assembled, in which George Bush would have been present at the creation as a
matter of birthright.
During 1959-60, Allen Dulles and the Eisenhower Administration began to
assemble in south Florida the infrastructure for covert action against Cuba. This
was the JM/WAVE capability, later formally constituted as the CIA Miami
station. JM/WAVE was an operational center for the Eisenhower regime's project
of staging an invasion of Cuba using a secret army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles
organized, armed, trained, transported, and directed by the CIA. The Cubans,
called Brigade 2506, were trained in secret camps in Guatemala, and they had air
support from B-26 bombers based in Nicaragua. This invasion was crushed by
Castro's defending forces in less than three days.
Before going along with the plan so eagerly touted by Allen Dulles, Kennedy had
established the pre-condition that under no circumstances whatsoever would there
be direct intervention by US military forces against Cuba. On the one hand,
Dulles had assured Kennedy that the news of the invasion would trigger an
insurrection which would sweep Castro and his regime away. On the other,
Kennedy had to be concerned about provoking a global thermonuclear
confrontation with the USSR, in the eventuality that N.S. Khrushchev decided to
respond to a US Cuban gambit by, for example, cutting off US access to Berlin.
Hints of the covert presence of George Bush are scattered here and there around
the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to some accounts, the code name for the Bay
of Pigs was Operation Pluto. 4 But Bay of Pigs veteran Howard Hunt scornfully
denies that this was the code name used by JM/WAVE personnel; Hunt writes:
"So perhaps the Pentagon referred to the Brigade invasion as PLUTO. CIA did
not." 5 But Hunt does not tell us what the CIA code name was, and the contents of
Hunt's Watergate era White House safe, which might have told us the answer,
were of course "deep-sixed" by FBI Director Patrick Gray. One code name
frequently used by CIA Miami Station personnel appears to have been "Don
Eduardo," roughly the Spanish equivalent of "Mr. Edward" or perhaps "Mr. Ed."
6
According to reliable sources and published accounts, the CIA code name for the
Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation Zapata, and the plan was so referred to by
Richard Bissell of the CIA, one of the plan's promoters, in a briefing to President
Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on March 29, 1961. 7 Does Operation Zapata have
anything to do with Zapata Offshore? The run-of-the-mill Bushman might
respond that Emiliano Zapata, after all, had been a public figure in his own right,
and the subject of a recent Hollywood movies starring Marlon Brando. As J.
Hugh Liedtke had observed, he was the classic figure for the revolutionary-cum-
bandit. A more knowledgeable Bushman might argue that the main landing beach,
the Playa Giron, is located south of the city of Cienfuegos on the Zapata Peninula,
on the south coast of Cuba.