Latin America in 1960, the U.S. decided to support an attack on Cuba by anti-Castro rebels. The Bay of Pigs invasion was an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba in 1961, financed by the U.S. through the CIA, to overthrow Fidel Castro. The incident proved to be very embarrassing for the new Kennedy administration. President John F. Kennedy initiated the Alliance for Progress in 1961, to establish economic cooperation between the U.S. and Latin America. The Alliance would provide $20 billion for reform in Latin America, and counterinsurgency measures. Instead, the reform failed because of the simplistic theory that guided it and the lack
CIA activities in Iraq Castro as well as his trips throughout the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and China. In 1991, former high-ranking U.S. diplomat Hermann Eilts told journalist Elaine Sciolino that Mahdawi had been the target. By 1961, the CIA had cultivated at least one high-level informant within the Iraqi wing of the Ba'ath Party, enabling it to monitor the Party's activities. A CIA cable reveals that the Ba'ath Party "first approached Arif about a coup in April 1962." In mid-1962, alarmed by Qasim's threats to invade Kuwait and his government's expropriation of 99.5% of the British- and American-owned Iraq Petroleum Company's (IPC)