Note: A recommended source for the Bay of Pigs in Richard Reeves, President Kenendy, Profiles of Power. The references in this lecture come from that book.

JFK inherited from Eisenhower a secret CIA plan (a covert operation) to overthrow Fidel Castro. More than 1400 anti-Castro Cuban exiles were trained at camps in Guatemala. They would be carried by ship to the Bay of Pigs (Bahia de Cochinos) in Cuba, to begin a revolt. It was hoped that the local population would join the revolt. The alternative scenario (think of it as Plan B) was that if the local population did not join the infant revolt and defeat Castro's forces, then Brigade 2506 (the Cuban Brigade) would proceed to the Escambray Mountains and begin a guerilla war. The Joint Chiefs assured JFK that if the initial attack did not succeed then the Brigade could go into guerilla mode. The CIA told the Brigade that they would have air support. There would be air strikes against Castro's forces. Meanwhile JFK was being reassured that the mission would succeed even if the US did not intervene directly.

Kennedy did not want to openly invade Cuba to overthrow a foreign government. He wanted the government overthrown, but he did not want the US to do it openly or directly. He wanted surrogates to do it for "us," so that we could escape receiving the blame and hide behind "plausible deniability." The deed would be done, but "our" hands would not be dirty.

JFK feared that if the US openly invaded Cuba to overthrow a government that it did not like, this might alienate and antagonize other countries in the Western Hemisphere, which were sensitive about the "Great Gringo," the great Anglo white man, throwing his weight around and trying to dictate to the countries of Latin America. Worse, if the US could intervene to overthrow a government that it did not like, why could not the Soviets do the same thing in Europe or East Asia or the Middle East? JFK feared that American aggression against a Soviet ally (Cuba) would give the Soviet Union an excuse to retaliate against West Berlin or Turkey or some other country (what is good for the goose is good for the gander).

The cover story was that disaffected Cubans, acting on their own, had risen up against Castro. "The US had nothing to do with it, we were not involved." We had not interfered in the internal affairs of another country. Arthur Schlesinger, advisor to the president, who thought the whole thing was a mistake, suggested that if lies needed to be told they should be told by subordinates (Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, p. 85). In this way one could protect the president from getting caught in obvious untruths.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The Bay of Pigs covert operation turned into a disaster. The Cuban Brigade was trained in Guatemala by the CIA. The members were then put on trucks and taken to an airstrip at Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua (Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, p. 90). The plan was to carry the men by ship to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The trip was more than 600 miles.

The plan fell apart before it even began. News of the expected invasion was everywhere. People in Miami knew about it. The American newspapers knew about it. The Soviets in Moscow knew about it. Early in April, the New Republic intended to run a story about the planned operation. The Kennedy White House succeeded in getting the New Republic to kill the story. But on April 7, 1961, ten days before the actual landing, the New York Times ran an article on the front page, by Tad Tzulc, under the headline "Anti-Castro Units Trained To Fight At Florida Bases." Kennedy had tried to kill the story the day before it ran. The Times compromised. It reduced the headline from four columns (the original intention) to one, and deleted the words "invasion imminent." Kennedy was stunned by even the watered down story. He said he couldn't believe what he was reading. He asked, were these media guys Americans? He felt that the media had breached national security and the entire operation. Nevertheless, the whole reading world now knew in print that the US allegedly was planning an invasion. The proverbial cat was out of the bag. Castro knew that the Americans or their proxies were coming.

JFK had given final approval for the operation on April 5, but with a proviso. No American troops or planes were to be used (by this he presumably meant military planes).

The CIA plan called for ten old CIA B26s (owned by the CIA, not the American military) [B26s were old surplus World War II bombers] to strafe Castro's airfields and destroy Castro's air force of forty or so old B26s (which the US had given the old Batista regime and Castro had inherited). The air strikes would occur on the weekend (Sunday morning, April 16, 1961, the day BEFORE the actual invasion). By using the old B26s owned by the CIA the US could truthfully deny that American Navy or Air Force planes were involved. But the devil is in the details. The flight from Nicaragua to Cuba was more than 600 miles, for a ROUND TRIP of more than 1200 miles. The planes could not land in Cuba to refuel. Therefore they could only stay over the beachhead for about forty minutes. The air strike on Sunday did NOT do much damage to Castro's airfields and it did not destroy his planes (Reeves, Kennedy, 90-92). Indeed, only five of Castro's forty planes had been disabled (Reeves, p. 91).

On Sunday Cuba complained to the United Nations that it was being bombed by the United States, and demanded a special session. The American ambassador to the UN was Adlai Stevenson. He had been told nothing about the Bay of Pigs operation. One of the planes that had strafed the Cuban airfields landed in Miami. The flier claimed to be a defector from the Cuban Air Force (Fuerza Aerea Revolucionaria or FAR). The American cover story was that elements of the Cuban air force had rebelled against Castro and it was Cuban planes, not American planes, that were involved in the bombing and strafing. Of course Castro's planes were originally old American B26s to begin with, and the CIA planes were old American B26s. The only difference was the insignia or markings on the planes.

With Cuba accusing the US, before [in front of] the United Nations and before the world, of bombing Cuba, JFK did not want to do anything that would prove the truth of the Cuban accusation and show that the US Government was lying. Therefore Kennedy ordered Secretary of State Dean Rusk to cancel the air strike that had been planned for the morning (dawn) of the invasion (Monday, April 17). Doing what would be best to assure the military success of the operation would also expose America's hand and show that the US Government was lying. Kennedy was caught in a difficult trap.

When the Cuban Brigade approached the beach, ships got caught on coral reefs that the CIA had not charted. Castro's planes and more than 20,000 troops were waiting for them. Kennedy insisted that the Essex (aircraft carrier) and US destroyers be stationed over the horizon from Cuba, out of sight. (Reeves, p. 91).

Unbeknownst to the CIA, Castro had refit three old T33 jet trainers (made in the US, of course, which Castro had inherited from Batista, who had received them from us). The refitted T33s now had machine guns and bomb racks. These planes immediately sank two freighters that carried the Brigade's ten day supply of reserve ammunition, and much of the communications equipment. Practically before the assault on the beach started, the ammunition ship and the communications ship were gone! (Reeves, p. 92). As a consequence, the Brigade was short of equipment from the very start, and communications with US warships and Washington lagged by as much as twelve hours.

At this point CIA chief of operations Richard Bissell insisted that the operation could still succeed IF the President would send NAVY JETS to control the air over the beachhead and bring up a US destroyer to shell Castro's tanks. Kennedy insisted that he did not want the US [directly and openly] "involved in this." Admiral Arleigh Burke responded, "Hell, Mr. President, We are involved." (Reeves, p. 93).

The original plan hoped that local Cubans would "rise up" against Castro and join the Brigade. Castro, knowing of the forthcoming incursion, arrested anyone who might remotely contemplate assisting the exiles. There was no sympathetic uprising. The Brigade was on its own.

With the invasion falling apart, General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "it's time for this outfit to go guerilla." The back-up plan was if the invasion failed then the Cuban Brigade would flee to the Escambray Mountains and begin a guerilla war against Castro.  But Bissell now explained that the back-up plan could not work. The Brigade was pinned down on the beach. Beyond the beach were swamps. And the Escambray Mountains were 80 miles away. The back-up plan never articulated just how the Brigade was supposed to get through the swamp and past 20,000 Cuban troops and 80 miles to the mountains to start this fanciful guerilla war. In retrospect it appeared that the guerilla war scenario was wishful thinking, or just plain delusional.

With the Brigade being cut to pieces on the beach and forced to surrender, the cold reality set in. As Reeves explains, there was no way though the swamp. Castro had been waiting for the Brigade before it even arrived. The Cubans had weapons the CIA had not known about. The expected uprising never materialized.

As a last desperate gasp, for the morning of Wednesday, April 19, JFK authorized a new air strike by the CIA's B26s from Nicaragua. And to protect them, he authorized the use of jets from the Essex to protect the B26s. But again the devil is in the details and the details killed us. The mission was supposed to occur at 6:30 AM. But while Cuba is in the same time zone as Washington and New York, Nicaragua is in the Central time zone, with Chicago and Houston. The Navy jets arrived at 6:30 Eastern time, in order to provide protection, but the B26s were not there yet. In fact, they did not arrive until 7:30 Eastern Time, which was 6:30 in Central Time (Reeves, p. 95). By then the navy jets from the aircraft carrier were gone. Castro's planes shot down two of the unprotected B26s, which apparently had the American insignia intact. And he showed them to the world, catching the US in a lie ("we were not involved").

The invasion was over. The Cuban exiles felt betrayed and used. It was as if they had been "hung out to dry." JFK came to a realization or insight. JFK now perceived that the real unwritten plan, the plan within the plan, had been that the President, whether it was Eisenhower or Kennedy or anyone else, would in the end send in the Air Force, Navy, Marines if the Cuban Brigade could not handle Castro's men. That was the real back-up plan. The Brigade was just a camouflage. Kennedy felt betrayed, and felt that he had been set up by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. He suspected that they knew all along that the guerilla war back-up plan could not and would not work. Kennedy suspected that the real plan was that if and when the Cuban Brigade failed, the President would have no choice but to launch an open invasion of Cuba to overthrow Castro in order to save the mission from failing. If the CIA and the military could just get the thing started, the President would have to finish it whether he really wanted to or not. He would be caught, and have no choice but to go forward. It was a backdoor way of pulling a President into the overthrow of Castro. The CIA under Eisenhower had operated in a culture where the president did not necessarily want to know the dirty details. Just get the job done. But Kennedy did not go along.

In the aftermath, Kennedy publicly took the blame. But he never trusted the CIA or the generals in quite the same way again. Kennedy called in Nixon for a unity meeting. Nixon told him "I would find a proper cover and I would go in. There are several justifications that could be used, like protecting American citizens living in Cuba and defending our base at Guantanamo. The most important thing…is that we do whatever is necessary to get Castro and Communism out" (Reeves, p. 99). In other words, the end justifies the means. But Kennedy replied that there was a good chance that if we move on Cuba, the Soviets will move on Berlin (Reeves, p. 99).

Kennedy also went to meet with Eisenhower. Ike chastised Kennedy. In so many words, he called him naïve. He said to Kennedy "Mr. President, how could you expect the world to believe that we had nothing to do with it [Cuban Brigade]? Where did these people get the ships to go from Central America to Cuba? Where did they get the weapons? Where did they get all the communications and all the other things that they would need? How could you possibly have kept from the world any knowledge that the United States had been involved? I believe there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing, it must be a success" (Reeves, p. 103).

Eisenhower's private rebuke seems to suggest that he thought it was pollyannnish to imagine that everyone (the world) did not know that the US Government was up to or behind the operation, no matter what the US Government said, and if the US was going to take out Castro then it should own up to it and do it openly and not try to hide. Eisenhower did not understand the effort to hide American involvement, since nobody would believe such a preposterous story anyway. Perhaps Eisenhower and Nixon thought it was squeamish for Kennedy, or anyone, to worry about what other countries would think or what "world opinion" or even opinion in Latin America would be. If they didn't like what the US did, too bad: they don't have to like what the US does with its power. There isn't anything they can do about it, so what difference does it make whether they like it or not?

Ike thought that the Soviets would not retaliate in Berlin because they would fear and respect American resolve, but the Soviets would take irresolution as a sign of weakness and as an invitation to test us (inter alia, see Reeves, p. 103).

In retrospect it is interesting to note that about March 29, while Kennedy was considering the CIA plan, Senator J. William Fulbright, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Kennedy in writing (12 page memo) that although Castro was a "thorn in the flesh" [in America's side], he was "not a dagger in the heart….To give this activity even covert support is of a piece with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union (Reeves, p. 79). Fulbright wondered how the US could maintain the "high moral ground" in the struggle against the Soviet Union and still behave just like the Soviets and practice the same kind of conspiratorial policy of subverting and overthrowing governments and throwing our weight around in the world. If we behave like the Soviets in Czechoslovakia or Poland and overthrow governments that we do not like just because we have the power to do so, and we can, how are we any different from the Soviets? It is bad when they do it but okay when we do it?

Discussion of what Kennedy's mistake was (or mistakes were) in handling of situation.