wanted success and I foolishly thought we had it made.
"There were to be three air strikes out of Puerto Cabezas, timed exactly to help the amphibious landing in the critical hour. The purpose was clear enough -- to knock out the Cuban Air Force as the expedition clawed its way ashore and while it was solidifying the beachhead. Whether we had enough bombers and air crew to be sure of so doing, I had no way of judging, and besides, that was not my problen.
"Well, just before the curtain was to go up, I got a call from Washington. This was on Thursday. The call was from CIA. I was told, 'We are moving up the first two strikes 24 hours; they will go on Saturday instead of on Sunday.' I simply could not believe what I heard. So I protested with all of the force I could muster. Not being a military man, I still knew what the change meant. The two air strikes and the amphibious landing would be 48 hours apart, time enough to serve to get through to the White House to protest; there was no answer. So I had a battle with my conscience and it lost. My brother, Tacho, who commands our forces, was not at hand to advise me. He had been sent on a mission to Formosa, as part of the cover plan.
"Why was the plan changed? I was never told. No one who knew ever tried to talk to me about it. My guilt comes of the fact that knowing we were going on to a catastrophe, and knowing that men would die for no good end in the course of it, I still did not call the whole thing off when I had the power to do so. The only assumption possible for me is that President Kennedy changed the plan to test out national sentiment as revealed by the Sunday newspapers, though none of us will ever know for sure. Then after the first two strikes were re-set, dooming the expedition, the third strike was canceled wholly. Why? Because either the man in the White House or your man in U.N. or both, chickened out. And put me on the list of individuals who chickened out. I have no excuse for myself.
"In the end we were directly defeated and shamed by these mistakes, though there were others. The two strikes missed three fighter planes. We had two communications ships close to the Bay of Pigs -- here was the brain of the op