Forwarded:
LA Times Article from 15 March 1998
Copyright LA Times
Sunday, March 15,
1998
COLUMN ONE
Bay of Pigs: the Secret Death of Pete Ray
The Alabama Air Guard pilot died during ill-fated Cuban invasion
attempt. For years, the CIA hid his fate from his family. Havana,
meanwhile, kept his body frozen. By MARK FINEMAN, DOLLY MASCARENAS,
Special to The Times
H AVANA--When Thomas "Pete" Ray's B-26 bomber was shot down by
Cuban antiaircraft batteries near Playa Giron on April 19, 1961, he
wasn't there.
So said the CIA.
And for decades, the U.S. government publicly denied that a
top-secret squadron of civilians recruited from the Alabama Air
National Guard ever existed, let alone was on a CIA mission to bomb
Cuba in one of the agency's best-kept and most humiliating secrets.
It was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, in which, officially, no
Americans were involved.
But Ray was there. The 30-year-old Center Point, Ala., pilot
was
shot to death--pistol and knife in hand--by one of Fidel Castro's
soldiers. They also killed his flight engineer, Leo Baker, after
the two had bombed targets near Castro's field headquarters. Two
other Alabamians also died when their plane was shot down during
the invasion, which included napalm bombing by U.S. aircraft.
They were on a mission that Col. Joe Shannon, one of the few
surviving pilots from the group, recently recalled was "a
last-ditch effort" that, through its very secrecy, would change the
course of many lives for decades to come.
Castro was so determined to prove the Americans were there
that
he froze Ray's remains--for more than 18 years.
For Ray's wife, mother and two children, those years were
haunted
by silent confusion and fear, as the U.S. government knew, but
refused to tell, the whereabouts of a man who had simply vanished
from the face of the Earth.
For the CIA, Ray's secret involved national security and
image.
To admit that the pilot was one of theirs was to concede the depth
of the agency's involvement in a disastrous invasion that it
insisted, until last year, was the work of dissidents within Cuba.
And for the Cuban government, which spent thousands of dollars
preserving Ray's remains, the case was both frustrating and
mystifying: How could any government lie for so long to the family
of a soldier? After all, it had announced to the world on the day
Ray died that it had the body of an American pilot.
In December 1979, after the Cubans learned of a personal
mission
by Ray's daughter, Janet Ray Weininger, to find his body--and after
19 months of painstaking diplomacy with a U.S. government that
still did not want to claim him as one of its own--the Cuban
government returned the pilot's body to Alabama.
The CIA still has not publicly admitted that it knew where his
remains were all along. Just last month, however, the agency
released a document confirming that U.S. pilots were, in fact, shot
down over Cuba in 1961.
And last week, in response to detailed inquiries about the Ray
case from The Times, agency officials acknowledged publicly for the
first time that the Alabama pilot was one of theirs.
"Thomas 'Pete' Ray made heroic contributions to the CIA and to
this country, serving with great distinction," CIA spokesman Bill
Harlow said. "Given the passage of time and recent declassification
of historic documents from this time period, his affiliation with
the CIA can now be acknowledged publicly."
Documents obtained by The Times from the Cuban government,
combined with the recently declassified CIA memos, cables and
confidential reports on the Bay of Pigs, solve much of this
extraordinary Cold War mystery of the lost Alabamians.
Official Deception and Mutual Mistrust
It is a story of official U.S. deception and of a mutual
mistrust
between the United States and the Communist government 90 miles off
its shores--a regime the CIA has spent hundreds of millions of
dollars trying to overthrow since Castro came to power in 1959.
As for the men of the secret squadron, "these were vortex
people--the most important people in the world for a few
moments--and then the government just cuts the strings and cuts
them loose to drift," said Thomas Bailey, Ray's cousin and an
Alabama journalist. "You're the front line between communism and
the free world. . . . Then, at the end, the government ignores you.
"If there's a message beyond that, it's about government,
about
human lives, about how lives are changed by one event. In some
ways, these people were never the same again. Some better, some
worse. But it marked that moment when we all, who believed in the
government, began to lose faith in that government."
Added Weininger, whose mother died years ago and whose Miami
home
is filled with boxes of documents and photographs of her father:
"If we had to go back and do it all over again, I just wish they
would have told me the truth when it no longer needed to be a
secret."
In its formal statement to The Times last week, the CIA also
confirmed for the first time that Ray was posthumously awarded the
CIA's highest honor for bravery--the Distinguished Intelligence
Cross.
"We plan to add his name to the book of honor which identifies
individuals for whom a star has been inscribed in the marble facade
of the foyer of the CIA headquarters building," spokesman Harlow
said.
Until now, Ray's star has been marked only by a number.
Cubans Call Costly Mission Humanitarian
In opening Havana's archives on the Ray case to The Times last
month, Cuban officials asserted in interviews that their government
originally froze the pilot's body to prove U.S. involvement in the
invasion but that the costly maintenance quickly became a
humanitarian mission.
"In our culture, we do not handle dead bodies insensitively,
not
even our enemies, our worst enemies," Cmdr. Manuel Pineiro, a
former intelligence chief better known as "Red Beard," said in his
last interview before he died of a heart attack after a car crash
in Cuba last week.
"The only explanation that I have for keeping the body for so
long was to return him to whoever claimed him, to his family," said
Pineiro, who was venerated in the Cuban press after his death as
"the CIA's nemesis" in Cuba.
Pineiro and other Cubans interviewed expressed shock that the
U.S. government could turn its back for so long on one of its own.
"How does a country allow its own citizens--I refer to the
families of these pilots--to live in doubt, not to know what
happened to their loved ones?" he asked. "We told the world, the
United Nations; we sent the list with the names we had. Why was it
nobody answered?"
Another senior Cuban official used a recent interview to
invite
Ray's daughter to Havana as a state guest for what he said would
amount to emotional closure.
But Weininger, 43, who has devoted her life to researching the
case and who now participates in Cuban American exile events in
Miami, politely declined.
After decades of trying to find out the truth and finally
retrieving her father's body with the help of two members of the
U.S. Congress who pushed the case with the State Department, she
said she has become suspicious of nearly everyone.
"I don't want to go to Cuba and be involved in something
bigger,
to be used as a pawn between different political groups--there or
here," she said. "I want to go to Cuba when it's a free country."
Yet Weininger added that she harbors no animosity toward the
Cubans for keeping her father all those years. Just the opposite:
"I blame my government. My government did wrong. They led these men
into harm's way and then turned [their] back on them."
It is only within the past year that the CIA has admitted even
that.
In more than 1,000 pages of recently declassified documents on
file at the National Security Archives in Washington, and in a
State Department volume published last fall, the spy agency has
come clean about its role and its failures in the Bay of Pigs
invasion.
The agency previously went to great lengths to keep the
information secret. A document released last month, for example,
was the sole surviving copy of CIA Inspector General Lyman
Kirkpatrick's highly critical 150-page report, which had been kept
in a CIA safe for 37 years.
Those documents, combined with others provided by the Cuban
government and interviews with witnesses and with relatives of
those who died in the invasion, tell a story not only of CIA
bungling but of bitter betrayal.
Recruits, Secret Bases and an Ill-Fated Plan
The story begins about a year after Castro overthrew Cuba's
U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and marched into Havana in
January 1959. In a plan hatched under President Eisenhower and
executed in the first months of John F. Kennedy's presidency, the
CIA plotted every ill-fated step of an invasion that was meant to
appear entirely the work of dissidents within Cuba and of mutinous
Cuban military forces.
The CIA recruited exile fighters from throughout the United
States, set up clandestine training bases in the U.S., Guatemala
and Nicaragua, and searched for planes that would match those in
the Cuban air force--B-26 bombers that the agency could repaint and
deploy to make it appear as if Castro's military had turned on him.
The only B-26s the CIA could find in the United States were in
the aging fleet at the Alabama Air National Guard in Birmingham.
And there, the agency also found a more-than-willing co-conspirator
in the local Air Guard commander, Maj. Gen. G. Reid Doster Jr., who
hated Communists everywhere.
In January 1961, the CIA picked Doster to recruit local pilots
to
fly, along with Cuban exiles, the disguised B-26s during the
invasion. Ray, an Alabama-born aircraft inspector at a Birmingham
factory, was typical of Doster's unlikely Cold Warriors--weekend
fliers who included the owner of a local pizza shop.
Weininger remembers the day her father left home for the last
time: Feb. 5, 1961. She was 6. None of the families of the dozen or
so local pilots knew the men were heading to Nicaragua to prepare
to bomb Cuba. The men's "cover story," Col. Shannon says, was that
they were going to pilot training school.
"My dad was just an average guy who loved to fly," Weininger
said. "But he firmly believed in what he did. He had told his
mother that if he dies flying, he'll die happy. But he also said
that if we don't stop communism in Cuba, someday we might have to
fight it in our own backyard."
Shannon concurred. The Birmingham resident flew another B-26
the
morning Ray was killed; Shannon escaped a Cuban fighter jet that
shot down his best friend, Riley Shamburger, that day.
"This was a last-ditch effort, a desperate mission to save the
guys on the ground," recalled Shannon, now 76. "We weren't supposed
to fly at all. We were told we wouldn't be able to fly even if we
wanted to. But we were so close to the Cuban [exiles], their cause
sort of became our cause. And in a last moment of desperation, they
[the CIA] let us fly."
The declassified CIA documents show that the final invasion
plan
did bar the U.S. pilots from joining in the bombing runs. But the
exile pilots, who had been attacking Cuban airports and other
targets for three days before the invasion collapsed on April 19,
"were exhausted and dispirited," according to the documents.
By the time Ray took off from the Nicaraguan base at 3:55 a.m.
on
April 19 for the 700-mile flight to Cuba, the invasion already had
failed. At the last minute, Kennedy canceled U.S. air cover in a
further effort to deny Washington's role, and the 1,500 Cubans the
CIA had sent to invade were being torn to pieces on the beachhead.
Initially, the CIA blamed the lack of air cover for the
invasion's failure, but the CIA inspector general's report blamed
the CIA itself--its arrogance, poor planning and "almost willful
bungling."
A CIA telegram to its personnel in Nicaragua authorizing Ray
and
his colleagues to attack Castro's forces that day foreshadowed the
decades of mystery that would follow:
"Cannot attach sufficient importance to fact that American
crews
must not fall into enemy hands. In event this happens, despite all
precautions, crews must state [they are] hired mercenaries,
fighting communism, etc.; U.S. will deny any knowledge."
And that it did--despite Cuba's best efforts.
Jet Downed After Several Strafing Runs
Cuban Gen. Oscar Fernandez Mell, who was in charge of field
operations the morning Ray was killed, described in a recent
interview how Ray's B-26 was shot down after it made several daring
strafing runs.
"The airplane fell in a cane field. We ran toward it. Then
there
was an explosion and fire," he said. "I gave orders to recover
everything inside the aircraft."
But Ray and flight engineer Baker had already fled their
cockpit.
Witnesses told Fernandez that the pair ran into a nearby cane
field. Baker was found holding a grenade; a Cuban soldier shot him.
Another soldier told Fernandez that he found Ray hiding in a
nearby forest, wounded but alive and armed. The soldier said he
killed Ray in self-defense.
Foreign Minister Raul Roa made headlines worldwide later that
day
when he announced to the U.N. Security Council that Cuba had the
body of a U.S. pilot shot down during the invasion; "Proof of the
Yankee Intervention," the daily Revolucion declared the following
day.
The United Nations never pursued the issue after the U.S.
publicly denied its involvement.
Baker, whose features appeared Latin, was buried along with
other
unclaimed Cuban invaders soon after. But Ray, whose features did
not, was sent to Havana's Institute of Forensic Medicine, where
mortician Juan Menendez Tudela, now 75, recalls embalming him.
Menendez says he placed the body in a freezer, where it
remained
at about 5 degrees below zero for 18 years and eight months.
"I never questioned why he was there; there were orders about
him, and that was enough for me," said Menendez, who cared for the
body the entire time. "Of course, I knew he was an American pilot,
but my orders were to take care of him, to watch over him."
Cuban officials conceded that they did not know the identity
of
the body until soon after they learned of Weininger's search for
her father. That information came through diplomatic notes sent to
Cuba's Foreign Ministry from the U.S. Interest Section,
Washington's diplomatic mission in Havana, which opened in 1977, 16
years after the United States broke off diplomatic relations with
Castro and closed its embassy.
The only identification found at Ray's crash site in 1961 was
fake CIA documents for Baker.
It wasn't until 1979 that Cuban and FBI officials positively
identified Ray's body by matching it with fingerprints and dental
records.
The day after Ray's death, a Defense Department spokesman in
Washington flatly denied rumors that the Alabama Air Guard had
taken part in the attack. President Kennedy, under fire from U.S.
allies and enemies alike, told reporters only: "I think that the
facts of the matter involving Cuba will come out in due time."
Though shattered and forever changed, the survivors of Ray's
small group of Guardsmen quietly went home to Birmingham and kept
Kennedy's secret--for decades. The word went around town that Ray
and the others had died in a cargo plane crash in an unrelated
operation.
"They were about as good of secret keepers as you'd want to
have," said Bailey, the cousin who joined forces with Ray's
daughter. "The community soaked them back up, and the community
helped them keep their secret."
Asked why, Bailey said: "First, you've got the South, the way
we
are. . . . We're not always very forthcoming. Then, I think there's
the issue that the government scared the crap out of these people.
"The fear of God was just put in a lot of people here; the CIA
came to the houses of every one of my grandmother's 11 kids and
interviewed every one of them to see what they knew."
Among the stories that made the rounds in the family but were
never confirmed by the U.S. government, Bailey added, was that
Ray's wife was told that she would be committed to a mental
institution for life if she continued pressing to learn her
husband's whereabouts.
"But thirdly," Bailey said, "sometimes you handle the pain of
something like this by just not talking about it."
Families Petition to Get Real Story
In the late 1970s, Bailey and Weininger sent 100 questions to
the
CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, asking it to explain
Ray's fate.
The agency never answered in writing. Instead, it sent two
agents
to meet them in Selma, Ala., in the spring of 1978. There, Bailey
and Weininger recalled, the agents told the truth about Ray and
handed over two medals and a citation posthumously awarding Ray the
Distinguished Intelligence Cross.
But when the agency did provide the posthumous award,
Weininger
said, "they told us not to mention anything about it to anyone."
Even after Ray's body went home the next year to a funeral
that
drew many of the Air Guard veterans, along with Cuban survivors and
even one of the CIA agents who had briefed Bailey and Weininger,
the CIA did not acknowledge publicly that Ray and the other men had
ever served their country--until its statement to The Times last
week.
Weininger and Bailey say--and the CIA papers declassified last
month confirm--that documents they have accumulated show that the
agency set up a front company that paid each dead pilot's family a
regular stipend and financed children's college
educations--including Weininger's. Relatives were told that the
money was from a Miami company--not the government.
One of the CIA documents states that the fake company created
to
settle "the legal and moral claims arising from these [airmen's]
deaths has been costly, complicated and fraught with risk of
disclosure of the government's role."
The document adds: "In spite of the invasion failure, the
story
of the American pilots has never gotten into print, although its
sensational nature still makes this a possibility. In dealing with
the surviving families, it has been necessary to conceal connection
with the United States government."
Clearly, however, the costs were not financial.
As for her own life, Weininger said: "You can say it's an
obsession, but to me it's an opportunity to look through somebody's
window at a moment of history and then be able to share it with
people.
"Everybody has to confront pain in their own way. No one gets
out
of it without scars, but the difference is how those scars heal."
For Cuban officials, who say Castro's forces lost far more
lives
in the Bay of Pigs than did the invaders, the CIA's recent
admissions are a vindication. But the case of Thomas "Pete" Ray,
most say, remains one of sadness.
"To me, dead people--even enemies--make me feel sad and
sorry,"
said retired Lt. Col. Arnelio Loynaz, who was assigned to check on
Ray's body in the mid-1970s.
"I feel sorry for him, and for his family."
* * *
Times staff writer Fineman reported from Havana, Washington,
Miami and Birmingham, Ala. Times researcher Mascarenas reported
from Havana.
Ann Rosenthal, Ph.D.
Communication
Columbus State University
Columbus, GA 31907
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