Preparations would take six to eight months. At 5412 Gordon Gray had complained about the extended schedule and wondered about a crash program. Now the agency reported that a limited air capability “already exists under CIA control” and could be expanded. Within two months the secret warriors could supplement this with a force under deep cover in a third country; and the exile organization would be functional within Cuba, which the agency saw as providing hard intelligence, arranging the landing or exfiltration of agents, inducing the defection of individuals as directed, doing the distribution of “illegal propaganda.”

  The project paper commented on problems of cover also. The secret warriors made clear that “all actions undertaken by the CIA in support and on behalf of the opposition council will, of course, be explained as activities of that entity.” And, in a reference to persons like William D. Pawley, the agency’s Cuba paper further explained that it would “make use of a carefully screened group of U.S. businessmen with a stated interest in Cuban affairs.” Such people could act as a funding mechanism, and CIA personnel could be documented as their representatives. Money from private sources would also help disguise the agency’s hand. Allen Dulles’s proposal noted $100,000 in pledges already made by Pawley and others. The secret war managers now estimated the Cuba project would cost $4.4 million.

  On March 17 in the afternoon, President Eisenhower took the unusual step of convening the 5412 Group, plus other senior officials, in the Oval Office. Eisenhower accepted the CIA’s Cuban project. Not before some discussion, however. Once Allen Dulles presented the basic plan, Bissell did most of the talking. Bissell, whose skills lay elsewhere, and who had appointed Tracy Barnes his assistant precisely because of the latter’s abilities as a salesman, did well enough here. The exile slogan would be to “restore the revolution.” Most likely they would be located in Puerto Rico, though Mexico would be better in the unlikely event the Mexican government would agree. The group of American businessmen would be in New York. The paramilitary force, Allen Dulles interjected, would require eight months and begin with a cadre of leaders outside Cuba.

  The spy chiefs took the approval back to Quarters Eye. Allen Dulles had barely begun his introductory remarks when he had to take a call from the president. The group waited. Bissell, silent, worked through a stack of cables. General Cabell slouched in a chair. Gossip over a Georgetown party occupied Tracy Barnes and Richard Helms. Colonel King of WH Division did not even attend. Lesser fry fidgeted. The scene could have served as metaphor for what was to come. Dulles reported the president’s go-ahead. Ike wanted everyone prepared to swear they had never heard of this scheme—the great problem would be leaks. Those, it turned out, would be just one headache.

  Ike awaited results on Castro. Allen Dulles came to the National Security Council time after time to report that Castro was expropriating properties or putting Cuban newspapers under government control, yet popular support for the Maximum Leader stayed high. By early April 1960 the CIA task force began producing daily progress reports. In May the government completed nationalization of the United Fruit Company’s 272,000 acres of cane fields, though for the moment la frutera held on to its two mills. On June 3 Tracy Barnes attended a meeting at Foggy Bottom that considered retaliation in kind—persuading U.S. oil companies to stop refining crude for Castro at their Cuban refineries. Three weeks later Charles Cabell briefed Vice President Nixon on the latest developments. Dick Bissell and J. C. King were on hand to take questions. That nothing had weakened Castro was the most disturbing aspect of CIA’s presentation, Nixon declared, demanding OAS action plus economic sanctions.

  A few days later a large group met at the State Department to mull over economic measures. OAS approval remained problematical, and pushing to isolate Cuba in that organization might harm U.S. regional allies. Arguments about support for right-wing versus leftist dictators further complicated the issue. General Cabell and Colonel King again represented the agency. Secretary of State Herter questioned them elliptically. Cabell expressed general satisfaction with CIA progress on its covert operation but warned that Castro’s popularity remained undiminished. Economic warfare would be necessary to Project Ate, Cabell observed.

  Around the end of June, Ike told Gordon Gray he could not remember the details of the March 17 discussion where he had approved the Cuba project. Gray reminded the president of what Allen Dulles had proposed, then reported “the current thinking as to the timetable of various events.” Weeks later, with Eisenhower at Newport, Rhode Island, Gray told him of a fresh CIA bid to expand the exile force, use Guatemalan bases, and enlarge the budget accordingly.

  By August Esterline’s task force had reworked its plan and presented it in a new memorandum to the president. The key meeting took place at the White House on August 18. Present were Allen Dulles, NSC officials, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, who coordinated trade policy on Cuba. After talk of the U-2 affair, which had consumed Eisenhower since May, the group turned to Ate. Allen Dulles cited success in creating a Cuban political front, the FRD, so far based in Mexico. The CIA director also extolled Radio Swan, now on the air, its broadcasts attacking Trujillo in addition to Castro. Cuba had already begun jamming its transmissions. At Fort Gulick in Panama the CIA had trained a cadre of twenty or more exiles who would go to Guatemala and help instruct five hundred more men. Several dozen radio operators were also learning their trade. Dulles noted that he now needed U.S. military people to assist in training.

  Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates, not happy, shot back that the training did not concern him as much as the possibility that the U.S. military might find themselves going over the beaches into Cuba. Richard Bissell deflected his objection—only fifteen or twenty people were involved, most of them already on assignment to CIA. They would be concerned primarily with the movement of aircraft. Bissell commented, “There would be no conceivable hazard involved and they would get no closer to para-military operations than the airstrip in Guatemala.” Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, the JCS chairman, saw no difficulty with the military trainers.

  Deputy Director Bissell also spoke of the Cuban exile force. He expected they could be ready for action by November and would constitute “a standby force preferably of non-Americans with special forces type training.” Secretary Gates renewed his objection. Hot debate over the use of Americans as part of the force ended with Allen Dulles, who said the decision could be put aside and reexamined by the CIA with the Joint Chiefs.

  Gordon Gray added that an abortive project would be worse than none—it would be unwise to mount any action without the determination to see it through. If a backup force were necessary, this should be considered fully now. Director Dulles still wished to defer the issue.

  The operational concept centered on the internal resistance to Castro. It might succeed without “outside help,” Bissell noted. Some B-26 bombers would have Cuban exile pilots, and they could fly in support of the “local resistance.” They would be supplied by air and sea, and some exiles would be sent to stiffen them. The CIA had identified a dozen anti-Castro or “alleged groups” with potential. If these failed to unseat Castro, the backup force would capture an island off the Cuban coast, such as the Isle of Pines, which could become the ostensible resistance base. Allen Dulles admitted the project had blown through its budget: the CIA now thought in terms of $10 million more than already set aside.

  If everyone believed JM/Ate had a good chance, Eisenhower was for it. Cost posed no obstacle: Ike declared “he would defend this kind of action against all comers and . . . if we could be sure of freeing the Cubans from this incubus, $25 million might be a small price to pay.”

  So money became the next issue. After the meeting Dulles visited Maurice Stans, director of the Bureau of the Budget, to ask that the funds be included in CIA’s request for fiscal year 1962.

  “It is needed,” the DCI explained, “to supply and train somewhere in Central America a group of exile Cubans who are preparing for a guerrilla invasion to overthrow Castro.” The director refused to supply documentation to support his demands. Stans protested. “It’s none of your damn business!” Allen Dulles angrily retorted. “If you question my authority go to the President and ask him.”

  Stans did exactly that. Dwight Eisenhower soothed him with an explanation: “I authorized Dulles to spend that money but I did not authorize any specific military action by the anti-Castro Cubans. That will have to come later and I won’t give it an OK unless I’m convinced it is essential and I’m convinced it won’t fail.” Stans went back and wrote $15 million into the CIA budget. Ike probably rued that day.

  One piece of the Cuba scheme was held so tightly that only a handful knew about it: Dick Bissell had a whole other track under way. During the spring there had been talk of neutralizing Castro—J. C. King’s comments in an early memo and at a March staff meeting are examples—but not much had been done. Bissell made that talk into something real.

  Only days before President Eisenhower approved the original JM/Ate program, Tracy Barnes had been at dinner at Senator John F. Kennedy’s Georgetown home. John Bross, now Bissell’s top planner, also attended. The star attraction was the Englishman, former spy, and author of the James Bond thrillers, Ian Fleming. Asked about Castro, Fleming ruminated that what he would do would be discredit the Cuban leader, subject him to ridicule, harping on Cubans’ fascination with money, religion, and sex. A huge Fleming fan, like Allen Dulles himself, Barnes passed this vague notion along, and early the next morning Dulles telephoned the home where Fleming was staying.

  But the historian Evan Thomas is correct to note that it remains impossible to connect the Fleming suggestions and the early CIA program by anything more than suggestion. Under orders from President Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1967 the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general carried out a full internal investigation of efforts to kill Castro, and the same ground was later plowed by a presidential commission (the Rockefeller Commission), a Senate investigating committee (the Church Committee) in 1975, and a House of Representatives committee (Select Committee on Assassinations) in 1979. Both the internal and independent investigations found CIA plots against Castro beginning around this time, and found the early ones focused on somehow discrediting the Cuban leader. One plot envisioned radioactive chemicals sprinkled in Castro’s shoes, presumably during a scheduled visit to Chile, which would cause his hair to fall out, robbing the image of Castro’s virility. The CIA had agents on the staff of a radio station on Castro’s itinerary; Fidel unaccountably canceled the visit.

  Much more concrete was what occurred following Eisenhower’s decisions of August 18. Deputy Director Bissell called up Col. Sheffield Edwards and asked him to drop by. Edwards, another of the ex-FBI folk at the agency, headed the Office of Security, part of the CIA Directorate for Support. Bissell asked Edwards to contact the Mafia, whose gambling profits from Havana casinos had disappeared as Castro prohibited the practice. Edwards undertook to do so. This track of the Cuba operation remained entirely separate from the exile project. Jacob Esterline knew of the plot but had no knowledge of the planning. Its purpose was assassination.

  Later inquiries into the plots go to considerable lengths to determine whether Allen Dulles approved the scheme. Dulles died in 1969 before the plots became known. Edwards passed away in 1975, never clarifying this point. Richard Bissell, who died in 1994, is exceedingly sparse on the murder plots in his memoirs, but claims he first learned of the Mafia approach from Edwards. The CIA inspector general in 1967 was quite specific that it was Bissell who asked Edwards to get involved. Edwards and other figures in these events all recalled specific exchanges with Bissell, who professed not to remember any of them. His generic stance with investigators was that he did not recall but that some such contacts must have occurred. Bissell’s memoir remark that “I had no desire to become personally involved” is certainly correct, but the antecedent, that “The idea did not originate with me (as some authors and historians have claimed it did),” can only be true in the sense that Bissell had been asked (by someone higher up) to take care of this matter.

  It has been established that Colonel Edwards personally briefed Director Dulles and General Cabell about a month after initiating the Mafia contact. In Bissell’s presence, Edwards used elliptical terms to refer to the plot, updating the CIA chieftain and his deputy. Bissell personally handled the details. But a key point, never made, is that as DDO Richard Bissell had no authority over an officer from the Support directorate. For Bissell to have asked Edwards to do anything required sanction from Director Dulles.

  Of course Richard Bissell had no experience dealing with the Mafia, as he acknowledges, and that, plus his high-ranking CIA position, were good reasons for him not to become directly involved. Rather, Colonel Edwards asked his deputy, James P. O’Connell, to find someone with the right connections. Among their officers, Robert Cunningham knew a detective named Robert A. Maheu who did. O’Connell and Cunningham, like Edwards, were FBI men who had come to the agency and Maheu, also former FBI, had done contract work for the CIA. Maheu had let go his CIA retainer by this point but remained happy to work with the agency, and Shef Edwards told Bissell he had a man with suitable underworld contacts. The Dulles briefing happened then. The CIA inspector general’s comment on this point: “It is appropriate to conjecture as to just what the Director did approve. It is safe to conclude, given the men participating and the general subject of the meeting, that there was little likelihood of misunderstanding.” Maheu approached Mafia go-between Johnny Roselli.

  Bob Maheu and Jim O’Connell went to Miami the week of September 23, and Maheu alone met with “Sam Gold,” later identified as Salvatore (“Sam”) Giancana. He in turn introduced the CIA cutout to his courier “Joe,” who turned out to be Santos Trafficante. The agency offered $150,000 to take out Castro. O’Connell never met the Mafiosi himself, no doubt to avoid any direct link between the CIA and the Mafia. O’Connell, who headed the Operational Support Branch of Sheffield’s office, happened to be very senior for a case officer, another indication of the sensitivity of this initiative. In fact only three persons at the CIA—O’Connell, Edwards, and Bissell—were fully apprised of the plot.

  Meanwhile at headquarters, Colonel Edwards went to the Technical Services Division (TSD) of his directorate, the scientists who concocted exotic weapons and equipment for the agency, where chief Cornelius Roosevelt fielded his request. But the doctor who headed the operations division of the Office of Medical Services made notes indicating that on August 16 he was asked for a box of Cuban cigars impregnated with lethal chemicals. The cigars were ready by October but not delivered until four months later. Jake Esterline recalled keeping a box of poisoned cigars in his safe for months until disposing of it. Roosevelt and O’Connell remember the cigar scheme as having been considered but rejected.

  Edwards next turned to TSD for poison capsules, bacteria in liquid form. What he got would be solid white pills. When the support chief tested one, it lay inert at the bottom of a glass of water. Unacceptable. Other capsules were crafted, tested on monkeys, and worked. A pencil was also hollowed out and prepared as a device with which to smuggle capsules into Cuba. The CIA inspector general proved unable to determine exactly when the capsules reached O’Connell, who passed them to Johnny Roselli for Trafficante, but this happened in February 1961 or later. By then the plot had already failed. The Mafia’s man in Havana, Juan Orta, director general of Castro’s personal office, had been slated as the hit man to poison Castro. Orta had apparently gotten into Trafficante’s pocket by taking bribes on casino licenses back in Batista days, but Fidel fired him on January 26. After that the CIA had no way to deliver a poison.

  Trafficante briefly favored using a prominent exile, identified as Tony Varona, as an assassin, but that too fell through, though O’Connell and Edwards told the inspector general money went to Varona for the job. When Jake Esterline learned this he went through the roof, properly insisting that anti-Castro leaders could not be involved in any such plot. In the spring of 1961 Edwards had word sent to Roselli that the project had gone onto the back burner. There would be no neutralizing Castro. The Cuban operation would have to succeed on its own.

  A different story of the vendetta against Castro is told by the Cuban exiles themselves. For the most part the exiles ardently believe, with some justification, that they created a resistance of which the CIA took advantage. As agency reports noted soon after Batista’s fall, the romance of the revolution wore off quickly, and by the spring of 1959 disillusioned Cubans, scattered at first but gradually building links, began to oppose Castro. The Communist question—whether the Maximum Leader was one or not—predominated for them. Cuban government repression and property seizures drove more and more into opposition.

  In February 1959 fifty men went back into the Sierra Maestra under Manuel Artime, a former Batista military commander who had sided with Castro. Styling themselves “commandos rurales,” they taught reading to illiterate peasants. Several contingents of these workers for the revolution made progress until Havana ordered them to substitute the teaching of Marxist doctrine. That became the last straw for yet more Cubans. By the summer, opponents had begun to coalesce. Dominican dictator Trujillo backed a plot against Fidel that August, but the fidelistas broke it up, then purged the army of all former Batista elements. By October the “red terror” had progressed, with Havana ordering the arrest of remaining commandos rurales as well as such revolutionary leaders as Huber Matos, now accused of fomenting revolt against Castro. Days later came the death of another of the most-admired commandantes, Camilo Cienfuegos, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances after arresting Matos.