Page 12 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 12 of 237

He and his advisers had not anticipated the volume and nature of the publicity that was being given to the
bombing raids and to the story of the mysterious "defecting" pilot who had landed in Miami.

Across the nation, the morning papers had played the story of the bombing raids with varying degrees of caution.

Many papers ran the Associated Press lead out of Cuba, which said flatly:

HAVANA, April 15 -- Pilots of Prime Minister Fidel Castro's air force revolted today and attacked
three of the Castro regime's key air bases with bombs and rockets..0

But the influential New York Times was not buying the story completely. Tad Szulc's lead story from Miami was
carefully qualified. He wondered, for example, how the Cuban Revolutionary Council had advance notice of the
flier's defection, since the pilot who landed in Miami said their escape was hasty. Ruby Hart Phillips filed a
similar carefully worded story from Havana.

And the Times Washington Bureau this Sunday was trying to reach administration officials at their homes. The
bureau was busily putting together a story pointing out "puzzling circumstances." Besides the question of how
Cardona knew about the defections in advance, the Times wanted to know why the pilot's name had been
withheld in Miami, since pictures were allowed which clearly showed his face and the number 933 on the nose of
his bomber.* Furthermore, the Times asked whether Havana would not quickly know the identity of a Cuban Air
Force pilot who waltzed off with a B-26 bomber.

Other newsmen in Washington and Miami were asking where the third plane was if three pilots had defected. A
reporter in Miami saw the bullet holes but noted that dust and grease covered the bomb-bay fittings of B-26 933
and that the plane's guns did not appear to have been fired. Further, while the B-26s in Castro's air force had
plexiglass transparent noses and guns in the wing pods, this B-26 had eight .50-caliber machine guns in a solid
nose.

The Bay of Pigs operation was already foundering. What bad occurred was the inevitable collision between the
secret machinery of the government and a free press. It was at this point of contact between the Invisible
Government and the outside, real world, that the Bay of Pigs plan began to deteriorate. As President Eisenhower
had discovered during the U-2 fiasco a year earlier, and as President Kennedy was now finding out, it is an
extremely difficult and precarious business for the government to try to deceive the press and the country to
protect a covert operation.

In Havana, Fidel Castro exploited the situation for all it was worth. At a military funeral for the "Cuban heroes"
killed by the bombing raids, he compared the attack to the raid on Pearl Harbor. He said the Japanese had at least
assumed full responsibility for their raid, but "the President of the United States is like a cat ... which throws a
rock and hides its hand." Of the pilot's tale, he said, "even Hollywood would not try to film such a story."

***

But in Miami, Immigration Director Ahrens was sticking to the scenario. He announced that the three fliers who
had landed in Florida had been granted political asylum. Ahrens was still silent about their identities,
however. "These men don't want their names released," he told UPI, "or any other information about them." *

***