by Tim Weiner
Lansdale was introduced as the new chief of operations at the Special Group (Augmented). “The President explained that General Lansdale had been engaging in a study of possible action in Cuba, acting under the direction of the Attorney General, and he, the President, desired an immediate plan of action which could be submitted to him within two weeks,” McCone recorded in his CIA files. “The Attorney General expressed grave concern over Cuba, the necessity for immediate dynamic action.” McCone told them that the CIA and the rest of the Kennedy administration had been in a state of shock ever since the Bay of Pigs—“and, therefore, were doing very little.”
McCone thought nothing short of a shooting war would knock out Castro. And he believed that the CIA was unfit to run a war, secret or not. He told President Kennedy that the agency could not continue to be seen as “a ‘cloak and dagger’ outfit…designed to overthrow governments, assassinate heads of state, involve itself in political affairs of foreign states.” He reminded the president that the CIA had one fundamental responsibility under law—“to assemble all intelligence” gathered by the United States, and then analyze it, evaluate it, and report it to the White House. The Kennedys agreed, in a written order drafted by McCone and signed by the president, that he would be “the Government’s principal intelligence officer.” His job would be “the proper coordination, correlation, and evaluation of intelligence from all sources.”
McCone also believed he had been hired to shape the foreign policy of the United States for the president. This was not, nor should it have been, the role of the nation’s chief intelligence officer. But though his judgment often proved sounder than that of the Harvard men at the highest levels of the government, he quickly discovered that the Kennedys had a number of novel ideas about how he and the CIA were to serve American interests. On the day President Kennedy swore him in, he found out that he and RFK and the unctuous General Lansdale were in charge of Castro.
“You are now living on the bull’s eye, and I welcome you to that spot,” the president told McCone at his swearing-in.
“OUT OF THE QUESTION”
The president asked McCone from the outset to find a way to pierce the Berlin Wall. The wall had been erected—first barbed wire, then concrete—in August 1961. It could have been an enormous political and propaganda windfall for the West, hard evidence that the exorbitant lies of communism no longer served to keep millions of East German citizens from fleeing. It could have been a golden opportunity for the CIA.
The week that the wall went up, Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to Berlin, where he received a top secret briefing from the CIA’s base chief, Bill Graver. LBJ gazed upon an impressively detailed chart showing all the CIA’s agents in the East.
“I saw this briefing map,” said Haviland Smith, then a rising star at the Berlin base. “If you listened to what Graver said, we had agents in the Karlsruhe compound”—the Soviet intelligence center—“agents in the Polish military mission, the Czech military mission—we had East Berlin absolutely penetrated up to the goddamn eyeballs. However, if you knew what we had, you knew that the penetration of the Polish military mission was the guy who sold newspapers on the corner. And you knew that this big penetration of the Soviet military compound was a Dachermeister—a master roofer, who fixed roofs.”
“Berlin was a sham,” he said. The agency was lying about its achievements to the next president of the United States.
David Murphy, then chief of the CIA’s Eastern Europe division, met with President Kennedy at the White House the week after the wall went up. “The Kennedy administration pushed us very hard to persuade us to devise plans for covert paramilitary action and the fomenting of dissidence” in East Germany, he said, but “operations in East Germany were out of the question.”
The reason finally emerged in a document declassified in June 2006, a devastating damage assessment drawn up by Dave Murphy himself.
On November 6, 1961, the West German chief of counterintelligence, Heinz Felfe, was arrested by his own security police. Felfe had been a hard-core Nazi who had joined the Gehlen organization in 1951, two years after the CIA took charge of it. He had risen rapidly through its ranks and kept rising after it became the official West German intelligence service, the BND, in 1955.
But Felfe had been working for the Soviets all along. He had penetrated the West German service and, through it, the CIA’s station and bases. He was able to manipulate and deceive the CIA’s officers in Germany until they had no idea whether the information they had gathered from behind the iron curtain was true or false.
Felfe could “initiate, direct, or halt any BND operations and later some of CIA’s,” Murphy noted glumly. He had revealed to the East German intelligence service the essential details of every important CIA mission against Moscow from June 1959 to November 1961. These included roughly seventy major covert operations, the identities of more than a hundred CIA officers, and some fifteen thousand secrets.
The agency was all but out of business in Germany and across Eastern Europe. It took a decade to repair the damage.
“THE PRESIDENT WANTS SOME ACTION, RIGHT NOW”
The Berlin Wall—and all else—paled before the Kennedys’ desire to avenge the family honor lost at the Bay of Pigs. The overthrow of Castro was “the top priority in the United States Government,” Bobby Kennedy told McCone on January 19, 1962. “No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.” But the new director warned him that the agency had little real intelligence on which to proceed. “Of the 27 or 28 agents CIA now has in Cuba, only 12 are in communication and these communications are infrequent,” he told the attorney general. Seven of the CIA’s Cubans had been captured four weeks before, after infiltrating the island.
On RFK’s orders, Lansdale drew up a to-do list for the CIA: recruit and deploy the Catholic Church and the Cuban underworld against Castro, fracture the regime from within, sabotage the economy, subvert the secret police, destroy the crops with biological or chemical warfare, and change the regime before the next congressional elections in November 1962.
“Ed had this aura around him,” said Sam Halpern, the new deputy chief of the Cuba desk, an OSS veteran who had known Lansdale for a decade. “Some people believed Ed was a kind of magician. But I’ll tell you what he was. He was basically a con man. A Madison Avenue ‘Man in the Grey Flannel Suit’ con man. You take a look at his proposed plan for getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime. It’s utter nonsense.” The plan boiled down to an empty promise: to overthrow Castro without sending in the marines.
Halpern said to Richard Helms: “This is a political operation in the city of Washington D.C., and has nothing to do with the security of the United States.” He warned that the CIA had no intelligence about Cuba. “We don’t know what is going on,” he told Helms. “We don’t know who is doing what to whom. We haven’t got any idea of their order of battle in terms of political organization and structure. Who hates whom? Who loves whom? We have nothing.” It was the same problem the CIA would face when it confronted Iraq forty years later.
Helms agreed. The plan was a pipe dream.
The Kennedys did not want to hear that. They wanted swift, silent sabotage to overthrow Castro. “Let’s get the hell on with it,” the attorney general barked. “The President wants some action, right now.” Helms saluted smartly and got the hell on with it. He created a new freestanding task force to report to Ed Lansdale and Robert Kennedy. He assembled a team from all over the world, creating the CIA’s largest peacetime intelligence operation to date, with some six hundred CIA officers in and around Miami, almost five thousand CIA contractors, and the third largest navy in the Caribbean, including submarines, patrol boats, coast guard cutters, seaplanes, and Guantánamo Bay for a base. Some “nutty schemes” against Fidel were proposed by the Pentagon and the White House, Helms said. These included blowing up an American ship in Guantánamo Harbor and faking a terrorist attack against an American airliner to justify a new invasion.
The operation needed a code name, and Sam Halpern came up with Mongoose.
“THERE IS NOTHING ON PAPER, OF COURSE”
Helms chose William K. Harvey, the man who had built the Berlin Tunnel, to lead the Mongoose team. Harvey called the project “Task Force W,” after William Walker, the American freebooter who led a private army into Central America and proclaimed himself the emperor of Nicaragua in the 1850s. It was a very odd choice—unless you knew Bill Harvey.
Harvey was introduced to the Kennedys as the CIA’s James Bond. This seems to have mystified JFK, an avid reader of Ian Fleming’s spy romances, for the only thing Bond and Harvey had in common was a taste for martinis. Obese, pop-eyed, always packing a pistol, Harvey drank doubles at lunch and returned to work muttering darkly, cursing the day he met RFK. Bobby Kennedy “wanted fast actions, he wanted fast answers,” said McCone’s executive assistant, Walt Elder. “Harvey did not have fast actions or fast answers.”
But he did have a secret weapon.
The Kennedy White House twice had ordered the CIA to create an assassination squad. Under very close questioning by Senate investigators and a presidential commission in 1975, Richard Bissell said those orders had come from national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and Bundy’s aide Walt Rostow, and that the president’s men “would not have given such encouragement unless they were confident that it would meet with the president’s approval.”
Bissell had handed down the order to Bill Harvey, who did as he was told. He had returned to headquarters in September 1959 after a long tour as chief of the Berlin base to command Division D of the clandestine service. The division’s officers broke into foreign embassies overseas to steal codebooks and ciphers for the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency. They called themselves the Second-Story Men, and their skills ran from locksmithing to larceny and beyond. The division had contacts with criminals in foreign capitals who could be called on for cat burglaries, the kidnapping of embassy couriers, and assorted felonies in the name of American national security.
In February 1962, Harvey created an “executive action” program, code-named Rifle, and retained the services of a foreign agent, a resident of Luxembourg but a man without a country, who worked on contract for Division D. Harvey intended to use him to kill Fidel Castro.
In April 1962, the CIA’s records show, Harvey took a second approach. He met the mobster John Rosselli in New York. He picked up a new batch of poison pills, designed to be dropped into Castro’s tea or coffee, from Dr. Edward Gunn, the chief of the operations division of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services. Then he drove to Miami and delivered them to Rosselli, along with a U-Haul truck filled with weapons.
On May 7, 1962, the attorney general was briefed in full on the Rifle project by the CIA’s general counsel, Lawrence Houston, and the agency’s security chief, Sheffield Edwards. RFK was “mad as hell”—not mad about the assassination plot itself, but about the Mafia’s role in it. He did nothing to stop the CIA from seeking Castro’s death.
Richard Helms, who had taken command of the clandestine service three months before, gave Harvey the go-ahead on Rifle. If the White House wanted a silver bullet, he believed it was the agency’s job to try to find it. He thought it best not to tell McCone, correctly judging that the director would have the strongest religious, legal, and political objections.
I once put the question to Helms personally: Did President Kennedy want Castro dead? “There is nothing on paper, of course,” he said evenly. “But there is certainly no question in my mind that he did.”
Helms thought political assassination in peacetime was a moral aberration. But there were practical considerations as well. “If you become involved in the business of eliminating foreign leaders, and it is considered by governments more frequently than one likes to admit, there is always the question of who comes next,” he observed. “If you kill someone else’s leaders, why shouldn’t they kill yours?”
“A TRUE UNCERTAINTY”
When John McCone took over as director of central intelligence, “CIA was suffering” and “morale was pretty well shattered,” he recounted. “My first problem was to try to rebuild confidence.”
But CIA headquarters was in an uproar six months into his reign. McCone started firing hundreds of clandestine service officers—aiming first to purge the “accident-prone,” the “wife-beaters,” and the “alcohol-addicted,” noted his deputy director, General Marshall S. Carter. The dismissals, the aftershocks from the Bay of Pigs, and the almost daily beatings from the White House over Cuba were creating “a true uncertainty as to what the future of the Agency may be,” McCone’s executive director, Lyman Kirkpatrick, told him in a July 26, 1962, memorandum. He suggested that perhaps “something should be done immediately to restore morale in the Agency.”
Helms determined that the only cure was a return to the basics of espionage. With some misgivings, he took his best men out of the paralyzed Soviet and Eastern Europe divisions and turned them on Castro’s Cuba. He had a handful of officers under his command in Florida who had learned how to run agents and couriers in and out of communist-controlled zones such as East Berlin. The CIA set up a debriefing center in Opa-Locka to interview thousands of people who had left Cuba on commercial airliners and private boats. The center interrogated some 1,300 Cuban refugees; they provided the agency with political, military, and economic intelligence along with documents and the detritus of everyday life—clothes, coins, cigarettes—to help disguise agents infiltrating the island. The Miami station claimed to have forty-five men running information out of Cuba in the summer of 1962. Some arrived in Florida for a ten-day CIA crash course and returned by speedboat under cover of night. The small spy network they built inside Cuba was the sole achievement of the $50 million Mongoose operation.
Bobby Kennedy kept calling in vain for commandos to blow up Cuba’s power plants, factories, and sugar mills in secret. “Can CIA actually hope to generate such strikes?” Lansdale asked Harvey. “Why is this now called a possibility?” Harvey replied that it would take two more years and another $100 million to create a force capable of overthrowing Castro.
The CIA was so busy carrying out covert action that it failed to see a threat to the national survival of the United States gathering in Cuba.
18. “WE HAD ALSO
FOOLED OURSELVES”
On Monday, July 30, 1962, John F. Kennedy walked into the Oval Office and switched on the brand-new state-of-the-art taping system he had ordered installed over the weekend. The very first conversation he recorded was a plot to subvert the government of Brazil and oust its president, Joao Goulart.
Kennedy and his ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, discussed spending $8 million to swing the next elections and to prepare the ground for a military coup against Goulart—“to push him out, if necessary,” Ambassador Gordon told the president. The CIA station in Brazil would “make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action whatsoever if it’s clear that the reason for the military action is—”
“—against the Left,” the president said. He would not let Brazil or any other nation in the Western Hemisphere become a second Cuba.
The money started flowing from the CIA into the political life of Brazil. One conduit was the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an arm of the AFL-CIO (British diplomats in the know called it the AFL-CIA). Another was the Institute for Social Research Studies, a newly formed organization of business and civic leaders in Brazil. The recipients were politicians and military officers who opposed President Goulart and who kept in close contact with the new American military attaché in Brazil—Vernon Walters, a future deputy director of central intelligence. The return on these investments would be paid in less than two years.
The White House tapes, transcribed in 2001, recorded a daily drumbeat of covert-action plans taking shape in the Oval Office.
On August 8, McCone met the president at the White House to discuss
the wisdom of dropping hundreds of Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Mao’s China. The president had approved the paramilitary operation. McCone was dubious. Mao had surface-to-air missiles, and the last U-2 flight that the CIA had sent over the Chinese mainland, McCone told the president, had been spotted and tracked by Chinese communist radars twelve minutes after takeoff from Taiwan. “That’s humorous,” said Kennedy’s national-security aide, Michael Forrestal, the son of the late defense secretary. “We’ll give the President another U-2 disaster.” And what would the cover story be this time? the president joked. Everyone laughed. One month after this meeting, Mao’s forces shot down a U-2 over China.
On August 9, Richard Helms went to the White House to discuss the chances for overthrowing Haiti, thirty miles from Cuba. Haiti’s dictator, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, had been stealing American economic aid and using American military support to shore up his corrupt regime. The president had authorized a coup. The CIA had given weapons to dissidents who hoped to topple the government by any means necessary. The question of whether Duvalier would be killed had been weighed. McCone had given the go-ahead.
But the CIA was bogged down. “I might say, Mr. President, that the plotting doesn’t seem to be very successful,” Helms said. He warned that Duvalier’s “goon squads” were “a repressive force of no mean substance,” which “makes plotting a dangerous business.” The CIA’s best recruited agent, a former chief of the Haitian coast guard, lacked the will or the wherewithal to carry out the coup. Helms saw scant hope for success. “Another coup really doesn’t do any good if you don’t have anybody to work with,” the president told Helms.