by Tim Weiner
Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s clubfooted master chemist, brought an airline carry-on bag containing vials of lethal toxins to the Congo and handed it to the station chief. It held a hypodermic syringe to inject the lethal drops into food, drink, or a tube of toothpaste. It was Devlin’s job to deliver death to Lumumba. The two men held a nervous conversation in Devlin’s apartment on or about the night of September 10. “I asked on whose orders these instructions were issued,” Devlin said under oath in secret testimony declassified in 1998. The answer was “the President.”
Devlin testified that he locked the toxins in his office safe and agonized over what to do. He remembered thinking: I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave that lying around. In time, he took the poison vials out to the banks of the Congo River and buried them. He said he was ashamed of the order to kill Lumumba. He knew there were other means at the CIA’s disposal.
The agency had already selected the Congo’s next leader: Joseph Mobutu, “the only man in the Congo able to act with firmness,” as Dulles told the president at the NSC meeting on September 21. The CIA delivered $250,000 to him in early October, followed by shipments of arms and ammunition in November. Mobutu captured Lumumba and, in Devlin’s words, delivered him into the hands of a “sworn enemy.” The CIA base in Elizabethville, deep in the heart of the Congo, reported that “a Belgian officer of Flemish origin executed Lumumba with a burst of submachine gun fire” two nights before the next president of the United States took office. With the unwavering support of the CIA, Mobutu finally gained full control of the Congo after a five-year power struggle. He was the agency’s favorite ally in Africa and the clearinghouse for American covert action throughout the continent during the cold war. He ruled for three decades as one of the world’s most brutal and corrupt dictators, stealing billions of dollars in revenues from the nation’s enormous deposits of diamonds, minerals, and strategic metals, slaughtering multitudes to preserve his power.
“AN ABSOLUTELY UNTENABLE POSITION”
As the 1960 election drew nearer, it was clear to Vice President Nixon that the CIA was far from ready to attack Cuba. At the end of September, Nixon nervously instructed the task force: “Don’t do anything now; wait until after the elections.” The delay gave Fidel Castro a crucial edge. His spies told him an American-backed invasion might be imminent, and he built up his military and intelligence forces, cracking down hard on the political dissidents whom the CIA hoped would serve as shock troops for the coup. The internal resistance against Castro began to die that summer, though the CIA never paid much heed to what was actually happening on the island. Tracy Barnes privately commissioned a public-opinion poll in Cuba—and it showed that people overwhelmingly supported Castro. Disliking the results, he discarded them.
The agency’s effort to drop arms to rebels on the island was a fiasco. On September 28, a pallet of machine guns, rifles, and Colt .45s for a hundred fighters floated down to Cuba from a CIA plane flying out of Guatemala. The drop missed its target by seven miles. Castro’s forces seized the arms, captured the Cuban CIA agent set to receive them, and shot him. The pilot got lost on his way back and landed in southern Mexico, where the local police seized the plane. In all, thirty such missions were flown; at most three succeeded.
By early October, the CIA realized that it knew next to nothing about the anti-Castro forces inside Cuba. “We had no confidence that they weren’t penetrated” by Castro’s spies, Jake Esterline said. He now was certain that Castro could not be overthrown by subtle subversion.
“We had made a major effort at infiltration and resupply, and those efforts had been unsuccessful,” Bissell recalled. He decided that “what was needed was a shock action”—a full-scale invasion.
The CIA had neither presidential approval nor the troops needed to carry out that mission. The five hundred men undergoing training in Guatemala were “a preposterously inadequate number,” Bissell told Esterline. Both men realized that only a far larger force could succeed against Castro, who had a sixty-thousand-man army with tanks and artillery, along with an increasingly cruel and efficient internal-security service.
Bissell had the Mafia on one phone line, the White House on another. The presidential election was looming. Sometime during the first week of November 1960, the core concept of the Cuban operation cracked under the pressure. Esterline pronounced the plan unworkable, and Bissell knew he was right. But he told no one. In the months and weeks and days before the invasion, he retreated into deception.
“He was lying down and he was lying up,” Jake Esterline said—down to the CIA’s Cuba task force, up to the president and the new president-elect.
John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in November by fewer than 120,000 votes. Some Republicans thought the election was stolen in the political precincts of Chicago. Others pointed at vote buying in West Virginia. Richard Nixon blamed the CIA. He was convinced, wrongly, that “Georgetown liberals” like Dulles and Bissell had secretly aided Kennedy with inside information on Cuba before a crucial televised presidential debate.
President-elect Kennedy immediately announced the re-appointments of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles. That decision came from his father, and it was made for political and personal protection. Hoover knew some of the deeper secrets in the Kennedy family—including the president-elect’s sexual dalliances during World War II with a suspected Nazi spy—and he had shared that knowledge with Dulles. Kennedy knew all this because his father, a former member of Eisenhower’s board of foreign intelligence consultants, had told him on good authority.
On November 18, the president-elect met Dulles and Bissell at his father’s retreat in Palm Beach, Florida. Three days before, Bissell had received a conclusive report from Esterline on the Cuban operation. “Our original concept is now seen to be unachievable in the face of the controls Castro has instituted,” Esterline said. “There will not be the internal unrest earlier believed possible, nor will the defenses permit the type of strike first planned. Our second concept (1,500–3,000 man force to secure a beach with airstrip) is now also seen as unachievable, except as a joint Agency/DOD action.”
In other words, to overthrow Castro, the United States would have to send in the marines.
“I sat there in my office at CIA,” Esterline recounted, “and I said, ‘Goddamn it, I hope Bissell has enough guts to tell John Kennedy what the facts are.’” But Bissell never breathed a word. The unachievable plan became a can-do mission.
The Palm Beach briefing placed the CIA leaders in “an absolutely untenable position,” Bissell told an agency historian. Their notes for the meeting show that they had intended to discuss their past triumphs—particularly Guatemala—and a multitude of covert operations under way in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Central and South America, and Asia. But they did not. Before the meeting, President Eisenhower told them to hew to “a narrow agenda” they interpreted that as a ban on discussing anything that had transpired in the meetings of the National Security Council. As a result, crucial information about the CIA’s covert operations was lost in transition from one president to another.
Eisenhower had never approved an invasion of Cuba. But Kennedy did not know that. What he knew was what Dulles and Bissell told him.
“AN EIGHT-YEAR DEFEAT”
For eight years, Allen Dulles had fended off all efforts by outsiders to change the CIA. He had a reputation to protect—the agency’s and his own. Denying everything, admitting nothing, he had hidden the truth to conceal the failures of his covert operations.
From at least 1957 onward, he had shunned voices of reason and moderation, ignored the increasingly urgent recommendations of the president’s intelligence consultants, brushed aside reports by his own inspector general, treated his underlings with contempt. “He was, by that time, a tired old man,” whose professional conduct “could be, and usually was, trying in the extreme,” said Dick Lehman, one of the best analysts the agency ever had. “His treatment of us reflected his sense of values. He was wr
ong, of course, but we had to live with it.”
In his last days in office, President Eisenhower came to understand that he did not have a spy service worthy of the name. He came to that conclusion after reading through a thick stack of reports he had commissioned in the hope of changing the CIA.
The first, on December 15, 1960, was the work of the Joint Study Group, which he had created after the U-2 shootdown to survey the landscape of American intelligence. It was a terrifying picture of drift and disarray. It said Dulles never had addressed the problem of a surprise attack by the Soviets. He had never coordinated military intelligence and civilian analysis. He had never created the capability to provide warning in a crisis. He had spent eight years mounting covert operations instead of mastering American intelligence.
Then, on January 5, 1961, the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities issued its final recommendations. It called for “a total reassessment” of covert action: “We are unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk of the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved.” It warned that “CIA’s concentration on political, psychological and related covert action activities have tended to distract substantially from the execution of its primary intelligence-gathering mission.”
The board urged the president to consider the “complete separation” of the director of central intelligence from the CIA. It said Dulles was incapable of running the agency while carrying out his duties to coordinate American intelligence—the code making and code breaking of the National Security Agency; the dawning capabilities of spy satellites and space photoreconnaissance; the endless squabbles of the army, the navy, and the air force.
“I reminded the President that many times he had addressed himself to this general problem,” his national-security aide, Gordon Gray, wrote after reviewing the report with Eisenhower. I know, Ike replied. I’ve tried. I cannot change Allen Dulles.
“A great deal has been accomplished,” Dulles insisted to the president at the final gatherings of Eisenhower’s National Security Council. Everything is well in hand, he said. I have fixed the clandestine service. American intelligence has never been more agile and adept. Coordination and cooperation are better than they ever have been. The proposals of the president’s intelligence board were preposterous, he said, they were madness, they were illegal. I am responsible under the law for intelligence coordination, he reminded the president. I cannot delegate that responsibility. Without my leadership, he said, American intelligence would be “a body floating in thin air.”
At the last, Dwight Eisenhower exploded in anger and frustration. “The structure of our intelligence organization is faulty,” he told Dulles. It makes no sense, it has to be reorganized, and we should have done it long ago. Nothing had changed since Pearl Harbor. “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this,” said the president of the United States. He said he would “leave a legacy of ashes” to his successor.
PART
THREE
Lost Causes
The CIA Under Kennedy and Johnson
1961 to 1968
17. “NOBODY KNEW
WHAT TO DO”
The legacy was handed down on the morning of January 19, 1961, when the old general and the young senator met alone in the Oval Office. With a sense of foreboding, Eisenhower gave Kennedy a glance at the stratagems of national security: nuclear weapons and covert operations.
The two men emerged and met in the Cabinet Room with the old and new secretaries of state, defense, and the treasury. “Senator Kennedy asked the President’s judgment as to the United States supporting the guerrilla operations in Cuba, even if this support involves the United States publicly,” a note taker recorded that morning. “The President replied Yes as we cannot let the present government there go on…. The President also advised that the situation would be helped if we could handle the Dominican Republic at the same time.” Eisenhower’s idea that one Caribbean coup could counterbalance another was an equation no one in Washington had worked out.
As Kennedy arose the next morning for his swearing-in, the corrupt right-wing leader of the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, had been in power for thirty years. Support from the U.S. government and the American business community had helped keep him in office. He ruled by force, fraud, and fear; he took pleasure in hanging his enemies from meat hooks. “He had his torture chambers, he had his political assassinations,” said Consul General Henry Dearborn, the ranking American diplomat in the Dominican Republic at the start of 1961. “But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us.” But Trujillo had become intolerable, Dearborn said. “About the time I got there his iniquities had gotten so bad that there was a lot of pressure from various political groups, civil rights groups and others, not only in the U.S., but throughout the hemisphere, that something just had to be done about this man.”
Dearborn was left in charge of the American embassy in Santo Domingo after the United States severed diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic in August 1960. All but a few of the American diplomats and spies left the island. But Richard Bissell had asked Dearborn to stay on and serve as the acting CIA station chief. The consul general agreed.
On January 19, 1961, Dearborn was advised that a shipment of small arms was on its way to a group of Dominican conspirators who aimed to kill Trujillo. The Special Group, Allen Dulles presiding, had made the decision one week before. Dearborn requested the agency’s approval to arm the Dominicans with three carbine rifles left behind at the embassy by navy personnel. Bissell’s covert-action deputy, Tracy Barnes, gave the green light. The CIA then dispatched three .38-caliber pistols to the Dominicans. Bissell authorized a second shipment of four machine guns and 240 rounds of ammunition. The machine guns remained at the American consulate in Santo Domingo after members of the new administration questioned what the world reaction might be if it were known that the United States was delivering murder weapons via diplomatic pouch.
Dearborn received a cable, personally approved by President Kennedy, which he read to say: “We don’t care if the Dominicans assassinate Trujillo, that is all right. But we don’t want anything to pin this on us.” Nothing ever did. When Trujillo’s killers shot him two weeks later, the smoking gun might or might not have been the agency’s. There were no fingerprints. But the assassination was as close as the CIA had ever come to carrying out a murder at the command of the White House.
The attorney general of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, jotted down some notes after he learned of the assassination. “The great problem now,” he wrote, “is that we don’t know what to do.”
“I WAS ASHAMED OF MY COUNTRY”
As the CIA catapulted toward the invasion of Cuba, “the thing started to steamroller and get out of control,” said Jake Esterline. Bissell was the driving force. He forged on, refusing to acknowledge that the CIA could not topple Castro, blinding himself to the fact that the secrecy of the operation had been blown long ago.
On March 11, Bissell went to the White House with four separate plots on paper. None satisfied President Kennedy. He gave the chief of the clandestine service three days to come up with something better. Bissell’s brainstorm was his choice of a new landing zone—three broad beaches at the Bay of Pigs. The site satisfied a new political requirement from the administration: the Cuban invaders had to capture an airstrip upon landing, to establish a political beachhead for a new Cuban government.
Bissell assured the president that this operation would succeed. The worst that could happen was that the CIA’s rebels would confront Castro’s forces on the beaches and march on into the mountains. But the terrain at the Bay of Pigs was an impassible tangle of mangrove roots and mud. No one in Washington knew that. The crude survey maps in the CIA’s possession suggesting that the swampland
would serve as guerrilla country had been drawn in 1895.
The following week, the CIA’s Mafia contacts took a swipe at killing Castro. They gave poison pills and thousands of dollars to one of the CIA’s most prominent Cubans, Tony Varona. (Described by Esterline as “a scoundrel, a cheat, and a thief,” Varona later met President Kennedy at the White House.) Varona managed to hand off the vial of poison to a restaurant worker in Havana, who was to slip it into Castro’s ice cream cone. Cuban intelligence officers later found the vial in an icebox, frozen to the coils.
By spring, the president still had not approved a plan of attack. He did not understand how the invasion would work. On Wednesday, April 5, he met again with Dulles and Bissell, but could not make sense of their strategy. On Thursday, April 6, he asked them if their planned bombing of Castro’s small air force would eliminate the invaders’ element of surprise. No one had an answer.