BAY OF PIGS AGAIN--ONLY WORSE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000705860003-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 2, 2011
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: April 17, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2011/12/02 :CIA-RDP90-009658000705860003-6
ARTICLE APPEARED
WALL STREET JOURNAL
17 April 1986
Bay of Pigs Again-Only Worse
BY A~rrxtls SCxusnvcot Js.
Twenty-Hve years ago today there oc-
curred the celebrated and deplorable event
known to history as the Bay of Pigs. As
one who had a seat at the table where the
fiasco was planned (and muttered ineffec-
tual doubts along the way) , I look with spe-
cial concern on the revival in April 1986 of
the presumptions and illusions of April
1961.
The Bay of Plgs was, as has been re-
marked, ahistorical rarity-a perfect fail-
ure. The experience was not, however, use-
less. The education was painful, but the
debacle left President Kennedy with abid-
ing and justified skepticism about the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, which had approved the in-
vasion plans, and the Central Intelligence
Agency, which had drawn them up.
The assumption behind the Bay of Pigs
was that the CIA has the capacity and the
wisdom to decide the destiny of other na-
tions. The invasion force was a wholly
owned subsidiary of the CIA. Its CIA spon-
sors developed a heavy vested interest in
the men they had recruited, nurtured,
trained and armed. This vested interest
transformed the sponsors from cold?eyed
analysts into hot-eyed advocates. In the
process they abdicated the intelligence
function for which the CIA had originally
been set up.
CIA Assurances
So the CIA sponsors assured President
Kennedy that the American hand In the ex-
pedition could be securely hidden. To em-
phasize the point, they insisted that inva-
sion planning take place in utmost secrecy.
The operation was well known in Guate-
mala, where the invasion force was train-
ing, in Miami, where Cuban exiles forgath-
ered, and in Havana, where Cuban intelli-
gence kept Fidel Castro informed: but it
was studiously withheld from nearly every-
one in the State Department and even in
the CIA itself who knew anything about
Cuba. By declining to consWt the CIA's
deputy director for intelligence (who would
have disagreed), the sponsors were able to
assure the president that Mr. Castro was
deeply unpopular in Cuba and that the in-
vasion woWd provoke uprisings behind the
lines and defections from Mr. Castro's mi-
litia. The event, it need hardly be said,
proved them utterly wrong.
They assured him, too, that the exile
leadership would rally Cuban nationalism
against a regime that gave its loyalty to
Moscow. We soon learned; however, that
the CIA instinctively disliked independent-
minded nationalists. The agency's opera-
tional code preferred compliant Cubans
ready to accept agency control to anti-Cas-
tro Cubans with ideas of their own about
the best way to secure their country's fu-
lure. "The practical effect," I wrote in a
memorandum in July 1961, "is to invest
our resources in the people least capable of
generating broad support within Cuba."
From the start President Kennedy had
said that in no circumstances would U.S.
troops take part in the invasion. The CIA
sponsors nominally accepted this restric-
tion. But it is hard to believe that they
really thought the operation could succeed
within the limits laid down. They no doubt
thought that, if it faltered, the president,
having gone so far, would have no choice
but to follow the road to the bitter end and
send in the Marines. They underestimated
President Kennedy's ability to refuse esca?
lotion.
The lessons President Kennedy learned
from the Bay of Pigs seem to have been
largely forgotten in the quarter?century
since. Today we are engaged in a slow-mo-
lion reenactment of the Bay of Pigs in Cen-
tral America. Once again the CIA has cre-
ated anexile force, this time for use
against Nicaragua. Once again it has put
about the highly doubtfW theory that the
people of Nicaragua can hardly wait to
overthrow a deeply unpopular regime.
Once again it has rejected independent
anti-Sandinistas like Edgar Chamorro and
Eden Pastora, who could appear before
their own people as champions of their na-
tion and not as agents of the U.S., confer-
ringits blessing instead on a motley crowd
of ex-Somocistas whose future lies in sub-
servience to the agency.
And once again the CIA operation is go-
ing to confront the president with the con-
undrum of escalation. If the contras can't
overthrow the regime in Managua, people
will say to President Reagan, as they said
25 years ago to President Kennedy, that
the U.S., having embarked on the course,
cannot afford to abandon the effort, show
weakness and accept defeat. They will say
that, to preserve the "credibility" of the
U.S. before the world, we will have to send
in U.S. troops to do what the contras have
failed to do. Nor can one rely this time on
the president's capacity to refuse escala?
lion.
For President Reagan is setting out on
what sounds like a program of world revo-
lution. "We must not break faith," he has
said, "with those who are riskin? their
lives on every continent, from Afghanistan
to Nicaragua, to defy Soviet?supported ag-
gression." America, in the president's
view, is morally bound to help "freedom
fighters" in the Third World, whether or
not vital American interests are involved.
It is world revolution on the cheap, how-
ever, and at the expense of other people,
since the president shows little inclination
to invest enough in the way of American
men and resources to give the'revolution a
chance of success. But, since American
meddling in Third World conflicts does not
challenge vital Soviet interests, and since
the people in Washington believe they have
the Soviet Union on the run anyway, they
feel they can back "freedom fighters" with
relative impunity.
Reagan publicists have elevated this ef-
fort into what is now known as the Reagan
Doctrine. Americans have dada tradi-
tional weakness for Doctrines with a capi?
tal D, as if declarations by themselves
achieve world-shaking results. ' `The Amer-
ican habit," Herbert Croly wrote three-
quarters of a century ago, "is to proclaim
doctrines and policies, without considering
either the implications, the machinery nec-
essary to carry them out, or the weight of
the resulting responsibilities."
We tried something. very like the Rea-
gan Doctrine earlier in the Cold War. The
Truman Doctrine of 1947 was limited to the
containment of Soviet expansion. It did not
contemplate the overthrow of existing
communist regimes. Such restraint
aroused conservative ire. The Republican
platform of 1952 denounced containment as
"negative, futile and immoral." John Fos-
ter DWles called for a bold new policy of
"liberation." The mere statement by the
U.S., Dulles said. "that it wants and ex-
pects liberation to occur would change, in
an electrifying way, the mood of the cap-
tive peoples."
The Eisenhower administration came
into office pledged to "roll back" Soviet
power. But it did nothing at all in the face
of anti-Soviet upheavals in East Germany
in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, and talk of
"liberation" and "rollback" ended for
nearly 30 years. The Reagan Doctrine is?a
revival of Dulles's liberation policy, though
one prudently confined thus far to the
Third World. But even in the Third World
the Reagan Doctrine will require formida-
ble machinery and will entail grave re?
sponsibilities.
"In a rebellion, as in a novel," said
Alexis de Tocqueville, "the most difficult
part to invent is the end." Do the Reagan-
ites ever ask themselves a simple ques-
tion: What next? What happens if pats on
the back and CIA subsidies are not enough
to put "freedom fighters" over the top?
When we create forces in other lands, ex-
hort them to go into combat, arouse their
expectations of our support, do we then
wash our hands of them if they cannot
make it on their own? Of course we have
done that in the past-the Kurds, for exam-
ple, and the Montagnards; hardly our fin-
est hours. Yet, when our clients flop, do
the gospel of credibility and the pledge to
keep faith with "freedom fighters" obli-
gate us to send in American boys to finish
Conlint,eC
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the fob'! The Reagan Doctrine must ine-
luctably end either in cynicism or cru-
sade.
If it ends in Rambo-like crusading, what
happens to the U.S. itself? Will the Ameri-
can people to-erate the commitment of GIs
to costly and mysterious Third World wars
remote from direct American interests?
And what happens to the American Consti-
tution in the process? The idea that the
U.S. is the guardian of freedom every-
where on the planet, that it must be for-
ever ready to intervene unilaterally in the
affairs of other states and to dispatch
armed forces at will to the ends of the
world, calls for an unprecedented concen-
tration of authority, secrecy and discretion
in the presidency. It is a policy that will
devour constitutional limitations and re-
duce Congress to impotence.
A Warning, Not a Model
The Bay of Pigs should be a warning,
not a model. The Reagan Doctrine, if
pushed very far, would commit the U.S. to
endless foreign exertions, chronic warfare,
burgeoning expense and the militarization
of American life. If America, as John
Quincy Adams presciently said long ago,
were to become involved "in all the wars
of interest and intrigue, of individual
avarice, envy and ambition, which assume
the colors and usurp the standard of free-
dom," then "the fundamental maxims of
her policy would insensibly change from
liberty to force.... She might become the
dictatress of the world. She would no
longer be the ruler of her own spirit."
Mr. Schlesinger is Albert Schweitzer
professor of the humanities at the City Uni-
versity of New York and a winner of Pulit-
zer Prizes in history and biography.
Declassified and Approved For Release 2011/12/02 :CIA-RDP90-009658000705860003-6