At 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1959, David Atlee Phillips was lounging in a lawn chair in Havana after a New Year’s Eve party when a commercial aircraft flew low over his house. He surmised that dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing because Fidel Castro was arriving. He was right. Soon he, and many others, would be spectacularly wrong about Cuba.

According to Jim Rasenberger’s history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, “The Brilliant Disaster,” Phillips, a former actor, “had been something of a dilettante before joining the CIA.” There, however, he was an expert. And in April 1960, he assured Richard Bissell, the CIA’s invasion mastermind, that within six months radio propaganda would produce “the proper psychological climate” for the invasion to trigger a mass Cuban uprising against Castro.

The invasion brigade had only about 1,400 members but began its members’ serial numbers at 2,500 to trick Castro into thinking it was larger. Castro’s 32,000-man army was supplemented by 200,000 to 300,000 militia members. U.S. intelligence was ignorant of everything from Castro’s capabilities to Cuba’s geography to Cubans’ psychology.

The invasion still fascinates as, historian Theodore Drape says, “one of those rare events in history — a perfect failure.”

It led to President Kennedy’s decision to demonstrate toughness by deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Rasenberger writes that three weeks after the April 1961 invasion, Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon Johnson to Saigon: “Johnson’s assignment was to deliver a message to (South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh) Diem that the United States intended to fully support the South Vietnamese effort to beat the Communists.” (Thirty months later, the United States was complicit in the military coup — regime change — in which Diem was murdered.) The Bay of Pigs led to Nikita Khrushchev’s disdainful treatment of Kennedy at the June summit in Vienna, and to Khrushchev being emboldened to put missiles in Cuba.

In 1972, the Bay of Pigs made a cameo appearance in the Watergate shambles, which involved some Cubans and Americans active in the invasion. On the June 23 “smoking gun” Oval Office tape, Richard Nixon directs his aide H.R. Haldeman to urge the CIA to tell the FBI to back off from investigating the burglary by saying, “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing.”

Surely this “thing” should be studied as deeply as possible. Unfortunately, the CIA is resisting attempts to force the release of the fifth and final volume of its official history of it.

This autumn, a federal appeals court is expected to hear arguments about disclosing the document written in 1981 by CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer. The National Security Archive, a private research institution and library, is arguing that no important government interest is served by the continuing suppression of a 32-year-old report about a 52-year-old event.

The CIA argues that it should be covered by the “deliberative process privilege” that makes it exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. The argument is that, for some unclear reason, release of this volume, unlike the release of the first four volumes, would threaten the process by which the CIA’s histories are written. Supposedly candid histories will not be written if the writers know that, decades later, their work will become public.

This unpersuasive worry — an excuse for the selective censorship of perhaps embarrassing scholarship — is surely more flimsy than the public’s solid interest in information. And the government’s interest.

George Will is a columnist for The Washington Post. He can be contacted at:

georgewill@washpost.com

 

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