by Tim Weiner
On August 10, John McCone, Robert Kennedy, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met in Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s ornate conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department. The subject was Cuba. McCone remembered “a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime,” including Castro and his brother Raul, the Cuban defense minister, who had just returned from a weapons-buying trip to Moscow. He found the idea abhorrent. The director saw a greater danger ahead. He predicted that the Soviet Union was going to give Castro nuclear weapons—medium-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States. He had been worrying about that possibility for more than four months. He had no intelligence, nothing to go on save gut instinct.
McCone was the only one who saw the threat clearly. “If I were Khrushchev,” he said, “I’d put offensive missiles in Cuba. Then I’d bang my shoe on the desk and say to the United States, ‘How do you like looking down the end of a gun barrel for a change? Now, let’s talk about Berlin and any other subject that I choose.’” No one seems to have believed him. “The experts unanimously and adamantly agreed that this was beyond the realm of possibility,” notes an agency history of McCone’s years. “He stood absolutely alone.”
There was a growing skepticism about the agency’s ability to predict the Soviets’ behavior. Its analysts had been consistently wrong for a decade. “The CIA would come in and paint the most scary picture possible about what the Soviets would do to us—we were going to be second-rate; the Soviets were going to be Number One,” said former president Gerald R. Ford, who in 1962 sat on the cloistered House subcommittee that provided the CIA’s secret budget. “They had charts on the wall, they had figures, and their conclusion was that in ten years, the United States would be behind the Soviet Union in military capability, in economic growth,” Ford said. “It was a scary presentation. The facts are they were 180 degrees wrong. These were the best people we had, the CIA’s so-called experts.”
“THE MOST DANGEROUS AREA IN THE WORLD”
On August 15, McCone returned to the White House to discuss how best to overthrow Cheddi Jagan, the prime minister of British Guiana, a wretched colony in the Caribbean mudflats of South America.
Jagan, an American-educated dentist married to a Marxist from Chicago named Janet Rosenberg, was descended from colonial plantation workers. He was first elected back in 1953. Shortly thereafter, Winston Churchill suspended the colonial constitution, ordered the government dissolved, and threw the Jagans in jail. They were freed after the British restored constitutional government. Jagan was twice re-elected, and he had visited the Oval Office in October 1961.
“I went to see President Kennedy to seek the help of the United States, and to seek his support for our independence from the British,” Jagan remembered. “He was very charming and jovial. Now, the United States feared that I would give Guyana to the Russians. I said, ‘If this is your fear, fear not.’ We will not have a Soviet base.”
John F. Kennedy publicly proclaimed—in a November 1961 interview with Khrushchev’s son-in-law, the editor of Izvestia—that “the United States supports the idea that every people shall have the right to make a free choice as to the kind of government they want.” Cheddi Jagan might be “a Marxist,” he said, “but the United States doesn’t object, because that choice was made by an honest election, which he won.”
But Kennedy decided to use the CIA to depose him. Not long after Jagan left the White House, the cold war heated up in Georgetown, his capital. Previously unheard-of radio stations went on the air. Civil servants walked out. Riots took the lives of more than a hundred people. The labor unions revolted after taking advice and money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which in turn took cash and counsel from the CIA. Arthur Schlesinger, a special assistant and court historian for the Kennedy White House, asked the president: “Does CIA think that they can carry out a really covert operation—i.e., an operation which, whatever suspicions Jagan might have, will leave no visible trace which he can cite before the world, whether he wins or loses, as evidence of U.S. intervention?”
At the White House on August 15, 1962, the president, McCone, and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy decided it was time to bring matters to a head. The president launched a $2 million campaign that eventually drove Jagan from power. President Kennedy later explained to the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan: “Latin America was the most dangerous area in the world. The effect of having a Communist state in British Guiana…would be to create irresistible pressures in the United States to strike militarily against Cuba.”
At the same August 15 meeting that sealed Jagan’s fate, McCone handed President Kennedy the CIA’s new doctrine on counterinsurgency. Along with it came a second document outlining covert operations under way in eleven nations—Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand; Iran and Pakistan; and Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Venezuela. That document was “highly classified because it tells all about the dirty tricks,” McCone told the president. “A marvelous collection or dictionary of your crimes,” Bundy said, with a laugh.
On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone if the CIA could stage a phony attack on the American military base at Guantánamo Bay as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba. McCone demurred. He told John Kennedy in private the next day that an invasion could be a fatal mistake. He warned the president for the first time that he thought the Soviets might be installing medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. If so, an American sneak attack might set off a nuclear war. He advocated raising a public alarm about the likelihood of a Soviet missile base. The president instantly rejected that idea, but he wondered aloud whether the CIA’s guerrillas or American troops would be needed to destroy the missile sites—if they existed. At that point, no one but McCone was convinced that they did.
Their conversation continued in the Oval Office, shortly after 6 p.m. on August 22, when they were joined by Maxwell Taylor, the general Kennedy trusted most. The president wanted to go over two other secret operations before discussing Cuba. The first was the developing plan to drop twenty Chinese Nationalist soldiers into mainland China during the coming week. The second was a plan for the CIA to wiretap members of the Washington press corps.
“How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?” the president asked. Four weeks before, Hanson Baldwin, the national security reporter for The New York Times, had published an article on Soviet efforts to protect intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites with concrete bunkers. Baldwin’s highly detailed reporting accurately stated the conclusions of the CIA’s most recent national intelligence estimate.
The president told McCone to set up a domestic task force to stop the flow of secrets from the government to the newspapers. The order violated the agency’s charter, which specifically prohibits domestic spying. Long before Nixon created his “plumbers” unit of CIA veterans to stop news leaks, Kennedy used the agency to spy on Americans.
“CIA is completely in agreement with…setting up this task force, which would be a continuing investigative group reporting to me,” McCone later told the president. The CIA kept watch on Baldwin, four other reporters, and their sources from 1962 to 1965. By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow.
At this same White House meeting, the conversation finally returned to Castro. Thirty-eight Soviet ships had docked in Cuba in the past seven weeks, McCone told the president. Their cargo “might contain missile parts. We do not know.” But either way the Soviets were working to build up Cuba’s military strength. “Now, that would be separate from the question of whether they are building some missile bases, isn’t it?” asked the president. “Well, no,” said McCone, “I think the two are related. I think they’re doing both.”
McCone left Washington the next day for a long honeymoon. A recent widower who had just remarrie
d, he planned to go to Paris and the south of France. “I would be only too happy to have you call for me,” he wrote to the president, “and if you do, I would be somewhat relieved of a guilty feeling that seems to possess me.”
“PUT IT IN THE BOX AND NAIL IT SHUT”
A U-2 flight passed over Cuba on August 29. Its film was processed overnight. On August 30, a CIA analyst bent over his light table and shouted: I’ve got a SAM site! It was a surface-to-air missile, an SA-2, the same Soviet weapon that had brought the U-2 down over Russia. That same day, another U-2 was caught straying over Soviet airspace, violating a solemn American vow and prompting a formal protest from Moscow.
The knowledge that Cuba had surface-to-air missiles created “an understandable reluctance or timidity” in the White House about authorizing new flights, McCone said later. JFK ordered General Carter, the acting director of central intelligence during McCone’s honeymoon, to deep-six the report on the SAM. “Put it in the box and nail it shut,” the president said. He could not afford to let international tensions create a domestic political uproar, not with elections two months away. Then, on September 9, another U-2 was shot down over China. The spy plane and its risks were now regarded, as a CIA report put it, with “universal repugnance, or, at the very least, extreme uneasiness” at the State Department and the Pentagon. A furious McGeorge Bundy, spurred by Dean Rusk and acting in the president’s name, canceled the next scheduled U-2 flight over Cuba and summoned James Q. Reber, the CIA veteran in charge of the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance.
“Is there anyone involved in the planning of these missions who wants to start a war?” Bundy asked bluntly.
President Kennedy restricted U-2 flights from passing over Cuban airspace on September 11. Four days later, the first Soviet medium-range missiles docked at Mariel Harbor in Cuba. The photo gap—a blind spot at a decisive moment in history—went on for forty-five days.
McCone, keeping watch on CIA headquarters through incessant cables from the French Riviera, commanded the agency to warn the White House of the “danger of a surprise.” It did not. The CIA estimated that there were 10,000 Soviet troops in Cuba. There were 43,000. The agency said Cuban troop strength stood at 100,000. The true number was 275,000. The CIA flatly rejected the possibility that the Soviets were building nuclear sites in Cuba.
“The establishment on Cuban soil of Soviet nuclear striking forces which could be used against the US would be incompatible with Soviet policy,” the CIA’s top experts concluded in a Special National Intelligence Estimate on September 19. In a classic example of mirror imaging, an uncertain CIA stated: “The Soviets themselves are probably still uncertain about their future military program for Cuba.” The estimate stood as a high-water mark of misjudgment for forty years, until the CIA assayed the state of Iraq’s arsenal.
McCone alone dissented. On September 20, in the last of his honeymoon cables to headquarters, he urged his agency to think again. The analysts sighed. Then they took another look at a message received at least eight days earlier from a road watcher, a Cuban agent at the lowest rung in the intelligence hierarchy. He had reported that a convoy of seventy-foot Soviet tractor-trailers was moving a mysterious canvas-covered cargo the size of thick telephone poles around the Cuban countryside near the town of San Cristobal. “I never knew his name,” the CIA’s Sam Halpern said. “This one agent, the only decent result out of Mongoose, this agent told us there’s something funny going on…. And after ten days of arguing in front of the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance, it was finally approved to have an overflight.”
On October 4, McCone, back in command, raged against the U-2 ban imposed by the White House. There had been no spy flights over Cuba for nearly five weeks. At a Special Group (Augmented) meeting with Bobby Kennedy, “there arose a considerable discussion (with some heat)” as to who had stopped the flights. It was, of course, the president. Bobby Kennedy acknowledged the need for more intelligence on Cuba, but he said the president first and foremost wanted more sabotage: “He urged that ‘massive activity’ be mounted.” He demanded that McCone and Lansdale send agents into Cuba to mine the harbors and kidnap Cuban soldiers for interrogation, an order that led to the final Mongoose mission in October, when some fifty spies and saboteurs were sent to Cuba by submarine at the height of the nuclear crisis.
While American intelligence flailed, ninety-nine Soviet nuclear warheads came into Cuba undetected on October 4. Each one was seventy times more powerful than the bomb that Harry Truman dropped on Hiroshima. With a single act of stealth, the Soviets had doubled the damage they could do to the United States. On October 5, McCone went to the White House to argue that the safety of the nation depended on more U-2 flights over Cuba. Bundy scoffed, saying he was convinced that there was no threat—and if one existed, the CIA could not find it.
“NEAR-TOTAL INTELLIGENCE SURPRISE”
The CIA’s discovery of the missiles ten days thereafter has been portrayed as a triumph. Few of the men in power saw it that way at the time.
“The near-total intelligence surprise experienced by the United States with respect to the introduction and deployment of Soviet strategic missiles in Cuba resulted in large part from a malfunction of the analytic process by which intelligence indicators are assessed and reported,” the president’s foreign intelligence board reported a few months later. The president had been “ill served” by the CIA, which had “failed to get across to key Government officials the most accurate possible picture” of what the Soviets were doing. The board found that “clandestine agent coverage within Cuba was inadequate,” and that “full use was not made of aerial photographic surveillance.” It concluded: “The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences.”
The flaws went uncorrected; the failure to see the true state of the Iraqi arsenal in 2002 played out in much the same way.
But at last, at McCone’s insistence, the photo gap was closed. At first light on October 14, a U-2 aircraft, piloted by Air Force Major Richard D. Heyser of the Strategic Air Command, flew over western Cuba, taking 928 photographs in six minutes. Twenty-four hours later, the CIA’s analysts gazed upon images of the biggest communist weapons they had ever seen. All day long on October 15, they compared the U-2 shots to photos taken of the Soviet missiles paraded through the streets of Moscow every May Day. They checked manuals of technical specifications supplied over the past year by Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in the Soviet military intelligence service. He had spent four months, starting in the summer of 1960, trying to approach the CIA. But its officers had been too inexperienced, too wary, and too frightened to close the deal. He finally made contact with the British, who worked with him in concert with the CIA in London. At great risk, he had smuggled out some five thousand pages of documents, most of them providing insight into military technology and doctrine. He was a volunteer, and the first Soviet spy of consequence the CIA ever had. Exactly one week after the U-2 photos arrived in Washington, Penkovsky was arrested by Soviet intelligence.
By late afternoon on October 15, the CIA’s analysts knew they were looking at SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a one-megaton warhead from western Cuba to Washington. President Kennedy was in New York, campaigning for candidates in the November election, now three weeks away. That night, McGeorge Bundy was at home, holding a farewell dinner for Chip Bohlen, the newly appointed American ambassador to France. At about 10 p.m. the telephone rang. It was Ray Cline, the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence. “Those things we’ve been worrying about—it looks as though we’ve really got something,” Cline said.
Richard Helms brought the U-2 photos to the attorney general’s office at 9:15 a.m. on October 16. “Kennedy got up from his desk and stood for a moment staring out the window,” Helms remembered. “He turned to face me. ‘Shit,’ he said loudly, raising both fists to hi
s chest as if he were about to begin shadow boxing. ‘Damn it all to hell and back.’ These were my sentiments exactly.”
Bobby Kennedy thought: “We had been deceived by Khrushchev, but we had also fooled ourselves.”
19. “WE’D BE
DELIGHTED TO TRADE
THOSE MISSILES”
The CIA had fooled itself into thinking that the Soviets would never send nuclear weapons to Cuba. Now that it had seen the missiles, it still could not grasp the Soviet mindset. “I can’t understand their viewpoint,” President Kennedy lamented on October 16. “It’s a goddamn mystery to me. I don’t know enough about the Soviet Union.”
General Marshall Carter was again the acting director; McCone had flown to Seattle for the funeral of his new stepson, killed in a car crash. Carter went to the Special Group (Augmented) meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Situation Room, the underground command post at the White House, carrying new proposals for secret attacks on Cuba commissioned by Robert Kennedy. Carter, who privately compared Kennedy’s performances at Mongoose meetings to the gnawing of an enraged rat terrier, listened silently as the attorney general approved eight new acts of sabotage, contingent on the president’s go-ahead. Carter then met the CIA’s chief photo interpreter, Art Lundahl, and the agency’s top missile expert, Sidney Graybeal, upstairs at the White House. The three men brought blown-up U-2 images into the Cabinet Room, where the inner circle of the national-security establishment assembled shortly before noon.