The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [320]
Dulles had presented a bitter prospect: fifteen hundred disgruntled Cubans of Brigade 2506 and their colleagues and friends condemning a craven president for being afraid to let them fight the tyrant who controlled their beloved land. “I would have called them some bad words and said we are not going anywhere,” asserts Erneido Oliva, deputy military commander of the brigade training for the invasion at a secret Guatemalan base. “But the problem that we would have created in Guatemala would have been so great, Cubans fighting the Guatemalan army, taking over Guatemala … the Americans were the advisers and they were 15, maybe 20. That would not stop us, because we were the guys with the weapons…. I am telling you that the disposal problem was more than a problem. It was a BIG problem.”
A great leader in a democracy must be a great politician, but a great politician is not always a great leader. As Kennedy contemplated his actions in Cuba, he was thinking preeminently not as a world leader, or as a military strategist, but as a politician who had just won the closest presidential election in American history. He was obsessed by the fear that if he did not allow the exile force to invade Cuba he would be considered a cowardly appeaser, and that view would be amplified by disgruntled brigade members shouting their slogans.
22
The Road to Girón Beach
On March 11, the CIA presented Kennedy with its detailed plans for a daytime amphibious invasion with tactical air support at Trinidad, on the south coast of Cuba. The area was supposedly full of anti-Castro Cubans who might be expected to join Brigade 2506, but if they did not and the invaders were unable to hold even a few acres of Cuban territory, they could disappear into the Escambray Mountains, where guerrillas were already operating.
To the president, this operation appeared to have all the hallmarks of a World War II-type amphibious invasion and looked nothing like a guerrilla infiltration masterminded by the Cubans themselves. He called, instead, for a much less spectacular plan in which the Cuban brigade would disembark at night without air support on an area that included an airfield from which brigade planes could be launched.
Kennedy’s concern was more than a spineless reluctance to give the Cuban exiles the support they needed to end Castro’s reign. The CIA director may now have been soft-pedaling the possible American military effort, but it was assumed by almost everyone involved on the operational level from the CIA officers to the brigade members that the American government would not allow the fighters to die alone on the beach. Kennedy was trying to back off from the possibility of direct American intervention, not simply in his disavowals but by structuring the plan in such a way that he would not possibly be called upon to send in Americans to save beleaguered Cubans.
The CIA had spent months planning the Trinidad operation, but four days later the agency returned with revised plans for a less “noisy” operation to take place roughly one hundred miles to the west in the Zapata region at Baia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs.
Bundy enthusiastically reported to the president that the agency had “done a remarkable job of reframing the landing plan so as to make it unspectacular and quiet, and plausibly Cuban in its essentials.” The lightly populated Bay of Pigs was one of the most remote parts of Cuba and had a landing field within reach of the beaches. The chartered ships bearing the brigade would drop them at night and be gone before the first light of day. The forces would