Bay Of Pigs Essay Thesis Example For Students

Bay Of Pigs Essay Thesis The story of the failedinvasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs is one of mismanagement, overconfidence, andlack of security. The blame for the failure of the operation falls directly inthe lap of the Central Intelligence Agency and a young president and hisadvisors. The fall out from the invasion caused a rise in tension between thetwo great superpowers and ironically 34 years after the event, the person thatthe invasion meant to topple, Fidel Castro, is still in power. To understand theorigins of the invasion and its ramifications for the future it is firstnecessary to look at the invasion and its origins. The Bay of Pigs invasionof April 1961, started a few days before on April 15th with the bombing of Cubaby what appeared to be defecting Cuban air force pilots. At 6 a.m. in themorning of that Saturday, three Cuban military bases were bombed by B-26bombers. The airfields at Camp Libertad, San Antonio de los Ba?os and AntonioMaceo airport at Santiago de Cuba were fired upon. Seven people were killed atLibertad and forty-seven people were killed at other sites on the island. Two of the B-26s leftCuba and flew to Miami, apparently to defect to the United States. The CubanRevolutionary Council, the government in exile, in New York City released astatement saying that the bombings in Cuba were . . . carried out byCubans inside Cuba who were in contact with the top command of theRevolutionary Council . . . . The New York Times reporter covering thestory alluded to something being wrong with the whole situation when he wonderedhow the council knew the pilots were coming if the pilots had only decided toleave Cuba on Thursday after . . . a suspected betrayal by a fellow pilothad precipitated a plot to strike. . . . Whatever thecase, the planes came down in Miami later that morning, one landed at Key WestNaval Air Station at 7:00 a.m. and the other at Miami International Airport at8:20 a.m. Both planes were badly damaged and their tanks were nearly empty. Onthe front page of The New York Times the next day, a picture of one of the B-26swas shown along with a picture of one of the pilots cloaked in a baseball hatand hiding behind dark sunglasses, his name was withheld. A sense of conspiracywas even at this early stage beginning to envelope the events of that week. In the early hours ofApril 17th the assault on the Bay of Pigs began. In the true cloak and daggerspirit of a movie, the assault began at 2 a.m. with a team of frogmen goingashore with orders to set up landing lights to indicate to the main assaultforce the precise location of their objectives, as well as to clear the area ofanything that may impede the main landing teams 2:30 a.m. and at 3:00 a.m. twobattalions came ashore at Playa Gir ¢n and one battalion at Playa Larga beaches. The troops at Playa Gir ¢n had orders to move west, northwest, up the coastand meet with the troops at Playa Larga in the middle of the bay. A small groupof men were then to be sent north to the town of Jaguey Grande to secure it aswell. When looking at a modernmap of Cuba it is obvious that the troops would have problems in the area thatwas chosen for them to land at. The area around the Bay of Pigs is a swampymarsh land area which would be hard on the troops. The Cuban forces were quickto react and Castro ordered his T-33 trainer jets, two Sea Furies, and two B-26sinto the air to stop the invading forces. Off the coast was the command andcontrol ship and another vessel carrying supplies for the invading forces. TheCuban air force made quick work of the supply ships, sinking the command vesselthe Marsopa and the supply ship the Houston, blasting them to pieces withfive-inch rockets. In the end the 5th battalion was lost, which was on theHouston, as well as the supplies for the landing teams and eight other smallervessels. With some of the invading forces ships destroyed, and no command andcontrol ship, the logistics of the operation soon broke down as the other supplyships were kept at bay by Castos air force. As wi th many failed militaryadventures, one of the problems with this one was with supplying the troops. In the air, Castro hadeasily won superiority over the invading force. His fast moving T-33s, althoughunimpressive by todays standards, made short work of the slow moving B-26s ofthe invading force. On Tuesday, two were shot out of the sky and by Wednesdaythe invaders had lost 10 of their 12 aircraft. With air power firmly in controlof Castros forces, the end was near for the invading army. Volcano Mount Vesusius EssayIt was now fall and a newpresident had been elected. President Kennedy could have stopped the invasion ifhe wanted to, but he probably didnt do so for several reasons. Firstly, he hadcampaigned for some form of action against Cuba and it was also the height ofthe cold war, to back out now would mean having groups of Cuban exilestravelling around the globe saying how the Americans had backed down on the Cubaissue. In competition with the Soviet Union, backing out would make theAmericans look like wimps on the international scene, and for domesticconsumption the new president would be seen as backing away from one of hiscampaign promises. The second reason Kennedy probably didnt abort the operationis the main reason why the operation failed, problems with the CIA. The failure at the CIAled to Kennedy making poor decisions, which would affect future relations withCuba and the Soviet Union. The failure at CIA had three causes. First the wrongpeople were handling the operation, secondly the agency in charge of theoperation was also the one providing all the intelligence for the operation, andthirdly for an organization supposedly obsessed with security the operation hadsecurity problems. National Estimates could have provided information on the situation inCuba and the chances for an uprising against Castro once the invasion started. Also kept out of the loop were the State Department and the Joint Chiefs ofStaff who could have provided help on the military side of the adventure. In theend, the CIA kept all the information for itself and passed on to the presidentonly what it thought he should see. Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, in PoliticalScience Quarterly of 1984, based his analysis of the Bay of Pigs failure onorganizational behaviour theory. For an organization thatdeals with security issues, the CIAs lack of security in the Bay of Pigsoperation is ironic. Security began to break down before the invasion when TheNew York Times reporter Tad Szulc . . . learned of Operation Pluto fromCuban friends. . . earlier that year while in Costa Rica covering anOrganization of American States meeting. The conclusion one can draw from the articles in The New York Times isthat if reporters knew the whole story by the 22nd, it can be expected thatCastros intelligence service and that of the Soviet Union knew about theplanned invasion as well. In the administrationitself, the Bay of Pigs crisis lead to a few changes. Firstly, someone had totake the blame for the affair and, as Director of Central Intelligence, AllenDulles was forced to resign and left CIA in November of 1961 Internally, the CIAwas never the same, although it continued with covert operations against Castro,it was on a much reduced scale. According to a report of the Select SenateCommittee on Intelligence, future operations were . . . to nourish aspirit of resistance and disaffection which could lead to significant defectionsand other by-products of unrest. The CIA also now came under thesupervision of the presidents brother Bobby, the Attorney General. According toLucien S. Vandenbroucke, the outcome of the Bay of Pigs failure also made theWhite House suspicious of an operation that everyone agreed to, made them lessreluctant to question the experts, and made them play devilsadvocates when questioning them. In the end, the lessons learned from theBay of Pig s failure may have contributed to the successful handling of the Cubanmissile crisis that followed. The long-termramifications of the Bay of Pigs invasion are a little harder to assess. Theultimate indication of the invasions failure is that thirty-four years laterCastro is still in power. This not only indicates the failure of the Bay of Pigsinvasion, but American policy towards Cuba in general. The American policy,rather than undermining Castros support, has probably contributed to it. Aswith many wars, even a cold one, the leader is able to rally his people aroundhim against an aggressor. BibliographyFedarko, Kevin.Bereft of Patrons, Desperate to Rescue his Economy,Fidel Turns to an Unusual Solution: Capitalism. Time Magazine, week ofFebruary 20th, 1995. Internet, http://www.timeinc.com, 1995. Meyer, Karl E. and Szulc, Tad.The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicleof a Disaster. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1962 and 1968. Mosley, Leonard.Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen, and JohnFoster Dulles and their Family Network. New York: The Dail Press/James Wade, 1978. Prados, John. Presidents Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon CovertOperations Since World War II. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. Ranelagh, John.CIA: A History. London: BBC Books, 1992.