History of Cuba 20 April, the brigade surrendered and was publicly interrogated before being sent back to the US. Recently inaugurated president John F. Kennedy assumed full responsibility for the operation, even though he had vetoed the reinforcements requested during the battle. The invasion helped further build popular support for the new Cuban government. The Kennedy administration thereafter began Operation Mongoose, a covert CIA campaign of sabotage against Cuba, including the arming of millitant groups, sabotage of Cuban infrastructure, and plots to assassinate Castro. All this reinforced Castro's distrust of the US, and set the stage for the Cuban missile crisis. Tensions between
Nuclear weapons of the United States commanders if they believed it was warranted by circumstances, and were out of communication with the president or the president had been incapacitated. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, on October 24, 1962, General Thomas Power, commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), took the country to DEFCON 2, the very precipice of full-scale nuclear war, launching the SAC bombers of the US with nuclear weapons ready to strike. Moreover, some of these commanders subdelegated to lower commanders the authority to launch nuclear weapons under similar circumstance. In fact, the nuclear weapons were not placed under locks until decades