The Sixth Estate

The Central Intelligence Agency’s increasingly desperate schemes to assassinate or at least embarrass Castro, from exploding cigars and Mafia hitmen to beard depilatories, are legend. What is less well-known are some of the same agency’s other various schemes to attack Castro, one of which is detailed by Jack Pfeiffer in his secret history of the Bay of Pigs (a copy of which was obtained by a Florida researcher).

This one isn’t as serious (or illegal) as the Pentagon’s subsequent NORTHWOODS plan, which proposed (among other things) what amounted to a campaign of domestic terrorism within the U.S. The CIA considered and rejected such plans as doctoring photos of Cuban aircraft to make it look as though the Castro government was painting them in U.S. Air Force colours (presumably for some nefarious purpose), or sending a “Billy Graham type” speaker around Latin America in a white plane to warn people of the dangers of revolutionary movements in their own countries.

Then, it came across something far better. This too was rejected by the chief mucky-mucks, but it still deserves to be reproduced in full as an indication of CIA thinking:

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In the 1970s, CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer prepared a classified multi-volume history of CIA covert operations in Cuba, with special reference to the Bay of Pigs. Although the history as a whole is (or at least was) classified, one volume made its way out via the Kennedy Assassination papers, and was copied by professor David Barrett of Villanova University.

What Barrett acquired was Volume 3 of the Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, concerned with the pre-invasion covert operations of the CIA in Cuba. Unfortunately for readers it is divided into 18 separate PDFs, but all are still available. There are a number of important revelations in these files:

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