Shortly after World War II, Nixon answered a want ad from a Los Angeles newspaper which sought a man who would run for political office. Nixon ran for Congress with the help of these anonymous backers and was elected. These people continued to support him through the ups and downs of his political career. Nixon has acknowledged that he had these backers; exactly who they were is another question.
Nixon was in Dallas with a top executive of the Pepsi-Cola Company, Mr. Harvey Russell, the general counsel. Nixon was a legal counsel to that corporation. That top executive’s son has told of Nixon’s presence in Dallas at the time of the assassination, and Russell has confirmed the accuracy of his son’s account. Later, sometime after the shooting, Nixon was driven to the Dallas airport by a Mr. DeLuca, also an official of the Pepsi-Cola Company. In addition, the son of another Pepsi-Cola executive was in Dallas at that time and had dinner with Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, the night before JFK was murdered.
Most references to this CIA proposal are taken from the post—Bay of Pigs Study Group Report, which was actually Gen. Maxwell Taylor’s “Letter to the President” of June 13, 1961, plus my own personal files.
This was known as the “5412/2 Committee” established by National Security Council directive 5412, March 15, 1954.
This very modest proposal was submitted to the National Security Council by DCI Allen Dulles. It was a plan for the recruitment of Cubans into a military-type organization for training purposes. At that point, the CIA had plans for very little, if any, operational activities in Cuba. From this simple beginning, the agency, spurred on by certain former senior Cuban officials, began to formulate plans for airdrops and over-the-beach landings of small groups of Cuban exiles, as well as airdrops of arms and ammunition for anti-Castro groups on the island.
This is taken from a U.S. Army Civil Affairs School lesson guide for U.S. and foreign military personnel. It or a similar guide was used for the training and indoctrination of the cadre of Cuban exile leaders. It is important to note what the U.S. Army teaches on this subject and to consider its applicability in this and other countries. This same document was used widely to train and indoctrinate the U.S. Special Forces Green Berets in Vietnam.
I was the chief of that office, which was concealed in the Plans directorate and known simply as “Team B.” Its official duty was “to provide Air Force support of the clandestine operations of the CIA.” This was accomplished secretly, on a worldwide basis. I had been directed, in 1955, to establish that office under the provisions of NSC 5412 and was its chief from 1955 to 1960, when I was transferred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In this capacity as head of the Military Support Office, in 1960, I went to Fort Gulick with CIA agents.
See particularly chapters 5 through 8.
Air America was a major CIA air transport proprietary company, with Far East headquarters in Taiwan and operations all over the world. It was a Delawarechartered corporation and had about one hundred cover names under which it could do business, in order to conceal its identity and its connection with the CIA. At that time Air America was one of the largest airlines in the world, and one of the best.
The block system, an old form of control, “pacification,” and surveillance made infamous during the Hungarian revolt of 1956, divides an area into blocks. Each block is under the absolute control of a leader, who knows where everyone is on that block. He uses children and schoolteachers, wives, shop foremen, and all other sources to gain total, twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week surveillance. No one could penetrate the Cuban system either from airdrop entry or by beach landing, and no one could evade it from the inside. The effectiveness of this system neutralized the exile group’s ability to penetrate into, or to support, political guerrillas.
See chapter 8.
As described by R. Buckminster Fuller in The Critical Path, these are “vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.” Winston Churchill used the term High Cabal in recognition of this group’s existence and supremacy.
Flechettes are small, rocket-powered missiles or darts that can be individually fired from a tube much like a drinking straw. Being rockets, they have no recoil, make little or no noise, have a high terminal velocity, and are hard to detect by autopsy after they have entered a person’s body. (One such weapon, fired from a specially modified umbrella, may have been used to poison President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.)
Even this scheme had its uncertainties. Many CIA old-timers hated Nixon. When the CIA-directed rebellion against Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958 failed so miserably, it was Nixon who demanded, and got, the immediate dismissal of that World War II-era OSS hero Frank Wisner and the dispersal of Wisner’s Far East staff. Wisner had been chief of that operation working out of Singapore. The “old boy” network never got over that move by Nixon. Wisner committed suicide some years later. This action by Nixon may have planted the seeds of Watergate.
See “Operation Zapata,” University Publications of America.
I had an unusual insider’s view of these developments. I knew of Kennedy’s approval early Sunday afternoon, April 16. I knew the ships had been at sea and that forces would hit the beach at dawn on Monday, April 17. I had heard that three T-33s had not been destroyed in the April 15 air strike, when all of the other combat aircraft had been hit. I knew that the U-2 flight on Saturday had located the T-33jets at Santiago, and I knew that the CIA operator at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, had prepared four B-26s for the dawn air strike “coming in from the East with the sun at their backs and in the eyes of the defenders, if any.”
Bobby Kennedy later named a son Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.
Ordinarily, following a disaster such as the Bay of Pigs, there would have been an official inquiry, with a full detailed report issued. The President, however, did not want a public inquiry, and he did not want a formal report. The Taylor letter was prepared by a committee that met secretly, calling itself “a paramilitary study group.” About ten years later, I called Admiral Burke, whom I had worked with over the years, and asked him to lunch with a friend. During that luncheon, I asked the admiral, whom I have always believed to have been the finest chief of naval operations the U.S. Navy ever had, about that report. He still denied there had ever been a report. He did not fib; he simply toyed with words. It was not technically a “report.” It was a “Letter to the President.”
Wyden cites interviews with McGeorge Bundy as material for nearly every chapter in his book.
These are the exact words from paragraph 43 of the Taylor Report. Here is how Wyden distorts them to cover Bundy: “Cabell had every reason to be disturbed. He had just had a call from Mac Bundy. Bundy said no air strikes could be launched until after the brigade had secured the Giron airstrip, and strikes would ostensibly be launched from there. This was an order ‘from the President.’” This is a most important bit of revisionism. The Taylor committee, with Bobby Kennedy as a member and one who closely read the report, says nothing about “an order from the President.” Wyden and Bundy added that “order from the President,” after the deaths of JFK and RFK, to cover Bundy’s actions.