Haldeman recalled how in 1969, during the first attempt to wrest the records out of Helms, Ehrlichman burst into his office to report a bizarre development. “The Mad Monk,” Ehrlichman said, using his favorite nickname for Nixon, “has just told me I am now to forget all about that CIA document. . . . I am to cease and desist from trying to obtain it. “The sudden turnaround had come soon after Nixon had had a “long, secret conversation” with Richard Helms. What made him retreat so suddenly?
A White House tape made in 1971 suggests that what concerned him was material in the Cuba reports that could prove damaging to him. “The matter . . . is going to arise without question as time goes on—the Cuban thing,” he told Haldeman, Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and Charles Colson. “Tell Helms . . . I want this . . . in order to protect ourselves in the clinches.” Weeks later, after sitting in on the meeting at which Helms surrendered some material, Ehrlichman noted: “Purpose of presidential request for documents: must be fully advised in order to know what to duck. . . .” Why did Nixon believe “the Cuban thing” was bound to come up? What was there that he needed to protect himself from, or to be ready “to duck”?
Ehrlichman was still puzzled about the matter when interviewed in 1997. He had always felt there was a secret but never figured out what it was. His note of the conversation in which Nixon told him to get back after Helms, however, offers a hint: “was involved in Bay of Pigs . . . deeply involved. . . .”
“Apparently,” Haldeman wrote in his memoir, “Nixon knew more about the genesis of the Cuban invasion than almost anyone.” He also remembered Helms’s reaction after Watergate, when Nixon had him try to persuade the CIA director to help obscure the White House role in the break-in on the ground that it might somehow be linked to the Bay of Pigs.* There was “turmoil in the room,” Nixon’s chief of staff recalled, “Helms gripping the arms of his chair, leaning forward and shouting, ‘The Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with this. I have no concern about the Bay of Pigs.’ . . . I just sat there. I was absolutely shocked by Helms’ violent reaction. Again I wondered, what was such dynamite in the Bay of Pigs story?”4†
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Six years before the Bay of Pigs invasion, in January 1955, Nixon had written to Bebe Rebozo, thanking him for Christmas gifts—“Rum Zombies, Rum Coke, and guava jellies”—and promising to forward the schedule for an upcoming trip to Havana. Nixon had long had a special interest in Cuba. He had been there first with Pat soon after their marriage and liked it so much he talked of moving to Havana to practice as an attorney. Then there had been his alleged visit, or visits, to the island’s Mafia-operated gambling casinos before he became vice president. Once, as reported in these pages, the crooks who ran one of the casinos are said to have paid his bill.‡
In 1955, as on Nixon’s previous visits, the man who held power in Cuba was Fulgencio Batista. Three years earlier, after a period in exile in Florida, the fifty-four-year-old dictator had seized power again. He had suspended constitutional guarantees, dissolved political parties, and promised the people order and honesty. In the event, his seven remaining years in power were a time of tyranny and economic misery for the majority of Cubans. To maintain Batista’s hegemony, his police and army murdered at will. Thousands reportedly died.
The most glaring feature of Batista’s rule was corruption, on a colossal scale. The per capita income in the countryside was pathetically low, and the Cuban treasury virtually emptied, while the dictator banked untold millions abroad. Much of that fortune came from the U.S. Mafia, headed in Havana by Meyer Lansky. Lansky and Batista had a mutually beneficial business deal. The American criminals got to run their casinos and nightclubs, extracting millions from the pockets of junketing Americans, while in return, once a month at noon, a Lansky courier is said to have delivered a briefcase containing $1,280,000 to the side entrance of the presidential palace. Batista and Lansky, recalled the mob boss’s lawyer, were “very, very close—like brothers.”
“Batista’s continuance in office,” read the brief Nixon received before his 1955 trip to Havana, “is probably a good thing for the United States.” He “is friendly . . . admires the American Way of Life, and believes in free enterprise.” The brief noted that American businesses—the legitimate sort—had more than six hundred million dollars invested in Cuba. As the U.S. naval attaché at the time put it, “Batista was a dictator. But he was our dictator.”
Before he left, Nixon also received an impassioned letter from fifty prominent Cubans who had fled Batista’s “tyrannical fury” to live in the United States. They begged him not to close his eyes to the more than a million unemployed, to try to visit political prisoners and talk with the wives and mothers of those who had been murdered. “Please, Mr. Nixon,” they wrote, “be a sort of speaking trumpet of justice.”
Instead, once Nixon arrived in Havana, his friendliness toward Batista seemed to exceed even the standard diplomatic niceties. He announced that he was pleased to be in a land that “shares with us the same democratic ideals of peace, freedom and the dignity of man.” In the privacy of a cabinet meeting on his return home, Nixon gave no hint of disapproval of the regime, telling Eisenhower and senior colleagues that the dictator was “a very remarkable man . . . older and wiser . . . desirous of doing a job for Cuba rather than Batista . . . concerned about social progress. . . .”
Nixon said Batista had impressed him too as “self-educated . . . a voracious reader.” The dictator had perhaps told him he was in the middle of reading The Day Lincoln Was Shot, his favorite opening gambit to all American visitors. His real reading staple was the daily “novel” prepared by aides, the juicier bits of recent telephone wiretap transcripts. In the evenings Batista liked to watch Boris Karloff and Dracula movies.
Batista, Nixon reported to the cabinet, claimed he would “deal with the Commies.” Two years earlier a twenty-seven year old lawyer named Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl had been jailed after a bungled assault on an army barracks. After the Nixon visit, made more confident by the strength of his U.S. backing, Batista released them.
Less than a year later the Castro brothers and Che Guevara, starting with a band of just twelve men, embarked on the grueling guerrilla campaign that ended with the collapse of Batista forces on New Year’s Eve 1959. Batista fled in the night with his family and closest henchmen and, according to the CIA agent who reported his flight, “a vast array of suitcases stuffed not with clothes but money.” Fidel Castro entered Havana a few days later and, having said in his first marathon speech that he would know when to leave, began the iron rule that was to last more than forty years.
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In all accounts of the Cuba story the roles of two men have remained little documented and sketchily reported. Both wanted Fidel Castro dead from the moment of his rise to power. At different stages both urged or actively plotted his assassination, an act that, when perpetrated by one nation’s leaders against those of another, is, in the words of a U.S. Senate committee, “short of war, incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality.” What we can piece together of their actions suggests that both influenced or sought to influence Richard Nixon.
The first man is Meyer Lansky, long said to have been linked either to Nixon or to Bebe Rebozo.* Lansky and the other top mobsters active in Cuba were infuriated by the Castro takeover. The gambling empire that they had worked painstakingly to create over many years was now lost to them, and in a manner that made Lansky especially enraged.
While the victorious revolutionaries had at first closed down the casinos, Castro later negotiated with the mobsters and then allowed gambling to resume. Months later he briefly jailed Lansky’s brother and several associates before expelling them from the country. Gambling continued for some time, but under strict supervision and with the mob’s control and profits effectively destroyed. Finally the casinos were shut down once and for all.5 The way Lansky saw it, Castro had two-timed him, an offense that in the Mafia culture is punishable by death.
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Legend has it that Lansky placed a million-dollar bounty on Castro’s head. Years later, when questioned about this by a journalist, he refused to elaborate. “A number of people came to me with a number of ideas,” he said, “and of course I had my own suggestions to make. . . . I don’t think I should go into details. . . .” A longtime intimate, Joseph Stacher, provided some of the missing details. “Meyer indicated to the CIA,” he said, “that some of his people who were still on the island, or those who were just going back, might assassinate Castro. . . . He tried hard to convince the CIA agents that he could have Fidel removed.”
The CIA, hedging its bets, had acted benignly toward Castro in the months before the revolution. It had facilitated the guerrillas’ arms supplies and even sent an agent to join them in the mountains.6 During Castro’s first year in power, too, Washington had yet to become convinced that he was a Communist. That being the case, according to Stacher, the agency turned down Lansky’s early murder proposal. FBI files show that the bureau, likewise, ignored the mobster’s warning about the growing Communist threat in Cuba. Meanwhile Lansky tried another approach: contacting Vice President Nixon.
He went about it in a logical way, Stacher said, by calling in a favor. Lansky sought access to Nixon through Dana Smith, the California gambler who had gotten into trouble while at Havana’s Sans Souci casino—reportedly with Nixon—a few years earlier. He also contacted Senator George Smathers, mutual friend of Nixon and Rebozo. A Lansky message passed through either man, he knew, would go straight to Nixon.7
The other individual enraged by the Castro takeover was a very different sort of character. A wealthy, high-ranking former diplomat with instant access to President Eisenhower, to the CIA at the highest level, and to Nixon, this was William Pawley, a sixty-three-year-old veteran of international intrigue. After making one fortune in Florida real estate and another in the airline business in Cuba and China, he had held high office in the Defense and State departments, twice serving as ambassador in Latin America. A staunch right-wing Republican, Pawley had contributed to both Dwight Eisenhower’s and Nixon’s political campaigns and counted CIA Director Allen Dulles a personal friend. His customary apparel of white suit and broad-brimmed straw hat—suggested a plantation owner of another era.
Pawley had grown up in Cuba, spoke excellent Spanish, owned the Havana bus system and gas company, and had made it his business to foster personal relationships with both President Batista and the dictator of the neighboring Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. Not far into the future Pawley would choose Bebe Rebozo as his companion on a journey to try to persuade Trujillo to abdicate power. Just days before Batista fled, Pawley had flown to Havana—after discussions with President Eisenhower and the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division chief, J. C. King—to urge him to step down.
At that point the objective had been damage containment. As events spiraled out of control, Pawley had hoped Batista could be replaced by a military junta, or by any viable right-wing alternative to Fidel Castro. Pawley would claim that he had discovered Castro was a Communist years earlier, and although his story of how he discovered that was probably untrue, facts did not much concern him when it came to anticommunism.8 Pawley had been involved in the disinformation campaign that accompanied the CIA’s Guatemalan coup of 1954; and afterward he served on a panel that recommended the creation of “an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the [Communist] enemy.”
After the Cuban Revolution an outraged Pawley began talking about having Castro killed. “Find me one man, just one man,” he told a Miami acquaintance, “who can go it alone and get Castro. I’ll pay anything, almost anything.” In the months and years that followed he was to be, as Pawley’s niece told the author, “up to his eyebrows” in U.S. efforts to topple Castro. One of his key contacts in that endeavor was Richard Nixon.
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One rainy April weekend in 1959 Nixon and Castro met in Washington. The Cuban, just three months in power and still acclaimed by most as the guerrilla hero who had ousted a cruel dictator, had been astonishing America since his arrival. The beard, the ten-inch cigar, and the army fatigues had bewitched thousands. A cheering throng estimated at thirty-five thousand had welcomed him at a rally in New York’s Central Park. To the general public Castro seemed like an amalgam of George Washington, Billy Graham, and Barnum and Bailey. To the capital’s politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen, he was as yet still a puzzle.
Before leaving Havana, Castro had perceived a dilemma in the possibility of a meeting with President Eisenhower. He hoped to see him yet worried that it would appear as though he—just like the sort of Latin American potentate he despised—was “selling out.” In the event, Eisenhower remained pointedly out of town, and Castro had to make do with the vice president. “The president of the United States didn’t even invite me for a cup of coffee,” Castro grumbled later. “They sent me Nixon. . . .” The Cuban had refused an invitation to meet Nixon at his home and settled for the vice president’s office at the Capitol. Nixon later claimed there was nothing he had wanted less that weekend than to meet “the new Cuban dictator.”
Given the prolonged conflict to come, the encounter between America’s most prominent anti-Communist and the suspect revolutionary was historic. They sat talking for three hours beneath a chandelier that had once hung in Jefferson’s White House—alone, because Castro had decided that his English was good enough to allow him to get by without interpreters.
The vice president thought Castro seemed “nervous and tense,” “looked like a revolutionary, and talked like an idealistic college professor. . . .” For his part, Castro found Nixon oddly young, almost “a teenager, not in appearance but in behavior . . . a bit superficial,” though not hostile. Nixon said he spoke to Castro “like a Dutch uncle,” severely but kindly. His long report to Eisenhower and Dulles, written soon afterward, suggests he lectured the Cuban in the paternalistic way that perennially offended Latin American visitors to Washington.
“That son of a bitch Nixon,” Castro was to complain, “he treated me badly,” explaining what he meant in a conversation that night with the lawyer who represented Cuba in the United States, Constantine Kangles. “Nixon didn’t look me in the eye,” Castro said; “he looked up in the air, at the wall, all over, but not at me. I didn’t ask for money, but I did say we needed help. He told me I’d been a fine fellow, put in plenty of good reforms. Then he said that in about six months we could meet and talk again. Six months! He knew Cuba was broke, that Batista had looted the treasury. What he was effectively telling us to do was to go and starve to death.”
“Castro didn’t believe Nixon was interested in helping,” Kangles remembered in 1999. “He thought Nixon wanted economic catastrophe to hit Cuba, so that the people would overthrow Castro. He thought Nixon just wanted to see him toppled.”
The pair emerged from their meeting “with their arms around each other’s shoulders,” said Bob Stephenson, a State Department official who had waited outside. Dean Rusk, then heading the Rockefeller Foundation, recalled seeing them on television and hearing Nixon say, “We’re going to work with this man.”9 Behind the scenes Nixon took a different stance. Slapping his knee, he told Stephenson that Castro had no understanding of democracy. Closeted with his own aides Herb Klein and General Hughes, he said Castro was an “outright Communist and he’s going to be a real danger.” He told Jack Drown, a close California friend, that Castro was a “dedicated Communist, who’s going to be a thorn in the side of us all.”10
In a conversation with the former Costa Rican president José Figueres, Nixon commented that Castro had made a “terrible impression” on him. He “characterized Fidel as a lunatic,” Figueres recalled. “He was scared as hell; I could see it in his eyes.”
Castro meanwhile succeeded in convincing others in the government, including the CIA’s senior expert on communism in Latin America, Gerry
Droller, that he was not a Communist. “Castro,” Droller announced delightedly after meeting him, “is not only not a Communist, but he is a strong anti-Communist fighter.”
Whether Castro was committed to communism at that point remains a question to which only he knows the answer. There is some evidence that at the time he met Nixon he was attempting to go his own way, at odds with avowed Communists like his brother Raúl. Cuban leftists had even told Soviet contacts they suspected Castro was a tool of the Americans. In the nineties a former Soviet diplomat insisted that Castro made no approaches to Moscow until the year after his meeting with Nixon.
Some have argued that Castro merely sought to use communism as a vehicle for his personal style of one-man rule. He was neurotically anti-American, but that is not necessarily the same thing as being a Communist.
“The one fact we can be sure of,” Nixon wrote in his report about Castro to Eisenhower, “is that he has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. . . . He seems to be sincere, he is either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline—my guess is the former. . . . But because he has the power to lead . . . we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.”
“We will check in a year,” Eisenhower scrawled on another report about the Castro visit. In the months that followed, Castro—assisted by William Pawley, Allen Dulles, and Nixon—made up his mind for him. The Cuban leader soon seized American businesses in Cuba, businesses representing a billion-dollar investment, and started to arm rebels in other Latin countries. Nixon began urging the National Security Council that it was time to “find a few dramatic things to do . . . to indicate that we would not allow ourselves to be kicked around. . . .”