by Ted Gup
Margaret sent him photos of herself, and of Tommy and Janet. He marveled at Janet’s long pigtails. But, much as he wanted to keep the photos, he returned them to his wife, in keeping with the security orders given him by the CIA. They were just one more item that could tie him to the United States. Often his letters were about the most mundane of concerns. He even reminded his wife to “have the septic tank and grease trap cleaned before warm weather sets in.” Other times his letters reflected deeper concerns. He opened one letter with the question “Do you have all of the insurance policies paid up?”
For the first time, he was able to save a portion of his salary. “Tell Janet it is OK if you and her bought some new things,” he wrote. Again he asked about the income tax. “Please get it filed because I will not be home before the deadline.” What he did not mention was that the fast-approaching tax deadline, April 15, was also just two days before the invasion of Cuba.
In the year before Ray and the other men of the Alabama Air National Guard joined the mission, much had happened to affect its outcome. Bissell and his advisers had worked hard to devise a plan that they believed could work. The idea was to insert on the shores of Cuba a small but well-trained corps of Cuban exiles who would gradually be augmented by an anti-Castro insurgency within that country. They were to land near the town of Trinidad, selected because it was hoped that some of the twenty thousand residents might join the assault force, and also because, if things went poorly in the landing, the nearby Escambray Mountains would provide a safe haven where the men could disperse and later regroup for future guerrilla operations.
Encumbering the scheme from the beginning was a component of deception so grand and unwieldy that it would prove its undoing. At President Kennedy’s insistence, the operation was to appear to the world to be solely the work of Cuban exiles. The hand of America was to be entirely invisible. This demand for so-called deniability evolved into a tortured fiction.
From the outset Bissell and his advisers agreed that success depended on domination of the skies over Cuba. Castro’s meager air force had to be destroyed or the exiles’ landing would be doomed. Bissell found himself walking a constant tightrope between satisfying demands of deniability and the imperatives of a successful operation. To accommodate the former, he and his planners decided they would make it appear that any air support consisted of defectors from Castro’s own air force.
That meant the planes used would have to be identical to those found in Castro’s air force. Bissell approved the idea of using aging B-26s, World War II planes mothballed in dizzying numbers outside Tucson, Arizona. The aircraft were painted with Cuba Air Force insignias and numbers. Most of the Cuban fliers in the CIA operation had no combat experience and were commercial or cargo pilots. They would have to be trained by men still highly proficient in flying the aging bombers. Enter the Alabama Air National Guard, the country’s last unit to use B-26s. It was that thin thread of events that brought together Richard Bissell and Thomas “Pete” Ray.
But the project was dogged with grave problems early on. All CIA covert operations are compartmented, meaning only those who are deemed necessary to the planning or execution of the operation are brought into the loop. But this operation was deemed so close-held that not even the Agency’s director of intelligence was consulted. Such extreme secrecy led to the anomalous situation that the very individuals planning the operation also assessed its chances for success, violating a basic tenet of intelligence. But even as the CIA took pains to ensure that the operation remained a secret, the magnitude of the undertaking guaranteed that rumors were already seeping out in Washington and Miami, where much of the recruiting and planning was taking place. Cynics would later suggest that everyone knew the invasion was coming—except perhaps those who might have contributed to its success.
In late 1960 Bissell and CIA, desperate to bring down Castro, considered a number of harebrained schemes. One idea under serious consideration involved impregnating cigars with a depilatory that would make Castro’s body hair and beard fall out. There was also a more deadly version of the scheme. In February 1961 the Agency delivered to Cuba a box of Castro’s favorite cigars impregnated with the botulism toxin, though the box was apparently never delivered to the Cuban leader.
Another assassination plot involved the idea of contracting with the Mafia. Even as Bissell planned the upcoming operation, his CIA colleagues were exploring whether the mob’s Joe Bonano could assassinate Castro. Bissell was too smart to take much of a direct hand in the scheme, though he secretly wished it well. “My philosophy . . . in the agency,” he later wrote, “was very definitely that the end justified the means, and I was not going to be held back.”
Unorthodox as the Mafia solution might have been, it would have spared Bissell the need to plan a landing operation whose scope was without precedent in Agency history. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, while not opposing the plan, kept a wary distance. The State Department had grave misgivings and seldom missed an opportunity to undermine the effort, worried that it would create a foreign policy disaster. Kennedy, in office less than three months, was easily persuaded by his secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and others, who sought ever greater limitations on the operation in the name of deniability.
The plan conceived in the Eisenhower administration was repeatedly revised with an eye to ensuring that the United States would not be implicated. With officials still smarting from the U-2 shoot-down of eight months earlier, Kennedy was adamant that no American personnel take a direct role in the operation. To seasoned Agency officers under Bissell it seemed that the success of the operation was becoming less important than the ability to immunize the United States and the administration from embarrassment.
With each passing week the outlook was more bleak. Intelligence reports indicated there was no well-organized anti-Castro underground to come to the aid of the exiles. The CIA’s original vision of a tiny guerrilla operation had become an unwieldy full-scale invasion. Six weeks before D-Day, the odds against preserving the element of surprise, essential to the operation’s success, had risen to 85 to 15, according to advisers.
The original assault plan—of dubious merit itself—was now being hastily dismantled. In response to Kennedy’s misgivings, Bissell halved the initial air assault on Castro’s air force, from sixteen planes to eight. On March 15, a month prior to the invasion, even the landing site was changed. Kennedy deemed the proposed landing at Trinidad “too noisy.” He wanted something “less spectacular.” The site selected, because of a nearby airstrip, was Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs.
Then came the coup de grâce. Kennedy canceled the second air strike, scheduled for April 16, the eve of the operation, intended to wipe out whatever of Castro’s air force had survived the first attack. No one understood the implications of that decision better than Bissell. Yet whether out of personal ambition, presidential pressure, or the sheer force of momentum that had gathered behind him in the preceding months, Bissell never gave serious thought to aborting the mission.
From the beginning, the U.S. government had tripped over its own lies. On April 12, 1961, Kennedy pledged in a speech to the American Association of Newspaper Editors that the United States would not intervene militarily in Cuba. Then, three days later, following the first bombing raid against Cuba, pilots landed in Florida posing as fresh defectors from Castro’s air force. In the United Nations an outraged representative of Cuba lashed out at the United States. The esteemed U.S. representative, Adlai Stevenson, vigorously answered the attack, assuring the international body that the United States had nothing whatsoever to do with the bombing. Inadequately briefed on the Cuban operation, Stevenson discovered to his chagrin later that same day that he had been had. American credibility at home and abroad was about to sustain a mortal wound.
But it fell to the likes of Pete Ray and the fourteen hundred Cuban exiles to move forward with the plan. Ray had not been expected to leave the Nicaraguan base from which the Cuban exile pilots were fl
ying their sorties against Castro. But with a part of Castro’s air force left intact, the men on the beach and the supply ships they counted on were now easy targets for Castro’s pilots. Two vital support ships, one that carried ammunition, the other communications, were sunk. Other vessels withdrew out of range. Out of ammo and cut off from their communications, those left on the beach were subjected to a withering ground and air assault.
The Cuban pilots Ray and the other guardsmen had trained gave an able accounting of themselves. But they were forced to fly a grueling three and a half hours from the Nicaraguan base to Cuba, conduct their attack, and then return, switch planes or refuel and rearm, and take to the air yet again. Those planes that returned—and there were many that did not—were riddled with ground fire. After a full day of sorties, the pilots were bleary-eyed with exhaustion, their nerves frayed, their aircraft suspect. On the beach at Bay of Pigs, the situation was deteriorating by the second.
On April 18, at 10:00 P.M., after unsuccessfully pleading for air cover, the brigade commander sent a message. “I will not be evacuated,” he said. “We will fight to the end here if we have to.”
It was then that Ray and some of the other pilots of the Alabama Air National Guard were called into a tent near the runway at the Nicaragua base for a briefing. Informed of the dire position of the invasion force and of the collapse of the air wing they had trained, Ray and the others were told they could fly the B-26s in aid of the assault landing.
Ray was paired with thirty-five-year-old Leo Baker, a former flight engineer who owned two Birmingham pizza parlors. He had recently sent his wife flowers for Easter Sunday. She was expecting their second child. Ray and Baker readied one B-26, while two other Alabama guardsmen, Riley Shamburger and Wade Gray, prepared another. Before taking off, Ray gave his wallet to a fellow airman but tucked the cash into his pocket, telling him with a wink that he might be spending the night in Havana.
Shortly after midnight, Ray and Baker took off.
Earlier at the White House, Admiral Arleigh Burke had pleaded with the president to provide additional air cover and to allow navy fighters from the Essex to wipe out Castro’s remaining air force. Kennedy refused, saying he could not permit the United States to become involved in the assault.
“Goddamn it, Mr. President,” fired back an irate Burke. “We are involved, and there is no way we can hide it.”
Kennedy begrudgingly authorized a single hour of air support and cover from navy jets. Ray and the others counted on that support to fend off Castro’s smaller but more nimble air force. But as Ray and Baker arrived off the coast of Cuba, there were no jets to protect them. The Agency had calculated the strike on Cuban time; the navy had relied on Greenwich mean time. Now Ray and Baker would be easy prey for Castro’s agile T-33s and for ground fire. Exactly what happened next is not clear, but this much is known: Ray’s B-26 was hit and crashed inland, not far from a sugar mill and Castro’s headquarters. Baker was killed in the crash, Ray survived. Some would report later that Ray exited the plane and put up a valiant fight against Castro’s militiamen. One account, unsubstantiated, had it that he died with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other.
Ray was one of 114 men killed in the operation. The rest, 1,197, were thrown into prison, where they would remain for two years. Their release would come at a humiliating price—a ransom of more than $50 million worth of food and medicines.
In Birmingham, Alabama, as elsewhere throughout the world, news of the failed invasion was headlines. But it would be a week before the Agency would dispatch two of its own to break the news of Pete’s death to the Ray family. They found Margaret and her brother Charles at the Sloan Avenue home of their mother. Charles, too, had taken part in the secret operation and had only recently returned from Guatemala. What they told Margaret Ray was that her husband had been killed in the crash of a C-46 cargo plane during a training mission and that his body was not recoverable. It was the same story told the other four Birmingham widows.
But Margaret Ray knew better. She had read the newspapers and could put two and two together. She suspected all along her husband had been a part of the Cuban operation. She told the men from the Agency that she was not about to let such a lie stand. The moment they left, her ashen-faced brother told her she should not have voiced such accusations. Nor, he said, should she disclose whatever she might know. It was dangerous. It could even get her killed.
Eventually, all that would be returned to Margaret Ray of her husband’s possessions was a plastic bag containing dozens of packs of chewing gum, a small transistor radio, and some items of clothing.
She was shattered. She had to contend not only with the loss of her husband but also with the lies that surrounded his death and with the implicit threats that she was not to attempt to contradict the White House in its denials of U.S. involvement at the Bay of Pigs. Later the government would try to persuade the public that the Alabama guardsmen lost over Cuba were merely mercenaries, “soldiers of fortune” there for the money alone. Margaret Ray took that as a personal slap in the face. But she was frightened of the government and what it might do to her. She had nearly stopped eating, was put on heavy sedatives, and fell into a deep depression. It was a week before she could bring herself to tell her son and daughter, Tommy and Janet, that they had lost their father.
She waited that day until the children came home from school, then sat them down next to her in a rear bedroom on the lower bunk bed, Tommy to her right, Janet to her left. They had known something was wrong. So many strangers had come and gone and there had been so much whispering. When Margaret Ray finally told her children, Tommy sat speechless. Janet became hysterical, jumping up and down and yelling at her brother. “Our daddy’s dead!” she screamed. “Why aren’t you crying?”
But Tommy would not let himself cry in front of his sister and mother. Instead, he got up and walked out of the house and found the stoop of a neighbor’s porch, where he sat down and let the tears stream down his cheeks. Tommy had a gift for momentarily distancing himself from events. His sister did not.
Over the course of the ensuing weeks and months, the government’s version of events would change. Mysterious checks for $225 would arrive twice each month drawn on an account with the Bankers Trust Company of New York. There was no explanation of their origin, and none was needed.
The Bay of Pigs was not simply a stinging defeat for the CIA but the end of an epoch. For a time, a disgusted President Kennedy stopped reading the Current Intelligence Bulletin provided him by the Agency. The CIA’s credibility was clouded at best, and Agency confidence in the president fared no better. Allen Dulles tendered his resignation that November. Three months later, on February 28, 1962, Bissell resigned. Days later Kennedy bestowed upon him the National Security Medal. Bissell posed for an official photograph in the Oval Office, flanked by a grim Allen Dulles, no longer with the CIA, and by Kennedy, his hands tucked into the pockets of a dark suit. In the photo an owlish-looking Bissell wears the medal pinned to his chest and clutches the citation in his hands. But as Bissell looked into the lens of the camera, standing ramrod straight, he looked like a man facing a jury, as if awaiting the judgment of history. He had changed and so, too, had the CIA. No longer could the Agency believe that moral superiority and victory inevitably went hand in hand, that it would prevail as a matter of destiny. That belief, a quaint legacy of World War II and the OSS, was now part of the detritus of history. The time for blind faith was over.
The Bay of Pigs was what historian Theodore Draper called “a perfect failure.” It shattered the myth of infallibility and helped usher in a more skeptical era, not only at the Agency but in the country at large. Whatever lessons were to be gleaned from that debacle would have to be learned again and again. Cuba would not be the last time the Agency would miscalculate the willingness of indigenous insurgencies to follow its lead. Nor would it be the last time that covert operations would have to factor in deniability on a par with strategic and tactical objecti
ves, even if it meant undertaking the impossible. Each succeeding president would be insistent that he be able to distance himself from covert actions, particularly those pursued in contravention of law or principle. Not only America’s enemies were to be deceived, but Americans as well, because they might not support or tolerate such undertakings.
Ultimately the Bay of Pigs fooled no one. The price of preserving the fiction of deniability had led not only to defeat but to a wider loss of standing in the world. Such duplicity cost the United States more of its political credibility and moral authority than any outright assault on Cuba. The decision had been made by Kennedy, but it was the CIA that would bear the brunt of public rancor and suspicion. Such chicanery and deceit would prove fertile ground for those who saw CIA conspiracies behind every word and deed. As covert warriors, CIA officers were expected to fall upon their own swords in defeat, even as the architects of those disasters wagged their fingers knowingly. In the postmortems that followed the Bay of Pigs, the most unsettling finding was that men like Pete Ray had died to preserve an implausible fiction—what CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick called “a pathetic illusion.”
On September 23, 1961, a shaken CIA moved into its new headquarters building at Langley. On the wall in the marble lobby were engraved the scriptural words from John: “and the truth shall make you free.” The Agency, practiced in the art of deception, had itself become the victim of deception. In places like the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, and Nicaragua, covert objectives would again run headlong into the doctrine of deniability and limits imposed by fictive political aims. If political sensitivities sometimes reduced missions to quixotic pursuits, it did not diminish the courage of those dispatched to carry them out. It did, however, make it harder for some families of the bereaved to find meaning in such sacrifice.
