In the course of the Watergate investigation, Mr. Buckley reminds us, Mr. Hunt had

been outed as a CIA man, indeed as "the principal CIA official directly involved in" the Bay of Pigs. Mr. Lazo was not directly involved in that operation, but, as he tells us, "a year after Castro came to power, in January 1960, when the American embassy went down, I became a self-appointed spy for the U.S.... And what I did was to arrange with a friendly European government to send reports once a week to the FBI." ... EHH: "The fiasco of the Bay of Pigs was not a failure of intelligence.... The failure of the Bay of Pigs came about because at a critical time commitments that had been made by high officials of the United States government to the Cubans who were fighting,... those officials backed away from those commitments and, in effect, abandoned the brigade at the beachhead." Discursive at times but fascinating, not least Mr. Lazo's reminiscences of events in Cuba ten and twenty years earlier that are linked to Watergate.