The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [398]
The terms that Lansdale employed, such as “fractioning the regime,” were those he apparently used when he talked of assassination, and this memo is close to confirmation that the president and the attorney general were participants in the contemplation of murder.
Six days later Bobby learned at a meeting of the Caribbean Survey Group that sabotage was decreasing in Cuba and the Communists were imposing increasing controls over the populace. After hearing this, he proposed that the tens of thousands of refugees flowing into Florida be “exploited” and “asked what are the chances of kidnapping some of the key people of the Communist regime?”
Bobby had his own secret imperatives hidden from those around him, their details probably lost forever to history. Bobby was working his own covert CIA operative, Charles Ford, a tall, gregarious officer with the bulk and swagger of a college fullback. Ford was given the moniker “Rocky Fiscalini” and sent out to meet clandestinely with various Mafia figures who had Cuban connections. “His job was to follow whatever Bobby wanted,” recalled Sam Halpern, the executive director of the Cuban Task Force. “We liked to control the meeting sites and such, and we never knew how the arrangements were made for his meetings. Charlie was going in naked. His orders were to meet these guys and come back and report to Bobby. Whether it meant assassination or not, I have no idea because Charlie never talked to me about it and I never bugged him. Bobby had some reason for all this. What the hell he was thinking about beats the hell out of me.”
Bobby’s main problem was that Operation Mongoose was not working. It had become by far the largest covert project in history, involving close to five hundred full-time CIA operatives, part-time agents, Defense Department, State Department, and USIA personnel, and several thousand Cubans as well. The Cubans had not sat by passively observing this assault on their sovereignty. After the Bay of Pigs, Castro did his own spring-cleaning, breaking up most of the CIA’s covert operations while imprisoning those thought likely to join the U.S. efforts. There was a renewed militancy in Cuba, and a national pride at having thwarted the hated Yanqui, making it easier for Castro to convince his people that spying on their neighbors was a mark of high patriotism.
Castro was so successful that on the entire island the CIA had only twenty-seven or twenty-eight agents, only twelve of whom even communicated with their handlers, and then only rarely. On December 19, 1961, the agency attempted to add dramatically to that total by sending in seven more agents, but they were captured immediately, and two of them confessed on Cuban television.
As the months went by, it became increasingly clear that once an anti-Castro revolt began, only the infusion of military power would bring an end to the regime. It was the Bay of Pigs scenario all over again, and the president’s attitude was much the same: backing away from the logical conclusion that a massive operation made no sense unless one day he was ready to involve American troops. In February 1962, Kennedy accepted that there would have to be contingent planning for an invasion, but he “expressed skepticism that insofar as can now be foreseen circumstances will arise that would justify and make desirable the use of American forces for overt military action.”
Bobby continued lashing the CIA forward, at times screaming at officials who did not jump as high as ordered or stay in the air until he ordered them down. For all the clandestine aura of the agency, these men were career civil servants who were not used to being yelled at as if that were the only way to motivate them. Bobby had his own desk at CIA headquarters, and he often showed up at Langley unannounced. “Bobby came over almost acting like the acting director of the CIA,” recalled Dino Brugioni, a senior officer at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation