Jacob "Jake'' Esterline
was born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, on April 26, 1920. When he was eighteen he enrolled as an accounting student at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 1941 he joined the
Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning.
During the Second
World War Esterline was recruited into the Office
of Strategic Services (OSS). Esterline was sent to India in early 1943. Later that year he was infiltrated into Burma. By the end of the war he had became a commander of a guerrilla battalion fighting the Japanese Army in China.
Jake Esterline in China during the Second World War.
After the war Esterline finished his accounting degree. He then worked for a family law firm in Pennsylvania. On the outbreak of the Korean War Esterline joined the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA).
He was sent to work at what became known as "The Farm" -
a clandestine training school for CIA recruits at Williamsburg, Virginia.
Esterline was put in charge of guerrilla warfare training.
Esterline went to work
for Frank Wisner, head of the Directorate
of Plans (DPP) an organization
that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive
direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation
measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance
to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist
elements in threatened countries of the free world."
In 1954
Esterline was placed in charge of the CIA's
Washington task force in the successful overthrow of Guatemalan President
Jacobo Arbenz. Esterline also served as
CIA station chief in Guatemala, Venezuela and Panama.
Richard
Bissell, the new head of the Directorate of Plans, appointed Esterline
as Task Force Chief for the Bay of Pigs
invasion. He was also involved in the plot to assassinate Fidel
Castro. In an interview he gave to Don
Bohning of the The
Miami Herald just before his death, Esterline admitted
that Juan Orta, who functioned as Castro's private secretary, had
been recruited to slip a poisoned pill into a drink. However, a few
days before the invasion Orta changed his mind and fled to the Venezuelan
Embassy.
When Esterline discovered
that the assassination plot against Castro had failed he had serious
doubts about whether the Bay of Pigs
operation would be a success. Esterline and Jack
Hawkins, Chief of Paramilitary Staff, were also unhappy about
the decision to change the landing site from Trinidad to the Bay of
Pigs. On 8th April, Esterline and Hawkins went to see Richard
Bissell and told him they wanted to resign. Bissell persuaded
them to stay and be "good soldiers".
In February, 2005,
Gerry
P. Hemming
claimed that it was Esterline and not David
Atlee Phillips who was Maurice Bishop, the man who met with Antonio
Veciana and
Lee
Harvey Oswald in August, 1963, in the building that housed the
office of Haroldson
L. Hunt in
Dallas.
Esterline
also served as chief
of the CIA's Miami office (1968-1972) and as deputy chief of
the agency's Western Hemisphere division.
Esterline retired from the CIA in 1978.
Jacob "Jake'' Esterline
died at Hendersonville, North Carolina, in October, 1999.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
Forum Debate on Jake Esterline
Don Bohning led Discussion on The Castro Obsession
Forum Debate on Watergate
(1)
J.S.
Earman, CIA
Plots to Kill Castro (27th May 1967)
We find evidence of at least
three, and perhaps four, schemes that were under consideration well
before the Bay of Pigs, but we can fix the time frame only speculatively.
Those who have some knowledge of the episodes guessed at dates ranging
from 1959 through 1961. The March-to-August span we have fixed may be
too narrow, but it best fits the limited evidence we have.
a. None of those we interviewed
who was first assigned to the Cuba task force after the Bay of Pigs
knows of any of these schemes.
b. J.D. (Jake) Esterline,
who was head of the Cuba task force in pre-Bay of Pigs days, is probably
the most reliable witness on general timing. He may not have been
privy to the precise details of any of the plans, but he seems at
least to have known of all of them. He is no longer able to keep the
details of one plan separate from those of another, but each of the
facts he recalls fits somewhere into one of the schemes. Hence, we
conclude that all of these schemes were under consideration while
Esterline had direct responsibility for Cuba operations.
c. Esterline himself furnishes
the best clue as to the possible time span. He thinks it unlikely
that any planning of this sort would have progressed to the point
of consideration of means until after U.S. policy concerning Cuba
was decided upon about March 1960. By about the end of the third quarter
of 1960, the total energies of the task force were concentrated on
the main-thrust effort, and there would have been no interest in nor
time for pursuing such wills-o'-the-wisp as these.
We are unable to establish
even a tentative sequence among the schemes; they may, in fact, have
been under consideration simultaneously. We find no evidence that
any of these schemes was approved at any level higher than division,
if that. We think it most likely that no higher-level approvals were
sought, because none of the schemes progressed to the point where
approval to launch would have been needed.
(2)
Evan
Thomas, The Very Best Men: The
Early Days of the CIA (1995)
It never occurred to Bissell
that if push came to shove, Kennedy wouldn't put in his stack,"
said Mac Bundy. "He never said, "Do you really mean it?
If we get the beachhead, will you back us up?" These worries
were covered up. Once engaged, Bissell believed, Kennedy wouldn't
allow it to fail." Bundy or Kennedy himself should have pressed
Bissell to own up to his real expectations and intentions. It is the
job, particularly, of the national security adviser to prevent misunderstandings
between the president and his foreign policy advisers. But Bundy was
a little too trusting and admiring of Bissell, as was the president.
And Bissell was too sure of himself and his plan to fully seek their
advice as well as consent. The cheerful, damn-the-bureaucrats bond
between the CIA and the New Frontiersmen was a curse.
Back at Quarters Eye, Colonel
Hawkins and Jake Esterline, the project director, worked through the
night to produce a plan for the White House that was less "noisy."
A few days later Dave Phillips, the propaganda chief, walked into
the war room and noticed that someone had scrawled a large red "X"
over the town of Trinidad. "There's been a change in the plan,"
said Colonel Hawkins. "Trinidad is out. Now we are going to land
here." He pointed to an area on the coast a hundred miles to
the west. Phillips laughed when he saw the name. "Bahia de Cochinos?
How can we have a victorious landing force wading ashore at a place
with that name? How can propagandists persuade Cubans to join the
Brigade at the Bay of Pigs?"
Phillips squinted at the
map. "It's too far from the mountains," he said. The invaders
were supposed to be able to "melt into the mountains." Now
the Escambray Mountains were eighty miles, away-across an impenetrable
swamp. "How will the Brigade take' the beach and hold it?"
he asked Hawkins.
"The first ships to
land will carry tanks."
"Tanks!" Phillips
was "stunned," he writes in his memoirs, The Night Watch.
"We're going to mount a secret operation in the Caribbean with
tanks?"
"That's right,"
said the colonel. "A company. Three platoons of five each, with
two command tanks.
It is hard to see how the
addition of tanks made the operation "less noisy." But the
loss of the "guerrilla option" was a serious change in the
plans. Without the ability to "melt into the mountains,"
the invaders had to secure and hold the beachhead-or, pushed back
into the sea. There was no fallback plan. Bissell never told Kennedy.
"I did not deliberately mislead the president," he said.
"I didn't take the trouble to say to him that if we shift from
Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs, the fallback plan becomes totally different.
The guerrilla option was not an option.
(3)
Jake
Esterline was interviewed by Jack
Pfeiffer on 10th November, 1975.
Jack Pfeiffer:
I have a question, and it is what was Pawley's relation to this
whole operation... and your relation with Pawley seems to have been
quite close, too.
Jake Esterline:
I think it was a hangover relationship from the things that Bill
Pawley had done as quite a wheel with a number of very senior people
during the Guatemalan operation ... that they felt that Bill, who
had been very closely tied into Cuba ... that he was a very prominent
man in Florida... that there were a lot of things that he might
be able to do, in the sense of getting things lined up in Florida
for us... and also his ties with Nixon and with other republican
politicos. I used to deal with him quite a bit before.... From my
point of view, we never let Bill Pawley know any of the intimacies
about our operations, or what we were doing. He never knew where
our bases were, or things of that sort. He never knew anything specific
about our operations, but he was doing an awful lot of things on
his own with the exiles. Some of the people that he had known in
Cuba, in the sugar business, etc. I guess he actually was instrumental
in running boats and things in and out of Cuba, getting people out
and what not, and a variety of things that were not connected with
us in any way. He was a political factor from the standpoint from
J.C.'s standpoint. I don't know whether Tommy Corcoran entered in
at this point... I think Tommy Corcoran was strictly in Guatemala.
I guess Corcoran didn't come into this thing, at least not very
much.
Jack Pfeiffer:
His name turns up once or twice.
Jake Esterline:
Yes, I met him once, in connection with Cuba, but I don't remember
who... for J.C King, but I don't remember why, at this point. It
wasn't anything of any significance. My feeling with Pawley... he
was such a hawk, and he was every second week... he wanted to kill
somebody inside... . It was from my standpoint - we were trying
to keep him from doing things to cause problems for us. This was
almost a standing operation.
Jack Pfeiffer:
This is what I was wondering, because Tracy Barnes, I know on a
number of occasions, seemed to make it quite clear that what the
Agency had to be careful of was getting hung with a reactionary
label, and then at the same time that was going on, here is all
of this conversation back and forth with Pawley and his visits...
Jake Esterline:
Really to keep him from doing something to upset the applecart from
our standpoint. In that sense, I did fill that role in part for
a long time; and the net result of the thing is that Bill thinks
I am a dangerous leftist today. If I hadn't been a foot dragger,
or hadn't taken all these dissenting opinions of this, things in
Cuba would have been a lot better.
Jack Pfeiffer:
Was Pawley actually involved in the covert operation in Guatemala?
Jake Esterline:
Yes, he, well I am sure he was, in a...
Jack Pfeiffer:
I mean, with you as far as you...
Jake Esterline:
Not I personally, but he was involved with State Department. I said
Rubottom a couple of times, I didn't mean Rubottom, I meant Rusk.
He was involved - especially in Guatemala with Rubottom or whoever
Secretary of State was, and Seville Sacassaa and Somoza and whoever
Secretary of Defense was in getting the planes from the Defense
Dept., having them painted over, the decals painted over and flown
to Nicaragua where they became the Defense force for that operation.
Jack Pfeiffer:
I ran across some comment that he had made to Livingston Merchant.
Jake Esterline:
They were good friends, and knew each other. But to my knowledge,
he never had any involvement like that during the Bay of Pigs days,
although you'd have to ask Ted Shackley about what they did later,
because I think he ran some things into Cuba for Ted Shackley.
Jack Pfeiffer:
That is beyond my period of interest. He was involved in a great
amount of fund raising activity, in the New York area apparently
- pushing or raising funds in the New York area - wasn't Droller
involved in this too? What was
your relation with Droller... were you directing Droller's activities,
or was Dave Phillips running Droller...
Jake Esterline:
Oh, I sort of ran Droller, except I never knew what Tracy Barnes
was going to do next, when I turned my back. Droller was such.an
ambitious fellow trying to run in... trying to run circles around
everybody for his own aggrandizement that you never knew... but
Droller would never have had any continuing contact with Pawley,
because they had met only once, and I recall Pawley saying that
he never wanted to talk to that "you know what" again.
He was very unhappy that somebody like Gerry... he just didn't like
Gerry's looks, he didn't like his accent. He was very unfair about
Gerry, and I don't mean to be unfair about Gerry - the only thing
is that Gerry was insanely ambitious. He was his own worst enemy,
that was all.... We just didn't think that Tracy really understood
it that well, or if Tracy did, he coudn't articulate... he wouldn't
articulate it that well. Tracy was one of the sweetest guys that
ever lived, but he coudn't ever draw a straight line between two
points....
Jack Pfeiffer: What about JFK?
Jake Esterline:
JFK was an uninitiated fellow who had been in the wars, but he hadn't
been exposed to any world politics or crises yet if he had something
else as a warm up, he might have made different decisions than he
made at that time. I think he was kind of a victim of the thing.
I blame Nixon far more than I do Kennedy for the equivocations and
the loss of time and what not that led to the ultimate disaster.
Goodwin, I just thought was a sleazy; little self-seeker, who I
didn't feel safe with any secret. His consorting with Che Guevara
in Montevideo had rather upset me at the time...
Jack Pfeiffer:
How about McNamara did you get involved with him at all?
Jake Esterline:
No.
Jack Pfeiffer:
Bobby Kennedy?
Jake Esterline:
I wouldn't even tell you off tape. I didn't like him. He's dead,
God rest his soul.
(4)
Don
Bohning,
Troubling
questions still haunt legacy of Bay of Pigs, The Miami
Herald (17th April, 1998)
Thirty-seven years later, as the Bay of Pigs fades into history, many
questions have been answered by the release of long-secret documents
and the increasing willingness of the few remaining central participants
to talk.
But many of the answers
raise other questions surrounding the ill-fated invasion of Cuba on
April 17, 1961, by a brigade of 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and supported
by the CIA.
Two of the most troubling,
according to participants and analysts:
Was a failed Mafia assassination
plot against Fidel Castro directly linked to the invasion? And, if
so, did that detract from the invasion planning and execution?
Did a combination of ego
and ambition cause the late Richard Bissell -- the man most directly
responsible for the invasion as the CIA's chief of clandestine and
covert operations -- to mislead both President Kennedy and Bissell's
own planners?
Author Seymour Hersh, in
his recent book The Dark Side of Camelot, a critical look at
the Kennedy presidency, most persuasively raises the linkage between
the invasion and an assassination plot that began under the Eisenhower
administration.
Why was mission canceled?
" One of Kennedy's most controversial and least understood decisions
during the Bay of Pigs was the cancellation of the second bombing
mission'' Hersh writes. "The assumption that Castro would be
dead when the first Cuban exiles went ashore, and the fact that he
was not, may explain Kennedy's decision to cut his losses. The Mafia
had failed and a very much alive Castro was rallying his troops.''
Hersh quotes Robert Maheu,
a former FBI agent and the link between administration officials and
the Mafia for the assassination plot code-named ZR/Rifle, as telling
him that "Taking out Castro was part of the invasion plan.''
Castro's murder, said Maheu, was to take place "before - but
preferably at the time of - the invasion.''
The plot fell apart when
Juan Orta, who functioned as Castro's private secretary and was to
slip a poisoned pill into a drink, apparently got cold feet and took
refuge in the Venezuelan Embassy a few days before the invasion. Orta
died several years ago.
Kennedy, Hersh said in
an interview, must have known by April 15 - two days before the invasion
- and perhaps earlier, that the assassination plot had fallen apart
and "he was in real trouble with the operation.''
The question then became,
Hersh said, whether Kennedy should "take a bath by going ahead
with it or take a bigger bath politically if he stops it. If he stops
it he takes a tremendous hit from the right.''
Peter Kornbluh, senior
analyst at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit documentation
center in Washington responsible for the recent declassification of
hundreds of Bay of Pigs-related CIA documents, concurs that the question
of linkage between the assassination and invasion is an intriguing
one.
"The degree to which
it (the assassination plot) was coordinated as part of the planning
and whether the President actually knew about it and factored it into
the decision-making process'' is a key question, Kornbluh says.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger
insisted in at least two appearances at the Miami Book Fair last November
that he did not believe Kennedy was even aware of an assassination
plot against Castro.
If there was a link, key
CIA planners for the Bay of Pigs invasion apparently were not aware
of it. Jake Esterline, the Bay of Pigs project director, says he learned
of the assassination plot by accident when he was asked to approve
an unexplained expenditure by the late J.C. King, then head of the
CIA's Western Hemisphere division.
"I really forced my
way in by refusing to pay unless I knew what I was paying for,'' Esterline
said in an interview. "That got me partially briefed.''
Esterline said he was sworn
to secrecy and didn't even tell Jack Hawkins, a retired Marine colonel
who headed the Bay of Pigs paramilitary planning staff. Hawkins did
not learn about it until long after the failed invasion.
Esterline now believes
there "is no question about it... if that whole specter of an
assassination attempt using the Mafia hadn't been on the horizon,
there would have been more preparation'' for the invasion.
He believes "Kennedy
and his group were not prepared to support the operation and if Bissell
and others hadn't felt they had that magic bullet (assassination),
I don't think we would have had all the hairsplitting over air support.''
Esterline has no doubt
that Kennedy knew of the assassination plot.
The questions surrounding
Bissell arose in the spring of 1996 at a conference on the Bay of
Pigs attended by former CIA officials, brigade members and academics,
following release of documents to the National Security Archive.
Those documents and later
information have convinced both Hawkins and Esterline, who worked
for Bissell on the Bay of Pigs, that Bissell was not leveling with
them and probably was not passing on their concerns to Kennedy over
such things as a change in the landing site and air cover.
Hawkins cites a recently
declassified briefing paper by Bissell to the President dated April
12, 1961, that he says "proves that Bissell had agreed with Kennedy
several days before the operation began to cut the air support in
half.''
Bissell didn't tell Esterline
and Hawkins about the decision until the invasion.
"I am sure Bissell
never made it clear to the President why it was necessary to eliminate
Castro's air force before the landing,'' Hawkins said. `"I gave
great emphasis to this... Bissell knew what the military staff's opinion
was about this need but . . . Bissell never pressed it.''
(5)
Don
Bohning,
Jake
Esterline, The Miami Herald (18th October, 1999)
Jacob Donald "Jake'' Esterline, a veteran of US intelligence
services and the CIA'S project director for the ill-fated 1961 Bay
of Pigs invasion of Cuba, has died at age 79. Death came quickly at
midday Saturday as he collapsed of an apparent heart attack while
riding in a car with his son-in-law near his home in Hendersonville,
N.C.
Esterline, who spent 27
years with the Central Intelligence Agency and its World War II forerunner,
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was a significant participant
in the making of contemporary history.
In addition to his role
in the Bay of Pigs, he commanded a battalion of Burmese guerrillas
in a jungle war against the Japanese; was chief guerrilla warfare
trainer at The Farm, a once-clandestine training school for CIA recruits
at Williamsburg, Va.; headed the CIA's Washington task force in the
1954 overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz; served as CIA
station chief in Guatemala, Venezuela, Panama and Miami during the
height of the Cold War and as deputy chief of the agency's Western
Hemisphere division.
Apart from the Bay of Pigs,
it was as chief of the CIA's Miami office from 1968 to 1972, that
involved him most directly in Cuban affairs.
His task in Miami was to
quietly complete the phase-out of the unsuccessful post-Bay of Pigs
secret war against Fidel Castro - started by the Kennedy administration
and known in its initial stages as Operation Mongoose - without creating
a scandal that might embarrass Washington.
That meant disposing of
ships and boats, terminating leases on safe houses, marinas, boat
yards, relocating the CIA's Miami offices and - the most difficult
task - laying off the several hundred Cubans still directly on the
payroll.
''I felt a sense of obligation
to the Cubans after the failure of the Bay of Pigs,'' he said, explaining
in a 1995 interview why he volunteered for the Miami assignment. ``If
it was going to be done, I wanted to see it done right.
''I thought, Really, my
heart will always be with these people, these Cuban exiles in all
these years, starting with the Bay of Pigs, and I don't want to see
them cast in the cold.''
For better or worse, however,
his role in the Bay of Pigs remains the event for which he will be
most remembered and one that haunted him for the remainder of his
life.
He had been recalled from
Venezuela in early 1960 to undertake the project, which initially
was envisioned as a guerrilla incursion at Trinidad, on Cuba's south
coast. It eventually evolved into a full-scale invasion at the Bay
of Pigs, an isolated swamp area 80 miles to the west.
Both he and Marine Col.
Jack Hawkins, his paramilitary counterpart in planning the invasion,
became increasingly doubtful of its chance for success. On an April
Sunday, a week before the invasion, Esterline and Hawkins went to
the home of Richard Bissell, the agency's director of clandestine
services who was in overall charge of the operation, and told him
they were quitting.
After a heated discussion,
Bissell talked them out of quitting by appealing to their loyalty
and warning that their resignations wouldn't stop the invasion.
''We made a bad mistake
by not sticking to our guns and staying resigned,'' he said in the
1995 interview.
The invasion failed, with
both Esterline and Hawkins convinced the change in landing sites had
much to do with its failure, along with President Kennedy's reduction
in the air cover that had been promised for the invaders.
Hawkins, in a telephone
interview Sunday, recalled that Esterline, in his capacity as the
invasion task force chief ``had struggled continually to persuade
political authorities to provide all the support and protection necessary
for a small force of Cuban exiles to be landed on the Cuban coast.
''Failing this,'' said
Hawkins, "he warned his superior at the CIA that the landing
could not succeed with the restrictions imposed by the president.
He recommended cancellation, but his advice was not heeded. The result
was a military, political and diplomatic disaster at the Bay of Pigs.''
Hawkins praised Esterline
as a man ``whose dedication and abilities were recognized at the CIA
throughout his long career'' and who "devoted his life to the
defense of the United States.''
''Jake was a great leader,''
said Sam Halpern, a retired CIA colleague and contemporary of Esterline.
"He believed in what he was doing and he saw trouble ahead at
the Bay of Pigs and tried to stop the operation to no avail.''
''I had the privilege and
honor of serving under him during the U.S. intelligence community's
secret war against Castro communism,'' said Carlos Obregon, a Cuban-American
businessman in Miami. ``He shared with hundreds of us exile Cubans
a love and passion for our cause.''
Born in Lewistown, western
rural Pennsylvania on April 26, 1920, Esterline attended Temple University
in Philadelphia for three years then enrolled in Officer Candidate
School where he was when World War II war broke out.
He was recruited into the
OSS, winding up as the commander of a Burmese guerrilla battalion
fighting the Japanese, and was awarded a Bronze Star for his service.
He returned to Pennsylvania
after the war, finishing an accounting degree at Temple. Ordered back
to active duty in 1951 when the Korean War broke out, he took up a
standing offer to join the CIA.
Survivors include Mildred,
his wife of 53 years; two sons, Jacob Alan Esterline of Austin, Texas;
and John Esterline of Peachtree City, Ga.; and a daughter Ann Hutcheson
of Flat Rock, N.C.
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