Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story

The writer gives a blow by blow discription of what happened to cause the Bay of Pigs disaster. Allen Dulles was on a roll, having just used the CIA to take over Guatamala, and install a government we liked there.Ike had never signed off the the Cuban plan, but let it continue. Kennedy came in and thought that Ike had approved it.It was a fiasco from the start, with Kennedy demanding that he might pull the plug on the last day before the invasion, if he did not like it. The CIA and the military could not conceive that once things started that air support would be refused.I knew from years ago that Kennedy had denied air support from our own Navy for the invasion.What I did not know until reading this book was that Kennedy also reduced the size of the liberation forces B26 strikes, and eliminated 2 of them, thus allowing Fidel's air force to survive and slaughter the freedom fighters on the beach and their supplies coming in from the sea.Also, the Alabama National guard had and pilots who trained the Cubans in flying the B26 and 2 of them were killed when they flew strikes in for ground support of the invasion.Moving the target landing zone from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs at the last minute eliminated any chance of survivors escaping into the mountains to fight as guerillas if anything went wrong, and everything went wrong.The CIA flaws are numerous. They did not know about a reef that everybody in the area knew about, and sunk the supply ships.They refused to place guns on the supply ships as unneeded, as there would be air cover, and were forced to because the owner of the ships would not let them use the ships unless they were armed. The guns were used a lot. All the communications equipment was in one crate and went to the bottom, making it impossible to communicate with the beach. CIA officials were not on the supply ships.The air strike plan was not made clear to the Pres in advance.The plan assumed an uprising that never took place. It was only in the minds of the invaders.After the air strikes were cancelled, the CIA went ahead with the plan as there was no place to take a bunch of armed, pissed of Cuban freedom fighters, other than to Cuba.It is a frustrating book to read.