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A few days after the invasion fiasco, Carlson appeared in Birmingham and informed the airmen's wives that their husbands were lost and presumed dead. He provided few other details. "I had no idea my husband was even down there," recalls Mrs. Wade Gray. "I was looking for him to come home any day." Adding to the Administration cover-up try was Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who last January flatly denied that any Americans had been killed in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Hearing that, Shamburger's mother wrote President Kennedy: "If no Americans were involved, where is my son?" She got a remarkable reply from the President's Air Force aide, Brigadier General Godfrey T. McHugh, stating that "if any information is ever obtained on the circumstances surrounding the loss of your son, you will be informed immediately. Unfortunately, at present, neither the CIA nor any other Government agency possesses the slightest pertinent information on your son's disappearance." Unmollified, Mrs. Shamburger said: "I'm not going to give up. They take your boy away and never let you know what happened.''
Confusion Through Sensitivity. The attempted concealment of the flyers' deaths is just one example of the Kennedy Administration's acute sensitivity on all matters involving U.S.-Cuba relations—and that sensitivity often leads to confusion. Thus, speaking in Houston last week. Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted that "Cuba will not be permitted to use any of its arms outside Cuba. A Soviet military presence on that island cannot be accepted." That brought a wry retort from Vermont's Republican Senator George Aiken. "I wish," said Aiken, "that Secretary Rusk could make that determination retroactive, because the Russians apparently are occupying Cuba in force, and I understand Soviet-made weapons are showing up in considerable quantities in other Latin American countries."
Appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Central Intelligence Agency Director John McCone did little to clear up the confusion. Between 1,000 and 1,500 Latin Americans last year traveled to Cuba for sabotage and guerrilla training, and many more have gone in the first two months of this year, said McCone. The largest contingents, he reported, came from Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador. Argentina and Bolivia. "One group of trainees was asked to mark bridges and other similar demolition targets on detailed maps of their country."
McCone insisted that the CIA has no evidence to indicate that Cuba is shipping any great quantity of Soviet arms to other Latin American nations. "But." he said darkly, "we have no reason to believe that they will not or cannot do so, when so doing serves their stated purposes of creating uprisings in Latin America." What does the Administration plan to do if that happens? Well, that seems to be another secret.