Cuba under Fidel Castro Cuba and overthrow Castro; the plan resulted in the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961. On 15 April, CIA-supplied B-26's bombed three Cuban military airfields; the U.S. announced that the perpetrators were defecting Cuban air force pilots, but Castro exposed these claims as false flag misinformation. Fearing invasion, he ordered the arrest of between 20,000 and 100,000 suspected counter-revolutionaries, publicly proclaiming that "What the imperialists cannot forgive us, is that we have made a Socialist revolution under their noses". This was his first announcement that the government was socialist. The CIA and Democratic Revolutionary Front had based a 1,400-strong
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