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When Law and Order is the headline, what does it mean for us? Ebony K. Williams, an attorney and former public defender and host of a brand new podcast where we're going to cross-examine newsmaking cases and famous faces to understand the context.

And I'm Dustin Ross. I'm a TV writer, a cultural observer, and I am thrilled to be cohosting holding court with MBK Williams. This is not a podcast about the law. This is a show for the people and to help us navigate a system. Teachable moments from the so called Law and Order headlines, listen to Holding Court with Eboni K. Williams on the I Heart radio app, an Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of NPR Radio's HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles Doublecheck, Brian over there and Jerry's over there somewhere. And this stuff you should know, and it's about this recording session is off to his auspicious start as the Bay of Pigs invasion. Chuck. Am I right? Yeah.

Nice little tie in there. Thank you very much. It's what I'm paid to do.

Yeah, I think so. You know what they pay us for? To be witty and incisive.

I think so. I think so, too, so Chuck, I know to my astonishment that you were not alive during the Bay of Pigs invasion. No, he came along a good decade after that, from what I understand, ten full years.

I didn't want anything to do with it now. And I can understand why, because it was about as big a stinker as far as foreign policy and military intervention goes. Certainly the U.S. has made bigger blunders. A lot more people died through some of our misadventures abroad. But this one is perennially the one that's pointed to is like this is really a case study in how terribly wrong things can go and how decisions were made. Basically every level and at every stage that that made sure that the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was the United States supporting an invasion of Cuba by Cuban dissidents, that it's about as bad as it can go, that that was like the perfect example of that.

Yeah, it almost makes you think that if there was a God who cared about American politics, that that God was saying, don't invade Cuba over and over again, don't invade Cuba.

And like, you know, I can't I'm pressing all the buttons here. Everything's going wrong. Warning, warning.

Don't do it right or God really loves Fidel. Well, maybe so. Because that was the whole point, the whole reason that America supported this covert action really went a lot further than support, like drummed up a covert action led by the CIA. The military was secretly involved. It was illegal internationally. But the whole reason was to get rid of Castro because on New Year's Day of, what, 1959, Fidel Castro took control of Cuba from then existing president Fulgencio Batista and Batista.

I've read up on this guy. He was a bad dude. He was a dictator. He was actually he was the president of Cuba twice the first time he was corrupt. But the country still prospered under him. And he was he still looked out for people the second time after an eight year period abroad. When he came back, he was just bad news. But as far as America was concerned, they were like, well, he he lets American companies own most of the stuff in Cuba.

So we're OK with them. When Fidel came along, he said nuts to that. We're getting the American involvement out of Cuba and Cuba is going to take care of Cuba from now on. And America said, I'm not sure how we feel about that. Yeah.

And, you know, we had our chance to be buddies with Castro at the beginning, like he came to the United States and toured America. And we we gave him that the Heisman. And he was.

Huh, the guys.

We gave him the Heisman, you know, Heisman Trophy. Oh, it's an expression.

Oh, I've never heard that before. But he'll be stiff arm. If you ever seen the Heisman, you got.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. No, I thought you were still like like in like describing his grand tour and how great it was.

I got chills and that we gave him an honorary Heisman Trophy award. That's that's where my mind weird. So they pay me for it now.

It's an expression I got. Yeah. It might predate you to feel like it was an expression like in the nineties.

Now I totally get what you meant. It was the context that threw me.

OK, well, we gave him the Heisman and he wanted to buddy. And that's when Khrushchev came along and he was like, well, if Americans are going to be my buddy, I'll be a friend with you. And that's how it all got started.

We had our shot. Yeah, supposedly, though, the Bay of Pigs invasion itself was one of the things that really drove Castro into the arms of Khrushchev, so the whole idea was to get rid of Castro because we were afraid he was going to go toward Khrushchev and give the communists a foothold in the Western Hemisphere, basically in our backyard and by by carrying out this Bay of Pigs invasion, we made sure that that happened. It's one of the great ironies of this whole thing.

Yeah, because Castro wasn't looking to be a puppet of the Soviets right now. That was not on his docket. And the Soviets really needed him. I think at the time they they didn't have I mean, I think they had less than five ICBMs. I don't think they had anything that could even get to the United States at that point.

An ICBM is the worst kind of bomb.

Actually, I think the fiery hot and the worst kind.

Yeah, you're right about that.

Although as anyone had an ICBM, because you'd probably be in big trouble.

Maybe, but but Russia needed the Soviet Union needed Cuba way more than Cuba needed them at the end. I don't know that.

Wow, that's really interesting. I had no idea about that because I know that America was terrified of communism in the Soviet Union in particular. But also, you know, they didn't consider China to be slouches really as far as the spread of communism goes. But the Soviet Union seemed really interested in spreading Soviet style communism throughout the world. And at the time, colonialism was really kind of the I guess the European colonial powers were losing their grip on places in Southeast Asia and Africa.

And so there were all these countries, including ones in Latin America. They were kind of I don't want to say up for grabs because I don't mean to undermine, you know, the agency of the people who lived in ran these countries. But they were you know, these were the these were becoming the two superpowers in the world. So you you could fall under their influence at the very least, economically, if not politically. And so the U.S. was really worried about the spread of communism.

And one of the things that Dwight Eisenhower, Ike, who was president in the late 50s, warned about was the domino effect, where once, you know, you had one country turned communist, it would spread to another neighboring country and then another and another. And all of a sudden half of Africa is communist. So we need to be worried about this kind of thing. So America is really starting to enter like the fear of that Cold War panic in about the late 50s, early 60s.

Yeah, and here's the thing, too. When I say that Russia didn't have the capabilities to strike from where they were, I'm not sure if we knew that. I'm sure there are historians that that know that answer, but I'm not sure if America knew that. So I think that they just you couldn't take any chances. Basically, you had to get Cuba off the map for the Soviet Union and not like, you know, like sink the island, but you know what I mean?

No.

And at the very least, you could leave the island intact, leave the island. There's a lot of valuable industries. And like the mob was running casinos down there right before Castro's get rid of Castro seem to be the whole thing. Castro and Che Guevara. Right.

So this occurred to the Eisenhower administration, CIA, who hatched a plan that had the ominously CIA title of a program of covert action against the Castro regime.

And they presented this thing, I believe, in the beginning, in 1961, the very beginning of 1961. And they went to Eisenhower and they said, look, this guy really we all know that he has to go. But here's what we think is the best way to do this. We need to get rid of Castro, but we need to do it in such a way that it appears that the Cuban people have are dissatisfied with his rule and they've turned against him.

We need to keep our hands off of it. And for one reason, because I mean, that just kind of seems like a lot more legitimate a revolution, doesn't it? Like the the Cubans rose up against Castro. So they really didn't want Castro around. So nobody should swoop in to help Castro. But then secondly, the U.S. is not allowed to dabble in other countries affairs. It's illegal internationally to invade a sovereign country unprovoked or without reason.

And so this was not a good it wouldn't have been a good look for the U.S. to be caught doing this. So they figured the best way to do it would be to train a bunch of Cuban dissidents and have them just do it. Yeah, and not only that, they wanted to create a new government. They wanted to disperse propaganda, anti Castro propaganda. I mean, it was basically we want to topple the regime and install a new government of our choosing.

Right. And this is completely illegal. And Eisenhower said. Sure, go ahead. It sounds good to me because what we can't risk is them buddying up too much with Khrushchev and have nuclear weapons all of a sudden parked right off our coast.

That's right. So they went to Miami, which where else would you go to recruit, recruit Cuban defectors? Perfect place here because they were defecting and there were a lot of unhappy Cubans that didn't like Castro that that left. And and they were they were they're just sort of waiting to be called upon and very willing to be called upon by the CIA, as it turns out. Yeah, and apparently when they started, like amassing this group of recruits, they first started training them in the Everglades in Florida.

Yeah. And they learn things like cryptography and demolitions and guerrilla warfare and all that stuff. But it was, I guess, an open secret or maybe common knowledge is a better way to put it among Cuban dissidents in Florida that the CIA was was training a group down there with the CIA. Bless their hearts, they tried to at least make it seem like they weren't from the CIA, which is a very CIA type thing to do. So the agents, the CIA agents said that they were from a very powerful company that was bent on removing communism from the world.

Kind of true and yes, sure. But then one of the Cuban dissidents with CIA agencies and the CIA agent said, what in the cat was out of the bag?

Yeah. And these were not you know, they had to train these guys up. They were there were a bunch of students, obviously, if you think about dissidents, leaving Cuba can have a lot of student involvement, but they're also just professionals. There were doctors and lawyers and farmers.

There were people that were had no money. There were people that had quite a bit of money for Cuba. And they all didn't like Castro, though. But none of them, almost none of them had any kind of prior training. And they were I mean, why this hasn't been made into a movie yet is just flabbergasting to me because this has all the elements of a great movie.

Yeah. Especially if you do it from the view of the dissidents who are trained into a paramilitary group. I think that would have to be your protagonist.

Yeah, right. Because it's been touched on before, like it was in the Good Shepherd that that Matt Damon movie about the origin of the CIA. Yeah, they touch on you know, it's been a I believe it's been referenced at least. But yeah, you're right.

There's no blockbuster movie, you know, like the Rock and the know Cuban guy, the Rock, who are like, you know, they also form a bromance to that that that really kind of is a subplot to the whole thing.

Oh, yeah. That's that's how they ruin it, isn't it? The bromance is just that by casting the rock and everything you just said sounded awful and exactly how it would probably happen.

I think Vin Diesel actually released a record recently, which I say props to him, man. He's multifaceted. He's a double threat.

Is the name of his one man band diesel fuel? I don't know, because if not, it should be not a bad one.

You're going to take a break? Uh, yeah.

I think it's a great time for a break. Thanks, man. I thought you'd say that. So we're going to take a break, everybody, in case you hadn't heard. And we'll be right back.

Hi, I'm Katie Lowes, host of the podcast Katie's Krib, where we try to keep things real while providing an indispensable guide for all parents just trying to find their way. I want to share one of my favorite moments from the show with you. Presented by Target, Target has always been there to celebrate the thoughtfulness you bring to every little thing and can help bring meaningful moments to this year's holidays. You can try Target's contact list services by downloading the Target app.

Today, my dear friend, the most wonderful person, Shonda Rhimes. We are here talking about Adoption Awareness Month. Yeah.

For a lot of people they have dreamed of, like making a baby their entire lives, of being pregnant or having a child that's biologically linked to them. And then they have to deal with that grief and that loss of not being able to do that. And then once they've dealt with that, now they have this image in their head of what they always thought their child was going to be like to have a child put in their arms. That is nothing like their imagination for a lot of people that it's very in Congress and maybe doesn't work.

Right.

Katy's crib is available and I heart radio, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Name starts with Joshua. So Dave Vries helped us out with this one, Chuck, and he said we need to be sure to give a shout out to Jim Ratzenberger, who's an author of the book The Brilliant Disaster Colon JFK Castro in America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs, which is I've seen his work referred to in multiple places. So he wrote a pretty good book about it. And I guess they've learned a lot from him. So thanks a lot, Mr.

Rosenberger. But at the where we left off was there was a group of Cuban dissidents. I think they reached the ranks of like 4500 before they stopped recruiting. They were being trained in the Everglades, but they said, hey, we found this way, better camp in Guatemala. Let's move everybody there to the to the rainforest because it's a little more like Cuba's climate.

And and we kind of own Guatemala, right? Well, Guatemala was at the very least, very much friendly to American interests by this time, because we'd already overthrown the I think the Allende and government, if I'm not mistaken, like we had just done that and installed like a pro-American regime. So, yeah, this would have been a perfect place to have a secret CIA training camp for Cubans to train to invade Cuba.

That's right. Thanks to bananas. That's right, reference to our past episode on PR. That was such a good one. I think that's my all time favorite Libet All-Time favorite. I don't know, I'd have to I'd have to look at the list and really give it thought, it's that one's up there. I also love the the Kellogg brothers. Those are probably my top tier.

That was a good one, too, for sure.

Remember that guy with the pick, let's just say.

Yeah, so weird in foreign.

Remember when we would go in the room with fifteen hundred other people and all all hug each other. It just broke out in like a cold sweat. The idea of that, I mean it's like it's funny when you watch TV shows and they were filmed, you know, prior to the pandemic, you're like you're standing too close together. So I put on a mask. Yeah, you're making me nervous.

Do you have anxiety dreams, too, about proximity? No, I have anxiety dreams about politics. See, I have a lot of anxiety dreams lately. I mean, not lately for the past nine months, every once a week or so about somebody, you know, being all up in my grill and I'm like, what are you doing? Like, what are you doing?

Get away from me. Stand back, sir. Which is ironic because I love being close to people physically.

I know. I think that's probably why you have anxieties, because there's a tension there. Like if you were naturally like, stay over there. Sure. I got to tell you that part of the pandemic has been kind of easy for some standoffish to begin with, you know.

Oh, goodness. So check one of the things that I thought was kind of cool about this. This group of people, this group of Cuban dissidents who were trained into a paramilitary group, the CIA had the foresight to give them serial numbers starting at number 2500. It's pretty funny that if any one of them were caught, they could say, well, my serial number is 25, 50, and they'd be like, oh, my God, there's 2500 people ahead of them.

How and how? Who knows how many after them? But in fact, again, it was just fourteen hundred.

In fact, I think their patch said 2500 and that had a little arrow pointing to it. And then right beside that it said, you see. Yeah, I get it, it was it was very elaborate, Pat. It was very colorful, too, and as a matter of fact, it stood out a little too much and then underneath it said, and there's more to come get it.

Right, well, it was under that under that was it's totally not a made up number, and then below that there was an arrow that went all the way to the top, start over again. Oh, man.

So so they were actually called Brigade 25 06. And they named themselves after the serial number of one of their fallen comrades who died in training camp in Guatemala. He he slipped on a slippery trail during an exercise and fell into a ravine. And what was his name?

His name was Carlos Rafael Santana.

Carlos Santana slipped on a banana peel that Rafael really threw me off. But yeah. Did it not occur to you if it's a banana peel now? It did. Yeah. But they said this is very sad. So we're going to name our brigade after him. And they did. So that's what they've always been known by. From that moment on, this invasion force of Cuban dissidents, as they were known as Brigade 25 06. And one of the really amazing things about Brigade 25 06 is despite being, like you said, you know, a group of doctors and lawyers and farmers and fishermen and students and coming from all walks of life and socioeconomic status, they actually were trained into a pretty decent paramilitary group.

They fought bravely. They fought really well. They held their own, as we'll see. And they were doomed from the start, not really by any any of their own fault, which must have been incredibly frustrating for them.

Yeah, I imagine so.

I mean, they like I said, they weren't too hard to recruit, like they were eager to do this job and they really wanted to get Castro out of there.

And you might think when a new president comes in that things might change. They might kind of revisit this plan, think maybe this is not the best idea.

I'm pretty excited because I get to do my Kennedy. So I'm glad Ike is out of there. I have no idea what he sounded like. He sounded like this very, very soft spoken. What's your problem? But Kennedy, one in 60 in no small part due to the fact that he was he touted being very tough on communism and on Cuba.

And so I said, let's get him in here. Yeah, he was he came off as more hawkish about communism in Cuba than Nixon did, which is funny, running against Nixon and Nixon said that he he basically lost because Kennedy seemed like he would do more about Cuba. And that's kind of one of history's great ironies, because Nixon because Kennedy accused Nixon and and Ike of being too soft on Cuba, of letting this Castro fella take power and letting him amass power and not doing anything about it.

And Nixon had to sit there and take it because he had been sworn to secrecy about this plot to train Cuban dissidents and invade Cuba. And he couldn't he couldn't be like, actually, that's not true. We've got this really great plan, let me tell you, viewing audience all about it. So he had to he had to defend this position of being soft on Cuba, even though he knew they weren't while Kennedy got to just run circles around him because Kennedy was an unproven guy who seemed more hawkish on Cuba.

And some people point to that is how Kennedy. So when Kennedy when he came in. Yeah, I had no idea about that. When he came in, he really wanted to prove himself in that respect. And the CIA said, are you sitting down because we'd like to drop this opportunity into your lap? And they let him in on this plan to invade Cuba with with brigade 25 or six. And Kennedy said. Ah, great, yeah, they said, here's our plan, Mr.

New President, and he said area, you can stop calling me that. Mr. President will suffice. And they said, we're going to take seven hundred and fifty of these men and we are going to do a D-Day style invasion at dawn on the beachhead in the Bay of Pigs named. So because well, that's the name of it. It's Bahía. They congeners in Spanish. It's on the southern side of Cuba. And he said, it sounds delicious.

And they said, we're going to land on that beachhead. We're not going to we're just going to route down there and not take Havana or anything, because here's what's going to happen, Mr. President. They're going to get news of this in Cuba and all these anti Castro Cubans there are going to know that this is their moment. And they've got some army dudes that are involved. They got some military personnel that are anti Castro. And they are going to say, all right, now's our time.

We're going to rise up to overthrow Castro. And then that's when our 750 men who are, by the way, totally disguised as Cuban dissidents, like we're going to paint planes like American planes, like they're from Cuba and stuff like that, like no one's ever going to know. It's the perfect place.

We've printed we've printed up T-shirts for him that say down with Castro Castro.

And he said that's when they're going to join the fight and join this general revolt and might take a couple of weeks, bing, bang, boom, easy peasy.

And Kennedy said, all right, so there was a key to success in there that the whole thing hinged on and from what I can tell, kind of unwarranted. But that was the idea that when these dissidents attacked Cuba and the word got out that Cuba was being attacked, that the Cuban people would be like, to heck with Castro, get him, and we would ignite this revolt. And from what I saw, this is based on a hunch.

It wasn't based on Intel or anything. It was based on a hunch or even a hope you could possibly say which that alone is a sign that you may be working on a really bad plan, because anything short of sparking a revolution internally in Cuba means that this is going to fail, like Cuba's small. But Castro had a really extensive army, tens and tens and tens of thousands of professional soldiers, plus another, I think 100000 militia members like what we would probably call like the National Guard or reservists here.

So even if there were 5000 people or 2500, however many, they made it seem like they were probably going to be overwhelmed if if Cuba didn't rise up and they had no reason to believe that Cuba would rise up, they were just hoping. So that's that's that's strike one. Yeah. It's a big time intelligence failure. Another key to this and you're going to just put a pin in this one listener is airstrikes. They were like, listen, here, we got these dudes on the beach.

They're going to be routed down and they are going to be bombed to heck and back by Castro's Air Force, which is small, but he's still got these planes. And he said, so we got to take out that Air Force or else they're toast like they're sitting ducks out there. We got to take out the Air Force.

We've got to take out the Air Force, which is I mean, it wasn't like out of the question. Like Castro had a big a big army of ground troops, but his air force was fairly paltry, pretty small, and it was entirely within the realm of possibility to strike all of his planes. And if they did do that, that would give this amphibious landing force a real fighting chance to make their way inland. And if this revolution sparked, then then there you have it.

So that that was definitely doable. The problem is Kennedy, when he came in, he was really ambitious about getting rid of communism and making a name for himself as tough on communism and, you know, delivering on what he'd campaigned on. But at the same time, he was also really aware of international image, political image of the United States. And so he said, I'm really worried that this is going to be like like Chuck said, he knew who you were, Chuck, that this is going to be to bing bang, boom.

Like there's going to be a lot of blowing things up. And it's going to be obvious that the United States is is involved in this and we just can't have that. So let's go smaller for one. And also this place where we're going to land, it's a little too close to Trinidad, which is a pretty populous town in Cuba that seems a little hostile and aggressive. Let's move it to the middle of nowhere. This place called the Bay of Pigs and start there.

And that was a really big, big issue for the plan because one of the reasons they chose that landing site near the city of Trinidad in Cuba is because it was near the mountains. And so if the guerillas amphibious landing failed and it was broken up, they could flee to the mountains and then regroup and start launching a guerrilla war from the mountains instead. This place at the Bay of Pigs was nowhere near anywhere, it was near swampland, and I think there are 60 miles of swamp between the Bay of Pigs and the mountains.

So there was no melting into the mountains to escape. It was all or nothing when they moved that landing site. And that was another big thing that Kennedy did, along with saying make it smaller, make it seem more like Cuban dissidents are the ones who are really behind this.

Yeah. And the third thing he did was said, I don't like this dawn invasion thing. He's like, this has got to happen under the cover of night. We've got to be out of there by dawn. We can't have any inkling that we're involved in any way. And I know that paint job on these planes is pretty good, but it looks a lot better at night, guys. So let's go in there at night. And this was this is like a month out.

And the CIA was like, dude, we had a plan here. And you're telling us to make it smaller, put it in a different place to change our time of invasion. And this is a big deal. Like this is not how things work. You can't just change everything a month out and expect it to go down the way you want it to. And this was this was everybody's chance to back out entirely. Like this was the moment where somebody could have and should have stood up and said, you know what?

This has got disaster written all over it. Now, we can't we can't do this. We need to not just we just need to back out, not go through with it at all. And nobody did it.

No. And this has all the hallmarks of any corporate project where you've been working on something in this plan and developing like this, this whatever it is you're developing. And then somebody comes along and says, change this, this and this and completely alters it. But then you try to go ahead with that, with the idea anyway. And it doesn't fit. It doesn't work enough. Fundamental things have changed that. It just isn't like the original any longer.

And usually just speaking from experience when that happens, you just scrap it and start all over. You either don't do the project. Yeah, New Coke is a great example, actually. New Coke, terrible example. Let's go with a slice of apple slice. Sure. So Apple Slice started out is something called Aspen. It was an apple flavored cola and people loved it. But then they took it away and one slice came out as a new citrus based soft drink.

I think Pepsi owned it. They threw Apple Slice in, but it was really Aspen, but they just threw it in and rebranded it Apple Slice. It didn't work because it was something else. And they had just tried to clamp it on to the existing framework without adjusting it or altering it. And Apple Slice went the way of the dinosaur when Aspen had been so beloved.

So the Bay of Pigs invasion is on.

Kennedy felt like he he had to do something because the Soviets were buddying up to Castro and he could not take the risk of them installing nuclear weapons right there, 90 miles off the coast. So they pressed forward a few days before the invasion. The twenty five or six were moved from Guatemala to where they were going to launch from, which was a CIA camp in Nicaragua called Happy Valley. Very ironically.

And just a few days before the invasion, The New York Times published a story about the operation, basically outed the whole thing, and Kennedy had to say something. So he said a bunch of words that were lies. He said, first, I want to say they will not be under any circumstances or conditions an intervention in Cuba by the United States armed forces. This government will do everything it possibly can. I think it can meet its responsibilities to make sure there are no Americans involved in any actions inside Cuba days before they were about to do that very thing.

Yeah, and not just days before the actual invasion, but one day before that planned aerial strike that was to take out all of Castro's planes, which was, again, as far as the CIA analysts were concerned, essential to the success of the plan. Well, that New York Times article made Kennedy pretty cagey and worried, and it took a lot of the confidence that he might have had as small as it was to begin with in the plan. And so he said just for no really good reason, just kind of reacting, from what I can tell.

He said we were going to have sixteen bombers. Let's just cut it to like eight instead. And so the sixteen bombers went out. And the whole key was, I think you said before that they were going to paint these bombers to make them look like stolen Cuban planes. And the premise was that some Cuban Air Force pilots had were revolting against Castro and they had carried out this strike. So they actually did have brigade. Twenty five or six members fly these planes, but they were American planes painted to look like Cuban planes.

They carried out the strike. They only got about, I think, half of. Those planes, unfortunately, and then as part of the ruse, they flew to Miami, landed and said we're defecting to Cuba or from Cuba, wink, wink. And so the press was brought out for a press conference and apparently the press immediately was like that. Sure looks like a pretty fresh coat of paint. And somebody else said, Yeah, and aren't Cuban machineguns mounted to the wings?

These are mounted in the nose like American planes. And Kennedy was like, everybody, get out of here. Get out of here. No one's calling you anymore for any press conferences. And so it was very clear that the U.S. was actually doing what the New York Times article was, was saying and that it was basically happening now. So Castro definitely had a pretty decent heads up of what was coming.

Yeah, I mean, Castro, that was all the proof he needed. And he was like, hey, you in the U.S. of A.. Broke their charter because they attacked us. And what say you and the US representative to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, said, I don't know anything about this because he didn't he was in the dark about this whole thing.

And he was really upset about this, obviously, because the CIA was doing this all very, very privately.

And then Kennedy made one more big, big decision is they said, listen, you sent half the planes that we wanted, so we only destroyed half their air force. That's how that works, sir. He said, right. They said so we need to send in another air strike because they still have half their air force and that they're still sitting ducks. It'll just take them twice as long to make them dead. And he said, uh, you know what?

We can't do it. We cannot go in with a second. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

That is not at all what Kennedy sounded like, Chuck.

He said, I don't think we should go in with a second air strike. This is getting slightly heated and we're all very frightened and horny. Yeah, that's what they pay you for.

Chuck, that's a make up.

So there's like a myth that the CIA planned this whole thing. And the reason it was so botched and terrible was because some CIA analysts had basically done the whole thing in some secret bunker without any kind of input in like this very isolated project. And that's not at all how it worked, that, you know, there was basically a lot of people really throwing in a lot of opinions and thoughts to to planning it. It was signed off by Eisenhower, signed off by Kennedy.

The CIA was definitely not blameless in the first place. They were blamed. They were they were blamed for interfering in another country's, you know, affairs like that. But as far as this operation goes, there were some blunders on the CIA side. And one of the big ones, big ones, is that some U2 spy planes that they flew over Cuba to take pictures of the Bay of Pigs, this new landing site. When the analysts were looking at the photos, they said all this like like dark colored stuff, like in the shallows off of the coast, about 100 yards off the coast or 100 meters.

That's just a seaweed bed. So we don't need to worry about that. Well, when they finally staged this invasion, Chuck, they found that that was not the case at all, that the seaweed was actually coral and these transport ships ran aground on coral because the CIA botched that so badly. And I feel like we might have gotten a little ahead of ourselves because I've put the people in the Bay of Pigs now and we should back up a little bit, think we should take a break and then we should launch the invasion day.

What do you think? Sounds good.

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All right, so, Chuck, it's the day of the invasion, they launch Brigade 25 06 and remember the whole thing, the whole point of this is that the U.S. is not supposed to be clearly involved. So they have to do this at night, like Kennedy requested to get the American ships out of there. So you've got American supply ships holding supplies for this amphibious force of Cubans brigade 25 or six, and they're starting to run aground in the coral reef.

And that was just the first of many, many problems that they ran into that day.

Yeah, I mean, coral is not the kind of thing, you know, 100 yards out from the beachhead that you can deal with very easily. It's like it's not like they're like, all right, well, just walk on this razor sharp coral and get everything in there. Everything's getting wet. All this radio equipment is and these weapons are getting waterlogged and drowned out. A lot of it was inoperable by the time they finally got to the beach.

Um, so it was just it was the whole thing had gone sideways at this point.

Um, yeah. Like like before literally before dawn, the whole thing had gone sideways.

That's right. And by the time dawn breaks, Castro knows what's going on. He knows that the Bay of Pigs has as had a beachhead landing, while not quite a coral landing. And they were still unloading stuff and struggling to get their their stuff onto the beach. When the Air Force gets there, Castro's Air Force and they opened fire on a supply ship named the Houston and killed about 12 men and everyone else got back in the water. I love hear that.

Dave says shark infested waters, it's always shark infested very much.

Never like sparsely populated with like water. A few sharks here and there. It's always infested. They're everywhere full of sharks waters.

So more of these planes start coming in. And the Rio Escondida, which was the biggest supply ship, they had had tons of explosive explosives, tons of airplane fuel. It was just a big bomb waiting to go off. And that's exactly what happened. Took a direct a direct hit from a bomb and just exploded. Like this is the big scene in the movie, I guess, where the rock is on the beach sand like.

Can you believe that, bro? Right. I see him saying Wolverines. Yeah, but with a Cuban accent.

El Wolverine's. So although he said he they say what it is. Remember, there's Cubans in Red Dawn. Oh, that's true, it was Cuba, wouldn't it? Yeah, and they said, well, Wolverine wasn't Spanish, but I can't remember, but I guarantee a few of our listeners will let us know. Chuck.

Well, the CIA at this point says realizes what's going on and says, all right, the supply ships need to get out of there and get into international waters. Stat.

And it's they didn't pull the troops, but it's basically a retreat at this point.

Yeah. And so the Cubans realize this and like at least one of them, Pepé San Ramon said, like he got on the radio to his CIA handlers, said, do not desert us. And CIA said, oh, we're not. We're not. We're just forgot something back in the United States. We got to go get it. We'll be right back. And they just kept backing off in international waters. They definitely deserted these Cuban dissidents who had been landed on the beach.

That was so like the Cubans are trapped there and they. Fought like their whole thing was to just hold the beach and then wait for this this this revolution to spark by their presence, and they actually did they held that beach for like two days, despite the fact that Castro sent everything he had at these guys. But they still managed to hold the beach for a while. And during this this time, while they were holding it, the the the military brass in the CIA went to Kennedy and they said, look, these guys are getting slaughtered.

We need to provide some bombing cover. So we've got these bombers. Remember how you cut the number of bombers in that first air strike by half? Well, we've got some other ones. Let's get them out there and we'll just have to also provide some some air cover from some fighter jets. So they did. Kennedy finally relented and said, OK, but just as with everything that's possibly gone wrong with this head so far, it's going to continue with this bombing raid because the bombers took off from Nicaragua, from the base in Nicaragua, and the air cover that was supposed to meet up with them was not ready because they apparently miscalculated.

They didn't take into account the time zone difference between Nicaragua and Cuba. No one's exactly sure what happened, but they showed up an hour early and just cruised on by over to Cuba and started getting shot down.

Yeah, everything I saw said time zone. OK, I saw that, too.

But the thing is, it doesn't make sense if if if they were an hour behind, then wouldn't they have been an hour late rather than an hour early.

That's what I saw.

Well, I just saw a time zone error, so it could have been well, big time error.

But whatever it was, they showed up in our basically an hour early and they got shot down. But the problem that I saw with that particular truck was these were not brigade 25 or six pilots. They were Alabama National Air National Guard pilots, straight up Americans who were flying a bombing mission over Cuba. Now, at this point in this botched Bay of Pigs invasion, and they got shot down, were killed and captured, their bodies were captured by Castro, who basically paraded them around Cuba for the international press, saying this is an American look, the Americans are bombing and America denied it.

They denied ordering or having these Americans bombed Cuba until the 90s. It was a real disgrace for America's government for decades.

Yeah, Castro recovered the body of Captain Thomas Willard Ray.

And the only reason it came out was because it was declassified in the 90s, which time the CIA, his body, by the way, was returned to his family by Cuba in 1979. And then when it was declassified in the 90s, Ray was awarded the CIA's highest honor of the intelligence star, which is just almost even more shameful to kind of just slap an award on this guy that you denied, you know, even sending him to his death for, you know, however many decades.

So, yeah, it was a real one of the more shameful moments in US political and military history.

Yeah, because they were for decades saying, no, this guy just went rogue. He he he he went rogue. And his family was like they he did not do that. Stop lying. And they finally did after years. But yeah, it is it was a big, big black eye on the on America for sure. But even before that, the whole Bay of Pigs fiasco was a black eye on America and the Kennedy administration, because by the time the the battle was over at the Bay of Pigs, I think 114 people had died among the brigade members, eight Americans.

But the rest, more than a thousand, were captured and kept alive and eventually were I think they were kept for a few years, but they weren't executed. Everybody just expected Castro to execute them all publicly and he didn't. Instead, he decided to keep them as basically political pawns, didn't he?

Yeah, they kept them for 20 months, one thousand one hundred and thirteen men. And eventually they start negotiating for a trade through an American attorney, James B. Donovan. And initially Castro said, I tell you what, I'll give the men back for five hundred tractors.

And I guess somebody on the Cuban side said, that's not enough, man. They're really, really rich. And he said, All right, how about twenty eight million dollars? And then someone said, that's still not enough. We can take him for a lot more. They eventually settled on fifty three million dollars in food and medical. Ad, which was raised by private and corporate donations, and they made that swap and I think Che Guevara, who was Castro's sort of right hand man at the time, thanked the United States very publicly and said, you know what, because of this trade, because of all this money and aid and food you have of equal the playing ground here and now we are America's equal.

We are not an aggrieved little country any longer. And that was a big, big deal. That was a lot of that was an influx of cash and and food and medicine that Cuba really needed at the time. So it was it's like injury or insult on top of injury after this, basically.

Yeah. Not only that, the attack, the fact that Castro fended off the attack and then the fact that Castro negotiated another 53 million dollars in aid from the attack helped Castro really solidify his power there. So like he might have been shaky at some point before the Bay of Pigs. He was not afterward. He was a beloved leader who showed that he could and would defend Cuba. It also drove him toward Khrushchev if he had been on the fence about it before he went full throated buddy with the Soviets afterward.

And then also on our side, just the huge, again, black eye gave America internationally on the world stage. But also the Kennedy administration just looked like fools and also weasels. It it drove JFK and his brother, Bobby Kennedy, to find another way to show that they were tough on communism. And a lot of people point to us going into Vietnam, looking at Vietnam as the next place to stand up to communism, that that came directly from the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

That's right. Lesson not learned. No, not at all. So that's it for the Bay of Pigs, there's a lot more to it. It was one of the more chronicled episodes in American history. So if you like this, well, go read more about it. And since I said read more about it, I think, Chuck, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this you, me and LSD.

Hey, guys, I'd like to thank you both for bringing such great entertainment to my ears. I've been listening only for a few months, but I'm able to listen to several episodes a day while I work.

So over the last couple of weeks, guys have been sort of messing around with micro dosing, LSD and magic mushrooms.

And it has been years since my last full blown LSD trip. Well, last weekend I decided I wanted to take a full amount of LSD, see where it took me. Oftentimes there is an overwhelming feeling in the body just before the psychoactive part takes place for me, which sort of allows you or allows me to gauge how you how the trip is going to go. Well, this particular time, the feeling in my body told me that I was going to have a bad time and lose my ability to govern where my thoughts meander.

So I put on an episode of Stuff You Should Know and listen to you both talk about Schoolhouse Rock, which included the interview with Bob A. Danovitch from Pavement, which was wonderful. Listening to you both talk really helped guide me through the initial peak of my LSD trip, which set the tone for the rest of my day. And it turned out great. You were both so levelheaded and kind in spirit. And I just want to say thank you all caps for being who you are.

You are truly both role models for me in the more I listen to you, the better human I become. So once again, thanks. And that is from Mike Artinian. That's really amazing.

Mike, thanks for that. I feel like, Chuck, when we were recording that we kept saying to another during the break, like, wow, people are going to love tripping on this one.

I think so. And I even asked Mike, I said, you know, I cannot read your name. And he went numb and read it, read it and weep. It's right. Well, thanks again, Mike. That's pretty great. Glad that you came back down. And if you want to be like Mike and send us an email, you can send it off to Stuff podcast that I heart. Radio dot com.

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