Page 58 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 58 of 237

And it was true that the checks continued to come from New York. But that was all the widows had.

Three years after the Bay of Pigs the Birmingham widows had still received no official acknowledgment from the
United States Government about their husbands. There had been no written notification to the wives that their
husbands died while employed by, and fighting for, the United States. They had nothing official to show their
children to explain their fathers' deaths.

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* Hutchinson later retired from the Air Force and became an oilman in Oklahoma City. He said, on March 8,
1963, that five, not four, American pilots had died flying in the Cuban operation but implied that the fifth pilot
was not lost in combat.

* Albert C. Persons, managing editor of the weekly Birmingham Examiner, said on March 8, 1963, that the plane
carrying Shamburger and Gray was shot down by a T-33 jet. Persons was one of the American pilots at Happy
Valley. He had been scheduled to fly in Shamburger's bomber. Doster canceled his mission because Persons had
experience flying carrier aircraft rather than the B-26.

* Hayes was not notably communicative. When one of the authors asked for information about the background of
the four men, who had worked for the company for many years, a Hayes public- relations spokesman said he
would have to check with "topside." After doing so, he said he could give out no information. "The matter is
closed as far as we are concerned," he said.

* Prior to this, the clearest statement by the administration was made by President Kennedy in an interview with
the three major TV networks on December 17,1962. Speaking in general terms of the 1961 Cuban invasion, the
President said: "And I was responsible."