WASHINGTON, April 16, 2026 – In the wake of the failed CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion, President John F. Kennedy considered reconfiguring and even dismantling the intelligence agency, according to documents posted by the National Security Archive on the 65th anniversary of the paramilitary assault on Cuba.
The President tasked his White House aide, Arthur Schlesinger, to examine “the British intelligence set up” to determine “what of value there might be for our own thinking about CIA reorganization,” according to a little-known secret memorandum to Kennedy dated a month after attack.
“What is of special interest in the British experience is, not the division between intelligence and operations,” Schlesinger advised the President, “but the means by which the clandestine service is kept under continuous policy control.”
The May 18, 1961, document, titled “How to Organize an Intelligence Service: The British example,” along with a second Schlesinger memo declassified in full last year on “CIA Reorganization,” are included in a special collection of formerly secret records posted today by the National Security Archive to commemorate the Bay of Pigs invasion.
The selection also includes a comprehensive secret CIA report on its collaboration with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro in advance of the invasion – a plot paid for out of the invasion budget – as well as Cuban intelligence reports from Central America on the CIA’s preparations to launch an exile attack on the island.
Today’s anniversary posting also highlights the top secret, 100-page CIA “Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation” – a scathing, self-critical, agency postmortem considered so sensitive that CIA director John McCone burned most of the 20 existing copies to sequester the report from critics, like Schlesinger, who sought to hold the Agency accountable for the Bay of Pigs debacle. “In unfriendly hands,” CIA Deputy Director William Cabell noted in a December 1961 memorandum, the IG report “could become a weapon unjustifiably used to attack the entire mission, organization, and functioning of the Agency.”
After several years of FOIA efforts, the National Security Archive obtained the declassification of the CIA inspector general’s report – the historical Holy Grail of the Bay of Pigs – in the late 1990s.
The inspector general’s “survey” was conducted by CIA veteran officer Lyman Kirkpatrick, who spent almost six months interviewing officials and reviewing thousands of contemporaneous records. Among his main conclusions:
The operation was predicated on CIA deputy director Richard Bissell’s assumption that “the invasion would, like a deus ex machina, produce a shock … and trigger an uprising” against Castro. Yet, the CIA had “no intelligence evidence that Cubans in significant numbers could or would join the invaders ….”
What was supposed to be a covert operation became a major overt military project “beyond the Agency’s responsibility as well as Agency capability.” Security