Ronald Hilton, a Latin America scholar who uncovered preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion, died February 20 at 95 at his home on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif.. He was 95.

As director of Stanford’s Institute of Hispanic American Studies, Hilton reported that it was common knowledge in Guatemala that the CIA had established a base there to train Cuban exiles for an invasion of Cuba.

A November 1960 editorial in The Nation on preparations for the invasion cited Hilton as the magazine’s key source of information. Hilton long held the American press in contempt for failing to work more vigorously to expose plans for the failed 1961 attempt to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Hilton was born in Torquay, England, in 1911 and received his B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University before embarking on an extended tour of Europe as the continent descended into war. He bicycled around Germany in the 1930s and observed the Nazis consolidating power and found himself in Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

After a stint teaching in Canada, Hilton joined the faculty of Stanford in 1941, where he worked and lived in the same house for the rest of his life. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946. He founded the university’s Institute of Hispanic American Studies and the Hispanic American Report, the journal where his news of the Bay of Pigs preparations first appeared.

In 1965, Hilton founded the World Association of International Studies, a network of scholars that in 1990 began publishing its work exclusively online.

Hilton edited the multi-volume “Who’s Who in Latin America” and published the two-volume “Scientific Institutions of Latin America,” among other books. He continued to work with the association, publishing articles and organizing conferences until shortly before he died.