Fifties (117 page)

At first Powers was sure the Soviets were going to execute him. But then he was moved from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, and he began to believe for the first time that he might be permitted to live and that the Soviets might use him in the propaganda war. Perhaps Khrushchev, he thought, might take him to the upcoming summit and present Powers to Eisenhower was something which belonged to him.

Years later Chip Bohlen, one of the top American Kremlinologists, said that Khrushchev took the U-2 as a personal insult; it was a personal embarrassment, because he had promised his colleagues in the Politburo that Eisenhower could be trusted. (Khrushchev himself later said that the U-2 affair was the beginning of the end for him in terms of his ability to hold power.) Khrushchev decided to bait a trap for the Americans. On May 5, he announced that the Russians had shot down a spy plane. He seemed, however, to be allowing some room to maneuver for the President, who could say that he had not known what the CIA was doing. Unfortunately, Eisenhower was already under severe criticism for not being the master of his own house. Khrushchev did not let on that the pilot was alive. In Washington the administration came up with a cover story about a weather plane that had flown off course, and thereby walked right into the baited trap. Eisenhower was confident that Khrushchev had no proof. At best there had been a quick flash on the radar, and perhaps some wreckage.

On May 7, six days after Powers had been shot down, Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet that he had the wreckage of the plane and the live pilot and, of course, the film. “The whole world knows that Allen Dulles is no great weatherman,” he said. He mentioned the gold rings and gold watches that Powers, like other U-2 pilots, carried with him in case he needed to barter with the local people. “Perhaps he was supposed to fly still higher, to Mars, and seduce the Martian ladies!” He showed some of the photos taken by the plane. “Here—
look at this
! Here are the airfields—
here
! Fighters in position on the ground. Two little white strips.
Here they are!
...”

For the next day American officials squirmed and pointed fingers at each other, trying to decide what the next cover story would be and who would take the fall. Some suggested the commander of the base in Turkey be relieved. Others thought that Allen Dulles should resign for the good of his country, thus protecting the President and perhaps saving the summit. Eisenhower, however, was not a man who liked scapegoats. (When his son, John, told him he should get rid of Allen Dulles because Dulles had misled him on the issue of whether a pilot could survive, the President was very angry. “I am
not
going to shift the blame to my underlings!” he had said.) Gradually, the truth began to seep out. The President was responsible for flights like this, came a statement.

But whatever victory Khrushchev had scored overseas, he was sure he was the loser at home, the man who had preached trust but who, on the eve of so important a meeting as the summit, had been
betrayed by the Americans. He now felt isolated, vulnerable to the hard-liners, who hated his efforts to deal with the West.

The Americans took a terrible beating in the propaganda game; the only question now was whether the summit could be saved. Eisenhower told reporters he still intended to go to Paris but that he would not be able to go to Moscow. Allen Dulles was allowed to meet with a group of eighteen select congressional leaders, and he and an aide showed some of the U-2 photos as a means of justifying them. What pleasure there was in knowing that the Soviet threat was overrated vanished in shards of shattered diplomacy.

The Paris summit was a disaster. Khrushchev chose to thunder his way through it. He shouted so loudly that de Gaulle, the host, tried to quiet him by saying, “The acoustics in this room are excellent. We can all hear the chairman.” Eisenhower, listening to himself and his country being berated by the angry First Secretary, wrote a note to Christian Herter, who had replaced the ailing Foster Dulles as secretary of state: “I’m going to take up smoking again,” he observed mordantly. Khrushchev told de Gaulle that he could not understand why Eisenhower had admitted his involvement with the U-2. To him it was not a sign of American candor but of contempt for himself personally and for Russia as a nation.

For Eisenhower there would be no trip to Moscow, no sightseeing with the Khrushchevs, no warm toasts, and no test-ban treaty. That which he had wanted most desperately—a genuine beginning of peace—had been shot down along with Powers. His administration would end, he said somewhat bitterly, much as it had begun—without any real progress. “I had longed,” he said just before he died, “to give the United States and the world a lasting peace. I was able only to contribute to a stalemate.” Yet Eisenhower may have underestimated the most important achievement of his Administration—the fact that the worst did not happen. In the years of his Presidency both superpowers developed the hydrogen bomb along with intercontinental delivery systems. Yet his own essential decency, and the respect his own nation held for him, allowed him to soften the most terrible furies of that time and permit a relatively safe passage through those years.

Some thought the failure was Powers’s. What had happened to great patriots like Nathan Hale? wondered the liberal educator Robert Hutchins. Hanson Baldwin was shocked that Powers had not committed suicide. Was Powers yet another reflection of a too affluent America gone soft? William Faulkner thought the Russians might release him immediately as a reflection of their contempt for what America had become. The Russians at least were not about to execute him. They sentenced him to ten years.

FORTY-SIX

T
HE AMERICAN CLANDESTINE CAMPAIGN
against Fidel Castro began so tentatively that the people who were its authors did not even realize they were taking a fateful step. By the late 1950s those who posed legal and moral questions about clandestine operations were considered naive. The success of the coup in Guatemala was a precedent for covert action elsewhere in the region, and American policy had apparently been established: essential indifference to the needs of the people living there in favor of the interests of the large American companies in the region, most notably United Fruit. Given the increased feelings of nationalism in much of the area because of advances in modern communications, it was not a happy situation.

The CIA agents who had engineered the Guatemalan coup were now considered to be experts, though in general their knowledge of the region was marginal, few spoke Spanish, and they tended to seek
out only far right-wing military men as agents. In Cuba the government of Fulgencio Batista had to come apart in the latter part of the fifties. Few countries were headed by so greedy or cruel a dictator as Batista. His base of popular support was surprisingly small, and Cuba boasted, by Latin American standards, an increasingly sophisticated urban middle class. That power was slipping from Batista’s hands and that his armed forces were corrupt and of dubious loyalty were not exactly secrets either in Havana or in Washington.

The Cuba of the fifties was an ugly and decadent place, a play-land for rich Americans who wanted to escape the puritanical atmosphere of their home country, where they could gamble legally and buy whatever they wanted in terms of sexual gratification. It was a place of gambling, drinking, sex shows, prostitution. One mulatto star of the sex shows was known by the Americans as Superman, because of the heroic size of his penis, which was a tourist attraction of sorts, a must-see for many Americans on their Havana vacations. Superman would pretend to have sex with a number of women onstage every night. He did not particularly like his job, but he made $25 a night for it, which was for him a great deal more money than he could make working in the cane fields for United Fruit.

The gambling casinos were run by the American mob, and a healthy percentage of the profits went to Batista himself. Nothing worked without bribes and kickbacks. The key players in the regime—the secret police, the top military, and the bagmen who were responsible for the deliveries of money back and forth to the casinos—were handsomely rewarded with large cash bonuses, given out personally by the dictator each month in unmarked brown envelopes. This method implied that the dictator could, if he so chose, withhold the bribe the following month if things did not go to his liking. It was all surprisingly well organized. Batista’s control of the Cuban political and military process, wrote John Dorschner and Roberto Fabricio, “resembled the organization of a large criminal mob more than it did a traditional government.”

A regimental commander had to pay Batista $15,000 a month in kickback money from the gambling houses in his area. That alone gave Batista more than $1 million a year. But the main casinos in Havana were the heart of the action. They were controlled by the American mobster Meyer Lansky, and the dictator’s take was a neat $1.28 million a month. It was always paid on Monday at noon. Someone from Lansky’s operation would slip into the presidential palace with a briefcase full of money. From there a portion of the
money would percolate down through the Batista system—to the secret police and the torturers, of course.

Batista had ruled Cuba, directly or indirectly, legally or illegally, for much of the preceding two decades. He had risen to power through the army, taking over in a coup while still a sergeant in 1940. Shrewd and tough, he skillfully exploited Cuba’s potential for corruption. Taking a brief sabbatical after his first tour of office, he returned at the beginning of the fifties, shed his first wife, and married a young, ambitious woman who coveted social acceptance from Havana’s snobbish aristocracy. Since Batista was the son of a cane cutter and a mulatto, that was not a realistic aspiration. He was blackballed at the elegant Havana Yacht Club—the vote against him was said to be one of the rare free elections in Cuba.

He proceeded to extract his revenge by accumulating fabulous wealth—including cattle ranches, sugar plantations, and his own airline. He and his wife were world-class shoppers and clotheshorses. He loved to eat and turned it into something of an art form; during endless meals, he would periodically go off to vomit so that he could eat more. He loved to play cards with his pals, and rich though he was, even here he cheated, using waiters to tip him off about his opponents’ cards. He delighted in his control of the political apparatus, and he started each day by meeting with a trusted aide from the secret police, who brought him up to date on gossip gathered from wiretaps. “The novel,” the briefing was called and it was the dictator’s favorite moment of each day. A man like that has enemies and Batista went everywhere surrounded by teams of bodyguards, equipped with machine guns.

The key to his survival, of course, was the support of the United States, which in the past had committed itself to him unwaveringly: It was a policy set in part by hoods like Lansky, in conjunction with the more respectable businessmen from United Fruit, who were getting what they wanted out of Batista’s Cuba. But by 1957 his power had declined. There was a growing debate within the State Department about Batista’s effectiveness as an agent of American policy. The top people in the Latin American division of the State Department thought that Batista’s reign was already in its twilight, and that the United States should separate itself from supporting him so uncritically. The U.S., they thought, should work quickly to help create an alternative government, one far more liberal and democratic, which could keep up with the increasing demands for social change in the country. If we did not, the choice of Batista’s successor might well be outside our control. Worse, there was the
likelihood that this violent, oppressive regime on the right might well create its mirror image, a brutal regime of the left.

Yet Batista had one important American supporter: Earl E. T. Smith, a wealthy contributor to Eisenhower’s campaign and the American ambassador to Cuba. Smith liked to say that he was the second most powerful man and occasionally the most powerful man in Cuba, and he managed to sabotage the attempts of moderates in Havana, including church leaders, to find some kind of moderate successor to Batista.

Smith’s policy was perfect for Batista, because the two got on so well. Smith was very conservative. The only Cubans he talked to were wealthy, right-wing ones. Of the U.S. he would say, “I have lived in two eras, One when the country was run by the classes, and now when it is run by the masses. Something in between is probably best but I’ll be honest. I enjoyed it more when it was run by the classes.” Almost his entire embassy dissented from his view that Batista (or a Batista proxy) was a valid instrument of American policy, but Smith silenced them by refusing to sign off on their reporting. When it was clear that Batista was on his way out, Smith still continued to sabotage the attempts of moderate leaders in Cuba to bring some kind of moderate coalition government to power. Years later, Wayne Smith, a young political officer at the time, wrote of Earl Smith that he had come to see Batista as “a bulwark against Communism. In fact Batista was exactly the opposite; it was Batista who brought about the conditions that opened the door to radical solutions.”

Yet time had already passed Batista by. He ruled by force, had no popularity among the peasants, and his army was commanded by men who held their ranks for political reasons. The brutality of his regime offended almost everyone. In an age of modern communications, his attempts at manipulation were pathetically transparent. Even as Batista’s government was collapsing in 1958 and Fidel Castro was gathering his forces for the final military strike, Batista was sending out press releases on his forces’ alleged victories to journalists whom he bought and sold—but Castro was using his own rebel radio to reach the Cuban masses. In Havana, given the nature of the regime, almost nothing the government said was believed, while almost everything that came from Castro’s radio had credibility, born of the fact that he was challenging a tyrant.