Bay of Pigs

The failure that made Kennedy vow to splinter the agency into a thousand pieces.

April 1961: a CIA-trained exile brigade landed in Cuba and was destroyed in three days. Documented in the agency's own declassified inspector-general report (released 1998), which called the operation self-deceived at every level — and in the aftermath: Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, reportedly vowed to splinter the CIA, and inherited a grudge that conspiracy chronology places at the head of the road to Dallas. On this map it is the documented hinge where the agency and the presidency became rival powers in lore.