Pentagon hatched plots, Cuba invasion plan

Published Wednesday, November 19, 1997, in the Miami Herald

Pentagon hatched plots, Cuba invasion plan

By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
Herald Staff Writer

WASHINGTON -- Within months of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Pentagon hatched devilishly intricate plans to invade the island and topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but shelved them after the assassination of President Kennedy, newly declassified documents show.

The Defense Department plans -- including a proposed August 1964 D-Day -- involved everything from trying to destroy Castro's image by distributing faked photos of him with beautiful women to justifying an invasion by simulating a Cuban attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay or even against a commercial airliner.

The 1,500 documents, from the files of top Pentagon officials from 1962 to 1964, were released Tuesday by the Assassination Records Review Board, a federal agency responsible for declassifying records surrounding the Kennedy assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

The documents reveal that Robert Kennedy, who was deeply involved in an anti-Castro sabotage campaign, met with Cuban exile militants Nov. 17, 1963, and was scheduled to see them again Nov. 21 or Nov. 22, the day the president was killed. Among the exiles was Manuel Artime, a Bay of Pigs veteran who was trying to recruit former comrades for a revolutionary force being assembled in Nicaragua, the army intelligence shows. Artime died in 1977.

The documents show how Pentagon thinking advanced from dirty tricks to a step-by-step invasion plan. The plans proceeded despite the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, which took the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war -- and ended with President Kennedy's pledge to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that the United States would not invade Cuba.

Many details of an anti-Castro strategy of economic sabotage, assassination attempts and psychological operations known as Operation Mongoose have been disclosed before. The newly released documents cast light on another aspect of that strategy, a host of Pentagon schemes -- mostly unrealized -- to destabilize the Havana government. They include:

Operation Good Times, in which airdrops or agents would distribute doctored photos of an obese Castro ``with two beauties in any situation desired, ostensibly within a room in the Castro residence, lavishly furnished, and a table brimming over with the most delectable Cuban food with an underlying caption (appropriately Cuban) such as ``My ration is different.''

``This should put even a Commie dictator in the proper perspective with the underprivileged masses,'' wrote the unidentified Army author of a February 1962 memo.

Operation Free Ride, aimed at creating unrest by airdropping valid one-way airline tickets in Cuba. The tickets, which would be ``good for passage to Mexico, Caracas, etc. (none to the U.S.)'' would have an expiration date and be mixed in with other leaflets dropped from the sky.

Operation Dirty Trick, which sought to exploit the U.S. launching of the Mercury manned orbit flight to make Cuba nervous by spreading rumors that it was merely a cover for unspecified naval maneuvers.

If the flight failed, the proposal called for the United States to blame Cuba by manufacturing evidence of electronic interference from the island. Astronaut John Glenn successfully completed the flight Feb. 20, 1962.

Operation True Blue, by which the United States would use high-powered transmitters in Florida or elsewhere to break into Cuban radio and television and ``periodically degrade Castro and other government figures in the minds of the Cuban people.''

The biggest potential punch came under the code name Operation Bingo, and was later discussed simply as finding the right grounds for a U.S. invasion.

On Mar. 9, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff received recommendations from their Cuba team for ``pretexts which they would consider would provide justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba.''

While asserting that a ``legitimate provocation'' would be the best excuse, the Pentagon planners weren't about to leave anything to chance. They recommended:

A faked attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay staged by ``friendly Cubans.'' Exile infiltrators would land in uniform outside the base, then storm its fences; others would provoke riots outside the main gate. Inside, U.S. soldiers would orchestrate explosions, start fires, burn aircraft and detonate mortar shells.

A ``Remember the Maine'' incident. Under this ruse, the Pentagon would blow up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and blame Cuba, mirroring the incident that ignited the 1898 Spanish-American War. The United States would follow up with a dramatic rescue of the nonexistent crew. ``Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.''

A staged Communist campaign of terror in Miami or other Florida cities, or even in Washington. The phony terrorists ``could sink a boatload of Cuban refugees en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.''

Fabricate the downing of a U.S. military plane or even a crowded civilian airliner by Cuban fighter jets. The passenger-carrying airliner would be replaced by a drone, which would broadcast its distress when over Cuban territory, then explode. U.S. agents in a submarine or fast boats could strew wreckage near the site.

In a Top Secret memo to the secretary of defense dated April 10, 1962, the Joint Chiefs chairman, L.L. Lemnitzer, urged action ``as soon as possible.''

``In view of the increasingly military and subversive threat to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere posed by the Communist regime in Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States,'' he wrote.

The Pentagon eventually set a timetable: Infiltrators would slip into Cuba in January 1964; by June 15 of that year, a ``Free Cuban Government'' would be established on Cuban soil; U.S. ``pretexts'' would unfold and conclude in an Aug. 3 invasion.

But, in the interim, Kennedy was shot. President Johnson, his successor, focused on Vietnam and was cool to armed conflict in Cuba.

Within five weeks of Kennedy's death, the Pentagon had changed its tune.

On Dec. 30, 1963, a memo from Army Secretary Cyrus Vance said: ``The U.S. does not contemplate either a premeditated full-scale invasion of Cuba or the contrivance of a provocation which could be used as a pretext for such action.''