A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  The Bruce-Lovett report was written in 1956. In 1957, the OCB reiterated many of these concerns in another report to President Eisenhower. The CIA’s Directorate of Plans, the “black ops” division of the CIA, was singled out for “operating for the most part on an autonomous and free-wheeling basis in highly critical areas.” In some cases this had led to “situations which are almost unbelievable because the operations being carried out by the Deputy Director of Plans are sometimes in direct conflict with the normal operations being carried out by the Department of State.”

  Schlesinger quoted an unnamed “CIA man” who described how in 1957 CIA tried to force the State Department’s hand in Indonesia by feeding them increasingly disturbing intelligence reports on the Indonesian leader Sukarno. “When they read enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the suggestion that we should support the colonels.” When the Indonesian Ambassador expressed opposition to any plot to overthrow Sukarno, Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, pressured his brother John Foster Dulles, then head of the State Department, to replace the Ambassador. And while Allen Dulles had “personally promised” to keep the new Ambassador apprised of CIA activity, he did not.

  In 1958, the CIA launched an utterly unsuccessful attack on Indonesia that resulted in CIA pilot Allen Pope being captured. This incident was as poorly planned and executed as the Bay of Pigs operation would be three years later. The OCB once again admonished President Eisenhower to rein in the CIA. The OCB expressed similar sentiments again in 1959 and 1960. In January 1961, just before John Kennedy was inaugurated, the board wrote:

  We have been unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk or the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved. In addition, we believe the CIA’s concentration on political, psychological and related covert action activities have tended to detract substantially from the execution of its primary intelligence-gathering mission. We suggest, accordingly, that there should be a total reassessment of our covert action policies.

  Because the CIA had done a covert psychological assessment of John Kennedy before he took office, they knew he would never approve of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the mineral-rich Congo. John Kennedy understood, as few leaders of the American political scene did, that most so-called “Communists” the CIA sought to overthrow were really just nationalists trying to protect their country’s resources from the greed of foreign interests. So CIA rushed to foment the assassination of Lumumba before JFK took office.

  Senator Frank Church, during the Church Committee hearings, accused the CIA of behaving like a “rogue elephant.” Indeed, the only evidence that the CIA ever ran an assassination or coup plot directly under orders of a president came in the Lumumba case. Notetaker Robert Johnson testified to the Church Committee that President Eisenhower had given what appeared to be a direct order to assassinate Lumumba. The Church Committee, despite Johnson’s testimony, put ultimate responsibility for Lumumba’s death on local rebels under the command of Joseph Sese Seko Mobutu. But Mobutu was, as Andrew Tully baldly put it, the “CIA’s man” in the Congo.782 CIA officer John Stockwell claimed in his book In Search of Enemies that another CIA officer drove around with Lumumba’s body in the trunk of his car for days after Lumumba’s assassination, wondering how best to dispose of the body.783 As I wrote in the Probe magazine article “Midnight in the Congo,”

  From the CIA’s own evidence, the CIA sought to entice Lumumba to escape protection. They then monitored his travel, assisted in creating road blocks, and when he was captured, encouraged his captors to turn him over to his enemies. The CIA had a strong relationship with Mobutu when Mobutu had the power to decide Lumumba’s fate. And then there are the admissions reported by Stockwell … How can anyone, in the light of such evidence, claim the CIA was not directly responsible for Lumumba’s murder?784

  President Kennedy versus the CIA

  THIS, THEN, IS THE AGENCY PRESIDENT KENNEDY INHERITED when he was sworn in on January 20, 1961. The CIA had been out of control for a full eight years, despite four years of strong warnings to the previous administration. So it should come as no surprise that Allen Dulles and his cohorts at CIA had no qualms planning the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. They did not fear the consequences of failure, because there had never been any consequences for previous failures. Any parent understands if you do not punish children for errant behavior, they will continue to repeat that behavior.

  The CIA brought President Kennedy the Bay of Pigs operation, which had been planned under the Eisenhower administration, as a fait accompli. Less than one hundred days into his administration, President Kennedy believed the CIA and trusted them.

  Little did he realize that Allen Dulles specifically planned for the failure of the Bay of Pigs, as coffee-stained handwritten notes attested when discovered years later.785 Dulles knew Kennedy would not improve a U.S.-led invasion. So Dulles planned a failed attack on the assumption that, forced with a choice between saving face or letting a CIA operation go sour, Kennedy would send in reinforcements. As reporter Daniel Schorr explained decades later, “In effect, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed.786

  But the CIA underestimated President Kennedy. Unlike his predecessor, who was content to let the CIA run foreign policy, JFK thought he was truly the Commander in Chief and refused to provide additional support that he had not previously authorized. And contrary to much of the published history on this incident, Kennedy had authorized air cover to protect the landing at the Bay of Pigs. But for whatever reason—intentional or otherwise—the air support showed up an hour late—too late to be of any help.

  At this point, Kennedy refused to authorize any additional military support, given that the invasion had been sold to him as one that would succeed as a “native” uprising of anti-Castro Cubans. Given the choice between escalation to “win” or de-escalation to prevent outright war with Cuba, JFK chose to de-escalate the situation, a choice for which the CIA never forgave him.

  Unlike Eisenhower, Kennedy wanted to impose consequences on the CIA for their lies and behavior. That’s why he fired Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, the Deputy Director of Plans who had personal responsibility for the failed operation. President Kennedy formed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to oversee the CIA. In the first few months of its existence, the PFIAB met 25 times—more than Eisenhower’s board met over a five-year period. And President Kennedy made sure the PFIAB’s recommendations were implemented.

  But it was another of President Kennedy’s moves that likely sealed his own fate. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy transferred, via National Security Action Memoranda (NSAM) 55, 56 and 57, control of paramilitary operations from CIA to the Department of Defense. He realized that such operations should be conducted under strict military chains of command, not through unaccountable secret operations. Kennedy had vowed he would shatter the CIA into a million pieces and scatter it to the winds.787 This move was a huge step in that direction.

  President Kennedy even considered having his brother Robert head the CIA, but Robert thought that was a bad idea for political reasons: he was a Democrat—which would arouse the ire of the Republicans who had just lost the presidency after holding power for eight years—and he feared it might look nepotistic.

  The Kennedys held a worldview that put them on a collision course with the covert establishment. They believed in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union and the right to self-determination of smaller countries. They understood that bullying smaller, poorer nations into submission by economic strangulation and military action was not a viable strategy in the long run. Both Robert and John had traveled the world extensively and had reached out to numerous world leaders in an attempt to understand what their countries needed. The Kennedys understood that providing schools, roads, food and other forms of economic aid, in
cluding government-to-government loans that bypassed greedy bankers, was key to laying a foundation for a true peace, as President Kennedy laid out in his landmark speech at American University in June 1963:

  What kind of peace do I mean? … Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children. Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women. Not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.

  Both Kennedys were aware how close the world came to nuclear war during the October Missile Crisis of 1962. Both were advocates of nuclear disarmament. President Kennedy spoke about how nuclear weapons not only didn’t guarantee peace, but were costlier and less efficient than other tactics. But President Kennedy also talked about the role every individual played in bringing peace to the world, a topic few leaders have ever broached:

  Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament—and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.

  “Our problems are manmade,” the President told the American University audience, “therefore they can be solved by man.” Kennedy pointed out he wasn’t after a fantasy version of peace, but something both tangible and achievable:

  Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process—a way of solving problems.

  With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. …

  Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.788

  “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,” President Kennedy said as part of his closing argument for a kinder, gentler approach to other nations. But in Vietnam, the U.S. was poised to do just that. President Kennedy found himself in conflict with the CIA over the depth and nature of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a conflict that spilled over into the papers of the time.

  A CIA coup in America

  IN AN ARTICLE HEADLINED “ARROGANT, POWER MAD—THAT’S OUR CIA in Viet Nam,” journalist Richard Starnes wrote of how the CIA was failing to obey direct orders from President Kennedy’s Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge:

  Twice the CIA flatly refused to carry out instructions from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, according to a high U.S. source here.

  In one of these instances, the CIA frustrated a plan of action Lodge brought with him from Washington, because the agency disagreed with it.

  This led to a dramatic confrontation between Lodge and John Richardson, chief of the huge CIA apparatus here. Lodge failed to move Richardson, and the dispute was bucked back to Washington. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and CIA Chief John A. McCone were unable to resolve the conflict, and the matter is now reported to be awaiting settlement by President Kennedy. …

  Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA.

  “If the U.S. ever experiences a ‘Seven Days in May’ it will come from the CIA, and not the Pentagon,” one U.S. official commented caustically. …

  “They represent a tremendous power and total unaccountability to no one….” …

  One very high American official here, a man who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy, likened the CIA’s growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer. [Emphasis added.]789

  Arthur Krock repeated some of Starnes’ charges in his own article, calling on President Kennedy to put an end to the war between the administration and the CIA in a way that both preserved the CIA’s secrecy yet held them accountable on these charges.

  That same month, Starnes also took Allen Dulles to task for propagandizing in his book The Craft of Intelligence:

  In any effective sense of the word as used in a democracy, the CIA’s accountability is so vague and amorphous as to be meaningless. The face it turns toward the public when it is under criticism is one of sad virtue: CIA, so goes the myth, does not reply to attacks, does not deny stories (however outlandish—or true—they may be), is above the hurly burly of democracy in action.

  This, of course, is disingenuous nonsense. The CIA does reply to criticism, violently and vociferously. It does deny and attempt to discredit stories that seek to penetrate its cloak of piety. It moves heaven and earth to unmask the sources of news accounts that shake its cloudy complacency.790

  Privately, to aides and close friends, President Kennedy evinced a desire to get Americans out of Vietnam. At a press conference on November 14, 1963, Kennedy discussed that, because there was a new government in Vietnam, there was a new need to reassess the American commitment there. “That is our object: to bring Americans home,” and transition military action back to the South Vietnamese, Kennedy told the reporters, adding that the purpose of the upcoming Honolulu conference was to figure out how to “pursue these objectives.”

  After President Kennedy was assassinated, combat troops were introduced into Vietnam and the counterinsurgency effort became an outright war, launched under the false premise that the Vietnamese had attacked the U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. It took nearly 30 years for that lie to be exposed. But Americans in general and journalists in particular seem unable to see the truth of such lies when they are pronounced by government sources. It was perhaps the ability of both Robert and John Kennedy to see through such lies that ensured their fates.

  Cuba

  NOWHERE WAS THE TURN AWAY FROM AMERICAN EMPIRE AND toward world peace more prominent than in the way President Kennedy treated Fidel Castro and Cuba in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy had assigned Robert Kennedy to oversee what became known as Operation Mongoose, a series of covert actions against Cuba designed to weaken Castro in the hopes of destabilizing him politically. These plots were not assassination plots. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mongoose was cancelled. As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy had the Justice Department and FBI shut down anti-Castro training camps in Miami, in Louisiana and in other places where CIA assets were trying to start their own revolution. President Kennedy sent journalists William Attwood and Lisa Howard as unofficial ambassadors to talk rapprochement with Carlos Lechuga, the UN Ambassador from Cuba.

  Richard Helms was tracking these attempts at rapprochement closely. One could make the case that Helms wanted to sabotage these efforts. And perhaps he tried, in the Cuban weapons cache episode.

  President Kennedy made clear the only way he’d authorize another action against Cuba would be if Castro were found to be exporting his revolution abroad. So when a large cache of weapons ostensibly from Cuba was found on a beach in Venezuela in November 1963, the CIA was quick to tout this as the proof President Kennedy had been looking for.

  Helms grabbed a desk officer and dropped in on Attorney General Robert Kenne
dy on November 19, 1963, just three days before President Kennedy would be killed in Dallas, “with one of the Belgian-made submachine guns we had filched from the arms cache.” How did the CIA know the Belgian weapons had been sold to Cuba? Helms’ answer borders on the absurd:

  In an effort to conceal the origin of the weapons, the Cubans had attempted to scrape away the Cuban army shield and serial numbers the guns had originally borne. Fortunately, one of our technicians had developed an acid which, when applied to the filed area, rendered the original markings legible. There was one hitch—the restored markings faded from the blue steel barrier in a matter of seconds. Worse, our acid treatment could be applied only twice before the markings faded permanently away. A complex bit of photography solved the problem.791

  To me, this read as if the CIA forged photos and then attributed the lack of physical evidence to a chemical process. I was not alone in my skepticism, as you will soon see.

  Robert Kennedy took Helms and the desk officer to the Oval Office to talk to the president. President Kennedy asked how the Cubans got three tons of ordnance onto the beach. As Helms wrote:

  Castro’s Fidelistas had in effect answered the President’s question. In the process of getting smartly away from the scene of the crime, the Cubans had overlooked one of their outboard-powered launches.792

  Down in Venezuela, the same Joseph Burkholder Smith we met earlier didn’t believe any of this:

  “I like the touch about the boat’s being sold by Canadians to the Cuban Agrarian Reform Institute. Makes it sound as though Castro’s trying to be real spooky, using a cover like the Agrarian Institute to deliver arms,” I couldn’t resist saying. “How did we actually get weapons there?”793