Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [33]
The resulting plan distributed among various executive departments and agencies thirty-two specific tasks, running the gamut from “inducing failures in food crops” and mounting sabotage attacks to recruiting defectors and devising “songs, symbols, [and] propaganda themes” to boost the morale of an all but nonexistent indigenous resistance. According to Lansdale, accomplishing this menu of tasks would culminate with Castro’s overthrow. The target date for completion: October 1962.27
The manic activity that followed included a pronounced element of opéra bouffe. The slogan devised to inspire the Cuban opposition (task 27) was “Guasano Libre,” loosely translated by one unimpressed State Department official as “worms of the world unite.”28 Concerted attempts by the Defense Department to induce Cuban exiles to enlist in the U.S. armed forces (task 32) yielded a meager total of 142 recruits. Hundreds more expressed interest only to be rejected on “moral and security grounds.” The explanation for this puzzling problem? Most of the would-be warriors, reported Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, “were found unacceptable on the basis of admitted sexual deviations.”29
Within weeks, it became evident that prospects for fomenting an uprising inside Cuba were remote. Sabotage, harassment, propagandizing, economic warfare, and assassination plots would not suffice to eliminate Castro. Disappointment did not, however, persuade the administration to reassess its objectives, nor is there evidence that it abandoned Lansdale’s timetable. Instead, Mongoose underwent a metamorphosis. Rather than itself serving as the instrument of decision, it became an interim step, intended to pave the way for “the instantaneous commitment of sufficient armed forces to occupy the country, destroy the regime, free the people, and establish in Cuba a peaceful country.”30 As early as March 1962, therefore, Lansdale was asking the Pentagon to provide “a brief but precise description of pretexts which the JCS believes desirable” to justify “direct military intervention.”31
From our present vantage point, with the passing of several decades during which nine of Kennedy’s successors managed to coexist with Castro even as the Kennedy brothers achieved the status of secular saints, Operation Mongoose appears inexplicable. Suffice it to say that by the end of 1961, the Kennedy administration was fixating on Fidel Castro with the same feverish intensity as the Bush administration exactly forty years later was to fixate on Saddam Hussein—and with as little strategic logic.
In its determination to destroy the Cuban Revolution, the Kennedy administration heedlessly embarked upon what was, in effect, a program of state-sponsored terrorism. In substance if not in scope, the actions of the United States toward Cuba during the early 1960s bear comparison with Iranian and Syrian support for proxies engaging in terrorist activities against Israel since the 1980s. The principal difference is that, whereas Hamas and Hezbollah have achieved considerable success, at least in enhancing their political standing, the U.S. attempt to unseat Castro achieved none whatsoever. Apart from expending the lives of several dozen guileless exiles who, at the CIA’s behest, attempted to infiltrate their home island, those efforts were stillborn. From a moral and legal point of view, Operation Mongoose was indefensible. From a practical point of view, it turned out to be arguably even more stupid than Operation Zapata.
How can we explain this? Why did an administration whose senior members fancied themselves to be pragmatic and analytical go off the deep end in its pursuit of a dictator governing a country that, in 1961, boasted a population of slightly less than six million, a per capita income one-fifth that of the United States, and negligible military power?32
No doubt domestic politics provides at least a partial explanation. In