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LBJ'S invasion of Cuba?


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I was rereading Oglesby's 1976 book The Yankee and Cowboy War today.

It is an underrated volume.  But I was really struck by a reference he made to a planned invasion of Cuba in 1965 by LBJ.  It was called Second Naval Guerrilla.  He sources this to Tad Szulc,

INhis article Cuba on Our Mind, which i think was published in Esquire.

Oglesby says the Cuba operation was called off because of the Dominican Republic invasion, which used the same troops.

Has anyone seen this information before?  How solid is it?

 

 

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I can't answer, but now that it's brought up I'm curious of what people remember about popular reaction in the US to the 1965 Dominican invasion.  It seems that growing opposition to Vietnam would have put a Cuban invasion off the table in the remaining LBJ and Nixon years. 

Edited by David Andrews
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But remember, LBJ did not commit troops to Vietnam until that year.  

And he used the pretext that they were protecting an air base.

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Second Naval Guerilla was one of the group covers used for certain of the Artime activities and people under the AM/WORLD project which was really just barely getting operational in 64 - and by operational that means actually having boats, weapons and some operating bases although doing relatively little in the way of actual attacks. Since the plan was to have Artime's raids fully deniable and all going in by sea, in support of hoped for on island uprisings the SNG name sort of made sense.  If anybody has Shadow Warfare you will find it described in the chapter titled Autonomous and Deniable.  Gary Murr has done more research on the related documents and especially the funding/logistics than anyone else and was kind enough to let me refer to much of that work.  There was never a real US military component associated with it - that whole concept takes you back to Lamar Waldron and his views about a US invasion to support Artime.   All this stuff was very mysterious back in 1976 but now that we can see a great amount of the actual documentation associated with the project its really pretty clear.

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Larry:

This is 1964 then?  And the CIA is still supplying Artime with money, arms, supplies and advisors?

Why? Simply because he is down there in Central America and they can deny it quite plausibly?

Did Johnson approve of this?  Or was it a rogue CIA operation? 

Since Gary is here maybe he can reply.  Because the CW on this is that Johnson shut off the spigot on Cuba after the assassination and after he was advised to do so by Fitzgerald and Helms.

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Most definitely yes Jim, not only spending money on Artime's project but assisting with the purchase of ships, weapons, and supporting him overseas...in Spain primarily.  Which is why Hunt moved over there. And yes, the whole point of the RFK driven project in 1963 was to move Artime off shore for deniablity. Johnson backed off from some exile activities within months but there was a lot of inertia with AM/WORLD and it took a couple of years for it all to come apart, largely related to some scandals around Artime and some bad press overseas because certain of the air strips and bases he was setting up were also used for drug smuggling by third parties.  Same thing as the later Contra dual use issues. JFK signed off on it initially, Johnson just didn't shut it all down completely immediately.  A considerable amount of the detail on this is in Shadow Warfare - much of it is from Gary but you can also find a goodly number of documents related to the project going well beyond 1963.  Certainly it was not ever set up to conclude with an invasion in Nov. 63; they were just barely started in their logistics process at that point in time.

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20 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

I was rereading Oglesby's 1976 book The Yankee and Cowboy War today.

It is an underrated volume.  But I was really struck by a reference he made to a planned invasion of Cuba in 1965 by LBJ.  It was called Second Naval Guerrilla.  He sources this to Tad Szulc,

INhis article Cuba on Our Mind, which i think was published in Esquire.

Oglesby says the Cuba operation was called off because of the Dominican Republic invasion, which used the same troops.

Has anyone seen this information before?  How solid is it?

 

 

"It is an underrated volume," (that means 'book,' right?).

To say the least. His underlying premise is the foundation upon which most theories, acknowledged, recognized, or not, find ground. No question. It is the book that taught me how to view our federal government with realism - (on the second read). Carl Oglesby, SDS or not, was brilliant. Dawn knew him and always speaks reverently of him, and I wish I had had the chance to meet him.

Richard Bartholomew wrote a good bit about SNG. His research, as well, is brilliant. I don't remember LBJ's name being connected by him, but sometimes I don't remember my wife's name. Or if I have one.

So...

Edited by Glenn Nall
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In my earlier post I mentioned that the Artime offshore initiative was part of a dual track which was intended to stimulate and hopefully  support on island counter revolutionary movements against Castro - the hope had been that AM/TRUNK would drive that sort of thing and of course AM/LASH, AM/WHIP etc were all other paths to stir up things on the island.  Since none of that ever came to fruition and given that we now know Castro and his counter intelligence people were all over those contacts the whole premise of outside pressure via Artime complimenting on island action just never happened.

I should have elaborated on that there, all those were initiatives which began under RFK and which really had very little support within the CIA; you can find memos from from Artime's commanders talking about Hecksher expressing his doubts himself but soldiering on just because it was his assignment.  It took a while for it all to tail off though, the programs operated through 64 and I think largely came to an end in 65 or 66, not sure of the exact date from memory.

 

 

Edited by Larry Hancock
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BTW, take a look at how much Oglesby's book costs on Amazon today.

I don't think I have ever seen that high a price for a JFK assassination book that was out of print.

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21 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

BTW, take a look at how much Oglesby's book costs on Amazon today.

I don't think I have ever seen that high a price for a JFK assassination book that was out of print.

yeah, they're about $75 anywhere on the net. Amazingly I found my one copy (after I lost my first one) on one of the free book shelves at the Atlanta VA Med Center about three years ago (among other very unique books i've come across - like a Nelson DeMille autographed Hard Cover, etc... ).

You better believe i'm still amazed that I came across this one sitting on a giveaway bookshelf.

Two years ago I scanned all the pages from it and reproduced a full copy of the book here in the forum - in text form; not jpgs. Before that i could never find a full, online copy.

 

Come to think of it, I actually first discovered the book on a thrift store bookshelf in Daytona Beach, FL at least 30 years ago. Always on the lookout for JFK related material, i grabbed it and right away realized its uniqueness and quality of work (as opposed to the vast majority of the other material "out there.") It was only after having read it the second time many years later that its significance affected - and rearranged - my approach to viewing our FedGov (while maintaining 100% patriotism; otherwise known as 'compartmentalization' :) ).

Funny how these things work - one of the most important books ever written on such an important topic, in my opinion, and I discover it not once but twice on toss-away bookshelves.

Edited by Glenn Nall
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Do you  have an extra copy?

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this is the full version, much more readable than the one at archive.org, here on this forum:

 

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