by Ed Strosser
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. S
uccess depended on speed.
As the situation on the beach deteriorated, just after midnight on April 18 Kennedy broke away from a White House reception to hold a quick meeting in tails. Bissell told him the situation was dire, but one way out existed: send in American jets from the carrier Essex stationed off Cuba to clean up Castro’s forces. Bissell always expected that when this moment of truth arrived, JFK, a dedicated Commie hater, would openly commit U.S. forces rather than see the operation die. In fact, since Bissell had read the CIA’s analysis the year before, he knew this was the only way it would work.
But JFK insisted the United States would not become mixed up in the affair. Admiral Burke, chief of naval operations, snapped at the president that the country was already involved. The president stood fast. Apparently, American involvement to Kennedy meant nothing less than having the White House staff actually machine-gunning enemy tanks. But at this point he was not thinking about victory for the invaders. His focus was trying to save himself politically from what he now realized was a huge mistake. Kennedy told Bissell it was time for the invaders to melt into the mountains and continue the fight as guerrillas. Bissell pointed out that since the invaders were sixty miles from the mountains, it was not an option. At this point, on the fifth day of military operations, one can assume Kennedy should have understood the importance of moving the invasion site. A kingdom for Google maps!
E. HOWARD HUNT
Whether he was especially unlucky or just idiotic is not clear, but either way E. Howard Hunt is a two-time loser. First, he played a key role in the Bay of Pigs debacle, as a spy in Cuba trying to organize the rebel political leaders, using the code name Eduardo, a sly attempt to blend in with the Cubans. A decade later, now working out of the basement of the Nixon White House, presumably under his real name, he led the botched Watergate break-in that turned a second-rate crime into the greatest presidential scandal of all time. A good hint that his failures were of his own making comes from the company he kept. His key sidekick during the Cuban debacle was Bernard Barker, the very man who was caught red-handed in the Watergate hotel on that fateful night. With him was the Cuban Eugenio Rolando Martinez. Both men had address books with Hunt’s name and phone number alongside the note “W. House.” How anyone was able to then link the robbery to the White House with those paltry clues is unknown. As one CIA colleague said, Double Trouble Eduardo had consistent judgment. “It was always wrong.”
Kennedy agreed to one concession, allowing jets from the Essex stationed off Cuba to escort the B-26s as they attacked the Cuban airport in hopes of knocking out the few Cuban planes that had been terrorizing the invaders. The jets were not to engage the enemy, but just fly alongside the bombers so as to discourage Castro’s planes from shooting the B-26s. The Cubans, however, refused to fly the planes because it was viewed as a suicide mission, so American volunteers — mostly Alabama Air National Guard pilots who had been training the Cubans for the CIA — took the controls. In an invasion that was not supposed to have any U.S. forces, American navy planes were escorting American planes with American pilots to attack Castro’s air force.
In another crowning moment of deskbound operational brilliance, CIA planners failed to realize that Cuba and Nicaragua, where the B-26s were based, were in different time zones. As a result of this oversight, the bombers arrived an hour before their navy escorts, and four were shot down by the same handful of Cuban fighters flying on duct tape and hope. Even the time zones were working for Castro. The rebels held on throughout all of Tuesday, but the situation remained hopeless. By dawn on Wednesday, April 19, the fight was lost. Castro’s troops tightened the noose on the rebels. That afternoon, Lynch, who had stationed himself offshore shortly after the landings and assumed the role of de facto rebel field commander, took command of a small landing craft packed with ammuniton and guided it toward shore.
But it was too late. Before he could land, the rebels gave up. Their leader, Pepe San Roman, radioed Lynch that he was destroying his communications equipment and heading for the swamps. Brigade 2506 was no more. The survivors stumbled around the swamps until rounded up by Castro’s men a few days later. The spin continued. The exiled Cuban leaders, having learned the PR lessons from their CIA trainers all too well, declared that the invasion was really a small supply operation that had failed to achieve all its objectives. And they swore up and down the United States was not involved.
In all, 114 rebels died and 1,189 were captured. Castro returned most of the captors to the States in late 1962 in exchange for $53 million in drugs and food.
In a ceremony held on December 29, 1962, at the Orange Bowl in Miami to honor the returning fighters, Kennedy prasied their courage and vowed that the rebels’ flag would one day fly over a Castro-free Havana.
Eight presidents later, the wait continues.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
From the ashes of Kennedy’s biggest disaster sprang his greatest triumph. To protect Cuba, the Soviets parked some nuclear hardware in Fidel’s backyard. When discovered in 1962 by the United States, Kennedy confronted the Soviets and forced the Russkies to back down and remove the missiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis stands as the world’s closest known moment yet to a nuclear exchange.
The failure of the invasion provided Castro with a good cover story to imprison tens of thousands of dissenters, further strengthening his hold on power. Even after the Soviet missiles were removed, Castro has kept a vigilant, paranoid guard against external enemies. Since 1962 he’s been waiting for the next invasion to overthrow him.
And for Richard Bissell, the genius behind the whole mess? Bissell left the CIA, with a national security medal pinned on him from Kennedy, and moved back to Hartford, Connecticut, where one can be quite certain no day is ever as exciting as running black ops for the agency. Bissell died in 1994.
THIRTEEN.
THE SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN: 1979
Cars have cruise control. Planes have autopilot. And empires have auto empire control.
Without thinking, empires will respond to the same situation the same way time and time again, disregarding other options that might be better suited. It worked once before, their thinking goes, so let’s not mess with the plan. When two superpowers run on reflex and fight a pilotless war against each other, however, the situation is ripe for disaster.
In December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in order to prop up its failing Communist regime. Just like in the old days when the Red Army crushed opposition in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Russians felt that the philosophy of Marx and Lenin was best taught by tanks machine-gunning the populace, repeating as necessary.
In knee-jerk response, the Americans stepped in and supported anyone, absolutely anyone, who was willing to fight the hated Soviets. The result was a long, bloody, and destructive war that left Afghanistan in ruins, rapidly put the Soviet Union on the fast track to disappearance, and created a whole new brand of enemy for the United States, just in time for the demise of the USSR.
Two superpowers fought it out, in the last great battle of the Cold War. Both lost more than they could have possibly imagined.
THE PLAYERS
William Casey — head of the CIA under Ronald Reagan, the devout Catholic took command of the U.S. effort to supply the Afghan rebels and pumped billions into killing Russians.
Skinny — During World War II, he ran the U.S. spy program inside Germany.
Props — Mumbled so badly that few understood what he was saying. Turns out this is a great way to get what you want.
Pros — Killing godless Communists brought him to a state of grace.
Cons — Thought it was a good game plan to team up with the devout mujahideen.
Mohammed Zia-ul Haq — Dictator of Pakistan and the gatekeeper for the anti-Soviet operations. After spotting the opportunity, he enriched himself like a good ole American vulture capitalist.
Skinny — Started his life as an officer in the Bri
tish colonial army.
Props — Murdered his predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, made himself dictator, and created an Islamic state. This earned him status as a moderate in the region.
Pros — Spoke with British accent.
Cons — Looked the other way as a mob of students ransacked and burned the U.S. embassy in Islamabad in early 1979. Miraculously only a handful of the 139 employees died.
Ahmed Shah Massoud — The “Lion of the Panjshir,” he was perhaps the most successful and famous Afghan to fight the Soviet invasion.
Skinny — Fought the Soviets, the Taliban, and al Qaeda and yet there is no statue of him in Washington, D.C.
Props — Started his jihad against the Soviets with thirty supporters and seventeen rifles.
Pros — Took the Russians’ best shots and withstood six direct Soviet campaigns to wipe them out.
Cons — Declared a truce with the Soviets in 1983.
THE GENERAL SITUATION
The Soviet Union’s best export was always puppets. At every opportunity, the tireless revolutionaries in the Kremlin grabbed territory and installed puppet regimes to run the show. And when things went bad, as they usually did, such as the local people realizing they didn’t like being an abused and overlorded nook of the Soviet empire, the Russians knee-jerked in their second most successful export, the army.
The knee-jerk strategy became so ingrained in Soviet thinking that it even had a name, “the Brezhnev Doctrine,” bathing it in a gloss of scholarship as if produced by professors at Invasion State University. And of course once you create a doctrine, it needs to hit the road every few years so the battery won’t die. It morphed into a doctrine looking for a target.
This one popped onto the Soviet radar in the 1970s along its southern border. For the first decades after the end of World War II, Afghanistan, isolated and poor, occupied a minor place in the Cold War. Both the Americans and the Soviets, however, shipped in small amounts of money and advisors to curry favor with Afghan ruler King Zahir.