Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (18 page)

The book meshed with JFK’s activist foreign policy philosophy and he incorporated its themes into his 1960 campaign. And Lansdale would later strike Kennedy as the ideal choice to take on Castro, using the revolutionary leader’s own guerrilla tactics to bring him down.

There was a romantic aspect to the Lansdale legend that strongly appealed to the Kennedys. He was brave and risk-taking and uninhibited by bureaucratic protocols. Though he initially enlisted in the Army during World War II, he had later been assigned to the OSS and he spent his subsequent government career floating between intelligence and the military, where he had risen to become an Army brigadier general. This gave Lansdale an aura that was independent of both the CIA and the Pentagon, neither of which fully trusted the lone ranger. A Lansdale-run Operation Mongoose, the Kennedys realized, had the potential to cut out the CIA hierarchy and Joint Chiefs of Staff, an obvious Kennedy aim when it came to Cuba. Lansdale played to RFK’s distrust of the CIA elite in a memo he wrote the attorney general soon after Mongoose was launched, suggesting that they go around “Dick Bissell” and “the CIA palace guard” and work with a middle-management CIA official named Jim Critchfield as their agency liaison, a man Lansdale thought they could rely upon.

The freewheeling attorney general and his equally independent-minded point man on Cuba seemed intent on yanking the island away from the national security bureaucracy and creating their own special team to deal with it. In a December 7, 1961, memo, Lansdale complained that the CIA’s “smash and grab” raids on Cuba—which often utilized militant exiles who would not have met Robert Kennedy’s more exacting criteria, including men linked to Batista and the mobsters who helped prop him up—were out of step with the Mongoose philosophy, which held that sabotage expeditions should only be carried out when they helped build a popular movement inside Cuba against Castro.

Lansdale invoked the democratic ideals of the American Revolution to justify the U.S. operation against Castro. “Americans once ran a successful revolution,” wrote Lansdale in a program review of Mongoose dated February 20, 1962. “It was run from within, and succeeded because there was timely and strong political, economic, and military help by nations outside who supported our cause. Using this same concept of revolution from within, we must now help the Cuban people to stamp out tyranny and gain their liberty.”

But underneath the shiny, new democratic marketing, Lansdale’s overseas missions pretty much fit the old imperialist mold. In the Philippines, he had managed Magsaysay’s political career like a corrupt ward heeler, spreading around a suitcase full of CIA cash to ensure his man’s 1953 presidential victory and once slugging Magsaysay so hard he knocked him out when the candidate tried to deliver a speech written by a Filipino instead of one by his American handlers. The counterinsurgency wizard delighted in telling the story of how he terrorized the rebellious Huks into fleeing a part of the Philippine jungle where they had been strong by making the superstitious rebels believe the area was infested with vampires:

“When the Huks came…the last man [of their patrol] was silently grabbed by the [government] patrol. When the Huks were out of the vicinity, the captured Huk was held down, two holes punched in his throat, held up by the heels, and drained of blood. The body was carefully placed back on the trail. The returning Huks found the body. The vampire evidence was compelling. The Huks deserted their strongly held jungle area before dawn.”

Lansdale’s grotesque vampire stunt later became notorious in the Philippines, with one journalist writing in 1986 that the tale “makes Filipinos vomit. Lansdale would never dare desecrate the body of a white American…. But not the Filipinos, who are dung, who are of an inferior race and whose bodies may be desecrated, drained of blood and left to rot in the jungles.”

Lansdale never attempted anything so grisly in Cuba. But his grab bag of raids, propaganda tricks, and psychological war stunts—including his plan to stage a Second Coming of Christ by having a U.S. submarine off the Cuba coast fire some star shells into the sky, thereby inciting Catholics on the island to rise up and overthrow Castro—fell ludicrously short of endangering the Havana regime. It was one thing to send the primitive Huks scurrying in the Philippines jungle. It was quite another to unseat the brilliant and charismatic Fidel Castro, whose rule was growing steadily stronger through his popular social reforms and his increasingly sophisticated repressive machinery.

CIA officials loathed Lansdale, whom they derided as a “con man” and a “mystic,” fearing that he would cut them out of the Cuba account, which was becoming the government’s biggest, most lavishly financed battlefront in the Cold War. They connived to find ways of bringing him down, and were quick to point out Mongoose’s notable lack of results.

Bobby Kennedy was forced to acknowledge Mongoose’s obvious misfires, but he stuck with the program through most of 1962, until the October missile crisis highlighted its utter failure. The operation served the Kennedys’ purpose that year. As the Democrats headed toward the midterm congressional elections in November, the brothers were under sharp pressure to prevent Cuba from becoming an explosive issue. The Luce press, the media’s leading champion of Cold War machismo, kept up a steady drumbeat that year to get tough on Castro, starting with a January 19
Life
magazine editorial that warned JFK he must take strong unilateral action against this “captured beachhead [of] Communist imperialism” if our Latin allies proved too timid to act. Meanwhile, Barry Goldwater was denouncing the administration’s “do-nothing policy toward Cuba,” and restive Cuban exiles were charging that President Kennedy was secretly settling for coexistence with Castro. As his brother’s political guardian, Bobby realized that Mongoose at least provided the president some cover. It gave the appearance that the administration was not simply ignoring Castro, as Goodwin had advised, but was now taking the offensive.

The Kennedys were aware that the calls for an all-out U.S. military invasion of Cuba would grow louder as the November elections drew closer. As Admiral Burke prepared to leave the Navy in summer 1961, eased out by the administration he had come to revile, JFK had called him into the Oval Office to debrief him about Cuba. The president surely realized that Burke was soon to become a political thorn in his side and he wanted to hear what his line of attack on Cuba would be. “He asked me if I thought we would have to go into Cuba,” Burke later recalled. “I said yes. He asked whether we could take Cuba easily. I said yes, but it was getting more and more difficult. He asked what did I think would happen if we attacked. I said all hell would break loose but that some day we would have to do it.” By the following year, Goldwater was declaring that “something must be done about Cuba…if it takes our military, I wouldn’t hesitate to use it.”

President Kennedy had no intention of invading Cuba. But he and his brother knew that to do nothing in the fevered climate of the day would be political suicide. So they settled on the middle option, Operation Mongoose, as the safest. Picking an ad man like Lansdale to run it made perfect sense. The operation was “mostly for show,” griped the CIA’s point man on Cuba, Bill Harvey. As the more savvy CIA officials undoubtedly realized, that was the point. Lansdale’s Cuba show, starbursts and all, was supposed to dazzle the American people. It would reassure them that something was being done. Polls showed that the public—poked and prodded by a media whose belligerence rivaled that of the Hearst press in the “Remember the
Maine
!” era—did indeed want
something
done. But, fortunately for the Kennedys, Americans stopped short of demanding war. So the Kennedys kept the Pentagon and CIA in check, while assuaging the public’s vague anxieties about Cuba by fruitlessly harassing the Castro regime.

CIA and Pentagon officials were not fooled or assuaged. They knew that Operation Mongoose had no chance of succeeding and that a military invasion was the only way to remove the “humiliating” Communist outpost in the Caribbean, as Goldwater called it. For the rest of the Kennedy administration, military leaders and intelligence officials would strain and conspire to force the president to take this drastic step, as they had during the Bay of Pigs debacle. And their anger and frustration steadily grew as the Kennedys kept deflecting their bellicose pressures.

On July 18, 1962 CIA director John McCone dined with Bobby, using the occasion to urge tough action on Cuba. McCone had already advised RFK that “Cuba was our most serious problem. I also added, in my opinion, Cuba was the key to all of Latin America; if Cuba succeeds, we can expect most of Latin America to fall.” Over dinner, the CIA chief drove home these points. But Kennedy was not buying McCone’s argument. Bobby acknowledged that the Mongoose effort was “disappointing” so far, but he could not be persuaded that the United States should unleash its full military might against Havana. “He urged intensified effort but seemed inclined to let the situation ‘worsen’ before recommending drastic action,” a discouraged McCone later wrote in his notes on the dinner.

In the ideological war to define the Kennedy administration, which broke out soon after the president was laid to rest in Arlington and continues to this day, national security officials insisted that the Kennedy brothers were “out of control” on Cuba, pushing them to take absurd measures against Castro like the Mongoose folly. This would become the standard version of the Kennedys’ Cuba policy in countless books, TV news shows, and documentaries—it was rash, obsessive, treacherous, even murderous. But this is not an accurate picture of Kennedy policy. What in truth bothered national security hard-liners was not how “out of control” the brothers were on Cuba—it was how
in
control they were. They were enraged by the way that Bobby Kennedy, and eccentric lieutenants like Lansdale, were installed over them. And they were infuriated by the restrictions imposed on their military ambitions. Frustrated in their campaign to declare war on Cuba, intelligence officials declared war instead on the Kennedys, particularly the insufferable kid brother who was put in charge of supervising them. And without telling either the president or the attorney general, they took another ominous step. They renewed their sinister contract with the Mafia to eliminate Fidel Castro.

ON A BRIGHT SPRING
afternoon, Cynthia Helms sits in the sunroom of her comfortable home in a leafy Washington neighborhood near Battery Kemble Park. She is surrounded by photos of her late husband, Richard, who died in his sleep in their upstairs bedroom in 2002 at age eighty-nine. There are framed shots of Helms with every president he served—with the notable exception of Kennedy. Late in the administration, the CIA man realized he didn’t have one of the “customary” autographed pictures of JFK, and he phoned Kenny O’Donnell at the White House to get one. But three days later, Kennedy was dead.

Cynthia Helms’s hair, once a striking red, is now cloud white. She wears a no-nonsense outfit this afternoon—light cotton blouse and tan slacks. She is a bright, well-read, unflappable woman. On a side table is a copy of Ian McEwan’s latest novel,
Saturday
.

During World War II she served her native England as a WREN (Women’s Royal Naval Service). Afterward she married a Scottish surgeon and “went directly with him to the Mayo Clinic, where I cried for months” when she realized she had made a mistake. She gave birth to four children, then divorced her husband, and moved to Washington, D.C., where she met Helms at a party at the Lebanese embassy, marrying him in 1968. She remained married to Helms the rest of his life, throughout his controversial career as CIA director and later ambassador to Iran—no easy task. “I nearly wrote a book about CIA wives,” she says. “I think they had a really difficult time. You go to a foreign country and your husband’s gone all night and you don’t know where he is. And you can’t ask. There were many divorces.”

But she learned to accommodate her husband’s private ways. She knew when to press him and when not to—like the days he came home from the office with what she called his “Oriental look—totally inscrutable.” It was better not to ask him anything those evenings. Her husband was “terribly discreet.” And drinking wouldn’t loosen his tongue, as it did with many ginswilling CIA old boys. “He just had a martini on Friday nights—one martini,” she says. “Very disciplined.”

But Helms did not conceal his true feelings from his wife about Robert Kennedy, even though the spymaster had long since stopped working for him when they met and Kennedy would die the year the couple was wed. “My husband was not particularly an admirer of Robert Kennedy’s,” says Cynthia Helms with British understatement. “He felt he was obsessed with Cuba. He was just obsessed. It was very hard for people in the government to handle.” Helms also thought Kennedy was a phony, says his widow. By the end of his life, Kennedy was widely admired for being one of the few white politicians in racially polarized America who could cross lines and appeal to diverse audiences. But Helms was disdainful. “He really didn’t feel that Bobby was—how can I put it? He thought his interest in civil rights was political.”

So strong was the animus of top CIA officials like Helms against Robert Kennedy that it outlasted both men’s lives. Revulsion for the Kennedys, and for Bobby in particular, would be channeled by aging Helms associates like CIA veteran Sam Halpern, whose disparaging remarks about the reign of Camelot were widely quoted in history books and documentaries until his own death in 2005.

Richard Helms effectively took over the CIA in February 1962 when his bitter rival, Dick Bissell, finally walked the plank for the Bay of Pigs and Helms replaced him as covert operations chief. It was the agency’s number two post, but Helms—who had served under Allen Dulles in the OSS—had the same proprietary sense about the CIA that his old boss did and he quickly overshadowed Dulles’s replacement, John McCone, as the real center of power at Langley. For the rest of the Kennedy presidency, Helms was the key intelligence figure with whom Robert Kennedy engaged. While Helms treated McCone as a harmless front man—a white-haired, well-groomed CEO type who “stepped straight from central casting in Hollywood,” as he later wrote in his posthumously published 2003 memoir—he regarded Bobby as his true rival for leadership of the spy agency.