On This Day: Bay of Pigs fiasco leads to term "groupthink"; President Kennedy adjusts - Apr. 17, 1961
(edited from Wikipedia)
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Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF), consisting of Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution, clandestinely financed and directed by the U.S. government. The operation took place at the height of the Cold War, and its failure influenced relations between Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
In 1952, the American-allied dictator General Fulgencio Batista led a coup against President Carlos Prío and forced Prío into exile in Miami, Florida. Prío's exile inspired Castro's 26th of July Movement against Batista. The movement succeeded in overthrowing Batista during the Cuban Revolution in January 1959. Castro nationalized American businesses, including banks, oil refineries, and sugar and coffee plantations.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began planning the overthrow of Castro, which U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved in March 1960, and the U.S. began its embargo of the island. This led Castro to reach out to its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, after which the US severed diplomatic relations. Cuban exiles who had moved to the U.S. following Castro's takeover had formed the counter-revolutionary military unit, Brigade 2506, which was the armed wing of the DRF. The CIA funded the brigade, which also included approximately 60 members of the Alabama Air National Guard, and trained the unit in Guatemala.
Over 1,400 paramilitaries, divided into five infantry battalions and one paratrooper battalion, assembled and launched from Guatemala and Nicaragua by boat on 17 April 1961. Two days earlier, eight CIA-supplied B-26 bombers had attacked Cuban airfields and then returned to the U.S. On the night of 17 April, the main invasion force landed on the beach at Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs, where it overwhelmed a local revolutionary militia. Initially, José Ramón Fernández led the Cuban Revolutionary Army counter-offensive; later, Castro took personal control.
As the invasion force lost the strategic initiative, the international community found out about the invasion, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy decided to withhold further air support. The plan, devised during Eisenhower's presidency, had required the involvement of U.S. air and naval forces. Without further air support, the invasion was being conducted with fewer forces than the CIA had deemed necessary. The American force, Brigade 2506 invading force were defeated within three days by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and surrendered on 20 April. Most of the surrendered counter-revolutionary troops were publicly interrogated and put into Cuban prisons.
The invasion was a U.S. foreign policy failure. The Cuban government's victory solidified Castro's role as a national hero and widened the political division between the two formerly allied countries, as well as embolden other Latin American groups to undermine US influence in the region. It also pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Casualties
67 Cuban exiles from Brigade 2506 were killed in action, additionally, 10 more were executed by firing squad, 10 lost their lives on the boat Celia trying to escape, 9 captured exiles in the sealed truck container on the way to Havana, 4 by accident, 2 in prison, and 4 American aviators, for a total of 106 deaths.
The final toll for Cuban armed forces during the conflict was 176 killed in action. This figure includes only the Cuban Army and it is estimated that about 2,000 militiamen were killed or wounded during the fighting. Other Cuban forces casualties were between 500 and 4,000 (killed, wounded or missing).
In 2011, the National Security Archive, under the Freedom of Information Act, released over 1,200 pages of documents. Included within these documents were descriptions of incidents of friendly fire.
Prisoners
Between April and October 1961, hundreds of executions took place in response to the invasion. They took place at various prisons, including the Fortaleza de la Cabaña and Morro Castle. Infiltration team leaders Antonio Diaz Pou and Raimundo E. Lopez, as well as underground students Virgilio Campaneria, Alberto Tapia Ruano, and more than one hundred other insurgents were executed.
Political reaction
The failed invasion severely embarrassed the Kennedy administration and made Castro wary of future U.S. intervention in Cuba. On 21 April, in a State Department press conference, Kennedy said: "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan... Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility because I'm the responsible officer of the Government..."
Later, Kennedy told Khrushchev that the Bay of Pigs invasions was a mistake.
In August 1961, during an economic conference of the OAS in Punta del Este, Uruguay, Che Guevara sent a note to Kennedy via Richard N. Goodwin, a secretary of the White House. It read: "Thanks for Playa Girón. Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it's stronger than ever".
As Allen Dulles later stated, CIA planners believed that once the troops were on the ground, Kennedy would authorize any action required to prevent failure – as Eisenhower had done in Guatemala in 1954 after that invasion looked as if it would collapse. Kennedy was deeply depressed and angered with the failure. Several years after his death, The New York Times reported that he told an unspecified high administration official of wanting "to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." However, following a "rigorous inquiry into the agency's affairs, methods, and problems... [Kennedy] did not 'splinter' it after all and did not recommend Congressional supervision."
Kennedy commented to his journalist friend Ben Bradlee, "The first advice I'm going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn."
According to author Jim Rasenberger, the Kennedy administration became very aggressive with regard to overthrowing Castro following the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, reportedly doubling its efforts. Rasenberger elaborated on the fact that almost every decision that was made by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs had some correlation with the destruction of the Castro administration. Shortly after the invasion ended, Kennedy ordered the Pentagon to design secret operations to overthrow the Castro regime. Also, President Kennedy persuaded his brother Robert to set up a covert action against Castro which was known as "Operation Mongoose."
CIA report
In November 1961, CIA Inspector-General Lyman Kirkpatrick authored a report, "Survey of the Cuban Operation", that remained classified until 1998. Conclusions were:
The CIA exceeded its capabilities in developing the project from guerrilla support to overt armed action without any plausible deniability.
Failure to realistically assess risks and to adequately communicate information and decisions internally and with other government principals.
Insufficient involvement of leaders of the exiles.
Failure to sufficiently organize internal resistance in Cuba.
[etc.]
[Dulles out]
In spite of vigorous objections by CIA management to the findings, CIA Director Allen Dulles, CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and deputy director for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. were all forced to resign by early 1962. In later years, the CIA's behavior in the event became the prime example cited for the psychology paradigm known as groupthink syndrome. Further study shows that among various components of groupthink analyzed by Irving Janis, the Bay of Pigs Invasion followed the structural characteristics that led to irrational decision making in foreign policy pushed by deficiency in impartial leadership. An account on the process of invasion decision reads,
At each meeting, instead of opening up the agenda to permit a full airing of the opposing considerations, [President Kennedy] allowed the CIA representatives to dominate the entire discussion. The president permitted them to refute each tentative doubt immediately that one of the others might express, instead of asking whether anyone else had the same doubt or wanted to pursue the implications of the new worrisome issue that had been raised.
Looking at both the Survey of the Cuban Operation and Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes by Irving Janis, it identifies the lack of communication and the mere assumption of concurrence to be the main causes behind the CIA and the president's collective failure to efficiently evaluate the facts before them. A considerable amount of information presented before President Kennedy proved to be false in reality, such as the support of the Cuban people for Fidel Castro, making it difficult to assess the actual situation and the future of the operation.
In mid-1960, CIA operative E. Howard Hunt had interviewed Cubans in Havana; in a 1997 interview with CNN, he said, "...all I could find was a lot of enthusiasm for Fidel Castro."
Invasion legacy in Cuba
For many Latin Americans, the invasion reinforced the belief that the U.S. could not be trusted. It also showed that the U.S. could be defeated, and thus encouraged political groups in Latin America to undermine U.S. influence. Victory made Castro even more popular, fuelling nationalistic support for his economic policies.
There are still yearly nationwide drills in Cuba during the 'Dia de la Defensa' (Defense Day), to prepare the population for an invasion.
American public reaction
Only 3 percent of Americans supported military action in 1960. According to Gallup, 72% of people had a negative view of Fidel Castro in 1960. After the conflict, 61% of Americans approved of the action, while 15% disapproved and 24% were unsure.
Kennedy's general approval rating increased in the first survey after the invasion, rising from 78 percent in mid-April to 83 percent in late April and early May. Dr. Gallup's headline for this poll read, "Public Rallies Behind Kennedy in Aftermath of Cuban Crisis." In 1963 a public opinion poll showed 60 percent of Americans believed that Cuba is "a serious threat to world peace," yet 63 percent of Americans did not want the U.S. to remove Castro.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion
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How John F. Kennedy Changed Decision Making for Us All
by Morten T. Hansen
...
Eighteen months earlier, [President Kennedy] made arguably the worst decision he ever made, to support an ill-conceived covert operation to unseat Fidel Castro, known today as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Yale psychologist Irving Janis used the debacle to coin the term “groupthink,” which refers to a psychological drive for consensus at any cost that suppresses dissent and appraisal of alternatives. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, who took part in that decision process, later wrote that “our meetings were taking place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus, [and] not one spoke against it.”
And yet, as I write in more detail in Collaboration, after the Bay of Pigs Kennedy brilliantly retooled his group decision-making process. He ordered a review (keep in mind that not even the military was doing formal after-action reviews at the time) and subsequently instituted four changes to how his top team would make critical decisions:
Each participant should function as a “skeptical generalist,” focusing on the problem as a whole rather than approaching it from his or her department’s standpoint.
To stimulate freewheeling discussions, the group should use informal settings, with no formal agenda and protocol, so as to avoid the status-laden meetings in the White House.
The team should be broken into sub-groups that would work on alternatives and then reconvene.
The team should sometimes meet without Kennedy present, so as to avoid people simply following his views.
It would be easy to assume that we’d always made high-stakes decisions through a structured method of seeking different options and debating which was right. But that would be wrong; first, someone had to decide to invent it."
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https://hbr.org/2013/11/how-john-f-kennedy-changed-decision-making
(edited from article)
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Victims of Groupthink
Groupthink prevails when the "need to conform" is operating. It is believed that Groupthink was operating during the "Bay of Pigs." There are other situations where Groupthink is thought to have been operating, including mass suicides and juries delivering illogical verdicts. Similarly, in "The Abilene Paradox," people end up going where they do not want to go, because they think the others want to go there and failed to express their honest preferences. In Groupthink, what is achieved is a false sense of consensus. Irving Janis in his book Victims of Groupthink originated the term groupthink. It is considered a disease of healthy groups, making them inefficient, unproductive, and irrational. Janis identifies a number of causes including: cohesiveness, working in isolation, biased leadership, and decisional stress.
After Kennedy got elected, Eisenhower saw that he was briefed on the upcoming Bay of Pigs operation. President Kennedy was briefed on the Agency's plans weeks before he took office, and had not raised objection to them. Once he was in office, planning for the invasion continued. On 10 March 1961, Dulles provided a detailed briefing to the CIA subcommittee of the HASC on the Agency's operational activities against Castro: its efforts to mount a propaganda campaign, organize the Cuban resistance parties, and train a paramilitary force to invade the island. He said the paramilitary force numbered about a thousand Cubans and had its own "air force." Although several members wondered how an army of 1,000 exiles could be expected to defeat a Cuban army of 200,000, Dulles replied that he expected the exiles to "light the fuse" that would spark a general uprising on the island.
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https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/ops/bay-of-pigs-groupthink.htm
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