Short answers, pulled from the story.
Operation Mongoose, also known as the Cuban Project, was a covert U.S. campaign of sabotage, terrorism, and assassination plots directed against Cuba and the Castro government. It was officially authorized by President John F. Kennedy on the 30th of November, 1961, and the name was agreed upon at a White House meeting on the 4th of November, 1961.
Operation Mongoose was led on the military side by U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale and at the CIA by William King Harvey. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy chaired the Special Group-Augmented that oversaw the operation and was its most forceful advocate within the Kennedy administration.
The operation's primary execution center was JMWAVE, a CIA covert operations and intelligence gathering station on the campus of the University of Miami in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Additional activities were based at the Caribbean Admission Center at Opa-Locka, Florida, and the CIA acquired safe houses and properties across Miami and in other U.S. cities and abroad.
The CIA devised numerous assassination schemes, including poisoned cigars, thallium salts in his shoes to cause his beard to fall out, botulin poison pills administered through the gambling syndicate via mobster Johnny Roselli, a contaminated diving suit, and a fountain pen loaded with the poison Black Leaf 40. The U.S. Senate's Church Committee of 1975 confirmed at least eight separate CIA plots against Castro.
The CIA-organized sabotage and terrorist attacks against Cuba were a major factor in the Soviet Union's decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba and in Cuba's decision to accept them, directly precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The operation was suspended on the 30th of October, 1962, though three of ten six-man sabotage teams had already been deployed before the order reached them.
Operation Mongoose had a budget of $50 million per year and employed roughly 2,500 people, including about 500 Americans. According to Noam Chomsky, it remained secret for 14 years, from 1961 to 1975, when it was revealed partly by the Church Committee in the U.S. Senate and partly by investigative journalism.