The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [321]
One of the major criteria for the revised plan was that the terrain be “suitable for guerrilla warfare in the event that an organized perimeter could not be held,” a crucial matter for both military and political reasons. On that point Bissell was strangely silent; as he knew, an immense sea of swamps surrounded the Bay of Pigs. “We were standing in the hall, and I told Bissell we could capture the airfield but that it would be hard for the landing force to get out of there through the swamps that surround the area, and moreover they would not be able to reach the Escambray Mountains eighty miles away,” recalled Colonel Hawkins, the paramilitary head of the operation. “He said it’s the only place that satisfies the president’s requirements, and that’s what it has to be.”
As Kennedy saw it, the CIA had come up with an alternative that answered all of his concerns. He was nonetheless still so uncertain that even while he gave his tentative go-ahead, he insisted that he “have the right to call off the plan even up to 24 hours prior to the landing.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff gave their considered opinion that in the absence of major elements of Castro’s army, “the invasion force can be landed successfully in the objective area and can be sustained in the area provided resupply of essential items is accomplished.” The Joint Chiefs, like the CIA, did not mention that in a losing engagement the forces would die, surrender, or be hunted down in the trackless swamps. Admiral Arleigh Burke told the president that the operation had a fifty-fifty chance of success, odds that probably would not have been considered good enough if Americans had been landing on those uncharted shores.
Of the voices that Kennedy heard those days opposing the invasion, none was listened to more closely than that of Thomas C. Mann, the assistant secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Mann was probably the lowest-ranking State Department official who knew about the invasion plans. A career diplomat, he had served as ambassador to El Salvador and had a hard-won, gritty sense of Latin American realities. Mann was perhaps the only diplomatic exception to what Robert A. Hurwitch, then the Cuban desk officer, called “a divorce between the people who daily, or minute by minute, had access to information, to what was going on, and to people who were making plans and policy decisions.”
Bundy sensed that the president sided with the diplomat’s position more than with Bissell’s hawkish views. “Since I think you lean to Mann’s view, I have put Bissell on top,” Bundy wrote in a memo to the president. Mann believed that the fragile, embryonic laws that sought to govern the actions between sovereign nations could not be ignored or a great and terrible price might have to be paid. He pointed out that the OAS charter, the United Nations Charter, and the Rio Treaty all “proscribe[d] the use of armed force with the sole exception of the right of self-defense ‘if an armed attack occurs.’” He envisioned that in the case of an obvious invasion the “Castro regime could be expected to call on the other American States … to assist them in repelling the attack, and to request the Security Council … to take action to ‘maintain and restore international peace and security.’ “Mann told the president bluntly that most Latins would oppose the invasion, and that “at best, our moral posture throughout the hemisphere would be impaired. At worst, the effect on our position of hemispheric leadership would be catastrophic.”
Kennedy’s insistence on downscaling the invasion was in part an attempt to deal with such criticisms. On March 29, Kennedy had what was supposed to have been the last major meeting before the April 5 invasion. When the president asked