The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Harvey struck back during one of the early meetings on the missile crisis, Halpern told me, saying directly to the president and his brother, in essence, "'We wouldn't be in such trouble now if you guys had had some balls in the Bay of Pigs.' Everybody was thunderstruck," Halpern said. "You don't say that to the president in his own office, but Harvey was the only guy who had the guts to do it." John McCone, who was at the meeting, wanted to fire Harvey immediately, Halpern said. But Richard Helms "saved" Harvey by suggesting that he be reassigned as CIA chief of station in Rome. In late 1962, before leaving Task Force W, Harvey wrote a final memorandum to McCone on Cuba, obtained for this book under the Freedom of Information Act. Harvey argued that the president's pledge of noninvasion---Kennedy's only public retreat in the missile crisis---had put the CIA in an impossible position. Jack Kennedy still wanted the Castro government overthrown, but he had taken away his best asset---the possible use of the American military. Kennedy's pledge also vitiated another favored plan, Harvey wrote, that of "invading Cuba on the pretext of a contrived provocation such as an attack on Guantanamo," the American navy base on Cuba.

  The administration's long-standing goal of provoking "a revolt inside Cuba" was now meaningless, Harvey wrote, because "such a revolt if provoked would be totally destroyed by Cuban counteraction in a matter of hours or, at the most, a few days unless supported by a major United States military commitment." It was unnecessary for Harvey to remind McCone that Edward Lansdale's pie-in-the-sky scheming during Operation Mongoose had, at its core, the use of American forces inside Cuba in case of a full-scale revolt.

  There was a parting shot at Bobby Kennedy's renewed push for Cuban sabotage: "Commando and sabotage operations, except in rare selective instances, will serve little purpose," Harvey wrote.

  Just before Christmas 1962, Bobby Kennedy put together a privately funded ransom of $53 million in pharmaceuticals and farm machinery and paid it to Castro in return for the release of the members of Cuban Brigade 2506, who had been captured and imprisoned during the April 1961 invasion. On December 27, the returned exiles held an emotional meeting in Miami with a contrite John Kennedy, who told them he was sorry for what had happened at the Bay of Pigs. He also asked, according to published accounts, if the exiles had really expected American air support. The answer, given by Pepe San Román, the brigade commander, was yes. In his 1964 book on the Cuban invasion, The Bay of Pigs, Haynes Johnson quoted San Román as telling Kennedy that "naturally we expected it because we had been told the sky would be ours and we knew the B-26s were not enough." The president, wrote Johnson, "looked serious." He did not tell the men that it was his decision to call off the crucial second air strike. Two days later, Kennedy and the first lady attended a tumultuous mass rally at the Orange Bowl in Miami, and the president, as if to make amends, waded into the men of the brigade, shaking hands and exchanging greetings. Some members of the White House press corps told Haynes Johnson, as he wrote, "they had never seen the President act so informally and with such enthusiasm." Kennedy's speech was exuberant. "I can assure you," he said, amidst flag waving and cheering, "that it is the strongest wish of the people of this country, as well as the people of this hemisphere, that Cuba shall one day be free again, and when it is, this brigade will deserve to march at the head of the free column." Those words were as heartfelt as any the president uttered while in office.

  Bill Harvey's replacement as head of Task Force W was Desmond FitzGerald, a CIA veteran who had made his reputation in the late 1950s as a clandestine operator in the Far East. FitzGerald was everything Harvey was not: a New York socialite who went to all the right schools and belonged to all the right clubs. His first wife was Marietta Tree, the granddaughter of Endicott Peabody, the very proper rector of Groton. He had a house in Georgetown and a country place among the horsey set in The Plains, Virginia, where the first lady often rode. He also had the dashing good looks and athletic mien, as did Max Taylor and Ed Lansdale, that attracted the Kennedy brothers; many in the CIA thought, incorrectly, that FitzGerald was a distant relative of the Kennedys.

  FitzGerald, who died in 1967, was eager to do what the president and his brother wanted, to get rid of what he thought was the bad taste left by the truculent Harvey. In The Very Best Men, published in 1995, FitzGerald's biographer, Evan Thomas, quoted a letter FitzGerald wrote to his daughter, the writer Frances FitzGerald, explaining that "my first job was to convince the Administration that anyone from my firm dealing with the Cuban situation is not necessarily a Yahoo bent on disaster." His goal, he added, was "to make the Agency's operations acceptable as respectable, which they obviously haven't been since the Bay of Pigs."

  FitzGerald's problem was Bobby Kennedy. Frances FitzGerald told Evan Thomas that her father initially thought the attorney general was "a young punk." However, Barbara Lawrence, Desmond FitzGerald's stepdaughter, told Thomas that FitzGerald "was scared of Bobby's power. He felt threatened by him. He felt Bobby was just there because he was the president's brother. He thought he was an amateur, and he didn't really like him." FitzGerald, asked in early 1963 by an old colleague whether he was having fun as Harvey's replacement, responded, wrote Thomas, "All I know is that I have to hate Castro."

  Under FitzGerald's supervision the CIA began providing funds, arms, and intelligence in 1963 to rabidly anti-Castro exile groups, operating on their own---not under the control of the large CIA station in Miami. The activities of the rogue exile groups were publicly condemned at the time by the Cuban and the Soviet governments, and the Kennedy administration repeatedly denied any involvement with them. The full story of the direct role of the CIA and Bobby Kennedy in support of the ad hoc raids has remained untold until this book.

  The CIA's concept, Sam Halpern told me, was "to let the exiles go on their own and give them money for arms and ammunition. We did it under Des [FitzGerald]." Knowledge of the support activity was limited to a very few in the government, Halpern said: "Only one guy was working on it, who had good Spanish, and he reported to Des. Des reported to Bobby."

  The White House was explicitly warned, Halpern told me, that "we couldn't control them and they might not hit what we wanted them to hit. We were fighting an undeclared war and people were dying on both sides." There were at least twenty-five exile deaths among the groups fighting in Cuba in 1963, Halpern told me, with many more deaths among Cuban civilians as well as soldiers battling the rogue attackers. The agency did more than merely supply the funds for weapons, Halpern said. "We told them where to buy arms, so they wouldn't get rooked." The weapons were usually bought from foreign arms dealers. The CIA also provided the exile groups with intelligence support, Halpern said, on the rare occasions when the groups "told us what they were doing" in advance.

  A major problem, Halpern said, was Bobby Kennedy's penchant for getting involved directly in what was considered to be the CIA's business. One of the groups was led by newly liberated Manuel Artime, the fanatical founder of Brigade 2506, who had been jailed for eight months by Castro in 1959 for opposing the revolution. Artime's escape led him to the Bay of Pigs and more time in jail. In newspaper interviews before his death in 1977, Artime claimed that in 1963 he met repeatedly with Bobby Kennedy at his office and at his home at Hickory Hill, as he and his men were staging violent and seemingly independent hit-and-run attacks on targets throughout Cuba.*

  Evan Thomas, in his biography, described FitzGerald's rage upon learning that Bobby Kennedy had been privately socializing with Cuban exile leaders, presumably including Artime, at suburban Hickory Hill, and also meeting with them in a Washington hotel, where they were guests of the CIA. Ad hoc exile operations were being agreed to in advance with the attorney general, undermining the basic purpose of the rogue missions---to isolate the U.S. government from any possible link to the exiles' indiscriminate strikes in Cuba. One of FitzGerald's nephews, Albert Francke, told Thomas of overhearing his uncle on a Sunday afternoon in 1963 telling Bobby Kennedy, firmly and loudly, on the telephone, "No, Bobby, we can't
do that. We cannot do that." When FitzGerald, face red, emerged from his study, Francke asked him what was going on. "Oh, nothing," the CIA man said. What was going on, Sam Halpern explained in one of his interviews for this book, was clear. The Cuban exiles "were getting different orders from Bobby. We never knew what was going on."

  FitzGerald, with his desire to please, was in an untenable position, Halpern told me: "He was working his heart out to try and do what they wanted, and it couldn't work." In a letter to his daughter, Frances, cited in the Thomas biography, FitzGerald expressed dismay at his situation: "I have dealt with a fairly rich assortment of exiles in the past, but none can compare with the Cuban group for genuine stupidity and militant childishness. At times I feel sorry for Castro---a sculptor in silly putty."

  By mid-1963, with the rogue exile groups becoming increasingly active, the president and his brother were directing a two-track operation. The CIA was still being asked to plan and mount propaganda and sabotage operations against the Castro regime, using CIA-paid operatives under the control of the Miami station, while the real campaign was being run, with little paperwork and some unwanted help from Bobby Kennedy, out of FitzGerald's back pocket. There was no national security reason for keeping up the pressure and supporting the fighting, as even the president acknowledged---privately. In Conversations with Kennedy, Ben Bradlee related how Kennedy explained, after a private dinner in February 1963, that

  the presence of 17,000 Soviet troops in Cuba ... was one thing viewed by itself, but it was something else again when you knew there were 27,000 U.S. troops stationed in Turkey, right on the Soviet border, and they had been there some years. He warned me against releasing this information. Obviously, it is classified, and just as obviously it would be politically suicidal for him publicly to equate the two. "It isn't wise politically, to understand Khrushchev's problems in quite this way," he said, quietly.

  The Kennedys' support for the concept of the ad hoc exile raids was telegraphed at a bizarre final meeting of the Ex Comm on March 29, 1963, in which Jack Kennedy, just as during the missile crisis, did not speak candidly to the men who were supposedly his most trusted advisers. Declassified notes, prepared by Bromley Smith of the National Security Council and published in 1996 by the State Department, show that the president began the meeting by announcing that he wanted the group to "talk about" a recent series of hit-and-run raids staged by Cuban exiles. Two days earlier, an exile raiding team had severely damaged a Soviet vessel at anchor in a Cuban harbor, provoking an official protest from Moscow.

  There was an immediate consensus among the Ex Comm members, who included Secretary of State Rusk, that the United States should do all it could to stop the exile raids. "If anyone is shooting Russians," Rusk was quoted as saying, "we ought to be doing it. Not Cubans who are acting beyond our control." The Kennedy brothers, who knew better than anyone else that the exiles in question had likely been "shooting at the Russians" with the secret support of U.S. intelligence and arms, seemed almost to be enjoying the discussion. The official notes of the meeting paraphrased the president's comment that "these in-and-out raids were probably exciting and rather pleasant for those who engage in them. They were in danger for less than an hour. This exciting activity was more fun than living in the hills pursued by Castro's military forces." Even Robert McNamara, one of the president's closest confidants, seemed to be out of the loop. He pointed out that the administration could "stop the raiders if we use the Navy. If we don't want to stop the raids," the secretary of defense shrewdly added, "we can modify them, making it difficult for the raiders to attack targets not of our choosing." The president then suggested, said the notes, "that we first tell the British and then, on a background basis, tell the press that the raiders are staging out of the Bahama Islands." Washington reporters, the president clearly believed, would print anything his White House told them.

  Kennedy eventually got around to the serious issue underlying American support for the ad hoc raids: the exiles were creating unneeded tensions in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. The president seemed not fully to understand, as did his brother, the extent to which some exile groups were out of control. They were being given intelligence, weapons, and money by the CIA---but not instructions. JFK "suggested," nonetheless, the notes showed, "that we tell the raiders that they must not attack Soviet ships---but could attack purely Cuban targets." The whole point of financing and supplying some of the more extreme exile groups, as no one at the meeting said, was their lack of control---and their ability to hurt Castro in ways that, so the CIA believed, had always gratified the president and his brother. The president made it clear that he wanted continued guerrilla action against Cuba, telling the Ex Comm that he wanted to "handle this problem [restraining the exile raiders] in such a way as to avoid the appearance of prosecuting Cuban patriots." Smith's notes of the meeting end with Kennedy's suggestion that the group meet the next day to discuss its recommendations. State Department historians reported in 1996 that they were unable to locate any record of the next day's meeting, if one did take place. Ex Comm's role in the Kennedy administration was over: it never met again.

  In June 1963 Jack Kennedy, fully aware of all the negatives involved, formally approved the CIA's covert support for the ad hoc raids: the hit-and-run exile teams were blandly depicted in CIA working papers, according to declassified documents, as the "autonomous groups."

  By early spring 1963, Operation Mongoose was out of business, Bill Harvey was drinking his martinis and taking his naps in Rome, and Desmond FitzGerald's Task Force W had been renamed the Special Activities Staff (SAS). Johnny Rosselli and his Mafia colleagues were no longer involved in assassination plotting; Rosselli's role ended when Bill Harvey, his CIA handler, left. But the Kennedy brothers still wanted Castro dead. That job, too, fell to the ill-equipped FitzGerald. Two of FitzGerald's assassination schemes were made public by the Church Committee in its 1975 report. Castro was known to enjoy skin diving, and, Halpern told the committee, "Mr. FitzGerald came in the office one morning with a book on seashells. I asked him why the seashells and he said he thought ... if we can develop an exotic-looking shell, Castro ... might go for a shell which might be rigged up to explode. I thought the idea had no merit and said so. Despite that," Halpern testified, "he asked me to check it out with our technical people.... As far as I know, nothing ever came of it." The second scheme, equally dubious, called for a contaminated diving suit to be manufactured and somehow given to Castro as a gift. The agency bought a diving suit and began experimenting with it, but the suit apparently never left the laboratory.

  Halpern, in one of his interviews for this book, expressed sympathy for his former boss. "He was trying to be a good soldier," he said. FitzGerald would soldier on, even after Jack Kennedy's death, in his effort to assassinate Fidel Castro.

  On June 10, 1963, with the world increasingly concerned over fallout from nuclear weapons tests, Kennedy gave what historians consider to be the best speech of his presidency, telling a commencement audience at American University in Washington that the time had come for Americans to reconsider their views about the Soviet Union and the Cold War. It was a speech unlike any he had given before, with no threats and no promises of instant retaliation. "Most Americans felt he had proven his mettle by facing down the Russians over Cuba," Michael Beschloss noted in The Crisis Years, his study of the Kennedy-Khrushchev relationship. "Now he could advocate better relations without fear of being branded 'a weak sister'"---or, as Kennedy might have put it, an Adlai Stevenson.

  In the speech, Kennedy called for world peace and asked, "What kind of peace do I mean? ... Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children---not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women---not merely peace in our time but pe
ace for all time."

  The president treated the Soviet Union as a superpower of equal status and bearing. The leaders in Washington and Moscow, Kennedy said, have "a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race.... If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

  "Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common," Kennedy said, "none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among major powers, we have never been at war with each other.... We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last eighteen years been different." Those conciliatory words echoed around the world.