Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  De Gaulle looked at Khrushchev, according to translator Walters, “as one would look at a naughty child.” He adjourned the meeting. As Eisenhower started to leave the room, de Gaulle caught him by the elbow and drew him aside, with Walters to interpret. He then said to the President, “I do not know what Khrushchev is going to do nor what is going to happen, but whatever he does, or whatever happens, I want you to know that I am with you to the end.”34

  The next day Khrushchev returned to Moscow. The Paris Summit Conference was over.

  In summing up the event in his memoirs, Eisenhower admitted that “the big error we made was, of course, in the issuance of a premature and erroneous cover story. Allowing myself to be persuaded on this score is my principal personal regret.”35

  THERE HAVE BEEN many interpretations of the Powers incident and the failure of the summit conference. A prominent one is that the CIA deliberately sabotaged Powers’ plane in order to prevent an outbreak of peace. This conspiracy theory reached such respectability that in October 1975 the professional quarterly journal Military Affairs published an article on the subject that concluded, “The anomalies in the Powers case suggest that the U-2 ‘incident’ may have been staged. Moreover, the management of the crisis gives further warrant to the hypothesis that the U-2 was a device deliberately chosen to destroy an emerging détente.”36

  Powers was eventually exchanged for Colonel Rudolf Abel, a master Soviet spy caught in Brooklyn. Powers worked for Lockheed as a test pilot for a few years, then became a pilot of a helicopter that watched rush-hour traffic for a television station in Los Angeles. In August 1977 he crashed and died in an accident. Inevitably, it was suggested that his crash was no accident—that the CIA had done him in, presumably because he was about to “talk.”37

  Powers in fact had already “talked,” in his memoirs, entitled Operation Overflight, which he published in 1970. He had his own conspiracy thesis. It was based on the following facts: In 1957 the U-2s were based in a new location, Atsugi, Japan. In September 1957 a seventeen-year-old Marine private was assigned to a radar unit at Atsugi. After two years of extensive radar work for the Marines, he was discharged from the Corps. In October 1959 he defected to the Soviet Union, where he presumably told the Soviets everything he knew about American radar operations, and what he had learned, including—perhaps—the supposedly crucial information about the flying altitude of the U-2s.

  The name of that Marine was Lee Harvey Oswald.38

  One of Powers’ “proofs” of Oswald’s involvement was the fact that the Warren Commission had refused to release a top-secret CIA memorandum of May 13, 1964 (prepared by Richard Helms) to J. Edgar Hoover on the subject of “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Access to Classified Information About the U-2.” Powers complained that the document was still classified and he had been refused access to it.

  In 1979, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, this writer obtained the document. It recorded that the U-2 station at Atsugi was a “closed” base, with restricted flight lines and hangar areas. Oswald “did not have access to this area.” Helms’s conclusion was that “there is no evidence or indication that Oswald had any association with, or access to, the U-2 operation or its program in Japan.” He may have seen the airplane but if he did “it is most unlikely that Oswald had the necessary prerequisites to differentiate between the U-2 and other aircraft engaged in classified missions which were similarly visible at Atsugi at the same time.”39

  When Richard Immerman asked Bissell about the possible Oswald connection, Bissell scoffed at it. There was no way that Oswald could have known the date of the flight, obviously, and Soviet radar had long since been tracking U-2 flights, so the Russians already knew how high the planes were flying. Bissell agreed with Goodpaster, John Eisenhower, and Kelly Johnson (the man who designed the U-2) that Powers was downed by a near-miss explosion from a SAM.40

  The Military Affairs article made the point that because satellites were in operation by May 1960 further U-2 flights were unnecessary. Therefore, Powers must have been sent out by the CIA in order to be shot down.

  Bissell’s response to this charge is that “the first U.S. reconnaissance satellite did not occur until late August of 1960. Prior to that flight there had been some thirteen unsuccessful launches of the reconnaissance satellite, no one of which yielded usable photography, by reason either of vehicle or camera malfunction.”

  A second reason for using the U-2 was that “an aircraft mission can be programmed, as to choice of targets and timing over targets, so a mission could be laid out and timed in such a way as to achieve coverage of selected targets at specified times when it was expected that they would be visible.” By contrast, satellite missions “had to be planned and prepared days in advance before reliable weather predictions were available. They could of course be aborted up to the last minute but they could not be greatly modified.”

  Finally, “the resolution of U-2 photographs was considerably higher than that of satellite photography. (That situation has changed in the intervening years.) Since the purpose of Powers’ flight was to verify or disprove the existence of a number of ICBM sites in East Central Russia, and to obtain high resolution photography of them if discovered, a case could have been made for the use of the U-2 even if a satellite capability had been in existence.”41

  THE CHARGE THAT BISSELL, Allen Dulles, and others in the CIA deliberately sabotaged the Powers flight in order to wreck the summit conference and thus prevent détente is absurd. It ignores the obvious fact that it was Khrushchev who took the initiative. He was the one who made the Powers incident public, not Ike or Dulles or Bissell. He was the one who made a fuss, not the Americans. He was the one who wanted to wreck the summit, for whatever reason, and he succeeded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Ike and the CIA’S Assassination Plots

  AUGUST 18, 1960, Léopoldville, the Congo. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba has just made a deal with Khrushchev that will give the Congo forces Soviet military planes, which Lumumba says he needs to bring rebellious Katanga Province back under the control of the central government. Victor Hedgman, CIA station chief in Léopoldville, sends a telegram to Allen Dulles: “BELIEVE CONGO EXPERIENCING COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER GOVERNMENT. MANY FORCES AT WORK HERE: SOVIETS, COMMUNIST PARTY, ETC. ALTHOUGH DIFFICULT DETERMINE MAJOR INFLUENCING FACTORS TO PREDICT OUTCOME STRUGGLE FOR POWER, DECISIVE PERIOD NOT FAR OFF. WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUALLY COMMIE OR JUST PLAYING COMMIE GAME TO ASSIST HIS SOLIDIFYING POWER, ANTI-WEST FORCES RAPIDLY INCREASING POWER CONGO AND THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TAKE ACTION.”

  August 26, 1960. Allen Dulles sends a cable over his own signature (a highly unusual action) to Hedgman in Léopoldville: “IN HIGH QUARTERS HERE IT IS THE CLEAR-CUT CONCLUSION THAT IF LUMUMBA CONTINUES TO HOLD HIGH OFFICE, THE INEVITABLE RESULT WILL AT BEST BE CHAOS AND AT WORST PAVE THE WAY TO COMMUNIST TAKEOVER.… CONSEQUENTLY WE CONCLUDE THAT HIS REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE AND THAT UNDER EXISTING CONDITIONS THIS SHOULD BE A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION.”1

  LUMUMBA WAS NOT THE ONLY TARGET. One of the CIA’s plots was to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Another was to drop a poison pill in his coffee. A third bright idea was to rig an exotic seashell with an explosive device to be placed in Castro’s favorite skin-diving area; a fourth was to dust his diving suit with a skin contaminant.

  Bissell brought the Mafia in on the plot. He thought the gangsters would be efficient and would keep their mouths shut. It turned out that they blundered every attempt to kill Castro and then sang like canaries, to everyone’s embarrassment, especially after it was said that one of the Mafia leaders and John F. Kennedy shared a girl friend.2

  There is no doubt, in either of these cases, that CIA Director Allen Dulles ordered Castro and Lumumba murdered. Whether he did so with Ike’s knowledge, or not, is hotly debated. Whether he did so under Ike’s orders, or not, is even more hotly debated. Eisenhower loyalists, and there are many, swear that Ike did not and c
ould not have known about these assassination plots. In their opinion, it is inconceivable that he could have ordered the murders. Yet these same loyalists insist just as firmly, with regard to the U-2 and other CIA programs, that Ike was absolutely in charge, the man in command, and that Allen Dulles would never have dared move without the President’s orders.

  IN NOVEMBER 1975, the U. S. Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, popularly known as the Church Committee, conducted widely publicized and highly controversial hearings into CIA activities, including the assassination plots against foreign leaders. One of the committee’s conclusions was, “The chain of events revealed by the documents and testimony is strong enough to permit a reasonable inference that the plot to assassinate Lumumba was authorized by President Eisenhower.”3

  Two months later, in January 1976, a number of Eisenhower administration insiders, including Gordon Gray, Douglas Dillon, Andrew Goodpaster, and John Eisenhower, challenged this finding. In a statement to the Senate, they requested that the committee “disavow” the finding that President Eisenhower had authorized an assassination. In a reply of February 2, 1976, the committee chairman, Frank Church, and the vice chairman, John Tower, responded, “After reviewing the evidence in the Lumumba case once again, we remain convinced that the language used in the Committee’s findings was warranted.”4

  The committee itself had noted in its original report, however, that “there is enough countervailing testimony … and enough ambiguity and lack of clarity in the records of high-level policy meetings to preclude the Committee from making a finding that the President intended an assassination effort against Lumumba.” The committee did state directly and clearly that “Allen Dulles authorized an assassination plot.” In explanation, it wrote, “Strong expressions of hostility toward Lumumba from the President and his national security assistant, followed immediately by CIA steps in furtherance of an assassination operation against Lumumba, are part of a sequence of events that, at the least, make it appear that Dulles believed assassination was a permissible means of complying with pressure from the President to remove Lumumba from the political scene.”5

  Those close to Ike deny directly and vehemently that the President ever authorized a murder. John Eisenhower, who attended NSC meetings as Assistant White House Staff Secretary, said he had no memory of his father ever ordering an assassination at one of them, as was alleged, and pointed out that “if Ike had something as nasty as this to plot, he wouldn’t do it in front of twenty-one people,” the number present at NSC meetings.

  Goodpaster testified unequivocally to the Church Committee, “At no time and in no way did I ever know of or hear about any proposal, any mention of such an activity. It is my belief that had such a thing been raised with the President other than in my presence, I would have known about it.”6

  In an interview in the Superintendent’s office at West Point in 1979, Goodpaster said he recalled some assistant once making a joking reference to bumping off Lumumba. Ike reddened, the sure sign of anger in the man, and said sternly, “That is beyond the pale. We will not discuss such things. Once you start that kind of business, there is no telling where it will end.”7

  Yet Robert H. Johnson, a member of the NSC staff from 1951 to 1962, told the Church Committee, “At some time during that discussion in the NSC, President Eisenhower said something—I can no longer remember his words—that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba. There was no discussion; the meeting simply moved on. I remember my sense of that moment quite clearly because the President’s statement came as a great shock to me.”8

  At an August 25, 1960, meeting of the 5412 Committee, covert operations against Lumumba were discussed. Gordon Gray, after hearing about attempts to arrange a vote of no confidence against Lumumba in the Congolese Senate, commented that “his associates had expressed extremely strong feelings on the necessity for very straightforward action in this situation.”

  Gray later admitted that his reference to his “associates” was a euphemism for Ike, employed to preserve “plausible deniability” by the President.

  Dulles replied to Gray’s comment by saying “he had every intention of proceeding as vigorously as the situation permits or requires but added that he must necessarily put himself in a position of interpreting instructions of this kind within the bounds of necessity and capability.”

  The minutes of the 5412 meeting concluded, “It was finally agreed that planning for the Congo would not necessarily rule out ‘consideration’ of any particular kind of activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba.”9

  One of the major functions of 5412, Gordon Gray declared in a 1979 interview, was to “protect the President.” In one sense, this meant its task was to carefully scrutinize policies and programs to make sure they did not get the President into trouble. The 5412 Committee also provided a forum for the discussion of operations too sensitive to be discussed before the whole NSC.10 The committee also provided a perfect device for obscuring the record, making it impossible for the historian to say that this man ordered that action, or otherwise fix responsibility.

  The CIA’S record, and Ike’s, with regard to assassination, is therefore purposely ambiguous. This is true not only with regard to Lumumba but also in the cases of Chou En-lai and Fidel Castro. A review of the whole delicate subject of assassinations and the CIA is thus in order before any conclusions can be attempted.

  HOWARD HUNT IS THE SOURCE for the charge that the CIA, in the mid-fifties, had an assassination unit. Hunt said that the unit, which “was set up to arrange for the assassination of suspected double agents and similar low-ranking officials,” was under the command of Colonel Boris T. Pash, a U. S. Army officer assigned to the CIA.11 Pash’s title was Chief of Program Branch 7 (PB/7), a “special operations” unit within the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the original clandestine services organization that eventually became the Directorate of Plans.

  Frank Wisner, director of OPC and thus supervisor of Program Branch 7, said that Pash’s PB/7 functions included assassinations and “kidnapping of personages behind the Iron Curtain … if they were not in sympathy with the regime, and could be spirited out of the country by our people for their own safety; or kidnapping of people whose interests were inimical to ours.” This was, Wisner explained in a memorandum, “a matter of keeping up with the Joneses. Every other power practiced assassination if need be.” The written charter of the unit read, “PB/7 will be responsible for assassinations, kidnapping, and such other functions as from time to time may be given it by higher authority.”

  Hunt told the Church Committee that at one point in 1953 he had a meeting with Pash and his deputy to discuss “wet affairs,” i.e., liquidations, with regard to a double-agent who had penetrated the CIA’S operation in West Berlin. Hunt said that Pash “seemed a little startled at the subject. He indicated that it was something that would have to be approved by higher authority and I withdrew and never approached Colonel Pash again.”12

  One attempt was almost made, in 1955, but PB/7 was not involved, the target was not a low-ranking double-agent, and Ike knew nothing about it. A station chief in East Asia sent a cable to CIA headquarters outlining a proposed media propaganda campaign. To it he added a plan to assassinate Communist China’s number two man, Chou En-lai. Chou was attending a conference of Third World countries at Bandung. The plan was to have an indigenous agent place an undetectable poison in Chou’s rice bowl at the Bandung Conference’s final banquet. Chou would die two days later, after his return to Peking.13

  Allen Dulles vetoed the plan. He had CIA headquarters send out a cable that “strongly censured” the station chief for even suggesting assassination and indicating “in the strongest possible language this Agency has never and never will engage in such activities.” The cable added orders to “immediately proceed to burn all copies” of any documents relating to the plan.14

  FOR THE NEXT FIVE
YEARS, the CIA stayed away from any discussion of political assassination. The subject came up again in 1960. Patrice Lumumba was the target. A brief history of developments in the Congo during the fifties is necessary to an understanding of the Lumumba assassination attempts.

  The Belgian Congo, a European colony located in central Africa, was governed by the Belgians as if it were the eighteenth century. There was no local government of any kind; not even the 100,000 Belgians employed in the Congo had any political rights. All power resided with the Governor General, who was appointed by the Belgian Government and derived his powers from it. The Belgians made no attempt to prepare the Congo for independence until 1956, when at the urging of the United Nations some local elections were held to choose African advisers to the municipal governments. These elections led to the formation of political parties in the Congo. Joseph Kasavubu, leader of the Bakongo tribe in Léopoldville, formed one party drawn mostly from his tribe. Patrice Lumumba, a post-office clerk, founded another, which, unlike Kasavubu’s, tried to attract supporters on a nationwide basis. Moise Tshombe formed a third party in the mineral-rich province of Katanga.

  The coming of political parties naturally increased the pressure for independence, as no politician could hope to win votes unless he attacked the Belgians and demanded immediate independence. By the beginning of 1960 the Belgians had come to the conclusion that there was only one way they could keep the goodwill of the Congolese after independence, and thus keep possession of the mines, and that was to grant independence as early as possible and trust that the Congolese would recognize that their total inexperience made it necessary for them to rely on Belgian advisers and managers. Elections were quickly arranged, with independence promised for June 30, 1960. The elections would choose a National Assembly, which would then select a head of state and a prime minister.