The Real Plan

7. The real plan

One might ask, at this point, where Allen Dulles was when his agency was undertaking probably the biggest operation (that we know about) of his career. He was in Puerto Rico, giving a speech. Why did he choose not to be in Washington at this critical time? Was it because he knew it would be harder for him to pretend that he was afraid to talk with the President directly than it was for Cabell and Bissell? Did he hope that by being away, the inconsistent behavior of his subordinates would be more explicable? It doesn't matter. Cabell and Bissel were in charge, and I don't believe for a minute that they would have suffered from timidity or indecisiveness at these crucial points in an operation that had been in preparation for two years, where hundreds of lives and the reputation of the country were at stake. And if they did, there are telephones in Puerto Rico.

One more point needs to be mentioned. According to at least one source quoted in Operation Zapata, a leader of the Cuban Revolutionary Front, the main political organization of Cuban exiles in the U.S., the CIA does not seem to have wanted a true counterrevolution from the very beginning:

Mr. Ray: We had a plan to take the Isle of Pines, but this was constantly postponed and we never got the supplies that we were supposed to. Later on we asked for help in the Escambrays, for airdrops between September and February, and during all this period we never received any airdrops. Then in early April we presented a plan of sabotage in Cuba which we call Cuban Flames. We felt we could be very successful in this because we had made a very deep penetration in the labor movement; however, we never received the support we needed for this either (p. 339).

The Front did NOT want an invasion, but a true counter-revolution:

Mr. Ray: We still believe that we can cause an uprising within Cuba amongst the Cuban people but we believe that the leaders must be developed within Cuba itself. We believe that the invasion concept was wrong (p. 339).

The CIA did not even allow the Front to participate in selecting the invasion force:

Mr. Ray: Another thing that was wrong with this operation was the fact that many of the elements in the invasion force represented the old [Batista] army. We felt it was wrong to give the impression that the old army was coming back and we protested (p. 339).

Even the leader of the Brigade was a Batista man:

Question: Did you approve of Pepe San Roman as the commander?

Mr. Ray: No. Everyone knew that he liked Batista. His brother had also fought against Castro in the Sierra Maestra (p. 340).

Yet the CIA believed an invasion of 1500 men led by Batista supporters could prevail against the charismatic Castro, who was still idolized by most of the Cubans who had remained in Cuba.

All of this can only point to one conclusion, assuming that the CIA wanted Operation Zapata to succeed: they--the CIA--were either incredibly stupid or incredibly incompetent. I do not believe this, and from all that has been discussed here, it is difficult to believe that the CIA wanted the invasion to succeed. Despite what they led the military, administration officials, and Kennedy to believe, there would be no uprising of the Cuban population (especially not in support of a small band of ex-Batista supporters), no guerrilla alternative, and no chance at all of even holding the beachhead without defeating Castro's air force. The CIA made sure that even these small chances for success were lost at the critical moments, by failing to insist on the air strikes on D-Day and on the air cover for the ammunition convoy two days later. In other words, it looks as if the CIA sabotaged its own operation.

Why? It is conceivable that what Dulles and his friends really wanted (though certainly not everyone in the CIA) was a full-scale U.S. invasion of Cuba, and were hoping to put Kennedy in such a compromised position that he would feel compelled to order it. Perhaps Dulles thought he could manipulate Kennedy as easily as he and his brother John Foster had run the Eisenhower administration. When Kennedy saw the invasion becoming a disaster, his fighting Irish spirit would rise to the occasion, he would send in the troops, and Castro would be easily overthrown. I am sure there was a good deal of private encouragement during the crisis for Kennedy to do just that, which does not appear in the Taylor report. But what Dulles could not have counted on was Kennedy's refusal to fall for this ruse and his willingness to accept defeat rather than be pushed into an overt invasion he did not want.

We must remember too that the CIA had been preparing secretly for a greater war in Southeast Asia since at least 1955. The Bay of Pigs "disaster" provided the perfect demonstration of what would happen if we didn't "stand up" to Communism. It led to the missile crisis of 1962 and a greatly increased perception of the worldwide Communist threat. Cuba became the prime example of what could happen, and would happen, even in our own backyard, if we were not prepared to fight the Communists. Vietnam was not far away.

Thus Dulles may have created a win-win situation, but I don’t think he counted on getting fired. That would explain his trip to Puerto Rico: to confuse the command structure at the critical moment. If Kennedy did not react as anticipated, things would turn out exactly as they have: the invasion would be considered a general screw-up, with Kennedy, as commander-in-chief, shouldering the blame. The general view would be, as McNamara told the Taylor committee, that "It was not a CIA debacle. It was a government debacle" (p. 204). As I hope to have shown, however, a close reading of the Taylor report reveals that the bungling on the part of the CIA top echelon was so extreme that it must have been deliberate. Kennedy is the one who ordered this report, and the conclusion she drew from it became obvious when he fired Dulles, Cabell, and Bissell. He might have been young and naive when he came into office, but he was a fast learner.

He did not fire McGeorge Bundy, and this, I think, was a fatal mistake. Bundy was Kennedy's own appointee and must have been able to convince the President that he had acted competently and in good faith, but the record does not support this. Bundy says in his letter to Taylor that "Mistakes were made in this operation by a lot of people whom the President had every right to trust, as a result of circumstances of all sorts" (p. 179). One of these people was certainly Bundy himself. But were what he calls "mistakes" really mistakes?

Bundy was the author, along with CIA, of the D-2 plan, the effect of which was to embarrass the U.S. at the UN and make it clear to the world that further airstrikes would have no chance of being "plausibly deniable." On the key question, whether Kennedy actually canceled the D-Day strikes, there is no direct answer. What we do know is that 1) Kennedy approved the D-Day plan, including the airstrikes, at noon on April 16, and 2) Bundy canceled the strikes at 9:30 that evening. Bundy's order went directly to the CIA, following the chain of command (President-National Security Advisor-CIA), but deviated drastically from it in referring further discussion to the Secretary of State. There is no indication of what Kennedy actually said or thought at this point or whether he was even consulted. Bundy told Cabell the strikes "should not be launched," not that the President had ordered them canceled (para. 43, quoted above).

Bundy further obfuscates the point in his letter to Taylor:

In my meeting with General Taylor and his advisory group, I was asked about the decision not to permit an airstrike by the Cuban invasion force early on Monday morning. This is a matter which arises from a conversation with the President and the Secretary of State, and I do not believe I am the right man to comment on it. I do have the recollection that during the presentation of the Zapata landings, the impression was conveyed to the President that there would be no strikes on D-Day that could not plausibly come from an airstrip in Cuba (p.179).

This merits close scrutiny. If Bundy had acted on Kennedy's direct order, he would have said so here. Instead, he refers to “the decision," not "the President’s decision," and to "a matter" (not "a decision") "arising from a conversation with" Kennedy and Rusk. What conversation? Was Bundy present? When did it take place--before or afternoon that same day? Did Bundy feel that any “matter arising" from such a conversation could be interpreted as an order to be passed on to the CIA? Why did he refer the CIA to Rusk, who was outside the chain of command, if he was relaying an order from the President? Again, there is no indication that Kennedy asked to be cut off in this way, and it is extremely unlikely that he would have wanted to be. Then, as if to add insult to injury, Bundy tells Taylor that he is "not the right man" to be answering such questions. Yet as the President's liaison with the CIA, if anyone had to know about the importance of the D-Day air strikes and the consequences of canceling them, it was Bundy. The record shows that Bundy canceled the strikes, but it does not show that Kennedy did so, and Bundy himself does not say this. Nevertheless, he obviously was able to convince Kennedy that the blame lay solely with the CIA. Perhaps Kennedy did not realize just how good a student of Richard Bissel Bundy had been at Yale (1939-40).

If we take this speculation to its nastiest conclusion, the Bay of Pigs may have foreshadowed what happened in Dallas in 1963. The war machine was again moving Kennedy inexorably toward war, this time in Vietnam, and he again did not behave as anticipated. By October he had changed his mind about Vietnam and decided to withdraw all U.S. troops by 1965, a little-known fact to this day, thanks to the historical engineers. His opponents were obviously prepared for this: he was shot on Nov. 22, and Johnson proceeded immediately with the escalation of the war, reversing Kennedy's policy while pretending to continue it. Many Americans suspect that the same groups that wanted most to retake Cuba, namely the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and the Mafia (who wanted their casinos and bordels back), all of whom were intensely antagonistic to Kennedy, were behind his assassination. Kennedy had also alienated Big Oil, but most of all, his decision to withdraw on Vietnam threatened to deprive the warmongers, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned Kennedy about when he took office, of the $570 billion "cost" that the war would eventually produce--which for them was of course income.

Could this be "the whole Bay of Pigs thing" that Nixon was afraid Watergate would reveal--that the CIA engineered both the "disaster" at the Bay of Pigs and in Dealey Plaza? Does this explain the presence of Nixon in Dallas the morning of the assassination, the presence of Allen Dulles and future vice-President Gerald Ford on the Warren Commission, the fact that Gen. Cabell's brother Earl was mayor of Dallas at the time, the obvious determination of the Commission and the CIA over a quarter of a century to thwart any reasonable investigation, and the fact that, through it all (1961-1966), the one person constantly in a position to know all the CIA's dirty secrets was McGeorge Bundy? Is it mere coincidence that the presidency has now passed from John Kennedy, who was bitterly antagonistic to the CIA, to George Bush, one of Allen Dulles’s successors?

Finally, speaking of coincidences, I mentioned earlier that one of the supply ships used in Operation Zapata was the Houston. George Bush's oil company was the Zapata Petroleum Corporation and was based in Houston. One of the landing craft at the Bay of Pigs was the Barbara J. Now, if Barbara Bush (ne Barbara Pierce) had a middle name like Jane or Jennifer, we might be onto something, but apparently she has no middle name at all. This surprises me, somehow.