The Bay of Pigs invasion flowed from a directive signed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower on March 17, 1960, authorizing the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to begin operations to remove the Castro government from power in Cuba (Kornbluh 1998, p. 269). This quickly evolved into a plan to land an invasion force of some 1,200 Cuban exiles near the city of Trinidad, Cuba, at the foot of the Escambray Mountains. The invasion force, called the Brigade 2506, trained in Central America and by the end of 1960 was making final preparations for the landing.
Meanwhile, however, presidential elections had been held in the United States. Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, lost, and the Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy, won. The latter might have been expected to cancel the invasion plan, once informed of it, but this would have been difficult for him to do. During the election campaign, he had sharply criticized the Eisenhower-Nixon administration for allowing this Communist foothold to emerge only 90 miles to the south of the United States. Had he canceled the invasion, the Republicans would doubtless have gone public and pointed out that they had had a plan to remove the "foothold," but Kennedy had abandoned it.
Further, Kennedy quickly developed confidence in Richard Bissell (1910-1994), the CIA’s deputy director for plans, who was masterminding the operation (Wyden 1979, p. 96). Thus, Kennedy let the invasion plan go forward. He did insist, however, that a landing so near the city of Trinidad would be "too spectacular," and requested that it be moved to a more remote location (Wyden 1979, p. 100). Bissell obligingly moved the site some 70 miles to the west, to the Bay of Pigs (Bahfa de Cochinos). This meant, however, that if the invasion failed, the invaders could not melt away into the mountains and become guerrillas, as Bissell had suggested to Kennedy, for the mountains were now far away across impenetrable swamps (Wyden 1979, p. 102).
The invasion force of approximately 1,200 exiles seemed totally inadequate to the task at hand, given that they would face a regular army of 60,000 armed with Soviet tanks and artillery, and backed by a militia force of 100,000. Bissell assured Kennedy, however, that the invasion would spark a massive popular uprising against Fidel Castro. Unfortunately, this assurance was not based on any hard intelligence. Indeed, it turned out to be utterly baseless (Kornbluh 1998, p. 12).
Preparatory air strikes against Cuban airfields, flown by exile and CIA pilots operating from Central America, were quickly revealed to be exactly that and not strikes by defecting Cuban pilots, as the United States claimed.
Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965), the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (UN), was deliberately misinformed by the White House, however, and gave a speech in the UN saying the raids had been carried out by defecting Cuban pilots. Outraged when he found out the truth, he complained to Kennedy, who ordered the next day’s air cover to be canceled. Nevertheless, as the CIA’s own report on the operation later stated, this was not "the chief cause of failure" (Kornbluh 1998, p. 12). The chief cause, rather, was the glaring disparity between the numbers of the invading force and the number of defenders. The former never really had a chance. They went ashore in the early morning hours of April 17, 1961, and by 2 p.m. of April 19, facing overwhelming odds, were forced to surrender. In retrospect, that surrender seemed so inevitable that the Bay of Pigs invasion came to be described as that rarest of all things—a perfect failure (Smith 1987, p. 70).
The failure of the United States at the Bay of Pigs had three crucial consequences. First, it solidified Castro in power. Second, seeing that if the United States used its own forces, he would need Soviet support to survive, to persuade Moscow to provide that support, Castro announced on April 16 that Cuba was a "socialist" state and he began to transform it into one, with a system patterned after the Soviet Union. And third, flowing in part from this transformation, Nikita Khrushchev the next year decided to place missiles in Cuba, thus leading to the October missile crisis of 1962.
