To create a convincing air of provenance to accompany the first air attack, a rebel pilot flew a CIA-supplied B-26 directly from the invaders’ air base in Nicaragua to Miami and, before the assembled press, pretended to be a defector from Castro’s air force. The charade dissolved under questioning from the meddlesome free press as it quickly became apparent that the plane had never fired its guns. Also, it had a metal nose; Castro’s B-26 bombers were equipped with plastic noses. Bissell was able to fake out the State Department and the United Nations quite a bit easier. While news of the attack swept through the halls of power around the world, the U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson, a convenient egghead stooge, was assured by his superiors at the State Department that the “Cuban defectors” were, in fact, pure Cuban, which he unwittingly proclaimed to the world during a U.N. debate.
But the connection between the United States and the plausibly deniable air strike was beginning to reveal itself. Castro declared the United States was behind the strike, and the Russians seconded it. The veil of secrecy was in tatters. Kennedy, always more concerned about upholding the secrecy of the invasion than its success, panicked. So when the time came to approve the next air strike for dawn the following Monday, which of course he theoretically knew nothing about, he canceled it. This air strike would be the one to wipe out the remainder of Castro’s air force, and the most critical piece of the operation, if Kennedy wished it to succeed. He still wasn’t sure.
With the cover blown for the first strike, a second one would make it plain that the invasion had U.S. backing, once and for all revealing that it was not Bermuda or Morocco behind the invasion, but Uncle Sam. Bissell and other CIA leaders pressed Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to allow the attack. But the president didn’t budge. And with that one executive decision, JFK sealed the fate of the invasion. It was doomed before the first rebel hit the beaches. In an effort to prevent the world from finding out what it already knew, JFK had flushed the entire operation down the drain. Bissell had failed to fully impress upon the president that the air attack was the crucial element in the whole affair. Kennedy failed to grasp this fact or knew it but didn’t care. JFK closed the umbrella.
As the rebel bombers stood down, the doomed invaders churned toward the beach during the early morning of Monday, April 17, blissfully unaware the air strike had fallen victim to JFK’s whims. Led by Cuban frogmen whose job was to scout out the beaches shortly before the arrival of the main force, the invaders waited a few miles offshore ready to land during the night. At the last moment, the frogmen were joined by their trainer, Grayston Lynch, a former army special forces officer who had signed on with the CIA in 1960. Lynch was a veteran of the actual D-Day landings and winner of two Silver Stars.
Lynch planned to establish a command post a few plausibly deniable yards offshore. As they neared their landing spot, the frogmen found a well-lit beach and a bodega full of people. Seeing the confidence of the Cubans slipping, Lynch, who was more gung-ho to liberate Cuba than many of his Cuban comrades, steered his dinghy toward a dark stretch of beach. Just before they landed, a Cuban army jeep stopped nearby and swept the area with a spotlight. Lynch opened up with his machine gun, knocking out the jeep and killing two Cuban soldiers. His rattling machine gun had given up the element of surprise, but the frogmen still secured the beach and radioed the rebels to land. Lynch, realizing that nobody was actually in charge of the landing despite months of preparation, took command. The Cubanization of the invasion didn’t survive the campaign’s first shot.
Shortly after Lynch took out the jeep on the beach, Castro was told of the invasion. He sprang into action and made two phone calls. That call, coupled with Kennedy’s refusal to send the second wave of bombers, sealed the doom of the invasion. Castro notified the head of the Cuban military academy and ordered him to take his cadets and repel the invasion. He also phoned Enrique Carreras, his ace pilot, with instructions to attack the invading transport ships with his Sea Fury, a World War II–era propeller fighter. That was all Castro needed to do. He could have gone back to bed.
By the end of that first day, the invaders were pinned down on the beach, their ammunition nearly exhausted, their spirits declining, two of their key ships sunk by the creaky sharpshooter Carreras. Castro kept up the pressure by rushing more troops to the scene.
As a comparison in leadership between the heads of two ideologically opposed systems, the differences were stark. Back in the dynamic States, Kennedy issued orders from his retreat in Virginia; down in the totalitarian state, the dynamic Castro personally joined the attacking columns and took active command of his defenders. He positioned his troops, directed which routes they should take, and kept in constant contact with his military leaders. Kennedy meanwhile was kept apprised of the situation from wire reports that were hours behind the pace of the actual fighting. This distance did not deter Kennedy from issuing orders directing troops on the ground, trying to micromanage the war from the White House. The president made snap decisions without fully understanding their implications, thus putting politics over victory. Castro made snap decisions with a total mastery of the situation focused solely on a quick and decisive military victory. The landing zone happened to be one of the dictator’s favorite fishing areas. He was intimately familiar with all its back roads and villages. And he knew that its isolation behind impenetrable swamps made it an ideal location to establish a beachhead. Success depended on speed.
As the situation on the beach deteriorated, just after midnight on April 18 Kennedy broke away from a White House reception to hold a quick meeting in tails. Bissell told him the situation was dire, but one way out existed: send in American jets from the carrier Essex stationed off Cuba to clean up Castro’s forces. Bissell always expected that when this moment of truth arrived, JFK, a dedicated Commie hater, would openly commit U.S. forces rather than see the operation die. In fact, since Bissell had read the CIA’s analysis the year before, he knew this was the only way it would work.
But JFK insisted the United States would not become mixed up in the affair. Admiral Burke, chief of naval operations, snapped at the president that the country was already involved. The president stood fast. Apparently, American involvement to Kennedy meant nothing less than having the White House staff actually machine-gunning enemy tanks. But at this point he was not thinking about victory for the invaders. His focus was trying to save himself politically from what he now realized was a huge mistake. Kennedy told Bissell it was time for the invaders to melt into the mountains and continue the fight as guerrillas. Bissell pointed out that since the invaders were sixty miles from the mountains, it was not an option. At this point, on the fifth day of military operations, one can assume Kennedy should have understood the importance of moving the invasion site. A kingdom for Google maps!
Whether he was especially unlucky or just idiotic is not clear, but either way E. Howard Hunt is a two-time loser. First, he played a key role in the Bay of Pigs debacle, as a spy in Cuba trying to organize the rebel political leaders, using the code name Eduardo, a sly attempt to blend in with the Cubans. A decade later, now working out of the basement of the Nixon White House, presumably under his real name, he led the botched Watergate break-in that turned a second-rate crime into the greatest presidential scandal of all time. A good hint that his failures were of his own making comes from the company he kept. His key sidekick during the Cuban debacle was Bernard Barker, the very man who was caught red-handed in the Watergate hotel on that fateful night. With him was the Cuban Eugenio Rolando Martinez. Both men had address books with Hunt’s name and phone number alongside the note “W. House.” How anyone was able to then link the robbery to the White House with those paltry clues is unknown. As one CIA colleague said, Double Trouble Eduardo had consistent judgment. “It was always wrong.”