Commandante Jose Ramon Fernandez, one of Castro’s best field commanders, awakened by Fidel between 2 and 3 A.M., received four calls from the Maximum Leader before he could dress and get on the road. Fernandez would take over at Central Australia and seal the causeway exit. Castro had been at general staff headquarters, “Point One,” on Saturday morning when the exile B-26 bombers hit his airfields; he had no intention of being caught flatfooted. By 3:15 he had swung into action. In less than an hour the radio posts at Playa Girón and Playa Larga fell silent. Fidel took personal control. He ordered the command at Santa Clara to send Battalion 117 to Covadonga, another of the several exits from the Bay of Pigs area, placing it under Commandante Filiberto Olivera Moya. By morning Fernandez could see the first reinforcements, militia of Battalions 223 and 219 from Matanzas, and expected the cadets from one of the training schools he commanded. Capt. Orlando Pupo headed toward Playa Girón from the east along the coast. Red Beach at Playa Larga endured its first air attack from a Castro B-26 as early as 6:20 A.M.

  The parachute drop of Brigade 2506’s First Battalion came soon after dawn. These men were to block Castro troops from both Central Australia and Covadonga. They landed in a mass drop, leaping from half a dozen C-46 aircraft and one C-54, escorted by four exile bombers. The drop scattered. This was not Normandy. Eddie Ferrer, for example, came under fire from milicianos in a jeep and released his paratroops a few miles short of their drop zone.

  Off the beaches, disorganization happened for another reason. Gray Lynch, called back to Blagar after a short time ashore, found a CIA dispatch warning him that Castro’s air force still had planes. The danger to the invasion fleet dictated they put ashore as much as possible before dawn, then clear the area. Frantic activity ensued. Some landing boats could not start their motors, courtesy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff supervisor back at Puerto Cabezas. Others hung up on the reefs while, as the tide fell, unloading came to a halt.

  Dawn found most of the brigade ashore but with far less than the planned amount of supplies. The invasion fleet remained off the beaches. That was when Castro’s air force made its appearance: in two strikes, at 6:30 and at 9 A.M., his planes hit the ships. Nilo Carreras’s Sea Fury fighter scored rocket hits on the transport Houston. Carreras hit below the waterline, otherwise the ship might well have exploded since she carried ammunition. She also had aboard the 130 men of Ricardo Montero’s Fifth Battalion. The survivors swam ashore without equipment, into the salt marshes of the Zapata Peninsula, across the bay from the brigade positions. Off Playa Girón, Sea Fury aircraft sank the Rio Escondido. It went down with the brigade’s communications van and aviation gasoline for use at the Girón airstrip.

  At Playa Larga, Hugo Sueiro’s Second Battalion got ashore in good order. With Brigade 2506’s impaired communications, however, hours passed before Sueiro could tell Pepe San Roman at Girón. The battalion at Playa Larga, in position to reinforce the paratroops near Central Australia, received no orders. By the time San Roman established radio contact, yet another CIA error was becoming evident.

  Among key assumptions throughout the planning had been that Castro would need days to react. Exile officers were told before embarkation that there would be no resistance at the Bay of Pigs, that FAR would require until D+2, the second day after the invasion, to mount significant opposition. Bissell, Hawkins, and other planners repeatedly used this estimate. Their confidence was striking given their ignorance of conditions in Cuba. Admiral Dennison, in his own planning, had submitted a list of ninety specific questions on Castro forces, and twenty-nine on the Cuban resistance, as early as December 1960; less than a dozen were answered. The secret warriors had been wrong about the reefs; they were also wrong that no Castro forces would be in the area. About a hundred militia guarded Girón and vicinity and a larger force, Battalion 339 at Central Australia, had already begun to pressure the paratroops north of Playa Larga.

  At the time of the first invasion scare in December, Castro’s mobilization orders had created great confusion. Later repeated scares created a highly efficient system, however, and Castro had two days after the air attack to put his units in motion. This time there were no mistakes. By 9 A.M. Commandante Fernandez at Central Australia had his troops from the Matanzas Militia School, sending them forward without dismounting from their trucks. Large forces, including armor, deployed against the exile brigade from the first day. Before evening the paratroop roadblocks had been driven back toward Playa Larga, and Castro’s forces could begin to attack down the causeway to the head of the bay.

  Ultimately some twenty thousand troops assembled against the invasion force. Intending a night counterattack, Fidel appeared at Central Australia, directing operations, calling all over, using an old, hand-cranked black telephone. He called his brother Raul, telling the defense minister, “You’re missing the party!” He ordered “a hell of a barrage.” Fernandez pushed his troops down the causeway. By early morning of the second day, April 18, the exiles at Playa Larga were desperate as FAR tanks approached. Meanwhile the paratroop roadblocks near Covadonga on the opposite flank of the bridgehead were also in retreat.

  In the evening Allen Dulles returned from his expedition to Puerto Rico. No doubt the Young Presidents’ Association, whom he had addressed, appreciated his remarks, but the director had been out of pocket at a critical moment. Richard Drain met Dulles at Baltimore’s Friendship Airport. Drain quickly passed along the gist—the invasion hung by a thread. Their drive to Washington passed mostly in silence.

  Brigade 2506 had no real chance. On the second day San Roman’s troops were driven back on all fronts. San Roman sent his deputy commander, Erneido Oliva, to Playa Larga with some troops and a couple of tanks. Oliva took over the defense and put up a good fight. But the village had become impossible to hold, and the brigade’s troops fell back to Girón. The biggest success of April 18, an air strike against the Castro column advancing from Playa Larga, became known as the “slaughter of the Lost Battalion,” as many of the 339th Militia and their trucks expired under Oliva’s fire and the strikes, disrupting the FAR’s advance. Castro had assembled two dozen tanks and self-propelled guns, and the B-26 strikes knocked out seven of them.

  The Cuban exile pilots of Major Villafaña’s air force were demoralized after losing four planes on D-Day (two more made forced landings) and run ragged from flying constant missions. They tried a night attack on Castro’s air base at San Antonio but could not find it in the dark and overcast. Next morning McGeorge Bundy warned JFK to expect CIA pleading for air help. Bundy noted that assistance would be hard to deny because the Cuban exiles needed it, but the real issue lay in whether to reopen the question of U.S. intervention. He advised Kennedy to wipe out Castro’s air force, “by neutrally-painted U.S. planes if necessary,” but to “let the battle go its way.” The president made a different choice: he authorized navy air cover, but for an area away from the combat zone. Kennedy’s refusal to engage U.S. Navy aircraft in support of the CIA Cubans is the fourth decision that saddled this president with responsibility for the Bay of Pigs.

  Faced with the problems at Trampoline, Richard Bissell quietly removed the prohibition on Americans flying missions. CIA contract pilots flew two of the nine sorties on April 18. Each flight could spend only about twenty minutes over the Bay of Pigs, which added up to very limited capability. Castro’s jets, closer to their bases, had a lot more air potential in addition to outperforming the B-26s.

  Once more that night the principals debated air support at the White House. Kennedy left a state dinner to participate. The arguments and potential consequences were familiar, but the danger to the CIA Cubans had risen dramatically. JFK agreed to a halfhearted measure: U.S. jets could fly cover but under such restrictions that they could do little.

  On April 19, the third day, Americans piloted six of the seven aircraft sent over the Bay of Pigs. Two American-crewed planes were lost, killing Riley Shamburger, Wade C. Gray, Willard Ray, and Leo F. Baker. They were American casualties in a war which, according to President Kennedy as recently as his news conference of a week earlier, occurred strictly between Cubans.

  By the third day Brigade 2506 had virtually exhausted its ammunition. The ships of the invasion fleet, carrying the supplies, had scattered. They were rounded up by Dennison’s warships. Grayston Lynch and Rip Robertson aboard Blagar and Barbara J stayed together, and Blagar shot down FAR aircraft. Amid frantic appeals from Pepe San Roman and the CIA, President Kennedy came closer than ever to intervention. American jets made intermittent overflights from the Essex. On Wednesday the 19th, destroyers Eaton and Murray closed in toward shore with orders to take off survivors. San Roman sent a last, plaintive message, then shot at his radio. The navy found twenty-six survivors. Lynch and Robertson took their LCIs to search for brigadista escapees. Castro’s artillerymen sighted in on the U.S. warships and prepared to fire, but Jose Ramon Fernandez, and then Castro himself, ordered them to stand down.

  Twenty-two of the exiles endured an odyssey by sailboat to land in Mexico. The remains of Brigade 2506, including San Roman, political chief Manuel Artime, and deputy Erneido Oliva, scattered into the swamps and were rounded up one by one. Castro’s forces killed 114 brigade soldiers and captured 1,214. Havana admits to suffering 178 dead while exile sources claim inflicting losses of 1,600 killed in action and 2,000 wounded.

  As the cables flowed into the WH/4 command post, disaster glaringly evident, the task force ground to a halt. Esterline and his top people had been living on cots at Quarters Eye for a few days, manning the center round the clock. Now they reacted from exhaustion and despair. Esterline groaned. Dick Drain threw up into a wastebasket. Ed Stanulis scratched his wrists so hard they bled.

  At one of the numerous Washington discussions of limiting damage from the defeat, the Joint Chiefs were amazed to hear Bissell say, after all the talk of how an uprising would overthrow Castro, that the brigade could not switch to guerrilla-style fighting. President Kennedy finally conceded, raising his hand up just under his nose, “We’re already in it up to here.”

  Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower had a special interest in the outcome of the Cuban operation. Nixon planned a foreign policy address in Chicago and had arranged for a CIA briefing through Kennedy. Allen Dulles made the presentation at Nixon’s Washington home on April 19. The CIA director appeared an hour and half late. Nervous and shaken, Dulles seemed almost desperate. Nixon asked if the agency man wanted a drink.

  “I certainly would,” Allen replied, “I really need one. This is the worst day of my life!”

  Nixon, who read the newspapers better than most and could not miss Cuba splashed all over the front pages, asked what was wrong. Dulles blurted, “Everything is lost, the Cuban invasion is a total failure.”

  In a rush the DCI sketched developments, blaming Kennedy’s “nervous aides” for getting JFK to compromise Project Ate with changes like dropping the air strikes. “I should have told him that we must not fail.” Allen stared at the floor. “I came close to doing so but I didn’t.”

  “It was the greatest mistake of my life!” Dulles repeated.

  Nixon heard President Kennedy’s version directly, in a telephone call and an afternoon chat at the White House. The conversations were mercifully silent on Nixon’s own role in this fiasco.

  Allen Dulles faced the music with Eisenhower on Friday, April 21. Conciliatory, Ike reassured the shattered DCI. Prelude to a weekend the Eisenhowers had been invited to spend at Camp David with the Kennedys, the briefing cued the former president to the inside story. Ike and Mamie helicoptered over from Gettysburg anticipating a social visit, but JFK opened with business and walked Ike over to the terrace at Aspen Lodge.

  President Kennedy did not quibble. “The chief apparent causes of failure,” JFK told Eisenhower, “were gaps in our intelligence, plus what may have been some errors in shiploading, timing, and tactics.”

  By their own accounts, in his moment of disaster Nixon and Eisenhower encouraged Kennedy to pursue Fidel Castro. Richard Nixon advised the president to find a “proper legal cover” and then “go in,” exactly the kind of thing to fuel conspiracy theories like Fabian Escalante’s—that the United States might stage a fake attack on Guantanamo Bay and then invade Cuba. Eisenhower told Kennedy he’d support “anything that had as its objective the prevention of communist entry and solidification of bases in the Western hemisphere.”

  Neither the new administration nor the old understood that implacable American hostility had precisely the wrong effect on Cuba, driving Castro into the arms of the Russians.

  Six weeks later Ike received another detailed account of the Bay of Pigs from his friend William D. Pawley, whose information came from a brigadista escapee. Pawley also recounted what he had learned of White House meetings during the invasion. In an allusion to John Kennedy’s 1956 book Profiles in Courage, Eisenhower wrote in his diary that “if true, this story could be called a “ ‘Profile in Timidity and Indecision.’ ”

  Ike sealed up the notes, plus an accompanying map. The envelope would only be opened years later by archivists working on his papers.

  Fidel Castro also had an interest in the outcome of the secret warriors’ big play, and for more than the obvious reasons. The failure of Project Ate stymied, and for the moment halted, American efforts to unseat him, but it also had a number of additional consequences. Central Intelligence Agency involvement in an open effort to depose Castro demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that U.S. actions were far from the American rhetoric of self-determination. The operation put Washington squarely in violation of international law. The Bay of Pigs furnished concrete evidence for the “Yanqui” imperialism Fidel loved to excoriate.

  For American leaders who professed concern that the “Cuban model” might spread through the Western Hemisphere, failure validated that model and lent it credibility across Latin America. Washington had seen Castro’s prestige in Latin America as a diminishing quantity. The Bay of Pigs reversed that. Here a Latin leader had stood up to the United States. Whether democracy or dictatorship, Fidel’s government had been sustained, and the CIA operation had united Cuba in support of it. That gave Castro an important organizing tool.

  Playa Girón became an enduring feature of Fidel’s public statements, his leadership in the affair a piece of his heroic persona. And the evident hostility of the United States encouraged the radicalization of Cuba, both in defense and as a response.

  American intervention also put Cuba squarely on the table of Cold War conflict. That meant greatly increased aid from a Soviet Union pursuing its side of that competition. The U.S. threat also gave the Russians reasons to provide that aid for free, a key consideration for Castro, whose economy faltered due to his nationalizations, the U.S. sanctions, and global trade conditions. For many years after the Bay of Pigs, Cuba got a free ride from Moscow.

  Most of these consequences had been perfectly predictable. But Washington restricted its deliberations to the instrumental and short-term questions, such as the exile “disposal” problem or the amount of time needed to gain support at the OAS. This is among the most serious failures of all, and it lies squarely on the desks of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

  One other thing John Kennedy told Dwight Eisenhower: there would be an investigation. Indeed, an investigation could not be avoided, and in fact more than one. Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor presided over the first committee, which called itself the Green Board. Robert F. Kennedy represented his brother, the president. Allen Dulles guarded the interests of the Central Intelligence Agency. Adm. Arleigh Burke watched out for the navy. The board held twenty hearings with participants from Bissell on down, including brigadista escapees and politicians.

  Grayston Lynch and Rip Robertson appeared, literally plucked off a navy destroyer in the Caribbean and shuttled to Washington. A series of special courier flights through Jacksonville, then a suite at the Shoreham Hotel and new custom-tailored suits were laid on for the case officers, who were watched by CIA minders, then closely pumped by the committee. Lynch, astonished to learn of the Washington end of the operation during lengthy debriefing with WH/4, made up his mind that the Taylor committee intended to produce a useless whitewash once he heard the line of questioning pursued by JFK’s brother Bobby.

  The declassified transcripts of Taylor panel testimony do reveal an odd circumspection. It could hardly have been otherwise. The details of the air strikes, the plans for Trinidad versus the Bay of Pigs, the military’s review of the CIA plans—all were examined over and again. How these were handled set off Gray Lynch. But other central questions were not confronted at all. Allen Dulles mounted a preemptive defense of the CIA: at one session he remarked that he favored reassigning paramilitary activities to the Pentagon.

  The committee eventually attributed failure to a mistaken belief that this large operation could be conducted with plausible deniability; to a lack of coordination among U.S. agencies; to the attempt to command from a distance, with headquarters at Washington. The panel concluded that the guerrilla option had not really been available to the exiles, and that the plan Project Ate had had “a marginal character . . . which increased with each additional limitation.” By not actually rejecting the CIA plan, the Joint Chiefs seemed to have approved it and thus bore a measure of responsibility. Everyone had failed to do the things possible to ensure success.

  On May 16, 1961, General Taylor made one presentation of his committee’s report to President Kennedy at a luncheon. This would be a private session, and all panel members except Admiral Burke were there. Bobby Kennedy shone. From the CIA were Allen Dulles, General Cabell, and Richard Bissell. On June 13 Taylor’s group again discussed their final conclusions with Kennedy. Bissell remembers the occasion as an evening in the upstairs sitting room of the White House. At Quarters Eye the morning staff meeting on the 14th found Dulles reporting that there would be just one copy of the study and it would stay with the president. Bissell thought that a splendid idea since any leaks could not then be blamed on the CIA, but he wanted a copy for agency files since it represented the best available account of the Bay of Pigs.