The Bay of Pigs invasion met its
ignominious end on the afternoon of 19
April 1961. Three days after the force
of Cuban émigrés had hit the beach, the
CIA officers who planned the assault
gathered around a radio in their
Washington war room while the Cuban
Brigade's commander transmitted his last
signal. He had been pleading all day for
supplies and air cover, but nothing
could be done for him and his men. Now
he could see Fidel Castro's tanks
approaching. "I have nothing left to
fight with," he shouted. "Am taking to
the woods. I can't wait for you." Then
the radio went dead, leaving the drained
and horrified CIA men holding back
nausea.
1
Within days the postmortems began.
President Kennedy assigned Gen. Maxwell
Taylor to head the main inquiry into the
government's handling of the operation.
2 Director of Central
Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles asked
the CIA's Inspector General (IG), Lyman
B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., to conduct an
internal audit. A humiliated President
Kennedy did not wait for either report
before cleaning house at CIA. He
accepted resignations from both Dulles
and Deputy Director for Plans Richard
Bissell (although both stayed at their
posts until their successors were
selected a few months later).
Lyman Kirkpatrick subsequently
acknowledged that his Survey of the
Cuban Operation had angered the handful
of senior Agency officers permitted to
read it, particularly in the Directorate
for Plans (the Agency's clandestine
service and covert action arm, referred
to here as the DDP).
3 The IG's Survey elicited a
formal rejoinder from the DDP, written
by one of Bissell's aides who was
closely associated with all phases of
the project. These two lengthy briefs,
written when the memories and
documentation were fresh, were intended
to be seen by only a handful of
officials within the CIA. They shed
light on the ways in which the CIA
learned from both success and failure at
a milestone in the Cold War.
Did Kirkpatrick build a fair case
against the Bay of Pigs operation? If he
did, what can be inferred about the
rejection of his Survey by Dulles,
Bissell, and other Agency principals?
Historian Piero Gleijeses has noted that
the White House and the CIA were like
ships passing in the night during the
planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion;
they assumed they spoke the same
language with regard to Cuba, but they
actually were imprisoned by mutually
exclusive misconceptions about the
invasion's likely outcome. The Kennedy
administration believed the assault
brigade would be able to escape
destruction by melting into the
countryside to wage guerrilla warfare.
According to Gleijeses, CIA officials,
from Dulles on down to the branch chief
who ran the operation, professed this
same belief but tacitly assumed
President Kennedy would commit US troops
rather than let the Brigade be overrun.
4 A close reading of the IG's
Survey and the DDP's response supports
Gleijeses's thesis and hints that an
analogous misunderstanding within CIA
itself hampered planning for the
invasion and contributed to the
communications breakdown with the White
House.
Shooting the Messenger?
The Eisenhower administration and the
CIA had decided in late 1959 that Fidel
Castro was a tool of Communism and an
ally of the Soviet Union. Bissell
contended in February 1961 that popular
discontent with Castro's regime could be
galvanized into active resistance only
by an external shock. The spring of 1961
was seen as the last opportunity to
administer such a shock (without
actually committing US troops) before
Castro's military received more
shipments of Eastern Bloc weapons. A
CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles would
seize an isolated area along Cuba's
southern coast, allowing émigré
political leaders to return to the
island and offer the populace a
democratic alternative to Castro.
Assuming the émigré force gained control
of the air and consolidated its
beachhead, the Brigade's aircraft
(obsolescent but potent B-26 bombers
allegedly purchased on the black market)
would then negate the Cuban Army's
numerical superiority and demonstrate
Castro's impotence to the Cuban people.
Over the next few weeks, Cuba's populace
and military would finally mount an
active resistance to him, setting in
motion his eventual downfall. If worst
came to worst, however, the Brigade
could be evacuated by sea, and elements
might be able to "go guerrilla" in the
not-too-distant Escambray Mountains.
5 These assumptions proved
disastrously mistaken.
Allen Dulles had ordered Kirkpatrick
to investigate the failed invasion three
days after the Cuban Brigade
surrendered. Kirkpatrick subsequently
called the events surrounding the Bay of
Pigs affair one of the most painful
episodes of his long service with CIA.
6 He had been named IG by
Dulles in 1953 after being crippled by
polio. Although Kirkpatrick was rumored
to covet the job of Deputy Director for
Plans and to resent his bad luck, there
was no doubt about his competence and
concern for improving the Agency's
functioning. His judgments commanded
responsible consideration.
The IG's team of three investigators
quickly set to work, reviewing the
voluminous documentation and
interviewing approximately 125 CIA and
military officers associated with the
project, codenamed JMATE (originally
JMARC). Kirkpatrick himself played an
unusually active role in compiling and
evaluating records and interviews for
the study. After six months of research
and drafting, the IG Staff completed its
thick report and had it ready for
submission to DCI Dulles.
7
At this point, Kirkpatrick made a
serious tactical error. He set aside
Copy #1 of the Survey for DCI-designate
John A. McCone, rather than for Dulles,
and gave McCone his copy before he had
given copies to Dulles or Bissell.
8Both McCone and Dulles were
angered by this breach of protocol.
Kirkpatrick's faux pas naturally
stimulated gossip about his motives. The
IG Survey was critical of the DDP and
would not have been enthusiastically
received in any event, but the IG's
premature presentation of the Survey to
McCone had piled insult on injury. Soon
after taking office, McCone allowed
Bissell to prepare a formal rebuttal to
the IG.
9
Bissell's assistant, C. Tracy Barnes,
drafted the DDP's response, completing
it in January 1962. Barnes was well
qualified to present the DDP's case,
although hardly an objective observer.
One of the Directorate's two Assistant
Deputy Directors (Richard Helms was the
other), Barnes had set aside his usual
duties for a year to concentrate on the
Cuban operation. Although he rarely
imposed operational direction himself,
he often reviewed and approved decisions
in Bissell's name.
10 Barnes thus had gained a
comprehensive view of (and significant
responsibility for) the project,
obtaining wide knowledge of its details
as well as working with many of the
policymakers involved.
The most notable feature of the IG's
Survey of the Bay of Pigs operation is
that it says little about the Bay of
Pigs invasion per se. Kirkpatrick later
insisted that Dulles had ordered him to
"stay out of national policy
decisions"--that is, to restrict his
probe to the performance of the CIA and
not to pass judgment on decisions taken
by higher authority.
11 Whatever Dulles's orders
had been, the Survey stated on its first
page that its purpose was "to evaluate
selected aspects of the Agency's
performance" in the attempt to overthrow
Castro, and that those aspects did not
include the operation's "purely military
phase." The Taylor report had already
evaluated the US Government's conduct of
the entire operation. Kirkpatrick's
Survey did not presume to judge the
actions of other departments, let alone
those of higher authority, and thus
concentrated on the phases of the
operation that CIA controlled. Nor did
the Survey examine the totality of CIA
activities within Cuba or directed
against it from abroad; among other
things, Kirkpatrick did not examine in
depth the functioning of the Havana
station or the Santiago base, the
development of foreign intelligence
assets and liaison contacts, Division
D's technical collection programs, or
counter-intelligence work against the
Cuban services.
The inspectors concluded that the
operation's unorthodox command structure
ensured that vital information would not
be properly disseminated and that
decisionmakers would entangle themselves
in minutiae. Operational details fell to
Branch 4 (Cuba) of the DDP's Western
Hemisphere Division (WH), but Jacob
Esterline, chief of Branch 4, reported
to DDP Bissell and Tracy Barnes rather
than to the chief of WH, J.C. King
(although King was regularly informed
and often consulted). To confuse matters
still further, Branch 4 had no direct
control over the Brigade's aircraft,
which were managed by a separate DDP
division that also took some orders
directly from Deputy Director of Central
Intelligence (DDCI) Charles P. Cabell, a
US Air Force general who liked to keep
his hand in the planning of airdrops and
other missions. These odd command
relationships were accompanied by
similarly ad hoc arrangements in other
phases of the operation.
12
Kirkpatrick's inspectors also
criticized Branch 4's mishandling of
intelligence on the political resilience
and growing military capabilities of the
Castro regime. Although the branch
already had its own Foreign Intelligence
Section, it nonetheless established a
separate "G-2" unit subordinate to its
Paramilitary Section, which planned the
actual invasion. This decision was "a
grave error," in the IG's opinion,
because it allowed the project's most
important analysts to become so
engrossed in the invasion planning that
their objectivity and judgment suffered.
Even worse, there was no one to audit
the "G-2's" analyses: Branch 4's Foreign
Intelligence Section could not see all
the available sources and was not privy
to the invasion planning. These
circumstances:
undoubtedly had a strong
influence on the process by which
[Branch 4] arrived at the conclusion
that the landing of the strike force
could and would trigger an uprising
among the Cuban populace. This
conclusion, in turn, became an
essential element in the decision to
proceed with the operation, as it
took the place of the original
concept, no longer maintainable,
that the invasion was to be
undertaken in support of existing
and effective guerrilla forces. 13
The IG Survey also criticized CIA
Headquarters' micromanagement of the
Agency effort to bolster the indigenous
"guerrilla forces" operating in Cuba in
the months before the Bay of Pigs
invasion. The CIA's air supply effort
accomplished little; the Agency's
maritime supply operation looked no
better. CIA efforts to train and
infiltrate rebel leaders wasted months
and produced no appreciable results. The
air operation in particular suffered
under the personal attentions of DDCI
Cabell. In one especially embarrassing
foul-up, agents in Cuba requested a drop
of not more than 1,500 pounds of
weapons and sabotage equipment; thanks
to Cabell, they received 1,500 pounds of
other unrequested materiel, plus 800
pounds of rice, 800 pounds of beans, and
160 pounds of lard!
14
Senior Agency officials often gave
short shrift to the operation in the
press of daily business, and more-junior
officers working full-time on it had too
little authority and no view of the full
picture. The project staff was
shorthanded from the beginning despite
its rapid expansion (the work to be done
expanded even more rapidly), and its
managers did not insist that DCI Dulles
honor his promise to put the CIA's best
talent on the effort. Finally, the
Agency's plans were left behind by its
assumptions and never caught up. The CIA
kept building its Cuba project ever
bigger as the likelihood of popular
resistance to Castro faded in the
distance. In the autumn of 1960, Agency
officers envisioned a strike force to
assist the failing rebellion; by the
following spring, it had become clear
that there was no more rebellion. The
only solution was to create a rebellion
by shocking the Cuban people.
15 In the end, the shock was
too ephemeral to damage the Castro
regime, let alone threaten its survival.
But no one with significant authority
seemed to understand this dilemma, and
no one at the lower levels who grasped
it could do much about it.
The IG Survey suggested that the
Agency's principals--Bissell in
particular--had been derelict in their
duty to advise the White House of the
growing possibility of disaster. "When
the project became known to every
newspaper reader, the Agency should have
informed higher authority that it was no
longer operating within its charter."
The DDP [Bissell], "a civilian without
military experience, and the DDCI, an
Air Force general, did not follow the
advice of the project's paramilitary
chief, a specialist in amphibious
operations," to insist that Kennedy
revoke his cancellation of the D-Day
airstrike. "And the President made this
vital, last-minute decision [to cancel]
without direct contact with the military
chiefs of the invasion operation." Faced
with a choice between "retreat without
honor and a gamble between ignominious
defeat and dubious victory," states the
IG Survey, "the Agency chose to gamble"
and accommodated its plans to whatever
restrictions were imposed by the White
House.
16
The IG Survey ended with a brief set
of conclusions and recommendations.
Kirkpatrick's team believed the CIA had
failed to notice that the project had
progressed beyond the Agency's
capabilities and responsibility:
The Agency became so wrapped up
in the military operation that it
failed to appraise the chances of
success realistically. Furthermore,
it failed to keep the national
policymakers adequately and
realistically informed of the
conditions considered essential for
success.
In addition, the Agency had misused
some of its Cuban partners, failed to
build resistance to Castro "under rather
favorable conditions," and neglected
crucial information on Castro's
strength.
17
Kirkpatrick's team had produced a
detailed but flawed appraisal of the
Agency's performance in the Bay of Pigs
operation. The Survey's rambling
argument obscured some of its more
important insights. For example, the
Survey did not explicitly conclude that
the CIA's allegedly bungled effort to
foster an anti-Castro insurgency helped
ensure that popular resistance to the
regime would collapse by early 1961--and
that an invasion would be the only
option left for Agency planners. The IG
Survey also missed other opportunities
to strengthen the logic behind its
conclusions. Important judgments were
scattered almost randomly across a
haphazard overall structure, which,
combined with the internal
disorganization of certain sections,
surely left readers wondering how some
of the evidence collected by the IG's
staff supported the Survey's key
judgments. These weaknesses in the
Survey gave its opponents easy targets.
Tracy Barnes responded to the survey
by attacking its assumption that the
invasion was doomed from the start. More
clearly written (although no better
organized) than the Survey, Barnes's
lengthy analysis insisted that JMATE was
not given a real chance to succeed.
Instead of proving that the plan was
irredeemably flawed, Barnes argued, the
Survey had busied itself with
highlighting trivial mistakes and
raising false issues in an effort to
show that the Agency alone was
responsible for the disaster.
Arguing that defeat on the beach was
by no means foreordained, Barnes
suggested that any serious inquiry would
have looked at what actually happened
instead of judging that Castro would
have won anyway. Once that questionable
hypothesis was set aside, said Barnes,
it then became clear that all the
problems encountered before the invasion
had not mattered much because, despite
all these obstacles, the Cuban Brigade
had actually been trained and landed.
The pre-invasion setbacks had only
slowed the Brigade's preparations; they
did not diminish its fighting ability.
Alleged mistakes by CIA "were not in the
actual event responsible for the
military failure." The Brigade could not
hold its beachhead because its
ammunition was lost at sea to Castro's
T-33 jets--aircraft that the Agency had
planned to destroy but was not allowed
to attack at the critical moment.
18 CIA's error was not in
mishandling the Brigade but in
misperceiving Castro's ability to rally
his forces and crush the landing. Barnes
argued that Kirkpatrick had missed this
point:
It is impossible to say how grave
was [CIA's] error of appraisal since
the plan that was appraised was
modified by elimination of the D-Day
airstrike. Had the Cuban Air Force
been eliminated, all these estimates
might have been accurate instead of
underestimated.
Turning to the specifics of the IG
Survey, Barnes complained that the
Survey was little more than a list of
niggling and ultimately inconsequential
errors committed by the DDP. The
organization and staffing of the Bay of
Pigs operation had followed standard
practices, according to Barnes;
arrangements that the IG Survey had
criticized had both logic and custom to
recommend them, and it was not clear
that alternatives would have worked any
better. Barnes conceded that the
operation's security precautions,
logistic procedures, and training
efforts fell short of perfection, but he
argued nonetheless that they had been
done about as well as they could have
been.
Barnes's analysis seemed to make a
telling case against the IG Survey,
exposing every weakness and factual
error in the IG's effort. Nevertheless,
he had begged as many questions as he
answered. His analysis offered almost no
concessions to the IG's findings,
defending virtually everything done by
the DDP--even the infamous "rice and
beans" supply drop mentioned earlier.
19 It sometimes seemed as if
Barnes was describing a model operation.
Ultimately, however, the sheer magnitude
of the disaster thwarted Barnes's
efforts to shift blame away from the
Agency and forced him into the refuge of
inconsistency. Barnes seemed to want it
both ways. He defended the DDP against
charges of unorthodox practices by
citing the unique nature of the Cuban
operation, in which standard procedures
did not always suffice. At the same
time, Barnes disputed Kirkpatrick's
insinuations of complacency at the top
by asserting that the Bay of Pigs
operation was an ordinary project in
many respects and that the Agency's
principals did not need to do much
beyond the ordinary call of duty.
The fundamental dispute between
Kirkpatrick and Barnes, however, was
over the operational plan itself. Was it
a good one gone awry (Barnes's view), or
a wild gamble that never should have
been tried (Kirkpatrick's)? In taking
this contrary view, the IG Survey
implicitly supported the Taylor
commission's speculative judgment that
the Cuban Brigade was too small to have
maintained its foothold, even with
proper air support. CIA planners knew
that the 1,500-man Brigade could face as
many as 13,500 well-armed troops of
Castro's regular army within 12 hours of
its landing and would also face several
thousand militia troops, albeit of
questionable loyalty and fighting
prowess.
20 Both Taylor and Kirkpatrick
concluded that the Brigade could not
have held its 40-mile-wide
beachhead--even with air
superiority--much longer than it
actually did.
The IG Survey's argument and
conclusions hinged on the assumption
that the Brigade was simply too weak to
hold its wide beachhead--a point both
obvious and infuriating to Barnes and
the DDP. Kirkpatrick had indeed analyzed
the Agency's performance apart from the
larger context of policy decisions made
in Washington on the eve of the
invasion. If the invasion had been
doomed from the outset, Kirkpatrick
implied, then its planners in the Agency
should not delude themselves with the
excuse that President Kennedy's
last-minute cancellation of key
airstrikes had wrecked the operation.
Kirkpatrick dismissed this alibi,
arguing that such logic begged the
question of why the project had so
little margin for error that it could be
spoiled by one hasty decision. The CIA's
mishandling of the operation from the
beginning had produced "pressures and
distortions" and inattention to the
developing dangers--leading to grave
errors of judgment and finally to
disaster.
21
In the end, Kirkpatrick and Barnes
were talking past each other. Barnes was
correct in saying that CIA could not be
judged in isolation from the
motivations, anxieties, and
misapprehensions affecting policymakers
in the White House and other agencies.
On the other hand, Kirkpatrick was
correct in arguing that CIA should be
judged on its mediocre performance in
those areas that it ran. Both assertions
were true, but they did not fully grasp
what had happened at the Bay of Pigs.
A Missing Assumption
Piero Gleijeses's recent analysis
suggests a way beyond this impasse. The
basic error in the US Government's
planning, according to Gleijeses, was
the lack of any real effort to outline
and assess the consequences that would
follow from a failure by the Brigade to
hold its lodgment. CIA bears primary
responsibility for this omission. The
Agency's principals accepted two general
assumptions: that Castro was too weak to
crush the invaders, and that President
Kennedy would land the Marines and
finish Castro once and for all if it
seemed the Brigade was doomed. Beyond
these two certainties, Bissell later
explained to Gleijeses, specific
planning was pointless because the
actual situation on the island would be
too fluid as Cuban politicians and Army
officers mounted their challenges to
Castro:
In most covert operations I know
of' [,] particularly those that have
a large paramilitary component, the
planning for later stages is very
incomplete. The outcome of the first
stages of the operation is usually
so difficult to predict (especially
in operations like PBSUCCESS [in
Guatemala] and the Bay of Pigs, in
which there is very heavy reliance
on psychological warfare) that it
wouldn't have seemed sensible to
have planned the later stages. One
can plan the first phases, but not
what happens next.
22
This is what indeed had happened in
Guatemala in 1954; Headquarters had all
but lost hope that the CIA-trained
invading force could overthrow the
leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz,
when suddenly the Guatemalan Army turned
on Arbenz, who stepped down and fled.
23 Experience had taught
Agency officials to expect a certain
amount of chaotic uncertainty after the
initial stages of any paramilitary
covert action, and not to try to hold
events to rigid plans and timetables.
There were no such rigidities built into
JMATE. "Arms were held in readiness for
30,000 Cubans who were expected to make
their way unarmed through the Castro
army and wade the swamps to rally to the
liberators," noted the IG Survey with a
hint of sarcasm. "Except for this, we
are unaware of any planning by the
Agency or by the US Government for this
success."
24
CIA had re-learned one lesson from
PBSUCCESS--coups are chaotic--but the
Guatemalan operation held another lesson
of equal or greater importance.
PBSUCCESS succeeded not because the
CIA-trained rebels won on the
battlefield or frightened Arbenz into
fleeing, but rather because the émigré
invasion of Guatemala, combined with the
Guatemalan Army's concern over Arbenz's
leftward drift and fear of US military
intervention, gave Army leaders a
pretext to force Arbenz from power.
25 CIA-orchestrated airstrikes
and ground maneuvers had played an
indirect role in changing the Army's
mood, to be sure, but Agency personnel
in Guatemala City itself had initiated
the crucial face-to-face meetings that
ultimately prodded the Army's indecisive
leadership to act, and had met
repeatedly with vacillating Guatemalan
colonels, insisting that they save
themselves and their nation by toppling
Arbenz before it was too late. This
"K-Program" to influence the Army had
proceeded with the support of US
Ambassador John Peurifoy.
26 What, then was the second
lesson from PBSUCCESS? Very simple:
divide and conquer. Get your adversaries
fighting among themselves.
JMATE had no "K-Program"--no
significant CIA or diplomatic effort to
persuade Cuban Army leaders to depose
Castro. It is difficult to tell exactly
how Havana station was dealing with the
Cuban military in 1960 because the
station cables have been destroyed.
27 Nevertheless, surviving
records from Headquarters, the Havana
station, and the Brigade training sites
suggest that CIA's principals did not
expect the Ambassador, the chief of
station, or any American in Havana to
influence the Cuban Army. The
possibility of turning the Army against
Castro looked too remote to consider. An
unsigned DDP analysis from February 1960
compared the earlier situation in
Guatemala with the contemporary scene in
Cuba:
Arbenz, a professional Army
officer, had left the armed forces
of Guatemala virtually
unchanged--and could not rely on
them in the crisis; Castro has
largely liquidated [deposed Cuban
dictator Fulgencio] Batista's armed
forces, filled key military posts
with his trusted followers, and
introduced a system of intense
ideological indoctrination.
28
Fidel Castro had drawn his own lesson
from the Guatemala operation, and he was
determined to leave no opening for the
sort of "chaos" that PBSUCCESS had
exploited.
CIA's Havana station had little
opportunity to persuade Castro's new
army in any event. The IG Survey noted
that the station reported creditably on
political, economic, and Communist Party
matters, but found that "its agents in
Cuba lacked access to high-level
military sources" when Headquarters
asked for more military reporting in
late 1960.
29 Castro's secret police kept
a close watch on station and Embassy
personnel, and in October 1960 they
caught three Technical Service Division
technicians redhanded as they were
installing listening devices at the New
China News Agency.
30 The slim opening for
mounting a "K-Program" in Havana slammed
shut in January 1961, when the outgoing
Eisenhower administration severed
relations and closed the American
Embassy. Thus JMATE proceeded without
one particular capability that had
proved vital to PBSUCCESS.
The possibility of personally
persuading Cuban Army officers had been
discounted in the earliest days of the
operational planning, but CIA had
another arrow in its quiver. Bissell
probably believed that Castro would be
dead at the hands of a CIA-sponsored
assassin before the Brigade ever hit the
beach. This expectation perhaps kept
Bissell and Barnes overoptimistic about
JMATE, but project officers themselves
were not privy to assassination plotting
and thus should have been looking for
some way of working within Cuba to
influence the loyalty and effectiveness
of Castro's military.
They did not have any such plan--a
fact made uncomfortably clear in
hindsight. Lacking direct contact with
Castro's army, project officers by March
1961 had convinced themselves that the
mere survival of the Brigade on Cuban
soil would suffice to turn much of the
military against Fidel. Grasping at
straws--and tacitly assuming that they
were trying to replicate the dynamic
that had operated in Guatemala seven
years earlier--the DDP analysis now
portrayed Castro's thorough
reorientation of Cuba's armed forces as
a source of weakness for Castro and
strength for the CIA:
It is our estimate that
[Castro's] forces, if confronted by
a trained opposition element with
modern weapons and a unified
command, will largely disintegrate.
It is significant that most of the
leaders of the anti-Castro insurgent
groups are Army officers who once
fought with Castro against Batista.
The Army has been systematically
purged, and most of it is now
serving in labor battalions or on
routine garrison duty. There is
great resentment in the Army at this
downgrading, the subordination to
the Militia, and the imprisonment of
such popular leaders as Huber Matos.
31
This estimate was wishful thinking
disguised as analysis. The Agency had
"no intelligence evidence" that there
was anyone in Cuba who "could have
furnished internal leadership for an
uprising in support of the invasion,"
noted the IG Survey.
32 JMATE thus coasted along on
the tacit assumption that something good
would happen within the Cuban Army, once
the battle was joined and the émigré
Brigade demonstrated its staying power.
(S)
At least one DDP leader had the
experience to have recognized this error
and the authority to have acted upon it.
Ironically, that man was A/DDP Tracy
Barnes, who had commanded the CIA's
LINCOLN task force at the climax of
PBSUCCESS, and who been Bissell's aide
for JMATE. Yet the long apologia for
JMATE that Barnes wrote in response to
the IG's Survey seemed deaf to the real
lesson of PBSUCCESS and the way in which
it was unlearned during the planning of
the Cuban operation.
Conclusion
The disconnect between what CIA
wanted Cuba's Army to do and how the
Army would be persuaded to do it was a
major flaw in the invasion planning.
This defect, in turn, distorted the
Agency's advice to President Kennedy. It
made Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell
overconfident, and thus contributed to
the disastrous misunderstanding explored
in Piero Gleijeses's recent analysis.
CIA officials did not spot this omission
before the Bay of Pigs, and the
controversy over the IG Survey obscured
the lesson and ensured that few Agency
principals would understand what had
gone wrong.
Forgetting history kept Barnes and
Kirkpatrick talking past one another in
their respective reviews. Barnes had
turned his apologia into an attack on
the IG Survey and the Inspector
General's motives. The DDP would have
served itself and CIA better by drafting
a careful analysis of the operation,
particularly the way in which the
assumptions contained in the JMATE plan
evolved on their own without conscious
revision and constant comparison with
current intelligence and policy
directives. Kirkpatrick, for his part,
had approved a rambling report and then
bungled its presentation to CIA's
principals, thus incurring lasting
resentments and helping to ensure his
report would not be heeded. Neither the
IG nor the DDP prepared clear insights
that could instruct Agency leaders and
planners. More attention to the need to
understand the Bay of Pigs invasion
might have prevented a generation of CIA
officers from believing that one more
airstrike would have saved the Brigade.
What difference did history make?
Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and the
DDP had forgotten one of the crucial
lessons of PBSUCCESS. As a result, CIA
convinced itself that 1,500 brave and
well-trained men--with no help from
American diplomats and intelligence
officers in Havana--could hold 40 miles
of beach against Castro's toughened
military long enough to spark a coup or
a general uprising. Dulles and Bissell
then sold this plan to the White House,
apparently believing that the details
did not matter much anyhow because
Castro would either be assassinated or
President Kennedy would send in the
Marines to rescue the Brigade. Fidel
Castro and his Soviet allies, however,
had studied the 1954 events in Guatemala
and resolved to avoid Arbenz's mistakes.
The result was the surrender on Blue
Beach on 19 April 1961, when the lessons
of history meant plenty for the men
trapped and taken prisoner.
NOTES
1 The scene at CIA
Headquarters is described by David Atlee
Phillips, an eyewitness, in The Night
Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service
(New York: Atheneum, 1977), p. 109. The
text of the final radio message appears
in the sanitized version of the Taylor
committee report to President Kennedy;
see Luis Aguilar, ed., Operation
Zapata: The "Ultrasensitive" Report and
Testimony of the Board of Inquiry on the
Bay of Pigs (Frederick, MD:
University Publications of America,
1981), p. 28.
2 General Taylor's
Board of Inquiry comprised himself,
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy,
Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke,
and DCI Allen Dulles.
3 Lyman B.
Kirkpatrick, Jr. The Real CIA
(New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 200.
Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold
Story (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1979), p. 324.
4 Piero Gleijeses,
"Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White
House and the Bay of Pigs," Journal
of Latin American Studies, 27
(February 1995), pp. 37-42.
5 Unsigned
memorandum [probably from Col. Jack
Hawkins, Western Hemisphere Division] to
Jacob Esterline, Chief, WH/4, "Policy
Decisions Required for Conduct of Strike
Operations Against Government of Cuba,"
4 January 1961, cited in Gleijeses,
"Ships in the Night," p. 17. For
Bissell's explanation of the need for a
"shock," see pp. 10-11.
7 CIA Inspector
General, "Inspector General's Survey of
the Cuban Operation," October 1961, CIA
History Staff files, HS/CSG-2640.
8 Lyman B.
Kirkpatrick, IG, to John A. McCone, DCI,
"Inspector General Survey of the Cuban
Operation (dated October 1961)," 16
February 1962, Executive Registry Job
80B01676R, box 20, folder 1.
9 Richard Bissell,
with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T.
Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior:
From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996),
p. 183.
10 Deputy Director
(Plans), "An Analysis of the Cuban
Operation," 18 January 1962, section VI,
p. 13. Barnes's official title was
Assistant Deputy Director (Plans) for
Psychological and Paramilitary Action.
20 The estimate of
the size of Castro's forces was provided
by Allen Dulles to the Taylor committee;
see Aguilar, ed., Operation Zapata,
p. 351. The Taylor committee's judgment
that the assault brigade was doomed--a
judgment from which Dulles and Admiral
Arleigh Burke dissented--can be found on
p. 29.
25 Piero
Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The
Guatemalan Revolution and the United
States, 1944-1954 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991), pp.
338-342.
26 Cullather,
PBSUCCESS, pp. 64-65, 75-77. See
also Western Hemisphere Division,
"K-Program," Annex E in "Debriefing
Reports, Project PBSUCCESS," no date
[1954], Latin America Division Job
79-01025A, box 167, folder 6.
27 DO Latin
America Division's inventory of retired
records indicates the cables to and from
Havana station from 1958 to 1961 were in
Job 65-00196R, which was destroyed in
1979. Havana station dispatches survived
in LA Division Job 78-02 163R, box 3; a
sampling of those from October 1960
showed no contacts with the Cuban Army.
28 Unsigned
memorandum, Directorate of Plans,
"Covert Action against Cuba," no date
[probably 24 or 25 February 1960], Latin
America Division Job 85-00106R, box 1,
folder 5.
30 David R.
McLean, "Western Hemisphere Division,
1946-1965," Clandestine Services History
Program [CSHP] study number 324,
December 1973, CIA History Staff, pp.
233-235. See also Nathan Nielsen, "Our
Men in Havana," Studies in
Intelligence, Vol. 32 (spring 1988),
p. 1.
31 Western
Hemisphere Division, "Anti-Castro
Resistance in Cuba: Actual and
Potential," 16 March 1961, Latin America
Division Job 82-00679R, box 3, folder 4.
Central
Intelligence Agency
