by admin » Fri Jul 07, 2017 7:45 am
PART TWO. AN ANALYSIS OF THE CUBAN OPERATION BY THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR (PLANS)
I. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY:
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of the nature of and the reasons for the failure of the Cuban operation and in so doing to suggest what are the correct lessons to be learned therefrom. It is prompted by and is, for the most part, a commentary on the IG Survey.
That document gives a black picture of the Agency's role in this operation. It makes a number of different kinds of allegations.
First, there are numerous charges of bad organization and incomplete execution, including specifically criticisms of: command relationships; the quality of personnel; the internal operational planning process; the conduct of maritime and air operations; and the collection and evaluation of intelligence. These deficiencies are portrayed as responsible for the failure to build up and supply resistance organizations under rather favorable conditions.
Second, and more serious is the allegation of major errors of judgment, notably (a) the decision to convert the project into what rapidly became an overt military operation beyond the Agency's capability, (b) the treatment of the Cuban exiles as "puppets", (c) the inadequacy of the military plan for the invasion, and (d) the failure "to appraise the chances of success realistically."
Third, the Survey is critical of the Agency's failure to insure that the decision making process in the Executive Branch was orderly and effective. The Agency, it is alleged, "failed to keep the national policy makers adequately and realistically informed of the conditions considered essential for success, and it did not press sufficiently for prompt policy decisions in a fast moving situation". As a corollary of this judgment, the Survey attributes the blame for incompetence of execution and for errors of judgment essentially to this Agency alone.
It is almost self-evident that some of these allegations are true, at least in part. In any large and rapidly organized undertaking there are certain to be errors of organization and of execution. In all likelihood major errors in judgment were committed. Similarly, the decision making process in the Executive Branch of the Government operated in a manner that left something to be desired. Nevertheless, this paper argues: that a large majority of the conclusions reached in the Survey are misleading or wrong; that the Survey is especially weak in judging what are the implications of its own allegations and, therefore, that its utility is greatly impaired by its failure to point out fully or in all cases correctly the lessons to be learned from this experience. This generalized rejection can be made more meaningful by an elaboration at this point, which will at the same time serve the purpose of outlining the structure of this paper and summarizing certain of its main conclusions.
A. Organization and Execution
As to the first set of allegations, there is not too much that can be said short of detailed discussion which is contained in later sections, except to make the obvious point that perfection in organization and execution is never attained and that the real question is whether the mistakes that were made were worse than they reasonably should have been and justify blanket condemnation. Stated flatly, the conclusions reached here on the main substantive points are:
a. That Agency command and organizational relationships were what they should have been.
b. That any shortcomings in the internal planning process reflected, for the most part, the difficulty of securing clear policy guidance from outside the Agency and prompt, willing, support based on that guidance.
c. That the failure of most air operations in support of the resistance was the result of circumstances completely beyond the control of the air arm and probably not remediable by any action that the Agency could have taken.
d. That the intelligence on the Castro regime and on the internal opposition thereto was essentially accurate.
The greatest operational weaknesses were in the early phases of maritime operations and, possibly, in the failure to place trained paramilitary agents with resistance groups, although it must be recognized that major efforts were made to accomplish this result and even with hindsight it is not clear that any different operational procedures or any greater effort could have achieved greater results.
The ultimate test of any project such as this is, of course, its outcome but if a judgment of the effectiveness of organization and execution is to be made, the deficiencies need to be balanced by the accomplishments. As even the Survey remarks, "There were some good things in this project." After a slow start, a sizable number of small boat operations were run efficiently and a large number of persons and volume of cargo were infiltrated successfully into the island. In the last weeks before the invasion, a political organization was formed which covered a remarkably broad spectrum of political opinion and brought together what was described by a State Department officer at the time as the best group of exile leaders that could be assembled and that left outside no important politically acceptable element. In the military build-up, a force was created that was twice as large as original envisaged and larger than any paramilitary force ever developed by the Agency. It was brought to a high state of combat effectiveness with a remarkably low percentage of individuals who had to be eliminated for unsuitability and with high morale later proven in combat. This force was airlifted to a staging base, the location of which was never revealed until after the finish of the operation. It was loaded on ships which sailed on dispersed courses and achieved complete surprise five days later. The Brigade then successfully carried out what had been described as the most difficult type of military operation, a landing on a hostile shore, carried out largely at night. Finally, as the battle was joined, adequate supplies of all sorts were available within a few hours of the beaches, had conditions permitted their off-loading. These various results were accomplished in such a way that only a small number of Agency staff officers were ever exposes to the Cuban participants and the true identities of these Americans have never been revealed. Moreover, the entire build-up was accomplished under the limitation that it contemplate no use of Americans in combat and no commitment of American flag shipping. As the event proved (and the Survey remarks), "This was not enough." Nevertheless, a recital of affirmative accomplishments suggests that whatever shortcomings there were in organization, personnel, and execution were not the decisive reasons for failure. It will be necessary to return to this point later.
B. Errors of Judgment
The second set of criticisms, those described above as allegations of major errors of judgment and the third, relating to the Agency's relationships with the rest of the Executive Branch, are more complex. Their validity is discussed in separate sections below (Section III on Why a Military Type Invasion and IV on The Decision Making Process, Section VIII on The Relationships with the Cubans, and Section V on The Assessment of the Adequacy of the Plan and on the Appraisal of its Success.) Summarized in flat statements, the conclusions there reached are these:
a. The basic reason for placing increasing emphasis as the build-up progressed upon the planned military operation and decreasing emphasis on the internal resistance is that for a number of reasons the capacity of the resistance to achieve an overthrow without a significant assist from the outside appeared to be diminishing rather than growing despite the best efforts of which the Agency was capable to support it. Moreover, preparation for the military operation was not intended to reduce support of the resistance and the two efforts became truly competitive only in the last week before the invasion was mounted.
b. The decision to deny the Cuban political leadership control of or close contact with the Brigade and to withhold from them knowledge of the impending invasion was based on two considerations. First, it was believed at the time that if the Brigade was to achieve unity and esprit de corps, it must not be split by political rivalries and its officers must be chosen on professional grounds. This clearly precluded control of the Brigade, or even access to it, by the political leaders. Second, the insecurity of the Cubans was notorious. It was quite inconceivable that they could know the details of times and places without the gravest risk that the essential advantage of surprise would be lost. It was clear at the time that the Agency assumed a significant risk in denying responsibility to the Cubans and inevitably assuming this responsibility itself. No evidence that has come to light during or since the invasion suggests that military effectiveness and security could have been obtained without paying that price.
c. The conclusions of this paper on the adequacy of the military plan are really too complex to be summarized in a sentence or two. All that can be said here is that (1) there was solid reason to believe that it had a good chance of at least initial success; (2) the last minute cancellation of the D-Day air strike significantly reduced the prospects of success; (3) there was never a test of whether internal support for the invasion would materialize on the scale and in the manner anticipated; and (4) the main deficiencies in the plan and in the capabilities of the Cuban force which may have contributed to the defeat have not been touched on in the Survey.
d. The appraisal of the chances of success may well have been faulty. The intelligence was generally good but it may have underestimated the skill with which the Castro forces would be directed, the morale of the militia units he would deploy against the Brigade and the effectiveness of any T-33's that remained in operation. There was some exaggeration of the capabilities of both ground and air forces of the invasion. It is impossible to say how grave was the error of appraisal since the plan that was appraised was modified by elimination of the D-Day air strike. Had the Cuban air been eliminated, all of these estimates might well have been accurate instead of underestimated. Probably, therefore, the primary fault lay in having one factor (i.e., the elimination of Cuban air) achieve so vital a significance to the whole plan. Although the D-Day air strikes were essential to the destruction of the Cuban air, no guaranty of such destruction was possible even had there been authority for the strikes.
The conclusions summarized above bear on the correctness of the Survey's allegations of deficiencies of execution and major errors of judgment but for the purposes either of understanding what happened or of learning how to avoid such a failure in the future, it is far from sufficient to know that certain activities were (or were not) incompetently performed and certain mistakes were (or were not) made. With many of the deficiencies it is essential to understand why they existed. And with all of them it is important to know what part they played in causing the outcome to be what it was. The central weakness of the Survey is that it is often misleading in its implications as to why certain things were done and it is grossly incomplete in its analysis of the consequences of mistakes alleged to have been made. Accordingly, before proceeding to the detailed discussion beginning in Section II of this paper which supports the conclusions summarized here, it has been felt necessary to make good in some degree these errors of omission by commenting on the nature and causes of the failure in a manner which will be in part alternative and in part supplementary to the Survey.
C. The Decisions That Led to Failure
It has been suggested not only in the Survey but elsewhere that the operation against the Castro regime should never have been allowed to take the form that it did of a military invasion. It ultimately did take this form, however, and it was in this form that it failed. The military failure has been analyzed far more exhaustively and with greater authority by General Taylor and others than this paper can pretend to do. Nevertheless, certain conclusions as to the nature of the military failure must be restated here if its causes are to be understood.
There is unanimous agreement that the proximate cause was a shortage of ammunition on the beachhead and that this shortage was directly traceable, in turn, to the effective interdiction of shipping and air resupply by the Castro Air Force. It has been less emphasized that Castro's command of the air deprived the Brigade of its capability for battlefield reconnaissance, of the equivalent of field artillery, and of close air support against enemy ground forces. It deprived it, too, of the possibility of "strategic" strikes against enemy lines of supply and communications. Finally, reliance had been placed on daytime and virtually unopposed air and sea resupply as a necessary condition for the activation of resistance groups throughout the Island. It is incontrovertible that, without control of the air, and the air crews and aircraft to exploit that control of the air, the whole military operation was doomed. Even with control of the air it might have failed but without it there could not have been any chance of success. If, then, one wishes to learn what actually caused the military operation to fail, rather than what might have done so, the starting point must be an inquiry into why control of the air was lost and never regained. Of equal significance for an understanding of the whole operation is an awareness of the circumstances that did not contribute to the failure in the air.
Fortunately, it is possible to list without much possibility of controversy the circumstances that led to the outcome in the air. First, the nearest real estate that could be used was Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua a distance of over 800 miles from the target area. The only way to avoid this severe limitation on the capability of any but the most modern aircraft would have been to use a base on U.S. territory. Second, in choosing types of aircraft, no sort of plausible denial could be maintained unless the project limited itself to the kinds of obsolete aircraft that might plausibly be found in the hands of a privately financed Cuban force. There was the further argument that it was desirable to use types of aircraft that could have defected from the Castro Air Force. The choice was thus rapidly narrowed down to B-26's. Third, policy guidance throughout the project was to the effect that no U.S. air crews could be committed to combat or placed where they might be involved in combat. This restriction was not relaxed until the second day of the invasion and then only in desperation. This had implications not only for the quality of the air crews but also for the number that could be assembled, screened for security, and trained within the time period available.
Given these limitations, the only way in which there was the slightest possibility of achieving control and maintaining control of the air was by destruction of the Castro Air Force on the ground before the dawn of D-Day when vulnerable shipping would be exposed to air strikes. The one air strike on D-2 was not expected to be, and in fact was not, sufficient to accomplish this purpose. Only one other strike was planned for this purpose and that was cancelled. Moreover, in the interests of making the air strikes appear to have been done by the Castro Air Force, a restriction was placed on the number of aircraft that could be committed to these strikes by the invasion force.
Even after the very considerable damage done on D-Day itself by enemy air, it is possible that a determined and major strike on the night of D/D+1 would have crippled the Castro Air Force, the final destruction of which might have been completed the following night. By the evening of D-Day, however, the Cuban air crews were exhausted and dispirited and the opportunity could not be fully exploited.
Even if things had gone better on D-Day, it is questionable whether the 17 Cuban air crews that constituted the air arm of the strike force would have been adequate to accomplish all of the tasks for which reliance was placed on the air arm. The chance of success would have been greater (with or without the D-Day strike) if it had been possible to assemble and commit to action more trained Cuban or U.S. air crews.
D. Washington Decision Making
These, then, were the circumstances which together led to defeat in the air and made inevitable a defeat on the ground. Several things are notable about them. In the first place, it should be emphasized that these all trace back to Washington decisions. The defeat in the air cannot be blamed on bad maintenance of Puerto Cabezas, or on a shortage of spare parts or fuel. It cannot be blamed on a shortage of B-26's, inasmuch as it proved possible rapidly to replace losses from the U.S. It cannot be blamed on the cowardice or lack of skill of the Cuban air crews, who by and large gave a good account of themselves. Nor can it be attributed to bad tactical decisions made either at Puerto Cabezas or in the Washington command post. The crucial defeat in the air was to no significant degree the result of bad execution. It was directly and unambiguously attributable to a long series of Washington policy decisions.
Before exploring the touchy question of whose decisions these were and how they were made, the implications of this conclusion deserve emphasis and elaboration. It suggests that the bad organization, improperly drawn lines of command, low quality personnel and operational inadequacies alleged by the Survey were not in the actual event responsible for the military failure. If organization and execution had approached perfection, the invasion would still have failed in the absence of more and larger pre-D-Day air strikes or the use of more modern aircraft from U.S. bases.
To be sure, this conclusion derives from an analysis only of the failure to gain control of the air. It is arguable that even if control of the air had been achieved, maintained, and exploited, the beachhead would not have been consolidated nor the Regime ultimately overthrown. Without arguing that point here, however, the evidence strongly suggests that if the Brigade had been defeated by ground action under these more favorable circumstances, it would have been because of errors of planning and conception rather than by errors of execution. The Brigade fought long enough to prove its determination and tactical skill. It appears to have been well handled by its officers. There were ample supplies at hand to support continued ground action. And Castro himself has admitted that the terrain was well chosen. Given control of the air, the Brigade might ultimately have been defeated by a complete failure of any resistance to materialize under conditions which would have encouraged it and permitted air support coupled with continued effectiveness in the face of heavy casualties of the Castro militia. Either of these possible developments would have confirmed the errors of intelligence and assessment that are alleged but would have given no support to the view that errors of organization and execution in the build-up phase were responsible for the military defeat. Despite whatever mistakes of this character there were, the Agency did after all (with the invaluable help of the Department of Defense) build up, train, equip, and deploy a force that proved itself in combat to be of high quality.
E. Agency vs. Government Responsibility
Another notable feature of the decisions that together were responsible for failure to achieve control of the air (in addition to the fact that they were all Washington policy decisions) is that they were all interdepartmental decisions. Other elements of the Executive Branch were involved along with the Agency in making them. This is not to imply that in all cases they were imposed on the Agency. Regardless, however, of how blame should be assessed between the Agency for accepting restrictions and the policy makers outside the agency for imposing them, it is necessary to have clearly in mind the nature of the decision making process in a project of this sort in order to understand how the ultimate failure came about.
Inherent in this situation was a clear conflict between two goals, a conflict of the sort familiar in recent American history. One objective was that, mainly through the various activities comprised in this project, the Castro regime should be overthrown. The other was that the political and moral posture of the United States before the world at large should not be impaired. The basic method of resolving this conflict of objectives that was resorted to was that of attempting to carry out actions against Castro in such a manner that the official responsibility of the U.S. Government could be disclaimed.
If complete deniability had been consistent with maximum effectiveness, there would theoretically have remained no conflict of goals but in fact this could not be (and never is) the case. The most effective way to have organized operations against the Castro regime, even if they would have been carried out exclusively by Cubans, would have been to do so perfectly openly, on the largest scale and with the best equipment feasible. Practically every departure from this pattern of behavior imposed operational difficulties and reduced effectiveness. Inherent in the concept of deniability was that many of these restrictions would be accepted but at every stage over a period of many months questions had to be answered in which operational difficulties was weighed against the political requirement of deniability.
As these decisions presented themselves week after week, the Agency as the executive agent for the conduct of the operation was usually and naturally the advocate of effectiveness. The State Department and, with respect to certain matters, the Department of Defense were the guardians of the correctness of the country's political posture and thus the advocates of deniability. There was obviously no way in which a generalized policy could have been laid down which would have furnished guidance as to the way the many successive decisions ought to be made. There was no quantitative measure of either the improvement in the chances of success that would have resulted from say, permission to use American air crews in overflights or of the decrease in deniability that would have resulted therefrom. Each of many such decisions had to be discussed and made on its own merits, and in almost all of them several agencies had to take part.
One of the consequences of this state of affairs was that prompt decisions were hard to obtain. Another was that, like so many inter-departmental decisions, these were subject to differing interpretations by different participants in the process. Delays and differences of interpretation were compounded by the constantly changing situation both of Cuba and the Castro regime on the one side and of the opposition on the other, which would have rendered rigid and entirely orderly planning difficult under the best of circumstances.
The nature of the decision making process had other consequences as well. It explains in large measure the failure to write tidy and comprehensive plans and have them properly approved in writing by competent authority well in advance. It explains why there was a long succession of alternate plans and of modification to plans under consideration. Above all, the constant weighing of costs and benefits in the effort to satisfy the military requirements for success without excessive impairment of the political requirement of deniability explains why the final plan (and most of the variants considered in the last six weeks) was a compromise.
F. Why An "Overt" Operation
Against the background of these remarks on the way decisions were made and on the nature of policy issues involved, it is worth commenting briefly on one of the major errors of judgment alleged by the Survey: the decision to "convey the project into what rapidly became an overt military operation beyond the Agency's capability." In part this "decision" was compelled by the failure of the internal resistance the reasons of which are discussed in later sections and are not germane to the current context. As for the Agency's capability, enough has already been said to suggest that the operation was not so much beyond the Agency's capability as it was beyond the scope of activities judged to be acceptably deniable. The question that is highly relevant to the policy making process is how and why the project was allowed to become overt and, when this had happened, why it remained the responsibility of the Agency.
That it did become "overt" in the sense that there was extensive public discussion of the preparations for invasion and that the military action was widely attributed to the United States Government, both before and after it took place, there can be no doubt. Nor is there any mystery as to why this happened. It was quite out of the question to infiltrate men and arms by sea and air for months, recruit, train and arm a strike force of some 1800 Cubans, to organize the political fronts, first the FRD then the CRC and run a major propaganda campaign, without at least reports and rumors of these activities becoming widespread. Nor were there any illusions either in the Agency or elsewhere in the Executive Branch as to the degree to which the facts were surmised and accepted as true by journalists and other informed persons. Why, then, would anyone continue to regard the involvement of the United States as plausibly deniable and why was the undertaking not converted into an overt operation, which presumably would have become the responsibility of the Department of Defense?
The answer to the first part of this question is that up to and through the invasion itself the operation remained to an extraordinary degree technically deniable. Funds were disbursed in such a way that their U.S. Government origin could not be proved. No Agency case officer who played an active role was publicly revealed as such by true name. No Americans were captured (although the bodies of an American B-26 crew were probably recovered after its loss on the second day of the invasion). In short, even the best informed correspondents in Miami who published what purported to be detailed, factual reports could substantiate them only by quoting Cubans who themselves were often not well informed. This limited and purely technical maintenance of deniability was less important to the decisions of the Executive Branch, however, than the fact that no one in the Executive Branch was ready at any point until after the defeat officially to avow U.S. support. Indeed, this alternative was never seriously considered. Even the most inadequate fig leaf was considered more respectably than the absence of any cover whatsoever. Indeed, the final changes in the operational plan made in March, the official announcement in April that the United States would not give support to the rebels, and the cancellation of the D-Day strike were all last minute efforts to shore up the plausible deniability of an enterprise for which Governmental support was bound to be conclusively surmised even if it could not be proved. These decisions were made by the senior policy makers of the Government who were reading the newspapers every day and knew well to what degree the project had in fact become "overt". These men simply were not willing to state officially either that the United States itself was about to make war on Cuba or that the U.S. Government was openly supporting a group of Cubans, not even recognized as a Government in exile, in a military invasion. In the aftermath of failure this decision may have seemed a wrong one. Had the operation succeeded reasonably quickly and without too much bloodshed, the decision would probably have seemed a correct one. Be that as it may, it was not the Agency's decision and, as the above cited actions suggest, the pressure to strengthen deniability in the last few weeks came from outside the Agency and led to decisions which were unwelcome to the Agency. To suggest, as the Survey seems to do, that the Agency was responsible for this clinging to deniability is demonstrably false.
G. Government vs. Agency Decision
The same comment applies in some degree to the three other alleged major errors of judgment. (These have to do respectively with the treatment of the Cuban exiles, the adequacy of the military planning, and the appraisal of the chances of success. They have been touched upon above and are discussed at some length in Section V below.) In the context of the decision making process, the most important conclusion that emerges is that, whether they were wise or unwise, they were Governmental decisions in a very real sense. As to the handling of the Cubans, this was a matter of the most intimate consultation with the State Department, especially in the two months preceding the invasion when the CRC was in process of formation. As to military planning, the record clearly shows that there was detailed consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the JCS considered the successive plans both formally and informally, and that these were the subject of review and discussion at the highest levels of Government. The chances of success were assessed favorably by the Joint Chiefs (minus, of course, the last minute cancellation of the D-Day strike) as well as by the Agency. The Agency must accept a sizable share of the blame for whatever mistakes were made in these three areas but no one who studies the record with care can assert (and no one who has done so has asserted) that the responsibility was narrowly focused on any one of the participants in the decision making process.
H. Conclusions
This introductory and summary section began with a re-statement of the main allegations of error made in the Survey and it followed with a summary of the conclusions reached in this paper (partly in the foregoing discussion but principally in the later more detailed sections) with respect to these allegations. For the most part the allegations are rejected. In concluding this section it may be useful first to list, for comparison and contrast with the Survey, what in the judgment of this paper do appear to have been the strengths and weaknesses of this undertaking and second to suggest some of the lessons to be drawn therefrom. The list is as follows:
1) Small boat infiltration operations were slow to start (but by and large were effective and well run in the last three months). Moreover, due to the existence of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, defectors and legal travel, the need for illegal infiltration was comparatively slight until January 1961.
2) Partly for this reason, the effort to place trained communicators, paramilitary types, and other agents with resistance groups inside the Island, and thereby to create a reception capability for air and maritime resupply, never caught up with Castro's improving security measures. This impaired the build-up not only of guerrilla groups but of intelligence nets. It is doubtful, however, whether significantly more could have been accomplished in building up an effective internal resistance particularly in view of the timing of the whole operation and the lead time involved in recruiting and training.
3) Aside from these weaknesses, alleged defects of organization and execution had little to do with the unsuccessful outcome. In particular, the limiting factor on air operations in support of the resistance was not bad management but the limitations of the reception parties and competence of Cuban air crews.
4) The air arm should have been stronger by the time of the invasion in numbers of air crews, type of equipment, availability of U.S. bases, or some combination of all these. If relief could not have been obtained from any of the politically motivated restrictions, and if a larger number of competent Cuban air crews could not have been recruited, the Agency should on its own responsibility have assembled more U.S. nationality air crews in the hope that their commitment would be permitted in an emergency.
5) There should have been more pre-D-Day air strikes and they should have employed the full strength of the air arm. The D-Day strike should not have been cancelled.
6) The military plan was a good one (except for the restrictions on, and possible inadequacy of, the air arm). It was properly worked out as between the Agency and the Joint Staff and was a product of highly competent, professional military planning.
7) The appraisal of the chances of success was probably faulty for reasons summarized above (para. d, page 8).
8) The important decisions were Governmental not those of one Agency. It was frustrating but of little practical consequence that the decision making process was at times cumbersome and did not promote tidiness. It was inevitable that the whole shape of the operation was determined as a compromise between the conflicting goals of deniability and effectiveness.
I. Lessons For The Future
What are the lessons for the future to be drawn from this unhappy experience? Perhaps the main one is that the U.S. should not support an operation such as this involving the use of force without having also made the decision to use whatever force is needed to achieve success. If the political decisions necessary to facilitate the effective use of force on an adequate scale, up to and possibly including the overt commitment of U.S. military forces, are too difficult to make, then the operation should be called off unless the odds in favor of success within the politically imposed restrictions are very great.
It is a fact of life that the use of force by the U.S. (or any major Western nation -- the Communists seem to be judged by a different standard) in an effort to influence the course of events in another country is deeply unpopular with an important body of opinion. Most of the damage to the political posture of the U.S. that is done by such action occurs when the action is identified, whether on the basis of evidence or of pure surmise, with the U.S. Once this point of identification has been passed, it will almost invariably be true that ultimate failure not only means loss of the original objective but further exaggeration of the political damage. Ultimate success, on the other hand, is the only way partially to retrieve and offset the political damage. It is, therefore, only the part of the wisdom to reassess an undertaking of this sort when identification of the U.S. Government with it has begun to occur or appears imminent and to determine at that time either to insure success or to abandon it.
The feeling has been widespread that another major lesson to be learned has to do with respect to the decision making process in the Executive Branch. In any major operation involving the actual exercise of power by the U.S. Government (as distinguished from the threat to exercise power), some branch of the Government will be responsible for execution, preoccupied with the achievement of success, and therefore generally the advocate of a massive and effective exercise of power. At the same time, the U.S. will always be in pursuit of a variety of essentially political objectives which will impose a requirement to maintain a certain public posture (notably in the UN). This requirement, in turn, will imply limitations on the manner in which and the scale on which power can be exercised. The guardian of the public posture whose primary responsibility it will be to devise and support restrictions on action will typically be the Department of State, or policy makers outside the action organization. In such a situation there is almost bound to be a succession of operational decisions that present (or appear to the participants to present) major issues of policy and, since there is an inevitable, and in a sense legitimate, conflict of interests between departments reflecting the conflict of objectives, there will typically have to be an arbiter who is himself neither the activist operator nor the statesman-like guardian of the country's political posture. Such issues are continuously brought to top levels for resolution. The result is a very human tendency on the part of the decision makers to decide not only the policy matters which only they can handle but also operational matters in which they have little of the expertise necessary for judgment and can rarely acquire through briefings enough depth of factual detail for a full understanding. Admittedly, expert advisors can be used but under pressure of time compounded by the unavoidable ambiguity of committee considerations, decisions are often made by the policy makers without full concurrence of the experts based on an inadequate understanding of the issues or their implications.
These are of course external problems of high level decision making and minor changes in governmental structure will not cause them to disappear. Nor are they in any sense unique to clandestine operations conducted by this Agency. Whenever something like the Cuban situation arises, what seem to the operators to be operational decisions will in fact raise policy issues. The issues will be real because they arise out of a real conflict of objectives. The decision making process could be tidier than it usually is and a meticulous written record would minimize recriminations after the fact, but tidiness and a good written record will have little bearing on the substantive wisdom of the decisions themselves. Whether in important matters of this sort any one other than the President himself can resolve the conflict between the requirements for effectiveness of action and acceptability of the political consequences remains to be seen. Perhaps the most useful lesson about Government decision making to be learned from the Cuban case is that one must be prepared for and philosophical about this process.
A third lesson of lesser generality has to do with the covertness or deniability of paramilitary and other large scale operations. An operation can be said to be covert only so long as the knowledge that it is being performed can be restricted to authorized individuals. This is possible if an activity can really be concealed (e.g., photography of a document without the knowledge that the document has been reproduced) or if that part of the activity which is observable by unwitting people can be made to appear to them to be perfectly normal (the black movement of bodies or cargo from place to place through the use of false documentation). Unfortunately, a good many large projects including notably most paramilitary operations cannot be covert in this sense. Journalists and other unwitting people are almost certain to learn that something untoward is afoot. The only aspect in which such operations can be kept clandestine is by successfully concealing the part played by the U.S. Government.
It is a necessary condition for the preservation of such deniability that no unwitting individual acquire hard evidence of Governmental participation but this is by no means a sufficient condition. If it comes to be widely believed even in the absence of hard evidence that the U.S. Government is assisting or participating in an illegal activity, then a considerable part of the benefit that accrued from deniability has already been lost. After all, the effect on public opinion depends on what is believed by that part of the public with which the policy makers are for the moment concerned. There may still remain, however, a benefit to be derived from deniability after the public has decided that the denials are false because the Government can still maintain a formally "correct" posture. The Soviets frequently derive advantage from this limited official deniability. As a rule, however, the advantages that accrue to a Western Government, with a lively and at least partly hostile press and with statesmen who shrink from the utterances of flat untruths, are limited.
The lesson suggested by these remarks is that in future clandestine operations of any size, it behooves all concerned to assess realistically the degree to which the operation is, and is likely to remain, clandestine. If the very scale of the activities makes it impossible to conceal them, can they be made to appear to suspicious journalists and others to be perfectly normal? If it is becoming apparent that something newsworthy is going on, can suspicion of Government involvement be kept to an acceptably low key? Or is the only option that remains open that of firm, repeated, public official disclaimer of a responsibility which will generally be attributed to the Government anyway? A corollary is that the advantages of whatever degree of deniability that remains feasible should not be overestimated. With hindsight, the U.S. did not buy very much political advantage with all the restraints imposed on air activity in the Cuban operation. Had it been decided even ten days before the invasion that responsibility for the operation would be unanimously attributed to the U.S. and that only official deniability could be preserved, consideration might have been given to recognizing the Cuban Revolutionary Council as a government in exile and allowing it to make as many and as powerful air strikes as it could. Another possibility might have been to use U.S. aircraft for a night strike. No one proposed either course of action at the time. They are mentioned here as theoretical possibilities only to illustrate the kind of conclusion that might have flowed from a more realistic assessment of the achievable degree of covertness and of the benefits to be obtained by maintaining only that limited degree of covertness.
There may be a fourth lesson to be drawn with respect to the assessment of the chances of success of any inherently risky operation. As stated above, a conclusion of this paper is that the assessment may have been faulty. Generally, this has been attributed, both in the Survey and elsewhere, to the circumstance that those responsible for conducting the operation were doing the appraising and exhibited a predictable bias. But this diagnosis ignores the role of the JCS who were directed by the President to review the prospects for the operation: principally so that there would be an independent and professionally competent judgment. It is also true that in judging the temper of the Cuban people, principal reliance was placed on a National Estimate. Nevertheless, it is probably true that the views of men deeply involved in the operation received too much weight in the assessment of the probably outcome, though it is far from clear where and how additional skeptics could have been introduced into the process of judgment without simply adding to the confusion. The only clear lesson is that policy makers should not make mistakes, which is scarcely helpful.
Finally, there are various lessons to be drawn with respect to Agency organization, procedures, and resources. No attempt will be made here to elaborate them, partly because to do so would require rather detailed exposition and partly because these are not among the really important lessons. It must be repeated still again that errors of execution did not have much to do with the failure and it must be emphasized that ways were found of bringing to bear on the conduct of the operation professional talent of a high order, especially in the military field. The mistakes were mainly those of judgment which a different organization would not have forestalled.