Bay of Pigs Invasion — Failed CIA-Sponsored Operation
A CIA-organised force of Cuban exiles landed in Cuba in April 1961 and surrendered within three days. The operation had been approved under Eisenhower and inherited by Kennedy three months into his presidency, and it assumed two things that were both false: that the landing would trigger a popular rising, and that the Cuban air force could be destroyed on the ground beforehand. The first air strike on 15 April used obsolete bombers painted in Cuban markings and missed most of the aircraft, and the cover story collapsed within a day when a journalist noticed that the nose of a supposedly defecting Cuban plane was the wrong shape. Kennedy then cancelled the second strike to preserve deniability, which left the invasion force without air cover. About 1,400 men landed at the Bay of Pigs on 17 April, a swamp with one road out, chosen partly because it was remote — which also meant no population to rise. Castro was there within hours with artillery and tanks, and the surviving Cuban aircraft sank the supply ships carrying the ammunition and the communications equipment. Some 114 exiles were killed and 1,189 captured, and were ransomed twenty months later for 53 million dollars in food and medicine. Kennedy took public responsibility and privately asked how he could have been so stupid. The consequences were large: Castro declared the revolution socialist within days, and Khrushchev drew a conclusion about the new president that produced the missiles eighteen months later. The internal review afterwards, written by the CIA's own inspector general, was so critical that it was kept secret until 1998 and most copies were destroyed. Its central finding was that the agency had failed to tell the president what it did not know.
- Year: 1961 CE
- Category: Covert
