The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  As the presidential campaign neared its end, the morning newspapers and nightly television news broadcasts provided extensive coverage, but the real story was known to only a few. Sometime in 1960 the Eisenhower administration had lost control of its most important secret, and it was being used to defeat the Republican candidate. Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, the two men running the CIA's operations against Cuba, had apparently decided to break ranks and do what they could to elect Kennedy. Candidate Kennedy had no quarrel with the means, or the ends, of the CIA's anti-Castro activity, as he would demonstrate in the months ahead. For now his overriding goal was to get elected, and he did not hesitate to take advantage of the nation's most sensitive secrets to do so.

  Dulles and Bissell, with their secrets, thus joined ranks with Kennedy's father and the Irish Mafia---serving the greater good of Jack Kennedy.

  Fidel Castro got the message while Kennedy and Nixon slugged it out over the future of Cuba. By October 19 his spokesmen were predicting that the United States would launch "a large-scale invasion." On October 25, four days after the final debate, the Cuban government nationalized a final batch of American-owned industries in Cuba and again claimed, this time in the United Nations, that it had proof of American invasion plans that would be triggered by a "manufactured provocation" at Guantanamo Naval Base. A few days later Castro talked publicly about mercenaries who were being trained by Americans. The New York Times considered Castro's complaints ludicrous. "Dr. Castro and his friends," the paper editorialized, "cannot for a moment think that the United States would be wicked enough or foolish enough to attempt an armed conquest of Cuba."

  Meanwhile, Nixon was pushing, until the end, for Castro's ouster. His campaign press secretary, Herbert G. Klein, later told the author Peter Wyden that until the end of October he had expected "our Nicaraguan friends" to engineer the overthrow of Castro. It would have been "a major plus" and "a real trump card" for the Republicans, Klein said, as the neck-and-neck campaign came to its end.

  The Kennedy campaign got one late scare on October 25, when an anonymous caller warned campaign manager Bobby Kennedy that "most of the Cuban exiles [in Miami] are saying that there is an invasion fever in Guatemala but they are being rushed into it and they are not yet equipped for it." The candidate reminded himself in a note that day, on file at the Kennedy Library, to "talk to Allen Dulles to make sure nothing being done Cuba." The Washington Post reported a few days later that the Kennedy campaign staff was worried that a final "foreign crisis" might help Nixon in the last days of the campaign. It was this fear that apparently prompted deputy CIA director Charles Cabell's flight to California on November 2, six days before the election, and his last-minute briefing for candidate Kennedy, a briefing officially recorded as being on world tensions.* The world tension that worried Kennedy at the time was Cuba, and the possibility that the CIA would precipitously move against Castro.

  Nixon, the ultimate political pragmatist, had met his match in 1960, but only he and a few of his close aides knew it. The public, fascinated with his opponent's charm and style, would see very little of the real John F. Kennedy, and would never fully sense the Kennedy cynicism and toughness. "I had been through some pretty rough campaigns in the past," Nixon wrote in RN,

  but compared to the others, going into the 1960 campaign was like moving from the minor to the major leagues. I had an efficient, totally dedicated, well-financed and highly motivated organization. But we were faced by an organization that had equal dedication and unlimited money that was led by the most ruthless group of political operators ever mobilized for a political campaign. Kennedy's organization approached campaign dirty tricks with a roguish relish and carried them off with an insouciance that captivated many politicians and overcame the critical faculties of many reporters.

  Nixon eventually came to believe that it was Kennedy's manipulations on Cuba that defeated him, and not the impact of Kennedy's sleeker appearance during the television debates. Of that fourth debate, Nixon wrote, "Kennedy conveyed the image---to 60 million people---that he was tougher on Castro and communism than I was." He cited Gallup polls showing that Kennedy's two-percentage-point lead after the first debate dwindled seven weeks later, after all four debates, to a one-point lead. By election day, the polls showed a dead heat. "Those who claim that the 'great debates' were the decisive turning point in the 1960 campaign overstate the case," Nixon concluded.

  The losing Republican candidate had learned a lesson that he would act on in future campaigns: "From this point on I had the wisdom and wariness of someone who had been burned by the power of the Kennedys and their money and by the license they were given by the media. I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them---or anyone---on the level of political tactics."

  The lessons learned would lead Nixon to the presidency in 1968 and to the disgrace of a forced resignation, with impeachment pending, in August 1974. Jack Kennedy, once elected to the White House in 1960, got on with the business of assassinating Fidel Castro.

  * * *

  * Smith's seminal work was OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency, published by the University of California. The book was the steppingstone to a planned biography of Allen Dulles. After years of interviewing, and even more years of inactivity, however, Smith turned over his notes and other data to Peter Grose, a former New York Times reporter, who published a Dulles biography, Gentleman Spy, in 1994. Grose, apparently relying on the Smith materials, reported that Bissell had also made "discreet" contact with Adlai Stevenson early in 1960, suggesting that he would be willing to leave the CIA, if need be, to work on a Stevenson campaign for the presidency.

  * In The Very Best Men (Simon and Schuster, 1995), a biographical account of four CIA officials, including Bissell, author Evan Thomas quoted one guest at the Kennedy dinner party as reporting that Dulles telephoned her early the next morning "desperate to find Ian." Dulles had heard, Thomas wrote, that Fleming had discussed some "interesting ideas of how to deal with Castro" and wanted a personal briefing. But Fleming, it turned out, had already left for London.

  * Schlesinger's colleague Ted Sorensen failed to mention J. Edgar Hoover at all in Kennedy, his 860-page book published in 1965, which included a long chapter on President-elect Kennedy's appointments. Two other Kennedy insiders, Kenneth O'Donnell and David Powers, also failed to mention Hoover in their 1970 bestseller, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye." O'Donnell and Powers went even further than Sorensen in their denial: they wrote about the early reappointment of Allen Dulles while ignoring Hoover's reappointment.

  * A compendium of CIA presidential campaign briefings, published in 1995 by the Center for the Study of Intelligence at the CIA, reported only that Robert Kennedy had sought the final briefing on possible trouble spots. Cabell flew out to deliver a memorandum, the CIA study said, dealing with the Soviet Union, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and "possible action by Cuba against Guantanamo Naval Base," the American naval station located on the eastern tip of Cuba. The only newspaper known to have reported on the Cabell-Kennedy meeting was the San Diego Union, which published two paragraphs about it on November 3. A Kennedy spokesman told the newspaper that Cabell had briefly come aboard the senator's campaign plane to inform Kennedy "if there is anything important that he needed to know to fulfill his responsibility as a nominee for President."

  13

  EXECUTIVE ACTION

  Murder was in the air at the CIA and at the White House as the new administration was taking office. A few senior men in the CIA learned in January that the incoming president was going to be much tougher than any outsider could imagine; sometime just before his inauguration, President-elect Kennedy asked Richard Bissell, the CIA's director of clandestine and covert operations, to create inside the agency a formal capacity for political assassination.

  In the last few months of the Eisenhower administration, three foreign leaders---Fidel Castro; Patrice Lumumba, of the Congo; and R
afael Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic---had already been selected as potential targets of political assassination. The planning, under the aegis of Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, continued without interruption after the November election and throughout the presidential transition period. Political assassination, Dulles and Bissell knew, was not a new concept for the Eisenhower government. In 1953, according to declassified files, the CIA, while plotting the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala, drew up a "disposal list" of fifty-eight Guatemalans suspected of communist leanings, and trained assassins for their murder. The assassinations were not carried out, but the released files show that the CIA's plans were discussed in detail at the highest levels of the State Department.*

  Candidate Kennedy, as we have seen, utilized his close relationship with Dulles and Bissell, among others, to learn what he needed to know about the planned invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained exiles, facts that helped him defeat Richard Nixon. Now, as the president-elect, he continued to meet officially and unofficially with Bissell.

  Bissell, with his lucidity and arrogant wit, seemed a perfect match for the new president and the energetic New Frontier; he was said to have wowed Kennedy and his senior aides in the White House by introducing himself at a get-acquainted staff dinner as "your basic man-eating shark." As a professional intelligence officer, he was dedicated to "plausible deniability"---the CIA's sacrosanct procedure for insulating the president from any responsibility for a failed, or exposed, intelligence operation of dubious morality or legality, such as the murder of a foreign leader.

  From the outset Bissell had Kennedy's trust; Secret Service logs list Bissell at thirteen off-the-record Oval Office meetings with Kennedy and others in the first three months of 1961, as planning intensified for the invasion of Cuba. "He was there all the time," his secretary, Doris Mirage, recalled in an interview for this book. "If he wanted to see [Kennedy], I'd call Evelyn Lincoln." It was understood that Bissell was the heir apparent as CIA director; it was just a matter of time before the aging Allen Dulles would retire.

  Of course, there is no written record of any discussion of assassination by Kennedy or any other president. But the CIA's plotting against the three foreign leaders did more than continue under Kennedy. It was formalized at the time of Kennedy's inauguration as a highly secret program known as executive action---given the code name ZR/RIFLE. William K. Harvey, one of the agency's most successful and flamboyant operatives, was put in charge.

  Bill Harvey, who died in 1976, was a larger-than-life figure inside the CIA. He was short and fat, with bulging eyes, a raspy voice, and a serious drinking problem---in his heyday, two double martinis and then a single were his norm at lunch. He often walked around with two pearl-handled pistols tucked into his belt and bragged incessantly about his success with women. Harvey was by all accounts brilliant, dedicated, a gifted writer of memoranda, and not afraid to tell the truth to a superior. He was also a devout keeper of secrets, sometimes to the distress of his colleagues: a generally laudatory CIA "fitness report" for the years 1960--62 described him as being "less than outgiving of information about operational matters in which he is engaged." It was Harvey, a former FBI agent who joined the CIA after the war, who looked beyond Harold "Kim" Philby's social connections in Washington and concluded in the early 1950s that the British intelligence attaché was a most valuable Soviet agent. And it was Harvey who provided the CIA with an early Cold War success by masterminding construction of a tunnel into East Berlin that gave the CIA access to underground East German and Soviet telephone lines. Harvey's achievement made his assignment in the late 1950s as head of the D branch of foreign intelligence---the elite group responsible for CIA communications intelligence and the theft of codebooks from foreign embassies---a natural. It also made him the inevitable choice to set up and operate ZR/RIFLE.

  Despite the secrecy surrounding ZR/RIFLE, and the protection of "plausible deniability," the evidence linking Jack Kennedy and McGeorge Bundy to ZR/RIFLE and to the murder plots is overwhelming. Much of it was known in 1975 to the Senate investigating committee headed by Frank Church, whose Democratic members chose---for political reasons---not to confront it. Much more remained for me to disclose.

  In late January 1961, as the new administration was settling in, Richard Bissell summoned William Harvey and ordered him to develop an "executive action" program for the murder of foreign leaders. Harvey was a careful note taker, and his notes of the meeting, as provided to the CIA's inspector general in 1967, quoted Bissell as saying that "the [Kennedy] White House had twice urged me to create such a capability." The new young, aggressive president wanted results. Harvey's notes and other documents were left on file with the inspector general's office in 1967, but by 1975, when the Church Committee began its post-Watergate investigation, the notes of his conversations with Bissell about White House pressure had been destroyed.* Harvey, however, had made other notes from his early days as head of ZR/RIFLE, and those notes, provided by Harvey to the Senate in 1975 but not published at the time---and obtained, without deletions, for this book---gave Senate investigators the first clear evidence that ZR/RIFLE's targets were Castro, Trujillo, and Lumumba. Harvey further told the committee, according to Senate files, that specific "approval by President" was one of the CIA's three requirements for the authorization of what he called "assassination as a tool."†

  Bissell, asked by the Church Committee about Harvey's supplementary notes and his explanatory testimony about them, did what was unthinkable to Kennedy loyalists---he brought the White House into the concept of political assassination. Rather than challenging the Harvey material, Bissell volunteered the extraordinary fact that he had talked about executive action with McGeorge Bundy, the president's national security adviser. But Bissell quickly added that he and Bundy had discussed "an untargeted 'capability' rather than the plan or approval for an assassination operation." Bissell further supported Harvey's account by testifying that although he did not have a specific recollection, he "might have" mentioned Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo to Harvey in the course of a discussion of executive action, "because these were the sorts of individuals at that moment in history against whom such a capability might possibly have been deployed."

  The relatively honest, if far from complete, 1975 testimony from Harvey and Bissell put McGeorge Bundy on the spot. The former national security adviser was afraid---far more than was publicly known---of a perjury charge. Even prior to his midsummer appearance before the Church Committee, Bundy felt compelled to revise sworn testimony given to a presidential commission.

  The Church Committee's investigation was triggered by a New York Times article (written by me) in December 1974, which described a series of illegal domestic activities by the CIA. President Gerald R. Ford, obviously hoping to avoid congressional hearings, responded to public outcry over the disclosures by establishing a presidential commission, headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, to investigate the CIA. Ford's hopes were dashed when the Senate voted to begin its far-ranging independent investigation.

  In his first day of Rockefeller Commission testimony, on April 7, 1975, the former national security adviser categorically denied any knowledge of "an actual decision" to assassinate a foreign leader. He also testified that he had "no recollection" of an executive action program. The next day, obviously fearing perjury, Bundy held a private meeting with David W. Belin, the executive director of the Rockefeller Commission, "to make some additions to the record." Bundy claimed, according to the record of the meeting, declassified in 1996, that "as I reflected overnight about my answers to certain questions, my recollection was refreshed." Asked anew about executive action, he said, "I recall the words 'executive action capability' more clearly today than I did yesterday.... I think it was something like ... a plan to have some kind of standby capability for actions against individuals." Having taken care of any worrisome legal liabilities, Bundy continued to obfuscate: "But I do not have any recollection as to when I knew about th
at or who requested it or how much was done under it."

  Bundy's two days of testimony angered Belin, a former lawyer on the Warren Commission, which had investigated John Kennedy's assassination. In an interview in 1997 for this book, Belin, still angry, said what he would not say earlier: "There is no doubt that Bundy lied to me." Belin, now practicing law in Des Moines, Iowa, added that he came away from the 1975 hearing believing that President Kennedy "knew" about the CIA's assassination plotting. "Bobby Kennedy [also] knew about it. The Kennedys were out to get Castro."

  Some witnesses "lied," Belin said. "Some did not." Among those who told the truth, in his view, was William Harvey.

  Bundy appeared before the Church Committee in July 1975, after the committee had interviewed Bissell and Harvey. His memory once again suddenly improved. Most important, Bundy, like Bissell, broke with Camelot and its fourteen years of lies and cover-ups, confirming Bissell's account of their conversation. He acknowledged that there was talk of murder in the White House, and that the men of the CIA had not been on their own in the assassination plotting.

  The president's man did include a series of caveats in his testimony. He reiterated that he and Bissell were talking only about what the Senate report called "an untargeted capability, rather than an assassination operation." It was his impression, Bundy said, that Bissell was "testing my reaction" and not "seeking authority" for ZR/RIFLE. "I am sure I gave no instruction. But it is only fair to add that I do not recall that I offered any impediment either." He took no steps to halt the CIA's executive action program or investigate it further, because it had been set up in the abstract and would not become "operational" until a specific individual was targeted. Asked if he had discussed the CIA's new program with the president, Bundy said that as far as "I can recall," he did not.