Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (13 page)

Yet
inexplicably, only days later, Lemnitzer submitted a positive recommendation to
Secretary of Defense McNamara. "Evaluation of the current plan results in
a favorable assessment ... of the likelihood of achieving initial military
success," he wrote. "The JCS considers that timely execution of the
plan has a fair chance of ultimate success and, even if it does not achieve
immediately the full results desired, [it] could contribute to the eventual
overthrow of the Castro regime." Later that day, McNamara verbally
endorsed those conclusions.

It may
well have been that the Joint Chiefs, angry with the arrogant CIA brass for
moving into their territory, were hoping that the spooks would fail. Once the
CIA was out of the way, the uniformed professionals in the Pentagon would be
called on to save the day—to take over, conduct the real invasion, and oust
Castro. From then on, military invasions would again be the monopoly of the
generals. But soon it became clear that Kennedy had meant what he said about
keeping the operation covert.

As
originally planned, the exile force was to land at the coastal town of
Trinidad. But the White House objected. According to Lemnitzer's private
summary, Kennedy wanted a quiet night landing, which the world would believe
was planned by Cubans. Above all, Lemnitzer noted, there was to be no
intervention by U.S. forces.

Following
Kennedy's order, CIA planners presented the Joint Chiefs of Staff Working Group
with a list of five alternative landing sites. Later the list was reduced to
three. The group picked Alternative III, a spot in the swampy Zapata Peninsula
called the Bay of Pigs. After a brief twenty-minute discussion, barely enough
time for a coffee break, Lemnitzer and his Chiefs agreed with their Working
Group's choice. "Of the alternative concepts," said the JCS
recommendation, "Alternative III is considered the most feasible and the
most likely to accomplish the objective. None of the alternative concepts are
considered as feasible and as likely to accomplish the objective as the
original [Trinidad] plan."

Lemnitzer
had grave doubts about the whole CIA operation from the beginning but remained
largely silent and quickly approved the plan. The Bay of Pigs was considerably
closer to Havana than Trinidad was; this meant a quicker response from Cuban
troops, and with only one road in and out of the landing zone, it was a perfect
place for a slaughter. Cuban troops could easily isolate the invaders, who
would be forced to die on the beaches or drown in the sea.

Lemnitzer
had one last chance to reach up and pull the emergency brake before the train
plunged off the embankment. On April 4, 1961, Kennedy held a conference at the
State Department with his key advisers to get their final thoughts on the
invasion. Lemnitzer, seeing certain disaster ahead, buttonholed Assistant
Secretary of State Thomas C. Mann before the meeting started and insisted that
the choice of Zapata for a landing site was a bad decision, that the Joint
Chiefs did not want the invasion to take place closer to Havana. Mann, taken
aback by Lemnitzer's sudden change of position, dismissed his protest and
insisted that Kennedy had already made his decision.

As Kennedy
convened the meeting, Lemnitzer sat mute. The man in charge of the most
powerful military force on earth, with enough nuclear weapons to destroy
civilization, was afraid to speak up to his boss. It was his moment of truth.
Instead he chose to close his eyes, cover his mouth, and wait for the sound of
grinding metal. He knew, as he had known from the beginning, that the operation
would turn out to be a disaster, that many men would die painfully and
needlessly, but still he preferred silence. He must also have finally realized
that the Pentagon would never receive presidential authorization to charge in
and save the day. At the end of the meeting, Kennedy asked who was still in
favor of going ahead with the invasion. Lemnitzer's hand slowly reached toward
the ceiling. Much later, in his summary, he confessed his failure to speak up
but offered no apology.

At the
time of Kennedy's inauguration, NSA's role in supplying intelligence on what
was going on inside Cuba grew substantially. Until then, the CIA's Havana
Station and its Santiago Base had been a beehive of espionage. But just before
he left office, in preparation for the invasion, Eisenhower cut diplomatic
relations with Cuba. With the closure of the embassy in Havana and the
consulate in Santiago, the CIA was homeless and had to return to the United
States. Anticipating this contingency, CIA case officers in Cuba had developed
a number of "stay-be-hinds," agents who would remain under deep
cover. This net consisted of some twenty-seven persons, fifteen of whom were
reporting agents and the rest radio operators and couriers. But the principal
agents and one of the radio operators were U.S. citizens and thus had limited
access to key information—especially military intelligence, which was most needed.
Without a CIA station in Cuba producing intelligence, the CIA, the White House,
and others in the intelligence community became more dependent on NSA's
intercepts.

Miami Base
received copies of NSA's signals intelligence reports on Cuba but there was no
NSA liaison official there to help interpret the messages. This was a serious
mistake. Without NSA's cold, independent analysis of the intelligence, the
gung-ho CIA officers were forced to rely upon their own judgment—which was
often colored by their desire for the operation to go ahead. This was one of
the key reasons for their overestimate of Cuban internal opposition to Castro.
As a CIA postmortem said, "This conclusion, in turn, became an essential
element in the decision to proceed with the operation."

Another
problem was that without an NSA presence, Miami Base could neither receive nor
send superfast emergency CRITIC messages should the invasion run into serious
problems. "The [NSA] effort was very small," said one NSA official
assigned to the Cuban desk at Fort Meade at the time. A key source of NSA's
signals intelligence on Cuba was a Navy ship that had secretly been converted
into a seagoing espionage platform. Since February, the USS
Perry
(DD-844),
a destroyer rigged with special antennas and receivers, had patrolled off the
Cuban coast eavesdropping on whatever it could pick up. The
Perry
occasionally
pulled into the Key West Naval Base, where Navy Sigint specialists would work
on the equipment.

As the
preparation for the invasion proceeded at full steam, NSA continued to focus
much of its attention on Soviet shipping. In March, an intercept operator at
the NSA listening post in Karamürsel, Turkey, discovered that the
Nikolai
Burdenko
was back in the port of Nikolayev loading a new shipment of "Yastrebov's
cargo"—the Soviet euphemism for weapons. The 5,840-ton cargo ship, a
hulking gray workhorse, departed Nikolayev on March 21. Intercept operators
kept track of the ship's progress by monitoring its daily transmissions, noting
its position and triangulating it with "elephant cages," giant
circular antennas.

"On 7
April limited D/F [direction finding] placed the BURDENKO near the Windward
Passage," said one intercept report. Another revealed that the ship
"possibly arrived at a Cuban port late evening 7 April or early morning 8
April with an unspecified amount of YASTREBOV's cargo . . . This is the fourth
noted instance of a Soviet ship loading cargo specifically described as
'YASTREBOV's' for Cuba." Within the White House, pressure was building to
take action.

As the
Burdenko,
heavy in the water, pulled into Havana harbor, U-2s were crisscrossing the
island fourteen miles above. Beginning on April 6, U-2s flying out of Texas
conducted fifteen missions over the island in final preparation for the CIA's
invasion.

The
operation began at dawn on Monday, April 17, 1961, and quickly turned into a
debacle. As Cuban air force and other military units converged on the area, NSA
voice-intercept operators eavesdropped on the desperate pleas of the exiles.
"Must have air support in next few hours or will be wiped out,"
Brigade Commander Pepe San Roman implored. "Under heavy attacks by MiG
jets and heavy tanks." The Navy offered to evacuate the brigade commander
and his troops, but was refused. They would fight to the end.

Because no
provision had been made to provide NSA's Sigint to the brigade, the agency's
intercepts were largely useless. All analysts could do was sit and listen to
the hopeless messages from the rebel soldiers fighting on the beach and their
supporters throughout Cuba. "Arms urgent," said one. "We made a
commitment. We have complied. You have not. If you have decided to abandon us,
answer." Another radioed, "We are risking hundreds of peasant families.
If you cannot supply us we will have to. . . . demobilize. Your responsibility.
We thought you were sincere." Still another pleaded, "All groups
demoralized. . . . They consider themselves deceived because of failure of
shipment of arms and money according to promise." Finally, there was one
last message. "Impossible to fight. . . . Either the drops increase or we
die. . . . Men without arms or equipment. God help us."

"It
wasn't much that was done here, as I understand," said one NSA official,
"except they were copying the communications . . . and their calls for
help and assistance and what-have-you were all monitored."

"I
will not be evacuated," said San Roman, defiantly. "Will fight to the
end if we have to." On the beach, nearly out of bullets and mortars, the
brigade launched a futile counterattack against Cuban army soldiers pushing
relentlessly in from the west. "We are out of ammo and fighting on the
beach," the brigade commander radioed to the task force command ship.
"Please send help, we cannot hold."

"In
water. Out of ammo. Enemy closing in. Help must arrive in next hour." San
Roman's voice was now terse and desperate. There was no place to go. Between
them and the approaching helmets were scores of their comrades, their blood
joining the seawater with each crashing wave. "When your help will be here
and with what?" The commander's voice was weaker now, unbelieving but
still wanting to believe. "Why your help has not come?"

There were
faces under the green helmets now, and arms with rifles, and legs running. They
were coming from all sides, bullets hitting the water, the sand, and the men.
NSA intercept operators eavesdropped on the final messages. "Am destroying
all equipment and communications. Tanks are in sight. I have nothing to fight
with. Am taking to woods. I cannot, repeat, cannot wait for you."

At 3:20
P.M.,
out at sea beyond the horizon, the evacuation convoy heading for the beach
received a final message. "[Ships] ordered withdrawn [at] full
speed."

The pall
cast over the CIA as a result of the botched invasion did nothing to dampen the
Kennedy administration's obsession with Castro. On a gray autumn Saturday in
early November 1961, just after two o'clock, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
called a meeting to order in the Cabinet Room of the White House. The day
before, the president had given the group their marching orders. He wanted a
solution to the Cuba problem and his brother was going to see that it was done.
Robert Kennedy turned to the group and introduced Edward G. Lansdale, an Air
Force one-star general and a specialist in counterinsurgency who sat stiffly in
a padded black leather chair.

Tall, with
Errol Flynn good looks, Lansdale was the deputy director of the Pentagon's
Office of Special Operations. Hidden away behind the door to Room 3E114 in the
Pentagon, the OSO was the unit responsible for NSA. Responsibility for dealing
with Cuba, Kennedy said, was to shift from the CIA to the Pentagon, where the
project would be known as Operation Mongoose. Kennedy asked the group if they
had any problems with the change. Richard Bissell, who had just seen the CIA's
crown jewel pass from his hands, could not resist at least one jab. No, he
said, as long as "those employees on it were competent in clandestine
operations."

Both
Lansdale and Lemnitzer viewed Operation Mongoose as a golden opportunity, a
chance for the military to flex its muscles at last and show off its ability to
succeed where the CIA had so miserably failed. As prospects of an internal
revolt in Cuba dimmed, Lansdale and Lemnitzer began to quietly explore the
possibility of doing what they had wanted to do all along: conduct a full-scale
invasion.

Since the
Kennedy administration had come into office the extreme, distrustful right wing
within the military had grown significantly, not only in numbers but also in
decibels. In April 1961 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara finally lowered the
boom on Major General Edwin A. Walker. Walker was charged with indoctrinating
his troops with John Birch Society propaganda, officially admonished, and relieved
of his command. As a result many conservatives accused the Kennedy
administration of trying to muzzle anti-Communists.

Walker
resigned from the Army in protest, but even as a civilian he continued to warn
of the dangers of Communist infiltration. Among the themes he constantly
pounded home was a distrust of civilian control of the military. "The
traditional civilian control of the military has been perverted and extended
into a commissar-like system of control at all major echelons of command,"
he said. In September 1961 he traveled to Oxford, Mississippi, to protest the
enrollment of James Meredith, a black student, at the state university there.
Robert Kennedy later issued an arrest warrant for Walker, charging him with
seditious conspiracy, insurrection, and rebellion. He was jailed for five days,
during which time he claimed he was a political prisoner.