The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [440]
Whenever Donovan and Nolan went to Cuba, they brought Castro a gift. On one occasion they gave the Cuban leader a Polaroid camera that he took with him on a trip to Moscow. Another time they brought a wet suit that Castro used when he went diving one day with his two American guests. It was not until many years later, during the Senate investigations into assassinations in the mid-1970s, that Nolan learned that the CIA had prepared a diving suit dusted with a fungus that would infect Castro with a serious skin disease and a breathing device laced with tubercle bacillus. Donovan and Nolan had unwittingly thwarted the CIA’s plans by giving the gift before the agency was ready. There had perhaps been some rules when the CIA began to try to kill Castro in 1960, but there were none now in 1963, not when the agency would place a deadly gift in the unknowing hands of two Americans serving a diplomatic mission.
In early March, the president expressed himself as being “very interested” in Donovan’s meetings, saying “We don’t want to present Castro with a condition that he obviously cannot fulfill.” McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s top foreign affairs adviser, mentioned alternatives, including not only an invasion to overthrow the Communist government but “always the possibility that Castro … might find advantage in a gradual shift away from their present level of dependence on Moscow.” In his memo of April 21, 1963, Bundy went on to say that “a Titoist Castro is not inconceivable,” precisely the point that Aleksei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law, had made to the president in February 1962.
Castro gave Donovan every indication that he wanted to initiate a serious dialogue with the United States, but the Kennedy administration backed away from any such discussion. To push such possibilities would have taken the president’s strong initiative. Instead, Kennedy expressed his “desire for some noise level and for some action in the immediate future.” The CIA proposed attacking “a railway bridge, some petroleum storage facilities and a molasses storage vessel,” then to move on to bigger, more important targets later in the year. At the same time the administration developed a number of contingency plans that were anathema to everything for which a free, democratic society supposedly stood. The administration discussed provoking the Cubans into an attack that would allow the Americans to stage an invasion. If the Cubans were slow to anger, the United States “might initially intensify its reconnaissance with night flights, ‘show-off’ low-level flights flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action … [or] perhaps the U.S. could use some drone aircraft as ‘bait,’ flown at low speeds and favorable altitudes for tempting Cuban AAA or aircraft attacks.” These were only contingency plans, but they were presented as reasonable alternatives, with no apparent awareness of the dangers of such provocation. For these were ideas meant not simply to provoke the Cubans but to deceive the American people, many of whom would probably die in a war that they thought Castro had instigated.
In a ten-hour interview on April 10, Castro told Lisa Howard of ABC that he sought a rapprochement with the United States. The United States and Castro’s Cuba would never walk hand in hand, but there was something disturbingly cavalier about the Kennedy government’s refusal even to employ secret diplomatic channels to seek a possible accommodation. There was consideration in the White House of attempting to block ABC’s broadcast of the interview. “Public airing in the United States of this interview would strengthen the arguments of ‘peace’ groups, ‘liberal’ thinkers, Commies, fellow travelers, and opportunistic political opponents of present United States policy,” an NSC analysis stated. These were the views of intellectual cowards