The Winds of a Coup

 by

        M. Richard Maxson

 

      This series of articles continues to examine what the shadow government and the  deep state are and how they have gained so much control over the U.S. government and society in general.

 

     In the 1950s, the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles were running U.S. foreign policy. They withheld much of what they were doing from President Eisenhower. He wasn't quite sure what was really going on but he knew something wasn't right. Across the globe the agencies were out of control. Because of his health problems and his commitment to a lifetime of military service he reluctantly went along with the vanilla reports and plans that were presented to him. They were presented as fact. That was not always the case. The brothers had a massive anti-communist agenda.

     After Fidel Castro's successful overthrow of the Cuban government, on March 17, 1960, the Eisenhower administration, at the insistence of the intelligence community, instructed the CIA to organize a paramilitary unit composed of Cuban exiles with the purpose of defeating the Fidel Castro regime without implicating the United States. It had to look like an uprising organized by Cuban dissidents. The incoming President Kennedy had inherited the this and other ongoing operations of the agencies. One that became famously known to history as “The Bay of Pigs”

      The agencies, knowing their plan was not viable as it stood, demanded the president provide U.S. Air cover for the attack. He declined stating that it had to look like an uprising organized by Cuban dissidents, not the U.S. invading. The last thing he wanted, he said, was “direct, overt” intervention by the American military in Cuba: The Soviets would likely see this as an act of war and might retaliate. However, CIA officers told him they could keep U.S. involvement in the invasion a secret and, if all went according to plan, the campaign would spark an anti-Castro uprising on the island. The attempted coup was a failure. The invaders surrendered on the afternoon of April 19. More than 200 people been killed; another 1,197 were taken captive. On April 20, Kennedy told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that the episode was Cubans fighting Cubans and that the U.S. had not been involved. President Kennedy did not like having to lie to the American public and the world.

     Kennedy had inherited this shaky operation and against his better judgment, not long after entering the White House, he gave it the green light the behest of a Washington security and intelligence establishment he would soon come to mistrust and disdain. He did so while refusing to commit US air support, a decision later held up by the plotters as key to the operation’s failure. It was an immediate failure. A few months later, the three responsible for planning the invasion — Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles, Deputy Director of Operations Richard Bissell, and Air Force General Charles Cabell— were fired.

      Allen Dulles had continuously tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces, not only to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961 with no chance of success, but also to Vietnam where their newest plan could be undertaken. More on that later.

     CIA director, Allen Dulles, had been offended when young President Kennedy had the audacity to ask in depth questions about their operations. When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles set out, with supreme confidence, to ambush the President politically. But Kennedy stuck to his guns and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” The outrage was very obviously mutual.

       In the minds of some leaders in the [US] military and intelligence community Kennedy was…guilty of treason, a slanted point of view that does not hold up in law. He was supposedly guilty for not following through in the Bay of Pigs, dis-empowering the CIA and firing its leaders…concluding the atmospheric test ban treaty, planning to disengage from Vietnam, flirting with ending the Cold War, encouraging Third World nationalism, and, perhaps most damningly, accepting a negotiated settlement in the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

     Looking back 55 years later on JFK’s attempt to end the Cold War, we are compelled to consider how the world may have looked if he’d been spared and gone on to serve a second term. Sadly, for the generations that came after, Kennedy lost and the ‘deep state’ won.

 

 NOTE: U.S. assassination plots.