Jim DiEugenio Wrote:IMO, you're two cents is not worth two cents.

The Bay of Pigs operation was designed to fail. Period. We have this from Dick Bissell, Lyman Kirkpatrick (more or less) and above all Allen Dulles. And we have it not secondhand, but in their own words.

You have read the Douglass book have you not? How about Destiny Betrayed? Its all in there at length. All one has to do it read the Kirkpatrick Report and the Taylor Report. And you will see that both investigations were puzzled at the feasibility of the operation. So was JFK. Which is why Dulles had to scare JFK into doing it by saying he had a disposal problem if he called it off. Dulles admitted this also, that Kennedy was never enthusiastic about the project. It was an orphan child he had to push on Kennedy. Further, the CIA was going to arrange an operation to launch it anyway if Kennedy did cancel out at the last minute. To me, and to Bobby Kennedy, this was treason.

As Lyman Kirkpatrick wrote, let us say the CIA had knocked out Castro's Air Force. So what? That would have left 1,500 exiles against a 35,000 man regular army. Supported by a militia of about 175,000 volunteers. In other words, the exiles were outnumbered by over 20-1. As anyone with familiarity with amphibious operations knows, this will not work. Dulles understood this. So he lied to Kennedy and told him that 1.) It would be a surprise operation 2.) Thousands of defectors would come to their side 3.) The exiles could go guerilla if they had to.

You should read Dulles answering these question under RFK's questioning during the Taylor hearings. He was caught by his own BS. This is all in new edition of Destiny Betrayed. You should read it sometime.

RFK was so outraged by Dulles' answers that he called in Robert Lovett, who wanted to fire Dulles under Eisenhower. He then read the Lovett-Bruce report. After this, RFK arranged a meeting with Lovett with JFK. Lovett told him he now had the perfect opportunity to fire Dulles since he was caught in his own deceptions. Because JFK had announced days in advance that there would be no direct American intervention in Cuba. As Dulles wrote in his notes, he though that once exposed to the "realities" of the operation--in other words a failure--he would cave. Kennedy did not.

So during the Taylor hearings, Dulles saw the handwriting on the wall. Namely that his secret agenda had been exposed. He knew the operation had no chance of achieving success without American forces. And he and Bissell made sure any memo saying that would not go to JFK's desk. So he decided to sneak attack JFK in advance of getting fired. He called in Howard Hunt and Hunt secretly penned an article for Charles Murphy at Fortune. It branded Kennedy a callow neophyte who listened to too many doves. It then said it was Kennedy's fault the Bay of Pigs failed. Thus began the myth of the cancelled D Day air strikes. Which Hunt and Phillips used to fire up the exiles against JFK. If you had read my book, you would realize that JFK never authorized any D Day air strikes. These were all contingent on achieving a beachhead and having an air strip on Cuba to launch these strikes from. The CIA knew this. Which is why they picked Playa Giron after Kennedy vetoed their first plan. The Cubans never got close to a beachhead since Castro knew they were coming and he had mortars, artillery, and tanks at the front within hours.

The difference between Kennedy and Nixon is this: Nixon told JFK he would have said they had a beachhead and sent in the Navy. That is he would have overthrown a Third World government with American forces and lied about it. If you know anything about Kennedy, you would understand why he did not.

As per your throwaway line about JFK offing Castro, please. Have we not had enough of this crap? The CIA was trying to kill Castro since 1959. And they continued to do so until 1965. In their own report, they admit they never had executive authorization to do so. Which is why they 1.) Kept these plot from JFK,and 2.) Lied to Kennedy about their continuation after he found out about it.

Read some good stuff on this case, in addition to talking to those Cubans. You can then cross check what they say. And maybe teach them something.

Quote:As per your throwaway line about JFK offing Castro, please. Have we not had enough of this crap?

Jim DiEugenio Wrote:The following is from Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 47. I will denote what I wrote by not using quotation marks. I will denote what Dulles wrote by using quotation marks.

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."

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." In Dulles' eyes, all the deceptions about "going guerilla", 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 action. This limitation tends to disappear as the needs of the operation become clarified."

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."

Quotes off.

Its not often these guys confess to treachery in print. But this time they did. They couldn't avoid it. Someone stuffed the unfinished manuscript into the files.

You should read some of these things from the actual pens of Dulles and Bissell. This is what the CIA is all about: lies, lies and more lies. Which would have been fine under Ike, Nixon or LBJ. But as Kennedy told Red Fay, Dulles had misjudged him. Which is why Dulles told the author he was working with on this essay, "That little Kennedy, he though he was a god." (ibid, p. 34)

No Allen. He just thought he was president. It was you who thought you were a god.