Ike's Spies (51 page)

As Bissell's operation grew, it had to move to larger quarters. None were available in the Canal Zone, so he made contact with his friends in the Guatemalan Government, whose President, Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, had helped to overthrow Arbenz seven years earlier. Ydígoras agreed to allow the
CIA
to establish its training base on Guatemala's Caribbean coast. By October the agency had four hundred guerrillas-in-training at the base.

The whole concept of the operation, meanwhile, had undergone a radical transformation, although neither Ike nor the 5412 people
were informed of the change until months later.
¹⁶
The original idea had been to rely primarily on the anti-Castro resistance forces already on the island, but by the fall of 1960, Bissell had reluctantly accepted the fact that such a plan was impossible, because there was no resistance force that could be counted on. Bissell's new plan was to land a fairly large, well-equipped, heavily armed force that would secure a beachhead and be able to hold it against Castro's counterattack.
¹⁷

The next stage would be a repeat of the
CIA'S
performance in Guatemala in 1954. That is, the invasion force would hold its position, as Castillo Armas' “army” had sat in the Church of the Black Christ, while cu airplanes carried out raids on Havana and cu radio stations bombarded Cuba with propaganda and rumors. Then, as in Guatemala, it was hoped there would be defections by Castro's army and air force, Castro would lose his nerve and flee the island, and the cu would have another triumph.
¹⁸

As the training went forward, Bissell built his radio station on Swan Island, 110 miles off the coast of Honduras and 400 miles southwest of Cuba. Swan Island, a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, with a population of twenty-eight humans and thousands of lizards and gulls, was claimed by both Honduras and the United States. Bissell put up a fifty-kilowatt radio station which was powerful enough to cover the whole Caribbean area at night. It could also be heard in Miami. To give the appearance of evenhandedness, it attacked both Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Castro.
¹⁹

In the United States, meanwhile, the Cuban operation became an issue in the Kennedy-Nixon presidential contest. Nixon was urging Ike to act: He felt that the overthrow of Castro before Election Day would be “a major plus, a real trump card.” But Ike was unwilling to order action before the Cubans had agreed among themselves as to the government that would replace Fidel. The President continued to press Bissell and Dulles about the government in exile; they assured him that progress was being made. Ike was skeptical. “I'm going along with you boys,” he said, “but I want to be sure the damned thing works.”
²⁰

Bissell later confessed in an interview that no real progress had been made. “We had to virtually force a kind of alliance among the Cubans,” he said. “They never achieved sufficient unity at the political level to make possible the formation of a cohesive, effective
Cuban-manned organization, that could direct the training, much less conduct it, that could plan for operations, that could do any of the logistic planning or support, or that could be entrusted with sensitive Intelligence or anything of this kind. So the impossibility of constructing such a Cuban organization left no alternative, if the operation was to be continued, but to have a U.S. organization [the
CIA
] that in effect made all the decisions.”
²¹

Democratic nominee Kennedy, meanwhile, thrust Cuba to the front of the campaign. On October 20 the New York
Times
headline ran, “
KENNEDY ASKS AID FOR CUBAN REBELS TO DEFEAT CASTRO
.
URGES SUPPORT OF EXILES AND
‘
FIGHTERS FOR FREEDOM
.' ”
²²

Nixon later wrote that, when he saw the headline, “I could hardly believe my eyes.” He checked with Dulles, who said he had informed Kennedy about the training operation in Guatemala and Bissell's plans. Nixon, furious, felt that Kennedy had jeopardized the operation while winning votes from the millions of Americans who wanted Castro toppled and who thought the Republicans too weak to do it. But despite his anger, Nixon believed that “the covert operation had to be protected at all costs.” He therefore went to the other extreme, attacking Kennedy's proposal “as wrong and irresponsible because it would violate our treaty commitments.”

In his campaign debate with Kennedy the following night, Nixon predicted that if the United States supported the Cuban exiles in a military adventure, it would be “condemned in the United Nations” while failing to “accomplish our objective.” It would be “an open invitation for Mr. Khrushchev … to come into Latin America.”
²³
The irony, of course, was that precisely what Nixon predicted would happen—although he never really believed it himself—did happen. The United States did fail, it was condemned, and the Bay of Pigs operation was an invitation for the Russians to move military forces into Cuba, an invitation Khrushchev quickly accepted.

Kennedy, meanwhile, won the closest election in decades. The week after the election was a tense one in Central America. Riots in Guatemala, brought on by the government's decision to allow the
CIA
to use that country as a base of operations, raised fears in Washington that the Communists might take over there. Ike told
Secretary of State Herter that “if we received a request from Guatemala for assistance, we would move in without delay.”
²⁴

The State Department, meanwhile, always more sensitive to Latin American feelings than the
CIA
or the White House, was urging the President to order the whole Cuban brigade out of Guatemala. Ike asked Bissell about it. “We thought of moving them by airlift out to one of the islands in the Pacific,” Bissell later recalled, “we were so desperate to find a more secure base for them.” One solution would have been to bring the Cubans back to southern Florida, but as Bissell said, “There was a reluctance to move them back and to face the fact that since the U.S. was doing the training, it might as well be done in the U.S.” It seemed to Bissell that it was important to maintain the fiction that the United States was not involved. He convinced Ike. The brigade stayed in Guatemala.
²⁵

Its presence there practically invited Castro to send his own paramilitary forces, led by Che, into Guatemala. To guard against that possibility, Ike sent U. S. Navy vessels to the Caribbean to patrol the Guatemalan coast. Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua was also worried about Che and other Cuban guerrillas invading his country, so Ike extended the patrols to include Nicaragua and added air cover to the sea patrols. The American servicemen were ordered to “refrain from combat unless specifically authorized or unless necessary to bar a direct Communist invasion attempt.”
²⁶

In December, Dulles finally briefed Ike on Bissell's evolving concept of the operation. The new idea called for landing a relatively strong, self-contained force that could seize and hold a beachhead. Ike listened, then asked once again about political progress. Did the Cubans have a recognized leader yet? The President wanted a government in exile formed that would have enough popular support among Cuban exiles to allow him to recognize it as the new government.
²⁷

The following day, December 8, Dulles told the 5412 Committee of the new concept. By then the brigade was up to seven hundred men and still growing. The committee “encouraged” Dulles to continue “development” of the force. Someone warned that it was becoming common knowledge throughout Latin America that a United States-backed force was being trained in Guatemala.
²⁸

It was such common knowledge, in fact, that on January 10, 1961, the New York
Times
carried an article, with a map, describing
the force, its location, and its purpose. The Eisenhower administration ignored the article.
²⁹

Ike's attitude toward the brigade remained one of wait and see. Douglas Dillon, Under Secretary of State, who discussed the brigade with the President on a number of occasions, reported that Eisenhower maintained “a certain skepticism until such time as the Cubans' training was completed, and then a willingness to look at it.”
³⁰
As always, he insisted on political unity before attempting paramilitary operations. In his memoirs, Ike declared, “Because they had as yet been unable to find the leader they wanted—a national leader known to be both anti-Castro and anti-Batista—it was impossible to make specific plans for a military invasion.”
³¹

Bissell later reported that “it wasn't until about January 1961 that the force in training reached as many as eight or nine hundred in strength, and of course at that time there had been
no firm decision
that they would be employed.”
³²

But, as Goodpaster had suggested to Eisenhower, the momentum was there—and it was unstoppable. As Bissell put it, “It's only fair to say that the Kennedy administration did inherit a military organization here that would have been difficult to dispose of and embarrassing to dispose of in any way other than by allowing it to go into action.”
³³

In his retirement, Eisenhower insisted that the distinction between creating an asset and approving a plan remained sharp and clear. He said he never discussed a tactical or operational plan with Bissell, Dulles, or anyone else, because the program had never gotten that far along.
³⁴
And various members of Ike's administration insist to this day that had Eisenhower been in the White House, the Bay of Pigs operation either never would have gone forward or, if it did, there would have been massive American military backup support.

Perhaps so. But there was that momentum, a big part of which was the
CIA'S
intense desire to help the refugees while simultaneously pretending that the United States was not involved. Ike was technically correct in saying he had not given his approval to any specific plan, but only technically. Bissell, Dulles, the State Department, and the incoming Kennedy administration all felt that the plan had General Eisenhower's professional backing.

The Kennedy people felt so because they had it from the best
possible source, Ike himself. On January 19, the day before Eisenhower left office, he had an all-morning transition meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House with the top echelon of the incoming administration. Clark Clifford, Harry Truman's special counsel and later Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, took notes.

According to Clifford's notes, Eisenhower, with JFK sitting on his left, made it clear that the project was going very well and that it was Kennedy's “responsibility” to do “whatever is necessary” to make it work. Clifford saw no “reluctance or hesitation” on Ike's part. Indeed, five days later Clifford sent a memorandum to President Kennedy reminding him that Ike had said “it was the policy of this government” to help the Cubans “to the utmost” and that this effort should be “continued and accelerated.”
³⁵

The result, as everyone knows, was the disaster of the Bay of Pigs. The momentum Ike had allowed the
CIA
to build proved irresistible.

HUNT RECALLED
, “By the time he emerged on the third floor from his private elevator and walked into the office, he would have a cheery grin on his face. He'd be rubbing his arthritic hands together, and would be cheerful and outgoing, giving none of us any reason to believe that he was under strain, that he was depressed
about the fate that awaited him, and the very harsh and unwarranted criticism that the agency was being subjected to.

“And he would come into the mess for lunch (we would be already inside and seated) and give a shoulder-pounding to somebody, and shake hands here and there, and take his place at the head of the table and begin commenting on the World Series game the day before, ask for news of one thing or another. Very little business—mostly on events in the outside world. He was a pretty avid sports fan, so that is what he chatted about.”
¹

ALLEN DULLES
became the scapegoat for the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy accepted his resignation. After that, his health failed rapidly. Within a few months he had a stroke.

More bad news followed. Dulles' son had been living with him in Washington. The boy had been a brilliant student at Princeton but had suffered a grievous wound in the Korean War, where he served in the Marine Corps. A Chinese bullet had blown away a good portion of his head. Dulles' son's condition naturally preyed on his mind. The burden became intolerable when the boy became extremely violent. Dulles had to have him taken off to a sanitarium in Switzerland.