The disastrous failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion was all the more embarrassing to John F. Kennedy because by some widely believed accounts he lost his nerve and doomed the expedition by calling off promised U.S. air cover. Last week the President's brother made an attempt to erase that version of what happened. Said Attorney General Robert Kennedy in an interview: "I can say unequivocally that President Kennedy never withdrew U.S. air cover . . . There never were any plans made for U.S. air cover, so there was nothing to withdraw."
That statement of the case sounded pretty firm and final—except that it contradicted the accounts of many other people, including some members of the Bay of Pigs expedition. One of them, Manuel Penabaz, charged a few weeks ago that "we were betrayed." The invasion's leaders, he said, "had been assured of U.S. air cover." Dr. Manuel Antonio de Varona, a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, insisted that the U.S. had indeed assured the invaders of "full air control," though another invasion leader, Manuel Artime, declared that no U.S. air support had been promised. Adding to the confusion, Publisher Jack W. Gore of the Fort Lauderdale News said that in May 1961 the President himself had told a group of seven Florida newspaper executives, gathered for a confidential White House briefing, that planned air cover had been canceled by presidential order on the morning of the invasion. At his press conference, President Kennedy grimly declared that "there was no such conversation."
Targets of Opportunity. Whether or not the invaders were promised U.S. air cover, they were indeed promised air cover of a sort. It was to be provided by some 20 obsolescent B26. bombers, resurrected from U.S. Air Force storage by the CIA. The pilots were mostly Cuban exiles, but some were U.S. citizens (at least one U.S. pilot was killed during the invasion attempt). The bombers took off from a CIA-managed base at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua.
The basic mission of this semi-clandestine bomber force was to destroy Castro's planes on the ground before the invasion was launched. That task, the invasion planners decided, would take three days of repeated strikes at "targets of opportunity." After that, the bombers were supposed to provide close support for the invaders as they moved over the beaches. But shortly before the invasion got under way, White House orders went out limiting the B-26 force to two pre-invasion strikes. The first ineffectual sortie, two days before Dday, set off rumblings at the United Nations, so Kennedy called off the second strike, scheduled for the morning of the invasion. After the invaders scrambled ashore, Kennedy ordered the second strike reinstated, but it was too little and way too late.