The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (26 page)

At the same time Rosselli was putting his life on the line off the coast of Cuba, FBI agents back in Chicago were trying to track down his fictive birth records in an effort to deport him as an illegal alien.
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Rosselli was closing in on Castro in the name of national security; Bobby Kennedy was closing in on Rosselli as a matter of national interest. But Rosselli fought on. In addition to the words commonly used to describe him during this period — charming, dapper — the word “patriotic” comes up again and again.
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Johnny Rosselli, who had once signed up with the U.S. Army to fight in World War Two only to be mustered out of the military in 1943 and then tried and imprisoned for extortion, was once again trying to prove that he was a true American.
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It is certain that Bobby was aware of Rosselli’s unusual qualities and far-flung pursuits. The overlap of their activities is extraordinary. Harvey, who was in “intense contact” with Rosselli during this period, reported to the attorney general among others. Brigade exile leaders Pepe San Roman and Enrique Ruiz-Williams, both of whom spoke to Bobby at least once a week, were Rosselli acquaintances.
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Former Eisenhower ambassador (and Flying Tiger cofounder) William D. Pawley, who had become a sort of godfather of Cuban exiles in south Florida, approached Kennedy through aide Richard Goodwin. Pawley wanted to raise money to pay the ransom of the imprisoned Bay of Pigs fighters through the sale of Cuban government bonds.
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It was a venture long on creative quality and short on financial sense, but Kennedy looked at it. One of the major subscribers was Johnny Rosselli.
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Even their mutual dedication to the Catholic Church as well as to civil rights brought Kennedy and Rosselli into indirect contact. Unlike most of his Mafia confreres, Rosselli was a progressive on civil rights and had befriended a Jesuit priest, Father Albert Foley, then chairing the sociology department at Springhill College in Mobile, Alabama. At Rosselli’s urging, Monte Prosser Productions had retained Father Foley to prepare a screen treatment on the true-life story of a priest who traveled from New England to the South during the Civil War. The film was to rally for desegregation.
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Father Foley’s civil rights activism (he served as chairman of the Alabama Advisory Board to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission) came to the attention of journalist Fletcher Knebel, who set up a meeting between the attorney general and the priest.
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There is no record of their conversation, but it would have been news to the attorney general that the man charged with the task of killing Fidel Castro was also active in the cause of desegregation — through a Catholic priest, no less. As different as their backgrounds were, these two men shared a ferocity fortified by religious belief. The difference was, Rosselli was a murderer.

On one occasion Rosselli’s henchmen came close to killing Castro. In September 1961, minutes before Castro was to pass through the intersection of Rancho Boyeros and Santa Catalina Avenues in Havana on his way out of Ciudad Deportiva, four assassins (led by Juan Basigulpe-Hornedo) in two Jeeps armed with bazookas, grenade launchers, and machine guns were arrested. They were parked in a garage on that corner.
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On September 24, the Cuban government announced that it had smashed the so-called Amblood ring. Two of those arrested, Guillermo Caula Ferrer and Higinio Menendez, gave Cuban DGI interrogators the full details about the plot: they had been trained on Guantanamo, the American naval base in Cuba, and communicated with their CIA handlers in Miami via secret writing drops in Quito, Ecuador. They even alleged that the Swiss embassy in Havana had served as a contact point. They were all executed.
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To some CIA professionals, this attempt revealed some inescapable truths about trying to eliminate Castro. First, there were more than one thousand pro-Castro agents in south Florida, including some who were in evident contact with CIA case officers. Nothing JM/WAVE tried to do — whether launching a sustained counterintelligence effort, requiring tens of thousands of hours of interrogation and analysis, or separating covert operations into self contained units insulated from pro-Castro penetration — seemed to work. Additionally, the Cuban exiles were preternaturally talkative and had formed some 300-odd movements, factions, parties, and so on, which only intensified the level of gossip and leaks. “A Cuban is someone who can’t keep his mouth shut,” one American official groused. Justin Gleichauf, chief of the CIA’s Miami field office, held the same opinion. “To a Cuban,” he said, “a secret is something you tell only one hundred people. The Agency and administration were naive in dealing with Cubans. They thought they were dealing with some breed of Europeans where self-discipline is part of the character. The Cubans had no self-discipline. ”
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It was the same old problem: the CIA had no real use and no respect for the Cuban exiles. They were only regarded as instruments for Castro’s destruction. Whatever their effectiveness as covert actors, CIA principals like Bill Harvey, Jim O’Connell, Ted Shackley, Howard Hunt, David Phillips, Rocky Farnsworth, and David Morales all shared the same supercilious attitude toward the Cubans. For this reason, they aligned themselves with the most conservative (and usually corrupt) Cuban leaders — those who had demonstrated their fervent devotion to the American presence during the Batista regime. Thus it was perfectly natural that the poison should pass from O’Connell to Rosselli to Antonio de Varona under the watchful eye of Santos Trafficante.
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The mind-set of the CIA and its criminal confederates was like that of the Bourbons:
Ils n’avaient rien appris mais rien oublié
(They had learned nothing but forgotten nothing). Varona was their type — hot-tempered, corrupt, and, if his nickname
El Tronco de Yucca
(Yucca Trunk) was accurate, dumb. When he failed to get the job done, Rosselli and Morales repaired to ex-president Carlos Prio Socarras (Prio was overthrown by Sergeant Fulgencio Batista in 1952). Prio’s mass larceny of the Cuban treasury was only matched by his largesse with gangsters.
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With neither faith in nor concept of Cuba’s future beyond Fidel, the Americans could only plot to bring back the past.

Peter Wyden, in his account of the Bay of Pigs invasion, called this the “gook syndrome” and asserted that at its base was racism:

The final arrogance, the failure to inform themselves about Castro’s strength and his people’s spirit or even to inform their own infiltration teams, I attribute to the gook syndrome. American policymakers suffer from it constantly. They tend to underestimate grossly the capabilities and determination of people who committed the sin of not having been born American, especially “gooks” whose skins are less than white.
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In the absence of the most elementary understanding of recent Cuban history and politics, Bobby Kennedy filled the void in his own knowledge of Cuba with Lansdale’s counterinsurgency option. “Counterinsurgency,” wrote Kennedy in 1962, “might best be described as social reform under pressure. Any effort that disregards the base of social reform, and becomes preoccupied with gadgets and techniques and force, is doomed to failure.”
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But that is exactly what happened. “Pressure” of the most violent kind took the place of “social reform.” As in Vietnam the capture of hearts and minds (“the allegiance of man,” as Bobby put it) was difficult in war zones where torture, terror, and execution had become the currency of power. The Mafia and the CIA’s cloak-and-dagger types understood this. They also knew that America’s association with the corrupt ancien regime was deep and would be difficult to change.

Bill Harvey was the one who brought this to Kennedy’s attention. At issue was the infiltration into Cuba of trained teams of anti-Castro commandos. In “Lansdaleland,” JM/WAVE would infiltrate 255 Cuban spies by mid-1962 — “an astonishingly unrealistic number,” according to historian David Corn. At one meeting the impatient attorney general demanded to know why JM/WAVE had not infiltrated even a single team. Harvey answered that the Cubans had first to be trained. Kennedy supposedly replied that he would “take them out to my estate and train them.” “What will you teach them, sir?” Harvey asked. “Baby-sitting?” No one in all Washington dared to speak to the president’s brother like this. It must have done Rosselli’s heart good, given the transgressions he thought Bobby Kennedy guilty of, to hear Harvey routinely refer to the attorney general as “that fucker.”
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As was his nature, Bobby formed policy through people. In civil rights, this brought him close to potent and constructive figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph. On Cuba it led him to Generals Lansdale and Taylor, the apostles of counterinsurgency, and to the anti-Castro Cubans, several of whom became devoted to Kennedy. Perhaps it was because his youth, Catholicism, and his vengeful anticommunism matched theirs; or perhaps they saw in him what they desired most from the Americans — a sincerity of allegiance.
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Any number of rank-and-file Cuban operatives on CIA retainers of $150 a month called him at the office or at home with their concerns or demands, and usually they got what they wanted the next day. Other Cuban exile fighters attended receptions, or even spent the night, at Hickory Hill. George Ball thought the practice “completely disruptive to any settled development of policy. But nobody,” he said, “dared question Bobby. He would have your head.”
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Interviewed in 1977, former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy thought that Kennedy’s personal attachment to the Cubans “while it may have energized the covert war also had the effect of continuing it as a matter of human loyalty as opposed to considered policy. My distinct memory is that we [Special Group Augmented] never really believed that the covert actions against Castro had any chance of succeeding. ”
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The Cuban leaders Kennedy grew closest to were Roberto San Roman, Enrique Ruiz-Williams, and, in 1963, Manuel Artime. On at least one occasion, as Bundy suggested, Bobby’s personal relationship with the exile fighters nearly backfired in a major way. After a Cuban exile agent the attorney general had met with in Washington was infiltrated into Cuba, he was captured by Cuban security and reportedly tortured. According to David Corn, Ted Shackley and the principals of JM/WAVE feared that he would confess he had conferred with the president’s brother. The agent was tried by Cuban authorities, confessed to nothing, and was executed. The CIA leadership “let out a collective sigh.”
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There were other instances of Kennedy’s indiscretion. On May 17, 1962, he met with Miguel Aleman, whose father José Aleman Jr. had close ties to Santos Trafficante.
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Beyond Kennedy’s sophomoric dedication to counterinsurgency, the simple fact was that Miami was no longer controlled by Washington. Besides Rosselli’s kill team, Operation 40, a ZR/RIFLE unit created prior to the Bay of Pigs, brought together Cuban mob henchmen like Eladio del Valle and Rolando Masferrer — both Trafficante couriers — soldiers of fortune like Frank Sturgis (Fiorini), and CIA case officers like Colonel William Bishop and David Morales, who managed assassins.
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Sturgis later described them as a “group that would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military [or] the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and, if necessary, some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents. . . .”
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Operation 40’s closest ties were with the violently anti-Castro group Alpha 66, the special charge of the chief of Cuba operations in the Mexico City CIA station, David A. Phillips. This assembly of malignant spirits had by 1962 quickened into a beast beyond the control or even bureaucratic comprehension of its putative handlers in Washington.

The incoherence of the Kennedy administration’s Cuban policy was never more evident than in August of 1962. Despite Bobby’s hectoring, neither the State Department nor the intelligence wing of the CIA believed that Operation Mongoose would bring down Castro. CIA director John McCone, Under Secretary of State Ball, and even the delphic secretary of state Rusk resisted efforts to expand the covert war. At a Cuban task force meeting in Rusk’s office on August 10 (from which Bobby was absent), a new Lansdale proposal for large-scale sabotage raids called “stepped-up Course B” was rejected by the majority of the group. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a close Bobby ally, got up to leave and voiced an opinion that “the only way to take care of Castro is to kill him. I really mean it.”
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Later, Lansdale referred to “the liquidation of leaders” in a memorandum to the group. Harvey described this as “stupidity.”
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Helms agreed with Harvey. Murder should not be advertised in print.

At the next meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) on August 21, Bobby Kennedy was back in action, arguing for more sabotage raids. This time Kennedy and McNamara won the day. New attacks, including one on Cuba’s largest copper mine in Matahambre, were ordered up.
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(Incredibly, either because of appallingly sketchy intelligence from Cuba or complete operational impotence, JM/WAVE was never able to assist the large anti-Castro insurgency in the Escambray Mountains, which by mid-1962 numbered about three thousand men and ultimately caused about $1 billion damage.) Lansdale was soon waxing lyric about a hybrid weed that could be sown throughout Cuba via aerial bombardment. When combined with fire and chemical drops, the invasive weed would starve the Cubans into submission.