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
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| 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.
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| 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 30th 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 1st, 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 15th 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.
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| 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
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| Ed Lansdale |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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”.
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| 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
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| 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 14th 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.
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| 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.
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| Ted Sorensen |
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| 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 15th 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
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