For some time afterward at CIA, General Cabell would be known as “Old Rice and Beans” while many agency folk picked up “forward leaning” for their lexicon. General Cabell leaves this episode unmentioned in his memoir.

  Seaborne supply had its own difficulties: the CIA did not even have a maritime unit. The agency had always borrowed from the U.S. Navy. Once the project began, boat operations were improvised. Cubans themselves were quicker off the mark, with Cuban-owned boats Reefer and Wasp beginning supply deliveries in September 1960. Typically CIA case officers like Rudy Enders arranged supplies to haul, or coordinated the Miami end of operations to exfiltrate anti-Castro people or insert agents. Around November the agency actually acquired the Wasp from its Cuban owners. In 1960 a dozen Cuban or CIA boat missions took place off Cuba. Throughout the period before the invasion, boats carried fifty-one agents, radio operators, or rebel leaders and extracted seventy-nine persons. Early in 1961 Castro imported fast patrol boats and radars from Russia to block the boat activities.

  Around December 1960 Castro’s Fuerzas Armadas Revoluccionarias (FAR) became actively involved in a major counterinsurgency campaign against the Escambray, beginning a blockade to force hungry guerrillas to emerge in search of food, when they would be captured or killed. By the spring of 1961 the FAR blockade had the guerrillas starving. In all, aircraft dropped almost fourteen tons of materials. Perhaps a third actually reached the rebels while boats landed almost four times as much, again with some seized by Castro forces. This amounted to very thin gruel, and at some point there were probably rebels wishing the CIA had in fact dropped rice and beans to them. The failures perplexed Jake Esterline and his officers.

  Meanwhile the analytical component of CIA, the Directorate of Intelligence, had been cut completely out of the action. From Esterline on down, no one in the DO was allowed to request any intelligence analysis that might even suggest what impended for Cuba. The analysts did not “need to know” about the uprising. As a result they could not furnish effective support to the paramilitary planners.

  The chief analyst, Deputy Director Robert Amory, Jr., went to many of the same Georgetown parties as the secret warriors but, even privately, heard nothing about JM/Ate. Washington gossip being what it is, Amory undoubtedly found out. He also sat through a Capitol Hill briefing on January 6, 1961, where Allen Dulles presented the Senate CIA subcommittee some details on the Cuban project. But Amory had no standing to supply reports that might call the project into question. The U.S. Intelligence Board analyzed Soviet aid to Cuba in November 1960 and February 1961, but without deeper knowledge of CIA plans their reporting failed to tell WH/4 much of what it needed to know about Castro’s capabilities both against the resistance and an invasion.

  To cap it all, the CIA from Trax intervened in Guatemalan politics. On November 14 a number of army officers revolted against President Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, who had allowed the CIA into his country. Dick Bissell awoke to a 3:30 A.M. phone call from the duty officer at Quarters Eye: a dispatch had just come in from Lt. Col. Frank Egan at Trax, conveying Ydigoras’s demand for the CIA Cubans to help him. Bissell spoke to the State Department, only to learn the diplomats would not decide until later in the day. Egan needed an answer in an hour. Bissell cabled Egan on his own authority permitting the use of CIA pilots but not the exile troops. He recalls no evidence the troops were ever used. But President Eisenhower was later briefed that Cubans deployed to Guatemala City and Puerto Barrios, disarming the rebels. It seems that two planeloads flew to the affected places but never got off the aircraft. Cuban veterans like Felix Rodriguez have spoken and written about the intervention. The U.S. Navy also responded, dispatching Amphibious Squadron Ten to the Caribbean with the helicopter carrier Boxer, five destroyers, and a contingent of two thousand Marines.

  President Ydigoras survived and with him CIA’s privileges in Guatemala. But Ydigoras became restive as the CIA Cubans overstayed their allotted two months. The agency asked for two more; after that, Esterline used his frequent trips to assuage the Guatemalan leader.

  The CIA contributed to rupturing secrecy. In his effort to recruit Cubans in Miami, Howard Hunt took photos of Trax. The pictures got wide distribution and found their way into the Miami Herald. Publication outraged Esterline. Hunt’s effort to sanitize the photos did little to disguise their true meaning. Sets of the pictures even reached the Cuban government—the Ministry of Information gave them to a Havana newspaper.

  In Eisenhower’s councils after November 1960, it would be implausible to argue that Project Ate/Pluto remained secret. The most that could be claimed was that details of it were still hidden. Total surprise became impossible.

  President Eisenhower had to be frustrated with leaks, the repeated recasting of the operation, and the OAS’s complete rejection of sanctions against Havana. Bilateral trade became the one area where Eisenhower pretty much had his way. Ike beamed at the performance of Bob Anderson, coordinator of U.S. economic actions. In mid-March 1960 the United States revoked export licenses already issued for a sale of helicopters. Two months later Eisenhower terminated all existing aid. In July he drastically reduced the quota for Cuban sugar after amendment of the law permitted such revisions. On October 14 Fidel completed nationalizing the Cuban sugar industry. The administration answered by embargoing almost all trade. Political relations deteriorated. Twice during 1960 U.S. Ambassador Phillip Bonsal was recalled from Havana for “consultations.” After Castro demanded withdrawal of half the embassy personnel, the United States, on January 3, 1961, broke diplomatic relations. The final message from Jim Noel’s CIA station in Havana went out about noon that day, reporting his code materials destroyed.

  The rupture of relations occurred after the Cuban project expanded yet again. The new concept, aired in Allen Dulles’s office the week after the 1960 presidential election, envisioned a conventional amphibious landing. The Cuban exiles could establish a beachhead, declare a provisional government, then call for American help. The plan for an invasion went to the 5412 Group on November 16, to President-elect John F. Kennedy two days later, and to Eisenhower on the 29th.

  Ike made no final decision, but he demanded expedited preparations. At the meeting of November 29, which included many of the same people who sat on 5412, he questioned the boldness and imagination behind the project, given the necessity for plausible deniability, as well as whether actions were effective. The president repeated the concerns of William D. Pawley, who had complained to Eisenhower about the size of the operation and the political character of the Frente. (Pawley, a presidential crony, sided with Howard Hunt’s view of exile leadership as too far left.) Ike showed his unhappiness. Referring to the transition, he said he did not wish to be “in the position of turning over the government in the midst of a developing emergency.”

  If a “developing emergency” existed, no fault lay with Eisenhower’s intelligence overseers. More than three dozen 5412 Group meetings touched on Cuba between the project approval and the end of the Eisenhower administration. From November 1960 on, eight to ten of these involved detailed discussion. On December 8 the CIA mounted a full-scale briefing. Jack Hawkins described the conventional invasion option, including the latest developments. Hawkins detailed a concept including an amphibious landing on the Cuban coast preceded by airstrikes, to seize and hold a beachhead, then draw dissident elements to join up, hopefully triggering a general uprising. There would be extensive air preparation—up to a hundred flights a month for many weeks, some of them bombing missions.

  The landing force would be a heavily armed unit of 600 to 750 exiles with U.S. training and equipment. Frank Egan described the Cuban force at Camp Trax and its superior motivation and leadership. Egan felt these exiles would have no trouble exacting a heavy toll among Castro’s larger forces. The 5412 Group issued no formal approval but encouraged the CIA to proceed.

  The agency complained anew of Pentagon foot-dragging, specifically the refusal of Special Forces personnel for temporary duty in training the exiles. It was true. Since August the Office of Special Operations, which advised the secretary of defense on covert operations, had been registering objections; both Graves Erskine and Ed Lansdale voiced criticism. Lansdale was especially acerbic in his comments to Undersecretary James H. Douglas, who represented the Pentagon at Cuba meetings. In the discussion of December 8, Douglas agreed to recommend the release of twenty-seven Special Forces advisers but made clear that the Pentagon in no way supported CIA’s plan. Lansdale spoke up, but Allen Dulles interrupted to say he was not a principal on this committee. Undersecretary Douglas countered that the Group should indeed listen. Months later, when CIA air boss Stan Beerli told an investigating panel that the agency had had to fight for every single thing it got out of the Pentagon, the complaint really referred to Lansdale and his colleague Fletcher Prouty.

  President Eisenhower worried about synchronization among the U.S. agencies. At Ike’s November meeting he created a coordinating panel with a senior official from the State Department plus one from the agency. The conversation took place immediately after the president spoke to William Pawley, who had wanted a single coordinator and proposed himself for the job. Instead Ike went for the panel. The State Department nominated Whiting Willauer, Dick Bissell chose Tracy Barnes. On December 7 the president approved. These men handled everything related to Ate. Willauer, the chairman, who had done so well in maintaining the Honduras base for the CIA’s Guatemala coup, was recalled from Costa Rica, ostensibly as special deputy to Thomas Mann, the assistant secretary for Latin America. He usually took the CIA side in disputes. The Special Group itself continued to furnish overall guidance.

  At Willauer’s first meeting with his focal group the ambassador’s vision emerged as even more expansive than CIA’s—five to ten thousand Latino volunteers to train in the United States and get rid of Castro. A Pentagon representative listened aghast. Willauer also called attention very early on to the skimpy air side of the project—his experience with Civil Air Transport showed here.

  The leaders of the secret war gathered again on January 3, 1961, to discuss progress as well as the rupture of diplomatic relations with Cuba. Bissell reported that Ydigoras wanted CIA forces out of Guatemala by March 1. The exiles’ own morale would suffer if they did not soon see action. The time problem also applied at the OAS, observed Willauer. American bases, unacceptable to Eisenhower, were the only suitable alternative. No one spoke of the difficulties of CIA’s Miami base, the ineffective aerial supply, the lack of visible strengthening of resistance on Cuba, or the continuing popularity of Castro, and precious little would be said of the deep enmities among exile leaders. Participants instead emphasized their confidence in the troops. Gordon Gray mentioned a report calling the Cubans the best army in Latin America. Although he saw some equipment shortages, Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer agreed. Within weeks, frustrated, these wonderful exile troops would mutiny.

  President Eisenhower summarized: the two reasonable alternatives were to support the Cubans to go in March, or abandon the operation.

  Exactly seven days later the New York Times published an account of Cuban exiles training in Guatemala.

  Did the president bequeath his successor a “developing emergency”?

  Eisenhower’s presidency ended with the Cuban project at mid-course. But during his final months in office, and especially after the election that Kennedy won, Eisenhower had sparked a remarkable surge in preparations, including a much-expanded operational concept. Then he left Jack Kennedy to choose between the tough alternatives Ike had summed up on January 3. Only two days before Kennedy’s inauguration, Eisenhower’s councils were still grappling with problems that could only be passed on. The horns of the dilemma were even clearer then: Whiting Willauer wrote a memo on January 18 that explicitly said the Cuba project might not succeed under existing plans, that to proceed assumed the United States stood ready to intervene. The next morning, at the last Eisenhower-Kennedy meeting of the transition, Ike turned to Cuba. According to Clark Clifford’s notes, the president insisted that the United States had to support “to the utmost” those who struggled against Castro, and that responsible action meant “to do whatever is necessary.”

  The postmortem conducted later by a panel under Gen. Maxwell Taylor concluded that it had been incumbent on the president, at the latest by November–December 1960, to make the basic decision as to how far the United States was willing to go.

  By not confronting that choice himself, Dwight Eisenhower left questions history has yet to confront openly. Rather, given events that actually took place on Kennedy’s watch, and JFK’s forthright acceptance of responsibility, historians have repeatedly presented the Cuba fiasco as a pure artifact of the Kennedy presidency. But Kennedy’s people implicitly trusted the secret warriors. Eisenhower had been at the apex of the secret war for eight years; he knew better. He knew the difficulties of the 5412 Group, the CIA’s penchant for avoiding implementation review once approvals were given, and the conflicts between military and civilian intelligence agencies. Ike knew the status of Project Ate and its specific problems. Until the moment JFK took his oath, President Eisenhower could have shut down the project with a few words. But he didn’t. Ike believed in the secret war.

  The declassified records of the Cuba meetings during Eisenhower’s final months reveal that the arguments given Kennedy were well rehearsed. Many knew the weaknesses in the CIA’s plan. Castro’s forces were clearly more powerful than the exiles could muster. The point had also been noted, by the State Department on January 3 and most recently by Willauer on the 18th, that American forces would have to back up the invasion. The conditions for success simply had not been created.

  President Eisenhower’s stated motive—to counter a leftist or Communist Fidel Castro—evolved despite the lack of Cuban diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Actual exchanges of Cuban and Soviet diplomats occurred only during the summer of 1960, when the CIA already had its project in motion. The rise of U.S. hostility in many ways resembles the tragic enmity Eisenhower permitted to develop toward Nasser and Egypt, with peremptory choices for covert action, dismissals of the foreign leaders’ words and deeds, and an almost willful refusal to understand their positions. The net result put America on the wrong side of its own advocacy of national self-determination. Covert actions to impose regime change, even if successful, also put Washington in a poor position to insist that America stood for democracy.

  The question of direct American involvement in Ate/Pluto also illustrates the control system gone awry. That no Americans were to be involved in combat remained a fundamental assumption. After the fiasco in Indonesia it is doubtful whether Ike would have accepted any direct involvement. But before the end of his administration, Americans were flying with the exile air force, and CIA officers were commanding the rebel LCI mother ships.

  Eisenhower told Max Taylor just weeks after the Cuban operation went down that he held no responsibility, he’d never approved any invasion. Two years after Kennedy’s death, Eisenhower repeated the claim in interviews and in his memoir Waging Peace: he had never approved a plan because the exiles never had a unified political leadership. According to Ike there had been a “program” but no plan. This recollection is supported by his son and other White House staff. Yet the date on the CIA’s plan for a conventional invasion near Trinidad, Cuba, is December 6, 1960. There was a D-Day too—March 1961—as well as a specific timetable for invasion-related events.

  Eisenhower’s memory is correct only in a technical sense: he withheld sanction due to the problems with Project Ate. But he personally participated in numerous deliberations on the Cuba plan—throwing plausible deniability to the wind—and pushed for more action. He did approve an invasion-dependent scheme, and he knew that John Kennedy would have to execute or cancel it. Ike also knew that Kennedy lacked the detailed understanding that might have guided a decision. Eisenhower’s not acting to halt the operation essentially constituted approval.

  At numerous meetings, Gordon Gray remembers, the president repeated one of his mantras: “Now boys,” Ike would say, “if you don’t intend to go through with this, let’s stop talking about it.” Eisenhower did not take his own advice. Within months the result would crash atop the secret warriors’ enterprise like a ton of bricks.

  * In India in 1756 the Nawab of Bengal, resisting British encroachments, had captured Calcutta and imprisoned Englishmen in the “Black Hole,” a storeroom in the fort. Dozens died before the East India Company recaptured the city. Eisenhower used the phrase to make out Castro as an oppressor.

  † In actuality the original cryptonym was JM/Arc, but this would be compromised in December, replaced with Ate. To avoid confusion this narrative will adopt the later nomenclature.

  12

  The Bay of Pigs: Failure at Playa Girón

  THE CUBA OPERATION almost never came off, and in every way it would have been better if it had not. Each day Castro grew more entrenched and his militia more numerous and better armed. Each day the exiles lost a little credibility. But Jake Esterline and his bosses, aware of the stakes, had no intention of moving against Castro until their exile force had been fully prepared, and the U.S. military trainers reached Camp Trax only late in the game. Jack Hawkins needed a solid, on-the-ground evaluation of the Cuban force. General Lemnitzer could say whatever he liked at White House meetings, but his were paper assessments based on figures for equipment and such. Hawkins and Esterline realized that many of the Cubans’ weapons had just been issued, and the exile unit, swollen every day by new recruits, no longer actually met U.S. military standards. Agency trainers like Napoleon Valeriano and William Buckley knew a lot but lacked the up-to-date awareness of the professional military. Without Special Forces trainers, the CIA believed their Cubans would not be set until the fall of 1961. The Cubans thought themselves plenty ready and viewed American higher-ups, if not their immediate supervisors, with increasing suspicion and scorn, especially the Filipino trainer Valeriano.