Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  * Some have argued that it’s highly unlikely the Cubans would be trying to frame Oswald on September 24, 25, 26, or 27, 1963, when Kennedy’s itinerary for his Texas visit wasn’t announced until November 1, 1963, more than one month later. However, word that the president would be visiting the state first appeared in the Dallas papers on September 13, 1963, and Dallas being the state’s second-largest city, it could be assumed that any trip by the president to Texas would probably include his coming to Dallas. Coincidentally, the September 26 edition of the Dallas Morning News had a front-page story on the president’s planned trip to Texas. (HSCA Report, pp.37, 132)

  † Conspiracy author Sylvia Meagher writes that Leopoldo “took pains to plant seeds which inevitably would incriminate Oswald in the assassination…so that an anonymous phone call [from framers] would be enough to send the police straight after [Oswald]” (Meagher, Accessories after the Fact, p.379). But Meagher doesn’t go on to point out that there is no evidence any such anonymous call was ever made.

  * Many of those who escaped, after being repulsed on the beaches by Castro’s militia, tanks, and planes, were able to get on small rowboats that drifted to one of the nearby keys, where they subsisted on coconuts, crabs, and salt water until they were picked up days later by an American destroyer (Aguilar, Operation Zapata, pp.309, 310). Brigade 2506 was named after the number of the last volunteer who was accepted in Miami to be part of the exile force, Carlos Rodriguez Santana. Santana died in an accident during training in Guatemala. (Rodriguez and Weisman, Shadow Warrior, p.54)

  * By “involved,” the president apparently meant “fighting.” Certainly, we were “involved” to the extent that quite apart from the CIA having 588 personnel assigned to the project, as well as organizing and funding the invasion, five U.S. Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier Essex escorted the anti-Cuban invasion force’s seven vessels (carrying the invasion troops and their supplies) to the beaches of the Bay of Pigs by protecting them in the event of attempted interdiction by Castro’s forces (Wyden, Bay of Pigs, pp.125, 210, 212, 216; 588 CIA personnel: Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, p.46).

  † “Cuba seems to have the same effect on American Administrations,” Wayne Smith, a former U.S. State Department officer in Havana, said, “as the full moon used to have on werewolves” (McKnight, Breach of Trust, p.330).

  * Actually, the first members of the brigade force (officially called the Cuban Expeditionary Force), led by Brigade Commander José Pérez San Román and two teams of six frogmen each, went ashore at Blue Beach at one hour and fifteen minutes past midnight on Monday morning, April 17 (Aguilar, Operation Zapata, p.21; Wyden, Bay of Pigs, pp.131, 217–220). Around sunup, 177 brigade paratroopers also landed, dropped from the sky by six brigade C-46s (Wyden, Bay of Pigs, p.232).

  * What Kennedy also did not authorize and only learned about nearly two years later is that on the morning of April 19, the third and final day of the invasion, CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell, in a last-ditch effort to save the invasion, dispatched five American civilian pilots and one Cuban exile pilot, all flying B-26s, from the airfield at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, to the Bay of Pigs, five hundred miles away. They were to provide air cover for the brigade already on the beach, fight Castro’s pilots in the sky, and destroy any concentration of Cuban troops and equipment in the combat area. The pilots were all members of the 117th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard in Birmingham who had been enlisted by the CIA in early January of 1961. Twenty other members of a contingent from the Wing were also enlisted to train exile pilots at the Guatemalan air base at Retalhuleu near the Pacific Ocean in the southwestern part of the country and transport the Brigade 2506 invasion force from its training camps in Guatemala to Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the departure point for the invasion. The five American pilots were Riley Shamburger (flying with his observer, Wade Gray—all of the observers were also from the Wing), Thomas “Pete” Ray (with observer Leo Baker), Don Gordon (with Jack Vernon), Bill Petersen (with an exile observer), and Hal McGee (with an unidentified flight engineer from the Wing). The observer for the Cuban exile pilot, Gonzalo Herrera, leaped from the aircraft onto the ground before flight at the Puerto Cabezas air base and fled into the woods, so Herrera flew alone. Though the B-26s inflicted some damage on Cuban forces and supplies on the ground, they were largely ineffective, and two of the American pilots, Shamburger and Ray, together with their observers, Gray and Baker, were shot down over the Bay of Pigs and died. (Persons, Bay of Pigs, pp.4–14, 17–18, 71–72, 89–95, 101, 156 [see also CIA on page 158 of book’s index, where the author, a member of the Wing contingent, says his employment contract for the mission was with the CIA]; Thomas, Very Best Men, pp.261–262; on Bissell authorizing the last-minute effort without Kennedy’s knowledge and Kennedy finding this out two years later: Wyden, Bay of Pigs, p.278) Ray’s son, Thomas Ray Jr., a San Francisco attorney, told me that it wasn’t until seventeen years after the invasion that his family got his father’s remains back from Castro. Ray said his father and the other pilots worked “for the CIA,” and that there was only one flight, but the CIA wouldn’t acknowledge this lone flight by CIA pilots “for many years.” (Interview of Thomas Ray Jr. by author on November 21, 1997)

  * Author Haynes Johnson, in his book The Bay of Pigs, wrote that Castro spoke disparagingly of the brigade “as mercenaries, war criminals and sons of the jaded rich who were coming to regain their vast holdings at the expense of the workers. In reality, Brigade 2506 was a cross-section of Cuba. The men ranged in age from 16 to 61, with the average 29. There were peasants and fishermen as well as doctors, lawyers and bankers. A larger percentage of the men were married and had children, and there were a number of father-and-son pairs aboard the ships. By profession, students, with 240, were the largest group, but there were mechanics, teachers, artists, draftsmen, newspaper reporters, engineers, musicians, three Catholic priests and one Protestant minister, geologists, cattlemen and clerks. Some fifty of the men were Negroes and many more had Negro blood…While the vast majority were Catholics, there were also Protestants and even Jews in the Brigade. With the exception of 135 former professional soldiers—who had served both under Castro and Batista—most of the men had no previous military training or experience.” There were also two Americans in the brigade landing force at the Bay of Pigs, both of whom had helped train the force back at Camp Trax in Guatemala—Grayston “Gray” Lynch and William “Rip” Robertson. Gray and Rip, in fact, were the first to land, as frogmen, in the two beachheads of the invasion, Playa Girón and Playa Larga. (Johnson with Artime et al., Bay of Pigs, pp.98–99, 103, 106, 221)

  But there can be little question that many in the rebel invading force didn’t just serve under Batista as a requirement of Cuban citizenship, but had been staunch supporters of him. Castro used this to his political advantage after the rebel invasion was repulsed. President Kennedy was aware of this liability and had ordered that Batista supporters be purged from the exile force. But according to informed rebel leaders, the CIA ignored the order, believing that these men had much needed military experience that outweighed their political background. (Tad Szulc, “Cuba Asserts U.S. Used Batista Men,” New York Times, April 26, 1961, p.2)

  * In his speech to the nation’s newspaper editors in Washington, D.C., which was carried by national radio and television, Kennedy defended himself from the assaults by many that if America had intervened militarily, the invasion would have succeeded, by noting that “we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces of this country would not intervene in any way. Any unilateral American intervention in the absence of an external attack upon ourselves or an ally would have been contrary to our traditions.”

  † However, at an August 10, 1962, meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) in Secretary of State Rusk’s office, someone, believed to be Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, raised the issue, for discussion only, of the assassination of Castro being included in Operation Mongoose as an ac
ceptable alternative way of overthrowing Castro’s regime. Though memories differed and the minutes of the meeting were silent as to whether the issue was even raised, the consensus is that the suggestion was quickly discarded by the Special Group members, although Lansdale himself acknowledged that thereafter, he “thought it would be a possibility someplace down the road in which there would be some possible need to take action such as that [assassination].” (Alleged Assassination Plots, pp.161–167)

  * Though RFK’s total immersion in, and direction of, Operation Mongoose cannot be questioned, too many have assumed that he was likewise heavily involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion. But there is no evidence of this. The invasion took place just three months after RFK’s brother was inaugurated on January 20, 1961, and although JFK gave his approval to the CIA operation, it had already been in existence for almost a year and barreling down the track when he did so. RFK was aware of the invasion plans, but he was first briefed on the operation by the CIA on April 12, 1961, just five days before the invasion. (Thomas, Robert Kennedy, p.120)

  † Though all important decisions came from Washington and Langley, the day-to-day operations of Mongoose fell to the chief of the CIA’s station at JM/WAVE, thirty-four-year-old Theodore Shackley, considered one of the agency’s most promising young men, who was brought back from assignment in Berlin to head a team charged with preparing a “vulnerability and feasibility study” of Castro’s regime and then to run JM/WAVE (Branch and Crile, “Kennedy Vendetta,” pp.50–51).

  * The Cuban economy did, in fact, begin to deteriorate and weaken. And the paramilitary raids by the exiles caused a fear in Cuba that they foreshadowed another invasion. Arguably, one of the main reasons why Castro turned to Russia for economic support and military assistance was to offset the effects of Operation Mongoose. (Branch and Crile, “Kennedy Vendetta,” p.61)

  * Kennedy, wanting above all to avoid, if possible, a war of any kind with Russia, wasn’t too partial to the aggressive LeMay, much less his suggestion. He told his aide Kenneth O’Donnell, “Those brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we…do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they’re wrong.” (Thomas, “Bobby at the Brink,” p.52)

  * The word offensive was set forth in Kennedy’s letter to Khrushchev the previous day, October 27. It was in this October 27 letter that Kennedy told Khrushchev that in return for the Soviet Union’s removing offensive weapons from Cuba, he was willing to “give assurances against an invasion of Cuba.”

  † Though it has almost been universally accepted that in the confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev, Kennedy won (i.e., “Khrushchev blinked”), this depends somewhat on the perspective. In a series of taped interviews of Khrushchev at his dacha near Moscow in early 1967 (he was removed from power in October of 1964), Khrushchev said that the 1962 missile crisis had resulted in a victory for the Soviet Union, reasoning that he had sent missiles to Cuba to protect that country from American attack, and since there was no attack, his action served its purpose. “What was the American aim?” he asked. “They aimed to liquidate Socialist Cuba. The invasion by the Cuban emigres was part of the American plan. Our aim was to preserve Cuba, and Cuba still exists.” (New York Times, June 27, 1967, p.15)

  * In fact, in a front-page Miami Herald headline story on November 10, 1963 (just twelve days before the assassination), captioned “War in Cuba: Fidel Battling an Iceberg,” the reporter, Al Burt, quoting unnamed sources of his in the Cuban exile community, wrote that “recent events make it undeniable that a secret war is being waged against Fidel Castro.” Saying that “the full size and scope of the war has not been revealed,” he analogized it to an iceberg, “the part that shows only hints at the part that doesn’t…What is known reveals a well-organized and equipped military operation that…keeps opposition alive inside the island…Sources point out that the war stepped up its pace in the last three months.” Burt also said that on October 21, 1963, “the Cuban Armed forces captured an armed band of infiltrators” who admitted that their mission was to “prepare the people for [an] armed uprising.” (Miami Herald, November 10, 1963, pp.A1, A16; see also Waldron with Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice, pp.231–232, 668–669, for discussion of article and its implications) If Burt’s sources were correct, the operation referred to virtually had to have been with U.S. knowledge and support. See also endnote discussion on what we do know was going on at the time—contingency plans for a U.S. invasion of Cuba if an uprising did, in fact, materialize.

  † He also told them, again to wild applause, that “I can assure you that it is the strongest wish of the people of this country…that Cuba shall one day be free again, and when it is, this Brigade will deserve to march at the head of the first column.” Jackie Kennedy then told the throng, in nearly flawless Spanish, that the brigade members were “the bravest men in the world.”

  * As already indicated, support for Kennedy remained strong among many in the exile community. In a 1976 interview with Miami News Latin community writer Hilda Inclan, Carlos Prío, the former president of Cuba, said, “When Kennedy was killed, Cuban exiles here [in Miami] who were active against Castro had not yet lost faith in the President. Cubans were still waiting for Kennedy to fulfill his promise to help free Cuba” (Miami Daily News, May 20, 1976).

  Leopoldo, one of the two Cubans who appeared at Sylvia Odio’s door, told her in the telephone conversation the next day that the Cuban people bore no malice toward President Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs episode (CD 205, p.1, December 18, 1963). This clearly was too broad a statement, of course.

  * Indeed, nearly half of the brigade members who landed on the shores of the Bay of Pigs enlisted in the U.S. Army within two months after their liberation.

  * Former attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach told the HSCA that “Hoover resented criticism to a degree greater than any other person that I have ever known…[And] if the Bureau made any mistake or anything for which the public could criticize the bureau, the bureau would do its best to conceal the information from anybody” (3 HSCA 646, 700, Testimony of Nicholas Katzenbach before the HSCA on September 21, 1978). Time magazine went so far as to say that Hoover “cared less about crime than about perpetuating his…image” (“Truth about Hoover,” p.14).

  * An internal FBI memorandum of November 27, 1963, from W. C. Sullivan to D. J. Brennan Jr. speaks of “Kostikov’s connection with the 13th Department of the KGB, which handles sabotage and assassinations.” The memorandum goes on to say that this information on Kostikov was “based on data developed both by the Bureau and CIA.”

  * The December 20, 1963, report should not be construed to mean that the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Kostikov’s possible role in the assassination only commenced weeks or even days after the assassination. Indeed, though a CIA report said there was “little in Headquarter’s file on Kostikov,” on November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination, the CIA was sufficiently interested in Kostikov to generate this directive from CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., to its Mexico City station: “Urgently require info Valeriy Vladmirovich Kostikov travels outside Mexico, hour by hour whereabouts 22 Nov…any indications unusual activities involving KGB and Sovemb [Soviet embassy] personnel 17 through 30 Nov.” A CIA Teletype from the Mexico City station to headquarters later that day (November 23) confirmed an earlier Teletype that Kostikov had only left Mexico once in September, and “no recent unusual KGB and Sovemb personnel activities 17 Nov to date.” (CIA Record 104-10127-10207, “Mexico City Chronology,” pp.6, 55)

  * There was no need for the CIA to inform the Warren Commission of the CIA’s effort to overthrow Castro. Everyone already knew this. Indeed, President Kennedy even took full responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion back in 1961. What the CIA didn’t tell the Warren Commission about was the CIA’s plots to kill Castro, and as the Church Committee said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the Warren Commission knew of [the] CIA assassination efforts. Former Senator John Sher
man Cooper, a member of the Commission, advised the Select Committee that the subject never came up in the Commission’s deliberations. Lee Rankin, Chief Counsel for the Warren Commission, and Burt Griffin, Howard Willens, and David Belin of the Commission staff have all stated they were not aware of the CIA plots.” (Church Committee Report, pp.67–68)

  † The CIA-mob plot to kill Castro was separate and distinct from AMLASH, the code name for the Cuban figure close to Castro with whom the CIA conspired to overthrow Castro (HSCA Report, p.107). See endnote discussion on whether the AMLASH operation included plans for Castro’s murder.

  ‡ When Helms testified before the HSCA three years later, in 1978, he responded similarly. When HSCA staff counsel asked him “why the Warren Commission was not told by you of the anti-Castro assassination plots,” Helms responded, “I [was] never asked to testify before the Warren Commission about our operations.” Question: “If the Warren Commission did not know of the operation, it certainly was not in a position to ask you about it. Is that not true?” “Yes, but how do you know they did not know about it? How do you know Mr. Dulles had not told them? How was I to know that? And besides, I was not the director of the agency, and in the CIA, you did not go traipsing around to the Warren Commission or to congressional committees or to anyplace else without the director’s permission.” “Did you ever discuss with the director whether the Warren Commission should be informed of the anti-Castro assassination plots?” “I did not, as far as I can recall.” (JFK Document 014710, Testimony of Richard Helms before Executive Session of HSCA on August 9, 1978, pp.30–31; 11 HSCA 482–483)