Cuban Project by late August, the Soviet military build-up in Cuba disgruntled the Kennedy administration. The fear of open military retaliation against the United States and Berlin for the US covert operations in Cuba slowed down the operation. By October, as the Cuban Missile Crisis heated up, President Kennedy demanded the cessation of Operation Mongoose. Operation Mongoose formally ceased its activities at the end of 1962. The first assassination plots began in the late summer of 1960, according to the Church Committee’s documentation. Some of the plots and ideas ranged from “poisoned pills, an exploding seashell, and a planned gift of a
Missile gap a dangerous extremist, who worked with the American military to plant the idea of a Soviet first-strike capability to justify a pre-emptive American attack. That belief about Kennedy as a militarist was reinforced in Soviet minds by the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis after the Soviets placed nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. A second claim of a missile gap appeared in 1974. Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment in his 1974 foreign policy article, "Is There a Strategic Arms