We annually spend more on military security than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Famous last words, but they could not undo the damage of eight years of alternately encouraging and acquiescing in the growth of that complex.137
The CIA’s Cuban operation was the main subterranean event of 1961. Eisenhower broke off relations with Cuba on January 3. Sketchy reports in
The invasion took place at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs on Monday morning, April 17, 1961, as State Department and White House spokesmen denied all knowledge. Six of the eleven B-26s were lost, and the exile brigade withered quickly on the Cuban beaches. The next evening, Bissell desperately asked Kennedy to authorize the use of navy jets. Kennedy, knowing that plausible deniability was at the breaking point, first said no, then relented to allow unmarked navy jets to support the B-26s for one hour, purely defensively. The navy fliers arrived at the wrong time; no one remembered their time zone was one hour off. The operation ended in disaster.139
Kennedy was determined that CIA heads would roll, and they did, just in time for the opening of the new Langley headquarters. On September 27, Allen Dulles resigned as DCI; Rockefeller associate John A. McCone replaced him. Bissell soon left clandestine services, replaced by Richard Helms. Charles Cabell, who played a small but crucial role in the invasion’s failure, was also gone. But despite new faces, little changed. If anything, the debacle heightened Kennedy’s burning desire to get Castro the hell out of Cuba. The result was Operation Mongoose, a “full court press” against Cuba that included coup attempts, contamination of exports, and counterfeiting, often with Mafia assistance. Ironically, the Soviet Union also tried to remove Fidel, who was not especially servile in the early years. Castro’s security forces disabled a KGB-organized plot against him in the fall of 1961.140
The last key event of 1961 was the birth of the Defense Intelligence Agency on October 1, 1961. The DIA was mandated to coordinate all military intelligence and became an instant competitor to the CIA. Interservice rivalries, however, impeded its effectiveness. Before long, the DIA was an unwieldy organization “rutted with independent intelligence fiefdoms and esoteric study groups.”141
UFOs IN 1961
The trend of scant UFO sightings continued in 1961. Some were interesting for the attention they received; others simply in their own right. During the test-firing of a Polaris missile at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 10, “an unidentifiable object,” much larger than the missile itself, tracked it, and got so close that radar momentarily locked on to it, according to official logs. The incident made it to the NICAP files and was reported in the January 1965 issue of True magazine.142
On January 22, at Eglin AFB in Florida, a metallic-looking and elliptical UFO approached from over the Gulf, made a U-turn, and sped back. A civilian apparently photographed it on 8 mm movie film. From February 5 to 7, several UFO reports came from Maine describing strange lights in the sky. Some of these blinked and moved up and down. Local press wrote, “The military had us just about convinced that no such objects existed. The only trouble was that many people—good, reliable observers—continued to see these things.” In Antarctica on March 16, a meteorologist saw an odd, multicolored, fireball-like object.143
