James D. Barber, The Presidential Character (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Bantam Books, 1965).
The absence of Dulles and the ineffectiveness of his deputies, Gen. Charles P. Cabell and Richard Bissell, are described in this book as “a breakdown of leadership.” One must keep in mind, however, that this apparent “breakdown” may well have been intentional. Our so-called national policy on “anticommunism” has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of Castro and his “Communist threat,” just as it has continued to do in Central America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East.
My office was only a short distance from the rooms in the Pentagon used by the Cuban Study Group. I had worked with the CIA on anti-Castro activities since January 1, 1959. I knew almost all the men who had been called to meet with the study group. Many of them would wait in my office until they were called; many came back following their testimony and interrogation. One comment was general among them all. Their words were, in effect: “That group is highly charged with the presence of strong individuals. But the most intense man there is the one who sits in a straight-backed chair, separate from the others, and never says a word.” That man was Bobby Kennedy. It was well known that he returned to the White House each day to discuss developments with the President and his inner circle; but nothing on the record gives any indication that he ever broke the stranglehold the CIA had on that investigation or that he ever became aware of being in the grip of its velvet gloves.
As noted in an earlier chapter, following the President’s formal approval at midday of the landing plan, which included an air strike by four B-26 aircraft to destroy Castro’s remaining three T-33 jet trainers on the ground, the air strike had been canceled.
The entire anti-Castro campaign was fraught with intrigue. De Varona was one of the four Cuban exiles who, after flying from the American Legion convention in Detroit, where Nixon had spoken in August 1960, to Washington, had gone directly to the offices of then senator John F. Kennedy in the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. From Kennedy’s office they all went to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. Kennedy had been in personal touch with de Varona and the others all through this period. This adds another element to the value of de Varona’s testimony before the Taylor group.
Those three aircraft, Castro’s last combat-capable aircraft, were the T-33 jet trainers that had been spotted by a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, parked wingtip to wingtip on an airfield near Santiago and were the target of the four B-26 aircraft that were to have been launched from the CIA airbase at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Had that strike been flown as approved by the President, the jets would have been destroyed and the invasion would have been successful. Castro would have had no air force. The Brigade on the beach could have countered Castro’s attacks along the narrow approach causeways while its own substantial air force of hard-hitting B-26 aircraft operated from the airstrip the Brigade had already captured on the beach.
It was Allen Dulles himself who revealed that the U-2 had not been shot down as the Soviets and the rest of the world had believed. Although Dulles revealed this information in sworn testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, May 31, 1960, the same month in which the crash landing occurred, his testimony was not released until 1982 and generally has been ignored by the American press.
His revelation was staggering; however, no one has ever fully investigated the possibility that this flight, launched in direct violation of President Eisenhower’s order that there be no overflights before the summit conference, might have been ordered covertly by a small but powerful cabal that intended for it to fail and thereby to cause the disruption of the summit conference. Based upon a number of other strange events related to this particular flight, there is a strong possibility that this could be the case.
I worked in the same office with General Lansdale at that time. Those in the Office of Special Operations and the Office of the Secretary of Defense were certain, from what they had heard firsthand, that Lansdale would be named the next ambassador to Saigon.
The director of the Joint Staff was the senior permanently assigned officer in the then four-hundred-man office that supported the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Wheeler went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he held for some six years.
I was the first chief of the Office of Special Operations and continued in that office until 1964, while Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer and, later, Gen. Maxwell Taylor were the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
One of the reasons Eglin Air Force Base was selected for this program was that a major CIA air facility had been established there a few years earlier and had become the worldwide center for CIA air-operation activities, excluding the U-2 program and those within the Air America proprietary airline infrastructure.
This program was said to have been developed under the leadership of George Ball in the Department of State.