Michael Dobbs - One Minute to Midnight

Harvey had learned that military action against Cuba could be imminent at the Mongoose meeting with Bobby Kennedy on October 18. As often happened, his instructions were vague. He decided it was his responsibility to mobilize “every single team and asset that we could scrape together” in support of a possible invasion. In addition to the agents preparing to land in Cuba by submarine, he organized teams of frogmen to destroy ships in Havana Harbor and parachutists to blaze a trail to the missile sites. His “assets” included John Roselli.

By Roselli’s account, Harvey sent for him “immediately” and put him in a safe house in Washington, to await further instructions. After a couple of days, Harvey decided that his protege would be more useful in Miami, “gathering intelligence.” Roselli spent his time in Miami exchanging gossip about the possible invasion with anti-Castro exiles. The poison pills, euphemistically known as “the medicine,” were in a “safe” place in Havana. The Mafia had not been able to find a way of placing one in Castro’s food.

While there is no smoking gun tying the Kennedy brothers to the Castro assassination plot, there is some circumstantial evidence. Jack Kennedy discussed the possibility of Castro’s assassination with a journalist, Tad Szulc, in November 1961, only to agree that it would be “immoral” and “impractical.” Bobby raised no objection the following month when Lansdale sent him a memo proposing to use “certain of our own criminal elements…who have operated inside Cuba with gambling and other enterprises” to undermine the Castro regime. RFK threw a fit in May 1962 when CIA officials briefed him about the early stage of the assassination plot, but appears to have done little, if anything, to put a stop to it. He had his own connection to the Mafia in the form of a CIA agent named Charles D. Ford, who was given the alias “Rocky Fiscalini” and worked directly for the attorney general. RFK frequently talked about “getting rid” of Castro, without specifying exactly what he had in mind.

Harvey reported to the CIA’s head of covert operations, Richard Helms, a cautious, career-minded bureaucrat who would later rise to become director. The two men made sure that their boss, McCone, was kept out of the loop. On the one occasion when the “liquidation of leaders” was raised in the Special Group, in August 1962, McCone expressed horror at the idea. An ardent Catholic, he told his colleagues that he could be “excommunicated” for condoning murder. The conspiratorial Harvey had the minutes altered to delete any written reference to assassination.

It is difficult to explain why Helms and Harvey would ask the Mafia to kill Castro without instructions from higher authority. On the other hand, it is possible that the Kennedy brothers refrained from issuing clear instructions to preserve the principle of “plausible deniability.” Helms would deny talking to either Jack or Bobby Kennedy about political assassination. But Harvey understood that there were “no holds barred” and that the plot had the “full authority of the White House.”

Harvey would come to see the notion of using the Mafia to kill Castro as a “damn fool idea.” He had grave doubts about the Lansdale strategy of “helping Cubans to help themselves” without direct American military intervention. He would regale friends with stories of a dramatic meeting in the White House Situation Room at the height of the missile crisis, at which he supposedly told the president and his brother: “If you fuckers hadn’t fucked up the Bay of Pigs, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess.”

There are no documents, and no independent testimony, to support the CIA man’s version of the climatic confrontation. But even if it never took place, it revealed a lot about his state of mind. Bill Harvey would never forgive the Kennedys for what he termed the “idiocy” of Operation Mongoose.

The headquarters of the CIA’s secret war against Fidel Castro was a 1,500-acre campus on the southern fringes of Miami. The estate had served as a base for Navy blimps during World War II, but was sold to the University of Miami after being devastated by a hurricane. The university in turn had leased it to Zenith Technical Enterprises, a wholly owned subsidiary of the CIA. The internal CIA code name for the Miami operation was JM/WAVE.

During the course of 1962, JM/WAVE had grown rapidly, to become the largest CIA station outside of Washington. More than three hundred agency officers and contract employees worked at JM/WAVE, supervising a network of several thousand agents and informants, many of them Cuban veterans from the Bay of Pigs. The station’s assets included over a hundred vehicles for the use of case officers, a mininavy for infiltrating agents into Cuba, a warehouse stocked with everything from machine guns to Cuban army uniforms to coffins, a gas station, a couple of small airplanes, hundreds of safe houses in the Miami area, a paramilitary training camp in the Everglades, and various maritime bases and boathouses. The annual budget for the operation exceeded $50 million a year.

To keep up appearances, a CIA officer served as president of Zenith, with an office for greeting visitors. Wall charts recorded phony sales figures and fictitious charitable contributions by employees. Dozens of smaller CIA front companies were scattered around Miami. The huge CIA operation was pretty much an open secret in the city. Many people, including reporters for the Miami Herald, knew that Zenith was a CIA front but felt they had a patriotic duty to keep quiet. When CIA operatives got in trouble with the police or the Coast Guard, a telephone call was usually sufficient to bail them out.

The JM/WAVE station chief was Ted Shackley, a tall, muscular, somewhat distant figure known to his colleagues as the “blond ghost.” Just thirty-five years old, Shackley was one of the CIA’s rising stars. He had a reputation for cold efficiency and a phenomenal memory. In Berlin in the early fifties, he had served under Bill Harvey, who had personally selected him for the Miami assignment. Shackley did his best to prevent Langley from poking into JM/WAVE affairs, but he had to endure the odd visits from Harvey, which were often memorable. On one occasion, Harvey wanted to get inside the building in the evening, and came across a doorway nailed shut with a two-by-four plank. There was another entrance one hundred feet away, but Harvey could not tolerate obstacles. He simply kicked his way in, growling, “I don’t have time for this fucking door.”

The officers in Shackley’s secret army were mainly American; the foot soldiers were practically all Cuban. They were drawn from the ranks of the quarter of a million Cubans who had fled the island in the four years since Castro came to power. Although they were all passionately opposed to Castro, they had difficulty rallying around an alternative leader. A “counter-revolutionary handbook” drawn up by the CIA listed 415 Cuban exile groups and movements seeking to depose Castro, ranging from former Batista supporters to disillusioned revolutionaries. The handbook noted that some of the counterrevolutionary organizations were “sponsored by the [Cuban] intelligence services” for the purpose of staging provocations and sowing dissent in the ranks of the dissidents. Many of the groups existed only on paper, while others channeled their energy into competing with one another “for membership and U.S. financial support.” The handbook bemoaned the lack of effective refugee leaders.

“The trouble with us Cubans,” an exile leader told a reporter for The Washington Post, “is that everybody wants to be president of Cuba. We are putting personal ambitions above the national interest.”

Many of the Cuban factions operated on their own. But several hundred cooperated with the CIA and accepted its tutelage. Their fighters were on the agency’s payroll. The question that confronted Harvey and Shackley when the missile crisis erupted was how to make best use of these assets. They had had little success with sabotage raids. But they believed that the Cubans could gather useful intelligence on the Soviet military presence in Cuba to supplement the photographic reconnaissance. In the event of an American invasion, the intelligence gatherers would transform themselves into pathfinders for the U.S. military.