Operation Dirty Trick: or, How Castro Would have Been Blamed if a Mercury Mission had Failed
- Aeryn Avilla
- Feb 20, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 10
On February 20, 1962, the United States launched its first manned orbital mission. Mercury-Atlas 6 carried the 40-year-old Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn and his spacecraft Friendship 7 on one of the most important voyages in the nation's history. Although it had been almost a year since the Soviet Union put the first man in orbit, Glenn's three-orbit mission was a massive success that boosted the American people's confidence in their space program. Glenn instantly became a national hero, and his fame and political potential set him up for a decades-long career as a public servant. Sixty years later, when people think of the early NASA, they think of an all-American boy in a silver spacesuit. But what if Mercury-Atlas 6 had failed?
Godspeed, John Glenn
NASA's prior two manned spaceflights utilized the Mercury-Redstone Launh Vehicle, a man-rated derivative of the US Army's Redstone ballistic missile. However, it was not powerful enough to carry a man into orbit. NASA's solution was to use a modified US Air Force Atlas missile. But there was a problem: The Atlas had an annoying habit of blowing up.
Between June 11, 1957 and February 16, 1962, the Atlas rocket launched 116 times. 65 were successes, 40 were failures, and 11 were partial failures for a success rate of 56%. Of the 19 that attempted to reach orbit, only 6 successfully did for a success rate of only 31.6%. The Atlas rocket's first space launch put the world's first communications satellite into orbit– SCORE, or Signal Communications by Orbital Relay Equipment. Looking at the Mercury-Atlas Launch Vehicle, the man-rated Atlas D used in Project Mercury, 3 were successful and 2 were not for a success rate of 60%.
Dirty Tricks and Cover-Ups
While NASA was planning for Glenn's historic flight, military planners at the Pentagon were figuring out how to remove Cuba's communist government from power. In November 1961, in response to the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion that April, the Kennedy administration officially authorized the implementation of Operation Mongoose, a campaign of covert operations and terrorist attacks to be carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency against the island nation of Cuba to remove prime minister Fidel Castro.
In 1997, nearly 2,000 pages of top secret Army records were declassified. These documents, dated from 1962 and 1963, were from the files of Joseph Califano, former Army General Counsel and Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army. One specific report, titled "Possible Actions to Provoke, Harass, or Disrupt Cuba," outlined numerous proposals to do just that. Number 7, coincidentally, was Operation Dirty Trick. Its objective was "to provide irrevocable proof that, should the Mercury manned orbit flight fail, the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba." This would be achieved by "manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans."
Directly above Operation Dirty Trick in this memo is Operation Cover-Up, in which the CIA would "convince the Communist government of Cuba that Naval Forces ostensibly assigned to the Mercury project is merely a cover." It notes that what this "cover" is should be left to speculation, and that this proposal could tie in with Dirty Trick
Some of the proposals in this document are better known than Dirty Trick and Cover-Up. Operation Free Ride called for the airdropping of one-way airline tickets for Latin American cities such as Mexico City in Mexico and Caracas in Venezuela to stir a mass exodus from the country. Operation Good Times is probably the best known, so I'll put it here for you to read.
Fortunately for NASA and the US, Mercury-Atlas 6 was a success and no plans like Operation Dirty Trick were ever proposed again. The Cold War nearly turned hot in October 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis and Operation Mongoose was phased out by early 1963.
A Real Fireball
I do want to point out a major problem that occurred during Glenn's flight. A faulty switch indicated the capsule's heat shield and landing bag came loose. The heat shield protected the spacecraft during reentry while the landing bag absorbed the shock of splashdown. If this was the case, only the straps of the retropack (the solid rocket motors that slowed the capsule for reentry) held the heat shield in place. If these straps came loose, Glenn and Friendship 7 would be lost during reentry. Normally, the retropack would be jettisoned after retrofire, but Mission Control ordered Glenn to retain it just in case. As he hurled through the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere, he watched chunks of something fly past the window. He feared it was his heat shield, but it was just the retropack, which was not designed to withstand reentry.
John Glenn served in the US Senate from the state of Ohio from 1974 to 1999 and returned to space as payload specialist on Space Shuttle Discovery during STS-95 in 1998. At 77 years old, he remains the oldest person to ever orbit the earth [1]. Glenn was the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven and the oldest living American astronaut before his passing on December 8, 2016 at the age of 95.
Although none of Operation Mongoose's plans were adopted, had Glenn's mission failed, can we be positive extreme measures would not have been taken to place the blame on the enemy as the country mourned the loss of one of its best and brightest? Fortunately, we will never know.
Author's Note: Thanks for reading and be sure to like and share!
[1] Only three individuals older than Glenn have been to space– Wally Funk (82), William Shatner (90 years and 205 days), and Ed Dwight (90 years and 253 days)– but did not orbit.
Bibliography
"Astronaut John Glenn and the Friendship 7 Mission." National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/friendship-7-transcript
"The Bay of Pigs Invasion and its Aftermath, April 1961-October 1962." Office of the Historian. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/bay-of-pigs
"Kennedy and Cuba: Operation Mongoose." Edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi. National Security Archive, October 2019. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2019-10-03/kennedy-cuba-operation-mongoose
Lardner, George, and Pincus, Walter. “MILITARY HAD PLAN TO BLAME CUBA IF GLENN'S SPACE MISSION FAILED.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 19 Nov. 1997, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/11/19/military-had-plan-to-blame-cuba-if-glenns-space-mission-failed/24eb451e-bdb2-441a-9b83-c4e8aecd6aa1/.
"Possible Actions to Provoke, Harass, or Disrupt Cuba." Record Number: 198-10004-10020. Record Series: Califano Papers. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2018/104-10333-10014.pdf –> jump to page 19
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