Operation Mongoose

The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians, and covert operations, carried out by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba.^[10] It was officially authorized on November 30, 1961 by U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The name "Operation Mongoose" was agreed to at a White House meeting on November 4, 1961.

This article is about the terrorism and sabotage campaign carried out by the US Government in Cuba. For other uses, see Operation Mongoose (disambiguation).

The operation was run out of JMWAVE, a major secret United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station owned by the University of Miami and established a year earlier in Miami.^[11]^[12] The operation was led by United States Air Force General Edward Lansdale on the military side and William King Harvey at the CIA and went into effect after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Operation Mongoose was a secret program against Cuba that aimed to remove the Cuban government from power, and to force the Cuban government to introduce intrusive civil measures and divert precious resources to protect its citizens from the attacks. The removal of the Castro government was a prime focus of the Kennedy administration.^[4]^[13]^[14]

When the scale of the operation escalated from the training of guerrilla cadres to work with dissidents inside Cuba to an air supported invasion, plausible deniability went out the window. The operator failed to recognize that the effort was both beyond the CIA's responsibility and its capability, and failed to back off.

Because of its concentration on the planned invasion the Agency failed: "To appraise the chances of success realistically... To keep the national policymakers adequately and realistically informed of the conditions considered essential for success, and... [to] press sufficiently for prompts policy decisions in a fast moving situation."

The Agency's relationships with the Cubans in terms of what the Inspector General regarded as the Agency's failure to take advantage of the "active participation" of the Cuban leadership; and the failure to develop any strong resistance elements inside Cuba.

A failure to "collect adequate information on the strengths of the Castro regime and the extent of the opposition to it; and it failed to evaluate the available information correctly". A failure to make full use of the information and resources which were available within the Intelligence Directorate of the CIA. Use of such resources could have avoided the problem of the operators doing their own intelligence analysis.

Overall bad organization, poor quality of staffing, inadequate assets (in material and personnel) and a lack of clear plans and policies.

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Media portrayals[edit]

In the Oliver Stone film JFK, Operation Mongoose is portrayed in flashback sequences as a training ground where, among others, Lee Harvey Oswald becomes versed in anti-Castro militia tactics.

El Encanto fire

Assassination attempts on Fidel Castro

Church Committee

Cuba–United States relations

Foreign interventions by the United States

Latin America–United States relations

NSC 5412/2 Special Group

Operation 40

Operation Northwoods

United States and state-sponsored terrorism

United States involvement in regime change in Latin America

Cuban History Archive, 20 Feb 1962.

Operation Mongoose: The Cuba Project

The National Security Archive.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

CIA minutes, 19 January 1962.

Meeting with the Attorney General of the United States Concerning Cuba

Joint Chiefs of Staff, 13 March 1962.

Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba

4 October 1962.

Minutes of Meeting of the Special Group on Operation Mongoose

CIA Historical Review Program, 23 May 1967. (HTML version)