The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [368]
Lansdale could speak bureaucratic language at White House meetings, but what appealed to the Kennedys was that the man was a democratic shaman, full of tales of how he had defeated communism by wit, magic, and endless courage. Whatever he did, Lansdale was to the Kennedy brothers’ thinking a brave, true man who had made the fight against communism his chosen field of combat, one on which he again and again proved his mettle and his manhood.
Lansdale, who had started out in advertising before World War II, was an endless spinner of tales. One of the stories that embroidered his legend took place in the Philippines, where his men captured a guerrilla in an area threatened by the Communists. Lansdale supposedly ordered the men to puncture the man’s neck as if a vampire had latched onto him, to turn the corpse upside down to drain the blood, and then to set it out on the trail to be found by the Huk guerrillas. When the peasant soldiers came upon the gruesome corpse, they were so terrified that they moved out of the area.
In February 1962, Lansdale set out a precise timetable that was as reliable as an Indian train schedule. He proposed the active fostering of revolution within Cuba to take place by October “with outside help from the U.S. and elsewhere.” The guerrillas would move into operation no earlier than August, leading to the revolt and overthrow of Castro in October. “A vital decision still to be made, is on the use of open U.S. force to aid the Cuban people in winning their liberty,” Lansdale noted, his plan as dependent on American involvement as was the CIA’s scenario for the Bay of Pigs. He showed no awareness that Castro might have been a popular leader and arrogantly assumed that most Cubans would welcome this new “revolution” imposed by the hated gringos.
The new CIA station in Miami, code-named JM/WAVE, was set up at an abandoned naval air station in Richmond, just south of the city. It was fitting that JM/WAVE should be run from an old military base, for this was indeed a war that the CIA was running out of these office buildings and warehouses set on a secluded 1,571-acre plot. Its resources included ships and planes and hangars full of munitions, and above all, the Kennedy imperative to do something.
The president and the attorney general had told Bissell “to get off your ass about Cuba.” His successor, Richard M. Helms, picked up that banner, as did the new director, John A. McCone, a conservative Republican and deeply religious Catholic. Bobby wanted the CIA operatives to stop their endless excuses for inaction and to get on with it, and he bludgeoned the supposedly slothful bureaucrats with Lansdale’s plan. Even four decades later, those involved at the CIA still remember Bobby’s voice on the telephone, berating them for laxness, lashing them onward. He rarely seems to have called with any specific directive but merely to whip them on. As they galloped blindly ahead, avoiding the lash, they ran down the innocent, the unaware, and the unlucky.
“Bobby’s project,” as Lansdale called Operation Mongoose, involved in part taking young men from among the flower of the Cuban bourgeoisie, encouraging them with rhetoric and promises, and sending them on missions that at times would lead to their deaths. It is true enough that the roots of liberty are nourished by the blood of patriots, but this blood was being shed in futile, desultory, dangerous efforts whose only result was to further United States foreign policy to destabilize Cuba. As for the mobsters’ continued involvement with the CIA, there was no longer the dubious saving grace of innocence. The CIA knew their names now, who these men were, and what they did. If the agency insisted on trying to kill Castro, it did not have to do business with thieves and professional murderers. There were patriots who would have given their lives for a cause greater than reestablishing their casinos, brothels, and drug operations.
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