Bay of Pigs Invasion

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bay of Pigs Invasion ended in total defeat within three days. On the 20th of April 1961, the invading force of Cuban exiles surrendered to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, and most of the captives were publicly interrogated, imprisoned, and put on trial. The operation had been conceived under one American president and carried out under another, financed by the U.S. government and built on a chain of deceptions that eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. How did one of the most elaborately planned covert operations in U.S. history fall apart so completely? The answers reach back to the origins of the CIA itself, to a guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and to a series of decisions made in the weeks before the landings that stripped the plan of the very conditions its own planners said were necessary for success.

• 2. A Revolution and Its Fallout

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  On the 31st of December 1958, Fulgencio Batista resigned and fled Cuba, taking with him an amassed fortune of more than $300 million. The man who replaced him, Fidel Castro, had led a guerrilla army against Batista from a base camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains between December 1956 and 1959. Castro's movement, the 26th of July Movement, was organized as a clandestine cell system in which each cell of ten members knew nothing of the whereabouts or activities of the other cells.

  Once in power, Castro moved quickly to reshape Cuban society. Agrarian reforms redistributed land ownership, and the newly formed Instituto de la Reforma Agraria was placed directly under Castro's control. The Cuban government's economists, men such as Felipe Pazos and Rufo López-Fresquet, began expressing disillusionment with Castro's economic direction as early as June 1959.

  Castro's handling of political opposition alarmed U.S. officials watching from Washington. He legalized the Communist Party, nationalized property owned by U.S. citizens totaling $1.5 billion, and strengthened ties with the Soviet Union. In January 1960, each newspaper was ordered to publish a "clarification" by the printers' trade union at the end of every article criticizing the government. On May Day, 1960, Castro outright canceled all future elections, declaring that the revolution had created a direct bond between the people and the government. U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter responded by publicly accusing Cuba of following the Soviet model of communist rule, with a one-party state, government control of trade unions, and the suppression of civil liberties.

  The tension was not only diplomatic. In 1960, Castro's government ordered the country's oil refineries, then controlled by U.S. corporations Esso, Standard Oil, and Shell, to process crude oil purchased from the Soviet Union. The companies refused under U.S. government pressure. Castro expropriated the refineries. The U.S. canceled its import of Cuban sugar. Cuba nationalized most U.S.-owned assets, including banks and sugar mills. The break between the two countries was hardening fast, and by January 1961 the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations entirely.

• 3. The CIA and Its Plans

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  The CIA had been founded in 1947 by the National Security Act, explicitly designed to counter the Soviet Union's KGB. By early 1960, President Eisenhower had approved a CIA budget of $13,000,000 to explore options for removing Castro from power, and had agreed to a plan presented to the National Security Council on the 17th of March 1960. The plan's first stated objective was to bring about Castro's replacement in a way that would "avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention."

  Richard M. Bissell Jr. was placed in charge of overseeing invasion plans. He assembled agents who had worked on the 1954 Guatemalan coup, including David Atlee Phillips, Gerry Droller, and E. Howard Hunt. Hunt was asked to fashion a government in exile that the CIA would effectively control, and he traveled to Havana to speak with Cubans from various backgrounds before returning to the United States to coordinate with Cuban American contacts.

  The force that would carry out the invasion was Brigade 2506. It started with just 28 men who were told initially that their training was being funded by an anonymous Cuban millionaire emigre. The recruits soon guessed the real source of funding, calling their supposed benefactor "Uncle Sam", and the pretense was dropped. Training took place at a CIA-run base code-named JMTrax on the Pacific coast of Guatemala, in the Helvetia coffee plantation between Quetzaltenango and Retalhuleu. An airfield was constructed near Retalhuleu in the summer of 1960. Tank training for the brigade using M41 Walker Bulldog light tanks took place at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Benning, Georgia. Underwater demolition training took place at Belle Chasse near New Orleans.

  To give the operation plausible deniability, the CIA purchased five cargo ships from the Cuban-owned, Miami-based Garcia Line rather than using U.S. vessels, since the State Department had insisted no American ships could be involved. The first four ships, the Atlantico, the Caribe, the Houston, and the Rio Escondido, were loaded with enough supplies and weapons to last thirty days. Manuel Artime was appointed the overall civilian leader of Brigade 2506, while José "Pepe" Pérez San Román, a former Cuban National Army officer who had been imprisoned under both Batista and Castro, served as the military commander.

• 4. Kennedy's Dilemma

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  On the 18th of November 1960, CIA Director Allen Dulles and Bissell first briefed President-elect Kennedy on the plans. Kennedy did not take any decisive action on the matter until mid-March 1961, months after taking office. His hesitation was not without cause. Top aides, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the joint chiefs of staff, later said they had reservations about the plan but muted their concerns. Military advisers were skeptical of its potential for success.

  The original plan, code-named Operation Pluto, envisioned landing roughly 1,000 men at Trinidad, Cuba, about 270 kilometers southeast of Havana, at the foothills of the Escambray Mountains. Trinidad had good port facilities, was close to existing counter-revolutionary activity, and offered an escape route into the mountains. Kennedy rejected Trinidad, preferring a less conspicuous location. On the 4th of April 1961, he approved Operation Zapata, a landing at the Bay of Pigs, 150 kilometers southeast of Havana, because it had a sufficiently long airfield, was farther from large civilian populations, and seemed less likely to be traced back to direct U.S. involvement.

  The landings were to take place at three beaches: Playa Girón, code-named Blue Beach; Playa Larga, code-named Red Beach; and Caleta Buena Inlet, code-named Green Beach. A critical element of the plan was air support. Two days before the main landing, eight CIA-supplied B-26 bombers had attacked Cuban airfields in an effort code-named Operation Puma, painting false Cuban Air Force markings on the aircraft to suggest the strikes were the work of internal defectors.

  Late on the 16th of April, Kennedy ordered the cancellation of further airfield strikes planned for the following morning, hoping to preserve the pretense of no direct American involvement. The CIA had already judged the original plan required U.S. air and naval forces to succeed. Without the follow-up air cover, the invasion would proceed with fewer forces and less fire support than the CIA itself had deemed necessary. That decision would prove decisive.

• 5. Deception and Diplomacy

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  At 10:30 on the 15th of April, Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa appeared before the United Nations and accused the U.S. of aggressive air attacks against Cuba. U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson responded by flatly denying any American military involvement and presenting a wire photo of a B-26 in Cuban Air Force markings at Miami airport as evidence that Cuban defectors had carried out the strikes. Stevenson was later embarrassed to discover that the CIA had lied to him.

  The staged deception had been carefully constructed. Pilot Mario Zúñiga had flown a B-26 toward Cuba and then northward to Florida, feathering one engine whose cowling had been deliberately bullet-riddled by CIA personnel before departure. Landing at Miami International airport, Zúñiga presented himself to the world press as a defector under the alias "Juan Garcia" and claimed that three colleagues had also broken from the Cuban Air Force. The ruse worked briefly.

  Radio Moscow had broadcast an English-language newscast on the 13th of April 1961, predicting the invasion "in a plot hatched by the CIA" within a week. The invasion took place four days later. British intelligence analysis, made available to the CIA through ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, had concluded that the Cuban people were overwhelmingly behind Castro and that there was no likelihood of mass defections or popular uprisings. Cuban security services also knew an attack was coming, partly because members of the brigade had been indiscreet, and their talk had circulated in Miami and appeared in U.S. and foreign newspapers.

  On the 15th of April, the Cuban national police, led by Efigenio Ameijeiras, began arresting thousands of suspected anti-revolutionary individuals across Havana. They were detained in places including the Karl Marx Theatre, the moat of La Cabaña, and the Principe Castle. In total, somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 people were arrested in the sweep.

• 6. Three Days at the Bay

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  At midnight on the 17th of April 1961, the two command ships, the Blagar and the Barbara J, each carrying a CIA operations officer and an underwater demolition team of five frogmen, entered the Bay of Pigs. They led a force of four transport ships carrying about 1,400 Cuban exile ground troops of Brigade 2506, along with the brigade's M41 tanks and other vehicles.

  The landing plan ran into trouble almost immediately. As frogmen approached Red Beach, they discovered it was lit with floodlights, forcing a hasty change of landing position. A passing Cuban militia jeep stumbled on the operation, and the few militia present succeeded in radioing a warning to Cuban Armed Forces before they were overcome. Castro was awakened at about 03:15 and put all militia units on high alert.

  At daybreak, around 06:30, the Cuban Air Force struck back. Three Sea Furies, one B-26, and two T-33 jets attacked the ships still unloading at the beaches. The transport ship Houston was struck south of Playa Larga and beached by its captain, Luis Morse; it had been carrying much of the medical supplies, meaning wounded fighters had to make do with inadequate care. At about 07:30, five C-46 and one C-54 transport aircraft dropped 177 paratroopers in an action code-named Operation Falcon, but equipment was lost in the swamps and key road-blocking positions were never established.

  Initially, Captain José Ramón Fernández led the Cuban Revolutionary Army's counter-offensive. Castro then took personal command. As the invaders lost the strategic initiative, Kennedy decided to withhold further air support. Over 1,400 paramilitaries had been divided into five infantry battalions and one paratrooper battalion, but without resupply or air cover they were outgunned and surrounded. On the 20th of April 1961, the invading force surrendered. Chester Bowles, in a memoir, described the aftermath plainly: "The humiliating failure of the invasion shattered the myth of a New Frontier run by a new breed of incisive, fault-free supermen. However costly, it may have been a necessary lesson."

• 7. Aftermath and Consequences

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  The defeat at the Bay of Pigs had consequences that spread outward in every direction. Castro's victory solidified his standing as a national hero inside Cuba and widened the political divide between Havana and Washington. For other Latin American movements, the failed invasion was a signal that U.S. influence in the region could be challenged and undermined.

  Most of the surrendered counter-revolutionary troops were publicly interrogated, imprisoned, and prosecuted. The operation drove Cuba closer to the Soviet Union at precisely the moment Cold War tensions were at their most volatile. That shift would directly set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the proximity of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the edge of open conflict.

  Within the United States, the failure prompted significant scrutiny of the CIA. The agency had kept key figures, including Ambassador Stevenson and apparently Kennedy himself, incompletely informed about the operation's full scope. Documents from the Eisenhower Library later revealed that Eisenhower had not ordered or approved plans for an amphibious assault, even though the plan had originated under his administration. Kennedy inherited the operation, modified it in ways that undermined its own logic, and then bore responsibility for its failure.

  The Senate Church Committee, set up to investigate CIA abuses, released a report in 1975 entitled "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders", revealing that efforts to assassinate Castro had commenced in 1960, including contact with the Cosa Nostra in Chicago in August of that year. In exchange for the assassinations of Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro, and Che Guevara, the CIA had reportedly agreed to restore the Mafia's monopoly on gambling, prostitution, and drugs in Cuba if a pro-U.S. government were reinstalled. Manuel Artime, who had led Brigade 2506, had first come to the CIA's attention when his resignation from the revolutionary government was published on the front page of Avance newspaper on the 7th of November 1959, one of the last papers in Cuba not yet controlled by the government.