Chapter 8

"History Corrupted As The CIA Corrupts History"

As with Hersh's chapter "Executive Action," his "Bay of Pigs" chapter is so dishonest, so deliberately dishonest for Hersh's special purposes, a few selections from it suffice.

In the Hersh-it formula the failure of the Bay of Pigs, for which Kennedy assumed full responsibility, gave Kennedy his motive for having Castro assassinated.

The actuality, as Schlesinger concluded his letter to the Times saying, is that as of the time Kennedy was assassinated he was, through two intermediaries, seeking to negotiate with Castro a basis for rapprochement. I wrote about this years earlier. The first approach, as we saw in the William Attwood testimony, was made by Castro, who was well aware of all the attempts to assassinate him. He used Lisa Howard, the ABC News correspondent, to get that effort started at the United Nations. Howard made contact with the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, Carlos Lechuga and she made contact with Attwood, then one of our ambassadors to the UN. Attwood got the official OK all the way up to the President. The President sent him word on November 19, as we saw earlier, that on his return from his trip to Texas he wanted Attwood to come to the White House to explore possibilities with him. But Kennedy was assassinated three days later and when he returned he was a corpse.

There is no mention of any of this in the Hersh book of almost five hundred pages. Hersh had no use for truth and reality. And with negotiations initiated, if he admitted that, he destroyed the motive he made up for his false presentation of Kennedy as a would-be assassin.

Well known as some of the facts of the Bay of Pigs are, or at least were more than thirty years earlier, and for all Hersh's using of standard sources he cites selectively and less than honestly, he brazenly misrepresents those facts. He has to for his "score," for his loot from his book. If he tells the truth he has no book.

Hersh begins his chapter (pages 202-21) saying that while the details were know there were whispers in Washington that something was up regarding Cuba. If Hersh had had any taint of scholarly intent he would have cited all that the Cubans were presenting publicly to the UN about this. It is included in the daily UN proceedings copies of which were freely available and which I obtained more than thirty years before Hersh's book appeared.

Hersh treats what was coming as a Kennedy project when it was of the Eisenhower administration and was inherited by — wished upon — the Kennedy administration. He writes:

The few Kennedy insiders who knew about the invasion in advance shared Bundy's confidence about its success; doubts, if any, were overcome by the president's mystique — and the prevailing sense that Kennedy could do no wrong (page 202).

This malarkey of "the president's mystique" is more Hersh propaganda and more of his deliberate dishonesty, as we see and see in greater detail later.

Not only does Hersh not say this was a project of the Eisenhower administration, he treats it, writes about it, as known to only a "few Kennedy insiders." In fact the CIA knew ever so much more about it than many more than a "few" who were "insiders." Many in the CIA knew about it. Many also in the military, especially in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because, they were also involved and gave Kennedy their approval. The "confidence" was from this, not that Hershian "mystique." But in this writing, in which Hersh keeps the JCS involvement secret and treats the invasion as a Kennedy deal, the reader does not get the truth: it was wished on Kennedy and there was not, as a practical matter, a thing he could do about it.

On the next page Bundy is McGeorge Bundy, who was head of the National Security Council; Raskin was Marcus Raskin , then a then a new addition to the Bundy staff; and Goodwin is Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy speech writer:

Bundy knew what Raskin and Goodwin did not: the dice were loaded. The Mafia's men in Havana were on the job. Fidel Castro, the Cuban prime minister, was to be assassinated by the Mafia on or before the day the invasion force landed at the Bay of Pigs. It looked like a sure thing (page 205).

This is a string of untruths at least some of which was known by Hersh to be lies when he put them on paper. Remember, he had and used selectively and dishonestly the CIA' s official and once-Top Secret memo on its Mafia plot to assassinate Castro. That memo is quite specific in stating that there was no connection between the assassination and the Bay of Pigs invasion. This Hersh knew, but he lied repeatedly about it.

Bundy also did not know that "The Mafia's men in Havana were on the job." He did not even know at the time if it had any men there. It had a "courier" who went to Havana from time to time, but it had no men working for it in Havana. Or, we see still again Hersh's reasons for omitting source notes. He can't source his lies, what he merely makes up, as he made up what we have just quoted. He made this up out of nothing. There being no basis at all for it — other than Hersh's need.

And, as we saw, according to the CIA itself, it is a Hersh lie that "the Cuban prime minister was to be assassinated by the Mafia on or before the day the invasion force landed."

If the Mafia ever made any serious effort te get Castro knocked off there is no known proof of it. Not even any indication of it.

Quite a few efforts to kill Castro were known and made public but not one of them is of any Mafia effort.

Hersh knowing it was a lie, resorted to the lie to give Kennedy an imagined motive for having Castro assassinated and in all this — artificial excitement to make up what could sell books — make his "score" for Hersh.

Knowing he was adding to his lie Hersh then did just that:

Though he was only one of three prospective targets of political assassination as the new administration was being formed, Castro was the most important. His death, so the planners thought, would precipitate a widespread revolt.

"Taking out Castro was part of the invasion plan," Robert Maheu, the CIA's liaison to the Mafia, told me during one of our interviews for this book. Castro's murder was to take place "before — but preferably at the time of — the invasion," Maheu said. "We'd get word that something had happened. And we were waiting to hear" if "poison had made it into his food." Maheu spent much of the winter and spring of 1961 plotting Castro's murder while holed up in hotels in Miami with Sam Giancana and two of his fellow mobsters, Johnny Rosselli and Santos Trafficante (page 203).

Hersh resorts to more of his dirty-tricks writing when he says that those were "prospective targets of political assassination as the new administration was being formed." He knew they had no connection with the "new administration" or with its being "formed." They were Eisenhower administration assassination plans and despite all that Hersh does to make it appear that they were of the Kennedy administration, that is not true.

In the first sentence of this quoted paragraph Hersh also refers to the "planners" of the assassination as of "the new administration." He knew this was a lie. He knew the "plan" was of the Eisenhower administration that was, actually, of the CIA only.

Hersh also knew that what he quotes from Maheu was a lie, all the parts of it.

According to the CIA's official record reproduced in its entirety above — and which he had — assassinating Castro was not part of the invasion plan. It therefore also could not have been planned to be either before or at the time of the invasion, as Hersh says Maheu told him.

Maheu had no connection with the invasion and his use by the CIA was limited to contact with the Mafia in the failed effort to get Castro killed that dated not to the April, 1961 time of the invasion but to the August, 1960 time that the CIA dreamed it up.

It therefore is another lie by both Maheu and Hersh for Hersh to quote Maheu as saying his identified "we" would "get word" about the assassination, here referred to as "word that something happened" like "'if poison made it into his food.'"

There is no joy, no satisfaction in referring to one who has done such fine work, such justly honored investigative reportings as Hersh did, as what he in this book and in particular at this point is, a liar. It, in fact is tragic for such castigation to be as justified as it is. So there can be no doubt about it and so that it will not be necessary to turn back to the May 12, 1963 Sheffield Edwards memo, parts of it are here quoted again.

On the limited use of Maheu and what it was limited to, Edward wrote that Maheu "was approached by the undersigned [meaning Edwards] and asked to establish contact with a member or members of the gambling syndicate to explore their capabilities." This was because of the belief not that they did but that they "might have both intelligence assets in Cuba and communications between Miami, Florida, and Cuba."

The only thing specific that the CIA knew was done was that Giancana "arranged for Maheu and Rosselli to meet with a 'courier' who was going back and forth to Havana."

On who knew about this plot and on its complete separation from the planned invasion, "knowledge of this project during its life was kept to a total of six persons and never became a part of the project current at the time for the invasion of Cuba." (The next sentence identifies those "six persons" as "senior officials of the Agency," or of the CIA.)

So the CIA itself says that Hersh lies.

Hersh knew that from this CIA record he was lying yet having that record and misusing it elsewhere, he suppressed this information from it, that being necessary to the lies that are essential to the financial success of his book.

(The quotation is from one of the two copies only made of that memo, this one being the Department of Justice file copy from its 82-46-5 file.)

In a note on his next page Hersh, still without reference to this official CIA record, which he had, repeated some of his lies in the note in which he says that Bissell admitted that the assassination plot plotting and the Bay of Pigs were "linked," as they were not, according to those six "senior officials" one of whom was Bissell (page 204).

Soon Hersh refers to Kennedy's acceptance of full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco without reminding the reader that he inherited that fiasco from the Eisenhower administration. Hersh writes it as though it was all Kennedy's rather than an inherited liability about which Kennedy could do nothing at all. Hersh continues with the fiction that Kennedy was in contact with the Mafia for its supposed assassination of Castro, which is false, according to the CIA itself — and, it should be repeated, to Hersh's knowledge. After reporting that following, Kennedy's taking of full responsibility "his public approval rating soared," Hersh adds:

In private, however, Kennedy complained to all, including may reporters, that he had done little more than follow the recommendations of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I just their advice," he insisted a few days later, during a meeting with Dwight Eisenhower (page 209).

Hersh writes this as though it was not true. It was the literal truth. The record is clear: Kennedy consulted with the CIA and the military and he did get a go-ahead from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What was of considerable influence Hersh does not mention: the CIA's expectation that the Cuban people would rise up against Castro. When that did not happen there was no chance of success for that invasion. And as Hersh, the supposed digger after hidden truths as an investigative reporter does not wonder about, the possibility that the CIA, expecting the invasion not to succeed, also expected that it would be followed by American military action against Cuba. As Watergater E. Howard Hunt wrote when his writing required the CIA's approval if he were to continue to get his retirement, required also by his employment contract, he was to have been the political advisor to the Cuban government-in-exile that the CIA was going to set up and he was to write its constitution for it. Our government had already set up leadership for a government-in- exile. So, it was much more complicated than Hersh indicates and despite his contrary pretense, Kennedy was completely truthful in saying that he had followed the recommendations of the CIA and of the Joint Chiefs.

As Hersh nears the end of this chapter, he has a paragraph he begins with his usual defense of the CIA, essential in his scheme for making money from his book, and he follows that with a fair comment on what some of those closest to Kennedy said, but Hersh, with his permeating dishonesty, did not say what he could and should have said about what he quotes:

In their memoirs, both Schlesinger and Sorensen sought to depict Jack Kennedy as a victim of the CIA's ambitions, a leader who inherited an invasion plan from his predecessor and reluctantly let it unfold. "The whole project seemed to move mysteriously and inexorably toward execution," wrote Sorensen, "without the President able either to obtain a firm grip on it or reverse it . . . In later months, he would be grateful that he had learned so many major lessons . . . at so relatively small and temporary a cost." Schlesinger described Kennedy as "wondering" for months after the Bay of Pigs "how a rational and responsible government could ever have become involved in so ill-starred an adventure" (page 218).

The first book on that fiasco was written by Haynes Johnson, then a reporter on the since- discontinued Washington Star. His The Bay of Pigs was published by Dell in 1964. There is no question about the fidelity of the comments of the President's close advisors and there is no question about whether the President sought and obtained the advice of his military leaders. There is also is no question about Hersh's prejudices and the lack of any rational basis for them. Here is the way Johnson begins his chapter on the initiation of the invasion:

Soon after his inauguration, John F. Kennedy began meeting with his advisors on the problem of Cuba.

Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell of the CIA were urging action.* Time was running out, they warned: If Castro was to be overthrown, it had to be done shortly. Intelligence reports indicated that even the month of May would be too late. By then more and more weapons and planes — Soviet MIG jet fighter planes, and the pilots to fly them would be arriving in Cuba from Czechoslovakia and other countries behind the Iron Curtain. The CIA was certain that an invasion would succeed if it was undertaken soon, but the longer the decision was postponed the smaller would be the margin of safety. Dulles and Bissell not only endorsed the plan for an invasion; they strongly advocated it.

The President asked for the opinion of his professional military men. The outline tactical plan for the invasion was sent to the Pentagon, approved as a subordinate level and then reviewed by General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's supreme military authority, and Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations. On February 3 they, too, endorsed it and predicted success.

At this time the plan called for the invasion in March near Trinidad, a city of twenty thousand on the southeast coast of Cuba at the foot of the Escambray Mountains. There the Brigade would make its assault landing and link up with guerrillas in the mountains. "Operation Trinidad" had evolved in the fall of 1960, after the Eisenhower administration decided to form an invasion army and discarded its plans for major guerrilla action.

President Kennedy had been in Washington fourteen years, first as a Representative, then as a Senator and now as the new President. In those years, like all legislators he had to rely on the judgment of such men as Dulles and Lemnitzer and Burke — they were the pros, the men whose expert opinions had been tested and accepted by other Presidents in times of crisis, men on whose abilities the security of the United States had rested. And he, the President, was facing his first major decision.

The President had a variety of choices. Politics, of course was deeply involved. The camps and the Brigade were a fact. They represented a tacit commitment by the United States. If he vetoed the plan, the men of the Brigade, trained under difficult conditions for nearly a year in the expectation of liberating Cuba, would be thrown back into the vortex of more than one hundred thousand embittered exiles in Miami. The angry Cubans certainly would accuse him publicly of betraying them. Just as certainly, the Republicans would. attack. By scrapping the plans begun under Eisenhower, he would lay his administration open to the charge that it was soft on Castro and Communism — and that the young "amateurs" in the White House had disregarded the advice of the experts. During the campaign Kennedy himself, in the celebrated fourth television debate with Nixon, had pledged to aid Cuban Freedom fighters.

Aside from the domestic implications, there was a more significant consideration: the rewards of success. If Dulles and the military were correct, the invasion would eliminate Castro and his Communist base in the Caribbean without jeopardizing or directly involving the United States. If intelligence reports were reliable, such an opportunity would not come again. It was also clear that no more Cuban exile support could be expected if the invasion were halted. The United States would have to do it alone. That meant the risk of conflict with Russia. Was Cuba worth that risk?

There was another factor: the camps in Guatemala were attracting public attention, threatening to expose the United States involvement. As a consequence, the Guatemalan government was becoming nervous and asking when the Cubans would be removed from its soil. There was only one direction for the men to move — to Cuba.

Kennedy told the CIA to continue preparing for the invasion, but made it clear that he still might call it off. The President's doubt stemmed not only from the danger of conflict with Russia, but also from the possibility of damage to the relations of the United States with the neutral countries as well as with its allies. The Cuban undertaking easily could be labeled another Hungary, in reverse, with the United States branded as a ruthless imperialist aggressor. It was vital, then, for the American involvement to be kept both secret and at a minimum in the actual landing and fighting. The reasoning was logical and yet, with hindsight, it contained major flaws. For, in fact, the operation had long since ceased to be secret, and the United states would have to bear the responsibility for whatever resulted. Also, a failure could be disastrous to world confidence in a new administration. Success, it would seem, was an absolute necessity, if the invasion were to take place at all.

* On a "Meet the Press" television interview on December 31, 1961, for instance, Allen Dulles said the growing military strength of Castro determined the time of the invasion. The five months preceding April were, he said, "most auspicious" for getting rid of Communism (pages 63-5).

Although this was the first book on the Bay of Pigs it is not among those included in Hersh's so-called chapter notes for his Bay of Pigs chapter (pages 465-6). This is not because Hersh was not familiar with this basic book. He quotes it in a different chapter on page 376.

Johnson did not itemize all the problems Kennedy faced with the invasion he inherited from the Eisenhower administration. They are, however, problems Hersh not only ignores — he pretends they did not exist — as if for any reason Kennedy did call the invasion off.

Which would, among other things, have been domestic political suicide, as Hersh knew.

He also faced the problem with which Allen Dulles confronted him when he was considering canceling the whole thing: what would he do with those fifteen hundred trained, armed and angry Cubans in Guatemala if they refused to surrender their arms and be demobilized?

Kennedy certainly could not take them, with their arms, back to Miami and have fifteen hundred, mostly unemployed and well-armed angry men loose in that city. Or anywhere else.

Would it take an army and a battle to get their arms from them?

Would any other country accept them, armed as they were, if they would agree to go to another country?

And what about these trained to use explosives and then had those explosives?

The absence of any consideration of these and of the other problems Kennedy would have faced if he had canceled the Bay of Pigs invasion raised the most substantial questions about Hersh's professional integrity in this book of his. He knew of them. But responsible treatment of them would at the very least have diminished the virulence of his abusive treatment of Kennedy and his Presidency that Hersh said he hoped would make him enough money so he could retire.

It simply was deliberate dishonesty to pretend these serious problems did exist for the Kennedy administration . Or, as Hersh also did, pretend that Kennedy had not taken the advice of the CIA and the JCS, who predicted success — victory.

The CIA and Eisenhower, as Hersh is careful not to say, saw to it that Kennedy would have this insoluble problem at the very outset of his administration, when he was only beginning to learn the ropes of being President.

It would be beyond belief that any writer, more one who had earned the honors Hersh did earn, could omit such significant considerations in his writing if this Hersh writing did not establish that he is capable of the intellectual and professional lack of integrity required to omit it all from the book in which it is essential for minimal honesty and not to deceive and mislead the reader.

After two chapters not related to Cuba, Hersh has his Chapter 17, "Target Castro" (pages 268-99). It would not have been inappropriate to title that chapter, "History corrupted as the CIA corrupts History."

Hersh's major sources for what he has in this chapter are of the CIA. He depends still again on the Sam Halpern who had such involvements of his of his own, the Halpern who is on almost half the pages of this longer than average chapter. He is a source for such lies as Hersh retails in the first sentence of this chapter. He there says that Robert Kennedy "became the driving force in a renewed American effort to murder Fidel Castro . . ." (page 268).

How far from an acceptable, dependable, and impartial source Halpern was, how deeply he was personally involved in all those CIA efforts to assassinate Castro that he and the CIA seek to pin on the Kennedys, is indicated in Time magazine. It says of Halpern, that he was the "one time executive officer of the CIA's Task Force W, and enterprise charged with the single mission of killing Castro . . ." (November 17, page 49). This should have been enough, if not to disqualify using Halpern at all, to have raised serious questions about what he said. Hersh uses him as beyond question, as a totally dependable source.

Other than those who really were involved in or connected with the CIA's efforts to assassinate Castro, Hersh has no source for this libel, a safe libel with Robert Kennedy safely dead, himself assassinated.

This is a persistence in that Hersh-it method of recording history, repeat rumors and conjectures and lies over and over again and wind up treating them as established fact. The Hersh of this book is not capable of feeling disgrace but it does disgrace him, Little, Brown and the country.

Still again, reason for the absence of source notes. Lies have no quotable sources.

Immediately Hersh is in Halpern's debt again, depending on him and giving Halpern's actual words more meaning than is in them. As Hersh uses them in this book, "get rid if Castro" means assassinate him. This is also true of such formulations as "Castro has to go." But as we saw in the Operation Mongoose documents published by the State Department, what was really meant was overthrowing the Castro government and getting "rid of" him that way. That was the way he "had to go."

Hersh continues with the same line and the same dependence upon Halpern as his only and as he writes it his unquestionable source, which Halpern certainly is not:

"The Kennedys were on our back constantly to do more damage to Cuba, to cause an uprising, to get rid of Castro and the Castro regime," the CIA's Samuel Halpern, who served as the executive assistant to three deputy directors for clandestine operations, told me in one of our interviews for this book." They were just absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Castro . . . I don't know of any senior officer that I talked to who felt, aside from the pressure from the Kennedys, that Castro had to go. Me and my buddies kept asking over and over again, 'Why are we doing this? We're not getting anywhere.' We didn't know why we were doing what we were doing, but we were told to do it, so we did it. We were good soldiers."

Halpern, who began his intelligence career with the OSS in 1943, was brought to Washington from the Far East in the fall of 1961 and was eventually designated executive officer for the Cuba task force as the CIA's bureaucracy grew in response to the White House's demand to oust Castro. Within months what soon became the largest CIA station in the world was in operation on the campus at the University of Miami, with six hundred American case officers monitoring the activities of an estimated three thousand Cuban exiles on the payroll. Scores of guerrilla teams infiltrated Cuba by boat, collecting intelligence and attempting to carry out hit-and-run sabotage. The Kennedy administration had changed its approach. The Bay of Pigs had called for a military invasion by a large and well-armed exile force and the murder of Castro, provoking an uprising on the island. The new plan, which became known as Operation Mongoose, relied on propaganda, economic sabotage, and the infiltration of small unit exile teams to create the conditions for an internal revolt. To run thee operation, Jack Kennedy sought out Edward G. Lansdale, an air force general famed for his exploits as a covert operator in the Philippines and South Vietnam (he was said to be the model for The Quiet American, Graham Greene's 1955 novel about Saigon). William Harvey still responsible for executive action (ZR/RIFLE), was the CIA's point man on Mongoose — and the revived assassination plotting against Castro. Johnny Rosselli and his friends in the Mafia would now be working directly for Harvey and once again trying to get poison pills in Havana (pages 268-9).

(They did have a "courier"going to and returning from Havana, and with such a courier the Mafia had trouble "trying to get poison pills into Havana"? A Mafia courier could not do that? Small as a poison pill may be?)

After criticism of Robert Kennedy for his saying that, to begin with, the people in the CIA were not very good, this:

The people in the CIA saw it differently. "You don't know what pressure is until you get those two sons of bitches laying it on you," Halpern told me "We felt we were doing things in Cuba because of a family vendetta and not because of the good of the United States." The Kennedys were taking on Castro "for personal reasons — because the family name was besmirched by the Bay of Pigs. Cuba stained the Kennedy escutcheon. It wasn't national security. It was like their father always said: 'Don't get mad; get even.' We knew we were in a political operation inside the city of Washington (pages 169-70).

As this ends, Halpern, with his own ass to cover, has converted the dismal failure of the CIA, whose project The Bay of Pigs was, albeit under the Eisenhower administration, into a Kennedy project, and with that he and Hersh make of it motive for anything they want to attributed to any Kennedy.

Or from which they absolve the CIA.

There is no doubt, as Hersh quotes Halpern as saying, that the Kennedys wanted the end of the Castro regime. There is, however, no real support anywhere, including in this book, for the exaggerations relating to pressure and drive and above all there is no proof at all of any Kennedy intent to or order to assassinate Castro.

That was the CIA and the CIA alone, and the Halperns are driven to hold all others responsible, not them and their CIA who are alone responsible.

What Hersh does not spell out to those less than well informed is that Halpern's career in the CIA, once he was back from the far east, was a career of dirty-tricks. Instead of telling the reader this, Hersh covers his own ass by referring to Halpern's role as "the executive assistant to three deputy directors for clandestine operations."

They are the chief dirty-tricksters.

It was from them and from the CIA's office of "security" that the pressures to assassinate Castro came.

As Schlesinger pointed out in his letter to the Times correcting the prejudicial inaccuracies in the Powers review of this Hersh book, there is no proof at all not only that Kennedy authorized the assassination of Castro or that Eisenhower did, either.

If there were any such proof the CIA would have leaked it long ago.

Hersh, the experienced reporter, does not tell his reader what it is — or could be — that Halpern refers to in, "Why are we doing all this?" What was "all this" that the CIA was doing?

Sponsoring raids by anti-Castro Cuban exiles that were at most pinpricks and hurt the Cuban people, not their government.

It is all talk, Hersh talk and Halpern talk, and it means nothing but is intended to give the false impression, the way Hersh uses it, to imply that the pressure was from Kennedy and to assassinate Castro.

That Halpern line about doing what they were told to do, although it meant nothing is a plain lie. He is covering for himself and his former associates in the same failures.

As he and Hersh continue rambling and by their rambling confuse the reader, it becomes clear that what Halpern is talking about is Operation Mongoose. That, as we saw with the official documents, did not include either an assassination of Castro or any new invasion of Cuba unless there were to be a an uprising that threw the Castro government out.

Halpern was not involved until Operation Mongoose, from what Hersh writes and does not explain. He was not brought back from the far east until "the fall of 1961" and after some time ("eventually") was "designated executive officer of the Cuban Task Force."

There is no doubt that what the CIA did do to try to hurt the Castro government it did in the expectation that Kennedy would approve it, but there is no evidence at all — and when he could use that evidence Halpern comes up with none -- that the niggling little things the CIA did and had done to do petty harm to Cuba was on the orders of any Kennedy. Likewise does Hersh fail to include a single illustration of this.

All those schemes failed because of what the CIA would not face: despite all the hardships they suffered, most Cubans were better off than they had been. They had medical care when that had been impossible for them, they were literate where most had been kept illiterate, and their children had opportunities the children of the poor had never had before. The average Cuban also understood that at least a major part of the hardships they were suffering were inflated by the United States and the Cuban exiles who worked with the CIA.

After Hersh admits that Operation Mongoose "relied on propaganda, economic sabotage, and the infiltration of small-unit exile teams to create the conditions for an internal revolt," in which, as he does not say, they failed miserably, Hersh repeats the persisting lie, with careful language so he can deny it, that "the revived assassination plotting against Castro" was part of it. It is not true and any such renewed plotting was off the cuff, not authorized. There is nothing to prove that anyone other than as the CIA itself could have been behind assassinating Castro.

The false pretense that orders to assassinate came from the White House, again with Halpern as the sole source, is repented on page 270.

It continues this way with what is a bit unusual for Hersh, quotation of a British expert saying that the British spooks "were convinced that 'the CIA [was] blundering in the Carribean" (page 270).

This all but the CIA knew.

Still trying to attribute the assassination of Castro to a Kennedy and speaking of after Bill Harvey took over the Halpern "get Castro" CIA Task Force W that was to do it, Hersh has this:

"Bill Harvey was a rough and tough SOB," Sam Halpern told me, "but when push came to shove, he couldn't deliver either. He had no more expertise than you and I in eliminating anybody. We never killed anyone," Halpern added, "but not for lack of trying."

Until his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy repeatedly denied that he or his brother had anything to do with the Castro assassination attempts. The most explicit denials came during his taped interviews in April and May 1964 at the Kennedy Library. Asked whether there had been any direct attempts on Castro's life during his brother's administration, Kennedy said, "no."

"No one tried?"

"No."

"Contemplated?"

"No" (pages 272-3).

Hersh intends for this not to be believed but the fact is that there is no proof of any reasonable kind that it is not true. All there is, all that he has in all this book, comes from those who were officially the get-Castro gang in the CIA, those who were directly or indirectly involved in the actual efforts to assassinate him. They are hardly credible sources and they have nothing but their word. They have no proof at all.

Even little dishonesties as the basis for contrived criticism of the Kennedys are wholesale in Hersh's book. For example, he complains that the that the President "was adamant that Arthur Goldberg, the secretary of labor, be allowed to join the counter-insurgency group" that was being formed (page 279). Aside from the appropriateness of one with Goldberg's official role to be involved in what would be pitched to the average Cuban worker, what Hersh omits is that Goldberg had been an official of the steel-workers union and had been in precisely that role when he had been in counterinsurgency in the OSS in World War II. He then interviewed me for work there but decided against using me because my German language skills were not very good. Goldberg was experienced in counterinsurgency, despite Hersh's disapproval of him for being on the Kennedy administrations's Special Group (CI) for counterinsurgency.

The long and the short of it is that the continued attempts to assassinate Castro, as is true of all earlier attempts, were the CIA's idea. It is, as Schlesinger wrote The New York Times, quoted above, "that the CIA, like intelligence agencies in other countries, believed that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials and used the excuse of 'plausible deniability' to act as it deemed best without telling those to whom the agency was minimally accountable."

Or, as Helms had put it, although he did not use these exact words, he got his orders by mind-reading.

Like Halpern, Hersh treats Bill Harvey as totally credible, as a solidly dependable source. There was a glimpse of a different side of the fabled Harvey in The Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section of October 10, 1976. Its lead article, which ran across the top of its first page, is headlined, "The CIA's 'Loaded Gun.'" The subheading is, "The Life and Hard Times of 'America's James Bond.' William King Harvey." The article was written by a Washington reporter who specialized in and covered intelligence agencies, David C. Martin. Here is how Martin's Article begins:

There should have been more people there when they buried Bill Harvey last June. In a way, when the most controversial clandestine operator in CIA history died of a heart attack at 60, it was the end of an era.

Twelve months before his death, William King Harvey had been a key witness in the Senate intelligence committee's investigation of the CIA's futile efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Harvey had not only been directly involved; he perhaps held the answer to whether President Kennedy had ordered Castro's death.

Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale, whose own covert exploits inspired no less a novelist than Graham Greene, had told the committee of a meeting between Harvey and the President. Some time in late 1961 or early 1962. Lansdale recalled, the President had remarked to him that he was the American James Bond. Lansdale, with all due modesty, demurred, suggesting, that the real 007 was to be found at the CIA in the person of Bill Harvey. Fan of Ian Fleming that he was, The President asked to meet Harvey and, before long, the CIA's cumbersome operator was sitting with Lansdale outside the Oval Office.

As they waited to be ushered in, Lansdale turned to Harvey and said, "You're not carrying your gun, are you?" Of course he was, Harvey replied, starting to pull a revolver from his pant pocket. Lansdale, not knowing how the Secret Service would react, quickly told Harvey to keep the damn thing in his pants until he could tell the agents that the gentleman would like to check his firearm. Harvey turned over the gun and was preparing to enter the Oval Office when, suddenly remembering something, he whipped out a .38 detective special from a holster snapped to his belt in the small of his back and handed it to what must have been some very startled agents.

Harvey denied under oath that he had carried any firearms that day to the White House. The guns may or may not be Lansdale's invention, but they are a constant ingredient in the stories that made Harvey's name a household word in cloak and dagger circles for at least two decades before it finally surfaced publicly.

President Kennedy must have been slightly chagrined at the sight of his American Bond a red-faced, pop-eyed, bullet-headed, pear-shaped man with a duck-like strut that was part waddle and part swagger. Harvey's deep, booming voice and absolute self-assurance must have restored the President's faith in 007 somewhat, but Ian Fleming would never read the same again. They had a brief but pleasant chat, Harvey testified, with absolutely no mention of assassination.

For one year after his meeting with the President, Harvey operated for the only time in his career at the highest levels of government. As head of the agency's Task Force W, he directed intelligence gathering missions, propaganda activities, paramilitary operations and sabotage raids against Cuba as part of a carefully orchestrated administration effort to overthrow Castro.

It was known as Operation Mongoose . . .

In other accounts, when Harvey was at the White House and with the President, it was after he'd eaten a heavy lunch. He fells asleep and snored when conferring with the President. Other accounts have it that Robert Kennedy then delivered a memorable chewing-out of Harvey, at some length. This is among the reasons for CIA prejudice against the Kennedy White House on this controversial matter.

Harvey headed the CIA's part of Operation Mongoose that Martin reports was drafted

By Lansdale and approved by the President in writing. Harvey took orders from the Special Group (Augmented) which was chaired by Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

It would prove Harvey's undoing, for he was strictly an operator, ill-suited to the corridors of power. As John McCone, who headed the CIA at the time, would later say, "When you take a plant supervisor and make him president of the company, it doesn't always work out."

McCone did not say it all but he did say enough!