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CIA: OPERATION MONGOOSE – The Plot To Assassinate Fidel Castro – Part 2 of Trilogy
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posted Sunday, 12 February 2006
CIA: OPERATION MONGOOSE –
The Plot To Assassinate Fidel Castro –
Part 2 of Trilogy
Fidel Castro: Operation Mongoose’s Original Target
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuban_Project
The Cuban Project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose is the general name for CIA covert operations and plans initiated by President John F. Kennedy on November 30, 1961 which authorized aggressive covert assault on Communism in the Cuban Republic. The operation was led by Air Force General Edward Lansdale and came into being after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
The goal of The Cuban Project was to "help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime", overthrow its leader Fidel Castro, and aim "for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962".
The Cuban Project was created based on the assumption that Communist controls inside Cuba were severe and that the regime was serving as a Communist leader in the Americas. There was also evidence that the repressive measures of the Communists, together with disappointments in Castro's economic dependency on the Communist formula, had resulted in an anti-regime atmosphere among the Cuban people which made a resistance program a distinct and present possibility. As such, the United States designed their covert plan to fuel the growing anti-regime spirit to provoke an overthrow of the government and/or assassination attempts on Castro. Historically, just as the Americans had overthrown their own unwanted leaders through a revolution from within, the Americans were hopeful that the Cubans would undergo the same process with a little persuasion from the actions of The Cuban Project. They hoped that their covert operation would set this insurgency in motion from within, as it had been in the United States' history. American policy makers wanted to "help the people of Cuba overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace."
The U.S. Department of Defense Joint Chiefs of Staff saw the project's ultimate objective to be to provide adequate justification for a U.S. military intervention in Cuba. They requested that the Secretary of Defense assign them responsibility for the project, but the Attorney General Robert Kennedy retained effective control.
Over thirty different plans were considered under The Cuban Project, some of which were carried out. The plans included the use of American Green Berets, destruction of the Cuban sugar crop, mining of harbors and even the possible creation of rumors that Jesus would return to Cuba after the Communist Party of Cuba was overthrown.
The Cuban Project played a significant role in the events leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Cuban Project's six-phase terrorist schedule was presented by counter-insurgency specialist Air Force General Edward Lansdale on February 20, 1962. Lansdale outlined the coordinated program of political, psychological, military, sabotage, and intelligence operations as well as assassination attempts on key political leaders. Each passing month since his presentation, a different method was in place to destabilize the Communist regime; including poor publicity for Castro, arming militant opposition groups, establishing guerilla bases throughout the country and finally culminating in an October military intervention in Cuba. Many individual plans included making Castro's beard fall out, sending Castro a poisoned wetsuit, and placing explosive seashells in Castro's favorite places to go diving. The operation, directed by Lansdale, was overseen by the Attorney General Robert Kennedy. President John F. Kennedy was briefed on the operation guidelines on March 16, 1962.
The Cuban Project was originally designed to culminate in October 1962 with an "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime." This is of course at the peak of the Cuban Missile crisis whereupon the United States and the Soviet Union come alarmingly close to nuclear war over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The operation was suspended on October 30, 1962, but three of ten six-man sabotage teams had already been deployed to Cuba, and on November 8, 1962, one six-man CIA team blew up a Cuban industrial facility.
The Cuban Project did not emerge successfully, if anything the covert plan helped strengthen Fidel Castro’s popularity in Cuba.
CIA (Edward Lansdale) Operation Mongoose:
The Cuba Project
Written: February 20, 1962
First Published: 1998
Source: ParaScope
Markup: Brian Basgen
Online Version: Cuban History Archive (marxists.org) 2000
In this February 20, 1962 document, CIA counterinsurgency specialist Edward Lansdale summarizes plans and objectives for the Kennedy-authorized Operation Mongoose. Lansdale outlines a coordinated program of intelligence gathering, sabotage and political warfare. Operation Mongoose, he reports, "aims for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962." Though this document (initially classified TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE) still contains significant deletions, its declassified portions graphically detail the covert war against Castro. Note: For the purposes of coherence, the formatting of this document has been slightly altered. The content of the document remains unaltered. See document image scans for original formatting.
SENSITIVE 20 February 1962
Program Review
by Brig. Gen. Lansdale
The Goal
In keeping with the spirit of the Presidential memorandum of 30 November 1961, the United States will help the people of Cuba overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.
The Situation
We still know too little about the real situation inside Cuba, although we are taking energetic steps to learn more. However, some salient facts are known. It is known that the Communist regime is an active Sino-Soviet spearhead in our Hemisphere and that Communist controls inside Cuba are severe. Also, there is evidence that the repressive measures of the Communists, together with disappointments in Castro's economic dependency on the Communist formula, have resulted in an anti-regime atmosphere among the Cuban people which makes a resistance program a distinct and present possibility.
Time is running against us. The Cuban people feel helpless and are losing hope fast. They need symbols of inside resistance and of outside interest soon. They need something they can join with the hope of starting to work surely towards the overthrow of the regime. Since late November, we have been working hard to re-orient the operational concepts within the U.S. government and to develop the hard intelligence and operational assets required for success in our task.
The next National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba (NIE 85-62) promises to be a useful document dealing with our practical needs and with due recognition of the sparsity of hard facts. The needs of the Cuba project, as it goes into operation, plus the increasing U.S. capability for intelligence collection, should permit more frequent estimates for our guidance. These will be prepared on a periodic basis.
Premise of Action
Americans once ran a successful revolution. It was run from within, and succeeded because there was timely and strong political, economic, and military help by nations outside who supported our cause. Using this same concept of revolution from within, we must now help the Cuban people to stamp out tyranny and gain their liberty.
On 18 January, the Chief of Operations assigned thirty-two tasks to Departments and Agencies of the U.S. government, in order to provide a realistic assessment and preparation of U.S. capabilities. The Attorney General and the Special Group were apprised of this action. The answers received on 15 February provided the basis for planning a realistic course of action. The answers also revealed that the course of action must contain continuing coordination and firm overall guidance.
The course of action set forth herein is realistic within present operational estimates and intelligence. Actually, it represents the maximum target timing, which the operational people jointly considered feasible. It aims for a revolt, which can take place in Cuba by October 1962. It is a series of actions and dates, not a rigid timetable. The target dates are timed as follows:
Phase I, Action, March 1962. Start moving in.
Phase II, Build-up, April-July 1962. Activating the necessary operations inside Cuba for revolution and concurrently applying the vital political, economic, and military-type support from outside Cuba.
Phase III, Readiness, 1 August 1962, check for final policy decision.
Phase IV, Resistance, August-September 1962, move into guerrilla operations.
Phase V, Revolt, first two weeks of October 1962. Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime.
Phase VI, Final, during month of October 1962. Establishment of new government.
Plan of Action
Attached is and operational plan for the overthrow of the Communist regime in Cuba, by Cubans from within Cuba, with outside help from the U.S. and elsewhere. Since this is an operation to prompt and support a revolt by the people in a Communist police state, flexibility is a must for success. Decisions on operational flexibility rest with the Chief of Operations, with consultation in the Special Group when policy matters are involved. Target actions and dates are detailed in the attacked operational plans, which cover:
A. Basic Action Plan Inside Cuba
B. Political Support Plan
C. Economic Support Plan
D. Psychological Support Plan
E. Military Support Plan
F. Sabotage Support Plan
G. Intelligence Support Plan
Early Policy Decisions
The operational plan for clandestine U.S. support of a Cuban movement inside Cuba to overthrow the Communist regime is within policy limits already set by the President. A vital decision, still to be made, is on the use of open U.S. force to aid the Cuban people in winning their liberty. If conditions and assets permitting a revolt are achieved in Cuba, and if U.S. help is required to sustain this condition, will U.S. respond promptly with military force to aid the Cuban revolt? The contingencies under which such military deployment would be needed, and recommended U.S. responses, are detailed in a memorandum being prepared by the Secretaries of State and Defense. An early decision is required, prior to deep involvement of the Cubans in this program.
Distribution (Copy No.):
1. The President
2. The Attorney General
3. General Taylor
4. The Secretary of State
(through Deputy Under Secretary Johnson)
5. The Secretary of Defense
(Through Deputy Secretary Gilpatric)
6. The Director, Central Intelligence Agency
7. The Director, U.S. Information Agency
(through Deputy Director Wilson)
8. State (Mr. Goodwin)
9. Defense (Brig. Gen. Craig)
10. CIA (Mr. Harvey)
11.-12. Chief of Operations (Brig. Gen. Lansdale)
---------------
Severely Edited by Tabacco
---------------
PURPOSE
To add to the increased U.S. intelligence coverage on Cuba and to strengthen the concern of Latin American states for security.
CONSIDERATIONS
(Responsibility of Defense, with support by others as required.)
ACTIVITY
7. Periodic intelligence estimates, as required by progress of operations.
PURPOSE
To up-date NIE 85-62, so that current estimates can be considered at national policy levels.
CONSIDERATIONS
As the operations develop, there will be both increased intelligence collection and a need for as current an Intelligence Estimate as the U.S. can produce meaningfully. It is likely that a more informal method of producing an Intelligence Estimate for use at the national level (than now governing the issuance of NIE's) may have to be followed. (CIA responsibility, with support of others as required.)
http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/subject/cia/mongoose/c-project.htm
To read the entire text of the above-transcribed document, go to the Marxists.org website above. Even 40 years later the document is highly “blacked-out” and still sensitive.
Or go to the following for the complete article:
http://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/castroreport.htm
Document: CIA Plots to Kill Castro
This document, "CIA Inspector General's Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro," was approved for release in 1993 under the CIA Historical Review Program. The report describes the various capers the CIA engaged in during their attempts to "eliminate" Fidel Castro. From shellfish toxin to exploding conch shell, almost every spy-vs.-spy gag imaginable was considered by the CIA.
[document begins]
23 May 1967
MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD
SUBJECT: Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro
This report was prepared at the request of the Director of Central Intelligence. He assigned the task to the Inspector General on 23 March 1967. The report was delivered to the Director, personally, in installments, beginning on 24 April 1967. The Director returned this copy to the Inspector General on 22 May 1967 with instructions that the Inspector General:
Retain it in personal, EYES ONLY safekeeping
Destroy the one burn copy retained temporarily by the Inspector General
Destroy all notes and other source materials originated by those participating in the writing of this report
The one stay back burn copy, all notes, and all other derived source materials were destroyed on 23 May 1967.
This ribbon copy is the only text of the report now in existence, either in whole or in part. Its text has been read only by:
Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence
J.S. Earman, Inspector General
K.E. Greer, Inspector (one of the authors)
S.D. Breckinridge, Inspector (one of the authors)
All typing of drafts and of final text was done by the authors.
Filed with the report are:
Office of Security file used as source material
Memorandums concerning William Harvey
Certain MONGOOSE papers
Drew Pearson columns
[Signed]
J.S. Earman
Inspector General
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introductory Section
Scarcity of documentary evidence ....... 1
Relationship of assassination planning to government policy ....... 2
Risk of assassination when a government is overthrown ....... 4
Resort to synecdoche ....... 5
Published intelligence on the possibility of Castro's demise ....... 5
Accuracy of the story Drew Pearson has ....... 6
Miscellaneous Schemes Prior to August 1960 ....... 9
Aerosol Attack on Radio Station ....... 10
Contaminated Cigars ....... 11
Depilatory ....... 13
Gambling Syndicate - Phase 1 ....... 14
Genesis of the plot ....... 14
First contact with Maheu ....... 15
O'Connell named as case officer ....... 16
First meeting with Roselli ....... 16
Briefing of Dulles and Cabell ....... 17
First meeting between Maheu and Giancana ....... 18
True identities of Giancana and Trafficante become known ....... 19
Role of Trafficante ....... 19
Early planning on the means of assassination ....... 20
Gunn's involvement with lethal cigars ....... 21
[deletion] preparation of lethal cigars ....... 21
Delivery of the cigars to Gunn ....... 22
Roosevelt learns of the plot ....... 23
Possible ways of packaging the poison ....... 23
Decision to package the poison in pill form ....... 24
Juan Orta is identified as the syndicate's man in Cuba ....... 25
Gunn tests the pills on guinea pigs ....... 25
Sequence preceding passing the pills to O'Connell ....... 26
O'Connell receives the pills and passes them to Roselli ....... 27
Harvey is briefed on the operation ....... 27
Trafficante receives the pills and gives them to Orta ....... 27
Identification of Orta ....... 28
The Orta channel collapses ....... 29
Varona is brought into the operation ....... 29
Edward K. Moss ....... 30
Roselli associates O'Connell with CIA ....... 31
Funds are approved for passing to Varona ....... 31
Money and lethal pills are passed to Varona ....... 32
Varona's restaurant contact in Cuba ....... 32
Edwards calls off the operation ....... 33
Disposition of the pills ....... 34
List of those witting of the operation ....... 34
Gambling Syndicate - Phase 2 ....... 37
Why Harvey was briefed on Phase 1 ....... 37
Harvey put in charge of the Executive Action Capability ....... 37
Harvey briefs Helms on the Executive Action Capability ....... 37
QJWIN - planned assassination of Lumumba ....... 38
Approval of Project ZRRIFLE ....... 38
Bissell puts Harvey in charge of the Castro operation ....... 39
Harvey is told he will head the Cuba task force ....... 39
Harvey's first meeting with Edwards on the Castro operation ....... 40
Termination of QJWIN ....... 41
Harvey briefs Helms on the Castro operation ....... 41
Differing views on the turnover to Harvey ....... 41
Harvey's first meeting with Roselli in New York City ....... 43
Roselli and O'Connell go to Miami ....... 45
Harvey leaves for Miami with lethal pills ....... 46
Roselli is already in touch with Varona ....... 47
Harvey takes over "a going operation" ....... 47
Changes in gangster personnel participating ....... 48
Maceo enters the operation ....... 48
Harvey supplies weapons and equipment to Varona ....... 49
Roselli reports that the pills are in Cuba ....... 50
Varona sends a three-man team to Cuba ....... 51
Varona plans to send three militia men to Cuba ....... 51
Harvey and Roselli agree to terminate the operation ....... 52
Roselli comes to Washington to meet Harvey ....... 53
Harvey's meeting with Roselli observed by the FBI ....... 54
List of persons witting of this phase of the operation ....... 55
The Wiretapping Incident ....... 57
Giancana suspects Phyllis McGuire and Dan Rowan ....... 57
Giancana asks Maheu to bug Rowan's room ....... 57
Likely date of the bugging incident ....... 58
Maheu asks Edward Du Bois to do the job ....... 58
Du Bois assigns Balletti and Harrison to the job ....... 58
Wiretap made instead of microphone plant ....... 59
Balletti is caught and phones Maheu for help ....... 59
Maheu refers the FBI to CIA ....... 59
Shef Edwards meets with an FBI representative ....... 60
Edwards intervenes with Sam Papich on Maheu's behalf ....... 61
Houston intervenes with the Justice Department ....... 61
Houston briefs General Carter ....... 62
Edwards and Houston brief the Attorney General ....... 62a
Edwards sends a memorandum record of the meeting to Kennedy ....... 63
Gambling Syndicate - Phase 2 is already under way ....... 64
Helms is briefed on the meeting with the Attorney General ....... 65
Edwards warns Harvey to clear with the DCI ....... 65
Kennedy's request on 4 March 67 for a copy of the briefing memo ....... 65
The Wiretapping Incident (continued)
Chicago Sun-Times story of 16 Aug 63 re Giancana & CIA ....... 67
Chicago Daily News story of 20 Aug 63 re Giancana & CIA ....... 69
Helms sends McCone a copy of the Kennedy briefing memorandum ....... 69
Rumors now connect CIA & gangsters in plot to kill Castro ....... 70
The Long Committee ....... 71
Former Maheu employee called to testify ....... 71
The Onassis-Niarchos fight over oil shipping rights ....... 71
Maheu is hired by Niarchos and is supported by CIA ....... 72
CIA intervenes on Niarchos' behalf ....... 72
The Long Committee plans to resurrect the Onassis wiretap ....... 72
CIA intervenes with the Long Committee on Maheu's behalf ....... 73
Maheu applies pressure on CIA to avoid publicity ....... 73
Maheu indicates he may brief his attorney ....... 74
Schemes in Early 1963 ....... 75
Skin Diving Suit ....... 75
Gift from Donovan to Castro ....... 75
The suit is bought and made ready ....... 75
The plan is overtaken by events ....... 75
List of persons witting ....... 76
Booby-trapped Sea Shell ....... 77
Books on Mollusca are bought ....... 77
The plan proves to be impracticable ....... 77
Names of those witting ....... 77
Project AMLASH - Rolando Cubela ....... 78
[deletion] meeting with Cubela in Mexico City (Mar 61) ....... 78
Cubela's role in the Cuban revolution ....... 78
Cubela reported disaffected ....... 79
Mexico City meeting inconclusive ....... 79
Cubela and Juan Orta want to exfiltrate (Mar 61) ....... 80
Cubela asks for meeting in Paris (Aug 61) ....... 81
Cubela plans to attend Helsinki Youth Festival ....... 81
Meetings in Helsinki (Aug 62) ....... 83
Cubela objects to the word "assassinate" ....... 85
Paris meetings (Aug 62); S/W & demolition training ....... 85
Meetings in Porto Alegre (Sept 63) ....... 86
Paris meetings (Oct 63); Cubela wants assurance from U.S. Govt ....... 87
FitzGerald meets with Cubela in Paris (Oct 63) ....... 88
Differing versions of what FitzGerald told Cubela ....... 90
Project AMLASH - Rolando Cubela (continued)
Cuba cache approved for Cubela ....... 91
The Black Leaf 40 scheme is discussed ....... 92
Gunn converts a ballpoint pen into a hypodermic syringe ....... 93
[deletion] gives to Cubela in Paris while Kennedy is shot ....... 93a
Cubela asks for high-powered rifle with telescopic sight ....... 93a
Those witting of the Black Leaf 40 episode ....... 94
Cubela cache put down (without rifles) (Mar 64) ....... 96
Cubela requests a silencer for a FAL rifle ....... 97
SAS requests TSD to produce FAL silencer on crash basis ....... 97
Second Cubela cache put down (with FAL rifles) (June 64) ....... 97
Artime meets Cubela intermediary ....... 98
Artime agrees to meet with Cubela personally ....... 99
[deletion] meets Cubela in Paris (Dec 64) ....... 100
Explanation of how Artime and Cubela were put together ....... 100
Artime and Cubela meet in Madrid (Dec 64) ....... 101
Artime agrees to furnish silencer ....... 102
Artime gives Cubela silencer and other special gear ....... 103
Second name-line between Cubela and gambling syndicate operation ....... 104
Headquarters terminates all contacts with Cubela group ....... 104
Cubela and others arrested; plead guilty (Mar 66) ....... 107
The charges ....... 108
Castro asks for leniency ....... 109
Testimony about the silencer ....... 109
Cubela expects to be executed ....... 110
Cubela sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment ....... 110
No mention made of Cubela's pre-Nov 64 dealings with CIA ....... 111
Memo to Secretary of State (Rusk), Subject: CIA Involvement in Cuban Counter-revolutionary Activities -- Arrest of Rolando CUBELA Secades and Ramon Tomas GUIN Diaz, dated 7 March 1966 (added after completion of report) ....... 132
OUTLINE
Introductory Section
Miscellaneous Schemes Prior to August 1960
Aerosol Attack on Radio Station
Contaminated Cigars
Depilatory
The Gambling Syndicate Operation
Phase 1 (August 1960 - May 1961)
Phase 2 (Late 1961 - June 1963)
The Wiretapping Incident
The Phyllis McGuire/Attorney General Phase (Late 1961 - May 1962)
The Long Committee Phase (May - July 1966)
Schemes in Early 1963
Skin Diving Suit
Sea Shell
Project AMLASH - Rolando Cubela (March 1961 - March 1966)
Discussion of Assassination at High-Level Government Meetings
Special Group (Augmented) Meeting of 10 August 1962
Special Group Meeting of 30 July 1964
The Ramifications of the Gambling Syndicate Operation
23 April 1967
MEMORANDUM
This reconstruction of Agency Involvement in plans to assassinate Fidel Castro is at best an imperfect history. Because of the extreme sensitivity of the operations being discussed or attempted, as a matter of principle no official records were kept of planning, of approvals, or of implementation. The few written records that do exist are either largely tangential to the main events or were put on paper from memory years afterward. William Harvey has retained skeletal notes of his activities during the years in question, and they are our best source of dates. Dr. Edward Gunn of the Office of Medical Services, has a record of whom he met wand when and cryptic references to the subjects discussed. [deletion] of TSD, has a record of two or three dates that are pertinent. Gunn and [deletion] were involved in only the technical aspects of operational planning, and their participations were short-lived. Although fragmentary, their records are a help in establishing critical time frames. Operational files are useful in some instances, because they give dates of meetings, the substances of which may be inferred from collateral information.
For the most part, though, we have had to rely on information given to us orally by people whose memories are fogged by time. Their recollections of dates are particularly hazy, and some of them
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are no longer able to keep the details of one plan separate form those of another. We interviewed everyone whom we could identify as likely to be knowledgeable, with the exceptions of Mr. Dulles and General Cabell. A complete list is attached at Tab A. We did not go on fishing expeditions among the mere possibles. To have done so would have risked making witting a number of employees who were previously unwitting and, in our estimate, would have added little to the details available from those directly involved. There are inconsistencies among the various accounts, but most of them can be resolved by collating the information furnished by all of the identifiable participants in a particular plan and by then checking it against specific dates that can be fixed with fair certainty. We believe that this reconstruction of what happened and of the thinking associated with it is reasonably sound. If there are significant inaccuracies in the report, they are most likely to occur in faulty ordering of the sequence of events. People still remember much of what happened, but they can no longer recall precisely when.
It became clear very early in our investigation that the vigor with which schemes were pursued within the Agency to eliminate Castro personally varied with the intensity of the U.S. Government's efforts to overthrow the Castro regime. We can identify five separate phases in Agency assassination planning, although the transitions from one
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to another are not always sharply defined. Each phase is a reflection of the then prevailing Government attitude toward the Cuban regime.
a. Prior to August 1960: All of the identifiable schemes prior to about August 1960, with one possible exception, were aimed only at discrediting Castro personally by influencing his behaviour or by altering his appearance.
b. August 1960 to April 1961: The plots that were hatched in late 1960 and early 1961 were aggressively pursued and were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs.
c. April 1961 to late 1961: A major scheme that was begun in August 1960 was called off after the Bay of Pigs and remained dormant for several months, as did most other Agency operational activity related to Cuba.
d. Late 1961 to Late 1962: That particular scheme was reactivated in early 1962 and was again pushed vigorously in the era of Project MONGOOSE and in the climate of intense administration pressure on CIA to do something about Castro and his Cuba.
e. Late 1962 until well into 1963: After the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 and the collapse of Project MONGOOSE, the
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aggressive scheme that was begun in August 1960 and revived in April 1962 was finally terminate in early 1963. Two other plots were originated in 1963, but both were impracticable and nothing ever came of them.
We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration's severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime. The fruitless and, in retrospect, often unrealistic plotting should be viewed in that light.
Many of those we interviewed stressed two points that are so obvious that recording them here may be superfluous. We believe, though, that they are pertinent to the story. Elimination of the dominant figure in a government, even when loyalties are held to him personally rather than to the government as a body, will not necessarily cause the downfall of the government. This point was stressed with respect to Castro and Cuba in an internal CIA draft paper of October 1961, which was initiated in response to General Maxwell Taylor's desire for a contingency plan. The paper took the position that the demise of Fidel Castro, from whatever cause, would offer little opportunity for the liberation of Cuba from Communist and Soviet Bloc control. The second point, which is more specifically relevant to our investigation, is that bringing about the downfall of a government necessarily requires the removal of its leaders from
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positions of power, and there is always the risk that the participants will resort to assassination. Such removals from power as the house arrest of a [Mossainq?] or the flight of a [Busieca?] could not cause one to overlook the killings of a Diem or of a Trujillo by forces encouraged but not controlled by the U.S. government.
There is a third point, which was not directly made by any of those we interviewed, but which emerges clearly from the interviews and from review of files. The point is that of frequent resort to synecdoche--the mention of a part when the whole is to be understood, or vice versa. Thus, we encounter repeated references to phrases such as "disposing of Castro," which may be read in the narrow, literal sense of assassinating him, when it is intended that it be read in the broader, figurative sense of dislodging the Castro regime. Reversing this coin, we find people speaking vaguely of "doing something about Castro" when it is clear that what they have specifically in mind is killing him. In a situation wherein those speaking may not have actually meant what they seemed to say or may not have said what they actually meant, they should not be surprised if their oral shorthand is interpreted differently than was intended.
The suggestion was made that operations aimed at the assassination of Castro may have been generated in an atmosphere of stress in intelligence publications on the possibility of Castro's
-5-
demise and on the reordering of the political structure that would follow. We reviewed intelligence publications from 1960 through 1966, including National Intelligence Estimates, Special National Intelligence Estimates, Intelligence Memorandums, and Memorandums for the Director. The NTE's on "The Situation and Prospects in Cuba" for 1960, 1963, and 1964 have brief paragraphs on likely successor governments if Castro were to depart the scene. We also find similar short references in a SNIE of March 1960 and in an Intelligence Memorandum of May 1965. In each case the treatment is no more nor less than one would expect to find in comprehensive round-ups such as these. We conclude that there is no reason to believe that the operators were unduly influenced by the content of intelligence publications.
Drew Pearson's column of 7 March 1967 refers to a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro. Pearson also has information, as yet unpublished, to the effect that there was a meeting at the State Department at which assassination of Castro was discussed and that a team actually landed in Cuba with pills to be used in an assassination attempt. There is basis in fact for each of those three reports.
a. A CIA officer passed an assassination weapon to an Agency Cuban asset at a meeting in Paris on 22 November 1963. The weapon was a ballpoint pen rigged as a hypodermic syringe.
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The CIA officer suggested that the Cuban asset load the syringe with Black Leaf 40. The evidence indicates that the meeting was under way at the very moment President Kennedy was shot.
b. There was a meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) in Secretary Rusk's conference room on 10 August 1962 at which Secretary McNamara broached the subject of liquidation of Cuban leaders. The discussion resulted in a Project MONGOOSE action memorandum prepared by Edward Lansdale. At another Special Group meeting on 31 July 1964 there was discussion of a recently-disseminated Clandestine Services information report on a Cuban exile plot to assassinate Castro. CIA had refused the exile's request for funds and had no involvement in that plot.
c. CIA twice (first in early 1961 and again in early 1962) supplied lethal pills to U.S. gambling syndicate members working in behalf of CIA on a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. The 1961 plot aborted and the pills were recovered. Those furnished in April 1962 were passed by the gambling syndicate representative to a Cuban exile leader in Florida, who in turn had them sent to Cuba about May 1962. In June 1962 the exile leader reported that a team of three men had been dispatched to Cuba to recruit for the operation. If the opportunity presented itself, the team would make an attempt on Castro's life--perhaps using the pills.
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This report describes these and other episodes in detail; puts them into perspective; and reveals, that while the events described by Drew Pearson did occur and are subject to being patched together as though one complete story, the implication of a direct, causative relationship among them is unfounded.
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Castro in mid-life
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/peopleevents/e_mongoose.html
People & Events: Operation Mongoose:
the Covert Operation to Remove Castro from Power
The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 was a disaster for the Kennedy administration. It made the young president look weak, and gave fuel to Cold Warriors in both parties who could not stand the presence of a Soviet-aligned, Communist dictatorship just ninety miles south of Florida.
Target: Fidel Castro
A couple of months later, a special investigation of the Bay of Pigs chaired by retired General Maxwell Taylor made its report. "There can be no long-term living with Castro," Taylor wrote, just in case President Kennedy was thinking of giving up. The president's brother -- the new point-man on the Cuba problem -- needed no such prompting. "We will take action against Castro," Bobby wrote. "It might be tomorrow, it might be in five days or ten days, or not for months. But it will come."
Nothing to Lose
Like most covert operations, the plan to oust the Cuban dictator was a slippery thing. Who was paid to do what to whom is still not clear. But one thing is certain: Robert Kennedy was in charge. Convinced he had been betrayed by his military and intelligence advisors in the decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion, John Kennedy placed Cuba in the hands of the one man he knew he could trust. But what could be done? At a White House meeting in November, 1961, RFK scribbled the following in his notes:
My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run and operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites and Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.
Top Priority
Pressure was on from both Democrats and Republicans to do something to undermine Castro. GOP leaders were constantly attacking the administration for "losing" Cuba by not providing air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Brushing aside a CIA National Intelligence Estimate, which said that Castro enjoyed too much support in Cuba to be overthrown, Robert Kennedy organized a secret project, code named "Mongoose." On January 19, 1962, in a pep talk to the team, Kennedy called deposing Castro "the top priority of the U.S. government -- all else is secondary -- no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared."
The Game of Espionage
Small, covert, special operations -- not another large-scale military invasion -- would be the method this time. Kennedy's term of art was "counterinsurgency," also described as "social reform under pressure." He was so enamored of the fearless commandos and real-life James Bonds who did such work that he once invited Special Forces troops to Hickory Hill to instruct his children how to swing from trees.
Ops Mastermind
The man RFK chose to run the operation was legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, whose exploits fighting Communists in the Philippines in the 1950s made him a model for a character in Graham Greene's novel, The Quiet American. Playing on Kennedy's desperation and distaste for bureaucratic inertia, Lansdale hatched a series of operations which were to climax in a "Touchdown Play" by October 1962. Though highly skeptical in private, CIA Director Richard Helms spent around $100 million on manpower and equipment for a spy base in Miami. This did little, however, to address the fact that the Americans had very few "assets" left in Cuba, so tight was Castro's grip.
Plausible Deniability
The CIA had been plotting to assassinate Castro since the summer of 1960, even before John Kennedy was elected. A congressional investigation of the CIA later uncovered eight separate plots of varying ridiculousness between 1960 and 1965. But did either John or Robert Kennedy actually order him killed? History will probably never know. The Kennedys knew the meaning of the term "plausible deniability" all too well, and had been taught the old Boston Irish political rule, "never write it down."
"Get Rid of Castro"
"Get rid of Castro and the Castro regime, quote-unquote." This is how Sam Halpern, executive officer of the CIA team charged with carrying out Operation Mongoose, described his orders from Director Helms. "And when I asked Dick, what does "Get rid of" mean, he said, 'Sam, use your imagination.' That was it... Now what does that mean, throw him in the ashcan? Kill him, or what? And nobody could tell me. Just get rid of. Remove him from power basically." Helms himself was responding to relentless pressure from the White House. "You haven't lived until you've had Bobby Kennedy rampant on your back," he later remarked.
The CIA and the Mob
The pressure was so great that it led to one of the most controversial and grotesque chapters in presidential history: the hiring of the Mafia to help assassinate Castro. Though the details are murky and RFK's involvement has never been proven, it went something like this. CIA operatives, aware that the Mob was eager to renew the profitable gambling business it enjoyed under the Batista regime, hired Mafia hitman Johnny Rosselli to kill Castro. If this wasn't sordid enough, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover learned of the plot from FBI surveillance of Mob boss Sam Giancana, who just happened to share a mistress with John Kennedy. These machinations have provided much of the fuel behind various conspiracy theories of John Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in 1963.
Who Knew?
It is unclear whether the Kennedys knew what was going on. There is evidence that John Kennedy opposed the assassination as policy. Bobby's biographer Evan Thomas concludes, "the Kennedys may have discussed the idea of assassination as a weapon of last resort. But they did not know the particulars of the Harvey-Rosselli operation -- or want to."
Bogged Down
Even with all the money and elaborate measures being thrown at the problem, removing Castro proved easier said than done. Thomas writes that "after seven months, Kennedy's secret war... was hopelessly bogged down, driven by personality clashes, incapable of producing the 'boom and bang' that Kennedy wanted to see on the island."
Pros and Cons
RFK continued to hector his team, questioning their efforts and proposing unworkable solutions of his own. While they humored him, most senior officials were resigned to failure. Some, like Secretary of State Dean Rusk, were afraid that too much "noise" in Cuba would complicate more important Cold War problems like the struggle over Berlin. National security advisor McGeorge Bundy thought the only options were another invasion -- which the president had ruled out -- and "learning to live with Castro." Only CIA director John McCone was on RFK's side, worried the Soviets would turn Cuba into a missile base.
On the Brink
Within weeks, McCone's fears were validated. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, fearful of an American first strike, had ordered nuclear warheads to be slipped into Cuba as a deterrent. He also demanded that the American spy planes stop flying over his shipping -- which they agreed to do in early September. But in early October, at McCone's insistence, American U-2 flights resumed. And on October 16, RFK was called in to see some very disturbing pictures. The world stood on the brink of nuclear war.
A Shameful Legacy
Though it happened under the radar, history has revealed that Operation Mongoose was, in its own way, every bit as disastrous as the Bay of Pigs. "It was an expensive and embarrassing failure," summed up Thomas. "Castro after all is still alive in Cuba, and the people who tried to get him are long since gone. And the way they went after him, by hiring the Mafia, was something that has long-term effects on U.S. foreign policy. People still see the CIA as this sinister, nefarious force. It was a fundamentally foolish thing to do and Bobby bears real responsibility for it."
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3134open_goss_file.html
This article appears in the September 3, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Coming Senate Battle:
Open the Porter Goss File
Part 1
by Jeffrey Steinberg,
with Michele Steinberg and Scott Thompson
In his damning book on the Bush-Cheney Administration, Worse Than Watergate, former Nixon White House General Counsel John W. Dean reported that Vice President Dick Cheney has been obsessed for decades with the mid-1970s Church and Pike Committees, whose pioneering work led to the first serious Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. As far as the Vice President is concerned, those investigations, and the Congressional oversight committees that emerged from the process, represented a dark moment, in which the powers of secret government were undermined. As Dean put it: "Cheney has long believed that Congress has no business telling Presidents what to do, particularly in national security matters."
Cheney's refusal to turn over a shred of paper from his White House Energy Task Force; his secret intelligence organization buried in the Pentagon bureaucracy; and his trips to CIA headquarters to stare down analysts who dared to challenge his Iraq WMD Big Lies, all underscore the Veep's obsession with government-by-secret-cabal.
It is no wonder that Cheney's choice as the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) is Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.). Goss not only presided over a vicious partisan cover-up of the Iraq pre-war intelligence fraud—a fraud run out of Cheney's office—through his position as chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Goss's own career as a 1960s-era Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service officer is a throwback to the pre-Church Committee, pre-Watergate days, when the intelligence community, under the Allen Dulles/James Angleton legacy, ran amok.
Playing Politics With National Security
Sources in the U.S. intelligence community and the Congress identify three reasons that Cheney chose Goss for the DCI post, and is now intent on ramming his confirmation through the Senate immediately after Labor Day.
First, the White House is desperate to "plug the leaks" at the CIA. The Agency has been scapegoated by the White House and its Congressional toadies, like Goss and California Republican Duncan Hunter, for the 9/11 attacks and for the failure to find the so-called Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Senior career intelligence officers are furious, according to the sources, at the White House's blame game, and they do not intend to sit by and allow this propaganda scam to go unchallenged. The fact that evidence points to Cheney as the culprit behind the July 2003 leaking of the identity of CIA "non-official cover" officer Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak, only deepens the intelligence community's fury at the Bush White House. And Goss's personal role in attempting to prevent an independent counsel probe into the Plame leak just adds to the volatility of the issue.
The spy community knows that evidence easily accessible in the public domain reveals that the President, the Vice President, and the Attorney General repeatedly ignored CIA and FBI warnings about an imminent terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the Spring-Summer 2001, including the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing item, talking about al-Qaeda hijacking plots and surveillance of targets in Washington and New York. Likewise, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's recent report documented that the majority of intelligence community analysts disputed the Iraq WMD threat; and former DCI George Tenet told an audience at Georgetown University earlier this year that Iraq "never posed an imminent threat" to the United States—and he told Bush and Cheney that on repeated occasions.
When the CIA General Counsel rushed through approval of a book, Imperial Hubris, by a senior Agency counterterrorism analyst, writing anonymously, which tore into the Administration's failed Iraq and Afghanistan policies, Cheney and company moved to pre-empt further damaging material from surfacing from the Agency—by naming Goss. Goss's first mission will be to plug the leaks—at least through November.
Second, the Bush-Cheney campaign is growing worried that the President could lose the must-win state of Florida in November, and the Goss nomination is aimed at bolstering enthusiasm among the Cuban-American right-wing community in Miami for a second Bush-Cheney term. Goss is the darling of the southern Florida right wing, and has been, dating back to his CIA days from 1961-71, when he participated in the efforts to assassinate or overthrow Fidel Castro in Havana.
Third, and most important for Cheney, Goss is the personification of the rogue spook, serving at the pleasure of the President, and behind the back of the Congress and the American people. In Cheney's warped mind, Goss is going to turn the clock back to the bad-old-days before Watergate and intelligence oversight.
JM/WAVE and Mongoose
In 1975, the Church Committee investigating the activities of the U.S. intelligence community issued its final report. Among the revelations contained in the multi-volume document were the first unclassified accounts of the CIA's program to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. "United States government personnel plotted to kill Castro from 1960 to 1965," the report stated. "American underworld figures and Cubans hostile to Castro were used in these plots, and were provided encouragement and material support by the United States."
Those anti-Castro operations were run out of a large Miami CIA station, under the code name JM/WAVE. At the height of JM/WAVE, the station employed over 200 CIA officers, and ran a network of over 2,200 Cuban exiles. It maintained an armada of boats, for raids on Cuba, and a small fleet of aircraft for other missions. One sub-feature of the anti-Castro efforts, Operation Mongoose, involved assassination plots against the Cuban leader.
Porter Goss was a young CIA officer assigned to JM/WAVE. Goss had, by his own accounts, been recruited to the CIA while in his third year at Yale University. His two years of military service were, in all likelihood, actually CIA assignments. In 1961, Goss was officially brought into the CIA and sent to JM/WAVE. He later would continue to participate in the anti-Castro operations, based out of CIA stations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Later, Goss was sent to London and then Paris, where he was involved in the infiltration of labor organizations, until he developed a near-fatal infection and was forced, officially, to retire from the spy world.
In his role in JM/WAVE, Goss served with some of the CIA's most hardened Cold Warriors, including Miami Station Chief Theodore G. Shackley, later a central figure in the Iran/Contra debacle; Felix Rodriguez, another leading Iran-Contra player; and Frank Sturgis, later of Watergate break-in infamy.
Indeed, from the Bay of Pigs and the Operation Mongoose Castro assassination plots of the 1960s, to the Watergate Plumbers Unit of the 1970s, to the Iran-Contra narco-financed insurgency of the 1980s, this circle of right-wing CIA operators and closely allied Cuban exiles, has represented an ugly stain on the American political landscape. Is this what Porter Goss brings to the table?
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence cannot avoid the details of Goss's CIA career, in deliberating on his nomination.
Subscribe to EIW
Castro today; Still alive and
kicking – Jack & Bobby are
long gone.
Other sites of interest:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/ops/mongoose.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmongoose.htm
T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)
The Plot To Assassinate Fidel Castro –
Part 2 of Trilogy
Fidel Castro: Operation Mongoose’s Original Target
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuban_Project
The Cuban Project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose is the general name for CIA covert operations and plans initiated by President John F. Kennedy on November 30, 1961 which authorized aggressive covert assault on Communism in the Cuban Republic. The operation was led by Air Force General Edward Lansdale and came into being after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
The goal of The Cuban Project was to "help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime", overthrow its leader Fidel Castro, and aim "for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962".
The Cuban Project was created based on the assumption that Communist controls inside Cuba were severe and that the regime was serving as a Communist leader in the Americas. There was also evidence that the repressive measures of the Communists, together with disappointments in Castro's economic dependency on the Communist formula, had resulted in an anti-regime atmosphere among the Cuban people which made a resistance program a distinct and present possibility. As such, the United States designed their covert plan to fuel the growing anti-regime spirit to provoke an overthrow of the government and/or assassination attempts on Castro. Historically, just as the Americans had overthrown their own unwanted leaders through a revolution from within, the Americans were hopeful that the Cubans would undergo the same process with a little persuasion from the actions of The Cuban Project. They hoped that their covert operation would set this insurgency in motion from within, as it had been in the United States' history. American policy makers wanted to "help the people of Cuba overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace."
The U.S. Department of Defense Joint Chiefs of Staff saw the project's ultimate objective to be to provide adequate justification for a U.S. military intervention in Cuba. They requested that the Secretary of Defense assign them responsibility for the project, but the Attorney General Robert Kennedy retained effective control.
Over thirty different plans were considered under The Cuban Project, some of which were carried out. The plans included the use of American Green Berets, destruction of the Cuban sugar crop, mining of harbors and even the possible creation of rumors that Jesus would return to Cuba after the Communist Party of Cuba was overthrown.
The Cuban Project played a significant role in the events leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Cuban Project's six-phase terrorist schedule was presented by counter-insurgency specialist Air Force General Edward Lansdale on February 20, 1962. Lansdale outlined the coordinated program of political, psychological, military, sabotage, and intelligence operations as well as assassination attempts on key political leaders. Each passing month since his presentation, a different method was in place to destabilize the Communist regime; including poor publicity for Castro, arming militant opposition groups, establishing guerilla bases throughout the country and finally culminating in an October military intervention in Cuba. Many individual plans included making Castro's beard fall out, sending Castro a poisoned wetsuit, and placing explosive seashells in Castro's favorite places to go diving. The operation, directed by Lansdale, was overseen by the Attorney General Robert Kennedy. President John F. Kennedy was briefed on the operation guidelines on March 16, 1962.
The Cuban Project was originally designed to culminate in October 1962 with an "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime." This is of course at the peak of the Cuban Missile crisis whereupon the United States and the Soviet Union come alarmingly close to nuclear war over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. The operation was suspended on October 30, 1962, but three of ten six-man sabotage teams had already been deployed to Cuba, and on November 8, 1962, one six-man CIA team blew up a Cuban industrial facility.
The Cuban Project did not emerge successfully, if anything the covert plan helped strengthen Fidel Castro’s popularity in Cuba.
CIA (Edward Lansdale) Operation Mongoose:
The Cuba Project
Written: February 20, 1962
First Published: 1998
Source: ParaScope
Markup: Brian Basgen
Online Version: Cuban History Archive (marxists.org) 2000
In this February 20, 1962 document, CIA counterinsurgency specialist Edward Lansdale summarizes plans and objectives for the Kennedy-authorized Operation Mongoose. Lansdale outlines a coordinated program of intelligence gathering, sabotage and political warfare. Operation Mongoose, he reports, "aims for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962." Though this document (initially classified TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE) still contains significant deletions, its declassified portions graphically detail the covert war against Castro. Note: For the purposes of coherence, the formatting of this document has been slightly altered. The content of the document remains unaltered. See document image scans for original formatting.
SENSITIVE 20 February 1962
Program Review
by Brig. Gen. Lansdale
The Goal
In keeping with the spirit of the Presidential memorandum of 30 November 1961, the United States will help the people of Cuba overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace.
The Situation
We still know too little about the real situation inside Cuba, although we are taking energetic steps to learn more. However, some salient facts are known. It is known that the Communist regime is an active Sino-Soviet spearhead in our Hemisphere and that Communist controls inside Cuba are severe. Also, there is evidence that the repressive measures of the Communists, together with disappointments in Castro's economic dependency on the Communist formula, have resulted in an anti-regime atmosphere among the Cuban people which makes a resistance program a distinct and present possibility.
Time is running against us. The Cuban people feel helpless and are losing hope fast. They need symbols of inside resistance and of outside interest soon. They need something they can join with the hope of starting to work surely towards the overthrow of the regime. Since late November, we have been working hard to re-orient the operational concepts within the U.S. government and to develop the hard intelligence and operational assets required for success in our task.
The next National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba (NIE 85-62) promises to be a useful document dealing with our practical needs and with due recognition of the sparsity of hard facts. The needs of the Cuba project, as it goes into operation, plus the increasing U.S. capability for intelligence collection, should permit more frequent estimates for our guidance. These will be prepared on a periodic basis.
Premise of Action
Americans once ran a successful revolution. It was run from within, and succeeded because there was timely and strong political, economic, and military help by nations outside who supported our cause. Using this same concept of revolution from within, we must now help the Cuban people to stamp out tyranny and gain their liberty.
On 18 January, the Chief of Operations assigned thirty-two tasks to Departments and Agencies of the U.S. government, in order to provide a realistic assessment and preparation of U.S. capabilities. The Attorney General and the Special Group were apprised of this action. The answers received on 15 February provided the basis for planning a realistic course of action. The answers also revealed that the course of action must contain continuing coordination and firm overall guidance.
The course of action set forth herein is realistic within present operational estimates and intelligence. Actually, it represents the maximum target timing, which the operational people jointly considered feasible. It aims for a revolt, which can take place in Cuba by October 1962. It is a series of actions and dates, not a rigid timetable. The target dates are timed as follows:
Phase I, Action, March 1962. Start moving in.
Phase II, Build-up, April-July 1962. Activating the necessary operations inside Cuba for revolution and concurrently applying the vital political, economic, and military-type support from outside Cuba.
Phase III, Readiness, 1 August 1962, check for final policy decision.
Phase IV, Resistance, August-September 1962, move into guerrilla operations.
Phase V, Revolt, first two weeks of October 1962. Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime.
Phase VI, Final, during month of October 1962. Establishment of new government.
Plan of Action
Attached is and operational plan for the overthrow of the Communist regime in Cuba, by Cubans from within Cuba, with outside help from the U.S. and elsewhere. Since this is an operation to prompt and support a revolt by the people in a Communist police state, flexibility is a must for success. Decisions on operational flexibility rest with the Chief of Operations, with consultation in the Special Group when policy matters are involved. Target actions and dates are detailed in the attacked operational plans, which cover:
A. Basic Action Plan Inside Cuba
B. Political Support Plan
C. Economic Support Plan
D. Psychological Support Plan
E. Military Support Plan
F. Sabotage Support Plan
G. Intelligence Support Plan
Early Policy Decisions
The operational plan for clandestine U.S. support of a Cuban movement inside Cuba to overthrow the Communist regime is within policy limits already set by the President. A vital decision, still to be made, is on the use of open U.S. force to aid the Cuban people in winning their liberty. If conditions and assets permitting a revolt are achieved in Cuba, and if U.S. help is required to sustain this condition, will U.S. respond promptly with military force to aid the Cuban revolt? The contingencies under which such military deployment would be needed, and recommended U.S. responses, are detailed in a memorandum being prepared by the Secretaries of State and Defense. An early decision is required, prior to deep involvement of the Cubans in this program.
Distribution (Copy No.):
1. The President
2. The Attorney General
3. General Taylor
4. The Secretary of State
(through Deputy Under Secretary Johnson)
5. The Secretary of Defense
(Through Deputy Secretary Gilpatric)
6. The Director, Central Intelligence Agency
7. The Director, U.S. Information Agency
(through Deputy Director Wilson)
8. State (Mr. Goodwin)
9. Defense (Brig. Gen. Craig)
10. CIA (Mr. Harvey)
11.-12. Chief of Operations (Brig. Gen. Lansdale)
---------------
Severely Edited by Tabacco
---------------
PURPOSE
To add to the increased U.S. intelligence coverage on Cuba and to strengthen the concern of Latin American states for security.
CONSIDERATIONS
(Responsibility of Defense, with support by others as required.)
ACTIVITY
7. Periodic intelligence estimates, as required by progress of operations.
PURPOSE
To up-date NIE 85-62, so that current estimates can be considered at national policy levels.
CONSIDERATIONS
As the operations develop, there will be both increased intelligence collection and a need for as current an Intelligence Estimate as the U.S. can produce meaningfully. It is likely that a more informal method of producing an Intelligence Estimate for use at the national level (than now governing the issuance of NIE's) may have to be followed. (CIA responsibility, with support of others as required.)
http://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/subject/cia/mongoose/c-project.htm
To read the entire text of the above-transcribed document, go to the Marxists.org website above. Even 40 years later the document is highly “blacked-out” and still sensitive.
Or go to the following for the complete article:
http://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/castroreport.htm
Document: CIA Plots to Kill Castro
This document, "CIA Inspector General's Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro," was approved for release in 1993 under the CIA Historical Review Program. The report describes the various capers the CIA engaged in during their attempts to "eliminate" Fidel Castro. From shellfish toxin to exploding conch shell, almost every spy-vs.-spy gag imaginable was considered by the CIA.
[document begins]
23 May 1967
MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD
SUBJECT: Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro
This report was prepared at the request of the Director of Central Intelligence. He assigned the task to the Inspector General on 23 March 1967. The report was delivered to the Director, personally, in installments, beginning on 24 April 1967. The Director returned this copy to the Inspector General on 22 May 1967 with instructions that the Inspector General:
Retain it in personal, EYES ONLY safekeeping
Destroy the one burn copy retained temporarily by the Inspector General
Destroy all notes and other source materials originated by those participating in the writing of this report
The one stay back burn copy, all notes, and all other derived source materials were destroyed on 23 May 1967.
This ribbon copy is the only text of the report now in existence, either in whole or in part. Its text has been read only by:
Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence
J.S. Earman, Inspector General
K.E. Greer, Inspector (one of the authors)
S.D. Breckinridge, Inspector (one of the authors)
All typing of drafts and of final text was done by the authors.
Filed with the report are:
Office of Security file used as source material
Memorandums concerning William Harvey
Certain MONGOOSE papers
Drew Pearson columns
[Signed]
J.S. Earman
Inspector General
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introductory Section
Scarcity of documentary evidence ....... 1
Relationship of assassination planning to government policy ....... 2
Risk of assassination when a government is overthrown ....... 4
Resort to synecdoche ....... 5
Published intelligence on the possibility of Castro's demise ....... 5
Accuracy of the story Drew Pearson has ....... 6
Miscellaneous Schemes Prior to August 1960 ....... 9
Aerosol Attack on Radio Station ....... 10
Contaminated Cigars ....... 11
Depilatory ....... 13
Gambling Syndicate - Phase 1 ....... 14
Genesis of the plot ....... 14
First contact with Maheu ....... 15
O'Connell named as case officer ....... 16
First meeting with Roselli ....... 16
Briefing of Dulles and Cabell ....... 17
First meeting between Maheu and Giancana ....... 18
True identities of Giancana and Trafficante become known ....... 19
Role of Trafficante ....... 19
Early planning on the means of assassination ....... 20
Gunn's involvement with lethal cigars ....... 21
[deletion] preparation of lethal cigars ....... 21
Delivery of the cigars to Gunn ....... 22
Roosevelt learns of the plot ....... 23
Possible ways of packaging the poison ....... 23
Decision to package the poison in pill form ....... 24
Juan Orta is identified as the syndicate's man in Cuba ....... 25
Gunn tests the pills on guinea pigs ....... 25
Sequence preceding passing the pills to O'Connell ....... 26
O'Connell receives the pills and passes them to Roselli ....... 27
Harvey is briefed on the operation ....... 27
Trafficante receives the pills and gives them to Orta ....... 27
Identification of Orta ....... 28
The Orta channel collapses ....... 29
Varona is brought into the operation ....... 29
Edward K. Moss ....... 30
Roselli associates O'Connell with CIA ....... 31
Funds are approved for passing to Varona ....... 31
Money and lethal pills are passed to Varona ....... 32
Varona's restaurant contact in Cuba ....... 32
Edwards calls off the operation ....... 33
Disposition of the pills ....... 34
List of those witting of the operation ....... 34
Gambling Syndicate - Phase 2 ....... 37
Why Harvey was briefed on Phase 1 ....... 37
Harvey put in charge of the Executive Action Capability ....... 37
Harvey briefs Helms on the Executive Action Capability ....... 37
QJWIN - planned assassination of Lumumba ....... 38
Approval of Project ZRRIFLE ....... 38
Bissell puts Harvey in charge of the Castro operation ....... 39
Harvey is told he will head the Cuba task force ....... 39
Harvey's first meeting with Edwards on the Castro operation ....... 40
Termination of QJWIN ....... 41
Harvey briefs Helms on the Castro operation ....... 41
Differing views on the turnover to Harvey ....... 41
Harvey's first meeting with Roselli in New York City ....... 43
Roselli and O'Connell go to Miami ....... 45
Harvey leaves for Miami with lethal pills ....... 46
Roselli is already in touch with Varona ....... 47
Harvey takes over "a going operation" ....... 47
Changes in gangster personnel participating ....... 48
Maceo enters the operation ....... 48
Harvey supplies weapons and equipment to Varona ....... 49
Roselli reports that the pills are in Cuba ....... 50
Varona sends a three-man team to Cuba ....... 51
Varona plans to send three militia men to Cuba ....... 51
Harvey and Roselli agree to terminate the operation ....... 52
Roselli comes to Washington to meet Harvey ....... 53
Harvey's meeting with Roselli observed by the FBI ....... 54
List of persons witting of this phase of the operation ....... 55
The Wiretapping Incident ....... 57
Giancana suspects Phyllis McGuire and Dan Rowan ....... 57
Giancana asks Maheu to bug Rowan's room ....... 57
Likely date of the bugging incident ....... 58
Maheu asks Edward Du Bois to do the job ....... 58
Du Bois assigns Balletti and Harrison to the job ....... 58
Wiretap made instead of microphone plant ....... 59
Balletti is caught and phones Maheu for help ....... 59
Maheu refers the FBI to CIA ....... 59
Shef Edwards meets with an FBI representative ....... 60
Edwards intervenes with Sam Papich on Maheu's behalf ....... 61
Houston intervenes with the Justice Department ....... 61
Houston briefs General Carter ....... 62
Edwards and Houston brief the Attorney General ....... 62a
Edwards sends a memorandum record of the meeting to Kennedy ....... 63
Gambling Syndicate - Phase 2 is already under way ....... 64
Helms is briefed on the meeting with the Attorney General ....... 65
Edwards warns Harvey to clear with the DCI ....... 65
Kennedy's request on 4 March 67 for a copy of the briefing memo ....... 65
The Wiretapping Incident (continued)
Chicago Sun-Times story of 16 Aug 63 re Giancana & CIA ....... 67
Chicago Daily News story of 20 Aug 63 re Giancana & CIA ....... 69
Helms sends McCone a copy of the Kennedy briefing memorandum ....... 69
Rumors now connect CIA & gangsters in plot to kill Castro ....... 70
The Long Committee ....... 71
Former Maheu employee called to testify ....... 71
The Onassis-Niarchos fight over oil shipping rights ....... 71
Maheu is hired by Niarchos and is supported by CIA ....... 72
CIA intervenes on Niarchos' behalf ....... 72
The Long Committee plans to resurrect the Onassis wiretap ....... 72
CIA intervenes with the Long Committee on Maheu's behalf ....... 73
Maheu applies pressure on CIA to avoid publicity ....... 73
Maheu indicates he may brief his attorney ....... 74
Schemes in Early 1963 ....... 75
Skin Diving Suit ....... 75
Gift from Donovan to Castro ....... 75
The suit is bought and made ready ....... 75
The plan is overtaken by events ....... 75
List of persons witting ....... 76
Booby-trapped Sea Shell ....... 77
Books on Mollusca are bought ....... 77
The plan proves to be impracticable ....... 77
Names of those witting ....... 77
Project AMLASH - Rolando Cubela ....... 78
[deletion] meeting with Cubela in Mexico City (Mar 61) ....... 78
Cubela's role in the Cuban revolution ....... 78
Cubela reported disaffected ....... 79
Mexico City meeting inconclusive ....... 79
Cubela and Juan Orta want to exfiltrate (Mar 61) ....... 80
Cubela asks for meeting in Paris (Aug 61) ....... 81
Cubela plans to attend Helsinki Youth Festival ....... 81
Meetings in Helsinki (Aug 62) ....... 83
Cubela objects to the word "assassinate" ....... 85
Paris meetings (Aug 62); S/W & demolition training ....... 85
Meetings in Porto Alegre (Sept 63) ....... 86
Paris meetings (Oct 63); Cubela wants assurance from U.S. Govt ....... 87
FitzGerald meets with Cubela in Paris (Oct 63) ....... 88
Differing versions of what FitzGerald told Cubela ....... 90
Project AMLASH - Rolando Cubela (continued)
Cuba cache approved for Cubela ....... 91
The Black Leaf 40 scheme is discussed ....... 92
Gunn converts a ballpoint pen into a hypodermic syringe ....... 93
[deletion] gives to Cubela in Paris while Kennedy is shot ....... 93a
Cubela asks for high-powered rifle with telescopic sight ....... 93a
Those witting of the Black Leaf 40 episode ....... 94
Cubela cache put down (without rifles) (Mar 64) ....... 96
Cubela requests a silencer for a FAL rifle ....... 97
SAS requests TSD to produce FAL silencer on crash basis ....... 97
Second Cubela cache put down (with FAL rifles) (June 64) ....... 97
Artime meets Cubela intermediary ....... 98
Artime agrees to meet with Cubela personally ....... 99
[deletion] meets Cubela in Paris (Dec 64) ....... 100
Explanation of how Artime and Cubela were put together ....... 100
Artime and Cubela meet in Madrid (Dec 64) ....... 101
Artime agrees to furnish silencer ....... 102
Artime gives Cubela silencer and other special gear ....... 103
Second name-line between Cubela and gambling syndicate operation ....... 104
Headquarters terminates all contacts with Cubela group ....... 104
Cubela and others arrested; plead guilty (Mar 66) ....... 107
The charges ....... 108
Castro asks for leniency ....... 109
Testimony about the silencer ....... 109
Cubela expects to be executed ....... 110
Cubela sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment ....... 110
No mention made of Cubela's pre-Nov 64 dealings with CIA ....... 111
Memo to Secretary of State (Rusk), Subject: CIA Involvement in Cuban Counter-revolutionary Activities -- Arrest of Rolando CUBELA Secades and Ramon Tomas GUIN Diaz, dated 7 March 1966 (added after completion of report) ....... 132
OUTLINE
Introductory Section
Miscellaneous Schemes Prior to August 1960
Aerosol Attack on Radio Station
Contaminated Cigars
Depilatory
The Gambling Syndicate Operation
Phase 1 (August 1960 - May 1961)
Phase 2 (Late 1961 - June 1963)
The Wiretapping Incident
The Phyllis McGuire/Attorney General Phase (Late 1961 - May 1962)
The Long Committee Phase (May - July 1966)
Schemes in Early 1963
Skin Diving Suit
Sea Shell
Project AMLASH - Rolando Cubela (March 1961 - March 1966)
Discussion of Assassination at High-Level Government Meetings
Special Group (Augmented) Meeting of 10 August 1962
Special Group Meeting of 30 July 1964
The Ramifications of the Gambling Syndicate Operation
23 April 1967
MEMORANDUM
This reconstruction of Agency Involvement in plans to assassinate Fidel Castro is at best an imperfect history. Because of the extreme sensitivity of the operations being discussed or attempted, as a matter of principle no official records were kept of planning, of approvals, or of implementation. The few written records that do exist are either largely tangential to the main events or were put on paper from memory years afterward. William Harvey has retained skeletal notes of his activities during the years in question, and they are our best source of dates. Dr. Edward Gunn of the Office of Medical Services, has a record of whom he met wand when and cryptic references to the subjects discussed. [deletion] of TSD, has a record of two or three dates that are pertinent. Gunn and [deletion] were involved in only the technical aspects of operational planning, and their participations were short-lived. Although fragmentary, their records are a help in establishing critical time frames. Operational files are useful in some instances, because they give dates of meetings, the substances of which may be inferred from collateral information.
For the most part, though, we have had to rely on information given to us orally by people whose memories are fogged by time. Their recollections of dates are particularly hazy, and some of them
-1-
are no longer able to keep the details of one plan separate form those of another. We interviewed everyone whom we could identify as likely to be knowledgeable, with the exceptions of Mr. Dulles and General Cabell. A complete list is attached at Tab A. We did not go on fishing expeditions among the mere possibles. To have done so would have risked making witting a number of employees who were previously unwitting and, in our estimate, would have added little to the details available from those directly involved. There are inconsistencies among the various accounts, but most of them can be resolved by collating the information furnished by all of the identifiable participants in a particular plan and by then checking it against specific dates that can be fixed with fair certainty. We believe that this reconstruction of what happened and of the thinking associated with it is reasonably sound. If there are significant inaccuracies in the report, they are most likely to occur in faulty ordering of the sequence of events. People still remember much of what happened, but they can no longer recall precisely when.
It became clear very early in our investigation that the vigor with which schemes were pursued within the Agency to eliminate Castro personally varied with the intensity of the U.S. Government's efforts to overthrow the Castro regime. We can identify five separate phases in Agency assassination planning, although the transitions from one
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to another are not always sharply defined. Each phase is a reflection of the then prevailing Government attitude toward the Cuban regime.
a. Prior to August 1960: All of the identifiable schemes prior to about August 1960, with one possible exception, were aimed only at discrediting Castro personally by influencing his behaviour or by altering his appearance.
b. August 1960 to April 1961: The plots that were hatched in late 1960 and early 1961 were aggressively pursued and were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs.
c. April 1961 to late 1961: A major scheme that was begun in August 1960 was called off after the Bay of Pigs and remained dormant for several months, as did most other Agency operational activity related to Cuba.
d. Late 1961 to Late 1962: That particular scheme was reactivated in early 1962 and was again pushed vigorously in the era of Project MONGOOSE and in the climate of intense administration pressure on CIA to do something about Castro and his Cuba.
e. Late 1962 until well into 1963: After the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 and the collapse of Project MONGOOSE, the
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aggressive scheme that was begun in August 1960 and revived in April 1962 was finally terminate in early 1963. Two other plots were originated in 1963, but both were impracticable and nothing ever came of them.
We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration's severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime. The fruitless and, in retrospect, often unrealistic plotting should be viewed in that light.
Many of those we interviewed stressed two points that are so obvious that recording them here may be superfluous. We believe, though, that they are pertinent to the story. Elimination of the dominant figure in a government, even when loyalties are held to him personally rather than to the government as a body, will not necessarily cause the downfall of the government. This point was stressed with respect to Castro and Cuba in an internal CIA draft paper of October 1961, which was initiated in response to General Maxwell Taylor's desire for a contingency plan. The paper took the position that the demise of Fidel Castro, from whatever cause, would offer little opportunity for the liberation of Cuba from Communist and Soviet Bloc control. The second point, which is more specifically relevant to our investigation, is that bringing about the downfall of a government necessarily requires the removal of its leaders from
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positions of power, and there is always the risk that the participants will resort to assassination. Such removals from power as the house arrest of a [Mossainq?] or the flight of a [Busieca?] could not cause one to overlook the killings of a Diem or of a Trujillo by forces encouraged but not controlled by the U.S. government.
There is a third point, which was not directly made by any of those we interviewed, but which emerges clearly from the interviews and from review of files. The point is that of frequent resort to synecdoche--the mention of a part when the whole is to be understood, or vice versa. Thus, we encounter repeated references to phrases such as "disposing of Castro," which may be read in the narrow, literal sense of assassinating him, when it is intended that it be read in the broader, figurative sense of dislodging the Castro regime. Reversing this coin, we find people speaking vaguely of "doing something about Castro" when it is clear that what they have specifically in mind is killing him. In a situation wherein those speaking may not have actually meant what they seemed to say or may not have said what they actually meant, they should not be surprised if their oral shorthand is interpreted differently than was intended.
The suggestion was made that operations aimed at the assassination of Castro may have been generated in an atmosphere of stress in intelligence publications on the possibility of Castro's
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demise and on the reordering of the political structure that would follow. We reviewed intelligence publications from 1960 through 1966, including National Intelligence Estimates, Special National Intelligence Estimates, Intelligence Memorandums, and Memorandums for the Director. The NTE's on "The Situation and Prospects in Cuba" for 1960, 1963, and 1964 have brief paragraphs on likely successor governments if Castro were to depart the scene. We also find similar short references in a SNIE of March 1960 and in an Intelligence Memorandum of May 1965. In each case the treatment is no more nor less than one would expect to find in comprehensive round-ups such as these. We conclude that there is no reason to believe that the operators were unduly influenced by the content of intelligence publications.
Drew Pearson's column of 7 March 1967 refers to a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro. Pearson also has information, as yet unpublished, to the effect that there was a meeting at the State Department at which assassination of Castro was discussed and that a team actually landed in Cuba with pills to be used in an assassination attempt. There is basis in fact for each of those three reports.
a. A CIA officer passed an assassination weapon to an Agency Cuban asset at a meeting in Paris on 22 November 1963. The weapon was a ballpoint pen rigged as a hypodermic syringe.
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The CIA officer suggested that the Cuban asset load the syringe with Black Leaf 40. The evidence indicates that the meeting was under way at the very moment President Kennedy was shot.
b. There was a meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) in Secretary Rusk's conference room on 10 August 1962 at which Secretary McNamara broached the subject of liquidation of Cuban leaders. The discussion resulted in a Project MONGOOSE action memorandum prepared by Edward Lansdale. At another Special Group meeting on 31 July 1964 there was discussion of a recently-disseminated Clandestine Services information report on a Cuban exile plot to assassinate Castro. CIA had refused the exile's request for funds and had no involvement in that plot.
c. CIA twice (first in early 1961 and again in early 1962) supplied lethal pills to U.S. gambling syndicate members working in behalf of CIA on a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. The 1961 plot aborted and the pills were recovered. Those furnished in April 1962 were passed by the gambling syndicate representative to a Cuban exile leader in Florida, who in turn had them sent to Cuba about May 1962. In June 1962 the exile leader reported that a team of three men had been dispatched to Cuba to recruit for the operation. If the opportunity presented itself, the team would make an attempt on Castro's life--perhaps using the pills.
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This report describes these and other episodes in detail; puts them into perspective; and reveals, that while the events described by Drew Pearson did occur and are subject to being patched together as though one complete story, the implication of a direct, causative relationship among them is unfounded.
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Castro in mid-life
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/peopleevents/e_mongoose.html
People & Events: Operation Mongoose:
the Covert Operation to Remove Castro from Power
The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 was a disaster for the Kennedy administration. It made the young president look weak, and gave fuel to Cold Warriors in both parties who could not stand the presence of a Soviet-aligned, Communist dictatorship just ninety miles south of Florida.
Target: Fidel Castro
A couple of months later, a special investigation of the Bay of Pigs chaired by retired General Maxwell Taylor made its report. "There can be no long-term living with Castro," Taylor wrote, just in case President Kennedy was thinking of giving up. The president's brother -- the new point-man on the Cuba problem -- needed no such prompting. "We will take action against Castro," Bobby wrote. "It might be tomorrow, it might be in five days or ten days, or not for months. But it will come."
Nothing to Lose
Like most covert operations, the plan to oust the Cuban dictator was a slippery thing. Who was paid to do what to whom is still not clear. But one thing is certain: Robert Kennedy was in charge. Convinced he had been betrayed by his military and intelligence advisors in the decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion, John Kennedy placed Cuba in the hands of the one man he knew he could trust. But what could be done? At a White House meeting in November, 1961, RFK scribbled the following in his notes:
My idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run and operated by Cubans themselves with every group but Batistaites and Communists. Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate.
Top Priority
Pressure was on from both Democrats and Republicans to do something to undermine Castro. GOP leaders were constantly attacking the administration for "losing" Cuba by not providing air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion. Brushing aside a CIA National Intelligence Estimate, which said that Castro enjoyed too much support in Cuba to be overthrown, Robert Kennedy organized a secret project, code named "Mongoose." On January 19, 1962, in a pep talk to the team, Kennedy called deposing Castro "the top priority of the U.S. government -- all else is secondary -- no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared."
The Game of Espionage
Small, covert, special operations -- not another large-scale military invasion -- would be the method this time. Kennedy's term of art was "counterinsurgency," also described as "social reform under pressure." He was so enamored of the fearless commandos and real-life James Bonds who did such work that he once invited Special Forces troops to Hickory Hill to instruct his children how to swing from trees.
Ops Mastermind
The man RFK chose to run the operation was legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, whose exploits fighting Communists in the Philippines in the 1950s made him a model for a character in Graham Greene's novel, The Quiet American. Playing on Kennedy's desperation and distaste for bureaucratic inertia, Lansdale hatched a series of operations which were to climax in a "Touchdown Play" by October 1962. Though highly skeptical in private, CIA Director Richard Helms spent around $100 million on manpower and equipment for a spy base in Miami. This did little, however, to address the fact that the Americans had very few "assets" left in Cuba, so tight was Castro's grip.
Plausible Deniability
The CIA had been plotting to assassinate Castro since the summer of 1960, even before John Kennedy was elected. A congressional investigation of the CIA later uncovered eight separate plots of varying ridiculousness between 1960 and 1965. But did either John or Robert Kennedy actually order him killed? History will probably never know. The Kennedys knew the meaning of the term "plausible deniability" all too well, and had been taught the old Boston Irish political rule, "never write it down."
"Get Rid of Castro"
"Get rid of Castro and the Castro regime, quote-unquote." This is how Sam Halpern, executive officer of the CIA team charged with carrying out Operation Mongoose, described his orders from Director Helms. "And when I asked Dick, what does "Get rid of" mean, he said, 'Sam, use your imagination.' That was it... Now what does that mean, throw him in the ashcan? Kill him, or what? And nobody could tell me. Just get rid of. Remove him from power basically." Helms himself was responding to relentless pressure from the White House. "You haven't lived until you've had Bobby Kennedy rampant on your back," he later remarked.
The CIA and the Mob
The pressure was so great that it led to one of the most controversial and grotesque chapters in presidential history: the hiring of the Mafia to help assassinate Castro. Though the details are murky and RFK's involvement has never been proven, it went something like this. CIA operatives, aware that the Mob was eager to renew the profitable gambling business it enjoyed under the Batista regime, hired Mafia hitman Johnny Rosselli to kill Castro. If this wasn't sordid enough, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover learned of the plot from FBI surveillance of Mob boss Sam Giancana, who just happened to share a mistress with John Kennedy. These machinations have provided much of the fuel behind various conspiracy theories of John Kennedy's assassination in Dallas in 1963.
Who Knew?
It is unclear whether the Kennedys knew what was going on. There is evidence that John Kennedy opposed the assassination as policy. Bobby's biographer Evan Thomas concludes, "the Kennedys may have discussed the idea of assassination as a weapon of last resort. But they did not know the particulars of the Harvey-Rosselli operation -- or want to."
Bogged Down
Even with all the money and elaborate measures being thrown at the problem, removing Castro proved easier said than done. Thomas writes that "after seven months, Kennedy's secret war... was hopelessly bogged down, driven by personality clashes, incapable of producing the 'boom and bang' that Kennedy wanted to see on the island."
Pros and Cons
RFK continued to hector his team, questioning their efforts and proposing unworkable solutions of his own. While they humored him, most senior officials were resigned to failure. Some, like Secretary of State Dean Rusk, were afraid that too much "noise" in Cuba would complicate more important Cold War problems like the struggle over Berlin. National security advisor McGeorge Bundy thought the only options were another invasion -- which the president had ruled out -- and "learning to live with Castro." Only CIA director John McCone was on RFK's side, worried the Soviets would turn Cuba into a missile base.
On the Brink
Within weeks, McCone's fears were validated. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, fearful of an American first strike, had ordered nuclear warheads to be slipped into Cuba as a deterrent. He also demanded that the American spy planes stop flying over his shipping -- which they agreed to do in early September. But in early October, at McCone's insistence, American U-2 flights resumed. And on October 16, RFK was called in to see some very disturbing pictures. The world stood on the brink of nuclear war.
A Shameful Legacy
Though it happened under the radar, history has revealed that Operation Mongoose was, in its own way, every bit as disastrous as the Bay of Pigs. "It was an expensive and embarrassing failure," summed up Thomas. "Castro after all is still alive in Cuba, and the people who tried to get him are long since gone. And the way they went after him, by hiring the Mafia, was something that has long-term effects on U.S. foreign policy. People still see the CIA as this sinister, nefarious force. It was a fundamentally foolish thing to do and Bobby bears real responsibility for it."
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3134open_goss_file.html
This article appears in the September 3, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Coming Senate Battle:
Open the Porter Goss File
Part 1
by Jeffrey Steinberg,
with Michele Steinberg and Scott Thompson
In his damning book on the Bush-Cheney Administration, Worse Than Watergate, former Nixon White House General Counsel John W. Dean reported that Vice President Dick Cheney has been obsessed for decades with the mid-1970s Church and Pike Committees, whose pioneering work led to the first serious Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. As far as the Vice President is concerned, those investigations, and the Congressional oversight committees that emerged from the process, represented a dark moment, in which the powers of secret government were undermined. As Dean put it: "Cheney has long believed that Congress has no business telling Presidents what to do, particularly in national security matters."
Cheney's refusal to turn over a shred of paper from his White House Energy Task Force; his secret intelligence organization buried in the Pentagon bureaucracy; and his trips to CIA headquarters to stare down analysts who dared to challenge his Iraq WMD Big Lies, all underscore the Veep's obsession with government-by-secret-cabal.
It is no wonder that Cheney's choice as the new Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) is Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.). Goss not only presided over a vicious partisan cover-up of the Iraq pre-war intelligence fraud—a fraud run out of Cheney's office—through his position as chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Goss's own career as a 1960s-era Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service officer is a throwback to the pre-Church Committee, pre-Watergate days, when the intelligence community, under the Allen Dulles/James Angleton legacy, ran amok.
Playing Politics With National Security
Sources in the U.S. intelligence community and the Congress identify three reasons that Cheney chose Goss for the DCI post, and is now intent on ramming his confirmation through the Senate immediately after Labor Day.
First, the White House is desperate to "plug the leaks" at the CIA. The Agency has been scapegoated by the White House and its Congressional toadies, like Goss and California Republican Duncan Hunter, for the 9/11 attacks and for the failure to find the so-called Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Senior career intelligence officers are furious, according to the sources, at the White House's blame game, and they do not intend to sit by and allow this propaganda scam to go unchallenged. The fact that evidence points to Cheney as the culprit behind the July 2003 leaking of the identity of CIA "non-official cover" officer Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak, only deepens the intelligence community's fury at the Bush White House. And Goss's personal role in attempting to prevent an independent counsel probe into the Plame leak just adds to the volatility of the issue.
The spy community knows that evidence easily accessible in the public domain reveals that the President, the Vice President, and the Attorney General repeatedly ignored CIA and FBI warnings about an imminent terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the Spring-Summer 2001, including the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing item, talking about al-Qaeda hijacking plots and surveillance of targets in Washington and New York. Likewise, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's recent report documented that the majority of intelligence community analysts disputed the Iraq WMD threat; and former DCI George Tenet told an audience at Georgetown University earlier this year that Iraq "never posed an imminent threat" to the United States—and he told Bush and Cheney that on repeated occasions.
When the CIA General Counsel rushed through approval of a book, Imperial Hubris, by a senior Agency counterterrorism analyst, writing anonymously, which tore into the Administration's failed Iraq and Afghanistan policies, Cheney and company moved to pre-empt further damaging material from surfacing from the Agency—by naming Goss. Goss's first mission will be to plug the leaks—at least through November.
Second, the Bush-Cheney campaign is growing worried that the President could lose the must-win state of Florida in November, and the Goss nomination is aimed at bolstering enthusiasm among the Cuban-American right-wing community in Miami for a second Bush-Cheney term. Goss is the darling of the southern Florida right wing, and has been, dating back to his CIA days from 1961-71, when he participated in the efforts to assassinate or overthrow Fidel Castro in Havana.
Third, and most important for Cheney, Goss is the personification of the rogue spook, serving at the pleasure of the President, and behind the back of the Congress and the American people. In Cheney's warped mind, Goss is going to turn the clock back to the bad-old-days before Watergate and intelligence oversight.
JM/WAVE and Mongoose
In 1975, the Church Committee investigating the activities of the U.S. intelligence community issued its final report. Among the revelations contained in the multi-volume document were the first unclassified accounts of the CIA's program to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. "United States government personnel plotted to kill Castro from 1960 to 1965," the report stated. "American underworld figures and Cubans hostile to Castro were used in these plots, and were provided encouragement and material support by the United States."
Those anti-Castro operations were run out of a large Miami CIA station, under the code name JM/WAVE. At the height of JM/WAVE, the station employed over 200 CIA officers, and ran a network of over 2,200 Cuban exiles. It maintained an armada of boats, for raids on Cuba, and a small fleet of aircraft for other missions. One sub-feature of the anti-Castro efforts, Operation Mongoose, involved assassination plots against the Cuban leader.
Porter Goss was a young CIA officer assigned to JM/WAVE. Goss had, by his own accounts, been recruited to the CIA while in his third year at Yale University. His two years of military service were, in all likelihood, actually CIA assignments. In 1961, Goss was officially brought into the CIA and sent to JM/WAVE. He later would continue to participate in the anti-Castro operations, based out of CIA stations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Later, Goss was sent to London and then Paris, where he was involved in the infiltration of labor organizations, until he developed a near-fatal infection and was forced, officially, to retire from the spy world.
In his role in JM/WAVE, Goss served with some of the CIA's most hardened Cold Warriors, including Miami Station Chief Theodore G. Shackley, later a central figure in the Iran/Contra debacle; Felix Rodriguez, another leading Iran-Contra player; and Frank Sturgis, later of Watergate break-in infamy.
Indeed, from the Bay of Pigs and the Operation Mongoose Castro assassination plots of the 1960s, to the Watergate Plumbers Unit of the 1970s, to the Iran-Contra narco-financed insurgency of the 1980s, this circle of right-wing CIA operators and closely allied Cuban exiles, has represented an ugly stain on the American political landscape. Is this what Porter Goss brings to the table?
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence cannot avoid the details of Goss's CIA career, in deliberating on his nomination.
Subscribe to EIW
Castro today; Still alive and
kicking – Jack & Bobby are
long gone.
Other sites of interest:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/ops/mongoose.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmongoose.htm
T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)
comments (1)
1. Sam Chambers left...
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Tuesday, 15 August 2006 6:58 am
Hi,
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