Operation Mongoose

Seven months after the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy brothers tried again, this time without an invasion force. On 3 November 1961 the President met his advisers at the White House and authorized a new program to undermine Fidel Castro's government. Robert Kennedy's handwritten notes of the meeting set out the idea: "stir things up on island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run & operated by Cubans themselves." He added: "Do not know if we will be successful in overthrowing Castro but we have nothing to lose in my estimate"¹.

The organization

A presidential memorandum of 30 November 1961, apparently drafted by McGeorge Bundy, set the program up. The United States would "use our available assets to go ahead with the discussed project in order to help Cuba overthrow the communist regime." Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale became Chief of Operations. An earlier draft of 22 November had put the Attorney General formally in charge with Lansdale under him; the final text did not, but Robert Kennedy remained its driving force^2,7. Lansdale had made his name in the Philippines and Vietnam dealing with insurgencies⁷.

Policy control passed to a body created for the purpose, the Special Group (Augmented): the regular covert-action review group plus the Attorney General and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, chaired by General Maxwell Taylor^4,7. The CIA carried most of the load through Task Force W under William Harvey, operating from a large station, JMWAVE, on University of Miami property⁸. Richard Helms, who replaced Richard Bissell as Deputy Director for Plans in February 1962, was Harvey's superior⁷.

A timetable for revolution

On 20 February 1962 Lansdale presented "The Cuba Project," a six-phase schedule that "aims for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962." Action would begin in March, build-up run from April to July, a policy decision come on 1 August, guerrilla operations follow in August and September, and the final phases were labeled "Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" in the first two weeks of October³. (See the document page Lansdale's "The Cuba Project" (1962).)

The Special Group's guidelines of 14 March 1962 were more cautious, and more candid. They assumed that "final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention," and that the resources developed inside Cuba would be used "to prepare for and justify this intervention." For the time being the priority was "hard intelligence," and other actions were to stop short of anything "reasonably calculated to inspire a revolt"⁴. That gap between an exile-led uprising and an American invasion runs through the whole program. The Joint Chiefs' contribution to the planning included the pretext proposals known as Operation Northwoods.

What it achieved

Mongoose collected a great deal of intelligence, ran infiltration teams and propaganda, and tried sabotage, but the revolt never came near. On 16 October 1962, as the missile crisis was breaking, Robert Kennedy told a Mongoose meeting of "the general dissatisfaction of the President." After a year, he said, the results were discouraging: "there had been no acts of sabotage, and that even the one which had been attempted had failed twice." Intelligence collection had improved, but little else had⁶.

According to the Church Committee, Mongoose "was disbanded following the Cuban Missile Crisis"; the Special Group (Augmented) was abolished and an interagency Cuban Coordinating Committee in the State Department took over the planning of covert action⁷. Little if any sabotage took place in the first half of 1963; in June 1963 President Kennedy approved a new, more limited sabotage program⁷.

Mongoose and the assassination question

Mongoose ran alongside, and partly overlapped with, the CIA's attempts to kill Castro (The plots against Fidel Castro). The clearest trace in the record is the Special Group (Augmented) meeting of 10 August 1962. Harvey wrote that Secretary of Defense McNamara raised the assassination of Cuban leaders, and that it was "the obvious consensus at that meeting" that this was "not a subject which has been made a matter of official record." The Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone, later recalled that he "took immediate exception" to the suggestion⁵.

Many historians count Mongoose, and the threat of invasion it seemed to foreshadow, among the factors behind the Soviet and Cuban decision to place missiles on the island⁸.

Read next

17 March 1960 – 19 April 1961 The Bay of Pigs invasion In April 1961 a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs to topple Fidel Castro and was defeated within three days. The records show how a covert plan outgrew its cover. August 1960 – 1965 The plots against Fidel Castro Between 1960 and 1965 the CIA pursued at least eight plots to kill Fidel Castro, using poison pills, gangsters and a Cuban insider. None succeeded, and who authorized them was never settled. 9–16 March 1962 Operation Northwoods A March 1962 Joint Chiefs of Staff paper listing staged incidents that could be blamed on Cuba to justify a US invasion. It was a proposal only, and the Kennedy administration did not adopt it. 20 February 1962 Lansdale's "The Cuba Project" (1962) Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale's program review of 20 February 1962 for Operation Mongoose, with a six-phase timetable that aimed at an 'open revolt and overthrow' of the Castro government in October 1962. 10 August – 20 November 1962 Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis How US intelligence missed, then found, Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962: a wrong estimate, a five-week gap in U-2 coverage, the 14 October flight over San Cristóbal, and what the photographs never showed.