The Arrogance of Power (30 page)

It became obvious to many that summer that Nixon was growing impatient with the delay in dealing with Cuba. “How the hell are they coming? How are the boys doing at the Institute?” he would ask Cushman, referring to the CIA. “What in the world are they doing that takes months?” Nixon, with no significant military experience, talked as though the Pluto operation involved little more than some “rifle training.” Eisenhower, the veteran
professional, urged caution. “He knew the perils,” Cushman said dryly later. “Nixon didn't.”

By September a top man on the CIA's Cuba project, Tracy Barnes, would find himself confronted by a colleague asking, “What's the hurry? . . . Why are we working our asses off on this?” Barnes knew, as did Cushman, that it was Nixon, focused on his presidential ambitions, who was applying the pressure.

To the frustration of the CIA planners, who hoped to replace Castro with democratically minded Cubans, Nixon took advice on the matter from William Pawley. The conservative Floridian, who also had Eisenhower's respectful attention, kept promoting the idea of using the far-right exiles. “Ike, Nixon, and Pawley . . . don't know it,” joked Richard Bissell, the overall head of the CIA's Cuban effort, “but we're the real revolutionaries.” His men stalled the exile extremists, who complained to Pawley, and he in turn pressed their case with Nixon.

Nixon became involved in one of the rightist intrigues, in a way that suggests a penchant for hands-on skulduggery that went far beyond what was permissible in an elected official—economic sabotage on the grand scale and later, allegedly, conspiracy to murder. It brought Nixon together with Mario García Kohly, a middle-aged exile who had been a prominent financier and politician before Batista's fall. Kohly placed a special emphasis on disruption of the Cuban economy, a position entirely in line with that of Nixon, Pawley, and the CIA.

CIA Director Dulles had been avidly interested in a suggestion made at a Washington dinner party by Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond spy novels. One way to destabilize Castro, he said, would be to flood Cuba with fake currency. Soon, at a National Security Council meeting, Nixon was urging economic warfare. Failing swift action, he said, the United States would soon be known not as Uncle Sam but as Uncle Sucker.

Kohly gravitated naturally toward Nixon. By one account, his first patron on arriving in Florida had been none other than Bebe Rebozo, himself a Cuban-American who—Henry Kissinger would one day note—“hated Castro with a fierce Latin passion.” According to Kohly's son, Mario, Jr., his father was in touch with Nixon within months of his arrival.
¹⁵

The pivotal contact came in July 1960, engineered by former Senator Owen Brewster, a conservative Republican who had once been investigated for supplying Nixon with illegal campaign funding. Also involved as go-between was Marshall Diggs, a Washington lawyer and former Treasury official who had long been in touch with Nixon on intelligence matters. Nixon met with Kohly, then put him in touch with Allen Dulles. A series of contacts with CIA agents followed.

Kohly was to organize the printing of huge sums in counterfeit Cuban pesos, with the assistance of powerful accomplices. In the summer of 1960 Nixon's aide Bob Cushman found himself on a plane with Dulles, flying down to Florida to discuss “a scheme to print Cuban bonds” with Pawley.

The CIA operatives trying to forge a united anti-Castro leadership, however, saw Kohly as a handicap. He had delusions of grandeur, saw himself as “president-in-exile,” and was too right-wing to be compatible with the moderates the CIA wanted in its exile alliance. Nixon disagreed, describing Kohly as “a red-hot prospect to lead the Cubans.” He would remain enthusiastic about him three years later, when Kohly's counterfeiting eventually got him into trouble with the law.

Nixon was to ensure that Kohly received free legal advice, and would write to the judge in the case pleading for leniency. Rather than send the exile to prison, he was to tell a colleague, “they should give him a medal.” According to one witness, Nixon even told Kohly that “everything would be all right” if he could just hold up court proceedings by jumping bail and going into hiding for a while. Kohly did jump bail, but was eventually picked up and jailed anyway.

Nixon may have helped Kohly not least because he feared exposure of his own role in a matter that did not come up in court—namely, conspiracy to murder. Kohly's son has recounted an extraordinary episode that took place in October 1960—after the CIA had steered Nixon away from Kohly and when U.S. policy was shifting from support of guerrilla action to plans for outright invasion. Kohly, Jr., told of a telephone conversation with his father, conducted for security reasons on predesignated pay phones, in which his father described a meeting with Nixon at the Burning Tree Club in Maryland.
¹⁶

According to an affidavit sworn by Kohly's son, Nixon agreed at the meeting to “the elimination of the leftist-approved Cuban [exile] leaders at a time when the island would be invaded by the exile groups trained under the direction of the CIA. This promise was made if my father would guarantee the use of his underground organization inside Cuba and his 300–400 man armed guerrilla force in the Escambray Mountains.”
¹⁷
Interviewed in 1996, the younger Kohly repeated the allegation, saying it was clear that Nixon had sanctioned the executions of any exile leaders Kohly deemed leftist. “The way I recall it was that Nixon okayed it, saying, ‘When you go into Cuba, if you have to get rid of a bunch of Communists, go ahead and do it. If there's leftist leaders there, kill them and let it be known that they fought to the last man. . . .' ”

Kohly, Jr., said it was also understood “absolutely” that Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl, and Che Guevara were to be killed in the event of an invasion. “Part of Washington went along with this,” he said, “the Nixon part. Many in the CIA were against it.”

The details of U.S. plots to kill Castro have emerged in dribs and drabs ever since their existence was revealed by a Senate committee in the midseventies. Much of the focus has been on whether President Kennedy and his brother Robert were privy to the assassination plans, and to what extent. But was Nixon also involved? Was he even aware of the plots? It is a key question, and one until now much neglected.

The determination to kill a foreign leader . . . is not only a sign of moral and political impotence, but an arrogant assertion of one nation's right to control the destinies of all humanity.

—Harry Rositzke, career CIA officer

T
rying to determine who authorized the CIA's attempts to murder foreign leaders, said Walter Mondale after a 1975 Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” He thought “the system was intended to work that way, that things would be ordered to be done that—should it be made public—no one could be held accountable.”

The Intelligence Committee did nevertheless establish the outlines, albeit fuzzy, of the agency's murder plots against three foreign leaders. Poisons were sent to the Congo in 1960 to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, although he eventually met his death at the hands of his own countrymen. Weapons were sent to the Dominican Republic in 1961 to dissidents seeking the overthrow of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, and may have been used in his assassination. As for Castro, the CIA tried repeatedly to have him murdered over a period of five years, starting under Eisenhower and Nixon in 1960.

By the time the Intelligence Committee did its work, none of the presidents who had served during the relevant periods remained alive to answer questions. The committee made no formal finding “implicating presidents.” In spite of denials by Eisenhower's intimates, however, the senators heard testimony suggesting that he approved the plan to kill Lumumba.
¹
The former executive
secretary of the National Security Council, Marion Boggs, said in an interview for this book that Eisenhower also discussed the possible assassination of Castro. The president eventually rejected the idea—but on purely pragmatic grounds. “Eisenhower's view,” Boggs explained, “was always: ‘Why should anyone assassinate the head of Cuba, Castro? Because we'd only get his brother instead, who's worse.' ”
²

Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA at the time the death plots were initiated, maintained in his memoirs that the agency “never carried out any action of a political nature . . . without appropriate approval at a high political level in our government
outside the CIA.
”
*
Other senior CIA officials have maintained the same. “Authorization outside the CIA for a Castro assassination,” the Senate committee concluded, “could, according to the testimony, only have come from President Eisenhower [or] from someone speaking for him . . .”
³

The CIA official in charge of anti-Castro operations, Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell, told the committee he never discussed the assassination plots with any administration official, having relied on Director Dulles to do that, and to obtain authorization.
⁴
“What happened above his level,” he said years later, “I never knew precisely and didn't particularly inquire. . . . No one would have expected to get an affirmative, an explicit approval from the president.”

Dulles, like Eisenhower, had died by the time of the committee investigation. The responses of CIA chiefs who did testify, like Bissell and Helms, rested on the opaque principle that where assassination was concerned, the CIA related to the White House on the basis of the nod and wink rather than direct authorization. “I think we all had the feeling,” Helms said, “that we were hired out to keep those things out of the Oval Office.” With that proviso he testified that the Castro death plots were known “to almost everybody in high positions in government.”

Only one man who had served at the highest political level and had had a special involvement in Cuban matters, the year the murder plots began, was alive and available for testimony in 1975. Richard Nixon, forced out of office the previous year, was by then ensconced at San Clemente in California. Yet the committee was unable to question him on the subject.

The senators had certainly sought to have Nixon testify in full. In months of negotiation, however, Nixon insisted on his right not to answer certain questions, by invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and the principle of executive privilege. He also objected on the ground of ill health to having to come to Washington to be interrogated, even though he had recently been photographed playing golf. In the end Nixon was only persuaded to respond, in writing, to a number of agreed-upon questions. None of them dealt with Cuba or specifically with the Castro plots.

The committee lawyer who carried the questions to San Clemente, Joe Dennin, said in 1996 that the arrangement was “the compromise between the perfect, which would have meant that Nixon testified like other people and sat for eight hours of questioning under oath, which wasn't going to happen, and a grudging agreement to written interrogatories. . . . This was eleventh-hour stuff for the committee. They were ready to go to print, and there was tremendous pressure, a sign up on the wall in jest reading: ‘If you can't get it right, get it written.' ”

“Nixon should have been questioned,” said former Senator Gary Hart, who served on the committee. “But this was a man in exile, and we had no real belief that under oath or not, he was going to tell us what he knew. . . . There was a kind of fatalism about it, that even if we went through the motions, we probably wouldn't get Nixon to admit culpability. . . .”

One of the negotiated questions did touch on whether national security considerations could justify breaking the law, if that was ordered by the president or a high official. Nixon answered in a way the committee chairman thought “pernicious and dangerous.” Certain actions that would otherwise be unlawful were legitimate if undertaken by “the sovereign,” Nixon asserted, evoking a peculiarly Nixonian concept of presidential authority. “Assassination of a foreign leader,” he went on, “might have been justified during World War II as a means of preventing further Nazi atrocities.”
⁵
But assassination of a foreign leader, he claimed, was “an act I never had cause to consider.”

In spite of his long-standing interest in Cuba, Nixon made no reference in his memoirs to the Castro plots, even though their discovery made headlines not long before the book came out. Thus, obviously, he avoided having to make any denial that he had played a part in them. Only in 1986, in a little-noticed magazine interview, did he refer directly to the matter. “I was amazed,” he stated then, “to hear that they had the assassination plots. I really was. Maybe that's the way they operate . . . it's a strange world, isn't it?” Strange indeed, given what one can now piece together about the way that the 1960 Castro conspiracies interconnected with Nixon's Cuban involvements.

The historian Fawn Brodie was verbally briefed in 1978 by Dr. Jack Pfeiffer, then the CIA historian, following his review of agency files on Nixon and Cuba. Brodie's notes indicate that in January 1960, just after Western Hemisphere Division chief, J. C. King, first proposed Castro's “elimination,” Nixon's aide General Cushman asked at a meeting, “If you need to get some goon squads into Cuba, why don't you do it?”

That March Nixon was personally briefed on the use of “goon squads.” What the squads were to do is not stipulated in the notes, but the dictionary definition of “goon” is a man “hired to . . . eliminate opponents.”
⁶
That same month, and on later occasions, Nixon's friend William Pawley discussed with the head of the CIA's exile-training program the killing of an unnamed “somebody” inside Cuba.

Also in March, at the dinner party at which he had proposed flooding Cuba with forged currency, the author Ian Fleming offered a solution to the Cuban problem gentler than murder. Ridicule, he reckoned, would be as good a way as any to destabilize Castro. If bombarded with propaganda warning of radioactive residue that would linger in their beards and render them impotent, Castro's followers—and El Líder Máximo himself—would hasten to shave. With its best-known symbol gone, the revolution would wither away.

On the heels of this wacky suggestion, the CIA began its most fatuous anti-Castro schemes. CIA technicians seriously considered how a woman's depilatory, one that worked either orally or by absorption through the skin, might be administered to him. Would it work to dust it into the Cuban leader's shoes, in powder form, when the footwear was left out for shining during a foreign trip? We shall never know, because Castro canceled the trip in question.

The agency's boffins also turned their attention to how to impregnate Castro's food—or a box of his favorite cigars, Montecristo No. 1 brand—with a chemical that would leave him disoriented and looking foolish during one of his marathon speeches. A CIA in-house history says Nixon was briefed on these famously silly plots. Soon, though, the ludicrous turned to the lethal when the CIA's Office of Medical Services was asked to contaminate a box of Montecristos with a botulin toxin “so potent that a person would die after putting one in his mouth.” By the time the poisoned cigars were ready, it was established policy that Castro was to be murdered.

Howard Hunt made four recommendations in an April report to his CIA superiors. The first was: “Assassinate Castro before or coincident with the invasion (a task for Cuban patriots).” Hunt later denied knowing if the CIA had taken up this suggestion. “I myself never heard of the plots until the Church Committee revealed them,” he told the author in 1996. According to Nixon's aide Charles Colson, however, Hunt had informed him of the efforts to kill Castro much earlier. Also, in 1974, in an internal memo purloined by a CIA source from G. P. Putnam's Sons, then about to publish Hunt's second volume of memoirs, Hunt was quoted as saying he “recommended
and planned
assassination/Castro operation.”
*
⁷

In his 1996 interview Hunt confirmed that his proposal that Castro be killed had been discussed at his June meeting with Nixon's aide General Cushman. He had raised the topic, he said, “like dropping it into a well.” It is logical to conclude that Cushman would have passed the information on to Nixon; it was after all his responsibility to do so.

The CIA file on William Pawley, who also wanted Castro dead, includes a document filed just two weeks after the Hunt-Cushman meeting. The heavily censored message, sent to Allen Dulles, reports an offer by a Cuban contact of Pawley's to collaborate in Castro's assassination. Five days later, on July 18, Pawley wrote to Nixon: “I'm in touch with Dulles' people almost daily and
things are shaping up reasonably well. The matter is a very delicate problem and every care should be taken to handle it so as not to affect our Nation adversely, nor our political campaign.”

“For a secret assassination,” a CIA training manual had advised in the fifties, “the contrived accident is the most effective technique.” Two days after Pawley's letter to Nixon, CIA headquarters responded to a suggestion by an Air Cubana pilot that he might be able to arrange an “accident” to kill Castro's brother Raúl. “Possible removal top three leaders is receiving serious consideration at HQS,” a cable notified the CIA's Havana station, promising the pilot a ten-thousand-dollar reward should he succeed in killing Raúl. A few hours later a second cable rescinded the message, in part perhaps because it had flouted another provision in the agency manual: that “assassination instructions should never be written or recorded.”

This aborted plot had in fact been ordered by Pawley's friend division chief J. C. King and by Tracy Barnes, the number two headquarters man on Cuba and a key figure in the fake peso operation to which Nixon was privy. The Operation Pluto field chief liaising with Nixon's office, Jacob Esterline, was also told about it.

Meanwhile, also in 1960, a more exotic plot was hatched. A close Pawley associate, Alexander Rorke, spent months cultivating a dark-haired young woman, just twenty years old, named Marita Lorenz. The daughter of a German sea captain and an American mother, Lorenz had unique qualifications to take part in a Castro murder conspiracy. The previous year, on a visit to Havana aboard a cruise liner skippered by her father, she had met Castro, then thirty-three. Soon afterward, summoned back to Cuba, she had done office tasks for him and become his lover. Within weeks she was pregnant—by Castro, according to Lorenz
⁸
—but the romance ended soon and unhappily. Lorenz wound up back in New York, recovering from a bungled abortion and badgered by U.S. agents determined to get her to become what one reporter later called “the Mata Hari of the Caribbean Cold War.”

Pawley's friend Rorke, a former FBI agent now apparently in cahoots with the CIA, filled Lorenz with notions of religion and sin, ending up by persuading her, in her words, that “if I eliminated Fidel, I could make myself right with God.” In Florida that summer, she has claimed, she met a CIA officer known to anti-Castro fighters as Eduardo. This was the name Howard Hunt used, and years later Lorenz would claim she was certain that Eduardo had been one and the same as the man who organized the Watergate break-ins.

Rorke also introduced her to Frank Sturgis, likewise to win notoriety as a Watergate burglar. A former marine who had once fought alongside Castro in the mountains, Sturgis was now his avowed enemy. It was Rorke and Sturgis, said Lorenz, who convinced her to return to Havana—apparently in the spring of 1960—armed with two poison capsules. Her mission was to slip them into one of Castro's drinks. The poison was odorless and tasteless, the plotters assured her, and death would come quickly.