'Operation Mongoose' to depose Castro shelved after Cuban Missile Crisis: Newly released RFK files

President John F. Kennedy talks with his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the Oval Office at the White House in 1962.

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President John F. Kennedy talks with his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the Oval Office at the White House in 1962.

By the fall of 1962, President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had spent the better part of a year orchestrating a massive and multifaceted campaign aimed at toppling Cuban dictator Fidel Castro from power.

The initiative, code named "Operation Mongoose," drew on the brainpower and energies of the U.S. government's most senior officials and ranged from balloon drops of anti-Castro pamphlets and cartoons to covert sabotage of Cuban industry and infrastructure. In time, it would even include active plotting to assassinate the Cuban dictator, with the Central Intelligence Agency clandestinely enlisting the aid of the era's reigning Mafia chieftains.

An example of anti-Castro cartoons developed as part of Operation Mongoose and released as part of the RFK files unsealed by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on July, 24, 2013.

Fidel Castro exhales cigar smoke during an interview at his presidential palace in Havana in 1985.

Suddenly that autumn, however -- and only temporarily -- the Kennedy brothers were forced to back off because of the Cuban Missile Crisis, newly declassified files show.

The new restraint was formalized at a tense gathering of the Special Group, an elite cadre of policymakers drawn from the ranks of the National Security Council, on October 26, 1962. It was the twelfth of the famous "thirteen days" that saw the world teetering on the edge of nuclear war, after the U.S., relying on state-of-the-art aerial reconnaissance photography, discovered that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles on Cuban soil.

"It was agreed that all plans for dispatch [of saboteurs] should be suspended," declared a Top Secret memorandum of the session, adding that "instructions were issued during the course of the meeting designed to recall the three teams already on the way" to Cuba. "No major acts of sabotage should be undertaken at this time."

Solusi Sehat