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In April of 1962, anti-Castro Cuban exiles staged an invasion
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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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
did eventually come to an end, it's
hard not to wonder what history would
look like if the Bay of Pigs Invasion
hadn't been such a half-assed [BLEEP] show.
Do you think a successful Bay of Pigs Invasion
might have changed history?
Let us know in the comments below.
And while you're at it, check out some of these other videos
from our Weird History.