Who Rules the World? (16 page)

In a review of recently released documents on Kennedy-era terror, Harvard University Latin Americanist Jorge Domínguez observes, “Only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism”: a member of the National Security Council staff suggested that raids that are “haphazard and kill innocents … might mean a bad press in some friendly countries.”
19

The same attitudes prevailed throughout the internal discussions during the missile crisis, as when Robert Kennedy warned that a full-scale invasion of Cuba would “kill an awful lot of people, and we’re going to take an awful lot of heat on it.”
20
And they prevail to the present, with only the rarest of exceptions, as easily documented.

We might have been “in even a worse position” if the world had known more about what the United States was doing at the time. Only recently was it learned that, six months earlier, the United States had secretly deployed missiles in Okinawa virtually identical to those the Russians would send to Cuba.
21
These were surely aimed at China at a moment of elevated regional tensions. To this day, Okinawa remains a major offensive U.S. military base over the bitter objections of its inhabitants.

AN INDECENT DISRESPECT FOR THE OPINIONS OF HUMANKIND

The deliberations that followed are revealing, but I will put them aside here. They did reach a conclusion. The United States pledged to withdraw the obsolete missiles from Turkey, but would not do so publicly or put the offer in writing: it was important that Khrushchev be seen to capitulate. An interesting justification was offered, and is accepted as reasonable by scholarship and commentary. As Michael Dobbs puts it, “If it appeared that the United States was dismantling the missile bases unilaterally, under pressure from the Soviet Union, the [NATO] alliance might crack”—or, to rephrase a little more accurately, if the United States replaced useless missiles with a far more lethal threat, as already planned, in a trade with Russia that any “rational man” would regard as very fair, then the NATO alliance might crack.
22

To be sure, when Russia withdrew Cuba’s only deterrent against an ongoing U.S. attack—with a severe threat to proceed to direct invasion still in the air—and quietly departed from the scene, the Cubans would be infuriated (as, in fact, they understandably were). But that is an unfair comparison for the standard reasons: we are human beings who matter, while they are merely “unpeople,” to adopt George Orwell’s useful phrase.

Kennedy also made an informal pledge not to invade Cuba, but with conditions: not just the withdrawal of the missiles, but also termination, or at least “a great lessening,” of any Russian military presence. (Unlike Turkey, on Russia’s borders, where nothing of the kind from our military could be contemplated.) When Cuba was no longer an “armed camp,” then “we probably wouldn’t invade,” in the president’s words. He added that if it hoped to be free from the threat of U.S. invasion, Cuba must end its “political subversion” (Sheldon Stern’s phrase) in Latin America.
23
“Political subversion” had been a constant theme in U.S. rhetoric for years, invoked for example when Eisenhower overthrew the parliamentary government of Guatemala and plunged that tortured country into an abyss from which it has yet to emerge. This theme remained alive and well right through Ronald Reagan’s vicious terror wars in Central America in the 1980s. Cuba’s “political subversion” consisted of support for those resisting the murderous assaults of the United States and its client regimes, and sometimes even perhaps—horror of horrors—providing arms to the victims.

Though these assumptions are so deeply embedded in prevailing doctrine as to be virtually invisible, they are occasionally articulated in the internal record. In the case of Cuba, the State Department Policy Planning Staff explained that “the primary danger we face in Castro is … in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries.… The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half,” since the Monroe Doctrine announced Washington’s intention, then unrealizable, to dominate the western hemisphere.
24

The right to dominate is a leading principle of U.S. foreign policy found almost everywhere, though typically concealed in defensive terms: during the Cold War years, routinely by invoking the “Russian threat,” even when Russians were nowhere in sight. An example of great contemporary import is revealed in Iran scholar Ervand Abrahamian’s important book on the U.S.-UK coup that overthrew the parliamentary regime of Iran in 1953. With scrupulous examination of internal records, he shows convincingly that standard accounts cannot be sustained. The primary causes were not Cold War concerns, nor Iranian irrationality that undermined Washington’s “benign intentions,” nor even access to oil or profits, but rather the way the U.S. demand for “overall control”—with its broader implications for global dominance—was threatened by independent nationalism.
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That is what we discover over and over by investigating particular cases, including Cuba (not surprisingly), though the fanaticism in that particular case might merit examination. U.S. policy toward Cuba is harshly condemned throughout Latin America and indeed most of the world, but “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” is understood to be meaningless rhetoric intoned mindlessly on the Fourth of July. Ever since polls have been taken on the matter, a considerable majority of the U.S. population has favored normalization of relations with Cuba, but that too is insignificant.
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Dismissal of public opinion is, of course, quite normal. What is interesting in this case is dismissal of powerful sectors of U.S. economic power which also favor normalization and are usually highly influential in setting policy: energy, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, and others. That suggests that, in addition to the cultural factors revealed in the hysteria of the Camelot intellectuals, there is a powerful state interest involved in punishing Cubans.

SAVING THE WORLD FROM THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR DESTRUCTION

The missile crisis officially ended on October 28. The outcome was not obscure. That evening, in a special CBS News broadcast, Charles Collingwood reported that the world had come out “from under the most terrible threat of nuclear holocaust since World War II” with a “humiliating defeat for Soviet policy.”
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Dobbs comments that the Russians tried to pretend that the outcome was “yet another triumph for Moscow’s peace-loving foreign policy over warmongering imperialists,” and that “the supremely wise, always reasonable Soviet leadership had saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction.”
28

Extricating the basic facts from the fashionable ridicule, Khrushchev’s agreement to capitulate had indeed “saved the world from the threat of nuclear destruction.”

The crisis, however, was not over. On November 8, the Pentagon announced that all known Soviet missile bases had been dismantled.
29
On the same day, Stern reports, “a sabotage team carried out an attack on a Cuban factory,” though Kennedy’s terror campaign, Operation Mongoose, had been formally curtailed at the peak of the crisis.
30
The November 8 terror attack lends support to McGeorge Bundy’s observation that the threat to peace was Cuba, not Turkey, where the Russians were not continuing a lethal assault—though it was certainly not what Bundy had in mind or could have understood.

More details are added by the respected scholar Raymond Garthoff, who also had rich experience within the government, in his careful 1987 account of the missile crisis. On November 8, he writes, “a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility,” killing four hundred workers, according to a Cuban government letter to the UN secretary-general.

Garthoff comments: “The Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba,” particularly since the terrorist attack was launched from the United States. These and other “third party actions” reveal again, he concludes, “that the risk and danger to both sides could have been extreme, and catastrophe not excluded.” Garthoff also reviews the murderous and destructive operations of Kennedy’s terrorist campaign, which we would certainly regard as more than ample justification for war if the United States or its allies or clients were its victims, not its perpetrators.
31

From the same source we learn further that, on August 23, 1962, the president had issued National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) No. 181, “a directive to engineer an internal revolt that would be followed by US military intervention,” involving “significant US military plans, maneuvers, and movement of forces and equipment” that were surely known to Cuba and Russia.
32
Also in August, terrorist attacks were intensified, including speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel “where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans”; attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships; the contamination of sugar shipments; and other atrocities and sabotage, mostly carried out by Cuban exile organizations permitted to operate freely in Florida. Shortly after came “the most dangerous moment in human history,” not exactly out of the blue.

Kennedy officially renewed the terrorist operations after the crisis ebbed. Ten days before his assassination he approved a CIA plan for “destruction operations” by U.S. proxy forces “against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships.” A plot to assassinate Castro was apparently initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The terrorist campaign was called off in 1965, but, reports Garthoff, “one of Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba.”
33

We can, at last, hear the voices of the victims in Canadian historian Keith Bolender’s
Voices From the Other Side
, the first oral history of the terror campaign—one of many books unlikely to receive more than casual notice, if that, in the West because its contents are too revealing.
34

In the
Political Science Quarterly
, the professional journal of the American Political Science Association, Montague Kern observes that the Cuban Missile Crisis is one of those “full-bore crises … in which an ideological enemy (the Soviet Union) is universally perceived to have gone on the attack, leading to a rally-’round-the-flag effect that greatly expands support for a president, increasing his policy options.”
35

Kern is right that it is “universally perceived” that way, apart from those who have escaped sufficiently from their ideological shackles to pay some attention to the facts; Kern is, in fact, one of them. Another is Sheldon Stern, who recognizes what has long been known to such deviants. As he writes, we now know that “Khrushchev’s original explanation for shipping missiles to Cuba had been fundamentally true: the Soviet leader had never intended these weapons as a threat to the security of the United States, but rather considered their deployment a defensive move to protect his Cuban allies from American attacks and as a desperate effort to give the USSR the appearance of equality in the nuclear balance of power.”
36
Dobbs, too, recognizes that “Castro and his Soviet patrons had real reasons to fear American attempts at regime change, including, as a last resort, a US invasion of Cuba … [Khrushchev] was also sincere in his desire to defend the Cuban revolution from the mighty neighbor to the north.”
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“TERRORS OF THE EARTH”

The American attacks are often dismissed in U.S. commentary as silly pranks, CIA shenanigans that got out of hand. That is far from the truth. The best and the brightest had reacted to the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion with near hysteria, including the president, who solemnly informed the country: “The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong … can possibly survive.” And they could only survive, he evidently believed, by massive terror—though that addendum was kept secret, and is still not known to loyalists who perceive the ideological enemy as having “gone on the attack” (the near-universal perception, as Kern observes). After the Bay of Pigs defeat, historian Piero Gleijeses writes, JFK launched a crushing embargo to punish the Cubans for defeating a U.S.-run invasion, and “asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the ‘terrors of the earth’ on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him.”
38

The phrase “terrors of the earth” is Arthur Schlesinger’s, in his quasi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for conducting the terrorist war and who informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries “the top priority in the United States Government—all else is secondary—no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared” in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime.
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The Mongoose operations were run by Edward Lansdale, who had ample experience in “counterinsurgency”—a standard term for terrorism that we direct. He provided a timetable leading to “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime” in October 1962. The “final definition” of the program recognized that “final success will require decisive US military intervention” after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis for it. The implication was that U.S. military intervention would take place in October 1962—when the missile crisis erupted. The events just reviewed help explain why Cuba and Russia had good reason to take such threats seriously.