The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  As a senior intelligence officer, Murphy was aware that Kennedy's options in Berlin were extremely limited. In March 1961 Henry Kissinger, as the National Security Council's consultant on Germany, asked the CIA to review possible clandestine action that "could be undertaken in support of the U.S. position on Berlin." The answer, reported by Murphy in his 1997 book, Battleground Berlin, written in collaboration with Sergei A. Kondrashev, his KGB counterpart, was disappointing. Some propaganda activities would perhaps be useful, the CIA replied. But open insurrection against the government---as was being urged for Cuba---was "not a feasible clandestine action" in East Berlin. Three months later, Murphy wrote, the CIA's William Harvey, who had directed clandestine operations in Berlin for seven years in the 1950s, told a meeting at CIA headquarters in Washington that it would be "unrealistic" for America's policymakers to conclude that the agency could be effective in organizing resistance groups inside East Germany. "Our abilities are not equal to this task," Murphy quoted Harvey as explaining, "when balanced against the defensive capability" of the East German security services. Murphy, who published little about his intelligence work prior to Battleground Berlin, also reported that the Kennedy administration informed the American Embassy in Bonn in a cable in late July that "there is not much the United States could do" if the East German government tightened controls in Berlin.

  The president's technique in superpower confrontations would become ingrained by the Cuban missile crisis in late 1962. The president would speak with resolve to his aides and in public, but privately do everything---using Georgi Bolshakov, if he was available---to settle the dispute. He used this technique again in late October 1961, when American and Soviet tanks squared off against each other at Checkpoint Charlie, a highly publicized gate in the Berlin Wall formally known as the Friedrichstrasse crossing. The tanks were armed and had authority to fire.

  The dispute began when East German border guards stopped the automobile of Allan Lightner, the senior American diplomat in Berlin, who with his wife was going into East Berlin to attend an opera. The guards asked to see Lightner's passport. He refused, since to show it would have suggested American recognition of the authority of East Germany, and not the Soviet Union, in East Berlin, a concession the United States did not wish to make. Lightner was refused access to the East, and returned with a squad of American soldiers, backed up by four tanks. The border guards stepped aside and Lightner and his wife were allowed to drive through. General Clay telephoned the president and won approval to escalate the issue. American civilians, ignoring the border guards, thus began to drive into East Berlin, accompanied by ever-increasing numbers of American troops. On October 26, a battalion of thirty-three Soviet tanks entered East Berlin, precisely matching the number of American tanks in reserve on the other side. The formal standoff began a day later, when ten Soviet tanks moved up to the East German side of the checkpoint, facing ten American tanks, which also moved forward.

  Publicly, as Clay told his biographer Jean Edward Smith, Kennedy backed him all the way. The president telephoned during the crisis and urged him to not "lose your nerve." Clay responded, he said, "Mr. President, we're not worried about losing our nerve over here. What we're worried about is whether you people in Washington are losing yours." Kennedy said, "I've got a lot of people here that have, but I haven't." In private, of course, Kennedy was agitated by the dispute, telling an aide, "We didn't send him [Allan Lightner] over there to go to the opera in East Berlin." The president and his brother turned once again to Georgi Bolshakov. In his interview with the Kennedy Library, Robert Kennedy said, "I got in touch with Bolshakov and said the president would like them to take their tanks out of there in twenty-four hours. He said he'd speak to Khrushchev, and they took their tanks out in twenty-four hours. He delivered effectively when it was a matter that was important."

  In a little-noted analysis published thirty years later in Foreign Policy magazine, Raymond L. Garthoff, a former CIA and State Department official who has written widely on U.S.-USSR affairs, wrote about the Checkpoint Charlie incident from the Soviet point of view. In Soviet archives and through interviews in Moscow, Garthoff discovered that---apparently unknown to the Kennedy brothers---General Clay had that fall secretly replicated a section of the wall in a secluded area of West Berlin and was practicing, with army combat engineers, effective ways to tear it down. The Soviet high command learned of Clay's activities, which it assumed had been approved by the Kennedy White House, and concluded that an American military invasion of East Berlin was being considered. Garthoff interviewed a senior Communist Party official, Valentin Falin, then part of Khrushchev's brain trust, who told him that Soviet intelligence agents had documented Clay's training activities with photographs and had presented their evidence to the Soviet leadership by October 21.

  On that day, too, Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, gave a speech, personally reviewed by the president, in which he revealed more than had ever been said publicly before about America's nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. Citing specific numbers, and referring directly to Berlin, Gilpatric declared that America "has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part.... Therefore, we are confident that the Soviets will not provoke a major nuclear conflict.... The United States does not intend to be defeated." Gilpatric's jingoistic speech, which put an end to any concern about an American "missile gap," had been planned long in advance, but Moscow didn't know that. The Soviets' Twenty-second Party Congress was in session at the time, and the party leaders were struggling over dissent in Albania and China. They feared, Garthoff was told years later in Moscow, that the United States might seek to open a "second front" in Europe while the Soviet leadership was distracted. There was an added reason for concern: four days earlier, in his opening speech to the Party Congress, Khrushchev had publicly withdrawn his ultimatum that America negotiate a postwar peace treaty with Germany by the end of 1961---the ultimatum that had caused Kennedy so much distress at Vienna. The Gilpatric speech seemed to be Kennedy's response to the Soviet retreat.

  These factors led Khrushchev and his advisers to conclude, Valentin Falin told Garthoff, that Clay's decision a few days later to begin moving American tanks up "seemed deliberate and sinister." Were the Americans going to breach the wall and being pouring troops and tanks into East Berlin? It was at this point, Falin said, that the Kennedy-Bolshakov back channel got active. The exchange was far more complex---and more important---than that described by Robert Kennedy.

  "President Kennedy," Garthoff reported in Foreign Policy, "did ask Khrushchev to remove the Soviet tanks---but only to do so first in the context of a mutual disengagement. Kennedy promised that if Khrushchev did so, the American tanks would withdraw in turn." The back-channel message, far from seeking a unilateral Soviet withdrawal, as depicted by Robert Kennedy, "was a plea from the president for mutual restraint and deescalation, asking Khrushchev to take the initial step." Khrushchev, in his memoirs, did not mention his back channel to Kennedy, but he said that he instructed his commanders in Berlin to withdraw their tanks first. He quoted himself as saying, of the Americans, "They're looking for a way out, I'm sure, so let's give them one. We'll remove our tanks, and they'll follow our example." Khrushchev's published claim, Garthoff added, that he removed his tanks confident of a reciprocal U.S. response "had heretofore been considered a belated invention or a lucky gamble. Now it is clear that Khrushchev had Kennedy's prior assurance."

  It was also clear, Garthoff wrote, "why some Soviets, including Falin, regarded this as perhaps the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War. Such claims now make sense---a U.S. breach of the Berlin Wall would have violated a vital Soviet interest."

  The flare-up at Checkpoint Charlie, Garthoff concluded, was "the last serious challenge of the Berlin crisis." The city remained divided for the next three decades.

  John Kennedy had exercised restraint, in secret, to
head off potentially devastating confrontations over Berlin with the Soviet Union. The men in charge of the Kremlin understood Kennedy's instinctive caution, but the men around the president, who knew little or nothing of the back channel, saw Khrushchev's "retreat" in Berlin as validation of the president's toughness. That fall Bobby Kennedy had declared during an appearance on Meet the Press, the Sunday morning TV interview show, that there "is no question" his brother would order the use of nuclear weapons if he considered it essential to safeguard freedom in West Berlin. Reporters were later told that Kennedy's statement was "no accident," as the New York Times put it the next day. Echoing the public theme, Arthur Schlesinger declared in A Thousand Days: "Kennedy's determination to rebuild the military power of the West had shown Khrushchev that he could not obtain his maximum objectives by bluff."

  The president was getting a lot of hard-line advice that fall. In South Vietnam he had been urged by every senior adviser, with the exception of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to escalate the American commitment dramatically by stationing at least eight thousand American soldiers there. The president's newly named military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor, a disciple of counterinsurgency warfare, had traveled to Vietnam in October and provided a very aggressive recommendation that, as the future would show, was wrong in every detail. In urging the deployment of troops, Taylor depicted South Vietnam as "not an excessively difficult or unpleasant place to operate" for American soldiers. Much of the terrain, he said, "is comparable to parts of Korea where U.S. troops learned to live and work without too much effort." Taylor further assured Kennedy that North Vietnam "is extremely vulnerable to conventional bombing."

  Presidential notes from one key meeting show that Kennedy expressed fears about a "two-front war," asking if the commitment of American troops in South Vietnam would jeopardize the tenuous Berlin stalemate that he and Khrushchev had worked out. Kennedy eventually rejected Taylor's call for troops, but agreed to a steady, and secret, incremental increase in American support for the South Vietnamese government. Two fully operational American helicopter companies were quietly transferred to South Vietnam, and the president allowed air force "trainers" to begin flying combat operations in the South. By the end of 1961, at Kennedy's direction, there were 2,200 American advisers assigned to South Vietnamese combat units, a nearly 300 percent increase since January. Americans were beginning to die in combat---with no public announcement of the deaths---and so were many more Vietnamese, combatants and noncombatants alike. The president, despite his hesitancy about a manpower commitment to the Saigon regime, had no objection to what amounted to a continuous increase in covert operations, including the use, as of January 1962, of U.S. aircraft to spray virulent herbicide defoliants in areas where the Viet Cong guerrillas were concentrated. The goal of the operation, code-named Ranch Hand, was to deny the enemy jungle cover and deny him food. The American activities were in direct violation of the 1954 Geneva Accords, partitioning North and South Vietnam, to which the United States was a signatory.

  Kennedy's low-profile approach to the expanding war in South Vietnam masked the extent of his commitment. The policy debate on Vietnam, as captured in the Pentagon Papers, was not about whether to save the nation from communism, but how to do it. After one early meeting, General Lionel McGarr, chief of the military advisory group in Saigon, informed his superiors in the Pacific Command that President Kennedy and General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "have repeatedly stated Vietnam is not to go behind [the] Bamboo Curtain under any circumstances, and we must do all that is necessary to prevent this from happening." McGarr was told that the president believed this was "a primarily military problem," and that the American officials in Saigon should not be restricted by the Geneva Accords.

  Kennedy had a chance in 1961 to disengage from an American involvement in South Vietnam. He instead chose, quietly and indirectly, to go to war, with the vast majority of his senior advisers solidly in front of him, urging him to send in American troops and confront Soviet expansionism in Southeast Asia.

  Kennedy's instinctive caution in Berlin and fear of Soviet reprisal did not play a part in his thinking about South Vietnam---or even about Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader continued to be targeted, and so did his potential allies.

  On October 25, 1961, as American and Soviet tanks were jousting for position near Checkpoint Charlie, President Kennedy held what seemed a routine morning meeting with Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the first native-born prime minister of British Guiana, whose socialist People's Progressive Party had swept into power in elections the month before. The tiny Latin American nation of 600,000 citizens, divided between East Indians and blacks, was still a British colony, but was soon to obtain independence (as Guyana); Jagan came to Washington to plead for American foreign aid.

  Jagan's financial needs, Arthur Schlesinger noted in A Thousand Days, were viewed in the White House in Cold War terms: How much foreign aid would it take to keep Jagan from turning, as many thought was his predilection, to the Soviet Union? During the meeting with Kennedy, Schlesinger wrote, Jagan "turned out to be a personable and fluent East Indian but endowed, it seemed to those of us present, with an unconquerable romanticism or naïveté." Jagan's mistake, apparently, was to tell the president that, as a committed socialist, he believed in state planning. Kennedy's response, according to Schlesinger, was gracious: "We have often helped countries which have little personal freedom, like Yugoslavia, if they maintain their national independence. That is the basic thing. So long as you do that, we don't care if you are socialist, capitalist, pragmatist or whatever."

  Jagan didn't get his money. Within months race riots and labor unrest broke out, with the loss of more than one hundred lives. The center of downtown Georgetown, British Guiana's capital, burned down in February 1962, in the aftermath of a riot. British troops were called in to maintain law and order. New radio stations went on the air and newspapers began printing false stories. Jagan clung to power until late 1964, when a coalition government under Forbes Burnham, a black who was strongly anticommunist, was elected.

  Thirty-three years after Cheddi Jagan's visit to Washington, the New York Times reported what had happened in the hours after he left Kennedy's office. "Kennedy met in secret with his top national security officers," the Times's Tim Weiner wrote. "A pragmatic plan took shape. Still-classified documents depict in unusual detail a direct order from the President to unseat Dr. Jagan." The Times, quoting unnamed government officials said to be "familiar with the secret documents," reported that the CIA's classified files on the Jagan operation "are a rare smoking gun: a clear written record, without veiled words or plausible denials, of the President's command to depose a Prime Minister."*

  The CIA's men inside the Guianan labor movement triggered the riots, the CIA's money financed the new radio stations, and the CIA's propaganda experts produced the phony newspaper stories that heightened the unrest.

  Arthur Schlesinger, asked to comment in 1994, blamed the CIA, as he had done after the Bay of Pigs, and not the president. Jagan "wasn't a communist," he told the Times. "The CIA decided this was some great menace, and they got the bit between their teeth.... We misunderstood the whole struggle down there."*

  Jack Kennedy, as Schlesinger perhaps did not know or could not acknowledge, had behaved in the Oval Office like a bully at the beach, flinging sand in the face of a weaker man. The president was sending no diplomatic signal in the destruction of Cheddi Jagan, no implicit warning to Nikita Khrushchev about further restrictions of access to West Berlin. Cheddi Jagan was a surrogate for the real target of presidential obsession---Fidel Castro. In Cuba, the president could meet his need to live on the edge without jeopardizing all of mankind.

  * * *

  * There is some evidence that the GRU and the KGB, the main Soviet intelligence service, might have been skeptical about Robert Kennedy as a secret conduit. The skepticism was linked to a 1955 visit to the Soviet Union that Robert Kennedy made at the invitation of Supreme Cour
t Justice William O. Douglas, who was one of Joe Kennedy's close friends. During their research for "One Hell of a Gamble," Fursenko and Naftali were given access to the KGB's files on the Kennedy-Douglas trip. The KGB concluded, in a report to Khrushchev, that Kennedy was a provocateur who had a "negative opinion of the Soviet Union" and constantly sought to uncover secret intelligence. He expressed an interest "in the techniques of tapping telephone conversations, secret censorship of mail, Soviet intelligence activities abroad, the system of repression, including the means of punishing captured foreign spies." Kennedy also displayed the family weakness, Fursenko and Naftali wrote, by cavalierly requesting his Soviet Intourist guide to "send a woman of loose morals" to his hotel room. In 1961, with the ascent of the Kennedy administration, the attorney general was assessed as a "troublemaker" by the Soviets.

  * On Sunday, June 4, Reston described the atmosphere of the Kennedy-Khrushchev talks as "apparently more cordial than had been expected after the rising controversies of the last few months." In his dispatch published Monday, Reston reported that the summit had ended with "hard controversy," but added that "there were no ultimatums and few bitter or menacing exchanges." Khrushchev was quoted as saying that the meetings were a "very good beginning." Kennedy was not directly quoted in either Reston article.