Live by the Sword

by Gus Russo

  In order to protect the secrecy of the planning and safety of thousands of men and women involved in the operation, I had no choice but to take a completely opposite stand. . . the most uncomfortable and ironic duty I have had to perform in any political campaign.

  Recent disclosures indicate that Nixon was correct that JFK had inside information about the planned invasion of Cuba. Not only was Kennedy said to have secretly met with the leader of the invasion brigade (Manuel Artime) in July of 1960, as will be seen later to be the case, but it is now known that Kennedy had still another source for the sensitive intelligence.

  John Patterson, then Democratic governor of Alabama, had been told of the Cuban operation in October of 1960 by his friend George R. “Reid” Doster, a National Guard instructor assigned to train the invaders. Patterson, a Kennedy campaigner, immediately flew to New York and briefed Kennedy—before the final TV debate with Nixon. (Patterson said precisely this in his oral history for the Kennedy Library, only to find it censored by library officials.)39

  While the campaigning continued, the Bay of Pigs invaders were hard at work trying to coalesce a 1,500 man force in training camps in Guatemala. The invaders were assigned consecutive badge numbers, which, oddly, started with the number 2,500. According to one Brigade member, “We were trying to appear larger than we were.” When Brigade member 2506 (Carlos Santana) fell to his death during training, CIA coordinator Barney Hidalgo suggested, “We should name the force after him, as a memorial.”40 Thus was born the force known forever after as “Brigade 2506.”

  Prescriptions for Disaster

  John F. Kennedy came to the White House with promises to toughen Eisenhower’s supposedly weak commitment to getting rid of Castro—and “when you become an advocate of a point of view,” as Goodwin would put it in retrospect, “you tend to believe it. I think everybody got to feel that way about Castro. And Kennedy’s desire to prove himself in foreign policy by getting Cuba back was important.”

  But as the newly-elected president took the reins of power, the invasion plans, already beset with problems, suffered from the expected inadequacies of a young, inexperienced Chief Executive, and the predictable degree of chaos any changing-of-the guard brings with it. The key problem, however, may have been Kennedy’s own inattention to the whole Cuban issue after it served his electioneering purpose. Kennedy aide Harris Wofford later wrote:

  Kennedy paid Cuba little heed in February [1961]. His trouble spot that month was Laos, where the Communist-led Pathet Lao continued to do well. There was, therefore, a vacuum of inattention in which the landing scheme moved into its final phase, and in that silence all parties to the operation acted out a perfect scenario of how to march, with all good will and intelligence, straight into a disaster.41

  Kennedy, however, was acutely concerned with the potential for negative political fallout, and demanded that a new plan, providing him deniability, be prepared in only four days. Calling the proposed plan “too noisy,” he wanted it substituted for a “less spectacular” one that would remove all administration fingerprints.

  One such plan involved a newly-formed exile umbrella organization called the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC). The CRC was a wing of the Frente Revolutionario Democratico (FRD), formed in May 1960 by prominent Cuban expatriates such as Dr. Manuel Artime and Dr. Aureliano Sanchez Arango. After its organization in Mexico, the FRD created the CRC to be its official liaison to Washington. The Kennedy White House noted: “The United States regards the Revolutionary Council as the central point of contact in its dealings with the Cuban exile and underground activity.” The memo added that the CRC would be allocated one million dollars per year, and “retain contact with the White House.”42 This plan also heralded both Washington’s and the Kennedys’ liaisons with Cubans in New Orleans, where the CRC maintained a key outpost.43

  Exile leader and former Castro supporter Nino Diaz was assigned by his CIA controllers to lead a mission so sensitive that certain aspects were withheld from Diaz himself. Diaz was sent to New Orleans to command a rust-bucket fishing boat called the Santa Ana, which had been leased by the CIA for $7,000 a month. “They gave me this beat-up old ship. Nothing worked on it,” recalls Diaz.44 Although he was told his mission was to “create a front in the Oriente province [of Cuba],” Diaz is now convinced “this was a lie.” He and his men were told to dress in Cuban Army uniforms and fly the flag of Costa Rica.

  The Santa Ana mission was prepared in New Orleans, with the assistance of the Cuban Revolutionary Council’s delegate Sergio Arcadia Smith. That effort, Arcadia says, was coordinated directly by Bobby Kennedy. It’s now known that Diaz’s mission was personally approved by the President.45 The provocation gambit was originally proposed to the President by his friend Senator George Smathers of Florida in the weeks prior to the attack.46

  Historically, Diaz’ mission has been portrayed as a diversionary tactic, drawing Castro’s firepower away from the Bay of Pigs landing site towards the Santa Ana, which would arrive at Oriente. However, the mission was cancelled at the last moment when Diaz, by U.S. accounts, got “cold feet.”47

  Recent testimony suggests that the ploy may have had a more sinister agenda. A CIA agent testified in 1978 that Diaz’ exiles, dressed like Castro’s troops, were to appear as a “tripwire”—a fake attack against the U.S. naval forces at Guantanamo that would justify the Bay of Pigs invasion.48

  “We were lied to,” says Diaz. “We weren’t even told about the landing at the Bay of Pigs until we were near our landing site. The CIA knew Castro’s troops were waiting for us—we were to be sacrificed.”49

  The Invasion Plan

  In its initial formulation, the invasion actually made some sense: a daylight beach landing at Trinidad, at the foot of the Escambray Mountains. Because of the cover provided by U.S. air strikes, the exiles would, at the very least, enter Cuba, escape to the mountains, and encourage the locals to initiate guerrilla warfare, that, over time, might overthrow the Castro government.

  For three decades, the Marine in charge of planning the invasion has remained silent about the Bay of Pigs operation. Recently, however, Colonel Jack Hawkins described the initial thinking:

  The Trinidad Plan was actually a good plan. The force could have been inserted into the mountains very easily where they could have remained for a very long time. We had agents in Trinidad who reported that the people there were very pro-guerrilla and anti-Castro. Fundamental to it all was—we were going to destroy Castro’s Air Force by using 40 sorties of B-26’s. We met every week for briefings at the White House. I was appalled at what I was hearing. Bissell was briefing the President, not [Joint Chiefs Chairman] Lemnitzer or the other military present. They were all afraid of [Defense Secretary] McNamara. One month before the invasion, [Secretary of State] Rusk, with Kennedy’s agreement, vetoed the Trinidad landing as “too noisy.” Bissell and McNamara stood silent. Bissell gave us four days to arrive at a new plan. Rusk demanded a landing near an airstrip. The only place that fit that requirement was the Bay of Pigs. We had almost no sleep for the four days. When I gave Bissell the plan, I said, “We can land there, but we can’t hold it long. It’s just not suitable.” The final plan provided for 40 [air] sorties.50

  Now, after eight months of planning, and with only weeks to go, the invasion evolved into a night-time amphibious assault landing at a swamp known as the Bay of Pigs. There were only two problems with this approach: first, there was no escape route from the Bay to the Escambray Mountains; and second, the exiles had no training in this newly-revised tactic. In February 1961, the official report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the invasion planning gave a strong clue as to how the events would transpire. “The amphibious element of the [invasion] force,” wrote Chairman Lemnitzer to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “has received no amphibious training and is not now scheduled to receive any prior to the operation. . . Against moderate, determined resistance, this plan will fail to provide adequate logistic support.”51

 
McNamara, however, remained silent about this memo in subsequent cabinet planning meetings. His failure to convey “the damning analysis in Lemnitzer’s report,” wrote Bissell, “is part of the pattern of incomplete interaction that continued throughout the period leading up to the actual invasion.”52 But, as will be seen, Bissell also withheld vital information—and from the President himself.

  The plan further suffered from the tight internal security placed on the operation. Knowledge of it was so tightly held that experts who should have been consulted were left completely out of the loop. Because he was unable to ask, Bissell never learned that his early reports of dissent in Castro’s regime were dreadfully overestimated. By February 1961, Castro had excoriated his political enemies, and enjoyed widespread popularity, but Bissell, Dulles, and others were out of touch.

  Furthermore, the internecine rivalry between the various Miami-based exile leaders should have been enough alone to scare off the U.S. planners. As Bissell himself later came to admit:

  The leaders of the Cuban exile community, centered in Miami, were in competition with one another for U.S. funds, supplies, and support. . . . It was disheartening to hear [radio] broadcasts by exile program managers who seemed more concerned with serving the political ambitions of Cubans in Miami than with the situation of those trapped on the island.53

  Kennedy Administration officials would never develop much respect for the Cuban exiles, whose apparent selfishness caused considerable infighting. Desmond FitzGerald, the CIA official later tabbed by the Kennedys to bring about Castro’s downfall, wrote his daughter Frances, “I have dealt with a fairly rich assortment of exiles in the past, but none can compare with the Cuban group for genuine stupidity and militant childishness. At times I feel sorry for Castro—a sculptor in silly putty.”54

  To make matters worse, the media, most notably the New York Times and the New Republic, leaked word that Cubans were training for an imminent invasion. When he read Tad Szulc’s New York Times article,” Anti-Castro Units Trained to Fight at Florida Bases,” JFK fumed, “Castro doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers.”

  In fact, Castro agents had already infiltrated every aspect of the Bay of Pigs operation. Former CIA executive assistant Lyman Kirkpatrick, Jr. wrote that, “the leaks about the operation from its very inception were horrendous.”55 Philip Bonsai, former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, recalled, “The nature of the activities and the number of people involved made concealment impossible. I assume that Castro’s intelligence service knew of the project within weeks, perhaps days, of the operation.”56

  Raphael “Chi Chi” Quintero, a Brigade leader at the camps, was one of the first to arrive at the training base. “We definitely had spies at the [Bay of Pigs] training camps [in Nicaragua],” he recently affirmed. One of the few who was there before Quintero was later found to be a Castro spy. “This man actually helped construct the camps,” says Quintero. “One month after the Bay of Pigs invasion, I secretly infiltrated to Cuba and saw this same man working in Castro’s security force.”57

  Captain Albert “Buck” Persons was one of the American pilots who flew in the invasion, as well as helping with the training in Nicaragua and Guatemala. He recalls:

  It would have been very easy for Castro to have infiltrated our camps. We had AWOLs all the time. He knew there was an invasion coming, and he had very good intelligence. Still, I believe we could have established a beachhead, if we had stayed with the original plan and landed at Trinidad. It was a city of 20,000 people who were known to be friendly with the Castro resistance in the nearby Escambray Mountains. But Kennedy changed the landing site because he wanted to disguise our participation in the invasion. It was insanity. Everyone would know in ten seconds that the U.S. was involved, no matter where we landed.58

  Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA’s Inspector General, wrote:

  [Castro] obviously knew about the [US.-sponsored] training camp in Guatemala. He was certain that some sort of major blow against his regime was in the making. . . As a result, Castro directed his security forces to round up all known or suspected members of the opposition. Nearly 100,000 were arrested and taken to detention camps all over the island. This was the first catastrophic blow to the Bay of Pigs operation, because here was the hard core of those who might have rallied to the support of the beachhead.59

  In 1961, Kirkpatrick conducted an internal CIA review of the operation, the only copy of which was withheld from public scrutiny for thirty-seven years. When finally released in 1998, the report stated one of its conclusions: “Such massive preparations could only be laid to the U.S. . . . Plausible denial was a pathetic illusion.”

  Rafael Nuñez, then serving as Castro’s Diplomatic Attaché in Costa Rica, recently recalled how in early 1961 he picked up one of Raul Castro’s counterintelligence chiefs, General Fabian Escalante, at the Costa Rican airport. “He told me that his main objective was to gather intelligence on the exile training camps,” Nuñez recalls. “He told me they were in training to invade Cuba near the Zapata Peninsula. When the Bay of Pigs occurred, Castro was waiting for them.”60

  Castro’s supporters were not at all amused by what they were learning. In late March 1961, barely nine weeks into the Kennedy presidency (and two weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion); the first of an unending series of anti-Kennedy threats emanating from Havana was apparently made. At the time, the President’s wife, Jackie, and three-year-old daughter, Caroline, were spending the Easter holiday at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Secret Service surveillance teams were closely monitoring a group of four Cubans living in Miami known to have close ties to pro-Castro activists in Havana. One of the Cubans was heard to remark, “We ought to abduct Caroline Kennedy to force the United States to stop interfering with Cuba’s Castro government.”

  The Secret Service, taking the threat very seriously, expected the group to attack the family while at St. Edward’s Catholic Church on Easter Sunday. To keep close tabs on the threatening Castroites, the agency used the intelligence network of the recently-formed anti-Castro group known as the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC). The subjects were watched around the clock, and the threat never materialized.61

  This assistance, combined with the CRC’s support for the Diaz mission, heralded the beginning of a long relationship between the Kennedy White House and CRC members. According to a Congressional investigation, the CRC had been formed to coordinate anti-Castro activities with the U.S. government. The report further conceded, “The new organization had direct access to President Kennedy and top White House aides.” The CRC went on to maintain a strong presence in New Orleans, where, in two years, the President’s future assassin would arrive.

  On April 9, 1961, eight days before the invasion, Castro appeared on Havana TV warning, “the extremely vigilant and highly-prepared Cuban people would repel any invasion attempt by the counter-revolutionaries now massing in Florida and Guatemala who are sponsored and financed by the United States.”62

  Col. Hawkins concluded the obvious:

  This thing was going to be an utter disaster. During the preceding months, Castro had a massive military buildup, drafting 200,000 militia. He had fifty tanks. So I went to see Jake [Esterline, the CIA coordinator]. Jake agreed with my assessment and said, “We have got to go to Bissell and get him to stop this thing.” The next day, Sunday, we went to him. He refused to call it off, and we both threatened to resign. To keep us on, Bissell promised to persuade the President to increase the airpower.63

  Thirty-four years later, Hawkins and Esterline would learn that this promise was a lie told to prevent their resignations. In 1995, when Bissell’s presidential briefing memos were released, it was learned that Bissell, before his confrontation with Hawkins and Esterline, had agreed with Kennedy to cut the air support.

  Not only were American coordinators wanting out of the invasion, but key Cuban leaders, such as FRD founder Aureliano Sanchez Arango, sensed imminent disaster, and would have nothing to d
o with it.

  But if JFK had any qualms about proceeding, he quickly dismissed them when he met with CIA Director Allen Dulles. The young president revered Dulles. Dulles would later painfully confess, “I confronted an inexperienced President Kennedy directly with the argument, ‘Do you want to be perceived as less anti-communist than the great Eisenhower?’”64 Dulles assumed that Kennedy would give adequate air support. When told the night of the invasion that Kennedy had reduced the air attacks, he said, “The President must be confused.”65

  Before approving the invasion, Kennedy briefed Senator William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Fulbright urged him to leave Castro alone because he and his regime were a “thorn in the flesh” but not a “dagger in the heart.”66 Fulbright considered the invasion illegal and immoral, as well as badly planned. Behind the invasion, he said, was fundamentally the same “hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union.”67 But as historian Bernard Weisberger said, Kennedy’s position by this time was “frozen.”

  Kennedy told aide Ted Sorenson, “I know everybody is grabbing their nuts on this,” but he wasn’t going to be “chicken.”68 Yet Kennedy’s macho stand was fatally weakened by his overriding concern for deniability. He insisted that the invasion should in no way be traced to his White House. But with the plan now revised to land the exiles in the suicidal, enclosed swamp, the CIA’s Dick Bissell concluded, “the long-touted guerilla option was as much a myth as plausible deniability.”69