JFK (29 page)

First of all, there’s the subject of air cover for the men on the beach by U.S. military aircraft manned by U.S. military personnel. On previous pages I have written with some detail that the National Security Council had established the policy that U.S. military forces cannot be used operationally in peacetime. This was established policy when Kennedy became President, and he knew it. Therefore, the U.S. Marine Corps officers who drew up the invasion plan for the CIA, and for the Cuban exile brigade, were not allowed to include any supporting role for the U.S. military. Still, this posed no real problem for them, as long as they could predicate the tactical plan on the fact that all of Castro’s combat-capable aircraft would have been eliminated before the men hit the beach.

With this stipulation in the plan, the CIA came to my office in U.S. Air Force headquarters and requested a number of modified World War II B-26 bombers. By means of intelligence data and aerial photographs, it had been determined that Castro had ten combat-capable aircraft. Therefore, on April 15—two days before the landing—a group of these modified B-26s flew over the Havana area and destroyed seven of these aircraft. Three T-33 jet aircraft had flown to a base in the Santiago area. That afternoon one of the CIA’s U-2 spy aircraft located them parked wingtip to wingtip on a small air base.

The brigade was scheduled to hit the beach at dawn. The President had been well briefed on the significance of that prelanding air strike and had directed that B-26 attack. But, as we have seen, it was never carried out. Why wasn’t that crucial air strike flown, after the President had specifically directed that it be done?

This failure has been erroneously blamed on President Kennedy for three decades in various contrived stories, some of which appear to have a bearing on the overall assassination story.

A most unusual article, “The Brigade’s My Fault,” appeared on the op-ed page of the
New York Times
on October 23, 1979. It contained an elaborate and confusing confession. Its author was McGeorge Bundy, the former special assistant to Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and the man the “Cuban Study Group” (to be identified below) determined had made the call that directed General Cabell of the CIA to cancel the B-26 bomber strike against Castro’s last three combat aircraft.

In this article, Bundy wrote about the “brigade in Cuba” and “the famous brigade, a unit of about 2,600 men.” He revealed his top-level views of the intelligence community of that time: “But in fact, like other people, the intelligence community usually has more on its plate than it can handle.”

He recalled all those major programs the CIA had under full steam when the Kennedy administration came to Washington in 1961, then wrote: “So I have to consider that there was a staff failure—which means mostly me.”

He leaves no question about it as he writes that after eighteen years of contemplation, “The Brigade’s My Fault.” Kennedy had never placed the fault for the brigade on anyone but himself. Eisenhower had done likewise with the U-2 affair.

On April 22, 1961, JFK had directed Gen. Maxwell Taylor, in association with Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
¹⁷
Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Allen Dulles, to give him a report on the “Immediate Causes of Failure of Operation Zapata,” that is, the Bay of Pigs. That elaborate report by Taylor was submitted to JFK in the form of a lengthy letter on June 13, 1961.

The existence of that report has been denied by those principals and was one of the best-kept secrets of the Kennedy years.
¹⁸

However, during 1979, the same year when Bundy wrote his op-ed piece, a book about the Bay of Pigs appeared, written by Peter Wyden, formerly editor of the
Ladies’ Home Journal.
In Wyden’s book there are several quotes that he attributes to the “so-called Taylor Report,” and with that revelation the long-buried report became public. Wyden mentions McGeorge Bundy no less than seventeen times and quotes liberally from the long-missing Taylor Report. This is undoubtedly why, in October 1979, Bundy finally made his long-overdue statement. He most assuredly had read the Wyden book
¹⁹
and had heard people discussing the critical role he played in the strange Bay of Pigs drama.

Wyden had stated rather specifically about Bundy:

Bissell, Bundy, and Wyden were all referring to a few specific lines from the Taylor Report that placed the blame for the defeat of the brigade on one telephone call. Keep in mind that Kennedy had approved the dawn air strike at 1:45 P.M., April 16, 1960.

This quote is from the Taylor letter, paragraph 43: “At about 9:30 P.M. on April 16, Mr. McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President, telephoned General C. P. Cabell of CIA to inform him that the dawn air strikes the following morning should not be launched until they could be conducted from a strip within the beachhead.”
²⁰

No wonder Bundy admitted he had “a very wrong estimate of the consequences.” First of all, U-2 photos taken late Saturday, April 15, showed the three T-33 jets parked wingtip to wingtip on a small airstrip near Santiago, Cuba. One eight-gun B-26 alone could have wiped them out on the ground. The CIA’s operational commander at Puerto Cabezas was sending four B-26s to do the job that one could have done easily—provided the T-33s were caught on the ground. The brigade was scheduled to hit the beach at sunrise. That would alert Castro’s air warning system and put the T-33s in the air. As reported by Wyden, the Bundy call to Cabell stating that no air strikes could be launched until after the brigade had secured the Giron airstrip constituted a total misreading and a complete reversal of the approved tactical plan.

The dawn air strikes were essential to destroy the three T-33s on the ground—the only way the slower B-26s could destroy them. With them out of the way, Castro would have had no combat aircraft. The brigade would have been subject to no air attacks, their supply ships would have been safe, and the “air cover” issue that some revisionists have raised would have been totally irrelevant. This was the plan JFK had approved; Bundy misunderstood it—or did he?

There is one more thing to add about the McGeorge Bundy article. Bundy had no doubt seen the Wyden book. He realized then that, after eighteen years, the “never written” Taylor “Letter to the President” had finally been released. Bundy saw the undeniable evidence that it was he who had canceled the dawn air strike and caused the failure of the brigade’s gallant effort. There was nothing he could do to alter those facts except counterattack. He used a clever Freudian gambit: He let his mind think one thing and his fingers write another.

His op-ed article says, “The Brigade’s My Fault.” Any alert reader seeing that title would immediately connect it with the Bay of Pigs brigade and its failure. But Bundy is clever. He instead wrote a rather nonsensical, slightly offbeat, and quite disparaging article on the subject of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He didn’t say one word about the Bay of Pigs. He used the word “brigade,” but in a contrived context of the later event. It was clever, but it doesn’t wash—especially not after the release of the Taylor Report, written right before the eyes of Robert F. Kennedy, who reported the group’s findings to his brother every day.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the problem Kennedy faced concerned the Russian “technicians,” that is, rocket experts, and not a “brigade.” The “brigade” was at the Bay of Pigs. Bundy furnishes two numbers of military unit strength, 22,000 and 2,600. Neither one is pertinent to anything, and neither represents a “brigade” of anything.

With Bundy’s clever article in the
Times
, one is reminded of Richard Nixon’s equally clever article in
Reader’s Digest
, “Cuba, Castro and John F. Kennedy,” and then of Gerald Ford’s gratuitous article in
Life
magazine, scooping the report of the Warren Commission with his “Piecing Together the Evidence.”

Not one of these articles is completely true. They all have a special scenario to build, and all are revisionist. They are all written by men who have held high positions—two by ex-Presidents and one by the man who was formerly the national security assistant to two Presidents. They are, one way or the other, closely involved with that most important subject: the death of John F. Kennedy.

THE ASSASSINATION of President John F. Kennedy has been a never-ending puzzle for researchers and assassination “buffs.” They can tell you the name of the street where Lee Harvey Oswald lived while he worked in Minsk in the Soviet Union or the precise weight loss of the so-called Magic Bullet that the Warren Commission says passed through both President Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally before it mysteriously came to rest among the sheets on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital. This research has become such a mad game that few people ever think of basic facts and causes. Who ordered the murder of President Kennedy? Why was it done, and for whose benefit? Who manages and perpetuates this omnipresent cover-up, even today?

On the other side of the coin, those who have created the entrancing cover-story scenario have provided so many precious and diversionary “golden apples” that many researchers have taken the lure and stopped to examine every one of them. As an example: It is clear from the abundant evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President Kennedy. Then why study Oswald and that whole matter to absurdity? Such actions are an utter waste of time and serve to obfuscate the truth.

The murder of President Kennedy required the simultaneous existence and application of three fundamental factors:

1. the decision and the power to do it;
   
2. the professional mercenaries or “mechanics” to carry it off precisely as a team effort; and
   
3. the application and maintenance of the cover-story scenario to assure continuing control of the government of the United States of America thereafter.
   

The first two requirements were relatively simple ones and were the work of professionals. Once the decision had coalesced within the power elite, the die was cast. The “mechanics” were from “Murder Inc.,” the international specialist group that is maintained by the government, just as ex-President Lyndon B. Johnson confirmed in his interview with Leo Janos that appeared in the July 1973 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly
magazine. The continuing cover story, on the other hand, was difficult to create and manipulate and is by far the most important factor. It is this third factor that reveals the nature of the top echelon involved and the power and skillful determination of the plotters who benefited by gaining control of the presidency.

After all, the members of this cabal were able to control a commission created by a President and headed by the chief justice of the United States. They obtained the written endorsement of two men who later became Presidents: Ford and Nixon. They have controlled the media and congressional activity, to the extent that the assassination has never been investigated adequately. And they have controlled the judicial system of the state of Texas where by law a trial for the murder of President Kennedy should have been, and must still be, convened. The book is never closed on murder.

Why, then, was Kennedy killed? What brought about the pressures that made murder of the President essential, no matter what it cost? This chapter will probe this subject within the scope of the parameters of that time and will attempt to link the assassination with the Vietnam War—a link that unquestionably exists.

On November 8, 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States of America by a margin of 112,000 votes—a one-half-vote-per-precinct edge, the slimmest victory margin for the presidency since 1884.

Just over a thousand days later, President Kennedy was shot dead in the streets of Dallas by the closely coordinated rifle fire of a team of hired guns—or, to use the CIA terminology, “mechanics.” Pressures that had built during the election had become even greater during those intervening three years. Someone else wanted to take over control of the presidency before JFK could be reelected in 1964, and wanted it badly enough to kill and to put up with the eternal burden of maintaining the cover-story scenario—that one lone gunman, from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, did it with three shots from an old, Italian-made rifle with an unreliable telescopic sight. To maintain that cover story has taken real power; and those responsible for the assassination have that power.