later—April 12
Another piece of news takes over the rest of the day. A Soviet spaceman named Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in a spaceship. That is to say—the language is new—he has circumnavigated the planet in a space capsule. At Quarters Eye, most of our people are glum. It is a frightful shock. How can the Russians have won the race into space? On the other hand, my father takes hope. “It couldn’t have happened at a better time,” he says. “This could get Kennedy’s Irish up.”
No one says Bay of Pigs around here. We speak of Red Beach, Blue Beach, and Green Beach. Shades of Normandy? Tarawa? Iwo Jima?
April 13, 1961
I missed an interesting remark made yesterday by Jack Kennedy at his press conference. “The indictment of Mr. Masferrer of Florida, on the grounds that he was plotting an invasion of Cuba in order to establish a Batista-like regime should indicate the feelings of this country toward those who wish to establish that kind of administration inside Cuba.”
April 14, 1961
Today, D minus 3, the Brigade is under sail. Our troops are crowded into five old tubs; our operation is called Zapata. Tomorrow, D minus 2, eight exile B-26s will take off from a Nicaraguan base near Puerto Cabezas and launch an air strike against three Cuban airfields. We aim not only to knock out Castro’s air force, but to prove to the world that the operation was performed by Cuban defectors flying Cuban planes purchased by Cubans. The prevailing opinion at Quarters Eye is that a large air attack on D-Day itself would have too American a signature. Hunt and I are agitated by the choice, however. Bombing these airfields on D minus 2 is going to give Castro time to roll up our networks. It is likely, then, that there will be no serious underground in Cuba on invasion day. Late at night, when we argue in our living room, Cal will not admit to this logic, but I have an intimation for the first time of how calculating Allen Dulles must be. While he is taking off to Puerto Rico tomorrow to fulfill a speaking engagement he agreed to make months ago—which hopefully will confuse the DGI into thinking the invasion is not that near—I decide that only Mr. Dulles could have made the cold estimate that if our networks in Cuba were now, on balance, so infiltrated as to be of as much use to Castro as to us, then let him arrest all those tens of thousands of Cubans in a massive roundup. Most likely he will be imprisoning a great many of his own double agents as well. This could produce extremely bad morale for his intelligence forces further down the line. As for our underground morale—well, that appears to be expendable.
Hunt and Phillips are also worrying about the millions of leaflets that will not be distributed during the D minus 2 air strike. All payload on the B-26s has now been given over to bombs for knocking out Castro’s planes. Later, if there are more air strikes (no one seems certain how many have been authorized, and Phillips is beginning to pound the desk because he cannot find out), we may be permitted to drop some paper, but any thought of a Guatemala-like coup seems to have been put on the back burner. To mollify us, we are assured that the supply ships will carry the leaflets. “Once we have a beachhead and an airstrip, your input will come in very handy.”
“Too late,” Phillips tries to explain. Since he may be the most impressive physical specimen in Quarters Eye, as much an Agency man as a cadet at Sandhurst is a Sandhurst cadet, it is odd to see him so frustrated that his mouth and face crinkle like a five-year-old refusing tears. “They can’t get it straight,” he says. “We’re the foreplay. Are we going to introduce foreplay after fornication?”
April 14, later entry
On pressure from the State Department, someone above us, possibly Bissell, has decided that in the air raid tomorrow, an extra decoy plane can fly directly from Nicaragua to Miami. It will purport to be a Cuban B-26 who defected from Castro’s air force, bombed the Havana airfields, and then flew over to us.
Hunt foresees all manner of things going wrong with this caper, and gets on the Encoder-Decoder to Happy Valley which is our code name for the airport in Puerto de Cabezas. He proceeds to explain what is essential in the way of preparation. The plane must look as if it took a bit of a drubbing in combat over the Cuban air space. Camouflage artists can put bullet holes and burn marks in appropriate places. Hunt’s comment: “This one gives me the collywobbles. Get one detail wrong and it can all come undone.”
Knowing that the air raid will strike at dawn, most of the Quarters Eye personnel are staying over tonight. We rest on army cots with surprisingly nonstandardized mattresses—either bone-hard or flaccid—drink coffee, and idle out the hours. I suppose all situations that require one to wait for news from outside are prison-like. One is suffering sensory cut-off, which is, I suppose, what prison is all about.
8:00 A.M., April 15, 1961
The room stank of cigarette smoke through the night, and the stale, near-sickly odor of too many men sleeping with too much tension. Shortly after dawn, however, the cable traffic concerning our three strikes commenced. A wing of three B-26s called “Linda” has for its target San Antonio de los Baños, a big and crucial military airfield thirty miles southwest of Havana. “Puma,” another flight of three B-26s, will hit Camp Libertad just outside Havana, and “Gorilla,” the third wing, two B-26s, is to strike the other end of the island, Santiago de Cuba Airport in Oriente Province.
Now the reports come in all at once. All three airfields have been simultaneously bombed and strafed. Havana is erupting into hysterical broadcasts, and our Cuban pilots are reporting to us that Castro’s air force has been wiped out on the ground.
How our sleeping dormitory is transformed! At 6:30 A.M. windows fly open, and we are cheering. There is a whoop of a rush to get clothes on and go down to the War Room. More euphoria there. Officers are hugging each other. Bissell is receiving congratulations. “Nothing official,” I hear him say, “we still have to wait for official confirmation from our U-2 photographs,” but he is beaming. I hear other officers murmuring, “It’s over. Havana might as well be in our hands.”
Meanwhile, the lone B-26 that flew from Happy Valley to Florida landed at Miami International Airport, and the pilot was immediately led away by Immigration and his plane impounded. We listen to American news reports that the Miami pilot was wearing a T-shirt, a baseball cap, and dark glasses, and looked remarkably cool smoking a cigarette. His airplane had certainly been chewed up. One engine was dead, and the fuselage showed many bullet holes.
A statement comes out of New York from Miro Cardona. “The Cuban Revolutionary Council has been in contact with and has encouraged these brave pilots.” We have a ten-inch black-and-white TV set in the War Room, and I watch Cardona as he speaks to reporters. He looks tired. He removes his dark glasses and says to the press, “Gentlemen, look into revolutionary eyes that have known little sleep of late.”
“Are the raids a prelude to invasion?” asks a reporter.
Cardona smiles. He spreads his hands like an umpire calling “Safe.” Cardona says: “No invasion, sir.”
Barbaro, however, seated next to him, says, “Spectacular things have begun to happen.” Barbaro looks hysterical to me.
an hour later
Bizarre events as well. At Key West, an unforeseen emergency landing had to be made by one of our bona fide exile bombers when it developed engine trouble after participating in the strike at Camp Libertad. When real events conform to fictional scenarios, no one is prepared. The local high school in Key West was getting ready to celebrate Olympics Day at Boca Chica Naval Air Station. They were there with all the trimmings: track events, parents, marching bands, cheerleaders. All canceled. Olympics Day was called off by the Navy.
Then another B-26 from the San Antonio de los Baños strike had to land at Grand Cayman Island when one of its fuel tanks failed to feed. Since Grand Cayman flies a British flag, returning the pilot and plane to Happy Valley will not be automatic. As Cal remarks, “You can’t trust the British on things like this. They can get formal at the goddamnedest times.”
The director of Immigration and Naturalization appears on
the TV news from Miami. He refuses to give the names of the two pilots who have landed in the U.S. Their families in Cuba must be protected. A reporter asks: “Wouldn’t Castro’s air force generals know the names of their own pilots?”
“I cannot help you,” says the director. “These pilots have requested that their names be kept secret.”
Hunt shakes his head. “I can hear the bilge sloshing in the hold.”
He is right. All through the day, reporters in Miami and New York keep posing new questions. I begin to see that they are another kind of force in our field of forces, and have a homing instinct for every hole in the tissue of a tale. One reporter actually managed to get close enough to the plane that came down in Miami to notice that the muzzles on the machine guns of the B-26 were still taped. While that is done routinely to keep dust and detritus out of the breech, it also means the guns were not fired. That question hangs in the news reports. All through the Newsroom and the War Room, I can hear men muttering, “These son of a bitch reporters—whose side are they on?” I can hear myself saying it. The questions are getting worse, and no answers are coming back. The radio and TV announcers are underlining “No comment” with more of a resonant pause each time.
In the UN, Raul Roa, the Ambassador from Cuba, has a run-in with Adlai Stevenson. I catch reports of that on radio all afternoon. Stevenson is saying: “These pilots defected from Castro’s tyranny. No United States personnel participated. These two planes, to the best of our knowledge, were Castro’s own air force planes, and, according to the pilots, took off from Castro’s own air force fields. I have a picture of one of these planes. The markings of Castro’s air force are clearly visible.”
I feel merry and woeful all at once. It gives me an odd and unexpected sense of importance that so famous a personage as Adlai Stevenson is ready to lie for the Agency. It is as if he, too, is part of that transcendental wickedness that partakes of goodness because its aim is to gain the rightful day. Nonetheless, I am depressed as well. Stevenson seems such a consummate liar. His voice is absolutely sincere.
“I don’t know that he’s witting,” says Hunt.
Raul Roa certainly is: “This air raid at dawn is the prelude to a large-scale invasion attempt, supported and financed by the United States. These mercenaries have been trained by experts of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.”
At a White House press briefing, Pierre Salinger, the Press Secretary, denies any knowledge of the bombing.
later
Toward evening, I stop by my father’s office to share a cup of hot coffee. He is not in a good mood. Word has just come in of the first casualty. On the Atlántico, one of the rented freighters, there had been .50-caliber machine-gun practice, and the mountings tore loose from the (no doubt rusted) deck plates. A spew of bullets lashed the deck. One man dead, two wounded. A burial ceremony at sea. Full uniform, prayers, and the body goes into the sea at sunset.
Cal Hubbard sees needless death as a bad omen; he is also worried about Adlai Stevenson. “I don’t think Adlai knows those two planes were ours. Tracy Barnes gave him the orientation, and Tracy can be vague if he chooses to be. There will be hell to pay when Stevenson finds out. God, he might talk Kennedy into scrubbing the invasion.” Cal immediately adds, “That won’t happen,” as if the force of his will can become as much of a factor as the untrustworthy air absorbing his words.
evening
Tonight, after dark, Hunt is paid a visit by Dorothy. He slips out of Quarters Eye and they sit in their car and talk. He has not told her that we are leaving for the beachhead in less than seventy-two hours. He has not even packed a bag. He will probably join the Cuban Revolutionary Council shortly after they are flown down to Opa-Locka, and there he will pick up some chinos and army boots. Ditto for me. I picture Howard and Dorothy in their car, talking of her mother’s recent death, the children’s school—their domestic agenda. We are heading into tropical country but again I feel a chill. It is not quite real to me that I am going to war. Nonetheless, my death is vivid to me. I can picture my dead body. Since this journal is for Kittredge, I presume to ask: Does Omega tease Alpha with images of that death it is more willing to meet than its uncooperative partner?
Sunday morning
Few of us slept well on our cots last night. Even though the invasion is not scheduled until early tomorrow morning, men kept getting up and going down to the War Room. Over coffee and doughnuts, Phillips regales us with a story. One of the secretaries, taking her turn on a cot for a little rest last night, was panicked to awaken to the sight of a strange man sleeping in the bunk next to her. He was very big and very pale, and she had never seen him before. Was he an interloper? No, Phillips said, he was Richard Bissell, our leader, catching forty winks.
About 9:00 A.M., with half of Quarters Eye absent for an hour or two to see their families and/or go to church, disturbing news rises from the War Room: The aerial photographs, after close scrutiny, reveal that the strike on the Cuban airports yesterday was less successful than first reported. Not all of Castro’s planes were destroyed. Apparently, our Brigade pilots had seen what they wished to see. By the War Room’s count, two-thirds of the Castro force is destroyed or out of commission, but there still remain three or four T-33 jet trainers, the same number of Sea Fury fighters, and two B-26 bombers. A cleanup mission is needed, therefore, to finish the job. Our air operations officer was ordering such a move when General Cabell, now Acting Director in Mr. Dulles’ absence, came back to the War Room from a Sunday morning of golf.
I was out of hearing, but soon learned that Cabell refused to approve this second strike without calling Secretary of State Rusk first, and Rusk, in turn, asked him to come over to the State Department. Richard Bissell, visibly upset, departed with Cabell.
Two hours later, our second air strike is still being held up. The mood at Quarters Eye has shifted again. As Cal explains to me in passing, the main body of troops are scheduled to land around 2:00 A.M. Monday morning, and the supply ships have to be unloaded before dawn; otherwise, they could be mangled by the remains of Castro’s air force. It is possible to finish the task before morning light, says Cal, but only if everything goes well. That’s a good deal to ask of an untried invasion force coming in by dark on old ships to an unfamiliar shore.
two hours later
We are still waiting. It is late afternoon. We are getting worried. The lead story in the Sunday New York Times by Tad Szulc has done all too good a job of chasing after “puzzling circumstances.” The questions are getting worse. Why, for instance, are the pilots’ names still being withheld? Then there is the question of the B-26 nose. Castro’s planes have transparent Plexiglas turrets—the Miami B-26 showed a solid nose.
Hunt outlines the real trouble. Our fake story has to hold until the landing is accomplished. Once we have an airfield operating in the Bay of Pigs, our little fiction about the defecting pilots can be buried by immediate and real events. In the meantime, however, the State Department may have lost its stomach for more air attacks. All we know is that the meeting between Rusk, Bissell, and Cabell continues, and queries from Happy Valley concerning the delayed air strike continue to pile up. The mood is reminiscent of a waiting room.
I am busy, however, preparing messages with Hunt and Phillips. They will be broadcast many times this night to Cuba from our clandestine radio station on Swan Island and, hopefully, will prove most confusing. “Alert! Alert!” we send out. “Look well at the rainbow. The fish will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red.” Too late I pick up from our language expert at the Directorate of Intelligence that “fish” is one more word in Cuba for phallus. Oh, well, “the phallus is rising, the phallus is red.”
Next comes in a Reuters teletype from Havana describing a funeral procession thirty blocks long that moves slowly through the stre
ets of the capital behind the bodies of those who were killed in the air strike yesterday. The bodies had lain in state at Havana University through the night; now the cortège advances to Colón Cemetery where Castro is waiting to speak.
An hour later, Reuters provides excerpts of Castro’s speech. “If the attack on Pearl Harbor is considered by the American people as a criminal, treacherous, cowardly act, then our people have a right to consider this act twice as criminal and a thousand times as cowardly. The Yankees are trying to deceive the world, but the whole world knows the attack was made with Yankee planes piloted by mercenaries paid by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.”
I show the teletype to Cal. He nods. “I’ve heard,” he says, “that Stevenson is in an absolute rage. He’s found out our B-26s were not true defectors, and threatens to resign. So I don’t believe they’ll give us another strike. The political factors are going to ride right over the military considerations.”
He is right. Bissell comes back at dusk, haggard, grim, composed. The invasion is on, he tells us, but the air strike is off. If the ships are not unloaded by dawn, they will have to withdraw, and go out to sea until the second night, when they can come back to finish their unloading.
I am struck by the reaction. The unhappy news is, at least, equal to the good news, yet the fifty or more of us assembled to hear Bissell start to cheer. The invasion is on. We are committed. The President is committed. That is the essential. The game is on. I believe we cheer in relief at no longer having to steel ourselves against rejection of the entire project.
I see that we are not without resemblance to a chorus, and feel as if I understand Greek drama at last. We are not merely a group of individuals commenting on the actions of the gods, but have become our own human field of force, and will seek, through the intensity of our concentration, to bend destiny toward our desires. Before long, we have begun to brood on the need to bring the supply ships and unloading craft closer to the beachhead. I would not be surprised if many of us, in our minds, are oiling the gears of the donkey engines on those rusty old freighters.