The Castro Obsession:
U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965
By Don Bohning
(Potomac Books, 307 pages, $29.95)
Don Bohning is an old-fashioned reporter. That doesn’t mean he
is without opinions or biases, and maybe even a prejudice or two.
But it does mean that in his long years as a successful reporter —
mainly for the Miami Herald — Don felt duty-bound to keep
his opinions to himself and to tell the truth as fully, factually,
and responsibly as he could.
He has done just that in this, his first book.
That reporting leads (on page 255) to this chilling, and on the
evidence so impressively amassed by Bohning, incontrovertible
conclusion:
“The legacy of the unsuccessful six-year secret war against
Fidel Castro — a legacy that belongs mostly to the Kennedy
brothers — is not an admirable one. Among the war’s main negative
consequences were the consolidation of Castro’s hold on Cuba,
contributing to the Soviet decision to install offensive missiles
on the island and spawning a cadre of Cuban exile terrorists
perpetrating murder and mayhem far in excess of their relatively
small numbers.”
One might quibble with the tail-end of that assertion — for
many of us, waging a high-risk war against a totalitarian dictator
is pure patriotism, and not terrorism.
But it is the essence of Bohning’s finding that matters: (1)
Castro very likely remains in power today because the Kennedy
brothers became the real-life “foreign devils” he needed to
consolidate his iron grip on power; (2) The most dangerous moment
in Cold War history — the missile crisis of 1962, when the world
tottered at the edge of a nuclear holocaust — was, to a
considerable extent, triggered by the Kremlin’s response to
Kennedy’s “secret war.”
Other authors have made similar assertions, but to the best of
my knowledge, none with such rich and convincing documentation.
Alas, whatever or whose ever the documentation, the American public
remains largely unaware of the U.S. role in either of these
outcomes: Castro’s 46-year reign as the longest-surviving dictator
in hemisphere history (and the only totalitarian in hemisphere
history), and the escalation of events culminating in the
near-apocalypse of October 1962.
Planning to topple Castro began in 1960, the last months of the
Eisenhower Administration. By the time John F. Kennedy took office
on January 20, 1961, those initiatives included payment of $200,000
to the Mafia to assassinate Castro with a lethal pill (two such
attempts were aborted) and plans for an invasion of Cuba by a small
force (1,500 men) of Cuban exiles, then undergoing CIA-led training
in Guatemala.
The story of the Bay of Pigs debacle, in April of 1961, is told
here in dazzling detail. Essentially, it failed because of the
Kennedy Administration’s obsession with “plausible deniability,”
meaning that no matter how transparently an action might be
American, it had to be done in such as way as to enable the White
House to deny American involvement. That proposition, in place the
length of the six-year war, repeatedly ended in politics trumping
strategic thinking. (For example, the highly experienced CIA men
nominally in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation wanted B-25
bombers rather than B-26’s, because they were more flexible and
reliable. The political operatives around Kennedy insisted on
B-26’s. Why? “Because the 26’s were more deniable. They were more
readily available on the open arms market.”)
The death blow was struck when Kennedy — influenced mainly by
the very-dovish Secretary of State Dean Rusk — first reduced the
number of planes from 16 to 6, and then halved the number of planes
in the first, softening-up air strike three days before the
invasion, and then calling off altogether the second strike
scheduled to coincide with the invasion itself. (“Deniability?” I
was among reporters at the Opa-Locka private airport outside Miami
awaiting two of the “clandestine” planes when they returned from
that first raid.)
The day after the ill-stared invasion collapsed — April 20,
1961 — “Bobby Kennedy,” Bohning reports, “was angry.” The young
Attorney General, his Brother’s closest confidante, then took
charge of an all-out campaign to oust Castro from power — dead or
alive. In the aftermath, the CIA put together south of Miami the
largest base in the world outside of its Langley, Virginia
headquarters — a bit odd, considering that the United States was
then, as leader of the Western alliance, locked in a life-and-death
struggle with the Soviet Union.
As mad as Bobby was — and he stayed mad, after his brother’s
assassination and right on into the Lyndon B. Johnson
Administration — the President was at least as mad. Richard
Bissell, the intensively ambitious, brilliant, and very political
head of the CIA’s clandestine branch, would write later, Castro
“had defeated the Kennedy team. They were bitter and would not
tolerate his getting away with it. The president and his brother
were ready to avenge their personal embarrassment by overthrowing
their enemy at any cost.” (Bissell, it should be noted, was
probably the person most responsible for the Bay of Pigs
fiasco.)
Over the next four years, “nutty schemes” — the description was
that of later CIA Director Richard Helms — littered the landscape
of Washington and JMWAVE, the CIA’s Miami frontline command post.
All are richly chronicled in this high-impact book.
Bohning writes not only responsibly, but well. The prose is
clean, crisp, and — not infrequently — phrased to read as a spy
novel. But, he also writes as an honest reporter would.
Don Bohning, you see, is a life-long Democrat, and indeed a
former student and then cohort of one of the great icons of the
liberal left of the Democratic Party, fellow South Dakotan George
McGovern. Not a trace of that partisanship appears in the pages of
this book.
