Flawed Patriot Page 18

  Tom Parrott, secretary of Bobby Kennedy’s SGA, talked to David Martin for Wilderness of Mirrors: “‘Nobody knew exactly what they wanted to do…. What was our policy toward Cuba? Well, our policy toward Cuba was to keep the pot simmering. Over and over the phrase was used, ‘Keep the pot simmering.’”

  Harvey resisted the brass. He griped that the demand for detail was “excruciating.” Kennedy’s lieutenants, in turn, found Harvey to be an appalling spectacle, especially after lunch. JFK’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, told Parrott, “Your Mr. Harvey does not inspire great confidence.”

  Martin continues, “The SGA even wanted to know what rations the raiders would carry. ‘It was almost as if Bill and the rest of us were accused of trying to sucker them into another Bay of Pigs,’ Harvey’s paramilitary aide said. ‘It was an insult to our professionals.’ Sam Halpern added, ‘and it was a useless exercise. What difference did it make if they were carrying a .38 or a .45?’

  “Exasperated, Harvey complained to McCone. ‘To permit requisite flexibility and professionalism for a maximum operational effort against Cuba, the tight controls exercised by the Special Group and the present, time-consuming coordination and briefing procedures should, if at all possible, be made less restrictive and less stultifying,’” he wrote in typically longwinded fashion.24

  It’s not hard to picture Harvey, sitting at a polished conference table in which he yearned to carve his initials, defensively offensive as senior members of the government pressed him for details and explanations they had no need to know. Harvey would rebel internally, rumble, then explode in a fury of thin-lipped frustration or retreat into obfuscating governmentese.

  Bill probably respected some of the SGA members, like General Taylor, as men of accomplishment and integrity. Others, like Lansdale, he scorned, too openly. And for Bobby Kennedy, he had nothing but loathing because the attorney general was, in Bill’s eyes, an undisciplined opportunist who would sacrifice any principle, as well as security and the lives of people he did not know, to score brownie points of personal revenge against Castro.

  For a while, the episodes were funny to Harvey’s staffers in the Langley basement. There was Bill, the dragon slayer, out tilting at windmills. But gradually, people like Sam Halpern realized that Bill was increasingly, and sadly, beginning to run out of control.

  BOOM AND BANG

  The cynical war cry in the Langley basement was (taken from a Kennedy demand) “boom and bang.” That was what Bobby Kennedy wanted, and that was what Ed Lansdale was determined to give him. Support for deposing Fidel Castro came, of course, from the noisy enthusiasts in Miami’s Cuban exile community. Every CIA officer who dealt with the exiles noted that they hatched assassination plots every other day, yet the Cubans were notoriously unable to keep secrets. And they seemed to have that open line to the attorney general’s office.

  By October 14, 1962, as the missile crisis loomed, Bobby was urging “massive activity” against Castro, a broad program of sabotage that would hit the Soviet military presence in Cuba, by now estimated to include, according to Cecil Currey’s biography of Lansdale, “20,000 Soviet military, 1,300 field artillery pieces, 700 anti-aircraft guns, 3,250 tanks, 150 jets—all poised and waiting. U-2 spy planes then confirmed that the Soviets were constructing some half dozen launch sites for the surface-to-surface intermediate-range missiles.”25

  Shackley’s people at JMWAVE estimated forty-four thousand to forty-five thousand Soviet troops on the island. The actual number was forty-two thousand. Harvey’s appointment to head Cuban operations had provoked the Soviets to reinforce their presence on Castro’s island.

  The days and nights in the CIA basement were grueling. Halpern whips out a battered Hallmark wallet calendar for the year 1962, which he still carries.

  Bill didn’t leave the office much after October 15. He was working flat out. We were all dead on our feet. No one ever told us we couldn’t go home. Pretty much everyone just stayed.

  Whether you were making any sense or not, only someone else could tell…. With Bill Harvey, you just stayed there and worked until he sent you home. You might have fought him because he was still there, but he just said, “Out!” and you had to go.

  October 20 was a Saturday. Bill threw me out of the office. I had been working continually for seventy-two hours … no shower. I hadn’t shaved. Bill said, “You’re out on your feet. Go home, get some sleep. I’ll call you when I need you.” He even took my badge, so I couldn’t get back into the building without him escorting me.

  My phone rang at noon on Sunday. I had slept straight through. “You’re my last fresh troops,” he said. So I got up, shaved, and went back in.

  We at the working level knew on the fifteenth [about the IRBMs], when we got the photos from the photo interpretation people. JFK knew on October 16. Our crisis lasted from then until the twenty-second.

  If it had continued much longer after October 22, all of us would have really been out on our feet.

  The official end of the Cuban Missile Crisis was on Sunday, October 28.

  How close did we come to nuclear war?

  I was very concerned in the first few days. But then, in the days right after, we were getting NSA material which told us there was no Soviet military build-up. They didn’t call up their reserve classes of conscripts for the armed forces … there was no sudden change in orders or disposition for railroad box cars … or supply ships … or aircraft…. The Russian forces in Germany went on a higher state of alert…. But that was the only thing. The Russians weren’t getting ready to fight a war!

  The Kennedys ordered Defcon 2. SAC [Strategic Air Command] was in the air, communicating in the clear [i.e., basically telling the Soviets we were prepared to bomb Russia if necessary]. In our office, we were wondering what the hell was going on! Of course, we didn’t know then that the Russian general had tactical nukes at his disposal, and the authority to use them … until Khrushchev took that authority way from him.

  Then Major Anderson was shot down on October 27, and the Russians threw in the towel on the twenty-eighth.

  The Kennedy brothers most certainly had not reckoned with the possibility of offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba. From Moscow, Col. Oleg Penkovsky told the CIA that the missiles in Cuba could be readied to strike the United States in less than a day.

  BLOW-UP

  There have been various accounts of the maneuvering that brought the Cold War to flashpoint in October 1962, but there have not been many that told of an intense clash—indeed animosity—between Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and the man appointed to carry out the Kennedy brothers’ revenge on Castro for the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs, Bill Harvey.

  Harvey tried valiantly for nine months to bring some order to Cuban operations, and as an FI man, he continued to stress the need for solid intelligence before military vengeance was sought by the administration. And then he got into career-destroying trouble by once again thinking that his way was the best way, despite what his overlords thought and said.

  It all came unglued on the afternoon of Friday, October 26, 1962. Halpern: “We heard that Bobby said to Harvey, ‘I could train agents at my house in Virginia!’ And Harvey retorted, ‘as baby-sitters?’”

  To this day, there is still no absolute clarity about all that happened in the culmination of friction between Bobby Kennedy and Harvey. We do know that during that afternoon or early evening, DCI John McCone decided Harvey had “outlived his usefulness.” There most definitely was a meeting of the MONGOOSE principals across the Potomac, in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Operations Room at the Pentagon, starting at 2:30, i.e., after lunch. The minutes, dated October 29, written by the Special Group Augmented’s secretary, Tom Parrott, and originally stamped “SECRET—EYES ONLY,” survive and are predictably bland, almost more interesting for what they omit than for what they say. The official record gives no hint of tension or rising tempers, even though everyone in the room, even those who were highly disciplined, must have b
een somewhat on edge and close to exhaustion in the full spate of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a time when the United States military was rapidly preparing for war.

  Much of the discussion dealt with a plan to launch nine covert teams, details further unspecified, into Cuba. “Lansdale disavowed any responsibility for, or information of, the proposed infiltrations. General Taylor stated JCS had not established any such requirements, nor had they outlined requirements toward which they could contribute.” Lansdale would canvas several agencies. “After this examination it will then be decided what the best use of these assets actually should be.”

  Then comes the discussion of the three agent teams which Bobby Kennedy had recalled while they were at sea en route to Cuba. The attorney general’s action cancelled a mission that the CIA considered part of its responsibility under long-standing guidelines with the Pentagon. To RFK, the boats were an Agency end-run, an attempt to operate behind his back and without his authority, a flagrant violation of political control of the government, especially when he was involved in separate sensitive maneuvers to defuse the showdown.

  The dry minutes reflect nothing of any open flare-up between Kennedy and Harvey. “Mr. McCone and Mr. Harvey said during the course of the discussion on agent teams that the action taken had represented a unilateral decision by CIA and was not in response to specific military requirements. CIA had felt that this was within its sphere of responsibility, and particularly with respect to the first three teams, had considered that it was a continuation of previously-approved operations.”

  McCone seemed to try to mollify the Kennedy side by commenting that Cuban security had improved noticeably within the last two weeks, “therefore agent activity on this scale will only be justified if the responsible departments specifically require it for intelligence purposes…. Mr. Harvey made the point that the proposed agent dispatches would not use up all existing assets.”

  At the end of the minutes: “It was reiterated that General Lansdale is the focal point for all Mongoose activities, that he is charged with their overall management and that he should be kept informed.”26

  Even though they are not elaborated in Parrott’s memorandum, harsh words fitting the tensions of the moment must have been exchanged during the meeting. And it must have been galling for Harvey to have Lansdale’s authority over MONGOOSE operations confirmed, even though Bill was well aware that Lansdale held the Kennedys’ personal brief on clandestine matters to do with Cuba.

  More than four decades after the searing events of the October days, Parrott does not recall a particular showdown on that day between Harvey and Bobby Kennedy. “Of course he had had a couple of martinis before the meeting. But I was the only one there who knew him and his habit…. Well, [Gen.] Max Taylor did say to me, ‘Tell your friend Mr. Harvey to stop mumbling into his umbilical cord!’”

  Parrott probably had little respect for Harvey while both were in Germany. Now, in retrospect, his view of Bill has mellowed. “I thought it was unfair to Bill that they fired him. He had dispatched the teams under the rules…. Of course he hated getting all the clearances [that the military and Lansdale] required, but he had gotten the approval of the principals. Bill did maintain that he had the authority to dispatch the boats.”

  And, again, for emphasis, Tom says, “During the missile crisis, everyone was told to stand [provocative acts] down, but Bill had no way to call the boats back.”27

  The boat mission might not have looked then, to anyone who knew Bill’s record, to be another instance of Harvey pushing against established authority—going out on a risky limb to do what he considered right, despite the considered judgment of the U.S. government. Parrott underlines that Bill went by the book and was sure he had the authority to send the boats on their way. But, to a probably overwrought Bobby Kennedy, Harvey’s behavior qualified as insubordination from a man who had been difficult and abrasive in the past; perhaps Bobby took it as a personal provocation, as well as a danger to the peace-making negotiations.

  Bill had done only what he considered best, in line with Pentagon requirements, and he obviously had gotten himself into a tense showdown with Bobby Kennedy, even though this is not reflected in the minutes. Then, he had the rug pulled out from under him. The military didn’t back him up when the crunch came, and Bobby, who may have been looking for cause, made it obvious that Harvey was a liability to the CIA.

  Halpern’s memory of a personal, eyeball-to-eyeball showdown is not reliable, but that is not Sam’s fault. Perhaps his recollection of the circumstances of Bill’s crash was embellished over time because it is based on what Harvey told him all those years ago.

  When Harvey came back from across the water, back to the Langley basement, he likely was steaming even more than usual after an encounter with Bobby Kennedy and Lansdale. He may well be forgiven for having dramatized the circumstances of his dismissal from Cuban operations, transferring the showdown, in the telling, from the Joint Chiefs’ Operations Room to the White House Cabinet Room. Halpern and his colleagues would not necessarily have known where the meeting was held, nor who had taken part in it, and they would have eagerly accepted Bill’s version as just another indicator that the CIA was ever more under the control of the nation’s political leaders, who had no understanding of and little respect for the professionals of intelligence.

  If, indeed, Harvey embellished and dramatized the circumstances of his ouster from the Cuba chair, he was certainly forgiven by his loyal staff, who then, of course, spread the word in the Langley corridors. Halpern would not have invented a fiction to make Harvey look good. Here is Sam’s version of that fateful day:

  Harvey approved the dispatch of six three-man teams to Cuba, on either October 21 or 22, 1962, as the missile crisis heated up. The missions were launched at the specific request of the Pentagon, as part of the standing Interagency Command Relationship Agreement. The military was reckoning with an invasion of Cuba by air and sea; its forces needed support on the ground to help the landings. Harvey did what was right operationally and within the framework of the interservice agreement. The CIA dispatched the three teams of saboteurs or perhaps pathfinders for an American airborne invasion toward Cuba.

  It is, of course, possible, given Bill’s rambunctious, iconoclastic mindset, that he launched the three boats as a provocation, to force strong American action in response to the threat of the Soviet IRBMs. Remember the episodes in Berlin, when Bill urged the administration to take risks he considered justified, to face the Soviets down. Bill’s humiliation—being shoved aside by McCone—was made all the deeper because Lansdale was reconfirmed as the point man on “all MONGOOSE activities.”

  Still, for Harvey the professional, dismissal was the final joust. The whole MONGOOSE effort had long been too personalized, the erratic pressures from topside had become too intense, the piddling requirements laid on Harvey by Lansdale too annoying, the Kennedy interference too obvious, too irrational, too far out of the line of normal operational procedure, too unprofessional.

  Halpern says Harvey blew his cool, personally and with Harvey-esque obscenity, in the face of the attorney general. According to Sam, the climax came at a top-drawer meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on October 26. Whatever the immediate point of friction, says Halpern, Harvey chose to tell the Kennedy brothers what he thought of them and their handling of the situation. “If you fuckers hadn’t fucked up the Bay of Pigs, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess!”

  In itself, this version of the episode is interesting if for no other reason than that its source must have been Harvey, who did not usually give sensitive background to his subordinates—or to anyone. It’s possible that a deeply wounded, even bitter, Harvey went back to Langley and gave his staff this version, inserting Jack Kennedy and setting the scene at the White House, in a forlorn face-saving grasp at credibility. The truth lies in CIA papers that have not been released.

  Harvey’s Lone Rangerism and its accompanying insubordination could not be toler
ated in a government as top-down as the Kennedy administration. Harvey had crossed the line once too often. He had to go.

  Was his self-immolation before the Kennedys simply the outburst of an exhausted man who had been given a series of impossible jobs, harassed by an image-conscious-adman-turned-soldier, overseen by politically driven, headlining people whom he considered incompetent meddlers? Was Harvey consumed by William Walker’s story? Was the final blow-up simply a melodramatic drunken spasm? Or was there something more to Harvey’s scathing personal denunciation of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy?

  Halpern: “Everyone had expected something like this to happen one of those days. But we were all professionals…. We all knew when to keep our mouths shut. Bill was not embarrassed by his outburst, but he was censured for being ‘disrespectful to the president.’

  “Bill hinted that Helms saved his skin…. He was very stoic about it. I felt very sorry for Bill after he was removed.”

  Warren Frank recalls, “They chewed Harvey pretty bad. When he was relieved, all we could do was say, ‘It’s been nice working for you.’ That was all…. They had him sit in the middle of all those desks and all that activity, doing absolutely nothing…. Just sitting in that damn office in Langley, twiddling his thumbs! … Just sitting there, as punishment! It took them a couple of months to transfer him to Rome.”

  Even Tom Parrott, who had not been overly friendly to Harvey years earlier in Germany, now says, “That meeting was the end of an era, really. I thought it was unfair that they fired Harvey. He had dispatched the teams under all the rules. Bill did maintain that he had the authority to dispatch the boats, but he couldn’t get them back.