President Kennedy didn't want to reform the CIA. He wanted to tear it apart.

In April 1961, the agency's director, Allen Dulles, promised the new president a clean operation: land a brigade of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban people would rise up against Castro. Within three days, the plan collapsed.

Brigade commander Jose San Roman radioed for the air cover Dulles had promised. It never came. Over a hundred exiles were killed on the sand. More than a thousand were marched into Castro's prisons, San Roman among them, while the world watched Washington's humiliation unfold live.

Kennedy was furious, and not only at the failure. The agency had told him the invasion could not fail. It failed completely, and Castro turned the wreckage into the greatest propaganda victory of his Cold War career.

Within weeks, Dulles was forced out. Kennedy told his closest aides he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." A sitting president had lost faith in the agency built to protect the country from exactly this kind of failure.

The CIA survived intact. Kennedy's plan to dismantle it did not. Six decades later, the CIA remains one of the most powerful unelected institutions in the American national-security system.

Some historians argue Kennedy was hunting for someone else to blame. The CIA presented options, and the Oval Office approved every one of them, then pulled the air support at the last hour and let the agency absorb the fallout.

Others point to what Dulles's own team knew going in: that Cuban civilians were not going to rise up, and they let Kennedy believe otherwise anyway. An agency willing to mislead a president about an operation this size, they argue, cannot be trusted with the far larger calls it was actually built to make: covert wars, regime change, the fate of governments most Americans never hear about.

Was Kennedy right to distrust Dulles and the CIA he ran, or was he blaming an agency for a failure the Oval Office itself signed off on?