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NEW YORK (AP) -- One of the Cold War's most secret documents --- the CIA's scathing internal investigation into the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle --- is finally out, and there is little wonder why the spy agency has guarded it so jealously.
The 150-page report, released after sitting in the CIA director's safe for more than three decades, blamed the disastrous attempt to oust Fidel Castro not on President John F. Kennedy's failure to call in air strikes, but on the agency itself.
The CIA's ignorance, incompetence, as well at its arrogance toward the 1,400 Cuban exiles it trained and equipped to mount the invasion, was responsible for the fiasco, said the report.
"The choice was between retreat without honor and a gamble between ignominious defeat and dubious victory. The agency chose to gamble, at rapidly decreasing odds," the report said.
The document, released by the agency last week, criticized almost every aspect of the CIA's handling of the invasion: misinforming Kennedy administration officials, planning poorly, using faulty intelligence and conducting an overt military operation beyond "agency responsibility as well as agency capability."
Few of the CIA personnel helping train the exiles for the invasion spoke Spanish, yet "the agency reduced the exiled leaders to the status of puppets."
Despite U.S. news articles linking the United States with a plan to invade Cuba, the project went forward under the "pathetic illusion" of deniability, the report said.
Castro's forces easily turned back the April 1961 assault at the Bay of Pigs, killing 200 rebel soldiers and capturing 1,197 others, who were later turned over to U.S. authorities.
The fiasco at the swampy, mosquito-ridden inlet on Cuba's southern coast was a watershed for the CIA, puncturing the air of invincibility it had acquired with its successes in helping topple Iran's president in 1953 and Guatemala's leader in 1954.
It was also a major foreign policy disaster for the Kennedy administration, tarnishing its "Camelot" sheen and frustrating its young president. Yet it also hardened his determination to get rid of Castro, evident in subsequent assassination plots that became subject of congressional investigations.
CIA officials and Cuban exiles believed Kennedy's failure to approve air strikes to back up the seaborne invaders doomed the plan.
But the report, by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, placed the blame directly on CIA leaders, saying they had "failed to advise the president, at an appropriate time, that success had become dubious and to recommend that the operation therefore be canceled."
The report so outraged CIA officials that all but one of the 20 copies produced was destroyed.
CIA officials feared that if the document leaked, it could provoke crippling public criticism of the agency. "In unfriendly hands, it can become a weapon unjustifiably (used) to attack the entire mission, organization, and functioning of the agency," CIA deputy director C.P. Cabell wrote in a December 15, 1961, memorandum.
The sole remaining copy of the report remained in the CIA director's safe until last week, when it was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive, a non-profit group in Washington.
The following item is an excerpt from Warren Hinckle's memoir, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, published in 1974. This is from Chapter 6, "Give Us This Day Our Daily Paranoia." The title over this excerpt was dreamed up by Fair Play wags.
My eyebrows ached from rising at the ooo-la-la life styles of the CIA types we found submerged in the intelligence swamp surrounding the assassination, and I began to wonder what the heralded CIA "connection" was all about.
Silly boy, an espionage-wise and cynical friend said to me, did you think the CIA was running a tennis club?
My friend was from a distinguished Eastern seaboard family. He had worked for the CIA for ten years, before concluding that his father was right when he told him he was rich enough not to work for a living if he didn't want to, and never mind the bourgeois conventions about having a job. He therefore retired, at 41, to write novels and hike in the Adirondacks.
Although we did not agree about many things politically, he was more than happy to set me straight about the CIA. He proceeded to give me a proper dressing down for my naiveté. Was I some sort of Protestant dope like John Lindsay, who thought the world could be straightened out with Robert's Rules of Order? He said he would straighten me out about the Kennedy assassination theories and countertheories. I must warn the reader that his interpretation is about as favorable to the CIA as it is possible to be under the circumstances. He put it to me thus:
"The movies have fancied up the spy business, and the adventure-hungry academics who joined the agency have given it an Ivy League frosting, but the filling is rotten like a cream puff filled with pus. In some ways, it has to be like that. Spies must operate in the scum-belt of humanity cinching the world; the scum attracts the weak, and weakness is the backbone of intelligence. Without weakness and greed there would be no spies or counterspies. The system depends on the bribe and blackmail --- those are the basic tools of intelligence, the pen and pencil, the hammer and sickle --- but they can only be applied to the soft spots. If you can't find a soft spot, you make one. That's why agents employ the corrupt to compromise the weak, when necessary. Where else would the fishermen of espionage search for their minnows but in the pools of miscast and misfit humanity? These people have no existence to be proud of, so they are willing to change it for the purposes of a job. And, they are expendable.
"It is a rotten business, to be sure, but the name of the game is results --- and a satisfactory result is just maintaining the status quo. You shouldn't be surprised that a lot of people have to spy, and people even have to die, and a lot of dredge go under the bridge unnoticed, just to keep things the way they are --- between nations, and between intelligence establishments. Those people in the business who still have consciences tell themselves that in a rotten world, it becomes necessary to spread a little more rot, just for the limited but desperate purpose of keeping the whole shebang from collapsing of its own dry rot."
I asked if he thought if the CIA would go so far as to kill the President.
Negative, my friend said. Highly unlikely, anyway. "Intelligence is not in the business of overthrowing the government. If the CIA ever bumped a President, they'd have a war with the Pentagon for ultimate power. They need the President as a buffer; the executive is something to influence and manipulate, not destroy. Even a hostile President isn't that much trouble for the CIA. These guys have got staying power. Look how long Hoover has hung around, and he didn't have half the shit on people that the Agency has in its files."
Well, then, I asked, could individual agents, or their hangers-on have done it?
"Of course. It wouldn't surprise me. Oswald obviously had an intelligence background. And the CIA in the sixties was spread as thin and was as long and as screwed up as a tapeworm. If it wiped its ass it couldn't be sure if it was its own hand that was doing it.
"The CIA kept all those poor Cubans on the string for years after the Bay of Pigs --- it had them running around all over the place, using the CIA's guns and money for God knows what. Most of them ended up in narcotics or smuggling of some kind. It's not unlikely that, either, that some agency guys would work out a deal on the side with them. Opium smuggling was standard operating procedure for CIA and Air America guys in Southeast Asia. It was a goddamn fringe benefit.
"But you can be sure of this. If any of the CIA people, regulars or fly-by-nights, were involved in any way in the assassination, the CIA would cover it up. And that isn't just a matter of complicity --- it's a matter of survival for them. Even the involvement of minor agents acting unilaterally would open such a public can of worms that the Agency could never go fishing the same way again.
"Now, I'll bet this too: The CIA would take care of those people privately. Their eyeballs would be on somebody's cuff links. But at the same time the agency would do anything they had to --- even kill --- to keep the lid on."
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