Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

To create this winged behemoth, Bissell turned to moth-balled vintage World War II B-26 bombers owned by the air force, but they, wary of becoming entangled in this mess, re­fused to just hand them over. They had to be purchased. The two sides haggled over the price, like rug traders in a Turkish bazaar.

Bissell also realized his invading army needed a navy, as he quite reasonably deduced — they could not walk from Guate­mala to Cuba. Now the navy refused to cooperate and pro­vide any ships. In order to get his hands on some ships, Bissell first had to get permission from the Joint Chiefs on February 10, 1961. The bulk of the rebel navy consisted of rickety merchant ships chartered from a Cuban businessman hell-bent on taking out Castro.

The ruling junta at the Pentagon had qualms about the plan that ran deeper than holding up ships and planes. After JFK took office, the CIA briefed a committee established by the Joint Chiefs on their plan. Some plans occupy thick brief­ing books; others take up just a few pages. This one existed solely in the minds of its planners — nothing was written on paper. The Joint Chiefs were stunned. They took notes and ran it through their own patented invasion process. They concluded in February 1961 that their plan had about a 30 percent chance of success. Not wanting to look like wussies, however, they told Kennedy that the plan had a fair chance of success, without ever mentioning the 30 percent figure. Even this slight chance required total air superiority and a popular uprising in Cuba against Castro.

While Bissell hadn’t seen the necessity of committing the invasion plan to writing, the CIA did have its own PR de­partment. Two in fact. At the very beginning the CIA hired the same guy who had headed the propaganda for the Guate­mala operation to reprise his role. His first step was to set up a propaganda radio station on Swan Island. As backup, a PR man and his assistant in New York spewed out press releases dictated from the CIA in the name of a phony CIA “leader­ship council.”

Finally, in early April 1961 the switch was flipped. The troops were shipped to a port in Nicaragua for transport to Cuba aboard the chartered Cuban navy. Along the way they picked up U.S. naval escorts as protection. The force of 1,500 invaders received a joyous, dockside send-off from Nicaraguan dictator Luis Somoza. Viva democracy!

Then Kennedy developed a bad case of cold feet. He sensed problems with the cover story, and at the last second he tweaked the initial air assault, reducing the number of bombers from sixteen to eight. The first assault on April 15, a Saturday, knocked out a large chunk of Castro’s air force but still left behind a number of decrepit, British-made fighters.

To create a convincing air of provenance to accompany the first air attack, a rebel pilot flew a CIA-supplied B-26 directly from the invaders’ air base in Nicaragua to Miami and, before the assembled press, pretended to be a defector from Castro’s air force. The charade dissolved under ques­tioning from the meddlesome free press as it quickly became apparent that the plane had never fired its guns. Also, it had a metal nose; Castro’s B-26 bombers were equipped with plastic noses. Bissell was able to fake out the State De­partment and the United Nations quite a bit easier. While news of the attack swept through the halls of power around the world, the U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson, a conve­nient egghead stooge, was assured by his superiors at the State Department that the “Cuban defectors” were, in fact, pure Cuban, which he unwittingly proclaimed to the world during a U.N. debate.

But the connection between the United States and the plausibly deniable air strike was beginning to reveal itself. Castro declared the United States was behind the strike, and the Russians seconded it. The veil of secrecy was in tatters. Kennedy, always more concerned about upholding the se­crecy of the invasion than its success, panicked. So when the time came to approve the next air strike for dawn the follow­ing Monday, which of course he theoretically knew nothing about, he canceled it. This air strike would be the one to wipe out the remainder of Castro’s air force, and the most critical piece of the operation, if Kennedy wished it to suc­ceed. He still wasn’t sure.

With the cover blown for the first strike, a second one would make it plain that the invasion had U.S. backing, once and for all revealing that it was not Bermuda or Morocco behind the invasion, but Uncle Sam. Bissell and other CIA leaders pressed Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to allow the attack. But the president didn’t budge. And with that one executive decision, JFK sealed the fate of the inva­sion. It was doomed before the first rebel hit the beaches. In an effort to prevent the world from finding out what it al­ready knew, JFK had flushed the entire operation down the drain. Bissell had failed to fully impress upon the president that the air attack was the crucial element in the whole affair. Kennedy failed to grasp this fact or knew it but didn’t care. JFK closed the umbrella.

As the rebel bombers stood down, the doomed invaders churned toward the beach during the early morning of Monday, April 17, blissfully unaware the air strike had fallen victim to JFK’s whims. Led by Cuban frogmen whose job was to scout out the beaches shortly before the arrival of the main force, the invaders waited a few miles offshore ready to land during the night. At the last moment, the frogmen were joined by their trainer, Grayston Lynch, a former army spe­cial forces officer who had signed on with the CIA in 1960. Lynch was a veteran of the actual D-Day landings and winner of two Silver Stars.

Lynch planned to establish a command post a few plausi­bly deniable yards offshore. As they neared their landing spot, the frogmen found a well-lit beach and a bodega full of people. Seeing the confidence of the Cubans slipping, Lynch, who was more gung-ho to liberate Cuba than many of his Cuban comrades, steered his dinghy toward a dark stretch of beach. Just before they landed, a Cuban army jeep stopped nearby and swept the area with a spotlight. Lynch opened up with his machine gun, knocking out the jeep and killing two Cuban soldiers. His rattling machine gun had given up the element of surprise, but the frogmen still secured the beach and radioed the rebels to land. Lynch, realizing that nobody was actually in charge of the landing despite months of prep­aration, took command. The Cubanization of the invasion didn’t survive the campaign’s first shot.

Shortly after Lynch took out the jeep on the beach, Castro was told of the invasion. He sprang into action and made two phone calls. That call, coupled with Kennedy’s refusal to send the second wave of bombers, sealed the doom of the invasion. Castro notified the head of the Cuban military academy and ordered him to take his cadets and repel the invasion. He also phoned Enrique Carreras, his ace pilot, with instructions to attack the invading transport ships with his Sea Fury, a World War II–era propeller fighter. That was all Castro needed to do. He could have gone back to bed.

By the end of that first day, the invaders were pinned down on the beach, their ammunition nearly exhausted, their spirits declining, two of their key ships sunk by the creaky sharpshooter Carreras. Castro kept up the pressure by rush­ing more troops to the scene.

As a comparison in leadership between the heads of two ideologically opposed systems, the differences were stark. Back in the dynamic States, Kennedy issued orders from his retreat in Virginia; down in the totalitarian state, the dy­namic Castro personally joined the attacking columns and took active command of his defenders. He positioned his troops, directed which routes they should take, and kept in constant contact with his military leaders. Kennedy mean­while was kept apprised of the situation from wire reports that were hours behind the pace of the actual fighting. This distance did not deter Kennedy from issuing orders directing troops on the ground, trying to micromanage the war from the White House. The president made snap decisions without fully understanding their implications, thus putting politics over victory. Castro made snap decisions with a total mas­tery of the situation focused solely on a quick and decisive military victory. The landing zone happened to be one of the dictator’s favorite fishing areas. He was intimately familiar with all its back roads and villages. And he knew that its iso­lation behind impenetrable swamps made it an ideal location to establish a beachhead. Success depended on speed.