After the Bay of Pigs failed in April 1961, Kennedy pushed out the men at the top of the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, his deputy Charles Cabell, and Richard Bissell, who ran covert action. [4] He kept the covert war on Cuba going, though, under Operation Mongoose. [1]
On 30 June 1961 his aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sent him a memo titled “CIA Reorganization.” It said that “47 percent of the political officers serving in United States embassies were CAS”, meaning CIA under diplomatic cover. In Paris the memo counted 123 CIA people; in Chile, 11 of the 13 political officers were CIA. It noted the agency had some 1,500 people under State Department cover. [2][3]
The line most often quoted, that Kennedy vowed to “splinter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”, first appeared in a New York Times article of 25 April 1966, attributed to an unnamed official. No named witness has ever confirmed he said it. [4]
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