5. The D-2 air strikes
Now to the crucial matter of the air strikes. Two air strikes were planned. The first one, on D-2 (Sat., April 15), was to be a bombing raid on two airfields (at Santiago and San Antonio de Los Baños), accompanied by a "diversionary” landing of 160 men 30 miles east of Guantanamo. The landing did not take place, which is a good thing for the 160 men, who would obviously have been quickly captured or killed. The bombing raids did take place and destroyed a small number of Castro's planes. But the logic behind this first strike was never clear. The B-26s, which were actually flown from Nicaragua, were meant to look like Castro's own planes, flown by defectors who shot up their own air field and then hightailed it for parts unknown, whence they would return in two days to carry out the definitive D-Day strike and provide air cover for the invasion. This would preserve "plausible deniability" from the U.S. point of view, i.e. the fiction that it was solely a Cuban exile operation. The ploy didn't work, of course. Two of the bombers landed in Key West with their machine guns obviously not having been fired, and the Cuban ambassador denounced the attack as a U.S. plot in the U.N. the same day. Why did the CIA bother with this subterfuge? Who did they think would be fooled? How would it explain the 1500 men who would storm the beach? Why not hold the air strikes until D-Day? The "defectors" story would have been just as convincing, or unconvincing, then as two days earlier. As it was, all the D-2 strike did was embarrass the U.S. and tip Castro and the whole world off to the likelihood of another attack.
Taylor summarizes the controversy surrounding the D-2 strikes as follows:
These strikes were for the purpose of giving the impression of being the action of Cuban pilots defecting from the Cuban Air Force and thus support the fiction that the D-Day landing was receiving its air support from within Cuba. The Joint Chiefs of Staff did not favor these D-2 air strikes because of their indecisive nature and the danger of alerting prematurely the Castro force. Mr. Bissell of CIA also later stated at a meeting on April 6 that CIA would prefer to conduct an all-out air strike on the morning of D-Day rather than perform the D-2defection strikes followed by limited strikes on D-Day. Nevertheless, the political advantages led to their inclusion in the plan but with the realization that main reliance for the destruction of the Castro Air Force must be placed on the D-Day strikes (Memo. 1, para. 30).
It is clear from the testimony that the military were against the D-2 strikes and were ill-informed:
Question: Do you feel that you had absolute and complete knowledge about this operation?
Gen. Shoup: Absolutely not (p. 249).
Gen. White: ...I thought that if we did do the pre-D-Day strikes, there was a pretty good chance that world reaction would be such that the thing would be called off...I think the best operation would have been to launch as heavy a strike as we could on the airfields on the day of the attack (p. 256).
Gen. Lemnitzer: The D-2 strikes were added for nonmilitary reasons. We could have preferred to do without the D-2 air strikes. They were never intended to accomplish the destruction of the Castro air force. They were to lend plausibility to the story that the D-Day strikes had been launched from within Cuba.
Question: Did you object to the D-2 air strikes?
Lemnitzer: No, we did not object. We would have preferred not to have them, but for nonmilitary reasons they were considered to be of great importance and they were approved (p. 322).
Question: Now with regard to establishing the plausibility of aircraft operating out of Cuba, would you feel that the Joint Chiefs had a responsibility for arguing against that concept? Rather, do you feel that the Joint Chiefs should have registered a reclama on this?
Burke: Yes, and Gen. Lemnitzer did protest (p. 347).
Who insisted on the D-2 strikes, then? Despite Bissell's purported disavowal, Dulles admits that it was the CIA and Bissell's former student, McGeorge Bundy (whose brother William was a CIA officer):
Question: Who was the proponent of the D-2 strikes, Allen? I don't recall that point.
Dulles: I think that it was partly in our shop and partly with Mac Bundy, as I recall. The idea of the defections--this was one of the keys to the idea that the planes that were striking Cuban airfields were operating from Cuba. I can’t say whether that limited strike concept was ever brought over here [to the Pentagon] or not. I think it must have been known to Gen. Gray, but I don't know whether it was discussed in the Joint Chiefs (p.257).
He doesn't know if it was discussed by the military? Why was the military involved at all, then? What Dulles says in this case is probably the truth: it was a CIA-Bundy plan. (The feigned defections and the limited strike were the plan.) Interestingly, however, Bundy does not even mention the D-2 strikes in his letter to Taylor.
Dulles may have revealed more than he intended when he responds to Gen. Shoup's description of the D-2 plan as a "half-effort":
Dulles: General, may I add this: The D-2 Day was essentially a plot, not a plan. The plan was the D-Day strike (p. 249).
Allen Dulles was anything but a naive man, and one wonders whom this "plot" was intended to deceive. At another point, he admits that the attempt to make the whole operation look "plausibly deniable" was hopeless:
Dulles: When you get an operation this big, the cover blows off (p. 265).
Later he tries to hedge:
Statement: I think they wanted to make it appear that this force had come from Cuba somewhere and consequently they wanted to get the ships out of there.
Mr. Dulles: Yes, but they were Cuban ships and Cuban crews and Cuban owned. Everything about them was Cuban (p. 286).
Of course, by "Cuban" Dulles means Cuban exiles. I wonder if he was thinking of one of the supply ships that was sunk during the invasion and which had the distinctly non-Cuban name of Houston? (The name may have further significance, which I will get back to later.) In any case, the question remains: Who could Dulles possibly have thought he was fooling--if indeed that is what he thought? And if it was enough that the men and equipment used on D-Day were "Cuban," why were the D-2 strikes necessary?
The truth is that neither Dulles nor anyone else believed the efforts to achieve "non attribution" would work:
Rusk: We were hoping for the maximum [deniability]. In retrospect, however, this looks a little naive (p. 223).
Gen. Shoup: I don't think that at this time in 1961 or hereafter you are going to do it covertly.
Question: Did you really think that this could be covert in the sense that it would not be attributed to the United States?
Gen. Shoup: I did not (p. 254).
Gen. Decker: It never occurred to me that we could disown supporting this operation (p. 271).
The Secretary of Defense is more confused on this point:
Question: Were the implications of the conflict between operational requirements for success and the need for no attribution clearly understood?
McNamara: Not really... (p. 204).
That is, he did "not really" understand that the invasion could not succeed if they tried to hide the U.S. role in it, although this was obvious to his military experts.
Question: What degree of non attribution was sought and why?
McNamara: The highest possible degree because the Latin American countries had indicated they would not support the operation.
So it was also obvious to "the Latin American countries," with whom the invasion plans were discussed, that the U.S. would be held responsible. Who else, then, might be fooled?
Question: Was there any doubt that, globally speaking, this operation would be attributed to the United States?
McNamara: We felt it would to a degree, but wanted to reduce this to a minimum (p. 203-4).
I am afraid that what McNamara meant here is that nobody in the world would be fooled except perhaps his own countrymen.