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#allen-dulles
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The Bay of Pigs
On the night of Sunday, April 16, 1961, approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the United States Central Intelligence Agency embarked from a staging port at Puerto Cabezas on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast aboard chartered freighters of the García Line. They were Brigade 2506 — the operational unit codename derived from the serial number of the brigade's first combat fatality during the Guatemalan training phase. Their objective: an amphibious landing on the southern coast of Cuba at Bahía de Cochinos — the Bay of Pigs — followed by the establishment of a beachhead from which a provisional Cuban government-in-exile would be declared, internal opposition to Fidel Castro's two-and-a-half-year-old revolutionary government would be encouraged, and conventional U.S. military intervention could, if events warranted, be requested under cover of a civil war already in progress. The plan had been developed under the Eisenhower administration from March 1960; the operational variant executed in April 1961 had been authorized by President John F. Kennedy, in office for 87 days, on April 4 and again on April 16. The operation was, in its own operational terms, a comprehensive failure: the air strikes on Cuban airfields scheduled for the morning of April 15 destroyed only a fraction of Castro's air force; the landings on April 17 met immediate, sustained, and well-organized resistance; the second wave of U.S. air support was cancelled by Kennedy on April 16-17; the brigade was overrun at the beach within 72 hours. Brigade casualties: 114 killed, 1,189 captured. The captured personnel were held in Cuba until December 1962 when they were exchanged for approximately $53 million in U.S.-supplied food and medicine. Within weeks of the operation, Kennedy had requested the resignations of CIA Director Allen Dulles, CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. Within eighteen months, the Soviet decision to install medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuban territory — a decision Nikita Khrushchev later attributed in part to the demonstration of U.S. willingness to attempt military overthrow — had brought the United States and the Soviet Union to within hours of nuclear exchange. The Bay of Pigs is the foundational documented operational failure of the U.S. intelligence community and the immediate institutional precursor to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Operation Mockingbird
Between 1948 and the mid-1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency cultivated paid and unpaid working relationships with American journalists, editors, and publishers across every major U.S. news organization. The architect was an OSS veteran named Frank Wisner. He called the network the 'Mighty Wurlitzer' — a theatre-organ metaphor for a machine that could play many instruments from a single console. The full scope was confirmed by the 1975 Church Committee, expanded upon in Carl Bernstein's 25,000-word 1977 Rolling Stone investigation, and partly declassified since. What the records have not yet given up is the operational name everyone agrees was attached to it.
MK-Ultra
Between 1953 and 1973, the Central Intelligence Agency ran one of the most ambitious — and least restrained — human-experimentation programs in American history. The goal was mind control. The subjects rarely knew they were subjects. By the time the public found out, most of the records had been burned.
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