Then there is the question of the Brigade 2506 landing fleet, which was composed
of five older freighters bought or chartered from the Garcia Steamship Lines,
bearing the names of Houston, Rio Esondido, Caribe, Atlantic, and Lake Charles.
In addition to these vessels, which were outfitted as transport ships, there were
two somewhat better armed fire support ships, the Blagar and the Barbara. (In
some sources Barbara J.) 8 The Barbara was originally an LCI (Landing Craft
Infantry) of earlier vintage. Our attention is attracted at once to the Barbara and
the Houston, in the first case because we have seen George Bush's habit of
naming his combat aircraft after his wife, and, in the second case, because Bush
was at this time a resident, booster, and Republican activist of Houston, Texas.
But of course, the appearance of names like "Zapata," Barbara, and Houston can
by itself only arouse suspicion, and proves nothing.
After the ignominious defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion, there was great
animosity against Kennedy among the survivors of Brigade 2506, some of whom
eventually made their way back to Miami after being released from Castro's
prisoner of war camps. There was also great animosity against Kennedy on the
part of the JM/WAVE personnel.
During the early 1950's, E. Howard Hunt had been the CIA station chief in
Mexico City. As David Atlee Phillips (another embittered JM/WAVE veteran)
tells us in his autobiographical account, The Night Watch, Howard Hunt had been
the immediate superior of a young CIA recruit named William F. Buckley, the
Yale graduate and Skull and Bones member who later founded the National
Review. In his autobiographical account written during the days of the Watergate
scandal, Hunt includes the following tirade about the Bay of Pigs:
No event since the communization of China in 1949 has had such a
profound effect on the United States and its allies as the defeat of the US-
trained Cuban invasion brigade at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.Out of that humiliation grew the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, guerrilla
warfare throughout Latin American and Africa, and our Dominican
Republic intervention. Castros' beachhead triumph opened a bottomless
Pandora's box of difficulties that affected not only the United States, but
most of its allies in the Free World. These bloody and subversive events
would not have taken place had Castro been toppled. Instead of standing
firm, our government pyramided crucially wrong decisions and allowed
Brigade 2506 to be destroyed. The Kennedy administration yielded Castro
all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti,
then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue
would simply melt away.9Hunt was typical of the opinion that the debacle had been Kennedy's fault, and not
the responsibility of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, who had designed
it and recommended it. After the embarrassing failure of the invasion, which