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The Fish Is Red. The operation started with a surprise attack by B-26 light bombers on Cuban airports where Russian MIG-15s were reportedly being uncrated and assembled. In the best cloak and dagger tradition, to lend credence to a cover story that the bombings were by pilots defecting from Castro's air force, a few .30-cal. bullets were fired into an old Cuban B26. A pilot took off in the crate and landed it at Miami with an engine needlessly feathered and a cock-and-bull story that he had attacked the airfields. A reporter noted that dust and undisturbed grease covered bomb-bay fittings, electrical connections to rocket mounts were corroded, guns were uncocked and unfired. The planes that actually did the bombing never were seen.
That same evening, in high romantic style, a clandestine radio transmitter sent a cryptic message crackling across the Caribbean: "Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The first will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will not take much time to rise. The fish is red. Look well at the rainbow . . ."
At the six main training bases in Guatemala, and at staging bases at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, and tiny Swan Island off the Honduran coast, fish were already rising. In recent weeks, the equivalent of 50 freight carloads of aerial bombs, rockets, ammunition and firearms was airlifted into Puerto Cabezas by unmarked U.S. C-54s, C-46s and C-47s, in such quantities that on some days last month planes required momentary stacking. During Easter week, 27 U.S. C124 Globemasters roared in three or four at a time to off-load full cargoes of rations, blankets, ammunition and medical supplies at the U.S.-built airstrip at Retalhuleu, at Guatemala City and at Guatemala's San José airbase.
Hit the Beach. On D-day-minus-one, a fleet of invasion ships, painted black and equipped with guns and radar in New Orleans, steamed toward Cuba. That afternoon Miró and his Revolutionary Council were driven from Manhattan to Philadelphia by the CIA and flown to a secret rendezvous in Florida, where they could be held in readiness to move into the first available chunk of "free Cuba." They were lodged in an old house near an abandoned airfield, surrounded by a swarm of agents, ordered to stay put. At one point, some of the council members announced that they were going to leave, even if it meant getting shot, but were put off with promises. Eventually, Kennedy's Latin American affairs specialists, Adolf A. Berle and Arthur Schlesinger, flew in from Washington to reassure them.
After midnight, in simultaneous landings at three beaches on the Bay of Pigs, 90 miles southeast of Havana (see map), the attackers went in with artillery, tanks and B-26 air support. Soon afterward, Castro's military duty officer at Jagüey Grande reported fighting on the beach. The choice of a landing place seemed to come as a surprise to a military expert of the Revolutionary Council, onetime Cuban Army Colonel Ramón Barquín. "It has a