Reclaiming History (297 page)

K
ennedy redeemed himself, in part, with the exiled Cuban community by eventually giving more support, in every way, to the anti-Castro movement than ever before, though again, there was no promise that U.S. forces would fight Castro. “Before the invasion when we asked for arms it was difficult to get them, but now it’s easier,” said Cuban exile leader Manolo Ray.
¹⁴³
“Cuba must not be abandoned to the Communists,” Kennedy told the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 20, the day after the Bay of Pigs debacle, adding that with respect to his administration’s policy of nonintervention, “Our restraint is not inexhaustible.” He spoke of the “new and deeper struggle.”
¹⁴⁴
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The exiles, still wanting to believe that Kennedy’s heart was in the right place, dug in even harder.

In the latter part of 1961, the Special Group (formally called NSC 5412, the secret, informal, National Security Council subcommittee that approved or disapproved of all proposed CIA covert activities) was augmented by two new members, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor, for the express purpose of overseeing Operation Mongoose, the government’s plan established after the Bay of Pigs to remove Castro from power.
¹⁴⁵
That the new group, called “Special Group (Augmented),” and Operation Mongoose were a presidential initiative was made clear by the creating document, a November 22, 1961, memorandum from presidential assistant Richard Goodwin to the secretaries of state and defense, the director of the CIA, attorney general, General Edward Lansdale, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Paragraph one of the memorandum stated that the object was “to help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime and establish a free Cuba. All available assets will be directed to this and as a matter of urgent national priority.” The effort was to be “under the general guidance of the Attorney General [RFK], with [Air Force] General [Edward] Lansdale as his chief of operations. The NSC 5412 group will be kept informed of activities.” Though the CIA would be more heavily involved in carrying out the mission than any other federal agency, JFK had shifted the primary supervision of the effort away from the CIA, which had failed him so badly in the Bay of Pigs, to the Department of Defense at the Pentagon, a clear slap in the face to the CIA.

Lansdale was a counterinsurgency specialist in the Office of Special Operations of the Defense Department who had worked in U.S. covert operations in the Philippines (where he successfully helped put down a growing Communist insurgency with what some felt were “brilliant” counterrevolutionary tactics) and Vietnam, and became the model for the hero in the best-selling novel
The Ugly American
who courageously fought against Communist guerillas in these two nations. President Kennedy once called Lansdale America’s answer to James Bond. Although raids on Cuban installations by exile groups were to continue vigorously under Mongoose, the main part of Lansdale’s plan to overthrow Castro, which he presented on January 18, 1962, was to organize anti-Castro Cubans (both exiles and those still living in Cuba) into “a movement
within
Cuba to the point where it could mount an insurrection” against Castro’s regime. A plan, by the way, that the CIA felt was unrealistic from the beginning.
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As Lansdale told the Church Committee, he wanted “the [Cuban] people themselves [to] overthrow the Castro regime.”
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Severely disrupting the Cuban economy (by an economic embargo, commando raids blowing up oil refineries, chemical plants, etc., and sabotaging cargo to Cuba from other countries) would supposedly incite discontent by the Cuban people with Castro.
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The next day, January 19, at a meeting of principal Mongoose participants held in Robert Kennedy’s office, Kennedy said that the solution to the Cuban problem was a “top priority,” and that “no time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared.”
¹⁴⁹
Robert Kennedy was, by all accounts, not just a figurehead in the administration’s efforts to overthrow Castro. “Bobby Kennedy was running it, hour by hour,” Alexander Haig says. “I was a part of it, as deputy to Joe Califano and military assistant to General Vance. We were conducting two raids a week at the height of that program against mainland Cuba…Weekly reports were rendered to Bobby Kennedy. He had a very tight hand on the operation.”
¹⁵⁰
Sergio Arcacha, an anti-Castro Cuban exile heavily involved in the effort to overthrow Castro, told
Life
magazine reporter Holland McCombs, “We used to call Bobby Kennedy and he would take care of it.”
¹⁵¹
Richard Helms, who as the CIA’s deputy director of plans had overall supervision of the CIA’s Mongoose effort, told the Church Committee that he and RFK “were constantly in touch with each other” with respect to Mongoose, even down to details like RFK asking him if a particular land sabotage effort was organized yet and had it left. “The Attorney General was on the phone to me, he was on the phone to Mr. Harvey [operational head of Mongoose]…He was on the phone even to people on Harvey’s staff, as I recall it.”
¹⁵²
An October 4, 1962, “Memorandum for Record” of the minutes of a meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) on that day starts by saying, “The Attorney General opened the meeting by saying that higher authority [presumably the president] is concerned about progress on the
Mongoose
program and feels that more priority should be given to trying to mount sabotage operations…He urged that ‘massive activity’ be mounted within the entire
Mongoose
framework.”
^153
*

Called by many the “secret war” to overthrow Castro, Mongoose
,
which it should be repeated commenced
after
the Bay of Pigs invasion, was the best example of the CIA becoming a paramilitary organization. Buying its own fleet of ships and boats, even planes, the CIA registered its ownership under fictitious companies, altered them for combat, and employed civilian mercenaries and Cuban exiles to operate them.
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The HSCA wrote that the nerve center of Operation Mongoose, the United States’ new and deeper struggle against Castro,

was established in the heartland of exile activity, Miami. There, on a secluded, heavily wooded 1,571 acre tract that was part of the University of Miami’s south campus, the CIA set up a front operation, an electronics firm called Zenith Technological Services. Its code name was JM/WAVE and it soon became the largest CIA installation anywhere in the world outside of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The JM/WAVE station
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had, at the height of its activities in 1962, a staff of more than 300 Americans, mostly case officers. Each case officer employed from four to ten Cuban “principal agents” who, in turn, would be responsible for between ten and thirty regular agents…It was the JM/WAVE station that monitored, more or less controlled, and in most cases funded the anti-Castro groups. It was responsible for the great upsurge in anti-Castro activity and the lifted spirits of the Cuban exiles as American arms and weapons flowed freely through the training camps and guerilla bases spotted around South Florida. Anti-Castro raiding parties that left from small secret islands in the Florida Keys were given the “green light” by agents of the JM/WAVE station. The result of it all was that there grew in the Cuban exile community a renewed confidence in the U.S. Government’s sincerity and loyalty to its cause.
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And from February of 1962 on, JM/WAVE and the Cuban exiles it managed conducted a great number of missions against mainland Cuba with varying degrees of success.
¹⁵⁶
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B
ut a second betrayal awaited the Cuban exiles. As the major U.S. concession in the agreement between Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to resolve the Cuban missile crisis (and in return for the Soviets’ withdrawing from Cuban soil their missiles with nuclear warheads targeted on U.S. cities), in late October of 1962 Kennedy, in addition to secretly agreeing to withdraw fifteen Jupiter missiles of ours from Turkey, made a “no invasion” pledge regarding Cuba.
¹⁵⁷
The missile crisis started at 9:00 a.m. on October 14, 1962, when a CIA U-2 spy plane and low-level reconnaissance flights confirmed what CIA informants in Cuba had been reporting: the existence of launching pads and Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, installed that summer, as well as medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) bases under construction. (Later, two intercontinental-range ballistic missile [IRBM] bases were found to be under construction.) At the time, the CIA estimated that ten thousand Soviet troops were in Cuba. The actual number, the Soviets would later admit, was forty thousand.

The first major meeting of the Kennedy administration on the ominous missile sightings was in the Cabinet Room on the morning of October 16, when the CIA made a formal presentation, with photographs and charts, of its findings to the president and eleven key advisers, including several members of his cabinet, who would meet regularly with him or RFK throughout the crisis as an ad hoc group called “Ex Comm” (the Executive Committee of the National Security Council). The group consisted of Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon, RFK, CIA Director John McCone, Undersecretary of State George Ball, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, Ambassador-at-Large Llewellyn Thompson, special presidential counsel Ted Sorenson, special assistant to the president for national security affairs McGeorge Bundy, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor. The group, which lived and worked together almost around the clock during the crisis, heard the advice of others and was sometimes joined in its deliberations by people like former secretary of state Dean Acheson and UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson.
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No corresponding special policy group was created by the Kremlin to deal with the crisis, Khrushchev relying on his existing foreign policy advisers.
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For thirteen tense days and nights thereafter, Kennedy and his top advisers deliberated on how to handle the world’s closest brush with a nuclear holocaust, the group predictably breaking down into hawks and doves. Would it be a blockade, or air strikes to knock out the missile sites, or an outright invasion of Cuba—air strikes or an invasion carrying a possible risk of the Soviets retaliating militarily and triggering an eventual nuclear war? “I guess this is the week I earn my salary,” JFK would say.
¹⁶⁰

With World War III hanging in the balance, not all of “the President’s men” were urging a peaceful resolution. In an October 19, 1962, exchange with the president, General Curtis LeMay, air force chief of staff, said, “This [proposed] blockade and political action, I see leading into war…This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich…I just don’t see any other solution except direct military action
right now
.”
¹⁶¹
Indeed, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a military invasion, not a blockade, was called for.
^162
*
Not only called for, but, per JFK assistant Arthur Schlesinger, desired. “Some of them [members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] were quite disappointed when a…peaceful settlement came about.”
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Bobby Kennedy told the
New York Times
in 1964 that the Ex Comm group was split 7 to 5 on whether to bomb or blockade, though he did not say which course the majority preferred. In his later book,
Thirteen Days
, he says the majority favored a blockade, and that he and McNamara were on the side of a blockade, but that Acheson joined the military in advocating bombing. RFK told the
Times
that when his brother asked his intelligence officers to estimate how many innocent civilians would be killed in Cuba by bombing the missile sites and they reported back twenty-five thousand, he ruled this military option out.
¹⁶⁴

In a televised speech to the nation on the evening of October 22, 1962, in which he told Americans in a fair amount of detail what had transpired to that point and his decision to initiate a “strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba,” Kennedy called on Premier Khrushchev to immediately “halt and eliminate this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace,” by “withdrawing these weapons from Cuba.” Kennedy said, “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard
any
nuclear missile launched from Cuba against
any
nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Kennedy signed a “proclamation of interdiction” the following day which went into effect on October 24 at 10:00 a.m., the order imposing a naval blockade halting all Soviet ships carrying weapons and warheads to Cuba. That same day, Soviet ships that were heading for Cuba altered course and avoided contact with U.S. ships blockading the island.

A flurry of diplomatic exchanges followed for several days and Khrushchev eventually backed down and acceded to Kennedy’s demands, messaging Kennedy on October 28, 1962, “I regard with great understanding your concern and the concern of the United States people in connection with the fact that the weapons you describe as ‘offensive’
*
are formidable weapons indeed. Both you and we understand what kind of weapons these are. In order to eliminate as rapidly as possible the conflict which endangers the cause of peace…the Soviet Government…has given a new order to dismantle [these] arms…and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union.” Kennedy messaged Khrushchev back that same day, praising the latter’s “statesmanlike decision” as an “important and constructive contribution to peace.”
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The crisis was over. It had been a crisis “that historians have called the most dangerous moment in recorded time.”
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Secretary of Defense McNamara would later recall that a Saturday night during the crisis was a “beautiful fall evening,” and “as I left President Kennedy’s office to return to the Pentagon, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night.”
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†