The Miami Herald, the CIA, and the Bay of Pigs scoop that didn’t run

[kpete]

Cuban exiles training for Bay of Pigs shot 16-year-old Floridian in the head, federal government stopped prosecution:

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............In a little-known collision of journalism and national security, the Herald, seven months before the Bay of Pigs, had prepared a news story saying that the United States was planning to launch a military operation against Cuba. But the paper’s top management killed the story after CIA Director Allen Dulles said publishing it would hurt national security.

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On the sultry night of Aug. 26, 1960, 16-year-old John Keogh had called some of his teenaged buddies over to the family poultry farm in Homestead to help him wrangle a bunch of chickens that were scheduled to be shipped off to customers. But the delivery truck never showed, and the bored kids at last gave up and drove off to a little store where they could buy some Cokes and talk about girls.

On the way there, though, one of the guys mentioned seeing a camp for migrant farmworkers nearby. “He said they danced around the fire at night and acted weird,” says Keogh, now 70 and working in the auto wholesale business in Land O’ Lakes. “So we thought we’d like to see that. And later, that got us called ‘thrill-seeking youths’ in the newspapers.”

When they reached the camp, one of the guys suggested it would be funny to toss a few firecrackers over the fence. A lot of thoughts would flash through Keogh’s mind in the moments after the firecrackers went off, and one of them was, these are not your average immigrant farmworkers. A host of weapons, including .30-caliber machine guns, opened up from inside the camp. One of the bullets came through the window of Keogh’s pickup truck, hit him in the back of the head and left him blind. Over the next 72 hours, he underwent three surgeries.

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Video & More:
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article18792675.html#storylink=cpy

[Fred Sanders]

1. One of countless American interference with other nations...which is why the world considers

America the nation representing the gravest danger to world peace.....just look at the history.

"Free" press? Never has been, the freedom is an illusion.

Remember the Dixie Chicks.

[johnnyreb]

2. Dulles said don't print, Kennedy said print more.

“I didn’t show Dulles the story, but I told him, in detail, everything that was in it,” Kraslow recalls. “He was stoic, poker-faced. Was he surprised? I don’t know, directors of the CIA never, ever look surprised. And he never commented on the accuracy of the story. At the end of it, he said: ‘If you publish that kind of information, you’ll seriously damage national security.’”
(....)
....Kennedy told a senior Times editor: “If you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”

[Eleanors38]

3. It is said that Miami is Foggy Bottom South, and the Herald contains its history in the warehouse.

Growing up in Florida, we were aware of paramilitary training in the 'Glades well before the Bay of Pigs, and what it was for. Trafficante ran Havana until Batista was ousted, whereupon he fell back to Tampa to run Florida operations, sans Miami. (With Las Vegas, it is an open city to La Cosa Nostra, and not in any family's geographic jurisdiction).