IT WAS unfair to blame Edward Lansdale for not toppling Castro when no one else had any better luck. And yet Mongoose had been a failure, and he had been responsible. His reputation inside the government went from that of a can-do covert-action specialist to a “nut,” “a fantasist, a lucky amateur.”103 This was the view pushed in particular by Sam Halpern and Tom Parrott of the CIA, the sources of these damning descriptions. They nurtured a long-standing loathing of the “Ugly American,” whose lack of traditional espionage credentials and disdain for CIA “tradecraft” was seen as an affront to
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