All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Read online

  It was from Butler that I learned all about Operation Mongoose and the Agency’s secret war against Castro. In lifting the CIA’s veil of secrecy, Harmon Butler gave us an account of sabotage, espionage and outright acts of war, all committed in a concerted effort to topple the Castro regime. Butler boasted of the thousands of guns, along with ammo, successfully smuggled into Cuba to help rebel groups and guerrillas. He told of the contaminations of sugar exports bound for Europe and the Soviet Union; the bombings of power plants and copper mines by cover operatives; the counterfeiting of the Cuban peso; the spreading of anti-Castro propaganda from one end of the island to the other, along with a network of spies informing them of everything happening on the island just 90 miles south of Key West. Butler called it counterinsurgency, and it had gone on for three years. Mongoose or JM/WAVE as it was code-named, had employed over 700 Americans and 3,000 Cubans; cost over $50,000,000 a year, and so far had conducted over 2,000 missions, all run out of the Florida CIA station.

  “We’ve been doing the hard work of steadily chopping away at the trunk,” Butler said when he was done giving us the rundown of the operation, “and it’s only a short matter of time until the tree of Castroism crashes to the ground for the world to see. And all those pinko college professors and professional malcontents who can’t love The Beard enough can go fuck themselves.” It was said in the tone of a man inordinately proud of his work.

  We had not been allowed to tape Mr. Butler, I had made a request to do so and it had been refused by the Attorney General himself on the grounds that only CIA personnel could record other Agency people, so Colonel Gillison and the rest of my group had been busy making notes while Agent Butler spoke. When it was done, I was quite pleased with their work because Butler made a point of not repeating anything, even when politely requested to do so. Another thing he did when he was finished was to make a call from the phone on my desk; when the other line was picked up, Butler said, “I need you to let them know where things stand,” and handed me the receiver. The man on the other end of the line was Miami Station Chief William Harvey, Butler’s boss, who told me that if I had any doubts as to what his assistant had conveyed to us concerning Operation Mongoose, “I can confirm that every damn word of it is true; can you confirm that every damn word you heard will stay within those four walls?” I answered in the affirmative, and Mr. Harvey thanked me and hung up.

  As he was about to take his leave of us, Butler offered his unrequested opinion: “If this operation goes south, it won’t be the fault of the men in the field, it’ll be because of the cowards in this city, safe behind their desks.”

  I let his remark pass; I’ll put my experience in Korea up against anything this Company man had been through. The next time I saw Harmon Butler, it was years later, and he was on TV sweating through his testimony before Inouye Committee.

  Butler’s revelations about Operation Mongoose did not impress me; for all their time, trouble and expenditure of treasure, they men running Mongoose had accomplished not much from what I could tell. More than one NSC report from independent sources on the state of affairs in Cuba had come across my desk, and there was little in them to suggested the Cuban people were about to rise up and overthrow the regime anytime soon. After our encounter with Harmon Butler, I decided the people running Mongoose had started believing their own bullshit, always a bad sign.

  Because of my opinion as to the worth of Operation Mongoose, I nevertheless had to choose my words well in my next conversation with the Attorney General, who was, after all, running the whole show out of his office in the Justice Department. “Quite impressive,” I told him when asked about Butler’s revelations, “and it sounds like you’ve got the right men for the job, Sir.”

  “I agree, Colonel Maddox, “he replied, “and the time is rapidly coming when we will have to integrate our covert operations with our military responses when it comes to Cuba. You will be a big part of it, Colonel, a big part of it.”

  That is where things stood in the first week of the New Year; my group had just spent a month in preparation for a crisis yet to arrive; it had been a crash course of briefings and the dumping of highly sensitive intelligence in our laps, but things had proceeded at a deliberate pace, without a sense of critical urgency. The events in Dallas had clearly put in motion a chain of events which could lead to a most violent outcome, namely another superpower showdown with the Soviet Union; looking back, I believed it would never come to such an end, reasonable men would find a way to resolve this thing before it came to the worst case scenario. That all the hard work of my group was just an exercise of “just in case.”

  Yet in the wider world beyond my office in the basement of the White House, there was a real sense of crisis and had been since November 22nd; how could it not be when there were so many unanswered questions concerning Lee Harvey Oswald and the men in the shadows with whom he had conspired to assassinate the President; all the major news magazines - Time, Newsweek, Life, Look, US News and World Report - had cover stories the entire month of December concerning Oswald and the aftermath of his botched crime in Dallas. Everyone was busy trying to tie together the strands of a spider web stretching from Texas down to Mexico and then across the Gulf to Cuba.

  Through all of this the Kennedy White House had nothing to say on the investigation, that any response would come only “at a suitable time.”

  If the White House had decided to take its time responding to the disclosures out of Dallas, others did not feel the need for the same restraint: Senator Fulbright of Arkansas, the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, went on Meet the Press and said that the President had the right to use whatever appropriate action was necessary to remove Castro immediately and he was ready to introduce the appropriate legislation in Congress saying as much. Furthermore, he added, “I was for settling this problem militarily back in October of ’62, but other council was listened to, and that was not the course of action taken. Look what it got us.”

  In his speech on January 16th, announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President, Senator Barry Goldwater said, “It has become apparent to every American that a lawless and murderous dictatorship sits not 90 miles offshore, a Communist dictatorship which has attempted to strike at the heart of America, we must not waste time with meetings to decide what ‘proper response’ is required, we must strike back at them with the full fury they deserve, and if the boys in the Kremlin don’t like it, too damn bad.” His audience in the Phoenix auditorium broke into thunderous applause upon hearing these words.

  His rival for the nomination, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York made a speech in New Hampshire, where he was campaigning to win the state’s March primary, stating that Castro needed to be put in the bull’s eye as soon as possible, “…and let him see how he likes it.”

  The columnist Joseph Alsop wrote that the Cuban dictator should be considered nothing more than a common criminal, no different than Al Capone when he ordered the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and should be dealt with accordingly. The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune called for a total blockade of Cuba until Castro was forced to flee into exile in the Soviet Union.

  There were others who took a more wary approach: The New York Times ran an editorial asking if a world crisis more perilous than the showdown with Russia over the missiles in Cuba was in the offing; Herblock drew a cartoon for the Washington Post showing a string of firecrackers with the fuse lit - a small bomb was labeled Cuba, while the huge one at the end of the string had Soviet Union on it; the hand holding the match which lit the fuse was simply marked “Dallas.” More than a few public commentators were drawing comparison to recent events with the outbreak of World War I by likening the shooting in Texas with what happened in Sarajevo almost 50 years before.

  From the situation reports we were seeing, that was the attitude being taken in Havana, where preparations for an invasion had begun in December, including the digging of machine gun nests and the installation of
artillery batteries on the beaches. Day and night, the state controlled radio ominously warned the populace how the “slanderous Yankee Imperialists” were plotting to destroy the Revolution with any and every means at their disposal.

  The investigation in Texas wasn’t completed until the last Tuesday in the month. That’s when the FBI, Dallas PD, and the Texas State Attorney General all signed off on the report which was made public on the same day.

  I got the gist of it in my basement office when I read one of the first stories to come over the wire a little after 1:00 p.m.; I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until halfway down the second page, that’s when I read the details about Oswald’s trip to Mexico City at the end of the previous September (ostensibly to get a visa) and it hit me exactly how huge a piece of political dynamite this document was going to be. They had interviewed over 125 different men and women, from the guys who picked up the trash on the streets of Big D to Governor Connally himself, including every last person who had come in contact with Lee Harvey Oswald going back to forever. It asserted that Oswald was acting at the behest of operatives of the Cuban Intelligence service when he fired those shots at Kennedy on November 22nd, a fact not only established by the discovery of the incriminating contents of that bus terminal locker, but by the accounts of E. Howard Hunt, the temporary CIA station chief in Mexico City during the fall and by a Leon Ortiz, an aide to the Ambassador at the Cuban Embassy who had defected in late December. Together, they documented how during the last days of September and the first of October, Oswald had been in the Mexican capital and made contact there with Manual Piniero, the head of Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence, along with two Mexican nationals in his employ, Armando Vargas and Hector Bermudez, who frequently traveled to the United States to spy on anti-Castro activists under the guise of buyers for a company that serviced and repaired air conditioners south of the border. Men matching their descriptions, but using assumed names had been sighted in Dallas in the two weeks prior to the assassination attempt; more to the point, these two had crossed into Mexico at Laredo on the morning of November 23rd and from there made their way to the capital and made a brief appearance at the Cuban embassy. They had not been seen since. It was assumed Vargas and Bermudez, along with an associate, Roberto Lopez, had flown out of Mexico City sometime the next day, when two more unscheduled flights to Havana occurred.

  The Oswald in this report was quite the slick character, a former United States Marine and sometime defector to the Soviet Union; a man who publicly espoused pro-Castro sentiments, and then tried to infiltrate at least one of the numerous anti Castro groups while staying in New Orleans. This was corroborated by Guy Bannister, a retired FBI agent and active member of the anti-Castro Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front and backed up by fellow members David Ferrie, an airline pilot and Sergio Aracha Smith, a former official in the Batista regime, all of whom stated that Oswald had approached them about joining their group. They realized he was a double agent after catching him red handed handing out pro-Castro leaflets on the street. Oswald was promptly told where he and his leaflets could go; apparently when he couldn’t cut it as a spy, his Cuban handlers made better use of his skills as a marksman.

  There was a hell of a lot of holes in this narrative, like exactly when did Oswald and Cuban Intelligence first get together? Why did he want to get a visa from the Cuban Embassy when he was plotting to kill Kennedy at the same time? How was he planning to get out of Dallas after committing the crime of the century? And who dropped the dime, and ratted out the whole conspiracy just in time to save John F. Kennedy’s life?

  All questions to which answers would have to wait until the guilty parties were apprehended. That is where the rub came, for the men who could provide those answers were now sitting on a beach in Cuba, sipping on rum and cokes.

  The end result of all this was the issuing of Federal and State arrest warrants for Armando Vargas, Hector Bermudez and Gilberto Lopez on suspicion of conspiracy to commit homicide against one John F. Kennedy, President of the United States of America.

  By the end of the afternoon, 25 Senators, both Republicans and Democrats, had made public statements calling for an ultimatum to be issued, demanding Castro turn over the three men immediately or face an aerial bombardment which would reduce the Cuban military to a ruin not seen since what was meted out to the Germans and Japanese. Walter Cronkite used the word “crisis” in his opening remarks on The CBS evening network news.

  “The shit hits the fan - yet again.” That was how Colonel Gillison summed up the day’s news. “Get used to it.”

  There was no reaction from the White House except to say that the President would make a statement the next day. I was ordered to be in the Attorney General’s office in the Justice Department in the afternoon. This would be my first time in Robert Kennedy’s office; nobody had to tell me another big shoe was about to drop.

  Shortly past noon that Wednesday in January, the President - flanked by his brother and Secretary of State Rusk - stood in the press room and before a worldwide audience and stated that, “The time has come for the Cuban government to come clean; members of its Intelligence Directorate have been caught red-handed conspiring to conduct criminal and terrorist acts on American soil and no amount of blustering and posturing can deny it. The three men, whom arrest warrants were issued for yesterday, are believed to have been given sanctuary on the island, their presence there an indictment of the Castro regime. It shall be the policy of this government to pursue all available avenues in the quest to see justice done. It would be in the interest of Havana to forthrightly end this matter right now.” The President refused to answer any questions, neither did the Attorney General and the Secretary of State.

  I was prompt and on time to my meeting in Robert Kennedy’s office two hours later; there were three others already inside when I arrived. The Attorney General rose from his desk and introduced to me Enrique Ruiz-Williams (who was always referred to as “Harry”) and Manuel Artime; the other man, wearing a United States Army officer’s uniform, was Lt. Colonel Alexander Haig, an aide to the Secretary of the Army. After the introductions, from which I learned that the two civilian were veterans of the Bay of Pigs debacle, men who had been on the beach and done time in Castro’s prisons before being ransomed by the Kennedy Administration. After only a few minutes in the Attorney General’s office, I understood that I was in the presence of two of the toughest sons of bitches I was ever likely to meet, and I say this as a Marine Corp officer; Harry Williams was permanently crippled because his body had been riddled with more than 70 pieces of shrapnel, which had smashed his feet, ripped a hole in his neck and another one much too close to his heart, and that was before both he and Artime enjoyed the hospitality of the Beard‘s prison.

  Like I said, I went into this meeting prepared to hear another big shoe drop - that does not begin to describe what I learned from Harry Williams and Manuel Artime; in the words of Robert Kennedy that day ”…these gentleman have in their hands the final resolution of the Cuban problem.” For 15 minutes, first Williams and then Artime spoke, describing in detail how for the past year and a half, they had been in contact with some of the highest officials in Castro’s dictatorship, men who had become quite distressed about the course of events in their homeland and where the Revolution they had dedicated their lives to was headed. In short, these men who considered themselves to be true Cuban patriots were now convinced Fidel and Raul Castro were turning their island into a virtual colony, utterly dependent upon the sufferance of the Soviets, whose ever larger military contingent in the country was coming to resemble an occupying force.

  “We fought and bled to give Cuba democracy,” Williams explained, referring to the fight against Batista, when both he and Artime had followed Castro, “and there was nothing worse than to see our victory betrayed and handed over to the Communists. Not everyone who felt this way took up arms like me and Manuel; there are those who stayed at Fidel’s side because they couldn’t bea
r to leave Cuba. But it doesn’t mean they will not act if the time and conditions are right.” This meant something coming from men who knew not only the Castro brothers, but Che Guevara as well.

  Williams told of a visit he received while in Castro’s prison by an old friend and comrade in arms, Commander Juan Almeida, the head of the Cuban armed forces and the third most powerful man in the government; out of this meeting an alliance was formed, one that could now make Almeida the savior of his country, for he was now agreeable to leading a coup against the Castro’s regime if the Kennedy brothers could give him the proper cover. Almeida, Williams explained, was one of those men who considered themselves to be true Cuban patriots who had gone from being disillusioned with Castro to genuinely fearful for the future of his country.

  “Proper cover,” Robert Kennedy said at this point, “is what we are going to give Commander Almeida so that he can stage a coup, depose Castro and resolve the Cuban situation once and for all. Not to mention, hang the bastards responsible for Dallas. And do it all right under the noses of the Soviets.”

  This is when Colonel Haig explained how the Cuban Coordinating Committee, of which he was a member, had helped reconstitute the Cuban resistance after the Bay of Pigs, establishing and supporting bases in Costa Rica and Nicaragua where exiles had been planning for the day the hated dictator is deposed, and they can return to their homeland to back up a new government dedicated to a free Cuba. A return headed by Harry Williams and Manual Aritme, setting the stage for a final act culminating in their victory in a free election. The CCC had involved Cuban specialists from the State Department and all branches of the armed forces to back up the exiles and create a small army, not big enough to take on the Soviet-backed Cuban military one on one, but capable of being a force in the confusion after Castro was deposed.