The CIA & the president

...Two FINAL PIECES of evidence remain...

...Perhaps the most chronic official complaint over the last thirty years has focused on the CIA's tendency to expand programs beyond proportion, and perpetuate them forever, like the broom in the tale of the Sorcerer's Apprentice...

...In the case of Indonesia the Church Committee decided not to publish its report, because the CIA argued against exposing yet another operation in such detail, and because the pattern of presidential control was as clear as it was with regard to Cuba and Chile...

...had many critical things to say about my book on Richard Helms and the Central Intelligence Agency, The Man Who Kept the Secrets...

...J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for fifty years because presidents did not want to run the risk of trying to fire him...

...The files of the National Security Council are filled with White House grumbling about opaque CIA paperwork, just as the files of the State Department are filled with ambassadorial protests against highhanded local CIA stations stirring up trouble with their aggressive pursuit of agents, or propaganda outlets, or telephone lines into Soviet bloc embassies...

...Because of the FBI's role in this episode, J. Edgar Hoover learned in detail about the first of the Mafia plots to kill Castro...

...Reports of this meeting are in varying degrees of conflict: Bissell says he got no orders, and the people who worked for him say that certainly wasn't what he told them...

...Intelligence services are notoriously prickly in their relations with the other branches of government...

...The lack of a plausible strategy for Castro's removal, and the resort to a kind of aimless commando violence in its absence, gave the whole operation a decidedly unpleasant, even vindictive air...

...Houston told the Church Committee he told Kennedy the plot had been terminated because that was what Edwards had falsely told him...

...1 know of no major action taken by the CIA during the time I was in the governCommonweal: 140 ment that was not properly authorized...

...Schlesinger prefaced his criticisms of my book with a declaration of interest, citing his own experience with the OSS during World War II...

...But he has declared the wrong interest: it is not his background in intelligence which helps to explain his position, but his loyalty to the Kennedys...

...This does him credit as a man, but gets in his way as an historian...

...Schlesinger right...

...President Kennedy appointed his brother, then the Attorney General, as his special representative on the high-level group which directed the CIA's effort to disrupt the Cuban economy, build an underground, and create "boom and bang" on the island...

...It seems clear the proposal was a real one in his mind, that he understood its moral dimension, that it troubled and worried him...

...It has been jealous of the identity of its agents, reluctant to admit how heavily it depends on liaison with foreign intelligence services, protective of its own in bureaucratic squabbles, and often lacking in candor about some of its local allies...

...The main reason for the failure was the Kennedys' attempt to do secretly with the CIA what could really only be done openly with an army...

...Not even Mr...

...I don't know whether he brought it up...

...I do not remember his commenting about the operation itself {Assassination Report, p. 133...

...But I think it more likely that Kennedy allowed himself to say yes, shrank back from the details, and then absorbed this seemingly small assent as one more of those awful freedoms which power cannot justify, but allows...

...But in taking the rogue elephant position Mr...

...At a certain point nuance, implication, and unspoken agreement may become the language of conspiracy...

...Schlesinger, I do not know exactly what happened here...

...We had further conversation of assassination of Fidel Castro, what would be the reaction...

...Since the CIA certainly did make the attempt, we must conclude that it did so on its own, in the manner of a rogue elephant, or that President Kennedy knew about and authorized the plots...

...In every instance CIA complaints were the same: they were being pressed to do too much, too quickly, by men with too little understanding of what really might be accomplished by covert action...

...Schlesinger instinctively, and I think correctly, recognizes this would be stretching matters...

...I do not blame Mr...

...But the drift of his criticisms was that I had got the main thing wrong, and had failed to understand the nature of the relationship between presidents and the CIA...

...Ah, if only we could say . . ." All this is true, but it does not mean that the CIA has been off on its own since 1947, pursuing its own policies for its own reasons in contemptuous disregard of presidential authority...

...There was in fact no bureaucratic response whatever...

...But Hoover's memo of the meeting does not record any disapproval of assassination per s" and that October Hoover sent Robert Kennedy a memo saying he had found someone who could kill Castro, and offering to handle 14 March 1980: 141 the job...

...Schlesinger might have argued that the assassination attempts were mounted by .the CIA on its own as being within the limits, of its traditional operational freedom...

...What it does sound like is a man who knew what had been going on in general, but not in particular, and was angry when he found out...

...Whatever Kennedy may have thought of the subject privately, it seems clear he left Hoover with the impression that a really workable plan to kill Castro might be welcome...

...both indicated they felt they had all the authority they needed, and that Robert Kennedy in particular (in Helms's words) "would not have been unhappy if he [Castro] had disappeared off the scene by whatever means'' (Assassination Report, p. 151...

...In the Soviet Union, where the KGB and its predecessors have been principal organs of state control, no less than three intelligence chiefs have been murdered by their colleagues in government since 1917...

...Schlesinger has given himself an uphill battle...

...The assassination of a foreign leader is the sort of thing no properly responsible intelligence service would undertake without authority...

...His best defense would be to cite numerous examples of major operations undertaken by the CIA on its own, thus establishing a pattern of freewheeling independence...

...An intelligence service is a double-edged weapon...

...President Kennedy asked Szulc the same question he had asked Smathers the previous April: how would he respond to a proposal for Castro's assassination...

...But worst was the CIA's attempts to poison Castro with the aide of Cuban allies recruited for the job by the Mafia...

...But the facts are too numerous to be let lie...

...Schlesinger's claims, alas, are true...

...Some of Mr...

...Schlesinger, in his book The Imperial Presidency, has argued that presidents were lacking in the power to set their own priorities, or were backward about doing so...

...In addition, intelligence services are instruments of power in its rawest form, and they tend to know the worst that can be said of the men who give them orders...

...Clearly, things have never gone so far in this country, but the danger is nonetheless real and one goal of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Church, was to determine if the CIA was a rogue elephant beyond control...

...I just can't understand how it could have happened...

...The revealing thing to me here is Kennedy's reaction to what he had been told: he did not order an inquiry, did not ask John McCone what this was all about, did not demand to know just who had been behind this in the first place, did not insist oh punishment—nor even a reprimand—for those responsible...

...During a meeting of Hoover and Kennedy a few days after the CIA's briefing, both men remarked on the abysmal judgment shown by the Agency in using the Mafia for such a sensitive undertaking...

...He is the author of a history of the opposition to the war in Vietnam, The War at Home, as well as The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Knopf...

...Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense during Kennedy's administration, told the Church Committee he had known nothing of any plot to murder Castro, but he was also at pains to emphasize that' 'the CIA was a highly disciplined organization, fully under the control of senior officials of the government...

...In the end Senator Church concluded that it was not, but of course Church might be wrong, and Mr...

...By the nature of its work an intelligence service is bound to be autonomous when it comes to operational matters, and the CIA has been no exception...

...In the absence of more explicit written evidence, this left the Church Committee in a quandary...

...But it is plain silly for him to suggest that the plots against Castro were only part of an established pattern of .freewheeling CIA independence...

...one of the Mafia figures involved had run afoul of the FBI, and Kennedy wanted to know what connection he had with the CIA...

...As I recollect he was just throwing out a great barrage of questions—he was certain it could be accomplished—I remember that—it would be no problem...

...Commonweal: 142...

...In May, 1962, Robert Kennedy was briefed about the assassination plot by two CIA officers, Lawrence Houston, the CIA's General Counsel, and Sheffield Edwards, the Director of Security...

...If the Agency's past behavior were the only evidence we had in this matter, we would have to conclude—albeit tentatively, in the absence of certain knowledge—that the CIA probably had authority to proceed as it did...

...Of that there is no evidence...

...To me they suggest that President Kennedy was told of the efforts to kill Castro sometime after his election, in the course of a more general briefing on planning for the Bay of Pigs...

...After Kennedy himself was murdered, Smathers described the conversation in an interview for the oral history collection of the Kennedy Library...

...But he also told the Committee that Kennedy was angry about the CIA's reliance on the Mafia, not about the attempts themselves...

...Early that fall, during a meeting at the White House, both Kennedy brothers "chewed out" Bissell for failing to get Castro...

...There does not seem to be room for any other interpretation of the facts...

...But Bissell's colleagues at the CIA had a different impression from Bissell's report at the time...

...A random few targets destroyed in sabotage operations, and a good many people were killed by both sides, but Castro was as firmly in power at the end of Mongoose as he had been at the beginning...

...Schlesinger argues that the CIA attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro without the knowledge, much less the authority, of President John F. Kennedy...

...Schlesinger recognizes...

...IN ITS STUDY of the covert operations conducted by the CIA die Church Committee focused, in exhausting detail, on Indonesia, Cuba, and Chile...

...But Mr...

...Schlesinger argues that far from being an obedient servant of the White House, the CIA is a kind of' 'rogue elephant'' (in Senator Frank Church's phrase), not just secretive about operational details—which it certainly is—but fully capable of mounting a major operation on its own, for its own reasons...

...the likelihood (as it seems to me) that John F. Kennedy was guilty of an attempt to assassinate a man who humiliated him goes beyond the limits of irony...

...Szulc said he would be against it and Kennedy said he felt the same way, but that he was under great pressure by "advisors" to order Castro killed—' 'think he said intelligence people, but not positive," Szulc recorded in his notes later that evening...

...Other evidence, cited by the Church Committee in varying contexts, demonstrates that the Kennedys were certainly thinking about the assassination of Castro and knew the CIA was thinking about it too, although it does not establish when and where—or if—the orders were given...

...One can go down the list of presidential preoccupations since 1945—France and Italy in the 1940s, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1958, the Congo, Cuba, Southeast Asia, Chile: every last one of them received the full attention of presidents and their advisors...

...Schlesinger has ignored them...

...It is conceivable that a failure to say no was taken by the CIA as permission to go ahead...

...they elude oversight 14 March 1980: 139 when they can, engage in whispering campaigns, fall back on secrecy as an argument of last resort...

...Assassination Report, p. 158...

...The Attorney General told Houston "that if we were going to get involved with Mafia personnel again he wanted to be informed first...

...It is far from being a proud episode in the Kennedys' personal history, as Mr...

...The circumstances surrounding the briefing are complicated...

...All this was established by the Church Committee, and has been corroborated and expanded upon by other writers...

...None of these operations was supervised more closely, or was more heavily dependent on the use of violence, than Operation MONGOOSE, initiated by President Kennedy after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs with the clear and single goal of getting rid of Castro...

...The secrecy which can make it effective abroad also shields it from scrutiny at home...

...This is not something which happens only in spy novels...

...Schlesinger for rebelling against this terrible interpretation of the facts we both know...

...It is a small irony that much of the evidence about Kennedy's role comes from those to whom he expressed his doubts...

...The responsible CIA officials who testified before the Church Committee—in particular Richard Bissell and Richard Helms—tried to have it both ways...

...Neither man said he had received explicit orders to kill Castro...

...Perhaps the most explicit report of what the Kennedys knew and when they knew it comes from the journalist Tad Szulc, who met with both of them, at their invitation, at the White House in November, 1961...

...When Houston and Edwards told him—not vaguely, but in great detail—he was furious, a fact which has been cited as proof he didn't know anything about the attempt to kill Castro...

...But despite the Kennedys' insistent pressure, the plan was a total failure...

...The point is an important one...

...These claims, I think, are not true...

...I am not surprised that it should...

...This does not sound to me like the response of a man who has just learned the CIA—answerable to his brother—had tried to murder a foreign leader with no authority whatsoever...

...But it is not the only evidence...

...This operation, the outgrowth of an earlier, similar attempt which began under President Eisenhower, never got very far but it was pushed energetically and, at least from the CIA's point of view was an integral part of the broader attempt to remove Castro...

...Thus armed with secret knowledge, and experienced in conspiracy, intelligence services are in an ideal position to aspire to independence, and even to rule...

...THOMAS POWERS received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1971...

...Thomas Karamessines, later chief of the clandestine service, told me that the Cuban aide's description of what Bissell had told him left no doubt in his—Karamessines's—mind whatever in September, 1961, the Kennedys gave Bissell all the authority he needed to kill Castro...

...He cites none...

...But the plans went forward, and were renewed later after a period of dormancy following the Bay of Pigs...

...If it were not for the Kennedys' discussion of Castro's assassination on other occasions, both before and after the September, 1961, meeting, one might conclude that the Kennedys' passion to "get rid" of Castro was simply taken too literally by the CIA officers entrusted with the job...

...Like Mr...

...So far Mr...

...He told the CIA's General Counsel—not its director—he wanted no more use of the Mafia, and that is all he told him...

...Bissell himself told the Church Committee he did not remember this meeting clearly, and that, in any event, the Kennedys had never ordered him to kill Castro...

...When Bissell described that meeting to the man who ran his Cuban operation, the man assumed that Bissell had been told to "get Castro" by any means necessary, including assassination...

...they have been content to give the CIA a great deal of leeway in running its own show, but none of them has tolerated—or been faced with—the least rebellion when it came to the goals or major undertakings of American foreign policy...

...The Kennedys' intense personal interest in MONGOOSE was abundantly established by the Church Committee...

...More particularly, Mr...

...At this particular time I felt, and I later on learned that he did, that I wasn't so much for the idea of assassination, particularly when it could be pinned on the United States...

...The question which remains, left hanging for want of conclusive evidence by the Church Committee, was whether either or both of the Kennedy brothers knew of the plots, or authorized them...

...In addition to regular attendance at the oversight committee's meetings, Robert Kennedy frequently telephoned CIA officers involved in operational details, called in two heads of the clandestine service (Richard Bissell and Richard Helms) to read them the riot act, and even dealt directly with anti-Castro Cubans on his own...

...There has been little talk of rogue elephants since the Church Committee concluded its work...

...Presidents are jealous guardians of their power in foreign affairs...

...Of all the defenses of the Kennedys he might have chosen, this is the one least supported by the evidence...

...Quoted in Richard J. Walton, Cold War and Counterrevolution, p. 48...

...In late March or early April, 1961, shortly before the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy asked his friend Senator George Smathers how he would respond to the assassination of Castro...

...These things were not always handled wisely or well, but no president could claim anything like ignorance of what was going on...

...In all three cases the Committee found that presidents and their advisors had pressed the CIA relentlessly for results...