The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

OPERATION MONGOOSE was not revived after the end of the crisis. On January 4, 1963, McGeorge Bundy wrote to President Kennedy, “There is well-nigh universal agreement that Mongoose is at a dead end.” 99 Efforts to overthrow Castro resumed shortly thereafter, with Bobby Kennedy as eager as ever to topple the Cuban strongman, but Lansdale was no longer in charge. A new Cuba Coordinating Committee, headed by Sterling J. Cottrell, a deputy assistant secretary of state, replaced the Caribbean Survey Group.100 Among the ideas explored in 1963, after Lansdale’s removal from the project, was a plan to give Castro a skin-diving suit contaminated with “a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin condition” and another one to plant an “explosives-rigged sea shell” in an area where he liked to go skin diving. This plan was called off, the CIA inspector general wrote, when it was determined that “none of the shells that might conceivably be found in the Caribbean area was both spectacular enough to be sure of attracting attention and large enough to hold the needed volume of explosives.”101 The most that the CIA accomplished in 1963 was to stage a few attacks on Cuban infrastructure. But such sabotage—“boom and bang,” in CIA parlance—“never amounted to more than pinpricks,” Richard Helms conceded. “The notion that an underground resistance organization might be created on the island remained a remote, romantic myth.”