Blowback - S2 Episode 5 - "Fish Is Red"

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

The CIA and the Cuban exiles get their long-awaited shot at taking out Castro and the Revolution. The subsequent battle in Cuba sends shockwaves around the world.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Well, thank you very much, please. Thank you very much, and I'm delighted to welcome you to the White House as we honor the Cuban-American veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, brave people, great people. I was honored to receive the endorsement of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association in 2016, And they gave me a beautiful award, and I have it very proudly on a wall of great importance to me. And I just understood that once again, I've received your official endorsement and support, and I very much thank you for that. Thank you all very much.

That's a great honor. Today we declare America's unwavering commitment to a free Cuba, and you will have that. You will have that very soon. We'd glad to be joined by Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. President, you've taken strong action to stand for freedom in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. And today, with the new sanctions that you'll be announcing at this event, you will confirm that in this White House, it will always be Kviva, Cuba Libre. Welcome to Blowice, son. Speak about this loss, son.

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Noah Colwyn. I'm Brendan James, and one quick announcement before we start the show, the soundtrack, the music of Blowback that you've been hearing this season, is out now, wherever you get your music, streaming on Spotify, Apple. If you like to contribute and buy the album, you can get it on Bandcamp. And it's nine full tracks, fully fleshed out version. of the musical cues and themes that you've heard in the season so far.

And maybe some you haven't heard yet. We had a lot of great reception to the music, and I was really happy to be able to make this album of these full songs with Marty SoCal and Joe Valley co-producing and a special guest performance by Robin Hatch, who also co-wrote one of the tracks. So we're really proud of it, and we hope you go listen to it again. You can get the blowback soundtrack by the Great Vorelli,

anywhere you stream you music. Meanwhile, this is episode five, fish is red. Noah, take it away. The Bay of Pigs was a formative event for everyone involved in our story. For its planners, the invasion represented a chance to prove once again that the CIA and American covert operations could remake the world in whichever fashion they so chose. For the Cuban exiles, particularly the Batisteano heavy members of Brigade 2506, the invasion was about taking back their country and winding back the clock. How the invasion would unfold, and who was responsible for its inevitable outcome would become a key part of the lore,

the mythology that powered the counter-revolutionary movement for decades to come. For John Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs was a scary possibility. His intelligence and military advisors had told him that they could contain the noise, that they had done it before, and that this problem of Cuba would not be a problem anymore. Things would turn out differently. As JFK would fetch to an advisor in the immediate aftermath, how could I have been so stupid to let them go ahead? Now, for Fidel Castro and millions of Cubans,

the Bay of Pigs was the long-awaited American attack. Ever since Castro and the Cuban Revolution had declared their independence from the American neocolonial system, with land reform and nationalizing key industries at the center of their platform, the American government had declared that the Cuban Revolution's days were numbered.

In a speech a few months after the Bay of Pigs' invasion took place, Castro articulated exactly how he and many of his countrymen understood the stakes. Quote, this is a life or death struggle that can only end with the death and destruction of the revolution or the counter-revolution. The Bay of Pigs operation had begun with high hopes in the beginning of 1960, and at the end of 1960, as the Eisenhower administration passed the Cold War baton to the Kennedy administration, so too did those high expectations for the CIA's so-called Cuba project make their way into in 1961.

Three weeks after JFK assumed the presidency in 1961, Alan Dulles convened a special dinner at the ultra-exclusive alibi club in Washington, D.C. The alibi club is a little slice of Bohemian Grove right at home in the nation's capital. Both Dulles brothers were members, as were and remained, Bushes, Roosevelt's, and other bits of American royalty. There were 22 people at this dinner, 10 CIA guys and 12 White House guys. They were all good and liquored up

when Dulles asked his men to go around the table and say a little bit about what they did. When it came Richard Bissell's turn to speak, the deputy director and CIA Cuba Project Overseer said, quote, I'm your man-eating shark. According to the reporter Peter Wyden, the remark was a hit with the room. In fact, Bissell's quiet confidence and nerdy bravado

was a hit with the White House. JFK personally liked the guy. In fact, JFK once told an advisor that he planned to tap Bissell to succeed Dulles partway through his term. A one-time colleague of Bissals, the ex-CIA agent Joseph B. Smith, he said that as early as 1959, Bissell betrayed an anti-communist dogmatism that would get him in trouble. Quote, I had heard that, in discussing the precipitous pace at which Fidel Castro seemed to be turning his revolt against Batista into a communist revolution, that Bissell had declared, there will be no communist government in Latin America while I am DDP. That's deputy director of planning. That, I recognized as the language of a man who knows he has

great power and is affected by its intoxicating qualities. You could read this as Bissell's arrogance, the overconfidence of his smart set, Ivy educated, Washington-centric worldview. And it probably is all those things. But that remark was also a deeper expression of the fatal flaw shared by everyone involved in the Bay of Pigs, which was imperial hubris. Peter Cornblu is the head of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive and co-author of, most recently, Backchannel to Cuba, a history of secret U.S. Cuban diplomacy. Here's Cornblu's take on that hubris. The history of the U.S. intervention in Latin America and CIA covert intervention to undertake

what we now call regime change does begin in, in Guatemala in 1954 with the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, with key CIA officials such as Richard Vissell and Tracy Barnes working on that project, which involved extensive psychological operations. It involved creating a small cadre of insurgents and then using propaganda and siops to make Arvins and the people around him believe that this was a big band of insurgents that was going to destroy the Capitol and really to scare the bejesus out of the Guatemalan military as well about this small rebel force that the CIA had organized and brought across the border from Honduras. So Arbans did capitulate and resign, and CIA officials didn't really learn the lessons of how close they'd come to failure in that operation.

They got very lucky and didn't quite understand how lucky they'd gotten. and because of the minimal effort they had made that had been successful, their arrogance in believing they could take basically the same plan, transfer it to Cuba, and the Fidel Castro would act just like Arvents did, is what got them into initial trouble. Quote, always looking for the new and unusual, Fidel Castro discovered and invaded the Bay of Pigs two years before the Americans thought of it. Tad Schultz in his biography of,

Fidel Castro, believe it or not, still had time for pet projects while overseeing the Cuban revolution. One of those pet projects was the Bay of Pigs, which he found two years before the Americans decided on it as the landing site for their Cuban exile invasion. The Zapata Swampland, or La Sienega de Zapata, where the Bay of Pigs is located, is a vast 1800-square mile swamp land on the southwestern coast of Cuba. It's a little over 90 miles to the south of pivana. The people who lived there were among the poorest and least educated on the island, and the lack of arable land made La Sienega's development a huge challenge. But to Fidel Castro, the Zapata swamp, including its southeastern edge at the Bay of Pigs, the swamp land and its

people represented an adequate test for how far the revolution could go. Fidel was, in fact, a fanatic about the area. He liked to go fishing there, and he ultimately had a small home and office built near the Bay of Pigs so that he could go there to relax. Fidel spent so much time in the Bay of Pigs, that, according to Tad Schultz, he nearly died in the swamp twice in 1959. These experiences apparently did not discourage Castro from paying attention to the region or even spending time there himself. In fact, Fidel kept talking about the swamp in speeches, even remarking in December 1959 that, quote, we have rediscovered the Bay of Pigs, broad and deep. Fidel spent Christmas Eve of 1959 in the Zapata Swamp,

showing up to tell residents of the village of Sopiar about the road that he would build, connecting their village to the rest of the country. For the villagers, who barely made a living to that point making charcoal, this would obviously make their lives much easier. That Christmas, Fidel showed up in a helicopter, and he sat in the villagers' huts and he ate dinner with them. In the words of the youngest daughter of a charcoal maker in Sopiare, quote, I was a little girl, but I remember it perfectly.

I sat next to Fidel and had a malt and soft drinks. I was given a pair of white socks. After dinner, a local farmer came in to play the guitar. I still remember the ballad he sang for Fidel that night. We discussed last time how the mafioso's Johnny Raselli and Chicago Capo Sam Giacana had finally found a contact to murder Fidel Castro with CIA-produced botulinum toxin. Their contact was someone within Castro's government, in fact someone within Castro's office. The man's name was Juan Orta.

Orta was one of the many Cuban officials who was starting to miss the kickbacks he used to get from the mob-controlled circuit of casinos and hotels pre-revolution. Chicago Magazine writes, As payback, Orta had offered to help kill Castro relying on the services of a chef at a restaurant frequented by Castro. This is where the botuline impills, which had made it from the CIA's laboratories to CIA handler Jim O'Connell to Sam Giacana and Johnny Raselli would finally make it down Castro's throat.

But in a streak of luck that would not end here, in addition to a very competent Cuban intelligence service, Castro would not end up swallowing that poison. One explanation offered was that he had stopped eating at that restaurant, but, quote, the more likely explanation is that Orta, who had lost his position in Castro's government, no longer had the means to pass the pills to his contact. Orta was probably discovered by the Cuban intelligence services,

because he high-tailed it out of Cuba pretty damn fast, as soon as he realized he would no longer be acting as Castro's secretary. Either way, he returned the poison. The mobsters in this pre-Bay of Pigs moment did not give up, however, and turned to our old friend Tony Verona, one of the Cuban exiles who had been tapped not only by the U.S. government, but also by Meyer Lansky, as a future power broker in a post-Castro Cuba. According to FBI reports, Florida mob boss Santo Traficante had already forked over

some cash to Verona, Verona claiming that he could find someone who could poison one of Castro's meals. The trusty CIA handler Jim O'Connell once again took some pills from a safe and got them to Johnny Raselli, who passed them and the cash to Tony Verona. All that was now needed was the green light from the CIA. Early April 1961 was the key decision-making time for the Kennedy administration on whether to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs operation. According to Kennedy's advisor, Arthur Schlesinger, JFK, was increasingly anxious about the noise level of the operation. Now remember, the key part of the Bay of Pigs plan was that it would be a Cuban exile force landing on the beaches in Cuba. That would allow the

U.S. to maintain plausible deniability. The idea was basically Guatemala Redux. With about two weeks to go before the eventual invasion date, Kennedy needled Richard Bissell repeatedly about the noise level, and asked the CIA deputy director bluntly, would enough Cubans really rise up against Castro? And did Castro have any idea of what was coming? Although arms drops to counter-revolutionaries in the previous few months had mostly been a failure, Bissell suggested there were thousands of Cubans who belonged to resistance organizations, waiting to link up with Brigade 2506 once the landing force had secured a beachhead. And Bissell estimated that roughly a quarter of Cubans would rise up against Castro, and out-of-this-world prediction that did not really factor.

in how all of the most fervent anti-Castro Cubans, you know, the base for a successful counter-revolution, all those people had been filtering out of Cuba over the previous year and a half, or they were already in the brigade. As to the question of whether Castro and the Cuban government knew what was coming, Bissell's answer was in the negative. And in order to assuage JFK's concerns about a noisy invasion near the Cuban city of Trinidad, Bissell and the invasion planners had changed La Brigada's landing spot to the Bay of Pigs in the Zapata swamp. Whereas before, two boats would be landing on side-by-side beaches with access to roads and so on, now they were in the middle of nowhere, separated from each other by miles.

Whatever the plan's low odds of success before, moving it to the Bay of Pigs to satisfy JFK's noise problem, certainly doomed it. Though some people, like JFK advisor, Arthur Schlesinger, and Senator William Fulbright, still lobbied JFK against the invasion, they found that his perspective had changed significantly after he spent Easter weekend at the beginning of April in Palm Beach, Florida. There, JFK spent time with his rabid anti-communist dad and the Batista-era American ambassador to Cuba, good old Earl Smith. For the best insight into JFK's state of mind,

or at least what he thought U.S. Cuban policy should look like, we should look to the State Department's Cuba White Paper, released on April 3, 1961, two weeks before the operation would take place. This white paper was a major policy. policy declaration, written by Arthur Schlesinger, and personally edited by JFK, who made sure that it read like a list of indictments against Castro and the revolutionary government. It was a compilation of excuses for overthrowing the Cuban government based on supposed communist violations of inter-American pledges of mutual security. They even twisted the words

of I.F. Stone, a radical left-wing journalist who was a Cuban Revolution supporter, into a case for overthrowing Castro. The evidence for the pro-invasion case rested on intelligence estimates being supplied by none other than Richard Bissell and his advisors. Bissil estimated that there were already plenty of guerrillas all over Cuba ready to take up arms against Castro once they got word that an exile force had landed on the island. But it's likely the CIA understood how weak that counter-revolutionary force inside of Cuba really was. JFK was probably more convinced to go forward with the Bay of Pigs by what Alan Dulles called

the disposal problem. Let's say JFK called the invasion off. What would be the political cost of over 1,000 Cuban exiles returning from Central America to Florida after having spent months in the muck and mud because this liberal president didn't let them have a go at Castro? How would you, as they say, dispose of those exiles? That was a pretty compelling domestic political reason for JFK to go through with it, especially given that his presidency was barely 90 days old and a combination of enlightened CIA, men and wizened military cold warriors were telling him it was a good idea with at least

a majority odds of success. Though others would try to talk JFK out of the invasion by the afternoon of Friday, April 7th, according to JFK's advisor Arthur Schlesinger, JFK had firmly made up his mind. Turning to the aide who had crafted some of his Cuba campaign statements, JFK said, Well, Dick, we're about to put your Cuban policy into action. The Exile Brigade's tentative invasion date was set for April 7th. That's all? Yes, Mr. President, has a decision been reached on how far this country would be willing to go in helping an anti-Castro uprising in Cuba?

So there was one other thing that could have plausibly kept the Bay of Pigs operation from going off. On April 6th, JFK received word of a forthcoming New York Times article by Tad Schultz. It was a major headline feature reporting an imminent invasion. While previous media features had been quashed or buried, JFK personally spoke with the publisher of the New York Times, Orville Dreyfus, and the paper went about watering down the account. Well, first, I want to say that there will not be under any conditions, be an intervention in Cuba by United States Armed Forces.

Although the news editors had prepared the story to lead the paper's front page with a splashy, multi-column headline, editor Turner Catledge reduced it to a single column in the middle of the page. All references to the CIA were struck. This government will do everything it possibly can, and I think it can meet its responsibilities to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba. Fidel Castro didn't need to subscribe to the New York Times to know about the imminent invasion cooked up by the Americans.

Planes from the U.S. were still intensifying their bombings of Cuban cities in the days leading up to the invasion. Fidel reportedly received a tip about the April 17th invasion date from Soviet intelligence, but Cuban counterintelligence agents in Florida and elsewhere had already told him what he needed to know. As early as April 8th, just a few days after JFK had asked Bissell to make sure Castro didn't know anything about what was coming, Fidel said the following in a speech, quote, For months, the central agency of Cretans has been preparing on the soil of Guatemala and the soil of other countries ruled by puppets of imperialism, military bases,

and armies of mercenaries to attack. our country. On April 12th, five days before D-Day, JFK gave a press conference at which he assured there was no imminent U.S. assisted invasion. The basic issue in Cuba is not one between the United States in Cuba. It is between the Cubans themselves. And Fidel, who was already readying his defenses in Cuba, basically took JFK's outright denial as an admittance of guilt. And I intend to see that we adhere to that principle. And as I understand it, this administration's attitude is so understood and shared by the anti-Castro exiles from Cuba in this country. President, would you give us your views, sir, about the Soviet achievement of putting a man in orbit?

The first ships carrying exiles left for Cuba on April 11th, and the last left on April 13th, with a planned arrival date for the midnight to early morning hours of April 17th. Frank Bender, you'll remember him, the pseudonym for the pseudonym for the... the German-born CIA official Gary Droller, Frank Bender and other U.S. trainers, according to multiple brigade members, had assured them that there would be air cover forthcoming to secure their landing in addition to disabling the Cuban Air Force. The Cuban exile pilots would fly B-26 bombers and destroy the Cuban Air Force in a first wave, and then they would come back to inflict further damage with the brigade landing. Diversionary landings elsewhere on the island would throw the Cuban military off.

Now, because the Bay of Pigs was so isolated and because Castro's forces would be so far away, the exiles later claimed that they were told, quote, Castro could not react for at least 72 hours. For the group of Brigade 2,506 exiles who were leaving from Nicaragua, the dictator Samoza actually came to send them off. Quote, he was dressed like a musical comedy potentate, wore powder on his face, and was surrounded by gunmen. Just the creepiest. Okay, to be clear, there is, he gets even. creepier. He waved his hand, this bizarre Twin Peaks-like display of this dictator with powder powder on his face, he waved his hand at all the boys and said, bring me a couple hairs from Castro's beer. At 6 o'clock in the morning on April 15th, Vidal Castro saw a B-26 with

Cuban markings fly over his head at an airbase near Havana before hearing the explosions of bombs and aircraft guns. Later that morning, two very dinged-up B-26 bombers with Cuban markings arrived in Florida, one in Key West and one in Miami. When reporters interviewed the pilot who had touched down in Miami, he told him that he and the other pilot were defectors, and critically, their identities were being kept secret to protect their families. Impounded in Miami, one of the three B-26s which bombed Cuban bases before the invasion. The Cuban bomber pilot, concealing his identity, says he had planned his defection flight for three This is, of course, part of the plan. We want to make it look like the Cubans are revolting

against their own government, and that's kicking off this domino effect. This is, of course, a very, very thin way to go about providing that kind of cover story. In the afternoon of April 15th, Pepe San Roman, the military leader of Brigade 2506, got a message from Frank Bender. The bombings did the trick. Cuba's Air Force is gone. Problem. This was not true. Castro still had bombers and fighter jets left, and that wasn't the only thing going wrong. Three men had been practicing on a 50-caliber machine gun on one of the invasion boats, quote, when its mountings came loose and bullets sprayed wildly about the deck, killing one man and injuring two.

And it gets worse for the exiles. The 160 man April 15th diversionary landing force that's supposed to arrive somewhere east of Guantanamo Bay on the other side of the island, that fails, as it will again the next day, because of boat failures and because their receiving party never showed up. The first thing I did was to join the glorious 2506 brigades. I have already explained that our boat didn't get enough gasoline, and for that reason we arrived three days late for the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Raul Roa, Cuba's foreign minister, as all of this is going on,

persuades the UN General Assembly to convene a special session at which he accuses the U.S. of plotting an imminent invasion, with the air bombings as just the latest evidence. Raul Roa, charging his nation has been invaded by what he terms mercenaries from Guatemala and Florida. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Adley Stevenson replies on the floor with ready-made photos of the Cuban markings on the plane that arrived in Miami as evidence of this being an all-Cuban defector show. These charges are totally false, and I deny them categorically.

Of course, this is the pretext for Stevenson's greatest humiliation, when this gets revealed as a farce. The United States has committed no aggression against Cuba, and no offensive has been launched from Florida or from any other part of the United States. Alert, alert, look well at the rainbow. The fish will rise very soon. Chico is in the house.

Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red. While the 1400 man-strong Brigade 2506 was on its way to hit the beaches, Radio Swan, the propaganda network located on Swan Island near Honduras, had begun broadcasting that repeat message as a signal for counter-revolutionary Cubans to rise up. Fidel Castro had already begun mobilizing his countrymen to prepare for the imminent attack, though not yet sure of how many invaders would actually be attacking or from where they would be coming. Fidel tapped the committees for the defense of the revolution, composed of citizens, and all other available elements of the Cuban government to be on the lookout and to detain possible counter-revolutionaries. Raul Roa, son of the aforementioned top diplomat Raul Roa, who was exposing America's ploy at the UN, spoke to us about Cuba's preparation and response to the unfolding invasion at the Bay of Pigs. He was actually in Czechoslovakia at the time, but well informed about what was going on. and Raoul singles out the importance of the Revolutionary Defense Committees and the Cuban National Militia. Revolutionary Defense Committees, which was a very important mass organization,

and the Cuban National Militia, which was also very important. These were two elements, one in the towns, because the CDRs detected those who were against the revolution, and they wound them up, and they got them out of circulation. during the invasion, and they couldn't support the invasion at the time, a very important thing. The other thing was that the Cuban National Militia, which was actually the decisive military factor in defeating the invasion, was also recently organized. And it was very important, and the most interested thing is that these people, even though they had little military training and they were using some weapons for the first time in their lives,

fought courageously, tremendously. And, of course, we suffered the greatest of Cuban revolutionaries during the actual battle. Meanwhile, our friend Marta Nunez Sarmiento was only 14 years old at the time. But that didn't make her any less a member of the Federation of Cuban Women. And she talked with us about a particular task she was in charge of during the invasion. I was already in a public high school, in a public high school. And as a member of the Federation of Cuban Women with my mother, was a member of the sanitary brigades of the Federation of Cuban Women.

We were, how would you say, taking care of the feet of the militia men that had been walking 62 kilometers. That was something that the militia man had to do, walk 62 kilometers, come back to the base, and we took care of their feet. Imagine I was cleaning the feet of these men, but I felt that I was proud doing that, because I thought in my Catholic way, that's what Jesus was doing to the Apostles before he was crucified. So it was something that sort of a sacrifice I had to do, part Catholic, part revolutionary. At 1.45 that afternoon, blowing past the noon deadline that Richard Bissell had set for the president,

JFK gave Bissell the formal word to let the ships land. Go ahead. On April 16th, while JFK was giving the go-ahead on the invasion over the phone from his Virginia estate, Fidel Castro stood outside the Colon Cemetery in Havana at the corner of 23rd Avenue and 12th Street. And this is what Castro knew. The Americans had begun their attack. He was standing outside the cemetery because he had just attended a funeral of victims of the latest wave of bombing striking Cuba. These included bombings from the air on Havana, as well as the shelling of the airport at Santiago. Castro knew that the, quote, inevitable battle, as the Cuban official would later call the Bay of Pigs, had arrived.

This wasn't the first time that Fidel had addressed a crowd at this intersection. As he began talking, he reminded the crowd that, quote, this is the second time that we meet on this same corner. The first having been, after the Lecubre explosion, the year earlier, which had killed nearly 100 people. Now, however, Castro had decided it was time to declare publicly for the first time the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution. What the imperialists cannot forgive is that we are here. This is what they cannot forgive. The fact that we are here right under their very noses. And that we have carried out a socialist revolution

right under the nose of the United States. Though Kennedy had strictly disallowed it, Two of the first men to land with the brigade were Americans, and what one of those men saw at Playa Giron stunned him. In the words of Peter Wyden, quote, their intelligence could not have been more wrong. The Cubans had installed tall, extremely bright archetype vapor lights right on the beach. According to a CIA frogman, it looked just like, quote, Coney Island. In fact, the first landing team saw five guys chilling at a bodega on the beach, as the first inflatable raft drew close to the beach, escorted by Cubans, pushing it in chest high water,

a CIA frogman was lying prone in the boat, taking aim. As he heard a Jeep pull up on the shore, the Cubans would later say that they thought this raft was like a lost fisherman or something. The CIA man opened fire, letting loose the first shots of the Bay of Pigs at around 1 a.m. Things did not improve from there. Once the first group had made it onto the beach and into the woods, they forgot to tell the people following them about the coral reefs that had caused their boats to run aground. According to the CIA photographs, analysts had thought that these reefs were seaweed. After Exile Brigade leaders Pepe San Roman and Manuel Artime made it ashore, the brigade received word, Castro still has operational aircraft. Expect you to be hit at dawn.

Unload all troops and supplies and take ships to sea as soon as possible. Within hours, the exiles' already rickety boats had begun sinking from Cuban attacks, taking valuable ammo and cargo down with them, requiring the brigadiers also to try and swim to shore, let alone try and carry their gear. These are shark-infested waters, by the way. Castro, in Havana, meanwhile, had learned by three in the morning of an invasion force

landing at the Bay of Pigs around two hours after the first landing. The first consequential thing he did after mobilizing some troops to head to the Bay of Pigs was to get his Air Force in gear. Because the American planners had assumed that the Cuban Air Force would have been destroyed by this point, none of the brigade's ships had anti-air weapons. Castro began individually calling Cuban pilots,

urging them to go after the exile ships. In fact, at 4.30 in the morning, he called up one pilot and said, Chico, you must sink these ships for me. The exiles ships were sliced up by Cuban jets equipped with machine guns. The planes that had made the difference were the three American-made team. T-33 fighter jets that the Revolutionaries Air Force had inherited from the Batista government,

which had been sent the T-33 jets by the Americans years earlier. The Batista-era planes weren't the only callback as the Bay of Pigs unfolded. By noon on April the 17th, Fidel was shouting, We've already won the war, echoing what he had said years before, after the disastrous grandma landing of the Cuban rebels. The combat operations after this were basically a cleanup assignment. The Cuban military lost 161 men. Brigade 2506 lost 107.

In the end, there were about 1,180 brigade prisoners taken, including the entire leadership. The two Americans slipped away. A few days later, after Brigade 2,440, 506 was steamrolled at the Bay of Pigs, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy walked into the office of his deputy. And by now everyone in this office knew how bad things were. Bundy's colleagues were gathered around a table eating some fruit, which one staffer likened to the Romans. And the first thing Bundy said upon walking into the room, quote, well, I guess Che learned more from Guatemala than we did. Whatever relief, JFK, Richard Bissell, or any of the other Bay of

Pigs Plotters had felt after JFK gave the green light on Sunday, April 16th, it didn't last long. The limited information that was coming from La Brigada on early Monday morning suggested that the exiles were outgunned and trapped without the ability to resupply. One thing that Washington could confirm was that the Cuban exile pilots had failed to knock out all of the Cuban Air Force's combat planes in that first B-26 bombing raid two days earlier. And what's more, those two B-26 bombers, ostensibly piloted by Cuban exiles that had landed in Florida just the day before, their cover story provided by the CIA and the Cuban Revolutionary Council had been blown.

Here's Peter Cornblue. They had this whole story laid out that this was a defecting, that the bombing of the air base to take out of Castro's planes was done by a defector, a pilot who was defecting and dropped all of his bombs before he flew to Miami. The plane lands in Miami. The reporters look at it. It's freshly painted. It doesn't have the markings of the Cuban plane.

It has the markings of the U.S. version of that plane. The cover story is uncovered literally within minutes. And instead, the blame is laid right where it is at the CIA's doorstep. By Sunday afternoon, when JFK had said that the ships were okay to go ahead and land, two key assumptions about the plan had collapsed. First, that the Cubans wouldn't have an operational air force. and second, that the American cover story for the operation would hold. But the boats were already approaching the shore, and Kennedy had gotten reassurances.

Richard Bissell and others affirmed to Kennedy that with these well-trained fighters, with a fine-tune invasion plan and the inevitable support of the rest of the Cuban people, nothing could go wrong. Hours after Kennedy had given the go-ahead on the landing, CIA reports about the failure to destroy all the bombers made their way up to Dean Rusk. Combined with the fact that their cover story at the UN was being shot to pieces, as Adelae Stevenson had sent Rusk a Sunday night memo with the subject line, top secret, priority eyes only, saying he was, quote, greatly disturbed, Russ convinced Kennedy

to call off further airstrikes. This meant that the second Cuban exile airstrike planned for early Monday morning to supposedly finish off the Cuban Air Force had been canceled by JFK. The biggest myth of all of the failure of the Bay of Pigs is that it failed because John F. Kennedy canceled the second airstrike, which was intended to take out the rest of Bidel Castro's Air Force. This is a myth. The myth, as rehashed by angry Cuban exiles or angry CIA men, is like this. Kennedy had wanted to overthrow a government, but he wanted to have it done quietly. And when the time came for him to actually go through with it, Kennedy chickened out.

One of the best accounts of how Cuban exile militants and their American compatriots felt about Kennedy's decision comes from Captain Eduardo B. Ferrer, an exile pilot in LaBriguez. When Ferrer and his co-pilots and their American trainers first learned that the airstrikes had been called off, here's how he describes the scene. This was absurd, incredible, unbelievable. We were very much aware that these orders had come from the highest levels in Washington, but we still could not believe it. A bitter expression sprang into my mind.

Dogs obey, though their ideas may be different from those of their masters. One of the first to read the order canceling further airstrikes was Major General Reed Doster. Reed became so angry that, cursing the stupidity of the bureaucratic dictators of the operation, he threw down his cap and roared, there goes the whole fucking war. Ferrer elaborates further elsewhere. Quote, Kennedy was a little bit immature, a little bit chicken. Today, 90% of the Cubans are Republicans because of Kennedy, that motherfucker. At CIA headquarters, meanwhile, Alan Dulles was out of town,

which meant deputy director and Air Force General Charles Cable was the one running the show, and he had decided to follow the orders he was given, no second wave of airstrikes. Here's Peter Wyden's retelling of how the CIA men, who had worked on the Bay of Pigs for a year, took that news on Sunday night as the brigade boats were headed to the beaches. Here's Wyden. For well over an hour, Jake Esterline, Stan Beirley, David Atley-Fillips, Howard Hunt, and several other operators stood or paced around Cable's desk in the control room, arguing for a reinstatement of the mission and berating cable in four-letter language.

Why didn't he act like a man and go back to work on Rusk some more? Jake Esterline pounded on the general's desk and told him he was the lowest form of human being he'd ever seen. How could he let the men of the brigade go to their death? All over the room, voices were raised to the bellowing level. Faces were crimson. Any form of rank consciousness or civility was gone. These were emotion-driven men out of control. Here's Peter Cornblum retelling the story of the canceled airstrikes scheduled for Monday morning, April 17th.

The CIA tried up until the early morning hours to get Kennedy to change his mind. There were phone calls, and then the deputy director, one of the deputy directors of the CIA actually went to the condominium of Dean Rusk in the middle of the night to plead with him to talk to the president and restore the second airstrike. and that was the result of Jack Hawkins and Jake Esterline basically saying if we don't get that second airstrike, our force is doomed. They will be hit by the remaining planes. Now, all of this, all of this to tell you, their assumption was that Fidel Castro was just going to sit and leave those planes there for them to hit a second time. And we actually were able to discuss this issue in Cuba with Fidel Castro on the 40, anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, with brigade members, with their surviving Kennedy White House officials, and with Robert Reynolds, the former Miami Station Chief and deputy manager of the invasion

itself. And we put the question to Fidel. What about the second airstrike? If Kennedy hadn't canceled it, you know, what would that have changed? And Fidel Castro said, you know, I knew there might be more airstrikes. I moved those planes. I positioned pilots to sleep under those planes. We set up our air raid monitors and alerts so that those planes would go into the sky the moment that any enemy aircraft appeared on the horizon. It wasn't as if those planes would be sitting ducks as the CI seemed presumed they would be for a second air strike. The first airstrike started the invasion. Castro responded militarily, paramilaterally, strategically, and by the way, politically, announcing that Cuba was now a socialist state and was joining the

socialist bloc, basically inviting the Soviet Union to help defend Cuba as an ally in the cause. So it wasn't that Cuba just sat there and waited to be attacked a second time. And I think that if there had been a second air strike, they would have been dropping bombs on empty airfields. The tension between plausible denial and success was too great for this operation to succeed. And this is all without even considering the preparations on the Cuban side to fight back and make sure that the invasion did not succeed. Rather than be straightforward with Kennedy about the operation's low prospects for success, Dulles, and particularly Bissell, decided to bet that JFK would use American military might to finish the job when push came

to shove. In his memoirs, Bissell admitted as much was true. Although Alan Dulles never publicly admitted it or was made to publicly admit it, historians have found what seems to be Dulles's true thoughts on the Bay of Pigs in his private notes. Quote, we felt that when the chips were down, when the crisis arose in reality, any action required for success would be authorized rather than permit the enterprise to fail. While La Brigade faced doom on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, and JFK kept nixing CIA requests for military support, the whole world had basically picked up on what was happening in Cuba. After Castro's declaration about the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution,

Khrushchev sent a public message to the U.S., pledging Soviet solidarity with Cuba against obvious American aggression. And Kennedy immediately dictated a reply. I have previously stated, and I repeat now, that the United States intends no military intervention in Cuba. While refraining from military intervention in Cuba, the people of the United States do not conceal their admiration for Cuban patriots who wish to see a democratic system in an independent Cuba.

The United States government can take no action to stifle the spirit of liberty. Speaking of those Cuban patriots, What happened to those Cuban exiles who were supposedly releasing press bulletins and, you know, preparing for their accession to power in Cuba? On the day of the invasion, the Cuban Revolutionary Council had been hustled from their swanky Midtown Manhattan Hotel into black Cadillacs, which drove them to JFK Airport, then called Idlewild Airport. After an airport dinner at JFK, the CRC leaders were then driven from JFK to Philadelphia and put on a plane to a deserted-looking airfield, which one of them recognized as the CISO, CIA training site at Opalaca near Miami, Florida. After heading inside decrepit barracks, the CRC first learned about these pressed bulletins that they had supposedly written by listening to them get read over the radio. They got angry at that, and then got even angrier when they were

told that they could not leave their barracks. A CIA official named Dick Drain, masquerading as a colonel for them to joint chiefs, flew down to brief them on the changing situation on the ground. Under pressure from the CIA, and in particular, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arlie Burke, JFK allowed the military one more bombing run on the morning of April 19th to provide Labrigata cover to evacuate. In yet another operational fuck-up, the bombers, which were piloted by members of the Alabama Air National Guard, missed their escort rendezvous. This is audio of John Kennedy discussing with Bobby Kennedy the events of the Bay of Pigs on a phone call, specifically the planes.

Did we paint out the markings? Yeah, you painted out the markings in the plane. How many planes? And I think there were three planes. Yeah. And they flew air cover for an hour. Yeah. But didn't see anybody. Over the beach.

Yeah. And they were supposed to give air cover to the B-26s that were coming in. Yeah. And unfortunately, they, between all of them, they got the hours mixed up. I think you gave them from seven to eight or something. Yeah. And they must have thought it was seven, CIA thought it was seven to eight central American time. Yeah.

So the result was that the B-26s came in an hour late. hour up late, and we're all shot down. Two of them shot down. Among the planes on this bombing run was one that included napalm, which the pilot successfully dropped from his plane. But in the midst of all this chaos, the napalm didn't hit its target. At this point, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had called a press conference. He said, quote, The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to that question is no.

On April 20th, JFK tacitly admits U.S. involvement in the invasion in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, while castigating the press for investigating the Cuba operation and endangering national security. And the next day, JFK takes responsibility at a press conference, using that now iconic line... There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat as an orphan. There was a rather key element of the Bay of Pigs invasion that had not come to pass, the day the boots hit the ground, one that was unstated, plausibly denial. This, of course, was the assassination of Fidel Castro. Now, what had happened? Because last time we left it in this episode, the CIA was ready to give the go signal to Tony Verona's contact, who would apparently

be able to drop the botulinum poison in Castro's food. But this go signal never came. Journalist Warren Hinkle has one theory, by way of Chicago Magazine, quote, At the very moment Verona was supposed to give the signal, he was being sequestered by another group of CIA agents, unaware of Verona's crucial role in the hit. That group had planned to install Verona, along with several other Cuban exiles, as the provisional government to take over Cuba once the counter-revolution dispatched Castro. But fearing Verona might gab and spill the Bay of Pigs plan, the agents kept Verona locked up, until the invasion was over. As a result, Verona could not get word to his contact at the restaurant. Either way, Fidel was very much alive when the Bay of Pigs operation went into effect.

Now, Richard Bissell in his memoirs, says basically that he had hoped that Fidel Castro would have been dead by the time of the Bay of Pigs. He and Dulles, both up until their deaths, respectively, were very careful about the words that they used with this kind of stuff. One of the things that Richard Bissell was anticipating happening was for the Cuban Revolution to be decapitated just before the invasion force landed, facilitating through the chaos of Fidel Castro's assassination, a U.S. sponsored takeover of Cuba and a rollback of the revolution. And in this extraordinary meeting where Estherline and Hawkins came and shared with me what really happened, Jake Esterline told me. the story of being approached by a high-level CIA official in the fall of 1960 and being told that this official needed him to transfer through a series of checks, money from the Bay of Pigs

invasion budget, to another account. Esterline said, well, I'm not going to give you the money unless you tell me what it's for. And the response was, well, you're not clear to know what it's for. And his Esterline's response to that was, then you don't get money from my budget. Eventually, he was brought in and briefed that this money was going to be given to the mafia through Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancano to pay for an assassination plot that would take out Fidel Castro before the invasion actually occurred and create a better set of circumstances for the invasion to succeed. Nestlein's response was, I just don't like the idea that you are predicating the entire success of this operation on a, quote, magic bullet. Of course, he did sign those checks.

The money was given to the mafia, along with a set of poison pills that were made in the CIA's Technical Services Division, transferred to Cuba, and supposedly we're going to be put into an ice cream Sunday that Fidel Castro was going to eat at one of the hotel. restaurants where the mafia had agents in the kitchen. The Cubans themselves say they recovered these pills, which were hidden in an old wooden type of icebox freezer where the pills had stuck to the coils. It was Robert Mayhew himself, the investigator hired by the CIA to be a cutout between the CIA and the mob. It was Mayhew who told Cy Hirsch explicitly that, quote, taking out Castro was part of the invasion plan. Months after the invasion, Alan Dulles appeared on Meet the Press and denied the CIA had assumed an uprising would accompany the invasion. He said he had expected something else to happen. But he didn't say what that

was. Perhaps it was the kind of thing you don't say on Meet the Press. There's quite a general popular misapprehension that it was felt that there would be a spontaneous uprising. We had never contemplated that. The days of the war, I worked a great deal with the French underground. The last thing we wanted was spontaneous uprisons that get slaughtered by the Nazi troops. In the same way, we were not looking for a spontaneous uprising, but for other developments, other developments, other developments, other developments, other developments, other developments, other development, other development, other development, other development, other development, other development,

I'm going to read now from Richard Nixon's memoirs about the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs. Of course, the phrase, for what it's worth, should hang over all of this. I spent the morning of April 20th on Capitol Hill conferring with the Republican leaders. We agreed that the situation, following the Bay of Pigs, was too serious for partisanship. We all had to stand behind the president until the crisis was over. When I got home early that afternoon, I found a note from Trisha. his wife, next to the telephone in the hall. Quote, J.F.K. called. I knew it. It wouldn't be long before he would get into trouble

and have to call on you for help. I dialed the familiar White House number. The operator immediately put my call through to the president. Sounding tense and tired, he wasted no time on small talk. He said, Dick, could you drop by to see me? Kennedy was standing at his desk in the Oval Office talking to Lyndon Johnson. We greeted each other with solemn hand. shakes. The atmosphere was tense. After Johnson left the room, Kennedy motioned me to one of the small sofas near the fireplace. He sat in his rocking chair. I had a meeting with the members of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, he said. Several of those who were there had lost their sons, brothers, or other close relatives or friends in this action. Talking to them and seeing the tragic

expressions on their faces was the worst experience of my life. I asked about the Cuban's morale. He said, last night they were really mad at us, but today they have calmed down a lot, and believe it or not, they are ready to go out and fight again if we will give them the word and the support. With that, he jumped up from his chair and began pacing back and forth in front of his desk. His anger and frustration poured out in a profane barrage. Over and over, he cursed everyone who had advised him, the CIA, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, members of his White House staff, quote, I was assured by every son of a bitch that I had checked with all the military experts in the CIA that the plan would succeed, he said.

Everything had been going so well for him. A few days earlier, he stood high in the polls, and his press was overwhelmingly favorable. Now he was in deep trouble, and he felt that he was the innocent victim of bad advice from men whom he had trusted. He paced up and down with his fists clenched tightly. You can just feel Nixon, vibing off this. After he had blown off some steam, JFK returned to his rocking chair. For a moment, the room was silent. It suddenly struck me how alone he must feel, how wronged, yet how responsible.

He looked over at me and said, quote, What would you do now in Cuba? Without any hesitation, I replied, I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in. There are several justifications that could be used, like protecting American citizens living in Cuba and defending our base at Guantanamo. I believe that the most important thing at this point is to do whatever is necessary to get Castro and communism out of Cuba. Kennedy seemed to think about what I had said, and then he shook his head.

Both Walter Lipman and Chip Boland have reported that Khrushchev is in a very cocky mood at this time. This means that there is a good chance that if we move on Cuba, Khrushchev will move on Berlin. I just don't think we can take that risk. A bit later, Nixon writes, I was surprised and disappointed that he did not make the logical connection between his own statements, that the communist threat was indivisible,

and unless it was resisted everywhere, there was really no point in resisting it anywhere. But I knew this was no time to try and convince him of that. This was a crisis. He wanted and needed my support. We had been talking for almost an hour, and I felt that I had at least lightened his burden by listening to him and by assuring him

that I would not turn this crisis into a partisan exercise. Then Kennedy said, It is really true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president to handle, isn't it? I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25

in comparison to something like this? Nixon concludes, we shook hands, and he turned and walked back up the path to his office. His hands were thrust in his jacket pockets, but his head was bowed, and his usually jaunty walk seemed slow. At that moment, I felt empathy for a man who had to face up to a bitter tragedy that was not entirely his fault, but was nonetheless his inescapable responsibility.

As you heard at the beginning of the episode, the Bay of Pigs looms large in the American political consciousness. Members of the Brigade 2506 would go on to become notorious terrorists supported by the American government in the years following. Some of them would also go on to become influential American business and political leaders. And some of these veterans will show up in our story later on as the U.S. War on Cuba intensifies. But it didn't necessarily have to shake out that way. A couple months after the Bay of Pigs in August, 1961, Kennedy's Wiz-Kid White House aide Richard Goodwin found a beautiful box of Cuban cigars delivered to his hotel room in Uruguay. Attached was a note from Che Guevara. Both men were in town in Punta deleste

for the Inter-American Conference. Goodwin was promoting Kennedy's aforementioned Alliance for Progress Plan. When they met, Che Guevara offered the American an olive branch, an informal handshake to start normalizing relations. Richard Goodwin recorded the conversation in a memo. Quote, I said nothing, and Che waited, and then said that, in any event, there were some things he had in mind, that they could not give back the expropriated properties, the factories and banks, but they could pay for them in trade. They could agree not to make any political alliance with the East, although this would not affect their natural sympathies. Of course, they would not attack Guantanamo, in parentheses Goodwin writes, at this point Chee laughed as if at the absurdly

self-evident nature of such a statement. Goodwin goes on, Che indicated very obliquely and with evident reluctance because of the company in which we were talking, that they could also discuss the activities of the Cuban Revolution in other countries. He then went on to say, he wanted to thank us very much for the invasion,

that it had been a great political victory for them, enabled them to consolidate, and transformed them from an aggrieved little country to an equal. Gavara said he knew it was difficult to negotiate these things, but we could open up some of these issues by beginning to discuss subordinate issues. But he said they could discuss no formula that would mean giving up the type of society to which they were dedicated. At close, he said that he would tell no one of the substance of this conversation

except Fidel. I said I would not publicize it either. So here we have Che Guevara, probably the most iconic and recognizable of Cuba's militant revolutionaries, very possibly against his own instincts offering prudent negotiations in which Cuba, as it had in fact promised to do since the beginning of land reform, offered to compensate American owners, create some space between itself and the socialist bloc, and even cut back on its revolutionary activities in the hemisphere. All of this on the heels of a great victory, as Jay put it, against an attempted U.S. invasion of Cuba. and Richard Goodwin took Jay's cigars and his message back to Washington.

And what did the Kennedy administration, fresh off the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs, do when it heard this offer? Well, they realized that this offer was a sign of weakness from the Cubans. They were clearly spooked by how close we had come with the Bay of Pigs, and if it weren't for Castro's luck and a couple of our mistakes, we could have gotten the job done. So the only thing to do now was to make sure that next time we got it right. Thank you, Mr. President.

It's a privilege to join you today among so many heroes. 23 heroic veterans of Brigade 2506. As you said, Mr. President, April 1961, with American support. Brigade 2506 landed on the beaches along the Bay of Pigs, vastly outnumbered by Castro's socialist forces. America secured the release of nearly all of the prisoners 20 months later, but the last prisoner was not released until 1986. And upon his arrival in Miami, history records that he said, I am grateful to be in the land of freedom.

Thank you.