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Our critique..• set some kind of record as a conscious effort on the part of an administration to derive the lessons from an important episode in time to apply them to the problems of the future. To be complete, however, we might profitably have reviewed the alternatives open to the President in the spring of 1961 and tried to decide what ~ou1d have been the best course of action to have undertaken then. 1/ The alternatives that Taylor suggested were available at the time were: 1) cancellation of the operation and dis- banding the Brigade; 2) infiltrating groups of the Brigade for sabotage and intelligence gathering; 3) using the Brigade as an invading force without direct US participation, but avoiding the errors that had occured at the Bay of Pigs; and 4) landing the Brigade with the clear intention of supporting it with whatever US military power was necessary to its objective-- the ouster of Fidel Castro. After reviewing the pros and cons of those four alternatives, Taylor concluded: "Such an analysis ?~r~?~~ to me to tilt the scales in favor of alternative one, cancellation." "if In a newspaper article which he prepared following the failure of the 1980 attempt to rescue the US hostages held by Iran, General Taylor made further references to the CSG review of the Bay of Pigs operation.* Some of the remarks which he made in May 1980 did not necessarily jibe with what he had written in 1972. The newspaper article suggested, for example, * Washington Post, 12 May 80, Analogies (I I) : "Was Desert I another Bay of Pigs?" 225