All's Fair in a Secret War

Samuel Halpern and the CIA as Praetorian Guard

“In terms of talking about assassination plotting, it gets kind of hairy after a while. It’s hard to know when to stop, and you don’t even know when you start something.”

-Samuel Halpern, 1998

Samuel Halpern had a new mission in 1961: overthrow the government of Cuba by any means necessary. “Where the hell is that?” he asked. Having spent most of his time working for the CIA and its predecessor since 1947 in the Far East Division, Halpern’s knowledge of the region was wanting, to say the least. He was brought into the assignment by Richard Bissell, whose hopes of becoming CIA Director were now dashed with the failed Agency invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Bissell had just come back from the Cabinet Room in the White House, where he was told by John and Robert Kennedy to “get off his ass and get rid of Castro.” Once Halpern learned that Cuba was an island country 90 miles south of Florida, he was ready to begin.

One of the first leaders put in charge of the Cuban operation was Edward Lansdale, who had achieved success with the CIA in electing the President of the Philippines, Ramon Magsaysay, in 1953. He had next turned his efforts to building support for Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam. According to Halpern, “With Diem, he pulled out, because Diem couldn’t stand him anymore. It was counterproductive to keep Ed in Vietnam…He did very well with Magsaysay, no question about that. But we always thought he was kind of a kook.” His standing in Halpern’s eyes only diminished as the two met for a briefing in the same war room that had been used for the Bay of Pigs operation. Lansdale stood and peered at the large map of Cuba on the wall. He pointed to a small island south of Cuba’s mainland. “What’s that?” he asked. He was informed it was the Cuban Isle of Pines. He continued asking some of the officers from the Bay of Pigs operation: “What’s on the island?” He learned it contained Presidio Modelo, a prison where Fidel and his brother Raúl Castro had been held by Fulgencio Batista’s regime from 1953 to 1955. “This was the blind leading the blind,” Halpern admitted, “I was just barely learning where Cuba was myself.” Lansdale suddenly had what he thought was a bright idea: “Whoops, that’s it.” Halpern replied: “Whoops, what’s what, Ed?” Lansdale explained what he had in mind:

“We’ll take the island, we’ll make that our headquarters command post, and we’ll operate off the island to Cuba.”

“Ed, are you serious? You’ve got to have rocks in your head. You couldn’t get within miles of that place, let alone take the island.”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” Lansdale assured him. “We’ll just take it.”

“Ed, you’ve got to get your feet on the ground,” Halpern urged. “It won’t work. You can’t do it.”

“Oh, we did worse things than that in Vietnam and the Philippines.”

While Lansdale was unable to effectuate his island takeover idea, as leader of the military side of the operation, he tasked the CIA with coming up with a name for the government-wide effort. Halpern approached a cryptic reference officer with a request to build some subterfuge into the name: “Give me a cryptonym with a digraph on the other side of the world—away from [Western Hemisphere] Division or Latin America. This is going to get all over the building anyway, let’s confuse them as much as we can for at least five minutes. And when the cryptonym gets all over the world, let’s confuse the Russians for a while, because their penetrations abroad will pick it up faster than we will.” Having worked in the Far East Division, Halpern suggested: “How about Thailand? See what they’ve got in the MO digraphs.” Halpern liked the sound of the name MONGOOSE, which he passed on to Lansdale. “It was an across-the-board, Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department, Commerce Department, Treasury Department—every agency in the government was involved in this one. It was not just simply a CIA operation,” he recalled.

“OK, who do you want, smart guy?” Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms asked Halpern, as the operation required a CIA lead.

“I think we need Des FitzGerald,” Halpern replied, referencing his boss in the Far East Division, for whom he had worked as Executive Officer.

“No, he’s fighting a war in Vietnam, can’t use him,” Helms answered.

“OK, my second choice is Al Ulmer,” then Chief of Station in Paris. Halpern had also previously worked as his Executive Officer in the Far East Division.

“No, can’t spare him.”

Halpern then moved on to his third choice: Tom Karamessines, Chief of Station in Rome. “Nope, can’t spare him,” Helms repeated.

“My fourth choice is Bill Harvey,” Halpern continued. William King Harvey, then responsible for the Foreign Intelligence Staff, Division D, whose work involved electronic surveillance. “I’ll think about it,” Helms responded.

Cuba was deemed a priority by the U.S. government in both funding and focus. In 1960, funding for that fiscal year on Cuba amounted to $13.25 million ($141 million today) and in 1961, spending for CIA operations related to Cuba were four times that of the rest of Latin America combined. Cuba was severed from the Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA and assigned to Task Force W (TFW), of which Halpern was made Executive Assistant to the Task Force Chief in January 1962. Harvey became its first head, despite having no experience in the region. CIA officer Frank Hand was nonetheless impressed with the selection said to Halpern: “Now, Sam, the Agency is showing good sense. They finally put a real top-notch operator in charge.” According to Halpern, “That was the attitude of Bill as a rough tough S.O.B. on the outside. Inside, he was soft as melted butter. A wonderful guy to work for, if you didn’t mind having a loaded gun pointed at you.”

Halpern’s CIA colleague George McManus agreed with his assessment of Lansdale, describing him as a “kook,” “wild man,” and “just plain crazy.” They were stuck with him, in his estimation, since Lansdale was “sponsored by the Kennedys” and “as good soldiers, the CIA had to cooperate.” In early 1962, Lansdale sent the CIA a list of ideas for sabotage he wanted them to implement immediately. McManus called the schemes “unrealistic,” “half-baked,” and “half-ass.” Every morning a new “half-baked scheme” from Lansdale would arrive at the Task Force W’s doorstep. In Lansdale's eyes, the CIA were his “troops and horses” that were to do battle indirectly through agents in Cuba, whereas CIA leadership, including Director John McCone, Helms, and Harvey resented his presence. According to McManus, “Lansdale’s projects simply gave the impression of movement. Although the frenzy of activity gave a whirlwind impression, it was without substance.” Some U.S. government decision makers viewed Lansdale as a mystic, hence why he remained at the helm of the operation: “they must have believed that despite Lansdale’s insane ideas, he had some sort of power to accomplish results or they wouldn’t have kept him.” By the end of the first month in January 1962, Lansdale was pitching an idea called “Operation Bounty,” a “system of financial reward commensurate with position and stature of victim, for killing or delivering alive known Communists in Cuba.” The next month he was proposing an assassination program that included chemical warfare to begin in September: “an attack on the cadre of the regime including key leaders. Gangster elements might provide the best recruitment potential for actions against police—G2 [military intelligence] officials…CW agents should be fully considered.” Lansdale emphasized the need to keep the plan secret: “any inference that this plan exists could place the President of the United States in a most damaging position.”

The committee tasked with overseeing MONGOOSE, the Special Group (Augmented) or SGA, was chaired by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and featured other high-ranking government officials from the State Department, Defense Department, and the White House. In March, Lansdale was pitching the supply of “arms and equipment to deserving Cuban guerrillas.” His memo to the SGA that month promised that agents would be “trained for paramilitary skills as well as intelligence collection…however, the CIA has noted that, once the agents are inside Cuba, they cannot be controlled effectively outside Cuba.” The SGA was also informed that a plan to use biological and chemical warfare to incapacitate Cuban sugar workers was “infeasible and it was cancelled.” In April, McCone urged the SGA to authorize covert action beyond intelligence collection and plans were developed to cause “attrition of the leadership of the [Cuban] government, through bribery and related means.” In May, Harvey briefed the SGA that three infiltration teams were now in place.

“Look, let’s give Jim a present to give to Castro,” McManus proposed one day. In June 1962, lawyer James Donovan began working on an agreement to free the 1,113 prisoners from the Bay of Pigs invasion who were jailed in Cuba at the time. Given that Castro enjoyed scuba diving, it was thought that a poisoned wet suit might “disable him, make him sick.” According to Halpern, by the time they were “discussing it and wondering what the devil to put into the wet suit to make him sick, Jim had already given him the wet suit, so we dropped it.” The CIA proposal had called for a diving suit and breathing apparatus to be contaminated respectively with “Madura foot fungus and tuberculosis bacteria.” By the end of December, Castro had agreed to release the prisoners in exchange for $53 million (worth $552 million today) in food and medicine.

By July 1962, Lansdale pointed to the CIA having “45 Asians in Havana operating” as a sign of progress, as well as the “‘Voice of Cuba’ broadcasts from the U.S. Navy submarine” as being “successful.” In the same month at the SGA, McCone reported that a group led by Cuban exile militant Orlando Bosch had acquired B-26 bombers in Costa Rica and were preparing to “conduct a bombing raid on Cuba.” The SGA group agreed that cables be sent to Latin American embassies and “that any such contemplated raid would be premature at this time. Disassociation of the United States from any such endeavor was to be accomplished by leaking stories of the impending raid to the press.” In August, Lansdale sent a memo to SGA requesting authority “for major sabotage against industry and public utilities” in Cuba.

On August 13, 1962, Lansdale pitched the assassination of Castro in a “stupid memorandum” in Halpern’s view, which referred to options “including liquidation of leaders.” Harvey then did his best to retract the statement, sending his own memo the next day, but in doing so added further evidence in internal documentation that assassination had been discussed: “Upon receipt of the attached memorandum,” Harvey wrote, “I called Lansdale’s office and, in his absence, pointed out to Frank Hand the inadmissibility and stupidity of putting this type of comment in writing in such a document. I advised Frank Hand that, as far as CIA was concerned, we would write no document pertaining to this and would participate in no open meeting discussing it. I strongly urged Hand to recommend to Lansdale that he excise the phrase in question from all copies of this memorandum, including those disseminated to State, Defense, and USIA. Shortly thereafter, Lansdale called back and left the message that he agreed and that he had done so.”

By August 20, sabotage as a tactic was approved to be “employed on selective basis under guidelines” and on August 30, the SGA requested that the CIA submit a list of possible sabotage targets, writing: “The group by reacting to this list could define the limits within which the Agency could operate on its own initiative.” The first target discussed in early September was agriculture: notes from the meeting indicated that “release of chemicals must be avoided unless it could be completely covered up.” The next month at an SGA meeting, Robert F. Kennedy noted that President Kennedy was “dissatisfied with lack of action in the sabotage field.”

Halpern remembered being frustrated with the kinds of questions the CIA received on their sabotage proposals brought forward to the SGA. “Kennedy was awful on minutiae…when we presented plans to them for sabotage operations into Cuba, the questions were, ‘What kind of shoelaces are the men going to wear?’ and ‘what’s the gradient of the beach?’ and ‘what kind of sand is there?’” Halpern thought it was “ridiculous for a man at that level to worry about that kind of stuff.” Some of the CIA’s economic warfare measures that failed included tampering petroleum additives, planned as “subtle sabotage; after being mixed with Soviet petroleum the additives would surely but imperceptibly incapacitate Cuban machinery,” a later CIA study explained. Instead, the “doctored additives proved anything but subtle and the Cubans promptly discovered they were unusable.” A late 1962 operation, described by the CIA’s Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division as “one of the most tightly held of our Cuban activities,” made it to the New York Times in 1965: the article “President Kennedy Balked CIA Plot on Russian Sugar” described how a chemical substance was applied to Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union to damage their relationship. The 14,135 bags of sugar, an unknown quantity of it contaminated to “spoil its taste and usefulness” remained stuck in a U.S. warehouse and never made it to the Soviet Union, sold instead to an unwitting buyer “to pay for storage fees.”

Among the operation team, according to Halperin, there was “concern that the thing might leak...There always was [concern] and this is why it was so tightly held. If you are thinking about using anxiety in terms of morality, no. Because as far as we were concerned, I think most of the guys on the Task Force, we were at war with Cuba. I mean, when you start sending in people to shoot up somebody else’s country and blow up parts of somebody else’s country and they take losses, I mean human losses, and we take human losses, that’s war as far as I am concerned....we were at war. And of course, some people could even call it by today’s terminology, terrorism. International terrorism. We weren’t targeting marketplaces, though, and bus stations and things like that obviously. We were going after industrial plants, power plants, sugar plants. Things like that. But people did get hurt on both sides.”

A team was ultimately sent in to sabotage the Matahambre copper mines inside Cuba. In addition, the SGA approved a plan to contaminate cylinders in trucks and locomotives purchased by Castro from Europe with carbon dust at the time of shipment. McCone reported that the “program met with some success.” He also recounted a plot involving spare parts from Canada to be sabotaged before being shipped to Cuba, likely from the British engineering company Vickers. According to a still-redacted account, multiple companies were approached with the idea of designing defective parts that were “deliberately designed to break down” but company vice-presidents “refused to cooperate; they feared that their companies’ reputations would be ruined if the doctored parts accidentally got into the wrong channels.” The SGA also looked into a “proposal to subsidize Japanese purchases of Dominican sugars so that the Japanese could divert these purchases from Cuba.”

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, which lasted from October 16-28, 1962, Halpern could personally feel the tensions running high: “Things were hot and heavy, and people’s tempers during the missile crisis were very short.” During the intense thirteen days, at one point during the middle of the night at 1:00 a.m. Halpern required money immediately: “I needed all the cash the Agency had in the building to send people out with neutron counters, to find out if the nuclear warheads were coming in.” In speaking to a finance officer, Halpern got nowhere: “poor little guy…couldn’t understand this at all.” He then phoned the head of finance: “If you don’t believe me,” Halpern told him impatiently, “that I’ve got the authority to do this, then you call the Director. But I want that cash down here in jig time, now!” Halpern’s temper was short in this stressful period and the same could be said of others: “nobody was being polite to anybody during those fourteen days, believe me. On any subject. And it was rough.”

The lack of comity extended into the post-mortem sessions on the missile crisis, some of which Halpern attended. Marshall “Pat” Carter, Deputy Director of the CIA since April “was was cut to ribbons by McCone.” Halpern found it difficult to stomach “the way McCone just tongue-lashed him in front of the entire [U.S. Intelligence Board] and all of the hangers-on, including me.” The fallout had to do with the “famous [Special National Intelligence Estimate] which said the Russians have never put missiles abroad, therefore they’ll never do it in Cuba. And McCone, of course, sitting off in Nice knew goddamn right they will.” Every time Carter spoke “he was browbeaten by McCone. Over and over again…it wasn’t polite, gentlemanly language…I don’t remember the exact words, but the feeling I had was, in effect, saying, ‘Well, you dumb ninny, what the hell did you do that kind of thing for?’ you know, that kind of stuff. I cringed, literally cringed, sitting up there. Poor Pat Carter. I would have cringed for anybody being given that kind of treatment.”

Among the issues Halperin learned about during the post-mortem sessions was the fact that it took ten days for photos taken by a U.S. Navy plane of Soviet merchant ships bringing missiles to Cuba to raise an alert and for the U.S. government to act: “So, if you’re sitting in Moscow on their version of a National Security Council, you’re thinking, ‘Well, maybe they don’t care. So, okay, we’ll keep on going.’ That was a sensitive issue: what happened in those ten days. The Navy couldn’t figure—I don’t know to this day that they ever figured out what the hell happened to those bloody pictures for ten whole days. Whether they were sitting in some chief petty officer’s in-basket or what, nobody knows.” He also recalled that the National Security Agency had distributed an analysis of Soviet ships arriving and leaving from Cuba. “Theoretically, they weren’t supposed to [conduct an analysis], but they did” and their work incorrectly stated that the ships were “there to remove from Cuba all of the excess military hardware the Soviets have put in!” Once the missile crisis had begun, the “NSA immediately asked everybody to return this Top Secret” document and “all copies” were recalled. In the aftermath, there were “turf battles” and the question as to “whether they should be prohibited in the future from doing analysis.”

Halpern remembered that the missiles were discovered in Cuba by “a fluke, a pure and utter fluke.” A CIA agent in Pinar del Rio Province had informed the Agency that “there was an area which had been completely cleared of all living things, people and animals, and he couldn’t explain exactly precisely where it was, so he gave us names of little towns. We plotted the towns, and it turned out to be a trapezoidal shape.” Their G-2 (U.S. military intelligence) colleagues with the capability to conduct an overflight to check out what was in the area “came over to our war room and I was in the room when they plotted the damn thing, and there was a trapezoid.” The reporting took ten days to be shipped through international mail and be deciphered by the CIA since the contacts had used “secret writing; I don’t know what type of secret writing techniques he had—it could have been lemon juice for all I know. It took ten days for that to get to our chemists to develop the bloody paper.” They could have used radios instead to convey the information but that argument had gone nowhere: “What about the size of the radios? You can’t get the radios in, and etc., etc., etc…So there were those kinds of problems in terms of the operators.” Even the overflight using a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft that discovered the missiles almost did not happen: “During the [Committee On Imagery Requirements & Exploitation] approval, the overflights and all the flights had to be approved. At that time, in October of ‘62, the overflights were limited to four flights a month…And so, when the report of this trapezoid came in and the G-2 people at our instigation asked for an overflight of this particular spot on the western part of Cuba, I’m told it took more than 10 days to get that approved, to get the flight approved.” The State Department representative had initially turned down the request: “No,” the rep stated. “We’ve been flying that part of the island all the time. We haven’t flown the eastern part for a long time. Let’s fly the east.” It took ten days for the bureaucracy to argue and sort out the request in order to take the required flight and identify the missiles. Halpern never discovered the name of the State Department rep “and I never want to find out because I’d go shoot him.”

For his part to assist in the effort, according to Halpern, Harvey sent reconnaissance teams into Cuba: “Bill’s idea was, that if the U.S. forces were going to go in (they sure as hell were getting ready for an invasion, and they were making no secret of it, they wanted the Russians to know)—they were going to need some kind of help getting in. And it is always nice to have somebody on the beach waving you in, telling you that’s the way to go. Rather than go stumbling across some landmines or something.” Harvey was soon let go from MONGOOSE; according to the official story, the sending of ten intelligence operatives into Cuba had been an authorized operation, for which he now had to take responsibility. In addition, days after the Cuban Missile Crisis, on November 3, Harvey also received intelligence that the copper mines sabotage team may have been captured: “a fragmentary [communications intelligence] report was received, reflecting the arrests by the Cuban authorities in Panar del Rio, of the infiltrees. It was impossible to determine, definitely, whether this report referred to the two members of the Matahambre sabotage team.” On November 16, 1962, a news agency reported that one member of the sabotage team had been captured: “Cuban security officials said today they have smashed an attempt to sabotage the copper mines of Matahambre and captured a man they called the principal chief of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba. Radio Havana identified the captive leader as Miguel Angel Orozco Crespo, once an army officer under ousted President Fulgencio Batista. It said two groups of saboteurs landed near Matahambre, on Cuba's western tip, with half a ton of weapons. It called them CIA agents.” If the sabotage team had been successful, the report stated, up to 400 workers could have been killed. Another news report added further detail: “The mines manager requested the prisoner be handed over to workers to be executed.” Lansdale denied foreknowledge of the operation and Harvey was forced to draft a memo refuting this contention, stating all of the occasions on which superiors, including Lansdale, were briefed on the sabotage operation.

Despite these clear conflicts flaring up in the MONGOOSE operation, Halpern claimed Harvey was removed due to his candid opinions on the Kennedys being expressed in front of them and his CIA Director John McCone: “Harvey, at the White House, told the President and Bobby what he thought of them in no uncertain gutter language, in McCone’s presence. He just let himself go.” Harvey was “so mad, so angry at the whole effort…at the attitude and the way the Kennedys handled themselves, in that they were more concerned about the Kennedy escutcheon than they were about the security and safety of the United States.” Given the senior players in the room, Halpern had to rely on Harvey’s recounting of the incident afterward, but he took him at his word. After that outburst, according to Halpern, McCone was forced to remove Harvey from MONGOOSE and Harvey was barred from the White House going forward. Helms stepped in to protect Harvey’s job: “Helms saved Bill’s ass and didn’t fire him. And he kept him out of McCone’s view.” Harvey was reassigned as Chief of Station in Rome “just to get him the hell out of the way, so he wouldn’t be around the building and all that kind of stuff.”

With Harvey out of the picture, Helms brought in Desmond FitzGerald from the Far East Division to replace him as CIA lead on MONGOOSE, Halpern’s top choice, since he was also in the process of souring a relationship with a Cabinet member: “Des had already blotted his copybook with [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara anyway, about Vietnam. We had some strong characters in those days. Guys who didn’t give a good goddamn about anything except getting the job done right.” The switch felt to Halpern like the operation was starting over. “It was the Kennedys who put Des in charge of the next effort and it was the Kennedys who pushed us again into the whole business.” He recalled the Kennedys’ attitude was: “What the hell, Castro is still there. Do something. Do something!” Halpern could tell he FitzGerald was receiving a lot of pressure from the two brothers to accomplish the Cuban goal: “The way he reacted, the way he talked...The pressures that he relayed practically every morning when we got into the office were just unbelievable. I’ve never been on an operation like that before in my life, and I have been in some fairly sensitive ones...We were all under the gun to do something and do it fast. And there were no excuses accepted of any kind.” However, the CIA attitude in general remained skeptical with the feeling: “This isn’t going to work any better this time.”

Planning for more sabotage operations continued as the CIA kept “looking for new plans, ‘How do you blow up this or blow up that?’” One section of the team was devoted to “working on plans for ‘what do we go for next?’, ‘what are the targets?’, and ‘how do you do it?’ And that never stopped. We kept doing that all along.” Making the plans operational in the field was another matter, as the Special Group (Augmented) in its oversight role slowed down every proposal. “Every one of our plans, every single, had to be presented to the Special Group (Augmented), so they could ask about things like shoelaces. It took months, literally months, to put that kind of stuff together.”

With success in sabotage also came failure in the eyes of the Kennedys. “I believe we blew up some small power plant,” Halpern recalled. “We got chewed out because the story about the explosion and damage made headlines in Cuba and in Florida, where it hit the front pages. Bobby Kennedy screamed at us and said, ‘I thought you guys did things in a secret way! What’s the matter with you guys? Why all the publicity?’ And we had to tell him in no uncertain terms that when you're going to blow something up, it’s going to make noise, people are going to see it, it’s going to be on television, and it’s going to be in the newspapers. That’s the kind of stupidity we were getting from the White House, from the President and his brother the Attorney General.” This rage may have stemmed from the reporting that the announcement was provided by the Cuban exile group to newspapers on August 16, 1963: “A Miami anti-Castro exile group announced today one of its planes bombed a sugar mill yesterday in Cuba’s Camaguey Province. The Revolutionary Insurrectional Movement (MIRR) said the plane dropped two bombs and one of them exploded and damaged the power plant of the Bolivia Sugar Mill, blacking out the area. Because of the blackout, the group reported, the plane left the area without dropping its four other bombs, because of the chance that they might hit the living quarters of the mill workers.” The Cuban government confirmed that two bombs had been dropped, one causing no damage.

High Places

Des FitzGerald was shaving one Monday morning early in 1963 when a new idea for an assassination plot came to him: it involved taking the wet suit plot one step further.