Ships in the night: the CIA, the White House and the Bay of Pigs.

bridgehead for X number of days and establishing a Provisional Government and putting those five old gentlemen - none of whom was too brave - on the beachhead. And then it would be up to the United States to intervene [faced with the beachhead and the Provisional government there asking for help]. And nobody [in WH/4] really wanted to articulate that [i.e.: that Kennedy's hand would be forced].

What I am sure of is that we told the Frente that there would be no US overt military intervention until a viable provisional government had been established on the beach.

We would establish the beachhead - it would give the US time to decide what to As I interviewed Richard Bissell about PBSUCCESS - the CIA-sponsored overthrow of President Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 - I kept wondering how this highly intelligent, professional and even sensitive man could have been responsible for the wild idea of overthrowing Castro with 1,400 exiles.(1) It was this fiasco, the Bay of Pigs, that destroyed his career, for he had been President John Kennedy's likely choice to replace Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence.(2) I also wondered how the Kennedy administration could have agreed to the bizarre plan. The more I learned, the more sceptical I became of the explanations of the Bay of Pigs that stress the hubris of CIA officials or their gross lack of information about reality in Cuba. Certainly hubris was not lacking, but neither was realism, and the CIA's understanding of the situation in Cuba was not as faulty as has been assumed.(3)

My questions led me to ferret through the documents in the Kennedy Library in Boston and the Eisenhower Library in Abilene.(4) But the documents cannot tell the whole story, not only because much remains to be declassified, but also because there is much that was never consigned to paper.(5) Therefore, I went to the protagonists - to former officials in the CIA, the White House and the State Department.

This research led me to focus on the inner workings of the CIA, particularly the task force that ran the operation. It led me to understand the crucial importance of the miscommunication between the CIA and the White House, and it also led me to a fuller appreciation of the many real choices Kennedy faced in the months before the plan was implemented. Given his campaign rhetoric, it would have been politically costly for Kennedy to have aborted the operation. But this can be overstated: when Kennedy was first briefed, planning was rudimentary and fluid; it was under his watch that decisive choices were made. My research has led me to conclude that the Bay of Pigs was launched not simply because Kennedy was poorly served by his young staff and was the captive of his campaign rhetoric, nor simply because of the hubris of the CIA. Rather, the Bay of Pigs was approved because the CIA and the White House assumed they were speaking the same language when, in fact, they were speaking in utterly different tongues.

The genesis of the Bay of Pigs was in late 1959. At a National Security Council Meeting on 14 January 1960, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Livingston Merchant noted that the State Department 'had been working with CIA on Cuban problems', and went on to say that 'our present objective was to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about...a new government favorable to U.S. interests'. Then, at Merchant's request, the Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, Roy Rubottom, summarised the evolution of US-Cuban relations since January 1959:

He said the period from January to March might be characterized as the honeymoon period of the Castro government. In April a downward trend in U.S.-Cuban relations had been evident...In June we had reached the decision that it was not possible to achieve our objectives with Castro in power and had agreed to undertake the program referred to by Mr. Merchant. In July and August we had been busy drawing up a program to replace Castro. However some U.S. companies reported to us during this time that they were making some progress in negotiations, a factor that caused us to slow the implementation of our program. The hope expressed by these companies did not materialize. October was a period of clarification...On October 31, in agreement with CIA, the Department had recommended to the President approval of a program along the lines referred to by Mr. Merchant. The approved program authorized us to support elements in Cuba opposed to the Castro government while making Castro's downfall seem to be the result of his own mistakes.(6)

It was probably as part of this program that Cuban exiles mounted seaborne raids against Cuba from US territory, and that unidentified planes attacked economic targets in Cuba, provoking the US Embassy to warn that the population was 'becoming aroused' against the United States ('particularly [by] those raids in which incendiaries have been dropped resulting in burning of sizeable quantities of sugar cane').(7) And it was as part of this programme that Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles 'asked for a meeting with the President' in early January 1960. 'In this meeting Mr Dulles presented an Agency proposal for sabotage of sugar refineries of Cuba', writes Gordon Gray, Eisenhower's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, who was present.

I remember the schematic drawings which he brought to the meeting and which he used to show how the activity was to be carried out. At the conclusion of the presentation, the President said that he didn't object to such an undertaking and, indeed, thought something like this was timely. However, he felt that any program should be much more ambitious, and it was probably now the time to move against Castro in a positive and aggressive way which went beyond pure harassment. He asked Mr. Dulles to come back with an enlarged program.(8)

As a result, a task force, WH/4 (Branch 4 of the Western Hemisphere Division), was established within the CIA,(9) and Jack Esterline, the CIA station chief in Caracas, was summoned back to Washington. 'We have an interesting assignment for you', J. C. King, head of CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, told Esterline: he would head WH/4.(10)

In the following weeks 'A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime' was prepared by WH/4. It was approved by Eisenhower on 17 March 1960 at a meeting attended by Vice-President Richard Nixon and a select group from the State Department (Secretary Christian Herter, Merchant and Rubottom), the Treasury Department (Secretary Robert Anderson), the Pentagon (Assistant Secretary John Irwin and Admiral Arleigh Burke from the JCS), the CIA (Dulles, Bissell and King), and the White House staff (Gray, Eisenhower's Staff Secretary General Andrew Goodpaster, and Assistant Staff Secretary John Eisenhower).(11) This programme 'contemplates four major courses of action', the CIA documented stated:

a. The first requirement is the creation of a responsible, appealing and unified Cuban opposition...outside of Cuba...[to] serve as a magnet for the loyalties of the Cubans....

b. So that the opposition may be heard and Castro's basis of popular support undermined, it is necessary to develop...a long and short wave gray broadcasting facility....

c. Work is already in progress in the creation of a covert intelligence and action organization within Cuba....

d. Preparations have already been made for the development of an adequate paramilitary force outside of Cuba.(12)

The essence of this plan, therefore, was a combination of guerrilla infiltration and psychological warfare. It would be complemented both by 'a program for economic pressures against Castro' and by an effort to make the Organisation of American States (OAS) impose sanctions on Cuba. 'I would like to inform you', Secretary Herter had written that same day to the president, 'that the [State] Department, CIA and USIA [United States Information Agency] are engaged in an accelerated program to prepare Latin American public and governmental opinion to support the United States in possible OAS action under the Caracas anti-Communist Resolution and/or a number of other avenues open to us through the OAS.'(13)

Eisenhower was pleased. 'The President said that he knows of no better plan for dealing with this situation', the minutes of the 17 March meeting record. 'The great problem is leakage and breach of security. Everyone must be prepared to swear that he has not heard of it.' After months of groping, Eisenhower finally had a plan. 'The president said that at the next meeting he would want to know what is the sequence of events by which we see the situation developing - specifically what actions are we to take. He said our hand should not show in anything that is done. In the meantime, State should be working on what we can do in and out of the OAS.'(14)

The CIA set to work to train 300 guerrillas. Initially based in the United States and the Canal Zone, the training shifted to Guatemala after an accord had been reached with President Miguel Ydigoras in June.(15)

Meanwhile, a powerful radio station was installed by the CIA on Greater Swan Island, ninety-seven miles off the coast of Honduras. Tiny and practically uninhabited, the island had served the CIA well in 1954, when Radio Swan had been installed to broadcast against Arbenz as part of PBSUCCESS. It had ceased operating after the fall of Arbenz, but some equipment had been left behind.(16) In March 1960, the CIA sprang into action: 'within sixty days, equipment had been brought in...a landing strip was cleared on the island, and the station was able to go on the air on 17 May, precisely on schedule'.(17) ('We received tremendous support from the Navy', observed Esterline.)(18) Transmitting to 'the whole Caribbean area at night and nearby areas in the daytime',(19) Radio Swan became 'the symbol of the anti-Castro effort'. There were, however, problems: its broadcasts, the CIA later complained, reflected 'the selfish interests of the Cuban groups producing the various programs' and included blatant lies. (For example, 'one of the announcers stated that there were 3,000 Russians in a park in Santiago de Cuba - the residents had only to walk to the park to see that this was untrue'.)(20)

Finally, in June, 'We formed', recalled a CIA official, 'the Frente Revolucionario Democratico', the Cuban junta that was supposed to serve as a magnet for the Cuban people. As had been the case for PBSUCCESS, here too the native leadership was selected by the CIA. And, as in the case of PBSUCCESS, it had been no easy task; as Dulles told Eisenhower, 'there had been at one time or another 184 different groups'.(21) In Bissell's words, 'during that period it was found less and less possible to rely on the Cuban politicians'.(22) This was a problem that would continue to bedevil the operation.

The similarities between the Guatemalan and the Cuban operations went beyond the selection of the native leadership. From an institutional point of view as well, the parallels are striking. In both…