Kennedy: The Classic Biography (55 page)

With heavy misgiving, little more than a week before the plan was to go into effect, President Kennedy, having obtained the written endorsement of General Lemnitzer and Admiral Burke representing the Joint Chiefs and the verbal assent of Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, gave the final go-ahead signal. He did not regard Castro as a direct threat to the United States, but neither did he see why he should “protect” Castro from Cubans embittered by the fact that their revolution had been sold out to the Communists. Cancellation of the plan at that stage, he feared, would be interpreted as an admission that Castro ruled with popular support and would be around to harass Latin America for many years to come. His campaign pledges to aid anti-Castro rebels had not forced his hand, as some suspected, but he did feel that his disapproval of the plan would be a show of weakness inconsistent with his general stance. “I really thought they had a good chance,” he told me afterward, explaining it this way: If a group of Castro’s own countrymen, without overt U.S. participation, could have succeeded in establishing themselves on the island, proclaimed a new government, rallied the people to their cause and ousted Castro, all Latin America would feel safer, and if instead they were forced to flee to the mountains, there to carry on guerrilla warfare, there would still have been net gain.

The principal condition on which he insisted before approving the plan was to rule out any direct, overt participation of American armed forces in Cuba. Although it is not clear whether this represented any change in policy, this decision—while in one sense permitting the disaster which occurred—in another helped to prevent a far greater one. For had the U.S. Navy and Air Force been openly committed, no defeat would have been permitted, a full-scale U.S. attack would ultimately have been required, and—assuming a general war with the Soviets could have been avoided—-there was no point in beginning with a Cuban brigade in the first place. Once having openly intervened in the air and on the sea, John Kennedy would not have permitted the Cuban exiles to be defeated on the ground. “Obviously,” he said later, “if you are going to have United States air cover, you might as well have a complete United States commitment, which would have meant a full-fledged invasion by the United States.”

The results of such an overt unilateral intervention, “contrary to our traditions and to our international obligations,” as the President said, would have been far more costly to the cause of freedom throughout the hemisphere than even Castro’s continued presence. American conventional forces, moreover, were still below strength, and while an estimated half of our available Army combat divisions were tied down resisting guerrillas in the Cuban mountains, the Communists could have been on the move in Berlin or elsewhere in the world. Had such intervention appeared at all likely to be needed, Kennedy would never have approved the operation.

This decision not to commit U.S. forces emphasized the assumption underlying the pleas for the plan by its authors that it would succeed on its own. It also led to other restrictions designed to make the operation more covert and our involvement more concealed, restrictions which in fact impaired the plan’s military prospects.

Yet no one in the CIA, Pentagon or Cuban exile movement raised any objection to the President’s basic condition. On the contrary, they were so intent on action that they were either blind to danger or willing to assume that the President could be pressured into reversing his decision once the necessity arose. Their planning, it turned out, proceeded almost as if open U.S. intervention were assumed, but their answers to the President’s specific questions did not. Could the exile brigade achieve its goals without our military participation? he asked. He was assured in writing that it could—a wild misjudgment, a statement of hope at best. Were the members of the exile brigade willing to risk this effort without our military participation, the President asked, and to go ahead with the realization that we would not intervene if they failed? He was assured that they were—a serious misstatement, due at least to bad communications on the part of the CIA liaison officers. But as the result of these assurances, the President publicly pledged at an April 12 press conference:

… there will not be, under any conditions, any intervention in Cuba by United States armed forces, and this government will do everything it possibly can—and I think it can meet its responsibilities—to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba…the basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States and Cuba; it is between the Cubans themselves. And I intend to see that we adhere to that principle…this administration’s attitude is so understood and shared by the anti-Castro exiles from Cuba in this country.

That pledge helped avoid any direct American attack the following week, thus limited our violation of international law and—despite pressures from the CIA and military—was never reversed or regretted by the President. But he was shortly to realize that he should have instead canceled the whole operation.

Early in the morning of Monday, April 17, 1961, the members of Cuban exile Brigade 2506—some fourteen to fifteen hundred Cubans of every race, occupation, class and party, well trained, well led and well armed—achieved tactical surprise in their place of landing, fought ably and bravely while their ammunition lasted, and inflicted heavy losses on a Castro force which soon numbered up to twenty thousand men. The proximate cause of their defeat, according to the full-scale investigation later conducted under the chairmanship of General Maxwell Taylor, was a shortage of ammunition, and the reasons for that shortage illustrate all the shortcomings of the operation.

The men had ample supplies with them, but, like most troops in their first combat, said General Taylor, they wasted ammunition in excessive firing, particularly upon encountering more immediate opposition than expected. A ten-day supply of ammunition, along with all the communications equipment and vital food and medical supplies, was on the freighter
Rio Escondido;
but that freighter was sunk offshore by Castro’s tiny air force effectively led by two or three rocket-equipped jet trainers (T-33’s) on the morning of the landing, along with another supply-laden freighter, the
Houston.

Additional supplies and ammunition were carried by two other freighters, the
Atlántico
and the
Caribe.
But, although the President’s rule against Americans in the combat area was violated in other instances, no Americans were on board these freighters or in a position to control their movements. When their sister ships were sunk, these two, ignoring the order to regroup fifty miles from shore, fled south so far so fast that, by the time the U.S. Navy intercepted them, the
Caribe
was too far away to get back in time to be of help. By the time the
Atlántico
returned Tuesday night and transferred her ammunition supplies into the five small boats prepared to run them fifty miles in to the beach, it was too late to complete the run under cover of darkness. Certain that they could not survive another Castro air attack when dawn broke, the Cuban crews threatened to mutiny unless provided with a U.S. Navy destroyer escort and jet cover. With the hard-pressed exiles on the beach pleading for supplies, the convoy commander requested the CIA in Washington to seek the Navy’s help; but CIA headquarters, unable to keep fully abreast of the situation on the beach and apparently unaware of the desperate need for ammunition in particular, instead called off the convoy without consulting the President.

That was the only request for air cover formally made from the area, and it never reached the President. Yet that very night, in a somber postmidnight meeting in the Cabinet Room, the CIA and Joint Chiefs were asking him to reverse his public pledge and openly introduce American air and naval power to back the brigade on the beach. The President, still unwilling to precipitate a full-scale attack by this country on Cuba, and mindful of his public pledge of nonintervention and his global responsibilities, agreed finally that unmarked Navy jets could protect the anti-Castro force of B-26’s when they provided air cover the next morning. As noted below, these B-26’s were capable of providing air cover for no more than an hour. But receiving their directions from the CIA, they arrived on the scene an hour before the jets, who received their directions from the Navy; and whether this tragic error was due to a difference in time zones or instructions, the B-26’s were soon downed or gone, the jet mission was invalidated before it started, and without ammunition the exiles were quickly rounded up.

Thus, while the lack of ammunition led directly to disaster, Castro’s control of the air had led directly to the lack of ammunition. The landing plan had not neglected to provide for air control. There had been, on the contrary, unanimous agreement that the Castro Air Force had to be removed. But confusion persists to this day about the President “canceling the air cover” that U.S. jets were to have provided. Actually no U.S. Air Force jet participation had ever been planned, much less canceled. Nor was there any cancellation of any other combat air cover over the battle front. Instead, the plan was to destroy Castro’s air force on the ground before the battle began, and then to provide air support, with an anti-Castro “Air Force” consisting of some two dozen surplus planes flown by Cuban exiles. That plan failed.

The exile air arm, other than transports, was composed solely of lumbering B-26’s as part of the covert nature of the plan. These World War II vintage planes were possessed by so many nations, including Cuba, that American sponsorship would be difficult to prove, and the prelanding attack on Cuban airfields could thus be attributed to defecting Castro pilots. No Florida, Puerto Rico or other bases nearer than Nicaragua were to be used for similar reasons. But the B-26’s were slow, unwieldy, unsuited to air cover and constantly developing engine trouble. The fuel used flying between Nicaragua and Cuba restricted them to forty-five to sixty minutes over the island. The limited number of exile crews, exhausted by the long, dangerous flights, and overcome on the final day by fear and futility, had to be replaced in part on that day by volunteers from their American instructors, four of whom gave their lives. Although one reason for selecting the Bay of Pigs site was its airstrip, Castro’s superior ground forces and ground fire made it almost completely useless. Supplies dropped from the air blew into the jungle or water, and half of the usable B-26 force was shot down over the beach on the first day by Castro’s T-33’s.

The failure to destroy Castro’s planes on the ground in two strikes before the fight started thus affected control of both the air and the beach. The first strike went off as planned early Saturday morning, April 15. But its effectiveness was limited by the attempt to pretend it was conducted by pilots deciding to defect that day from Castro. Only B-26’s were used, no American napalm was used, and the planes had to fly in from Nicaragua and return, except for one flown to Florida to act out the cover story.

The cover story was even less successful than the air strike. It was quickly torn apart—which the President realized he should have known was inevitable in an open society—not only by Castro’s representatives but by a penetrating press. Adlai Stevenson’s denials that Saturday afternoon at the United Nations were disproven within twenty-four hours by photographs and internal inconsistencies in the story, contrary to all the assurances given the President that the strike could be accomplished without anyone knowing for some time where the attackers came from, and with nothing to prove that they weren’t new defectors from Castro. The whole action was much bigger news than anticipated. The world was aroused by this country’s deliberate deception. No one would have believed that the second strike, scheduled for dawn Monday after the landing party was ashore, was anything other than an overt, unprovoked attack by the United States on a tiny neighbor. The Soviet Union said American intervention would not go unmet, and our Latin-American friends were outraged.

As a result, the President was urged on Sunday by his foreign policy advisers—but without a formal meeting at which the military and CIA could be heard—to call off the Monday morning strike in accordance with the previous agreed-upon principle of avoiding overt American involvement. The President concurred in that conclusion. The second strike was canceled. The CIA objected strongly but, although given an opportunity, chose not to take the matter directly to the President. All hoped that the first strike had done enough damage to Castro’s air power, as had at first been reported. After the events on Monday made clear that these hopes were in vain, the second strike was reinstated for that night, but a cloud cover made this postponement fatal. The last opportunity to neutralize the air over the beach by destroying the T-33’s and other planes was gone. In retrospect General Taylor concluded that both in the planning stages and on Sunday the military importance of the air strike and the consequences of its cancellation should have been made more clear to the President by the responsible officers. But in fact the first strike, designed to be the key, turned out later to have been remarkably ineffective; and there is no reason to believe that Castro’s air force, having survived the first and been dispersed into hiding, would have been knocked out by the second.

The President’s postponement of the Monday morning air strike thus played only a minor role in the venture which came to so inglorious an end on Wednesday afternoon. It was already doomed long before Monday morning, and he would have been far wiser, he told me later, if, when the basic premises of the plan were already being shattered, he had canceled the entire operation and not merely the second air strike. For it was clear to him by then that he had in fact approved a plan bearing little resemblance to what he thought he had approved. Therein lies the key to the Bay of Pigs decision.

With hindsight it is clear that what in fact he had approved was diplomatically unwise and militarily doomed from the outset. What he thought he was approving appeared at the time to have diplomatic acceptability and little chance of outright failure. That so great a gap between concept and actuality should exist at so high a level on so dangerous a matter reflected a shocking number of errors in the whole decision-making process—errors which permitted bureaucratic momentum to govern instead of policy leadership.