Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (25 page)

This operation was a triumph of optimism and disorganization over experience. It rested on two fallacies: first, that in 1961, around 30,000 dissidents would take up arms against Castro if they were encouraged by a token occupation of part of the Cuban coast by a small invasion force based in the USA; second, that 1,500 paramilitaries, after an amphibious landing without close air support, could take on Cuba’s Revolutionary Army of 30,000, backed by 200,000 militia newly furnished with 40,000 tons of Warsaw Pact weapons. The CIA wrongly assumed that any civilian opponent of Castro was an insurgent. Substitute “Saddam Hussein” for “Castro” and it was a miscalculation repeated in Iraq in 2003. In Cuba there was no meaningful Resistance of the sort that Eisenhower—who first approved the operation—applauded in Occupied Europe during the Second World War.

By the time the invasion plan was transferred to the incoming President Kennedy in January 1961 it was already mired in administrative chaos, its political front composed of exiles torn by internal feuds, its secrecy blown in the press. As an official report noted: “‘Plausible denial’ was a pathetic illusion.”
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Radio Moscow announced the impending invasion four days before it happened. All that was required to ensure failure was a decision by Kennedy, after the invasion fleet had set sail from Nicaragua, to deny the force proper air cover. An official report, classified top secret for many years, reveals: “Late on 16 April, the eve of D-Day [in Cuba], the air strikes designed to knock out the rest of Castro’s air force on the following morning were called off. The message reached the field too late to halt the landing operation, as the decision to cancel the air strike was made after the landing force had been committed.” The outcome was predictable. As the invasion fleet approached Cuba, Castro’s B-26 light bombers, Sea Fury and T-33 fighters sank a supply ship, caused a transport to beach uncontrollably and damaged an infantry landing craft. A projected beach landing was abandoned, its assets transferred to another beach. Cuban air attacks went on throughout D-Day. At a third beachhead, Blue Beach, “enemy ground attacks, supported by aircraft, began from three directions on the afternoon of 18 April [D+1].” Six of the invaders’ B-26, two flown by American freelances, “inflicted heavy damage on the Castro column…using napalm, bombs, rockets and machine gun fire to destroy several tanks and about twenty troop-laden trucks. Air support to the Blue Beach troops was continued on the morning of 19 April, when three friendly [anti-Castro] B-26s including two piloted by Americans were shot down by Castro T-33s….

“In spite of a reported 1,800 casualties suffered by the Castro forces, the [exile] brigade’s ability to resist depended in the last resort on resupply of ammunition which had now become impossible….

In the last hours of resistance the brigade commander sent a series of terse and desperate messages to the task force command ship pleading for help:

“‘We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help. We cannot hold.’

“‘In water. Out of ammo. Enemy closing in. Help must arrive in next hour.’

“‘When your help will be here and with what?’

“‘Why your help has not come?’

“‘Am destroying all equipment and communications. Tanks are in sight. I have nothing to fight with. Am taking to woods. I cannot repeat cannot wait for you.’”
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During the following days, two freelance Americans and some Cuban frogmen rescued twenty-six survivors from the beach and nearby islands. The invaders lost 118 killed and 1,202 captured. Cuba lost 176 dead.

The Bay of Pigs left the memory of a nightmare that still haunts America. This is the well-grounded but unproven suspicion that Kennedy’s belated decision to withhold air support from the Cuban Exile Brigade, to ensure Washington’s plausible deniability, lay at the root of the president’s assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963. At least 100,000 Cuban exiles flooded into the U.S. during Castro’s first year of power in 1960. They included small but extremely violent mafias such as Alpha 66 that continued raids on Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. When Kennedy ordered those to stop, the exiles—some linked to the CIA as well as organized crime—saw this as a further betrayal. As one investigator reminds us: “By 1963, an intense bitterness pervaded the community of anti-Castro Cubans toward the man they believed betrayed them, John F. Kennedy. That hatred was, at the least, as great as their hatred of Fidel Castro.”
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In 1979, after a three-year investigation, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reported that there probably was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy and that the exiles “had the motive, based on what they considered President Kennedy’s betrayal of their cause, the liberation of Cuba from the Castro regime; the means, since they were trained and practiced in violent acts, the result of the guerrilla war they were waging against Castro and the opportunity, whenever the President appeared at public gatherings, as in Dallas on 22 November 1963.”
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However, the committee stopped short of identifying any Cuban group as such as being a formal part of the conspiracy. It concluded: “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that anti-Castro groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination…but that on the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.”
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If, indeed, Cuban-exile bitterness was what fueled the Kennedy assassination then it was one of history’s more lurid examples of the law of unintended consequences, known in military circles as “blowback,” that can result from ill-advised and clandestine paramilitary operations.

Assassinations can even happen in Washington—perhaps a mere fourteen blocks away from the White House—as well as in Dallas when an intelligence agency, or a conspiracy of intelligence agencies, puts their minds to it. Between 1973 and 1977 an international, anti-Marxist crusade shared by numerous South American governments embarked on Operation Condor, to hunt down perceived enemies around the world. Leading the pack was President Augusto Pinochet of Chile and his secret police chief, Manuel Contreras, who received a payment from the CIA officially explained away by “miscommunications in timing.”

On 21 September 1976, Orlando Letelier, his country’s former ambassador to the U.S., and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, his American colleague in the Institute for Policy Studies, were assassinated by a car bomb at Sheridan Circle, Washington, D.C. Hundreds of other opponents of Pinochet were dying suddenly, violently, at the time. After the Pinochet regime fell, Contreras was convicted of Letelier’s murder. He claimed he was acting under orders from Pinochet, with CIA complicity. In fact, he was brought to trial for this crime in Chile in 1995 as a result of U.S. pressure. He served seven years for this crime and in June 2008 was further convicted of the assassination of Carlos Prats, former Chilean Army chief, and his wife in Buenos Aires in 1974, also by car bomb, and given two life terms.

When Letelier and Moffitt were murdered, the CIA was being prodded by the Nixon administration into promoting anti-Communist coups in Central and South America, with a beatitude of dollars to promote the right sort of publicity and influence. The Agency was also encouraged to stop short, just, of actual assassination, leaving it to surrogates to do the dirty work. The dilemma Operation Condor presented to the CIA was made plain in an Agency report dated 18 September 2000. It conceded: “In addition to information concerning external threats, CIA sought from Contreras information regarding evidence that emerged in 1975 of a formal Southern Cone cooperative intelligence effort—‘Operation Condor’—building on informal cooperation in tracking and, in at least a few cases, killing political opponents. By October 1976 there was sufficient information that the CIA decided to approach Contreras on the matter. Contreras confirmed Condor’s existence as an intelligence-sharing network but denied that it had a role in extra-judicial killings…. As a result of lessons learned in Chile, Central America and elsewhere, the CIA now carefully reviews all contacts for potential involvement in human rights abuse against the potential intelligence value of continuing the relationship. These standards, established in the mid-1990s, would likely have altered the amount of contact we had with perpetrators of human rights violators in Chile had they been in effect at that time.”
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But that sentiment, of course, predated 9/11 and the sea change that overtook many liberal Western regimes afterward.

Sometimes, in an untidy world, who dares wins. Shortly before Kennedy was assassinated—some veterans suggest the day before—Kennedy told the British prime minister, the 14th Earl of Home (pronounced “Hume”)—that he was concerned about rumors concerning a force of Anglo-French mercenaries running a private war in Yemen. That this operation shared some of the characteristics of the Bay of Pigs concept did not strike Kennedy as anomalous. He had his Frontiersman’s dream of a world in which decaying European empires would be replaced by newly independent, democratic states that had to be brought on-side before Soviet Russia impregnated them with Communism. In Yemen, a medieval monarchy had been overtaken by a Marxist republican revolution supported by an Egyptian expeditionary force. The republicans controlled the country’s few urban areas including the capital, Sana’a. The royalists, headed by Imam Mohammed al-Badr, were fighting a rearguard guerrilla war in the mountains.

British SAS and French Foreign Legion veterans, with the complicity of both their governments, were training and leading the royalist resistance. Britain and France did not trust the word of the Egyptian leader Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose country they had invaded in 1956. Nor did they sign up to Kennedy’s vision. The Brits, with effective control of Aden and its hinterland, feared the domino effect of Yemen on access to Gulf oil. Saudi Arabia feared Egyptian expansionism by way of Yemen. But Kennedy recognized the new regime in Sana’a. The British held off. For the Western alliance, it was a can of worms. Kennedy’s events diary for the time reveals how heavily Yemen weighed on his mind, even alongside Vietnam, following the downfall and murder of President Diem.

“October 4, 1963, 10.30-11.25: Meeting with British Foreign Minister, the Earl of Home [later prime minister] and Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, the White House.” In that conversation, Home gave his personal word to Kennedy that “Britain has given no aid to the Imam” and was not, therefore, running a secret war in Yemen.
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“October 10, 1963: President Kennedy directs the Secretaries of State and Defense to keep pressing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic to disengage from the civil war in Yemen.”

“October 28, 1963: 5:25–6:00
P.M
.: Meeting with advisers to discuss Yemen, Morocco and Algeria.”

Twenty-four days later, Kennedy was dead, replaced as president by Lyndon Johnson, whose sympathies lay more with Israel than emerging Arab republics. Macmillan had been replaced as British Prime Minister by Lord Home. It is now apparent that when Lord Home told Kennedy that Britain had not assisted the Imam in Yemen, he was—to use a phrase later conjured in London—being economical with the truth. For many months, a cabal of right-wing politicians, including government ministers and serving and former SAS soldiers, had been running a war of attrition in Yemen in a campaign that Nasser would describe as “my Vietnam.” It was a war that sapped Egypt’s fighting strength on the countdown to the 1967 war with Israel.

The London circle was known as the Aden Group. Before that, it had been the Suez Group, political cheerleaders for the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal Zone, with Israeli complicity, in 1956. One of the group was Neil (“Billy”) McLean, a British Member of Parliament, wartime veteran of SOE in Albania and the Far East, and SIS “asset.” Another was Air Minister Julian Amery, son-in-law of the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. Amery would later double, secretly, as “Minister For Yemen.” In September 1962, King Hussein of Jordan visited London, met Amery, and appealed for non-recognition of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). Amery asked McLean to visit the country to obtain ground truth about the war. Could the royalists hold out? Was the Egyptian Air Force using chemical weapons against civilians? Using journalistic cover, McLean took to the hills of Yemen with enthusiasm. In December, he returned to advise Macmillan that the Egyptians could be defeated. In January 1963, the British cabinet received an unsourced intelligence assessment, based on McLean’s report, suggesting that to recognize the YAR would be to surrender control over the Gulf to America. Diplomatic recognition of the Sana’a regime withheld, the movement toward a deniable military intervention began.

The operation had a slow start, possibly because McLean and others depended on the Secret Intelligence Service to handle recruitment, while the Saudis acted as banker for this enterprise. In mid-April, at White’s, a gentleman’s gambling club in London, Amery and Home (then Foreign Secretary) met SAS founder Colonel David Stirling, Brian Franks, by now Colonel-Commandant of the SAS, and McLean. By this time, McLean had visited Yemen again. British positions in the Aden Federation were coming under guerrilla assault from Yemen, confirming the worst fears of the U.K. government about recognizing the YAR. A delegation from the Yemeni royalists had visited Israel, which was now delivering arms into areas under royalist control.

One of those involved in the later operation recounts what happened. “McLean told the gathering, ‘Whatever the Egyptians are telling Washington, the coup in Yemen is not a success. Resistance continues. We have to get some sort of operation going.’ Home reported that SIS was having difficulties. Alec [Home] said, ‘I will talk to SIS but they say they have no agents in Yemen and it will take six months to set something up.’”