The Increasing Public Profile of the CIA

This chapter examines the public presence of the Central Intelligence Agency after its high-profile successes in Iran and Guatemala, related in the previous chapter. An effort to oust Sukarno in Indonesia failed, and the CIA was troubled by the general political environment of the 1950s, driven by fears that the Soviet Union was technologically ahead of the United States. Though able to weather the crisis that ensued when a U-2 surveillance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, the CIA’s public and humiliating failure to oust Fidel Castro in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion undermined the CIA’s reputation for effectiveness. Though not a reason for the failure of the invasion, the press’s coverage of the anti-Castro operation demonstrated that press attitudes toward the agency had begun to shift as a younger generation of reporters and managers more willing to question the CIA emerged on the scene.