06/09/09 – Howard Jones – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
We're also streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
I'm happy to introduce our final guest on the show today, Howard Jones.
And if I click the right tab, I really need more arms to do this job, I'm telling you.
Here we go.
He is a professor of history at the University of Alabama and is the author of this excellent book I've just finished reading called The Bay of Pigs.
A little personal story, not that it's really important or anything, but when I was a little kid my dad had a giant bookshelf in the living room and one of the most prominent books up there was a big yellow book called Bay of Pigs and it always stood out to my eyes and I remember asking my dad about it when I was very young.
I've always kind of known a little bit about this story my whole life long, but this book has really helped to flesh out my understanding and so I'm very happy to welcome Dr. Howard Jones to the show.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thank you so much for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you on the show here today.
And before we get into the Bay of Pigs story here, real quick, I saw in here that you had also written a book about the ship Amistad, right?
Is that right?
Yes, yes I did.
What's the name of it?
Is that the title?
It's called Mutiny on the Amistad.
Mutiny on the Amistad.
And is the movie that I've seen, which is all I know about that story, is that based on your work?
The movie is based on the story and I was invited out and managed to meet Spielberg and watch him do a couple scenes and so forth.
So I guess you would call an unofficial consultant on the set and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life, as you can imagine.
I bet.
And I guess he must have read all your work as preparation for writing the movie, yeah?
I would hope so.
Well, it's really an excellent movie for people who haven't seen it.
My favorite part, actually, is the scene where the Spanish ambassador is telling, I think it's President Monroe, that, well, why don't you just fire the judge and replace him?
And the President's saying, well, unfortunately we have this independent judiciary thing and I can't.
That's a real pain.
I've always wanted to get that sound bite to play on the show, actually.
That is highly relevant, to say the least.
Now let's get to this.
Regime change in Cuba.
The policy of David Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in the 50s and early 60s.
How's that working out?
One can just look around and see the lessons that the Bay of Pigs offers and so many lessons that the people afterward have not followed.
That's about all I can say about it.
The very idea of intervening in another country's domestic affairs expecting to find a very simple solution, step in, do the job, and leave without any repercussions is just beyond me.
But it's been a policy that was there before the Bay of Pigs, I think probably reached its zenith during that time and has been used several times since in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, you name it.
Yeah, Nicaragua, Panama.
It looks so easy when you first look at it that you can tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.
But when you get in, there are all kinds of problems that unfold and I don't think we've ever really understood them.
Well, and really the rise of Fidel Castro was blowback against the American dictator Batista anyway, right?
Yes, it was.
The Eisenhower administration had committed itself militarily and economically to the Batista regime and my understanding is that the very few at the top had quite a bit and the great masses below had next to nothing.
There certainly was a middle class and so forth, but there was no attempt to do anything for these people.
And as long as he kept ironclad rule, things went well.
But Fidel Castro, a charismatic young lawyer, built up a guerrilla force, started out very small in the mountains, and then eventually grew to such a crescendo that there was no way to stop him in 1959.
And it just absolutely perplexed the Eisenhower administration because the man was really relatively unknown to the Ike administration and he didn't know what to do.
Richard Nixon had an interview with him and came away convinced that if he wasn't a communist, he was leaning in that direction.
Alan Dulles, who was clearly the icon of the period after Guatemala and Iran and so forth, came forth and said that he could work out a plan to unseat this person.
The idea was to eliminate him, which was clearly a euphemism for assassination, all of this part of plausible deniability and so forth.
And he told the president that the plan we have now is better than we had in Guatemala and it will be an ironclad success.
Yeah, like Guatemala was an ironclad success, right?
Absolutely.
Wouldn't three-quarters of a million people were killed in the Civil War that took place after the coup there?
Yes, definitely.
It's something that people don't look at.
They see the beginning and they see the guy come in that we supposedly consider the good guy and don't look at all the other problems that come from it.
But didn't John F. Kennedy in your book, isn't it Kennedy that's quoted as saying, well, you know, look, we took Guatemala, we lost all of South America.
Yeah, that's a good point.
So he recognized this principle of blowback and you can't always get what you want and all these kinds of things to begin with.
It clearly is something that he wrestled with and such an intelligent man and it still just confuses me so much trying to understand what went on in his mind to lead him to support a plan such as this.
I mean, there are all kinds of theories.
Arthur Schlesinger talked continually about John F. Kennedy having the Midas touch, that no matter what happened, it ended up working out.
There was, in the Eisenhower administration, the feeling that I'm sure carried over under Kennedy that there's this American good luck, ingenuity, innovative genius, that somehow it will work out despite all the odds.
And I guess Dean Acheson probably said it better than anyone else when in the midst of all this going back and forth about whether Kennedy should support the Eisenhower idea of regime change, Acheson was walking in the Rose Garden with Kennedy and said, well, how many men does Castro have?
Well, he has, we estimate, 20,000, 25,000 or whatever.
And how many do you have, Mr. President?
And the answer was, oh, around 1,500.
And basically what he said was it doesn't take a mathematical genius to realize these are not good odds, Mr. President.
And clearly it just simply wasn't going to work out.
Well, and Dean Acheson was no dove.
No, no way at all.
He would have, he said it.
I don't need to add to that.
You know, I just saw a thing, it was called the Jim Garrison tapes, and it was pretty extended interviews of Jim Garrison, the whole John Kennedy conspiracies and all that stuff.
And the whole first section of it was about how John Kennedy, the poor guy, he was just completely hoodwinked into this thing by the CIA, and they just lied to him from beginning to end, and they suckered him into it, and he never forgave them.
And that seems to be kind of the myth of the Bay of Pigs, is that poor John Kennedy, you know, it's not his fault.
No question.
And many people have said that he should have known, if nothing else, just common sense, that when you try to invade an area such as that, and you're carrying 1,500 people, you're trying to carry off a nighttime amphibious operation, which the best World War II strategists refused to do.
And this kind of thing is built for experts, and even the experts know that it's very difficult to carry it off.
And you don't have any experts, and you have a small number, and you have no air cover.
And all these things came together, and it would seem that anyone with any kind of common sense would realize the odds are against you, that this just cannot work out.
And yet he went ahead with it.
I'm talking with Dr. Howard Jones from the University of Alabama about his book The Bay of Pigs, and I guess it was not too long ago that Dick Cheney's spokeswoman was revealed to not have any idea what the Cuban Missile Crisis was, and I guess if she doesn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis is, maybe it's a bad premise to start this interview based on the idea that everyone understands what the Bay of Pigs even was at all.
You mentioned an amphibious landing at night there.
Tell us the story in a nutshell of what we're even talking about, really, with the Bay of Pigs, an attempted overthrow of the Castro regime here.
Well, the Eisenhower administration had decided that Castro should be eliminated, and the plan started out, of course, it was turned over to the CIA, because the CIA was two for two, and this was Guatemala and Iran, and had done fairly well in Laos and various other places, so it was the one.
And so the CIA was given almost total control of it.
The military was basically shut out.
Well, it started out to be a small-scale guerrilla operation.
The idea was to infiltrate Cuba and then pick up the support from the vast numbers of people in Cuba that we all assumed were anti-Castro, which was a major error, to put it mildly.
And then it grew like Topsy.
It grew to 50 to 60 to 100 to 300, and then more and more people volunteered, and the number had become 1,500.
Well, when Kennedy came in, this kind of passed right into his hands, and the plan was to land at Trinidad, which was a populated town of about 18,000, filled with anti-Castro people, close to the mountains, which would provide an excellent refuge, very good landing docks, all kinds of things that work in favor of an invasion, it seemed.
Kennedy didn't like it, though, because it was too much like World War II's Normandy invasion, that there would be no way we could hide our hand in it.
There would be no chance for plausible deniability.
So he told Richard Bissell, who was the number three man in the CIA, considered to be the smartest man in Washington, but not with a lick of common sense, told him that you've got to find a different place.
It's got to be a quiet nighttime landing.
And so Bissell, in less than three or four days, came up with a place called Zapata.
Well, Zapata is a swamp.
It's known as the Great Swamp of the Caribbean.
It has everything in the world you can imagine in this swamp, from mangrove trees to reptiles to every bug known to mankind, all kinds of things that really prevented any chance at all from making a major landing.
And on top of that, the mountains that were close to Trinidad, by moving the invasion site to the Bay of Pigs, now placed them 80-plus miles away, and there was no escape hatch, no refuge, and no place at all for them to get out if it didn't work out on the beaches.
Well, when they landed, it was supposed to be a surprise landing.
And on top of this, the CIA had engineered a plan where assassins were to remove Castro from the scene on the eve of the invasion, so that this would instill a real energy in the people to rise against Castro.
Well, that didn't take place.
The people who had been in favor of Castro had been clapped into prisons by Castro, because everyone in the world, practically, it seemed, knew this thing was coming.
And so Castro was ready.
And so the result was he had militiamen, he had regulars, he had everything you can imagine that greatly outnumbered the force hitting the beach.
Then the other problem with it was that the air cover that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and others had considered absolutely crucial to any kind of landing, particularly an amphibious landing and at night, air cover had to be there.
There had to be softening up airstrikes two days before the landing on April 17, 1961, and then there would be air cover on the day of the landing.
Well, Kennedy had gotten concerned about our hand being shown and had called off everything.
And so not only was this an amphibious landing, it was one without any kind of air cover.
And Castro had probably around 18 craft, including a half-dozen T-33 jets, which the Joint Chiefs and others had said, oh, don't worry about them, they're not effective.
Well, they had mounted some machine guns and strafing material and so forth, and they were highly effective.
And the result was, from the Cuban invaders' point of view, an absolute disaster.
From the point of view of Castro, a major victory.
From the point of view of the Kennedy administration, a humiliation catastrophe of the first proportion.
And it really is interesting the way the story plays out in the book.
If it's not about all the people dying, it would be a comedy of errors, where you have all these know-it-alls with their brilliant plans, and yet none of them are talking to each other, none of them really know what's going on.
And throughout the whole thing, the president is taking his scalpel and he's knifing all of the effective parts of the plan out of the plan, and he wants to be able to deny an invasion and overthrow of the government off the coast there.
Absolutely.
Which is preposterous, which is, it wasn't deniable at all anyway.
Well, McGeorge Bundy tried to tell him that, and so did members of the Joint Chiefs, that there is no way you can deny it.
The best thing to do is go in and do it.
And if you do it, do it well.
Don't go in halfway, because it just won't work.
It's like trying to go over Niagara Falls and halfway.
Well, of course, at this point, we're caught up in their argument about how best to be an aggressive imperial force in the world, which kind of begs the question and that kind of thing.
But it was very important to me, as you point out in the book, that Castro, as much as he had proven that he was not just going to be the next Batista puppet of ours, he did not declare himself officially a communist and allied with Moscow until after the Bay of Pigs.
Yes.
Yes.
If anything, we pushed him into that position.
No question.
And he declared himself a Marxist, and there's the spot that is now a monument in Cuba as a result of this.
And it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, is what the CIA and the administration had carried out.
Well, and you also say in the book that they resolved, because of the absolute humiliation here, that we have to stand up stronger in Vietnam and in Africa, and we have to be harsher Cold Warriors elsewhere in the world to make up for the embarrassment at the Bay of Pigs.
Yes.
And another myth that has come out of this is that Kennedy learned a great deal.
And he certainly did.
He learned a few things, not as much as he should have.
But the whole idea is that he learned that he cannot counter Castro, and so therefore he has to work toward an accommodation.
And so on the eve of his death, people will lament his death in many ways, and one of which is that we might have carried out something with Castro.
Well, the documents show that rather than the Kennedy administration pulling back, Robert Kennedy became obsessed.
In fact, some said he was like a mad dog on a chain during this time, obsessed with a program called Operation Mongoose, which was run by a former CIA operative and others who were trying to undermine Castro by any means possible, which clearly implies assassination as a last resort.
And not only that, John F. Kennedy had approved a plan set forth by a very energetic Joint Chiefs, trying to make up for the bad things that had happened to them in the course of all this, by setting up a plan for invading Havana.
And the idea was that 60,000 ground forces, after a marine force and naval force had pummeled the area, would land, take over Cuba, and win a war very quickly.
Well, and all, importantly, based on a pretext.
And it's a very interesting James Bamford story about Operation Northwoods.
The Lemitzer plan to, if John Glenn's rocket had blown up, they were going to blame that on Castro.
Or they even contemplated hijackings and blowing up of airplanes and all these things, and blaming it on Castro.
Yes.
And one of the, to me, most fascinating parts and tragic parts is that, within the first week of the Kennedy administration, the President, and there's no question that he knew all about this, approved McGeorge Bundy's talking with the CIA.
And McGeorge Bundy, of course, National Security Affairs Advisor, the direct liaison with the CIA, called the CIA twice within the first week of the Kennedy administration, and asked Richard Bissell and others there to establish an executive action capability within the CIA.
And that was to set up an actual process by which the administration would be able to assassinate troublesome state leaders, such as Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, and certainly Castro.
And this was supposed to be very, obviously, hush-hush.
And the way plausible deniability worked was you don't say the word assassination.
You don't write it.
You don't talk about anything like that.
You can use euphemisms in big cabinet meetings and so forth, but never use the word.
And so one thing you definitely don't do is write it down.
Well, when Richard Helms authorized an internal inquiry into the CIA, and it was supposed to be kept secret, and it has just become public not too many years ago, which is a wealth of information in there, the whole idea was that it was to be kept secret.
And when I was going through some CIA materials that were supposed to have been destroyed by Richard Helms' order, I came across a scrappy piece of paper in which it was in the file of William Harvey, who was like the gun-slinging desperado who does all the scut work for the CIA, the type that I'm talking about.
And he had taken notes on a meeting discussing the process of executive action.
And if you want what I would call a smoking gun, when you read down his notes, which I have copies of, he has written the words scratched on the side of a scrappy piece of paper, never use word assassination.
And what boggles my mind is not only did he not destroy it, as Helms said, why?
What would be going on in his mind that he would need to write that down?
And besides that, all throughout the book, and in different places, you have all kinds of euphemisms on the record that clearly refer to assassination.
Yes, no question.
Liquidate, remove, eliminate, the list just goes on and on.
Wink, a nod, all kinds of things.
Until finally, Robert McNamara, and you probably remember this, Robert McNamara finally exploded in a meeting and said that we need to assassinate him.
And, oh boy, the place just dropped, as you can imagine.
And he got bawled out twice by John McCone, who was now the director of the CIA.
He had taken Alan Dulles' place, and he was embarrassed by it.
Well, and speaking of Alan Dulles, I don't really know, how hard do you think he took being fired or having to take the fall for this thing?
I read his interview at the John F. Kennedy Library, and of course he had a different picture.
He said that I had told the president that in a year or so I was going to retire anyway, and it was clear that Richard Bissell was going to be the heir apparent, and all that kind of thing.
And so he therefore was not fired.
Well, that's just a face-saving measure.
Kennedy exploded about the CIA, swore that he would like, in fact he told his brother, to rip the CIA apart into a thousand pieces and let it just blow away in the wind.
And that really unsettled the CIA.
And then he also referred to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military, all those guys wearing their fruit salad on the fronts of their shirts and all this kind of thing.
He was not going to listen to the experts anymore.
And so he turned inward and listened to his brother and a few others in a very tightly knit circle from then on.
Well, and that seems important.
Of all the conspiracy theories that are interesting to me, I've never really looked into the Kennedy thing that much just because it seems like there's so much out there that who's ever going to really be able to weed through it all and come to a real conclusion?
But I did see on the garrison tapes yesterday clips of, I don't know, a good half dozen or so of my fellow Texans saying, yeah, gunshots came from right over there on that picket fence and so forth.
It always just seemed to me without really knowing that Allen Dulles was a pretty powerful guy to cross.
And for John Kennedy, who was, I mean, the Kennedys were really kind of the outside of the establishment.
The CIA certainly at that time was the very core of the establishment.
For him to threaten to smash it into a thousand pieces and to fire Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell like this, are you suspicious at all that this led to his eventual getting shot in the face there in Dallas?
That's one theory that people entertain, and I'm like you.
I don't know where to go in this.
Lyndon Johnson had a statement that perhaps you remember in the book in which he pointed out that here was this character named Amlash who was Rolando Cabela, who was a number four man approximately in the Cuban military hierarchy, and he had turned against Castro.
And he's talking to CIA operatives all around the world in secret places in Madrid and so forth.
And you've got a man like John F. Kennedy who is enamored of Jan Fleming's books on James Bond and very much caught up in guerrilla warfare and all this kind of thing.
And so here is a real enticement.
You've got this guy that you can hire to kill Castro, and they're talking in Paris on the very day, November 22, 1963, and when they come out, the CIA operatives and Cabela, the headlines, the news everywhere, John F. Kennedy has been shot and he's dead.
Lyndon Johnson said, isn't it ironic that Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got him first.
Now whether you can put any weight in this, this is what Johnson apparently believed.
There was a story that came out I think about a year ago that was in Salon.com that said, I want to say it was Sidney Blumenthal that wrote it, but that might not be right, but it said that Robert Kennedy, the first thing he did was pick up the phone and call Langley and accuse them.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's right.
So that's not conclusive, but boy, that sure shows where his state of mind was.
It sure does.
It sure does.
And then of course there's the mafia connection as well, as you know, with some claiming Johnny Roselli, who was deeply involved in the attempt to kill Castro and making contact with the mafia for the CIA and so forth, had been involved in one way or another in bringing down Kennedy.
So there are just half a dozen or more major theories out there, and then a whole string of others that I'm with you if you jump into that, you're in a real cobweb and I wouldn't know which direction to go.
Right.
Yeah, it's the kind of thing where basically since I first saw JFK when I was a kid, I figured out, yeah, well, Alan Dulles did it, and they put him on the commission to decide who did it and everything.
Not much of a mystery there, but that's purely an assumption, I guess.
I don't think I have the patience to try to put the case together, that's for sure.
That's my feeling as well.
All right.
Well, I have to tell you, I really enjoyed this book.
Oh, thank you.
It's a really great history of the Bay of Pigs, and it is a story that has a lot of implications, obviously, as you mentioned, for American policy all over the world.
It really serves as kind of the backdrop, the past as prologue and so forth.
Well, Scott, I really appreciate your saying that and having me on your show.
All right, everybody, that is Dr. Howard Jones from the University of Alabama, where he teaches history.
The book is The Bay of Pigs.
And as I'm looking at your, whatever they call it, curriculum vitae or whatever, I don't know how to say it, here on this website, it looks like you have written a ton of books that I would like to get a chance to read someday.
War So Horrible, Union and Confederate Foreign Relations During the Civil War.
That's coming out in January.
Really?
It's actually got a new title now.
It's called Blue and Gray Diplomacy.
Blue and Gray Diplomacy.
All right, I'm jotting that down.
And then Crucible of Power, All These Histories of Foreign Relations from 1897, and Death of a Generation, How the Assassination of D.M. and J.F.
K.
Prolonged the Vietnam War.
This looks like a lot of interesting stuff here.
Well, thank you.
I've got a new project I'm working on with Oxford called, well, I'm calling it Into the Heart of Darkness, and it's a story of My Lai.
So that's the beauty of being in diplomatic history.
You can run across the entire spectrum.
Yeah, well, this is certainly an impressive list of work here.
Thank you.
All right, well, thank you again very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.