The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (17 page)

By early April, Castro had his forces on full alert and daily taunted the exiles in radio broadcasts, saying that everywhere he went people were asking: “When are they coming?” With literally scores of agents in Miami and at the training camp of Brigade 2506 in the Guatemalan mountains, Castro had a complete view of the coming invasion. He sensed that the American-led invaders would first try to destroy his tiny air force, so he scattered and concealed the operative fighters and bombers and grouped the disabled planes in obvious locations.
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To make the infiltration “less noisy,” President Kennedy meanwhile cut the number of B-26s provided the exile air squadron from 16 to 8.

On April 14, Brigade 2506, with 1,500 men in the bowels of seven ships, put to sea from Puerto Cabezas on the Nicaraguan coast for the two-day trip to Cuba. Only 135 were soldiers; the rest were lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and students. Among the latter was Blas Casares Rovirosa, native of Camaguey province and the son of a doctor. In 1960 Casares had dropped out of the University of Oklahoma, where he had been studying geological engineering, to join the anti-Castro front. Trained as a frogman, Casares was assigned to put markers that would guide the landing craft through the reefs leading in to the beaches.
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Analyzing aerial photographs of the Bay of Pigs, CIA photo experts had concluded that a series of dark ridges in the bay were seaweed formations. They were not; they were reefs.

At the Puerto Cabezas dock, Nicaraguan dictator Luis Somoza, surrounded by his bodyguards, his face heavily powdered, shouted to the departing volunteers: “Bring me a couple of hairs from Castro’s beard.”
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Although there had been a near mutiny in the exile training camp three weeks before, the flat assurance by CIA trainers that American forces would follow after the Cubans established a beachhead had a cheering effect on the rebels.
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A dispatch sent directly to President Kennedy of an eleventh-hour evaluation, done at his insistence by a Marine Corps colonel (and decorated combatant at Tarawa), corroborated this mood: “My observations have increased my confidence in the ability of this force to accomplish not only initial combat missions but also the ultimate objective, the overthrow of Castro. . . . These officers are motivated by the fanatical urge to do battle.”
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When the brigade was at sea, rebel pilots, guided by CIA command and control, struck at Castro’s air force. At about 6 A.M. on April 15, eight B-26s began bombing airfields and military bases in Cuba. They destroyed Castro’s junked-together decoys, but missed several of his operative bombers and jet trainers. Several of the 500-pound bombs hit downtown Havana, causing civilian death and injury. Castro now moved on all suspected and identified members of the opposition, rounding up tens of thousands in the days that followed the attack and detaining them in the Principe castle, the La Cabana moat, the baseball park in Matanzas, and a host of other locations.
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Recarey managed to elude this roundup.

Castro then led a huge cortege through the streets of Havana to the cemetery at Colon, railing for two hours against the United States, likening the bombing to Pearl Harbor, remembering the sinking of
La Coubre
, and telling of one loyal
miliciano
, who, lying mortally wounded from a bomb fragment, wrote the name Castro with his blood on a wall.
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No one had advised Kennedy of the worst-case contingency for the United States in the invasion plan — that Castro, no longer having to live with protest within Cuba, would gun down the internal opposition once and for all. The Cuban leader ordered his pilots to sleep under the wings of what was left of his air force and to take turns around the clock in the cockpits. Faced with embarrassing revelations that the bombing raids were orchestrated by the United States, President Kennedy countermanded the order to permit Cuban exile pilots, then waiting in their cockpits, to make another series of runs over Cuba.

Back in Miami, the nominal political leadership of the exiles, the Democratic Revolutionary Council — which Castro referred to as the Consejo de Gusanos (the Council of Worms) — were put under house arrest by their CIA advisors as a matter of “security.” Incredibly, these men knew nothing of the launching, in which four of their sons and two of their brothers had participated. The CIA turned over all public communications for the waiting world to the Lew Jones Agency, an advertising group in New York. President Kennedy spent an anxious weekend in Glen Ora, Virginia, at one point pounding golf balls into an empty cornfield with his old friend Charles Spalding, and then heliocoptering back to the White House for the first reports from the beach.
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An hour or so after midnight on April 17, the troop ships of Brigade 2506 rendezvoused 2,000 yards off the principal landing site at Playa Giron. In Havana, the now-sleepless Recarey heard the CIA’s Howard Hunt (later of Watergate fame) issue supposedly coded messages in an early morning broadcast from “Radio Swan” island: “Look well to the Rainbow . . . The fish will rise very soon . . . The fish is red.” This nonsense was supposed to panic Castro and his lieutenants the way the CIA had panicked the hapless Guatemalan populist Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. It did nothing of the sort. In fact, the CIA attempted no radio contact of any operational nature with the anti-Castro underground in Cuba on the eve of the invasion. The Agency simply did not trust the Cubans. Through the entire charade, there was that cruel word —
disposable
.

As the force of Brigade 2506 waited in their ships in the morning darkness, a squad of frogmen led by two Americans, Grayston Lynch and Rip Robertson, reconned the beach area. Suddenly, they ran into a Cuban patrol and had no choice but to open fire. From the ships, the soldiers, now starting to scale down the ship nets to the landing craft below, could see the flashes of light on the beach and hear the choppy report of automatic arms fire. The advantage of surprise was lost. Using the inaccurate reef maps provided by the CIA, frogman Casares and his team dropped markers to guide the landing craft between the reefs. The widest point between the reefs was no more than 25 yards. An hour later, half of the landing craft were hung up on the reefs. When members of the Brigade’s Fifth Battalion exhibited doubts about getting into the LCVs, the CIA’s Robertson pulled out his sidearm and shouted: “Get into the boats. This is your fucking war.”

Fidel Castro was awakened at about 2:30 A.M. at Celia Sanchez’s apartment on Eleventh Street in Havana. He immediately phoned his old friend Captain José Ramon Fernandez, “El Gallego,” in Managua, south of Havana, and ordered him to move the elite Militia Officers School Battalion, numbering 870 men, to Playa Giron, along with as many Soviet T-34 tanks as he could get onto flatbed trucks.
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Sometime early that morning, sensing that something was happening, Recarey woke his driver and sped to the outskirts of Havana. There, in the early morning dark, they saw a long line of Cuban troop and tank trucks, bumper to bumper, crossing the lone bridge that led toward the Bay of Pigs, the bridge that Recarey had scheduled for demolition. He began to cry.
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By 3 A.M. Castro was at his Punto Uno command post. He phoned the air force base at San Antonio de los Banos and spoke with its senior pilot, Captain Enrique Carreras: “Chico, you must sink those ships for me.” At first light, two of the Sea Furies, armed with rockets and four 20mm cannons, and a B-26 bomber, started strafing the troop and supply ships, grounding the
Houston
, damaging the
Barbara J
, which was serving as the CIA command vessel, and sinking the freighter
Rio Escondido
, which was carrying most of the Brigade’s ammunition and supplies. Castro’s T-33 jet trainers then intercepted six of the exiles’ lumbering B-26s, shooting down four of them.

The main exile force of about 1,350 men had established a deep beachhead, and now exchanged mortar and artillery fire with Castro’s force of some 2,000. By the afternoon of April 17, there was heavy fighting. Led by Commander Erneido Oliva, the exile forces attacked with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and bazooka teams that took out several of the T-34s. After several hundred yards of progress, they were met by a blanket of 122mm howitzer fire, and dug in.
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Castro, now at the front in battle dress with his M-1 in hand, supervised the emplacement of Cuban reinforcements of some 20,000. It was now obvious that without American intervention the brigade would eventually be overwhelmed.

As Castro’s T-33s strafed brigade positions, Commander José “Pepe” San Roman radioed for help: “Blue Beach attacked by three jets . . . . Where is our cover?” From the
Barbara J
, the CIA’s Grayston Lynch radioed back that the “jets are coming.” This cheered the beleaguered invaders but was untrue. American Sabre jets made passes over the field of battle and viewed the havoc below, but did nothing more. When navy aviator Commander Mike Griffin, who had piloted one of those jets, returned to his carrier, he was crying uncontrollably in shame and frustration. But President Kennedy was moved more by Khrushchev’s stinging message that came the next day, April 18. The Soviet premier intimated that the Soviet Union might come directly to Castro’s aid, or even move on West Berlin, if the Americans invaded the island. At midnight, Bissell and Navy chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, asked that the president authorize an air strike to relieve the brigade. Kennedy refused. Later, disconsolate at the predicament in which he had put himself and the hapless men in the Bay of Pigs, he called Bobby. “How could I have been so stupid?”

Castro’s forces now massed for the final assault on the brigade positions. Kennedy read the desperate series of radioed messages from Commander San Roman, which were forwarded to him from the carrier, USS
Essex
:

Do you people realize how desperate the situation is? Do you back us up or quit? All we want is low jet cover and jet close support. Enemy has this support. I need it badly or cannot survive. Please don’t desert us. Am out of tank and bazooka ammo. Tanks will hit me at dawn. Pepe.

Back at CIA command in Quarters Eye in Washington, one CIA officer vomited into a wastebasket after he read this.
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Later, on the 19th, this message was received from the beach: “We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help. We cannot hold. Pepe. ”
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Later still on the 19th: “In water. Out of ammunition. Enemy closing in. Help must arrive in this hour. Pepe.”

By afternoon, the brigade forces started to surrender. Back on the sinking
Blagar
, hit again by a Sea Fury cannon, the commander yelled, “Everybody for himself.” As the crew abandoned ship, Casares grabbed the radio message log and stuck it in his pocket before jumping into a 20-foot catamaran. They were eventually picked up by the American destroyer USS
Eaton
. In the days that followed, Casares and four other volunteers went back into the swamp near Giron in a small boat to look for brigade survivors. They rescued thirty-six of them.
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In Washington, the recriminations had begun. At a National Security Council meeting on April 19, the participants argued bitterly about how to destroy Castro — by an invasion of American forces, naval blockade, or other means. McNamara later characterized the mood regarding Castro as “hysterical.” Attorney General Kennedy, reverting to his role as his brother’s enforcer, ripped into Undersecretary Chester Bowles outside the cabinet room for disloyalty to the president. Bobby accused Bowles of leaking his opposition to the invasion after the fact to his liberal friends on the editorial board of the
New York Times.
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Bowles was outraged. The president, although insistent in shouldering the blame publicly, was privately appalled at “those fucking brass hats,” namely the Joint Chiefs, for their indifferent review of the military aspects of the plan. He told Schlesinger that he was considering asking Bobby to take over the CIA. The president asked that the Cuban exile leaders be flown from Miami, where they were still languishing under house arrest, to Washington. Upon arrival they were whisked from National Airport directly to the White House, and then through the East Wing to avoid the swarming press.
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Kennedy, looking exhausted, greeted them somberly as they walked into the Oval Office. Sitting in his rocking chair, the president tried to explain why he had backed away from full intervention and why he had supposed that the operation might succeed on its own. He took out the dispatch from the Marine colonel who had done a final evaluation of the brigade on the eve of setting off for Cuba and read its rousing prognosis out loud.

Kennedy told the exile leaders that the struggle against communism had many fronts and that leadership in that struggle imposed many responsibilities. The United States had to consider the balance of affairs all around the world. However tragic this episode, no one could doubt our commitment to the eventual freedom of Cuba, Kennedy said. He added that he himself “had fought in a war, that he had seen brave men die, that he had lost a brother, and that he shared their grief and their despair.”
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Later the president called his father in Palm Beach. The senior Kennedy was so surprised by his son’s piteous tone that he told Jack that if he couldn’t take it then “give it to Lyndon.” Kennedy later told family friend and former Truman cabinet officer Clark Clifford, “For two days I haven’t slept. This has been the most excruciating period of my life.”
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