Exile veterans often romanticize this Guatemala training phase. The truth was different. At Retalhuleu Cuban pilots resented the handling of air operations and their exclusion from the base’s little social club. The failures of flights to succor the resistance lowered morale even more. A number of the Cuban airmen staged a strike to protest conditions. They were taken away, not to be seen again. At Camp Trax the Cubans also abhorred their conditions. The American trainers lived in Roberto Alejos’s plantation hacienda atop the hill. The training necessarily remained perfunctory until weapons were distributed. On January 13 Lt. Col. David Crowe finally arrived with almost forty Special Forces soldiers. Meanwhile divisions sharpened between exiles from the student groups and those of the former Cuban military. When the Cubans tried to elect their own leader, the Americans insisted on selecting him instead. The CIA chose Jose (“Pepe”) San Roman, an officer of the old Batista army trained in the United States at Fort Benning and elsewhere. San Roman had led a military revolt against Batista and been imprisoned, but that did not excuse him in the eyes of the purists.

  What the CIA saw as ensuring a professional cadre, many Cubans viewed as against the very principles of democracy for which they wanted to fight. While Trax boss “Colonel Frank”—army Lt. Col. Frank Egan—was in Washington, the exiles had it out. San Roman assembled the brigade, told the men they would be going to Cuba under his command, and asked those who did not wish to follow him to step to the right. Almost half the existing force, 230 men, including every person in the planned second and third battalions, took that step. Egan returned to face protesters’ demands.

  In interviews and oral histories, many participants pass over this January 1961 near mutiny. In his book-length account of the Bay of Pigs, CIA contract officer Grayston Lynch fails even to mention the brigade mutiny. Francisco Molina of the Second Battalion is one of the exceptions, but he remembers “some problems in Guatemala” as a coup d’état against the Frente. Battalion commander Hugo Sueiro describes events simply as “political turmoil at the camp.” Francisco Hernandez, another Second Battalion participant, recalls fearing that their officers were taking CIA orders, not those of the Cuban political leadership, and that was what caused the trouble. A hundred exiles remained adamant even after mediating a working arrangement. The agency, among other things, agreed to banish trainer Valeriano, whose role had much diminished anyway with the arrival of the Special Forces. Cuban holdouts were kept in tents for two weeks of the rainy season. Then Howard Hunt and several frente political leaders visited Trax and exhorted them. The FRD people told the men the CIA were there to help, disguising the degree to which, in fact, the brigade existed as a CIA creation.

  In a deft political move, Jose San Roman resigned, reenlisting as a private. Egan defended Pepe and reinstated him as brigade commander. A dozen hard-core refusniks were sequestered, in fact kept prisoner, until the Cuban operation had ended. Pepe San Roman gradually gained the confidence of the remaining Cubans, even those who had seen him as a batistiano. The CIA’s selection had been a good one. Manuel Artime, resident political authority of the FRD—and liaison with the Americans—also helped end the controversy. It had happened for reasons that had everything to do with what made Ate a CIA project rather than an exile improvisation.

  Meanwhile, the exiles suffered their first training casualty. Carlos Rodriguez Santana, recruit number 2,506, fell to his death during a march through the mountains. In memory of him the Cubans adopted the unit designation Brigade 2506. San Roman commanded a force that eventually totaled about fourteen hundred men. Beginning with the Second Battalion, the brigade units went successively to a lowland base for intensive unit training.

  The brigade contained six small “battalions” and a heavy weapons group. Men of the First Battalion trained as paratroopers, getting up at three or four in the morning for even more strenuous exercises. The Fourth Battalion made up a small armored force with five M-41A2 tanks, plus trucks mounting .50-caliber machine guns. The tank detachment actually trained at the U.S. Army base at Fort Knox and never met their comrades until the invasion. The weapons unit contained 4.2-inch mortars, 3.5-inch bazookas, and 57- and 75-millimeter recoilless rifles. The “battalions” ranged from 167 to 185 men, somewhat fewer than a standard rifle company in the U.S. Army. There also existed a commando force under “Niño” Diaz of 168 men, who would make a diversion at another point on the Cuban coast just before the main landing. They too trained separately, as did the brigade frogmen, in Louisiana; landing craft crew trained in the Florida Keys or Puerto Rico.

  Finally, there was the exile air force under the nominal command of Maj. Manuel Villafaña. The air group numbered more than 150 Cubans and an equal number of Americans, both as aircrew and in support roles. The combat element consisted of sixteen B-26 bombers, the air transport unit of eight C-46s and six C-54s.

  Richard Bissell expected to reinforce the Brigade 2506 beachhead once the invasion began. About 500 Cubans gathered in the Miami area, of whom 162 joined the brigade before it left Guatemala. The rest would fly into the battle area once the exiles set up an air base. The invasion force carried extra weapons for 4,000 volunteers and expected to enlist numerous campesinos. These would flesh out San Roman’s small battalions.

  Meanwhile problems with the Cubans seemed to grow almost daily. Besides discussions in Miami and Havana newspapers, a major leak appeared in the New York Times in a January 10, 1961, article by Paul Kennedy. In yet another sign of rapidly eroding secrecy, in its January 27, 1961, issue Time magazine printed a photograph of Cuban rebel aircraft sitting on the ground at the Retalhuleu base. The Guatemalan government began insisting the CIA Cuban unit leave the country. Something had to give.

  A different and huge obstacle lay in the fact that Dwight D. Eisenhower no longer commanded the secret warriors. John Fitzgerald Kennedy had won the 1960 presidential election on November 6, 1960, defeating Richard M. Nixon. Had Nixon won, the secret warriors would have been in no doubt about their Cuba project. Nixon lacked Eisenhower’s professional mastery of the craft of intelligence, but he had been an enthusiastic supporter from the outset. Kennedy remained an unknown quantity. Or not. Allen Dulles did know the new president—he had met Jack in April 1955 at Palm Beach. Good friends with Kennedy’s father Joe (Dulles biographer Peter Grose maintains that Allen knew Joe Kennedy mainly by reputation, but Dulles himself insisted, in a 1964 oral history with Tom Braden, that he knew Joe Kennedy “quite well” from his days at the law), Dulles befriended Palm Beach neighbors of Jack’s father. The neighbors’ home on North Ocean Boulevard lay up the street from the Kennedy compound, so Dulles could hardly miss the Kennedys on his visits. Dulles met Jack as the Massachusetts politician recuperated at Palm Beach from an illness, working on what would be his best-selling book Profiles in Courage. Dulles knew Jack Kennedy as a devotee of spy fiction, and knew him well enough that Jacqueline Kennedy made Allen a present of one of Ian Fleming’s early James Bond novels, From Russia with Love. Dulles liked it so much he joined the legion of Fleming fans and bought the next Bond novels himself.

  Of course there were occasional contacts with Congressman, then Senator Kennedy on official business. And Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and other senior CIA people also encountered Kennedy on the Washington social scene. Dulles, Bissell, and Kennedy, for example, all shared friendship with newspaper columnist Joe Alsop. Robert Amory, the agency’s deputy director for intelligence, had met Kennedy while an undergraduate in college, and while not close, always found him cordial when he encountered Kennedy on Capitol Hill.

  Dick Bissell had his own Kennedy moment, which he speculates resulted from an Alsop comment to Jack. The candidate invited Bissell to his Senate office and asked his views on a range of issues. Bissell answered but made it clear he still worked for Eisenhower and could do nothing of an active nature. Kennedy asked Bissell to give him ideas that might be fed into the campaign, but the CIA official, pressed by the daily string of emergencies, never got around to it. Bob Amory’s impression was that Kennedy regarded Bissell as one of the four or five brightest people in the government.

  During the 1960 presidential campaign, Allen Dulles briefed JFK on international matters in general, including the Cuba situation, but Kennedy had not been privy to the covert plan. As a matter of policy, Dulles later put it, “I did not brief candidates on secret operations which were destined to come out in the future.” Richard Nixon, not so sure, pressed Allen after his first briefing, admonishing Dulles to tell Kennedy nothing. Indications are that Dulles had mentioned a covert capability designed to bring political pressure on Castro, and the Swan Island radio activity, but nothing more. The reports Dulles sent President Eisenhower after each of his briefings are sparse on detail and indicate simply inclusion of the subject of Cuba. Many years later, agency historians preparing a history of presidential candidate briefings noted: “A search of CIA records has failed to confirm that Dulles briefed Kennedy on the status of Cuban covert action planning in either of their two sessions held before the election in 1960.” In contrast to the first Kennedy briefing, at Hyannis in July, the second took place in impromptu fashion on September 17, when Dulles, interrupted at a Georgetown dinner, was asked to meet JFK and spoke to him privately for about half an hour. There could not have been time to tour the world horizon and cover covert operations.

  But nothing could convince Richard Nixon. In mid-October, during the climactic phase of a series of televised debates between the candidates, Nixon denounced Castro in a speech, declared his patience exhausted, and advocated a quarantine of Cuba. The Cuba issue resounded in the debates, in which Nixon painted Kennedy as soft on communism. Responding to that charge, on October 20 the Kennedy campaign put out a statement demanding support for Cuban “fighters for freedom,” blaming the U.S. government for providing “virtually no support” to the “non-Batista democratic forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro.” Drafted by Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin, who had tried to get JFK on the telephone the night before but found him asleep, the statement went out, further enraging Nixon. At their last debate Kennedy took up the October 20 statement, but Nixon, who later insisted he was trying to preserve the secrecy of the CIA operation, attacked the position as reckless. He asserted that American backing for the exiles would not work, would be condemned by the UN, and amounted to an invitation for Russian involvement in Latin America.

  Nixon insisted afterward that Kennedy must have known and had stolen a march in the debate, forcing him to oppose the administration’s actual policy as “dangerously irresponsible.” Within government Vice President Nixon demanded to learn what Kennedy had been told of the CIA plan. By his account in a memoir, within the hour aide Fred Seaton reported to Nixon that Allen Dulles had indeed told Kennedy. By the CIA director’s account, Eisenhower political wizard Wilton B. Persons phoned and Dulles informed him he had briefed JFK “on Cuba” but failed to clarify that he referred to events on the island, not Project Ate. Nixon later attributed defeat in the 1960 election, in part, to the unnatural stance adopted regarding Castro. In his book Six Crises, Nixon wrote that the newspapers had reported contemporaneously, in July, of Dulles briefing JFK about Cuba, and that he had corroborated his suspicions by speaking to knowledgeable people (Fred Seaton). On publication of Nixon’s book in 1962 the Kennedy White House averred that the two-and-a-quarter-hour CIA briefing had not dealt with the Cuban operation. In a battle of press releases, Nixon countered that he had personally researched the matter, adding that Ike’s orders had been that Kennedy should be as well briefed as the vice president.

  In an April 1962 interview with television reporter Eric Sevareid, Allen Dulles called the whole episode “an honest misunderstanding.” Recently declassified records of the phone conversations of his successor, John McCone, who dealt with both Dulles and the White House during this controversy, and advised Kennedy officials on their public statement, indicate that private approaches were made to Nixon but did not dissuade him. Dulles told McCone—accurately—that Kennedy could not have known of the invasion plan because as of the date of the debate (October 20) there was no such plan. It would be adopted about two weeks later.

  Nevertheless Nixon’s analysis in the debate itself proved exactly correct: the enterprise he himself had pushed was indeed “dangerously irresponsible.”

  “Freedom fighters” happened to be the exact term used in Eisenhower’s secret councils to refer to the Cuban exiles. As a matter of fact, secret warriors recount that in the final weeks before the election, Nixon encouraged a slowdown in the expectation he would be taking over. Then, having lost, the vice president egged Ike on to accelerate the project. Task force chief Esterline told a CIA interviewer in 1975, “I blame Nixon far more than I do Kennedy for the equivocation and the loss of time . . . that led to the ultimate disaster.”

  The flap over Kennedy’s Cuba statement was the first of four decisions that in the eyes of history seem to have taken authorship away from Dwight Eisenhower and placed it squarely in John F. Kennedy’s basket. The second was Kennedy’s actions during the final preparations.

  Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell visited JFK at Palm Beach on November 18, 1960. Now they broached the Cuba project. The meeting took place outside, near the swimming pool, where a big table permitted them to lay out maps. Bissell described the plan for almost an hour, including the invasion (thus Eisenhower’s authorship). Bissell recalls: “The plan, as we outlined it to him, did contemplate some form of landing of a significant force to act as a catalyst in inducing, ultimately, a revolutionary situation in Cuba.”

  The CIA briefing papers note that points prepared for presentation included Eisenhower’s original project approval, the political action efforts already under way, propaganda publications and radio broadcasts, and a range of paramilitary phases. The briefing included discussion of the early guerrilla phase; a second phase with a combined sea-air assault coordinated with guerrilla activity; and a final phase that provided for a possible airborne assault on Havana as well as the contingency for U.S. military intervention if necessary; also the timing and numbers of men and items of equipment to be sent. The CIA explicitly noted that it did not believe resistance activity in Cuba could unseat Castro without outside action. Dulles and Bissell avoided soliciting an approval, and the president-elect volunteered none. The CIA officials also spent time discussing covert activities in the Dominican Republic, elsewhere in Central America, Venezuela, and Tibet.

  Afterward the pipe-toting DCI took Kennedy into the back garden for a private conversation. Bissell stayed on the terrace. Soon after the top bosses returned, Tracy Barnes told Howard Hunt that JFK had given a “qualified go ahead.”

  Meanwhile Kennedy proceeded to rob himself of the machinery Ike had created to control the secret warriors. Kennedy’s White House arrangements dismantled much of the Eisenhower NSC systems. The device of the 5412 Group, in theory intact (by March it would have had three sessions), in practice took a backseat to meetings at which JFK personally presided. More than ever before, the new NSC staff transacted business directly. Kennedy never consulted Ike’s White House staff secretary, Andrew Goodpaster, who had the relevant information at his fingertips. Kennedy also abolished the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, the one entity supposedly intended for intelligence oversight. Finally, in an action with special impact on interagency coordination for the Cuba operation, on February 8 the Willauer-Barnes group passed out of existence.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy swept into office with confidence that belied his narrow electoral victory. Although his “New Frontier” offered fresh visions of America’s role in the world, real policies on questions like Cuba changed not a whit. Instead Kennedy eliminated staff offices he thought had stifled action; he did not see the positive value of those institutions. JFK would have no staffs senior enough to do things on their own and no board capable of providing a second opinion. No doubt thinking he was moving away from a certain (fancied) passivity, with which critics had tarred the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy exercised direct leadership. He made no changes whatever in the upper management of the CIA. Project Ate also continued, though those close to Kennedy insist the young president had a certain ambivalence about it.

  The secret war went on as before, the difference being that mechanisms established to control it disappeared. The most obvious continuity between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations was Cuba. That project decisively demonstrated the fallacy of abolishing controls over the intelligence community.

  Robert Amory stunned colleagues when he attended one of the Kennedy inaugural celebrations, a Camelot costume ball, as Fidel Castro. Some secret warriors saw that as a serious security breach. But Amory didn’t care. He had a point to make. Of course, on one level Amory could not break secrecy—as chief of the Directorate for Intelligence he led a CIA unit with no official knowledge of the Cuba project. Roger Hilsman, whom Kennedy appointed to head the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, believes both he and Amory were cut out of the loop on Cuba precisely because the secret warriors feared they would oppose the operation. Be that as it may, Amory knew. The DI chief at that time held responsibility for the Photographic Interpretation Center that processed all overhead imagery for U.S. intelligence. Its head, Art Lundahl, kept Amory apprised of the pictures passing through his shop. Photos of the Cuban coast were worthy of comment to the boss.