QUESTION: How can we in a democracy use all our assets effectively without having to completely reorganize the Government? 

GENERAL SMITH: A democracy cannot wage war. When you go to war, you pass a law giving extraordinary powers to the President. The people of the country assume when the emergency is over, the rights and powers that were temporarily delegated to the Chief Executive will be returned to the states, counties and to the people.

 QUESTION: We often say that we are in a state of war at the present time. 

GENERAL SMITH: Yes, sir, that is correct.

 QUESTION: Are you suggesting that we should approximate the President's wartime powers?

 GENERAL SMITH: No. However, the American people do not feel that they are at war at the present time, and consequently they are not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to wage war. When you are at war, cold war if you like, you must have an amoral agency which can operate secretly. .. . I think that so much publicity has been given to CIA that the covert work might have to be put under another roof. 

QUESTION: DO you think we should take the covert operations from CIA

 GENERAL SMITH: It's time we take the bucket of slop and put another cover over it.

  Three months later, Walter Bedell Smith died at age sixty-five. The CIA's inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, ran his own post-mortem on the Bay of Pigs. He concluded that Dulles and Bissell had failed to keep two presidents and two administrations accurately and realistically informed about the operation. If the CIA wanted to stay in business, Kirkpatrick said, it would have to drastically improve its organization and management. Dulles's deputy, General Cabell, warned him that if the report fell into unfriendly hands, it would destroy the agency. Dulles wholeheartedly agreed. He saw to it that the report was buried. Nineteen of the twenty printed copies were recalled and destroyed. 

The one that survived was locked away for almost forty years. In September 1961, Allen Dulles retired as director of central intelligence. Workers were still putting the finishing touches on the grand new CIA headquarters he had fought for years to build in the Virginia woodlands above the west bank of the Potomac River, seven miles from the edge of the capital. He had commissioned an inscription from the Gospel of John to be engraved in its central lobby: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free." A medallion in his image was hung in the same soaring space. "Si monumentum requiris circwnspice, " it reads:

If you seek his monument, look around you. Richard Bissell stayed on another six months. He later confessed in secret testimony that the vaunted expertise of his clandestine service was a façade—it was "not the place where one would expect to look for professional competence." When he left, the president pinned the National Security Medal on his lapel. "Mr. Bissell's high purpose, unbounded energy, and unswerving devotion to duty are benchmarks of the intelligence service," he said. "He leaves an enduring legacy." Part of that legacy was a broken confidence. For the next nineteen years, no president would place his full faith and trust in the Central Intelligence Agency.

    "YOU ARE NOW LIVING ON THE BULL'S EYE"

 In his wrath after the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy first wanted to destroy the CIA.

Then he took the agency's clandestine service out of its death spiral by handing the controls to his brother. It was one of the least wise decisions of his presidency. Robert F. Kennedy, thirty-five years old, famously ruthless, fascinated with secrecy, took command of the most sensitive covert operations of the United States. The two men unleashed covert action with an unprecedented intensity. Ike had undertaken 170 major CIA covert operations in eight years. The Kennedys launched 163 major covert operations in less than three.

The president had wanted to make RFK the new director of central intelligence, but his brother thought it best to choose a man who could afford the president political protection after the Bay of Pigs. After casting about for months, they settled on an Eisenhower elder statesman: John McCone. Almost sixty years old, a deeply conservative California Republican, a devout Roman Catholic, and a fiery anticommunist, McCone would very likely have been secretary of defense had Nixon been elected in 1960. He had made a fortune building ships on the West Coast during World War II, then served as a deputy to Defense Secretary James Forrestal, hammering out the first budget of the new Department of Defense in 1948. As undersecretary of the air force during the Korean War, he had helped create the first truly global military power of the postwar world.

 As chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission under Eisenhower, he had overseen the nation's nuclear-weapons factories and held a seat on the National Security Council. McCone's new covert operations chief, Richard Helms, described him as "straight from central casting in Hollywood," with "white hair, ruddy cheeks, brisk gait, impeccable dark suits, rimless glasses, aloof manner, and unmistakable self-confidence." The new director was "not a man that people were going to love," said Red White, his chief administrator, but he quickly became "very close with Bobby Kennedy." McCone first bonded with Bobby as a co-religionist and fellow anticommunist. The attorney general's big white clapboard house, Hickory Hill, was only a few hundred yards from the agency's new headquarters, and Kennedy often stopped by the CIA in the morning on his way to work downtown at the Justice Department, dropping in after McCone's daily 8:00 a.m. staff meeting.

 McCone left a unique and meticulous daily record of his work, his thoughts, and his conversations, many first declassified in 2003 and 2004. His memoranda provide a moment-to-moment account of his years as director. Along with thousands of pages of conversations secretly recorded by President Kennedy inside the White House, many not accurately transcribed until 2003 and 2004, they detail the most dangerous days of the cold war. Before his swearing-in, McCone tried to get the big picture of the agency's operations. He toured Europe with Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, went on to a Far East station chiefs' meeting at a mountain retreat north of Manila, and immersed himself in paper. But Dulles and Bissell left out some details.

They never saw fit to tell McCone about the CIA's biggest, longest-lasting, and most illegal program in the United States: the opening of first-class mail coming in and out of the country. From 1952 onward, working at the main postal facility at the international airport in New York City, the CIA's security officers opened letters and Jim Angleton's counterintelligence staff sifted the information. Nor did Dulles and Bissell tell McCone about the CIA's assassination plots against Fidel Castro, temporarily suspended after the Bay of Pigs. Almost two years would pass before the director learned of the murder plans; he never found out about the mail openings until the rest of the nation did. After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy was persuaded to rebuild the clearinghouses for covert action that he had torn down after his inauguration. The president's foreign intelligence board of advisers was reestablished.

The Special Group (later renamed the 303 Committee) was reconstituted to oversee the clandestine service, and its chairman for the next four years would be the national security adviser: cool, clipped, correct McGeorge Bundy of Groton and Yale, the former dean of the arts and sciences at Harvard University. The members were McCone, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and senior deputies from Defense and State. But until very late in the Kennedy administration it was left to the CIA's covert operators to decide whether to consult with the Special Group. There were more than a few operations that McCone and the Special Group knew little or nothing about. In November 1961, in the greatest secrecy, John and Bobby Kennedy created a new planning cell for covert action, the Special Group (Augmented). 

It was RFK's outfit, and it had one mission: eliminating Castro. 

On the night of November 20, nine days before he took the oath of office as director, McCone answered his home telephone and heard the president summoning him to the White House. Arriving the following afternoon, he found the Kennedys in the company of a gangly fifty-three-year-old brigadier general named Ed Lansdale. His specialty was counterinsurgency, and his trademark was winning third-world hearts and minds with American ingenuity, greenback dollars, and snake oil. He had worked for the CIA and the Pentagon since before the Korean War, serving as Frank Wisner's man in Manila and Saigon, where he helped pro-American leaders take power. 

Lansdale was introduced as the new chief of operations at the Special Group (Augmented). "The President explained that General Lansdale had been engaging in a study of possible action in Cuba, acting under the direction of the Attorney General, and he, the President, desired an immediate plan of action which could be submitted to him within two weeks," McCone recorded in his CIA files. "The Attorney General expressed grave concern over Cuba, the necessity for immediate dynamic action." McCone told them that the CIA and the rest of the Kennedy administration had been in a state of shock ever since the Bay.of Pigs— "and, therefore, were doing very little."

McCone thought nothing short of a shooting war would knock out Castro. And he believed that the CIA was unfit to run a war, secret or not. He told President Kennedy that the agency could not continue to be seen as "a 'cloak and dagger' outfit. . . designed to overthrow governments, assassinate heads of state, involve itself in political affairs of foreign states." He reminded the president that the CIA had one fundamental responsibility under law—"to assemble all intelligence" gathered by the United States, and then analyze it, evaluate it, and report it to the White House. The Kennedys agreed, in a written order drafted by McCone and signed by the president, that he would be "the Government's principal intelligence officer." His job would be "the proper coordination, correlation, and evaluation of intelligence from all sources." McCone also believed he had been hired to shape the foreign policy of the United States for the president. This was not, nor should it have been, the role of the nation's chief intelligence officer. But though his judgment often proved sounder than that of the Harvard men at the highest levels of the government, he quickly discovered that the Kennedys had a number of novel ideas about how he and the CIA were to serve American interests. On the day President Kennedy swore him in, he found out that he and RFK and the unctuous General Lansdale were in charge of Castro. "You are now living on the bull's eye, and I welcome you to that spot," the president told McCone at his swearing-i

  "OUT OF THE QUESTION" 

The president asked McCone from the outset to find a way to pierce the Berlin Wall. The wall had been erected—first barbed wire, then concrete— in August 1961. It could have been an enormous political and propaganda windfall for the West, hard evidence that the exorbitant lies of communism no longer served to keep millions of East German citizens from fleeing. It could have been a golden opportunity for the CIA. The week that the wall went up, Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to Berlin, where he received a top secret briefing from the CIA's base chief, Bill Graver. LBJ gazed upon an impressively detailed chart showing all the CIA's agents in the East. "I saw this briefing map," said Haviland Smith, then a rising star at the Berlin base. "If you listened to what Graver said, we had agents in the Karlsruhe compound"—the Soviet intelligence center—"agents in the Polish military mission, the Czech military mission—we had East Berlin absolutely penetrated up to the goddamn eyeballs. However, if you knew what we had, you knew that the penetration of the Polish military mission was the guy who sold newspapers on the corner. And you knew that this big penetration of the Soviet military compound was a Dachermeister—a master roofer, who fixed roofs." "Berlin was a sham," he said. The agency was lying about its achievements to the next president of the United States. David Murphy, then chief of the CIA's Eastern Europe division, met with President Kennedy at the White House the week after the wall went up. "The Kennedy administration pushed us very hard to persuade us to devise plans for covert paramilitary action and the fomenting of dissidence" in East Germany, he said, but "operations in East Germany were out of the question."

The reason finally emerged in a document declassified in June 2006, a devastating damage assessment drawn up by Dave Murphy himself. On November 6, 1961, the West German chief of counterintelligence, Heinz Felfe, was arrested by his own security police. Felfe had been a hard-core Nazi who had joined the Gehlen organization in 1951, two years after the CIA took charge of it. He had risen rapidly through its ranks and kept rising after it became the official West German intelligence service, the BND, in 1955.

But Felfe had been working for the Soviets all along. He had penetrated the West German service and, through it, the CIA's station and bases. He was able to manipulate and deceive the CIA's officers in Germany until they had no idea whether the information they had gathered from behind the iron curtain was true or false. Felfe could "initiate, direct, or halt any BND operations and later some of CIA's," Murphy noted glumly. He had revealed to the East German intelligence service the essential details of every important CIA mission against Moscow from June 1959 to November 1961. These included roughly seventy major covert operations, the identities of more than a hundred CIA officers, and some fifteen thousand secrets. The agency was all but out of business in Germany and across Eastern Europe. It took a decade to repair the damage.  

  "THE PRESIDENT WANTS SOME ACTION, RIGHT NOW"

 The Berlin Wall—and all else—paled before the Kennedys' desire to avenge the family honor lost at the Bay of Pigs. The overthrow of Castro was "the top priority in the United States Government," Bobby Kennedy told McCone on January 19, 1962. "No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared." But the new director warned him that the agency had little real intelligence on which to proceed. "Of the 27 or 28 agents CIA now has in Cuba, only 12 are in communication and these communications are infrequent," he told the attorney general. Seven of the CIA's Cubans had been captured four weeks before, after infiltrating the island. On RFK's orders, Lansdale drew up a to-do list for the CIA: recruit and eploy the Catholic Church and the Cuban underworld against Castro, fracture the regime from within, sabotage the economy, subvert the secret police, destroy the crops with biological or chemical warfare, and change the regime before the next congressional elections in November 1962. "Ed had this aura around him," said Sam Halpern, the new deputy chief of the Cuba desk, an OSS veteran who had known Lansdale for a decade. "Some people believed Ed was a kind of magician. But I'll tell you what he was. He was basically a con man.

A Madison Avenue 'Man in the Grey Flannel Suit' con man. You take a look at his proposed plan for getting rid of Castro and the Castro regime. It's utter nonsense." The plan boiled down to an empty promise: to overthrow Castro without sending in the marines. Halpern said to Richard Helms: "This is a political operation in the city of Washington D.C., and has nothing to do with the security of the United States." He warned that the CIA had no intelligence about Cuba.

 "We don't know what is going on," he told Helms. "We don't know who is doing what to whom. We haven't got any idea of their order of battle in terms of political organization and structure. Who hates whom? Who loves whom? We have nothing." It was the same problem the CIA would face when it confronted Iraq forty years later. Helms agreed. The plan was a pipe dream. The Kennedys did not want to hear that. They wanted swift, silent sabotage to overthrow Castro. "Let's get the hell on with it," the attorney general barked. "The President wants some action, right now." Helms saluted smartly and got the hell on with it. He created a new free-standing task force to report to Ed Lansdale and Robert Kennedy.

He assembled a team from all over the world, creating the CIA's largest peacetime intelligence operation to date, with some six hundred CIA officers in and around Miami, almost five thousand CIA contractors, and the third largest navy in the Caribbean, including submarines, patrol boats, coast guard cutters, seaplanes, and Guantânamo Bay for a base. Some "nutty schemes" against Fidel were proposed by the Pentagon and the White House, Helms said. These included blowing up an American ship in Guantânamo Harbor and faking a terrorist attack against an American airliner to justify a new invasion. 

The operation needed a code name, and Sam Halpern came up with Mongoose. 

"THERE IS NOTHING ON PAPER, OF COURSE"

Helms chose William K. Harvey, the man who had built the Berlin Tunnel, to lead the Mongoose team. Harvey called the project "Task Force W," after William Walker, the American freebooter who led a private army into Central America and proclaimed himself the emperor of Nicaragua in the 1850s. It was a very odd choice—unless you knew Bill Harvey. Harvey was introduced to the Kennedys as the CIA's James Bond. This seems to have mystified JFK, an avid reader of Ian Fleming's spy romances, for the only thing Bond and Harvey had in common was a taste for martinis. Obese, pop-eyed, always packing a pistol, Harvey drank doubles at lunch and returned to work muttering darkly, cursing the day he met RFK. Bobby Kennedy "wanted fast actions, he wanted fast answers," said McCone's executive assistant, Walt Elder. "Harvey did not have fast actions or fast answers." But he did have a secret weapon. 

The Kennedy White House twice had ordered the CIA to create an assassination squad. Under very close questioning by Senate investigators and a presidential commission in 1975, Richard Bissell said those orders had come from national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and Bundy's aide Walt Rostow, and that the president's men "would not have given such encouragement unless they were confident that it would meet with the president's approval." Bissell had handed down the order to Bill Harvey, who did as he was told. He had returned to headquarters in September 1959 after a long tour as chief of the Berlin base to command Division D of the clandestine service. The division's officers broke into foreign embassies overseas to steal codebooks and ciphers for the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency. They called themselves the Second-Story Men, and their skills ran from locksmithing to larceny and beyond. The division had contacts with criminals in foreign capitals who could be called on for cat burglaries, the kidnapping of embassy couriers, and assorted felonies in the name of American national security.

In February 1962, Harvey created an "executive action" program, code-named Rifle, and retained the services of a foreign agent, a resident of Luxembourg but a man without a country, who worked on contract for Division D. Harvey intended to use him to kill Fidel Castro. In April 1962, the CIA's records show, Harvey took a second approach. He met the mobster John Rosselli in New York. He picked up a new batch of poison pills, designed to be dropped into Castro's tea or coffee, from Dr. Edward Gunn, the chief of the operations division of the CIA's Office of Medical Services. Then he drove to Miami and delivered them to Rosselli, along with a U-Haul truck filled with weapons. 

On May 7, 1962, the attorney general was briefed in full on the Rifle project by the CIA's general counsel, Lawrence Houston, and the agency's security chief, Sheffield Edwards. RFK was "mad as hell"—not mad about the assassination plot itself, but about the Mafia's role in it. He did nothing to stop the CIA from seeking Castro's death. Richard Helms, who had taken command of the clandestine service three months before, gave Harvey the go-ahead on Rifle. If the White House wanted a silver bullet, he believed it was the agency's job to try to find it. He thought it best not to tell McCone, correctly judging that the director would have the strongest religious, legal, and political objections. I once put the question to Helms personally: Did President Kennedy want Castro dead? "There is nothing on paper, of course," he said evenly. "But there is certainly no question in my mind that he did." Helms thought political assassination in peacetime was a moral aberration. But there were practical considerations as well. "If you become involved in the business of eliminating foreign leaders, and it is considered by governments more frequently than one likes to admit, there is always the question of who comes next," he observed

  "A TRUE UNCERTAINTY" 

When John McCone took over as director of central intelligence, "CIA was suffering" and "morale was pretty well shattered," he recounted. "My first problem was to try to rebuild confidence." 

 But CIA headquarters was in an uproar six months into his reign. McCone started firing hundreds of clandestine service officers—aiming first to purge the "accident-prone," the "wife-beaters," and the "alcohol-addicted," noted his deputy director, General Marshall S. Carter. The dismissals, the aftershocks from the Bay of Pigs, and the almost daily beatings from the White House over Cuba were creating "a true uncertainty as to what the future of the Agency may be," McCone's executive director, Lyman Kirkpatrick, told him in a July 26, 1962, memorandum. He suggested that perhaps "something should be done immediately to restore morale in the Agency." Helms determined that the only cure was a return to the basics of espionage. 

With some misgivings, he took his best men out of the paralyzed Soviet and Eastern Europe divisions and turned them on Castro's Cuba. He had a handful of officers under his command in Florida who had learned how to run agents and couriers in and out of communist-controlled zones such as East Berlin. The CIA set up a debriefing center in Opa-Locka to interview thousands of people who had left Cuba on commercial airliners and private boats. The center interrogated some 1,300 Cuban refugees; they provided the agency with political, military, and economic intelligence along with documents and the detritus of everyday life—clothes, coins, cigarettes—to help disguise agents infiltrating the island. 

The Miami station claimed to have forty-five men running information out of Cuba in the summer of 1962. Some arrived in Florida for a ten-day CIA crash course and returned by speedboat under cover of night. The small spy network they built inside Cuba was the sole achievement of the $50 million Mongoose operation. Bobby Kennedy kept calling in vain for commandos to blow up Cuba's power plants, factories, and sugar mills in secret. "Can CIA actually hope to generate such strikes?" Lansdale asked Harvey. "Why is this now called a possibility?" Harvey replied that it would take two more years and another $100 million to create a force capable of overthrowing Castro. The CIA was so busy carrying out covert action that it failed to see a threat to the national survival of the United States gathering in Cuba.  

 Chapter 18

 "WE HAD ALSO FOOLED OURSELVES"

On Monday, July 30, 1962, John F. Kennedy walked into the Oval Office and switched on the brand-new state-of-the-art taping system he had ordered installed over the weekend. The very first conversation he recorded was a plot to subvert the government of Brazil and oust its president, Joao Goulart.
Kennedy and his ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, discussed spending $8 million to swing the next elections and to prepare the ground for a military coup against Goulart—"to push him out, if necessary," Ambassador Gordon told the president. The CIA station in Brazil would "make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action whatsoever if it's clear that the reason for the military action is—"
*—against the Left," the president said. He would not let Brazil or any other nation in the Western Hemisphere become a second Cuba.
The money started flowing from the CIA into the political life of Brazil. One conduit was the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an arm of the AFL-CIO (British diplomats in the know called it the AFL-CIA). Another was the Institute for Social Research Studies, a newly formed organization of business and civic leaders in Brazil. The recipients were politicians and military officers who opposed President Goulart and who kept in close contact with the new American military attaché in Brazil—Vernon Walters, a future deputy director of central intelligence. The return on these investments would be paid in less than two years.
The White House tapes, transcribed in 2001, recorded a daily drumbeat of covert-action plans taking shape in the Oval Office.
On August 8, McCone met the president at the White House to discuss the wisdom of dropping hundreds of Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Mao's China. The president had approved the paramilitary operation. McCone was dubious. Mao had surface-to-air missiles, and the last U-2 flight that the CIA had sent over the Chinese mainland, McCone told the president, had been spotted and tracked by Chinese communist radars twelve minutes after takeoff from Taiwan. "That's humorous," said Kennedy's national-security aide, Michael Forrestal, the son of the late defense secretary. "We'll give the President another U-2 disaster."
And what would the cover story be this time? the president joked.
Everyone laughed. One month after this meeting, Mao's forces shot down a U-2 over China.

On August 9, Richard Helms went to the White House to discuss the chances for overthrowing Haiti, thirty miles from Cuba. Haiti's dictator, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, had been stealing American economic aid and using American military support to shore up his corrupt regime. The president had authorized a coup. The CIA had given weapons to dissidents who hoped to topple the government by any means necessary. The question of whether Duvalier would be killed had been weighed. McCone had given the go-ahead.
But the CIA was bogged down. "I might say, Mr. President, that the plotting doesn't seem to be very successful," Helms said. He warned that Duvalier's "goon squads" were "a repressive force of no mean substance," which "makes plotting a dangerous business." The CIA's best recruited agent, a former chief of the Haitian coast guard, lacked the will or the wherewithal to carry out the coup. Helms saw scant hope for success. "Another coup really doesn't do any good if you don't have anybody to work with," the president told Helms.
On August 10, John McCone, Robert Kennedy, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met in Secretary of State Dean Rusk's ornate conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department. The subject was Cuba. McCone remembered "a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime," including Castro and his brother Raul, the Cuban defense minister, who had just returned from a weapons-buying trip to Moscow. He found the idea abhorrent.

The director saw a greaterdanger ahead. He predicted that the Soviet Union was going to give Castro nuclear weapons—medium-range ballistic missiles capable of strikingthe United States. He had been worrying about that possibility for more than four months. He had no intelligence, nothing to go on save gut instinct.
McCone was the only one who saw the threat clearly. "If I were Khrushchev," he said, "I'd put offensive missiles in Cuba. Then I'd bang my shoe on the desk and say to the United States, 'How do you like looking down the end of a gun barrel for a change? Now, let's talk about Berlin and any other subject that I choose.' " No one seems to have believed him. "The experts unanimously and adamantly agreed that this was beyond the realm of possibility," notes an agency history of McCone's years. "He stood absolutely alone."
There was a growing skepticism about the agency's ability to predict the Soviets' behavior. Its analysts had been consistently wrong for a
decade. "The CIA would come in and paint the most scary picture possible about what the Soviets would do to us—we were going to be second- rate; the Soviets were going to be Number One," said former president Gerald R. Ford, who in 1962 sat on the cloistered House subcommittee that provided the CIA's secret budget. "They had charts on the wall, they had figures, and their conclusion was that in ten years, the United States would be behind the Soviet Union in military capability, in economic growth," Ford said. "It was a scary presentation. The facts are they were 180 degrees wrong. These were the best people we had, the CIA's so-called experts."

"THE MOST DANGEROUS AREA IN THE WORLD"
On August 15, McCone returned to the White House to discuss how best to overthrow Cheddi Jagan, the prime minister of British Guiana, a wretched colony in the Caribbean mudflats of South America.
Jagan, an American-educated dentist married to a Marxist fromChicago named Janet Rosenberg, was descended from colonial  plantation workers. He was first elected back in 1953. Shortly thereafter, Winston Churchill suspended the colonial constitution, ordered the government dissolved, and threw the Jagans in jail. They were freed after the British restored constitutional government. Jagan was twice re-elected, and he had visited the Oval Office in October 1961.
"I went to see President Kennedy to seek the help of the United States, and to seek his support for our independence from the British,"
Jagan remembered. "He was very charming and jovial. Now, the United States feared that I would give Guyana to the Russians. I said, 'If this is your fear, fear not.' We will not have a Soviet base." John F. Kennedy publicly proclaimed—in a November 1961 interview with Khrushchev's son-in-law, the editor of Izvestia—that "the United States supports the idea that every people shall have the right to make a free choice as to the kind of government they want." Cheddi Jagan might be "a Marxist," he said, "but the United States doesn't object, because that choice was made by an honest election, which he won."
But Kennedy decided to use the CIA to depose him. Not long after Jagan left the White House, the cold war heated up in Georgetown, his capital. Previously unheard-of radio stations went on the air. Civil servants walked out. Riots took the lives of more than a hundred people.
The labor unions revolted after taking advice and money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development, which in turn took cash and counsel from the CIA. Arthur Schlesinger, a special assistant and court historian for the Kennedy White House, asked the president: "Does CIA think that they can carry out a really covert operation—i.e., an operation which, whatever suspicions Jagan might have, will leave no visible trace which he can cite before the world, whether he wins or loses, as evidence of U.S. intervention?"
At the White House on August 15, 1962, the president, McCone, and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy decided it was time to bring matters to a head. The president launched a $2 million campaign that eventually drove Jagan from power. President Kennedy later explained to the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan: "Latin America was the most dangerous area in the world. The effect of having a Communist state in British Guiana . . . would be to create irresistible pressures in the
United States to strike militarily against Cuba."
At the same August 15 meeting that sealed Jagan's fate, McCone handed President Kennedy the CIA's new doctrine on counterinsurgency. Along with it came a second document outlining covert operations under way in eleven nations—Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand; Iran and Pakistan; and Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Venezuela. That document was "highly classified because it tells all about the dirty tricks," McCone told the president. "A marvelous collection or dictionary of your crimes," Bundy said, with a laugh.
On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone if the CIA could stage a phony attack on the American military base at Guantanamo Bay as a pretext for an American invasion of Cuba. McCone demurred. He told John Kennedy in private the next day that an invasion could be a fatal mistake. He warned the president for the first time that he thought the Soviets might be installing medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. If so, an American sneak attack might set off a nuclear war. He advocated raising a public alarm about the likelihood of a Soviet missile base. The president instantly rejected that idea, but he wondered aloud whether the CIAs guerrillas or American troops would be needed to destroy the missile sites—if they existed. At that point, no one but McCone was convinced that they did.
Their conversation continued in the Oval Office, shortly after 6 p.m. on August 22, when they were joined by Maxwell Taylor, the general Kennedy trusted most. The president wanted to go over two other secret operations before discussing Cuba. The first was the developing plan to drop twenty Chinese Nationalist soldiers into mainland China during the coming week. The second was a plan for the CIA to wiretap members of the Washington press corps.
"How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?" the president asked. Four weeks before, Hanson Baldwin, the national security reporter for The New York Times, had published an article on Soviet efforts to protect intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites with concrete bunkers. Baldwin's highly detailed reporting accurately stated the conclusions of the CIA's most recent national intelligence estimate.
The president told McCone to set up a domestic task force to stop the flow of secrets from the government to the newspapers. The order violated the agency's charter, which specifically prohibits domestic spying.
Long before Nixon created his "plumbers" unit of CIA veterans to stop news leaks, Kennedy used the agency to spy on Americans.
"CIA is completely in agreement with . . . setting up this task force, which would be a continuing investigative group reporting to me," McCone later told the president. The CIA kept watch on Baldwin, four other reporters, and their sources from 1962 to 1965. By ordering the director of central intelligence to conduct a program of domestic surveillance, Kennedy set a precedent that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and George W. Bush would follow.
At this same White House meeting, the conversation finally returned to Castro. Thirty-eight Soviet ships had docked in Cuba in the past seven weeks, McCone told the president. Their cargo "might contain missile parts. We do not know." But either way the Soviets were working to build up Cuba's military strength. "Now, that would be separate from the question of whether they are building some missile bases, isn't it?" asked the president. "Well, no," said McCone, "I think the two are related. I
think they're doing both."
McCone left Washington the next day for a long honeymoon. A recent widower who had just remarried, he planned to go to Paris and the south of France. "I would be only too happy to have you call for me," he wrote to the president, "and if you do, I would be somewhat relieved of a guilty feeling that seems to possess me."

"PUT IT IN THE BOX AND NAIL IT SHUT"
A U-2 flight passed over Cuba on August 29. Its film was processed overnight. On August 30, a CIA analyst bent over his light table and shouted: I've got a SAM site! It was a surface-to-air missile, an SA-2, the same Soviet weapon that had brought the U-2 down over Russia. That same day, another U-2 was caught straying over Soviet airspace, violating a solemn American vow and prompting a formal protest from Moscow.
The knowledge that Cuba had surface-to-air missiles created "an understandable reluctance or timidity" in the White House about authorizing new flights, McCone said later. JFK ordered General Carter, the acting director of central intelligence during McCone's honeymoon, to deep-six the report on the SAM. "Put it in the box and nail it shut," the president said. He could not afford to let international tensions create a domestic political uproar, not with elections two months away. Then, on September 9, another U-2 was shot down over China. The spy plane and its risks were now regarded, as a CIA report put it, with "universal re-pugnance, or, at the very least, extreme uneasiness" at the State Department and the Pentagon. A furious McGeorge Bundy, spurred by Dean Rusk and acting in the president's name, canceled the next scheduled U-2 flight over Cuba and summoned James Q. Reber, the CIA veteran in charge of the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance.
"Is there anyone involved in the planning of these missions who wants to start a war?" Bundy asked bluntly.
President Kennedy restricted U-2 flights from passing over Cuban air-space on September 11. Four days later, the first Soviet medium-rangemissiles docked at Mariel Harbor in Cuba. The photo gap—a blind spotat a decisive moment in history—went on for forty-five days.
McCone, keeping watch on CIA headquarters through incessant cables from the French Riviera, commanded the agency to warn the White House of the "danger of a surprise." It did not. The CIA estimated that there were 10,000 Soviet troops in Cuba. There were 43,000. The agency said Cuban troop strength stood at 100,000. The true number was 275,000. The CIA flatly rejected the possibility that the Soviets were building nuclear sites in Cuba.
"The establishment on Cuban soil of Soviet nuclear striking forces which could be used against the US would be incompatible with Soviet policy," the CIA's top experts concluded in a Special National Intelligence Estimate on September 19. In a classic example of mirror imaging, an uncertain CIA stated: "The Soviets themselves are probably still uncertain about their future military program for Cuba." The estimate stood as a high-water mark of misjudgment for forty years, until the CIA assayed
the state of Iraq's arsenal.
McCone alone dissented. On September 20, in the last of his honeymoon cables to headquarters, he urged his agency to think again. The analysts sighed. Then they took another look at a message received at least eight days earlier from a road watcher, a Cuban agent at the lowest rung in the intelligence hierarchy. He had reported that a convoy of seventy-foot Soviet tractor-trailers was moving a mysterious canvas-covered cargo the size of thick telephone poles around the Cuban countryside near the town of San Cristobal. "I never knew his name," the CIA's Sam Halpern said. "This one agent, the only decent result out of Mongoose, this agent told us there's something funny going on. . . . And after ten days of arguing in front of the Committee on Overhead Recon-
naissance, it was finally approved to have an overflight."
On October 4, McCone, back in command, raged against the U-2 ban imposed by the White House. There had been no spy flights over Cuba for nearly five weeks. At a Special Group (Augmented) meeting with Bobby Kennedy, "there arose a considerable discussion (with some heat)" as to who had stopped the flights. It was, of course, the president. Bobby Kennedy acknowledged the need for more intelligence on Cuba, but he said the president first and foremost wanted more sabotage: "He
urged that 'massive activity' be mounted." He demanded that McCone and Lansdale send agents into Cuba to mine the harbors and kidnap Cuban soldiers for interrogation, an order that led to the final Mongoose mission in October, when some fifty spies and saboteurs were sent to Cuba by submarine at the height of the nuclear crisis.
While American intelligence flailed, ninety-nine Soviet nuclear war-heads came into Cuba undetected on October 4. Each one was seventy
times more powerful than the bomb that Harry Truman dropped on Hiroshima. With a single act of stealth, the Soviets had doubled the damage they could do to the United States. On October 5, McCone went to the White House to argue that the safety of the nation depended on more U-2 flights over Cuba. Bundy scoffed, saying he was convinced that there was no threat—and if one existed, the CIA could not find it.

"NEAR-TOTAL INTELLIGENCE SURPRISE"
The CIA's discovery of the missiles ten days thereafter has been portrayed as a triumph. Few of the men in power saw it that way at the time.
"The near-total intelligence surprise experienced by the United States with respect to the introduction and deployment of Soviet strategic missiles in Cuba resulted in large part from a malfunction of the analytic process by which intelligence indicators are assessed and reported," the president's foreign intelligence board reported a few months later. The president had been "ill served" by the CIA, which had "failed to get across to key Government officials the most accurate possible picture" of what the Soviets were doing. The board found that "clandestine agent coverage within Cuba was inadequate," and that "full use was not made of aerial photographic surveillance." It concluded: 'The manner in which intelligence indicators were handled in the Cuba situation may well be the most serious flaw in our intelligence system, and one which, if uncorrected, could lead to the gravest consequences."
The flaws went uncorrected; the failure to see the true state of the Iraqi arsenal in 2002 played out in much the same way.
But at last, at McCone's insistence, the photo gap was closed. At first light on October 14, a U-2 aircraft, piloted by Air Force Major Richard D. Heyser of the Strategic Air Command, flew over western Cuba, taking 928 photographs in six minutes. Twenty-four hours later, the CIA's analysts gazed upon images of the biggest communist weapons they had ever seen. All day long on October 15, they compared the U-2 shots to photos taken of the Soviet missiles paraded through the streets of
Moscow every May Day. They checked manuals of technical specifications supplied over the past year by Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in the Soviet military intelligence service. He had spent four months, starting in
the summer of 1960, trying to approach the CIA. But its officers had been too inexperienced, too wary, and too frightened to close the deal.
He finally made contact with the British, who worked with him in concert with the CIA in London. At great risk, he had smuggled out some five thousand pages of documents, most of them providing insight into military technology and doctrine. He was a volunteer, and the first Soviet spy of consequence the CIA ever had. Exactly one week after the U-2 photos arrived in Washington, Penkovsky was arrested by Soviet intelligence.
By late afternoon on October 15, the CIA's analysts knew they were looking at S S-4 medium-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a one-megaton warhead from western Cuba to Washington. President Kennedy was in New York, campaigning for candidates in the November election, now three weeks away. That night, McGeorge Bundy was at
home, holding a farewell dinner for Chip Bohlen, the newly appointed American ambassador to France. At about 10 p.m. the telephone rang. It was Ray Cline, the CIA's deputy director of intelligence. "Those things we've been worrying about—it looks as though we've really got something," Cline said.
Richard Helms brought the U-2 photos to the attorney general's office at 9:15 a.m. on October 16. "Kennedy got up from his desk and stood for a moment staring out the window," Helms remembered. "He turned to face me. 'Shit,' he said loudly, raising both fists to his chest as if he were about to begin shadow boxing. 'Damn it all to hell and back.' These were
my sentiments exactly."
Bobby Kennedy thought: "We had been deceived by Khrushchev, but we had also fooled ourselves."

Chapter 19
 "WE'D BE DELIGHTED TO TRADE THOSE MISSILES"
The CIA had fooled itself into thinking that the Soviets would never send nuclear weapons to Cuba. Now that it had seen the missiles, it still could not grasp the Soviet mindset. "I can't understand their viewpoint," President Kennedy lamented on October 16. "It's a goddamn mystery to me. I don't know enough about the Soviet Union."
General Marshall Carter was again the acting director; McCone had flown to Seattle for the funeral of his new stepson, killed in a car crash.
Carter went to the Special Group (Augmented) meeting at 9:30 a.m. in the Situation Room, the underground command post at the White House, carrying new proposals for secret attacks on Cuba commissioned by Robert Kennedy. Carter, who privately compared Kennedy's performances at Mongoose meetings to the gnawing of an enraged rat terrier, listened silently as the attorney general approved eight new acts of sabotage, contingent on the president's go-ahead. Carter then met the CIA's
chief photo interpreter, Art Lundahl, and the agency's top missile expert, Sidney Graybeal, upstairs at the White House. The three men brought blown-up U-2 images into the Cabinet Room, where the inner circle of the national-security establishment assembled shortly before noon.
The president flicked on his tape recorder. More than forty years went by before an accurate transcript of the Cuban missile crisis meetings was compiled.

"THAT'D BE GODDAMN DANGEROUS"
The president stared at the pictures. "How far advanced is this?" he asked. "Sir, we've never seen this kind of an installation before," Lundahl said. "Not even in the Soviet Union?" Kennedy said. "No, sir," Lundahl replied. "It's ready to be fired?" asked the president. "No, sir," said Graybeal. "How long have . . . we can't tell that, can we, how long before they fire?" Kennedy asked. No one knew. Where were the war heads? asked Defense Secretary McNamara. No one knew. Why had
Khrushchev done this? wondered the president. No one knew. But Secretary Rusk had a good guess: "We don't really live under fear of his nuclear weapons to the extent that he has to live under ours," he suggested. "Also, we have nuclear weapons nearby, in Turkey and places like that."
The president was only dimly aware that those missiles were in place.
He had all but forgotten that he had chosen to keep those weapons
pointed at the Soviets.
JFK ordered three strike plans prepared: number one, to destroy the nuclear missile sites with air force or navy jets; number two, to mount a far bigger air strike; number three, to invade and conquer Cuba. "We're certainly going to do number one," he said. "We're going to take out these missiles." The meeting broke up at 1 p.m. after Bobby Kennedy argued for an all-out invasion.
At 2:30 p.m., RFK cracked the lash at the Mongoose team at his enormous office in the Justice Department, demanding new ideas, new missions. Passing on a question posed to him by the president ninety minutes earlier, he asked Helms to tell him how many Cubans would fight for the regime if the United States invaded. No one knew. At 6:30 p.m., the president's men reconvened in the Cabinet Room. Thinking of the Mongoose missions, President Kennedy asked if the MRBMs, the medium-range ballistic missiles, could be destroyed with bullets. Yes, General Carter told him, but these were mobile missiles; they could be moved to new hiding places. The problem of targeting mobile missiles has remained unsolved to this day.
The president now contemplated the question of a nuclear war over Cuba. He began to grasp how little he understood the Soviet leader. "We certainly have been wrong about what he's trying to do," the president said. "Not many of us thought that he was gonna put MRBMs on Cuba."
Nobody save John McCone, Bundy muttered. Why had Khrushchev done it? the president asked. "What is the advantage of that? It's just as if we suddenly began to put a major number of MRBMs in Turkey," he said. "Now that'd be goddamn dangerous, I would think."
A moment of awkward silence fell. "Well, we did it, Mr. President," said Bundy.
The talk then turned to secret warfare. "We have a list of sabotage options, Mr. President," said Bundy. "... I take it you are in favor of sabotage." He was. Ten teams of five Mongoose agents were authorized to infiltrate Cuba by submarine. Their orders were to blow up Soviet ships with underwater mines in Cuban harbors, to attack three surface-to-air missile sites with machine guns and mortars, and perhaps to go after the nuclear missile launchers. The Kennedys were swinging wildly. The CIA
was their blunt instrument.
The president walked out of the meeting, leaving two military options on the table: a sneak attack on Cuba and a full-bore invasion. His part-  ing words were a request to see McCone the next morning before leaving for a campaign trip to Connecticut. General Carter, McNamara, Bundy, and a few others stayed behind.
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Marshall Carter was sixty-one years old, short, squat, bald, and sharp-tongued. He had been chief of staff of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, under
Eisenhower. He knew the nuclear strategies of the United States. Now, with the president out of the room, the CIA man voiced his deepest fear:
"You go in there with a surprise attack," Carter said. "You put out all the missiles. This isn't the end; this is the beginning. " It would be the first day of World War III.

"THE COURSE WHICH I HAD RECOMMENDED"
The next day, Wednesday, October 17, John McCone and John Kennedy met at 9:30 a.m. "President seemed inclined to act promptly if at all, without warning," McCone noted in his daily memo for the record. The president then asked McCone to drive to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to brief Dwight D. Eisenhower. McCone arrived at noon carrying U-2 photos of the medium-range ballistic missiles. "Eisenhower seemed to lean toward (but did not specifically recommend) military action which would cut off Havana and therefore take over the heart of the government," McCone noted.
The director drove back to Washington and tried to pull together histhoughts. He was weary; he had been to the West Coast and back in less than forty-eight hours. The six single-spaced pages of notes he produced that afternoon were declassified in 2003. They reflect a search for a way to rid Cuba of the missiles without a nuclear war.
Given his background as a master shipbuilder, McCone understood the military, political, and economic power of ships at sea. The notes he drew up included the idea of imposing "an all-out blockade" on Cuba—
"the interruption of all incoming shipping," backed up with the threat of an attack. In meetings with Bobby Kennedy, McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy that went on until nearly midnight, he elaborated on the blockade strategy. McCone's notes show that the idea received no evident support from the president's top advisers.
At 11 a.m. on Thursday, October 18, McCone and Art Lundahl went to the White House with new U-2 photos. These showed a new set of bigger missiles, each with a range of 2,200 miles, capable of hitting any
major American city save Seattle. McCone said the missile bases were run by Soviet troops; McNamara pointed out that a surprise air strike on the bases would kill several hundred Soviets. Attacking them was an act of war against Moscow, not Havana. Then Undersecretary of State George Ball voiced what the CIA's Marshall Carter had said two nights
before: "A course of action where we strike without warning is like Pearl Harbor."
The president said, "The question really is what action we take which lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure. . . . You have the blockade without any declaration of war.
You've got a blockade with a declaration of war. We've got strikes one,
two, and three. We've got invasion."
That day, McCone picked up two votes in favor of his argument for a blockade backed with threats of attack. One was Eisenhower's. The other was RFK's. They both had shifted to McCone's stance. They were still in
the minority, but they turned the tide. The president told himself, sitting alone in the Oval Office at about midnight, speaking directly to the hid-

den microphones, that "opinions had obviously switched from the ad-
vantages of a first strike." The president called McCone at home on Sunday to say, as the director noted with satisfaction, that "he had made up his mind to pursue the course which I had recommended." The president announced that decision to the world in a televised address on Monday night, October 22.

"I WOULDA BEEN IMPEACHED"
The morning of Tuesday, October 23, began at the White House with a briefing by McCone. Intensely alert to the political damage the director could cause them as the only man in Washington who had accurately forewarned them of the threat, the Kennedys put McCone on spin patrol, briefing members of Congress and columnists. They also wanted him to stiffen the spine of Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who needed to argue the American case at the United Nations.
From the White House, McCone called Ray Cline, his chief intelligence analyst, and told him to fly to New York with copies of the U-2 photographs. Stevenson's team was "in some difficulty putting together a con-
vincing case to the Security Council," McCone explained. "See, they're in a little bad spot because at the time of the Bay of Pigs, why, Stevenson showed some fake pictures and they later turned out to be fake."
President Kennedy's twelve top national-security men then met to talk about how to manage the blockade, set to begin the next morning.
It was technically an act of war. McCone reported corridor chatter at the United Nations, relayed by Ray Cline, suggesting that the Soviet vessels en route to Cuba might try to run past the American warships.
"Now what do we do tomorrow morning when these eight vessels continue to sail on?" asked President Kennedy. "We're all clear about how"—a beat of silence, a nervous chuckle—"we handle it?"
No one knew. Another brief silence fell.
"Shoot the rudders off 'em, don't you?" McCone replied.
The meeting broke up. Kennedy signed the quarantine proclamation.
He and his brother were then alone for a few minutes in the Cabinet
Room.
"Well, it looks like it's gonna be real mean. But on the other hand, there's really no choice," said the president. "If they get mean on this one—Jesus Christ! What are they gonna fuck up next?" His brother said:
"There wasn't any choice. I mean, you woulda had a—you woulda been impeached. " The president agreed: "I woulda been impeached."
At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, October 24, the blockade took effect, the American military went on its highest alert short of nuclear war, and McCone began his daily briefing at the White House. The director of central intelligence at last was serving as his charter commanded, bringing all of American intelligence to the president into a single voice. The Soviet army was not on full alert, but it was increasing its readiness, he reported, and the Soviet navy had submarines in the Atlantic trailing the
fleet headed for Cuba. New photoreconnaissance showed storage buildings for nuclear warheads, but no sign of the warheads themselves. McCone took pains that day to point out to the president that the blockade would not stop the Soviets from readying the missile launching sites.
McNamara began to lay out his plans for intercepting the Soviet ships and submarines. Then McCone interrupted. "Mr. President, I have a note just handed me. . . . All six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters . . . have either stopped or reversed course." Rusk said, "Whaddya mean, 'Cuban waters'?" The president asked, "The ships leaving Cuba or the ones coming in?" McCone got up, said, "I'll find out," and left the room. Rusk muttered: "Makes some difference."
McCone returned with the breaking news that the Soviet ships had been heading for Cuba, more than five hundred miles from the island, but had either stopped or reversed course. This is the moment when Rusk is supposed to have leaned over to Bundy and said: "We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked."
The first part of McCone's strategy was working: the quarantine on Soviet shipping would hold. The second part would be much harder. As he kept reminding the president, the missiles were still there, the warheads were hidden somewhere on the island, and the danger was growing.
At the White House on October 26, Adlai Stevenson said it would take weeks, perhaps months of negotiations to get the missiles out of Cuba.
McCone knew there was no time for that. At midday, he took the president aside (Bobby, if present, never spoke) for a private meeting, with only himself and the photo interpreter Art Lundahl, in the Oval Office.
New photoreconnaissance showed that the Soviets had introduced short-range battlefield nuclear weapons. Newly camouflaged missile launchers were almost ready to fire. The missile sites each were manned by up to five hundred military personnel and guarded by three hundred more Soviets.
"I'm getting more concerned all the time," McCone told the president.
"They could start at dark and have missiles pointing at us the next morning. For that reason, I'm growing increasingly concerned about following a political route."
"What other way?" asked the president. "The alternative course is we could do the air strike or an invasion. We are still gonna face the fact that, if we invade, by the time we get to these sites after a very bloody fight, we will have—they will be pointing at us. So it still comes down to a question of whether they're gonna fire the missiles."
"That's correct," McCone said. The president's mind now swerved from diplomacy to war. "I mean, there's no other action that, other than diplomatic, that we can take, which does not immediately get rid of these," Kennedy said. "The other way is, I would think, a combination of an air raid and probably invasion, which means that we would have
to carry out both of those with the prospect that they might be fired."
McCone cautioned against an invasion. "Invading is going to be a
much more serious undertaking than most people realize," he told the
president. The Russians and the Cubans had "a hell of a lot of equip-
ment. . . . Very lethal stuff they've got there. Rocket launchers, self-
propelled gun carriers, half-tracks. . . . They'll give an invading force apretty bad time. It would be no cinch by any manner or means."
That night, a long message from Moscow arrived at the White House.
The cable took more than six hours to transmit and receive, and it was not complete until 9 p.m. It was a personal letter from Nikita Khrushchev decrying "the catastrophe of thermonuclear war" and proposing—so it seemed—a way out. If the Americans would promise not to invade Cuba, the Soviets would pull out the missiles.
On Saturday, October 27, McCone began the 10 a.m. White House meeting with the grim news that the missiles could be fired in as little as six hours. He had barely concluded his briefing when President Kennedy read a bulletin ripped from the Associated Press news ticker, datelined
Moscow: "Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy yesterday he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States with- drew its rockets from Turkey."

The meeting went into an uproar.
No one bought the idea at first—except the president and McCone.
"Let's not kid ourselves," Kennedy said. "They've got a very good pro- posal." McCone agreed: it was specific, serious, and impossible to ignore. The arguments over how to respond dragged on all day, punctuated by moments of terror. First a U-2 strayed into Soviet airspace off the coast of Alaska, prompting Soviet jets to scramble. Then, at about 6 p.m., McNamara suddenly announced that another U-2 had been shot down over Cuba, killing Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson.
The Joint Chiefs now strongly recommended that a full-scale attack on Cuba should begin in thirty-six hours. Around 6:30 p.m., President Kennedy left the room, and the talk immediately became less formal, more brutal.
"The military plan is basically invasion," McNamara said. "When we attack Cuba, we are going to have to attack with an all-out attack," he said. "This is almost certain to lead to an invasion." Or a nuclear war, Bundy muttered. "The Soviet Union may, and I think probably will, attack the Turkish missiles," McNamara continued. Then the United States would have to attack Soviet ships or bases in the Black Sea.
"And I would say that it is damn dangerous, " said the secretary of defense. "Now, I'm not sure we can avoid anything like that if we attack Cuba. But I think we should make every effort to avoid it. And one way to avoid it is to defuse the Turkish missiles before we attack Cuba," McNamara said.
McCone exploded: "I don't see why you don't make the trade then!"
And the ground shifted.
Other voices shouted out: Make the trade! Make the trade then! His anger rising, McCone went on: "We've talked about this, and we'd say we'd be delighted to trade those missiles in Turkey for the thing in Cuba."
He pressed his point home. "I'd trade these Turkish things out right now. I wouldn't even talk to anybody about it. We sat for a week and there was—everybody was in favor of doing it"—until Khrushchev proposed it.
The president returned to the Cabinet Room at about 7:30 p.m., and suggested everyone take a dinner break. Then, in the Oval Office, he and his brother spoke with McNamara, Rusk, Bundy, and four other trusted aides. McCone was excluded. They discussed his idea, which was what the president wanted. Everyone in the room was sworn to secrecy. Bobby
Kennedy left the White House and met with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in his office at the Justice Department. He told Dobrynin that the United States accepted the quid pro quo on the missiles, provided it was never made public. The Kennedys could not be seen to be cutting a deal with Khrushchev. The attorney general deliberately falsified his memo of the meeting, deleting a drafted reference to the trade. The swap was kept a deep secret. John McCone said a quarter century later: "President Kennedy and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy insisted that they at no time discussed the missiles [in] Turkey with any representatives of
the Soviets and that there was no such deal ever made."
For many years thereafter, the world believed that only President Kennedy's calm resolve and his brother's steely commitment to a peaceable resolution had saved the nation from a nuclear war. McCone's central role in the Cuban missile crisis was obscured for the rest of the twentieth century.
The Kennedys soon turned against McCone. The director let it be known throughout Washington that he had been the sole sentinel on the Cuban missiles; he testified to the president's foreign intelligence board that he had told the president about his hunch back on August 22.
The gist of the board's report on the "photo gap" appeared in The Washington Post on March 4, 1963. That day, Bobby Kennedy told his brother that the CIA must have leaked the information to wound him.
"Yeah," said the president, "he's a real bastard, that John McCone."

"TO ELIMINATE FIDEL, BY EXECUTION IF NECESSARY"
At the height of the missile crisis, McCone had tried to put a leash on Mongoose and focus its considerable energies on gathering intelligence for the Pentagon. He thought he had succeeded. But the CIA's Bill Harvey concluded that the United States was about to invade Cuba and ordered his Mongoose saboteurs to attack.
When Bobby Kennedy, who had pushed the hardest for the Mon- goose missions, found out about that dangerous failure of command, he went into a rage. After a screaming match, Harvey was banished from Washington. Helms sent him to Rome as chief of station—though not before the FBI took note of a drunken farewell meal Harvey had with Johnny Rosselli, the Mafia hit man he had hired to kill Castro. In Rome, the hard-drinking Harvey became unhinged, driving his men as Bobby Kennedy had driven him.
Helms replaced him as the man in charge of Cuba with his Far East chief, Desmond FitzGerald, a Harvard man and a millionaire who lived in a red-brick Georgetown mansion with a butler in the pantry and a Jaguar in the garage. The president liked him; he fit the James Bond image. He had been hired out of his New York law firm by Frank Wisner at the start of the Korean War and instantly made executive officer of the Far East division of the clandestine service. He had helped run the disastrous Li Mi operation in Burma. Then he commanded the CIA's China Mission, which sent foreign agents to their deaths until 1955, when a
headquarters review deemed the mission a waste of time, money, energy, and human life. FitzGerald then rose to deputy chief of the Far East, where he helped to plan and execute the Indonesian operation in 1957 and 1958. As Far East division chief, he presided over the rapid expansion of the CIA's operations in Vietnam, Laos, and Tibet.
Now the Kennedys ordered him to blow up Cuban mines, mills, power plants, and commercial ships, to destroy the enemy in hopes of creating a counterrevolution. The objective, as Bobby Kennedy told FitzGerald in April 1963, was to oust Castro in eighteen months—before the next presidential election. Twenty-five Cuban agents of the CIA died on those futile operations.
Then, in the summer and fall of 1963, FitzGerald led the final mission to kill Fidel Castro.
The CIA planned to use Rolando Cubela, its best-placed agent inside Cuba's government, as the hit man. A high-strung, loose-lipped, violent man who detested Castro, Cubela had held the rank of major in the Cuban army, served as its military attaché in Spain, and traveled widely.
On August 1, 1963, in a conversation with a CIA officer in Helsinki, he
volunteered "to eliminate Fidel, by execution if necessary." On September 5, he met with his CIA case officer, Nestor Sanchez, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he was representing the Cuban government at the international Collegiate Games. On September 7, the CIA duly noted that Castro had chosen a reception at the Brazilian embassy in Havana to deliver a long tirade to a reporter for the Associated Press. Castro said that "United States leaders would be in danger if they helped in any attempt
to do away with Cuban leaders. ... If they are aiding terrorist plots to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe."
Sanchez and Cubela met again in Paris in early October, and the Cuban agent told the CIA officer that he wanted a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight. On October 29, 1963, FitzGerald took a plane to Paris and met Cubela in a CIA safe house.
FitzGerald said that he was a personal emissary sent by Robert Kennedy, which was dangerously close to the truth, and that the CIA would deliver Cubela the weapons of his choosing. The United States, he said, wanted "a real coup" in Cuba.

Chapter 20.

HEY, BOSS, WE DID A GOOD JOB, DIDN'T WE?"

Alone in the Oval Office on Monday, November 4, 1963, John R Kennedy dictated a memo about a maelstrom he had set in motion half a world away—the assassination of an American ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.
"We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it," JFK said. He stopped for a moment to play with his children as they ran in and out of the room. Then he resumed. "The way he was killed"—and he paused again—"made it particularly abhorrent."
The CIA's Lucien Conein was Kennedy's spy among the mutinous generals who murdered Diem. "I was part and parcel of the whole conspiracy," Conein said in an extraordinary testament years later.
His nickname was Black Luigi, and he had the panache of a Corsican gangster. Conein had joined the OSS, trained with the British, and parachuted behind French lines. In 1945, he flew to Indochina to fight the Japanese; he was in Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh, and for a moment they were allies. He stayed on to become a charter member of the CIA.
In 1954, he was one of the first American intelligence officers in Vietnam. After Ho defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam was partitioned into North and South at an international conference in Geneva, where the United States was represented by Under-secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith.
For the next nine years, the United States backed President Diem as
the man to fight communism in Vietnam. Conein served under the command of Ed Lansdale at the CIA's new Saigon Military Mission. Lansdale had "a very broad charter," said the CIA's Rufus Phillips. "It was literally, 'Ed, do what you can to save South Vietnam.' "
Conein went to North Vietnam on sabotage missions, destroying trains and buses, contaminating fuel and oil, organizing two hundred Vietnamese commandos trained by the CIA, and burying weapons in the cemeteries of Hanoi. He then returned to Saigon to help shore up President Diem, a mystic Catholic in a Buddhist country whom the CIA provided with millions of dollars, a phalanx of bodyguards, and a direct line to Allen Dulles. The agency created South Vietnam's political parties, trained its secret police, made its popular movies, and printed and peddled an astrological magazine predicting that the stars were in Diem's favor. It was building a nation from the ground up.

"THE IGNORANCE AND THE ARROGANCE"
In 1959, the peasant soldiers of North Vietnam began to carve the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the jungles of Laos; the footpaths were filled with guerrillas and spies heading for South Vietnam.
Laos, a preindustrial lotus land, became "a flashpoint where the U.S. saw its interests being challenged by the communist world," said John Gunther Dean, then a young State Department officer at the American embassy in Vientiane. The CIA set to work buying a new Lao govern- ment and building a guerrilla army to fight the communists and attack the trail. The North Vietnamese reacted by stepping up their attempts to infiltrate the country and train the local communists, the Pathet Lao.
The architect of the American political strategy in Laos was the CIA station chief, Henry Hecksher, a veteran of the Berlin base and the Guatemala coup. Hecksher began to build a network of American control by using junior diplomats as bagmen. "One day, Hecksher asked me whether I could take a suitcase to the Prime Minister," Dean remembered. "The suitcase contained money."
The cash made the leaders of Laos "realize that the real power at the Embassy was not the Ambassador but the CIA station chief," said Dean, later the American ambassador in Thailand, India, and Cambodia, among other nations. "The Ambassador was supposed to support the Lao Government and basically not rock the boat. Henry Hecksher was committed to opposing the neutralist Prime Minister—and perhaps bring about his downfall. That is what happened."
The CIA forced out a freely elected coalition government and installed a new prime minister, Prince Souvanna Phouma. The prime minister's case officer was Campbell James, an heir to a railroad fortune who dressed, acted, and thought like a nineteenth-century British grenadier.
Eight years out of Yale, he saw himself as a viceroy in Laos, and lived accordingly. James made friends and bought influence among the leaders of Laos at a private gambling club he created; its centerpiece was a
roulette wheel borrowed from John Gunther Dean.
The real battle for Laos began after the CIA's Bill Lair, who ran a jungle warfare training school for Thai commandos, discovered a Lao mountain tribesman named Vang Pao, a general in the Royal Lao Army who led the hill tribe that called itself the Hmong. In December 1960, Lair told the Far East division chief Desmond FitzGerald about his new recruit. "Vang Pao had said: 'We can't live with the communists,' " Lair reported. " 'You give us the weapons, and we'll fight the communists.' "
The next morning, at the CIA station, FitzGerald told Lair to write up a proposal. "It was an 18-page cable," Lair remembered. "The answer came back in a very short time. . . . That was the real go-ahead."
In early January 1961, in the final days of the Eisenhower administration, the CIA's pilots delivered their first weapons to the Hmong. Six months later, more than nine thousand hill tribesmen controlled by Vang Pao joined three hundred Thai commandos trained by Lair for combat operations against the communists. The CIA sent guns, money, radios, and airplanes to the Lao military in the capital and the tribal leaders in the mountains. Their most urgent mission was to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Hanoi had now proclaimed a National Liberation Front in the south. That year, four thousand South Vietnamese officials died at the hands of the Vietcong.
A few months after President Kennedy took power, the fates of Laos and South Vietnam were seen as one. Kennedy did not want to send American combat troops to die in those jungles. Instead, he called on the CIA to double its tribal forces in Laos and "make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnam" with its Asian recruits.
The Americans sent to Laos during the Kennedy years did not know the tribal name of the Hmong. They called them the Meo, an epithet somewhere between "barbarian" and "nigger." One of those young men was Dick Holm. Looking back, he rued "the ignorance and the arrogance of Americans arriving in Southeast Asia. . . . We had only minimal understanding of the history, culture, and politics of the people we wanted to aid. . . . Our strategic interests were superimposed onto a region where our president had decided to 'draw the line' against communism.
And we would do it our way."
At CIA headquarters, "the activists were all for a war in Laos," said Robert Amory, Jr., the deputy director for intelligence. "They thought that was a great place to have a war."

"WE HARVESTED A LOT OF LIES"
The Americans sent to Vietnam had an equally profound ignorance of the country's history and culture. But the CIA's officers saw themselves as the point men in the global war on communism.
They had the run of Saigon. "They were under covers as varied as film and drama producers and industrial salesmen; they were trainers, weapons experts, merchants," said Ambassador Leonardo Neher, then a State Department officer in Saigon. "They had unbelievable funds. . . .
They were having the time of their lives. They had everything they wanted."
What they lacked was intelligence about the enemy. That was the responsibility of William E. Colby, the station chief in Saigon from 1959 to 1961, soon to be chief of the Far East division of the clandestine service.
Colby, who had fought behind enemy lines as an OSS commando, did as he had done in World War II. He started an operation called Project Tiger to parachute some 250 South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam. After two years, 217 of them were recorded as killed, missing, or suspected of being double agents. A final report listed the fate of fifty-two teams of agents, each team as large as seventeen commandos:
"Captured soon after landing."
"Hanoi Radio announced capture."
"Team destroyed."
"Team believed under North Vietnam control."
"Captured soon after landing."
"Doubled, played, terminated." That last phrase suggests that the United States discovered that a commando team was secretly working for North Vietnam and then hunted and killed its members. The reason for the failure of the missions eluded the CIA until after the cold war, when one of Colby's cohorts, Captain Do Van Tien, the deputy chief for
Project Tiger, revealed that he had been a spy for Hanoi all along.
"We harvested a lot of lies," said Robert Barbour, the deputy chief of the American embassy's political section. "Some of them we knew were lies. Some of them we didn't."
In October 1961, President Kennedy sent General Maxwell Taylor to assess the situation. "South Vietnam is now undergoing an acute crisis of confidence," Taylor warned in a top secret report to the president. The United States had to "demonstrate by deeds—not merely words—the American commitment seriously to help save Vietnam." He wrote: "To be persuasive this commitment must include the sending to Vietnam of some U.S. military forces." That was a very deep secret.
To win the war, General Taylor continued, the United States needed more spies. In a secret annex to the report, the CIA's deputy station chief in Saigon, David Smith, said that a key battle would be fought within the government of South Vietnam. He said Americans had to infiltrate the Saigon government, influence it, "speed up the processes of decision and action" within it—and, if necessary, change it.
That job went to Lucien Conein.

"NOBODY LIKED DIEM"
Conein started working with President Diem's half-mad brother, Ngo
Dinh Nhu, to establish the Strategic Hamlets program, which herded
peasants from their villages into armed camps as a defense against com- munist subversion. Wearing the uniform of a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Conein burrowed deep into the decaying military and political culture of South Vietnam.
"I was able to go to every province, I was able to talk to unit commanders," he said. "Some of these people I had known for many years; some I had known even back in World War Two. Some of them were in powerful positions." His contacts soon became the best the agency had in Vietnam. But there was so much he did not know.
On May 7, 1963, the eve of the 2,527th birthday of the Buddha, Conein flew to Hue, where he found a large military entourage whose presence he did not understand. He was encouraged to leave on the next plane. "I wanted to stay," he remembered. "I wanted to see the celebration of the birthday of Buddha. I wanted to see the boats with the candles lit going down the perfumed river, but it was not to be." The next morning Diem's soldiers attacked and killed members of a Buddhist entourage in Hue.
"Diem had been out of touch with reality," Conein said. Diem's blue-uniformed scouts modeled on the Hitler Youth, his CIA-trained special forces, and his secret police aimed to create a Catholic regime in a Buddhist nation. By oppressing the monks, Diem had made them a powerful political force. Their protests against the government grew for the next five weeks. On June 11, a sixty-six-year-old monk named Quang
Due sat down and set himself ablaze in a Saigon intersection. The pictures of the immolation went around the world. All that was left of him was his heart. Now Diem began raiding the pagodas, killing monks and women and children to sustain his power.
"Nobody liked Diem," Bobby Kennedy said not long thereafter. "But how to get rid of him and get somebody who would continue the war, not split the country in two and, therefore, lose not only the war but the country—that was the great problem."
In late June and early July 1963, President Kennedy began to talk in private about getting rid of Diem. If it were to be done well, it had best be done in secret. The president began the change of regime by nominating a new American ambassador: the imperious Henry Cabot Lodge, a political rival he had twice defeated, once in the race for senator from Massachusetts and once as Richard Nixon's running mate. Lodge was happy to accept the job, once assured he would be provided with a viceroy's powers in Saigon.
On the Fourth of July, Lucien Conein received a message from General Tran Van Don, the acting chief of the joint staff of the army of South Vietnam, a man he had known for eighteen years. Meet me at the Caravelle Hotel, the message said. That night, in the smoky, jam-packed basement nightclub at the hotel, General Don confided that the military was preparing to move against Diem.
"What will be the American reaction if we go all the way?" Don asked Conein.
On August 23, John R Kennedy gave his answer.
He was alone on a rainy Saturday night in Hyannis Port, on crutches for his aching back, grieving for his stillborn son Patrick, buried two weeks before. Shortly after 9 p.m., the president took a call from his national-security aide Michael Forrestal, and without preamble approved an eyes-only cable for the newly arrived Ambassador Lodge, drafted by Roger Hilsman at the State Department. "We must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved," it told Lodge, and it urged him to "make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem's replacement." The secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence had not been consulted. All three were dubious about a coup against Diem.
"I should not have given my consent to it," the president told himself after the consequences became clear. Yet the order went forward.
Hilsman told Helms that the president had ordered Diem ousted.

Helms handed the assignment to Bill Colby, the new chief of the CIA's Far East division. Colby passed it on to John Richardson, his choice to re-place him as the station chief in Saigon: "In circumstance believe CIA must fully accept directives of policy makers and seek ways to accomplish objectives they seek," he instructed Richardson—though the order
"appears to be throwing away bird in hand before we have adequately identified birds in bush, or songs they may sing."
On August 29, his sixth day in Saigon, Lodge cabled Washington: "We are launched on a course from which there is no turning back: the over-throw of the Diem government." At the White House, Helms listened as the president received that message, approved it, and ordered Lodge to make sure above all that the American role in the coup—Conein's role— would be concealed.
The ambassador resented the agency's exalted status in Saigon. He wrote in his private journal: "CIA has more money; bigger houses than diplomats; bigger salaries; more weapons; more modern equipment." He was jealous of the powers held by John Richardson, and he scoffed at the caution the station chief displayed about Conein's central role in the
coup plotting. Lodge decided he wanted a new station chief.
So he burned Richardson—"exposed him, and gave his name publicly to the newspapers," as Bobby Kennedy said in a classified oral history eight months later—by feeding a coldly calculated leak to a journeyman  reporter passing through Saigon. The story was a hot scoop. Identifying Richardson by name—an unprecedented breach of security—it said he
had "frustrated a plan of action Mr. Lodge brought with him from Washington, because the Agency disagreed with it. . . . One high official here, a man who has devoted most of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA's growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it." The New York Times and The Wash-
ington Post picked up the story. Richardson, his career ruined, left Saigon four days later; after a decent interval, Ambassador Lodge moved into his house.
"We were fortunate when Richardson was recalled," said Conein's old friend, General Don. "Had he been there, he could have put our plan in great jeopardy."

"A COMPLETE LACK OF INTELLIGENCE"
Lucien Conein went to meet General Duong Van Minh, known as "Big Minn," at the Joint General Staff Headquarters in Saigon on October 5.
He reported that the general raised the issue of assassination and the question of American support for a new junta. Dave Smith, the new acting station chief, recommended that "we do not set ourselves irrevocably against the assassination plot"—music to Ambassador Lodge's ears, anathema to McCone's.
McCone commanded Smith to stop "stimulating, or approving, or supporting assassination," and he rushed to the Oval Office. Careful to avoid using words that could link the White House to a murder, he later testified, he chose a sports analogy: Mr. President, if I were the manager of a baseball team, and I had only one pitcher, I'd keep him on the mound
whether he was a good pitcher or not. On October 17, at a meeting of the Special Group, and in a one-on-one with the president four days later, McCone said that ever since Lodge's arrival in August, American foreign policy in Vietnam had been based on "a complete lack of intelligence" on the politics of Saigon. The situation developing around Conein was "exceedingly dangerous," he said, and it threatened "absolute disaster for the United States."
The American ambassador reassured the White House. "I believe that our involvement to date through Conein is still within the realm of plausible denial," he reported. "We should not thwart a coup for two reasons.
First, it seems at least an even bet that the next government would not bungle and stumble as much as the present one has. Secondly, it is extremely unwise in the long range for us to pour cold water on attempts at a coup. . . .

We should remember that this is the only way in which the people in Vietnam can possibly get a change of government."
The White House cabled careful instructions for Conein. Find out the generals' plans, don't encourage them, keep a low profile. Too late: thline between espionage and covert action already had been crossed.
Conein was far too famous to work undercover; "I had a very high pro- file in Vietnam," he said. Everyone who mattered knew exactly who he was and what he represented. They had faith that the CIA's point man spoke for America.
Conein met with General Don on the night of October 24 and learned that the coup was no more than ten days away. They met again on October 28. Don later wrote that Conein "offered us money and weapons, but I turned him down, saying that we still need only courage and conviction."
Conein carefully conveyed the message that the United States opposed assassination. The reaction of the generals, he testified, was: "You don't like it like that? Well, we'll do it our own way anyhow. . . . You don't like it, we won't talk about it anymore." He did not discourage them. If he had, he said, "I would then be cut off and blinded."
Conein reported back to Lodge that the coup was imminent. The ambassador sent the CIA's Rufus Phillips to see Diem. They sat in the palace and talked of war and politics. Then "Diem looked at me quizzically and said, Is there going to be a coup against me?' " Phillips remembered.
"I looked at him and just wanted to cry, and said, 'I am afraid so, Mr. President.' That was all we said about that."

"WHO GAVE THOSE ORDERS?"
The coup struck on November 1. It was noon in Saigon, midnight in Washington. Summoned at home by an emissary from General Don, Conein changed into his uniform and called Rufus Phillips to watch over his wife and infant children. Then he grabbed a .38-caliber revolver and a satchel with about $70,000 in CIA funds, hopped into his jeep, and rushed through the streets of Saigon to the Joint General Staff headquarters of the army of South Vietnam. The streets were filled with gunfire.

The leaders of the coup had closed the airport, cut the city's telephone lines, stormed central police headquarters, seized the government radio station, and attacked the centers of political power.
Conein filed his first report shortly after 2 p.m. Saigon time. He stayed in contact with the CIA station over his jeep's secure communications link, describing shellings and bombings and troop movements and political maneuvers as they took place. The station relayed his reports to the White House and the State Department through encoded cables. It was as near to real-time intelligence as could be achieved in that day.
"Conein at JGS HQS/ from Gens Big Minh and Don and eyewitness observation," came the first flash cable. "Gens attempting contact Palace by telephone but unable to do so. Their proposition as follows: If the President will resign immediately, they will guarantee his safety and the safe departure of the President and Ngo Dinh Nhu. If the President refuses these terms, the Palace will be attacked within the hour."
Conein sent a second message a little more than an hour later: there would be "no discussion with the President. He will either say yes or no and that is the end of the conversation." General Don and his allies called President Diem shortly before 4 p.m. and asked him to surrender.
They offered him sanctuary and a safe passage from the country. He refused. The president of South Vietnam then called the American ambassador. "What is the attitude of the United States?" Diem asked. Lodge
said he had no idea. "It is 4:30 a.m. in Washington," he replied, "and the U.S. government cannot possibly have a view." Lodge then said, "I havea report that those in charge of the current activity offer you and your
brother safe conduct out of the country. Have you heard this?"
"No," Diem lied. Then he paused, perhaps realizing that Lodge was in on the plot against him. "You have my telephone number," he said, and the conversation came to an end. Three hours later he and his brother fled to a safe house owned by a Chinese merchant who had financed Diem's private spy network in Saigon. The villa was equipped with a phone line hooked to the presidential palace, preserving the illusion that he remained at the seat of power. The battle went on all night; close to
a hundred Vietnamese died as the rebels stormed the presidential palace.
At about 6 a.m., Diem telephoned General Big Minh. The president said he was ready to resign, and the general guaranteed his safety. Diem said he would be waiting at the Saint Francis Xavier church in the Chinese quarter of Saigon. The general sent an armored personnel carrier to fetch Diem and his brother, ordered his personal bodyguard to lead the
convoy, and then raised two fingers on his right hand. It was a signal: kill them both.
General Don ordered his troops to clean up his headquarters, to bring in a large green-felt-covered table, and to prepare for a news conference.
"Get the hell out," the general said to his friend Conein, "we're bringing in the press." Conein went home, only to be summoned by Lodge. "I went to the Embassy and I was informed that I had to find Diem," he said. "I was tired and fed up, and I said, 'Who gave those orders?' They let me know that those orders came from the President of the United States."
At about 10 a.m., Conein drove back to General Staff headquarters and confronted the first general he met. "Big Minh told me they committed suicide. I looked at him and said, where? He said they were in the Catholic Church in Cholon, and they committed suicide," Conein said in his classified testimony to the Senate committee investigating the assassination twelve years later.
"I think I lost my cool at that point," Conein said. He was thinking of mortal sin and his eternal soul.
"I told Big Minh, look, you're a Buddhist, I'm a Catholic.

If they committed suicide at that church and the priest holds Mass tonight, that story won't hold water. I said, where are they?

He said they are at the General Staff headquarters, behind the General Staff headquarters, did I want to see them?

And I said no.

He said, why not?

And I said, well, if by chance one in a million of the people believe you that they committed suicide in church and I see that they have not committed suicide and I know differently, I am in trouble."

Conein returned to the American embassy to report that President Diem was dead. He did not report the whole truth. "Informed by Viet counterparts that suicide committed enroute from city," he cabled. At 2:50 a.m. Washington time came a reply signed in Dean Rusk's name:
"News of Diem, Nhu suicide shocking here . . . important to establish publicly beyond question that deaths actually suicide if this true."
On Saturday, November 2, 1963, at 9:35 a.m., the president convened an off-the-record meeting at the White House with his brother, McCone, Rusk, McNamara, and General Taylor. Before long, Michael Forrestal ran in with a flash from Saigon. General Taylor recounted that the president leaped to his feet and "rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before."
At 6:31 p.m., McGeorge Bundy cabled Lodge, with eyes-only copies to McCone, McNamara, and Rusk: "Deaths of Diem and Nhu, whatever their failings, has caused shock here and there is danger that standing and reputation of incoming government may be significantly damaged if conviction spreads of their assassination at direction of one or more senior members of incoming regime. . . . They should not be left under illusion that political assassination is easily accepted here."
Jim Rosenthal was the duty officer at the American embassy in Saigon on that Saturday. Ambassador Lodge sent him down to the front door to receive some important visitors. "I'll never forget the sight," he said.
"This car pulled up to the Embassy, and the cameras were grinding away. Conein hops out of the front seat, opens the back door, and salutes, and these guys come out. As if he was delivering them to the Embassy, which he was. I just went up with them in the elevator, and Lodge greeted them. . . . Here were the guys who had just carried out a coup, killed the chief of state, and then they walk up to the Embassy, as if to say, 'Hey, boss, we did a good job, didn't we?' "

Chapter 21

"I THOUGHT IT WAS A CONSPIRACY"

On Tuesday, November 19, 1963, Richard Helms carried a Belgian submachine gun concealed in an airline travel bag into the White House.
The weapon was a war trophy; the CIA had seized a three-ton arms cache that Fidel Castro had tried to smuggle into Venezuela. Helms had taken the gun to the Justice Department to show it off to Bobby Kennedy, who thought they should bring it to his brother. They went to the Oval Office, and they talked with the president about how to fight Fidel. The late autumn light was fading as the president arose from his rocking chair and stared out the window at the Rose Garden.
Helms slipped the weapon back into his bag and said: "I'm sure glad the Secret Service didn't catch us bringing this gun in here." The president, lost in thought, turned from the window and shook hands withHelms. "Yes," he said with a grin, "it gives me a feeling of confidence."
The following Friday, McCone and Helms were at headquarters, sharing a lunch of sandwiches in the director's suite. The tall wide windows on the seventh floor looked out over an unbroken field of treetops to the horizon. Then the terrible news broke.
The president had been shot. McCone clapped on his fedora and went to Bobby Kennedy's house, a minute away by car. Helms went down to his office and tried to draft a book message, a cable to be sent to every CIA station in the world. His thoughts at that moment were very close to Lyndon Johnson's.
"What raced through my mind," Johnson remembered, "was that, if they had shot our president. . . who would they shoot next? And what was going on in Washington? And when would the missiles be comin'?
And I thought it was a conspiracy, and I raised that question. And nearly everybody that was with me raised it."
Over the next year, in the name of national security, the agency hid much of what it knew from the new president and the commission he created to investigate the killing. Its own internal investigation of the assassination collapsed in confusion and suspicion, casting shadows of doubt that still linger. This account is based on CIA records and the sworn testimony of CIA officers, all declassified between 1998 and 2004.