at Cuba's Bay of Pigs.

The CIA, who was behind the three-day operation,

would come to consider it one of the most colossal blunders

in their entire history.

How bad did it go?

Well, let's just say that Che Guevara himself

is reputed to have thanked an American government

official for enabling it.

Today, we're going to recount some of the most insane facts

about the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

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you would like to hear more about.

OK, now we go to Cuba.

In 1973, E. Howard Hunt stood before a senate committee

investigating the Watergate break-in and said,

"I cannot escape the feeling that the country is punishing

me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to."

Do what Hunt didn't say was that those things included

some seriously shady stuff.

Hunt joined the CIA in 1949 and quickly rose through the ranks.

In 1954, he helped overthrow the Arbenz regime in Mexico.

By 1960, he was helping recruit Cuban exiles

willing to serve in a provisional government set up

to take control of the government

after the defeat of Castro.

This would lead directly to Hunt's eventual involvement

in the Bay of Pigs.

Though he wouldn't officially resign until 1970,

Hunt's career with the CIA was effectively over

after the failed invasion.

He would quickly fall in with the players in the Nixon White

House and became a key figure in the Watergate scandal.

Seeking to give themselves plausible deniability

as to involvement in the invasion,

the CIA sought to launch the invasion from Nicaragua.

To this end, they approached president and de facto dictator

of the country, Louis Somoza.

Nervous that he would face repercussions

at the hands of international entities like the United

Nations, he was reluctant.

Determined to get their way, the CIA eventually

bribed Somoza into agreeing for the tidy sum of $10 million.

Similarly, the CIA had helped quash

an attempted coup in Guatemala against a pro-US government.

They held a great deal of influence

there and used the country as a staging

grounds for the operation.

The American planes that came to support the ground

troops during the invasion had been disguised as Cuban planes.

This is so the Cubans wouldn't shoot them down.

Unfortunately, the invasion force

was so disorganized and ill-informed that they thought

the American planes were actual Cuban planes

and shot at their own air support.

[GUNFIRE]

[INDECIPHERABLE RADIO CHATTER]

It's difficult to start a revolution without the support

of the locals.

The CIA, though their director denied it,

was relying on a popular uprising

to break out against Castro as part of their plan.

They even convinced the US military

that such a revolt was likely in the wake of an invasion.

Unfortunately, the Bay of Pigs was

in a geographically remote area with a low population.

Without a wide-ranging propaganda campaign

to spread the word, most Cubans would

have no way to find out an invasion had even occurred.

That campaign never came.

Complicating matters even further,

Castro had thousands of political dissidents arrested

mere days before the invasion.

With those fighters out of the picture,

the chances of an insurrection fell precipitously.

Even worse, the timing of the arrest

suggested Castro knew the invasion was

coming days in advance.

It has been suggested by some that the only way

to explain the spectacular failure of the Bay of Pigs

is to assume failure was what the CIA wanted all along.

But why would the CIA want the invasion to fail?

Well, the agents in command of the operation

didn't believe Castro could be overthrown

without a full-scale US invasion.

This theory holds that the agency

sought to manipulate President Kennedy into ordering

that larger invasion by arranging for the smaller

invasion force of exiles to fail sooner rather than later.

After the invasion failed, President Kennedy

ordered a military review of the operation to figure out

what had gone so wrong.

That report, which would remain classified for decades,

concluded that both Cuba and the USSR knew of the invasion plan

long before it occurred.

In fact, the review determined that the communists

knew the plan before the rank-and-file members

of the invasion force did.

This implies that someone higher up in the chain of command

must have leaked the information.

The report further concluded that Allen Dulles, then

head of the CIA, knew that the Cubans

and Russians knew of the plan, but let it go ahead anyway.

This is often cited as further evidence

that the agency wanted the invasion to fail.

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

[CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]

On April 15, 1961, the CIA sent several B-26 bombers

to raid Cuban airfields with the intent of dealing

a blow to Castro's Air Force.

Painted to look like Cuban military planes,

the aircraft eventually landed in Key West, Florida.

Their pilots presented themselves

as defectors who stole the planes of their own accord

and flew them during the attacks.

Of course, as we've already established,

Castro knew the invasion was coming.

To protect his aircraft, he had them scattered

throughout the country.

The vast majority of the planes were unharmed,

and the damage was minimal.

This failure meant that Castro would

be able to attack planes providing air

cover for the invasion force.

Alarmed by such a possibility, the Kennedy administration

refused to provide any such air support.

There will not be under any conditions

an intervention in Cuba by United States Armed Forces.

This government will do everything it possibly can,

and I think it can meet its responsibilities to make sure

that there are no Americans involved

in any action inside Cuba.

Both American military personnel and civilians

were involved in the Bay of Pigs Invasion,

and the CIA spent decades trying to cover up their deaths.

Take the story of Thomas Pete Ray.

He was a member of the Alabama Air National Guard,

and he specialized in flying the same B-26s that Castro's Air

Force mainly used.

The CIA needed pilots like Ray, so he was recruited along

with several of his fellow guardsmen

and sent to a staging ground in Nicaragua to prepare.

By April 19, 1961, the invasion was in dire straits.

Ray and his fellow pilots were told

they could help the invasion force by attacking

sites near the Bay of Pigs, but if they were captured or killed

they would be disavowed as mercenaries.

They went anyway.

While conducting a strafing run near the invasion landing site,

Ray was shot down.

Miraculously, both he and his flight engineer,

a man named Leo Baker, survived the crash.

However, they were quickly caught and killed

by the Cuban militia.

Baker was buried in a Cuban cemetery.

Ray, who was Caucasian and whose presence supported

the notion of American involvement in the invasion,

was embalmed and placed in a freezer until 1979.

His remains were eventually returned to his daughter.

The families of both men were told their fates

but also told to keep the information secret.

It wouldn't be until 1988 that the CIA would finally

acknowledge their connection to Ray and his fellow lost airmen.

All of them would receive the distinguished Intelligence

Cross, which is the highest award the CIA can bestow.

The Bay of Pigs has been reexamined repeatedly

over the decades since it occurred.

One of the interesting facts that has been uncovered

is that several units of US Marines

were apparently in the general vicinity of the invasion site.

Some analysts have suggested that this marine presence

was part of the CIA's plan to draw Kennedy

into a larger invasion.

If that was the case, it didn't work.

When the administration refused air support for the operation,

they also told the Marines to stand down.

One marine who was part of that force

recalled that explosions were already

going off in the distance when they received that order.

The Marines didn't have the numbers

to repel the 60,000 Cuban troops that they would have faced.

It's likely that if Kennedy hadn't held them out

of the Bay of Pigs, many of them would

have been captured or killed.

The buck stops with the president,

and John F. Kennedy decided to take public responsibility

for the Bay of Pigs Invasion and its failure.

Behind the scenes, though, Kennedy blamed the CIA

and felt they had misled him about the mission.

He also felt that they were doing their best to wash

their hands of the disaster.

A few months later Allen Dulles and

several other ranking members of the CIA

were dismissed or allowed to resign.

Dulles' role in the Bay of Pigs remains mysterious.

Many accounts hold that he was fully aware of and in control

of the situation, but more recent reports

have suggested that Dulles may have

been deteriorating mentally during the planning stages.

In an unusual move, he had delegated the tasks

of organizing the invasion and keeping the White House

informed to a subordinate.

He is also alleged to have missed important meetings

and displayed odd and eccentric behavior

in the course of his duties.

With the Cubans having advanced notice of the invasion,

the US Marines being held out of the battle,

and the lack of air support, you'd

think the Cuban exiles would've been slaughtered.

Yet only 118 members of the anti-Castro Cuban invasion

force died during the Bay of Pigs.

This seems especially incredible when you take into account

that the Cubans, with home field advantage and vastly superior

numbers, lost 176 members of the military and an estimated

500 to 4,000 militiamen.

Still, nearly 1,200 anti-Castro fighters were captured.

After the invasion, Castro found himself with

over 1,000 American prisoners.

In exchange for their safe return,

he demanded expensive industrial machinery and tens of millions

of dollars.

However, he eventually settled for $53 million

worth of food and medical supplies.

All of this was provided by private companies.

The US government, who still maintained

they weren't involved in the invasion, had no official role.

The first prisoners returned were 60 seriously

injured men who were released in exchange

for a payment of $2.5 million.

This was quickly followed by a mass release which

included almost all of the remaining

members of the invasion force.

These prisoners were returned to Miami

where they were greeted by over 10,000 supporters.

However, one bay of pigs exile would remain in a Cuban prison

until 1986 before being released and returned.

The real reasons behind his quarter century of detention

were never explained by the Cuban government

and remain a mystery to this very day.

No matter how you slice it, the Bay of Pigs

was a complete disaster.

It embarrassed the United States and emboldened their enemies,

bringing the world closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

The Cold War lasted for decades, and while it