CUBA VS THE C.I.A.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP64B00346R000200200003-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 73
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 24, 2003
• Sequence Number: 3
• Content Type: REPORT

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0
by Robert E. Light, Cars Marzoni
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CUBA
versus
CIA
by ROBERT E. LIGHT
CARL MARZANI
Marzani
& publishers
too w . 23 STREET, NEW YORK I I, N.Y.
Munsell, inc.
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INTRODUCTION
NEW YORK Times, May 10, 1961, addressed an editorial to the
-11- U.S. government called, "The Right Not to Be Lied To," which was
precipitated by the wilfull falsehoods spread by Administration officials on
the Cuban invasion fiasco. Despite the well-warranted rebuke of the
Times, and many public figures, official lying on the nature of U.S.
involvement in the unhappy affair has persisted.
It has been our purpose, to the extent of our information and
experience, to put together the full story of the purpose, execution
and failure of the invasion carried out under the aegis of the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency, with the approval of two U.S. Presidents.
To explain the mentality of the invasion's midwife?the CIA?we have
examined the agency, traced the career of its director Allen W. Dulles
and publish herewith?for the first time in the U.S., we believe?a Hitler
SS document covering Dulles' meeting with a Nazi representative in
1943. A concluding section of our joint effort deals with the dilemmas
of U.S. foreign policy and suggests ways to peaceful readjustment to a
changing world.
It has not been our purpose to evaluate Premier Castro's government;
neither to list its shortcomings nor to trumpet its achievements. But,
we frankly profess our belief that the revolutionary government holds
far more promise for Cuba than any regime the invaders might have
established.
We are indebted to Robert Edwards, British Member of Parliament,
and to his collaborator, Kenneth Dunne, for many of the facts on Allen
Dulles, which they printed in a booklet, A Study of a Master Spy, pub-
lished by Housmans, London.
The extensive files and library of National Guardian newsweekly
provided much of the material on the Cuban invasion. The impetus for
this published work grew out of a series published in the Guardian.
We are in deepest obligation to John T. McManus for wise counsel
and deft editing.
ROBERT E. LIGHT
CARL MABZANI
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THE OPPOSING STRATEGISTS
ALLEN W. DULLES
Director,
Central Intelligence Agency,
United States of America
FIDEL CASTRO RUZ
Commander-in-Chief,
Cuban armed forces,
Republic of Cuba
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DULLES AND THE CIA
pERHAPS AS A HEROIC GESTURE in behalf of subordinates, President
Kennedy has assumed responsibility for the invasion of Cuba April
17 which ended 66 hours later in total defeat for the invaders.
It was correct for the President to assume the blame for the resulting
fiasco, but the responsibility must be apportioned among the agencies
and men who planned and carried out the action.
Operation Pluto, the code name for the Cuban invasion (Pluto
was King of the Underworld in Creek mythology), was conceived under
the Eisenhower Administration and willed to its successor. President
Kennedy accepted the inheritance and committed his Administration
to carrying out the plan.
Between conception and birth, the operation involved the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, top officials in the State and Defense Departments, UN
Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, Sen. J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and the CIA. Whatever reserva-
tions some may have had, only Fulbright went on record against the
adventure?which cost some $45 million of -U.S. taxpayers' money, to
which $15-$20 million may be added by public contribution to indemnify
Cuba for the damage done, via the tractors for prisoners project ini-
tiated by the President a month after the invasion.
While all concerned must bear an appropriate share of the responsi-
bility, the CIA was the agency most directly implicated. It trained the
invaders, procured the arms, drew up the invasion plan and presented
the intelligence estimates on the basis of which the other agencies con-
curred and participated. Washington made its decisions on what the
CIA reported.
In a basic sense, CIA made foreign policy and this (says the New
Republic, for example) "was the natural end-result of a broad usurpa-
tion of power which took place, almost unnoticed, during those anoma-
lous years when one Dulles ran the State Department and another the
agency [emphasis added]. . . . Since the death of Foster Dulles this
usurpation has grown increasingly visible, and Cuba turned a searing
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spotlight on the phenomenon of a government which has come to have,
in effect, two State Departments." Perhaps the most important conse-
quence of the failure of the Cuban invasion is that for the first time
the American people have had a glimpse of the sinister influence of the
CIA in foreign policy.
But this usurpation of power was not only due to the fact that the
Dulles brothers ran two vital U.S. agencies; it was also due to the fact
that in the CIA, as Marquis Childs reports, "military influence has long
been important" and the Pentagon has supported, abetted and protected
the CIA in its political adventurism. The power of the Pentagon in
foreign policy is little known to the American people but is beyond dis-
pute. As long ago as 1950, Walter Lippmann wrote that there was de-
veloping in the Pentagon "a very good and rather serious imitation of
what in any other country would be militarism?namely the military
control of foreign policy." (N.Y. Herald Tribune, June 20, 1950.) Not
only Lippmann, but John Foster Dulles himself in 1950 attacked the
Democratic Administration for the fact that "the State Department is
in many respects subordinated to the National Security Council in the
field of foreign affairs. The National Security Council has been pre-
dominantly military in character." (War or Peace, p. 235.) In the in-
tervening decade the power of the military has greatly increased; in-
deed President Eisenhower warned of this trend in his farewell address
in January, 1961. Yet when the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave written ap-
proval to the Cuban invasion, they were approving a plan in which
the Pentagon had participated. The debacle is a comment on the mili-
tary mind, and this military mind functions also inside the CIA, which
Marquis Childs says "falls into the error of counting guns and tanks
as though a census of the number of divisions in being were proof of
the stability of a country."
But we must look deeper into the structure of the CIA. Leaving
aside the morality of invading a sovereign nation in times of peace,
the sheer massive misrepresentation of intelligence as well as the bum-
bling inefficiency of execution staggers the imagination. Here is an
agency that has tens of thousands of employes and spends hundreds of
millions of dollars a year (the exact amount being unknown as the
CIA has no Congressional supervision) and yet can fail so dramatically
to present a true picture of conditions within a small nation 90 miles from
our shores?which until Jan. 3, all U.S. citizens might freely visit.
Where were all those secret agents and spies which the CIA is supposed
to have all over the world? Did they mislead Washington?
The answer lies in the nature of an intelligence agency. Contrary
to popular belief the heart of intelligence work is not the information
of the super-duper spy, but the systematic gathering of facts which are
90 per cent obtained from open and legal sources from the country in
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question: their magazines, newspapers, academic journals and So on, as
well as the reports of our embassies with their various attaches, com-
mercial, military, naval and the rest. Some 200,000 pieces of such
open" literature go into the CIA every month and are processed into
permanent records as an infinity of facts on IBM cards.
But these millions and millions of disparate facts are quite useless
unless a mind is applied to them, unless somebody thinks with them,
uses them to develop and check judgments and evaluations. This takes
a body of experts; and by historical development of intelligence in this
country, the CIA is not only weak in general on evaluation, but in the
case of Latin America it happens to be staffed by men trained to be
cops and not political analysts. The New Republic for May 8, 1961,
lays bare this hitherto little known aspect of the CIA:
"When the wartime intelligence groups were disbanded,
some 1,600 scholars and area experts who had been enlisted
by the Office of Strategic Services became the nucleus of the
State Department intelligence organization, while only a hand-
ful of OSS veterans found their way into the newly formed
CIA. The CIA had to start from scratch to develop its per-
sonnel, or to draw on the military and the Federal Bureau of
investigation. In the case of Latin America, the FBI men who
had been given wartime responsibility for intelligence and
counter-espionage work in the Western Hemisphere served as
the core of the CIA regional staff. The Special Intelligence
Service set up by the FBI for overseas work had performed
effectively for seven years. But it was one thing to arrest
enemy espionage agents and quite another to fathom the inner
social and political workings of Latin American societies. . .
The FBI hemisphere organization was in the end incorporated
into the CIA more or less intact."
The reason military men and FBI agents do not make good in-
telligence experts in the political field is that their training is too rigid
and narrow. Furthermore, they are usually politically naive and tend
to see everything in black and white?or should one say, red and white.
But the decisive factor is not so much their past training as the
indoctrination they receive in the CIA itself: the atmosphere of the
agency, which, as in every organization, is a reflection of the director.
There is an old joke that the key part of an automobile is the nut that
holds the steering wheel; and this cmnment holds for an intelligence
agency. The personality and. predilections of Allen Dulles are basic to
the steering of the CIA and to molding its collective personality. -
What kind of a man is Allen Dulles?
In a long article on the CIA, Newsweek (May 8, 1961), waxes
ecstatic over Allen Dulles the master-mind:
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"For more than eight years, Dulles has dedicated himself
to his job, giving it ten or twelve hours a day, expanding and
improving his staff, developing new facilities and techniques,
doing his best to make CIA the best intelligence agency in the
world. And there is no question but that his devotion has
paid off. French and British security officers privately express
great admiration for CIA. American intelligence officials?
especially the old timers from OSS days?say what Dulles
has really given the CIA is professionalism."
With such admiration for Dulles, two further paragraphs in the
article are unexpectedly devastating:
"The CIA was in the news this week because of two de-
feats. . . . One setback was in Laos, where the CIA decided
to support the power of General Phoumi Nosavan, mainly
on the grounds that he was strongly anti-Communist He was
?but the CIA entirely overlooked the fact that he was also
politically unpopular, and his army was almost entirely worth-
less.
"The other humiliation was in Cuba, where the CIA clearly
failed to grasp the political realities of the situation. The
CIA believed the information it received from one group of
Cuban refugees, that the Cuban people were ripe for revolu-
iton; it discounted the information that said this simply was
not so."
Newsweek calls this "astonishing ineptitude" and goes on to analyze
why:
"The basic reason is that the CIA tendency to support the
most militant anti-Communist is built into the system. . .
When a CIA man goes abroad, the emphasis is on getting
intelligence, especially about what the Communists are doing,
and the best way to find out about the Reds is to establish
contact with the national secret police. . 'The result is that
the system tends to make the U.S. clandestine allies of reac-
tion,' says a former CIA man who now holds elective office."
Militant anti-Communism is Newsweek's reason for the CIA inepti-
tude, a blind, self-defeating anti-Communism. But this political position
is not the result of co-operating with reactionary secret police throughout
the world. Such co-operation is the result and not the cause of CIA's
blindness. A more accurate reason is given by Marquis Childs in the
Washington Post (April 26, 1961) in what he calls the CIA's "exile men-
tality." He writes:
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"Ever since the Russian revolution of 1917 and increasingly
in the past two decades exiles have influenced American policy
and the American appraisal of critical situations. . , . But by the
very terms of exile they arc more likely than not to be wrong
in their estimates of what is happening in their former home-
lands."
But in a sense this reason begs the question: Why should U.S. policy
makers be influenced by exiles? It is, after all, well known that exiles
are rarely objective about conditions in their former countries: Chiang
Kai-shek is not the best expert on China, and reactionary governments
are out of touch with their own people?that's what makes them reac-
tionary.
Naturally such people will give biased and misleading information.
Commander Lederer, one of the authors of The Ugly American, has
shown in his recent book, A Nation of Sheep, how U.S. intelligence and
diplomats are systematically gulled by the reactionaries' regimes through-
out Southeast Asia. Lederer gives specific instances where these regimes
prevent U.S. agents from going into the field, a not too difficult job of
persuasion since U.S. agents generally do not know the language and are
reluctant to leave the easy life of the big cities.
Above all, however, these agents also know that the home office looks
with suspicion on reports that seem "soft" on communism. In the strug-
gle between the Chinese Red Army and the Kuomintang, American
officials in China were afraid to report the objective situation. Time-Life
correspondent Jack Belden in China Shakes the World gives many in-
stances of this fear. Newsweek unwittingly confirms this phenomenon
quoting the former CIA man as saying: "When it comes to recommenda-
tions about politics, the safe project is to support the element which is
most anti-Communist."
In other words, the political bias of the top CIA officials, their blind
anti-Communism, is the basic reason for CIA ineptitude. The intel-
lectual climate of the agency is shaped by these officials and primarily
by the director himself. Dulles himself has said, "You have to look to
the man who is directing the organization and the result he achieved.
If you haven't got someone who can be trusted, or who doesn't get re-
sults, you'd better throw him out and get some one else."
This is sound advice and will probably be prophetic. It is doubtful
that Allen Dulles will last through 1961 as director of the CIA. But
when he is gone it may be hoped that he will not be forgotten, for his
life and mentality arc typical of many top policy makers in our govern-
ment, particularly the ease with which such men shuttle from lucrative
corporate positions to high government posts and back again. Much of
Allen Dulles' background is unknown to the American people. A quick
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look at his personal history will illuminate both the CIA and U.S. foreign
policy in the last decade.
Allen Dulles was born on April 7, 1893. As a future diplomat and
intelligence official he had picked his relatives carefully. His maternal
grandfather, General John Watson Foster, was Secretary of State in the
Harrison administration [1890-94], and busied himself to annex the
Hawaiian Islands. His uncle, Robert Lansing, became Wilson's Secretary
of State in August, 1915. Thanks to his abilities and his family connec-
tions, Allen Dulles became a second secretary in Vienna in 1916 at the
age of 23. From Vienna he went to Switzerland and later to the Paris
Peace Conference in 1919. His admirers say he showed great talents in
those years. Time magazine in September, 1959, wrote that in Switzer-
land in 1918 "Dulles batched the first of the grandiose plots which were
to become his trademark." Grandiose seems to be the mat juste: Dulles'
plot aimed at saving the Hapsburg empire by turning it into a kind of
United States of Austria. Events didn't quite turn out that way?and as
a matter of history, the hallmark of futility has remained with Allen
Dulles right through to the Cuban enterprise.
A year later, at the Paris Peace Conference, we find Dulles terribly
impressed by anti-Bolshevik emigres. He wrote a memorandum entitled
"Lithuania and Poland, the Last Barrier Between Germany and the Bol-
sheviks." The memorandum is strongly in favor of Polish-Lithuanian
intervention and "The Allies should not be deterred from a military ex-
pedition because of their fear that it would require hundreds of thou-
sands of men." Allen Dulles was only twenty-five and a half years old,
but already he was thinking big.
Allen Dulles' superior at this time was a Mr. Ellis Dressel who was
the leading U.S. expert on German affairs. When Dressel went to Ber-
lin in 1919 as U.S. Charge d'Affaires, Dulles was with him as first secre-
tary. Dressel had many contacts with the generals and financiers who
were dreaming of a future push to the East. One of the Dressel reports
makes interesting reading. He talked to a leading financier who told him
that the nations destined to bring order to Russia were undoubtedly
Germany and America. America could not cope with this task alone
because she did not understand conditions in Russia whereas Germany
had the necessary experience. Dulles' top level German contacts date
from this time.
After Berlin, Dulles spent two years in Constantinople and then re-
turned to Washington where he became head of the Division for Near
East affairs until he left in 1926. Near East means oil and during this
period the battle between American and British oil companies took place
with Rockefeller finally getting 25 per cent of the shares of Iraq Petro-
leum Co., Mellon's group of the Gulf Oil Corporation getting priority
rights on the Bahrein Islands.
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In 1926 Dulles resigned from the State Department for a post in the
powerful legal firm of Sullivan and Cromwell which had ties and deal-
ings with Rockefeller and Morgan among other American corporations.
Dulles' knowledge of oil stood him in good stead as evidenced quickly
by the affair of the so-called "Barco Concession" in the oil fields of Co-
lombia.
In 1917 a certain General 13areo had sold a group of American firms
(including Morgan and Mellon) a concession on the rich oilfields in the
province Norte de Santander, but in .1926 the Colombian President, Dr.
Miguel Abadia Mendez, denounced the concession. The Morgan-Mellon
group chose two experts on the art of putting pressure, both former
State Department officials?Allen Dulles and Francis Loomis. Other ad-
visers were Gerrard Winston, former assistant Secretary of the Treasury
and Herbert Stadler, former head of the Latin American Division of the
State Department.
By 1928 Secretary of State Kellogg had sent an ultimatum and the
Mellons threatened an economic boycott. But President Mendez re-
mained firm. However by 19S0, with a little financial push from the U.S.
oil companies, a new president was elected in Colombia who forced a
new oil bill through the Colombia Congress. The operation was a
SUCCCSS.
Among the major customers of Sullivan and Cromwell were three
German firms, Vereinigte Stahlwerke (the famous steel trust), I. G. Far-
ben and Bosch. Bosch had an American subsidiary which at the begin-
ning of World War II was turned over to the Swedish bankers, Wallen-
berg Brothers, to be returned at the end of the war. The Dulles brothers
handled the transaction in the United States. By this time Allen Dulles
had become a director of the German-international J. Henry Schroeder
Banking Corporation in the United States. The head of the German
parent outfit, Schroeder Bankhaus, Was a genuine German baron, Kurt
von Schroeder, whose house in Cologne was the rendezvous for the
famous meeting of Hitler and Franz von Papen in January, 1933. The
Baron later became an SS Gruppenfitehrer and chairman of a group
that collected funds to finance Minnler.
Because of his German contacts, Allen Dulles became head of the
Berne office of the OSS during the Second World War. His work is still
shrouded in secrecy but here and there a glimpse is available. A British
Member of Parliament, Mr. Robert Edwards, has obtained and published
documents from the files of the SS Reich Security Office of conversations
held between Dulles and a high SS of ficial in February, 1943. The cover
name for Dulles was Mr. Bull. The SS official's cover name was Pauls.
Here are excerpts From the SS reports published by the Hon. Mr. Ed-
wards:
"He ( Dulles ) received I 'err Pauls very cordially, and the
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two established that they had already met in 1916 in Vienna
and between 1923 and -- in New York. Mr. Bull (Dulles)
said he was very glad to see Mr. Pauls again after all this time
and exchange ideas with him, as he had a clear head for Euro-
pean problems; be (Dulles) was fed up with listening all the
time to outdated politicians, emigres and prejudiced Jews. In
his (Dulles) view, a peace had to be made in Europe in the
preservation of which all concerned would have a real interest.
There must not again be a division into victors and vanquished,
that is, contented and discontented; never again must nations
like Germany be driven by want and injustice to desperate ex-
periments and heroism. The German state must continue to
exist, as a factor of order and progress; there could be no ques-
tion of its partition or the separation of Austria. . . . To the
Czech question Mr. Bull (Dulles) seemed to attach little im-
portance; at the same time he felt it necessary to support the
formation of a cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism and pan-
Slavism through the eastward enlargement of Poland and the
preservation of Rumania and of a strong Hungary."
"Then Mr. Bull (Dulles) turned to the subject of National
Socialism and the person of Adolph Hitler and declared that
with all respect to the historical importance of Adolph Hitler
and his work it was hardly conceivable that the Anglo-Saxons'
worked-up public opinion could accept Hitler as unchallenged
master of Greater Germany. People had no confidence in the
durability and dependability of agreements with him. And re-
establishment of mutual confidence was the most essential thing
after the war. Nevertheless, Herr Pauls did not get the impres-
sion that it was to be viewed as a dogma of American prejudice.
Mr. Bull (Dulles) described the Atlantic Charter as an impor-
tant basis; but its excessively wide compass needed to be re-
vised."
The hint of anti-Semitism contained in the first excerpt was more
sharply enunciated in two other passages which follow.
"Herr Pauls now made a very sharp thrust on the Jewish
question and declared that any Central European would find it
unbearable to think the Jews might ever come back again;
people would simply not accept a return of the Jews and a re-
establishment of their position of power. Herr Pauls intimated
that he sometimes actually felt the Americans were only going
on with the war so as to be able to get rid of the Jews and send
them back again. To this Mr. Bull (Dulles) who in the course
of the conversation. had clearly evinced anti-Semitic tendencies,
replied that in America things had not quite got to that point
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yet and that it was in general a question of whether the Jews
wanted to go back."
"Mr. Bull (Dulles) is in close touch with the Vatican. He
himself called Herr Pauls' attention to the importance of this
connection, for the American Catholics also have a decisive word
to say, and before the conversation ended he again repeated
how greatly Germany's position in America would be strength-
ened if German bishops were to plead Germany's cause there.
Even the Jews' hatred could not overweigh that. It had to be
remembered, after all, that it had been the American Catholics
who had forced the Jewish-American papers to stop their baiting
of Franco Spain."
We cannot assume that Dulles is as virulently anti-Semitic as his
Nazi counterpart, herr Pauls?after all he was trying to be pleasant to a
Nazi?but even for this purpose he seems unnecessarily enthusiastic. More
important, however, is that at a time when the Casablanca Conference
hPd set a Big Three allied agreement of "unconditional surrender" Dulles,
is suggesting that Austria not be liberated and that a strong Germany
be part of a new cordon sanitaire against the USSR.
Moreover this conversation in February, 1943, must be seen in the con-
text of the times. The German defeat at Stalingrad in January, 1943, was
seen by all military strategists as the turning point of the war. Hence-
forth the USSR could not be defeated and therefore a German defeat
was inevitable unless the Allies could be split. The more far-sighted
Nazis recognized this and from the memoirs of such Nazi intelligence
agents as Gisevius and Hottl we know that Himmler at about this time
was looking for contacts with the West for a deal to remove Hitler,
cede the occupied territory in the West and continue the war in the East.
Dulles supplied this contact and was actually being used by Himmler
perhaps without his knowing it. ( Incidentally the Nazi agents have re-
vealed that the Hungarian deciphering office had broken the code that
Dulles used to communicate with Washington.)
There was no alternative to the agreed policy of "unconditional sur-
render" except on the political premise of anti-Sovietism. This was
clearly understood by all concerned including the Vatican, which was
to have its finger in the generals' plot against Hitler the following year.
That Dulles favored this plan is shown by the fact that two years later,
in February, 1945, he was involved in secret negotiations for the sur-
render of Nazi troops in Italy, excluding the Russians who had a right
to participate and thus precipitating one of the few angry exchanges
between Stalin and 'MR.
The full story of what Dulles' contacts with the Nazis actually
achieved is still shrouded in secrecy, but if they were as praiseworthy
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as has been hinted it is a reasonable supposition that more details would
be available?for Dillies is not unaware of public relations methods.
From what little has been garnered here these contacts seem to show
the typical Dulles hallmark of grandiose (and futile) schemes of which
the Cuban invasion has become the most notorious.
Despite Dulles' protestations to the contrary, the CIA under his direc-
tion has consistently edged into foreign policy and has acted again and
again as if it were a government super-imposed on a government. It has
been published and never denied that the CIA has subverted govern-
ment after government, not stopping at the use of military force. The
CIA role in overthrowing the Mossadegh government in Iran and the
Arbenz government in Guatemala has been underlined in innumerable
publications. A Saturday Evening Post article over four years ago de-
clared that CIA agents had worked with Naguib and Nasser in the over-
throw of King Farouk in 1952 and the responsible British New Statesman
( May 12, 1961) flatly asserted that the CIA "disposed of Patrice Lu-
mumba." There are persistent reports in France that CIA agents were
involved in the generals' abortive revolt in Algeria. There are strong
grounds for believing the CIA supported Chiang Kai-shek's defeated
troops which retreated to Burma and set up bases there for hit-and-run
raids on China. This led to serious friction between the U.S. and Burma.
Says the New York Times ( May 23, 1961):
"The Chinese Nationalist operations which were unsuccess-
ful against Communist China ended in an exacerbation of rela-
tions between Burma and the United States. In 1953, 7,000
Chinese Nationalists were taken out by air to Taiwan (by the
U.S.) and it appeared that the episode was over."
But the tenacity of the CIA, and their flouting of official U.S. policy,
is shown in the same Times article by the fact that at Geneva in May,
1961, Secretary of State Rusk had to assure the Burmese that the U.S.
was not responsible for "the recent renewal of Chinese Nationalist ac-
tivity in Burma and that the Central Intelligence Agency had not been
involved in it. The history of Chinese Nationalist operations in Burma,
however, have kept Burmese suspicions alive."
The Times proceeds to give some details of why the Burmese are
not satisfied:
"Burmese Army patrols last October [1960] discovered an
airstrip in Shan State maintained by Chinese Nationalists. Air-
drops were being made by unmarked transport planes, [This is
a favorite CIA device.] One of the transports was engaged by
a Burmese fighter plane. The fighter plane was shot down by
the transport and the pilot killed."
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All this has come out because at the Geneva conference on Laos,
the Communist delegate charged that Chiang's troops were being used
in Laos and the Burmese Foreign Minister, though friendly to the U.S.,
felt compelled to tell the conference:
"Past experience warns us that these marauders, unless
withdrawn from Laos, are likely to infiltrate into Burmese terri-
tory again while we are engaged in mopping up the small num-
bers still remaining on our soil."
With masterly understatement the Times dispatch says:
"The Burmese Foreign Minister indicated that his neutral
country was not entirely satisfied with assurances he received
privately from Secretary of State Dean Husk . . . that Chinese
Nationalists would not be allowed to infiltrate back into Burma
from Laos."
It is a commentary on the influence of CIA on foreign policy that a
U.S. Secretary of State is not believed by the Foreign Minister of a
friendly neutral country. how disastrous to U.S. prestige irresponsible
CIA actions can be was, of course, dramatically shown by the U-2 flight
before the summit conference of May, 1960. President Eisenhower took
full responsibility for that disaster, just as Kennedy did for Cuba, al-
though as Newsweek stated on May 8, 1961, "most of official Washington
still believes that Mr. Eisenhower didn't know beforehand!about the last,
tragic U-2 mission."
The CIA sees as "Communism" the slightest attempt at social reform
by any government and proceeds to subvert such government. If un-
successful, the intervention pushes those governments further left, as in
the case of Iraq and Cuba; where successful, as in the case of Mossadegh
in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, it ultimately strengthens the pressures
for revolutionary solutions.
Enough details have (AMR; out on the Cuban fiasco so that citizens
can see for themselves what the CIA has been doing and how far its
actions square with existing laws or accepted morals in our country.
We can also see to what extent CIA policy is the result of a blind ad-
herence to the status quo which puts U.S. foreign policy at variance
with a world in change. There is an inescapable symbolism between
Allen Dulles, chief instigator of the invasion and Fidel Castro who led
the defending forces. Dulles is 68, Castro half his age. Dulles won his
first spurs trying to save the Hapsburg. Empire?in a world that had no
Soviet Union, no atom bombs, no African liberation struggles; a world
where China was a geographical expression, the United States a rising
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power protected by ocean distances, and world politics settled in a hand-
ful of capitals in tiny Europe.
Castro grew up in a world of cataclysmic change, a teen ager when
World War II was going on, a student when the atom bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima.
For Dulles the Russian Revolution was a traumatic experience, the
terrifying eruption of the lower depths as seen through the eyes of bitter
emigres. The Soviet Union was a patchwork of a state that couldn't
possibly last, Marxism the Devil's own dogma and Lenin a conspiratorial
agent probably paid by the Germans to take Russia out of the war.
Castro saw correctly that a new social structure built on wholesale
agrarian reform was the only hope for politico-economic independence.
for his country?and indeed for the whole of Latin America. When the
U.S. reacted imperialistically to his aims, he turned toward the Soviet
Union, which he respected as the leading world power in a victorious
alliance against Fascism. He saw in Marxism a stimulating philosophy
in vigorous competition with other philosophies, and regarded Lenin as
a great historical figure.
In the last decade while the sedentary Dulles in his sixties shuffled
papers on his desk and spun schemes to stem the rising tide of social
change the free-wheeling Fidel in his twenties was fighting gun in hand to
free his country from the oppression of the U.S.-supported Batista. As the
aging Dulles sat at his desk waiting to hear reports from the long-feared
invasion, the vigorous Castro, in the prime of his life, was shooting from
a tank and sinking an ammunition ship chartered by the CIA. Two
worlds stood face to face, two epochs, and the answer was in doubt only
for Dulles.
from Vie Nuove, Rome
"I'll bet he's a CIA man."
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IP SA
0 *
from Revolucion, Habana
We want Peace ?and to be left in peace.
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MADE IN U.S.A.: the counter-revolufionaries arsenal.
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INTERVENTION -YANKEE STYLE
IN THE EARLY nouns of April 17, a fleet of cargo ships, converted fishing
boats and onetime sub chasers dropped anchor off Bahia de Cochinos
(Bay of Pigs), on the south shore of Cuba 90 miles southeast of Havana.
At 3 a.m, the first of some 1,500 to 1,700 Cubans scrambled ashore from
self-exile to try to overthrow the Revolution won Jan. 1, 1959.
The invaders wore U.S.-made camouflage uniforms with cap devices
reading, "God, Fatherland and Liberty." They were armed with some
2,500 tons of supplies, including five tanks, ten armored cars, 18 anti-tank
guns, recoilless rifles, 70 bazookas, rocket and flame throwers, 30 mortars,
sub-machine guns, heavy machine guns, rifles and knives.
They landed at Playa Largo. (Long Beach) at the bottom of the bay
and at Giron Beach at its mouth. Some 175 paratroopers dropped
inland. The bay is in the Cienaga de Zapata, a vast thicketed swamp-
land, which lies between the mainland of Cuba and a small strip of solid
land along the coast. Two newly-built roads lead inland.
From the Caribbean, Radio Swan island broadcast in the name of
Jose Miro Cardona, president of the Cuban Revolutionary Council:
"Before dawn, Cuban patriots in the cities and in the hills
began the battle to liberate our hot rueland from the despotic rule
of Fidel Castro."
The "liberators" on the beaches did their best. They moved 20 miles
inland, overrunning handfuls of local militia, many of whom were teen
agers from the cities teaching peasants to read and write.
But even as the invaders were landing, a call from five militiamen
guarding Playa Larga, "they're here," alerted Cuban defense forces. By
dawn the six planes that constituted the Cuban air force?two British-
made Sea Furies, two U.S.-made jet trainers and two U.S.-made B-26s?
attacked the supply ships and landing craft. Five vessels were sunk,
including the Rio Escondido which carried about 30,000 gallons of avia-
tion gas as well as tank shells and anti-tank mines, and the Houston
with tons of communications equipment and one battalion of troops.
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Infantry battalions from Cienfuegos, Matanzas and Cavadonga, as
well as a militia battalion from Matanzas, moved against the invaders.
Artillery and tank units followed. From Havana, Premier Castro came
to take command.
The Cuban planes hammered at the supply ships around the clock.
The counter-revolutionaries' propeller-driven B-26s were no match for the
Cuban jets. They conceded the skies over the sea and beach and con-
centrated on strafing the Cuban defenders. On the ground, Castro di-
rected his tanks and artillery against the flanks; infantry moved against
the center. The defenders fought efficiently and with fury.
By April 19 the invaders were in full rout. Many fled into the
swamps. Others ran back to the beaches looking for evacuation boats,
but for most there was no escape.
Manuel Pcnabaz, one who escaped, described the scene at the beach:
"Glancing back we saw the entire battalion fleeing in panic?running
wildly toward the sea and then, when the shells rained down on the
beach, back toward the road, and then back toward the sea."
On April 19, "Communique No. 4" was issued from the battlefield,
signed by Fidel Castro Ruz, Commander in Chief." It said:
"The invading mercenary army which occupied Cuban terri-
tory for less than 72 hours has been completely crushed.
"The Revolution has emerged victorious though paying a
high toll in courageous lives of fighters who faced the invaders.
"A part of the mercenaries sought to leave the country by
sea in a number of boats which were sunk by the revolutionary
air forces.
"The remainder of the mercenary forces suffered heavy
casualties, dispersing in a swamp area from which no escape
is possible.
"A large quantity of arms of American manufacture was cap-
tured, including several Sherman tanks."
Cedric Belfrage reported in National Guardian on visiting the battle-
field April 20:
"All the way down the road to Playa Giron, tired, dirty, tri-
umphant militiamen greeted us.. . . In the ditches lay the debris
of a two and one-half-day war. Militiamen who'd come from
Havana spoke of their disappointment at arriving too late to
fight. Nothing remained to do except bring in the groups of in-
vaders who kept emerging from the thickets of the swamp,
burning with thirst, clothes and bodies torn, desperate to sur-
render. . . .
"It was clear that a similar defense could have and would
have been mounted anywhere in Cuba, using mostly the forces
in the locality. There was never even time to bring into play
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the major forces. When word of .the landing reached Jaguey,
its people stormed the armory for weapons. An old man wept
because none were left for him."
A final count of captured counter-revolutionaries ran to 1,214. Many
were sons of landlords and other property holders who lost their assets
under the revolution. Some were former army and police officers in
Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship. A few were "idealists," adventurers
and opportunists.
Under questioning they told like tales. They did not expect to meet
resistance. They were told that Cubans were suffering under Castro,
who had allowed Russians to overrun the country. Cuban soldiers and
militiamen, they were led to believe, would throw down their arms and
join the counter-revolution. In the cities there were to be mass upris-
ings and a general strike.
The invaders also expected that a 15,000-man inter-American army
would reinforce them on the beachhead. U.S. planes were to protect
them overhead.
For some of the invaders counter-revolution was a patriotic duty.
To others it was to be a lark. As the prisoners mused over their fate,
they also wondered what went wrong.
The story of how and why the invaders got to Cuba and how and
why they were manipulated and deceived is both sordid and alarming.
The plan was written in Washington and the plot developed in Florida,
Louisiana and Texas am! in Guatemala, Panama, Puerto Rico and
Nicaragua. The authors are U.S. political and military leaders, in both
parties. Their purpose was imperialist; their technique in character. The
casualties of their folly were fortunately light. But the sortie camp
dangerously close to setting off a world-wide holocaust.
WHO MADE TIIE DECISION?
When Fidel Castro visited the U.S. in April, 1959?three months after
the success of the 26th of July Revolution?Washington had not yet set
an official attitude toward Cuba. Some saw threats to U.S. investments
in the Revolution's promises of agrarian reform, an end to unemployment,
redistribution of income and affirmation of the sovereignty of the nation.
They wanted open expression of U.S. displeasure of the Revolution, or,
at most, icy acceptance.
Others in Washington argued that Castro's promises were standard
pap to lull the Cuban populace. They recalled that Batista and other
Latin American dictators also came to power on promises of reform.
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When the furor died down, they said, Castro would be like the rest.
U.S. business interests would be protected.
Eisenhower played it safe. He found it expedient to be out of town
when Castro arrived. The State Department did not officially receive the
Cuban Premier on the grounds that his was not an official visit.
But Vice President Nixon spent three hours with him, listening to his
plans (then still unimplemented) for Cuba.
Nixon prepared a three-page memorandum for Eisenhower and other
leaders in which he argued that Castro was a captive of communists
and perhaps even more dangerous than orthodox Marxists. He urged that
a force of Cuban exiles should be trained to overthrow Castro.
The Eisenhower Administration mulled over the issue for some
months. By the end of the year?after the agrarian reform and other
measures were instituted in Cuba?Nixon's view prevailed. The National
Security Council directed the CIA to prepare a "Guatemala Solution"
for Cuba. The CIA was instructed to promote disaffections, organize
exiles, train a military force and plan an invasion.
The operation was in full swing by the spring of 1960; the invasion
targetted for November. After the Democratic convention in July, Dulles
flew to Hyannis Port, Mass., to brief candidate Kennedy. (Interestingly,
during the election campaign Kennedy called for full U.S. support to
Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro. Nixon, instigator of the plan, was
forced to argue against the dangers of unilateral action.)
After the election, Eisenhower thought it proper to check with
President-elect Kennedy before instituting the invasion. Kennedy "seemed
taken aback," Drew Pearson reported. But, Pearson added, "he did not
say anything against going ahead." Whatever misgivings Kennedy had,
Eisenhower thought them sufficient to delay the invasion for execution
by the new administration.
President Kennedy's first announcement, the day after election, was
the reappointment of Dulles as CIA director. He assigned his own
"task force" to reexamine and reevaluate the Cuba invasion plans. He
asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review the military aspects.
Chalmer M. Roberts reported in the Washington Post ( May 14):
"Months ago some additional Pentagon officers were assigned to work
on the project. When the plans were worked out, they were subject
to review by a military committee of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, the top
ranking military group under the Joint Chiefs.
"When the, plans were presented to the President after he came into
office it was no cursory affair. The meeting room was surrounded with
maps showing the beaches and landing places, diagrams to show the
methods of landing and the logistic preparations.
"Finally . . . the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman
L. Leminitzer, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Arleigh Burke,
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gave the President a written, signed opinion that the operation made
sense militarily."
Late in January, Kennedy began meeting weekly with top CIA,
State and Defense Department officials and key aides. Opinions were
also sought from Administration figures, including UN Ambassador
Adlai Stevenson and Sen. J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. The invasion plan was greeted with
varying degrees of enthusiasm. The CIA and the Pentagon promoted
it as their own offspring. But others were concerned with world reaction.
James Reston reported in the New York Times (April 11): "The
State Department is worried about the political and military con-
sequences in the hemisphere and elsewhere of providing military force
to achieve political ends." He pointed out that Article 15 of the Charter
of the Organization of American States "specifically forbids such action."
The Article reads: "No state or group of states has the right to inter-
vene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal
or external affairs of any other state. The foregoing principle prohibits
not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted
threat against the personality of the state or against its political, economic
and cultural elements."
Only Fulbright argued that invasion plans were wrong morally. He
wrote a long memorandum to President Kennedy in March, arguing
that Castro is "a thorn in our flesh, but he is not a dagger in our hearts."
Some argued that other Latin Americans might interpret the invasion
as a U.S. move to restore a dictatorship and end economic reforms.
Consequently, President Kennedy ordered the State Department to
publish a white paper on U.S. policy drafted principally by special
assistant Arthur Schlesinger, jr.
It appealed to Castro to -return to the original purposes which
brought so many gallant men together in the Sierra Maestra and to
restore the integrity of the Cuban revolution."
The White Paper accused the Castro government of "betraying their
own revolution," but it also denounced Batista. It admitted past U.S.
"omissions and errors" in relations with Batista and acknowledged the
progress of the Revolution in building schools, houses and medical
clinics as well as "the early projects of land reform." It added,
no future Cuban government can expect to turn its back on such .
objectives."
As a further step to show Washington's concern for a "democratic"
new Cuba, President Kennedy ordered the exiles' military training
camps purged of former Batista men.
In March the CIA pushed hard for a go-ahead signal. It argued
that Castro was growing steadily stronger militarily. About 100 Cubans,
CIA officials said, were in Czechoslovakia learning to fly Soviet-made
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MIG jets; they would return soon with planes. (This has never been
confirmed by Cuba, Czechoslovakia or neutral sources.)
CIA officials also pointed out that the Cuban underground was fast
being discovered and suppressed. Jules Dubois reported in the Chicago
Tribune (April 25) that "the underground inside Cuba suffered its
worst setback on March 17 when most of its top leaders were arrested
. . . while holding a meeting in Havana." Among those arrested and
later executed were Maj. IIumberto Sorin and Rogelio Gonzalez Corzo,
whom Dubois described as "Mr. Underground."
Counterrevolutionaries were at the peak of training, the CIA argued,
and they were getting restless.
But the CIA's most telling argument was that Guatemalan President
Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes had asked that the exiles be removed from
training camps in his country by June 1. Ydigoras was under considerable
pressure at home because of the camps. He had continually denied
in public that the bases existed, but by now they were an open secret.
He could not fight the pressure much longer.
President Kennedy's time for decision came the first week in April.
Newsweek (May 1) described the scene in the Cabinet Room of the
White House thus:
"Assembled around the octagonal table were President Kennedy,
CIA director Allen W. Dulles; his deputy Gen. C. P. Cabell; the CIA
deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell; Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman L.
Lemnitzer; the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Arleigh Burke; Secretary
of State Dean Rusk; Assistant Secretary of State Thomas C. Mann;
the chief of the Administration's special Latin America task force,
Adolph Berle; and the President's Special Assistant for National Security
Affairs, McGeorge Bundy.
"It was the tenth time in ten weeks that these same officials--
in effect, the National Security Council augmented?had met to consider
the Cuban plan. Now, in this last dramatic meeting, the President asked
each man, in turn, the critical question. Not one voiced opposition."
President Kennedy signalled the green light. But he set some
restrictions on the invasion plan. He insisted that no U.S. nationals
could be directly involved in the landings and that the invaders could
not jump off from U.S. soil.
The original plan had called for air cover from U.S. Navy planes,
but the. President vetoed this. A revised plan, according to Newsweek,
provided for an air strike by U.S. planes before the invasion boats
went in. The President also canceled this, at the last moment.
On advice from Rusk, Stevenson and Bowles, President Kennedy
ruled out proposals for pre-invasion radio appeals to Cuba calling
for an insurrection and for showering the country with leaflets.
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The first phase of the invasion began April 15. Four days later,
while the invaders' commander Capt. San Roman was running about
the beach shouting, "Every man for himself," the Washington planners
held their heads in anxiety over what went wrong.
At first, the U.S. officials reacted as if San Roman's words were
aimed at them. Each struggled to evacuate himself from the disaster. The
Joint Chiefs of Staff leaked a story that they had not drawn up the
military plan. But Defense Secretary McNamara went out of his way
at a news conference to confirm the Pentagon's role.
James Reston reported in the New York Times that Rusk and Bowles
had advised against the plan. According to Newsweek, President Kennedy
"called Rusk and blisteringly reminded him that he had not offered
such advice at the time."
Newsweek further said that "Bowles was handled by Brother Bobby
[Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy], who in a personal confrontation jabbed
his finger at the Under Secretary's chest and said: 'I understand you
advised against this operation. Well, let me tell you something as of
right now. You did not. You were for it.' ( Drew Pearson reported
that Bowles had drawn up a memo advising against the invasion,
but, Pearson said, there was no evidence that he had sent it.)
At a briefing for newsmen, the CIA said flatly that its intelligence
estimates had been correct. Scapegoats would have to be sought
elsewhere.
With all the cover-up, only Stevenson remained exposed, unable
to hide the naive tales he had told at the UN. Although his part in the.
planning was small, he had had to tell the world that the U.S. was not
involved. He was cast as the used-car salesman, left to face an irate
customer whose car collapsed as he drove off the lot.
VICTORY PARADE: their slogan is "Homeland or Death."
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CIA UBER ALLES
THEN THE CIA got the green light from Washington early in 1960
to organize an invasion of Cuba, it found Florida teeming with
exile groups. There were about 100 organizations?an accurate count
is not possible because they formed and folded almost daily?each with
at least one leader who aspired to the premiership of the next Cuban
government.
The exile chiefs ranged politically from wealthy industrialists who
flourished under Batista and longed for a return to the good old days,
to Manuel Ray's People's Revolutionary Movement, dedicated to a brand
of middle-class liberalism. In between were businessmen, professionals
and politicians who had lost their holdings under the Castro revolution,
as well as opportunists and adventurers.
Some of the groups just talked, but others trained private armies.
In addition, Drew Pearson reported that training in the Florida Ever-
glades were "dissident groups financed by American corporations whose
property was seized by Castro." Richard II. Rovere reported in the
New Yorker: "It has been said on excellent authority that part of the
money that supported the exiles during their months of peparation for
the invasion came from private interests?sugar, oil, shipping and tele-
phones."
The groups had only this in common: Each wanted to overturn the
revolution and none had a mass following in Cuba or among the exiles.
The CIA came on the scene with an open pocketbook and a closed
mind. It took to its bosom and purse the Revolutionary Recovery Move-
ment. The R.R.M. was small, reactionary and activist. It kept a dozen men
in military training in a former mansion in Miami.
Manuel Artime, its leader, was a former Catholic student leader who
had been with Castro briefly after the Revolution and who had
close ties with the Spanish Jesuit community in Cuba. William Shannon
said in the New York Post: "The CIA discovered Manuel Artime . . .
and has groomed him to play the role which the late Castillo Armas
played in the Guatemala takeover."
But the R.R.M. had little standing with other exiles. Cuban business-
men looked on it as an adventurist group with no clear economic
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program. To establish a firmer base, the CIA fostered a united front of
five groups, including the R.R.M.
The new combination was called the Democratic Revolutionary
Front. Its political line was conservative, but it could not be tied
to Batista. Its leader, Manuel Antonio ?Varona, was respectable and
safe. He was Prime Minister in the Prio government in 1947. He
advocated the return of land expropriated by the revolution to the
original owners, except for "about 15 per cent" that is not productive.
"The need for agrarian reform in Cuba," Varona said, "is a myth."
The CIA showered money on the Front. Time reported (April
28): "Estimates of how much money was pumped into the Front for
recruiting centers and other political expenses vary from $130,000
monthly to a high of $520,000 last December."
Miami proved a bonanza for the CIA's recruiting drive. There were
40,000 Cubans in the city, 27,000 of them recent emigres. Many were
broke and did not speak English. At first they were a source of cheap
labor for the hotels, but when the recession hit, they lost their jobs.
While the Immigration Service admitted all freely, it did not permit the
exiles to leave Florida.
The CIA designated the 'Front's office in Miami as general staff
headquarters and established training bases in Florida in the Everglades
and in homestead, as well as camps near New Orleans and Houston.
Other bases were set up in Panama and on Vieques Island, off Puerto
Rico.
But the expanding army needed more room. Time reported: "As the
plans for a frontal invasion took shape, CIA men went to Guatemala
and arranged with rancher-businessman Roberto Alejos (brother of
Guatemala's Ambassador to the 'U.S. ) to use three of his properties
?coffee plantations named Helvetia and La Sui.za near the town of
Retalhuleu, and a cotton farm called San Jose Buenavista, 35 miles
from the Pacific port of San Jose?as camps to train an army of invasion.
(`No charge,' said Alejos. `Just remember me in IIavana.')
"Through Alejos, the CIA also arranged a $1,000,000 hurry-up sur-
facing of a 5,000-ft. airstrip at .Retalhuleu. ? . . Later, Alejos helped
establish two more camps, one at San Juan Acul, close to the Mexican
border, the other at 1)os Lagunas in the jungles of northern Guate-
mala." Camps were also set up in Trax, Champerico and Sayaxche.
While the camps were an open secret in Miami, Washington denied
their existence. Time said: "Aleios last winter allowed nosey journalists to
visit the Helvetia plantation. Before they arrived, the Cubans were
transferred to nearby La Suiza; they were brought back as soon as the
visitors left."
CIA instructors at the camps were counterrevolutionary experts, re-
cruited from around the world. A Filipino, who gained his experience in
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BEFORE: in Miami, The invasion looked like a lark.
the campaign against the Huks;, was in charge of guerilla training at the
Panama camp. Other instructors were described by recruits as Germans,
Poles, Czechs and Ukrainians. They spoke to the trainees through inter-
preters. Many of the U.S.-born CIA men also did not speak Spanish.
All were known by code names.
Strict discipline was maintained at the camps. All but a few officers
were prohibited from going into town. Time reported: "Exiles also say
that they were subjected to lie-detector tests before going to camps
(sample question: Have you had homosexual relations?) and were
threatened with deportation or detention camps at McAllen, Texas, if
they got out of line."
But the recruits did get out of line. Fist fights and even gun
battles were reported. Politics was the major source of friction. Although
Batista supporters were supposed to have been screened out, they
appeared at all camps in top ranks.
The New York Times ( April 26) reported that after President
Kennedy ordered the camps purged of Batista men, "on many occasions
agents of the Central Intelligence Agency in charge of the camps refused
to expel Batista men on the ground that these soldiers and officers had
military experience and that was more important than their political
background."
Time reported: "When one Frente (Front) man mentioned the
Batista recruits to a U.S. colonel, the colonel dismissed the matter with
'they're anti-communists, aren't they?'"
Manuel Penabaz, one of the invaders who managed to get back to
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the U.S., reported that the chief of the general staff in Miami was Col.
Martin Elena, a former officer in Batista's army.
On Jan. 31 about 300 men at the camp in Trax were assembled and
told by "Frank," the CIA agent in charge, that two of the leaders had
been sent away "for playing polities" and that Capt. Jose Perez San
Roman, a former Batista officer, was now in command. Because of
the change, 230 asked to resign.
After a week the recruits went on strike. But on assurances and
threats from "Frank," all but 20 went back to training. On Feb. 11,
eight of the strikers were taken under guard to La Suiza, where they
were held prisoner with six others who had argued with San Roman.
One of the prisoners, Dr. RodoIfo Nodal Tarafa, a lawyer, said that
they were questioned separately by "Pat," whom Nodal described as
"six feet, four inches tall and about 230 pounds and stupid." Later they
were given lie-detector tests and interrogated about possible communist
connections.
Eventually the group was taken to a camp in the Peten jungle and
"guarded by Americans with automatic weapons." They were told they
would be turned over to San Roman "in handcuffs" after the invasion.
But on April 28, 11 days after the unsuccessful invasion, they were
returned to Miami and released.
The CIA handled the refugee political leaders with equal disregard.
It openly adopted Artime. although other exiles referred to him as a
"Franco Falangist." One CIA man said of Artime: "He's my golden boy."
While the CIA bestowed money and honors on Artime and the
Front leaders, it withheld support from Ray's liberal M.R.P. In protest
against the CIA's tactics, one of the Front leaders, right-wing but
independent Aurelian() Sanchez Arango, took his group out of the
combination. In a memo to Front leaders, in October, 1960, he wrote:
AFTER: on the beach, it turned out to be a cruel hoax.
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"The brief history of the relations between the Front and the organism
assigned to deal with Cuban questions is the history of an incessant
series of pressures and impositions."
By the middle of last February, the CIA moved to pull the groups
together in a quasi government-in-exile. Stuart Novins said in The
Reporter ( May 11) that "the CIA brought the leaders of the opposing
factions [including Ray] together and told them to work out a modus
vivendi or else." Or else meant an end to money and arms.
Deputy CIA director Richard Bissell Jr., who was in charge of the
operation, assigned agent Frank Bender to work with the exile groups.
Bender was described by Shannon in the Post as a middle-aged German
who had fought in the French underground and joined U.S. intelligence
after the war. Shannon called him a "vain, domineering man who refers
to himself in the third person: 'Bender will have another cup of coffee.'"
Bender gave the exile leaders a list of 26 names, from which he asked
them to pick 10 to participate in the selection of a provisional president.
But Cubans refused because they did not recognize six names on the list.
The exiles finally agreed on March 20 and named a Cuban Revolutionary
Council, headed by Jose Miro Cardona.
The council was assigned the public relations role of issuing state-
ments and building morale. The CIA, and later the Pentagon, took
charge of the invasion. In the final stages a U.S. colonel ran the show.
On April 16, the day before the invasion, the council?except Artime,
who was with the invaders as commander-in-chief?was taken from a
meeting at New York's Hotel Lexington to Philadelphia and from
there it was flown to an abandoned house near Miami. Armed guards
surrounded the house and kept the exiles from leaving.
From a radio the council learned of the invasion and heard reports
of statements issued in its name. On April 18, a U.S. colonel briefed the
exile leaders on the military situation. White House aides Adolph
Berle Jr. and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. came at dawn on April 19 from
Washington to reassure the Cubans.
The council members returned with Berle and Schlesinger to Wash-
ington and held three meetings with President Kennedy. From Wash-
ington the council issued a statement, which all knew to be made up of
lies. It said the invasion "was in fact a landing mainly of supplies and
support for our patriots who have been fighting in Cuba for months.
. . Regretfully we admit tragic losses among a small holding force.
the force fought Soviet tanks and artillery, while being attacked by
Russian MIG aircraft."
The New Yorker magazine summed up the invasion: "It used to be
said that you would never need an enemy if you had a Hungarian
for a friend, and Senor Castro has probably by now concluded that you
will never need a friend if you have the CIA for an enemy."
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FIZZLE MOST STREPITANT
BY THE END OF MARCH the Cuban community in Miami was
swept by a sense of anticipation. Something big seemed in the wind.
On March 28 the Revolution Council issued a mobilization order. Vol-
unteers were signed up in Miami and shipped off to training camps as
fast as they could be processed. Manuel Panabaz recalled in his diary
from a Guatemala training camp: "April 8?We've also heard they have
eliminated the general staff in Miami, and that means the brakes are off
on shipment of any Cuban who wants to train for battle, despite hiN
political background. Any Cuban who wants to fight communism now
has the right to carry a rifle, and they're arriving in droves."
Tad Szulc reported from Miami in the New York Times April
8: "Families and friends gathered to bid farewell to the soldiers who
assemble at night at certain Miami buildings. The men are given khaki
uniforms, then put aboard trucks to be driven to abandoned Florida
airfields where unmarked aircraft are waiting to fly them to Central
America."
Five days later Szule wrote: "Not a night goes by without the
departure from here of khaki-uniformed volunteers for the revolutionary
camps. . . . Cuban physicians and nurses in the Miami area are
being mobilized for the six medical units being assembled at undisclosed
spots."
Other invasion preparations were also under way. From Laughlin.
Air Force base in Texas, according to Newsweek, a U-2 photo recon-
naissance plane of the type that flew over the USSR flew over Cuba.
"The mission," Newsweek said, "gave the CIA a set of near-perfect
pictures of Cuban airfields (and the planes on them) and military
bases."
At dawn on April 15, B-26 bombers .11own by counterrevolutionaries
attacked Cuban airfields. Their purpose was to destroy Cuba's air force.
On returning to their Caribbean bases, they reported total success and
produced aerial photographs to prove it.
At the UN, in answer to Cuban charges of aggression, Stevenson
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THE FAMED CZECH QUADRUPLE-BARRELED WEAPON:
Cubans called if the "Quatro Boca" and used if against the invaders B-26 bombers.
stuck to a CIA "cover story" that the bombings had been carried
out by defectors from the Cuban air force, from Cuban airfields. Two
of the planes landed in Florida, Stevenson said, and the pilots identified
themselves as defectors. But their names were withheld.
The artifice was quickly exposed. Time reported that a few bullets
had been fired into an old Cuban B-26 in U.S. bands and "a pilot took
off in the crate and landed it at Miami with an engine needlessly
feathered and a cock-and-bull story that he had attacked the airfields.
A reporter noted that dust and undisturbed grease covered bomb-bay
fittings, electrical connections to rocket mounts were corroded, guns were
uncocked and unfired." When the pilot's picture was published, he
was promptly identified in Cuba and by exiles in Miami as Lieutenant
Zuniga, a flyer from the Guatemala training base in Retalhuleu.
Two other air strikes were planned for April 17, just before the
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landings. But they were vetoed on the advice of Rusk, Stevenson and
Bowles. Joseph Newman reported in the N. Y. Herald Tribune: "The
three foreign policy advisers argued that additional attacks would make
it impossible for them to uphold the official United States contention
that this country was not a direct participant in the Cuban attack and to
answer charges that the U.S. was committing acts of aggression in
violation of the United Nations Charter and provisions of the Organiza-
tion of American States."
Prior to this, the exiles had broken camp in Guatemala during the first
week of April and moved to a staging area in Puerto Cabezas, Nic-
aragua. They were loaded on ships April 10 and 11 at Great Corn
and Little Corn islands, just off the Nicaraguan coast. The islands belong
to Nicaragua but have been on a 99-year lease to the U.S. since 1916.
According to Time, the ships had been "painted black and equipped
with guns and radar in New Orleans." They set sail April 11. U.S.
destroyers and an aircraft carrier ( Castro said there were also sub-
marines) provided escort until the armada was five miles from the
Cuban shore. Possibly to cover the deployment of U.S. ships off Cuba,
Washington had announced early in the month that 'part of the Second
Fleet would hold maneuvers in the Caribbean April 22-23. It also said
that President Kennedy would witness the maneuvers. ( After the inva-
sion fizzled, the maneuvers were canceled.)
The CIA had organized the invasion fleet months before and recruited
Cuban exiles as seamen. It bought old LCIs ( Landing Craft Infantry)
and old fishing boats and it rented three cargo ships from Garcia Lines
BULLSEYE: Quatro Bocas brought down a B-26, while U.S. newspapers credited Soviet-
made MIGs.
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?Rio Escondido, Huston and Atlantic. It bought two of the LCIs through
Miami yacht broker Charles A. Mills for $240,000, including recondition-
ing. Drew Pearson reported that those who know ships "estimate that
the vessels were worth around $30,000 each." The Garcia Lines ships
were rented for two months at $7,000 a month, in addition to a guarantee
of $100,000 for each ship in case of damage.
Pearson reported ( May 6): "The CIA did not seem to trust Cubans
with the liberation of their own homeland and hired American merchant
officers to command this private navy of ancient ships. Many of these
American mercenaries ?turned out to be drunks and derelicts. Some
even refused to associate with the Cubans they were supposed to lead.
One skipper, G. C. Julian, insisted upon naming his Cuban freedom
vessel the 'Barbara J,' after his wife."
Eduardo Garcia, head of Garcia Lines, considered himself in corn-
man and designated the Rio Escondido as the flagship. Cuban exiles
named the LCI Blagard as flagship, under an American merchant officer
who understood no Spanish. Pearson said that in the middle of the
invasion, the American "forgot the battle plan." A Cuban on board who
had memorized the plan "prompted him on what orders to issue."
"Thus the invasion started off with two flagships in command, each
giving orders," Pearson added. "In addition, several crew members would
take orders from only Jesus Blanco, a former Cuban naval officer, who
had recruited them."
All the invaders' aviation gas, tank shells and anti-tank mines were
placed on the Rio Escondido. Early in the fighting it was hit by a bomb
from a Sea Fury and went down in flames with its cargo. The ship
carrying most of the communications equipment also was sunk.
Capt. Nino Diaz and a force of 168 commandos trained in Louisiana
were supposed to make a diversionary landing elsewhere on the Cuban
coast. The commandos sailed on the Santa Ana on schedule. They were
certain they were headed for Oriente province where Diaz had fought
with Castro and where he knew the terrain intimately. But when
Diaz opened his orders, he learned that he was to land in Camaguey.
In disgust, Diaz refused to make the landing and ordered the ship
back to port.
On the beach, the other counterrevolutionaries also got surprises.
The Cuban air force, which was supposed to have been destroyed,
was in the air around the clock. The militia, which was supposed to
defect in droves, fought with fury. A captured invader recounted:
"When we met the first bunch of militiamen we told them they must
surrender. They shouted Tatria o Muerte' and started shooting"
The invaders were told, according to Newsweek, that Castro would
be vacationing at his fishing cabin two hours' march from the beach.
The unsuspecting Premier was to be an easy prize. They found Castro,
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THE OLD DAYS ARE GONE: invaders today are met not with machetes, but with
modern field artillery.
but he was on a tank, firing its gun.
In the cities, the "secret" underground agents, who were supposed
to set off uprisings, were arrested before they could make a move.
The whole show was over in less than three days.
In the late hours of April 18, invader Capt. San Roman appealed
for U.S. air support, speaking from a walkie-talkie to a U.S. ship off
shore. The appeal was relayed to CIA operations chief Bissell. At
2 A.M. on April 19 a group met with President Kennedy to decide
whether to send U.S. planes. Some urged the President to send Navy
aircraft. Some reports say that President Kennedy said it was too
late to intervene; others say he refused flatly. The Herald-Tribune
reported that a snag in naval communications made it impossible to
send an order before the battle was over.
But Drew Pearson wrote (May 9): "Kennedy finally ordered Amer-
ican planes into action in a last-minute effort to save the rebels from
collapse. But when Navy planes finally got off their nearby carrier, their
only contribution to freedom was to help Castro. They shot down a
rebel B-26."
In any event, it was too late for planes alone to succor the rebels.
By April 19 most of those who were still alive had surrendered or fled
into the swamps, to be captured later. Some managed to get away in
small boats and were later picked up by U.S. ships. Chalmers M.
Roberts said in the Washington Post April 25: "When the battle was
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ending on the beach some of the wounded were taken off by American
naval vessels." The survivors were taken to Camp Garcia, a U.S.
Marine base on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico. They were interrogated
by CIA men and on May 2 they were released. Some are known to have
returned to Miami; the others are still not accounted for.
On the Sunday following the invasion Castro spoke on television
and radio all afternoon, analyzing in full detail what had occurred.
After the April 15th air raids, he reported, "we said to ourselves:
this is the aggression. What we still don't know is why they didn't land
the same day, but gave us two days -in which to mobilize. They
committed a grave error. We [speaking of himself and his aides] had
adopted the habit of sleeping in the afternoons and not at night; but
on Sunday night we had gone to bed following the funeral of the
air attack victims, and were wakened with news of :fighting at the
two Playas in the Cienaga dc Zapata."
After Castro's speech, captured counterrevolutionaries were put on
TV and allowed to explain themselves. For three evenings the invaders
were questioned by Cuban editors and Castro himself. Most of the
captives were contrite. They blamed the CIA for deceiving them. They
had been told that the people were dissatisfied with Castro; that he had
turned over the country to the Russians; that there were Soviet missile
bases on the island; and that they would be greeted as liberators by the
militia.
But some of the prisoners held to their views. They debated with
Castro and the editors. Cedric Belfrage reported the TV discussions
in National Guardian May 8, thus:
In discussion with one of the few Negro "liberators" about
"what could have brought you here," Fidel turned to the son of
a wealthy Cuban family (who had just said he came to fight
for "his ideals") and asked if he belonged to any club in Havana.
The wealthy white liberator replied: "Yes, the Yacht Club."
"Did they allow Negroes in there?" "No." Fidel turned back to
the Negro and said:
"So you can join this man to :fight our revolution, but you
can't bathe on the same beach with him?and he never worried
about that but accepted it?as though your color would come off
in the seawater." All discrimination, he added, had been wiped
out by the revolution.
Prisoners mentioned several claims of the revolution which
they had been told in the U.S. were false, such as the turning
of barracks into schools, the guarantees to small property-owners
under Urban Reform. Fidel asked: "Would I be making such
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claims before the whole Cuban people if they were not true?"
Landowners were allowed up to $600 a month from their prop-
erty, and he asked a prisoner: "Did you ever make that much?"
"Never in my life." "Think you could live on it, with your own
house and car?" "I'll say I could!"
As an example of Cuba's type of democracy, Fidel described
the present setup in rural coops where the cam pesinos run their
own affairs including public order. In former days, starving
under the extortions and terror of the police, the campesinos
sold their votes and senators and representatives whom they
"elected" became millionaires from graft. None of the "ideal-
ist" prisoners who needled Fidel about elections, who "idolatrize
Yanqui democracy," could deny this.
"Do you," asked Fidel, "know a single member of the
revolutionary government who is a millionaire?" Nobody did,
but one prisoner said: "They say that you yourself have many
millions of dollars in Switzerland." Fidel took this in stride,
saying that U.S. papers could publish such nonsense but
"absolutely no one here has the slightest doubt about the
honesty of this government. Supposing the U.S. spent $10 million
on this expedition, wouldn't they gladly have spent $15 million
to buy us? Why didn't they try? Because the know we are not
for sale." [Actually the invasion cost $45 million.-Ed.]
In the days of electoral "democracy" there were a half million
kids without schools, a half million workers without jobs, a
million and a half illiterates, millions of acres owned by a hand-
ful of companies, fantastic rents, discrimination, and the com-
mon folk couldn't even use the beaches. In the Cienaga de
Zapata where the "liberators" landed they had seen the changes
wrought in two years by the revolution.
The roundup of invaders from the swamps continued for some two
weeks. A final count of captives totaled 1,214. Eight hundred of these
came from families who owned a total of 27,556 caballerias of land
(a caballeria is about 33 acres), 9,666 houses, 70 industries, ten
sugar centrals, two banks and five mines. One hundred and thirty-five
were former Batista soldiers and police. The rest were adventurers and
"idealists."
On May 17, Castro offered to return the prisoners?except for
those wanted for murder under Batista?if the U.S. would idemnify
Cuba for the invasion damage with 500 tractors. If the deal was not
approved, he said, the prisoners would be put to work digging defenses
against another invasion.
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LIES BY THE DOZEN
THE FULL STORY of the invasion came to light bit by bit. It
-.Toured from the mouths of exiles eager to document their deception
by Washington. It oozed from the wounded egos of American officials
who wanted to absolve themselves. It was leaked by others looking
to minimize their responsibility.
But none of the debates answered a basic question of why U.S. in-
volvement in the invasion came as a surprise to Americans. That it should
have been a shock to the reading public is a black mark against
American newspapers. Few stories have been more grossly mishandled
and the public rarely has been lied to more wilfully. The story was
there for all to see but the editors chose to wear blinders.
While the CIA operation was an open secret in Florida and
throughout Latin America, U.S. publications pretended that the invasion
preparations and the training camps were being handled by exiles. They
also reported every extravagant claim of the exiles as gospel, while
they scoffed at or ignored contradictory reports from Cuba. The story
was so wide open one observer said that the code names and phone
numbers of CIA agents in Miami were known in every beer joint.
A New York businessman visiting Tampa a few days before the invasion
was told casually by an associate that landings would take place within
a week.
As long ago as October, 1960, La Hora in Guatemala reported on
invasion preparations and CIA-run camps. Cuban papers and radio
stations heard here told of the build-up regularly. But the first report
in a U.S. publication directly implicating the CIA was not published
until Nov. 19, when the Nation reported that Dr. Ronald Hilton,
director of the Institute of Hispanic-American Studies at Stanford U., had
disclosed that the CIA had acquired a tract of land in Guatemala for
$1,000,000 for training troops. But it was months before other publica-
tions, except National Guardian, followed up the story.
In hindsight, Reston commented in the Times April 26:
"Cuban radio was broadcasting all about these camps and the U.S.
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NO PLEASURE TRIP: when Fidel had time to fish, he used to like to go to Cienaga
de Zapata. This time he had another mission.
Government's part in them weeks before they were discussed in the
American press. The official line in Washington was that this was a
'secret' operation, but it was about as secret as opening day at Yankee
Stadium.
"In fact the only people who knew very little about what was
happening back in the early planning stages of the exercise were the
American people who were unknowingly picking up the tab . ."
Reston might have included his own paper in the spanking. A few
days before his article, WCBS- TV Views the News took the Times to
task for coming very late to the story. With a full bureau in Havana and
reporters in Miami, the Times editors surely had the story. But with
the rest, they reported Castro's warning of imminent invasion by CIA-
trained troops as hysterical rantings.
But it must be said that when the editors took the wraps off the
reporters, the Times did a splendid job. Ted Szule's reports from Miami
were particularly noteworthy.
Morris II. Rubin, reporting on his tour of Cuba in the June, 1961,
issue of The Progressive, explained how the deception worked. He
wrote:
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"I talked with virtually all the American correspondents in Havana
?and the correspondents of Canadian, British and German newspapers
as well. I came away convinced that they are far more torn by doubt
about Castro's Cuba than their dispatches would indicate. For example,
one correspondent who has been strongly anti-Castro in his commentaries
confessed he was confused, that there was much good mixed with the
bad, although he emphasized the latter in his reports 'because that's
what they seem to want back home.'
"Typical of press coverage of Cuba before the April invasion was
this depressing incident:
"Cuba's Foreign Minister Roa sent a note to the various Latin
American embassies., The note contained the usual tirades against North
American imperialism, but the heart of its contents was a plea to the
Latin American governments to use their good offices to explore the
prospect of negotiations between Cuba and the United States.
"An American correspondent heard of the note 48 hours before it
was released to the public. He cabled a story to his newspapers, empha-
sizing the revival of official Cuban sentiment for negotiation with the
United States. But the newspaper killed the story, preferring for its
Cuban coverage that day a wire service report that two Catholic
nuns had been arrested and detained for six hours. The management
of the newspaper cabled its Havana correspondent a sour message
pointing out that it was not especially interested in interpretive stories
of the kind filed on the Cuban willingness to negotiate?although it was
a clear scoop on a story that was to break in all the papers in a day
or two?and that it was interested only in 'hard, headline news'?stories
of bombs that go off or nuns being arrested by Castro's police."
Rubin concluded bitterly:
"For what it seems to want out of Cuba, the American press would
do better to staff its Havana offices with police reporters rather than
foreign correspondents."
Much of the pre-invasion "analysis" that the Cubans wanted to get
rid of Castro and that the exile chiefs were popular leaders back home
with extensive "underground" support was fed to the papers by Lem
Jones Associates, Inc. in New York and Abrams, Osborne and Associates
in Miami, public relations outfits hired by the Revolutionary Council
and paid indirectly by the CIA. After the invasion Jones Associates owned
up to staging two "stunts" that had been reported as pure news. One was
to import some 60 "Women in Black" from Miami to appear in St.
Patrick's Cathedral in New York while Castro was attending UN
sessions in September, 1960.
During the fighting, reports of counterrevolutionary successes filled
the papers, ,The invaders were moving inland; the militia was deserting,
Castro was wounded, no, he was dead, no, he was wounded; Raul Castro
was captured; Che Guevara committed suicide. On top of these
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remarkable successes, the press suddenly noted that the invasion had
collapsed.
How fiction can turn up in print on the news pages was explained
in part by Joe Alex Morris jr. in the New York Herald Tribune April
20. He reported that during the fighting, Abrams, Osborne and Associates
(particularly one young red-headed associate, Mary Berrer ) were,
doing their job "with Madison Avenue efficiency and the pitch is a
hard sell stressing the significance, size and success ef the Cochinos
Bay landing and other guerrilla operations."
While the Revolutionary Council leaders were held prisoner in
Florida by the CIA, the PB outfits turned out regular bulletins in their
name on the fighting. One communique credited "MIG aircraft" with
destroying "sizable amounts of medical supplies and equipment."
The story of Soviet-made MIG jets in the Cuban air force was
dutifully repeated across the country. Some rear-echelon pundits turned
out columns blaming the invaders' defeat on Castro's MIGs. Yet it
was well known that Cuba had no M1Gs. Joseph Newman reported
in the Herald Tribune May 1 that the CIA knew that the Cuban air
force has only a few U.S.- and British-made planes.
Sen. Wayne Morse ( D-Ore. ) finally pinned down the story on
May 14, when he said that Administration witnesses at the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee hearings confirmed there was no evidence
"that there was a single Russian MIC in Cuba."
Faced with the bungling, most editors refused to report or even
to be embarrassed. They could justify the mishandling of news as a
blow against communism. If they needed further justification, President
Kennedy supplied it April 27 to a meeting of the American Newspaper
Publishers Assn. He called on the press to exercise "self-restraint"
in fighting the "fierce struggle" in which we are engaged. He added:
"Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story, 'It is news?'
All I suggest is that you add the question: 'Is it in the interest of
national security.' " (Monthly Review editor Leo Huberman, who was
in Cuba during the invasion, suggested a preferable criterion, "Is
it the truth?")
The implication was clear. Reporting U.S. intervention in Cuba
was not in the national interest; pretending it hadn't happened was.
A few papers refused to bend. The Times printed an editorial called,
"The Right Not to Be Lied To." It said: "The Cuban tragedy has raised
a domestic. issue that is likely to come up again and again. . . . Is a
democratic government in an open society such as ours ever justified
in deceiving its own people?" The Times answered itself: "Neither
prudence nor ethics can justify any administration in telling the public
things that are not so."
In California, the little El Colon Valley News put it plaintively: "Why
Do They Lie To Us About Cuba?"
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WORLD-WIDE CONDEMNATION
MEASURED BY WORLD REACTION Operation Pluto turned the
U.S. democratic image into a mirage and lowered John F. Ken-
nedy's prestige to the level of Richard Nixon's. As news of the invasion
spread, thousands in Latin America, Europe and Asia poured into the
streets to demonstrate against "Yankee Imperialism." At home there were
protests outside the UN and in more than a dozen cities.
In NATO countries many were privately pleased over Washington's
embarrassment. Some recalled pious words from the U.S. against
imperialism when they were being divested of former colonies. In
Britain and France the invasion was called the "American Suez," referring
to their joint invasion of Egypt in 1956 which ?the U.S. disowned.
Many of the demonstrators were students. Others were those who
had long opposed U.S. foreign policy, but for a good number it was
a first break with Washington. Despite the denials of U.S. participation,
few doubted that the counterrevolution was a Yankee show.
In New York demonstrations against the invasion outside the UN
started on April 17 and continued through the week. The first day
2,000 people picketed the U.S. mission and then marched to the UN.
The slogan "Hands Off Cuba" united liberals, progressives and non-
political persons with Cubans living in New York.
Counterdemonstrations by anti-Castro Cubans heckled the lines.
As the invasion's failure became clear, Hungarian "freedom fighters"
and other "professional pickets" joined the counterdemonstrations. They
picketed the Soviet Embassy, throwing rocks and burning Russian flags.
On April 21, a Fair Play for Cuba Committee rally at Union Square
drew 3,000 persons.
The same day, the Fair Play committee took a large ad in the New
York Times, appealing to the American conscience. It said: "If our
government's activities are, as we believe, illegal and immoral, then we as
a nation stand condemned." The same ad was refused by the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch and all four Chicago dailies.
An ad headlined, "A Declaration of Conscience by Afro-Americans"
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and signed by 27 prominent Negroes appeared in the Baltimore Afro-
American April 22. It concluded: "Afro-Americans, don't be fooled?the
enemies of the Cubans are our enemies, the jimcrow bosses of this land
where we are still denied our rights."
Signers included Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, author Shirley
Graham; William Worthy, Dr. Lonnie Cross, Daniel II. Watts, Robert
F. Williams, Julian Mayfield, Conrad Lynn and Richard Gibson.
An ad by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation in the New York
Times on April 23 also condemned U.S. intervention. Signers included
Dr. William C. Davidon, Dr. Kermit Eby, Dr. Erich Fromm, Maxwell
Geismar. C. Wright Mills, A. J. Muste, Clarence Pickett, I. F. Stone and
Norman Thomas.
An ad hoc pacifist group, Nonviolent Committee for Cuban Inde-
pendence, held a two-week vigil and fast outside CIA headquarters near
Washington. On week ends rallies and picket lines were held in coopera-
tion with the Fair Play committee. Some of the pacifists were arrested
and served ten-day jail terms. They continued the fast in prison.
A group of 132 lawyers including top professors in Yale and other
law schools and Arthur Larson, former U.S. Information Agency Director,
protested violations of U.S. laws and international obligations committed
in the undertaking and urged U.S. conformity with international law.
A group of professors, most of them from Harvard, published an ad
in the Times deploring the invasion. Harvard history professor II. Stuart
Hughes said at an American Friends Service Committee ( Quaker)
meeting in Cambridge, Mass., on April 23: "All the pious fraud has
collapsed. Everyone from the New York Times down has . . . admitted
the fact of American intervention in Cuba. President Kennedy hasn't
admitted his fault and, until he does, we have to withhold our confidence
in him."
He said "it is time for a few resounding resignations" from the admin-
istration. Of Stevenson, he found it alarming "to see this man who has
been a great American reduced to the level of a shyster lawyer."
A meeting of 400 Harvard students and faculty members approved
a resolution urging a reversal of U.S. policy toward Cuba.
Students in San Francisco marched from a Union Square rally on
April 20 to the Federal Building to protest the counterrevolution. Some
2,000 persons attended the rally. The day before 200 students at the
U. of California in Berkeley and 200 students at San Francisco State
College held rallies. On news of the invasion, "Bay Area Students Com-
mittee to Oppose U.S. Intervention in Cuba" was formed.
Other demonstrations were organized by students at Michigan,
Wisconsin and Cornell universities and at Antioch and Oberlin colleges.
In Los Angeles, the Fair Play Committee picketed the Federal
Building for three days. About 900 persons from Washington and
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HANDS OFF CUBA: There were world-wide protests. This one in San Francisco drew
2000, people.
Baltimore picketed near the White House for two hours on April 22.
They were from the Fair Play committee, 26th of July Movement and
the Dominican Liberation Movement. One sign read, "Cuba Is Not
Guatemala." In Chicago 300 persons picketed the Federal Building
in the rain. One picket wrote his own slogan: "We Don't Want to Die
for the United Fruit Co."
Demonstrations were also held in Boson, Detroit, Cleveland, Seattle,
New Haven, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Tampa.
Anti-U.S. demonstrations swept Latin America on reports of the
invasion. But as the extent of CIA involvement became clear, slogans
turned on President Kennedy. Those who had hoped that his election
signalled a new U.S. policy in Latin America turned out to denounce
him.
There were three days of demonstrations in Mexico City, involving
as many as 25,000 persons at one time. About 15,000 turned out at a
march called by students at the Mexican National University. At the
head of the column were members of the Pancho Villa Brigade, a group
which offered to go to Cuba to defend Castro.
Students chanted: "Castro Si, Kennedy No." As the line neared the
National Palace, 1,000 soldiers, police and firemen attacked the marchers.
In Venezuela students led demonstrations throughout the country.
High schools in Caracas were closed for a week after students burned a
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U.S. flag in a public plaza. Demonstrations of high school students
in Puerto Cabello, Valencia, San Cristobal and Maracaibo were broken
up by police.
One of the biggest demonstrations in recent Uruguayan history
was held April 22. Some 8,000 persons marched through Montevideo
chanting, "Cuba Si, Yanquis, No." A rally, which included speakers
from right- and left-wing parties, denounced President Kennedy as
"paranoie" and as "the worst imperialist in 50 years."
The New York Times reported: "Although Uruguay's government
and most of the press had praised Mr. Kennedy's policy, many Uruguay-
ans, including some who have been traditionally pro-Western and cool
toward the Castro regime, joined the demonstration."
Anti-U.S. sentiment in Brazil carried into the government and news-
papers. Six federal and state legislators presented a petition at the
U.S. Embassy urging President Kennedy to "make every effort to see
that the counterrevolutionary and mercenary invaders of the Cuban
nation should not have any support from the U.S. government."
A leading Rio de Janeiro paper Piano de Noticias summed up:
"President Kennedy must come to understand that the future of rela-
tions between the U.S. and Latin America is at stake . . [former Vice
President] Nixon was spit upon because there was a Guatemala as a
repulsive symbol of a certain policy toward Latin America. What awaits
Kennedy?"
In Bogota, Colombia, 500 demonstrators attempting to reach the
U.S. Embassy April 17 were attacked and dispersed by police. Two
days later, 8,000 persons gathered for an anti-U.S. rally in the city's
main square.
The defeat of the counterrevolution spread apprehension through
Guatemala. The government, which itself was installed by the CIA,
seemed concerned that Cuba might retaliate against Guatemala for
its help to the counterrevolution.
Despite tear gas barrages and clubbings by police, anti-U.S. dem-
onstrations went on or a week in Guatemala City. President Kennedy
was denounced as an "arch assassin" and his picure was burned at a
meeting. Demonstrators broke windows in the Pan American World
Airways and United Fruit Co. offices after they were prevented from
marching on the U.S. Embassy by police.
There were demonstrations at U.S. embassies in East and West Europe
on the first days of the invasion. Later there were few in NATO
capitals to defend the U.S. Angry demonstrators denounced "U.S. im-
perialism" in Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest, Sofia and Belgrade.
Students also demonstrated in Paris. Rome and Helsinki. In London
65 prominent persons, including 29 Labor Members of Parliament, sent
telegrams to President Kennedy, Prime Minister Macmillan, UN secy.-
gen. Hammarskjold and Premier Castro expressing "shock" at the invasion.
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Claude Julien wrote in Le Monde in Paris: "The naivete of the
American government is incredible." Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich,
West Germany, said: "Many Americans are finally beginning to realize
that you can't settle with weapons a social revolution such as took
place in Cuba."
In Vienna, the Kronenzeitung said: "President Kennedy got a double
uppercut?first a Soviet cosmonaut in the skies and now a victorious
Castro at the doorstep." The executive committee of the Union of
Democratic Left, main opposition party in Greece, called the invasion,
"an act of international piracy." Don Cook, Paris correspondent of the
New York Herald Tribune, concluded: "There is not much comfort for
Washington to gain by turning to the opinions of its Europeans allies."
There was also little comfort for Washington in Asia or Africa. In
Tokyo students held a demonstration April 18 before the US. Embassy
and four more the next day to coincide with the arrival of U.S. Ambassa-
dor Reischauer. An unidentified Frenchman summed it up best for
Cook. Ile said: "You really haven't handled your Cubans very well."
RETURN TO THE HOMELAND: The invasion cost U.S. taxpayers $45,000,000 and
Cuban families immeasurable suffering.
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WHAT THE PLAN WAS
AFTER THE FIRST GUSH of news following the invasion's collapse,
which brought to light most of what had happened, Administra-
tion and Pentagon officials were ordered to "clam up" and to direct
inquiring newsmen to State Department off-the-record briefings. Depart-
ment officials, who were supposed to pass on to reporters "inside stuff" on
the invasion, developed instead a quasi-official explanation of the affair.
It was a little fuzzy and could not withstand deep questioning, but
Washington relied on the press to play along. The official analysis was
accepted and passed along by dozens of reporters and columnists.
In the accepted version, the collapse of Operation Pluto is credited
to the CIA's failure to estimate accurately the extent of internal opposi-
tion to Castro and the strength of his government and armed forces.
The counter-revolution failed, the story goes, because Cubans neglected
to revolt and the militia refused to defect. Some with bellicose plans
for the future embellish the tale with the estimate that the invasion
would have succeeded if U.S. planes had been committed. Others further
disparage the CIA by stressing the operational mishaps.
But the official story is a transparent over-simplification of what
most probably was the real plan. The CIA is a handy scapegoat. To
allow it to draw the fire, conveniently masks the involvement of others.
Rather than a quixotic bungle, Operation Pluto might be called more
accurately: The intervention that almost succeeded.
There is abundant evidence that Washington never expected the
landings to do more than establish a beachhead where a "provisional
government" could maintain itself long enough (say a week) to be
recognized and to appeal for U.S. armed support. Little stock was put
in a general uprising or in the alleged guerrillas operating in the hills.
Clearly, Castro was to be overthrown by external armed might.
The plan. failed because the Cubans overwhelmed the invaders with
such speed that the later stages of Operation Pluto could not be effected.
To sell the story of an intelligence snafu, which limits the blame
to the CIA, Gen. Lemnitzer, charman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
testified before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that he and
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other career military men had approved a plan for an invasion (1)
at a point flanked by swamps, with only two good roads leading
inland; (2) with 1,500 to 1,700 soldiers against an army of 40,000 and
a militia of 250,000; (3) with no fighter plane protection; and (4) with
no reserves.
Lemnitzer told his story to civilian legislators; he might better have
told it to the marines. Perhaps public embarrassment was Lemnitzer's
penance for his part in the operation, but his story couldn't hold water
with anyone who got through GI basic training. Sen. Albert Gore (D-
Tenn.) concluded from the testimony that "the President needs new,
wiser and abler men." He added: "I find it perfectly incredible that
career military officers, charged with such high responsibility, could
certify as a feasible military undertaking the uncoordinated plan of a
few hundred ill-equipped Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. . . . There
were no reserve forces to back up the so-called 'expedition.'
Pieced together from what slipped out before the clampdown, this
is what seems to have been Washington's plan for Cuba:
Operation Pluto was a multi-stage project. At its maximum it might
have meant full-scale war, with U.S. and other forces fighting the Cuban
army and militia. At:a minimum it would be a commando raid to probe
Cuba's defenses. Along the way, there were a series of checkpoints
at which Washington could decide whether to go further.
The exiles' mission was to establish and hold a beachhead. As
soon as it was feasible, the Cuban Revolutionary Council was to be
flown in and to proclaim itself the new government of Cuba. The U.S.
and some Latin American countries were to recognize the government
immediately and respond to its calls for military help. U.S. Marines
and Navy were to lead an inter-American force into Cuba.
Before each phase, Washington was to decide whether to proceed
or to vary the plan to meet a new circumstance. If there was a general
uprising against Castro, or, if the militia threw down its arms and
defected, open U.S. involvement might not be necessary, If Castro was
brash enoug to attack the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo in Cuba,
Washington had an even better pretext for action.
But should the exiles fail to hold out for a week, they were to
be evacuated and the operation would be chalked up as a large com-
mando raid like the one at Dieppe, France, in advance of the Second
Front invasion during World War H.
Considerable evidence and opinion favor this explanation over the
official version. Clearly, Washington never counted on much help from
the underground in the cities or from guerrillas previously planted
in the Escambray Mountains in Las Villas province. Walter Lippmann
wrote in the Herald Tribune May 2: "As I understand it, and contrary
to the general impression, there was no serious expectation that the
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landing of exiles would be followed immediately by political uprising
against Castro. The object of the landing was to establish a beachhead
for a civil war."
In a pre-invasion story, -Joseph Newman wrote in the Herald
Tribune April 14 that the strategy for bringing down Castro "is based
on a plan to start a Hungarian-type uprising." Newman added: "Once
the uprising takes place, Cuban revolutionaries will call on the United
States and other American republics to help them establish a free and
democratic society." Newman reported that Miro Cardona said that
"as provisional president, [he] would be entitled to request diplomatic
recognition and receive aid from outside."
Newman added: "Having extended diplomatic recognition to the
provisional government, the United States and other American republics
could supply economic and military aid without appearing to violate
their international commitments."
If the CIA indeed reported mass discontent in Cuba, President
Kennedy had considerable advice to the contrary. While the Administra-
tion might have leaned to its own intelligence voices, it is not likely
that a plan based on a disputed judgment would have been approved.
During- Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's visit to the U.S. last
March, he told President Kennedy that British intelligence did not
forecast an early uprising against Castro. The London Times' Washing-
ton correspondent later reported that "British intelligence reports sug-
gesting that the landings in Cuba would not lead to a revolt were
rejected unread by President Kennedy,"
In addition, Sen. Claiborne Pell (1)-R.I.), a former Foreign Service
officer, made an unofficial and confidential trip to Cuba last December
to test the atmosphere. On his return, according to Rowland Evans
Jr. in the Herald Tribune May 9, Pell reported to the Administration,
that "the people were far from ready to revolt against Fidel Castro."
Pell said: "I am afraid that it is only true that they were still tasting
the satisfaction of Castro's land reform, of his nationalization of
United States companies and of the other much-touted reforms put into
effect by Castro. The dispossessed were in jail or in exile."
If political uprising was a cornerstone of Washington's plan, then
considerable advance contact with the underground was to be expected.
But, Time reported, an exile leader complained on April 19: "We
offered the complete underground system in Cuba for the purposes of
coordination. We were capable of bringing about great defections in the
military inside Cuba, even contacts to bring off a general strike. Why,
48 hours after the invasion started, has this not been done?"
Stuart Novins said in The Reporter that "Manolo Ray's underground,
all prepared to hit preselected targets and ready to appeal to the
Cuban people over at least 14 transmitters scattered across the country
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. . . received no advance word of the landing."
While the anti-Castro saboteurs were not alerted, other forces were.
Joe Alex Morris Jr. reported from Miami in the Herald Tribune April
22: "The U.S. Navy was reported to have two task forces, each with a
carrier, operating in the [Caribbean] area, instead of the usual one. Both
were said to be engaged in routine exercises, as were 1,700 Marines
in Puerto Rico. But American naval and Air Force units in the area were
on a constant alert."
Despite the official word that the Escambray guerillas were to
carry out harassing attacks and perhaps link up with the beachhead,
Washington knew that the mountain fighters had been eliminated weeks
before the invasion. Szulc reported from Miami in the Times April
7: "It is now conceded here that Dr. Castro succeeded in virtually
wiping out the Escambray operation in months of action by tens of
thousands of his militiamen." Belfrage had reported substantially the
same story earlier in the Guardian.
Washington strained hard to convince the world that it did not
plan to commit U.S. military forces) It did not convince the exiles.
Miro Cardona told Time before the invasion: "They [U.S. officials]
promised me they will use the troops." In Havana, the invaders'
captured chief Manuel Artime said: "We were promised air support."
Another captive, identified only as Pablo on Cuban TV, said that a CIA
1 The false ring to the "official" story made it open season for speculation
on the real plan. One die-hard Administration supporter insists that Operation
Pluto was President Kennedy's devious scheme to discredit Allen Dulles and
pump $45,000,000 into the economy in one move.
A more interesting thesis comes from an imaginative friend who asks to be
identified as Mr. Machiavelli. He examines two troubling questions: (1) Why
did President Kennedy abandon a plan for air cover?, and (2) Why did he return
the British intelligence packet unopened?
His answer goes back to the OAS meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica last
August, where the U.S. hoped to get a strong statement against Cuba as well as
private support for the invasion plan. But, as Raul Castro warned at the time,
the Latin American leaders were fearful of open identification with the U.S.
against Cuba because it would set off angry protests from their own people
at home. The best Secy. of State Christian Herter could get out of the con-
ference was a weakly worded Declaration of San Jose against "intervention
or threat of intervention' by an extraeontinental power, which did not mention
Cuba.
World opinion against a Washington-devised invasion of Cuba solidified
by D-Day and forced President Kennedy to reconsider the air cover scheme.
The Soviet note threatening to sink U.S. shipping apparently was the clincher.
President Kennedy, Mr. Machiavelli argues, did not open the British packet
because it did not contradict what he already knew about the possibilities of
a Cuban uprising. The CIA in fact did not predict a revolt. But the story
of CIA predictions was circulated to prepare the agency as scapegoat in case
the operation failed.
Thus the President did not want to be on record as having seen a contradictory
report. ?(Ed.)
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man told him that "the U.S. would intervene directly within 15 days
if the invasion failed."
In Miami, Manuel Penabez, invasion survivor, said that in the last
hours, when the attackers called for U.S. planes, this reply came on the
radio in English: "Don't worry. They will be there soon. Keep fighting."
Last February Adolph Berle Jr., special advisor to President Kennedy
on Latin America, took a trip through the hemisphere, ostensibly to
report the general situation. But on May 11, Brazilian Congressman
Osmar Cunha reported that during an interview with captured counter-
revolutionaries in Havana, Artime gave him another version of Berle's
trip. Cunha, a member of the middle-of-the-road Social Democratic
party, quoted Artime as saying: "Berle . . . visited Brazil and various
other countries on the continent with the specific mission of consulting
and negotiating with these gc wernments the immediate recognition
of an anti-revolutionary government in Cuba that would be set up by
invading troops." Cunha added: "Artime told me that the Brazilian
government was the only one consulted to reject the . . . proposal."
U.S. News (May 21) reported that some exile leaders said the CIA
had promised that "once they were established on the beaches, there
would be support for them by a three-nation force of 30,000 men.
On rechecking with the Americans, the figure was reduced to 15,000."
A troubling question to those who accept the purpose of the landing
as a major thrust inland was the choice of the site at Cienaga de
Zapata. It is flanked by impassable swamps, with only two roads leading
to the interior. To break out of the beachhead, invaders would have to
move along roads on which defenders would be certain to concentrate
heavy fire.
But as a defensive position, Cienaga de Zapata is excellent. Castro
himself described it as "a very difficult position to attack, because
you have to attack it from a highway across the swamp, with only
three or four entry points, which would be effectively defended with
tanks, anti-tank guns and heavy mortars."
Drew Pearson (May 9) confirmed that the invaders' strategy was to
"hold out in the swamp and on the beach" by mining the "roads
against the advance of Castro's tanks." Newsweek (May 1) reported that
the i orders for the bulk of the invading forces were to "set up a defense
for the beachhead."
The invaders' mission then was to hold the beachhead long enough
to fly in the six leading members of the Revolutionary Council,
held under guard near Miami. U.S. News (May 15) reported that "on
a Miami airport were a number of C-46s and C-47s, painted white with-
out markings." One of the planes "was in readiness to transport the
'Revolutionary Council' to set up an anti-Castro government."
Had the invaders held the beachhead for a few more days, Operation
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Pluto might have "succeeded." The last stages might have been effected;
the new government established, recognized and reinforced by U.S. and
other forces in a day or two.
The operation failed because:
? The tiny Cuban air force (six assorted planes) was never knocked
out. It dominated the skies and it played havoc with the invaders on
the beach.
? It underestimated the ability of Cuba's militia and the efficiency
of its intelligence. Cuban forces fought well and with high morale.
There are also indications that Castro knew when and where the
invasion was coming.
? It overestimated,the ability and passion of the counter-revolution-
aries. That 1,214 of an invading force of between 1,500 and 1,700 sur-
rendered does not speak well for it. Francis L. McCarthy, Latin
American editor of United Press International, told the American News-
paper Publishers convention that the invading paratroopers "retired
without orders" at the sound of Cuban artillery.
While the CIA deserves no kudos for its part in the scheme, it is a
misjudgment to credit it with more than an agent's share of the blame.
A member of Congress, described by David Lawrence in the Herald
Tribune as familiar with facts, found a more just apportionment in
this characterization: "A case of cumulative stupidity."
L' Express, Park
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A FORTUNATE FAILURE
OPERATION PLUTO'S moment of truth came at the White House
meeting in the early hours of April 19 when President Kennedy
had to choose between writing off the invasion or unleashing U.S.
forces against Cuba. What went into the President's decision not to
commit U.S. forces may never be known. Some speculate that he
thought the/ situation was too far gone. Others conclude that he did not
want to intervene unilaterally after he and Stevenson had stressed
that U.S. forces were not involved in the landings. One foreign diplomat
reported the scuttlebutt that Premier Khrushchey had sent a secret
note threatening that Soviet submarines would retaliate against U.S.
shipping, if the President sent troops or planes to Cuba. It was recalled
that Soviet intimations of intervention were credited with causing
the Franco-British withdrawal from Suez in 1956.
Whatever President Kennedy's reasons, the world can be thankful that
he made the decision he made. 'Success" for Operation Pluto at best
would have meant a modern version of the Spanish Civil War, with
U.S. and perhaps other American troops fighting Cubans. It might
have created also an "American Algeria"?a devitalizing and endless
war against guerillas. At worst, it could have led to nuclear war, if the
U.S.S.R. made good on its promise to defend Cuba with missiles.
Walter Lippmann pointed out that should the invasion have started
a civil war, "no plan seems to have been made, no thought seems to have
been given, to what we would do then, what the rest of Latin America
would do then, what the Soviet Union would do, while the civil war
was being fought."
Operation Pluto's military aspects were detailed GI fashion, by the
numbers. There were written plans covering from "D-Day minus 7"
to "D plus 30." But beyond that the exiles were in such sharp disagree-
ment that they never could present more than a vague political-
economic outline for a post-Castro Cuba. Varona was concerned with
the protection of private property. Ray argued for soci4 justice.
Miro Cardona stressed the importance of rule by law. Artime, the
fugitive embezzler, stressed the importance of Artime.
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Did the operation's planners think they could turn back the clock
in Cuba? Having tasted the first fruits of agrarian reform, did anyone
expect the eampesinos to go back to the plantation system? Could
high rents and low pay be reinstituted in the cities and the anti-
illiteracy campaign ended in the countryside?
The dynamics of social revolution are that progress breeds further
progress. Looking back is for the exploiters; the liberated can point
only forward. Cubans would have fought to protect their newly-won
gains against whatever force with whatever weapons. Take away their
"Quatro Bocas," they would have used pistols. Remove their sidearms,
they would have fought with machetes. And they would have con-
tinned fighting in the certain knowledge that they were defending
the future and the U.S. was fighting for the past.
While Washington reappraises its Cuban policy, there are ominous
signs that the obvious is being overlooked in favor of the bellicose.
The exiles, more split than ever?Ray took his group out of the Revolu-
tionary Council?have dropped the pretense of overturning Castro from
within and openly advocate direct U.S. intervention. Varona told
a New York meeting May 7 that the invasion should "teach a lesson"
to the U.S. that nonintervention is an untenable doctrine in the fight
against communism. Miro Cardona earlier spoke of doing away "with the
formalities of nonintervention" and he added that Cuba must be freed
by "the coordinated forces of all the nations of this continent."
Many of the respected columnists have based their post-invasion
analyses on the premise that Castro must be overthrown. Reston called
it a requirement of "the self-interest of the nation." Shannon said,
"it would be in America's national interest." Sanguine Stuart Alsop put
it: "Some day, one way or another, the American commitment to bring
Castro down will have to be honored. The commitment can only be
honored if the American government is willing, if necessary? to strike
to kill, even if that risks the shedding of American blood."
To a visitor from Mars the dread fear of the richest nation in the
world of a tiny island with a population less than New York City's might
seem pathological. Clearly the invasion showed that all Cuba wants
Castro. But, the logic says, we must overthrow him to protect our
security. Our Martian might question the nature of Castro's threat. He
might easily brush off the canard of Soviet missile bases off our shores by
pointing out that aside from the fact that Khrushchey has disowned
such designs in Cuba, a nation that has the rocket thrust to orbit a
cosmonaut need not locate its bases under a potential adversary's nose.
The more logical answer lies in the statement of an unidentified
diplomat to the Wall Street Journal April 28: "We might as well face
it, Castro is no great threat to our security by himself; it's the danger
of his doctrine spreading to other countries that's a threat to us."
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Our Martian might attribute vulgar motives to Washington officials
because of their direct and covert ties to U.S. sugar and business inter-
ests in Cuba, which were "intervened" by the Castro revolution. For
example, Adolph Berle, until last February, was chairman of American
Molasses Co., which got its sugar and molasses from companies form-
erly in Cuba. The company's stock price rose to an all-time high at the
time of the invasion. Berles wife owns, and he is trustee for, $1,250,000
worth of American Molasses stock.
But we would divert our Martian from cynical thoughts and turn
him toward the real lesson for the U.S. in Cuba. While we have been
watching television, the I satin American campesino has been looking
at his plight. He has decided that he is entitled to a fair share of what
he produces and the Cuban revolution has shown him that he can get
it and how to get it.
The campesino's emanicpation is no threat to the nation; it endangers
only the spoilers, who have had their way too long. The United
States can live in peace with the new campesino and it can do business
with him. It can sell him goods at a fair price and buy his on similar
terms. But the nation must accept that the day of the spoiler in the
"banana republics" is gone. The campesino may choose political forms
different from ours, but we must recognize that that, too, is his right
and to challenge this right is to risk global holocaust.
It is not easy for the spoiler who has fed so long high on the
hog to settle for chittlings. But we must not allow his recalcitrance
to put the nation out of step with history. The real threat to national
security is allowing the spoiler to shape our policy.
Globally every day, we test whether great powers of unlike political
and social systems can coexist. In Cuba, the question is whether a great
power can survive the impertinence of a tiny neighbor's decisions
to have economic self-determination. As the Soviet Union has survived
reactionary regimes in Turkey and Iran on its borders, so the U.S. can
survive agrarian reform in Cuba, even though it calls itself socialist.
from Nis Hammortsroem n Ny Dag, Stockholm
"The tourhi. posters told us Cuba is the land of surprises!"
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VACUNA ANTIRRABICA.
Anti-Rabies Vaccination
from Revolucion, Habana
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POSTSCRIPT
Another of our powerful weapons.
from Revolucion, Habana
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I
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FOREIGN POLICY AFTER CUBA
The humiliating defeat for the U.S. of Operation Pluto by the Cuban
revolutionary forces has had, and is having, significant repercussions
within the ruling power elite of the United States. The defeat was the
sharpest expression of the failure of American foreign policy in the past
decade, and it has resulted in an enraged feeling of frustration among
the rulers of America. Frustration leads to bitter arguments. At an
earlier time of frustration the late John Foster Dulles threatened his
Western allies with an "agonizing reappraisal" of American commitments
in Europe. It was a threat uttered at the wrong time, to the wrong
people, for the wrong reasons, but it was a memorable phrase. In
a fateful way, the phrase accurately fits the present dilemma of the
Kennedy Administration as a result of the Cuban fiasco. Says The
Reporter:
"Cuba and Laos have done it: a debate on the ends and
means of our foreign policy has started; the strategy and dip-
lomacy of the nation are being publicly re-examined with
feverish thoroughness."
Everybody is agonizing, though some agonize less than others, and
two broad camps have shaped up. The less agonized camp, whose
articulate and sober spokesmen are James Reston of the N. Y. Times
and Walter Lippmann of the N.Y. Herald Tribune, holds that the balance
of power in the world has shifted from U.S. preponderance to East-West
equality and that our foreign policy must be drastically re-adjusted
to this reality.
The other camp, which is led by the CIA and the Pentagon, argues
that Western power is still dominant but is not used ruthlessly enough.
What is needed is to reinforce Dulles' policy of force; put a little more
heat under the Cold War! Most U.S. press pundits?Max Lerner, Joseph
Alsop, Marguerite Higgins, David Lawrence, Roscoe Drummond and
so on?are in the second camp. There is however a lot of confusion among
them as is natural among agonizers.
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Both camps claim President Kennedy as their own, the re-adjusters
a little wistfully, the ruthless ones a little more confidently, since the
President's utterances since the Cuban invasion have been quite belliger-
ent. His first speech after the failure was an affirmation that the United
States would intervene unilaterally in Latin America if he felt American
national security was at stake. lie has said that the East-West conflict
is such that "no war has ever posed a greater threat to our security."
He has declared, "every new piece of information, every fresh event,
has deepened my conviction that the survival of our civilization is at
stake?and the hour is late."
Furthermore the main emphasis in foreign policy is still on military
force. The enormous arms budget has been further increased. The
ICBM and Polaris submarine programs have been accelerated and we
have also stepped up the construction of medium-range missle batteries
in England, Turkey and Italy. Most important, Kennedy has decided to
increase rapidly the special units of the army for so-called guerrilla
warfare. The appointment of General Taylor to head the inquiry into
the CIA fiasco has a built-in verdict: take away the operations functions
of the CIA and give them to the Pentagon in order to strengthen and
increase them.
Guerrilla warfare is the new panacea of Kennedy?just as massive
retaliation was that of John Foster Dulles. It is reported that Kennedy
has been reading Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara's works on the sub-
ject, and according to Hanson Baldwin of the N. Y. Times, Kennedy
"has been impressed." The Army has three Special Forces groups.
Baldwin in the Times describes them thus: "The Seventh (or parent)
Group now at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; the Tenth in Germany and
the First in Okinawa. . . . A further index of the emphasis on guerrilla
and anti-guerrilla activities is the increase in rank from colonel to
brigadier general given to the commanding officer of the Special
Welfare Center at Fort Bragg. He is Col. William P. Yarborough. . . ."
Baldwin explains that the outfit is expanding because of the special
interest shown by President Kennedy himself. The Kennedy budget
for 1962 requests 3,000 more men for the Special Forces, enough to
more than double their strength. The outfit is aware of the Presidential
interest and the men are calling themselves the President's Own.
The sudden discovery of guerrilla warfare as a cure for the U.S.
military problems has created a kind of euphoria which has influenced
even such a sober paper as the Wall Street Journal. Under a headline
U.S. ARMY TAKES TIP FROM REDS, STEPS UP GUERRILLA
TRAINING, a special report is enthusiastic:
"Here in the pine woods around Fort Bragg, a select group
of volunteer soldiers is learning how to infiltrate a Communist
country, arm and train anti-Red native bands, and then help
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these insurgent groups ambush convoys, disrupt communica-
tions, raid supply lines and otherwise harass the enemy . . .
"These rugged men, all volunteers for hazardous duty,
train to survive and operate in swamps, jungles, deserts and
mountains. . . . The Army claims these men could infiltrate Com-
munist-dominated lands by land, sea or air; working perhaps up
to 2,500 miles behind the Iron Curtain, they could organize
sympathetic people into guerrilla bands to harass and under-
mine the government. Initially the resistance movement would
probably concentrate on subversion through strikes, rumors,
riots; then as it picked up strength and firepower, the movement
would chip away at industry, communications and supply, and
government morale . . ."
"Special Forces detachments can use such diverse weapons
as a bow-and-arrow, an obsolete Thompson sub-machine gun,
a Cuban developed M-16, a sawed-off shotgun that fires an
incendiary gasoline bottle as much as 1,200 yards. . . . Each
Special Force soldier must possess a number of skills: How
to perform minor surgery, bag rattlesnakes to stave off starva-
tion, fire foreign weapons and win over natives at the grass-
roots level."
Unfortunately, there is a little problem which even the euphoric
reporter could not miss: The problem of language. Our bow-and-arrow
sharpshooters and rattlesnake-bagging guerrillas "face a pitfall in their
limited ability in language . . . an obvious limitation in swaying native
opinion and controlling guerrilla forces." But the Army doesn't give
up easily and the officers see to it that the men learn a few hundred
words of any language they may need. As one of them explained to the
reporter, "if our men know 300 to 500 words and select phrases, they
can show natives how to strip down a gun or plant a demolition bomb."
One can only marvel at such monumental egocentricity and visualize
our highly trained paratrooper knocking at the door of a Laotian
peasant and drawing on his scant stock of words for the magic phrase
that will open the door.
The new American reliance on guerrilla warfare will prove illusory.
The Kennedy Administration may read Mao Tse-tung, but it doesn't
understand him. On June 4, 1961, under the headline "Mao's Primer
on Guerrilla Warfare" the New York Times published extensive excerpts
from Mao's manual (translated by the Marine Corps!) The opening
sentences should make the Pentagon think:
"Without a political goal, guerilla warfare must fail, as it
must if its political objectives do not coincide with the aspira-
tions of the people and their sympathy, cooperation and assist-
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ance cannot be gained. The essence of guerrilla warfare is thus
revolutionary in character. (Emphasis added.)
"On the other hand, in a war of counter-revolutionary nature,
there is no place for guerrilla hostilities because guerrilla warfare
basically derives from the masses, and is supported by them."
The Pentagon thinks it can make use of the techniques of guerilla
warfare because it thinks in terms of equipment and training, of TNT
and small radios, of Garand riffles and bows and arrows. But the decisive
factor in guerrilla warfare, as Mao points out, is the political factor:
what is the guerrilla fighting for? Always, in every case, the guerrilla is
fighting for food and justice against oppressive social and economic
systems, against landlords, usurers, corrupt officials and arbitrary police,
in short the very things American foreign policy supports because it
supports the status quo.
The Pentagon's utilization of guerrilla warfare, or as it is more
formally called, paramilitary warfare will end up to be nothing more than
hit and run commando raids and sabotage missions . . plain gangsterism
by the U.S. government. That this is no exaggeration is shown in a blunt
article in the Wall Street Journal of May 16, 1961 which make this brutal
statement about paramilitary warfare: "It is a doctrine which could
concentrate on brutalities performed in the dark; honorable men of
high rank now sit in this city (Washington) calmly discussing the pos-
sibilities of such things as the methodical assassination of Communist
leaders abroad." This is not a Steve Canyon comic strip; this is the
Wall Street Journal reporting on high U.S. officials, and if there are any
doubts it is not because of moral considerations but rather "opposition
to all-out paramilitary ventures has centered within the government
on purely practical considerations." One of these considerations is a
rather important one, "By any realistic assessment, it would seem that if
America tries to step up undercover competition with the Soviet, it
must count on a 'paramilitary gap' that will make the 'missile gap' look
trivial by comparison."
By some kind of insane logic the failure of the Cuban invasion has
strengthened the proponents of paramilitary action. We read in the
article, "The idea that the U.S. Army must rely on undercover para-
military techniques of warfare as one way to stop and reverse Red
advances now appears more firmly established as national policy than
it was before the recent resounding failure of the paramilitary invasion
of Cuba . . . which attempted to cloak as a spontaneous rebellion of
exiles an attack which was in fact fully sponsored and directed by the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency." But this logic is no longer insane
when the Journal reveals why the Pentagon likes the idea, namely, the
ability to use secrecy so that there are no controls over the Pentagon
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activities. "Any paramilitary program, large or small, can bypass estab-
lished governmental mechanisms of review. An offensive involving vast
stakes can be decided in secret by a few highly placed officials, then
executed without scanning by Congressional committees. Though the
CIA has had its failures, its success in blazing this trail is complete."
In other words the CIA has shown the Pentagon the technique of waging
undeclared war without the knowledge or consent of Congress, and the
Journal goes on to spell this out: "The tradition of an informed, public,
the Constitutional right of the Senate to advise on foreign policy and of
Congress to declare war . . seem in basic conflict with paramilitarism."
This paramilitary doctrine is clearly designed not to attack Moscow
or Peking, but as an undercover police action to stop popular movements.
It is the military doctrine which corresponds to the political doctrine
expressed by Kennedy in his speech to the American Society of News-
paper Publishers where he said that the struggle "is taking place every
day, without fanfare, in thousands of villages and markets, day and night
and in classrooms all over the globe. . . ."
In these thousands of villages are hundreds of thousands of people
who are sick and tired of their poverty and exploitation, and prepared
to fight for their emancipation when they get socialist weapons. But it
isn't the weapons that make the revolutionary movements, it's the people.
The Pentagon can supply arms by the millions of dollars, as it did in
Laos, but it cannot find the people willing to fight to maintain the status
quo. That this reality should escape the secluded, rigid Pentagon brass
hats is understandable, but it is surprising that so intelligent and demo-
cratic a person as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt does not see it. She, too,
is puzzled. "As you look around the world," she writes, "where the
Russians have supplied arms and materials of war, it is a strange
thing to find that the peoples who have received this aid seem to fight
harder than those to whom we supply arms and materials of war. There
must be a reason for this . . ."
There is a reason, and it seems fairly obvious when one appraises the
Algerians or the Viet Nam forces fighting the French army, the Angolese
fighting the Portuguese, or the Cubans resisting American-trained in-
vaders. The obvious can be called by name?colonialism, imperialism?
but these are dirty words. "There must be a reason for this," says
Mrs. Roosevelt, "and I think it would be well for us to ferret it out.
Perhaps those to whom we give aid are not entirely sure they can trust
us. Why those who take aid from Russia should be sure they can
completely trust the Soviets is a mystery, but it is one for us to study."
The fact is that those to whom we give aid do trust us: we give to
oppressors. It is their oppressed peoples who don't trust us. One has
only to call the roll, Chiang Kai-shek, Syngham Rhee, Batista, Franco
and so on. This fact is so clear that in recent months commentators
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freely admit it and try to excuse it on the grounds that the alternative
to reactionary regimes is Communism. For example William Shannon
writing in the liberal New York Post on May 16, 1961 says:
"The governments we back in some countries are gray, but
the alternative is black. The Spain of General Franco is in many
ways a very sad country, but there is not the hopelessness of
Hungary, South Vietnam has its problems and the Ngo Diem
government could do better, but there is nothing like the blood-
shed and ruthlessness of lb o Chi Minh's rule in North Vietnam.
"There is an unconscious moral jingoism in the view that the
U.S. should insist upon better governments in the countries we
are aiding. In some countries there is no alternative to existing
ruling factions. . . . When it comes to the problems of corrup-
tion and of social change, we must bear in mind how difficult
such matters are in our own country. The maintenance of
honesty in the governments of New York and Chicago is a
constant struggle. The achievement of social change in Alabama
and Mississippi almost defies the reason and imagination of
men of goodwill . .
"The question we must ask about a government is not wheth-
er it is corrupt but whether it functions effectively.. In foreign
affairs, social reform represents the utopian solution of liberals."
These statements reflect attitudes that are widely held in the govern-
ment by men who consider themselves realists. In fact these ideas are
appalling self-deceptions. The corruption in the American "client"
states ( as Lippmann calls them) is not the corruption of a city govern-
ment. It is the corruption of a nation, a corruption that is so enormous,
widespread and tenacious that it stifles trade, industry, agriculture,
all possibilities of economic growth. This is what makes for explosive,
revolutionary conditions. To ask whether a corrupt government functions
effectively is to beg the question: such governments seem to function
until overthrown. Batista looked very powerful and effective until, a
couple of months before he was thrown out. By then it was too late.
Reform in our client states is not a moral question; it is a question.
of achieving stable government supported by a majority of the popula-
tion. This is difficult to achieve under the best of circumstances, but it
becomes impossible if the position is taken that any reform will help
Communism.
Shannon's attitude that the choice is between reactionary govern-
ments and Communism is predominant in our government circles and it
is the root of our self-defeating foreign policy. This "either/or" psychology
closes the door to alternatives and was the essence of John Foster
Dulles' policy. To Dulles the neutralism of India was offensive because
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all neutrality in the East-West struggle was a vote of no-confidence
in the U.S. and therefore, for Dulles, a pro-Communist position. While
the Kennedy Administration is more realistic about neutralism, the
"either or" psychology is still powerful within it, particularly in the
Pentagon. The English, who are our closest allies, look upon this
attitude with dismay since it is a sure formula for diplomatic defeats.
A clear statement of the British position is found in the London Observer,
a conservative, pro-American newspaper. It said on April 30, 1961:
"It would be comforting to believe that the Cuban adventure
was an isolated blunder, partly inherited from the previous
Administration. But all President Kennedy's speeches and actions
since then, and in the reactions of the American press, suggest
that this was not so. The Cuban intervention sprang from a
particular view of the world which the President fully shares,
which most Americans approve, and which at present sharply
divides the United States from most of her allies and from all
the neutral nations.
"To a far greater extent that they would like to admit, our
American friends are the prisoners of an ideology almost as
narrow as that of the Communists and just as ferently believed.
The American ideology equates capitalism not only with free-
dean but very nearly with virtue. The nationalization of an
American company by a small nation seems to most Americans
proof of a political sin so obvious as to require no further
discussion.
"To nearly all Americans, Communism is an evil as absolute
as Nazism or as murder, and any one who questions this dogma
must already be infected by the contagion. They decline to
notice any difference between Khrushchev's Russia and Stalin's
Russia. They ignore the case of Yugoslavia, where Communists
have created a society which is independent of Russia and
which appears to less impassioned democrats morally no worse
than the capitalist societies of Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal
or Verwoerd's South Africa. Few Americans can conceive that
a Laotian peasant might genuinely prefer the Pathet Lao to
Prince Bonn Oum, or that there is anything except misery in the
Soviet Union.
. . . This view of the world is a dangerously over-simplified. . . .
one. Mr. Khruslichey makes no secret of his conviction that
Communism will ultimately prevail and that be will do his best
to help it. No one would deny that Communist techniques
are dangerous and hard to counter. But Mr. Khruslichev also
knows that technique is not enough; that outside the areas where
the Russian and Chinese armies are dominant, Communism can
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succeed only where the conditions favor it. The chief of these
conditions are well known to be poverty, backwardness, feudal-
ism and oppression; but there are also external factors of great
importance.
"In Eastern Europe, for instance, Communism's greatest ally
is fear of Germany. In the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin
America, it is anti-colonialism. By direct intervention in would-
be neutralist parts of the world, the West presses a still painful
wound. Admittedly, it takes strong nerves not to intervene when
a country is threatened by Communist subversion, but it may
be the right course. If Britain had intervened in Iraq after
General Kassem's revolution, Iraq would now be Communist."
(Emphasis added.) -
No one can accuse the conservative British government of pro-
Communism and Prime Minister Macmillan has a long record of anti-
Soviet bias, so the tartness of British comment is not due to ideological
differences but to the fact that American policies have actually aided
Communism, a contention which is strongly and explicitly supported
by Walter Lippmann who writes:
?`. . . The reason we are on the defensive in so many places
is that for some ten years we have been doing exactly what Mr.
Khrushchev expects us to do. We have used money and arms
in a long losing attempt to stabilize native governments which,
in the name of anti-Communism, are opposed to all important
social change.
"We cannot compete with Communism in Asia, Africa or
Latin America if we go on doing what we have done so often
and so widely?which is to place the weak countries in a dil-
emma where they must stand still with us ?and our client rulers,
or start moving with the Communists."
The U.S.?Cuba relations of the last few years fit perfectly into the
British and Lippmann analysis. The United States supported Batista
with money and arms, opposing all social change, while major American
utilities, sugar and oil companies derived huge profits. The fact of U.S,
control over Batista is uncontested. One may say it has been certified
by a qualified authority, Mr. Earl T. Smith, former U.S. Ambassador
to Cuba, who told a Senate Committee:
"Senator, let me explain to you that the United States,
until the advent of Castro, was so overwhelmingly influential
in Cuba that. . . the American Ambassador was the second most
important man in Cuba; sometimes even more important than
the President."
Batista's army was equipped with American weapons and trained
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by U.S. military men, who remained in Cuba even beyond the fall of
Batista. In fact, they were sent home by Castro who explained politely
that their services were not needed by the Cuban guerrillas and that
their competence, in view of Batista's defeat was, to say the least,
questionable. Despite U.S. support of Batista, when Castro won in
January, 1959, he was not at all oriented to the socialist countries. There
wasn't even a trade agreement with the Soviet Union for over a year.
An intensely eclectic individual, Castro's only basic commitment
was the agrarian reform which his guerrilla forces, predominantly
p2asants, had been promised and now expected. But there was certainly
at that time no immediate intention to nationalize U.S. companies.
In fact, in the spring of 1959 Castro came to the U.S. to seek loans and
economic help. He was turned down, and after he carried into effect the
Agrarian Reform, the Eisenhower Administration began to put active
economic obstacles in the way of Cuban trade. Nevertheless it was
several months before Cuba turned to the socialist countries and in
February, 1960, signed a trade agreement which included the purchase
of Soviet oil at prices well below those of the monopoly-dominated
world market. The big refineries ( Standard of New Jersey, Texaco, Shell)
refused to handle the oil and the Cuban government took over the
refineries. This was in June, 1960, a year and a half after the victory
of the Revolution. It was this event which triggered the chain reaction
that led to the nationalization of all American companies in Cuba.
The monopolies thereupon cut off the flow of oil from Venezuela and
Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for all its oil.
In July the U.S. government cancelled the sugar quota, a major
blow of economic warfare, expected to cripple the Cuban economy.
Cuba sold its sugar to the socialist countries and retaliated by nation-
alizing the oil refineries, the U.S.-owned sugar mills, the U.S.-owned
utilities. In October Washington imposed an embargo. on exports and
Cuba nationalized all the U.S. companies. All told, about one billion
dollars of U.S. investments were taken over. The CIA stepped up its plans
to prepare an invasion which was carried through in April, 1961.
Several things must be noted. If there are Czech trucks on the
Cuban highways and Soviet tankers in Habana harbor, it is because
American companies have refused to sell U.S. trucks and U.S. oil to Cuba.
U.S. policy of economic warfare deliberately destroyed the network
of trade relations forcing Cuba to turn to the socialist countries for its
machines, spare parts, technical training and so forth.
Secondly, and as a consequence, the Cuban people began to get a
new viewpoint on socialism and the socialist countries. The mass of
people in Cuba have been influenced not so much by Cuba's small
Communist Party as by the daily arrival of Soviet tankers into Cuban
harbors. The entire Cuban economy depends on oil as a source of
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energy and every Cuban knows how essential oil is to any activity.
The white tankers with the hammer and sickle on their funnels are
the most effective propaganda that could possibly be devised.
Thirdly, while the nationalization of U.S. industries was part of the
struggle against American economic warfare and was determined by
American actions, yet this nationalization had an internal effect of
strengthening the public sector of the Cuban economy, thus pushing
Cuba further on the road to socialism. As sections of the upper middle
class turned against the Castro government because of their economic
and political ties with American interests, the Cuban government
nationalized their holdings as well. Large sections of the upper classes
defected to Miami and their defection further weakened the conservative
forces inside Cuba. The ultimate result of U.S. enmity was that both the
economic and the political basis of socialism was strengthened in Cuba
and the opposition dispersed in the brief space of two years. The at-
tempted invasion climaxed this development and it was after this
fiasco that Castro spoke of the revolution as patriotic, democratic, and?
for the first time?socialist.
The contention that American foreign policy forced the Cuban
Revolution to take the socialist road has been challenged by friend
and foe. Theodore Draper has argued that the break with the United
States was desired by Castro and his friends and that they maneuvered
skillfully so that the actions they wanted to do seemed to be reactions
to American economic aggression. The least that can be said to this
is that American foreign policy was terribly obtuse to give Castro,
the excuses he wanted. Yet Draper himself admits that Castro's
ideas were the ruling ideas of the Revolution and that at the beginning
Castro did not have socialist solutions in mind. Draper at no time
takes up the question of what would have happened had the United
States accepted the Agrarian Reform and given Cuba the loans which
Castro came looking for in the spring of 1959.
The Monthly Review editors, Huberman and Sweezy, in their book
and their articles have argued that, whether they knew it or not, the
original objectives of the Cuban Revolutionists could only be achieved
through socialism. Huberman has written: "Let me be clear. I am not
saying that opposition by the U.S., of itself, forced the Revolutionary
Government to move towards socialism?it served rather to speed tip
the process." Of course, everything revolves around that phrase "speed
up." It can mean a year, a decade, or even half a century. The point
simply is this: Had the United States accepted the Agrarian Reform
and provided loans, the nationalization would have been limited to a
few key monopolies (oil, utilities, sugar mills) which would have been
compensated, but the smaller American and Cuban businesses would,
have been functioning, expandh ig, and -finding the way to have a political
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platform and exercise political influence. It is beyond our scope at this
time to examine this problem at length, and it is only touched upon
here because it deals with the question of whether the U.S. could have
pursued an alternate policy in its own class interests, what the New York
Times termed editorially "the engineering of a social and economic
revolution by peaceful means."
Whether such an alternative is feasible or not, no one knows. It
hasn't been explored and of course it hasn't been tried. What is being
tried is the policy of bolstering disintegrating regimes with American
arms. The result can only be a series of colonial wars which will
be as disastrous for the American nation as the Indo-China and Algerian
conflicts have been for the French nation. It is evident by now that the
American policy of clinging to a reactionary status quo and of attempting
to turn the clock back has resulted in such resounding defeats in
Cuba and now in Laos as well, that some sections of the American
ruling class are beginning to take stock. In an editorial on May 14,
1961, the New York Times stated:
"We have too often encouraged communism by treating
any anti-Communist government as a friend. The fact that Fidel
Castro has been able to build up an anti-United States, pro-
Russia regime in Cuba is at least partly due to our tolerance of
the arbitrary and corrupt Batista government which Castro
overthrew. We should learn from this case and from others
that we cannot successfully fight communism by subsidizing
governments that rob or exploit their own people."
A few days later, May 18, Walter Lippmann in a slashing attack on
the continuation of the Dulles foreign policy, which he titled "A Dying
Policy," analyzed the failure of this policy in the Far East, writing:
"The revolution in Iran and the revolution in South Korea
are warning signs . . . that it is not only in Laos that there is
trouble for the American client states.
'In Iran the revolution is a desperate attempt at the top,
with the blessings of the Shah, to reform the regime before
it is overthrown from below. . . . The hour is late in Iran.
"In South Korea the revolution is the work of the Army. . .
the new military government, although it is not anti-American
intheory, is in fact defying and ignoring our embassy and the
American army commander."
"The revolutions in South Korea and Iran, following the dis-
orders in Laos and South Vietnam, are a warning that in Asia
the policy of containment by American satellite states is breaking
down. In all four of these countries the governments have been
our clients, indeed they have been our creations. All of them
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are crumbling, and in the last analysis they are all crumbling
for the same reason. . . these American client states are not only
corrupt but they are into reactionary.
. . . our present experience on the periphery of Asia is the
American equivalent of what the British and the French are
experiencing during the liquidation of their colonial empires.
For what we are witnessing is the dissolution of the Dulles
system of Asian protectorates. (Emphasis added. )"
This is strong language indeed and a blunt statement of facts long
hidden from the American people. That so respectable a commentator
as Lippmann should talk about American satellites and the Dulles sys-
tem of Asian protectorates in a context which equates American policy
with British and French imperialism is a reflection of the urgency of the
need for new foreign policy. The old foreign policy of Mr. Dulles, says
Lippmann, has confirmed Mr. Khrushchev's belief "that a capitalist
society cannot change, that in its dealings with the under-developed
countries it can only dominate and exploit. It cannot emancipate and
help." A new approach must be, says Lippmann, to make it "our
central and persistent and unswerving policy to offer these unhappy
countries a third option, which is economic development and social
improvement without the totalitarian discipline of Communism."
In more cautious language the New York Times supports this
position, editorializing: ". . . whether we like or or not we are living
in a revolutionary period. . . . What we must do is to understand
that we are living in a period of irrepressible change. We will have to
broaden and deepen the principles of democracy. We will have to be
tough with groups in other countries who would use foreign aid to
promote their own interests and power."
Whether or not such a new foreign policy could work is a moot
question. Given the structure of American society it is a difficult, unex-
plored question beyond the scope of this writing. Yet the necessity
of making the attempt is clear to men like Lippmann and Reston, to
institutions such as the New York Times. The immediate political
problem, therefore, is to widen and deepen the debate between the
re-adjusters and the standpatters, to isolate such powerful forces as
Standard Oil and the Pentagon which will not budge a millimeter.
Tigers do not want to eat grass.
It is a gauge of the new cleavages created by this political diremma
that certain liberal forces, blinded by anti-Sovietism, now support the
most reactionary forces in America. Typical is Max Ascoli, editor of The
Reporter, writing in the issue of May 25 a bitter editorial against
Lippmann and Reston under the title "Foreign Policy After Cuba."
Ascoli sees the desperate straits of American foreign policy, saying:
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"A great power enjoys a considerably broad margin for error. After
Cuba, we have no margin." But his recipe is: more of the same, no
readjustment, no negotiations, no disengagement. The next to last
paragraph of his editorial is a blatant statement of the new Know-
Nothingism.
"The great post-Cuba debate will go on for a long time and
any number of Clausewitzes are likely to suggest changes in our
diplomacy as a result of what they consider our new strategic
position. As far as we are concerned, to the now fashionable
question of which country we should disengage ourselves from,
our answer is: from none. And if it is asked which country we
should like to have neutralized by a coalition government with
Communist participation, our answer is again: none."
The forces opposing a re-examination and change in foreign policy
are powerful indeed and not to be minimized. But these contemporary
King Canutes have already suffered a major defeat in the very fact
that a debate has begun, and, as Ascoli agrees, this debate will go
on for a long time. It is our belief that events will force this debate
to go deeper and deeper and to penetrate into all layers of the American
population. The voices of reason will have to speak ever more clearly,
ever more bluntly. They will have to reveal much of the truth of
American diplomacy and foreign policy of the past decade, bring out
facts which have been systematically hidden and falsified.
Already, for example, Lippmann and Reston have boldly stated the
key fact of the post-Roosevelt foreign policy, namely that the atomic
diplomacy of the U.S. initiated the Cold War. In the last fifteen
years any such statement would have been immediately red-baited, for
only the Left took such a position.
Fifteen years ago when Churchill and Forrestal used the pliant
Truman to start the Cold War, it was nearly impossible to find any
politically respectable individual to state the truth of this matter. It
took diligent research to get a quote like that of Summer Welles who,
wrote in 1946 concerning the Cold War that "the blame for the present
disaster should be shared by the United States," or Elliot Roosevelt's
statement in the same year that "it was the United, States who first shook
the mailed fist."
For 15 years such statements were tabu. To say that the Truman
Administration, hypnotized by the atomic bomb, was primarily respon-
sible for the Cold War, was to ask for trouble. But now, listen to
James Reston: "Immediately after the war, when the United States
had an atomic monopoly, it was in a position to enforce its will in
areas close to the Communist borders. It was then that the Government
decided on a policy of halting expansion of Communism everywhere."
Or listen to Lippmann, "They [the American people] have not been told
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that the military situation which existed when John Foster Dulles
established his policy no longer exists. They have not been told that
he made it work by shaking the bomb at the Communists."
To understand the origins of the Cold War is the beginning of
wisdom in foreign policy. The overwhelming majority of the American
people still have no idea of the struggle that went on in the Truman
Cabinet over the issue of getting tough with the USSR; do not know
that Stimson and Marshall as well as Henry Wallace disagreed with
the policy of the Cold War. There is little knowledge in America that
as early as September 1945 Stimson wrote a famous memorandum to
President Truman warning against atomic diplomacy and saying
prophetically:
"I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with
Russia as not merely connected with but as virtually dominated
by the problems of the atomic bomb. Except for the problem
of the control of that bomb, those relations, while vitally im-
portant, might not be immediately pressing. The establishment
of relations of mutual confidence between her and us could
afford to await the slow progress of time. But with the discovery
of the bomb, they become immediately emergent. Those rela-
tions may be perhaps irretrievably embittered by the way in
which we approach the solution of the bomb with Russia.
For if we fail to approach them DOW and merely continue
to negotiate with them, having this weapon rather ostentatiously
on our hip, their suspicions and distrust of our motives will
increase."
The American people still do not know that as early as 1946, in
Truman's first Administration, John Foster Dulles was busy behind
the scenes in the State Department. William L. Shirer reported in
June of 1946 that "Mr. Truman and Mr. Byrnes, green as they are in
foreign affairs, have taken over so many ideas of Mr. Dulles, especially
in regard to Russia." In sum, Dulles planted the seed of the Cold
War at that time.
The Dulles policy of the Cold War, introduced via Truman and
continued by Eisenhower, has brought the United States from is apex
of world power and prestige in 1945 to the low of 1961. It has been a
disastrous policy not only for the broad national interests of the Amer-
ican people, but also for the narrower class interests of the ruling
groups themselves, and it is for this reason that in the last few years
differences of opinion have been growing sharper among policy makers,
erupting into the present "great debate." The wiser heads among the
power elite would like to make the necessary adjustments but they are
in a minority and can only achieve their aim if they can muster
broad popular support within the American people.
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It is in this context that the necessity arises of informing the public
of the truths of the past decade. The New York Times, Reston, Lippmann,
Kennan and others are finding it necessary to speak clearly enough so
that all may understand them and to point out the obvious results of
atomic diplomacy. Today this policy is in ruins and when Lippmann
attacks the policy he has to say why it was made and how it failed. He
writes as follows on Asia, but his words arc applicable all over the world:
"The Kennedy Administration did not form the policy of
of setting up on the periphery of Asia a semi-circle of American
military clients. But it is now confronted with the breakdown
of that policy, with the disorders, the dangers, and the pains
of having to pick up the pieces. This is an experience which the
American people have never had before and it is one for which
their leaders have not prepared them. They have not been told by
anyone in authority that there has been a radical change in the
military situation and what the consequences of that change are.
They have not been told that the military situation which
existed when John Foster Dulles established this policy no
longer exists. They have not been told that he made it work by
shaking the bomb at the Communists. That is why so many
of them suppose that Mr. Kennedy can make it work with a
few Marines and by shaking his fist.
"Our moral and intellectual unpreparedness for the reality of
things is causing widespread demoralization among us. We must
not let ourselves be overcome by it."
The American people are demoralized because they have been lied
to by their own government, lied to persistently and systematically.
So much has this been the case that the New York Times, which has
not been wholly blameless, published its stinging enditorial, THE RIGHT
NOT TO BE LIED TO.
Cuba has brought out into the open a debate which has been
going on among the power elite in the privacy of their offices, homes
and clubs. This debate is a reflection of the struggle over a change
in foreign policy, a struggle which will become sharper under pressure
of international events. More and more people will be drawn into this
struggle, more and more the truth will be out about the Cold War.
It is our profound conviction that in the next few years great political
struggles will take place in our country to take American foreign
policy out of the hands of the CIA, the Pentagon, the armaments
corporations and the political diehards. In such an eventuality we
may look back to the Cuban fiasco as a turning point in international
affairs, and the American people may finally see the Cuban Revolution
as an essential step in achieving their own democratic fulfillment.
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THE AUTHORS have gathered and
analyzed all the material available
on the attempted invasion of Cuba in
April 1961, paying particular attention
to the systematic misinformation and
deception of the American public by
government agencies and government
officials of the highest rank. The decep-
tion was so blatant that the usually
restrained New York Times published
a blistering editorial entitled THE
RIGHT NOT TO BE LIED TO.
The Cuban invasion was organized and
executed by the Central Intelligence
Agency under Allen Dulles. A summary
view of the CIA and its director is given
so that the Cuban invasion may be
seen in its proper perspective as one of
many similar operations?Iran, Guate-
mala, Burma?in which the CIA has been
engaged without the knowledge of the
American people.
The failure of the Cuban invasion has
had, and is having, profound repercus-
sions on American foreign policy and
has precipitated a debate as to its
future course. The importance of this
debate cannot be minimized, and the
authors have added as a postscript a
chapter entitled Foreign Policy After
Cuba, which brings to the reader some
of the pros and cons of the arguments
now current.
Marzani
&publishers
Munsell, inc.
ROBERT E. LIGHT is an associate
editor of National Guardian neves-
weekly, where he has been employed
since 1949. He has written on a wide
variety of subjects, ranging from the
hazards of nuclear radiation to labor
and medical developments. He has
been also a music critic and has
written for radio. He was an infantry
soldier in Europe during World
War
CARL MARZANI is a graduate of
Williams College and Oxford Univer-
sity and has taught economics at
New York University. He served dur-
ing the war in the Office of Strategic
Services which was the predecessor
agency of the Central Intelligence
Agency. After the war he held a
responsible position in the State
Department Intelligence Office, and
has since written several books on
questions of foreign policy.
100W. 23 STREET, NEW YORK 11, N.Y.
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