Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 241 - The Bay of Pigs Invasion

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

Joe is joined by producer Nate (@inthesedeserts)to talk about the time the CIA attempted to invade cuba with a handful of guys and some repurposed fishing trawlers. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2134 https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB355/bop-vol3.pdf https://www.historynet.com/cold-war-bay-of-pigs-invasion/ https://www.historyonthenet.com/the-bay-of-pigs-invasion https://web.archive.org/web/20160621043713/https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2016-featured-story-archive/the-bay-of-pigs-invasion.html

Hello, and welcome to the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Nate. What's up, Nate? Hello, how's it going? This is the first time you and I have recorded together in person, despite having, I think 2018 was the first year I did any kind of guest appearance on your show. So this would be, certainly it was not until, you know, like, well, it would have to have been 2018 or 2019.

So it's been almost five years that we've been podcasting. We've never been on an episode in person recording together. Yeah. And this is the first time the show has ever been recorded in an actual recording studio. So Joe is in London and I've brought him over to the studio we use for Trash Future and other podcasts. You may recognize the sound of these microphones from the periodic recordings I've done for Hell of a Way, where you're like, oh, yep, it must be in the studio. There's not the sound of a fan or the sound of a British guy yelling about the bins in the background. And so, yeah, I brought Joe in and we have a proper professional studio recording for

once in our goddamn lives. Yeah. i feel kind of uncomfortable in this situation i i've over the years it's been almost it's almost five years the show's been going on and during that time there's been uh we've been recording on like a desk in person with nick and i one time a recording my roof exploded and water started leaking on him from my air conditioning system thankfully my computer where i was reading from was on the other side of the table. And then for the years after that, my desk was a beer pong table. Yep. I remember hearing about the beer pong table. Yep. You guys basically used to record Brown Out every single episode.

For like the first 50, I'd say. And then you guys, you went to establishment, you got serious, you polished up the podcast. And now look at you, you're in a studio in London. And that sounds so exotic and professional until you're like, no, it's the studio where they write songs about Honkball, Hoopla Klaas. I noticed I was sitting next to a drum set. I was like, this must be where this was recorded. Yeah.

It wasn't actually in here. It was two studios ago. We kind of moved around. We finally found a long-term location. And so now we can record drums without either getting kicked out of the co-working space or milo's neighbors yelling at us so this is good the idea of you recording fake dutch pop music in a co-working space is fucking incredible yeah in the middle of 2020 when like everything was closed yes we we spent like 25 hours recording the song in like 20 minutes doing the skit because it was we had to teach ourselves

audition or um ableton and it just took so fucking long but you know what it's all part of the history that's led to us being in this very nice quiet if i do say so myself yeah because i fucking hung all these panels with milo space and this is the first time i've recorded with anybody since uh nick was disappeared by unknown people yeah r.i.p nick We miss you, buddy. Please come home safe. So I figured it'd be a good time. Actually, I didn't figure this is Nate's idea. Cause I have like five scripts done and I'm still let him pick the topic that he wants. So I can't, I can't be like, I figured this would be a good time to talk about the Bay

of Pigs invasion. But sure. It's a good time to talk to talk about the Bay of Pigs invasion. I feel like this has been requested a thousand times over the years. Um, and I finally got around to doing it not that long ago and I figured it'd be a good time to do that all in the TF, uh, the TF bunker here in London. Yeah. I think it would be a great idea to talk about the Bay of pigs with, uh, me, someone who works for the CIA. Uh, I've also been accused of working for the CIA. Everyone, everyone knows one thing that I do find very funny the CIA. I've also been accused of working for the CIA. As everyone knows.

One thing that I do find very funny about it, I mean, online shit is going to be online shit and I don't really get bent out of shape about it. But my friends who are still in the military or still work for the government now have to basically report me as one of their foreign contacts because for when they do their periodic reinvestigation for their security clearances, because I'm a British citizen, I am one of their foreign contacts now. Oh, that's incredible. So it's very funny the perception of like, Nate, doing CIA

work for the CIA. And it's like, no, I'm just a dickhead in London that people know that was in the army eight, almost nine years ago. I've been accused of being a CIA source of some kind because I work with Robert Evans from time to time. I was like, ah, yes, all CIA agents

maintain a Patreon account. There's a part of me that thinks that when it comes to this sort of a thing that like, well, as we'll get into in this episode, I feel as though there's, while the CIA has obviously disrupted a lot of things and has had, especially in middle, mid century, 20th century, we're quite heavily involved in just about everything. There's also a degree to which when you say, I think this person works for the cia you're kind of implicitly saying i think this person sucks at their job yes and we're gonna get into that because this is a story of uh everybody hoodwinking everybody until bullets were literally flying yeah um that's one thing

that i've always tried to push back on uh in this show is that like this uh concept that any intelligence service is this like omnipotent evil force which like obviously they're fucking awful but like they're also universally in question it's the omnipotence that's the problem even the comp the basic level competence of the cia especially in virtually any time we've ever talked about that every time we've talked about the kg bay fucking i think we've talked about french intelligence before when it came to emperor bokasa like all these guys are dumb as hell they just have a huge budget to be as dumb as they've ever been in their life and depending on what country you're in they also have an unlimited budget for like leather jackets and breaking knee hammers like and so yes there is a degree to which like they get stuff done at like

the sort of like street thug level because they're just constantly breaking people's knees. But the degree to which some of this stuff, like you said, there's a perception of it that implies omnipotence when if the CIA were omnipotent, they would have found smarter Cuban exiles, but they didn't. smarter cuban exiles yeah but they didn't or uh you know uh guys who didn't i don't know maybe know how to use a radio system and shanghai people have detention facilities but this is all things we're going to talk about here it's like listen sam giancana we need you to read the aar okay now i think it'd be fair uh safe to say that the united states and cuba have one hell of a long history together virtually all of it okay all of it has to a long history together. Virtually all of it, okay, all of it, has to do with the U.S. wanting to take it over, taking it over, giving it up, taking it over again,

and then attempting to control it from outside pretty much since the dawn of the United States. Yes. We still cut checks to the Cuban government for an agreed-upon amount of, I think, $10 or $100 a month for Guantanamo Bay, and they just never cashed them. I like to think that there's a drawer somewhere in the president of Cuba's office where just uncashed checks from the u.s government

but they're they all amount to like maybe ten thousand dollars yeah like it's not very much money because it's an agreed upon sum from like roosevelt era like like like teddy roosevelt era but um it's from the spanish uh american war which we did do a series on if you want to go listen about more fucked up shit that the US did with Cuba, and also how Teddy Roosevelt completely lied about his military history, go listen to that series. It's a lot of fun. Now, those

three episodes pretty much only bring us to what I think could be considered the beginning of US fuckery on the island, because before then it was quite minimal. And this episode is when it really, really picks up. So we have to learn about a guy named Fulgencio Batista. We sure do. Now, the Bay of Pigs has its roots, of course, in the Cold War, but just saying that is very simplistic. In reality, while of course the Cold War capitalism versus communism thing

had a part in it, the US's Bay of Pigs quest really goes all the way back to US involvement in Cuban affairs beginning in the late 19th century. And this isn't an exhaustive history of pre-revolution Cuba. There's probably an entire podcast out there that does that. Consider this a speed run to Batista because that's really the guy we have to talk about. Valencia Batista was a guy educated in an American Quaker school before getting into the Cuban military. Now, in 1933, Batista and several others launched the Sargent's Revolt to overthrow the president at the time, Gallardo Machado, who had developed a fun pastime of murdering most of his political opponents,

which Batista himself had become quite fond of in the future. Now, the Sargent's Revolt led to a short 100-day period of government that was run by five different presidents who were all supposed to work together. As you can imagine, they didn't work great. Yeah. Sounds like it's not going to work. This period of the five presidents was like the tail end of that 100 days, and the five presidents lasted five whole days, or one day per president.

This led to a guy named Ramon Gow taking charge. And this would, again, only last about 100 days as Gow did something that if you are putting together a government, a revolutionary government, the smoldering ruins of an old state, there's one thing that you really, well, I'll say there's two things you really don't want to do. You don't want to fuck with the money. You don't want to piss off the guys with all the guns. He did both of that. He pissed off the military and was also hilariously corrupt. As the Cuban government tried and failed to slap together a functioning state, the military began to get pissed that their salaries were simply not being paid.

And a lot of occasions, the garrisons or soldiers were not being supplied with food. But the main driving force of this, of course, because the rank and file very rarely lead a coup. I mean, a great example is like the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. That was mostly rank and file soldiers. But the main nail in the coffin for Gao was that senior officers had been passed over for promotions. Isn't it a shame when that happens? So, yeah, you have the pissed off guys who are hungry not getting paid but more importantly you now have the organizational structure of the military that's

also pissed off in the form of staff officers mad they didn't get to pin some more shit on their uniform now these angry officers gathered these angry men mostly around batista batista also happened to be in close communication with u.s. Envoy Sumner Wells, who supported him in a soft military coup. And there's actually quite a bit of debate if Wells is actually even talking to the U.S. government about this at the time, or if he was just kind of freebooting it. Just freewheeling. I love it. Both are very possible. like that where just like whether it's a government envoy or just a guy basically engineering to bring a new government into power or to bring a government in Central America or Latin America into the US orbit. In the 19th century, they called these guys filibusters. They were people who would go and literally try to take over countries themselves with like a militia they've raised and things along those lines but this sort of a thing of kind of like like freewheeling

yeah as you just described it freebooting this sort of stuff pretty common and i think especially in that era the idea of like a guy who's a political appointee because he's like you know you know riding the coattails of someone because like he made you know donations for the from the chock full of nuts coffee company to someone's fucking Senate campaign. Like is now basically like the, the point man on whether or not a new government is going to form on a Caribbean Island. Yeah. And I mean,

his name is Sumner Wells and I didn't do a lot of research into him, but he feels like a guy who wears a bow tie constantly. It makes you think it's going to be a guy who speaks a little bit like this. I'm only a simply country us envoy. Yeah, exactly. When it's two last names and it's before 1975 chances are really good the man's family has slavery wealth that's just the way that it works and i mean his first name is sumner that like that's a weird name from a guy coming

from the u.s uh i mean my name's appomattox per. Let me tell you about the war of Northern aggression. God, that guy is now governor of Texas. Yeah, exactly. That guy really believes CRT is a threat to the American way of life. Someone in that family will be on the Supreme Court one day. Or he will be at the next Duke lacrosse scandal. Yeah, that's true. So we're not really sure.

I mean, of course, the U..s at some point openly begins working with batista but most of that is when it's clear that his coup is going to work and then when it comes to power it really feels like sumner wells is like he's like he did a startup but for a coup and then he got like you know funding from the u.s government later down the line um now batista was uh uh promoted by gau at the time uh who tried to keep him around uh like trying to like kind of smooth everything over uh but it was very clear to everybody that batista in command of the military had all of the power on the island and after this sumner wells and batista forced gau to resign and a series of other presidents came into power most of them did nothing because batista again was like shadow president he held the reins of power behind the scenes until around

1940 when he finally gave up all pretense and became president himself in a quote-unquote election uh it was quite it was a quite a fucked up election it seemed to be very corrupt um now somewhat ironically however because of how fucked up the series of presidents have been and gal before him the country was not working everybody was terrifically corrupt the communist party of cuba supported batista's election into power uh whoops i call it being an accelerationist look credit, credit where credit's due. They realized their mistake and got rid of him later. I was going to say, I mean, they're like, he needs to fuck things up enough so that we can get more popular support.

And the only way to do that is for us to support him. So we are team Batista now. I mean, I know that's not actually the case because, in fact, when the insurgency against batista actually began to gain steam like there was a significant amount of repression so it's not as if it was like hand and glove there was there was a lot of political violence um but it is just very funny because yeah there's an extent to which that sounds ridiculous on paper but also like the situation of the communist party of cuba in 1940 versus 1959 is extraordinarily different. It's a different party altogether. Also, a huge thing that's different too, and we'll get into this, I don't want to take away from you,

is that the situation as regards Communist parties in Latin America being on the radar of people like Sumner Wells, among other people, is very different in 1940 versus in 1945, 1949 especially. Yeah, this is, I mean, World War II hasn't ended yet. There's no Red Scare in the West yet. There's no Cold War yet. So nobody gives a fuck about that. There's definitely a shitload of anti-communist sentiment in America, but it's nowhere near official policy to the degree that it's going to be in just a few years.

But then certainly when China, when Mao Zedong takes over in China, and certainly when the Russians deploy their first nuclear weapon. That's when America goes fucking psychotic about it. Yeah, of course. So like 1940 Communist Party of Cuba, the US doesn't really give a fuck about them. And more specifically, the country simply wasn't working. I mean, this is, like we pointed out, a much different communist party.

They had not decided that armed revolution was the only way to succeed. And they're like, Batista cannot be worse than everybody else. Of course, they would end up being wrong. But hey, that happens to the best of us. Whoops, guys, we fucked up. We're going to fix this. I'm going to go talk to my uncle Kalashnikov and we'll figure out a way to solve this problem. Yeah, there's a relatively similar situation in Naragua that happens with simosa where it's

like simosa senior like well that bad fuck shit but nobody can be worse and it's like oh yeah somebody can actually be worse than him his son and like and eventually that leads to a socialist revolution in nicaragua so like this is a common thing but like once again you're kind of the events we're talking about kind of like are bestride two different eras because pre-world war ii america is just sort of like alternating between just like full-bore invasions occupations and like regime change in latin america or specifically in the caribbean but or really all of latin america yeah and then also being like oh no we don't have a budget fuck everything we're gone do your. United Fruit Company, please govern this country.

It's this weird pendulum swing. I really liked, we did a series on the American-Filipino War, the Spanish-American War, and the moral rebellion and stuff like that. And it was very interesting seeing that the US was dead set on starting an empire, but they didn't really want to, but we don't really want to build an army. We're still going to use volunteer detachments from like fucking nebraska or whatever my i'm actually my great-grandfather was an engineer officer in the moral rebellion uh from fucking mississippi so like how he got there i have no idea yeah it was like the i think just about the first shots of like the u.s's war in the philippines i've taken was like

some teenager from nebraska who called a filipino the n-word it's like we just think it's a greeting where i'm from shit we call everything that isn't corn the n-word nebraskans listen to this episode be like we've changed god damn it we've reformed all right like no state gets away scott free from this fucking show no state no country well i think it also helps that like we will be the first to shit on our home states like constantly you you for michigan me for indiana like let's be real yeah the only thing uh lower than michigan's ohio yeah ohio does fucking suck really bad yeah we'll talk about that later now uh batista stayed in power for uh years, and during that time, he was more corrupt than anybody else, turned into something of a mafia don, which we'll talk about in a little bit later.

And he eventually named a successor and then left office, but he retained command of the military. So he's still in office. That one lasts after being out of power for a little bit. He decided that, you know, only being the shadow president isn't good enough for me. So he's going to make a comeback in 1952 and run for president again. However, during the course of the campaign, it was going quite bad for him. And even though elections weren't the most fair, they were mostly fair during this era. And he decided that the current president, again, him is So so car is was so corrupt that there's no way that

there could be a fair election which is ironic coming from fucking Batista and really what happened was shortly before the election opinion poll went out and had him in dead last and everyone else that was running for office over him promised that if they won

they would remove Batista from command of the military so yeah he hit the big red coup button again um now this is mostly mostly bloodless uh especially for a coup and especially for a coup that happens on this show uh the military is foaling batista's pocket as you would imagine and the ones that maybe weren't realize that if i'm not i don't go along with this i might get a speed hole punched in my skull. You know, so the military quickly took over. Batista was quickly named head of the new government. And 10 days later, the U.S. recognized him as such, which should become as no surprise because at this point, the U.S. government is fully working with Batista and helped him organize everything. The U.S. didn't much care about the horrific corruption and violence that Batista's

reign of terror would become. He let the U.S. exploit the much care about the horrific corruption and violence that Batista's reign of terror would become. He let the U.S. exploit the living shit out of Cuba at will and promised to torture and murder pretty much any Cuban that so much whispered the word Marx in his general direction. Yeah. So in Cuba, you have both. You have the sugar industry. You have the fruit industry. And you have casinos run by the American mob. Yeah.

Before there was las vegas there was cuba as myer lansky myer lansky sam jankana yeah like the like the remnants of the capone organization like so much stuff both money laundering and like casinos where like the basic the house always wins kind of stuff like stuff they couldn't get away with in america um a degree to which they could get away with also running prostitution, also drugs to a degree, but not like during prohibition, this stuff also was a big tourism destination. And so obviously by this point, prohibition is long dead, but the amount of money that it generated with the mob, they sought refuge elsewhere away from the prosecution, away

from the FBI. And so you're in a situation now where Batista has the backing of the US state. He has the backing of a number of international organizations or corporations as regards things like sugar, things like rum, tropical fruits. And then he also has the backing of basically a lot of fucking mob money. Yeah. Because he's making a lot of money for them or of fucking mob money. Yeah. Because he's making a lot of money for them or letting them make money. Yeah.

And we'll talk about it a little bit more in a bit. But to the point that his relationship with the mafia soured his relationship with the CIA, which is kind of impressive. And just to underline here what this UX exploitation of Cuba looked at, this was said by JFK. line here, what this UX exploitation of Cuba looked at. This was said by JFK. Quote, at the beginning of 1959, the United States companies owned 40% of Cuban sugar lands, almost all of the cattle ranches, 90% of the mines and mineral concessions, 80% of all utilities and the entire oil industry, and supplied two-thirds of Cuba's imports. In short, the US owned Cuba and would lavish riches on Batista as long as he shut the fuck up and let them do it. According to historian Luis A. Perez Jr., author of the book On Becoming Cuban, quote, daily life had developed into relentless degradation, the complicity of the political leaders and public officials who operate at the behest of American interests. The same book also points out the U.S. ambassador actually had more direct power in Cuba than Batista did. So, yeah. Anything you can think of, poverty, illiteracy, tropical diseases, the average Cuban had a horrible quality of life. Oh, God, yeah. And that's a climate where lots of bad things

can happen health-wise, and it was happening. Disease was endemic. Batista did absolutely nothing to try to control tropical diseases. And people often point out that there was slavery in cuba it's more like a serfdom which like i don't want to like be like it wasn't slavery exactly it was but there was no like chattel slavery however there was a batista effectively implemented serfdom on cuba uh for these companies and the mafia um it was absolutely insane he didn't give a single fuck about his people. He made a personal agreement with the head of the CIA, Alan Dulles, to act as effectively a spook for the CIA. He was made fantastically wealthy by this arrangement and murdered around 20,000 people, but probably more. That's 20,000 that we can confirm.

And this is in less than a decade. It is an absolute rate of terror. And the US administration cheered him defense of people like Pinochet in Chile. And the thing about it is, with the Fujimori in Peru, this is a constant- The entire Argentine- Yeah, the Argentine military. Yeah. Well, they're great allies in defense against communism, but if you live in those countries and you seek redress over anything that makes your life worse, you might just get disappeared. Yeah, he'll get yeeted out of a helicopter.

So far in the history of the show, the only country that we've ever found that was staunchly quote-unquote anti-communist, that didn't get a full-throated American support in the middle of the Cold War was like Rhodesia. And that was the line. It was like, you've officially

gone too far with this whole apartheid thing, but if you dial it back, we'll be cool. Totally be cool. Yeah. And like, I think it was the crippled the Eagles of Rhodesia episode. We point out that like whenever anybody and of course, we're, you know, we're various different shades of left on the show. But if you didn't know that before, I don't know how you didn't.

But like generally when anybody is like screaming about anti-communism, they're just a fascist. Yeah. That's the thing is that as long as you allow... Basically, the rubric in the Cold War was that as long as you allow business to continue at its rapacious pace, and there isn't anything that's going to alter u.s or foreign control of assets of resources or of the labor force you can basically do whatever you want it has to be so bad like when you think about the kind of stuff that fucking papadoc duvalier got away with before there was any sun yeah yeah yeah exactly before there was any kind of uh any kind of real official criticism when you think about about the degree, like the depravity that the apartheid regime in South Africa had to get up to, with very public displays of brutality against people protesting, things along those lines, we basically didn't care.

No, of people being murdered or beaten within an inch of their life for protesting for fucking trade union rights in Japan, for example. Yeah. We were fine with that. We were fine with General Motors sending out people to beat the shit out of Japanese strikers. We were fine with all this stuff. We were fine with it in America too, but we were way more fine with it abroad. Of course. And so- strikers we were fine with all this stuff we were fine with in america too but we were way more fine with it abroad of course and so look at i mean i think it was nestle or coca-cola ran death squads in columbia very recently yeah i mean this is one of those things where like like you will see a lot

of of kind of like blanket defenses of stuff blanket sort of partisan positions what you might call campism as regards uh cuba post-revolution but like one thing that you can't really argue against unless like your granddad owned slaves in cuba is that fucking life sucked as a cuban life fucking sucked unless you were yeah there's there's no viable defense of the batista regime like i don't i don't think anybody on this anybody who listens to this show will i mean likewise like even when in our soviet afghan war series like the first afghan revolution against the king makes a lot of sense and then it didn't because it all went very badly from there it went extremely badly very very quickly and then uh then the

soviets invaded made everything worse because one of the dumbest fucking arguments i've ever heard in my life and uh maybe we can cut this out later if it doesn't make sense fair enough is like the soviets did not invade afghanistan they were invited i'm like well in that case the u.s didn't invade vietnam either you stupid motherfucker yeah i mean they they were the the soviets the acronym or the the turn of phrase the soviets love to use in afghanistan was that they would call themselves the limited contingent of soviet forces that were invited there but like that kind of ignores the fact that like they were yeah notionally invited there so they could fucking kill hafizullah amin the first thing they did is kill the president went in and killed the president like they installed

fucking barbac carmel in the in the spetsnaz's defense they also killed a lot of their own men they did yes fair enough yeah like so it's just one of those things where like right you don't necessarily want to be hardline one versus the other but like or at least if you want the perspective of like all of the historical record you're gonna force yourself to ignore a lot of shit if you say i refuse to even acknowledge the existence of this stuff but one thing that i will never acknowledge the existence of with any um legitimacy ohio ohio point number one and defenses of batista's cuba oh no it's fucking insane that that is that's like people who say like you know rodigio wasn't great but look what wogabi did i'm like so you're a fucking nazi google google search bread basket of of Africa daily mail comments and you will see a lot of that

shit. Good God. That just sounds like nightmare fuel. Now, uh, eventually Batista went too far, even for the United States, rather than only killing communists,

like we've already talked about, Batista effectively became a member of virtually every American mafia outlet. Uh, he was working with Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and others. And this relationship with the mafia became so important because he made so much money that he stopped being a good CIA agent. Actually, he was a profound fighter in the fight against antisemitism by employing Meyer Lansky. You need to respect that. Champion of the Jewish people. lansky all right you need to respect that in a time when jewish people in a time when there

were jewish quotas at harvard fulgencio batista was willing to work with people with jewish people as equals as long as they were mob bosses who killed a lot of people who were huge pieces of shit yeah it's like yeah i'll work with the purple gang it's fine uh sounds good to me say what you will about batista he was a war criminal mass murderer not an anti-semite doesn't seem like he was or if he was an anti-semite he liked making money more than he liked being anti-semitic oh so it's like switzerland yes yes fair enough you know that the only americans to receive the pow medal from being held in a camp in a neutral country were from switzerland there was like a like a company's worth of american soldiers who were held.

And the commandant of their camp was a Swiss-German guy with a French name who was so pro-Nazi that he was just like, I'm going to abuse the fuck out of these guys because I love the Nazis. And it took forever. By the time this was actually acknowledged, there's only like a handful of these guys still alive. But they got the POW medal, which you don't get typically if you're held in a neutral country. It has to be if you're held in an enemy country but they literally they finally

agree they're like in the case of this camp it counted as being held by an enemy country because fuck's sake this was bad jesus christ switzerland nothing about that country surprises me anymore um now when the u.s event eventually told batista like look you have to stop working with the mafia mostly because like you know the fbi and cia also want to wrap up the mafia and you're protecting them and you're supposed to be a member of the cia yeah um like normally the cia is totally fond of like you know go get her attitude start your own shit but you know and they're typically like as this stuff plays out fine with organized crime in those countries but but when it's stuff that becomes politically difficult in the United States-

Right. Manuel Noriega is a great example of that. Yeah, exactly. It's like in the middle of the drug war in America where that's the big political haymaker, this guy who's like, hey, you got any cocaine money? Please put it in my banks. That's going to be a political problem in America. And it's like, that's the moment where a guy has to be like, okay, okay, I realize

that I've had billionaire reality bends around me money for so long. But this is a thing where consequences might actually exist. Yeah, and those consequences came in the form of Fidel Castro's communist revolution. It swept through the countryside and Batista

fell from power quite easily, mostly because the US is like, this is what you get motherfucker, we're not helping you. He fled from the country in, I believe, 1959 and Castro's army marched in and captured Havana. Now somewhat surprisingly, America

immediately recognized the Castro government. Eisenhower, shock to shock's sake, a staunch anti-communist, at first thought Castro was going to be good for Cuba, mostly because one of the first things he did was crack down the fucking mafia, which was really hurting American profits. Now, of course, the breaking point was nationalization of all those American companies that set up shop in Cuba under Batista. Which I mean like fucking respect because it was just absolutely just, yeah, rapacious extraction.

Like, let's be real here. There was absolutely no viable way to keep that up. And what's weird is at this point, people still thought in the United States that despite the fact that Castro was obviously a left-wing revolutionary, like Alan Dulles is like, well, he's no communist. It's like, all right. I mean, to be fair, that opinion only lasts about a month uh and then doll is like all right guys i may have been wrong about this this is kind of like it's like the the political orientation version of the meme about you know historical document

where like i am so gay for you dude i love you and i want to have sex with you i'm a dude and so are you and we're totally gay and And the historian's like, they were really good friends. Yeah. Now, everything that we know about what happens between Cuba and the US could have actually been much different, but Eisenhower ghosted Castro. Castro went to the US for a UN meeting, hoping to meet with Eisenhower, because at this point, Castro was under very obvious ideas like, if I piss off the US too much, they are going to invade me. Yeah, exactly. So he was going to smooth out the problems the two of them were having.

And there's a fair bit of evidence suggests that Castro really meant it and is willing to make concessions. Like, look, we're going to do a little leftism. You can do a little bit of your extractionism, but not like you used to. And mostly to make sure he doesn't, you know, get invaded, get invaded. However, when Eisenhower learned that Castro wanted to meet with him,

he literally left DC, just left fucking Washington pissed. Castro went to the UN and he famously made a speech at the UN that, that year declaring Cuba's independence from domination of the U S and afterwards, they rapidly moved towards the Soviet sphere of influence. So real big own goal there on behalf of Eisenhower. Now, Eisenhower did realize that he had fucked up.

And he was like, oh, probably should have done that. I'm going to send my vice president to go and talk to him. But who was his vice president? Richard fucking Nixon. Exactly. Exactly. Richard Nixon, who, when he was eisenhower's vice president kind of made political hay because he was his motorcade was attacked by communist protesters i'm struggling

to remember the city that it was in but like that was a really i think it was in latin america but i can't remember but that was a really big thing for nixon was like nixon was the anti-communist and he was sort of the enemy of fucking communists around the world is like this, this guy who like that was his sort of political drum to beat was he was like solidly anti-communist. And as be fair, Eisenhower was kind of on the fence about it. Not nearly as on the fence as JFK eventually would be. But on December 11th, J.C. King, who is the head of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, wrote a memorandum to a guy named Richard Bissell, the Deputy

Director of Plans. And the memo said that Castro had turned Cuba into a, quote, left-wing dictatorship and was threatening to lend Cuban support to revolutionary activity across Latin America and said that the only remedy to this entire situation was quote to violent action. So yeah, they wanted to kill him.

So now literally ended. So thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro. So now it is your job to find the drunkest and least reliable Cuban men in Miami. That's right. And in March 1960, the Eisenhower administration officially began planning their attempt to take out Castro. And the plan that they originally had looks much, much fucking different than the one that existed. Just so people don't go nuts here, I'm pretty sure that in March 1960, yeah, so you're basically at the point where the revolution has taken place.

Nixon, I believe, has not yet clenched the nomination to be the presidential candidate to replace Eisenhower in the 1960 election. I don't think so. He is absolutely favored for that. And so you're already at the point where Eisenhower is coming to the end of his eight years in office. And America looks back on Eisenhower. There's a lot of, weirdly, there's a lot of MSNBC liberals who are like, Eisenhower is my ideal government. But there were a lot of weird back and forth kind of meltdowns with Eisenhower, a lot of big scandals. There was a huge kind of bullshit expense bribery scandal that got a lot of people hemmed up and also like in his last years in office eisenhower was very unwell he spent a lot of time like unable to be doing his job because he was

sick and so like it's a very strange era because uh you've gotten past mccarthy but like mccarthy may not be the fucking most powerful senator anymore but like there are a lot of people in america who still really support what McCarthy was selling. Oh, fuck yeah. Nixon among them. Yeah, exactly. This man from California with the world's biggest chip on his shoulder is now apparently going to be...

He's trying to get elected president on the promise like, don't worry, no one will ever have legal jurisdiction over the tapes that I record in my office. Don't mind me recording my threats to murder journalists and shit and getting drunk and wondering. Well, one of my favorite Nixon stories is when it was clear to everybody that he had to leave office, he literally just spent the entire time wandering the halls of the White House drunk in his underwear and a robe. I'm pretty sure there were times when he actually was trying to initiate nuclear

strikes. I don't think that's apocryphal. I genuinely think there's a record of that. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had to put something in place to make sure he was unable to do so in his current state, which is very funny because there's a weeks-long period there that someone attacked the United States.

The generals are currying him into a corner like he's a puppy so he doesn't try to blow up the world and like nobody's running out because spiro agnew had resigned like nobody was sure what the fuck to do yeah yeah um now in 1960 the eisenhower administration began officially playing their attempt to take out castro the plan had several stages the creation of a unified cuban opposition to the cash regime outside of cuba use of propaganda to undermine Castro, development of intelligence network within Cuba that would follow orders of the exile opposition based in the US, and the development of a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for future guerrilla actions on the island. All this would eventually coalesce

together and of course overthrow Castro if everything goes right. Eisenhower approved this plan within the week and it was given the name Operation Pluto, though this looks absolutely nothing like the operation they ended up going with because immediately the plan ran into pretty big problems, namely the fact that the anti-Castro groups, mostly in Miami, fucking hated one another. They all did. There was no way to unify them. They all thought that their one group was a group to free Cuba. They were not going to work together. Fuck everybody else. So the U.S. had to work around them. They would simply start their own group, namely the paramilitaries that would be integral to the entire plan. When I say the U.S. started and ran this group independently of any anti-Castro political groups, they did. anti-cash or political groups who are already working with the cia because they were uh they know pretty much all of them weren't told about this plan they needed to keep these guys in the dark because the they just unreliable they were yeah and they were also they they had been

infiltrated like that's the thing that's gonna become important to the failure of this plan yeah uh and the cia kind of knew that like they weren't vetting anybody like you show up so you hate cash or like welcome aboard dude uh but if you were a member of one of those groups, a documented member of one of those groups, they would not let you join the CIA group because they couldn't trust you. You could be a mole or whatever, which will become funny in a bit because you'll see who they end up recruiting. Because would you just cut out all of these well-defined organizations in Miami? You're not left with a lot of other people to pick from.

The plan for the paramilitaries is based on commando tactics used during World War II. A group of 25 or so men would be trained and inserted into Cuba, and they would train locals who would obviously welcome them as liberation heroes, a plan that never goes wrong, as two people at this table could tell you. Slowly, this would build an entire

grassroots army. And then they were effectively attempting to recreate Castro's revolution. It does not work. Some of these Cuban exile volunteers. I'm going to use the term volunteers and paramilitary is kind of interchangeable here because some of them were volunteers. Some of them were not. Some of them are full blooded anti Castro militants. Guys like Eduardo Ferrer, who's a Cubana Airlines pilot who had hijacked his own plane at gunpoint and flown to Miami. And there are other people who are not so motivated to fight Castro. For instance, one guy had joined the Cuban revolution, Aus Batista. And when it was all over, he fell out politically with the new government. So he made his way to the US. However, once he got there, he was arrested for being a legal immigrant and threatened with deportation unless he volunteered to join the CIA's growing army. And that happened hundreds of times.

Damn, I wonder if any of those guys might have any grievances and be willing to share information with other organizations besides the CIA. Couldn't imagine. So a fair amount of the paramilitaries literally do just shanghaied, given a choice between joining the CIA paramilitary or being deported to Cuba. Yes. Which, bad things awaited them if that happened. Yes.

Because at that point, if they would have gone and then been deported, the Cubans, because of their moles within the Cuban exile community, know that they've been contacted by the CIA. That is a death sentence. Yeah. And of course the CIA knew that. At a bare minimum, you're going to be fucking in prison. Yeah. With probably a few less toenails than you started off with and so it's one of these situations where it's like

they have managed to both yeah like trap these guys but also build in like a self-defeating low morale machine yeah like in a huge way and it just gets more and more you often you what you discover learning about this is that like the left hand is never talking to the right. Yeah. Ever. Of course, especially in this situation. Now, Cuban recruits all receive the same assurance. The project simply could not fail because the US government was behind it and would simply not let it fail.

They would give it lots and lots of material support like air cover and naval gun cover and resupply and medevac. Guess what they didn't give any of those yeah now with dolus was telling recruits that it looked if it looked like it was gonna fail the u.s would simply step in directly and make sure it didn't training began in louisiana and florida but then was moved to the panama canal zone and then it moved again to guatemala in the middle of nowhere in a coffee

plantation when cuban volunteers finally got there they finally weren't actually being trained by the CIA, but rather like subcontractors the CIA had hired to do the job for them. This included Eastern Europeans, Mexicans, and Chinese people, who obviously the Mexicans spoke Spanish. But the guys that they managed to hire really fucking hated Cubans. Physical abuse by the contractor is not only common, but expected as a part of everyday training exercises in life. And this led to constant communication problems, right? Because only like two of these guys

could actually speak Spanish. And so, you know, problems with the communication results in several training deaths, mostly through mysterious gunshots to the back. Blank fire adapter came off. On September 8th, Carlos Rodriguez Santana, a member of the Volunteer Brigade, was shot and killed in an accident.

His roster number is 2506, and that number became the Volunteer Brigade's official name, Brigade 2506. Which I have to say, pretty fucking grim if you're in that brigade. Not a lot to boost the old morale there. Then you have to explain if you survived to your grandkids that you're named after a different Carlos Santana. Didn't even write smooth. He just got shot by his own guys. Yeah, that brigade, not so smooth.

The brigade was commanded by Pepe San Roman, who's a graduate of Cuba's military academy who'd undergone Cuban military training and also military training in the United States during an exchange program. He'd been a Batista loyalist until he was arrested under Batista, freed by the revolution, joined the new military under Castro, and then was arrested again. After that, he decided he should probably leave Cuba and was smuggled to the US via the CIA. Another one of the commanders was Rodrigo Montero Duque. He was another Batista loyalist who did not decide to change sides during the revolution. Instead,

it was pretty well known for murdering civilians and doing all sorts of war crimes against revolutionaries. He only escaped from almost certain death from the Castro regime due to help from Roman. Roman put in a good word with the CIA and he got smuggled to the US. These guys were handpicked by the CIA to command the volunteer force. While politics did play a part, it was a decent-sized part, especially because they're already not working with all these

other groups. We kind of already said, it limits who you can recruit. The CIA picked 10% of the people the CIA picked, only 10% had any prior military service. So of the officers who had command experience, these

guys were pretty much it. And the soldiers fucking hated them. Now, the soldiers hated them because while they mostly knew what was happening, nobody told each one of these soldiers, you're working for the CIA. But it was no secret amongst them that these officers were not picked for their want to free Cuba.

They weren't picked for their command experience or military genius. They were picked by the CIA to lead them. So they're just like, oh, fuck you. You're nothing but a CIA spook. Right. to lead them. So they're just like, oh, fuck you. You're nothing but a CIA spook. Right. And so you already have an organization where morale's going to be

pretty low amongst rank and file, and then you've got a lot of inexperienced people who don't trust each other. And the training, as you have just described, is subpar would be very generous to describe it. Mostly just getting hit a lot by some Romanian guy on a CIA contract.

Exactly. Look at this fucking guy. He doesn't even know how to hang a gun. Fuck this guy. on a CIA contract. Exactly. Look at this fucking guy. He doesn't even know how to hang a gun. Fuck this guy. Sorry. That's Romanians. We had a Romanian cab driver, Romanian van driver who was talked like he was from Brooklyn, but also with a Romanian accent.

And everywhere we went when he was driving, he's like, look at this fucking asshole. Look at this fucking guy. And then I was like, yeah, it's really funny, man. Like, yeah, you know, you remind me of guys in New York. He's like oh yeah man i live in new york for like 15 years now you poured my ass i gotta fucking come here instead and so uh yeah i'm just imagining a romanian with cubans just in the swamp hating his life yelling at him like that smacking people around a coffee plantation making cia money and like Somewhat ironically, the people who maybe were not the brightest

in the organization said that having the CIA pick our commanders makes this entire thing look like it was plotted by a foreign government. I wonder how you got that idea. I wonder how you got that idea. Curious. Now this ended in a strike. Somewhat ironic for

anti-communist militia. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, up the workers, dickheads. Yeah. Where hundreds of volunteers simply refused to train, protesting Roman as their commander. Some wanted to elect their own commander. So the CIA contractors locked them all in a house and put them under house arrest. And they would stay there until after the invasion ended.

So these guys are the real winners. They didn't have to take part in anything like they're under house arrest sure but they didn't have to like storm the beaches of the bay of pigs storm the beaches of this empty swamp and then get fucking hit by anti-aircraft fire non-stop yeah wow okay before we get into what happens next we have to talk a little bit uh something that nate is obviously very familiar with this concept called mission creep um i know nothing about this there's not a big 20-year war lesson in this yeah several of them uh the easiest way to explain this is when you plan one thing normally something small or simple and it rapidly spirals into

something so large and complex it is you just cannot possibly succeed no matter how long or how hard you try and a good example of this is pretty much every war the US has fought since Korea or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan or Russia and Ukraine or the US and Iraq. Yeah. I would say that specifically, if you look at Iraq and you look at Afghanistan and you look at the Gulf War, the reason why one of those ended and the other two only ended by force was from the other side winning or forcing the US to a stalemate where they eventually politically had to leave. It's because the Gulf War was one where the mission was expel Iraqi army from Kuwait. And that was a very defined thing.

It was their military forces have to be kicked out and we can't... There was some more of maneuver and movement into Iraq across the border during the war. But like at the end, the end state of the war is at the Iraqi border. There are no more foreign troops and Iraqi forces are back in Iraq or dead because we bombed the shit out of them on the highway of death. Right. Whereas let's go to Iraq and let's install democracy.

Not really a very well-defined mission to begin with. Let's drive around in circles until some randos try to kill us. Yeah, exactly. Or like in Afghanistan, let's get rid of the Taliban. Okay. But now let's make this place democratic and stable so the Taliban can't come back to power and let terrorists back in. Okay. How does that end? Oh, that's the fun part. It doesn't. This is a country that's literally never had this kind of political system and the people you put in place are 100% just like the absolute rogues gallery

of the worst people committing war crimes and human rights abuses in the last 20 years yeah like Dostum yeah this is 20 years ago as of 2001 and so then they're like hmm I wonder if this war is gonna end well it did a different way.

And so, yes, long explanation here, but mission create basically it's like, well, if it just continues to spiral into more stuff because the actual the task becomes impossible. Right. And that's exactly what the CIA starts doing. As the CIA subcontractors are mauling the volunteers, the CIA also figured that this is going to work. Brigade would need an air force They'd been using a shell company called Southern Air Transport using old C-46 Cargo planes to ferry the volunteers to the Training area and back but they decided they needed something

More. They slapped together an air force Made up of 15 B-26 bombers 5 C-47 transports and 7 C-54s Of course this ran into a snag It is hard to train pilots. It is a complicated job to have, and it takes a long time. So despite Eisenhower giving explicit orders that no Americans be involved in any single part of the operation in Cuba, the CIA just hired some American pilots

to fly the Cuban Air Force they'd put together. Most of them are actually from the Alabama Air National Guard. Now, you'll notice that there's no attack aircraft in that manifest you've just put together. They have bombers, but no fighter escort, nothing. No fighter aircraft, which that's going to be important later on because there are certain tasks that, we'll put it this way, bombers are better at

and there's certain tasks that fighter aircraft are better at. Yes. And this will become important. As if that wasn't dumb enough, at least 80 Americans showed up to the training camp to join and since the contractors the CIA contractors at the camp didn't really give a fuck

they were let right in so there's several just American citizens involved yeah so once again not really doing good for your stage managed story that this is solely resistance on the part of dissatisfied Cuban exiles who want to take their country back. And even then, remember, they're planning an invasion of Cuba with less than 2,000 guys.

It's absolutely ridiculous. As if throwing together an Air Force staff by Americans wasn't bad enough, the U.S. also decided to give the Cub cubans a navy kind of it gave them some old world war ii higgins boats they laying around uh but as you figured from this kind of mission creep the cia was moving away from the idea of that small 25 commando team thing and there was now going on to just an outright invasion the reason for this switch at least according to the CIA, was because Cuba was accepting Soviet help rebuilding their military and arming them with mostly modern equipment. And if they waited for that to occur, there's no way that their plan could work because they were sending the worst fucking volunteer force on earth out to go fight people

with World War II hand-me-downs. And it's also very funny to be like, yeah, by this point, modern aviation is not as advanced as it is now, but like it's not as if you can just fly without a declared flight plan to at least the air traffic control of your departure airport. So the idea that you were like, nobody knew where these guys came from. Whose

planes are those? It's like, fucking come on, guys. All these guys are from Florida. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh no, it's not invasion. We're just trafficking cocaine. Yeah. the cia figured the only way to beat them uh in the rapid rearmament process is to just immediately stage a full-scale amphibious invasion of cuba before the military with a grenade minus size element of people who are terrible at their jobs yes and don't forget no armor uh and i mean this is back when it was very important to have armor. They don't have any kind of support.

It's real bad. Now, this also meant they suddenly had to get new boats, or at least more boats. Nothing there is going to be new. So the CIA reached out to a guy named Eduardo Garcia, who ran the Garcia Line Corporation, which is the only Cuban freighter still shipping rice and sugar from Cuba to the US.

Garcia had been working with the CIA extensively for years, smuggling out anti-Casper leadership and pretty much anybody the US wanted them to. The Garcia Line consisted of six old transport freighters. All of them were in real, real rough shape. The CIA figured they looked so haggard that nobody would see them as a military invasion force, and they wanted to pack them full of Cubans and steam them towards the islands. And then from those boats, they would load into Higgins' boats and then come to shore. Garcia would only do it if the CIA promised to protect his ships, wanting to be armed with several machine guns and stuff like that. But the CIA refused, saying, like, who would dare attack a fleet protected by the american navy and air force and so yeah that's what they're telling everyone involved like the the u.s air force and navy and

naval wing whatever they're all going to be there to protect you uh so like don't worry about it so garcia leased the agency his entire fleet um which will be a mistake so by by now it's 1960 and JFK was in office. And he wasn't exactly the biggest fan of this invasion thing. Some of this could be chalked up to the fact it was Eisenhower's idea. And presidents really don't like picking up ideas from their predecessors. But a fair amount of it seems to be that he did not see that it was going to work. He ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to evaluate the plan. And surprise, surprise. They said,

quote, it has a fair amount of success. Ah, cool. All right. Which doesn't really seem to be a vote of confidence, like a fair amount of success. Like,

I mean, I think the thing about it is, is it like they're already kind of hedging their bets. Yes. JFK immediately starts hedging his bets. So like JFK, by this point, the U S in the,

in the early part of the 20th century, the US still had a system where presidents didn't take office until March. By this point, it's in January like it is now. So JFK has been president in, by the time that the invasion is set to take place, he has been president for, I believe, fewer than four months. Like it's very, very early in his presidency. So like the planning for all of this, all of the logistics, all the training, everything that's been set in motion, that's from before. And there's this combination of intense skepticism as well as the desire to sort of present an optimistic face to kind of bluff your way through it.

But I really do feel like what you've just described, it kind of gets to the heart of it in the sense that they're already saying, oh yeah, this might work. it kind of gets to the heart of it in the sense that they're already saying, oh yeah, this might work. Like think about some of the big military debacles in our lifetimes when they walked into it. It was never, oh,

we, we might, we might, we might manage this. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like even internally, they were fully convinced and they're like the joint chiefs like,

eh, like, like when, when, when Eric Shinseki said that that wouldn't be enough troops to invade Iraq, they were like, oh yeah, guess who your replacement is going to be, dickhead?

Like, they effectively fired him. Yeah. And so, like, in this case, like, they're already a little bit more, if not necessarily alarmism, then, like, fatalism about it. Another thing that really pushed JFK to finally pull the trigger on this thing is that the president of Guatemala was like, we're not going to house these fucking guys forever. You need to do something with these guys. So like if they didn't act, the entire framework of this, like, I don't know, backup plan or whatever you want to call it would fall apart. So JFK gave the operation a green light.

He once again demanded that no Americans be involved in the operation and reserve the right to defer his final decision on air support until 24 hours before the mission was set to begin. Again, not a huge vote of confidence. And then it got worse. Great. It tends to do that around here. Yeah. Now, a key part of the plan was for the Cuban, quote-unquote Cuban, volunteer Air Force to bomb Castro's Air Force while it was still on the ground,

throw in some paratroopers, and then land them in a shore. But a key part that could not fail was the bombing. And JFK was edging a bit on this and not the way that JFK normally edged. I'm appalled. Well, I'm appalled too. Sorry, fuck me.

That's right. Confession of lack of workplace professionalism. I was trying to check a thing on Wikipedia about the president of Guatemala because I would have said the wrong name. And then I totally did not expect that from Joe. Fuck. This will not be the only JFK related dick joke in here because I don't get

to make this very often. Yeah. Now, while JFK wouldn't give a date for the invasion to start, the paramilitary sat around their training camp getting madder and madder, which also meant they just got drunk and fought one another constantly because they're still soldiers. JFK finally came up with

a date, April 11th, 1961, but that still wasn't good enough. To give himself more time, he postponed the invasion date from the original date to April 17th. And then, even once it was set, he began to back down and worry, even though he could still just call the whole thing off. He didn't because JFK is not one to pull out.

Fuck. Well, yeah, fair enough. Low-hanging fruit. Instead, he called to ask how many aircraft would be used in the bombing of Castro's airfields. He was told it was going to be 16. And then he told Bissell, the guy in charge of the whole plan, that 16 is too many. He would scale back down to six. No real reason is given for this.

So he's like very obviously trying to walk him back, himself back from the cliff of this, but he doesn't. On Saturday, April 15th, a wing of only six bombers took off from Nicaragua. Two planes were to strike each of three of Cuba's airfields, Campo Libertad on the outskirts of Havana,

Antonio Macio Airport at Santiago de Cuba, and San Antonio de los Baños, which is also nearby. It was supposed to be time that they all hit their targets at the exact same time. Even Castro's forces very little time to react. And actually, this worked. Well, the bombing didn't. But they did hit all their targets on time, which is one of the few times that I point out that something is supposed to happen in regards to time, and it actually happens. They had to fly only 50 feet

above the tree line to avoid radar detection before climbing up and over the mountains and then diving down onto their targets. They're armed with 500 pound bombs, which they dropped on their targets and strafed other targets with machine gun fire, and they were eventually forced back by anti-aircraft fire.

The Castro Air Force was not able to scramble any fighters in their defense, and they were eventually forced back by anti-aircraft fire. The Castro Air Force was not able to scramble any fighters in their defense and the bombers actually only had orders to do two runs on the airfield but they did five. So this sounds like a rousing success. Yeah. Is this where we're going to find out the planes have been moved?

This is the most success this operation was having. It was still a complete failure. Now the pilots all landed back to where they started thinking that they had destroyed the entire Cuban Air Force, but they hadn't. A post-bombing recon flight showed that they had only taken out five planes. This is because, like we point out, the Cuban exile political community was full of fucking spies. And enough information of the coming plan did get back to Castro that he was able to like, I think he knew something was coming. He didn't know what exactly,

but anybody with a brain between their ears and I was like, the first thing they're doing is trying to blow up my fucking air force. So he spaced them very far apart. So bombs and strafing runs didn't have that much impact. A lot of them are decoys and a lot of them were simply broken planes. And he hid the other ones in the forest. Yeah, I was going to say, that was the first thing that was going to cross my mind,

was that these guys can't keep a secret about anything. It's very obvious that if there was no planes on the airfield, then they would realize something was up. But if what they're hitting is actually just training hulks and burned out old planes, then got them. And somewhat ironically ironically they found this out through a post-bombing recon flight and if they would have done a pre-bombing recon flight they would have seen that there were not that many planes and they would have realized like oh element of surprise is fucked we can't do this they did not um now seeing that this failed the ci ready to another attack that was when General Charles Cable rolled

into the office and pointed out that the president had only authorized one air attack and he would have to call him personally and ask for to authorize another one Cable had been put in charge of the CIA temporarily while the director Alan Dulles was away doing something else despite the fact this is Alan Dulles

his baby he's like oh I gotta go see a guy about a horse you You handle this. So being a random replacement, he was not entirely sure of the mission plan or what he could do. He wasn't sure what the CIA was allowed to do in this situation. The CIA

Air Operations Officer responded, quote, No, sir. There are no restrictions on the number of strikes. The authorization from the President was to knock out the Cuban Air Force. Cable, still unsure, said no more strikes are to go on without further authorization from the president himself, and he would try to call him. JFK did not answer. Still, at this point, JFK could still cancel the invasion. The invasion had not happened yet. The airstrikes had failed. The guy in charge wasn't actually sure of the plan, and now everything was pretty much ruined.

So, of course, he told the invasion to go ahead, while simultaneously canceling any other airstrikes from going further to support the invasion. When the American in charge of the Volunteer Air Force heard this, he punched his desk and yelled, quote, well, there goes the whole fucking war.

Sigh. Yeah, something about that. And he was right. As soon the cuban paramilitaries uh were on their boats they were learning how fucked they were uh a diversion force of about 168 men was supposed to land in the mountains and try to pull as many cuban forces away from the main landings they could as they were set to begin however once their boats got to where they were supposed to go they just didn't get out they refused sensing that was wrong, and they didn't like the way things were going, and they turned their boat around and went back towards the ship, which is the smartest thing that's going to happen during this entire invasion.

Yeah, I mean, definitely don't want to be like a do-or-die person in this invasion, let's be real. The CIA had chosen the Bay of Pigs as a landing spot for their main force. It was far away from Havana, and it was thought that no rapid modern communication systems or roads had been built between the two. So it'd be a slow reaction to get there. And for a bonus, they thought it was sparsely populated. So like nobody be rushing out to mess with them once they landed. All of this was dead wrong. Castro had built several roads into the area and a communications network for local defense had been operating for months.

Once again, they would have known this if they'd done a recon flight. Then, of course, the element of surprise was ruined. A team of frogmen, which were kind of like sea demolition guys, went ashore to mark the landing zone the night before it was set to begin. The boat they were riding in got stuck on some reefs they didn't know about because they didn't consult a tidal map. And then a local militia patrol found them as they struggled to get their boat unstuck. and then a local militia patrol found them as they struggled

to get their boat unstuck. This led to a firefight and the frogmen radioing back to the ships who thought they had hours to prepare for an invasion like you need to fucking invade now

before everything goes fully tits up. So they did. Men started getting shoved onto Higgins boats and being like just go that way. And like

one of the more important things that the frogmen were doing was marking the landings. So they don't have their landing point of deparkation marked yeah nothing is marked so there's like floating out in the middle of the night in the general direction of the bay of pigs so you

understand about the bay of pigs and the topography of that area is that there are beaches but there's also like some some straight up like like mangrove swamps like stuff where the the coastline hits the land and it's just swamp for a while which is not really a place you want to disembark, especially if you've got any kind of equipment, especially if you've got vehicles. Oh, they didn't have fuck all for vehicles. Yeah.

For some reason I had the impression that they had, yeah, they had like, like stuff and like, they literally like even the, the small amounts of like wheeled vehicle assets they had, like wound up getting fucking stuck in shit. They got stuck.

Yeah. They got stuck. They got blown up in the Higgins boat. Some of them just sank. Uh, like a good example is like, because nothing was marked, uh,

another landing craft ran right into the same reef that the frogman had run into. Some of them just sank. A good example is because nothing was marked, another landing craft ran right into the same reef that the frogman had run into and their boat also sank. Other people ran ashore and got stuck up to their knees in a swamp. The jeeps just bogged down. Some guys had to swim ashore.

There's no command and control going on at all. I remember radios not working, radios not being on the right frequencies. The equipment was actually broken when they got there. It hadn't been agreed upon. It hadn't been tested. They didn't have a command frequency. Nope.

They couldn't talk to any of the aviation assets that they did have. I don't think that the guys, they could talk to the Higgins boats. I don't think they could talk to the actual carrier boats. Yeah, so they could talk to the Higgins boats, but nobody could talk to the actual carrier boats yeah they could so they could talk to the higgins boats but nobody could talk to the the the converted freighters yeah uh like there was like a good example of how dumb this whole thing was the cia had actually outfitted them with a

completely different kind of radio and it was in uh like they couldn't cross talk with whatever the fleet had so like for instance one of the boats out, one of the freighters, not military, the US Navy, because they're not involved at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had their ammunition and first aid supplies. They couldn't call that boat and be like, you need to send more ammunition to the shore.

There was no way. Their logistic system wasn't broken. It literally didn't exist. The guys with the ammo were like, damn, I thought they would need some ammo by now I guess it must be going really fucking good they didn't called for it like not a single guy's been having a thing on the radio yeah yes they're being really good about radio silence

fucking op sex training hell yeah great great day if you're an RT on one of those like shitty converted fishing trawlers like dude when I was calling for anything when I went when I went to Pathfinder school I know we don't have a ton of time to do digressions when i went to pathfinder school my graded patrol on um the ftx which is nowhere like graded patrols in ranger school but there is still a job you have to do was to be uh the um the rto on a gmrs drop which ground mark reference system drop the great thing

about it is that you don't have to have radio comms so i was the rto which meant i showed up i plotted out my control circle and coordinates where they have radio comms so i was the rto which meant i showed up i plotted out my control circle and coordinates where they were on the maps we could show to the instructor and then no one talked to me on the radio because there was no radio because for gmrs you literally mark the ground and they know when to drop from the fucking ground markings and i was like sick as hell fucking squared away love it pass my patrol nice like this guy the rto with the ammo supply and fucking the bay of pigs invasion he passed his patrol too sucks about the rest of the guys but he was good hold on to that shit shit i just wanted one story of fucking the joes getting hooked up but that may not happen well as thousands of men and material

being offloaded onto the two beaches the cuban military started to respond it was like 1 a.m at this point is when like someone woke cast Castro up like someone's fucking invading us. They suck at their jobs, but they're still invading. Yeah, they made it to the beach at least. There's two beaches, red and blue. And around 6am the surviving Cuban Air Force showed up and began bombing all of the

Garcia Line ships. And despite the fact that they were told that they'd be protected by the Navy, and the Navy was 15 miles, like they could, according to the US orders to their forces they could not go within 15 miles of the shore of the combat zone which is Cuba but like so they could be fucking seen just like sitting off in the distance watching everybody get murked and the thing I wanted to point out from earlier remember when I said that their manifest had c46 and c454 combat uh cargo aircraft and then they had uh i can't remember the kind of

bob is b26 bombers something like that yeah yeah they didn't have any fighter aircraft we pointed that out now do you know what's great against bombers that are bombing your beaches fighter aircraft because bombers are slow and fat and huge big fucking targets and fighter aircraft can both obviously strafe ground forces but can really fuck up bombers yeah they didn't have any but they didn't have any fighters so the bombers basically were unimpeded oh yeah they could just circle around them just literally just like look just taking shits on every position they found because there was no portable anti-air defense systems these guys had no artillery of any kind the only thing they had was an 80 millimeter mortar yeah and about three of them and like man pads uh fucking anti-air stuff like was pretty primitive in this era i

don't know really how much of it existed but they had none of the stuff that would have existed at that time they didn't have that they didn't have it i mean they didn't even have like uh toad artillery which i don't know how you're supposed to invade and take over cuba with like no artillery basically they were like yeah they had like man portable or team portable mortars which like okay great you can fuck shit up with that but like that's not a replacement for artillery this is an invasion it's someone who plays like call of duty yeah this was literally no tanks nothing just a bunch of guys hopping up and down on the beaches remember when we talked about how basically when it comes to being like certifiably anti-fascist very correction certifiably anti-communist you just let me take that again remember when we said earlier that being certifiably

anti-communist tends to just mean fascist? There's this tendency amongst fascists to be unable to perceive or estimate their enemies because they assume they're just huge weak pussies who are also doing CRT on everyone's kids simultaneously. And the thing that you'll find in this is that they really went into it assuming that the minute

the first bullets were fired, every single person with a gun in Cuba was like, yeah, we've been waiting for an opportunity to depose this country, depose this government. And when that didn't happen, they had no plan B. Yeah. And not to mention

like the local defense forces did the majority of the fighting. They were motivated. Yeah. They were actually motivated. They were like, hey guys.

They assumed that they would turn, they're like, oh, the liberators are here and all they did is like, shoot that fucking guy. Yeah, yeah,

exactly. It's like, Antonio, fucking get your iron sights up and start plugging these assholes they clearly can't move look that one's from alabama shit i know uh like the bombing starts on the beaches uh and again the the navy is not being involved the air force uh naval air wing is not being involved. And they had strict orders to literally not do anything unless the Cubans shot at them, which, of course, Castro kind of assumed. So they were under the Cuban Air Force

under strict orders to not attack the American ships, despite the fact they easily could have. Of course, yeah. But in a way, here's the Cuban military, even with some element of surprise being attacked, but they have a better perception of their own battle space than these guys who have all of the assets that have been handed to them by... At least, we're not calling the CIA competent here, but they are well-funded. That is one thing they always have is funding.

Now, the bombing runs by the Cuban exile forces were called off. But you know what wasn't? Paratrooper drops so they began to fly in their fat slow aircraft towards their objective and they were met by a Cuban fighter aircraft and virtually all of them were shot down

this is about the time that the when they're getting shot at by Cuban fighters is the first time that those cargo pilots cargo plane pilots discovered that the US actually was not going to give them air cover. Like, oh, the U.S. jets will be coming any time now. Oh, God. Don't worry, guys.

Slow down to fucking drop speed. All right. 130 knots. Want to make it an easy drop. Easy opening shot for these guys. Just fucking getting obliterated. easy opening shock where these guys are just fucking getting obliterated i don't know if your listeners know this people who aren't military but like planes go fast but planes when you're dropping paratroopers have to slow down a lot because at a certain point like it's

too dangerous to go fast like uh 145 knots in a c5 is about the slowest you can go without it stalling and that's fucking painful like 130 is pretty painful like helicopters that go between 90 and 110 that's very comfortable but like most for a combat drop it's got to be about like yeah 130 140 and like that is fast for you when your parachute is opening that is slow as fuck for a plane so like essentially a fighter at interceptor exactly exactly buzzed by a fucking mig yeah exactly and you've got maybe got like a ball gunner with like you know like a really old thing, but you have your angle of being able to engage is really limited. And they can literally do barrel rolls around you and just destroy you. You're fucked. So fucked, it's not even funny. the u.s ships for like air cover because like of course the u.s navy gets air cover uh we're like constantly asking uh to like go in and like at least take out the fighters and of course there's like no you can't do anything like the cubans were like the cuban fighters are getting really

close and like flipping shitties in front of them yeah exactly just imagine i'm just imagining fucking angry barrel rolls from american fucking fighter pilots doing air cover. You're like, you pieces of shit, you fucking assholes. But yeah, like this whole sort of limited engagement thing. And then it's like, yeah, you can't do anything. You just have really, really good fucking seats to watch these guys get massacred. Yeah, like Castro fully understood the power dynamic here. So like he wasn't going to let anybody attack.

I know some paratrooper drops actually did go well, but only in very small groups. And they landed and then quickly found themselves surrounded by literally tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers. And one of the drops was like 150 guys. They're like, oh, fuck this. They just surrendered. So paratrooper lore about little groups of paratroopers or LGOPs. Like, yes, we go around, fuck some things up, et cetera. But that's typically when part of a larger airborne operation is one company of paratroopers against, you know,

a fucking entire division. Like, there isn't that much you can do. You can do one or two things. You'll be all right. After that, you're fucked. Like, you're just simply going to be fucked. It was one of my favorite stories from our series on the first Chechen Wars.

They, like, dropped in the vey de vey to, like, and they, like, landed, like, in the middle of a frozen forest, immediately surrounded by, like, a division-size element of Chechens and surrendered to, like in the middle of a frozen forest immediately surrounded by like a division size element of chechens and surrendered to like now we're good like no i i don't feel like yeah i don't like discovering how one can be filleted in different directions by chechen butchers like yeah seeing you guys making fucking donor kebabs good as hell at it i don't want to be the rotating meat you're gonna motherfucker i'm gonna turn you into a meat tornado uh and so at this point uh it's been mostly local defense forces like the local militias that have been fighting but now cuban regulars are showing up like all of them tens

of thousands of remember there's only like less than 2 000 of these guys on the beach and well less now because a lot of this is a remote part of cuba but like they've now had enough time to mobilize yeah they've had and they have seven hours yeah they have been training for this shit and more most importantly like this i'm not saying their plane ever would have worked but like a key part is like ah there's no roads that go out this way so it's gonna take the cubans forever to bus out reinforcements but like there was a highway fucking system through there like they could easily just run soviet trucks up and down yeah and like they had also been building roads they've been moving roads. They've been building roads. They had actually been doing shit with all this time they'd been given,

whereas these guys had just been like, hmm, let's play a game called Who Won't Remember Being Cornholed After Drinking an Entire Bottle of Rum. Cool. Let's play a game called, this training exercise is called being punched by Zvi, the Bulgarian. Goddammit. State of Israel just been established.

Zvi hadn't made it there yet to be your drill sergeant in the IDF who kicks you in the dick and calls you a leftist. So instead he was training guys to go fight the Bay of Pigs. Yeah. At this point, Cuban bombers were just circling over the red and blue beaches and bombing the hell out of it. The Cuban ground attack pretty much began to overpower the paramilitaries on the ground as they should have the number game wasn't even close to being like even like 1500 men hit the beach and now the cuban military had mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops again of course they are full fucking alert it's like imagine if someone invaded the u.s like all of fucking northcom would be would be notified yeah of course like all of u.s forces command

would at least get some kind of notification order like everyone within fucking the region where they need to react would react like yeah you'd everyone would be mustered on the west coast it would be insane or the east coast wherever it was it would be insane and now imagine it happening in a place as small as cuba yes very quick they've been training for the fact that an attack is actually a real threat, whereas in the US it's sort of like, do you really think that people are going to pull up on either side of the ocean and fucking do a seaborne invasion? Man, if an invasion happened in the US, it's really funny because you see forces clogging

up the highway going to respond. In reality, what would happen is we'd all die standing in a line outside the arms room trying to get our weapon. It's like, wait, every single one of these has been swapped out with an airsoft? Fuck. We don't even have ammo. I'm just going to surrender.

Fuck this. All right. Yep. I'll be, I don't even think, I'll be in fucking space alien force. Who would invade the US? I mean, the aliens could probably run America better than we ever have.

Yeah, at this point. They might be looking at the Constitution like, yeah, we're changing that. That sucks. Hopefully it's the tower or something. Now, at this point. They might be looking at the Constitution like, yeah, we're changing that. That sucks. Hopefully, it's the tower or something. Now, the only indirect fire that the paramilitaries had, like we said, was those 80-millimeter motors. They had three of them. One melted because they were firing it so rapidly.

The other one got so hot, it cooked off in a guy's face, killing him. And then the other one was lost in the ocean because it was on one of the boats that sank. killing him. And then the other one was lost in the ocean because it was on one of the boats that sank. Now, Roman was on the radio calling back to the Garcia line ships trying to get support and it really wasn't working. He kept asking the CIA

like, hey, when's the American forces showing up, guys? And they're like, just keep holding on. We're coming. We're coming. And they knew they weren't. Maybe he'll just die and he'll think there's still a little hope left in him rather than like sorry dude you're fucked bye i love doing make a wish foundation on my own invasion force uh now the last organized defense on blue beach which was like at this point it's like a handful of dudes uh was was 20 feet

away from the ocean itself so these guys are prone, rolling around in the sand, getting high tide splashed on them. No defensive posture, anything. Just trapped on an open beach. Now, at this point, JFK finally authorized one last airstrike, unless you're dropping a fucking, I don't know, like Fat Man on the beach. Are you dropping the neutron bomb? Like, yeah Fat Man on the beach. Are you dropping the neutron bomb? Yeah, come on.

But the key was the airstrike had happened before the sun came up. This has only been a couple hours at this point. Small problem. The bombers showed up at the wrong time in broad daylight and were immediately shot down by Cuban anti-aircraft fire.

Sorry. Imagine being on the beach like when the last like 10 guys like try to dig a foxhole in the middle of the ocean to stop getting shot at like you you see like finally the air supports here just getting shot down at this point roman's, Roman's last radio calls, quote, I'm destroying all of my equipment and communications. I have nothing left to fight with. I'm taking to the woods. I can't wait for you. And then he ordered what remained of his forces. Now, most of these guys do not die. I'm going to say that.

The vast majority of the exiles immediately realized how fucked they were and surrendered as soon as the regulars showed up. So, like, at this point, the vast majority of the losses that Roman has suffered is dudes running as fast as they could towards Cuban soldiers to surrender.

And Roman ordered what was left of his organized force that still wanted to fight into smaller groups and just to run. And they ran directly into a swamp, got stuck, got lost for two weeks, and finally were forced to surrender because they were dying

of thirst. And the reason why they were dying of thirst is they were drinking swamp water. That only works if you're Shrek, guys. You can't do that. Now, 1,180 men from the brigade surrendered and 118 were killed in action. There are some reports that up to 2,000 members of the Cuban military, both militia and soldiers, were killed.

But that number seems to be really, really, really inflated and it's not sourced very well. One source that does seem to be probably true is 160 regulars of the Cuban military died. I have a really hard time believing that these fucking idiots killed 2000 members of the Cubans, local, uh, defense forces. Yeah.

That definitely feels like some Vietnam era fucking body count, right? Inflated numbers. I feel like that was some stuff that, well, that the U S I mean the exiles, because of course the U S wouldn't admit that they had anything to do with this for a long time.

Um, said like, Oh, they did really well. They killed 2000 soldiers. I mean, and only a hundred of them died. And then like the time, said, like, oh, they did really well. They killed 2,000 soldiers. I mean, and only 100 of them died. And then the Cubans also were like, yeah, 2,000 of our heroes died defending the motherland. It's propaganda that works both ways.

Yeah. I mean, I think about it too, the degree to the sort of kayfabe unreality that the US has to maintain in this. It's such an obvious joke. It lasts like 10 minutes. Everybody knows immediately.S. has to maintain in this. It's such an obvious joke. It lasts like 10 minutes. Everybody knows immediately. Yeah. Now, most of the brigade's POWs stayed in prison for the next 18 months or so before they were ransomed back to

the U.S. for $28 million. Actually, Castro had a first offer of, give me some tractors and I'll give you your POWs back. And that offer was rejected, which I have to say. Imagine your commanders deciding that giving him some tractors in exchange for your life was considered not an equal trade. This motherfucker wants some John Deere's.

You are a thresher at best, you piece of shit. I'll give you a backhoe, bitch. Not everybody was ransomed. Some stayed in prison well into the 80s. Wow. Yeah. I didn't realize they were that long. Yeah, like mid to late 80s.

Like one of the guys uh duke uh the second guy in command he was sentenced like 30 years in prison wow which is shocking for taking part in invasion you kind of assume that he's going to be murdered yeah yeah now obviously this entire thing imploded uh and uh jfk tried to do the whole it wasn't us there's only cubans fighting for their freedom thing but absolutely nobody believed him. Eisenhower met with JFK the day after the whole thing unfurled and asked him, why the fuck would he authorize an invasion with no air cover? And oh, by the way, everybody knows it was us. Yes.

This plan could only work if it succeeds. There's no plausible deniability here. Alan Dulles, who owns a pretty big portion of the blame, testified that, because somebody asked him, why would you go ahead with this? He's like, well, I assumed if JFK was to pull the trigger on the invasion,

he would have no choice but to go all in because it's really dumb to do that and then claim we had nothing to do with it. But it's like the whole thing was to say,

all right, we're not going to get the regular US forces involved unless the mission from the get-go, which it sounds like Dulles is saying is the mission from the get-go, is force whoever agrees to this to then commit conventional forces to an invasion of Cuba.

It would have worked for sure. The Soviet Union wasn't there like they would be in a year during the missile crisis. But that means Dulles is the only man to find something JFK wouldn't go balls deep in. That's the last one, I promise. Well, I'm appalled, too.

I'm just laughing because that would have been Vietnam-level casualties pretty quickly. Oh, God, yeah. The disaster. I mean, the U.S. would probably have won militarily, but the insurgency would have been as bad as anything they experienced in Vietnam. Yep. Hey, there would have been no Vietnam War, though. Yeah, well, yeah. It would have just been Vietnam a whole lot closer. I insurgency would have been as bad as anything they experienced in vietnam and yep hey there would have been no vietnam war though yeah well it would have just been all vietnam a whole lot closer i wonder if there would have been any green berets or they've been

like something worse there'd be like there'd be like pink berets but they're just only trained to do war crimes like it's i know it'd be easier to spot yeah that is true now pretty much everybody involved in the operation was fired of course not jfk though i guess he'd be fired in a different way a short time later. I thought you said it was the last. I guess it was the last. It had nothing to do with the dick. The last of the sex joke. All right, all right, all right, all right.

A little over a year later, the Cuban Missile Crisis would begin, and such a failure against the quote-unquote spread of communism would eventually lead JFK to start committing forces to a little country called Vietnam. So yeah, good job all around, CIA. Well done. And JFK, too, he could have stopped yeah, good job all around, CIA. Well done. And JFK too, he could have stopped this at any point. Yeah, exactly. It was a stupid plan and anybody could have seen this,

but the fixation on anti-communist fervor and the idea that this would be a political win created a really stupid situation that killed a bunch of people and also embarrassed the US a lot and made everybody look like clowns. Yeah. In closing, I do have a fun fact with you.

Pepe Roman later killed himself. Okay, that's not the fun fact. I just had to put that out there. All right. Well, I'll put one other fun fact before we go, which is lots of good history books about this, and Joe can definitely cite them in the bibliography he's going to put up there. But I would also recommend if you're interested, it's not. I would say, if you're curious, there's a book called Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer.

It's really long. It's his longest novel. It's like 1,300 pages. But it's sort of like a novel about a guy kind of narrating the history of the CIA. And they talk a lot about this. And he did a ton of research. I reckon that it's close-ish accurate. And like, holy fucking shit, will you get some laughs at how bad everything was as far

as the Miami organizations go. Yeah, they're comically bad. It's almost like a whole episode worth of how stupid they were. It was very, very, very funny. So if you're interested in that, I'm just saying it's called Harlot's Ghost, came out in 91. I actually like it. It's probably one of Mailer's better books. So recommend. There's a very good book on the history of the CIA, which I did not use for this episode. It's called Legacy of Ashes. I believe it's- Yeah, yeah, I've read it. It is fucking incredible. It's very funny.

I mean, there's an extent to which the guy's kind of like, damn, if only we had a good CIA, but instead we have a bad CIA. There's part of me that's like, have you ever looked at these organizations? Did you not read your own research? Yeah, exactly. But if you ignore his weird wistfulness, it's like because it is a

very clear history of the CIA. It's a constant horribleness yeah yeah yeah uh wild bill donovan and the oss and then everything on like laos yeah yeah yeah just the crazy shit and in berlin too just like the psychotic stuff um the cia running the entire uh laos air air campaign with like two guys in the like fucking jeep and a radio in his hand yeah like it it's wild insane stuff but yeah, if you want to learn about all the other fuck-ups, it's a good book.

And yeah, man. I do have one fun fact. Ricardo Montero Duke, he was one of the guys that was released quite late from prison, became a real estate agent in 2007

in the New Jersey area. So, if you bought a house sometime after, sometime before. I was going to say, if you bought a house that went underwater

in the subprime crisis, it was probably sold to you if you were in New Jersey by a guy who fucking went to prison because he was in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yeah. He was in the Bay of Pigs invasion. There's a very good chance if you bought a house before the year of 2007 in the greater Newark area, you bought a house from a Cuban war criminal. That's kind of fun. Hey, man.

You know what? In the grand scheme of things, that's every VA loan. Okay. We do have one last thing on the show. It's called questions from Legion or you can ask us a question, donate to the show, ask me on a Patreon. Um,

and this one, uh, I have them as short in a bit because we've been at this a while. Uh, but he, so he calls us something that, uh, by something I'm familiar with.

Another word. We, we probably are aware of the term self licking ice cream cone. Yeah. He calls it a self sucking dick self-licking ice cream cone. Yeah. He calls it a self-sucking dick, which I think I like better. But he's like, what is it a situation that you've ever seen that could be called a self-sucking dick or self-licking ice cream? Self-sucking dick, self-sucking ice cream, self-licking ice cream cone. Gotta suck that cone.

I absolutely have one. I know you do. You're an officer. You have to have like 20 of them sitting in the back of your head. I mean, the one that's probably the biggest one for me is Bat Hyde. Do you remember Bat Hyde in Afghanistan? The biometric system. So Bat Hyde was a system that we were... The idea was that you would be able to use it to take people's biometrics in a very clunky kind of like early 2000s digital camera way for both face and for fingerprints. irises irises yeah yeah yeah

and you know the idea was that you would run it but like it was really clunky it was really bad it was administered by like civilians who had to basically download it off the camera and upload it to a server our bad guy was like fucking addicted to alcohol and pills and like duplicate entries all sorts of problems but um the bad high with the idea behind it was that it was supposed to be okay well you do this when you're on targets when you have suspects or like they do it for like interviewing people to do jobs like so that like like contractor jobs to make sure like we're not hiring people who like known to be fucking terrorists and shit but then it just became a thing that's like no you're the platoon's tasks is go out on a fucking patrol and bat hide a whole village or bat hide

at least 100 people i remember that doing that con like set up a traffic control point and bat hide every man that comes through. And it's like this stupid piece of technology that's supposed to make your life easier because it's just supposed to help with forensic identification, but we know doesn't work, then becomes the thing that's driving missions.

And you're like, this camera sucks. I've literally had it pop hot on a match and it tells me that this person I'm interviewing is dead. It's a dead body from a fucking sensitive site exploitation. I also had it happen one time where they fucking bat-hided a dude i mean you didn't see this personally but it happened to a friend of mine where like they bat-hided a dude and it came up and was like yep he was a child in 2014 it's like an old man yeah and it's like it no it fucking sucked it was a piece of garbage but like you'd get like one thumbprint like tier

one alert it's like this guy is not a sound bin Laden like calm down and like also like bat hiding corpses is really hard because the system had no manual override so like for example if it couldn't recognize something as an eye or a face you like I literally knew a dude who had to basically because he had a really not high ick factor he could handle gross

shit had to reach in around a guy's shoulders and hold his head back together so they could get the bat high to take the to recognize that the photo was a fucking profile of a person because it wouldn't recognize the you know when someone's been shot with a fucking 762 round photo right and and so like that system was such a piece of shit but it like was the thing driving missions so that to me like that was my last tour was fully like 25% of missions were built around that fucking camera basically sony mavica with a fucking fingerprint

reader and it sucked a fingerprint a fingerprint machine that works less than like your local county jail from like bumfuck nowhere yes like the gym down the street here that i fucking have a membership at like that uses a fingerprint scanner works way better than that thing. That's incredible. So what do you have? Oh, okay. So when I was stationed at Fort Knox, I was on a tank, right? And tanks are notoriously maintenance hogs.

I mean, the US logistic system is very, very good. That's one thing you can say about our military is that you generally always get what you need when you need it. However, at Fort Knox, we did not have tank mechanics. We had civilian contractor tank mechanics that only worked until five. And so if your tank was broken, obviously unit readiness goes down. You can't go out to the field. You can't go to gunnery and your tanks don't get fixed

because these motherfuckers are working a tight eight every day with an hour and a half long lunch. And so you get yelled at because your tank isn't operational the mechanics aren't working because they're fucking fucked off making and they're making ungodly amounts of money yeah so much god and they fucking know it like like hey like and normally in other units like if you work on something like over a soldier's normal level of maintenance, like level 10 maintenance, level 20, nobody really cares, especially in an armor unit, because everybody knows how to work in everything other than electrical systems, stuff like that. But if you were like, fuck, I need to get this tank ready so I don't get yelled at, and it's level 20 maintenance, which is one step above what a normal soldier is supposed to do. But if they find out about it, and they will, the civilians, they'll report you to your commander

and you'll get in trouble. So they create this feedback loop of constant unreadiness and broken tanks, all supported by a whole bunch of fat guys making like $200,000 a year. So the sickest thing in the world would be to be like, be a heavy vehicle mechanic in the army and then immediately move to Fort Knox as a civilian

after four years enlistment and just be that guy. Oh, they had to be living their fucking dream lives. There were guys like that in Afghanistan who were civilians who were the only people that were certified to do TIG welds on MRAPs. Yeah. And so they were making like $300,000 a year. Yeah, it was insane. But at least there... It makes sense.

It's a precision thing that has to be done. Yeah. I had my MRAP had to be stitched together a couple of times, but they moved pretty fast. I never had any... My windshield got busted out constantly from small arms fire and rocks and shit. Whether that be kicked up from the road or some kid with a slingshot or a hell of a fucking arm.

They love fucking slingshots, if you understand. Man, one time some kid just annihilated my driver's side window on my MRAP that I was a TC of. Those are bulletproof windows. They shatter, but like... It just fucking totally spider-cracked to the point you couldn't see through it.

And my gunner's like, he just did that with his fucking arm. I was like, we need to call the fucking Major League Baseball League. That kid's got a future. He threw a goddamn heater through a ballistic window. That's so funny.

Jesus Christ. That is a podcast episode. Nate, you can use this space to plug all of the other 20 things that you do. Yeah, not that many, but thank you once again for listening to this. I produce this show. I also am the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Die, and I

produce Kill James Bond and Trash Future. So if any of those podcasts ring a bell, check them out, and thank you for listening. Everybody, thank you so much for listening to the show. If you like what we do here, consider supporting us uh even a dollar gets a lot of stuff like access to our discord you'd get episodes like this before everybody else you get access to bonus episodes and you know you help keep the show running or don't give us money it's your money do whatever you want leave us a review that is free and it helps us uh i don't entirely

sure know how the algorithm works but I know it works in mysterious ways this is the only show that I have because this is enough but consider buying my books my series The Forlorn Hope is complete and out now and you can get it for free if you have Amazon or Kindle

Unlimited or whatever it's called or you can just buy it on paperback wherever normal books are sold and you don't have to buy it from Amazon. You can stop asking me that. And until next time, don't invade Cuba, I guess. Probably a bad idea. Bye.