Operation Mongoose: The Secret War on Castro

The Story

In April 1961, a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and, in the words of the State Department's historians, was defeated within two days by Cuban forces under Fidel Castro's direct command. The Kennedy administration had been publicly humiliated. Its answer, decided that November, was to try again more quietly. The code name was Operation Mongoose.

Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale was put in charge as chief of operations, with oversight from a special group expanded to include Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Lansdale's January 18, 1962 program review, now published in the government's own Foreign Relations of the United States series, opens bluntly: "The U.S. objective is to help the Cubans overthrow the Communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the United States can live in peace."

"The effort must be imaginative and bold enough to consider a 'name' defector to be worth at least a million U.S. dollars." (Lansdale's Mongoose program review, January 1962)

The to-do list that followed has 32 numbered tasks, and some read like a thriller. The CIA had equipment on a small vessel to break into Havana TV broadcasts and planned to try it during a Castro speech. It was to plan the defection of top Cuban officials, and Lansdale wrote that the effort must be "bold enough to consider a 'name' defector to be worth at least a million U.S. dollars." It was to submit plans for "inducing failures in food crops in Cuba" and for disrupting Cuban nickel exports to the Soviet Union. The review also notes that the CIA "has initiated action to contaminate POL supplies for Cuba" (POL meaning petroleum, oil and lubricants). There was even a proposal to smuggle in morale-boosting packets modeled on the "I Shall Return" cigarette packets given to Philippine guerrillas in World War II.

Lansdale was also frank about his own side's limits. He wrote that the CIA had concluded its realistic role was to create "at least the illusion of a popular movement," which he called "far short of the Cuba Project's goals."

By August 1962, a State Department memo was naming the sugar industry and the Nicaro nickel plant as "high priority targets" for sabotage. In October, CIA officer William Harvey sent Lansdale a plan, now posted by the National Security Archive, that the archive says proposed attacks on Cuban ships and port facilities and examined mining Cuban harbors. The Office of the Historian adds that Lansdale's overall program included "proposed assassination attempts on key political leaders, including Castro."

It didn't work. According to the Office of the Historian, only some of the planned actions were carried out, the military intervention the plans built toward never happened, and Castro stayed in power. In October 1962 the administration suspended Mongoose, because something far more dangerous had turned up in Cuba: Soviet missiles.