CIA initiative targeting Cuba
Military unit
Operation 40 was the code name for a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored counterintelligence group composed of Cuban 🍐 exiles.[1] The group was formed to seize control of the Cuban government after the Bay of Pigs Invasion.[2] Operation 40 🍐 continued to operate unofficially until disbanded in 1970 due to allegations that an aircraft that was carrying cocaine and heroin 🍐 in support of the group crashed in California.[1]
It was approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in March 1960, after the 🍐 January 1959 Cuban Revolution, and was presided over by Vice President Richard Nixon.[citation needed]
Origins [ edit ]
On 11 December 1959, 🍐 following the Cuban Revolution of January 1959, Colonel J.C. King, chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, sent a confidential 🍐 memorandum to CIA director Allen W. Dulles. King argued that in Cuba there existed a "far-left dictatorship, which if allowed 🍐 to remain will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries."[citation needed]
The group was presided over by 🍐 then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon and included Admiral Arleigh Burke, Livingston Merchant of the State Department, National Security Adviser Gordon 🍐 Gray, as well as Dulles himself.[citation needed]
Tracy Barnes functioned as operating office of the Cuban Task Force. He called a 🍐 meeting on 18 January 1960, in his temporary office near the Lincoln Memorial.[citation needed]
On 17 March 1960, President Eisenhower signed 🍐 a U.S. National Security Council directive on the anti-Cuban covert action program authorizing the CIA to organize, train, and equip 🍐 Cuban refugees as a guerrilla force to overthrow the government of Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro.[citation needed]
Operations [ edit ]
Operation 🍐 40 was not only involved in sabotage operations. One associate of the group, although never a member, Frank Sturgis, allegedly 🍐 told author Mike Canfield: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or 🍐 the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own 🍐 members who were suspected of being foreign agents...We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time."[citation needed] The group 🍐 sought to incite civil war in Cuba against the government of prime minister Fidel Castro. When Operation 40 failed in 🍐 accomplishing this goal, then in October 1960, Brigade 2506 was created, a CIA-sponsored group made up of 1,511 Cuban exiles 🍐 who fought in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion.
On 17 April 1961, Vicente León León, with other members of 🍐 Operation 40, landed at the Bay of Pigs via the CIA-chartered freighter Atlántico. He was killed in action.[3]
In popular culture 🍐 [ edit ]
Operation 40 is a playable faction in the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops. Within the game's 🍐 campaign mode, there is heavy implication that the main protagonist and Operation 40 operative Alex Mason may have been involved 🍐 in the assassination of President Kennedy as a Soviet sleeper agent.[citation needed]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Bibliography [ 🍐 edit ]
