Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (19 page)

Like most of the CIA’s upper ranks, Helms was a product of WASP affluence and entitlement. The grandson of a prominent international banker and the son of an Alcoa executive, he was raised in Europe and educated alongside the future shah of Iran at the fashionable Le Rosey School in Switzerland. After graduating from Williams College as “the most likely to succeed,” he married the heiress to the Barbasol shaving fortune, but this first match ended in divorce. He was pursuing a career in journalism, the highlight of which was landing an interview with Hitler as a young Berlin correspondent for the United Press, when World War II broke out and he was recruited into the intelligence world. Tall, well-dressed, his thinning hair slicked straight back, Helms carried himself with a supremely self-confident air. He was a fixture of the Georgetown salons and tennis courts, where he worked the Washington press and charmed his dinner partners. “A former foreign correspondent, he observes much and can recall precisely what few American husbands ever note in the first place—what gown each woman wore to dinner and whose shoulder strap was out of place,” noted the
New York Times
.

Helms viewed the younger Kennedy as a cunning political enemy who had to be carefully monitored and managed. He smoldered as the attorney general poked his nose into agency affairs and barraged him with directives. Helms resented it when Kennedy abruptly ordered him to drive in to Washington from Virginia to attend Mongoose meetings at 9:30 every morning. “Given the travel time involved in getting about in Washington at that hour,” he later sniffed, “there seemed to be more than a whiff of a disciplinary flavor in this decision.”

Helms dismissed the Mongoose sabotage efforts as no “more than pinpricks” against Castro and he bridled at Kennedy’s “hammering us for results.” He later complained that under Bobby’s “relentless” reign, he was “getting my ass beaten. You should have enjoyed the experience of Bobby Kennedy rampant on your back.” While thrashing the spymaster’s behind, Kennedy had only “a slight idea what was involved in organizing a secret intelligence operation,” Helms bitterly concluded. The espionage chief grimly considered his dilemma: He was saddled with an obnoxious brat of an overseer who had a direct line to his older brother in the White House—and both of them seemed determined to “upend” the intelligence agency he was dedicated to protect, while leaving Castro safely in power.

RFK had a similar disregard for Dick Helms. “I didn’t trust Helms and I don’t think Bob did either,” said John Seigenthaler. “Bob would make snide remarks about him. I think the Kennedys thought they could energize and breathe fresh air into damn near every agency in the government. Maybe it was idealistic. But I think Bob in particular believed it. He was shaking up everything. Still, there were a couple places where the bureaucracy was entrenched and impenetrable. Bob didn’t think there was any way to break through the crust of the CIA. That only meant to him that they should not be trusted.”

Dick Helms was a smooth enough bureaucrat to know how to contain his bitter resentment of the president’s meddling brother. But the man he put in charge of the agency’s Cuba operations lacked Helms’s knack for dissembling. Bill Harvey was a hard-drinking, ill-tempered former FBI man from the Midwest known for strutting around with a revolver stuffed in his waistband. When he took over the CIA’s Miami-based Cuba operation, he named it in typically cocky fashion “Task Force W” after the nineteenth century soldier of fortune William Walker who seized Nicaragua as his private empire and was later executed by a Honduran firing squad. Squat-figured and bug-eyed, due to a thyroid condition, and often drunk, Harvey had nonetheless made a name for himself as a daring spymaster in postwar Berlin by digging a tunnel underneath Soviet lines to eavesdrop on the enemy. (The fact that the Russians discovered the tunnel before they suffered a significant intelligence setback did not tarnish Harvey’s reputation within a Cold War Washington hungry for espionage heroes.) When the James Bond–bedazzled JFK asked to meet the CIA agent who came closest to 007, Lansdale walked Harvey over to the White House. The bemused president asked the pear-shaped, pigeon-toed, balding agent if he had as much luck with women as Bond.

Privately, Harvey called the Kennedy brothers “fags” but he reserved a special loathing for Bobby, whom he routinely referred to as “the little fucker.” Often admonished by the attorney general for making too much “noise” with his Cuba raids, he considered the Kennedys cowards who were not serious about removing Castro. “After Bill Harvey takes over in early ’62, we did have a small success…maybe we knocked out a transformer,” recalled Sam Halpern, who served as Harvey’s Task Force W assistant. “It was a minor thing but it made headlines in Cuba and it made the headlines in Miami…and the attorney general gets on the phone to Bill Harvey…Bill gets chewed out by Bobby Kennedy on the phone. Harvey tells the attorney general that people are going to talk about it; it’s going to be on radio, it’s going to be on television. That’s the facts of life. You can’t hide these things.”

As time passed, Harvey grew increasingly irritated by Kennedy’s hands-on management and was not afraid to show it. RFK and Lansdale, whom Harvey and his aides dismissed as a “screwball,” sometimes paid visits to Task Force W’s headquarters, which were housed in former Navy barracks on the University of Miami’s secluded south campus. Harvey made it clear that they were not welcome. During one of his visits to the JM/WAVE station, as the sprawling center of covert anti-Castro operations was codenamed, Kennedy ripped a piece a paper out of an office teletype, but Harvey immediately grabbed it from his hands. “You have no right to read that,” he growled at Kennedy in his gravelly voice. On another occasion, an impatient Kennedy complained that Harvey’s station was not infiltrating enough operatives into Cuba, offering to train more men himself at his Hickory Hill estate if necessary. “What will you teach them, sir?” the CIA man shot back. “Babysitting?”

Nothing the Kennedys did, short of launching a massive U.S. military invasion of the island, would have pleased CIA officials like Helms and Harvey. This was, they believed with good reason, the only certain way of ousting the Castro regime. But the Kennedys would do little more than engage in pointless “boom and bang” exercises, in Halpern’s dismissive phrase, and play around with far-fetched coup schemes involving exile leaders who had no serious chance of replacing Castro. Bobby had a weakness for these brave if deluded Don Quixotes, often driving CIA officials to distraction by going around them and conferring directly with these Cuban plotters. And he was especially fond of exile leaders who rejected CIA sponsorship, vowing to take back their country by themselves.

One such man was Ernesto Betancourt, the former Washington emissary of Castro’s revolutionary movement who had tried to warn JFK against the doomed Bay of Pigs mission through Kennedy press pal Charles Bartlett. In 1962 Betancourt fell in with one of many Cuban exile groups with visions of toppling Castro before Christmas, the ELC (
Ejercito Libertador de Cuba
). That September he met with Bobby Kennedy, exciting the attorney general with his talk of sparking a popular uprising in Cuba by the end of the month. And yes, this remarkable feat could be accomplished without the CIA, an agency, he bitterly told a receptive Bobby, that has typically “relegated Cubans to the status of tools, while the Americans called the signals.” Betancourt painted a picture of a Cuba in full revolt: ELC slogans splashed on walls all over the island, bridges and factories blown to pieces, Castro’s militia under fire throughout the countryside. It was then that Betancourt’s guerrillas would land on Cuba’s beaches and infiltrate the island, to begin coordinating the final assault on Havana. And this time they would be successful, unencumbered by the inept leadership of the CIA.

Kennedy immediately called Helms and told him of the Betancourt plan. One can only imagine the delight with which the consummate CIA bureaucrat greeted this latest Bobby scheme to “work outside the framework” of the agency to unseat Castro. Helms and Harvey promptly moved to squelch the plan, dispatching an agent named Charles Ford to assess the Betancourt brainstorm and to inform Kennedy of its futility. Ford told RFK that “in the frank opinion of the CIA, there is little likelihood of there being 15,000 persons ready to carry out even a partially successful revolt; that CIA does not believe such a revolt will take place, and that in the unlikely event that it does occur, it will be ruthlessly and totally suppressed.” It was a harsh but accurate assessment and Kennedy was forced to accept the agency’s logic. Meanwhile, Ford reported to his CIA superiors that one of the ELC men surrounding Betancourt was tied to a suspected Castro spy who had been sent to the United States to penetrate the group and kill its leaders. This undoubtedly confirmed Helms’s and Harvey’s view of Kennedy as an amateur spook whose antics only distracted the professionals from their real work.

Despite the enthusiasm of CIA officials for a military assault on Cuba, the agency’s own analysts took a dim view of the prospects for such an invasion. In an April 10, 1962, memo to Director McCone, Sherman Kent, chairman of the CIA’s Board of National Estimates, drew a sobering picture of what would likely happen if U.S. troops stormed the island. Over four decades later, the Kent memo still has a startling, revelatory power.

The good news, Kent wrote McCone, is that initial resistance from Castro’s forces would melt within a few days of the U.S. invasion. Euphoria would reign as Washington promised to turn over control of the nation as soon as possible to a government that was representative of the Cuban people. Then the situation would quickly deteriorate, Kent predicted. “Substantial numbers” of Castro’s forces would survive the initial U.S. assault and “would continue a guerrilla resistance” in the country’s interior. Much of the Cuban population would support this resistance against what they would perceive as a U.S. attempt to “reimpose upon the Cuban people the yoke of ‘Yankee imperialism.’” Establishment of a pro-U.S. government would be “greatly hindered by the persistence of terroristic underground resistance in the cities” and guerrilla resistance in the countryside. “Pacification of the country, to the extent necessary to permit the development of a credible…regime, might be long delayed,” Kent noted. As a result, the U.S. military would be forced into a “prolonged” role as an occupation force, which would become a sitting target for terrorist violence. This would provoke American soldiers to take “arbitrary measures against the general population,” deepening resentments against the U.S. occupation and adding fuel to the resistance. Meanwhile, the United States’ international standing would suffer badly as a result of its unilateral military action, isolating the country from its allies in NATO and Latin America and heightening suspicions about U.S. power in the rest of the world.

It was a nightmare scenario that would be played out more than once in America’s future. And it was precisely the quagmire that President Kennedy feared would suck him down if he followed his national security officials’ advice, first on Cuba and later on Vietnam.

But buckets of cold water like the Kent memo did nothing to dampen the Cuba war fever in the Pentagon and CIA headquarters. The Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to have contingency plans for a Cuba invasion drawn up, none of which had the same bad ending as the Kent scenario. One of the most insidious documents ever produced by the U.S. government was delivered by General Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962. The top-secret memo, which was signed by the country’s highest military commanders, urged the administration to stage a variety of shocking incidents to create a rationale for invading Cuba. Among these were faking attacks on the U.S. military base at Guantánamo and on Latin countries such as the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua and blaming the Castro government; simulating Cuban shoot-downs of U.S. civilian and military aircraft (phony “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation,” noted the memo); and blowing up an American ship in Guantánamo Bay and pinning it on Cuba, an incident the memo compared to the mysterious explosion of the U.S. battleship
Maine
in Havana harbor in 1898, which helped spark the Spanish-American War.

But the Joint Chiefs’ most cold-blooded suggestion was to mount a terror campaign in Miami and other Florida cities “and even in Washington” that would create international revulsion against the Castro regime. This violent campaign would be directed at Cuban refugees in America, the chilling memo read. “We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” The military leaders did not spell out how their exploding bombs would be limited to only wounding, not killing, their unsuspecting victims and how they could be assured that the only casualties would be innocent Cuban refugees, and not American bystanders. But the U.S. military has long been overly confident in its precision.

There is no record of how McNamara responded to this cynical proposal by his top military officers when Lemnitzer met with him that Tuesday afternoon. But the sinister plan, which was codenamed Operation Northwoods, did not receive higher approval. When I asked him about Northwoods, McNamara said, “I have absolutely zero recollection of it. But I sure as hell would have rejected it…. I really can’t believe that anyone was proposing such provocative acts in Miami. How stupid!”

Like the president, McNamara regarded Lemnitzer with barely disguised contempt. “McNamara’s arrogance was astonishing,” said a Lemnitzer aide. “He gave General Lemnitzer very short shrift and treated him like a schoolboy. The general almost stood at attention when he came into the room. Everything was ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir.’”