Operation Pluto operation
also: Clouto, Pluto
Explore in graph → Export claims (CSV) ↓
Related entities (most co-mentioned)
CIAintelligence service · 68Cubacountry · 63John F. Kennedyperson · 55Fidel Castroperson · 36Allen Dullesperson · 35Dwight D. Eisenhowerperson · 23United Statescountry · 23Richard M. Bissell Jr.person · 16Operation Mongooseoperation · 10Richard Nixonperson · 9Richard Helmsperson · 9Guatemalacountry · 9Richard Drainperson · 9Miamiplace · 7Jean Kirkpatrickperson · 7Antonio Boscaraperson · 6Maxwell D. Taylorperson · 6Whiting Willauerperson · 5Pentagonorganization · 5Richard Goodwinperson · 55412 Grouporganization · 5Arthur Schlesinger Jr.person · 4Washington, D.C.place · 4John McConeperson · 4
Claims (34)
Allen Dulles carried_out_attack
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“In April 1961, the biggest disaster in the CIA's history occurred. And of course, that was their attempt to topple Fidel Castro. Dulles was quoted as saying, it was the blackest day of my life. In public, the newly minted president, JFK, to…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Devil’s Chessboard Part 1 @ 34:30
Edward Lansdale objected_to
Operation Pluto documented
“There were also changes in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under the Office of Special Operations. The Office of Special Operations got abolished after the Bay of Pigs, although some of its representatives, like Ed Lansdale, had cons…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner- Presidents’ Secret Wars Chap 12 @ 46:04
CIA trained
Operation Pluto documented
“So let me flesh a little bit of that out. For those of you who don't know, after this coup, Guatemala became, because it's under now the control of the CIA, it becomes the launching point for the Bay of Pigs.…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Safe for Democracy Part 10 @ 1:06:53
Antonio Boscara member_of
Operation Pluto host_asserted
“1,400 other recruits were stationed there in April of 1961 when they moved to Nicaragua and launched the Bay of Pigs invasion. It failed in less than one day before Basqueiro's fighter got off the ground. He and others who remained were sen…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner LIVE RESEARCH INTO OPERATION GLADIO @ 33:22
Guillermo Tabre member_of
Operation Pluto host_asserted
“They married and he found work, first flying crop dusting planes and later a pilot for tourist companies and wealthy businessmen. His Bay of Pig contacts in Miami invited him to join them for other covert operations, but he declined, tellin…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner LIVE RESEARCH INTO OPERATION GLADIO @ 33:50
Richard Nixon covered_up
Operation Pluto documented
“who was then the CIA director, by warning him that if the spy agency did not help shut down the growing Watergate scandal, the president's belief is that this is going to open up the whole quote-unquote Bay of Pigs thing, and it's going to …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner The Devil's Chessboard Part 22 @ 37:50
David Atlee Phillips member_of
Operation Pluto documented
“But in his communication with St. John, Hunt was more emphatic about the plotters. In addition to Harvey and Morales, the name David Atlas Phillips and Cord Meyer was Hunt's speculations. Phillips was the CIA counterintelligence specialist …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner The Devil's Chessboard Part 22 @ 59:43
E. Howard Hunt member_of
Operation Pluto documented
“But in his communication with St. John, Hunt was more emphatic about the plotters. In addition to Harvey and Morales, the name David Atlas Phillips and Cord Meyer was Hunt's speculations. Phillips was the CIA counterintelligence specialist …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner The Devil's Chessboard Part 22 @ 59:43
Dwight D. Eisenhower approved
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“pushed for. Eisenhower approved the smaller force. Trax learned the news on November 4th when CIA first briefed the Navy on the plans just before 5412 group. It was the combat unit option that the secret warriors described. Dwight D. Eisenh…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 19 (20) @ 54:26
Jean Kirkpatrick criticized
Operation Pluto documented
“Kirkpatrick with his staff of about a dozen investigators assembled a detailed picture of the CIA side of the affair. Studying the paper trail and talking to more than 125 people, the investigators touched the points made by the...…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 23 (24) @ 8:11
Anastasio Somoza supplied_arms_to
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“personally worked on that, he said. When the CIA needed a secret base to prepare for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Somoza couldn't have been more accommodating. The U.S. called me and I agreed to have the bombers leave here and knock the hell o…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance by Gary Webb Part 2 @ 2:23
Dwight D. Eisenhower funded
Operation Pluto host_asserted
“just a week after, a couple of weeks after the new president was elected. President Kennedy was briefed during this period of time. Eisenhower made no final decision, but he demanded expedited preparations, put everything on a fast track.…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 5:31
Jack Hawkins trained
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“which is very rare. From November 1960 on, eight to 10 of these involved detailed discussions of the future Bay of Pigs operation. On December 8th, the CIA mounted a full-scale briefing. Jack Hawkins described this conventional invasion opt…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 7:22
Frank Egan trained
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“600 to 750 exiles with U.S. training and equipment. Frank Egan described the Cuban force at Camp Trax and its superior motivation and leadership. Egan felt these exiles would have no trouble extracting a heavy toll on Cuba's larger forces. …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 8:21
Whiting Willauer headed
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“On December 7th, the president approved. These men handled everything related to ATE. Willauer, the chairman, who had done so well in maintaining the Honduran base for the CIA Guatemalan coup, was recalled from Costa Rica, ostensibly as the…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 11:55
Ygorius ordered_assassination_of
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“On the skimpy air side of the project, his experience with civil air transport was illustrative to the meeting. The leaders of the secret war gathered again on January 3rd, 1961 to discuss progress as well as the rupture of diplomatic relat…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 13:32
Dwight D. Eisenhower funded
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“Two reasonable alternatives were to support the Cubans to go in March or abandon the operation. Exactly seven days later, the New York Times published an account of Cuban exiles training in Guatemala. Did the president bequeath his successo…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 15:35
Allen Dulles covered_up
Operation Pluto documented
“Asked if he wanted to drink, Allen said, I certainly would. I really need one. This was the worst day of my life. When Nixon asked what was wrong, Dulles blurted out, everything is lost. The Cuban invasion is a total failure. In a rush, Dul…”
▶ The Colonel’s corner president’s secret war chapter 11 @ 59:12
Maxwell D. Taylor exposed
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“concluded that it had been incumbent on the president at the latest by November or December of 1960 to make basic decisions as to how far the U.S. was willing to go. By not confronting that choice himself, Eisenhower left questions history …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 18:19
Dwight D. Eisenhower covered_up
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“just weeks after the Cuban operation went down, that he held no responsibility. He had never approved any invasion. Two years after Kennedy's death, Eisenhower repeated the claim in the interviews and in his memoirs, Waging Peace. He had ne…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 22:36
Napoleon Valeriano trained
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“Agency trainers like Napoleon Valerino and William Buckley knew a lot, but lacked the up-to-date awareness of the professional military standards. Without special forces trainers, the CIA believed their Cubans would not be set until the fal…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 27:08
William F. Buckley trained
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“Agency trainers like Napoleon Valerino and William Buckley knew a lot, but lacked the up-to-date awareness of the professional military standards. Without special forces trainers, the CIA believed their Cubans would not be set until the fal…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 27:08
David Crosby trained
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“On January 13th, Lieutenant Colonel David Crowe finally arrived with 40 Special Forces soldiers. Meanwhile, divisions sharpened between exiles from the student groups and those of the former Cuban military that are now Cuban exiles. When th…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 29:12
José Pérez San Román headed
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“was in Washington, the exiles had it out. San Roman assembled the brigade, told the men they would be going to Cuba under his command, and asked those who did not wish to follow to step right. Almost half of the existing force, 230 men, inc…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 31:08
Grayston Lynch covered_up
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“In interviews and oral history, many participants pass over this January 1961 near mutiny. In his book account of the Bay of Pigs, CIA contract officer Grayston Lynch fails to even mention the mutiny. Francisco Molino of the 2nd Brigade is …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 31:37
Francisco Franco member_of
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“In interviews and oral history, many participants pass over this January 1961 near mutiny. In his book account of the Bay of Pigs, CIA contract officer Grayston Lynch fails to even mention the mutiny. Francisco Molino of the 2nd Brigade is …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 31:37
Hugo Surio member_of
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“Battalion Commander Hugo Surio describes events simply as political turmoil at the camp. Francisco Hernandez, another 2nd Battalion participant, recalls fearing that their officers were taking CIA orders, not those of the Cuban political le…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 32:08
Francisco Hernandez member_of
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“Battalion Commander Hugo Surio describes events simply as political turmoil at the camp. Francisco Hernandez, another 2nd Battalion participant, recalls fearing that their officers were taking CIA orders, not those of the Cuban political le…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 32:08
José Pérez San Román removed_from_power
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“and several other political leaders visited tracks and extorted them. The FRD people told the men the CIA were there to help, disguising the degree to which, in fact, the brigade existed as a CIA creation. In a political move, Jose San Roma…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 33:12
Carlos Rodrigo Santana member_of
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“resident political authority of the FRD and liaison with the Americans also helped in the controversy. It had happened for reasons that had everything to do with what made ATE a CIA project rather than an exile movement. Meanwhile, the exil…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 34:13
Richard M. Bissell Jr. headed
Operation Pluto documented
“While every single element had to go right for it to have even had a remote chance of success. The CIA's project had been marginal at best from the beginning. Dwight Eisenhower and the agency share the blame for that. Richard Bissell had be…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 23 (24) @ 21:42
CIA covered_up
Operation Pluto host_asserted
“Kennedy knew at that moment he couldn't authorize a second air campaign because it was already discovered and they were trying to hush it up that the entire air campaign was basically CIA US attacking a foreign country. So at that point, be…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 19 (20) @ 1:01:50
Whiting Willauer exposed
Operation Pluto book_quoted
“were still grappling with problems that could only be passed on. The horns of the dilemma were even clearer then. Whiting Willauer wrote a memo on January 18th that explicitly said the Cuba project might not succeed under existing plans. Th…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 21 (22) @ 16:33
United States funded
Operation Pluto host_asserted
“The U.S. Embassy in Leopoldville obtained the overwhelming majority of its information, 90%, from Belgium sources. In other words, they weren't even doing actual intelligence. They were just being fed shit by Belgium. They protected their o…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner Safe for Democracy Part 23 (24) @ 34:13
Mentions (120)
▶ 36:49
had been a benefactor to the members of the Cuban Brigade 2506. No kidding. The infamous, oh, because they got imprisoned on the Isle of Pines, the infamous prison where they kept the Bay of Pigs people. So Tito Mesa was a Cuban drug figure…
▶ 41:20
to go to war against the people that are truly the freedom fighters and the people that want the land back for their original owners, which happened to be in the Sandinista government. Okay, Tom Clines enjoyed a long history and friendship …
▶ 46:12
businesses and organizations, just like Bush Sr. He was actually involved in the oil industry, but he was actually a CA. They put him in a spot of a position to where they could use that as an asset, and that's where the connection to the B…
▶ 47:56
had been discovered in the Zapata Bay area of Cuba. And so they were desperately trying to get Cuba back in their portfolio. So as the relations in Washington and Havana went south, the Kennedy administration initiated a CIA-sponsored invas…
▶ 48:56
And we read all about the Swan Island that was being used for the radio. So he basically kind of just takes the reader through a whole bunch of that, which we already know. So for Buckley and Mannion, the Bay of Pigs fiasco was instantly fa…
▶ 49:25
question how similar these operations are and how they all turn out the same becomes one of our famous patterns. So their view on the matter was sharpened by the Cuban paramilitaries who had survived the invasion and then returned home, who…
▶ 2:23
personally worked on that, he said. When the CIA needed a secret base to prepare for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Somoza couldn't have been more accommodating. The U.S. called me and I agreed to have the bombers leave here and knock the hell o…
▶ 34:00
Mr. Morris, who happened to be a young editor at Harper's Magazine, to help him set the record straight of a humiliation event. He wanted him to write his side of the story of the Bay of Pigs because it made Dulles furious that the Bay of P…
▶ 34:30
In April 1961, the biggest disaster in the CIA's history occurred. And of course, that was their attempt to topple Fidel Castro. Dulles was quoted as saying, it was the blackest day of my life. In public, the newly minted president, JFK, to…
▶ 35:02
and made gracious remarks about Dulles as he was kicking him out the door. But in private, a war had begun between Kennedy and Dulles camps. The Bay of Pigs came after a long string of Dulles victories, given free reign by President Eisenho…
▶ 41:48
Ike concluded that Dulles had robbed him of his place in history as a peacemaker and left him nothing but a legacy of ashes. Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served. Clearly outmatched by the savvy spy master, talking about …
▶ 45:24
the ways that Dulles' CIA had intended to contrive to lure the young president into a trap. When the Bay of Pigs operation was underway and the chips were down, Dulles wrote, he was confident that JFK would be compelled to do the right thin…
▶ 55:15
And then, you know, you have other people that say, oh, it was all the Cuban exiles because they were pissed off at him for the Bay of Pigs, which again is not possible because all of the coordination and all of the different scenarios that…
▶ 31:07
raising awareness on his case online and enlisting support of his Old Bay of Pig buddies. I know my dad did something, but whatever he did, he didn't deserve to serve 36 years. In person, Boscaro could pass as a harmless grandfather, his kh…
▶ 33:22
1,400 other recruits were stationed there in April of 1961 when they moved to Nicaragua and launched the Bay of Pigs invasion. It failed in less than one day before Basqueiro's fighter got off the ground. He and others who remained were sen…
▶ 33:50
They married and he found work, first flying crop dusting planes and later a pilot for tourist companies and wealthy businessmen. His Bay of Pig contacts in Miami invited him to join them for other covert operations, but he declined, tellin…
▶ 34:20
and was now the owner of a thriving little Havana jewelry store. In 77, Miami had become a drug capital in the Western Hemisphere, a hub for smugglers and money launderers. Many drug dealers and city cops shopped at the store. He was later …
▶ 35:45
It was enriching bankers and local law enforcement authorities who chose to look the other way. Bascaro was among several Bay of Pigs veterans who found their past experience as clandestine operatives useful. It was exciting, he said. I was…
▶ 38:10
Bascaro remained resolute in his stand against helping authorities. He declined to parlay his smuggling connections and declined to serve as a witness when he saw wrongdoing behind bars, an act of self-preservation that aligned with his mor…
▶ 39:08
He began to wonder if there was something in his files he didn't know about, a black mark. Bascaro's hope turned to desperation. After completing just about every education and vocational program available to him, he says he now spends his …
▶ 33:29
Meanwhile, the implementation of Pluto was accelerating. Two final postponements resulted in an invasion set for April 17th. On April 1st, Admiral Dennison got his basic marching orders in a Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum. The Navy could …
▶ 36:21
but supposedly they're going to be the new government. President Kenney was still reserving his final decision and had the option to cancel Pluto up to 24 hours prior to it, to the landing. Although the military man sent down to observe loa…
▶ 37:47
The men have received more firing experience than U.S. troops would normally receive. I was impressed with the serious attitude of the men. The president gave the go-ahead after he received that. Wouldn't you love to know the name of the Ma…
▶ 1:16:23
What we need to know is there is a group of people that are attacking us using our religion to separate us. And that needs to stop. Look, Colonel, at my age, I don't have any more fucks to give. So I don't I'm not worried about it. OK. All …
▶ 1:16:23
What we need to know is there is a group of people that are attacking us using our religion to separate us. And that needs to stop. Look, Colonel, at my age, I don't have any more fucks to give. So I don't I'm not worried about it. OK. All …
▶ 11:41
perhaps the 1961 retirement of Frank Wisner, who had grown weary of increasingly ceremonial job, because remember, he got basically fired and they moved him over to London. Paramilitary plans in Wisner's era had frequently involved grand sc…
▶ 22:20
Taylor himself had just signed a five-year contract at the Lincoln Center. He remained for the moment in New York, where he read confused reports about the Bay of Pigs. Two days after the fall of Garonne, President Kennedy called and person…
▶ 23:17
Bobby Kennedy told the general that the president was going to replace Allen Dulles at the CIA and offered Taylor the job. While still considering the offer in June of 1961, Mack Taylor helicoptered to Gettysburg with Allen Dulles to brief …
▶ 23:46
Max wondered if he should ask Dulles to test the waters ahead of him. Allen was in no position to do favors that day. He himself had been in the woodshed with the former president over the botched Bay of Pigs. Neither man needed to have wor…
▶ 46:04
There were also changes in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under the Office of Special Operations. The Office of Special Operations got abolished after the Bay of Pigs, although some of its representatives, like Ed Lansdale, had cons…
▶ 27:08
cited the quote-unquote disposal problem to JFK as one reason to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion. Far from disposing of the Cuban contract agents, the operation led to an almost open-ended CIA involvement with the Cuban exiles all ov…
▶ 34:18
had he not been under attack by the United States. President Kennedy kept his distance from the paramilitary offensive, but his brother Bobby was at the forefront of the operations, prodding the planners to get moving, encouraging action wi…
▶ 54:38
Because it also connected with, as I recall, the schools. I mean, it was not just a matter of trying to push out propaganda. Well, no, J.M. Wade was actually the operation to overthrow Castro. It really had very little to do with propaganda…
▶ 55:14
was you can think of it like this. They had pre-positioned it. Operation Pluto was more like what we did with Panama, where we have a fake government or like what we did with Katanga in the Congo, where they have a fake government already i…
▶ 55:40
With the hopes that there are other people that will rise up. And in the midst of the quote unquote civil war that ensues. They're going to install this government that had been in exile. That the U.S. had already recognized onto the island…
▶ 1:07:20
Well, it opens with Operation Pluto. Operation Pluto, when it was discovered what was going on, they renamed the operation to Operation Zapata. That's never mentioned. And then it goes to Operation Mongoose, which is mentioned. So I'm begin…
▶ 1:07:20
Well, it opens with Operation Pluto. Operation Pluto, when it was discovered what was going on, they renamed the operation to Operation Zapata. That's never mentioned. And then it goes to Operation Mongoose, which is mentioned. So I'm begin…
▶ 1:09:16
Because they now don't control Cuba because Castro got in the way and wouldn't work with them after that. Because keep in mind, Bush is part of the CIA when all this is happening. We don't know where he's at, but we definitely know he's par…
▶ 38:32
even as it began to focus on Guyana. For those months, this was months after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, there were investigations, postmortems, a National Security Council policy review, and even an inquiry. A generation of CIA le…
▶ 41:55
the U.S. involvement in Cuba, when in fact the U.S. had been taken in, using their words, air quotes, taken in. As Kennedy, people kept telling the British, King escaped blame for the Bay of Pigs because it had been managed at a level above…
▶ 46:42
By early 62, the Directorate of Operations had a new boss, as did the CIA itself, the Deputy Director for Operations of Professional Intelligence Officer Richard Helms. He had stayed out of the limelight of the Bay of Pigs and managed to su…
▶ 1:01:16
Constantly noticing the patterns. Yep. Yep. I agree. All along, did you want to say something? Yeah, Colonel. Yeah. Okay, good. You know, again, once again, good friends of the United Fruit Party come up here. And it just, it kind of is a g…
▶ 1:06:53
So let me flesh a little bit of that out. For those of you who don't know, after this coup, Guatemala became, because it's under now the control of the CIA, it becomes the launching point for the Bay of Pigs.…
▶ 1:07:13
That's where they were training ground troops. That's where they were training pilots. It becomes a critical node, which is why the CIA does this. They want to control governments, not just for the oligarchs, but also for their operational …
▶ 1:09:12
that in other books that we've read, Alan Dulles never actually thought that they could take Cuba with this ragtag group of Cuban exiles. He never did. And that's the reason why he was making backroom deals with Lyman Lemonsker to have the …
▶ 1:10:44
Sometimes they gave actual numbers. And one of the books I read, and it may have been Colonel Prouty's book, said they never gave it, the military never gave, in reviewing the Bay of Pigs plan, never gave it above a 20% chance of working. A…
▶ 1:11:12
And he knew he had Lyman Lemesker on his side. And they literally did. I mean, Curtis LeMay and Lyman Lemesker goes and bullies JFK during the Bay of Pigs. They were so disgusted with JFK that he would not allow them to use the U.S. militar…
▶ 17:01
Only in the very last days before the CIA's invasion did the agency's political action people succeed in inducing the Cubans to widen their political council to include Ray. Typically, by that time, agency analyst Glitchkoff at the Miami fi…
▶ 22:59
creating a World War II-style resistance, as Bissell complains, and that most appropriate CIA role would have been recruiting agents in Castro's government who could have helped blunt his efforts. None of that was tried. It was immediately,…
▶ 26:54
quote, a thorough education in the difficulty of establishing an effective guerrilla organization, unquote, is what Helms thinks the DDO ought to have known beforehand. By then, Bissell was immersed up to his ears and couldn't turn back. We…
▶ 32:00
But historians blame CIA procedures for task force and notes that the entire arrangement was scrapped after the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Even by August, Esterling still had a good dozen senior officer vacancies on his task force. Paramil…
▶ 37:37
During the Guatemalan operation. But enlisting Rip. As a contract officer. Didn't require King's approval. Esterling thought highly of Robertson. And didn't mind bringing him back. Anticipating the need to embark. The exile force. As well a…
▶ 44:25
the Matusa time in the summer and made it a nautical foray on September 28th, landing several hundred pounds of equipment on a Cuban beach and picking up two men and bringing them back to the United States. A second boat, Sea Grill, became …
▶ 45:28
It became the workhorse, though she became active duty in February of 1961. In one month, she carried more material to Cuba than all the previous cruises put together. Eisenhower's August decision upped the ante across the board. Cuban exil…
▶ 47:57
And we know all about the Philippines and all of their stay behind units that Lansdale and all of those other people created. So they just go pluck them and say, hey, we got a new project over here. Just like you had the Cuban exiles in Ang…
▶ 50:57
By late fall 1960, I was greatly concerned that senior officers involved in the operation were overworked and that they were running out of the appropriate personnel to fill the necessary positions. Cuban invasion actually occurred. The hig…
▶ 53:53
There can be no doubt the revised CIA plan amounted to an invasion. The 5412 group resisted it, making the issue one of the CIA's operations as against a combined agency military one. Because they know they can't do it with this small force…
▶ 54:26
pushed for. Eisenhower approved the smaller force. Trax learned the news on November 4th when CIA first briefed the Navy on the plans just before 5412 group. It was the combat unit option that the secret warriors described. Dwight D. Eisenh…
▶ 56:47
tells me that what they were really looking for is these people were going to be sacrificed. They really wanted the U.S. for a land invasion. But the other thing that struck me was Brayston Lynch and what he contributed here and where he we…
▶ 58:16
I'm wondering how much of that really tracks with what really went down. Yeah. Well, their version of everything, despite what's actually been declassified, is that Kennedy's held the responsibility for the entire thing being botched, which…
▶ 59:32
and come away with that conclusion. But once you understand the sequence of events, and as we've discovered, and I don't recall, because I read this part probably a couple months ago in the book, if he goes into the same detail that that on…
▶ 1:00:00
The mission was compromised because their idea to have that one bomber land in Miami, like he was confused on where he was. And it was supposedly dressed up like a Cuban Air Force bomber. And this guy was actually pretending to be a Cuban, …
▶ 41:20
or anti-Castro people, or insert agents. They basically contracted out everything. Around November, the agency actually acquired, they bought the WASP from the Cuban owners. In 1960, a dozen Cuban or CIA boat missions took place off of Cuba…
▶ 41:50
and extracted 79 people. Early in 1961, Castro imported fast patrol boats and radars from Russia to stop those activities. Around December of 1960, Castro's FAR became actively involved in major counterinsurgency campaigns against the Escam…
▶ 44:59
Amori undoubtedly found out. They all got through a capital briefing on January 6, 1961, where Alan Dulles presented the Senate CIA subcommittee some details of the Cuban project. But Amori had no standing to supply reports that might call …
▶ 49:27
Publication outraged Esserling. Hunt's efforts to sanitize the photos did little to disguise their true meaning. Sets of the pictures even reached the Cuban government. The Ministry of Information gave them wide publication. Oh, the CIA is …
▶ 51:04
So we'll start with that on Monday and then move on to the actual Bay of Pigs. Sorry about that. I got thrown out at the very beginning. I see War Hamster in the audience. Yep. All right. Any comment, SR or Bridget? More nefarious since Ste…
▶ 58:12
the facts, the logical conclusion is that the Bay of Pigs was meant to fail. And you're going to have to create a very strong argument that that's not true because the facts lead you in that direction. And the aftermath of that, when we've …
▶ 58:41
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Curtis LeMay, in charge of the Air Force, Dulles, all in JFK's office screaming at him that he has to use the military. You know, it's interesting. We're going back 60 years or more, and it makes it so…
▶ 1:19
For those of you who may be following along on the book, we're on page 231, and we're in the chapter, Another Black Hole of Calcutta. So we begin, and we're almost done with this chapter, by the way. We'll be into the next chapter here duri…
▶ 4:11
The final message from Jim Noel's CIA station in Havana went out that afternoon, reporting his code materials had been destroyed. The rupture of relations occurred after the Cuban project expanded yet again. The new concept aired in Allen D…
▶ 5:01
up until the new president comes in so that the new president is forced to go along with whatever operation that they're initiating. The Cuban exiles could establish a beachhead, declare a provincial government, then call for American help.…
▶ 5:31
just a week after, a couple of weeks after the new president was elected. President Kennedy was briefed during this period of time. Eisenhower made no final decision, but he demanded expedited preparations, put everything on a fast track.…
▶ 6:52
Referring to the transition, he said he did not wish to be in a position of turning over the government in the midst of a developing emergency. If a developing emergency existed, no fault lay with the Eisenhower's intelligence overseers. Mo…
▶ 7:22
which is very rare. From November 1960 on, eight to 10 of these involved detailed discussions of the future Bay of Pigs operation. On December 8th, the CIA mounted a full-scale briefing. Jack Hawkins described this conventional invasion opt…
▶ 8:21
600 to 750 exiles with U.S. training and equipment. Frank Egan described the Cuban force at Camp Trax and its superior motivation and leadership. Egan felt these exiles would have no trouble extracting a heavy toll on Cuba's larger forces. …
▶ 8:51
of the Pentagon's foot dragging, specifically the refusal of special forces personnel for temporary duty in training. It was true. Since August, the Office of Special Operations, which advised the Secretary of Defense on covert operations, …
▶ 10:54
Eisenhower's November meeting, he created a coordination panel with senior officials from the State Department plus one from the agency. The conversation took place immediately after the president spoke to William Polly, who had wanted a si…
▶ 11:55
On December 7th, the president approved. These men handled everything related to ATE. Willauer, the chairman, who had done so well in maintaining the Honduran base for the CIA Guatemalan coup, was recalled from Costa Rica, ostensibly as the…
▶ 12:59
We've said that the State Department is an extension of the CIA. This illustrates that point perfectly. You have an ambassador serving as the head honcho for a covert operation. He wanted 5,000 to 10,000 volunteers to train in the US to get…
▶ 13:32
On the skimpy air side of the project, his experience with civil air transport was illustrative to the meeting. The leaders of the secret war gathered again on January 3rd, 1961 to discuss progress as well as the rupture of diplomatic relat…
▶ 15:04
in Latin America, meaning the Cuban exiles. Although he saw some equipment shortages, Lyman Lemesker, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed with all of them, even though the people on his staff did not. Within weeks, frustrated,…
▶ 15:35
Two reasonable alternatives were to support the Cubans to go in March or abandon the operation. Exactly seven days later, the New York Times published an account of Cuban exiles training in Guatemala. Did the president bequeath his successo…
▶ 16:04
But during his final months in office, and especially after the election that Kennedy won, Eisenhower had sparked a remarkable surge in preparation, including a much expanded operational concept. Then he left JFK to choose between the tough…
▶ 16:33
were still grappling with problems that could only be passed on. The horns of the dilemma were even clearer then. Whiting Willauer wrote a memo on January 18th that explicitly said the Cuba project might not succeed under existing plans. Th…
▶ 16:59
At the conclusion, and this is the day after Eisenhower's famous speech and the day after the CIA had killed Patrice Lumumba, by the way, January 18th, Willauer wrote an infamous memo that basically said this likely was not going to work an…
▶ 17:26
Don't you love those memorialized memos? Kind of reminds you of the Obama administration. We did everything by the book. The next morning at the last Eisenhower-Kennedy meeting of the transition, Eisenhower turned Cuba. According to Clark C…
▶ 17:54
And that responsible action meant to do whatever's necessary. They've boxed JFK into a corner and they had every intention of using military forces. The plan depended on it. The post-mortem conducted later by a panel under General Maxwell T…
▶ 18:19
concluded that it had been incumbent on the president at the latest by November or December of 1960 to make basic decisions as to how far the U.S. was willing to go. By not confronting that choice himself, Eisenhower left questions history …
▶ 19:12
had been at the apex of the secret war for eight years, he knew better. He knew that almost every one of his successes were almost a failure. He knew the difficulties the 5412 group was having, the CIA's penance for avoiding implementation …
▶ 19:42
Eisenhower knew the status of Project ATE and its specific problems. Until the moment JFK took his oath, Eisenhower could have shut down that project with a few words. He didn't. The declassified records of the Cuba meetings during Eisenhow…
▶ 21:40
The net result put America on the wrong side of its own advocacy of national self-determination. Covert actions to impose regime change, even if successful, also put Washington in a bad position to insist America stood for democracy. The qu…
▶ 22:07
That no American were to be involved in combat remained a fundamental assumption. After the fiasco in Indonesia, it is doubtful whether Eisenhower would have accepted any direct involvement. But before the end of his administration, America…
▶ 22:36
just weeks after the Cuban operation went down, that he held no responsibility. He had never approved any invasion. Two years after Kennedy's death, Eisenhower repeated the claim in the interviews and in his memoirs, Waging Peace. He had ne…
▶ 4:03
a lot of the similar research. I don't think he's as steeped in the stay behind aspect of it, but he certainly knows how the whole game is played. Just absolutely amazing. Okay, so we're gonna get started where we left off yesterday and fin…
▶ 6:24
So the Presidential Intelligence Board submitted many recommendations in 1961, some of them on covert operations from the board's own Bay of Pigs post-mortem. Among these were advice that the CIA increase its intelligence work and de-emphas…
▶ 7:44
the DO role in reviewing its own covert operations. Who would ever do that? They assigned that function to the CIA IG, who, by the way, is just a defunct agent anyway. It's not like it's an independent review. Now the IG took a look at the …
▶ 8:11
Kirkpatrick with his staff of about a dozen investigators assembled a detailed picture of the CIA side of the affair. Studying the paper trail and talking to more than 125 people, the investigators touched the points made by the...…
▶ 10:29
We attack him because we can't attack the information. In a wheelchair, he had contracted polio on duty for the agency and then had been assigned the IG job. Dark gossip attended the preparation of the IG report, but uproar followed its Oct…
▶ 12:25
and by three Cuba task force officers. All these circulated with Kirkpatrick's report. Then Director McCone had the copies collected. McCone had all saved, one destroyed. Years later, in his memoirs, Richard Bissell reconsidered his view of…
▶ 14:51
Although the CIA might not have looked so bad in the Taylor report, Kennedy had considered Alan Dulles a master spy and a political asset, and now he did not. At lunch with author Schlesinger and James Reston during the last days of Project…
▶ 15:18
Allen on until the completion of the new CIA headquarters building in Langley, the construction of which had been one of Dulles' great dreams. And then he pulled the rug out and fired him so that he never got to be in the building officiall…
▶ 16:16
that when the chips were down, JFK would go along with the agency's need to engage the military to save the exiles. Without the pressures of defending current programs, the former CIA director admitted to failing to ensure that Kennedy unde…
▶ 17:46
whitewash as the Taylor Report. The on-scene CIA officer, Lynch, defends the fighters in Brigade 2506 and places the responsibility squarely on Kennedy's shoulders. Lynch has certain details wrong. For example, Bissell, not JFK, had the ini…
▶ 18:46
and therefore he was there to meet the real invasion because they had tried. Remember the submarine guy was going to go to the opposite end of the island. They didn't fall for it. So everything about the CIA plan failed, but it's all Kenned…
▶ 21:12
Aircraft, certainly not in the types and numbers that was available to the CIA, could not have destroyed Castro's army. Meanwhile, the internal resistance, weak and far away, like literally on the other side of the island, had no chance to …
▶ 21:42
While every single element had to go right for it to have even had a remote chance of success. The CIA's project had been marginal at best from the beginning. Dwight Eisenhower and the agency share the blame for that. Richard Bissell had be…
▶ 24:11
Dio, Bissell, and John Brose all walked the plank in his staff meeting. His subordinate said that. The staffer was shunted to a job at the Pentagon, but Barnes moved over to become division chief of a newly established domestic operations d…
▶ 27:19
How cool. The Miami Post embroiled Esterling in hot water again because of the CIA Cubans scandal in Watergate. Esterling retired in mid-1973. By and large, however, the Bay of Pigs proved to be more benign for CIA personnel than participat…
▶ 5:43
Complaints about the handling of the Bay of Pigs brought no end to the secret war against Castro. If anything, it redoubled their effort. The brigadistas still roamed the Zapata swamps when Bobby Kennedy sent Jack a memorandum calling for n…
▶ 9:41
going to be pushed around by a reporter. Goodwin sent the president a memo at the beginning of November that analyzed the idea that the only effective way to handle an all-out attack was an all-out attack on the Cubans. Goodwin believed, as…
▶ 10:11
taking Tracy Barnes' suggestion for deliberations of his task force. Goodwin then had an uncanny encounter with Shea Cavera at a Latin American conference in Uruguay that summer, at which Shea had thanked the Kennedy man for the Bay of Pigs…
▶ 11:47
Goodwin helped the reporter in his quest to see administration higher ups. Over a period of the next few days in early November, Sluck met with both Bobby and Jack Kennedy. His meeting with the president is reported to have been at the sugg…
▶ 12:16
had excellent contacts in Cuba, and had proven himself an acute observer. That summer, he had reported through author Schlesinger a private conversation with Castro after the Bay of Pigs. The only other person present at his Oval Office cha…
▶ 12:44
According to his own notes of the conversation, the reporter told the president that, quote, Castro thought that despite the Bay of Pigs, JFK was the only politician with whom he could deal in terms of improved relations, unquote. Kennedy e…
▶ 13:14
to make it impossible for the agency to construct another operation like the Bay of Pigs. He said something about setting up a special group on Cuba. Kennedy leaned forward in his chair, quote, what would you think if I ordered Castro to be…
▶ 21:23
instructed the Secret Warriors to proceed in such a fashion as to permit disengagement. General Lansdell would continue as the project chief. The CIA's next day promised to ensure a steady flow of intel on Cuba. This flaw of the Bay of Pigs…
▶ 22:21
Just before the president entered, Lansdale told the group that Taylor's guidelines would preclude success. Taylor emphasized the need to gather intelligence. President Kennedy, as he had done in the Bay of Pigs, shut off discussion of U.S.…
▶ 23:51
was highly unusual. McCone may have wanted to keep the play in his own hands, or he may have anticipated the fight over the guidelines and wanted no witnesses. Or perhaps, just like Jack and Bobby, McCone felt the CIA had made a poor showin…
▶ 24:21
something not evident to the Cuban agents left to flap in the wind as Castro's security services hunted them down. Records of the CIA director's morning staff meetings indicated the agency began planning new activities for Cuba within a wee…