◆ SpookStack

that the people would have listened to, and ••• he was the equivocator that let the thing get away from him that night. He came in ••• I'll never forget him coming in with a cigar, and he said "Well, we are going to have to ration- alize a little bit here." ••• Hawkins and I looked at each other, and I said, "General are you saying that weare not going to get that airstrike," and he said "Yes." Hawkins said, "Well, we've lost. We are going to lose every ship." Cabell said, "Colonel," he said, "I don't know that that's right, I don't think I agree with that." ••• That's when I wrote out a resignation to the Agency. That was before the first shot had ever been fired ••• Cabell said •.. there was not going to be an airstrike. Well, he equivocated, he didn't speak in forthright terms to whomever of Kennedy's group he was talk- ing to. He didn't tell them that "it is going to be a disaster if this doesn't happen." If he'd said that, and they had said, "well, you are not going to get the airstrike. Call it off," at least we might have still had a few hours to try and call it off. Now, whether they would have come back or not, is something else ••. What I am really saying by this is if we were running this operation at this point -- Hawkins and t -- Cabell, who was not very deeply informed on it, shouldn't have been the one that was up there giv- ing the facts in cold terms of what would happen if any further diminishment of the capability took place. Now, I would like to think that the reason that he failed so miserably was that he wasn't adequately informed and didn't know ... As I had said at that time, he had clay feet .•. - 283 -