The Bay of Pigs invasion

The invasion began as something much smaller. On 16 March 1960 the National Security Council's covert-action panel, the 5412 Committee, produced a paper titled "A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime." Its aim was to replace Fidel Castro's government "in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention," chiefly by organizing Cuban exiles to act as if on their own initiative¹. The program had four parts: a unified Cuban opposition in exile, a propaganda radio, a clandestine network inside Cuba, and a small paramilitary force trained outside the island^1,2.

President Eisenhower approved it the next day. At the meeting, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles estimated that building the force might take eight months. Eisenhower said he knew "of no better plan," warned that the great problem was "leakage and breach of security," and said that "everyone must be prepared to swear that he has not heard of it"².

From guerrillas to an amphibious landing

Over 1960 the plan grew. The CIA's Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Bissell, oversaw the project; recruits trained at a base on a coffee plantation in western Guatemala, and an airstrip was built near Retalhuleu. The exiles named their unit Brigade 2506. A guerrilla-infiltration scheme turned into a conventional landing, with its own B-26 bombers based at Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua^4,8.

John F. Kennedy inherited the project in January 1961. In mid-March 1961 the White House rejected a daylight assault plan as too much like a Second World War landing and set new ground rules: a quiet night landing and the seizure of an airfield to which air strikes could be attributed⁸. On 16 March CIA officials presented the revised plan, code-named Zapata, for a night landing at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy let planning continue and "reserved the right to call off the plan even up to 24 hours prior to the landing." The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, put its chance of success at about 50 percent³. Asked what would happen if the brigade were pinned down on the beach, Burke recorded the answer: "they would not be re-embarked because there was no place to go"³.

15–19 April 1961

On 15 April eight exile B-26s attacked Cuban airfields. One pilot flew on to Miami, and the raids were presented as the work of Cuban air force defectors. At the United Nations the US ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, repeated that story and displayed a wire photo of the plane in Cuban markings, unaware that the CIA had misled him. His objections to further strikes weighed heavily in the decision of the following night^4,8.

At about 9:30 on the evening of 16 April, the night before the landing, McGeorge Bundy told Deputy Director Charles Cabell that the planned dawn strikes on Cuban airfields would not be permitted until they could be flown from a strip inside the beachhead. Cabell and Bissell appealed to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who cited the position at the UN and would not reverse the decision; the order to cancel "caught the crews in their cockpits"⁴.

The landings began at 1 a.m. on 17 April. Paratroopers seized the road junction of San Blas. But Castro's remaining aircraft were flying, and by mid-morning two of the brigade's ships, the Rio Escondido and the Houston, had been sunk; the supply ships withdrew to sea with much of the ammunition⁵. US Navy ships stood offshore with orders not to become involved except in self-defense⁵. By the morning of 19 April the brigade commander was radioing that he could not hold without help, and the CIA was preparing to recommend evacuation⁶. The beachhead collapsed later that day⁸.

Inquiries and consequences

Kennedy appointed a Cuba Study Group under General Maxwell Taylor to find out what had gone wrong. Its conclusions, delivered on 13 June 1961, were blunt: an operation "of the magnitude of Zapata could not be prepared and conducted in such a way that all U.S. support of it and connection with it could be plausibly disclaimed," and by about November 1960 that should have been recognized and the project reviewed or "abandoned"⁷. The CIA's inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, wrote a harsher internal survey later in 1961, faulting the agency's planning, intelligence and organization; it was kept secret until 1998 (see The Inspector General's survey of the Cuban operation (1961))⁸.

About 1,100 members of the brigade were taken prisoner. After long negotiations, the lawyer James B. Donovan signed an agreement with Castro on 21 December 1962 exchanging 1,113 prisoners for $53 million in food and medicine, paid for by private donations⁸. Dulles was eased out in November 1961, and Bissell and Cabell were also made to leave⁸.

Inside Washington the defeat did not end the effort against Castro; it moved it to the White House and toward sabotage, under Operation Mongoose, while the CIA continued separate efforts to kill him (The plots against Fidel Castro). Eighteen months after the landing, Soviet missiles in Cuba brought on the crisis of October 1962 (Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis).

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30 November 1961 – October 1962 Operation Mongoose The Kennedy administration's 1961–62 covert program to overthrow Fidel Castro, run by Edward Lansdale under Robert Kennedy's eye, which aimed at a revolt in Cuba by October 1962. October 1961 The Inspector General's survey of the Cuban operation (1961) CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick's October 1961 post-mortem on the Bay of Pigs blamed the agency's own planning, intelligence and organization. Twenty copies were made; it was released in 1998. 12 August 1953 – 27 June 1954 Operation PBSuccess The CIA's 1953–54 campaign of propaganda, pressure and a small proxy invasion that forced Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Árbenz to resign on 27 June 1954. August 1960 – 1965 The plots against Fidel Castro Between 1960 and 1965 the CIA pursued at least eight plots to kill Fidel Castro, using poison pills, gangsters and a Cuban insider. None succeeded, and who authorized them was never settled. 1893–1969 Allen Dulles OSS spymaster in wartime Switzerland and Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961, Allen Dulles presided over the CIA's era of coups and covert wars until the Bay of Pigs ended his tenure.