by Ted Gup
For the children and widows of the Birmingham pilots killed in the Bay of Pigs operation, there was neither closure nor consolation. There were no bodies and no answers forthcoming from the government—only lies. Some would go about their business, vainly attempting to put it behind them. But that was something Pete Ray’s daughter, Janet, could not do. Instead, she consecrated herself to learning all she could about her father, his mission, and his fate.
In some ways she appeared to want to duplicate her father’s life. She married a fighter pilot—Michael Weininger—and named their son Pete, after her father. She even named her dog Chase, after the dog she had as a child. She allied herself to the cause of freeing Cuba and spent countless hours interviewing veterans of the Bay of Pigs, searching for clues to her father’s mission and death. Never was she without her small pink vinyl suitcase, the sort a child takes on a sleep-over. It held her father’s dental impressions, notes, tape recordings, newspaper clips, photos, and every document she could lay her hands on related to the Bay of Pigs.
For Janet Weininger and the other family members from Birmingham, the tragedy of death was only the beginning of their suffering. Over the ensuing years, the Agency steadfastly refused to acknowledge that Pete Ray and the others had worked for the CIA, albeit on contract, or that they were anything more than mercenaries.
Worse yet, the Agency had retained a local representative, ostensibly to provide assistance and moral support to Margaret Ray. But instead of providing comfort, remembers her son, the man threatened Margaret Ray, telling her that if she tried to publicly link her husband’s death with the CIA she would lose her benefits and face financial ruin and even possible criminal prosecution and psychiatric institutionalization. He informed her that he knew where she shopped, who her friends were, and what her daily routine was. He also, Margaret later told her son, made crude and unwanted sexual advances toward her.
Margaret Ray, already shattered by the loss, now believed she was under constant surveillance. She was frightened, sometimes hysterical. She never did fully recover from the trauma of loss and the pressures, both real and imagined, to keep her silent. Amid such deception, Margaret Ray could not even be certain that her husband was dead. There was, after all, neither a body nor a grave. And there was irrefutable evidence that the CIA had already lied to her about other matters. Five years after Pete Ray’s death she remarried, but she was haunted by a recurring nightmare in which Pete Ray returned from his ill-fated mission, demanding to know how she could have abandoned him and remarried. For a brief time in 1969 Margaret Ray was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. Thereafter she was placed on antidepressants.
Pete Ray’s mother, Mary, was embittered and distrustful of the U.S. government. She had but one object that had belonged to her firstborn son. It was a schoolbook, a small red dog-eared volume entitled Presidents of the United States, which ended with Franklin Roosevelt. But for her, it was just one more bitter reminder of the government’s perfidy and lies. A year and a half after Bay of Pigs, when Kennedy was assassinated, Mary was almost ashamed of her reaction. “I was sorry he was killed but I didn’t cry about it,” she would say. “I grieved for his children but I didn’t cry for him because he was the cause of Pete’s being killed.”
More than twelve years after Ray’s death, on November 14, 1973, William Colby, Director Central Intelligence, quietly conferred a posthumous Distinguished Intelligence Cross upon Pete Ray. The accompanying citation read: “In recognition of his exceptional heroism in April 1961 when he undertook an extremely hazardous mission of the highest national priority. Although fully aware of the dangers he faced, Mr. Ray unhesitatingly volunteered to fly the mission on which he lost his life. In doing so he demonstrated his greatest personal courage and outstanding loyalty to his country. Mr. Ray’s selfless devotion to duty and dedication to the national interests of the United States uphold the finest traditions of our country and reflect the highest credit on him and the Central Intelligence Agency.” It was a marked turnaround.
But for the family of Pete Ray it was too little too late. The Agency continued to refuse to release to them any information about Ray’s mission or his death, and maintained for another six years that he had been killed in the crash of his plane, when they knew otherwise.
For Ray’s daughter, Janet, grief had long before transformed itself into a crusade to unearth all she could about her father. In 1978 her quest took a bizarre turn when she learned that her father’s body might still be recoverable. She had been told that a body, believed to be her father’s, had been preserved, perhaps even frozen, by Castro, as a kind of trophy of war.
Over the course of the next two years, she worked ceaselessly to confirm that report and, if true, to win the return of her father’s remains. She sent Castro telegrams and letters asking for information. Through Cuban representatives in Washington, the State Department, and sympathetic members of Congress, she learned that if she could substantiate that this body was indeed her father’s, Castro would be willing to release it to her. The Cubans took fingerprints of the cadaver, which were then sent to the FBI. In September 1979 the FBI compared those prints with microfilmed prints taken at Ray’s enlistment in the Alabama National Guard in 1947. The conclusion: the Havana morgue did indeed have the remains of Thomas “Pete” Ray.
Janet, pregnant with her son Pete, stood in the drizzling rain as the plane carrying the body of her father touched down at the Birmingham airport in December 1979. It was the same runway from which Ray had taken off for the mission eighteen years earlier. But before Ray’s remains would be buried, she and her brother, Tom, insisted that it be autopsied. They hoped that it might yet yield some final secret of how Pete Ray died.
On the afternoon of December 6 a medical examiner at the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office set about removing the five screws, sealed in red wax, that fastened the lid to the gray pine coffin. Inside, the body was in a zinc metal container with a small window over the face. It was lined with white cloth. Ray’s head rested on a white pillow. As the coroner examined the body, one thing was obvious. Ray had not died in a plane crash, as the CIA had originally told the family. His body was riddled with bullets and marked by at least ten wounds—to his head, abdomen, arm, shoulder, ear, and wrist. As the procedure continued, the coroner carefully removed several fully jacketed slugs. Ray’s son, Tom, then twenty-five, stood by and watched in silence.
Two days later, on Saturday, December 8, 1979, some two hundred people gathered on a Birmingham hillside to bury Ray with full military honors. Ray would have liked the view from that hill that overlooked the airport and the planes of the Alabama Air National Guard. Among those who came to remember him were family members, old friends, officers of the Cuban men he fought beside from Brigade 2506, former governor George Wallace, and even a camera-shy case worker from the CIA. As the coffin was carried to the open grave, some of those who had served with Ray in the Alabama Air National Guard saluted him. Ray’s widow, Margaret, confined to a wheelchair by a recent heart attack, stared at the flag-draped casket and a black-and-white photo of her late husband. There were few words spoken.
Janet had already written a five-page letter to her father and slipped it into the uniform in which he was buried. At the funeral her remarks were brief. Said Janet, “I’m so glad my father’s home.”
Richard Bissell, too, had been changed by the Bay of Pigs. His name, once synonymous with brilliance and promise, was now forever welded to the Cuban debacle, like Napoleon and Waterloo. Following his CIA service, he spent two unhappy years at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a think tank, then returned to Farmington, Connecticut. There followed ten utterly unfulfilling years as marketing director of the United Aircraft Corporation. Then he retired. At his modest office his assistant, Fran Pudlo, decorated the walls with photos and keepsakes of his career.
He had mellowed and grown reflective. Pudlo and he would read to each other from passages of Greek or Roman history. One of his favorites was The Gree
k Generals Talk: Memoirs of the Trojan War. He liked to listen to the broader sweep of history, as if it might give him some perspective on his own life, if not outright absolve him. As he listened to Pudlo reading, he sipped coffee from a white china mug decorated with five gold stars and the letters “RBAF.” It stood for “Richard Bissell’s Air Force”—a gift from those who had worked with him on the U-2.
But at his home Bissell had almost no reminders of his CIA days. Somewhere in a drawer was a pair of titanium cuff links, a forgotten memento of the SR-71 project. He occasionally spoke of his Agency days but rarely of the Bay of Pigs. It was a reservoir of regret he would not allow himself to revisit. By the early 1990s, as he entered his eighties, he was no longer the imposing and sometimes volatile figure that loped down the long halls of Agency headquarters, already a legend. He was now frail and easily winded. He was wearing himself out trying to collect his thoughts into a memoir, a kind of footrace with his own mortality. When completed, it was unsparingly candid about his own culpability in the Bay of Pigs, but also placed much blame on Kennedy.
More and more he spent his days in the bedroom, surrounded by books and journals. In the winter of 1993 he was a sickly eighty-four-year-old man, his mind still keen, but no longer able or willing to fend off the limits of age.
It was on January 17, 1994, that Janet Weininger, daughter of Pete Ray, came to visit him in Farmington at the Bissell home, a three-hundred-year-old converted farmhouse. Bissell rarely turned down a request for an interview or a visit from a stranger. But the man Janet Weininger met that evening was a ghost of the robust Cold Warrior who had sent her father and so many others into the fray against Communism. Short of breath from pneumonia and suffering from circulation problems, he shivered in a recliner, a green plaid blanket draped over him and his feet warmed by slippers. For hours he listened as Janet spoke of her father and of the Cuban brigade. It was the least he could do, part of an endless penance.
Even Janet did not fully grasp the nature of her feelings toward this man whom she might well have hated as the architect of the fiasco that had claimed her father’s life. But instead, she came to him seeking answers about her father and the mission and to pay homage to the man who had overseen the U.S. attempt to unseat Castro. With her, she brought a plaque from Brigade 2506, which she presented to him. The plaque had been made up by the Cuban veterans three years earlier as part of a thirtieth-anniversary observance. They had hoped to present it to him in person in Miami.
Bissell declined the brigade’s invitation in an eloquent letter dated thirty years to the day after the invasion. “Looking back,” he wrote, “one can see there were many reasons for the failure and many persons who must share responsibility for it. There were errors of planning, particularly the failure to foresee and plan for contingencies for which I accept with profound regret a share of the blame. There were equipment defects. There was a faster and more effective response by Castro than we expected. But above all there were restrictions imposed on the way the operation was designed and conducted in an attempt to maintain an unattainable secrecy about the role of the U.S. government.”
But even in his later years Bissell never conceded the ultimate defeat. He closed his letter with these words: “I wish I could be with you on this occasion to drink a toast to the brave men who risked and those who lost their lives trying against all odds to overthrow a tyrant. I am confident that theirs is the wave of the future, and an increasingly isolated Communist dictatorship will collapse and that Cuba will again be free. May that day come soon.” It was a remarkable exhortation considering that by then Castro had outlasted seven U.S. presidents and become the longest-serving leader in the Western Hemisphere—thanks, in no small part, to the CIA’s failed attempts to oust him.
The plaque Janet carried with her that day was inscribed with the words “In Recognition and Appreciation for Gallant Services Rendered During The Bay of Pigs Military Operations. . . . . You Are One of Us.” Bissell was visibly moved, though perhaps not nearly as much as Janet wished to believe. They spoke for several hours. After being subjected to years of government lies and evasion, Janet felt that at last she was getting the truth about the campaign that claimed her father’s life. She would remember their meeting as a moment when a tremendous burden was lifted from her shoulders. Bissell, too, seemed to feel a sense of liberation. In coming together on a blustery winter day in Connecticut, the two had managed, at least momentarily, to exorcise some of the demons that had tormented them both for so many years.
Bissell’s health continued to deteriorate, but it was his spirit more than his body that capitulated. On February 6, 1994, he was told that it might be necessary to place him in a hospital or nursing home. He did not voice any protest, but there was no concealing his disdain for his own disabilities and growing dependence on others.
That night he did not awaken from his sleep. He was found in his twin bed in a large bedroom painted red and flushed with sunlight. The newspapers said it was a heart condition, but his family knew better. At age eighty-four Richard Bissell had simply decided to let go of life.
His body was cremated, but it was not until June 26 that there was a memorial service for him. That had always been his favorite time of year. For such a public figure, once the standard-bearer of the Cold War, it was a decidedly private affair. That was how Bissell would have wanted it. It was a brilliant sunlit day. Only about thirty people were to gather to pay their remembrances, none of them from his Agency days. But among those who were in attendance was Janet Ray Weininger. A short time before the memorial service, members of Bissell’s immediate family and Janet gathered in the living room, a long two-story room filled with books on politics, military history, economics, and mysteries, and even some Mark Twain. Once again, Janet had come with a gift. This time it was the blue and gold flag of Brigade 2506, which she presented to Bissell’s widow. There were few words spoken.
After that, the thirty or so family members and close friends assembled on a sunlit hillside overlooking the Farmington River. Across the river was a quiltwork of cultivated fields. Bissell’s ashes were placed beneath a simple granite stone that lay flush with the grass. The marker bore nothing but his name and dates of birth and death.
Neither the return of her father’s body nor the hours spent with Bissell brought any lasting peace to Janet Weininger, so consumed was she by the loss of her father. But for opposition from other family members, she would have had her father’s body exhumed and moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Miami—closer to her home. And in the spring of 1997, three years after her time with Bissell, she could be found trekking through the jungles of Nicaragua in an effort to find and recover the bodies of two Cuban pilots who had crashed after taking part in the Bay of Pigs operation.
That operation had been a tragic comedy of errors, a futile quest concocted by men of great power and intellect and carried out by men of unquestioning courage. At least in part, it was the contemporaneous demand for deniability that had doomed the mission, and subsequent decades of denials and secrecy that kept public fascination with the fiasco alive. All but one of the original twenty copies of the CIA inspector general’s scathing reports examining the Bay of Pigs were destroyed. The lone surviving copy was for thirty-six years securely locked in the CIA director’s safe, as if it were the last of some virulent strain of pox that could once again wreak havoc on the world. Not until February 1998 did the Agency release the remaining copy, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Visitors to the CIA, perusing the pages of the revered Book of Honor, would find four nameless stars beside the year 1961, one for each of the Alabama Air National Guardsmen who died in the Bay of Pigs. Long after their names had appeared in the national press and histories of the invasion, the Agency still steadfastly refused to publicly acknowledge the men or to inscribe their names in the Book of Honor. It was as if, by refusing to utter their names, the Agency did not have to look them or itself in the eye, as if accountability
could be so easily sidestepped. This, too, is a fiction.
One of those four stars belongs to Thomas “Pete” Ray. His daughter, Janet, is still in pursuit of answers as if they might fill the void of her grief. In this way, she, too, has come to be counted among the casualties of the Bay of Pigs.
PART TWO
A Time to Question
CHAPTER 6
Deception
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”
THE AFTERNOON of August 25, 1964, was hot and steamy as a tiny knot of mourners—a mother and father, a sister and a widow—gathered on a grassy Chattanooga hillside to say a last good-bye to thirty-four-year-old John Gaither Merriman. There, in grave 172, section BB, Merriman took his place in the national cemetery among many honored dead. Interred around him were more than six thousand unknown Civil War casualties who fell at Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Lookout Mountain, as well as six recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. John Merriman would have been proud to be in the company of such men, and they in his.
All that August day, Merriman’s widow, Val, had done what she could to steel herself. The night before, she had spoken with the minister, Brother Paul, and told him only that her husband had been involved in “a terrible accident.” Those were the very words he used from the pulpit of the Church of Christ addressing some thirty-five mourners, among them many brawny young men with weathered faces and aviator glasses tucked into their coat pockets.
In a pew close to Val sat Dorothy “Dot” Kreinheder, a casual friend who had worked with John and now took a more than casual interest in Val’s well-being. If she was there to offer Val Merriman emotional support, she was also there to ensure that the widow said nothing that might raise questions about Merriman’s death or implicate the CIA. Kreinheder had made herself indispensable, even purchasing Val’s mourning dress (a black affair with a low circular collar and white inset), a snug black pill-box hat, and the black fabric purse Val would clutch to her side, knowing it held a picture of her husband.
