94. JFK vs the CIA: The Mafia Plot (Ep 5)

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From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy, died at 1 p.m.

Central Standard Time.

Cuba itself is really quickly going to become the Kennedy administration's top priority.

The next four years are going to be difficult and challenging years for us all.

At the end of the day, the U.S.

is facing off against this tiny island, Cuba.

How could you lose?

Castro Castro will tell the General Assembly the United States is seeking to overthrow him.

Kennedy really looks to the CIA to get the business of the Cold War done.

Castro and his fellow dictators, they rule nations, they do not rule people.

The CIA were kind of playing JFK.

In the eyes of some CIA-trained militants, Kennedy had become a traitor to the cause.

B-26 bombers of the Cuban Exile Air Force attacked Castro's airfield.

Everything that could go wrong does.

Out of ammunition, men fighting in water, if no help given, Blue Beach lost.

The airstrike has humiliated the United States before the world.

Were you ever offered money to assassinate President Kennedy?

Directly.

On numerous occasions.

It is clear that the forces of communism are not to be underestimated in Cuba or anywhere else in the world.

It's like a nightmare.

It's

something you think, well, I'll wake up tomorrow and it's not true.

It is clear that the farces of communism are not to be underestimated in Cuba or anywhere else in the world.

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies about to be swept away with the debris of history.

Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.

We intend to profit from this lesson.

We intend to re-examine and reorient our forces of all kinds.

We intend to intensify our efforts for a struggle in many ways more difficult than war, where disappointment will often accompany us.

For I am convinced that we in this country and in the free world possess the necessary resource and the skill and the added strength that comes from a belief in the freedom of man.

And I am equally convinced that the history will record the fact that this bitter struggle reached its climax in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.

Let me then make clear as the President of the United States that I am determined upon our system's survival and success, regardless of the cost.

and regardless of the peril.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classify.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey.

And that was John F.

Kennedy, President of the United States.

Could you tell, David?

I could.

I spent a year in Boston.

Did you know that?

I did not know that.

That was a very solid Boston accent.

Yeah.

Only occasional lapses into your normal Stoke-Newington accent.

South London, yeah.

Well, it was me trying to suggest a kind of virile leadership.

That was the kind of, anyway.

But those would be the first two words I would use to describe that little blurb there.

Virile leadership.

So you're welcome.

But it's an interesting moment because it's JFK speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April the 20th, 1961.

So he's speaking literally as the kind of biggest gamble of his very new presidency, only a few months old, is falling apart on that day in kind of the most dramatic style.

And we're looking at JFK and his relationship with the CIA.

And of course, it will be defined particularly by Cuba and particularly this opening disaster at the Bay of Pigs.

So maybe take us to the Bay of Pigs, David.

After my attempt to do it in American accent, maybe you can do it in a more convincing Spanish accent and talk about Cuba.

Unlikely, unlikely.

I think listeners who endured our Pablo Escobar series will doubtless have little faith in my ability to execute on any manner of Spanish accents.

So I'm not even going to try, although I did did try in the last episode.

I think I said baya do cochinos, which is the Bay of Pigs in Spanish, in my butchered Spanish.

We have been talking about the Bay of Pigs, Gordon, and the run-up to it, but we haven't actually talked about the Bay of Pigs itself.

And it raises the question of what is this place?

And what actually is the plan for this exile brigade?

when they hit the beaches in Cuba.

And the Bay of Pigs, I, in my mind, I always pictured it as just white sandy beaches with pigs running on them, which it turns out is only partially right.

From sort of mouth to head, the bay is about 18 miles long.

It's narrower than four miles for most of its length.

It's very lovely.

Look at pictures.

It's a very kind of beautiful place.

There's turquoise water.

The beaches alternate between a kind of white sand and rocky coral.

It's lined with palm trees and pine, very leafy.

Looks like the kind of place you might want to plop a beach resort down.

But the plan for the Bay of Pigs is that this exile brigade is going to land at three points within and adjacent to this bay that are going to be codenamed Blue, Red, and Green Beach.

Now, the only access points to these beaches are three roads that run through this mangrove swamp.

We talked about this on the last episode that inland from the beach is a very imposing, pretty much impassable swamp, which in some of the histories of the Bay of Pigs, particularly, I think maybe some of the lazier ones, the historians will point out that, oh, you know, how could you have possibly chosen a spot where you have this impassable swamp?

The reality is the spot was chosen in part because of the swamp, because the idea, as we discussed last time, is not that this exile brigade is going to advance inland and take Havana, but that they are going to hold the beach.

And so so the swamp provides a kind of defensible position for them on the beaches.

So the idea is that there are roads that run through this mangrove swamp that sit atop beds of gravel.

And the brigade will secure those roads immediately, in part with the help of paratroopers, and set up positions so that Castro's forces won't be able to get through those choke points.

Now, after the amphibious landing on the beach, tanks and mortars will be deployed to further seal those roads.

And once all of this is accomplished, securing those three beachheads, essentially, will offer the brigade a lodgement is the term

CIA has been using that's about 40 miles long and includes, crucially, an airstrip that the B-26 kind of fleet operated by the Exile Brigade will be able to use to sort of conduct bombing runs on Castro's forces outside of the lodgement.

And of course, the idea is you've got the lodgement, and that destabilizes the Castro regime, doesn't it?

And you will get what they hope for would be a kind of mass uprising, the falling apart of his military, because they've got this kind of hold on the island.

That's the theory.

And I think it's, of course, an untestable proposition at this point what effect it may have had to have an exile brigade that has taken control of a piece of Cuban territory and held it against Castro.

We just simply don't know.

But that's the idea.

I think at the point where the brigade controls the lodgement, it's undoubtedly true that the plan becomes way less clear.

And you're kind of hoping for things to happen outside of the lodgement that then affect the political trajectory inside it.

Now,

irrespective of what happens, though, the idea is that in a few weeks, this provisional government that the CIA has sort of horse-collared into agreement in Miami, they'll be flown in to the lodgement.

And at this point, the U.S.

government would offer assistance in what will likely become a Cuban civil war.

So, really important

is that the idea is not that this brigade of 1,400 or so men is going to conquer Cuba, right?

That's not the point.

So, again, in some of the takedowns, I guess you'd say, of this plan that have been written since, that you know, you kind of look at the numbers and scoff and say, 1,400 men, Castro's got an army of 30,000.

What the hell was the CIA thinking?

The idea is that the 1,400 men take the lodgement and hold it.

Offshore, the Navy will be there with tens of thousands of rifles, tanks, jeeps to distribute to anti-Castro forces if something does happen.

There is, of course, an open question of how any anti-Castro forces would actually get through the choke points to the beach if Castro is not able to do it himself.

And of course, there is the massive open question of Castro's Air Force, which on the morning of of the 17th of April 1961 is still operational.

So that's the scene and that's the plan.

And it's the morning of the 17th of April 1961 when those first Cubans are going to go ashore.

And the problem is, I mean, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

This one falls apart almost immediately, doesn't it?

Yeah, this one goes bad right away.

And the first group of Cubans ashore are going to discover

one of the major problems in the plan, which is this five-man underwater demolition team is going into the bay to mark out the landing channel for the broader sort of invasion force.

And they discover one problem right off the bat, which is coral.

The bay is full of coral.

The CIA had reviewed aerial imagery, of course, prior to the invasion and had assured the brigade that there wasn't any coral.

But those imagery analyst eggheads back in DC have screwed up.

A black mark for your coral analysts at the CIA.

Coral analysts

have hugely failed.

Now, what's even worse is that when members of the brigade had looked at the imagery as well, they had said, hey, I think this might be coral.

And they were dismissed by the CIA imagery analysts.

And of course, the Brigadistas were right.

Now, the coral is really important for the reason that they actually take an image of a sandy beach on the Bay of Pigs.

You would literally be able to take your landing craft off of, you know, your sort of main boat onto the beach and get onto the beach quickly.

What happens is that they're going to have to essentially get off the boat 75 to 100 yards out on top of this coral and wade in, which is going to slow the landing down considerably.

And that would be okay, wouldn't it, if the beach was deserted and quiet, which was the original assumption, which is another one that falls apart pretty quickly.

Yes.

And it is spoiled by a fiesta, Gordon.

There is a fiesta on the beach.

There's a group of construction workers who are building a nearby resort, who are having a party.

And so the beach or parts of the beach are lit up with floodlights.

Another problem is that one of the red marker lights that the frogman will use to mark the landing zone, it flickers on when he's still out in the boat, which alerts Cuban militiamen up on the beach who come to check it out.

And at this point, the militiamen obviously have no idea who these people are.

And in fact, they probably think they're fishermen.

And the frogmen probably could have gotten away with this if they had called out simply that they were fishing.

But it leads to a firefight, and gunfire rings out, and the town of Playa de Ron.

wakes up, essentially, to the sound of gunfire.

So the frogmen are still preparing the beach.

Now, those militiamen depart, presumably to get reinforcements.

The frogmen are preparing the beach when more militia show up in trucks.

And so support from one of the boats out in the bay is called in and has a.5 caliber machine gun mounted on it.

They're shooting onto the beach until the militia retreat.

And at this point, the brigade begins landing.

But again, because of that coral, all of the men are unloading 75 to 100 yards out.

They're wading through the water.

They're stepping over really sharp coral.

And when they hit the beach after this arduous effort, many kneel and kiss the sand.

They don't have air superiority.

Remember, it's dark.

They're doing this landing in the middle of the night.

The landing needs to be done by dawn for them to have any chance of taking up defensible positions.

Otherwise, they are going to be sitting ducks unloading essentially in the bay when Castro's Air Force is able at first first light to begin targeting them.

And the coral right off the bat basically makes this impossible.

There's no way they're going to be done dispatching all of these Brigadistas onto the beach by dawn.

So more problems.

Like everything that could go wrong does.

But it's amazing how just the fact of not knowing the coral is there, that one single failure almost guarantees, as you said, the kind of doom for the operation because it slows them down.

i mean it is a kind of catalogue of disaster but that is a pretty big one yeah it is i actually think that the most critical

disasters or decisions that were made along the way it leads back to the lack of air superiority because if castro's air force is destroyed even if the unloading takes four hours longer than you thought you are not going to be run down by his planes.

And in this case, you're working on a clock that's been imposed by the lack of air superiority.

Because this is going to be part of the blame game that comes afterwards.

I think you could also argue the whole plan was flawed.

You would say that, Gordon.

You would say that.

Because your argument places the blame more on the president for not authorizing the airstrikes.

But I would, I'm afraid, place more of the blame on the CIA for coming up with a plan which I think didn't happen.

But anyway, let's get back to the story because I think we'll argue about that later.

So, more problems, though, at Red Beach, the winches that are lowering the landing craft from the main vessels are incredibly rusty.

And they make so much noise as they're lowering these landing craft into the water that one of the brigadistas said you could probably hear these things in Havana.

So the landing craft, Evan Rude, is the manufacturer of these landing craft, they're very flimsy.

And some of them, as they're being lowered, they tip over in the surf.

In one of them, in sort of black comedy, the motor literally falls off and sinks into the water as it's being lowered down into the bay.

Now, by the end, only two of the eight landing craft that were intended to be used at Red Beach were serviceable.

The capacity of each of those is 10 men, and they need to bring 400 men onto the beach by dawn.

So, even in this case, like even if the coral hadn't been there, you've lost six of your eight landing craft, and you've slowed down essentially your throughput to get to the beach by 75%.

So, disaster after disaster as the brigade is moving onto the beach.

Now, the CIA, of course, is trying to do what it can from a propaganda standpoint to help the Brigadistas, anticipating that they'll be able to take this lodgement.

So there's that radio station from Swan Island is on the air.

It's pumping out propaganda as this happens.

Very few Cubans we now know were ever listening to that station.

So the CIA men, there's a couple on the ground who are actually essentially embedded with the Brigadistas and will take part in some of the fighting on the beach, they see that disaster is coming.

And so a call chain goes and ends up at the Pentagon asking if they might help.

And among those who get these calls are the CIA's liaison to the DOD, the Commandant of the Marine Corps is called, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, basically saying, look, there's going to need to be some help.

It's already going south.

At this point, there's a lot of phone tag among JFK's advisors.

No one is intervening out with the president.

So at 4.30 in the morning, deputy director of the CIA Cable, he goes to see Dean Rusk at the State Department and pleads for the Navy, which has A-4 Skyhawks on the aircraft carrier Essex, which is off the coast of the Bay of Pigs.

Cable pleads for these Skyhawks to be able to provide combat air patrols.

for the Expeditionary Force ships off the coast because those ships, which contain members of the brigade, all of the brigade's supplies, the brigade's ammunition, all of the extra fuel that the B-26s will need if they can take the airstrip just off the Bay of Pigs.

All of that is on these boats.

And as the sun comes up, these boats are going to be the thing that Castro is going to go after.

So

Rusk and Cable talk about this.

Rusk calls JFK around five in the morning.

puts Cable on the phone, and they basically give three options.

The first one is you could have air support that includes the beach.

So in other words, you have the Skyhawks actually defending the brigade's positions on the beach.

The second one is you could have air support starting about three miles from the shores, which would give the boats, if Castro's Air Force shows up, a chance to sort of get into territorial waters where they could be defended by these A-4 Skyhawks.

And then the third option was to authorize the planes to fly routes beyond the three-mile line to just sort of intimidate the Cubans.

Because, you know, the idea is that the Cuban Cuban Air Force sees that there are A-4 Skyhawks out there, they'll be less inclined to attack the brigade.

What does JFK say to all of these options?

No.

He says no.

He says no.

And he wants the Essex, the aircraft carrier, and all other U.S.

naval assets to actually move further away from the Cuban shore, well beyond the horizon, out 30 miles.

JFK is surely just doing what he always signaled he would do, which is he did not want direct military intervention.

This isn't the last time there's going to be pressure on him, you know, in the next few days to do it.

But he'd made it clear to the team.

I still think the CIA and the other people were just assuming that he would at the end bend, that he would not want to be seen to preside over a failure and he would give them what they knew they needed ultimately to make it work.

And he's actually just sticking to his sticking to his guns, as it were, by not deploying his guns.

But anyway, it's not the last time there's pressure on him, is there?

No.

To do something.

Now, what's going on with Castro?

Yeah, what is going on with Fidel?

I'm guessing he knows what's going on.

He does.

He does.

And as we said last time, Castro sort of strategically understood this was coming.

There had been the preparatory airstrikes three days prior, which had not gone well, but had destroyed some of his aircraft.

And I think it signaled to Castro that something was coming.

He receives word of the invasion around 2.30 in the morning, so well before most of the brigade are on the beaches.

And he begins scrambling his remaining air Force to target the ships and the forces that are deploying toward the Bay of Pigs.

And this is a smart move, right?

Rather than having the Air Force target the brigade members that are on the beach, Castro wants them to go after the ships that will resupply them.

Now, Castro has B-26s as well.

He has British-made Sea Furies from the Batista days.

And the planes reach the ships by dawn.

And because the unloading, as we've discussed, has gone so slowly, on one of the ships, the Houston, there are still 220 members of the brigade on board.

They're sitting docks.

Now the Houston's hit.

It catches fire and it begins to fill with water.

The captain can't steer it.

He runs aground on a sandbar 400 yards from shore to avoid sinking.

Castro's planes are strafing the ship.

The men start jumping into the water to swim.

20 are probably killed by gunfire.

Maybe another 10 drown.

Some of them are probably killed by sharks in the bay.

And one of the battalions is going to wind up six miles from their intended landing zone.

When they go ashore, they're immediately met by militia, they retreat, and they basically dig in and wait, and they're totally out of the action.

Now, similar disaster befalls some of the paratroopers.

They're dropped by mistake into the swamp after the plane carrying them is harassed by one of Castro's planes.

So we can see right off the bat, this lack of air superiority has thrown an absolute wrench into the plan.

Now, there are some bright spots.

By mid-morning, the 2nd Battalion of the Brigade is in place to defend one of the roads, and the 6th Battalion, which is one of the armored battalions of the brigade, has unloaded most of its equipment.

But again, these successes mean...

almost nothing if Castro's planes continue to fly.

So the brigade, they do down two Cuba aircraft and the B-26s that the brigade operates and that are being flown from Nicaragua, they're flying overhead in shifts of 45 minutes, but they're really fuel constrained because they're coming 500 plus miles from Nicaragua every time.

The B-26s are not particularly useful in air-to-air combat.

And to make matters worse, because all of the brigade's B-26s, have been painted and have serial numbers to make them look like Castro's aircraft, the brigade's ships can't really distinguish them from Castro's planes.

Some of this problem with air superiority will be rectified if the brigade can take that airstrip, but the airstrip is only going to be useful if they can also offload the 200 barrels of fuel from one of the ships.

Now, this ship is called the Rio Escondido.

It's out in the bay, and it's also the brigade's primary supply ship.

It's carrying 10 10 days' worth of ammunition, 20 tons of explosives, as well as most of the brigade's food stocks and the radio van that has all of the comms equipment for the brigade.

One of Castro's sea furies hits it with a rocket.

The captain of the Rio Escondido orders everyone to abandon ship, and within minutes, the ship explodes.

An explosion so massive it is heard 16 miles away at Red Beach, where one of the CI officers wondered if Castro had used an atomic weapon.

Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong on this.

I mean, we've had sharks, swamps, and now exploding ships.

It's pretty clear from this point on, it's not going to work, isn't it?

I mean, I think some of the brigades start turning back.

I think I said this last time.

The brigade, you listen to the interviews with them, they always thought America's got our back.

The U.S.

Air Force, someone will come to the rescue.

But they're not coming to the rescue.

And Castro's forces are now gathering and turning up to take them on.

I mean, it just couldn't get any worse.

No, it couldn't.

And some of the brigade ships actually do begin to turn back under that assumption, right?

And air support is just not coming.

On the beaches, the first real resistance on shore happens around 10 a.m., right?

Up to this point, there's been kind of small arms fire and really muted a resistance from the militias.

But around 10 a.m., Castro has himself has actually

arrived.

Castro himself himself pitches up.

But he's a rebel leader.

You know, this is his thing, isn't it?

This is what you do.

I mean, this is how you make yourself a hero of revolutionary groups around the world, isn't it?

By turning up at these battles and getting on with it.

While Alan Dulles and others are kind of skulking off, he's in the heat of the battle.

He is.

He takes up command at a sugar mill a few miles from the bay.

There are many photographs that are taken of Castro over the next few days.

He's kind of leaping out of tanks.

He's gazing out over the bay.

He's kind of ministering to his troops.

So he's getting

all the cred as a revolutionary leader and is taking advantage of it with all these photo ops.

Now, by mid-afternoon, a column of maybe a thousand or so of Castro's troops have arrived.

These are cadets from the militia leadership school in Matanzas, and they have come in whatever transportation they could arrange.

If you were imagining a well-organized convoy of soldiers, you were mostly wrong.

Some of them show up in trucks that until that morning had held crates of fruit or chickens.

So it's a bit of a motley effort, but nonetheless, there are a thousand troops that have arrived.

Two of the brigade's B-26s arrive and begin to pound the convoy, but again, they're met by Castro's planes and forced to retreat.

One of the brigade's B-26s is shot down there.

The other is hit and tries to limp back.

to Happy Valley, to the base in Nicaragua, but it can't make it.

And I mean, in one of just many of the tragic moments that will happen over the course of that day, as the plane is flying over the Caribbean, it becomes clear it will not make it back to Nicaragua.

The brigade's priest administers last rites over the radio, and the plane crashes into the sea.

Everybody vanishes.

The plane vanishes into the Caribbean, and they're never heard from again.

Now,

you mentioned Alan Dulles, Gordon.

Shadowy Spy Master.

Whenever Alan Dulles is mentioned, we should have some Alan Dulles, like, creepy theme music, because

Gordon has made him out to be like this vampiric puppeteer who hangs over this entire story.

When in fact, he's a tweedy pipe-smoking kind of professorial.

But that is his outside cover for a man at the heart of machinations of the CIA.

And of course, he's been in Puerto Rico conveniently, absent.

He's been giving a speech.

Almost certainly deliberately planned to be out of town.

But anyway, there we go.

He gets back though, which is good when there's a major disaster going on.

That's right.

And he's met at the airport by one of the Cuba Task Force officers

who accompanies Dulles back to his home.

They talk about how poorly Cuba is going in kind of general terms.

Dulles says the president must have been confused by canceling the airstrikes because, again, Dulles, you know, even though he's been slightly checked out and Dickie Bissell has been running the show, Dulles understood that the airstrikes were part of the plan.

And in an absolutely bizarre and surreal moment in this whole thing, the officer is obviously extremely upset by what's happening and is thinking about nothing other than Cuba.

And Dulles insists that the guy come in and have a scotch at his house.

And the guy walks in with Dulles.

Dulles pours him a drink.

They sit down.

And Dulles kind of just shifts the conversation away from Cuba.

They actually talk about this officer, I guess, had experience in Greece, and Dulles was going to attend a meeting with the Greek prime minister or something in Washington.

And so Dulles just kind of turns the conversation casually to Greece, and they just make small talk for like an hour.

I mean, you could read it as Dulles being super cool and conspiratorial, or you could read it as a man who is in almost denial about the fact that this disaster is unfolding.

I mean, that feels more like a man in denial that this thing, which he's been at the heart of for years, is falling apart.

And I mean, the situation is just going to get worse and worse, isn't it?

I I mean, that was April the 17th has been a disaster, but it must be pretty clear by that point that they're not going to make it, this brigade.

I think that is becoming clear to the CIA officers inside the Cuba task force.

It's definitely not clear to the brigade.

They're fighting on.

Yeah, why wouldn't you?

They're fighting on.

And when you read the accounts of the way that the leaders of the brigade were thinking about that day, they're thinking at some point the U.S.

is going to directly directly intervene and turn the tide.

Yeah, the cavalry is going to ride to the rescue.

The cavalry is coming.

We just got to hang on.

We've just got to hang on.

And so, as April 17th becomes the 18th, the situation, though, on the ground is going to get worse.

The brigade is running low on ammunition.

Their supply ship that had the ammunition has been blown to pieces.

Another of the ships is out of commission.

And really, darkly, two others have actually just sailed off and gone AWOL.

The brigade commander, a guy named Pepe San Roman, who is, I think, a really remarkable character and exhibits extraordinary bravery during the course of these couple days on the beaches, has actually gone out on a small boat with a radio to try to find those ships, and they're nowhere to be found.

So we have the brigade on the beach.

They're absolutely exhausted.

Many of them have actually not eaten much since the 14th of April.

since they left Nicaragua.

So you've got a group of men on the beach who are starving, who are low on ammunition.

Their tanks have 12 rounds apiece of anti-tank rounds.

So, I mean, they're running very low on necessary supplies.

They don't have any air cover.

And as the sort of morning of April 18th breaks, they start to feel the ground moving beneath them.

And it's not just because, Gordon, that it's the springtime mating season for black and red land crabs and there's crabs all over these beaches.

It's because Castro's armor is on the way.

So the the ground is kind of shaking and rumbling as Castro's tanks and armored vehicles show up.

The second battalion of the brigade, which the previous evening had endured a pretty intense artillery assault, is now trying to hold on to one of the roads into the beach as this column of armor comes down.

They fight valiantly.

They destroy a number of Castro's tanks as they kind of rumble down the road.

At this particular point, there's probably fewer than maybe 370 brigadistas that basically hold off a force that of probably more than 2 000 men on castro's side and more than 20 tanks while the brigade has lost 20 dead and 50 wounded castro's forces have taken significantly heavier casualties maybe 500 dead and a thousand wounded but of course castro can just keep throwing yeah men and equipment at this problem and the brigade cannot.

So it's a tactical victory, but there's no way they can win and they must start to realize that.

And at that point, I guess they've got nothing to do but effectively, I mean, try and retreat.

I mean, that's the only option left to them.

Yeah, so that 2nd Battalion retreats to Blue Beach because it's just too much.

And at this very late hour, the White House finally does authorize the brigade to conduct some airstrikes with their B-26s to target Castro's Air Force.

But two have to abort on takeoff, and the heavy fog means they can't even see Castro's planes on the ground.

So that airstrike goes nowhere.

So there, I think, with clearly the brigade facing disaster, let's take a break.

And when we come back, we'll look at not just what happens to them, but crucially, what happens in Washington, because that is going to define JFK's presidency and his relationship with the CIA.

See you after the break.

This episode is brought to you by Attio, the CRM for the AI era.

Now, David, people think that spycraft is just car chases and secret codes, but an awful lot of it is just idling around waiting for the action.

It's a bit like starting your own business.

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Well, welcome back.

The brigade is facing disaster on the ground in the Bay of Pigs.

And in Washington, this realization that this is unraveling very fast is clearly taking hold in the White House.

And I think the mood is despondent, isn't it, for JFK and for those around him.

I mean, they realize this is going terribly wrong.

Not the success, perhaps, that they'd been promised.

Well, it counts the Oval Office meeting that takes place in the early morning hours of the 18th of April as a pretty glum affair.

And news agencies are already carrying reports of anti-American protests around the world, embassies being stormed.

I mean, in places like Delhi, Tokyo, Cairo, Belgrade, Warsaw.

So that prediction that this invasion might affect kind of world opinion about the intentions of the United States, I think that morning it seems like that's already coming to pass.

Which is always what Kennedy worried about, because he'd been trying to project this vision of a kind of of idealistic United States acting in concert with allies against communism.

And suddenly it's the world of kind of covert operations and coups and, you know, pretending it's local.

And clearly everyone in these protests can see through that.

So in a sense, he was right about the kind of dangers of it.

And it's coming true.

And also, you've got the Soviet Union worried about it.

Khrushchev is going to get involved, which again had been one of Kennedy's worries, hadn't it?

That Khrushchev would kind of wade in, warning him that the Soviet Union Union will be able to help the Cubans and that there's a risk of a kind of confrontation.

I mean, this had always been the concern.

The cabinet room, because of that concern, has been turned essentially into a war room.

The situation room, the White House situation room, has not yet been constructed at this point.

And in fact, it will be constructed in the fallout from Bay of Pigs.

But at this point, a lot of these meetings are happening in the Oval Office or in the cabinet room of the White House.

Now, at this point, Bobby Kennedy, who's the Attorney General, who hasn't really been been involved much in the Cuba file, is pulled in because I think JFK is starting to feel, again, we mentioned when we introduced JFK as a character, that this family unity and this idea that he's representing the family with something bigger than himself and that the family needs to be loyal to each other and kind of circle ranks when they're threatened.

I mean, he turns to Bobby in this moment and brings Bobby into the mix on Cuba.

Dickie Bissell and Alan Dulles are there.

There's a bunch of maps.

The CIA CIA keeps pressing for air support.

It's not coming.

JFK, in one account, walks over to a big metallic map of Cuba that's been set up, and they have miniature magnetic boats that are representing the U.S.

fleet, kind of out on the map.

JFK picks up one of the boats, sets it down a little bit further from the coast of Cuba, and says, Well, don't you think we ought to get our forces out over the horizon?

So, you kind of, again, to your point, Gordon, at every point up to this critical meeting, JFK has been essentially walking things back, right?

Let's get the boats further out, no air support, on and on.

The meeting adjourns without a plan of action, but it is clear that JFK is not going to budge on those earlier positions.

No American planes are going to fly in combat, no military assistance of any kind.

He does authorize reconnaissance flights by Navy jets to understand what's actually happening on the beaches.

You can imagine how discouraging that will be to the brigade when they see these jets fly overhead and realize they're just there to take pictures, not to actually help them fight Castro's Air Force.

JFK is

very distressed.

There's a scene where he actually goes outside and talks to Bobby for a while, and there's no record of what they said, but the eyewitnesses who were there describe JFK, you know, kind of rubbing his eyes, shaking his head.

He's despondent.

JFK, though, throughout this, I mean, has this kind of remarkable ability,

I think, to compartmentalize because he then has lunch with James Reston from the New York Times.

Famous journalist, yeah.

Yes, and he's kind of already in damage control mode.

It's so interesting because this is where he's the politician, isn't it?

Because he's already thinking, I'm going to get word out to people that the CIA is to blame.

Basically, as the Bay of Pigs is already underway, it's not over yet.

It's not finished.

The blame game is starting because he's kind of going to rest.

And I probably made a mistake in keeping Alan Dulles at the CIA.

You know, I can't estimate his his meaning when he tells me things.

It's an important piece of the job description for your head of the Central Intelligence Agency is that you can understand what they're saying when they talk to you.

So

that's a pretty black mark.

He also, I mean, at this point, JFK is even suggesting he might move Bobby over to run the CIA when this is all done.

And he tells Rustin, you know, we have to deal with the CIA.

So already kind of...

scapegoating them.

Meanwhile, Pepe San Roman and the brigade are sending just frantic messages to the U.S.

Navy off the coast of Cuba.

And here's one.

I mean, just to give a sense of, as JFK is having his lunch, I mean, this is what's going on.

At 1.25 p.m., the message from San Roman, under heavy attack, supported by 12 tanks.

Need air support immediately.

Red Beach wiped out.

Request airstrikes.

Need ammo of all types immediately.

And then 20 minutes later.

We are under attack by two Sea Fury aircraft and heavy artillery.

Do not see any friendly air cover as you promised.

Need jet support immediately.

Pepe.

And again, what's awful is that he is expecting air support.

And they've actually heard probably mistakenly through kind of a game of telephone with the CIA officers that are in Nicaragua and the CIA officers who are liaising with them on the beaches.

They've heard mistakenly that it's coming.

What is coming is that the CIA is going to have some contract pilots take over some of the B-26s that are flown by the Cubans because the Cubans are flying these B-26s back and forth between Nicaragua and the Bay of Pigs.

They have been doing it consistently at this point for over a day.

They are absolutely exhausted.

So the CIA is going to actually have some pilots conduct some of the strafing and bombing runs.

They'll target the convoys on the roads leading into the Bay of Pigs to try to wreck some of Castro's tanks and trucks and the buses he's used to bring troops in.

So that night, the White House is hosting the first formal gala of JFK's term.

It's the congressional reception at which every member of Congress and their spouse comes to the White House along with cabinet officials and the Joint Chiefs.

So JFK has to leave the disaster of the cabinet room.

He puts on a white tie, tails, Jackie's in a pink gown.

There's a dance floor in the east room of the White House.

So you have this remarkable contrast between the mayhem on on the beaches and JFK dressed up in his white tails, shaking hands with congressional leaders.

Now at CIA,

it's absolute chaos because they understand that the only way to salvage this is with air support.

And Dickie Bissell decides to take one more shot to convince JFK to intervene.

A meeting is called.

The president is still in his white tails.

Everyone's in tuxes.

The military guys are in dress uniform.

It's midnight.

And Admiral Burke, the Secretary of the Navy, he starts and he asks the president those very pointed questions about whether the Navy could muster a few Skyhawks to actually intervene.

And there's a back and forth, which, of course, does not go well for the Admiral.

But by 2 a.m., so a couple hours into the meeting, JFK yields a little bit.

And what he does is he authorizes one hour of U.S.

Navy air cover to provide cover for the brigade's B-26s.

It's not much, is it?

It's not much.

Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, doesn't like it, but JFK

puts a hand basically up to his nose, says we're in it up to here.

So there's some acknowledgement that there's kind of no going back.

So at last, there's going to be a period of time where the Cuban exiles will own the skies over the Bay of Pigs.

One hour.

Now, at this point, there are eight U.S.

airmen who have flown the B-26s instead of the Cubans.

But now, members of the Alabama Air National Guard get involved.

They had been acting as trainers for the Cubans in Nicaragua.

And this was a feature of U.S.

involvement in the Bay of Pigs that was really kept quiet for decades.

And the families of some of these pilots were, I think, really treated quite shamefully by the government because nobody wanted to acknowledge that Americans had actually been involved hands-on in the operation.

So sometime after dawn, those B-26s arrive.

They're flying there under the presumption that they will have an hour where the Navy's Skyhawks will be in the air.

So they'll be able to basically conduct bombing and strafing runs against Castro's armored columns unmolested.

But instead of being met by the Skyhawks, they are met by Castro's jets.

One of the B-26s is damaged.

Two are shot down.

There's four dead Americans.

What happened to the air cover?

As you could imagine, Gordon, there's a lot of finger-pointing afterwards.

Surely not.

And it looks like it's to do with time differences.

Is that the claim?

Well, maybe.

The reason given by the task force commander aboard the Essex, that aircraft carrier that's out there, was that the time zones had been screwed up in the order.

So, in other words, because there's an hour difference between the Bayapigs and Nicaragua, where they're coming from.

So, in other words, the B-26s arrived at 5.30 in the morning rather than 6.30, as the Navy had expected.

So, the Navy basically says, look, the chief of the Cuba Task Force at CIA, Jake Esterlein, he screwed it up, right?

Because he forgot about this time zone difference.

Now, recent efforts by historians, including by Jim Rasenberger, have uncovered some of the CIA cable traffic, and it's vindicated the agency.

The time zones were correct.

Trust you to bring that up.

So, it's the Navy's fault, basically.

That's what you're saying.

What does seem more likely at this point is that the Navy received the order too late, took three plus hours to decode the cable, and so mustered the jets well beyond when they should have.

It's always someone else to blame.

Always someone else to blame other than the agency.

But anyway, the point is that there was no air cover.

And the point is that the Navy screwed it up, Gordon.

I'm going to just take a swing at the Navy here.

Okay, you do that.

Navy people, feel free to write in.

Regardless, the problem is back on the beach no air cover there's no air cover there's no strafing of castro's forces so castro's forces are going to be able to kind of close the net on what's left of the brigade and i mean some of the messages here from pepe san romano you know the people on the beach is out of ammunition men fighting in water if no help given blue beach lost so you can almost see it can't you just the kind of shrinking of these beachheads smaller and smaller so from the idea of this kind of what was it, 40 square miles or whatever it was going to be, suddenly you're down to what?

Half a mile length of beach, you know, and then a quarter of a mile into Cuba.

It's nothing.

So, there's going to be one last stand, I guess, between the brigade and Cuban forces, which, I mean, it's only going to end one way, isn't it?

It's brutal.

I mean, in some places, this, it has actually been christened the last stand, this fight.

It devolves into hand-to-hand combat.

But by mid-afternoon, Castro has brought artillery close enough that it can range shells down accurately on the brigade's positions there.

The brigade's ammo runs out by mid-afternoon.

They retreat further.

And at around 2.30 in the afternoon, Pepe San Roman sends a last message.

He says, I'm destroying all equipment and communications.

I have nothing left to fight with.

I'm taking to the woods.

I can't wait for you.

It's that last line, isn't it?

I can't wait for you.

Because it suggests that they're still thinking it's coming.

And he's just saying, I can't wait any longer.

But he still thinks it's going to come.

So they're going to smash the radios and the weapons and basically just flee.

And this is the whole problem.

You're back to the problem of the geography of the place, because the whole problem was you've got the water and the coral behind you, and you've got the swamp in front of you.

And out in the water, there's two Navy destroyers that are out there, and they actually come very close to engaging Castro's forces on the beach.

The Cubans are firing at the destroyers.

But instead of engaging, the captain decides the risk isn't worth it, and the destroyers sail out to sea.

So the brigade has basically gone into the swamp.

They've gone out into the bay, in some cases in boats, and really the fight is over.

So JFK spends much of that afternoon in the residence at the White House.

At one point, actually lays down on their bed with Jackie, and he's close to tears.

It's a huge mess inside the Cuba task force at the CIA.

Grown men are quite literally in tears.

One person throws up in a waste bin because he's so disgusted by what's happened.

Bissell, Dickie Bissell, is, you know, we talked about him.

He's kind of, he's kind of an aloof guy.

And he tells everyone to just go home and get some sleep because there's not much they can do at this point, which I think partially is true.

He goes home.

Dickie Bissell goes home and he sits in his living room and listens to his wife play piano for the afternoon, kind of in shock.

Alan Dulles will later say it was the worst day of his life.

And on the 20th of April, the country wakes up to major headlines about the disaster in most newspapers.

So it's gone from being an, you know, sort of a military and covert action failure to now a massive political problem for the Kennedy White House.

And one of Kennedy's aides will write in his journal, now Kennedy is revealed as if no more than a continuation of the Eisenhower-Dulles past.

We not only look like imperialists, we look like stupid, ineffectual imperialists, which is worst of all.

It's a good moment here, I think, to look at what the reaction is from the Kennedy White House House to this disaster.

It's interesting because we talked previously how Kennedy has this tension between wanting to be seen as the kind of great internationalist liberal statesman, but also wanting to fight communism.

And the tension between those two kind of defines his presidency, in my mind.

And this has been, you know, a kind of humiliation, but he becomes almost more emotionally committed to taking down Castro.

Rather than feeling like he got his fingers burnt, he's actually going to kind of double down, if you like, on wanting to get rid of Castro to be vindicated for it, which I find kind of, it's not necessarily the most rational thing to do, but you feel like this is someone who's angry at failure.

He's not someone perhaps who's used in his career to failure and so he wants to do something about it.

He goes and tells the Pentagon to develop a plan, doesn't he, to overthrow Castro and say we've got to deal with it.

But you kind of think, well, if you really wanted to overthrow him, then you should have gone all in with the war plan.

It's almost like in reaction to failure, he then feels he needs to do something.

I think this is the point where his fight with Castro becomes deeply personal and it becomes about the Kennedy family.

I mean, he pulls Bobby more into Cuba stuff and Bobby will effectively become kind of the Cuba czar for the remainder of JFK's presidency up until he's shot.

And Castro was a massive policy and political problem for JFK in the first months of his administration.

But I think the obsession with Fidel Castro on the part of both brothers really begins after the Bay of Pigs.

And I think that's one of the main consequences of the failure.

The second one, which is maybe not as well understood, is that JFK, in his desire in the pretty much immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs to not look like a loser, to not look like he's soft on communism, directs the Pentagon to create a presidential task force on Vietnam, the goal of which is to create a program of action to prevent communist domination of the South.

And vietnam had been kind of in those first months of his presidency sort of a backburner issue and and that really changes in the aftermath of the bay of pigs i found this fascinating actually the link between bay of pigs and then the beginnings really of the long story of america's entanglement with vietnam because again you can see kennedy learning from Bayo Pigs a certain caution about getting too involved militarily, about things going wrong, about some of the risks of COVID action.

But you can also see him smarting at the public humiliation of having been seen to fail to contain communism in Latin America.

So you can also see, well, we can't be seen to then lose Asia as well, because if Vietnam goes communist, then who knows where else will go communist.

So you can see, again, the kind of roots of the complicated JFK policy on Vietnam, which is to kind of, a bit like Cuba, kind of get half involved, but not go all in, want a certain outcome, but not necessarily commit everything to it.

You can see the same thinking, I think, the duality here.

I think it's fascinating as a kind of prelude to that.

But then I think it's worth saying the third lesson is CIA.

How do you deal with the CIA?

What becomes clear right off the bat?

I mean, we talked about it, JFK is even suggesting this in his lunch with James Reston of the New York Times as the attack is unfolding.

I mean, there's an effort, I think, to make the CIA the scapegoat and the whipping boy for this disaster.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

There's one fascinating quote where JFK tells Bissell from the CIA, he says, if this was Britain, I would resign and you as the senior civil servant would remain.

But it isn't.

In our government, you and Alan Dulles have to go and I remain.

It's really interesting.

He's basically saying, someone's got to take the fall for this and it's not going to be me.

I think it's so interesting because this blame game starts while the invasion is still going on.

It's going to kind of pick up pace.

And there's a kind of battle of memoirs between Dulles and between some of Kennedy's aides, which is very, very interesting, in which each side is trying to pin the blame on the other.

And of course, the Dulles view is it was kind of JFK not authorizing the airstrikes and not going all in.

And Kennedy's aides, though, are very interesting because I think, you know, Schlesinger, who we've talked about, and Ted Sorensen, will say that Dulles basically misled them.

There's a kind of famous bit where I think they they recall Dulles going up to JFK and saying, you know, well, I stood at this desk and told Eisenhower Guatemala would succeed and the prospects for Bay of Pigs for Cuba, the Cuba operation, are even better.

And they will claim that Dulles basically told JFK, don't worry, this is going to be fine.

And Dulles is going to kind of dispute that in his own memoirs.

So you get this battle starting.

I think it's unlikely.

that that little anecdote ever happened.

It's two Kennedy aides.

It is two Kennedy aides recalling something that Dulles said to Kennedy.

But here's what I think is true:

I think the spirit of that is right.

There was a connection made between the success in Guatemala in 1954 and the planning for Cuba in 1959 and 1960 and 61, that absolutely those dots were connected.

But I think that story is greatly exaggerated by Kennedy aides who in the aftermath were really keen to make it look like the CIA sold JFK on the invasion or somehow he'd kind of been duped by the agency.

Even JFK is going to say to one of his aides, you know, they were sure I'd give in to them, I think he says.

He tells Dave Powers.

They couldn't believe that a new president like me wouldn't panic and try to save his own face.

Well, they had me figured all wrong.

That quote supports the conspiratorial view.

semi-conspiratorial view that, you know, Dulles and others were trying to kind of start the operation and then assume he'd bail them out if it didn't work.

Not that they wanted it to bail.

I don't know.

I think we could accept there are different interpretations of this.

And in a way, that's the point, isn't it?

Is that the blame game is going to go on and there's going to be two very different interpretations of who was to blame.

And even though on the surface the CIA and JFK are going to play nice, particularly Dulles and JFK are beneath the surface going to start engaging a kind of war of words and briefing and memoirs to kind of put their case across.

And that is important when we get to some of the theories about JFK's assassination, I think, as well.

Frankly, from JFK's standpoint, the political necessity of doing two things.

One, I mean, JFK says the right things afterward.

He says, I'm the responsible officer of government and it's on me.

He says that publicly.

But at the same time, via, you know, sort of anonymous White House sources and a lot of the history that comes out in the years after, there's the push to sort of blame the agency for it.

And I think.

There is something evergreen here, which is the CIA, unlike the Pentagon, has no natural constituency and no ability to defend itself from those kinds of attacks.

So it is a very helpful scapegoat for presidents.

If you run into a problem with a covert action program that you, the executive of the U.S.

government, have told the CIA to execute.

If it doesn't go well, you can absolutely foist the blame on the CIA without hampering yourself politically.

I totally get what you say there.

And there'll be other programs, like, for instance, you know, enhanced interrogations and torture programs after 9-11, which the cia will take the blame for which people will rightly say well this was actually ordered and authorized by the white house and the question is the cia takes the blame for the things it does but sometimes those things are ordered or authorized by the white house but i think what's different in this case is there is an ambiguity about how far the CIA were kind of running and pushing the show versus it having been pushed by the White House.

Kennedy inherits this policy.

He's never that happy with it.

He feels he's being pushed into it.

I think that's that's perhaps what's different from the times when

the CIA is simply executing a policy coming from the president.

It's an interesting example of that, but kind of quite a unique one.

And I mean, there's going to be a commission, isn't there, to kind of look into this and examine it.

It's going to spread the blame around, unsurprisingly, partly for this issue of failing to articulate to the White House.

the details of the operation and some of the risks.

And it goes to this question, could it have ever worked?

You know, was it Kennedy's fault for not doing air cover?

But there is a view which to say, if you underestimate the support for Castro, overestimate the support for the Rebels, the idea you could have ever sparked a revolt by just having this lodgement, even if you've had the air cover to provide it, I just think the whole thing was always flawed.

I think the plan itself was flawed, rather than it just being Kennedy failed to give them the backing that they needed.

And in that report, it basically says the CIA...

Bissell and Dulles primarily committed a series of sins of omission throughout the planning process.

And the quote from this report, which was called the Taylor Report after its author, Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor, said, Leaders of the operation did not always present their case with sufficient force and clarity to the senior officials of the government to allow the latter to appreciate the consequence of some of their decisions.

There was not an effort to, a clear effort, to say, if you do this, then this happens, which I think maybe to your point, Gordon, if that had happened, it would have resulted in the operation probably being canceled and called off before.

Now, one of the things that shocked me is that after all of this, we've talked about this massive failure, this sort of gut-wrenching moment for John F.

Kennedy, this connection between Bay of Pigs, and then what we're going to talk about in the next episode, which is this kind of essentially obsession between the Kennedy brothers and Castro, the connection to Vietnam.

JFK's approval rating after the crisis is 82%.

It's up 10%

before the crisis.

It's incredible.

He's, you know, absolute political Teflon.

I think it's worth talking about and kind of closing out on the Bay of Pigs chapter of this series with Cuba and what has happened to this

brigade.

So 105 members of Brigade 2506 are dead.

Hundreds more in the days after are hiding in the swamps.

They're breaking down into smaller groups to avoid detection.

They're basically eating whatever they can find, raw chicken, snakes.

They're drinking their own urine or brackish water.

Some of them are actually adrift in the Caribbean on rafts.

Most of them wind up being captured by Castro, and initially they're put into a prison camp on the beach.

Now, this is like peak Fidel here.

He is the toast of the communist world, right?

He's beaten the Americans.

You know, we talked in the very first episode of this series about how Castro's, to some degree, his political ideology is all about how do I sort of throw off the Yankee yoke, throw it off Cuba, make Cuba independent.

He's beaten the Americans, and he uses the Bay of Pigs as, I think, you know, an excuse to tighten his grip inside Cuba and to really turn Cuba into even more of a police state.

But the brigadistas are not executed because Castro logically understands that they're worth more alive to him.

than dead.

And they are sent to a prison in Havana, mistreated terribly on the journey, nine actually die on the journey to Havana, and they will rot in Cuban prisons for 20 months as a deal is worked out.

So, what did happen to the brigadistas?

I mean, they weren't executed.

No, Castro wants a deal.

You know, he understands that he can potentially get something from the Americans for all of these prisoners.

And initially, he says he'll trade the prisoners for 500 tractors, which I thought felt like sort of an odd opening salvo to the negotiation, but he actually says later, those are caterpillar bulldozers, and the sum total of that would be about $63 million.

That's an impossible amount for private citizens to raise in the States because, again, the government, the JFK administration, is not going to do a deal with Castro.

Essentially, up until Christmas of 1962, there is a back and forth negotiation between a group of private citizens in the States, Castro, and it ends up actually, Gordon being the deal, ends up being brokered by none other than Jib Donovan, who would actually help broker the trade for Francis Gary Powers, the downed U-2 pilot.

And a deal is struck eventually that will allow Castro to receive food, medicine, products basically valued at $53 million and some sum of cash in exchange for the brigadistas.

And they come back.

1,113 men are released in the Christmas season of 1962.

JFK is going to go down and meet them at the Orange Bowl in Miami.

Pepe San Roman will present JFK with the flag of the brigade.

And JFK says to Pepe San Roman, I can assure you, this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free havanna.

And that, of course, doesn't happen.

In a kind of a sad end to this already sad story, there's an incredible amount of frustration, of course, with the Cuban exiles toward JFK.

And in 1977, the brigade will demand the return of the flag it gave to Kennedy.

And it is now among the various exhibits in the Bay of Pigs Museum.

We'll stop there with all this anger that's come out of the failure of the Bay of Pigs, the anger of the Brigadistas, but also

what is effectively a kind of deathmatch struggle now between Castro and Kennedy, which has been set in motion by the Bay of Pigs.

And next time in our final episode, we'll look at how that plays out in the final months of JFK's presidency, leading, of course, towards his tragic assassination in Dallas, Texas.

You can listen to that episode right now.

If you're a club member, you can join at therestisclassified.com.

And you will, of course, get access to our special series looking at some of the theories and conspiracies around the assassination.

We'll see you next time.

See you next time.