Posted on 08/16/2005 9:31:11 PM PDT by SAMWolf
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are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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As the Cuban T-33 jet strafed the insurgents on the beach, a U.S. carrier plane closed to shoot it down. "Don't fire! Don't fire!" cried the carrier's air controller. "Rules of engagement have been changed." Fidel Castro "What are those planes?" he demanded of his staff. No one could tell him. He bolted to the window and watched in helpless rage as the American-made, WWII-type bombers began diving on Campo Libertad airport nearby. He heard the Grump of exploding bombs and the stutter of antiaircraft fire. He was sure the invasion had begun. There is an old saying in Latin countries, spoken only half in jest - if you get two Cubans together you have a party, but three and you have a revolution. Plots to invade Cuba began almost immediately after Castro swept cut of the Sierra Maestra to take over Havana. Miami, Fla., 90 miles from the Cuban coast, became a hotbed of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary activity. Cuban exile organizations vowing to topple the island nation's bearded jefe sprouted like mushrooms in Miami; at one point there were more than 100 of them. Castro retaliated, according to the FBI, by seeding Miami with some 200 agents of his own. But the conspiracy to unseat Fidel Castro germinated not with the Cuban exiles but instead with Vice President Richard M. Nixon and the Central Intelligence Agency. Castro met with Nixon in April 1959, when he was invited to the United States as the headline speaker for The American Society of Newspaper Editors. Nixon's secret memo to President Dwight D. Eisenhower about the meeting concluded that "Castro is either incredibly naive about Communism or is under Communist discipline."' From that moment, Nixon has said, he became "the strongest and most persistent advocate for" a covert military operation to fell the Cuban dictator. A select number of CIA agents met in Quarters Eye, a onetime WAVE barrack in downtown Washington, on January 18, 1960. One of them stood up and announced that Richard Bissell, Chief of Clandestine Services, had appointed him to head the new "Cuban Project," funded, organized, controlled and commanded by Americans, although the CIA took great pains to hide U.S. involvement and give it the appearance of being a patriotic Cuban movement. The plot hatched by the CIA evolved out of the Eisenhower administration and passed into that of President-elect John F. Kennedy, who assumed office less than three months before the scheme flowered. It called for exile forces establishing an invasion beachhead on Cuban soil, behind which a Cuban government-in-exile would broadcast to the world as a government-in-arms. Under international law, the United States would then have an excuse to supply and reinforce the invaders. President John F. Kennedy Secrecy was not easy to maintain. Rumors of an impending invasion spread even as CIA procurement teams scouted the United States and Europe for airplanes, tanks, ships and other weapons to arm an exile army. News broke in American and Mexican newspapers shortly after New Year's Day 1961, that a Cuban attack force known as Brigade 2506 was training on a coffee finca and a refurbished airstrip near Retalhulehu in the mountains of southern Guatemala. In Florida, Cuban refugees arrived daily by leaky boats, homemade rafts, even floating barrels. A CIA reception and debriefing center in the Keys directed many of them to Miami's Dinner Key, where the Frente Revolucionario Democratico (FRD), the Cuban government-in-exile established by the CIA, had opened a recruiting office. Rumors and news of a possible invasion provided a bristling business. Weekly C-54 flights from Opa-Locka airfield north of Miami discharged a steady stream of trainees at Trax, the coffee plantation training camp in Guatemala. One of the early recruits was a Cubana Airlines captain named Eduardo Ferrer. Passengers on Flight 480 from Havana to Santiago de Cuba on the morning of July 27, 1960, included Pepe Vergara, Alberto Perez and Perez's "wife," who made herself appear pregnant with a pillow inside her dress. Cushioned behind the pillow was a .45 pistol. Captain Ferrer also managed to smuggle aboard in his flight bag a 9mm Browning pistol given to him in Havana by a CIA agent known only as "John." Brigade airstrip built by the U.S. at Retalhuleu, Guatemala. Base Trax was high in the mountains in the background. Fifteen minutes after takeoff, Ferrer turned the airplane controls over to his co-pilot, saying he was going for coffee. With Pepe Vergara, he walked to the rear of the plane where an armed guard rode with each flight to keep an eye on the passengers. Ferrer thrust his pistol against the guard's neck while Perez kept everyone else neutral with his "wife's" gun. "One move and I'll kill you," Ferrer warned the guard. Half the passengers asked for political asylum in Miami when they arrived. Perez and Vergara joined Brigade 2506 and shipped out to Guatemala. Ferrer and 45 other Cuban pilots formed the foundation for what soon became, with 16 B-26 bombers and 12 C-46 and C-54 transports, one of the largest air forces in Latin America. The transports immediately began flying re-supply missions to guerrillas in Cuba's Escambray Mountains and Sierra Maestra while U.S. pilots trained Cuban bomber jockeys to knock out Castro's air force in support of a pending invasion. Another recruit was Pablo Organvides Parada, who had once supported Castro and was captured with him during the 1953 attack on the Moncada army post. Parada said he was coerced by the FBI and the CIA to either join the brigade or be deported. He became an intelligence specialist. "I was told, first of all, I did not have to take part in the landing at all, and, secondly, the undertaking in Cuba couldn't fail in any case," Parada later stated. "I asked [an assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles] 'How do you know the undertaking can't fail?' Upon that, he answered me with the following: 'If the landing operation in Cuba should happen to fail, we will at all events intervene directly, and immediately, too, no matter what the OAS [Organization of American States] says about it.'" Cuban recruits all received the same assurance-that the project could not fail because the U.S. government was behind it and would not let it fail. By March 1961, the brigade in Guatemala was equipped and training with four-deuce mortars, 75mm recoilless rifles, bazookas, surplus M1 Garands from World War 11, machine guns, pistols and five M-4 Sherman tanks. The CIA wanted to charter a Navy fleet to sail this vast weapons stockpile and accompanying assault troops to Cuban soil. Two CIA agents summoned Eduardo Garcia to a New York City apartment. The Garcia Line Corporation with offices in Havana and New York was the only Cuban freighter line still running rice and sugar off Castro's island. It had also been exfiltrating anti-Castro leaders. The line owned six small (2,400 ton) freighters, all old, slow and run-down; no one would suspect them of being a military armada. Garcia wanted to know how his ships would be protected if he chartered them to the CIA.
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Dewd, someone took the brown acid. Washington didn't cross the Delaware in 1953.
GMTA . . . XOX
It mentions EOD so its got to be good. I've seen it and I think it is very balanced.
What you say is true.
Sorry, Snippy. Words fit for publication will not come. Words that are fit for other people to hear, or for myself to say, just won't come. Words that are not screaming for blood are just not in me.
Enough.
free dixie,sw
:-)
Per Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield, Coup de Etat in America, Third Press, 1975, Hunt was in Dallas November 22, 1963, and Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, Thunder's Mouth, 1991, Hunt could not keep his alibi for that day intact.
The B-26's were kept ready for the approval that never came--hence the intact remaining three T-33s with .50's took out the air cover for the landing.
Of course the 1500 hundred were not intended to best Castro's army--it was to establish a beachead and ask for assistance.
The problem arose when Kennedy and Johnson stole the 1960 election with the aid of Mayor Daley's Cook County machine and Johson's expertise at stuffing Texas ballot boxes, all enhanced by the fifth-column media which favored Soviet Communism.
Nixon sniffed out Alger Hiss--and was vindicated by the 1995 declassification of some Venona decrypts. Nixon would've seen the matter through.
Kennedy was busily drugging himself and drilling Marilyn et al, while being every bit the useful idiot.
He betrayed the Cuban operation earning the enmity of people you don't irritate.
He demonstrated advanced wussness inciting in Khruschev and Ulbricht adventurism; his concessions were breathtaking.
His bridge too far was his NSAM 263 withdrawing advisors. He was a smashed pumpkin soon after, and Johnson rescinded 263 with his own 273 signed the Tuesday (26 Nov 63) after the Monday funeral of Comrade Camelot.
Of course Johnson would've been dropped from the 64 ticket and couldn't afford to be out in the cold when the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker scandals would've put him in jail.
Hoover would've been fired (allowed to resign via removal of retirement waiver) 1 Jan 65.
Cabell's brother was mayor of Dallas.
Kennedy made a mess of his job and put the nation in a bad way.
His consequences were the crossfire obfuscated by Commission de Warren and the magical ballistics of Arlen Specter.
Johnny Rosselli said Lee Harvey Oswald was "our boy", that he "never knew who was controlling him."
Rosselli was garrotted and dismembered and found floating in an oil drum hence was unavailable for subpoena by the HSCA.
The Houston was allegedly provided by G. H. W. Bush's Zapata Oil Company.
Hence, it was just about oil and was Bush's fault.
Over the rage. Sorry about my tantrum.
I will never forget.
I will never, never forgive.
BTTT!!!!!!
LOL.
:-)
free dixie,sw
Thanks for telling us sw.
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