Updated below

At Foreign Policy Joshua Keating is claiming that the CIA told Kennedy in 1960 that Cuba invasion plan was "unachievable". He bases his claim on CIA documents the academic National Security Archive (NSA) liberated from the CIA through various FOIA requests.

Keating asserts:

Most interesting for presidential historians may be the minutes of a briefing given to President-Elect Kennedy on Nov. 15, 1960, during which the CIA task force expressed skepticism about whether the mission was viable with the small invasion force that the administration insisted upon, in order to maintain plausible deniability.

The claim that this briefing was given to Kennedy is false.

As the NSA scholars write in their introduction to the papers (a page Keating himself links to):

On page 149 of Volume III, Pfeiffer quotes still-secret minutes of the Task Force meeting held on November 15, 1960, to prepare a briefing for the new President-elect, John F. Kennedy: “Our original concept is now seen to be unachievable in the face of the controls Castro has instituted,” the document states. “Our second concept (1,500-3000 man force to secure a beach with airstrip) is also now seen to be unachievable, except as a joint Agency/DOD action.”

This candid assessment was not shared with the President-elect then, nor later after the inauguration. As Pfeiffer points out, “what was being denied in confidence in mid-November 1960 became the fact of the Zapata Plan and the Bay of Pigs Operation in March 1961”—run only by the CIA, and with a force of 1,200 men.

The minutes of the meeting Keating asserts were given to Kennedy were from a briefing preparation meeting of some underlings who did not include the point when they briefed Kennedy himself. They were people who wanted the invasion to occur and therefore suppressed the point.

I do not know why Keating is misrepresenting this. He certainly found the quote, just as I did, through the NSA introduction. Did he simply not read the sentence immediately following the claim? Or does he want to further a "Kennedy was the worst president" claim other writers on his site are propagandizing? I for one would expect better from an editor of a major foreign policy site.

As usual such misrepresentations give cause to ask a serious question: What other stuff are Keating and Foreign Policy lying about?

Update 1:15pm Est: Keating has now corrected his piece. Anyway – why did he get it wrong in the first place if not for Kennedy bashing?