A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Everyone knows, Miró said, that the United States is behind the expedition. If it should succeed no one will object to the American role. Berle then said that it could not succeed without an internal uprising, and that, if one came, we would provide the democratic Cubans with the things necessary to make it successful. Once the provisional government was established on the beachhead, we would offer all aid short of United States troops. Miró said that 10,000 Cubans would immediately align themselves with the invading forces. Berle replied that there would be plenty of arms for them. The kind of help we were prepared to give, he repeated, would be enough if, in fact, a revolutionary situation existed within Cuba.

  I reproduce this part of the conversation from notes made at the time because Miró told his colleagues and later claimed publicly that Berle had promised the support of 10,000 United States troops. Either Miró’s knowledge of English or the translation was sadly at fault. Miró, a driven man, probably heard what he desperately wanted to hear. He went on to tell us that, if the provisional government was established and things then began to go badly, he planned to call for help from all the nations of the hemisphere—including the United States. He said with solemnity, “This help must come.” For, if the operation should fail, the American government would have suffered a severe defeat on its very doorstep, communism would be consolidated in Cuba, and Castro would move on to destroy the whole inter-American system. “You must understand what will happen to your own interests if we lose. You must commit yourselves to full support of our efforts.”

  I returned to Washington considerably depressed. Whatever Miró was told, it was evident he simply would not believe he could not count on United States military support. “He is a serious person,” I reported to the President the next morning, “and will not be easily moved from his present position. Nonetheless I think a very tough effort should be made to get him to accept the President’s press conference statement . . . as the basis for his futune relations with the United States.” The President promptly picked up the phone—it was a fragrant morning at the beginning of spring, and we were discussing the speech he was about to give at the Pan American Union—called Dick Bissell and told him that Miró must understand that either he agrees to proceed on the basis of no United States military intervention or else the whole expedition would be called off. Bissell sent Tracy Barnes to New York that day to stress the point. Though Barnes got a formal assent, he too returned to Washington doubtful whether Miró really believed him.*

  Kennedy’s speech that morning was a summons to the Council of the OAS to expedite the work of the Alliance for Progress. Though I had composed drafts for his use, this was my first experience in working directly with him on a speech. I had written a text the night before. Gretchen Stewart came to the office at seven-thirty in the morning, along with Wymberley Coerr, now Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Tom Mann, who was scheduled to become ambassador to Mexico, had resigned early in April lest he arrive in Mexico City bearing the onus of the invasion of Cuba). As I revised the pages, I handed them to Coerr, who passed them on to Miss Stewart, who put them on the speech typewriter. A little before ten o’clock—just an hour before the speech was to be given—Evelyn Lincoln called to say that the President was free and wanted to see the draft. When I took it to his office, he read it carefully and calmly, cut out the two explicit anti-Castro passages on the ground that he did not want to mix up the Alliance for Progress with Cuba, decided that the text was too long, made some other cuts and revisions and then read it again—all in a state of total relaxation. He then asked whether I could not find an appropriate quotation from Franklin Roosevelt. I dug one up in the next few minutes.

  It was ten forty-five. He invited me to come along with Jacqueline in the car; and, as we drove over to the Pan American Union, he remarked that he thought he might say something about the importance of using existing institutions, like the OAS, rather than succumbing to the pressure of devising new institutions. I said that this sounded fine to me. A few minutes later, when he began the speech, he went into an apt improvisation along these lines. It was the most effective part of the address and drew the only applause. As a veteran ghost, I felt appropriately chagrined. On the way back, he stopped the car just inside the White House grounds and proposed a walk down to the pond to see Caroline’s ducks. Caroline, who came running out of nowhere, joined us for a leisurely fifteen-minute stroll in the spring sun. It was a last peaceful moment before the storm broke.

  XI

  Ordeal by Fire

  EVENTS WERE RUSHING toward climax. D-day had originally been proposed for April 5; at the end of March the President postponed it to April 10; now it was set for April 17. In Guatemala the Cuban Brigade, now grown to almost 1400 men, waited with growing impatience. A veteran Marine colonel arrived to make a final inspection as the force prepared to leave its base. The day after the President had publicly excluded United States military intervention, Washington sent an urgent request for the colonel’s evaluation of the Brigade and its capabilities. The reply came back in unequivocal language:

  My observations have increased my confidence in the ability of this force to accomplish not only initial combat missions, but also the ultimate objective, the overthrow of Castro. The Brigade and battalion commanders now know all details of the plan and are enthusiastic. These officers are young, vigorous, intelligent and motivated by a fanatical urge to begin battle. . . .

  They say they know their own people and believe that after they have inflicted one serious defeat upon the opposition forces, the latter will melt away from Castro, whom they have no wish to support. They say it is a Cuban tradition to join a winner and they have supreme confidence they will win against whatever Castro has to offer.

  I share their confidence.

  This message reached the White House on April 14 shortly before the hour of what is known in Pentagonese as the ‘no-go’ decision on preliminary operations. The fervent testimonial confirmed the President in his intention to let the expedition go ahead.

  1. PRELUDE TO TRAGEDY

  But I doubt whether anyone in Washington really knew what was taking place in Guatemala. The top CIA officials—Dulles, Bissell, Barnes—were civilized and responsible men; but the CIA operatives in the field and their military colleagues were a different breed, if, at least, the Cubans themselves are to be believed. As zero hour approached, the American advisers told them again (or so they later informed Haynes Johnson) that their Brigade would not be the only unit in the invasion. They received the impression that after seventy-two hours they could count on United States military and air support. At one point, according to Pepe San Román, the chief United States adviser even talked darkly of efforts in Washington to cancel the operation and said that, if a stop order came through, “you come here and make some kind of show, as if you were putting us, the advisors, in prison, and you go ahead with the program as we have talked about it, and we will give you the whole plan, even if we are your prisoners.” He went on to hint that this was the desire of his superiors.* (Actually the United States Navy had been briefed to intercept and turn back the invasion in case of a last-minute decision against it.)

  As for the Cubans themselves, their spirit was high. Many of the new recruits, however, had been at the base only a few days. Some had not even fired a gun. Of the 1400 men, only about 135 were soldiers. Of the rest, 240 students made up the largest single group. In addition, there were businessmen, lawyers, doctors, landowners and their sons, along with fishermen and peasants. At least fifty were Negroes. The average age was about twenty-nine, though one man was as old as sixty-one and some were no more than sixteen. Apart from professionals who had served in Batista’s army, few real Batistianos had slipped in, but some notorious Batista criminals somehow showed up on the boats on the way to Cuba (to be subsequently displayed by Castro as representative members of the Brigade). The officers, though not active Batistianos, stood considerably to the right of the Revoluti
onary Council. The rank and file were politically heterogeneous. The only common purpose was to return home and get rid of Castro.

  On April 10 the Brigade began to move by truck from the Guatemalan base to the point of embarkation at Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua. By April 13 the men were beginning to board the boats. On April 14 the United States advisers finally disclosed the invasion plan—the seizure of three beaches along forty miles of the Cuban shore in the Bay of Pigs area, with paratroops dropping inland to control the roads crossing the swamps to the sea. Castro’s air force, the advisers said, would be neutralized in advance, and five hundred guerrillas were waiting nearby to join the fight. The Brigade’s mission was to hold the beach for three days, after which, as the chief American adviser put it, “you will be so strong, you will be getting so many people to your side, that you won’t want to wait for us. You will go straight ahead. You will put your hands out, turn left, and go straight into Havana.”* The Cubans, still regarding the Americans with veneration and not used to locker-room pep talks, left the briefing in a state of exaltation.

  As the flotilla of seven small ships waited off Puerto Cabezas on the late afternoon of April 14, Luis Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua, appeared at the dock, his face powdered, bodyguards in his wake. He shouted boldly, “Bring me a couple of hairs from Castro’s beard,” and waved the patriots farewell. The members of the Brigade trailed their vivid battalion scarves in the wind, and the boats, tinted by the red light of the dying sun, set out for Cuba.

  The neutralization of Castro’s air force was to be brought about by air strikes from Nicaraguan bases before the landings. This question of air attack had been under debate since January. The State Department had opposed pre-invasion strikes as incompatible with the ground rule against showing the American hand. In the Department’s view, there should be no air activity until the invaders secured an airstrip of their own in Cuba and their air power could appear to be something they were mounting out of their own resources. The Pentagon, on the other hand, had contended that preinvasion strikes were essential to knock out the Cuban air force and protect the disembarkation.

  The Trinidad plan had contained no provision for advance strikes; but with the Bay of Pigs plan there had come a compromise—a strike against Cuban airfields two days before the landings, to be carried out, in order to meet State’s objections, by Cuban pilots pretending to be defectors from Castro’s air force. After an interval to permit U-2 overflights and photographic assessment of the damage, a second strike would follow at dawn on D-day morning. No one supposed that the cover story would hold up for very long; Castro, for example, would obviously know in short order that he was not being attacked by deserters from his own air force. But the planners expected that it would hold at least until the invaders hit the beaches—long enough to mask the second strike. It was also recognized that the pre-invasion strikes would probably cause Castro to move against the underground; but, since CIA did not put much stock in the underground anyway, its elimination was considered less important than the elimination of Castro’s air power. The compromise was not altogether satisfactory, the Joint Chiefs fearing that the strikes would alert Castro without destroying his air power, and even CIA preferring a massive strike concurrent with the invasion; but in the end it seemed the best solution.

  As the ships made their slow way toward Cuba, eight B-26s took off from Puerto Cabezas in the night. At dawn on Saturday morning they zoomed down on three main Cuban airfields. CIA had estimated Castro’s air strength at about fifteen B-26s and ten Sea Furies; there were also four T-33 jet trainers, but these did not figure significantly in either CIA’s or, what is worse, the Joint Chiefs’ calculations. The Cuban air force, according to the CIA estimate, was “entirely disorganized,’’ its planes “for the most part obsolete and inoperative,” its combat efficiency “almost nonexistent.”

  The pilots returned to Nicaragua with optimistic claims of widespread damage. The overflights the next day, however, showed only five aircraft definitely destroyed. And not all the attacking planes made it back to the base. One developed engine trouble, and its pilot headed for Florida, finally making an emergency landing in Key West. In the meantime, a ninth B-26 had flown straight from Nicaragua to Miami to put the cover plan into operation. The pilot on landing announced himself as a Castro defector who had just bombed the airfields. The unscheduled arrival of the second plane at Key West complicated things somewhat; and the appearance at Jacksonville the day before of a perfectly genuine Castro defector in a Cuban plane compounded the confusion.

  In New York Adlai Stevenson was getting ready for a long-delayed debate in the United Nations General Assembly over a Cuban charge of aggressive intentions on the part of the United States. Kennedy, who had been much concerned about the UN aspect of the Cuban operation, told the group in the Cabinet Room that he wished Stevenson to be fully informed, and that nothing said at the UN should be less than the truth, even if it could not be the full truth. “The integrity and credibility of Adlai Stevenson,” he had remarked to me on April 7, “constitute one of our great national assets. I don’t want anything to be done which might jeopardize that.”

  In preparation for the debate, Tracy Barnes and I had held a long talk with Stevenson on April 8. But our briefing, which was probably unduly vague, left Stevenson with the impression that no action would take place during the UN discussion of the Cuban item. Afterward, when Harlan Cleveland, the Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, Clayton Fritchey of the United States Mission to the UN, and I lunched with Stevenson at the Century, he made clear that he wholly disapproved of the plan, regretted that he had been given no opportunity to comment on it and believed that it would cause infinite trouble. But, if it was national policy, he was prepared to make out the best possible case.

  After the Saturday air strike, Raúl Roa, the Cuban foreign minister, succeeded in advancing the Cuban item, scheduled for the following Monday, to an emergency session of the UN Political Committee that afternoon. In Washington Harlan Cleveland tried to ascertain the facts about the strike. His office called the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, which in turn called the CIA. Word promptly and definitely came back that it was the work of genuine defectors, and Cleveland passed this information on to Stevenson. A few moments later Stevenson told the UN: “These two 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 Stevenson spoke, someone handed him a piece of press ticker containing what appeared to be corroborative detail, and Stevenson read further parts of the CIA cover story into the record.

  The ‘need-to-know’ standard had simply left the Bureau of International Organization Affairs and most of the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs (as well as Ed Murrow and the USIA) ignorant of the operation. Rusk himself, moreover, seems for a while to have confused the phony defector at Key West with the authentic defector at Jacksonville. Apparently it was not till late Saturday afternoon that he understood that the Key West plane was part of the CIA plot. Why CIA should have misled State has never been clear. Possibly the Agency, having worked out its deception plan, felt obliged to deceive even the rest of its own government; or possibly the CIA source, if in the Intelligence Branch, was himself ‘unwitting.’

  The President had meanwhile gone off to his Virginia retreat at Glen Ora early Saturday afternoon; had he remained, contrary to custom, in Washington, the press would have presumed that something was up. At Sunday noon, the last ‘no-go’ point, he authorized the expedition to proceed to the beaches. But in Washington newspapermen were starting to call the State Department and ask penetrating questions about the fugitive B-26s in Key West and Miami. It was evident that the CIA cover story was cracking, that Stevenson had been permitted to misinform the UN and that the international repercussions might be extensive. Stevenson was understandably indignant. Rusk, remorseful at the position into which State had thrust its UN ambassador, now resolved that
the Cuban adventure should not be permitted further to jeopardize the larger interests of United States foreign policy.

  In particular, the collapse of the cover story brought the question of the second air strike into new focus. The President and the Secretary understood this strike as one which would take place simultaneously with the landings and have the appearance of coming from the airstrip on the beach. It had slid by in the briefings, everyone assuming that it would be masked by the cover story. But there could be no easy attribution to defectors now. Nor did the fact that the planes were B-26s flown by Cuban pilots save the situation; despite the great to-do about ‘Cubanizing’ the operation, they would still be United States planes in the eyes of the UN. Rusk, after his talks with Stevenson, concluded that a second Nicaraguan strike would put the United States in an uptenable position internationally and that no further strikes should be launched until the planes could fly (or appear to fly) from the beachhead. Bundy agreed, and they called the President at Glen Ora.