Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  It had four: Raymond L. Garthoff, “Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities,” in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett (eds.), Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, CIA/CSI, 2003.

  “provocative pin-pricking”: Goodpaster memo, October 30, 1959, DDEL.

  “the lie we told about the U-2”: Ike made the remark to journalist David Kraslow; it is cited in several sources, including David Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973).

  “Bissell probably believed”: Michael Warner, “The CIA’s Internal Probe of the Bay of Pigs Affair,” Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1998–1999, CIA/CSI.

  should be eliminated: The evidence that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba dead is overwhelming. “The President did want a man whom he regarded (as did lots of others, myself included) as a thorough scoundrel and a very dangerous man, got rid of,” Bissell said later in an oral-history interview for the Eisenhower presidential library. “I have not the slightest doubt that he wanted Lumumba got rid of and he wanted it badly and promptly, as a matter of urgency and of very great importance. Allen’s cable reflected that sense of urgency and priority.” NSC secretary Robert Johnson’s testimony on Eisenhower’s order to kill Lumumba at the NSC meeting on August 18, 1960, and Devlin’s quoted testimony on his orders coming from “the President” were given to investigators for the Church Committee. Devlin testified on August 25, 1975; Johnson testified on June 18 and September 13, 1975. On the murder of Lumumba, see “Conclusions of the Enquiry Committee,” a thousand-page parliamentary report published by the government of Belgium in December 2001. See also NSC minutes, September 12 and 19, 1960, DDEL. Steve Weissman, former staff director, House of Representatives subcommittee on Africa, granted the author an illuminating interview on the structure of the covert operation in the Congo; see also Weissman’s “Opening the Secret Files on Lumumba’s Murder,” Washington Post, July 21, 2002. After the killing, Nikita Khrushchev had a conversation with the American ambassador in Moscow, who reported in an eyes-only cable to Washington: “With respect to Congo K said what had happened there and particularly murder of Lumumba had helped communism. Lumumba was not Communist and he doubted if he would have become one.” FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. X, document 51. Moscow nonetheless established the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University for students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the KGB used it as a rich recruiting ground. But Soviet intelligence would never return to the Congo under Mobutu, who personally staged a mock execution of the last Soviet intelligence officer he expelled from the capital.

  The CIA delivered $250,000: Personal testimony on the payoffs to the CIA’s allies in the Congo comes from Owen Roberts, later a U.S. ambassador under President Ronald Reagan. Roberts was the ranking expert on the Congo at the State Department’s intelligence and research bureau in Washington in 1960. He had served for two years in the Congolese capital and was the first American foreign service officer who knew all the new leaders personally. He was working on a book-length study of the country financed by the CIA in 1960, and he served as the escort officer when Prime Minister Lumumba, President Joseph Kasavubu, and eighteen of their ministers visited Washington and the United Nations, where the general assembly convened in September 1960. “The CIA made some payoffs, I know,” to the Congolese delegation at the United Nations, Ambassador Roberts said. Roberts oral history, FAOH.

  “We had made a major effort”: Bissell interview in Piero Gleijeses, “Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House, and the Bay of Pigs,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 27, 1995, pp. 1–42.

  “a tired old man”: Lehman oral history, “Mr. Current Intelligence,” Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

  “worth the risk”: “Report from the Chairman of the President’s Board of Intelligence Consultants” and “Sixth Report of the President’s Board of Consultants,” January 5, 1961, DDEL; “Report of the Joint Study Group,” December 15, 1960, DDEL; Lyman Kirkpatrick, memorandum for director of central intelligence, “Subject: Summary of Survey Report of FI Staff, DDP,” undated, CIA/CREST; NSC minutes, January 5 and 12, 1961, DDEL.

  “I reminded the President”: Gordon Gray, memorandum of meeting with President Eisenhower, January 18, 1961, DDEL.

  “an eight-year defeat” and “a legacy of ashes”: Memorandum of discussion at the 473rd meeting of the NSC, January 5, 1961, DDEL; memorandum from Director of Central Intelligence Dulles, January 9, 1961 (Dulles claiming that he had “corrected deficiencies” in the clandestine service and that everything there was “now satisfactory”); memorandum of discussion at the 474th meeting of the NSC, January 12, 1961, DDEL(Dulles saying that American intelligence was “better than it ever had been,” that creating a director of national intelligence would be “illegal,” and that such a director would be “a body floating in thin air”). The declassified NSC minutes, published in 2002, are not verbatim notes, but they preserve the president’s anger and frustration. All are collected in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XXV, released in March 7, 2002.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Senator Kennedy asked the President’s judgment”: “Transfer: January 19, 1961, Meeting of the President and Senator Kennedy,” declassified January 9, 1997, DDEL.

  “He had his torture chambers”: Dearborn oral history, FAOH. This is a remarkably candid interview.

  “The great problem now”: RFK notes cited in Church Committee report.

  The worst that could happen: Unless otherwise indicated, the reconstruction of the Bay of Pigs invasion in this chapter is drawn directly from The Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Vol. 10, Cuba, 1961–1962, declassified in 1997, and its microfiche supplements, published in 1998, Vol. 11; Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, 1962–1963, declassified in 1996, and its 1998 supplements; and Jack Pfeiffer, Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951–January 1961, Vol. 3 of Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, CIA, NARA. Quotes from Jake Esterline are from the Musgrove conference transcript, in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

  another blown operation: The station chief who tried to buy off the government was Art Jacobs, Frank Wisner’s law school friend and gatekeeper in the early days of the CIA, a diminutive man known in those days as Ozzard of Wiz. “We had a bandit down in Singapore, a cabinet minister who was on the CIA payroll,” remembered Ambassador Sam Hart, then a political officer at the American embassy in Malaysia. “One night they had him wired to a polygraph in a safe house…. The Singapore M-5 burst in on the safe house and there’s this cabinet minister wired to the polygraph.” Hart oral history, FAOH. The subsequent letter from Rusk read: “Dear Mr. Prime Minister: I am deeply distressed…regret very much…unfortunate incident…improper activities…very serious…reviewing activities of these officials for possible disciplinary actions.”

  could not launch air strikes: Cabell and Bissell, memorandum for General Maxwell D. Taylor, “Subject: Cuban Operation,” May 9, 1961, JFKL, DDRS.

  The president said he was unaware that there were going to be any air strikes on the morning of D-Day: FRUS, Vol. XI, April 25, 1961 (Taylor Board).

  “The time has come for a showdown”: Robert F. Kennedy to the president, April 19, 1961, JFKL, cited in Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 97.

  “Mr. President, I stood right here”: The aides were Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, and their accounts are, respectively, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), and Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).

  an instrument of government he had disdained: President Kennedy had torn out the wiring in the White House for governing the use of secret power. Eisenhower had exerted the presidential power through a rigorous staff system, like the army’s. Kennedy had tossed it around like a pigskin at a touch football
game. Days after taking office, he had abolished the president’s panel of intelligence consultants and the Operations Coordinating Board. They were assuredly imperfect institutions, but they were better than nothing, which was what John Kennedy had built in their place. The post–Bay of Pigs meeting of the NSC was the first serious roundtable discussion of covert action in the Kennedy administration.

  “I’m first to recognize”: Dulles quoted in “Paramilitary Study Group Meeting”(Taylor Board), May 11, 1961, declassified March 2000 and available online at http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB29/06-01.htm.

  “take the bucket of slop”: Smith quoted in “Paramilitary Study Group Meeting” (Taylor Board), May 10, 1961, NARA.

  “He leaves an enduring legacy”: Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 204. Bissell came to believe he had left the CIA with “a legacy that has still not been put to rest historically and perhaps never will be.” In secret testimony declassified in 1996, Bissell gave this assessment of the CIA’s clandestine service: “In part because of my own failings and shortcomings, by the late ’60s the Agency already had, I thought, a rather lamentable record…. Reviewing the whole range of different kinds of covert operations—they involved propaganda operations, paramilitary operations, political action operations, and the whole range—the Clandestine Service is not the place where one would expect to look for professional competence.” Bissell said that basic skills in military affairs, political analysis, and economic analysis had not been developed at the CIA. The agency had become nothing more than a secret bureaucracy—and a “very sloppy” one at that. Bissell testimony, President’s Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), April 21, 1975, GRFL.

  “and unmistakable self-confidence”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 195.

  “not a man that people were going to love”: James Hanrahan, “An Interview with Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. ‘Red’ White,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 1999–2000, CIA/CSI.

  McCone tried to get the big picture: On his worldwide tour to meet the troops, at the Far East station chiefs’ retreat at the mountain resort of Baguio in the Philippines in October 1961, McCone chose a new deputy director to serve as the CIA’s chief intelligence analyst: Ray Cline, then chief of station in Taipei.

  There were more than a few operations that McCone and the Special Group knew little or nothing about: Division chiefs such as J. C. King, who had served a decade under Dulles, thought nothing of running operations as they saw fit. McCone also never knew that his appointment had set off an internal rebellion at the agency. “I, for one, underestimated the strength of the opposition in the second and third levels of CIA,” McGeorge Bundy told the president. “Some very good men are disquieted.” Robert Amory, the deputy director of intelligence, called McCone’s appointment “a cheap political move.” Other foes within the CIA feared McCone would sacrifice the agency to the young lions at the White House. Still others at the clandestine service were unhappy at an outsider’s coming to power.

  “The President explained”: McCone memo, November 22, 1961, FRUS, Vol. X. 182 “a ‘cloak and dagger’ outfit”: McCone memorandum for the file, January 13, 1964: “I have felt, and expressed myself to the late President Kennedy, to President Johnson, and to Secretary Rusk and others, that the DCI and CIA image must be changed. Its basic and primary responsibilities by law are to assemble all intelligence, analyze, evaluate, estimate and report such intelligence for the benefit of policy makers. This function has been submerged and CIA has been consistently referred to as a ‘cloak and dagger’ outfit whose activities involve (almost exclusively) operations designed to overthrow governments, assassinate Heads of State, involve itself in political affairs of foreign states…. I wish to attempt to change this image.” FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXXIII, document 184. McCone was “a man who believed he had two hats: one hat was running the Agency, and the other hat was as one of the President’s policymakers.” Richard Helms oral history, September 16, 1981, LBJL. McCone said he consistently argued that the CIA “had through the years been subordinated to operational activities”—and “this had to be changed.” McCone memo, “Discussion with Attorney General Robert Kennedy,” December 27, 1961, CIA/CREST. He drafted and received a written understanding that he would be “the Government’s principal intelligence officer.” JFK to McCone, January 16, 1962, CIA/CREST.

  “You are now living on the bull’s eye”: David S. Robarge, “Directors of Central Intelligence, 1946–2005,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2005, CIA/CSI.

  “Berlin was a sham”: Smith interview with author.

  “operations in East Germany were out of the question”: Murphy, CNN Interactive chat transcript, 1998, available online at http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/guides/debate/chats/murphy/.

  The agency was all but out of business: Murphy to Helms, “Subject: Heinz Felfe Damage Assessment,” February 7, 1963, declassified June 2006, CIA.

  “the top priority”: Helms to McCone, January 19, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

  “Of the 27 or 28 agents”: McCone memo, “Discussion with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 2:45 P.M., 27 December 1961,” FRUS, Vol. X.

  the Catholic Church and the Cuban underworld: Lansdale to McCone, December 7, 1961, FRUS, Vol. X.

  “Ed had this aura around him”: Esterline, Musgrove transcript, Politics of Illusion, p. 113.

  “Let’s get the hell on with it”: Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 205.

  “he wanted fast answers”: Elder statement to Church Committee investigators, August 13, 1975, declassified May 4, 1994.

  “it would meet with the president’s approval”: The question of whether president Kennedy authorized the CIA to kill Castro can be answered, at least to my satisfaction. In 1975, Bissell testified to the presidential commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller on the question of presidential authorization of assassinations by the CIA.

  Rockefeller questioned Bissell:

  Q: Any assassination or assassination attempt would have to have the highest approval?

  A: That’s correct.

  Q: From the President?

  A: That is correct.

  “mad as hell”: Houston to the historian Thomas Powers: “Kennedy was mad,” Houston said. “He was mad as hell…. He was not angry about the assassination plot, but about our involvement with the Mafia.” Powers, “Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1979.

  “no question in my mind that he did”: Helms interview with author. This seems to me to settle the question of JFK’s authorization, taken together with Bissell’s testimony and the overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence. The counterargument is that John Kennedy would never have done such a thing, and that argument has worn very thin.

  “why shouldn’t they kill yours?”: The full context of Helms’s observation is worth reproducing, now that the CIA is back in the business of targeted killings. “Let’s leave aside the notion of theology and the morality of all good men for just a moment,” he said in 1978. “Leaving that aside, one comes smack up against the fact that if you hire someone to kill somebody else, you are immediately subject to blackmail, and that includes individuals as well as governments. In short, these things inevitably come out. That is the most compelling reason for not getting involved. But then there is an ancillary consideration. If you become involved in the business of eliminating foreign leaders, and it is considered by governments more frequently than one likes to admit, there is always the question of who comes next…. If you kill someone else’s leaders, why shouldn’t they kill yours?” The question was very much on Helms’s mind after November 22, 1963. Helms interview with David Frost, 1978, full transcript reprinted in Studies in Intelligence, September 1993, CIA/CSI.

  “CIA was suffering” and “morale was pret
ty well shattered”: McCone oral history, August 19, 1970, LBJL. McCone recounted his first meeting with President Kennedy, when he was offered the job as director of central intelligence: “[JFK said]: ‘Now, there are only four people besides Allen Dulles that know that we are having this discussion: Bob McNamara and his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, and Dean Rusk, and [Chairman of the Senate Atomic Energy Committee] Senator Clinton Anderson.’ And he said, ‘I don’t want anybody else to know about it, because if these liberals. o.b.’s that work in the basement of this building hear that I am talking to you about this, they’d destroy you before I can get you confirmed.’” McCone oral history, April 21, 1988, Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley.

  “accident-prone”…“alcohol-addicted”…“something should be done immediately to restore morale in the Agency”: Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., “Report of the Task Force on Personnel Management in CIA,” July 26, 1962, CIA/CREST; Kirkpatrick’s handwritten notes from an August 6, 1962, Executive Committee meeting on the report, CIA/CREST.

  1,300 Cuban refugees: Harvey to Lansdale, May 24, 1962, CIA/DDRS

  “forty-five men”: Lansdale to Special Group (Augmented), July 5, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

  “Can CIA actually hope to generate such strikes?”: Lansdale to Harvey, August 6, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

  Chapter Eighteen