Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (21 page)

“I don’t think the president ever fully succeeded in getting a handle on what the CIA was doing,” Sorensen told the committee. This statement received no headlines, but it was a frighteningly simple description of the limits of democratic power. Why couldn’t Kennedy control his own intelligence agency, Sorensen was asked? “If I knew the answer to that, your committee’s problem would be much easier,” he replied. But he tried to unravel it for the senators. “I think it was a large organization which had been accustomed for many years to operating with a degree of independence. Its officials regarded themselves as highly sophisticated individuals who had an understanding of the realities of the world that they do not feel people in the White House and the State Department shared.”

Kennedy’s intelligence apparatus grumbled under his command, testified Sorensen. “While President Kennedy was alive, there were reports around town of CIA officials expressing doubt as to his toughness, courage, and ability to recognize all the hard things that had to be done.”

Dissatisfied with Kennedy’s leadership, agency officials like Helms simply began to ignore it. They undertook drastic actions against Cuba without informing the president, his brother, or his CIA director. Some of these actions were discovered by Kennedy, many were not. Some would escape even the curiosity of the Church Committee and other congressional panels that explored the hidden chambers of the Kennedy years. These incidents dramatically illustrate how brazen the CIA had become in the pursuit of its own unauthorized Cold War policy.

ON AUGUST 22, 1962,
the S.S.
Streatham Hill
, a British freighter under Soviet lease, limped into San Juan harbor in Puerto Rico after damaging its propeller on a reef. The ship, which was bound for Russia, was carrying 80,000 bags of Cuban sugar. To facilitate repairs, over 14,000 bags were offloaded and stacked in a warehouse under U.S. customs bond because of the embargo on Cuban products. Sometime while the repairs were underway, CIA agents slipped into the warehouse and contaminated the sugar with an emetic. “It would have made whoever ate the sugar feel very lousy,” Carl Kaysen, a Kennedy national security advisor, later said.

Kaysen found out about the CIA sabotage when he intercepted a cable that had not been meant for his eyes. He immediately informed President Kennedy, who flew into a rage.

“I just read a book review by Tom Powers where he wrote that CIA officials never do anything the president doesn’t want done,” Kaysen said. “But I simply don’t have that kind of observation.”

Kaysen, a Harvard political economist, was brought into the White House by his former academic colleague McGeorge Bundy. His views were not predictably dovish—during the 1961 Berlin Crisis he had helped prepare a plan for a limited nuclear war that had outraged Sorensen. Still, he recognized that poisoning a shipment of sugar meant for unsuspecting Russian consumers was a highly provocative act that crossed the administration’s boundaries. The president strongly agreed.

“Kennedy got very angry and said eating the sugar could kill a sick person, an old person or a child,” Kaysen recalled. The president promptly phoned McCone at his Langley office and told him to report to the White House. It is not known whether McCone authorized the act of sabotage, but in any case, he knew he was about to be tongue-lashed for his agency’s reckless behavior. On his way into the Oval Office, the CIA director confronted Kaysen, lighting into him for blowing the whistle on the agency. “What the hell are you interfering in this business for?” McCone erupted.

“But after Kennedy chewed him out, [McCone] came out of the president’s office and put his arm around my shoulder like he was my buddy,” recalled Kaysen, now a professor at MIT.

Kennedy ordered McCone to do whatever was necessary to stop the contaminated sugar from reaching Russia. William Sturbitts, a CIA agent involved in the economic sabotage of Cuba, later told a Rockefeller Commission investigator that the United States simply arranged for a sugar firm to buy the cargo from the Russians. But according to Kaysen, the contaminated cargo was disposed of in a more dramatic way: CIA agents again stole into the warehouse and this time torched the sugar bags.

The CIA was capable of even more shocking insubordination in its secret war on Castro. The same month that the agency poisoned the S.S.
Streatham Hill
’s cargo without the president’s knowledge, the Kennedy brothers dispatched a New York attorney named James Donovan to Havana to negotiate the release of 1,113 Bay of Pigs prisoners still held captive by Castro. It was the beginning of a diplomatic initiative that would again raise the possibility of a peace agreement between the two countries, a discussion that had been dormant since the political firestorm in 1961 over the Goodwin-Guevara meeting.

Bobby Kennedy had selected Donovan as the brothers’ emissary to Castro because of his storied success in negotiating the release of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers after he was shot down over the Soviet Union during a 1960 spying mission. Donovan had led a colorful life, serving as the OSS general counsel during World War II and later as OSS prosecutor at Nuremberg, where he presented shocking photographic evidence of Nazi leaders’ crimes. Donovan (who was no relation to legendary OSS founder Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, but liked to joke he was his illegitimate son) had the Irish gift of gab, and he loved to banter and philosophize while smoking and drinking. The lawyer hit it off with Castro, a nighthawk who loved nothing better than to swap stories and opinions until dawn. The voluble Cuban leader would summon Donovan late at night from the decaying villa outside Havana where he was staying, bringing the American lawyer to the presidential palace or a mistress’s apartment, where they would talk until morning’s early glow. After months of negotiations, which were severely complicated in October 1962 by the missile crisis, Donovan and Castro finally worked out an agreement under which the prisoners were freed in return for $53 million worth of U.S. food, medicine, and equipment.

As the last of the prisoners boarded a plane on a tropical December night in Havana, the ebullient Donovan turned to Castro—who stood in the airport surrounded by aides and machine gun–toting militiamen—and joked that, considering all the American consumer goods he had won for the Cuban people, he was thinking of capitalizing on his popularity on the island. “I think the next election I’m going to come back here and run against you,” Donovan told the Cuban leader, loud enough for his retinue to hear, “and furthermore, I think I can take you.” Castro slowly digested this, Donovan later recalled. “He is a tremendous ham actor, you see. Then he looked around, and in an equally loud voice he said, ‘You know, Doctor, I think you may be right. So there will be no elections.’”

Encouraged by the successful Bay of Pigs settlement, Donovan continued making trips to Cuba to negotiate the release of others held in Castro’s prisons, including twenty-two U.S. citizens, among whom were several CIA agents. The relationship between the two men grew warmer, as the energetic Castro entertained Donovan at his presidential palace in Havana and his beach resort at Varadero and took him on excursions around the island, including a trip to the Bay of Pigs, where the Cuban leader gave a detailed account of how his forces had defeated the invaders. Castro invited Donovan to three Cuban baseball championship games and to fishing expeditions on his boat. During an impromptu visit to a medical school, Castro led three hundred medical students in a round of cheers for his American friend: “Viva Donovan!”

Bobby Kennedy asked John Nolan, a young Washington lawyer who had worked on the 1960 campaign, to accompany Donovan on the Cuba trips. Kennedy, who found Donovan grating to deal with, trusted Nolan, who would later become his administrative aide, to be his eyes and ears on these high-stakes missions. “Bob wanted me to deal with Donovan because he wasn’t very fond of him,” Nolan told me. “They were just very different people. Bob was fast on the uptake, witty, sometimes brusque, very action-oriented. Jim was very philosophical—he liked to lean back in his chair with a Scotch and cigarette and analyze the situation. Bob was not comfortable with his style.”

Nolan was relieved to find how accommodating Castro was, in striking contrast to the villainous caricature of the Cuban leader in the American media. “During the time that we were with him, Castro was never irrational, never drunk, never dirty. In his personal relationships with us and in connection with the negotiations, he was always reasonable, always easy to deal with. There were no tantrums, fits. He was a talker of very significant proportions. I mean, he would come over at midnight or one o’clock in the morning and stay all night talking. But he wasn’t a conversational hog. He’d ask questions, listen for answers, give his own viewpoints. He was easy to talk to, a good conversationalist.”

Donovan and Nolan soon realized that Castro was opening up a bigger diplomatic subject than simply the release of prisoners: he was interested in exploring a resolution of the U.S.–Cuba conflict. Returning from a Cuba trip in April 1963, Nolan phoned RFK from Miami to tell him about Castro’s intriguing peace feelers. Bobby expressed strong curiosity about the man who loomed so large in Washington’s fevered dramas. “What do you think?” he asked Nolan. “Can we do business with that fellow?” The president was also very interested in the message that Castro was communicating through Donovan and Nolan. JFK told his advisors that “we should start thinking along more flexible lines.” He did not want to impose conditions on any future negotiations with Castro that might drive him away.

Jim Donovan was the kind of man who thought any problem could be worked out with enough time and talk. He grew increasingly excited by the idea that he could mediate the most bitter conflict in the hemisphere. “Before falling asleep at night, I think Jim would see himself as the man who brought peace to Cuba and the United States,” said Nolan, looking back today at his colorful partner, who died in 1970 at the age of fifty-three. “He would refer to himself as a ‘meta-diplomat.’”

But Donovan’s old associates in the intelligence world did not share his enthusiasm about the embryonic Cuba peace venture. The CIA was well aware of Donovan’s discussions with Castro. After every trip to Cuba, he and Nolan were debriefed by agents in a Miami safe house. “I couldn’t tell what the CIA thought about Donovan’s peace talks,” said Nolan. “The agents who debriefed us were just apparatchiks—they just sat there taking notes as Jim rambled on.” But years later Nolan later got a strong idea of how the agency felt about the Donovan peace initiative.

On their final trip to Cuba, in April 1963, Donovan and Nolan brought with them a gift for water-enthusiast Castro—a skin-diving suit. “We knew that Castro liked to skin dive, and I don’t know whether it was Jim’s idea or whether it was suggested by someone in the CIA, but a skin-diving suit was purchased at Abercrombie & Fitch in New York,” recalled Nolan. “The guy who purchased it was a lawyer for the agency, and he bought and delivered it to Donovan. Then we flew to Havana and were driven to Castro’s beach house at Varadero and the following day we drove with Castro to the Bay of Pigs. When we got there, we went out on Castro’s boat and he put on the skin diving suit and jumped into the water, where he speared a half dozen fish. Then he climbed out of the water, took the suit off, and we had lunch. That was the last I saw of the suit or heard about it until thirteen years later. Flash forward to the Church Committee hearings. You can imagine how I felt when I heard the evening news that day.”

What Nolan heard on TV that evening in 1975 stunned and infuriated him. Among the schemes devised by the CIA to kill Castro, the Senate investigation revealed, was a plan to give him a skin-diving suit dusted “with a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin disease” and a scuba “breathing apparatus contaminated with tubercle bacilli.” The CIA’s scientific wizard of extermination, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, told the committee that a diving suit had been purchased and contaminated, but he did not know if it was actually delivered.

It is uncertain whether the diving suit Donovan delivered to Castro was the one prepared in the CIA death labs. Perhaps it was and the toxins failed to do their job. CIA spokesman Sam Halpern claimed it was not—he said that the plan was dropped because Donovan had already given Castro a suit on his own initiative.

But Nolan was convinced that the CIA intended to use him and Donovan—two men who were pursuing peace with Castro on behalf of the Kennedy administration—to kill the Cuban leader instead. After he heard the shocking news story that evening in 1975, the former Kennedy aide picked up his phone to confront a CIA official he knew. “I said, ‘Did you see that story about what was disclosed at the Church hearings today?’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry, it never happened. That was just some crazy idea some guy at the agency had and nothing ever came of it.’ And I said, ‘What happened to the guy?’—thinking they should have taken him out and shot him! And he said, ‘Nothing happened to him—he was just a squirrel in the basement laboratory.’

“This plot was clearly hatched without Jim Donovan’s or my knowledge. Obviously he and I were not going to be part of anything that would be injurious to Castro.”

But, it seems, the CIA was not above contemplating using two Kennedy peace envoys as unwitting assassins. If the diving suit that Donovan and Nolan carried to Cuba was indeed contaminated, the agency showed as much disregard for the safety of these two Kennedy envoys as it did for Castro’s life.

Donovan and Nolan might have been treated with callous disregard by the CIA, but the man they reported to—Robert Kennedy—was treated as an enemy leader, a hostile strongman who had to be kept under constant surveillance. The agency felt the need to maintain this vigilant watch over the attorney general even after his brother’s assassination, when his power was greatly diminished. In March 1964, JM/WAVE station chief Ted Shackley wrote a memo to his CIA boss, Desmond FitzGerald, boasting of his success at recruiting Miami journalists as CIA assets, including Al Burt, the Latin America foreign news editor for the
Miami Herald
. It was essential for the CIA to enlist journalists like Burt, Shackley wrote, to ensure that the huge JM/WAVE station, the agency’s second largest operation after its Langley headquarters, did not attract “the publicity spotlight” of the southern Florida media. Media assets like Burt also gave JM/WAVE “an outlet into the press which could be used for surfacing certain select propaganda items,” as well as serving as useful informers for the agency, Shackley noted.