Book Review: 'Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story'

Map Credit: Wikipedia

In 1979, Simon and Schuster published Peter Wyden’s Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, a hard-hitting and critical examination of one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s biggest blunders – the failed attempt to topple Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s regime with an invasion force of 1,500 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles that landed at Playa Giron, a beach on the Bay of Pigs, located on the southern coast of Cuba. 

(C) 1980 Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster.

Planned during the last year of the Eisenhower Administration but never officially approved by the lame-duck President Eisenhower, Operation Zapata was not intended to defeat Castro’s forces at Playa Giron with such a small force. Instead, the Brigada de Asalto 2506 (Assault Brigade 2506) was originally assigned to land at Trinidad, 170 miles to the southeast of Havana.

There, the five small battalions would seize the port and airfield, carve out a beachhead, and once a perimeter was secured, a government-in-exile – recruited by the CIA’s Howard Hunt – would be flown in to declare itself as the legal leadership of the Republic of Cuba. Once this was accomplished, per CIA Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) Richard M. Bissell Jr.’s concept, this council of Cuban politicians from across a wide spectrum of exile groups would presumably ask the U.S. to send American military forces, including U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and a Marine amphibious force, to liberate the small island nation from the Castro regime, which was looking less democratic and more Communist with each passing month. 

But as Wyden explains in Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, President Eisenhower never officially signed off on Operation Zapata, even though he had authorized CIA Director Allen Dulles and DDP Bissell to plan it. Ike was reluctant to go beyond that, partly because he knew the invasion would not take place until a new President – hopefully Richard Nixon, his Vice President – was in the Oval Office, and partly because most of Latin America still resented the U.S. for the CIA’s successful efforts to topple Guatemala’s democratically-elected President, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954. (Arbenz was not a Communist dictator, but his efforts to pass a land reform law that would transfer huge tracts of land owned by Guatemala’s wealthy ruling class and American multinational firms enraged the influential United Fruit Company, which labeled Arbenz as a Communist “stooge,” thus making him a target for Allen and the CIA.)

Eisenhower, whose reputation as a President who had managed to avoid large scale military interventions and wars overseas was on the line, was happy to hand over the thorny issue of Cuba and Operation Zapata to his successor – the young and untested former junior Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who defeated Nixon by excoriating Ike’s allegedly impotent foreign and defense policies during the iciest years of the Cold War.

In Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, Wyden was the first author to explain how and why Operation Zapata became, in the words of a later chronicler of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a “brilliant disaster.”

For the first time, eyewitnesses tell the complete inside story of the CIA’s mismanaged and private war to overthrow Fidel Castro. Based on painstaking research and personal interviews with combatants on both sides – including Fidel Castro and Richard Bissell, former CIA Deputy Director – Bay of Pigs uncovers previously secret information and re-creates the events that led up to the confrontation.
Revealed here for the first time: 

·         How United States destroyers, with their hull numbers painted out, led the Cuban invasion. On the last day of the battle, two of them were shelled 2,000 yards off Cuban shores – an event that almost triggered World War III.

·         How CIA officers – after discarding all personal identification and effects – flew combat missions over Cuba in planes marked with faked insignias of Castro’s forces.

·         How the CIA lied to President Kennedy, claiming that the invasion was worth the gamble, when logistics experts of the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered victory “marginal without resistance, but impossible with it.” – Publisher’s back cover blurb, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story

My Take

As a long-time resident of South Florida, I lived under the shadow of Operation Zapata’s failure almost all my life. In Miami’s Cuban-American community, especially among members of el exilio antiguo, there is still a strong resentment toward the late President Kennedy over what many Cubans perceive to be a betrayal of the worst kind. This is one of the reasons why many exiliados and their now-adult children and grandchildren tend to vote Republican, even though the invasion took place over 50 years ago.

As most accounts of the Bay of the Pigs invasion – including Wyden’s book and the later The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by Jim Rasenberger – point out, it was Kennedy – eager to show his credentials as a Cold Warrior – who approved Operation Zapata at the start of his Administration.

In addition, it was Kennedy who, following the advice of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other Cabinet members, ordered DDP Bissell to change the landing site from Trinidad to Playa Giron. JFK was – rightly, in my opinion – keen on making sure that Operation Zapata had a lower profile and didn’t look like a small-scale version of the D-Day landings in Normandy, which were still in relatively recent memory. As Wyden and other chroniclers of Operation Zapata point out, it was ridiculous to assume that a major amphibious landing on Cuba, complete with air and naval support, would be seen by a leery Latin America and the rest of the world, as not being an American endeavor.

As Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story explains so clearly, Kennedy was caught between two conflicting priorities; he was attracted to the CIA’s notion that the operation would get rid of Castro and his left-leaning comrades, but he also wanted to avoid whataboutism criticism from the Soviet Union. In other words, the Russians would reply to criticism about their own brand of repressive intervention in Eastern Europe and elsewhere with the classic rejoinder “Really? You are lecturing us about how we dealt with the Hungarian revolt of 1956? Well, what about your invasion of small, defenseless Cuba?” 

 As Commander-in-Chief of America’s armed forces and the individual who asked the CIA to alter the already flawed Operation Zapata, Kennedy bears – and accepted – the ultimate responsibility for the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs. JFK was ambitious, overly zealous in his desire to show the world that he meant to confront Communism no matter where it reared its ugly head in the world, and that he was tougher than his 1960 Presidential election rival, Richard Nixon, would have been.

And to his credit, Kennedy was his own harshest critic. After the failure of Operation Zapata, he turned to his aides and asked, “How could I have been so stupid?”

Yet, Kennedy was not the only American official who deserves to be chastised for the disaster at the Bay of Pigs. Dick Bissell, the gifted Ivy Leaguer who years earlier had masterminded the CIA’s U-2 spy plane program, conceived, supervised, and ultimately sold Operation Zapata to a President that Bissell knew would be a relatively easy “customer.”

As Wyden observes in Bay of Pigs, Bissell was so sure that the invasion plan was going to work that he never saw the inherent flaws in it. Even when the President ordered the CIA to scale the landings down and change the target area from Trinidad – which was located near a mountain range where the invaders could hide if the landings failed – to the Bay of Pigs, Bissell remained confident that his plan would work in spite of criticisms from the experts at the Pentagon.

Though many books have been written about the Bay of Pigs disaster and its far-reaching consequences – including the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s decision to send more advisers to South Vietnam – since 1979, Wyden’s book is still relevant and informative.

The author, who died in 1998 at the age of 74, was an experienced reporter who contributed many articles to publications such as Newsweek magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He researched the Bay of Pigs invasion for many years and interviewed many of the participants, including veterans of the Brigada de Asalto 2506 (among them, Jose Basulto, who would later make headlines as the leader of Brothers to the Rescue), Grayston Lynch, a CIA officer who would later write his own scathing account of the operation, Dick Bissell, and even Fidel Castro. The Cuban dictator spoke to Wyden for two hours and even drew two maps of his forces’ moves during the battle for Playa Giron.

As Lyman Kirkpatrick, the CIA’s inspector general who wrote the official report on Operation Zapata, wrote in his review for the back cover, Wyden’s Bay of Pigs is “definitive and invaluable…Leaves no doubt as to what happened and why.”