The Bay of Pigs was a CIA-organized invasion of Cuba by approximately 1,500 Cuban exiles that landed on April 17, 1961, and was defeated within 72 hours. The operation — code-named Operation Pluto by the CIA and Operation Zapata at the Pentagon — was a deliberate, on-the-record (if covert) American attempt to overthrow the Castro government. For more on the CIA article; the follow-on crisis is covered in Cuban Missile Crisis article.
The invasion had been planned since 1959. The CIA’s deputy director for plans, Richard Bissell, working with a small staff and a former FBI agent, E. Howard Hunt, organized the recruitment of the exile force at a camp in Guatemala. The brigade — numbered 2506 in the agency records — was trained in guerrilla tactics, amphibious assault — the use of the World War II-era equipment the agency supplied. The plan called for a night landing at the Bay of Pigs (Bahía de Cochinos) on Cuba’s southern coast, a march into the Escambray Mountains, a hoped-for popular uprising in the cities, prompt fall of Castro. President Eisenhower had approved the plan in March 1960; on his last day in office, January 20, 1961, he met with Allen Dulles and reaffirmed his support.
Kennedy takes over
President Kennedy and his advisers reviewed the plan in January and February 1961. Kennedy was uneasy. The planners, led by Bissell and the Joint Chiefs’ representative, General Charles Cabell, were confident. The President asked the Joint Chiefs to examine the operation; they replied in March that it had “a fair chance of success” but that a final judgment would depend on Cuban popular reaction. Kennedy made two changes: he reduced the number of air strikes the CIA had planned against the Cuban air force, on the grounds that surprise was already gone, and he pushed the invasion date from early April to April 17. He did not cancel the operation.
The invasion was doomed before it began. The two aircraft carrier groups allocated to provide close air support were too far from the beach. The CIA’s B-26 bombers, painted to look like defecting Cuban air force aircraft, were visibly American. The pre-invasion air strikes on April 15 destroyed a small number of Castro’s aircraft but did not neutralize the air force; the surviving T-33s, Sea Furies, and B-26s attacked the landing force the next day. The supply ship that was supposed to deliver the brigade’s second-wave equipment was held back by its captain. By April 19, the brigade was surrounded.
The aftermath
The political fallout was severe. Castro claimed 114 brigade members killed, with the rest of the roughly 1,500-man force captured; he held the prisoners for almost two years, returning them in December 1962 in exchange for $53 million in food and medicine paid for by American private donations organized by James Donovan. Kennedy took public responsibility on April 21, calling the failure his own. The President then asked his representative, General Maxwell Taylor, and his former law partner, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., to investigate; the Taylor Report, completed in June 1961, was a withering critique of the agency’s planning.
The long-term consequences were worse than the short ones. Castro, convinced that the United States would not stop at covert action, turned to the Soviet Union for military protection. The agreement between Anastas Mikoyan and Castro in late 1961 set the stage for Operation Anadyr, the Soviet deployment of MRBMs and IRBMs to Cuba in the summer of 1962. The October 1962 crisis that followed is, in a direct line, the consequence of April 1961. The CIA’s reputation within the administration, badly damaged by the failure, took years to rebuild. Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and the Deputy Director for Plans, Charles Cabell, all resigned in the weeks after the operation.
The operation is now also remembered as a turning point in the institutional culture of the agency. The willingness of Bissell and Dulles to tell the President what they wanted him to hear — and the corresponding willingness of the President to accept the cheerful version of the plan — has been a case study at the Kennedy School and at the agency’s own training facilities. For the broader context of CIA covert action, see the CIA article.