Bay of Pigs Invasion

8 Key excerpts on "Bay of Pigs Invasion"

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  Understanding Angry Groups

  Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Their Motivations and Effects on Society

  • Susan C. Cloninger, Steven A. Leibo, Susan C. Cloninger, Steven A. Leibo(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Although the Bay of Pigs Invasion represented a major U.S. foreign policy debacle as well as a source of anger on the part of Cuban Americans against the Kennedy administration, it also represented the largest scale raid of the paramilitary era. The Bay of Pigs Invasion as a source of Cuban American anger at the U.S. government was investigated earlier in this chapter. It is important to recognize, however, that the Bay of Pigs Invasion was, at least in part, a result of anger on the part of the Cuban exile community. In the context of the unfolding Cold War, Cuban exiles may have been pushing on an open door when it came to pressuring the U.S. government to take actions to topple the Castro regime. That said, the invasion could never have taken place without the willingness of Cuban exiles to form the vanguard of the invasion force. The United States, after all, did not want to enter into direct conflict with Cuba given the possibility that direct action might trigger a direct response from the Soviet Union (Jones, 2008, p. 17).

  Planning for what ultimately became the Bay of Pigs Invasion began during the Eisenhower administration. A variety of exiles from different backgrounds were recruited into Brigade 2506, which was to spearhead the invasion (after Cuban forces were softened by U.S. airpower) (Martinez-Fernandez, 2014, p. 76). One of the problems that immediately emerged during the planning phase was recruitment. The number of recruits was not growing fast enough to complete a strike before the end of Eisenhower’s term (Jones, 2008, p. 42). Ultimately, the plans for an invasion were inherited by the Kennedy administration. Eventually, the CIA gathered and trained the roughly 1,500 men that it was thought would be needed for an invasion. However, recruiting delays resulted in an inability to launch the invasion by March 1st, the latest optimum date for an invasion suggested by military advisors (Jones, 2008, p. 42).

  The basic plan for the Bay of Pigs Invasion was to use Cuban exiles, trailed primarily in Guatemala, as the main ground force for the invasion. Exiles would launch diversionary strikes in the days leading up to the invasion. As the CIA became less confident of underground resistance within Cuba, the proposed role for the exiles grew (Vandenbroucke, 1984, p. 474). U.S. air support would be used to take out large portions of the Cuban Air Force, leaving the exiles to establish a foothold on the island for further incursions. Various forms of propaganda, including leaflet dropping and subversive radio broadcasts, were also part of the plan. Finally, the plan would rely on various forms of sabotage undertaken by Cubans who had remained in Cuba in concert with Cuban exiles (Martinez-Fernandez, 2014, p. 86). The Cuban American exile community had come to believe that the invasion, which was a very poorly kept secret, would be the optimum way for Cubans to take the lead in liberating Cuba from Castro and returning the country to its former glory.

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  No longer available |Learn more

  Know All About John F. Kennedy Political Era

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter-3 Bay of Pigs Invasion Bay of Pigs Invasion Part of the Cold War Map showing the location of the Bay of Pigs Date April 17–19, 1961 Location Bay of Pigs, southern Cuba Result Cuban government victory Belligerents Cuba United States Cuban exiles Commanders and leaders Fidel Castro José Ramón Fernández Juan Almeida Bosque Che Guevara Efigenio Ameijeiras John F. Kennedy Grayston Lynch Pepe San Roman Erneido Oliva Strength c. 25,000 army c. 200,000 militia c9,000 armed police >1,500 Cuban exiles (c. 1,300 landed) 2 CIA agents Casualties and losses 176 killed (Regular Army) 4,000-5,000 killed, missing, or wounded (Militias and armed civilian 118 killed 1,201 captured ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ fighters) The Bay of Pigs Invasion (known as La Batalla de Girón , or Playa Girón in Cuba), was an unsuccessful attempt by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba, with support from US government armed forces, to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The plan was launched in April 1961, less than three months after John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency in the United States. The Cuban armed forces, trained and equipped by Eastern Bloc nations, defeated the exile combatants in three days. The invasion is named after the Bay of Pigs, although that is just one possible translation of the Spanish Bahía de Cochinos . The main invasion landing specifically took place at a beach named Playa Girón, located at the mouth of the bay. Political background On March 15, 1960, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to use their Special Activities Division to equip, train, and lead Cuban exiles in an amphibious invasion of Cuba, to overthrow the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro. Eisenhower stated it was the policy of the US government to aid anti-Castro guerrilla forces.

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  American Spy

  My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond

  • E. Howard Hunt(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Trade Paper Press

    (Publisher)

  11

  Bay of Pigs

  The Bay of Pigs story contains all the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy: An evil but charismatic villain, Castro, wields an ironhanded rule over an inaccessible island and is pitted against a young ruler in exile, the visionary young Cuban Mañuel Artime. The protagonist’s ally, John F. Kennedy, promises help but betrays the hero at a crucial hour. I portray myself as the experienced counselor trying to make the different personalities mesh together. There are many complex secondary characters with different agendas for the outcome, including, sadly, the brave soldiers of Brigade 2506, who must fight a much larger force and are doomed by missed opportunities, misunderstandings, and miscommunication. The outcome of this action has been recorded and retold so many times that it need not be a mystery here, but like a classic drama or opera whose ending is already well known, audiences still come to see it played again and again in an act of catharsis.

  The tragic Bay of Pigs Invasion has been the subject of one of the most intensive self-flagellating internal CIA inquiries in history, several scathing presidential reports and congressional investigations, and an untold number of articles, books, and Ph.D. dissertations. And that was before the Internet.

  Blame for the failure is usually heaped on the shoulders of President John F. Kennedy, who championed the exile cause against Castro as an election promise but who withdrew all-important U.S. air support at the crucial hour when men were dying on the beach. A few CIA and government officials have written about the incident in their memoirs, including two Kennedy administration officials and Deputy Director Richard Bissell, who detailed his own shortcomings in his book Reflections of a Cold Warrior,

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  Destiny Betrayed

  JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case

  • James DiEugenio(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Skyhorse

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER THREE Bay of Pigs: Kennedy vs. Dulles

  “That little Kennedy, he thought he was a god.”

  —Allen Dulles

  T he Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba was first designed during the last year of the Eisenhower administration. It was meant to be the culminating action of the battle plans that originated in the White House in March of 1960. It was originally drafted by the CIA’s guerrilla warfare expert Jake Esterline as a small-scale infiltration plan.1 The idea was to unite with a larger group of dissidents on the island. It was thought this could be done since there was a group of anti-Castro rebels in the Escambray Mountains that this landing force could locate and unite with.2

  This design was called the Trinidad Plan and had been approved by Eisenhower on March 17, 1960. It consisted of a group of 500 trainees and 37 radio operators. The CIA-trained Cuban exiles could be used as an invasion force, or as infiltration teams. But Esterline noted that any successful paramilitary operation would be “dependent upon widespread guerrilla resistance throughout the area.”3 In other words there had to be a significant number of resistance forces already on the island to recruit from. For even if all five-hundred men went in, this would not be nearly enough to combat Castro’s standing army, plus his reserve forces.

  Somewhere around the time of Kennedy’s election, this concept was changed. A cable from Washington directed a reduction in the guerrilla teams to only 60 men. The rest of the exiles began to be formed into an amphibious and airborne assault strike force.4 This may have been caused by Castro’s aggressive internal war to eliminate any opposition forces to him inside of Cuba. By the end of 1960, all dissenting newspapers had been closed, and radio and television stations were under strict state control. Neighborhood spy teams had been set up to turn in counter revolutionary suspects. And thousands of them had been jailed.5 The main organized counter revolutionary group on the island, UNIDAD, advised the CIA it was not yet ready to support any large military actions. Another factor impacting this decision was the difficulty the CIA had in supplying dissidents on the island by aerial drops. Only four of the thirty drops were successful.6

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  Almanac of American Military History

  [4 volumes]

  • Spencer C. Tucker(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Now short of supplies and bereft of air cover, the invaders come under heavy attack by Cuban government forces. Within 72 hours, exile forces have been driven back to the landing area at Playa Giron, where they are soon surrounded by Castro’s forces. A total of 114 members of the invading force are killed in the fighting; the remainder either escape into the countryside or are taken prisoner. In all 1,189 captured exiles are brought to trial and sentenced to prison. (In December 1962, Castro agrees to exchange 1,113 captured rebels for $53 million in food and medicine raised by private donations in the United States.)

  The Bay of Pigs fiasco provokes anti-American demonstrations in Latin America and Europe and further embitters U.S.-Cuban relations. Kennedy is also subjected to heavy criticism in the United States. CIA director Allen Dulles is forced to resign, and there is now closer government oversight of CIA operations.

  The failed invasion increases tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the invasion, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had warned Kennedy that the Soviets would help defend Cuba if necessary. Kennedy had replied with an equally strong warning against any Soviet involvement in Cuba. The Bay of Pigs Invasion brings increased Soviet military aid to Cuba and ultimately leads to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

  May 5, 1961

  First U.S. manned space flight. A Redstone rocket launched from Cape Capaveral, Florida, propels into suborbital flight the Freedom 7 spacecraft with U.S. Navy commander Alan B. Shepherd Jr. The flight reaches an altitude of 116.5 miles and terminates in the Atlantic Ocean. The first human spaceflight was accomplished on April 12, 1961, by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

  May 26, 1961

  Geneva Conference on Laos opens. In Laos the Soviet Union and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, North Vietnam) are actively supporting the Communist Pathet Lao, and the United States is backing the rightist government. With the renewal of civil war and the threat of a wider conflict, a 14-nation conference convenes in Geneva. During the next year it works to create a tripartite coalition government, which proves short-lived. The North Vietnamese government seeks to partition Laos in order to secure the vital Ho Chi Minh Trail network supplying Communist insurgents in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, South Vietnam). Unlike the Dwight Eisenhower administration, President John F. Kennedy is prepared to accept a neutralist solution for Laos.

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  Red Heat

  Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean

  • Alex von Tunzelmann(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster UK

    (Publisher)

  Its credibility with the rest of its third-world allies depended on its resolve in the face of what they all saw as American imperialism. Khrushchev realized this and, as a direct consequence of the Bay of Pigs, began plans to arm Cuba. ‘Although the counterrevolutionaries were defeated in the landing, you would have had to be completely unrealistic to think that everything had ended with that,’ he remembered. 80 Not only had the Bay of Pigs failed to achieve its objectives, it had achieved precisely the opposite of its objectives. It increased the power of Fidel Castro’s government and armed forces, struck a fatal body blow to the Cuban opposition at home and in exile, and, for the first time in history, made aggressive Soviet military involvement in Latin America a fully fledged fact. As Fidel Castro himself put it a few days after the invasion, ‘it was one of the most ridiculous things that has ever occurred in the history of the United States. And they have only themselves to blame.’ 81 The shockwaves created in the Bay of Pigs rolled out across the CIA and the State Department. ‘As I said to the Attorney General the other day, when you are in a fight and knocked off your feet, the most dangerous thing to do is to come out swinging wildly,’ wrote Jack Kennedy’s adviser Walt Rostow to the president on 21 April. ‘Clearly we must cope with Castro in the next several years. . . But let us do some fresh homework. . . Vietnam is the place where – in the Attorney General’s phrase – we must prove that we are not a paper tiger.. . We have to prove that Vietnam and Southeast Asia can be held.’ 82 In the weeks after the Bay of Pigs, remembered Mac Bundy, Kennedy ‘did go through a process of saying that there must never be another Cuba’. General Max Taylor made a chart of Cold War strategy, which the president pinned up in his bedroom

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  Encyclopedia of U.S. - Latin American Relations

  • Thomas Leonard, Jurgen Buchenau, Kyle Longley, Graeme Mount(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  The belief was that a popular uprising against Castro would follow. John F. Kennedy learned of the plan following his November 1960 presidential election. He hesitantly approved the plan only a month before the April 1961 invasion and when it took place, he failed to approve the necessary protective air cover; without it, the invasion quickly collapsed. The international prestige that the Bay of Pigs fiasco cost Kennedy in 1961 was regained as a result of the October 1962 missile crisis. The Soviets placed intermediate range missiles in Cuba beginning in June 1962 , not to defend Cuba as Castro believed, but to gain a sense of geopolitical balance with the United States. Premier Nikita Khrushchev reasoned that Soviet missiles within striking range of major U.S. east coast cities counterbalanced the U.S. missiles in west-ern Europe aimed at the Soviet Union. Castro learned a harsh lesson when the Soviet missiles were withdrawn. Cuba was Cuba, U.S. Relations with 239 little more than a pawn between the Cold War superpowers. As a result Castro distanced himself from Moscow until the near collapse of the Cuban economy in 1968 . Kennedy, how-ever, remained fixated on the Cuban leader and sought his removal through attempting assassination, the undermining of his authority, destroying his public image, and attempting to destroy the Cuban economy under Operation Mongoose, a CIA-implemented operation. President Lyndon B. Johnson cancelled the operation in 1964 . Eisenhower’s second policy initiative took place in pub-lic—the Congress—during the spring of 1960 . Congressional representatives expressed vehement opposition to Castro and, like members of the administration, argued that the island’s economic strangulation would bring the desired political change. Toward that end congress approved the Sugar Act of 1960 that continued to secure a special place in the U.S.

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  A Thousand Days

  John F. Kennedy in the White House

  • Arthur M. Schlesinger(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Mariner Books

    (Publisher)

  X

  The Bay of Pigs

  ON NOVEMBER 29, 1960, twelve days after he had heard about the Cuban project, the President-elect received from Allen Dulles a detailed briefing on CIA’s new military conception. Kennedy listened with attention, then told Dulles to carry the work forward. The response was sufficiently affirmative for Dulles to take it as an instruction to expedite the project.

  Dulles understood, however, that interest did not mean commitment. All Kennedy wanted at this point was to have the option of an exile attack on the Castro regime. Let the preparation go on for the time being: there would be ample opportunity after the inauguration for review and reconsideration. In the meantime, there was a legislative program to develop and those 1200 jobs to fill . . . Kennedy saw the Cuban project, in the patois of the bureaucracy, as a ‘contingency plan.’ He did not yet realize how contingency planning could generate its own momentum and create its own reality.

  1. CONFUSION IN THE INTERREGNUM

  In the next weeks government floated as in a void. Neither the outgoing nor the incoming administrations wanted to make fundamental decisions, and most matters continued to move along existing tracks. Early in December the new CIA plan went in a routine way before the Special Group, the secret interdepartmental committee charged with the supervision of special operations. The lieutenant colonel in command of the training in Guatemala came along to offer his personal testimony about the Cuban Brigade.

  The plan was taking definite shape. Its sponsors said little now about the old ideas of guerrilla infiltration or multiple landings except as diversionary tactics. Instead they envisaged 600 to 750 Cubans coming ashore in a body at a point still to be chosen along the southern coast of Cuba. Air strikes from Nicaragua in advance of the attack would knock out Castro’s air force. These strikes, along with supply flights, would continue during the landing. The invaders would also have artillery. The mission would be to seize and hold an area sufficiently large to attract anti-Castro activists, induce defections in Castro’s militia and set off a general uprising behind the lines. As for the Brigade itself, the lieutenant colonel assured the Special Group that his charges were men of unusual intelligence and ‘motivation’ and that their morale was superb. They would have no trouble, he said, in taking care of much larger numbers of Cuban militia.

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