The Arrogance of Power (29 page)

Pawley had grown up in Cuba, spoke excellent Spanish, owned the Havana bus system and gas company, and had made it his business to foster personal relationships with both President Batista and the dictator of the neighboring Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. Not far into the future Pawley would choose Bebe Rebozo as his companion on a journey to try to persuade Trujillo to abdicate power. Just days before Batista fled, Pawley had flown to Havana—after discussions with President Eisenhower and the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division chief, J. C. King—to urge him to step down.

At that point the objective had been damage containment. As events spiraled out of control, Pawley had hoped Batista could be replaced by a military junta, or by any viable right-wing alternative to Fidel Castro. Pawley would claim that he had discovered Castro was a Communist years earlier, and although his story of how he discovered that was probably untrue, facts did not much concern him when it came to anticommunism.
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Pawley had been involved in the disinformation campaign that accompanied the CIA's Guatemalan coup of 1954; and afterward he served on a panel that recommended the creation of “an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the [Communist] enemy.”

After the Cuban Revolution an outraged Pawley began talking about having Castro killed. “Find me one man, just one man,” he told a Miami acquaintance, “who can go it alone and get Castro. I'll pay anything, almost anything.” In the months and years that followed he was to be, as Pawley's niece told the author, “up to his eyebrows” in U.S. efforts to topple Castro. One of his key contacts in that endeavor was Richard Nixon.

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One rainy April weekend in 1959 Nixon and Castro met in Washington. The Cuban, just three months in power and still acclaimed by most as the guerrilla hero who had ousted a cruel dictator, had been astonishing America since his
arrival. The beard, the ten-inch cigar, and the army fatigues had bewitched thousands. A cheering throng estimated at thirty-five thousand had welcomed him at a rally in New York's Central Park. To the general public Castro seemed like an amalgam of George Washington, Billy Graham, and Barnum and Bailey. To the capital's politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen, he was as yet still a puzzle.

Before leaving Havana, Castro had perceived a dilemma in the possibility of a meeting with President Eisenhower. He hoped to see him yet worried that it would appear as though he—just like the sort of Latin American potentate he despised—was “selling out.” In the event, Eisenhower remained pointedly out of town, and Castro had to make do with the vice president. “The president of the United States didn't even invite me for a cup of coffee,” Castro grumbled later. “They sent me Nixon. . . .” The Cuban had refused an invitation to meet Nixon at his home and settled for the vice president's office at the Capitol. Nixon later claimed there was nothing he had wanted less that weekend than to meet “the new Cuban dictator.”

Given the prolonged conflict to come, the encounter between America's most prominent anti-Communist and the suspect revolutionary was historic. They sat talking for three hours beneath a chandelier that had once hung in Jefferson's White House—alone, because Castro had decided that his English was good enough to allow him to get by without interpreters.

The vice president thought Castro seemed “nervous and tense,” “looked like a revolutionary, and talked like an idealistic college professor. . . .” For his part, Castro found Nixon oddly young, almost “a teenager, not in appearance but in behavior . . . a bit superficial,” though not hostile. Nixon said he spoke to Castro “like a Dutch uncle,” severely but kindly. His long report to Eisenhower and Dulles, written soon afterward, suggests he lectured the Cuban in the paternalistic way that perennially offended Latin American visitors to Washington.

“That son of a bitch Nixon,” Castro was to complain, “he treated me badly,” explaining what he meant in a conversation that night with the lawyer who represented Cuba in the United States, Constantine Kangles. “Nixon didn't look me in the eye,” Castro said; “he looked up in the air, at the wall, all over, but not at me. I didn't ask for money, but I did say we needed help. He told me I'd been a fine fellow, put in plenty of good reforms. Then he said that in about six months we could meet and talk again. Six months! He knew Cuba was broke, that Batista had looted the treasury. What he was effectively telling us to do was to go and starve to death.”

“Castro didn't believe Nixon was interested in helping,” Kangles remembered in 1999. “He thought Nixon wanted economic catastrophe to hit Cuba, so that the people would overthrow Castro. He thought Nixon just wanted to see him toppled.”

The pair emerged from their meeting “with their arms around each other's shoulders,” said Bob Stephenson, a State Department official who had waited
outside. Dean Rusk, then heading the Rockefeller Foundation, recalled seeing them on television and hearing Nixon say, “We're going to work with this man.”
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Behind the scenes Nixon took a different stance. Slapping his knee, he told Stephenson that Castro had no understanding of democracy. Closeted with his own aides Herb Klein and General Hughes, he said Castro was an “outright Communist and he's going to be a real danger.” He told Jack Drown, a close California friend, that Castro was a “dedicated Communist, who's going to be a thorn in the side of us all.”
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In a conversation with the former Costa Rican president José Figueres, Nixon commented that Castro had made a “terrible impression” on him. He “characterized Fidel as a lunatic,” Figueres recalled. “He was scared as hell; I could see it in his eyes.”

Castro meanwhile succeeded in convincing others in the government, including the CIA's senior expert on communism in Latin America, Gerry Droller, that he was not a Communist. “Castro,” Droller announced delightedly after meeting him, “is not only not a Communist, but he is a strong anti-Communist fighter.”

Whether Castro was committed to communism at that point remains a question to which only he knows the answer. There is some evidence that at the time he met Nixon he was attempting to go his own way, at odds with avowed Communists like his brother Raúl. Cuban leftists had even told Soviet contacts they suspected Castro was a tool of the
Americans.
In the nineties a former Soviet diplomat insisted that Castro made no approaches to Moscow until the year after his meeting with Nixon.

Some have argued that Castro merely sought to use communism as a vehicle for his personal style of one-man rule. He was neurotically anti-American, but that is not necessarily the same thing as being a Communist.

“The one fact we can be sure of,” Nixon wrote in his report about Castro to Eisenhower, “is that he has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. . . . He seems to be sincere, he is either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline—my guess is the former. . . . But because he has the power to lead . . . we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.”

“We will check in a year,” Eisenhower scrawled on another report about the Castro visit. In the months that followed, Castro—assisted by William Pawley, Allen Dulles, and Nixon—made up his mind for him. The Cuban leader soon seized American businesses in Cuba, businesses representing a billion-dollar investment, and started to arm rebels in other Latin countries. Nixon began urging the National Security Council that it was time to “find a few dramatic things to do . . . to indicate that we would not allow ourselves to be kicked around. . . .”

According to a former cabinet secretary, Robert Keith Gray, “There were no executive secrets between Eisenhower and Nixon.” In part because of how he had functioned during the president's illnesses, Nixon now saw himself as
the president's deputy. He attended two hundred NSC meetings and presided over twenty-six of them. His assistant for NSC affairs, Brigadier General Robert Cushman, brought him a full intelligence briefing every morning.

Nixon, CIA officials had discovered when he sat in for Eisenhower, was an “apt and eager” student of intelligence matters. One of them recalled that he had a “vicarious interest in the supposedly romantic side of spying . . . like a child who wants to know what lies behind a magician's illusions. Technique and detail were Nixon's interests . . . how to open and reseal a letter without leaving any marks, or how to detect, move or install a bug. . . .”

The agency had come to treat the vice president as its “friend at court” and made certain he received a regular flow of intelligence. This would explain why, when NSC deputy executive secretary Marion Boggs tried to carry out his duty of briefing Nixon's staff, he found they often “didn't see fit to talk to us very much.” Nixon's more direct line to U.S. intelligence made such conversations unnecessary.

At the NSC meeting on December 16, CIA Director Dulles said it was time to do “a number of things in the covert field” on Cuba. Behind the scenes, Nixon was also listening to advice from William Pawley, who had argued from the start that Castro should be killed. Pawley's friend at the top at CIA, J. C. King, had just days earlier sent Dulles a list of four “recommended actions.” One of them, which Dulles approved, proposed “Thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro. . . . Many informed people believe that the disappearance of Fidel would greatly accelerate the fall of the present government.” It was the first recorded official reference to the assassination track. The notion of murdering certain other foreign leaders was to come up in National Security Council sessions, although always veiled by euphemisms. “Removal” or “dispose of,” for example, would be used, but never the word “assassination.”

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Eisenhower let the dogs of covert war loose against Castro, in a more general way, at a meeting in March 1960. Dulles told him there was no hope of living with the Cuban leader, and the president approved a plan the CIA had been working on for months. It called not for an invasion—that was to come later—but for the creation of a paramilitary force made up of exiles, a resistance network inside Cuba, and the formation of a moderate leadership capable of replacing the Castro regime once it was overthrown. The agency called the scheme Operation Pluto, after the Roman god of the dead. Castro was allotted a cryptonym, AM/THUG.
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To Nixon, Pluto was a potential stepping-stone to the goal that motivated him more than the overthrow of any Caribbean dictator, the presidency. Thomas McCoy, a CIA man offered an assignment on the project, was told there was “substantial pressure coming from the White House to get the thing
settled by October of 1960, so that this would not be an issue that Nixon had to deal with in the presidential campaign.”

As Nixon viewed it, the anti-Castro effort could work either for or against him. Unresolved, it could be detrimental to Republican chances. Successfully handled, and at the right time, it would be a highly effective vote getter. In spite of Eisenhower's admonition that Pluto should be held in utmost secrecy, Nixon spoke of the plans with four of his staff. He told his press aide, Herb Klein, that the toppling of Castro would be “a real trump card.” “He wanted it to occur in October, before the election,” Klein said in 1997. “The only people who knew his role exactly were himself and his aide General Cushman.”

Some commentators have resisted the notion that Nixon was a prime mover in the Cuba project, let alone a party to plots to murder Castro. “By no stretch of the imagination,” CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer wrote in an in-house report, “was Nixon the architect of the Bay of Pigs.” Perhaps not, but Pluto did not evolve into an invasion plan until the last months of the Eisenhower presidency. Pfeiffer did note that Nixon and Bob Cushman attended dozens of meetings on Operation Pluto. “The Vice President,” he said, “had a great interest in the Agency's progress in organizing the ouster of Castro.”

The last U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Philip Bonsal, stated flatly that Nixon was “one of the earliest sponsors . . . in a sense the father of the operation” to topple Castro. In private, apparently, Nixon claimed it was his initiative. President Figueres of Costa Rica, whose country the CIA hoped to use for covert training, was often in Washington in 1960. “Nixon,” he said, “told me he had told the CIA to prepare for an invasion of Cuba. He called Allen Dulles and said, ‘Castro has to be overthrown. You try the best you can.' . . .”
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A senior CIA veteran, Sam Halpern, has said he had the impression Nixon “more or less” became the White House action officer on Cuba. “It's my understanding,” Alexander Haig said in 1998, “that Nixon was Eisenhower's point man. . . .”
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The agency officer who directed Operation Pluto was Jacob Esterline, who two years earlier had encountered Nixon during his Venezuela trip. He found the vice president a “heavy monitor” of CIA activities, through his aide Cushman. Howard Hunt, the CIA's liaison with Cuban exile leaders, has recalled a luncheon meeting with Cushman and Esterline in the summer of 1960. According to Hunt, Cushman described his boss as the “chief architect . . . the honcho” of the project. He stressed that Nixon wanted nothing to go wrong, telling Hunt to call him day or night should he need “high-level intervention.”
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