Blowback - S2 Episode 6 - "Nothing To Lose"

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

Smarting from failure at the Bay of Pigs, the White House sets in motion a new plan to thwart the Cuban Revolution: Operation Mongoose.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Good evening, my fellow citizens. I returned this morning from a week-long trip to Europe, and I want to report to you on that trip in full. It was in every sense an unforgettable experience. I went to Vienna to meet the leader of the Soviet Union, Mr. Khrusha. For two days, we met in sober, intensive conversation. In the 1940s and early 50s, The great danger was from communist armies marching across free borders, which we saw in Korea.

Our nuclear monopoly helped to prevent this in other areas. Now we face a new and different threat. We no longer have a nuclear monopoly. Their missiles, they believe, will hold off our missiles. And their troops can match our troops should we intervene in the military. these so-called wars of liberation. Thus the local conflict they support can

turn in their favor through guerrillas or insurgents or subversion. A small group of disciplined communists could exploit discontent and misery in a country where the average income may be $60 or $70 a year and

seize control, therefore, of an entire country without communist groups ever crossing in the international frontier. This is the communist theory. Mr. Khrusha made one point which I wish to pass on. He said there are many disorders throughout the world, and he should not be blamed for them all.

He is quite right. It is easy to dismiss as communist inspired, every anti-government or anti-American riot, every overthrow of a corrupt regime, or every mass protest against misery and despair, but these are not all of all. But these are not all communists inspired. The communists move into exploits to infiltrate their leadership,

to ride their crest to victory. But the communist did not create the conditions which caused them. It caused them. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Noah Colwyn. I'm Brendan James. And this is episode six, Nothing to Lose. Our last episode was the Bay of Pigs episode. We saw how Richard Bissell and the CIA devised an invasion of Cuba at Playa Giron.

We looked at Cuba's extensive preparations, all of the sloppy American leaks, and the technical failures in the actual execution of the plans. And lastly, we talked about the choices that JFK made. and why he made them, like denying the key second air raid that now lives on in infamy in the minds of CIA spooks and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. This episode, we're going to look at the fallout from the Bay of Pigs. JFK is now surrounded by scowling Gmen, CIA and military brass, not to mention the angry exiles who had been effectively abandoned by the U.S. government after being made some pretty big promises. The Kennedys had also been personally humiliated by Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolutionaries. Despite the Kennedy's,

Kennedy's stick of condescending goodwill toward the third world, which supposedly marked their administration as different from Eisenhower's, they couldn't abide a communist leader who had made fools of them. Yes, and we will now see what comes next, because following the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy told Bobby that, quote, the final chapter on Cuba had not been written. Cuba was, quote, the top priority of the U.S. government. All else is secondary. No time, money, effort, or man power is to be spared. And as Bobby put it in his notes in 1961, when it came to ramping up aggression against the Cuban Revolution, he felt, quote, we have nothing to lose. At this point, this is perhaps the only thing that the Kennedy brothers and the CIA agree on.

In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, John F. Kennedy felt he had been had by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs, that he had inherited a bunch of crusty old fools from Eisenhower. After the Bay of Pigs, during his daily afternoon swim with his aide, Dave Powers, Kennedy whined to powers about how impressive the CIA and Joint Chiefs had made everything seem. Here's a reported account of Kennedy in the pool. quote, Admiral Arley Burke sat right across from me. I've been reading about 30-not Burke. He was terrific.

You should have seen how impressive it was to see the Joint Chiefs of Staff show up with all that fruit salad, the badges on their chest and stuff, and they'd have kernels carrying around pointers and maps. And as for the Central Intelligence Agency, Kennedy was furious. He said he'd have to do something about the, quote, CIA bastards. But he couldn't brood in the pool for long, because JFK had a long and unpleasant list of things that he had to do. For one thing, he had to develop a plan to bring back the 1,189 Bay of Pigs prisoners

and as many bodies of their dead as possible. After having promised to clean up Cuba during his campaign, he's now got to explain to Congress and the American people how he screwed it up. For JFK, there was one bit of good news. The American people were apparently on his side. A Gallup survey showed that over 80% of Americans polled had a favorable view of the president, even after the botched invasion. And while the Americans' poll didn't have as much sympathy for, say, Fidel Castro,

who, as we've seen, has now been demonized by the American government and its media since 1959, significantly, the majority of Gallup respondents also said they did not support an American intervention to overthrow Castro. But all the same, JFK and everyone around him, they agree. He's got to approve a new plan for regime-changing Cuba. without repeating the mistakes of the last one. Mr. Cattlidge, members of the American Society, newspaper editors, ladies and gentlemen, President of a great democracy, such as ours,

and the editors of great newspapers, such as yours, owe a common obligation to the people, an obligation to present the facts to present them with candor and to present them in perspective it is without obligation in mind that I have decided in the last 24 hours to discuss briefly at this time

the recent events in Cuba we mentioned last episode that among the first public appearances after the Bay of Pigs Kennedy called for press censorship during a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors during that address Kennedy made another significant point I have emphasized before that this was a struggle of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator.

While we could not be expected to hide our sympathies, we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces of this country would not intervene in any way. Though you might think that Kennedy would at least be a little bit humble in public at this point, he took the time to outline the conditions under which he might say, send in the Marines to finish the job left unfinished at the Bay of Pigs. But let the record show that our restraint is not inexhaustible. Should it ever appear that the inter-American doctrine of non-interference merely conceals or excuses a policy of non-action if the nations of this hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments

against outside communist penetration, then I warn it clearly underscored that this government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations which are to the security of our nation. That's a pretty spicy declaration. But as we saw with the Bay of Pigs, JFK did have limits on the political costs that he would pay.

To succeed at toppling Castro next time around, some changes would need to be made. The Cuban historian, Jesus Arbolea, author of the book The Cuban Counter-Revolution, summarizes the parameters of what Kennedy's new Cuba strategy will need to be. And here I'm quoting directly from Arbolea who summarized it. One, a climate of political instability in Cuba to contrast with the massive popular support enjoyed by the revolution. Two, international conditions that would allow the Cuban problem to be presented within

the ideological and geopolitical context of the Cold War, depriving it of its nationalist and third-world character. and three, the regionalization of the conflict through the support of the rest of the continent. In other words, siloing Cuba by entrenching U.S. puppet regimes in the surrounding area. Arbalea continues. Kennedy also required that his policy be cloaked in the progressive attributes of U.S. revolutionary heritage, regaining for his country the concept of revolution so vigorous in those times in order to bestow on it a counter-revolutionary meaning. Here's Peter Cornblou, head of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive,

on the momentum in the Kennedy administration and the rest of the U.S. government that rolled on straight after the Bay of Pigs. There are three elements of reaction in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs' debacle that are really worth considering. One is world condemnation, world reaction. And the world reaction is summed up in a rather extraordinary memo from Arthur Schlesinger in May of 1961, saying that he's met with foreign officials, he's traveled through Europe. This is what they think of the stupidity of the United States in wasting all this global capital to invade this itty-bitty little country off their coast this way.

The whole kind of fig leaf of it being a covert operation completely lost. So there was a kind of a world reaction that was extremely negative. The CIA's reaction is to say, we want to keep going with these kinds of covert operations. And literally, they kept going. There really wasn't any halt to the planning of the infiltration and sabotage operations. There was expansion of the groups that they were training. They wanted to present to the exile community in Miami, essentially the idea that this wasn't going to change anything. Kennedy himself wanted to protect his rights.

right flank. So he authorized kind of movement and motion and more planning and more sabotage. But in Cuba, of course, the attack consolidated the revolution, led to defense packs, more equipment coming from Russia. And so the Bay of Pigs really sets off a chain of historic response. John F. Kennedy, you know, held a press conference. He said, there are sobering lessons to be learned. And then he didn't bother to learn any of them. And instead, kind of walked right back into the use of covert operations and aggression against Cuba to kind of seek revenge on Fidel Castro for having embarrassed the big United

States of America under the leadership of John Kennedy. The failure of April's invasion wasn't the only thing that had a Kennedy's sweating at this time. While the White House was picking up the pieces from the Bay of Pigs, the secret CIA mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro was suddenly at risk of exploding into public view. The possible culprit, the FBI. You may remember we mentioned that Sam Giancana, the Chicago Capo working with the CIA to murder Castro, he'd been bragging about his involvement with this plot to the lovely ladies, the pop stars, that were known as the McGuire sisters. Well, several months before the Bay of Pigs and the planned assassination of Castro in that

operation, Giancana was starting to get jealous that Dan Rowan, one half of 60s comedy duo Rowan and Martin, might be putting the moves on Giancana's favorite gal, Phyllis McGuire. The Chicago mobster enlisted his new friends in the CIA to spy on this comedian to make sure that Giancona's girlfriend was not double-dipping. How did this go down? Here's Warren Hinkle and William Turner in their book Deadly Secrets. In an effort to dispel Giancana's anxieties, Bob Mayhew, the Howard Hughes representative who worked as a cutout between the mafia and the CIA, Mayhew had a quiet word with a fellow FBI old boy, Edward Du Bois, who ran a private detective agency in Miami. With $5,000 in CIA cash transmitted by Mayhew,

boys dispatched one of his private eyes to Las Vegas to rifle Rowan's room in the Riviera hotel and tap his phone. But the man was a bit careless, and his tapping equipment was found by a maid. He was arrested by the local sheriff, and a miffed Johnny Raselli had to put up the bail. Quote, it was blowing everything, blowing every kind of cover I had tried to arrange to keep quiet, Raselli complained. Giancana didn't share his consternation. quote, I remember his expression, Raselli said, smoking a cigar, he almost swallowed it laughing about it. But the CIA boys and soon some others in the U.S. government were not in on the joke. As Jack Colhoun reports, quote, the agency worried that the details of the CIA mafia assassination operation

would spill into the public square if the wiretap case went to trial, and no one wanted that to happen. Least of all Bobby Kennedy, who styled himself as a crusader against organized crime. crime. For example, the historian David Kaiser writes, quote, the target of RFK's first and most dramatic anti-racketeering initiative after becoming attorney general was Carlos Marcello of New Orleans. Carlos Marcello ran the mob in New Orleans and Dallas in the early 1960s. He was buddies with Chicago's Sam Giancana and Florida's Santo Traficante, whom we now know we're working directly with the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Marcello also had interests in Cuba.

To this very point, Bobby Kennedy was breathing down Marcella's neck because an informant, a heroin trafficker, had stepped up claiming to have sent Marcello's slot machines, a key part of his New Orleans crime syndicate, to Havana casinos. So a leak about the U.S. government working with mob guys to topple foreign governments, this kind of thing would put a stain on Bobby's legacy

if it were to get out. But this is not all. FBI director, Jay Edgar Hoover, a couple months after the Bay of Pigs, informed RFK that his bureau had discovered the CIA mafia plot and that RFK's Justice Department had been contaminated by it. Calhoun writes, quote, Kennedy had been further drawn into the CIA Mafia collaboration in June when his aides met with mafia gambler Norman Rothman to assess a possible quid pro quo.

So now, RFK's just disguise have met with a mafioso, connected with anti-Castro activities. You'll remember this guy Norman Rothman. He was part of the campaign against the revolution favored by mafia guys like Meyer Lansky and Santo Traficante. He had run guns, sold explosives, and organized paramilitaries among the counter-revolutionaries. Rothman by now had been sentenced to five years in prison for gun-running activities in Ohio, but he had posted a $50,000 bond while on appeal. And here I'm going to read from Calhoun. Rothman was invited to a meeting in Deputy Attorney General Byron White's office with the Attorney General Kennedy's Aides. An unnamed CIA officer from the Western Hemisphere Division was also present to evaluate Rothman's bona fides.

According to a CIA memorandum, Rothman offered to make assets available to the United States, quote, in return for the dropping of federal charges against him. Rothman claimed that he had, quote, an operational base in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, and quote, personnel and capabilities to carry out sabotage raids inside Cuba. He also had a basic plan for assassinating Castro in a napalm attack as he spoke at a mass rally in Havana. Now, the CIA handler present didn't think much of Rothman, and it was unlikely that this was going to go very far. But combined with the wiretap case that threatened to send all of this public and with his brother already in a tight spot, Bobby Kennedy, the president's attorney general, chief advisor, and soon to be,

point man on Cuba, was now in, as Cahom puts it, a compromised position. The supposed post-mortem or autopsy of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion drawn up by the U.S. government is known as the Taylor Review, named after its head, one General Maxwell Taylor. Taylor's career in the 1960s would include urging intervention in Cuba, and later, urging greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam. To begin with, the report that General Taylor delivered to JFK in June of 1961 was not really a post-mortem of the Bay of Pigs. Sure, it was an examination of the things that went wrong, but the primary purpose of the Taylor report was to explain why the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. could never live side by side. The group that

assembled the report included Taylor, RFK, who was designated by JFK as his primary deputy in all things Cuba, Alan Dulles and Admiral Arley Burke. Yeah, this is the first time that Alan Dulles will be put on a commission, if you like, that he probably shouldn't have been a part of. Or arguably another commission that he is overseeing, reviewing the screw-ups of an operation that Alan Dulles approved of. Yeah. Although a heated Bobby Kennedy was the lead questioner throughout the Taylor Review,

it's worth stressing that the Taylor Report was not a serious review of the situation. For example, all of those assassination plots that were so, critical to victory at the Bay of Pigs. It's as if everybody questioned by the Taylor report, including the questioniners themselves, just had one giant case of amnesia. Taylor later denied ever knowing about Sam Giancana and Johnny Raselli and Robert Mayhew and their contacts with the CIA, and he certainly never asked Bissell or anybody else about plans to kill Castro that appear to have been critical to the Bay of Pigs invasion's success. There's a different report that we'll discuss in a bit that has more details on how blame was assigned within the CIA.

But the key thing about General Taylor's review was that he, with RFK, breathing down his neck, outlined a plan for what needed to happen next. From the notes of one Kennedy administration official during a National Security Council meeting on April 22, 1961, as the invasion ships were practically still smoldering in Cuba, here's what the scene in the White House looked like. Again, Bobby Kennedy was present and took the lead, as he had at the cabinet meeting two days earlier, slamming into anyone who suggested that we go slowly and try to move calmly and not repeat previous mistakes. What Taylor and RFK argued for was a new program. This new program would need to unify the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and White House resources. Yes, especially that last part.

The Kennedys wanted this to have explicitly executive branch oversight. Right. You know, I would say that it was to be a team effort with Bobby Kennedy being the first among equal, across all the three-letter agencies in Washington devoted to rewinding the Cuban Revolution. As we mentioned last time, the USSR was quick to condemn the Bay of Pigs' invasion with Nikita Kruchev warning JFK that if U.S. forces invaded Cuba,

if perhaps the operation at Plague Iran had gone as far as the CIA boys wanted, the Soviet Union would back Castro up. This whole thing, in fact, put a real damper on an upcoming summit in June planned in Vienna between the U.S. and the USSR, which until now had been a big opportunity for John Kennedy to earn some international prestige. For several days after the Bay of Pigs fallout, JFK waffled on whether to back out entirely, but ultimately he decided that would make him look weak and agreed to put on a face and meet Khrushchev in Vienna.

JFK studied the transcripts of Khrushchev's brief meetings with Eisenhower years before. He concluded Khrushchev was, as Timothy Naftali puts it, but also clever and quick on his feet. The Americans decided what they would go for in Vienna was a nuclear test ban treaty, if only because they had no interest in really working on any other issue, especially the issue of Berlin. What was on Khrushchev's agenda? Well, of course, it was the issue of Berlin. At this time, Berlin was the hotspot in the world that seemed most likely to bring the two superpowers to a nuclear confrontation. This is why it demanded such attention from Khrushchev and why it majorly spooked Kennedy.

Ever since the end of World War II and the dismemberment of the Third Reich, Germany had been partitioned into West Germany, allied with the capitalist bloc, and East Germany allied with the socialist bloc, except one half of Berlin, which was well and truly deep into the territory of East Germany. West Berlin, quite unreasonably to the Soviets, existed as a kind of NATO sub-capital within East Germany's borders. The Soviets had long wanted the issue of Berlin resolved on both economic and security grounds. Not unlike what we've seen in Cuba, thousands of middle-class East Germans were leaving the country via West Berlin each year,

draining the German Democratic Republic of its reserve of white-collar professional workers. Meanwhile, West Germany had for years now been re-arming under its NATO membership, with recent noises even hinting that it would join the nuclear club. Khrushchev's goal to counteract all this was to produce a peace, treaty that the West would sign with East Germany, leaving the East Germans to then decide the status of Berlin on their own, since it lay in, well, East Germany. He'd been pushing this for several years, and with a new American president, a little bit bruised up by the Bay of Pigs, and considered a, quote, complete pragmatist by the Soviet Presidium, Khrushchev decided to push on Berlin again

and hard. But there was something else on Khrushchev's mind. Jupiter missiles. The American nuclear arms stationed in Turkey that were pointed directly at the Soviet Union. These were what you might call first strike-style weapons, and although there were some in the American camp that pointed out their vulnerable design, to the Soviet Union, this did not make them any less nuclear, nor any less pointed at the Soviet Union. In fact, there was another set stationed in Italy as well. All defensive, of course, according to the United States. The Soviets had no equal setup against the U.S. stationed anywhere in the world, and Khrushchev was very interested in prodding Kennedy to answer why that was. So in the run-up to Vienna, managing expectations perhaps, the White House publicly maintained that this summit was not about, quote, negotiating or reaching agreement on the major international problems.

But privately, JFK had Bobby open up a back channel with a senior Soviet intelligence officer Georgi Bolshekhov. One thing Bobby told Bolshekoff, ahead of these talks in Vienna, was that Cuba was a, quote, dead issue. For the CIA, the White House, really the whole cause of the Cuban counter-revolution, the six months or so after the Bay of Pigs, from the spring until the fall of 1961, it was primarily a period of sorting things out. Now, you may recall that last episode, we said goodbye to CIA golden boy, Richard Bissell. Although he didn't officially leave the agency until February 1962, his time as deputy director of planning was over. The Republican businessman John McCone, whom Kennedy brought in to replace Alan Dulles in the fall of 1961, held a goodbye party for Richard Bissell at his home in Washington, D.C. His replacement at the CIA was future agency director, God King of the CIA's

shadows, Richard Helms, who was also Bissell's fiercest bureaucratic rival. After all, Helms had lost out on the deputy director for planning job to Bissell in 1958. The two guys had never gotten along. Bissell was the loquacious U-2 spy plane nerd who had taught economics at Yale, and Richard Helms preferred the cloak and dagger stuff like running agents. The journalist Thomas Powers wrote a book about Helms in 1979

called The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Here's how Powers describes the handoff from Bissell to Helms and what lay in store for America's clandestine Cuba program. The United States was in an interventionist. mood after the Second World War, and no intelligence officer, Richard Helms included, could have lasted long or risen high with a reputation for obstruction. The Kennedys wanted Castro out of there, and when the time came, Helms tried just as hard to give them what they wanted as Bissell had before him. But Helms and Bissell differed very greatly on how to go about it. To begin

with, they had differing standards of secrecy. When Helms said secret, he meant secret. in the words of Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Inspector General of the CIA, secret from inception to eternity. Bissell meant secret from the New York Times, at least until the operation was successfully completed. And which was a standard, you know, by Bissell's own standard, he had failed miserably at with the Bay of Pigs. The Bay of Pigs from Helms' point of view was a disaster

long before Brigade 2,506 was ever anywhere near the beaches. Quote, do you realize there isn't one piece of paper in this agency associating Dick Helms with the Bay of Pigs, a CIA deputy director once said to a colleague. A military invasion of Cuba covertly sponsored by the CIA, it just didn't make sense to Helms. Fortunately for Helms, Bissell didn't like him. When Bissell offered Helms a senior job under him,

he actually got Alan Dulles to make Helms the offer in Bissell's stead. When Bissell fell on his sword after the invasion, lots of people around the CIA noticed the smooth office politicker who took his job. When the Vienna conference opened on June 3rd in the summer of 61, Nikita Khrushchev went on the offensive. On day one, he asked Kennedy, what was the deal with these Jupiter missiles that NATO had placed on the Soviet Union's doorstep in Turkey and Italy?

He then went on to make a very important analogy, drawing here from Martin Sherwin. Quote, Khrushchev linked the Turkey missile deployment to Cuba. How was a country of 6 million people, Cuba, a threat to the United States, he asked Kennedy. You stated that you are, quote, free to act, he scolded. Then what should the USSR do? The invasion of Cuba had set a precedent, he said,

and he asked what Kennedy would think if the USSR invaded Turkey in order to eliminate the threat that the deployment of American military equipment had created. The second day, Khrushcheb opened fire with the subject of Berlin, asking that they work to finally remove the splinter of West Berlin from the socialist bloc. Here's Sherwin again. Kennedy, however, intended to cling to the status quo, a divided Germany with the Federal Republic, that's West Germany, re-armed, and a NATO participant. Any alternative acceptable to Khrushchev would cause difficulties with the British, French, and, of course, the West Germans. He assured the premier that the United States would, quote,

live up to its commitments to West Berlin, quote, and its rights there. It was a matter of American security. Khrushchev, shocking Kennedy, said that, well, no force would prevent the USSR from signing a peace treaty. And any violation of the German Democratic Republic's rights, quote, would be regarded by the Soviet Union as open aggression with all the consequences that would ensue. That one really spooked the Americans. Next, Kennedy, now perhaps anticipating increasing tension not only over Cuba but everywhere the U.S. was propping up the status quo, attempted to cool Khrushchev's support for anti-colonial wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Khrushchev reportedly said,

Although the Soviet Union does not participate directly, it supports such wars. The president believes when people rise up against tyrants, that is the result of Moscow's activities. That is not so. Failure by the United States to understand this generates danger. And Khrushchev, of course, wrought up Cuba. quote, a mere handful of people headed by Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime because of its oppressive nature. During Castro's fight against Batista, U.S. capitalist circles supported Batista, and this is why the anger of the Cuban people turned against the United States.

And he delivered the somewhat famous remark, Castro is not a communist, but U.S. policy can make him one. When Kennedy got back to Washington from Vienna, he said that the conference was, quote, the worst thing in my life. He told a New York Times columnist, quote, we have a problem making our power credible and said that Vietnam seemed to be the best

place for America to correct that. But the Kennedy administration was hardly finished with Cuba. Aside from Maxwell Taylor's review, the other significant post-mortem of the Bay of Pigs was the internal CIA audit conducted by the agency's inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick. This

report was kept secret for nearly 40 years because it was considered so damaging to the agency's reputation. It was kept in a safe, along with the agency's other reported, quote-unquote, family jewels. Kirkpatrick's report's conclusion was that Richard Bissell had been grossly incompetent, and although he didn't say it quite so clearly, Alan Dulles had fucked up big time as well. The two men should have called off the operation, having had to have known that there was CIA intelligence indicating no uprising on the island was possible by April 1961, and the two men. that the security of the operation had been deeply compromised. Now, this might seem crazy, but Richard Bissell was actually still around at the agency for the rest of

1961, and he wasn't having a good time. By the early fall of 1961, Bissell was, quote, chewed out in the cabinet room of the White House by both the president and the attorney general for, as he put it, sitting on his ass and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime, end quote. When asked by Senate questioners, if this entailed assassination, Bissell said no. And further, according to the Church Committee report, quote, Bissell also said there was in fact no assassination activity between the pre-Bay of Pigs Raselli operation and his departure from the agency in February 1962. This was not true. There were several highly evolved assassination plots

that were set in motion by the summer of 1961, which all failed. One CIA-supported plot involved assassinating Yuri Gargarin, the first cosmonaut in space, during a visit of his in Havana, as well as trying to create some sort of incident near Guantanamo, a la the USS Maine, to start a war. One of these plots, CIA codename Amblood. If you get a CIA cryptonym like that, that means that you're considered like a designated asset. It's like, you know, a higher ranking than, you know, a mere, quote-unquote, cooperating person or something. And if the name is Amblood, it also means you're involved in something shady. Yeah. And Amblood involved a Cuban economist who was smuggled back into Cuba after CIA

training in Florida and who coordinated with Ecuadorian military intelligence in Quito to communicate back to the CIA. So Amblood and his ring were broken up and the Cuban government revealed their plan to shoot bazookas at Fidel Castro during a speech in Havana. And the leader of the ring was executed. By now, in the fall of 1961, as the foiled Amblood plot shows the job of either taking out Castro personally or unsettling his government, it just isn't getting done. Now there are some people who are very much involved in the Bay of Pigs whom we haven't mentioned really yet this episode.

And those are the Cuban exiles, the people whom the American government had just very recently been claiming were the independent forces hoping to take their country back merely with a little push from the U.S. The brigadistas who were captured were unhappy, as they would be stuck in Cuba for 20 months, while the Castro and Kennedy governments negotiated, a process that we'll get into later.

The brigadistas who weren't captured were also pissed, as it became clear their ill-equipped invasion force never had a chance, and it was unclear what would happen to their cause next. Eddie Ferrer, who led the Exile Air Force, a few days after he got back, he was told to go to the Frente office in Miami, the hub of the political network of Cuban exiles in Miami, where he received $300 in cash,

and a month after that, he got an unsubed, signed letter with no return address advising him, as Peter Wyden puts it, quote, that he was entitled to no further compensation. With the key exile leaders, the ones with military training and CIA ties out of commission, imprisoned in Cuba for the time being, the Cuban exiles were going to need to put a pause on their most fervent activity while the people guiding the action in Washington figured things out. Any dreams you have or plans or hopes for your future, I think you're going to have to put that on hold. But it was just that, a pause,

because while at an April 19th meeting with the president, you could see the Cuban exile leaders ashen faced and silent. Two weeks later, on May 4th, 1961, Jose Miro Cardona, the president of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the puppet group set up by the CIA, came out of the White House, feeling pretty good. Kennedy had promised to continue the effort to conquer back Cuba. Tumbling down

Last season, we mentioned that sometimes there's a man. Well, once again, there is a man. Edward Lansdale, now Brigadier General, but often referred to by the rank from his early days, Colonel Lansdale. He had conducted operations in Southeast Asia with his, quote, liberal theory of counterinsurgency and had since inspired characters in novels such as the Quiet American,

and the ugly American. In Washington, Lansdale was compared more frequently to a non-American, James Bond, including by JFK himself. The sensitive and suave face of American Empire, he was credited as the brainiac behind suppressing the Huck rebellion in the Philippines years earlier, and for his counterinsurgency work in Vietnam as well. It was a career that earned him a national security medal. It did not earn him, however, much respect from his colleagues at the CIA. Lansdale had basically worked directly for Alan Dulles, quote, outside the CIA chain of command. This earned him a sort of teacher's pet status and special enmity from other agents and officers. Richard Helms' assistant called Lansdale a cook, wild man, just plain crazy.

He was hated within the agency. But whatever you wanted to call him, Lansdale was sponsored by the Kennedys and was now in charge of the new phase of war against Cuba, Operation Mungoose. The Council of Elders that oversaw this new group were known as the SGA, special group augmented. That augmented meant that the old Eisenhower guys Kennedy inherited would make room for Bobby Kennedy, the head of the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And in November of 1961, with the efforts against Castro, since the Bay of Pigs going nowhere, JFK and Bobby took Taylor's recommendations and put the SGA in charge of, quote, Operation

Mungus, the new nerve center for all things, anti-Castro. Bobby's temper at these meetings was legendary. One aide reported that he threatened, quote, I'll tell my big brother on you if someone didn't do what he wanted. He knew that Jack wanted Castro gone in a new government in Cuba, and he was going to do whatever it took to make that happen. Now, in addition to Edward Lansdale, we have some new players in this new phase. There's a new CIA director, one-time Republican businessman John McCone.

He will strip Richard Bissell come December, 1961, of all the Cuba duties, and pass them to Bissell's replacement as director of planning, the aforementioned phantom menace, Richard Helms. Helms, in turn, will supervise the CIA's point man on most things Cuba, William Harvey. Harvey is a pretty infamous character all on his own. He was the portrait of a stout, cynical, alcohol-soaked CIA agent who was swilling back drinks all the time and apparently carried a loaded gun wherever he went. Having already been running the covert assassination program ZR rifle, which included the attempts on Castro's life,

Harvey will now also take over Task Force W, the CIA's delegation to Mongoose. But it was the man running the show who would come under the most pressure. from Bobby. And that was, of course, the master counter-revolutionary himself, Edward Lansdale. The initial plan that Lansdale put forward in December 61 speaks to how big Mungoose would swell. It outlined the contributions to the Cuba program by institution, including the CIA, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the U.S. Information Agency, and the State Department. The size of Mungoos quickly became apparent to people throughout the CIA. Former CIA official Joseph B. Smith wrote in his memoirs that the budget for

anti-Castro operations was multiplied from $10 million to $100 million at this time, and Cuban operations specialists were embedded in embassies and CIA stations around the world. Now, the CIA station in Miami had become the agency's largest outpost outside of Washington, and its Mungoose operational name was Jam Wave, or Jam Wave, which we'll just call for short. It would quickly become, as the historian and journalist Thomas Powers writes, quote, the single largest clandestine program within the CIA. Yeah, that's about 500 CIA staff and as many as 5,000 personnel operating elsewhere. Plus, the CIA's Secret Navy was the largest in the area. The CIA got to work on training Cuban exiles on American soil near Palm Beach, Florida,

including, according to FBI reports, exile groups financially connected to mafia gamblers, Batisteanos, and others willing to support. Longoos' Commando raids on Cuba. Gangsterismo is back, and it is bigger than ever. They set up dozens of dummy corporations, such as, quote, Caribbean research and marketing, or just switched out the names of shell employers that had been used prior in the Bay of Pigs. The two CIA Americans who had been first to hit the beaches at the Bay of Pigs, these guys were the registered agents under Florida law with the commando boats kept in the

Miami Marina. Now, the CIA was technically disallowed from operating on U.S. soil, so here it is. is illegally transporting arms and explosives all over Florida while overseeing raids and assassination plots that were blatantly illegal under international law. But the CIA and Mungoos had the assistance of local institutions like the press, you know, the Miami Herald or the smaller Miami Times. And these news organizations were fed, quote, handouts by CIA agents, you know, old CIA officials or agents like Howard Hunt. Or, for example, Frank Sturgis, aka Frank Fiorini. Now, Frank Sturgis, who had been the mob guy who had flown to Cuba in 1959 under CIA

supervision, well, he was now back at it, except this time he was flying planes along the Cuban coast for $600 a pop, trying to see if he could trigger surface-to-air missile defense systems. Those two CIA guys we mentioned before who had been at the Bay of Pigs and were now in Miami, their names were Rip Robertson and Grayston Lynch, and they were organizing these commando units in Florida with the counter-revolutionary exiles. Rip once offered a guy a reward if he, quote, returned with the ear of a Cuban. When this exile came back from one of their missions with two ears,

Robertson gave him $100. You ever listen to Kay Billy's Supersounds in the 70s? Lansdale was always pressuring different departments of the U.S. government to come up with their own mongoose plans. You had the CIA, you had the State Department, and so forth. The Joint Chiefs, America's top military brass, At one point came up with a contingency plan called Operation Northwoods. And the heart of this plan essentially proposed fabricating aggression from Cuba in order to justify a U.S. military invasion of the island.

Among these ideas, quote, we could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Elsewhere, quote, it is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner and route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama, or Venezuela. There were plans of developing a terror campaign and blaming it on Cuba, quote, we could develop a communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area in other Florida cities and even in Washington. This specific report was officially rebuffed. Of course, the United States had pursued policies like this before and would do so later, for example, Operation Gladio in Europe.

In early February, a memo sent to General Edward Lansdale details, quote, possible actions to provoke, harass, or disrupt Cuba. It proposes such operations as Operation Smasher to disrupt Disable Military and Commercial Communication Facilities in Cuba. Operation Breakup to clandestinely introduce corrosive materials to cause aircraft, vehicle, or boat accidents. Operation Dirty Trick. to provide irrevocable proof that, should John Glenn's Mercury-manned orbit to space fail,

the fault lies with the communists in Cuba. This is to be accomplished by manufacturing various pieces of evidence, which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans. And Operation Bingo. To create an incident which has the appearance of an attack on U.S. facilities in Cuba, thus providing an excuse for use of U.S. military might to over-s. throw the current government of Cuba. Operation Mungus was formed around the concept of a multi-level, multi-agency,

multi-operational effort that covered covert operations, sabotage, economic pressures through blockades and through international isolation, diplomatic pressures where the State Department went around the world, trying to get other countries to cut off any type of trade, aid, contact with Cuba, and vast propaganda efforts to cast Cuba and the revolution in the worst possible light, all of which was supposed to lead to economic deprivation on the island, anger among the Cuban people, and a kind of national insurrection against Castor that then the United States would support through an overt invasion. Edward Lansdale, who was appointed to run Operation Mongoose, had this six-phase plan that ended with another U.S.

invasion, not a covert paramilitary invasion led by the CIA, but an overt Pentagon-led invasion. And when was that invasion scheduled for in his initial conception? Well, it was scheduled. Edward Lansdale and his original planning scheduled the invasion for the fall of 1962 for the midterm elections. We spoke a bit about Mong-Goose with Rafael Hernandez, editor of the Cuban Magazine. Temas, but the phases of Mungoos, where first you were supposed to have groups taking over some territory, causing some terror, then calling themselves an alternative government, then inviting the U.S. to invade the island.

In the center of Cuba, 2000, 2,000 counter-revolutionary guerrillas were supported by the United States, by the CIA, by the very powerful, underground, never. work. The idea was that a group of counter-revolutionary guerrillas might control a certain area and they create terror

in that area. So, terror among peasants who live in those mountains. Second step control that area since they have a permanent control of a certain territory in the mountains. They could bring from outside

a provisional government. a civilian government. And once they have a civilian government in one of those free territories, free of communism, once they were able to do that, the next step would be that this new government

called for a US intervention. So this was Operation Mongo so far, a massive coordinated plan for hit and run raids, commando attacks, espionage, and installing cells into Cuba that would be operational in July of the next year, who would gather intelligence

to pass back to the U.S. while working to create the conditions for unrest and revolt inside of Cuba. Richard Helms, Master of Secrecy, kept himself in the shadows while William Harvey ran things day to day on the ground. At the very top of all this sat Edward Lansdale fielding angry calls on a regular basis from Bobby Kennedy. One program that Lansdale would highlight as still in the quote, planning stages, was the State Department's idea for, quote, economic warfare. As Lansdale put it, squeezing Cuba economically was a critical key to our political action project. Although Operation Mungoose is best remembered as a covert action program, the most important and longest lasting impact of it didn't involve guns or espionage. In January of 1962, Secretary of State

Dean Rusk successfully got the OAS to pass a resolution expelling Cuba on the grounds that its revolutionary government was incompatible with the inter-American system. This was a maneuver right out of the Mongo's playbook. The basis for the expulsion were documents forged by the CIA and leaked in a staged defection by a Cuban diplomat in Argentina. The deciding vote to kick Cuba out of the OAS was Hades, and it was secured by the U.S. with a multi-million dollar promise to build an airport in Porta-Prince that could finally accommodate jet engines. Now, JFK followed up the OAS expulsion by ratcheting up more economic pressure

with new sanctions that would cut off in estimated $35 million in Cuban exports to the U.S. Of course, JFK had to find a way around these sanctions for his own personal benefit. There's a famous story about how he dispatched his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to, in the hours before the blockade was to go into effect, to do everything he could to get him

as many Cuban cigars as possible. Thousands of Cuba's. Yes, like literally thousands. JFK was able to get his cigars. This kind of economic sabotage would continue well beyond the Kennedy administration. With Operation Mongoos, the United States' efforts to overthrow the Cuban Revolution turned dark and murderous and sustained. Under the rubric of Operation Mongoos, the CIA station in Miami becomes the biggest CI station in the world. world with more than 2,000 employees and hundreds of properties and boats and cars and to create an infrastructure to sustain a protracted effort to destroy the Cuban economy,

to undermine the Cuban Revolution, and create conditions in which Fidel Castro can be overthrown. So Mungo deserves the attention that is. has gotten in history. My organization of the National Security Archive found a storage list. I obtained a storage list of Mongoose documents that literally said what file boxes they were in and what bin they were in and what part of the State Department they were being kept in. And we filed a Free Information Act request and then a lawsuit for those documents and eventually got almost all of them declassified.

One of the ones the CIA wanted to keep secret until the judge ruled that it had to be released was a propaganda operation that the CIA claimed in the late 1990s was still a viable type of operation and therefore had to be kept secret. And this operation involved renting a freighter, positioning it off the coast of Cuba, putting a bunch of chachas, little propaganda, leaflets, cards, pairs of nylons in baskets that were on little helium balloons. And when the winds would be correct, lofting these balloons into the air, having them drift over Cuba, and then the timer on the basket under the balloon would go off and the basket would drop and scatter on the heads of everybody below all these little propaganda chachas and gifts and things that made Castro look bad. And this is an example of the, you know, the costly and yet specious and almost ludicrous types of operations that the CIA was counting on at the time

and then decided were so valuable that they had to be kept secret more than 20 years later. We go now to a strange scene. November 1961, as Mongoose is lifting off the ground, President Kennedy sits in his rocking chair in the Oval Office, speaking to the New York Times reporter, Tad Schultz. Schultz, whom we've mentioned before, was seen as one of the foremost American journalist chronicling Cuba, with access to Fidel Castro and many other officials, both Cuban and American. After discussing various issues, including whether Castro was serious about normalizing relations with the U.S., Kennedy leaned in. Quote, what would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated, he asked.

Schultz replied he was against assassinations in general. Kennedy leaned back. He said he agreed with Schultz, but that people around him were insisting that he authorized an assassination of Castro. Kennedy advisor and Cuba consigliary Richard Goodwin, who was also in the room, recalls that as the reporter walked out,

Kennedy turned to him and said, we can't get into that. We'd all be targets. But something about this rings odd. The U.S. had engaged in assassinations for decades, including attempts on Castro, as both of these men knew. Goodwin, for what it's worth, thought perhaps Kennedy was using Schultz. Quote, the only explanation is he didn't want Tad to think he was involved, that is, in any future Castro assassination.

Goodwin also suspected Kennedy was recruiting Schultz as a propaganda tool for Operation Mungus. Schultz, in the tradition of the New York Times, was behind his professional objective veneer, a partisan of Cuban exile Manuel Ray. Ray, who styled himself a progressive anti-communist, also happened to be the Kennedy's favorite counter-revolutionary in the mix. And Schultz had once lobbied for Ray at the White House backing his, quote, War of Liberation in Cuba. At the same time, though, the CIA was deeply suspicious of the reporter, suspecting him of communist connections, and made a note when Schultz was transferred to the Times-D.C. Bureau. In any case, this meeting with Schultz fits a pattern, as Jack Holhorn puts it, of steps taken by the

Kennedy brothers related to Castro's assassination. One month later, Bobby Kennedy quashed the Giancana wiretap case in Las Vegas, which had threatened to expose the CIA Mafia assassination job. That same day, John Kennedy ordered the State Department to cook up a plan in case of the event of a Castro assassination. The fact was, despite Edward Lansdale's dreamy portraits of a popular uprising waiting to be unleashed in Cuba, the CIA estimated that, quote, the great bulk of the population still accepts the revolution, and substantial numbers still support it with enthusiasm. Despite the mammoth reach that Operation Mungoose would have and the damage it would bring to Cuba's economy and security, the so-called contingency plan to murder Castro was considered

by the realists to still be the best shot at destabilizing the revolution. Among this crowd was Mortini-guzzling CIA-hand William Harvey. Aware of how many previous plots had failed, Harvey was doing some homework in the fall of 1961. He had met with MI-5 to learn how the British secret police attempted assassinations in places like Cyprus and Egypt. Harvey wanted to learn about an MI-5 plan to assassinate Egyptian leader Nassar, developed but not carried out during the Suez crisis in 1956. His British colleague wrote, quote, nerve gas obviously presented the best possibility. The London station had an agent with limited access to one of Nassar's headquarters.

Their plan was to place canisters of nerve gas inside the ventilation system. But at heart, Harvey was a minimalist. He wanted a project that was compact and nimble. The one sure way to do it, he once said, was simply appoint a single senior officer to do everything to run the operation. kill the person, bury the body, and tell no one. Ultimately, according again to the head of CIA estimates, even a successful assassination of Fidel or some other Cuban leader,

very possibly, quote, would not be fatal to the revolution. But this would not stop Harvey from scheduling a meeting with Johnny Raselli. Already detecting the ripples from the newborn mongoose in fall, of 61, and having withstood yet another year, the year of education, no less, facing sabotage and threat of murder from the United States, Fidel Castro turned to the USSR once again for more military support, which he hadn't gotten since the Bay of Pigs invasion. By mid-September and 61, they were there, and 40% of the bill was waived off for the Cubans, paid through one of the Soviets' trademark barter loans. Now, at the end of the year, Castro was openly

identifying as Marxist Leninist, and, quote, I shall be till the end of my life. This, far from pleasing some international conspiracy in Moscow, in fact, had some in the Soviet government rather nervous. An open communist administration in Cuba would only attract more attention now from the United States. Indeed, an American national intelligence estimate would soon note, quote, the past year has witnessed increasing open identification of the Castro regime with communism and the Soviet bloc. 40% of farmland is state-owned, 90% of GDP value is from state enterprise. Meanwhile, in Washington, John Kennedy was increasingly being presented with exactly what Cuba and the Soviets feared.

The option of using U.S. military power against Havana. It is now 1962. February. As workers across Cuba carry out a nationwide campaign of vaccination against polio, Khrushchev's son-in-law visits the U.S. and ends up scoring a chat with JFK, who would use him, of course, to send a message to Khrushchev himself. Here is what Kennedy chooses to say. If I run for re-election, and the Cuban question remains as it is,

then Cuba will be the main problem of the campaign, and we will have to do something. This was for Khrushchev, enough said. He called for an immediate reassessment of Cuban security and sent the remainder of the defense weaponry the USSR had promised following the Bay of Pigs. The USSR would also excuse all Cuban debt and send over experts on irrigation and land reform. In late February, in a memo that remains partially redacted to this day, Lansdale himself outlines the phases of mongoose, which, quote, aims for a revolt that can take place in Cuba

by October 1962. March, Soviet military intelligence provides Khrushchev with what it considered, quote, reliable evidence that the Pentagon had made serious preparations for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. April, the U.S. begins military exercises to test their Cuban operational plans in the Caribbean. Several exercises involving tens of thousands of men simulate an invasion of Cuba, as well as air and naval maneuvers. During one of these drills, John Kennedy joins our old friend from season one, the Shah of

Iran, to observe one of the largest military exercises ever conducted in the Caribbean. May, the U.S. executes another full-scale military exercise simulating an invasion of Cuba, codename Whiplash. In late May, the CIA-sponsored exile group Alpha 66 carries out an assault on a Cuban patrol boat, killing three and wounding five. The Soviets who had been picking up intel on the scope and scale of mongoose, and the Cubans who were witnessing it firsthand, saw in all of this a very simple conclusion. The United States was preparing to invade Cuba within several months to finish what it had failed to do the year before. The question was not whether the United States was driving toward war.

The question was, what would be done about it? Nikita Khrushchev believed he had an answer. You know, I'm going to be. I'm the B. I'm

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Thank you.