Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Maybe this is true. The problem here is that we begin to descend into the realm of the counterfactual, the “if onlys” and “what ifs”—things that we are doing our damnedest to avoid. Look, I’ve met a lot of the Cubans who took part in the invasion, many of whom have permanently settled in or around Miami—my hometown. They are impressive men, and I wouldn’t put anything past them. If they say they could have kicked out Castro with U.S. air and naval support, who am I to argue?

…but I still will.

Because things are much more complicated from an intelligence perspective. Despite the lack of air and naval support, and despite the intensity and desire of the Cuban exile forces, it would have been immeasurably difficult to overcome one of the most problematic aspects of the entire invasion: Castro not only knew they were coming, he knew when and where they were coming. A combination of piss-poor information security (or in today’s parlance, InfoSec) with the ability of Cuban intelligence to infiltrate the Miami exile community meant that the “secret” mission to free Cuba of Castro was anything but.

It’s not like this was a huge surprise for the CIA or the U.S. military. The Cuban intelligence service was very good, and some in the exile community had loose lips. In this environment, it was nearly impossible to conduct effective counterintelligence and keep the invasion secret. Most telling of all, the Soviets had literally broadcast their knowledge of the mission four days before it happened. On April 13, Radio Moscow released an English-language newscast in which they “predicted” an invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained exiles within the week. It seems they were trying to warn us against carrying out the invasion, a type of deterrence through propaganda, a “Hey, we know you are coming, so perhaps now’s not a good time for your secret operation.” Clearly, it didn’t work.

The blowback from the failed mission was significant on multiple levels. More than a hundred members of the 2506 Brigade were killed in combat, along with four American volunteer pilots from the Alabama Air National Guard (who were contracted by CIA). Hundreds more in Cuba would be executed in the days and weeks following the invasion, as Castro eliminated anyone suspected of abetting the exiles. More than twelve hundred of the brigade would be captured by the Cuban government, and some of those members were subsequently executed.

The Kennedy administration was embarrassed by the failed mission. The U.S. government looked inept in failing to maintain order even in its own backyard. In the zero-sum game of the Cold War, where victory for one of the superpowers was defeat for the other, this was a huge win for the Soviets. Not to mention that the invasion pushed Castro even more firmly into the Soviet sphere of influence. And as far as the strength of the regime was concerned, the Bay of Pigs invasion did the exact opposite of what was intended. It made Castro’s regime more powerful than ever before. The operation was a great political victory for the Cubans at home and abroad. Castro was a hero in the eyes of his people for defeating the Yanqui invasion, and was able to consolidate his power. The fiasco also elevated the Castro government to a newfound global status, transforming communist Cuba from an aggrieved little country to an equal in the eyes of the world. In fact, Argentinian physician turned Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara actually thanked the United States for the failed invasion.

The CIA bore the brunt of the blame for the failed mission. President Kennedy fired CIA director Allen Dulles, along with Deputy Director Charles Cabell and Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell—the three men who made up the core of the Agency’s leadership, particularly in the realm of covert action. Kennedy also removed (at least temporarily) major paramilitary operations from the purview of the CIA. For more than a decade, CIA had been the agency with primary responsibility for paramilitary covert action, but now it was benched.

Into the void leapt the U.S. military.

In June 1961,about two months after Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy approved National Security Action Memoranda 55, 56, and 57, which codified the shift in paramilitary responsibility from CIA to the Pentagon. Nothing else really changed—the U.S. government was still looking for ways to oust Castro from power, just through a different government agency. By autumn, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, a legendary intelligence officer (or infamous; or both, depending on your perspective) was asked to brainstorm ideas to get rid of Fidel.

He didn’t disappoint. In February 1962, Lansdale provided a document titled “Possible Actions to Provoke, Harrass [ sic ], or Disrupt Cuba.” Some of the ideas are pretty good, some are quite silly, and some are downright abhorrent. Here is a smattering of the plans contained within:

Operation Free Ride

In an attempt to create “unrest and dissension” among the Cuban people, American pilots would airdrop hundreds of valid one-way airline tickets for flights from Cuba to Mexico City, Caracas, or a number of other U.S.-friendly countries. Whether people used them or not probably didn’t matter all that much. The idea was to get the Cuban security services worried about a mass exodus, on the dime of the U.S. taxpayer.

Operation Defector

Using the vague premise of “intelligence means” (whatever that is) with the promise of equally vague “rewards,” Operation Defector was intended to induce Cuban soldiers (or even entire units) to defect along with their equipment. Not only would this reduce Cuban military readiness, but it would create “havoc” within Cuban security and intelligence agencies as they scrambled to prevent military desertions.

Operation Break-Up and Operation Full-Up

Two plans that were intended to reduce Cuban confidence in the equipment of their Soviet benefactors. Operation Break-Up would “clandestinely introduce corrosive materials” to Soviet-supplied aircraft, vehicles, and ships, to cause accidents, increase supply and maintenance problems, and “seriously” affect combat capability and readiness. Operation Full-Up called for an introduction of a “known biological agent” into jet fuel storage, which would multiply until it “consumes all the space inside the tank.” The Cubans would believe that the fuel was contaminated when it arrived, and since it was supplied to them by the Soviet Bloc…

Operation Dirty Trick and Operation Cover-Up

One of these is relatively benign. The other, yikes.

As astronaut John Glenn prepared to become the first American to orbit the Earth, the U.S. military (mainly the Navy) was gearing up to support the operation. This meant dozens of ships—to monitor the launch, to take in scientific data from the mission, to pre-position themselves in case of emergency, and even if there wasn’t an emergency, to recover Glenn and his space capsule upon reentry. Operation Cover-Up would use this naval buildup to try and convince (it doesn’t say how) the Cubans that it was actually a smokescreen for something else. I’m not being cagey when I write “for something else,” because the document itself says that “it should not be revealed as to what the cover is.” I suppose the obvious conclusion would be cover for an invasion force, but they apparently wanted to keep the Cubans guessing… or they didn’t have a plan beyond that, and they wanted us to think they were being extra sneaky.

Operation Dirty Trick took things a step further. Remember, at this point the United States had barely put two men into space. Alan Shepard’s mission was just high enough to be considered a spaceflight, and Gus Grissom’s was similar—and then we lost Grissom’s capsule to the bottom of the ocean, and almost lost Grissom too. So we didn’t have a superb track record on sending people into space and recovering them safely back on Earth. There was a fairly decent chance that John Glenn’s mission would be a disaster (and it almost was—his flight was shortened due to a mechanical malfunction). If things didn’t go well, we were ready to blame it on the Cubans. The objective of Dirty Trick was to manufacture “irrevocable” evidence that, should Glenn’s flight fail, we could show that Cuban “electronic interference” was the cause. Contingency planning at its worst.