground rule and forbidding United States participation in combat, imposing a restriction likely to handicap seriously what was, after all, no more than an exercise in guerrilla infiltration.

  But the new plan raised new questions. It called for an expeditionary force of size, scope and visibility; and it proposed to pit that force in pitched battle against defending a
rmies of vastly superior numbers. Could the United States convincingly deny complicity in an expedition well trained and equipped to conduct an amphibious invasion? And, if it could not escape accountability, could it afford to let such an expedition fail? In short, if the United States kept its role small enough to conceal its responsibility, the operation might not have a fair chance of success; while if it made its role large enough to give the operation a fair chance of success, the responsibility could not be plausibly disclaimed in case of failure. Washington might then face the choice between the political humiliation of defeat and the commitment of United States troops to insure victory.

  There was reason to suppose that the CIA ground rule had already been stretched to the point of no return. Someone remarked at the Special Group meeting that the Guatemala base was no longer much of a secret. This was plainly so. A Guatemala City newspaper, La Hora, had broken the story as early as October 30, saying that an invasion of Cuba was in preparation and hinting at United States collusion. Articles by Ronald Hilton of Stanford University in the Hispanic-American Report and The Nation brought the story to the attention of American readers in November. By December a number of North American papers were writing about mysterious happenings in Guatemala. Early in January Time said in its knowing way that the Frente was getting generous financial assistance from the United States government, that Manuel Ray and his MRP were denied such assistance and that “‘Mr. B,’ the CIA agent in charge, reportedly has suggested that the MRP get help from the Frente.”

  The publicity might well have raised the question whether the old ground rule was compatible with the new plan; but no one in the interregnum seemed to feel final responsibility, and so matters drifted along. In January the Joint Chiefs of Staff began for the first time to get into the act. A JCS paper, tacitly questioning the ban on United States participation in military operations, discussed possible levels of involvement. The paper went to the office of the Secretary of Defense but was shuffled aside in the confusion of the changeover. The Cuban planners in CIA meanwhile pored over maps of southern Cuba, weighed the merits of alternative landing sites and busied themselves with the operational problems of invasion.

  The hiatus in Washington gave the CIA operatives in the field a free hand. Since the force in Guatemala was still too small for the new plan, recruitment now had the urgent priority. The political criteria laid down by the CIA in Washington and demanded by most members of the Frente were abandoned in the rush. Bender gave particular authority to a dubious figure in Miami named Joaquín Sanjenis, and Sanjenis favored men of the Cuban right. If they had been in Batista’s army, no matter: Time reported that, when one member of the Frente complained about the recruitment of Batistianos, a United States officer replied, “They’re anti-communists, aren’t they?” Unmarked planes picked up the refugees in the supposedly deserted Opa-Locka airport in Miami and deposited them a few hours later at the Guatemalan base.

  The influx of new recruits created problems in the training camp. Men who had taken part in the revolution had a natural hatred of officers who had served Batista. The American advisers, on the other hand, were impatient of what they regarded as political quibbling. They preferred men who had professional military experience (like Pepe San Román, who had received training at Fort Belvoir and Fort Benning in the United States) and could be relied on to follow orders. It is true that most of the Batistianos were so called because they had once been in Batista’s army, not because they now wanted to return Batista to power. But this did not make the Cubans selected by the United States advisers to command the Brigade any more popular with the rank and file.

  In spite of the optimistic reports rendered to CIA in Washington about the splendid morale in the camp, discontent increased. In January it broke out into mutiny. Almost half of the now more than 500 Cubans in the camp resigned. It is hard to disentangle all the motives behind this demonstration: but it seems clear that the mutineers had the support of the Frente. At this point, the United States advisers intervened on behalf of the officers. “I am the boss here,” one adviser said, “and the commander of this Brigade is still Pepe San Román.” A hundred of the Cubans refused to accept this decision and insisted on seeing representatives of the Frente. When they were promised a visit from the Frente, most agreed to rejoin the Brigade, but a few still held out. In one of the unhappier passages in this whole unhappy story, the CIA operatives arrested a dozen of the ringleaders and held them prisoner under stark conditions deep in the jungle of northern Guatemala.

  The CIA now decided to bring in Artime, the most amenable member of the Frente, as one of the military commanders. In the end only two other members of the Frente visited the camp—Tony Varona and Antonio Maceo; the CIA successfully discouraged Justo Carrillo as too friendly to the mutineers. When Varona arrived, he cheered the rebels by a speech to the Brigade critical of the intervention by the United States advisers. Then, after a private conference with the senior American officer, Varona capitulated. In a second speech the next day he wholeheartedly endorsed the American choices for the leadership of the Brigade. The CIA was now in complete command.

  This episode had scant impact on Washington. If it was ever reported to the new President, it must have been greatly minimized. The impression given at the White House meetings in March was that life in the Brigade could not be happier.

  In the meantime, the CIA planners in Washington had settled on the town of Trinidad as the point of invasion. Trinidad, they pointed out, had the advantages of a harbor, a defensible beachhead, remoteness from Castro’s main army and easy access to the Escambray Mountains. They proposed a heavy and concentrated amphibious assault, to take place at dawn and to be supported by paratroop drops on the hills behind the town and by simultaneous (though not advance) strikes against the Cuba air force. Once the landing force had established itself on the beaches, it could expect to rally support from the townspeople and overpower the local militia.

  As the expeditionary force enlarged its hold, the CIA men argued, now introducing a new idea, a provisional government could be flown in; and, if the invaders could sustain themselves for ten days or two weeks, this government could receive recognition as the government of Cuba. Once this was done, the new government could request United States aid, though this aid was carefully defined as “logistic” and therefore presumably excluded military intervention. The CIA planners envisaged a continuous build-up and enlargement of the perimeter around the beachhead over a long period, rather like Anzio in 1944. The scheme envisaged victory by attrition rather than by rebellion and no longer assigned a significant immediate role to the internal resistance. As the invaders strengthened their position, this, along with their command of the skies and the acceptance of the new government by other American republics, would produce a steady withdrawal of civil support from Castro and his eventual collapse. And, if by any chance the attack failed, Trinidad was near enough the Escambray for the invaders to disappear into the hills.

  About this time the snow began to fall, and John F. Kennedy took his oath as President of the United States.

  2. KENNEDY AND HIS CUBAN INHERITANCE

  The Eisenhower administration thus bequeathed the new President a force of Cuban exiles under American training in Guatemala, a committee of Cuban politicians under American control in Florida and a plan to employ the exiles in an invasion of their homeland and to install the committee on Cuban soil as the provisional government of a free Cuba.

  On January 22, two days after the inauguration, Allen Dulles and General Lemnitzer exposed the project to leading members of the new administration, among them Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and Robert Kennedy. Speaking for the Joint Chiefs, Lemnitzer tried to renew discussion of alternatives ranging from minimum to maximum United States involvement. Six days later President Kennedy convened his first White House meeting on the plan. He was wary and reserved in his reaction. After listening for a long time, he instructed the Defense Department to take a hard look at CIA’s milit
ary conception and the State Department to prepare a program for the isolation and containment of Cuba through the OAS. In the meantime, CIA was to continue what it had been doing. The ground rule against overt United States participation was still to prevail.

  The Joint Chiefs, after brooding over CIA’s Trinidad plan for a week, pronounced favorably on the chances of initial military success. The JCS evaluation was, however, a peculiar and ambiguous document. At one point it said categorically, in what would seem an implicit rejection of the Anzio model, that ultimate success would depend on either a sizable uprising inside the island or sizable support from outside. Then later, without restating these alternative conditions for victory, the document concluded that the existing, plan, if executed in time, stood a “fair” chance of ultimate success. Even if it did not immediately attain all its goals, the JCS remarked philosophically, it would still contribute to the eventual overthrow of the regime.

  There was plainly a logical gap between the statement that the plan would work if one or another condition were fulfilled and the statement that the plan would work anyway. One cannot know whether this gap resulted from sloppiness in analysis or from a conviction, conscious or unconscious, that once the invasion were launched, either internal uprising or external support would follow, and, if not the first, then the second—that, in short, once the United States government embarked on this enterprise, it could not risk the disaster of failure. Certainly this conviction permeated the thinking of the exiles themselves as well as of the United States officers in Guatemala. Since some, at least, of the Joint Chiefs had always been skeptical of the CIA ground rule, that conviction may well have lurked in the back of their minds too.

 

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