VENDETTA! Fidel Castro and the Kennedy Brothers.<i> By William B. Breuer</i> .<i> Wiley & Sons: 288 pp., $24.95</i>

“You blew it!” Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. greeted his son the president when he arrived at the family compound in West Palm Beach after the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961. The patriarch had taken a hit in the wallet when the Coca-Cola franchise he owned in Havana with Irish tenor Morton Downey had gone the way of Fidel Castro’s revolution. “I know that outfit,” he said of the CIA, which had planned and run the operation behind the scenes, “and I wouldn’t pay them a hundred bucks a week.” The invasion would become a family humiliation, and John and Robert Kennedy vowed not to get mad but to get even.

How they schemed to do so, arranging an intense series of covert actions called Operation Mongoose, is the central theme of “Vendetta!” by William B. Breuer, a prolific writer on military history. The low-profile missions, designed to be “plausibly deniable,” consisted of commando raids, sabotage and guerrilla infiltrations, coupled with fomenting an internal opposition: more “boom and bang” on the island. The book’s jacket blurb promises “revealing, new information” based on interviews with participants from the FBI and the CIA, but the chapter notes show only two: one with an assistant FBI director and the other with the CIA station chief in Miami. Only the second, Theodore Shackley, who was called the Blond Ghost because of his hair color and his recondite past, played more than a bit role. But he seems to have conformed to the agency’s code of omerta; the lone contribution attributed to him is a description of the camouflaged Miami station, “a good-sized city within a city,” which, although rich in detail, doesn’t breach a secret. Shackley, who later helped orchestrate the notorious Phoenix Program against suspected Viet Cong in Vietnam, undoubtedly could have shed some light on the question du jour: Were the Kennedys aware that assassination (in this case of Castro) had become an instrument of American foreign policy?

To set the stage for Mongoose, William B. Breuer traces the early careers of Castro and the Kennedys. He describes as “foolhardy” the young Cuban’s assault on President Batista’s Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953, which touched off the revolution. He tells how Castro created the “hoax” of more troops than were visible in his Sierra Maestra redoubt in 1957. And U.S. newspaper editors who fell for the Castro-as-Robin-Hood legend were “misty-eyed.” Throughout, the book suffers from a touch of Castrophobia. On the other hand, Breuer’s treatment of the Kennedys, while short of hagiographic, is even-handed. He traces JFK from his Democratic heritage in Boston, reinvented by old Joe and stage-managed by Robert, to a razor-thin 1960 presidential victory over Richard Nixon and a fateful post-election briefing by CIA Director Allen Dulles on the impending Bay of Pigs invasion.

How the Kennedys and Castro evolved into adversaries is a convoluted story. In April 1960, four months after his triumphant entry into Havana, the Cuban hero was invited to visit Washington and New York by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He was greeted by admiring throngs everywhere. On NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” he voiced opposition to communism and declared he would side with the United States in any showdown with the Soviet Union. But as a visiting head of state, Castro was snubbed by President Eisenhower, a spit-and-polish military man who was put off by Castro’s hirsute appearance and suspect politics. Castro was handed off to Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who, as soon as his visitor was out the door without a photo op, pronounced him at least “under communist discipline.” Breuer, as if to confirm their suspicions, pitches the view that Castro was a born Communist who would gravitate naturally into the Soviet orbit. But the CIA was not so sure, sizing him up as an “enigma” with whom “there still may be the possibility of a constructive relationship.”

The analysis was not without merit. During his formative stage, Castro had affiliated with the Autentico Party, which was mildly liberal, and in his work with the party, he seemed to be more organizer than ideologue. It was his brother Raul who belonged to the Young Communist League and brought his comrades into Castro’s ruling council. This left flank pushed for alignment with a superpower, and when Castro was stiffed by the White House, only the Soviet Union was left. When Eisenhower went on a golfing trip to avoid meeting with Castro, his tee shot might have been a huge slice into the foreign-policy rough.

But Ike took no mulligan. With Nixon as action officer, the administration gave the CIA the task of opening a stealth war against Cuba. Breuer recounts how an invasion brigade was recruited in Miami and sequestered in Guatemala and a pact with the devil was formed with the mob to assassinate Castro, which in agency jargon, was “tweeping (terminate with extreme prejudice).” In revisiting E. Howard Hunt, Sam Giancona, the caricature capo and the other protagonists, “Vendetta!” offers nothing significantly new.

There is, however, a fresh look at JFK’s pre-Bay of Pigs attitude toward Cuba. Well remembered are the 1960 TV debates with Nixon, when he out-hawked his opponent. But earlier in the campaign, he had styled Castro as “part of the legacy of Bolivar” and opined that had Eisenhower not made himself scarce when Castro came calling, relations with Cuba might have been more equable. Nor was Kennedy exactly gung ho after inheriting the invasion project. But he gave the green light, having painted himself into a corner with rash campaign promises to topple Castro. “I know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this one!” he grumbled to aide Theodore Sorensen.

As orphans of defeat the Kennedys went after Castro with a vengeance, as “Vendetta!” details. RFK ramrodded Operation Mongoose in his intensely personal style, spurred on by his wife, Ethel, whose own family’s Cuban holdings had been expropriated. The Miami CIA station, code-named JM/WAVE, burgeoned into the largest in the world, with a staff of 400 and today’s equivalent of a $550-million budget. Its navy was the largest in Caribbean seas. It was hoped that hundreds of pinpricks would eventually cause hemorrhaging, leaving the island too weak to resist a planned second exile invasion.

The author is at his best in describing an encounter between RFK, who was inspecting the JM/WAVE war room, and William Harvey, the Rambo-like CIA officer in charge of Mongoose. Kennedy noticed an item on the Teletype linking JM/WAVE with headquarters in Washington and, considering it a security breach, ripped it out. Harvey snarled, “Hey, where in the hell do you think you’re going with that?” snatching it from his hand. Kennedy shot him a burn-in-hell look, and not long afterward, Harvey found himself in a Roman purgatory.

But the Kennedys were playing with matches in a Cold War tinderbox. As part of the October 1962 missile crisis settlement, JFK promised to crack down on unauthorized military strikes against Cuba launched from American soil, but there was a crossed-fingers exemption for Mongoose. A flash-point was reached in October 1963 when the CIA raider Rex, landing a commando unit to blow up a copper mine in Cuba, was ambushed. Cuban MiGs mistakenly strafed a passing neutral freighter, while the Rex slunk away and American Phantom jets scrambled from Key West, Fla., in response to the freighter’s SOS Disaster was averted, however, when the Phantoms were recalled. Only a few weeks earlier, Moscow had warned that it would “not tolerate” further raids on Cuba.

Missing from “Vendetta!” is any reference to the clandestine operation JFK was running on his own, a diplomatic one that would halt the secret war. Through his trusted aide William Attwood at the United Nations, he was negotiating with Castro to normalize relations. By Nov. 21, 1963, Attwood recalled in his book “The Reds and the Blacks,” talks had reached the stage at which JFK wanted to see him “after a brief trip to Dallas.” At the same time Mongoose was highballing along. As Breuer recounts, on Nov. 22 in Paris, a high-ranking CIA officer handed Rolando Cubela, a disaffected Cuban official, a device to kill Castro: a ballpoint pen “containing a hypodermic needle so thin that the victim would not even feel its insertion.” During the meeting, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. (Despite compounding conspiracies, the author dismisses the notion that JFK was the victim of one more, a blowback from the secret war. He keeps the cuffs on Lee Harvey Oswald as a “ne’er-do-well” lone assassin, curtly dismissing alternative scenarios as “fanciful accounts.”)

Though “Vendetta!” falls short of being a definitive account of the secret war--many CIA and Pentagon documents on the subject are currently being released under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act--it contains a wealth of insights into that arcane era.