Farewell America
15
Spies
I never had any thought . . . when I set up the CIA, that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in a part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role . . .
HARRY TRUMAN
Everywhere -- and the United States is no exception -- there are criminals who will do anything for money. But it is one thing to murder a creditor, a Senator or a jealous husband, and quite another to assassinate the President of the United States.
Hired killers are rarely employed by a parapolitical or paramilitary group. They are much too dangerous. Their connections, their morals, and their insatiable avarice pose too many problems for a responsible organization. On the other hand, a number of individuals active in groups like the John Birch Society, the Patrick Henry Association, and the Christian Crusaders would be only too happy to volunteer for an ideological crime. But, although successful assassinations have on occasion been the work of fanatics, serious-minded conspirators would prefer not to rely on idealists. History tells us why.
The Tsar's Prime Minister, Stolypin, was shot to death in 1911 during a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Tsar Saltan" at the Kiev Opera.(1) The assassin, a lawyer named Dimitri Bogrov, was convinced he had acted in the cause of freedom, and many others before him had sacrificed themselves in the struggle against the Tsars. But fanatics like Bogrov who are prepared to die for a cause are few indeed, and the nihilists lost more men than the imperial families.
Today, professional soldiers and guerrilla warriors have taken up where the nihilists left off. They are just as courageous, but often less successful. In Germany, in 12 years of Nazism and 5 years of war, despite the Kreisau Circle and the numerous groups that claimed in 1946 to have belonged to the underground, despite the work of the Allied intelligence services and the plots hatched by several high-ranking officers of the Wehrmacht and the OKW, Hitler was never assassinated. Two officers, however, tried.
The first planted a bomb on one of Hitler's aides, claiming it was a bottle of cognac. The bomb was due to go off in the plane carrying the Fuhrer to the eastern front, but it failed to explode. The assassination attempt was never discovered. It was publicized later by its author, who meanwhile had recovered his "bottle of cognac."
The second, more serious attempt was the work of Colonel Klaus Yon Stauffenberg. His failure dealt a deathblow to the plot of July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg either didn't dare or didn't care to shoot Hitler.(2)Instead, he placed his briefcase, containing the equivalent of a pound of TNT,(3) under the conference table where Hitler was sitting and left the room, claming he had to make a phone call. The TNT was set off by a detonator a few minutes later.
But Colonel Yon Stauffenberg, while a brilliant cavalryman, was a poor saboteur. His bomb would have killed Hitler, and probably most of the other officers present, if the conference had been held, as was usually the case at Rastenburg, in the casemate of a cement blockhouse. The closed quarters would have magnified the compression, and the explosion would have proved fatal. On that hot July day, however, the conference was held instead in a wooden barracks with the windows open. Hitler was only knocked to the floor and slightly wounded by the explosion.
Colonel Von Stauffenberg was mistaken in his choice of an explosive. TNT is excellent for blowing up railroad lines and bridges, but for this type of operation Von Stauffenberg should have used a defensive grenade of the type used by the German Army, along with a phosphorous grenade and, as an additional precaution, a bottle containing about a pint of gasoline. The explosive power of the blasting agent would have been amplified by bits of flying steel and the heat from the phosphorus and the gasoline. Regardless of where the meeting was held, the explosion would have done its work. Those officers who weren't killed immediately would have been burned alive. But despite their small chance of survival, it would nevertheless have been wise to verify the success of the operation before giving the signal for a revolt that resulted in hundreds of executions, including that of Von Stauffenberg, about whom any biographer is forced to conclude that he was a total failure as an assassin. His technical incompetence caused the collapse of the German resistance and probably cost the Allies several more months of war.
Another Colonel, the Frenchman Bastien Thiry, attempted in 1962 to avenge the honor of the French Army by assassinating General De Gaulle. He set up an ambush using submachine guns at an intersection in the suburbs of Paris one evening when the General's car was due to pass on the way to the airport. The car, an ordinary Citroen, was going about 40 miles an hour. On a signal from the Colonel (a brandished newspaper), the gunmen fired more than 100 rounds, but neither the General nor his wife nor the driver nor the security agent accompanying them was hit. The tires were shot out, but the driver accelerated immediately, and the General disappeared over the horizon.
Colonel Thiry was a graduate of the foremost scientific school in France, the Ecole Poly technique, the students of which are renowned for their reasoning power. Moreover, he was a leading aeronautical specialist and, like Von Stauffenberg, a disinterested patriot. But, as far as assassinations were concerned, he too was a failure.(4) Like Von Stauffenberg, he was executed, and from a technical point of view his failure is understandable. He was an amateur, and assassinations are not for amateurs. His plan was of interest to the men at Dallas because its target was a moving vehicle. An attack on a moving target presents special problems which we shall examine later. In any case, these are problems that can only be solved by a specialist.
The Committee needed professionals who were accustomed to planning clandestine and risky operations, and who had the proper mentality -- in other words, professionals who had not lost their amateur standing. The men best qualified for this type of job are undoubtedly the specialists of the intelligence services like the Soviet KGB and the CIA, which have a special section for assassinations. It is safe to assume that nothing is impossible or surprising in the world of espionage, in the widest sense of the term. Obstacles that would hamper organized criminals or conscientious conspirators can be overcome or avoided more easily by those who are known as "spies."
Spies! The spy trade has come a long way since A. Curtis Roth wrote in the Saturday Evening Post in 1917:
"Scientific spying knows no ethics, owns no friendships and enjoys no code of honor. It delights to operate through degenerates, international highbinders and licentious women. It shrinks before no meanness or blackguardism to attain its ends, even callously conducting official houses of prostitution for the entrapment of the unwary."
Twenty-five years later, Winston Churchill described it as "plot and counterplot, deceit and treachery, double-dealing and triple-dealing, real agents, fake agents, gold and steel, the bomb and the dagger."
Today, the cloak and the dagger have been replaced by scientific administration. Intelligence organizations, be they American or Russian, direct activities that run from routine murders to full-scale revolutions. The necessary technicians are trained and available. They can be used for official ends, but they may also be corrupted and their abilities exploited for more questionable purposes. Once we step into the world of these organizations and the individuals who work for them, it is no longer possible, as we have done in preceding chapters, to set out and analyze the facts in logical order. Espionage activities know no logic, nor is it possible to learn the entire truth. If the Warren Commission devoted several thousand pages to Oswald, it did so not only to conceal the nature and the origins of the plot, but also because Oswald, immersed in the muddy waters of the intelligence world, had anything but a simple life. The object of this book is not to study his short and picturesque history, which in the end has little significance, nor to provide a detailed description of the organization and activities of the CIA in the period between 1960 and 1963.(5) But it is necessary to know something about the CIA in order to understand the Oswald affair, and to draw together all the threads that lead to the 22nd of November.
The CIA celebrated its twentieth anniversary in September 1967. It was created on September 8, 1947, by the same law that instituted a unified Defense Department and established the National Security Council.(6) Its mission was the coordination and evaluation of intelligence information, but it immediately branched out into special operations, which took on such importance that the Plans Division was organized in 1961 to plan and carry them out.(7) In 1949 a law was passed exempting the CIA from disclosing its activities, the names and official titles of its personnel, their salaries, and the number of persons it employed. The Director of the CIA was authorized to spend his entire budget(8) on the strength of his signature, without ever having to account for the way in which it was spent.
This provision enabled the CIA to become, during the Fifties, a sort of "invisible government" which expanded its authority when Allen Welsh Dulles became Assistant Director in 1951, then Director on February 10, 1953.(9) Six months later, in August 1953, the CIA proved to the world just how powerful it had become when General Fazollah Zahedi replaced Mossadegh as Prime Minister of Iran. In 1951, Mossadegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and confiscated the Abadan refinery with the support of Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party. The CIA succeeded in having Mossadegh arrested, and the leaders of Tudeh were executed. A consortium of the major oil companies thereby signed a 25-year agreement with Iran granting 40% of the shares in the former Anglo-Iranian to Standard Oil of New Jersey, Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of California, Socony Mobil and Texaco. A few months later, in April 1955, nine other independent American companies were given a share in the operations. The CIA man who directed the operation was Kermit Roosevelt,(10) a State Department consultant for Middle Eastern and Communist affairs since 1947. When "Kim" Roosevelt left the CIA in 1958, he was hired by Gulf Oil as its "director for governmental relations." He became vice-president of Gulf in 1960. (He is also a consultant for Socony Mobil.)
Its Iranian success consolidated the power of the CIA, which in the years that followed multiplied its interventions and carried off some brilliant operations, the best-known of which took place in Guatemala and behind the Iron Curtain, where the CIA attempted to split up the Communist Bloc. It was the West German intelligence service, a step-child of the CIA, that set off the East German revolt of June 17, 1953, that was checked by Soviet intervention and caused 2,000 dead or wounded in East Berlin alone. In 1956, the CIA was behind the Hungarian uprising, which proved even more costly to the Hungarian people.
The CIA established several intelligence rings in the USSR and multiplied its special missions. Between 1956 and 1960, its U2 spy planes furnished valuable intelligence on airfields, the locations of planes and missiles, rocket experiments, special ammunitions dumps, submarine production and atomic installations.(11) In Egypt the CIA, under the cover of Ambassador Jefferson Caffrey, who was acting on instructions from John Foster Dulles, played an important role in the 1952 overthrow of King Farouk and the seizure of power by Colonel Neguib, and later in the latter's overthrow by Colonel Nasser.
In 1954, the CIA overthrew the Guatemalan regime of President Jacob Arbenz Guzman because of his "Communist leanings," and replaced him with one of their puppets, Colonel Castillo-Armas, who immediately denied illiterates (who made up 70% of the population) the right to vote and returned to Frutera(12) the 225,000 acres of land that President Arbenz had confiscated. One million acres which had already been distributed to the peasants were taken back, and a committee was created to fight communism in the country.(13)
The CIA also suffered failures -- in Indonesia against Sukarno in 1958, in Laos with Phoumi in 1960, in South Vietnam with Ngo Diem between 1956 and 1963,(14) or partial successes, as in West Germany.(15)
Nor did the CIA confine its activities to the hotspots of the world -- the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Central and Latin American "protectorates," and the Iron Curtain countries. The CIA was naturally strongly established in the socialist countries such as Yugoslavia, and in neutral states like Austria and Switzerland, but it was also active, for economic and political reasons, in zones of international tension throughout the world. In some cases, for example in Algeria, these reasons were directly opposed.(16) In 1955, the CIA intervened in Costa Rica, one of the most stable and democratic of the Latin American nations, where it tried to overthrow the moderate socialist government of President Jose Figueres.
Thus, endowed with complete autonomy, a virtually unlimited budget, and a de facto co-directorship under the Eisenhower administration, the CIA in the period between 1953 and 1960 developed into a world power.(17) The CIA was represented in 108 different countries, commanded submarines and jet planes, and controlled 30,000 agents under the cover of diplomatic, commercial, industrial, journalistic, military, technical, labor, university and secret activities.
The CIA, of course had competition. The Soviet KGB has been described by Allen Dulles as a "multipurpose, clandestine arm of power, more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counterintelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries" (a definition that seems equally applicable to the CIA). Apparently, the budget of the KGB is about the same as that of the CIA, which means that it employs many more agents, since a Russian costs far less than an American.(18) Most of the agents employed by both organizations are "legal," which means that they have a diplomatic cover job abroad. According to Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was executed by the Russians in 1963 for espionage activities in favor of the United States, three-quarters of all Soviet diplomats abroad, and all of the consular personnel, are members of the KGB.
This percentage is far lower in the United States; about one-third of all American embassy and consular personnel belongs to the CIA, although the figure varies widely from country to country.(19) When Kennedy became President, an American Ambassador had no more authority over the CIA "Station Chief" in his embassy than a Soviet Ambassador had over the KGB "resident."
The CIA had infiltrated all the international organizations of which the United States was a member, even UNESCO and the FAO, and its agents operated in all the NATO centers in Europe. In 1961 the CIA was represented in every country in the world, even Iceland (where it had 28 agents and two offices, one at the US Embassy at Reyjkavik and the other at the military base at Keplavik), Uganda, Surinam, the Ryukyu Islands, and Sierra Leone. Photographs and reports from its agents poured in from all over the world to Langley,(20) where they were analyzed by photo-interpretation experts and fed into Walnut, the CIA's electronic computer.
In addition, the CIA controlled the most colossal propaganda apparatus of all times, concealed behind the names of more than 600 different companies. Hundreds of organizations were financed wholly or in part by the CIA.(21) The CIA controlled, directly or through subsidies, radio stations, newspapers, and publishing houses in the United States and throughout the world.(22) Some, like Praeger, Doubleday, and Van Nostrand, agreed to publish propaganda works such as Why Vietnam? Its influence even extended to television and the motion picture industry. Until 1956, it controlled the Near East Broadcasting Station, with the most powerful transmitter (located on Cyprus) in the Middle East, and a newspaper chain in Beirut run by a double agent for the CIA and the British Secret Service, Kamel Mrowa, that published the dailies Al Hayat and Daily Star. In 1958, it installed seven clandestine radio stations based in Aden, Jordan, Lebanon and Kenya to counter Radio Cairo and defend the "independence" of Iraq (sixth largest producer of oil in the world, and the only Arab state that is a member of the pro-Western Baghdad Pact). In North America, the CIA operated a shortwave radio station, WRUL, used to broadcast coded messages to its agents, and it had an interest in the gigantic Voice of America transmitting complex located at Greenville, North Carolina, the most powerful radio station in the world. In Europe, Radio Liberty (transmitters at Lampertheim in West Germany and Pals in Spain) employed 12,000 persons in its offices in Paris, Munich and Rome, and Radio Free Europe had 28 transmitting stations in West Germany (at Frankfurt and Munich) and in Portugal. The principal radio stations operated by the CIA in the Far East were located at Taipeh, Formosa, Seoul, Korea, and at three places along the coast of Japan. It also controlled stations in Australia and in the French-owned islands of the Pacific.
Beginning in 1955, the CIA extended its intelligence networks on the continent of Africa, which up till then, with the exception of Egypt and Libya, had been considered of secondary importance. It established itself solidly in Algeria, the Republic of South Africa, the ex-Belgian Congo, French West Africa and the. Portuguese African colonies. Latin America and the Caribbean were controlled by its American Division.
When Kennedy entered the White House, preparations were already underway for an invasion of Cuba. The project had originated with an executive order signed by President Eisenhower on March 17, 1960, authorizing the clandestine training and arming of Cuban refugees. The operation was directed by Richard Mervin Bissell, Jr., a brilliant graduate of the London School of Economics and former professor of economics at Yale who had joined the CIA in 1954 and, as director of its Plans Division, had supervised the U2 project. Bissell's original plan included the organization of guerrilla troops in Cuba itself, but the shortage of qualified volunteers and the lack of support among the Cuban population and Castro's army rendered this impossible. Instead, Allen Dulles decided on a military invasion of the island by Cuban exile forces.
The CIA immediately began looking for a suitable training site. At the beginning of April, 1960, Robert Kendall Davis, First Secretary of the American Embassy in Guatemala and the local CIA Station Chief, visited Guatemala President y digoras at his official residence, situated out of precaution on the grounds of the Guatemalan military school.(23) Ydigoras, who had no sympathy for Castro and who was also faced with a mounting budget, agreed to allow the CIA to train "special forces" on a base in Guatemala. The CIA chose the "Helvetia" coffee plantation at Retalhuleu, which covered 5,000 acres, was easy to guard, and offered 50 miles of private roads. There it established a training center for saboteurs and combat forces equipped with barracks and a swimming pool.
At the end of May 1960, the CIA met with representatives of the five Cuban exile groups, which joined in a common front, the Cuban Revolutionary Council, for which the CIA opened bank accounts in New York, New Orleans, and Miami. The majority of the Cuban exiles lived in Florida or Louisiana. Word spread quickly that something big was in the wind and that there was no lack of funds. Volunteers poured in, and a first contingent of men described as "geometrical engineers," departed for Guatemala at the end of May 1960.
The CIA provided military specialists and foreign technicians, mainly German and Japanese contractuals, to train the Cubans as radio operators, paratroopers, frogmen, saboteurs, and in the techniques of BOA.(24) In August, an airstrip was constructed, and the first planes, camouflaged as civilian aircraft, landed at Retalhuleu.(25) An airlift was established between the CIA bases in the United States and the base at Guatemala. The volunteers who applied to the recruitment offices camouflaged behind the names of various associations in New Orleans and Miami were interrogated, their background was checked, and they were tested in the training camps run by the CIA in the Everglades near Miami and on Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana before being flown from a clandestine airport, Opa Locka or R2, to Retalhuleu.
All of these activities were conducted in that special atmosphere of mystery and secrecy so dear to intelligence people, with false identity papers, planes without lights, post office box addresses, fake license plates, security checks, "advice," and informers -- official or otherwise. Anti-Castro fanatics of bourgeois background rubbed shoulders with unemployed or hungry Cuban refugees, Castroist agents, mercenary pilots, US Marine Corps instructors, mail collectors, Japanese karate specialists, arms dealers,(26) soldiers of fortune, Army Colonels, and extremist orators. Under the scrutiny of the FBI they milled about and crossed each others' paths, play-acted, pretended not to know one another, flew, fought, talked of their island home or drugged themselves in hotel rooms, apartments, or bungalows rented by the CIA using the names of tourists or non-existent companies. From time to time, top CIA men from privileged backgrounds, exuding Anglophilia and a gentlemanly attitude, came to inspect their troops.
Across the water in Cuba, these events were followed attentively by Ramiro Valdes, chief of the Cuban Intelligence Service, and Sergei M. Kudryatsev, Soviet Ambassador to Cuba and a veteran KBG agent. The CIA knew, of course, that they knew, but the preparations dragged on. Dulles requested Bissell to speed up the training. He wanted the invasion carried out before the November, 1960 Presidential elections. But there were delays in the recruiting and training of the Cuban pilots needed to parachute supplies and carry out bombing raids.
In September 1960, despite all the extra efforts, the overtime and the bonuses, the invasion force still wasn't ready. Then bad weather intervened. The CIA realized that it would have to postpone the operation until the spring of 1961. The extra time was used for additional training and to strengthen the logistics of the operation.
On October 20th, 1960, towards the end of his electoral campaign, Kennedy declared that the United States should "attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro." This campaign position, which probably contributed to Kennedy's victory, reassured the CIA, but it placed Kennedy in an uncomfortable position when he was confronted with the impending invasion the following spring (he had been partially informed of the plan in his capacity as President-elect by Allen Dulles in November, 1960).
The invasion was a disaster. The remnants of the Cuban exile brigade were captured in Cuba. The CIA had lost the first round. The second was won a year later, in October 1962, by Kennedy, when he persuaded the Soviets to dismantle their Cuban missile bases. On December 24, 1962, 1,113 captured survivors of the invasion brigade were traded for a large quantity of medicine and drugs.(27) On December 29th, Kennedy paid homage to their courage in Miami. In January 1963, 450 of these men, including 200 officers, were retrieved by the CIA, which had begun to organize another invasion force. Once again they were sent to camps in Florida and Louisiana, where they were trained until the spring of 1963.(28)
But the CIA did not go unpunished for its failure. Kennedy had decided to take the intelligence agency in hand. He blamed it not only for the Cuban fiasco, but for activities in Central and South America and the Far East which ran counter to his foreign policy.(29) After relying during the first months of his administration on the experts, Kennedy had ordered a member of his staff, McGeorge Bundy, to represent him in Special Group 54/12.(30) But he was dissatisfied with the results. Dulles was condemned. He was allowed a few months of respite to save his face, but on November 29, 1961, he was replaced by John McCone.
The Kennedy's choice of McCone was surprising. McCone was a good Republican, but he was hardly as pure as Douglas Dillon. His entire career had been spent in the oil industry. In 1937, at the age of 35, he had been one of the founders of the Bechtel McCone Parson's Corporation of Los Angeles, which specialized in the construction of petroleum refineries and electrical power plants in the United States, Latin America and the Middle East. During the Second World War, McCone's California Shipbuilding Company(31) had earned huge profits. Later he took over Panama Pacific Tankers, a fleet of oil tankers. In 1961, he owned a million dollars worth of stock in Standard Oil of California.(32) After his appointment, he offered to sell them,(33) but the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that this was unnecessary, although Senator Clark of Pennsylvania protested that the American oil industry, like the CIA, was deeply involved in the politics of the Middle East.
What was the reason behind Kennedy's choice? It has been suggested that "with a conservative Republican at the head of the invisible government, the President clearly thought the political fire would be somewhat diverted."(34) The fact is that the world of intelligence was repugnant to President Kennedy, although he was well aware of its power.(35) He put off this problem until later, considering it of only secondary importance. It was not resolved until after his death.(36)
In the spring of 1963, the anti-Castro invaders were killing time in Florida and Louisiana. Many of them had been surprised and disillusioned when the- Air Force and Navy planes had failed to come to their rescue in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. Their resentment had been aggravated by their captivity in Cuba, and their CIA superiors did nothing to calm them.
In the first months of 1963, President Kennedy couldn't hold a press conference without being asked about the "16,000 or 17,000" Soviet technicians reported to be in Cuba. The President was concentrating on an end to the Cold War, which meant peaceful coexistence with the USSR and the maintenance of the status quo with Castro. But the CIA failed to take the diplomatic thaw seriously, and word never reached the lower echelons. Everything proceeded as before. In the training camps hope, money and ammunition continued to be dispensed. Preparations were speeded up, and security precautions were multiplied. The techniques of secret warfare, the post office boxes, the clandestine airstrips, the meetings in the Turkish baths and the encounters in the railroad stations, the messages in the toilets, the passwords, the pseudonyms and the smuggling flourished, all the more so since the CIA had grown suspicious of the federal government and distrustful of the DIA. Meanwhile, the FBI carefully noted every encroachment of the CIA on its territory.(37)
On October 17, 1962, in New York, the FBI uncovered and seized a cache of arms and ammunition belonging to Castroist Cubans and arrested three men, including Robert Santiesteban Casanova, an attache at the Cuban United Nations Mission. This was only one of the many episodes in the quiet but growing conflict between the CIA and the FBI over the limits of their respective jurisdictions. Their struggle for power grew steadily more serious.
To the anger of the exiles, the impatience of the CIA, and the investigations of the FBI, something else was added: the training officers who belonged to the Minutemen and other extremist organizations remained in contact with the leaders of these movements, and in particular with disgruntled military officers like General Walker.
One of the CIA men in New Orleans was named Guy Banister. A former FBI agent and member of the Minutemen, he had worked for the CIA since 1958. His office was located at 544 Camp Street. His deputy, Hugh Ward, also belonged to the Minutemen and to an organization called the "Caribbean Anticommunism League," which had been used as a CIA cover group since the Guatemalan operation in 1954. One of the people who frequented 544 Camp Street was a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.
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NOTES
1. He succeeded in his attempt even though he himself had warned the police that someone would try to kill Stolypin that night. As a sign of their gratitude, the police sent him an invitation to the opera. Bogrov was hung two months later, still attired in evening dress.
2. He declared before and after the assassination attempt that he was willing to take the risk, but that he considered himself indispensable to the conspiracy, the members of which were waiting for him in Berlin. Despite a radio signal announcing the success of the operation sent with the help of General Fellgiebel, Chief of Signals, who was also mixed up in the plot, the General Staff in Berlin postponed the insurrection until Von Stauffenberg's return to Berlin. The success of the conspiracy depended on a single man, who tried to do too much and blundered.
3. Trinitrotoluene, a stable and very powerful explosive.
4. Thiry's assassination plot failed because:
- the site was a poor choice (a straight road that enabled the car to move too fast)
- the firing was badly synchronized, and failed to take account of the speed of the objective
- the signal used (a brandished newspaper) was ridiculous at nightfall
- no radical means of stopping the car (an explosion, a herse, [?] some sort of obstacle) was planned
- the gunmen were placed along a line nearly perpendicular to the car, which reduced their angle of fire and increased the dispersion.
5. We advise our readers who are especially interested in this subject to consult the two books written by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government and The Espionage Establishment.
6. Its predecessors were the Office of Coordinator of Information and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), created on June 13, 1942 and directed by General Donovan, followed by the Central Intelligence Group, created on January 22, 1946 and directed at first by Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers and then by Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoeter, who became the first Director of the CIA.
7. The Plans Division has sole control over secret operations of all kinds (Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the U2 flights, the Bay of Pigs, the Congo revolt in 1964, etc.)
8. Which in 1963 amounted to nearly $ 2 billion. In 1967, total US intelligence expenditures amounted to $4 billion annually.
9. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State at the time and the most influential figure in the Eisenhower administration. The reign of the Dulles brothers lasted until the death of John Foster Dulles in 1959.
The Eisenhower Administration, it will be remembered, lasted from 1952 until 1960.
10. Theodore Roosevelt's grandson and a cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
11. The Soviets responded to the U2s by launching military observation satellites, which were used to photograph American strategic bases. Between October 1957 and October 1967, the Russians launched about 100 of these Cosmos "scientific" satellites from their bases at Tyuratam and Plesetsk. The satellites remained in orbit from 3 to 8 days before being brought back to earth. During the same period, the United States launched about 200 secret military satellites. At the end of 1967, there were 254 American and 54 Russian satellites in orbit.
12. A subsidiary of United Fruit.
13. President Eisenhower described Guatemala that year as "a beautiful land of Central America whose mountains and moderate climate make it one of the garden spots of the hemisphere."
14. In these three countries, Kennedy's foreign policy was in direct opposition to that of the CIA, which was forced, officially at least, to fall into line. But the CIA continued to operate in the shadows, often against the instructions of the federal government.
15. The Bundesnachrichtendienst, better known as the Federal Intelligence Agency or FIA, is largely dependent on the CIA, which subsidizes and controls it. It is directed by Gerhard Wessel, a former lieutenant Colonel in the Wehrmacht. Wessel in 1967 replaced Reinhard Gehlen, a former ex-Nazi Colonel "recuperated" in August 1945 by Allen Dulles, who at the time headed the ass in Switzerland and was in charge of American intelligence activities in occupied Germany.
Gehlen, who had conceived the idea of the "Vlassov Army" (Russian anti-Communist troops), was given the responsibility for the underground that continued to operate behind Communist lines until 1950. In Poland, Gehlen's guerrillas on March 28, 1947 murdered General Karol Swierczenski, Vice-Minister of Defense who, under the name of Walter, had commanded the 14th International Brigade in Spain, and who served as the model for one of the characters in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Gehlen developed his network under the cover of a firm known as the "Economic Association for the Development of South Germany." He employed former members of the Gestapo such as Boemel-Burg, his intelligence chief in Berlin, and Franz Alfred Six, former SS General and one of Eichmann's subordinates, who was put in charge of Gehlen's contacts in Western Europe.
With the aid of other highly-qualified specialists, Gehlen successfully infiltrated East Germany and the Eastern European states, uncovered Soviet intelligence rings, planted agents among groups of expatriate workers, and took charge of the refugee organizations.
But he also suffered failures. In 1954, Dr. Otto John, the head of a rival West German intelligence organization backed by the British, disappeared in Berlin and fled to the USSR. In 1961 the CIA learned that three of Gehlen's agents, Heinz Felfe, Hans Clemens, and Erwin Tiebel, had been passing information to the Russians since 1950. A short time before they were uncovered, the three double agents had been honored by their chiefs (Gehlen and Shelepin, chief of the KGB). As a result, the CIA grew wary of West German intelligence and has since treated it with caution.
16. Under Eisenhower, financial agreements, particularly in the domain of oil, were under discussion between American firms and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA). Contact had been made between representatives of Aramco (which was interested in the Sahara) and Ben Bella a short time before a plane carrying the Algerian nationalist leader from Morocco to Tunisia was intercepted on the orders of French Minister Robert Lacoste.
But at the same time the CIA was active in anti-Communist and anti-Gaullist movements, and it backed preparations for the 1961 French Generals' putsch. Richard M. Bissell, Director of the Plans Division of the CIA, met on December 7, 1960 with Jacques Soustelle, a French political figure who was planning a previous coup that failed.
17. The influence and activities of the CIA are beyond the scope of the imagination. It has been involved in nearly all the major international events of the past 15 years. It played an important role in Israeli intelligence activities during the 1967 six-day war, and it was involved in the Greek military coup that originated in 1965 as a result of the Aspida plot, and which brought General George Papadopoulos, a CIA man, to power. In the South Pacific the CIA runs a large-scale training center for guerrillas and saboteurs on Saipan Island, one of the Mariannas group. In 1961 the Saipan school had already furnished 6 to 700 guerrilla warfare experts to Chiang Kai Shek to be used to stir up subversion on the Chinese mainland.
18. The First Directorate, or department in charge of foreign intelligence, is not the sole activity of the KGB. The Second Directorate is responsible for keeping the Soviet people in order, and there are other departments which constitute technical support sections.
19. On July 14, 1966, Senator Fulbright declared, "The operations of the CIA have grown today to exceed the Department of State In both number of personnel and budget."
20. Langley, Virginia, 10 miles outside Washington, where CIA headquarters are located.
21. The African American Institute, American Council for International Commission of Jurists, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, American Friends of the Middle East, American Newspaper Guild, American Society of African Culture, Asia Foundation, Association of Hungarian Students in North America, Committee for Self-Determination, Committee of Correspondence, Committee on International Relations. Fund for International Social and Economic Education, Independent Research Service, Institute of International Labor Research, International Development Foundation, International Marketing Institute, National Council of Churches, National Education Association, Paderewski Foundation, Pan American Foundation, Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside Russia, United States Youth Council, and the Philadelphia Education Fund for the Nordic Arts.
Conduits for CIA money included: the Andrew Hamilton Fund, Beacon Fund, Benjamin Rosenthal Foundation, Borden Trust, Broad-High Foundation, Catherwood Foundation, Chesapeake Foundation, David, Joseph and Winfield Baird Foundation, Dodge Foundation, Edsel Fund, Florence Foundation, Gothan Fund, Heights Fund, Independence Foundation, J. Frederick Brown Foundation, J. M. Kaplan Foundation, Jones-O'Donnell, Kentfield Fund, Littauer Foundation, Marshall Foundation, McGregor Fund, Michigan Fund, Monroe Fund, Norman Fund, Pappas Charitable Trust, Price Fund, Robert E. Smith Fund, San Miguel Fund, Sydney and Esther Rabb Charitable Foundation, Tower Fund, Vernon Fund, Warden Trust, Williford-Telford Fund.
The CIA subsidized the following international organizations The Inter-America Federation of Newspapermen's Organizations. International Federation of Free Journalists. International Journalists. International Student Conference. Public Services International World Assembly of Youth, World Confederation of Organizations of the Teaching Profession. Overseas, the CIA is the benefactor of Africa Forum, Africa Report, Berliner Verein, Center of Studies and Documentation (Mexico), Congress for Cultural Freedom (Paris) which supports the publications Preuves In France, Encounter in Britain, Forum in Austria andHiwar in Lebanon, Frente Departemental de Capesinos de Puno, Foreign News Service, Inc., Institute of Political Education (Costa Rica), etc.
As of December 31, 1967, the CIA no longer contributes financially -- in theory at least -- to American private or cultural organizations abroad. However, the State Department specifies that "in certain cases," certain cultural organizations may continue to receive official subsidies on a temporary basis to enable them to overcome financial difficulties, and that the government of the United States will continue to study the possibility of granting public funds to certain cultural organizations with activities abroad in so far as these activities are considered to promote the national interest.
22. These activities may not be considered normal, but they are nevertheless logical. They have been copied by the Russians, which in 1958 created Section D (for Disinformation and Decomposition) of the KGB. Section D, directed by Ivan Ivanovitch Agayants, employs new post-Stalin techniques borrowed from the Americans which are far more sophisticated than those generally ascribed to the Soviets. Section D's new approach consists of using agents of Western appearance and Western manners who are as un-Bolshevik as possible -- journalists, writers, economists, professors, and Soviet citizens who reside or travel abroad. These agents even go so far as to criticize Soviet society. They are in constant contact with influential Western officials. The old dialectic has been replaced by persuasion. In this area, as in the domain of pure intelligence, the KGB is superior to the CIA.
In 1967, for example, Section D launched a campaign to discredit Svetlana Stalin's book of memoirs, the publication of which is credited to the CIA. In 1968 it launched "Operation Philby" with the object of discrediting Her Majesty's Secret Service and bringing about a reduction in its budget through the publication of the memoirs of the former British counter-espionage chief.
23. Ydigoras' predecessor, President Carlos Castillo Armas, who had seized power in 1954 in a coup d'etat organized by the CIA, had been assassinated in the Presidential Palace.
24. Techniques for the recuperation and reception of personnel and supplies parachuted into an area.
25. The Guatemalan government explained to foreign diplomats that these were private planes used to transport fruit and shrimp.
26. Although it possessed enormous stocks of arms itself and had all of the weapons of the US Army at its disposal, the CIA was continually buying weapons, particularly foreign-made weapons: Israeli machine-guns, Swiss pistols, Belgian rifles, and even out-of-date weapons from the Second and First World Wars, which it supplied to its confederates and "protectorate" states. It even purchased Vampire jets from Canada. It used well-known firms such as InterArmco, as well as fly-by-night arms dealers, which it protected and paid in either cash or drugs (the latter imported by the CIA from the Far East).
27. The last shipment of medicine reached Havana on July 3, 1963. Castro had set a price per head for the invaders. He demanded $500,000 for Manuel Artime Buesa, the leader of the expeditionary force, and $63 million for the 1,200 others. Their ransom was paid mainly by the federal government, which obtained the drugs from pharmaceutical companies at wholesale prices.
28. Dozens of commercial enterprises in Florida and Louisiana are actually covers for the CIA. These include shipping concerns like the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, airlines like Southern Air Transport, advertising agencies such as Evergreen Advertising, employment agencies such as Workers, Inc., import- export firms like Sherman Export, and, naturally, radio stations such as Radio Swan which, after its cover was blown, became Radio Americas.
The contacts between these cover agencies are made rarely by telephone, but person-to-person, through post office box addresses, and by innocent-sounding personal advertisements broadcast over commercial radio stations in Florida and Louisiana.
29. President Kennedy had been informed of the Bay of Pigs invasion, but not of the CIA's plan to contaminate a shipment of Cuban sugar in Puerto Rico in August 1962. This shipment was headed for the Soviet Union. In its defense, the CIA declared that it was only following the instructions of the Special Group, which had enjoined it to sabotage the Cuban economy wherever possible. The President informed the CIA that in this instance it had exceeded its powers.
30. The Eisenhower Administration had sought to solve the problem of the CIA by exercising a greater measure of control. In December 1954, the National Security Council had created a high-level coordinating body called the Special Group (or Group 54/12) consisting of the CIA Director, the President's adviser on national security affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the U undersecretary of State for Political Affairs or his deputy. The Special Group was supposed to authorize all "black" operations and any expenditure of more than $10,000 that might have embarrassing political repercussions.
In point of fact, the CIA managed in large measure to escape the control of the Special Group.
During the period between Dulles' disgrace and McCone's arrival, and at the instigation of the Pentagon's inter-services study group, which was anxious to take advantage of the temporary eclipse of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was created on October 1, 1961, with the announced intention of remedying the (presumed) American inferiority in missile technology. Actually, the DIA brought together the intelligence divisions of the three branches of the armed services, the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy, to the benefit of the Pentagon. Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, who had begun his career in the FBI and served as one of J. Edgar Hoover's deputies in 1947, when Hoover, in his capacity as an expert, had created a section for investigation and counter-espionage for the Air Force in which he left a certain number of "correspondents," was named Director of the DIA.
John McCone, who at the time was head of the Atomic Energy Commission, favored the establishment of the DIA, but it would have been difficult for him to do otherwise, and he changed his mind seven weeks later when he was named Director of the CIA and saw how quickly its young rival was developing. By 1963 the DIA had more than 2,000 employees and controlled all military intelligence.
McCone installed a new team at the CIA. Between January and May, 1962, General Marshall Sylvester Carter was named Deputy Director, Lyman Kirkpatrick, an OSS and CIA veteran, was appointed Executive Director, Ray S. Cline became Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI), and Richard M. Helms was named Deputy Director for Plans (DDP).
31. Ralph E. Casey of the General Accounting Office testified that in 1946 McCone and his associates had earned $ 44 million on a $100,000 investment (mainly on defense contracts).
32. Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on the Appointment of John McCone, January 18, 1962.
33. As John Kennedy had done with all his stocks when he became President. (He transformed them into US Savings Bonds).
34. A more likely explanation was that Kennedy was a magnanimous President who was more interested in a person's abilities and experience than in his political color or his personal opinions. In August 1963 he appointed Henry Cabot Lodge, who had been his opponent in the Massachusetts Senatorial race and again in 1956 in the Vice-Presidentia1 campaign, as Ambassador to Vietnam to succeed Ambassador Frederick Nolting (a close friend of Madame Nhu).
35. On April 23, three days after he announced the Bay of Pigs disaster to the nation, Kennedy appointed a board of inquiry composed of Robert Kennedy, General Maxwell Taylor, Allen Dulles and Admiral Burke. On May 4 he revived the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board presided by James R. Killian, to which he appointed Robert Murphy, William Langer, and General Jimmie Doolittle. Killian was succeeded by Clark Clifford in 1963. The Killian Committee was ordered to make a thorough investigation of the organization of the American intelligence community.
36. In 1965 President Johnson, who is known for his distrust of cultivated Easterners, appointed a Texan, retired Vice Admiral William F. Raborn, Jr., to succeed McCone, David Wise and Thomas B. Ross wrote in The Espionage Establishment that " The CIA professionals feared that, perhaps, the choice of Raborn merely reflected the President's disinterest in the more intellectual aspects of intelligence." Helms' promotion as CIA Director in 1966 was a triumph for the ass Ivy League types. The CIA was back in the hands of the Establishment.
37. Their rivalry was a result not of the discrepancy in their power on the international scale, but of the evolution of their activities. Counterespionage in the United States is the exclusive responsibility of the FBI, and more particularly of its secret Division (domestic intelligence), which in 1963 was headed by William C. Sullivan.
This division is in charge of espionage, sabotage, and subversion. It handles more than 100,000 cases a year, and it is responsible for most of the successes (both known and unknown) in the United States in the field of counter-espionage in the past 20 years. It was the FBI that exposed the National Security Agency employees (Martin Mitchell, Petersen, and Sergeant Dunlap) who were working for the Soviet Union.
The FBI had known for some time that the CIA was behind several "illegal acts" committed on its territory, and the CIA was aware that the FBI was behind several official denunciations that impeded its operations. The FBI bragged that its reports were more accurate and less hysterical than those of the CIA, while the CIA considered the FBI a bunch of choir boys.
When the CIA (which is prohibited by law from operating within the United States) extended its activities on American soil, setting up reception centers and training bases in several states, the resulting confusion and risk of infiltration led to encounters, protests, and finally to blows. Soon the two intelligence powers were setting traps for one another and organizing reprisals.
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