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Gavin Sidhu
Mrs. Whitney
Global Perspectives
April 9, 2018
Analyzing U.S. Foreign Policy: The Bay of Pigs Invasion
"So the reason that the Bay of Pigs failed was that the original promise made by
Eisenhower was not kept by the subsequent Administration,” intelligence officer E. Howard
Hunt once said. This indeed summed up the vertex of the Bay of Pigs Invasion’s failure; the
outline and plans of the raid kept changing. The sudden attack was a retaliation against the
Soviet Union’s alliance with Cuba, where the United States (U.S.) recruited exiled Cubans to
invade the Bay of Pigs. Unfortunately, the invasion was an utter embarrassment of the U.S.: The
United States failed to execute this attack due to the limitations of the operation,
miscommunication, and careless mistakes; in other words, a rushed pace and disarray caused the
Bay of Pigs Invasion to be a trainwreck.
Miscommunication resulted in a frenzy of problems that contributed to the invasion’s
failure. This applies in the sense that miscommunication forced the CIA (Central Intelligence
Agency of the United States) to take inefficient shortcuts and inadequately accelerate the
process. The first and most commonly referenced miscommunication was when the CIA lied to
the Cuban exiles. Before the raid, they told the exiles that U.S. military assistance would come if
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needed, but this was never planned and never actually happened. Communication in the midst of
the invasion severely limited the brigade. For instance, there were only a few radio channels that
the brigade could use for communication that would not be detected by Cuba. Some sections of
the brigade had to interfere with other channels because there were not enough for each section
to have their own. According to Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, “In the Bay of Pigs there was severe
miscommunication and misunderstanding, caused in part by tight deadlines and the pace of
events. For example, after Kennedy rejected the Trinidad plan in early March 1961, the CIA
hastily devised several “quieter” alternatives, and gave the Pentagon only two days to evaluate
them” (Vandenbroucke, 486). This is an example of a rushed instance where risky shortcuts had
to be made in a limited amount of time. Since it resulted in rushed decisions and bottlenecked the
brigade amidst the operation, miscommunication was a large contributing factor in its failure.
General limitations and suspicions within the agency stopped sufficient work from being
done. This backfired on the operation as a whole. Vandenbroucke says that there is evidence that
the CIA just wanted to solidify their position rather than conduct the most efficient strategies. In
other words, they were taking extra, yet inefficient steps to ensure their position in the world was
in good standing. Another blockade in the CIA’s path was their small fourteen million dollar
budget. This was rather puny for a moderate-scale invasion, which required lots of guns,
ammunition, bombs, aircraft, ...
