Blackmail or Betrayal", when he became convinced that his relationship with the latter had compromised the security of the United States, and that the Soviets had developed a hydrogen bomb. In February 1955, General Marshall, the Secretary of Defense, ordered a team of US scientists to fly to the USSR to inspect "the quality of their hydrogen bomb program". In the United States, the team included Richard Bissell, Jr., and E.P. "Tom" Watson, Jr., who had joined RAND two years earlier and were involved in the agency's work on what was called "RAND Super". The two American members were sent to the USSR on the pretext of helping with the American exhibition called "USSR through Soviet Eyes", but in fact with the aim of assessing whether or not the Soviets were in fact developing a hydrogen bomb. The RAND team, together with William Penney, went to Moscow to investigate. There they carried out detailed inspections at the Soviet nuclear facilities: Semipalatinsk and Zakharov, to assess the state of the program and its leadership. They were not welcomed with open arms, and their presence was covered by a veil of secrecy, but they remained undeterred, and ultimately were able to report that the Soviets had obtained a plutonium-based bomb in 1949, and developed a number of warheads for this, but were nowhere near being able to develop a true thermonuclear weapon. This was a significant revelation for the US. In 1963, it was disclosed that the CIA had planned a coup in 1953 to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba, but as a result of the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco it had become convinced that the Soviet Union had come to an accommodation with the Cuban Government. On 18 October 1962, Richard Helms wrote to James Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief: The Soviet Union [was] ... determined to make Cuba safe for Marxist governments. We have worked assiduously to undermine the government of Fidel Castro. If one can break the Communist movement, Cuba will have to be sacrificed. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba On the night of 17 January 1961, a group of CIA operatives, under the direction of Bill Harvey and Howard Hunt, took a shot at Lumumba as he was entering his car. The bullet hit him in the back, went through his body and lodged in the bottom of the door. After the assassination, the two men drove his vehicle to a nearby lake, where they abandoned the car and left their equipment, including weapons, ammunition and money. At 4 am, on the morning of 17 January, Angleton called one of the officers to ask for a progress report. At noon on that day he sent an internal message to Director Allen Dulles and other senior US officials: What about the car? Don't the Cubans know he was executed? No reply came from headquarters, and the matter was never investigated. Although an official inquiry was never carried out, the US Government was convinced that the CIA was responsible. According to William Blum, in his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, it was the first and only time that the United States government, under an official inquiry, attempted to assassinate a foreign leader. The assassination of John F. Kennedy There have been a number of claims by conspiracy theorists that President John F. Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy to kill him. According to one theory, made by the French magazine Le Point in 2001, this was part of a CIA plot whose aim was to cover-up the Agency's connection to the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In May 1963, a week after the CIA had killed Lumumba in Africa, the team sent to kill him returned to Washington. While staying at a house at 1600 17th Street, N.W., in Washington, they found out that Kennedy was due to give a speech in a couple of days, in which he was expected to make public the American connection with the failed invasion. The team decided that this posed too much of a threat to their organization's existence, and decided to take action. On 11 November 1963, four days after Kennedy had been assassinated, one of the assassins, Frank Sturgis, told his wife: I've had an experience in Dallas that'll shake up the world. I assassinated the President. On 16 November 1963, at a press conference, Bobby Kennedy stated that: I don't think there is any question in the mind of anyone in this room that President Kennedy wanted to get the answer and he wanted it fast, and that the question of what information should come out of this thing and what should not be let out was a very difficult one. But I think what is important is that this committee is doing what we said it was going to do and that it's going to do it well. After the assassination, the Agency's Director of Plans, Richard Helms, gave a memo to his senior staff instructing them to make a number of changes to the Agency's records and files. In response to the assassination, the memo instructed: It is imperative that this sort of thing not be allowed to happen again ... The problem of "national security" will never be a valid excuse for failure to report.... If the Agency is forced to choose between embarrassment and integrity, it will always be forced to make the lesser of the two sacrifices. As a result of these revelations, an investigation was opened, which, after initial denials, eventually admitted that "Jack Ruby" (not his real name) had been employed by the CIA in the 1940s, and that one of the weapons used to kill Kennedy had been traced back to him. In his book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the author John Marks, who worked for the CIA at that time, wrote: This chapter was not closed with my retirement in 1974, however, for as I was leaving my office one evening I noticed a stack of boxes on the floor outside the door that was the overflow from my office. Looking through the boxes, I discovered documents that we had reviewed during our investigation of the assassination, which was launched after the assassination in order to find out what the CIA knew. Many of these files were heavily redacted or censored, but enough remained to convey the picture that the CIA did not in the final analysis know what killed President Kennedy. It was very clear that there were no CIA files which showed that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were CIA employees as was suspected and reported. Dissenting voices John Coleman, a former CIA officer and a member of the National Security Council's Psychological Warfare Board in the mid-1950s, stated that while he admired many of the objectives of the Agency's covert operations, he could never get past the CIA's habit of lying to Congress. John Stockwell, a former station chief in Angola during the 1960s, described a CIA team in a raid on a Viet Cong camp: The team was armed and equipped with explosives. The plan was to blast a hole in the wall of the building and rush inside ... I told them it wouldn't work. We knew nothing about the defenses in the building we were going to attack. The team had been hand picked and selected on the basis of its eagerness to carry out the mission. They had been trained in the handling of explosives. In this environment, the most important weapon is information. The information here was that the walls were four feet thick. We then tried the same strategy at a different point on the wall ... Only this time we didn't tell the men what the wall was made of. I could see the doubt on their faces. I didn't want to say more. I wanted them to see for themselves. In a press conference on 21 September 1976, President Gerald Ford stated: The CIA has undertaken activities to disrupt and discredit anti-war movement activities ... including the financing of "black" operations in the United States. The Agency does not undertake such operations unless they are essential to the national security of the United States, and if they are in accordance with the wishes of the President. There are few countries that conduct such operations, for a variety of reasons. Ford refused to take any further action in relation to the matter, and instead "stressed the high level of integrity within the CIA" and "insisted that all intelligence agencies were equally dedicated to the truth". In 2005, in an interview with Der Spiegel, Michael Ledeen revealed that he had been approached by Dick Cheney in 1998 with a plan for regime change in Iran, and that he had shared this plan with an Iranian exile living in Paris, Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ghorbanifar, an Iranian businessman, had been involved in numerous arms deals with the Israelis, the Iranians and the CIA. His close relationship with the latter led him to be known as "Israel's Man in Iran". Ledeen asserted that Cheney's plan involved a "covert operation" where the US would organize "the overthrow of [the] Iranian government" and that the operation "did not originate with the president". On 20 May 2006, Ledeen repeated his allegation, saying that Cheney "knew the whole thing was a scam", but he declined to give any further information about his allegation. In popular culture Films and television The American Broadcasting Company TV series The X-Files, which first aired on 5 September 1993, is set in the counter-intelligence section of the Central