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We cannot let the present government there go on. —President Eisenhower to President-Elect Kennedy, 19 January 1961 6 THE BAY OF PIGS “Before dawn Cuban patriots in the cities and in the hills began the battle to liberate our homeland”—so read the press bulletin issued by the Cuban Revolutionary Council but written by CIA officer David Atlee Phillips.¹ The landing had begun in the predawn hours of 17 April 1961, two days after eight Cuban-piloted B-26 bombers had set out from Nicaragua to destroy Cuba’s air force. The damage had been incomplete, and now, at dawn, the Cuban air force began its counterattack, disabling two of the brigade’s ships before they could unload their cargo, and the assault began to disintegrate. Early the next morning, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy warned President John F. Kennedy, “I think you will find at noon that the situation in Cuba is not a bit good.”² That was an understatement. “They are in a real bad hole,” reported the chief of naval operations, Arleigh Burke, after rushing to the White House for the noon meeting. “We got over there in the Cabinet Room. The President was talking with CIA people, State Department people and Rostow and a lot of other people. They were talking about Cuba. Real big mess.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff may have approved the invasion, but Admiral Burke’s immediate reaction was to make certain that the Department of Defense not take the blame, dictating a memorandum for the record during the ride back to the Pentagon: “Nobody knew what to do nor did the CIA who were running the operation and who were wholly responsible for the operation know what to do or what was happening. A lot of things have happened The Bay of Pigs 143 and they have caused to happen and [that] we the JCS don’t know anything whatever about. We have been kept pretty ignorant of this and have just been told partial truths.” Admiral Burke failed to mention that his navy was involved up to its scuppers and that he had been among the first senior officials to propose the adventure: more than a year earlier, on 26 February 1960, he had sent the State Department a “paper indicative of current Navy thinking” that included a discussion of how “the U.S. could assist rebel groups covertly to overthrow the present government.”³ A navy task group under the command of Admiral John Clark had escorted the CIA’s brigade to the battle site and had turned over the landing craft to the invaders, and on the morning of 19 April, Clark’s carrier, the Essex, had launched navy fighters to protect rebel planes from Castro’s air force. Below the flight deck, two thousand U.S. Marines had been issued live ammunition and were ready to fight should JFK permit U.S. troops to enter the battle.⁴ But the nation’s new president, John Kennedy, would not allow the marines to be deployed, and the navy fighters came too late to be useful, so Admiral Clark’s principal role was to receive and forward reports on the debacle . Sitting offshore at 11:18 A.M. on 19 April, he received a message from the beach: “Please send help. We cannot hold.” Thirteen minutes later, he received another: “Out of ammunition. Men fighting in water.” A half hour after that, Clark reported that the area held by the brigade “appears to be one quarter to one half mile along the beach to a depth of about one quarter [mile] under artillery fire with tanks and vehicles to both east and west. Believe evacuation impossible without active [U.S.] engagement with Castro forces.” Then the brigade’s radio operator sent his final message: “Am destroying all equipment and communications. Tanks are in sight. I have nothing left to fight with. Am taking to the woods. I cannot wait for you.” A few minutes later Clark radioed the Pentagon, “Castro is waiting on beach.”⁵ That evening CIA director Allen Dulles told Richard Nixon, “This is the worst day of my life”; Attorney General Robert Kennedy thought that Dulles “looked like living death.” Dean Rusk complained that the Bay of Pigs was “one hell of a way to close out my first hundred days as secretary of state.”⁶ “Castro is far better organized and more formidable than we had supposed ,” presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in his diary on Day...

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