Thursday, April 23, 1998 | 3:51 a.m.
"It feels good to finally be able to talk about it," said Baker, who lives in Reno. Last month the government declassified documents on the U.S.-backed effort to topple Cuba's Communist leader.
"It wasn't the CIA, which stood by us," she said. "It was the politicians who were so lying, so arrogant." Next month, one of Baker's daughters plans to go to the Washington, D.C., area where her father finally will be honored.
On April 17, 1961, Baker was working in one of the family's two pizza restaurants in Birmingham, Ala., when she had a frightening premonition that something bad had happened. She closed the store and went home, where she heard a radio report of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
She knew her husband, Leo Francis Baker, had been training exiled Cuban fliers for the invasion, a U.S-backed effort to seize the island nation from Fidel Castro.
"I heard Americans had been killed," Baker said. "They gave Leo's description and the name Leo Francis Berle."
She knew he was dead. She felt it in her heart. But it took two weeks before three men visited her to say Leo died in "a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico." Baker, with a 1-year-old daughter and pregnant with another girl, felt her life come crashing down.
A massive cover-up began: The U.S. at first insisted Cuban defectors had been flying B-26 twin-engine bombers involved in the battle. Then they denied any American involvement and finally admitted that American "mercenaries" may have been with the Cuban exiles.
In a week or so, a friend of her husband's from the CIA told her the truth: Leo Baker, a flight engineer and pilot Thomas "Pete" Ray had flown a B-26 into battle after President Kennedy refused to allow U.S. jets waiting offshore to provide air support.
"They made several bombing runs, trying to clear a way through the defenders for the cuban exiles trapped on the beach," Baker said. "They were shot down by ground fire. They survived the crash but were butchered by Castro's men."
Slowly, the truth came out in the newspapers, but the government continued to deny American involvement. The CIA provided the Bakers with death benefits. A 1979 book about the Bay of Pigs was published with pictures of Leo and three other Birmingham CIA men killed in battle.
In 1982, the family received bronze and silver CIA medals secretly issued to Leo six years earlier. On a wall of honor at CIA headquarters, gold stars were hung to represent the four fliers, but their names were absent because they were classified.
Ten years ago, an American general referred to the CIA fliers as "soldiers of fortune."
"It was rough on all the families of the men who were killed," said Baker's daughter, Mary Cottrill. "We would tell people our dad was dead, but not how he died."
Then on March 13 of this year, the government declassified all remaining Bay of Pigs documents. Leo Francis Baker's name became part of history.
On May 14, Cottrill will go to McLean, Va., to see her father's name placed next to the gold star. Catherine Baker and daughter Laura Schaechtele hope to travel to Cuba to put flowers on the mass grave containing Leo's remains.
"This will give some kind of closure to the ordeal," Schaechtele said. "We've known the truth for so long, but it was the lack of recognition that hurt."
"It's our way of saying goodbye," Cottrill said. "We want to see some finality to this."
"One thing that always bothered me was the sheer arrogance of the politicians, all the denials, all the lies," Catherine Baker said. "Those men were doig their duty for their country. They were following orders.
"I'm glad the truth is out."
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