TimeLine

The April 15 – April 19, 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion (also known in Cuba as the Playa Girón after the beach in the Bay of Pigs where the landing took place) was an unsuccessful United States-planned and funded attempted invasion by armed Cuban exiles in southwest Cuba. An attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro, this action accelerated a rapid deterioration in Cuban-American relations worsened by the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year.

The CIA began to recruit and train anti-Castro forces in the Sierra Madre on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. They were self-named Brigade 2506 (Brigada Asalto 2506), and the overall plan was code-named Operation Zapata (aka Operation Pluto) by the CIA. CIA Director Allen W Dulles appointed Richard Mervin Bissell, Jr., one of his three aides, as director of Operation Zapata.

On March 17, 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed to a recommendation from the Central Intelligence Agency to equip and drill Cuban exiles for action against the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro. Eisenhower stated it was the policy of the US government to aid anti-Castro guerrilla forces. The CIA was initially confident it was capable of overthrowing the Cuban government, having experience assisting in the overthrow of other foreign governments such as the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954.

The failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and several failed assassination plots utilizing CIA-recruited operatives from the Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans directly against Fidel Castro undermined the CIA’s credibility, and pro-American but unpopular regimes in Iran and Guatemala that he helped put in place were widely regarded as brutal and corrupt. The reputation of the agency and its director, Allen W Dulles, declined after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco; he and his staff (including Director for Plans Richard Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell) were forced to resign (September 1961). President Kennedy did not trust the CIA, and he reportedly intended to dismantle it after the Bay of Pigs failure. Kennedy said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” Ironically, Dulles was later appointed to the Warren Commission, the official government investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.