Bay of Pigs 1961: Coral Reefs Read as Seaweed and the Groupthink Behind It

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After Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement toppled Fulgencio Batista at the end of 1958, the new government dismantled the system Washington relied on and turned toward the Soviet Union. The Eisenhower administration authorized a CIA program that began as sabotage of the Cuban sugar industry and grew, under Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, into Brigade 2506, a force of Cuban exiles trained in Guatemala. John F. Kennedy inherited the plan and demanded plausible deniability, so the landing moved from Trinidad, near the Escambray Mountains, to the remote Bay of Pigs, ringed by swamp. The April 15, 1961 airstrikes used B-26s painted as Cuban defectors' planes, but reporters in Miami noticed the wrong nose cones, and most of Castro's air force survived.

Castro declared the revolution Marxist-Leninist and rounded up tens of thousands of suspected dissidents before the landing. On April 17, boats tore open on coral reefs that analysts had read as seaweed, and troops waded ashore at Playa Larga under floodlights. About 1,400 men with light arms faced a mobilization of over 200,000 militia and more than a hundred Soviet tanks, including T-34s. Kennedy refused to send U.S. forces, and by April 20, 114 invaders were dead and over 1,200 captured. The episode examines Lyman Kirkpatrick's inspector general report, Irving Janis's theory of groupthink, and how the defeat led Castro to seek Soviet missiles in 1962.

• Cuban exile fishermen warned their CIA handlers that the dark patches were coral, and planners dismissed them.
• Castro was woken at 3:15 a.m. and went to the front to direct the counterattack himself.
• Castro's planes sank the supply ships Houston and Rio Escondido, and the Caribe and Atlantico fled with ammunition and medical gear.
• The Kirkpatrick report, classified until 1998, cited a lack of Spanish speakers among the operation's planners.
• Arthur Schlesinger later wrote that he kept his doubts to himself during the cabinet meetings.