| Goods |
Dulles, the creator of America’s sprawling intelligence empire, had
summoned Morris—a rising young editor at Harper’s magazine—to help him set
the record straight on the most cutting humiliation of his career. He wanted to
write his side of the story about the Bay of Pigs. The words alone still brought a
spasm of pain and rage to Dulles’s face. It was just a spit of sand and scrubby
palms along Cuba’s southern coast. But it was the scene, in April 1961, of the
biggest disaster in the CIA’s history—a motley invasion that fell ignominiously
short of toppling Cuba’s dangerously charismatic leader, Fidel Castro. The failed
invasion, Dulles said, was “the blackest day of my life. |