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)