Bissell, cleaning his eyegla.s.ses with the tip of his tie, nodded. "That's the general idea, Mr. President."

Kennedy, his eyes wrinkling at the corners with tension, his brow furrowing in concentration, shook his head slowly. "It won't wash, d.i.c.k. Presumably-hopefully-your sixteen planes will inflict sixteen planes' worth of damage on Castro's air force. Castro will surely have footage of the damage. He may even have footage of the attack. How in heaven's name can you hope to pa.s.s off the raids as if they were done by two planes? n.o.body will swallow it."

"The notion that we can plausibly deny American involvement will be compromised from the start," agreed Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State.

Decked out in a sports jacket, slacks and an open-necked shirt, Jack Kennedy presided from the head of a long oval table cluttered with coffee cups and packs of cigarettes, the saucers doubling as ash trays. The President had gone over to State late in the afternoon to witness the swearing-in of Anthony Drexel Biddle as amba.s.sador to Spain, then ducked into the small conference room tucked away behind Rusk's office immediately after the 5:45 ceremony. It was D-day minus thirteen. A dozen people were alreauy crammed into the room. Some had been waiting for hours; in order not to attract attention to the meeting, they had been instructed to arrive by side doors throughout the afternoon. Now Bissell and Dulles exchanged knowing looks. Leo Kritzky underlined two sentences on a briefing paper and pa.s.sed it to Bissell, who glanced at it, then turned back to Jack Kennedy. "Mr President, it's obvious that the key to the invasion is the success of the landings. And the key to the success of the landings, as we've pointed out before is complete control of the air s.p.a.ce over the beaches. Castro has a small air force-we count two dozen machines which are air worthy and sixteen which are combat-ready. It is essential to the success of our project that they be destroyed on the ground before D-day. If the cover story is bothering you-"

"What's bothering me," Kennedy snapped, "is that no one in his right mind is going to believe it. We can count on the Communist bloc to raise a stink at the United Nations. The world will be watching. Adai Stevenson has to sound convincing when he denies-"

"Perhaps we could fly some additional B-26s into Miami-" Dulles started to suggest.

"Replete with bullet holes in the wings," Kennedy commented ironically. Rusk leaned forward. "Let's face it, no cover story is going to hold water until your Cubans have captured the runway at the Bay of Pigs. Only then can we argue convincingly that Cuban freedom fighters or Castro defectors are flying from an air strip that has nothing to do with the United States."

Kennedy asked, "Is there any way you scale back the raid, d.i.c.k, in order to make the story of the two B-26 defectors look plausible?"

Bissell could see which way the wind was blowing; if he didn't give way there would be no air attacks at all before D-day. "I could conceivably cut it back to six planes-two for each of Castro's three airports. Anything we don't destroy on the D-minus-two raid we could still get on the D-minus-one raid."

Kennedy seemed relieved. "I can live with six planes," he said. The President glanced at Rusk, who nodded reluctantly. "I'd prefer no planes," the Secretary of State said, "but I'll buy into six."

The people gathered around the table started shooting questions at Bissell. Was the Cuban brigade motivated? Was its leadership up to the challenge? Had the Company's people in Miami cobbled together a credible provisional government? How much evidence was there to support the idea that large segments of Castro's army would refuse to fight? That the peasants would flock to join the freedom fighters?

Bissell handled the concerns with a combination of gravity and cool confidence. The brigade was motivated and straining at the leash. When the moment of truth came the provisional government in Miami would pa.s.s muster. The latest CIA intelligence report-CS-dash-three-slant-four-sevenJ.Q., that had been distributed earlier in the morning showed that Castro was losing popularity steadily: sabotage was frequent, church attendance was at record highs and could be taken as a benchmark of opposition to the regime. Disenchantment of the peasants had spread to all the regions of Cuba. Castro's government ministries and regular army had been penetrated by opposition groups that could be counted on to muddy the waters when the actual landing took place.

From the far end of the table, Paul Nitze, Kennedy's a.s.sistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, asked what would happen to the brigade if the invasion was called off. Kennedy caught Dulles's eye and smiled grimly. Bissell admitted that the Company would have a disposal problem. The 1,500 members of the brigade couldn't be brought back to Miami; they would have to be dumped somewhere out of sight of the American press.

"If we're going to dump them," Kennedy remarked with sour fatality, "there's something to be said for dumping them in Cuba."

At the last minute the President had invited Senator Fulbright to join the briefing; Fulbright had gotten wind of JMARC and had sent Kennedy a long private memorandum outlining why he was dead set against the operation. Now Kennedy turned to the Senator, who was sitting next to him, and asked what he thought. Fulbright's mastery of foreign affairs won respect even from those who disagreed with him. He sat back in his chair and eyed Bissell across the table. "As I understand your strategy, Mr. Bissell, your brigade is supposed to break out of the beachhead and march on Havana, with supporters swelling its ranks as it goes."

Bissell nodded warily; he wasn't at all pleased to discover that Fulbright was a member of the President's inner circle when it came to the Cuban project.

Fulbright favored the DD/0 with a wan smile. "Sounds like the game plan for Napoleon's return from Elba in 1815. "

"Napoleon started out with fifteen hundred men also," Bissell shot back. When he reached Paris he had an army."

"It only lasted a hundred days," Fulbright noted. He turned to the President. "Forgetting for a moment whether this adventure can or will succeed, let me raise another aspect of the problem, namely that the invasion of Cuba clearly violates several treaties, as well as American law. I'm talking about t.i.tle 18, US code. Sections 958 through 962, I'm talking about t.i.tle 50, Appendix, Section 2021, which specifically prohibits the enlistment or recruitment for foreign military service in the United States, the preparation of foreign military expeditions, the outfitting of foreign naval vessels for service against a country with which we are not at war."

Rusk waved a hand. "In my view success is self-legitimizing. It legitimized Castro when he seized power. It legitimized the founding fathers of this country when they rebelled against British rule. I've always taken it for granted that Jefferson and Washington would have been hanged as traitors if the revolution had failed."

Fulbright shook his head angrily. "The United States is forever condemning Moscow for meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign countries, Mr. President. Intervention in Cuba will open the door to Soviet intervention anywhere in the world-"

Dulles said, "The Soviets are already intervening anywhere in the world, Senator."

Fulbright didn't back off. "If we go ahead with this, if we invade Cuba, we won't have a leg to stand on when we condemn them."

"You're forgetting that the operation is going to look indigenous," Bissell remarked.

Fulbright fixed him with an intense gaze. "No matter how Cuban the operation is made to appear, everyone on the planet is going to hold the United States-hold the Kennedy administration-accountable for it." The Senator turned back to the President. "If Cuba is really so dangerous to the national interest we ought to declare war and send in the Marines."

Kennedy said, "I'd like to go around the room-I'd like to see what everyone thinks."

He looked to his right at Adolf Berle, the State Department's Latin American specialist. Berle, an old Liberal warhorse who had served under Franklin Roosevelt, began weighing the pros and cons. Kennedy cut him short. "Adolf, you haven't voted. Yes or no?"

Berle declared, "I say, let 'er rip, Mr. President!" Rusk, who had been in on the planning of guerrilla operations in the China-Burma theater during World War II, wasn't convinced that the Company's operation would succeed but he felt that the Secretary of State had to close ranks behind his President, and he did so now with a lukewarm endors.e.m.e.nt of the operation. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Bundy's deputy, Walt Rostow all voted for JMARC. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lyman Lemnitzer, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Arleigh Burke, voiced reservations about whether the operation could be plausibly disavowed; when pressed, both conceded that the CIA and the President were better judges of this aspect than the military chiefs. Nitzer said he thought the chances of success were fifty-fifty but Bissell had made a convincing case that the Cuban people would join the freedom fighters, which prompted him to come down on the side of the project.

Kennedy glanced at his wrist.w.a.tch. "Look, I know everyone is grabbing their nuts over this." He turned to Bissell. "Do you know Jack Benny's line when a mugger sticks a gun in his stomach and demands, 'Your money or your life?"' Bissell looked blank. "When Benny doesn't answer," Kennedy went on, "the mugger repeats the question. 'I said, your money or your life?' At which point Benny says, 'I'm thinking about it.'"

n.o.body in the room so much as cracked a smile. The President nodded heavily. "I'm thinking about it. What's the time frame for my decision?"

"The ships put to sea from Guatemala on D-minus-six, Mr. President. The latest we can shut things down is noon on Sunday, D-minus-one."

Jack Kennedy's eyes narrowed and focused on a distant thought; in a room crowded with people he suddenly looked as if he were completely alone. "Noon," he repeated. "Sixteen April."

The Mosquito Coast was little more than a memory on the horizon astern as the five dilapidated freighters, half a day out of Puerto Cabaezas, Nicaragua, steamed north in a line, one ship plodding through the silvery-gray wake of another, toward the island of Cuba. Sitting on the main deck of the lead ship, the Rio Escondido, his back propped against a tire of the communications van, Jack McAuliffe caught a glimpse through binoculars of the distinctive bedspring airsearch radar antenna atop the mast of an American destroyer, hull down off to starboard. The aircraft carrier Ess.e.x, loaded with AD-4 Skyhawk jet fighters, would be out there beyond the escorting destroyers. It was rea.s.suring to think the US Navy was just over the horizon, shadowing the dilapidated freighters and the 1,453 Cuban freedom fighters crowded onto them. Overhead, on the flying bridge, a merchant officer was lining up the mirrors of his s.e.xtant on the first planet to appear in the evening sky. Around the deck, amid the drums of aviation fuel lashed with rusting steel belts to the deck, the hundred and eighty men of the sixth battalion of La Brigada lay around on sleeping sacks or army blankets. Some of them listened to Spanish music on a portable radio, others played cards, still others cleaned and oiled their weapons.

"D-day minus six," Roberto Escalona said, settling down next to Jack. ''

"So far, so good, pal."

Up on the fo'c's'le forward of the foremast, some of the Cubans were lobbing empty number ten cans into the water and blasting away at them with Browning automatic rifles or M-3 submachine guns. Shrieks of pleasure floated back whenever someone hit one of the targets. From a distance the Cubans looked like kids trying their luck at the rifle range of a county fair, not warriors headed into what the brigade priest had called, in the evening prayer, the valley of the shadow of death. "D-minus-six," Jack agreed. "So far, so bad."

"What's your problem, hombre?"

Shaking his head in disgust. Jack looked around. "The logistics, for starters, Roberto-logistically, this operation is a keg of gunpowder waiting to explode. When's the last time you heard of a troop ship going into combat crammed with a thousand tons of ammunition below decks and two hundred drums of aviation fuel on the main deck?"

"We've been over this a hundred times," Roberto said. "Castro has only sixteen operational warplanes. Our B-26s are going to destroy them on the ground long before we hit the beaches."

"They might miss one or two," Jack said. "Or Castro might have stashed a few more planes away for a rainy day."

Roberto groaned in exasperation. "We'll have an air umbrella over the Bahia de Cochinos," he said. "Any of Castro's planes that survive the initial strikes will be shot out of the skies by carrier jets flown by pilots who don't speak a word of Spanish."

"You still think Kennedy's going to unleash the Navy if things heat up," Jack said.

Roberto clenched his fingers into a fist and brought it to his heart. "I believe in America, Jack. If I didn't I wouldn't be leading my people into combat."

"I believe in America, too, Roberto, but America hasn't told me how we're supposed to wrestle four-hundred-pound drums of gasoline off the ship and onto the beach. If we don't get them ash.o.r.e, our B-26s won't be able to operate from the Bay of Pigs strip after you capture it."

Roberto only smiled. "When my kids get a whiff of victory in their nostrils they'll move mountains."

"Forget about moving mountains," Jack said. "I'll settle for drums of gasoline."

One of the mess boys made his way forward carrying a wooden tray , filled with tumblers of Anejo, a distilled rum that was taken with coffee in Cuba but sipped neat on the Rio Escondido because the electric coffee machine in the galley had broken down. Roberto clanked gla.s.ses with Jack and tossed back some of the rum. "Did you get to speak with your wife before we left?" he asked.

"Yeah. The loading master at Puerto Cabaezas let me use his phone. I got through to her right before we put to sea."

Jack turned away and grinned at the memory: "Oh, Jack, is that really you? I can't believe my G.o.dd.a.m.n ears," Millie had cried into the telephone. "Where are you calling from?"

"This isn't a secure line, Millie," Jack had warned.

"Oh, Christ, forget I asked. Anyhow, I know where you are. Everyone in the shop knows where you are. Everyone knows what you're doing, too."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Jack had said, and he had meant it. He had heard scuttleb.u.t.t about the New York Times story on the CIA's operation in Guatemala. "Hows my boy? How's Anthony?"

"He's only incredible, honey. He celebrated his eight-month birthday yesterday by standing up all by himself for the first time. Then he fell down all by himself, too. But he didn't cry, Jack. He picked himself up all over again. Oh, honey, I just know the first words out of his mouth's going to be your family motto-once down is no battle!"

"What about you, sweetheart? You hanging in there?"

The phone had gone silent for a moment. Jack could hear Millie breathing on the other end of the line. "I'm surviving," she had finally said. "I miss you, Jack. I miss your warm body next to mine in bed. I miss the tickle of your mustache. I get h.o.r.n.y remembering the time you touched the hem of my skirt back in Vienna..."

Jack had laughed. "Jesus H. Christ, if this were a secure line I'd tell you what I miss."

"Screw the line, tell me anyhow," Millie had pleaded.

The loading master had pointed to the Rio Escondido tied to the pier. Through the grimy office window Jack could see the sailors singling up the heavy mooring lines. "I've got to go, sweetheart," Jack had said. "Give Anthony a big kiss from his old dad. With luck, I ought to be home soon."

Millie had sounded subdued. "Come home when you can, Jack. Just as long as you come home safe and sound. I couldn't bear it if-"

"Nothing's going to happen to me."

"I love you, Jack."

"Me, too. I love you, too, Millie." He had listened to her breathing a moment longer, then had gently placed the receiver back on its cradle.

"There's something I've been wanting to ask you, hombre," Roberto was saying now.

"What's stopping you?"

"I know why I'm here. I know why they're here," he said, waving toward the Cubans sprawled around the deck. "I don't know what you're doing here, Jack."

"I'm here because I was ordered to come out and hold your hand, Roberto.

"That's horses.h.i.t and you know it. I heard you volunteered."

"This is a hot a.s.signment for a young officer looking for a promotion."

"More horses.h.i.t, hombre."

The shooting on the fo'cs'le had stopped. Darkness had fallen abruptly, as it does in the Caribbean. Stars were still dancing over the tips of the swaying masts. The bow wave, filled with phosph.o.r.escent seaweed, washed down the sides of the ancient hull. Jack polished off his rum. "In the beginning," he told Roberto, "it was inertia. I was in motion-been in motion since they sent me off to Berlin ten years ago. And a body in motion tends to continue in motion. Then it was curiosity, I suppose. Where I come from you're brought up to test yourself." He thought of Anthony. "You climb to your feet, you fall down, you climb to your feet again. It's only by testing yourself that you discover yourself."

"So what have you discovered?"

"A center, a bedrock, a cornerstone, the heart of the heart of the matter. On one level I'm the son of an Irish immigrant buying into America. But that's only part of the story. I came down here hoping to find the beginning of an answer to the eternal question of what life is all about. To give it a name, Roberto, I guess what I discovered was something worth rowing for besides speed."

d.i.c.k Bissell's Cuba war room on the ground floor of Quarters Eye had been transformed for what one Company clown had billed as a premortem autopsy on the cadaver known as JMARC, the last global review scheduled before the Cuban freedom fighters. .h.i.t the beaches. Fifty or so folding chairs had been set up in semicircular rows facing a lectern. Folding metal tables off to one side were filled with sandwiches, soft drinks and electric coffee urns. There was a handwritten sign posted on the inside of the door advising partic.i.p.ants that they could make notes for the purposes of discussion, but they were obliged to deposit them in the burn bin when they left the room. d.i.c.k Bissell, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie hanging loose around his neck, had been talking nonstop for one and a quarter hours. Now, turning to the wall behind him, he rapped the grease pencil marks on the plastic overlay to bring everyone up to date on the progress of the five freighters ferrying Brigade 2506 toward the beaches designated Blue and Red at the Bay of Pigs. "We're at D-minus-three and counting," he said. "Planes from the Ess.e.x, patrolling the airs.p.a.ce between Cuba and the invasion fleet, have seen no indication of increased air or sea activity on the part of Castro's forces. We haven't stepped up the U-2 overflights for the obvious reason that we don't want to alert Castro. The single overflight on D-minus-four showed no unusual activity either."

A Marine colonel sheepdipped to JMARC said from the front row, "d.i.c.k, the communications people on Swan Island did pick up a sharp increase in coded traffic between Point One and several militia units on the island. And the Pentagon is reporting more radio traffic than usual between the Soviet emba.s.sy in Havana and Moscow."

Leo raised a finger. "There's also that report from the Cuban government in exile in Miami about the two Cuban militiamen who fled in a fishing boat to Florida last night-the militiamen, from the 312th Militia Battalion stationed on the Isle of Pines, reported that all leaves have been cancelled until further notice."

Bissell took a sip of water, then said, "So far we've been unable to confirm the report from the militiamen, nor is there evidence of leaves being cancelled anywhere else in Cuba. As for the increase in Cuban military traffic, I want to remind you all that we've known since late February that the Cuban General Staff was planning to call a surprise alert sometime in late March or early April to test the readiness of the militia to respond to an emergency situation. The alert even had a code name-"

Leo said, "The Cubans were calling it Operation Culebras."

"That's it," Bissell said. "Culebras. Snakes."

"Which leaves the Russian traffic," Ebby noted from the second row.

Bissell worked a cap on and off of a fountain pen. "If you take the traffic between any given Soviet emba.s.sy in the world and Moscow, you'll see that it fluctuates from week to week and month to month. So I don't see what conclusions we can draw from an increase in Russian diplomatic traffic. For all we know, a Russian code clerk in the Havana emba.s.sy could be having a hot love affair with a code clerk in Moscow."

"That's not very convincing," Ebby muttered.

Bissell stared hard at him. "How would you read these particular tea leaves, Eb?"

Ebby looked up from some notes he had jotted on a sc.r.a.p of paper. "It's the nature of the beast that every morsel of intelligence can have several interpretations. Still, every time we see a detail that would appear to warn us off JMARC, we somehow manage to explain it away."

And there it was, out in the open for everyone to see: the visceral misgivings of one of the Company's most respected middle-level officers, a veteran of the CIA's unsuccessful efforts to infiltrate agents behind the Iron Curtain in the early fifties, a holder of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for his exploits in Budapest in 1956. The room turned still-so still that it was possible to hear a woman in the back scratching away on a cuticle with a nail file. Bissell said, very quietly, "Your 'every time we see a detail' covers an awful lot of territory, Eb. Are you suggesting that we re inst.i.tutionally incapable of criticizing an operation?"

"I guess I am, d.i.c.k. I guess I'm saying it is an inst.i.tutional problem- the Company has the action in Cuba, so it has become the advocate, as opposed to the critic, of the action it has. What criticism I've seen always seems to be confined to this or that detail, never to whether the operation itself is flawed."

"D-minus-three seems to me to be pretty late in the game for second thoughts."

"I've had second thoughts all along. I did raise the problem of our losing the so-called guerrilla option when we switched the landing site from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs. When I was brought in on the logistics end of the operation, I wrote a paper suggesting that the obsession with being able to plausibly deny an American role in the invasion had adversely influenced the choice of materiel-we are using old, slow cargo ships with limited storage s.p.a.ce below decks, we are using antiquated B-26 bombers flying from air bases in Central America instead of southern Florida, giving them less time over target." Ebby, tormented by the possibility that the Company was treating the Cubans freedom fighters the way it had treated the Hungarians five years before, shut his eyes and ma.s.saged the lids with the thumb and third finger of his right hand. "Maybe I should have raised these points more forcefully-"

Bissell swatted at the air with a palm as if he were being strafed by an insect. "If those are your only objections-"

Ebby bristled. "They're not my only objections, not by a long shot-"

"Mr. Ebbitt seems to forget that we pulled off this kind of operation in Guatemala," a young woman working on the propaganda team commented from the back row.

Ebby was growing angrier by the second. "There's been nothing but regression in Guatemala since we got rid of Arbenz," he said, twisting around in his seat. "Ask the Mayan campesinos if we succeeded. Ask them if-"

Bissell tried to calm things down. "Okay, Eb. That's what we're here for. Let's hear your objections."

"For starters," Ebby began, "it's an open question whether the so-called Guatemala model will work in Cuba. Castro won't scare off the way Arbenz did in Guatemala simply because we land a brigade of emigres on one of his beaches. He's made of sterner stuff. Look at his track record. He and a handful of guerrilla fighters sailed to Cuba on a small yacht, took to the mountains and survived everything Batista could throw at them, and finally walked into Havana when Batista lost his nerve and ran for it. Today Castro is thirty-two years old, a confident and vigorous man on the top of his game, with zealous supporters in the military and civilian infrastructure."

Ebby pushed himself to his feet and walked around to one of the tables and drew himself a cup of coffee. Behind him, n.o.body uttered a word. He dropped two lumps of sugar into the cup and stirred it with a plastic spoon as he turned back to face Bissell. "Look at the whole thing from another angle, d.i.c.k. Even if the invasion does succeed, the whole world will see this for what it is: a CIA operation from start to finish. The fact of the matter is that JMARC is likely to cripple the Company for years to come. We're supposed to steal secrets and then a.n.a.lyze the bejesus out of them. Period. Using the Company to do covertly what the government doesn't have the b.a.l.l.s to do overtly is going to make it harder for us to collect intelligence. What business do we have mounting an amphibious invasion of a country because the Kennedys are p.i.s.sed at the guy who runs it? We have an Army and a Navy and the Marines and an Air Force- they're supposed to handle things like invasions." Ebby opened his mouth to say something else, then, shrugging, gave up.

At the lectern, Bissell had been toying with his wedding ring, slipping it up and back on his finger until the skin was raw. "Whoever called this a premortem certainly knew what he was talking about," he said uneasily. Nervous laughter rippled through the war room. "Anyone who a.s.sumes that we haven't agonized over the points Ebbitt raised would be selling us short. what you're saying, Eb-what we've said to ourselves so many times the words ring in my brain like a broken record-is that there are risks no matter what we do. There are risks in not taking risks. Risks in moving the invasion site to the more remote Bay of Pigs. Risks in using obsolete B-26s instead of Skyhawks. Risks in calculating how the Cuban people and the Cuban Army will respond to the landings. Our job up on the top floor is to calculate these risks and then weigh them against the downside. Which, believe me, is what we've done." Bissell's voice was hoa.r.s.e and fading fast. He took another gulp of water. Then he straightened his stooped shoulders as if he were a soldier on a parade ground. "Let me be clear-I believe in the use of power, when it's available, for purposes that I regard as legitimate. Ridding the hemisphere of Castro, freeing the Cuban people from the oppression of Communism, is clearly legitimate. So we'll go forward, gentlemen and ladies, and win this little war of ours ninety miles from the coast of Florida."

The Marine colonel hammered a fist into the air. A dozen or so people in the room actually applauded. Bissell, embarra.s.sed, shuffled through his notes. "Now, I want to say a word about the bogus coded messages we're going to broadcast from Swan Island..."