Lansdale's "The Cuba Project" (1962)

Ten months after the The Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy administration tried again to remove Fidel Castro, this time by trying to build a revolt inside Cuba. A memorandum from the President dated 30 November 1961 put the effort under Brigadier General Edward Lansdale of the Air Force as "Chief of Operations." He was to work through the regular departments, and knowledge of the program was limited to a handful of officials². The FRUS editors note that an earlier draft had put Attorney General Robert Kennedy in charge, with Lansdale under him². The program became known as Operation Mongoose.

The document printed here is Lansdale's second statement of the plan. FRUS prints the program review of 20 February 1962. The 39-page operational plan attached to it is not printed in the book and appears only in the volume's microfiche supplement¹.

The January version

Lansdale's first paper under the title "The Cuba Project" was dated 18 January 1962. It set out the objective of helping "the Cubans overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba." Under it, Lansdale assigned 32 tasks to the State and Defense Departments, the CIA and other agencies, asking each what it could actually do^1,3. The status notes show how thin the base was: the CIA hoped to have eight to ten Cuban political action agents spotted and assessed by mid-February³. The paper was blunt about the political damage of April 1961. The failure of the American-backed landing, it said, had so shaken Cuban patriots' faith in the United States that any new effort needed visible support from Latin American governments³.

What the February review says

The answers came back on 15 February, and five days later Lansdale circulated the program review. The distribution list shows 12 copies: the President through McGeorge Bundy, Robert Kennedy, General Maxwell Taylor, Secretary Rusk, Secretary McNamara, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, Murrow of the US Information Agency, a representative of the Joint Chiefs and William Harvey of the CIA, among others¹.

The review restates the goal in the language of Kennedy's November memorandum. It admits that "we still know too little about the real situation inside Cuba"¹. It frames the project with an analogy to the American Revolution, a revolt "run from within" with outside help¹. Then it gives a timetable, which FRUS prints as a list¹:

• Phase I, Action, March 1962: "Start moving in."
• Phase II, Build-up, April–July 1962: operations inside Cuba together with outside political, economic and military support.
• Phase III, Readiness, 1 August 1962: a check for a final policy decision.
• Phase IV, Resistance, August–September 1962: guerrilla operations.
• Phase V, Revolt, first two weeks of October 1962: "open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime."
• Phase VI, Final, during October 1962: establishment of a new government.

The attachment contained a basic action plan for inside Cuba and six support plans: political, economic, psychological, military, sabotage and intelligence. The review leaves operational decisions with the Chief of Operations¹. It ends with the question the plan could not answer by itself: whether the United States would send in its own forces if a revolt began and needed help to survive. Lansdale asked for an early decision "prior to deep involvement of the Cubans in this program"¹.

What happened next

The answer was cautious. On 14 March 1962 the Special Group (Augmented) issued guidelines that put the acquisition of "hard intelligence" first. The guidelines ruled out, for the time being, actions "reasonably calculated to inspire a revolt." They also accepted that "final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention"⁴. A note in State Department files records that when the guidelines were discussed with the President on 16 March, he was skeptical that circumstances would arise to justify using American forces, and no such decision was taken⁴.

The October target date came and went in a way no one had planned for. Soviet missiles were found in Cuba in mid-October; the Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis page covers that discovery⁵. Planning in the same months for a pretext to intervene produced the Joint Chiefs' The Northwoods memorandum (1962)⁵. The CIA's side of Mongoose was run by William Harvey, who also handled the agency's contacts in the The plots against Fidel Castro⁵.

Why it matters

The program review is the clearest statement in the official record of what Mongoose was supposed to achieve and when¹. It does not mention assassination; the Senate's 1975 inquiry into plots against Castro is a separate story, told on the Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (1975) page⁵. The review appeared in the Cuba volume of Foreign Relations in 1997 alongside the Special Group records that show the plan being cut back^1,4.