JFK and the Road to Dallas: The Cuban Missile Crisis…Part II…by Mark Arnold

President John F. Kennedy

 Note: Throughout the late summer and early fall of 1962 reports and rumors were swirling in Washington DC that the Soviet Union and Cuba were collaborating on building nuclear missile launch sites in Cuba. On August 10^th CIA Director John McCone sent JFK a memo stating that he thought the Soviet Union would deploy medium range nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba and this was followed at the end of the month by an announcement by Senator Kenneth Keating (Republican NY) in the U.S. Senate stating there was evidence the Soviets were actually building the sites and urging the President to do something about it. In early September Kennedy had his brother and chief advisor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy meet with the Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to express JFK’s concerns about the reports and rumors he is getting. He is assured by Dobrynin that any military aid being given to Cuba is for defensive purposes only and does not involve offensive missiles. A week later, on September 11^th the Soviet News Agency Tass announces the same thing, but the same day Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in a speech to the UN states that should the U.S. invade Cuba it would mean war with the Soviet Union.  In response to all of this JFK orders a U-2 over flight of Cuba to take place on October 9^th but the flight is delayed until the 14^th by bad weather. On October 10^th Senator Keating makes another announcement that the Soviets are building six nuclear missile launch sites in Cuba. A few days later, on October 14^th, the U-2 takes photographs that on analysis reveal the first hard evidence that the Russians and Cubans are, indeed, building the missile launch sites. The President’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy is informed of the photos on October 15^th and on Tuesday morning October 16^th he informs the President. For the next thirteen days the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a high wire act of nuclear brinksmanship that threatened the whole world with annihilation…the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here is the whole story…MA

JFK and RFK during the Crisis

A

ccording to Robert Kennedy in his memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis Thirteen Days, just after 9AM on Tuesday, October 16^th 1962 he received an urgent phone call from the President asking that he come immediately to the White House. The message was that “we are in great trouble” but beyond that no further data was given. Upon arriving RFK was told by his brother that according to U-2 photos just taken and analyzed the Soviets were constructing nuclear missile launch sites in Cuba. Within two hours a meeting was convened in the Cabinet room at the White House comprised of most of the top officials of the US Government and national security establishment. In attendance besides the President and his brother were Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Director of the CIA John McCone, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Special Counsel to the President Ted Sorensen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor, Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Special Assistant to the President Ken O’Donnell.  In addition there were a number of assistants to the Secretaries of State and Defense as well as an advisor on Russian affairs. This is the group, more or less, that would become known as “Ex Comm”, short for “Executive Committee of the National Security Council”, which met daily and often long into the night across the next two weeks and was charged by President Kennedy with looking at all options and solutions to resolve the crisis.

          Realizing that his presence might prevent some members of the group from honestly speaking their minds JFK only attended the meetings he was asked to attend in order to be briefed or to render decisions. Robert Kennedy briefed him daily on what transpired at the meetings. At this first meeting the Ex Comm group was briefed on and shown the photographs by the CIA. With their charts and pointers the CIA’s photo experts pointed out where the sites were being built and what the various images meant. According to RFK in his memoir, even with the photos, he had to take the fact there were missile launch sites being built on faith because, try as he might, what he was looking at just looked like vacant lots to him. The President, he states, felt the same way. Neither doubted the veracity of what they were being told however.

  

Nikita Khrushchev

        JFK’s immediate response to what he was now realizing was true was a feeling of betrayal. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet government’s representatives had flat out lied to him. In addition, prior to the U-2 over flight and as late as 19 September, the official intelligence estimates JFK received stated that the Soviet Union had not used any of their other satellite nations as missile bases and concluded, therefore, that they would not make Cuba a base. The risk of U.S. reprisal, the intelligence people thought, was just too great for the Soviets to do such a thing. Now, it appeared, the intelligence estimates were completely wrong and the President and everyone in Ex Comm realized it. Though there were a few who thought otherwise, most of Ex Comm was of the immediate opinion that something had to be done to stop the launch sites from being built; they could not allow Cuba to become a nuclear missile base 90 miles from our shores. To most of them an airstrike to destroy the sites was the best option. JFK also knew that something had to be done and that he could not allow the missiles to remain in Cuba. He wasn’t ready to push the panic button, however. He wanted to be certain that every option was looked at and every possibility for a peaceful resolution was considered and he charged his brother Robert and the Ex Comm group with this responsibility.

          In the meantime it was also imperative that the situation be handled with the utmost secrecy. JFK did not want the Soviets to be aware that he knew what they were doing in Cuba just yet; at least not until he had a chance to formulate his strategy for handling the crisis. Likewise, he did not want the media or the public in the loop until he was ready, fearing it would cause unnecessary panic. To accomplish this it was worked out that he would keep up the semblance of his normal Presidential routine. The mid-term elections were coming up in November and he had a number of campaign speeches and appearances scheduled. He would need to make good on these commitments, lest his absence indicate that something was up.

          For the next two days the Ex Comm group met, arguing over the options and alternatives possible. It was in these early meetings that Robert McNamara proposed the idea of a blockade of Cuba as the strategic response to the missile launch sites. He argued that the blockade option had several advantages; it would put pressure on the Soviets but it would be limited pressure and would give them time to reconsider what they were doing and pull out. It also gave the U.S. the option of taking steps to increase that pressure if needed. In addition, McNamara noted that, based on estimates from the JCS, surgical airstrikes, as the group had initially entertained as an option, were not practical unless they also included hitting other Cuban military installations as well and also unless a follow up invasion took place. McNamara argued that, while it might come to that in the end, we should not start at that point and that taking a less extreme approach would afford more options at avoiding war and still getting the missiles out. Opposing McNamara was the view, held by several in Ex Comm as well as the JCS, that a blockade would do nothing about the missiles already in Cuba or about the on going construction of the launch sites and therefore would not resolve the threat. They also argued that a blockade around Cuba would result in the Russians doing the same with Berlin thus expanding the crisis. Because of these things military intervention was the only viable option they asserted.

JFK and the Joint Chiefs of Staff

          On Wednesday, 17 October more U-2 photography was taken which showed more missile installations and revealed that as many as 32 medium range ballistic missiles were in Cuba capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to any location within a thousand mile radius. Within a few minutes of an attack these missiles could potentially kill 80 million Americans. It was against this mounting pressure that on the morning of Friday, 19 October JFK met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss the military options for taking out the missiles, should that be option chosen. Present for the meeting were the President, Defense Secretary McNamara Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor, Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay, Naval Chief George Anderson, Army Chief of Staff Earle Wheeler and Commandant of the Marine Corp David Shoup. During the meeting the depth of the disparity between JFK’s views and those of his military leaders was on full display as well the antipathy held for the President by some of the Chiefs, particularly Curtis LeMay.

          LeMay had fashioned a remarkable, if somewhat controversial career in the Air Force. He had commanded the B-29 firebombing raids over Tokyo during WW II that are estimated to have killed between 250,000 and 500,000 civilians. He once commented that if the Japanese won the war he would be tried for war crimes. He also helped run the Berlin airlift in 1948 and later in 1948 he took over the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Over the next nine years LeMay presided over its emergence as the most massive jet powered, nuclear bomber force in the world with over 2000 jet bombers, many of them B-52s. In 1951 he became the youngest four star general in the U.S. Military since Ulysses Grant in the Civil War. He had become Chief of Staff of the Air Force in 1961. Noted for his right wing, anti-communist views, the cigar smoking LeMay could be both intimidating and belligerent in expressing them. With regard to the Joint Chiefs, JFK felt that he would probably have the most trouble with LeMay; an

General Curtis LeMay

apprehension that proved to be correct. In a meeting on October 18^th with the Chiefs, Kennedy had asked Lemay what the Soviet response would be should the U.S. bomb Cuba, as LeMay had been advocating. “They’ll do nothing” LeMay responded.

          Incredulous at what he was hearing, Kennedy retorted: “Are you trying to tell me they’ll let us bomb their missiles and kill a lot of Russians and then do nothing? If they don’t do anything in Cuba they’ll certainly do something in Berlin.”

          After the October 18^th meeting with LeMay JFK commented to his assistant Ken O’Donnell: “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”

          During JFK’s Friday meeting with the Chiefs, LeMay again displayed his bellicose attitude stating, “We don’t have any choice except direct military action” and once again asserted that in response the Soviets would do nothing. He was critical of the “blockade” option stating that it would be a weak response and telling Kennedy it would be “…almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich”; a reference to English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Adolph Hitler’s territorial demands at a conference held in that city in 1938. (LeMay’s comment was also a veiled allusion to the role JFK’s father Joseph Kennedy played at the time, the elder Kennedy having been the U.S Ambassador to England in 1938 and a supporter of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy.)  The other Generals at the meeting, including Kennedy’s own Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman appointee Maxwell Taylor, chimed in as well. They all agreed…there was no choice but direct military intervention in Cuba. LeMay summed up his statements at the meeting by saying that if the President responded weakly to the Soviet threat in Cuba then his administration would be viewed as spineless overseas and that many U.S. citizens would feel that way. He concluded his baiting of Kennedy by stating to the President: “In other words, you’re in a pretty bad fix at the present time.”

          Not one to let a challenge pass, Kennedy responded: “What did you say?”

          “You’re in a pretty bad fix.” LeMay repeated.

          “You’re in there with me. Personally.” Kennedy retorted.

          After an hour Kennedy and McNamara left the meeting without JFK giving a decision to the Chiefs as to how he would proceed in Cuba. He was clearly shaken by the attitude of LeMay and his top military men. Right after the meeting Kennedy encountered Ted Sorensen outside the Cabinet room. In reference to the blockade strategy JFK told him, “You and Bobby have to get a consensus on this thing.” Pointing at the door of the room he just exited and where the Chiefs still were, the President added, “They all want war.”

          A little later he expressed his fear that his military would start a war without his approval, stating to an aide, “I don’t want these nuclear weapons firing without our knowing it. I don’t think we ought to accept the Chief’s word on that one.”

          The Ex Comm group met all day and night of Friday the 19^th and by Saturday morning had reached a consensus for a blockade. Robert Kennedy called the President, who had gone to Chicago to meet Mayor Richard Daley for a campaign visit, and told him that he needed to return to Washington to meet with the group and make the final decision. Telling the press that his campaign stop was being cut short due to a cold, JFK flew back to the White House. While he was in the air U.S. armed forces around the world were put on alert and Defense Secretary McNamara ordered four tactical air squadrons be readied in the event Kennedy opted for the air strikes. By 2:30 PM on

Ex Comm meeting

Saturday, October 20^th  Ex Comm was back in session with the President at the White House. In the discussion that followed all of the options and the reasons for them were reviewed and in the end JFK chose the blockade as the best strategy to move forward with. According to Robert Kennedy in his memoir, the main point that swung the decision toward blockade was the moral aspect of a big and powerful nation like the U.S. launching a surprise attack on its smaller and weaker neighbor. Much time had been spent on this point. McNamara, RFK and others argued that such an act ran counter to what the United States stood for and would damage the country’s reputation in the world’s eyes. In the end this view prevailed with the President but his decision was aided by a more honest Air Force officer he had consulted with, General Walter Sweeney Jr., who told him there was no way anyone could guarantee that an air strike would get all the launch sites or missiles leaving the possibility that any surviving missiles could still be launched against the United States. Any doubt Kennedy had about how to proceed was now gone….blockade it would be.

          While plans to implement the blockade moved forward Kennedy scheduled airtime on all three major broadcast networks, NBC, ABC and CBS, to announce the situation to the American people. He had his strategy for handling and had managed the first week of the crisis without the Soviets or the public realizing what was going on. The time for secrecy was over.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

JFK and the Road to Dallas: The Cuban Missile Crisis…Part I …by Mark Arnold

        Note: Of the many crises confronted by John Kennedy during his time in office the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most significant, both for the nation and in terms of the effect it had on him personally. Never before or since has the nation come so close to nuclear war. In the next two installments of this series on the reasons for the decline of the U.S. as a nation we will examine this crisis and walk through it completely. To understand the events that transpired in the year following the crisis, the last year of Kennedy’s life, you must understand what happened across thirteen days in October 1962…here is the whole story…MA

I

JFK

 do not believe another American president during peacetime ever had to deal with an array of crisis situations like those faced by John Kennedy during the brief time he was in the White House. Not all of these situations were Cold War related. By the fall of 1962 the Civil Rights movement had been building for some time in the United States. It had been 7 years since Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, thus igniting the Montgomery Bus Boycott and bringing national attention to the young Baptist minister leading the Boycott, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Through those seven years the Civil Rights movement had grown to the point that it was challenging the practice of racial segregation in schools all across the South. One of those schools was the University of Mississippi. A black man named James Meredith, who had twice before been denied enrollment by university officials and the district court, was finally granted his right to enroll by appealing the district court decision to the Fifth Judicial Circuit Court which had voted 2-1 in Meredith’s favor. The door was now open; it remained for Meredith to walk through it and he determined to do so by enrolling at Ole Miss for the fall 1962 term. 

James Meredith

          Winning the legal battle, as Meredith would find, was the easy part. Upon his arrival at the University to enroll the campus erupted in violent protest with some 2500 white students, Ku Klux Klan members and off duty police squared off against a hastily assembled group of several hundred federal marshals, deputized prison guards, border patrol and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents assigned by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to protect Meredith. Through the violent night of September 30^th 1962 with the Kennedys monitoring the situation from the White House the federal officers and deputized personnel protecting Meredith repelled attack after attack from the mob using tear gas while dodging bricks, rocks, pipes, Molotov cocktails, sniper fire and the occasional shotgun blast. 166 federal officers and dozens of protesters were wounded and two people were killed before the long night was over, but on the next day, October 1^st, 1962 James Meredith successfully enrolled at the University of Mississippi.

          While another major step towards ending segregation in the South had been taken, the violence of the situation at Ole Miss portended more fierce Civil Rights battles in the future. For John Kennedy, however, there would be no time to evaluate what had happened in Mississippi or to plan for potential similar future occurrences in the South. On Monday, October 15^th 1962, exactly two weeks after Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss, a U-2 spy plane photographed what appeared to be medium range, nuclear ballistic missile launch sites being constructed in west Cuba. What would come to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis was underway.

Cuban missile launch site

          By the time they were photographed by the U-2 spy plane the Soviet Union had been working on constructing medium range ballistic missile sites in Cuba for a number of weeks. As noted earlier Fidel Castro felt the drastic action of installing the missile launch sites was needed as the necessary deterrent to prevent the U.S. from once again trying to invade and depose him. He had good reason to think that just such an effort was underway by the United States. I have already mentioned “Operation Northwoods”, the crackpot scheme dreamed up in spring of 1962 by Joint Chiefs Chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer and ostensibly approved by the other Chiefs that involved a variety of plots to make Castro look guilty of attacking U.S. bases, ships or citizens and therefore justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. In late 1961, clearly bypassing the CIA and military, Kennedy himself had authorized a plan called Operation Mongoose and chose none other than Ed Lansdale as the man to run it and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy as the man to run Lansdale.  (Yes…the same Ed Lansdale who ran the Philippine operation and the Saigon Military Mission) The whole point of Mongoose from Kennedy’s viewpoint was to provide a covert operation against Castro that his administration actually controlled and could therefore trust, as opposed to what he had experienced already from the CIA and military. This, of course, drove a deeper wedge between Kennedy and his National Security establishment, who felt the Kennedys were meddling in what was rightfully their turf; the area of covert operations

Ed Lansdale

          In light of what we have learned about him thus far the choice of Lansdale by JFK as the man to run Mongoose may seem peculiar. He had started his career as regular military (Army) in World War II but quickly shifted to the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s war time precursor, where he had gotten his start on intelligence and counter-insurgency activities. As the CIA’s point man for the Philippine operation in the early ‘50s as well as the Saigon Military Mission, both of which were considered Cold War successes by the CIA, Lansdale was the most experienced man for the job the Kennedys wanted done in Cuba, that’s for sure. In the clandestine world he had become something of a legendary figure. Two novels were written loosely based on Lansdale’s Asian exploits; 1955’s “The Quiet American” and 1958’s “The Ugly American”, which was also made into a movie. Being originally U.S. Army as well as OSS, his clandestine career pre-dated the CIA and simply merged into it as that intelligence agency came onto the scene following 1947’s National Security Act. As he advanced in the clandestine world so did his military rank, eventually reaching Brigadier General. This gave Lansdale the appearance of being somewhat independent of the CIA and, in fact, a number of CIA men viewed him as a rogue and not to be trusted.

Fidel Castro

          Indeed, Lansdale’s theories about dealing with the communists in the Cold War seemed to be at odds with many in the Agency, centering as they seemingly did on the notion that you had to win the hearts and minds of the people of the nation you were dealing with so that they would take on the fight against the communists themselves. It was probably this fact about him that so appealed to Kennedy, who had no intention of invading Cuba but very much wanted Castro ousted. (Keep in mind that in 1961-62 Kennedy was still a committed Cold Warrior. His chief difference from the Military/CIA advisors in his administration was that he knew that involving the U.S. military in the various covert ops being run was not only an outright violation of international law but also extremely dangerous in a nuclear age. He simply was not willing to risk an all-out war that would kill millions.)

          Though he was a staunch anti-communist, Lansdale had made a study of the tactics used by Mao Zedong during his successful revolution in China. Mao had stated to his guerillas, “Buy and sell fairly. Return everything borrowed. Indemnify everything damaged. Do not bathe in view of women. Do not rob personal belongings of captives.” Lansdale recognized in Mao’s strategy the importance of the allegiance of the people and felt this needed to be incorporated into the various U.S. Cold War operations being carried out. At least that is the impression he tried to convey.

Col. Fletcher Prouty

          Of course, with a man like Lansdale it is hard to know what the truth is or what he really believed. According to Col. Fletcher Prouty, who knew him since the early ’50s, Lansdale was “…the classic chameleon. He would tell the truth sparingly and he would fabricate a lot.” With respect to Lansdale, Prouty also stated, “I have heard him brag about capturing random Vietnamese and putting them in a helicopter. Then they would work on them to make them ‘confess’ to being Viet Minh. When they would not, they would toss them out of the chopper, one after the other, until the last ones talked. This was Ed’s idea of fun…as related to me many times.” To me this does not sound like a man really interested in winning the “hearts and minds of the people”. It is entirely possible that in taking on Kennedy’s Mongoose operation Lansdale was still carrying out some sort of CIA assignment designed to mislead JFK into thinking he was controlling something he wasn’t.

          Whether Lansdale was or was not misleading the President, what we do know is that as Mongoose moved ahead into 1962 the types of operations it engaged in were sabotage operations within Cuba of one kind or another as well as propaganda and psychological schemes. One idea of Lansdale’s that never made it off the launching pad was a plot that involved getting a U.S. submarine to fire star shells into the sky in an effort to convince the naive Catholic Cubans on the island that the Second Coming of Christ was at hand in the hopes that it would inspire a revolt against Castro. (star shells are a type of artillery shell that is designed to explode in the air with a star-like shower of sparkles. They are ordinarily used for signaling or illuminating an area.) Though we don’t know that Kennedy actually was aware of Lansdale’s crazy scheme one has to wonder what he would have thought of it, being Catholic himself.

          Operation Mongoose served the Kennedy administration in another way as well and this may have been Kennedy’s real reason for it in the first place. With Republicans like Barry Goldwater and intelligence media assets like Life magazine (It is known that “Life” publisher Henry Luce had numerous intelligence and CIA connections) claiming that sufficient action wasn’t being taken to remove Castro, JFK could point to the various Mongoose activities as evidence that something was being done, thus satisfying the less hawkish elements of the American public. The CIA and top military were not misled by this however and by mid ’62 were very frustrated. They felt that Mongoose as it was being run would never result in deposing Castro. For Kennedy, of course, that was not the program’s intention, at least not by invasion. Because of this the CIA moved once again to take matters into its own hands. In his book “Brothers…The Hidden Story of the Kennedy Years” author David Talbot tells us that in early May of 1962 Richard Helms, the man who replaced Richard Bissell as Deputy Director Plans after Bissell was fired by JFK following the Bay of Pigs, realizing that Kennedy would never invade Cuba, instructed his top Agency Cuba man William Harvey to renew the CIA’s contract with the Mafia to assassinate Castro.

Richard Helms

          As the order to “renew” the contract would indicate, this was not the first time the CIA had hooked up with the Mafia to get Castro. In August of 1960, well before JFK took office, CIA Director Allen Dulles approved a plan by which Mafia lieutenant Johnny Roselli was contacted by the CIA’s Robert Maheu. Maheu told Roselli that he represented a number of large businesses that took heavy losses when Castro took over Cuba and that they were willing to pay $150,000 to have Castro removed. Roselli in turn introduced Maheu to the Mafia bosses of Chicago and Miami, Sam Giancanna and Santos Trafficante respectively, out of which resulted several plots to kill Castro. For whatever reasons none of these escapades were successful. In May of ’62, when Helms gave William Harvey the order to renew the contract on Castro, Harvey once again went straight to Johnny Roselli. This time Giancanna and Trafficante were not involved directly and Harvey worked exclusively with Roselli it seems. Harvey’s initial idea was to give Roselli some poisoned pills that he could slip to a contact of his in Cuba who would then use them to poison Castro. This plan, however, was quickly scrapped in favor of using long range rifles to take Castro out. The CIA delivered the rifles to Roselli who arranged for them to get to Cuba but for some reason this operation also failed. Harvey continued to associate with Roselli on various other “get Castro” schemes and the two became friends, even vacationing together. Harvey provided Roselli with fake credentials as an Army colonel and allowed him complete access to the CIA’s station in Miami. Harvey’s adopted daughter became so accustomed to Roselli that she knew him as “Uncle Johnny”.

Johnny Roselli

          In the mid 1970s, when the congressional investigatory committee chaired by Senator Frank Church was investigating the CIA, Helms and Harvey did their best to shift the blame for their bizarre schemes with the Mafia to John and Robert Kennedy claiming that the pressure they were bringing on the Agency to remove Castro included the demand to have him assassinated in any way possible, even through the use of the Mafia. They claimed or implied that Kennedy authorized these actions as part of Operation Mongoose. Their revisionist efforts got some traction and today you will still run into articles and books claiming that the Kennedy brothers were responsible for the CIA’s efforts at assassinating Castro including those involving the Mafia

Robert Kennedy

          In his book “Brothers…The Hidden Story of the Kennedy Years” David Talbot presents evidence that counters this view and states outright that when Helms made the decision to once again use the Mafia to get Castro he did so outside the parameters of Mongoose and did not inform the President or his brother. On May 14^th 1962, just a few days after William Harvey had handed Johnny Roselli the poison pills to kill Castro, Robert Kennedy had two men from the CIA in his office. The first was a long time agent named Sheffield Edwards and the second was a CIA lawyer named Lawrence Houston. Kennedy wanted to know from the CIA men why the CIA was attempting to block the prosecution of a private eye who was caught illegally bugging the Las Vegas hotel suite of comedian Dan Rowan the year before. (Yes, the same Dan Rowan who a few years later would become famous for the hit TV show Laugh In) Edwards and Houston told RFK that the reason was for national security purposes which on questioning turned out to be the fact that the private detective had been hired by none other than the CIA’s Robert Maheu as a favor to Mafia chief Sam Giancanna who apparently thought Rowan was sleeping with his girlfriend. Why, the Attorney General wanted to know, would Maheu do such a thing? The answer, of course, was that Giancanna had assisted the CIA’s earlier efforts at assassinating Castro and was now getting a favor in return.                                                                

Sam Giancanna

          One can only imagine what Robert Kennedy thought when Edwards and Houston told him about the CIA/Mafia “get Castro” plot of 1960/61. RFK had made a name for himself in the Senate in the 1950s with his investigations of and attacks on organized crime and now here he was being told that his own government intelligence agency had been in cahoots with the Mafia for the purpose of assassinating a foreign leader. The CIA men assured RFK that the Agency was no longer involved in such activities, either unaware of or simply lying about the fact that Helms and Harvey had initiated a new contract on Castro just days earlier.

          Robert Kennedy’s meeting with Sheffield and Houston has become a controversial point in the history of JFK’s one thousand days in office. Richard Helms and others in the CIA claimed that at the time of the meeting the Attorney General was already aware of the CIA’s Castro contract renewal and that his apparent surprise at the news was just a reuse. RFK, they claimed, along with JFK were the ones who had pressured them into it. Yet this claim is contradicted by the testimony of none other than the CIA’s own attorney who was present at the meeting, Lawrence Houston. Before the Church Committee in 1975, as described in David Talbot’s book, Houston testified that he got the impression from the meeting that RFK was completely unaware of the CIA’s Mafia dealings and that he was disgusted to be put in a position where he would have to drop a case against organized crime because of the CIA’s shady activities.

   

Ted Sorensen

       A more eloquent defense of the Kennedys and particularly JFK as regards the CIA/Mafia assassination plots on Castro comes from someone who knew him very well and who was a good friend of Kennedy’s; his speech writer Ted Sorensen. Sorensen’s testimony before the Church Committee is quoted in Talbot’s book. With regard to the subject of JFK and political assassination Sorensen stated that it “…was totally foreign to his character and conscience, foreign to his fundamental reverence for human life and his respect for his adversaries, foreign to his insistence upon a moral dimension in U.S. foreign policy and his concern for the country’s reputation abroad…Particularly ludicrous is the notion that one of his background would have ever knowingly countenanced the employment for these purposes of the same organized crime elements he had fought for so many years.” (Both Kennedys had been involved in the Senate committees investigating organized crime and labor unions in the late ‘50s and were staunchly opposed to organized crime.)

William Harvey

          Why would top CIA officers such as Richard Helms and William Harvey while under oath do their best to mislead and confuse the Senate Church Committee investigating the CIA’s assassination activities? On the face of it the CIA’s effort to smear the Kennedy brothers by charging they were responsible for the Castro assassination plots smacks simply of trying to save the Agency’s reputation and just possibly its existence. Underneath this one can discern a more sinister purpose however. If the Agency could make it appear that the Kennedys really were in control of and running the CIA and that it was doing their bidding then the idea that the CIA as some rogue element of government could have possibly been involved in JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations would appear that much more remote.

          To Fidel Castro, however, sitting on his island in the Caribbean in the late summer of 1962, it made no difference whether it was Kennedy or the CIA behind the attempts on his life or the sabotages and harassment his nation was being subjected to. Cuba had already been invaded once at the Bay of Pigs. To sit and wait to be invaded again was suicide. So Castro made his move and arranged with the Soviets to have the medium range ballistic missile launch sites built as the necessary deterrent to another U.S. invasion.  When they were spotted by the U-2 spy plane on October 15^th 1962 the most intense Cold War crisis in history was launched. Across the next thirteen days the U.S. and the Soviet Union would teeter on the brink of all-out nuclear war. When it was finally all over John Kennedy had emerged from the crisis a changed man.

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

JFK and the Road to Dallas: The Missiles of Cuba: Prelude to a Crisis…by Mark Arnold

           

Note:  In this article, the tenth in the series on the causes of the decline of the United States as a nation, we take a closer look at the factors leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. We will see that Kennedy’s predecessor in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower had his own catastrophic run-ins with the national security establishment at the end of his administration in 1960 and how that presaged what Kennedy experienced at the Bay of Pigs and the situations in Laos, Vietnam and Berlin. As the summer of 1962 waned towards fall these same interests in the military and CIA continued to push for a U.S. military intervention in Cuba and events would soon conspire to bring the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war....MA

W

ith the signing of the “Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos” in late July of 1962 JFK had been in office exactly a year and a half. Immediately on his plate upon arriving in office in January of ‘61 was the Laotian crisis and within a couple of months the colossal failure of the CIA’s Cuban Brigade at the Bay of Pigs, during which he had defied his military and intelligence establishment’s demands to salvage the Brigade by authorizing the use of  U.S. military force. In the fall of ’61 he had faced and withstood heavy pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA to commit regular U.S. combat forces to both Laos and Vietnam and this was followed almost immediately by the Berlin confrontation where he once again found a way to defuse the situation and keep us out of war.

John F. Kennedy

          You should see a pattern developing here. Even at the expense of alienating himself from his national security establishment, in every instance where Kennedy was seemingly cornered into going to war he bobbed and weaved his way out of it. To the cold warriors of the JCS, CIA and their ilk this made him “soft” on communism and a threat to the nation; likewise to the “defense” contractors of the “military industrial complex”, President Eisenhower’s term to describe the interwoven alliance between the military and national security establishment and the various corporations and companies of the “arms” industry who equip and profit from them. It is worth noting that “military in collusion with industry” is a text book definition of fascism. President Eisenhower, old general that he was, was acutely aware of this, having witnessed the rise of the national security establishment during the eight Cold War years of his administration from 1952 -1960. He had famously warned of its threat in his “farewell to the nation” speech as he was leaving office in January of 1961.

Dwight Eisenhower

          Eisenhower must have felt great empathy for JFK, having himself been seared by these same forces now searing Kennedy. Towards the end of his administration, in late 1959 and 1960, he had made his own effort to defuse the dangerous Cold War with what he was calling his Crusade for Peace. In May of 1960 a summit conference was to be held in Paris with the Soviet Union, the United States, France and England in attendance. This was to be followed up by another Eisenhower/Khrushchev meeting in Moscow later in the year. The theme for these meetings was worldwide peace and harmony and in keeping with this Eisenhower had ordered that all U.S. aerial surveillance flights over communist territory cease and that no regular U.S. military personnel become involved in combat activities, whether covert or overt during the period leading up to the summits.

The U-2 spy plane

          Despite this restriction, on May 1^st 1960 a U.S. U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers took off from Pakistan destined for Norway with a direct flight route over the Soviet Union. (In the days before spy satellites intelligence aerial surveillance was carried out by the top secret U-2, a special high altitude aircraft developed for this express purpose by Lockheed) Powers never made it to Norway. His U-2 was shot down over Russia and the aircraft as well as Powers himself were captured. On noting the U-2 was missing the U.S. national security geniuses calling the shots made an announcement that a weather research aircraft had gone missing and potentially had strayed into Soviet airspace. Noting this false statement, the Soviets countered by announcing that they had captured the U-2, a statement that brought stringent denials from the United States. When the Soviets then produced pictures not only of the plane but of Francis Gary Powers alive and well the U.S. was caught in a lie. Eisenhower was placed in the identical situation Kennedy would find himself in a year later with the Bay of Pigs; having to admit responsibility for a disaster brought about through direct violation of orders issued by the President. The Paris summit meeting and Eisenhower’s Crusade for Peace were effectively destroyed.

Francis Gary Powers

          From our perspective today, understanding how the CIA operated, we have to ask the questions: was it really an accident that Powers and his U-2 were sent on their mission across Russia at such a strategic time in violation of Eisenhower’s orders?  Who really gained by the sabotage of Eisenhower’s Crusade for Peace? A closer look at the U-2 spy plane program shows that in 1960 it was being run by the same man responsible for the CIA’s Cuban brigade and the man in charge of all CIA covert operations, Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell. It was under his authority that Powers was sent on his mission. The U-2 generally flew at an altitude that rendered it impervious to being shot down. In one of his writings on the subject Fletcher Prouty speculates that it would have been possible to cause the U-2 to reduce altitude into the Soviet “surface to air missile” (SAM) range by the simple expedient of limiting the hydrogen required in the aircraft’s fuel mixture. This would have caused the pilot to have to reduce altitude to keep his engine running and thus be exposed to being shot down. Whether this happened or not, what is certain is that the Powers U-2 incident destroyed Eisenhower’s hopes to defuse the Cold War.

          By mid-summer 1962 JFK was a seasoned veteran at dealing with the duplicity of his own intelligence agency as well as the war mongering efforts of his top military leaders to try and compel his authorization of the use of regular U.S. military forces in the conflicts in Laos, Vietnam and the various strategies to get rid of Castro and re-take Cuba. One such strategy regarding Cuba serves as a particularly extreme example of just what Kennedy was dealing with from his top military people. On March 13^th 1962, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer proposed to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a plan to get rid of Castro that he called Operation Northwoods. Lemnitzer represented the plan as having the full support of all of the Joint Chiefs. Among the things the plan called for were the following:

 

Robert McNamara

1.    Fake attacks on the U.S. base at Guantanamo carried out by the ubiquitous anti-Castro Cubans making it look like they were Castro’s forces attacking.

2.   Use of the same friendly Cubans to infiltrate the base and stage sabotage incidents that could then be blamed on Castro.

3.    Lob mortar shells into the Guantanamo base blaming it on Castro.

4.  Stage a “remember the Maine” type incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo harbor complete with fake lists of the dead for publishing in U.S. newspapers and fake funerals. (The USS Maine was the ship sunk in Havana harbor in 1898, supposedly by the Spanish, and which justified the U.S. involvement in the Spanish American War.)

5.    Create a terrorist program in the U.S. that could be blamed on Castro specifically targeting the Cuban exiles in south Florida but even extending to Washington D.C. that involved shooting at and wounding people and even the use of plastic bombs to be exploded at specifically chosen spots.

6.    Simulate or even use a real boatload of Cuban refugees and sink it blaming the incident on Castro.

These and the other steps called for in Operation Northwoods were solely designed to create the conditions needed to justify U.S. regular military intervention in Cuba to oust Castro. Exhibiting great restraint, for he must have privately felt that Lemnitzer had gone off the deep end, three days later Kennedy responded to Op Northwoods by simply stating that he could foresee no circumstances that would justify the use of U.S. military might in Cuba. He had once again rejected the efforts of the Cold Warrior, national security establishment to push the nation to war.

          That did not stop Lemnitzer and his generals from continuing to try however. In another memo to McNamara on April 10^th, 1962 Lemnitzer stated flatly that the Chiefs believed that the Cuban problem had to be resolved in the near future and that it would require the military to do it. They continued to develop and push plans, along with the CIA, for invasions or the pretexts that would justify invasions across the summer of 1962. Seeing that the situation with Lemnitzer was an impossible one Kennedy finally removed him as JCS Chairman in September of ’62 replacing him with General Maxwell Taylor; the man he had used to help investigate the CIA Bay of Pigs failure the year before. Through firing Lemnitzer Kennedy was definitely shaking things up and sending a message but considering the Cold Warrior attitude predominating in his government at the time the action had about as much effect as spitting into the proverbial wind. Before too many more weeks went by in 1962 JFK would see this for himself.

          Meanwhile, 90 miles from the Florida coastline in the island nation of Cuba,

Castro and Khrushchev

Fidel Castro was evaluating his options. Though he had survived the invasion effort at the Bay of Pigs he was under no delusions that this meant the U.S. military and CIA were through trying. He was definitely aware that more plans were being created and considered by the U.S. to deal with him and his Cuban revolution. The effect of this was to force him to the only main option available to him to ensure the defense of his island: Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union. Khrushchev wanted to know from Castro what it was he needed to accomplish this defense. Castro replied: “…do whatever is needed to convince the United States that an attack on Cuba is the same as an attack on the Soviet Union.”

          After considering the courses of action available they determined that merely conventional military aid from the Soviets might not be sufficient to deter a U.S. attack, and so it was decided; the Soviet Union would install nuclear missiles in Cuba.

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved

JFK and the Road to Dallas: Confrontation in Berlin…by Mark Arnold

Germany as divided by Allies following WW II

Note:  Sometime before the close of World War II decisions were made as to how the post war world would look and how the mechanism of conflict and war would continue to be used to direct the affairs of man for the benefit of the unseen decision makers. The immediate consequence of this was what would come to be known as the “Cold War”. Those of you familiar with World War II know that the Soviet Union was our ally in the fight against Nazi Germany. Germany fell to the Allies in May of 1945 and Germany’s ally Japan surrendered in early September of that year following the nuclear devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How could it be, then, that within less than two years the world would be so arrayed that our former ally Russia was now our earnest foe and that conflict would henceforth be carried forward as “freedom and capitalism vs. communism and totalitarianism.” As is the way with such things, what looks to be a spontaneous occurrence actually is rooted in earlier beginnings and causes. We will look at this more deeply in future articles in this series. The important thing to understand for our purposes here is that the conquered German nation was divided into administrative zones under each of the allied victors; the British getting the northwest zone, the French the southwest, the Americans the south and the Russians the northeast. The German capital of Berlin, though located in the Russian zone, was likewise divided with a sector going to each allied nation; the American, French and British sectors eventually comprising what would become known as West Berlin and the Soviet zone becoming East Berlin. From that point on Berlin would become a major focal point of the Cold War and  in 1961 came within an eyelash of triggering World War III…for the full story of how JFK once again averted disaster, with some help from a most unlikely source, please read on.. MA

I

The city of Berlin divided
East (red) and West

t did not take long for Berlin to become one of the first flash points of this new “Cold War”. Plans had been laid before the end of the war as to how Germany would be administered and how it would be divided as described in the note above. What had not been agreed upon was how Germany should proceed economically. As a result there was no coordinated plan for the re-building of Germany or its economic system. France, the U.S. and Britain, therefore, ended up embarking on their own economic strategy for Germany, largely through what was known as the “Marshall Plan”, while the Soviets went their own way with their own plan. The “Marshall Plan”, named after General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army during World War II and U.S. Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, was a program of economic assistance to help re-build war torn Europe and was first proposed by Marshall at a commencement address delivered at Harvard University in 1947. Within a few months the plan was approved by Congress and implemented with Marshall ultimately being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1953) for being the driving force behind it.

General George C. Marshall

          In early 1948, as part of their plan, the Western Allies decided to introduce a new currency into their sectors of Germany and Berlin. Since the war had ended Germany had largely been operating on a “chocolate and cigarettes” barter system and a functional currency was vitally needed to get the country going. The Soviets were not brought into the loop on this new currency, however, and so viewed it as a threat. The Russian people and country had suffered greatly at the hands of Germany and the Russian leader Joseph Stalin was not particularly interested in a revitalized German nation. As well, a relatively strong currency in West Germany and Berlin would undermine potentially what the Soviets were doing economically in their sectors in the East. Their response in the spring of 1948 was to start disrupting traffic to and from the portion of Berlin controlled by the Western Allies.

General Lucius Clay

          After several interruptions of traffic and also of electricity and water, in late June, 1948 Stalin finally ordered a full scale blockade of the Western Allied sectors of Berlin, cutting all road and railroad access as well as water routes to and from the city, thus cutting Berlin off from the rest of the world. Stalin was hoping to force the Western Allies to give up on Berlin and leave it to the Soviets. The U.S. Commander in Berlin, General Lucius Clay, responded by ordering what has become known to history as the Berlin Airlift, by which the needed supplies for the western sector of Berlin were airlifted in to the city. The Berlin airlift was a massive operation that went on for nearly a year, peaking in April of 1949 with nearly 1400 flights made to West Berlin delivering 12,000 tons of supplies in a 24 hour period. Witnessing this, in May of 1949 the Soviets finally gave up on the blockade and the Berlin Airlift came to an end. Not so the Cold War stresses and confrontations regarding the city of Berlin, however.

                                                                                                                         

The Berlin Airlift

          I have given you this short history so that you have some of the background to the situation JFK faced in Berlin when he assumed the Presidency in 1961. In the 12 years since the end of the Berlin Airlift the Cold War had intensified into a standoff between two nuclear bomb wielding super powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The battles of the Cold War had been and were being waged mostly covertly in third world nations around the planet in places such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Guatemala, Laos and Korea. It was a new kind of warfare involving new kinds of tactics employed for the most part by “intelligence” agencies that really were specialists at insurgency, counter insurgency and paramilitary operations; the CIA and its Soviet counterpart the KGB. In Europe the Soviet Union dominated the Eastern part of the continent behind a border known to the U.S. and the West as the Iron Curtain. The Western Allied sector of Berlin, by 1961 simply called West Berlin, located as it was, deep behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany and still controlled by France, the U.S. and Great Britain, was a particularly troublesome area. Always simmering as a crisis, in fall of ’61, while Kennedy was wrestling with the situation in Laos, Berlin suddenly exploded into being the focal point of the Cold War with the two super powers confronting each other there in a deadly game of nuclear “Russian Roulette”.

          The Berlin crisis was precipitated in August of 1961 when Russian Priemier Nikita Khrushchev ordered that a wall be built between Soviet controlled East Berlin and French, U.S. and British controlled West Berlin. East Berliners had been fleeing to the West for some time and Khrushchev wanted to stop the flow. Ironically, shortly after this Kennedy sent as his personal representative to West Berlin retired General Lucius Clay; the same Lucius Clay who had orchestrated the Berlin Airlift 12 years earlier. Almost immediately Clay escalated the crisis by ordering the U.S. military commandant in West Berlin to have his engineers build a duplicate of a section of the Berlin Wall in a forest. U.S. tanks equipped with bulldozer attachments then practiced destroying it. General Bruce Clark, the commander of all U.S. forces in Europe, on discovering what Clay was doing ordered it stopped. He challenged Clay to call the President and talk to him about it if he did not like the order. Clay declined to make the call and neither man ever informed Kennedy of Clay’s aborted wall destruction exercises.

The Berlin Wall

          Khrushchev, on the other hand was informed almost instantly of the wall bashing being done by the U.S. tanks in the forest. The exercises were witnessed by Soviet spies who forwarded reports and pictures to Moscow. As a result Khrushchev and his advisers immediately made plans to be ready should the Americans move to take down the wall. That moment came in October when a flap took place over East German refusal to let an American official back into West Berlin through a checkpoint in the wall known as “Checkpoint Charlie”. That was all the prompting Lucius Clay needed. On October 27, ten American bull dozer mounted M-48 tanks made their way to Checkpoint Charlie, only to be confronted almost instantly by ten Soviet tanks that had been waiting in side streets for just such a moment. The Soviets had used their advance notice and prepared well. Soon twenty more Soviet tanks arrived on the scene and the Americans brought up twenty more of their own. For the next sixteen hours the Soviet and American tanks confronted one another almost muzzle to muzzle in a tense standoff.

          I was in 5^th grade at Shorewood Elementary School in Seattle, Washington when all of this was happening in Berlin in October of 1961. I vaguely remember hearing about it on the news and being concerned about the threat of nuclear war. (The Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year is a much clearer memory to me actually.) My childhood fears notwithstanding, most of us in the United States today have no idea how close we came to actual nuclear war as a result of what occurred in Berlin in October ’61. Much later Khrushchev’s foreign affairs advisor, a man named Valentin Falin provided some insight. Falin was beside Khrushchev through the entire crisis. He reports that had the U.S. tanks advanced any further the Soviet tanks would have fired on them and events after that very likely would have escalated out of control. In Berlin in October of 1961 we were that close to disaster.

US tanks at "Checkpoint Charlie"

          On getting the reports of what was occurring in Berlin an alarmed Kennedy employed a back channel communication line that he and Khrushchev had decided to set up at their Vienna summit earlier in the year. (The line was to be private and unofficial, bypassing the customary state to state formalities. Khrushchev had first used the line in September ‘61 prior to JFKs first address to the United Nations to express hope that he and Kennedy could set up a summit to address the tensions building regarding Berlin. Kennedy had responded that he would be open to the summit but first wanted a Soviet demonstration of good faith regarding the agreements made on Laos at the Vienna summit in June. The Kennedy/Khrushchev back channel line involved a message delivered by a trusted aide to a trusted aide. For Kennedy, in the case described above, that aide was his Press Secretary Pierre Sallinger. For the Berlin Crisis it was Robert Kennedy) JFK had his brother Robert deliver a message to Soviet press attaché Georgi Bolshakov for relay to Khrushchev. The message said that if the Russians would withdraw their tanks within 24 hours the Americans would do the same 30 minutes later. Kennedy then ordered Lucius Clay to prepare to carry out the American side of the withdrawal. The next morning the Soviet tanks withdrew followed shortly by the Americans and the Berlin Crisis came to a close.

             By a whisker JFK had once again averted war.

          The crisis in Berlin was resolved for the moment, but a question remains: why did Khrushchev trust that Kennedy would do as he promised in withdrawing the U.S. tanks if the Russians withdrew their tanks first? Why did he not insist that the Americans withdraw first? The answer to this is grasped when one realizes that Khrushchev apparently understood that Kennedy, if anything, was under more pressure from his military and intelligence people than he (Khrushchev) was. Because of their secret communication in September and because of JFK’s subsequent address at the U.N. which spoke hopefully of peace, Khrushchev thought he and Kennedy had been making progress on Berlin. He strongly suspected, therefore, that in Berlin, as well as other crisis zones, JFK was being undermined. By withdrawing first he gave Kennedy the “out” he needed to defuse the crisis.

          Khrushchev, as we shall see, was tragically and uncannily accurate in his assessment that Kennedy was being undermined.

         

To be continued…

Copyright © 2013

By Mark Arnold

All Rights Reserved