The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  That winter Ernest Betancourt, a onetime Castro supporter who defected after Castro seized power, ran into arrogance and hostility when he attempted to warn the White House about the folly of the exile invasion. In an interview for this book, Betancourt said that he approached the journalist Charles Bartlett, a Kennedy confidant, and cautioned that the administration was viewing Cuba only in terms of the Cold War and ignoring the bases of Castro's legitimate popularity there. "My judgment was that the operation was antihistorical," Betancourt told me. "There was a total lack of understanding [in Washington] of what Fidel had done." Betancourt, one of the few Cubans in the anti-Castro movement to oppose an exile invasion, had gone to Bartlett with his concerns, he said, because he knew that "talking to him was like talking to Kennedy." A few days later Bartlett called "and warned me about the [anti-invasion] group I was associating with." The implication was clear: Betancourt's complaint about the pending invasion had endangered his political standing in the United States. Bartlett, in a subsequent interview for this book, acknowledged that Betancourt had warned him that "everybody in Havana knows an invasion is coming." But, he said, "I didn't want to burden Jack," and he chose to relay Betancourt's complaints instead to Allen Dulles. Weeks later, as the invasion was getting under way, Bartlett said, Dulles telephoned to say that "he'd checked out my story and it wasn't true that the operation was out of control." He also assured Bartlett that the planned invasion "had not leaked to the Cubans."

  Disaster struck on April 17. Fidel Castro's army and militia routed the CIA-recruited and trained brigade of 1,400 Cuban exiles which attempted an amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs, on Cuba's south coast. President Kennedy had been told that the landing would trigger a widespread revolt against the regime. But the only resistance was against the exile brigade, which in two days of fierce fighting suffered devastating losses of 114 dead and nearly 1,200 captured. Castro claimed victory in a four-hour televised speech, mocking the Kennedy administration for its misreading of the Cuban people.

  At the time, it remained a White House secret that on the eve of the invasion Kennedy personally canceled a second air strike that was considered crucial to the success of the landings. Eight air sorties had left from Nicaragua two days before the landing, but the exile pilots, flying unmarked B-26 bombers of World War II vintage, failed to wipe out the small but effective Cuban air force. A ninth B-26 flew directly from Nicaragua to Miami, where the pilot proclaimed that he was part of a group of Cuban air force defectors who had spontaneously carried out the bombings as part of a revolt against the Castro regime. The cover story fooled no one, and Kennedy, fearful that his administration would become even more closely linked to the invasion, refused to let the second bombing take place---with the inevitable deadly consequences for the exile army already approaching Cuba's beaches. The young president's direct role in the failed operation, and his indecision, would become public over the next fifteen years, but both would remain secret during the spring of 1961.

  Kennedy eliminated much of the controversy over who ordered what when he told a news conference on April 21 that "there's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.... I'm the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious."* His seeming willingness to take the heat won him enormous support from the public, who shared Kennedy's fear and hatred of Castro, and his public approval rating soared. In private, however, Kennedy complained to all, including many reporters, that he had done little more than follow the recommendations of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I just took their advice," he insisted a few days later, during a meeting with Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration had initiated the invasion planning a year earlier and had also recruited Giancana and Rosselli to assassinate Castro. At the time, none of the journalists reported Kennedy's private eagerness to have it both ways, but at least one did in a later memoir. Hedley Donovan, onetime editor in chief of Time Inc., wrote in 1987 that the president "was getting preposterous praise---and amazingly high ratings in the polls---for simply stating the inescapable constitutional fact that he was 'responsible.' Which did not stop him from telling scores of friends, senators, journalists, only slightly privately, that his mistake was to pay any attention to the CIA and the military brass."

  The portrait of a young president victimized by subordinates was reprised in Kennedy, Ted Sorensen's memoir, a huge bestseller when published in 1965. "John Kennedy," Sorensen wrote, "was capable of choosing a wrong course but never a stupid one; and to understand how he came to make this decision requires a review not merely of the facts but of the facts and assumptions that were presented to him" (emphasis in original). Sorensen argued that Kennedy had been misinformed by the CIA and the military, because the president's doubts and questions were being answered by those experts "most committed to supporting the plan." Arthur Schlesinger, in A Thousand Days, also published in 1965, theorized that Kennedy's mistake in authorizing the invasion stemmed from his inexperience, having been in office only seventy-seven days. "He could not know which of his advisers were competent and which were not," Schlesinger wrote. He told of a lunch after the debacle in which Kennedy acknowledged that "I probably made a mistake in keeping Allen Dulles on" as CIA director.

  Kennedy had many doubts about the feasibility of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Schlesinger noted. But he was also concerned---as was Dulles---about the "disposal problem" if the operation was called off before it began and the Cuban exiles went back, unbloodied, to Florida, where they would surely tell their story of frustration and disappointment to every journalist they could find. Schlesinger quoted Kennedy as saying of the Cuban exile brigade, "If we have to get rid of these ... men, it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States, especially if that is where they want to go." It was a rare glimpse into Kennedy's instinct for self-preservation. He understood that the political price of canceling the invasion would be great, far greater than if it were to go forward and collapse in failure. By canceling, he would appear weak and indecisive, and give the Republicans an opportunity to accuse him of being soft on communism. But Schlesinger's account depicted Kennedy's dilemma in far loftier terms. If the president canceled, he "would forever be haunted by the feeling that his scruples had preserved Castro in power." In going forward, the historian added, Kennedy was motivated "by the commitment of the Cuban patriots" and "saw no obligation to protect the Castro regime from democratic Cubans."

  Sorensen and Schlesinger apparently did not know the critical truths about Cuba. They did not know that candidate Kennedy had been privately informed by CIA officials and some participants before the election that the island would soon be invaded by the secret exile army---information he used to great effect against Richard Nixon. And they were not privy to one of the major reasons for President Kennedy's last-minute ambivalence about the Bay of Pigs operation: Sam Giancana's henchmen inside Cuba had been unable to murder Castro in the days immediately before the invasion.

  One of Kennedy's most controversial and least-understood decisions during the Bay of Pigs was the cancellation of the second bombing mission. There has been an outpouring of declassified White House documents in recent years on the invasion, none of them dealing with assassination. But the assumption that Castro would be dead when the first Cuban exiles went ashore, and the fact that he was not, may explain Kennedy's decision to cut his losses. The Mafia had failed and a very much alive Castro was rallying his troops.

  The White House documents that have been declassified make it clear that Kennedy, Bundy, and others on the president's staff were intimately involved with the day-to-day planning and decision-making for the invasion. One especially significant memorandum from Bundy to Kennedy, dated March 15, 1961, one month prior to the invasion, shows that Kennedy's subsequent cancellation of the second B-26 bombing strike---a decision not publicly disclosed at the time---was done with full knowledge of the consequences. "I think," Bundy told the president, "there is unanimous agreement that at some stage
the Castro Air Force must be removed.... My own belief is that this air battle has to come sooner or later, and that the longer we put it off, the harder it will be.... Even the revised landing plan depends strongly upon prompt action against Castro's air." Bundy was recommending that one air strike, involving six or eight B-26s, should come "some time before the invasion" (emphasis in original). The final invasion plans, as approved by Kennedy, doubled the number of B-26 strikes to two---one on April 15 and the second two days later, on the morning of the Bay of Pigs landings, to ensure the destruction of Castro's air force. The first strike failed to do the job---and it also led to immediate Cuban and Soviet protests in the United Nations and elsewhere.

  Kennedy's refusal to go forward with the essential second bombing mission---or, for that matter, simply to call off the exile invasion---was not a military but a political decision. As Kennedy had to know, his decision amounted to a death sentence for the Cuban exiles fighting on the ground. But he and Nikita Khrushchev had just agreed, after weeks of secret back-and-forth, to an early June summit meeting in Europe. A second bombing attack was sure to focus attention on American involvement; it would jeopardize Kennedy's face-to-face meeting with the Soviet premier and his chances for an early foreign-policy triumph. In terms of domestic politics, the president understood that a failure at the Bay of Pigs was preferable to the political heat he would take from Republicans and conservative Democrats if he did not go forward with the invasion. He would be considered just another liberal, like the much-maligned Adlai Stevenson. Nothing---not even the death and capture of hundreds of Cuban patriots---was worth that.

  Robert Maheu, still working in Miami to enlist the Mafia's help, knew that Castro's assassination was integral to the invasion plan. But that fact was so sensitive he had not been authorized by James O'Connell, Maheu's liaison with the CIA, to share it with his Mafia contacts. Giancana and his men had no need to know, Maheu told me in an interview: "Their job was to get rid of Castro."

  Over the winter and spring of 1961, Maheu told me, O'Connell, chief of the operational support division in the CIA's office of security, met privately with him and kept him up to date on the progress of the exile army's readiness in Guatemala. The two men understood that if the Mafia failed to assassinate Castro, the invasion of Cuba would go forward---but only as long as President Kennedy authorized air cover and the bombing of Cuban military targets. "Everyone involved to our knowledge had said that this invasion could not be a success unless the air raid took place and the adequate air cover was carried out," Maheu told me. On the eve of the landings, Maheu was told that Kennedy had canceled the second raid and air cover. "I asked if as a consequence of those decisions the invasion had been called off," he recalled. "We could not get an answer. Finally we did get an answer---that it had not been called off. And I tried to reach the president at the White House." Maheu could not get past the White House switchboard and turned to a friend and former client, David J. McDonald, president of the United Steelworkers of America, a Kennedy favorite whose union had funneled untold millions of dollars into the 1960 campaign. "I begged him to try to get the president to call off the invasion," Maheu told me. "Dave reported to me that he had been unable to reach the president."

  At that point, Maheu recalled thinking, "I'm finished." He returned to Las Vegas and his job as a security consultant and said nothing in public about Cuba and the CIA until his 1975 testimony before the Church Committee. "I didn't want anything more to do with it. I never talked to Sam [Giancana] again."

  Maheu believes today that the Kennedy administration was criminally irresponsible in permitting the Cuban exiles to land at the Bay of Pigs without the support necessary for survival. "When we called off the [second] air raid and the adequate air cover, we inherited the responsibility of calling off the invasion," he told me. "We could not allow those kids to hit those beaches and be destroyed by hardware that should have been destroyed by us hours before. And as far as I'm concerned, we thereby indulged in mass murder."

  As the "kids" of the exile brigade fell, Castro was noisily leading the successful defense of his nation. Sam Giancana's assassination efforts had failed: Juan Orta fled to the safety of sanctuary in the Venezuelan Embassy, and Tony Varona's gangster friends in Cuba were not able to pull the trigger.

  Kennedy continued to cut his diplomatic and political losses while the invasion turned to disaster. As he had warned the Pentagon brass beforehand, he refused to permit American jet fighters and warships to come to the aid of the Cuban exiles. A navy task force, warplanes and ships at the ready, sat in international waters off Cuba and watched Castro's military destroy the exile force. The military's frustration was heightened by the fact, not widely known at the time, that the White House---and not the Pentagon---was running the show in the waters and airspace near Cuba; the president's men, not generals and admirals, were deciding where to dispatch each ship and each warplane.

  Kennedy's fear, which would return in future crises, seemed to be that he would lose control of the military as the invasion floundered. An important oral interview---one overlooked by historians---was recorded in the early 1970s at the U.S. Naval Institute. Admiral Robert L. Dennison, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy forces in the Atlantic, told of being ordered by the Pentagon to have his destroyers set up a safe haven fifteen miles off the coast of the Bay of Pigs and wait there for possible survivors of the debacle. The orders, as relayed by General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not only instructed Dennison what to do but how to do it. "It was really a tactical order," Dennison recounted. "I wouldn't have sent the thing to a captain.... So I called up Lemnitzer on the scrambler phone and said, 'I've gotten a good many orders in my life, but this is a strange one.... This is the first order I ever got from somebody who found it necessary to interpret his own orders.' [Lemnitzer] said, 'Where did you get this directive?' And I said, 'I got it from you.' He said, 'Who do you think wrote it?' I said, 'You did.' He said, 'No, I didn't. That order was written at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.'"

  Dennison, who died in 1980, was no amateur in the ways of political Washington; he spent five years as the naval aide to President Truman before returning to combat assignments. In his view, he said in his Naval Institute interview, many of the orders emanating from the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the crisis "came from the White House or from CIA, with very little understanding of what the situation requires.... I hope somebody, like Lemnitzer, has some diaries or something, but there's too much of value in this whole story to just have it disappear. But, so far as I know, the record that I have is the only one extant."

  Lemnitzer did not write a memoir, and none of the reportage and histories of the Bay of Pigs and its aftermath has revealed the precise extent to which Jack Kennedy's White House directly controlled events.

  As the Cuban operation, with its negative political ramifications, was failing, Jack Kennedy turned to his brother Bobby, who would remain his only real confidant over the next thirty months, a presidential protector not afraid of anyone in the American government. After the Bay of Pigs, it was Bobby Kennedy who took the hard line or delivered the bad news, while the president said nothing. The two brothers moved to minimize the political fallout from Cuba, and their hardheaded zeal in so doing led to a final humiliation for Bissell, whose sure thing as the next director of the CIA dissolved with the failure in Cuba.

  Sometime on April 19 the Kennedys received the unsettling news that four American pilots, members of the Alabama Air National Guard who were in Nicaragua secretly training the Cubans, had ignored the president's refusal to authorize a second strike and had taken off on their own, in two B-26s, to go to war against Castro. The two bombers inflicted heavy damage to the Cuban forces before being shot down. It was not immediately known whether the pilots survived. The possibility existed that an Alabama pilot, if one survived, would be put on display by Castro on Havana television---as Francis Gary Powers had been shown off a year earlier by Khrushchev in Moscow. The W
hite House's repeated public insistence---in Washington and in the United Nations---that no Americans were involved inside Cuba would be in shambles.

  On the afternoon of April 19, with the fate of the rogue pilots still unclear, Bissell was summoned to an Oval Office meeting with John and Robert Kennedy. It took Bissell thirty-two years to reveal to Janet Weininger, the daughter of one of the dead pilots, what happened at the meeting. "When everything was over," Bissell told Weininger in 1993, as she recounted to me in a 1995 interview, "I went to brief the president. Bobby met me when I entered [the president's office]. He was short but got right in my face as best he could. The first words out of his mouth were 'Those American pilots had better goddamned well be dead.' All he could see was another Francis Gary Powers.... Bobby's only concern was the image of his brother and what the pilots could do if they were captured. For once I stood as tall as possible, glad to be well over his height," the elderly Bissell told Weininger, according to her notes, which she made available for this book. "Bobby was like a wounded animal, while the president just sat back and let him attack." The Central Intelligence Agency, Bobby Kennedy said, "had better keep the [pilot] families quiet." The attorney general insisted that a cover story be devised for the disappearance of the four Alabama pilots, all of whom were determined to have died. Weininger described Bissell to me as someone who "had been waiting a long time to share the pain" of the scene in the White House. At the time of the Bay of Pigs, Bissell told her, he "didn't know the real Jack Kennedy."

  In a subsequent interview for this book, Jake Esterline, Bissell's deputy, confirmed that he, too, knew of Bissell's meeting with the two Kennedys. Esterline said that Bissell, obviously distressed, began a conversation with him shortly after the failed invasion by saying, "I don't like to tell you this." He then said, "Bobby wanted them dead," Esterline continued. "Bissell did tell me that."