Two days after Trujillo's murder, Robert Kennedy dictated a four-page memorandum for the files summarizing his involvement, reprinted in part in the final report of the Church Committee. Kennedy complained about the lack of reliable intelligence after the slaying, but expressed no upset about the direct American involvement in shipping weapons to Trujillo's assassins. "Nor is there any record," the committee noted, "that anyone took steps following Trujillo's assassination to reprimand or censure any of the American officials involved either on the scene or in Washington, or to otherwise make known any objections or displeasure to the degree of United States involvement." In later documents, the committee added, the CIA described the Kennedy administration's action in the Dominican Republic "as a 'success' in that it assisted in moving the Dominican Republic from a totalitarian dictatorship to a Western-style democracy."*
In his thousand days in office, President Kennedy showed no official curiosity about the many allegations of American involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders.
One hint of Kennedy's real attitude was provided by Smathers in a March 1964 oral history for the Kennedy Library. He was talking with the president about the consequences of Fidel Castro's assassination, a subject the two men had discussed previously. JFK's concern, Smathers noted, was not about the morality of political murder but about the pragmatic difficulty of getting it done without leaving any evidence. "We had further conversation of assassination of Fidel Castro," Smathers said, "what would be the reaction, how would the people react, would the people be gratified.... As I recollect, he was just throwing out a great barrage of questions. He was certain it could be accomplished---I remember that. It would be no problem. But the question was ... whether or not the reaction throughout South America would be good or bad. And I talked with him about it and, frankly, at this particular time I felt that [he] wasn't so much for the idea of assassination, particularly where it could be pinned on the United States."
The president did have one explicit conversation about the murder of Castro with Hans Tofte, a socially prominent CIA operative who was an old Asia hand and something of a dandy. One CIA colleague described him as a "swashbuckling guy who dressed well and had a lovely house in Georgetown." He looked like a CIA agent should, and apparently began a social acquaintance with "Jack"---as Tofte referred to Kennedy in conversations with his friends---when the president served in the Senate. The swaggering Tofte got in trouble with the agency in the mid-1950s for keeping classified materials at home; his travails were described in The Man Who Kept the Secrets, the journalist Thomas Powers's definitive 1979 book on former CIA director Richard Helms. Tofte, angered by some of the materials in the book, asked after its publication to meet with Powers. The conversation turned to Kennedy, Powers recalled in a 1994 interview for this book.
Tofte told Powers of an extraordinary meeting he had with the president in March 1961. Tofte had just returned from a CIA assignment in Colombia, where he had conducted an extensive study of the government's attempt to stop La Violencia, the long-running guerrilla insurgency in the countryside. Research had begun under the Eisenhower administration, but Tofte's three-volume report was not completed until the first weeks of the Kennedy administration. How to combat communist movements was of paramount concern to the new president, and Kennedy, always willing to be briefed by working-level officials, summoned Tofte to the White House. Tofte told Powers that he personally handed JFK a copy of his report and described what was going on in Colombia. He also had the audacity to raise the Cuban invasion with the president. Like many CIA men throughout Latin America, Tofte had heard a great deal about the pending exile invasion of Cuba and, as Powers put it, he "seized the moment to urge Castro's assassination as a prelude to invasion, saying nothing would be achieved so long as Castro was in power. But the Cuban government would evaporate if he were killed."
Kennedy listened intently and then said, "That is already in hand. You don't have to concern yourself about that." Tofte understood precisely what the president meant, he told Powers, and was later astonished to hear that the invasion took place with Castro still in power. He had assumed, as Powers put it, "that the deed would be done."*
* * *
* The CIA files, made public in May 1997 by the National Security Archives, a public interest group in Washington, included no evidence that President Eisenhower approved the assassinations. But the files also included a twenty-two-page CIA training manual, entitled A Study of Assassination, that amounted to a how-to murder kit. The manual included this caution: "No assassination instruction should ever be written or recorded." Other sections discussed various murder techniques, appropriate weapons, and advice on how to make a political murder seem to be an accident.
* Richard Helms, the CIA director at the time of the IG Report, ordered the destruction of all notes and working papers dealing with the CIA's Castro assassination efforts. An internal CIA memorandum for the record written in May 1967, one month after the IG Report was completed, noted that Helms returned his copy of the report to the inspector general's office with orders that it was the only copy to be kept on file. All other copies of the 133-page document were to be destroyed.
† The other requirements cited by Harvey, according to the Church Committee files, were the existence of "a real threat" and the possibility that the assassination could "be done successfully."
* Years later, Mirage said, she destroyed the Bonanno note.
* In interviews for this book and in his memoir, I'd Do It All Over Again, Igor Cassini insisted that his ruinous indictment (to which he eventually pleaded nolo contendere, resulting in a $10,000 fine and a six-month suspended prison sentence) came about because of his role in bringing Joe Kennedy into the public eye. Cassini acknowledged accepting a public relations contract for $150,000 from the Trujillo regime in early 1961 and not disclosing it, as required by federal law, but claimed that he had not done so because he did not want to reveal his participation in the secret negotiations involving Trujillo, Robert Murphy, and the Kennedys. "I know for a fact," Cassini insisted in an interview in 1996, "that neither Jack nor Bobby wanted to prosecute me, but when it came to their being embarrassed [over their father's involvement], they let me go to the wolves."
* The Church Committee, in its summary of Robert Kennedy's June 1 memorandum, avoided making what seemed to be an obvious judgment. It "is uncertain," the committee said, whether Kennedy's failure to express concern about the American role in Trujillo's murder "was due to the press of other matters, including concern over Trujillo's successor and the future government of the Dominican Republic, or whether it represented a condonation or ratification of the known United States involvement."
* A Kennedy Library official reported that the library's classified holdings include volumes two and three of Tofte's report on the insurgency in Colombia. Suzanne Forbes, a national security archivist at the library, said that one of the volumes has a note attached stating that it had been received from presidential aide Ted Sorensen in February 1964, three months after Kennedy's assassination. Ms. Forbes said in an interview for this book that it would be fair to conclude that Tofte, as he told Thomas Powers, did give a copy of his report to the White House. The Eisenhower administration left virtually none of its national security files behind, Ms. Forbes said, as is usually the case with outgoing governments, when it vacated the White House and Executive Office Building on January 20, 1961. Tofte died in 1987.
14
BAY OF PIGS
In the early spring of 1961, Marcus Raskin, a bright young congressional aide, got an irresistible offer: Would he be interested in joining the Kennedy administration's National Security Council staff as an assistant to McGeorge Bundy for arms control? Raskin said yes and in early April arrived at the Executive Office Building for a meeting with Bundy, a few days before a planned exile invasion of Cuba at an obscure beach known as the Bay of Pigs. Raskin knew nothing officially of the invasion, but he had heard, as had many in Washington, that so
mething was up. The government of Brazil had publicly proposed brokering a settlement between the United States and Cuba; Raskin, never afraid to speak his mind, suggested that the White House consider the offer. "Oh, no," Bundy said. "It'll take just one detachment and he'll be out of there."
The few Kennedy insiders who knew about the invasion in advance shared Bundy's confidence about its success; doubts, if any, were overcome by the president's mystique---and the prevailing sense that Kennedy could do no wrong. Richard N. Goodwin was a speechwriter who became a trusted presidential assistant after the campaign. "I remember saying at one point," he recalled in an interview for this book, "'You know, the problem with the Cubans is they'll fight and they'll die. And we can end up killing a lot of people in Cuba.' But Kennedy felt he was on a roll. He had won the nomination; he had won the election. He figured things were going his way, and so he tossed the dice one more time."
Bundy knew what Raskin and Goodwin did not: the dice were loaded. The Mafia's men in Havana were on the job. Fidel Castro, the Cuban prime minister, was to be assassinated by the Mafia on or before the day the invasion force landed at the Bay of Pigs. It looked like a sure thing.
Though he was only one of three prospective targets of political assassination as the new administration was being formed, Castro was the most important. His death, so the planners thought, would precipitate a widespread revolt.
"Taking out Castro was part of the invasion plan," Robert Maheu, the CIA's liaison to the Mafia, told me during one of our interviews for this book. Castro's murder was to take place "before---but preferably at the time of---the invasion," Maheu said. "We'd get word that something had happened. And we were waiting to hear" if "poison had made it into his food." Maheu spent much of the winter and spring of 1961 plotting Castro's murder while holed up in hotels in Miami with Sam Giancana and two of his fellow mobsters, Johnny Rosselli and Santos Trafficante.
The link between the invasion and Castro's assassination was publicly acknowledged by Richard Bissell. But he waited more than twenty years to do so, and chose an obscure journal in which to reveal his ultimate Bay of Pigs secret. "Assassination was intended to reinforce the plan," Bissell explained to Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, a foreign service officer who interviewed him in 1984 for a scholarly article published that fall in Diplomatic History, an academic quarterly. "There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing. Very few, however, knew of this aspect of the plan."*
The Cubans and Soviets certainly knew. Cuban intelligence, working closely with the Soviet KGB, had captured a huge cache of weapons in January 1961, including pistols with silencers, in what was determined to be a CIA undercover center in Havana. Soviet intelligence files provided in the mid-1990s to two academics, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, showed that Cuban security and the KGB concluded that the pistols were for "the murder of Fidel Castro." Fursenko and Naftali, in "One Hell of a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958--1964, their 1997 study of the Cuban missile crisis, concluded that the pistols "make some sense" in the planning for the Bay of Pigs: "The Kennedy administration had expected Castro to die before he could rally support for destroying the invasion." Cuban and Soviet intelligence would claim later to have uncovered a total of more than two dozen assassination plots against Castro.*
In his biography of Castro, Fidel, journalist Tad Szulc quoted Ramiro Valdés, who set up Cuba's security service after the 1959 revolution, as claiming that his operatives were able to track the CIA's planning for the Bay of Pigs step by step, from the first days of training in Guatemala. So much information was pouring out of Miami, Valdés said, that it was difficult to sort out truth from rumor.
The story---as told in the 1975 Church Committee's report and the top-secret 1967 report by the CIA's inspector general---begins with Santos Trafficante, a longtime associate of Sam Giancana and the former Mafia boss of Cuba, who was eager to get rid of Castro and go back into the gambling business in Havana. Trafficante was instrumental in putting the Giancana team in touch with two disaffected Cubans who---upon being promised as much as $50,000 by the CIA---were prepared to murder Castro.
The first was Juan Orta Cordova, whose official title was director general of the office of the prime minister; he was, in effect, Castro's private secretary, with daily access to him, and therefore able, so he told the Giancana team, to slip a poisoned pill into one of Castro's drinks. After much trial and error, the agency had prepared a lethal pill dissolvable in cold water; by early February 1961 at least six of the pills had been provided to Giancana's team for relay to Orta in Cuba. But Orta had already lost his direct access to Castro, or was in the process of losing it. A CIA analysis later quoted the Mafia leaders as complaining that he got "cold feet." Eventually he took refuge in the Venezuelan Embassy in Havana a few days before the Bay of Pigs; he remained under embassy protection, a de facto political prisoner, until October 1964, when Castro permitted him to flee to Mexico City.
Giancana and Trafficante also had a backup plan. Through Rosselli they had made contact early in 1961 with Tony Varona (Dr. Manuel Antonio de Varona y Loredo), a dissident who had worked closely but unsuccessfully with the gambling elements in Havana to oust Castro and was now living in Miami. Varona, a leader of the anti-Castro coalition known as the Democratic Revolutionary Front, was heavily involved in the CIA's planning for the Bay of Pigs; if Orta failed to slip Castro the pill, Varona would somehow find the people inside Cuba to get it done. Varona and the Mafia, in their Miami hotel rooms, knew more about what was planned for Cuba, and for Fidel Castro, than did most of the CIA officers engaged in the day-to-day training of the Cuban exile force in Guatemala.
One CIA operative chose not to know. Jacob B. Esterline, a CIA career man, was named director of operations for the Cuban task force in the summer of 1960, working under Richard Bissell. Getting the exiles ready to hit the beach was his most important assignment yet, and Jake Esterline recalled in a series of interviews for this book that he was gung ho. He was convinced that the exile force, once in Cuba, would take over the government. Sometime that winter, just before Kennedy's inauguration, Esterline was summoned to a meeting with Sheffield Edwards, the CIA's director of security, and got, he said, "one of the big shocks of my life. All of a sudden I was to make a payment of fifty thousand dollars [for the assassins in Cuba] through a blank check." Esterline, who had studied accounting in college, took his fiduciary responsibility as director of operations seriously, and he refused to authorize the funds without a complete briefing. "I was told it was for a mobster. They said the White House wanted this done." Esterline signed two, or perhaps three more vouchers, equally large, over the next few months; sometime shortly before the planned invasion, he learned that the money was going to Johnny Rosselli for assassination plotting. Esterline was told not to write memoranda about the payments. "I didn't tell anybody on my staff," Esterline said, "not even my deputy."
Esterline, who had served as a behind-the-lines commando in Burma during World War II, knew about tough times, he told me; while in Burma, he had paid his operatives in raw opium. But now he was appalled. "Fooling around with the Mafia really got me on edge," he said. "There's a world of difference between facing some guy in combat and setting out to kill him behind his back." Esterline kept his mouth shut, made the payments, and continued training the Cubans for the invasion. He was never formally told by Bissell or Edwards that Castro's death was an integral part of the plan, and, as Esterline ruefully acknowledged in our interview, he resisted facing the truth. "The two [assassination and invasion] were supposed to be contiguous, but I didn't want to believe that," Esterline said. "How do I tell people to get ready for mortal combat when there's some quick and easy solution? They were being so ruthless. I guess I did put it together, but I was trapped. Was I supposed to blow a whistle?"
There was no office in the Kennedy administration prepared to handle such a complaint. Even before being sworn in, the president himself had told the CIA to be ready to kill, an
d the attorney general, his brother, would become his ally in political assassination after the Bay of Pigs, continually pressuring the CIA's men to get on with their lethal plans, instructions long suspected and assumed but not confirmed until this book. Bobby Kennedy's role was two-edged, as usual: he was the president's surrogate, demanding that the CIA do more, and he was the president's protector, making sure that the FBI and other federal police agencies were unable to derail the assassination operations.
Jack Kennedy had every reason to believe in April 1961 that Sam Giancana and his men in Miami and Havana would do the deed. Giancana had delivered, as promised, on the 1960 election. And, as Kennedy surely knew, no one was more adept at murder.
That confidence perhaps made it easier for Kennedy and the men who ran the CIA to ignore their friends in the agency, the press, and elsewhere who sought to warn the administration that the secret of the Cuban training in Guatemala and planned invasion was no secret---not in America, and most certainly not in Cuba. In late 1960 Thomas Polgar, the CIA station chief in Hamburg, Germany, was informed by Axel Springer, the conservative and influential German publisher, that he wished to see Allen Dulles. A meeting was quickly arranged. Once in Washington, Polgar recalled in a 1994 interview for this book, Springer told Dulles that "he and his reporters were picking up stories about [exile] training in Guatemala" for an invasion of Cuba. Springer added that he had "no problems with that, ideologically, but if my reporters can pick it up, surely Castro's people can pick it up, too." Dulles laughed away the warning, telling the German, "It's true that we're training Cubans, but it's better to train them than to put them on relief."*
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