26-08-2016, 08:54 PM
Jim DiEugenio Wrote: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.