On Edwin Kaiser and Related Topics

[Scott Kaiser]

Playa Giron was 85 miles from the mountains. And that 85 miles was swamp not dirt. But further, to show another lie the CIA dumped on Kennedy, the exiles had no training in guerrilla warfare or how to survive under those conditions.

Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana is plenty swampy. Wasn't that the site of the "guerrilla warfare training center" that the FBI raided on 8/1/63? And didn't the CIA ultimately admit that it had a "guerrilla warfare training center"?

Some did have training, while others had very little, if they all had been trained for guerrilla warfare and how to kill tactics, then folks like my father wouldn't have no need in training some of these men after the disaster.

While Cliff points out that planes were cut from 16 to 8, somewhere, I read that. It's also confronting to know that our U.S. government contends that after the battle, the Brigade lost a total of 16 planes, however, after speaking to several surviving members, they all told me there was a total of 19 planes lost. I suppose if all Jim and a few others have to say about me that I listen to these anti-Castro men for truth, yet I over look the Kirkpatrick and Taylor Report, well, lets face it, no ones perfect.

I believe there is one single emotion that drives a person to want to tell the truth, desire.

[Scott Kaiser]

He read it right after the Taylor Report. And he then made his decision to fire the top level of the CIA.

Again, this is NOT true, how many times must I correct this guy? The top three [resigned,] and in-fact, Kennedy had a very elaborate farewell celebration for Allen Dulles, ugh!

[Scott Kaiser]

Therefore since he had been on full alert for a week, he was able to get thousands of his troops to the front within hours. This was another lie by the CIA. They had told Kennedy that, because of the element of surprise, Castro would not be able to mass a counterattack for days.

I'm not debating that the CIA lied to Kennedy, in-fact, I said they did somewhere throughout this topic. But, now lets for a moment take a look at the link I posted telling the story of more than ahalf a dozen journalist's sitting around the table with president Kennedy who heard Mr. Kennedy say himself he called off the "air-cover," he didn't say "air-attacks," he said, air-cover. That was a slip that needed to be stricken from record, then, Senator Smathers tells all the journalists that this information is to be stricken from record, but I suppose if one wants truth, out of those half a dozen or so journalists who heard Kennedy himself say he called off the "air-cover," wouldn't it make sense to track down someone who's still alive to ask him the question? How far is one willing to go for the truth? Desire...

Now, my question would be, if there is information I provided you, and that information is accurate and true, yet, it's stricken from record, then, is that information not to be accepted?

What if we were speaking about Trump? Then, would you have accepted the fact that Trump called off the air-cover by asking his advisory to call the CIA and "stand-down."

You see, just because some information is stricken from record doesn't mean it should be omitted from history, when information like this is proven, then it's imperative the whole story gets told, and yes, Hunt did spread the word that Kennedy called off the air-cover, but that information was already out as soon as July 1963. Hunt started to spread the information [after] Kennedy's assassination, that's when all the pieces of the puzzle started to come together, so my question would be, if Kennedy did cancel the air-cover, but then denies it, well, isn't he also lying to the CIA?

[Scott Kaiser]

^Edited.

[Jim DiEugenio]

1. Cabell, Dulles and Bissell were forced into resigning, they did not resign of their own free will. Big difference. For example, when Kennedy confronted Dulles after the reports were in, he said words to the effect that if this was a parliamentary system, he would have to resign. But since it was a presidential system, Dulles would have to go.

2. The main body of the invading force was in Central America. They did not get guerrilla training.

3. Every person who JFK consulted during the collapse advised him to save the operation with American forces. In addition to Cabell, this included Nixon and Burke. And when Dulles returned from Puerto Rico, around the second day, who did he go visit? Nixon.

[Scott Kaiser]

And, just when they had high hopes with Nixon, what did Nixon do after becoming presidential elect? He shut-down CIA operations, after president Kennedy's assassination, then there was Watergate.

[Scott Kaiser]

Nixon also believed, and wanted to prove the CIA was behind Kennedy's assassination, did Nixon think that by shutting down operations would be away for him to prove the CIA was behind Kennedy's assassination had Nixon gotten assassinated too? The goal wasn't to assassinate Nixon, but to extort enough money to recapture Cuba. By the way, Nixon wasn't the only target for a quick bribe, but alas, just as Sturgis said, "we just got greedy."

You see, my father knew exactly what Watergate was about, I have even mentioned the length they would have gone as they were thinking about hijacking a freighter that carried passengers from more than twenty different countries, in-fact, this plot was to take place just before they were caught in Washington, there really is so much more information that even the greatest of authors on this subject as left out, all I'm doing is filling in the blanks.

[Cliff Varnell]

1. Cabell, Dulles and Bissell were forced into resigning, they did not resign of their own free will. Big difference. For example, when Kennedy confronted Dulles after the reports were in, he said words to the effect that if this was a parliamentary system, he would have to resign. But since it was a presidential system, Dulles would have to go.
2. The main body of the invading force was in Central America. They did not get guerrilla training.

3. Every person who JFK consulted during the collapse advised him to save the operation with American forces. In addition to Cabell, this included Nixon and Burke. And when Dulles returned from Puerto Rico, around the second day, who did he go visit? Nixon.

Every person?

Cabell, Burke and Nixon were "every person"? Only Burke was a principal in the mid-March planning sessions!

That DiEugenio passes this nonsense with a straight face is amazing.

He appears incapable of grasping the significance of the following:

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocu...-63v10/d66

Emphasis added

On March 16, 1961, CIA officials outlined for President Kennedy the revisions to the Zapata plan that the President had called for on the previous day. The President's appointment book indicates that the meeting took place in the White House from 4:15 to 5:23 p.m. The meeting was attended by Vice President Johnson, McNamara, Rusk, Mann, Berle, Dulles, Bissell, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, and Gray. (Kennedy Library, President's Appointment Book) Although not listed in the appointment book, it is clear from his subsequent debriefing on the meeting that Admiral Burke also attended. According to Gray's notes on the meeting:

"At meeting with the President, CIA presented revised concepts for the landing at Zapata wherein there would be air drops at first light with [Page 160]the landing at night and all of the ships away from the objective area by dawn. The President decided to go ahead with the Zapata planning; to see what we could do about increasing support to the guerrillas inside the country; to interrogate one member of the force to determine what he knows; and he reserved the right to call off the plan even up to 24 hours prior to the landing." (Summary notes prepared on May 9, 1961, by General Gray; Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Countries Series, Cuba, Subjects, Taylor Report)

On March 17 Admiral Burke provided the JCS with additional details about the discussion of the revised Zapata plan. According to Burke, the President wanted to know what the consequences would be if the operation failed. He asked Burke how he viewed the operation's chance of success. Burke indicated that he had given the President a probability figure of about 50 percent. President Kennedy also inquired what would happen if it developed after the invasion that the Cuban exile force were pinned down and being slaughtered on the beach. If they were to be re-embarked, the President wanted to know where they could be taken. According to Burke's account of the meeting: "It was decided they would not be re-embarked because there was no place to go. Once they were landed they were there." In the course of the discussion, it was emphasized that the plan was dependent on a general uprising in Cuba, and that the entire operation would fail without such an uprising.

"It was decided they would not be re-embarked..."

What part of "it was decided" does DiEugenio not understand?

[Cliff Varnell]

This Stephen Kinzer article destroys Jim DiEugenio's claim that Allen Dulles was engaged in a "Machiavellian agenda" during the BOP.

Worth repeated readings...

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/20...ulles.html

How the worst blot on JFK's presidency happened

Was Allen Dulles' early dementia to blame for the Bay of Pigs?

November 23, 2013 6:00AM ET
by Stephen Kinzer

Before dawn on April 17, 1961, a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles landed in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's new regime. History has recorded the disaster that befell them. "How could I have been so stupid?" President John F. Kennedy shouted after the scope of the failure became clear.

Soon afterward, Kennedy fired his CIA director, Allen Dulles. "In a parliamentary system of government, it is I who would be leaving office," he told Dulles. "But under our system, it is you who must go."

Historians often call the Bay of Pigs failure the worst moment of Kennedy's presidency. Historian Michael Beschloss has called it Kennedy's "first enormous defeat" and said Kennedy felt he had "blotted his copy book forever." What has not been understood, however, is that this failure may have been in part the result of dementia that was beginning to affect Dulles.

Listening to baseball

Planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion began under President Dwight Eisenhower. As soon as Dulles was given the assignment, he did something he had never done before in his eight years as CIA director: He turned over a vital assignment to another officer and stopped paying attention to it.

The person Dulles chose, Richard Bissell, did almost all the talking every time the two of them went to the White House to brief Eisenhower on the plot. When Bissell briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dulles did not even attend.

Stories of Dulles' increasingly distracted behavior had already begun to circulate quietly at the CIA. One day in 1958, an analyst took him a batch of surveillance photos taken by a U-2 reconnaissance plane but found him unwilling to switch off the baseball game he was listening to. He paid little attention to the photos and remained absorbed in the game, muttering comments like, "He couldn't hit a bull in the ass with a banjo." With the same extreme inattention, he absented himself from planning for the Bay of Pigs.

In the weeks before the invasion, secrecy was broken by reporters from Time, The New York Times and other news outlets. The landing spot was changed to a beach, from which the invaders would have no chance to reach mountain hideouts.Kennedy, eager to limit U.S. involvement in the plot, made clear that he would allow only eight planes to provide air cover not enough to knock out Castro's air force and would under no circumstances order U.S. Air Force planes to support them.

These changes convinced the two men Bissell had chosen to direct the invasion CIA officer Jacob Esterline and Col. Jack Hawkins of the Marine Corps to conclude that it would fail. On Sunday morning, April 9, they went to Bissell's home, evidently distraught, and told him the plot was certain to end in "terrible disaster." He told them it was too far advanced to be called off and persuaded them to go back to work.

Under other circumstances, these two men might have appealed to Dulles himself. They did not because they understood that Dulles did not know much about the plan, had delegated everything to Bissell and would have nothing to say.

On the day of the invasion, Dulles was not even in Washington. Instead he was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, joining Margaret Mead and Dr. Benjamin Spock as speakers at a convention of young businessmen. He returned late at night.

"Well, how is it going?" he asked the aide who met his plane in Baltimore. "Not very well, sir," the aide said. Dulles' only reply was, "Oh, is that so?"

The two men chatted on the ride to Dulles' home in Georgetown. After they arrived, Dulles invited his aide in for a drink. Over whiskey, he shifted the subject away from Cuba and began rambling aimlessly. The aide later described this conversation as "unreal."

Sobering lessons

After the invasion failed, Dulles fell into a period of shock. ThenAttorney General Robert Kennedy later wrote that he "looked like living death" and "was always putting his head in his hands." John Kennedy dismissed him a few months later.

The declassified transcript of a closed hearing that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held two weeks after the invasion shows that some of Kennedy's advisers attributed the fiasco to Dulles' dreamy absentmindedness. "He showed up at meetings and sat there smoking his pipe," said Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations. "I blame him for not being there."

Years later, in an oral history now available at the Dulles family archives at Princeton University, another witness to the disaster, William Bundy, made a similar judgment.

"I had the feeling that by then, he was slowing down a bit," said Bundy, who at that time worked under Paul Nitze, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security Affairs. "He hadn't been quite the man I had known. All through, he hadn't been as much on top of the operation as I expected."

Several years after his forced retirement, Dulles wrote rambling notes for an essay defending his performance, but his sister, Eleanor Dulles, persuaded him not to publish it because "he had already begun to lose his command over his memory and ideas." In retirement, he began losing his way on the streets of Georgetown.

"Perhaps it was what we call Alzheimer's disease today," a cousin, Eleanor Elliot, who cared for him later suggested. She recognized what no one at the White House or CIA had seen or dared to mention in the weeks leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion.

When Allen Dulles died in 1969, obituaries focused on his responsibility for what one called "the greatest U.S. intelligence blunder." His appalling performance may be explained at least in part by the onset of dementia. It taught Kennedy what he called "sobering lessons," but it remains the low point of his presidency.

[Scott Kaiser]

1. Cabell, Dulles and Bissell were forced into resigning, they did not resign of their own free will. Big difference. For example, when Kennedy confronted Dulles after the reports were in, he said words to the effect that if this was a parliamentary system, he would have to resign. But since it was a presidential system, Dulles would have to go.

2. The main body of the invading force was in Central America. They did not get guerrilla training.

3. Every person who JFK consulted during the collapse advised him to save the operation with American forces. In addition to Cabell, this included Nixon and Burke. And when Dulles returned from Puerto Rico, around the second day, who did he go visit? Nixon.

The fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, reinforced by Kennedy's frustration at the meeting with Khrushchev in early June, changed everything. General Clifton informed current intelligence director Sheldon that the President was reluctant to continue receiving intelligence in the normal way. Clifton suggested that the Agency would have to come up with some entirely different way of presenting its information if it were to regain the President's confidence. He volunteered that there was no point in the DCI discussing the matter directly with the President as that would be counterproductive. Dulles took this implicit criticism calmly, possibly foreseeing that the President's disappointment with the Agency on this and other scores would lead, as it did in November 1961, to his own removal.

Meaning, Dulles took it upon himself to resign whereas not to further come under the president's criticism.

Dulles gamely soldiered on in his attempts to bring the new President the fruits of the Agency's collection and analysis in the traditional manner, but it was largely the unauthorized efforts of his subordinates that opened a new and less formal channel to the White House that would satisfy Kennedy and most of his successors. In mid-1961 Huntington Sheldon and other managers of the Office of Current Intelligence--working with Clifton but without the knowledge of their superiors either at the White House or the Agency--came up with a new intelligence briefing publication designed exclusively for the President.