CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
Jan. 16, 2009 – 6:54 p.m.
Obama Should Heed Kennedy’s Cuba Lessons When Thinking About Iran
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
On Jan. 19, 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy sat down at the White House with the man he would replace the next day, to talk about Cuba.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 70, brought to the table an immense military reputation, of course, as the supreme commander of Allied forces on D-Day, perhaps the most audacious invasion in history. And as Kennedy, 43, knew, Eisenhower had spent eight years authorizing a number of successful CIA covert operations, including the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953.
Now the aging general wanted to talk with his young successor about what the CIA was up to in Cuba.
Kennedy had already been briefed at least twice during the campaign about the CIA’s covert campaign of sabotage and subversion against the Fidel Castro regime.
Over the clap of carpenters’ hammers on the inaugural parade bleachers outside, Eisenhower assured Kennedy that the project was going well. And more: He lectured Kennedy that it was the new administration’s responsibility to finish the job and bring down Castro.
“Should we support guerrilla operations in Cuba?” Kennedy asked, according to Richard Reeves account of JFK’s administration, “President Kennedy.”
“To the utmost,” said Eisenhower.
Kennedy’s major worry about that, according to notes taken at the meeting: U.S. exposure. “Senator Kennedy asked the President’s judgment as to the United States supporting the guerrilla operation in Cuba, even if this support involves the United States publicly. The President replied Yes [sic] as we cannot let the present government there go on.”
As it turned out, the guerrilla campaign was ineffectual. And so Kennedy authorized an invasion by a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles, which the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff assured him was “the best Army in Latin America.”
That was a disaster, of course, upon which Kennedy then turned to more covert action against Castro, including a plot to assassinate the Cuban leader with the help of organized crime.
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s first thought, upon the assassination of Kennedy, was that Castro had struck back.
How U.S. policy toward Castro grew from folly to delusion to tragedy and back again is still being sorted out by historians, along with other CIA covert actions embraced by American presidents to fix problems in places like the Congo, Vietnam, Iraq and Iran.
For over a half century now, the CIA has been intriguing in Iran, starting with the 1953 coup d’etat it concocted to oust populist Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in favor of a monarchy.
To some old CIA hands, the virtually trouble-free operation was one of the CIA’s greatest successes.
The autocratic shah, Washington’s firmest ally in the region after Israel, lasted for a quarter century.
“Hey, we got 25 years out of that,” a CIA man cracked to me, only half facetiously, when the shah was overthrown in 1979. “That’s not so bad.”
The religious fanatics who toppled him have done better. On Feb. 1, the Shiite regime will celebrate its 30th anniversary in power, with ballistic missiles in hand and nuclear weapons on the way.
And President Obama, 47, will inherit the latest bag of dirty tricks that, so far, have failed to undermine the regime, much less dislodge it from power or cripple its nuclear weapons effort.
“The covert American program, started in early 2008,” New York Times reporter David E. Sanger revealed on Jan. 11, “includes renewed American efforts to penetrate Iran’s nuclear supply chain abroad, along with new efforts, some of them experimental, to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies. It is aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the weapons-grade fuel and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear weapon.”
Now why, one might ask, would anonymous “senior American and foreign officials” tell Sanger that?
For the same reason, I’m going to guess, that their predecessors in 1961 used the Times repeatedly to warn Kennedy off the Bay of Pigs.
“Knowledge of the program has been closely held,” Sanger wrote, “yet inside the Bush administration some officials are skeptical about its chances of success, arguing that past efforts to undermine Iran’s nuclear program have been detected by the Iranians and have only delayed, not derailed, their drive to unlock the secrets of uranium enrichment.”
Who knows why officials talked to Sanger about such sensitive programs?
I suppose it’s possible that among them are Pentagon officials who think covert action has failed and now it’s time for the fist.
Whatever, the lesson to be taken is that this new, untested president, like his predecessor in 1961, needs to proceed very, very carefully.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Comments
Having lived through this mess caused by the CIA and America's reliance on covert action, I would say they are succesful less than 50% of the time. The only thing we have gotten out it is more headaches and poorer relations. The CIA should be confined to fact-finding. That was the initial purpose of creating the CIA.
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