40

April 1961

In the event of my demise, these journal pages are to be delivered by hand to Kittredge Gardiner Montague, TSS, Detached Duty. My father, Boardman Kimble Hubbard, will serve as my executor and vet these entries for security should he deem it necessary. I do not wish to embarrass Mrs. Montague or my executor.

Let this first entry serve, therefore, as a cover page. Subsequent entries will be placed in envelopes and transmitted to safekeeping as per mode agreed upon.

         

Quarters Eye, April 4, 1961

This page marks the first sealed entry.

After some deliberation, I have decided to keep a journal. The invasion of Cuba is to take place on April 17, and that is precisely two weeks from today. So soon as a perimeter is secured, I expect to be flown to the beachhead with the exile leaders of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. It occurs to me that I may be describing the last two weeks of my life.

         

April 5, 1961

I would like to apologize here, Kittredge, for my mode of transmission. You may ask why I simply didn’t pass it on to you care of Hugh. Please do communicate to him that no man with the possible exception of my father has had more influence on my life. Hugh possesses the most powerful and decisive mind I have ever encountered, and it is precisely for this reason that I do not wish him to be an intermediary between you and me. If, for his own good and sufficient reasons, he were to judge that you should not see these pages, he would destroy them. For that matter, even the thought that he might read this journal would inhibit the writing of it. After all, I have been hopelessly in love with you from the day we met at the Keep, eight years ago this summer. If I die in battle, extinguished by some errant shell that missed a more military mark, I will go out cherishing my love because it provides me with the moral wherewithal to face my death and fight for a cause that—considering the fell complexities of Alpha and Omega—is a cause I would say I believe in. Our fight against Communism does offer dignity and sanction to the lonely quarters of one’s soul. I suppose that I am in the proper occupation, therefore, and I do love you. Since I revere Hugh, yet am here admitting to unfocused designs on the security of his home, I now see myself as his Shade.

Enough. I have said what did not, perhaps, need to be said. For the rest, let me keep this journal lively enough to satisfy some of your omnivorous curiosity on how things work.

         

April 6, 1961

Given the irregular nature of our much-enclaved Agency, it occurs to me that perhaps you do not know where Quarters Eye is located.

We are a good stone’s throw away from the I-J-K-L, and have our own World War II shacks on Ohio Drive, a former Wave barracks that actually faces the Potomac. Needless to say, we require special ID and maintain our own communications center which neatly bypasses the rest of the Agency. It worked for Guatemala, goes the theory, and will again.

Well, we may have moved our distance from the Reflecting Pool, but the drains continue to clog in the Washington swamplands, the old barracks floor creaks, and the poor ventilation reminds us of the old problem; shower as we do, and raid the exchequer for deodorants as we must, nonetheless we discover all over again that we are not odorless beasts. I mention this as the intimate cruelty that is put upon our work. Never have so many good people devoted to personal cleanliness and dedicated labor had to suffer such an awareness of close quarters. This may be the penance we were not prepared to pay. Every time I come back to work in Washington I am reminded of it. One term for our local bastion is Stale Quarters.

At any rate, there’s not much to picture. Two floors of a large barracks. Upstairs is the Newsroom—Hunt’s and my bailiwick. Desks, posters, propaganda displays in various stages of development. Always the ubiquitous cubicles. One studio at the north end for draftsmen. We are comparatively good on light compared to the first floor where the War Room is located (and requires still another ID card—took forty-eight hours to clear me, even if Cal has an office adjoining). The War Room, of course, is where one wants to be. Enough communications systems and cable-snakes to compete with a film set; large maps and charts covered with acetate overlays, still virgin, for the most part, of grease pencils. One has entered a sanctum. I am reminded of a surgical theater. There is the same kind of palpable hush before the first incision.

         

April 7, 1961

Howard’s immediate boss in Quarters Eye is called Knight. In Uruguay, Howard used to speak of earlier days in Guatemala when Knight was working for him, so I happen to be in on the fact that the fellow’s real name is David Phillips. This sets up an embarrassment. One must pretend not to be aware. What compounds the irony is that it doesn’t really matter. It wouldn’t wreck a thing at Quarters Eye if we knew him as Dave Phillips. In Miami, cover may be another matter, but the general feeling up here is that we’re laying on a little too much hygiene. Hence, this journal will call him David Phillips. It’s how I think of him, and it is a perfect name for what he is, a tall man, reasonably built, a Texan with a pleasant face, not too strong, not too weak, and reasonably manly. He looks intelligent, yet not overly cultivated. Central Casting would take him for a CIA man, and, at the moment, he rules the propaganda roost here. Around 1958, he cut his CIA ties and opened a public relations office in Havana on the sound expectation Batista would lose. He anticipated that all the old publicity firms would then be persona non grata under Castro. What he didn’t count on, he now admits, is that Castro would move to the left so quickly that the Communist Party would not allow anyone but themselves to take care of publicity. Naturally, the Company also had Phillips doing a bit of contract work in Havana, so when he pulled up stakes and left for America, Tracy Barnes signed him on again, and with a promotion. Phillips is now a career man on the express elevator. While he and Howard get along ostensibly well, I would guess they relate like in-laws.

Phillips has been pleasant enough to me, and I like him, although not that much. Perhaps it’s his air of corporate geniality. He could have worked the front office for General Motors, IBM, Boeing, General Foods, Time, Life, name it. I expect that he’s as ambitious as Howard.

Moreover, he has a social vice that puts me off. Phillips is always telling stories. They are funny enough provided you put in a little work behind your laugh. While chuckling away at his tales, I feel not unlike a pastry tube being squeezed for a bit more whipped cream. One sample is sufficient: “I knew,” he begins in practiced fashion, “an American newsman in Beirut who once had the following experience on the road to Damascus. He was driving a Volkswagen when the young soldier on guard at the Syrian border proceeded to stop him. Why? On the charge that he was smuggling an automobile engine across in his rear trunk. To cut down on corruption, the Syrian government had plucked their loyal guards right off the farm, and this new lad in uniform had never before seen a vehicle with a rear-mounted motor. My friend, however, being an old hand, shrugged, turned around, drove one hundred yards down the road to the Lebanese guard post, and then backed up to Syrian customs again.

“The guard went to the rear (which two minutes ago had been the front of the car), opened it, discovered it to be empty, and said, ‘You may enter my country.’ So my friend got his story by driving into Syria ass-backwards.”

Do you know, Kittredge, how many anecdotes at just this level of exaggeration are forever being swapped back and forth around here? I realize that I’ve always avoided Agency men like Phillips where I could. Their brand of humor reminds me of the one drink before dinner that is taken by people who do not like alcohol but are following doctor’s orders.

At any rate, we have a troika. Phillips tells his jokes, Howard whinnies, I chuck-chuck-chuckle, and our laughter, once it has lasted respectably long enough, stops like a slow-moving car with good brakes. I swear, there are more damn ways to lose your soul.

         

April 9, 1961

A report has come to the War Room regarding the cargo vessels we leased. They are to serve as troop transports and have arrived at Puerto de Cabezas in Nicaragua. By way of HALIFAX, I learn that they are gangrenous old tubs with rusty cranes and winches and are bound to cause a slowdown in loading supplies. Our people on the spot did not have a favorable reaction. “It gave me a cold feeling,” reported one of them to Cal.

Let us hope this is not symbolic of the venture. I alternate between fever and chill. While the Brigade was most impressive in February, their numbers have since doubled. In consequence, half the troops have to be seriously undertrained. The Fifth and Sixth Battalions were created just a few days ago out of recruits who signed up in the last couple of weeks, and one can worry about the collective makeup of our personnel, since it is indubitably a middle-class army and has only fifty Negroes in the ranks. Which could prove a problem. More than half the population of Cuba is black. In addition, the Directorate of Intelligence tells us that only 25 percent of the Cuban population is opposed to Castro. Somehow, that causes less concern. It seems our pride here at Operations is to pay no attention to what comes over the transom from the Directorate of Intelligence.

All the same, I keep being bothered by that statistic; can only 25 percent of the Cuban population be opposed to Castro? If it is true, why won’t the man permit an open vote? I must say that I keep swinging back and forth in confidence. Chills when I think of Castro’s army. We estimate it at thirty thousand trained soldiers, and his militia could come to ten times that. Of course, our assumption is that the militia will fall away from him at a great rate. All wars in Cuba have been won by the smaller force. In other words, Cuba is a magical system. So I experience what I would term good fevers at the thought of the outcome. Combat, according to Cal, is the largest magic show of them all and always takes place “on that damned old darkling plain,” fraught with coincidence and intervention. Yes, I worry over the Brigade.

         

April 10, 1961

A report has just been forwarded to me from Zenith. My number-one Miami agent, the same Chevi Fuertes I worked with in Uruguay, keeps warning me about two gentlemen named Mario García Kohly and Rolando Masferrer. There is serious talk in Miami that their ultra-right-wing group is planning to assassinate the Cuban Revolutionary Council en masse, just so soon as that political body is flown into Cuba. To me it sounds more like a threat than an execution, but the element to give pause is that if I were Castro, Kohly’s underground in Cuba would be precisely the people I would not wish to arrest until they had fulfilled their mission against the Cuban Revolutionary Council. This is to assume that Kohly, like the others, has been penetrated by Castro.

When I go with this concern to Cal, he shakes his head at me. “Do you ever read the newspapers?” he asks.

It is right there for me in the first section of the Washington Post. Rolando Masferrer was indicted today by a Federal Grand Jury in Miami for conspiring to send a military expedition to Cuba. That is a violation of neutrality laws.

“Well,” I say, “we don’t always mess up, do we?”

“Not always,” says Cal.

         

later, April 10, 1961

Hunt, Phillips, and myself, at work in a conference room on the second floor, must sound like we are programming a computer to print poetry on demand. Come D-Day, our Swan Island shortwave transmitter is going to bombard Havana and the provinces of Cuba with enough transmissions to paralyze whatever section of the DGI is assigned to intercepting our messages to the underground. The transmissions, while nonsense, will have the ring of tradecraft. It is a neat concept. Our people in Cuba will ignore messages they do not understand on the assumption those words are being beamed to other groups. But the DGI will feel obliged to deal with each and every transmission. In preparation, as good conscientious wordsmiths, we fine-tune our output. “The jackal is loose in the sugarcane,” for example. We argue whether jackals are indigenous to Cuba, and whether they have a tropism for sugarcane. We do not want to send any message that will reveal an ignorance of Cuban natural history. We could certainly use one sophisticated Habanero right at our side. Instead, we call on the Caribbean Desk in the Directorate of Intelligence. Since they are excluded from the operation, we request no more than a rundown on flora and fauna and agricultural techniques in the eastern and western halves of Cuba. Then we’ll know if we can employ, “The owl hoots at midnight,” “The bobcat moves over the ridge,” “The swamps are draining,” “The papaya fields show smoke.” Or, best of all, “Wait for the eye of the Antilles.”

         

April 11, 1961

The cherry blossoms came out today on the Potomac. A faint reflection of that natural bounty is in our collective mood today at Quarters Eye, or do I make a case out of a few errant smiles?

The Cuban Revolutionary Council, hereinafter known as the CRC, has by means of one or another subterfuge been brought up to New York to meet with their overlord, Frank Bender, a bald, cigar-smoking East European who speaks no Spanish. He has gotten them into one small meeting room at the Commodore long enough to announce that the invasion is very much in the works, and that if they wish to be flown to the beachhead, they must now agree to be sequestered in a hotel suite in New York for the next few days—security forbids any closer information. They will be able to make no phone calls. If any one of them does not wish to agree to this, he is free to leave and free to miss the invasion. Bender, an old hand at East European ironies, also gets across the notion that any CRC leader who did not wish to join such an agreement might find himself a security risk and be sequestered alone. Naturally they all agree to go into the communal lock-up. Hunt claims that these elaborate steps are necessary because of Manuel Ray, but I can think of Toto Barbaro, and am just as happy that none of them can now send out a message. It does occur to me that we must have used at least twenty people from Zenith to set up the various pretexts that brought these six highly individual Cuban gentlemen to New York. Well, we are good at that, and so should we be.

Bender, who is now cloistered with this crew of esteemed prisoners, informs Hunt that they are importuning him already for advance news. “If we are to be captives,” they say, “can we at least have the compensation of acquiring some privileged knowledge?”

In the meantime, to steer CRC publicity, Knight has hired a Madison Avenue public relations firm named Lem Jones Associates. Actually, he has rehired them. Lem Jones has already done work for the Frente. I can see by the expression on Phillips’ face that I am in for one of his stories.

“I would say,” commences Phillips, “that Lem Jones earned his Frente money last September. Castro was slated to speak at the UN that month, and Lem and I decided to confront him with a couple of busloads of Cuban women. ‘Mothers from Miami.’ It was to be ‘a Caravan of Sorrow’ and would climax with a prayer session at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

“En route, however, from Miami, our chartered Greyhound buses were seriously slowed. We had carefully selected four pregnant women, and now we discovered that they had to pee every ten miles. We came in late at Washington, D.C., and missed a press conference. Ditto, Philadelphia. The Caravan of Sorrow entered New York one full day late, but we did get news shots of the ladies praying in St. Patrick’s. It made the papers and the wire services. I would say Lem Jones has earned his reemployment.”

April 12, 1961

The tempo of real action is commencing. One can feel it in the War Room.

I learn today that the loading of the supply ships at Puerto de Cabezas progressed even more slowly than anticipated. The winches kept fouling, and a huge hatch cover on one of the ships had rusted in place. Hours of effort were expended in prying it loose. The Brigade troops, however, full of high morale, threw themselves into manhandling the cargo. My imagination is sufficiently vivid to hear winches screaming and hoists wheezing from one end of the harbor to the other. So soon as they are loaded, off they go to anchor a few hundred yards away, their share of the Brigade already on board. Word comes back that the troops are sleeping in hammocks below deck and on tarpaulins over the hatch cover. The officers, still living in pup tents on shore, will celebrate a Mass tonight after receiving their full orientation on the invasion plan. Only then will they learn where they are going to land in Cuba.

Our people in Puerto Cabezas also reported that Luís Somoza, President of Nicaragua, adjured the Brigade to: “Bring me a couple of hairs from Castro’s beard.” Our observer added: “Since Somoza is a plump and powdered dictator with pancake makeup, I’m afraid his expectation of hearty applause had to put up with a few snickers as well. One rugged Cuban yelled back, ‘The beard above or the beard below?’”

It is also being bruited about at Quarters Eye that our rented freighters from the García Line are so old they will lend absolute authenticity to our claim that the invasion is financed by Cubans and run by Cubans. No self-respecting American would ever go near such tubs. Phillips comments: “Keeping this operation authentically Cuban may have been carried a little too far.”

         

still April 12

I keep alternating between two systems of perception. One part of me fastens on every report from TRAX and Puerto de Cabezas. The other reminds me that the fate of the Brigade may yet be linked to my own. In a week or less, I will join them on the beachhead. That does not yet feel real. As a result, my anxiety lives in my body like a mild grippe and sensitizes each movement of my limbs.

Now, it occurs to me that if I am on the beachhead, I can be captured, and if they conclude, as they will, that I am CIA, they could torture me. I could talk. (Could I? I do not possess the answer.) I realize that I may know too much. This produces a childish reaction—I am furious at everyone in the Agency who has told me too much. “It will be your fault, not mine,” I actually say to myself, and am appalled. The truth is that I have no basis in experience by which to measure these new ventures. So I am as wild in my thoughts as a man alone at a party to whom no one speaks.

         

still April 12

The large news today at Quarters Eye has been Kennedy’s statement at a packed press conference this morning. “Under no conditions,” he declares, “will there be an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces.”

Naturally, these words are striking enough to be put up in type on the Newsroom billboard and downstairs in the War Room. Hunt is beaming. “A superb effort,” he concludes, “in misdirection.” We know the aircraft carrier Essex is waiting in Puerto Rico to rendezvous at the Bay of Pigs.

Down in the War Room, however, Cal is much less pleased: “If Kennedy means what he says, we can get out the black drapes.”

Cal is obviously counting on a full military follow-up by the U.S. That suggests Bissell and Dulles are of the same persuasion. The assumption has to be that Kennedy will never accept defeat. Arguments rotate around this. Does our President mean that he will not intervene under any circumstances, or is it a masterstroke, as Hunt hopes?

In the War Room, I am more aware than ever of how prodigiously large is our map of the Bay of Pigs. I see it as a species of technological magic to pose against the bloody, twisted chicken necks in the mayombero’s soup.

         

later—April 12

Another piece of news takes over the rest of the day. A Soviet spaceman named Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in a spaceship. That is to say—the language is new—he has circumnavigated the planet in a space capsule. At Quarters Eye, most of our people are glum. It is a frightful shock. How can the Russians have won the race into space? On the other hand, my father takes hope. “It couldn’t have happened at a better time,” he says. “This could get Kennedy’s Irish up.”

No one says Bay of Pigs around here. We speak of Red Beach, Blue Beach, and Green Beach. Shades of Normandy? Tarawa? Iwo Jima?

         

April 13, 1961

I missed an interesting remark made yesterday by Jack Kennedy at his press conference. “The indictment of Mr. Masferrer of Florida, on the grounds that he was plotting an invasion of Cuba in order to establish a Batista-like regime should indicate the feelings of this country toward those who wish to establish that kind of administration inside Cuba.”

         

April 14, 1961

Today, D minus 3, the Brigade is under sail. Our troops are crowded into five old tubs; our operation is called Zapata. Tomorrow, D minus 2, eight exile B-26s will take off from a Nicaraguan base near Puerto Cabezas and launch an air strike against three Cuban airfields. We aim not only to knock out Castro’s air force, but to prove to the world that the operation was performed by Cuban defectors flying Cuban planes purchased by Cubans. The prevailing opinion at Quarters Eye is that a large air attack on D-Day itself would have too American a signature. Hunt and I are agitated by the choice, however. Bombing these airfields on D minus 2 is going to give Castro time to roll up our networks. It is likely, then, that there will be no serious underground in Cuba on invasion day. Late at night, when we argue in our living room, Cal will not admit to this logic, but I have an intimation for the first time of how calculating Allen Dulles must be. While he is taking off to Puerto Rico tomorrow to fulfill a speaking engagement he agreed to make months ago—which hopefully will confuse the DGI into thinking the invasion is not that near—I decide that only Mr. Dulles could have made the cold estimate that if our networks in Cuba were now, on balance, so infiltrated as to be of as much use to Castro as to us, then let him arrest all those tens of thousands of Cubans in a massive roundup. Most likely he will be imprisoning a great many of his own double agents as well. This could produce extremely bad morale for his intelligence forces further down the line. As for our underground morale—well, that appears to be expendable.

Hunt and Phillips are also worrying about the millions of leaflets that will not be distributed during the D minus 2 air strike. All payload on the B-26s has now been given over to bombs for knocking out Castro’s planes. Later, if there are more air strikes (no one seems certain how many have been authorized, and Phillips is beginning to pound the desk because he cannot find out), we may be permitted to drop some paper, but any thought of a Guatemala-like coup seems to have been put on the back burner. To mollify us, we are assured that the supply ships will carry the leaflets. “Once we have a beachhead and an airstrip, your input will come in very handy.”

“Too late,” Phillips tries to explain. Since he may be the most impressive physical specimen in Quarters Eye, as much an Agency man as a cadet at Sandhurst is a Sandhurst cadet, it is odd to see him so frustrated that his mouth and face crinkle like a five-year-old refusing tears. “They can’t get it straight,” he says. “We’re the foreplay. Are we going to introduce foreplay after fornication?”

         

April 14, later entry

On pressure from the State Department, someone above us, possibly Bissell, has decided that in the air raid tomorrow, an extra decoy plane can fly directly from Nicaragua to Miami. It will purport to be a Cuban B-26 who defected from Castro’s air force, bombed the Havana airfields, and then flew over to us.

Hunt foresees all manner of things going wrong with this caper, and gets on the Encoder-Decoder to Happy Valley which is our code name for the airport in Puerto de Cabezas. He proceeds to explain what is essential in the way of preparation. The plane must look as if it took a bit of a drubbing in combat over the Cuban air space. Camouflage artists can put bullet holes and burn marks in appropriate places. Hunt’s comment: “This one gives me the collywobbles. Get one detail wrong and it can all come undone.”

Knowing that the air raid will strike at dawn, most of the Quarters Eye personnel are staying over tonight. We rest on army cots with surprisingly nonstandardized mattresses—either bone-hard or flaccid—drink coffee, and idle out the hours. I suppose all situations that require one to wait for news from outside are prison-like. One is suffering sensory cut-off, which is, I suppose, what prison is all about.

         

8:00 A.M., April 15, 1961

The room stank of cigarette smoke through the night, and the stale, near-sickly odor of too many men sleeping with too much tension. Shortly after dawn, however, the cable traffic concerning our three strikes commenced. A wing of three B-26s called “Linda” has for its target San Antonio de los Baños, a big and crucial military airfield thirty miles southwest of Havana. “Puma,” another flight of three B-26s, will hit Camp Libertad just outside Havana, and “Gorilla,” the third wing, two B-26s, is to strike the other end of the island, Santiago de Cuba Airport in Oriente Province.

Now the reports come in all at once. All three airfields have been simultaneously bombed and strafed. Havana is erupting into hysterical broadcasts, and our Cuban pilots are reporting to us that Castro’s air force has been wiped out on the ground.

How our sleeping dormitory is transformed! At 6:30 A.M. windows fly open, and we are cheering. There is a whoop of a rush to get clothes on and go down to the War Room. More euphoria there. Officers are hugging each other. Bissell is receiving congratulations. “Nothing official,” I hear him say, “we still have to wait for official confirmation from our U-2 photographs,” but he is beaming. I hear other officers murmuring, “It’s over. Havana might as well be in our hands.”

Meanwhile, the lone B-26 that flew from Happy Valley to Florida landed at Miami International Airport, and the pilot was immediately led away by Immigration and his plane impounded. We listen to American news reports that the Miami pilot was wearing a T-shirt, a baseball cap, and dark glasses, and looked remarkably cool smoking a cigarette. His airplane had certainly been chewed up. One engine was dead, and the fuselage showed many bullet holes.

A statement comes out of New York from Miro Cardona. “The Cuban Revolutionary Council has been in contact with and has encouraged these brave pilots.” We have a ten-inch black-and-white TV set in the War Room, and I watch Cardona as he speaks to reporters. He looks tired. He removes his dark glasses and says to the press, “Gentlemen, look into revolutionary eyes that have known little sleep of late.”

“Are the raids a prelude to invasion?” asks a reporter.

Cardona smiles. He spreads his hands like an umpire calling “Safe.” Cardona says: “No invasion, sir.”

Barbaro, however, seated next to him, says, “Spectacular things have begun to happen.” Barbaro looks hysterical to me.

         

an hour later

Bizarre events as well. At Key West, an unforeseen emergency landing had to be made by one of our bona fide exile bombers when it developed engine trouble after participating in the strike at Camp Libertad. When real events conform to fictional scenarios, no one is prepared. The local high school in Key West was getting ready to celebrate Olympics Day at Boca Chica Naval Air Station. They were there with all the trimmings: track events, parents, marching bands, cheerleaders. All canceled. Olympics Day was called off by the Navy.

Then another B-26 from the San Antonio de los Baños strike had to land at Grand Cayman Island when one of its fuel tanks failed to feed. Since Grand Cayman flies a British flag, returning the pilot and plane to Happy Valley will not be automatic. As Cal remarks, “You can’t trust the British on things like this. They can get formal at the goddamnedest times.”

The director of Immigration and Naturalization appears on the TV news from Miami. He refuses to give the names of the two pilots who have landed in the U.S. Their families in Cuba must be protected. A reporter asks: “Wouldn’t Castro’s air force generals know the names of their own pilots?”

“I cannot help you,” says the director. “These pilots have requested that their names be kept secret.”

Hunt shakes his head. “I can hear the bilge sloshing in the hold.”

He is right. All through the day, reporters in Miami and New York keep posing new questions. I begin to see that they are another kind of force in our field of forces, and have a homing instinct for every hole in the tissue of a tale. One reporter actually managed to get close enough to the plane that came down in Miami to notice that the muzzles on the machine guns of the B-26 were still taped. While that is done routinely to keep dust and detritus out of the breech, it also means the guns were not fired. That question hangs in the news reports. All through the Newsroom and the War Room, I can hear men muttering, “These son of a bitch reporters—whose side are they on?” I can hear myself saying it. The questions are getting worse, and no answers are coming back. The radio and TV announcers are underlining “No comment” with more of a resonant pause each time.

In the UN, Raul Roa, the Ambassador from Cuba, has a run-in with Adlai Stevenson. I catch reports of that on radio all afternoon. Stevenson is saying: “These pilots defected from Castro’s tyranny. No United States personnel participated. These two planes, to the best of our knowledge, were Castro’s own air force planes, and, according to the pilots, took off from Castro’s own air force fields. I have a picture of one of these planes. The markings of Castro’s air force are clearly visible.”

I feel merry and woeful all at once. It gives me an odd and unexpected sense of importance that so famous a personage as Adlai Stevenson is ready to lie for the Agency. It is as if he, too, is part of that transcendental wickedness that partakes of goodness because its aim is to gain the rightful day. Nonetheless, I am depressed as well. Stevenson seems such a consummate liar. His voice is absolutely sincere.

“I don’t know that he’s witting,” says Hunt.

Raul Roa certainly is: “This air raid at dawn is the prelude to a large-scale invasion attempt, supported and financed by the United States. These mercenaries have been trained by experts of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At a White House press briefing, Pierre Salinger, the Press Secretary, denies any knowledge of the bombing.

         

later

Toward evening, I stop by my father’s office to share a cup of hot coffee. He is not in a good mood. Word has just come in of the first casualty. On the Atlántico, one of the rented freighters, there had been .50-caliber machine-gun practice, and the mountings tore loose from the (no doubt rusted) deck plates. A spew of bullets lashed the deck. One man dead, two wounded. A burial ceremony at sea. Full uniform, prayers, and the body goes into the sea at sunset.

Cal Hubbard sees needless death as a bad omen; he is also worried about Adlai Stevenson. “I don’t think Adlai knows those two planes were ours. Tracy Barnes gave him the orientation, and Tracy can be vague if he chooses to be. There will be hell to pay when Stevenson finds out. God, he might talk Kennedy into scrubbing the invasion.” Cal immediately adds, “That won’t happen,” as if the force of his will can become as much of a factor as the untrustworthy air absorbing his words.

         

evening

Tonight, after dark, Hunt is paid a visit by Dorothy. He slips out of Quarters Eye and they sit in their car and talk. He has not told her that we are leaving for the beachhead in less than seventy-two hours. He has not even packed a bag. He will probably join the Cuban Revolutionary Council shortly after they are flown down to Opa-Locka, and there he will pick up some chinos and army boots. Ditto for me. I picture Howard and Dorothy in their car, talking of her mother’s recent death, the children’s school—their domestic agenda. We are heading into tropical country but again I feel a chill. It is not quite real to me that I am going to war. Nonetheless, my death is vivid to me. I can picture my dead body. Since this journal is for Kittredge, I presume to ask: Does Omega tease Alpha with images of that death it is more willing to meet than its uncooperative partner?

         

Sunday morning

Few of us slept well on our cots last night. Even though the invasion is not scheduled until early tomorrow morning, men kept getting up and going down to the War Room. Over coffee and doughnuts, Phillips regales us with a story. One of the secretaries, taking her turn on a cot for a little rest last night, was panicked to awaken to the sight of a strange man sleeping in the bunk next to her. He was very big and very pale, and she had never seen him before. Was he an interloper? No, Phillips said, he was Richard Bissell, our leader, catching forty winks.

About 9:00 A.M., with half of Quarters Eye absent for an hour or two to see their families and/or go to church, disturbing news rises from the War Room: The aerial photographs, after close scrutiny, reveal that the strike on the Cuban airports yesterday was less successful than first reported. Not all of Castro’s planes were destroyed. Apparently, our Brigade pilots had seen what they wished to see. By the War Room’s count, two-thirds of the Castro force is destroyed or out of commission, but there still remain three or four T-33 jet trainers, the same number of Sea Fury fighters, and two B-26 bombers. A cleanup mission is needed, therefore, to finish the job. Our air operations officer was ordering such a move when General Cabell, now Acting Director in Mr. Dulles’ absence, came back to the War Room from a Sunday morning of golf.

I was out of hearing, but soon learned that Cabell refused to approve this second strike without calling Secretary of State Rusk first, and Rusk, in turn, asked him to come over to the State Department. Richard Bissell, visibly upset, departed with Cabell.

Two hours later, our second air strike is still being held up. The mood at Quarters Eye has shifted again. As Cal explains to me in passing, the main body of troops are scheduled to land around 2:00 A.M. Monday morning, and the supply ships have to be unloaded before dawn; otherwise, they could be mangled by the remains of Castro’s air force. It is possible to finish the task before morning light, says Cal, but only if everything goes well. That’s a good deal to ask of an untried invasion force coming in by dark on old ships to an unfamiliar shore.

         

two hours later

We are still waiting. It is late afternoon. We are getting worried. The lead story in the Sunday New York Times by Tad Szulc has done all too good a job of chasing after “puzzling circumstances.” The questions are getting worse. Why, for instance, are the pilots’ names still being withheld? Then there is the question of the B-26 nose. Castro’s planes have transparent Plexiglas turrets—the Miami B-26 showed a solid nose.

Hunt outlines the real trouble. Our fake story has to hold until the landing is accomplished. Once we have an airfield operating in the Bay of Pigs, our little fiction about the defecting pilots can be buried by immediate and real events. In the meantime, however, the State Department may have lost its stomach for more air attacks. All we know is that the meeting between Rusk, Bissell, and Cabell continues, and queries from Happy Valley concerning the delayed air strike continue to pile up. The mood is reminiscent of a waiting room.

I am busy, however, preparing messages with Hunt and Phillips. They will be broadcast many times this night to Cuba from our clandestine radio station on Swan Island and, hopefully, will prove most confusing. “Alert! Alert!” we send out. “Look well at the rainbow. The fish will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red.” Too late I pick up from our language expert at the Directorate of Intelligence that “fish” is one more word in Cuba for phallus. Oh, well, “the phallus is rising, the phallus is red.”

Next comes in a Reuters teletype from Havana describing a funeral procession thirty blocks long that moves slowly through the streets of the capital behind the bodies of those who were killed in the air strike yesterday. The bodies had lain in state at Havana University through the night; now the cortège advances to Colón Cemetery where Castro is waiting to speak.

An hour later, Reuters provides excerpts of Castro’s speech. “If the attack on Pearl Harbor is considered by the American people as a criminal, treacherous, cowardly act, then our people have a right to consider this act twice as criminal and a thousand times as cowardly. The Yankees are trying to deceive the world, but the whole world knows the attack was made with Yankee planes piloted by mercenaries paid by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.”

I show the teletype to Cal. He nods. “I’ve heard,” he says, “that Stevenson is in an absolute rage. He’s found out our B-26s were not true defectors, and threatens to resign. So I don’t believe they’ll give us another strike. The political factors are going to ride right over the military considerations.”

He is right. Bissell comes back at dusk, haggard, grim, composed. The invasion is on, he tells us, but the air strike is off. If the ships are not unloaded by dawn, they will have to withdraw, and go out to sea until the second night, when they can come back to finish their unloading.

I am struck by the reaction. The unhappy news is, at least, equal to the good news, yet the fifty or more of us assembled to hear Bissell start to cheer. The invasion is on. We are committed. The President is committed. That is the essential. The game is on. I believe we cheer in relief at no longer having to steel ourselves against rejection of the entire project.

I see that we are not without resemblance to a chorus, and feel as if I understand Greek drama at last. We are not merely a group of individuals commenting on the actions of the gods, but have become our own human field of force, and will seek, through the intensity of our concentration, to bend destiny toward our desires. Before long, we have begun to brood on the need to bring the supply ships and unloading craft closer to the beachhead. I would not be surprised if many of us, in our minds, are oiling the gears of the donkey engines on those rusty old freighters.

         

later

There is a lull in the evening, and I am closeted in the john again, adding to these notes. Soon the local legend will have it that Hubbard doesn’t keep a tight sphincter. If my absences every few hours are noted, and my hope is that in the general intensity and confusion they are not, all good and well. If, on the other hand, I get to be known as Shit-House Harry, that will establish the cost of this journal. I wish, by now, that I had not started. If they taught us one principle at the Farm over and over, it was to take no unnecessary notes. Even as I write, I feel constrained. I am careful not to speak in any too great detail about our War Room personnel and their specific tasks, I try to describe no more than historical moments and, of course, the divagations of my own mood, but I still have to marvel at the basic impropriety of my father’s makeup. He encouraged me to do this journal, knowing full well that such activities are, at best, professionally inappropriate. I marvel at myself. I obey him. How great is my need to get a little nearer to him.

All the same, these hours of writing, these meditations on whether or not I am preparing myself for the incalculable pressures of a beachhead headquarters and a conceivable visit to eternity, would be close to intolerable without this journal. And the risk is small. Every time I write a few pages, they are enclosed in an envelope and dropped in the mail slot in Cal’s safe. I assume he collects them every few days for deposit in one of his secure boxes. In fact, as if it would compound the trespass, we do not talk about it.

Hunt has just informed me of the latest update on our itinerary. If by dawn the supplies are landed and the beachhead is secure, then we will be on our way to Miami to join the exile leaders. In another twenty-four hours, or less, we will be on the beachhead. Indeed, in the early hours of this morning, the CRC left New York for Opa-Locka. So soon as they debarked from their plane, they were immediately installed—I will not say incarcerated—in one of the barracks on the old air base. Naturally, they are in a half-boiled state; half-simmering, half–boiled over. I have never been able to come to terms with the all too readily available hysteria of the Cuban temperament, but I can appreciate their feelings in this situation. After all, they are on the outskirts of Miami, not ten miles away from their wives and families, yet they cannot get out. Being politicians, they would love to join the festivities. What we hear from every side is that the Cubans in southern Florida have taken off on a nonstop fiesta ever since the air attack Saturday. The recruiting offices have long lines. Everyone in Miami now wants a chance to join the battle against Castro. At Opa-Locka, however, the exile leaders are suspended between high elation at the commencement of war activities, and the quintessential Cuban gloom that comes from regarding their immured impotence in the face of events.

I find an ax-hewn poetic justice in the fact that Frank Bender is the Agency man shut up with them at this point. Bender, from the little I saw of him when he would fly down occasionally to Miami, never got along well with Hunt or the Frente. An East European street man with tradecraft forged and annealed in the espionage mills of Vienna and Berlin, Bender has one principle from which he works backward—results. He is bald, wears eyeglasses, chews cigars, is abrasive as a corncob, and for months, whenever Hunt was speaking to him on a nearby phone, I would wait for the crash of the receiver when Howard’s end of the phone came slamming down. Now, however, they are almost friendly. Bender, after putting up for three days with six Cubans in a hotel suite, and contained with them now in a barracks, is suffering from enough claustrophobia to metamorphose Howard’s voice into a friendly sound. Sometimes, Bender even talks to me. “Give me some news, boy-chick,” he says. “Something to divert these guys. They’re ready to eat the rug.”

“Tell them,” I answer, “that Castro said the American news services purvey fantasy. ‘Even Hollywood,’ and I quote him, ‘would not try to film such a story.’”

“Ha, ha, the son of a bitch is right,” says Bender.

Howard yells over to me, “Tell Frank to inform them that things are going according to plan.”

“They hate the plan,” says Bender. “They want to be in the action.” “Tell him,” yells Hunt, “that I sent his regards to his wife.”

“Bring down a box of cigars,” says Bender. “I’m running low.”

Two hours later, he calls again. Barbaro wishes to speak to me. “I have three words for you to pass on to your father,” he says. “These three words are Mario García Kohly. Kohly, Kohly, Kohly. Ask your father if Kohly is under observation as fully as we are.”

“Kohly can do nothing now,” I say. “Masferrer has been arrested.” “There are many Masferrers, and only one Kohly. He is a bomb, and we will all be exterminated in the blast,” says Barbaro.

A little later, Cal, on being asked, remarks that Kohly is merely a single cannon among 184 pieces of loose ordnance below decks. (This is the number of separate refugee groups in Miami.)

         

late Sunday night, close to midnight

We are trying to catch a few hours of sleep before the landing begins. The prepared text of the Cuban Revolutionary Council Communiqué Number 1, carefully crafted by Hunt and Phillips, is now complete. In a few minutes we will phone it in to Lem Jones, and he will mimeo it, get into a taxi, and start distribution to the news services. They should have it by 2:00 A.M.

         

THE CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL WISHES TO ANNOUNCE THE PRINCIPAL BATTLE OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION AGAINST CASTRO WILL BE FOUGHT IN THE NEXT FEW HOURS. THIS TREMENDOUS ARMY OF INVINCIBLE SUPERPATRIOTS HAS NOW RECEIVED ITS INSTRUCTIONS TO STRIKE THE VITAL BLOW FOR THE LIBERATION OF THEIR BELOVED COUNTRY. OUR PARTISANS IN EVERY TOWN AND VILLAGE IN CUBA WILL RECEIVE, IN A MANNER KNOWN ONLY TO THEM, THE MESSAGE WHICH WILL SPARK A TREMENDOUS WAVE OF INTERNAL CONFLICT AGAINST THE TYRANT. OUR INFORMATION FROM CUBA INDICATES THAT MUCH OF THE MILITIA IN THE COUNTRYSIDE HAS ALREADY DEFECTED.

         

I have had no time to think, but I have to wonder if we have any partisans left. This afternoon there were reports from Reuters of Castro’s response to the Saturday air raid. Huge roundups of Cubans are taking place in Havana and Santiago. I am beginning to wonder all over again at the wisdom of our first air raid. I suppose we were afraid that Castro’s reconnaissance planes might spot the approach of the Brigade’s rusty freighters if we waited too long and so Fidel would have time to disperse his air force, but how much has been lost by not striking everywhere at once? Well, I will not question my military superiors.

         

12:30 A.M., April 17, 1961

I am back in the loo, writing away. The paratroop contingent of the Brigade, 176 men strong, took off a while ago from Happy Valley after a steak dinner. Their breakfast will be an apple. Now they are due to land in a couple of hours to set up roadblocks. For days I have been looking at a wall-sized map in the War Room of an area forty miles high and eighty miles wide, and it occupies the inner panorama of my mind. Perhaps I should describe the projected beachhead. Once action starts, there will not be time.

Our landing will occupy an L-shaped line of coast. The Bay of Pigs is a narrow body of water running from north to south for twenty miles down to the shore of the Caribbean, which is on an east-west axis. One part of our force (two battalions) will sail up the Bay of Pigs to the head of this body of water and debark at Playa Larga (Red Beach). Our main force will come in at Girón on the Caribbean shore some ten miles around the bend. Playa Larga and Girón are thus thirty miles apart on a good road newly built by Castro. Further to the east, another twenty miles along the Caribbean coast, is Green Beach. There, a third force will come in later. Within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, it is expected that our forces will link up and we will have fifty miles of shore protected by the Bay of Pigs and the Caribbean to one’s rear, and the great swamp of Zapata three miles to the fore. Miles ahead of our main body, the paratroopers will be sitting astride the three roads that traverse the swamp.

I think of the paratroopers flying from Nicaragua to Cuba. The droning of C-46 motors mixes in my mind with muttered outcries from the dreams of men asleep on cots beside me even as I stir and get up and walk to a stall in the men’s room to pen this entry.

         

6:15 A.M., April 17, 1961

Much has happened in the last six hours.

The invasion force succeeded in getting ashore at Playa Larga and Girón by 2:30 in the morning, but little else followed by plan. We are receiving messages from the area through roundabout means—the command post at Girón radios back to the Brigade’s command ship, the Blagar, and thence to an American destroyer twenty miles offshore which relays the same communication to the Pentagon and to us in the War Room. It is hard to determine how much is fact, how much is false report, but after confirmations and refutations, this much I now know. The landing beaches were not sloping sandy aprons as expected, but jagged coral pocked with underwater rocks. In the dark, it took longer than expected to set out luminescent buoys on the sea lanes of approach. Most of the supply launches assigned to the troops could not reach the shore because they grounded on the coral; the men, holding rifles overhead, had to walk in through chest-deep water. Much equipment was soaked, including many radios. Their temporary (we hope) loss of function accounts for the slowness of our communications with the Brigade.

There was also an unforeseen hurdle. A small detachment of Castro militia were on shore, and a few firefights took place before the locals surrendered or decamped. Several microwave radio transmitters were still warm when our Cubans captured the equipment. So Castro will be heard from earlier than expected. Cal, passing me in the corridor, said, “He will try to mop up the operation before there is enough of a beachhead for us to be able to justify flying in the provisional government.”

All the news arriving now becomes a function, therefore, of that race to build up the beachhead. The paratroops are in varying degrees of peril. On the eastern front, out toward San Blas to the north, the roadblocks are well armed and supplied. Some of the citizens of San Blas are even carrying supplies and volunteering as nurses. On the western front, however, at the roadblock north of Playa Larga, the paratroopers’ supplies landed in the swamp (once again, we trained the troops better than the pilots) and the men have had to fall back to the beach.

So, at Playa Larga, Tony Oliva, the Commander of the Second Battalion on the western front, has been engaged in combat ever since he landed. It has been mess, horror, and some success. Both landings, Playa Larga and Girón, were supposed to be unopposed, both met fire from small detachments of militia stationed near the beach. Both Brigade battalions prevailed and are now dug in, but hours have been lost. The cheap, second-hand landing craft that we chose to camouflage the operation seem to have functioned badly. What radio traffic we receive from the combat area offers repetitive messages of outboard motors failing, boats wallowing through delays in the dark, and time-consuming imbroglios with the coral reefs. From something Cal said a couple of days ago, I believe the Agency was warned by Naval Intelligence that the Girón coast could present many such obstacles, but we chose to ignore those briefings. Once we lost Trinidad as a landing site, the Agency must have decided that we could afford no more such shifts or there would be no plan to execute. We are obviously on a do-what-it-takes program. Is there trouble landing?—get the stuff ashore any way you can. That is why the supplies are now coming in too slowly. It looks like no tanks will get onto the beach before daylight when the supply ships must move away from shore.

I have to cease this entry. I can hear commotion in the hall.

         

11:30 A.M.

It is five hours since the last entry, and much has taken a turn for the worse. The remains of Castro’s air force appeared over Girón at 6:30 this morning, just six planes, and one was shot down, but we, in turn, lost one supply ship, and another is now foundering in shallow water three hundred yards offshore.

Some frightful facts appear. The Houston did succeed in getting all of the Second Battalion off at Playa Larga by dawn, but the Fifth Battalion, full of green recruits, was still on board when the Houston took a direct rocket from one of Castro’s planes. Since the ship was also carrying ammunition and gasoline, it was a miracle that none of the inflammables were struck. The vessel did suffer a serious hole below the waterline, however, and headed for shore where it grounded less than a quarter mile out and began to sink like a dying bull (or so I see it), oil and bilge seeping out of its wounds, even as the Fifth Battalion jumped into the sea and swam to shore. They were strafed from the air. Reports put their deaths between twenty and forty, and other casualties are as yet uncounted. Tony Oliva, Commander of the Second Battalion at Playa Larga, needs those Fifth Battalion troops to back his advance, but they are at present ten miles south and presumably regrouping.

Just a few minutes later came a larger disaster. Another of Castro’s planes hit the Río Escondido with another rocket, and that boat suffered a large explosion and sank. The survivors are still uncounted (although many were rescued by the Blagar which steamed up to help), but the real damage, as we have been learning over the last couple of hours, is that the Río Escondido carried most of the necessities for the first ten days of fighting—ammo, food, medical supplies, fuel—nearly all of it.

Now we are receiving reports that the Brigade has succeeded in unloading only 10 percent of its ammunition, probably enough for today, but the supply ships have fled out to sea and will not be able to come in again until tonight. The Third Battalion, which was supposed to land at Green Beach, twenty miles to the east, had to be diverted instead to the base at Girón. It is now set up on the right flank, just two miles to the east of town. If Playa Larga on the western front does not hold, and Oliva’s Second Battalion has to retreat all those thirty miles back to Girón, the beachhead will be only a few miles wide. In such a worst-case scenario, it is crucial that supplies get in.

That leads to the next problem. The freighters were told to rendezvous with the U.S.S. Essex in order to be protected from further air raids, but the ships’ captains are not responding to radio instructions. Their merchant crews, while Cuban, obviously do not have the same high motivation as the Brigade. Result: The Blagar, the Caribe, the Atlántico, and the Barbara J. are scattered all over the Caribbean.

The only good news is that we have a small airfield in the environs of Girón, and it is in decent condition. One drop of sweat goes right down my spine when I tell myself that that is the airfield where I will be landing. Hunt, however, comes by to say that our flight down to Florida to join up with the Cuban Revolutionary Council has been delayed by the bad news. In the interim the CRC has dealt out its portfolios. Cardona is, of course, the President, and Manuel Artime (at present with the Brigade) is called “Delegate in the Invading Army,” but Toto Barbaro, a genius at checks and balances, is Secretary of Defense. Manuel Ray has received Chief of Sabotage and Internal Affairs, just the post he would seek if Hunt’s suspicions of him as a Communist are accurate.

Hysteria, nonetheless, reigns at Opa-Locka. One of the Ministers (Barbaro, I suspect) has sworn to kill himself unless he is released. He keeps telling Bender that he must speak to Allen Dulles. Bender has been on the telephone to Dick Bissell adjuring him to send a couple of impressive Kennedy people down to Opa-Locka to calm these putative statesmen’s nerves. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Adolf Berle are mentioned.

Work at Quarters Eye has come to a standstill for many of us. Occasionally a cable comes to the War Room and its contents activate a few people into intense activity for a period—we are all eager to do something—but for the most part, we are like idle gears waiting to be engaged. The B-26s stationed in Nicaragua are constantly in the air, but the three-and-a-half-hour flight from Happy Valley to Girón and the equally long flight back consumes so much fuel that they can put in no more than fifteen minutes over the beachhead. Carrying 3,000 pounds of bombs and eight rockets and eight .50-caliber machine guns plus fuel, these bombers manage to lift 40,000 pounds into the air. Which happens to be 4,000 pounds of overload. And all this is achieved by not carrying a tail gunner inasmuch as the weight of his machine gun, ammo boxes, firing rig, etc., would come close to an additional thousand pounds, and that is enough weight to consume the fifteen extra minutes of gasoline made available for air time over the battlefield. How vulnerable these B-26s, bereft of a tail gunner, must be, however, to Castro’s remaining fighter planes.

One unreflective fellow here—how happy I am that I am not speaking of myself!—asked why the B-26s weren’t kept on the local airfield. Answer: They would be destroyed by Castro’s planes.

         

3:00 P.M., April 17, 1961

Tempers are drawing fine. David Phillips, who obviously prides himself on his urbanity, is beginning to get downright testy. We are in an outright cauldron of indecision about what kind of CRC bulletins to release to Lem Jones Associates. Are we to acknowledge any difficulties in the operation?

We come up with the following: THE CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL WISHES TO ANNOUNCE THAT ACTION TODAY WAS LARGELY OF A SUPPLY AND SUPPORT EFFORT TO FORCES WHICH HAVE BEEN MOBILIZED AND TRAINED INSIDE CUBA OVER THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS.

We added a “quote” from an unnamed statesman: “I PREDICT THAT BEFORE DAWN THE ISLAND OF CUBA WILL RISE UP EN MASSE IN A COORDINATED WAVE OF SABOTAGE AND REBELLION .  .  .. MUCH OF THE MILITIAIN THE COUNTRYSIDE HAS ALREADY DEFECTED.”

Actually, the Brigade had so far captured a hundred militia, of whom half subsequently defected to us. We extrapolated the future of Cuba from that ratio.

Dean Rusk was somewhat more cautious. A transcript of his morning press conference is now passing around the Newsroom. It is incredible how many cigarettes are being smoked, how many ashtrays not emptied, how many mimeographed papers of every description end up on the floor. We Agency hands are normally the neatest people in America, but the tension of these last few days has extorted a species of excretion from our nerves. A gray excretion, be it said. All is gray—the news itself, the cigarette ash, the smoke, the detritus on the floor, the gray footprints on the fallen paper. Yes, we exude information as fast as we receive it.

         

Q: There is a very puzzling case of this pilot who landed in Miami after saying he had defected from the Cuban Air Force. Castro has challenged us to produce him. Why do we not allow the press to see this man? Is the Immigration Service making policy for the State Department?

RUSK: I think this is a question which started as one on the Immigration Service and became one on Cuba. I would not wish to answer that question this morning.

Q: If the rebels succeed in establishing a solid foothold in Cuba, would we be prepared to consider or to grant diplomatic recognition?

RUSK: That is a question for the future into which I can’t go this morning.

Q: Mr. Secretary, I will get off Cuba.

RUSK: Thank you. (laughter)

         

Others, however, are not obliging the matter so quickly. Crowds, rocks, and smashed windows at the U.S. Information Agency in Bogota; tear gas employed in Caracas against an unruly demonstration. Izvestia reports “alarming news.” I skim statements by foreign ministers in London, Paris, Rome, Bonn, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Peking, New Delhi, Kinshasa. More mimeos for the floor. Outside on Ohio Drive one can see the Monday-afternoon traffic going by. Motor launch passengers pass on the Potomac. At this moment, we might be the most important office in Washington, yet we are relatively idle. I feel hollow, exalted, twisted by caffeine, angry, and full of a most peculiar, even an alienated sentiment—I am a participant in history as it is being made, but only as a spear carrier playing his own small anxious part in the opera.

         

I cannot rid myself of a small sense of outrage as I read early editions of the evening newspapers. They are not responsible! The rumors printed in small type leap out at me like headlines:

         

CUBAN NAVY IN REVOLT

INVADERS HIT BEACHES IN FOUR OF CUBA’S SIX PROVINCES

RAUL CASTRO CAPTURED

THOUSANDS OF POLITICAL PRISONERS FREED

CASTRO READY TO FLEE CUBA

         

Outrageous rumors daring to appear virtually as facts. I feel righteous that I am in Intelligence. At least we lie with some finesse. Then I think of our bulletins for the Cuban Revolutionary Council. That is not Intelligence. I hate Hunt for a moment, as if he is responsible for traducing me into propaganda. I realize that my nerves are living in two places at once. I had thought I would be in Opa-Locka by now and on the beachhead tomorrow; I am still in a consortium of stale armpits. Is anything so stale as exhausted deodorant? The gray excreta of our nerves spews onto the trays and the floor.

         

3:30 A.M., April 18, 1961

Battles at Playa Larga and San Blas go on through the night. Castro’s troops reached the front at 3:00 P.M., twelve hours ago, and heavy action ensued. Reports seem to confirm that his men were mangled in the first attacks. Now the Brigade is under heavy artillery and tank fire and is answering with its own tanks, 4.2-inch mortars, and white phosphorus shells. The claim is that massive casualties are being inflicted. I cannot sleep. The battle sounds epic.

         

3:44 A.M., April 18, 1961

Unable to sleep, I listen to Radio Swan. An hour later, a transcript comes in of their broadcast to the Cuban underground. It may be worth entering in this journal. What the hell; Hunt, Phillips, and I worked on it hoping to inspire fear in all the Fidelistas who might be listening.

“Now is the precise moment for you to take up strategic positions that control roads and railroads. Take prisoners or shoot those who refuse to obey your orders! Comrades of the Navy, .  .  . secure your post in the Navy of Free Cuba. Comrades of the Air Force, listen closely! All planes must stay on the ground. See that no Fidelist plane takes off. Destroy its radios; destroy its tail; break its instruments; puncture its fuel tanks! Freedom and honor await those who join us. Death will overtake the traitors who do not!”

         

6:31 A.M., April 18, 1961

More from Radio Swan:

“People of Havana, attention, people of Havana. Help the brave soldiers of the liberation army .  .  .. Today at 7:45 A.M., when we give the signal on this station, all the lights in your house should be turned on; all electrical appliances should be connected. Increase the load on the generators of the electric company! But do not worry, people of Havana, the liberation forces will recover the electrical plants and they can be placed in operation rapidly.”

         

7:00 A.M., April 18, 1961

The Brigade won the battle at Playa Larga, yet lost the ground. By all our reports, Castro’s casualties were high. His troops were obliged to attack along a road surrounded by swamp on either side. It sounds like an operation where one wounded human inches forward behind another, dead flesh a shield for bleeding flesh.

As I write the above sentence, I recognize that my senses are not wholly under control. I see myself in the wounded man pushing the dead man. I feel the dirty, intimate stickiness of blood.

Castro’s troops could not break through. In turn, Oliva’s Second Battalion has run out of ammunition. The Fifth Battalion, dragged ashore from the stove-in Houston, are without weapons. They never did join up with Second Battalion. A retreat has been ordered from Playa Larga to Girón. The fifty-mile-long beachhead is falling backward into a five-mile perimeter.

The worst news is that no new supplies came in last night from the sea. I must have gotten up four times during the night to read the cable traffic from Girón. It is confounding. The crews of the Caribe and the Atlántico must have been berserk with panic. The first ship is now 218 miles south of the Bay of Pigs and shows no sign of returning for supply operations. The Atlántico, a mere 110 miles south, is asking to be off-loaded into LCUs fifty miles from shore.

It seems the explosion of the Río Escondido was the local equivalent of an atom bomb going off. Huge mushroom of smoke. An end of the world boom heard thirty miles away. While much of the crew was rescued by the Blagar, that same demoralized crew is now paralyzing all action. While the Brigade lost most of its ammunition and communications when the Escondido went down, the Blagar has enough supplies to keep our Cubans fighting for another two days. If it can get them in. But the Blagar is crawling back to Girón. It will not reach the shore by dawn, and that means it will not be able to unload again today. The survivors of the Escondido have so infected the Blagar that its crew now threatens to stop the ship’s motors unless they are given American destroyer escort to shore. Since this is in negotiation (with the White House, I assume) they do permit the ship to return slowly.

I try not to sit in judgment. If I had been blown into the water, perhaps I could no longer control my will. The root of the problem with these mutinous crews goes right back, Phillips explains, to the way we obtained the boats. The García Line who rented them to us (offices in Havana, New York, and Houston) was not only a bona fide shipping firm but indeed the largest in Cuba. The owners’ decision to defect from Castro was doubtless not passed on to the crew who thought they were signing on for routine voyages.

         

later

The situation has become so acutely intolerable for Pepe San Román that he took off in one of his battered launches to scour the seas, looking to find a supply ship. Of course, from six miles out, which is as far as the launch, given its asthmatic motor, dared to go, he could do nothing but transmit code-name cries by radio: DOLORES, THIS IS BEACH, NEED YOU. AM TRYING TO FIND YOU. DOLORES, PLEASE ANSWER BEACH.

I couldn’t help observing that the text was as desperate as the notices in a personals classified.

By dawn it seems evident that we will not be able to supply the beachhead until tonight. In compensation, President Kennedy did agree during the night to allow six of the B-26s in Nicaragua to try a strike against the remaining planes in Castro’s air force.

We are, however, cursed. This morning, black, low-lying tropical clouds cover Havana’s airfields.

Of course, the fact that this flight was authorized after the same mission was vetoed on Sunday has put everyone in an ugly mood. “Irish Hamlet” may be the one epithet applied to Kennedy that is not too vicious to memorialize, and Cabell has hardly been seen on these premises since he paid that catastrophic visit on Sunday morning in golfing clothes. There is also some resentment of Bissell. The story, as it is coming out (and I have heard two virtually congruent versions from Cal and from David Phillips) is that when Bissell and Cabell went to Rusk’s office in the State Department on Sunday afternoon to argue for the need to reinstate the bombing raid, Rusk, obviously more concerned with our compromised situation at the UN, proceeded to call President Kennedy at Glen Ora. Over the telephone, he did give a fair presentation of Cabell and Bissell’s arguments on the need for a second air strike, but then told the President that he did not agree. Whereupon Kennedy said he would go along with Rusk, who now relayed this message to our officers, and pointed to the phone. Did they wish to speak to the President? They did not. Three days later, you can still hear the muttering at Quarters Eye. Of Cabell it was to be expected, but why had Bissell been silent?

I asked my father. He put a quick end to that subject. “Dickie was afraid,” said Cal, “that if he pushed too hard on the absolute necessity of a second air strike, Kennedy might reply, ‘If it hangs on that thin a thread, call it off.’” Cal gave me one wild look. “Every now and then in a man’s life,” he said, “one can have a little trouble with an erection. What’s the advised procedure? Get it in, boy, even if it’s only the tip. Then, pray to God for reinforcements. Please, God, just let an elephant step on my ass.”

How my father, son of the greatest headmaster St. Matthew’s ever had, developed his sexual view of the universe is to me, after eight years of living with the idea, the best single proof of the existence of Alpha and Omega.

         

3:00 P.M., April 18, 1961

Roberto Alejos’ brother, Carlos, the Guatemalan Ambassador, has just made a speech to the UN in answer to Cuba’s charges. As I watch on TV, Carlos Alejos says, most forcefully, that the troops who landed in Cuba, were not trained in Guatemala. His country, he solemnly states, is not about to allow its territory to be used for aggressive acts against fellow American republics.

I am overcome. In part, I must admit, it is with admiration. Large lies do have their own excitement. I much prefer a major mistruth in the name of a real purpose than all that pandering to Mothers of Miami and Caravans of Sorrow.

         

4:00 P.M., April 18, 1961

The front is relatively quiet this afternoon. Castro’s forces, a little more respectful after their mauling last night, are moving cautiously down the road from Playa Larga to Girón. At San Blas, on the eastern front, where equally heavy fighting took place yesterday, there has been some realignment of our troops. The Third Battalion, which went ashore with Pepe San Román at Girón and has seen no action so far, is moving over to the eastern front to relieve the paratroopers at San Blas. The Fourth Battalion, dispatched to Playa Larga yesterday in lieu of the half-drowned Fifth Battalion, has now been pulled back to cross over to the eastern flank. The Sixth Battalion, playing musical chairs with the Fourth, has shifted to the western end. It occurs to me that I have not accounted for the First Battalion. Then I realize they are the paratroopers. Yes, they are back taking a well-earned rest in Girón for a few hours. I think of beer bottles in cantinas, and men diving under tables when Castro’s planes come over. I have no idea if the image has any validity.

At TRAX, Pepe San Román impressed me as lean and lithe, with a small, pinched, totally consecrated face, utterly humorless. Whole determination to win. It was obvious he was altogether capable of sending men out to die since he had no doubt of his own ability to do so. Now he is at the edge of his temper.

         

BLAGAR: This is Task Force Commander. How are you, Pepe?

PEPE: Son of a bitch. Where have you been, you son of a bitch? You have abandoned us.

BLAGAR: I know you have your problems. I’ve had mine.

GRAY: (an Agency man on the Blagar): Pepe, we will never abandon you. If things are very rough there, we will go in and evacuate you.

PEPE: I will not be evacuated. We will fight to the end here.

GRAY: What do you need?

PEPE: Weapons, bullets, communications, medicine, food.

GRAY: We will get you all these things tonight.

PEPE: That’s what you said yesterday and you did not come.

5:02 P.M., Tuesday, April 18, 1961

Cal tells me, via his State Department leads, that Khrushchev sent a strong note to Kennedy. He has part of the text and shows it to me.

         

Written at an hour of anxiety fraught with danger to world peace: It is not a secret to anyone that the armed bands which invaded Cuba have been trained, equipped, and armed in the United States of America. There should be no misunderstanding of our position: We shall render the Cuban people and their government all necessary assistance in beating back the armed attack on Cuba. Sincerely interested in a relaxation of international tension, we shall, if others aggravate it, reply in full measure.

         

Kennedy’s answer is available to us. He is going to say that in case of outside intervention, the U.S. will feel obliged to honor immediately its hemispherical treaty obligations.

The fish is red!

         

8:00 P.M., APRIL 18, 1961

A message from the Blagar: PROCEEDING BLUE BEACH WITH 3 LCUS. IF LOW JET COVER NOT FURNISHED AT FIRST LIGHT BELIEVE WE WILL LOSE ALL SHIPS. REQUEST IMMEDIATE REPLY.

12:30 A.M., April 19, 1961

The Blagar waits for an answer even as we have been waiting all night. It has taken this long for Bissell, General Lemnitzer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Burke, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara to get a meeting underway with the President. Very much in the way was a formal reception at the White House tonight. The President and First Lady have to greet his Cabinet, members of Congress, and guests.

No sooner has the President left the party for the meeting, however, than one of my father’s contacts, a Congressman present at the White House reception, reaches Cal to tell him about it. I have always known that my father is, by half, a gregarious man, but I had never realized until the last two weeks of bunking with him how many tips, leads, sources, feeds, ties, and links he has to Congress and Departments of the Government. Where Hugh Montague is devious and full of pressure points he can tap, my father treats it all as a social matter. He is full of friendly curiosity, or so, at least, he presents himself, and given his personal force, which always leaves you feeling as if you’re setting more weight on one foot than the other (for he is certainly capable of tilting you), people do come forward with answers to his inquiries. Tonight, from the mouth of this minor Congressman, who is delighted to be able to get through to a senior officer in CIA, Cal has learned the following: The President, immaculate in white tie and tails, and Jackie Kennedy on his arm in a pink evening gown, came down the main stairs to the ballroom at 10:15 P.M. while the Marine band in dress red uniforms played nothing less than “Mr. Wonderful.” The President and the First Lady had a dance looking “elegant as champagne,” then mixed with the guests until close to midnight, whereupon apologies were made, and the President left the party, went to his office, and now is closeted with the high officials who are going to help him to decide the fate of the Brigade. Cal informs me that Bissell has some daring and wholehearted goals to shoot for at this point. My guess is that Bissell has been in contact with Allen Dulles in Puerto Rico. According to Cal, Admiral Burke and General Lemnitzer in company with Bissell will ask Kennedy for the following: (1) Complete air support from the U.S. Navy carrier Essex, now twenty miles off the coast of Girón; and (2) Bite the bullet! Put ashore the 1500-man Marine battalion stationed on the Essex. In short, the tip is in; reinforce it. Bissell and Company will argue that this is the only way for the U.S. to save face.

I can’t get over the picture I hold of the President coming down the main stairway of the White House with his wife (who in my mind now looks more and more like you, Kittredge). It might as well be a film by George Cukor, or Rouben Mamoulian. High intrigue cum white tie and tails. Of course, I haven’t really slept in two and a half nights. My mind leaps like a fly with one wing.

         

2:30 A.M., April 19, 1961

About a quarter of an hour ago, Bissell came back to Quarters Eye. Needless to say, we all gathered about him. He looked tired to me, but spoke as if much has been gained. The President, he said, had authorized six jet fighters from the Essex to provide air cover over the beach from 6:30 A.M. to 7:30 A.M. They would be there to protect the B-26s from Castro’s fighters. While our jet fighters were under orders not to be the first to fire, they were now authorized to reply. With such protection, the Brigade’s B-26s ought to be able to cause serious damage to Castro’s troops and tanks at the battlefront. During that hour, the Barbara J., the Blagar, and the LCUs can also unload their supplies at Girón.

I, knowing how much military aid was asked for, and how little has been granted, am surprised at the enthusiasm with which the news is received. Perhaps it is no more than the power to be electrified by some kind of positive response when fatigue and despair have hollowed one out, but you can feel the difference. Even Cal is not without enthusiasm. “We asked for a lot, and didn’t get it, but those were bargaining chips. When Admiral Burke spoke of sending in the Marines, Kennedy had to offer something.”

“Is it enough?”

“Well, Kennedy can’t pretend he’s a virgin anymore.”

         

3:30 A.M., April 19, 1961

I walk around with a knot of anxiety as large as an apple in the long road of my esophagus. It is all very well to send B-26s in under an umbrella of American jet fighters, but what Kennedy may not know, and Bissell did not necessarily tell him, is that nine of the sixteen B-26s with which we began, are down; most of the remaining bombers are battered. Since Sunday night, the pilots have been up in the air almost constantly. What with seven hours for each round trip and at least two trips a day, they are exhausted. In fact, some of them, not believing in our promise to give jet support, now refuse to take off. Someone, obviously without authorization, must have promised jet support yesterday that did not materialize.

Cal has also informed me that two of the four planes going out on this mission are actually being flown by Americans, two to each plane. Four Americans, contract pilots, any one of whom, if he parachutes out and is captured, can sink us internationally. Moreover, one of the Cuban pilots on this mission has served notice that he will not take his B-26 past Grand Cayman Island, 175 miles south of Girón, unless he is met by fighter cover.

Well, he will not be met. Fighter cover doesn’t begin to show until they are much nearer the Essex. In any event, it’s academic. That same pilot has just radioed in that his right engine is gone and he has to turn back. We are down to three planes. I try to conceive of how difficult it must be to fly dangerous missions once you have lost the belief that your side can win. Your brave actions must begin to seem suicidal. Valhalla is for victorious warriors.

I am by now in that state of mental disarray where simple computations have to be made over and over again. If the planes are to arrive at 6:30 over the beach, then they must leave at 3:10 A.M. our time, or 2:10 A.M. Nicaraguan time.

Since Bissell only returned at 2:45 A.M., I am trying to calculate how the B-26s can possibly get to the beachhead on time. Then I realize (while imbibing all the spiritual ecstacy of an epiphany opening its gates) that even if Bissell did not leave the White House before 2:30 A.M., the decision to accompany the B-26s with Essex jet fighters had to have been reached earlier. The order probably went out at 1:45 A.M. So, of course, the planes had time to take off.

A simple calculation, but I am perspiring, and feel beatific from the ardors of the calculation. If three nights of three hours of sleep has done this to me, how well will I function under combat? I do not want to lose respect for myself, but I feel drawn too fine. By the look of everyone around me, I am not certain they are faring better. It is my hope that real combat delivers energies that staff work leaches out.

         

6:30 A.M., April 19, 1961

All of us are ill. The three B-26s, flying in prearranged radio silence, appeared promptly over the beaches of Girón at 5:30 A.M., our time. Since the support from the Essex was not due till 6:30, the Navy jets were still being brought up to the carrier deck about the time Castro’s T-33 trainer jets came along to shoot down two of the three B-26s. The survivor, seriously crippled, managed to get away, and, at last report, is skittering back to Nicaragua on one engine while staying a hundred feet above the water. Naturally, none of our supply boats were approaching the shore at 5:30, and no ammunition has been landed. The Essex jets, which were only empowered to protect the B-26s from attack 6:30 A.M. to 7:30 A.M., will not even take off now.

Everyone is trying to determine how the error was made, but a wall of obfuscation has come up over this point.

I have a theory. Assuming other minds have been stretched into skews of calculation comparable to mine, someone in Quarters Eye must have sent a message for the B-26s to be over the beach at 5:30 their time, and something happened to the possessive to make it come out in Puerto Cabezas as their time in Cuba, or 4:30 A.M. Nicaraguan time. Consequently, the planes took off at 1:10 A.M. Nicaraguan time, or 2:10 A.M. our time, and what with radio silence, no one knew.

This is my explanation. I have heard five others. The most convincing is that Bissell and Admiral Burke never checked with each other, so separate orders were transmitted to Happy Valley and to the carrier fleet. Cal whispers that the Navy is always on Greenwich Mean Time and we are sometimes on Standard Time. Oh, God! I can feel in me—I must admit it—a vein of pure nastiness. It is taking a lively, private pleasure in all these massive military mentalities failing to anticipate the one crucial trouble spot. The pleasure whips through me as fast as a squirrel crossing an open yard, then shame at myself wells up with more volume than I expected; behind it flows the woe of all that is being lost, and I am relieved to know that I am human, loyal to the team, and not a monster after all.

         

7:30 A.M., April 19, 1961

On the western front, a few miles to the west of Girón, Castro’s forces are attacking. Also on the San Blas road. Troops pressing from the east. To the south is the Caribbean.

         

10:30 A.M., April 19, 1961

This journal may no longer be necessary. The messages sent to the Blagar by Pepe San Román tell most of it.

         

6:12 A.M. Enemy on trucks coming from Red Beach are right now 3 km from Blue Beach. Pepe.

8:15 A.M. Situation critical. Need urgently air support. Pepe.

9:25 A.M. Two thousand militia attacking Blue Beach from east and west. Need close air support immediately. Pepe.

         

On it goes. Obviously, no one explained to Pepe San Román that the jet support was only for the B-26s. In their absence, nothing.

1:30 P.M., April 19, 1961

More messages. “Out of ammo.” “Enemy closing in.”

         

3:30 P.M., April 19, 1961

They are still holding. I don’t know what last negotiations have taken place between Quarters Eye, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House, but the Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic, that is, CINCLANT, has been instructed to bring off an evacuation. In force, if necessary. A copy manages to make its way among us. (Two days ago, such breach of security would have been unheard of—I am beginning to understand why old OSS men are the way they are. Security is for cold wars, but combat calls for mutual participation.) I hardly feel as if I am in the CIA any more.

CINCLANT was told: HAVE DESTROYERS TAKE BRIGADE PERSONNEL OFF BEACH TO LIMIT CAPTURE. DESTROYERS AUTHORIZED RETURN FIRE IF FIRED UPON DURING THIS HUMANITARIAN MISSION.

Two destroyers will lead the Blagar, the Barbara J., the Atlántico, and the LCUs in to shore. The only trouble is that after the aborted attempt this morning, the supply ships dispersed again and are now about fifty miles out to sea.

At this moment, I am put to work on the last communiqué, Number Six, to be issued by Lem Jones Associates. I am given the guidelines by Hunt and Phillips who, I realize, are even more emotionally decomposed than myself. Decomposed? Or is there a brushfire burning within? I feel as if we are all in danger of being overrun by incoherence. I am happy to have a task to perform. I feel like a fire fighter.

         

4:20 P.M., April 19, 1961

BULLETIN #6, CRC, CARE OF LEM JONES ASSOCIATES. TO BE RELEASED UPON NOTICE TONIGHT:

         

The Revolutionary Council wishes to make prompt and emphatic statement in the face of recent astonishing public announcements from uninformed sources. The recent landings in Cuba have been constantly, although inaccurately, described as an invasion. It was, in fact, a landing of supplies and support for our patriots who have been fighting in Cuba for months and was numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands. The action taken allowed the major portion of our landing party to reach the Escambray Mountains.

         

I had difficulties writing the paragraph. Three times I misspelled “uninformed” as “uniformed.” Mental fatigue takes on its images. I am in a dungeon, and a woman with an enormous vagina is waiting outside my door. I know she is enormous because her mighty thighs are spread and Hunt and Phillips are stroking her with a giant feather. Her greed to be stroked is insatiable. She has no interest where the feather went one minute ago. She wants to know: Where is it now?

I begin to laugh. We are the gnomes who seek to please the great American public. To my horror, I am suddenly close to throwing up. Then I realize why. From the stalls around me comes the odor of vomit. My nostrils are so acute that I can not only smell Scotch and vodka, but am convinced that the metallic odor of each pocket flask is in the spew, and so is the pharmacological smell of Dexedrine. We’ve been spinning along on the stuff for days. I have an intimation that this is how one feels when a marriage is breaking up.

When I come out of the loo, I am assigned to write a few vagaries to take the place of the radio broadcasts we had prepared to send into Cuba after early victories. I compose it now: “The fish are brightly spotted. Javier is carrying his hoe. The whale will spout on the full of the moon. The grass is waving. The seed is dispersed.”

There will be no argument over these choices.

         

5:00 P.M., April 19, 1961

I read a last message. It came via the Blagar at 4:30 P.M. I HAVE NOTHING TO FIGHT WITH. AM TAKING TO THE WOODS. I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU. PEPE.

         

5:30 P.M., April 19, 1961

This was followed by a transcript of a conversation which concluded at 4:40 P.M.:

         

GRAY: Hold on. We’re coming. We’re coming with everything.

PEPE: How long?

GRAY: Three to four hours.

PEPE: You won’t be here on time. Farewell, friends. I am breaking this radio right now.

         

It is believed that Pepe San Román, Artime, and their staff are heading into the Zapata swamps. Thirty or forty of them may succeed in making their way into the Escambray Mountains. Like Castro before them, they can build a mighty guerrilla movement. Or so, I suspect, goes the thinking of Artime and San Román.

         

6:00 P.M., April 19, 1961

Men are starting to leave Quarters Eye. Others remain. Most are not needed any longer. Nonetheless, they remain, as I do. Perhaps we have some elusive quality in common. I begin to think we must all be the sort of people who stay up till three in the morning listening to repetitive news broadcasts about a catastrophe, hoping to hear one new detail.

Indeed, one new detail does arrive. This Wednesday morning, the exile leaders threatened to smash their way out of their barracks. Bender succeeded in convincing them that the bad publicity would be a media bloodbath. Everyone will lose dignity. To keep them placated, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Adolf Berle flew down this morning. Now, word comes back that the Council is in the air, and will land soon in Washington where they will be taken to see President Kennedy. Several of the exile leaders (Cardona, Barbaro, and Maceo) have sons fighting in the Brigade. Others have brothers or nephews. All are now dead or captured. In this swamp of desolation, I feel something positive for Kennedy. It is a decent act, I decide, to meet them at this time.

Dick Bissell comes up to the newsroom, and tells us that the exile leaders are now in a safe house near Washington, D.C. “Will you,” asks Bissell of Hunt, “escort them to the White House?”

“I can’t face them,” says Howard. “They trusted me and I can’t face them.”

Frank Bender will accompany them instead. I think of wildly corrupt and wholly compromised Toto Barbaro engaged in small talk with the President. What does it matter?

Phillips slips a word into my ear. “I don’t think it was the Cubans that Howard can’t face, but the President. I would bet Howard wishes Kennedy six feet under and I don’t know if I disagree with him.”

         

The last teletype I read before leaving Quarters Eye was a wire service pickup of a story in the Miami News. “Rebel invaders claimed today to have driven fifty miles and scored their first big victory in the battle to topple Fidel Castro.”

Well, at 9 P.M., Bulletin q6 will go out from Lem Jones Associates to confirm that nonexistent fact.

I send out last instructions to Happy Valley. Tomorrow, one of the remaining B-26s is to take our undistributed leaflets hundreds of miles out to sea, and dump them.

So ends this journal which I tried to present in a nondramatic style appropriate to the posthumous tone. Now that I am instead alive, I will transfer all of these pages from Cal’s safe deposit box to mine.