The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [367]
“My idea is to stir things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites & Communists,” Bobby wrote. “Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.” Lansdale took Bobby’s emotional imperative and turned it into a policy that seemed to embody all the can-do spirit of America.
Lansdale condemned the CIA’s ineffectual “harassment” techniques with a flick of rhetoric. He wasn’t for imposing some American solution on the backs of the Cubans. As he said later, he was for having “the people themselves overthrow the Castro regime rather than U.S. engineered efforts from outside Cuba.” He was going to find leaders among the Cuban exiles who opposed both Batista and Castro, bold men who would lead their people to overthrow the Communist tyrant. He knew Communists and their ugly acts, and he was not about to “arouse premature actions, not to bring reprisals on the people there and abort any eventual success.”
While Bobby listened to Lansdale, he also had before him a memo on Cuba from the Board of National Estimates, representing the best judgments of analysts from the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and the State Department. It was a rational, realistic portrait of Castro’s Cuba, detailing not only the oppressive measures the state had taken but also the legitimate support it still maintained. The leadership had institutionalized the revolution in such a way that Castro’s death would not end the regime. The report concluded on the deeply ironic note that “a dead Castro, incapable of impulsive personal interventions in the orderly administration of affairs, might be more valuable to them as a martyr than he is now.” That was a daringly prescient analysis, for when the revolutionary leader Che Guevara was executed by American-trained soldiers in Bolivia in 1967, he became in death a symbol to Cuba and a goad to revolution that he probably never would have been in life.
Lansdale understood rightly that this report represented a profound challenge to his own aggressive, daring schemes. He warned Bobby that this “special intelligence estimate seems to be the major evidence to be used to oppose your project.” He criticized the report for drawing conclusions based on inadequate intelligence, but he had nothing to offer in its stead but rhetoric and unbridled passion.
Robert Amory, the CIA deputy director for intelligence, believed that the past was a guide to the present. Amory pointed out at a later CIA meeting that “no authoritarian regime has been overthrown in the 20th Century by popular uprising from within without some kind of support—war or otherwise.”
When Roger Hilsman, another expert and proponent of counterinsurgency, looked at Lansdale’s plans, even he had profound doubts. Hilsman wrote in February 1962, “we may be heading for a fiasco that could be worse for us than the ill-fated [Bay of Pigs] operation.”
In listening to Lansdale’s entreaties, Bobby, then, willfully turned away from many of the best minds and judgments of his intelligence and diplomatic services to accept a policy based largely on one man’s deadly idealism. Operation Mongoose was, as Lansdale called it, Bobby’s plan, but it was also Bobby’s revenge, Bobby’s private war, a war that he staged to vindicate his brother, the president.
Lansdale had always been terribly eclectic in the means he employed. On the one hand, he intended to train idealistic young Cuban students to infiltrate their homeland, and on the other hand, he would also employ some of the same Mafia figures who had already been involved in assassination attempts. “This effort may, on a very sensitive basis, enlist the assistance of American links to the Cuban underworld,” Lansdale wrote in a top-secret memo in December 1961. “While this would be a CIA project, close cooperation of the FBI is imperative.” It is simply unthinkable