Ghosts of Havana (Judd Ryker #3)(9)
The chairwoman returned to her written text and continued, “We did not predict the Iranian revolution coming in 1979 and we continue to fly blind on political change in Tehran. We did not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union and we have been unable to foresee new Russian aggression. We have repeatedly missed the signs of new threats to the state of Israel, our most important democratic ally in the Middle East.”
Chairwoman Adelman-Zamora removed her reading glasses and sighed deeply for the cameras. “And most obvious of all, our neighbor to the south has been imprisoned by tyranny since 1959. That once-proud nation should be a close American ally. It should be an engine for prosperity in our hemisphere. Instead, our long history of failure to bring liberty to a country just ninety miles from our own shores is an affront to free people everywhere. Our missteps are a lingering embarrassment for these great United States. Today, we are continuing to fail freedom-loving people around the world by the misguided policy of our own administration. Despite the ill-advised steps by the State Department to embrace dictatorship and apologize for oppression, our neighbors remain locked in chains. I have called this special hearing today to ask a simple but vital question: How are we still losing Cuba?”
6.
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
TUESDAY, 11:15 A.M.
The red file taunted the Deputy Director. He snatched the folder labeled OPERATION RAINMAKER and threw it across the room. It flew like a Frisbee for a second before the papers scattered everywhere and floated down around his office like snowflakes.
“Dammit,” he swore to himself. He grimaced at the tall pile of files on his desk, a catalog of every covert operation by the Central Intelligence Agency against Cuba since the revolution in 1959. OPERATION TASMANIAN DEVIL, OPERATION PANDORA, OPERATION DEMON BARBER, OPERATION PIT BOSS, OPERATION BANANA SUNRISE. This mountain is a pathetic collection of history, he thought. A graveyard of bad ideas.
On the very bottom was a file much fatter than the others. He extracted OPERATION ZAPATA, tipping over the rest of the folders into a fan on his desk. As he opened the thick ZAPATA file, he winced as his chest tightened. The first document was a memo summarizing the Agency’s most embarrassing fiasco, the April 17, 1961, botched invasion by CIA-supported Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The memo to the CIA Director had been by Randolph Nye, the Deputy Director of Operations during the height of the Cold War. Nye was the man who had occupied this precise office, this seat. His seat.
Nye had accomplished many things that the world would never know about, but he had died a year ago, unredeemed. Quiet victories in Egypt, in the Congo, in Mexico, and in the Philippines. But the world would always remember the black eye of the Bay of Pigs. The air cover wasn’t approved. The ammunition ran out. The weather turned. The cash never arrived. Everything had gone wrong on that day.
Randolph Nye was now gone, but his ghost lived on in these walls, thought the Deputy Director. He wouldn’t allow that to happen to him. He wouldn’t allow that to happen again.
—
The intelligence game had changed so much. After the failings of 9/11, the United States’ multiple intelligence services had been reorganized. Instead of the clarity of a CIA Director leading America’s secret information-gathering and covert operations, a new super Director for National Intelligence was created to advise the President on all intelligence matters and to oversee all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA. The DNI was suddenly above the CIA Director, a new player in town and a new layer between the CIA and the White House. To compensate for this slight, the boxes were shuffled and renamed in Langley, too. The Deputy Director of Operations, the person responsible for global covert operations, was renamed the Director of the National Clandestine Service.
In a classic Washington move, the elevation in title was actually a demotion. He believed this was political theater and textbook ass-covering, the kind of bureaucratic crap that he had grown to despise about Washington, D.C. Just like the incessant meddling from Congress, the politics of management was a growing distraction from the real work of fighting America’s enemies. And a further erosion of the CIA’s preeminence.
So when he was eventually promoted to run covert operations, he insisted that they call him by the old name, the Deputy Director of Operations. That was the great Cold Warrior Allen Dulles’s title, too, before he became CIA Director. A lesser title on paper, but a symbolic nod to better times and older ways of doing things. And he had made a bargain with himself to make it all worthwhile.
—
The Deputy Director closed the Operation Zapata file and randomly opened another. This outlined an aborted attempt in the 1960s to poison El Jefe’s cigars. The next file detailed a bungled attempt to add an undetectable toxin to the Cuban leader’s aftershave. Another plot had planned to induce paranoia and psychosis by lacing his coffee with LSD via a tainted sugar cube. A fourth scheme made covert payments to bribe his security guards into turning their guns on their leader. They had accepted the cash but never pulled the trigger.
None of these operations had worked. His predecessor Randolph Nye had let America down. And let down the brave Cuban people.
The Deputy Director sighed to himself, knowing that, decades later, he was still letting them down. All nineteen successors between Nye and the current occupier of this office had let them down, he thought. The Deputy Director knew he now had access to more money and more technology than anything Nye could have ever imagined. Yet the same old men, the same ragtag rebels who had seized Havana in 1959, still ran Cuba. The island was in a prison and part of the blame lay squarely on him.