The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [442]
Bradley Earl Ayers, a career army officer, was one of those assigned to train Cubans in Florida for covert missions and to accompany them at least to the shores of Cuba. Ayers was given a cover as a technical specialist doing classified research at the University of Miami. As Ayers led his Cubans out on their first missions, the whole nature of the missions was slowly expanding. Before the Cuban Missile Crisis, it had been something of a joke at the CIA that when they had burned sugarcane fields, the Cubans could easily harvest the burned sugar. That was no longer the case. “We fixed that,” Ayers recalled. “We began to disseminate defoliants and herbicides, dumping it in the irrigation canals and wells pretty liberally in agricultural areas, doing a pretty good job of killing crops.” After a few months Ayers learned that they would soon be going against refineries, mines, and other major industrial projects. Until now, such facilities had been off limits in part because American corporations wanted their properties back intact.
Another of the major players in the Special Operations Division was Grayston Lynch, who had won a certain notoriety by going ashore at the Bay of Pigs. Lynch began by training Cubans for missions that primarily involved supplying arms to those within Cuba, but he too knew that things were changing. He recalled receiving word that they were to “set Cuba aflame.”
On July 16, shortly before the covert operations expanded, Bobby attended the NSC Cuba Standing Group meeting. There were few actions he was not willing to pursue in destroying Castro’s Cuba. During the discussion Secretary of the Treasury Dillon said that an official had blocked Canadian funds in the United States equal to the amount of Cuban funds deposited in Canada. It was a blatant infringement on the sovereignty of one of American’s most esteemed allies. Bobby agreed with the others that the United States should stop such actions. Nonetheless, he said, he “hoped that it would be done in such a way as not to destroy the morale of the U.S. officer who had initiated the action…. There were too few officers in the U.S. Government who acted with comparable initiative.”
Another problem facing the group that day was an article that had appeared in the Miami Herald on July 14. “Backstage with Bobby” described in detail the attorney general’s meetings with Cubans planning to raid Cuba from Central America. Bobby said that the administration could handle the matter simply enough. “We could float other rumors so that in the welter of press reports no one would know the true facts,” he told the group. In this instance he was all for bringing the CIA’s disinformation campaign home, attempting to poison the free press with lies and half truths.
Although McCone agreed that they might do as Bobby suggested, he added “that in future dealings with Cuban exiles we must use cutouts and not deal with the exiles directly,” and warned that “there be no direct contact with them in Washington.” The CIA director was attempting to rein Bobby in, but it was that immediate, visceral contact with these men and the games of war that the attorney general sought. He could no more have walked away from that experience than from his obsession with Castro.
In early June, President Kennedy flew to San Diego to spend a night on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. Kennedy was the commander in chief, but he was also a proud navy man who loved the rituals of his chosen branch of the service. At ten o’clock that evening the president sat in a leather-padded rocking chair on the bridge of this magnificent city of