Washington, D.C., April 7, 2025 - Just six months before the 1964 military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart in Brazil, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Plans Richard Helms briefed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on CIA clandestine operations in South America’s largest country.
Washington, D.C., April 29, 2021 – John F. Kennedy may have secretly warned Fidel Castro against executing survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion 60 years ago this month while also dangling a pledge of strict non-intervention if the Cuban leader spared their lives, according to new evidence posted today by the nongovernmental National Security Archive. Kennedy’s secret channel to Castro, the records suggest, was the president of Brazil, João Goulart.
Washington D.C., April 16, 2021 – In the earliest known CIA assassination plot against leaders of the Cuban revolution, high agency officials offered the pilot of a plane carrying Raul Castro from Prague to Havana “payment after successful completion of ten thousand dollars” to “incur risks in arranging accident” during the flight, according to formally TOP SECRET documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The pilot, who the CIA had earlier recruited as an intelligence asset in Cuba, “asked for assurance that in event of his [own] death the U.S.
Washington, DC, October 3, 2019 – When the Soviet Union put nuclear missiles in Cuba nearly 60 years ago, American officials refused to believe that at least one Soviet motivation was the defense of Cuba. But declassified U.S. documents published in the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) confirm a series of sometimes frenetic covert operations ordered by the Kennedy White House and run by the CIA in those years to overthrow the Castro regime that in hindsight make Moscow’s (and Havana’s) concerns about defending the island much more credible.
Washington, D.C. October 31, 2016 - The CIA today released the long-contested Volume V of its official history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which it had successfully concealed until now by claiming that it was a “draft” and could be withheld from the public under the FOIA’s "deliberative process" privilege.
Washington, DC, May 21, 2014 – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday joined the CIA's cover-up of its Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 by ruling that a 30-year-old volume of the CIA's draft "official history" could be withheld from the public under the "deliberative process" privilege, even though four of the five volumes have previously been released with no harm either to national security or any government deliberation. "The D.C.
Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba
Edited by Peter Kornbluh
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Washington, D.C., December 7, 2012 – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday rejected the CIA's attempt to shortcut the National Security Archive's lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the last still-secret history of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. With the ruling, the Archive has moved a step closer to compelling openness for the only remaining unreleased volume of a draft history of the Bay of Pigs operation, written by a CIA staff historian in the 1980s. One volume of the five-volume history reached the public through the John F.
Washington, DC, May 10, 2012 – More than year after the National Security Archive sued the CIA to declassify the full "Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation," a U.S. District Court judge today sided with the Agency's efforts to keep the last volume of the report secret in perpetuity.
Washington, D.C., August 15, 2011 - In the heat of the battle at the Bay of Pigs, the lead CIA field operative aboard one of the transport boats fired 75mm recoilless rifles and .50-caliber machine guns on aircraft his own agency had supplied to the exile invasion force, striking some of them. With the CIA-provided B-26 aircraft configured to match those in the Cuban air force, “we couldn’t tell them from the Castro planes,” according to the operative, Grayston Lynch. “We ended up shooting at two or three of them.