There is a sacredness in tears
they are not the mark of weakness
but of power
they speak more eloquently than 10,000 tongues.
They are the messengers
of overwhelming grief,
and of deep contribution,
and of unspeakable love.
~Washington Irving~

 

This Page is dedicated to the memory of

Leo Baker

Rank/Branch: Flight Engineer/Alabama National Guard
Unit:
Date of Birth:
Home City of Record:
Date of Loss: 19 April 1961
Country of Loss: CUBA
Loss Coordinates:
Status (in 1973): Died in Captivity
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: B26
Missions:

Leo Baker, thirty-four at the time of his death, was a native of Boston. A short,
dark-haired, handsome man, he was thought to be Italian by many of his
friends because of his appearance and the fact that he owned two
 pizza shops in Birmingham. Actually, he was the son of a French
 mother and a father who came from Newfoundland.

He entered the Air Force in 1944, served as a flight engineer and was
discharged as a technical sergeant. He married, and was divorced.
There was one daughter, Teresa. Baker flew in the Korean
War, then, on Lincoln's Birthday, 1957, joined Hayes as a
flight engineer. He also started a pizza shop in East Lake.
The  following year an attractive, blue-eyed brunette walked
 into Leo's Pizza Shop. He hired her on the spot.

Her name was Catherine Walker. Although born in Kentucky,
she was raised in Birmingham and was graduated from Woodlawn
High School there. They began dating and were married on August 12, 1959.
In December, Baker was laid off by the Hayes Company. But he
bought a second pizza shop in Homewood. Cathy managed one; Leo the other. He worked hard -- he could not abide lazy people -- and his small restaurant business prospered.

They had two children: Beth, born April 22, 1960, and Mary, who
never saw her father. She was born September 26, 1961, six months after he died.
In January, 1961, Leo Baker went to Boston for his father's funeral. He told Cathy he was expecting a phone call and it came while he was gone. Soon after, late in January, Baker left home. He did not tell Cathy where he was going. But he told her she could write to him c/o Joseph Greenland at the Chicago address. His return mail came once
from Washington, but usually it was postmarked Fort Lauderdale,
Florida. One picture post card from that city showed a motel with
 a tropical-fish pool. One weekend Leo returned to Birmingham
carrying a plastic bag full of tropical fish.

During this period Baker told his wife he was dropping supplies
 over Cuba and training pilots. Every two or three weeks he came home briefly.
Two weeks before Easter he came home for the last time.
He arrived on a Saturday and left on a Sunday, and
that was the last time Cathy ever saw him.

"Watch the newspapers early in May," were among the parting words he spoke to her.
Cathy believed he then went to Guatemala. She later learned he
 had won $300 in a poker game in Central America before the invasion.
When someone asked if he planned
to send the money home, he had replied: "I'm taking it with me to Cuba.
I might be able to buy my way out of trouble."  Cathy did not
 know how much money Leo was paid.
 But she received $500 a month while he was away.

Bay of Pigs anniversary spurs memories 
By Jeff Donaldson
Reno Gazette-Journal
April 16th, 2000 

Family remembers downed pilot
After years of denying U.S. involvement in the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the government’s admission of the truth two years ago has offered little more than solace to one Reno family as the anniversary of the attack approaches.

For 39 years, Catherine Baker and her two daughters have been coming to grips with the loss of Leo Baker — husband, father and “soldier of fortune” whose plane was shot down during the battle April 17.

Though Baker was one of only four American fliers lost in the plot to remove Fidel Castro from power, Catherine Baker’s effort to retrieve her husband’s body has been a bittersweet chapter in a story of lies and deceit that haunts the family still.

In 1998, the government declassified documents that confirmed Leo Baker had been a flight engineer on a B-26 bomber piloted by Thomas “Pete” Ray.

Before the attack, Catherine Baker said she knew the fliers were 
training Cuban exiles in Florida.

“Leo came home right before Easter that year and said he didn’t
 expect to fly,” Baker recalls. “Before he left, he told us to watch
the papers sometime during the middle of April.”

But when the attack began, Leo Baker’s plane was called into action.

While Riley Shamburger, pilot, and Wade Gray, flight engineer, were lost when their plane was shot down off the coast of Cuba, Baker and Ray made several bombing runs over the island before they were shot down by ground fire.

Catherine Baker said she knew the men had survived the crash
but were killed by Castro’s men.

“Kennedy stood up at the United Nations and told everyone that Americans weren’t involved in the invasion,” Baker recalled. “But Castro had Leo’s body on ice and threatened to bring him to New York to convince the world we were there.”

As more information about the botched invasion began to reach the public, a lawyer the Central Intelligence Agency hired eventually visited one of two pizza shops the Bakers owned in Birmingham, Ala., to tell Catherine Baker the truth.

But even then, the truth was that Leo Baker and Pete Ray had died when their plane crashed during a training mission over the Gulf of Mexico.

“Most of the surviving flight engineers and pilots had been sent away 
with their families, so we couldn’t talk with them,” Baker said. “The 
CIA had us pretty convinced to keep our mouths shut.”

The search Catherine Baker said she began her quest to find Leo’s body in 1972.

Her daughters, Laura Schaechtele and Mary Cottrill, wanted to 
know what happened to their father. 

Baker said they were often teased at school because they would tell friends
their father had died but they were not permitted to discuss the details.

With the help of Alabama congressman Clarence Miller, Catherine Baker 
finally got an interview with the Yugoslav consulate. 

She turned over dental records and a search began within Cuba that 
eventually revealed Baker’s whereabouts.

Strangely enough, Castro kept the bodies of both Baker and Ray frozen for
many years. Ray’s family eventually retrieved the pilot’s body in 1981 and
buried him in San Francisco, but Leo Baker’s body was buried in a 
gravesite in Cuba marked 425-E.

In early 1980, Cuban officials conducted an autopsy on the body in 425-E but discovered the remains were not those of Leo Baker. 

A year later, the U.S. State Department sent a memo to Catherine Baker
that said her husband’s body had been removed from his grave and buried 
in a common burial plot with the remains of numerous other people.

For Catherine Baker, the search was over.

“We’d cried so many tears, and now it’s over and done with. 
We’re all cried out,” Baker said.

But her daughter, Laura, feels differently. She said the fact that the 
family never has had a formal funeral for her father makes the situation 
all the more difficult to accept.

“I still have a lot of anger toward the government because I feel like they owed us more,” Schaechtele said. “They could have brought him back. They still could.”

Thomas Ray, a San Francisco lawyer who helped his sister and cousin retrieve his father’s body, said he could identify with the Bakers’ disappointment.

Ray said the CIA threatened his mother, like all four of the flyers’ wives, and she was afraid to inquire about the remains. 

His family eventually sent a set of his father’s dental impressions to Havana, and the Swiss embassy helped locate the body.

“We were told the reason they kept the body was to return it to the family,” Ray said. “I can’t see any mileage that would have been gained by them keeping the body all these years. It lost all political purposes years ago.”

Like Baker, Ray thinks Leo Baker may have met a different fate because of the color of his skin.

Catherine Baker said her husband had a dark complexion and looked Cuban, unlike Pete Ray who had fair skin and red hair.

“We were extremely fortunate to have the ability to bring the body back,” Ray said. “It made a major difference in our lives.”

The healing
Despite the lies and cover-up, Catherine Baker said she holds no grudges against the CIA, which took care of her and her family for many years.

In 1982, the family received bronze and silver CIA medals secretly issued to Leo Baker six years earlier.

Gold stars also were hung on a wall of honor at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., to honor the four fliers, though their names weren’t added until 1998.

For Thomas Ray, the burial of his father in the U.S. helped bring closure for his family. But the mystery took a toll on his mother, Margaret Ray, who died in 1992 at age 63.

Both men also are remembered at Cuba’s Revolution Museum where Ray said he learned that the gunners who shot down the plane and fought Ray and Baker for nearly three hours still tell the story of the flyers’ bravery.

For Baker’s daughters, Schaechtele and Cottrill, the journey they made to McLean, Va., two years ago for the CIA’s annual memorial honoring the men was the first step to healing. 

Catherine Baker admits she hopes one day to accompany her daughters to Cuba to lay flowers on the gravesite where Leo Baker is buried.

“I don’t go to the memorials, but the last couple of years I’ve wanted to go to Cuba,” Baker said. “I don’t know what could be gained by the continuation of these things. I don’t mind, really. I’ve accepted it.”

***
FAST FACTS:
Initial budget of CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion: $4.4 million
Final cost: $67.6 million, estimated
Total propaganda leaflets dropped over Cuba: 12 million pounds
Total men participating in the invasion: 1,511 (177 airborne, 1334 ships) 
 2000 Reno Gazette-Journal
 
 

Other Personnel in Incident: Thomas "Pete" Ray, DICSource: Compiled by 
P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews.REMARKS:From the National Alliance 
BITS 'N' PIECES newsletter 03/27/98"CIA Acknowledges U.S. Pilots downed in 
Bay of Pigs Mission"How many American Servicemen, Active Duty, Reserves or 
National Guard were lost during the ill fated CIA operation 
to invade Cuba on April 19, 1961? According to an L.A. Times 
article by Mark Fineman and Dolly
Mascarenas at least two Americans recruited from the Alabama National
Guard, were shot down over Cuba. Both crewmen, Capt. Pete Ray and
flight Engineer Leo Baker survived the crash. Both men were shot and
killed by Cuban soldiers. "Baker whose features appeared Latin was
buried along with other unclaimed Cuban invaders..."What happened to Pete 
Ray? According to the article "Castro was so
determined to prove the Americans were there he froze Ray's remains for
more than 18 years."Finally, in 1979, due to efforts of 
Ray's daughter, Janet Ray Weininger
"and after 19 months of painstaking diplomacy with a U.S. government
that still did not want to claim him as one of its own, Cuba returned
the pilot's body to Alabama."In 1978, agents met with Weininger "...the 
agents told the truth about Ray and handed over two 
medals and a citation posthumously awarding Ray
the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the agency's highest award for
valor...""Last month, the CIA released a document confirming that U.S. 
pilots had in fact been shot down over Cuba in 1961. And last week, agency
officials acknowledged publicly for the first time that the Alabama
pilot was one of theirs." "These were vortex people, the most important 
people in the world for a few moments, and then the government
just cuts the strings and cuts them
loose to drift," said Ray's cousin, Thomas Bailey an Alabama 
journalist""...Weininger said she harbors no animosity toward the Cubans for
keeping her father's body all those years. "I blame my government...
They led these men into harm's way and then 
turned [their] back on them."

=============================================================
Los Angeles Times
03/15/98Bay of Pigs: the Secret Death of Pete Ray* The Alabama Air Guard 
pilot died during ill-fated Cuban invasion attempt. 

For years, the CIA hid his fate from his family. Havana, meanwhile, kept his body frozen.By MARK FINEMAN and DOLLY MASCARENAS, SPECIAL TO THE TIMESLos Angeles Times Sunday March 15, 1998 Home Edition Part A Page I Foreign DeskHAVANA--When Thomas "Pete" Ray's B-26 
bomber was shot down by Cuban antiaircraft batteries near Playa Giron on April 19, 1961, he wasn't
there.So said the CIA.And for decades, the U.S. government publicly denied that a top-secret
squadron of civilians recruited from the Alabama Air National Guard ever existed, let alone was on a CIA mission to bomb Cuba in one of the agency's best-kept and most humiliating secrets. It was the failed Bay
of Pigs invasion, in which, officially, no Americans were involved. But Ray was there. The 30-year-old Center Point, Ala., pilot was shot to death--pistol and knife in hand--by one of Fidel Castrols soldiers.
They also killed his flight engineer, Leo Baker, after the two had bombed targets near Castrols field headquarters. Two other Alabamians also died when their plane was shot down during the invasion, which
included napalm bombing by U.S. aircraft.They were on a mission that Col.Joe Shannon, one of the few surviving pilots from the group, recently recalled was "a last-ditch effort" that, through its very secrecy, would change the course of many lives for decades to come.Castro was so determined to prove the Americans were there that he froze Ray's remains--for more than 18 years.For Ray's wife, mother and two children, those years were haunted by silent confusion and fear, as the U.S. government knew, but refused to tell, the whereabouts of a man who had simply vanished from the face of the Earth.For the CIA, Ray's secret involved national security and image. To admit that the pilot was one of theirs was to concede the depth of the agency's involvement in a disastrous invasion that it insisted, until last year, was the work of dissidents within Cuba.And for the Cuban government, which spent thousands of dollars
preserving Ray's remains, the case was both frustrating and mystifying: How could any government lie for so long to the family of a soldier? After all, it had announced to the world on the day Ray died that it had
the body of an American pilot. In December 1979, after the Cubans learned of a personal mission by Ray's daughter, Tanet Ray Weininger, to find his body--and after 19 months of painstaking diplomacy with a U.S. government that still did not want to claim him as one of its own--the Cuban government returned
the pilot's body to Alabama.The CIA still has not publicly admitted that it knew where his remains
were all along. Just last month, however, the agency released a document confirming that U.S. pilots were, in fact, shot down over Cuba in 1961.And last week, in response to detailed inquiries about the Ray case 
from The Times, agency officials acknowledged publicly for the first time that the Alabama pilot was one of theirs."Thomas 'Pete' Ray made heroic contributions to the CIA and to this country, serving with 
great distinction," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said. "Given the passage of time and recent declassification of historic documents from this time period, his affiliation with the CIA can now be acknowledged publicly."Documents obtained by The Times from the Cuban government, combined with the recently declassified CIA memos, cables and confidential reports on the Bay of Pigs, solve much of this extraordinary Cold War mystery of the lost Alabamians.Official Deception and Mutual MistrustIt is a story of official U.S. deception and of a mutual mistrust between the United States and the Communist government 90 miles off its shores--a regime the CIA has spent hundreds of millions of dollars
trying to overthrow since Castro came to power in 1959.As for the men of the secret squadron, "these were -vortex people--the most important people in the world for a few moments--and then the
government just cuts the strings and cuts them loose to drift," said Thomas Bailey, Ray's cousin and an Alabama journalist. "You're the front line between communism and the free world. . . . Then, at the end,
the government ignores you."If there's a message beyond that, it's about government, about human lives, about how lives are changed by one event. In some ways, these people were never the same again. Some better, some worse. But it marked that moment when we all, who believed in the government, began to
lose faith in that government."Added Weininger, whose mother died years ago and whose Miami home is filled with boxes of documents and photographs of her father: "If we had to go back and do it all over again, I just wish they would have told me the truth when it no longer needed to be a secret."In its formal statement to The Times last week, the CIA also confirmed for the first time that Ray was posthumously awarded the CIA's highest honor for bravery--the Distinguished Intelligence Cross."We plan to add his 
name to the book of honor which identifies individuals for whom a star has been inscribed in the marble facade of the tower of the CIA headquarters building," spokesman Harlow said.Until now, Ray's star has been marked only by a number.Cubans Call Costly mission HumanitarianIn opening Havana's archives on the Ray case to The Times last month, Cuban officials asserted in interviews that their government originally
froze the pilot's body to prove U.S. involvement in the invasion but that the costly maintenance quickly became a humanitarian mission."In our culture, we do not handle dead bodies insensitively, not even
our enemies, our worst enemies," Cmdr. Manuel Pineiro, a former intelligence chief better known as "Red Beard," said in his last interview before he died of a heart attack after a car crash in Cuba
last week."The only explanation that I have for keeping the body for so long was to return him to whoever claimed him, to his family," said Pineiro, who was venerated in the Cuban press after his death as "the CIA's nemesis" in Cuba.Pineiro and other Cubans interviewed expressed shock that the U.S.
government could turn its back for so long on one of its own."How does a country allow its own citizens--I refer to the families of these pilots--to live in doubt, not to know what happened to their loved
ones?" he asked. "We told the world, the United Nations; we sent the list with the names we had. Why was it nobody answered?"Another senior Cuban official used a recent interview to invite Ray's daughter to Havana as a state guest for what he said would amount to emotional closure.But Weininger, 43, who has devoted her life to researching the case and who now participates in Cuban American exile events in Miami, politely declined.After decades of trying to find out the truth and finally retrieving her father's body with the help of two members of the U.S. Congress who pushed the case with the State Department, she said she has become suspicious of nearly everyone."I don't want to go to Cuba and be involved in 
something bigger, to be used as a pawn between different political groups--there or here," she said. "I want to go to Cuba when it's a free country."Yet Weininger added that she harbors no animosity toward the Cubans for keeping her father all those years. Just the opposite: "I blame my government. My government did wrong. They led these men into harm's way and then turned [their] back on them."It is only within the past year that the CIA has admitted even that in more than 1,000 pages of recently declassified documents on file at the National Security Archives in Washington, and in a State Department
volume published last fall, the spy agency has come clean about its role and its failures in the Bay of Pigs invasion.The agency previously went to great lengths to keep the information secret. A document released last month, for example, was the sole surviving copy of CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick's highly
critical 150-page report, which had been kept in a CIA safe for 37 years.Those documents, combined with others provided by the Cuban government and interviews with witnesses and with relatives of those who died in the invasion, tell a story not only of CIA bungling but of bitter betrayal.Recruits, Secret Bases and an Ill-Fated PlanThe story begins about a year after Castro overthrew Cubals U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and marched into Havana in January 1959. In a plan hatched under President Eisenhower and executed in the first months of John F. Kennedy's presidency, the CIA plotted every ill-fated step of an invasion that was meant to appear entirely the work of dissidents within Cuba and of mutinous Cuban military forces.The CIA recruited exile fighters from throughout the United States, set
up clandestine training bases in the U.S., Guatemala and Nicaragua, and searched for planes that would match those in the Cuban air force--B-26 bombers that the agency could repaint and deploy to make it appear as if Castrols military had turned on him.The only B-26s the CIA could find in the United States were in the aging fleet at the Alabama Air National Guard in Birmingham. And there, the agency also found a more-than-willing co-conspirator in the local Air Guard commander, Maj. Gen. G. Reid Doster Jr., who hated Communists everywhere.In January 1961, the CIA picked Doster to recruit local pilots to fly, along with Cuban exiles, the disguised B-26s during the invasion. Ray, an Alabania-born aircraft inspector at a Birmingham factory, was typical of Doster's unlikely Cold Warriors--weekend fliers who included the
owner of a local pizza shop.Weininger remembers the day her father left home for the last time: Feb. 5, 1961. She was 6. None of the families of the dozen or so localpilots knew the men were heading 
to Nicaragua to prepare to bomb Cuba. The men's "cover story," Col. Shannon says, was that they were going to pilot training school."My dad was just an average guy who loved to fly," Weininger said. "But
he firmly believed in what he did. He had told his mother that if he dies flying, he'll die happy. But he also said that if we don't stop communism in Cuba, someday we might have to fight it in our own backyard.Shannon concurred. The Birmingham resident flew another B-26 the morning Ray was killed; Shannon escaped a Cuban fighter jet that shot down his best friend, Riley Shamburger, that day."This was a last-ditch effort, a desperate mission to save the guys on the ground," recalled Shannon, now 76. "We weren't supposed to fly at all- We were told we wouldn't be able to fly even if we wanted to. But
we were so close to the Cuban (exiles], their cause sort of became our cause. And in a last moment of desperation, they [the CIA] let us fly."The declassified CIA documents show that the final invasion plan did bar the U.S. pilots from joining in the bombing runs. But the exile pilots, who had been attacking Cuban airports and other targets for three days before the invasion collapsed on April 19, "were exhausted and dispirited," according to the documents.By the time Ray took off from the Nicaraguan base at 3:55 a.m. on April 19 for the 700-mile flight to Cuba, the invasion already had failed. At the last minute, Kennedy canceled U.S. air cover in a further effort to deny Washington's role, and the 1,500 Cubans the CIA had sent to invade were being torn to pieces on the beachhead.Initially, the CIA blamed the lack of air cover for the in-vasion's failure, but the CIA inspector generals report blamed the CIA itself--its arrogance, poor planning and "almost willful bungling."A CIA telegram to its personnel in Nicaragua authorizing Ray and his colleagues to attack Castrole forces that day foreshadowed the decades of mystery that would follow:"Cannot attach sufficient importance to fact that American crews must not fall into enemy hands. in event this happens, despite all precautions, crews must state [they are] hired mercenaries, fighting communism, etc.; U.S. will deny any knowledge."And that it did--despite Cubals best efforts.Jet Downed After Several Strafing RunsCuban Gen. Oscar Fernandez Mell, who was in charge of field operations the morning Ray was killed, described in a recent interview how Ray's B-26 was shot down after it made several daring strafing runs."The airplane fell in a cane field. We ran toward it. Then there was an explosion and fire," he said. "I gave orders to recover everything inside the aircraft."But Ray and flight engineer Baker had already fled their cockpit. Witnesses told Fernandez that the pair ran into a nearby cane field. Baker was found holding a grenade; a Cuban soldier shot him.Another soldier  told Fernandez that he found Ray hiding in a nearby forest, wounded but alive and armed. The soldier said he killed Ray in self-defense.Foreign Minister Raul Roa made headlines worldwide later that  day when he announced to the U.N. Security Council that Cuba had the body of a U.S. pilot shot down during the invasion; "Proof of the Yankee Intervention," the daily Revolucion declared the following day.The United Nations never pursued the issue after the U.S. publicly denied its involvement.Baker, whose features appeared Latin, was buried along with other unclaimed Cuban invaders soon after. But Ray, whose features did not, was sent to Havanals Institute of Forensic Medicine, where mortician Juan Menendez Tludela, now 75, recalls embalming him.Menendez says he placed the body in a freezer, where it remained at about 5 degrees below zero for 18 years and eight months."I never questioned  why he was there; there were orders about him, and that was enough for me," said Menendez, who cared for the body the entire time. "of course, I knew he was an American pilot, but my orders were to take care of him, to watch over him."Cuban officials conceded that they did not know the identity of the body until soon after they learned of Weininger's search for her father. That information came through diplomatic notes sent to Cubals Foreign Ministry from the U.S. Interest Section, Washington's diplomatic mission in Havana, which opened in 1977, 16 years after the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Castro and closed its embassy.The only identification found at Ray's crash site in 1961 was fake CIA documents for Baker.It wasn't until 1979 that Cuban and FBI officials positively identified Ray's body by matching it with fingerprints and dental records. The day after Ray's death, a Defense Department spokesman in Washington flatly denied rumors that the Alabama Air Guard had taken part in the attack. President Kennedy, under fire from U.S. allies and enemies alike, told reporters only: "I think that the facts of the matter involving Cuba will come out in due time."Though shattered and forever  changed, the survivors of Ray's small group of Guardsmen cfuletly went home to Birmingham and kept Kennedy's secret--for decades. The word went around town that Ray and the others had died in a cargo plane crash in an unrelated operation."They were about as good of secret keepers as you'd want to have," said Bailey, the cousin who joined forces with Ray's daughter. "The community soaked them back up, and the community helped them keep their secret."Asked why, Bailey said: "First, you've got the South, the way we are...We're not always very forthcoming. Then, I think there's the issue that the government scared the crap out of these people."The fear of God was just put in a lot of people here; the CIA came to the houses of every one of my grandmother's 11 kids and interviewed every one of them to see what they knew."Among the stories that made the rounds in the family but were never confirmed by the U.S. government, Bailey added, was that Ray's wife was told that she would be committed to a mental institution for life if she continued pressing to learn her husband's whereabouts."But thirdly," Bailey 
said, "sometimes you handle the pain of something like this by just not talking about it."Families Petition to Get Real Story In the late 1970s, Bailey and Weininger sent 100 questions to the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, asking it to explain Ray's fate.The agency never answered in writing. Instead, it sent two agents to meet them in Selma, Ala., in the spring of 1978. There, Bailey and Feininger recalled, the agents told the truth about Ray and handed over two medals and a citation posthumously awarding Ray the Distinguished Intelligence Cross.But when the agency did provide the posthumous award, Weininger said, "they told us not to mention anything about it to anyone."Even after Ray's body went home the next year to a funeral that drew many of the Air Guard veterans, along with Cuban survivors and even one of the CIA agents who had briefed Bailey and Feininger, the CIA did not acknowledge publicly that Ray and the other men had ever served their country--until its statement to The Times last week.Weininger and 
Bailey say--and the CIA papers declassified last month confirm--that documents they ha-ve accumulated show that the agency set up a front company that paid each dead pilot's family a regular stipend
and financed children's college educations--including Weininger's. Relati-ves were told that the money was from a Miami company--not the government.One of the CIA documents states that the fake company created to settle "the legal and moral claims arising from these [airmen's] deaths has been costly, complicated and fraught with risk of disclosure of the government's role."The document adds: "In spite of the invasion failure, the story of the American pilots has never gotten into print, although its sensational nature still makes this a possibility. In dealing with the surviving families, it has been necessary to conceal connection with the United States government.''Clearly, however, the costs were not financial.As for  her own life, Weininger said: "You can say it's an obsession, but to me it's an opportunity to look through somebody's window at a moment of history and then be able to share it with people.Everybody has to  confront pain in their own way. No one gets out of it without scars, but the difference is how those scars heal."For Cuban officials, who say Castrols forces lost far more lives in the Bay of Pigs than did the invaders, the CIA's recent admissions are a vindication. But the case of Thomas "Pete" Ray, most say, remains one of sadness."To me, dead people--even enemies--make me feel sad and sorry,"  said retired Lt. Col. Arnelio Loynaz, who was assigned to check on Ray's body in the mid-1970s."I feel sorry for him, and for his family."
Times staff writer Fineman reported from Havana, Washington, Miami and
Birmingham, Ala. Times researcher Mascarenas reported from Havana.----- 

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