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

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Stupid Wars : A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions Page 21

by Ed Strosser


  To many Americans, Cuba seemed a natural extension of Florida. Only a mistake of geography prevented the United States from exercising its natural domination over the island. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill during the Spanish American War, Americans treated Cuba like their little brother. Of course, that’s if you don’t like, treat well, or respect your kid brother. But then one day the little kid got pissed off and dressed up in army fatigues, lit a cigar, and fought back. In 1959 Fidel Castro took over Cuba, kicked out the American business interests, and declared himself in charge.

  Immediately the United States began looking to take out Castro. In 1960, under President Eisenhower, it turned to its master spies, the CIA. While not strictly in the job descrip­tion, the CIA was willing to overthrow foreign governments if requested by the government. The upstanding Yale men, Skull and Bones types, who had controlled the agency since its founding as the OSS in World War II, were still dining out in their Brooks Brothers suits on the stories of overthrowing the leader of Guatemala in 1954 with a slingshot and two broken walkie-talkies. They figured if it worked there, it could work in Cuba. Both countries are filled with Spanish-speaking people and have nice beaches, so what could go wrong?

  When Vice President Richard Nixon grabbed the reins from a disinterested Eisenhower, the CIA rounded up the old Guatemala gang and set them loose on the problem of “saving” the little hermano to the south from their new leader. With Richard Bissell, the patently brilliant head of covert operations running the show against Castro, the CIA just knew his days were numbered. They tweaked and jim­mied up various plans, each one more foolproof than the last, finally settling on the perfect plan of a tidy little inva­sion of just a few hundred lightly armed, disgruntled former citizens.

  Kennedy, who inherited the plan along with Bissell and his gang of bureaucratic revolutionaries, agreed to do it if they could pull it off without anyone guessing that the giant, superpower, archenemy ninety miles to the north was in­volved.

  THE PLAYERS

  John F. Kennedy — Young, exceedingly lucky and charismatic, the new president was ready to push the United States into a New Fron­tier of, well, everything. But beyond the hype he was an inexperi­enced, untested president who won a very close election and needed to prove he had the mettle to stand up to the Russkies and more important, the Russki-haters.

  Skinny — Probably won the election because he had a closer shave than Nixon.

  Props — Marilyn Monroe was a key member of the bedroom cabi­net.

  Pros — After the invasion tanked he sheepishly admitted his mistake by saying “How could I have been so stupid to let them go ahead?”

  Cons — This epiphany came a week too late.

  Fidel Castro — young, exceedingly lucky and charismatic, the new dictator was ready to join forces with the Soviet Union in the world­wide struggle against the shopping mall. Before taking command with his merry band of a dozen comrades, he convinced the world he was a major threat to Cuban dictator Batista. When Batista sud­denly fled the country, Castro found himself in charge.

  Skinny — Mass executions not as fun since Ché bought it in Bolivia.

  Props — Knew an invasion was coming. He read about it in the U.S. newspapers.

  Pros — Big baseball fan. Found it easy to motivate players with jail time and random killings.

  Cons — Tested the revolutionary zeal of his underfed and TV-de­prived citizens by requiring them to sit through four-hour ha­rangues.

  Richard Bissell — The reputedly brilliant chief of covert operations for the CIA, he was managing his first major coup without a net, notes, or a plan. He conceived the entire operation and was the one person who knew all the ways it could fail, and he was deter­mined to keep them secret.

  Skinny — Yale man. Studied there, taught there. Never featured on the cover of the course catalog.

  Props — Overthrew countries from a desk in Washington, D.C.

  Pros — Created the U-2 spy plane.

  Cons — Needed a spy plane to find his career after the invasion flopped.

  THE GENERAL SITUATION

  When Castro first took over Cuba in January 1959, follow­ing the New Year’s Day flight of dictator Fulgencio Batista, he had everyone confused. No one knew quite what he stood for. He told the world that he led a people’s revolution that aimed to install all the trappings of the good society; free press, elections, good schools, and health care for all. Crowds cheered him during his first visit to the United States in April 1959. Many in the CIA wanted to support him. Even after a three-hour meeting with the famed Red-hunter Richard Nixon, the true picture of Fidel remained fuzzy. He was a tantalizing blend of Lenin and Elvis.

  It didn’t take long, however, for the real Castro to emerge. Starting in mid-1959 Castro took over the large hotels and then, outrage of outrages, outlawed gambling. Even more ominously, he rounded up political opponents and summar­ily shot them. He slowly closed his grip on Cuban society. Many people fled; airline pilots often hijacked their own planes and flew them to the United States. After Castro’s takeover, the Cuban community in Miami swelled with exiles. They demanded immediate coup action. Some shipped arms to anti-Castro guerrillas in Cuba; others brawled with Castro’s supporters in Miami. The tipping point occurred once Castro linked Kalashnikovs with the Soviet Union in 1960. Now he represented a real threat, and soon thereafter Washington joined the Cuban exile chorus demanding imme­diate coup action. It was 1960, the height of the Cold War. Kennedy was campaigning by denouncing the Republicans for allowing the United States to fall behind the Russians in strategic mis­siles. The Communists kept pushing forward around the world while the country shouldered the effort to roll back the Red Menace. Americans fervently believed that when one country came under Soviet domination, other countries were sure to topple. The inescapable logic of the domino theory, which led to numerous international experiments, such as the war in Vietnam, dictated immediate coup action: if the U.S. government stood idly by and let Cuba go Red, the next domino to fall would surely be the United States.

  Starting in January 1960, CIA honcho Richard Bissell took the lead in cooking up a strategy. Plans were discussed, meetings held, calls placed. Many of these activities received hearty backing by Nixon, who was particularly eager for the invasion to happen that year to boost his presidential plans. Eisenhower had no qualms about coup action. But in his last year in office, he focused more on his putting game than on pushing for the invasion. He let Nixon run with the ball.

  Invading Cuba was actually the backup plan. The first choice was simply to kill Castro. In a striking example of real life imitating a bad movie, in August 1960 the CIA hired the mob to rub out Castro. In a chain of command, bedaz­zling in its complexity, Bissell instructed his CIA compatriot Sheff Edwards to head the project, and Edwards ordered James O’Connell, also of the CIA, to handle the job. O’Connell then outsourced the work to Robert Maheu, a private investigator who handled odd jobs for the agency, and Maheu brought in mobster Johnny Roselli. Roselli re­cruited Momo Salvatore Giancana, Chicago mob chief, and Santos Trafficante, former mob ruler of Havana. And those two paragons of national security were tasked to hire the actual killer. Shockingly, it almost worked. Giancana and Trafficante had numerous plans to kill Castro: (1) assassinating him via a facial defoliant to his famous beard, (2) killing him with a poisonous cigar, (3) drugging him into a rambling mess during a live radio talk, (4) poisoning his favorite meal, and (5) staging the “accidental death” of his trusted brother Raul. But due to the combination of absurd plans, Castro’s charmed fate, and bad luck, all failed. Methods left untried include a laser aimed at his crotch, and dipping him in a huge pot of boiling oil.

  Bissell and the CIA had tasted success and knew where to get the recipe. In 1954 the agency had launched a mission to oust Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, guilty of flirting with Communists. Arbenz fled to Europe, Moscow, and landed eventually, of all places, in Cuba itself. Flushed with
victory from one successful coup, the agency felt confi­dent it could take its show on the road. And Cuba was the next logical stop.

  WHAT HAPPENED: OPERATION “DAY AT THE BEACH”

  In 1960 Bissell’s original vision for the conquest of Commu­nist Cuba required only a tidy group of a few dozen infiltra­tors, dropped in under cover of darkness, who would foment a guerrilla insurgency. A key added benefit to this plan was that the operation would be small enough to appear organi­cally Cuban. Richard Bissell, however, was not in the habit of thinking small. Mission creep crept in as Bissell tinkered with his plan. When he finally unveiled it, the plan called for “a shock action,” CIA-speak for a full-scale military inva­sion. Bissell’s enthusiasm got the best of him. Then he forgot to tell anyone.

  Bissell went dark for strategic reasons. His own CIA re­ports in November 1960 stated that a Cuban military invasion, even with upward of 3,000 troops, would fail. The CIA concluded that the only way to oust Castro would be to land the Marines. Bissell never breathed a word of this report to anyone; instead, he beefed up the invasion all by himself.

  Bissell’s plan now ran as follows: 1,500 American-trained Cuban rebels, shipped in from Guatemala, would land on a remote beach on the southern coast of Cuba, hold on for a few days while makeshift air support fended off the Cuban army of 200,000 men. The country would erupt in anti-Castro hysteria, and the rebels, now joined by their Cuban leaders (who would be holing up in a Manhattan hotel until the invasion worked) would simply walk into Havana and take over, just like Castro had done, with the occasional stop for a refreshing Mojito. A fun and easy covert op with full deniability for the United States.

  The problem for the CIA, as with all of their home-brewed revolutions, was creating an invading force powerful enough to win… but not so strong that it would reveal the American backing. The invasion, in essence, had to be Cubanized — made to look unprofessional. As events later proved, unprofessional military operations came quite easily to the CIA.

  Like a Broadway show working out the kinks on the road, the CIA held a preview invasion. In May 1960 the agency conquered Swan Island — “Bird Drop Island” — a lonely out­post in the western Caribbean, which was coated in the stuff. The CIA set up its own radio transmitter to broadcast anti-Castro messages into Cuba. To capture Swan (Codename: Operation Dirty Boots) required a secret deployment of a destroyer to evacuate some drunken Honduran students found partying on the island. The pre-invasion reviews: two thumbs up.

  To train the rebel army, in July 1960 Bissell established a base in a remote area of Guatemala, with the help of the country’s superfriendly president Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes. The camp grew as the CIA flew in more Cuban fighters, mostly recruited from the pool of cranky exiles around Miami, who trained under the eyes of sunburned CIA train­ers and army drill masters disguised in civilian clothes and sporting aliases, to keep up the fiction that America was in no way involved. The growing force was named Brigade 2506 after an early volunteer, secret ID number 2506, died in training. In a shockingly clever twist, the CIA gave volun­teers ID numbers starting with 2500 to fake out Castro on the size of the force, should he happen to discover its exis­tence. This turned out, unfortunately, to be one of their craftier moves.

  One complication with Brigade 2506 was the high rate of rebel soldiers going AWOL. When the CIA found the rebels were taking off to frolic in a distant brothel, the agency didn’t hesitate to make the logical move; they opened a whorehouse on the base. For security reasons the whores were recruited from El Salvador and Costa Rica.

  A larger issue was that security of the plans was a top pri­ority. If word of the CIA’s project leaked, it would destroy the myth that the American invasion of Cuba was organi­cally Cuban. But in mid-1960, the Miami Herald discovered Cubans being trained for war and planned to run a story on the whole affair. Pressure from the U.S. government, how­ever, killed the story. On October 30, 1960, a Guatemalan paper ran an article about the training camp, which was largely ignored in the United States, as often happened to events in Guatemala. Then on January 10, 1961, the New York Times ran a front-page story disclosing the CIA train­ing of Cuban guerrillas. Now the cat was out of the bag, it seemed. But Bissell and company remained unperturbed, convinced that few people actually paid attention to the front page of the Times.

  After Kennedy’s election in November 1960, Bissell had briefed him on the plan. The young president had been as uninterested as everyone else. Bissell tried to get Kennedy to focus on the plan but failed in maneuvering the young presi­dent into green-lighting the project.

  As the invasion planning went forward under Kennedy’s new administration, it occurred to only one key person during the planning, Antonio de Varona, one of the Cuban exile po­litical leaders, that the plan’s math hardly spelled success: the invasion brigade of a few hundred men would face about 200,000 Cuban soldiers. Bissell had a one-word response that calmed everyone: “umbrella.” The invasion would be pro­tected by an umbrella of air power, one of the inviolable laws of modern warfare. American planes would lay waste to any ground forces the invaders would meet. The umbrella was not only the key to victory; it was a sedative for restive and questioning minds. The umbrella would solve all problems.

  A bigger problem that nobody seemed to notice was the lack of any clear chain of command for the operation, a gross violation of basic military strategy. While Bissell cre­ated the plan, and the CIA controlled every aspect of the op­eration, Kennedy retained final authority on all decisions. He lacked, however, a firm grasp of the details. The lack of clear U.S. operational lines of control was matched by the paraly­sis of the rebel Cuban leadership. For example, the main ground force, Brigade 2506, reported to no one in particular. Various groups vied for control: some were former Batista cronies, some were disgruntled hangers-on from Castro’s en­tourage, others were former government leaders. They hated and distrusted one another. Each had his own idea of how a post-Castro government should look, with each one seeing himself as the next top dog. If the invasion succeeded, it was not clear who would take over for Castro. It was a revolu­tion without a revolutionary.

  Despite the mushrooming cloud of problems, Bissell remained convinced that none of them were unsolvable and that the correctness of getting rid of Castro would swing Kennedy to his side. Bissell’s interactions with Kennedy throughout the early months of 1961 confirmed this, as the new president rarely asked probing questions whenever Bissell swung by the White House to update Kennedy on his in­vasion plans.

  As a result Bissell’s little invasion plan began to suffer from scope creep, which he conveniently forgot to mention. The series of small infiltrations designed to inflame an inter­nal Cuban uprising had morphed into a mini D-Day, com­plete with a beach assault from amphibious boats and the motley crew of Cuban exile rebels standing in for a division of Marines. He consulted no one but simply tried to bam­boozle the new president into agreeing to what was quickly becoming a full-scale invasion.

  On March 11, an alarmed Kennedy rejected Bissell’s mini D-Day as overblown. And he wanted the plan reworked to ensure a 100-percent organically Cuban provenance. But it still wasn’t canceled. Bissell stomped off to massage his plan.

  Kennedy was holding true to his lifelong predilection of getting exactly what he wanted, in this case a double victory to start off his presidency. There was no reason Castro couldn’t be crushed and the whole operation hidden behind a well-tailored cloak of invisibility. Like the “help” his father provided to secure his election or the beautiful “secretaries” he kept stashed in the basement of the White House, he didn’t see any reason whatsoever to suffer any blemishes on the sheen of perfection on his shiny, new administration. He seemed to have full confidence that the CIA could pull this off without him having to even miss his weekend sail off the Cape.

  In late March 1961, a month before the invasion, Bissell came back to Kennedy with a new softer version of the invasion, one that included a change that Kennedy never both
­ered to understand. It was still a military invasion, just slightly smaller. But now its location had moved from the foot of the guerrilla-friendly Escambray Mountains to about sixty miles away in the swampy, isolated Bay of Pigs. Unreal­ized by Kennedy, this change meant that if the invasion failed, the rebels could not simply melt into the mountains as guerrillas to continue the fight and continue the fiction that the invasion was a “100 percent Cuban affair.” Kennedy ob­viously had not thought the whole thing through, and con­sulting a new map was not part of Kennedy’s approval process. The young president was a man of action without the fail-safe backup his father’s money and planning had provided. The confident Bissell assured him the plan would succeed, even better than in Guatemala. Kennedy was caught in a trap: if he canceled the operation he would look weak — both to the Republicans and to the Russians.

  One thing remained the same, though. The deciding factor of the entire invasion was control of the air — the key to modern warfare. If the rebels controlled the skies, they could land reinforcements at will. But if Castro had air superiority, he would pick off the rebel ships, and the invading force would wither on the beaches. It was obvious, given Kenne­dy’s insistence on maintaining the total veil of secrecy, that the United States could not simply flood the skies with jets emblazoned with USAF. The rebels needed their own air force, and Bissell gave it to them.

 

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