Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case
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In fact, in Ray’s eyes, even the leader of the brigade was a Batista man:
Q: Did you approve of Pepe San Roman as the commander?
Ray: No. Everyone knew that he liked Batista. His brother had also fought against
Castro in the Sierra Maestra.79
One of the points that Morrisey brings up about the failure of the invasion and the inability of the CIA to coordinate things properly with the White House is this: Where was Allen Dulles while the disaster was happening? After all, he was the Director of the Agency at the time. This was really his baby, since he was one of the first to declare Castro an enemy of the USA. Dulles chose to be in Puerto Rico on the day of the landing. But further, in the two major reports about this operation, there is no record of him phoning in from there to contribute instructions or relieve bottlenecks and confusion. For all intents and purposes, while his operation was collapsing everywhere, it was his deputy, General Charles Cabell and Director of Plans Bissell who were running the operation. As we have seen, Cabell tried to get Victor Marchetti to fabricate a story about Russian MIGs in Cuba. But further, as Morrisey notes, these two men made two serious errors in judgment. When Dean Rusk gave them the opportunity to phone President Kennedy about air strikes from Nicaragua the morning of the invasion, they declined. Then, on the third day, when the brigade was running out of ammunition, Cabell had the opportunity to request naval assistance in escorting supply boats to the front. The CIA refused to make any request. And this marked the end of the invasion.80
Yet, on April 19, when the invasion was now defeated, when the operation he had been preparing for over a year was now in tatters, Dulles appears to have met with, not President Kennedy, but Richard Nixon.81
As Morrisey asks in his essay, could such a string of errors and incompetence, such confusion, such rudderless leadership, could this all be just happenstance? Or was there something else at work underneath it all? As both Larry Hancock and David Talbot have noted, there was important information that was kept from the White House about the operation. In 2005, a primary source CIA history on the invasion was finally released to the public. In it was a November 1960 CIA memo prepared for Bissell that said that “our concept … to secure a beach with airstrip is now seen to be unachievable, except as joint Agency/DOD/CIA/Pentagon action.” Peter Kornbluh states that this memo demonstrates, five months in advance, that the Agency knew it could not achieve a beachhead without direct Pentagon intervention. But they went ahead with the project anyway. But more to our point, there is no evidence that Bissell ever forwarded this to President Kennedy.82 Colonel Jack Hawkins, the Marine amphibious expert detailed to the project by General David Shoup, wrote a similar memo. This one centered on the number and type of planes to be used, and the number or air sorties to be flown. Again, there is no evidence that this memo ever got to Kennedy’s desk. It stopped with Bissell.83
But Hawkins and Esterline go even further in this vein. Esterline states that he was never present at any high level White House discussion of the project. As he should have been. He and Hawkins later concluded that this was most likely deliberate. And in their absence, Bissell had given unfounded assurances to Kennedy about two key elements of the plan. First, that in its revised form it would still be plausibly deniable. Second, that it would need minimal air support. Hancock states that Bissell had many opportunities to misinform Kennedy. As the discussions about the project were heating up, he had thirteen “off the record” meetings with the president from January to March of 1961.84
In the wake of this strategic and tactical incompetence, this arrogance and superiority toward Cubans risking their lives, this maneuvering to keep crucial information from President Kennedy, the CIA hatched a cover story. It was essentially this: the operation failed not because of them, but because of Kennedy. How was it the president’s fault? The Agency and its media assets now created the myth of the “cancelled D-Day air strikes.” And since both Lyman Kirkpatrick’s CIA Inspector General Report and the White House’s Taylor Report were both classified for three decades, that myth began to gain ground. Before dealing directly with that controversial issue, let us address the point that Kirkpatrick makes early in his review. For the sake of argument, let us assume the CIA launched the D-Day air strikes and they managed to knock out all the jet fighters on the ground. What situation would that have left for the exile army? As Kirkpatrick notes, the 1,500 man army would no doubt have eventually “been crushed by Castro’s combined military resources strengthened by Soviet Bloc-supplied military materiel.” Later on, Kirkpatrick enumerates the size of this combined force at 32,000 regular army troops supplemented by a 200,000 man reserve militia.85 In other words, the exiles were potentially outnumbered by a ratio of well over 100 to 1.
But yet, it seems clear in both reports, and from other sources, that these D-Day air strikes were to be launched only from a strip secured within the beachhead. This meant that the invasion force had to capture and maintain a protected beach zone large enough to contain an air strip. In fact, the CIA agreed to this. In their revised version of the plan, delivered on March 15, they mention it at least three times.86 For instance, this March 15 memo reads that air operations over Cuba would be “conducted from an air base within territory held by opposition forces.” Later, in describing the sequence of the actual military landing, the memo reads, “The second phase, preferably commencing at dawn following the landing, will involve the movement into the beachhead of tactical aircraft and their prompt commitment for strikes against the Castro Air Force.” Then, a couple of sentences later, it reads, “the whole tactical air operation will be based in the beachhead …” Therefore, it is clear that the CIA understood this fact a month before the invasion began.
In furtherance of this declassified information, Kirkpatrick’s report contains an interview with Hawkins. He states that once the Trinidad Plan was revised, Bissell told him that the State Department and Kennedy had imposed new restrictions, one of them being they had to capture an airfield from the first day for air operations.87 Therefore, from this testimony, we know Bissell understood this requirement. In the Taylor Report, it clearly states that McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, told Cabell the night before the brigade landed that there would be no D-Day air strikes unless they were launched from a strip within the beachhead.88 Importantly, it was at this point that Bissell and Cabell now went to Dean Rusk to argue this point. This sequence also jibes with what Robert McNamara told Noel Twyman for his book Bloody Treason—that is, the CIA came back to the White House and asked for this D-Day air raid from outside Cuba. It was not in the revised plan. Finally, on April 16, when the idea of a D-Day air strike from Nicaragua came up with UN representative Adlai Stevenson and Dean Rusk, Kennedy specifically said he was not signed onto that decision. It was his understanding that any further air strikes would come from inside the beachhead.89 So, with these declassified reports, the evidence on this issue is compelling.
In light of this information, there is an interesting letter contained in the newly recovered files of the Garrison investigation. In it, Fortune reporter Charles Murphy is writing to veteran black operator Edward Lansdale. They are corresponding over an article Murphy had penned entitled “Cuba: The Record Set Straight.” Murphy writes that after this article appeared—in which he blamed Kennedy for the failure at the Bay of Pigs—JFK stripped him of his Air Force reserve status. Murphy added that this really did not mean that much to him. For his true loyalty was not to President Kennedy, but to Allen Dulles.90 As we will see, it was through compromised reporters like Murphy that Dulles got his cover story out. We will later see that— among other things—Dulles switched the blame for the failure from himself to JFK. Since the Kirkpatrick and Taylor reports were classified, the cover story took hold. Until now.
From the evidence adduced above, one could make a strong case that Kennedy was being misled by both Dulles and Bissell about the chances of success for the operation—that he was being given a
ll the wildly optimistic reports, but he was being deprived of crucial information about the liabilities of the operation. Was this done in a deliberate attempt to mislead him into committing to the project? If so, was it because Dulles and Bissell knew it could not succeed unless it had direct American military forces involved? Today, we can firmly say that this was the case. Unfortunately, the public had to wait over two decades to read the evidence.
In 1965, Dulles was preparing a magazine memoir about the Bay of Pigs. He got so far as writing some notes about it. He then decided against it. But many years later, his coffee-stained notes were discovered in his papers at Princeton. In them, Dulles finally admitted that he had a secret agenda for leaving Kennedy misinformed. He wrote that he never raised any objections when Kennedy insisted that there be no American troop commitment to the operation, or that the invasion be deniable, or quiet, or it should rely on internal uprisings. He then explained why:
We did not want to raise these issues … which might only harden the decision against the type of action we required. We felt that when the chips were down—when the crisis arose in reality—any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail… . We believed that in a time of crisis we would gain what we might have lost if we provoked an argument in advance.91
In other words, by misleading Kennedy into committing to a project he really did not want to commit to, Dulles would place him in a position where he would either have to swallow a humiliating defeat or reverse his public pledge of April 12: “There will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States armed forces.”92 In Dulles’s eyes, all the deceptions about “going guerrilla,” about the D-Day air strikes, about the Cuban masses rallying to the exile beachhead, these were all justified in his Machiavellian world view. He then tried to rationalize his justification:
I have seen a good many operations which started out like this B of P, insistence of complete secrecy—non-involvement of the U.S.—initial reluctance to authorize supporting actions. This limitation tends to disappear as the needs of the operation become clarified.93
This essay, by Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, was not published until 1984. At the time, the publication, Diplomatic History, gave Bissell an opportunity to reply. Bissell admitted that he and Dulles “had allowed Kennedy to persist in misunderstandings about the nature of the Cuban operation.”94
But it’s actually even worse than that. Because back in 1964, four of the exiles involved in the activity told reporter Haynes Johnson that the CIA had anticipated that Kennedy might pull back from the operation at the last minute. If that contingency arose, their handler told them to put on an act as if they had imprisoned the officers involved. They should place an armed guard at each CIA officer’s door, cut off all communications, then go the landing site and proceed anyway.95 This is how intent Dulles and Bissell were in putting Kennedy’s back against the wall.
There is little doubt that, by the time both inquiries were completed, Kennedy had understood he had been duped. In fact, he said as much to his friend Paul Fay. He stated that when he first came into office, he was appalled by the lack of judgment some of the military had shown. Being a former Navy man, he had looked up to these officers who placed the many ribbons and medals they won on their uniforms; he assumed they had higher qualifications than the rest of us. He now thought he was wrong in that perception. He would not instinctively follow their advice in the future. He then alluded to the Bay of Pigs: “They wanted a fight and probably calculated that if we committed ourselves part way and started to lose, I would give the OK to pour in whatever was needed.”96
As we have seen from Dulles’s notes, Kennedy was correct. But Dulles did not like his darker and duplicitous side being exposed. In addition to putting out a cover story through Murphy, he seemed to have some personal animosity toward Kennedy. When he was doing the preliminary work on his magazine essay on the Bay of Pigs, Harper’s sent over a young writer named Willie Morris. In the midst of one discussion they had about Kennedy, Dulles surprised Morris by blurting out the following comment, “That little Kennedy, he thought he was a god.” Morris wrote many years after, “Even now those words leap out at me, the only strident ones I would hear from my unlikely collaborator.”97
With what was in the two reports, Kennedy felt he had no choice except to take drastic action. Action, which as we will see, Eisenhower very likely would not have taken. But before doing so, he consulted extensively with a scion of the Eastern Establishment, Robert Lovett. Lovett had been a friend of his father, Joseph Kennedy. Under Eisenhower, the elder Kennedy had worked with Lovett and David Bruce on a forerunner of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This was a civilian panel meant to monitor the activities of the CIA. Both men were stunned at what Dulles had done to the Agency. They felt it was a perversion of what Truman had meant it to be: an intelligence and analysis center. When Robert Kennedy served on the Taylor committee, he called Lovett as a witness. After RFK died, biographer Arthur Schlesinger found Kennedy’s notes and a remnant of a report Bruce and Lovett had written among his papers.98
Lovett told the Cuban board of inquiry that “Bruce was very much disturbed” by the CIA’s actions. “He approached it from the standpoint of ‘what right have we to go barging into other countries, buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties, or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office.’ He felt this was an outrageous interference with friendly countries.” The report therefore captures Dulles’s cavalier, unfeeling attitude— probably garnered form his days at Sullivan and Cromwell—about sending young men of privilege abroad to engage in adventures with a blank check in hand. Bruce went as far as to deride Dulles’s actions as irresponsible “King Making,” all the while ignoring what the CIA was really supposed to do: collect, collate, and evaluate the best intelligence possible. They further scored the system Dulles installed, which rewarded success and ignored failure, with no system of justification or control. As long as a covert action was deemed as frustrating the Russians or keeping a country pro-Western, it was given the go-ahead. Approval was almost always a “pro-forma” matter, done over lunch by a small inner group. The result was that, “no one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on.” This meant that the CIA’s covert action arm exerted unilateral influences on American foreign policy. And at times, not even the U.S. ambassador in country knew about it beforehand. The writers believed that what had happened “could not possibly have [been] foreseen” in the legislation of 1947 and 1948. And they blamed lack of oversight as being “responsible in a great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today.”
The report also pointed out that the way Dulles organized the CIA allowed covert action programs to consume 80 percent of the budget. Further, the National Security Council (NSC), exercised little or no control over covert action. The CIA’s Directorate of Plans “is operating for the most part on an autonomous and free-wheeling basis in highly critical areas.” At times this was truly lamentable since “the operations being carried out by the Deputy Director of Plans are sometimes in direct conflict with the normal operations being carried out by the Department of State.” A perfect example of this was the CIA coup attempt against Sukarno in Indonesia. John Allison, the ambassador, opposed the coup attempt. So Allen had his brother at State remove Allison. The new ambassador was kept largely in the dark about the CIA plans. The coup failed, greatly alienating Sukarno from the USA. Lovett and Bruce—and Joseph Kennedy who was also on the advisory board—continued to press their case against Dulles until they left. In their last report they wrote that “the CIA’s concentration on political, psychological, and related covert action activities have tended to detract substantially from the execution of [a] primary intelligence-gathering mission. We suggest, accordingly, that there should be a total reassessme
nt of our covert action policies.”
Lovett told the Cuban board that, “I have never felt that the Congress of the United States ever intended to give the United States Intelligence Agency authority to conduct operations all over the earth.” Lovett’s report and testimony held great sway with the Kennedys. In fact, Joseph Kennedy was so impressed by working with Lovett that he urged JFK to offer him a top job in his Cabinet. Kennedy did, but Lovett declined. After his Bay of Pigs testimony, President Kennedy called Lovett in for a private meeting. He told the president that the CIA was “badly organized, dangerously amateurish, and excessively costly.” It had to be re-organized, which wasn’t possible with Eisenhower as president and Dulles as Director.