This week, a lecture about national intelligence under President John F. Kennedy.

Catholic University professor and former CIA historian Nicholas Dumevich teaches the class,

which includes a discussion on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The Cuban invasion forces were trained at CIA bases in Nicaragua and Guatemala.

The invasion was planned originally, I saw in the CIA declassified documents.

This was the preferred plan to land at the beach at Trinidad.

This was considered an anti-Castro town.

Again, looking for that local support. It had a good port. It had a defensible beach with good maritime approaches and was close to the mountains.

Professor Dumevich also talks about other covert operations during the Cold War.

In this introductory question, covert operations during the Cold War.

In this introductory course, we're continuing our historical survey of American intelligence under each presidential administration.

And now we've come to the presidency of John F. Kennedy. January, 1961 to November, 1963.

Kennedy was a former naval officer, so he thought he knew something about intelligence.

He was also a big fan of the James Bond novels written by Ian Fleming.

I've pictured him with his brother, Robert Kennedy, because the brothers together

had great influence on U.S. intelligence. There's a lot to say about U.S. intelligence under

Kennedy, even though he served less than a full term because, of course, he was assassinated

by a pro-Cuban, American leftist, a disturbed former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald.

At the end, I'll have some reflections about the assassination.

Before we get to the main intelligence events of this administration, I want to mention a couple

of other developments that they're not as spectacular, but still they deserve to be remembered as important milestones in U.S. intelligence history, and they leave a legacy to this day.

One of them is the president's daily brief, which was created for Kennedy as the president's intelligence checklist.

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