* Sidey did not include the Bobby Kennedy anecdote in his 1963 biography, John F. Kennedy, President, published by Atheneum.
* The thrust of Weiner's story was that the CIA and State Department were refusing to declassify the file on the anti-Jagan operations in British Guiana, and other potentially embarrassing activities, despite a law mandating the declassification of government papers after thirty years unless the release would compromise national security secrets. The release of a historical volume on Guyana had been prepared, but later withheld, Weiner was told, because of a reluctance to declassify the Jagan papers. Someone involved in the process provided the gist of the embarrassing material to Weiner.
* Robert Kennedy, in one of his 1964 interviews for the Kennedy Library, was once again glib, in concealing what really happened to Cheddi Jagan. The interviewer, John Barlow Martin, who served in the Kennedy administration as ambassador to the Dominican Republic, cited Jack Kennedy's private meeting with Jagan and commented, "The president seems to have gone to a good deal of trouble to be nice to him." Martin apparently did not know of the CIA operations in British Guiana. Bobby Kennedy explained that the meeting took place because his brother had been "concerned" about the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere and was "convinced that Jagan was probably a communist." But, added Kennedy, the president wanted to "see whether we could work something out with him.... There were various plans we went through ... of trying to get the British to come up with something ... I think there was an election coming on [in British Guiana] ... Most of our efforts were to try to get the British to recognize the concern that we had and ask them to take action to control the situation. They were reluctant." Asked why, Kennedy explained that the British "were not as concerned about him and about the situation." At that point, Martin noted, "But it's a very small country." Kennedy responded: "Well, I suppose Cuba is too. It's caused us a lot of trouble." Nothing more about Jagan was said.
17
TARGET CASTRO
Robert Kennedy, fresh from his crucial back-channel role in the Berlin crisis, took on yet another assignment in the fall of 1961: he became the driving force in a renewed American effort to murder Fidel Castro and overthrow his government. His enthusiasm for the assignment and his insistence on getting it done made the thirty-five-year-old attorney general the most feared, and despised, official in the government---especially at the Central Intelligence Agency. But everyone involved understood that Bobby Kennedy was doing his brother's bidding.
"The Kennedys were on our back constantly to do more damage to Cuba, to cause an uprising, to get rid of Castro and the Castro regime," the CIA's Samuel Halpern, who served as the executive assistant to three deputy directors for clandestine operations, told me in one of our interviews for this book. "They were just absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Castro.... I don't know of any senior officer that I talked to who felt, aside from the pressure from the Kennedys, that Castro had to go. Me and my buddies kept asking over and over again, 'Why are we doing this? We're not getting anywhere.' We didn't know why we were doing what we were doing, but we were told to do it, so we did it. We were good soldiers."
Halpern, who began his intelligence career with the OSS in 1943, was brought to Washington from the Far East in the fall of 1961 and was eventually designated executive officer for the Cuba task force, as the CIA's bureaucracy grew in response to the White House's demand to oust Castro. Within months what soon became the largest CIA station in the world was in operation on the campus at the University of Miami, with six hundred American case officers monitoring the activities of an estimated three thousand Cuban exiles on the payroll. Scores of guerrilla teams infiltrated Cuba by boat, collecting intelligence and attempting to carry out hit-and-run sabotage. The Kennedy administration had changed its approach. The Bay of Pigs had called for a military invasion by a large and well-armed exile force and the murder of Castro, provoking an uprising on the island. The new plan, which became known as Operation Mongoose, relied on propaganda, economic sabotage, and the infiltration of small-unit exile teams to create the conditions for an internal revolt. To run the operation, Jack Kennedy sought out Edward G. Lansdale, an air force general famed for his exploits as a covert operator in the Philippines and South Vietnam (he was said to be the model for The Quiet American, Graham Greene's 1955 novel about Saigon). William Harvey, still responsible for executive action (ZR/RIFLE), was the CIA's point man on Mongoose---and the revived assassination plotting against Castro. Johnny Rosselli and his friends in the Mafia would now be working directly for Harvey and once again trying to get poison pills into Havana.
The pressure was on at the CIA, whose anti-Castro operatives the Kennedys held in contempt after the failure at the Bay of Pigs. Bobby made plain his feelings about the agency in a 1964 interview with the Kennedy Library: "The people the CIA had originally were not very good ... I was trying to do things, mostly trying to get them to come up with some ideas about things to be done."
The people in the CIA saw it differently. "You don't know what pressure is until you get those two sons of bitches laying it on you," Halpern told me. "We felt we were doing things in Cuba because of a family vendetta and not because of the good of the United States." The Kennedys were taking on Castro "for personal reasons---because the family name was besmirched by the Bay of Pigs. Cuba stained the Kennedy escutcheon. It wasn't national security. It was like their father always said: 'Don't get mad; get even.' We knew we were in a political operation inside the city of Washington."
Even as the Mongoose project was taking form, the CIA's Richard Bissell, soon to leave the agency's payroll, was given his marching orders: get on with eliminating Castro. There was a brutal meeting in the White House, Bissell later confided to Halpern. "Bissell said he had been called over to the White House and met with the president and his brother," Halpern told me. "He was chewed out and told to get off his ass and do something about the Castro regime---and Castro. What they said was, in effect, that he hadn't done anything since the Bay of Pigs and it was time to get back into action. They expected him to continue to do the same kinds of things that the Bay of Pigs was supposed to do---to get rid of Castro."
Halpern, the new man on the team, asked Bissell what the words "get rid of" meant. "He said, 'Use your imagination.' There were no holds barred." Of course, Halpern added, no one talked about murdering Castro "in so many words, and nobody was about to in those kinds of operations. It just doesn't happen that way. I'll bet even the Mafia doesn't have pieces of paper on that kind of stuff. We knew what we were doing, because that's what they wanted."
Bill Harvey certainly understood his orders. A few weeks after Bissell's meeting at the White House, he attended a five-day conference on a British breakthrough in code-breaking in a secure room at the National Security Agency's headquarters, in suburban Maryland. Also at the conference was Peter Wright, one of Britain's most experienced intelligence operatives and an advocate of using intelligence, rather than force, to combat political insurgencies. During a break, Wright wrote in his 1987 memoir, Spycatcher, Harvey sought him out and asked what "the Brits" would do about Castro. Wright was apprehensive about being drawn into "the Cuban business," he wrote, because he and his colleagues were convinced that "the CIA [was] blundering in the Caribbean."
"Would you hit him?" Harvey asked. "We're not in it anymore, Bill," Wright responded. "We got out a couple of years ago." Harvey, dropping his voice and speaking very slowly, explained, Wright said, that "we're developing a new capability in the Company to handle these kinds of problems, and we're in the market for the requisite expertise." The agency needed "deniable personnel and improved 'delivery mechanisms,'" he said. The conversation was unnerving, Wright added: "I began to feel I had told them more than enough ... They seemed so determined, so convinced that this was the way to handle Castro, and slightly put out that I could not help them more."
Bill Harvey, as a professional intelligence officer, had not told Wright about the pressure from
the Kennedy brothers. But he did tell all he knew to the Church Committee fourteen years later. In an interview with a committee aide, unpublished until this book, Harvey was asked about the White House pressure on the agency. Was it possible that the Kennedys, in their tough talk with Bissell, merely wanted to topple Castro's government? "Harvey said, 'No,'" according to the previously secret committee summary of the interview. "Bissell," the summary paraphrased, "clearly said that the White House had reiterated its interest in executive action capability." Harvey added, when questioned further, that it "was possible" that the president and his brother had approved Castro's assassination again that fall without being told any details. "It would not have been good form," a committee summary quoted Harvey as explaining, for the agency to give the president and his brother "the actual specifics of the plot, or the day-by-day account of its going forward."
Jack and Bobby Kennedy were not being subtle about what they wanted done to Castro. On January 19, 1962, with Operation Mongoose finally in place, Bobby Kennedy convened what he called a "How it all got started" meeting. Careful notes, later declassified, were taken by the CIA's Richard Helms, soon to be named to replace Bissell as deputy director for plans, in charge of clandestine operations. Kennedy was quoted as saying that Cuba carried "the top priority in the U.S. government. All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared. Just the day before," Bobby added, according to Helms's notes, the president had told him that "the final chapter [on Castro] has not been written. It's got to be done and will be done." In his carefully hedged Senate testimony Helms told the Church Committee that Kennedy's impassioned talk reflected the "kind of atmosphere" in which Helms perceived that assassination was authorized.
There is evidence that Operation Mongoose had its own assassination component, separate from the ongoing CIA effort. One of the CIA men who worked with Lansdale told me in an interview for this book that Lansdale's planning documents initially included the concept that Castro would "die during fighting for the island." At President Kennedy's request, the former intelligence operative said, such language was removed from all future Mongoose papers. The operative, who did not wish to be named, shrugged at the memory: "Would Castro be killed in the overthrow? Yes. He wasn't going to accept a golden invitation to leave the island." This understanding about Castro's fate helps explain a handwritten note later in 1962 from Lansdale to Bobby Kennedy, made public by the Church Committee, in which Lansdale told the attorney general that a packet of enclosed documents "does not include the sensitive work I have reported to you; I felt that you preferred informing the President privately." A few days later, Lansdale alerted Kennedy to the possibility that "we might uncork the touchdown play."
Bill Harvey formally took over the CIA's Cuba task force in February 1962, renamed it Task Force W, and began running what he always thought, he told the Church Committee, was a continuation of the ongoing Castro assassination operation that had started before the Bay of Pigs. In early April, Harvey met with Johnny Rosselli in New York and gave him CIA-produced poison pills intended for Castro. Rosselli told the committee he informed Harvey at the meeting that the Cuban exile operatives had expanded the hit list to include Che Guevara and Castro's brother, Raul. Rosselli testified that Harvey approved the targets, saying, "Everything is all right." The CIA also arranged for a shipment of long-range rifles with night scopes and other equipment, including radios and ship radar, to be delivered in May to the Cuban hit team in Miami. The murder plotting continued unabated until February 1963, Harvey testified, although he had grave doubts by September whether the assassination would ever take place. The Mafia's delivery man, once again, was Tony Varona. And, once again, the mob did not deliver.
"Bill Harvey was a rough and tough SOB," Sam Halpern told me, "but when push came to shove, he couldn't deliver either. He had no more expertise than you and I in eliminating anybody. We never killed anyone," Halpern added, "but not for lack of trying."
Until his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy repeatedly denied that he or his brother had anything to do with the Castro assassination attempts. The most explicit denials came during his taped interviews in April and May 1964 at the Kennedy Library. Asked whether there had been any direct attempts on Castro's life during his brother's administration, Kennedy said, "No."
"No one tried?"
"No."
"Contemplated?"
"No."
By mid-1961 the president and his brother had gained complete control of military operations and foreign policy. The military chiefs were mute; Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, was loyal, almost slavish, in his admiration for the president. The Kennedy brothers terrorized the CIA.
Bobby Kennedy had gotten his first insight into the clandestine world of the CIA while spending two months on the four-man study group to investigate the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, headed by the retired Maxwell Taylor. The dapper and well-spoken Taylor, a former army chief of staff, had won the president's admiration by breaking with his fellow generals in the Eisenhower administration and advocating "flexible response": the ability to fight communist insurgencies locally instead of relying on massive retaliation to deter Nikita Khrushchev's support for wars of liberation.
The other two members of the study group were Allen Dulles, at that time still director of the CIA, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations. There is evidence that Taylor quickly learned what Kennedy and Dulles already knew---that assassination plotting had been an integral part of the failed invasion.
The evidence came in a memorandum from the ever-methodical J. Edgar Hoover. On May 22, 1961, while the Taylor panel was still interviewing witnesses, Hoover sent Bobby Kennedy a memo putting on record, among other things, the fact that the FBI had received a briefing on Richard Bissell's testimony before the panel. The disgraced Bissell, still in charge of the assassination plotting, had been permitted to testify, so Hoover learned, before only two members of the panel, Taylor and Bobby Kennedy. Bissell subsequently described his testimony to Sheffield Edwards, of the CIA's office of security (it was Edwards who talked to the FBI, Hoover said), and claimed to have told Taylor and Kennedy about "the use of Giancana and the underworld" in the agency's "dirty business" against Castro.*
Max Taylor, like many men instinctively loyal to the president, included no hint of assassination plotting against Castro in his final report. He also did not tell what he knew to Admiral Burke, who was suspected of being more loyal to the truth than to Jack Kennedy.† But Hoover's memorandum about Bissell's revelatory testimony remained in Justice Department files---yet another problem for the Kennedys.
Taylor's highly classified report on the Bay of Pigs, whose conclusions were leaked in part to the press in the summer of 1961, was everything Jack Kennedy could have wanted. It was unrelenting on the threat posed by Castro. "There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor," the report concluded. "His continued presence within the hemispheric community as a dangerously effective exponent of communism and anti-Americanism constitutes a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more of the weak Latin American republics." The report, which was not declassified for two decades, criticized the CIA for not making the need for two air strikes before the landing at the Bay of Pigs "entirely clear in advance" to the president; it also criticized the Joint Chiefs of Staff for not making clear their overall doubts about the invasion. "By acquiescing," the report said, the Joint Chiefs "gave the impression to others of approving it."
The report was a cover-up, and known to be one by many in the CIA and the military. Grayston Lynch, a CIA operative who went ashore at the Bay of Pigs with the first wave of Cuban exiles, waited more than thirty years before writing a memoir recounting the testimony he gave the Taylor panel. In his manuscript, made available for this book, Lynch reported that Taylor had seemed to be seeking the facts; during his questioning, the retired general allowed Lynch to complain that the collapse of the invasion "goes back to
the planes"---the failure to destroy the Cuban air force. Bobby Kennedy was not interested in testimony about his brother's decision-making, Lynch wrote. The attorney general posed questions that were narrowly focused, he noted, and meant "to show that the invasion would have failed, even with the air strikes. This was something that was impossible to prove." Lynch, like many in the CIA, was convinced that the president had doomed the Cuban freedom fighters by his last-minute cancellation of the second air strike. After Bobby Kennedy's questioning, Lynch asked permission to make a statement and told the panel that, in his opinion, "had the Castro planes been destroyed on the ground, as planned," the operation would have succeeded. Lynch was quickly excused and was not surprised, he wrote, when the Taylor Report not only deflected "the blame" for canceling the air strike from the president but placed it "on the shoulders of the very persons [in the CIA] who had warned them against canceling the air strikes."
Admiral Burke also kept his distress at the Taylor Report to himself. Burke was a strong believer in the presidency, and had been stunned by the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. "When the news started coming in that it was a disaster," Gerry M. McCabe, a navy officer who was one of Kennedy's military aides, said in a 1995 interview for this book, "all the civilians"---including McGeorge Bundy---"folded up their desks and went home by four-thirty [P.M.]. The president stayed in his office until six. Nobody was around." Burke arrived at the White House Situation Room moments later, "slammed down his briefcase and"---with McCabe's help---began coordinating rescue efforts for the remnants of the defeated Cuban exile army. McCabe recalled his astonishment at how thoroughly Burke knew the waters: "He was able to tell those guys [the captains] how close to come offshore. Those who got out got out because of him." A week or so later, McCabe told me, Burke gathered his top admirals and ordered them not to talk about what had really happened in Cuba. He also wrote a private letter to Kennedy, telling him, in essence, that "the navy and the military had broad shoulders" and would accept the blame for the invasion "for the good of the presidency and the good of the country."
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