The director of central intelligence described the possibilities starkly. McCone doubted the CIA could overthrow Castro or that diplomacy might detach him from Moscow, though he did not mind trying. But he wanted the Soviets (and their weapons) out of Cuba. The director felt that “we must not, under any circumstance, dismiss the possibility of a second confrontation of a type encountered last October.” He had “the same feeling about the presence of SAMs in Cuba now as I did last fall.” Carefully planned sabotage could magnify Cuban problems but not bring down Fidel. McCone’s reasoning is worth quoting:

  Low-level sabotage, such as minor crop destruction activities, interruption of transportation, etc., will be annoying. Successful major sabotage from within and without will, in my opinion, add to the problems created by the economic [blockade] measures. This will be particularly true as the flow of spare parts to essential plants (such as power plants) is effectively shut off. A combination of economic pressure and large-scale sabotage will hurt Castro seriously, but it will not bring him down. In addition a variety of other actions can be effectively carried out which would seriously impair relationships between Castro and Latin American countries.

  The CIA director also wanted to amplify and play back any criticisms Cuban and Soviet leaders might make of each other, to create divisions between them, and carry out an effective misinformation program.

  Among subjects discussed in this NSC policy review was “conditions without Castro, assuming Castro would be assassinated or die.” A few days later, on the agenda for the next Standing Group meeting, the death of Castro was listed as a contingency that could lead to the accomplishment of wider political objectives.*

  At that meeting Bob McNamara, taking McCone’s point, acknowledged that small-scale sabotage had little potential. Afterward Bundy asked CIA for its assessment of Cuba after Castro’s death. The Board of National Estimates did that report. Bundy also instructed the agency to study effective interference with the Cuban economy.

  On May 28 the NSC Standing Group listened to FitzGerald present his fresh covert action plans. There were two: a general plan and a specific option dealing with Cuban oil supplies. Director McCone provided the preface, introducing his new task force chief with the remark that America needed to heighten hardship in Cuba, and that measures to that end plus sabotage might create such desperation that Fidel’s commandantes would get rid of him. McCone was prepared for the CIA role in this to become apparent. McNamara reiterated his earlier stance that sabotage would be insufficient. Desmond FitzGerald remarked that a new sabotage program could begin by the new-moon period of July.

  Bobby Kennedy entered the Situation Room as FitzGerald ended his briefing. The attorney general did not care whether Washington believed it could bring down Castro or not; something had to be done about Fidel.

  Des FitzGerald revised his proposal based on the Standing Group discussions. His June 8 revision built on the assumption there would be no major U.S. intervention, and included only things the CIA could do. But the plan integrated existing projects and some new ones into an overall program including intelligence collection, propaganda, stimulation of disaffection in Cuba, economic denial, sabotage, and support of autonomous exile resistance. It proposed hit-and-run attacks against selected targets, specifically the Cuban electric power industry, its oil facilities, transportation, and manufacturing assets.

  Several weeks into the project, Des FitzGerald returned to the NSC Standing Group to update them. The agency planned two operations for the anniversary of Castro’s revolution, July 26. These were postponed to avoid conflicting with U.S.-Soviet negotiations on a nuclear test-ban treaty, scheduled for a few days later. Soon Ted Shackley’s JM/Wave was preparing a dozen or so missions every month. Yet straws were already in the wind. Special Forces officer Bradley Ayers, training an exile unit in the Florida Keys, enthusiastically received a visit from Bobby Kennedy. Not long after, he received orders to stand down.

  But the exile brigade notion had not disappeared. In fact the really novel feature of Kennedy’s June decision was to switch to a stance backing “autonomous” raids, in other words, abandoning the pretense of impeding the exiles. Manuel Artime, returned from prison in Cuba, was the prime mover in the reinvigorated effort. An actual “brigade” became the centerpiece of Artime’s scheme, to be based in Central America, stage raids on Cuba, and ultimately move there. This would have been the Bay of Pigs all over again, with the exiles supposedly calling the shots. Rafael Quintero scouted out locations for the base. Luis Somoza, Nicaraguan dictator, offered his cooperation. Manuel Artime and other prominent exiles completed their arrangements, moving by early August. They set up shop near the town of El Bluff. Soon they began bombing Cuba. Langley sent Jake Esterline to Panama as station chief, placing him where he could coordinate training services and other help for Artime.

  Public speculation of CIA involvement ran high. The public was right: Langley had assigned Henry Heckscher as case officer to Artime, subsidizing him at $50,000 to $100,000 a month, though for the more limited purpose of encouraging a revolt by Castro’s armed forces. Heckscher held monthly meetings with Artime, often accompanied by Quintero, usually in the United States though never Miami. Another indication of CIA support was what happened when Artime and Quintero tried to recruit Felix Rodriguez to run their communications. They promised him a demonstration of their U.S. government backing. Rodriguez, one of those who had enlisted under the special army program, was at Fort Benning as a army lieutenant. He demanded radio training right there, on the base, instead of his normal duties. Two gentlemen promptly showed up at Benning to give him the instruction.

  On July 16 Desmond FitzGerald reported to the Standing Group on the “brigade” in Central America. (Actually the brigade was located in the United States—Erneido Oliva had gotten permission to pull together all the Cubans in the army and create a single combat unit. The “brigade” in Nicaragua never grew larger than about four hundred exiles.) The press already connected Bobby Kennedy to Artime and others in the operation—again correctly. Bobby suggested floating so many rumors that no one would be able to distinguish truth from fiction. John McCone agreed that could be done. Washington considered putting out an official statement denying any relationship with exile hit-and-run raids, but RFK opposed that, and his word carried.

  Actually the raids gave the CIA good cover for its own activities. In the Magic City, Shackley invented a phony Cuban exile group, Commandos Mambises, to take credit for CIA raids. With deputy David Morales and paramilitary officer Bob Simons, he set up a frogman team for clandestine missions, kept outside and separate from the commando forces. On August 18 and 19 gunboats struck the Cuban oil facilities at Casilda and a plant at Santa Lucia. Desmond FitzGerald had specifically made Casilda a target in his original April plan while Santa Lucia fell squarely within the target categories CIA had proposed. Shackley had an agent claim credit in behalf of the fake group, even predicting the Santa Lucia strike in advance to gain credibility.

  According to Shackley, this device worked like a charm. But Gordon Chase, Bundy’s NSC staffer for intelligence, told the security adviser, “Even the connoisseurs in Miami seemed to pay relatively little attention to the two CIA-sponsored attacks.” Within weeks the Bundy staff was congratulating itself on the excellent operational security of the August raids, and Chase wrote a paper for the Special Group on the continued need for secrecy, using the August raids as an example. Suddenly the White House wanted secrecy, not publicity. Ted Shackley’s unit made only three more raids on Cuba.

  By now McGeorge Bundy wore many hats, among them chairman of the Special Group, where he succeeded Maxwell Taylor. General Taylor had given up the post in 1962 when appointed to head the JCS. On October 3 Bundy’s Special Group adopted a menu of nine additional CIA missions, and on the 24th a schedule for the period from November through January 1964, including thirteen raids, among them missions against an electric plant, an oil refinery, and a sugar refinery. Within Califano’s army office, Al Haig processed the paperwork and passed it along. Bundy held the reins there too, apparently none too successfully since it seems that just five direct CIA raids occurred between the summer of 1963 and the spring of the following year—the strikes by Shackley’s phony exiles. Then the agency’s focus shifted.

  Desmond FitzGerald briefed the PFIAB on the program in early September. More Catholic than the pope, the board encouraged the spooks. Another FitzGerald briefing, on September 25, aimed at bringing around the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This culminated a series of contacts at Joe Califano’s request in which FitzGerald let out bits of CIA’s story and asked for help. For some time the Pentagon had been less than enthusiastic about the secret war. A typical military view held that the Bay of Pigs—and Mongoose—were failures because they lacked the expertise and capability that regular forces could bring to the table. In July, Califano’s office had compiled a detailed analysis of where the secret warriors had been and what they needed to win, concluding the program held no promise, not even a moderate chance of success. The FitzGerald briefings began soon thereafter.

  Presidential decisions back in April had given the military a wider support role, particularly in Artime’s autonomous “brigade,” and the series of strikes these exiles carried out through the fall seemed to bear out Pentagon opinions. An August bombing raid, well equipped and coordinated, the subject of much media speculation, was actually attributed to Shackley’s Commandos Mambises. A second autonomous initiative began to create a force under Manolo Ray. But the inertia level remained high and relations with the CIA delicate. On one occasion Califano met FitzGerald in Miami at his hotel. Des opened the door, put his finger to his lips, proceeded to turn on the radio full blast and run every water tap in the room, and then whispered in Joe’s ear. Califano thought he had stumbled onto the set of a spy movie. It was no way to do business.

  The other track of the Cuba operation—assassination—continued throughout. Soon after FitzGerald came on board there was a scheme to get Fidel with an exploding seashell. Sam Halpern, whom Des retained, questioned the legality of the enterprise when he learned about it, and took the matter to CIA counsel Lawrence Houston. The lawyers decided that if the project had been authorized by the president and attorney general, it must be legal. The seashell plot, never realistic (how to make sure Fidel picked up the right shell?), collapsed by itself. But new possibilities arose. FitzGerald’s plans hinged on encouraging a coup against Castro by the Cuban military. That formed the operational goal of the June plan. When Des briefed the Joint Chiefs in September, one theme was how the CIA had begun studying the ways German generals had plotted against Hitler during World War II. Langley asked the Pentagon to assemble all its data on Castro’s officer corps.

  From Miami, Ted Shackley’s foreign intelligence chief, Nestor Sanchez, spent a good deal of time traveling Latin America and chatting up Cuban officers. The Pentagon intelligence was grist for his mill. One officer, Maj. Rolando Cubela Secades, met with the CIA in Mexico City as early as 1961. Over the months there were repeated indications he might wish to defect. Cubela, in Spain as the Cuban military attaché, could travel freely and met other CIA officers in Helsinki during the Mongoose period. He became a CIA agent code-named AM/LASH. Nestor Sanchez pursued FitzGerald’s ambition to trigger a coup. Returned to Langley, the Cuba chief assigned Sanchez as case officer to AM/LASH, whom he met in Brazil in September 1963. Cubela spoke of an anti-Communist circle in the Cuban military—music to the CIA’s ears—but most of them were loyal to Fidel, or they were afraid.

  The Cuban went on to Paris. Although he told the CIA that he wished to get away from politics and wanted nothing more to do with Sanchez, the agency officer followed him to the French capital. A sympathetic character, Nestor Sanchez claimed descent from the conquistadors and spoke fluent Spanish. He could trade on war stories from Korea, where Sanchez had started out with the agency in 1951, and he had been deputy station chief in Guatemala City during Project Success. He was a veteran of a dozen years with the CIA, with service in Latin America and the turbulent Middle East of the 1950s, and able to talk Cubela out of cutting ties. Instead Cubela turned the conversation to getting rid of people—only in that way could a coup ever succeed. Sanchez later maintained that Fidel himself was not mentioned.

  But AM/LASH proved no easy sell. Cubela feared the United States would walk away from a plot, as it had from Brigade 2506. He wanted assurances from a senior U.S. official—AM/LASH specified Robert F. Kennedy. He also wanted weapons—high-powered rifles with telescopic sights. Sanchez had no authority to make deals but passed on the demands. After Cubela’s second request to meet with a top official, on October 17, DDO Richard Helms cleared Des FitzGerald to follow up, with instructions to present himself as the personal representative of Robert Kennedy. FitzGerald’s counterintelligence chief warned him that AM/LASH might be an imposter working for Castro’s G-2, but the ebullient spook brooked no objections. The meeting took place in Paris on October 29; Nestor Sanchez interpreted. FitzGerald’s field report and Sam Halpern agree that they avoided mention of an actual operation. Nevertheless, Rolando Cubela demanded equipment support, and the CIA provided it.

  Scientists at Langley crafted a poison pen using a toxic chemical injection. Nestor Sanchez went to Paris to hand over the instrument. He met Rolando Cubela again on November 22. Only hours later President John F. Kennedy fell to the bullets of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas.

  At the moment of Kennedy’s murder, Des FitzGerald sat in Georgetown’s City Tavern Club, at lunch with a foreign diplomat who fed the agency snippets of gossip. When the Cuba task force chief heard of the assassination he thought immediately of Cubela and the Castro murder plot. He hoped there was no connection. Sam Halpern drove FitzGerald back to Langley afterward, the chief sat white as a sheet. They discussed Cubela.

  That moment marked the effective end of the CIA’s assassination plots, though the Cubela affair dragged on. The CIA gave weapons to Cubela, and there were fights between Langley and Miami station over the shipments, with several sums of money handed over. Manuel Artime independently contacted Cubela in late 1964 and received CIA money to fund the Cubela plot. In March 1966 Castro’s security services arrested AM/LASH, who was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. The CIA murder plot received no mention at the trial, though the Artime contacts figured prominently. When the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee investigated this affair in 1975, Joe Califano learned that his suspicions about why the CIA needed all that biographical intelligence had been correct.

  Meanwhile John Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, brought a fresh perspective to the White House. LBJ may not have known that Kennedy had begun to put out peace feelers toward Castro, but he certainly felt less committed to the secret war. Al Haig believes it a fact that President Johnson understood JFK’s assassination as the result of the murder plots, and LBJ made comments at several times suggesting that was true. The new president also voiced doubts regarding Cuban exile groups, including Artime with his brigade in Nicaragua.

  President Johnson ordered curtailment of the U.S. military’s Cuban enlistment program. For Joseph Califano the consequence would be a very painful reunion on February 24, 1964, with Erneido Oliva, who made the last of many appeals to use the Cuban assault brigade against Castro. Oliva slumped into his chair when Califano rejected the idea. A few days later Oliva and several others resigned. Fewer than 150 Cubans volunteered for the special Cuban program between the beginning of 1964 and the end of April 1965. Oliva went to Thanksgiving dinner at Califano’s home. Later he returned to the U.S. Army Reserve, from which he finally retired as a brigadier general. But the intentions of the several thousand Cuban recruits clearly show from the fact that only 61 of them continued in U.S. service after training. In November 1965 the initiative would be phased out.

  The Cuban operation began dying as sensitivity to the problems of control increased. Around the time Califano saw Oliva, Des FitzGerald sent McCone a paper that went over the options without adding anything. In March Des reported again on the status of the Artime and Ray autonomous operations, extolling their deniability and using a fresh version of the “disposal” argument—should the United States terminate its support the exiles would probably just go on, especially Ray’s group. The secret warrior anticipated that the groups would be ready to become active in two or three months.

  On April 7 Lyndon Johnson held a White House review. McGeorge Bundy recommended continuing the economic blockade, propaganda, and intelligence gathering, but he wanted discussion of the future of sabotage missions, both the CIA’s and the exiles’ autonomous ones. John McCone referred to FitzGerald’s “integrated” program to argue the marginal value of doing just some things. President Johnson had doubts. McCone insisted the United States still wanted Castro’s commandantes to rise up. “He was deadly serious about all this,” Ray Cline remembered. “It was crucial to have Cuban communism a failure. If we couldn’t destroy it . . . we ought to make it as unattractive as possible by making it a poor show economically for the Cuban people.” FitzGerald spoke of the nonagency exile activities. Robert McNamara reiterated what, for him, had now become a hard conclusion: the covert program had no chance. The real question for McNamara had become what should be Washington’s overall policy toward Cuba.