CIA Historian Fails to Shield Allen Dulles from Invasion Failure
By Desmond Okafor ·
Top Secret questions for Allen Dulles remain hidden as the Agency rejected a history that tried to excuse the men who led the Bay of Pigs to disaster.
Jack B. Pfeiffer spent years writing the CIA’s official history of the Bay of Pigs. He completed four volumes. The fifth, submitted to the Center for the Study of Intelligence on April 18, 1984, was rejected.
According to a cover sheet added by CIA Chief Historian David S. Robarge, the Agency found the draft "inadequate." The rejection wasn't merely a matter of footnotes or formatting; the Agency's reviewers cited "serious shortcomings in scholarship" and a "polemical tone." In the eyes of the CIA's historians, Pfeiffer had failed to add anything significant to the understanding of the disaster. Instead, he had written a defense of the people who caused it.
"Bound to fail from the outset"
The central conflict of the draft is a clash between Pfeiffer and Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency's Inspector General at the time of the 1961 failure. Kirkpatrick had conducted a "Survey of the Cuban Operation" that offered no quarter to the architects of the invasion. He assessed the operation as "misconceived, mismanaged, and bound to fail from the outset."
Kirkpatrick did not stop at generalities. He placed the blame squarely on the Agency task force and two men at the very top: Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles. For the CIA, this was a heresy. The operations directorate responded with a "fervent defense," and the Agency spent decades treating Kirkpatrick's report as "classified and sensitive," consistently denying requests for its release or sanitization.
Richard Bissell and the Directorate
Pfeiffer, writing decades later, largely adopted the viewpoint of the operations directorate. He took "very strong issue" with Kirkpatrick’s findings, suggesting that the Inspector General had a predetermined agenda. The draft argues that Kirkpatrick conducted his inquiry with the specific purpose of laying the responsibility for the fiasco on the officers who planned the operation and on Dulles and Bissell.
This internal struggle illustrates a recurring theme in the Agency's history: the instinct to protect the prestige of the directorate over the pursuit of a cold, honest accounting of failure. By framing Kirkpatrick's internal investigation as a targeted attack rather than a professional audit, Pfeiffer attempted to recast the Bay of Pigs not as a systemic failure of leadership, but as a victim of internal politics. The Agency's eventual rejection of the draft suggests that even by the standards of the CIA's own historians, Pfeiffer's attempt to whitewash the debacle was too transparent, even for a secret history.
Appendices B, C, and D
While the bulk of the draft was eventually released in 2016 due to changes in the Freedom of Information Act, the record remains incomplete. The cover sheet notes that the file contains three appendices—B, C, and D—that must be controlled as TOP SECRET.
The table of contents lists Appendix B as a memorandum from Kirkpatrick to Mr. McCone dated November 20, 1961, and Appendix C as a report to the Director of Central Intelligence dated November 24, 1961. Appendix D is simply titled "Questions for Mr. Dulles."
These appendices are handled separately from the secret manuscript. The record leaves the specific contents of those Top Secret documents, and the answers to those questions for Allen Dulles, outside the public reading room.