Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (36 page)

In March 1960 President Eisenhower approved a plan to train a group of Cuban exiles to invade their homeland, with the anticipation that the Cuban people and various elements of the Cuban military would support the invasion. The goal was to overthrow Castro and to establish a non-Communist government favorable to the United States. Richard Bissell, the CIA deputy director for plans who had successfully developed the Lockheed U-2 spy plane program, spearheaded the plan within the CIA to invade Cuba that ultimately became the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
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Bis-sell, a graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics, had never spent a day in the US military, though he was ensconced in a group of journalists and government officials that became known as the “Georgetown Set,” a group that included CIA officials James Jesus Angleton, Allen Dulles, and Cord Meyer—three figures that played roles in the JFK assassination.

Once Eisenhower approved Bissell’s plan to invade Cuba, the CIA set up training camps in Guatemala where a small army was prepared for an amphibious assault landing and guerrilla warfare. E. Howard Hunt was selected to train the Cuban invasion army in Guatemala. Hunt leaves no doubt that the plan to invade Cuba was a direct copycat of his plan to overthrow Arbenz in 1954. “As principal assistant to Bissell, Tracy Barnes told me, I was needed for a new project, much like the one on which I
had worked for him in overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz,” Hunt wrote in his 1974 book,
Under-Cover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent
. “My job, Tracy told me, would be essentially the same as my earlier one—chief of political action for a project recommended by the National Security Council and just approved by President Eisenhower: to assist Cuban exiles in overthrowing Castro.”
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Hunt also affirmed that Nixon was in charge of executing the plan. “Nixon, however, had little to say on the subject in public,” Hunt explained. “Secretly, however, he was the White House action officer for our covert project, and some months before, his senior military aide, Marine General Robert Cushman, had urged me to inform him of any project difficulties the Vice President might be able to resolve. For Nixon was, Cushman told me, determined that the effort should not fail.”
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Operating under the code name “Eduardo,” E. Howard Hunt began organizing a government-in-exile that would form a provisional government in Cuba once Castro was deposed. Hunt’s principal assistant was a Cuban-American named Bernard “Macho” Barker who had worked for years for the CIA station in Havana. Baker and Hunt chose then-twenty-seven-year-old Manuel F. Artime to head the provisional government. Artime, a Jesuit-trained psychiatrist, had joined Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra and served as a regional agricultural official after Castro ousted Cuba’s ruling dictator Fulgencio Batista. Artime fled to Miami after becoming disillusioned with the number of anti-Communist friends who were being executed by Castro even though they had supported the revolution. Bernard Barker later turned up as one of the burglars apprehended in the break-in of Larry O’Donnell’s Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex. Artime later figured into the many plots to assassinate Castro that Robert Kennedy advanced in the Kennedy administration, right up to the time of the JFK assassination. The Kennedy plan was to replace Castro with the commander of the Cuban army, Juan Almeida, another Castro supporter who reportedly had turned against the revolution after Castro took power.
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According to Hunt, the plan developed by Bissell and the CIA in the Eisenhower administration called for “a total wipeout of Castro’s air power by a series of strikes just prior to the invasion landing.”
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Once the invasion of Cuban exiles cleared the perimeter around the airstrip at the Bay
of Pigs, Hunt planned to fly to Cuba with the provisional government. From Cuba, the provisional government would broadcast to the world a declaration that it was a government-in-arms, making an appeal for aid in overthrowing Castro. Following this declaration, a sizable contingent of US Marines waiting offshore in the US aircraft carrier
Boxer
was ready to land on the island once the provisional government was establish and had a chance to appeal to the United States for assistance. Because what the Eisenhower administration was planning was illegal under international law, the entire Cuban project was run under the principle of “plausible deniability.” To hide the secret war planning, the CIA trained the Cuban exiles in Guatemala and utilized agency covers in the United States that included businesses and individuals who shared rentals with organized crime and radical right-wing paramilitary organizations. “In time it became impossible to separate the wheat of intelligence from the chaff of the underworld,” commented journalist Warren Hinckle and his coauthor William Turner, a former FBI agent, in their 1981 book,
The Fish Is Red: The Secret War Against Castro
.
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On July 23, 1960, CIA director Allen Dulles visited JFK at the family compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod to brief the candidate on the Eisenhower administration’s anti-Castro efforts. This put the Kennedy campaign on notice that the invasion of Cuba was possibly an October Surprise, an event to effect the election. Increasingly, the Kennedy camp became paranoid as rumors out of Miami talked about the creation of a CIA-sponsored invasion force consisting of Cuban exiles.
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After confirming an invasion of Cuba was being planned, the Kennedy campaign decided to step up the candidate’s rhetoric. On October 6, 1960, at a Democratic Party dinner in Cincinnati, Ohio, JFK insisted the country “must firmly resist further Communist encroachment in this hemisphere—working through a strengthened organization of the American States—and encouraging those liberty-loving Cubans who are leading the resistance to Castro.”
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This sounded close to an endorsement of a US policy of assisting Cuban exiles in an effort to oust Castro. On October 20, 1960, on the eve of the fourth and final presidential debate, JFK put out a statement
that said the United States “must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our Government.”
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Again, while the statement stopped short of endorsing a US government–sponsored invasion of Cuba, JFK was trying to pre-empt the aggressive rhetoric on Cuba, positioning himself to claim credit for the idea, if Nixon and the Eisenhower administration were to go forward with the Cuban exile plan prior to election day.

Then, during the fourth debate, on October 21, 1960, in New York City, in his opening statement, JFK again returned to the theme of Cuba. “I look at Cuba, ninety miles off the coast of the United States,” Kennedy began. “In 1957, I was in Havana. I talked with the American ambassador there. He said he was the second most powerful man in Cuba. And yet even though Ambassador Smith and Ambassador Gardner, both Republican ambassadors, both warned of Castro, the Marxist influences around Castro, the Communist influences around Castro, both of them have testified in the last six weeks, that in spite of their warnings to the American government, nothing was done.” The Kennedy campaign had correctly calculated that Nixon’s training as a debater would induce him to take the opposite approach, urging a policy of restraint while charging that Kennedy was being irresponsible in suggesting a US military invasion of Cuba. This is exactly what Nixon did in the fourth debate, calling JFK’s Cuba policy the “most dangerously irresponsible recommendations he’s made during the course of this campaign.”
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Kennedy’s calculated move effectively checkmated Nixon on Cuba. Nixon was furious.

In his 1962 book,
Six Crises
, Nixon describes how as he was preparing the day before the fourth debate, he saw huge black headlines in the afternoon papers that read: “Kennedy Advocates U.S. Intervention in Cuba, Calls for Aid to Rebel Forces in Cuba.”
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Nixon recalled that as early as September 23, 1960, Kennedy had given an exclusive statement to the Scripps-Howard newspapers in which he said, “The forces fighting for freedom in exile and in the mountains of Cuba should be sustained and assisted.” In briefing Kennedy, Dulles was doing nothing wrong. Nixon acknowledged in
Six Crises
that he knew President Eisenhower had arranged for Kennedy to receive regular briefings by Allen Dulles on
CIA covert activities around the world. But, when Nixon read the headlines in the newspapers, he could hardly believe his eyes. Nixon asked his aides to call the White House and find out if Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy specifically on Cuba, on the fact that for months the CIA had been training Cuban exiles in Guatemala for the purposes of an invasion.

Within a half hour, Nixon discovered Dulles had briefed Kennedy on the impending Cuban invasion. Nixon’s reaction was rage, not at Dulles for informing Kennedy, but at Kennedy for exploiting this highly sensitive information for political advantage. “For the first and only time in the campaign, I got mad at Kennedy—personally,” Nixon wrote. “I understand and expect hard-hitting attacks in a campaign. But in this instance I thought that Kennedy, with full knowledge of the facts was jeopardizing the security of a United States foreign policy operation. And my rage was greater because I could do nothing about it.”
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Nixon was particularly enraged that, although the idea of providing the Cuban exiles cover training was actually his idea, Kennedy, by exploiting the classified information Dulles had shared with him about US training activities, managed to pull off the illusion he had thought of it first.
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Kennedy had robbed Nixon of his October Surprise that he was sure would catapult him into office. If Eisenhower and Nixon were successful with the Cuban invasion, Kennedy could claim they were simply implementing a plan Kennedy himself was the first to advocate publicly.

Nixon felt cornered. He had been planning the operation—the arms, ammunition, and training for the Cuban exiles—for six months before the 1960 campaign had gotten under way. It was Nixon’s program, but now he could not say a single word about it. “The operation was covert,” Nixon wrote. “Under no circumstances could it be disclosed or even alluded to. Consequently, under Kennedy’s attacks and his new demands for ‘militant’ policies, I was in the position of a fighter with one hand tied behind his back. I knew we had a program under way to deal with Castro, but I could not even hint at its existence, much less spell it out.”
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Nixon wrote that because Kennedy had him at such a tremendous disadvantage, he was faced with one of the most difficult decisions of the campaign. “Kennedy was now publicly advocating what was already the policy of the American Government—covertly—and Kennedy had been so informed,” Nixon groused. “But by stating such a position publicly, he obviously stood to
gain the support of all those who wanted a stronger policy against Castro, but who, of course, did not know of our covert programs already under way.”
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Nixon decided that, as the Kennedy camp predicted he would do, he had to protect the covert operation at all costs. He had to go to the other extreme. He had to “attack the Kennedy proposal to provide such aid as wrong and irresponsible because it would violate our treaty obligations,” Nixon explained.
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The Kennedy ploy had worked. By taking the aggressive position on Cuba, JFK effectively blocked the October Surprise by exposing it. But that was hardly the end of the story. While Kennedy’s stratagem may well have been critical to preserving JFK’s chance to beat Nixon in 1960, the strategy ultimately backfired. Once JFK was elected president, he suddenly became vulnerable to Bissell and the CIA, who blackmailed him over Cuba. If JFK as president did not keep good on his campaign promise to support the Cuban exiles in their effort to regain their country, Bissell and the CIA would leak to the public the reality that JFK’s hard-line stand against Cuba during the campaign was nothing more than a stratagem to get elected. Once JFK blocked Nixon from executing the CIA covert plan to invade Cuba, he committed himself to following through with the plan shortly after taking office, with no assurance the plan would work.

JFK approved the Bay of Pigs operation despite serious reservations the plan had any chance of success. Presidential historian Robert Dallek reported that two days after JFK became president, the CIA began pushing him to move against Cuba. At a January 22, 1961, meeting of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Army General Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and various national security and foreign policy experts, CIA director Allen Dulles stressed the United States had only two months “before something had to be done about” the Cubans being trained in Guatemala.
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The CIA knew they had Kennedy over a barrel. To abandon the invasion would make Kennedy look like an appeaser of Castro, appearing as if Eisenhower had approved the plan and JFK dropped it. A JFK confidante and political advisor warned him
that canceling the Bay of Pigs operation would present JFK with “a major political blowup.”
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Besides, if the invasion plans were scrapped, what was JFK supposed to do with the Cuban exiles who had been trained by the CIA in Guatemala?

Kennedy’s own military instincts told him the plan was harebrained. Even his adviser Arthur Schlesinger and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator William Fulbright agreed. There was no assurance the invasion would trigger a popular uprising, and there was little likelihood the invasion would succeed even with direct US military support. Still, Allen Dulles was insistent. “Mr. President, I know you’re doubtful about this,” Dulles told JFK in the Oval Office. “But I stood at this very desk and said to President Eisenhower about a similar operation in Guatemala, ‘I believe it will work.’ And I say to you now, Mr. President, that the prospects for this plan are even better than our prospects were in Guatemala.”
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The covert invasion began on Saturday, April 15, 1961, when eight B-26s marked deceptively as Cuban air force planes, flew from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, to bomb three Cuban airfields near Havana. The mission turned into an unmitigated disaster, much as JFK feared, when two days later, on April 17, 1961, the invasion of the Cuban exile forces trained by the CIA began parachuting into strategic locations in Cuba.
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