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

by Tim Weiner

  John F. Kennedy walked into the Oval Office and switched on the brand-new state-of-the-art taping system: Direct quotations in this chapter are drawn from the recently transcribed Kennedy White House tapes, unless otherwise cited. The tapes, McCone’s newly declassified memos, and more than one thousand pages of internal CIA records create a rich mosaic of the daily life of the agency in the summer and fall of 1962. The White House tapes from July 30 through October 28, 1962, are compiled in Timothy Naftali, Philip Zelikow, and Ernest May (eds.), The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 2001), produced by the Miller Center of Public Affairs. The cited McCone memos are from three sources: FRUS, CREST, and DDRS. The internal CIA records were obtained by the author from CREST.

  The return on these investments: Two years after this Oval Office conversation, Goulart was overthrown, and Brazil was on the road to a police state. Bobby Kennedy had gone to Brazil to see the situation for himself: “I didn’t like Goulart,” he said. The 1964 coup backed by the CIA led to the first in a series of military dictatorships that ruled Brazil for the better part of twenty years.

  McCone had given the go-ahead: The director drew a distinction in his own mind between a coup in which there might be a bloodbath and a targeted assassination attempt against a head of state. One was moral, the other was not; a coup in which a president was killed might be deplorable, but not reprehensible.

  On August 10…The subject was Cuba: Almost every record of this meeting has been destroyed, but fragments were painstakingly reassembled by State Department historians from the files of the director of central intelligence: “McCone maintained at the meeting that the Soviet Union had in Cuba an asset of such importance that ‘the Soviets will not let Cuba fail.’ To prevent such a failure McCone expected that the Soviet Union would supplement economic, technical, and conventional military aid with medium-range ballistic missiles, which they would justify by reference to U.S. missile bases in Italy and Turkey…. [T]he issue of the assassination of Cuban political leaders came up during the discussion. According to an August 14 memorandum from Harvey to Richard Helms, the issue was raised during the meeting by McNamara…. On April 14, 1967, McCone sent a memorandum from his retirement to Helms, who had become Director of Central Intelligence, in which he wrote of the discussion at the August 10 meeting: ‘I recall a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime, including Castro. I took immediate exception to this suggestion, stating that the subject was completely out of bounds as far as the USG and CIA were concerned and the idea should not be discussed nor should it appear in any papers, as the USG could not consider such actions on moral or ethical grounds.’” FRUS, Vol. X, editorial note, document 371. McCone first raised the question of nuclear weapons in Cuba at a March 12, 1962, Special Group meeting: “Could we now develop a policy for action if missile bases are placed on Cuban soil?” FRUS, Vol. X, document 316. But on August 8, 1962, only two days before delivering his first warning that Soviet missiles would be sent to Cuba, McCone had told a gathering of twenty-six Republican senators that he was “positive that there were no missiles or missile bases in Cuba.” “Luncheon Meeting Attended by the DCI of Senate Republican Policy Committee,” August 8, 1962, declassified May 12, 2005, CIA/CREST.

  “If I were Khrushchev”: Walter Elder, “John McCone, the Sixth Director of Central Intelligence,” draft copy, CIA History Staff, 1987, partially declassified and released in 1998.

  “the Soviets were going to be Number One”: Ford quoted in John L. Helgerson, “CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates,” May 1996, CIA/CSI.

  “They had charts on the wall”: Ford cited by the author, The New York Times, July 20, 1997.

  “I went to see President Kennedy”: Jagan interview with author.

  “the United States supports the idea”: “Interview Between President Kennedy and the Editor of Izvestia,” November 25, 1961, FRUS, Vol. V. 192 “a really covert operation”: Schlesinger memo, July 19, 1962, FRUS, Vol. XII.

  time to bring matters to a head: Memo to Bundy, August 8, 1962.

  The president launched a $2 million campaign: The author laid out some of its consequences in “A Kennedy-C.I.A. Plot Returns to Haunt Clinton,” The New York Times, October 30, 1994. The article touched on the struggle over the declassification of the government records about the covert operation. In 2005, the State Department published the following “editorial note” in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXXII: “During the Johnson administration, the U.S. Government continued the Kennedy administration’s policy of working with the British Government to offer encouragement and support to the pro-West leaders and political organizations of British Guiana as that limited self-governing colony moved toward total independence. The Special Group/303 Committee approved approximately $2.08 million for covert action programs between 1962 and 1968 in that country. U.S. policy included covert opposition to Cheddi Jagan, the then pro-Marxist leader of British Guiana’s East Indian population. A portion of the funds authorized by the Special Group/303 Committee for covert action programs was used between November 1962 and June 1963 to improve the election prospects of the opposition political parties to the government of Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party. The U.S. Government successfully urged the British to impose a system of proportional representation in British Guiana (which favored the anti-Jagan forces) and to delay independence until the anti-Jagan forces could be strengthened.”

  e note continued: “Through the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States provided Forbes Burnham’s and Peter D’Aguiar’s political parties, which were in opposition to Jagan, with both money and campaign expertise as they prepared to contest the December 1964 parliamentary elections. The U.S. Government’s covert funding and technical expertise were designed to play a decisive role in the registration of voters likely to vote against Jagan. Burnham’s and D’Aguiar’s supporters were registered in large numbers, helping to elect an anti-Jagan coalition. Special Group/303 Committee–approved funds again were used between July 1963 and April 1964 in connection with the 1964 general strike in British Guiana. When Jagan’s and Burnham’s supporters clashed in labor strife in the sugar plantations that year, the United States joined with the British Government in urging Burnham not to retaliate with violence, but rather to commit to a mediated end to the conflict. At the same time, the United States provided training to certain of the anti-Jagan forces to enable them to defend themselves if attacked and to boost their morale.

  “Following the general strike, 303 Committee–approved funds were used to support the election of a coalition of Burnham’s People’s National Congress and D’Aguiar’s United Force. After Burnham was elected Premier in December 1963, the U.S. Government, again through the CIA, continued to provide substantial funds to both Burnham and D’Aguiar and their parties. In 1967 and 1968, 303 Committee–approved funds were used to help the Burnham and D’Aguiar coalition contest and win the December 1968 general elections. When the U.S. Government learned that Burnham was going to use fraudulent absentee ballots to continue in power in the 1968 elections, it advised him against such a course of action, but did not try to stop him.”

  “the most dangerous area in the world”: Memorandum of conversation, June 30, 1963, Birch Grove, England, “Subject: British Guiana.” Participants included President Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Ambassador David Bruce, McGeorge Bundy, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Lord Home, and Sir David Ormsby-Gore. FRUS, Vol. XII.

  “all about the dirty tricks”: Naftali, Zelikow, and May, The Presidential Recordings. Later that day, the president read aloud from the doctrine paper, a classic of geostrategic gobbledygook: In the interests of U.S. national security seek to replace local leadership with indigenous leaders who are more amenable and sympathetic to the need for eliminating the breeding areas for dissension…seeking to insure that modernization of the local society evolves in directions which will afford a congenial world environment for fruitful international cooperation and for our way of l
ife. “That’s a lot of crap,” Kennedy said scornfully. “‘For our way of life.’”

  On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone: RFK argued for a “Remember the Maine” incident—a staged attack on Guantánamo—at this meeting and continued to advocate it during the missile crisis. McCone memo, August 21, 1962, in “CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis,” CIA/CSI, 1992; McCone memo on McCone-JFK meeting, August 23, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X, document 385.

  “How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?”: Naftali, Zelikow, and May, The Presidential Recordings. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI went to interrogate Baldwin and to tap his home telephone. Baldwin was a graduate of the naval academy who had resigned his commission in 1927, worked as a military analyst for The New York Times since 1937, won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Guadalcanal and the western Pacific in 1943, and was a dependably pro-military voice in the pages of the paper. His sources at the Pentagon were first-rate. After his visit from the FBI, the shaken Timesman told a colleague in a conversation taped by the bureau on the night of July 30: “I think the real answer to this is Bobby Kennedy and the President himself, but Bobby Kennedy particularly putting pressure on Hoover.” A transcript of that conversation was on the attorney general’s desk the next day. The president’s foreign intelligence advisory board met with John Kennedy the following afternoon and told him that Baldwin’s work was a grave danger to the United States. “We would suggest,” said James Killian, the author of the 1954 “surprise attack” report under Eisenhower, “that the Director of Central Intelligence be encouraged to develop an expert group that would be available at all times to follow up on security leaks…a team available to him operating under his direction.” Clark Clifford, a member of the board and a drafter of the CIA’s charter in the National Security Act of 1947, when he served as Harry Truman’s White House counsel, urged President Kennedy to create “a full-time group that is working on it all the time” at the CIA. “They can find out who are Hanson Baldwin’s contacts,” Clifford said. “When he goes over to the Pentagon, who does he see? Nobody knows now. The FBI doesn’t know. But I think it would be mighy interesting.” Clifford’s many friends in the Washington establishment would have been appalled at this skulduggery. Congressional hearings in 1975 laid responsibility for the taps solely on Attorney General Kennedy and the FBI—not President Kennedy and the CIA.

  “I would be only too happy”: McCone to Kennedy, August 17, 1962, declassified August 20, 2003, CIA/CREST.

  “an understandable reluctance”: McCone, “Memorandum for: The President/The White House,” February 28, 1963, JFKL.

  “Put it in the box and nail it shut” and “universal repugnance”: “CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis,” CIA/CSI, 1992.

  “who wants to start a war?”: “IDEALIST Operations over Cuba,” September 10, 1962, CIA/CREST.

  The photo gap: The whys and wherefores of the “photo gap” are in Max Holland, “The ‘Photo Gap’ That Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2005, CIA/CSI.

  195“I never knew his name”: Halpern in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh(eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

  “a considerable discussion (with some heat)”: “CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis,” CIA/CSI, 1992.

  “‘Massive activity’”: “Minutes of Meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) on Operation Mongoose, 4 October 1962,” declassified February 19, 2004, CIA/CREST; McCone memo, October 4, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

  “The near-total intelligence surprise”: The report survives in a 2001 declassified excerpt in an editorial note in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XXV, document 107, and a 1992 version in “CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis,” CIA/CSI, 1992, pp. 361–371.

  “Those things we’ve been worrying about.”: McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 395–396.

  “Damn it to all hell and back”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 208.

  “we had also fooled ourselves”: Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 27.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “The president flicked on his tape recorder”: Until 2003 the question of what was really on the White House tapes was still a hot dispute. After four decades, what really happened, and who said what to whom, has been settled by a reliable transcript, the result of more than twenty years of labor by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s historian, Sheldon Stern.

  Conventional wisdom contends that the crucible of the Cuban missile crisis transformed John and Robert Kennedy, making a brilliant leader out of a callow commander in chief, converting young Bobby from hawk to dove, and changing the White House from a Harvard seminar into a temple of wisdom. It is in part a myth, founded on an inaccurate and falsified historical record. President Kennedy fed favored journalists with poetic but palpably untrue stories. Robert Kennedy’s posthumously published book on the crisis contains inventions and made-up dialogue, repeated by otherwise reliable historians and the loyal circle of Kennedy acolytes.

  We now know that the Kennedys distorted the historical record and concealed how the crisis was resolved. And we now can see that where they plotted a path out of the crisis, they were as often as not following a course charted by John McCone. See Sheldon Stern, Averting “The Final Failure”: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). This chapter relies on Stern’s transcriptions and McCone’s declassified memos, except where noted.

  Thinking of the Mongoose missions: Carter, “16 October (Tuesday)/(Acting DCI),” declassified February 19, 2004, CIA/CREST; “Mongoose Meeting with the Attorney General,” October 16, 1962; “CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis,” CIA/CSI, 1992; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 227–228.

  The six single-spaced pages of notes: McCone, “Memorandum for Discussion Today,” CIA/CREST; untitled McCone memo; and “Talking Paper for Principals,” all dated October 17, 1962, declassified March 5, 2003.

  “opinions had obviously switched”: Presidential recordings, October 19–22, JFKL.

  “the course which I had recommended”: McCone memos, October 19–22, 1962, CIA/CREST. A formal meeting of the National Security Council was held in the Oval Room of the Executive Mansion at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 20. The meeting was not taped, but Cline’s briefing notes and handwritten scribbles survive, as does the formal record of the NSC’s note taker, Bromley Smith. Cline’s notes are in “CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis,” CIA/CSI, 1992.

  “there was no such deal ever made”: McCone oral history, April 21, 1988, Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley.

  “he’s a real bastard, that John McCone”: This snarl was caught on tape on March 4, 1963, presidential recordings, JFKL. It was first reported by the historian Max Holland, author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (New York: Knopf, 2004), and recounted in his monograph “The ‘Photo Gap’ That Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2005, CIA/CSI.

  McCone had tried to put a leash on Mongoose: McCone’s actions are reflected in the tapes of the 10 a.m. meeting on October 26, his memos, and the FRUS record of the meeting. The tape transcript is fragmentary. On October 30, “Mr. McCone stated that all MONGOOSE operations must be held in abeyance until this week of negotiations is over.” Marshall Carter, memorandum for the record, October 30, 1962, declassified November 4, 2003, CIA/CREST. Covert operations planned and conducted against Cuba during and after the missile crisis are detailed in FRUS, Vol. XI, documents 271, 311, 313, and 318–315.

  the final mission to kill Fidel Castro: The plot is outlined in the 1967 CIA inspector general’s report to Helms, declassified in 1993. J. S. Earman, Inspector General, �
�Subject: Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 23 May 1967,” CIA. Quotes and citations in the following paragraphs are drawn from the report. John McCone never found out about the last plot as it unfolded. But he came close. On August 15, 1962, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times telephoned CIA headquarters, asking about connections between the notorious Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana, the CIA, and the anti-Castro Cubans. The word went up to McCone, who asked Helms if this could possibly be true. In response, Helms handed over a three-page single-spaced memo from the CIA’s chief of security, Sheffield Edwards. It recorded that RFK had been briefed on May 14, 1962, about “a sensitive CIA operation” conducted against Fidel Castro between August 1960 and May 1961, involving “certain gambling interests” represented by “one John Rosselli of Los Angeles” and one “Sam Giancana of Chicago.” The attorney general knew those names very well. The memo never mentioned assassination, but its meaning was clear. Helms handed it to Mc-Cone with his own covering note: “I assume you are aware of the nature of the operation discussed in the attachment.” McCone became intensely aware in the four minutes it took to read it. He was furious beyond words.

  That may be why Helms never troubled to tell him about the new assassination plot that FitzGerald was leading—or about who was in charge of the plotting. In 1975, Helms told Henry Kissinger that Bobby Kennedy had “personally managed” more than one assassination attempt against Fidel Castro. Kissinger and Ford, memorandum of conversation, January 4, 1975, GRFL.

  Chapter Twenty

  “We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it”: JFK Tapes, November 4, 1963, JFKL. The recording, worth hearing, is available online at http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1963_1104_jfk_vietnam_mem oir.html.

  “I was part and parcel of the whole conspiracy”: Conein’s 1975 testimony to Senate investigators was declassified in September 1998. All quotations in this chapter from him are taken from that transcript. Born in Paris in 1919, Conein was sent to Kansas City to live with an aunt, a French war bride, in 1924. He raced to enlist in the French Army when World War II erupted in 1939. When France fell in 1940, he made his way to the United States and wound up in the OSS. In 1944, based in Algiers, he was dropped into occupied France to rendezvous with the Resistance. With France liberated, the OSS sent him to southern China to join a French-Vietnamese commando team assigned to attack a Japanese port in northern Vietnam. He formed an attachment to Vietnam. The affair ended badly for both.