To a roomful of Cuban diplomats, many of whom knew otherwise, Khrushchev falsely claimed, “What is more, [the Americans] are trying to present the case as though rocket bases of the Soviet Union are being set up or are already established in Cuba. It is well known that this is foul slander. There is no Soviet military base in Cuba.” Actually, this is exactly what the Soviets were doing. “Of course we knew better, and on January 3, 1961, severed all diplomatic ties with Cuba,” Barnes explains.
Ten days later, the CIA convened its Special Group, a secret committee inside the National Security Council that had oversight regarding CIA covert activities. A formal decision was made that Castro’s regime “must be overthrown.” The man in charge of making sure this happened was Richard Bissell. In addition to being the highest-ranking CIA officer in the Special Operations Group, Bissell was also the most trusted CIA officer in the eyes of John F. Kennedy, the dashing new president. Before taking office, a member of the White House transition team asked Kennedy who he trusted most in the intelligence community. “Richard Bissell,” Kennedy said without missing a beat.
Bissell’s official title was now deputy director of plans. As innocuous as it sounded, DDP was in fact a euphemism for chief of covert operations for the CIA. This meant Bissell was in charge of the Agency’s clandestine service, its paramilitary operations. The office had previously been known as the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC. As deputy director of plans, Richard Bissell would be doing a lot more than playing a gentleman’s spy game from the air. The CIA’s paramilitary operations spilled blood. During these covert anti-Communist operations, men were dying in droves from Hungary to Greece to Iran, and all of these operations had to be planned, staged, and approved by the deputy director of plans.
In such a position there was writing on the wall, script that Richard Bissell did not, or chose not to, see. The man he was replacing was Frank Wisner, his old friend and the man who first introduced Bissell to the CIA. It was Frank Wisner who’d knocked on Bissell’s door unannounced and then spent a fireside evening in Bissell’s Washington, DC, parlor eleven years before. It was Wisner who had originally asked Bissell to siphon off funds from the Marshall Plan and hand them over to the CIA, no questions asked. Wisner had served the Agency as deputy director of plans from August 1951 to January 1959, but by the end of the summer of 1958, the job proved too psychologically challenging for him—Frank Wisner had begun displaying the first signs of madness. The diagnosis was psychotic mania, according to author Tim Weiner. Doctors and drugs did not help. Next came the electroshock treatment: “For six months, his head was clamped into a vise and shot through with a current sufficient to fire a hundred-watt light bulb.” Frank Wisner emerged from the insane asylum zombielike and went on to serve as the CIA’s London station chief. A broken man, Wisner did not last long overseas. He shuffled in and out of mad-houses for years until finally forced to retire in 1962: “He’d been raving about Adolf Hitler, seeing things, hearing voices. He knew he would never be well.” Tragically, on October 29, 1965, Wisner was getting ready to go hunting with his old CIA friend Joe Bryan at his country estate when he took a shotgun out of his gun cabinet and put a bullet in his own head.
The pressure that came with being the deputy director of plans for the CIA was, for some, as treacherous as a loaded gun.
As workers toiled away at Area 51 getting ready for the arrival of the Oxcart spy plane, Richard Bissell focused on his orders to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro. By 1961, the Agency decided that Bahía de Cochinos, or the Bay of Pigs, was the perfect place to launch its “paramilitary plan.” The little sliver of coastline on the south shore of the island was barely inhabited. A few summer cottages were scattered among little bays, used mostly for fishing and swimming, and there was a valuable asset nearby in “an airstrip not far from the beach.”