landing by four thousand Marines were put on hold.
Pentagon planners had dubbed the maneuvers 'Operation ORTSAC,' Castro spelled backward. Once the task force got to Vieques, the Marines would storm ashore, depose an imaginary dictator, and secure the island for democracy. If all went well, the entire operation would last no more than two weeks.
The five Joint Chiefs had been pushing for an invasion of Cuba for many months. They were very skeptical of Operation Mongoose and saw 'no prospect of early success' in fomenting an anti-Castro uprising inside Cuba. Back in April, they had warned the president that the 'United States cannot tolerate permanent existence of a communist government in the Western Hemisphere.' If Castro was permitted to remain in power, other countries in Latin America might soon fall under Communist domination. Moscow might be tempted to 'establish military bases in Cuba similar to U.S. installations' around the Soviet Union. The only sure method of overthrowing Castro was through direct 'military intervention by the United States.'
Prior to the discovery of Soviet missiles on Cuba, the main problem confronting the Joint Chiefs was how to justify an attack against a much weaker nation. A memorandum dated August 8 outlined various ideas for a staged provocation that could be blamed on Castro, along the lines of the 'Remember the
• We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba;
• We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington;
• A 'Cuban-based, Castro-supported' filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation.
• It is possible to arrange an incident that will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civilian airliner.
The Joint Chiefs were confident that they could organize an invasion of Cuba without running the risk of a 'general war' with the Soviet Union. U.S. forces were strong enough to secure 'rapid control' over the island, although 'continued police action would be required.' A single infantry division, around fifteen thousand men, would be sufficient to occupy the island following the initial invasion.
The only dissent came from the Marine Corps, which challenged the assumption that Cuban resistance would be rapidly crushed. 'Considering the size (44,206 sq. mi.) and population (6,743,000) of Cuba, its long history of political unrest, and its tradition of sustained and extensive guerrilla and terrorist resistance to constituted authority, the estimate that only a division-size force will be required subsequent to the assault phase appears modest,' a Marine Corps memo noted. It predicted that at least three infantry divisions would be required to subdue the island and that it would take 'several years' to install a stable successor regime to Fidel Castro.
The Marine Corps had reason to be wary of Cuban entanglements. History had shown that it was a lot easier to send troops to Cuba than to pull them out. It had taken four years for the Marines to disentangle themselves from Cuba after the Spanish-American War. The Marines were back again four years later, much to the disgust of President Theodore Roosevelt, whose political career had received a huge boost in Cuba, when he led his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. 'I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth,' the hero of 1898 grumbled to a friend. 'All that we wanted of them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere.'
The Marines had remained in Cuba, off and on, until 1923, just three years before the birth of Fidel Castro. And even after that date, they still kept a foothold on the island, at Guantanamo.
From the American perspective, Cuba was a natural extension of the United States. The crocodile-shaped island was like a sluice gate bottling up the Gulf of Mexico, controlling the sea routes between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean. In 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams attributed to Cuba 'an importance in the sum of our national interests with which that of no other foreign Territory can be compared.' As Adams saw it, the annexation of Cuba by the United States was virtually inevitable, a function of the 'laws of political gravitation.'
Just ninety miles from Key West, Cuba exercised a powerful pull over the American imagination, long after the withdrawal of the Marines. In the thirties, forties, and fifties, the island became a playground for rich Americans who flew in to lie in the sun, gamble, and visit whorehouses. American money poured into casinos and hotels in Havana, sugar plantations in Oriente, and copper mines in Pinar del Rio. By the 1950s, much of the Cuban economy, including 90 percent of the mining industry and 80 percent of utilities, was under the control of American corporations.
The attraction was not just geographic and economic; it was very personal. By the eve of the revolution, Ernest Hemingway, America's most celebrated writer, had taken up residence at the Finca Vigia, on a hilltop overlooking Havana. The Mafia boss, Meyer Lansky, had built a twenty-one-story hotel called the Riviera on the Malecon and was advising Batista on gambling reform. Nat King Cole was singing at the Tropicana nightclub. And a young American senator named John F. Kennedy was making frequent visits to Havana as the guest of the pro- Batista U.S. ambassador.
Bobby Kennedy was already having trouble keeping his promise ? made Tuesday afternoon ? to hold daily Mongoose briefings in his office. He had been unable to attend the scheduled Wednesday session because of an urgent White House meeting. But on Thursday he managed to squeeze in half an hour with Mongoose operatives, including Lansdale and Bill Harvey, the head of the CIA's anti-Castro task force.
Gruff and uncouth, Harvey had the job of making sense of the blizzard of paperwork generated by Ed Lansdale. The two men were like fire and water. The visionary Lansdale would come up with dozens of new ideas for hitting Castro, only to have them squelched by the methodical Harvey. In Harvey's view, such operations required months of meticulous planning before they could be launched.
By the third day of the crisis, Bobby was rethinking his views on how to respond to Khrushchev. His initial fury at Soviet duplicity had given way to more sober analysis. One of his biographers would later detect a pattern: 'an initial burst of belligerence and intransigence, followed by a willingness to listen and change.' He now opposed a surprise air attack on the missile sites as incompatible with American traditions, a kind of Pearl Harbor in reverse. 'My brother is not going to be the Tojo of the 1960s,' he had told a White House meeting on Wednesday. Bobby was beginning to favor a naval blockade of Cuba combined with some kind of ultimatum to Moscow, an idea first proposed by McNamara.
Bobby's sudden streak of moralism did not, however, extend to calling a halt to Operation Mongoose. According to Harvey's record of the Thursday, October 18, meeting, the attorney general continued to place 'great stress on sabotage operations and asked to be furnished with a list of the sabotage operations CIA planned to conduct.'
The most feasible target, in Harvey's view, was a copper mine in Pinar del Rio Province in western Cuba. The CIA had been trying for months to halt production at the Matahambre mine and had made careful studies of the terrain, but had been hampered by a string of bad luck. The first operation, back in August, failed after the would-be saboteurs got lost in a mangrove swamp. The second attempt was aborted when the radio operator fell and broke his ribs. The third time around, the sabotage team had got within a thousand yards of the target when it was challenged by a militia patrol and forced to withdraw after a firefight. Despite these setbacks, Matahambre was still at the top of Harvey's 'to do' list.
He informed RFK and Lansdale that he would 're-run' the operation as soon as circumstances allowed.
The president was leafing through the latest batch of intelligence reports as the generals filed into the Cabinet Room. The news from Cuba was becoming more ominous by the day. In addition to the original missile sites in Pinar del Rio, U-2 spy planes had discovered a second cluster of sites in the center of the island. The new sites included facilities for so-called intermediate-range ballistic missiles, or IRBMs, which were capable of hitting targets nearly 2,800 miles away, more than double the distance of the medium-range rockets, or MRBMs, discovered on October 14.
There was still no evidence that the bigger missiles had arrived in Cuba, so they were a less immediate threat. But work on the original missile sites was proceeding rapidly. The CIA had identified three different medium-range ballistic missile regiments on the island. Each regiment controlled eight missile launchers, making
