Chapter 9

One Example of Hersh's Omission of What Proves Hersh Untruthful

Comparing Hersh, meaning the writer and what he wrote, with one of his major sources, of almost two decades earlier, is informative. It tells us much about Hersh the writer and what he wrote.

Thomas Powers, like Hersh, was a Pulitzer winner. His The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, was published by Knopf in 1979. It was reprinted by Pocket Books in 1981. (All citations that follow are to the Pocket Books reprint.) The New York Times hailed it as "The best book written on the CIA," an opinion shared widely in the major newspapers.

Unlike the Hersh book, Powers' does have source notes by chapter and a bibliography. Power' notes are almost a fifth of the book, they are that extensive and detailed. In the reprint edition they take up eighty-eight pages of small type.

As will be obvious as we do it, citing by page number to the earlier Powers work on which Hersh did draw is no problem at all. Not in honest writing, in honest use of earlier information. So, the obvious reasons for not citing this and other sources by page number is to make it more difficult for readers and scholars to check Hersh out, to compare what Hersh wrote with what Powers wrote.

Had Hersh done this, he would have been asking for trouble, beginning with Little, Brown. Which, of course, could have done what I have done and done it more easily and more rapidly if it had wanted to. The trouble for Hersh and his book, if he had done what is normal and provided the usual source notes, would have extended to reviewers and to readers.

Comparing what Hersh wrote with what Powers wrote provokes wonder. Did they write about the same presidents, Eisenhower and Kennedy? About the same assassination plots? The same CIA and the same people in it?

This comparison that follows does not come from rereading the Powers book of 1979 when Hersh's appeared the end of 1997. All we now do is repeat some of what would have been obvious if Hersh had had the minimal honesty of providing page citations for Sam Halpern, Hersh's major CIA source. No other entry in the Powers index was used.

As will be obvious after what evolved, what the Powers book includes and says that Hersh's does not say, that what Hersh did not include is not because he did not know about it, and where Hersh has a different version that also is not because he was not aware of what Powers published and what he had been told by those who had the personal knowledge.

This does suggest additional Little, Brown motive for avoiding any peer reviews before accepting the Hersh book.

Many books have been written about the CIA and any of them also could have been consulted by Little, Brown. It happens that I remembered that when I read the Powers book a few simple notes I made at the end of its index relate to what Hersh wrote. That can be evaluated when compared with Hersh whose book came almost two decades later. It does happen that the content of the Powers book about which I made those notes is, with a single exception, what is quoted from his book that Hersh that follows. Hersh also wrote about those same things and people, but what he said and what Powers said are not the same thing.

Whether someone used a source has any personal involvement or any coming from his employment is important in evaluating his dependability, or undependability, his partiality or impartiality — in whether a writer should have him as an impartial, uninvolved source and the credibility the reader can give what he is quoted as saying.

With regard to Halpern, Thomas Powers' book holds a few references to him and others who are used by Hersh as though he and they had no personal involvements of any other kind, as impartial, uninvolved sources whose words should be credited without any question. These few excerpts help in deciding whether Halpern and others from the CIA and what they say could be taken as Hersh does.

The first selection that includes Halpern relates to the CIA's efforts to overthrow the Indonesian ruler, Sukarno.

The State Department reluctantly overcame its hostility to "white faces" and allowed the CIA to send two more paramilitary experts with their radiomen to join the rebels. One of them war Anthony Poshepny, called Tony Po, who had trained CIA client armies all over the Far East. Tony Po was a hard, meticulous man, a veteran of many battles who habitually carried a boxer's mouth guard in his pocket because you never know what's going to happen when you walk into a bar — better safe than sorry. But no amount a paramilitary expertise could have saved the Sumatran rebels at that point. Even a rebel air force flown by CIA pilots and paid for with CIA funds — although the funds for security reasons were passed through a rebel bank account — failed to slow the rebels' defeat on Sumatra and retreat to the Celebes. At that point the CIA was reduced to the hope that its clients might hold on to an island or two for use as a "pressure point" in future dealings with Sukarno.

But on Sunday, May 18, Allen Lawrence Pope, one of the CIA pilots, was shot down in his B-26 after accidentally bombing a church and killing most of the congregation. When word of Pope's lose reached Washington the same day, Allen Dulles decided to call off the operation and sent an emotional cable — this is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, brave men, etc. — to the senior paramilitary officer with the rebels in Menado, telling him to inform the rebels the United States must disengage. After telling the rebel leaders about the decision, the CIA officers simply abandoned what they could not destroy or carry, and left. One group of officers still in the heart of Sumatra, accompanied by a handful of Indonesians facing death if they remained, had to walk out to the coast through several hundred miles of jungle, and then put out to sea in rubber boats from which they were later picked up by the U.S. Navy.

The result, of course, was a humiliation for the United States, but it was a quiet humiliation. The Indonesians knew who had been behind the rebels, of course, but they elected to treat the matter calmly, knowing Foster Dulles would have to come around, as he did; and the American press somehow never got wind of the CIA's role. But within the CIA the covert operators were sobered by their failure. Al Ulmer was shortly thereafter replaced a chief of the Far Fast Division by Desmond FitzGerald, and that summer Frank Wisner left the DDP for good. Ulmer's chief executive officer throughout the operation had been Sam Halpern, and he was upset by its failure. Halpern had served a liaison with British MI 6, involved because of the CIA's use of British territory in Singapore during the operation, and he found it painful to watch their cool professional equanimity the Sunday morning word arrived of Pope's loss. The CIA was in a full scale flap, officers pulled in from home, people running about. The British attitude was implicit but clear by the time an operation is blown it's too late to do anything about it; why all the excitement? couldn't things wait for Monday? One British intelligence official watching the uproar; told Halpern, "This would never happen on our home territory."

Richard Helms took much the same attitude. After the dust had settled he casually raised the subject with Halpern, who happened to be in his office on another piece of business one day that summer. Helm asked, "What went wrong, Sam?"

Halpern told him. The rebels had been an unknown quantity, the State Department wanted an aggressive operation but refused to allow CIA to send more than one officer to deal with the rebels in the early stages. They were worried about white faces blowing the operation and embarrassing the United States. Al Ulmer argued again and again at the Ad Hoc Interagency Committee's meetings on the operation that you can't cover an operation like this with one guy. By the time the second and third men got in, it was too little and too late again, as usual. The rebels were given plenty of equipment but they had little stomach for fighting.

Halpern did not go into great detail, but he laid it out clearly enough. Just about everything that can go wrong with a paramilitary operation, he told Helms, had gone wrong with this one. From confusion about aims and a bad estimate of clients, to a fatal caution about striking to kill, if you're going to strike at all. When Halpern was done, Helm said nothing. Nothing at all. Not, "I see," or "So that's it," or "No surprise about that." Halpern expected some sort of comment, but Helms proved again that he was a very taciturn man, not easy to read. Helms listened to the description of the CIA's biggest covert failure in ten years, a classic Cold War spoiling operation gone wrong, and then he just nodded his head (pages 113-5).

Powers dates this as during the summer of 1956 (on page 112). Halpern then was the executive officer of an operation comparable to his and the CIA's Cuba failure. The CIA that did not learn what it could and should have learned from its failures.

The next selection related to Operation Mongoose. It adds a bit to what we said about Bill Harvey. He does not seem to be the same man about whom Hersh writes:

The first order of business for the CI Group was Cuba. The CIA was heavily involved in both Laos and Vietnam at the same time, but the covert operations launched against North Vietnam beginning in the fall of 1961 under the Saigon station chief, William Colby, were on the back burner. Cuba was where the Kennedys wanted immediate results. A second committee, the Special Group Augmented (SGA) was established to oversee Operation Mongoose, run by General Edward G. Lansdale, a counterinsurgency specialist with experience in both the Philippines and Vietnam, where he had helped Ngo Dinh Diem to consolidate his control over the country. No Kennedy program received less publicity than Mongoose, or more personal attention from the Kennedys, and in particular from Robert. The Kennedys wanted Castro out of there, and the CI Group's weekly meetings hardly had time for anything else. The fifteen members would gather at 10:00 p.m. in a conference room next door to Taylor's office. After an hour or two, half the members would leave and the remainder would convene a meeting of the Special Group Augmented. When that ended, the members of the Special Group for overseeing covert operations would bid its meeting, with the result that John McCone, beginning in November 1961, and the other Special Group members would sometimes spend six or seven hours at a stretch in three successive meetings dominated by one priority: getting rid of Castro.

Operation Mongoose quickly became the single largest clandestine program within the CIA, but it was hardly unprecedented. In fact, it was entirely characteristic of the CIA response to the passing enthusiasms of postwar American presidents, whose administrations tended to focus on one crisis at a time. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the CIA cranked up a huge operation against the Soviet bloc Europe; at one time General Lucian K. Truscott II the CIA's first station chief in Germany, had 1,200 men under him. Later, similar efforts were directed against Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion failed. When Cuba slipped from Lyndon Johnson's mind the CIA switched its focus to Vietnam, and later still — for a briefer period, but with the same intensity — to Chile. In every instance the Washington bureaucracy would become obsessed with the crisis at hand, committees would proliferate, meetings would spawn meetings, paper would be cranked out by the cartload, reputations would be made or destroyed overnight, and the CIA, under the pressure of presidential demand, would search for the lever which might turn things around. Sometimes, as with Guatemala, they would find it, and sometimes not. Operation Mongoose followed the pattern with eerie exactitude. For nearly eighteen months, beginning in November 1961, the Kennedy administration demanded action on Cuba. The CI Group established the Special Group Augmented, which approved Mongoose and entrusted it to Lansdale, who drew up an elaborate scenario with a precise timetable calling for a march on Havana and the overthrow of Castro in October 1962. It was all worked out on paper. The final stage of Mongoose was right there in Lansdale's charts and it was up to the CIA under McCone and Helms to see that the plan worked.

The importance of the undertaking did not take long to establish. In the early stages of Mongoose, a CIA officer working on the operation, Sam Halpern, asked Lawrence Houston if the operation was even legal. He pointed out that the Bay of Pigs landing had been organized outside the United States at least partly in order to avoid violating the Neutrality Acts, which prohibited the bunching of attacks on foreign targets from American soil. Now Mongoose was being geared up in Miami; wasn't this against the law? Houston said the answer was no: if the President says it's okay, and if the Attorney General says it's okay, then it's okay.

The CIA officers in charge of the Cuban Branch set up by Helms were appalled by the magnitude of the task. "With what?" they asked. "We haven't got any assets. We don't even know what's going on in Cuba." One of Halpern's first suggestions, submitted repeatedly to Helms's chief executive officer, Gordon Mason, was to put a major CIA officer in charge of the Cuban program to give the effort clout within the Agency. But most of the names on Halpern's list were tied up elsewhere: Desmond FitzGerald was running the Far East Division and was supposed to fight the war in Vietnam, gearing up at the same time; his predecessor Al Ulmer was in Paris and couldn't be spared, so it was decided to give the job to William Harvey, a veteran of operations in Europe including the Berlin Tunnel.

Only a handful of CIA people captured the imagination of their colleagues and became legends within the Agency. Harvey was one such, a man everyone knew but not everyone liked, a rough-voiced, imposing figure, and so fat he had the Agency's permission on medical grounds to first travel first class whenever he flew, because he could not settle his bulk comfortably into the narrow tourist-class seats. In 1947, already a heavy drinker, he had moved from the FBI to the CIA. He described himself (accurately) as a three-martini man at lunch — two doubles and a single. Afterward, he sometimes fell asleep at his desk, more than once while a visitor waited patiently for him to reawaken. When he snoozed off during a meeting with McCone the new director wanted to fire him forthwith, but was dissuaded: Harvey was a rough diamond, perhaps, but he had his uses.

There was about him a certain single-mindedness. When he set himself to do something he did not hold back. He once told an acquaintance that he had been to bed with a woman every day of his life since he was twelve. Colleagues remember him as the only CIA officer who always carried a gun. He often left it in plain view on his desk, as if expecting to be surprised by an assassin while at work. Sometimes he loaded the gun while he talked, or worked the action and then let the hammer down gently, gently, but never too gently for the visitors who watched him do it. Not just a gun, but a different gun every day, from the large collection he kept in a case at home. This habit of Harvey's has often been dismissed as an affectation or eccentricity, a gesture devoid of violence, but one man who knew him well in Rome in the mid-1960s after his failure with Mongoose, considered Harvey a genuinely "dangerous clown." Asked why, the man said that once Harvey expressed his position in an argument by pulling a .45-caliber automatic from his desk drawer, pointing it between his listener's eyes at a distance of only two or three feet, and flipping the safety.

Dulles once said of him, "That Harvey is a conspiratorial cop. The only trouble is I can't decide if he's more conspiratorial or more a cop." But he was an experienced and imaginative clandestine operator; and he was a tireless project director as long as he was given a free rein. Harvey's first job as the head of CIA's Task Force W was to restore the agent networks in Cuba which had been rolled up by Castro just before the Bay of Pigs invasion. The island was penetrated to a degree because Castro's Russian security advisers had recommended he consolidate his control of the cities first, and leave the countryside until later. But despite the hectic pace with which agents were sent into Cuba and recruited inside not only exiles from Miami sent in over the beach, but foreign businessmen and diplomats — the Kennedy brothers were in a hurry to move yet faster. Lansdale's plan called for a popular uprising; Harvey was trying to build an underground network for political organizing, and to put enough agents in place to let CIA know what was going on. But the Kennedys, like an other Presidents and high officials dealing with the CIA, did not really understand the operational side of clandestine activity, or the importance of time in establishing solid covert organizations in a world all too untidy and unstable.

The Kennedys' dissatisfaction with the pace of Mongoose went to the CI Group, which passed it on to the SGA, which pressed Lansdale, who pushed Helms, who demanded results from Harvey and Task Force W. Reports and memos sent back up the line were frequently kicked back by Helms, who complained that they were not sufficiently positive in tone, not sufficiently "forward-leaning" (a Lansdale cant word). "There's a lot of ways you can write the English language to make it sound like we're moving ahead," Helms told the Cuban operators.

The sense of urgency emanating from the White House was intense. More than once Helms told Larry Houston, "My God, these Kennedys keep the pressure on about Castro." At a meeting in Bobby Kennedy's office on January 19, 1961 nearly a month before Helms officially took over as DDP, the Attorney General said that "no time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared," and that the President had told him the day before "the final chapter had not been written — it's got to be done and will be done." According to the Church Committee's Assassination Report, Helms attended at least seven of the forty Operation Mongoose meetings, and he himself testified that he frequently spoke with Robert Kennedy by phone and from time to time met with him privately. Accustomed to leaving his office with a clean desk between six and six-thirty every day, Helms, after the onset of Mongoose, regularly worked late into the evening.

But despite the White House pressure the SGA and Mongoose proceeded sluggishly, not from bureaucratic indifference, but because Cuba was a hard nut to crack. Lansdale's original plan had called for an escalating effort to create an opposition to Castro inside Cuba, followed by insurgency and a general uprising. When Lansdale spoke of a march on Havana in October 1962, he meant march — triumphal entry like Castro's own just three years earlier. But Lansdale's plan was a fantasy. The officers on Task Force W knew what they had begun with — something so close to nothing only a philosopher might establish the difference. Castro's effective opposition was very close to being a class without members. A number of Kennedy administration officials accused the CIA of ignoring dissident Cubans with support inside the country in favor of more pliable men the Agency could control. The CIA insisted it was only working with what it had, and that a lot of the administration's favorite Cubans could not deliver; their support networks were illusory. Harvey managed to get agents onto the island, and to recruit others in rural areas, but what they told him was bleak: there would be no general uprising.

After the first few months of covert operations, Mongoose gradually shifted its emphasis from resistance-building toward sabotage, paramilitary raids, efforts to disrupt the Cuban economy by contaminating sugar exports, circulating counterfeit money and ration books, and the like. "We want boom-and-bang on the island," Lansdale said. Robert Kennedy took a particular interest in efforts to sabotage the Matahambre copper mines in western Cuba, on one occasion even calling repeatedly to learn if the agents had left yet: Had they landed? Had they reached the mines? Had they destroyed them successfully? Kennedy, like Lansdale, wanted boom-and-bang, and a number of CIA officers on the operational level grew to know his voice as he called to find out how they were coming along, and to press them forward. On occasion, even his secretary called in his behalf. The Matahambre copper mines were never destroyed, despite the launching of three separate full-scale raids, but other attacks on sugar refineries, oil storage facilities and similar targets were more successful. Still, they fell far short of wrecking the Cuban economy, even in its weakened state following the dislocations of revolution, and the paramilitary program held out little promise of Castro's overthrow.

There were three reasons for the failure. First was the inherent difficulty of the undertaking. The CIA station in Miami quickly expanded into the world's largest — six hundred case officers and as many as three thousand contract with which agents were sent into Cuba and recruited inside — not only exiles from Miami sent in over the beach, but foreign businessmen and diplomats — the Kennedy brothers were in a hurry to move yet faster. Lansdale's plan called for a popular uprising; Harvey was trying to build an underground network for political organizing, and to put enough agents in place to let CIA know what was going on. But the Kennedys, like all other Presidents and high officials dealing with the CIA, did not really understand the operational side of clandestine activity, or the importance of time in establishing solid covert organizations in a world all too untidy and unstable.

The Kennedys' dissatisfaction with the pace of Mongoose went to the CI group, which passed it on to the SGA, which pressed Lansdale, who pushed Helms, who demanded results from Harvey and Task Force W. Reports and memos sent back up the line were frequently kicked back by Helms, who complained that they were not sufficiently positive in tone, not sufficiently "forward looking" (a Lansdale cant word) "There's a lot of ways you can write the English language to make it sound like we're moving ahead," Helms told the Cuban operators . . . (pages 170-5)

The Taylor referred to is General Maxwell Taylor.

Houston, remember, was the CIA's general counsel.

Powers details the same mistakes made by the same CIA people, Halpern and Harvey included. Powers refers to the "eerie exactitude" of repeating those mistakes.

He also refers to the CIA's Operation Mongoose as a "fantasy."

It was the CIA's plan, not the Kennedy's.

And it is clear that while the Kennedys did, like all other Presidents, Powers says, want action, they did not suggest or want and Powers has no hint that they suggested or wanted Castro assassinated, as Hersh says. Powers did include the Mafia plots in his book, as we see. He knew about them and that they were not Kennedy's.

The truth is clear in Powers, what was sought was the overthrow of the Castro regime. Hersh says the exact opposite: that the plan was Kennedy's and it was for assassination, and he has only Exner as his source.

Powers also gives a different impression of the CIA and what it does than Hersh conveys. It is also a different picture of Operation Mongoose and some of those in it and what the Kennedys expected or wanted of it. Powers is explicit that they did not plan to assassinate Castro. As Powers put it, the meaning of "get rid of" was "The Kennedys wanted Castro out of there." That does not mean assassinate him.

The Kennedy dissatisfaction was with the slow pace of Mongoose. It is more that, like all presidents, Kennedy did not understand clandestine operations. He had been misled about what was possible.

The next Powers excerpt begins with what relates to the CIA/Mafia plot of the Eisenhower administration and then changes over. Some of the story-book stuff is reported. It then shifts to the second CIA/Mafia plot that clearly was other than Hersh writes about. There was no Kennedy involvement in it. No Kennedy even knew about it:

The Technical Services Division, meanwhile, was working on poisons which might be used for the murder, after Giancana had protested that a gangland-style killing would never work. In a separate but related effort in August 1960, the CIA's Office of Medical Services was given a box of Castro's favorite cigars and told to treat them with a lethal poison. They were ready in October, and delivered to someone in the Agency — it is not known to whom — the following February. The cigars my have been intended for Castro during his trip to the United Nations in September 1960. According to David Wise and Thomas B. Ross , a CIA officer told Michael J. Murphy of the New York Police Department that the Agency planned to assassinate Castro with a box of exploding cigars, but then had changed its mind. Perhaps the box of cigars referred to by Murphy was the same one the Office of Medical Services had treated with botulinum toxin by October 7. Perhaps not. In any event, the Technical Services Division prepared botulinum toxin pills in February 1961, tested them successfully on monkeys, and delivered them to Colonel Edwards who passed them on to Rosselli in Miami. Late that month or early in March, Rosselli told the CIA the pills had been given to a man in Castro's entourage, but that he had returned them after he lost his job, and with it his access to Castro. A second attempt in April faded when the agent got "cold feet" and after the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion the Maheu-Rosselli operation went into a dormant phase.

Early that fall, however, the Mafia plot to kill Castro was reactivated after Bissell, in a meeting with both Kennedy brothers held in the Cabinet Room, was "chewed out" for "sitting on his ass and not doing anything about getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime." This time Bissell bypassed Colonel Edwards and gave the job to William Harvey. Earlier in 1961 Bisell had asked Harvey to organize a unit which might recruit agents to carry out assassinations on call — described with the euphemism "executive action," the very phrase, interestingly, which Allen Dulles later used in his memoirs to describe the "'Murder Inc' branch of the KGB." Harvey organized the group, and on November 16, 1961, he and Bissell discussed the possibility that ZR/RIFLE, the "executive action" group, might be used for killing Castro. Bissell also told Harvey about the Mafia plot, and later Harvey briefed Helms.

In early April 1962, acting on Helms's explicit orders, Harvey asked Colonel Edwards to put him into contact with John Rosselli, and a few days later the two men were introduced in Miami by the man Edwards had assigned as Rosselli's case officer, James O'Connell. Harvey got off on the wrong foot with Rosselli by telling him to break contact on the Castro operation with Robert Maheu and Sam Giancana. Harvey had apparently decided the two men were superfluous and untrustworthy as the result of an episode eighteen months earlier, in October 1960, when the CIA-Mafia plot was first getting under way. At that time, Maheu, as a favor to Giancana, had hired a private detective to tap the Las Vegas phone of one of Giancana's girlfriends in order to discover if she was being unfaithful to him. The tap was discovered by a maid, the detective was arrested by the police, and Maheu was told to square it or else.

Later, in April 1961, with the permission of Colonel Edwards, Maheu told the FBI that the tap was connected to an operation he had undertaken for the CIA, and Edwards confirmed his story. The problem refused to go away, however, and the following year the Las Vegas wiretap episode helped the FBI to learn the rough outlines of the plot to kill Castro. This all struck Harvey as a perfect example of an operation out of control, and he decided the first step was to get rid of the clowns, Maheu and Giancana. Rosselli did as Harvey asked, and the two men met again, in New York on April 8, 1962. Before the end of the month Harvey delivered four poison pills to Rosselli in Miami. In May, Rosselli reported that the pills were inside Cuba, and later, in June, that a three-man team had been sent in to kill Castro.

But that was as far as things went. By September 1962 when Rosselli told Harvey another three-man team was to be sent to Cuba, Harvey concluded the operation was going nowhere. He had run the operation with extreme security; none of the men who even worked for him on Task W knew what he was up to, or where he was going when he disappeared for a few days every month or two. Bissell had given him the Rosselli operation, Helms told him to give it a shot, Harvey decided on his own it was a will-o'-the-wisp. In February 1963, already replaced by Desmond FitzGerald as head of the renamed Special Affairs Staff, Harvey told Rosselli the operation was over. In June the two men had a farewell dinner in Miami, which was "observed" by the FBI. The Bureau's liaison officer with the CIA, Sam Papich, told Harvey that J. Edgar Hoover would naturally be informed. Considering the nature of Harvey's business with Rosselli, this presented something of a problem. Harvey went to Helms, who agreed the best thing was to proceed one step a time, and not to offer explanations until explanations were necessary. They decided not to inform McCone about the dinner unless Papich told Harvey that Hoover intended to tell McCone about it on his own.

The reason for their coyness with McCone is unclear. According to the written record, Harvey frequently discussed the Rosselli plot with Helms during the eleven months -- April 1962 to February 1963 — while Harvey was running it, but both men agreed not to tell McCone what they were up to. McCone later claimed that he had known nothing about the assassination plots, and CIA documents on this episode, at least would seem to bear him out. But a number of CIA people in a position to know, and not only those directly involved, have said in unmistakable terms they found McCone's amnesia hard to credit. He was in a position to know what was going on, and the fact no assassination memos signed by McCone could be found was better evidence of his caution than of his ignorance. Helms in particular, once the investigations began, was to be trapped between McCone's forgetfulness and Harvey's total recall, putting Helms squarely atop the traceable chain of command. So far a the record shows, during the second phase of the Rosselli plot Helms was the man in charge.

Harvey's replacement by Desmond FitzGerald in early 1963, and the scuttling of the Rosselli operation, did not end but only redirected the CIA's attempts to kill Castro. One of FitzGerald's early inspirations was fanciful and impractical, appealing to his temperamental love of the clever and the ingenious. It called for the Special Services Division to rig an exploding seashell which would be placed on the sea floor an area where Castro liked to go skin diving. Like many CIA people, in love with the subtle and the artful, FitzGerald was fascinated by gadgets, and resented skeptics who dourly suggested they would cost too much, or would fail to work, or weren't even needed at all. At times he became downright petulant. When Sam Halpern once protested that a fancy new communications device just wasn't going to work, FitzGerald said, "If you don't like it you don't have to come to meetings anymore."

Halpern protested the seashell plan as inherently impossible to control: how could you be sure that Castro would be the one to find it? Besides, the best assassinations do not appear to be assassinations at all, while Castro blowing up on the ocean floor would point a finger directly at the United States. Similar protests had been made about the plan to give Castro a box of poisoned cigars: he might hand them all out to a delegation of visiting school teachers. If the idea was to kill Castro, you had to find something which would get him, and no one else.

FitzGerald's ideas weren't turning out any better than such earlier ones as the proposal to provide Castro with a wet suit to be delivered by James B. Donovan, and American lawyer negotiating the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. The Technical Services Division had duly purchased a suit, contaminated the breathing apparatus with tuberculosis bacilli and the suit itself with fungus spores that would cause a chronic skin disease called madura foot. Critics of this plan argued that its authors had neglected the most elementary considerations — for example, the fact that it was in effect a gift from the United States, while the idea was to keep it secret; or, then again, Donovan's feelings about being the gift-giver in this plot. If he wasn't let in on the plot, after all, he might try on the suit himself. In the event, Donovan gave Castro a wet suit entirely on his own, and the CIA's wet suit destroyed.

But FitzGerald did not abandon the problem (pages 197-90).

Clearly, this second CIA plot to assassinate Castro through the Mafia was not only not any Kennedy plot, if was entirely unknown to either of them.

The record is again clear, Hersh knew that what he attributed to Exner was untrue, that she lied, as he knew she did about other matters. Harvey had forced Giancana out. He was not even in the plot which Exner claimed she carried money and messages!

Powers is also explicit in his source notes: Kennedy did not even know about this second CIA/Mafia plot to assassinate Castro. Three of these relevant source notes appear on pages 444 and 445:

71 Much later this meeting was described to Thomas Karamessines by the Cuba desk officer. Karamessines told me he thought that's when Bissell got an order to kill Castro. The Church Committee also learned of the meeting, but heard it described in somewhat less explicit terms. Bissell told the Committee he did not recall that particular meeting, but agreed that the Kennedys had in fact told him to "get off your ass about Cuba." But they did not tell him to kill Castro, he would not have tried it without "formal and explicit approval," and besides, the entire effort was not really renewed until after he had turned over the DDP to Richard Helms in February 1962. Ibid., p.141.

75 Kennedy was not told that a second phase of the plot was under way — a new batch of pills had been given to Rosselli in April. Houston says that the head of Staff D in the DDP told Edwards that the plot was over, and that Edwards told him the same thing. That, he says, was why a memo sent to the Attorney General on May 14, 1962, made no mention of the ongoing effort. But the memo had been read by both Harvey and Helms, who were in charge of the second phase of the poison-pill plot. Why they sent a deliberately inaccurate memo to the Attorney General is a mystery. The Church Committee pointed out in its report (p 131) that Kennedy's appointments calendar for May 7 (the day of the Houston-Edwards briefing at 4:00 p.m.) stated "1:00 — Richard Helms." The Committee asked Helms if he had met secretly with Kennedy that day to give him the full story before Houston and Edwards arrived with their "official" but incomplete version. Helms said he had not, and if he had he would have remembered it because "I would have been conniving or colluding, and I have no recollection of ever having done anything like that."

76 It ought to be added here that on October 29, 1962, Hoover sent the Attorney General a memorandum about an underworld informant of the FBI who had stated confidently that he could arrange Castro's assassination. Hoover and Kennedy had frequently discussed the CIA's plot at the time of the Houston- Edwards briefing, had agreed that use of the Mafia for such an undertaking was foolish to say the least, but had never condemned assassination as such. Knowing Kennedy's feelings on the subject. Hoover did not hesitate to offer the FBI's good offices where the CIA's had failed. Hoover's memo to Kennedy concluded: "The informant was told that his offer is outside our jurisdiction, which he acknowledged. No commitments were made to him. At this time, we do not plan to further pursue the matter. Our relationship with him as been most carefully guarded and we would feel obligated to handle any recontact of him concerning this matter if such is desired" Final Report, Book V, p. 10n.

(Easy as it is to cite pages in the Church Committee report, to which Hersh refers often, he does not have a single citation to a single page to which he refers. Perhaps the nature of what we are seeing from the Powers book explains why.)

The second of the seventy-nine source notes Powers has for this chapter, most of which follows, relates to other assassinations of heads of state several of which Hersh tries to attribute to Kennedy, of whom he is critical for them. But Hersh has nothing to say about the president's under whom they were planned and he has no criticism of the assassination agency, the CIA:

2 The Church Committee's report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (1975) deals at length with the murder or attempted murder of five individuals — Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Fidel Castro, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Chilean General René Schneider. The attempt on Abdul Kassem in Iraq is mentioned in passing. The Committee concluded that the CIA was not directly responsible for the death of any of the six, although it certainly tried to kill Lumumba and Castro; was involved up to its scuppers with the Dominicans who assassinated Trujillo, and may even have been the source of the murder weapon; war fully knowledgeable of plans to overthrow Diem; and conspired with Chileans who planned to kidnap Schneider and killed him when the tried.

There is scattered evidence, in addition, that the CIA was at least in contact with groups who planned to kill Sukarno and Nasser. In the early 1960s high officials of the French government anonymously charged that the CIA had been in touch, and perhaps something more than in touch, with members of the Secret Army Organization (OAS) who repeatedly tried to kill Charles de Gaulle. The charges, which the CIA denied, and which were never sustained, were probably the result of de Gaulle's irritation over CIA contacts with the Algerian FLN , a subject of frequent diplomatic protest . . . (pages 432-3).

Hersh's "Chapter Notes" for his "Target Castro: and "Judy" chapters (pages 467-9) make no reference to Powers' book. The reason is obvious. In and of itself this leaves little question: Hersh set out to do a dishonest book and that is what he did. His dishonesties are not accidental, not from carelessness and, with five years on the book, certainly are not from haste.

It is worth noting that the first sentence in the brief Hersh note on his "Target Castro" chapter refers to the former British spook, Peter Wright's book, Spycatcher (page 467). On page 270 Hersh refers to Wright as "one of Britain's most experienced intelligence operatives." But in using Wright as an authority, as Hersh does, Hersh fails to report the incredible scandal in which Wright was involved: he denounced the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, of the Labor Party, as a Moscow agent. This, of course, bears heavily on Wright's credibility.

Other than to Hersh. It is also typical of Hersh in this book.

Why Hersh had to ignore the Powers book, of which he knows and to which he refers elsewhere, is obvious. It becomes more obvious when we regard the lies that are so important to Hersh, who had to know they were lies, without which he could not have had this book.

Without regard to Powers, Hersh could not have used his book and they have written of Exner as he did.