OPERATION ZAPATA (Bay of Pigs, Cuba, 1961)
When Fidel Castro took power in Cuba by overthrowing the previous dictator, Fulgencio Batista, he was hailed as a liberator by the Cuban people themselves and became a hero to the American people as well. However, Castro soon took actions inimical to American interests and aligned his country publicly with the Soviet Union. The US public and government were gravely concerned about the creation of a communist state and member of the Soviet Bloc only seventy miles from its southern shores.
Eisenhower considered John Kennedy too young and inexperienced to be a serious presidential candidate (He referred to Kennedy as "the boy" and "young whippersnapper.") and resented the money and all the political manipulation that made him one. During the campaign he was incensed with Kennedy's claim that his administration was responsible for a missile gap that Eisenhower knew "damn well" didn't exist. When Kennedy won the 1960 election, Eisenhower considered it his own greatest defeat. As press reporters' adulation of the new president-elect grew, so did Eisenhower's dislike. "We have a new genius in our midst who is incapable of making any mistakes and therefore deserving of no criticism whatsoever," he once remarked with undisguised sarcasm.
On March 17, 1960, President Eisenhower quietly authorized the CIA to organize, train, and equip Cuban refugees as a guerrilla force to overthrow Castro. In 1960, after Kennedy got elected, Eisenhower saw that he was briefed on the upcoming Bay of Pigs operation. The Central Intelligence Agency planned a "black world" operation to land anti-Castro Cubans on a remote beach. On January 2, 1961, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba.
A period of increased tension followed. It was marked by an exchange of bitter statements by the new US President, John F. Kennedy, and the Cuban Premier. Castro charged CIA complicity in counterrevolutionary activity against his Government and publicly predicted an imminent US invasion.
In the first months of the Kennedy administration a crisis arose over the final planning and launching of the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Shortly after taking office, President Kennedy approved the CIA's plan, inherited from the Eisenhower administration, to invade Cuba and oust Fidel Castro's Communist government. The United States launched the invasion three months into Kennedy's administration.
Between 15 and 19 April 1961 the administration supported the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba designed to overthrow Castro. Over 1,400 Cuban exiles, trained and equipped by the CIA, landed on Cuba's coast without air cover. The success of the invasion depended on a large uprising against Fidel Castro. However, the CIA had underestimated Castro's military strength and his popular support. Executed by anti-Castro Cuban refugees armed and trained by the CIA, the invasion was a debacle almost from the beginning. It was predicated on an assumption that the Cuban people would rise up to welcome the invaders and when that proved to be false, the attack could not succeed. All of the exiles were captured or killed by the Cuban armed forces within three days.
On President Kennedy's orders, no US military personnel actually fought on Cuban soil, but US sponsorship of the landing was readily apparent. President Kennedy publicly acknowledged "sole responsibility" for the US role in the abortive invasion.
The exiles were defeated by Fidel Castro's forces after President John F. Kennedy declined to provide air cover or military backup. Even the air cover for "Operation Phoenix" was to be flown by Cubans. The CIA obtained Douglas B-26s from the desert "boneyard" in Arizona and set up a training base deep in the Peten Jungle of Guatemala. Since the Alabama ANG at Birmingham had been the last unit to fly the plane, the CIA recruited everyone there from firefighters to flight surgeons. Col Joe Shannon was sent to Guatemala in January 1961 to train the pilots. They were all Cuban defectors who had flown for Cubana Airlines or in the Cuban Air Force. Later, as the actual invasion grew into a political and military fiasco, Shannon and three other Americans were given permission to fly, but it was too late.
Early in the morning of 19 April 1961, 2506 Brigade troops, having landed with CIA support, were in a desperate situation. Pleas for help finally persuaded the CIA to allow American "advisors" to fly a combat mission. Joe Shannon and three other members of the Alabama ANG took off in two Cuban-marked B-26s and headed for the island's south coast. Making landfall at dawn after a 3-hour flight, between Giron and Cienfuegos, they turned west along the coast at full throttle and 200 feet above the sand. Suddenly, a Cuban Lockheed T-33 fighter attacked them. As his wingman crashed into the sea, Shannon instinctively pushed the throttles and prop controls full forward, heading downward until his propellers were nearly "dipping into the water."
A B-26 bomber crew crashed in Nicaragua in 1961. The two-man civilian crew was supporting Bay of Pigs-related operations. The bomber pilot and navigator died when they crashed April 19 in a remote area near the Bocay River in Nicaragua. The 27-year-old exiles were identified as pilot Crispin Garcia Fernandez of Havana and navigator Juan de Mata "Nabel" Gonzalez Romero of Las Vallas, Cuba.
American backing of the invasion was a great embarrassment both to Kennedy personally and to his administration. It damaged US relations with foreign nations enormously, and made the communist world look all the more invincible.
The audio tapes made in the Oval Office during the Cuban missile crisis have an interesting exchange between President Kennedy and Maxwell Taylor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and President Kennedy is regretting not having used the Bay of Pigs or similar episodes early in his administration to depose Castro, because at that point he was facing the prospect of dealing with a nuclear Castro as the Soviet missiles were moving in.
The Kennedy Administration suffered a devastating blow in the Cold War that contributed to the sense that action had to be taken. The failure of the invasion led to a searching reexamination of Cuba policy. In addition, President Kennedy established a committee under former Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell Taylor and Attorney General Robert Kennedy to examine the causes of the defeat suffered at the Bay of Pigs. President Kennedy, in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs debacle, said it taught him that "generals should be kept on tap, not on top."
The Department of State's apparent failure effectively to coordinate the administration's response to the Bay of Pigs crisis in early 1961 led to a series of measures aimed at providing the President with better independent advice from the government. It also sparked the NSC process to reenter the arena of monitoring the implementation of policy. The most important step in this direction was the establishment of the Situation Room in the White House in 1962.
The drive for consensus among Kennedy's advisors was believed to have precluded crucial information from being discussed, and has been blamed for the invasion's failure. The flawed decision of President Kennedy and his advisors to authorize the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba is the example commonly used to illustrate the phenomenon of groupthink. Group-think is characterized by excessive efforts to reach agreement, and a strong need for group consensus that can override the group's ability to make the most appropriate decision. Symptoms of groupthink include group members' tendency to (i) believe the group to be more invulnerable than it is; (ii) rationalize the group's decisions and believe stereotypes about its enemies; and (iii) feel increasing pressure to agree with others in the group).
President Kennedy said that if the press had printed what it knew beforehand about the Bay of Pigs invasion plans, that catastrophe in Cuba could have been avoided.
In the spring of 1960, Lloyd A. Free of the Institute for International Social Research at Princeton (no friend of the new regime, but a social scientist, withal) had carried out an extensive public opinion survey in Cuba. Polling techniques now common to American politics were already quite developed by scholars such as Free and his associate Hadley Cantril; in this case the technique was the "Self-Anchoring Striving Scale." One thousand Cubans were asked to rank their well-being at that time, five years previously, and five years hence. Cubans reported they were hugely optimistic about the future, and mostly dreaded the return of the previous dictator Fulgencio Batista. They would learn better, as peoples the world over would do as the earlier excitements of revolution gave way to Leninist terror and intimidation. But they had not learned yet. Free’s report ended on an unambiguous note: Cubans "are unlikely to shift their present overwhelming allegiance to Fidel Castro."
Cantril later recalled: "This study on Cuba showed unequivocally not only that the great majority of Cubans supported Castro, but that any hope of stimulating action against him or exploiting a powerful opposition in connection with the United States invasion of 1961 was completely chimerical, no matter what Cuban exiles said or felt about the situation, and that the fiasco and its aftermath, in which the United States became involved, was predictable."
These data were public, and were dutifully provided to United States Government agencies. (The Cuban Embassy sent for ten copies.) It is difficult not to think that the information in the public opinion survey might have had greater impact had it been classified. In a culture of secrecy, that which is not secret is easily disregarded or dismissed.
While the Bay of Pigs invasion was never mentioned explicitly as a reason for stepping up US efforts in space, the international situation certainly played a role as Kennedy scrambled to recover a measure of national dignity. Science Advisor Jerome Wiesner reflected, "I don't think anyone can measure it, but I'm sure it [the invasion] had an impact. I think the President felt some pressure to get something else in the foreground." T. Keith Glennan, NASA Administrator under Eisenhower, immediately linked the invasion and the Gagarin flight together as the seminal events leading to Kennedy's announcement of the Apollo decision. He confided in his diary that "In the aftermath of that [Bay of Pigs] fiasco, and because of the successful orbiting of astronauts by the Soviet Union, it is my opinion that Mr. Kennedy asked for a reevaluation of the nation's space program."
On June 17, 1972, five men employed by the Committee to Re-elect the President (later known as CREEP) were arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel to plant listening devices in the phones and steal campaign strategy documents. Two former White House aides working for CREEP, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were also arrested. Liddy was a former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent, and Hunt was the Central Intelligence Agency agent responsible for planning the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. The seven Watergate burglars were indicted on September 15, 1972. In November 1972, President Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern in a landslide.
