RFK files show missile crisis disrupted anti-Castro plots
By James Rosen
Published July 25,
2013
FoxNews.com
By the fall of 1962, President John F. Kennedy and his
brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had spent the better part of a
year orchestrating a massive and multifaceted campaign aimed at toppling Cuban
dictator Fidel Castro from power.
The initiative, code named "Operation Mongoose,"
drew on the brainpower and energies of the U.S.
Suddenly that autumn, however -- and only temporarily -- the
Kennedy brothers were forced to back off.
The intervening event, newly declassified files show, was
the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The new restraint was formalized at a tense gathering of the
Special Group, an elite cadre of policymakers drawn from the ranks of the
National Security Council, on October
26, 1962 . It was the twelfth of the famous "thirteen
days" that saw the world teetering on the edge of nuclear war, after the U.S. Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles on Cuban
soil.
"It was agreed that all plans for dispatch [of saboteurs]
should be suspended," declared a Top Secret memorandum of the session,
adding that "instructions were issued during the course of the meeting
designed to recall the three teams already on the way" to Cuba. "No
major acts of sabotage should be undertaken at this time."
To drive home the point that Operation Mongoose needed to
take a back seat to the more urgent task of defusing the superpower
confrontation, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara chimed in, while Attorney
General Kennedy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other Special
Group members listened carefully. "Mr. McNamara," the memo recorded,
"thought that MONGOOSE in the short-term should be considered in the
context of (a) providing support for action designs to get rid of the missiles,
and (b) support for a possible invasion."
* * *
These deliberations were among the revelations tucked away
in some 7,500 pages of files amassed by the younger Kennedy and withheld from
public view until now. The unsealing of RFK's confidential files on Wednesday,
a half-century after the events they chronicled, drew a handful of researchers
and historians to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston
While an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pages of RFK's files
remain classified -- the documents released by the library were peppered with
redactions and withdrawn items -- those that were unsealed provided fresh
insight into the extraordinary influence that their owner wielded in the
Kennedy White House. They make clear that as the president's brother and a
ruthless practitioner of realpolitik in his own right, RFK exercised power
second only to that of President Kennedy himself, and shaped policy on a broad
range of issues -- from counterinsurgency measures in Vietnam, Latin America and
Iran to the proliferation of what were known, even then, as "weapons of
mass destruction" -- in a manner that far exceeded the typical purview of
the attorney general.
A Top Secret memo distributed to the Special Group in May
1962, for example, appeared to show that Bobby Kennedy virtually predicted the
missile crisis, seven months before aerial reconnaissance photographs first
captured evidence of the Soviets' nuclear aggression.
"At the 22 March meeting," the memo stated,
"Mr. Robert Kennedy asked the Special Group...what would be an appropriate
course of action for the United Sates to take in the event that the Soviets
establish a military base in Cuba
A Pentagon official noted: "Since the Special
Group...has assumed that overt U.S. Cuba
-
Yellowing carbon sheets bearing the usual welter of
classified markings -- as well as the rather unusual imprint of a red rubber
stamp reading MONGOOSE -- show that RFK was also forced, early and often, to
referee disputes among lower-level officials about how Operation Mongoose was
to be prosecuted.
Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, a legendary master of the
dark arts of psychological warfare and covert operations, frequently dashed off
memos to RFK exhibiting frustration at the slow inter-agency pace of Mongoose.
On October 15,
1962 -- one day after the Kennedys learned of the Soviet missiles
on Cuba Lansdale
urged the attorney general to take a tougher line with the intelligence
community. "When the President asks for something, he should get it,"
Lansdale wrote in a memo captioned "Sabotage
Program, Mongoose." "He has asked for action [to overthrow Castro],
yet CIA indicates it has these actions
'under study' or 'in preparation' despite the fact that it has claimed to be
ready to go...I believe you will have to hit CIA
per the head personally."
The next day, Lansdale sent RFK
another Top Secret memo, hoping to prod him to stern action in a Mongoose
meeting scheduled for 2:30 that
afternoon. "You can strike a real blow for action by looking [senior CIA
officials] Dick Helms and Ed Martin in the eye and telling them you are very
dissatisfied with the initiative and the results in this project," the
general wrote. "Lay it directly on them..."
But RFK had already received conflicting counsel from his
own staff. Administrative aide James W. Symington, later a congressman, had
written the attorney general earlier that year to caution him against accepting
Lansdale 's advice wholesale.
"Lansdale 's emotional focus on
Castro's overthrow has obscured his peripheral vision," Symington wrote
Kennedy, in a memo declassified in 2002. "[The] State [Department] will
not support any action which, if leaked, would point to a U.S.
Symington noted that CIA
officials had found "little proof" that Castro was seeking to subvert
other Latin American governments, and added:
"If the genesis of Mongoose was the President's desire to
knock off Castro without counting the cost...then there is no need to 'justify'
the operation in those terms."
* * *
Students of the Vietnam War will find of interest a February
1962 briefing paper that RFK received from Roger Hilsman, then the head of the
State Department's intelligence unit. In "A Strategic Concept for South
Vietnam," first declassified in 2012, Hilsman emphasized that the struggle
against Communism in Southeast Asia could not be won solely by military means,
and lamented that, where basic counterinsurgency doctrine was concerned,
"there is as yet no real understanding of these concepts at the working
level" of the U.S. government.
Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose
regime the U.S. Washington United
States Saigon
in November 1963, a violent episode in which some historians have indeed
suggested the Kennedy administration was complicit.
* *
Within weeks of Diem's death, President Kennedy would be
felled by a sniper's bullet in Dallas November 21, 1963 --
one day before the assassination of the president -- RFK was among a select
group of senior U.S. CIA
Director Richard Helms, in which the latter, recounting a recent trip to Miami
Perhaps the most personal of the documents released in this
batch was a handwritten note that then-CIA
Director John McCone sent to Bobby and Ethel Kennedy two months after the
assassination of President Kennedy.
"Your thoughtfulness...touched me deeply," McCone
wrote on December 23, 1963 ,
"coming at a time when deep sadness so fills your own lives."
"I know how difficult this season is for both of
you," he continued, "and I can say almost nothing to comfort you
except to tell you that the heartbreak that you are experiencing is keenly felt
and shared by your many friends and admirers."
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