Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [32]
Finally—perhaps as a reward for items one and two—Taylor managed to make his way back into a position of power. Kennedy’s disenchantment with the Joint Chiefs of Staff for having failed to alert him to the risks posed by Zapata—whether the Chiefs were malicious, lazy, or just stupid was not clear—persuaded him to recall Taylor to active duty, first by inventing the post of Military Representative to the President, and then by appointing him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
The most immediate result of the Bay of Pigs debacle was to redouble the administration’s determination to eliminate Castro. Although the Pentagon focused its attention on the possibility of direct military intervention, the White House remained wary of action that smacked of naked imperialism. Instead, the Cuba Study Group’s recommendation that the president issue “new guidance” regarding action against the Cuban dictator found expression in Operation Mongoose, an aggressive program of covert action that aimed to get rid of Castro and subvert his revolution. In hopes of ensuring the program’s success—and protect himself from being duped again—Kennedy fired Allen Dulles along with other senior CIA officials who had concocted Operation Zapata. He then assigned responsibility for Mongoose to his most trusted deputy: his brother Robert, the attorney general, now doing double duty as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and its principal impresario of dirty tricks.
The younger Kennedy became chair of a newly created anti-Castro steering group known as the Special Group (Augmented), charged with coordinating the actions of all government agencies conspiring to topple Castro. Bringing to this task the energy for which he was well known, Robert Kennedy declared his intention to “stir things up on [the] island with espionage, sabotage, [and] general disorder,” working through Cuban exiles. Direct military intervention was to be a last resort.
The likelihood of such actions inducing unintended consequences left the attorney general undaunted: “[W]e have nothing to lose in my estimate.”24 The younger Kennedy wasted no time declaring that solving the Cuba problem ranked as “the top priority in the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.”25
Likewise not to be spared were the legal and moral norms to which U.S. officials professed allegiance. With legendary spook Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale acting as Kennedy’s chief of operations, all sorts of bizarre chicanery soon followed, including collusion with the Mafia in plots to assassinate Castro, fantastical schemes aimed at inciting popular insurrection, and a program of sabotage directed at Cuba’s food supply, power plants, oil refineries, and other economic assets—all of this together constituting one of the most infamous and profitless episodes in the history of American statecraft.
From the outset, Mongoose was bravado and swagger masquerading as policy. “We are in a combat situation—where we have been given full command,” Lansdale announced in January 1962, adding that with “all the men, money, material, and spiritual assets of this most powerful nation on earth,” failure was not an option.26 At Robert Kennedy’s urging, Lansdale cobbled together an ambitious program