In an effort to get the CIA to stop the FBI’s initial Watergate probe, Nixon tried to blackmail CIA Director Richard Helms, apparently by using his knowledge of major CIA secrets to keep the lid on Watergate.

The president wanted to scare Helms with the prospect that, under pressure, an apprehended Hunt might start blabbing to authorities about “the Bay of Pigs.”

That phrase, to Bob Haldeman—Nixon’s most trusted aide—was secret Nixon-CIA code for one of the darkest events in our history, an event with tenuous ties to the disastrous 1961 Cuban invasion.

In a post-Watergate book, Haldeman disclosed, “It seems that in all those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination. . . .

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General Petraeus didn’t invent the successful strategy while out for one of his eight-mile runs, and then hand out the orders as though promulgating the Ten Commandments.

He did something far rarer and more difficult: he looked further down the ranks, and outside the armed forces entirely, searching for people who had already solved parts of the problem that the US forces were facing.

It’s not that David Petraeus was an empty vessel for the ideas of others. He commanded American forces in Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq, in 2003. Like McMaster, he ignored much of what he was being ordered to do by his superiors . . .

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The first major foreign policy decision in which Bundy participated became the signature failure of the entire Kennedy administration.

The new administration inherited a covert plan to topple the Cuban leader Fidel Castro with an invasion force of 1,300 exiles being trained in Guatemala.

It was a CIA plot actively incubated under the Eisenhower administration—which had recently broken off diplomatic relations with Cuba—and then presented to the new president for execution within the first months of his administration.

The code name for the invasion was “Operation Zapata.”

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