Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (28 page)

Kennedy agreed with Goodwin, saying he wanted “to play it very quiet with Castro because he didn’t want to give Castro the opportunity to blame the United States for his troubles,” which Kennedy believed would come from his heavy-handed control of the Cuban economy and secret U.S. operations subverting his government. In September, when Kennedy met with former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek, he explained that he was determined to ignore Cuba, “thus depriving Castro of the publicity on which he flourishes,” and avoid complaints that the United States was “a positive threat to the independence, sovereignty and right to self-determination of nations in the Hemisphere.” Similarly, when Kennedy met Argentina’s President Arturo Frondizi at New York’s Carlyle Hotel at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly’s 1961 fall session, he said it was important to discourage impressions of “the United States versus Cuba, or of Castro versus Kennedy, because a debate of this kind would only enhance Castro’s prestige.” It was “important not to leave the impression of the United States, great imperialist power from the North, attacking poor, brave Cuba, which is the impression Castro wishes to give.”

At the same time, however, Kennedy remained determined to undermine Castro’s communist regime through all possible clandestine means. He signed on to proposals from Goodwin to quietly intensify economic pressure on Cuba. Economic warfare, including sabotage by anti-Castro paramilitary forces using American-supplied equipment to destroy industrial plants such as refineries, was to be a high priority. Propaganda aiming to convince Cubans and others in Latin America that Castro was sacrificing Cuba’s welfare to international communism was another weapon in the anti-Castro campaign. Kennedy told Frondizi that “[i]t was important to take action to discredit the Cuban revolution, identifying it as foreign, alien, and anti-Christian, and not permitting it to be considered as a revolution that was trying to improve the living conditions of the Cuban people.” He hoped that others in the hemisphere would understand that Castro aimed to subvert their governments and that the Cuban leader was as much a problem for them as for the United States.

But White House discussions of how to bring Castro down made clear that President Kennedy and his brother were involved in score settling. Castro had bested them in the first clash and they were determined to see to his demise. They assigned responsibility for the project to a new set of advisers. Because McNamara, Bundy, Schlesinger, Sorensen, and Goodwin had fallen short on ousting Castro and his communist government, Kennedy turned to other planners and operatives. On November 3, he and Bobby set up Operation Mongoose, with Bobby at the head of the program. He expected “to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites & Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate,” Bobby recorded in some notes he made after initial discussion of the planning.

While Bobby assumed the central role in directing the operations, his principal collaborators were Taylor, Brigadier General Edward G. Lansdale, and William Harvey at the CIA, with a supporting cast of approximately four hundred CIA agents located at agency headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and its Miami station. Bundy was made the chairman of an interagency group known as SGA, Special Group Augmented, which was charged with direction of Mongoose operations, but it was Lansdale and Harvey who were instructed to develop and implement anti-Castro actions. Although McNamara wouldn’t say until much later—“We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter”—his skepticism about investing too much in bringing down Castro had registered sufficiently on the president and Bobby to keep him in the background.

Likewise, Bundy was no enthusiast about making Castro a prime foreign policy consideration. True, he kept on his desk only two boxes, one marked “President’s box” and the other “Cuba,” but he saw the focus on Castro as a case of overkill. He thought Bobby was trying to repair the damage to his brother’s standing from the Bay of Pigs and seemed to view the conflict with Castro as some kind of contest or game: “It was almost as simple as goddammit, we lost the first round, let’s win the second.” The Alliance for Progress was one counterweight to Castro’s threat and Mongoose was the covert side of the campaign.

Whatever ambivalence McNamara and Bundy had about the attorney general as the lead operative in trying to bring down Castro and making this a leading foreign policy goal, they passively went along with the plans. The shadow of Bowles’s dissent and displacement hung over the new initiative. They weren’t going to challenge something the president and Bobby were so eager to do. But it didn’t quiet their doubts about whether the administration could actually affect Cuban affairs. McNamara and Bundy were happy to be largely shut out of the administration’s new anti-Castro campaign. They took their counsel from a National Intelligence Estimate. At the same time the White House set Operation Mongoose in motion, they read an NIE report saying that Castro had “sufficient popular support and repressive capabilities to cope with any internal threat likely to develop within the foreseeable future. . . . The bulk of the population” accepted the regime and “substantial numbers still support it with enthusiasm.” Moreover, Castro’s “capabilities for repression” were well ahead of “potentialities for active resistance.”

Yet the administration or at least the Kennedys and their new team of advisers didn’t want to hear about limitations; they wanted to know what could be done. On November 22, Kennedy asked John McCone, the new director of the CIA, who had replaced Dulles, to give him “an immediate plan of action” to overthrow Castro, and Kennedy instructed his principal national security officials to make this a high, if not the highest, priority with a commitment of all available assets. Similarly, Bobby began hectoring Lansdale and Harvey to move aggressively against Castro. “Why can’t you get things cooking like 007?” Bobby asked Harvey, whom he and the president hoped might prove to be their James Bond. When Harvey described problems in training CIA agents for infiltration of the island, Bobby sarcastically proposed to take them to Hickory Hill, his home in rural Virginia, where he would train them himself. “And what will you train them in? Baby-sitting?” Harvey snidely asked Kennedy, who had seven children.

Lansdale was the president’s and Bobby’s great hope for toppling Castro’s government through well-disguised skulduggery. There is not a single reference to Lansdale by Kennedy in any of his public comments, but the idea was to keep his involvement secret or at least as low profile as possible. Lansdale had a track record for brilliant secret operations, and if it were common knowledge that he had been tapped to fix his attention on Cuba, it would have revealed Kennedy’s obsession with Castro.

The fifty-three-year-old Lansdale was an up-through-the-ranks commissioned officer with a background in advertising. Entering the service in 1943 at the age of thirty-five, he was an OSS operative in World War II. At the close of the war, he served in the Philippines, where he made a name for himself as a counterinsurgency adviser to Ramon Magsaysay, the Philippines’ national defense secretary. He helped the Philippine army build its intelligence services, and in collaboration with Magsaysay, he devised a successful strategy for combating the Hukbalahaps, the Philippines’ communist guerrillas, who were trying to overturn the pro-American government.

Lansdale’s success in the Philippines brought him to Saigon as the CIA station chief, where he hoped to defeat Viet Cong communist guerrillas with the same counterinsurgency strategy: By contrast with advocates of repressive military action like Kennedy’s new Green Beret Army units, who declared “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow,” Lansdale preached a soft policy of wooing the Vietnamese with actions that made the United States appear as “pro-people.” It was an approach born of his conviction that American values had universal appeal, and echoed Wendell Willkie’s 1943 bestselling book,
One World
, in which Willkie argued that the Russians and Chinese were adopting American ideals. The success of the United States in transforming Germany and Japan from totalitarian societies to representative democracies was evidence to Lansdale that missionary diplomacy was a realistic means for bringing adversaries to our side. As Lansdale said in a later description of his work in the Philippines and Vietnam, “I took my American beliefs with me into these Asian struggles, as Tom Paine would have done.”

Two novels in the fifties, Graham Greene’s
The Quiet American
(1956) and William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s
The Ugly American
(1958), encouraged many to see Lansdale as the principal character in both books: Greene’s CIA agent Alden Pyle, whose hopes of finding a “Third Force” in Vietnam between the communists and France’s colonial occupiers echoed Lansdale’s idea of promoting American democratic values; and
The Ugly American
’s Colonel Edwin B. Hillendale, whose aims to pass along American ideas to Vietnamese peasants resembled Lansdale’s strategy for defeating the Viet Cong. Lansdale’s appeal to the Kennedys rested on his opposition to working with repressive dictators against communists for the sake of American national security or relying on U.S. forces to overturn leaders tying themselves to Moscow and Beijing. Instead, he urged defeat of left autocratic governments through support for indigenous democrats proposing to serve the people with policies advancing economic development and social justice.

As much as the Kennedys preferred his plans for toppling Castro, Lansdale found himself in competition with the CIA’s William Harvey on how to change the Cuban government. The forty-six-year-old Harvey grew up in Indiana, where he earned a law degree and served as an FBI agent from 1940 to 1947. He was an unstable, erratic personality and Hoover had fired him for drunkenness and insubordination. It didn’t bar him from entering the newly organized CIA, where he established himself as a master spy by building a tunnel between West and East Berlin that allowed the U.S. military to listen in on Soviet telephone conversations.

In 1961, Harvey became the head of a CIA executive action committee, dubbed “capability,” committed to assassinating Castro. Plans to kill Castro had been hatched in August 1960 during Eisenhower’s presidency. No scheme was too nutty for the CIA operatives charged with the assignment: The plans included getting Castro to smoke a botulism-filled cigar that could kill him at first puff; poison capsules hidden in a jar of cold cream that a Castro mistress was supposed to put in his drink, but couldn’t use when she found that they had melted; and a contract with a former FBI agent with mob contacts who tried to put lethal pills in Castro’s drinks or food. After the Bay of Pigs, discussion of assassination plans were suspended; they were reactivated in April 1962, however, with poison pills, assassination teams, and then an exploding seashell at a site where Castro might be skin diving becoming the weapons of choice. When nothing came of these plots, in February 1963 the CIA gave up trying to assassinate Castro.

Harvey’s principal assignment in Operation Mongoose was to promote infiltration by exiles into Cuba, where they were supposed to commit acts of sabotage that would destabilize Castro’s government. But nothing he initiated came to any constructive end and Bobby Kennedy and Lansdale saw him as an unreliable loose cannon. He was in fact a paranoid character, notorious for carrying guns, saying, “If you ever know as many secrets as I do, then you’ll know why I carry a gun.” Although Bobby disliked and distrusted him, Harvey’s credentials as a resourceful agent had allowed him to join the Mongoose team. Harvey reciprocated Bobby’s antagonism. One of his CIA colleagues said he “hated Bobby Kennedy’s guts with a purple passion.”

The Joint Chiefs also got into the act. Lyman Lemnitzer endorsed a madcap plan called Operation Northwoods. It proposed terrorist acts blamed on Castro against Cuban exiles in Miami, including assassinations and the possible destruction of a boatload of Cubans escaping the island. Terrorist strikes in other Florida cities were to be considered in order to inflame enough Americans and win support from the world community for an invasion that could bring down Castro’s communist regime. Kennedy rejected the plot as too extreme and the memo was too embarrassing to see the light of day until the National Security Archive at George Washington University forced it into the open in 2001. Kennedy may have rejected the plot as excessive, but it was the atmosphere set by Mongoose that gave Lemnitzer license to suggest such outlandish plans.

Unhappily for the president and Bobby, Lansdale had no better luck in deciphering how to topple Castro than did Harvey and the hundreds of other CIA operatives assigned the job. Lansdale’s idea was to foment an internal revolution, but Castro’s grip on his country was too firm and Lansdale’s schemes were no more effective than Harvey’s: a chemical assault on the sugar crop that would destabilize the economy; appeals to Castro’s government associates to see him as undermining the island’s well-being; a bizarre scheme to persuade Cubans that Castro was the Antichrist by exciting expectations of the Second Coming with star shells launched from a U.S. submarine off the Cuban coast—“elimination by illumination,” one skeptic called it; and finally, a six-part program with thirty-three steps or tasks that would produce “the Touchdown Play,” an internal revolt turning out the communists in October 1962. Cuba had turned into one of those problems about which everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

While nuclear talks and Cuba bedeviled Kennedy’s hopes for some kind of international progress, worries that Soviet-American differences over Berlin could erupt in war shadowed everything the White House did in the summer of 1961. For Kennedy, the Berlin problem now stood as a kind of two-front war. On one hand, he needed to convince Khrushchev that he could not be pushed around and forced into humiliating concessions on Berlin. On the other, he wished to mute the domestic pressures for military steps toward a confrontation with Moscow. On July 3,
Newsweek
ran a story allegedly coming out of the Pentagon describing preparations for war, including “some demonstration of U.S. intent to employ nuclear weapons,” as Acheson had advised. No one could identify the source of the leak, but the White House was a likely candidate: It not only sent a sharp message to Khrushchev but also blunted demands from Dean Acheson and Alsop for stronger leadership in confronting the Soviet threat.