◆ SpookStack

The testimony of General George H. Decker, Chief of Staff of the US Army, added nothing new to what had already been put to the Taylor Committee during the course of the twelfth meeting by Generals Shoup and White. The Session with General Decker also appears to have been conducted at a less emotional level than were the meetings with either the Air Force or the Marine Corps senior officers. General Decker was in agreement with his colleagues in that the JCS favored Trinidad over Zapata, but could live with the Zapata plan and thought that it had a reasonable chance of success. He did not believe that there was any possibility that the support from the US could have remained deniable, and he thought that the JCS had acted properly in giving its best evaluations on the basis of the information that they had available. The only point on which General Decker differed from Generals White and Shoup was with reference to the D-2 air strike. General Decker was very much in favor of the D-2 strike, but he also suggested that strikes even earlier than D-2 would have effectively insured destruction of Castro's air arm. General Decker agreed with his JCS colleagues that the operation was of such scale that it should have been run by the military rather than by the Central Intelligence Agency. As with other witnesses who had appeared before the committee, General Decker's . explanation of the brief time that the JCS spent in review of the shift from Trinidad to Zapata was based on the similarity I ,..."" 126