Page 7 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 7 of 237

As his plane carried him toward Florida, Zuniga was flying also toward his wife Georgina, his two young
sons, Eduardo and Enrique, and his daughters, Beatriz and Maria Cristina. He had left them behind in the safety
of Miami, in an apartment on South West 20th Avenue when he had joined the exiles who were training in
Central America to invade their homeland.

To the southeast, the strike force droned onward toward Cuba and the new day. The attack was to be led by Luis
Cosme, a wiry, crew-cut former Cuban Air Force and Cubana Airlines pilot who had fled Cuba eight months
before. At the controls of the other two planes in Cosme's "Linda" wing were Alfredo Caballero, a stocky twenty-
five-year-old, and Rene Garcia. They, too, were Cuban Air Force veterans. Their target was San Antonio de los
Banos, the vital military airfield twenty-five miles southwest of Havana.

Jose Crespo, short and handsome, led the "Puma" flight that was to strike at Camp Libertad airfield on the
outskirts of Havana. The other two B-26s in Crespo's wing were flown by Daniel Fernandez Mon, Spanish-born
and the only bachelor in the flight, and "Chirrino" Piedra, at twenty-five one of the youngest and best-liked of
the exile pilots. None of these three pilots or their co-pilots survived the Bay of Pigs. All six men in the "Puma"
wing had less than forty-eight hours to live.

Two planes comprised the third, "Gorilla," wing. They were flown by Gustavo Ponzoa and Gonzalo
Herrera. Their target was the airport at Santiago de Cuba, in Oriente Province, where Castro had begun his climb
to power in the Sierra Maestra five years earlier.

***

The invasion fleet of half a dozen ships was already steaming toward Cuba under the escort of U.S.
warships. Unable to sleep on the crowded deck of the Houston, nineteen-year-old Mario Abril, a private in E
Company, 2nd Infantry Battalion of the exile brigade, heard the drone of the bomber fleet overhead.

He looked up and saw the B-26 formation against the night sky. Two months before he had been in Miami,
preparing to leave for the training camp in Guatemala. He had told no one of his decision. And yet, when his
mother had awakened him on February 26, his nineteenth birthday, instead of the present he expected she gave
him a rosary. She had said it was all she could give him.

Now, aboard the Houston in battle dress, the slender youth switched on his transistor radio to hear
whether Havana would describe the bombing raids. Tomorrow he would still be at sea. The day after he would
face his first trial in battle.

***

In Washington, Richard M. Bissell, Jr., an urbane, six-foot-four former economics professor, waited anxiously for
word of the bombing strike and for news of Zuniga's arrival in Miami. Bissell was the CIA's deputy director for
plans (DDP), "plans" being a cover name for covert foreign operations. In intelligence parlance, "black" means
secret, and Bissell directed the blackest of the black operators. He was the CIA man in charge of the clandestine
Bay of Pigs operation from the beginning. From a secret office near the Lincoln Memorial, across the reflecting
pool from the White House, he was linked by high-speed coded teletype circuits to Happy Valley.

On this Saturday, April 15, Bissell's boss, the CIA director, Allen W. Dulles, was in Puerto Rico. He had gone
there that day to keep a long-standing engagement to speak at a convention of young businessmen
Monday morning. The CIA chief decided that to cancel it would look peculiar and might attract attention.
Moreover, Dulles reasoned, his presence in Puerto Rico would be good cover. The public appearance of the head