Let's Blame Bobby: Part One

...William Harvey, head of Task Force W, the CIA’s end of Operation Mongoose [was astonished on August 13, 1962] when he got an official memo from Edward G. Lansdale, the Kennedy brothers’ personal choice to run Mongoose, which explicitly requested Harvey to prepare papers on various anti-Castro programs "including liquidation of leaders." Harvey, a tough-talking former FBI agent with a gravelly voice, told Lansdale in plain terms what he thought of the "stupidity of putting this type of comment in writing in such a document." He repeated his objections to [CIA Director John] McCone the same day, and on August 14, 1962, fully briefed [Richard] Helms on [the matter].... He went so far as to delete the phrase "including the liquidation of leaders" from a copy of Lansdale’s memo which he was passing on to Helms.

[pp. 162-3; the episode is described in detail in Report of the Senate Select Committee on Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders," 1975, pp. 105, 161ff.]

The first order of business for the CI Group was Cuba. The CIA was heavily involved in both Laos and Vietnam at the same time, but the covert operations launched against North Vietnam beginning in the fall of 1961 under the Saigon station chief, William Colby, were on the back burner. Cuba was where the Kennedys wanted immediate results. A second committee, the Special Group Augmented (SGA), was established to oversee Operation Mongoose, run by General Edward G. Lansdale, a counterinsurgency specialist with experience in both the Philippines and Vietnam, where he had helped Ngo Dinh Diem to consolidate his control over the country. No Kennedy program received less publicity than Mongoose, or more personal attention from the Kennedys, and in particular from Robert. The Kennedys wanted Castro out of there, and the CI Group's weekly meetings hardly had time for anything else. The fifteen members would gather at 10:00 p.m. in a conference room next door to Taylor's office. After an hour or two, half the members would leave and the remainder would convene a meeting of the Special Group Augmented. When that ended, the three members of the Special Group for overseeing covert operations would hold its meeting, with the result that John McCone, beginning in November 1961, and the other Special Group members would sometimes spend six or seven hours at a stretch in three successive meetings dominated by one priority: getting rid of Castro.

Operation Mongoose quickly became the single largest clandestine program within the CIA, but it was hardly unprecedented. In fact, it was entirely characteristic of the CIA response to the passing enthusiasms of postwar American Presidents, whose administrations tended to focus on one crisis at a time.... In every instance the Washington bureaucracy would become obsessed with the crisis at hand, committees would proliferate, meetings would spawn meetings, paper would be cranked out by the cartload, reputations would be made or destroyed overnight, and the CIA, under the pressure of presidential demand, would search for the lever which might turn things around.... Operation Mongoose followed the pattern with eerie exactitude. For nearly eighteen months, beginning in November 1961, the Kennedy administration demanded action on Cuba. The CI Group established the Special Group Augmented, which approved Mongoose and entrusted it to Lansdale, who drew up an elaborate scenario with a precise timetable calling for a march on Havana and the overthrow of Castro in October 1962. It was all worked out on paper. The final stage of Mongoose was right there in Lansdale's charts, and it was up to the CIA under McCone and Helms to see that the plan worked.

The importance of the undertaking did not take long to establish. In the early stages...a CIA officer working on the operation, Sam Halpern, asked Lawrence Houston if the operation was even legal. He pointed out that the Bay of Pigs landing had been organized outside the United States at least partly in order to avoid violating the Neutrality Acts, which prohibited the launching of attacks on foreign targets from American soil. Now Mongoose was being geared up in Miami; wasn't this against the law? Houston said the answer was no: if the President say it's okay, and if the Attorney General says it's okay, then it's okay.

The CIA officers in charge of the Cuban Branch set up by Helms were appalled by the magnitude of the task. "With what?" they asked. "We haven't got any assets. We don't even know what's going on in Cuba." [pp. 170-2]

....Lansdale's original plan had called for an escalating effort to create an opposition to Castro inside Cuba, followed by insurgency and a general uprising. When Lansdale spoke of a march on Havana in October 1962, he meant march -- a triumphal entry like Castro's own just three years earlier.... A number of Kennedy administration officials accused the CIA of ignoring dissident Cubans with support inside the country in favor of more pliable men the Agency could control. The CIA insisted it was only working with what it had, and that a lot of the administration's favorite Cubans could not deliver; their support networks were illusory. Harvey managed to get agents onto the island,[14] and to recruit others in rural areas, but what they told him was bleak: there would be no general uprising.

[An alternative view would be that Kennedy Administration officials favored more “leftist-oriented” dissidents than the CIA wanted anything to do with and that the CIA favored (and/or was obligated to) wealthy, conservative, reactionary elements among the dissident Cuban exile community-dwd]

After the first few months of covert operations, Mongoose gradually shifted its emphasis from resistance-building toward sabotage, paramilitary raids, efforts to disrupt the Cuban economy by contaminating sugar exports, circulating counterfeit money and ration books, and the like. "We want boom-and-bang on the island," Lansdale said.[15] Robert Kennedy took a particular interest in efforts to sabotage the Matahambre copper mines in western Cuba, on one occasion even calling repeatedly to learn if the agents had left yet: Had they landed? Had they reached the mines? Had they destroyed them successfully? Kennedy, like Lansdale, wanted boom-and-bang, and a number of CIA officers on the operational level grew to know his voice as he called to find out how they were coming along, and to press them forward. On occasion, even his secretary called in his behalf. [???!!-dwd] The Matahambre copper mines were never destroyed, despite the launching of three separate full-scale raids, but other attacks on sugar refineries, oil storage facilities, and similar targets were more successful. Still, they fell far short of wrecking the Cuban economy, even in its weakened state following the dislocations of revolution, and the paramilitary program held out little promise of Castro's overthrow.

There were three reasons for the failure. First was the inherent difficulty of the undertaking. The CIA station in Miami quickly expanded into the world's largest -- six hundred case officers and as many as three thousand contract agents.[16] But Cuba is 90 miles from Key West, and a good deal farther from the Florida coast around Miami, from which most of the assaults were launched. Despite extraordinary cooperation from the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Dade County police, these raids were hard to arrange secretly, required huge logistical backup, and were easily interrupted by weather, the phases of the moon, communications failures with agents on the island, Castro's security forces, and even the sheer cussedness of the boats themselves. "Between helicopters and boats," Desmond FitzGerald once said of two of the world's most temperamental machines, "I'd rather walk."

The second reason for Mongoose's failure was that Lansdale was after boom-and-bang, while his real expertise lay in political operations of the sort he had conducted in the Philippines and Vietnam, where he had been working with the legal governments. According to several men who worked with him on Cuba, he simply did not know very much about over-the-beach operations. On top of that, he was uneven in judgement. Nutty ideas sometimes seemed to strike him as imaginative and plausible. In an early meeting with CIA people in Task Force W, he pointed to the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba and said, "That's what we'll do. We'll capture that island and we'll use it as our base of operations." "But Ed," said one of those present, "that's where Modello prison is. That's where Castro keeps all of his prisoners. How are you going to do that?"

Another Lansdale inspiration was to convince Cuba's Roman Catholic population that Castro had lost God's confidence.... Cuba was to be flooded with rumors that the Second Coming was imminent, that Christ had picked Cuba for His arrival, and that He wanted the Cubans to get rid of Castro first. Then, on the night foretold, a U.S. submarine would surface off the coast of Cuba and litter the sky with star shells, which would convince the Cubans that The Hour was at hand. Walt Elder, McCone's executive assistant, named this gambit "elimination by illumination."[17] It was not pursued.

A third reason for the failure of Mongoose was William Harvey's inability to get along with Taylor and Lansdale, and later the Kennedys themselves. Having spent a lifetime in the military, General Taylor expected meticulous staffing of an operation before it was approved. Harvey, a seasoned clandestine operator, was accustomed to a freer style, taking his opportunities as he found them. Time and again he proposed an operation to the Special Group Augmented, won a kind of general okay, and concluded he was at liberty to proceed. He was wrong. Taylor expected a thick sheaf of substantiating paper before anything actually happened. A kind of three-way tug-of-war developed, with the Kennedys demanding action, Harvey pressing ahead, and the Special Group Augmented dragging along behind.

At one point during his year on Task Force W, Harvey was put on the carpet by McCone and criticized for moving too slowly. Harvey said it wasn't his fault; the SGA wanted every operation supported on paper in relentless detail, and then, as like as not, refused their approval pending an additional report or more study or a review by some third party. The SGA's deliberate rumination and chin-stroking was beginning to strike Harvey as willful and frivolous. They talked about getting rid of Castro in one year; well, how about it? In a memo to McCone, Harvey expanded in the manner to which the SGA hoped he would become accustomed: "To permit requisite flexibility and professionalism for a maximum operational effort against Cuba, the tight controls exercised by the Special Group and the present time-consuming coordination and briefing procedures should, if at all possible, be made less restrictive and stultifying."[18]

Harvey made a similar protest to Helms, who sought the help of Tom Parrott, a CIA officer on loan to the Special Group as secretary. "Harvey complains that Taylor never approves anything," Helms said. "He goes in week after week and they're all turned down. Can't you do something about this?"

Parrott could not. The various committees involved -- the CI Group, SGA, and the Special Group -- had all been streamlined for maximum effect. Taylor insisted that every meeting be attended by the principals involved, not by stand-in subordinates, so that decisions might be reached and acted upon immediately. But the system was not working. The officials involved had too much else on their minds, expressed their caution in demands for paperwork, and in the end shrank from the sort of all-out attack on Cuba which the Kennedys wanted.... [pp. 174-178]



In the early stages of the missile crisis the Kennedys wanted a sharp acceleration of covert raids on Cuba, but then they reversed themselves and ordered a complete halt. Within the following few months the Special Group Augmented was disbanded and replaced by the Cuban Coordinating Committee, General Lansdale quietly disappeared from the Cuban effort, Task Force W was replaced by a new CIA group called the Special Affairs Staff, and Desmond FitzGerald left the DDP's Far East Division [24] and took over the new Cuban campaign which began to gear up early in 1963. But this time FitzGerald's timetable was more flexible than Harvey's under Lansdale. In the course of 1963, with the operation going "full blast," according to several sources, the CIA carried out at least six major operations against Cuba, along with a host of lesser ones. [p. 180]

[14.] The first agent sighting of a Russian missile in Cuba, in September 1962, came from an agent recruited by one of Harvey's teams.
[15.] In a study of terrorism in 1977 the CIA defined international terrorism as "single actions carried out by individuals or groups controlled by a sovereign state," a pretty good description of Operation Mongoose. Times change. See the New York Times, Nov. 13, 1977.
[16.] This was the figure given by the former Deputy Director for Intelligence, Ray Cline, in "The CIA's Secret Army," CBS Reports, June 10, 1977. Other estimates have put the figure somewhat lower.
[17.] Assassination Report, p. 142n. Elder is not identified in the report. Ideas of this sort -- pranks really -- were apparently second nature to Lansdale. In 1954, shortly after the Geneva Convention which ended the first Indochina war, a Lansdale team in Hanoi secretly put sugar in the gas tanks of North Vietnamese buses. But despite all the evidence to the contrary, Lansdale was a serious man and his work in the Philippines was a model of political action.
[18.] Memo from Harvey to McCone, dated April 10, 1962. Assassination Report, p. 145.
[24.] He was replaced by William Colby.