Documents / FOIA release
This is Volume II, Part 1 of the CIA History Staff's Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, a Top Secret history dated October 1979 and approved for release in July 2011. It looks at how the Agency took part in shaping US foreign policy toward Guatemala and Nicaragua during the anti-Castro program. It covers dealings with President Ydigoras Fuentes and Roberto Alejos, training sites such as Retalhuleu, cover stories, and negotiations with the Somoza brothers for an air base and port. It contains no UFO material.
“King”13 pages
as a partner in crime was similarly wishful. The one voice of reason in Washington was that of Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs; and it was Mann who from the fall of 1960 until he was replaced in 1961 railed against the failure of the US to abandon plausible deniability and openly support an anti-Castro program with use of arms. Unfortunately Mann won no converts. In the end, he, too, played the game. The question that will always remain unanswered is whether the whole shooting match at the BOP might have been cancelled if the Department of State repre- sentatives in either Guatemala or Nicaragua had been better qualified and had been given better guidance from Washington about the fact that there could not be degrees of plausible deniability either the operation was deniable or it was not. If it was not -- and it obviously was not -- an alert and forceful Ambassador might have precipitated a decision either to stand down the operation or to openly support the Brigade.
Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 179 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.