DESPITE THE INTERNATIONAL uproar and embarrassment caused by the downing of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 in May 1960, many still considered Dick Bissell, the program’s architect, “the most brilliant man in Washington.” Two months before the U-2 debacle, CIA chief Allen Dulles had placed Bissell in charge of covert operations for the agency.
Bissell shifted his focus away from the U-2 project and concentrated his efforts on thwarting Soviet encroachment in Latin America—primarily the island of Cuba. The Russians had found an ally in bearded dictator Fidel Castro, a former lawyer and the son of a wealthy sugarcane farmer who had successfully waged a two-year guerrilla war against General Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s US-backed president. Batista had defined his role as “president” very loosely. In reality, he was a cold-blooded despot who had suspended elections along with his citizens’ constitutional rights, carried out widespread terror campaigns, and executed political adversaries—namely, suspected Communists. Batista was a brutal tyrant, but he was America’s brutal tyrant, having aligned himself with the US government and American business interests.
Such support could not guarantee Batista’s political survival, however. He fled the island after Castro’s ragtag army of revolutionaries seized the city of Santa Clara in late December 1958. In February 1959, Castro declared himself prime minister of Cuba and entered into an agreement to purchase oil from the Soviet Union. When the American-owned Standard Oil refused to process it, Castro seized and nationalized the corporation’s refineries on the island. The Eisenhower administration responded by halting US import of sugar, the product that fueled Cuba’s economic engine. Castro immediately turned to the Soviet Union for financial and military support. At first a bit skeptical of Castro, viewing him as a socialist and not a staunch Communist, the Russians were all too willing to build a relationship with this new thorn in America’s side.
For this reason, Allen Dulles and Dick Bissell decided that Fidel Castro had to be removed from power by any means necessary.
Bissell oversaw a clandestine plan to recruit and train Cuban exiles to infiltrate the island and spark a revolution that would lead to the overthrow of Castro and his government. Presented to President Dwight Eisenhower in March 1960, the plan was finally approved in August with an operational budget of $13 million. Eisenhower knew this bold operation would not be carried out under his watch and that the next president would reap the benefits of its success or bear the heavy burden of its failure.
The plan did not remain top-secret for long. In October 1960, Fidel Castro received intelligence that Cuban exiles were drilling and training in CIA-funded camps in Guatemala. Instructors from the agency and Army Special Forces spent weeks teaching the recruits infantry and amphibious assault tactics, team guerrilla operations, and land navigation. Bissell wrongly presumed that all insurgents had been properly screened and vetted before the mission. Among the recruits were several double agents who were feeding information to Castro and his army.
The Cuban dictator was not the only person outside the Eisenhower White House to get briefed on the invasion plan. According to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in his 1997 book The Dark Side of Camelot, John F. Kennedy met with Bissell before the election in a secret CIA safe house in Georgetown, where he learned about the plan to depose Castro.
Bissell’s plan had three phases. The first and second called for insurgent pilots to destroy Castro’s air force so that it could not respond to or retaliate against the impending land invasion. Phase three called for 1,400 armed Cuban exiles to storm the beaches of Trinidad, a colonial town in the heart of the island where counterrevolutionaries had established a strong presence.
Bissell was confident the plan would work. A month after Kennedy’s inauguration, he attended a private dinner hosted by Dulles for key members of the new administration at the exclusive Alibi Club in Washington, DC. There the normally restrained Bissell downed a few cocktails and boldly introduced himself to the group of men as “a man-eating shark.”1
Bissell calculated the odds of success as about two to one. He knew that nothing was certain in the fog of war. To increase his chances, Bissell ordered two U-2 overflights of Cuba on March 19 and then three days later on March 21, 1961. As the CIA’s deputy director for plans, Bissell had relied heavily on his aerial reconnaissance pilots in the months leading up to the invasion. Airmen from Laughlin Air Force Base flew two long missions over Cuba in late October 1960. These flights stretched over nine hours and covered 3,500 miles. But because of heavy cloud cover, their missions netted poor results. A week later, three more flights were approved. These U-2 missions allowed Bissell and his team to assess Cuban troop strength and identify potential landing beaches. Additional flights were ordered in late March and early April 1961 as final preparations for the invasion were now under way.
President Kennedy had formally approved the plan but wanted it carried out under the cloak of deniability. It had to seem like an organic uprising by the Cuban people against a tyrannical despot—Castro. Otherwise, the operation would give the lie to all of Kennedy’s inaugural pledges. The president voiced concern about the proposed landing site at Trinidad. Despite the town’s defensible beachhead in close proximity to the Escambray Mountains, where exile fighters could flee if the invasion failed, Kennedy was leery of a spectacular invasion reminiscent of World War II. The president wanted something “quieter” to ward off charges of American military intervention in Cuba. Bissell and his team scrambled for an alternative. They chose the Bay of Pigs, an isolated beach one hundred miles west of Trinidad on the Zapata Peninsula. The landing zone had an airstrip at Playa Giron but little else to support the brigade of Cuban exiles. Bissell’s confidence in the mission diminished, but he failed to alert President Kennedy of the risks of the new landing site. For one, it lacked port facilities, and rugged coral reefs edged its shark-infested waters. Uninhabitable swampland surrounded the beaches, making it virtually impossible to mount a mass insurrection.
Launched just after midnight on April 17, 1961, the invasion was an immediate and spectacular failure. The Cuban exiles struggled to make it to the beach as boat engines stalled and razor-sharp coral reefs shredded the bottoms of their landing crafts. Soon after, Castro’s planes bombed the secret brigade’s ammunition ship, which also stored medical supplies, and Cuban soldiers began to bear down on the landing beaches. In the early hours of the invasion, the White House received only scant information from Bissell and the CIA. President Kennedy had put his faith and trust in the agency and now felt duped. He sought out his most trusted advisor—his brother Bobby, now the US attorney general.
“I don’t think it’s going as well as it should,” said the president.2
The aerial reconnaissance photos taken by U-2 pilots, ordered over the skies of Cuba to capture the carnage on the ground, supported Kennedy’s fears. Spy pilots flew two missions over the island on the day of the invasion and two more the following day.
“The shit has really hit the fan,” the president later told close friend and former Senate colleague George Smathers of Florida.3
Smathers suggested sending in the US Marine Corps, but that was the last thing Kennedy wanted to do. He still felt the exiles could disappear into the mountains and save their own lives and also save his administration embarrassment. At this point, Dick Bissell had to disclose that the mountains were eighty miles away and unreachable because of heavy swamp. The brigade was trapped.
In all, Castro’s forces mowed down 114 Cuban exiles and marched more than 1,200 others off to prison.
For the first time since the PT-109 ordeal, Jack Kennedy had lost men under his command. The president contemplated this as he walked alone in the Rose Garden. When he finally went to bed in the early-morning hours of April 18, President Kennedy wept.