CHAPTER 10:
BAY OF PIGS: A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN
Brigade 2506 got into trouble right from the start at the Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. A local militia unit spotted the Cuban exile expeditionary force as it landed in the early morning darkness on April 17 with CIA officers William “Rip” Robertson and Grayston Lynch in the lead. The suspicious activity was reported to Havana.
Fidel Castro assumed overall command of the Cuban counterattack. Castro ordered the Fuerza Aérea Revolucionaria (FAR) (Revolutionary Air Force) into action. He telephoned the commander and pilots of the FAR base at San Antonio de los Baños to stress the importance of sinking the CIA expeditionary force’s supply ships. Two Sea Fury attack planes, two B-26s, and three T-33 jet trainers which had survived the April 15 air strikes on Cuban air fields quickly gained control of the air over the Bay of Pigs.404
As the sun rose over the water, FAR planes opened fire on the brigadistas on the beach and the Houston, a CIA-supplied freighter, carrying arms and munitions. The Houston took a hit and ran aground. A FAR attack plane strafed the landing craft Barbara J with machine gun fire as it ferried the Cuban exile expeditionary force to the beach.
A Sea Fury appeared over Playa Girón, at the mouth of the Bay of Pigs, and hit the Río Escondido, another CIA-supplied freighter, with a rocket at 9:30 a.m. The Río Escondido, carrying ten days’ worth of ammunition and supplies, sank an hour later. Brigade 2506 suffered serious losses on the first day of fighting. Four B-26 bombers were shot down as they flew tactical missions in support of the brigadistas on the beaches. An entire airborne unit of 172 brigadistas was never heard from again after it parachuted into an area at the head of the Bay of Pigs.
Castro was visible at the Bay of Pigs in combat fatigues and a brown beret, smoking a cigar and carrying a rifle as he walked with his commander Captain José Ramón Fernández. Newspapers in Cuba and elsewhere carried a photograph of Castro jumping off a tank at Playa Larga. Fernández commanded a combined force of Cuban army and militia personnel, 870 soldiers. His force included artillery and tank units and the Militia Officers School Battalion and Militia Battalion from nearby Cienfuegos. As the fighting continued, other Cuban forces also joined the battle.
On April 18, Cuban tanks were spotted at 3:00 a.m. moving south toward Playa Larga. At 7:30 a.m., the brigadistas, under heavy fire, began to withdraw to Playa Girón. By the end of the day, Brigade 2506 was running low on ammunition.405 Meanwhile, the CIA became more deeply involved operationally as Brigade 2506 foundered on the beaches. U.S. citizens, under CIA contract, flew combat air missions over the Bay of Pigs when brigadista pilots balked at doing so on April 18. Some brigadista pilots, based in Nicaragua, refused to fly out of exhaustion, and others did not want to go on what they considered suicide runs. CIA contract pilots took their place, dropping bombs, rockets, and napalm on a Cuban army column of tanks and other vehicles. But the CIA air strikes failed to stop the advance of the Cuban army toward Playa Girón.
There was little the CIA could do to save Brigade 2506 from defeat without U.S. military intervention. Former Newsweek correspondent Peter Wyden described a scene of abject defeat at the Bay of Pigs, a 13-mile long, narrow bay named for the region’s cochinos cimarrones (wild pigs). “Tanks were standing around idly, out of ammunition,” Wyden wrote, referring to Brigade 2506. “The machine guns mounted on vehicles were out of ammunition. Men were running about in every direction, shouting, debating what to do.”406 While Brigade 2506 foundered at the Bay of Pigs, the lights burned late into the night in the White House.
President Kennedy and his aides, dressed in formal attire, gathered in the Cabinet Room around midnight on April 18, 1961. The Joint Chiefs of Staff wore dress uniforms bedecked with medals. The president and his men had just come from a formal reception for members of Congress.
CIA Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) Richard Bissell and Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke pressed Kennedy to commit U.S. air and naval power to the battle at the Bay of Pigs. Otherwise, they said, Brigade 2506 faced certain defeat. Admiral Burke declared, “Let me take two jets and shoot down those enemy aircraft,” seconding Bissell’s plea for direct U.S. military intervention at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy replied sharply, “Burke, I don’t want the United States involved in this.” “Hell, Mr. President, but we are involved,” Burke retorted. Burke had already deployed the aircraft carrier Essex with 2,000 Marines in international waters ready to intervene in Cuba.
Allen Dulles reported that Brigade 2506 was trapped, unable to establish a beachhead or be extracted without the intervention of U.S. air and naval power. Rusk, who opposed open use of U.S. military force, said the time had come to implement the Bay of Pigs plan’s guerrilla option, suggesting that the brigadistas head for “the hills.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lemnitzer concurred, saying it was “time for this outfit to go guerrilla.”
For the first time, Bissell informed Kennedy and his inner circle that the Bay of Pigs plan did not have a guerrilla alternative. Bissell said the brigadistas “were not prepared to go guerrilla.” Unlike the Trinidad plan, the Bay of Pigs plan did not include an option for the brigadistas to retreat into the Escambray Mountains, a fact Bissel withheld from Kennedy.
As the meeting broke up a little before 4 a.m., Kennedy walked over to Kenneth O’Donnell and Pierre Salinger, two of his top White House aides. The three men talked briefly as they stood in the Oval Office near the French doors overlooking the Rose Garden. Kennedy stopped, distracted in mid-sentence, opened the doors and walked into the chilly spring night with his hands in his pockets. He had just turned down the CIA and the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation to use overt U.S. military power to save Brigade 2506 at the Bay of Pigs. For nearly an hour, Kennedy stood in the Rose Garden in troubled solitude. Then he walked over to the family quarters of the White House and turned in for the night.407
Time was quickly running out for Brigade 2506. The 1,500 brigadistas were besieged by a Cuban force, which had grown to 20,000 revolutionary army and militia combatants, chanting “¡Viva la revolución!” and “¡Patria o muerte!” (“Homeland or Death!”). On April 19, the brigade, cut off from its supplies, ran out of ammunition and surrendered.408
Admiral Burke ordered nearby U.S. Navy destroyers to pick up brigadistas stranded on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. But only a few were extracted because of the danger posed by the Cuban air force. The next day Burke instructed the Navy’s Atlantic Command to escort the destroyers carrying the Brigade 2506 survivors to the island of Vieques off the coast of Puerto Rico. Brigadistas left behind at the Bay of Pigs expressed their anger at the United States. Wyden wrote, “When the men saw the destroyers leave, some tried to shoot at the American ships in their anger.” He observed, “Others fired at the boats and rafts that bobbed offshore. Then they fired into the tires of their trucks and destroyed their tanks.”409 The Cuban revolution’s victory at the Bay of Pigs was decisive.
Wyden summed up, “All told, 114 men of the Brigade died.” He added, “Castro captured 1,189. Approximately 150 were unable to land; or were never shipped out; or made their way back.” Manuel Artime and the entire high command of Brigade 2506 were captured as prisoners of war. Artime was the Consejo Revolucionario Cubano’s (CRC) (Cuban Revolutionary Council) liaison with Brigade 2506.410
Meanwhile, Fidel Castro relished Cuba’s victory over Brigade 2506. Castro and the Cuban revolution soared in popularity. In a speech in Havana, he referred to the Cuban revolution for the first time as “socialist.” He called Cuba “a revolution of the humble, with the humble, for the humble, democratic and socialist.” He added, “What the imperialists cannot forgive us is that we made a socialist revolution under the noses of the United States.”
Castro also had words of praise for Havana’s Soviet ally. He called the launch of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space on April 12, 1961 an “admirable” accomplishment. Gagarin’s orbit around the earth in a spaceship marked the first human travel in space.411
A few days later, Castro delivered a four-hour televised speech. Wyden wrote, “Alternatively he radiated fire, irony, contempt… He gloated over how the planes that the mercenarios had bombed at Campo Libertad had been useless dummy targets… He laughed at the poor CIA intelligence and read from captured documents that had judged his planes to be ‘in flying condition but not in combat condition.’”
Cubans were spellbound by Castro’s address. Castro biographer Tad Szulc observed, “Practically the entire population watched Fidel on television that Sunday.” Szulc added, “Streets and plazas and parks were deserted, and his popularity seemed greater than on the day of his first victory, the victory of 1959. Girón [the beach at the mouth of the Bay of Pigs] had unified the country behind him….” Five decades later Castro explained why he proclaimed that the Cuban revolution was socialist in April 1961. He said, “Giron accelerated the revolutionary process… I was first a Marti-an and then became a Marti-an, Marxist and Leninist.”412 As Cuba celebrated its victory at the Bay of Pigs, an atmosphere of defeat enveloped the White House.
Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Whitman Rostow recalled, “Hour by hour, day by day, the full measure of the failure, with its repercussions at home and abroad, pounded on Kennedy and his advisers. Every detail hurt.” The Bay of Pigs was the greatest defeat of Kennedy’s presidency.
“I sensed an air which I had known in my military past—that of a command post that had been overrun by the enemy,” General D. Maxwell Taylor later wrote about his meeting with Kennedy and his inner circle on April 22. “There were the same glazed eyes, subdued voices, and slow speech that I had remembered observing in commanders routed at the Battle of the Bulge or in recovering from their first action… learning the sting of defeat.”
Attorney General Robert Kennedy personified the dark mood in the White House. He was not involved in the planning for the CIA covert action in Cuba until April 12. But President Kennedy relied increasingly on his brother on issues related to Cuba after the rout at the Bay of Pigs. Over the next several days, President Kennedy spent a lot of time in meetings in the White House. Time magazine Washington correspondent Hugh Sidey wrote, “John Kennedy, in shirt sleeves, moved from room to room listening to new facts on the disaster, asking for new ideas…. He tried to evaluate every fragment of information. His skepticism of what was told him was now monumental.”413
But in public Kennedy took responsibility for the failed Bay of Pigs operation. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” Kennedy told reporters at a news conference in Washington on April 22. “I am the responsible officer of this government.”414
U.S. public opinion rallied around President Kennedy, according to a Gallup Poll taken in late April 1961. Gallup reported an eighty-three percent overall approval rating for Kennedy, including sixty-one percent of the respondents who supported his “handling [of] the situation in Cuba.” Equally significant, sixty-five percent of the public opposed the intervention of “our armed forces into Cuba to help overthrow Castro.”415
Behind the scenes, Kennedy promoted his own view of what went wrong at the Bay of Pigs. Sidey wrote, “The White House did its own hatchet work.” He continued, “Reporters were called into background sessions and informed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had selected the landing beaches and that the CIA had promised the native uprising that never materialized. Some attempts were made to fasten the responsibility on the Eisenhower Administration.”416 As President Kennedy privately expressed his frustration with the CIA and Joint Chiefs, Kennedy’s decision to cancel the D-Day air strikes on Cuban air bases caused a near-mutiny in the CIA’s Cuba Task Force.
The White House waited until the last minute to notify the CIA that President Kennedy had canceled the second wave of air attacks on Cuban air bases scheduled for April 17. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy notified Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) Charles Cabell on April 16 at 9:30 p.m. that the D-Day air strikes had been called off. Bundy told Cabell if he wished to discuss the matter further he should contact Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
A little after 10 p.m., Cabell and Richard Bissell showed up at Rusk’s office on the seventh floor of the Department of State in Foggy Bottom. Cabell made a case for the restoration of the D-Day air operations.
Rusk telephoned Kennedy. Bissell recalled, “Cabell and I heard him tell Kennedy that the CIA felt strongly that the strikes were a military necessity.” Bissell added, “He then gave his own reasons against the strike, explaining that developments at the United Nations made another air strike politically disastrous for the President.”
Rusk told the CIA men, “Well, the President agrees with me.” He said, “Would you, General Cabell, like to speak to the President?” Cabell replied, “There’s no point in my talking to the President.”417
Meanwhile, McGeorge Bundy did not bother to inform the Joint Chiefs that Kennedy had decided to scratch the D-Day air strikes on Cuban airfields. Joint Chiefs Chairman Lemnitzer’s doorbell rang at his home at Fort Meyer on April 17 at 2 a.m. When two senior aides informed Lemnitzer that Kennedy had canceled the D-Day air strikes, he was stunned. “Unbelievable,” he sputtered, adding “Pulling out the rug” on Brigade 2506 was “reprehensible, almost criminal.”
Admiral Burke did not learn that the D-Day strikes had been called off until he arrived at the Joint Chiefs situation room in the Pentagon on April 17 a little after 6 a.m. When he got the news, he was “horrified” and “very angry.” He asked bitterly how Kennedy could “pull the strings out of an operation at the last minute.”
According to Wyden, “He [Burke] had always considered this strike crucial.” He noted, “The D-Day strike could have temporarily immobilized whatever flying capability Castro’s men had left.”418 When Cabell returned to CIA headquarters, he faced the wrath of the Cuba Task Force. Cabell was the senior CIA official in Washington on the eve of the Bay of Pigs landing. Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles had arranged to be out of town at a conference in Puerto Rico as a featured speaker.
Jacob Esterline shouted at Cabell, “Goddamn it, this is criminal negligence!” Esterline was chief of the Cuba Task Force. Esterline, Stanley Beerli, head of Cuba Task Force air operations, Howard Hunt, David Philips, and other CIA officers gathered around Cabell’s desk and unloaded their anger on him.
Wyden wrote, “Jake pounded the general’s desk and told him he was the lowest form of human being he had ever seen. How could he let the men of the Brigade go to their death?” Wyden wrote. “All over the room, voices were raised to the bellowing level. Faces were crimson. Any form of rank-consciousness or civility was gone. These were emotion-driven men out of control.”419
Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s opposition to the D-Day air strikes was based on diplomatic considerations. Rusk later wrote, “Personally I was skeptical about the Bay of Pigs plan from the beginning.” Rusk stated, “Most simply, the operation violated international law. There was no way to make a good legal case for an American-supported landing in Cuba. Also, I felt that an operation of this scale could not be conducted covertly. The landing and our involvement would become publicly known the moment the brigade started for the beach. We didn’t grapple with that reality at all.” Rusk believed the D-Day air strikes would provoke an international outcry of protest. Kennedy agreed that the second wave of bombing should not take place until Brigade 2506 had established a beachhead and seized a nearby air field. Air strikes launched from Cuba would fit the cover story that the Bay of Pigs operation was an internal Cuban revolt.
Cabell paid Rusk a second visit, this time at Rusk’s apartment at the Sheridan-Park Hotel at 4 a.m. on April 17. Cabell wanted Kennedy to authorize the use of combat jets from the aircraft carrier Essex to provide air support for the beleaguered Brigade 2506. Cabell knew that control of the air over the Bay of Pigs was essential for the success of the landing. Once again Rusk telephoned Kennedy. This time he put Cabell on the line. Cabell suggested a range of air support operations involving U.S. jets. Kennedy did not comment. When Rusk got back on the line, Kennedy told Rusk he would not authorize U.S. air power to be used in Cuba.420 Rusk later explained, “I was caught by surprise with the first air strikes.” He said, “I was trying to advise Adlai Stevenson at the United Nations what was happening and suddenly found out there were additional air strikes coming. We didn’t want to have him lie to the United Nations.”421
Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been embarrassed in the United Nations when he denied that the United States was connected to the bombing of Cuban air fields on April 15. Stevenson had argued that Cuban air force defectors had carried out the air attacks.422
Bissell’s deputy Tracy Barnes had misled Stevenson. In an internal CIA memorandum, Barnes conceded that he did not brief Stevenson about the CIA’s role in the April 15 air strikes. Bissell later wrote, “Stevenson was left with the distinct impression that the United States had virtually no hand in the events that were unfolding.”
Stevenson was furious when the U.S. involvement was exposed. He expressed his frustration to Kennedy, Rusk, and Dulles. Kennedy sent National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to New York to make sure Stevenson did not break publicly with President Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs. Stevenson, the Democrats’ standard bearer in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, privately protested Kennedy’s proposal in 1960 for U.S. aid to the Cuban “fighters for freedom.”
According to CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer, Stevenson dutifully supported the Bay of Pigs operation once he learned that President Kennedy had sanctioned it.423 While Kennedy dealt with the CIA and Joint Chiefs, he also had to contend with Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, who responded angrily to the Bay of Pigs.
Nikita Khrushchev protested the botched CIA operation in an April 18 letter to President Kennedy. “Mr. President, I send you this message in an hour of alarm, fraught with the danger for peace of the whole world. Armed aggression has begun against Cuba,” he wrote. “It is a secret to no one that the armed bands involving this country were trained, equipped and armed in the United States of America.”
Khrushchev warned that U.S. “aggression” in Cuba could trigger a Cold War crisis. “Military armament and the world political situation are such at this time that any so-called ‘little war’ can touch off a chain reaction in all parts of the globe,” Khrushchev wrote. “As far as the Soviet Union is concerned, there should be no mistake about our position: We will render the Cuban people and their government all necessary help to repel armed attack on Cuba.”
Kennedy wrote Khrushchev immediately. Kennedy did not want the Bay of Pigs to jeopardize negotiations for a summit meeting between the United States and the Soviet Union later in 1961. “I have previously stated, and repeat now, that the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba,” Kennedy stressed. “While refraining from military intervention in Cuba, the people of the United States do not conceal their admiration for the Cuban patriots who wish to see a democratic system in an independent Cuba.” He added that the United States would use military force to defend the Western Hemisphere from external aggression.
Kennedy also expressed willingness to negotiate with Khrushchev to lessen Cold War tensions. “I agree with you as to the desirability of steps to improve the international atmosphere,” he wrote. “I have taken careful note of your statement that events in Cuba might affect peace in all parts of the world. I trust that this does not mean that the Soviet Government, using the situation in Cuba as a pretext, is planning to inflame other areas of the world.”424 Kennedy then turned his attention from Khrushchev to the leaders of the Consejo Revolucionario Cubano, who were angry and anxious about the fate of Brigade 2506.
President Kennedy dispatched Adolf Berle and Special Assistant to the President Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to Miami to meet with the Cuban exile leaders. Kennedy told Berle, “One member is threatening suicide.” He added, “Others want to be put on the beachhead. All are furious with CIA. They do not know how dismal things are. You must go down and talk to them.” The sons of Consejo leaders, José Miró Cardona, Antonio Varona, and Antonio Maceo, were brigadistas. Consejo leader Manuel Artime was among the Brigade 2506 prisoners of war held in Cuba.
Berle and Schlesinger were taken aback by emotion and pain of the CRC leaders. The CIA had held the exiled politicians under virtual house arrest but issued communiqués in the name of the Consejo during the fighting at the Bay of Pigs. When the Kennedy aides got the news of the brigadistas’s surrender, they called the White House to set up a meeting between the Cubans and Kennedy. They hoped a meeting with the president would quell the mutinous mood.
Kennedy invited the Consejo leaders to the White House on April 19. He apologized for the way they had been treated by the CIA. Schlesinger wrote, “Kennedy, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, declared his sorrow over the events of the last forty-eight hours.” Kennedy explained that he had been advised that Brigade 2506 could succeed without overt U.S. military force. Then he spoke to the Cubans about his own experiences with war and death. “He added that he had himself fought in a war, that he had seen brave men, that he had lost a brother, and that he shared their grief and despair.”
Kennedy brought out a photograph of his brother Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., who was killed in World War II. He asked the Consejo leaders if they had pictures of their brigadista sons. Maceo took a photo of his son from his billfold and showed it to the group. As the Cubans got up to leave the Oval Office, Kennedy gave each of them an autographed picture of himself.425 Kennedy had other political fires to put out on the home front.
President Kennedy reached out to the elder statesmen of the Republican party. Kennedy invited Richard Nixon to meet with him in the Oval Office on April 20. Kennedy asked, “What would you do now in Cuba?” Nixon responded, “I would find a proper legal cover, and I would go in,” savoring the irony of the moment. “There are several justifications that could be used, like protecting American citizens living in Cuba and defending our base of Guantánamo. I believe that the most important thing at this point is that we do whatever is necessary to get Castro and communism out of Cuba.”
Kennedy replied, “Both Walter Lippmann and Chip Bohlen have reported that Khrushchev is in a very cocky mood at this time.” He continued, “This means that there is a good chance that, if we move on Cuba, Khrushchev will move in Berlin. I just don’t think we can take the risk, in the event their appraisal is correct.” Charles Bohlen, U.S. ambassador in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, was special assistant to the secretary of state.426
On April 22, Kennedy met with Dwight Eisenhower at Camp David. Eisenhower arrived at the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains by helicopter from his retirement farm in nearby Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He wanted to know why there was no air cover for the amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs. He was an old hand when it came to amphibious landings, having commanded Operation Overlord in Normandy during World War II.
Kennedy told Eisenhower, “We thought that if it was learned that we were really doing this rather than these rebels themselves, the Soviets would be very apt to cause trouble in Berlin.” He added, “My advice was that we must try to keep our hands from showing in the affair.”
Eisenhower replied, “I believe there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing. It must be a success.” He asserted, “The Soviets follow their own plans, and if they see us show any weakness, then is when they press us the hardest. The second they see us show strength and do something on our own, then is when they are very cagey. The failure at the Bay of Pigs will embolden the Soviets to do something that they would not otherwise do.”
Eisenhower impressed upon Kennedy the importance of driving the Cuban revolution from power. But he cautioned, “I believe the American people will never approve a direct military intervention, by their own forces, except under provocations against us so clear and so serious that everybody will understand the need for the move.”427 Kennedy, shaken by the defeat in Cuba, appointed a blue-ribbon commission to investigate what went wrong at the Bay of Pigs.
President Kennedy summoned General Maxwell Taylor out of retirement to lead a Board of Inquiry into the failed Bay of Pigs operation. Kennedy was impressed by Taylor’s book The Uncertain Trumpet, a critique of the Eisenhower Administration’s “massive retaliation” strategy. Taylor, Army Chief of Staff from 1955 to 1959, took a leave of absence as president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York to assume his new duties in Washington.428
The Taylor Board included Robert Kennedy, Allen Dulles, and Admiral Arleigh Burke. The Taylor Board, also known as the Cuba Study Group, took testimony from fifty witnesses over six weeks in April and May 1961.429 The Taylor Board heard testimony about the Kennedy Administration’s ambivalence about the Bay of Pigs plan. Secretary of State Dean Rusk acknowledged that the probability of success at the Bay of Pigs was about fifty percent. But he said the risk was acceptable because “the importance of success was fully appreciated.”
Rusk asserted, “Time was running out. It was the last chance in some time to have this job done by Cubans. Otherwise we might have to do this with American personnel and that would be less desirable.” The Taylor Board accepted Rusk’s reasoning, noting Kennedy and his advisers planned to implement the CIA plan’s guerrilla option if Brigade 2506 got into trouble.
“It was recognized as marginal and risky, but the Cuban Brigade, if not used quickly, would have become a political liability, whereas landing it might achieve important success before Castro became too strong,” the Taylor Board stated. “In approving the operation, the President and his advisers had been greatly influenced by the understanding that the landing force could pass into guerrilla status, if unable to hold the beachhead.”430
As we have seen, Bissell informed Kennedy for the first time that the Bay of Pigs plan did not have a guerrilla option on April 19. A guerrilla option was included in the Trinidad plan. When the landing site was shifted from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs, however, the terrain made a guerrilla retreat to the Escambray Mountains impossible.
At the Bay of Pigs, Castro took advantage of the local geography, which he knew intimately. The Cuban army sealed off the battle zone and trapped Brigade 2506 on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. It was not possible for the Brigade 2506 soldiers to wade through the rugged Zapata marsh to get to the Escambray Mountains eighty miles to the east.431
Meanwhile, the Taylor Board also sought to learn what role an uprising in Cuba of opponents of the revolution played in the Bay of Pigs plan. Joint Chiefs Chair Lemnitzer said the Joint Chiefs had no independent intelligence that the Bay of Pigs plan would trigger a revolt against the revolution. Lemnitzer testified, “We went on CIA’s analysis and it was reported that there was a good prospect. I remember Dick Bissell, evaluating this for the President, indicated there was sabotage, bombings and there were also various groups that were asking or begging for arms and so forth.”432
The Joint Chiefs prepared for an uprising in Cuba. Commandant of the Marine Corps David C. Shoup told the Taylor Board that Brigade 2506 took 30,000 extra rifles with it to the Bay of Pigs. General Shoup stated, “We would not be taking 30,000 additional rifles if we didn’t think there was going to be someone to use them.”433
But the CIA did not give a heads-up signal to underground groups in Cuba prior to the Bay of Pigs landing. Bissell wrote in a January 1962 analysis, “It can be said that no one expected an immediate uprising.” He stated, “No advance warning was given to the internal resistance, as a security precaution, to avoid any disclosure of D-Day…”434
According to an April 12 revision of the Bay of Pigs plan, the CIA planned to air drop arms to Cuban counterrevolutionaries after Brigade 2506 secured a beachhead. The operational plan stated, “Every effort will be made to coordinate their operations with those of the landing parties.” The plan estimated there were “nearly 7,000 insurgents responsive to some degree of control through agents with whom communications are currently active.” The groups were small and not well armed.435 Maxwell Taylor asked Allen Dulles what role an uprising played in the Bay of Pigs plan. Taylor observed, “All of these plans seem to contain the critical assumption that there would be an uprising by the Cuban populace.” Dulles replied, “We didn’t count on this so much in the Zapata Plan.” He said, “Whereas the Trinidad Plan was more of a shock treatment which might have brought the Cuban people around to our side. The latter [Bay of Pigs] plan was not tailored to this and was far quieter.”
Robert Kennedy asked: “Then what was the objective of the operation?” Replied Dulles: “Get a beachhead, hold it, and then build it up.”436
Taylor later summed up the inherently flawed nature of the Bay of Pigs plan. Taylor wrote, “While the immediate cause of the failure was a shortage of ammunition, there was a dangerous character about the entire project resulting from the numerical weakness of the Brigade, the paucity of air support, the lack of replacements for battle losses, and the dependence on local volunteers in Cuba for even short-term survival.” Taylor added, “The fundamental weaknesses made for a fragility which invited disaster with the first adverse turn of luck. This adverse turn occurred in the form of destructive enemy strikes on the shipping of the expedition, though one had the feeling that if this misfortune had not occurred another would have, with similarly disastrous results.”437
The Taylor Board noted the connection between President Kennedy’s restrictions on air strikes and the FAR’s ability to wreak havoc on Brigade 2506 as it landed at the Bay of Pigs. “The effectiveness of the Castro air force over the beach resulted from a failure to destroy the airplanes on the ground… before or concurrently with the landing,” the Taylor Board concluded. “This failure was a consequence of the restraints put on the anti-Castro air force in planning and executing its strikes, primarily for the purpose of protecting the covert character of the operation.”438
But the Taylor Board also faulted the CIA and Joint Chiefs for failing to make clear to Kennedy the serious military consequences of his decision to limit the “noise” level of the CIA covert action plan. The CIA and Joint Chiefs failed to stress air and naval superiority around the landing site were required for the success of an amphibious operation. Without control of the air and sea, an expeditionary force is vulnerable to attack as it moves soldiers and supplies from ship to shore, as the Bay of Pigs landing demonstrated.439
The Taylor Board concluded that the large U.S. role was the underlying contradiction of the CIA covert action plan for Cuba. The CIA plan had grown from a small infiltration into a large amphibious landing in the last months of the Eisenhower Administration. The U.S. footprint was too big to be denied.
The Taylor Board stated, “A paramilitary operation of the magnitude of Zapata could not be prepared and conducted in such a way that all U.S. support of it and connection with it could be plausibly disclaimed.” The Board noted, “By November 1960, the impossibility of running Zapata as a covert operation under the CIA should have been recognized and the situation reviewed.” The Taylor Board also learned about the CIA’s covert collaboration with the Mafia to assassinate Castro.440
In the meantime, CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick conducted a separate in-house investigation of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kirkpatrick’s “Survey of the Cuban Operation” concluded that Bissell became too much of an advocate of the covert plan to recognize its flaws. “The CIA, after starting to build up the resistance and guerrilla force inside Cuba, drastically converted the project into what rapidly became an overt military operation,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “The Agency failed to recognize that when the project advanced beyond the stage of plausible denial, it was going beyond the area of Agency responsibility as well as Agency capability.”
The Kirkpatrick report continued, “The Agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically. Furthermore, it failed to keep the national policymakers adequately and realistically informed of the conditions considered essential for success, and it did not press sufficiently for prompt policy decisions in a fast moving situation.”441
Another internal CIA assessment concluded that the CIA covert action developed an almost unstoppable “momentum.” CIA historian Wayne G. Jackson noted that the plan grew from a small infiltration with a $4 million budget into a $46 million paramilitary operation.442 The rapid transformation of the CIA covert action plan for Cuba created a situation ripe for manipulation.
Allen Dulles planned to write an essay for Harper’s magazine, “My Answer to the Bay of Pigs.” But he had second thoughts. Instead, the notes he left for historians reveal that he believed the restrictions President Kennedy put on the Bay of Pigs operation made the plan unworkable. “[It] must be a quiet operation yet must rouse internal revolt vs. Castro and a center to which anti-Castroites will defect,” Dulles jotted in his notes. “The very fact of a quiet landing rendered both impossible. Revolt and defection required the utmost ‘notice’ to the people of Cuba.”
Dulles had believed when push came to shove, Kennedy could be persuaded to authorize the use of overt U.S. military power at the Bay of Pigs. “We felt that when the chips were down—when the crisis arose in reality; any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail.” In the past, he noted, presidential reluctance to authorize military support “tends to disappear as the needs of the operation become clarified.” But Kennedy’s opposition to overt U.S. involvement remained steadfast. Dulles took him to task for a lack of firmness of purpose.
“Great actions require great determination,” he wrote. “In these difficult types of operations, so many of which I have been associated with over the years, one never succeeds unless there is a determination to succeed, a willingness to risk some unpleasant political repercussions, and a willingness to provide the basic military necessities. At the decisive moment of the Bay of Pigs operation, all three of these were lacking.”443
In his posthumously published memoir, Bissell admitted that he deceived Kennedy about the likelihood of a popular revolt. “The move from the heavily populated Trinidad to the remote Bay of Pigs made a mass uprising less likely and effectively negated the option of a retreat into the Escambray Mountains.” He confessed that he did not tell the president about the flawed nature of the Bay of Pigs plan, because he worried that Kennedy would cancel it.444 Bissell’s memoir also shed light on another dark secret of the Bay of Pigs: a failed attempt to kill Castro.
Although it was secret, the CIA-Mafia attempt to assassinate Castro was an integral part of the Bay of Pigs plan. As head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Bissell said he made the “necessary decisions” for the assassination of Castro.445 As he explained in an interview with retired Foreign Service officer Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, “There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing. Very few, however, knew of this aspect of the plan.”446
Indeed, Cuba Task Force Chief Jake Esterline said later of the separate, compartmented assassination track of the Bay of Pigs plan, “It wasn’t until years later that I found out Bissell was the guy behind it.” In an interview with historian Peter Kornbluh, he recalled, “All of a sudden I started getting requests to authorize big payments, $60,000, $100,000, and I refused them. And J. C. King called me and he said, ‘Say, you’re going to have to sign these things.’ Well, I said that you’ll have to tell me what I am signing or I won’t. He said, ‘Well, I can’t because you’re not cleared.’”
A few days after that, Esterline was briefed on the CIA-Mafia assassination operation by Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA’s Office of Security. That’s when he learned the money was for Sam Giancana.447 According to CIA Inspector General J. S. Earman, Edwards “clearly relates” CIA-Mafia plotting to assassinate Castro to the Bay of Pigs plan.448
A few weeks before the Bay of Pigs landing, Kennedy spoke about the possible assassination of Castro in a conversation with his friend Senator George Smathers, a Democrat from Florida. Kennedy told Smathers he had been “given to believe” by the CIA that Castro would be dead before the brigadistas landed in Cuba. Smathers recalled, “Someone was supposed to have knocked him off and there was supposed to be pandemonium.”449
According to Bissell, he did not tell President Kennedy about the CIA-Mafia assassination project. But he said that Dulles told Kennedy about the assassination plotting in “a circumlocutious fashion” before the Bay of Pigs. Bissell explained that Dulles’s reason for giving the president as little information as possible was to shield Kennedy, “to give the President the opportunity, if he so elected, to cancel it… or to allow it to continue but without… extracting from him an explicit endorsement of the detailed specific plan.”
According to Thomas Powers, biographer of Richard Helms, Dulles wanted to shield the ongoing CIA-Mafia assassination operation. “In a case where the administration changed in midstream, he [Dulles] would have been doubly cautious, and triply elusive, in order to test the water before plunging in.” Powers adds, “It would not do to tell Kennedy the CIA was trying to poison Castro before being assured that the new President would not blanch and phone the police.”450
In any case, the CIA-Mafia assassination attempt to poison Castro was called off when the Mafia assassin lost his access to Castro, as we have seen. Other CIA assassination plans using Cuban exiles also failed to materialize. Both Manuel Artime’s MRR and Manuel Ray’s Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (MRP) wanted to assassinate Castro at the Sports Palace. According to Cuban exile Rafael Quintero, a leader of the MRR, closely aligned with Manuel Artime, the plan was simple: “There was going to be a big fight, a big boxing match, and we knew Castro was going to be present. And we planned to have him hit with a bazooka.”
However, Quintero said both exile groups “were selling the same plan to the U.S.” And political infighting in Miami got in the way. “We were told not to do it. And they [CIA] allowed the MRP to go ahead with the plan.” But the MRP didn’t have the personnel to do it.451
Meanwhile, Felix Rodríguez, a Cuban CIA agent, told his CIA case officer that Castro’s assassination was the key to the overthrow of the Cuban revolution, and volunteered to kill Castro in December 1960. Rodríguez later disclosed that he and a fellow Cuban counterrevolutionary made three unsuccessful attempts to land at Varadero Beach east of Havana to assassinate Castro in early 1961. The first attempt was called off when the yacht used in the mission developed engine trouble. Two other missions were terminated when reception groups failed to meet the assassins on shore as planned.452
Speaking to the Church Committee investigators, John Henry Stephens, a Special Forces soldier based in Guatemala from 1959 to 1961, recalled two attempts to parachute men from Guatemala into Cuba to kill Castro before before the Bay of Pigs invasion. “He and/or members of his four-five man training cadre were told to give parachutes and weapons to individuals who were to be parachuted into Cuba to attempt to assassinate Castro.” The memorandum noted, “He referred to an ‘assassination package.’ Such a ‘package’ would contain a variety of weapons, grenades, and other armaments, including a special assassination gun.’”
On the first occasion, one man was successfully flown into Cuba on a B-26, but when he reached a hotel room and radioed back to Guatemala, “this individual’s radio report was interrupted by gunfire and no more was ever heard from him.” On the second attempt, they sent two men, “who… were captured or killed in the drop zone where they made their parachute landing in Cuba.”453 As all these assassination attempts failed, the Kennedy brothers searched for new ways to overthrow the Cuban revolution.