John McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy had forced Dulles out following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.
McCone had one overriding mission: restore order at the besieged CIA. Kennedy hoped his management skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian—mostly a stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who had always run the spy agency—faced a steep learning curve.
Over the pulsating beat at an exclusive nightclub, the arms smuggler made his pitch to a client: 2.5 million euros for enough radioactive cesium to contaminate several city blocks.
Female workers in California will get new tools to challenge gender-based wage gaps under legislation signed into law Tuesday that supporters say offers the strongest equal-pay protection in the nation.
The Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors have a specific genetic mutation.
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell, accepted the United States’ responsibility Tuesday for deadly airstrikes on an Afghan hospital in which 22 people were killed, stating that the attack was a “mistake” but that the ultimate decision to shell the facility was made by the U.S. chain of command.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a newspaper interview published on Sunday that more corporate executives should have been prosecuted for their actions leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.
For a second day, searchers failed to locate a plane with 10 people on board that went missing in eastern Indonesia, officials said Sunday.
