Untitled Document

18 April 2004

Bay of Pigs

Rebel troops opposed to Premier Fidel Castro landed before dawn on the swampy southern coast of Las Villas Province in Cuba on April 18, 1962.

There was no good reporting of the action. Intelligence was a cruder and more personal business in those days. After daylight was gone, Premier Castro issued a brief statement on Havana Radio. He said that his armed forces were fighting the enemy heroically.

The Rebels were shouting on the radios too, claiming that there were new landings and internal uprisings in Oriente and Pinar del Rio Provinces, but none of these reports could be confirmed.

They couldn't, because they did not happen. They call it an intelligence failure today, but we know that these things are really policy failures that result from not understanding the places the policy-makers want to go.

The U.S. sponsored-invasion had been thoroughly penetrated by Cuban intelligence, and the patriots of Fidel were waiting to meet the patriots of Batista as they waded up out of the waves.

This was another of the bi-partisan ideas that we are talking about so vigorously in front of the 9/11 Commission today. Richard Nixon had proposed the idea of opposing Castro as early as April 1959. He had a suspicion that the Charismatic former baseball pitcher was a communist.

President Eisenhower agreed. He approved a CIA Covert Action (CA) against the young regime shortly thereafter. It included three parts: the development of a credible alternate government offshore, a massive propaganda campaign, establishment of an extensive clandestine presence on the island and the establishment of a a paramilitary force for firect action.

There was supposed to be plausible deniability for the U.S. Government. Ike signed off on a Presidential Finding that the operation was in the interest of the national security. There was a wedge of $4,400,000 set aside for the commencement of the operation, nearly a million for initial housekeeping, a couple million for propaganda, paramilitary operations, one and a half million, and a quarter million for intelligence.

I think they shortchanged the intelligence collection piece. They always do. If they had done that part of the job right they might have understood what they were getting into. They might have realized that the only way it would have worked would have required a massive invasion with the full commitment of American Forces. And maybe not then.

It could have gone another way. There could have been massive support by the American military. In a desperate last-ditch effort to support the invasion, a limited air strike was approved on April 19, and four American pilots flying World War Two aircraft were shot down and killed.

Brigade commander "Pepe" Perez San Roman threw in the towel for Unit 2506 on April 20th. Two hundred of his men had been killed. He was abandoned and he had no options.

The invasion at the Bay of Pigs cost over $46 million, so with the housekeeping activities, the tab was right around fifty million.

After the mass trials of the 1,189 men captured they were sentenced to thirty years in the slammer. Most of them were ransomed a couple years later for a package of $53 million in food and medicine. So call the net cost for the operation something north of a hundred million.

I won't bore you with the inflation factors that enable us to translate then-dollars to now-dollars. B look at it this way: Ford introduced the Mustang on 18 April, two years later as a 1964 ½ model. They cost $2,500 new, and a quick look at a bare-bones Mustang coup today shows them at $18,000 with no options.

So, let's call the adventure, adjusted for inflation, as costing right around a billion dollars in today's terms. Not inconsequential, but this is a big country with a lot of capabilities.

But of course, that wasn't the end of the matter. The Kennedy's were bitter about the humiliation. They fired legendary CIA Director Allen W. Dulles, his Deputy Director Charles P. Cabell, and the one principally responsible for the operation, Deputy Director Richard Bissell.

Kennedy's obsession with Castro continued. Camelot was a competitive place. A plan code-named "Operation Mongoose" was championed by Bobby Kennedy, the goal of which was to eliminate Castro by any means necessary. His involvement in organizing and directing Mongoose became so intense that Richard Bissell said later "he might as well have been deputy director for plans for the operation."

The inspector general's report that followed the fiasco attributed it to ignorance, incompetence, and arrogance on the part of the CIA. There is plenty of blame to go around, though, and it is unfair to pin the whole thing on the boys from Langley. But it is worth considering as we try to figure out what to do about the Intelligence Community, and whether we need to unleash the dogs to hunt down our enemies.

It is a complex business, and in view of the gravity, seems to be something we want to have our best minds on.

Castro made one of those endless speeches in Havana on April 23, when the dust was settling on the invasion. He was pretty full of himself and he had good reason. "The United States has no right to meddle in our domestic affairs. We do not speak English and we do not chew gum. We have a different tradition, a different culture, our own way of thinking. We have no borders with anybody. Our frontier is the sea, very clearly defined."

Except for the airspace over it, of course. We continued to overfly the island, and it is a good thing we did.

The Bay of Pigs had convinced the bearded dictator that he need a trump card against the furious Kennedy's. He invited the Russians to install some medium range missiles with nuclear warheads to make the Yankees stay away for good.

I'm not saying he wouldn't have done it anyway, even without the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose. I think the man is a brutal tyrant, was then and is now, even if he has assumed a certain grandfatherly aspect.

But you know where it all went later in the year of 1962, straight to the Missile Crisis and the October we almost blew up the world.

We are still paying that one off, if you count it in constant dollars.