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Plausible Deniability: Why the Bay of Pigs Was Doomed Before Dawn
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In April 1961, the CIA landed 1,400 Cuban exiles on a remote beach and watched the operation collapse within 72 hours — not from bad luck, but from compounding institutional failures built into the plan from the start. This is the full story of how confidence became catastrophe.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's four in the morning on April seventeenth, nineteen sixty-one. The water is dark and warm.
To understand how badly this went wrong, you need to understand how confidently it was designed. The plan was born under Eisenhower.
The exile brigade was designated Brigade two five zero six. By April nineteen sixty-one, it numbered around fourteen hundred men.
The air component was supposed to be decisive. Before the landing, a fleet of B-twenty-six bombers, painted to look like Cuban air force planes, would destroy Castro's air force on the ground.
The fighting lasted roughly three days. By any tactical measure, the brigade fought hard.
Kennedy took public responsibility. That's significant and worth sitting with.
The captured men of Brigade two five zero six sat in Cuban prisons for twenty months. Kennedy tried to negotiate their release through a ransom arrangement.
The immediate legacy was a hardened Castro, a humiliated Kennedy administration, and a CIA leadership that had been publicly decapitated. But the longer consequences shaped the Cold War for years.
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