The daring incursion s success was entirely contingent on US air support, which
then-President John F. Kennedy refused to provide, meaning it foundered in just three days, with at least 114 insurgents killed, 360 wounded, and 1,200 captured and jailed. In December the next year, the release of 1,113 Bay of Pigs veterans was secured by a CIA-assisted lawyer, in exchange for $53 million - worth $464.5 million today - in food and medicine.
The details of the embarrassing episode are farcical in the extreme, but the newly-released files make abundantly clear the CIA and their exile proxies were deadly serious - quite literally.
A June 1966 internal Agency