Up to the Others

Everywhere that President Kennedy turned, Cuba kept popping up. At his press conference, six of the 21 questions were about Cuba. Reporters learned little from his answers.

Did the President have accurate information about how many Soviet troops have been removed from Cuba so far? No. Had the Russians offered the U.S. any way of verifying the troop pullout? No. Was Kennedy satisfied with the rate of the Soviet withdrawal? No. What about charges that the Administration knew about the Soviet missile buildup in Cuba several days before finally taking action last October? "I have seen charges of all kinds," said Kennedy. "One day a distinguished Republican charges that it is all the CIA's fault, and the next day it is the Defense Department's fault, and the next day the CIA is being made a scapegoat by another distinguished leader. So that we could not possibly answer these charges, which come so fast and furiously." Kennedy was most evasive when asked if four Alabama airmen killed during the Bay of Pigs invasion had been employees of the Central Intelligence Agency or any other department of U.S. Government. Said he: "The flight that cost them their lives was a voluntary flight, and while because of the nature of their work it has not been a matter of public record, as it might be in the case of soldiers and sailors, I can say that they were serving their country."

The Curious Sequence. But if President Kennedy was reluctant to talk, others were not. Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus said that as many as 25 Arkansas Air National Guardsmen had been recruited by the "Federal Government" to train anti-Castro Cubans. Some of the Arkansans, he said, flew combat missions over the Bay of Pigs--an assertion denied by the White House.

In a curious sequence, retired Air Force Major General David W. Hutchison, commander of the U.S. Ninth Tactical Air Force during the Bay of Pigs buildup, said that he had been "consulted as an adviser on occasion" about the invasion. He named Brigadier General G. Reid Doster, commanding general of the Alabama Air National Guard, as the man "in charge of tactical air operations" for the invasion. Doster, said Hutchison, has "plenty to tell." But instead of telling, Doster referred newsmen to Albert C. Persons, managing editor of the Birmingham Examiner, and cousin of retired Army Major General Wilton B. Persons, who was President Eisenhower's top legislative liaison aide.

When questioned, Albert Persons simply pointed to two articles he had just written for Chicago's American. In them, Persons said that he had been one of 18 American airmen hired to "replace inexperienced Cuban air crews for the all-important initial air strikes against Cuba." The recruiters, according to the Persons account, "represented themselves as being with a company under contract to one of the Cuban exile groups . . . We all believed then, and believe now, that the men who hired us were representatives of the U.S. Government."

The Gap. Confusing? Of course. But no more confusing than the rest of the continuing Cuba controversy. In what may rank as the silliest statement made so far about that controversy, Texas' Democratic Representative George Mahon, chairman of the House Military Appropriations Subcommittee, called on the Administration, Senators and Congressmen to stop answering questions about Cuba. "There has been talk of an intelligence gap," said Mahon. "There is an intelligence gap. The gap is in the intelligence of those who are daily revealing the secrets of the intelligence operations of the U.S. Government." It was "outrageous," he said. "Critics have made public statements on matters which should never be discussed in public. The Administration has mistakenly allowed itself to be goaded into revealing information detrimental to our best interests."

Presumably, Mahon would have withheld from the nation even such sparse information about Cuba as was officially forthcoming last week. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, for one, reported that enough Soviet shipping is on the way to Cuba to remove "several thousand" Russians. That, of course, will leave several thousand others still in Cuba. The activities of those Russians, both military and civilian, were the highlight last week of a notable CBS-TV "Eye Witness" program.

Testifying before the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, chaired by Mississippi's John Stennis, Army Intelligence Chief Alva R. Fitch indicated that some Soviet technicians are indeed being removed--but a lot of Russian combat troops are digging in.

Cuban caves, said Major General Fitch, are being converted into military storehouses--"many suited to storage of both large and delicate electronic items." Some of these storehouse caves are off limits to all but Russians.

All the while, according to CIA Director John McCone, Cuba-trained Communist sabotage and guerrilla experts are flooding the rest of Latin America. This is precisely the sort of activity that President Kennedy, only a few months ago, said that the U.S. would not tolerate. But what does the U.S. plan to do now? Apparently, very little. Said Kennedy at his press conference, in answer to a question about hemispheric subversion from Cuba: "There has been an Organization of American States committee which has reported on the need for control. Now it is up to the Latin American countries."

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