by Gus Russo
The first item for Bill Harvey and his staff was the choice of a code name, or crypto, for the new program of sabotage. The CIA’s longtime crypto reference officer recommended the diagraph MO, which was the agency’s code for Thailand—in hopes of briefly confusing the unauthorized who learned the code name. A list of words beginning with “MO” was submitted to Cuba Desk officer Sam Halpern, who chose Mongoose.32 (The apt mongoose/cobra analogy was an unintended coincidence.)
Although CIA budgets are still classified, insiders all agree that Operation Mongoose received a bloated allocation, with estimates ranging from $50 million to $150 million per year (over $500 million in 1998 dollars.) Mongoose was headquartered in Miami and the CIA station there was given the code-named acronym JM/WAVE. It employed over 700 Americans and over three thousand Cubans, and was overseen by former Saigon Station Chief Theodore Shackley. Shackley, Bill Harvey’s protegé in Berlin, had also served as the head of the Western Hemisphere Division of Clandestine Services.33
Mongoose’s strategy of sabotage consisted of contaminating Cuban sugar exports, inciting guerrilla warfare, counterfeiting Cuban currency, conducting military raids against refineries and copper mines, disseminating anti-Castro propaganda, and carrying on espionage.
Although the CIA’s charter forbids domestic intelligence operations, one would never know it by the Mongoose logistics. Ray Cline, the Deputy Director of Intelligence, remembers Mongoose as “a real anomaly. It was run as if it were in a foreign country, yet most of our agents were in the state of Florida. People just overlooked the fact that it was a domestic operation.”34 “We ran 2,123 missions out of the Florida CIA station,” CIA agent Grayston Lynch remembered.35
Working the Cuba Desk at Langley in Virginia, Sam Halpern wasn’t certain the project was legal, and sought advice from CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston. Houston noted that Congress had provided the funds, and added, “If the President says it’s okay, and the Attorney General says it’s okay, then it’s okay.”36
The Cuba Project had as its sole purpose the removal from office of Castro, now known by his CIA cryptonym AM/THUG. The White House contingent met daily, often for six and seven hours at a stretch. Its scope and intensity astounded even seasoned staffers.
From Kennedy With Love
Just prior to the Bay of Pigs, the White House released a list of JFK’s favorite books. Number nine was Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventure From Russia With Love, a piece of fiction chock full of assassinations and womanizing. That Kennedy took such a hankering to Fleming’s work received wide coverage in the press. As it turned out, Kennedy’s passion for Fleming was shared by his friend and CIA director, Allen Dulles, who wrote that he was first recommended to the Fleming books in 1957 by Jackie Kennedy. “She gave me From Russia With Love,” Dulles later recounted. From then on “President Kennedy and I often talked about James Bond.”37 What was not as well reported was that the previous spring Fleming had been Senator Kennedy’s houseguest at his Georgetown home (another guest was CIA agent and close friend of Allen Dulles, John Bross).
According to Fleming biographer John Pearson, while coffee was being served, Kennedy asked Fleming what James Bond would do if his superior “M” asked him to get rid of Castro. Fleming replied that the U.S. was making too much fuss over the dictator, thereby inflating his importance in the eyes of his followers and the rest of the world. He then proceeded to regale the dinner guests with his proposals for “ridiculing” the Cuban leader. Claiming that there were only three things that mattered to Cubans—money, religion, and sex—Fleming suggested the following three-pronged approach:
The United States should send planes to scatter Cuban money over Havana, accompanying it with leaflets showing that it came with the compliments of the United States.
Using the Guantanamo base, the United States should conjure some religious manifestation in the sky (a cross of sorts), which would induce the Cubans to look constantly skyward.
The United States should send planes over Cuba dropping pamphlets, “compliments of the Soviet Union,” stating that the American A-Bomb tests had poisoned the atmosphere over the island; that radioactivity is held longest in beards; and that radioactivity makes men impotent. Consequently, the Cubans should shave off their beards, and, as the logic follows, without bearded Cubans, the revolution would collapse.38
Ian Fleming died in 1964 and therefore did not live to read the report of the Church Committee in 1975, or the 1967 CIA “Inspector General’s Report” released in 1993. He would have been proud. All of his proposals were acted on by the CIA at the urging of the Kennedy’s Mongoose coordinator, General Edward Lansdale. As we will see, the CIA attempted to make Castro’s beard fall out, considered staging a “religious event” off the coast using Guantanamo-based submarines, and was involved in a plot to flood Cuba with counterfeit currency. Allen Dulles wrote that after he was turned on to the Bond books by the Kennedys, he met and became great friends with Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. “I kept in constant touch with him,” Dulles wrote after Fleming’s death. “I was always interested in the novel and secret ‘gadgetry’ Fleming described from time to time. . . They did get one to thinking and exploring, and that was worthwhile because sometimes you came up with other ideas that did work.”39
The most unsavory aspect of the administration’s anti-Castro plotting, its use of the Mafia, also bore the Fleming stamp—but may in fact have been a case of Kennedy inspiring Fleming. It recalls what many consider Judy Campbell’s most controversial allegation: while she was John Kennedy’s lover, she passed Castro assassination plans from Kennedy to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. One year after Campbell says she performed this function, Fleming published On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), In that novel, James Bond falls in love with the daughter of an organized crime syndicate leader. Bond proceeds to use his lover as a go-between with her father, and together they attempt to kill the sinister leader of an international terrorist organization.
At one Mongoose meeting, the President indicated to Lansdale that the decorated warrior seemed to embody the essence of JFK’s favorite fictional hero, James Bond. Lansdale disagreed and informed Kennedy that America’s real James Bond was the man coordinating the Cuba Project at CIA, the man who had been in charge of ZR/RIFLE, William Harvey. Soon, President Kennedy would meet the legendary Harvey face-to-face. On that occasion, the President was said to remark, “So you’re our James Bond.”40 Although initial meetings with Harvey went well, it soon became apparent that the Kennedys and the old pro from CIA were at strategic loggerheads.
Bill Harvey was assigned to coordinate Mongoose from the CIA headquarters in Langley. He was rightly perceived as a single-minded man who got things done. Along with Lansdale, his task was to make Mongoose a success within a single year. But Harvey and Lansdale disagreed on the strategy needed to incite a popular uprising in Cuba. Harvey hoped to use professional tradecraft, to create an infrastructure of agents, and to put it in place on the island. This took time, and the Kennedys let Lansdale know that they were in a rush. “To the White House, it was just pressing buttons,” recalled Harvey’s assistant Sam Halpern. “They didn’t understand how long it took. Spies don’t grow on trees.”41
“We want boom and bang on the island,” Lansdale countered.42 Harvey’s handwritten notes of an early meeting with Robert Kennedy underscore the determination involved: “Top priority in U.S. Gov’t. . . All else is secondary. . . Nothing to stand in way of getting this done.”43
The differing strategies of the White House and Harvey were not the only problems confronting the Cuba Project. In fact, this difficulty was dwarfed by another obstacle: practically everyone remaining in Cuba supported Fidel, and gave no indication that they would rise up against him, even if incited. Harvey had managed to place some agents in Havana, and their reports were discouraging. No support networks existed on the island for the Kennedy-backed exiles, as the exiles had promised. A popular, CIA-sponsored uprising was a fantasy. But no one
in the White House, it appeared, was reading the intelligence reports. Consequently, Mongoose proceeded full speed ahead.
Robert F. Kennedy—“Mr. Mongoose”44
“Bobby Kennedy could sack a town and enjoy it.”
—General Maxwell Taylor, JFK’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after watching RFK berate the Special Group45
“Bobby went bonkers on counterinsurgency. We [at CIA] were up to our bloody eyeballs in counterinsurgency. Those of us at the ‘troop’ level did not like what was going on. We objected.”
—Sam Halpern, CIA Executive at the Cuba Desk46
After the Bay of Pigs, Colonel Jack Hawkins wrote an “after-action” report. “It concluded,” Hawkins later explained, “that Castro is too strong to be overthrown by para-military action, and that no further action should be taken. If Bobby Kennedy even read my report, he must have thought, ‘Hawkins is a fool.’”47 The Kennedy administration plowed ahead.
Key players in the Kennedy administration were well aware that Bobby Kennedy maintained a “hands-on” approach to all things Cuban, especially those matters involving his covert counterinsurgent footsoldiers. George Ball, for example, then-Undersecretary of State, recalled, “Bobby was always for that kind of thing. He was fascinated by all that covert stuff, counterinsurgency, and all the garbage that went with it.”48
“Counterinsurgency,” as epitomized by Operation Mongoose, had become the buzzword of the day, and Bobby reveled in it. Kennedy aide Harris Wofford noted that RFK’s interest was far more than intellectual. “He would invite Green Berets for weekends at Hyannis Port and watch them demonstrate their prowess swinging from trees and climbing over barricades.”49 Thomas Parrott, a CIA officer assigned as Secretary to Bobby Kennedy’s Special Group, recently complained, “Everybody in the Army—even lieutenants in the finance corps—had to have a course in counterintelligence. We in the CIA would refer to Lansdale as the FM—for Field Marshall.”50 As Bobby himself recalled, “Yes, I was involved in it all the time—Cuba. I was trying to do things, mostly trying to get them to come up with some ideas about things to be done.”51
Bobby Kennedy even made frequent clandestine appearances at the CIA base in Florida. “In 1962 and 1963, RFK was running the anti-Castro operation in Florida by himself. I saw him down here myself many times. Everybody knew it. Everybody knew it!” said CIA contractor/exile organizer/Watergate burglar, Frank Sturgis.52 As will be seen, Army Captain Bradley Ayers, on loan to JM/WAVE as an instructor, saw the Attorney General at the Florida base twice in 1963, when he was inspecting the Everglades training camps. He had come by private helicopter from the family compound in West Palm Beach.53 While at the secret base, Bobby worked the phone incessantly, calling Harvey regularly to play cheerleader. Grayston Lynch remembers the RFK phone calls to the CIA’s safe houses in Florida. “I’d come into the safe house in the morning,” says Lynch, “and they would say, ‘Bobby says this, and Bobby says that.’”54
CIA photo analyst Dino Brugioni recently recalled Bobby’s regular presence at CIA headquarters in Langley. At the time, Brugioni’s office was using U-2 photos to monitor the damage inflicted by the Mongoose troops. “Bobby used to stop by after going home for lunch [in nearby McLean], or on his way home from work late in the afternoon,” says Brugioni. “He wanted to be kept up on how the sabotage was going. We provided a room for him where he could call the White House.”
Brugioni remembered that Bobby was especially keen on blowing up the island’s oil refineries.55 “It was obvious he was the eyes and ears of his brother. He was like a prizefighter, pumped up for action.” Brugioni later wrote, “Frequently, [Bobby] would chat with [CIA Director] Mr. McCone, but more often he would want to discuss the latest covert operations against Cuba with officers in the Directorate of Plans.”56 When Bobby couldn’t make it to Langley, CIA officers brought surveillance photos over to his D.C. office.
CHAPTER THREE
MURDER AND MISSILES
Hashshasin—The “hashish-users.” A fanatical Moslem sect that flourished in Persia over a thousand years ago and who considered murder of their enemies a sacred duty; the origin of the modern word, assassin.
When the Kennedy administration took office in January 1961, it inherited not just the Bay of Pigs operation, but the programs of assassination directed against several foreign leaders, including Castro. Insiders wondered how Kennedy’s policy-making would affect the anti-Castro mayhem instituted by Eisenhower and Nixon. Incredibly, due to the effects of the Bay of Pigs fiasco on the vaunted Kennedy pride, the new administration upped the ante to dramatic, and tragic, heights. Whereas the previous administration had failed in all its attempts to do away with Lumumba (Congo), Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Diem (Vietnam) and Castro (Cuba), the Kennedys seemed determined to claim the title of first American administration to successfully murder a foreign leader. This was accomplished four months after Kennedy’s inauguration, when Trujillo was murdered. Two and a half years later, the Diem brothers were killed. But it was Castro’s head that was most coveted.1
Close friend Senator George Smathers encountered a distraught John Kennedy soon after the Bay of Pigs. Recalling what he had told Smathers prior to the invasion, Kennedy again brought up a sensitive secret. Smathers remembered Kennedy saying that he “had been given to believe by the CIA that Castro would be dead before the attack went in. Someone was supposed to knock him off.”2 Eight months later, just after his retirement, CIA Director Allen Dulles admitted to a national television audience, “We were not looking for a spontaneous uprising, but for other developments.”3 The CIA’s Bay of Pigs planner Richard Bissell was less discreet in 1984, when he stated, “There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing. Very few, however, knew of this plan.”4
Three decades later, details are beginning to emerge about what Dulles termed “other developments.”
The Pre-Invasion (Phase One) Castro Assassination Attempts
As has been stated, even before John F. Kennedy made it to the White House, there were plans for a Castro assassination. The pre-Kennedy phase of the operation began when the CIA’s Western Hemisphere chief, J.C. King, wrote an internal memo suggesting the “elimination” of Fidel Castro. King’s daughter Eloise recently recalled the period and her father’s frame of mind. “He felt very strongly about this country. If he honestly felt it would help this country, I believe he would have done it.” Eloise recalls that her father was caught up in the Cold War mindset of the times, much like the Kennedys.5 Another daughter, Marguerita King, adds, “It also stems from the great friendships he developed with the Cuban exiles living in Miami.”6 Soon, a handwritten note appeared indicating that both CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, the director of Covert Operations, approved King’s recommendations (including assassination).7 (Dulles and King were very close friends. Dulles was even the godfather of one of King’s daughters.) Bissell placed his subordinate, Sheffield Edwards, in charge. This pre-Bay of Pigs period came to be known as Phase One of the assassination plots. These efforts were clearly designed to provide the coup de grace for the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion.
Edwards’ plan was to utilize members of organized crime to eliminate Castro. It was a fact known to all that the U.S. mob had been reaping vast sums from the Cuban casinos it controlled under the previous regime, and the gangsters badly wanted to return to Havana. Edwards surmised that there should be an extensive Mafia network already in place on the island, and that they had murderers at their disposal, so the mob seemed an obvious choice. “I learned of the Mafia plots early on,” says CIA planner for the Bay of Pigs, Jake Esterline. “I often wished I hadn’t. I controlled the purse strings and had to sign off on it, in this case, without being told what the money was to be used for. I told J.C. King that I refused to O.K. it.” The next day, Esterline was given a detailed briefing by [CIA Director] Allen Dulles. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” says Esterline. “Dulles told me, ‘It’s alright. This is mo
ney approved by the President.’”8
The first CIA-mob liaisons have gone largely unreported. In the summer of 1960, Charles Siragusa, Washington-based deputy Director of the Bureau of Narcotics (and the bureau’s liaison with the CIA), was approached by a CIA friend, who said, “We are forming an assassination squad. . . There’s some foreign leaders we’d like dead.” Siragusa knew that one such leader had to be Castro.9 An unnamed middleman, it was later learned, was used to enlist a number of mobsters, including Santos Trafficante. It now appears that that mobster middleman—Norman Rothman—was the partner of Meyer Lansky, and had links to Richard Nixon.10
Before Castro’s takeover, Rothman, together with mob partners Meyer Lansky and Gabriel and Sam Mannarino, owned the Batista-era Sans Souci Casino in Havana, where Rothman was known to share his profits (“the skim”) with Batista and his family. After the revolution, Rothman, like many others, fled to Miami. Rothman, however, was one of the few with the moxie to return to Havana and attempt to enlist Castro’s bodyguards in an assassination attempt against the new dictator. Rothman was apparently the “go-between” for the CIA, sources have revealed. “Rothman was in touch with several CIA agents,” a former CIA officer recalls. “They had many meetings concerning assassination plots against Castro.” According to this agent, Rothman tried to enlist fellow mobsters Santos Trafficante of Tampa, the Mannarinos of Pittsburgh, Sal Granello and Charles Tourine of New York, and Johnny Rosselli of Las Vegas.11
According to Time magazine, the CIA obtained mobsters’ aid by promising that they would be allowed to recover the booty left behind if they would assist the Agency in recruiting “their old contacts on the island to set up a small network of spies.” The CIA specifically wanted them “to pinpoint the roads that Castro might use,” so that they would be in the best position possible to kill him.12