Story Of American Fliers Who Died At Bay Of Pigs

ON APRIL 17, 1961, 1,500 CIA-backed Cuban exiles began a land assault in their ill-fated attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Little known is the story of American pilots who died in that fiasco.

Midnight. April 18, 1961. In a secret camp in the jungles of Nicaragua, incoming reports couldn't be worse.

A military and political catastrophe was in the making, as Fidel Castro's army pounded a CIA-trained Cuban "liberation force" at the Bay of Pigs.

"Gloom is the only way to describe it," said Alabama Air National Guard Col. Joe Shannon of Birmingham, who remembers April 18 well.

More than 80 members of the Alabama Air National Guard, recruited in greatest secrecy by the CIA to train Cuban pilots for the invasion, shared in the gloom and could do little to help. Terms of their recruitment prohibited them from flying in the invasion.

The CIA tried to salvage the mission with one final, doomed covert action. In a telegram to the secret Nicaraguan camp, the agency authorized some of the Alabama pilots to fly, but it did not order them to do so.

"We had lived with the Cubans for three months, and we were so close to them that their cause became our cause. We were enthusiastic about going," Shannon said.

Thus was born a daring mission that the U.S. government would disavow for decades, and which the CIA has only recently fully acknowledged.

Four of the eight American pilots who flew died. To maintain the ruse that no Americans participated, the CIA invented cover stories and told the pilots' families that the men crashed on a test flight over the Caribbean.

Only now, almost 40 years later, are the remaining secrets of America's involvement in the Bay of Pigs coming out.

In February, the CIA released the "Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation," a document so secret and explosive that the agency destroyed all but one copy. That report placed the blame for the Bay of Pigs fiasco squarely on the CIA, and in so doing largely absolved then-President John Kennedy.

CIA admits Americans died

In March, the CIA publicly admitted what it had privately acknowledged to the families of the pilots some years ago: That the Alabamians died fighting in the service of the CIA, trying to eliminate the Soviet-aligned, communist dictator just 90 miles off the U.S. coast.

The Alabama Guard's participation in the Bay of Pigs is a war story, a spy story, and a tragedy. This is that story, as told by Shannon; by Janet Weininger, the daughter of Thomas "Pete" Ray, one of the four pilots who died; and by former Alabama Gov. John Patterson, who allowed the CIA to recruit Alabamians for the mission.

In early 1960, Maj. Gen. Reid Doster of the Alabama Air National Guard paid Patterson a visit and made a most unusual request, Patterson recalled.

Would the governor let the CIA essentially borrow some 80 to 100 Alabama guardsmen to train a Cuban air invasion force for an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro?

Patterson consented, assured that President Dwight Eisenhower backed the project to eliminate the dictator who had come to power in January 1959.

"The understanding was, no Alabamians would be involved in any of the actual operations," said Patterson, 76, a retired judge.

Shannon, who flew combat missions during World War II and was at the time an officer in the Air Guard, remembers being summoned into Doster's office and meeting a man from the CIA.

As the highest-ranking recruit, he and his good friend and fellow pilot, Riley Shamburger, spent several months in Washington being briefed on the plan.

"We were told we wouldn't be able to fly in the invasion, even if we wanted to," Shannon said.

Cover story

Like Shannon, the pilots, mechanics and communications experts were provided with cover stories to tell their friends and even their families - they'd been hired to test military equipment at sea.

The Alabama guardsmen arrived in Nicaragua about three months before the April 1961 invasion. The overall operation bore the name Operation Pluto, and the air invasion was tagged Operation Puma.

Shannon, a small, polite and soft-spoken man, wears a flight jacket like a second skin. During a recent interview at the Southern Air Museum in Birmingham, Ala., where he works, he said he hasn't seen the recently released Inspector General's report that blames the CIA, but he knows enough not to like it.

In particular, he points to a decision made by the White House just days before the invasion.

Operation doomed?

All along, the CIA and the Cubans planned for two airstrikes just before the invasion: A 16-plane strike at dawn, and, after those planes returned to Nicaragua and refueled, a second attack that evening, Shannon said.

Each Cuban crew was assigned targets, and in most cases those targets were air bases. They were to bomb the bases and destroy all of Castro's tactical planes, so that when the invasion began, the Cuban air force would be unable to bomb the invaders and their supply ships.

"The White House decided that was too spectacular, so they reduced the initial strike to eight airplanes and canceled the second strike," Shannon said. "They didn't want it to look like an American operation."

"We felt then that the whole operation was doomed, but we had to follow through with it," Shannon said. "They had to be naive to think the truth wouldn't get out."

Operation begins

On April 15, Operation Puma - diluted though it was - commenced. Sounding like a proud coach, Shannon said "my pilots destroyed everything that moved on the air field" they were assigned to attack.

According to histories of the attack, the Cuban pilots hit many of their assigned targets. Shannon, who said only seven of Castro's tactical airplanes survived, believes that the two 16-plane strikes, had they been permitted, would have wiped out Castro's air force.

As large as the Bay of Pigs looms in history, it's a sign of the small scale of the actual battle that the seven or so Cuban planes that survived played such a major role in crushing the invasion.

Castro's remaining planes bombed the invaders' ammunition supply ship as well as the communications ship, leaving the troops on the beach with no means of resupply or radio contact.

"That was probably the difference in success or failure right there," Shannon said.

The seven-hour flights - about three hours each way over water, with as much as an hour over Cuba - took a toll on the Cuban pilots, Shannon said. Reports of the ongoing slaughter of their compatriots further demoralized them, Shannon said.

"We were getting bad news from the very beginning," Shannon said of the beach invasion that began April 17.

Increasingly hopeless

The few communications from the would-be liberators that reached the CIA and were passed on to the camp in Nicaragua described an increasingly hopeless situation.

One said: "We are out of ammo and fighting on the beach. Please send help."

Another said: "In water. Out of ammo. Enemy closing in. Help must arrive in the next hour."

The Alabamians, hearing these reports, were chomping at the bit. "It was a matter of desperation," Shannon said. "We wanted to make one last effort to help the invaders stranded on the beach."

Permission granted

The telegram from the CIA that granted permission - and which was only recently declassified - contained one imperative.

"Cannot attach sufficient importance to fact that American crews must not fall into enemy hands," the telegram stated. "In event this happens, despite all precautions, crews must state that they are hired mercenaries, fighting communism, etc.; U.S. will deny any knowledge."

Eight Alabama pilots bearing fake identities would provide the only source of what Kennedy later would be criticized for not providing: American air support of the invasion.

The eight Alabamians flew two to a plane, a pilot and a navigator in each of the four B-26s that took off in staggered mini-waves of two planes apiece. Planes piloted by Billy Joe Goodwin and Pete Ray left first. It was the first-ever combat flight for the 30-year-old Ray, who'd been a weekend flier for the Alabama Air National Guard when he was offered the opportunity to train Cuban pilots for the invasion.

Several hours later, at about 3 a.m. April 19, Shannon and Shamburger took off.

The element of surprise was long gone by the time the Alabama pilots reached Cuba. Worst of all, the Cubans, to the invaders' surprise, possessed several T-33 fighter planes, which were considerably faster than the outmatched WWII-era B-26 bombers.

`It was rough'

Shortly before reaching land, Shannon and Shamburger spotted Goodwin on his way back and made radio contact, Shannon said.

"He just said it was rough."

Janet Weininger, Ray's daughter, has investigated her father's death for years. "I found two gentlemen who were there that day," she said. "They said he was bombing around Castro's headquarters and he was shot down, and he got away from the plane but was injured in a gun battle."

Leo Baker, the navigator, died in the gun battle. Her father, the CIA now says, was shot on the ground after the crash. Weininger believes he was captured, then executed.

The planes flown by Shannon and Shamburger reached land about 6 a.m. They spied a column of Cuban army trucks near the beach and began their descent to attack. Neither pilot noticed a T-33 sneaking up from behind and shielded by the glare of the morning sun, Shannon said.

"Shamburger moved over to my left wing, and then I heard him yell in the radio, `I'm hit,' " Shannon said. "I looked over and saw Shamburger headed into the water in a shallow dive, with a T-33 right behind him."

Shannon knew there was no way that Shamburger and his navigator, Wade Gray, could have survived the crash.

His only course of action was to veer into the T-33, which would have put the Cuban fighter in his firing line. To avoid flying past Shannon's nose, the Cuban pilot pulled up into the sky, giving Shannon the break he needed.

"I headed into the sun low and as fast as I could get," he said.

Dead pilots not acknowledged

"The next morning, everybody ran for cover, and you couldn't find anybody who knew anything about anything," Patterson said. "The president went on TV and denied knowing anything about anything."

Several days later, Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, announced that Kennedy accepted full responsibility for the fiasco. But nothing was said about the lost Alabama pilots.

Cubans kept body

While the Cubans didn't have a live American prisoner to parade, they did have a body. Ray was embalmed, put in a glass coffin and stored in a freezer. The body remained there for 18 years; on rare occasions, it was displayed, like a trophy memorializing the victory at the Bay of Pigs, said Weininger.

In 1979, the Cuban government agreed to return Pete Ray's body. Weininger, who insisted on seeing her father, said the corpse "wasn't very pretty," but was recognizable.

An autopsy confirmed that he'd been shot at close range in the head, as if executed, she said.

Eddie Curran is a staff writer for the Mobile (Ala.) Register.