Bay of Pigs: Revelations: CIA "Friendly fire"

'Friendly Fire' Reported as CIA Personnel Shot at Own Aircraft
New Revelations on Assassination Plots, Use of Americans in Combat

National Security Archive

Washington, D.C., August 15, 2011 - In the heat of the battle at the Bay of Pigs, the lead CIA field operative aboard one of the transport boats fired .75mm recoilless rifles and .55mm machine guns on aircraft his own agency had supplied to the exile invasion force, striking some of them.  With the CIA-provided B-26 aircraft configured to match those in the Cuban air force, “we couldn’t tell them from the Castro planes,” according to the operative, Grayston Lynch. “We ended up shooting at two or three of them. We hit some of them there because when they came at us…it was a silhouette, that was all you could see.”

This episode of ‘friendly fire’ is one of many revelations contained in the Top Secret multi-volume, internal CIA report, “The Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation.”  Pursuant to a Freedom of Information lawsuit (FOIA) filed by the National Security Archive on the 50th anniversary of the invasion last April, the CIA has now declassified four volumes of the massive, detailed, study--over 1200 pages of comprehensive narrative and documentary appendices.

Archive Cuba specialist Peter Kornbluh, who filed the lawsuit, hailed the release as “a major advance in obtaining the fullest possible record of the most infamous debacle in the history of the CIA’s covert operations.” The Bay of Pigs, he noted, “remains fundamentally relevant to the history of the CIA, of U.S. foreign policy, and of U.S. intervention in Cuba and Latin America. It is a clandestine history that must be understood in all its inglorious detail.”

In an article published today in the "Daily Beast," Kornbluh described the ongoing "FOIA wars" with the CIA to obtain the declassification of historical documents the CIA continues to keep secret. He characterized the process of pressing the CIA to release the Official History and other historically significant documents as "the bureaucratic equivalent of passing a kidney stone." 

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