This is where the Soviet Union stepped in.
Khrushchev offered to buy Cuban sugar. He offered to send the Cubans shipments of Soviet oil. Castro accepted—and began a drift toward Soviet-style communism, the very opposite of the freedom and independence his revolution had promised. He jailed political opponents by the thousands. He confiscated privately owned businesses, censored the media, and canceled elections. Many Cubans fled their country, most settling in Miami.
Now, in six rusting ships, fourteen hundred of those Cubans were sailing back home. The little force reached the Bay of Pigs just before midnight on April 16.
* * *
The captains cut their engines two thousand yards from the beach. Five men climbed into rubber rafts and paddled toward shore to mark the landing site with lights—and immediately discovered a major flaw in the plan.
The CIA had told them to expect a sandy approach, but the water here was clogged with razor-sharp reefs. Navigating the coral slowed the men down, leaving them exposed. Two soldiers driving past on a routine patrol stopped short when their jeep’s headlights swept over five men in the shallow water near shore. Both sides opened fire.
The one advantage of landing at night—the element of surprise—was gone.
* * *
At an air base near Havana, Captain Enrique Carreras was sleeping in the cockpit of his plane—ready for action at a moment’s notice. This hand-me-down British Sea Fury constituted a significant portion of Cuba’s entire air force. Carreras, Cuba’s top fighter pilot, was woken and called to the phone.
Invaders were hitting the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Castro told him. The Cuban army was on its way, but the air force had the most important job.
“Chico,” Castro said, “you must sink those ships for me.”
Carreras understood. Without the supplies on their ships, the rebels could not hold the beach.
* * *
The secretary of state came to the door in his bathrobe.
It was 4:30 a.m., and the CIA’s Charles Cabell had come to Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s door with an update—and an urgent request.
The battle was on at the Bay of Pigs, Cabell told Rusk, but the landing was taking longer than expected. The men weren’t going to be out of the water by daylight. They’d be sitting ducks. U.S. Navy planes on the aircraft carrier Essex were ready to go. They could provide air cover, Cabell suggested, give the men a chance to unload their supplies and get off the open beach. All they needed was the president’s okay.
Rusk agreed to wake Kennedy. He got the president on the line, then handed the phone to Cabell. The general made his case.
Kennedy listened without comment. He asked Cabell to hand the phone back to the secretary of state. Kennedy’s first word to Rusk said it all:
“No.”
* * *
As the sun rose at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, hundreds of men fought through chest-high blue-green water, lugging guns and radios and cases of ammunition, stumbling on coral, facing a steady barrage of bullets as they struggled up to the beach.
Pepe San Román splashed onto the sand, knelt, and kissed the ground. Then he heard a sound he’d dreaded—the roar of engines in the sky. Castro only had a few planes, but here they were at the worst possible time, unopposed, dropping low and strafing San Román’s men in the water and in their open landing crafts.
At the controls of his Sea Fury, Enrique Carreras dove toward one of the invaders’ boats and fired a rocket straight through its deck. Fires burst out, and men jumped into the water as the boat went down.
Carreras took aim at another boat, one sitting heavy in the water, loaded with supplies for the invasion. The crew saw him coming.
“Sea Fury!” they shouted, “Sea Fury!”
Carreras blasted a hole in the boat, igniting barrels of fuel and crates of ammunition. The ship exploded, blowing a massive black mushroom-shaped cloud hundreds of feet into the bright blue sky.
* * *
At the White House, John Kennedy listened to the latest updates from Cuba. The news was bad and getting worse. After the two supply boats went down, the others fled out to sea, taking their cargo of ammunition, food, and medical supplies. Castro’s soldiers had started to arrive in large numbers, pinning the invaders on the beach.
Kennedy knew that he was seen as young, untested. The Bay of Pigs was his first major act on the world stage. He needed it to succeed.
Was it time to send in American forces? Where would that end? With all-out war in Cuba? Occupation of the entire island? What if the Soviets stepped in to defend their allies? What if they retaliated by attacking an American ally somewhere else in the world? The goal of the operation was to overthrow a pesky communist dictator, not to ignite World War III.
Kennedy picked up the phone and called his most trusted adviser, the U.S. attorney general—and the president’s younger brother—Bobby Kennedy. The president told Bobby, “I don’t think it’s going as well as it should.”
* * *
In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday. He could not have asked for a nicer present than the Bay of Pigs.
Back in 1956, when Hungarians began demanding freedom, Khrushchev had quite literally crushed the rebellion beneath the treads of Soviet tanks. That, in his mind, was how a leader behaved.
“I don’t understand Kennedy,” Khrushchev said to his son. “What’s wrong with him? Can he really be that indecisive?”
* * *
Early the next morning, Pepe San Román and Erneido Oliva stood in a tiny building on the beach, studying maps taped to the concrete walls.
Day one had been a success, in some ways. The brigade had captured a long beachhead. But how were they going to fight their way inland? Castro’s planes owned the sky. His troops and tanks blocked the roads. After fierce fighting all night, the invaders were nearly out of ammunition. Without fresh supplies they were doomed.
The CIA’s plan called for the invaders to escape to the mountains if things went wrong on the beach. Looking at their maps, San Román and Oliva could see another mistake the Americans had made. The Escambray Mountains were near the original invasion site.
Here, at the Bay of Pigs, eighty miles of roadless swamp lay between them and the mountains.
* * *
The president spent most of the day in the Oval Office, hiding from the press and hoping for good news that he knew wasn’t coming. After reading one update from Cuba, he shook his head and said, “We really blew this one.”
After dinner, an aide reminded Kennedy that it was time to dress for the White House’s congressional reception that evening. A formal gala was the last thing Kennedy was in the mood for, but twelve hundred guests were on their way. The president went upstairs and put on a tuxedo and white bow tie.
He and Jackie made a grand entrance to the ball, gliding down the stairs as a Marine band played “Hail to the Chief.” They danced together in the East Room, smiling and laughing. People who didn’t know better thought the president was having a wonderful time.
Near midnight, Kennedy and a few top officials slipped away to the West Wing to hear the latest from the CIA’s Richard Bissell. There was nothing new, Bissell reported. The invading force was trapped on the beach.
U.S. Navy Admiral Arleigh Burke jumped in. “Let me take two jets and shoot down those enemy aircraft.”
“No,” Kennedy said. “I don’t want to get the United States involved in this.”
“Hell, Mr. President, we are involved!”
Burke was right, of course. But Kennedy worried about getting more involved, about how quickly the violence could escalate. The only other option Kennedy could see was to abandon those men on the beach. Accept defeat. Take the political beating that would go with it.
After three hours of back-and-forth debate, Kennedy stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, opened the door to the Rose Garden, and walked out. From inside the Oval Office, Kennedy’s aides watched the president, in his lo
ng dress coat, pace back and forth on the wet grass.
Ken O’Donnell, Kennedy’s appointment secretary, said, “He must be the loneliest man in the world tonight.”
* * *
In the morning, backed up to the water at the Bay of Pigs, Pepe San Román radioed his CIA contact.
“Have you quit?” he demanded. “Aren’t you going to support me anymore?”
The CIA promised to send back the supply ships as soon as they could. But time ran out. Castro’s forces closed in, raining shells on the exposed beach.
“I have nothing to fight with,” San Román reported to the Americans. “Taking to the woods. I cannot wait for you.”
San Román’s surviving fighters fled into the swamp. They were rounded up by Castro’s forces, loaded into trucks, and driven as prisoners to Havana.
* * *
“We look like fools to our friends,” wrote a New York Times columnist, “rascals to our enemies and incompetents to the rest.”
In public, Kennedy accepted blame for the Bay of Pigs disaster. Privately, he seethed at what he saw as lousy advice from the CIA and military leaders.
“How could I have been so far off base?” he ranted to an adviser. “How could I have been so stupid to let them go ahead?”
First there was Gagarin’s flight. Then the Bay of Pigs. Two epic defeats in less than a week, and John Kennedy took it very personally. Bobby Kennedy had never seen his brother so shaken, so down on himself.
On April 22, Kennedy flew to Camp David, where Dwight Eisenhower joined him for a private talk.
“No one knows how tough this job is,” Kennedy confided as they walked in the woods, “until after he has been in it a few months.”
Eisenhower said, “Mr. President, if you will forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago.”
THE HEADLESS SPY
IN HIS PRISON CELL IN the Soviet Union, the American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers fantasized about the following foods:
Banana splits
Hamburgers
Salad
He never knew it was possible to miss salad.
In Pound, Virginia, Frank Powers’s father was trying to figure out a way to get his son home. He’d even consulted the lawyer who worked in the office above his shoe repair shop.
“Hey, listen,” Oliver Powers began, “have you heard of Rudolf Abel?”
The lawyer, of course, knew of the Soviet spy.
“Well, he’s pulling time in Atlanta,” Oliver said. “I’d like to see if he’s willing to be exchanged for my son.”
Together, they drafted a letter to Rudolf Abel and mailed it to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
Soon after, two government agents in dark suits came to visit. They told Oliver Powers to stop writing letters to enemy spies.
Actually, President Kennedy was open to the idea of a prisoner trade. It looked terrible to let an American pilot rot in a Russian prison. But any negotiations with the Soviets over an Abel-for-Powers trade would need to take place at a level far above Oliver Powers and his lawyer.
In the meantime, the battle for secret information remained a vital front of the Cold War. As the Soviets celebrated with Yuri Gagarin, and Fidel Castro crowed about his glorious victory at the Bay of Pigs, a Soviet official named Oleg Penkovsky boarded a flight from Moscow to London. Penkovsky, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence, was offering to share the Soviet Union’s most guarded military secrets with the Americans and the British.
Possibly. Possibly, his offer was part of an elaborate Russian trick.
Until CIA agents could question the man in private, there was simply no way to know.
* * *
Oleg Penkovsky had entered the story nearly a year before—or tried to, anyway.
In the summer of 1960, on a warm, rainy night in Moscow, two American students were approaching a bridge over the Moscow River when Penkovsky walked up.
“I beg you to help me,” he said.
The man was Russian, speaking choppy English. He was in his forties, his red hair beginning to gray. He reached into his jacket and took out an envelope.
“Do not open it,” the man said, “and do not keep it overnight in your hotel. Go immediately to the American embassy with this letter. Your government will be grateful for this information.”
One of the Americans, Eldon Ray Cox, asked the man for his name. The Russian handed over the envelope, turned, and walked away.
The Americans weren’t sure what to do. The Soviets were infamous for planting evidence on tourists. Then they’d “discover” the evidence and use it to blackmail the visitors. Worried about being entrapped, Cox’s friend went back to their hotel.
Cox sensed the man at the bridge was genuinely desperate for help. He got in a cab and asked to be taken to the American embassy.
* * *
In the embassy the next morning, several American officials stepped into the “bubble”—a large soundproof box suspended by wires from the ceiling. This was the only place Americans could talk with any confidence that Soviet listening devices could not pick up the conversation.
They opened the envelope the student had brought to the embassy the night before. Inside was a typed letter in Russian. An embassy official translated aloud:
“It is your good friend who is turning to you, a friend who has already become your soldier-warrior for the cause of Truth, for the ideals of a truly free world.”
The writer said he had thought carefully about his decision. He was ready to take a step from which there could be no return.
“I have at my disposal very important materials on many subjects of exceptionally great interest and importance to your government.”
The letter did not specify the exact nature of the materials. But it did include a hand-drawn map of a suggested dead-drop location: the entryway of a Moscow apartment building where a package could be hidden behind a radiator. There was also a photograph. It showed a man in a Soviet military uniform with the rank of colonel, standing beside an American officer, also a colonel.
There was a hole in the photo were the Soviet colonel’s head had been.
The letter and photo were sent to the CIA’s new headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where they landed on the desk of Joe Bulik, the officer in charge of America’s secret operations inside the Soviet Union. Bulik needed answers to two questions:
Who is this guy?
Is he for real?
Question one could be attacked with detective work. Suppose the figure in the photo, the one with his head cut off, was the letter writer. With a little digging, Bulik identified the American standing beside the headless man as an officer who had served in Turkey in the mid-1950s. Bulik checked agency files for photos of Soviet military officials who’d been stationed at the Soviet embassy in Turkey at that time.
There was only one. Oleg Penkovsky. A known member of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency.
The next step was simple. Bulik had agents track down the two American students who’d met the mystery man in Moscow. The students were shown photos of ten Soviet military officials and told to point to the man they’d met at the bridge. Both immediately picked out Oleg Penkovsky.
That was easy. Almost too easy.
Was Penkovsky a setup?
To answer that, the CIA would need to get some material from Penkovsky and test its validity and its worth. If Penkovsky was a loyal Soviet agent trying to deceive the CIA, he’d hand over what spies call “chicken feed”—secret information that is true, but not truly valuable. But what if he was the real thing? It was too tempting a possibility to ignore. The CIA had never had a high-ranking source inside Soviet intelligence.
The agency assigned Penkovsky a code name, Hero. A young agent, code-named Compass, was sent to Moscow with the mission of making contact. As cover, he worked as a janitor in a building where many American embassy officials lived—but apparently the KGB didn’t buy it. They followed Compass everywhere he went. There w
as no chance to approach Penkovsky. No chance to use the dead-drop he’d suggested. After a few months of frustration, Compass made a desperate move.
Oleg Penkovsky was home with his wife when the phone rang. He answered. A voice began speaking in terribly garbled Russian. The voice switched to English. Penkovsky’s English wasn’t good enough for a phone conversation. He made out a word or two, nothing more. He knew any phone in Russia could be tapped.
He hung up. Wrong number, he told his wife.
Compass was out of ideas.
Smart enough to admit they needed help, the CIA turned to MI6—British foreign intelligence, an agency so secret the government refused to admit it even existed.
The Brits had a clever idea. They had an agent named Greville Wynne, a salesman who traveled often to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on legitimate business. Wynne flew to Moscow and arranged a meeting with Oleg Penkovsky. The British businessman made what sounded like a perfectly innocent offer, inviting the Soviets to send a delegation of government officials to Britain for a friendly tour of British steel mills and factories. Penkovsky presented the idea to his bosses, and they liked it. They told Penkovsky to personally lead the Soviet delegation—and to be sure to take every opportunity to steal Western technology.
So far, MI6’s plan was working perfectly.
* * *
Now, in late April 1961, with Kennedy reeling from the Bay of Pigs and desperate for some good news, Greville Wynne drove to London Airport to meet his Soviet visitors.
Oleg Penkovsky came through customs carrying two large suitcases, flanked by the six other members of his delegation. Wynne had cars waiting to drive them to their hotel. Penkovsky went up to his room—a private room, which was essential to the plan.
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