GRANMA INTERNATIONAL 1998. ELECTRONIC
EDITION. Havana, Cuba
 FROM THE
FOREIGN PRESS
That didn't we do to get rid of Castro?
• Declassified documents tell more tales
BY LINDA ROBINSON
Faking an attack on the U.S. naval base in
Guantánamo was one of the options proposed to create a pretext for another invasion of
Cuba.
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MIAMI.- Cuban leader
Fidel Castro, who will mark his 40th year in power on January 1, has lasted through eight
U.S. presidencies. Some of America's efforts to dislodge him are well known, especially
the Bay of Pigs invasion and the CIA's infamous assassination plots involving poison
cigars, an exploding seashell, botulin pills, and Mafia hit men in the early 1960s. But
the full history of U.S. attempts to unseat Castro remained sealed in government files
until this year. During the course of 1998, an estimated 10,000 pages of documents have
been quietly declassified.
One of the most startling documents - disclosed here for
the first time - is an April 10, 1962, memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara urging that U.S. troops invade Cuba. Attached to it is a list of
incidents that could be fabricated and blamed on Castro to justify an attack. The
proposals were drawn up at the behest of the Kennedy administration, which remained
obsessed with toppling Castro even after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which the CIA
recruited and trained 2,600 Cuban exiles for a disastrous beach landing on April 17, 1961.
PRETEXTS FOR INVASION
In the 1962 memo, Lyman Lemnitzer, then chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, argued that "the Cuban problem must be solved in the near future"
and that "military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow
the present communist regime." A five-page addendum, titled "Pretexts to Justify
U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba," presented several options:
· Fake an attack on the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo,
Cuba, with friendly Cubans masquerading as attackers. They would lob mortars, burn
buildings, and destroy aircraft before being captured. A variation: "Sink ship near
harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims."
· Arrange for an unmanned vessel to be blown up near a
major Cuban city. Americans would pretend to rescue members of the nonexistent crew, and
"casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national
indignation." The document calls this the "Remember the Maine" scenario,
after the battleship that exploded in Havana's harbor in 1898, sparking the
Spanish-American War.
· Stage a "Communist Cuban terror campaign" in
the Miami area. "We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or
simulated)," the Joint Chiefs suggested. "We could foster attempts on lives of
Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be
widely publicized."
· Plant arms in a Caribbean country and send in jets
painted to look like Cuban MiGs, creating the appearance of a "Cuban-based,
Castro-supported" subversion.
· Blow up an unmanned U.S. plane that would
surreptitiously replace a charter flight of civilians, all provided with "carefully
prepared aliases" so that they could disappear. The Cubans would then be blamed for
downing a passenger plane. In one variation, unwitting U.S. pilots would pick up
parachutes and phony crash debris scattered by a submarine or small boat.
"Although these schemes were never implemented, it is
clear that the Pentagon was champing at the bit to invade Cuba," say Peter Kornbluh,
director of the Cuban Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit
research institute in Washington.
The Joint Chiefs were not the only ones who had come to
believe that a full-scale invasion was necessary. In a 1961 assessment of the Bay of Pigs,
declassified this summer, one of the operation's military planners, Col. Jack Hawkins,
concluded that: "Further efforts to develop armed internal resistance, or to organize
Cuban exile forces, should not be made except in connection with a planned overt
intervention by United States forces."
That opinion was echoed in what may be the most important
of the newly released documents, the CIA inspector general's report on the Bay of Pigs.
This scathing internal critique has just been published this month with related documents
in a book by Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, which also includes an interview with
Hawkins and the operational chief of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Jacob Esterline. In it,
Esterline says he was disgusted at having to make payments for a mob hit on Castro. As
more secrets trickle out, even spymasters may get a shock or two.
(Taken from U.S. News & World Report) |
