"The Republicans have allowed a communist dictatorship to flourish eight jet minutes from our bordersWe must support anti-Castro fighters. So far these freedom fighters have received no help from our government."(Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy baiting Richard Nixon during the famous 1960 debates.)

Short weeks before the debates CIA chief Allen Dulles (on President Eisenhower's orders) had briefed Kennedy about Cuban invasion plans (what became the Bay of Pigs invasion,) so Kennedy was lying through his teeth. He knew damn well the Republican administration was training Cuban freedom fighters. And since the plans were secret, he knew damn well Nixon couldn't rebut. So Nixon bit his tongue. He could easily have stomped Kennedy on it. But to some candidates national security trumps debating points.

To blindside his Republican opponent Kennedy relied on that opponent's patriotism. Let's face it, Republicans are at a woeful disadvantage here. Nixon bit his tongue. He could easily have stomped Kennedy on it. But to some candidates national security (and those freedom-fighters lives) outweighs debating points.

"We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty," proclaimed President Kennedy at his inauguration.

Camelot's criminal idiocy as the freedom-fighters battle savagely against outrageous odds finally brought Adm. Arleigh Burke of the Joints Chief of Staff, who was receiving the battlefield pleas, to the brink of mutiny. Years earlier, Adm. Burke sailed thousands of miles to smash his nation's enemies at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Now he was Chief of Naval Operations and stood aghast as new enemies were being given a sanctuary 90 miles away!

The fighting admiral was livid. They say his face was beet red and his facial veins popping as he faced down his commander-in-chief that fateful night of April 18, 1961. "Mr. President, TWO planes from the Essex! That's all those Cuban boys need, Mr. President. Let me order...!"

JFK was in white tails and a bow tie that evening, having just emerged from an elegant social gathering. "Burke," he replied. "We can't get involved in this."

"WE put those Cuban boys there, Mr. President!" The fighting admiral exploded. "By God, we ARE involved!"

Finally, JFK relented and allowed some Skyhawk jets to take-off from the Essex. One of these pilots quickly spotted a long column of Castro's Soviet tanks making for the freedom-fighters. The Soviet tanks and trucks were sitting ducks. "AHA!" he thought. "Now we'll turn this thing around!" The pilot started his dive...

"Permission to engage denied," came the answer from his commander.

Originally Posted By bgenlvtex:
That's a lot of reading I don't have time for so let me ask, does it address in any depth the reason the Soviets moved missiles to Cuba being in response to U S. Missiles in Turkey?

Does it mention that the Soviets agreed to withdraw their missiles provided the U.S. withdrew ours from Turkey?

I see Allen Dulles mentioned,  the same Dulles that Kennedy fired who also sat on the Warren Commision.

If you want a good insight on the virtually unlimited nefarious skullduggery the American Government and Intelligence community engage in currently , study their action following WWII through the mid 70's. Nothing has changed.

Kennedy began his reputation-rehabilitation campaign by a most curious face-saving meeting with his predecessor, President Eisenhower, just as the last defeated remnants of his Bay of Pigs invasion force were being marched to prison in Havana. On April 22, 1961   just five days after the Bay of Pigs fiasco   President Kennedy sent a helicopter to Ike's Gettysburg farm to fly him to Camp David for secret talks.

He told Eisenhower that he had followed the advice of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and "everybody had approved" the invasion. The meeting itself, if not the private talks, was set up for major public consumption with dozens of reporters and photographers and a full contingent of military aides. Kennedy was publicly signaling his careful consultation with America's preeminent military hero, while he was privately blaming the Eisenhower plan that had failed him to anyone who would listen.

Eisenhower informed Kennedy in short terms that not only had the operation been a military disaster, but it had been worse: it had let Khrushchev see that he was weak. "I just took their advice," Kennedy pleaded, meaning the CIA and the Chiefs of Staff. After leaving the meeting, the new president was visibly shaken.

Kennedy's heavily publicized meeting with Eisenhower   the man whose plan supposedly had blown up on Kennedy   was a well-planned exercise in duplicity. However, Eisenhower's notes on the meeting clarify the reality behind the intended obfuscation.

The key point turned on Kennedy's paramount concern to Eisenhower about undertaking the Cuban invasion: "the State Department 'thought that we should be very careful that our hand not show in this operation.' If the United States airplanes carried out airstrikes, the diplomats argued, there would be no question of American involvement. They persuaded him to cancel a second bombing run in support of the exiles because 'the Soviets would be very apt to cause trouble in Berlin.'"

Ike was astounded by this reasoning. Everyone would know that the United States had been complicit. Where else would the invaders have gotten their ships, their arms, and their communications?

Ike says that he told Kennedy that there was "only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing. It must be a success."

In one sentence, Eisenhower demonstrated what Kennedy's real failure had been at the Bay of Pigs: he had sacrificed military effectiveness for absurd political public relations concerns. It hadn't been the advice of the CIA or the military which had doomed his venture, as he had stated to his close associates. Kennedy had been listening to the advice of the State Department, and his political advisers, in conducting a military operation.

Indeed, there had been a carefully developed invasion plan. Eisenhower had commissioned it early in 1960 under Vice President Richard Nixon's direction. But Kennedy not only did not follow the Eisenhower plan, he made critical last-minute changes that doomed it to failure before it was executed, exactly as he had told Eisenhower   for political considerations.

That plan, called "Pluto," was created under the CIA's Richard Bissell.

Trinidad is a small city 200 miles from Havana, on the south coast of Cuba, in the province of Sancti Spiritus which is south of Santa Clara. From the immediate aftermath of Castro's revolution in 1959 to 1965, this area was the center of a large number of dissident groups opposing the Communist regime of Fidel Castro. From the earliest revolutionary allies of Castro who did not want a Communist state to former Batista supporters to small farmers resisting collectivism, it totaled thousands of people. In the end, it would take Castro raising 250,000 militia members to finally suppress their uprising   four years after the Bay of Pigs in 1965.

It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety. The scheme was straightforward and audacious: 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs and ignite a populist uprising that would topple a Soviet-backed communist revolutionary by the name of Fidel Castro.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

More than anything, Kennedy learned that he would have to challenge the details and weigh the potential pitfalls of military action far more seriously, by asking more questions and probing more deeply.

Charles Bohlen, the well-regarded U.S. diplomat, walked with JFK in the Rose Garden days after the disaster and later recalled that the president "had realized he would have to go much deeper into any operation of the nature of this kind with the consequences it could have than he had in regards to the Bay of Pigs."

Kennedy had learned the hard way not to blindly trust the advice of his decorated military and intelligence chiefs, most of whom had assured him that success at the Bay of Pigs was overwhelmingly likely.

In fact, the military venture was expertly-planned and was anything but naive. The astonishing blunders and naivety were entirely Camelot's.

After it dropped in their lap with Nixon's electoral defeat, the New Frontiersmen insisted on sticking their manicured fingers and fumbling with almost everything planned on the orders of the Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord.

"Help the Cubans to the utmost," Eisenhower stressed to his successor while handing over the reins. "We cannot let Castro's government go on."

For starters, the original invasion plan by the CIA and its military partners (all WWII and Korea vets) picked the Cuban town of Trinidad as the landing site. This coastal town 100 miles east of the Bay of Pigs was originally chosen by the CIA and the military men because it was a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment and offered good off-loading facilities.

Also, the nearby Escambray Mountains crawled with anti-communist guerrillas, who were giving the Castroites fits. These would join the invading force that also carried arms for them. Just as importantly, only two major roads led to Trinidad from the north, so any Castro troops moving in would have been sitting ducks for the freedom-fighter's small air force.

Alas, landing in a populated area like Trinidad was deemed "too noisy" by the guilt-stricken New Frontiersmen. They had a fetish about hiding the U.S. role (this massive secret!) Any hint of such a role might discomfit the Latin American "street," you see. The New Frontiersmen suffered a guilty conscience about such "Yankee bullying."

And, mercy me, what would the U.N. say? The Best and the Brightest suffered a veritable fit of the vapors just thinking about it. So back to the drawing board for the planners.

They returned with a landing site at the Bay of Pigs, a desolate swamp. This was worse from a military standpoint but had a good chance of success   given total air superiority, given the complete obliteration of Castro's air force. This was stressed by the military and CIA planners, just as it's stressed here by me. Don't let Camelot's Press Agency (the Beltway media and academia) feed you any malarkey about this all-important factor, please, amigos.

Idiotically (and tragically) 80 percent of the pre-invasion sorties by the freedom-fighter planes from Nicaragua -- the essential component of the plan to knock out Castro's air force on the ground as originally devised under the Eisenhower administration -- was canceled at the last moment by JFK on the advice of his Best and Brightest. The U.S. hand after the first air strike (that "HUGE SECRET!") was showing, you see.

So the flustered and guilt-stricken Knights of Camelot, while frantically fanning their blushing faces, nixed the next airstrikes literally in their tracks. Some of the freedom-fighter planes were already taxiing down the crude runways.    

"WHAT?! Are they NUTS?!" bellowed Brigade Air Force chief Reid Doster when he learned that Kennedy had canceled most of the vital airstrikes to destroy Castro's small air force before the invasion. "There goes the whole f***ing war!"

The canceled airstrikes made the Brigade's lumbering B-26s easy prey for Castro's jets and fast Sea-Furies -- and the troops, ships and supplies below them were even easier prey. It was a turkey shoot for the Castroites.

But the unequal battle raged furiously on the tiny beachhead. "Where are the planes?" kept crackling over U.S. Navy radios two days later. "Where is our ammo? Send planes or we can't last!" Brigade Commander Jose San Roman kept pleading to the very U.S. fleet that escorted his men to the beachhead. Crazed by hunger and thirst, his men had been shooting and reloading without sleep for three days. By then many suspected they'd been abandoned by the Knights of Camelot.

That's when Castro's Soviet Howitzers opened up, huge 122 mm ones, four batteries' worth. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the freedom-fighters over a four-hour period. "It sounded like the end of the world," one said later. "Rommel's crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment," wrote Haynes Johnson in his book, the Bay of Pigs. By that time the invaders were dazed, delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger, too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. But these men (representing every race and social class in Cuba) were in no mood to emulate Rommel's crack Afrika Corps by retreating. Instead they were fortified by a resolve no conquering troops could ever call upon the burning duty to free their nation.

The term "liberation" was no abstraction to these men. No navel gazing about the merits of "regime change" for them. Sullen or hostile foreigners in sandals, beards, kiffeyehs, and strange robes wouldn't be the ones meeting them. They'd be bashing open prison doors and bulldozing down barbed wire, all right   but their own fathers, uncles, cousins and even sisters, aunts, daughters would be the ones staggering out to suffocate them with teary hugs and sobs.

One of 19 Cubans was a political prisoner that horrible year. Firing squads were murdering hundreds every week. Dozens of American citizens languished in Cuba's prison cells too.

"If things get rough," the heartsick CIA man Grayston Lynch radioed back, "we can come in and evacuate you."

"We will NOT be evacuated!" San Roman roared back to his friend Lynch. "We came here to fight! We don't want evacuation! We want more ammo! We want planes! This ends here!"

It seemed like Camelot's criminal idiocy had finally relented when Pres. Kennedy allowed some Skyhawk jets to take-off from the Essex, which was just offshore of the beachhead.  One of these pilots quickly spotted a long column of Castro tanks and infantry making for the freedom-fighters.  The Soviet tanks and trucks were sitting ducks. "Aha!" he thought. "Now we'll turn this thing around!" The pilot began his dive.

"Permission to engage denied," came the command.

"This is CRAZY!" he bellowed back. "Those guys are getting the hell shot out of them down there! I can see it!" Turned out, JFK had allowed them to fly and look but not to shoot!

Originally Posted By bgenlvtex:
That's a lot of reading I don't have time for so let me ask, does it address in any depth the reason the Soviets moved missiles to Cuba being in response to U S. Missiles in Turkey?

Does it mention that the Soviets agreed to withdraw their missiles provided the U.S. withdrew ours from Turkey?

I see Allen Dulles mentioned,  the same Dulles that Kennedy fired who also sat on the Warren Commision.

If you want a good insight on the virtually unlimited nefarious skullduggery the American Government and Intelligence community engage in currently , study their action following WWII through the mid 70's. Nothing has changed.