Central Intelligence Agency face-to-face briefing. The CIA hoped that Castro would bring about a friendly democratic government, and planned to curry his favor with money and guns. On December 11, 1959, a memo reached the DCI's desk recommending Castro's "elimination". Dulles replaced the word "elimination" with "removal", and set the wheels in motion. By mid-August 1960, Dick Bissell would seek, with the blessing of the CIA, to hire the Mafia to assassinate Castro. The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed military invasion of Cuba undertaken by the CIA-sponsored paramilitary group Brigade 2506 on April 17, 1961. A counter-revolutionary military, trained and funded
CIA activities in Vietnam had difficulties understanding their politics. This can be attributed to the fact that the CIA did not make a concerted effort to gain a better understanding of the history and people of Vietnam. The CIA instead focused on the military forces occupying the territory instead of the political and economic forces that motivated them. The diplomats were not getting clear information in 1954 and early 1955, but the CIA station "had ... no mandate or mission to perform systematic intelligence and espionage in friendly countries, and so lacks the resources to gather and evaluate the large amounts of information required