In Washington administration insiders were beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t the exiles who were being sabotaged. Everything was going wrong for them. The landing craft assigned to their assault waves turned out to be fourteen-foot open boats with no protection for those aboard. The 50-caliber machine guns on them were improperly sighted and aimed in the wrong direction. The boats were powered by outboard motors; at the peak of the coming action one of the invaders, jumping from his ship, struck a pilot and knocked him overboard, leaving the landing craft to drift in aimless circles. There were other mishaps; aboard the transport Atlántico three insurgents were practicing with a 50-caliber machine gun when it tore loose from its mounting and fired wildly in all directions, killing one of their comrades and wounding two others. More ominous for the outcome of the operation, the force of rebel commandos who were supposed to draw Castro’s mission away from the Bay of Pigs by a feint in Oriente province never reached the shore. Twice they boarded their landing craft and twice returned to reembark on their ship, La Playa. The CIA agents accompanying them sent back word that the diversion had been “aborted primarily because of bad leadership.” The leaders had been chosen by the CIA.
The Oriente landing was to have been part of a cunning design meant to throw Castro off balance. Even more important were plans for a general uprising in Cuba by the anti-Castro underground. President Kennedy had been told that the underground movement was vital to the success of the mission. The Joint Chiefs had agreed. The behavior of the CIA, however, had been curiously ambivalent. The underground was part of the over-all strategy. Agents had been in touch with Rogelio Gonzáles Corso, the almost legendary leader of the movement, known throughout Cuba under his code name, “Francisco.” He and his men were on the alert. At the proper time they were to be told to create disorders and create a general air of insurgency which would then be capitalized upon by Radio Swan, the exiles’ propaganda station; Radio Swan broadcasts would tell the populace how to help La Brigada, how to join its ranks, how to blow up power stations, and so on. This looked fine on paper, but in practice it raised a basic question of priorities. The difficulty was one of timing. The uprisings conflicted with the air strike meant to wipe out Castro’s air force. Whichever one came first would alert him to the other. Command of the air was judged to be more important. It came first and it failed. The following night Radio Swan broadcast orders for the underground to rise. They were in code and lyrical in the most florid Howard Hunt prose:
Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The first will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red.
The strangest thing about this message was that it seems to have beamed toward the wrong people. It was picked up by the Columbia and National broadcasting networks and by several Florida stations, none of which could fathom its meaning. But although it was repeated over and over, it reached none of the listeners for whom it was intended—the brigade, the commandos, the Frente, the infiltration teams, and the saboteurs in Cuba. In reality it didn’t much matter, though. Castro, warned by the air attack the day before, had ordered a roundup of all Cubans whose loyalty to him was suspect. Instantly, in the words of nineteen-year-old Félix Rodríguez, one of those who was waiting to revolt, “The roads were closed, the houses were surrounded, and they were arresting thousands of people. I cried.” In Havana alone more than two hundred thousand men and women were arrested and lodged in baseball parks, public buildings, theaters, and auditoriums. Thus the underground audience wasn’t tuned in. It was being held at gunpoint. On the next day, D-day, Monday, April 17, 1961, Francisco himself was found guilty of treason and executed.
At 7:45 P.M. the previous evening the five rusty cargo ships and two escorts of the exiles’ task force had arrived in the Bay of Pigs and cast anchor. One by one the subplots meant to support the insurgents on board had failed—the Oriente deception, the sabotage, Radio Swan’s instructions, the rising of the underground—and now the amphibious landing would go in with as little subtlety as at Anzio. The men didn’t know that. Like assault troops in all wars, they had been told as little as possible. They waited below deck dressed for combat, dozing fitfully. At 11 P.M. Pepe San Román, their commander, came topside for a breath of air. What he saw stunned him. The shore, which he had been told would be forsaken, glittered with lights. His briefers had described the Bay of Pigs as it had been three years earlier, before Castro seized power. Since then the government had decided to turn this strip of coast into a public park. Modern roads now crossed the swamps, which the CIA thought were still impassable. Three tourist centers were in advanced stages of construction. One of them dominated the brigade’s first objective, the town of Girón. Motels, snack bars, and bathhouses—nearly two hundred buildings altogether—were almost ready; they would accommodate a thousand Cubans at a time. The grand opening was scheduled for May 20, less than five weeks away. Every weekend since Three Kings’ Day in January sightseers by the thousand had been driving down from Havana to inspect the progress. This being a Sunday, the last cars had left only a few hours before the brigade’s transports sighted land. There were still people moving around on the beach; construction workers putting the finishing touches on the new buildings were living in Girón with their families. It was as though Russian conspirators had planned a hostile landing on Coney Island or Jones Beach. When Kennedy found out he was openmouthed. He remembered that Eisenhower had been in the White House when this venture was planned, and he said, “My God, the bunch of advisers we inherited…. Can you imagine being President and leaving someone like all these people there?”
That may have been the worst of it, but it wasn’t all. If there was one kind of operation the American military had mastered in the past twenty years, it was the amphibious landing. From North Africa to Normandy, from Guadalcanal to Inchon, fighting men had been put ashore with practiced skill. Tide tables, underwater obstacles, undertow, surf, riptides—all obstacles had been overcome by brilliant seamanship, special landing craft, and ingenious amphibious techniques. Veterans of those operations were now CIA strategists. If they remembered anything, it should have been that no American commander in those battles had been foolhardy enough to increase the odds against him by scheduling a landing at night. Yet that was what they had laid out for the Cuban exiles. In addition, they had neglected to note a vital feature of the Bay of Pigs: every approach to it was guarded by sharp coral reefs just beneath the surface.
The first insurgents to go in were frogmen, former officers in the Cuban navy whose job was to place landing lights. (Despite Kennedy’s order to the contrary, Americans were leading them.) Coming upon the reefs, they realized that they would have to chart a way through. At midnight their first flashing beacon, a guide to the troops who would be coming ashore, was placed beside a concrete pier. No sooner had it been switched on than the headlights of a jeep appeared on the beach. It was a militia patrol. The jeep swerved and stopped, its lights on the frogmen. They opened fire on it. Next a truck carrying armed Castro militia raced up to join the jeep. Gunners aboard one of the troopships, the Blagar, silenced that threat, but it was small comfort; the first wave of exiles hadn’t even left the transports and already the element of surprise—the sole justification for a night landing—had been lost.
Now the frogmen set to work in earnest trying to find lanes through the coral for LCVPs and the wider, tank-bearing LCUs. In some cases it was impossible. Men halted as far as 150 yards from the shore waded through surf carrying weapons and radios which became inoperable in the salt water. The reefs knocked propellers off some boats. Impatient soldiers who leaped into deep water sank like stones because of heavy equipment lashed to them; comrades dragged them to safety. Some men yearned for dawn and even prayed for it, but daybreak, it became apparent, would only increase the odds against them. The officer who discovered that was
Erneido Oliva. At 2:30 A.M., Oliva later testified, he reached the shore. The first building he saw was a shack with the antenna of a microwave station on top. He captured it at once, but as he said afterward, “You could see that they had transmitted from there recently.” At 6 A.M. two more microwave stations had been discovered in Girón. In each the equipment was still warm. The failure of CIA intelligence to warn of them was one of the greatest oversights in the entire operation. Because of those sets, Castro knew they were here. Now he would be coming after them.
***
At 3:15 A.M. the bearded dictator had been roused in Havana and told that the enemy was landing troops at Girón and nearby Playa (beach) Larga. Wary of a trap, he asked for details. Operators at the microwave stations replied that they were under attack from naval gunfire, 50-caliber machine guns, bazookas, and recoilless cannons. Then they went off the air, obviously overrun. A beachhead had been established; at any moment a provisional government might be landed and recognized by the United States, creating a political problem. Castro was determined to throw the rebels into the sea.
It says much for the state of his defenses throughout Cuba that he had in that area, ready to march, a sufficient force to repel a landing much larger than this: a battalion commanded by Osmani Cienfuegos, his minister of public works; a battalion of militia armed with three mortar batteries; an infantry battalion; three battalions of reserves to guard the roads through the swamps, and several detachments of armed militia. Altogether 20,000 men barred the exiles’ way out of the Zapata peninsula. In addition Castro still had his air force. At sunrise he ordered his six B-26s, each carrying a full bomb load, to take off from San Antonio de Los Baños airfield with a fighter escort and attack the ships at anchor in the Bay of Pigs.
There was a great deal of confusion on the beachhead that morning, part of it arising from the error of exiles on the ground who opened fire on their own planes. When Castro’s pilots arrived over the beach the most vulnerable unit beneath them was La Brigada’s heavy gun battalion. The frogmen had finished mapping a route through the coral at 6 A.M., and at 6:25 these big weapons began to come ashore. It was slow going, and it stopped altogether when the enemy swooped down from above. Briefly the action shifted to dogfights in the sky—the brigade’s fliers were up there, too—but the T-33 jet trainers chased away the rebel aircraft. Then Castro’s bombers zeroed in on the rusty cargo ships. The first to be lost was the Houston, loaded with ammunition and gasoline; twenty-six of her men drowned. Then came the Río Escondido and the ten days of supplies aboard her. A Sea Fury fighter put a rocket in the Rio, which simply disintegrated in a blinding sheet of flame. That was enough for the task force commander. His crews, mostly Cubans with no strong political loyalties, were on the verge of mutiny. He notified Pepe San Román that although less than 10 percent of the brigade’s ammunition had been unloaded, he and the surviving vessels were leaving now, immediately, at flank speed. He promised to come back that night.
In Washington the conflicting stories coming from Cuba at first seemed very far away. Cuba dominated the news that morning, however. In the United Nations Raúl Roa, Castro’s foreign minister, had charged that in Saturday’s air raid by rebel pilots in B-26s he detected the fine hand of the Central Intelligence Agency. Adlai Stevenson, disturbed, sent a query to Harlan Cleveland. Cleveland called the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, which called the CIA, which solemnly denied the charge, thereby betraying America’s most respected spokesman in foreign affairs. On the strength of that, Stevenson told the U.N. that the President had vowed “to make sure that no American participates in an action against Cuba.” He then read from a bogus statement by a phony defector in Miami, which Stevenson believed to be true. He said, “These pilots and certain other crew members have apparently defected from Castro’s tyranny.” He added: “No United States personnel participated. No United States aircraft of any kind participated. These two planes, to the best of our knowledge, were Castro’s own air force planes and, according to the pilots, they took off from Castro’s own air force fields.”
He held up a picture of one of the B-26s and said, “It has the marking of Castro’s air force on the tail, which everyone can see for himself. The Cuban star and the initials F.A.R., Fuerza Aerea Revolucionaria, are clearly visible.” Roa replied that anyone could have painted the insignia on, which of course was what had happened. The American ambassador assured him: “Steps have been taken to impound the Cuban planes and they will not be permitted to take off for Cuba.”
There were to be no such steps. Already the CIA’s cover story was becoming unstuck, leaving a humiliated Stevenson to extricate himself from the tangle of lies as best he could. As Robert F. Kennedy said afterward, “Things were beginning to surface.” By Monday evening the worst was known. Kennedy’s admirers abroad were dismayed. “In one day,” said the Cordiere della Sera of Milan, “American prestige collapses lower than in eight years of Eisenhower timidity and lack of determination.” The Frankfurter Neue Presse declared that “Kennedy is to be regarded as politically and morally defeated.” In the U.N. General Assembly diplomats from African and Asian countries, remembering John Foster Dulles’s charges that neutralism was immoral, were having a field day. Stevenson said dryly that he wasn’t sure who was attacking Cuba, but he knew who was attacking the United States.
The 6 P.M. edition of Monday’s Miami News bore the headline: CUBAN NAVY IN REVOLT; INVASION FORCE MOVES IN. The story disclosed that the navy’s mutiny bore the imaginative code name “Bounty,” and that the exiles were slicing up Castro’s disintegrating forces with gigantic pincer attacks. “Various accounts” were cited as sources for the claim that the invaders had “hit the beaches in four of Cuba’s six provinces, sparing only Havana Province and Camaguey in Eastern Cuba.” The accounts were all wrong. There was no operation called “Bounty”; the navy remained loyal to a man; and the only action was on the shores of the Bay of Pigs, where the 20,000 defenders of Castro’s regime had the exiles trapped with their backs to the sea.
Deserted by their ships, the invaders were in a hopeless position. Yet they were fighting magnificently. The paratroopers, though they had been dropped in the wrong place, were beating back militia attacks. Outnumbered thirteen to one or more, facing an enemy with heavy artillery and tactical air support, the brigade had lost fewer than a hundred men that first day while holding every position. Oliva’s command, just 370 rebels, had thrown back 2,100 Castro soldiers and twenty tanks. They had sustained fewer than a hundred casualties while inflicting on the government—the figures are from a Castro doctor—five hundred dead and over a thousand wounded.
They were exultant. Their overall plight was known only to their leaders, who clung to hope because they were being encouraged by radio messages from CIA agents on the dispersed troopships. (“Hello, Pepe. I want you to know that we will never abandon you, and if things are very rough there we will go in and evacuate you.”) Afterward there was much controversy about these exchanges. There can be no doubt that by heartening the men on the beach the agents prolonged their resistance and thereby added to the bloodshed. It was generally believed by CIA critics that strategists in the agency had convinced one another that Kennedy wouldn’t let the invasion fail, whatever his earlier position—that once he realized that American prestige was at stake he would intervene with U.S. might. Here, as in so many other ways, they were wrong. He meant what he had said. “What is prestige?” he asked those around him in the White House that day. “Is it the shadow of power or the substance of power? We are going to work on the substance of power. No doubt we will be kicked in the can for the next couple of weeks, but that won’t affect the main business.”
Most Americans seemed to understand, and to sympathize. The bitterness which was to divide them later in the 1960s lay ahead. The country had not yet split into hostile camps. As Robert F. Kennedy was to write afterward in Thirteen Days, “We had virtual unanimity at the time of the Bay of Pigs.” Editor John Fischer expressed the
general view when he observed in Harper’s that “Every President needs about twelve months to get his executive team organized, to feel his way into the vast and dangerous machinery of the bureaucracy…. While [Kennedy] was still trying to move in the furniture, in effect, he found the roof falling in and the doors blowing off.” The Gallup poll showed that 82 percent of his countrymen approved of the way he was handling his job. “It’s just like Eisenhower,” Kennedy said dourly. “The worse I do, the more popular I get.”
To be sure, opinion wasn’t unanimous. On the right were such hard-liners as Richard Nixon, who was to reveal in the November 1964 Readers Digest that he had advised Kennedy to “find a proper legal cover and… go in.” But that was expected. What was surprising was the emergence at this time, and on this issue, of an abrasive New Left. Schlesinger noted that many “on the left, more than one would have thought, now saw full vindication of their pre-election doubts about Kennedy.” Their placards demanded “Fair Play for Cuba.” They filled Manhattan’s Union Square with demonstrators. Norman Mailer joined them. Outside the White House a sandwich board worn by a tall woman poet reproached the First Lady: JACQUELINE, vous AVEZ PERDU vos ARTISTES. The Fair Play movement found recruits on many campuses, especially in the humanities and the social sciences; H. Stuart Hughes, a member of the Harvard history department and an early New Left militant, led seventy college teachers who signed an open letter to the President demanding that the administration “reverse the present drift towards American military intervention in Cuba.” Barrington Moore Jr., a sociologist, predicted “a militarist and reactionary government that covers its fundamental policies with liberal rhetoric,” and from a hospital bed C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite, telegraphed a Fair Play rally in California:
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 135
