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HALPERN, SAM

Interview by Brian Latell, Michael Warner

7 APRIL 1998

MW :

BL:

This is the interview with Sam Halpern, done by Brian

Latell and Michael Warner in the spaces of the Center

for the Study of Intelligence on the 7th of April,

1998.

Sam, you told me that you read recently the IG report

on the Bay of Pigs.

SH: I did, and the responses....

BL: Which were recently declassified by the Agency, and you

told me that. you had never seen it before, and that had

you seen it when you were running Operation Mongoose

you would have learned some critical lessons. You said

that it-was a shame that you had not seen it.

SH:

That's right. Neither did Bissell; I mean, neither did

Harvey and neither did Ted Shackley. Harvey's dead so

I couldn't ask him, but I asked Ted the other day

whether he had ever seen the report, and he said no he

had never seen it and nobody had ever talked to him

about it. So here you have the man in charge of a new

Cuban Bay of Pigs SIC Operation, although we weren't

going to send in 1, 000 troops.

And you have the guy in

charge of the whole thing, Bill Harvey, and of course

the DDP himself, Dick Helms.

Helms by that

time....When we were doing Mongoose, none of the three

people, none of the three senior people ever saw the

damn thing.

I think McCone was wrong not to let those

three people, at least those three people, see the

thing, because the sections dealing with the

organization and management of the whole Bay of Pigs

Operation had lessons for what we were doing in

Mongoose, and we were running the same kind of

operation in terms of trying to overthrow a foreign

government.

BL:

What, in particular, would you have done differently?

What specifically, what lesson specifically applied to

Mongoose?

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SH:

BL:

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I think one of the biggest things was a Governmental

structure and what and how. it was done, and how it was

done under Mongoose.

Fortunately under Mongoose CIA

was not the main target of the Government structure.

We were part of a Government-wide operation, as opposed

to the Bay of Pigs.

The Bay of Pigs as I read the

report was basically a CIA operation supported to some

extent by the Defense Department and politically by the

State Department. In Mongoose it was totally different

in that directions - all directions - came from the

White House, basically Bobby Kennedy, through the voice

of a fellow called General Edward Landsdale.

But in

terms of the management of the thing, one of the best

things that ever happened in Mongoose was that the

three senior people who were involved in this, namely

John A. McCone as DCI, Dean Rusk as Secretary of State,

and Bob McNamara as Secretary of Defense, refused, flat

out, to follow

the original concept of Mongoose,

which

was that Ed Lansdale would be set up as Chief of

Operations reporting to Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney

General. All the other agencies of Government - the

three I

mentioned plus Commerce,

Treasury, USIA,

and

God knows how many other pieces

-would all have

detailed men, money, and material to Lansdale, in

effect creating a brand new agency.. The three senior

members of the cabinet that I mentioned, except for the

Director, three senior members said "no, we can't do

that.

Congress appropriates the money to us and we're

responsible for the money and the manpower and the

material.

channels.

i put or hau

We'll put our shoulders to the wheel, we'll

follow all your orders, but only through command

That's what made Mongoose different than

the Bay of Pigs.

like a sore thumb, and in Mongoose CIA was subdued in

terms of just being part of a whole series of people

that were

structure, and the management of the thing, I think

e hurting Part Ferna

In the Bay of Pigs the CIA stood out

involved.

In terms of the organizational

that with Harvey, particularly, in charge, and with

Helms as his boss as DDP, we avoided one problem

automatically in there were two senior men who

organized our part of Mongoose the way we in the Agency

had always done in terms of headquarters and the field

station.

Shackley, as almost the equivalent of headquarters. It

was JMWAVE.

He had more people under his command than

we had in the branch, or in the task force up in

Washington.

I think

he ended up with about 600

staffers including commo and logistics and God knows

what else.

So you did solve that problem?

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SH: We solved that problem.

BL: Because the IG report criticized the Bay of Pigs

Operation because of the poor

coordination/ communication between Miami and

Headquarters.

SH: We did it without knowing that.

We set up our

organization without knowing what way they had done it

before. It was sheer luck.

You had Harvey and you had

Helms.

Two old hands in the DDP business, and that's

the way we set it up.

But I think if we had known what

the problem was in the Bay of Pigs operation I think we

would have been helped a bit, in terms of at least

have been a

watching out for that because there could have been a

real problem if somebody had said it back here, "Hey

you're doing it all wrong you know; you can't have a

station in the United States."

Well, in this case we

didn't even

ask anybody, and we didn't ask Landsdale,

and we didn't the President, and we didn't ask Bobby,

we just did it our way, and

with the support of a guy

called Larry Houston, CIA's General Counsel, who said,

"Set it up any way you want to," in effect.

are responsible and

1 van yor

"You guys

go,

and go with God. You are reporting to the president;

And we did.

But I think we

would have felt a lot more, at least I would have felt

more comfortable, in knowing that we weren't going to

face some of the problems that Jake Esterline had

faced. One of the things we didn't have to worry

about, and Jake did have to worry about, is this

business of the air support.

We weren't worrying about

air support because we weren't operating in Air Branch

or anything like that.

Jake's problem, for example -

which Bissell thought he had solved by that memorandum

that he wrote in October of 1960 where he set up the

command relationship between DPD and Branch 4....It's

on a piece of paper, but I asked Jake specifically

He said it didn't. Those things just

don't happen the way you write them on a piece of paper

and dictate in a memorandum.

MW: Development Plans Division, DPD, acted as an

independent entity and basically answered to the DDCI

Cabell.

SH :

Well, first they answered to a guy called Bissell.

It

was Bissell's private air force, and he ran it as his

private air force.

Fortunately we didn't have to worry

about that one, but Jake did, and all the memorandums

in the world didn't help any on that one. Listening to

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Jake on that - in terms of trying to get air support -

it was basically on a person-to-person basis. It's

what you can wheedle out of somebody and get them to do

it the right way instead of being able to command them

and not having to spend your time massaging a guy's

That's one of the key problems I thought, and

also Jake's relationship, or Washington's relationship

with Miami, was obviously, if you read the report, and

even the rebuttal, I thought it was very confusing.

Case officers did not know really who their boss was.

Maybe they should have looked at who was writing their

fitness reports, I suppose is one way, but it was too

haphazard.

We tried to organize it, again it was sheer

luck.

We tried to organize it, as I say, as if Miami

was a foreign station and Ted had all the rights and

privileges of a Chief of Station abroad. The fact that

he was in the United States didn't bother us at all; we

never thought of it that way.

Largely because you've

got a guy like Harvey in charge, who, despite the fact

that he was a gruff SOB, had a heart of melted butter

when it came to his own troops.

He would never let

anybody, at any level, blast at one of his troops

without himself, in effect, taking out of his guns and

shooting the SOB who did it.

I'll give you a perfect example of that.

I was on a

telephone call to J.C. King,

and J.C. was chewing me

out on the phone about something I wasn't even involved

in, but anyway he chewed me out.

I. finished my

conversation with him, if you want to call it that,

hung up, and at that time Harvey buzzed me to come

in

and see him.

So I came

in and I must of had a hang-dog

look on my face or something, and he looked up at me

and he said,

"What's the matter with you?"

I said J.C.

just chewed the ass out of me.

He said,

"For what?"

I

said, "Nothing, I wasn't even involved.

He didn't ask

any questions. He picked up the phone and dialed to

J.C. Himself. Before I could say anything he started

to read J.C. the riot act, in only his. language, which

makes paratroop language look like a church meeting.

In effect he said,

"Look, if there is anybody that's

going to chew out my troops, I'm going. to chew out my

troops.

Don't you ever do that again without checking

with me first.

If you've got trouble with some of my

troops you talk to me and not to them."

Moves his arm

as if he is slamming down the receiver.

I think J.C.

must have lost his ear then. It was awful. Ok, you

got a guy like Bill Harvey in charge - Jake couldn't do

that.

But Jake for example, Jake and Col. Jack Hawkins

both resigned from the Bay of Pigs operation up in the

Agency.

Bissell took them to his house, on a Sunday

morning, talks

them into reneging and staying with the

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Agency and staying with the operation.

said

"This isn't going to work, it's useless.

Both of them

BL: This was exactly when Sam?

SH :

About

a week before the invasion, I don't even know the

date

but it happened on a Sunday.

BL:

What was the precipitating issue that caused them to

reach that?

SH: Air.

BL: The air strikes?

SH: Yes, the cut on the air support.

BL: The reduction of the air strike?

SH:

Yes, the reduction.

It was quite clear, Jake says, and

I've also talked to Hawkins now. He's

a great guy, I

don't know if you've ever met him? He's 80 something

at the moment and he's still sharp as a tack.

and he e

Anyway,

it was the lack of air and Bissell said, in effect,

If

ou auys quit I'll just appoint two other people ir

go on anyway so why don't you stay

and see what you can do to help.

So he talked them

back into the Agency and they stayed.

point was that they are convinced - and I am now

absolutely - that Bissell never told the President what

the troops, Hawkins and Esterline,

were saying, and

what their opinions were in all this stuff. He never

did.

BL: What's your view, Sam, about why Bissell did not?

SH:

I think he was so imbued with the operation that he

thought, as many people have said now, that he thought

that Kennedy could never let it die and he'd send the

troops in, he'd send the Marines in if it came to that.

Plus, I think Bissell really thought he had a deal

going on an assassination plot of some kind.

It makes

no sense that all of these things wouldn't bother him -

including not talking to the President again, in Rusk's

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MW :

SH:

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office on the telephone, that whole story - makes no

sense, makes no sense at all without an assassination

plot in the background. And the worst thing to me, and

looking at that damn report again, why they didn't say,

when the President and Rusk said "Trinidad looks too

professional, find some other place."

...At that point I

would have just blown my stack.

Bissell may not be the

kind of person to blow his stack, but anyway I would

have blown my stack. If you want a non-professional

job, then go pick some people off the street and do a

job.

I mean;

we're professionals.

If you don't like

what we are doing, fine; go get somebody else, but I

would never have agreed to move from Trinidad to a

place that has to have an airfield on it, that's going

to take B-26's when everyone knows there is no such

place on the bloody island. So they found a little

spot of ground near the Bay of Pigs after spending four

days looking at the maps.

That's crazy. It makes no

sense at all. And why Bissell went along with all this

stuff. Again, from a purely management point of view

and organizational point of view, Bissell never used

Hawkins the way he should have as a staff officer for

Christ's sakes. You take your staff officer to the

meetings with you. You don't know the details -

you

are not

the guy who knows military tactics or strategy,

for God's

sakes. Bissell may be great at U-2'S and SR-

71's, and he may have been able to put all the ships in

his head during the war, but you don't know military

tactics

and strategy.

Hawkins

was at those meetings.

Hawkins came out here

about a month ago - Lee Strickland [CIA Information and

Privacy Coordinator] had him out. Hawkins said he was

at the meetings but he wasn't allowed to talk.

He said

it was agony because he just sat there and watched

Bissell mangle the military aspects and he was

wondering why the Joint Chiefs, some of them who were

there at the meetings,

didn't speak up - why the

Generals who were advising Secretary of Defense

McNamara didn't speak up.

He found out afterward from

a classmate of his (because he was a Marine - and he

had a classmate from some military class who was on the

staff of General Shoup, the head of the Marine Corps)

that. McNamara wouldn't allow any of them to talk

either.

They were afraid; they

were cowed, and they

wouldn't speak up for fear they'd show up

McNamara.

It was worse than I thought it was.

This is

ridiculous.

You don't run an operation that way.

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BL:

Sam, another kind of key point in the IG report is that

the DO's Chief of Operations - Dick Helms, I guess -

was not involved in the Bay of Pigs planning.

SH: That's right.

BL:

The report, rather pointedly, complains that Helms

should have taken the opportunity to become involved,

but that, on at least one, perhaps more than one

occasion, he did

not.

He

seemed to prefer not being

involved. Is this a lesson that you all took to heart

with Mongoose, and was that criticism of Helms fair?

Was it accurate?

SH: I think it was accurate from what I know, being

since I

was enjoying life in Tokyo at the time.

came through and Jake was knocking his ass off here, I

know...But yes, I think Dick probably did the right

thing,

for a very simple reason.

Somebody had to take

care of the rest of the world, from a command point of

view. If Bissell was spending his time on the Bay of

Pigs, plus the U-2, plus SR-71, plus Corona, there

isn't much time left for Bissell to worry about the

rest of the world. Secondly, Helms knew his troops,

the personnel more or less,

in the Clandestine Service.

He knew the good ones from the bad ones or the mediocre

ones.

That's one thing that I fault him on, in that he

knew that the Division Chiefs' protective association,

and the Staff Chiefs' protective association, were

sending off to the Bay of Pigs operation, which they

all knew about, obviously, but they were sending off

their second-best, their has-beens, the guys who had

stacked arms, and just kind of washing their hands of

the whole thing. That's one thing, which is not in the

report itself,

but that's one thing that I knew,

as

just a case officer and having my own ears and fingers

out in the wind. When we started on Mongoose, that's

one thing I knew - at least I wasn't going to

be

involved in - is letting the Division Chiefs and the

Staff Chiefs palm off on us all the cast-offs. I went

to Des Fitzgerald, whom I knew very well, because I had

been his Executive Officer,

and I said to Des "You and

the other Division and Staff Chiefs ought to be ashamed

of yourselves in what you did.

I said "I don't know

the troops in the other Divisions

and Staffs, but I do

know something about the Far East Division Staffers,

and you did the wrong thing. You didn't send the best

troops you had. And I'm not saying you had to give

them all your best troops," because there's another big

world out there in addition to Cuba, there's still the

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Soviet Union, there's still China, etc....When Bill

Harvey came aboard I have him the same

story and the

same pitch,

and I said "Bill, we're going to have to

come up with better people and the way to do this is

you go to Dan Debartele'

' who was then the Clandestine

Service Personnel Officer, the big wheel at "Career

Manglement"

as we called it in those days.

I said

"Get

from Dan,

at each appropriate GS level, GS 9's, 10's,

11'5, 12's, and so on, right up the line, and get from

him from each component of the CS, Staffs and

Divisions, get from him

the promotion list from each

component,

including those that made it and those that

didn't quite make it but they're near the middle - are

near the top - and they might make it the next time

around. It's from those lists that we're going to pick

our people: I think we can get anybody we want to but

bearing in mind there's still a big world out there and

the Soviet Union comes first, regardless of what the

President says about Cuba."

Harvey looked at me and

listened, didn't say a bloody word, and I left.

The

next day when I came back into his office he was

stacked high with personnel jackets which he had gotten

from Dan in terms of what I had said.

You go and get

the top lists of who was recommended for what, and you

pick from those.

In addition to that, obviously Harvey

knew he wanted Ted Shackley down in Miami. He was only

a GS-14, I think, at the time he was sent down. I

think he may have been a GS-13 for all I know.

Ted

knew some of the good people from the Eastern European

Division, the old EE..

That's how we built a different

kind of a cadre. than Jake was forced to take.

He had

some good people, there's no question about that, and

that, shown in the DDP's rebuttal to the IG report are

some

of the senior officers they had, but they also had

some guys who were not top notch.

I don't have the

list in front of me now, but I remember when I showed

Dick Helms....From the beginning of the Mongoose

nonsense, Dick Helms came over to take a look at what

we had, and this was in December of 1961, when he

suddenly found himself being told by McCone, the new.

DCI, that he, Helms, was now McCone's man on Cuba.

That was told to him, by McCone, at a morning staff

meeting up in the Director's office.

At which, my

ooss, Goshen Zogby (we were still Branch 4 but it was

Cuba

and all the Caribbean Islands and Zog was there)

our Branch Chief at a morning DCI staff meeting, was

most unusual. But anyway, he was there and he told me

the story about how Helms

looked like a thunderbolt had

hit him when McCone said, "By the way you're my man on

Cuba."

Just like that.

Helms, who had stayed away

from the Bay of Pigs (I'm still on your question) and

he was right to do that, I think, because he wasn't

going to get anywhere with Bissell in charge, he knew

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that. Bissell was a one-man operator and Helms knew

exactly what to expect from Tracy Barnes.

BL: But the complaint is that, I think, in the iG report,

Kirkpatrick's complaint about Helms is that Helm's did

not ring the alarm bells.

SH:

He should have. Yes, I saw that, but I don't think you

can blame Helms, because he did stay away from it so he

didn't know what alarm bells to ring.

Is it personnel?

Is it your operational approach? Is it the air field?

Is it the air support? Is it the troops on the ground?

What is it you want him to ring alarm bells about?

didn't know. He had no idea. I'm not trying to defend

him from that point of view; maybe he should have

forced his way in,

which would have meant a real

confrontation with Bissell.

And with Allen Dulles

looking the other way, Helms might not have found

himself in any position to argue with anybody - he

might have been out.

So I think you've got to

give....I think Kirk, CIA Inspector General Lyman

Kirkpatrick, was wrong in that particular aspect.

Yes,

the guy who's third in line should maybe say something

to the guy who's second in line, but not when it's a

closed corporation.

I know people who argue both ways

on this one, and I have too, but I think in the end you

come down,

saying that somebody had to watch the rest

of the world, number one.

And number two, no matter

what Helms would have said to Bissell about the quality

of the personnel....As I was about to say, when Helms

came over to Quarters I,

where we were in Branch 4 for

Mongoose, and I showed him the roster of the people who

had been

on the Bay of Pigs, literally he went down the

list saving', I just didn't say a word.

"hhhmmm, oh no, no, NO, hhmm, no

it

couldn't be.

three people in the room, Zog and me land Zog is dead

unfortunately), and Helms.

And he's going down the

list of people, including

those we have left, in

Mongoose.

Of course, why do we have them left

because nobody wanted them.

Nobody wanted those extra

people.

And Helms

work with?"

Zog said,

saidyes sir. That's what we have

"Is this what you have left to

left.

That's when he picked up the phone. I'll tell

yOU,

it's the funniest thing. He picked up the phone,

called J.C. King and said,

"As of now Cuba is no longer

part of WH Division. You have all the rest of the

islands but Cuba is separate reporting to me." Boom.

This is before Harvey comes along.

This was well

before.

So Zog and I find ourselves a task force

without calling ourselves a task force.

The word

Mongoose didn't come along until much later.

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MW:

What was the impression about IG report at the time?

In the trenches? There must have been rumors.

What

did you know about it?

SH:

We didn't see it. All we knew about it was that it was

a bad report; that Kirk had taken the knives out and

was really murdering Bissell and Jake.

Nobody

mentioned J.C. J.C. was off on the sidelines as far as

everybody was concerned.

Everybody in the room was

Jake (lost words)... and I don't think Hawkins' name

was kicked around much, but Bissell's name sure as hell

around mish a

was, and Tracy Barnes' name was kicked around as the

two masterminds, with Jake getting most of the blame

because he's the guy doing the work. Theoretically

that's what we thought anyway. And remember that I had

just gotten back from Saigon when all of this thing

hit.

The rumors where.... sure they were there, but

nobody had any facts.

All we had was rumors.

The

rumors mostly came from the WH Division.

So you had to

sort of figure out whether they were really telling you

what the report said, or whether they were making it up

or what have you.

And everyone knew there was no love

loss between Kirk and Bissell in the first place.

BL:

Sam, another of the points the IG report makes is that

the DDP did not consult with the analysts - especially

with regard to Castro's survivability, his popularity,

the effectiveness of his security forces, and so on -

and they recommended that that become a standard

practice before covert actions were implemented in the

future. Did you all have a lot of consultation with

the DI, or with ONE, through Mongoose?

SH: Oh yes. There was no problem on that.

Yes we did.

And as

a matter of fact we like to think that Sherman

Kent's September 1962 estimate, the famous September

NIE, when he was sure that the Soviets were not going

to put missiles into Cuba, came about as a result of

our prodding

the DDI side of the house in terms of

doing some kind of an estimate because things down

there looked pretty strange. We didn't know what the

Hell was going on.

We said so frankly "We're getting

all these crazy reports.

Ted and his people were

doing a fine job in providing us with all this crazy

stuff that's going on in the island, and the OpaLocka

the Caribbean Admissions Center - was doing a fine job

with providing us the stuff from all the refugees

coming out.

Everything looked like there was something

screwy going on but we don't know what, literally.

I

don't know who it was who got a hold of DDI Ray Cline,

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to say "how about an estimate of some kind." Ray was

the wrong guy because Ray and Sherman didn't see eye to

eye on anything.

But anyway the word got around, and I

think we can take credit for prodding Sherman and his

staff to do an estimate on all of these crazy reports

that nobody could figure out what the hell's happening.

MW: You mean the many reports from Cubans coming out of

Cuba about missiles being

seen here or there and

everything else.

SH: Yes, there was all kinds of stuff coming out. They

were seeing planes

when no planes had arrived yet.

The

reports were confusing to say the least. And somebody,.

without an ax to grind, like the DDI's supposed to be,

had to put it together.

BL: Were there cleared DI officers who knew about Mongoose,

who knew why (overlapping sound) going on?

SH:

I don't know if we kept a record of that, but obviously

the DDI knew; Sherman Kent knew, and I think the Cuban

desk officers knew.

There were enough. We weren't

playing that kind of a game. The Pentagon did. I know

that for a fact. The Pentagon really had Mongoose -

cleared officers to do things. Colonel Wright, for

example (the guy who actually pushed through the report

that targeted the U-2), he's the guy who presented the

(lost word??). We did it on the grounds that it's in

our report and it would look bad if we did it. Nobody

listened to us, so we had Colonel Wright do it. He was

very happy to do it, and he later took credit for the

whole damned thing.

He never mentioned CIA in his own

biography that he wrote about what he had done. The

report came in - he never knew where the report came

from - but a report came in!

Anyway, no, we kept our

DDI counterparts pretty well informed on what the hell,

not what we were doing, but in terms of what the u.s.

Government was doing, so that everybody was putting

their shoulder to the wheel - that kind of thing. We

didn't get into the details.

We later did, when, after

the Cuban. Missile Crisis, and Des Fitzgerald took over,

Des actually brought down, I forget the guy's name - he

was a very, very senior elder statesman of the DDI, and

Des went out of channels without so much as a "By your

leave to anybody, and a lot of the troops objected, and

Des - made available to this gentleman the true

- identities, plus the source descriptions we used for

the assets.

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BL: This was a DI person? Milton Brown?

SH: No, it wasn't Milt. I know Milt. No it was somebody

else.

Gray-haired gentleman. Elderly statesman kind

of thing.

MW:

But a Cuban expert?

SH: Not

really, no. He was just a good analyst and a good

estimator.

Anyway, Des made available everything,

against every single solitary rule or procedure you can

imagine. He just brought him down and said "Look, here

are all of our sources, true names, ranks, positions,

everything. And this is the kind of by-lines we are

using for these people.

You sit and look at this stuff

and see if it's worth disseminating. See if it's worth

putting out.

We've been putting it out, but tell us.

What do you think when you see it?

did this to

avoid this constant nonsense we used to get from the

DDI types, which was

"You can't tell us the source, so

we can't really understand the information without

knowing who the source was.

BL: Was it Archer

Bush?

SH: No, that doesn't sound right.

MW: When was this; when did this happen?

SH: Right after Des came aboard in early 1963. After the

Missile Crisis.

MW: So he wanted a real (cut off)

SH: He wanted a totally honest appraisal from somebody

without an ax to grind.

If we did it in-house and the

Task Force - or the SAS,

we were suddenly called - or

You can't do it

that way. And if we did it to the DDI as a

between DDI and DDP types, and that wasn't fair. So

pick one guy who's an honest fellow - and everyone

knows he's honest, he's not going to be swayed one way

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or the other - and literally stick him in a room and

say, "Here, everything, and tell me what it's like."

MW :

The degree of communication between the DDP and DDI on

Mongoose is apparently a lot more that it was during

the Bay of Pigs Operation:

SH :

Oh, much more.

MW: Years ago, when I started amassing the documents that

we put together into the Bay of

Pigs collection, I

wanted to know if there was anything left in the branch

over in the DI. So I called up whoever was the Cuban

analyst - this would have been, probably, early 1993.

I don't remember the analyst's name (I could probably

look it up); but he told me - and I don't know if this

is true or not.

The folklore in the branch was that

whoever it was

that had been one of the Cuban analysts

was called in the Saturday before the invasion because

there were all these news stories about Cuban defector

pilots having bombed the air field in Havana and then

flown to Key West and here they are, they have their

planes on the ground and now they are defecting to the

United States and this is a big news story.

He came in

and wrote it up for the current publications at the

time and gave it to his editors, and at the last minute

somebody came over from the DDP

and said "Wait guys,

that's a covert action.

Those are our planes, those

are our pilots,

those are B-26's we painted with Cuban

This is all a big hoax.

You don't need to

be reporting this to the President or you're going to

look silly.

So apparently this has been handed down

at the Cuban desk by word of mouth.

SH: It sounds true.

MW:

I don't know it that's true or not.

You probably know

better than I do.

SH: It sounds true.

Those things have happened. That's

one thing we made sure in Mongoose

we didn't do.

I can

go. back to another operation that I was involved in

long before we had things like Mongoose and Bays of

Pigs and what have you.

This is the Indonesian

operation in support of the Sumatra colonels in 1957

and 1958. -I personally,..on my own authority...l never

Checkea with Al Umer, who was my Division Chief,

or

anybody else. I happened to know the DDI/OCI person on)

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MW :

SH :

the desk on Indonesia, Jeanette Marr. I knew her from

oss days. I used to call her up and we double-talked

and I kept her fully informed of anything that might

suddenly appear on the horizon without going into the

details of our operation or anything like that.

wrote the President's Daily Brief sections on Indonesia

and a guy called Cabell insisted on calling the ?

Sumatran colonels

"patriots." Everyone else in the

Government called them "rebels."

(This was the DDCI?)

Cabell, yes.

He was known as "Rice and Beans" Cabell.

Same guy.

He insisted on the PDB using the wordl

patriots.

Jeanette hated it.

She couldn't do anything

rabout it obviously - Cabell insisted.

at the old

PDB's and you'll see that they have patriots, not

(rebels. We could double-talk because of patriots and

it worked fine When Mongoose came along there was no

question in my mind....at least, I would have done the

thing unless Bill Harvey had said "Don't talk to

them," but he never did. Bruce Cheever, who was Bill's

deputy, thought you had to bring them in, too, to let

them know what's going on.

You don't go

into details

of an operation, you don't go into details of your

The only guy that ever did that was Des.

That was 1963. His final report to Des was simply,

"You guys are shooting yourselves in the foot. This

information is very good,

not just good but very good

and you are masking it all with all these crazy by-

I know you can't give the true name but you

at least change the by-line somehow."

This is what Des

used later when he became DDP for a couple of years, to

change all the by-line systems throughout the whole

DDP. We

started to give better descriptions of the

sources. Some of these things had some benefits. But

coming back to this crazy report, let me come back a

second...:

BL: The IG report....

SH: In the IG report, the thing that bothered me, too, in

there, in reading the IG report was the fact

that so

many of the case officers - if it's correct - seemed to

be confused as to just what the hell they were doing

and why they were doing what they were doing. I don't

think we ever had that in the Mongoose show.

We had Ed

Marelius up here in Washington las the Chief of the FI

We had Seymour Bolten as head of the Covert

Action Branch, PP, Psychological Warfare Branch. We

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had Art Maloney as head of the PM Branch. Hal Swensen

as head of the CI Branch. These were all very senior

guys who were well regarded by everyone, and they were

honest as the day is long,

and they wouldn't take any

horseshit from anybody, and ran a very tight ship.

SO

the case officers here at this end, and we had case

officers working against Cuban targets in from

Washington, but they never ran across the Cuban case

officers that Ted was running down in Miami. They each

knew their fields.

They each worked with each other.

They kept each other informed so they didn't cross each

others trails. That's something I think we did, I

think from second nature, but it would have been nice

to know, in that, from that report, that we were at

least not doing something that we were wrong in doing,

or doing something that we shouldn't have done. That

report makes it clear that we did just the right thing.

That everybody knew what the hell their piece was. I

don't know if that's correct.

The DDP's rebuttal

doesn't really face that particular question about the

case officers and where they looked for their guidance.

It kind of sloughs it off more or less.

To me it made

no sense for, as I say, for the three senior guys in

the Mongoose thing not

to have seen that report so that

they could be sure that they weren't making some of the

same mistakes.

McCone, I know, and Cabell, were trying

to hide the whole thing.

Within limits I

agree with

them, but not.... You don't have to put it on the

bulletin board like they've done now.

It's on the

internet.

SH:

(Conversation in progress) .....poisonous pesticide and

it was

available in any hardware store you wanted to go

to or Sears or what have you, and it was available in

Havana or other parts of Cuba.

It was done all over

the world and the little bottles that it used to come

in actually had a skull and crossbones, the old symbol

for poison.

The idea was the needle would be so fine

that it would be just like a little tiny scratch and if

AMLASH would get close enough to Fidel to use that to

scratch him and at the same time have the Black Leaf 40

enter the bloodstream. How much you have to put in, or

what have you, I never found out.

Never asked.

Manny

Gunn gave all the technical details to Nestor Sanchez

to pass on to AMLASH.

When Nestor offered the ball-

point pen to AMLASH he looked at it very disdainfully,

and he said when Nestor tried to explain about the

Black Leaf 40, AMLASH, who was a medical

doctor in his

own right, said "I know all about that "come on, you

You don't have

to tell me all about that."

He said,

fellows can come up with something better than

that."

And as far as I know he never took the pen.

Although

if he had been a double agent

I think he would have

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taken the pen to use at some kind of public trial, so

he could show the evidence. that the United States was

behind it. The fact that he never took the pen, to me,

is pretty good evidence that he was not a double agent.

I don't think to this day that he ever was.

In

addition to that particular one thing that I know I was

involved with Nestor, on and with Manny Gunn. The one

thing that I don't know enough about is when we had to

assign an officer to Bobby Kennedy, to be used by Bobby

Kennedy to make contact with Mafia types in this

country and in Canada..'

That Bobby Kennedy would pick

and set the appointment time and place and our case

officer would then go and meet whoever this person was

and come back and report to Bobby Kennedy. The theory

behind this apparently was that Bobby had some bright

idea that the Mafia must have left some kind of stay-

behind network in Cuba because of all of their

interests

that they had in Cuba when Fidel came in:

prostitution, gambling, drug running and whatever else

was involved.

He said they must have had a good stay-

behind network and we could get some decent information

to what's going on.

Well just to give you the QED of

this,

we never got any information that was worth

disseminating.

I never saw any information at all from

The case officer I picked... Apparently the way

the request came was from Bobby to General Marshall

Carter, who was then DDCI, to Bill Harvey, Bill Harvey

to me, to pick a case officer to assign to Bobby.

I

sat with Bruce Cheever and then, of course, with Bill

himself and we decided on a guy named Charles Ford,

Charley Ford. Charley was a huge man.

Very stocky,

make a very good lineman on any football team, and he

know how to handle himself in any kind of problem.

We

figured he was the best kind of guy. Charley and I sat

and we

figured out he's got to have

some kind of name

to use

- we can't use Charley Ford. But Charley also

had some handkerchiefs and some shirts with CF on it,

and rather than risk an exposure of some kind, Charley

and I sat in my office, the ground floor of the

building,

and we said "How about Charley Rocky

Fiscalini."

And ever since then, I always called

Charley,

til he died,

"Rocky."

We came up with

Fiscalini.

There are two different ways of spelling

it.

I spelled it FISCALINI and Angie Novella, Bobby

Kennedy's

secretary, spelled it on her appointment log,

FISCOLLINI, which is

probably more ethnic than mine.

But anyway, Fiscalini is the way you pronounce it.

SO

Charley went off and he made several trips in the

United States, and I know he made at least one if not

more in Canada - I think it was Toronto. All at the

behest of Bobby.

об ее . ne

Either Bobby himself would talk to

Charley on the phone, or Angie Novella would call

Charley on what we euphemistically called a secure

phone - nothing more than an outside line that we had

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in the front office of Task Force W - it was a big

bullpen where we had four or five secretaries.

Bill

Harvey's office here [motions with his hands]. Bruce

Cheever's office here. Mine over here, and the

secretaries out in what we called the bullpen. There

was a big section in here where we had a bunch of

special assistants, and Charley Ford was one of those

who sat in here.

There were about four or five guys in

there doing all kinds of different things.

Charley

never, as far as I know, never spoke.

I know he never

spoke

to me about who he saw - what they talked about -

and I never never saw any intelligence information to

disseminate, and as far as I know Charley never had any

intelligence information to disseminate.

To us it was

a waste of time and effort, plus we were putting a man

in real danger, since, from pure tradecraft point of

view we wanted to control, the meeting time and the

meeting place.

We wanted

to set it up, and we don't

want to walk into a hornet's nest without knowing who

or what we're seeing.

I have mentioned this to several

people, without mentioning Charley Ford's name until

recently, and I'll tell you why in a minute.

I

mentioned it to Scott Breckenridge, and Scott mentioned

it in his last book that he put out.

I mentioned it to

a fellow by the name of Goldfarb, who was an attorney

on Kennedy's staff at the Justice Department, and

Goldfarb wrote a book in which he quotes me on this,

and then he also says he doesn't believe me and he

doesn't know why I'm making these kinds of stories up.

MW:

He's defending Bobby Kennedy.

SH:

Oh, absolutely, no question about that. I mentioned it

to other people along the way and I even mentioned it

to Seymour Hersh when he was putting his book together

"The Dark Side of Camelot." If you look at, I forget

what page it is, there's a footnote there.

Sy was the

one who found, in doing his researches, he found, as a

result of the Kennedy Assassination Records Review

Board, and all the documents that were produced as a

result of that, Angie Novella, in

her log - her

appointment and telephone log for 1962 - puts down

General Carter, Charles Ford (Fiscalini), for a date,

for a meeting with Bobby Kennedy.

I've got documentary

proof now. I'd like to shove it under Goldfarb's nose,

but anyway....Hersh puts that as a footnote in his book

in which he says until he, Hersh, was able to show me

the log.

I had always refused to mention the name of

the individual who was the case officer.

The fact that

Kennedy was involved in trying to work

with the Mafia

at the same time....He, Goldfarb, couldn't believe that

Kennedy would be working with the Mafia at the same

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time he's trying to send them to jail. "He's your

boss"

I would say to Goldfarb,

"he wasn't my boss, I

can't figure him out any better than you can."

Now I'm

told by Chuck Briggs that in the pile of paper that

he's looking at now - as a result of the AARB nonsense

- they have found two memorandums

from the Church

Committee - the Schwieker subcommittee of the Church

Committee.

I had forgotten that I had testified before

the Schwieker Subcommittee.

Chuck now tells me that

not only did I testify - and he's looking at my

transcript of my testimony - but he also has Charley

Ford's testimony. Where Charley....I don't know what

he says - Chuck hasn't shown it to me - but he says

"That is there, it's in great detail, it's longer than

yours, so obviously Charley must have told the

Schwieker committee what I'm telling you now."

That he

actually was assigned to Bobby and did what Bobby had

asked him to do. Which is to go meet Mafia types.

What they said, unless Charley says in his testimony -

and all this is under oath - I don't know what Charley

said, but you guys go ahead and look at it.

I haven't

got the clearances yet until it's declassified.

Can't

even look at my own testimony. Oddly enough, I told

this to Chuck when he called me and gave me the date.

I looked at my old calendars - I keep all my old

calendars. I never had any calendar that I kept while I

was working but ever since I left the job, over 20

years ago, I've been keeping good records on my

calendar.

Anyway, there it is, April something, 1976.

Written right in the little box, Schwieker

Subcommittee.

I called Chuck back and I said, "you're

right, I did testify." People have said that, as a

result of this, that Charley and Bobby must have been

working on using the Mafia in some kind of

assassination plots. Check what Charley says in his

testimony; I don't know what they did.

They never

said. Charley never talked to me about that. He would

always stick his head in before he left on another

trip, "I'm off again,

Bye."

The reason I know he

to Canada - I think it was Toronto - was because

he came in for the first time and said,

"I'm leaving

the country."

I said "Where the Hell are you going?"

He says "Canada."

Charley was a damn fine officer, and

I'm awfully sorry he died so early.

In terms of talking about assassination plotting, it

gets kind of hairy after a while.

It's hard to know

when to stop, and you don't even know when you start

something.

I remember under Des; when Des came in on

-hat Monday morning tor example, on this crazy business

of the sea shallots had been all over

everywhere... Again it was a Monday morning and he had

just come in from driving his VW with his foot through

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the floorboards.. When he got on those highways he was

murder.

This is what always made me think somewhere

during those weekends he must have seen Bobby, because

he came in all charged up.

I asked him over and over

again, not just once but several times, where the heck

is this pressure coming from?

I don't see it myself

except through you.

said "It's coming from high

places."

He never said Bobby. It's coming from

outside the agency, and Des is an honest guy, I can't

say he's making this up.

Why would he be doing that?

So I have to assume he's getting it from somebody who's

got the authority to tell him, without going through

the chain of command. It's a surmise on my part; I

can't prove it.

BL:

Who up the chain of command knew about Charley and

Bobby?

SH:

Carter.

Marshall Carter, the DDCI.

BL: And that was all?

SH: As far as I know.

Helms never knew. I know that much.

MW :

MW :

Fitzgerald?

No. It was all over by then.

Charley's activities

stopped after the Missile Crisis.

Ok,

ok.

Fitzgerald didn't come in until 1963.

SH: January 1963.

MW:

McCone?

SH:

Unless Carter told him.

MW :

Why would Carter be in the loop and not McCone?

SH :

I don't know.

I'm looking

at Angie Novella's logs,

that's the only way I know

Carter's in the loop.

It

says

Carter,

right there.

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MW: You sure it's our Carter?

SH: Yes, Marshall Carter.

Take a look at the page.

I've

got

a copy of the page at home, I should have brought

it.

MW:

Send us a fax.

SH :

All right, I'll dig it up. You may have to remind me

again.

I got it through the courtesy of Sy Hersh.

It

is now available as a public document. When I saw

that, as a matter of fact I hadn't yet gotten it....Sy

once called me when he was still doing his research on

the book, and we had talked about a guy working for

Bobby, and he kept on asking me, who? who? who?

"Not me, I'm not going to tell you the name."

me on the phone one morning

and he said, "How

does Fiscalini strike you?"

I said, "where in the

goddamned hell

did' you ever get that name?"

He told

"It's from Angie Novella's appointment

logs.".

I said run that by me again, slowly.

because it's got Ford and Fiscalini but it could be

He gave me Fiscalini.

There were only two guys

in the world that I knew of

that had that name.

never told Harvey, we never told Bruce Cheever. Didn't

need to.

Theoretically we were professionals.

MW:

You just had it because you had to clear it. You

travel a get cong pat 10m

basically had to sign his vouchers and make sure his

travel was getting paid for and everything.

SH:

That's all we did. If you've got the finance records

you can find out where he went and every time he went,

way.

I'm trying to remember the vouchers. He fixed it

up in such a way that that didn't really show.

He

wouldn't ask for stuff. When Sy said "Fiscalini"

said "You got me hands down."

I said "It's the only

time I ever lied to you."

It was true. It was the

only time I ever held anything back

When I start

talking I know my limits.

BL: Did you lie to him or you just didn't tell him?

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SH:

I hadn't told him. I must have never told him the

name.

He's got a note to that effect; a footnote on

that same page where he talks about this operation in

the book.

If you've got the book around I'll show you.

In terms of assassination plots, first of all they're

few and far between.

In terms of getting involved in

one of these things.

Being in the business we were in,

with the old rules and regulations that we had - and we

didn't have to worry about a Senate Intelligence

Committee and a House Intelligence Committee - we did

lots of things just by feel, by gosh and by golly.

Larry Houston told me when the Church committee started

322as

AS

to expose lots of things, Larry said,

"Sam, I told you.

You should have talked to me about a lot of these

things.

We wouldn't be here today."

I said, "Yeah,

Larry, and you know why we didn't talk to you in those

days?

Because you would have stopped a lot of us from

doing things."

He says, "Very right.". That's the way

life was, and I'm sure that there are other

officers.... I'm just one of many who were involved in

different parts of the world, doing a whole variety of

things, with almost no way to pin down somebody saying,

"I authorized X, Y, or Z.

That goes even for State

intelligence collection,

because some of the

intelligence collection

was done by some screwball

ideas.

BL:

Sam, you've just talked about Bobby Kennedy and CIA and

Mafia assassination plotting against Castro. Many

scholars have concluded, though on just circumstantial

evidence, that Jack Kennedy was also fully witting, if

not involved in assassination plotting against Castro.

Do you have a view about that?

SH :

Yes, I agree with the people who say the same thing

because I can't imagine Bobby on his own without

telling Brother Jack some of the things he's done, and

including probably Jack being the inspiration for some

of the things that Bobby finally did.

I think they

were so close together.

There's a new book out,

it's

not new anymore this is now 1998, this came out in the

Fall of 1997 - it's Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector.

You got it?

MW:

No.

SH: The author is a fellow by the name of Hilty.

University of Tennessee Press.

It's got some of the

weirdest stuff in it that you can think of. I only

read the parts that I know something about, namely

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Mongoose and its antecedent follow-on.

He's got so

many mistakes in there it's not even funny.

On the

first 24 pages there are 19 errors.

Most of them

serious ones. Including calling AMLASH a double agent.

He doesn't know the language; he doesn't know what he's

talking

about.

AMLASH was never a double agent by

anybody's stretch of the imagination. A lot of other

stuff, but even he says he's partially protecting the

Kennedy image as well as everybody else.

Even he says

in there the same thing, that based on his researches

there's no question that what one knew the other knew.

uest on that what one

They always worked in tandem on all subjects.

The

problem that Goldfarb had, for example - because he was

one of the Lawyers attacking the Mafia, trying to put

them in jail - and he just couldn't....He was sitting

in my living room and he just couldn't understand, and

he kept on saying, "how could Bobby tell me to put the

Mafia

in jail when he's working with them?"

don't know how he could do that:

You worked for him,

you tell me."

But he did. I couldn't prove it then,

but if you

guys ever release those Charley Ford memo's

and my memo, at least we've got two statements done

the Church Committee really, where at least it's being

discussed. I don't see how anybody, on any of this

stuff, particularly after the Bay of Pigs Operation,

dealing with the Agency, I don't think anything was

said or done between the

two guys that the other one

didn't know.

Bobby may have stayed away

from the Agency up before the Bay of Pigs, but after

the Bay of Pigs he was always Johnny at the rathole on

everything. Didn't understand what he was doing

either, in

many cases.

BL: Sam, is there anything else before we adjourn?

SH: I don't know. You guys ask and I'll try and answer.

MW: I've exhausted my.... I've fired my shots.

SH: I still like reading those two reports, and I agree

completely, by the way, between the Kirkpatrick report

and the Bissell rebuttal.

I think McCone was right to

say that the truth is somewhere in-between.

I honestly

think if I had been a case officer, or been involved

like Jake was, if the President said "Don't go to

Trinidad find

really, I would have

said

find somebody

else to do it."

That's number one, and that's an

important one. Because for example, I'm the guy who

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told General Carter to tell somebody, and I didn't know

who the hell it was, he was not supposed to tell until

I found out later, it was Ike, Eisenhower, in our

Sumatra operation... We were involved in all kinds of

crazy nonsense, including air, by the way. Cabell

didn't get involved in that, thank the Lord. It was

Civil Air Transport planes we were using. A suggestion

came to me, through cabel's office,

• to me, about,

something going to, be done, I forget exactly what it

was? but something ought to be done in the field to

make-things easier for the rebels. I'II call them

rebels.

It made no sense at afl. Actually had noy

relation to reality in the field. I didn't even bother›

checking with anybody, I just decided on my own. It;

finally got to Cabell talking to me,

you say is fine.

". I find out later that the

hat the sugee son

came not from Cabell but from Ike, through Gordon Gray,

who was then the National Security Council guy, through

the Agency and down to me.

Why they)

- but anyway I get the draft.

If they had said

the President

wants you to do such and such i might

have given him a different answer.

Ike's got a good

military background, better than mine, for God's sakes.

That's the one nice thing I liked about this Agency,

and always have. I hope it's around, you can really

speak

your mind.

MW: Sometimes.

SH:

Well, all right. Things may have changed. I've been

out 20 years, but in my day we screamed bloody murder

and we screamed bloody murder about Mongoose.

We

screamed bloody murder about other things, believe me,

over the years, and when it didn't make sense we said

So help me, Trinidad and then the cutting 80% of

the air support, I don't know if Bissell really

understood the meaning.

He may have thought that by

the time they would land Castro would be dead.

That's

fine, but if you're running a vest pocket operation

like that, you had better be sure, and you don't take

the chance with

1,500 men or 1,400 men whatever hit the

beaches.

Bissell

was no kind of a guy to - let alone

Tracy Barnes - to be involved in assassination

plotting. They didn't know what the hell they were

doing.

Tracy wouldn't know.

The record is clear, and

it's even in the Church Committee report, for Christ's

sake, that a message came from headquarters to the

Havana station, when it was still there, talking about

assassination.

The very next morning, when someone saw

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the confirmation copy, a flash went out saying "Ignore

the message.

Who the hell wrote the message, Tracy.

I mean that is the silliest thing I've ever seen.

The

last thing in the world you want on paper.

Just like

when Lansdale talked about elimination of leaders in

the August 10, 1962 meeting of the Special Group

(Augmented) .

Puts it in writing and Harvey goes

through the roof. It's all out there now,

but that's

the kind of people who don't know what the

hell it's

all about: They never tried.

BL:

Sam, thanks so much. We appreciate you coming in.

24

SECRET

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