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]
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]
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]
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