WASHINGTON — A day after the American-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs began in April 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned President Kennedy in a letter that the "little war" in Cuba "could touch off a chain reaction in all parts of the globe."
Khrushchev issued an "urgent call" to Kennedy to end "the aggression" against Cuba and said his country was prepared to provide Cuba with "all necessary help" to repel the attack.
The letter was one of hundreds of previously classified American and Cuban documents that were released Thursday as a three-day Bay of Pigs review conference was getting under way in Cuba to mark the 40th anniversary of the Cuban triumph.
Besides loyalist Cubans involved in event, participants include officials of the Kennedy White House and some members of the 1,500-member force of exiles who took part in the invasion.
The event is co-sponsored by the University of Havana and several Cuban government agencies, along with the National Security Archive, a George Washington University affiliate that specializes in declassifying foreign policy documentation.
Kennedy responded to Khrushchev's letter not long after receiving it. He said the Soviet leader was under a "serious misapprehension" in regards to developments in Cuba. The invading refugees were simply trying to reclaim democratic liberties denied them by the Cuban revolution, Kennedy wrote.
At no point in the letter did Kennedy acknowledge any U.S. role in the training and equipping of the refugee invaders.
He cautioned Khrushchev against any effort to use Cuba as a pretext to "inflame other areas of the world."
"I would like to think that your government has too great a sense of responsibility to embark on any enterprise so dangerous to the general peace," he said.
Two days later, after the defeat of Brigade 2506 had been confirmed, Kennedy convened a Cabinet meeting at the White House to assess the debacle.
"The president was really quite shattered," wrote Chester Bowles, an undersecretary of state who attended the meeting. "It was clear to see that he had been suffering an acute shock."
Bowles said in a newly declassified memo that almost without exception, Kennedy's public career "had been a long series of successes, without any noteworthy setbacks."
On the Net: National Security Archive: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
National Archives and Records' JFK assassination records: www.nara.gov/research/jfk/index.html