OPERATION MONGOOSE

Opening

Seven months after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed in April 1961, President John F. Kennedy authorised a new secret campaign to bring down Fidel Castro. Operation Mongoose, formally approved on 30 November 1961, was meant to use sabotage, propaganda and exile raids to spark a revolt inside Cuba, without another open invasion.

It became one of the largest covert programmes the CIA had ever run, with its own Miami station and hundreds of officers. Its planners set October 1962 as the month for the uprising. October 1962 brought the Cuban Missile Crisis instead, and by the end of the year Mongoose had been shut down with Castro still in power.

Timeline

17 to 20 April 1961The Bay of Pigs invasion by CIA-trained exiles is defeated.

4 November 1961The name Mongoose is agreed at a White House meeting.

30 November 1961Kennedy authorises the operation, with Brigadier General Edward Lansdale in charge of coordination.

January 1962At a meeting on Cuba, Attorney General Robert Kennedy tells officials that removing Castro is the top priority of the United States government.

20 February 1962Lansdale presents a six-phase schedule of 32 tasks, ending in October 1962 with open revolt and the overthrow of the communist regime.

13 March 1962The Joint Chiefs of Staff send Defense Secretary Robert McNamara the Northwoods proposals, which include staging incidents that could be blamed on Cuba to justify intervention. Kennedy rejects them.

1962Sabotage teams, propaganda and exile raids go into Cuba from the JMWAVE station in Miami. None produces a rising.

October 1962The Cuban Missile Crisis. CIA officer William Harvey sends sabotage teams into Cuba during the crisis, angering Robert Kennedy.

30 October 1962Mongoose operations are suspended. The programme formally ends at the close of 1962.

1975The Senate's Church Committee investigates and confirms at least eight separate CIA plots to assassinate Castro between 1960 and 1965.

Key figures

Edward Lansdale was the counter-insurgency specialist who ran the planning and wrote the task lists.

Robert Kennedy was the operation's driving force in the administration and pressed the agencies for faster results.

William Harvey led the CIA's Task Force W, which carried out Mongoose's operations from JMWAVE.

Fidel Castro was the target. He outlived Mongoose and every assassination plot, and died in 2016.

Cuban exile fighters carried out most of the raids and took most of the risk.

Physical and documentary trail

The sources: Lansdale's task lists and schedules, minutes of the Special Group (Augmented) that oversaw the programme, CIA memos recording Robert Kennedy's demands, the Northwoods memo, the Church Committee's 1975 report on assassination plots, and later releases through the JFK records collection. What is not public is a complete list of the raids that were actually carried out, as opposed to the many that were planned.

The top priority in the United States Government - all else is secondary - no time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.

Things you might not know

• The Miami station was on a campus. JMWAVE operated from the University of Miami's grounds and became the largest CIA station outside its Virginia headquarters.
• The deadline met the crisis. Lansdale's plan set October 1962 for the revolt, the same month Soviet missiles were found in Cuba.
• The Joint Chiefs proposed fake attacks. Northwoods, drafted by the Joint Chiefs in the same period, proposed fake attacks blamed on Cuba. It was rejected and only became public in 1997.
• The Mafia was already involved. Separate CIA plots from 1960 used mobsters, and John Roselli was reportedly offered $150,000 to kill Castro.
• Lansdale was famous before Cuba. His work in the Philippines and Vietnam had made him a model, people said, for a character in the 1958 novel The Ugly American.
• The budget was large. Estimates of Mongoose spending run as high as $50 million a year, with about 400 CIA officers involved.

Competing explanations

A serious covert war that failed. The raids, the staff and the money were real, and the planners believed an uprising was possible. It failed because Cuba's security services were effective and the population did not rise.

Mostly paper. Critics inside the government at the time, and some historians since, have argued that Mongoose produced far more memos than operations and that many tasks were never feasible.

A trigger for the Missile Crisis. Soviet and Cuban leaders said the threat of another American attack was one reason missiles were sent to Cuba. Mongoose was part of that threat, though historians differ on how much weight it carried in Moscow.

Later life of the case

Mongoose became central to later debates about the Kennedy assassination, the Mafia and the CIA, largely because of the Church Committee's disclosures. Releases under the 1992 JFK Records Act have added detail but have not produced the full operational record.

Finding

The documents show that the Kennedy administration ran a large, expensive, secret campaign to overthrow Castro, with direct pressure from the Attorney General, and that it failed. They also show that much of Mongoose stayed on paper, and that the most ambitious ideas were rejected.

What still will not resolve: a full record of the raids actually carried out, and how much Mongoose weighed in Moscow's decision to send missiles to Cuba.