Charlie couldn’t believe his ears as the officer explained the false-flag scheme he claimed the Joint Chiefs chairman, General L. L. Lemnitzer, had presented to Defense Secretary Bob McNamara days before: the U.S. would stage a “series of well-coordinated incidents” at or near the U.S. base at Guantanamo “to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.” Fake saboteurs, fake riots, burning our own aircraft, even staging funerals for mock victims. The document the lieutenant presented was hideous: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” it stated. The general proposed staging terrorist operations against Cubans in Miami and Washington, DC, sinking a boatload of Cubans, real or imagined, an “incident” where a Cuban aircraft shot down a chartered civilian airliner on its way from the U.S. to Central America, or an “incident” where Cuban MiGs destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack. This, of course, would prompt a massive U.S. invasion of Cuba. Adiós, Fidel.

Charlie and his fellow congressmen promised the lieutenant they would protect his name. Who knew what a Pentagon willing to hatch and carry out such deranged orders might do to a leaker? And what the lieutenant didn’t know was that he was not the first officer to tread outside his chain of command. Charlie had previously received an anonymous letter detailing the CIA’s Operation Dirty Trick, a plan to blame the Cubans if anything had gone wrong with the Mercury orbit the month before. A different source told them about Operation Good Times, which would spread throughout Cuba a fake photo of “an obese Castro with two beauties in any situation desired” next to a “table brimming over with the most delectable Cuban food with an underlying caption (appropriately Cuban) such as ‘My ration is different.’”

After several years on the Oversight Committee, through the Eisenhower and now Kennedy administrations, Charlie had reached many disappointing conclusions about the wisdom and even the emotional stability of those tasked with keeping the United States safe, mostly those at the CIA, run by men to the manor born, boola-boola Brahmins with no sense of humility. The worst of these unaccountable operatives was the one known as “the most brilliant man in Washington,” Richard Bissell—he of Groton, Yale, the Skull and Bones, the Marshall Plan, and the Ford Foundation—the agency’s deputy director for plans ever since the man who’d recruited him for the job, Frank Wisner, had had a mental breakdown in ’58.