BAY OF PIGS CIA Internal Investigation file released - Jack B. Pfeiffer Volume 5

[Anthony Thorne]

This long withheld document has finally been shaken loose by FOIA requests. The full document runs for 181 pages and is linked at the bottom of this post. A 'disclaimer' of sorts from CIA historian David Robarge follows.

September 2016

Context for Readers of the Attached CIA Draft Volume

Between 1979 and 1984, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staff historian Jack Pfeiffer prepared five volumes of the Agency’s Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation. The titles of the first four volumes were Air Operations, March 1960-April 1961; Participation in the Conduct of Foreign Policy; Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951-January 1961; and The Taylor Committee Investigation of the Bay of Pigs. All have been declassified and are available to the public on CIA’s website in the electronic reading room. Pfeiffer also wrote a draft fifth volume, CIA’s Internal Investigation of the Bay of Pigs, being released today, which the CIA Chief Historian rejected as inadequate at the time, instructing Pfeiffer to make substantial revisions. Pfeiffer did not complete those revisions before retiring in 1984.

Unlike his four other histories, this fifth draft volume was not publishable in its present form, in the judgment of CIA Chief Historians as well as other reviewers, because of serious shortcomings in scholarship, its polemical tone, and its failure to add significantly to an understanding of the controversy over the Bay of Pigs operation—much of which has now been discussed in open source histories and memoirs. CIA’s Chief Historians have assessed that addressing those deficiencies would have required much more effort than the draft volume’s potential value would justify. Consequently, it remains an unfinished and unpublished draft.

In the attached draft volume, Pfeiffer took very strong issue with the findings of the CIA Inspector General, Lyman Kirkpatrick, who blamed the Bay of Pigs debacle on the Agency task force in charge of an operation that Kirkpatrick assessed was misconceived, mismanaged, and bound to fail from the outset. Kirkpatrick’s report evoked a fervent defense from CIA’s operations directorate (both of those documents have been declassified and are on CIA’s website in the electronic reading room), and Pfeiffer in large part accepted the operations directorate’s viewpoint. He contended that Kirkpatrick, for a variety of motives, conducted his inquiry from the start with the purpose of laying responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco on the officers who planned and ran the operation and on two Agency leaders, Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell and DCI Allen Dulles.

We are releasing this draft volume today because recent 2016 changes in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires us to release some drafts that are responsive to FOIA requests if they are more than 25 years old.

David S. Robarge

CIA Chief Historian, 2005 - present

OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE BAY OF PIGS

​DRAFT Volume V: CIA'S INTERNAL INVESTIGATION OF THE BAY OF PIGS

by Jack B. Pfeiffer

https://archive.org/details/CIAsInternalInvestigationOfTheBayOfPigs

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks so much for this Anthony./

[Chuck Schwartz]

The Bay of Pigs veterans endorsed Trump- which may have a negative impact on getting JFK files released in October..

Miami’s veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion voted late Wednesday (Oct. 12) to endorse Donald Trump for president, the first endorsement in the organization’s 55-year history.”

Fifty years before Benghazi we had the Bay of Pigs:

“Where are the planes?! Where is our ammo?! Send planes or we can’t last!”

The pleas came from Commander Jose San Roman as Soviet tanks, Soviet artillery and tens of thousands of Soviet led troops pounded the 1400 Cuban freedom-fighters he commanded on a bloody and heroic beachhead now known as the Bay of Pigs.

 

The same heartsick and enraged U.S. Navy men listening to these pleas had escorted these freedom–fighters to that beachhead. Their ships—including the aircraft carrier Essex groaning under a heavy load of deadly Skyhawk jets– sat just offshore.

“If things get rough,” radioed back the heartsick CIA man who helped train and had befriended them, “we can come in and evacuate you.”

“We will not be evacuated!” San Roman roared back to his friend Grayston Lynch, a multi-decorated WWII and Korea war hero. “We came here to fight!  We don’t want evacuation! We want more ammo! We want the planes that were promised! This ends here!”

Camelot’s criminal idiocy as the U.S.-trained freedom-fighters battled 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 (1) 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!

(1) President Gerald Ford gave the Medal of Honor to Admiral Burke in 1977.

 

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.

“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!

Some of these Navy pilots admit to sobbing openly in their cockpits. They were still choked up when they landed back on the Essex. Now they slammed their helmets on the deck, kicked the bulkheads and broke down completely.

“I wanted to resign from the Navy,” said Capt. Robert Crutchfield, the decorated naval officer who commanded the destroyer fleet off the Bay of Pigs beachhead. He’d had to relay Washington’s replies to those pilots.

A close-up glimpse of the heroism on that beachhead might have sent those Essex pilots right over the edge. As JFK adjusted his bow tie in the mirror and Jackie picked lint off his tux, the freedom-fighters of Brigada 2506 faced a few adjustments of their own. To quote Haynes Johnson, “It was a battle when heroes were made.” And how!

We call them “men,” but Brigadista Felipe Rondon was 16 years old when he grabbed his 57 mm cannon and ran to face one of Castro’s Soviet tanks point-blank. At 10 yards he fired at the clanking, lumbering tank and it exploded, but the momentum kept it going and it rolled over little Felipe.

Such things went on for three days—until the inevitable “defeat” after the freedom-fighters had spent their very last bullets.

When the smoke cleared and their ammo had been expended to the very last bullet, when a hundred of them lay dead and hundreds more wounded, after three days of relentless battle, barely 1,400 of them — without air support (from the U.S. Carriers just offshore) and without a single supporting shot by naval artillery (from U.S. cruisers and destroyers poised just offshore) — had squared off against 21,000 Castro troops, his entire air force and squadrons of Soviet tanks. The Cuban freedom-fighters inflicted over 3000 casualties on their Soviet-armed and led enemies. This feat of arms still amazes professional military men.

“They fought magnificently and were not defeated,” stressed Marine Col. Jack Hawkins a multi-decorated WWII and Korea vet who helped train them. “They were abandoned on the beach without the supplies and support promised by their sponsor, the Government of the United States.”

Maybe it’s an odd coincidence that such men are endorsing Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton?

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/14/bay-of-pigs-veterans-association-endorses-donald-trump/#ixzz4Xlot3AoZ