On Edwin Kaiser and Related Topics

[Jim DiEugenio]

All of this misses the bigger problem - that an invasion of Cuba was doomed to fail because the revolutionary regime was popular with most Cubans, and had a large, combat-experienced army with ideal terrain to defend. It's the reason why JFK didn't want to invade Cuba during the Missile Crisis. As Marine Corps Commandant David Schoup pointed out by displaying a map of Cuba with a small red dot overlaying it. He said that the red dot represented the island of Tarawa, which took three days and 18,000 Marines to capture.

I couldn't agree more -- as a military operation Op Zapata was doomed all along.

However, as a bureaucratic operation designed to get rid of Allen Dulles it was a smashing success.

LOL, ROTF, LMAO

This has gotten to be one of the most absurdly humorous threads I can recall here.

Like I said, there is nothing more grotesque than one lame theorist teaming up with another to advance ideas that simply are not justified by the evidence, and which ignore certain key facts.

One of the key points that Lyman Kirkpatrick made in his report was this: OK, let us assume for the sake of argument that Castro's Air Force was neutralized. What would that have left on the ground?

About 35,000 Cuban regulars supported by Soviet tanks, mortar and artillery and motorized companies, against about 1,100 exiles who already had one supply ship sunk and one stuck on the reef. This meant ammunition, radios and aviation fuel was lost.(What do you think the last was for Scott?) This greatly crippled their ability to communicate, and also to counter the Cuban troops arriving at the water's edge. Kirkpatrick goes on to say that this was made worse since the CIA told Kennedy there was no police force at Playa Giron, but there was! And Castro also knew when the last ship had left Central America. 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.

Secondly, there were no defections. Period. So it was Castro's regular army of about 35,000 men, with all of the armored weapons available enabling it to hit the exiles with long range artillery shells and short range mortar shells, and then tanks to push forward and polish them off--against a force of about 1,100 men who had two supply ships already inoperative. Kirkpatrick then adds that this was not the worst part. The worst part was the fact that Castro still had a 200,000 man reserve militia he could call upon if needed. But his implication is that it was not needed here. Because it was all over in about 24 hours. And not because of the air cover issue, but because the CIA had planned this thing so poorly, and had anticipated things that did not happen. Like the fact that Castro had rolled up the last resistance weeks before. Therefore, there was no possibility of getting any support on the island.

But beyond that, there was not any hope of going guerrilla either. Because 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. Bobby Kennedy made sure that this got in the record of the Taylor Report by supplying exiles who had been trained by the Agency. You should read Dulles' ridiculous and mendacious response to that testimony.

See, the whole thing about the "cancelled D Day raids" was simply a dual edged myth that the CIA, specifically Dulles, Hunt, and Bissell, manufactured afterwards to cover the fact that they knew the operation could not succeed unless the USA participated directly. In fact, as Talbot discovered, the Pentagon had written a paper saying just that. But Bissell, who controlled the paper flow going to JFK on this, made sure the president did not see it. When I write "dual edged myth" what I mean is this:

1.) There were no cancelled D Day air strikes. There was no beachhead attained--and Kennedy had made it clear he wanted those launched from the island.

2.) They would have made no difference to the ultimate outcome anyway. For the simple reason that Zapata was mismanaged in every possible way you can imagine. And Kirkpatrick takes literally dozens of pages showing how this was the case. Pages that, evidently, Scott wants to ignore. Because it shows that, for the CIA, the Cuban exiles were expendable.

Dulles and Bissell understood that the operation had simply no opportunity to succeed unless American forces were directly involved. And, misjudging Kennedy, that is what they were banking on.

Dulles and Hunt then made up this whole D Day bombing excuse to cover their own butts about the CIA's treachery. And Phillips and Hunt then spread it among the Cubans. And they bought into it. And they are still buying into it. And Scott listens to them.