Posted on 09/15/2013 1:56:31 PM PDT by Olog-hai
At 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1959, an hour when there never were commercial flights from Havana, David Atlee Phillips was lounging in a lawn chair there, sipping champagne after a New Year's Eve party, when a commercial aircraft flew low over his house. He surmised that dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing because Fidel Castro was arriving. He was right. Soon he, and many others, would be spectacularly wrong about Cuba.
In 1972, the Bay of Pigs made a cameo appearance in the Watergate shambles, which involved some Cubans and Americans active in the invasion. On the June 23 "smoking gun" Oval Office tape, Richard Nixon directs his aide H.R. Haldeman to urge the CIA to tell the FBI to back off from investigating the burglary by saying, Look, the problem is that this will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing.
Surely this thing should be studied as deeply as possible. Unfortunately, the CIA, which you might think had made every mistake possible regarding the invasion, is now making another. It is resisting attempts to force the release of the fifth and final volume of its official history of it.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Look, the problem is that this will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing.The merc who eventually assassinated JFK from the County Records Building had gone onto the beach with the Brigade, realized it was hopeless, and under cover of night swam out and reached one of the US destroyers, which were just out of range of the tracers, with their colors struck and numbers painted out.
Good post, but I am utterly amazed that tweed twerp George Will would write for anything really conservative like, Newsmax.
WOW.
“The merc who eventually assassinated JFK from the County Records Building...”
Fascinating; I never heard that before.
Read "Appointment in Dallas" by Hugh McDonald
I’m still trying to rid my mind of the disaster of a sentence that opens this piece. Will should stick to writing about baseball. I’m not suggesting that his musings on the game have merit. Just that, as I have no interest in the national pastime, I won’t see his scribblings.
I remember before the Bay of Pigs as a very young aviation
enthusiast with a pilot buddy hearing that someone was
recruiting pilots and crew for I think B-26s down in
Florida. We didn’t know what for, perhaps fortunately
we were too young and my friend was not multi rated so
it never went any where.
He went on to be a crop duster and I went into the Marines.
Heck we even jumped out of perfectly good airplanes too.
None of these fancy chutes then, modified military with
gores cut out to give you some control, some. We used to
practice PLFs by jumping off the back of moving cars.
So long ago...
Thanks. Interesting reader comments downpage.
http://www.amazon.com/Appointment-Dallas-Final-Solution-Assassination/dp/0821738933
Well, the JFK assassination has produced more tinfoil headwear material than anything besides UFOs, so it’s risky to even bring up either one. :’)
http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh16/pages/WH_Vol16_0331b.jpg
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1551438/posts?page=183#183
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1016623/posts?page=24#24
Thanks, that’s the book.
My sister was working as a clerk/typist during Summers while she was in college. This was in the very early 60s at Hurlburt Field, then an auxiliary field of Eglin. We all called it Field 9.
I can remember those B-26 bombers with 8, .50 caliber machine guns in the nose. There were Cubans all over the place. Those planes were excellent for ground attack but could not survive attacks from Cuban jets.
They keep these secrets because our gov has been up to no good for a very long time. There can be no other reason.
Yeah, recruitment for what became the Bay of Pigs started a few weeks after Castro took over. You probably are better off not having gone. :’)
The training camp was in Central America somewhere, got exposed by a US newspaper (probably out of Miami?), and then was moved to Nicaragua, which was the point of departure. Reportedly, the elder Somoza arrived at the last minute to see them off, saying, “bring me some hairs from Castro’s beard”.
A former coworker who was on a destroyer off Cuba for both Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, when asked about anyone who swam to safety, said, they didn’t get anyone, but another destroyer (he named it, but I don’t remember now) did.
Thanks; I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the real truth, just a lot of interesting theories.
That pic still has me laughing. Haven’t seen it in years.
“They keep these secrets because our gov has been up to no good for a very long time. There can be no other reason.”
Who was President? Enough said.
If Nixon was President, the Rats would be bringing it up every election cycle. Just like they do Watergate.
C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery (from a few years back)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2364514/posts
There are things that can be ruled out, such as “Grassy Knoll” shooters — police officers thought the shots came from there (it was due to the echoes) and found no one, smelled no gun discharge, and no casings. The X-Files had an interesting twist, putting the Cigarette Smoking Man in a street drain on the hillside, but the two shots that actually hit JFK came from behind — from the Country Records Building.
Well said.
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