The CIA came out looking much better than it should have. Bissell himself agreed, telling an agency interviewer in 1975 that the Taylor report had been “very fair,” “reasonable,” and “mild.” The report said nothing of the absurdity of using an invasion plan cobbled together in just a few days, a month before execution, and very little about the military feasibility of committing fifteen hundred Cuban exiles in a beachhead area forty miles wide, against a military establishment numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The report even observed, “We do not feel that any failure of intelligence contributed significantly to the defeat,” though it conceded that the data had not been perfect and the effectiveness of Castro’s military forces “not entirely anticipated or foreseen.” Agency historian Jack Pfeiffer, author of CIA’s four-volume official account of Project Ate, and other agency veterans have been highly critical of the Taylor report, seeing Bobby Kennedy’s role as having been to ensure that outcome. But the plain facts show a wide array of basic errors in CIA’s implementation of the project.

  In its recommendations, the Taylor report discussed possible establishment of a “Strategic Resources Group,” consisting of a chairman, the DCI, and the undersecretaries of state and defense—nothing less than the old 5412 Group resuscitated. The report also recommended, following Dulles, that the armed services be accorded primary responsibility for paramilitary operations, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff the normal avenue for presidential advice, and that an inventory be made of U.S. paramilitary assets.

  President Kennedy responded to the recommendations of the Taylor committee with several National Security Action Memoranda in late June. One appointed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs as the president’s main adviser for “military type” actions in time of peace as well as of war. Another ordered the inventory of U.S. assets for covert warfare. The third we will return to in a moment.

  In early May Kennedy revived his oversight unit—not the 5412 Group but the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The prominent citizens group, to which Dr. James Killian returned as chairman, and Clark Clifford and Gordon Gray were soon appointed, met an unprecedented twenty-five times between May and December 1961. They pressed for details on the CIA’s covert operations. At their very first session, on May 15, Allen Dulles made a point of suggesting that the Killian Board look into the future relationship of the CIA to paramilitary activities—an allusion to his new line that these ought to be handed over to the armed services. President Kennedy joined the meeting in progress. He now felt someone at the White House should be “constantly in touch with and on top of covert operations,” observing that Congress believed this to be already the case. That exchange led into a fresh discussion of the failure of the 1958 Indonesia project. The Cuban fiasco, Jack Kennedy rasped, represented “Indonesia all over again.”

  Another of Allen Dulles’s comments raised eyebrows on the board. The CIA director suggested that the PFIAB also look at the agency’s use of proprietaries like Radio Free Europe and others. Clark Clifford cast a withering eye on Dulles and quietly said he had been on the Radio Free Europe board of directors for three years but here, now, learned for the first time that it had any connection to the CIA. Dr. Edwin Land professed himself “both shocked and indignant” to hear that RFE was a proprietary. Land, incidentally, had been a member of Eisenhower’s watchdog board since its inception.

  Director Dulles reiterated his idea that the paramilitary function be handed off at another Killian Board session on May 25. The third of President Kennedy’s June NSAMs did exactly that.

  At the May 25 PFIAB meeting, Gen. James Doolittle, who had once advised Ike that CIA covert action should be as ruthless as those of the Soviets, this time said it looked like the “covert operations dog is wagging the intelligence tail,” and that needed to be reversed. In July national security adviser McGeorge Bundy told the board that the president, General Taylor, and himself had recently sat through a two-hour presentation on current CIA covert action by Dulles and Bissell. In October, handing over a summary outlining CIA proprietaries and cover organizations, Allen Dulles began to shut the door on information again, telling the Killian Board that CIA violated its principle of compartmentation by giving up this data. He said nothing of the agency’s embarrassment that the list of entities presumably unknown to the board went on for seventeen pages. The PFIAB executive secretary assured the director that they took greater precautions with CIA data than the agency itself.

  The PFIAB submitted many recommendations in 1961, some of them on covert operations from the board’s own Bay of Pigs postmortem. Among these were advice that the CIA increase its intelligence work and deemphasize covert action; devise a means of eliminating low-potential programs; consider moving covert activity outside the agency; and consider relocating the DO outside Washington, perhaps to New York or elsewhere. Ninety percent of PFIAB recommendations are said to have been effected. These were not.

  Meanwhile investigation of the Bay of Pigs also proceeded within the CIA itself. Just two years earlier, responding to criticism of the Directorate for Operations that the Hull Board had offered President Eisenhower, Dulles had ended the DO role in reviewing its own covert activities and assigned this function solely to the CIA inspector general. Now the IG looked at the Bay of Pigs, the first major review under the new system.

  Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, with his staff of about a dozen investigators, assembled a detailed picture of the CIA side of the affair. Studying the paper trail and talking to more than 125 people, the inquisitors touched the points made by the Taylor panel but went far beyond it in terms of criticizing the secret warriors’ assumptions about Castro’s vulnerability, arrangements for equipment and training, the changes in the planning, the agency’s operational security, and the management of JM/Ate. Stung by Kirkpatrick’s powerful arguments, DO officers struck back with claims that Kirkpatrick had been motivated by personal reasons—animosity for Bissell after being passed over for deputy director for operations—and thus his report amounted to a hatchet job. Even college friend Tom Parrott took that view. Dick Bissell raised the issue himself in a 1967 interview:

  . . . the then Inspector General was known to be, to I think everyone who knew him, extremely ambitious. He was an individual who, as I felt well before this incident, was not above using his reports and his analysis of situations to exert an influence in the direction that he chose, and these directions were, not always but sometimes, tied up with his personal ambitions. I think in this case he had a number of purposes he was trying to serve, more or less of that character.

  In a wheelchair, afflicted with the polio he had contracted while on duty for the agency, not long after the report Kirkpatrick was shunted to a different CIA post.

  Dark gossip attended the preparation of the IG report, but uproar followed its October 1961 completion. By then a new director held the reins at CIA. Despite the direct relationship between the mess and his own appointment, John A. McCone gave Kirkpatrick’s report short shrift when the IG presented it on November 20. He met Kirkpatrick and remarked that the report gave a false picture, suggesting that the CIA alone had responsibility for the failure. Then he arranged for the inspector general to supply an additional memo pointing a finger at the “U.S. Government” (that is, the Kennedy administration). McCone also promised the DO that its rejoinder would be bound together with the report, and he needled Bissell more than once on the DO’s progress in compiling this response. Largely the work of Tracy Barnes and practically as long as the IG report itself, that paper went to the director on January 18, 1962. Denunciations of the report were also filed separately: by Allen Dulles, by Bissell, by Charles Pearre Cabell; by Barnes (in addition to his work on the DO response paper), and by three Cuba task force officers. All these circulated with Kirkpatrick’s report, then Director McCone had the copies collected. McCone had all save one destroyed.

  Years later in his memoirs, Richard Bissell reconsidered his view on the Kirkpatrick report. The IG’s conclusion that the Cuba project had been inadequately staffed the former deputy director now termed “probably correct.” As for Kirkpatrick’s critique of the decision process, Bissell now wrote that

  much of his characterization was fair, but I have never felt that inadequate paperwork or staffing had much to do with whatever misconceptions arose. The shortcomings of our procedure were mainly attributable to keeping the circle of knowledgeable participants as small as possible. I will say, however, that I found our procedures refreshing in contrast to the stuffy discussions and negotiations that went on among the National Security Council’s staff members during the Eisenhower years.

  Dick Helms, who had a better opinion of Lyman Kirkpatrick’s critique, also sided with McCone in holding the Kennedy people to blame for sloppy decisions, even while he noted the project could not have succeeded on its own terms.

  There is no question that the Cuba debacle stripped away the CIA’s luster, especially that of the Directorate of Operations. Although the CIA might not have looked so bad in the Taylor report, Kennedy had considered Allen Dulles a master spy and a political asset, and now he did not. At lunch with Arthur Schlesinger and James Reston during the last days of Project Ate, the president remarked, “Dulles is a legendary figure and it’s hard to work with legendary figures.” He kept Allen on until completion of a new CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, the construction of which had been one of Dulles’s great dreams, then let him go.

  Director Dulles retired to write a book, The Craft of Intelligence, in which the passage explaining the Bay of Pigs contains barely a few lines. Later he reacted angrily to publication of the Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen memoirs on Kennedy, with their descriptions of the president’s concerns about the CIA plans. Dulles wrote drafts of a reply, hundreds of pages, never published. The rebuttal shows that CIA officers consciously abetted Kennedy’s ignorance in the expectation that, when the chips were down, JFK would have to go along with whatever the agency needed in order to save the exiles. Without the pressures of defending current programs, the former CIA director admitted to failing to ensure that Kennedy understood that air cover had become an absolute prerequisite for success, and to failure to protest repeated orders to reduce the noise level of the operation, so as to avoid hardening the president’s leanings against it. Dulles, who rejected Kirkpatrick’s IG report, accepts its key criticisms in his drafts. His successor John McCone would have added one more: in 1986 McCone told Dick Bissell that a big mistake had been Dulles’s absence from the scene, going to Puerto Rico. Dulles himself saw no problem with this maneuver.

  Among smaller fry, Grayston Lynch in a 1998 memoir published a fierce diatribe aimed primarily at Schlesinger, Sorensen, and the journalist Haynes Johnson. In common with a number of CIA veterans, Lynch sees in those accounts the same whitewash as in the Taylor report. The on-scene CIA officer, Lynch defends the stalwart fighters of Brigade 2506 and places the onus of responsibility squarely on Kennedy’s shoulders. Lynch has certain details wrong (Bissell, not JFK, halved the initial strike against Castro’s air bases, though based on understanding the president wanted less “noise”; there was not—at least in Washington councils*—a plan for a campaign of five or more major strikes before the invasion; it was true that internal uprising held a significant role in CIA’s concept; Castro did not mistake the U.S. deception in Pinar del Rio for the true invasion), but his core argument is that if the brigadistas had ruled the air, the operation would have ended with the downfall of Fidel Castro. Agency Deputy Director Charles Cabell makes the same argument. This is sheer speculation.

  At best the CIA air force might have denied Castro forces entry into the Girón area, more likely it could have done no more than make the FAR assault slower and costlier. Brigade 2506 would still have had to get out, through a far superior Cuban army which the terrain would then have favored just as it helped the exiles in defense. A completely hidden obstacle would have been a species of crab native to Girón. The thousands of crabs crushed while crossing the roads, their razor-sharp shells often covering roads several feet deep, would have sliced the tires of the brigade’s vehicles. Beyond the beachhead, victory would still have required the Cuban people to change sides.

  Lynch and Cabell’s contention is representative of a view held by participants ranging from Jack Hawkins to exile pilot Eddie Ferrer, to observers like John McCone. But bombers were not about to conquer Havana. Air superiority was necessary for success, not a guarantee of victory. Aircraft, certainly not in the types and numbers available to the CIA, could not destroy Castro’s army. Meanwhile the internal resistance, weak and far away, had no chance to link up with the brigade. The Cuban people were the key factor, and the CIA lacked the capacity to wean them from the romance of the Revolution.

  Any one failure would have wrecked this complex plan, while every single element had to go right for it to have had even a chance of success. The CIA’s project had been marginal at best, from the beginning. Dwight Eisenhower and the agency share the blame for that.

  Richard Bissell had been considered the leading candidate to succeed Dulles as the DCI; instead his star went into eclipse. Kennedy famously told him that if America had had a parliamentary government he, the president, would resign, but given the presidential system, Bissell had to go instead. John McCone came on board to replace Dulles in November 1961, and then Bissell resigned. Shortly thereafter McCone’s first wife died, and the new director felt he needed some stability. He phoned Bissell from California, where McCone attended the funeral, and asked the DO to stay until he returned. In early 1962, with the president’s blessing, Bobby Kennedy met with Bissell and said he and McCone wanted the erstwhile secret warrior to go back to dealing in his strong suit, starting up a new Directorate for Research (really science and technology) that the agency was about to create. Bissell declined. He left to head a think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia. There were no farewell parties or ceremonial leavetakings.

  Tracy Barnes’s career flamed out too. Gossip about the botched briefing of Stevenson spread throughout the agency, infuriating Barnes, who felt he had not lied and that the UN ambassador could have asked questions. The atmosphere soured so much that, a few months later, a junior officer had no compunction about standing up at a staff meeting Barnes conducted to declare that it would really help the DO if Barnes, Bissell, and John Bross all walked the plank. The staffer was shunted to a job at the Pentagon, but Barnes moved over to become division chief of the newly established Domestic Operations Division. E. Howard Hunt became a subordinate.

  Gen. Charles Pearre Cabell returned to the air force in December 1961. John Bross, like Helms, held little regard for Tracy Barnes’s tradecraft, and his loyalties ran to Bissell. Lyman Kirkpatrick, removed as inspector general, became the CIA’s executive director, another of McCone’s new posts, but found the job a sinecure. He left in 1964 to become an academic. Robert Amory departed the agency for the White House in 1962, becoming head of the international division of the Bureau of the Budget and its resident expert on intelligence. Dick Drain tried to get as far away as he could, and went to Nairobi as chief of station. Later he turned up in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, serving as deputy chief of the largest CIA station in the world. Other agency careers appeared unaffected but in the long run sputtered out. Gar Thorsrud shifted to one of the proprietaries and worked out of a disguised CIA air base at Marana, Arizona, retiring in the mid-1960s. Gerry Droller was promoted to special assistant for political action for the WH Division while Jake Esterline became its chief of operations. They soon had their hands back in with the Guyana affair. Esterline received only a couple more, pro forma, promotions during his career and ended up as chief of base in Miami. At the time of Watergate, the Miami post embroiled Esterline in hot water again, for some of the CIA’s Cubans would be characters in that scandal. Worn out, Esterline retired in mid-1973.

  By and large, however, the Bay of Pigs proved to be more benign for CIA personnel than participation in later agency muck-ups: only a few dozen officers retired, few were cashiered, no one went to jail.

  Thenceforth Kennedy kept the CIA at arm’s length. Langley became more than a headquarters complex across the Potomac River, it was shorthand for an alliance of secret warriors the president viewed warily. JFK told aides of his desire to “splinter” the CIA “into a thousand pieces and scatter [it] to the winds.” But the actual shake-up proved less extreme.

  * Not to be confused with the island of Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela.

  * Such a strike program appears in a schedule provided by Gar Thorsrud’s people at Puerto Cabezas but not in the JM/Ate planning documents that President Kennedy considered a month before the invasion.

  13

  Cold War and Counterrevolution

  THE NOTORIOUS Cuba project had been a crossover operation, a CIA covert action begun under one president and continued by another. There are lots more. Tibet, of course. Another, a tragic page from the history of Africa, took place in Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo, with the arrival of independence. This American operation occurred against a backdrop of intense political strife and Belgium’s residual colonial ambitions.