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Reviewed by:
  • The Bay of Pigs
  • James Holeman
Howard Jones . The Bay of Pigs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Howard Jones's The Bay of Pigs (2008) provides a thought-provoking synthesis of a complex topic: the failed Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles in April 1961. Several works, including those by Peter Wyden, Peter Kornbluh, Haynes Johnson, and Trumbull Higgins, exhaustively cover the operational failures at the Bay of Pigs. Jones departs from those accounts by showcasing the Bay of Pigs fiasco as "the first United States sponsored regime change that relied on a combination of military force and assassination" (3). He maintains that three presidents, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, all "found it critical to mesh assassination with military action" to topple Fidel Castro's regime between 1959 and 1965 (6).

Jones links the development of Eisenhower administration planning to overthrow Castro between late 1959 and early 1961 with a CIA program to use mafia figures to assassinate Castro. Richard Bissell, CIA deputy director of plans, who oversaw both programs, believed that the director of central intelligence, Allen Dulles, and hence Eisenhower, authorized assassination indirectly through "circumlocutious" wording to maintain plausible deniability. The CIA assassination planning proceeded in tandem with infiltration planning and would theoretically facilitate the formation of a rebel force in the Escambray Mountains and lead to a popular anti-Castro uprising. Bissell and the CIA officer Sheffield Edwards agreed that the Mafia represented the perfect organization, in terms of motive and ability, for the assassination track, which Bissell and other CIA officers considered integral to the invasion planning. Bissell and [End Page 247] Edwards briefed Dulles and Cabell on the "gangster-type operation" in euphemistic terminology, which the director of central intelligence understood and approved.

Jones asserts that Kennedy authorized continued paramilitary planning and CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Castro. He concedes that the Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger claimed that Kennedy did not know about the assassination plots and that CIA officers believed that they had had permanent authorization to assassinate Castro since 1960. Nevertheless, Jones posits, on the basis of two conversations Bissell claimed to have had with Kennedy's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, that Kennedy not only knew about the ongoing assassination operations against Castro but also authorized the CIA to establish an executive action capability to be used to frustrate the effectiveness of recalcitrant foreign leaders, with assassination as a last resort.

Jones argues that Kennedy interpreted the failed assassination attempt on Castro on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion as a failed first step in the invasion plan. He claims that the president went forward with the operation, but the failed assassination attempt diminished the operation's chances for success and probably influenced Kennedy to reduce the preinvasion air strikes and cancel the D-Day airstrikes in an attempt to further conceal the U.S. role. The president continued to operate under the assumption that the invasion force could retreat into the mountains and conduct guerilla operations without realizing the impossibility of that option, given the swampy and isolated terrain at the Bay of Pigs. Jones finds Bissell responsible for not taking a more forceful position on the air strikes with the president and the secretary of state, but he lays the lion's share of the blame for the operation's failure on the lack of clearly defined planning responsibilities within the defense establishment.

Jones stresses that the Kennedy administration and the CIA's internal inquiries into the operation's failure did not temper the crusade to remove Castro. Instead, the administration sought to impose greater control over the CIA and gravitated toward a direct U.S. military invasion of Cuba. Simultaneously, the CIA revived the Mafia plots to assassinate Castro. Relying on the testimony of the CIA officers Bissell, Sheffield Edwards, and Richard Helms, Jones claims that Robert Kennedy, and hence the president, knew about the CIA-Mafia plots. Jones concludes that denials of the administration's knowledge of ongoing plots to assassinate Castro, both before and after the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, represented the efforts of administration loyalists to protect the president with...

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