The Bay of Pigs was what historian Theodore Draper called “a perfect failure.” It shattered the myth of infallibility and helped usher in a more skeptical era, not only at the Agency but in the country at large. Whatever lessons were to be gleaned from that debacle would have to be learned again and again. Cuba would not be the last time the Agency would miscalculate the willingness of indigenous insurgencies to follow its lead. Nor would it be the last time that covert operations would have to factor in deniability on a par with strategic and tactical objectives, even if it meant undertaking the impossible. Each succeeding president would be insistent that he be able to distance himself from covert actions, particularly those pursued in contravention of law or principle. Not only America's enemies were to be deceived, but Americans as well, because they might not support or tolerate such undertakings.
Ultimately the Bay of Pigs fooled no one. The price of preserving the fiction of deniability had led not only to defeat but to a wider loss of standing in the world. Such duplicity cost the United States more of its political credibility and moral authority than any outright assault on Cuba. The decision had been made by Kennedy, but it was the CIA that would bear the brunt of public rancor and suspicion. Such chicanery and deceit would prove fertile ground for those who saw CIA conspiracies behind every word and deed. As covert warriors, CIA officers were expected to fall upon their own swords in defeat, even as the architects of those disasters wagged their fingers knowingly. In the postmortems that followed the Bay of Pigs, the most unsettling finding was that men like Pete Ray had died to preserve an implausible fictionâwhat CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick called “a pathetic illusion.”
On September 23, 1961, a shaken CIA moved into its new headquarters building at Langley. On the wall in the marble lobby were engraved the scriptural words from John: “and the truth shall make you free.” The Agency, practiced in the art of deception, had itself become the victim of deception. In places like the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, and Nicaragua, covert objectives would again run headlong into the doctrine of deniability and limits imposed by fictive political aims. If political sensitivities sometimes reduced missions to quixotic pursuits, it did not diminish the courage of those dispatched to carry them out. It did, however, make it harder for some families of the bereaved to find meaning in such sacrifice.
For the children and widows of the Birmingham pilots killed in the Bay of Pigs operation, there was neither closure nor consolation. There were no bodies and no answers forthcoming from the governmentâonly lies. Some would go about their business, vainly attempting to put it behind them. But that was something Pete Ray's daughter, Janet, could not do. Instead, she consecrated herself to learning all she could about her father, his mission, and his fate.
In some ways she appeared to want to duplicate her father's life. She married a fighter pilotâMichael Weiningerâand named their son Pete, after her father. She even named her dog Chase, after the dog she had as a child. She allied herself to the cause of freeing Cuba and spent countless hours interviewing veterans of the Bay of Pigs, searching for clues to her father's mission and death. Never was she without her small pink vinyl suitcase, the sort a child takes on a sleep-over. It held her father's dental impressions, notes, tape recordings, newspaper clips, photos, and every document she could lay her hands on related to the Bay of Pigs.
For Janet Weininger and the other family members from Birmingham, the tragedy of death was only the beginning of their suffering. Over the ensuing years, the Agency steadfastly refused to acknowledge that Pete Ray and the others had worked for the CIA, albeit on contract, or that they were anything more than mercenaries.
Worse yet, the Agency had retained a local representative, ostensibly to provide assistance and moral support to Margaret Ray. But instead of providing comfort, remembers her son, the man threatened Margaret Ray, telling her that if she tried to publicly link her husband's death with the CIA she would lose her benefits and face financial ruin and even possible criminal prosecution and psychiatric institutionalization. He informed her that he knew where she shopped, who her friends were, and what her daily routine was. He also, Margaret later told her son, made crude and unwanted sexual advances toward her.
Margaret Ray, already shattered by the loss, now believed she was under constant surveillance. She was frightened, sometimes hysterical. She never did fully recover from the trauma of loss and the pressures, both real and imagined, to keep her silent. Amid such deception, Margaret Ray could not even be certain that her husband was dead. There was, after all, neither a body nor a grave. And there was irrefutable evidence that the CIA had already lied to her about other matters. Five years after Pete Ray's death she remarried, but she was haunted by a recurring nightmare in which Pete Ray returned from his ill-fated mission, demanding to know how she could have abandoned him and remarried. For a brief time in 1969 Margaret Ray was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. Thereafter she was placed on antidepressants.
Pete Ray's mother, Mary, was embittered and distrustful of the U.S. government. She had but one object that had belonged to her firstborn son. It was a schoolbook, a small red dog-eared volume entitled
Presidents
of the United States,
which ended with Franklin Roosevelt. But for her, it was just one more bitter reminder of the government's perfidy and lies. A year and a half after Bay of Pigs, when Kennedy was assassinated, Mary was almost ashamed of her reaction. “I was sorry he was killed but I didn't cry about it,” she would say. “I grieved for his children but I didn't cry for him because he was the cause of Pete's being killed.”
More than twelve years after Ray's death, on November 14, 1973, William Colby, Director Central Intelligence, quietly conferred a posthumous Distinguished Intelligence Cross upon Pete Ray. The accompanying citation read: “In recognition of his exceptional heroism in April 1961 when he undertook an extremely hazardous mission of the highest national priority. Although fully aware of the dangers he faced, Mr. Ray unhesitatingly volunteered to fly the mission on which he lost his life. In doing so he demonstrated his greatest personal courage and outstanding loyalty to his country. Mr. Ray's selfless devotion to duty and dedication to the national interests of the United States uphold the finest traditions of our country and reflect the highest credit on him and the Central Intelligence Agency.” It was a marked turnaround.
But for the family of Pete Ray it was too little too late. The Agency continued to refuse to release to them any information about Ray's mission or his death, and maintained for another six years that he had been killed in the crash of his plane, when they knew otherwise.
For Ray's daughter, Janet, grief had long before transformed itself into a crusade to unearth all she could about her father. In 1978 her quest took a bizarre turn when she learned that her father's body might still be recoverable. She had been told that a body, believed to be her father's, had been preserved, perhaps even frozen, by Castro, as a kind of trophy of war.
Over the course of the next two years, she worked ceaselessly to confirm that report and, if true, to win the return of her father's remains. She sent Castro telegrams and letters asking for information. Through Cuban representatives in Washington, the State Department, and sympathetic members of Congress, she learned that if she could substantiate that this body was indeed her father's, Castro would be willing to release it to her. The Cubans took fingerprints of the cadaver, which were then sent to the FBI. In September 1979 the FBI compared those prints with microfilmed prints taken at Ray's enlistment in the Alabama National Guard in 1947. The conclusion: the Havana morgue did indeed have the remains of Thomas “Pete” Ray.
Janet, pregnant with her son Pete, stood in the drizzling rain as the plane carrying the body of her father touched down at the Birmingham airport in December 1979. It was the same runway from which Ray had taken off for the mission eighteen years earlier. But before Ray's remains would be buried, she and her brother, Tom, insisted that it be autopsied. They hoped that it might yet yield some final secret of how Pete Ray died.
On the afternoon of December 6 a medical examiner at the Jefferson County Coroner's Office set about removing the five screws, sealed in red wax, that fastened the lid to the gray pine coffin. Inside, the body was in a zinc metal container with a small window over the face. It was lined with white cloth. Ray's head rested on a white pillow. As the coroner examined the body, one thing was obvious. Ray had not died in a plane crash, as the CIA had originally told the family. His body was riddled with bullets and marked by at least ten woundsâto his head, abdomen, arm, shoulder, ear, and wrist. As the procedure continued, the coroner carefully removed several fully jacketed slugs. Ray's son, Tom, then twenty-five, stood by and watched in silence.
Two days later, on Saturday, December 8, 1979, some two hundred people gathered on a Birmingham hillside to bury Ray with full military honors. Ray would have liked the view from that hill that overlooked the airport and the planes of the Alabama Air National Guard. Among those who came to remember him were family members, old friends, officers of the Cuban men he fought beside from Brigade 2506, former governor George Wallace, and even a camera-shy case worker from the CIA. As the coffin was carried to the open grave, some of those who had served with Ray in the Alabama Air National Guard saluted him. Ray's widow, Margaret, confined to a wheelchair by a recent heart attack, stared at the flag-draped casket and a black-and-white photo of her late husband. There were few words spoken.
Janet had already written a five-page letter to her father and slipped it into the uniform in which he was buried. At the funeral her remarks were brief. Said Janet, “I'm so glad my father's home.”
Richard Bissell, too, had been changed by the Bay of Pigs. His name, once synonymous with brilliance and promise, was now forever welded to the Cuban debacle, like Napoleon and Waterloo. Following his CIA service, he spent two unhappy years at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a think tank, then returned to Farmington, Connecticut. There followed ten utterly unfulfilling years as marketing director of the United Aircraft Corporation. Then he retired. At his modest office his assistant, Fran Pudlo, decorated the walls with photos and keepsakes of his career.
He had mellowed and grown reflective. Pudlo and he would read to each other from passages of Greek or Roman history. One of his favorites was
The Greek Generals Talk: Memoirs of the Trojan War.
He liked to listen to the broader sweep of history, as if it might give him some perspective on his own life, if not outright absolve him. As he listened to Pudlo reading, he sipped coffee from a white china mug decorated with five gold stars and the letters “RBAF.” It stood for “Richard Bissell's Air Force”âa gift from those who had worked with him on the U-2.
But at his home Bissell had almost no reminders of his CIA days. Somewhere in a drawer was a pair of titanium cuff links, a forgotten memento of the SR-71 project. He occasionally spoke of his Agency days but rarely of the Bay of Pigs. It was a reservoir of regret he would not allow himself to revisit. By the early 1990s, as he entered his eighties, he was no longer the imposing and sometimes volatile figure that loped down the long halls of Agency headquarters, already a legend. He was now frail and easily winded. He was wearing himself out trying to collect his thoughts into a memoir, a kind of footrace with his own mortality. When completed, it was unsparingly candid about his own culpability in the Bay of Pigs, but also placed much blame on Kennedy.
More and more he spent his days in the bedroom, surrounded by books and journals. In the winter of 1993 he was a sickly eighty-four-year-old man, his mind still keen, but no longer able or willing to fend off the limits of age.
It was on January 17, 1994, that Janet Weininger, daughter of Pete Ray, came to visit him in Farmington at the Bissell home, a three-hundred-year-old converted farmhouse. Bissell rarely turned down a request for an interview or a visit from a stranger. But the man Janet Weininger met that evening was a ghost of the robust Cold Warrior who had sent her father and so many others into the fray against Communism. Short of breath from pneumonia and suffering from circulation problems, he shivered in a recliner, a green plaid blanket draped over him and his feet warmed by slippers. For hours he listened as Janet spoke of her father and of the Cuban brigade. It was the least he could do, part of an endless penance.
Even Janet did not fully grasp the nature of her feelings toward this man whom she might well have hated as the architect of the fiasco that had claimed her father's life. But instead, she came to him seeking answers about her father and the mission and to pay homage to the man who had overseen the U.S. attempt to unseat Castro. With her, she brought a plaque from Brigade 2506, which she presented to him. The plaque had been made up by the Cuban veterans three years earlier as part of a thirtieth-anniversary observance. They had hoped to present it to him in person in Miami.
Bissell declined the brigade's invitation in an eloquent letter dated thirty years to the day after the invasion. “Looking back,” he wrote, “one can see there were many reasons for the failure and many persons who must share responsibility for it. There were errors of planning, particularly the failure to foresee and plan for contingencies for which I accept with profound regret a share of the blame. There were equipment defects. There was a faster and more effective response by Castro than we expected. But above all there were restrictions imposed on the way the operation was designed and conducted in an attempt to maintain an unattainable secrecy about the role of the U.S. government.”
But even in his later years Bissell never conceded the ultimate defeat. He closed his letter with these words: “I wish I could be with you on this occasion to drink a toast to the brave men who risked and those who lost their lives trying against all odds to overthrow a tyrant. I am confident that theirs is the wave of the future, and an increasingly isolated Communist dictatorship will collapse and that Cuba will again be free. May that day come soon.” It was a remarkable exhortation considering that by then Castro had outlasted seven U.S. presidents and become the longest-serving leader in the Western Hemisphereâthanks, in no small part, to the CIA's failed attempts to oust him.