4/15/1961 At dawn on April 15, 1961, eight B-26 bombers of the Cuban Expeditionary Force, launched from Nicaragua, carried out air strikes to destroy the Cuban Air Force on the ground, achieving only partial success. The planes carry Cuban Air Force insignia and are piloted by exiles and US civilians. It was meant to take out Castro's air force, but it did little damage. Two other exile bombers land in Florida as part of a plan to make it look as though disgruntled members of Castro's Air Force were defecting. Reporters soon noticed discrepancies in this story.
Premier Castro then ordered his pilots "to sleep under the wings of the planes," ready to take off immediately. Castro rounds up 100,000 potential counterrevolutionaries, including nearly all CIA sources. Shortly after the attack started, Ambassador Adlai Stevenson at the UN flatly rejected Cuba's report of the attack to the Assembly, saying that the planes were from the Cuban Air Force and presenting a copy of the photograph published in the newspapers. In the photo, the plane shown has an opaque nose, whereas the model of the B-26 planes used by the Cubans had a Plexiglas nose. He derided the allegations as being "without foundation," and said that the 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." As David Atlee Phillips, the CIA's propaganda chief, monitored the events at the U.N., he was shocked by Stevenson's statements. As he later wrote: "As I watched Stevenson defend the deceitful scheme a chill moved through my body. What had we done? Adlai Stevenson had been taken in by the hoax! Had no one bothered to tell our Ambassador at the United Nations of the deception involved in the air strike?" In fact, Stevenson had not been briefed on the plans, and was later enraged to find that he had repeated the CIA cover story before the international community. Stevenson was extremely embarrassed a few hours later when the truth was revealed and he learned that Kennedy had referred to him as "my official liar." UN representative Conor Cruise O'Brien recalled, "Adlai himself was clearly conscious that this was not his finest hour...a dreadful speech, full of the kind of official lies that stick out in an unappetizing fashion. And Adlai read this stuff as if he had never seen it before, frequently stumbling over words, as he never stumbled over words of his own." (The Siege)
David Ferrie is taking a three week vacation from Eastern Airlines. It is believed he is playing some role in the Bay of Pigs invasion -- perhaps as a pilot.
Allen Dulles goes to Puerto Rico to speak at a meeting of the Young Presidents Organization -- a group closely affiliated with Harvard Business School and with the CIA. It is made up of men who are presidents of their own companies and under forty years of age. The CIA arranges meeting for them with young leaders in foreign countries for the purpose of opening export-import talks and franchising discussions. Why he has accepted and keeps this appointment at such a crucial time has never been properly explained. Because of the absence of its director, the CIA's secondary leaders -- officials with no combat or command experience -- made "the operational decision which they felt within their authority." For decisions above them, they were supposed to go to the President. Cabell and Bissell, in Dulles's absence, are inherently unqualified to carry the issue back to the President to "explain to him with proper force the probable military consequences of a last-minute cancellation."
4/16/1961 9:30 P.M. As the exile brigade prepared for its overnight landing at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy's National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, phoned CIA deputy director General Charles P. Cabell to say that " the dawn air strikes the following morning should not be launched until planes can conduct them from a strip within the beachhead. " Since no such opportunity came, this order in effect canceled the air strikes. Castro's army surrounded the invading force in the following days. "The Bay of Pigs Invasion: A Comprehensive Chronology of Events, " in Bay of Pigs Declassified, edited by Peter Kornbluh ( New York: New Press, 1998)
This constitutes a total misreading and a complete reversal of the approved tactical plan. For years afterward, it will be believed that JFK canceled the air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion. The man who actually does this is McGeorge Bundy. Dean Rusk gives Cabell and Richard Bissell an opportunity to speak directly to JFK by telephone in order to convince him to provide the needed air strikes. The CIA men see no point in speaking personally to the President and so inform the Secretary of State. The order to cancel the D-Day strikes is then dispatched to the departure field in Nicaragua, arriving when the pilots are in their cockpits ready for take-off. The Joint Chiefs of Staff learn of the cancellation at varying hours the following morning.
4/17/1961 On the night of 16-17 April 1961, when the relatively young President needed the advice of the armed forces as the Bay of Pigs invasion was turning into an unmitigated fiasco, the tension between President Kennedy and Admiral Burke was palpable. As told by Admiral Burke's biographer, the late E.B. Potter, in the early-morning hours of 17 April, President Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in white tie and tails, along with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer and Admiral Burke, in dress uniforms with medals, left the East Room, where the annual Congressional Reception had just concluded, headed for the Oval Office. There, Richard M. Bissell of the CIA informed President Kennedy that although the situation was bad, it "could still take a favorable turn if the President would authorize sending in aircraft from the carrier." "Burke concurred," wrote Potter. "Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft," he urged. But President Kennedy said "No," and reminded them that he had said "over and over again" that he would not commit U.S. forces to combat. Apparently, he did not want the world to find out what it already knew, that the whole expedition had been conceived, planned, and armed by the United States. According to Potter, "Burke suggested sending in a destroyer. Whereupon Kennedy explodes. "Burke." He snapped, "I don't want the United States involved in this." "All in all, Mr. President," Burke snapped back, "but we are involved."
Admiral Burke continued as Chief of Naval Operations for three-and-a-half more months. On 1 August 1961, having completed an unprecedented third term, he relinquished his office to Admiral George W. Anderson. The change of command took place at the U.S. Naval Academy, where Admiral Burke had begun his naval service 42 years earlier.
4/17/1961 Cuban exile Brigade 2506 landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Castro had about 20,000 troops, with tanks, artillery and aircraft; the exiles numbered 1,300 (with 5 transport freighters, 12 landing craft, 5 tanks, 18 mortars, 15 recoiless rifles, 4 flamethrowers, 12 rocket launchers). Of the five freighters, 2 (the Houston and Rio Escondido) were sunk by Cuban planes. The exiles had been supplied with obsolete and poorly equipped B-26s by the CIA. The invasion went badly from the start; the invasion force barely got to the beaches before it was pinned down by government forces. The B-26s were supposed to be escorted to Cuba by unmarked US Navy jets, but the CIA's failure to coordinate this properly led to the B-26s going in an hour early: "...the B-26s were soon downed or gone, the jet mission was invalidated before it started, and without ammunition the exiles were quickly rounded up." (Ted Sorensen) The CIA had made numerous mistakes: the landing site was not suitable for guerilla warfare, most of the invasion force had not been given guerilla training, and the proposed escape route to the Escambray Mountains was an impassable swamp.
Dean Rusk told a press conference: "The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to that question is no." (NYT 4/18)
JFK, LBJ, Rusk, McNamara, Lemnitzer, Burke, Bundy, Bissell, Walt Roston and Authur Schlesinger, Jr. meet today in the President's office. The reports are bad. Bissell and Burke propose a concealed U.S. air strike from the carrier Essex lying off Cuba. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and James Reston lunch with JFK. Schlesinger remembers him as being "free, calm, and candid; I had rarely seen him more effectively in control." JFK says: "I probably made a mistake in keeping Allen Dulles on. It's not that Dulles is not a man of great ability. He is. But I have never worked with him, and therefore I can't estimate his meaning when he tells me things . . . Dulles is a legendary figure, and it's hard to operate with legendary figures . . . I made a mistake in putting Bobby in the Justice Department. He is wasted there . . . Bobby should be in CIA . . . It is a hell of a way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business -- that is, we'll have to deal with the CIA."
Immediately following the Bay of Pigs disaster, the CIA begins to plan a second invasion, training Cuban exiles and soldiers of fortune, on No Name Key in Florida, in Guatemala, and on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. The CIA, theoretically more tightly controlled under the eye of RFK, also sets up an extraordinary new center of operations. Code-named JM/WAVE, and situated in Miami, it is, in effect, the headquarters for a very public 'secret war' against Cuba. This is the most ambitious CIA project ever, and comes to involve seven hundred CIA and coopted Army officers recruiting, training, and supplying thousands of Cuban exiles. The nerve center of the new struggle is set up in Miami, where the vast majority of the exiles are concentrated. There, in woods on the campus of the University of Miami, the CIA establishes a front operation in the shape of an electronics company called Zenith Technological Services. In 1962, at the height of its activity, the JM/WAVE station controls as many as 600 Americans, mostly CIA case officers, and up to 3000 contract agents. Internally, the JM/WAVE station is also a logistical giant. It leases more than a hundred staff cars and maintains its own gas depot. It keeps warehouses loaded with everything from machine guns to coffins. It has its own airplanes and what one former CIA officer calls "the third largest navy in the Western Hemisphere," including hundreds of small boats and huge yachts donated by friendly millionaires. One of the more active sites, used by a variety of anti-Castro groups, is a small, remote island north of Key West called, appropriately enough, No Name Key. It is home to a group called the International anti-Communist Brigade (IAB), a collection of soldiers of fortune, mostly Americans, who are recruited by Frank Fiorini Sturgis and a giant ex-Marine named Gerry Patrick Hemming. (Like Oswald, Hemming has been trained as a radar operator in California. Hemming will later claim that OSWALD once even tried to join his IAB group.)
4/18/1961 FBI records indicate that Robert Maheu informed the FBI that the Ballenti tap involved the CIA and suggested Edwards be contacted, Maheu informed the FBI that the tap had played a part in a project "on behalf of the CIA relative to anti-Castro activities," a fact which could be verified by Sheffield Edwards, CIA Director of Security. (FBI Memo Apr 20, 61; Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 11/20/75 p79)
4/18/1961 JFK returns to Washington from Glen-Ora, the family Virginia home, where he has been able to exercise "plausible denial" concerning the invasion of Cuba. He attends a scheduled cabinet meeting. He is extremely upset and spends twenty-five minutes telling the cabinet what he feels went wrong with the invasion -- and why. Both Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles are visibly shaken.
Andrew St. George writes: "Within a year of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA curiously and inexplicably began to grow, to branch out, to gather more and more responsibility for the 'Cuban problem.'" The Company was given authority to help monitor Cuba's wireless traffic; to observe its weather; to publish some of its best short stories (by Cuban authors in exile) through its wholly owned CIA printing company; to follow the Castro government's purchases abroad and its currency transactions; to move extraordinary numbers of clandestine field operatives in and out of Cuba; to acquire a support fleet of ships and aircraft in order to facilitate these secret agent movements; to advise, train, and help reorganize the police and security establishments of Latin countries which felt threatened by Castro's guerrilla politics; to pump such vast sums into political operations thought to be helpful in containing Castro that by the time of the 1965 U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic both the bad guys and the good guys -- i.e., the "radical" civilian politicos and the "conservative" generals -- turned out to have been financed by La Compania. Owing largely to the Bay of Pigs, the CIA ceased being an invisible government: it became an empire."
4/19/1961 In a memo for the president, RFK warns, "if we don't want Russia to set up missile bases in Cuba, we had better decide now what we are willing to do to stop it." Robert Kennedy identifies three possible courses of action: (1) sending American troops into Cuba, a proposal "you [President Kennedy] have rejected...for good and sufficient reasons (although this might have to be reconsidered)"; (2) placing a strict blockade around Cuba; or (3) calling on the Organization of American States (OAS) to prohibit the shipment to Cuba of arms from any outside source. He concludes that "something forceful and determined must be done...The time has come for a showdown for in a year or two years the situation will be vastly worse." (RFK and his Times)
Khrushchev writes to JFK, assuring him that the Soviet Union "does not seek any advantages or privileges in Cuba. We do not have any bases in Cuba, and we do not intend to establish any." Khrushchev, however, also warns against arming Cuban emigres for future attacks on Cuba. Such a policy of "unreasonable actions," he writes, "is a slippery and dangerous road which can lead the world to a new global war." (Soviet Public Statements with respect to Cuban Security, 9/10/62)
While visiting Richard Nixon's home, Allen Dulles is asked by Nixon if he would like a drink. He replies: "I certainly would -- I really need one. This is the worst day of my life." Dulles blames the invasion's failure on JFK's last-minute cancellation of air strikes.
JFK's depression about the Bay of Pigs reaches such depths that he tells his friend LeMoyne Billings, "Lyndon [Johnson] can have it [the presidency] in 1964." JFK refers to the presidency as being "the most unpleasant job in the world."
How else, he asked his friends Dave Powers and Ken O'Donnell, could the Joint Chiefs have approved such a plan? "They were sure I'd give in to them and send the go-ahead order to the [Navy's aircraft carrier] Essex," he said. "They couldn't believe that a new President like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong." (O'Donnell and Powers, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, " p. 274.)
At his death Allen Dulles left the unpublished drafts of an article that scholar Lucien S. Vandenbroucke has titled "The 'Confessions' of Allen Dulles." In these handwritten, coffee-stained notes, Dulles explained how CIA advisers who knew better drew John Kennedy into a plan whose prerequisites for success contradicted the president's own rules for engagement that precluded any combat action by U.S. military forces. Although Dulles and his associates knew this condition conflicted with the plan they were foisting on Kennedy, they discreetly kept silent in the belief, Dulles wrote, that "the realities of the situation" would force the president to carry through to the end they wished: "[We] did not want to raise these issues-in an [undecipherable word] discussion-which might only harden the decision against the type of action we required. We felt that when the chips were down-when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail." Lucien S . Vandenbroucke, "The 'Confessions' of Allen Dulles: New Evidence on the Bay of Pigs," Diplomatic History 8, no. 4 (Fall 1984) : p. 369; citing Allen W. Dulles Papers, handwritten notes, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University
