Authors: Oliver Stone,L. Fletcher Prouty
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”
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developed by the CIA and endorsed by the Special Group
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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,
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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 curriculum
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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 Force
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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 Vietnam
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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 America
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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.
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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 1958
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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.