Wilderness of Mirrors by David C. Martin

Author:David C. Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510722194
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

Murder Corrupts

6

The counterintelligence maelstrom stirred by the fear of a Soviet mole had barely begun to swirl within the CIA when a crisis of major proportions struck from without. On April 17, 1961, just three days before George Kisvalter was to meet for the first time with Oleg Penkovsky, the Agency suffered the greatest debacle in its history with the abortive landing at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Even as Kisvalter was sitting down with Penkovsky in a London hotel room, an enraged John F. Kennedy was ordering both a full-scale shake-up of the CIA and a renewed effort to overthrow Fidel Castro.

“There can be no long-term living with Castro as a neighbor,” a secret eyes-only memo signed by the President’s brother Robert warned. “If you can’t stand up to Castro,” Kennedy had said during his presidential campaign, “how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?” His rhetoric took on a grim reality during two days of face-to-face meetings with Khrushchev in Vienna. “He just beat the hell out of me,” a dazed Kennedy was quoted as saying afterward. “I think he did it because of the Bay of Pigs. I think he thought that anyone who was so young and inexperienced as to get into that mess could be taken, and anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts…. Until we remove those ideas, we won’t get anywhere with him. So we have to act.”

Kennedy began by getting rid of Allen Dulles. “Dulles is a legendary figure, and it’s hard to operate with legendary figures,” the President said. “I must have someone there with whom I can be in complete and intimate contact—someone from whom I will be getting the exact pitch. I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department…. Bobby should be in CIA.”

It was too early in his administration to be shuffling his cabinet, so the President brought in the hard-driving John McCone, a straitlaced, right-wing California businessman, to head the CIA. McCone moved at once to replace the collegial “old boy” atmosphere of the Dulles era with a strict, managerial regime. One of his first acts was to rip out an intercom system that had allowed senior officers to interrupt the Director at his desk with urgent matters. “Jolly John,” as the crusty McCone was quickly dubbed, also had the door that connected his office directly with the Deputy Director’s sealed off, ordering that the job be done overnight so that Marshall Carter would find a blank wall when he reported for duty the next morning. Realizing what had happened, Carter placed a fake hand on his newly paneled wall, as if it had been lopped off when the door slammed shut for the last time.

With similar decisiveness, McCone moved to wall off the lingering effects of the Bay of Pigs. Dulles’s Deputy Director, Charles Cabell, had already been removed, the Deputy Director for Operations, Richard Bissell, seemed certain to follow, and the survivors were jockeying for position in the new order of things.

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