Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (12 page)

Now a man
he considered disloyal was to be named to the top post of the Army,
Eisenhower's Army. He asked Lemnitzer to find a way to secretly torpedo Gavin's
appointment. It was a bizarre and outrageous request: an outgoing president was
directing his top military official to sabotage a civilian appointment by a
newly elected president. Before Lemnitzer could take any action, however,
Kennedy changed his mind, appointing Gavin ambassador to France and naming
Elvis J. Stahr, Jr., to the Army post. Nevertheless, Lemnitzer would become a
landmine in the Kennedy administration.

Twenty-five
minutes after leaving Quarters 1, Lemnitzer's chauffeur deposited the general
at the E Door of the Senate Wing. It was a journey the general had made many
times in order to testify before various Senate and House committees on military
policy. The chairman never quite trusted Congress and as a result the truth
became somewhat malleable. He once wrote to his brother, "I have been
involved in some very rugged hearings before seven congressional committees. .
. . We have to walk a very narrow path in telling the truth to the various
committees and at the same time keep out of trouble with the
administration."

Lemnitzer
walked through the arc under the Senate stairway and took an elevator up one
floor to the Senate Reception Room. There he joined the other service chiefs,
as well as diplomats and foreign ambassadors, as they awaited escort to their
assigned seats on the President's Platform. In charge of the Navy was Admiral
Arleigh A. Burke, a salt-and-pepper-haired veteran of World War II. He had
served as Eisenhower's Chief of Naval Operations for the past five years. Upon Lemnitzer's
elevation to Army Chief of Staff, Burke presented him with a four-foot-long
ceremonial bugle. Attached near the flowing gold tassels was a sign that read,
"The
Certain
Trumpet." It was an inside joke. Lemnitzer's
predecessor, General Maxwell Taylor, was one of those who had quit and written
a book harshly critical of Eisenhower's military policies. Taylor's title was
The
Uncertain Trumpet.

Lemnitzer
was escorted to Section 2, Row G, Seat 1
on the President's Platform, a
pillared structure erected on the steps of the east front of the Capitol
Building. His hands were covered in regulation black gloves and his heavy jowls
turned pink from the bitter cold. Below, thousands of onlookers filled the
snow-mantled plaza.

As he rose
to watch Chief Justice Earl Warren administer the oath of office to John F.
Kennedy, dressed in formal black coat and striped trousers, the Chairman's
frame of reference likely began shifting. He was like a sailor whose compass no
longer pointed north. For eight years the country had been run by a five-star
general, a West Point ring-knocker like himself who knew discipline, order,
tradition. Flags were saluted, shoes spit-shined, and dissent punished. Now the
man who had been Lemnitzer's mentor and boss for much of his long career was
quietly retiring to a farm in Gettysburg. Taking Eisenhower's place was a man
from a different time and a different culture, someone Lemnitzer knew little
and understood less. "Here was a president with no military experience at
all," he would later say, derisively, of a man who nearly died saving his
men while fighting on the front line of battle. "Sort of a patrol boat
skipper in World War II."

Lemnitzer
was not isolated in his point of view. Standing nearby was the man Lemnitzer
had picked to take his place as Chief of Staff of the Army, General George H.
Decker. "I think the senior military leaders probably were more
comfortable with President Eisenhower," he later recalled, "since he
had been a military man himself." Chief of Naval Operations Burke also
distrusted the new White House. "Nearly all of these people were ardent,
enthusiastic people without any experience whatever in administering anything,
including the president. He'd always been in Congress. He'd never had any sort
of job that required any administration. . . . They didn't understand ordinary
administrative procedures, the necessity for having lines of communication and
channels of command."

About
2:15, following the swearing-in and a luncheon in the Capitol, Lemnitzer
climbed into a 1961 Oldsmobile convertible for the chilly ride in the inaugural
parade to the presidential reviewing stand opposite the White House. Kennedy
had personally invited him to stand in the Presidential Box and review the
smiling high school bands and the endless military troops as they marched at
precisely 120 steps per minute, each step thirty inches long.

Soon,
Lemnitzer hoped, some of those troops would be marching down the palm-shaded
streets of Havana with Castro either dead or in custody. Like many in the
right-wing military movement, he saw communism as subverting the very fabric of
American society, an insatiable evil force that was eating away at America's
core values and had to be stopped. "I would offer the suggestion that you
read carefully the recently issued Draft Program of the Communist Party,"
he warned in a letter to a high school teacher who had written to him about
Cuba. "If you study this document I think you cannot escape agreeing with
its authors that the Communist world is pledged to the destruction of our
civilization and everything we value. Our heritage of freedom and the deep
aspirations and values which humanity has evolved over thousands of years are
thus squarely put in peril. An adequate response to such a deadly threat must
be found, not by governments alone, but in the hearts and actions of every one
of our citizens."

Lemnitzer
believed that nothing less than a massive military force could defeat communism
in Cuba. He therefore had little confidence in a covert plan developed by the
CIA that called for infiltrating fewer than a thousand anti-Castro rebels onto
the island. Developed during the last year of the Eisenhower administration,
the operation involved the rebels sparking an internal revolution that would
supposedly bring down Castro's regime.

Only two
days before the inauguration, Brigadier General David W. Gray, Lemnitzer's
representative on the Cuba Task Force, argued the point forcefully to the CIA:
"200,000 [Cuban] militia," he said, "each with a sub-machine
gun, is in itself a pretty strong force if they do nothing more than stand and
pull the triggers." Instead, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs were pressing
for all-out war—a Pentagon-led overt military invasion of Cuba from the air,
sea, and ground.

But
Lemnitzer and the Chiefs knew that armed invasion of a neighboring country
would be condemned both domestically and internationally as the American
equivalent of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Thus the Joint Chiefs developed
an enormously secret plan to trick the American public—and the rest of the
world—into believing that Cuba had instead launched an attack against the U.S.
It would be the ultimate
Wag the Dog
war.

According
to documents obtained for
Body of Secrets,
Lemnitzer and the Joint
Chiefs proposed secretly to stage an attack on the American naval base at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—and then blame the violent action on Castro. Convinced
that Cuba had launched an unprovoked attack on the United States, the unwitting
American public would then support the Joint Chiefs' bloody Caribbean war.
After all, who would believe Castro's denials over the word of the Pentagon's
top military commanders? The nation's most senior military leadership was
proposing to launch a war, which would no doubt kill many American servicemen,
based solely on a fabric of lies. On January 19, just hours before Eisenhower
left office, Lemnitzer gave his approval to the proposal. As events progressed,
the plan would become only the tip of a very large and secret iceberg.

Lemnitzer
smiled broadly and saluted when the Hegerman String Band and the Mounted State
Police from his native Pennsylvania passed by the Presidential Box in the
reviewing stand.

At 5:43,
ex-President Eisenhower and his wife, seated in the back of a five-year-old
Chrysler limousine, passed the Secret Service booth at the entrance to the
private road leading to their farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. For the first
time in eight years, the booth was dark and empty.

Forty-five
minutes later, Private First Class Bomer escorted Lemnitzer to his limousine
and drove him through the darkness back to Quarters 1; meanwhile, the general's
invading army retreated back across the Potomac.

On January
25, President Kennedy had his first meeting with Lemnitzer and the Joint
Chiefs. Kennedy said he was extremely anxious to keep in close contact with the
chiefs and that he would be seeing Lemnitzer frequently during National
Security Council meetings. Then the president asked what should be done with
regard to Cuba.

Lemnitzer
quickly dismissed the proposed CIA operation as too weak to combat Castro's
forces. He then told Kennedy about recent and troubling NSA reports. Eight days
earlier, in a windowless blockhouse in West Germany, an NSA intercept operator
assigned to monitor Czechoslovakian military air communications turned his
large black frequency dial to 114.25 megahertz and heard an unusual sound.
Instead of picking up the normal pilot chatter in Czech or Slovak at Trencin
airfield, he listened as a pilot undergoing flight training suddenly began to
speak Spanish. "This is the first known VHF activity at Trencin by a
Spanish-speaking pilot," he wrote in his intercept report, which was
quickly transmitted to NSA headquarters. He added, "This pilot was
possibly in a bomber or bomber trainer." Other reports indicated that Cuba
had recently received at least 30,000 tons of new military equipment from Czechoslovakia.

Lemnitzer
then pushed on the new president his own agenda: "What is required is a
basic expansion of plans," he said. "The hope is to get a government
in exile, then put some troops ashore, and have guerrilla groups start their
activities. At that point we would come in and support them. Plans are ready
for such action." "Time is working against us," Lemnitzer urged
Kennedy.

Three days
later, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Kennedy brought together his key
national security officials, including Lemnitzer and Allen Dulles. During the
meeting, the Pentagon representatives stated that none of the courses of action
then on the table would remove the Castro regime. Kennedy then called on the
Pentagon and CIA to review the various proposals for sending the anti-Castro
forces into Cuba. He also demanded that the entire operation be carried out
with white gloves—there could be no U.S. fingerprints anywhere. "I'm not
going to risk an American Hungary," Kennedy warned.

Eisenhower
had spent eight years working closely with the CIA. He knew the strengths and
weaknesses of Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Cuban operation, which he had
helped plan for nearly a year. Now Kennedy, in office barely a week and
attempting to put his administration together, was being pressured to quickly
okay a dangerous plan produced by a man he didn't know and an agency that was a
cipher to him. Dulles told him that once the landing took place, it would
trigger a great uprising and Castro would quickly tumble.

But Dulles
certainly knew that to be a lie. Castro was a hero to much of the Cuban
population for having rid them of the bloody excesses of Batista only two years
before. As a long-hidden CIA report notes, "We can confidently assert that
the Agency had no intelligence evidence that the Cubans in significant numbers
could or would join the invaders or that there was any kind of an effective and
cohesive resistance movement under anybody's control, let alone the Agency's,
that could have furnished internal leadership for an uprising in support of the
invasion." The same report concluded that at the time of that White House
meeting "the Agency was driving forward without knowing precisely where it
was going."

Lemnitzer
was a man of details. After becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he
sent out elaborate instructions outlining exactly how his fellow Chiefs were to
autograph group pictures—they were to sign their names directly under his, and
they must follow his slant. Neither his limousine nor his plane was ever to be moved
without his being consulted. Lemnitzer also enjoyed his reputation as a
consummate planner. In an eight-page biography he submitted to Congress prior
to his testimony, he made frequent reference to himself as an "imaginative
planner" and to his "skill as a planner." On his Pentagon desk
was a crystal ball and in a drawer was a favorite verse:

Planners
are a funny lot

They carry
neither sword nor pistol

They walk
stooped over quite a lot

Because
their balls are crystal

Lemnitzer,
the planner, certainly saw the pitfalls of the CIA's amateur and ill-conceived
plan, as did his fellow Chiefs. Years later Lemnitzer hand-wrote a detailed
fifty-two-page summary of the JCS involvement in the Bay of Pigs operation. He
called it "The Cuban Debacle" and locked it away in his house; he
died without ever publicly revealing its existence. Obtained for
Body of
Secrets,
the account clearly shows that Lemnitzer's Joint Staff viewed the
CIA plan as a disaster waiting to happen. He quotes from a secret internal JCS
analysis of the operation: "In view of the rapid buildup of the Castro
Government's military and militia capability,
and the lack of predictable
future mass discontent,
the possible success of the Para-Military Plan
appears very doubtful" [emphasis in original].