one of their craftier moves.
One complication with Brigade 2506 was the high rate of rebel soldiers going AWOL. When the CIA found the rebels were taking off to frolic in a distant brothel, the agency didn’t hesitate to make the logical move; they opened a whorehouse on the base. For security reasons the whores were recruited from El Salvador and Costa Rica.
A larger issue was that security of the plans was a top priority. If word of the CIA’s project leaked, it would destroy the myth that the American invasion of Cuba was organically Cuban. But in mid-1960, the
After Kennedy’s election in November 1960, Bissell had briefed him on the plan. The young president had been as uninterested as everyone else. Bissell tried to get Kennedy to focus on the plan but failed in maneuvering the young president into green-lighting the project.
As the invasion planning went forward under Kennedy’s new administration, it occurred to only one key person during the planning, Antonio de Varona, one of the Cuban exile political leaders, that the plan’s math hardly spelled success: the invasion brigade of a few hundred men would face about 200,000 Cuban soldiers. Bissell had a one-word response that calmed everyone: “umbrella.” The invasion would be protected by an umbrella of air power, one of the inviolable laws of modern warfare. American planes would lay waste to any ground forces the invaders would meet. The umbrella was not only the key to victory; it was a sedative for restive and questioning minds. The umbrella would solve all problems.
A bigger problem that nobody seemed to notice was the lack of any clear chain of command for the operation, a gross violation of basic military strategy. While Bissell created the plan, and the CIA controlled every aspect of the operation, Kennedy retained final authority on all decisions. He lacked, however, a firm grasp of the details. The lack of clear U.S. operational lines of control was matched by the paralysis of the rebel Cuban leadership. For example, the main ground force, Brigade 2506, reported to no one in particular. Various groups vied for control: some were former Batista cronies, some were disgruntled hangers-on from Castro’s entourage, others were former government leaders. They hated and distrusted one another. Each had his own idea of how a post- Castro government should look, with each one seeing himself as the next top dog. If the invasion succeeded, it was not clear who would take over for Castro. It was a revolution without a revolutionary.
Despite the mushrooming cloud of problems, Bissell remained convinced that none of them were unsolvable and that the correctness of getting rid of Castro would swing Kennedy to his side. Bissell’s interactions with Kennedy throughout the early months of 1961 confirmed this, as the new president rarely asked probing questions whenever Bissell swung by the White House to update Kennedy on his invasion plans.
As a result Bissell’s little invasion plan began to suffer from scope creep, which he conveniently forgot to mention. The series of small infiltrations designed to inflame an internal Cuban uprising had morphed into a mini D-Day, complete with a beach assault from amphibious boats and the motley crew of Cuban exile rebels standing in for a division of Marines. He consulted no one but simply tried to bamboozle the new president into agreeing to what was quickly becoming a full-scale invasion.
On March 11, an alarmed Kennedy rejected Bissell’s mini D-Day as overblown. And he wanted the plan reworked to ensure a 100-percent organically Cuban provenance. But it still wasn’t canceled. Bissell stomped off to massage his plan.
Kennedy was holding true to his lifelong predilection of getting exactly what he wanted, in this case a double victory to start off his presidency. There was no reason Castro couldn’t be crushed and the whole operation hidden behind a well-tailored cloak of invisibility. Like the “help” his father provided to secure his election or the beautiful “secretaries” he kept stashed in the basement of the White House, he didn’t see any reason whatsoever to suffer any blemishes on the sheen of perfection on his shiny, new administration. He seemed to have full confidence that the CIA could pull this off without him having to even miss his weekend sail off the Cape.
In late March 1961, a month before the invasion, Bissell came back to Kennedy with a new softer version of the invasion, one that included a change that Kennedy never bothered to understand. It was still a military invasion, just slightly smaller. But now its location had moved from the foot of the guerrilla-friendly Escambray Mountains to about sixty miles away in the swampy, isolated Bay of Pigs. Unrealized by Kennedy, this change meant that if the invasion failed, the rebels could not simply melt into the mountains as guerrillas to continue the fight and continue the fiction that the invasion was a “100 percent Cuban affair.” Kennedy obviously had not thought the whole thing through, and consulting a new map was not part of Kennedy’s approval process. The young president was a man of action without the fail-safe backup his father’s money and planning had provided. The confident Bissell assured him the plan would succeed, even better than in Guatemala. Kennedy was caught in a trap: if he canceled the operation he would look weak — both to the Republicans and to the Russians.
One thing remained the same, though. The deciding factor of the entire invasion was control of the air — the key to modern warfare. If the rebels controlled the skies, they could land reinforcements at will. But if Castro had air superiority, he would pick off the rebel ships, and the invading force would wither on the beaches. It was obvious, given Kennedy’s insistence on maintaining the total veil of secrecy, that the United States could not simply flood the skies with jets emblazoned with USAF. The rebels needed their own air force, and Bissell gave it to them.
To create this winged behemoth, Bissell turned to moth-balled vintage World War II B-26 bombers owned by the air force, but they, wary of becoming entangled in this mess, refused to just hand them over. They had to be purchased. The two sides haggled over the price, like rug traders in a Turkish bazaar.
Bissell also realized his invading army needed a navy, as he quite reasonably deduced — they could not walk from Guatemala to Cuba. Now the
The ruling junta at the Pentagon had qualms about the plan that ran deeper than holding up ships and planes. After JFK took office, the CIA briefed a committee established by the Joint Chiefs on their plan. Some plans occupy thick briefing books; others take up just a few pages. This one existed solely in the minds of its planners — nothing was written on paper. The Joint Chiefs were stunned. They took notes and ran it through their own patented invasion process. They concluded in February 1961 that their plan had about a 30 percent chance of success. Not wanting to look like wussies, however, they told Kennedy that the plan had a fair chance of success, without ever mentioning the 30 percent figure. Even this slight chance required total air superiority and a popular uprising in Cuba against Castro.
While Bissell hadn’t seen the necessity of committing the invasion plan to writing, the CIA did have its own PR department. Two in fact. At the very beginning the CIA hired the same guy who had headed the propaganda for the Guatemala operation to reprise his role. His first step was to set up a propaganda radio station on Swan Island. As backup, a PR man and his assistant in New York spewed out press releases dictated from the CIA in the name of a phony CIA “leadership council.”
Finally, in early April 1961 the switch was flipped. The troops were shipped to a port in Nicaragua for transport to Cuba aboard the chartered Cuban navy. Along the way they picked up U.S. naval escorts as protection. The force of 1,500 invaders received a joyous, dockside send-off from Nicaraguan dictator Luis Somoza. Viva democracy!
Then Kennedy developed a bad case of cold feet. He sensed problems with the cover story, and at the last second he tweaked the initial air assault, reducing the number of bombers from sixteen to eight. The first assault on April 15, a Saturday, knocked out a large chunk of Castro’s air force but still left behind a number of decrepit, British-made fighters.
To create a convincing air of provenance to accompany the first air attack, a rebel pilot flew a CIA-supplied B-26 directly from the invaders’ air base in Nicaragua to Miami and, before the assembled press, pretended to be a defector from Castro’s air force. The charade dissolved under questioning from the meddlesome free press as it quickly became apparent that the plane had never fired its guns. Also, it had a metal nose; Castro’s B-26 bombers
