CIA's Man at the Bay Of Pigs
By John Barry - Herald Staff Writer
The Miami Herald - Thursday, July 16, 1998

The three days of futile bloodshed haunted the both of them -- the CIA spook and the commander in chief he despised, John F. Kennedy.

"We both had scores to settle with Castro," the old, bullet-scarred commando recalls from his home in Tampa. "But I wasn't haunted in the same way that Kennedy was. I had nothing to feel guilty about."

Such is Grayston L. Lynch's way of explaining his long, strange bond to a flawed president and a lost cause that began 37 years ago with the bloody, tragic, history-altering Bay of Pigs invasion and continued until 1967 in more than 2,000 secret CIA raids on Cuba from Miami.

Lynch was our man on Cuba's Playa Giron beach on April 16, 1961 -- the white, "Tex-Mex" - speaking CIA agent who fired the first shot of the Bay of Pigs assault and then took desperate, unofficial command of the doomed force of 1,500 Cuban volunteers, most of them Miami exiles, recruited and trained -- then disavowed -- by the Kennedy administration.

Sunday, at age 75, Lynch returns to Miami with a new book that vents bitterness and disillusionment, but celebrates the bravery of his comrades in arms, about 75 of whom died, and 1,250 of whom were captured and imprisoned.
  Many of them are now prominent and successful Americans -- including Miami's Republican state Rep. Luis Morse, House Speaker pro tempore, then in command of the supply ship Houston. Lynch describes Morse's desperate beaching of the Houston in the Bay of Pigs after Cuban warplanes blew a 10-foot hole in its stern.
  Lynch hasn't seen any of the survivors of the 2506 Assault Brigade in years, but the Cuban volunteers who made up the force regard him as "one of the big warriors of this country," says Jose Dausa of the 2506 Brigade Association in Miami.

In his book, Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs (Brassey's, $24.95), Lynch returns the compliment: "The only heartening observation . . . was that the brigade had fought magnificently. Outnumbered in every battle by at least twenty to one, it had inflicted heavy casualties on Castro's forces at a rate of fifty to one."

Much about the Bay of Pigs debacle -- a three-day battle that failed after President Kennedy canceled air support and disavowed American involvement -- already has been told in other books.

But the mere fact that Lynch is alive and intact to tell his bullet-whizzing, ground-zero tale, which he wrote more than 20 years ago and only now has published, seems miraculous.