- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2143
The Southern Cross Briade visits Giron, Cuba – the Bay of Pigs invasion site.
On 18 March, under President Donald Trump’s executive order, 80,000 documents were uploaded to the National Archives website. Amongst these documents are a plethora of material on Cuba, Chile, CIA operations in Latin America, and Israel. A 40-page document details how the CIA was meddling in elections around the world. In 1967, the CIA took over an FBI monitoring post at the United Nations. Another interesting document is a summary of a 693-page secret CIA report from 1975, which says the agency’s operations “may have exceeded its mandate.” The new material provides greater details and insights into US State Department and secret service operations.
In June 1961, Kennedy’s aide, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, sent a memo harshly criticising the CIA, after it backed the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy was furious at the CIA, believing the agency was running its own foreign policy and that it was in need of reorganisation. A page of this report is still redacted. The CIA believed Kennedy was weak on communism.
There are new details of covert CIA operations in Cuba, including the gathering of clandestine information. The CIA tracked a Cuban national codenamed AMFUANA-1, who was sent to Cuba in 1961 to establish a network of people and sent more than fifty reports. The top-secret campaign “Operation Mongoose” was designed to destabilise the Cuban government. A communication in 1963, between the CIA director’s office and operatives in Cuba, show details on the plots to overthrow the government.
The Pentagon wanted to provoke a war with Cuba. Operation Northwoods, proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in March 1962, aimed to engineer a false flag operation to stage an attack on a US target and place the blame on Cuba. This would give the president authority and justification under international law to order an invasion and remove the Castro brothers. A revised plan was approved by the JCS on 1 May 1963. On the day of the Kennedy assassination, the CIA tried to tie it to Cuban communists. A memo to President Lyndon B Johnson, dated 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy was killed, says: “In the past week we intercepted Cuban military messages which show that Cuban interpreters are now posted at several surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites on the island.”
Tad Szulc, a New York Times foreign correspondent, broke the story of the impending Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. A 1962 memo from a station officer in Brazil notes that the station’s copies of files on Szulc had been destroyed. The CIA saw Szulc as “anti-agency” and a “hostile foreign agent.” In 1986 Szulc published his interviews with Fidel Castro in ‘Fidel: A Critical Portrait’.
One 1964 document showed that two intelligence assets discussed assassinating Castro. The CIA was “formerly in favour of such a plan,” but it was “shelved” due to the opposition of Attorney General Robert F Kennedy, who was briefed on potential plans to kill Castro. A footnote reads: “RFK asks to be told before the CIA works with the Mafia again.”
