Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

  Around seven o’clock that same morning, LAF pilot Mario Zúñiga made a dramatic emergency landing at Miami International Airport and announced that he and other members of Castro’s military were in revolt. Almost nobody believed him. His B-26 looked like it had recently been pulled out of storage and repainted, and one keen-eyed reporter observed that “dust and undisturbed grease covered [the plane’s] bomb-bay fittings, electrical connections to rocket mounts were corroded, [and] guns were uncocked and unfired.” Others noted that, though Zúñiga’s bomber certainly appeared similar to those in Castro’s Air Force, the nose of his B-26 was metal, while theirs were made of Plexiglas.

  From photographs taken by U-2 reconnaissance planes, the White House learned that only half of Cuba’s warplanes were destroyed in the first assault. Recognizing that the element of surprise was now gone and not wanting to lose additional bombers, President Kennedy and his advisors postponed further raids until the main invasion, when Brigade 2506’s approximately fourteen hundred troops would be going up against tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers.

  Frogmen and demolition experts disembarked from the cargo ships just before midnight on April 16 and were quickly spotted by Cuban militia, who then ran off after the two sides briefly exchanged gunfire. Word of the invasion reached Castro at his headquarters, but he and his senior officers couldn’t determine if there were multiple attacks across the island or just one major thrust at the Bay of Pigs. Adding to their confusion were reports of landings along the northern coast near Bahía Honda. This, in fact, was a feint conducted by CIA operatives motoring around on small rafts outfitted with large speakers broadcasting sounds of crackling radio transmissions, men yelling orders, and heavy equipment being moved.

  Due in part to the CIA’s diversionary ploys, most Brigade 2506 members made it ashore by dawn on April 17. Later that morning, however, Castro directed the bulk of his troops to the Bay of Pigs and ordered his remaining T-33s and Sea Furies into the air. The jets descended on the incoming forces and sank or scared away the cargo ships offshore carrying much-needed munitions and supplies. As the LAF crews predicted, the Cuban warplanes outmaneuvered them handily, and four B-26s were quickly shot down. Without cover from above and surrounded by an advancing army, hundreds of Brigade 2506 members became mired in the swamps around the bay and were easily killed or taken prisoner.

  Fearing an even greater bloodbath, the White House approved the one measure it had most wanted to avoid from the beginning. “Following is for your guidance,” CIA headquarters cabled its station chief at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, on April 18:

  AMERICAN CONTRACT CREWS CAN BE USED. B-26 STRIKES BEACHHEAD AREA AND APPROACHES ONLY. EMPHASIZE BEACHHEAD AREA ONLY. CAN NOT ATTACH SUFFICIENT IMPORTANCE TO FACT AMERICAN CREWS MUST NOT FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS.

  Americans Doug Price and Connie Siegrist were airborne hours later and joined by several other B-26s flown by their Cuban comrades, including Mario Zúñiga, who had already slipped out of Miami and returned to Puerto Cabezas. The sortie scored a direct hit on a convoy of Soviet-made trucks and tanks bearing down on Brigade 2506 ground forces, but while the strike served as a short-term morale boost, it had minor tactical significance.

  Castro was mobilizing his troops for a decisive, all-out offensive on April 19, and Alabama guardsmen were eager to jump into the fray. At this point Washington was willing to extend further military support and authorized A-4D Skyhawk fighter jets from the USS Essex to cover the next wave of B-26s, although only for a designated one-hour window of time.

  Eight Americans—pilots Joe Shannon, Riley Shamburger, Billy Goodwin, and Pete Ray, accompanied by crewmen Leo Baker, Nick Sudano, Wade Gray, and James Vaughn—volunteered for a final, last-ditch air raid to assist Brigade 2506’s surviving members. Zúñiga, despite having barely slept in four days, insisted on going, too.

  Six B-26s left Puerto Cabezas before sunrise on April 19, expecting to rendezvous with their faster and better-armed escorts as they neared Cuban airspace. None of the Skyhawks showed. (A simple time-zone-related miscalculation was said to be responsible for the mix-up.) Wade Gray and Riley Shamburger were first to come under attack. A T-33 swooped in from out of nowhere and blasted them from the side, killing both men and sending their plane straight into the ocean.

  With a T-33 trailing them, Pete Ray and his flight engineer, Leo Baker, made a dash for the sprawling sugar refinery that doubled as Castro’s field headquarters several miles north of the Bay of Pigs beachhead. A burst of antiaircraft fire struck their plane, and Ray transmitted a “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday” distress call before crash-landing in a cane field. They were never heard from again.

  Janet Ray was six years old when her father disappeared, and yet her memories of that time remain vivid. “We were living at my grandmother’s, right across the street from my school,” she told me. “I remember being on the playground at recess, and I watched through the chain link fence as this fancy black car drove up to the house and three men in suits got out. I knew something was wrong, and when I got home my mother was barely able to speak. The men had said that my father was ‘missing,’ but that’s all.”

  More men in suits came the next week. One, a lawyer connected to the CIA named Thomas McDowell, informed Margaret that her husband was probably lost at sea and the chance of finding him was slim. McDowell returned on May 3 with Alex Carlson, a lawyer representing the “Double-Chek Corporation,” to tell Margaret that her husband was dead, and they instructed her not to discuss with anyone what he may or may not have been doing in Cuba. They would take care of that.

  The next day Carlson held a press conference in Birmingham and announced that the four Americans were private mercenaries who died while flying noncombat cargo missions to aid anti-Castro freedom fighters. An anonymous group of affluent Cuban exiles, Carlson said, had paid the men through Double-Chek and would financially support the widows.

  Carlson’s statement infuriated the families. “My dad wanted to serve his nation and fight for what he believed was right,” Janet told me. “He wasn’t a soldier of fortune out to make a buck. One newspaper article even ran a picture of him with the words ‘A nice nest egg’ underneath. It made me physically ill.”

  Janet’s mother started receiving payments twice a month purportedly from Double-Chek, and this went on until 1976, when she remarried. Double-Chek was clearly a CIA front, and even Carlson had trouble keeping his details straight, sometimes spelling the company’s name Double Check, among other variations, in letters to the widows.

  President Kennedy claimed “sole responsibility” for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but behind the scenes he angrily blamed the CIA for giving him flawed intelligence. After a full review of the failed invasion, he forced the agency’s director, deputy director, and chief of operations to resign. Unquestionably the lowest moment of his presidency, the Bay of Pigs undermined U.S. credibility around the world and transformed Fidel Castro into a communist hero who had defeated the “Yankee imperialists.” It also exacerbated tensions with the Soviet Union, culminating in a near exchange of atomic weapons in October 1962 after the Russians were caught putting medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba.

  (In one of history’s greatest “what if?” moments, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president’s senior circle of military advisors unanimously recommended bombing Cuba, and Kennedy might well have followed their counsel if he hadn’t recently read The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book about the events that led up to World War I. Kennedy became convinced that launching air strikes would provoke a Soviet response and cause a domino effect resulting in another world war. Against the advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent additional missiles from being installed and proposed a secret deal to take U.S. warheads out of Italy and Turkey if the Soviets removed theirs from Cuba. Premier Nikita Khrushchev consented but added one more condition: Kennedy had to promise that the United States would never, ever, try
to invade Cuba again. Kennedy readily agreed.)

  Questions about the fate of Pete Ray, Leo Baker, Riley Shamburger, and Wade Gray reemerged in January 1963, when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy publicly denied that any U.S. servicemen were killed at the Bay of Pigs. On March 6 a reporter pressed President Kennedy during a live, televised news conference to admit that the missing Americans had been “employees of the government or the CIA.” Walking a verbal tightrope, Kennedy praised the airmen but remained vague about their mission. “Let me just say about these four men: They were serving their country. The flight that cost them their lives was a volunteer flight and while because of the nature of their work it has not been a matter of public record, as it might be in the case of soldiers or sailors, I can say that they were serving their country.”

  For the next ten years the CIA, the State Department, and the White House continued to stonewall the families, and Janet’s mother gave up hope of ever finding out what happened to her husband.

  “We had a memorial service for my dad,” Janet told me, “but it’s hard when there’s no body to bury. It doesn’t seem real.”

  At the age of fifteen, Janet figured she might have more luck with the Cuban government than her own, and she began writing to Castro himself. “I really did expect him to respond, but no one ever answered my letters.”

  Once Janet got her driver’s license, she started going to local libraries and reading every book and newspaper article she could find on the Bay of Pigs.

  “This was before the Internet,” Janet said to me, “and it was much harder to gather information. I would also go through trash cans in our home to look for names and addresses of relatives or anyone I thought might have been friends with my father. I’d write to them or, if they lived close by, drive over and interview them. I also eavesdropped on the conversations my mom had with other adults in our home and recorded what was said in a spiral notebook. There was a lot of speculation, but no one really knew anything.”

  I asked Janet if other family members were working as diligently as she was to uncover the truth about her father.

  “I think my mother was too traumatized to pursue it, and keep in mind that this was the era before Vietnam when Americans were more trusting of their government. I remember one time at my Uncle Bill’s house, my cousin Debra Ann kept going on and on about Watergate. Uncle Bill couldn’t take it anymore and finally said, ‘Debbie, you’re sitting at my table, and if you keep talking about the president of the United States that way, I’m going to break your plate.’ That’s how people were back then.”

  “So why were you so persistent?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I was very tomboyish as a child. I didn’t play with dolls. I preferred to be out exploring with my dog. My dad called me his Little Lulu, based on the old comic-strip character, always getting into trouble. He also said I was a fighter, and I guess that’s part of it.”

  During college, Janet began visiting Miami’s Little Havana to track down anyone who had flown with her father.

  “How did you do that? I can’t imagine you just walked up and down the streets asking random strangers if they knew Pete Ray.”

  “That’s not far from the truth,” Janet said. “I’d go into coffeehouses and barbershops or talk with people playing dominos, and a lot of them were related to the Cubans who took part in the invasion. It was a very close community.”

  Janet eventually did find Brigade 2506 veterans, and they spoke very highly of her father, but the trips offered no concrete information, only rumors.

  Back in Alabama, Janet was gaining allies, including her father’s first cousin Tom Bailey, who was also a Birmingham News reporter; a historian named Peter Wyden; Alabama’s junior U.S. senator, John Sparkman; and Congressman John Buchanan. Buchanan and Sparkman lobbied the CIA to acknowledge in some capacity the heroism of Ray and his fellow Americans, and in 1977 the agency awarded the four airmen its highest honor, the Distinguished Intelligence Cross. Old habits die hard, however, and after presenting the medals, the CIA representatives told the families not to mention them to anyone. And they continued to refuse Janet’s request for their files on her father.

  Janet’s big break came on April 19, 1978, exactly seventeen years after her father disappeared. “I was living at the Hahn Air Base in Germany with my husband, an Air Force pilot, and I’ll never forget that moment,” Janet told me. “I had picked up our mail, and there was a large envelope from Peter Wyden that contained a black-and-white photograph of my father’s body that Peter had come across while doing research in Cuba.”

  “That must have been awful,” I said.

  “I had asked Peter to find whatever he could on my father’s death when he went down there, but yes, it was still a shock. I was in my car parked behind the post office, and when I opened the package and saw the picture I just started screaming at the top of my lungs. Fortunately, an F4 had just taken off from the base, and I don’t think anyone heard me.”

  Numerous details were still unclear; Janet didn’t know, for instance, if her father had died in a shoot-out with Castro’s soldiers after his plane went down or from the crash itself, but at a minimum she knew that he hadn’t been a prisoner of war.

  Armed with the photo, Janet redoubled her efforts to pressure Cuban and American officials to bring her father’s remains back to the United States. Through Tom Bailey, Janet was also learning more about the incident, and by 1979 a clearer picture of her father’s fate was coming into focus.

  Pete Ray had survived the crash landing on April 19, 1961, and quickly extricated himself from the smoking wreckage of his B-26. Cuban troops hunted Ray down within hours and executed him with a point-blank shot to the head. (Leo Baker was either killed in the crash or shot by Cuban troops. And because of his olive skin, the soldiers assumed he was Cuban and tossed him into a pit with other dead rebels.) Ray’s body was taken to a Havana morgue, where it was put on ice. For eighteen years Castro kept Ray’s corpse in cold storage and proudly displayed it like a war trophy to other communist leaders when they visited Cuba.

  Finally, in the winter of 1979, the Cuban government agreed to relinquish Ray’s body.

  “After all those years, why do you think Castro decided to return your father?” I asked Janet.

  “I don’t know for certain, but I was told he wanted to earn brownie points with the Carter administration,” Janet said. “He wasn’t doing it to be nice. There was an ulterior motive.”

  On December 8, 1979, Pete Ray was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery by the Alabama Air National Guard with full military honors, and the Air Force provided a flyover in Ray’s memory. He now rests on a small hill overlooking the airport that had played such a central role in his life. Janet had informed me ahead of time that her father’s headstone contains two errors. Under his name, he’s identified as a “1ST LT US ARMY,” when he was really a captain, and the actual date of his death was April 19, 1961, not April 18, as the marker states.

  “I think my grandmother was so distraught when she filled out the paperwork that she was off by a day,” Janet told me.

  Daniel Boone comes to mind, and I asked Janet if there was any chance whatsoever that the Cubans had intentionally or mistakenly sent back the wrong body.

  “No,” she said. “Because of the condition he was in and the fact that he’d been shot in the head, the coroner discouraged me from looking at him, but I was adamant. I knew I wouldn’t have believed he was really home until I saw him myself, and it was definitely my dad.” The FBI also confirmed his identity using dental records and fingerprints.

  Before Pete Ray was buried, Janet slipped a five-page handwritten letter into his uniform, telling her father how proud of him she was.

  “Giving him a real funeral helped us to grieve properly,” Janet said. “I also came to know him as a person through this whole process, and I just wanted to bring him home with honor.”

  Since there’s no chance of ever retrieving the remains of Leo Baker, who was dumpe
d in an unmarked mass grave, or of Shamburger and Gray, the two airmen lost at sea, Pete Ray is the only American killed at the Bay of Pigs whose body has been recovered, or ever will be.

  I asked Janet, who now lives in Miami, if she’s ever been to Cuba, and she told me she had no interest in going until the country was liberated from communism.

  “Do you hold any ill will toward Cuba because of what Castro’s regime did to your father?”

  “I think I was actually angrier at our government,” Janet said. “They led these men into harm’s way and then turned their back on them.”

  There was, however, one final insult from Castro that rankles Janet to this day. Before releasing her father’s body, the Cuban government (unsuccessfully) tried to bill the Ray family $36,000—for eighteen years and eight months of “refrigeration” costs.

  HART ISLAND

  During the last year of the War, I became aware from letters received from various parts of the country, that a very large number of our soldiers had disappeared from view without leaving behind them any visible trace or record.…

  The heart-broken friends appealed to me for help, and by the aid of surviving comrades, I gained intelligence of the fate of nearly one half the number of [80,000] soldiers.… [These were men] who fell in the stern path of duty on the lonely picket line, perhaps, or [were] wounded, and left in some tangled ravine to perish alone, under the waters in some dark night, or, crazed with fever, to lie in some tent or hut, or by the wayside, unknowing and unknown, with none to tell his fate.

  —From the personal papers of Civil War nurse Clara Barton

  “THIS CAN BE a heavy experience,” Melinda Hunt advises me as we’re heading up the FDR Drive toward City Island in the Bronx. From there we’re renting a boat and venturing out to see Hart Island, the 101-acre cemetery where New York disposes of its unclaimed dead. “Even if you don’t have a personal connection to anyone buried there,” Melinda says, “it can still be emotional.”