The BOP is a long sad tale of perfidy , double dealing, and treachery by those who should have been on JFK's team.
JFK was Navy all the way.... He was from the school who believed that the Ex O should cover for the Captain....
When he realized that he couldn't defuse the ticking time bomb he decided to let the CIA take the reins ....And he put General Cabell at the controls in the role of his EX O ..... He thought that Cabell would authorize the second air strike on the Cuban airfields that hadn't been destroyed in the first strike But Cabell was NOT Navy and didn't understand that he had the authority to run the operation and he lacked the guts to proceed .
More passages from “Guerrilla Prince” by Georgie Anne Geyer:
Always the avid student of military history, Castro had assumed that the first step of the invasion would be an attack on his air force (he well remembered that Nasser's entire air force had been destroyed on the ground in Egypt in 1956), so he had dispersed the planes in his small air force. This one move would come to mean the difference between victory and defeat. In the bombing raids that Saturday, Castro lost five planes, but he was left with four British Sea Fury light attack bombers, one B-26, and three T-33S. It would be enough. ...
...But it was his small air force that really won the battle, before the rest of the fighting even began. The American "plan" had been prefaced entirely on the idea that Castro's tiny air force would be destroyed before the invasion force landed. Indeed, the brigadistas had been told it had already been destroyed. This was the fatal falsehood of the invasion. Castro's little Sea Furies were sent out from their hiding places to sink the invasion fleet of the United States of America. The amazing and unexpected fact is that they did! ...
... The battle was not very old when the surviving American ships began steaming out of the bay, stranding some 1,350 brigadistas, who only the day before had been happily sunning themselves at sea. ...
... The CIA had been so certain that Castro's air force would be destroyed that they had not taken even the basic precaution of placing anti-aircraft weapons aboard the ships. As the last U.S. destroyer sailed away from the Bay of Pigs, one brigadista remarked: "In the wake of that ship go two hundred years of infamy."