Who was in charge?
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.
l l I I A DEBATE ABOUT THE ClA & PRESIDEINTIAL AUTHORITY Who was in charge? Ill II I I ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. A COMMENTATOR on the looking-glass world of intelli- gence...
...To the American observer, the legislation is a potpourri of anti-union measures which were rejected by the 80th Congress when it enacted the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act in 1947...
...one could infer pretty accurately what the President wanted by paying attention to what the CIA did" (120...
...I Geneva:based International Labor Organization's continuous concern with Chilean alleged violations of ILO Conventions protecting freedom of association for workers...
...or of Desmond FitzGerald's attempt to give the Russians a supply route to Hanoi in exchange for Soviet attempts to restrain Hanoi (182...
...It is hardly a mystery to those who regard the CIA, not as a passive instrument of Presidents, but as an "'autonomous and free-wheeling" agency...
...Yet, for all its verve, its air of detachment and its nuggets of information, the work has deep and disqualifying flaws...
...The CIA began opening mall between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1952...
...But government agencies develop interests, purposes, constituencies, commitments, codes of their own...
...We have heard much in recent months about the need to revive the CIA...
...or of Robert Murphy's alleged demand to know why the CIA had not killed Ho Chi Minh (127...
...And, as one who has known Richard Helms since the Second World War, I regard him as an able public official who has served his country devotedly in this most ambiguous of trades...
...But Joseph B. Smith, who was then a CIA man in Indonesia and whose excellent book Portrait ofa C61d Warrior Powers praises in other contexts, explains how it was really done: "We began to feed the State and Defense departments intelligence...
...111...
...In its last written report to Eisenhower, the Board said: We have been unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk or the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved...
...In other words, contingency planning of a routine sort--and leaders may be removed from the scene by other ways than assassination, as the shah of Iran recently discovered...
...But we now know that, when Anthony Blunt confessed his espionage in 1964, the prime minister of the day was neither informed nor consulted...
...But Harvey actually testified--and Bissell agreed--that this conversation with Bissell had taken place in "early January" 1961--i.e., before Kennedy became President...
...His discussion of the assassination plots is curious indeed...
...Powers's contention that everything CIA did came from the top down and that one can therefore infer what Presidents wanted from what CIA did does wanton injustice to CIA's capacity to do things on its own...
...Powers does not even mention the views of this singularly authoritative group, though extensive quotations from its reports can be found in Robert Kennedy and His Times, a book cited by Powers in other connections...
...or of the assertion that the Kennedys wanted "a...
...as the book itself seems to reflect CIA's own campaign to regain its old autonomy...
...We do not need the CIA of 1957 in which more than 50 percent of personnel and more than 80 percent of the budget were dedicated to covert action...
...there is no evidence that Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, or Kennedy were ever informed of the mail openings" (365...
...He writes, "Kennedy was thoroughly briefed about the details of an attempt to murder Castro during his brother's presidency" (155...
...Powers goes on to say of National Security Action Memorandum 100 of October 5, 1961, that it "discussed Castro's assassination...
...every major clanI Ill ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR ,/S Sch weitzer Professor of Humanities at City University of New York Graduate Center...
...Under these almost any [covert] action can be and is being justified...
...There are no present provisions for any regular external review of Clandestine Cold War programs," the Board told Eisenhower at a meeting on December 16, 1958, "and no formal accounting of them...
...The DDP [covert action] side of CIA is operating for the most part on an autonomous and free-wheeling basis in highly critical areas...
...In a 1956 report to the Board, David Bruce and Robert Lovett--no bomb-throwers they--gave a very different picture of the manner in which CIA originated covert operations and palmed them off on higher authority: Initiative, and continuing impetus for [covert] operations, for the most part, reside in CIA...
...This is why the entire Chilean labor movement, including the moderate AFL-CIO-supported Group of Ten, has soundly condemned virtually every aspect of the new laws...
...Here again he suppresses contrary evidence--in this case, the testimony of President Eisenhower's own Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities...
...Why in the world does Mr...
...29 February 1980:109 What more could he say: Senator, how can you be so goddamned dumb...
...Why the CIA in this allegedly thorough briefing"sent a deliberately inaccurate memo to the Attorney General," Powers naively comments in a footnote, "is a mystery" (346...
...But Mongoose was not the vehicle of the assassination plots...
...or of the account of Robert Kennedy's supposed clash with Harvey in Miami in 1962 (141...
...But Kennedy was not President in October 1960...
...He had written in his book that Harvey, who was in charge of the assassination plots as well as of Task Force W, the CIA's instrument for Operation Mongoose, ran the assassination operation "with extreme security...
...There are also an undue number of factual errors, many of them listed by David Wise in his New R-@ublic review (November 3, 1979...
...And, once having been conceived, the final approval given to any project (at informal lunch meetings of the OCB inner group) can, at best, be described as pro forma...
...Powers also omits the fact that the supposedly vengeful Kennedys were engaged in the last months of 1963 in secret explorations into the possibility of regularizing relations with Castro...
...This, if true, would be a staggering fact, a smoking pistol, the conclusive solution to the mystery...
...Powers'hook, line, and sinker, is that the CIA has always been a passive and obedient organization, acting "only at the direction of the President" (viii...
...Yet, simultaneously, the government has announced new labor legislation which is designed to restore trade union freedoms which have been suspended since the Junta came to power...
...Minister Pinera told me that he "didn't care" about that because Chile had not ratified the relevant Conventions in any event...
...Mr...
...From their perspective, Presidents come, and Presidents go, but they go on forever...
...I also believe that we must retain a covert action capability...
...No doubt the inordinately uncritical reception accorded the Powers book reflects a widespread desire to believe that CIA's past excesses were due to the iniquity of Presidents and not to the internal dynamism of over-financed and under-supervised intelligence organizations...
...Combining as it does superficial criticism of the CIA on minor points with reverent acceptance of CIA's self-portrait as a blameless outfit doing bad things only at the order of Presidents, The Man Who Kept the Secrets is a triumph not of dispassionate scholarship but of CIA disinformation...
...The Man Who Kept the Secrets is written, moreover, in fluent and confident prose, its tone so knowing as to seduce the unwary reader...
...There are always, of course, on record the twin, well-born purposes of 'frustrating the Soviets' and keeping others 'pro-western' oriented...
...It did indeed receive Robert Kennedy's vigorous support--not to his credit either...
...The attempt to murder Castro, for example, began in the Eisenhower administration, continued through the Kennedy administration and went on into the second year of the Johnson administration...
...Similarly, in a paragraph narrating events of 1962, Powers describes a CIA operative, William Harvey, remembering "Bissell telling him that the Executive Action [i.e., assassination] project had been urged on him by the White House" (153...
...Powers suppose the CIA exempt from that elementary rule...
...His book, Mr...
...This is an elementary rule of bureaucracy...
...Constitutional scrutiny of Intelligence Services is largely an illusory concept," as John Le Carr~ noted in his introduction to The Philby Conspiracy...
...Ill II I I ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR...
...154) Now the Castro assassination scheme, though Powers does not note this, originated as part of the Eisenhower covert action project that culminated at the Bay of Pigs...
...The Board continued thereafter to criticize both the extent of CIA covert action and the alJsence of effective control...
...Powers does not hesitate to suppress contrary evidence...
...That thesis, swallowed by Mr...
...or of the story of Harvey's dinner with John Rosselli of the mob in June 1963 (149...
...but there is no evidence that any President knew anything about that program either...
...We are sure that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive [covert] program could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it...
...sharp acceleration of covert raids on Cuba" in the early stages of the missile crisis (142...
...If they're good, they fool the outsiders--and if they're bad they fool themselves...
...Eisenhower, according to Powers, wanted to murder General Kassem of Iraq and Lumumba in the Congo as well as Castro...
...In February 1957 the Board's executive secretary reported that many clandestine projects did not have the formal approval of the inter-agenCy Special Group...
...But Mr...
...We always believed in the United States that they ordered things better in Great Britain and that British intelligence was under the secure control of the political government...
...And Powers is additionally wrong when he says that Operation Mongoose" 'was not even known to exist for more than ten years" (133...
...I share this feeling though the kind of CIA we need, in my view, is an agency effective in intelligence collection and analysis and in counter-espionage rather than in murder and revolution...
...One would like to know, for example, the source of Allen Dulles's description of Helms on page 35...
...The reviews suggested that here at last, in the form of a biography of a professional who rose from the ranks to become Director of Central Intelligence, was a careful and objective account of the American intelligence experience...
...and so on...
...And it is especially well equipped, by the character of its trade, to disregard, evade, and outwit those masters...
...But on examination many of the notes deal with entirely trivial questions, and many of the more arresting items in Powers's account are not footnoted at all...
...As one who served in the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, I am doubtless suspect from the start...
...In fact, Kennedy was briefed in May 1962 about an attempt to murder Castro that had begun in II IIIIII I II I IIIIII I][111111 I I I I NEXT ISSUE Thomas Powers: a reply to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...You don't put an order like that in writing...
...The Republican Eisenhower was if anything even more intimately involved in the story than the Democrat Kennedy" (291...
...Accordingly, the new laws are not designed with a view toward obtaining internal acceptability--although the Chilean labor movement stresses that the government's door is always open to business...
...This is the book's obsessive theme: "at the top of the chain of command was always the President" (28...
...CHILE COURTS WORLD OPINION The junta & the trade unions WILLIAM B. GOULD G ENERAL AUGUSTO PINOCHET, leader of Chile's military junta since the overthrow of the Allende Government six years ago, has made clear that there is to be no political process in that country in the foreseeable future...
...I did not know...
...the 'excesses' of the CIA in its zeal to do the President's bidding" (206...
...And he goes on in the usual style about the Kennedys' "determination to get rid of Castro," neglecting the fact that, when Khrushchev supplied the perfect pretext by placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, and eminent advisers urged the Kennedys to invade Cuba and smash Castro forever, Robert Kennedy led the fight against that course and John Kennedy made the decision against it...
...Powers quotes Smith on other points, not on' this one...
...Operation Mongoose was the CIA covert action program designed to overthrow the Castro regime...
...This isn't the kind of thing you put in writing...
...To sustain his contention that all the Agency did was to follow orders from above Mr...
...A COMMENTATOR on the looking-glass world of intelligence had better begin by confessing his own involvement...
...In fact a secret intelligence agency is especially likely, because secrecy encourages selfhallucination, to feel that it knows national security better than its transient political masters do...
...Yet the fact is that the Pinochet government is deeply concerned about foreign impressions regarding Chilean intentions in this field...
...this fact should have given Bissell pause, but he went ahead with the plan anyway, a fact which ought to be taken as tacit confirmation of the pressure Bissell felt to 'get rid of Castro.' " (342...
...How we get the kind of CIA we need without creating another Frankenstein's monster is not an insoluble problem, but also not one to be solved in this review...
...This essential (Continued on page 116) 29 February 1980...
...none of the men who even worked for him on Task Force W knew what he was up to" (149...
...This is a cynical non-answer...
...Presidents or with their knowledge...
...Powers himself admits on occasion that Presidents did not know everything the CIA was up to...
...The legislation, contained in a series of decrees promulgated during the month of July, .is a detailed and, at times, a sophisticated effort to emulate the form of modern labor law in the West...
...Powers's statement that "every major clandestine operation of the CIA was authorized by the President in writing" is nonsense--as he himself tacitly concedes when he discusses the most reckless of such operations, the attempted assassination of foreign leaders...
...The Indonesian operation was at no time considered formally by the OCB Special Group as contemplated by the provisions of NSC 5412...
...Indeed, according to the Rockefeller Commission report of 1975, the CIA Commonweal: 108 Inspector General himself did not learn of the program until 1963--after it had been going on for eleven years...
...Thus he reports that in October 1960 Richard Bissell of the CIA received a memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover saying that the CIA's chosen agent, a Chicago gangster, was telling his friends all about the anti-Castro plot...
...I was not told," Lord Home said in the London Times...
...James Reston described it in every way exc~pt by name in theNew York Times, April 21, 1963...
...We don't have that here...
...The problem for the Pinochet government is that the recently enacted legislation can be regarded as equitable and even-handed to labor and capital only from a vantage point which focuses exclusively on the past six years" suppression of trade unions in Chile--i.e., something is better than nothing at all...
...Again, no evidence...
...l 19) He was being as clear as he could: the Kennedys wanted Castro out of there, the CIA did not go off on its own in these matters, the Agency was only trying to do its job...
...There is no evidence that any of the three Presidents knew of or authorized these or any other assassination plots...
...He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House IIII I I III destine operation of the CIA was authorized by the President in writing" (322...
...One obstacle to the idea that the Kennedys authorized the assassination plots is the universal testimony that John McCone, the head of CIA, did not know about them...
...p OWERS'S ACCOUNT of the clearance mechanisms for CIA covert action is highly disingenuous...
...p OWERS'S TREATMENT of Robert Kennedy is equally disingenuous...
...One wonders whether the Agency, admirable as it may be in many ways, provided this information out of disinterested passion for the historical record...
...I therefore turned to Thomas Powers's The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Alfred A. Knopf, $12.95, 408 pps...
...The Man Who Kept the Secrets will be less useful to historians than the Agency-approved but intelligent books by Harry Rositzke and Ray Cline or than the more popular accounts by W.R...
...Before 1955 covert operations were approved in a haphazard way," he writes...
...In the first chapter he imagines a CIA official telling the Church Committee: Well, who do you think ordered Castro's assassination, the office boy?It was John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby...
...Thus he describes the CIA effort to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958 as the initiative not of the CIA, but of John Foster Dulles (89...
...If Helms said that (which in my [Powers's] opinion he could have) . . . (7) This is a recurrent fantasy: More than once Helms found himself with an almost irresistible urge to fire back: Senator, how can you b6 so god-damned dumb...
...As the Church Committee summarized it, NSAM 100 "directed the State Department to assess the potential courses of action open to the United States should Castro be removed from the Cuban scene...
...But the overriding theme in the decrees is an attempt to rid Chile of the Junta's political opposition--much of which is to be found in the labor movement...
...You are subjected to the pressure of private groups who have interests in proposed laws...
...But it is not true...
...Mr...
...Corson and by David Wise and Thomas Ross...
...Butler, told either...
...In addition, we believe that CIA's concentration on political, psychological and related covert action activities have tended to detract substantially from the execution of its primary intelligence-gathering mission...
...The reason is not simply the WILLIAM B. GOULD teaches labor law at Stanford Law School in California...
...here Powers citesRobert Kennedy and His Times for the dates of Kennedy's trips to Florida that year, but the passage cited lists Kennedy's 1963 Florida trips, carelessness that casts further doubt on Commonweal: I I0 Powers's research competence...
...But Powers leaves the clear impression that, as the New Yorker reviewer put it, "our Presidents have been willing to promote assassination...
...l l I I A DEBATE ABOUT THE ClA & PRESIDEINTIAL AUTHORITY Who was in charge...
...with interest and hope...
...or, in the words of the Wall Street Journal review, "Where the CIA attempted to assassinate foreign leaders, it did so on orders from U.S...
...This is the wolf at the door which this past summer's decrees are designed to keep away...
...More formidable is the on-again, off-again American support for a boycott of Chilean goods and products...
...Still Powers reserves a special animus for Kennedy...
...When two Robert Kennedy associates later objected to Powers's account in a letter to the Atlantic Monthly, Powers tried to justify his claim of "RFK's responsibility for CIA attempts to murder Castro" by citing Kennedy's vigorous support of Operation Mongoose...
...We suggest, accordingly, that there should be a total reassessment of our covert action policies...
...When like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Army Corps of Engineers, they are run by professionals rather than by political appointees, they hold their cards close to their chests and play their own game...
...Nor was the Foreign Secretary, R.A...
...This thesis is in its nature implausible...
...etc., etc...
...I believe that this country requires an absolutely fh'st-class intelligence service--strong in technology, strong in agent espionage, strong in counter-espionage and strong, above all, in research and assessment...
...The Man Who Kept the Secrets is tarted up with what can only be called mock scholarship, There is a great show of footnotes and citations...
...No one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day-to-day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on...
...Eisenhower's presidency and had, the CIA told him, been terminated after the Bay of Pigs...
...Every executive agency of course is nominally accountable to the President...
...Powers ha£dly mentions the CIA's program of testing behavior-altering drugs on unsuspecting bystanders...
...or of the statement that Hanoi had 40,000 agents in South Vietnam (184...
...Powers observes in a footnote, was "heavily based on information provided by the CIA" (358...
...The CIA institutionally, and many CIA veterans individually, have their own thesis to argue...
...The focus "was on the possible courses of action open to the United States in a post-Castro Cuba, rather than on the means that might bring about Castro's removal...
...He enforces this version at the expense of chronology...
...Moreover, Powers well knows this to have been the case, which is why his reply to the Kennedy associates is so inexcusable...
...Powers's account emphasizes ra~er the alleged pressure exuding from the Kennedys and relentlessly applied to hapless CIA officials "to get rid of Castro...
...In order to accomplish this, the Chilean government plans a' new and more restrictive role for the trade unions...
...Powers handled this straighforwardly: he hints, repeatedly and not too delicately, that McCone, in denying knowledge of the plots, was lying (13,150,296...
...In most instances, approval of any new project would appear to comprise simply the endorsement of a DCI [Director of Central Intelligence ] proposal, usually without demurrer, from individuals preoccupied with other important matters of their own...
...Afterward, the [inter-agency] 5412 Committee, or Special Group, would say yes or no," and presumably everything received careful and formal authorization (78...
...When they read enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the suggestion that we should support the colonels...
...Indeed, the Special Group did not even start to meet regulariy until 1959...
...But, as Chile's 30-year-old Harvard educated Minister of Labor, Jose Pinera, said to me in Santiago recently: "We operate in a different environment than you Americans...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 4
