JFK (33 page)

To augment the military side of the study group, Kennedy selected Adm. Arleigh Burke, considered by many to be the finest chief of naval operations the navy has ever had. Admiral Burke had been among the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been most closely involved in the military elements of the Bay of Pigs planning process and support preparation. The actual tactical training for the invasion had been placed in the hands of a U.S. Marine Corps colonel; the transport ships had been assembled in the Norfolk, Virginia, area; and much of the logistics support had been channeled through the inactive navy base at Elizabeth City, North Carolina. All these steps had involved considerable navy support.

Another appointee to the study group was the scorpion in the bottle, the President’s brother and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy.

Kennedy’s next choice for the group was Machiavellian in its political implications. He appointed CIA director Allen W. Dulles, the man who in November 1960 had flown to Palm Beach with his deputy, Richard Bissell, to give the President-elect his first official briefing on the plan for the overthrow of Castro. It was Dulles who, on January 28, 1961, gave another briefing on the developing plan to the newly installed President, along with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, among others.

Now, Kennedy had decided to have Allen Dulles sit through the ordeal of this detailed study from beginning to end, to relive the whole scenario as General Taylor interrogated selected officials who had been connected with the operation.
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Despite the fact that Allen Dulles was the director of central intelligence when the plan was first presented to President Eisenhower in March 1960 and that he was the man who briefed Kennedy before and after his inauguration, Dulles had not been present at the White House on April 16, 1961, when the final discussions took place and when the go-ahead decision had been made by the President. Dulles was also not in Washington during the crucial period of the invasion itself to control the activities of his agency. He had taken that weekend off for a sojourn in Puerto Rico.

There is a businessmen’s group, the Young Presidents Organization, that is closely affiliated with Harvard Business School and with the CIA. It is made up of men who are presidents of their own companies and under forty years of age. The CIA arranges meetings for them with young leaders in foreign countries for the purpose of opening export-import talks and franchising discussions.

The Young Presidents Organization met in Puerto Rico on the weekend of April 15 and 16, 1961, and Dulles was the principal speaker. Why he accepted—and kept—that appointment at such a crucial time has never been properly explained. Did he prefer to have the Bay of Pigs fail? Did he choose to embarrass the new President?

As Maxwell Taylor’s “Letter to the President” on the Cuban disaster later stated: “There was no single authority short of the President capable of coordinating the actions of the CIA, State, Defense, and the USIA [U.S. Information Agency].”

Because of the absence of its director, the CIA’s secondary leaders—officials with no combat or command experience—made “the operational decisions which they felt within their authority.” For decisions above them, they were supposed to go to the President. “Mr. Bissell and General Cabell were immediately available for consultation” but, it is crucial to note, there “were usually emissaries sent to obtain” higher approvals. “Emissary” was a far cry from “commander,” as Dulles’s responsibilities required. This task fell far short of effectiveness, as the Taylor letter noted: “Finally, there was the failure to carry the issue to the President when the opportunity was presented and explain to him with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-minute cancellation. ”

In his letter, General Taylor suggested forcefully that after General Cabell had received the call from McGeorge Bundy to cancel the bomber strike planned for dawn on the seventeenth to destroy the last three combat aircraft in Castro’s skimpy air force, someone ought to have gone directly to the President to explain the absolute necessity of the air strike against these three T-33 jet trainers.
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That was the issue. In its guarded language, Taylor’s letter never mentioned the Dulles absence, but it discussed this “breakdown of leadership” during the study group meetings with both Allen Dulles and Bobby Kennedy present. We may be sure it did not go unnoticed by the President during those after-hours meetings with Bobby and his other “Irish Mafia” friends.

In that volatile environment of the Cuban study group, the direct relationship between the failure of the CIA command element to cope with the air strike issue and the absence that weekend of Dulles, the man responsible for the success of the anti-Castro program, became the biggest issue.

For the study group, the sequence of issues became quite clear:

1. The President had approved the landings and the air strike to destroy the last three combat aircraft in Castro’s air force at dawn before the brigade hit the beach.
   
2. Later that evening, McGeorge Bundy had canceled the air strike by calling Cabell. (There is a school of thought that raises the possibility that it was Cabell himself who canceled the air strike, for reasons that quite ominously have an impact upon plans for the President’s assassination in Dallas in 1963.)
   
3. Cabell and Bissell, in Dulles’s absence, were inherently unqualified to carry the issue back to the President to “explain to him with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-minute cancellation.”
   
4. The Cuban Study Group added: “This failure was a consequence of the restraints put on the anti-Castro air force in planning and executing its strikes, primarily for the purpose of protecting the covert character of the operation. These restraints included the decision to use only the B-26 as a combat aircraft because it had been distributed widely to foreign countries; the limitation of prelanding strikes to those which could be flown from non-U.S. controlled airfields under the guise of coming from Cuban strips, thus eliminating the possibility of using jet fighters or even T-33 trainers; the inability to use any non-Cuban base within short turnaround distance from the target area (about nine hours were required to turn around a B-26 for a second mission over the target from Nicaragua); prohibition of use of American contract pilots for tactical air operations; restriction on ammunitions, notably napalm; and the cancellation of the strikes planned at dawn on D-Day. The last mentioned was probably the most serious as it eliminated the last favorable opportunity to destroy the Castro air force on the ground. The cancellation seems to have resulted partly from the failure to make the air strike plan entirely clear in advance to the President and the Secretary of State, but, more importantly, by misgivings as to the effect of the air strikes on the position of the United States in the current UN debate on Cuba. Finally, there was the failure to carry the issue to the President when the opportunity was presented and explain to him with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-minute cancellation.”
   

The members of the study group saw this cancellation as the clear cause of the failure of the whole anti-Castro program that had been initiated in March 1960. To fortify their own professional findings, they called before them a man who had been instrumental from the earliest days in these decisions. This man was a key Cuban exile named Manuel Antonio de Varona, premier of Cuba before the Batista regime.
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The CIA tried to monopolize him. Nixon wooed him, as did Kennedy. Finally, he came to the Cuban Study Group and told the whole story. Needless to say, he played all sides, as all “contras” do.

De Varona made the following statement before the Cuban Study Group: “I would like to state that we would be in Cuba today if it was not for the lack of air support that our forces suffered. All those who’ve returned said that but for three airplanes,
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they would have been successful in their invasion attempt.”

Dulles was the man on the spot. There is no record of what he said behind those closed doors, but a record was unnecessary. Bobby Kennedy was always there. Despite this maneuver by the Kennedys, however, Dulles still controlled the moves. Few people have the experience to know how such things work under the cloak of secrecy. This is the great weapon of the CIA, and it is why the CIA cannot be stopped—short of eliminating all of its money. All the people who worked on the Bay of Pigs project—Cuban and American—did so under deep cover. CIA agents and military supporting-cast members all had pseudonyms and lived cover-story lives. The Cubans with whom they worked had no idea who these agents were, and their own American associates did not know their true names and identities.

Thus, after the anti-Castro program had failed and all participants had been dispersed, they themselves did not know who had been there with them. This gave Allen Dulles the key role within the study group. General Taylor had no alternative but to ask Dulles for the names of people—CIA, military, and Cuban—who could be called to testify before the group.

Dulles weeded out the ones who could tell too much and padded the list with those who knew very little. Although Bobby Kennedy sat there and listened to all of the dialogue, he had no way of realizing that he was hearing a carefully structured scenario. The book he wrote several years later revealed how little he really knew about some of the actual activities.

This advantage enabled Dulles and the CIA to shift the blame to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military. Dulles kept quiet about the shortcomings of his own agency and made it appear that Kennedy’s denial of the employment of U.S. Navy fighter aircraft as “air cover” was the real reason for the failure of the project. (Since 1961, in fact, the CIA has mounted a vigorous and comprehensive propaganda and revisionist campaign designed to ensure that the public is afforded no opportunity to discover the true facts.)

The CIA had kept the various elements of the Cuban exile groups apart. Many of them were of different political backgrounds and social levels and did not get along with each other. Thus, these diverse groups were trained in widely separated camps. When it came time to set sail for Cuba, the CIA put some units in the forefront of the brigade and landed them on the beach. At the same time, other units were “lost” at sea and never reached Cuba. Obviously they were the first to return to their separate base in Louisiana. Their emotional story of the failure to use their units on the beaches has led to much of the misunderstanding of the tactics of the operation. The CIA played this up and blamed the U.S. military for the oversight.

It happens that the Louisiana elements of the Cuban exile groups and their “mercenary” American trainers became suspect during the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Many of them had been recruited in the later, and much larger, anti-Castro program Mongoose under the CIA’s most experienced paramilitary leader, Gen. Edward G. Lansdale.

All this made a good cover story later, because the individual selected to be the “patsy” in Kennedy’s murder was a former U.S. Marine Corps enlisted man named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was born in New Orleans and had been active there with a Fair Play for Cuba organization during the early 1960s. Many assassination theorists have carried this presumed assassin’s trail from Dallas through the “Oswald” scenario to New Orleans and thence to Cuba and Castro himself. This is a futile exercise, because Oswald was only the “patsy,” not the murderer. Yet this trail of diversionary “golden apples” (as we recall them from Greek mythology) continues to divert the unwary and the overeager.

In an earlier chapter, I mentioned an unusual article that appeared in the
Reader’s Digest
of November 1964 in which the author, Richard Nixon, tied Cuba, Castro, and John F. Kennedy together. Nixon is one of those, as is Ford, who, for various reasons, want the American public to believe Oswald was the “lone assassin.” A single assassin does not have to have a motive for murder; a conspiracy must have a
why.
The “lone assassin” scenario is a cover story to preclude a conspiracy and its inevitable
why
.

At another time, Nixon wanted the American public to believe that he and Henry Kissinger had valid reasons for their genocidal bombardment of Cambodia with B-52s. This decision is also woven into the tapestry of history.

This orchestration of hidden motives and public smoke screens caused Kennedy to underestimate the power and skill of the CIA. He did not get to the root of the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and as a result he, too, became a victim of the sinister power of those agencies of the government that operate in total secrecy, knowing that they do not have to account to anyone for their actions and expenditures.

None of this should be taken to mean that Kennedy was not wise to the ways of Washington or that he could not mount extremely shrewd political maneuvers of his own. He was, and he did—but, despite this experience, he was up against impossible odds.

When he created the Cuban Study Group, he made it appear as if he were investigating a failed operation and nothing more. But this was not quite the case. It was only part of the story. Kennedy’s precise instructions to General Taylor were: “. . . to study our governmental practices and programs in the areas of military and paramilitary guerrilla and antiguerrilla activity which fell short of outright war with a view to strengthening our work in this area.”