THE KENNEDYS' SECRET WAR
...e efforts to bring Castro down was apparent to all who had dealings with him then. His unrelenting insistence on results made him the "most feared, and despised, official in the government-especially at the Central Intelligence Agency. The President's brother would not be denied the results he sought, often contacting CIA agents directly involved in operations he deemed significant. When one officer questioned CIA Counsel Larry Houston about the legality of these Miami-based undertakings, noting that the Bay of Pigs force had been assembled outside the United States partly to avoid the Neutrality Acts, he was told that "if the President says it's okay, and if the Attorney General says it's okay, then it's okay."[12] The officer later related that the Kennedy brothers were constantly haranguing CIA personnel to create more trouble for the Cuban leader: "They were just absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Castro. . . . We felt we were doing things in Cuba because of a family vendetta and not because of the good of the United States. . . . It wasn't national security."[13] Richard Helms told Larry Houston more than once, "My God, these Kennedys keep the pressure on about Castro."[14] The new Mongoose chief of operations was Edwin Lansdale, a legendary figure in the world of counterinsurgency who was already portrayed in popular literature such as Graham Greene's The Quiet American and The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. Lansdale himself had written that "there must be a heartfelt cause to which the legitimate government adheres, a cause which makes a stronger appeal than the Communist cause." He noted that "when the right cause is identified and used correctly, the anti-Communist fight becomes a pro-people fight."[15] Lansdale creatively forwarded a multitude of plans and proposals. Included among them were the use of nonlethal chemicals for the purpose of incapacitating sugar workers; "gangster elements" to attack police officials; defections "from the top echelon of the Communist gang"; even spreading the idea that Castro was the anti-Christ and that the Second Coming was imminent-an event to be produced by sending star shells up from an American submarine off the Cuban coast ("elimination by illumination").[16] Lansdale presented a six-phase plan designed to culminate the next October in an "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime." A budget of between fifty and one hundred million dollars provided for such activities as contaminating Cuban sugar exports, counterfeiting Cuban money and ration books, sabotage, paramilitary raids, propaganda, espionage, and guerrilla warfare. CIA agents ran some three thousand Cuban agents out of false business fronts with "fleets of airplanes, ships, and speedboats. Former owners of Cuban factories, refineries, and mines gave the CIA blueprints on how to wreck their own confiscated installations."[17] An extension of American hemispheric machinations was manifested in a far-reaching training program conducted by the United States throughout Latin America. Kennedy's concern that Castro was "undermining other countries that are trying to get on their feet" led him to order Secretary of Defense McNamara to set up the first of what would become many secret police academies. This project to train Central and South American police forces in riot control, intelligence gathering and interrogation techniques was code-named '1290-D.' Bobby Kennedy, who was the real mover and shaker behind the academies, said, "We're going to get control of the streets away from the Communists down there."[18] This program was essentially a hemispheric extension of the arms sales to Batista in the 1950s designed to shut down internal rebellion. Two weeks after the Bay of Pigs failure, McNamara told Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin, "The only thing to do is eliminate Castro."[19] Clearly the administration was desperate to get rid of Castro by virtually any means. Continuing assassination plans that had begun during the Eisenhower administration, although supposedly without the participation of the Mafia, Kennedy authorized a renewal of the Eisenhower-initiated Executive Action program. NSAM-100 was a "contingency plan in connection with the possible removal of Castro from the Cuban scene." Richard Reeves notes that it was Bobby Kennedy "running these operations day to day, and it was bureaucratically assumed that his orders came from his brother." Bissell commented that "Bobby is a wild man on this"[20] It should be noted that most historians, like the bureaucrats who received assassination orders from Bobby Kennedy, have built their assumptions about the President's true disposition and behavior on the idea that Bobby was only providing a mechanism for plausible deniability, and that his actions were the truest reflection of the President's own attitudes. While that assumption is most likely well-grounded during the Mongoose phase, it deserves serious questioning about the period that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis. Despite his approval of NSAM-100, President Kennedy tried to publicly distance himself from the assassination talk that was then common, not only in the White House but in newspapers and at Georgetown dinner parties. Kennedy's private and public selves were clearly conflicted over this issue. He told journalist Tad Szulc that he was under "terrific pressure . . . to okay a Castro murder."[21] Later, discussing the Szulc meeting with Richard Goodwin, he remarked, "If we get into that kind of thing, we'll all be targets!"[22] Only six weeks after signing NSAM-100, Kennedy gave a speech at the University of Washington in Seattle, saying, "We cannot, as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises." But moments later in the speech, he repeated the frustration that regularly moved him to secretly promote some of those tactics: "We possess weapons of tremendous power-but they are least effective in combating the weapons most often used by freedom's foes: subversion, infiltration, guerrilla warfare, civil disorder."[23] The newly appointed head of Executive Action, (code-named ZR/RIFLE) was William King Harvey, a legendary figure within the Agency. When the President once noted to Lansdale that he seemed to be a model for James Bond, Lansdale asserted that the observation was incorrect-that he would introduce Kennedy to the United States' version of James Bond, who turned out to be Harvey. This was high praise, given Allen Dulles' recollection that "President Kennedy and I often talked about James Bond."[24] When they first met, the President greeted Harvey by saying, "So you're our James Bond."[25] A bellicose, corpulent man, he was placed in charge of the mammoth CIA-Cuba project based in Miami, known as Task Force W. A heavy drinker with a penchant for waving his gun around during meetings, Harvey insisted upon the kind of autonomy rarely granted in any governmental practice. "To permit requisite flexibility and professionalism for a maximum operational effort against Cuba," he wrote in a memo to the director of the CIA, "the present time-consuming coordination and briefing procedures should, if at all possible, be made less restrictive and stultifying." On one occasion, Bobby Kennedy had a nasty confrontation with Harvey at the Miami station. After tearing a long teletype off the machine to read, Bobby began to head for the door with the paper in hand. After calling out, "Hey! Where are you going with that?" Harvey proceeded to walk over and physically grab the document out of the Attorney General's hand. This was not the kind of behavior that would have endeared him to the Kennedy brothers. Bobby Kennedy's intense involvement and promotion of this secret war at times concerned even the operatives themselves. The daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, a dashing CIA officer who became head of the CIA Special Affairs Staff, "remembered her father entering into a towering rage upon learning that Robert had been meeting privately with Cuban exiles." RFK was entertaining Cuban exiles at his house, Hickory Hill, and calling them at their apartments at the Ebbitt Hotel in downtown Washington, where they were housed by the CIA. FitzGerald was very wary of the Cuban exiles. "I have dealt with a very rich assortment of exiles in the past, . . . but none can compare with the Cuban group for genuine stupidity and militant childishness. At times I feel sorry for Castro-a sculptor in silly putty." Having the attorney general freelance with the Cuban exile community was, FitzGerald felt, an invitation to disaster.[26] Harvey had been given the assignment only after it was offered to E. Howard Hunt, who declined the appointment because he resented Kennedy's betrayal of the Bay of Pigs operatives and because he didn't believe the effort would be carried through with full intent. Hunt was extremely close to the Cuban exile underground, which had already begun to find other sources of funding and logistical support. Certain key exiles, working unofficially with their disaffected CIA handlers and Mafia sponsors, had even developed their own hit team. They were members of a renegade group self-designated as "Operation 40." Not given to even the minimum level of discipline required by one such as Harvey, this group was the outgrowth of the CIA-Mafia pact originated under the right-wingers so in favor in Eisenhower's day. During this period the CIA demonstrated a highly-developed sensitivity to overt discussion about assassination of foreign leaders. At one meeting in the Secretary of State's office in which McNamara suggested that Castro be killed, he was caustically upbraided by Harvey, who asserted that talk of murder was "inappropriate" in such a "form" and at such a "forum." Edward R. Murrow, the director of the United States Information Agency, had also protested the discussion as improper. The Executive Action chief was surprised then, when two days later, Lansdale sent him an official memo requesting that he prepare papers on various programs, "including liquidation of leaders." The CIA agent, known for his gravely voice and abrasive manner, told Lansdale in no uncertain terms what he thought of the "stupidity of putting this type of comment in writing in such a document."[27] The professionals at the CIA were clearly offended by the amateurishness of the officials with whom they were dealing. The murkiness of the record of authorization left gaping holes in subsequent investigations of whether Eisenhower and/or Kennedy had intentionally ordered the assassination of a foreign leader, which was denied by their official associates, or if the CIA had undertaken the murder of Castro on its own or by extension of the original Eisenhower authorization. If so, the CIA qualified for Senator Frank Church's later description as "a rogue elephant rampaging out of control."[28] Not only is the record of any written authorization devoid of any conclusive proof of complicity by the President or his brother, but as the years have passed, highly personal and questionable narrative renditions have acquired a level of acceptance that is unjustified. An example would be a story contained in a 1998 book by C. David Heymann, RFK. Heymann claims to have interviewed White House Chief of Staff Ken O'Donnell, a college friend of Bobby's, and to have sat on the story for over twenty years. Before O'Donnell's death in 1977, he supposedly told Heymann that Bobby, became quite nutty at times when talking about Castro. He once told me about this idea he had to blow up an American civilian airliner and then blame the dirty deed on Castro. "We'll say the Cubans did it." "Come on, Bobby. Get real," I told him. "You're going to kill innocent American civilians and then blame it on Castro? You've got to be nuts. Does your brother know about this?" "Of course not," he said. "He'd never approve."[29] Bobby certainly would have been "nuts" to have entertained such a notion. It is also very difficult to believe that O'Donnell, a friend with whom Bobby shared his last phone conversation before going down to the hotel ballroom, and then to his death, would have shared such a story with a sensationalist like Heymann. What is possible is that Bobby would have shared a story about the kind of scheming that went on within the exile community, including the contents of Operaton Northwoods, with which Bobby was very familiar. Just such a downing of an airliner was later executed by Operation 40 member Orlando Bosch in the 1970s. To say that the schemes generated by the CIA's Technical Services Division were far-fetched would be a colossal understatement. One agent protested that many of the ideas contained the possibility, if not likelihood, of inadvertent...