◆ SpookStack

Adviser. In a most interesting Memorandum to the President, dated 15 March 1961, during the period when the Agency, and JCS were in the process of revising the TRINIDAD plan, Mr. Bundy noted among other things that: Even the revised landing plan depends strongly upon prompt action against Cas- tro's air. The question in my mind is whether we cannot solve this problem by having the air strike come some little time before the invasion. A group of patriotic airplanes flying from Nicaraguan bases might knock out Castro's air force in a single day without anyone knowing (for some time) where they came from, and with nothing to prove that it was not an interior rebellion by theCtiban Air Force, which has been of very doubtful loyalty in the past; the pilots will in fact be members of the Cuban Air Force who went into the opposition some time ago. Then the invasion could come as a separate enterprise, and neither the air strike, nor the quiet landing of patriots would in itself give Castro anything to take to the United Nations. 4/ \ This recommendation by Bundy was undoubtedly the result of his contacts with Hawkins an1 Bissell. In his May 1961 post-mortem of the operation, Hawkins claimed that both the pre-n-Day and D-Day strike con- cepts went to the President; and in response to a query on the subject, Mr. Bissell could not recall whether the plans went directly to President Kennedy - 180 -