Lansdale had been among a minority of officials who opposed the invasion plans. In November 1960, in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, Allen Dulles had presented the CIA’s proposal for Operation Zapata to the senior interagency group charged with approving all covert actions. After analyzing the proposal, Lansdale later said, he concluded that “too little attention was being paid to the political preparation in Cuba and that too small a force was being utilized for what had turned into an over-the-beach invasion.” “We are going to get clobbered,” he warned, much to Dulles’s
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