The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [344]
The Bay of Pigs was hardly a month-old memory, and Bobby was not only taking a lead role in the entire Cuban issue but was also involving himself in secret contact with a Soviet agent. Bobby had set up the meeting through an American journalist, Frank Holeman, who had known the Russian for a number of years and had served as a conduit between the Soviets and the Eisenhower administration. Holeman had been the one originally to suggest the meeting, and both men had agreed.
Bobby was entering into a chamber of echoes, where sounds bounced back and forth and words meant more than they seemed to mean, or less, or maybe nothing at all. He could not be sure just who it was he was talking to this spring evening, whether these words would reach Chairman Khrushchev, or if they did, whether they would be translated with all his nuance and intent. Nor could he know who might be secretly observing the two of them walking together, be it other Soviet agents or the CIA or the FBI. “We were appalled when Bobby had a [relationship with] known espionage agents who were in the Soviet embassy,” reflected the FBI’s former deputy director, Cartha DeLoach. “And it scared the hell out of us…. We knew about them because we were tailing those people. And we also had wiretaps on the Soviet embassy. It hurt us too, you know. Here we are breaking our butts working four and five hours a day overtime, and the attorney general of the United States, our proverbial boss, [is] going out and wining and dining these characters.”
Bobby began by warning the Russian that his nation must not dare trifle with America. “If this underestimation of U.S. power takes hold,” he warned, “the American government will have to take corrective actions, changing the course of its policies.”
The president did not need his brother to warn the Russians. Bobby was pushing forward an agenda for the summit, telling Bolshakov that the new administration was seeking a “new progressive policy … consistent with the national interest.” He said that the president had not lost hope for a test ban treaty and was willing to compromise so that the two leaders would have a document to sign at Vienna. He said that the two superpowers could sign an agreement on Laos as well, and that the new U.S. government would show a new face to the developing world, even borrowing “good ideas from Soviet aid programs.” America would reach out to the Third World. “Cuba is a dead issue,” he said. Bobby asked that Bolshakov tell his “friends” what he had said and let him know their reaction.
After the debacle in Cuba, the president needed to fly out of Vienna with tangible agreements tucked under his arm. But in meeting with the mysterious Bolshakov, the Kennedys were taking risks that are rarely taken before such a crucial diplomatic encounter. They were letting the Soviets into their strategic thinking, allowing Khrushchev to know where the give was in the American positions. Beyond that, they were bypassing the entire government apparatus that dealt with the Soviet Union. The Soviet experts at the State Department were not pallid bureaucrats embedded in the past, hostile to the initiatives proposed by the administration, but some of the most deeply knowledgeable diplomats in government. Many of them were operating now without knowing that the Soviets had been given this unparalleled entree into the American positions.
In the Soviet Union, paranoia was the higher sanity, and no one in the Kremlin would have thought to take Bobby at his word. They had their own rich dossier on his 1955 visit to their country, and if ever a man was an enemy of the people, it was Robert F. Kennedy. He had, as the KGB learned in dogging his every step, “mocked all Soviets” and pointedly managed “to expose only the negative facts in the USSR,” photographing “only the very bad things … crumbling clay factories, children who were poorly dressed, drunk Soviet officers, old buildings, lines at the market, fights, and the like.” He had “attempted to discover secret information” and asked about those in labor camps