The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [316]
In a March NSC meeting, Kennedy asked that the United States push the Organization of American States to call for “prompt free elections in Cuba, with appropriate safeguards and opportunity for all patriotic Cubans.” Four days later, Schlesinger wrote the president that the State Department had decided “the risk is too great that Castro might accept the challenge, stage ostensibly free elections, win by a large majority and thereafter claim popular sanction for his regime.”
As loath as many in the CIA were to admit it, Castro was an authentic revolutionary who inspired millions not only in his own land but also in the barrios of Mexico City, the wretched slums of Lima, and elsewhere across Latin America. So this enterprise that the CIA was planning would be seen in much of the world not as liberation but as invasion.
Kennedy realized that “Castro has been able to develop a great and striking personality throughout Latin America and this gives him a great advantage.” The president also saw that it was only a matter of time before all but the politically blind would see that Castro was a determined Marxist who employed subversion, conspiracy, and state-sanctioned murder, all in the name of people’s revolution, and that the Cuban people would pay a terrible price for the illusion of equality. Kennedy had seen in Asia how communism grew best in poverty and tyranny, and the new administration would promise an Alliance for Progress for Latin America to help create a climate in which progressive democratic regimes could grow. At the same time, with the new administration’s knowledge, the CIA continued to appropriate the weapons and means of its totalitarian enemies and was using them with willful determination.
Truth is the ultimate weapon in a democracy, but truth does not work as quickly as deception. On CIA-sponsored Radio Swan, truth became only an occasional visitor on the broadcasts to Cuba, elbowed aside for propaganda blown up into gigantic cartoons. In its planning for the invasion, the CIA intended “to intimidate so as to obtain local support,” subverting the will of the Cuban people much as Castro did.
While in the White House, the president and his foreign policy advisers discussed the proposed Cuban operation, the CIA went ahead with its own deadly scheme to try to assassinate Castro. Bissell, the mastermind of these plots, told the historian Michael Beschloss: “Assassination was intended to reinforce the plan. There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing.”
The best known of the many schemes to murder Castro involved employing Mafia figures with Cuban connections to orchestrate the deed. The intelligence community had a long-term relationship with American mobsters going back to World War II and continuing in some measure in the postwar years. In late August 1960, during the last months of the Eisenhower administration, Bissell had asked Sheffield Edwards, the CIA director of security, to contact people with gambling interests in Havana, who by implication might be interested in murdering Castro. Edwards then asked Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent associated with Howard Hughes, if he had any contacts. When Maheu introduced James P. O’Connell to John Rosselli in mid-September, the mobster immediately guessed that O’Connell represented the CIA. Rosselli then introduced the CIA agent to other Mafia figures.
These agents were in Miami in early 1961, meeting with their collaborators Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante, when they supposedly came upon