B y the autumn of 1959, less than a year after Fulgencio Batista fled into exile, it was clear that peaceful coexistence between Washington and Cuba was impossible. Fidel Castro’s government had become increasingly and belligerently anti-United States. Any lingering doubts were erased by events of October: Castro announced the creation of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, headed by his brother, Raul. Huber Matos, a popular anti-Communist guerrilla commander, was arrested on charges of treason. Cuban Air Force Maj. Pedro Diaz Lanz, who had defected to Florida in July, returned for a clandestine leaflet drop over Havana, denouncing Castro as a Communist.
Despite deteriorating relations, debate continued in the United States as to whether Castro was a Communist and, if so, when had the transformation occurred from revolutionary to Marxist revolutionary? For some, like Earl E. T. Smith, a former U.S. ambassador to Cuba under Batista, there was no doubt that Castro had always been a Communist. Others, such as Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, saw him as a reformer, pushed into communism by U.S. pressures.
Both of these positions seem naive, based more on the ideological persuasions of their adherents than realistic appraisal. Declassified Soviet-era KGB documents show that Fidel’s brother, Raul, joined the Communist Party in the early 1950s, while a student at the University of Havana, although Fidel didn’t find out until 1962. 1 There was also little doubt about the Communist leanings of Argentina-born Ernesto “Che” Guevara, another Castro comrade who had been in Guatemala at the time of the 1954 Arbenz overthrow. But Fidel himself remained an ideological enigma well into the first year of his rule.
Fidel’s transformation probably lies somewhere between the two ideological extremes, and is best explained by the more realistic assessments of Theodore Draper and Andres Suarez, two of the foremost students of the Cuban Revolution’s early years. Both portray Castro, above all, as a
calculating opportunist who became a Communist because it suited his purpose. And both saw the failure of the Bay of Pigs as an important watershed in furthering his purpose of imposing one-man rule. According to Draper,
Once power came into his hands, he refused to permit anything that might lessen or restrict it. He would not tolerate the functioning of a government that was not a facade of his personal rule or of a party that might develop a life of its own. His power and his promises were from the first incompatible, and this contradiction forced him to seek a basis for his regime wholly at variance with that of the anti-Batista revolution. He did not have the disciplined and experienced cadres, the ideology, and the international support to switch revolutions in full view of the audience. Only the Cuban and Russian Communists could make them available to him.
Only the ingenuous can still believe that Fidel Castro walked into a Communist trap or that he gave up the democratic road because the United States did not give him enough support in his early months in power. The Communists and Fidel walked toward each other, each with his eyes open, each filling a need in the other . 2
Suarez offers a similar assessment.
He [Castro] has changed his main ideas in accordance with circumstances: First he was a ‘democrat,’ then he was a ‘humanist,’ later he was a ‘socialist’ and at the moment he is a ‘Marxist Leninist.’ He has founded and dismantled organizations. But what he has never abandoned is his personal leadership and the stratagem to impose it, his weapons, and his handful of followers, devoid of ideology and education and with no known professional training, who first in the Sierra and later in the command posts of the Revolutionary Armed Forces ... have carried out the constantly changing orders of their chief . 3
In response to escalating tensions as 1959 progressed, Philip Bonsai, the U.S. ambassador in Havana, fired off an October 23 cable to the State Department, declaring the “situation here has deteriorated considerably past week.” He cited Washington’s attempt to block the British sale of jets to Cuba, possible punitive reduction of Cuba’s sugar quota, and “alleged air bombings of Habana and other points in Cuba, by planes allegedly based in Florida. Intrinsic damaging effect these developments greatly inflated for present at least by hostile manner in which Castro has treated them in his TV appearances.” 4
At the end of October 1959, a program agreed on by the State Department and the CIA went forward to President Eisenhower, recommending approval to “support elements in Cuba opposed to the Castro Government while making Castro’s downfall seem to be the result of his own mistakes.” It gave birth to the first recorded covert action program against Cuba after Castro’s seizure of control. 5
In December 1959, the CIA prepared to activate a two-phase operation. The first phase called for recruitment of some thirty-five Cubans, “preferably with previous military experience, for an intensive training program which would qualify them to become instructors in various paramilitary skills, including leadership, sabotage, communications, etc.”
In the second stage, the new instructors would train—in some Latin American country—a group of Cuban recruits “who would be organized into small teams similar to the U.S. Army Special Forces concept, and infiltrated with communicators, into areas where it had been determined numbers of dissidents existed who required specialized skills and leadership and military supplies.” 6
From this bare beginning emerged—after many twists and turns—the ill-fated April 1961 invasion of Cuba by a 1,500-member Cuban exile brigade; one funded, trained, and directed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. When it was executed with such disastrous consequences three months into the Kennedy administration, it bore little resemblance to the far less ambitious covert action campaign officially approved by President Eisenhower on March 17, 1960, the more formal forerunner to the Bay of Pigs.
The controversial October 1961 CIA Inspector General’s Report on the operation, declassified in 1998, read:
Originally the heart of the plan was a long, slow clandestine build-up of guerrilla forces, to be trained and developed in Cuba by a cadre of Cubans whom the Agency would recruit, train and infiltrate into Cuba. But thirteen months later the Agency sponsored an overt assault-type landing of 1,500 combat-trained and heavily armed soldiers. Most of them were unversed in guerrilla warfare. They were expected to maintain themselves for a period of time (some said a week) sufficient to administer a ‘shock’ and thereby, it was hoped, to trigger an uprising. 7
Between the plan approved by President Eisenhower . . . and the invasion plan actually carried out on April 17, 1961 . . . there was a radical change in concept.
Throughout the shifting clandestine effort to rid the hemisphere of Castro, the one constant under both Eisenhower and Kennedy and the major reason for failure was the caveat of “plausible deniability.” Maintaining the facade that the U.S. government was not involved became increasingly difficult as the plan moved from infiltration to invasion. To preserve the fiction of non-attribution, political decisions invariably took precedence over tactical ones when the two conflicted.
This meant that the brigade could not be trained in the United States; no U.S. air base could be used for overflights of Cuba to supply arms to agent teams nor logistical support to the brigade when it landed; no U.S. air base could be used for tactical air operations against Cuba; less sophisticated aircraft and weapons available on the open market had to be used; and the brigade landing site had to have an airstrip from which its B-26s could fly sorties against Cuban forces. It also resulted in the cancellation of air strikes against Castro’s air force in conjunction with the brigade landing, another significant factor in the defeat. Finally, it meant the CIA had to cobble together and maintain the constantly squabbling Cuban exile leaders organized as a front for the operation, each of whom regarded himself as a future leader of the island.
The difficulties compounded on January 3, 1961, with the rupture of diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana. Loss of the embassy in Cuba deprived agency planners of a major source of on-theground intelligence and reduced contact with the internal resistance. The break in relations came during the uncertainty generated by the interregnum between John F. Kennedy’s November 1960 presidential election victory and his inauguration on Janury 20, 1961.
A deteriorating relationship between the two countries had made diplomatic severance inevitable, the only uncertainty being when and why. Washington recalled Bonsai from Havana in late October 1960 for “extended consultations,” effectively ending his tenure in Cuba. In midDecember, Daniel Braddock, the embassy chief in Bonsai’s absence, sent a lengthy cable to Washington arguing the pros and cons of a diplomatic break. He concluded that relations should be “severed at the moment most advantageous for our purposes, and in any event not without prior consultation and coordination with friendly Latin American countries.” 8 Washington agreed.
But an advantageous break wasn’t to be. It came less than three weeks later, provoked by Castro’s January 2, 1961, speech in which he demanded the United States reduce its embassy staff. Wayne Smith—then
a junior Foreign Service officer who later returned to Flavana to head the diplomatic mission established under President Jimmy Carter—was monitoring from the embassy what had been a dull speech when, unexpectedly, Castro referred to the embassy as a “nest of spies,” firing up the restless crowd. Invigorated by the audience response, Castro followed up with a demand that the embassy reduce its staff to eleven, the same num ber as the essentially nonfunctioning Cuban embassy had in Washington. U.S. embassy officials scrambled to determine whether the number included only accredited diplomats or support staff as well. When told the reduction order meant everybody, Washington decided the mission would no longer be able to function and broke relations the next day.
Smith wrote later that he was “convinced” the reference to a “nest of spies” was an “off-the-cuff remark, not a theme Castro intended to weave into his speech.” But, with the crowd responding enthusiastically, Castro went further by demanding the embassy reduction. 9 Bonsai concurred. “I suspect,” he wrote, “that Castro’s demand was a notion that came to him while he was orating; once the words were out of his mouth he could not retreat. Nor did the United States, once it was determined that Castro meant what he said, have any choice other than to close the Embassy in Havana.” 10
These and other factors involved with the planning, execution, and defeat at the Bay of Pigs have been recounted in detail in scores of books, articles, and declassified documents in the intervening years. The late Peter Wyden’s Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, published in 1979, remains the most thorough and authoritative account of the many treatises available. Among declassified documents, the most comprehensive are the scathing Inspector GeneraVs Survey of the Cuban Operation, October 1961, compiled by Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA’s inspector general at the time, and the so-called Taylor Commission report, the product of a probe ordered by President Kennedy to dissect the invasion’s failure. Headed by Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president’s military adviser, the Taylor Commission included CIA Director Allen Dulles, Adm. Arleigh Burke, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Less chronicled is how a guerrilla operation evolved over thirteen agonizing months into an invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The frustrations of the two professionals most directly responsible for planning the operation grew accordingly during those months amid the ever-changing political ground rules imposed for the sake of “plausible deniability.” The roles of Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins—the project chief and chief of the
paramilitary staff, respectively—have been largely lost in the historical debate over the search to place blame. Also lost are accounts of their failed last-ditch effort to cancel the invasion.
Esterline was a veteran CIA officer and the Cuba Task Force chief largely responsible for drafting the March 17, 1960, plan approved by Eisenhower. Hawkins, a Marine colonel, was brought in during the late summer of 1960 as the paramilitary chief when the project began its metamorphosis from a simple guerrilla operation to a much more complex amphibious invasion. Both Esterline and Hawkins were eminently qualified for their jobs, and while both had strong personalities, they got along well together. As greater details became known in later years, both came to view Richard Bissell, the CIA’s brainy, egocentric, ambitious, and secretive chief of clandestine operations as among those most responsible for the operation’s failure.
cJacob D. “Jake” Esterline, a.k.a. Jake Engler, became a spy more by accident than by design. A gruff country boy who grew up near Lewistown, in rural south central Pennsylvania, he at various times considered careers as an accountant, a lawyer, and a baritone singer. Enrolled as an accounting student at Philadelphia’s Temple University in 1938, he left college for World War II before he finished his degree and wound up with a second lieutenant’s commission from Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He and several classmates were recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and sent to Washington’s Congressional Country Club where the OSS did its training.
A three-month training course completed, Esterline was sent to India in early 1943. He was then infiltrated into Burma to train Burmese guerrillas in an effort to stop the advancing Japanese army. After returning to Calcutta for leave time, he parachuted into the China-Burma border area, taking command of a Burmese guerrilla unit. The war over, Esterline returned home, took a reserve commission in the U.S. Army, and finished his accounting degree from Temple. He then took dual jobs at a family law firm in northern Pennsylvania, where he was a taxman, and at a local corporation. His plan was to become a country lawyer and accountant.
Again war interrupted, this time in Korea. Recalled by the military he chose, instead, to take up a standing offer with the recently minted Central Intelligence Agency, for which he had been recommended by his OSS commanding officer. After initial CIA training, he was assigned as the first
chief instructor at the agency’s guerrilla warfare school at Fort Benning. Nine months later, in late 1952, he was transferred as chief of training to the CIA’s new super-secret training center, known as The Farm, near Williamsburg, Virginia.
Given his World War II guerrilla bonafides, Esterline caught the eye of Col. J. C. King, a former army officer and FBI agent who had worked in Latin America and headed the CIA’s Western Hemisphere covert operations. Guatemala was becoming a problem, and the Eisenhower administration had selected the CIA to do something about leftist president lacobo Arbenz, who seemed to be moving the country toward communism. Esterline was named to head the Washington task force on the Guatemala problem. With the CIA secretly orchestrating the show, a coup led by Carlos Castillo Armas ousted the Arbenz government in lune 1954. Castillo, a renegade Guatemalan colonel, was installed as the new president.
Three months later Esterline became CIA station chief in Guatemala, a post he held until 1957. He then transferred to Caracas as chief of the CIA’s Venezuela station, where he was to witness Castro’s mass appeal firsthand during the Cuban leader’s initial trip abroad in March 1959. Thousands of Venezuelans turned out to greet the bearded revolutionary as the reincarnation of Simon Bolivar.
Frank Wisner, Esterline’s old CIA boss and friend from the Guatemala operation, stopped by Caracas en route to a conference in Rio later the same year. Esterline recounted that Wisner asked if “I would be interested in getting back into harness, as he put it in our conversation, in connection with an operation against Cuba. I told him at the time I would certainly think about it.”
Subsequently, Colonel King, still chief of covert action for the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, contacted Esterline about a return to CIA headquarters in Washington “to begin to form a task force that would come to grips with the Cuban situation.” Esterline accepted. He ended his tour in Caracas in December 1959, a year early, taking leave time in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He returned to Washington in lanuary 1960, becoming head of the newly created WH/4 Task Force for Cuba within the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. 11
lack Hawkins joined the project eight months later, September 1, 1960, at a time when the original concept of a guerrilla-type operation to mobilize internal resistance was evolving into one that would include a small “strike force.” A request had gone to the Marine Corps for an officer
experienced in amphibious warfare. Gen. David M. Shoup, the Marine Corps commandant, personally selected Hawkins. He was assigned as chief of the paramilitary staff, a post for which he had impeccable credentials. His military experience included both guerrilla and amphibious operations.
Hawkins was born in tiny Roxton, Texas, in 1920, and his family moved to Ft. Worth where he graduated from high school in 1933. He went on to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1939 as a Marine second lieutenant. After a stint at the Marine Corps Basic School for Officers, he was ordered to China, where he served with the Fourth Marines in Shanghai. The regiment moved to the Philippines shortly before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
By then a first lieutenant, Hawkins fought the Japanese at Bataan and Corregidor before his capture in May 1942. He spent nearly eleven months in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on Mindanao before he and several companions escaped. After a tortuous trek through the jungles, they made contact with, and joined, a Philippine guerrilla force operating on the island. Their prison escape brought the first news to the outside world of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against American and Filipino prisoners, which resulted in thousands of deaths. Hawkins spent seven more months on Mindanao as a guerrilla leader before being taken to Australia by a U.S. submarine. He detailed the gripping account of his capture, imprisonment, escape, and guerrilla campaign in his book Never Say Die, published in 1961.
Hawkins had considerable experience—both practical and theoretical—in amphibious operations like the Bay of Pigs. He also took a senior course in 1944 at the Marine Corps Schools and, from 1950 to 1954, was an instructor for the same course. In 1959-60, as a student at the Naval War College, he wrote a thesis on the future of amphibious warfare.
During World War II, as a lieutenant colonel and assistant operations officer in the First Marine Division, he was directly involved in planning the 1945 amphibious landing in Okinawa. Again, in 1950, as a battalion commander, Hawkins planned the battalion landing plan at Inchon, South Korea, and the eventual capture of Seoul. Contrary to some accounts, Hawkins did not participate in the Iwo Jima operation.
Between World War II and the Korean War, he served three years in Venezuela as adviser to the Venezuelan Marine Corps before returning to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and then Korea. Promoted to full colonel
in 1955, he gained still further amphibious experience with the Commander Amphibious Forces, Atlantic, at Little Creek, Virginia.
After graduating from the Naval War College in 1960, he was assigned to the staff of the Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia, for three years, a tour interrupted by his temporary assignment to the Cuba Task Force. 12
Among the decorations awarded Hawkins during his active duty career were the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star Medal, the Bronze Star Medal with Combat V, and the Navy Commendation Medal with Combat V. There are those, Esterline among them, who believed that had it not been for the Bay of Pigs, Hawkins would have become a general and perhaps Marine Corps commandant.
Hawkins refused all public comment on the Bay of Pigs until 1996, the same year he and Esterline renewed contact for the first time since 1961. If there is a flaw in Wyden’s otherwise excellent book on the Bay of Pigs, it is his obvious pique with Hawkins for refusing to discuss the operation, which is reflected in several gratuitous comments in the book regarding Hawkins and a list at the end entitled “The People Who Made This Book. The list concludes with some who could have helped chose not to do so. They had their reasons.” The three so identified include “Colonel Jack Hawkins [who] refused to discuss any aspects of his role as the military commander and then carefully informed the CIA that he had done so.” The other two are Jose “Pepe” Perez-San Roman, the Cuban brigade commander who later committed suicide, and “The CIA bureaucracy of the present.” 13
Richard Bissell, head honcho of the Cuba Project for the CIA, was known by colleagues as “the smartest man in Washington.” Few would refute this description. Lyman Kirkpatrick, who was to become a bitter Bissell adversary within the agency, once cited him as one of the most brilliant individuals ever to serve in intelligence. Among the Ivy League elitists who dominated the CIA in its early years, Bissell’s best-known career achievement was overseeing development of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.
Prior to that, he had worked with Averill Harriman in implementing the Marshall Plan for Europe; served as deputy administrator of the European Cooperation Act; been with the Ford Foundation, simultaneously serving with a group of CIA consultants who met regularly at Princeton University; taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and been
a member of the American Delegation to the postwar Yalta and Potsdam summit conferences that brought together Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. However, his resume contained no military experience or experience as a field operative.
Bissell joined the CIA in 1954 as special assistant to Director Allen Dulles. In that role he became involved with PBSUCCESS, the covert operation that brought about the ouster of Arbenz in Guatemala. In late 1958, Dulles named him chief of the CIA’s clandestine service, succeeding Frank Wisner and beating out Richard Helms for the job.
As clandestine service chief, he became entangled in unsuccessful assassination plots against the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and Castro. More importantly, he was Esterline’s and Hawkins’s immediate superior in what became the Bay of Pigs disaster, a project tightly held and controlled by Bissell. Esterline and Hawkins later complained that Bissell made, or agreed to make, changes without advising either of his two top subordinates responsible for planning and executing the project. The Bay of Pigs failure cost Bissell the post of CIA director—a position he had been promised by John F. Kennedy. 14
Both Esterline and Hawkins came to believe that Bissell, in his desire to push ahead with the Bay of Pigs at all costs, failed to express their concerns about the operation in its late stages to either CIA Director Allen Dulles or President Kennedy. Said Esterline: “I don’t think he was being honest. I don’t think he was being honest up—I mean with Kennedy and maybe with Dulles too; and I don’t think he was being honest down—in dealing with his two principal aides, Esterline and Hawkins. I don t believe he was leveling with us.” 15
‘ ‘By the time I got back to Washington it was pretty damn clear in my mind what had to be involved in any kind of operation against Cuba and Castro, regardless of who did it,” Esterline recalled many years later. “To that end, under instructions of my longtime boss, J. C. King, I put together a first basic plan which suggested a few lines of action that should be very carefully adhered to if we were to avoid any kind of real disaster in Cuba.” 16
One of the first priorities, according to Esterline, was to increase the intelligence available in areas outside and inside Cuba, including intelligence concerning whether there was “any significant anti-Castro group, and, if so, how viable were they; how capable they would be of defending themselves against what was becoming an ever-increasing, Soviet-style
overrunning of the countryside. We knew from the very beginning that the only thing we could hope to do in and around Havana was to try and create good agents and sources who could give us reporting on what the government might be doing in terms of possible Soviet support.”
He also knew from his guerrilla experience in the Far East “what the conditions have to be to survive and ... whether we can put people someplace in Cuba to see if they can survive for one month, three months, six months, become active and still survive. That’s paramount.”
King accepted Esterline’s ideas “and from that I developed what became the Trinidad Plan where I thought maybe we could test the water . . . [but] I vowed when I accepted this assignment that I would not let myself get put into a situation in which we would get into a disaster. And yet that’s exactly what we moved into and I was too stupid to say to Mr. Bissell, ‘Sorry Sir, I’m not your man. Get somebody else.’ ”
Development of the Trinidad Plan began with the search for new recruits in addition to those already available, particularly, Esterline said,
people who were well motivated, tied in [to the island] and who had the gumption to come out, be trained, and go back in. In that time period, before diplomatic relations had been broken, we still had a station in Cuba.
We were able to move with more flexibility in these kinds of things. We began to develop the cadres that we would train very well in the United States, then put into [the area around Trinidad] and task them with things to do and see whether they could survive; if there was enough goodwill and spirit among the people there to allow us to do something like that.
We had no idea at that point whether Cuba was so totally lost to our control or whether there was still a chance. In retrospect, I believe our plan was pretty sound. That will never be proved one way or the other because the plan was taken away from us before it ever had a chance to evolve by Bissell s decision to go for more, much more, and create an invasion force.
The reason the Trinidad area had been selected for the original plan, said Esterline, is that an operation could be mounted there and, “if it hadn’t succeeded it would have looked like just one more exile effort to do something that didn’t work. It wouldn’t have become a national disaster.” 17
The Trinidad Plan emerged as part of A Plan of Covert Action Against Cuba, which Esterline began drafting when the CIA’s Cuba Task Force was created on January 18, 1960. The plan became official policy on March 17, 1960, when President Eisenhower approved it. And, as Hawk
ins noted in his May 5, 1961, after-action report, written for the Clandestine Services Historical Board, it was the only written policy directive ever approved “throughout the life of the project [culminating with the Bay of Pigs] ... at the national level to guide the project... and it was general in content.” 18
Its basic components were:
■ formation of a Cuban exile organization to attract Cuban loyalties, to direct opposition activities, and to provide cover for agency operations
■ a propaganda offensive in the name of the opposition
■ creation inside Cuba of a clandestine intelligence collection and action apparatus to be responsible to the direction of the exile organization
■ development outside Cuba of a small paramilitary force to be introduced into Cuba to organize, train, and lead resistance groups.
The initial staffing chart for the Cuba Task Force—known as WH/4 within the agency’s Western Hemisphere Division—called for forty people, including eighteen in Washington, twenty at the Havana Station, and two in Santiago, at Cuba’s eastern tip. By April 16, 1961, the Task Force had been “expanded to 588 . . . becoming one of the largest branches in the Clandestine Services, larger than some divisions.” 19
The task force total did not include air operations personnel who reported directly to Bissell, another source of ongoing frustration for Esterline and Hawkins. They had to go through Bissell to incorporate air activity into their planning.
By the end of June 1960, a Miami Base had been opened; a civilian exile front organization, the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FRD) had been formed; Radio Swan, the clandestine propaganda station, was on the air; and twenty-nine Cubans arrived in Panama for training in small unit infiltration.
A task force briefing paper prepared separately in August for the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that by November 1, 1960, there were expected to be “500 paramilitary trainees and 37 radio operators ready for action. It was expected that this group would be available for use as infiltration teams or as an invasion force.” But it also made the point to the Joint Chiefs that “obviously the successful implementation of any large-scale paramilitary operations is dependent upon widespread guerrilla resistance throughout the area.”
The briefing paper outlined the plan of operations:
The initial phase of paramilitary operations envisages the development, support and guidance of dissident groups in three areas of Cuba: Pinar del Rio, Escambray and Sierra Maestra. These groups will be organized for concerted guerrilla action against the regime.
The second phase will be initiated by a combined sea-air assault by FRD forces on the Isle of Pines coordinated with general guerrilla activity on the main island of Cuba. This will establish a close-in staging base for future operations.
The last phase will be air assault on the Havana area with the guerrilla forces in Cuba moving on the ground from these areas into the Havana area also. 20
When the document was approved, says the Taylor Commission report, “It is apparent... the concept of paramilitary action was limited to the recruitment of a cadre of leaders and the training of a number of paramilitary cadres for subsequent use as guerrillas in Cuba.”
There are no precise dates for when the guerrilla/internal resistance concept, originally drafted by Esterline as the Trinidad Plan, became a guerrilla operation with a strike force and then an invasion plan. According to the Taylor Commission, “sometime in the summer of 1960 the paramilitary concept for the operation began to change. It appears that leaders in the CIA Task Force . . . were the first to entertain the thought of a Cuban strike force to land on the Cuban coast in supplementation of the guerrilla action contemplated.” The first thought was to create a 200to 300-man infantry force for “contingency deployment with other paramilitary operations.” 21
The Trinidad area—on the south coast of Cuba below the Escambray Mountains where indigenous Cuban guerrillas were active—remained the preferred landing site throughout the changing concepts. The operation was referred to as the Trinidad Plan until President Kennedy ordered a change in March 1961, to make it “less spectacular.” It is apparent, however, that the concept already was beginning to change, with Bissell as the principal architect, when Hawkins joined the task force in September 1960.
In early November 1960, according to the Taylor Commission’s postmortem, a cable went from the CIA in Washington to the project officer in Guatemala directing “a reduction of the guerrilla teams in training to 60 men and introduction of conventional training for the remainder as
an amphibious and airborne assault force. From that time on, the training emphasis was placed on the assault mission and there is no evidence that the members of the assault force received any further preparation for guerrilla-type operations.” 22
Hawkins, in his after-action report, noted:
Action was begun on 4 November 1960, to recruit, organize, equip and train a larger ground force than the small 200 to 300 men contingency force originally contemplated. It was planned at the time that this force would reach strength of about 1,500. As this ‘Strike Force,’ as it came to be known, was developed over the ensuing months, many difficulties were encountered as a result of slowness in recruiting, political bickering among Cuban exile groups, lack of adequate training facilities and personnel, uncertainties with regard to whether Guatemala could continue to be used as a base, and lack of approved national policy on such questions as to what size force was desired, where and how it was to be trained, and whether such a force was actually ever to be employed. 23
“From that time on,” according to the Taylor Commission, “the training emphasis was placed on the assault mission and there is no evidence that the members of the assault force received any further preparation for guerrilla-type operations. The men became deeply imbued with the importance of the landing operation and its superiority over any form of guerrilla action to the point where it would have been difficult later to persuade them to return to a guerrilla-type mission.” 24
Bissell wrote in his memoirs, Reflections of a Cold Warrior, of growing problems with guerrilla infiltrations; squabbles within the exile community and the front organization itself; increasing repression by the Castro government; declining propaganda effectiveness and other difficulties. 25
As a result, according to Bissell, in late 1960 the initial covert action program approved by Eisenhower “underwent a metamorphosis . . . [and] our reliance shifted to the invasion force being trained in Guatemala.” Bissell said he discussed it with Jack Hawkins, telling him that the five hundred in training would have to be expanded by another one thousand to fifteen hundred but “Hawkins appeared not to share my sense of urgency about a further buildup.”
Shortly after, Hawkins laid out clearly in a lengthy and prophetic January 4, 1961, memorandum what he believed necessary to assure success of an invasion. It was addressed to Esterline under the subject: “Policy
Decisions Required for Conduct of Strike Operations Against Government of Cuba.” 26
Among the decisions required, said Hawkins, was one by the incoming president, Kennedy, on whether he concurred with the operation and its timing. If approved, Hawkins recommended it take place before March 1, 1961, citing as reasons: (1) pressures on the Guatemala government over training there; (2) Cuban trainees in the camps were “becoming restive and if not committed to action soon there will probably be a general lowering of morale” and even “large-scale desertions . . . with attendant possibilities of surfacing the entire program”; (3) time was working against the operation in a military sense with Cuban pilots being trained in Czechoslovakia as part of a military buildup with arms and equipment from Soviet Bloc countries; and (4) Cuban government progress in turning the island into a Communist-style police state.
Perhaps the most significant and prescient topic Hawkins raised related to air support. “The question has been raised in some quarters,” he wrote, as to whether amphibious/airborne operation could not be mounted without tactical air preparation or support or with minimal air support. It is axiomatic in amphibious operations that control of the air and sea in the objective area is absolutely required.”
He recommended “(1) that the air preparation commence not later than dawn of D minus 1 day; (2) that any move to curtail the number of aircraft to be employed from those available be firmly resisted; (3) that the operation be abandoned if policy does not provide for use of adequate tactical air support.”
When Hawkins read from his memorandum before the Taylor Commission’s postmortem, CIA Director Allen Dulles asked “what disposition” had been made of it. Hawkins replied that it was sent to Esterline, who said he had directed it “to higher authority.” General Taylor then asked Esterline to identify ‘higher authority.” Esterline said the paper went to J. C. King, Bissell, and Tracy Barnes, Bissell’s deputy. Bissell, in the same set of questioning, responded that the paper “did not go much further than his [Bissell’s] office.” Bissell offered no indication of what attention he might have given it, but it was evident from the context of the testimony that the Hawkins memo went to no one of any “higher authority” than Bissell himself. 27
As the project evolved in late 1960 and early 1961, Esterline and Hawkins moved to accommodate both the ever-changing demands of the operation and the change in the presidency. But they did so without
knowledge of Richard Bissell’s “magic bullet”: a plot, in collusion with the Mafia, to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Esterline became peripherally aware of the assassination attempt in late 1960, but only because, as the task force chief, he was responsible for the Cuba Project’s budget. It wasn’t until many years later that he concluded Bissell’s assassination plan was linked to the Bay of Pigs. He did not tell Hawkins what he had learned about the assassination plot until after the invasion failed.
Given his accounting background, he was meticulous in keeping track of where funds went. “We were never wanting for money, but we tried to be careful and abstemious about how we spent it. I was always a dog on that.” If it hadn’t been for that financial “doggedness,” it’s unlikely he would have known that Bissell was pursuing a two-track policy against Castro: one track of which included the assassination plot involving the Mafia.
Sometime in the fall of 1960 Esterline received a mysterious request “for a large amount of money. ... It could have been $50,000 or $150,000,1 just don’t remember. But it was a big amount, way above what would normally be signed off on . . . without questioning.” The request came from J. C. King, who had been marginalized from the Cuba Project by Dulles and Bissell.
“I looked at it and I thought, ‘no way. I’m not going to sign this,’ ” said Esterline. He sent the request back to King. “I got it back from him in due course and he said this is one you have to sign and do it promptly, because we need the money. I called him and said, ‘J.C., I’m not going to sign this thing. If it’s something you can’t tell me about, then you better get somebody here that you can tell about it.’ ”
King said he would get back to Esterline, which he did within the next day or so. King said he had gotten clearance to tell Esterline, but he could not tell anyone else. “And what he briefed me on . . . really couldn’t believe I was hearing it,” Esterline said. 28 What he heard were the broad outlines of an assassination plot against Castro, involving the Mafia, for which Esterline eventually signed over about $200,000.
After he became CIA director, Richard Helms ordered the agency’s inspector general to do a report on CIA involvement in assassinations. Declassified in 1993, it noted that the “first seriously-pursued CIA plan to assassinate Castro had its inception in August 1960. It involved the use of members of the criminal underworld with contacts inside Cuba.”
The report added: “Richard Bissell, Deputy Director for Plans, asked
Sheffield Edwards, Director of Security, if Edwards could establish contact with the U.S. gambling syndicate that was active in Cuba. The objective clearly was the assassination of Castro, although Edwards claims that there was a studied avoidance of the term in his conversation with Bissell. Bissell recalls that the idea originated with J. C. King, then Chief of WH Division, although King now recalls having had only limited knowledge of such a plan and at a much later date—about mid-1962.” 29 Esterline’s account of his conversation with King belies King’s claim of when he became aware of the plot.
The various accounts agree on the plot’s details. They consisted of a plan for the Mafia, financed by the CIA, to poison Castro with a lethal pill, also provided by the CIA, and passed by the Mafia to underworld contacts in Cuba. Two separate attempts were aborted, and the plot was abandoned shortly after the Bay of Pigs failed.
Four decades later, however, it is still disputed as to who originated the Mafia-linked plot and how directly it was linked to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Bissell, the key figure who died in 1994, gave widely varying answers at different times to both questions, although the preponderance of evidence indicates that the plot originated with him and that it was linked to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The CIA inspector general’s 1967 report on assassinations said, “the plots that were hatched in late 1960 and early 1961 were aggressively pursued and were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs.”
Bissell, in his memoirs, wrote that as brigade plans advanced “I hoped the Mafia would achieve success. My philosophy during my last two or three years in the agency was very definitely that the end justified the means.” 30 But historian Michael R. Beschloss wrote in 1985 that “Richard Bissell said years later that Track Two was ‘intended to parallel’ the invasion preparations: Assassination was intended to reinforce the plan. There was the thought that Castro would be dead before the landing.’ If Castro were killed, Bissell said, ‘it could have made Track One’ either unnecessary or much easier.” 31
As for who originated the assassination plot, Bissell was quoted in a 1975 interview with CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer as saying that “I remember an initial session with [Shef] Edwards, I don’t know who originally had the notion that it might be possible to work through, or in some way
with, or in a supporting role with the Mafia. Shef apparently did bring this idea to me to the best of my recollection.” 32
In his memoirs, Bissell offered a slightly different version, saying again that he thought he first heard about the Mafia assassination plan from Edwards, adding that the plot did not originate with him and “I had no desire to become personally involved in its implementation.” 33
Edwards, in a Memorandum for the Record, dated May 14, 1962, and prepared at the request of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, said categorically that in August 1960 he “was approached by Mr. Richard Bissell then Deputy Director for Plans at CIA to explore mounting this sensitive operation against Fidel Castro.” Edwards then described the evolution of the assassination plot. 34
“There’s no question about it. If that whole specter of an assassination using the Mafia hadn’t been on the horizon, there would have been more preparation [for the invasion],” Esterline concluded. “If Bissell and others hadn’t felt they had that magic bullet I don’t think we would have had all the hair-splitting over air support.”
In briefing him about the assassination plot, Esterline said, King had told him “this is so sensitive, so hush, hush . . . you dare not brief Dick Bissell on this because he’s not cleared. I looked at him and I said, ‘how can that be? I work for him directly.. . . This is a hell of a mess. How am I supposed to work in good faith with a man and not tell him?’ He said ‘well, you have to do it.’ I didn’t discuss it with Bissell. As time went on, I was pretty damn sure that Bissell was not being straight with us on a number of things.” After he forced King to tell him the outlines of the plot, Esterline said he got a fuller briefing from Edwards.
It wasn’t until many years later that Esterline said he discovered what he believed to be the truth: “I was concerned about not being honest with him [Bissell], but the sonofagun ... was one of the architects of the whole damn thing. And he wanted it to look that way to me, I presume, because he thought . . . that if I thought they had some magic bullet they would not properly support those valiant Cubans . . . we were sending to Cuba. And that certainly was Hawkins’s reaction when he found out sometime later, after the invasion.” 35
President Kennedy took office January 20, 1961. Eisenhower had broken diplomatic relations seventeen days earlier. Preparations for the Cuba Project continued, although Kennedy would not give a final go-head until early April, even then reserving the right to call it off up until the day before. Meanwhile, much to and fro on details—many related to “plausi
ble deniability”—continued between agency planners and the State Department, particularly with Dean Rusk, the new secretary of state.
It was in one of these meetings, said Esterline, that “I shot myself in the foot,” getting banned by Bissell from attending further sessions after insulting Secretary Rusk. As Esterline later described it, the problem related to the airstrip in the Trinidad area, which had significant impact on the so-called Trinidad Plan that was then still viable. There had been a dispute between Esterline/Hawkins and Bissell over the fact that the air section of the Cuba Project, headed by Col. Stan Beerli, who had worked with Bissell on the U-2 project, was not only in a separate building from the task force but also kept under BisselTs direct control.
The Cuba Task Force, from the beginning, had wanted B-25s for the exile air force as opposed to B-26s, because B-25s were much more flexible and reliable. Bissell and Beerli insisted on B-26s. When Esterline asked why, the response was, “because they’re [the B-26s] more deniable”; the B-26s were more easily available on the open market. Esterline continued to object about the use of B-26s and the lack of task force control over the air section. But, as Esterline put it, he “was whistling in the dark every time I tried to do anything involving air . . . our exchanges got pretty vitriolic at various points . . . and I am sure Beerli hated my guts . . . but there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it because we had no control of air and they chose to ignore us.”
“The coup de grace, certainly for the Trinidad Plan,” said Esterline, “came when our air people advised the State Department . . . that the airstrip at Trinidad” was 100 to 200 feet too short for the B-26s, even though it initially had been believed able to accommodate them. “I’m not sure how much too short, but that immediately put the whole Trinidad Plan in question which was the basis for my development of the program [of] testing and avoid disaster.” As originally conceived by Esterline, he saw the more modest Trinidad Plan of infiltration and guerrilla buildup as one that would “test” the situation in terms of survival and expansion, without the risk an assault such as the Bay of Pigs entailed.
At a subsequent meeting with Rusk, Esterline said he
was trying to defend the B-26s, because I had already lost the battle on B25s. I said that we had to have a potential airport and Trinidad was the only place that had one that really was good enough and was viable for guerrilla warfare. And the Secretary [Rusk] said to me, ‘well, if your airstrip isn t long enough why don’t you clandestinely airdrop bulldozers and
THE BEGINNINGS
lengthen it?’ I lost my cool. I said, ‘Mr. Secretary, if I made a suggestion like that to Mr. Dulles he should summarily fire me, because, hell, we don’t even know whether we can survive there in terms of putting people on the island. How in the world could we drop bulldozers in and lengthen an airstrip?’ Needless to say, we lost the argument and we lost the airstrip and the Trinidad Plan went out the window. And that’s the point that Jake Esterline should have asked for reassignment. But I didn’t.
Then, said Esterline, Bissell advised him that “Mr. Dulles said I was no longer to attend any high level meetings in the State Department or the White House because I was just too blunt and brusque in my dealings with people at that level. Therefore, Hawkins would attend in my place. Mad as it made me, I had to accept that because I had been rude to the Secretary of State when he goaded me into losing my temper about the bulldozer episode.” It occurred to him many years later, Esterline said, that it wasn’t Dulles who banned him from the meetings, but it was Bissell in “another one of his lies. ... He didn’t want my strident voice there because he knew he couldn’t control me the way he was able to control Hawkins or any of his other military people, because he controlled their efficiency reports.” At the same time, concluded Esterline, “at some point during this period, perhaps even before the selection of the Bay of Pigs, [Bissell] had already made an agreement with the President that he never thought to tell anybody about... that this operation would be low-keyed, would not use excessive air power.”
Sidelined by Bissell, said Esterline, he took himself out of the day-today planning, concentrating instead on administrative and other projects, but kept himself available to Hawkins for any help needed in developing the plan. 36 Esterline said he and Bissell never spoke after the Bay of Pigs. Bissell mentions Esterline once, and only in passing, in the fifty-two pages of his memoirs dedicated to the Bay of Pigs.
Even though he had been taken out of the high-level planning sessions, in early March 1961, Esterline was dispatched on an unprecedented visit to Guatemala to pacify President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, who was under increasing pressure related to the Cuban brigade training in the country.
When the project got under way, said Esterline, an oral agreement was made with Ydigoras “to handle all this training in Guatemala which he was understandably very nervous about.” As the brigade grew bigger and stayed longer than anticipated, added Esterline, “it was becoming a real
problem and he would just not deal with the ambassador. He wanted a representative of the State Department to come down. He was afraid the thing was going to blow on these 1,500 to 2,000 Cubans who at the time we had training there. And he damned well wanted a piece of paper to protect him with the international community.”
The State Department didn’t want anything to do with it. Esterline, who had served in Guatemala earlier as CIA station chief, was a known quantity to Ydigoras, although neither knew the other personally. Esterline was asked to go and, in effect, execute a status of forces agreement with Ydigoras. He got the agreement, saying to Ydigoras, “I hope this thing won’t become a public issue, this thing we’re signing, in the next year or so. He looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Esterline, Jacobo, if this thing surfaces it won’t be Ydigoras Fuentes in Guatemala. It will be you, or more likely, some of your friends up there in Washington.’ I thanked him, took my paper, duly boarded the plane and returned to Washington to find that we had a whole new ballgame.” 37
R eturning to Washington from his mission to pacify Guatemalan president Miguel Ydigoras, Esterline found yet another major alteration of his original design for a covert operation, one that brought a major change in its dynamics. The plan already had evolved from a guerrilla infiltration to an amphibious invasion, and Bissell had marginalized him in the process. Now the landing site had shifted from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs, upon President Kennedy’s order made under pressure from the State Department to find a “less spectacular” locale that would better mask U.S. involvement.
Esterline said the old Cuba and Latin America hands on the task force were
in a state of shock because of the choice the paramilitary staff had made. I must say, though, that the paramilitary staff made the only choice they could. ... It was the only airport that could handle B-26s and, unfortunately, it was called the Bahia de Cochinos [Bay of Pigs], and was located in a damn swamp. The old Cuba hands were upset because they couldn’t understand how any kind of guerrilla warfare could be fought in a swamp. Although it might be protected from Castro, it made it almost impossible to break out of the swamp and get to the Escambray Mountains, a couple of days or more to the east. But that was the decision that had to be because of the damn B-26s. And Dave Phillips [head of the project’s propaganda section] hit it right when he said ‘how can you expect to have an operation succeed when it’s called the Bay of Pigs?’ 1
To meet the new criteria imposed on the operation, Hawkins and his staff worked around the clock for three days, poring over maps of Cuba in search of a suitable site: a less populated area, in which a landing strip for exile air sorties against Cuban defenders could be seized by the brigade
on the first day of the operation. They came up with several possibilities, but the only plausible alternative was the Bay of Pigs, still on the island’s south coast but eighty miles to the west of Trinidad, on the swamp-filled Zapata Peninsula. Once the new site was selected, they had to revise the plans. The new code name became Operation Zapata; the Pentagon, appropriately, called it Bumpy Road.
As soon as I felt sure we would be able to finish them on schedule, I found time for serious thinking about whether a landing at the Bay of Pigs could accomplish the assigned mission of overthrowing the Castro government,” Hawkins said. “My conclusion was that it could not. We could seize a beachhead and hold it for several days and possibly longer, but operations beyond the beachhead would not be possible.” 2
Hawkins shared his misgivings with Esterline, who had reached essentially the same conclusion. By then, it was Saturday afternoon, April 8, 1961, at Quarters Eye—the operation’s headquarters on Ohio Avenue off the Mall in Washington—where the Cuba Project planning was under way.
Jake said that we had to talk to Bissell immediately and persuade him to stop the operation,” said Hawkins. “We learned that Bissell had already left and was at home. Jake telephoned him and made an appointment to meet at his home on the following morning; Sunday.”
The next day, April 9, 1961, a sunny Sunday morning, Esterline and Hawkins drove together to Bissell’s home in northwest Washington’s Cleveland Park neighborhood. The subsequent three-hour meeting, which has never been fully recounted nor even acknowledged by Bissell, could have altered the course of history had Bissell heeded what they had to say.
At the request of the author for specifics on the meeting with Bissell, Hawkins provided a detailed account of his and Esterline’s misgivings about the operation in a letter dated August 27, 2001. With Bissell and Esterline dead and nothing committed to paper, there is no way to know forty years later if or how forcefully and in what detail—all the concerns cited by Hawkins were presented to Bissell. In general terms, however, Hawkins s account of the meeting is consistent with his own previous comments and Esterline’s comments in a June 1995 interview with the author and in a now-declassified 1975 interview with CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer.
As Hawkins noted in his letter:
“Both Jake and I had war experience as infantry battalion commanders
in extended combat and understood the capabilities of a reinforced infantry battalion, and also its limitations, in offensive combat, alone and unsupported, against larger enemy forces.” The exile brigade, with its 1,500 men, a tank platoon, and heavy mortars was equivalent to a reinforced U.S. infantry battalion. On that basis, said Hawkins, he and Esterline concluded:
■ The Brigade could not break out through the few narrow passages through the great swamp behind the beachhead. Castro would be able to prevent egress with his greatly superior numbers of troops, tanks and artillery.
■ Even if the Brigade succeeded in breaking out, it would not be able to fight its way over 80 miles of flat, open country against Castro’s much larger forces in order to reach the Escambray mountains. Only in these mountains could the Brigade survive for a long time, perhaps long enough to overthrow Castro.
■ The Brigade could hold a beachhead behind the swamp for at least several days and possibly longer providing that Castro’s fighters and bombers had been completely eliminated, but would be overwhelmed eventually by the larger forces opposing them.
■ Since the Brigade could survive at the beachhead for only a limited time, it could not cause Castro’s overthrow except in the unlikely event that large elements of Castro’s armed forces would immediately turn against him.
■ The 16 B-26 bombers of the exile air force and the limited number of Cuban exile pilots were inadequate to ensure complete destruction of Castro’s fighters and bombers (about 16) in a single surprise attack on the three airfields where these aircraft were based.
■ If any of Castro’s fighters and bombers survived the first attack, they could defeat the landing by sinking the assault ships and maintaining control of the air over the beachhead. Surviving fighters would make further operations of our B-26 aircraft over the beachhead suicidal. They could also prevent aerial resupply of the landing force by cargo aircraft, essential for continued operations.
■ A landing at the Bay of Pigs could not cause Castro’s overthrow and would result in loss of the landing force within a short time after landing. 3
And as Hawkins described the meeting with Bissell:
He ushered us into the living room where the three of us sat down and
promptly entered into the business of our urgently arranged meeting. The
atmosphere was calm, serious, polite and mutually respectful. There were no heated discussions, but opinions were firmly stated without reservation by us all. In all of my extensive dealings with Bissell I found him to be courteous and friendly, never abrupt, abrasive or overbearing.
Jake and I presented our conclusions about the upcoming operation. We recommended unequivocally that Bissell take immediate action to stop the operation. Both Jake and I said that if the operation was not to be stopped we wanted to resign from our duties since we did not want to take any further part in what we believed would be a terrible disaster.
Bissell did not attempt to refute our arguments about the military pitfalls of landing at the Bay of Pigs. He took the position, however, that it was too late to stop the operation and was adamant that it had to go forward. Although Jake and I both believed that Kennedy would welcome a recommendation from the CIA to cancel the Bay of Pigs landing, we did not argue the point with Bissell for he had already made it clear that he would not try to stop it.
Bissell did address the question we had raised about the inadequacy of the exile air force for eliminating all of Castro’s aircraft in a single attack.
He said that he would take the matter up with the president and believed that he could persuade him to allow a greater number of aircraft in the first strike.
He earnestly asked us not to abandon him at this late date, saying that there was no one to take our place. Jake and I reluctantly agreed, but Jake exacted a promise from him that he would take immediate action with the president to use more aircraft and increase the power of the attack on the opposing air force.
It was thirty-seven years later, said Hawkins, when he and Esterline learned from declassified documents—as the National Security Archive in Washington brought them together for the first time since the Bay of Pigs—that
Bissell promptly reneged on this solemn promise. Within the next two or three days he agreed with Kennedy to cut the attacking force in half, from 16 to 8 aircraft! He never informed us that he had agreed with the president to do this. We were allowed to believe that Kennedy had acted arbitrarily in making the cut when we were finally notified about it late in the afternoon on the day prior to the attack on the following morning.
I have never seen any written acknowledgement by Bissell that our urgent Sunday meeting took place, much less that Jake and I had tried to persuade him to stop the landing. I did note in a draft of his memoirs an
admission that he had not given enough thought to the fact that moving the landing to the Bay of Pigs had eliminated the possibility of guerrilla warfare in the Escambray. That was one of the points we made with him at our meeting. I was informed a few years ago by Janet Weininger, daughter of one of our National Guard pilots killed in the Bay of Pigs action, that Bissell had said to her during a personal interview, ‘I should have listened to Esterline and Hawkins.’ I am sure he was remembering our Sunday meeting when he said that. 4
In the presidential briefing memorandum dated April 12, 1961, referred to by Hawkins, Bissell said that “the plans for air operations have been modified for operations on a limited scale on D-2 and again on D-Day itself instead of placing reliance on a larger strike coordinated with the landings on D-Day.” 5
The air operations were apparently modified even more after that briefing paper was prepared. In his memoirs, Bissell wrote that on the Friday before the invasion, Kennedy gave “a fairly ambiguous instruction” to downplay the scope of the invasion with a more limited air strike than the one scheduled. “I was simply directed to reduce the scale and make it ‘minimal.’ He left it to me to determine exactly what that meant, and I responded by cutting the planned sixteen aircraft to eight.” 6
Wyden, in his 1979 book on the Bay of Pigs, offered a slightly different account for cutting back on the air operations, a decision he implied came after President Kennedy read that day’s column by James “Scotty” Reston in the New York Times , imploring the public and administration to give greater consideration to the implications of an invasion of Cuba.
“In the White House,” wrote Wyden, “Kennedy picked up the phone and called Bissell. He said the Saturday air strikes could go forward. Then, ‘almost as an afterthought,’ he asked how many aircraft would participate.” When Bissell told him sixteen, Kennedy said “minimal,” without specifying a number. “That was left to Bissell, who thought the informality of this decision-making was ‘rather odd,’ especially after all the agonizing’ weeks of hassle in the Cabinet Room. He did not question the President’s decision. He was too pleased to hear that the strikes could go at all. That made it less likely than ever that the President might scrub the entire project. He passed the word to Stan Beerli: only six planes were to fly.” 7
The recollections by Esterline—who died in 1999—of the meeting with Bissell were less explicit than those of Hawkins as far as the specific
concerns addressed and whether they recommended the operation be called off. But in his 1995 interview with the author, Esterline left the clear impression that he was doubtful about the operation’s success.
“We were being emasculated in the critical hours of the Bay of Pigs and that s when Hawkins and I went to Bissell and said ‘you better get somebody else. . . . We can’t do what you’re asking because there are too many things happening to us externally.’ We made a bad mistake by not sticking to our guns and staying resigned-We wanted out of the proj
ect. He [Bissell] needed different leadership. . . . Because of the way they kept limiting us and taking things away from us, we couldn’t guarantee any success,” said Esterline.
Esterline said he debated with himself
many times over the years. I’ve said to myself ‘if we stuck with it, if we walked off the project ... it would have gone on and they would have gotten somebody in there and it would have become a bigger mess.’ I guess what Hawkins and I both felt was that if we had just been able to fight, if we had been able to learn several months earlier there were going to be these restrictions put on us, we would have gotten out in a gentlemanly manner and said ‘we think you better use somebody else. We don’t think that we’re going to be able to do what you want.’ But unfortunately we didn’t have that luxury of time. We didn’t discover the problems, the limitations we were going to have until it was too late to quit. You just can’t walk away and leave the ship to sink. 8
In his posthumously published memoirs, Bissell made no mention of the Sunday meeting with Esterline and Hawkins. In a 1975 interview, CIA historian Jack B. Pfeiffer asked Bissell directly: “Did Jake Esterline and Hawkins ever threaten to resign from the operation, to your knowledge?”
Bissell’s response was evasive: “I have little doubt that both of them did at one time or another. I think that Jack Hawkins’ moment of greatest unhappiness was when I didn’t put Beerli [Air Section Chief] under him.
I don t remember Jack ever saying that he flatly was going to resign, although it seems to me when I think back on it, that there may have been occasions when we were waiting around for one of the White House meetings, and Jack would say, ‘well, if they are going to take all the air cover away I am going to ask to be relieved’ and words to that effect. I don t remember Jack ever coming to me and objecting so strongly to some decision of mine that he made noises of that sort.”
Of Esterline, Bissell said, “Jake, I guess, got mad occasionally. I don’t
remember the specific issues of which Jake got mad at me and threatened to resign.” 9
Pfeiffer’s four-volume internal history of the invasion is among the most significant documents of the Bay of Pigs operation yet to be declassified. Pfeiffer himself wanted to see his work declassified and before his death sued the CIA unsuccessfully for its release.
Bissell did write in his memoirs that he recalled a meeting with Hawkins regarding the change of landing site. He also remembered Hawkins saying that his group had come up with an alternative plan that was better than the original in some ways to meet Kennedy’s requirements for a landing with “less noise.” “What we did not think or talk about much— but should have—was the fact that it hindered the possibility of guerrilla action in the event of an initial setback,” wrote Bissell. 10
Hawkins refuted this statement, and given the fact that he and Esterline went to Bissell’s house eight days before the landing to protest the change in landing site, it does seem unlikely Bissell would make such a comment that he attributed to Hawkins, about the landing site being better.
“I never made such a statement to him [Bissell] nor conveyed such thoughts using other words or means,” Hawkins said. “Also untrue is the assertion . . . that he did not get from me or others on his staff a feeling that a change from Trinidad made the outcome more uncertain. He could not possibly have forgotten what transpired at the urgent meeting at his home on a Sunday morning when Esterline and I explained in detail why a landing at the Bay of Pigs had no chance of success, would end in disaster and should be canceled. It is truly reprehensible that he never acknowledged, insofar as I know, that this meeting took place.” 11
Hawkins also disputed Bissell’s comments to Pfeiffer regarding his and Esterline’s threats to resign.
I mentioned resigning to Bissell only once—at the Sunday meeting at his home on April 9, 1961. It is clear that Bissell deliberately avoided ever mentioning this meeting. It is inconceivable that he did not remember the meeting and what transpired there. Jake and I urgently requested the meeting by telephone to Bissell, who had gone home from his office late on Saturday evening, April 8th. Both the time and venue for the meeting were out of the ordinary, taking place on Sunday morning, the next day, at Bissell’s home. The subject for discussion was of momentous importance— our recommendation to cancel the Bay of Pigs landing since we had concluded a landing at the site, selected hastily at the last minute to satisfy
political rather than military requirements, would fail disastrously. Jake
and I both said that we wished to resign if the landing was not canceled. 12
The concerns Esterline and Hawkins expressed that fateful Sunday morning apparently went no further than Bissell. Four days later, however, he made sure President Kennedy immediately saw a message Hawkins sent from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, where the Cuban brigade was preparing to board the invasion vessels.
Early Thursday, April 13, Esterline sent Hawkins an “emergency precedence” cable asking “if your experiences the last few days in anyway changed your evaluation of the Brigade” and telling Hawkins that “the President has stated that under no conditions will U.S. intervene with any U.S. forces.”
Esterline’s cable was sent at the request of Bissell, who had dispatched Hawkins to Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Hawkins responded: “My observations the last few days have increased my confidence in the ability of this force to accomplish not only initial combat missions but also the ultimate objective of Castro’s overthrow.”
He described the brigade in glowing terms, and observed: “They say it is Cuban tradition to join a winner and they have supreme confidence they will win all engagements against the best Castro has to offer. I share their confidence.”
Hawkins then described the brigade as “well organized and . . . more heavily armed and better equipped in some respects than U.S. infantry units. The men have received intensive training in the use of their weapons, including more firing experience than U.S. troops would normally receive” and called it “a formidable force.”
“The Brigade officers,” said Hawkins, “do not expect help from U.S. Armed Forces. They ask only for continued delivery of supplies. This can be done covertly.”
He concluded by saying that “this Cuban Air Force is motivated, strong, well trained, armed to the teeth, and ready. I believe profoundly that it would be a serious mistake for the United States to deter it from its intended purpose.” 13
The cable has subsequently been cited as a major factor in President Kennedy’s decision to give the go-ahead for the operation. Robert Kennedy later said he believed that Hawkins’s cable, more than any single factor, persuaded the president to go ahead. 14
Four decades later, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy aide at
the time of the Bay of Pigs and one of the few in the White House then who opposed the invasion, referred to the “fatuous” cable sent by Hawkins at a 2001 Bay of Pigs conference in Havana. 15
Hawkins has defended his cable in various forums, including interviews and written material, since 1996, when he first began speaking publicly about the Bay of Pigs.
His most detailed explanation came in a letter to Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive in Washington, the private, nonprofit organization responsible for getting large amounts of Cuban-related documents declassified by the U.S. government. 16 He acknowledged in the letter that his cable “seems inconsistent,” given the fact that he and Esterline had, only days before, gone to Bissell’s home to tell him the operation was doomed and they wanted to resign from the project. Hawkins’s explanation of his cable:
The mission in Central America assigned me by Bissell was to determine the state of morale and readiness for battle of the Cuban forces. The mission was not to determine whether or not the operation should go forward. That question had already been decided by Bissell in the affirmative despite the contrary advice Esterline and I had given him. My duty was to carry out my orders to the best of my ability.
I found the Cuban forces in a high state of morale and readiness. Speaking to the officers in Spanish, I learned that they wanted to fight now and were unwilling to remain in the camps any longer. I knew also that the host countries, Guatemala and Nicaragua, were becoming restive and wanted the Cubans to leave. Under these circumstances, I thought the best thing I could do was to get the operation under way before there was a collapse of morale or serious difficulties arose with the host countries.
With these thoughts in mind, I couched my message in terms calculated to get the action going without further delay.
As I drafted the cable, I thought how very sad it was that these men could not be heading to the protective mountains of the Sierra Escambray, where they could hold out and fight for a long time, perhaps long enough with the help of the air arm to topple Castro, instead of to the forbidding swamps of Zapata.
Had I known before setting off for Central America that the President, in concert with Bissell, would at the last minute cut by half the number of aircraft to participate in the first strike, and then, when the troops were actually nearing the beaches, the President would suddenly and unexpectedly cancel the second air strike altogether, I would not have made the trip. Instead, I would have asked General [David] Shoup, the Commandant of
the Marine Corps, to recall me from my temporary assignment with the CIA so that I would be spared from further involvement in such a disgraceful betrayal of the Cuban fighting men.
Hawkins’s explanation has remained consistent in interviews and other forums since he began speaking out on the Bay of Pigs, including a brief, undated paper entitled: MY INSPECTION TRIP TO GUATEMALA.
Hawkins, in a letter to the author accompanying a copy of the undated paper, also accused Bissell of “departing from the norms of command and staff procedure” by not providing such “vital information” as the cutback in the air strikes to Esterline, as Cuba Project chief, and Hawkins, as the chief of the paramilitary section. 17
Referring to the Sunday meeting at Bissell’s home, Hawkins said:
It seems reasonable to conclude that Bissell deliberately kept us in the dark until the last minute, knowing that Esterline and I would be outraged by what had happened and might make another last-ditch effort to stop the operation as we had done a short while before.
Bissell would not agree to try to stop the operation, which he could easily have done. It was obvious that the President was reluctant to conduct the operation and probably would have welcomed advice from Bissell to cancel it. . . . If Bissell had consulted Esterline and me before agreeing to such drastic changes to the air plan, as he should have done, we might have been able to avert the catastrophe which lay ahead.
Jacob Esterline was a forceful man with considerable clout in the Western Hemisphere Division headed by Col. J. C. King, and had much experience in the kind of thing we were doing. If there had been time enough to act, I believe he would have gone to extreme measures to prevent the operations from being undertaken without adequate air support.
As for himself, said Hawkins, “I would have had time to consult with General Shoup, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, who had personally assigned me to the mission, explain the untenable military situation which had developed and recommend to him that he propose to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that they intervene by informing the President that the plan as modified by changing the landing site from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs and greatly reducing planned air support was no longer viable. It was indefensible for Bissell to make drastically weakening changes in the operation plan at the last moment without consulting Esterline, the Chief of the Cuba Project, or even informing him. If he had not taken this unwise course, the tragedy at the Bay of Pigs might have been avoided.”
In Guatemala, meanwhile, one of the more puzzling incidents of the Bay of Pigs operation—one unlikely ever to be explained—was occurring. It involved the activities of Army Lt. Col. Frank Egan, the on-site paramilitary operations chief who reported to Hawkins. Egan was already with the Cuba Project in Washington when the transformation began in November 1960 from a guerrilla operation to an invasion. He then was assigned to Base Trax in Guatemala to direct the brigade training.
In early April, according to Haynes Johnson’s 1964 book on the Bay of Pigs—the earliest published account of the incident—Egan spoke privately with the brigade’s ranking officers, Cmdr. Jose “Pepe” Perez-San Roman and Deputy Cmdr. Erneido Oliva.
He told them there were forces in the Kennedy administration trying to block the invasion and that “Frank,” as he was identified, might be ordered to stop it. If the operation was cancelled, he said, the brigade should take the American trainers as “prisoners,” and the Cuban Brigade would then be given the plans to proceed with the invasion on their own. Separately, but later the same day, Frank gave Manuel Artime, the exile front’s civilian representative to the brigade, the same message.
According to Haynes Johnson’s account, “Frank never said who opposed the invasion—it was ‘forces in the administration’ or ‘politicians,’ or ‘chiefs above.’ He did say that if he received the order to stop the invasion ‘I have also orders from my bosses, my commanders, to continue anyway.’ ” If indeed he did receive such orders, he didn’t identify who might have given them. 18
Oliva, the brigade’s second in command who became an invasion hero for his leadership after the landing, provided a similar, but more extensive, account to the author in 1998. This account appears in his unpublished memoirs.
There is little question of Oliva’s credibility and credentials. After his capture, imprisonment, and release from Cuba, Oliva not only became close to Bobby Kennedy, but rose to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserves and deputy commander of the Washington, D.C., National Guard, before retiring. After his release from a Cuban prison, he gained an impeccable reputation among those with whom he worked, including former Secretary of State Al Haig Jr., then a Pentagon aide. 19
As recounted by Oliva, as the invasion drew closer, Egan and his staff began holding regular secret briefings with Oliva and Perez-San Roman. During these briefings, wrote Oliva, “we learned that we would establish and hold a beachhead until the president of the Revolutionary Council
arrived in Cuba, set up a provisional government and asked for assistance from the United States and other Latin American countries.
“There would be no problems, Frank assured us, because ‘everything had been arranged in’ Washington. Once the provisional government has been formally recognized, the Free World, including the United States, would supply the brigade with whatever it would need.”
One afternoon later in April, wrote Oliva,
Frank called the brigade commander and I to his headquarters. When we arrived, I found him very gloomy. He also sounded a little upset when he said: ‘there are forces in the administration trying to block the invasion, and if I receive such an order, I will secretly inform you. If this happens, you will come here and make some kind of show, as if you are putting us [all American advisers] in prison, and you go ahead with the plans as we have discussed. We will give you the whole plan, even if we are your prisoners.’
Frank was very specific in his instructions. We were to post an armed brigade soldier at each door of the American advisors’ quarters, cut outside communications and continue training until we were told when, and how, to leave for ‘Trampolin’ [Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, the brigade’s departure point], Frank then smiled and said, ‘At the end we will win.’ Pepe and I were disturbed by this revelation, but we trusted Frank and his military advisors. They were outstanding professional soldiers who, fortunately, had replaced the European, Chinese and White Russian mercenaries originally contracted by the CIA to train us. Frank had treated us very fairly and seemed committed to the liberation of Cuba. At the beginning, we thought that what he had said must be a scheme to mislead Castro’s intelligence apparatus.
Oliva acknowledged that there would have been problems in carrying out such a scheme, including “explaining to the brigadistas why we were placing our American advisors under house arrest,” as well as logistical difficulties involved in getting the troops to the staging area and on to Cuba.
Pepe and I did not discuss Frank’s instructions with anyone. However, late that evening, Frank called Artime and, privately, told him the same thing. Manolo called me to an isolated area behind one of the barracks and asked me if I had been told by Frank that someone was trying to stop the invasion. ‘Why do you ask?’ I said. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘that is what Frank told me.’
When I answered affirmatively to his question, he told me that he could not believe what Frank said. He was as stunned as I had been. He then went to headquarters to ‘check notes with Pepe,’ looking concerned. Frank never said who in the Kennedy Administration was opposing the invasion plans—he only referred to them as ‘forces in the Administration,’ or later on, ‘politicians’ or ‘chiefs above.’ ‘I also have orders from my bosses, my commanders, to continue anyway,’ he said on one occasion when the same topic was discussed.
Oliva said that he, Artime, and Perez-San Roman all agreed,
We did not have the contacts nor the political, financial or military muscle to accomplish such an enterprise.
After more than ten secret meetings with Frank, most of them attended also by Manolo, we arrived at the following conclusions:
1. The forces that would land in Cuba would be much, much larger than the brigade;
2. We would have the complete support of the United States Government;
3. The invasion was going to take place even if the ‘politicians’ in Washington tried to stop it;
4. Most important of all, the invasion was going to succeed and we would liberate our homeland. 20
Hawkins and Esterline said they had been unaware of Egan’s activities as related by Oliva, adding that, given the logistical problems involved, they did not see how such a plan could be carried out.
A possible clue is contained in Esterline’s November 1975 interview with CIA historian Pfeiffer, who asked:
“Do you know anything about Dick Drain’s [Esterline’s chief of operations for the Cuba Project] diary ... for example, he says that on the 3 rd of April 1963, that you felt that Ydigoras [Guatemalan president] and possibly with Somoza [Nicaraguan president] might run this operation anyway. Did you really think that if the United States said no, that if Kennedy said ‘no,’ the Brigade can’t go, etc., that there was a possibility that Ydigoras and Somoza would pick up? Or was this just emotional?”
Esterline responded: “No, no, no. I felt, I guess I was reflecting Alejos [brothers Carlos and Roberto Alejos, on whose Guatemalan coffee plantation the brigade training was taking place], who was my right hand man . . . no, it was more likely Alejos. It was something that Alejos more than
Ydigoras would have said to me, that they weren’t just going to let this thing fizzle like this . . . because they had taken all the risk. As far as they were concerned . . . they had all those people in there, training them and what not, and goddamn it, if we weren’t going to do it, they would do it. Well, the answer is, how are you going to get them there?” 21
Oliva remained convinced that Egan was not acting on his own when he discussed the takeover plan with the two brigade officers and Artime.
“I don’t think he would do something like that in isolation,” said Oliva. “He was loyal and professional to his superiors . . . whoever told him that. I don’t think that’s something that, ‘hey, Frank thinks that this is the way it should be. Let’s do it.’ He knew the same way that I did, that I could not have moved from Guatemala without the support of the Navy. So how can he say take over the camp and we’ll give you the plans.” 22
Hawkins disagreed that anyone higher up in Washington might have been involved, insisting, “I cannot believe that Bissell or any other responsible official at the CIA could countenance such a hare-brained scheme. If there was such a plan, Egan had to be acting on his own initiative.”
Hawkins said that Egan, on one of his trips to Washington, “remarked to me that the Cubans might refuse to turn the ships around if so ordered by the President.”
Hawkins said he “dismissed the idea,” noting that the Cubans “were entirely dependent upon U.S. support... possibly Egan made this remark to determine what my reaction would be. He said no more about it.”
But, said Hawkins, there were decisions made that caused him to suspect Bissell and Egan were communicating directly with each other about important questions of policy. Among those decisions were the increase in size of the landing force from seven hundred to fifteen hundred, organization of a parachute unit, and a platoon of tanks, none of which “was recommended by Jake or me.
“In fact, I offered my opinion to Bissell that it would be difficult to recruit, train, land and support such a force in Cuba and the use of tanks and parachute troops would brand the venture as a U.S. undertaking. He [Bissell] was firm in his decisions, however, and I pressed the matter no further.”
Bissell not being a military man, said Hawkins, “it seems unlikely that he would conceive the idea of using tanks or parachute troops, although he might have originated the idea of using a larger number of troops.
Someone must have recommended these things to him and the most likely person had to be Egan who was directly responsible for organizing and training the Cubans in Guatemala and was familiar from his Army experience with the employment of tanks and parachute troops. Egan never made these recommendations to Jake or me. If the recommendations were indeed his, and I think they were, they must have been made directly to Bissell orally in his office.” 23
Jim Flannery, one of Bissell’s three assistants during the Bay of Pigs period, said he didn’t even remember Egan and “never saw him in Bissell’s office. If they met, it had to be somewhere else.” Bissell, said Flannery, “could have come up with the additional troops, tanks, paratroopers’ angles all by himself. He didn’t need Egan for those ideas.” 24
Egan died December 11, 1999, in Ventura, California, at age seventysix. His obituary, appearing in the local newspaper, made no mention of his role with the brigade and the Bay of Pigs. It did note that he was a veteran of “World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam War.” Hawkins and Oliva, both of whom knew Egan well, said there was no question that the man described in the obituary was the man they had known from the Bay of Pigs.
Hawkins said he had last heard from Egan not long after the Bay of Pigs, when Egan contacted him to ask for a letter of recommendation for a promotion to full colonel. Hawkins said he wrote “a good letter to have in his file.” The obituary indicated Egan never got the promotion and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
Although Pfeiffer had indicated in other interviews that he intended to interview Egan for his history of the Bay of Pigs, he apparently never did. Pfeiffer is also dead.
Egan’s only known recorded comments regarding the Bay of Pigs came on May 1, 1961, in testimony before the Taylor Commission, in which he described the sequence of events leading to his arrival in Guatemala, the brigade readiness, Cuban spies, and other matters.
The only question linked to the possibility of the invasion being called off indirectly confirmed what he told brigade leaders: “What would have happened if the operation had been called off after the first part of April?”
Egan’s response: “It would have depended upon the posture they were in at the time. If it had been called off after they were actually on the way they would have taken over and kept going. I was informed that if the operation was called off they would take over. They said that as a friend
we want you to direct all your people not to resist if this comes about, because we don’t want anybody to get hurt. Consequently, I had all our people turn in their side arms. I would say that after the 1 st of April it was a go operation.” 25
Allen Dulles called Johnson’s account about Egan a “myth” in his book The Craft of Intelligence, published in 1965, adding that “Frank has denied the story.” Dulles wrote that he knew Frank and “from what Frank has recently said, I am prone to believe this was all a misunderstanding which the [Haynes] Johnson book has built up into a grave incident seemingly only to discredit the CIA.” 26
The so-called disposal problem of the Cuban Brigade were the invasion to be called off figured in Kennedy’s decision to go ahead with the plan, but again the president’s decision was based on political, and not tactical, reasons.
In his book A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, historian Arthur Schlesinger, a special assistant to Kennedy in 1961, quoted Allen Dulles as saying at the March 11 meeting that resulted in a change of the landing site: “Don’t forget that we have a disposal problem. If we have to take these men out of Guatemala, we will have to transfer them to the United States, and we can’t have them wandering around the country telling everyone what they have been doing.”
Confronted by Dulles’s arguments, Schlesinger added, “Kennedy tentatively agreed that the simplest thing, after all, might be to let the Cubans go where they yearned to go—to Cuba. Then he tried to turn the meeting towards a consideration of how this could be done with the least political risk.” One answer was to change the landing site. 27
Oliva left no doubt that he believed there would have been a serious problem with any last-minute effort to call off the invasion:
If you were an American advisor who had come to me and said ‘take all the weapons of your men and put them in the supply area, armor room.
Go home,’ I would have called you some bad words and said we are not going anywhere. We are going to keep on training and we are going to fight whoever is in our way.
I knew that we could not go to Cuba from there because I didn’t have the means to transport our troops. But the problem that we would have created in Guatemala would have been so great, Cubans fighting the Guatemalan army, taking over Guatemala, something to that effect.
The same brigadistas who fought in the Bay of Pigs, in Playa Larga, and Playa Giron, would have fought against the Guatemalan army. . . . The Americans were the advisors and they were fifteen, maybe twenty. That would not stop us because we were the guys with the weapons. . . . We have something that kept us together. It wasn’t only training. . . . We want to fight the Communists. Whether we fought in Guatemala or whatever. What I am telling you is that the disposal problem you mentioned was more than a problem; it was a BIG problem. I think Kennedy made the right decision to say, ‘hey, let them go to Cuba,’ instead of bringing them back to Miami. 28
Esterline believed it would have been a resolvable problem but said nobody ever asked either him or Hawkins. “These Cubans were very practical people. We would have worked out a solution for them. As a matter of fact, I ended up working out solutions for all kinds of them the last five years I worked ... when I went down to Miami to gradually retire those Cuban operations which nobody was backing and didn’t have much interest in.” This reference was to the late 1960s when, as CIA station chief in Miami, he completed the shutdown, except for intelligence gathering, of what had become a mammoth post-Bay of Pigs covert antiCastro operation.
Apart from the change in landing site, if the Bay of Pigs were doomed by a single decision, it came Sunday night, April 16, when President Kennedy, at Rusk’s urging, called off a second air strike timed to coincide with the next morning’s brigade landing in Cuba.
It was a decision provoked by U.S. ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s anger and embarrassment after his staunch defense before at the UN against charges of U.S. aggression following Saturday’s first strike. Not having been adequately briefed in advance of the U.S. role in the project, Stevenson’s defense was not only too convincing; it was untrue.
At 9:30 p.m. that Sunday evening, Gen. Charles Cabell, the CIA’s deputy director, was in Quarters Eye when he received a telephone call from McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security assistant. The message: “The President has directed that the air strikes scheduled for tomorrow morning be canceled.”
Cabell was further told—again in the name of plausible deniability— that air strikes would not resume until after the landing forces had seized the airstrip within the beachhead so the B-26s would be able to operate
from Cuban soil. Bundy said he was leaving immediately for New York to calm Stevenson down and any further discussion on the matter should be with Rusk, who “had the proxy of the President, who was going to Glen Ora,” his Virginia retreat.
Recognizing the implications of the cancellation and too late to halt the operation, Cabell called Bissell at home and Rusk at the State Department, both of whom agreed to meet with him immediately. Cabell and Bissell arrived at the State Department at 10:15 p.m.
They made the case for air strikes to Rusk, who remained adamant but agreed to call the president at Glen Ora. Rusk, said Cabell, “gave the President an astonishingly complete and accurate account of my stated implications and effects of the cancellation order.” But Kennedy stuck by his decision. Rusk offered them the phone to make their case directly with the president, but both declined. 29
Cabell was greeted by a firestorm of anger when he returned to Quarters Eye and delivered the message. Hawkins, according to Bissell, yelled, “Goddamn it, this is criminal negligence,” to which Esterline added, “This is the goddamndest thing I have ever heard of.” It was the only time in his memoirs Bissell mentioned Esterline. Bissell also acknowledged that it was probably out of cowardice” that he let Cabell face the music at Quarters Eye by “delivering the bad news.” 30
Many years later, Esterline said the incident was one he would never forget. He, too, noted that only a week earlier, in their meeting with Bissell at his home, “he solemnly pledged to Hawkins and I that he would ensure that we would get the total number of planes. He would go to the President and explain why it simply had to be. That we would get the number of planes we had to have before the task force got too close to Cuba to be recalled. Of course, the rest is painful history, which has been written about.”
What he found “most unacceptable,” said Esterline, “is that they [Bissell and Cabell] were offered the opportunity to speak with the President and they elected not to. . . . Bissell knew damn well what we were saying had to be right.”
In 1998 Esterline vividly recounted his reaction to that fateful Sunday night when Cabell returned from his meeting with Rusk and delivered the message to the task force team gathered at Quarters Eye:
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘General, what do you mean? Where’s Bissell?’ He said, ‘well, Mr. Bissell couldn’t come back, but they sent me to tell you that
EVOLUTION OF A DISASTER
you’re not going to get all the planes you want.’ I blew my top, which was another futile exercise. I said, ‘General, you can’t do this. You have those damn B-26s we didn’t want. You can’t expect those planes ... a small number of planes to cover all those targets. You’re going to end up with at least one Cuban jet and possibly another Sea Fury that are going to remain intact, and those two planes are enough to destroy our B-26s and destroy our ships deck-loaded with gasoline.’
Jack Hawkins went into great and painful detail with General Cabell, telling him exactly what had to be done to save the task force and the General simply said ‘there is nothing we can do.’ . . . We didn’t find out until sometime later that they didn’t even exercise the last choice that they had to get to the President and talk to him. Well, we know now that Bissell already had this agreement with President Kennedy that we never knew about. We should have surmised something like that, because Kennedy had been in the service and he couldn’t have been that much of a dope if he had had all the facts presented to him on a regular basis.
The rest of the night, said Esterline, was a fog.
I simply can’t remember. ... I’m sure I remained in the building. Jack and his paramilitary staff and my principal personal aide, Richard Drain, engaged in frantic planning of one sort or another, getting information and instructions out to the brigade. I can’t remember what instructions went out, but I am sure they were as graphic as we could make them.
Everything we sent had to be relayed. We didn’t have any direct channels and we could not send cables to the air arm. That was another thing Bissell had denied us; the right to send any air cables. So I don’t know what was done about air cables. But I’m sure that Jack and the staff got out as much information to the brigade, which was now on the high seas, as was possible.
The next morning, about 8 o’clock, I sat down at my desk and wrote out in very, very scathing terms, my resignation from CIA, expressing absolute disgust with the events of the last month, with particular emphasis on this shameful performance last night. ... I didn’t want to be part of an agency that conducted itself like this.
I finished it and typed it up. I went over to see my boss, J. C. King, who was in another building at the time. I said ‘J. C., our operation is about to be destroyed because of the goddamndest things that 111 never understand. And I just don’t want to be part of it or the agency.’ I handed him the resignation and started to leave. He said, wait, and read it. And he said I don’t want you to do this. . . . You can’t quit at this point because there may still be something you can do to help.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don t know
what it could be.’ I said, T was at the point of jail last night. I was about to strangle General Cabell when he walked in and gave us the news. And Bissell wasn’t man enough to come in himself.’
He said, ‘calm down, calm down now.. .. I’m going to put this resignation on ice. I’m not going to put it through now because it won’t accomplish anything. It won’t make things any better. Go back and see what you can do to help,’ so I said ‘yes sir,’ and that’s exactly what I did. I went back, but I was still in a state of shock over what happened the night before, and I confess that my mind is blank on the next three days.
Even today, it’s like when you were in a bad accident like that and your memory, from the time the thing happened and for quite a period of time after that, isn’t very good. I’m afraid that’s the situation I’m in. I know they sent me on leave but I’m not quite sure how I got reconstituted and functioning, but I did, and within a very short time, after the usual meetings with various inspectors and what not. 31
Esterline took leave time and went to Miami where he was seen going around town commiserating with families of brigade members, who by then were dead or imprisoned in Cuba. Manny Chavez, an Air Force intelligence officer assigned to the CIA’s overt office in Miami and an Esterline friend since the Guatemala coup in 1954, recounted in his unpublished memoirs:
“About a week after the defeat of Brigade 2506 Jake Esterline called me from Washington and asked me to meet him at Miami International Airport late that afternoon. As Jake walked out at the arrival gate he looked tired and distraught. He threw his arms around me and cried as he said, Manny, I tried to call it off. It was not my fault. We were screwed by Kennedy. They made me send these men to their slaughter. I will never forget this as long as I live. How could I be responsible for the lives of so many people who had faith in me?’ Jake was emotionally depressed. He then asked me to take him to one of the CIA safe houses in Coconut Grove [Miami], where he stayed about a week to try to recover from this tragic event. He told me he wanted to contact each of the mothers and fathers, wives and children of the men of the brigade to personally apologize for what had happened.” 32
He was in a deep state of shock, said Jay Gleichauf, who headed the CIA’s overt office in Miami at the time. “I talked to him briefly. There was no question about it. He was very much overcome by the way that [Bay of Pigs] turned out. This one time I saw him, he was just gray. The spirit was gone out of him. He was trying to pull himself out but it was very difficult. He was like a ghost.” 33
V ictory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan,” President Kennedy told a press conference in assuming responsibility for the Bay of Pigs failure. And, added the president, he was “the responsible officer of the government.” Although publicly accepting the responsibility for what historian Theodore Draper called a “perfect failure,” Kennedy didn’t accept the blame. Nor did he accept defeat gracefully, as subsequent events showed.
The sniping began almost before the Cuban Brigade’s surrender ended the shooting. Privately, Kennedy was furious with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and quickly made his anger known through surrogates. Kennedy loyalists, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen, lashed out at both the generals and the spies, accusing them of providing the president with bad or incomplete information and advice. They also contended that Kennedy’s predecessor had foisted a program on the idealistic and inexperienced young president that he couldn’t stop even if he had wanted to.
Hindsight, based on the greater information now available, indicates they were at least partially right. Communications and sharing of information among the various Kennedy administration players—inadvertently in some cases, deliberately in others—left much to be desired. It’s now clear that had officials with direct access to the president— namely Richard Bissell—been more candid in their briefings, Kennedy might well have called off the invasion. Adding to the problem was the fact that only the concept of the project, not the details, was committed to writing, a sure recipe for miscommunication.
The CIA, the Pentagon, and their defenders were just as insistent that Kennedy administration officials, including the president and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, made success impossible by imposing ever-increasing political restrictions on the operation in an effort to keep “secret” what was an already obvious U.S. role. Political restrictions resulted in two crit
ical—and fatal—decisions ordered by Kennedy: the change in landing site to make it “less spectacular” and the last-minute cancellation, at Rusk’s urging, of the D-Day air strikes.
Part of the problem also, acknowledged even by Kennedy partisans, was the loose organizational structure of a new and inexperienced White House staff that didn’t lend itself to making sure the president was kept fully informed. Even today, more than forty years later, the debate continues over responsibility for failure as new perspectives emerge.
Tom Parrott, a veteran CIA official who served as an assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles during the planning for the Bay of Pigs, contended that histories of the project gloss over the depth of White House responsibility for the Bay of Pigs failure without ever really presenting the agency’s side of the story. His opinion was widely shared by CIA officials involved.
“I’ve always deplored the fact that in the face of Schlesinger’s book and Sorensen’s book . . . [both] totally wrong . . . just apologia for Kennedy, but they are going to go down in history as the word because there’s nobody else left to tell the truth. Bissell didn’t do it [in his posthumous memoirs]. And Dulles wouldn’t do it,” complained Parrott, who was assigned in mid-July 1961 as a White House aide to Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president’s newly minted representative for military and intelligence matters. 1
Gen. Charles Cabell, the CIA s deputy director, provided the exception with his memoirs, A Man of Intelligence: Memoirs of War , Peace and the CIA, which was harshly critical of Kennedy and his entire administration. Edited and published posthumously by his son in 1997, some twenty-six years after Cabell died, the memoirs attracted scant attention.
Bissell, in his memoirs, cited an unpublished document found in the Allen Dulles Papers at Princeton University, in which the CIA director was implicitly critical of President Kennedy and “deplored” the version of events by Sorensen and Schlesinger. According to Bissell, Dulles observed that: “Great actions require great 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.” Dulles wrote in the same paper about the Sorensen and Schlesinger histories of the 1960s: “I deplore the way this is being done. In effect, an attempt is now being made to write history and only part of the story is available. If what is so written goes entirely unanswered and without critical examination, it will go down as the history of the event. It is not the true story.” 2
As the various governmental institutions and individuals involved sniped at each other over responsibility for the failure in the days following the event, two formal inquiries got under way, each adding its own perspective.
President Kennedy appointed one, the so-called Taylor Commission, or Cuba Study Group. To head the commission and also serve as the president’s military and intelligence adviser, Kennedy brought in from retirement Gen. Maxwell Taylor, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Eisenhower. Joining Taylor on the commission were the president’s brother and attorney general, Bobby Kennedy, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Adm. Arleigh Burke of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The dichotomy of the group was apparent in the final report in which Dulles and Burke dissented—in an implicit criticism of President Kennedy’s last-minute cancellation of air support—from a section suggesting that even with control of the air, a beachhead invasion “could not have survived long without substantial help from the Cuban population or without overt U.S. assistance,” neither of which ever materialized.
The Burke-Dulles dissent appeared as a footnote to the report. It read:
Admiral Burke and Mr. Dulles consider that there is insufficient evidence to support the conjectures in this paragraph. The well-motivated CEF [Cuban Expeditionary Force] fought extremely well without air cover and with a shortage of ammunition. They inflicted very severe losses on the less well-trained Cuban militia. Consequently, it is reasonable to believe that if the CEF had had ammunition and air cover, they could have held the beachhead for a much longer time, destroyed much of the enemy artillery and tanks on the roads before they reached the beachhead, prevented observation of the fire of the artillery that might have been placed in position and destroyed many more of the local militia en route to the area. A local success by the landing party, coupled with CEF aircraft overlying Cuba with visible control of the air, could well have caused a chain reaction of success throughout Cuba with resultant defection of some of the militia, an increasing support from the populace and eventual success of the operation. 3
“My feeling is that Bobby was determined to pin the blame on anybody except Jack, and Arleigh Burke did not go along with all that,” said Parrott. “Dulles, of course, was in an anomalous position. And Taylor, I think, was in a tough spot, too, because he was brand new in the job and I think he realized the pressure.”
Although Dulles and Burke were half the commission, “they didn’t have the firepower,” said Parrott. And as the first among equals, Bobby Kennedy “was out for blood.” 4
Even with Bobby’s influence, the Taylor Commission report was far more evenhanded than the one by Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA’s inspector general, who apparently used the occasion to exorcise some personal demons.
The Taylor report at least offered an indication of White House disorganization related to the project. The report cited as the last of eleven immediate causes of failure: “The Executive Branch of the government was not organizationally prepared to cope with this kind of paramilitary operation. There was no single authority short of the President capable of coordinating the actions of CIA, State, Defense, and USIA. Top level direction was given through ad hoc meetings of senior officials without consideration of operational plans in writing with no arrangement for recording conclusions and decisions reached.” 5
So controversial was the Kirkpatrick report that it was not declassified until February 1998, nearly thirty-seven years after its completion in the fall of 1961. Only twenty copies were made; nineteen were recalled and destroyed. The remaining copy was locked in the CIA director’s office safe.
The report’s existence—and the fact that it was critical—had long been known, but when finally released most news accounts focused only on its scathing indictment of the agency. They made bare mention, if any, of the report’s controversial background and the lengthy rebuttal from Bissell, Kirkpatrick’s rival, attached to it.
Typical of the many articles appearing on the report’s declassification was one in the February 22, 1998, edition of the New York Times, which ran under the headline: “C.I.A Bares Its Bungling in Report on Bay of Pigs Invasion. Only two paragraphs, buried in a lengthy story, accompanied by excerpts from the report, made any reference to its controversial nature, and the first contained two significant errors. It read:
“The C.I.A.’s leaders believed that it was President John F. Kennedy’s failure to approve an attack on Cuba’s air force to coincide with the landing of the commandos that caused the deaths of 1,500 raiders. And in their rebuttals to the report by Mr. Kirkpatrick, they wrote that his depiction of unmitigated and almost willful bumbling and disaster’—in the words of Gen. Charles P. Cabell, then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence—was motivated by personal malice. Mr. Kirkpatrick had wanted to
be the agency’s spymaster, but his career advancement stalled when he contracted polio in the early 1950’s.”
It was not President Kennedy’s “failure to approve an attack on Cuba’s air force,” but his decision within hours of the landing to call off an air strike that already had been approved, a fact noted deeper in the story. Nor did “nearly 1,500 raiders” die in the landing. Only 114 died and another 1,189 were captured, while 150 either failed to land or never shipped out. No mention was made of Bissell’s rebuttal. With the exception of Cabell, briefly quoted a second time later in the story, no other mention was made suggesting the torrid controversy that Kirkpatrick had stirred with his report.
Perhaps the most measured CIA response to Kirkpatrick came from John McCone, a businessman without an intelligence background, who succeeded Dulles as CIA director. In a January 19, 1962, cover letter transmitting a copy of the report and its rebuttals to the chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, McCone said: “It is my personal opinion as a result of examinations I have made of this operation after the fact, that both the report and the rebuttals are extreme. I believe an accurate appraisal of the Cuban effort and the reasons for failure rest some place in between the two points of view expressed.” 6
Jake Esterline, who was on the original distribution list of twenty people, commented at the time of its declassification, that “any good that could have come from the report was lost because of the vitriolic manner in which Kirkpatrick wrote it.” 7
Sam Halpern, a retired senior agency officer who had no role in the Bay of Pigs, but knew Kirkpatrick well and had worked with him, described the report as “basically Kirk’s vendetta against Bissell, aiming for the highest job [CIA director]. He had been a real rising star. Once he had polio [he was stricken on an overseas trip in July 1952] he got sidetracked and became a bitter man.” 8
Author Peter Grose, in his biography of Allen Dulles, wrote that “Kirkpatrick had once been a player in the Great Game [to succeed Dulles]; as he was repeatedly passed over for higher responsibility, colleagues came to sense that bitterness came to dominate his capacity for judgment. Pursuing his investigation with a vigor that also seemed to include the settling of old scores, the inspector general produced a 170-page critique even more scathing against his CIA colleagues, implicitly including Allen, than the Taylor report.”
Then, says Grose, Kirkpatrick “made a fatal misstep in the game of
bureaucracy. Completing his work the week before McCone was to be sworn in, he handed the report personally to the new man. McCone read the text on the plane to California, where he went to close out his private affairs over the Thanksgiving weekend. He telephoned Kirkpatrick the morning after his arrival. The document, he said, must go to Allen, who was still the director of central intelligence, and it must go to him ‘immediately.’ Allen, predictably, was outraged, both at Kirkpatrick’s ugly personal judgments and at the seemingly devious manner in which he had presented them to the new director rather than to the executive who had commissioned it.” 9
Tom Parrott had this to say:
Kirkpatrick was a good friend of mine. I probably knew him longer than anybody in the agency, because I was in college with him . . . but I’m convinced that by the time of that report he was a bitter, disillusioned guy. Bitter anyway, and with probably some good reason. He was intensely ambitious. It was just incredible.
And he had maneuvered himself into a position where he was all set to go . . . then he took this trip early in that capacity [head of the intelligence side of the CIA’s clandestine services] to view his empire around the world and got polio and that was it... so he was bitter, and very disappointed, of course. So when he saw all these people, and this is my view, going by him like [Richard] Helms and then Bissell being brought in from the outside and being put in jobs that Kirk would have liked to have had ... I just think that his report was dishonest and biased. I honestly think that Kirk was just almost demented at that point. 10
Bissell, the most obvious target of much of the report’s criticism, said in a 1967 oral history interview that he thought the document was “a typical report that uses hindsight illegitimately for criticism . . . and, in effect, criticized the participants for judgments that allegedly turned out to be incorrect after the fact, rather than trying to assess them on the basis of the evidence available to those who made them when they made them.”
Bissell added that Kirkpatrick was known to be, to I think everyone that knew him, extremely ambitious. He was an individual who, as I felt well before this incident, was not above using the reports and his analysis of situations to exert an influence in the direction that he chose; and these directions were, not always but sometimes, tied up with his own personal ambitions. I think in this case he had a number of purposes he was trying to serve, more or less of that character.” 11
Kirkpatrick, defending his work in another 1967 oral history interview, said that “the report was tailored quite specifically to just what CIA had done and how it had done it, and we avoided any political decisions that might have been made in the White House or the Pentagon or in the State Department or Congress because we were tailoring our report strictly to CIA successes or failures. What it boiled down to, in simple terms, in a report that ran about a hundred and fifty pages, was that by trying to do it [the Cuba Project] in a compartmented unit outside the regular structure of the Agency, it had failed to take advantage of the best talent in the Agency.”
When the report was finished, said Kirkpatrick, “it was a very, very difficult decision on my part as to what to do with it and how to do it because it couldn’t help but be a highly critical report on the Agency’s operations. Mr. Dulles by then had announced his retirement; the President had appointed John McCone; and I probably handled it the wrong way, in retrospect. ... I decided to show it to John McCone first [within a week of being sworn in as director] and asked him how he thought I should handle it.”
McCone replied, telling him, “I think you better hand this to Mr. Dulles immediately.”
“I told him when I gave it to him [McCone],” Kirkpatrick said, “that I realized that this would both shock and hurt Allen Dulles because it did indicate such very serious failings in the Agency’s operation: poor organization, poor use of personnel, overoptimism of the success of the operation, failure to use the intelligence side of the Agency—the intelligence side, I mean the Research and Analysis Directorate.”
Kirkpatrick said he gave Dulles and General Cabell copies of the report the next day “and they were both exceedingly shocked and upset, irritated and annoyed and mad and everything else because Mr. Dulles, I believe, used the term to McCone when he saw him that it was a hatchet job. And McCone talked to me and said, ‘Mr. Dulles thinks this was a hatchet job. I want you to reread it and write me a memorandum as to what you think now, looking at it again.’ ” Kirkpatrick said he reread the report and sent McCone a one-paragraph memo saying, “On rereading it several months after the report was finished, it’s my observation that, if anything, this is a moderate report and is not as severe as it should be.” 12
While critical of the “vitriolic manner” in which Kirkpatrick wrote the report, Esterline did say that it reinforced the conclusion that he and Col. Jack Hawkins had reached in recent years: Bissell had lied to them—
especially regarding air cover—and, at the least, withheld information from President Kennedy.
Esterline said it was now clear that “Bissell lied constantly or withheld vital information. We know now that Bissell had already agreed with President Kennedy that the expected air support would not be forthcoming.”
“It’s difficult to take positions after all these years on people who are now dead,” said Esterline, “but what has emerged to me in depth ... is the intensity of the rivalry between these two men [Kirkpatrick and Bissell]. That, coupled with my increased knowledge of both, has disillusioned me with both.” 13
IVtuch has been heard, and written, about the activities and views of top officials and their partisans in the White Elouse and, to a lesser extent, the CIA and the Pentagon, regarding the Bay of Pigs. But only in recent years did Esterline and Hawkins, the two men most directly charged with planning and carrying out the operation, decide to publicly make known their thoughts on what went wrong and who was responsible. 14
After reading declassified documents and comparing notes, Esterline and Hawkins came to the belated conclusion that their boss, Richard Bissell, should be added to their list of those most responsible for failure of the Bay of Pigs. The other two on the list were President Kennedy and Secretary of State Rusk.
They both became convinced that Bissell, who had virtually complete control over the Cuba Project, presented only selective information to the president reflecting their concerns about the operation, and they concluded, he never gave them access to the full scope of the operation either. This belief was reinforced by Bissell’s memoirs.
“Of the two, he [Bissell] was the bigger schemer than Kennedy,” said Esterline.
Hawkins, in a 1997 memo, offered his “Reflections on the Actions of Richard Bissell,” including the Cuba Project head’s responsibilities, management style, crucial mistakes, and reasons for what he did. 15
Hawkins noted that Bissell, as the CIA’s deputy director/plans, originated plans for “covert operations against Cuba and was the driving force behind their execution. He had virtually free rein within the CIA to direct the project as he saw fit.” CIA Director Allen Dulles, said Hawkins, “exercised oversight but did not play an active day-to-day role.”
Hawkins called Bissell’s management style “unconventional in that he often bypassed the established chain of command and control and dealt
directly with individuals, field activities and other agencies. Sometimes his own staff was not aware of what he was doing through his own channels. The lack of coordination with his staff caused misunderstanding and confusion.”
As for his “mistakes,” said Hawkins, the most fundamental was “his failure to realize that a successful landing operation which might lead to the overthrow of Castro had become infeasible as political authority imposed successive, fatally crippling restrictions.”
Tom Parrott recalled Bissell saying long afterward, in Parrott’s presence, “that he should have told Kennedy that with the change from Trinidad—and particularly to such an inhospitable place—the operation was no longer feasible.” 16
Among Bissell’s mistakes, Hawkins contended, were:
■ Not responding to a staff study—after the landing site was changed in March 1961 from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs to meet presidential criteria—reported to him that the new site was the only one meeting the requirement that it have a landing strip which could accommodate B-26s. It also said that the new site “could neither hold a beachhead nor advance beyond it. Mr. Bissell should have reported the results of this study to the President immediately.” Instead, he ordered staff preparation for a landing at the Bay of Pigs and “persuaded the President to approve it.”
■ Ignoring the “emphatic advice” from Esterline and Hawkins, “both of whom had extensive combat experience, that a landing at the Bay of Pigs . . . would result in disaster if allowed to proceed. If he had informed the President of this opinion, the Bay of Pigs disaster would probably have been avoided.” Not only did he fail to inform the president, he apparently never acknowledged publicly that the two top planners had urged cancellation of the operation only a week prior to the invasion.
■ Failure “throughout the planning period to make it clear to the President why it was essential to destroy Castro’s air force completely before the landing, and that further air operations would be required until the mission was accomplished or had failed.” Even though well aware of such necessities “he did not make the importance of this clear to the President.” Lacking military experience himself, he would have been better served to have his military staff brief the president on “this and other important military considerations.”
■ During the preparatory phase, Bissell “tended to act more as an
advocate trying to win approval of his plan from the President than a careful advisor. He accentuated positive aspects of the plan but played down, or did not mention, shortcomings, risks, possible adverse consequences or failure.” Hawkins noted that he accompanied Bissell to meetings at the White House with the president and Cabinet members, but “was not present at his briefings of the President. His briefing papers were not coordinated with Mr. Esterline nor me and we had no way of knowing what had been said.”
■ Not until 1996, when Hawkins and Esterline obtained a declassified copy of Bissell’s “final briefing paper for the President, dated April 12, 1961, three days before the first scheduled air attack,” did they learn he had not given the president an accurate picture of what the operation entailed. “The tenor of the briefing was to assure the President that the landing would be a quiet operation, less like an invasion, as the President desired. This was not true. The Bay of Pigs landing was an invasion, far from quiet.”
■ Hawkins and Esterline learned from the same paper that Bissell and the president “had reached agreement several days before the first air attack was to be launched to cut the number of our attacking aircraft in half, from sixteen to eight, and did not inform” them until the day before the attack, “thereby ensuring that we would have no time to react effectively against the decision. Mr. Bissell had promised us at our urgently requested Sunday meeting that planned air attacks would not be reduced.”
■ The ultimate mistake, said Hawkins, came a few hours before the landing was to begin, when Bissell declined to speak personally to the president “to explain the probably disastrous consequences of the President’s last-minute order canceling the scheduled dawn air attack against Castro’s remaining military aircraft. He was offered that opportunity by the Secretary of State, and the President was waiting on the telephone, but Mr. Bissell did not act. The Cuban Brigade was abandoned to its fate.”
Hawkins then offered what he acknowledged as “conjecture” about why Bissell acted as he did, and suggested “several factors which may have influenced him.” Among the reasons for Bissell’s actions were:
■ Overconfidence. Too much confidence in his own judgment and abilities, given recent successes in developing the U-2 spy plane and his role in the 1954 overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. Hawkins speculated that Bissell’s confidence in his own intellectual ability may have “prompted him to substitute his own
judgment for that of others who were more qualified in certain fields.”
■ Career considerations. Success in getting rid of Castro would “probably ensure” his promotion to CIA director, succeeding Allen Dulles.
■ Faulty intelligence. Too heavy a reliance on reports from the Cuban exile community for information about conditions in Cuba. “The Cuban exiles were bitterly opposed to Castro and would be inclined to slant their reports in ways calculated to benefit their own interests. CIA intelligence about Cuba was overly optimistic.”
■ Lack of military experience. Bissell had no military training, nor experience, yet assumed the burden of advising the president about military plans for operations against Castro. “A better approach would have been to have his military staff handle military portions of his briefings. This change of procedure alone might have averted the Bay of Pigs disaster.”
■ Momentum. “Operations of this kind generate a momentum of their own and are hard to stop once started. There is a large and ever-growing investment of human effort, not to mention government funds. Other agencies and other countries become involved. The originator of such an operation naturally hesitates to give up for fear of appearing incompetent or ridiculous.”
■ Possibility of U.S. intervention. Bissell “may have believed that in the end, if failure seemed imminent, the President would feel compelled to intervene with U.S. forces. Some involved people did believe that. Having listened to what the President had to say on numerous occasions, I believed the exact opposite. Perhaps Mr. Bissell did not interpret the President’s remarks in the same way that I did, or knew something that I was unaware of, but I doubt that this was the case.”
■ Disposal problem. If the operation were to be called off and the brigade disbanded, there was fear of “political embarrassment. This was considered at high levels of government.” Hawkins said he “did not know” Bissell’s views on the subject, but that he “doubted that many problems would have been encountered.”
■ Clandestine service tactics. Hawkins, a military officer, observed “the practice of secrecy and deception is necessary in the everyday lives of persons in the clandestine service, even in their social relationships. For some individuals, and I do not think this is widespread, the habitual use of deceptive tactics in professional activities may spill over into dealings with other agencies of government and even with their own colleagues. Those who cross the line in this
regard may feel that deception is justified in the interest of advancing what they regard as an important agenda.” 17
Hawkins concluded his “reflections” of Bissell with the observation that, “to some extent Mr. Bissell misled, sometimes by silence and omission, both the President and his own staff in dealing with important matters. Was this the result of misunderstanding on his part of the military realities, or the result of his uncoordinated, one-man-show management style, or was it conscious resort to deceptive tactics commonly employed in the clandestine service? Or was it all three?” 18
Bissell, who died in 1994, did little to provide any clear answers either in his posthumously published memoirs or his many interviews related to the Bay of Pigs. Instead of clarifications, a comparison of his public remarks shows a maze of contradictions regarding his actions.
“If there was anyone I wanted in the room, it was Richard Bissell,” said Jorge Dominguez, a Cuba scholar at Harvard University, in commenting on discussions at a spring 1996 Bay of Pigs Conference at St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. “No one made the point bluntly, but the impression was that Bissell deceived his superiors... the fact that Bissell didn’t write stuff down for the record. One of the ways you are truthful to those above and below you is to say ‘this is where you are.’ It’s almost impossible to find Bissell’s written record. If he was not being deceptive, he was hoarding information in such a way that he risked being deceptive.” 19
British historian Lawrence Freedman wrote “as D Day approached, presidential input was largely driven by Kennedy’s misconceived preoccupation with deniability. Bissell agreed with all of the President’s demands to trim the operation without ever warning of the consequences for its integrity. This exasperated the staff, which saw all the dangers. All modifications requested were immediately delivered. Faced with such responsiveness, the administration could not be churlish.” 20
Of the three factors that Hawkins suggested might have influenced Bissell’s actions, the most accurate seems to be his “uncoordinated, oneman-show management style.” This explains why Bissell paid no heed to, and told no one about the Esterline and Hawkins visit to his home eight days before the invasion to warn him it was doomed to failure. Or why he didn’t make it clear to the president that the change in landing site essentially ruled out the “guerrilla option” for the Cuban Brigade. And why he didn’t insist on talking with the president himself when offered the chance to argue for restoration of the critical invasion day air strikes.
Or why he apparently ignored a prescient January 4, 1961, memo by Hawkins—with its emphasis on air cover—that outlined what was required to make the operation a success.
Jim Flannery noted after reading Hawkins’s memos cited above that “I am now persuaded that Bissell did play games with Jake and Hawkins, especially in the final briefing [of the president April 12, 1961]. But what doesn’t make sense was that he was shooting himself in the foot with the lies and he must have known it.
“He didn’t need a Cuban success to put him in the Director’s chair. He didn’t need to go forward with the Bay of Pigs unless there was some private understanding with JFK,” said Flannery. “It just doesn’t make sense. Something’s missing. And I’ll bet that ‘something’ was between Kennedy and Bissell.” 21
Esterline shared such speculation.
“I’ll never forget that last meeting with Bissell [at his home eight days before the invasion] in which he solemnly pledged to Hawkins and I that he would ensure that we would get the total number of planes. He would go to the president and explain why it simply had to be; that we would get the number of planes we had to have before the task force got too close to Cuba to be recalled,” said Esterline. “Of course, the rest is painful history that has been written about.”
What Esterline found most unacceptable was that neither Cabell nor Bissell took the opportunity offered to appeal directly to the president when he confirmed cancellation of the D-Day air strikes. “That was unacceptable because Bissell knew damn well what we were saying [regarding need for the strikes] had to be right. Of course, again, now we know why he didn’t. He had already made an agreement with President Kennedy that he felt he had to live with, for better or for worse.” 22
Giving some credence to a private agreement between Kennedy and Bissell is the fact that Secret Service logs show Bissell, by himself or with others, at thirteen off-the-record Oval Office meetings with Kennedy in the first three months of 1961. 23
Taking note of the meetings, Hawkins said it raised two unanswered questions: “‘What did Bissell tell Kennedy in their numerous private meetings?’ and ‘Why did he keep us [Hawkins and Esterline] in the dark about his private relations with the president?’ ” 24
Flannery’s description of Bissell during the Bay of Pigs reinforces the “uncoordinated, one-man-management style” approach suggested by Hawkins. Bissell had, said Flannery, “lots of staff complexes and person
nel at his beck and call.. . but none that he used in a conventional sense. For planning, etc., Jake had a project staff in Quarters Eye, but I’m not sure how much Bissell used them or paid attention to them, especially on important matters. In essence, Bissell was his own staff, just as he was his own deputy and chief of operations.”
Even before reading Hawkins’s memos, Flannery had come to the conclusion that “Bissell’s most serious mistakes were not in what he did, but in what he did not do.” High among them was mending his relationship with Richard Helms, his deputy and a CIA veteran seen as “keeper of the flame on behalf of a pretty tight-knit group of old pros ... most of whom dated back to wartime service with the OSS and military intelligence.”
Bissell was named to replace Frank Wisner as the CIA’s deputy director/plans. As Wisner’s chief of operations, Flannery wrote in a private paper, Helms “had become Wisner’s de facto deputy. Few matters from within the Clandestine Services found their way to Wisner’s desk without having passed through Helms.. . . Bissell came in as an outsider and new broom exuding change. I suspect he even carried a bit of a chip on his shoulder.” Bissell had come in leaving “no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was going to be his own deputy and chief of operations . . . and most documents and matters would come directly to him. No wonder Bissell and Helms didn’t hit it off. As a matter of fact, I can’t recall a single occasion when Bissell had Helms into his office, though they were next door to each other. If they had any business to transact, they did so by telephone or notes.” Said Flannery:
A prime example of the depth of their estrangement was the Cuban operation. To keep up with developments in the project, Helms had me give him a briefing every Friday. That was fine until the latter stages when, from my position on the sidelines, I could no longer keep up with mounting developments. So, one Saturday afternoon when Bissell was not being harassed and seemed relaxed and in a good mood, I told him I had been briefing Helms on the Cuban project for some time, but it had reached the point where I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t missing important details, and I thought he might wish to cut Helms in on some of the meetings concerning the operation . . .
He extended me the courtesy of exposing me to a fifteen minute discourse that came down to the fact that one of his great weaknesses was an inability to work with a deputy so I should continue briefing Helms as well as I could. And that was that. The tragedy was that, temperaments aside, Bissell and Helms could have complemented each other in many ways and
would have made a great team. In generic terms, Bissell was a problem solver and innovator with an anarchist streak while Helms was an organization man who made the system function in an orderly fashion without any rocking the boat. Almost as important, Helms knew where all the skeletons from the past were buried and the strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies of most of our operational people. . . .
He could have used Helms’ vast knowledge of the organization and its people to considerable advantage . . . not to speak of Helms’ keen operational instincts and judgment as well. If Bissell was prone to use anyone as his deputy, it was Tracy Barnes and especially on the Cuban project. But Barnes had neither the stature within the Clandestine Service nor the operational acumen of Helms. 25
Rather than clarify his role, the recent declassification of documents, reflections by former colleagues, and many contradictions in his own statements have only served to make Bissell a greater enigma.
As journalist and author Evan Thomas wrote, one of the big questions of the Bay of Pigs is why McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser and a former Bissell student at Yale “did not do more to ride herd on Bissell or clear up a series of ruinous misunderstandings between the CIA and Bissell’s flaws. ‘If Dick has a fault,’ Bundy wrote JFK in February, ‘it is that he does not look at all sides of the question.’ ” 26
In reassessing responsibility for failure of the Bay of Pigs, the one area where there is little dispute by all involved, although from differing perspectives, is what British historian Freedman succinctly described as the conflict between “deniability” and “viability.” 27
Or, as the Taylor Commission observed: “A paramilitary operation of the magnitude of Zapata should not be prepared or conducted in such a way that all U.S. support and connection with it could be plausibly denied.
“Once the need for the operation was established, its success should have had the primary consideration of all agencies of government,” the Taylor report concluded. “Operational restrictions designed to protect its covert character should have been accepted only if they did not impair the chance of success. As it was, the leaders of the operation were obliged to fit their plan inside changing ground rules laid down for military considerations, which often had serious operational disadvantages.” 28
Bissell, in his memoirs, admitted that as an advocate for the operation, he was worried about what might happen if he told Kennedy that the U.S. role in the invasion could not be hidden, so it might as well be done
THE CASTRO OBSESSION
openly. Among the conditions Kennedy had placed on the invasion was one “that hard evidence of direct involvement by the U.S. government had to be concealed and, if exposed, plausibly explained or denied. ... If the United States was sure to be held responsible, then it made no sense to pay a price in terms of impaired operational capability for a result that could not be obtained. Yet that is exactly what we did. It was a major error.” 29
Bissell had made the same point in an earlier interview, saying “the concept of this as an operation, responsibility for which could be plausibly disclaimed by the U.S. Government, had lost its validity many weeks before the invasion itself took place. It was this fact, as I now believe it to have been, that really, it seems to me, was never faced by those of us in the CIA who were advocating the operation and deeply committed to it emotionally, or by someone like Rusk, who was on the whole opposed to it, or by the President or others in the circle of advisors. The one thing that seemed to be taken sort of for granted throughout was that if anything was going to be done, it would be done within this original concept. My feeling is that if the breakdown of that concept had been faced, some other possible courses of action would have been considered.” 30
Even Kennedy loyalist Arthur Schlesinger, while deflecting any blame away from the president, wrote that “if it was to be a covert operation for which we could plausibly disclaim responsibility, it should have been, at most, a guerrilla operation. Once it grew into a concentrated amphibious operation, it was clearly beyond the limits of disownability.” 31
Hawkins cited seven politically imposed restrictions “in the unrealistic and mistaken belief that ‘plausible deniability’ could be maintained on an operation of this scale. The principal advocate of these restrictions was the Department of State whose position prevailed.”
The restrictions: “(1) U.S. bases could not be used for training Cuban forces; (2) No U.S. air base could be used for overflights of Cuba to supply arms to agent teams for guerrilla forces nor to provide logistical support to the brigade when it landed; (3) No U.S. air base could be used for tactical air operations nor for logistical overflight missions; (4) American contract pilots could not be employed for tactical air operations nor for logistical overflight missions; (5) Only half of the sixteen available B-26 bombers could be used in the initial effort to destroy Castro’s air force in a surprise attack; (6) Important military targets could not be attacked in the initial strike due to the limit imposed on number of aircraft to be employed, and; (7) Cancellation . . . while the troops were approaching
FIXING BLAME
the beach area to land, of the air attack which was to eliminate Castro’s air force, ensured that the unwitting landing force would meet with disaster.”
“Political considerations were allowed to restrict military operations to such an extent that success was not possible,” Hawkins concluded. 32
For Esterline, with hindsight, the critical period on which success of the invasion hinged began in late March when
we were beginning to get our legs cut off all the time . .. about the kind of weapons, boats and planes we could have. . . . The whole thrust of our air program was that well before the invasion force was nearing Cuba, we felt that we could still catch those planes on the ground. . . . We knew we couldn’t destroy them in the air. . . . Every time we’d plan a raid and we would submit the plans with the number and kind of planes we thought were necessary for targeting, invariably somebody would say, ‘that’s too many, that’s too much noise,’ and they’d cut down the number of planes we could use. There was always some political factor that seemed to say ‘no, you can’t have that much.’
I’ll always regret that I wasn’t more forceful, couldn’t have been more forceful, or couldn’t have been more successful in fighting to preserve the advantage that I thought was necessary that political forces finally shot down. But that is the echo of anybody who’s ever tried to do anything in history. 33