NINE

The CIA in the Days of Camelot

ONE OF THE BITTEREST electoral battles of the century was fought in 1960, when Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts was elected President over the incumbent vice president, Richard Milhous Nixon. For Nixon and his longtime backers¹ in and out of government, the defeat on November 8 proved staggering and unexpected. They had many concrete plans for the next four years, and their dreams had been deflated by that “half a-vote-per-precinct” loss.

Years later, Nixon wrote one of the most unusual articles ever published for the millions of readers of Reader’s Digest. Under the title “Cuba, Castro and John F. Kennedy,” the article appeared in the November 1964 issue.

Nixon began with these remarkable sentences: “On April 19, 1959, I met for the first and only time the man who was to be the major foreign policy issue of the 1960 presidential campaign; who was destined to be a hero in the warped mind of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s assassin; and who in 1964 is still a major campaign issue. The man, of course, was Fidel Castro.”

Nixon had been Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president during the 1950s, and before that, going back to 1947, had served in both the House and the Senate. He knew Washington well, and the great industrial, legal, and banking combines that are so closely enmeshed with the government. In the article, he looked back over the hectic earlier years and linked the four factors that were uppermost in his mind:

1.              the 1960 election

2.              Fidel Castro

3.              the death of the President, John F. Kennedy

4.              the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

He wrote almost nothing about the growing warfare in Southeast Asia, even though he knew very well that it had been under way since 1945, when a vast shipment of American arms was put in the hands of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. By 1964, it had run its complex course, a course he had encouraged under the direction of the CIA.

Nixon’s article was published just one month after the release of the twenty-six-volume report of the Warren Commission, which made public the incredible finding that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had been responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy. It is astonishing that, since Nixon’s article was actually written before the Warren Commission report was issued, he had arrived at the same finding as that highly confidential report with his identification of Lee Harvey Oswald as “President Kennedy’s assassin.”

It is worth noting that a member of the Warren Commission also wrote an identical finding before the report was published. Gerald R. Ford’s article “Piecing Together the Evidence” appeared in Life magazine on October 2, 1964, before the Warren Report came out.

These two men—subsequently Presidents—for some reason found it necessary to put on the record, as soon as they could and before the official publication of the Warren Commission Report, their support of the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. This allegation of theirs was not true. Anyone with a few minutes of spare time can prove that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone assassin. Why did both of these men feel compelled to say that he was? To whom were these public figures beholden?

It has been established that Nixon was in Dallas on the day, and at the exact time, that JFK was shot—12:30 P.M., Central Standard Time, November 22, 1963.² Oddly, he avoided that fact in his Reader’s Digest article. Nixon wrote:

I boarded a plane [in Dallas on the morning of November 22] to New York. We arrived on schedule at 12:56. I hailed a cab. We were waiting for a light to change when a man ran over from the street corner and said that the President had just been shot in Dallas. This is the way I learned the news.” [NOTE: A man told him the news]

In the November 1973 issue of Esquire magazine, there’s the following imaginative quote by Nixon:

I attended the Pepsi-Cola convention [in Dallas] and left on Friday morning, November 22, from Love Field, Dallas, on a flight back to New York . . . on arrival in New York we caught a cab and headed for the city . . . the cabbie missed a turn somewhere and we were off the highway . . . a woman came out of her house screaming and crying. I rolled down the cab window to ask what the matter was and when she saw my face she turned even paler. She told me that John Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas. [NOTE: This time a woman told him the news]

That is not the end of Nixon’s version of that busy day. The Nixon story that appears in Jim Bishop’s book The Day Kennedy Was Shot is said to be the “official” account:

At Idlewild Airport [now JFK Airport] in New York . . . reporters and photographers had been waiting for the American Airlines plane . . . among [the passengers] was Nixon. As he got off the plane, he thought that he would give “the Boys” basically the same interview he had granted in Dallas . . . Nixon posed for a few pictures . . . got into a taxi-cab . . . was barely out of the airport when one of the reporters got the message: The President has been shot in Dallas.

Nixon covered up the important fact that he had been in Dallas at the very time Kennedy was killed with that erroneous recollection which he included in the Reader’s Digest article. Why did Richard Nixon not want anyone to know that he was actually in Dallas at the time of the assassination? Why did he so categorically pronounce Oswald to be the killer before the specious evidence of the Warren Commission had been made public? Does he have other information that he has been concealing to this day? It is uncanny that he so positively linked Cuba, Castro, Oswald, and Kennedy while at the same time completely omitting other important events. They were his priority; he must have had his reasons.

Nowhere was Nixon’s bias more evident than in another passage from the Reader’s Digest article: “Fidel Castro, therefore, proved to be the most momentous figure in John F. Kennedy’s life,” wrote Nixon. This was Nixon’s version. Would Kennedy have agreed?

As these chapters on the CIA and its role in the warfare in Southeast Asia arrive at the threshold of the Kennedy era, it is important to realize that JFK’s ascendance to power was a much more ominous transition than many have understood. An analysis of Nixon’s unusual comments will make this clear.

Castro and the Cuban situation in 1960 were the major foreign policy issues during the Nixon-Kennedy campaign, principally because Nixon had made them so.

On March 17, 1960, President Eisenhower had approved a rather modest CIA proposal for “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime”³ developed by the CIA and endorsed by the Special Group⁴ consisting of a deputy undersecretary of state, a deputy secretary of defense, the director, of central intelligence, and the special assistant to the President for national security affairs. As an ex officio member, Vice President Nixon was almost always present at these meetings.

This proposal later became known as the Bay of Pigs operation. Nixon not only knew of the President’s approval but, as vice president, was one of the prime movers of that top-secret CIA project. As he wrote for Reader’s Digest: “I was one of only three members of the President’s Cabinet who had been briefed on it, and . . . had been the strongest advocate for setting up and supporting such a program.”

During the campaign, this inside awareness of a highly classified CIA operation created a cruel dilemma for Nixon. Both Democratic and Republican headquarters knew, as they approached the fourth television debate of that campaign, that the presidential race was neck and neck. Nixon, with his eyes on Kennedy, wrote:

I was faced with a heads-he-wins, tails-I-lose proposition. If in the TV debate I were to reveal the existence of the [CIA’s Cuban] training program . . . I would pull the rug out from under Kennedy’s position. But, if I did so, the project would be doomed. I had only one choice: to protect the security of the program.

JFK, unrestrained by such top-secret security considerations, advocated “that the United States openly aid anti-Castro forces inside and outside Cuba.” The Kennedy attack had been released in time to appear in the afternoon papers, before the television debate went on the air. In this release the headlines said: “Kennedy Advocates U.S. Intervention in Cuba; Calls for Aid to Rebel Forces in Cuba.”

Each candidate was battling with all guns blazing; as in love and war, there are no limits in a political contest. Nixon’s assessment of Kennedy’s wiles fell short. Again, in the Reader’s Digest article, he wrote: “In a speech before the American Legion convention . . . I had gained the initiative on the issue. . . .”

It is hard to believe the shrewd Nixon still believed, in 1964, that “[he] had gained the initiative on this issue.” He should have known that after that very same American Legion convention, he had easily been outfoxed by Jack Kennedy. Kennedy proved his wide knowledge of this CIA project by his comments during the 1960 TV debates and during the progression of events that followed.

Immediately after the American Legion convention, the top-ranking ringleaders of the Cuban exile community, some of whom had been on the platform with Nixon at the convention, flew directly to Washington for a strategy meeting. Where did that meeting take place? Right in the private confines of Senator Kennedy’s Capitol Hill office. Kennedy had stolen a march on Nixon. He made himself totally aware of all that was going on in that top-secret CIA program, and when the time came to fire the big guns, during the fourth television debate, he did. He had all the facts.

His handling of this major issue was so effective that he won the television debate handily and then won the closest presidential election in history over the outgunned Nixon. At that time, Nixon may have taken a page from the Kennedy clan motto: “Don’t get mad, get even.” A bold counterattack began. Nixon and his cronies determined to get even. Most old-line bureaucrats know that the time to make huge gains is during that “lame duck” period between the election in November and the inauguration of the new President in January. At no time is this gambit more opportune than at the end of an eight-year presidential cycle.

The CIA and its bureaucratic allies in key government positions made some telling moves that, in retrospect, show how astutely they had read the presidential tea leaves. When Eisenhower had approved the CIA “Cuban exile” proposal, he had one thing in mind. Since the Castro takeover on January 1, 1959, tens of thousands of Cubans had fled the island. In Ike’s view, the best way to provide for these refugees, at least those of military age, was to put them in the army or in an army-type environment, where they would get food, clothing, and shelter while they became oriented to the American way of life. After that they could go it on their own. Thus, he approved a plan to put thousands of them into an “army” training program—and no more than this.

The CIA, however, saw this as an opportunity to go a bit further. The CIA’s presentation, made by Allen Dulles on March 17, 1960, to the National Security Council,⁵ was divided into four parts, one of which was “the development of a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for future guerrilla action.”

This was later expanded by the CIA to read:

Preparations have already been made for the development of an adequate paramilitary force outside of Cuba, together with mechanisms for the necessary support of covert military operations on the island. Initially a cadre of leaders will be recruited after careful screening and trained as paramilitary instructors. In a second phase a number of paramilitary cadres will be trained at secure locations outside of the United States so as to be available for immediate deployment into Cuba to organize, train, and lead resistance forces recruited there both before and after the establishment of one or more active centers of resistance. The creation of this capability will require a minimum of six months and probably closer to eight. In the meantime, a limited air capability to resupply and for infiltration and exfiltration already exists under CIA control and can be rather easily expanded if and when the situation requires. Within two months it is hoped to parallel this with a small air supply capability under deep cover as a commercial operation in another country.

This is precisely how the CIA presented its proposal, and this is the way such clandestine operations generally begin. At the time of approval, the President believed the concept of paramilitary action, as described, was to be limited to the recruitment of Cuban exile leaders and to the training of a number of paramilitary cadres of exiles for subsequent use as guerrillas in Cuba. Let no one be misled into believing President Eisenhower approved an invasion by a handful of Cuban refugees—not the man who had led the massive and successful Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944.

When this Cuban exile program was initiated, the CIA and its allies in the military had prepared a curriculum⁶ to provide the students in training with background information on Cold War techniques. A portion of this training described what is meant when the CIA uses the term “paramilitary”:

Paramilitary Organizations: We Americans are not very well acquainted with this type of organization because we have not experienced it in our own country. It resembles nothing so much as a private army. The members accept at least some measure of discipline, and have military organization, and may carry light weapons. In Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s the parties of the right and the Communists had such organizations with membership in the hundreds of thousands. It is readily apparent what a force this can be in the political life of a country, particularly if the paramilitary forces are armed, when the supremacy of the army itself may be threatened.

Following formal authorization from the White House Special Group, which included Nixon, the CIA set out to recruit three hundred Cuban exiles for covert training outside the United States. As with most such programs, the CIA began in accordance with NSC directives to come to the military for support. An inactive U.S. military base in Panama, Fort Gulick, was selected as the initial training site. The CIA put together a small unit to reactivate the base and to provide the highly specialized paramilitary training that the agency employs for similar units at certain military-covered facilities in the States, such as the one at Camp Peary, Virginia.

In the beginning, the CIA was unable to obtain properly qualified military doctors for Fort Gulick and therefore went to the Military Support Office at Headquarters, U.S. Air Force⁷

This action marked the formal entry of the U.S. military into the Bay of Pigs program in support of the CIA.

To keep the CIA-Cuban exile program in perspective and to understand the significance of how this prior planning had an impact later upon the administration of John F Kennedy, it must be understood that these events were taking place while President Eisenhower was winding up his eight-year term in office. Eisenhower had had high hopes for his Crusade for Peace, based upon a successful summit conference in Paris during May 1960, and for a postsummit invitation to Moscow for a grand visit with Khrushchev. The visit to the Soviet Union was to cap his many triumphant tours of other countries, where the ever-popular Ike had drawn crowds of more than one million.

In preparation for the summit and its theme of worldwide peace and harmony, the White House had directed all aerial surveillance activity (“overflights”) of Communist territory to cease until further notice and had ordered that no U.S. military personnel were to become involved in any combat activities, covert or otherwise, during that period.

Because of these restrictions, the support of this Cuban exile training facility began cautiously. Aircraft that had been ordered for a Cuban exile air force were being processed under the terms of an Air Force contract. In the Far East, an enormous overflight program that had been delivering vital food, medicine, weapons, and ammunition to the Khamba tribesmen (who were battling Chinese Communist forces) in the far Himalayas of Tibet was curtailed. Yet on May 1, 1960, a U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers left Pakistan on a straight-line overflight of the Soviet Union en route to Bodo, Norway, contrary to the Eisenhower orders.

The U-2 came down in Sverdlovsk, halfway to its goal. Powers, alive and well, was captured by the Soviets. This incident destroyed the effectiveness of the summit conference and brought about the cancellation of the invitation to President Eisenhower to visit Moscow. It also ended Ike’s dream of the Crusade for Peace.

The same man who was in charge of the Cuban exile program and the vast overflight program that supported the Khambas, Richard Bissell, deputy director of plans for the CIA, was the man who ran the U-2 program and who, ostensibly, sent the Powers flight over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960.

Through this crescendo of events, the CIA kept the pressure on Vietnam⁸ and moved the Cuban exile project along. On August 18, 1960, the President and a few members of his cabinet were briefed by the CIA on these developments, and a budget of $13 million was approved. Additionally, military personnel and equipment were made available for the CIA’s use. Although the plan devised after Kennedy’s election seemed to be the same as the original one approved by Eisenhower, those familiar with day-to-day developments noted a change. A number of Cuban overflights had been flown, usually in Air America⁹ C-46 or C-54 transport aircraft. The crews were Cuban exiles. They were scheduled to hit selected drop-zone targets at night, based on signals from the ground. Few of these missions, if any, were ever successful, and reports reaching the Pentagon were that “Castro was getting a lot of good equipment free.”

There were a number of over-the-beach landings from U.S. Navy ships that targeted sugar refineries, petroleum storage sites, and other prime targets for sabotage. These met with some success. But many exile teams disappeared and were never heard from again. The CIA and Cuban exile leaders either underestimated or did not believe in the total effectiveness of Castro’s “block” system.¹⁰ They could not get through its surveillance.

Faced with the reality of this situation, certain key CIA planners took advantage of the lame-duck administration to change the approved concept for the Cuban paramilitary operations. By midsummer, moves were designed to build a Cuban exile strike force to land on the Cuban coast. The three-hundred-man operation had grown to a three-thousand-man invasion. By June 1960, the CIA obtained a number of B-26 aircraft from the U.S. Air Force, each modified with eight .50-caliber aerial-type machine guns in the nose section. Those aircraft were aerodynamically “cleaner,” with fewer antennas and protrusions to slow them down, and hence faster than the original World War II models. They packed tremendous firepower. Many of these B-26s had been used by the CIA in the aborted Indonesian rebellion of 1958¹¹ and were moved from Far East hideaways for use by the Cuban exiles.

The CIA had already consolidated its rather considerable covert air apparatus from air bases in Europe and Asia to a semisecret facility on Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. While this air force was being assembled at a modification facility in Arizona and an operations base in Florida, the CIA made a deal with Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, president of Guatemala, and his close friend, Roberto Alejo Arzu, a wealthy landowner, to begin the improvement of a small airport at Retalhuleu in western Guatemala.

By summer 1960, around-the-clock construction was under way, under the management of a “nonexistent” firm known as the Cornwall-Thompson Company. Before long, a large assembly of C-46s and C-54s from Air America, along with the B-26s, took shape, and all further training was keyed to the landing operation on Cuban soil. While the Cuban program was being escalated, the CIA and its allies in the Pentagon took advantage of the political hiatus. They had so many covert programs under way and so many more planned that they had to make some arrangements for an enormous increase in available manpower.

The National Security Council’s 5412/2 Committee, which was empowered to direct covert operations, had approved the limited use of military personnel for Cuban training. That approval opened the door to other cases and other clandestine operations. This is what CIA Director Allen Dulles used to call “peacetime operations,” meaning clandestine operations. Some years later the Reagan administration—which included some of the same undercover operatives from the 1950s—referred to these clandestine operations as “low-intensity conflicts” by “special operations forces.”

It is traditional that the uniformed armed forces of one nation are not to be used in or against another nation, except in time of war, without some specific agreement, such as the NATO plan. This generally means in time of a declared war. Up to 1960, as a result of the specific prohibitions of NSC 5412, the U.S. government honored this tradition, with very few exceptions, and limited the use of arms to specific actions. This is one reason why the Bay of Pigs tactical plan did not include any reference to “air cover” to be provided by U.S. forces.

Nations, and nationalism, survive because of the existence of the fragile structure called sovereignty. True sovereignty must be absolute. If sovereignty is not recognized by the entire family of nations—large and small, rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped—nationalism will crumble, and the larger nations will devour smaller ones before the last act, when those left will begin to devour each other, like scorpions in a bottle.

To be practical, we must admit that true.sovereignty no longer exists. No nation today is free and absolutely sovereign. To be truly sovereign, a state must in no way be limited by external authority or influence. The United States is, in one way or another, under some degree of influence from other nations every day, and vice versa. The fact of the existence of the H-bomb and its uncontrollable power denies sovereignty to all nations. This fact has eroded sovereignty to the point that a small country, such as Israel, can boldly destroy a nuclear power plant in Iraq and a revolutionary camp in Tunisia, and demolish Lebanon, at will.

In today’s matrix of nations, the power elite controllers¹² are attempting to structure something to take the place of nationalism and sovereignty in a “New World Order.”

Thus, we have had the increasing use of military forces in nonmilitary roles, as in the indiscriminate carpet bombing of defenseless Cambodia. The CIA has been the leading edge of this change, and by 1960, during the transition period, it saw a way to make elements of the military available to itself for its ever-increasing “covert” operations. Of course, in this context the whole idea of “covert,” “clandestine,” or “secret” operations became ridiculous. Such operations could not be kept secret; they were called “secret” to avoid accounting for the vast sums of the “black” budget expended to support them and as a means of disciplining the media and any possible whistle-blowers.

The first step in this move for military support was for the CIA to join with the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where Lansdale and other CIA agents were assigned, to completely rebuild and enlarge the army’s Special Forces units—the Green Berets of Vietnam in the 1960s. The army’s Special Forces units had been allowed to decline, and morale had deteriorated at Fort Bragg.

Then a sudden change occurred. Lansdale, who had returned from Vietnam after completing his job as chief of the Saigon Military Mission and confidant of President Ngo Dinh Diem, found a way to bypass the conventional U.S. Army channels to reinvigorate the army’s Special Forces with the help of the CIA and friends in the Defense and State departments. He won approval to activate a new Special Forces school and to increase the size of the Special Forces center at Fort Bragg for U.S. troops and selected personnel from foreign armies.

He could not be sure of top-level U.S Army approval and support for his bold plan, so he went around them. While everyone else had become occupied with the final days of the presidential campaign, Lansdale, his longtime associate Col. Sam Wilson, and this writer flew to the U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Military Government School at Fort Gordon, Georgia, in October 1960, for a meeting with its commanding officer. During this meeting, Lansdale arranged to get a copy of the curriculum of that school, which—in the space of one week—we converted into a “Cold War” curriculum for use at the Special Forces center.

Lansdale, the CIA, and their Special Forces associates rushed this curriculum into print. The then deputy secretary of defense, James Douglas, cut the ribbon for the center, which became known as the Army Special Forces John F Kennedy Center. The President-elect, ironically, had nothing to do with it.

This ceremonial opening was so hurried that “instructors” were reading and “teaching” from lesson guides they had never seen before, and the foreign “students” were so few in number that they were rushed from one classroom to another while Deputy Secretary Douglas was being shown Special Forces weapons—the longbow, the crossbow, flechettes,¹³ and so forth.

Not to be outdone during this crucial lame-duck period, the CIA’s deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell, made more moves. The departing members on the 5412/2 Committee would no longer have any interest in the covert Cuban exile training program. They would be glad to forget the many failures as the Cuban exiles, time after time, did not accomplish their projected goals in Cuba.

On November 4, 1960, with the election set to take place four days later, the CIA dispatched a cable to the Bay of Pigs project officer in Guatemala, directing a reduction of the guerrilla training and the introduction of conventional training of an amphibious and airborne assault force. This was named “Operation Trinidad,” after the beach on which the invaders were originally supposed to land.

CIA officials made this major change on their own, without specific approval. They knew that if Nixon became President, he would go along with their decision anyway, since he had been the most vehement anti-Castro agitator at the top level.¹⁴ When JFK reappointed Allen Dulles as CIA director, they figured they could go ahead with invasion planning.

With Dulles continuing as head of the CIA, agency leaders were confident they could work with, or around, Kennedy, and they contrived to lock him into as many programs as possible. This agency’s momentum accelerated during the postelection period. Dulles briefed the President-elect on November 29, 1960, and the new plan was formally presented to the outgoing NSC 5412/2 Committee on December 8. There is no record of that Special Group’s approval on December 8, but the CIA continued with Operation Trinidad. (This plan was discussed with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff between January 11 and 19, 1961.)

I was the last officer to brief the outgoing secretary of defense on the subject of Operation Trinidad on his final day in office, while a major blizzard raged over Washington. It can be stated emphatically that the final tactical plan for the invasion that was approved by President Kennedy on Sunday, April 16, at about 1:45 P.M. could well have succeeded. It was based fundamentally on the prior use of four Cuban exile-piloted B-26s to destroy Castro’s small combat air force. The first attack had been made on April 15 and had put most of those planes out of commission. Only three remained intact.

The concept behind the Bay of Pigs tactical plan was similar to that of the 1956 British-French clandestine attack on Nasser’s air force in Egypt, which destroyed his entire combat air force first, making it possible for Gen. Moshe Dayan’s Israeli army to dash across the Sinai to the Suez Canal without attacks from the air. This similar plan for the Cuban brigade was sabotaged¹⁵ from the inside, however, after JFK had approved it that Sunday afternoon of April 16.

Zapata, the beach on the Bay of Pigs, had been selected on purpose because there was an airstrip there suitable for B-26 operations against Castro’s ground forces. It was isolated and could be reached only via causeways or the narrow beach itself.

The brigade could take over the airstrip after securing the beachhead, and B-26s flown by Cuban pilots operating from that strip could have overwhelmed any Castro force approaching via the causeways. But this excellent tactical plan was predicated upon the total destruction of Castro’s entire force of combat-capable aircraft.

Thus, a second attack was scheduled to knock out Castro’s three remaining aircraft at dawn on Monday before the brigade hit the beach and alerted Castro’s air defenses. It was absolutely essential that those three aircraft be eliminated first. Kennedy understood that key element of the strategy when he made the decision, on Sunday, to proceed with the Monday, April 17, landing, specifically approving the dawn air strike by four B-26 bombers from Nicaragua to wipe out those last three jets.

The overall second phase of the plan, now called “Operation Zapata,” included a Cuban government-in-exile, on the beach if necessary, after the brigade had held Cuban soil for at least seventy-two hours. It had been planned that the Cuban government-in-exile would call upon the Organization of American States (OAS) for support of the brigade immediately and that the United States, with nominal OAS assistance, would sustain the brigade and its new government.

With this show of strength and determination, the CIA forecast that tens of thousands of Cubans would rise to join the brigade and revolt against Castro. In short order he would either be killed, flee, or surrender. This was the plan. But between the time of Kennedy’s approval at 1:45 P.M. Sunday and the time for the release of the B-26s from the Hidden Valley base at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the vital dawn air strike to destroy Castro’s three remaining T-33 jets was called off by President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, in a telephone call to General Cabell.¹⁶

At about 1:00 A.M. , April 17, my home phone rang in Virginia with a call from Nicaragua. It was an old friend, the CIA commander at Puerto Cabezas. He was upset. He told me that the dawn air strike had been delayed. He said, “Anything after a two A.M. departure will destroy the whole plan, because our B-26s will not be able to arrive before sunrise. The brigade will hit the beach at dawn. This will alert the air defenses and the T-33s, and we’ll lose our targets on the ground.”

He urged me to call General Cabell at the Operation Zapata office and, using OSO/OSD authority, demand the immediate release of the B-26s. I could hear the planes’ engines running in the background of the telephone conversation. He suggested, “If I get on my bike and ride across the field, the Cubans will take off without orders.” Later, we both wished he had done that. I was unable to reach General Cabell, and Allen Dulles was out of the country. The Bay of Pigs operation came that close to a chance for success.

After that call, I reached the CIA’s Zapata office and suggested they release the B-26s “on Kennedy’s orders” or the whole effort would fail. The CIA’s tactical commander told me that the situation “is in the hands of” the President’s special assistant for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy; Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Charles P. Cabell; and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

We all understood that if the B-26s in Nicaragua did not leave very soon, the entire plan would fail. We learned later that someone else had called Nicaragua and said not to worry, other B-26s would knock out the T-33s. This is one reason so many B-26s were shot down later that day. The pilots believed there would be no air opposition—least of all from those superior T-33s.

As a result of that top-level cancellation, those three T-33 jets, scarcely to be considered combat aircraft, yet ever so much better in aerial combat than the relatively slow B-26, shot down sixteen brigade B-26s, sank the supply ships offshore, and raked the beach with heavy gunfire. They alone were responsible for Castro’s victory over the brigade. That cancellation of the dawn air strike had created Kennedy’s defeat and brought the whole burden down on the shoulders of the new President.

There was much about that sabotaged plan, which damaged Kennedy so drastically, that is similar to the sabotaged flight of Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, which destroyed Eisenhower’s Crusade for Peace. Neither defeat had been the result of a normal or expected turn of events. Some of the same men, in high places, were in key positions in both projects, and Nixon had worked closely with all of them. We have wondered why, in 1964, Nixon believed that Castro had “become the most momentous figure in John F. Kennedy’s life” and why he believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin and that Castro had been Oswald’s hero. These are important questions. We have just read how Castro came into JFK’s life; the Lee Harvey Oswald scenario will come later.

Over the years since that fiasco on the Cuban beaches in April 1961, there have been many explanations for its failure, some reasonably accurate and some totally wrong. President Kennedy was quick to accept overall blame for the failure of Operation Zapata. Some have said that JFK himself caused the failure because “he denied U.S. air cover” for the embattled men on the beach. As part of the objective of this book, it is important to analyze this operation and to get as close as possible to a reasonable and factual answer to the question “Who caused the failure of the brigade’s invasion of Cuba, and how did it happen?”

First of all, there’s the subject of air cover for the men on the beach by U.S. military aircraft manned by U.S. military personnel. On previous pages I have written with some detail that the National Security Council had established the policy that U.S. military forces cannot be used operationally in peacetime. This was established policy when Kennedy became President, and he knew it. Therefore, the U.S. Marine Corps officers who drew up the invasion plan for the CIA, and for the Cuban exile brigade, were not allowed to include any supporting role for the U.S. military. Still, this posed no real problem for them, as long as they could predicate the tactical plan on the fact that all of Castro’s combat-capable aircraft would have been eliminated before the men hit the beach.

With this stipulation in the plan, the CIA came to my office in U.S. Air Force headquarters and requested a number of modified World War II B-26 bombers. By means of intelligence data and aerial photographs, it had been determined that Castro had ten combat-capable aircraft. Therefore, on April 15—two days before the landing—a group of these modified B-26s flew over the Havana area and destroyed seven of these aircraft. Three T-33 jet aircraft had flown to a base in the Santiago area. That afternoon one of the CIA’s U-2 spy aircraft located them parked wingtip to wingtip on a small air base.

The brigade was scheduled to hit the beach at dawn. The President had been well briefed on the significance of that prelanding air strike and had directed that B-26 attack. But, as we have seen, it was never carried out. Why wasn’t that crucial air strike flown, after the President had specifically directed that it be done?

This failure has been erroneously blamed on President Kennedy for three decades in various contrived stories, some of which appear to have a bearing on the overall assassination story.

A most unusual article, “The Brigade’s My Fault,” appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times on October 23, 1979. It contained an elaborate and confusing confession. Its author was McGeorge Bundy, the former special assistant to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and the man the “Cuban Study Group” (to be identified below) determined had made the call that directed General Cabell of the CIA to cancel the B-26 bomber strike against Castro’s last three combat aircraft.

In this article, Bundy wrote about the “brigade in Cuba” and “the famous brigade, a unit of about 2,600 men.” He revealed his top-level views of the intelligence community of that time: “But in fact, like other people, the intelligence community usually has more on its plate than it can handle.”

He recalled all those major programs the CIA had under full steam when the Kennedy administration came to Washington in 1961, then wrote: “So I have to consider that there was a staff failure—which means mostly me.”

He leaves no question about it as he writes that after eighteen years of contemplation, “The Brigade’s My Fault.” Kennedy had never placed the fault for the brigade on anyone but himself. Eisenhower had done likewise with the U-2 affair.

On April 22, 1961, JFK had directed Gen. Maxwell Taylor, in association with Attorney General Robert Kennedy,¹⁷ Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Allen Dulles, to give him a report on the “Immediate Causes of Failure of Operation Zapata,” that is, the Bay of Pigs. That elaborate report by Taylor was submitted to JFK in the form of a lengthy letter on June 13, 1961.

The existence of that report has been denied by those principals and was one of the best-kept secrets of the Kennedy years.¹⁸

However, during 1979, the same year when Bundy wrote his op-ed piece, a book about the Bay of Pigs appeared, written by Peter Wyden, formerly editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. In Wyden’s book there are several quotes that he attributes to the “so-called Taylor Report,” and with that revelation the long-buried report became public. Wyden mentions McGeorge Bundy no less than seventeen times and quotes liberally from the long-missing Taylor Report. This is undoubtedly why, in October 1979, Bundy finally made his long-overdue statement. He most assuredly had read the Wyden book¹⁹ and had heard people discussing the critical role he played in the strange Bay of Pigs drama.

Wyden had stated rather specifically about Bundy:

Bissell’s former student, Mac Bundy, agreed in 1977 that the air strength was not only too small; it was much too small, but he pointed out that the planners said nothing about it. . . . He felt that the cancelled strike was only a marginal adjustment.

Bundy blamed himself in one respect: “I had a very wrong estimate of the consequences of failure, the mess.”

Bissell, Bundy, and Wyden were all referring to a few specific lines from the Taylor Report that placed the blame for the defeat of the brigade on one telephone call. Keep in mind that Kennedy had approved the dawn air strike at 1:45 P.M., April 16, 1960.

This quote is from the Taylor letter, paragraph 43: “At about 9:30 P.M. on April 16, Mr. McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President, telephoned General C. P. Cabell of CIA to inform him that the dawn air strikes the following morning should not be launched until they could be conducted from a strip within the beachhead.”²⁰

No wonder Bundy admitted he had “a very wrong estimate of the consequences.” First of all, U-2 photos taken late Saturday, April 15, showed the three T-33 jets parked wingtip to wingtip on a small airstrip near Santiago, Cuba. One eight-gun B-26 alone could have wiped them out on the ground. The CIA’s operational commander at Puerto Cabezas was sending four B-26s to do the job that one could have done easily—provided the T-33s were caught on the ground. The brigade was scheduled to hit the beach at sunrise. That would alert Castro’s air warning system and put the T-33s in the air. As reported by Wyden, the Bundy call to Cabell stating that no air strikes could be launched until after the brigade had secured the Giron airstrip constituted a total misreading and a complete reversal of the approved tactical plan.

The dawn air strikes were essential to destroy the three T-33s on the ground—the only way the slower B-26s could destroy them. With them out of the way, Castro would have had no combat aircraft. The brigade would have been subject to no air attacks, their supply ships would have been safe, and the “air cover” issue that some revisionists have raised would have been totally irrelevant. This was the plan JFK had approved; Bundy misunderstood it—or did he?

There is one more thing to add about the McGeorge Bundy article. Bundy had no doubt seen the Wyden book. He realized then that, after eighteen years, the “never written” Taylor “Letter to the President” had finally been released. Bundy saw the undeniable evidence that it was he who had canceled the dawn air strike and caused the failure of the brigade’s gallant effort. There was nothing he could do to alter those facts except counterattack. He used a clever Freudian gambit: He let his mind think one thing and his fingers write another.

His op-ed article says, “The Brigade’s My Fault.” Any alert reader seeing that title would immediately connect it with the Bay of Pigs brigade and its failure. But Bundy is clever. He instead wrote a rather nonsensical, slightly offbeat, and quite disparaging article on the subject of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He didn’t say one word about the Bay of Pigs. He used the word “brigade,” but in a contrived context of the later event. It was clever, but it doesn’t wash—especially not after the release of the Taylor Report, written right before the eyes of Robert F. Kennedy, who reported the group’s findings to his brother every day.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the problem Kennedy faced concerned the Russian “technicians,” that is, rocket experts, and not a “brigade.” The “brigade” was at the Bay of Pigs. Bundy furnishes two numbers of military unit strength, 22,000 and 2,600. Neither one is pertinent to anything, and neither represents a “brigade” of anything.

With Bundy’s clever article in the Times, one is reminded of Richard Nixon’s equally clever article in Reader’s Digest, “Cuba, Castro and John F. Kennedy,” and then of Gerald Ford’s gratuitous article in Life magazine, scooping the report of the Warren Commission with his “Piecing Together the Evidence.”

Not one of these articles is completely true. They all have a special scenario to build, and all are revisionist. They are all written by men who have held high positions—two by ex-Presidents and one by the man who was formerly the national security assistant to two Presidents. They are, one way or the other, closely involved with that most important subject: the death of John F. Kennedy.