Betrayal At The Bay Of Pigs, Part 2

In less than 72 hours Castro’s forces defeated the CIA-trained and backed brigade; about 114 men were killed, and more than 1,100 men were captured and held until the United States traded $53 million in food and medicine for their freedom. It was an outstanding military victory for Castro.

Even more important, the U.S. failed invasion gave Castro a legitimacy he could not have won in any other way. No other American act could have helped him any more. In addition, the invasion struck a mortal blow to the anti-Castro underground movement in Cuba and, soon after, to the anti-Castro guerrillas in the Escambray mountains. Also, after Bissell had united all anti-Castro groups in the U.S., the invasion’s failure had decapitated them with a single blow.

Moreover, since the image of the opposition to Castro has always been an American one, with Cubans in the U.S. appearing to participate in a subordinate capacity, the harsh treatment given to the anti-Castro underground appeared to be justified by the circumstances. All opposition to the regime had been identified in the Cuban people’s mind as American-inspired and counter-revolutionary, thus playing right into Castro’s hands.

The bottom line is that, contrary to common wisdom, far from being a failure the Bay of Pigs PSYOP was a total success. Its main goals: boosting Castro’s bona fides vis-à-vis the Soviets, and strengthening Castro’s iron grip over the Island, were fully accomplished. After their success, the CFR conspirators were now dangling[1] Castro as a mouthwatering bait for the Soviets to bite.

Further proof that the CFR conspirators who control the CIA planned the invasion to fail is that they knew it beforehand. In this case, we also have the smoking gun showing that the CIA knew five months before the Bay of Pigs invasion that the invasion was going to fail.

A declassified 300-page document with an internal CIA history shows that on November 15, 1960, five months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, a CIA task force code-named Western Hemisphere Branch Four (WH/4), in charge of plotting to overthrow Fidel Castro, met to prepare a memo for CFR agent and CIA deputy director of Plans, Richard Bissell. The memo would be used to help CFR agent and CIA Director Allen Dulles brief President-elect John F. Kennedy on foreign affairs. Present at the WH/4 meeting were not only Bissell, but also Dean Rusk, who was then Secretary of State; Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense, and McGeorge Bundy, the President’s special assistant for national security affairs — all of them CFR agents.[2]

The memo concluded that the invasion was unachievable as a covert paramilitary operation without the direct support of U.S. military forces.[3]. The document was found in June 2005, among several declassified documents in a box marked “Miscellaneous” at the National Security Archive

An interesting detail that shows the conspirators’ hands behind the curtains is that the document mentions the key role played by William Pawley in the Bay of Pigs PSYOP. This is the same Pawley who attended the meeting at Mario Lazo’s home where Castro was initially recruited; the same Pawley who was in Bogotá during the Bogotazo riots and later claimed he had listened to Castro on the radio saying that he was a Communist. This is the same person who, in late 1958, was sent to Cuba to inform Batista that the U.S. no longer supported him and that he had to go.[4]. Again, coincidence is not a scientific concept.

Though the finding of the document is new, its existence was known since a long time ago. In 1987, Jack Pfeiffer, CIA’s former chief historian, sued the CIA to release what he knew was a view of the Bay of Pigs quite different from the official one. He suspected that despite CIA’s Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick ordered to destroy the document some copies may still remain. He was right. [5]

But Pfeiffer was wrong when he reached the conclusion that Kirkpatrick had destroyed the records and blamed Bissell for the disaster because of personal motives —according to Pfeiffer, Kirkpatrick ambitioned Bissell’s position and wanted to discredit him for that reason. But, knowing that Bissell was a CFR agent, and that Kirkpatrick most likely was a CFR asset, we may safely surmise that everything was part of a CFR cover-up intended to distort the historical record.

National Security Archive director and professional disinformer Peter Kornbluh mentioned that the WH/4 analysis was so sound that it eerily foreshadowed a scathing and sometimes controversial report written by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick in the summer of 1961.[6]. Kirkpatrick, however, blamed the Bay of Pigs fiasco on the usual human frailties the CFR disinformers commonly use as a excuse to hide treason: arrogance, ignorance and incompetence.

But now, thanks to this document, we know that this is not true. The fact that in mid-November 1960 the WH/4 concluded that the goal that a 1,500-3,000 man force could secure a beachhead with an airstrip was “unachievable” except with direct Pentagon participation, and five months later become “achievable” with only 1,200 men and as a sole CIA covert operation without U.S. military support was not the product of arrogance, ignorance or incompetence.[1] It was sheer treason.

In conclusion, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion had far-reaching implications. As professor Peter H. Smith rightly pointed out,

“It boosted Castro’s political stature in Cuba, Latin America, and the developing world. And it helped him drive his revolution toward the Soviet Union; it was in December 1961, not before, that Castro declared his lifelong allegiance to Marxist-Leninism.”[7]

According to Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei, now an American citizen living in the U.S., when Castro took power in Cuba the Soviet leaders did not know who he really was. Sergei recalls that, on an occasion he was visiting his father at the Kremlin, he overheard him talking with other Soviet leaders about Castro with. According to Sergei Khrushchev, “They were sure Castro was a CIA agent and was working together with the United States.”[8]

But the event that changed the whole picture was the U.S.-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Castro consciously chose the support of the Soviet Union, a support he had been pushing for a long ago. He was gratuitously delivering the Soviets on a silver plate what they had never dreamed of having: an ally in what the Americans had always considered their own backyard.

But this was very unusual. A parade of Communist leaders all over the Americas had been preaching communism for more than thirty years, and not one of them had been ever able to gain political power. Now Fidel Castro, who was not a Communist, was presenting the Russians with the gift of a power base ninety miles from the Unites States. The Russians had ample reasons for being suspicious. Why was Castro delivering Cuba over to Communism? How could he become a Communist when the Cuban Communists themselves opposed the revolution that brought him to power?

But the temptation was too big. Despite all the warning signs, the Soviets swallowed the dangling bait line, hook and sinker. And the event that ultimately convinced them that Castro was what he purported to be was his unexpected victory at the Bay of Pigs. Because the invasion was on his birthday, Nikita Khrushchev mentioned to his Kremlin colleague that this invasion was a birthday present from the United States. [9].

Somebody with a cooler head should have warned the Soviet leader about never accepting gifts from the Greeks —particularly when the gift was a Horse. [10]

Click here for part one —–> 1

© 2017 Servando Gonzales – All Rights Reserved

FootNotes:

1. Dangle. An intelligence officer who is intentionally put into the path of an enemy agent in hopes that he will draw his attention. The idea is that the enemy agent eventually may try to recruit the dangle. Given the fact, however, that the basic rule of thumb of the intelligence job is to suspect anyone who takes the initiative in making an intelligence contact, “dangles” make red lights flash and are usually not recruited.
2. CFR agents present at the WH/4 meeting in Robert Pear, “The Pointing of Fingers at the Bay of Pigs,” The New York Times, December 30, 1987, p. B-6.

[1]  Carol Rosenberg, “Bay of Pigs U.S. Invades Cuba Failure on Many Levels,” The Miami Herald, August 11, 2005.

3. As it has become too common among people who know too much, Pawley eventually committed suicide under strange circumstances.
4. See, “New Look at an Old Failure. An Ex-CIA Historian Fights to Air His Version of the Bay of Pigs,” TME magazine, June 1, 1987, p. 29. See also, Robert Pear, “The Pointing of Fingers at the Bay of Pigs,” The New York Times, December 30, 1987, p. B-6.
5. Rosenberg, Ibid.
6. Keep in mind that these were the common excuses the CFR disinformers used before they discover the new catch-all excuse: failure to connect the dots!
7. Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S. – Latin American Relations ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 167.
8. Sergei Khrushchev’s on Castro in Carrie Linin, “Khrushchev Outlines Missile Crisis,” The Collegian, Kansas State University.
9. Khrushchev seeing the Bay of Pigs invasion as birthday present, mentioned by his son Sergei Khrushchev in a speech he gave at Kansas State University, see Carrie Linin, “Khrushchev Outlines Missile Crisis,” The Collegian, Kansas State University.
10. One of Castro’s most known nicknames was“El Caballo”[The Horse]

[1]  Keep in mind that these were the common excuses the CFR disinformes used before they discover the new catch-all excuse: failure to connect the dots!