Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba

by Peter Kornbluh (Editor)

For decades, the CIA's top secret postmortem on the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion has been the holy grail of historians, students, and survivors of the failed invasion of Cuba. But the scathing internal report on the worst foreign policy debacle of the Kennedy administration, written by the CIA's then–inspector general Lyman Kirkpatrick, has remained tightly guarded―until now. Dislodged from the government through the Freedom of Information Act, here is an uncompromising look at high officials' arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence, as displayed in their attitude toward Castro's revolution and toward the Cuban exiles the CIA had organized to invade the island. Including the complete report and a wealth of supplementary materials, Bay of Pigs Declassified provides a fascinating picture of the operation and of the secret world of the espionage establishment, with stories of plots, counterplots, and intra-agency power struggles worthy of a Le Carré novel. the complete text of the CIA report; a critical introduction; the newly declassified response to the report from Richard Bissell, who masterminded the operation; the first joint interview with the managers of the invasion, Jacob Esterline and Colonel Jack Hawkins; a comprehensive chronology; and biographies of the key participants.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

339 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

Reviews

[JR Bricksfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book, but it is not a narrative about the Bay of Pigs invasion. Instead, it is the official Inspector General report done by the CIA a few years after the operation. Recently declassified, this IG report was the CIA’s take on what went wrong. Of note, the IG report did not hesitate to bluntly identify the multiple failures and why they happened. Also in this book is the rebuttal report submitted by the former Deputy Director Richard Bissell, which tries to refute the IG conclusions point for point. For anyone interested in the Bay of Pigs and knowing what really happened (without all the conspiracy theories), this is a must read.