Operation Mongoose

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Mongoose was the name agreed upon at a White House meeting on the 4th of November, 1961, for a covert American campaign to destroy the Cuban government from within. Officially authorized by President John F. Kennedy on the 30th of November, 1961, the operation ran under another name as well: the Cuban Project. It was one of the most ambitious, most secretive, and ultimately most catastrophic intelligence undertakings in American history. Who ran it? How far did it go? And what did its failures set in motion?

• 2. Watching Castro

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  The CIA had been watching Fidel Castro since 1948, long before he took power. In the late 1950s, as his movement grew, the agency intensified its intelligence gathering, convinced he might be a communist, though it could not initially find hard evidence. In November 1959, General C. P. Cabell said openly that Castro was not a communist, but added that he allowed the communist party in Cuba to grow and spread freely. By December of that year, senior U.S. foreign policy officials were already discussing the idea of overthrowing him. An official CIA report states that by March 1960, the United States had made its decision: Fidel Castro had to be displaced. Because of U.S. fears about how the United Nations would react, the plan was held at the highest level of secrecy. "Plausible deniability" became a cornerstone of American clandestine policy from that point forward. The formal written authorization arrived on the 17th of March, 1960, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed a CIA paper titled "A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime." It was the only official government report issued throughout the entire project, a deliberate choice that underscored just how deeply the operation was to be buried.

• 3. Building the Machine

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  The CIA's initial budget estimate for the covert operation came to approximately $4.4 million. That figure funded a sprawling infrastructure. A base of operations was established in Miami on the 25th of May, using a New York career and development firm and a Department of Defense contract as cover stories. A communications station followed on the 15th of June, disguised as an Army operation. Safe houses were obtained across Miami, and properties were acquired in other U.S. cities and abroad. A financial body called the Bender Group was formed to give American businessmen a secret channel through which to funnel support to Cuban exile groups. On the 11th of May, 1960, the Bender Group reached an agreement with an organization called the Frente Revolucionario Democratico. An entire separate White House branch, called WH/4, was created to run Cuban operations. Its task force included 40 personnel: 18 at headquarters, 20 at the Havana station, and two at a Santiago base. By as early as June 1960, 500 Cuban exiles were being trained as paramilitary members, some of them in Panama, in preparation for what would become the Bay of Pigs invasion.

• 4. The Covert War

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  The operation's formal execution center was JMWAVE, a major CIA covert operations and intelligence gathering station on the campus of the University of Miami in Miami-Dade County, Florida. General Edward Lansdale led the military side, selected in part for his experience with counter-insurgency during the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines and his work supporting Vietnam's Diem regime. William King Harvey ran the CIA's portion. CIA co-organizer Samuel Halpern described the scope: "CIA and the US Army and military forces and Department of Commerce, and Immigration, Treasury, God knows who else - everybody was in Mongoose. It was a government-wide operation run out of Bobby Kennedy's office with Ed Lansdale as the mastermind." The operations included sabotage of a railway bridge, petroleum storage facilities, a molasses storage container, a petroleum refinery, a power plant, a sawmill, and a floating crane in a Cuban harbor. Harvard historian Jorge Dominguez, reviewing roughly a thousand pages of documentation, found that U.S. officials had raised something resembling a moral objection on only one occasion. The CIA also worked to disrupt Cuba diplomatically, using pressure to frustrate Cuban trade negotiations in Israel, Jordan, Iran, Greece, and Japan. The operation's 32 tasks - matching the 33 known living species of mongooses at the time - ranged from propaganda to chemical warfare against sugar crops and the mining of harbors.

• 5. Plots Against Castro

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  From March through August 1960, the CIA explored schemes to undermine Castro's public image in ways that now seem almost surreal. One plan was to spray his broadcast studio with a chemical compound similar to LSD before a speech; it was dropped because the compound was unreliable. Another involved lacing cigars with a chemical to cause temporary disorientation. A third called for lining his shoes with thallium salts, a potent depilatory, while he was on a trip outside Cuba, intended to cause his beard, eyebrows, and pubic hair to fall out, attacking what agents saw as his core image as "The Beard." Castro cancelled the trip and the plan was abandoned. In August 1960, the CIA moved to a different level entirely, enlisting mobsters with gambling syndicate contacts to attempt Castro's assassination. CIA officer Robert Maheu brought in Johnny Roselli, a member of the Las Vegas syndicate, offering him $150,000 for the job. Roselli recruited associates later identified as Chicago gangster Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante, the Cosa Nostra chieftain in Cuba. The preferred method settled on was solid botulin pills that would dissolve in liquid. A Cuban official named Juan Orta reportedly attempted the poisoning multiple times before getting cold feet; the Inspector General's report states he had already lost his access to Castro before even receiving the pills. By 1963, the CIA was devising a plot to give Castro a diving suit contaminated with fungus and a breathing apparatus seeded with tubercle bacilli. Other ideas floated included exploding seashells, a poisoned fountain pen, and poisoned ice cream. The U.S. Senate's Church Committee of 1975 confirmed at least eight separate CIA plots to assassinate Castro. Fabian Escalante, who had long been tasked with protecting Castro's life, contended the total number of schemes or attempts reached 638.

• 6. Road to the Missile Crisis

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  Attorney General Robert Kennedy chaired the Special Group-Augmented that oversaw Operation Mongoose. Its members included CIA Director John McCone, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and the heads of the State Department, Defense Department, and Joint Chiefs. Robert Kennedy stressed at a the 21st of November 1961 meeting the need for immediate dynamic action, still raw from the Bay of Pigs failure months earlier. By early 1962, internal reviews were already exposing the operation's limits. A January 1962 CIA assessment found the agency had failed to recruit suitable Cuban operatives capable of penetrating the Castro regime; Lansdale estimated they needed 30 and had none. In March 1962, a key CIA intelligence report delivered the operation's most damaging finding: roughly only a quarter of the Cuban population supported Castro, but the rest were passive and resigned. An internal revolt, the report concluded, was unlikely. Lansdale's own February 1962 review was blunt: "Time is running against us. The Cuban people feel helpless and are losing hope fast." By late summer, Soviet military build-up in Cuba had rattled the Kennedy administration badly enough to slow the operation. The Cuban Project was originally designed to culminate in October 1962 with an open revolt. Instead, October 1962 brought the Cuban Missile Crisis. Operation Mongoose was a direct contributing factor: the terrorist activities carried out by CIA-armed agents were a major reason the Soviet Union decided to place missiles in Cuba, and a major reason Cuba agreed to accept them. The operation was suspended on the 30th of October, 1962, but three of ten six-man sabotage teams had already been deployed to Cuba before the order reached them.

• 7. Aftermath and Accountability

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  Operation Mongoose formally ceased at the end of 1962, but the CIA continued its campaign against Cuba in the months that followed. Historian Stephen Rabe's work with Church Committee documents shows that from June 1963 onward the Kennedy administration intensified its war against Cuba, with the CIA coordinating propaganda, economic denial, and sabotage. CIA agents provided Cuban official Rolando Cubela Secades with a ballpoint pen rigged with a poisonous hypodermic needle. A CIA operation passed a fountain pen loaded with the poison Black Leaf 40 to a Cuban asset in Paris on the 22nd of November, 1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. The Taylor Committee, led by General Maxwell Taylor, investigated the Bay of Pigs failures and concluded in a memorandum of the 15th of August, 1961, that operation leaders had not presented their case with sufficient force to allow senior officials to understand the consequences of their decisions. CIA Chief Historian Jack Pfeiffer spent years writing an internal critique of that conclusion, arguing in multiple volumes written between 1974 and 1984 that the Taylor Committee had been biased toward protecting Kennedy's image and had only three weeks to prepare its report. Pfeiffer intended to publish his defense of the CIA after his resignation, but the book was never published. His fifth volume was finally released to the public on the 31st of October, 2016, following the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016. A 1975 Senate investigation led by Senator Frank Church revealed that Operation Mongoose had a budget of $50 million per year, employed roughly 2,500 people including about 500 Americans, and remained secret for 14 years. According to Noam Chomsky, it was revealed partly by the Church Committee and partly by investigative journalism, and Chomsky suggested in 1989 that aspects of the operation may have continued throughout the 1970s.