"SUBVERSION BY BALLOT"

While the agency weighed his assassination, Sukarno convened an international conference of twenty-nine Asian, African, and Arab chiefs of state in Bandung, Indonesia. They proposed a global movement of nations free to chart their own paths, aligned with neither Moscow nor Washington. Nineteen days after the Bandung conference disbanded, the CIA received a new covert-action order from the White House, numbered NSC 5518 and declassified in 2003.

It authorized the agency to use "all feasible covert means"--including payoffs to buy Indonesian voters and politicians, political warfare to win friends and subvert potential enemies, and paramilitary force--to keep Indonesia from veering to the left.

Under its provisions, the CIA pumped about $1 million into the coffers of Sukarno's strongest political opponents, the Masjumi Party, in the 1955 national parliamentary elections, the first ever held in postcolonial Indonesia. That operation fell short: Sukarno's party won, the Masjumi placed second, and the PKI--the Indonesian Communist Party--placed fourth with 16 percent of the votes. Those results alarmed Washington. The CIA continued to finance its chosen political parties and "a number of political figures" in Indonesia, as Bissell recounted in an oral history.

In 1956, the red alert was raised again when Sukarno visited Moscow and Beijing as well as Washington. The White House had listened when Sukarno said he greatly admired the American form of government. It felt betrayed when he did not embrace Western democracy as his model for governing Indonesia, an archipelago stretching more than three thousand miles, encompassing nearly one thousand inhabited islands, with thirteen major ethnic groups among a predominantly Islamic population of more than eighty million people--the world's fifth-largest nation in the 1950s.

Sukarno was a spellbinding orator who spoke in public three or four times a week, rallying his people with patriotic rants, trying to unify his nation. The few Americans in Indonesia who could understand his public speeches reported that he would quote Thomas Jefferson one day and spout communist theory the next. The CIA never quite grasped Sukarno. But the agency's authority under NSC 5518 was so broad that it could justify almost any action against him.

The CIA's new Far East division chief, Al Ulmer, liked that kind of freedom. It was why he loved the agency. "We went all over the world and we did what we wanted," he said forty years later. "God, we had fun."

By his own account, Ulmer had lived high and mighty during his long run as station chief in Athens, with a status somewhere between a Hollywood star and a head of state. He had helped Allen Dulles enjoy a romantic infatuation with Queen Frederika of Greece and the pleasures of yachting with shipping magnates. The Far East division was his reward.

Ulmer said in an interview that he knew next to nothing about Indonesia when he took over the division. But he had the full faith and trust of Allen Dulles. And he remembered vividly a conversation with Frank Wisner at the end of 1956, just before Wisner's breakdown. He recalled Wisner saying it was time to turn up the heat on Sukarno and hold his feet to the fire.

Ulmer's station chief in Jakarta told him that Indonesia was ripe for communist subversion. The chief, Val Goodell, was a rubber-industry magnate with a decidedly colonialist attitude. The essence of his fire-breathing cables from Jakarta was conveyed in notes that Allen Dulles carried to his weekly White House meetings in the first four months of 1957: Situation critical.... Sukarno a secret communist.... Send weapons. Rebellious army officers on the island of Sumatra were the key to the nation's future, Goodell told headquarters. "Sumatrans prepared to fight," he cabled, "but are short of arms."

In July 1957, local election returns showed that the PKI stood to become the third most powerful political party in Indonesia, up from the fourth spot. "Sukarno insisting on Commie participation" in Indonesia's government, Goodell reported, "because of six million Indonesians who voted for Communist party." The CIA described this rise as "spectacular gains" giving the communists "enormous prestige." Would Sukarno now turn toward Moscow and Beijing? No one had the slightest notion.

The station chief strongly disagreed with the outgoing American ambassador in Indonesia, Hugh Cumming, who said Sukarno was still open to American influence. From the start, Goodell fought the new ambassador, John M. Allison, who had served as the American envoy in Japan and the assistant secretary of state for the Far East. The two quickly reached an angry impasse. Would the United States use diplomatic influence or deadly force in Indonesia?

No one seemed to know what the foreign policy of the United States was on this point. On July 19, 1957, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Charles Pearre Cabell "recommended that the Director again attempt to find out State Department policy on Indonesia," say the minutes of the CIA chiefs' meeting. "The Director agreed to do this."

The White House and the CIA sent emissaries to Jakarta to assess the situation. Allen Dulles dispatched Al Ulmer; President Eisenhower sent F. M. Dearborn, Jr., his special assistant for security operations. Dearborn reluctantly advised Eisenhower that almost all of America's allies in the Far East were shaky. Chiang Kai-shek was leading "a dictatorship" in Taiwan. President Diem was running a "one-man show" in South Vietnam. The leaders of Laos were corrupt. South Korea's Syngman Rhee was deeply unpopular.

But the problem in Sukarno's Indonesia was different, the president's man reported: It was "subversion by ballot"--one of the dangers of participatory democracy.

Al Ulmer believed that he had to find the strongest anticommunist forces in Indonesia and support them with guns and money. He and Goodell argued furiously with Ambassador Allison over "a long and fruitless afternoon" on the veranda of the embassy residence in Jakarta. The CIA men did not accept the fact that almost all the Indonesian army leadership remained professionally loyal to the government, personally anticommunist, and politically pro-American. They believed that CIA support for rebellious army officers could save Indonesia from a communist takeover. With the agency's support, they could create a breakaway Indonesian government on Sumatra, then seize the capital. Ulmer returned to Washington denouncing Sukarno as "beyond redemption" and Allison as "soft on communism." He swayed the Dulles brothers on both counts.

A few weeks later, at the CIA's recommendation, Ambassador Allison, one of the most experienced Asia hands remaining at the State Department, was removed from his post and reassigned on short notice to Czechoslovakia.

"I had great regard for Foster and Allen Dulles," Allison noted. "But they did not know Asians well and were always inclined to judge them by Western standards." On the question of Indonesia, "they were both activists and insisted on doing something at once." They had been convinced by the station's reporting that the communists were subverting and controlling the Indonesian army--and that the agency could thwart the threat. The CIA had engraved a self-addressed invitation to an insurrection.

"THE SONS OF EISENHOWER"

At the August 1, 1957, meeting of the National Security Council, the CIA's reporting sparked a pent-up explosion. Allen Dulles said Sukarno had "gone beyond the point of no return" and "would henceforth play the communist game." Vice President Nixon picked up the theme and proposed that "the United States should work through the Indonesia military organization to mobilize opposition to communism." Frank Wisner said the CIA could back a rebellion, but he could not guarantee "absolute control" once it started: "explosive results were always possible." The next day, he told his colleagues that "the deterioration of the situation in Indonesia is being viewed with the utmost gravity in the highest circles of the U.S. Government."

Foster Dulles threw his full weight behind a coup. He put former ambassador Hugh Cumming, five months out of Indonesia, in charge of a committee led by officers from the CIA and the Pentagon. The group delivered its recommendations on September 13, 1957. It urged the United States to supply covert military and economic aid to army officers seeking power.

But it also raised fundamental questions about the consequences of American covert action. Arming the rebellious officers "could increase the likelihood of the dismemberment of Indonesia, a country which was created with U.S. support and assistance," members of the Cumming group noted. "Since the U.S. played a very important role in the creation of an independent Indonesia, doesn't it stand to lose a great deal in Asia and the rest of the world if Indonesia breaks up, particularly if, as seems inevitable, our hand in the breakup eventually becomes known?" The question went unanswered.

On September 25, President Eisenhower ordered the agency to overthrow Indonesia, according to CIA records obtained by the author. He set out three missions. First: to provide "arms and other military aid" to "anti-Sukarno military commanders" throughout Indonesia. Second: to "strengthen the determination, will, and cohesion" of the rebel army officers on the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi. Third: to support and "stimulate into action, singly or in unison, non-and anti-Communist elements" among political parties on the main island of Java.

Three days later the Indian newsweekly Blitz--a publication controlled by Soviet intelligence--ran a long story with a provocative headline: AMERICAN PLOT TO OVERTHROW SUKARNO. The Indonesian press picked up the story and ran with it. The covert action had remained secret for roughly seventy-two hours.

Richard Bissell sent U-2 flights out over the archipelago and plotted the delivery of arms and ammunition to the rebels by sea and air. He had never run paramilitary operations or drawn up military plans. He found it fascinating.

The operation took three months to plan. Wisner flew to the CIA station in Singapore, just across the Malacca Straits from northern Sumatra, to set up political-warfare operations. Ulmer created military command posts at Clark Air Force Base and the Subic Bay naval station in the Philippines, the two biggest American bases in the region. John Mason, Ulmer's Far East operations chief, assembled a small team of paramilitary officers in the Philippines; many were veterans of the CIA's Korean War operations. They made contact with a handful of the Indonesian army rebels on Sumatra and another contingent of commanders seeking power on the island of Sulawesi, northeast of Java. Mason worked with the Pentagon to put together a package of machine guns, carbines, rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, hand grenades, and ammunition sufficient for eight thousand soldiers, and he made plans to supply the rebels on both Sumatra and Sulawesi by sea and by air. The first arms shipment came out of Subic Bay on the USS Thomaston, bound for Sumatra, on January 8, 1958. Mason followed the ship in a submarine, the USS Bluegill. The arms arrived the following week in the northern Sumatran port of Padang, about 225 miles south of Singapore. The off-loading took place without a shred of secrecy. It drew an impressive crowd.

On February 10, the Indonesian rebels broadcast a stirring challenge to Sukarno from a newly established CIA-financed radio station at Padang. They demanded a new government and the outlawing of communism within five days. Hearing nothing from Sukarno, who was sporting in the geisha bars and bathhouses of Tokyo, they announced the establishment of a revolutionary government whose foreign minister, picked and paid by the CIA, was Colonel Maludin Simbolon, an English-speaking Christian. Reading their demands over the radio, they warned foreign powers not to interfere in Indonesia's internal affairs. Meanwhile, the CIA readied new weapons shipments from the Philippines and awaited the first signs of a nationwide popular uprising against Sukarno.

The CIA's Jakarta station told headquarters to expect a long, slow, languid period of political maneuvering, with "all factions seeking to avoid violence." Eight days later, on February 21, the Indonesian air force bombed the revolutionaries' radio stations in Central Sumatra into rubble, and the Indonesian navy blockaded rebel positions along the coast. The CIA's Indonesian agents and their American advisers retreated into the jungle.

The agency appeared unmindful that some of the most powerful commanders in the Indonesian army had been trained in the United States and referred to themselves as "the sons of Eisenhower." These were the men who were fighting the rebels. The army, led by anticommunists, was at war with the CIA.

"THE BEST CROWD WE COULD GET TOGETHER"

Hours after those first bombs fell on Sumatra, the Dulles brothers spoke by telephone. Foster said he was "in favor of doing something but it is difficult to figure out what or why." If the United States became "involved in a civil war" on the other side of the world, he said, how would it justify its case to Congress and the American people? Allen replied that the forces the CIA had assembled were "the best crowd we could get together," and he warned that "there is not too much time to consider all we have to consider."

When the National Security Council met that week, Allen Dulles told the president that "the United States faced very difficult problems" in Indonesia.

The NSC minutes say "he sketched the latest developments, most of which had been set forth in the newspapers," and then he warned: "If this dissident movement went down the drain, he felt fairly certain that Indonesia would go over to the Communists." Foster Dulles said that "we could not afford to let this happen." The president allowed that "we would have to go in if a Communist takeover really threatened." The CIA's false alarms were the basis for believing in that threat.

Allen Dulles told Eisenhower that Sukarno's forces "were not very enthusiastic about an attack on Sumatra." Hours later, reports from Indonesia came pouring in to CIA headquarters saying that those same forces had "bombed and blockaded dissident strongholds in first effort to crush rebellion by all available means" and were "planning airborne and amphibious action against central Sumatra."

American warships gathered near Singapore, ten minutes by jet from the coast of Sumatra. The USS Ticonderoga, an aircraft carrier with two battalions of marines aboard, dropped anchor along with two destroyers and a heavy cruiser. On March 9, as the naval battle group assembled, Foster Dulles made a public statement openly calling for a revolt against "Communist despotism" under Sukarno. General Nasution, Sukarno's army chief, responded by sending two battalions of soldiers on a fleet of eight ships, accompanied by an air force wing. They assembled off the northern coast of Sumatra, a dozen miles from Singapore's harbor.

The new U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Howard Jones, cabled the secretary of state that General Nasution was a reliable anticommunist and the rebels had no chance of victory. He might as well have slipped the message into a bottle and tossed it into the sea.

General Nasution's chief of operations, Colonel Ahmed Yani, was one of the "sons of Eisenhower"--devotedly pro-American, a graduate of the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff course at Fort Leavenworth, and a friend to Major George Benson, the American military attache in Jakarta. The colonel, preparing a major offensive against the rebels in Sumatra, asked Major Benson for maps to aid him in his mission. The major, unaware of the CIA's covert operation, gladly supplied them.

At Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, the CIA's commanders had called in a twenty-two-man team of aircrews led by Polish pilots who had been flying for the agency since the ill-fated Albanian operation eight years earlier. The first of their flights carried five tons of weapons and ammunition along with bundles of cash for the rebels on Sumatra. It was detected by one of General Nasution's patrols instants after it entered Indonesian airspace. Nasution's paratroopers had the pleasure of picking up every one of the crates that the CIA's pilots dropped.

To the east, on Sulawesi, the CIA's war went just as well. U.S. Navy fliers took off on a reconnaissance mission pinpointing potential targets on Sulawesi. The American-backed rebels showed their mettle by using .50-caliber machine guns supplied by the agency to shoot up the plane. The American team barely survived a crash landing two hundred miles to the north in the Philippines. The CIA's Polish pilots received fresh targets from the reconnaissance flight. Two sets of two-man crews arrived at a Sulawesi airstrip. Their refurbished B-26 aircraft were equipped with six five-hundred-pound bombs and heavy machine guns. One of the planes successfully attacked an Indonesian military airfield. The second crashed on takeoff. Two brave Poles went home to their British wives in body bags; an elaborate cover story disguised their deaths.

The CIA's last hope lay with the rebels on Sulawesi and its outlying islands, in the far northeastern reaches of the archipelago. For in the final days of April, Sukarno's soldiers destroyed the rebels on Sumatra. The five CIA officers on the island ran for their lives. They headed south in a jeep until they ran out of fuel, then walked through the jungle to the coast, stealing food from little shops in isolated villages to sustain themselves. When they reached the ocean they commandeered a fishing boat and radioed their position to the CIA station in Singapore. A navy submarine, the USS Tang, came to their rescue.

The mission on Sumatra had "practically collapsed," Allen Dulles glumly reported to Eisenhower on April 25. "There seemed to be no willingness to fight on the part of the dissident forces on the island," the director told the president. "The dissident leaders had been unable to provide their soldiers with any idea of why they were fighting. It was a very strange war."

"THEY CONVICTED ME OF MURDER"

Eisenhower wanted to keep this operation deniable. He ordered that no Americans could be involved "in any operations partaking of a military character in Indonesia." Dulles disobeyed him.

The CIA's pilots had begun bombing and strafing Indonesia's outer islands on April 19, 1958. These agency air forces were described in a written CIA briefing for the White House and the president of the United States as "dissident planes"--Indonesian planes flown by Indonesians, not American aircraft flown by agency personnel. One of the Americans flying those planes was Al Pope. At age twenty-five, he was a four-year veteran of dangerous secret missions. He was distinguished by bravery and fervor.

"I enjoyed killing Communists," he said in 2005. "I liked to kill Communists any way I could get them."

He flew his first mission in Indonesia on April 27. For the next three weeks, he and his fellow CIA pilots hit military and civilian targets in the villages and harbors of northeastern Indonesia. On May Day, Allen Dulles told Eisenhower that these air strikes had been "almost too effective, since they had resulted in the sinking of a British and of a Panamanian freighter." Hundreds of civilians died, the American embassy reported. Four days later Dulles nervously recounted to the National Security Council that the bombings had "stirred great anger" among the Indonesian people, for it was charged that American pilots had been at the controls. The charges were true, but the president of the United States and the secretary of state publicly denied them.

The American embassy and Admiral Felix Stump, commander of American forces in the Pacific, alerted Washington that the CIA's operation was a transparent failure. The president asked the director of central intelligence to explain himself. A team of officers at CIA headquarters scrambled to piece together a chronology of the Indonesia operation. They noted that although the "complexity" and "sensitivity" of the operation was immense, demanding "careful coordination," it had been improvised "day-to-day." By virtue of its size and scope, "it could not be conducted as a completely covert operation." The failure of secrecy violated the agency's charter and the president's direct orders.

Al Pope spent the early hours of Sunday, May 18, over Ambon City in eastern Indonesia, sinking a navy ship, bombing a market, and destroying a church. The official death toll was six civilians and seventeen military officers. Then Pope began to pursue a seven-thousand-ton ship transporting more than a thousand Indonesian troops. But his B-26 was in the crosshairs of the ship's anti-aircraft guns. It was also being tailed by an Indonesian air force fighter. Hit from behind and below, Pope's plane burst into flames at six thousand feet. Pope ordered his Indonesian radioman to jump, jettisoned his canopy, hit the ejection seat's release, and bailed out. As he tumbled backward, his leg struck the tail of his plane. His thigh shattered at the hip. His last bomb missed the troopship by about forty feet, sparing hundreds of lives. He fell slowly back to earth, writhing in pain at the end of his parachute. In the zippered pocket of his flight suit, Pope had his personnel records, his after-action flight reports, and a membership card for the officer's club at Clark Field. The documents identified him for what he was--an American officer bombing Indonesia on orders from his government. He could have been shot on sight. But he was placed under arrest.

"They convicted me of murder and sentenced me to death," he said. "They said I wasn't a prisoner of war and was not entitled to the Geneva Convention."

The news that Pope had gone missing in battle reached CIA headquarters that same Sunday evening. The director of central intelligence conferred with his brother. They agreed they had lost this war.

On May 19, Allen Dulles sent a flash cable to his officers in Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Singapore: stand down, cut off the money, shut down the arms pipeline, burn the evidence, and retreat. The minutes of that morning's meeting at headquarters reflect his fury over a "glaring mix-up."

It was time for the United States to switch sides. As quickly as possible, American foreign policy reversed course. The CIA's reporting instantly reflected the change. The agency told the White House on May 21 that the Indonesian army was suppressing communism and that Sukarno was speaking and acting in ways favorable to the United States. Now it was the CIA's former friends who threatened American interests.

"The operation was, of course, a complete failure," Richard Bissell said. For the rest of his days in power, Sukarno rarely failed to mention it. He knew the CIA had tried to overthrow his government, and his army knew it, and the political establishment of Indonesia knew it too. The ultimate effect was to strengthen Indonesia's communists, whose influence and power grew for the next seven years.

"They said Indonesia was a failure," Al Pope reflected bitterly. "But we knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn't even know what Communism meant."

The only contemporary record of Pope's service in Indonesia is one line in a CIA report to the White House, dated May 21, 1958. It is a lie, and it reads in full: "Dissident B-26 aircraft shot down during attack on Ambon on 18 May."

"OUR PROBLEMS WERE GETTING GREATER EVERY YEAR"

Indonesia was Frank Wisner's last operation as chief of the clandestine service. He came back from the Far East in June 1958 at the edge of his sanity, and at summer's end he went mad. The diagnosis was "psychotic mania." The symptoms had been there for years--the desire to change the world by force of will, the soaring speeches, the suicidal missions. Psychiatrists and primitive new psychopharmaceuticals did not help. The treatment was electroshock. For six months, his head was clamped into a vise and shot through with a current sufficient to fire a hundred-watt lightbulb. He came out less brilliant and less bold, and went off to serve as chief of station in London.

After the Indonesia operation fell apart, Dulles meandered through a series of National Security Council meetings, voicing vague and ominous warnings about the threat from Moscow. The president began wondering out loud if the CIA knew what it was doing. He once asked in astonishment: Allen, are you trying to scare me into starting a war?

At headquarters, Dulles asked his most senior officers where exactly he had to go to find intelligence on the Soviet Union. At a deputies' meeting on June 23, 1958, he said he was "at a loss as to what component of the Agency he can turn to when he desires specific information on the USSR." The agency had none to speak of. Its reporting on the Soviets was pure wind.

The CIA's Abbot Smith, one of its best analysts and later the chief of the agency's Office of National Estimates, looked back on a decade's work at the end of 1958 and wrote: "We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin."

On December 16, Eisenhower received a report from his intelligence board of consultants advising him to overhaul the CIA. Its members feared that the agency was "incapable of making objective appraisals of its own intelligence information as well as of its own operations." Led by former defense secretary Robert Lovett, they pleaded with the president to take covert operations out of Allen Dulles's hands.

Dulles, as ever, fended off all efforts to change the CIA. He told the president there was nothing wrong with the agency. Back at headquarters, he told his senior staff that "our problems were getting greater every year." He promised the president that Wisner's replacement would fix the missions and organization of the clandestine service. He had just the man for the job.

16. "HE WAS LYING
DOWN AND HE WAS
LYING UP"

On January 1, 1959, Richard Bissell became the chief of the clandestine service. That same day, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. A secret CIA history unearthed in 2005 described in detail how the agency took on the threat.

The agency took a long hard look at Fidel. It did not know what to make of him. "Many serious observers feel his regime will collapse within a matter of months," predicted Jim Noel, the CIA's station chief, whose officers had spent too much time reporting from the Havana Country Club. At headquarters, some argued that Castro deserved the agency's guns and money. Al Cox, chief of the paramilitary division, proposed to "make secret contact with Castro" and offer him arms and ammunition to establish a democratic government. Cox told his superiors that the CIA could ship weapons to Castro on a vessel manned by a Cuban crew. But "the most secure means of help would be giving the money to Castro, who could then purchase his own arms," Cox wrote to his superiors. "A combination of arms and money would probably be best." Cox was an alcoholic, and his thinking might have been clouded, but more than a few of his fellow officers felt the way he did. "My staff and I were all Fidelistas" at the time, Robert Reynolds, chief of the CIA's Caribbean operations desk, said many years later.

In April and May 1959, when the newly victorious Castro visited the United States, a CIA officer briefed Castro face-to-face in Washington. He described Fidel as "a new spiritual leader of Latin American democratic and anti-dictator forces."

"OUR HAND SHOULD NOT SHOW"

The president was furious to find that the CIA had misjudged Castro. "Though our intelligence experts backed and filled for a number of months," Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, "events were gradually driving them to the conclusion that with the coming of Castro, Communism had penetrated this hemisphere."

On December 11, 1959, having reached that conclusion, Richard Bissell sent Allen Dulles a memo suggesting that "thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro." Dulles penciled in a crucial correction to the proposal. He struck out elimination, a word tinged with more than a hint of murder. He substituted removal from Cuba--and gave the go-ahead.

On January 8, 1960, Dulles told Bissell to organize a special task force to overthrow Castro. Bissell personally selected many of the same people who had subverted the government of Guatemala six years before--and had deceived President Eisenhower face-to-face about the coup. He chose the feckless Tracy Barnes for political and psychological warfare, the talented Dave Phillips for propaganda, the gung-ho Rip Robertson for paramilitary training, and the relentlessly mediocre E. Howard Hunt to manage the political front groups.

Their chief would be Jake Esterline, who had run the Washington "war room" for Operation Success. Esterline was station chief in Venezuela when he first laid eyes on Fidel Castro in early 1959. He had watched the young commandante touring Caracas, fresh from his New Year's Day triumph over the dictator Fulgencio Batista, and he had heard the crowds cheering Castro as a conqueror.

"I saw--hell, anybody with eyes could see--that a new and powerful force was at work in the hemisphere," Esterline said. "It had to be dealt with."

Esterline returned to CIA headquarters in January 1960 to receive his appointment as Cuba task force chief. The group took shape as a secret cell inside the CIA. All the money, all the information, and all the decisions for the Cuban task force came through Bissell. He had little interest in the work of his spies, much less gathering intelligence from inside Cuba. He never stopped to analyze what would happen if the coup against Castro succeeded--or if it failed. "I don't think these kinds of things were ever thought about in any depth," Esterline said. "I think their first reaction was, God, we've got a possible Communist in here; we had better get him out just the way we got Arbenz out" in Guatemala.

Bissell almost never talked about Cuba with Richard Helms, his second-in-command at the clandestine service. The two men disliked and distrusted one another intensely. Helms did weigh in on one idea that filtered up from the Cuba task force. It was a propaganda ploy: a Cuban agent, trained by the CIA, would appear on the shores of Istanbul, claiming to be a political prisoner who had just jumped from a Soviet ship. He would proclaim that Castro was enslaving thousands of his people and shipping them to Siberia. The plan was known as "The Dripping Cuban." Helms killed it.

On March 2, 1960--two weeks before President Eisenhower approved a covert action against Castro--Dulles briefed Vice President Nixon on operations already under way. Reading from a seven-page paper initialed by Bissell, titled "What We Are Doing in Cuba," Dulles specified acts of economic warfare, sabotage, political propaganda and a plan to use "a drug, which if placed in Castro's food, would make him behave in such an irrational manner that a public appearance could well have very damaging results to him." Nixon was all for it.

Dulles and Bissell presented their plans to Eisenhower and Nixon at the White House in a four-man meeting at 2:30 p.m. on March 17, 1960. They did not propose to invade the island. They told Eisenhower that they could overthrow Castro by sleight of hand. They would create "a responsible, appealing and unified Cuban opposition," led by recruited agents. A clandestine radio station would beam propaganda into Havana to spark an uprising. CIA officers at the U.S. Army's jungle warfare training camp in Panama would school sixty Cubans to infiltrate the island. The CIA would drop arms and ammunition to them.

Fidel would fall six to eight months thereafter, Bissell promised. The timing was excruciatingly sensitive: election day was seven and a half months away. Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon had won by wide margins in the New Hampshire presidential primaries the week before.

Eisenhower's staff secretary, General Andrew Goodpaster, took notes on the meeting. "The President says he knows of no better plan.... The great problem is leakage and security.... Everyone must be prepared to swear that he had not heard of it.... Our hand should not show in anything that is done." The agency should have needed no reminder that, under its charter, all covert action required secrecy so secure that no evidence would lead to the president. But Eisenhower wanted to make sure the CIA did its best to keep this one under cover.

"WE WERE GOING TO PAY FOR THAT LIE"

The president and Dick Bissell were locked in an increasingly intense struggle over the control of one of the biggest secrets of all--the U-2 spy plane. Eisenhower had not allowed any flights over Soviet terrain since his talks with Khrushchev at Camp David six months earlier. Khrushchev had returned from Washington praising the president's courage in seeking peaceful coexistence; Eisenhower wanted the "spirit of Camp David" to be his legacy.

Bissell was fighting as hard as possible to resume the secret missions. The president was torn. He truly wanted the intelligence that the U-2 gleaned.

He longed to bury the "missile gap"--the false claims by the CIA, the air force, military contractors, and politicians of both parties that the Soviets had a widening lead in nuclear weaponry. The CIA's formal estimates of Soviet military strength were not based on intelligence, but on politics and guesswork. Since 1957, the CIA had sent Eisenhower terrifying reports that the Soviet buildup of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles was far faster and much greater than the American arsenal. In 1960, the agency projected a mortal threat to the United States; it told the president that the Soviets would have five hundred ICBMs ready to strike by 1961. The Strategic Air Command used those estimates as the basis for a secret first-strike plan using more than three thousand nuclear warheads to destroy every city and every military outpost from Warsaw to Beijing. But Moscow did not have five hundred nuclear missiles pointed at the United States at the time. It had four.

The president had worried for five and a half years that the U-2 itself might start World War III. If the plane went down over the Soviet Union, it could take the chance for peace with it. The month after the Camp David dialogues with Khrushchev, the president had rejected a newly proposed U-2 mission over the Soviet Union; he told Allen Dulles once again, bluntly, that divining the intentions of the Soviets through espionage was more important to him than discovering details about their military capabilities. Only spies, not gadgets, could tell him about Soviet intent to attack.

Without that knowledge, the president said, the U-2 flights were "provocative pin-pricking, and it may give them the idea that we are seriously preparing plans to knock out their installations" with a sneak attack.

Eisenhower had a summit meeting with Khrushchev set for May 16, 1960, in Paris. He feared that his greatest asset--his reputation for honesty--would be squandered if a U-2 went down while the United States was, in his words, "engaged in apparently sincere deliberations" with the Soviets.

In theory, only the president had the power to order a U-2 mission. But Bissell ran the program, and he was petulant about filing his flight plans. He tried to evade presidential authority by secretly seeking to out-source flights to the British and to the Chinese Nationalists. In his memoirs, he wrote that Allen Dulles had been horrified to learn that the first U-2 flight had passed directly over Moscow and Leningrad. The director had never known; Bissell never saw fit to tell him.

He argued for weeks with the White House before Eisenhower finally gave in and agreed to an April 9, 1960, flight over the Soviet Union from Pakistan. It was, on the surface, a success. But the Soviets knew their airspace had been violated once again, and they went on high alert. Bissell fought for one more flight. The president set a deadline of April 25. The date came and went with clouds covering the Communist targets. Bissell pleaded for more time, and Eisenhower gave him six days' reprieve. The following Sunday was to be the final date for a flight before the Paris summit. Bissell then tried to circumvent the White House by going to the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to win their backing for yet another flight. In his zeal, he had neglected to plan for disaster.

On May Day, as the president had feared, the U-2 was shot down in central Russia. The CIA's pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured alive. C. Douglas Dillon was the acting secretary of state that day. "The President told me to work with Allen Dulles," Dillon recounted. "We had to put out some sort of announcement." To the shock of both men, NASA announced that a weather plane had been lost in Turkey. That was the CIA's cover story. The director of central intelligence either never knew about it or had forgotten all about it.

"We couldn't understand how this had happened," Dillon said. "But we had to get ourselves out of it."

That proved difficult. Hewing to the cover story, the White House and the State Department deceived the American people for a week about the flight. Their lies grew more and more transparent. The last one came on May 7: "There was no authorization for such a flight." That broke Eisenhower's spirit. "He couldn't allow Allen Dulles to take all the blame, because it would look like the President didn't know what was going on in the government," Dillon said.

Eisenhower walked into the Oval Office on May 9 and said out loud: "I would like to resign." For the first time in the history of the United States, millions of citizens understood that their president could deceive them in the name of national security. The doctrine of plausible deniability was dead. The summit with Khrushchev was wrecked and the brief thaw in the cold war iced over. The CIA's spy plane destroyed the idea of detente for almost a decade. Eisenhower had approved the final mission in the hope of putting the lie to the missile gap. But the cover-up of the crash made him out to be a liar. In retirement, Eisenhower said the greatest regret of his presidency was "the lie we told about the U-2. I didn't realize how high a price we were going to pay for that lie."

The president knew he would not be able to leave office in a spirit of international peace and reconciliation. He was now intent on policing as many parts of the planet as possible before leaving office.

The summer of 1960 became a season of incessant crisis for the CIA. Red arrows signifying hot spots in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia multiplied on the maps that Allen Dulles and his men brought to the White House. The chagrin over the U-2 shootdown gave way to a murderous anger.

First Dick Bissell redoubled the CIA's plans for overthrowing Cuba. He set up a new CIA station in Coral Gables, Florida, code-named Wave. He told Vice President Nixon that he would need a force of five hundred trained Cuban exiles--up from sixty men a few weeks before--to lead the fight. But the army's jungle warfare center in Panama could not handle hundreds more raw recruits. So Bissell sent Jake Esterline down to Guatemala, where he single-handedly negotiated a secret agreement with President Manuel Ydigoras Fuentes, a retired general and a skilled wheeler-dealer. The site he secured became the main training camp for the Bay of Pigs, with its own airport, its own brothel, and its own codes of conduct. The CIA's Cubans found it "entirely unsatisfactory," reported marine colonel Jack Hawkins, Esterline's top paramilitary planner. They lived "in prison-camp conditions," which produced "political complications" that were "very difficult for C.I.A. to handle." Though the camp was isolated, the Guatemalan army was well aware of it, and the presence of a foreign force on its soil very nearly led to a military coup against their president.

Then, in mid-August, courtly, charming Dick Bissell put out a Mafia contract against Fidel Castro. He went to Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the CIA's chief of security, and asked the colonel to put him in touch with a gangster who could carry out a hit. This time he briefed Dulles, who gave his approval. An agency historian concluded: "Bissell probably believed that Castro would be dead at the hands of a CIA-sponsored assassin before the Brigade ever hit the beach" at the Bay of Pigs.

Bissell's men, knowing nothing of the Mafia plan, worked on a second murder plot. The question was how to put a trained CIA killer within shooting distance of Fidel: "Can we get a Rip Robertson close to him? Can we get a really hairy Cuban--I mean a gutsy Cuban?" said Dick Drain, the Cuba task force's chief of operations. The answer was always no. Miami was crawling with thousands of Cuban exiles ready to join the CIA's increasingly well-known covert operation, but Castro's spies were rife among them, and Fidel learned a fair amount about the CIA's plans. An FBI agent named George Davis, after spending a few months listening to loose-lipped Cubans in Miami coffee shops and bars, gave a CIA officer at the Wave station some friendly advice: it would be impossible to overthrow Castro with these chatty Cuban exiles. The only hope was to send in the marines. His CIA colleague relayed the message to headquarters. It was ignored.

On August 18, 1960, Dulles and Bissell discussed the Cuba task force in private with President Eisenhower for less than twenty minutes. Bissell asked for another $10.75 million to begin the paramilitary training of the five hundred Cubans in Guatemala. Eisenhower said yes, on one condition: "So long as the Joint Chiefs, Defense, State and CIA think we have a good chance of being successful" in "freeing the Cubans from this incubus." When Bissell tried to raise the idea of creating an American military force to lead the Cubans in battle, Dulles twice cut him off, evading debate and dissent.

The president--the man who had led the biggest secret invasion in American history--warned the CIA's leaders against "the danger of making false moves" or "starting something before we were ready."

"TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA"

Later that same day, at a meeting of the National Security Council, the president ordered the director of central intelligence to eliminate the man the CIA saw as the Castro of Africa--Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Congo.

Lumumba had been freely elected, and he appealed to the United States for assistance as his nation shook off Belgium's brutal colonial rule and declared its independence in the summer of 1960. American help never came, for the CIA regarded Lumumba as a dope-addled communist dupe. So when Belgian paratroopers flew in to reassert control in the capital, Lumumba accepted Soviet planes, trucks, and "technicians" to bolster his barely functioning government.

The week that the Belgian soldiers arrived, Dulles sent Larry Devlin, the station chief in Brussels, to take charge of the CIA post in the capital of the Congo and assess Lumumba as a target for covert action. On August 18, after six weeks in the country, Devlin cabled CIA headquarters: "CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER.... WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUAL COMMIE OR PLAYING COMMIE GAME.... THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TO TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA." Allen Dulles delivered the gist of this message at the NSC meeting that same day. According to secret Senate testimony delivered years later by the NSC's notetaker, Robert Johnson, President Eisenhower then turned to Dulles and said flatly that Lumumba should be eliminated. After a dead silence of fifteen seconds or so, the meeting went on. Dulles cabled Devlin eight days later: "IN HIGH QUARTERS HERE IT IS THE CLEAR-CUT CONCLUSION THAT IF LLL CONTINUES TO HOLD HIGH OFFICE, THE INEVITABLE RESULT WILL AT BEST BE CHAOS AND AT WORST PAVE THE WAY TO COMMUNIST TAKEOVER OF THE CONGO.... WE CONCLUDE THAT HIS REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE AND THAT UNDER EXISTING CONDITIONS THIS WOULD BE A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION. HENCE WE WISH TO GIVE YOU WIDER AUTHORITY."

Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA's clubfooted master chemist, brought an airline carry-on bag containing vials of lethal toxins to the Congo and handed it to the station chief. It held a hypodermic syringe to inject the lethal drops into food, drink, or a tube of toothpaste. It was Devlin's job to deliver death to Lumumba. The two men held a nervous conversation in Devlin's apartment on or about the night of September 10. "I asked on whose orders these instructions were issued," Devlin said under oath in secret testimony declassified in 1998. The answer was "the President."

Devlin testified that he locked the toxins in his office safe and agonized over what to do. He remembered thinking: I'll be damned if I'm going to leave that lying around. In time, he took the poison vials out to the banks of the Congo River and buried them. He said he was ashamed of the order to kill Lumumba. He knew there were other means at the CIA's disposal.

The agency had already selected the Congo's next leader: Joseph Mobutu, "the only man in the Congo able to act with firmness," as Dulles told the president at the NSC meeting on September 21. The CIA delivered $250,000 to him in early October, followed by shipments of arms and ammunition in November. Mobutu captured Lumumba and, in Devlin's words, delivered him into the hands of a "sworn enemy." The CIA base in Elizabethville, deep in the heart of the Congo, reported that "a Belgian officer of Flemish origin executed Lumumba with a burst of submachine gun fire" two nights before the next president of the United States took office. With the unwavering support of the CIA, Mobutu finally gained full control of the Congo after a five-year power struggle. He was the agency's favorite ally in Africa and the clearinghouse for American covert action throughout the continent during the cold war. He ruled for three decades as one of the world's most brutal and corrupt dictators, stealing billions of dollars in revenues from the nation's enormous deposits of diamonds, minerals, and strategic metals, slaughtering multitudes to preserve his power.

"AN ABSOLUTELY UNTENABLE POSITION"

As the 1960 election drew nearer, it was clear to Vice President Nixon that the CIA was far from ready to attack Cuba. At the end of September, Nixon nervously instructed the task force: "Don't do anything now; wait until after the elections." The delay gave Fidel Castro a crucial edge. His spies told him an American-backed invasion might be imminent, and he built up his military and intelligence forces, cracking down hard on the political dissidents whom the CIA hoped would serve as shock troops for the coup. The internal resistance against Castro began to die that summer, though the CIA never paid much heed to what was actually happening on the island. Tracy Barnes privately commissioned a public-opinion poll in Cuba--and it showed that people overwhelmingly supported Castro. Disliking the results, he discarded them.

The agency's effort to drop arms to rebels on the island was a fiasco. On September 28, a pallet of machine guns, rifles, and Colt .45s for a hundred fighters floated down to Cuba from a CIA plane flying out of Guatemala. The drop missed its target by seven miles. Castro's forces seized the arms, captured the Cuban CIA agent set to receive them, and shot him. The pilot got lost on his way back and landed in southern Mexico, where the local police seized the plane. In all, thirty such missions were flown; at most three succeeded.

By early October, the CIA realized that it knew next to nothing about the anti-Castro forces inside Cuba. "We had no confidence that they weren't penetrated" by Castro's spies, Jake Esterline said. He now was certain that Castro could not be overthrown by subtle subversion.

"We had made a major effort at infiltration and resupply, and those efforts had been unsuccessful," Bissell recalled. He decided that "what was needed was a shock action"--a full-scale invasion.

The CIA had neither presidential approval nor the troops needed to carry out that mission. The five hundred men undergoing training in Guatemala were "a preposterously inadequate number," Bissell told Esterline. Both men realized that only a far larger force could succeed against Castro, who had a sixty-thousand-man army with tanks and artillery, along with an increasingly cruel and efficient internal-security service.

Bissell had the Mafia on one phone line, the White House on another. The presidential election was looming. Sometime during the first week of November 1960, the core concept of the Cuban operation cracked under the pressure. Esterline pronounced the plan unworkable, and Bissell knew he was right. But he told no one. In the months and weeks and days before the invasion, he retreated into deception.

"He was lying down and he was lying up," Jake Esterline said--down to the CIA's Cuba task force, up to the president and the new president-elect.

John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in November by fewer than 120,000 votes. Some Republicans thought the election was stolen in the political precincts of Chicago. Others pointed at vote buying in West Virginia. Richard Nixon blamed the CIA. He was convinced, wrongly, that "Georgetown liberals" like Dulles and Bissell had secretly aided Kennedy with inside information on Cuba before a crucial televised presidential debate.

President-elect Kennedy immediately announced the re-appointments of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles. That decision came from his father, and it was made for political and personal protection. Hoover knew some of the deeper secrets in the Kennedy family--including the president-elect's sexual dalliances during World War II with a suspected Nazi spy--and he had shared that knowledge with Dulles. Kennedy knew all this because his father, a former member of Eisenhower's board of foreign intelligence consultants, had told him on good authority.

On November 18, the president-elect met Dulles and Bissell at his father's retreat in Palm Beach, Florida. Three days before, Bissell had received a conclusive report from Esterline on the Cuban operation. "Our original concept is now seen to be unachievable in the face of the controls Castro has instituted," Esterline said. "There will not be the internal unrest earlier believed possible, nor will the defenses permit the type of strike first planned. Our second concept (1,500-3,000 man force to secure a beach with airstrip) is now also seen as unachievable, except as a joint Agency/DOD action."

In other words, to overthrow Castro, the United States would have to send in the marines.

"I sat there in my office at CIA," Esterline recounted, "and I said, 'Goddamn it, I hope Bissell has enough guts to tell John Kennedy what the facts are.'" But Bissell never breathed a word. The unachievable plan became a can-do mission.

The Palm Beach briefing placed the CIA leaders in "an absolutely untenable position," Bissell told an agency historian. Their notes for the meeting show that they had intended to discuss their past triumphs--particularly Guatemala--and a multitude of covert operations under way in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Central and South America, and Asia. But they did not. Before the meeting, President Eisenhower told them to hew to "a narrow agenda" they interpreted that as a ban on discussing anything that had transpired in the meetings of the National Security Council. As a result, crucial information about the CIA's covert operations was lost in transition from one president to another.

Eisenhower had never approved an invasion of Cuba. But Kennedy did not know that. What he knew was what Dulles and Bissell told him.

"AN EIGHT-YEAR DEFEAT"

For eight years, Allen Dulles had fended off all efforts by outsiders to change the CIA. He had a reputation to protect--the agency's and his own. Denying everything, admitting nothing, he had hidden the truth to conceal the failures of his covert operations.

From at least 1957 onward, he had shunned voices of reason and moderation, ignored the increasingly urgent recommendations of the president's intelligence consultants, brushed aside reports by his own inspector general, treated his underlings with contempt. "He was, by that time, a tired old man," whose professional conduct "could be, and usually was, trying in the extreme," said Dick Lehman, one of the best analysts the agency ever had. "His treatment of us reflected his sense of values. He was wrong, of course, but we had to live with it."

In his last days in office, President Eisenhower came to understand that he did not have a spy service worthy of the name. He came to that conclusion after reading through a thick stack of reports he had commissioned in the hope of changing the CIA.

The first, on December 15, 1960, was the work of the Joint Study Group, which he had created after the U-2 shootdown to survey the landscape of American intelligence. It was a terrifying picture of drift and disarray. It said Dulles never had addressed the problem of a surprise attack by the Soviets. He had never coordinated military intelligence and civilian analysis. He had never created the capability to provide warning in a crisis. He had spent eight years mounting covert operations instead of mastering American intelligence.

Then, on January 5, 1961, the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities issued its final recommendations. It called for "a total reassessment" of covert action: "We are unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk of the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved." It warned that "CIA's concentration on political, psychological and related covert action activities have tended to distract substantially from the execution of its primary intelligence-gathering mission."

The board urged the president to consider the "complete separation" of the director of central intelligence from the CIA. It said Dulles was incapable of running the agency while carrying out his duties to coordinate American intelligence--the code making and code breaking of the National Security Agency; the dawning capabilities of spy satellites and space photoreconnaissance; the endless squabbles of the army, the navy, and the air force.

"I reminded the President that many times he had addressed himself to this general problem," his national-security aide, Gordon Gray, wrote after reviewing the report with Eisenhower. I know, Ike replied. I've tried. I cannot change Allen Dulles.

"A great deal has been accomplished," Dulles insisted to the president at the final gatherings of Eisenhower's National Security Council. Everything is well in hand, he said. I have fixed the clandestine service. American intelligence has never been more agile and adept. Coordination and cooperation are better than they ever have been. The proposals of the president's intelligence board were preposterous, he said, they were madness, they were illegal. I am responsible under the law for intelligence coordination, he reminded the president. I cannot delegate that responsibility. Without my leadership, he said, American intelligence would be "a body floating in thin air."

At the last, Dwight Eisenhower exploded in anger and frustration. "The structure of our intelligence organization is faulty," he told Dulles. It makes no sense, it has to be reorganized, and we should have done it long ago. Nothing had changed since Pearl Harbor. "I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this," said the president of the United States. He said he would "leave a legacy of ashes" to his successor.

PART
THREE

Lost Causes

The CIA Under Kennedy and Johnson

1961 to 1968

17. "NOBODY KNEW
WHAT TO DO"

The legacy was handed down on the morning of January 19, 1961, when the old general and the young senator met alone in the Oval Office. With a sense of foreboding, Eisenhower gave Kennedy a glance at the stratagems of national security: nuclear weapons and covert operations.

The two men emerged and met in the Cabinet Room with the old and new secretaries of state, defense, and the treasury. "Senator Kennedy asked the President's judgment as to the United States supporting the guerrilla operations in Cuba, even if this support involves the United States publicly," a note taker recorded that morning. "The President replied Yes as we cannot let the present government there go on.... The President also advised that the situation would be helped if we could handle the Dominican Republic at the same time." Eisenhower's idea that one Caribbean coup could counterbalance another was an equation no one in Washington had worked out.

As Kennedy arose the next morning for his swearing-in, the corrupt right-wing leader of the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, had been in power for thirty years. Support from the U.S. government and the American business community had helped keep him in office. He ruled by force, fraud, and fear; he took pleasure in hanging his enemies from meat hooks. "He had his torture chambers, he had his political assassinations," said Consul General Henry Dearborn, the ranking American diplomat in the Dominican Republic at the start of 1961. "But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works and he didn't bother the United States. So that was fine with us." But Trujillo had become intolerable, Dearborn said. "About the time I got there his iniquities had gotten so bad that there was a lot of pressure from various political groups, civil rights groups and others, not only in the U.S., but throughout the hemisphere, that something just had to be done about this man."

Dearborn was left in charge of the American embassy in Santo Domingo after the United States severed diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic in August 1960. All but a few of the American diplomats and spies left the island. But Richard Bissell had asked Dearborn to stay on and serve as the acting CIA station chief. The consul general agreed.

On January 19, 1961, Dearborn was advised that a shipment of small arms was on its way to a group of Dominican conspirators who aimed to kill Trujillo. The Special Group, Allen Dulles presiding, had made the decision one week before. Dearborn requested the agency's approval to arm the Dominicans with three carbine rifles left behind at the embassy by navy personnel. Bissell's covert-action deputy, Tracy Barnes, gave the green light. The CIA then dispatched three .38-caliber pistols to the Dominicans. Bissell authorized a second shipment of four machine guns and 240 rounds of ammunition. The machine guns remained at the American consulate in Santo Domingo after members of the new administration questioned what the world reaction might be if it were known that the United States was delivering murder weapons via diplomatic pouch.

Dearborn received a cable, personally approved by President Kennedy, which he read to say: "We don't care if the Dominicans assassinate Trujillo, that is all right. But we don't want anything to pin this on us." Nothing ever did. When Trujillo's killers shot him two weeks later, the smoking gun might or might not have been the agency's. There were no fingerprints. But the assassination was as close as the CIA had ever come to carrying out a murder at the command of the White House.

The attorney general of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, jotted down some notes after he learned of the assassination. "The great problem now," he wrote, "is that we don't know what to do."

"I WAS ASHAMED OF MY COUNTRY"

As the CIA catapulted toward the invasion of Cuba, "the thing started to steamroller and get out of control," said Jake Esterline. Bissell was the driving force. He forged on, refusing to acknowledge that the CIA could not topple Castro, blinding himself to the fact that the secrecy of the operation had been blown long ago.

On March 11, Bissell went to the White House with four separate plots on paper. None satisfied President Kennedy. He gave the chief of the clandestine service three days to come up with something better. Bissell's brainstorm was his choice of a new landing zone--three broad beaches at the Bay of Pigs. The site satisfied a new political requirement from the administration: the Cuban invaders had to capture an airstrip upon landing, to establish a political beachhead for a new Cuban government.

Bissell assured the president that this operation would succeed. The worst that could happen was that the CIA's rebels would confront Castro's forces on the beaches and march on into the mountains. But the terrain at the Bay of Pigs was an impassible tangle of mangrove roots and mud. No one in Washington knew that. The crude survey maps in the CIA's possession suggesting that the swampland would serve as guerrilla country had been drawn in 1895.

The following week, the CIA's Mafia contacts took a swipe at killing Castro. They gave poison pills and thousands of dollars to one of the CIA's most prominent Cubans, Tony Varona. (Described by Esterline as "a scoundrel, a cheat, and a thief," Varona later met President Kennedy at the White House.) Varona managed to hand off the vial of poison to a restaurant worker in Havana, who was to slip it into Castro's ice cream cone. Cuban intelligence officers later found the vial in an icebox, frozen to the coils.

By spring, the president still had not approved a plan of attack. He did not understand how the invasion would work. On Wednesday, April 5, he met again with Dulles and Bissell, but could not make sense of their strategy. On Thursday, April 6, he asked them if their planned bombing of Castro's small air force would eliminate the invaders' element of surprise. No one had an answer.

On Saturday night, April 8, Richard Bissell answered the insistent ring of his home phone. Jake Esterline was calling from Quarters Eye, the CIA's Washington war room, saying he and Colonel Hawkins, his paramilitary planner, needed to see Bissell alone as soon as possible. Sunday morning, Bissell opened his front door to find Esterline and Hawkins in a state of barely controlled rage. They marched into his living room, sat down, and told him that the invasion of Cuba had to be called off.

It was too late to stop now, Bissell told them; the coup against Castro was set to begin in a week. Esterline and Hawkins threatened to resign. Bissell questioned their loyalty and patriotism. They wavered.

"If you don't want a disaster, we absolutely must take out all of Castro's air force," Esterline told Bissell, not for the first time. All three knew that Castro's thirty-six combat aircraft were capable of killing hundreds of the CIA's Cubans as they went ashore. Trust me, said Bissell. He promised to persuade President Kennedy to wipe out Castro's air force. "He talked us into continuing," Esterline recalled bitterly. "He said, 'I promise you that there will be no reductions of air raids.'"

But at the crucial hour, Bissell cut the American force sent to destroy Castro's aircraft in half, from sixteen to eight bombers. He did it to please the president, who wanted a quiet coup. Bissell deceived him into believing the CIA would deliver one.

On Saturday, April 15, eight American B-26 bombers struck three Cuban airfields as the CIA's brigade of 1,511 men headed for the Bay of Pigs. Five Cuban aircraft were destroyed and perhaps a dozen more damaged. Half of Castro's air force remained. The CIA's cover story was that the attacker was a sole Cuban air force defector who had landed in Florida. That day, Bissell sent Tracy Barnes to New York to peddle the tale to the American ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson.

Bissell and Barnes played Stevenson for a fool, as if he were their agent. Like Secretary of State Colin Powell on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Stevenson sold the CIA's story to the world. Unlike Powell, he discovered the next day that he had been had.

The knowledge that Stevenson was caught lying in public riveted Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who already had good reason to be enraged with the CIA. Only hours before, on the heels of another blown operation, Rusk had to send a formal letter of apology to Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore. The secret police in Singapore had burst into a CIA safe house, where a cabinet minister on the CIA's payroll was being interrogated. Lee Kwan Yew, a key American ally, said that the station chief offered him a $3.3 million bribe to hush up the matter.

At 6 p.m. on Sunday, April 16, Stevenson cabled Rusk from New York to warn of the "gravest risk of another U-2 disaster in such uncoordinated action." At 9:30 p.m. the president's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, called Dulles's deputy director, General Charles Pearre Cabell. Bundy said the CIA could not launch air strikes on Cuba unless "they could be conducted from a strip within the beachhead" at the Bay of Pigs. At 10:15 p.m., Cabell and Bissell rushed to the elegant seventh-floor offices of the secretary of state. Rusk told them the CIA's planes could go into battle to protect the beachhead, but not to attack Cuban airfields or harbors or radio stations. "He asked if I should like to speak to the President," Cabell wrote. "Mr. Bissell and I were impressed with the extremely delicate situation with Ambassador Stevenson and the United Nations and the risk to the entire political position of the United States"--a situation created by Bissell and Barnes's lies--and so "we saw no point in my speaking personally to the President." Trapped by his own cover stories, Bissell chose not to fight. In his memoirs, he attributed his silence to cowardice.

When Cabell returned to the CIA's war room to report what had happened, Jake Esterline seriously considered killing him with his own hands. The agency was going to leave its Cubans to die "like sitting ducks on that damn beach," Esterline said.

Cabell's cancellation order caught the CIA's pilots in Nicaragua in their cockpits, revving their engines. At 4:30 a.m. on Monday, April 17, Cabell called Rusk at home and pleaded for presidential authority for more air power to protect the CIA's ships, which were loaded to the gunwales with ammunition and military supplies. Rusk called President Kennedy at his Virginia retreat, Glen Ora, and put Cabell on the phone.

The president said he was unaware that there were going to be any air strikes on the morning of D-Day. Request denied.

Four hours later, a Sea Fury fighter-bomber swooped down on the Bay of Pigs. The American-trained pilot, Captain Enrique Carreras, was the ace of Fidel Castro's air force. He took aim at the Rio Escondido, a rust-bucket freighter out of New Orleans under contract to the CIA. Below him to the southeast, aboard the Blagar, a converted World War II landing craft, a CIA paramilitary officer named Grayston Lynch fired at the Cuban fighter with a defective .50-caliber machine gun. Captain Carreras let loose a rocket that hit the forward deck of the Rio Escondido six feet below the railing, striking dozens of fifty-five-gallon drums filled with aviation gasoline. The fire ignited three thousand gallons of aircraft fuel and 145 tons of ammunition in the forward hold. The crew abandoned ship and started swimming for their lives. The freighter exploded in a fireball that sent a mushroom cloud rising half a mile high above the Bay of Pigs. From sixteen miles away, on a beach newly littered with the brigade's dead and wounded, the CIA commando Rip Robertson thought Castro had dropped an atomic bomb.

President Kennedy called on Admiral Arleigh Burke, the commander of the U.S. Navy, to save the CIA from disaster. "Nobody knew what to do nor did the CIA who were running the operation and who were wholly responsible for the operation know what to do or what was happening," the admiral said on April 18. "We have been kept pretty ignorant of this and have just been told partial truths."

For two miserable days and nights, Castro's Cubans and the CIA's Cubans killed one another. On the night of April 18, the commander of the rebel brigade, Pepe San Roman, radioed back to Lynch: "Do you people realize how desperate the situation is? Do you back us up or quit?...Please don't desert us. Am out of tank and bazooka ammo. Tanks will hit me at dawn. I will not be evacuated. Will fight to the end if we have to." Morning came and no help arrived. "We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help. We cannot hold," San Roman shouted through his radio. His men were massacred standing knee-deep in the water.

"Situation for air support beachhead completely out of our hands," the agency's air operations chief told Bissell in a cable at noon. "Have now lost 5 Cuban pilots, 6 co-pilots, 2 American pilots, and one copilot." In all, four American pilots on contract to the CIA from the Alabama National Guard were killed in combat. For years the agency hid the cause of their deaths from their widows and families.

"Still have faith," said the air operation chief's cable. "Awaiting your guidance." Bissell had none to offer. At about two in the afternoon on April 19, San Roman cursed the CIA, shot his radio, and gave up the fight. In sixty hours, 1,189 members of the Cuban brigade had been captured and 114 killed.

"For the first time in my thirty-seven years," Grayston Lynch wrote, "I was ashamed of my country."

That same day, Robert Kennedy sent a prophetic note to his brother. "The time has come for a showdown, for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse," he wrote. "If we don't want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it."

"TAKE THE BUCKET OF SLOP AND PUT ANOTHER
COVER OVER IT"

President Kennedy told two of his aides that Allen Dulles had reassured him face-to-face in the Oval Office that the Bay of Pigs would be a sure-fire success: "Mr. President, I stood right here at Ike's desk and told him I was certain that our Guatemalan operation would succeed, and Mr. President, the prospects for this plan are even better than they were for that one." If so, it was an astonishing lie. Dulles in fact had told Eisenhower that the CIA's chances in Guatemala were one in five at best--and zero without air power.

At the hour of the invasion, Allen Dulles was making a speech in Puerto Rico. His public departure from Washington had been part of a deception plan, but now it looked like an admiral abandoning ship. Upon his return, Bobby Kennedy recounted, he looked like living death, his face buried in his trembling hands.

On April 22, the president convened the National Security Council, an instrument of government he had disdained. After ordering the distraught Dulles to start "stepping up coverage of Castro activities in the United States"--a task outside the CIA's charter--the president told General Maxwell Taylor, the new White House military adviser, to work with Dulles, Bobby Kennedy, and Admiral Arleigh Burke to perform an autopsy on the Bay of Pigs. The Taylor board of inquiry met that same afternoon, with Dulles clutching a copy of NSC 5412/2, the 1955 authorization for the covert operations of the CIA.

"I'm first to recognize that I don't think that the CIA should run paramilitary operations," Dulles told the board--a puff of smoke obscuring his decade of unblinking support for such operations. "I think, however, that rather than destroying everything and starting all over, we ought to take what's good in what we have, get rid of those things that are really beyond the competence of the CIA, then pull the thing together and make it more effective. We should look over the 5412 papers and revise them in such a manner that paramilitary operations are handled in some other way. It's not going to be easy to find a place to put them; it's very difficult to keep things secret."

The Taylor board's work soon made it clear to the president that he needed a new way of running covert operations. One of the last witnesses before the board was a dying man who spoke with a grave clarity on the deepest problems confronting the CIA. The testimony of General Walter Bedell Smith resounds with chilling authority today:

QUESTION: How can we in a democracy use all our assets effectively without having to completely reorganize the Government?

GENERAL SMITH: A democracy cannot wage war. When you go to war, you pass a law giving extraordinary powers to the President. The people of the country assume when the emergency is over, the rights and powers that were temporarily delegated to the Chief Executive will be returned to the states, counties and to the people.

QUESTION : We often say that we are in a state of war at the present time.

GENERAL SMITH : Yes, sir, that is correct.

QUESTION : Are you suggesting that we should approximate the President's wartime powers?

GENERAL SMITH : No. However, the American people do not feel that they are at war at the present time, and consequently they are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to wage war. When you are at war, cold war if you like, you must have an amoral agency which can operate secretly.... I think that so much publicity has been given to CIA that the covert work might have to be put under another roof.

QUESTION : Do you think we should take the covert operations from CIA?

GENERAL SMITH : It's time we take the bucket of slop and put another cover over it.

Three months later, Walter Bedell Smith died at age sixty-five.

The CIA's inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, ran his own postmortem on the Bay of Pigs. He concluded that Dulles and Bissell had failed to keep two presidents and two administrations accurately and realistically informed about the operation. If the CIA wanted to stay in business, Kirkpatrick said, it would have to drastically improve its organization and management. Dulles's deputy, General Cabell, warned him that if the report fell into unfriendly hands, it would destroy the agency. Dulles wholeheartedly agreed. He saw to it that the report was buried. Nineteen of the twenty printed copies were recalled and destroyed. The one that survived was locked away for almost forty years.

In September 1961, Allen Dulles retired as director of central intelligence. Workers were still putting the finishing touches on the grand new CIA headquarters he had fought for years to build in the Virginia woodlands above the west bank of the Potomac River, seven miles from the edge of the capital. He had commissioned an inscription from the Gospel of John to be engraved in its central lobby: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free." A medallion in his image was hung in the same soaring space. "Si monumentum requiris circumspice," it reads: If you seek his monument, look around you.

Richard Bissell stayed on another six months. He later confessed in secret testimony that the vaunted expertise of his clandestine service was a facade--it was "not the place where one would expect to look for professional competence." When he left, the president pinned the National Security Medal on his lapel. "Mr. Bissell's high purpose, unbounded energy, and unswerving devotion to duty are benchmarks of the intelligence service," he said. "He leaves an enduring legacy."

Part of that legacy was a broken confidence. For the next nineteen years, no president would place his full faith and trust in the Central Intelligence Agency.

"YOU ARE NOW LIVING ON THE BULL'S EYE"

In his wrath after the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy first wanted to destroy the CIA. Then he took the agency's clandestine service out of its death spiral by handing the controls to his brother. It was one of the least wise decisions of his presidency. Robert F. Kennedy, thirty-five years old, famously ruthless, fascinated with secrecy, took command of the most sensitive covert operations of the United States. The two men unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity. Ike had undertaken 170 major CIA covert operations in eight years. The Kennedys launched 163 major covert operations in less than three.

The president had wanted to make RFK the new director of central intelligence, but his brother thought it best to choose a man who could afford the president political protection after the Bay of Pigs. After casting about for months, they settled on an Eisenhower elder statesman: John McCone.

Almost sixty years old, a deeply conservative California Republican, a devout Roman Catholic, and a fiery anticommunist, McCone would very likely have been secretary of defense had Nixon been elected in 1960. He had made a fortune building ships on the West Coast during World War II, then served as a deputy to Defense Secretary James Forrestal, ham mering out the first budget of the new Department of Defense in 1948. As undersecretary of the air force during the Korean War, he had helped create the first truly global military power of the postwar world. As chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, he had overseen the nation's nuclear-weapons factories and held a seat on the National Security Council. McCone's new covert operations chief, Richard Helms, described him as "straight from central casting in Hollywood," with "white hair, ruddy cheeks, brisk gait, impeccable dark suits, rimless glasses, aloof manner, and unmistakable self-confidence."

The new director was "not a man that people were going to love," said Red White, his chief administrator, but he quickly became "very close with Bobby Kennedy." McCone first bonded with Bobby as a coreligionist and fellow anticommunist. The attorney general's big white clapboard house, Hickory Hill, was only a few hundred yards from the agency's new headquarters, and Kennedy often stopped by the CIA in the morning on his way to work downtown at the Justice Department, dropping in after McCone's daily 8:00 a.m. staff meeting.

McCone left a unique and meticulous daily record of his work, his thoughts, and his conversations, many first declassified in 2003 and 2004. His memoranda provide a moment-to-moment account of his years as director. Along with thousands of pages of conversations secretly recorded by President Kennedy inside the White House, many not accurately transcribed until 2003 and 2004, they detail the most dangerous days of the cold war.

Before his swearing-in, McCone tried to get the big picture of the agency's operations. He toured Europe with Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, went on to a Far East station chiefs' meeting at a mountain retreat north of Manila, and immersed himself in paper.

But Dulles and Bissell left out some details. They never saw fit to tell McCone about the CIA's biggest, longest-lasting, and most illegal program in the United States: the opening of first-class mail coming in and out of the country. From 1952 onward, working at the main postal facility at the international airport in New York City, the CIA's security officers opened letters and Jim Angleton's counterintelligence staff sifted the information. Nor did Dulles and Bissell tell McCone about the CIA's assassination plots against Fidel Castro, temporarily suspended after the Bay of Pigs. Almost two years would pass before the director learned of the murder plans; he never found out about the mail openings until the rest of the nation did.

After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy was persuaded to rebuild the clearinghouses for covert action that he had torn down after his inauguration. The president's foreign intelligence board of advisers was reestablished. The Special Group (later renamed the 303 Committee) was reconstituted to oversee the clandestine service, and its chairman for the next four years would be the national security adviser: cool, clipped, correct McGeorge Bundy of Groton and Yale, the former dean of the arts and sciences at Harvard University. The members were McCone, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and senior deputies from Defense and State. But until very late in the Kennedy administration it was left to the CIA's covert operators to decide whether to consult with the Special Group. There were more than a few operations that McCone and the Special Group knew little or nothing about.

In November 1961, in the greatest secrecy, John and Bobby Kennedy created a new planning cell for covert action, the Special Group (Augmented). It was RFK's outfit, and it had one mission: eliminating Castro. On the night of November 20, nine days before he took the oath of office as director, McCone answered his home telephone and heard the president summoning him to the White House. Arriving the following afternoon, he found the Kennedys in the company of a gangly fifty-three-year-old brigadier general named Ed Lansdale. His specialty was counterinsurgency, and his trademark was winning third-world hearts and minds with American ingenuity, greenback dollars, and snake oil. He had worked for the CIA and the Pentagon since before the Korean War, serving as Frank Wisner's man in Manila and Saigon, where he helped pro-American leaders take power.

Lansdale was introduced as the new chief of operations at the Special Group (Augmented). "The President explained that General Lansdale had been engaging in a study of possible action in Cuba, acting under the direction of the Attorney General, and he, the President, desired an immediate plan of action which could be submitted to him within two weeks," McCone recorded in his CIA files. "The Attorney General expressed grave concern over Cuba, the necessity for immediate dynamic action." McCone told them that the CIA and the rest of the Kennedy administration had been in a state of shock ever since the Bay of Pigs--"and, therefore, were doing very little."

McCone thought nothing short of a shooting war would knock out Castro. And he believed that the CIA was unfit to run a war, secret or not. He told President Kennedy that the agency could not continue to be seen as "a 'cloak and dagger' outfit...designed to overthrow governments, assassinate heads of state, involve itself in political affairs of foreign states." He reminded the president that the CIA had one fundamental responsibility under law--"to assemble all intelligence" gathered by the United States, and then analyze it, evaluate it, and report it to the White House. The Kennedys agreed, in a written order drafted by McCone and signed by the president, that he would be "the Government's principal intelligence officer." His job would be "the proper coordination, correlation, and evaluation of intelligence from all sources."

McCone also believed he had been hired to shape the foreign policy of the United States for the president. This was not, nor should it have been, the role of the nation's chief intelligence officer. But though his judgment often proved sounder than that of the Harvard men at the highest levels of the government, he quickly discovered that the Kennedys had a number of novel ideas about how he and the CIA were to serve American interests. On the day President Kennedy swore him in, he found out that he and RFK and the unctuous General Lansdale were in charge of Castro.

"You are now living on the bull's eye, and I welcome you to that spot," the president told McCone at his swearing-in.

"OUT OF THE QUESTION"

The president asked McCone from the outset to find a way to pierce the Berlin Wall. The wall had been erected--first barbed wire, then concrete--in August 1961. It could have been an enormous political and propaganda windfall for the West, hard evidence that the exorbitant lies of communism no longer served to keep millions of East German citizens from fleeing. It could have been a golden opportunity for the CIA.

The week that the wall went up, Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to Berlin, where he received a top secret briefing from the CIA's base chief, Bill Graver. LBJ gazed upon an impressively detailed chart showing all the CIA's agents in the East.

"I saw this briefing map," said Haviland Smith, then a rising star at the Berlin base. "If you listened to what Graver said, we had agents in the Karlsruhe compound"--the Soviet intelligence center--"agents in the Polish military mission, the Czech military mission--we had East Berlin absolutely penetrated up to the goddamn eyeballs. However, if you knew what we had, you knew that the penetration of the Polish military mission was the guy who sold newspapers on the corner. And you knew that this big penetration of the Soviet military compound was a Dachermeister--a master roofer, who fixed roofs."

"Berlin was a sham," he said. The agency was lying about its achievements to the next president of the United States.

David Murphy, then chief of the CIA's Eastern Europe division, met with President Kennedy at the White House the week after the wall went up. "The Kennedy administration pushed us very hard to persuade us to devise plans for covert paramilitary action and the fomenting of dissidence" in East Germany, he said, but "operations in East Germany were out of the question."

The reason finally emerged in a document declassified in June 2006, a devastating damage assessment drawn up by Dave Murphy himself.

On November 6, 1961, the West German chief of counterintelligence, Heinz Felfe, was arrested by his own security police. Felfe had been a hard-core Nazi who had joined the Gehlen organization in 1951, two years after the CIA took charge of it. He had risen rapidly through its ranks and kept rising after it became the official West German intelligence service, the BND, in 1955.

But Felfe had been working for the Soviets all along. He had penetrated the West German service and, through it, the CIA's station and bases. He was able to manipulate and deceive the CIA's officers in Germany until they had no idea whether the information they had gathered from behind the iron curtain was true or false.

Felfe could "initiate, direct, or halt any BND operations and later some of CIA's," Murphy noted glumly. He had revealed to the East German intelligence service the essential details of every important CIA mission against Moscow from June 1959 to November 1961. These included roughly seventy major covert operations, the identities of more than a hundred CIA officers, and some fifteen thousand secrets.

The agency was all but out of business in Germany and across Eastern Europe. It took a decade to repair the damage.

"THE PRESIDENT WANTS SOME ACTION, RIGHT NOW"

The Berlin Wall--and all else--paled before the Kennedys' desire to avenge the family honor lost at the Bay of Pigs. The overthrow of Castro was "the top priority in the United States Government," Bobby Kennedy told McCone on January 19, 1962. "No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared." But the new director warned him that the agency had little real intelligence on which to proceed. "Of the 27 or 28 agents CIA now has in Cuba, only 12 are in communication and these communications are infrequent," he told the attorney general. Seven of the CIA's Cubans had been captured four weeks before, after infiltrating the island.

On RFK's orders, Lansdale drew up a to-do list for the CIA: recruit and deploy the Catholic Church and the Cuban underworld against Castro, fracture the regime from within, sabotage the economy, subvert the secret police, destroy the crops with biological or chemical warfare, and change the regime before the next congressional elections in November 1962.

"Ed had this aura around him," said Sam Halpern, the new deputy chief of the Cuba desk, an OSS veteran who had known Lansdale for a decade. "Some people believed Ed was a kind of magician. But I'll tell you what he was. He was basically a con man. A Madison Avenue 'Man in the Grey Flannel Suit' con man. You take a look at his proposed plan for getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime. It's utter nonsense." The plan boiled down to an empty promise: to overthrow Castro without sending in the marines.

Halpern said to Richard Helms: "This is a political operation in the city of Washington D.C., and has nothing to do with the security of the United States." He warned that the CIA had no intelligence about Cuba. "We don't know what is going on," he told Helms. "We don't know who is doing what to whom. We haven't got any idea of their order of battle in terms of political organization and structure. Who hates whom? Who loves whom? We have nothing." It was the same problem the CIA would face when it confronted Iraq forty years later.

Helms agreed. The plan was a pipe dream.

The Kennedys did not want to hear that. They wanted swift, silent sabotage to overthrow Castro. "Let's get the hell on with it," the attorney general barked. "The President wants some action, right now." Helms saluted smartly and got the hell on with it. He created a new freestanding task force to report to Ed Lansdale and Robert Kennedy. He assembled a team from all over the world, creating the CIA's largest peacetime intelligence operation to date, with some six hundred CIA officers in and around Miami, almost five thousand CIA contractors, and the third largest navy in the Caribbean, including submarines, patrol boats, coast guard cutters, seaplanes, and Guantanamo Bay for a base. Some "nutty schemes" against Fidel were proposed by the Pentagon and the White House, Helms said. These included blowing up an American ship in Guantanamo Harbor and faking a terrorist attack against an American airliner to justify a new invasion.

The operation needed a code name, and Sam Halpern came up with Mongoose.

"THERE IS NOTHING ON PAPER, OF COURSE"

Helms chose William K. Harvey, the man who had built the Berlin Tunnel, to lead the Mongoose team. Harvey called the project "Task Force W," after William Walker, the American freebooter who led a private army into Central America and proclaimed himself the emperor of Nicaragua in the 1850s. It was a very odd choice--unless you knew Bill Harvey.

Harvey was introduced to the Kennedys as the CIA's James Bond. This seems to have mystified JFK, an avid reader of Ian Fleming's spy romances, for the only thing Bond and Harvey had in common was a taste for martinis. Obese, pop-eyed, always packing a pistol, Harvey drank doubles at lunch and returned to work muttering darkly, cursing the day he met RFK. Bobby Kennedy "wanted fast actions, he wanted fast answers," said McCone's executive assistant, Walt Elder. "Harvey did not have fast actions or fast answers."

But he did have a secret weapon.

The Kennedy White House twice had ordered the CIA to create an assassination squad. Under very close questioning by Senate investigators and a presidential commission in 1975, Richard Bissell said those orders had come from national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and Bundy's aide Walt Rostow, and that the president's men "would not have given such encouragement unless they were confident that it would meet with the president's approval."

Bissell had handed down the order to Bill Harvey, who did as he was told. He had returned to headquarters in September 1959 after a long tour as chief of the Berlin base to command Division D of the clandestine service. The division's officers broke into foreign embassies overseas to steal codebooks and ciphers for the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency. They called themselves the Second-Story Men, and their skills ran from locksmithing to larceny and beyond. The division had contacts with criminals in foreign capitals who could be called on for cat burglaries, the kidnapping of embassy couriers, and assorted felonies in the name of American national security.

In February 1962, Harvey created an "executive action" program, code-named Rifle, and retained the services of a foreign agent, a resident of Luxembourg but a man without a country, who worked on contract for Division D. Harvey intended to use him to kill Fidel Castro.

In April 1962, the CIA's records show, Harvey took a second approach. He met the mobster John Rosselli in New York. He picked up a new batch of poison pills, designed to be dropped into Castro's tea or coffee, from Dr. Edward Gunn, the chief of the operations division of the CIA's Office of Medical Services. Then he drove to Miami and delivered them to Rosselli, along with a U-Haul truck filled with weapons.

On May 7, 1962, the attorney general was briefed in full on the Rifle project by the CIA's general counsel, Lawrence Houston, and the agency's security chief, Sheffield Edwards. RFK was "mad as hell"--not mad about the assassination plot itself, but about the Mafia's role in it. He did nothing to stop the CIA from seeking Castro's death.

Richard Helms, who had taken command of the clandestine service three months before, gave Harvey the go-ahead on Rifle. If the White House wanted a silver bullet, he believed it was the agency's job to try to find it. He thought it best not to tell McCone, correctly judging that the director would have the strongest religious, legal, and political objections.

I once put the question to Helms personally: Did President Kennedy want Castro dead? "There is nothing on paper, of course," he said evenly. "But there is certainly no question in my mind that he did."

Helms thought political assassination in peacetime was a moral aberration. But there were practical considerations as well. "If you become involved in the business of eliminating foreign leaders, and it is considered by governments more frequently than one likes to admit, there is always the question of who comes next," he observed. "If you kill someone else's leaders, why shouldn't they kill yours?"

"A TRUE UNCERTAINTY"

When John McCone took over as director of central intelligence, "CIA was suffering" and "morale was pretty well shattered," he recounted. "My first problem was to try to rebuild confidence."

But CIA headquarters was in an uproar six months into his reign. McCone started firing hundreds of clandestine service officers--aiming first to purge the "accident-prone," the "wife-beaters," and the "alcohol-addicted," noted his deputy director, General Marshall S. Carter. The dismissals, the aftershocks from the Bay of Pigs, and the almost daily beatings from the White House over Cuba were creating "a true uncertainty as to what the future of the Agency may be," McCone's executive director, Lyman Kirkpatrick, told him in a July 26, 1962, memorandum. He suggested that perhaps "something should be done immediately to restore morale in the Agency."

Helms determined that the only cure was a return to the basics of espionage. With some misgivings, he took his best men out of the paralyzed Soviet and Eastern Europe divisions and turned them on Castro's Cuba. He had a handful of officers under his command in Florida who had learned how to run agents and couriers in and out of communist-controlled zones such as East Berlin. The CIA set up a debriefing center in Opa-Locka to interview thousands of people who had left Cuba on commercial airliners and private boats. The center interrogated some 1,300 Cuban refugees; they provided the agency with political, military, and economic intelligence along with documents and the detritus of everyday life--clothes, coins, cigarettes--to help disguise agents infiltrating the island. The Miami station claimed to have forty-five men running information out of Cuba in the summer of 1962. Some arrived in Florida for a ten-day CIA crash course and returned by speedboat under cover of night. The small spy network they built inside Cuba was the sole achievement of the $50 million Mongoose operation.

Bobby Kennedy kept calling in vain for commandos to blow up Cuba's power plants, factories, and sugar mills in secret. "Can CIA actually hope to generate such strikes?" Lansdale asked Harvey. "Why is this now called a possibility?" Harvey replied that it would take two more years and another $100 million to create a force capable of overthrowing Castro.

The CIA was so busy carrying out covert action that it failed to see a threat to the national survival of the United States gathering in Cuba.

18. "WE HAD ALSO
FOOLED OURSELVES"

On Monday, July 30, 1962, John F. Kennedy walked into the Oval Office and switched on the brand-new state-of-the-art taping system he had ordered installed over the weekend. The very first conversation he recorded was a plot to subvert the government of Brazil and oust its president, Joao Goulart.

Kennedy and his ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, discussed spending $8 million to swing the next elections and to prepare the ground for a military coup against Goulart--"to push him out, if necessary," Ambassador Gordon told the president. The CIA station in Brazil would "make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action whatsoever if it's clear that the reason for the military action is--"

"--against the Left," the president said. He would not let Brazil or any other nation in the Western Hemisphere become a second Cuba.

The money started flowing from the CIA into the political life of Brazil. One conduit was the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an arm of the AFL-CIO (British diplomats in the know called it the AFL-CIA). Another was the Institute for Social Research Studies, a newly formed organization of business and civic leaders in Brazil. The recipients were politicians and military officers who opposed President Goulart and who kept in close contact with the new American military attache in Brazil--Vernon Walters, a future deputy director of central intelligence. The return on these investments would be paid in less than two years.

The White House tapes, transcribed in 2001, recorded a daily drumbeat of covert-action plans taking shape in the Oval Office.

On August 8, McCone met the president at the White House to discuss the wisdom of dropping hundreds of Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Mao's China. The president had approved the paramilitary operation. McCone was dubious. Mao had surface-to-air missiles, and the last U-2 flight that the CIA had sent over the Chinese mainland, McCone told the president, had been spotted and tracked by Chinese communist radars twelve minutes after takeoff from Taiwan. "That's humorous," said Kennedy's national-security aide, Michael Forrestal, the son of the late defense secretary. "We'll give the President another U-2 disaster." And what would the cover story be this time? the president joked. Everyone laughed. One month after this meeting, Mao's forces shot down a U-2 over China.

On August 9, Richard Helms went to the White House to discuss the chances for overthrowing Haiti, thirty miles from Cuba. Haiti's dictator, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, had been stealing American economic aid and using American military support to shore up his corrupt regime. The president had authorized a coup. The CIA had given weapons to dissidents who hoped to topple the government by any means necessary. The question of whether Duvalier would be killed had been weighed. McCone had given the go-ahead.

But the CIA was bogged down. "I might say, Mr. President, that the plotting doesn't seem to be very successful," Helms said. He warned that Duvalier's "goon squads" were "a repressive force of no mean substance," which "makes plotting a dangerous business." The CIA's best recruited agent, a former chief of the Haitian coast guard, lacked the will or the wherewithal to carry out the coup. Helms saw scant hope for success. "Another coup really doesn't do any good if you don't have anybody to work with," the president told Helms.

On August 10, John McCone, Robert Kennedy, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met in Secretary of State Dean Rusk's ornate conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department. The subject was Cuba. McCone remembered "a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime," including Castro and his brother Raul, the Cuban defense minister, who had just returned from a weapons-buying trip to Moscow. He found the idea abhorrent. The director saw a greater danger ahead. He predicted that the Soviet Union was going to give Castro nuclear weapons--medium-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States. He had been worrying about that possibility for more than four months. He had no intelligence, nothing to go on save gut instinct.

McCone was the only one who saw the threat clearly. "If I were Khrushchev," he said, "I'd put offensive missiles in Cuba. Then I'd bang my shoe on the desk and say to the United States, 'How do you like looking down the end of a gun barrel for a change? Now, let's talk about Berlin and any other subject that I choose.'" No one seems to have believed him. "The experts unanimously and adamantly agreed that this was beyond the realm of possibility," notes an agency history of McCone's years. "He stood absolutely alone."

There was a growing skepticism about the agency's ability to predict the Soviets' behavior. Its analysts had been consistently wrong for a decade. "The CIA would come in and paint the most scary picture possible about what the Soviets would do to us--we were going to be second-rate; the Soviets were going to be Number One," said former president Gerald R. Ford, who in 1962 sat on the cloistered House subcommittee that provided the CIA's secret budget. "They had charts on the wall, they had figures, and their conclusion was that in ten years, the United States would be behind the Soviet Union in military capability, in economic growth," Ford said. "It was a scary presentation. The facts are they were 180 degrees wrong. These were the best people we had, the CIA's so-called experts."

"THE MOST DANGEROUS AREA IN THE WORLD"

On August 15, McCone returned to the White House to discuss how best to overthrow Cheddi Jagan, the prime minister of British Guiana, a wretched colony in the Caribbean mudflats of South America.

Jagan, an American-educated dentist married to a Marxist from Chicago named Janet Rosenberg, was descended from colonial plantation workers. He was first elected back in 1953. Shortly thereafter, Winston Churchill suspended the colonial constitution, ordered the government dissolved, and threw the Jagans in jail. They were freed after the British restored constitutional government. Jagan was twice re-elected, and he had visited the Oval Office in October 1961.

"I went to see President Kennedy to seek the help of the United States, and to seek his support for our independence from the British," Jagan remembered. "He was very charming and jovial. Now, the United States feared that I would give Guyana to the Russians. I said, 'If this is your fear, fear not.' We will not have a Soviet base."

John F. Kennedy publicly proclaimed--in a November 1961 interview with Khrushchev's son-in-law, the editor of Izvestia--that "the United States supports the idea that every people shall have the right to make a free choice as to the kind of government they want." Cheddi Jagan might be "a Marxist," he said, "but the United States doesn't object, because that choice was made by an honest election, which he won."

But Kennedy decided to use the CIA to depose him. Not long after Jagan left the White House, the cold war heated up in Georgetown, his capital. Previously unheard-of radio stations went on the air. Civil servants walked out. Riots took the lives of more than a hundred people. The labor unions revolted after taking advice and money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which in turn took cash and counsel from the CIA. Arthur Schlesinger, a special assistant and court historian for the Kennedy White House, asked the president: "Does CIA think that they can carry out a really covert operation--i.e., an operation which, whatever suspicions Jagan might have, will leave no visible trace which he can cite before the world, whether he wins or loses, as evidence of U.S. intervention?"

At the White House on August 15, 1962, the president, McCone, and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy decided it was time to bring matters to a head. The president launched a $2 million campaign that eventually drove Jagan from power. President Kennedy later explained to the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan: "Latin America was the most dangerous area in the world. The effect of having a Communist state in British Guiana...would be to create irresistible pressures in the United States to strike militarily against Cuba."

At the same August 15 meeting that sealed Jagan's fate, McCone handed President Kennedy the CIA's new doctrine on counterinsurgency. Along with it came a second document outlining covert operations under way in eleven nations--Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand; Iran and Pakistan; and Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Venezuela. That document was "highly classified because it tells all about the dirty tricks," McCone told the president. "A marvelous collection or dictionary of your crimes," Bundy said, with a laugh.

On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone if the CIA could stage a phony attack on the American military base at Guantanamo Bay as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba. McCone demurred. He told John Kennedy in private the next day that an invasion could be a fatal mistake. He warned the president for the first time that he thought the Soviets might be installing medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. If so, an American sneak attack might set off a nuclear war. He advocated raising a public alarm about the likelihood of a Soviet missile base. The president instantly rejected that idea, but he wondered aloud whether the CIA's guerrillas or American troops would be needed to destroy the missile sites--if they existed. At that point, no one but McCone was convinced that they did.

Their conversation continued in the Oval Office, shortly after 6 p.m. on August 22, when they were joined by Maxwell Taylor, the general Kennedy trusted most. The president wanted to go over two other secret operations before discussing Cuba. The first was the developing plan to drop twenty Chinese Nationalist soldiers into mainland China during the coming week. The second was a plan for the CIA to wiretap members of the Washington press corps.

"How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?" the president asked. Four weeks before, Hanson Baldwin, the national security reporter for The New York Times, had published an article on Soviet efforts to protect intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites with concrete bunkers. Baldwin's highly detailed reporting accurately stated the conclusions of the CIA's most recent national intelligence estimate.

The president told McCone to set up a domestic task force to stop the flow of secrets from the government to the newspapers. The order violated the agency's charter, which specifically prohibits domestic spying. Long before Nixon created his "plumbers" unit of CIA veterans to stop news leaks, Kennedy used the agency to spy on Americans.

"CIA is completely in agreement with...setting up this task force, which would be a continuing investigative group reporting to me," McCone later told the president. The CIA kept watch on Baldwin, four other reporters, and their sources from 1962 to 1965. By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow.

At this same White House meeting, the conversation finally returned to Castro. Thirty-eight Soviet ships had docked in Cuba in the past seven weeks, McCone told the president. Their cargo "might contain missile parts. We do not know." But either way the Soviets were working to build up Cuba's military strength. "Now, that would be separate from the question of whether they are building some missile bases, isn't it?" asked the president. "Well, no," said McCone, "I think the two are related. I think they're doing both."

McCone left Washington the next day for a long honeymoon. A recent widower who had just remarried, he planned to go to Paris and the south of France. "I would be only too happy to have you call for me," he wrote to the president, "and if you do, I would be somewhat relieved of a guilty feeling that seems to possess me."

"PUT IT IN THE BOX AND NAIL IT SHUT"

A U-2 flight passed over Cuba on August 29. Its film was processed overnight. On August 30, a CIA analyst bent over his light table and shouted: I've got a SAM site! It was a surface-to-air missile, an SA-2, the same Soviet weapon that had brought the U-2 down over Russia. That same day, another U-2 was caught straying over Soviet airspace, violating a solemn American vow and prompting a formal protest from Moscow.

The knowledge that Cuba had surface-to-air missiles created "an understandable reluctance or timidity" in the White House about authorizing new flights, McCone said later. JFK ordered General Carter, the acting director of central intelligence during McCone's honeymoon, to deep-six the report on the SAM. "Put it in the box and nail it shut," the president said. He could not afford to let international tensions create a domestic political uproar, not with elections two months away. Then, on September 9, another U-2 was shot down over China. The spy plane and its risks were now regarded, as a CIA report put it, with "universal repugnance, or, at the very least, extreme uneasiness" at the State Department and the Pentagon. A furious McGeorge Bundy, spurred by Dean Rusk and acting in the president's name, canceled the next scheduled U-2 flight over Cuba and summoned James Q. Reber, the CIA veteran in charge of the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance.

"Is there anyone involved in the planning of these missions who wants to start a war?" Bundy asked bluntly.

President Kennedy restricted U-2 flights from passing over Cuban airspace on September 11. Four days later, the first Soviet medium-range missiles docked at Mariel Harbor in Cuba. The photo gap--a blind spot at a decisive moment in history--went on for forty-five days.

McCone, keeping watch on CIA headquarters through incessant cables from the French Riviera, commanded the agency to warn the White House of the "danger of a surprise." It did not. The CIA estimated that there were 10,000 Soviet troops in Cuba. There were 43,000. The agency said Cuban troop strength stood at 100,000. The true number was 275,000. The CIA flatly rejected the possibility that the Soviets were building nuclear sites in Cuba.

"The establishment on Cuban soil of Soviet nuclear striking forces which could be used against the US would be incompatible with Soviet policy," the CIA's top experts concluded in a Special National Intelligence Estimate on September 19. In a classic example of mirror imaging, an uncertain CIA stated: "The Soviets themselves are probably still uncertain about their future military program for Cuba." The estimate stood as a high-water mark of misjudgment for forty years, until the CIA assayed the state of Iraq's arsenal.

McCone alone dissented. On September 20, in the last of his honeymoon cables to headquarters, he urged his agency to think again. The analysts sighed. Then they took another look at a message received at least eight days earlier from a road watcher, a Cuban agent at the lowest rung in the intelligence hierarchy. He had reported that a convoy of seventy-foot Soviet tractor-trailers was moving a mysterious canvas-covered cargo the size of thick telephone poles around the Cuban countryside near the town of San Cristobal. "I never knew his name," the CIA's Sam Halpern said. "This one agent, the only decent result out of Mongoose, this agent told us there's something funny going on.... And after ten days of arguing in front of the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance, it was finally approved to have an overflight."

On October 4, McCone, back in command, raged against the U-2 ban imposed by the White House. There had been no spy flights over Cuba for nearly five weeks. At a Special Group (Augmented) meeting with Bobby Kennedy, "there arose a considerable discussion (with some heat)" as to who had stopped the flights. It was, of course, the president. Bobby Kennedy acknowledged the need for more intelligence on Cuba, but he said the president first and foremost wanted more sabotage: "He urged that 'massive activity' be mounted." He demanded that McCone and Lansdale send agents into Cuba to mine the harbors and kidnap Cuban soldiers for interrogation, an order that led to the final Mongoose mission in October, when some fifty spies and saboteurs were sent to Cuba by submarine at the height of the nuclear crisis.

While American intelligence flailed, ninety-nine Soviet nuclear warheads came into Cuba undetected on October 4. Each one was seventy times more powerful than the bomb that Harry Truman dropped on Hiroshima. With a single act of stealth, the Soviets had doubled the damage they could do to the United States. On October 5, McCone went to the White House to argue that the safety of the nation depended on more U-2 flights over Cuba. Bundy scoffed, saying he was convinced that there was no threat--and if one existed, the CIA could not find it.

"NEAR-TOTAL INTELLIGENCE SURPRISE"

The CIA's discovery of the missiles ten days thereafter has been portrayed as a triumph. Few of the men in power saw it that way at the time.

"The near-total intelligence surprise experienced by the United States with respect to the introduction and deployment of Soviet strategic missiles in Cuba resulted in large part from a malfunction of the analytic process by which intelligence indicators are assessed and reported," the president's foreign intelligence board reported a few months later. The president had been "ill served" by the CIA, which had "failed to get across to key Government officials the most accurate possible picture" of what the Soviets were doing. The board found that "clandestine agent coverage within Cuba was inadequate," and that "full use was not made of aerial photographic surveillance." It concluded: "The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences."

The flaws went uncorrected; the failure to see the true state of the Iraqi arsenal in 2002 played out in much the same way.

But at last, at McCone's insistence, the photo gap was closed. At first light on October 14, a U-2 aircraft, piloted by Air Force Major Richard D. Heyser of the Strategic Air Command, flew over western Cuba, taking 928 photographs in six minutes. Twenty-four hours later, the CIA's analysts gazed upon images of the biggest communist weapons they had ever seen. All day long on October 15, they compared the U-2 shots to photos taken of the Soviet missiles paraded through the streets of Moscow every May Day. They checked manuals of technical specifications supplied over the past year by Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in the Soviet military intelligence service. He had spent four months, starting in the summer of 1960, trying to approach the CIA. But its officers had been too inexperienced, too wary, and too frightened to close the deal. He finally made contact with the British, who worked with him in concert with the CIA in London. At great risk, he had smuggled out some five thousand pages of documents, most of them providing insight into military technology and doctrine. He was a volunteer, and the first Soviet spy of consequence the CIA ever had. Exactly one week after the U-2 photos arrived in Washington, Penkovsky was arrested by Soviet intelligence.

By late afternoon on October 15, the CIA's analysts knew they were looking at SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a one-megaton warhead from western Cuba to Washington. President Kennedy was in New York, campaigning for candidates in the November election, now three weeks away. That night, McGeorge Bundy was at home, holding a farewell dinner for Chip Bohlen, the newly appointed American ambassador to France. At about 10 p.m. the telephone rang. It was Ray Cline, the CIA's deputy director of intelligence. "Those things we've been worrying about--it looks as though we've really got something," Cline said.

Richard Helms brought the U-2 photos to the attorney general's office at 9:15 a.m. on October 16. "Kennedy got up from his desk and stood for a moment staring out the window," Helms remembered. "He turned to face me. 'Shit,' he said loudly, raising both fists to his chest as if he were about to begin shadow boxing. 'Damn it all to hell and back.' These were my sentiments exactly."

Bobby Kennedy thought: "We had been deceived by Khrushchev, but we had also fooled ourselves."

19. "WE'D BE
DELIGHTED TO TRADE
THOSE MISSILES"

The CIA had fooled itself into thinking that the Soviets would never send nuclear weapons to Cuba. Now that it had seen the missiles, it still could not grasp the Soviet mindset. "I can't understand their viewpoint," President Kennedy lamented on October 16. "It's a goddamn mystery to me. I don't know enough about the Soviet Union."

General Marshall Carter was again the acting director; McCone had flown to Seattle for the funeral of his new stepson, killed in a car crash. Carter went to the Special Group (Augmented) meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Situation Room, the underground command post at the White House, carrying new proposals for secret attacks on Cuba commissioned by Robert Kennedy. Carter, who privately compared Kennedy's performances at Mongoose meetings to the gnawing of an enraged rat terrier, listened silently as the attorney general approved eight new acts of sabotage, contingent on the president's go-ahead. Carter then met the CIA's chief photo interpreter, Art Lundahl, and the agency's top missile expert, Sidney Graybeal, upstairs at the White House. The three men brought blown-up U-2 images into the Cabinet Room, where the inner circle of the national-security establishment assembled shortly before noon.

The president flicked on his tape recorder. More than forty years went by before an accurate transcript of the Cuban missile crisis meetings was compiled.

"THAT'D BE GODDAMN DANGEROUS"

The president stared at the pictures. "How far advanced is this?" he asked. "Sir, we've never seen this kind of an installation before," Lundahl said. "Not even in the Soviet Union?" Kennedy said. "No, sir," Lundahl replied. "It's ready to be fired?" asked the president. "No, sir," said Graybeal. "How long have...we can't tell that, can we, how long before they fire?" Kennedy asked. No one knew. Where were the warheads? asked Defense Secretary McNamara. No one knew. Why had Khrushchev done this? wondered the president. No one knew. But Secretary Rusk had a good guess: "We don't really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under ours," he suggested. "Also, we have nuclear weapons nearby, in Turkey and places like that."

The president was only dimly aware that those missiles were in place. He had all but forgotten that he had chosen to keep those weapons pointed at the Soviets.

JFK ordered three strike plans prepared: number one, to destroy the nuclear missile sites with air force or navy jets; number two, to mount a far bigger air strike; number three, to invade and conquer Cuba. "We're certainly going to do number one," he said. "We're going to take out these missiles." The meeting broke up at 1 p.m. after Bobby Kennedy argued for an all-out invasion.

At 2:30 p.m., RFK cracked the lash at the Mongoose team at his enormous office in the Justice Department, demanding new ideas, new missions. Passing on a question posed to him by the president ninety minutes earlier, he asked Helms to tell him how many Cubans would fight for the regime if the United States invaded. No one knew. At 6:30 p.m., the president's men reconvened in the Cabinet Room. Thinking of the Mongoose missions, President Kennedy asked if the MRBMs, the medium-range ballistic missiles, could be destroyed with bullets. Yes, General Carter told him, but these were mobile missiles; they could be moved to new hiding places. The problem of targeting mobile missiles has remained unsolved to this day.

The president now contemplated the question of a nuclear war over Cuba. He began to grasp how little he understood the Soviet leader. "We certainly have been wrong about what he's trying to do," the president said. "Not many of us thought that he was gonna put MRBMs on Cuba." Nobody save John McCone, Bundy muttered. Why had Khrushchev done it? the president asked. "What is the advantage of that? It's just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey," he said. "Now that'd be goddamn dangerous, I would think."

A moment of awkward silence fell. "Well, we did it, Mr. President," said Bundy.

The talk then turned to secret warfare. "We have a list of sabotage options, Mr. President," said Bundy. "...I take it you are in favor of sabotage." He was. Ten teams of five Mongoose agents were authorized to infiltrate Cuba by submarine. Their orders were to blow up Soviet ships with underwater mines in Cuban harbors, to attack three surface-to-air missile sites with machine guns and mortars, and perhaps to go after the nuclear missile launchers. The Kennedys were swinging wildly. The CIA was their blunt instrument.

The president walked out of the meeting, leaving two military options on the table: a sneak attack on Cuba and a full-bore invasion. His parting words were a request to see McCone the next morning before leaving for a campaign trip to Connecticut. General Carter, McNamara, Bundy, and a few others stayed behind.

Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Marshall Carter was sixty-one years old, short, squat, bald, and sharp-tongued. He had been chief of staff of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, under Eisenhower. He knew the nuclear strategies of the United States. Now, with the president out of the room, the CIA man voiced his deepest fear: "You go in there with a surprise attack," Carter said. "You put out all the missiles. This isn't the end; this is the beginning." It would be the first day of World War III.

"THE COURSE WHICH I HAD RECOMMENDED"

The next day, Wednesday, October 17, John McCone and John Kennedy met at 9:30 a.m. "President seemed inclined to act promptly if at all, without warning," McCone noted in his daily memo for the record. The president then asked McCone to drive to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to brief Dwight D. Eisenhower. McCone arrived at noon carrying U-2 photos of the medium-range ballistic missiles. "Eisenhower seemed to lean toward (but did not specifically recommend) military action which would cut off Havana and therefore take over the heart of the government," McCone noted.

The director drove back to Washington and tried to pull together his thoughts. He was weary; he had been to the West Coast and back in less than forty-eight hours. The six single-spaced pages of notes he produced that afternoon were declassified in 2003. They reflect a search for a way to rid Cuba of the missiles without a nuclear war.

Given his background as a master shipbuilder, McCone understood the military, political, and economic power of ships at sea. The notes he drew up included the idea of imposing "an all-out blockade" on Cuba--"the interruption of all incoming shipping," backed up with the threat of an attack. In meetings with Bobby Kennedy, McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy that went on until nearly midnight, he elaborated on the blockade strategy. McCone's notes show that the idea received no evident support from the president's top advisers.

At 11 a.m. on Thursday, October 18, McCone and Art Lundahl went to the White House with new U-2 photos. These showed a new set of bigger missiles, each with a range of 2,200 miles, capable of hitting any major American city save Seattle. McCone said the missile bases were run by Soviet troops; McNamara pointed out that a surprise air strike on the bases would kill several hundred Soviets. Attacking them was an act of war against Moscow, not Havana. Then Undersecretary of State George Ball voiced what the CIA's Marshall Carter had said two nights before: "A course of action where we strike without warning is like Pearl Harbor."

The president said, "The question really is what action we take which lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure.... You have the blockade without any declaration of war. You've got a blockade with a declaration of war. We've got strikes one, two, and three. We've got invasion."

That day, McCone picked up two votes in favor of his argument for a blockade backed with threats of attack. One was Eisenhower's. The other was RFK's. They both had shifted to McCone's stance. They were still in the minority, but they turned the tide. The president told himself, sitting alone in the Oval Office at about midnight, speaking directly to the hidden microphones, that "opinions had obviously switched from the advantages of a first strike." The president called McCone at home on Sunday to say, as the director noted with satisfaction, that "he had made up his mind to pursue the course which I had recommended." The president announced that decision to the world in a televised address on Monday night, October 22.

"I WOULDA BEEN IMPEACHED"

The morning of Tuesday, October 23, began at the White House with a briefing by McCone. Intensely alert to the political damage the director could cause them as the only man in Washington who had accurately forewarned them of the threat, the Kennedys put McCone on spin patrol, briefing members of Congress and columnists. They also wanted him to stiffen the spine of Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who needed to argue the American case at the United Nations.

From the White House, McCone called Ray Cline, his chief intelligence analyst, and told him to fly to New York with copies of the U-2 photographs. Stevenson's team was "in some difficulty putting together a convincing case to the Security Council," McCone explained. "See, they're in a little bad spot because at the time of the Bay of Pigs, why, Stevenson showed some fake pictures and they later turned out to be fake."

President Kennedy's twelve top national-security men then met to talk about how to manage the blockade, set to begin the next morning. It was technically an act of war. McCone reported corridor chatter at the United Nations, relayed by Ray Cline, suggesting that the Soviet vessels en route to Cuba might try to run past the American warships.

"Now what do we do tomorrow morning when these eight vessels continue to sail on?" asked President Kennedy. "We're all clear about how"--a beat of silence, a nervous chuckle--"we handle it?"

No one knew. Another brief silence fell.

"Shoot the rudders off 'em, don't you?" McCone replied.

The meeting broke up. Kennedy signed the quarantine proclamation. He and his brother were then alone for a few minutes in the Cabinet Room.

"Well, it looks like it's gonna be real mean. But on the other hand, there's really no choice," said the president. "If they get mean on this one--Jesus Christ! What are they gonna fuck up next?" His brother said: "There wasn't any choice. I mean, you woulda had a--you woulda been impeached." The president agreed: "I woulda been impeached."

At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 24, the blockade took effect, the American military went on its highest alert short of nuclear war, and McCone began his daily briefing at the White House. The director of central intelligence at last was serving as his charter commanded, bringing all of American intelligence to the president into a single voice. The Soviet army was not on full alert, but it was increasing its readiness, he reported, and the Soviet navy had submarines in the Atlantic trailing the fleet headed for Cuba. New photoreconnaissance showed storage buildings for nuclear warheads, but no sign of the warheads themselves. McCone took pains that day to point out to the president that the blockade would not stop the Soviets from readying the missile launching sites.

McNamara began to lay out his plans for intercepting the Soviet ships and submarines. Then McCone interrupted. "Mr. President, I have a note just handed me.... All six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters...have either stopped or reversed course." Rusk said, "Whaddya mean, 'Cuban waters'?" The president asked, "The ships leaving Cuba or the ones coming in?" McCone got up, said, "I'll find out," and left the room. Rusk muttered: "Makes some difference."

McCone returned with the breaking news that the Soviet ships had been heading for Cuba, more than five hundred miles from the island, but had either stopped or reversed course. This is the moment when Rusk is supposed to have leaned over to Bundy and said: "We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked."

The first part of McCone's strategy was working: the quarantine on Soviet shipping would hold. The second part would be much harder. As he kept reminding the president, the missiles were still there, the warheads were hidden somewhere on the island, and the danger was growing.

At the White House on October 26, Adlai Stevenson said it would take weeks, perhaps months of negotiations to get the missiles out of Cuba. McCone knew there was no time for that. At midday, he took the president aside (Bobby, if present, never spoke) for a private meeting, with only himself and the photo interpreter Art Lundahl, in the Oval Office. New photoreconnaissance showed that the Soviets had introduced short-range battlefield nuclear weapons. Newly camouflaged missile launchers were almost ready to fire. The missile sites each were manned by up to five hundred military personnel and guarded by three hundred more Soviets.

"I'm getting more concerned all the time," McCone told the president. "They could start at dark and have missiles pointing at us the next morning. For that reason, I'm growing increasingly concerned about following a political route."

"What other way?" asked the president. "The alternative course is we could do the air strike or an invasion. We are still gonna face the fact that, if we invade, by the time we get to these sites after a very bloody fight, we will have--they will be pointing at us. So it still comes down to a question of whether they're gonna fire the missiles."

"That's correct," McCone said. The president's mind now swerved from diplomacy to war. "I mean, there's no other action that, other than diplomatic, that we can take, which does not immediately get rid of these," Kennedy said. "The other way is, I would think, a combination of an air raid and probably invasion, which means that we would have to carry out both of those with the prospect that they might be fired."

McCone cautioned against an invasion. "Invading is going to be a much more serious undertaking than most people realize," he told the president. The Russians and the Cubans had "a hell of a lot of equipment.... Very lethal stuff they've got there. Rocket launchers, self-propelled gun carriers, half-tracks.... They'll give an invading force apretty bad time. It would be no cinch by any manner or means."

That night, a long message from Moscow arrived at the White House. The cable took more than six hours to transmit and receive, and it was not complete until 9 p.m. It was a personal letter from Nikita Khrushchev decrying "the catastrophe of thermonuclear war" and proposing--so it seemed--a way out. If the Americans would promise not to invade Cuba, the Soviets would pull out the missiles.

On Saturday, October 27, McCone began the 10 a.m. White House meeting with the grim news that the missiles could be fired in as little as six hours. He had barely concluded his briefing when President Kennedy read a bulletin ripped from the Associated Press news ticker, datelined Moscow: "Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy yesterday he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey." The meeting went into an uproar.

No one bought the idea at first--except the president and McCone.

"Let's not kid ourselves," Kennedy said. "They've got a very good proposal."

McCone agreed: it was specific, serious, and impossible to ignore. The arguments over how to respond dragged on all day, punctuated by moments of terror. First a U-2 strayed into Soviet airspace off the coast of Alaska, prompting Soviet jets to scramble. Then, at about 6 p.m., McNamara suddenly announced that another U-2 had been shot down over Cuba, killing Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson.

The Joint Chiefs now strongly recommended that a full-scale attack on Cuba should begin in thirty-six hours. Around 6:30 p.m., President Kennedy left the room, and the talk immediately became less formal, more brutal.

"The military plan is basically invasion," McNamara said. "When we attack Cuba, we are going to have to attack with an all-out attack," he said. "This is almost certain to lead to an invasion." Or a nuclear war, Bundy muttered. "The Soviet Union may, and I think probably will, attack the Turkish missiles," McNamara continued. Then the United States would have to attack Soviet ships or bases in the Black Sea.

"And I would say that it is damn dangerous," said the secretary of defense. "Now, I'm not sure we can avoid anything like that if we attack Cuba. But I think we should make every effort to avoid it. And one way to avoid it is to defuse the Turkish missiles before we attack Cuba," McNamara said.

McCone exploded: "I don't see why you don't make the trade then!" And the ground shifted.

Other voices shouted out: Make the trade! Make the trade then! His anger rising, McCone went on: "We've talked about this, and we'd say we'd be delighted to trade those missiles in Turkey for the thing in Cuba." He pressed his point home. "I'd trade these Turkish things out right now. I wouldn't even talk to anybody about it. We sat for a week and there was--everybody was in favor of doing it"--until Khrushchev proposed it.

The president returned to the Cabinet Room at about 7:30 p.m., and suggested everyone take a dinner break. Then, in the Oval Office, he and his brother spoke with McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, and four other trusted aides. McCone was excluded. They discussed his idea, which was what the president wanted. Everyone in the room was sworn to secrecy. Bobby Kennedy left the White House and met with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in his office at the Justice Department. He told Dobrynin that the United States accepted the quid pro quo on the missiles, provided it was never made public. The Kennedys could not be seen to be cutting a deal with Khrushchev. The attorney general deliberately falsified his memo of the meeting, deleting a drafted reference to the trade. The swap was kept a deep secret. John McCone said a quarter century later: "President Kennedy and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy insisted that they at no time discussed the missiles [in] Turkey with any representatives of the Soviets and that there was no such deal ever made."

For many years thereafter, the world believed that only President Kennedy's calm resolve and his brother's steely commitment to a peaceable resolution had saved the nation from a nuclear war. McCone's central role in the Cuban missile crisis was obscured for the rest of the twentieth century.

The Kennedys soon turned against McCone. The director let it be known throughout Washington that he had been the sole sentinel on the Cuban missiles; he testified to the president's foreign intelligence board that he had told the president about his hunch back on August 22. The gist of the board's report on the "photo gap" appeared in The Washington Post on March 4, 1963. That day, Bobby Kennedy told his brother that the CIA must have leaked the information to wound him.

"Yeah," said the president, "he's a real bastard, that John McCone."

"TO ELIMINATE FIDEL, BY EXECUTION IF NECESSARY"

At the height of the missile crisis, McCone had tried to put a leash on Mongoose and focus its considerable energies on gathering intelligence for the Pentagon. He thought he had succeeded. But the CIA's Bill Harvey concluded that the United States was about to invade Cuba and ordered his Mongoose saboteurs to attack.

When Bobby Kennedy, who had pushed the hardest for the Mongoose missions, found out about that dangerous failure of command, he went into a rage. After a screaming match, Harvey was banished from Washington. Helms sent him to Rome as chief of station--though not before the FBI took note of a drunken farewell meal Harvey had with Johnny Rosselli, the Mafia hit man he had hired to kill Castro. In Rome, the hard-drinking Harvey became unhinged, driving his men as Bobby Kennedy had driven him.

Helms replaced him as the man in charge of Cuba with his Far East chief, Desmond FitzGerald, a Harvard man and a millionaire who lived in a red-brick Georgetown mansion with a butler in the pantry and a Jaguar in the garage. The president liked him; he fit the James Bond image. He had been hired out of his New York law firm by Frank Wisner at the start of the Korean War and instantly made executive officer of the Far East division of the clandestine service. He had helped run the disastrous Li Mi operation in Burma. Then he commanded the CIA's China Mission, which sent foreign agents to their deaths until 1955, when a headquarters review deemed the mission a waste of time, money, energy, and human life. FitzGerald then rose to deputy chief of the Far East, where he helped to plan and execute the Indonesian operation in 1957 and 1958. As Far East division chief, he presided over the rapid expansion of the CIA's operations in Vietnam, Laos, and Tibet.

Now the Kennedys ordered him to blow up Cuban mines, mills, power plants, and commercial ships, to destroy the enemy in hopes of creating a counterrevolution. The objective, as Bobby Kennedy told FitzGerald in April 1963, was to oust Castro in eighteen months--before the next presidential election. Twenty-five Cuban agents of the CIA died on those futile operations.

Then, in the summer and fall of 1963, FitzGerald led the final mission to kill Fidel Castro.

The CIA planned to use Rolando Cubela, its best-placed agent inside Cuba's government, as the hit man. A high-strung, loose-lipped, violent man who detested Castro, Cubela had held the rank of major in the Cuban army, served as its military attache in Spain, and traveled widely. On August 1, 1963, in a conversation with a CIA officer in Helsinki, he volunteered "to eliminate Fidel, by execution if necessary." On September 5, he met with his CIA case officer, Nestor Sanchez, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he was representing the Cuban government at the international Collegiate Games. On September 7, the CIA duly noted that Castro had chosen a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana to deliver a long tirade to a reporter for the Associated Press. Castro said that "United States leaders would be in danger if they helped in any attempt to do away with Cuban leaders.... If they are aiding terrorist plots to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe."

Sanchez and Cubela met again in Paris in early October, and the Cuban agent told the CIA officer that he wanted a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight. On October 29, 1963, FitzGerald took a plane to Paris and met Cubela in a CIA safe house.

FitzGerald said that he was a personal emissary sent by Robert Kennedy, which was dangerously close to the truth, and that the CIA would deliver Cubela the weapons of his choosing. The United States, he said, wanted "a real coup" in Cuba.

20. "HEY, BOSS, WE
DID A GOOD JOB,
DIDN'T WE?"

Alone in the Oval Office on Monday, November 4, 1963, John F. Kennedy dictated a memo about a maelstrom he had set in motion half a world away--the assassination of an American ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

"We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it," JFK said. He stopped for a moment to play with his children as they ran in and out of the room. Then he resumed. "The way he was killed"--and he paused again--"made it particularly abhorrent."

The CIA's Lucien Conein was Kennedy's spy among the mutinous generals who murdered Diem. "I was part and parcel of the whole conspiracy," Conein said in an extraordinary testament years later.

His nickname was Black Luigi, and he had the panache of a Corsican gangster. Conein had joined the OSS, trained with the British, and parachuted behind French lines. In 1945, he flew to Indochina to fight the Japanese; he was in Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh, and for a moment they were allies. He stayed on to become a charter member of the CIA.

In 1954, he was one of the first American intelligence officers in Vietnam. After Ho defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam was partitioned into North and South at an international conference in Geneva, where the United States was represented by Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith.

For the next nine years, the United States backed President Diem as the man to fight communism in Vietnam. Conein served under the command of Ed Lansdale at the CIA's new Saigon Military Mission. Lansdale had "a very broad charter," said the CIA's Rufus Phillips. "It was literally, 'Ed, do what you can to save South Vietnam.'"

Conein went to North Vietnam on sabotage missions, destroying trains and buses, contaminating fuel and oil, organizing two hundred Vietnamese commandos trained by the CIA, and burying weapons in the cemeteries of Hanoi. He then returned to Saigon to help shore up President Diem, a mystic Catholic in a Buddhist country whom the CIA provided with millions of dollars, a phalanx of bodyguards, and a direct line to Allen Dulles. The agency created South Vietnam's political parties, trained its secret police, made its popular movies, and printed and peddled an astrological magazine predicting that the stars were in Diem's favor. It was building a nation from the ground up.

"THE IGNORANCE AND THE ARROGANCE"

In 1959, the peasant soldiers of North Vietnam began to carve the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the jungles of Laos; the footpaths were filled with guerrillas and spies heading for South Vietnam.

Laos, a preindustrial lotus land, became "a flashpoint where the U.S. saw its interests being challenged by the communist world," said John Gunther Dean, then a young State Department officer at the American embassy in Vientiane. The CIA set to work buying a new Lao government and building a guerrilla army to fight the communists and attack the trail. The North Vietnamese reacted by stepping up their attempts to infiltrate the country and train the local communists, the Pathet Lao.

The architect of the American political strategy in Laos was the CIA station chief, Henry Hecksher, a veteran of the Berlin base and the Guatemala coup. Hecksher began to build a network of American control by using junior diplomats as bagmen. "One day, Hecksher asked me whether I could take a suitcase to the Prime Minister," Dean remembered. "The suitcase contained money."

The cash made the leaders of Laos "realize that the real power at the Embassy was not the Ambassador but the CIA station chief," said Dean, later the American ambassador in Thailand, India, and Cambodia, among other nations. "The Ambassador was supposed to support the Lao Government and basically not rock the boat. Henry Hecksher was committed to opposing the neutralist Prime Minister--and perhaps bring about his downfall. That is what happened."

The CIA forced out a freely elected coalition government and installed a new prime minister, Prince Souvanna Phouma. The prime minister's case officer was Campbell James, an heir to a railroad fortune who dressed, acted, and thought like a nineteenth-century British grenadier. Eight years out of Yale, he saw himself as a viceroy in Laos, and lived accordingly. James made friends and bought influence among the leaders of Laos at a private gambling club he created; its centerpiece was a roulette wheel borrowed from John Gunther Dean.

The real battle for Laos began after the CIA's Bill Lair, who ran a jungle warfare training school for Thai commandos, discovered a Lao mountain tribesman named Vang Pao, a general in the Royal Lao Army who led the hill tribe that called itself the Hmong. In December 1960, Lair told the Far East division chief Desmond FitzGerald about his new recruit. "Vang Pao had said: 'We can't live with the communists,'" Lair reported. "'You give us the weapons, and we'll fight the communists.'" The next morning, at the CIA station, FitzGerald told Lair to write up a proposal. "It was an 18-page cable," Lair remembered. "The answer came back in a very short time.... That was the real go-ahead."

In early January 1961, in the final days of the Eisenhower administration, the CIA's pilots delivered their first weapons to the Hmong. Six months later, more than nine thousand hill tribesmen controlled by Vang Pao joined three hundred Thai commandos trained by Lair for combat operations against the communists. The CIA sent guns, money, radios, and airplanes to the Lao military in the capital and the tribal leaders in the mountains. Their most urgent mission was to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Hanoi had now proclaimed a National Liberation Front in the south. That year, four thousand South Vietnamese officials died at the hands of the Vietcong.

A few months after President Kennedy took power, the fates of Laos and South Vietnam were seen as one. Kennedy did not want to send American combat troops to die in those jungles. Instead, he called on the CIA to double its tribal forces in Laos and "make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnam" with its Asian recruits.

The Americans sent to Laos during the Kennedy years did not know the tribal name of the Hmong. They called them the Meo, an epithet somewhere between "barbarian" and "nigger." One of those young men was Dick Holm. Looking back, he rued "the ignorance and the arrogance of Americans arriving in Southeast Asia.... We had only minimal understanding of the history, culture, and politics of the people we wanted to aid.... Our strategic interests were superimposed onto a region where our president had decided to 'draw the line' against communism. And we would do it our way."

At CIA headquarters, "the activists were all for a war in Laos," said Robert Amory, Jr., the deputy director for intelligence. "They thought that was a great place to have a war."

"WE HARVESTED A LOT OF LIES"

The Americans sent to Vietnam had an equally profound ignorance of the country's history and culture. But the CIA's officers saw themselves as the point men in the global war on communism.

They had the run of Saigon. "They were under covers as varied as film and drama producers and industrial salesmen; they were trainers, weapons experts, merchants," said Ambassador Leonardo Neher, then a State Department officer in Saigon. "They had unbelievable funds.... They were having the time of their lives. They had everything they wanted."

What they lacked was intelligence about the enemy. That was the responsibility of William E. Colby, the station chief in Saigon from 1959 to 1961, soon to be chief of the Far East division of the clandestine service.

Colby, who had fought behind enemy lines as an OSS commando, did as he had done in World War II. He started an operation called Project Tiger to parachute some 250 South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam. After two years, 217 of them were recorded as killed, missing, or suspected of being double agents. A final report listed the fate of fifty-two teams of agents, each team as large as seventeen commandos:

"Captured soon after landing."

"Hanoi Radio announced capture."

"Team destroyed."

"Team believed under North Vietnam control."

"Captured soon after landing."

"Doubled, played, terminated." That last phrase suggests that the United States discovered that a commando team was secretly working for North Vietnam and then hunted and killed its members. The reason for the failure of the missions eluded the CIA until after the cold war, when one of Colby's cohorts, Captain Do Van Tien, the deputy chief for Project Tiger, revealed that he had been a spy for Hanoi all along.

"We harvested a lot of lies," said Robert Barbour, the deputy chief of the American embassy's political section. "Some of them we knew were lies. Some of them we didn't."

In October 1961, President Kennedy sent General Maxwell Taylor to assess the situation. "South Vietnam is now undergoing an acute crisis of confidence," Taylor warned in a top secret report to the president. The United States had to "demonstrate by deeds--not merely words--the American commitment seriously to help save Vietnam." He wrote: "To be persuasive this commitment must include the sending to Vietnam of some U.S. military forces." That was a very deep secret.

To win the war, General Taylor continued, the United States needed more spies. In a secret annex to the report, the CIA's deputy station chief in Saigon, David Smith, said that a key battle would be fought within the government of South Vietnam. He said Americans had to infiltrate the Saigon government, influence it, "speed up the processes of decision and action" within it--and, if necessary, change it.

That job went to Lucien Conein.

"NOBODY LIKED DIEM"

Conein started working with President Diem's half-mad brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, to establish the Strategic Hamlets program, which herded peasants from their villages into armed camps as a defense against communist subversion. Wearing the uniform of a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Conein burrowed deep into the decaying military and political culture of South Vietnam.

"I was able to go to every province, I was able to talk to unit commanders," he said. "Some of these people I had known for many years; some I had known even back in World War Two. Some of them were in powerful positions." His contacts soon became the best the agency had in Vietnam. But there was so much he did not know.

On May 7, 1963, the eve of the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha, Conein flew to Hue, where he found a large military entourage whose presence he did not understand. He was encouraged to leave on the next plane. "I wanted to stay," he remembered. "I wanted to see the celebration of the birthday of Buddha. I wanted to see the boats with the candles lit going down the perfumed river, but it was not to be." The next morning Diem's soldiers attacked and killed members of a Buddhist entourage in Hue.

"Diem had been out of touch with reality," Conein said. Diem's blue-uniformed scouts modeled on the Hitler Youth, his CIA-trained special forces, and his secret police aimed to create a Catholic regime in a Buddhist nation. By oppressing the monks, Diem had made them a powerful political force. Their protests against the government grew for the next five weeks. On June 11, a sixty-six-year-old monk named Quang Duc sat down and set himself ablaze in a Saigon intersection. The pictures of the immolation went around the world. All that was left of him was his heart. Now Diem began raiding the pagodas, killing monks and women and children to sustain his power.

"Nobody liked Diem," Bobby Kennedy said not long thereafter. "But how to get rid of him and get somebody who would continue the war, not split the country in two and, therefore, lose not only the war but the country--that was the great problem."

In late June and early July 1963, President Kennedy began to talk in private about getting rid of Diem. If it were to be done well, it had best be done in secret. The president began the change of regime by nominating a new American ambassador: the imperious Henry Cabot Lodge, a political rival he had twice defeated, once in the race for senator from Massachusetts and once as Richard Nixon's running mate. Lodge was happy to accept the job, once assured he would be provided with a viceroy's powers in Saigon.

On the Fourth of July, Lucien Conein received a message from General Tran Van Don, the acting chief of the joint staff of the army of South Vietnam, a man he had known for eighteen years. Meet me at the Caravelle Hotel, the message said. That night, in the smoky, jam-packed basement nightclub at the hotel, General Don confided that the military was preparing to move against Diem.

"What will be the American reaction if we go all the way?" Don asked Conein.

On August 23, John F. Kennedy gave his answer.

He was alone on a rainy Saturday night in Hyannis Port, on crutches for his aching back, grieving for his stillborn son Patrick, buried two weeks before. Shortly after 9 p.m., the president took a call from his national-security aide Michael Forrestal, and without preamble approved an eyes-only cable for the newly arrived Ambassador Lodge, drafted by Roger Hilsman at the State Department. "We must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved," it told Lodge, and it urged him to "make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem's replacement." The secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence had not been consulted. All three were dubious about a coup against Diem.

"I should not have given my consent to it," the president told himself after the consequences became clear. Yet the order went forward.

Hilsman told Helms that the president had ordered Diem ousted. Helms handed the assignment to Bill Colby, the new chief of the CIA's Far East division. Colby passed it on to John Richardson, his choice to replace him as the station chief in Saigon: "In circumstance believe CIA must fully accept directives of policy makers and seek ways to accomplish objectives they seek," he instructed Richardson--though the order "appears to be throwing away bird in hand before we have adequately identified birds in bush, or songs they may sing."

On August 29, his sixth day in Saigon, Lodge cabled Washington: "We are launched on a course from which there is no turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government." At the White House, Helms listened as the president received that message, approved it, and ordered Lodge to make sure above all that the American role in the coup--Conein's role--would be concealed.

The ambassador resented the agency's exalted status in Saigon. He wrote in his private journal: "CIA has more money; bigger houses than diplomats; bigger salaries; more weapons; more modern equipment." He was jealous of the powers held by John Richardson, and he scoffed at the caution the station chief displayed about Conein's central role in the coup plotting. Lodge decided he wanted a new station chief.

So he burned Richardson--"exposed him, and gave his name publicly to the newspapers," as Bobby Kennedy said in a classified oral history eight months later--by feeding a coldly calculated leak to a journeyman reporter passing through Saigon. The story was a hot scoop. Identifying Richardson by name--an unprecedented breach of security--it said he had "frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought with him from Washington, because the Agency disagreed with it.... One high official here, a man who has devoted most of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it." The New York Times and The Washington Post picked up the story. Richardson, his career ruined, left Saigon four days later; after a decent interval, Ambassador Lodge moved into his house.

"We were fortunate when Richardson was recalled," said Conein's old friend, General Don. "Had he been there, he could have put our plan in great jeopardy."

"A COMPLETE LACK OF INTELLIGENCE"

Lucien Conein went to meet General Duong Van Minh, known as "Big Minh," at the Joint General Staff Headquarters in Saigon on October 5. He reported that the general raised the issue of assassination and the question of American support for a new junta. Dave Smith, the new acting station chief, recommended that "we do not set ourselves irrevocably against the assassination plot"--music to Ambassador Lodge's ears, anathema to McCone's.

McCone commanded Smith to stop "stimulating, or approving, or supporting assassination," and he rushed to the Oval Office. Careful to avoid using words that could link the White House to a murder, he later testified, he chose a sports analogy: Mr. President, if I were the manager of a baseball team, and I had only one pitcher, I'd keep him on the mound whether he was a good pitcher or not. On October 17, at a meeting of the Special Group, and in a one-on-one with the president four days later, McCone said that ever since Lodge's arrival in August, American foreign policy in Vietnam had been based on "a complete lack of intelligence" on the politics of Saigon. The situation developing around Conein was "exceedingly dangerous," he said, and it threatened "absolute disaster for the United States."

The American ambassador reassured the White House. "I believe that our involvement to date through Conein is still within the realm of plausible denial," he reported. "We should not thwart a coup for two reasons. First, it seems at least an even bet that the next government would not bungle and stumble as much as the present one has. Secondly, it is extremely unwise in the long range for us to pour cold water on attempts at a coup.... We should remember that this is the only way in which the people in Vietnam can possibly get a change of government."

The White House cabled careful instructions for Conein. Find out the generals' plans, don't encourage them, keep a low profile. Too late: the line between espionage and covert action already had been crossed. Conein was far too famous to work undercover; "I had a very high profile in Vietnam," he said. Everyone who mattered knew exactly who he was and what he represented. They had faith that the CIA's point man spoke for America.

Conein met with General Don on the night of October 24 and learned that the coup was no more than ten days away. They met again on October 28. Don later wrote that Conein "offered us money and weapons, but I turned him down, saying that we still need only courage and conviction."

Conein carefully conveyed the message that the United States opposed assassination. The reaction of the generals, he testified, was: "You don't like it like that? Well, we'll do it our own way anyhow.... You don't like it, we won't talk about it anymore." He did not discourage them. If he had, he said, "I would then be cut off and blinded."

Conein reported back to Lodge that the coup was imminent. The ambassador sent the CIA's Rufus Phillips to see Diem. They sat in the palace and talked of war and politics. Then "Diem looked at me quizzically and said, 'Is there going to be a coup against me?'" Phillips remembered.

"I looked at him and just wanted to cry, and said, 'I am afraid so, Mr. President.' That was all we said about that."

"WHO GAVE THOSE ORDERS?"

The coup struck on November 1. It was noon in Saigon, midnight in Washington. Summoned at home by an emissary from General Don, Conein changed into his uniform and called Rufus Phillips to watch over his wife and infant children. Then he grabbed a .38-caliber revolver and a satchel with about $70,000 in CIA funds, hopped into his jeep, and rushed through the streets of Saigon to the Joint General Staff headquarters of the army of South Vietnam. The streets were filled with gunfire. The leaders of the coup had closed the airport, cut the city's telephone lines, stormed central police headquarters, seized the government radio station, and attacked the centers of political power.

Conein filed his first report shortly after 2 p.m. Saigon time. He stayed in contact with the CIA station over his jeep's secure communications link, describing shellings and bombings and troop movements and political maneuvers as they took place. The station relayed his reports to the White House and the State Department through encoded cables. It was as near to real-time intelligence as could be achieved in that day.

"Conein at JGS HQS/ from Gens Big Minh and Don and eyewitness observation," came the first flash cable. "Gens attempting contact Palace by telephone but unable to do so. Their proposition as follows: If the President will resign immediately, they will guarantee his safety and the safe departure of the President and Ngo Dinh Nhu. If the President refuses these terms, the Palace will be attacked within the hour."

Conein sent a second message a little more than an hour later: there would be "no discussion with the President. He will either say yes or no and that is the end of the conversation." General Don and his allies called President Diem shortly before 4 p.m. and asked him to surrender. They offered him sanctuary and a safe passage from the country. He refused. The president of South Vietnam then called the American ambassador. "What is the attitude of the United States?" Diem asked. Lodge said he had no idea. "It is 4:30 a.m. in Washington," he replied, "and the U.S. government cannot possibly have a view." Lodge then said, "I have a report that those in charge of the current activity offer you and your brother safe conduct out of the country. Have you heard this?"

"No," Diem lied. Then he paused, perhaps realizing that Lodge was in on the plot against him. "You have my telephone number," he said, and the conversation came to an end. Three hours later he and his brother fled to a safe house owned by a Chinese merchant who had financed Diem's private spy network in Saigon. The villa was equipped with a phone line hooked to the presidential palace, preserving the illusion that he remained at the seat of power. The battle went on all night; close to a hundred Vietnamese died as the rebels stormed the presidential palace.

At about 6 a.m., Diem telephoned General Big Minh. The president said he was ready to resign, and the general guaranteed his safety. Diem said he would be waiting at the Saint Francis Xavier church in the Chinese quarter of Saigon. The general sent an armored personnel carrier to fetch Diem and his brother, ordered his personal bodyguard to lead the convoy, and then raised two fingers on his right hand. It was a signal: kill them both.

General Don ordered his troops to clean up his headquarters, to bring in a large green-felt-covered table, and to prepare for a news conference. "Get the hell out," the general said to his friend Conein, "we're bringing in the press." Conein went home, only to be summoned by Lodge. "I went to the Embassy and I was informed that I had to find Diem," he said. "I was tired and fed up, and I said, 'Who gave those orders?' They let me know that those orders came from the President of the United States."

At about 10 a.m., Conein drove back to General Staff headquarters and confronted the first general he met. "Big Minh told me they committed suicide. I looked at him and said, where? He said they were in the Catholic Church in Cholon, and they committed suicide," Conein said in his classified testimony to the Senate committee investigating the assassination twelve years later.

"I think I lost my cool at that point," Conein said. He was thinking of mortal sin and his eternal soul.

"I told Big Minh, look, you're a Buddhist, I'm a Catholic. If they committed suicide at that church and the priest holds Mass tonight, that story won't hold water. I said, where are they? He said they are at the General Staff headquarters, behind the General Staff headquarters, did I want to see them? And I said no. He said, why not? And I said, well, if by chance one in a million of the people believe you that they committed suicide in church and I see that they have not committed suicide and I know differently, I am in trouble."

Conein returned to the American embassy to report that President Diem was dead. He did not report the whole truth. "Informed by Viet counterparts that suicide committed en route from city," he cabled. At 2:50 a.m. Washington time came a reply signed in Dean Rusk's name: "News of Diem, Nhu suicide shocking here...important to establish publicly beyond question that deaths actually suicide if this true."

On Saturday, November 2, 1963, at 9:35 a.m., the president convened an off-the-record meeting at the White House with his brother, McCone, Rusk, McNamara, and General Taylor. Before long, Michael Forrestal ran in with a flash from Saigon. General Taylor recounted that the president leaped to his feet and "rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before."

At 6:31 p.m., McGeorge Bundy cabled Lodge, with eyes-only copies to McCone, McNamara, and Rusk: "Deaths of Diem and Nhu, whatever their failings, has caused shock here and there is danger that standing and reputation of incoming government may be significantly damaged if conviction spreads of their assassination at direction of one or more senior members of incoming regime.... They should not be left under illusion that political assassination is easily accepted here."

Jim Rosenthal was the duty officer at the American embassy in Saigon on that Saturday. Ambassador Lodge sent him down to the front door to receive some important visitors. "I'll never forget the sight," he said. "This car pulled up to the Embassy, and the cameras were grinding away. Conein hops out of the front seat, opens the back door, and salutes, and these guys come out. As if he was delivering them to the Embassy, which he was. I just went up with them in the elevator, and Lodge greeted them.... Here were the guys who had just carried out a coup, killed the chief of state, and then they walk up to the Embassy, as if to say, 'Hey, boss, we did a good job, didn't we?'"