50 years ago this month, the government of the US led by their idealistic young President, John F. Kennedy, launched an invasion of the island of Cuba.
A group of 1,500 Cuban exiles with American support landed at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. Their intention was to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro. The result was an utter disaster. Cuba had an army of about 25,000 and a militia of about 200,000. Within a few days, nearly all of the invaders had been killed or captured. The US was humiliated. Castro was triumphant.
How could this have happened? Kennedy and his advisors were, without doubt, highly intelligent people from their country’s best universities. They had a massive and highly sophisticated intelligence service. How did they come to engineer such a fiasco?
