Report Shows Cia Blamed Itself For Bay Of Pigs Disaster

Ignorance, incompetence and arrogance. That’s the CIA’s own assessment of its faults in the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. Small wonder that the spy agency guarded one of the Cold War’s most secret documents so jealously for so long.

The 150-page report, released after more than three decades in the CIA director’s safe, blamed the disastrous attempt to oust Fidel Castro not on President John F. Kennedy’s failure to back the invaders with air strikes, but on the agency itself.

The CIA’s ignorance, incompetence, and arrogance toward the 1,400 Cuban exiles it trained and equipped to mount the invasion was responsible for the fiasco, said the report, obtained by The Associated Press on Saturday.

“The fundamental cause of the disaster was the agency’s failure to give the project, notwithstanding its importance and immense potentiality for damage to the United States, the top-flight handling which it required,” the report said.

The top-secret document, released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request late last week, criticized almost every aspect of the CIA’s handling of the invasion: misinforming Kennedy administration officials, planning poorly, using faulty intelligence and conducting an overt military operation beyond “agency responsibility as well as agency capability.”