31

I DON’T KNOW WHETHER IT WAS THAT PARTING SHOT, BUT I DID NOT REPLY to her letter for a long time. Loneliness sat in me like an empty wallet. I had many an impulse to open the envelope that contained Modene’s telephone number, and once, I came so close to calling her that the urge expired only as my finger touched the dial.

Work took me over. I never gave myself to it more. Indeed, I was finding myself of use to my father. He had a mind that could crack a lobster claw with the pinch of his concentration when he was moved to concentrate, but that was not every day. His desk often looked like an unmade bed, and unpursued matters were as painful to his intermittent capacity for organization as unhappy recollections on a hangover. I loved him, I discovered, but recognition of such emotion came through my new passion for taking care of details. I was obliged to cover no narrow spectrum. There were occasions when I even sent his laundry out, and I certainly went over his memos to McCone, to Helms, to Montague, and to the fifty officers still working at JM/WAVE, I vetted incoming cables, and assigned priorities and route patterns to traffic initiated by us. I actually began to enjoy the chores of administration, since Cal’s secretary, Eleanor, had been overworked for years and was in her own need of an assistant. To our surprise, Eleanor and I got along. These days, the contents on my desk were more real to me than where I lived; indeed, Miami and Washington sometimes presented no more difference to me than my separate office cubicles at Langley and Zenith. I was overcome again with how partial was my knowledge of all I oversaw. Indeed, the more small power I acquired and the more I partook of beginnings, middles, and ends, the less available seemed the trinity of a satisfactory narrative. I found myself reading spy novels on evenings I spent alone, and they were satisfying in a manner that was never true of work with all its partially glimpsed projects, ops, capers, researches, stunts, and scenarios, but then, the spy novels were never true to life. I even had an extended rumination about the nature of plot. In life, it seemed to me, plot was always incomplete. No matter!—it was also the focus of half of one’s strivings—for we never strain harder than when we see ourselves as protagonists in a plot; the other half of one’s personal history is but an accumulation of habit, error, luck, coincidence, and large helpings of that daily sludge which is the ballast of narrative if you insist upon perceiving your life as a connected tale. I was grateful, therefore, to have a summer when I could live with only a few personal matters, a great many external details, and the knowledge that my father and I made, when all was said, a respectable team.

Some aspects of his work, however, he kept from me. I knew he was building his ties to AM/LASH, but I can hardly say how long it would have taken to learn any more if we had not had a flap on September 8 large enough to convince Cal that it was time to bring me in. That morning, he handed me a clipping from the Washington Post so soon as I came into his office. The story was datelined Havana. On the night of September 7, Castro had attended a party at the Brazilian Embassy where he made a point of taking aside a reporter for the Associated Press: “Kennedy is the Batista of our time,” he declared. “We have discovered terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders. If U.S. leaders assist in such terrorist plans, they will not themselves be safe.”

“I would call that,” said Cal, “a message for us.”

“Can you provide the background?” I asked.

“AM/LASH is now stationed at the Cuban consulate in Sáo Paulo, Brazil. One of our case officers there has been meeting with him.”

“I guess that’s all I need,” I answered. Given the variety of places in Havana one could choose for a chat with the local AP man, Castro had selected the Brazilian Embassy.

“Yes,” Cal said, “Counterintelligence is going to camp out this morning in Richard Helms’ office.”

They did. There were several such meetings in September, but by the end of the month, Cal was able to say, “We’re still operative.” I looked over a copy of the final memo sent to Counterintelligence by Helms: “If AM/LASH has not been doubled by Castro, and the evidence, as of this point, cannot be termed conclusive, then we are giving up one of the most, if not the most promising Cuban asset in our reach. No one with whom we are on speaking terms in the Caribbean approaches AM/LASH’s proximity to the Cuban leader. On balance, the answer declares itself. We will continue with AM/LASH.”

I had a reasonably good suspicion of why Helms was supporting my father. By mid-September, we had become aware of a covert peace agenda between the U.S. and Cuba at the United Nations. Harlot still had his line into the Bureau, and so we kept receiving FBI taps on the Cuban Embassy in Washington and the Cuban delegation to the UN. The Bureau also had a tap into Adlai Stevenson’s office in the UN building, or thus I supposed, since envelopes from all three sources came into our office every morning from GHOUL. It did occur to me that Ambassador Stevenson’s office should have been out of bounds for the FBI, but who would suggest that to Mr. Hoover? In any event, material came in abundance. Given my meditation on the scattered fragments of plot that composed the sad porridge of the Intelligence officer, I was at last in reasonably full reception of a comprehensive chowder.

On September 18, William Attwood, Special Advisor to the American delegation at the UN, sent a confidential memo to Averell Harriman, who was then serving as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs:

The policy of isolating Cuba, I would argue, has intensified Castro’s desire to initiate trouble and conflict in Latin America and has left us stiffened into the unattractive posture, as world opinion perceives it, of a big country trying to bully a small one.

According to neutral diplomats at the UN there is reason to believe that Castro would go to some length to obtain normalization of relations with us—even though this would not be welcomed by most of his hard-core Communist entourage.

All of this may or may not be true. But it would seem that we have something to gain and nothing to lose by finding out whether in fact Castro does want to talk and what concessions he would be prepared to make. If Castro is interested, I could travel to Cuba as an individual, but would, of course, report to the President before and after the visit.

A few days later we came into possession of the summary that Attwood provided Adlai Stevenson on Harriman’s reaction. The proposition, he declared, would put the Kennedys on a course of high risk: “Any of a number of Republicans who obtain even the faintest sniff of this could bring down sheer hell to pay.” Nonetheless, Harriman told Attwood that he felt “adventurous,” and suggested that Robert Kennedy be approached. Bobby wrote on the margin of Attwood’s memo, “Worth pursuing. Get in touch with Mac Bundy.” In his turn, Bundy told Attwood that “the President might look favorably upon working Castro out of the Soviet fold.” Encouraged by this much favorable reaction, Attwood got in touch with the Cuban Ambassador to the UN, Carlos Lechuga.

Meetings between Helms, Harlot, and Cal soon followed. Their strategy, as it came down to me, was to steer Special Group, by way of Director McCone, into approving new sabotage operations in Cuba. So soon as such authorization was obtained, Cal mounted a quick raid on an oil refinery, and the boats and men were dispatched on the heels of a hurricane that struck the Caribbean on October 6. The raiders never reached their target and two of the sixteen men who landed in Cuba were captured.

Cal did not seem unduly upset. Of course, he had not known the men. Neither did I. Dix Butler, responding to a call from me, had put the operation together in a rush. Whether it was bad luck or he prepared it poorly we could not decide without an inquiry, but the day when personnel were available at JM/WAVE for such investigations was certainly over.

Butler was furious, however. Over the phone from Miami came excoriations of Langley mentality until I could restrain myself no further and said, “All right. My father is responsible. I am responsible. And you? Can you accept any of the fault?”

“No,” he said. “You gave me Chevi Fuertes in the first place. I had to employ him as liaison.”

“You couldn’t have been authorized to use him. Not for a job like this.”

“There was no time. Repeat: no time. I was obliged to use him. I think he tipped off the Cuban Coast Guard.”

“How could he? You didn’t tell him where the men were going in, did you?”

“He might have sent out a general alert.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He’s hiding from me. He did not show up at his job in the bank.”

“Has he disappeared altogether?”

“He phoned me. He said he will come in when I have cooled down. I am going to have a showdown with Fuertes which he will never forget.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“I told him that there was nothing to cool down about. It was a time to regroup, not point fingers.”

I had no idea of whether to warn Chevi, seduce him into a meeting, or confront Butler with charges. That made for three disagreeable options, and besides I did not know where Chevi was hiding.

On October 13, Castro denounced the raid: “What does the United States do when we Cubans are striving to recover from a hurricane that killed one thousand of our people? They send saboteurs armed with pirate ships and explosives.”

We were able, therefore, to count our gains. Fidel Castro was unhappy, and Attwood’s labors, in consequence, would suffer. Then a Bureau transcript of a conversation in the Cuban delegation’s UN office came from Harlot, and we learned that a secret meeting with Castro was still being proposed: Would it be possible to fly Attwood to a small airport near Havana?

Adlai Stevenson, briefed by Attwood, was concerned. “Too many individuals may be privy by now to the new Cuban agenda,” he said. Attwood replied that the only government figures who knew about these contacts with the Cubans were, to the best of his knowledge, the President, the Attorney General, Ambassador Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, Stevenson, and himself.

Since Cal and Harlot had been seeding the groves of Langley with selected extracts from our take, and the FBI was stocked with UN reports to be leaked wherever Hoover saw fit, and JM/WAVE and the Cuban exile leaders were being informed by everyone, it seemed to me that the only principals not in the pipeline by now must have been Secretary of State Rusk and John McCone. There were mornings when Cal’s office would receive as many as four or five memos from different suites at Langley calling our attention to Attwood’s Cuban overture, and all of the memos were based on rumors Cal and I had surreptitiously disseminated the day before.

Hunt even took me to lunch in the senior-grade cafeteria at Langley to fulminate over what he had heard. “I always knew that Smiling Jack could not be trusted, but this is egregious betrayal. Can your father get word up to Dick Helms?”

“He can only try,” I said to Hunt.

“If Cal isn’t ready to exercise the direct route, I might take a crack at bearding Helms myself.”

“Well, don’t use up any favors. Cal can reach him.”

“Give my regards to your father. Is he in good spirits?”

“Today? Very.”

He was. Yesterday afternoon, October 24, John McCone, flanked by Richard Helms, Hugh Montague, and Boardman Hubbard, had succeeded in convincing Bobby Kennedy and Special Group to authorize thirteen major sabotage operations, one a week on average from November 1963 through January 1964. An electric power plant, an oil refinery, and a sugar mill were among the targets selected. “The timing is satisfactory,” Cal declared. “Now things will never settle down. We can burn an ulcer into Castro. That bastard! Daring to play with Soviet missiles! I could immolate myself, kamikaze fashion, Rick, if I knew one hand grenade would take out Fidel, Raul, and Che Guevara in the same flash of light.”

He meant it. My father, as he grew older, sprouted small shortcomings which gave every promise of growing larger, but if he could move you to wince at his follies, you could hardly laugh at him. He had no fear of dying. Death was one embrace that was brought off best if you took an enemy with you.

That was the larger part of my father, but every lion has his ghost. He was also, I came to discover, as delicate as an old lady to the shades and whispers of enemy intrigue. On October 25, the day after Special Group authorized our thirteen raids, and not twenty minutes after I came back from lunch with Hunt, I found Cal in a thoroughgoing bad mood. Yesterday afternoon, just about the time he was arguing his case at Special Group, President Kennedy, he had learned, was giving a full half hour of interview to an esteemed French journalist named Jean Daniel. The Frenchman, whose interview had been arranged by Attwood, was on his way to Havana, and there were no taps—alas!—into the Oval Office. There was, however, a Bureau report of a conversation at the UN on the night of October 24:

Attwood informed Ambassador Stevenson that while Jean Daniel stated that he was a professional journalist and would not repeat his conversation with President Kennedy, Daniel found such conversation “highly stimulating” and further stated that it might be “conducive to eliciting productive response from Fidel Castro.”

“Yes,” said Cal, “you can visualize it. Smiling Jack introduces Jean Daniel to Mrs. Kennedy. After all, our First Lady charmed Paris. You are not going to allow a top-dog French interviewer to go home without meeting her. Then Jack tells Jean that he is not opposed to collectivism, per se, just its abuse by the Soviets. Probably says that he can find a way to live with Cuba next door. Jack Kennedy has the ability to make a large difference sound like a family misunderstanding.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Spend a season watching the Washington snakes in their mating rites, and it’s amazing what you know.”

Let no one say my father had no instincts for divination. Fifty days after Jean Daniel met Jack Kennedy, the journalist’s account of the meeting appeared.

From THE NEW REPUBLIC

DECEMBER 14, 1963

President Kennedy received me at the White House on Thursday, October 24 .  .  .. As we passed through the small room where his secretary was working, we caught a glimpse of Mrs. Kennedy leaving by a French window on her way to a private garden of the White House. The President called her back to introduce me.

It was still Indian summer in Washington. The weather was very warm and both the President and Mrs. Kennedy were very lightly dressed, thus enhancing the impression of youth, charm, and simplicity which was in rather surprising contrast to the solemnity of entering these august chambers. After she left, the President invited me to be seated on the semicircular sofa which was in the middle of his office. He sat in a rocking chair opposite the sofa. The interview was to last from 20 to 25 minutes, and it was interrupted only by a brief telephone call .  .  ..

My notes are very specific and I shall let President Kennedy speak through them: “I’d like to talk to you about Cuba .  .  ..” John Kennedy then mustered all his persuasive force. He punctuated each sentence with that brief, mechanical gesture which has become famous.

“I tell you this: I believe there is no country in the world .  .  . where economic colonization, exploitation, and humiliation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I believe that we created, built, and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth and without realizing it. I believe that the accumulation of these mistakes has jeopardized all of Latin America. This is one of the most important problems in American foreign policy. I can assure you that I have understood the Cubans, I approved of the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.”

After a silence during which he was able to note my surprise and my interest, the President continued: “But it is also clear that the problem has ceased to be a Cuban one and has become international, that is, it has become a Soviet problem. I am the President of the United States and not a sociologist; I am the President of a free nation which has certain responsibilities to the Free World. I know that Castro betrayed the promises made in the Sierra Maestra, and that he has agreed to be a Soviet agent in Latin America. I know that through his fault—either his ‘will to independence,’ his madness, or Communism—the world was on the verge of a nuclear war in October 1962. The Russians understood this very well, at least after our reaction; but so far as Fidel Castro is concerned, I must say I don’t know whether he realizes this, or even if he cares about it.” A smile, then: “You can tell me whether he does when you come back. In any case, the nations of Latin America are not going to attain justice and progress that way, I mean through Communist subversion. They won’t get there by going from economic oppression to a Marxist dictatorship which Castro himself denounced a few years ago. The United States now has the possibility of doing as much good in Latin America as it has done wrong in the past; I would even say that we alone have the power—on the essential condition that Communism does not take over there.”

Mr. Kennedy then rose to indicate the interview was over .  .  ..