Bay Of Pigs
The story of the failed
invasion of Cuba
at the Bay of Pigs is one of mismanagement, overconfidence, and
lack of
security. The blame for the failure of the operation falls directly in
the
lap of the Central Intelligence Agency and a young president and
his
advisors. The fall out from the invasion caused a rise in tension between
the
two great superpowers and ironically 34 years after the event, the person
that
the invasion meant to topple, Fidel Castro, is still in power. To
understand the
origins of the invasion and its ramifications for the future
it is first
necessary to look at the invasion and its origins.
The Bay
of Pigs invasion
of April 1961, started a few days before on April 15th with
the bombing of Cuba
by what appeared to be defecting Cuban air force pilots.
At 6 a.m. in the
morning of that Saturday, three Cuban military bases were
bombed by B-26
bombers. The airfields at Camp Libertad, San Antonio de los
Ba¤os and Antonio
Maceo airport at Santiago de Cuba were fired upon.
Seven people were killed at
Libertad and forty-seven people were killed
at other sites on the island.
Two of the B-26s left
Cuba and flew
to Miami, apparently to defect to the United States. The
Cuban
Revolutionary Council, the government in exile, in New York City
released a
statement saying that the bombings in Cuba were ". . . carried out
by
'Cubans inside Cuba' who were 'in contact with' the top command of
the
Revolutionary Council . . . ." The New York Times reporter covering
the
story alluded to something being wrong with the whole situation when he
wondered
how the council knew the pilots were coming if the pilots had only
decided to
leave Cuba on Thursday after " . . . a suspected betrayal by a
fellow pilot
had precipitated a plot to strike.
. . ." Whatever
the
case, the planes came down in Miami later that morning, one landed at Key
West
Naval Air Station at 7:00 a.m. and the other at Miami International
Airport at
8:20 a.m. Both planes were badly damaged and their tanks were
nearly empty. On
the front page of The New York Times the next day, a picture
of one of the B-26s
was shown along with a picture of one of the pilots
cloaked in a baseball hat
and hiding behind dark sunglasses, his name was
withheld. A sense of conspiracy
was even at this early stage beginning to
envelope the events of that week.
In the early hours of
April 17th
the assault on the Bay of Pigs began. In the true cloak and dagger
spirit of
a movie, the assault began at 2 a.m. with a team of frogmen going
ashore with
orders to set up landing lights to indicate to the main assault
force the
precise location of their objectives, as well as to clear the area
of
anything that may impede the main landing teams 2:30 a.m. and at 3:00 a.m.
two
battalions came ashore at Playa Gir?n and one battalion at Playa Larga
beaches. The troops at Playa Gir?n had orders to move west, northwest, up the
coast
and meet with the troops at Playa Larga in the middle of the bay. A
small group
of men were then to be sent north to the town of Jaguey Grande to
secure it as
well.
When looking at a modern
map of Cuba it is
obvious that the troops would have problems in the area that
was chosen for
them to land at. The area around the Bay of Pigs is a swampy
marsh land area
which would be hard on the troops. The Cuban forces were quick
to react and
Castro ordered his T-33 trainer jets, two Sea Furies, and two B-26s
into the
air to stop the invading forces. Off the coast was the command and
control
ship and another vessel carrying supplies for the invading forces.
The
Cuban air force made quick work of the supply ships, sinking the
command vessel
the Marsopa and the supply ship the Houston, blasting them to
pieces with
five-inch rockets. In the end the 5th battalion was lost, which
was on the
Houston, as well as the supplies for the landing teams and
eight other smaller
vessels. With some of the invading forces' ships
destroyed, and no command and
control ship, the logistics of the operation
soon broke down as the other supply
ships were kept at bay by Casto's air
force. As with many failed military
adventures, one of the problems with this
one was with supplying the troops.
In the air, Castro had
easily won
superiority over the invading force. His fast moving T-33s,
although
unimpressive by today's standards, made short work of the slow
moving B-26s of
the invading force. On Tuesday, two were shot out of the sky
and by Wednesday
the invaders had lost 10 of their 12 aircraft. With air
power firmly in control
of Castro's forces, the end was near for the invading
army.
Over the 72 hours the
invading force of about 1500 men were
pounded by the Cubans. Casto fired 122mm.
Howitzers, 22mm. cannon, and
tank fire at them. By Wednesday the invaders were
pushed back to their
landing zone at Playa Gir?n. Surrounded by Castro's forces some began to
surrender while others
fled into the hills. In total 114 men were killed in
the slaughter while
thirty-six died as prisoners in Cuban cells. Others were
to live out twenty
years or more in those cells as men plotting to topple the
government of Castro.
The 1500 men of the invading force never had a
chance for success from almost
the first days in the planning stage of the
operation. Operation Pluto, as it
came to be known as, has its origins in the
last dying days of the Eisenhower
administration and that murky time period
during the transition of power to the
newly elected president John F.
Kennedy.
The origins of American
policy in Latin America in the late
1950s and early 1960s has its origins in
American's economic interests
and its anticommunist policies in the region. The
same man who had helped
formulate American containment policy towards the Soviet
threat, George
Kennan, in 1950 spoke to US Chiefs of Mission in Rio de Janeiro
about Latin
America..
By the 1950s trade with
Latin America accounted for a
quarter of American exports, and 80 per cent of
the investment in Latin
America was also American. The Americans had a vested
interest in the region
that it would remain pro-American.
The Guatemalan adventure
can be
seen as another of the factors that lead the American government to
believe
that it could handle Casto. Before the Second World War ended, a coup
in
Guatemala saw the rise to power of Juan Jose Ar‚valo. He was not a
communist
in the traditional sense of the term, but he ". . . packed his
government
with Communist Party members and Communist sympathizers." In 1951
Jacobo
Arbenz succeeded Ar‚valo after an election in March of that year.
The party
had been progressing with a series of reforms, and the newly
elected leader
continued with these reforms. During land reforms a major
American company, the
United Fruit Company, lost its land and other
holdings without any compensation
from the Guatemalan government. When the
Guatemalans refused to go to the
International Court of Law, United Fruit
began to lobby the government of the
United States to take action. In the
government they had some very powerful
supporters. Among them were Foster
Dulles, Secretary of State who had once been
their lawyer, his brother Allen
the Director of Central Intelligence who was a
share holder, and Robert
Cutler head of the National Security Council. In what
was a clear conflict of
interest, the security apparatus of the United States
decided to take action
against the Guatemalans.
From May 1st, 1954, to
June 18th, the
Central Intelligence Agency did everything in its power to
overthrow the
government of Arbenz. On June 17th to the 18th, it peaked with an
invasion of
450 men lead by a Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. With the help of
air support
the men took control of the country and Arbenz fled to the
Mexican
Embassy. By June 27th, the country was firmly in control of the
invading force.
With its success in Guatemala, CIA had the confidence
that it could now take on
anyone who interfered with American
interests.
Castro overthrew Batista
in 1959. Originally Castro was not
a communist either and even had meetings with
then Vice-President Richard
Nixon. Fearful of Castro's revolution, people with
money, like doctors,
lawyers, and the mafia, left Cuba for the United States. To
prevent the loss
of more capital Castro's solution was to nationalize some of
the businesses
in Cuba. In the process of nationalizing some business he came
into conflict
with American interests just as Arbenz had in Guatemala. "..
. legitimate
U.S. Businesses were taken over, and the process of socialization
begun with
little if any talk of compensation." There were also rumours of
Cuban
involvement in trying to invade Panama, Guatemala, and the
Dominican
Republic and by this time Castro had been turn down by the
United States for any
economic aid. Being rejected by the Americans, he met
with foreign minister
Anasta Mikoyan to secure a $100 million loan from
the Soviet Union. It was in
this atmosphere that the American Intelligence
and Foreign Relations communities
decided that Castro was leaning towards
communism and had to be dealt with.
In the spring of
1960,
President Eisenhower approved a plan to send small groups of
American trained,
Cuban exiles, to work in the underground as guerrillas
to overthrow Castro. By
the fall, the plan was changed to a full invasion
with air support by exile
Cubans in American supplied planes. The
original group was to be trained in
Panama, but with the growth of the
operation and the quickening pace of events
in Cuba, it was decided to move
things to a base in Guatemala..
It was now fall and a new
president
had been elected. President Kennedy could have stopped the invasion if
he
wanted to, but he probably didn't do so for several reasons. Firstly, he
had
campaigned for some form of action against Cuba and it was also the
height of
the cold war, to back out now would mean having groups of Cuban
exiles
travelling around the globe saying how the Americans had backed down
on the Cuba
issue. In competition with the Soviet Union, backing out would
make the
Americans look like wimps on the international scene, and for
domestic
consumption the new president would be seen as backing away from one
of his
campaign promises. The second reason Kennedy probably didn't abort the
operation
is the main reason why the operation failed, problems with the
CIA.
The failure at the CIA
led to Kennedy making poor decisions,
which would affect future relations with
Cuba and the Soviet Union. The
failure at CIA had three causes. First the wrong
people were handling the
operation, secondly the agency in charge of the
operation was also the one
providing all the intelligence for the operation, and
thirdly for an
organization supposedly obsessed with security the operation had
security
problems.
National Estimates could have provided information on the
situation in
Cuba and the chances for an uprising against Castro once the
invasion started.
Also kept out of the loop were the State Department and
the Joint Chiefs of
Staff who could have provided help on the military
side of the adventure. In the
end, the CIA kept all the information for
itself and passed on to the president
only what it thought he should see.
Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, in Political
Science Quarterly of 1984, based
his analysis of the Bay of Pigs failure on
organizational behaviour
theory.
For an organization that
deals with security issues, the CIA's
lack of security in the Bay of Pigs
operation is ironic. Security began to
break down before the invasion when The
New York Times reporter Tad Szulc
". . . learned of Operation Pluto from
Cuban friends. . ." earlier that
year while in Costa Rica covering an
Organization of American States
meeting.
The conclusion one can draw from the articles in The New York
Times is
that if reporters knew the whole story by the 22nd, it can be
expected that
Castro's intelligence service and that of the Soviet Union
knew about the
planned invasion as well.
In the
administration
itself, the Bay of Pigs crisis lead to a few changes. Firstly,
someone had to
take the blame for the affair and, as Director of Central
Intelligence, Allen
Dulles was forced to resign and left CIA in November
of 1961 Internally, the CIA
was never the same, although it continued with
covert operations against Castro,
it was on a much reduced scale. According
to a report of the Select Senate
Committee on Intelligence, future
operations were ". . . to nourish a
spirit of resistance and disaffection
which could lead to significant defections
and other by-products of unrest."
The CIA also now came under the
supervision of the president's brother Bobby,
the Attorney General. According to
Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, the outcome
of the Bay of Pigs failure also made the
White House suspicious of an
operation that everyone agreed to, made them less
reluctant to question the
experts, and made them play "devil's
advocates" when questioning them. In the
end, the lessons learned from the
Bay of Pigs failure may have
contributed to the successful handling of the Cuban
missile crisis that
followed.
The long-term
ramifications of the Bay of Pigs invasion are
a little harder to assess. The
ultimate indication of the invasions failure
is that thirty-four years later
Castro is still in power. This not only
indicates the failure of the Bay of Pigs
invasion, but American policy
towards Cuba in general. The American policy,
rather than undermining
Castro's support, has probably contributed to it. As
with many wars, even a
cold one, the leader is able to rally his people around
him against an
aggressor.
Bibliography
Fedarko, Kevin.
"Bereft of Patrons, Desperate to Rescue his Economy,
Fidel Turns to an
Unusual Solution: Capitalism." Time Magazine, week of
February 20th,
1995. Internet, http://www.timeinc.com, 1995.
Meyer, Karl E. and Szulc,
Tad. The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle
of a Disaster.
New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1962 and 1968.
Mosley,
Leonard. Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and
John
Foster Dulles and their Family Network. New York: The Dail
Press/James Wade, 1978.
Prados, John. Presidents' Secret Wars:
CIA and Pentagon Covert
Operations Since World War II. New York: William
Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986.
Ranelagh, John.
CIA: A History. London: BBC Books,
1992.