The first of eight admitted assassination attempts against Castro took place in 1960.
The program was, of course, a failure, if not a circus. The invasion of Cuba by the CIA's
anti-Castro exiles was put off until after John Kennedy took over the presidency. The
invasion at the Bay of Pigs was a fiasco, and Castro's forces easily prevailed. But the
program continued.
In 1960, Felix Rodriguez, Luis Posada Carriles, Rafael Chi Chi '' Quintero, Frank Sturgis (or Frank Fiorini '') and other Florida-based Cuban exiles were trained as killers
and drug-traffickers in the Cuban initiative; their supervisor was E. Howard Hunt. Their
overall CIA boss was Miami station chief Theodore G. Shackley, seconded by Thomas
Clines. In later chapters we will follow the subsequent careers of these characters--
increasingly identified with George Bush--through the Watergate coup, and the Iran-
Contra scandal.
NOTE:
- Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They
Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1986), p. 377. - Reed was better known in high society as a minor diplomat, the founder of the Triton
Press and the president of the American Shakespeare Theater. - Palm Beach Post, Jan. 13, 1991.
- For Lovett's residency there see Isaacson and Thomas, op. cit., p. 417. Some Jupiter
Island residencies were verified by their inclusion in the 1947 membership list of the
Hobe Sound Yacht Club, in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress; others were
established from interviews with long-time Jupiter Islanders. - Arthur Burr Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government,
to 1950 (College Station: Pennsylvania State University, 1990), p. 59. - The Chicago Tribune, Feb. 9, 1945, for example, warned of `` Creation of an all-
powerful intelligence service to spy on the postwar world and to pry into the lives of
citizens at home. '' Cf. Anthony Cave Brown, Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero (New
York: Times Books, 1982), p. 625, on warnings to FDR about the British control of U.S.
intelligence. - Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan, Eli Landau, Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob (New York:
Paddington Press, 1979) pp. 227-28.