Historically High - The Bay of Pigs Invasion

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the fight against communism was in full swing. The CIA was deep into the politics of Central America, having already assisted some dictator-ish guys staying in power. The U.S. felt like it couldn't lose when it decided to "intervene". America was friendly with the current regime of Cuba, and it probably had nothing to do with all of the American corporations controlling most of Cuban industry. When Fidel Castro came into power as a result of one of the many Cuban revolutions, the U.S. was panicking because we didn't know which way he was leaning, Capitalist or Communist. With Cuba only being 90 miles from Florida, this was a cause for concern (not at all escalated by the Nukes we put in Turkey aimed at Russia). When the U.S. botched the first interactions with Fidel and issued economic sanctions, to be fair he seized a bunch of American corporation property in Cuba, he decided to just get what he needed from Russia, and boy were they excited, a communist friendly country 90 miles from the United States, oh the possibilities. Well because of this Uncle Sam decided Fidel had to go, so you do what any rational government would do. You find a bunch of exiled Cubans, train them as guerrilla fighters, teach them to pilot WW2 era bombers, secure them ships, and supply them with everything they need to invade Cuba and start a revolution to topple Castro. Can't miss plan...right?. Yeah not so much, find out how the JFK and the braintrust at the CIA oversaw one of the most embarrassing failures in recent history. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, it's that time again. It's a very exciting time. It's a time to explore bays, bays of pigs. Yeah, this is, what was it, the Bahia de Cochinos? Yes. The Bay of Pigs. Bia de Cochino sounds way cooler. I'm not going to lie, man.

The Cold War, it's sneaking up on World War II for me. I don't know if it's because I already know a lot about World War II and the Cold War stuff is just really fucking interesting. But yeah, this is an episode where we really get to dive into the, uh, the slimy underbelly of, uh, of the CIA and the American government. The fun thing about the Cold War, I think that has it over World War II. And maybe as we get into more World War I, it'll kind of come on part two. But the Cold War was a time of sneakiness, but also not.

not a lot of action. And proxy wars. But yeah, then when it gets hot, it gets real hot for a second and then we cool off. But there's still that underlying tension of like at any point in time, there could be an atomic bomb flight. Like the stakes are so much higher. And during the time, even when stuff seems like it's cool, stuff is popping off all over the world with fucking, you know, espionage and all that kind of stuff. I think that, you know, that's a different type of battleground that, well, World War II does have a little bit of that.

That's not the mental point of it when it takes center stage in the Cold War. It also doesn't have a nuclear Holocaust. That's actually, yes. The stakes feel surprisingly the stakes feel much higher during the Cold War. But this is actually, this event, the Bay of Pigs invasion, takes place kind of at the peak of the Cold War. This is before the Cuban missile crisis when I think that's the zenith. That's the, you know, this is the peak. But then it's like Everest.

you get to the step and then you got to go a little bit higher. That's probably the missile crisis. But you can't explore that without setting the stage and kind of knowing what leads to that. And that's... Yeah, it's this. 61 is such a hot year, if you think about it, because that's when the Bay of Pigs happens. That's when the Berlin Wall goes up, too. Is it a direct...

Was the Berlin Wall a direct consequence of potentially what happened at the Bay of Pigs? There are so many things that we didn't... During the research of the Burlun Wall, it was really, I don't realize how much it was focused on just that area when it didn't really, our research really didn't take us into the, what was this a response to? We got into the, you know, kind of the, well, it was capitalism, communism. It was an example right there. People were escaping back and forth. That had a huge contributing factor. But it also had all these things from outside factors that were kind of contributing to the tension and kind of the call to action that was taken place during that time period. Yeah. Before we jump in, I am your host, Adam, my co-host Chris, aka the Lego Lothario. We're going to take you down this trip of kind of dirty U.S. actions that are supposed to be secret, but they really couldn't have been a whole lot more obvious. No. I think I kind of pointed it out.

it seems like, especially with these early operations, that the United States and the CIA kind of dipping their toes into the international influencer pool, I guess you would try to say. I don't feel like we had someone proofreading our work. I feel like maybe some of the stuff that popped off in World War II, some of those operations that were so successful that the United States took part in, a lot of those were joint efforts where you had, you know,

the British also kind of looking at stuff. had the French probably looking at stuff. You had a lot of eyes spotting some mistakes, maybe some deficiencies. But when you're just trying to write the paper yourself instead of having to be a group effort, and you're maybe not used to writing those papers yourself, you're going to have some pretty glaring mistakes. We're all gung ho and no gung no. Yeah, exactly. All right, guys, remember, rate, review, subscribe five stars where you guys can spare them. And without wasting your time any further, let's get into the Bay of Pigs. All right, so we're going to go back

because of course you have to set the stage. You can't just penetrate this bay. No. Cuba needs so much explanation just based upon how it kind of fell into the situation that it is. In 1898, we have the Spanish-American War where Cuba's liberated from Spanish rule.

There's a Cuban revolution that happens in 1930 that clears away for this new revolutionary government. Well, what's crazy, too, during the, and of course, the Spanish-American War is going to get its own episode. Yeah. This is going to have a lot of, this will get its own episode because this opens up so many, not only just events that branch off of this, but also like Che Guevara, Castro, Kennedy, all that kind of stuff, Alan Dulles, the CIA, like, it's going to have so many branches.

So many South American coups. Yeah. So, yeah, so, I mean, there was this series of revolutions between essentially the Cuban population in the Spanish that took place from like 1868 all the way up to like 1898 some of them were one of one was like a 10 year another one was one year and then the other one was i think like a six year and during that last year of it 1898 is when the u.s declared war on the spanish empire that led to the spanish-american war um didn't take long because in 1902 the republic of cuba was founded they're no longer under spanish rule and president thomas estrata palma who was a cuban born u.s

citizen was appointed the president. So weird. Yeah. Yeah, it starts that quickly. So at that point, as early as 1902, you get this huge influx because what used to be essentially a Spanish colony or a Spanish protectorate, we didn't have access to any of that. All of a sudden, all of that Spanish industry, all of that, stuff that they were pulling out of Cuba, that's no longer being pulled out of Cuba by the Spanish. So there's this insane influx. Of course, authorized by the president, who was Cuban-born, but U.S. citizen, allows basically

all these American companies and corporations to just come in and snatch up pretty much anything and everything that they can. Yeah. There again, you run the risk of another revolution because just like you didn't like the Spanish doing it, now the United States is not only taking your resources, but they're also implanting their own companies on your land.

The cookie, the hand is still in the cookie jar. Yeah. It's just a lighter skin color. Exactly. It's just, there's less melanin in the skin now. So we have another revolution in 1933 that clears the way for this new revolutionary government. Forgencio Batista is elected president in 1940. There was a rule with this new government that you could only serve a four-year term.

You couldn't serve consecutive terms. He serves his four-year term. He moves to Florida. Shocker. As you do. Yep. He ends up returning in 1948 to run again in 1952. Instead of running for president that time, he just goes ahead and sees his power of the island.

He disposed of the president that was actually voted for and was a duly elected official. Well, like, I'm trying to figure out kind of how this happens. So he's just like, okay, I can't serve another four years. I'm going to move to Miami. If he moves in Miami, hangs out there for a while, comes back four years before the election he's going to be running for. I wonder how far into that period he's like, I don't really want to wait to run in this, but at the same time, I'm going to have to.

He starts to see the tide kind of swinging out of his direction because he's probably been out of the game. Some of his policies might not be as popular. And prior to the new election coming up, the guy that's currently serving, who can't even serve another term, he ends up getting deposed by this guy. And then lo and behold, guess what?

president cancels the elections and now he's essentially the de facto dictator of cuba well it makes you wonder when he was in miami was there talk like wow we have another new revolutionary government who can we talk to this guy was already present there the first time of this new revolutionary government maybe we swoop him back in the other thing that was he's beneficial to us he was the guy that got into he was the first guy that got into power after they tried to oust and they were off about all of the American interference there and all of the, you know, American corporations and companies. Yeah.

But the fact is, if that is the case, it's not surprising based upon the other stuff we're going to discuss during this. But it would make sense to be like, hey, do you want to get back into power? We can help out with that. You're just going to have to kind of let us have free run at the place like we did. And he's like, oh, okay, I guess. Yeah, as long as my pockets are full. Inter Fidelis Castro.

I don't know if it's Fidelis. It just sounds cool. Fidel Castro would form the anti-Batista. They were called the 26th July movement. They would kind of start to raise some issues. Castro would end up being arrested. He would be sentenced to a 10-year term. For some reason, Batista took pity on him.

I believe he only served two. Then he ends up in Mexico City because he's still a revolutionary and he still needs a way to try to kick Batista out. I think they said around this time there were three different revolutionary groups that were looking to kind of like get Batiste out of power. Two of them were led by these two professors

like one professor leading each one. I can't remember what their names were. And then the third one was by Fidel Castro. Now Fidel Castro actually came from like a rich farming family. And so you know, when you're rich, you can spend a little bit more of your time with political activism, I guess.

Yeah. But he operates his revolution kind of in a different way that ends up being really successful is he divides guys up into these cells of 10 men. And he's using these cells to disrupt and do all of this kind of stuff, but no cell has communication with the other cells

or know what they're doing. So he's kind of the guy in control of everything. So no one's able to really organize in enough men to maybe get him out if they're having some thoughts about that. But then it allows him to essentially just kind of move these pieces around and not have to really deal with,

I guess, the larger operation as a whole where you're moving masses of people. Oh, and it would take him a hell of a lot longer to trace it back to him if everybody's working out of independent cells. You're also able to hide these smaller cells in a lot more places than these larger groups during these other revolutionary movements. A big part of this, and he's not going to get his due. He's going to get his own episode, a truly bad, bad man that is, I don't know, I've seen Che Guevara's face on so many college kids t-shirts. I'm not so sure about it.

But he meets Che Guevara in Mexico City while he's down there with his brother, Raul Castro, and they start to kind of see Guevara's revolutionary mindset and think that this guy is going to play a big role when we go back to Cuba. So they end up moving back into Cuba. They're training this guerrilla fighting group in the Sierra Maestro Mountains. so you're learning tactics up in the mountains of hiding, being able to attack at certain times and certain places. It's just kind of a breeding ground for this beautiful revolutionary force. I got to call it beautiful because they were able to sweep in

and they just kept pecking away at Batista. They would come down and attack. And then they'd go back up into the mountains and they'd retreat and they'd come back down and they'd come back down. And eventually this leads to December 31st, 19th. 1958, Batista and his family board a plane and take off. Pretty sure it was pride of Miami. Yeah, I think they, everyone goes to Miami.

Yeah. And I mean, this Cuban revolution, this thing was not swift. Took place from 52 almost immediately after Batista seized power. You had people that had a problem with it and were formed these revolutionary groups. Well, they're wondering why he came back and then just walked his way into power. Like, we elected you once. We'll probably do it again if things went well. Well, I think, well, if things would have went well, but I think that.

That's part of the reason he did as he saw he was losing the election. Oh, potentially, yeah. People weren't as supportive of him. How much money did you leave the country with? $300 million. And, damn, you got to try to imagine where you would get $300 million in 1959. Running Cuba, which is at that point still, I believe it would be considered a third world country. But, and I know there's a lot of industry and companies there.

So you're probably getting some pretty decent kickbacks from all of those corporations that you've given all of these gracious, like, land grants and, you know, you're a workforce for that's working on the cheap and everything. You're probably getting quite a few kickbacks. Yeah, one would tend to think, because that's a hell of a lot of money, especially in 1958. Like, you're one of the richest people in the world, and you were just the de facto rule. of a third world country. A country that literally, like, you didn't have a large enough military to not get ousted by, like, some

revolutionaries in your country. It doesn't take long because in February 59, Castro was in as the prime minister, and basically him in the 26th of, what was it? 26th July movement. Yeah, that movement in his, kind of now his men and his party are basically in control of most of the cabinet.

Well, this is where we start to see the cruelty of Castro. monumentally interesting guy. There's a couple things that I'll talk about that I like that he did. Just on like a mind game standpoint and not that I would be in favor of it, but he was a pretty decent ruler when it came to spinning stuff. January 1st, 1959. I think we can just call that a propagandist.

Yeah, a great propagandist. Well, a propagandist that was fed things to propagandize about from just bad U.S. decisions. There you go. It's provincial government or, yeah, provincial government is set up, provisional government, that's the word I was looking for, is set up. And the people of Cuba are still pretty pissed off with Batista's guys that didn't get away. And so they're ordering on these guys onto trial. They're ordering these pro Batista loyalists to trial and just executing them in the streets. Yeah.

And Castro is letting this go on. And it's one thing to swoop in and have a revolution and take it. I'm sure that it's never happened without the other. But then to start murdering all the pro-Batista loyalists is kind of starting to set a tone for maybe you don't fuck with this guy. That was also one of the big pushes against the Batista regime was that it was like insanely violent. Yeah. And now they're kind of just leaning into doing the same thing. He was criticized by, you know, some news outlets and everything.

He's like, you're just doing the exact same shit. Like you're not, you're not affecting any type of change. This is also kind of near a time when there's supposed to be elections coming up. So elections are supposed to be reinstated and everything. And Castro is like, you know what? We're still kind of stuff is in flux still. Let us go ahead and get everything solidified here. We've got a new government in place.

It's going to even be crazier if we have to go through an election and get someone else in. So he comes out with he's basically saying revolution first, elections later. And at that point, kind of just entrenched himself in as the de facto dictator. Now we can start talking about some of the big U.S. mistakes that happened early on. Because in April 1959, Castro's coming to the U.S. Why is Castro come to the U.S.? Because he accepted an invitation from the American Society of Newspapers to give a speech in the United States. He's the new ruler in power that's our neighbor to the South.

that we have so much industry in, and the president's not inviting him to the United States to have a talk with him? Eisenhower was so pissed off at this because he didn't officially bring him in that when Castro shows up, Eisenhower goes down and plays golf. Where's the Masters played Augusta?

Yeah. He's down at Augusta National playing around to golf, refusing to meet Fidel Castro. He sends to Nixon. Yeah, because, He wasn't the one that invited him. He was so sour about it that another ruler of a country that's pretty important to us, he just doesn't want to meet him.

That's an insane move to start out with. So he doesn't end up meeting Ike. He speaks to Nixon at length. He speaks to the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who you're going to hear the name Dulles a lot in this episode because they were brothers. The whole entire time he's here. he gets nothing but questions about if he's a communist or not. And this was a guy who was so concerned with his image that as he's coming to the United States, he hired a PR firm in the U.S.

to tell him kind of how he needs to try to play this to come off as good as possible. They say, always smile, always go out and greet the people that are there to see you. As soon as he gets off the plane as they're walking him in to his car service, he actually walks over at the airport and start shaking hands and talking to people that showed up to celebrate that he was here. So he's immediately playing the hits to the people. And the whole entire time they're questioning him. He's just,

I'm not a communist. I don't have any communist leanings. And I think at this point, honestly, it's probably a little bit true. Raoul was kind of more of the communist at this point, whereas Fidel, I don't think it kind of made up in mind.

He was aware of it. Yeah. He was aware of it. but at the same time he was still leaning more towards a different path. And he hadn't quite bought into capitalism yet, but he was just kind of towing the line. And I think this was another big mistake that they made because the whole time they're drilling him about communism and talking about it so much

that I think he kind of looks at the situation like, these guys are scared as hell of communism. Yeah. That could be something that I could use later on. And we've talked about this a million times. and I don't claim to, you know, be able to speak for anybody that actually went through like a full-blown threat of communism. I'm sure the shit was scary. I'm sure it was really bad back then because you had a lot of countries in Southeast Asia and in different areas that the entire Soviet Union that were accepting communism.

And this was kind of... But what were you hearing all the time? You had a direct feed to, you know, West Germany and West Berlin and everything where you were hearing all of the... these news reports because again, that was going to be news for a long fucking time because that was where the Cold War was actually touching is those places. And so, and again, how scary was this shit? Like, they called the red scare just because of like how the propaganda was spent. I'm not saying that it's not scary because, you know, it's a different way of life. I'm not even fucking endorsing it or anything like that. What I'm saying is our confidence in capitalism should have just

been like, fucking bring it on. Like, it's not going to beat out capitalism. China just went communist around this time. Let's let them see if communism works for them or they want to come back to our side. Yeah, it doesn't need to change what we're doing, but there was so much of this fucking scare. And part of me kind of also believes that this was at a time when the government was looking to really consolidate a lot of power. And by essentially creating this scare, people were looking to the government to protect them. And I think that gave a of power to the government by getting people worked up about this thing that in essence maybe they knew wasn't that big of a threat to the actual United States or anything. But at the same time,

they had to be shown to, it wasn't even that they were scared of fucking communism in Cuba. It was the fact that communism was what the Soviet Union had. So by being communist, you were essentially then showing that you were loyal to the Soviet Union. And then that was going to be a problem because guess what? They want to have missiles and they want to have a place to put them to aim them at us. You're really, really close.

From Cuba with an intermediate missile, you can hit Washington, D.C. Can't do that from anywhere in Europe, but sure shit can do it from there. Crazily enough, back in 59, the U.S. deploys Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads on them in Turkey.

So at this point, while all this is going on, the United States, and also, of course, the fucking Russians are aware, they can't do anything about it because we have permission from Turkey to actually have those there at our military bases or whatever. But you now have those missiles within striking distance of every major city in the Soviet Union where they have no way of defending against those. And if they were to launch, all their cities would already be destroyed by the time their missiles

even got a fraction of the way to us. Yeah. Their lob in one from left field were Bob and one from second base. Yeah. It's that simple. And so there's this huge fear that if all of a sudden, any time a regime was going to change, the fear was it that was it was going to be back maybe by the communists. And so there was that just insane fever. Yeah.

That any time there was going to be something to, are you communists? Are you communists? And he was probably just like, fuck. You people are nuts. I know. There's also a part of this. It's kind of. kind of interesting because through Nixon's evaluation and Dulles' evaluation in every government

official that talked to Castro, he was somebody that they said they wanted to keep an eye on, but they don't believe that he's a communist. So at that point in time, to be able to fool that many people, I don't think he probably was because he was able to at least schmooze these people enough to where it actually looked okay for him. Yeah, the relationship turns. Yeah, it does. rather quickly because like you said, it wasn't that the U.S. was against him initially.

They actually kind of supported him at first, not in a sense where they were like supporting him financially and all that kind of shit. But it was just like, oh, we're not going to be actively working against you. Yeah. But the point that Chris just brought up, there was no financial aid discussed for a new revolutionary government in Cuba, some place that we had so much industry, we'd already given stimuluses to everybody in Europe that stayed on our side. We had already started to try to rebuild Europe after World War II. And we're not going to kick a few bills down to Castro to try to help him fix Cuba. Well, you know that at the same time, as soon as a new regime got into place, all those American corporations that are donating all that money are down there being like,

we want to get our hands deeper in there now. Yeah. And now we got this new guy here. Can we get him into our pockets? I don't think private industry would have done it. I honestly think that U.S. government involvement in those finances would have done more than the actual companies because Fidel knew that those companies were just making more money that he could be making if he nationalized the companies, which we'll talk about shortly. Yeah, he saw how much money was going out of the country. Yeah, which credit to him, he figured a lot of that stuff out.

on his return to Cuba, things kind of start to get sour. They're starting to get reports that he's installing some more communist-leaning people into the heads of state in Cuba. He basically legalizes communism in the country. He starts talking a little shit about the United States. I think he was in response to a reporter, but he basically says something about like, you know, look at how many. It was during a visit to New York. And he's like, look how many poor people you have here. This is supposed to be the...

It's the second one, yeah. This is supposed to be the pinnacle of capitalism and freedom and all that kind of stuff. And you have people that are essentially living in the, you know, the belly of the capitalist beast or the imperialist beast. And then I can't remember what the other comment that he made was, fuck. I will talk about it when we get to the... That was in 1960. Okay. And but yeah, so I mean, the relationship, there's some stuff back and forth about that.

And at the same time, we're not sitting down there in Cuba taking meetings with Castro doing, he's also talking to other. And you know for a fact that he's talking to the Soviet unit at this point. He legalizes communism. Now fucking bells, alarm bells are going off. And he also starts to nationalize some companies that are owned by United States citizens. Well, this is where the tit for tat where the United States just feeds his propaganda. and a machine is they are

the main, or Cuba's the main supplier, they send all their sugar to the United States. Coca-Cola baby. Yeah, United States is the sugar buyer at the time. I think Hershey had his place down there. He definitely had his place down there. Coke had a place down there too, I believe. Probably.

But if the United States is the other one buying your sugar, they can manipulate the market. So if there's a point in time to where they want to buy the sugar for less and you're not selling to anybody else, they can just pay you less. And so as the United States is kind of manipulating some of the markets that they have down there, Castro's talking to his people, he's like, look, they're buying at a cheaper price because

they can. They're using this relationship to try to take money out of your pockets. That's an issue. The reason that they're coming after us is because they don't like me and they don't like what I'm doing. At that same point in time, Castro's going up and starting to round up anybody that could maybe see the U.S.'s side in this or maybe was still pro-Batista or that didn't like this movement

towards communism that he's making, these calls that he's taking from Khrushchev at the time. 36 sugar mills. Was Coca-Cola's? No, no, no, just in total. 30, but like, God, think of how many companies were probably using that. Tons. Absolutely tons. And these other

resources that are happening, the United States was running the electrical grid, down there. They were running the power grid in Cuba. I think the phone telephone service and everything. Yeah. It's just stuff like that to where the U.S. was so deeply entrenched in Cuba that is Castro starts kind of undoing some

of their power. The United States starts to fight back. Eventually we'll run into a full trade embargo in Cuba in 1960 and we'll talk a little bit about that. In 1959 there was a Cuban army commander named Hubert Matos who

had a lot of disagreement with the way that Castro is swing towards the Communist Party, Huber goes ahead and resigns, and within days after his resignation, him and eight of his closest confidants are all arrested. Yeah. And they're put in prison. Of course, during this whole entire thing,

the CIA is still keeping an eye on what's going on. And as they're seeing this turn towards communism, because as we slowly put an embargo on these different kinds of trade that we used to take from Cuba, Soviet Union's like, well, if you guys aren't going to sell that sugar to the United States, we'll buy it, and we'll buy it at a better price than what they were buying it at. All those other exports that the United States is putting an embargo on, just go ahead and send them to us, and we'll pay you handsomely for this stuff.

What the fuck did we think was going to happen? We talked about this during our little pre-episode chat so we could get all the stupid stuff out of our system. Um, what do you think is going to happen here? I know that you think you're going to try to hurt them and do you feel like you're going to easily just like strong-arm them into being like, oh, shit, okay, we give up, we give up, we'll do whatever you want. All it takes is for them to pivot their heads. And not only even that, as soon as the Soviet Union finds out about this embargo against Cuba, they're already sliding up on the other side and being like, hey, you have some sugar? Yeah, we can buy that too. In fact, guess what? If you're having trouble receiving anything else. You guys probably need oil, right? We can start sending you guys oil as well. Do you guys need, okay, everyone loves oil. You're basically running them into the arms of somebody else. It's such a dumb fucking move when it would be, based upon all the other shady shit that

the states had done up to this point. And we're going to reference back to this operation in Guatemala that was in the 50s, I think. And that's going to have kind of an impact on how the Bay of Pigs is actually like. out, but we've been kind of like deposing governments in South America. This is old half for us by now. We've been, we're practiced at this. And to not know, you know, we've cozied up to dictators and all that kind of shit at this point because they're not communist. We know how to do this and the fact that we just don't go to fucking Castro before any of this pops out and is like, what do you need? Like, we have one condition. Please just don't be communist. And we're going to take

care of each other and we're all going to live happily ever after. It would have been that fucking easy. Would it have been morally gray? Fuck yes, it would have been. But at this point, we're just like, hey, you know that country that's 90 miles off Florida? Why don't we just piss them off while the Soviets have their other ear? And we're completely aware of it. At this point in time, you're pushing democracy for the entire world, but you're willing to look beyond the democracy of another country that's a dictatorship in order for capitalism to thrive, which seems. seems like kind of a weird ethos for the U.S. to have at that point in time, but democracy almost took a backseat to better positioning for the United States.

And again, feeding into this whole propaganda machine in the way of weaponry and self-defense, Cuba had a contract lined up with Great Britain to buy fighter jets from them, to buy airplanes from them. The United States gets on the phone with Great Britain and he's like, Or they're like, don't, don't do this. Don't send him any sort of... They don't do that. Yeah.

Don't send him anything sort of defense-wise because he's in bed with the communists. So all of a sudden, Cuba realizes that this deal goes south. Here's why it goes south. Now Fidel's talking to all of his people down there saying, well, the United States doesn't want us to be able to defend ourselves. Does that seem like something that a good neighbor would want you to have or to do? Why would they want us weak? why wouldn't you want a strong neighbor that could help you and you could help each other? You're just playing right into his hands to be able to badmouth what you have going on.

And then you have literally a representative from the Soviet Union probably sitting there next to him being like, yeah, the United States sucks, don't they? And everyone's like, yeah. You probably should have come to us for these jets. We'd get you hooked up. Our jets are much better. Well, part of the emphasis for why the Bay of Pigs has to happen when it's going to happen is because they already have, believe they're called T-33 jets? Yeah.

That Russia... They're American. I thought the Russians were sending them new jets. No, they may have been in the process of doing that, but the planes that the Cubans had at the point of that the time during the Bay of Pigs, is they had B-26s,

which will explain why B-26s are used essentially by the Cuban exiles and the United States backing them. They had T-33s, which were at like a trainer, jet. Fury fighters? They had British Hawker, what were they, Sea Furies, which were... Sea Furies, yes. So basically they were like a marine version of like the Spitfire. They were a prop driven plane. The only

jet that they had was that T-33 and they only had like four of them. But they were provided as trainers. They armed them. Not usually what you do with the trainer. But some of these planes that they have left over still from the Batista regime. So there's still things that have fallen into their hands via Batista, who was good with us and good with everybody else. Good enough with us for us to supply him military planes.

Exactly. Yeah. World War II, you know, obsolete World War II, but still planes nonetheless. Yeah, we're still making money off of them. They're a little bit more protected. And just going along with this whole entire thing, in the 1960, the CIA would start to create these

assassination plots that they would try to figure out how to remove Castro from power to stop this spread of communism on the island. And there were certain points in times when memorandums would come through. And they would have to go through and scratch out some of the language. So they would always scratch out any way of like murder, assassinate, disappear. Unalive. On alive, probably at some point in time.

All of those would be scratched out on all these memorandums. and it would just say remove. Yeah. So this is clearly a cover up of like we don't want these to look like assassination plots, but there's going to be a couple of them that come up. And part of the reason why these start to get a little wild, and we probably won't talk about a lot of them, but there was an exploding seashell plot.

Yeah, there was some pretty bad shit stuff. And the reason it comes to this and essentially gets to the point of escalation is because CIA is doing a reassessment. they kind of are viewing based on the, you know, behaviors of Castro and everything like that, that he's becoming a legitimate threat at this point. And to kind of drive the point home, he ends up nationalizing enough of these U.S.

owned, you know, properties or companies and everything. It equates to about, like, $1.5 billion. That's a lot. It's a lot. He also, prior to doing this, he is going to require the American companies that have, like, a bunch of oil refineries down there. I think, like, Shell is,

one of them and Texaco and S.O. He basically, in 1960, he's trying to force these companies to refine Soviet, you know, crude oil that the Soviets are sending over, which basically they're like, well, we're supposed to be refining the oil that we're pumping and everything so we can make money off of it. When they actually, you know, requested and the companies, American companies refuse, he basically just seizes them and nationalizes them. So, at this point, he's pretty much nationalized all of the American companies to the tune of one and a half billion. And at that point, it's starting to hit these companies in the pocketbook, which at that

point, they're turning to the government being like, get this fucker out. So a couple of plans, you get the assassination ones that are ridiculous. You get, in 1960, you get this plan to sabotage the sugar mills to come down to hit him where it really fucking hurts right in the sugar. And basically, Ike is like, yeah, You know what? I feel like that's going to hurt their economy and their economic standing. And I think in his mind, he's like, we're not wanting to like completely damage this company. We just want to get Castro out.

Like, we want to keep it all intact. So the next guy we put in there is going to come into a functional country that essentially isn't going to require a whole lot of maintenance to get it back up and running. Well, the cornerstone of Ike's entire presidency was kind of calm. It was don't ruffle any feathers, don't do anything insane, obviously assassinating world leaders. This is the warning about like the military industrial complex. Yeah. Yeah, he was a way more chill president during his time than he was at any time before he became president. And in that situation, any kind of plot to try to take down a country's economy or take down a dictator's just not really. the cards. Well, I don't think he was very opposed to the idea of taking down the dictator.

Oh, no. I think he was more opposed. I wonder how much of that is based on just the experience of rebuilding in World War II in Europe, of being like, oh, it's going to be much harder to clean up this mess than it is just to, as if we would have just tried to take this guy out. Like, the rebuilding is the thing that's going to cost us the most. I think he knew at a certain point that there were so much, or so many aggressions happening back and forth between him and Cuba that if the assassination plots take out the dictator were to happen, which I'm sure he probably wasn't too

bummed about if it did, he would know that there's probably a pretty direct line that you could draw to the United States just because of the tensions. Yeah, to go along with some of these plots, the reason why some of these things are so outlandish, like an exploding seashell that Castro was going to

go or scuba dive down to the bottom and pick up, and then it was going to explode was because they were going to leave it on the beach. I read that they were going to try to leave it on the beach, but maybe they were hoping if he did have to dive down to get it, he would use the wetsuit. They were going to provide him with the flesh-eating bacteria in it. Yeah. Yeah, just stuff like that, just crazy spy things.

We also had the attempt to give him poison cigars. Mm-hmm. Another Alan Dulles trait, because we got to bring him into this now because he's kind of the architect of some of these things. Alan Dulles, the guy that was behind and helped and headed NK Ultra, said that... Director of the CIA. There was a chance. There was a substance that they could slip into Castro's food prior to a, like him going out

and speaking to the people that would make him act so erratically that it would scare the country into not having any faith in Castro anymore. I wonder what that substance that they could slip into his food that would make make him act erratically would be at that point in time. Could it have been LSD? Probably. Hmm. I didn't actually make that connection.

Yeah. Also, Dulles threw JFK's wife, Jackie Kennedy, because they were kind of buddies that would go hang out of each other's houses. Jackie Kennedy gives Alan Dulles an Ian Fleming James Bond novel. And Alan Dulles kind of falls for Ian Fleming to the point to what, where he actually questions Ian Fleming as to how he would try to take out Castro. Ian Fleming pitches this idea that they would send propaganda down there via pamphlet drop saying that there was atomic testing that happened close to Cuba and the radiation that was coming

off of it would then be absorbed by Cuba. Part of the deal with Castro was he always had the beard because that was his revolutionary symbol. What it said was all of the men would have to shave their beards off because the, or the radiation fallout would make them sterile. So Fleming's idea was to trick them into shaving their beards and that would then make them feel like Castro wasn't the leader that he was because he shaved his beard because he was scared.

This is why you have editors. Yeah. That can maybe try to taper some of these wilder outlandish, James Bond-ish plots. did you also hear that the CIA kind of went in with Costa Nostra? Yes. Because the mob had fingers and everything. Anywhere where there were

American companies, the mob also had dealings in there and basically made a deal that if they were able to kill Fidel, they would provide them basically the gaming rights, prostitution rights, and drug trade. So all of those trades in Cuba once they were able to install a friendly

regime in there. All they were giving them back, though, was exactly what Castro had taken from them. Exactly. Because before Castro came into power, they ran all the casinos. Yeah. They ran the liquor racket down there. They ran the prostitution racket down there. So the mafia also kind of had an ax to grind with Castro, excuse me, too.

Yeah. And perfect case and point, Castro goes ahead and comes back to the United States in 1960. I believe it was in September. It was like six weeks before the election. There is a general U.N. meeting taking place in New York. Now, Castro is already pretty much a communist at this point.

He's coming back to the United States for this UN meeting. Everybody from all the world leaders are there. Jesus Christ. The Russian. Storberchoff. Oh, okay. No, not Gorbachev. Khrushchev, yes.

It had to have a shev in it. Khrushchev is here. Everybody else is here. When Castro gets here, he goes to get off the plane and do exactly what he did last time and go greet the people at the airport that are there to celebrate him being there. And his security pushes him straight into the limo. As he's driving, Castro says that he goes to roll the window down to stick his hand out and wave to the people as he's leaving. He says that one of the security agents grabbed his arm and yanked it back inside the vehicle. Okay, so these aren't his guys.

No, this is U.S. security. Gotcha. He gets taken to, I believe it was Midtown Manhattan, and basically the entire island is his new prison. He's not allowed to leave the island at all like he did before. He's not allowed to travel. He went to the zoo the first time he showed up in New York. This time there's going to be no zoo visits. And they're basically trapped in this hotel.

Castro comes down to the lobby to finally get a little bit of press time. and he says that he is going to be leaving this hotel and leaving the country and not showing up to the UN meeting because the hotel had said they had to, it was like a $100,000 kind of like deposit that they had to put down in case anything went wrong. And Castro was like, nobody else had to do this. Why is this just something for me? And the hotel's like, no, that there was a miscommunication. That should have never come out. And Castro goes, no, I'm not dealing with this anymore. So Castro leaves and heads up to Harlem, a predominantly black neighborhood, not in great shape at that point in time.

And they find a hotel that they stay at. And this is where we get the famous picture of Fidel Castro and Malcolm X, because this was where that meeting took place and more of a seedy hotel that wasn't on a great block that they said the water in the rooms and everything like that was just really bad. The toilets didn't flush. before he got to this hotel, he had threatened that him and his people would go sleep in Central Park to attend the meetings. He reaches back into his bag and he pulls out a hammock and he goes, my people are mountain people. They're tough. We can survive a couple nights in Central Park. So while he's hanging out in this hotel, he also not only runs into Malcolm X, but he runs into Cruise Chef.

Because Cruise Chef and him go ahead and have a meeting in this hotel in Harlem. after the meeting happens and Cruz Chef leaves, this is when he comes out and he talks about the belly of the beast and the fact that the great power of the country still has poor people that have to feed it and live in it.

They show up to the UN meeting the next day. Cruz Chef gives up or stands up and gives a speech. It was like 20 minutes or something like that. Just a very, very long speech. The only guy that's standing and clapping for this is Castro the entire time. He's cheering for him like

crazy. Castro gets up, takes his time, four hours. He speaks in front of the UN council, and Khrushchev is doing the exact same thing for Castro. Every time he makes a point, every time he derides the United States for doing something wrong, Cruzchev is just cheering his ass off. And through this whole entire meeting, there's threats from Khrushchev about any movements or any violence towards Cuba would lead to them blocking off Berlin. Basically saying we've got Cuba's back. They're under kind of our watch. Any active aggression toward them is considered an active aggression toward us. Yeah. And so you have these two people teaming up, these two world leaders teaming up against the United States in New York

City, just telling them exactly what they're going to do in front of the entire UN, in front of the entire section of world leaders that's there. So this kind of just really, forces kind of what the greatest fear of the, of the, you know, U.S. government is at this point. So they see basically this, you know, budding relationship. They know that their relationship, they just heard him talk for four hours about, you know, talking shit about America and all that kind of stuff. Making some definitely valid points because that's when people get offended the most is probably when you make the most valid of points.

Yeah. And then kind of from here, there's things that just kind of escalate this that are kind of their own miniature little, I guess, U.S. Cuba-type Cold War type stuff. You get this plan put in place that when Ike kind of requested that there be plans put into place to go ahead and remove Castro from power, they come up, like I said, with that sabotage of the Cuban and American sugar mills. He passes on that. He basically sends these guys back to the drawing board. And the guys that are in charge of what is going to become essentially the Bay of Pigs invasion are Alan. Dulles, who is the CIA director,

Richard Bessel Jr., who is the overseer of the Bay of Pigs invasion plans, and then you get these other guys, and we're not going to get into detail about everybody, but just kind of provide kind of some of the players. David Phillips, Gary Droller, and E. Edward Hunt. You always got to love it when they put the

initial first. E. Edward or E. Howard? Oh, sorry, E. Howard Hunt. Yeah. What is that name, ring bells? He was the architect of the Watergate break-in for Nixon. Oh, shit. Yep. Okay. He was the one that was tasked with meeting with these anti-Castro Cubans in the United States to start building this militia. Fuck, man. Like, it was government was small. Like, just the same guys with their dirty dicks and shit. Yep. Yeah, go back and listen to that episode. That was a, that one was fun to do. Basically, you get droller who's assigned to contact the anti-Castro Cuban American groups. So once Castro took power, you had, you know, all of these anti-Castro revolutionaries.

fleeing the country to avoid, you know, reprisals and everything. You had them moving to all different areas. There was, you know, large numbers of them in the Florida area. So he was going to be put in contact with these guys and then kind of through these guys, try to build up a base of this anti-Castro movement. You had Hunt, who was basically to create a Cuban government in exile. The only way that you could legitimize removing Castro from power is if you gave the appearance that another Cuban government in exile that was already existing for the Cuban people was going to move into place. You couldn't just have a power vacuum of being like Castro's out

and then just kind of be like, ho-hum, wait for the Americans to put someone in. You essentially had to have somebody ready as legitimate, I say legitimate loosely, but essentially successor to Castro's regime once it was overturned. Well, they needed this because we'll talk about it during the actual invasion

and what happens. this wasn't an invasion to take Cuba. This was an invasion to hold enough of Cuba to where you could land this new government that staked a legitimate claim to the country. And then once they stake the claim to the country as the legitimate errors to it with a new government, then the United States can start sending in backing to help this new government take over. Well, part of what you're also counting on as well is you're counting on, the presence of a large population of anti-Castro people still within Cuba, that as soon as that

other government gets into place, you're going to rally this group of people and you're going to create this larger revolution. It's not just going to be the people essentially coming in in the boats that are going to be that. It's going to be them essentially being the core of this revolution that is going to attract all these other people. But you better be fucking right that there is this anti-Castro movement in Cuba. Meanwhile, what's Castro doing to all the anti-Castro revolutionaries in Cuba? Yeah.

He's putting them in prison or killing them. So now anybody that you have that you're counting on the inside to start this revolution is being put in prison or put to death, which is scaring a lot of people. So they come essentially, how the plans had to work at this point. I'm probably missing some steps is, The president has these guys drop the plan. They have to bring this plan to essentially the National Security Council. Eisenhower.

Isenhow. I did I say Ike? Yeah. You said the president. But to clarify. Ike at this point. We're not to JFK. Yeah, we're not to Kennedy yet. So on March 17th in 1960, CIA proposes this plan to the United States Security Council.

Essentially, they don't have the plan fully formed. They just basically have the goals of the plan. We're going to create another government. We're going to go ahead and train a bunch of, of these guys. We're going to put together this Cuban exile force and they're going to essentially get there start a revolution

with all these people who are in Cuba who are going to support them and then they'll overthrow Castro and this group that we've formed to be the new government is going to essentially be kind of like a CIA American puppet government. But we don't want to have any direct government involvement with this fighting force

so we're going to have to move them out of the United States to train them. Yes. They're like, okay, well, we're going to go ahead and give you $13 million to basically explore these options and kind of come up with a more solid plan about how you guys are going to go about doing this. And so again, not too many objectives here. Castor out, U.S. friendly government in, but don't make it too friendly. You can't make them too agreeable to all of the stuff that we do because if that happens, what's it going to look like? Because the whole point of this, like you just said, is you have to

provide the illusion that the U.S. government has no hand in this. This has to be strictly a group of self-funded Cuban exiles who are going to be putting this thing together. They can pull $13 million together. They didn't know how much they needed because it's going to cost a lot more than this. But yeah, you can't appear to have them just coming and being like, hey, we're best friends with the United States because they'd be like, bitch, shut up, I mean, be cool. So, but essentially they would be just playing it as a ruse that they weren't too friends. with the U.S. It's so much of a...

I wanted to point out the president thing because I think it's such a big deal that JFK takes so much heat for this and admittedly so, he does deserve a lot of heat for this. At the same time, most of these plans were started to be formed before he even

had a chance to put any input towards this. Oh, 100%. I mean, he doesn't get sworn in or even he doesn't even get briefed. For the first time, he gets briefed on November 18th. Once the election is done, he's confirmed essentially as the president-elect. There's like 10 days after he was confirmed as the president-elect. And I mean, and even during that time frame, you still have stuff escalating even more so. They're working on this plan. This isn't just simply a throw this stuff together. Like Adam said, they start training these exiles.

They gather, they're trying to get and build up this militia as much as they can. And they have to move them essentially from Florida where they were training them out there on this like island essentially. They had to then send them to Mexico City to basically get them out of the eye and continue to train them outside the country. During this time, there's also this incident that occurs in 1960, the Lecoubvre, which is a French ship that was sunk in Havana Harbor that Castro, to blame it on the United States. Did we mine it? Or did we torpe? Were we trying to make them look?

I can't remember what the rationale that we tried to sink this ship. And then kind of the last straw that showed us that there really was no turning back from this threat of, you know, Cuban communism was that on May 1st in 1960, Castro cancels the elections. And it basically is just confirmation that it's going to be a one-part. It's going to basically be following the Soviet Union form of communism as a one-party system. Yeah, and there's little room for any sort of negotiation. Now, it doesn't take long because after that in June 1960, because again, you can't all of a sudden just have this revolutionary anti-Cuban force present themselves initially during this invasion. And then everyone's like, what's going on? Who are these guys?

So in June, the Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front basically has their coming out party in Mexico City. and they announced themselves as kind of like, we're going to be the ones that overthrow Castro and bring back whatever they're going to to Cuba. And they're basically hoping that these other smaller groups that have like Splinter groups or groups that have formed on their own, kind of seeking the same type of revolution,

are basically going to all just kind of flock to them. That's what I forgot to talk about with that second trip. So during his second trip in New York for the UN thing, this is when a lot of context between the CIA and the mob is going on. Because you have Castro in the U.S. Yeah. And... Oh, can we get him while he's here or something?

Yeah. Can we get him while he's here? But can it be something that happens with the mob? And if the mob goes ahead and takes care of it, that's okay. I still see so many flaws. So what would be the reason? Would the reason just be the mob did it independently because Castro was hurting their bottom dollar down in Cuba.

Yeah. Because, dude, it's still happening on American soil. We couldn't keep a foreign dignitary from getting killed by the mob that's stationed in our country. It still leaves too much. That's what I'm saying. That probably was a plan. It was. But even just at a glance, it's such a dumb fucking plan.

Because what are you going to, you're going to have it happen in New York while he's there for the fucking UN? Like, how's that going to look? That's instantly going to turn hostilities against the U.S. I forgot who the mobster was that they had a meeting with. I don't think it was Dick Bissell that set up the meeting, but it was somebody who had an inside with the mob that they had set up a meeting with one of the mob bosses out west. They had offered him like $50,000 for the hit on Castro,

and the mobster said, don't worry about it. Your money's no good here. We'll take a look into it. So there was some planning and forethought on. on the mob side to see if this was going to happen. Like, legitimately, there's, there's records of these meetings with the mob to talk about this. It's still just such a dumb fucking plan, even if it, it would have gone down like that. Unless you believe that the mob helped JFK win the election and the mob might have had

something to do with the JFK assassination. Like, there's a lot of little fun strings to be pulled in that. It's kind of strange that, like, okay, so we did the JFK episode. while back. And again, because that's such a huge episode, it's hard to kind of, like, dig into, like, more of the conspiracy-ish-type mob things. But

even just talking about the fact that fucking E. Howard Hunt is the guy that fucking did Watergate, and you have all of these, like, specific players during this time frame, and especially with how easily it sounds like the mob was able to fucking communicate with the CIA. They had contacts

and everything. It kind of helps you... I'm not seeing it solidifies these conspiracies, but it helps add a little bit more meat to the stew. Yeah. It's a little more substantial. Yeah, when you start talking conspiracy theories and you think, well, there's no real link between the CIA and the mob and then all those links kind of start to come to be where it's like they knew that this was a full blown illegal organization that was operating in the United States, but they still had conversations between each other. Like you were just cool with all that going on. One thing too, when it was in, it was in, I think,

think August of 60. Was August when he was at in New York? It was either August or September. Okay. So Secretary of State Christian Herder basically publicly proclaims that Castro is a communist. He's moving, he's moved Cuba to the Soviet Union communist, you know, way of doing things. And basically just kind of like publicly disparages him and everything like that. When most of this was behind closed doors to this point, when you have a member of like, the government. Like the executive branch coming out. Secretary of State would be, yeah,

member of the executive branch. And this is when Fidel also kind of clasped back about giving his list of complaints about the United States. And one of them fucking hits that I just looked. I go, it was that all of our media is controlled by big business. And I just read that. And I was just like, yeah.

Like how do you respond? Like got, yeah, you got us. This guy's a bad guy, but he's making some points. Sometimes he makes some points. But, yeah, so I mean, between talking to the fucking CIA, talking to the mob and everything, and trying to kind of make these backdoor deals, it finally gets to the point where they're like, okay, we need to start hammering down the details of this invasion. This is going to be probably our most viable plan. So that's what we should kind of proceed with. And before we proceed any further, I do need to take a miss.

Good. Well, hey, there, all you sexy high. Historians, how are you guys doing? It is time for socials. Where can they find us on Instagram? If they want to follow us, they can find us at a historically high pod on Instagram. That goes the same for threads as well.

You can also find us on Twitter. Tell them about Twitter. Historically high. That's historically H-I on Twitter. and if you want to email any of your comments or suggestions, where can they find a sad, Adam? Historically High Podcast at gmail.com Gmail. All right, and back to the show.

All right. Just letting you guys know, this is probably going to be another two hours. I'm just being honest with you. Some of you guys enjoy that. I hope most of you guys enjoy the longer ones. We just want to make sure we're not missing anything. and this one is juicy. I didn't expect this.

We actually took one more day of research just because there's so much meat on this bone. And this is only like one half of what happens. Yeah, it's part one, part two. We're not going to do a part two until much later, but like technically the second part of this is the Cuban missile crisis. Which is nuts that it's like, yeah,

it's just the Cuban missile crisis. It's not that big of a deal because this was such a big deal. But you don't explain. why the missile crisis happens unless you explain how it escalates because of this. The colossal fuck-up that leads to it, yeah. Okay, so 1960 U.S. election, basically JFK wins, and he would basically kind of begin to keep his campaign promise.

The last debate I think he had with Richard Nixon, he'd have been attacking the softness of the Eisenhower Nixon administration about their toughness on communism. So that was a big thing that he was kind of running for on his campaign. wild because to claim that Richard Nixon wasn't anti-communist is a pretty out there claim. I honestly think, man, you just find what flusters Nixon. Just tell you're gas, you're basically just trying to get you. You're like, you're definitely not tough and he's like, oh, I'm tough. I'm tough. I think that was it. It was just supposed to try to fuck with his head. Well, this is a huge pivotal moment because you have Nixon who's the vice president, who's like Eisenhower's vice president, who's already kind of abreast of these plans that are going. forward in probably in one way of looking at it, it wouldn't be bad if he just continued on down that road. Now, the other way of looking at it is anything Nixon touched, he kind of seemed to

fuck up. So it's probably good that Nixon didn't win because he probably would have made this even worse than it turns out to me. You mean the guy that got drunk and tried to new places? Yeah. Probably would have handled this high pressure situation a little bit worse. Yeah. That's the guy. Yeah. There'd be some pretty big ballmarks all over the world had Nixon stayed in. So I don't know if we mentioned it, but around October of this same year, 1960, this is when basically the big economic embargo begins on Cuba. So we're trying to hit him in the pocketbook, but they're basically just making all their money off the Soviet Union at this point. Well, the reason that that happens is directly tied into this election because we're going into the last of four debates between Nixon and JFK. this is famously

these were the first debates that were on TV, this is where Nixon looks like shit and he's sweating and looks like just absolute anyone next to John. Well, and that's what it was. Guys, a goddamn movie star. They saw the suave and Devonair

JFK next to this gargoyle and they made the choice. That fucking sound. I just see that being the sound anytime Nixon got bad movies, he just went, So Nixon needs a Hail Mary. Nixon goes to Eisenhower and he says, hey, you need to do something in Cuba.

Oh, Ike, you got to give me something. This guy's kicking my ass out there. In order to go through with this communist attack plan, Eisenhower sets this full embargo up on Cuba. And Nixon goes out and he touts that and he says, look, I'm the vice president. He's the president. We just put a full embargo on Cuba. there's nothing that can get tougher than that against communism than what we just did. We shut them out completely.

Well, JFK comes out and he goes, that's not enough. You think that that's how you're hard on communists? If you think that's how you're hard on communists, you're going to hate this because if I'm elected president, I will fully support and fund and give any anti-Castro rebels all of the training and support that they need to go and overthrow Castro. And Nixon's like, how the fuck did you know about that? How'd you know about that?

Well, doesn't say that. But in his head, he's just got to be thinking to himself. He's like, how the fuck did you find out about this? Because he specifically told, when you're in an election, I don't know. I'm sure it's similar. I don't fucking know. But back then, if you had someone running for president, you wouldn't want them to just come in day one, especially on some of the major time sensitive stuff and just be like, oh, hey, by the way,

there's this that you got to fucking do. you would give them some type of heads up because again they're still in an office in the government and everything most likely they're a senator something like that you're going to appraise them of maybe not all the details but something that's maybe in the works so nixon basically goes to dulce and is like um don't tell jfk about the bay of pigs invasion don't tell him and dulce is like okay and so by kennedy actually coming out and saying that that's got to create this big fucking just suspicion in Nixon's head that you were talking about before we recorded about like, oh, this motherfucker told it.

Yeah, it's one thing that they do where you have to make both of these candidates abreast of the world things that are going on. It would also explain, and this would have to be something I'd have to look into, which I can't wait for the CIA episode, that's going to be fucking awesome. But if it was really a high turnover rate like it is today where you get someone in every key position in government that's in within your political party, I don't know if that was the case back then, but it does go ahead and kind of lend to the fact that Dulles got to hang around when Kennedy came into office as the director of the CIA, that he wasn't ousted and someone else wasn't put in his place. Because Kennedy didn't have a problem putting in family or anyone like that into positions.

No. Robert was the attorney general. So you get Dulles to at the end of his career. Dulles doesn't really expect to stay around if JFK's in, but JFK wins. he, as you were talking about, is then immediately briefed on November 18th, right after he's the president-elect by Dulles, by Richard Bissell, by Dick Bissell. He's not our buddy, but we're going to call him Dick. His real friends called him Dickie, which is hilarious that this guy that was the deputy... He was the deputy director of plans for the CIA, which sounds like quite a title.

If you're the director of plans... Yeah, buddy, but like, think of the fucking plans you're making. Like, for a second, ignore the fact that this is dirty as shit, this stuff that you're doing. But to be able to sit there and play a strategy game of being like, it's, how many video games do you think like risk and all those strategy games about trying to take over areas? You're playing a real life fucking version. Like, how do I depose this person out of this South American country? And he seemed to be pretty good at it too because they had some success like what, 10 years earlier or 5 or 6 years earlier. in Guatemala.

Yep. Dick Bissell was ahead of that. He was also... Dick Bissell. He was also the guy that kind of created the U-2 spy plane program. He worked with Polaroid. He worked with the Air Force to create this. This is also kind of an issue because this is post-Crucchev shooting down the U-2 in Russia,

which never really made the news at that point in time because it was kind of something in Cruz-Chef's back pocket that he could bring up at any point in time. It's also something that Castro actually references after this whole thing happens, that he knows about what happens. A cruise chef had obviously told him. Well, you've got to imagine that Cruz Chef is just feeding him all of the shit that they know about. And then say this.

And then say this. Yeah. Do you need any, anything? Do you need any? I got the dirtiest shit you could ever imagine. Inspiration for this shit. Yeah. I got the JFKPP videos.

So as this changeover happens, again, he's brief November 18th. Eisenhower, Dulles, Dick Bissell, the defense chiefs would begin finalizing plans prior to Ike leaving office for this pre-bay of pigs. What would be referred to, I think, at that point in time, is called the Trinidad plan.

Yeah. And the reason it was called the Trinidad plan was initially this was headed towards Trinidad and Cuba. JFK was sort of the guiding light to move them over to the Bay of Pigs, just because it would be a more advantageous position with Trinidad being somewhere where there's going to be more people? My Cuban geography is not exactly great.

So Cuba laying east to west, Havana, the capital, right? Yep. That is actually more like on the west coast. Northwest. Very northwest. Yeah. Because this thing is long and skinny and spread out. So probably in the like the first quarter, if not the first fifth of that western portion

of the country. The Bay of Pigs were this, or where was Trinidad? Trinidad was going to be to the west of the bay. Okay. And then they decided maybe move it a little closer to Havana and it was chosen as the Bay of Pigs, which kind of is, I think, 120 kilometers. I'm sorry, I didn't look up the mileage, do the math. It's 120 to 150 kilometers southeast of Havana.

But inland because it is a bay. So it does jut up into the body of Cuba. Finally, I mean, and it takes until mid-March of 61, but Kennedy finally agrees. But this is when he starts making these concessions of me. I don't want it to occur and turn it at it. It needs to be in a more isolated area. And he starts making these other changes. They decide also on the Bay of Pigs because one of the beaches they'd be landing on was near an airfield that they could then use as part of kind of the ruse to explain how this invasion and like the air support and everything like that occurs.

Well, to get down to kind of the brass stacks of how it's going to go, we won't talk about the beaches yet or anything like that. But the idea is, as we referenced earlier, to invade, establish a beachhead, you are going to try to wipe out Cuban air superiority. And the main thing that you want to do after that is there are three solid routes that you can get from the north of Cuba down to where the Bay of Pigs is. What's so insane is doing this episode and talking about the air battle.

Yeah. When we, a couple weeks ago was when we recorded the, uh, allied bombing. And then the sheer numbers. Yeah. Of the planes and the fighters and everything. And then breaking it down to what essentially the Cuban Air Force amounts to at that time. Um,

it was like two handfuls of planes. Yeah. It wasn't, it was maybe, it was less than two dozen. I believe that were like combat worthy. They had, um, some B26s. So the reason that the B20s, so the reason that the B20s, were chosen as part of the Bay and Pigs invasion is again, this whole thing is about deniability on the part of the U.S. to say we had nothing to do with it.

So we were like, oh, remember those planes that we sold them under the Batista regime? Okay, those were B26s. So we'll just make sure, because we have a shit ton of them left over, we'll go ahead and get a bunch of them out, get them running. We'll provide the rebels with B26s. So when people see these flying over, they'll be used to seeing them flying over because they're the same planes that the Cuban Air Force uses. But what are we going to do to those planes?

We're going to go ahead and make sure that because we need these to also be fighter planes, we can't provide fighter jets because guess what? The only fighter jets that the Cubans have is they have a few hawker sea furies, which are like the British Spitfire variations, the prop planes. And they have four of the Lockheed T-33 jets that we sent them as trainers. And we didn't know that they armed them because U-2 spy planes are, whatever those cameras are, you're not going to be able to see if they strap a couple guns onto these planes. So they're like, the B-26s that we provide these guys should probably be able to hold their

own against the planes they do have, especially when we load the noses of these things with 850 caliber guns, which, weirdly enough, none of the planes that we provided to Batista for use had these. They instead had the clear plexiglass nose cone because the planes were used as a bomber. So they, again, they're looking into some of the details, but not all of the details when they're planning this. Well, and you don't got to look into the details too much when you break out the old paint roller and go ahead and paint these to look exactly like the Cuban Air Force's planes to the point to where even the wing numbers on them, it was like they used the 900s in Cuba. 933 was one of them, but they had like duplicates or something like that. So they were trying to cover these up to make them look exactly like Cuban planes. So when these bombings are taking place, people have no idea what's going on.

Why is the Cuban Air Force bombing themselves? This must be some sort of a rebellion going on against Castro. It's got to be internal. Yeah. It's strictly internal. So eventually the Operation Trinidad becomes Operation Zapata, which is Shu. I'm not sure what that relates to. But that becomes...

Stomp and out communism. Stop. There you go. Zapata. is approved April 4th of 61. We're going to go ahead and pivot a little bit to another aspect of this, which is going to be who the fuck is going to be invading. And that in itself is nuts.

So training the rebels. This whole idea is predicated on trying to make sure that it doesn't look like you are training these rebels, which, as we just talked about, JFK said if he became president, that's what he would do. So the secrecy of that is sort of already out. I think, and we talked about this pre-episode, but I think him running for president, again, you're only privy to certain information. He says this during that, and that, you know, that doesn't win him the election, but it definitely puts Nixon in his place during that and probably does sway a little bit. But as soon as you get into that presidency, you're being briefed.

briefed on this and all of a sudden not only you're being briefed on this operation, but you're getting all of the other information that's coming in from all over Europe. The Cold War again is fucking just at its height and you're hearing about all the different threats. And during the course of this plan, you start to think about the aspect of how can this happen, but how can it happen in a way that it can't be pinned back on us? Because at this point, it kind of feels like anything can almost lead to nuclear conflict. conflict. Yeah. So the emphasis is put on, we got to make sure that we don't have any ties to this, which is insane when we get into the details and kind of the order of how stuff happens. But again, this is also at a time when just like Adam was saying, the invention of the U2 spy plane, surveillance and stuff like that isn't really advanced at this point, especially over long distances. Aside from essentially, you know, the Soviets might have a spy plane, but they don't know what to be flying it over Cuba this entire time or anything like that. And you would have to have some type of air presence there in order to kind of keep a closer watch. So there are going to be certain, I guess, little concessions or allowances by how involved we are, but it's going to be about like the long game. Like who's going to be on the ground? Who's going to be the ones that are actually fighting? Like that, that's who it needs to be where, you know, America has its hands clean of it. Well, the concessions are, we're not going to have anybody on the ground, but the training will be done by U.S. Army Special Forces groups. There were frogmen down there to train

the frog bend. Underwater fucking demolitions, clearing beach obstacles, kind of shit that like you would think like Operation Neptune back in World War 2, old hat for fucking Eisenhower was storming beaches. Yeah. That guy had an immaculate record when it came to storming beaches, so why

wouldn't this work to do this as well? He knew what it would take. If there's anybody that I want to leave a beach storming idea too, it's probably going to be Eisenhower. It's going to be the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Yeah. We also had the U.S. Air Force and shockingly enough, the Alabama Air National Guard.

You and I talked about this. It's very odd that they would be chosen. But then it makes perfect sense. Yeah. So the reason that the Air Guard was used from Alabama was because they were one of the last installations that were still using the B26. So they had kind of like the most recent training with them. Yeah.

And so it would be easier for them to go down and train these guys. Joaquin Perdomo was a former police chief in Cuba and the former intelligence officer Rafael Gutierrez headed up kind of the operation on the ground as far as helping to train these troops. As we talked about, E. Howard Hunt was really big on getting these people down there. one of the concessions that they had to make to JFK was JFK wanted more troops out there. And the thing that I can't blame JFK for is he walks into this and he's basically told you have two choices. You can either go with this plan or you can't go with this plan. If you go with this plan, there's a chance it's going to work out. Does a chance it may not work out to what we want it to and maybe our cover is blown?

On the other hand, if you deny this plan and we don't go down this road, we've spent the last three to six months training these Cuban exiles in Guatemala and in Mexico City and everywhere else. And if you call this plan off, they just have to go back to their daily lives. So they're going to go back to all of the family that they had just left in the United States and probably start spilling the tea on what they were doing down in Guatemala for three months. Which in turn is going to draw attention of some journalists, which in turn is. is going to turn around to, hey, didn't you just say that you would fund and support any type of revolution down to Alast Castro? Well, we're hearing a lot of stuff from a lot of people down in Florida that they were training to do just that and they've stopped. So it's kind of, he's kind of fucking caught between a rock and a hard place and he has to go with the operation. Part of the

training that these guys were doing and you're like, well, how would they know it's the government that's actually training them because it wouldn't be exactly like they're out there with guys in military gear from the fucking special forces training them in amphibious assault, guerrilla warfare, weapons training, land navigation. It eventually comes to be kind of a secret. They're saying that they were funded initially by wealthy anti-Castro like sympathizers and supporters. And before too long, when I say too long, I meant matter of weeks. They were all making, jokes, all of the guys, the Cuban exiles training, that it was Uncle Sam. That's who the name of the benefactor was. And at that point, they just dropped the ruse and they're just like,

okay, yeah, you know we're funding this shit. Well, what kind of wealthy benefactor is going to train paratroopers in Guatemala, train for amphibious landings in Puerto Rico, going to do tank training with the M-41 Walker Bulldog light tanks in Kentucky and Georgia? Like, who's funding that? You're also initially training in an island in Florida. Yeah, dude. Like what? What are we doing here? Well, here's the thing as well. Cats out of the bag on this. I'm not sure if this is going to ruin the episode, but this isn't a huge secret that something is going down for this type of invasion. Now, some of the things working against these guys is you have a large Cuban population in Florida that these guys are being pulled from, as well as being pulled from other places where, you know, there's other Cuban revolutionary groups, things like that. but Castro is not stupid and so he has people in Florida reporting back to him what's going on and in these communities where these people are going and training for an invasion of Cuba that's going

eventually get back to him and basically let him know it's not going to let him know where he's not going to get those types of details but it's going to put him on alert that something is getting ready to go down and that just allows him to maintain a higher you know state of readiness, basically. So it's not exactly like this is going to be a huge surprise. They're just hoping, and I don't know if they expect, they'd be really naive to fucking expect that there wouldn't be like leaks here. And I'm not saying that because a lot of these guys, these Cuban exiles were former police, military. A lot of the guys were just on the other side of the regime and had to get the fuck out when stuff, you know, went sideways for him. And so they're looking to go back in here. And some of the guys aren't. They're learning how to do this ship for the first time.

We're seeing middle-aged lawyers and CPAs in people that just have this pride of their country that only want it back that are willing to join. There were points in time in one of the audiobooks that I was listening to where they basically had like a pamphlet that you would fill out and send your information into. And then in a couple days they would call. Well, after JFK wants to boost these troop numbers, they start dropping. kind of the prerequisites that you would have to have to do this. They're just inviting anyone. Yeah. So there were guys that were turning.

This is what happens when you don't have background checks. Exactly. There were guys that were turning in their papers and getting a call the next day, telling them to show up to the airport in the morning so they could fly them down to wherever they were training. It was that fast that they were getting these guys into. And these places were not great. The reason that Guatemala was a part of it, their leader, dictator,

Miguel Fuentes and the Nicaraguan leader, Luis. Why was he in there? How did he get into power? It's so weird, huh? He actually was able to get in and then maintain power because the United States squashed a rebellion against the dictator. The Nicaraguan leader, Luis Samosa, was actually purchased. Again, another dictator. Samosa family being the one that Manuel Noriega or his group ousted, right?

I believe so. Okay. So, yeah, we're getting. into some very deep things. It's all fucking intertwined people. Go back, let's see in the episodes. And so when you had these CIA assets and these other places, you're able to train, you're able to use them as launching grounds. Where they would end up doing most of their taking off from was a place called Happy Valley that was in Nicaragua, not Penn State's football stadium. But these places were not good. They would basically have to go in and build these infrastructure. structures in the jungles for these guys to go train at.

In Guatemala, there was a rash of scorpions around. A rash of scorpions? Like a ton of them would be in the area. And you would use some sweet term for like a murder of crows or something. Like it's called a rash. A rash is. Yeah, that'd be actually pretty cool. That'd be sick.

They were in these camps. And there were guys that were stung in the latrines by these scorpions. that had to be sent home. And when you have these combustible elements in these areas, you can only hold these guys' morale for so long. Like, there's only so long that these guys can sit in training and be fighting this jungle atmosphere and trying to not get stung by a scorpion while you're taking a dump.

Like, you have to make a move eventually because if morale breaks and all these people want to leave, who's your fighting force? What are you going to do then? Then you have these guys, you had these guys pissed going back to the United States, just like before, telling everybody what's going on. It's just such a bad setup.

So, of course, you're going to need to be able to actually invade the Bay of Pigs. So the CIA purchases five cargo ships from a Cuban-owned but Miami-based company. And these are basically kind of like outfitted to where they'll have like some 50 caliber anti-aircraft guns on them. But these things are loaded up. And I think, I can't remember exactly what country or what flags they were flying when they were making their trips down there like Slovenian or something like that. Yeah. But basically these were used to kind of transport like supplies and all that kind of stuff. Because essentially with this invasion, kind of the thought process behind it is just kind of laying it out.

They would send in these flights of B-26s first. These things were to bomb and strafe Castro's airfields where he would have these like response. aircrafts, the fighters and the other bombers. So after that occurred and after that air superiority was, you know, gained, basically you would then have these five cargo ships or four cargo ships. One of them actually was held back because it had the government in waiting. And once they established this beachhead and this control of this area, they would then be able to kind of move in this provincial.

What did we say was? Yeah. Oh, shit. Not provincial because that's what you kept saying. Yeah. Provisional. provisional government. So you would establish air security, move in the troops, and then as you kind of pushed inland, controlled roads and got this area, the people were supposed to rally around you.

Well, what would happen at that point is the U.S. wouldn't intervene. They wouldn't need to, but they would start just funneling supplies in. So these supply ships that they initially had were supposed to get them through like the first 30 days of this. So like 30 days of fighting, that includes giving them they had tanks. I don't know if they had like jeeps or anything like that. I'm assuming they had to have some type of like transports because they moved the troops pretty quickly over a series of distance. Tried.

Or tried to. But yeah, you have tanks. You have, you know, things like that. So you're moving in also all of the medical supplies that you'll need to take care of wounded, all of the food that you guys will need, all of the ammunition. And that's having to come in on these ships because you can't really start moving in as far as the United States and actively supplying them. right away.

You essentially have to give it time to be like, oh, did you see what's going on in Cuba? Oh, the rebels are the internal rebels within the country are fighting Castro. Then you could essentially maybe have cause to start throwing some just material support behind it. But trying to remain incognito about this, you can't do it right away. So these five ships are insanely important to this force because they're not only carrying the troops. They're carrying all these supplies. In addition to these, they got two landing craft that are basically kind of the version of like a Higgins boat, but the larger version that could actually carry like tanks and everything. And that would allow them to move this armor onto the beach.

And the way these were going to get there, essentially, where these ships were going to be escorted to a certain point by the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy was going to go ahead and like 40 miles off after they all got. grouped up and everything was going to, because you can't drive these landing craft, they're not meant for like open sea and everything. You have to get them pretty close. So what they would do is they would transport the landing craft boats in these larger landing craft boat transports, get them all into position like 40 yards, I think, or sorry, 40 miles offshore, launch all these and then all of these Cuban exile soldiers would then transport in, get their support. And get their supply ships and everything.

And essentially, the airstrikes would have happened prior to this, and they would establish their beach head. We're going to try to keep the names straight with what side is what. I had a very hard time with this because this is exiles taking on revolutionaries, but the revolutionaries are the one in power, so they're not new revolutionaries that are invading. It's very, very confusing for me as far as how this all works. but they run into so many problems and we'll talk about it very soon. The number one problem that they ran into was Castro knew.

Castro knew what was going on. He knew that there was going to be different things that were going to be happening. He just didn't know how. It wasn't just information possibly getting leaked back from people that he had within the United States. You also have everything we're doing under surveillance by the Soviet Union. And you know that to some degree, people in West Berlin, certain people in the CIA, things like that, there's information because they're also looking to gain information about this

from the other side about, you know, what's the Soviet position on Cuba? Do they have, you know, anyone there, anything like that? So information can kind of get out through a couple different whole. holes here. And so anything that the Soviet Union finds out, they're just relaying directly to Castro. So if they hear anything about like, well, there's been a movement of like, you know, transports or funds or something like that that that we saw, he's going to know, you know, and by that we discern that they're, you know, maybe gaining or gearing up for an invasion. They're just funneling any of that information to him. Well, so much so that Castro spread out his Air Force to do.

different bases in the country because he knew that if they were concentrated to just one or two Air Force bases, they would be pretty easily taken out. I think that's like saying something as well as not just saying like consolidate everything at one place, but also if they're having to spread out their aircraft to go three different locations, it's going to be that much more inaccurate because you're not having as many bombs falling and chances are they might not hit their, you know, chances are even higher they're not going to hit their targets. What's crazy to is initially, you would think you'd be doing any type of advantage that you could get away with while still not showing your hand from the side of the United States.

The plane that they initially were looking at to do this was called the Sky Rader, and it was a prop plane, but this thing looks like a fucking beast. Like, it looks like a fighter. It could carry, like, missile pods and, like bombs and stuff like that. It could still get the job done. What's a missile pod? So missile pods were, like, these circular pods that they would have on the wings. And they would hold like 10 missiles.

Oh, okay. And so they would just... Okay. Kind of like he would see on an Apache helicopter. Got you. Got you. Got. Rambo movies and shit.

Okay. And then they looked at the cost and they're like, wait, it cost this much less for the B26s. They're like, yeah. And they're like, also, you know, the Cubans already have B26s too. And they're like, oh, perfect. Okay, we'll just use those then. But we'll make some modifications. Some of the modifications they made really mess some things up, though.

like I say Cuba had this prior knowledge of what was going on they knew that something was coming they didn't exactly know what but as far as that goes the fleet will start setting sail from Porto Crabas in Nicaragua they're headed towards the bay of pig during the night of April 14th April 14th into April 15th was a diversionary landing on the eastern tip of Cuba near it's called barakoa would be kind of almost in your Gitmo. Yeah, that's, I believe, where they took off from for this diversionary landing. Do you know what's fucking crazy about the diversionary landing? What did we use? They used two U.S. Navy destroyers. Oh, yeah, that's right, huh? And it's like, hold on a second.

Your diversionary landing is to make them think that American naval destroyers are leading the invasion. Yeah. And then just so happenstance that on the other side of the country, there's actually an invasion that's completely unrelated to the Americans. That is fucking nuts. Talk about coincidences. Did you also hear about what they wanted to do with the sonic booms?

They came, I think Dolis came up with the plan to cause like, um, like some type of like chaos and like confusion and stuff. they were going to fly over Savannah supersonic jets very quickly and create a whole bunch of sonic booms that would shatter glass and windows as like a diversionary tactic and they're like

no no don't fucking do that who else would be able to do that at that point who else is capable to do a shit right that's just us that prop planes yeah definitely not this diversionary force ends up retreating after they

see that there are Cuban militia forces on the coastline, so the diversionary force didn't even divert anybody. It wasn't even a diversion. It was just the ships. It wasn't like they were in landing craft or anything. So it was just like, oh, the lights are on. They saw us. Okay, reverse. Yeah. April 15th at 6 a.m. Cuban time. Eight B-26s simultaneously attacked three Cuban airfields. The way that they set these planes up was strictly for offense. They had actually pulled the tail gunners off of them and everything was pointing forward yeah if you were going to shoot something it had to be in front of you and these are not like fighter planes these are like a medium like a light bomber so it's twin engines off to the side they're not like super agile they're not meant

for like really dogfighting um they could strafe target so they could aim them kind of down strafe targets along the road and then pull up but they did have bomb base that they could also carry bombs just feels like such a wild move to pull off the defenses just in case you get somebody up there on your tail, you'd at least like to have a little something, right? The whole plan was to make sure nothing got up in the air, that they would have to shoot from the tail. True. And so they end up separating. There were eight of them, so you'd have to have two, two, two, wait, yeah, two, two, and three.

No, that'd be seven. You'd have to have three, three, three, and three. Sorry, you had a group of three, a group of three, and a group of two. Yep. Math is hard, guys. These three Cuban airfields would end up getting hit. were mostly successful. There was one B-26 bomber that was shot down. The crew was killed in the crash. And they didn't destroy or destroy this entire Air Force, which luckily enough, there were subsequent

bomber raids that were going to be on the table coming up the next, I believe it was in the afternoon in the following day. This is where things start to get a little fishy. So I'm not sure how many of these bombers. I couldn't find a number of for how many of the bombers or bomber fighters. And they called themselves the Cuban Exile Air Force called themselves the FAL. So if you hear us say that, that's the Cuban Exile Air Force. And then the invading force. The what?

The invading force. And then I'll probably just say Castro's Air Force or Cuba's Air Force if I'm talking about the Castro regime. Because there's the FAR and it's just too close. Too many letters I'm trying to talk. I couldn't even do math for a few numbers. So I'm not going to do acronyms very well. But these B-26s are all painted up to match the ones that Castro actually has in his Air Force as well to basically make it look like it's an internal conflict. They end up hitting about 10 to 15 Cuban planes are taken out.

Some of them are a couple, like one of them is like a commercial plane, but it's not like loaded or anything like that. It's just on the tarmac. But they do end up like hitting some of the military aircraft. One of the flights actually heads to Florida, actually, after taking some damage. one of the B-26s. And then those guys end up landing and are actually back in

Nicaragua the next day to like get in another plane. I'm not sure how many planes the actual FAL had because some of them get lost but they kind of seem to always have a couple more. That's all you're going to give this. What?

That's all you're going to give these boys that land in Miami. Okay. So Miami International? Yep. Okay. No, no, no, no. There was a, okay, that was a separate one. Hold on. One of them actually legitimately had to head to Florida. Oh, it was Key West that they landed in, wasn't it? No, no. One of them headed to Florida, and those guys, because no one knew they, like, they landed at a military place. That's how they were able to get back. Those guys were legitimate, like, FAL pilots and fighters. Okay. One of them was diverted to Grand Cayman and was actually seized by the British, and they were,

like, we obviously knew we're in the fucking grand cammen. Like, we can see movement and what the kind of shit you're doing around here. We know what you're doing. So what we're going to do is we know we're going to get suspected for like being in on this. We're going to hold this plane here so they can see we had nothing to do with it so that it didn't originate from here. That's what we're going to do. So they end up holding onto that plane and that crew. 90 minutes after the initial flights went to go actually bomb. Another plane took off. And this plane took off, kind of went around Cuba a little bit, faked an engine failure. I think they said the pilot, I love this term, because I got to use it previously, but he feathered one of the engines to make it

look like it wasn't running. So basically he turned off the engine and then made it to where the props were facing directly into the wind and ended up landing at Miami International Airport. He calls in Mayday, Mayday, lands there, and then taxis over to the like military wing of the Miami International airport. Now, all of a sudden, there's this big hullabaloo around this plane and everything. And this isn't exactly being hidden really well, because all of a sudden, I think the press end up getting wind of this. They needed it. They needed the press there. This was the whole idea. So, this plane had bullet holes in like the engine casing or like the, you know, the, yeah, the casing. Cowlings? Callings. Yes, they go over the engine. Well, what ends up coming to light,

is that the cowlings were taken off back in Nicaragua, shot full of holes by CIA operatives, whoever was there, put back on the engine. The pilot cut the engine, so there was nothing wrong with it. But lands here to show and to say, no, no, we had to land here and divert. We're part of the Cuban revolution. And, you know, we're currently trying to, like, you know, rebel against Castro. They had to essentially make it known that this was going on because they had to have a reason, once the initial or once the eventual having to resupply and having a military presence in that area was going to happen, they had to have the kickoff for that, to have people be like, oh, oh, they're supporting the guys that landed at the airport. Well, also, it's to try to foment a revolution in Cuba by saying these were guys that were in the Cuban Air Force.

Wow, that was gross. the Cuban Air Force that are now defecting and stealing these planes off of runways in Cuba and then flying up and shooting and bombing these airfields and then one of them

took fire and ended up in Florida there's a few issues with this one of the issues was journalists are smart yes yes that's a big issue it's a huge issue in this so what is

some journalists are smart One of the things that comes to light is during this story of him escaping, he's talking about doing these strafing runs and firing his guns. As Chris alluded to earlier, all of Castro's planes had their guns mounted underneath the wings, whereas this B-26 had its guns mounted at the nose. So Castro's B-26s were never converted like this. When they were provided to him, it was just like, or to Batista's, regime. It was just like, here, these are like light bombers. So they had like the clear plexi-last nose cone where the bomber could sit and actually drop the payload. None of Castro's planes that were provided to him before had this 850 caliber gun set up in the nose. And not

only that, but if you said you just were firing and everything like that, what wouldn't you have on the barrels? Tape. And the reason that they put tape over the barrels is when they weren't being used, they didn't want dust or anything getting in there and gumming them up. very hard to fire strafing rounds and to try to clear an airfield with your gun if there's tape over the barrels. Now, it's not exactly like this stuff is discovered and it's like a gotcha moment when all this is happening. Like, hey, Castro's B-26s only have, this is essentially information that's kind of found out throughout the whole course of this thing happening because this is front page news for a long

fucking time. Also, the timeline gets a little fuzzy too, because it's about a 30-minute flight. from Cuba to Miami. And he ends up landing two and a half hours after the bombings at the airfields took place because he left at 9 a.m. from Nicaragua.

Timing is actually going to be a tricky thing. Yeah. During this whole operation. Yeah, it's going to come up again. So there was also something else going on at this same time. Surprise, surprise. It's called Operation Mars.

Now, Operation Mars was devised by Nixon and good old G.W. Bush, who was, I think, the might have been the director of the CIA at that time. But basically, this... That was Dulles. He might have been secretary of something. I can't remember exactly what it was. Anyway, they had this plan to where it would coincide with the invasion,

the Bay of Pigs invasion. It would basically kind of just, like, supplement it. It was going to be a faint invasion that was going to take place at another location with, like, 160 trained guerrillas. And so that, actually, I believe part of that actually did attempt to occur, but they couldn't land on the beaches after like two attempts. But just the simple fact that there's like a fucking secret plan going on within this secret plan is just how fucking like crazy not looked into this whole thing was. So after the airstrikes, because for some reason, they occur on the 15th and the group.

isn't even scheduled to rendezvous to get the invasion going underway until late on the 16th. Cuba has time to basically be like, okay, let's put out the fires, let's see what aircraft can still fly. And obviously some shit just went down, so now we're on even higher alert. So now you've got your fucking pilots there. You've got all the air crews there that are loading up these ready to go ahead. And as soon as these things take off and up to come back, they're going to be reloaded immediately and sent back off again. you've given them fucking prep time. So I don't know, like, because that was one of the keys to the Normandy invasion was like the bombing took place.

Then I think the day of, or no, the night before. Yeah. Or hours before. They bombed a whole bunch. And then the invasion took place like that morning. Because that's what it was. They were watching the planes as they were coming back and the boats were going there. So the airborne invasion went over the night before.

Then prior to the landings, that's when the. Air Force came over and did the bombing. So it coincided quick. It makes a ton of sense. Yes. It makes so much sense. So instead, you get these airstrikes happening and then just this lull of nothing going on. So now you have these four-armed T-33 jets, four C-furies, five to six B-26s, and all of them had the ability to carry rockets and bombs. So now, guess what? The Cuban Air Force, what's left of it? Because you didn't do as much damage as you... First, of all, you didn't do as much damage as you thought you did when you reported back and gave your report, which is a commonality in any situation of warfare. You're always going to overestimate what you actually did. You now have the fact that this is now in the press because of part of the operation going on. Stuff is moving quickly on this. I know it's all happening very fast, but again, this is at a time in the Cold War where every little hiccup is being detected around. Kennedy starts to get the impression, okay, we did the first bombing. I feel like now there's too much visibility on this right now with the bombers,

you know, flying over these populated areas where these airfields are and everything. I want to go ahead and call off the second, the second bombing, the second bombing strike. Second and third, because it was, I believe it was afternoon and then the next morning, wasn't it?

The initial one that was done, I think was... The initial one was done at 6 a.m. And I think there was an afternoon session and then there was going to be next morning. What? do you attribute to pilots overestimating the damage that they've done? Is that a confidence best case scenario thing? Is that a visibility is impossible to see after you drop the bombs?

I think it's one of the things where if you felt you did your job in the preparation to that lead-up, so if you're a fighter and you're, you know, dive in at something and you strafe it and you hit that target, your assumption is probably that you've, especially if you have to kind of peel off and leave, and you look back and it's smoking or something like that, you're like, I took that thing out. And you almost don't want to short sale what you did, do you think? Or short sell it? Yeah, I don't think you ever want to come back and say I failed.

If someone gives you the benefit that down is like, well, tell me, do you think you knocked it out? And he's like, I think I did. They're like, okay, cool. Because that's where this. Everyone wants to report big numbers. The guys that are, he's reporting to you want to report big numbers. That's where this gets real bad because these pilots come back.

Just like you talked about during the bombing raids in Europe that I found fascinating and didn't realize this, they come back, they're immediately debriefed. And during this debriefing, pilots said that they had hit 50% of the offensive aircrafts at Campo Libertad. They destroyed 75 to 80% at San Antonio de los Baos, and then five planes in Santiago, Cuba. They're doing these numbers adding up with the numbers that I just said, and they're like, oh, so we've knocked out like, they have like three planes left. Yeah.

And of course, like you say, these guys are going to want to sell that they did the best job. But their initial reports and findings make it back to JFK. And JFK is like, well, they don't really have anything left. So is it worth? He's weighing the pros and cons of another airstrike because if this can get tied back to the United States somehow, was it really necessary? Is this a risk we have to take if you guys knocked out that many planes? Yeah, all he's thinking to himself is like three, I feel like we can handle three planes. Because I'm going to allow these guys to provide fighter support over the landing area because that's in an isolated area.

But if we've taken out that many, do we, like, no, three planes isn't worth the risk of getting, you know, more visibility on us. Yeah. But it goes back to, you know, what you hear most about it, if you look into it just kind of at a glance, is that it comes back to, like, Kennedy not allowing, like, the second air strike. when the way that everything goes down here, that is, it's like when they say, you know, a field goal kicker misses a field goal.

And it's like, and someone comes out and it's like, yeah, but did you see the 10 plays that we all missed before that that shouldn't have had that come, that drop pass and that, you know,

penalty that took us out of range that happened before that to where we could have had another six points. Kicker didn't lose this game. Exactly. And I think that's kind of what it comes down to when it gets kind of just a

a cursor, very glance, it's easy to say, well, JFK didn't order the second round of air strikes, but it's a little more complicated. Yeah, I again, I'm not giving him an out, I don't think you are either. No. He definitely screwed this up because he's the president and the buck stops with him. And he approved the

plan. Yeah, there were so many other times when he could have shut this down or he could have asked for some other better plan than this. But unfortunately this is what they got. The exaggerated numbers from the pilots gave intelligence as false confidence. That's why they ended up dropping out of these initial or the rest of the bombing campaigns that they

were going to do. They sent up a YouTube spy plane after that for a little bit of recon, and the recon showed that they were definitely not as successful as they at hope. Now, were those percentages of your misses or your percentages of your hits? It turns out it was a percentage of their misses because, yeah, the Cuban Air Force, was not as neutered as they would have liked to believe. Also around this point, kind of late on the 16th at a place called Point Zulu, which was 40 miles south of the Bay of Pigs, the five freighters and the two landing craft, and then the landing ships for the tanks were escorted by the Navy to this

point unloaded. And 1,400 Cuban exile soldiers in seven battalions essentially headed off and these supply ships and these landing craft toward three locations. One of them was play a Giron. Did I mean like that? Giron. Giron. Which was code named Blue Beach.

This one was selected because it had an airfield. So as soon as they could take control of that airfield, they could just station the planes there and start flying them out. And then basically, Nicaragua doesn't even come into play. No questions why they're flying out of Nicaragua or anything like that. So they need to capture that. Green Beach, which was further.

east. So if you're looking at Cuba, imagine it's just going, it's a trapezoid that's going from, you know, left to right. So basically if you are kind of in the Morse, I guess, western portion of that, the Bay of Pigs is basically just a little notch

curved out of the bottom of that. So the attack force is essentially approaching from the south to make it look like essentially, if they had to bring in these ships, they had to bring them from somewhere in Central America, something like that. You don't want them coming from the north. Yeah. So, and then you had also play a laga. Laga, Laga.

Larga. Yes, which was essentially at the very tip of the bay. So it went the furthest into Cuba. Deepest penetration. Deepest penetration. That was Red Beach. Now, in addition to these being sent as far as the ships going, paratroopers were going to be landed fucking a la Normandy style behind the beaches to be able to secure roads

and everything to be able to hold up and stop any type of like counter that the militia would try to put up before the military was able to mobilize and kind of find what they were doing. One thing that we forgot to mention earlier. So when these plans go through, this isn't just everybody having a talk about it and explaining the plan and selling it to each other. That's a big part of it. But also there's risk assessments that the DOD does to make sure that these plans are not just feet. usable, but if there's a chance of success, when these plans came through, they gave it a rating of fare. JFKC's fair. I can't say that I blame him.

He probably looks at it. He's like, well, fair doesn't sound bad. Fair sounds like more than 50%. Yeah, someone tells me, hey, am I going to win the lottery? You got a fair chance. I'm buying those tickets. On the risk assessment, fair is just above poor. And fair gives it right around a 30% sense.

success rate. Now, I don't know if I would put a lot of stake in something that's a 30% success rate that's so crucial to my administration that has been in power for four months. Who doesn't explain this to him? Like, who doesn't explain this? I think a lot of guys did. Like, yeah. Or tried at least. I know. It's, it's just fucking ridiculous. But alas, we're storming the beaches. So, uh, essentially, um, at this point, is it the brigadistas, right? Yeah. Okay, so the brigadistas are the Cuban exiles. So essentially that's what they're kind of referred to as the brigadistas.

Brigadiers, I'm sure. Yeah, brigadiers. So midnight on the, oh, sorry, so they're all assembled late August or April 16th, 1,400 guys going into land. Now, the U.S. Essex task group is assembled off the Cayman Islands. So not that far. And this makes up, I think, two aircraft carriers and then all. all of their support ships, destroyers, all of that stuff.

So they're positioned. And the reason they're positioned there is because, again, certain naval escorts, you know, sent them, you know, help bring them into, like, within 40 miles and everything. And also, on their way down for this operation, they stopped in Charleston, South Carolina to, like, rearm and everything. And they picked up a couple nukes. So during this time frame, that escalated quickly. the Essex, which was off Cuba, was carrying nuclear weapons in case shit escalated really fucking quickly.

So you already got the nukes in Cuba or in Turkey. So yeah, well, it's still, it's kind of a thing. Before we get any further, I think I need a second bathroom break. Okay. All right. A two breaker. We haven't done a two breaker in a while. No, but this, there's just so much. here and it's all so good. The break was fruitful.

A little actually same episode of attraction. Apparently George W. Bush, it turns out, was not the director of the CIA at the time, but then there's also information that says he may have been the director of the CIA at the time. So we're just going to leave that up to him, maybe. Yeah. He denied that he was a part of the CIA. And anybody that's a part of the CIA is a good chance they're going to deny the CIA. especially around that time

depending on the stigma of the CIA. Yeah. So we're, I think, to the landings portion. The guys are heading in. Yep. We have Red Beach, Playa Larga, the Chris mentioned Blue Beach, Playa Huron, Giron.

Green Beach was Caleta, Buena Inlet. That's not going to be important. We'll talk about that here in a second. The 5th and 2nd battalions, we're going to be at the Red with two ships. The 6th and 4th battalions, were going to be the blue with four ships. They were backed off, obviously, after they dropped them off.

There was going to be the 3rd Battalion Green Beach. Red Beach included paratroopers that were dropped inland, as well as Blue Beach. And basically what their job was was to block these three access roads. The only reason there was three access roads is because this is going through swamp land everywhere. So there were three hard packed roads that would lead down to where this invasion was going to happen. That's pretty much the option. Yeah, that sounds like that's a great place to do it. If there's only three roads that you have to do it, if you drop these paratroopers on it,

everything's going to go well if they can hold their positions to stop the troops moving in. Well, not only that, but also that night, there's another diversionary landing that's taking place at, like, the Western tip. So it's even trying to draw attention the other direction. And that one's just essentially just a one ship with a shit ton of loudspeakers that's just making a bunch of noise. like I don't know if it's like engines running or something like that, but it was just basically supposed to draw attention to make them think something was going on in the opposite direction. There was this dude that worked for the CIA.

His name was David Phillips. And he was kind of like the strategic, not really propagandist, but he was more the mental warfare of the setup that was going to try to spur this revolution going on. He was the author of this revolution. Yeah. So things. don't go well from the start. Blue Beach is going to be mainly where a lot of things happen.

The Frogmen are the first ones off the boat a little around 1 a.m. on April 17th. And as they are coming up to the beach for their landing to lay out the red beacons so then they can get the troops moving in, they end up running across a massive coral reef. Which is weird. Because in all the imagery,

that the United States, you know, had reviewed when checking out this landing beach, they were like, oh, that's seaweed. That's definitely not coral reef. We're definitely not going to listen to the people that used to live in this land and probably kind of know more about the topography. But no, no, no, totally seaweed. You'll go right through it. And the biggest issue with the coral reef is when you're bringing these landing boats up, it's going to either stop them at the reef or it's going to shear off the bottom of the boat. Either way. It snagged the zodiac that these frogmen were coming in on.

And that's got the shallowest draft of any of these boats. And so they end up like it takes some finagling, but they end up getting this thing dislodged from the reef and keep going up to the beach. And as they get up to the beach and they're kind of trying to get off the boat and everything and kind of secure the area, the fucking red beacon light on the fucking boat starts like malfunctioning and won't turn off.

and they're trying to cover the thing, well, this is also at a time when, again, you just did bombings like a day and a half ago, the entire militia, which makes up the bulk of the forces, it's not the actual army that Castro has. A lot of this is just local militias. So they're patrolling the entire island.

They're kind of like the scouting force everywhere. And guys driving by in a Jeep on the beach, see this red beacon light going off, and get out, park the Jeep, showing the light out in the water and see these guys trying to land on the beach. They initially think that they're fishermen and they are getting out to warn the fishermen that they think that are in the water of the dangers of the coral reef in fishing at night. Do you guys lose your boat in the reef? And as these Cubans, this Cuban militia is yelling at these frogmen, they just opened fire and completely decimate this Jeep.

and there was a canteena a little ways down the road or a little ways down the beach that was lit up, there was music playing. One of the Frogmen said that it was very weird to hear the salsa music going on as they were up. Yeah, as they were opening fire. And so that's just like a, okay, probably didn't need the bullets to make the noise to scare everybody. There's going to be more militiamen coming this way. It's not just that. They didn't get the guys. They destroyed the Jeep.

They may have gotten one of the guys because the death toll in this isn't like massive. Because again, this is on a much smaller scale. It's just the importance that this small scale had. And so they light up this Jeep. A few of the guys run. And because this island is on high alert already, there's a communication network that as soon as someone sees some shit going down, people are going to mobilize to that spot as quickly as possible. So without even getting the first wave of guys on the beach or anything like that,

you've already blown your cover with the guys that are sent in to be the most stealthy. So all of a sudden, those guys are still there. They don't have anywhere else to go because they're supposed to be waiting for the rest of the ships to come in and a bunch more militias show up and they're getting into this firefight. The good news is they set the beacons and they were on. So that way the ships would see the beacons and know that deployment was ready to go for the rest of the troops. Right through the coral reef. the frogmen didn't go ahead and radio back that there was a gigantic coral reef in the way.

They were a fucking firefight dude. Yeah, okay. I guess that's fair. As these landers show up to try to start dropping these troops off, everybody hits the coral reef. So they're about 50 yards away from the beach and way steep water. And they're carrying ammunition. They're carrying radio. They're carrying supplies.

And as soon as you have to jump out into that water and you soak your radio, you're pretty much fucked. And these are coming in like kind of Higgins boats. So, you know, a little bit shallow, but like flat bottom. So if something hits it, they kind of pitch and everything. Some of them, I think one of them ends up kind of like sinking on the reef. A couple of them get lodged on and then end up getting off. But they finally end up unloading, you know, guys onto this to where they're able to push the militia back and kind of establish an area. And finally someone radios back and is like, hey, there's a fucking reef here.

Avoid it all costs. So essentially by... I think, like, by 3.15 a.m., Castro is up. He's been woken up militias on alert, and they're already mobilizing, like, the jets for airstrikes on this beach. You know where he was? Where was he? He was at his hookup's house. He was at his mistress's house.

Nice. He was about 10 minutes away from HQ. When was he probably not at a mistress's house? You got to think. You probably have a better chance of catching him at a mistress's house than catching him at home. If there's an impending threat of the United States attacking you, I don't know how many nights I'd be spending with my mistress. You apparently have an alert system because it doesn't take them long to know what's going on. No, that's very true.

By 630, air strikes that the Cuban Air Force has launched hit the Houston. And the Houston was one of the freighter ships. Essentially, what happened is after it was hit by either bombs or rockets, it had to try to beach itself or it was going to sink. And instead of, so with the bay, everything that's had. happening is on the east side of the bay, with the exception of what's going on at Red Beach, which is up at the very tip. So the Houston ends up heading to the west and beaches itself on the west side of the bay, pretty much to where all the supplies that they were able to save on it aren't able to be accessed anytime remotely soon. Well, Red Beach has a little bit more of a major

success. They don't have to deal with the Coral Reef, but unfortunately the beach that they're pulling up to is illuminated with spotlights. Yeah. So the undercover showing up. Maybe a birthday party? Maybe not. Yeah. They're end up pretty much caught immediately. They

again, in a very similar fashion with their frogmen, start a firefight. They're trying to drop these troops off. And as you said, these aircrafts are scrambled and brought up at dawn. And they're already dropping by 630.

That's a pretty quick response time. And again, it's not like Cuba's huge. No. So they're able to reach these locations relatively quickly and then go back, reload, and then come back again. The biggest issue is, though, is how are these ghost aircrafts up in the air flying around, dropping bombs on the ships? They're supposed to be destroyed, right? Yeah, exactly. Not only that, Castro is sort of brilliant in this way, too, is he doesn't say, hey, go bomb all the militia, or go bomb.

all the invaders that are on the beach. He says, go bomb their ships. Yeah. Don't worry about the guys here. We can take care of that. Yeah, as soon as you bomb the ships, they're just trapped. Yeah. There's no way they're getting anything else.

When the Houston actually beached itself, that pretty much just took away a ton of their medical supplies. That had the most amount of the medical supplies that they had. So at that point, trying to go ahead and, you know, treat wounded, the inevitable wounded that you'd be starting to rack up, especially with shit going south like this, you don't have a lot of treatment options. They end up getting some of the FAL, the Brigadista Air Force in the air with their B-26s is to fly in to provide support again. They were meant to be kind of used like strafeer, fighter, bomber type things.

And just throughout this whole thing, there's just these like random engagements of like one or two or three planes that are coming in and like one of them will come in and try to strafe the boats and the other one will try to come in and shoot it and chase it off. but the Cubans are just basically being able to go back and land at their airfields, whereas when they need to rearm for the B-26s on the brigadista side, they got to go all the way back to Nicaragua. Which I was thinking about this earlier, and I understand that all of these ships and tanks and guns and planes were all probably bought at like a local Army Navy store somewhere in the United States. No, it was I know. It was a transaction. I'm assuming that the local Army Navy store didn't have any sort of carriers that they could land on. No.

That probably wasn't for sale next to the Army fatigued. Can you imagine trying to train these pilots to land bomber fighters on a carrier with six months of training? Not easy. Not even impossible. I'm sure there were some hairy landings back at Happy Valley. So I am forgetting the magazine that they were in. I want to say it was like Sears magazine or something like that. But the actual fatigues that they were wearing in and the camouflage was just duck hunting camouflage that they had bought out of like a magazine.

Really? A catalog. Yeah. Trying to make it as nondescript as possible. Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, it was like you wanted this revolutionary force, these invaders coming in, but you all wanted them dress the same. Like you want them have a little bit of.

Yeah. uniformity. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a bulk discount, man. What do you want? Can you just send them in there in their street closed? Exactly.

So by 830, they've actually landed all their tanks and all their troops at Blue Beach. So I mean, despite kind of the setbacks and everything, they're actually making pretty decent progress at this point. Seven and a half hours. It is. But at the same time, you know, despite what they're having to go ahead and kind of work against, they're still able to get like, at least on Blue Beach, some of their guys. Guys, and problem occurs, though, is because of the fighting that it takes them to actually get onto the beach.

All the radios are completely tapped out, and Red and Blue Beach can't communicate with each other. Well, the radios were also tapped out because they had to walk through 50 yards of ocean. That's what I was alluding to. But so essentially, they had to send a runner. Now, the kind of scope of where this is supposed to be occurring, again, Green Beach was in the initial plan, but after stuff kind of started going sideways, they kind of eliminated that. but from Green Beach up to Red Beach was a 40-mile strip of land. So it's not small. It's not just like, I'm going to run over to the next beach.

So they had to get a runner in a tank and basically send a runner up to Red Beach to try to kind of create some type of cohesiveness to find out how they were doing up there and kind of how the invasion was going. And at the same time, if you're landing that many people, it's 8.30 and everybody's landed on Blue Beach. Green Beach they've realized is not going to be feasible because they're going to be landing in the daylight. And that's just not the plan. And they also are realizing that Blue Beach is pretty hot. So maybe the reinforcements that you were going to send to Green Beach can just be folded in and brought into Blue Beach. Well, at 730, that's when 170. So a little bit before they get all their guys and tanks onto Blue Beach,

730 is when 177 paratroopers actually drop. And again, they're supposed to be, again, Sorry. You already have the militia on high alert. They're already traveling. There are some of them already at the beach and they're fighting over that area. You're still dropping guys behind the lines in an already like shit fuck situation and then still trying to hold these key roads because you can, if you cut those guys off,

then you can keep pushing forward and essentially, you know, pushing them out of the area. But you can't allow anything to come back in at this point. No, they were fairly successful on two of the roads. unfortunately they had run into some fire from some jeeps from the militia as they were trying to block off the road that was coming out of I believe it was called Central Australia it was a sugar mill that or sugar mill that the Australians owned so good day you guys are in this one too a little bit sons of bitches the problem was corrupt Aussie bastards nobody fucking love you guys you know that as the paratroopers were being fired upon in the plane they had to go ahead and divert and drop in a different location. Yeah. And where they were dropped was basically right over a swamp. Yep.

A lot of, you know, supplies don't do well. No. In the swamp, especially trying to carry that shit out. Pretty hard to find, too, I'm assuming, if you're dropping it in a swamp along with everybody else. So they're struggling to get back to the road. They end up being pretty ineffective. Most of their equipment was dropped in the swamp,

so they didn't have much. They were kind of the weak link in this whole entire thing. because the other two roads were successfully blocked and they held their positions for two days. Did you say they weren't the weak link? They were the weak link. Because the other two roads that they had to block were successfully held for two days while the Australian Mill Road was just dumping people in. Oh, okay. Oh, gotcha, got you. Okay.

So they couldn't hold their... That's not the weak link. They were holding two out of the three. Yeah, but if you're only holding two out of the three... You get dropped in a fucking swamp. Yeah. I'm not saying it's... It's their fault. I'm just saying... These goddamn gentlemen, they're due.

It's tough when you can't... Or, yeah, actively fight when you don't have anything to fight with. Well, 9.30 rolls around and stuff gets even worse because Cuban Air Force planes sink the Rio Escondido. So now you're down two freighters. And this one just happened to have a ton of aviation fuel. So when they were able to secure that airport to be able to fuel the planes to keep flying and covering. ammo, food, and medical supplies that were supposed to last 10 days for the invasion. That ship was evacuated quickly, and the explosion that happened when everything lit up all the ammo and everything.

One of the CIA guys that was actually kind of part of this saw it, and because even when an explosion like that happens, it forms kind of a mushroom cloud if it's big enough, like World War II era battleships that would explode would leave these huge like mushroom-like clouds. but thought that fucking Castro had fucking like mini-neut because this explosion was so big. Didn't help that they had all of the jet fuel or all the aviation fuel. With a bunch of ammo. Sitting on the deck of the ship. Yeah. It wasn't spread out anywhere. It wasn't at one end or the other.

This was actually one of the ships that they said on the way there, they had to ban cooking and smoking because they had. because they had so many volatile substances in the ship, which, again, you would probably want to spread those out, but you're so hastily putting this program together and you only have so much room on these boats, eventually there's going to be some jet fuel laying next to some ammunition. Well, that's not the worst of it that went down with this ship, because this also included the radio to communicate with the Bendista Air Force.

That's bad. Or sorry, the Brigadista Air Force. So pretty much now the invasion fleet and the troops on the ground can't communicate with the Air Force for Air Cover, and that left only communication with Blue Beach available. So from essentially the invasion fleet to the beach, they could only reach Blue Beach. After that, these airstrikes just continue to wreak havoc,

fearing that there was going to be more coming, the Atlantico and the Carribe just went ahead and abandoned their invasion on Blue Beach and headed out to sea. Yeah, they had to get to international waters. And even one of the planes, I think one of the planes ended up chasing them out there. And I can't remember, I know they did end up shooting down. It was two of the World War II era, like not the Higgins boats, but like the larger troop carriers for like the tanks. I think they had four spots for like 50 caliber anti-aircraft guns.

And they ended up shooting down or at least damaging and like chasing off like one or two planes. But yeah. So as soon as night falls, the two freighters ended up pulling. pulling away from Cuba, and then the landing ship transports, they end up following. And basically they were like, we're going to get to international waters. They're not going to be able to come, they're not sophisticated enough to come out here and locate us or anything like that. And as soon as daybreak happens, we're getting back in there and we're resupplying these guys to keep this thing going. The Atlantico, at least.

Well, I mean, they were both supposed to return the next day to unload more of their shit, and they end up bolting. they end up one of them was intercepted by the U.S. Navy only 110 miles south. The Atlantico. The other one made it 218 miles before they were able to locate this.

Now, how do you not have a tracking device on this ship? I know this is supposed to be a non, you know, they're not to be able to tie this back to us. I don't care. Put a fucking tracking device on. Like, how do you not do that? and that one made it so far that basically even with a full day to try to get back,

it would be completely useless and it supplies the next day. Yeah, that's just a wild move to take off that fast. And the fact that they picked off the Atlantic Guard, they're like, no, no, no, no, turn around, head back in there. And the Carribe is just steaming out towards as far away as possible to get. You know that you have a ship that's still full of supplies that you just basically bailed out on. And I know stuff's been going to. going downhill at this point, but it's going to keep actually going downhill. So there's really no rise to this. It's all downhill toward the end. So April 17th and 18th, there's a lot of

fighting up at Red Beach because it's, again, it's the closest part to like where Havana is and everything. It's the first place you're going to pass by when you're heading on down to Blue Beach. And they're basically ammo is getting low. They're having to kind of steadily give land and keep retreating. The landing ships are trying to kind of resupply them is best they can, but they weren't the ones carrying all of the supplies. So they're just basically having to give them kind of what they have to try to keep them in this fight. And after, you know, having to retreat and retreat, they have to fall back the 20 miles back to Blue Beach. So now the only area that they actually have as part of this beachhead is going to be just this area in this airfield.

Well, it's not like you can fight with rocks. It's not like you can keep throwing rocks. So if you don't have any ammo, you got to fall back. One thing we forgot to mention, this group was called the 2,506. And the group as a whole, the 1400. Yes. It was the 2506 battalion group, whatever. They were called this because in order to give them more belief that there were more soldiers than they had was they actually started the, like, soldier numbers at 2,500.

So instead of starting it at zero, and they were on a hike during training in Guatemala, and someone had fallen off of the pathway and died, and he was 2,506. So in order to honor him, they called the entire group 2506. You think they caught onto that whole starting at 2000 thing pretty quick when they kind of looked around?

They're like, it doesn't look like there's that many of us. Yeah. I'm sure they were. talking on the boats and they're like where do you think these other 25 you think they're below deck these other 2,500 guys that we need considering there were 1,400 of them. So crazy thing, on the 18th, 2 p.m., Kennedy gets a telegram from Khrushchev. And basically, Khrushchev says, and at this point, there hasn't been any U.S. intervention

or anything like that, but gets a telegram because, of course, they know what the fuck is going on and they know what's happening. And basically says, no one from the United States is to enter Cuba, is to step foot and intervene here in Cuba. Or we're going to be talking about nuclear reprisals. And I can only, I don't even think I can imagine getting,

because you know that when that telegraph came through, it was probably for his eyes only at the beginning. And he looks at that. And he already realizes being a politician at that point what the height of the Cold Wars and everything. But in the short amount of time that he's been in the presidency, he's also received all of that information that he wasn't privy to before regarding what all the capabilities for the Soviets are, for their nuclear capabilities, what would happen, how many it would

take to wipe out humanity, all of that shit. And he's sitting there with a telegram in his hand and it says, if you fucking do this, this is what's going to happen. The fucking flop sweat. Yeah. just instantly have on that. I hate that we keep missing this stuff, and maybe we have to do another,

maybe a Patreon episode in the future of like the, what's going on in Washington during this whole entire thing. But this kind of plays into the psyche of how many people in the government knew what was going on and when they knew. After the initial bombing raids,

there was somebody named Adelae Stevenson. He was a former presidential runner for the Democrats. He was actually JFK's emissary to the UN. Yeah. And after the first bombing

raid happens, the Cuban emissary to the UN comes out and he says, this was backed by U.S. forces. They were the ones that provided the planes. The U.S. is directly

attacking us and bombing us. Adelaide Stevenson was handed a press release to read to the U.N. as to what was going on. And when 100% denied every single thing. He didn't know.

Because he didn't know. So even the emissary to the UN, the guy that's the representative that shows up and takes accountability on the nose for everything that's going on, wasn't briefed about what was going on. And it's not like the press release is an abnormal thing. They're letting him know, hey, this is what's going on right now. Here's our position on it because he's not just sitting there writing current events down and figure out what he's going to say. He has people that are looking at this so when something pops up, he can respond accordingly.

So yeah, with all his belief, he had no idea what was going on and basically was just like, I found it, find it disgusting that we're being, you know, accused of this and everything like that. And then basically once he finds out later on this happened, he is like just dejected to shit. He's like, that, I truly believe that was the case. He's like, I lied in front of the UN council. Yeah. And through this whole entire thing. And no one's going to believe I didn't know.

Yeah, how do you play that off that you didn't know? How are you the representative of the UN and you're going to go out and deliver that and just lie in every single sentence and have no idea what's going on? And a big part of this, and something that kind of struck me was the Cuban representative to the UN said something that kind of struck me. And it was something that was brought up to JFK as they were going through these plans. but he said not only is this against international law to wage war on an elected official or like a world leader, it's against U.S. law to do the exact same thing. And nowadays it seems crazy to just, obviously, that's got to be an international law. You can't take over a country.

Yeah. That's just sort of should be. International manners, yeah, general international manners. Yet we're kind of in the middle of a situation right now where that's taking place in two other places in the world. And I haven't really heard about them breaking international law. And like if that's an international law, who's holding it up? Yeah. Because it's clearly we're forgetting that that's an international law if it's still an international law, right?

So if it was back then. Is it a Pirates of the Caribbean type deal where it's more of a like a set of guidelines? Yeah. And there are actual rules that's like the Pirates Code. Well, and laws are only as stringent as the people that enforce them. Yes. So that could possibly be able to. A lot of examples in the world of just not really backing up what you're supposed to be doing.

No. So back to this. By 1030 in the morning, Red Beach was taken back. The brigadistas were headed to Blue Beach. They knew that they were still fighting down there. And they didn't have any ammo left. They were running low on supplies. They needed to be able to be repubes.

replenished and they also probably wanted to see some friendly faces. The offensive at Plague, Yaron, was halted by the brigadistas while the Cubans, wow, while the Cuban forces kept steady air and artillery attacks. Oh, yeah, they had artillery. So they had been provided. So they had Russian tanks. So it's not like they were without tanks in the American, or sorry, the brigadistas were the only ones that did.

They had essentially like T-34, like old Soviet tanks. So again, this is literally just like American tanks versus Soviet tanks. They didn't have any tanks at Red Beach, though. I think they were all at Blue Beach. They did for a little bit. They ended up pulling them back because that was like, you know, precious resource and everything. So, yeah, some of them were kind of holding back and holding their positions, but no one was gaining really any ground. It was just trying to hold out.

On the 18th, 19th, arms and equipment were dropped off. I think it was a C-46, so they had some transport planes. came in and landed at the strip and unloaded whatever they could. And basically after that, without having those ships come in to provide whatever ammo they could, the troops were pretty much just running low on everything. This wasn't even to the point where they needed to make use of extended stay type supplies. Like it was just constant fighting that they were doing this entire time. Yeah, it's, there's so many tough things about this.

and one of them is I can't blame anybody on the ground that's down there fighting for anything that's going wrong they're trying their damnedest they were put in a situation where their bombings that were supposed to protect them were pulled they're down there fighting and doing every single thing

that they can to make this happen well all they're trying to do is liberate the country that they love like that's their main objective during this whole entire thing they're not looking for power. I'm sure maybe some of them are eventually trying to get it back, but they're just looking to, for lack of a better term, cleanse Cuba

and bring it back to what they remember it was, which is crazy because there's been like three revolutions in the last hundred years. Well, I mean, to sum this up, this entire thing, and we're not done yet, but Bissell, when he was asked about this, he said, I have no clear picture of what to expect, but I'm confident something will happen. And it's just like that's your, and this was even before like the invasion was going off.

He was just like, I don't know. Something's going to happen. Yeah, like you part of part of the kind of the crux of this whole thing is basically just anticipating or essentially wrongly anticipating what JFK was going to do. So when this plan got approved, the people that were actually planning it and kind of, getting it off the ground and leading the operation, were convinced that once this thing started, JFK wouldn't allow this thing to fail. So whatever it took after this point,

it would happen in order for this to be successful. If that meant intervening as far as like U.S. planes, things like that, that was the assumption essentially that the people planning this, once it was approved, had. JFK had no intention of doing that. It was this, it was this or bust. And especially, I don't know if anything played into his head prior to getting that note from Crucef,

but if he had any type of inkling of being like, maybe I should, I got the Essex right though, I could send in fire jets. As soon as you got that telegram, he's like, yep, nope, if this thing doesn't work, this thing doesn't work. There is a massive part of it. The other part of it, too, though, is his accomplishment successfully doing this or making sure that whether it goes well or goes south that he doesn't get an accomplishment he approved this well but that he can't be tied back to it like is his end goal he was tied back to it but that's what

he seemed to be taking moves at every step where it's like i just don't want to be tied back to this yes at the sacrifice of the success of the plan yes so even though it's a failure because they didn't extricate Castro and get him out of there would he have considered it a success had they not had it tied back to him. I don't believe so. But you wouldn't even know. Because it would never been tied back to. It never would have been an option.

It never just would have even been a thing. But again, I think that he was very literal when he said this whole thing has to happen with plausible deniability. And I think that the people that planned it were like, yeah, but there's wiggle room. They're like, you know, unless something goes wrong and we have to step in and they were doing it as they were leaving the Oval Office. Yeah. there was a final air attack that would be launched by the FAL, the brigadistas,

and this actually included a total of four Americans. And I text you about this. Okay, so two of them were Alabama Air Guardsmen, I think, and then two of them were, there were Americans, but essentially they were contractors. CIA contractors. contractors. So you can probably tell, based on what's going on, that this thing is going south. Yeah. When you volunteer to get in there to fly these missions, the missions that you're flying are not the, hey, I'm going to fly the supplies into the airstrip and doing something to try to keep this going from a pursuit of like, I can contribute to this.

your contribution in your mindset is I'm going to go fucking strafe some soldiers and bomb some tanks and blow some shit up now the guys that are fighting for you know for independence from Castro and for Cuba and everything those guys are flying for what they believe are the right reasons and what someone in a similar situation can look at for the right reasons they're doing it for for their country that seems to go a long ways in a lot of situations with people using the excuse

doing it for the country But when you have guys that don't have to go and can just walk away from it after this, and nothing's on them. Because, yeah, they trained them, but they're stepped far away from this. They're still getting paid. But you get in there with the intention to do that. That doesn't seem like a good person, right? Are you trying to tell me that these Alabama airmen had no connection to Cuba? I'm trying to tell you that I don't think these Alabama airmen had any loyalty to Cuba.

We're probably doing this just to fucking gun down some people and blow some shit up. There was a wild quote in something that I was reading that was from one of the Alabama airmen that when they found out... Not one of the two that were killed and then the two other contractors that were killed. Prior to. Yeah, okay. When they found out that the other bombing raids were called off, the guy said, well, goddamn, we just lost the war. this wasn't just an insurgency to these dudes. This wasn't just an invasion.

This was a war. And I don't know if it's... That's really telling. I don't know if it's because they were national guardsmen or what, but just the fact that he called it a war makes me think that in his mind this might have been more than just a CIA operation. Well, and this is, again, this is just fucking pure speculation. Yeah. But just kind of looking at the time frame and everything.

These are people that if they're in the National Guard, they're probably a little bit younger. They're not going to be like old vets or anything like that. They missed out on World War II, probably all the stuff of World War II. And there hasn't been anything going on for the Alabama Air National Guard, especially for the fact that they've been left to be one of the last ones to actually get these BGXs, is still flying Old War II shit. So for them, this opportunity, this is their war. This is the war they feel like they missed out on that they signed up for.

and God damn it, they're going to fucking participate. Yeah, I feel like that's a fairly spot on speculation to have. After this failure of the airstrikes, they were basically in full retreat, down to the beach, down into the water. They were running off into the swamps just trying to get away from this Cuban militia force. When the red group, or sorry, the Red Beach group came down to the group that was on the Blue Beach. So each of them had a commanding officer. And one of them had the, he's like, what we need to do is we need to disperse up into the hills. You know, we can wage a guerrilla warfare from there.

It'll maybe give them time to resupply us at a different time or drop us supplies. We just have to try to stay in this thing. The other guy was of the mindset like, no, they'll resupply us right now. They're going to come in and help us. They're not going to leave us out here. We're going to go and hold the beach. And it's just like, in the most respectable way, you just want to be like, it's like the, Oh, honey.

Like, the guy that's wanting to go up in the hills, he's like, we can go and we can still try to do something here. And the other guy's like, no, the United States, they'll help us out. And the other guy just had to look to him and been like, oh, oh, my, you actually, you believe that, right? Well, at the same time, the guy that was talking about scrambling up into the mountains, it's like if they were going to resupply you guys, they'd do it now. Like, I still think the merits of trying to get the fuck out of there. without the water at your back probably are a little bit. Yeah. A little bit better.

Either way, I see that there's some benefit to it. At the same time, how much were they trained in guerrilla warfare prior to that? Are you going to have doctors and CPAs out there? No, but I mean, they were trained in guerrilla warfare because they thought that that's what it kind of might turn into if it had to. One thing, too, that's crazy about this, and I think I mentioned it to you, is during this time, while, like, the beaches are, you know, there's firefights going on, all of this shit, tank battles. dog fights. There's American planes from the Essex that don't have any like national designation on them. But there are fucking current fighter jets that we're using. And they're constantly flying out around Cuba, like at a pretty decent distance. But to where you can fucking hear them. So you're just sitting there also as the Cuban army fighting. And you hear these jets just off in the distance. And they said they did it just like as a psychological ploy, both to demoralize the Cuban armed.

army because, oh shit, the Americans are coming. The fighter jets are coming. And then to also bolster the, you know, um, brigadistas to be like, hey, we're with, I mean, we're way up here, but yeah, we're letting you know, we're with you. It's the saddest part about it. Well, and it even got to the point where on the 19th, that was kind of, you know, that was after the four Americans got killed flying those, uh, little, their, their war. And kind of late that night when they saw, the riding on the wall. Two of the U.S. Navy destroyers, who coincidentally happened to be in the area,

weirdly enough, actually moved into the bay to try to, like, evacuate soldiers. I think they had to be, like, a mile off. And there were guys that were just kind of, like, attempting to swim out, guys that were stuck on the reef. Also, what's in warm Caribbean waters?

Sharks? Yes. Well, also, the ships apparently were close enough to where the tanks started firing at them, and they were like, oh, shit, probably had to go and they just fucking yeah they had to retreat

while they were trying to pick up the soldiers that were retreating it's just the Cubans fed us our lunch and technically it wasn't our lunch it was a lunch bag that didn't have our name written on it but it had all of our food in it no yeah yeah we made the lunch and everything and then the kid got to the lunchroom

when he opened it was like the fuck like this is an apple core and a half-eaten string cheese and a fucking d'animal. You guys gave us the bread to the sandwich and forgot the meat. Yeah. What is going on? It's a community service sandwich with just the scoop of peanut butter, the bologna slice.

Yeah. It's a... I'm sorry, I'm not trying to make light of this. No, but it's incredible just how bad the planning was for how long the planning took. And everything was like... even if it all went perfectly according to plan and there was no coral reef and fidel didn't already know that this was going to happen and we did have those other two bombing raids it would have had to have gone perfect beyond a shadow of a doubt i feel like that for this to work

any little minor inconvenience this is a lot like hitler moving towards the ordnnes i if they were going to get there in three days or four days or whatever it was they had to have everything go right, but even if everything went right, there's a great chance it's still not going to go right. Yeah, I feel like there are multiple things that went wrong that if you take one out, you'd have to take many of them out for this thing to be successful. And it's not just the not sending in the airstrikes. It's essentially up just a whole bunch of shit. Well, over the coming days after that, everybody that fleed on land was pretty much captured. There was about 1,200 members of the 2,506 that were captured.

uh seven of these members were or seven of these members and two CIA hired U.S. citizens were executed after trials back in Havana. I think those guys actually had to bail out of a plane. So four of them were shot down and then another two that had to actually bail out of like two of the other other. So they were piloting more than just the two. Yeah. Multiple aircraft. Well, there was just more CIA guys there than.

The wanted in on it than we even know about. Um, there was a total of 10. they were executed by firing squad. Ten of them died trying to escape via boat. They were shot by a plane. Nine were actually died in a... Nine actually died in a sealed container on their way back to Havana.

They put them in the back of a vehicle, sealed the container that they were in, and then just started driving. I think they probably knew that they weren't going to make it at that point. A fucking sealed container? Like, Jesus Christ. That's tough. Around a hundred,

124 in total were killed during the invasion with hundreds more executed afterwards. You'll see that that number changes from what's caught to what's delivered back versus 176 Cuban forces. Now, this number is a little bit tricky because it's 176 Cuban forces. So the Cuban military, they didn't actually take into account the militiamen that were just kind of there under their own accord. there were 360 wounded of the 2,506 members versus 4 to 500 Cubans. So again... So they don't even tell you how many militia members. No.

But they also had tens of thousands of militia members that were on the island. So those numbers are kind of not really necessary because just like we've seen with all the U.S. sides of the wars, if you got more people to commit or the Russian side, if you get more people to commit, you can lose more people. Yep. Um, it took all the way until December 21st, 1962, December 21st, 1962, more than a year and a half later for an exchange agreement to be signed. They would swap, uh, 1113 prisoners of the 1,200 prisoners that they caught, uh, for $53 million in food and medicine. Initially, they requested 500 farming tractors. And they're like, um, okay. And they're like, um, okay. And they're Like, how about like a bunch of food and medicine?

You're like, okay, I guess that works too. Yeah, if you have a full-blown embargo, you're going to take whatever you can give. But think about how much that is. Yeah. $55 million worth of food and pharmaceuticals. That's so much money. Or $55 million or $53 million. Just hard opiates.

They said that most of the stuff was donated by private enterprises. Uh-huh. Kind of the condition of knowing that there would be tax breaks for the federal government. And knowing what people would do if you were like your, taxes are paying for this. Yeah. Yeah. So, sort of an interesting way to go about paying off that $53 million. On December 29th, JFK and Jack E.O attended a welcome back ceremony at the Orange Bowl in Miami. I can't imagine that everybody that lived for a year and a half in Cuban prison would be pumped

about being paraded into the Orange Bowl so JFK can thank them for what he fucked up. Yeah. I don't think there was a lot of clapping going on. Oh, I don't know who the PR guy that set that up is. No. Definitely wasn't a Cuban PR guy. No. That actually takes place after Alan Dulles gets fired a CIA director in November, 1961.

Well, he gets awarded this very prestigious award. And then on their way out, he tells Kennedy, he's like, by the way, I'm not retiring. He's like, you know that I gave you this fucking award because you're retiring. And he's like, yeah, I'm not going to retire. And he's like, then I'm going to be doing some firing. He's like, I'm retiring. Didn't take long too far after that. Big Dick Bissell resigns February, 1962.

It's a little dick Bessel now. He say, or like we said, he was the deputy directorate of plans for the CIA. So all of these plans he had seen, he'd had his fingers in those pies. There was this report that was authored in November 1961. I got it too, buddy. By the CIA Inspector General, uh, Lyman. There was two of them, actually. There was one in April 61 called the Taylor Survey.

It had a general named Maxwell Taylor, Robert F. Kennedy, an admiral, and then Dulles to review the invasion. And even at that point with the guys that were there that were like part of the invasion planning, it still came to the point where the general basically just came out and said, you know, due to the lack of early realization of the impossibility of success by covert means to an adequate aircraft to limitations on armaments, pilots and air attacks set to attempt plausible deniability on the loss of important ships and lack of ammunition. So he's basically just like kind of all of it.

Yeah. This report that I got, General Lyman, the survey of the Cuban operation, didn't get declassified until 1998, long after most of these guys were dead. Definitely long after JFK was dead. Let's just go back and read like two or three of them. Kai. You go ahead first because I don't want to steal your favorite one. Just the first one's great. The CIA exceeded its capabilities in developing the project from guerrilla support to

overarmed action without any plausible deniability. So even them saying you should have had some plausible deniability in this. So it's not even that you shouldn't have done it. It's that you should have covered it up better. Insufficient employment of high quality staff. Well, and to go along with that, poor internal management of communications and staff, I mean, the best one that, yeah, okay, I see what you were talking about, is the one that I would enjoy the most insufficient Spanish speakers training facilities or material resources.

The reason that this plan failed is you didn't have enough Spanish speakers. You got the failure to sufficiently organize internal resistance in Cuba. And this was also something that it had been presented prior to the invasion, is the British had been also watching Cuba. Of course, they're in the Caymans and everything. And they were like, hey, just in case you guys are going to do anything in Cuba, just so you know, I don't think you guys know how much support Castro has because it was like 80%. It was between like 70 or 80% at that point.

So the British even told us, hey, you guys aren't really going to have a pool of people to select from because all those people that you're hoping will come over on your side. They still kind of like Fidel right now. Or they're dead or in jail. Maybe the best one and the one that really points to what's going on here. failure to realistically assess risks and to adequately communicate information and decisions internally and with other government principles. Bring in some other people. Yeah. How many clowns took a look at this and said this was okay?

Or maybe if there was enough nose that you heard, don't do it. Failure to competently collect and analyze intelligence about human forces. Oh, you mean the one thing that you should probably do before launching an operation is to know what you're fighting against? Yeah. Yeah, it, I mean, it doesn't tell us any more than we could have already figured out on our own. No, and it's, this is a real bad black eye on the United States because like we said, they were basically breaking international and U.S. laws by doing this. And the nice thing about this is we don't even have to draw this out and be like, oh, and here's what happened next and here's because what happens next that's of any substance is going to actually be in this, you know, sphere of the world is going to be the Cuban Missile Crisis. So that's what I'm really looking forward to.

Yeah, after this, there's going to be a lot to that one too. Yep. You got anything else? No. Fun episode. How long are we at? 2.45. Oh, that ain't bad.

It's under three. You guys know you like it. You like those long, long podcasts. Long format, baby. All right, guys, thanks for joining us this week. We'll catch you next time. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode.

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