Subject: Bay Of Pigs Site Blamed Date: Tue, 07 Jan 1997 10:30:05 -0800 From: Debra Conway Organization: JFK Lancer Productions & Publications Newsgroups: startext.jfk Published Sunday, January 5, 1997, in the Miami Herald Site change called fatal to invasion. Bay of Pigs a bad choice, planner says Did site doom Bay of Pigs? By DON BOHNING Herald Staff Writer Breaking a 35-year silence, the chief of the CIA's planning staff for military aspects of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion says the effort was doomed from the day, a month before the operation, when President Kennedy ordered the landing site changed to one that would attract less attention. Jack Hawkins, a retired Marine Corps colonel, said in an interview that after he and his staff drafted the new plan -- shifting the landing from a point on Cuba's south coast near the city of Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs about 80 miles farther west -- he had ``decided this plan has no chance. It is going to fail.'' He said efforts to convince superiors of that were of no avail. What eventually became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion began in January 1960, when the Eisenhower administration decided that Cuban leader Fidel Castro should be ousted, an effort Kennedy continued after becoming president. It evolved from sending in teams of agents to develop resistance, into a small guerrilla-type infiltration of 200 to 300 men to join existing guerrillas, and, finally, into a full-scale landing at the Bay of Pigs by a CIA-sponsored Cuban exile brigade of about 1,500 on April 15, 1961. The hope was not for Castro's immediate overthrow but to seize a beachhead, generate morale problems and defections within the Castro forces and eventually provoke a general uprising. Instead, the landing ended in disaster when B-26 air strikes reduced by Kennedy failed to knock out Castro's air force. Castro forces captured 1,189 exile invaders, 114 others died and 150 were unable to land or never shipped out. The captured invaders were ransomed by the Kennedy administration for $53 million in food and medicine. They returned to Miami on Dec. 23, 1962. The paramilitary staff, which Hawkins headed, was responsible for organizing, training and equipping the Cuban exile brigade and preparing the plans for its landing in Cuba. Although staff personnel changed at times, said Hawkins, they averaged six U.S military and 18 CIA officers. Hawkins reported directly to Jake Esterline, the CIA's project chief for the invasion. The interview with The Herald was the first Hawkins has given to a daily newspaper journalist since the Bay of Pigs, although he wrote a first-person article in the year-end edition of The National Review, a conservative journal published by William Buckley. In the wide-ranging December interview at his home in Fredericksburg, Va., Hawkins also: Questioned Kennedy's commitment to the Cuba project initiated under President Eisenhower, based in part on Hawkins' observations at Oval Office meetings. Speculated that the lack of commitment may have been partially due to parallel assassination plots against Castro, utilizing the Mafia, that had been undertaken by the CIA in 1960 separately from the Bay of Pigs and accelerated by the Kennedy administration. Bay of Pigs planners -- with the exception of the late Richard Bissell, the CIA's director of clandestine services and the man in charge of the invasion -- were unaware of the plots until they became public knowledge years later. Said that he and project director Esterline learned only recently from declassified documents that Bissell had agreed with Kennedy to cut the number of CIA-supplied B-26 planes from 16 -- considered the minimum necessary to knock out Castro's air force on the ground -- to eight, but he did not tell them of the decision until days later, on the eve of the first air attack before the landing. Placed the primary fault for the effort's failure ``at Bissell's door.