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It was rather interesting to note, looking back these days, that one of the ships was called the Houston, and the other ship was called the Barbara J. Colonel Hawkins had renamed the program as we selected a name for the Bay of Pigs operation. The code name was "Zapata."
I was thinking a few months ago of what a coincidence that is. When Mr. Bush graduated from Yale, back there in the days when I was a professor at Yale, he formed an oil company, called "Zapata," with a man, Lieddke, who later on became president of Pennzoil. But the company that Lieddke and Mr. Bush formed was the Zapata Oil Company. Mr. Bush's wife's name is Barbara J. And Mr. Bush claims as his hometown Houston, Texas. Now the triple coincidence there is strange; but I think it's interesting. I know nothing about its meaning. But these invasion ships were the Barbara J and the Houston, and the program was "Zapata." George Bush must have been somewhere around.
With the ships loaded and ready to go, the Agency went in to brief the President one more time. Actually, the ships were at sea, the troops were at sea. And finally, on a Sunday afternoon -- well, we'll go back a few days. On Saturday morning, April 15th 1961, three B-26 bombers flew over Cuba, and hit the military base near Havana, and destroyed all but three of Castro's combat-capable aircraft. It was a pretty successful trip.
We knew that the odds of getting them all in one shot would be a slim chance, so we were ready again to strike a second time. And we had already had briefings on two strikes, one earlier and then one to follow up. We had to follow it up. So we had U-2's fly all over Cuba and we found the three planes that were missing. They were three of what we call T-birds, T-33 jets. They were just training planes, but each one had two 50-caliber machine guns. They were fast little airplanes, easy to maneuver, and they were a great threat to the B-26's of our Cuban-exile airforce. We had to destroy them. We found them down in the southern part of Cuba, all in the same little base, sitting on the ground, wingtip to wingtip.
The plan for the second attack was that we would hit them just before sunrise with four B-26 bombers. One bomber could have destroyed them, but we would go with four: right at sunrise, because the brigade was due to land on the beach at sunrise. And if we were bringing the brigade in, certainly that would alert their aircraft, and their planes would be in the air. We had to hit them just before sunrise or everything was gone. So this was approved when we briefed the President on Sunday afternoon, which was April 16th, 1961.
He approved the whole plan. And he approved the strike with the Cuban-exile's bombers for the morning of the 17th which was absolutely necessary. Without that we could not have hit the beach. Nobody had any problem with that whatsoever. In fact, a very good friend of mine (an old Agency friend) was the base commander for this operation at Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua where we had the four B-26 bombers just ready to go.
That was about 3:30 on Sunday afternoon. The ships were at sea; the President said OK -- that was the first time he approved it, by the way. Here we were a few hours before the attack, before he even approved, that he first said they could go. You could see how reluctant he was, really, to approve this program.
and who was Zapata Oil?
The company traces its origins to Zapata Oil, founded in 1953 by future-U.S. President George H. W. Bush, along with his business partners John Overbey, Hugh Liedtke, Bill Liedtke, and Thomas J. Devine. Bush and Thomas J. Devine were oil-wildcatting associates. Their joint activities culminated in the establishment of Zapata Oil. The initial $1 million investment for Zapata was provided by the Liedtke brothers and their circle of investors, by Bush's father and maternal grandfather—Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker, and his family circle of friends.
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