Harlot's Ghost
“Well, Kennedy can’t pretend he’s a virgin anymore.”
3:30 A.M., April 19, 1961
I walk around with a knot of anxiety as large as an apple in the long road of my esophagus. It is all very well to send B-26s in under an umbrella of American jet fighters, but what Kennedy may not know, and Bissell did not necessarily tell him, is that nine of the sixteen B-26s with which we began, are down; most of the remaining bombers are battered. Since Sunday night, the pilots have been up in the air almost constantly. What with seven hours for each round trip and at least two trips a day, they are exhausted. In fact, some of them, not believing in our promise to give jet support, now refuse to take off. Someone, obviously without authorization, must have promised jet support yesterday that did not materialize.
Cal has also informed me that two of the four planes going out on this mission are actually being flown by Americans, two to each plane. Four Americans, contract pilots, any one of whom, if he parachutes out and is captured, can sink us internationally. Moreover, one of the Cuban pilots on this mission has served notice that he will not take his B-26 past Grand Cayman Island, 175 miles south of Girón, unless he is met by fighter cover.
Well, he will not be met. Fighter cover doesn’t begin to show until they are much nearer the Essex. In any event, it’s academic. That same pilot has just radioed in that his right engine is gone and he has to turn back. We are down to three planes. I try to conceive of how difficult it must be to fly dangerous missions once you have lost the belief that your side can win. Your brave actions must begin to seem suicidal. Valhalla is for victorious warriors.
I am by now in that state of mental disarray where simple computations have to be made over and over again. If the planes are to arrive at 6:30 over the beach, then they must leave at 3:10 A.M. our time, or 2:10 A.M. Nicaraguan time.
Since Bissell only returned at 2:45 A.M., I am trying to calculate how the B-26s can possibly get to the beachhead on time. Then I realize (while imbibing all the spiritual ecstacy of an epiphany opening its gates) that even if Bissell did not leave the White House before 2:30 A.M., the decision to accompany the B-26s with Essex jet fighters had to have been reached earlier. The order probably went out at 1:45 A.M. So, of course, the planes had time to take off.
A simple calculation, but I am perspiring, and feel beatific from the ardors of the calculation. If three nights of three hours of sleep has done this to me, how well will I function under combat? I do not want to lose respect for myself, but I feel drawn too fine. By the look of everyone around me, I am not certain they are faring better. It is my hope that real combat delivers energies that staff work leaches out.
6:30 A.M., April 19, 1961
All of us are ill. The three B-26s, flying in prearranged radio silence, appeared promptly over the beaches of Girón at 5:30 A.M., our time. Since the support from the Essex was not due till 6:30, the Navy jets were still being brought up to the carrier deck about the time Castro’s T-33 trainer jets came along to shoot down two of the three B-26s. The survivor, seriously crippled, managed to get away, and, at last report, is skittering back to Nicaragua on one engine while staying a hundred feet above the water. Naturally, none of our supply boats were approaching the shore at 5:30, and no ammunition has been landed. The Essex jets, which were only empowered to protect the B-26s from attack 6:30 A.M. to 7:30 A.M., will not even take off now.
Everyone is trying to determine how the error was made, but a wall of obfuscation has come up over this point.
I have a theory. Assuming other minds have been stretched into skews of calculation comparable to mine, someone in Quarters Eye must have sent a message for the B-26s to be over the beach at 5:30 their time, and something happened to the possessive to make it come out in Puerto Cabezas as their time in Cuba, or 4:30 A.M. Nicaraguan time. Consequently, the planes took off at 1:10 A.M. Nicaraguan time, or 2:10 A.M. our time, and what with radio silence, no one knew.
This is my explanation. I have heard five others. The most convincing is that Bissell and Admiral Burke never checked with each other, so separate orders were transmitted to Happy Valley and to the carrier fleet. Cal whispers that the Navy is always on Greenwich Mean Time and we are sometimes on Standard Time. Oh, God! I can feel in me—I must admit it—a vein of pure nastiness. It is taking a lively, private pleasure in all these massive military mentalities failing to anticipate the one crucial trouble spot. The pleasure whips through me as fast as a squirrel crossing an open yard, then shame at myself wells up with more volume than I expected; behind it flows the woe of all that is being lost, and I am relieved to know that I am human, loyal to the team, and not a monster after all.
7:30 A.M., April 19, 1961
On the western front, a few miles to the west of Girón, Castro’s forces are attacking. Also on the San Blas road. Troops pressing from the east. To the south is the Caribbean.
10:30 A.M., April 19, 1961
This journal may no longer be necessary. The messages sent to the Blagar by Pepe San Román tell most of it.
6:12 A.M. Enemy on trucks coming from Red Beach are right now 3 km from Blue Beach. Pepe.
8:15 A.M. Situation critical. Need urgently air support. Pepe.
9:25 A.M. Two thousand militia attacking Blue Beach from east and west. Need close air support immediately. Pepe.
On it goes. Obviously, no one explained to Pepe San Román that the jet support was only for the B-26s. In their absence, nothing.
1:30 P.M., April 19, 1961
More messages. “Out of ammo.” “Enemy closing in.”
3:30 P.M., April 19, 1961
They are still holding. I don’t know what last negotiations have taken place between Quarters Eye, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House, but the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic, that is, CINCLANT, has been instructed to bring off an evacuation. In force, if necessary. A copy manages to make its way among us. (Two days ago, such breach of security would have been unheard of—I am beginning to understand why old OSS men are the way they are. Security is for cold wars, but combat calls for mutual participation.) I hardly feel as if I am in the CIA any more.
CINCLANT was told: HAVE DESTROYERS TAKE BRIGADE PERSONNEL OFF BEACH TO LIMIT CAPTURE. DESTROYERS AUTHORIZED RETURN FIRE IF FIRED UPON DURING THIS HUMANITARIAN MISSION.
Two destroyers will lead the Blagar, the Barbara J., the Atlántico, and the LCUs in to shore. The only trouble is that after the aborted attempt this morning, the supply ships dispersed again and are now about fifty miles out to sea.
At this moment, I am put to work on the last communiqué, Number Six, to be issued by Lem Jones Associates. I am given the guidelines by Hunt and Phillips who, I realize, are even more emotionally decomposed than myself. Decomposed? Or is there a brushfire burning within? I feel as if we are all in danger of being overrun by incoherence. I am happy to have a task to perform. I feel like a fire fighter.
4:20 P.M., April 19, 1961
BULLETIN #6, CRC, CARE OF LEM JONES ASSOCIATES. TO BE RELEASED UPON NOTICE TONIGHT:
The Revolutionary Council wishes to make prompt and emphatic statement in the face of recent astonishing public announcements from uninformed sources. The recent landings in Cuba have been constantly, although inaccurately, described as an invasion. It was, in fact, a landing of supplies and support for our patriots who have been fighting in Cuba for months and was numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands. The action taken allowed the major portion of our landing party to reach the Escambray Mountains.
I had difficulties writing the paragraph. Three times I misspelled “uninformed” as “uniformed.” Mental fatigue takes on its images. I am in a dungeon, and a woman with an enormous vagina is waiting outside my door. I know she is enormous because her mighty thighs are spread and Hunt and Phillips are stroking her with a giant feather. Her greed to be stroked is insatiable. She has no interest where the feather went one minute ago. She wants to know: Where is it now?
I begin to laugh. We are the gnomes who seek to pleas
e the great American public. To my horror, I am suddenly close to throwing up. Then I realize why. From the stalls around me comes the odor of vomit. My nostrils are so acute that I can not only smell Scotch and vodka, but am convinced that the metallic odor of each pocket flask is in the spew, and so is the pharmacological smell of Dexedrine. We’ve been spinning along on the stuff for days. I have an intimation that this is how one feels when a marriage is breaking up.
When I come out of the loo, I am assigned to write a few vagaries to take the place of the radio broadcasts we had prepared to send into Cuba after early victories. I compose it now: “The fish are brightly spotted. Javier is carrying his hoe. The whale will spout on the full of the moon. The grass is waving. The seed is dispersed.”
There will be no argument over these choices.
5:00 P.M., April 19, 1961
I read a last message. It came via the Blagar at 4:30 P.M. I HAVE NOTHING TO FIGHT WITH. AM TAKING TO THE WOODS. I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU. PEPE.
5:30 P.M., April 19, 1961
This was followed by a transcript of a conversation which concluded at 4:40 P.M.:
GRAY: Hold on. We’re coming. We’re coming with everything.
PEPE: How long?
GRAY: Three to four hours.
PEPE: You won’t be here on time. Farewell, friends. I am breaking this radio right now.
It is believed that Pepe San Román, Artime, and their staff are heading into the Zapata swamps. Thirty or forty of them may succeed in making their way into the Escambray Mountains. Like Castro before them, they can build a mighty guerrilla movement. Or so, I suspect, goes the thinking of Artime and San Román.
6:00 P.M., April 19, 1961
Men are starting to leave Quarters Eye. Others remain. Most are not needed any longer. Nonetheless, they remain, as I do. Perhaps we have some elusive quality in common. I begin to think we must all be the sort of people who stay up till three in the morning listening to repetitive news broadcasts about a catastrophe, hoping to hear one new detail.
Indeed, one new detail does arrive. This Wednesday morning, the exile leaders threatened to smash their way out of their barracks. Bender succeeded in convincing them that the bad publicity would be a media bloodbath. Everyone will lose dignity. To keep them placated, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Adolf Berle flew down this morning. Now, word comes back that the Council is in the air, and will land soon in Washington where they will be taken to see President Kennedy. Several of the exile leaders (Cardona, Barbaro, and Maceo) have sons fighting in the Brigade. Others have brothers or nephews. All are now dead or captured. In this swamp of desolation, I feel something positive for Kennedy. It is a decent act, I decide, to meet them at this time.
Dick Bissell comes up to the newsroom, and tells us that the exile leaders are now in a safe house near Washington, D.C. “Will you,” asks Bissell of Hunt, “escort them to the White House?”
“I can’t face them,” says Howard. “They trusted me and I can’t face them.”
Frank Bender will accompany them instead. I think of wildly corrupt and wholly compromised Toto Barbaro engaged in small talk with the President. What does it matter?
Phillips slips a word into my ear. “I don’t think it was the Cubans that Howard can’t face, but the President. I would bet Howard wishes Kennedy six feet under and I don’t know if I disagree with him.”
The last teletype I read before leaving Quarters Eye was a wire service pickup of a story in the Miami News. “Rebel invaders claimed today to have driven fifty miles and scored their first big victory in the battle to topple Fidel Castro.”
Well, at 9 P.M., Bulletin q6 will go out from Lem Jones Associates to confirm that nonexistent fact.
I send out last instructions to Happy Valley. Tomorrow, one of the remaining B-26s is to take our undistributed leaflets hundreds of miles out to sea, and dump them.
So ends this journal which I tried to present in a nondramatic style appropriate to the posthumous tone. Now that I am instead alive, I will transfer all of these pages from Cal’s safe deposit box to mine.
41
ALLEN DULLES CAME BACK FROM PUERTO RICO EARLY THURSDAY MORNING with a terrible case of gout. To my father, who had gone out to meet him at Andrews Air Force Base, he said, “This is the worst day of my life.”
On that same morning three exile leaders were flying back from Washington to their families in Miami, and I was on board to expedite any problems they might encounter. While it had been deemed discourteous to send our Cubans back alone, none of my superiors wanted the job, so I volunteered one moment before it would have been assigned to me.
It proved a quiet voyage. As heavy as pallbearers, we sat in our Air Force seats, and, on arrival, so soon as I had arranged for transportation, we shook hands gravely to say farewell. It was obvious they had seen enough of the Agency.
Since I was done with this task before noon and could take another Air Force plane back to Washington in the evening, I decided to drive downtown, park the car, and walk about in the April warmth. Crossing NE 2nd Street, I felt an impulse to enter Gesu Catholic Church, a noble armory all of 180 feet wide and not much less than 300 feet in length, a Miami edifice to be certain, offering pink and green walls and golden-yellow chapels. I had gone there several times over the last ten months to service a dead drop in one of the missal books in the fifth pew of the thirty-second row off the southern aisle.
So, yes, I knew Gesu Catholic Church on NE 2nd Street. I had also dropped in there on my own after bouts of love with Modene, and I do not know why, but the church was balm, I found, for sexual depletions of the spirit. I even used to wonder, if in no serious way (since I understood that I was not the least bit inclined), whether one more High Episcopalian might not be tempted just a little to become a Catholic. As an expression of that random impulse, I had even on one occasion asked Modene to meet me in the back of Gesu at the votive candles, a choice that I suspect irritated her. She had not been inside a Catholic church for over a year, and then it had been for another stewardess’s wedding.
Today Gesu was not empty. The last Mass had taken place well over an hour ago, and the next was not due till five in the afternoon, yet the pews were not empty, and everywhere were women praying. I did not want to look at their faces, for many of them were weeping as well. My ears, keened to the private silence I could always hear within the larger solemnity of a church, became aware at last, in the slow befuddled manner of a drunk who has wandered right up to the edge of the sea, that today there was no silence. Lamentations never ceased. Into them poured, as from many smaller vessels, murmurings of sorrow from the throats of separate men and women, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters of the lost Brigade, and the dimensions of the loss came over me then with such power that for this one rare time in my life, I had a vision of the suffering of Christ and thought, yes, such suffering was real, and this is how the mourners must have felt as they waited in the shadow of the cross and heard His agony, and feared that some tenderness of spirit was vanishing from the world forever.
That much I felt, and knew the vision was a self-deception. Under my pain was rage. I did not feel tender or loving, but full of the most terrible anger at I knew not what—was it the President, his advisers, the Agency itself? I had the rage of a man who has just lost his arm to the gears of a machine and does not know whether to blame the engine or the finger in some upstairs office which flicked the switch to turn it all on. So I sat alone in church, a stranger to my own lamentations, and knew that the end of the Bay of Pigs would never end for me since I had no real grief to build a tomb for my lost hopes. I was condemned instead to the black, obsessive rings of one oppressive question: Whose fault was it?
At that moment I saw Modene on the other side of the church. She was sitting by herself at the end of a pew with a black lace handkerchief on her head, and she had knelt in prayer.
I saw it as a sign. A sense of happiness as quick as the light on a blade of grass when the wind turns it to the sun came
to me, and I stood up and walked to the back of the church and over to her aisle and up to her pew and sat down beside her. When she turned around, I knew that I would see the same light come into her green eyes that I had seen in the long thin palm of the grass blade, and she would whisper, “Oh, Harry.”
When the woman turned, however, to look at me, it was not Modene. I was staring at a young Cuban woman who styled her hair in the same manner—that was all.
I had not permitted myself to steal near to any feeling of what I had lost, but now it was there. I had lost Modene. “Discúlpame,” I blurted out and stood up and left the church, only to stop at the first pay phone and call the Fontainebleau. The desk clerk did not react to her name, but merely rang her room. When she answered, I discovered that my voice was near to mutinous. The words almost did not come out.
“God, I love you,” I said.
“Oh, Harry.”
“Can I come over?”
“All right,” she said, “maybe you had better come over.”
Her room, when I arrived, proved small enough to suggest she was certainly paying for it herself, and we made love on the carpet on the other side of the door, and from there made our way to bed, and I may have been as happy making love as I had ever been, for when we were done and holding one another, I heard myself say, “Will you marry me?”
It was an amazing remark. I had had no intention of making it, and thought it was desperately wrong so soon as I said it, for she would hate the life of an Agency wife, and, good Lord, she could not even cook, and I had no money unless I broke into the safe of my tightly closed principal and accruing interest—yes, all practical considerations came rushing into my thoughts like travelers arriving too late to catch the train—and were swept away in the big steam and blast of the departure—yes, I wanted to marry her, we would find a way to live together, we were extraordinarily different and wildly connected, we were the very species of cohabitation out of which geniuses are born, and I said again, “Modene, marry me. We’ll be happy. I promise you.”