What was the Bay of Pigs invasion?
The Bay of Pigs invasion was a landing on the south coast of Cuba by Brigade 2506, a force of Cuban exiles recruited, trained and funded by the CIA to overthrow Fidel Castro. It began at 1 a.m. on 17 April 1961. Castro's aircraft sank the brigade's supply ships, his troops closed in on the beachhead, and the brigade surrendered on 19 April. The defeat embarrassed President John F. Kennedy, who had let the plan go ahead, and in the judgment of the State Department's historians it strengthened Castro.7
The Bay of Pigs was meant to look like a Cuban affair. The United States paid for the brigade, trained it, planned the landing and flew its supplies, but again and again decisions in Washington were weighed against one question: could the hand of the United States be denied? That question shaped the air plan, the choice of beach and the last-minute orders, and the three days of fighting show what it cost. The wider record of American arms is told in our military history of the United States.8
Castro, Washington and a covert plan
The Cuban revolution ended in 1959 with the fall of President Fulgencio Batista and a new government under Fidel Castro. Castro's government quickly took over American property on the island and drew closer to the Soviet Union, and with Cuba so close to its shores, Washington came to see it as a new front of the Cold War.9
On 17 March 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a CIA paper titled "A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime". It called for a united Cuban opposition in exile, a radio station broadcasting into Cuba, a secret network on the island and the training of a paramilitary force outside the country. The radio station, Radio Swan, went on the air from Swan Island in May 1960.10
The exiles' armed force took the name Brigade 2506. It was the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FRD), the exile organization the CIA built up as a political front, and it trained in camps in Guatemala.11
From guerrilla teams to an invasion brigade
The first plan was to slip small guerrilla teams into Cuba. In the summer and autumn of 1960 it changed. Air drops to the resistance were failing, and Castro's security forces were tightening their grip, so the CIA's task force turned to a landing by a conventional strike force. In November 1960 the training in Guatemala was switched from small guerrilla teams to conventional training for an amphibious and airborne assault force.12
In January 1961, 38 US Army Special Forces instructors arrived at the camp in Guatemala to teach infantry tactics. The force kept growing. By April it had infantry battalions, a parachute battalion and heavy weapons units, with its own small air force of B-26 bombers. The CIA's official history puts its strength at about 1,200 men.13
John F. Kennedy learned of the plan after his election in November 1960 and inherited it on taking office in January 1961. On 11 March 1961 the CIA presented the Trinidad plan, a landing near the town of Trinidad on the south coast, next to ground suited to guerrilla war. Kennedy rejected it as too "spectacular" and asked for a "quiet" landing, preferably at night.14
Within days the planners offered alternatives, and on 15 March the Joint Chiefs of Staff judged a landing in the Zapata area by the Bay of Pigs (Bahía de Cochinos) the most feasible of them, while adding that none was as likely to succeed as Trinidad. The new site had an airstrip from which the brigade's air strikes could be claimed as coming from inside Cuba, but it lay beyond a great swamp crossed by only a few roads.15
The CIA task force running the project had doubts of its own. Minutes of its meeting of 15 November 1960, quoted in the agency's official history, judged a landing by a force of 1,500 to 3,000 men to secure a beach with an airstrip "unachievable, except as a joint Agency/DOD action". As that history points out, the landing went ahead with about 1,200 men and was run by the CIA alone.16
15 and 16 April: the air strikes
15 April. At dawn eight of the brigade's B-26 bombers attacked three airfields: Campo Libertad near Havana, San Antonio de los Baños and Santiago de Cuba. A B-26 with Cuban markings then landed in Florida, and its pilot claimed to be a defector from Castro's air force. The pilots' reports spoke of heavy damage, but according to the Taylor inquiry, photographs showed only five aircraft definitely destroyed. Castro later said that his planes had been dispersed and that the raid destroyed only a few, several of them transport or civil aircraft. Either way, Castro still had planes that could fly.17
A diversionary landing of 160 to 168 men east of Guantánamo, meant to draw Castro's forces away, never took place. American records blame weak leadership and trouble finding the beach, and another report gives lost boats and a reception party that never appeared.18
16 April. About midday Kennedy formally approved the landing. At about 9:30 p.m. his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, told the CIA that the dawn air strikes planned for the landing day should not be flown until they could start from the airstrip inside the beachhead. Secretary of State Dean Rusk heard the CIA's objections and stood by the decision, and the order cancelling the strikes reached Nicaragua when the pilots were already in their cockpits.19
17 April: the landing
17 April. The landings began at 1 a.m. at Playa Girón (Blue Beach) and Playa Larga (Red Beach), at the head of the bay. The brigade commander, José Pérez San Román, went ashore at 1:15 a.m. Local militia spotted the landing at once and shots were exchanged, so the alarm went out across the island and the planned landing at a third beach was dropped.20
At 7:30 a.m. paratroopers of the First Battalion dropped inland and seized the road junction of San Blas, about 10 miles northeast of Playa Girón, and the Third Battalion and a heavy weapons detachment joined them. At Playa Larga the Second Battalion pushed inland but met militia before it could close the road across the swamp. The Fifth Battalion never got ashore, partly because of trouble with the outboard motors of the aluminum boats.21
Castro's aircraft were over the bay at dawn. At 9:30 a.m. a Sea Fury sank the freighter Rio Escondido, carrying ten days' reserve of ammunition, and the Houston, hit from the air that morning, ran aground with about 180 men of the Fifth Battalion still on board. The other ships put out to sea, and two freighters kept going south until the US Navy intercepted them 110 and 218 miles from Cuba.22
In the air the old B-26s were no match for Castro's T-33 jet trainers. Four of the brigade's bombers were shot down on 17 April, while Castro lost two Sea Furies and two B-26s to antiaircraft fire. The Taylor inquiry later named the T-33s, whose importance had not been understood in advance, as the key to Castro's control of the air.23
18 April: the beachhead shrinks
18 April. North of Playa Larga the Second Battalion came under heavy attack from tanks before dawn. By 7:30 a.m. its position could not be held, and between 9 and 10:30 it fell back along the coast to Playa Girón. It had about 20 casualties, but its ammunition was low.24
Around San Blas artillery fire began before dawn and went on most of the day, and the brigade's line slowly contracted. Brigade B-26s attacked a long column of tanks and vehicles moving toward the beachhead in the afternoon, using napalm.25
At sea the ammunition never arrived. The freighter Atlantico rejoined the convoy about 50 miles south of the coast late on 18 April and transferred her cargo to landing craft, but by then it was too late to reach the beach in darkness. The convoy commander asked for a destroyer escort and jet cover and warned that his Cuban crews would mutiny without them. The CIA called off the run.26
19 April: the end at Playa Girón
19 April. After midnight Kennedy authorized one hour of cover, from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m., by unmarked Navy jets from the carrier Essex, so that the B-26s could support the beachhead. The jets and the bombers missed each other. The B-26s arrived about an hour early, two were shot down by T-33s, and four American airmen were killed.27
During the morning the Cuban forces, with tanks, infantry and air attacks, closed in on Playa Girón, and the brigade's troops around San Blas fell back. At 2:32 p.m. San Román sent his last message: "Am destroying all equipment and communications. I have nothing left to fight with. Am taking to the woods."28
The Taylor inquiry put the surrender of the landing force at about 2 p.m. and says that resistance had ended by nightfall. A Cuban communiqué gave 5:30 p.m. as the time Playa Girón fell.29
The CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer put the dead at fewer than 100 brigade members and fewer than 150 of Castro's forces killed in action, and a Cuban count gives 89 and 157. About 1,180 to 1,200 men of the brigade were taken prisoner.30
Inquiries, prisoners and the road to 1962
Kennedy publicly accepted responsibility for the failure. He then asked General Maxwell Taylor, his brother Robert Kennedy, Admiral Arleigh Burke and CIA Director Allen Dulles to find out what had gone wrong.31
The Taylor group reported on 13 June 1961. It named the shortage of ammunition as the immediate cause of defeat, and traced it to the loss of the supply ships and to a Cuban air force left alive by restraints placed on the air strikes to keep the operation deniable. It also concluded that an operation of this size could never have been plausibly disclaimed, and that by about November 1960 it should have been handed to the Department of Defense or abandoned.32
The CIA's own inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, blamed the agency itself for poor planning, poor intelligence and failing to tell the President that success had become doubtful, and called plausible denial "a pathetic illusion". Years later the agency's historian Jack Pfeiffer took the opposite view and laid much of the blame on the Kennedy White House and its decisions about air cover.33
The prisoners were tried by a Cuban revolutionary tribunal and held until the lawyer James B. Donovan negotiated their release. Under the agreement signed on 21 December 1962, they were exchanged for $53 million in food and medicine, and they reached Florida by Christmas Eve. The CIA gives the number freed as 1,113. At the end of December Kennedy welcomed them at the Orange Bowl in Miami.34
According to the State Department's Office of the Historian, the victory strengthened Castro's government, which now openly proclaimed socialism and sought closer ties with the Soviet Union. In November 1961 Washington started a new covert program against him, Operation Mongoose. The next year Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba brought on the missile crisis of October 1962.35
Other Cold War conflicts on this site include the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.
