“Let me tell you something,” President John F Kennedy told confidant Clark Clifford in April 1961. “I have had two full days of hell – I haven’t slept – this has been the most excruciating period of my life. I doubt my presidency could survive another catastrophe like that.”
That catastrophe was the failed attempt by a group of Cuban émigrés, with the backing of the US government, to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, an inlet on the island’s south coast, 90 miles south-east of the capital Havana. Their aim was to provoke an uprising that would bring about the overthrow of Fidel Castro, the left-wing leader who had seized power in an armed revolt in 1959.
Castro had found himself on a collision course with the United States almost from the moment he seized power. Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy’s immediate predecessor in the White House, had looked on with growing alarm as the Cuban revolutionary developed an ever-closer relationship with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had already used the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to topple ‘undesirable’ governments in Iran and Guatemala. In 1960, in the final year of his presidency, he turned to the CIA again.
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