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Cuba Declassification Project

Washington, D.C., May 3, 2000 – Shortly after the CIA's botched paramilitary invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy established a commission to investigate the failure and to consider whether the United States should conduct similar covert operations in the future.  The commission -- chaired by General Maxwell Taylor, but also including the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Admiral Arleigh Burke and DCI Allen Dulles -- produced a highly critical series of narratives and memoranda, concluding, in part, that "the impossibility of running Zapata as a covert operation under CIA should have been recognized" as early as November 1960, five months before the invasion.

Long the focus of declassification efforts, highly excised portions of the Taylor Commission's report were first released in 1977 and again in 1986, while the original remained tucked away in the coffers of the JFK Presidential Library.  In 1996, the document was again up for review, this time in response to a request from the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, but declassification required the concurrence of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, the State Department and the National Security Agency, each of which was to review the document for sensitivity.  More than three years passed.  It was not until December 1999 that the National Security Archive learned the reason for the hold-up:  The Pentagon had simply lost the report.  The Archive immediately requested the document under Mandatory Declassification Review, and the multi-agency declassification process, normally subject to a long, grinding backlog, began anew.

This time, thanks to the expeditious efforts of officials at the National Archives and Records Administration, the report was declassified in less than four months, an astonishing achievement for a process that under normal circumstances requires years of patience.  The National Security Archive can remember no other case where the concurrence of multiple agencies -- illustrated by the dates of the "Declass" stamps adorning the cover pages of each document -- was gathered so quickly.

The release of the Taylor Report follows the long-awaited declassification of the CIA's own scathing evaluation of the invasion, a report prepared in October 1961 by Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA's Inspector General, and called by Newsweek reporter Evan Thomas, "The most brutally frank and honest government document ever written."  Kirkpatrick's report was released to the National Security Archive in February 1998.  Appended to the IG Report is a point-by-point rebuttal from Richard Bissell, the operation's chief architect.  These and other associated documents, including interviews with key CIA managers of the Bay of Pigs operation, have been published in Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba, now available from The New Press.

While the full report of the Taylor Commission is too long to reproduce here, this Electronic Briefing Book provides excerpted passages from eight key documents, substantial portions of which were previously unavailable in the censored versions of the report released in 1977 and 1986.  The appended graphic, compiled by Catherine Nielsen, summarizes the two major previous releases of the Taylor Report, published in Operation Zapata (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981) and in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume X, Cuba, 1961-1962 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1997), and compares their content with the newly declassified version.  Other releases of parts of these materials have occurred elsewhere.  Researchers are encouraged to refer to these sources for the rest of the report, which is also available at the National Archives and Records Administration facility in College Park, Maryland.  We owe special thanks to the staff of the JFK Library for assisting researchers in identifying key passages that were previously classified.

THE DOCUMENTS

Document 1: Propaganda Action Plan in Support of Military Forces, Undated

Document 2: Chart of Command Organization for Operations

Document 3: Memorandum for Record, Paramilitary Study Group Meeting at the Pentagon, Ninth Meeting, 3 May 1961 [Excerpt]

Document 4: After Action Report on OPERATION PLUTO, 4 May 1961 [Excerpt]

Document 5: Memorandum for Record, Paramilitary Study Group Meeting at the Pentagon, Twelfth Meeting, 8 May 1961 [Excerpt]

Document 6: Memorandum for Record, Paramilitary Study Group Meeting at the Pentagon, Fourteenth Meeting, 11 May 1961 [Excerpt]

Document 7: Memorandum for Record, Paramilitary Study Group Meeting at the Pentagon, Nineteenth Meeting, 22 May 1961 [Excerpt]

Document 8: Mr. Phillips [Interview of David Atlee Phillips] [Excerpt], Undated