One thing that’s often missed about this in the hero-worship of JFK is that Kennedy’s administration desperately wanted to intervene in Cuba militarily - just because Castro was a Communist - and they had been pressuring the CIA hard to find something to justify an invasion. This was the context in which the CIA finally said “well, we can’t find anything, so how about we fake attacks on US citizens and blame it on Cuba?” It wasn’t like the CIA came up with this plan on its own out of the blue and presented it to Kennedy for approval.
To their discredit, the CIA would certainly have done this happily if Kennedy had given the go-ahead, but he said “uh, that’s a little too far.”
One thing that’s often missed about this in the hero-worship of JFK is that Kennedy’s administration desperately wanted to intervene in Cuba militarily - just because Castro was a Communist - and they had been pressuring the CIA hard to find something to justify an invasion. This was the context in which the CIA finally said “well, we can’t find anything, so how about we fake attacks on US citizens and blame it on Cuba?” It wasn’t like the CIA came up with this plan on its own out of the blue and presented it to Kennedy for approval.
To their discredit, the CIA would certainly have done this happily if Kennedy had given the go-ahead, but he said “uh, that’s a little too far.”