93. JFK vs the CIA: Bay of Pigs (Ep 4)

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Terms apply.

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 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.

Let me take two jets and shoot down those enemy aircraft.

No, I don't want to get the United States involved in this.

Hell, Mr.

President, we are involved.

Admiral, I don't want the United States involved in this.

Can I not send in an airstrike?

No.

Can we send in a few planes?

No, because they could be identified as belonging to the United States.

Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey.

And that was an exchange, as I think it probably would have sounded, minus maybe the British accent on one part, between Admiral Burke, who is Secretary of the Navy, and President John F.

Kennedy.

Of course, what they're discussing is this amazing operation to try and overthrow the Castro regime with an invasion organized by the CIA, perhaps not entirely, fully briefed to the president.

which is going to take place in April 1961.

We've been looking at the planning.

We've been looking at who who knew what, what the chances were of success.

But I think maybe at this point in the story, David, it is worth us trying to understand the view from Castro.

What is Fidel with his beard thinking?

He's kind of probably aware that the Americans are out to get him, isn't he?

Yeah, I think it's safe to say he is aware that the Americans are out to get him.

At this point in April of 61, he probably has already some sense that the CIA is trying to specifically kill him.

But Castro has a pretty effective security apparatus at this stage.

He's got plenty of agents in the exile community in Miami.

But to some degree, to know that it's coming, he doesn't need any of that.

He just needs the New York Times.

Because in the weeks before the invasion, pesky journalists.

Right.

Pesky journalists.

This is going to be the part of the story I knew you would love, Gordon.

The journalists, the journalists coming in and shaping history.

An enterprising investigative reporter named Ted Zulk,

who is a chain smoker with a taste for trench coats.

Perfect stereotype, you know, caricature of

the 50s, 60s American journalists.

Yeah.

A colleague described him as having a passion for meeting odd strangers in ill-lighted bars in ill-frequented parts of town.

That's a reputation I think I tried to kind of conjure up as a journalist as well during my years.

Yes, exactly.

He is the New York Times equivalent of Gordon Carrera.

Now, in the 80s, Ted Zulk will author a prominent Castro biography, but at this point, he's working the Cuba beat for the New York Times, and he gets a hot tip, Zolk does, from a Cuban at a hotel bar in Miami.

Just like me.

Like, yeah, exactly.

Gordon.

Gordon works.

Just work in the hotel bars in Miami for good stories.

Now, Zolk has already heard rumors about the training camps for Cuban exiles in Guatemala, but this tip is different.

And the tip is that an invasion is imminent.

So you could imagine that this probably came from somebody at base tracks in Guatemala or the air base in Nicaragua who told somebody, who told somebody, who told one of their friends in Miami who was sitting by Ted Zolk at the bar.

But that something is coming and it's coming very quickly.

So the urgency.

is what's new here.

This tip is passed eventually to Edward R.

Murrow, who's a legendary television reporter.

And I think at this point, probably the most respected journalist in the United States.

Ed Murrow in this period is running the U.S.

Information Agency, which is a now defunct federal agency that at that time was responsible for promoting favorable views of the U.S.

abroad.

And Edward R.

Murrow knows nothing about the invasion.

But, and I find this wild because it just gives you a sense of how maybe small of a town Washington was at this point.

He just calls up Alan Dulles Dulles

at the CIA and within hours is sitting with Dulles out at Langley asking him about this tip.

And Dulles admits to nothing, but eventually Murrow goes down to the White House and gets the story out of Mac Bundy, who is the president's national security advisor, which then leads to immense pressure from the White House on the New York Times to kill the peace.

Now, in the end, what happens is the word imminent is removed from Zolk's description of the invasion.

References in the story to the CIA are struck.

The headline is shrunk from four columns to one, and the article's placement is kind of shifted from the top of the front page to lower down.

Ted won't be happy with that, but it's still there.

It's still there.

And Ted Zulk's edited story appears in the Times on the morning of Friday, the 7th of April, 1961.

And here's how the article begins.

It says, for nearly nine months, Cuban exile military forces dedicated to the overthrow of Premier Fidel Castro have been training in the United States as well as in Central America.

Uh-oh.

JFK goes nuts.

He says, I can't believe what I'm reading.

Castro doesn't need agents over here.

All he has to do is read our papers, which is kind of true.

But also, Castro has lots of agents over here.

Yeah, I was going to say to blame it all on the New York Times is a bit harsh, isn't it?

It is.

It is.

And Castro has so many agents among the exile community in Miami that his problem is actually sorting through everything that's coming in.

Now,

it's also possible, although kind of murky, that Castro had received word of the exact invasion date, the 17th of April, from the Soviets.

And this actually, Gordon, is dramatized in The Good Shepherd.

Good film.

Good film.

Matt Damon, in a Angleton biopic about the early years of the CIA and the chief of the counterintelligence staff, it's portrayed in that movie as this kind of decisive moment in the failure of the invasion, in that Castro has gotten intel from the Soviets that it's going to happen on the 17th of April.

It's not clear that the Soviets pass that information to Castro.

I mean, at this point in time, the relationship between the KGB and Castro is tightening, but they're not.

in lockstep.

And it kind of

doesn't matter to some degree, Gordon, because the reality is that Castro, he's already primed for an invasion.

I mean, every day in April, he is on the airwaves in Havana, warning Cubans that, you know, mercenaries are coming.

He's calling the CIA.

I think this is not very clever.

The Central Agency of Cretans.

And specifically, he's calling out the presence of this base in Guatemala.

So a lot of what is reported in the New York Times, I think Castro already knows.

He is, though, being helped increasingly by Moscow.

and his security apparatus has really been bolstered by its relationship with the KGB.

The KGB has sent maybe 100 advisors to Cuba to help him build his internal security service.

And a man named Richard Helms, who will become the head of the CIA down the line, explains and who's working at the CIA at this time.

said that, you know, the Russians have done a rather astonishing job of bringing the Cubans into the 20th century when it came to security and counterintelligence.

And so Castro,

he's not operating a kind of third world security service anymore.

The Cubans are getting really sophisticated, and that security apparatus has already begun in anticipation of an invasion, arresting thousands of suspected dissidents and including executing many of them.

Yeah, I mean, I have to say, this is always the problem with these plots.

And you saw it in the late 40s, early 50s, when I think MI6 and CIA are dropping people into Albania and parts of the Eastern Soviet bloc.

Exile groups plotting invasions are always penetrated by the half-decent security service from the regime they're trying to overthrow.

I mean, it is so easy for them to just either recruit people or send people out to become agents within those kind of exile groups.

So you'd have no doubt that somewhere amongst all of those people training in Guatemala there are plenty of agents for Castro or people who are hearing about it on the grapevine.

So it is one of the problems is you just can't keep the secret, which I guess goes back to one of the pressures that the CIA felt, which is we just need to kind of do this.

Right.

Because the longer we wait, the more time Castro's got to prepare himself, but he's got plenty anyway.

And the other piece of the plan that his security apparatus is really undermining, it's not just the element of surprise in the invasion.

It's the expectation that the invasion could potentially trigger some kind of broader uprising or a military coup against Castro.

And this crackdown that Castro has implemented over the course of that spring, I think, has really reduced the odds of that working.

We should say that, you know, he's cracked down and he's got a better security apparatus, but he's also got some popularity in parts of Cuba as well, particularly in parts of rural Cuba.

There are areas where he is quite popular.

So,

again, it's another reason why the kind of odds are slightly stacked against this plan.

And speaking of the odds being stacked against it, I think we're a week or so out from the planned invasion date of the 17th of April.

And Dickie Bissell and the CIA and the task force have a bunch of problems.

So, one of them is that the president, John F.

Kennedy, is not aligned, I think it's fair to say, to the CIA plan for the operation.

He's been kind of trying to walk it back for weeks now, make it less noisy.

The second one is: despite the end of the last episode, we concluded with this big decision meeting where all of Kennedy's advisors had essentially voted yes.

That is masking over the fact that the administration is actually divided on whether this is a good idea, but nobody is speaking frankly to the president about it.

And then the third problem is that strategic surprise is gone.

I think the tactical surprise will remain.

I don't think Castro knew exactly where these forces were going to land, but the strategic surprise is definitely gone.

And on the 9th of April, a man named Jake Esterlein, who is the chief of the CIS Cuba task force, and one of the senior military advisors to that task force, they show up at Dickie Bissell's home on Sunday morning, which is not normal, and tell him that they think the operation is in serious jeopardy and that it now has the makings of what they describe as a terrible disaster.

They're concerned about the hasty change of the landing site.

They're concerned that the air support necessary for success, this is huge, is being compromised by the president, who's constantly trying to dial this stuff down.

And Bissell says, look, I agree, but it's too late to stop.

Now, Bissell promises in response to this intervention that he'll convince the president about the need for more aircraft, and in particular, the need to attack Castro's air force beforehand.

So, Bissell walks away from this meeting saying, Look, the president's been paring this stuff down.

I will reinforce to him the importance of these critical pieces.

It goes back to this kind of confidence the CIA have, I think, that they can bend JFK to give them what they need to make it successful.

It goes back to not the conspiracy theory that they wanted it to fail at the CIA, but that they thought we can either get JFK to give us what we need to succeed, or if it's looking wobbly, he will have to come in with more support.

I mean, it's interesting.

I was kind of listening to an interview with a Cuban exile, and he says at the time, he thought, how can we fail?

We've got the US behind us.

We've got the CIA behind us.

You can see why in the kind of exile community and why in some quarters, they think, at the end of the day, the US is facing off against this tiny island, Cuba.

How could you lose?

And that's what some of the exiles are thinking.

And I guess that's what some of them are kind of telling themselves.

But obviously, that depends on getting JFK to kind of pile in and support it.

And you figure at this point, I mean, Bissell's probably not totally mistaken in thinking he can convince Kennedy the merits of the bombing runs beforehand or some of these other elements of the operation.

But you have to look at this and say, how could he have confidence, really,

that JFK's desire to just continue to walk this thing back was ever going to go away?

Because it's been persistent throughout the spring.

Yeah, JFK has made clear he does not want his hands to get dirty with this.

So, you know, Kennedy has kind of placed himself on the public stage as someone who wants to be seen as a kind of beacon of a kind of, yes, aggressive anti-communism, but also liberal internationalism.

And so that should be obvious to Dickie Bissell that there's a reason why he doesn't want to get too dirty with Cuba.

From that standpoint of kind of the rhetoric that's coming out of the administration, JFK is going to further box himself in in the second week of April because he gives a press conference.

It's the ninth press conference of his presidency.

And at this press conference, he talks about Yuri Gagarin's trip into space.

He talks about China, talks about Laos.

Most of the attention, though, is on Cuba.

And Kennedy is asked how far the U.S.

will go in helping an anti-Castro uprising or an invasion of Cuba.

And he says there will not be, under any conditions, an intervention in Cuba by the United States Armed Forces.

This government will do everything it can to make sure that there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba.

This is really JFK's red line statement.

We've talked about some of the parallels to Syria.

And I think this is a moment where he has drawn a line that he can't commit U.S.

forces militarily.

Americans won't be inside Cuba.

We'll see how that's actually going to wind up not being true.

But it's limiting his options for what he can do if the invasion doesn't go as planned.

I mean, it's interesting.

It also reminds me a bit about Biden over Ukraine, where he says, we want to support the Ukrainians.

We don't want the Russians to invade.

But by the way, we're not going to put American boots on the ground.

We're not going to intervene.

We don't want World War III.

If you kind of publicly box yourself in and make clear what you're not going to do, you're suddenly reducing the intimidatory effect you might be able to have and the uncertainty which you can use in this.

These kind of make clear, well, I'm not going to put boots on the ground or get directly involved.

That should be a kind of red light, also, for the CIA, the fact that he said that.

Well, and straight from the press conference, JFK goes to another National Security Council meeting on Cuba.

Dickie Bissell is leading the briefing.

He hands out a schedule for airstrikes, which will begin three days before the invasion.

But there's kind of this aura of indecision and inconclusiveness that hangs over the meeting.

And JFK doesn't give explicit approval for the operation, but he does ask Bissell, okay, what's my deadline for killing this?

And Bissell says, on Friday, the 14th of April, you can tell us we can halt the airstrikes.

And by noon on Sunday, the 16th of April, you could cancel the amphibious landing, which is scheduled for Monday morning.

So I think, again, if you're Bissell, That's not exactly what you want to be hearing at this point.

I mean, it's a prudent thing for Kennedy to be asking, I think.

But at the same time, Kennedy, it seems, even though he's briefed on the plan for the airstrikes, it doesn't seem to sink in.

And here we get to, I think, a really interesting question of who's responsible, because

the briefing materials from that meeting are clear that

there were planned strikes three days out and then on the morning of the invasion.

But Bissell doesn't land the plane on this point, clearly, as we'll see.

The detail of what's happening in this plan is just kind of like, I don't know if it's glossed over or what, but Bissell doesn't communicate this to the president.

The president doesn't absorb it, right?

And it's an absolutely central part of the plan.

And then,

kind of from nowhere, although we've been watching the president's response to the planning, it's not exactly out of the blue.

JFK asks Bissell, how many planes are going to be used in the first strike on Cuba, which at that point is less than 24 hours away?

Bissell says 16.

And JFK tells Bissell to cut it down.

And JFK does this without consulting the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defense or really anyone else.

JFK just wants fewer planes.

And Bissell later wrote, I was simply directed to reduce the scale and make it minimal.

He left it to me to determine exactly what that meant.

And I responded by cutting the planned 16 aircraft down to eight.

So we should say that these aircraft are aircraft which are run by the exiles rather than US military, is that right?

Up to this point, yes.

These are the fleet of B-26s.

It's a World War II era bomber that has been outfitted to look like it is a Cuban revolutionary air force aircraft.

They're being run by the and piloted by the exiles at this point, by Cubans.

And yet still, JFK is trying to pull that back to make that decision or make that call.

What, 24 hours before go?

Bissell should be saying that.

I'd have thought, Mr.

President, if you want this to work, you can't do that.

I would argue that most of Dickie Bissell's sins in this whole escapade are sins of omission.

He should have said that here.

He should have said, this plan doesn't work unless we destroy Castro's Air Force.

And to have the best chance of destroying Castro's Air Force, we should use as many bombers as possible.

Again, unless you go back to my...

slightly conspiratorial view, which is that they think, well, you know, if it doesn't work at first go, we'll be able to persuade Kennedy to go all in.

But of course, you know, now he said he won't.

He's made it clear he won't.

So, President Kennedy on the 13th of April, he leaves the briefing with the CIA.

And as he goes to the executive mansion and kind of retires for the evening, the ships that are carrying Brigade 2506 are steaming on their way to Cuba.

They are being watched over by this U.S.

Navy contingent.

And those critical B-26s at happy valley are just hours away from takeoff by dawn the air attack on castro the much diminished air attack on castro should be underway and maybe there gordon with those planes getting ready to take off uh we will take a break and when we come back we'll see how they get on

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Well, welcome back.

I guess we've reached the point of no return in what will be the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, if that's not too strong a word.

I think it might be too light a word for what we're talking about here.

I think, as we'll see, that's a perfectly appropriate word to use for what is about.

So, the air attack is first.

That is the kind of prelude to the landing on the beaches at the bay itself.

And that's going to be vital, isn't it?

To kind of lay some of the groundwork for the ground evasion to work, in turn, to create the lodgement, in turn to destabilize Castro's hold on power.

A few words on the aerial component would be useful because it has, throughout the planning process, been an absolutely...

critical component of the plan's chances of success is there'll be an amphibious landing.

The The exile brigade will claim a strip of Cuban territory.

That strip will have an airstrip in it.

And the exiles will hold that for some time until broader conditions inside Cuba can be changed.

To do all of that presumes that you control the air.

You cannot control a strip of territory.

on or near a Cuban beach if you are being strafed and bombed by Castro's air force.

So you have to destroy Castro's air force.

And remember, we talked about some of these kind of ticking clocks that have made the CIA push Kennedy to move quickly.

One of them is that the Soviets, in weeks, will have MiG fighter aircraft sent to Cuba, and they're training Cuban pilots in Czechoslovakia and how to fly these planes.

But at this point in time, Castro's got only 36 combat aircraft, and it's kind of an old fleet.

Those 36 aircraft are more than capable of massacring the Cubans, the exiles, as they're on the beach.

But if they can be destroyed beforehand, it gives the exile brigade a real chance of success.

So on Saturday, April 15th, eight, not 16, because the number has been cut down, eight B-26 Douglas invaders flown by Cuban pilots conduct airstrikes on Castro's airfields.

They hit three Cuban airfields around the island, and they do so based on reconnaissance that had been conducted by U-2 overflights the the week before.

Now, these planes are not state-of-the-art, let's say.

They're from the Second World War.

They had been sitting in a boneyard near Tucson, Arizona for presumably over 15 years, and then sort of repaired and refurbished and repainted for use by this exile air force.

The exiles had practiced their gunnery skills on tin drum rafts floating in mountain lakes near their training camp in Guatemala.

None of the pilots have ever flown in combat, period.

Several of them were commercial airline pilots in Cuba before the revolution.

One of the B-26s is shot down in the raid.

The pilots are extremely optimistic, though, about how much of Castro's air force they have destroyed.

The reports are very encouraging.

The pilots think they might have destroyed more than 75% of Castro's air force, which in a single raid would be an astounding number to achieve.

So the raid finishes.

One of the B-26s is shot down, and the CIA conducts U-2 overflights.

That's the big spy plate that flies high, yeah.

Now, side note for all of you immint analysis nerds out there, Gordon, and I know we've probably got a few listening to the

imagery analysis in those days was completed at what was called the National Photographic Interpretation Center.

And that center was housed in a plain seven-story building in a rundown neighborhood of downtown Washington, D.C.

The ground floor of that building, Gordon, was an automobile showroom.

And the CIA had the four floors upstairs.

So the U2 photos are sent there for analysis.

I like to think that in the automobile showroom, there's like a secret door.

You climb into one of the cars, and there's like a hatch which takes you down and through a shaft into the secret place where they analyze the photos.

But I don't know.

It's a weird place to have cover.

That's undoubtedly how it went down, I'm sure.

It was a you got in a car and you put it in drive and you were sucked down a tube into the basement where you analyzed you two reconnaissance photographs.

Now, the true number of aircraft destroyed is not so great.

The pilots had seriously overestimated what they had done.

Only five of Castro's planes were destroyed.

A few others were damaged but intact.

It's like a 50% hit rate, but five of Castro's 36 planes are actually destroyed.

So it's not good.

But here's the thing.

The CIA plan calls for another round of airstrikes to happen on the morning of the invasion.

And Castro, according to this imagery, has apparently, and I think very inexplicably, left all of his planes clumped together at the airfield.

So when the B-26s go back for their next bombing,

they'll be able to finish the job.

And this is why the CIA had built into the plan, you know, two rounds of strikes.

So you think that's a little disappointing, but we'll get another go at it as the invasion kicks off.

But one question.

I mean, this is all supposed to be done by the Cuban exiles.

That's the cover story.

I mean,

when planes start bombing an airfield in Cuba, that's going to kind of arouse attention and also shortly lead Castro to kind of realize something big is going down, isn't it?

It is.

It is.

And of course, yeah, the U.S.

military is not involved.

So who in the world has conducted who are these mysterious pilots?

Who are these mysterious people who have bombed Castro's airfields so as part of the airstrike or concurrent to it there's actually a ninth plane that went out also a B-26 its engine cover as it flew kind of low and fast over Cuba if you look at it the engine cover is already pre-riddled with bullet holes that plane flies over Cuba it lands in Miami and it is a key element of the cover story that the CIA has cooked up for this bombing run.

The plane lands in Miami.

The pilot, a guy named Mario Zanika, he's wearing a Cuban-made t-shirt.

He's got Cuban cigarettes on him.

He's wearing a baseball cap with a made-in-Cuba tag.

Very subtly trying to tell people he might be Cuban.

He's very subtle.

He's Cuban.

All right.

He's definitely not come from Nicaragua, right, Gordon?

Okay.

He's come from

the United States.

or been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

He is taken into custody by Miami-Dade police, but he's got a cover story that was actually written for him in Washington.

And he says this.

He says, I'm part of a group of pilots who were plotting to defect.

We feared that Castro and his security services were onto us.

And so we defected with our planes.

We took off and we conducted a bombing run over Cuba as we defected.

Wearing made in Cuba baseball caps.

Wearing made in Cuba baseball caps.

We just thought we really wanted to stress that we're Cuban.

In a sign of things to come and just everything starting to go wrong everywhere this weekend, the cover story immediately begins to unravel.

And I have to say here, Gordon, it's done at the hands of just pesky journalists who

refuse to tow the comfort line for the good of that CIA cover story.

Yes.

So reporters in Miami, I mean, this is even before no one's talking to the CIA.

Reporters noticed that on Mario Zenica's B-26, there's tape that is sealing the barrels of the gun, which would be like, you know, a prophylactic you'd use to keep dust and dirt out and all this.

But he said he had fired them.

Why is there tape over the guns and fired them?

That's pretty, pretty bad attention to detail.

Another reporter, apparently there must have been someone down there on this beat who knew something or other about Castro's Air Force, because one journalist observed that the nose of Zuniga's B-26 was solid metal, while on Castro's Air Force, the B-26s have a plexiglass nose.

Doe.

Strike three is that the guns on Zuniga's B-26 are mounted in the nose, and on Castro's, they're mounted under the wings.

So this doesn't look like an aircraft that was part of Castro's Air Force.

I fear the CIA's carefully constructed cover story may be in the process of unraveling, David, thanks to pesky journalists.

Pesky journalists.

Rather obvious questions, some might suggest.

There's another problem, which is

in his story, Zanika talks about jettisoning auxiliary fuel tanks over Cuba.

And then there's the question of, well, if you came from Cuba to Miami, you don't need an aux fuel tank.

So this thing is unraveled in Miami pretty much from the get-go.

At the UN in New York, the Cubans and the Soviets start to make a fuss about the bombing because, I mean, this is the first time that something like this has happened in Cuba, and it's potentially very alarming if you're Fidel Castro or you're Nikita Khrushchev.

Now, a man named Adley Stevenson is the U.S.

permanent representative to the UN.

Adley Stevenson had, I believe, two failed runs for President Gordon in the 50s.

He is a, I mean, really was the senior politician in the Democrat Party before JFK.

He and JFK don't really get along with each other, and he's kind of been shunted aside to this role in New York where he's really outside of kind of JFK's decision-making circle.

Stevenson had received, and this is astounding to me, he had received a pre-brief from the Central Intelligence Agency from the Cuba Task Force, but he was briefed by an officer of that task force who was very well known for kind of not getting to the point in his verbal communications.

Brilliant for a briefer.

Which is great.

And task force leadership at the CIA realize, and they'll say later, that that briefing for Adley Stevenson contained the flavor, but not the facts.

So in other words, Stevenson had absolutely no idea that this bombing run was part of the covert action plan.

And he's basically been fed the CIA cover story, and then Stevenson begins to feed that cover story back to the UN.

So he holds up a photograph of Mario Zenigo's B-26.

It's been taken that morning, grabbed off the wires by Stevenson staff in New York.

And Adley says, you know, this has the markings of Castro's Air Force on the tail, and everyone can see this for themselves.

So Stevenson has been deceived.

He discovers this fairly quickly.

He's furious.

And we bring up this story, I think, for two reasons.

One is it shows immediately that a lot of the ins and outs of this plan that have been cooked up either among the exiles or at the CIA, as soon as they're encountering reality, are starting to come to pieces.

And then the second piece is that Adlee Stevenson, who in his role technically works at the State Department, is going to be so angry that he is going to write a memo that is going to land on the desk of the secretary of state at a very critical moment down the line and that is going to have a real impact ultimately i think on the decision making at the department of state and inside the white house on whether to give air support yeah reminds me a bit of colin powell standing up at the UN with intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in 2003 and being very confident and then finding out that the intelligence was less reliable than he thought and never quite living it down.

So there we go.

So in the meantime, the airstrikes were the precursor to lay the groundwork.

The first ones have not worked.

The cover story's fallen apart.

But of course, the ships are still heading towards the Bay of Pigs, aren't they?

With the men on board.

That's right.

The six ships of the Cuban Expeditionary Force, as it's called, are heading to Cuba.

There are 1,400 men aboard.

They are headed to hold off...

Castro's 30,000-man army and hold their little lodgement on the beach.

The flotilla is interesting because, again, these aren't American ships.

These are commercial freighters that have been chartered by the CIA from a shipping line called the Garcia Line, which is a company owned by a family of anti-Castro Cubans.

Two of the ships are converted landing craft of World War II vintage, so not the newest and shiniest objects in the shed.

They've been purchased by the CIA for $240,000 apiece.

And then on these, the brigade 2506 commanders and two CIA officers are going to run the show.

The situation on these ships is a little grim on their trip to Cuba.

There's not a lot of food.

The toilets are wooden planks rigged to the stern.

Toilets seem to be a recurring theme of our podcast, whether it's Pablo Escobar's or the toilets at various places.

Seems to be a detail you're particularly interested in, David, is like the state of toilets.

I feel like you and Escobar have this in common.

I'm always interested in the plumbing, Gordon.

I want to know what's the plumbing situation

inside this big operation.

And you know what?

The answer is, I mean, with Pablo's toilets, I mean, he was redoing bathrooms at every new safe house.

So his toilets were in great shape.

These are the opposite.

Exile brigade was not given proper plumbing.

Each of the ships of the Cuban Expeditionary Force has its own dedicated U.S.

Navy escort, which is keeping its distance.

So it's sort of escorting.

but not escorting.

And the kit that each of the brigade soldiers carries it's it's largely american surplus from the second world war or korea they carry an m1 garand semi-automatic rifle some of them have 45 caliber pistols and the uniforms that they're wearing are essentially duck hunting camouflage which has splattered kind of green and tan patterns on it but gordon what about that follow-up batch of airstrikes that was scheduled for the day, for really the hours before the invasion is supposed to start.

Well,

those strikes had been kind of put off for, quote, political reasons.

This was the word that came down to the CIA task force from the White House, which only left one day to destroy Castro's Air Force, the morning of the invasion, April 17th.

Even Castro later will say that he was confused by this because once that bombing run happens three days prior, I mean, Castro thinks it's the prelude to an actual invasion.

And Castro later says, Sunday went by, he marvels, and nothing happened.

And Castro's using this time to make a coup even harder.

His security forces have been working, I mean, literally over the weekend, to round up thousands of dissidents, put them in makeshift prisons, shooting people they deem to be spies, and making it really hard, I think, for the invasion to trigger a kind of political uprising or a coup that it is intending to trigger.

And do we think that the political reasons for the second wave of airstrikes, not to go ahead of basically JFK saying, I don't want to do this, maybe is the cover story is unraveling or for whatever reason, but that's already slightly dooming this to disaster.

It is, because what it means is instead of having done those strikes two days before and looking at the imagery and getting a sense of how many aircraft Castra has left, you're reliant on one more run and that's it.

It's Sunday, the 16th of April.

JFK goes to mass.

He hits some golf balls that afternoon and then he calls Dickie Bissell at the CIA just before 2 p.m.

and says, go ahead.

So this is the final authorization for the invasion of Cuba the next morning.

Now, where's Alan Dulles, Gordon?

Dulles has been absent for really the last couple episodes of this series, hasn't he?

Yeah, the shadowy spy master, the globalist intriguer, is in Puerto Rico giving a speech.

It's really about Dulles, and he actually liked to be out of town when big operations were going down.

He thought that kind of maintained the cover that the CIA wasn't behind an operation.

If he was like giving a speech in Puerto Rico or he was somewhere else, because then people will go, oh, well, it can't possibly be a CIA op because the boss is off-site.

Although it's probably also a little bit convenient for him as well to be, to be out of town.

Oh, see, I knew you were going to say that.

I knew you were going to kind kind of raise the specter of Dulles having kept his distance.

I don't think there's anything to that.

I think it is much more likely that Dulles understood that he hadn't been deep into the planning.

He had the scheduled speech already.

They didn't want the Soviets or the Cubans to think anything was amiss.

Just go forward with your plan, sort of as scheduled.

I do think it has and will have immense consequences because it means that instead of having Alan Dulles sort of intervening with Kennedy, which would have carried more weight,

we have Dickie Bissell doing it.

Dickie Bissell has been running the show up to this point, but he's not the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

So, in any case, Dulles is not around.

There is another CIA character who we haven't chatted much about, and that is the deputy director of the CIA, Charles Cable.

Now, Cable

on Sunday, like every good senior official in this story, is also playing golf.

He is a four-star Air Force general.

He technically, of course, outranks Bissell.

I mean, he's technically the number two at the CIA, but he's at the agency not so much to run the place, but to give the appearance of sort of some military polish to the organization.

And he really hasn't been involved deeply in the planning.

But

because Dulles is gone, and honestly, for some reasons that even now seem mysterious, Cable shows up on the Sunday afternoon at the Cuba Task Force and gets involved.

He asks if the airstrikes on the morning of the invasion, so this final chance to go after Castro's Air Force.

Cable says, you know, have these been approved?

And of course, these airstrikes have always been in the plans.

But Cable, says, I better check this out.

Okay.

Much to the consternation of the Cuba task force, Cable goes off and calls the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk.

And when Bissell learns of this, he reportedly says,

Cable.

All right.

So Cable has got off and gotten this operation that has already been approved.

Let's let's reapprove it.

And now, just like Ghostbusters, Gordon, we have these two streams.

crossing, right?

Don't cross the streams.

That's right.

That's right.

One of them is that the very furious Adley Stevenson, the permanent representative to the UN in New York, has sent an absolutely scathing cable to Dean Rusk and to Alan Dulles about the debacle at the UN.

Okay.

And then now we have Cable, the deputy director of the CIA, calling Dean Rusk about the airstrikes.

And Rusk kind of takes all of this as an opportunity to revisit the wisdom of those strikes.

And listeners, if you needed any further reminder, the airstrikes, the destruction of Castro's Air Force is critical.

Yeah.

All along, they've known that if it's going to work, they need air cover.

So Rusk, who's not in favor of the airstrikes and really, I think, has spent much of the spring kind of chipping away at the operation.

without actually saying he opposes it, calls the president.

And Kennedy is out at his country retreat in Glenora, a place outside Washington.

The president has also just played nine holes of golf, and he listens to Rusk about the airstrikes.

And, you know, Rusk is saying he's got concerns with them.

Rusk will later state that when Kennedy suddenly found out there were additional airstrikes coming, he was surprised.

I'm not signed on to this, is what JFK says.

He is not signed on to the D-Day airstrikes.

Hang on a sec.

Surely he has.

Yeah.

So is he playing a slight game with it?

I don't think he is playing a game.

The D-Day airstrikes had been included in the pre-invasion briefing papers that Bissell had brought down to the White House.

And specifically, they had been in final briefing that Bissell had given on the 12th of April.

So we're talking about four or five days earlier.

I think this gets back to the sort of cave of unreported exceptions point, where you can have someone who's thinking, Bissell, I've briefed you on this.

You know, this is coming.

And the president has not absorbed it.

He has not absorbed it for whatever reason.

Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting.

Some people say that JFK had a habit when he was being briefed, he'd go kind of, yeah, yeah.

And people would take that as approval, or at least a kind of sense he'd understood it.

But it was more his kind of slightly relaxed, informal way of listening to something.

And we also know JFK at times was on quite a lot of medication and other things.

So I think it's an open question, isn't it?

Whether Bissell had failed to brief or Kennedy had been briefed and failed to take it in, but something has gone wrong, which is the theme, I guess, of this series at the nexus between political leadership and intelligence leadership at this point.

Something has clearly gone wrong.

Everyone involved could put that on a t-shirt.

Something has gone wrong.

And all of the CIA planners had certainly taken...

the airstrikes and the condition of air superiority for granted.

But of course, what matters most that night is the opinion of John F.

Kennedy.

And Kennedy apparently has not signed on.

And so, you know, you think about really the constant admonition throughout the process of, you know, less noise, make it less like World War II.

Now there's, there's tons of noise everywhere, right?

There's noise about more airstrikes.

There's noise from Adley Stevenson,

there's noise from Dean Rusk at state.

So Around 9:30

that night, the Sunday evening, the National Security Advisor Mac Bundy calls Cable,

and he says the airstrikes are to be canceled until they can be conducted from a strip within the beachhead.

No strikes until after the invasion succeeds.

So you've got to take the airstrip, you've got to hold the beachhead, and then you bring the B-26s over from Nicaragua, and you run the air operation from essentially the airstrip near the Bay of Pigs.

And Cable,

despite his role in kind of instigating this doubt and setting this chain of events in motion, he's absolutely stunned.

I mean, he's a military man who fought in the Second World War and sort of understands how important the airstrikes are to the plan's ultimate success.

I mean, Cable has played a slightly almost comic role in this.

He's like,

let me get involved.

Let me intervene.

Oh, airstrikes.

I better go talk to the president about airstrikes.

And then suddenly the, oh, airstrikes.

The airstrikes are off.

I mean, he's kind of slightly set in motion some of the failures that are going to kind of damn this operation hasn't he slightly kind of clownish role i mean i don't mean to be rude to mr cable i don't i don't mean to be rude to him but obviously say something rude about him he was definitely an agent of chaos that sunday evening yeah he didn't mean to be but he was right yeah so cable is is stunned and furious and he talks to dickie bissell and explains what's happened and so cable and bissell go see Dean Rusk at the State Department to plead their case.

And Rusk, who doesn't want the airstrikes to occur and probably doesn't want the invasion to happen, says, you know, political requirements are overriding things.

And by the way, guys, the strikes are really not that important anyway, because we'll just start them once the Cuban exile force takes the beaches.

It'll be fine.

So it's about 11 p.m.

on Sunday night.

We're an hour away from the scheduled midnight launch of said airstrikes.

And Rusk, with Cable and Bissell in his office, calls the president.

Now, Rusk Rusk lays out their concerns, Bissell and Cable's concerns about the cancellation.

And Bissell and Cable can hear what he's saying on the phone.

They can't hear what the president is saying in response, but they can hear Rusk kind of laying out the CIA's case for the airstrikes.

Rusk on this phone call then gives his own argument against the strikes.

JFK responds briefly.

No one is even to this day quite sure what he said, but it's definitely not favorable to the CIA men.

And Rusk asks if they want to speak to the president.

And here we have another example

of a sin of omission on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency, because both Cable and Bissell say no.

Cable says, I don't think there's any point.

And then Bissell says, I think I agree with that.

So they let it stand.

Which seems to me to be more than a mistake because

they know that this is vital for this working.

Here it is on the line where the airstrike is going to happen, and they're not going to make the case.

I mean, if you believe in it, if you know how important it is, make the case.

Don't let Rusk sway the debate.

And they just kind of opt out.

Which, again, if you want to be conspiratorially minded, you could say it was setting him up for failure.

But I'm not quite sure I believe that.

This does feel like more just like a screw-up at this point.

Yes.

And I think Bissell

years later, he'll see this as a major mistake of his and a turning point in the whole operation because he has essentially had an opportunity to weigh in with the president at the 11th hour to change his mind.

And Bissell, I think inexplicably decides not to do that.

So Cable and Bissell rush back to brief the Cuba task force on the change just as the Cuban Expeditionary Force is offshore of Cuba.

And the CIA's Cuba task force predictably goes absolutely nuts at the news that those airstrikes are canceled.

The chief of that task force, Jake Esterline, says, this is the goddamnest thing I ever heard of.

So there with the invasion task force primed to land on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs.

Let's leave it and we'll pick it up next time to see how, I mean, this operation, which this air of doom hanging over it unfolds in the coming hours, but also plays this fascinating role in kind of shaping

the way JFK sees the CIA, the relationship between the two, presaging in many ways the assassination, whatever you think of the CIA's role.

A reminder that if you want to hear the whole series, if you can't wait, you can join the Declassified Club.

The restisclassified.com and you'll get access to the special series looking at the questions surrounding JFK's assassination and who was really behind it.

And including whether Gordon actually

believes the insane theories that he has been spouting off in this series.

We'll find out in that mini-series if Gordon is truly high on his own supply.

Unless they get to me first, David.

Unless they get to me first.

But hopefully, I'll be back for next time.

See you then.

We'll see you next time.