The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:34 am

The Search For Control

To maintain the CIA and the other branches of the intelligence establishment, the government spends about $4,000,000,000 a year. The exact figure is one of the most tightly held secrets of the government and it appears in none of the Federal budget documents, public or private. It is unknown, in fact, even to many of the key officials in the Invisible Government. Because the intelligence community is carefully fragmented, those in one branch find it difficult to estimate the budgets of the others.

All of the budgets are pulled together by the director of the International Division of the Budget Bureau. He is assisted by four experts, each of whom handles about $1,000,000,000 of the Invisible Government's money. One assistant checks on the National Security Agency, the second on the CIA, the third on the DIA and military intelligence, and the fourth on overhead reconnaissance.

All of the Invisible Government's hidden money is buried in the Defense Department budget, mainly in the multibillion-dollar weapons contracts, such as those for the Minuteman and Polaris missiles. The Comptroller of the Pentagon knows where the money is hidden, but so carefully is it camouflaged, even his closest assistants are unable to guess at the amount.

It is not startling, then, that even those at the very center of the Invisible Government vary in their estimates of what is being spent. In a private briefing for high-ranking military men in the summer of 1963 McCone offered a figure of $2,000,000,000 [i] and estimated that 100,000 persons were involved in intelligence work.

However, McCone appeared to be limiting his estimate to the money spent by the CIA and the other agencies on the more conventional forms of intelligence work. In addition, $2,000,000,000 is spent each year on electronic intelligence (the NSA and aerial spying). When the two forms of intelligence are included, the total budget reaches $4,000,000,000 and the personnel figure amounts to about 200,000.

It is often assumed that the National Security Council controls this vast intelligence establishment. But in practice much of the activity of the Invisible Government is never examined at NSC meetings. Nor is it disclosed to the United States Intelligence Board (which, for example, was not informed in advance of the Bay of Pigs).

The important decisions about the Invisible Government are made by the committee known as the Special Group. Although the composition of the committee has varied slightly, its membership has generally included the Director of Central Intelligence, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (or his deputy), and the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense. In the Kennedy and early Johnson Administrations, the presidential representative -- and key man -- on the Special Group was McGeorge Bundy. The others members were McCone, McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and U. Alexis Johnson, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

The Special Group was created early in the Eisenhower years under the secret Order 54/12. It was known in the innermost circle of the Eisenhower Administration as the "54/12 Group" and is still so called by a few insiders. The Special Group grew out of the "OCB luncheon group." [ii] It has operated for a decade as the hidden power Center of the Invisible Government. Its existence is virtually unknown outside the intelligence community and, even there, only a handful of men are aware of it.

The Special Group meets about once a week to make the crucial decisions -- those which are too sensitive or too divisive to be entrusted to USIB. The more grandiose of the Invisible Government's operations have been launched in this exclusive arena. It is here in this hidden corner of the massive governmental apparatus that the United States is regularly committed to policies which walk the tightrope between peace and war.

CIA men generally have the Special Group in mind when they insist that the agency has never set policy, but has only acted on higher authority.

"The facts are," Allen Dulles has declared, "that the CIA has never carried out any action of a political nature, given any support of any nature to any persons, potentates or movements, political or otherwise, without appropriate approval at a high political level in our government outside the CIA." 1

To the average citizen, Dulles' statement might logically conjure up a picture of the Cabinet, the National Security Councilor some special presidential commission meeting in solemn session to debate the wisdom of a dangerous clandestine operation.

But, in fact, some decisions of this type have been made by the Special Group in an informal way without the elaborate records and procedures of other high government committees. And these fateful decisions have been made without benefit of outside analysis. Little detached criticism has been brought to bear on the natural human tendency of the leaders of the Invisible Government to embark upon ventures which might prove their toughness, demonstrate their vision or expand their power.

The "euphoria of secrecy goes to the head," as C.P. Snow, the English scientist-novelist. has observed, and the Special Group has operated in an atmosphere of secrecy exceeding that of any other branch of the United States Government.

It is apparent, then, that the two presidential watchdog committees, the Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities of the Eisenhower Administration and the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, have had great difficulty getting to the bottom of things. Both committees were composed of part-time consultants who met only occasionally during the year.

The original committee had, in fact, been established by Eisenhower in 1956 at least partly to head off closer scrutiny of the Invisible Government. In 1955 the full Hoover Commission had recommended that such a presidential committee be established. But it had also proposed the creation of a Joint Congressional Committee on Foreign Intelligence.

The Eisenhower Administration compromised. It complied with the first and more innocuous of the recommendations, but opposed the Joint Congressional Committee, which was anathema to the CIA.

The Hoover Commission's Intelligence Task Force, headed by General Mark W. Clark, had submitted a much stronger recommendation. It had proposed a single watchdog commission composed of senators, congressmen, and presidential appointees.

"The Task Force ... is concerned," its report stated. "over the absence of satisfactory machinery for surveillance of the stewardship of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is making recommendations which it believes will provide the proper type of 'watchdog' commission as a means of re-establishing that relationship between the CIA and the Congress so essential to and characteristic of our democratic form of government."

The Task Force was critical in tone: "There is still much to be done by our intelligence community to bring its achievements up to an acceptable level.

"The glamour and excitement of some angles of our intelligence effort must not be permitted to overshadow other vital phases of the work or to cause neglect of primary functions. A majority of the Task Force is convinced that an internal reorganization of the CIA is necessary to give assurance that each of these functions gets adequate attention without diversionary interest." 2

Earlier studies of the CIA had been less critical. The 1949 Hoover Task Force, headed by Ferdinand Eberstadt. a Wall Street broker, found the CIA "sound in principle," although it recommended that "vigorous efforts be made to improve the internal structure ... and the quality of its product." 3

In 1954 a special presidential study group, led by General James H. Doolittle, said the CIA was doing a "creditable job." But it detected "important areas in which the CIA organization, administration and operations can and should be improved." 4

Inbetween, Allen Dulles surveyed the CIA for President Truman prior to joining the agency. But his report was kept secret.

By 1954, substantial pressure had built up in Congress for a closer scrutiny of the intelligence community. Mike Mansfield, then a freshman senator from Montana, submitted a resolution that would have carried out the Hoover Commission recommendation by creating a Joint Committee on the Central Intelligence Agency. In its final form, the resolution called for a twelve-man committee, six from the Senate and six from the House, and for the appropriation of $250,000 for staff expenditures during the first year.

Thirty-four senators joined Mansfield in sponsoring the resolution. But by the time the proposal came to a vote on April 11, 1956, fourteen of these sponsors had reversed themselves, and the resolution was defeated, fifty-nine to twenty-seven. Thirteen of those who had changed their minds were Republicans evidently reflecting White House pressure. Many of the Democrats who voted against the resolution clearly were worried about disturbing Senator Richard B. Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and other Democratic titans who opposed the idea.

Mansfield's language in introducing the resolution was not calculated to please the conservative inner club of the Senate, which enjoyed special relations with the Invisible Government.

"An urgent need exists" Mansfield said, "for regular and responsible Congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such scrutiny is essential to the success of our foreign policy, to the preservation of our democratic processes and to the security of the intelligence agency itself ...

"If we fail to establish some sort of permanent, continuing link between Congress and the CIA, the only result will be growing suspicion ... In the first place, the whole concept of peacetime foreign intelligence operations has been alien to the American tradition ...

"Our form of government ... is based on a system of checks and balances. If this system gets seriously out of balance at any point the whole system is jeopardized and the way is opened for the growth of tyranny ...

"CIA is freed from practically every ordinary form of Congressional check. Control of its expenditures is exempted from the provisions of the law which prevent financial abuses in other government agencies. Its appropriations are hidden in allotments to other agencies ...

"I agree that an intelligence agency must maintain complete secrecy to be effective. However, there is a profound difference between an essential degree of secrecy to achieve a specific purpose and secrecy for the mere sake of secrecy. Once secrecy becomes sacrosanct, it invites abuse.

"If we accept this idea of secrecy for secrecy's sake, we will have no way of knowing whether we have a fine intelligence service or a very poor one. Secrecy now beclouds everything about the CIA -- its cost, its efficiency, its successes and its failures." 5

As the Mansfield resolution approached a vote in April of 1956, the powers-that-be in the Senate massed their forces in a counter-attack.

"It would be more desirable," Russell declared, "to abolish the CIA and close it up, lock, stock and barrel, than to adopt any such theory as that all the members of the Congress of the United States are entitled to know the details of all the activities of this far-flung organization." 6

Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, the former Democratic Vice-President, declared: "The information I received as a member of the National Security Council, in my capacity as Vice-President, was so confidential that I would lose my right arm before I would divulge it to anyone, even to members of my own family ...

"Some of the information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency and laid before the National Security Council itself was so confidential and secret that the very portfolios in which it was contained were under lock and key. The members of the National Security Council were not even permitted to take those folders and portfolios to their homes. They had to be unlocked in the presence of the other members ...

"To say that now we should establish a Joint Committee to pry into and look into secret documents, to submit them before the Joint Committee, and to make them public seems to me incredible." 7

Russell also raised the specter of critical national secrets leaking out of the Joint Committee. He contended that the very creation of the committee would increase "the hazards to the lives of those who work for the CIA, and dry up sources of information, which are vital to the national security." He insisted that the CIA was already subjected to adequate scrutiny by members of the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees. [iii]

"Although Mr. Allen W. Dulles has been before us" Russell said, "and although we have asked him very searching questions about some activities which it almost chills the marrow of a man to hear about, he has never failed to answer us forthrightly and frankly in response to any question we have asked of him." 8

Republican Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts said the CIA subcommittee met with CIA officials "at least twice a year" [iv] and that the witnesses stated their willingness to answer all questions.

"The difficulty in connection with asking questions and obtaining information," Saltonstall remarked, "is that we might obtain information which I personally would rather not have, unless it was essential for me as a member of Congress to have it." 9

Nevertheless, Saltonstall would call his close friend, Allen Dulles, from time to time to get a personal explanation of some CIA operation.

The CIA's view on whether there should be more Congressional scrutiny was stated officially in a letter to Mansfield from General Cabell on September 4, 1953. "It is our opinion," he wrote, "that, from our point of view, the present ties with Congress are adequate."

Allen Dulles agreed: "Any public impression that the Congress exerts no power over CIA is quite mistaken. Control of funds gives a control over the scope of operations -- how many people CIA can employ, how much it can do and to some extent what it can do ...

"The chairman of the House [Appropriations] Subcommittee [on the CIA) is Clarence Cannon, and a more careful watchdog of the public treasury can hardly be found." 10

Whether or not Dulles' judgment held true for other budgetary matters, the eighty-three-year-old Cannon had no great reputation on his subcommittee as a "careful watchdog" of the CIA. In fact, he was such a good friend and great admirer of Dulles that much of the secret CIA hearings during Dulles' tenure were taken up with mutual congratulations. CIA officials came armed with thick black volumes, but the other members of the House Subcommittee [v] never had time to probe deeply into the agency's activities. Some of the members displayed annoyance but could do little about it in view of Cannon's absolute control over the committee.

Nevertheless, Cannon once sought to have the CIA checked by the General Accounting Office. The request threw the CIA into consternation: should it turn him down and lose a good friend or cooperate and risk the disclosure of operational secrets? The decision was to go along with Cannon but to steer the GAO into a non-sensitive area. The auditors were taken to the facilities of the CIA's broadcast information service which monitors the radio programs of foreign countries, particularly the Communist bloc. The GAO spent a year at the foreign broadcast service, but to the satisfaction of the CIA, turned in a harmless set of recommendations.

"They can't find the side of a barn," said one contented CIA man.

GAG men were not inclined to dispute the assessment. They despaired of the practicality of auditing covert operations where, as a GAO official put it, "they payoff some guy under a rock in the desert."

Prior to 1954 the GAO kept two of its men on permanent assignment with the CIA as consultants. When a problem arose in a non-sensitive area, the CIA accountants would ask the GAO men to judge whether they were acting properly. Taking the facts as presented to them, the GAO men would then refer the problem to the Comptroller General's office for approval.

Since the procedure amounted to a certification of CIA practices without the authority to investigate them, Joseph Campbell withdrew the GAO men from the CIA when he took over as Comptroller General in 1954.

Still, the GAO continued to bump into an occasional CIA project while investigating large defense contracts. But under the 1949 law, which removed Congress' power to audit the CIA, the GAO was prohibited from looking further, even if it had suspicions that the contractor might be juggling non-CIA funds.

Congress' difficulties with the intelligence community have been matched by those of American ambassadors in foreign countries. In 1959 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee compiled a booklet of anonymous quotations from retired Foreign Service officers. One of them noted:

"Every senior officer of the Department of State and every senior officer of the Foreign Service has heard something of CIA's subversive efforts in foreign countries and probably most of them have some authentic information about CIA operations of this nature in some particular case. Unfortunately, most of these activities seem to have been blundering affairs, and most, if not all of them, seem to have resulted to the disadvantage of the United States and sometimes in terrible failure ... The situation is exacerbated by the fact that in most diplomatic and consular establishments abroad espionage agents of the CIA are stationed masquerading as diplomatic and consular officers." 11

Several ambassadors complained about being used as fronts for espionage activities. But the CIA insisted that embassy cover was essential to its work. Without the immunity accorded to diplomatic property, the CIA's codes, files and communications would not be secure. The CIA maintains its own codes and an independent communications system (as does the Pentagon through the Defense Communications Agency), and unless CIA agents choose to tell an ambassador what they are up to and what they are reporting to Washington, he has no independent means for finding out.

Friction between Foreign Service men and CIA operatives became so pronounced by the end of the Eisenhower Administration, that President Eisenhower issued an executive order in November of 1960, stating: "The several chiefs of the United States diplomatic missions in foreign countries, as the representatives of the President and acting on his behalf, shall have and exercise, to the extent permitted by law and in accordance with instructions as the President may from time to time promulgate, affirmative responsibility for coordination and supervision over the carrying out by agencies of their functions in the respective countries."

The Eisenhower order seemed, on the surface, to re-establish the ambassador's supremacy over all United States agencies operating overseas. But many were troubled by the possibility of secret "instructions" to the CIA circumventing the ambassador's authority.

When President Kennedy entered office, he took prompt action to reaffirm the powers of the State Department and the ambassadors. On May 29, 1961, Kennedy sent a letter to all ambassadors:

You are in charge of the entire United States diplomatic mission, and I shall expect you to supervise all of its operations. The mission includes not only the personnel of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, but also the representatives of all other United States agencies which have programs or activities in [name of country]. I shall give you full support and backing in carrying out your assignment.

Needless to say, the representatives of other agencies are expected to communicate directly with their offices here in Washington, and in the event of a decision by you in which they do not concur, they may ask to have the decision reviewed by a higher authority in Washington.

However, it is their responsibility to keep you fully informed of their views and activities and to abide by your decisions unless in some particular instance you and they are notified to the contrary.


The moving force behind Kennedy's letter was Chester Bowles, then Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. In the summer of 1961 Bowles set out on a round-the-world trip to explain the new arrangement. A fifteen-man team, including leading representatives of the State Department, the CIA and the AID, accompanied Bowles to seven regional meetings with ambassadors and their staffs.

Bowles told the meetings that the ambassadors were to be kept fully informed on all CIA operations and were to receive copies of all CIA messages to Washington. At each meeting the CIA men would express skepticism: What, they asked, about situations in which ambassadors do not understand the CIA's special problems?

Let us know, Bowles replied, and we'll get new ones.

Do we tell the ambassador the sources of our information? the CIA men asked incredulously. Yes, Bowles answered, the ambassador should be in a position to cross-check information if he runs across one of the informants at a diplomatic function.

The CIA appealed for permission to circumvent the ambassador in "overriding circumstances." But Bowles said no, and a year later, when he made a check of each United States embassy, he received not a single complaint or comment from the CIA. The new system, Bowles concluded, was working well.

But a different impression was gained by a staff of experts sent on a world-wide inspection late in 1962 by the Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations of the Senate Government Operations Committee. The experts concluded that the Kennedy letter was a "shadow" and had not been interpreted as covering the CIA. Ambassadors were still unable to give orders to the CIA or to stop an agency operation. The only evident change was that the ambassador now appeared to be in a better position to protest about a CIA program and delay it until a decision came back from Washington.

These conclusions were watered down in the staff report published by the subcommittee in January, 1963. But the report did point out that the military services and the CIA tend to "take a restricted view of the ambassador's right to interpose himself" between them and their superiors in Washington.

And in a cautious observation that might equally have applied to the Invisible Government's relationship with the government as a whole, the report said:

"To a degree the primacy of the ambassador is a polite fiction."

_______________

Notes:

i. Significantly, many CIA officials estimate that the Soviet Union spends $2,000,000,000 a year on its spy apparatus. On the other hand, Soviet Secret Police Chief Alexander N. Shelepin estimated in 1959 that the CIA spent $1,500,000,000 a year and employed 20,000 persons.

ii. The OCB, the Operations Coordinating Board, was composed of the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the President's Special Assistant (National Security Affairs ), and the directors of CIA, USIA, and the old International Cooperation Administration. They were supposed to make sure the President's decisions were carried out in their departments. The OCB was abolished by President Kennedy in his first month in office.

iii. In the 88th Congress the CIA subcommittee in the Senate was composed of Russell, Harry Flood Byrd, Virginia Democrat, John Stennis, Mississippi Democrat, and Leverett Saltonstall, Massachusetts Republican, all members of the Armed Services Committee; and Carl Hayden, Arizona Democrat and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Milton R. Young, North Dakota Republican and Appropriations Committee member. A. Willis Robertson, Virginia Democrat and Appropriations Committee member, joined the CIA subcommittee on occasion.

iv. In a debate on August 14, 1963, Representative Walter Norblad, the Oregon Republican, said the House Armed Services Subcommittee on the CIA (of which he was a former member) "met annually one time a year for a period of two hours in which we accomplished virtually nothing."

v. In the 88th Congress they were Democrats George Mahon of Texas and Harry R. Sheppard of California, and Republicans Gerald Ford of Michigan and Harold C. Ostertag of New York.

In the House there was also a CIA subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. It was composed of Carl Vinson, Georgia Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee; L. Mendel Rivers, South Carolina Democrat; F. Edward Hebert, Louisiana Democrat; Melvin Price, Illinois Democrat; Charles E. Bennett, Florida Democrat; George Huddleston, Jr., Alabama Democrat; Leslie C. Arends, Illinois Republican; William G. Bray, Indiana Republican; Bob Wilson, California Republican; and Frank C. Osmers, Jr., New Jersey Republican.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:34 am

Purity in the Peace Corps

THE CONFLICT in the field between the ambassador and the intelligence operator is reflected on a larger scale in the frequent clashes in Washington between the State Department and the CIA. The uneasiness felt in other government agencies over the role of the CIA runs deeper than that, however.

This uneasiness is little known outside of the government, and it is almost never talked about. But the Peace Corps provides the best example.

During the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy had promised, if elected, to establish a Peace Corps. He kept his word, created the new agency by an executive order in March, 1961, and asked his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, Jr., to head it.

Shriver accepted, but he very quickly concluded that the Peace Corps, with its thousands of young volunteers dispersed over the globe, could well look like an all but irresistible "cover" to an intelligence agency always on the alert for new ways to disguise its people. At the same time, Shriver knew that the Peace Corps, because it would offer genuine help to the emerging nations of the world, would be an equally tempting target for Communist propaganda, which would seek at all costs to discredit it.

Therefore, Shriver privately proclaimed his determination to take every possible step to divorce the Peace Corps from even the faintest smell of intelligence work. He was well aware that even one "spy" incident involving a volunteer might destroy the Corps.

An anecdote that went the rounds of the executive suite of the Peace Corps at the time of its birth is revealing. It had the then Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, advising Shriver to "beware the three C's -- Communism, Cuties, and the CIA."

In the spring of 1961 Shriver made a trip seeking to persuade neutral nations to accept Peace Corpsmen. He discovered that the leaders of those countries were blunt in asking whether he would let the Corps be used as a cover for intelligence agents. Shriver replied just as bluntly that he was doing everything he could within the government to make sure that the CIA stayed out of his agency. He also promised to assist individual countries in any security checks they might care to make.

As early as March 16, 1961, Radio Moscow was attacking the Peace Corps as a plan for "the collection of espionage information for Allen Dulles' agency." On May 11 Tass, the Soviet news agency, sent out a dispatch in English to Europe, headlined "Peace Corps Head Shriver CIA Agent."

As a first step in his campaign to prevent the Peace Corps from becoming tarred as an instrument of Cold War intelligence-gathering, Shriver went directly to President Kennedy. "Jack Kennedy gave me his promise," Shriver later told a friend, "that there would be no CIA agents in the Peace Corps."

Upon graduating in 1949, Coffin entered the Union Theological Seminary, where he remained for a year, until the outbreak of the Korean War reignited his interest in fighting against communism. He joined the CIA as a case officer in 1950 (his brother-in-law Franklin Lindsay had been head of the Office of Policy Coordination at the OSS, one of the predecessors of the CIA) spending three years in West Germany recruiting anti-Soviet Russian refugees and training them how to undermine Stalin's regime....

Approached by Sargent Shriver in 1961 to run the first training programs for the Peace Corps, Coffin took up the task and took a temporary leave from Yale, working to develop a rigorous training program modeled on Outward Bound and supervising the building of a training camp in Puerto Rico. He used his pulpit as a platform for like-minded crusaders, hosting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela, among others.

-- William Sloane Coffin, by Wikipedia


President Kennedy followed up this verbal assurance to Shriver by issuing orders to Allen Dulles and later to his successor, John McCone, which continued in effect after President Johnson took office. In addition, Shriver met with Dulles and later with McCone and obtained their guarantee that the CIA would stay away from the Peace Corps.

But the problem was more subtle than that. Shriver's dilemma was a peculiar one, bred of the Cold War and inconceivable in the America of even twenty years before. Could he be certain that the White House attitude would be reflected all along the line? Could he be sure, for example, that a lower-echelon CIA official might not quietly attempt, despite everything, to plant agents in the Peace Corps, in the honest belief that he was acting in some higher national interest?

Shriver must have decided he could not be sure of the answers to these delicate questions, for he did not rely on presidential assurances alone. A careful screening process was set up. It was designed, of course, to catch any Communist or security risk who might try to get into the Peace Corps. But it was also designed -- hopefully -- to spot any CIA "volunteer" before he could unpack his cloak and dagger.

It might come as a jolt to most Americans to know that one agency of the United States Government feels it must protect itself against infiltration in its ranks by another agency of the United States Government. But the Peace Corps has taken elaborate steps to prevent just that.

Shriver designated William Delano, the Peace Corps' young general counsel, to ride herd on the problem and make sure no intelligence men slipped through the net. As insurance, Shriver laid down a firm rule. No one with any intelligence background, even years ago, would be accepted.

As Peace Corps officials soon discovered, there was a hitch. Openly acknowledged "overt" employees of the CIA are allowed to say so when they seek a new job. But covert employees of the CIA are not permitted to reveal it, even years later on a government job application form. They might put down the name of a commercial cover company or perhaps some other branch of the government for which they had ostensibly worked.

And a routine Civil Service check, Peace Corps officials realized, would not reveal whether applicants had been or were still covert CIA agents. Some applicants, unaware of Shriver's policy, innocently listed such past jobs as "CIA secretary, summer of 1951." They were immediately eliminated.

Others, more sophisticated, sought to fuzz their past employment by listing "U. S. Government" to cover a period of a year or two. But the would-be volunteers, in these cases, were questioned by Civil Service investigators, who naturally demanded to know more details.

One high Peace Corps official estimated that ten to twenty ex-CIA employees who had listed "U.S. Government" on their applications have been turned down since the Peace Corps began.

Screening out persons with a background in intelligence was only part of the problem. The Peace Corps also decided that it had to guard against the possibility of the CIA approaching a volunteer after he had been accepted into the Corps.

During orientation courses for volunteers, it became standard practice for a Peace Corps instructor to get up and pose the following question:

"Suppose a man asks you to have a cup of coffee with him and he identifies himself as a CIA agent. He says he doesn't want you to spy, but that he'd like you to get together with him and just chat every couple of weeks, and perhaps tell him a couple of things you've learned. What would be your reaction?"

Most of the volunteers replied they would have no part of any free-lance spying of this sort.

"Just so that no one will have any doubts about it," the instructor would then add, "if such a solicitation is made, you are to report it to the Peace Corps country representative within ten minutes, if you can get to him that quickly, because the CIA man would be defying the President's order to Dulles and McCone. Furthermore, the CIA man will be kicked out of the country faster than you can see, if you report it."

Because of this orientation, Peace Corps officials felt it was unlikely that their volunteers would be solicited to do any intelligence work. Still, one official admitted, the real problem would be "covert people trying to infiltrate. I don't see any way we can spot them. It would be a fluke. The more deliberate the attempt, the harder it would be to find."

Shriver's concern over keeping his agency "clean" was reinforced in September, 1961, when Secretary of the Army Elvis J. Stahr made a speech suggesting that an Army Peace Corps be established.

"We must plan so that we can use our tools in cold war as well as hot war and employ them anywhere in the world, " said Stahr. General Barksdale Hamlett, Army Deputy Chief of Staff, gave added details of the plan, which seemed to envision use of the Army in worthy social projects in underdeveloped countries -- but linked to paramilitary activities.

To Shriver, it smacked of precisely the sort of military and intelligence overtones he was trying so hard to avoid. Shriver objected strenuously. A high-level meeting was held at the Pentagon, attended by Stahr, Shriver, General Hamlett and a platoon of beribboned Army brass.

The generals at the meeting insisted that the Army Peace Corps would have no relation to any intelligence work. At that, Lee St. Lawrence, a Peace Corps official, spoke up. St. Lawrence had served with the Agency for International Development in Southeast Asia and was familiar with CIA operations in that part of the world.

He asked the generals to name the officers who would be in charge of the proposed "Army Peace Corps" in Southeast Asia. When they did, St. Lawrence singled out some as CIA men. He offered to reel off the names of others, but there was no need. The project was dropped.

Page ten of the eleven-paged DACOR Bulletin published in March includes a fifteen-line obituary that I read on the web, never having received one from DACOR:

Lee St. Lawrence, a retired Foreign Service Reserve Officer, died on November 23rd 2006 at a hospital near his home in Deal, Kent, England. Joseph Lee St. Lawrence was born in Massachusetts. He served in the U.S. Army Overseas between 1943 and 1946. Following his Honorable discharge, he worked as a military intelligence investigator in Paris in 1946 and as an instructor in a U.S. Government Intelligence School in Germany 1947 and 1951-1953. He returned to Paris in 1953 to serve as an interpreter translator for the U.S. Army for two years.

Mr. Lawrence joined the International Cooperation Administration, a bureau antecedent of the Agency for International Development in 1955. He was assigned to the ICA mission in Belgrade. In 1957 he was transferred to Vientiane. He returned to AID headquarters in 1960. Six years later he was posted to the AID mission in Bangkok as a regional development advisor; in 1967, he was detailed to the Embassy; in 1971 he became a counselor for regional development/economic affairs. His postings after 1974 and the date of retirement are unavailable; according to his long-time friend, Prof. Pierre Delva, he retired with ambassadorial rank. Mr. St. Lawrence moved to Deal in the 1980's. His wife, Ann St. Lawrence died in the 1980s.

He leaves his companion, Mme Corrine Baudon, of their home in Deal, and a brother (Kindness of Prof Delva)

Lee St. Lawrence: The Man Behind the Peace Corps (Excerpt), by Pierre L. Delva; Joan Campbel-Delva


But Communist attacks on Shriver and the Peace Corps continued. United States intelligence obtained, from Eastern Europe, what appeared to be a guide for satellite nations on how to phrase propaganda against the Peace Corps. The document stressed the general line that the Corps was a CIA operation and that volunteers were selected by the CIA. Peace Corps officials believed that it served as a primer for subsequent propaganda emanating from various points in the Communist world.

Certainly the Russian and Communist Chinese attacks followed a familiar pattern. In March, 1962, for example, Radio Moscow broadcast in Hindi to India: "U.S. agents are sent to Afro-Asian countries under the U.S. Peace Corps label. The plan to organize the corps was jointly prepared by the U.S. State Department, Pentagon and CIA. Director of the Corps, Shriver, is an old employee of the CIA."

Radio Peking joined in, and so did Fidel Castro. Radio Havana broadcast attacks on the Peace Corps that paralleled the Moscow barrage.

Also in Havana, the newspaper Roy warned Venezuela to "watch out" for the Peace Corps. "These Corps are land U-2s. Their mission consists in poking their noses into all places where meek rulers open the door for them."

On March 27, 1963, a Polish paper published an article attacking the Peace Corps by charging that girl volunteers were Mata Haris. It ran photographs of girls training, with the caption: "The Americans consider all means acceptable. Where other methods do not succeed, sex [i] may be very useful. Girl members of the Corps on the exercise field."

About the same time, Tass picked up the sex theme and charged that a wicked Peace Corps woman teacher in Somalia tried to teach pupils the "indecent movements" of the twist.

By the spring of 1963, United States analysts concluded that the Soviet Union, having had little success with this loud, public campaign against the Peace Corps, had embarked on a simultaneous behind-the-scenes campaign against the Corps. In Ghana, for example, the Soviet ambassador succeeded in persuading the government of President Kwame Nkrumah to impose some restrictions on the Peace Corps. And in May, 1963, the Ghanaian Times, regarded as the unofficial spokesman for Nkrumah, openly attacked the Corps as an alleged CIA tool.

There seemed no likelihood that the public attacks would stop, but their very intensity logically dictated that Shriver, more than ever, would want to keep the Peace Corps pristine. A spy incident involving a volunteer would give the Russians a propaganda field day and could possibly wreck the Peace Corps, and Shriver's political career as well.

The Peace Corps, it should be noted in fairness to the CIA, maintains it does not know of a single case in which it could be sure of an attempted infiltration by an intelligence agent seeking to use the Corps as cover.

But the fact that Shriver felt he had to take the astonishing precautions he did, speaks volumes. It reflects the atmosphere of mistrust that is felt, rightly or wrongly, by many overt officials of the United States Government toward their less visible colleagues. The distrust is not universal, however. Some unlikely departments of the government have become vehicles for secret operations of various shadings. The story of one of these begins in a house in Cuba.

_______________

Notes:

i. Actually, the Peace Corps has rather strict rules about sex. "In-service marriages of single volunteers must have the prior approval of the Peace Corps representative in charge of the project," a Peace Corps booklet warns sternly. "Approval will not be granted when the future spouse has come from the U.S. or from some other country for the purpose of marrying a volunteer ... married couples who find they are to become parents must notify their Peace Corps representative as quickly as possible."
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:35 am

A Gray Operation

Outside the high garden wall of the decaying villa in Miramar, on the outskirts of Havana, guards armed with Tommy guns patrolled back and forth.

Inside, James Donovan, the remarkable, soft-spoken New York attorney, picked up the telephone and asked the Cuban operator to put him through to a number in the United States.

He took out a black wallet, of the type that was large enough for foreign bills, and reached into an apparently empty pouch. From a concealed pocket in the wallet he pulled out a typewritten sheet of onionskin paper.

On it, down the left-hand side, were key words like "negotiations." On the right side were various phrases such as "1 am meeting with" and then a list of various people, including the name "Fidel." The sheet also contained what appeared to be a list of stocks.

By ordering his "broker" to "sell Quaker City" and by using other innocuous key words, Donovan, through his code sheet, was able to convey to the CIA men on the line in the United States the real progress of his negotiations to ransom the lives of more than 1,000 prisoners.

James Donovan was on his most important mission. He was playing for high stakes -- the freedom of the 1,113 survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The men were captives in the jails of Fidel Castro.

Donovan was a silver-haired, forty-six-year-old former OSS man, short but powerfully built. In February, 1962, on the bridge in Berlin, he had traded the Soviet master spy Rudolf Abel (whom he defended five years earlier in Federal Court) for the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Yale student Frederic L. Pryor, held on a charge of espionage by the East Germans. It was the most spectacular spy swap in the history of the Cold War.

Donovan's Cuban adventure began a few months later, early in June, 1962, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent to him a delegation of Cubans made up of survivors of the Bay of Pigs brigade and their families.

Up to that time, sixty prisoners had been ransomed for a pledge of cash, but efforts to free the rest had failed in June, 1961, when negotiations between Castro and a Tractors for Freedom Committee collapsed. The committee, sponsored by the Kennedy Administration, had been unable to reach agreement with Castro on the dictator's continually shifting offers to trade the prisoners for 500 tractors or bulldozers.

Donovan, after listening to the pleas of his visitors, agreed to become the general counsel to the group. It was called the Cuban Families Committee for Liberation of Prisoners of War, Inc., a charitable corporation that had been granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service.

On August 29, 1962, Donovan went to Cuba for his first talks with Castro. He stayed at the crumbling villa in Miramar and conferred with Castro at the Presidential Palace in Havana. He made it clear he would offer drugs and baby foods for the men, but no cash or tractors. Castro agreed to negotiate on this basis, provided the Cuban Families Committee came up with the $2,900,000 it had pledged in return for the sixty prisoners released the previous April.

Donovan returned to New York and visited John E. McKeen, the president of Charles Pfizer Company, who lived in the penthouse of Donovan's apartment building near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They called in John T. Connor, head of Merck, Sharp & Dohme, another friend of Donovan. The executives of the two drug companies offered to donate medicines to help Donovan get the men out.

The CIA separately approached the drug industry trade association, to explore the chances of large- scale donations by manufacturers.

In the meantime, Donovan had entered the political arena. On September 18, shortly after his return from Cuba, Donovan won the Democratic nomination for United States Senate. His opponent was the Republican incumbent, Senator Jacob K. Javits.

On October 2, the drug-company pledges in his pocket, Donovan returned to Havana, confident he could reach agreement with Castro. The Pfizer Company quietly began moving $2,000,000 worth of drugs in refrigerator cars to Idlewild International Airport. The United States Government began making preparations to receive the influx of prisoners in Miami.

It was on this second trip that Castro agreed to trade the men for baby foods and medicines. All was going well except for a painful attack of bursitis in Donovan's right shoulder that forced him to fly to Miami briefly for treatment.

He returned to Havana to continue his talks with Castro, but back in the United States there were charges that Donovan was seeking to make political capital out of his role as Cuban negotiator. And some members of Congress said that the United States ought not to be dickering with Castro at a time when it was asking other countries to cut off trade.

The White House refused to say whether any government funds would be used to ransom the men. It insisted Donovan was acting as a private attorney but said he was keeping President Kennedy advised of his activities. Donovan returned from Cuba on October 11.

Three days later a U-2 plane flying secretly over western Cuba took a photograph of a Soviet mobile medium-range missile site.

The Cuban missile crisis was on. The world moved close to nuclear war during the latter half of October. Against this background of tension it looked as though Donovan's chances of reaching an agreement to free the men had been shattered. He suffered a personal, although not unexpected, blow when he lost the election on November 6 to Senator Javits.

By late November the situation was this:

Donovan still had Castro's general agreement to a swap. But now in the wake of the missile crisis, the drug industry was unwilling to take the risk of donating medicines to Castro unless the Kennedy Administration made it publicly clear that the deal was in the national interest. The drug firms, already hit hard by the Senate investigation of their high prices, had no desire to bring a new wave of public disapproval down upon themselves.

On November 30 a meeting was held at the Justice Department of top aides to Robert Kennedy and officials of the Internal Revenue Service, the State Department and the CIA (including Lawrence R. Houston, the general counsel of the CIA, Donovan's CIA contact in the Powers-Abel trade). Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Assistant Attorney General Louis F. Oberdorfer represented the Justice Department. Robert Hurwitch spoke for the State Department.

The high-level meeting concluded that Castro's demand of $53,000,000 in drugs would cost only $17,000,000 at wholesale U.S. prices. It was also decided to study the tax angle involved in possible contributions of drugs by the companies. It was agreed that a memorandum would be prepared over the weekend to be ready for Robert Kennedy on Monday December 3. [i] In the meantime, a drug-industry representative was contacted informally.

On Monday morning the New York Herald Tribune published a front-page story by Warren Rogers, Jr., stating that the President felt a "moral obligation" to free the men. It was the kind of reassurance the drug companies had been looking for. Donovan's phone began to ring in Brooklyn with additional pledges of drugs from the industry.

In Washington, Robert Kennedy called on the President at the White House, and at noon the Attorney General phoned Oberdorfer to give him the green light to go ahead with the operation. The American Red Cross then agreed to accept the drugs as contributions to charity and to deliver them to Havana.

The next day Donovan slipped into Washington to confer with Robert Kennedy. On December 7 the Attorney General met with officials of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. He told the drug manufacturers that the Bay of Pigs invasion had been launched by the United States, that the plan had been started by the Eisenhower Administration and continued by the Kennedy Administration, and that both the nation and the government had a moral obligation to get the men out.

Robert Kennedy talked about the courage of forty members of the brigade who had escaped and crossed the Caribbean in an open boat. He went on to say that the United States could not directly conduct negotiations with Cuba because it would be "misunderstood" by the world and would be a diplomatic disaster if the deal failed. He said that all departments had received a list of the drugs Castro wanted and that none were considered strategic.

Finally, the Attorney General assured the companies that the sight of the returning prisoners would still any criticism of the drug companies for contributing to Castro. He made it clear that contributions were voluntary.

He then ordered Oberdorfer to devote his full time to the project. And on December 9, Robert Kennedy gave the same talk to a group of baby-food manufacturers.

Oberdorfer's office in the Justice Department became the command post for "Project X." Additional telephones were installed. A group of private attorneys, including John E. Nolan, Jr., and E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., were brought in to help. (Both later joined the administration.)

From Oberdorfer's office, the private attorneys (and two Justice Department lawyers) now began telephone solicitation of the drug companies. The Justice Department attorneys did not identify themselves as government employees, but said they were calling as representatives of the Cuban Families Committee.

The Justice Department team obtained clearances from the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Interstate Commerce Commission to permit charitable contribution of air and surface transportation to haul the drugs to Miami. The CIA, the Air Force, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare began making arrangements to receive and process the prisoners in Florida. The Commerce Department granted export licenses for the food and drugs.

During this time Donovan told the Justice Department that Castro was demanding a guarantee of full payment of the ransom; otherwise he would hold back the brigade officers until the last payment was made. Katzenbach flew to Montreal on December 14 but the Royal Bank of Canada balked at issuing a letter of credit without some formal guarantees by American banks. The Justice Department official flew back to New York. The Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York and the Bank of America agreed to participate; special meetings of their boards of directors were hastily convened to approve the plan.

To complete the financial arrangements, the Continental Insurance Company wrote out a $53,000,000 performance bond without charge, guaranteeing that the Red Cross would meet its obligations to deliver the drugs to Cuba.

Meanwhile, the drugs contributed to "Project X" by the manufacturers were flooding into Miami and creating a monster job of cataloging and bookkeeping at Opa-locka (ironically, the same CIA air base used as a jumping-off point for the Bay of Pigs trainees). The CIA provided a pharmacist, Stephen Aldrich, who helped log the drugs as they arrived in Florida.

On December 16 Donovan began his final mission. He stopped off in Washington to confer with officials and then went on to Miami, where he disappeared. The press could not find him, and with good reason.

Donovan stayed in a CIA house in Miami on December 16 and 17, telephoning to Havana. About 9:00 P.M., December 17, Donovan called Washington to say that he had arranged to go to Havana in the morning. He also reported that one of Castro's negotiators had a sick child who needed a certain medicine immediately.

Katzenbach called Walter Reed Hospital and got ten vials of the medicine. Shortly after midnight Oberdorfer, his assistant Frank Michelman, John Nolan and a CIA attorney flew to Miami from Washington, taking the medicine along.

They did not arrive at the CIA "safe house" until 5:00 A.M. on December 18. There, Donovan received a final pre-dawn briefing. Then he flew into Havana. Nolan stayed at the house, helping to man the CIA telephones. The rest of the team flew back to Washington.

Two days later Donovan returned briefly to Miami. Then he flew back to Havana, taking with him Dr. Leonard Scheele, the former Surgeon General of the United States. On December 21 Donovan and Castro signed a Memorandum of Agreement. But Castro was wary of Donovan's representations. Donovan suggested that Castro's aides inspect some of the drugs.

Shortly after midnight three Cuban Red Cross officials in olive drab flew secretly into Miami. They were met by Dr. Scheele and Barrett Prettyman, shown the supplies at Opa-locka and then taken to Port Everglades to inspect the drugs being loaded on the African Pilot, a ship donated by the Committee of the American Steamship Lines.

The Cubans then adjourned to a Howard Johnson's motel and said to Prettyman they wanted to remain for the day. It was now 5:00 A.M., December 22. Nolan and Prettyman were alarmed at what would happen if the press learned that Castro emissaries were holed up in a Florida motel. One of the Cuban Red Cross men smoked big cigars and, in his olive uniform, did not project the image of a man of mercy. Nolan and Prettyman finally prevailed on the Cubans to fly back to Havana, which they did at 9:00 A.M.

That same day the African Pilot sailed for Havana with the first shipload of drugs. Early on Sunday, December 23, Nolan and Prettyman joined Donovan in Havana. The African Pilot docked that afternoon. Castro met the ship.

The prisoner exchange seemed to be proceeding smoothly. At 5:00 P.M. the first plane left the San Antonio de los Banos airport for Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami. It landed in Florida an hour and five minutes later. All told, four planeloads and a total of 426 prisoners left Cuba by nightfall.

But, in Havana, it had become obvious to Donovan that the airlift would be halted by Castro unless the Cuban Families Committee came up with the $2,900,000 that had been pledged as ransom for the sixty wounded prisoners released in April before Donovan entered the picture.

At 2:00 A.M. on Monday, December 24, Nolan flew to Miami. He placed a 5:00 A.M. phone call to Robert Kennedy in Washington. Nolan made it clear that unless the money was raised by three o'clock that afternoon, the deal would collapse.

"What are you going to tell Jim Donovan?" Robert Kennedy asked.

"I'm going to tell him you're going to get the money," Nolan replied.

There was a pause. Then Robert Kennedy said: "Have a nice trip back."

Nolan flew back to Havana. The Attorney General called Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston, who pledged $1,000,000. Robert Kennedy also called General Lucius Clay, who was a sponsor of the Cuban Families Committee.

Clay borrowed the remaining $1,900,000 on his own signature, then solicited contributions from American business firms to cover that amount. Texaco, Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Ford Motor Company Fund each contributed $100,000.

In Cuba, that Monday, two more planeloads of prisoners were permitted to take off. Then Castro stalled.

First he staged a military air show at San Antonio de los Banos to tie up the airport. Then, about 1:00 P.M., Castro halted all flights until he received word about the money. Late in the afternoon Castro was assured the Royal Bank of Canada had deposited it in Montreal. Donovan and Castro then met at the Canadian consul's office to accept the financial guarantees.

At 9:35 P.M. the last of the planes carrying the returning prisoners touched down at Homestead Air Force Base. Aboard was James Donovan, a quiet American -- his mission accomplished.

For each of the returning prisoners, the routine was the same. Clean clothes, a meal and then a bus trip to Dinner Key Auditorium, where their families and friends were waiting. There, they marched between double lines of fellow members of Brigade 2506 as a band played the march from The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

It was Christmas Eve, 1962.

There were some people who were not content to accept the prisoner exchange as a humanitarian act arranged by a private citizen. Months later, in June, 1963, all thirteen Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee called for a Congressional inquiry into Donovan's role. They charged that many aspects of the exchange "remain baffling."

Donovan replied: "I was a private citizen acting on behalf of the Cuban Families Committee."

It was not, of course, quite as simple as that, as has been shown. Although both Donovan and the White House took this position (for reasons Robert Kennedy had explained privately to the drug industry on December 7, 1962), the fact is that no fewer than fourteen branches of the government participated in the complex deal: the CIA, the Air Force, the Departments of Health, Education and Welfare, Justice, Defense, Commerce, Agriculture, Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, the White House, Immigration, the CAB, the ICC and the State Department.

In January, 1963, the Agriculture Department gave 5,000,000 pounds of dried milk to the Red Cross for shipment to Cuba and pledged more as needed. In all, the Agriculture Department contributed a total of 35,000,000 pounds of surplus food to the prisoner exchange -- 15,000, 000 pounds of dried milk and 20,000,000 pounds of shortening.

But the administration was fearful that it would come under political attack for helping Castro. The milk and. shortening deal was played down.

Furthermore, the Agriculture Department announced on January 8, 1963, that "the Red Cross had indicated that the Cuban Families Committee expects to raise funds to reimburse the department." In other words, the government was saying that it would be paid back in cash for the surplus food.

What happened was somewhat different.

The dried milk cost the government $2,505,000 when it was bought from producers as part of the farm price support program. The shortening cost the government $3,150,000. Consequently, the government gave away commodities for which it had paid $5,655,000.

However, in calculating the value of the milk and shortening given to the Red Cross, the government figured its contribution as worth just under $2,000,000 -- the lower price the milk and repackaged shortening might have brought had it been sold by the government on the world market. Normally, the government uses the higher price that it paid to producers when it figures the value of a contribution of surplus food to charity. In this instance, it obviously sought to minimize the size of the donation because of the domestic political implications of giving anything away to Castro.

Nor was the government paid back any amount in cash for its donation of milk and shortening. Instead, in a bit of complex bookkeeping that leaves the onlooker breathless, the government accepted as "reimbursement" 4,000,000 pounds of an insecticide called Sevin. The Union Carbide Company had contributed $2,000,000 worth of the bug-killer to the Red Cross for the prisoner exchange. The Commerce Department ruled that the insecticides would be of strategic economic value to Castro by helping his sugar-cane crops.

"So the following took place: The Red Cross accepted the insecticides, then immediately turned them over to the Agency for International Development, which dispatched them to India, Pakistan and Algeria. The government accepted this as repayment for the milk and shortening. This was not quite the same as the "funds" which the Agriculture announcement had indicated would be raised "to reimburse the department."

A conservative estimate of what it cost the government to extricate itself after the Bay of Pigs would be $29,793, 000. This consists of a $20,000,000 tax loss [ii] to the government as a result of the drug companies' charitable deductions; $5,655,000 in skim milk and shortening; $4,000,000 in secret CIA payments to families of the Bay of Pigs prisoners over a twenty-month period, and $138,000 in costs to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare when the prisoners returned. (Each man got a $100 check; the other costs were clothing, housing and food.)

Because of the political risks at home of dealing with Castro, the government felt it necessary to mask its participation in the prisoner exchange both by acting through Donovan and by a certain amount of fiscal hocus-pocus. It decided that the realities of the situation were such that even an act of humanity had to be approached with the utmost political caution.

Nevertheless, Donovan succeeded and the prisoners' lives were saved. As an unexpected part of the deal, Donovan persuaded Castro not to let the Red Cross ships sail away empty. Castro began releasing thousands of refugees previously unable to leave Cuba, including over 5,000 members of the families of the prisoners.

Then in March and April of 1963 Donovan won the release of more than thirty Americans held in Cuban jails, including three CIA men. On July 3, when the last of the medical supplies reached Cuba, the American Red Cross announced that a total of 9,703 persons (including the Bay of Pigs prisoners and the Americans) had been brought out of Cuba under the agreements negotiated by Donovan.

The staggering figure of nearly 10,000 persons rescued by one man is not widely known, because the total figure received less public attention than did the dramatic return of the invasion prisoners.

In all of these missions, Donovan had the assistance of, and worked hand in hand with, the United States Government. But he was not formally a part of it. In each case, as a private citizen, he was breaking new ground in a form of intelligence diplomacy that is a unique outgrowth of the Cold War.

In the case of the Powers-Abel swap, the negotiations that culminated on the Berlin bridge began with a series of letters to Donovan signed "Hellen Abel" The writer of the letters claimed to be the wife of the Soviet spy imprisoned in the United States. The letters came from Leipzig, East Germany.

Donovan turned each of them over to Lawrence Houston, the CIA general counsel. The agency prepared an answer to each letter from "Mrs. Abel," and shipped them back to Donovan in New York, who sent them off to Leipzig. But when Donovan eventually went to East Berlin to negotiate the final details directly with the Russians and East Germans, he was technically on his own, a private American citizen with no diplomatic immunity or protection.

Donovan's missions, then, have defied any neat categorization. President Kennedy, in a letter to Donovan after the East Berlin mission, characterized them as "unique." Because of their very nature, there was public confusion over whether he acted as a private citizen or as a secret agent of the United States Government. The truth is that he was somewhere inbetween.

The government was unwilling to tell the full story of its role in the Cuban prisoner exchange, as it has been related here, because to have done so during Donovan's negotiations might have handicapped his ability to deal with Castro. And, afterward, it might have engendered too many delicate political questions. In a very real sense, the seeds of one covert operation, the Bay of Pigs, had given rise to another -- the return of the invasion brigade.

Those who sought a clear, simple explanation of whether an operation was private or governmental were bound to be disappointed in the case of James Donovan.

His rescue of the Bay of Pigs prisoners was not precisely a "black, " i.e., secret operation. Nor was it entirely "white." It might be most accurately described as a mixture of both -- truly a gray operation.

_______________

Notes:

i. The memorandum noted that some drug companies might gain a tax "windfall" by making charitable contributions to the prisoner exchange deal. An accompanying letter by Oberdorfer to Robert Kennedy pointed out that the drug companies would nevertheless insist on approval of the deal by someone at least as high as a Cabinet officer as well as "maximum protection from legislative and public criticism in two particular directions: (a) charges of pro-Communism and (b) criticism for inferences drawn from any price mark-up exposed in the transaction."

ii. The estimate of tax loss was made by Mitchell Rogovin, counsel to the Internal Revenue Service, on December 28, 1962.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:35 am

Missile Crisis

In the summer and fall of 1962, as Donovan was negotiating with Castro to rescue the victims of one of the Invisible Government's operations in Cuba, another operation was being conducted in the airspace over the island. In utmost secrecy, the U-2 spy plane was photographing every foot of Cuban territory in search of Soviet missiles.

The U-2 had been flying over Cuba from the earliest days of the Castro regime. In 1959 a U-2 was sent over the Zapata swamps near the Bay of Pigs to check an erroneous report that missiles were being set up in the area. By 1962 two U-2s a month were being flown over the island.

That August photographs were taken of SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles being unloaded at Cuban docks. The over-flight program was stepped up and seven U-2s were sent over the island in the five weeks between August 29 and October 7. Each mission returned with new pictures of short-range SA-2 defensive missiles.

But President Kennedy, citing the information provided him by the intelligence community, insisted there was no evidence that the Russians were moving in long-range offensive missiles that could threaten the United States. Kennedy gave his assurances despite the fact that John McCone had a suspicion -- never passed along to the White House -- that the Soviets were deploying ballistic missiles in Cuba.

In testimony before the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee on March 12, 1963, McCone said he had reported this view within the CIA on August 10. "I couldn't understand," he explained, "why these surface-to-air missile sites were there, so useless for protecting the island against invasion. They must be there, in my opinion, to shield the island against observation from aerial reconnaissance."

McCone conceded, however, that his view, was based on "intuition" without "hard intelligence." And although as Director of Central Intelligence he could have ordered that his view be made the official view and reported to Kennedy, he did not do so.

McCone left Washington on August 23 to marry Theiline McGee Pigott, the widow of a rich Seattle industrialist and an old family friend. During his honeymoon cruise to Europe and his three-week stay on Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, he received daily briefing telegrams. They deepened his apprehension, and on September 7, 10, 13 and 20 he responded with telegrams expressing his mounting concern. But, again, he did not direct that the "honeymoon telegrams" be passed along to the President. They were treated as "in-house" messages and were not circulated outside the CIA.

During McCone's absence, the Board of National Estimates was asked to assess the possibility that the Soviets would station offensive missiles in Cuba. And on September 19 a National Intelligence Estimate was produced. It conceded that the Russians might be tempted to introduce the missiles for psychological reasons, particularly to impress the Latin Americans. It also alluded to the possibility that the Soviets might wish to strengthen their position in Cuba as a prelude to a move against Berlin.

Nevertheless, the Estimate stated that it was highly unlikely that offensive missiles would be sent in, because the Soviets would be deterred by their awareness of the violent reaction which such a move would provoke on the part of the United States. The chief Kremlinologists in the State Department, Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen and Llewellyn E. (Tommy) Thompson, Jr., both former ambassadors to Moscow, concurred with the Estimate. [i]

However, on September 20, the day after the Estimate was handed down, a reliable eyewitness report of an offensive missile reached Ray Cline, the CIA's deputy director for intelligence. A CIA sub-agent had spotted a missile part on a highway on September 12, but had experienced delay in getting his information out of Cuba. Missile experts in Washington, who had rejected hundreds of prior reports by Cuban refugees, concluded that the sub-agent's description checked out against the known features of Russian offensive missiles. In retrospect the CIA decided the/missile part had arrived in a shipment of Soviet cargo on September 8.

McCone returned from his honeymoon on September 26, and on October 4 an urgent meeting of the United States Intelligence Board was called. The members took a look at the "mosaic" -- a photographic panorama of the entire island of Cuba pieced together from the latest U-2 pictures. There were still no photographic indications of offensive missiles. But McCone noted that there had been no pictures of the western sector of the island since September 5. He ordered that overflights be further stepped up and concentrated on that section of Cuba.

Until that time all U-2 flights had been made by civilian CIA pilots. Now, however, the risks would be greatly increased by the expanded schedule of missions and by the presence of the anti-aircraft missiles. The CIA had concluded that an SA-2 had downed Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union in 1960, and that another had accounted for a Nationalist Chinese U-2 over Communist China on October 9, 1962. Rather than risk another U-2 incident involving the CIA, McCone agreed to McNamara's recommendation that the overflight operation be transferred to the Strategic Air Command.

During this interval, on October 10, Senator Kenneth B. Keating, the New York Republican, announced that he had confirmed reports of intermediate-range missile sites under construction in Cuba.

Four days later, early on the morning of October 14, SAC flew its first U-2 mission over Cuba and returned with photographs of mobile medium-range ballistic missiles (MMRBM) at San Cristobal, 100 miles to the southwest of Havana.

The pictures were analyzed by the photo-interpreters in Washington all the next day, and late in the afternoon the findings were reported to General Carter, McCone's deputy (McCone had left Washington earlier in the afternoon for Los Angeles to take the body of his stepson, Paul J. Pigott, who had been killed in a sports-car crash, to Seattle).

General Carroll, the director of the DIA, was next to be informed. Then Carroll took two civilian photo-interpreters to dinner at the home of General Maxwell Taylor. Joining them were Carter, and Roswell Gilpatric and U. Alexis Johnson, both members of the Special Group. When the officials had been convinced that Soviet missiles were in place in Cuba, McGeorge Bundy was notified at his home. He arranged for the photo-interpreters to report to him at the White House the following morning.

Shortly before nine o'clock on the morning of October 16 Bundy took the pictures to President Kennedy, who was in his bedroom in pajamas and robe, reading the newspapers. Kennedy quickly indicated those officials who were to be called to the White House.

At 11:45 the group, which was later to be named the Executive Committee (Excomm) of the National Security Council, gathered in the Cabinet Room for the first of a running series of meetings during the following two weeks. Present were Kennedy, his brother Robert, Lyndon Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, Gilpatric, Bundy, Taylor, Carter, Theodore C. Sorensen, the presidential adviser, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, Under Secretary of State George Ball and Edwin M. Martin, Assistant secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. Adlai Stevenson joined the group that afternoon. McCone was brought in immediately upon his return from the West Coast. And two Truman Cabinet members were called in later in the week: Dean Acheson, former Secretary of State, and Robert Lovett, former Secretary of Defense.

Kennedy entered the first Excomm meeting with the feeling that two choices were open: knock out the missiles with an air strike or make representations to Khrushchev.

During the next four days the Excomm weighed the alternatives, moving gradually toward a consensus that the safest course was to take the middle way: to set up a blockade and insist that the Soviets withdraw, or direct military force would be applied.

In coming to this decision the Excomm was strongly influenced by Robert Kennedy. Recalling Pearl Harbor, he opposed an air strike against the small island of Cuba. He argued that the nation might never recover from the moral outrage of the world and the shock to its own conscience.

At first, the discussion centered on the immediate problem of getting the missiles dismantled or removed. There were detailed technical analyses of what kind of surveillance and inspection would be necessary to make sure the missiles were rendered inoperable.

Stevenson was troubled that the discussion would bog down in details and that the larger problem of eliminating the Soviets from Cuba would be obscured. He reminded the Excomm that a long period of negotiation would probably follow the removal of the missiles. And he recommended that some thought be given to possible United States proposals during that period.

Stevenson suggested that once the missiles were out, the United States might propose this deal: a pull-out of all Soviet troops from Cuba in return for a promise by the United States that it would not invade the island and would withdraw its missiles from Turkey. Stevenson was aware that the administration had decided the previous year to remove the missiles from Turkey (they were Jupiter IRBMs, obsolescent, clumsy liquid-fuel rockets. The plan was to replace them with missile-bearing Polaris submarines stationed in the Mediterranean. Turkey announced on January 23, 1963, that it had agreed to removal of the Jupiters).

As the Excomm deliberated, the President went through with two scheduled campaign trips, lest their cancellation betray the secret maneuvering. On October 17 he kept speaking engagements in Stratford and New Haven, Connecticut, and on October 19 he campaigned in Cleveland, Springfield, Illinois, and Chicago. He was supposed to go on to St. Louis and Seattle that weekend, but on Saturday morning, October 20, Pierre Salinger announced that the President would return to Washington immediately because he had a cold and was running a slight temperature.

At the White House that afternoon the secret meetings continued. Kennedy approved the Excomm's recommendation that a blockade be imposed around Cuba. The decision was ratified the next day by the National Security Council. (Up to that point the Excomm had been operating without formal, statutory authority. To make its actions official, it was necessary to include the Office of Emergency Planning, one of the five statutory members of the NSC. The Office had been excluded from the previous deliberations.)

The President also arranged to go on television Monday night, October 22, to inform the nation that offensive missiles had been discovered in Cuba and that a blockade would be imposed.

All weekend long, starting the previous Thursday and continuing until the afternoon of the President's speech, the Defense Department had repeated: "The Pentagon has no information indicating the presence of offensive weapons in Cuba." [ii]

In his TV address the President emphasized that the blockade was only an "initial" step and indicated strongly that direct military force would be employed if necessary to get the missiles out.

"It shall be the policy of this nation," Kennedy added, "to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."

For the next four days the world balanced on the brink of war, watching fearfully to see if the Soviets would continue work on the missiles, attempt to run the blockade, or otherwise defy the President's ultimatum.

Finally, late in the night of October 26, a message was received from Khrushchev. It suggested he was ready to withdraw his missiles under United Nations supervision in return for a lifting of the blockade and a pledge by the United States not to invade Cuba.

The Excomm convened the next morning in a hopeful atmosphere. But the optimism was quickly shattered by a second Khrushchev message, which was made public in Moscow. It offered to swap the Soviet missiles in Cuba for the U.S. missiles in Turkey.

The members of the Excomm knew that President Kennedy would not accept such a deal. As Kennedy was later to explain privately, he felt it imperative to reject the missile swap in order to preserve the Western alliance. The Turks had opposed the removal of the Jupiters during 1962. They looked upon the missiles as symbols of U.S. determination to defend them against Russian attack.

To accept Khrushchev's deal, Kennedy reasoned, would be to confirm all the things Europe had said and suspected about the United States: that when the vital interests of the United States were at stake, Europe's interests would be sacrificed.

It was a strange and ironic situation, Kennedy conceded, since he had decided the previous year to remove the obsolescent missiles from Turkey: a future historian might question the wisdom of risking a nuclear war over missiles that the nation did not need or want.

Kennedy issued a public statement, in effect rejecting the missile swap. Then he sent off a private message to Khrushchev, ignoring the Turkey proposal and agreeing to the terms of Khrushchev's first message.

Meantime, the Excomm's apprehension deepened as reports came in, first, that an SA-2 had opened fire in Cuba for the first time, downing a SAC U-2, and second, that a U-2 had wandered over Siberia while on an "air sampling" mission near the Arctic Circle. [iii]

The first U-2 incident that day suggested to the Excomm that Khrushchev might have reversed himself overnight and decided to defy Kennedy's demands. The Excomm also realized the second incident might have suggested to Khrushchev that Kennedy was planning some type of direct military action against Russia.

The President and the Excomm waited uneasily through the night. Then, shortly after ten o'clock on Sunday morning" October 28, Moscow released the text of another message from Khrushchev to Kennedy. The Soviet leader said he had ordered a stop to work on the Cuban bases and had directed that the missiles be crated and returned to the Soviet Union. United Nations representatives would "verify the dismantling."

Kennedy hailed Khrushchev's decision and responded with an expression of "regret" for the Siberian U-2 incident, which the Russian had complained about in his letter.

The missile crisis was over. Kennedy had won perhaps the greatest triumph of the Cold War. And in the November Congressional elections the triumph was reflected in a major Democratic victory .

The crisis had cost the Republicans as many as twenty House seats, said Representative Bob Wilson of California, the chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee. He insisted that the administration had known in late September that Russian missiles were in Cuba but had delayed announcing the fact in order to go into the election in a time of crisis, when the nation traditionally rallies round the President.

Wilson said administration officials had held a secret briefing for him and other members of the CIA subcommittee in the House six weeks before the election and had disclosed that offensive missiles were then in Cuba (Wilson apparently was referring to the eyewitness report of a missile part which reached the CIA on September 20).

The administration denied Wilson's accusation, but its credibility was called into question when Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, made a series of statements which suggested that the administration might have been manipulating the facts in its official announcements.

"The generation of news by actions taken by the government," Sylvester declared on October 30 in commenting upon the Cuban crisis, "becomes one weapon in a strained situation. The results, in my opinion, justify the methods we use ... News generated by actions of the government as to content and timing are part of the arsenal of weaponry that a President has in application of military force and related forces to the solution of political problems, or to the application of international political pressure."

Sylvester went even further in a speech on December 6: "It's inherent in [the] government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it's going up into a nuclear war. This seems to me basic."

In order to keep a closer watch over government information, Sylvester directed that a representative of his office monitor each interview between a reporter and a Pentagon official. Alternately, the official could report the substance of the interview to Sylvester at the end of the day. The State Department instituted a similar practice, but withdrew it a few weeks later under pressure.

Critics accused the administration of "managing the news," using information as a "weapon," even lying to protect itself.

Kennedy's October triumph was further compromised when Castro refused to allow on-site inspection of the missile sites by the United Nations. The Republicans seized upon this to suggest that the Russian military buildup was continuing and that all of the offensive weapons had not been removed.

Leading the Republican attack was Senator Keating, who had gained something of a reputation as an intelligence expert by virtue of his announcement on October 10, twelve days before Kennedy's TV address, that there were offensive missiles in Cuba.

Keating issued a series of post-crisis statements, culminating in a speech on January 31, 1963, in which he said:

"There is continuing, absolutely confirmed and undeniable evidence that the Soviets are maintaining the medium-range sites they had previously constructed in Cuba ... they may have missiles left on the island and need only to wheel them out of caves ... Without on-site inspection, it is hard to see how we will ever know for sure the true missile situation in Cuba."

Keating's statement drew banner headlines across the country. And the administration had difficulty gaining public acceptance of its denials. Its failure to quiet the storm over Cuba was undermining efforts to turn the October triumph into a Cold War breakthrough.

Finally, Kennedy decided he would have to overwhelm his critics with photographic proof. The original idea was to invite the small group of reporters covering Keating to view the special briefing which had been put together for several Congressional committees. At the last minute, however, the President decided that if classified material was to be released, he might as well go the whole way. He ordered McNamara to go on nationwide television that evening -- February 6 -- and display the aerial reconnaissance photos brought back from Cuba.

The decision was reached so quickly that there was no time to check with McCone. The CIA boss would have opposed the idea on grounds that the TV show would reveal the high degree of perfection which had been achieved with the U-2 cameras (much better than those which fell into Khrushchev's hands when Powers' plane was captured in 1960).

At the time of the decision, McCone was on Capitol Hill testifying: "We are convinced beyond reasonable doubt ... that all offensive missiles and bombers known to be in Cuba were withdrawn."

A few hours later McNamara went on TV. For close to two hours the American people were exposed to some of the "blackest" secrets of the Invisible Government. Most of the briefing was conducted by General Carroll's thirty-four-year-old assistant, John Hughes. He displayed dozens of blowups of reconnaissance photos showing the Cuban missile sites first under construction and then in the process of dismantling, and finally he showed the missile equipment being put aboard ships and carried away from the island.

It was a breathtaking demonstration of the high degree of sophistication which had been achieved in electronic intelligence. But the presentation prompted two questions which were to prove embarrassing to the administration. First, no pictures were shown for the period between September 5 and October 14, raising the question of whether the intelligence community had neglected to conduct aerial reconnaissance during this period or whether the administration was suppressing pertinent photos. And second, the briefing added up to a tacit admission that there had been no photographic count of the number of missiles shipped to Cuba and, therefore, there could be no certainty that the number spotted going out represented the total arsenal.

McNamara sidestepped these problems in answering questions after the briefing. But the next day Kennedy admitted frankly to his news conference: "We cannot prove that there is not a missile in a cave or that the Soviet Union isn't going to ship next week." He noted, however, that the Soviets were aware that if any missiles were discovered, it would "produce the greatest crisis which the world has faced in its history."

The President deplored the "rumors and speculations" which, he said, compelled the administration to go on TV and disclose "a good deal of information which we are rather reluctant to give about our intelligence-gathering facilities."

As to the so-called "photo gap" between September 5 and October 4, McNamara finally explained at a news conference in February that the U-2 missions during that period "didn't relate" to the areas where the Russian missiles were found. In plain English, McNamara was saying that the CIA failed to photograph the western half of Cuba during the six weeks preceding the flight which discovered the offensive missiles.

At his news conference on March 6 Kennedy argued that it really didn't matter very much because the Soviets set up their missiles so quickly, there would have been nothing to see until a few days before October 14.

"I suppose," the President remarked, "we could have always perhaps picked up these missile bases a few days earlier, but not very many days earlier ... ten days before might not have picked up anything. The week before might have picked up something ... So I feel that the intelligence services did a very good job ... I am satisfied with Mr. McCone, the intelligence community, the Defense Department and the job they did in these days, particularly taken in totality."

But many important members of the administration were not so satisfied with the Invisible Government. They suspected that someone in the Pentagon or high in the CIA had been funneling incriminating evidence to the Republicans, possibly raw intelligence which had not yet been analyzed or brought to the President's attention. On March 25, when McCone came for one of his periodic meetings with the President, a third person, McGeorge Bundy, was included for the first time. Clearly, Bundy was there to monitor the conversation.

The Invisible Government had taken great pride in its performance during the missile crisis, only to find its achievement compromised by suspicions that it was playing politics with intelligence.

There was no denying, however, that the intelligence community had succeeded in raising the art of aerial photography to unimagined heights. The missile crisis had revealed unmistakably that automation was revolutionizing the spy business as rapidly as it was transforming American industry.

_______________

Notes:

i. After the October crisis McCone was urged to make Sherman Kent of the Board of Estimates, the scapegoat for the bad guess. But McCone refused to fire him, despite repeated reminders from the White House that the Estimate was wrong.

ii. In a speech on March 11, 1963, Salinger insisted that during the Cuban crisis "We did not lie to the American people." He went on to explain that the Pentagon spokesman who issued the denials "was not lying. He was communicating the information as he knew it." By implication, Salinger excused his own statements about Kennedy's "cold."

iii. The Russians had charged that another U-2 flew over Sakhalin Island north of Japan on August 30, 1962. The United States replied that "severe winds" might have forced the plane "unintentionally" to violate Soviet airspace. After the Powers incident, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy promised there would be no more U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union. But their pledge did not rule out flights over Cuba, other Communist countries or along the borders of the Soviet Union.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:36 am

Electronic Spies

"The camera, I think, is actually going to be our best inspector."
-- JOHN F. KENNEDY on television, December, 1962

"That function [inspection] can now be assumed by satellites. Maybe I'll let you see my photographs."
-- NIKITA S. KHRUSHCHEV to Paul Henri Spaak, July, 1963


THE PRESIDENT of the United States and the Premier of the Soviet Union were referring to one of the strangest secrets of the Cold War, a secret which was scarcely a secret at all. Kennedy and Khrushchev were alluding to a revolutionary tool of espionage, the camera-bearing "spy in the sky" satellite. And it was clear that neither had been fooled by the elaborate security precautions of the other.

The United States had been orbiting SAMOS spy satellites over the Soviet Union since 1961, and the Russians were known to have the capacity to track them. With similar technique and purpose the Soviets started in 1962 to send up their COSMOS satellites under the vigilant eye of the U.S. tracking system.

By 1963 aerial reconnaissance had become the most secretive operation of the Pentagon. Yet, ironically, when SAMOS was first tested in 1960, its virtues were graphically described in official pronouncements. Indeed, the electronic and optical laws upon which it was founded had long been the property of the scientific community, Russian and American alike.

Until Francis Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 over Russia on May 1, 1960, little had been disclosed about SAMOS. But a summit meeting in Paris was being held that month and the Eisenhower Administration was emphasizing its determination to keep the Soviet Union under surveillance despite the U-2 incident. Suddenly, from the depths of the Pentagon, came a spew of previously highly classified details. By following the official disclosures over the next several months, a diligent Russian analyst could easily have pieced together the following description of the remarkable satellite:

SAMOS, the name of a Greek island, was a contraction for Satellite and Missile Observation System. The project was in an advanced state of development and the White House had given it a "DX" rating, which meant it was one of the handful of Pentagon programs with the highest national priority. Still, it was to be pushed even faster on a budget of just under $200,000,000 a year.

SAMOS was designed to be operational by 1962 and to take photographs with detail equal to what the human eye could see from a hundred feet. The satellite was launched [i] by an Atlas-Agena rocket, standing ninety-five feet high, or a Thor-Agena rocket, with a height of seventy-eight feet.

The Agena, or second stage, was made by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, designers and producers of the U-2. It was that part of the rocket which went into orbit. The satellite weighed 4,100 pounds and was twenty-two feet tall and five feet in diameter. It circled the earth upright like a giant cigar, carrying a 300-to-400-pound gold-plated instrument package.

SAMOS was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, into a polar orbit from which it could photograph every nation in the world as the globe rotated under it. The camera could be shut off when the satellite was off target, thereby conserving power.

(By 1964 reliable reports indicated that a SAMOS was passing over the Soviet Union eight to twelve times, and over Communist China two to four times, every day.)

Orbits varied: some carried the satellite around the earth at an equal altitude of 300 miles; others were purposely egg-shaped so that the satellite dropped as close as 150 miles. From this height a telescopic camera with a focal length of 120 inches could photograph objects two and a half feet wide.

In April, 1959, Amrom H. Katz of the RAND Corporation, a semi-official research group for the Air Force, wrote that camera lenses with a 240-inch focal length had already been developed.

In April, 1960, Howard S. Stewart, a University of Rochester optics expert, indicated in International Science and Technology that it was possible to develop satellite cameras capable of "resolving two objects three inches apart from 125 miles up."

In February, 1964, the Air Force's Aerospace Medical Division reported that astronauts could readily spot missile bases, encampments and troop movements from 100 miles in space.

There were four types of SAMOS satellites: one carried television cameras for transmitting simultaneous pictures back to earth; a second carried conventional cameras for producing more detailed photographs that could be ejected on command and recovered in big nets strung from aircraft; [ii] a third carried both types of cameras; and a fourth incorporated eavesdropping equipment.

The fourth version was known as the "ferret." It could pick out radar and communication centers, and pinpoint missile sites by their radio guidance signals. It could also tap microwave telephone links. The SAMOS photographs could locate enemy military targets and provide instantaneous indications of troop or supply build-ups.

The reconnaissance satellite would be subject to some of the limitations of the U-2. It could be frustrated by clouds which cover 60 percent of the earth at all times. But it could provide pictures of the northern stretches of the Soviet Union that were beyond the reach of the U-2. And it would be much less vulnerable to defensive measures. SAMOS' orbit could readily be determined by Russian tracking stations, and theoretically the satellite could be destroyed by an anti-satellite missile (the United States began experimental tests with such a system in 1963) But if it were hit by a rocket, it would burn up on re-entry into the earth's atmosphere and the evidence would be destroyed. And it would be a considerably more difficult target than a U-2 flying ten times lower.

Besides, SAMOS could carry a rocket motor which, on command from the earth, would enable it to move evasively. On the assumption that Soviet spy satellites would incorporate similar devices for evasion, the Air Force started work in 1960 on SAINT (Satellite Intercept). It was to be a maneuverable satellite which would rendezvous with an enemy vehicle in orbit and inspect it by electronic means such as television. Ultimately, it was to have the capacity to neutralize or destroy an enemy satellite. [iii]

Another reconnaissance system also came into view during this period. It was MIDAS (Missile Defense Alarm System), designed to detect missile launchings with infra-red sensors. MIDAS' weight and dimensions were virtually identical to those of SAMOS. It was fired into orbit by the same rocket and it was also produced by Lockheed.

By detecting the intense heat given off by rocket exhaust during take-off, MIDAS was to provide a thirty-minute warning of enemy attack. This would double the fifteen-minute alert of BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System), a massive radar in Thule, Greenland, which would pick up an incoming ICBM halfway between launch and impact. MIDAS' infrared instruments were so sensitive that they could detect a lighted cigarette from a distance of eight miles. During one test launching the heat sensors sent out signals set off by a coffee pot on the firing pad. (MIDAS encountered a series of difficulties which ran the research and development bill up close to $500,000,000. But in May and July of 1963 the satellite succeeded in detecting missiles launched from Florida and California.)

Another satellite launched with much public fanfare in 1960 was TIROS. Its cameras were to televise cloud cover and storm conditions in order to promote better weather prediction. Such surveillance obviously could be of great value in timing SAMOS launches for moments of minimum cloud cover over the Soviet Union. [iv] But in Senate testimony in July, 1961, James E. Webb, NASA's director, denied Soviet charges that the weather satellites were for purposes of espionage. He asserted that it was perfectly lawful for satellites to be flown over foreign territory just as ships freely sail the high seas. National sovereignty extends only to air space, Webb contended, and ''as to outer space where there is no air, this is a completely open field."

The head of NASA was betraying the fears of the administration that U.S. satellites operating over Russia would be shot down by Soviet propaganda. When President Kennedy took office, he was faced with three alternatives: (1) to continue the semi-public practices of the Eisenhower Administration; (2) to shut off all official discussion and disclosures about the espionage satellites; or (3) to make the program "overt" by proposing a new "open skies" plan and submitting all satellite photographs to the United Nations.

The last recommendation was privately proposed by a group of prominent scientists at the outset of the Kennedy Administration. They argued that there was a presumption of guilt in surreptitious activities and that the Soviet Union could play upon this as justification for shooting down a SAMOS or securing a UN resolution condemning the practice. On the other hand, they contended, if the operation were placed under the UN, the Soviets would be hard-pressed to destroy SAMOS either with rockets or words.

The Kennedy Administration quickly decided that secrecy was a safer course. When SAMOS II was successfully launched on January 31, 1961 -- eleven days after Kennedy took office -- the Pentagon prohibited the release of any details about it. This prohibition soon developed into an absolute ban on any discussion of the satellite, even in areas of prior official revelation. It was thereafter impossible to obtain official confirmation that in fact SAMOS existed. Future announcements were restricted to such words as: "A satellite employing an Atlas-Agena B booster combination was launched by the Air Force today. It is carrying a number of classified test components."

Since security, if any, had long since been breached by the original SAMOS disclosures, it was clear that the administration had international political purposes in mind in its new crackdown. The likeliest explanation was that it hoped to avoid provoking the Russians into countermeasures against SAMOS. Khrushchev had known for years that the U-2 was flying over Russia, but he said nothing until his hand was forced by the Powers incident. Might he not be inclined to maintain a similar silence on SAMOS, particularly since his own satellites were the first to fly over the United States and other nations?

The answer was quick in coming. SAMOS II was hardly off the pad before the Russians protested. Their complaint, which was formally carried to the United Nations in March, 1962, was summed up on December 3 of that year by Platon D. Morozov, the Soviet delegate to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

"Such observation," he said, "is just as wrong as when intelligence data are obtained by other means such as by photography made from the air. The object at which such illegal surveillance is directed constitutes a secret guarded by a sovereign state and, regardless of the means by which such an operation is carried out, it is in all cases an intrusion."

The standard reply of the United States was that a nation's sovereignty extends only to the air space above it. Officials noted that in the first three years of the space age neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had claimed its territorial sovereignty was infringed by satellite overflights. In the absence of protest or international agreement to the contrary, these officials maintained that a common law had been established, giving any nation the right to orbit satellites over another.

On January 13, 1962, the United States asserted formally that this freedom of movement in space had been endorsed by the UN General Assembly in its unanimous resolution the previous month on "international cooperation and the peaceful uses of outer space."

The resolution stipulated that international law and the United Nations Charter were to apply to outer space and that celestial bodies were not to be subject to national appropriation. The United States interpreted this as a contradiction of the Soviet argument that SAMOS violated national sovereignty.

To demonstrate its sincerity in subscribing to UN supervision of space, the United States pledged, shortly after the UN Space Registry was established in February of 1962, that it would list all of its satellites.

From time to time knowledgeable space watchers in the United States and Europe noted, sometimes in print, that more objects were in space than had been reported to the UN. Playing upon the deep secrecy surrounding the SAMOS program, the Russians alleged that the United States was concealing some of its launches.

These allegations imposed a nasty dilemma upon the United States Government. If it were to dispose effectively of suggestions that it was cheating, it would have to open up the SAMOS firings to much greater publicity. But this would run counter to the basic policy decision not to provoke the Russians.

Or the United States could publicly produce evidence that the unlisted objects in space were of Soviet origin. But this would expose the fact that the United States possessed a vast electronic network which kept a precise watch on all Soviet space operations. And the CIA and the Pentagon were opposed to providing the slightest help to the Russians in compromising the network.

Their opposition was twofold. First, if it were officially admitted that the United States was eavesdropping along the Iron Curtain, nations providing the clandestine facilities might be subjected to severe Russian pressure, as they were after the U-2 incident.

The second argument was expressed in a news conference on December 6, 1962, by Arthur Sylvester: "We are trying to keep intelligence [secret], not only what we gather but how we gather it ... We know that lots of things that two years ago we assumed our adversaries had, they did not have. We know this by what they're spending money to get. What we are trying to do in this field is to make it as difficult as possible for them. We are trying not to wrap it up, put it on a silver platter and hand it to them. We are trying to make them spend as much time and effort as we have to."

Defense Secretary McNamara was particularly jealous of the secrecy policy. He was incensed when Hanson Baldwin, the military-affairs analyst of the New York Times, disclosed in June, 1962 -- clearIy on the basis of SAMOS reports -- that the Soviets were erecting concrete storage "coffins" for their ICBMs. McNamara was disturbed that Baldwin's report might have given the Russians an indication of the excellence of SAMOS. He apparently did not comprehend that he himself had exposed SAMOS' effectiveness when he announced the month before that the United States was in a position to locate and destroy Soviet missile sites.

Arrayed against McNamara and the secrecy policy were those in the State Department who saw great propaganda value in destroying the myth that the Soviets could do no wrong in space and that they had suffered fewer failures than the United States. This viewpoint prevailed in September, 1962, when the government claimed that in the two previous years the Russians had failed in five attempts to reach the planets -- two to Mars and three to Venus.

In trying to substantiate the claim, the fears of the CIA and the Pentagon were realized. A Pandora's box of black electronic arts was opened. Out of it came revelations of a world that was unknown to the vast majority of Americans, if not to the Soviet leaders.

The United States had detected the Russian space failures through a surveillance system known as SPADATS (Space Detection and Tracking System). It was a complicated network of electronic fences, stretching across the United States, and sensitive radios and radars hidden along the perimeter of the Soviet Union. The network was so effective that no Soviet rocket could get off the ground without its being known within a few minutes at the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs and at the CIA and the White House.

The first point of detection was a radar and communications system in the Middle East. It was centered in Turkey at small Black Sea towns such as Zonguldak, Sinop and Samsun. There, powerful radars and listening gear monitored the countdowns and rocket launchings at the main Soviet missile sites near the Aral Sea.

The radars, which went into operation in 1955, could reach at least 3,000 miles. The scope of the listening gear was suggested by an advertisement which slipped uncensored into Aviation Week on February 25, 1963:

Modern electronic counter-measures are an important deterrent and intelligence tool for the military services. "Ferreting" ECM systems -- for the detection, location and analysis of foreign electromagnetic radiation associated with radar, missile command and communications -- are a demonstrated capability of Babcock's military products division, where operational ferreting systems are in production ...


Another indication of the potential of the eavesdropping equipment got out the following month. Senator Barry Goldwater, a general in the Air Force Reserve, disclosed that an "electronic ear," operating in planes off Cuba, was so sensitive that it could pick up the sound of various machines to the point of detecting a small generator in operation.

At the same time, the Pentagon was perfecting super-range "over the horizon" radar and the Air Force had installed highly sensitive atmospheric pressure gear which could provide instantaneous indications of a Soviet missile launching.

After a rocket had been detected by the Middle East system, it would next be picked up by the BMEWS radar in Greenland, which kept watch over the Arctic, or by the large saucer-like radar at Shemya in the Aleutians, which tracked Soviet test rockets as they flew out over the Pacific.

The third point of detection and the most precise was NAVSPASUR (Naval Space Surveillance System), an electronic fence stretching from Georgia to Southern California. Transmitters in Alabama, Texas and Arizona created the fence by sending out a beam of radio signals which were deflected back to one of four receiving stations when an object passed through them.

By running the angles of deflection through a massive computer at Dahlgren, Virginia, it was possible to determine a satellite's orbit, position, size and weight (NAVSPASUR was so sensitive that a piece of wire one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter was detected in 1960 when it separated from a U.S. satellite). It was also possible to calculate the exact time and place of launch and predict the future path of the satellite.

Many officials felt that too much was being revealed about these secret electronic systems. Nevertheless, NASA continued until April, 1963, to list Soviet launchings in the Satellite Situation Reports it issued twice a month.

Then there was an abrupt and unexplained return to the previous practice of secrecy. The House Information Subcommittee sought an explanation, but NASA spokesmen said all they knew was that the tracking system was controlled by the Pentagon, which refused to release the information.

This prompted the subcommittee's chairman, John E. Moss, the California Democrat, to observe: "The taxpayers certainly should not be called upon to spend billions of dollars on our space programs without being given all the facts necessary to make an intelligent judgment as to whether we are behind, ahead, or at least keeping pace with, Russian space efforts."

Despite the fact that the policy of secrecy was perpetuating a false image of United States inferiority in space, the administration held to its practice of suppressing the truth about Soviet failures. Despite the fact that nuclear test-ban negotiations were threatened by public ignorance of the elaborate array of U.S. detection devices, the administration refused to embark upon even a modest program of education.

It was a strange anomaly, indeed. The United States was seeking to hold its tongue about secrets that were no longer secret to the Russians. In November, 1962, the Soviets, indicating their complete awareness, dropped their long-standing demand for a ban on spy-in-the-sky satellites. This opened the way to a United States-Soviet agreement on the peaceful uses of outer space. Why the Russian about-face? Electronic experts suggested the Russians were developing a spy satellite of their own and did not wish to be inhibited by international prohibitions on such devices.

Khrushchev's son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, the editor of Izvestia, seemed to substantiate this theory in a speech in Helsinki, Finland, on September 2, 1963.

"One Western paper," Adzhubei said, "has published a picture taken of Moscow by a satellite from a height of 750 kilometers [about 465 miles] in which the Izvestia building is plainly discernible. We do not publish pictures of this kind, but I believe that we could print a similar picture of New York taken by one of our satellites."

_______________

Notes:

i. SAMOS I failed to achieve orbit on October 11, 1960. SAMOS II was a success on January 31, 1961.

ii. In July, 1963, the Outstanding Unit Award was presented to the 6593 Test Squadron at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. The Air Force said the squadron had achieved 70 percent success in its capsule recoveries.

iii The project proved much more complicated than SAMOS, however, and in 1962. its operational date was extended to 1967 at the earliest.

iv. Dr. S. Fred Singer, director of the National Satellite Weather Center at Suitland, Maryland, declared in a speech on February 20, 1963 that TIROS had been so used to plan U-2 flights over Cuba during the missile crisis in October, 1962.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:37 am

Black Radio

THE EMERGENCE of the transistor radio in the 1950s has intensified one of the most shadowy, elusive and least-known electronic aspects of the Cold War. This is the war of words, conducted on the airwaves by combatants who are thousands of miles apart -- and who will never meet.

Daily, East and West beam hundreds of hours of propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor has given this hidden war a new importance. Millions of people in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia who cannot read, can nevertheless be reached by the propaganda of both sides.

The Invisible Government is heavily engaged in "black radio" [i] operations of every conceivable type. So is the Communist bloc.

United States radio activities have ranged all the way from overt, openly acknowledged and advertised programs of the Voice of America to highly secret CIA transmitters in the Middle East and other areas of the world. In between is a whole spectrum of black, gray, secret and semi secret radio operations. The CIA's Radio Swan, because it became operationally involved at the Bay of Pigs, never enjoyed more than the thinnest of covers. But Radio Swan was a relatively small black-radio operation. Other radio operations, financed and controlled in whole or in part by the Invisible Government, are more skillfully concealed and much bigger.

Some are hybrids -- broadcasting organizations that solicit funds from business corporations and the general public but also receive secret funds from the CIA. While allegedly "private" organizations, they receive daily policy direction from the State Department and take orders from the CIA.

In some cases, it is possible, indeed probable, that lower-level employees of such an organization are unaware of the true point of control of the particular activity. A secret CIA transmitter in Lebanon, to take a random example, would be run directly by CIA officers. But in a larger, hybrid operation, knowledge of financing and control by Washington might be limited to a handful of top executives.

For purposes of this book, it is sufficient to note that an inevitable by-product -- as in clandestine operations generally -- is that the American public has been beguiled by some of this allegedly "private" broadcasting work. It has contributed its gift dollars to such "private" activity, entirely unaware that it is already supporting the same broadcasting operation with its tax dollars, through the CIA.

Black-radio operations fall into two categories -- transmitting and receiving. Besides broadcasting, both sides carefully monitor each other's broadcasts to learn what the opposition is saying.

For the United States, the task of monitoring and recording foreign radio broadcasts, by friendly as well as unfriendly countries, is performed by the CIA. The intelligence agency's listening posts all over the globe capture every major broadcast of a foreign nation on tape. Daily, this extremely valuable foreign broadcast information is edited, correlated, mimeographed and distributed to a wide list of consumers from a CIA office in downtown Washington. [ii] The consumers are asked not to mention the name or initials of the arm of the CIA which performs this work. However, this broadcast monitoring service, which is more or less openly acknowledged by the CIA, is about the most "overt" operation the agency conducts.

Some idea of the magnitude of the CIA's task, in monitoring Communist bloc broadcasts alone, can be gained from a speech made on January 30, 1963, by John Richardson, Jr., the president of the Free Europe Committee, which operates Radio Free Europe.

Radio stations of thirteen Communist countries, he said, "transmit more than four thousand hours of radio programming abroad every week in sixty-three languages. Leaving nothing to chance, the broadcast languages include even Esperanto ... The Soviet Union leads this radio propaganda parade with some thirteen hundred weekly hours of radio propaganda directed abroad. Red China comes second, with almost seven hundred hours weekly, followed by East Germany ... with little Cuba in fourth place." [1]

Surprisingly, the fact that black-radio operations are conducted by the United States was indirectly admitted by President Eisenhower in his Middle East speech to the UN General Assembly on August 13, 1958:

"The United Nations Assembly has on three occasions, in 1947, 1949 and 1950, passed resolutions designed to stop the projecting of irresponsible broadcasts from one nation into the homes of citizens of other nations ... we all know that these resolutions have been violated in many directions in the Near East. If we, the United States, have been at fault, we stand ready to be corrected."

For the background to this unusual passage in the President's speech, one must look to 1956 and Suez. In the aftermath of the abortive Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, Nasser increased his efforts to bring the entire Arab world under his domination. A major weapon in this campaign was Radio Cairo.

Up until 1956, the British-controlled Near East Broadcasting Station at Zyghi, on the south coast of Cyprus, was the most powerful propaganda voice in the Middle East. NEBS was a British black-radio operation, ostensibly under private ownership.

Beginning in 1956, Nasser's radio supplanted NEBS. Cairo spread the most violent sort of propaganda against its Arab neighbors and the United States. Its "Voice of the Arabs" was on the air from 6:30 A.M. to 1:15 A.M. the next morning, broadcasting throughout the Middle East and as far south as the Belgian Congo from two seventy-kilowatt transmitters on the Mokattam Hills overlooking Cairo, and from two other transmitters on the Nile Delta.

By 1958 Radio Cairo was openly urging bloody revolution in Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. In February of that year Nasser had seized power in Syria and proclaimed the United Arab Republic. Iraq's King Feisal II countered by joining with his Hashemite cousin King Hussein of Jordan to form the Arab Union.

On May 2, 1958, as an example, Radio Cairo broadcast to Baghdad: "Arise, my brethren on the police force and in its army in Iraq. Stand side by side with your brothers and your people against your enemies! The freedom of Iraq is in your hands."

Since Iraq was the world's sixth largest oil producer and the only Arab member of the pro Western Baghdad pact, the CIA felt this kind of talk from Radio Cairo could not go unanswered. As a result, by 1958 the CIA had set up a series of clandestine radio stations in the Middle East and along its fringes to counteract the influence of Radio Cairo.

Meanwhile, a crisis was brewing in Lebanon over the selection of a successor to President Camille Chamoun, whose term was expiring. The CIA had helped elect Chamoun, then turned against him.

On July 14 Brigadier General Abdul Karim el-Kassem took over Iraq in a pre-dawn coup which had not been "clearly predicted" [2] by the CIA, according to Allen Dulles. In the coup, twenty-three-year-old King Feisal and his uncle, the crown prince, were murdered. Premier Nuri as-Said, captured while trying to escape dressed as a woman, was also killed.

The next day Eisenhower, in Operation Blue Bat, sent the Marines into Lebanon to shore up the Chamoun government. Two days later the British airlifted 1,000 troops into Jordan.

Radio Cairo exulted in the bloodshed in Baghdad and urged the people of Jordan to rise up and butcher King Hussein. But now, as the CIA transmitters got busy, new voices were heard on the airwaves.

This obscure dispatch appeared in American newspapers on July 23, 1958, for example:

BEIRUT, July 23 (UPI) -- A second mysterious Arab radio station went on the air yesterday calling itself the "Voice of Justice" and claiming to be broadcasting from Syria.

Its program heard here consisted of bitter criticism against Soviet Russia and Soviet Premier Khrushchev. Earlier the "Voice of Iraq" went on the air with attacks against the Iraqi revolutionary government.

The "Voice of Justice" called Khrushchev the "hangman of Hungary" and warned the people of the Middle East they would suffer the same fate as the Hungarians if the Russians get a foothold in the Middle East." [8]


On August 14 Egyptian officials charged that seven secret radio stations were operating in the Middle East, attacking the UAR and Nasser personally. Cairo said two stations were transmitting from the French Riviera, and said others were in British Aden, Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus and Kenya. Before the revolt in Iraq, there had been another in Baghdad, the statement said. The carefully worded announcement stopped barely short of mentioning the CIA.

The Egyptian spokesman said the Voice of America was heard regularly in Egypt also, but added: "The Voice of America is not in the same category with clandestine stations." Asked if there was any evidence of who was behind these secret stations, the official replied laconically: "There is no way to be certain. Certainly they are too expensive for any small nations or groups to maintain without help." [4]

The Egyptian official had put his finger on one of the soft spots in black-radio operations. These operations are indeed expensive, and one of the most nagging problems for such radio stations is to explain the source of funds.

One short-wave radio station in the United States with an interesting history is WRUL, with offices in Manhattan as the World Wide Broadcasting System, Inc. In his fascinating book about Sir William Stephenson, the head of British Intelligence in the United States during World War II, H. Montgomery Hyde maintains that WRUL was penetrated by British Intelligence in the war years and subsidized by it through intermediaries.

In more recent times, WRUL has taken a more overt part in Cold War operations. As will be described, it joined with Radio Swan in broadcasting the programs of "Havana Rose."

In 1954 WRUL received a letter of commendation from the Castillo-Armas government of Guatemala, thanking the station for its services during the revolt against Arbenz. The letter was from Jose Toron, who had operated a clandestine "Free Guatemala" radio station before the Communist government was overthrown.

Thus, WRUL has been linked with at least two CIA operations -- the Bay of Pigs (through Radio Swan) and the Guatemala coup in 1954.

Not long after Cairo complained about clandestine transmitters in the Middle East, Konstantin Zinchenko, the head of the press department of the Soviet State Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations, told a news conference in Moscow that the United States had set up a whole series of secret radios aimed at making trouble for the Soviet Union. Among those he mentioned was Radio Liberation.

Radio Liberation, which changed its name to Radio Liberty in 1959, is an avowedly private organization with offices at 30 East 42d Street in New York. It broadcasts exclusively to the Soviet Union, twenty-four hours a day, from seventeen transmitters in three locations -- Lampertheim, West Germany; Pals, near Barcelona; and Taipeh, Formosa.

Its programming center is a rebuilt former airport building near Munich at Oberwiesenfeld, which was once Hitler's airfield. An official of Radio Liberty said the majority of its 1,200 employees are in Munich, but that the organization also has offices in Paris and Rome, as well as New York, Formosa and Spain.

Radio Liberty does not go to the public for funds. It says it is supported by foundations but does not list them anywhere. It insists that it receives no government funds, directly or indirectly, but says its budget is "classified."

"We do not advocate revolution," the official said, in explaining why Radio Liberty had changed its name from the more controversial Radio Liberation. "When the revolution comes, it will have to come from within. In the meantime, we can feed them ammunition."

According to its official booklet, "Radio Liberty is supported by the American Committee for Liberation, founded in 1951 by a group of private Americans who formed a working partnership with the free emigration from the USSR." It first went on the air on March 1, 1953. The American Committee for Liberation also supports the Institute for the Study of the USSR, Mannhardtstrasse, 6, Munich, which describes itself as a scholarly organization that puts out a number of publications on Russia, including Who's Who in the USSR.

Radio Liberty broadcasts a heavy diet of news to its Soviet audience. In 1956 it broadcast the text of Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Communist Party Congress. In 1961 it broadcast the fact that the Russians had resumed nuclear tests. Neither event, of course, had been disclosed to the Russian people by the Soviet government. The Russians, in turn, have tried hard to jam Radio Liberty.

Possibly, they have taken other steps as well. In 1954 two Radio Liberty employees died under mysterious circumstances in Munich. In September, Leonid Karas, a writer on the radio's Byelorussia desk was found drowned. In November, Abo Fatalibey, head of the Azerbaijan desk, was murdered and stuffed under the sofa in the apartment of a Russian named Mikhail Ismailov.

Police assumed the body was that of Ismailov, a fellow emigre. At the last moment the coffin -- which someone noticed was too short for the six-foot Ismailov -- was opened. The body was definitely identified as that of Fatalibey, the Radio Liberty official. Ismailov had vanished. Radio Liberty does not discount the possibility that the drowning and the murder were the work of the KGB.

Another interesting case was that of Anatoli Skachkov -- a Russian emigre who joined Radio Liberty on January 1, 1957. Skachkov died on July 22, 1959. On November 5, 1962, Izvestia carried an article which accused Radio Liberty of being staffed by CIA men. It listed eight alleged agents by name. In the course of the article, Izvestia said Skachkov had fallen from favor with American intelligence:

"He was seized at his place of employment and sent to a mental hospital. The next day two Americans, Valerio and Sanker, bearing flowers and a bottle of cognac, visited Skachkov. After their visit, he died. The physicians attributed his death to poisoning."

The tale of poisoned cognac is colorful, but Radio Liberty tells a different story. According to the radio station, Skachkov was an alcoholic who developed a persecution complex. As a result, he was committed to the State Institute for the Mentally Disturbed. He died, said Radio Liberty, of "a heart attack." Radio Liberty employed a Joseph Valerio and a Paul Sanker in its news department, but "neither Valerio or Sanker ever visited Skachkov, so the whole premise is a fabrication."

But the continuing Soviet attacks on Radio Liberty and its present and former employees provide some indication that this radio station "supported by a group of private American citizens" is reaching the Russian people in sufficient numbers to be irritating to the Soviet leadership.

By far the biggest, and from time to time the most controversial, of these radio operations is Radio Free Europe, which says it is a "private non-profit, non-government network broadcasting through the Iron Curtain to eighty million captive people in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria."

One distinction between Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty is that RFE broadcasts exclusively to the five satellite nations, while Radio Liberty broadcasts exclusively to the Soviet Union.

Radio Free Europe was born in 1949, with the formation of the National Committee for a Free Europe. In 1950 the committee's Crusade for Freedom fund drive was launched by General Eisenhower and General Lucius D. Clay, the hero of the 1948-49 Berlin airlift. The purpose of the fund drive was to raise money for RFE.

"We need powerful radio stations abroad," Eisenhower said in launching the crusade, "operated without government restrictions."

Clay struck the same theme. He praised the Voice of America but said: "There seemed to me to be needed another voice -- a voice less tempered perhaps by the very dignity of government; a tough, slugging voice, if you please."

In 1950-51, the directors of the National Committee for a Free Europe [iii] included Clay, Allen Dulles, C. D. Jackson, who became Eisenhower's psychological warfare adviser, and A. A. Berle, Jr., who participated in the Bay of Pigs operation a decade later.

RFE has twenty-eight transmitters at three sites. Two locations are in West Germany, at Biblis, near Frankfurt, and at Holzkirchen, near Munich. The third site is at Gloria, near Lisbon. RFE headquarters, like Radio Liberty, is at Munich. The organization employs about 1,500 persons.

"We're supported by contributions from the American people, mainly from the Radio Free Europe Fund," a spokesman said. He added that RFE is "privately managed and privately financed." However, he said "we work within the published policy of the United States Government."

Asked how it went about making sure that its broadcasts were consistent with United States foreign policy, he rep1ied: "We read the New York Times."

Are any government funds behind RFE? "No," was the reply, "but I prefer to put it positively -- we are supported by voluntary contributions." RFE's budget figures, however, are not published anywhere.

For a time, RFE dabbled in some intriguing balloon operations. In 1953 it set up something called the Free Europe Press, which began wafting rubber and plastic balloons filled with propaganda materials to Eastern Europe. For a time the balloon barrage went under the code name "Operation Prospero."

In February, 1956, the Czech Government charged that a balloon released by RFE had caused the crash of a Czech airliner on January 18 of that year in the Tatra Mountains of Slovakia. The crash killed twenty-two and injured four.

Moscow also protested the balloons, and Hungary chimed in that American balloons had caused three Hungarian air crashes. RFE replied that the balloons were not dangerous, that the "captive nations" had "attempted to shoot down balloons by aircraft and ground fire" and that Czech intelligence had tried twice "to blow up our balloon sites in Western Germany."

RFE called in its balloons during the Hungarian revolt. The program was not revived.

RFE figured in another cloak-and-dagger episode in December, 1959, when it charged that "a Communist diplomat" had put lethal amounts of atropine in the salt shakers of the radio station's cafeteria in Munich.

If taken in sufficient quantity, atropine can cause delirium, convulsions, coma or death. The U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps investigated and charged that Jaroslav Nemec, the vice-consul of the Czech consulate in Salzburg, Austria, had given the spiked salt shakers to a Communist agent "for placement in the Radio Free Europe cafeteria in Munich." The case was quietly dropped the next month, when the Munich public prosecutor said the amount of poison in the salt cellars had not been sufficient to cause serious harm.

At times, RFE has come under critical attack for the content of its broadcasts to Eastern Europe. On July 9, 1959, for example, there were news reports from Warsaw that the United States Ambassador to Poland, Jacob D. Beam, had protested RFE's broadcasts because he felt they contained misinformation and too blatant a propaganda line. At his press conference the same day, Secretary of State Christian A. Herter appeared to confirm the reports; he said any recommendations from Beam "will be very carefully studied."

But it was RFE's role in the Hungarian revolt of 1956 that brought the most criticism and controversy upon it. At the heart of the issue was the extremely touchy question of whether United States foreign policy should be aimed at the "liberation" of Eastern Europe.

"In thirteen years," an RFE executive explained, "Radio Free Europe has incurred a heavy moral responsibility. We must be extremely careful that what we say cannot lead to an ineffective uprising." Obviously, he had Hungary in mind.

Nevertheless, a recent RFE fund-appeal booklet, Your Money's Worth, illustrates that the radio station still speaks with a militant voice. 'The captive people," the appeal said, "desire freedom and do everything reasonable in their power to obtain it ... Radio Free Europe helps the East Europeans resist Communism ... helps them keep alive their faith in freedom ... Support Radio Free Europe ... it is one of the few ways you as a private citizen can take an active part in the fight against Communism ... bring the battle to the Kremlin's doorstep."

The Soviet role in Hungary was a sickening spectacle to civilized men everywhere. In the first phase, Moscow seemed willing to grant Hungary a measure of freedom. Then Russian tanks rolled into Budapest and brutally crushed the Hungarian patriots.

In the aftermath of the blood bath, questions were widely raised about RFE's role. Had it incited the Hungarians to revolt? Had it held out false promises of Western aid, knowing that this aid would not come? Was RFE, to put it bluntly, partly responsible for the carnage in Budapest?

Various tribunals examined this question, but little was said publicly about some more subtle and basic under lying questions.

These questions began with the Voice of America, the official voice of the United States Government. It is an organ of the United States Information Agency, and it broadcasts around the globe in thirty-six languages.

The Voice spends $22,000,000 a year. Forty percent of its programming is aimed at Communist countries. (In West Berlin, a huge 300,000-watt station called RIAS -- Radio in the American Sector- -- broadcasts around the clock to East Berlin and East Germany. It is said to be under the USIA.) In 1963 work was completed on a gigantic transmitter complex at Greenville, North Carolina, giving the Voice the most powerful long-range broadcasting station in the world.

From all this, it should be obvious that news and propaganda broadcasts across national boundaries to other nations, particularly behind the Iron Curtain, are among the mechanisms of United States foreign policy. On the face of it, therefore, it would seem logical that the United States Government could scarcely allow a competing organization to broadcast, as it pleased, material that might affect relations between governments, incite to revolt, or even involve the United States in military action. It did not seem likely, in other words, that it could allow a "private" broadcasting organization to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.

Consequently, lying ominously just below the surface of the various inquiries into RFE's role in the Hungarian revolt was the larger question of whether the United States Government had erred in permitting RFE to broadcast any degree of encouragement to the Hungarians that could not be backed up by U.S. military assistance.

However, the post-Hungary inquiries were not conducted in these terms. To do so would have opened up the entire sensitive question of whether and/or to what extent RFE received policy guidance, funds and direction from the CIA and the State Department. [iv]

The charges against Radio Free Europe began in Moscow and soon spread to the free world, where they were picked up by Freies Wort, the organ of West Germany's Free Democratic Party. They were aired further when three revolutionary leaders who had escaped from Hungary said at a press conference in Bonn, on November 19, that RFE had broadcast "more than the troth." On November 29 Anna Kethly, the Hungarian Social Democratic leader who had escaped to the West, dealt RFE another blow when she said of its broadcasts: "The intentions were good but the results were not always happy."

In New York, RFE countered by calling Miss Kethly's statement "utterly without foundation and wholly incorrect." A spokesman said broadcasts promising Western military aid to Hungary were the work of a "Communist radio located in East Germany. These Communist programs were broadcast in the name of Radio Free Europe."

There were then three inquiries into RFE's role. The West German Government set up a commission to study the charges (since RFE was headquartered in Munich on West German soil) RFE turned over to it three miles of tape containing all its broadcasts to Hungary before, during and after the revolt.

On January 25, 1957, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer reported the results of this inquiry at a press conference. Charges that RFE had promised the Hungarians armed assistance by the West "do not correspond with the facts," he said. "Remarks, however, were made that were subject to misinterpretation. The matter has been discussed and personnel changes have resulted. I believe we can consider the matter closed for the time being."

Adenauer's report seemed internally contradictory. On the one hand, it found the charges to be incorrect. On the other hand, it said there had been a shake-up at Radio Free Europe.

A second inquiry was conducted by a special committee of the Council of Europe, an organization of Western governments formed in 1949 to deal mainly with social problems. In its report on April 27, 1957, the committee said the charge that RFE had promised "military aid from the West was proved to be without ground." But it said one RFE news broadcast "could easily have led to misunderstandings."

The report added it was "regrettable that Radio Free Europe is still entirely financed by the U.S.A. ... Radio Free Europe depends entirely on American funds and is consequently a purely American affair ... actual political leadership and the last word rest with the American management."

In June, 1957, a United Nations special committee on Hungary came in with its verdict on RFE:

"Listeners had the feeling that Radio Free Europe promised help ... the general tone of these broadcasts aroused an expectation of support ... In a tense atmosphere such as that prevailing in Hungary during these critical weeks ... the generally hopeful tone of such broadcasts may well have been overemphasized in the process of passing from mouth to mouth ...

"The attitude of the Hungarian people towards foreign broadcasting was perhaps best summed up by the student ...who said: 'It was our only hope, and we tried to console ourselves with it.' It would appear that certain broadcasts by Radio Free Europe helped to create an impression that support might be forthcoming for the Hungarians. The Committee feels that in such circumstances the greatest restraint and circumspection are called for in international broadcasting."

The three cautiously phrased reports, in other words, found in varying degree that RFE's broadcasts, while they did not promise aid in so many words, "helped to create an impression," as the UN put it, that assistance might be on the way.

One RFE broadcast that might have contributed to this was a news report of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge's words in the UN. Lodge said the Hungarian resistance had given the UN "a brief moment in which to mobilize the conscience of the world on your behalf. We are seizing that moment and we will not fail you."

Another RFE broadcast during the revolt gave instructions on how to blow up attacking Soviet tanks.

While none of the inquiries produced any evidence that RFE actually promised military aid, there is no doubt that it encouraged the revolutionary fighters. For example, one script broadcast to Hungary by RFE on November 3, as Soviet tanks ringed Budapest, said:

"The Soviet monster stands at our gates ... the eight days' victorious revolution have turned Hungary into a free land ... Neither Khrushchev nor the whole of the Soviet army have the power to oppress this new liberty ... What can you do against Hungary, you Soviet legions? It is in vain to pierce Hungarian souls with your bayonets. You can destroy and shoot and kill: our freedom will now forevermore defy you ..." [5]

In his book The Bridge at Andau, James A. Michener said that RFE did not incite the uprising "but this radio did broadcast messages of freedom and is presumably still doing so. Are we now prepared to assume direct responsibility for these messages? How long can we broadcast such messages without assuming direct responsibility for our words?" [6]

Michener's question is well worth pondering. The effect of RFE's words is nowhere more heartbreakingly recorded than in the broadcasts from inside Hungary in the dying hours of the revolt. Better than any UN or other investigation, they reflect how the men and women inside Hungary, whether rightly or wrongly, regarded the role of RFE.

On the afternoon of November 5, Radio Free Rakoczi broadcast this message from inside Hungary at 13:48 hours: [7]

"Attention, Radio Free Europe, hello attention. This is Roka speaking. The radio of revolutionary youth ... continual bombing ... Help, help, help ... Radio Free Europe ... forward our request. Forward our news. Help! Help!"

November 6, 13:52 hours:

"We appeal to the conscience of the world. ...Why cannot you hear the call for help of our murdered women and children? Peoples of the world! Hear the call for help of a small nation! ... This is Radio Rakoczi, Hungary ... Radio Free Europe, Munich! Radio Free Europe, Munich! Answer! Have you received our transmission?"

15:05 hours:

"... Attention, attention, Munich! Munich! Take immediate action. In the Dunapentele area we urgently need medicine, bandages, arms, food and ammunition! Drop them for us by parachute."

And, finally, on November 7 at 09:35 hours:

"Must we appeal once again?

"Do you love liberty? ... So do we.

"Do you have wives and children? ... So have we.

"We have wounded ... who have given their blood for the sacred cause of liberty, but we have no bandages ... no medicine ... And what shall we give to our children who are asking for bread? The last piece of bread has been eaten.

"In the name of all that is dear to you ... we ask you to help ... Those who have died for liberty ... accuse you who are able to help and who have not helped ... We have read an appeal to the UN and every honest man ...

"Radio Free Europe, Munich! Free Europe, Munich!"

_______________

Notes:

i. To intelligence officers, the term "black radio" can have a specialized meaning, to describe a radio that is captured and then operated as if all were normal in order to deceive the opposition. The Germans successfully undermined the British Operation Northpole during World War II by using this technique. Parachutists dropped by British Intelligence were lured into traps by Dutch underground radios that had been captured by the Nazis. In this chapter, however, the term is used in its broader sense, to describe radio operations in general where they are controlled directly or indirectly by an intelligence apparatus.

ii. Less well known are the CIA's mimeographed summaries of the foreign press.

iii. The committee is now known as the Free Europe Committee, Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York. The Crusade for Freedom is now the Radio Free Europe Fund. The Committee engages in a multitude of other activities. It publishes East Europe magazine (22.,000 copies a month) and works with Eastern European exile groups "engaged in the struggle for eventual freedom of their countries." The Committee has five operating divisions: RFE, Communist Bloc Operations, Exile Political Organizations, Free World Operations and West European Operations.

iv. About the furthest anyone went was Edwin A. Lahey, a veteran Washington correspondent, who said in a December 15, 1956. dispatch from Munich in the Chicago Daily News: "The United States Government probably supports RFE with 'unvouchered funds' but this has never been officially established."
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:37 am

CIA's Guano Paradise

"There are three coconut palm trees on Great Swan Island at the present time," the State Department brochure discouragingly told Americans who inquired about retiring to an island paradise in the Caribbean. "There are no poisonous snakes, but the islands are infested with hordes of lizards ranging in size from only an inch to over three feet."

The vision of thirty-six-inch lizards slithering underfoot would likely deter any potential visitor who had written to the State Department for travel information about the little-known Swan Islands, which, on the map, beckon attractively as a speck in the western Caribbean near Honduras.

But the department's brochure, prepared for just such inquiries, had even more hideously disenchanting news. "It has been necessary," it said, "to construct the few houses on the island on piers and to take other steps to keep the lizards from overrunning them."

The water, the brochure added, "is exceptionally clear and blue and abounding in different types of fish. Ocean bathing is considered dangerous as a constant watch must be kept for shark and barracuda."

The State Department's disheartening travel folder might, just possibly, have been prompted by the fact that Great Swan Island, as late as 1964. was the site of a covert CIA radio station broadcasting to Cuba, Mexico, Central America and the northern tier of South America.

Not that any prospective tourist would have been likely to stumble on the island. There is, naturally, no commercial airline service to the CIA's airstrip. The only boat takes five days to ply between Tampa and the island and carries a pungent cargo of bananas and fertilizer. [i] And normally anyone visiting the island must have a secret clearance.

Despite these precautions, the story of the bedeviled efforts to conceal the CIA's hand on Swan Island provides an episode of comic relief.

The Swan Islands are really two islands, Great Swan (usually known simply as Swan Island), which is a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, and Little Swan. There is also a reef, called Bobby Cay. The islands are due south of the western tip of Cuba, and ninety-seven miles north of Punte Patuca, Honduras. They are said to have been named for a seventeenth-century pirate who used them as a base.

Like the lair of Ian Fleming's nefarious Doctor No, the CIA's Caribbean isle is made entirely of guano, the accumulated droppings of sea fowl. The United States has claimed the islands since 1863, but then, so has Honduras.

When the CIA received approval to mount the operation against Cuba that grew into the Bay of Pigs, it was decided first to soften up Castro's island psychologically by means of radio broadcasts.

By 1960 Radio Swan was on the air. Initially, its mission was confined to propaganda broadcasts designed to undermine the Castro regime. Gradually, as the Bay of Pigs invasion planning progressed, the radio station was assigned a more militant role. During the invasion, as has been seen, Radio Swan broadcast coded messages, appeals for uprisings among the Cuban populace and armed forces, and instructions in the art of sabotage. But back in May of 1960, there had to be some public explanation for the mysterious new fifty-kilowatt station that suddenly began to broadcast from Swan Island.

And so it was that something called the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, then of 437 Fifth Avenue, New York, announced publicly that it had leased land on Swan Island to operate a radio station. (Officials of the line said that the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation had not owned a steamship for ten years.)

Horton H. Heath, who described himself as "commercial manager" of the station, explained that Radio Swan would broadcast music, soap operas and news. "It is strictly a commercial venture," he announced to the press. "We plan to get advertisers. We haven't got any yet, but are negotiating."

But who owned Gibraltar Steamship?

Walter G. Lohr, of Baltimore, who said he was a stockholder, identified the president of Gibraltar as Thomas Dudley Cabot, of Weston, Massachusetts, a banker and the former president of the United Fruit Company, and the director, in 1951, of the State Department Office of International Security Affairs. Appropriately, considering his new capacity, Cabot was also president and director of Godfrey L. Cabot, Inc., the world's largest producer of carbon black.

Another stockholder was publicly identified at the time as Sumner Smith, a Boston businessman who claimed that his family owned Swan Island. Horton Heath explained that the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation was leasing the land for the radio station from Sumner Smith, who was chairman of the board of Abington Textile Machinery Works, 19 Congress Street, Boston.

When a reporter for the Miami Herald reached Smith in Boston in June, 1960, he fended off questions about Radio Swan by saying: "Speak to the government."

But the government professed ignorance of the radio station. In answer to a question at the time, a State Department spokesman had replied: "The only station that I know anything about on Swan Island is a United States Weather Bureau station." (And it was true that the United States had operated such a station on Swan Island intermittently since 1914.)

The United States Information Agency did go so far as to say it had planned a project similar to Radio Swan but had abandoned the idea because of "interference and licensing problems."

Peculiarly, the Federal Communications Commission, which is required by law to license all radio stations operating from United States territory, did not license Radio Swan or the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation.

"We don't know who owns the island," an FCC spokesman explained lamely.

The State Department suffered no such doubts. It firmly listed [ii] Swan Island as a "possession," and had consistently rejected Honduran claims.

And so Gibraltar Steamship and Radio Swan were in operation. It did not take long for Havana, stung by the propaganda broadcasts, to bark back. As early as June 21, 1960, Castro's Radio Mambi, in Havana, complained that "a counterrevolutionary radio station, supported by U.S. dollars, is now active on Swan."

Things were going reasonably smoothly for the CIA, however, until the Hondurans began to get fidgety over the funny business taking place on what they insisted was their mound of guano.

The trouble had its roots in the fact that a 1960 U.S. census had been taken on Swan Island. In March of that year, a two-star admiral had been piped ashore to count noses on Great Swan. (Only birds lived on Little Swan). Rear Admiral H. Arnold Karo, the director of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, stopped off to take the census during a voyage of the survey ship Explorer.

In April, with much fanfare, it was announced in Washington that the population of Swan Island was twenty-eight, a drop of four since 1950. In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a group of students reacted indignantly to the claim of sovereignty implied by the taking of the 1960 census. They announced plans to organize an expedition to plant their country's flag on Swan Island. And in July, thirteen armed Hondurans arrived off Swan Island. The invaders were repulsed single-handedly by John Hamilton, a Cayman Islander who was the Weather Bureau's native cook.

From their boat, the Hondurans shouted that they were coming ashore to place a marker on the beach claiming Swan Island as their own. "Leave your guns in the boat," the intrepid cook ordered. The Hondurans meekly complied. They came ashore, unarmed, sang the Honduran national anthem, took their own census and planted their flag.

In Washington, the State Department announced solemnly that the government was awaiting a report from its embassy in Tegucigalpa on the illegal landing by the Hondurans.

On Swan Island, the CIA took direct action to smooth things over. It invited the Hondurans to lunch. Horton Heath announced that all was well.

But in October the dispute got into the United Nations. Francisco Milla Bermudez, the permanent Honduran representative to the UN, told the General Assembly, on October 3, that the United States had occupied Swan Island "against the right and will" of his government. "Historically, geographically and juridically," he declared, "the Swan Islands are and always will be Honduran territory."

But the United States claim to the islands was solidly based on guano, specifically the Guano Act of 1856. Under it, the President could issue a certificate when an American citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed island. This gave the discoverer the right to collect and sell the guano, a valuable fertilizer rich in phosphates. The President, at his discretion, could then designate the island as United States territory.

In 1863 such a certificate was issued for Swan Island to the New York Guano Company by Secretary of State Seward, who acted for President Lincoln. Shortly after the turn of the century, the company abandoned the islands. They were claimed in 1904 by Captain Alonzo Adams, an old salt who sailed out of Mobile, Alabama.

In the 1920s Honduras made several passes at the islands, but Washington warned Tegucigalpa to keep off and sent along a copy of Seward's Guano Certificate to back up its territorial claim.

For a time the United Fruit Company harvested coconuts on the island, but the 1955 hurricane swept away all but the three trees alluded to in the State Department travel brochure.

The CIA shared Swan Island with two other branches of the Federal Government: the Weather Bureau and the Federal Aviation Agency. The Weather Bureau maintained a station, staffed by eight men, to take wind direction, wind speed, temperature and humidity pressure. The FAA maintained a high-powered radio beacon as a navigational aid to pilots."

The Weather Bureau people were rotated every three to six months, since they were not allowed to bring their wives and children to Swan Island. A favorite pastime of gourmets among the government men was clonking lobsters over the head with stones in the shallow water.

The CIA set up shop in lizard-proof Quonset huts half a mile from the Weather Bureau compound. They installed their radio equipment in big trailers slung with awnings to protect the delicate electronic gear from the broiling Caribbean sun. The Cayman Islanders, imported as a labor force, lived nearby with their families in a compound called Gliddenville.

In September, 1960, Walter S. Lemmon, the president of the World Wide Broadcasting System, announced that his station, WRUL, would co-operate with Radio Swan in broadcasts to Cuba. World Wide, besides its Manhattan office, had a short-wave station at Scituate, Massachusetts. Since April, WRUL had been broadcasting to Cuba. The programs featured Miss Pepita Riera, a Cuban exile billed as "Havana Rose." Lemmon said Radio Swan would tape and rebroadcast WRUL's programs.

At the same time, Representative Roman C. Pucinski, Chicago Democrat and sponsor of an organization called Radio Free Cuba, announced that his group would also cooperate with World Wide and Radio Swan. Pucinski described Radio Free Cuba as a privately owned group that had six radio stations in Florida, including the Florida Keys, and Louisiana.

During this period, Radio Swan's programs were for the most part recorded in the New York office of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation. Some prominent Cuban exiles taped programs for the CIA station, including Luis Conte Aguero, a former Havana radio and television commentator.

Havana Radio kept up its counter-barrage. On October 24 Castro's radio attacked the "miserable curs who speak over Radio Swan." In January, 1961, it said: "Radio Swan is not a radio station but a cage of hysterical parrots."

During the invasion, the CIA station was on the air twenty-four hours a day, transmitting romantic- sounding messages in code. At 10:57 P.M. on April 18, for example, the CIA broadcast this cryptic message in Spanish over Radio Swan: "Attention, Stanislaus, the moon is red 19 April."

Even after the invasion had collapsed, Radio Swan continued to broadcast mysterious orders to nonexistent battalions. On April 22 three days after the end of the invasion, Radio Swan ordered various detachments not to surrender -- help was on the way. Orders went out over the air to "Battalion Three" to advance. "Battalion Four and Seven" were told to "proceed to Point Z."

"Mission Alborada," which means reveille in Spanish, was ordered to commence, and Squadrons Four and Five were told to protect it. At the same time, "Air Group Pluto Norte" was told to cover position "Nino Three N/S."

In the swamps and forests around the Bahia de Cochinos, some of the weary brigade survivors who heard the broadcasts as they tried to evade capture by the militia were bitter at what they felt was false encouragement by Radio Swan.

By this time, Radio Swan's cover as a private station owned by the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation had worn perilously thin. A private station that had broadcast messages in code and instructions to troops during a clandestine invasion -- well, it seemed to be time to get out of town.

And that is just what Gibraltar did. It kept an office in Manhattan, but moved the entire operation to Miami in September, 1961. The "steamship" executives moved into rooms 910, 911 and 912 of the Langford Building in downtown Miami. Fred Fazakerley, a spokesman for the Gibraltar line, told a newsman that Horton Heath would be moving to Miami to take over the office. Several pieces of luggage being moved into the suite were marked with the name "George Wass," who was identified as an official of Radio Swan. Gibraltar took this listing in the Miami telephone book: [iii]

Gibraltar SS Corp. Langfrd B1 371-8098.

Then, silently, by a process akin to alchemy, Gibraltar Steamship faded away and was metamorphosed into a brand-new identity -- the Vanguard Service Corporation, "consultants." Radio Swan fluttered into a CIA Valhalla, only to emerge as "Radio Americas."

Oddly, the Vanguard Service Corporation did not bother to move out of Gibraltar's quarters or to change its telephone number. The 1963-64 Miami telephone book still carried the same listing for Gibraltar, but it also carried this listing:

Vanguard Serv Corp consltnts Langfrd B1 371-8098.

With a whole new dramatis personae, Radio Americas, now managed by one Roger Butts, continued to broadcast from Swan Island.

In 1962 an elderly New England couple, Mr. and Mrs. Prince S. Crowell, decided to visit Swan Island. Mr. Crowell's father had been a chemist for a guano company, and the adventurous couple occupied their leisure time with visits far and wide to the scene of bygone guano operations.

"Mr. Crowell had set his heart on going to Swan to continue the guano investigation," Mrs. Crowell wrote later in the Falmouth (Massachusetts) Enterprise. [1]

The couple would not be put off. They contacted Sumner Smith, who agreed to write to "his caretaker, Captain Donald E. Glidden, to make plans for us ... The captain had given us into the care of Mr. Roger Butts, an executive of Vanguard Service Corporation, which manages the commercial station, Radio Americas, on the island."

The Crowells were, apparently. innocently unaware of what they had stumbled into.

Once a week, a CIA plane would leave Miami for Swan Island, and it was the only air link with the United States.

"At last arrangements were made for us to be among the few recent visitors to Swan," Mrs. Crowell wrote. "We flew from Miami in a DC-3, twenty-four-passenger plane with two pilots, the mail, medical supplies, weekly food, several wares for the store, etc. We learned later that we presented some problem. About one half-hour before we were to land, the island found out that no preparation in the line of ramp or ladder had been made to get two aged passengers from the high door of the plane. After much scurrying around and various suggestions, a solution was found. They drove a tractor with a scoop up to the door, raised the scoop, led us onto it, backed away a bit and lowered us. Every available man, woman and child was down to greet us. I was a curiosity indeed, the only female citizen of the United States on the Island."

What happened next was like a scene straight out of a Margaret Rutherford-Alistair Sim film comedy, as the charming couple was turned loose on the CIA's guano island.

"Mr. Butts gave up his home for us, a Quonset hut, five rooms and a bath with hot and cold water," Mrs. Crowell continued.

"The radio station and weather bureau were carefully explained to us, but not comprehended. We were taken swimming in the loveliest water I ever saw ... my especial joy on that trip was the birds; at least one hundred frigate birds, one hundred brown boobies, and twelve red-footed boobies ... Palm warblers ... were around our house all the time and I had an excellent view of a vittelina warbler, Nelson's (denolroica vittelina nelsoni) named for Mr. George Nelson and found only on Swan, I believe. On the runway we enjoyed daily a flock of twenty little blue herons in all stages of color, a few white ibis and one cattle egret. It seemed like home to hear and see one catbird, also one tree swallow.

"One of the technicians led us to a young white booby in its nest. We had to pick our way several hundred yards over jagged sharp coral with great cracks to be crossed."

There was no question that the CIA had gone above and beyond the call of duty to be hospitable to the delightful Massachusetts couple. "When we reluctantly left for home," Mrs. Crowell concluded, "the pilot flew low over and around the islands as a farewell treat. We realized with grateful appreciation that no stone had been left unturned to make our unusual adventure a reality."

A year later, Radio Americas was still on the air from Swan. It called on Cubans to burn cane fields, and to carry matches to be ready for sabotage at all times. It instructed them to go into offices and telephone booths and take the receivers off the hooks to tie up communications. And it urged the people of Cuba to smash as many bottles as possible. The CIA's reported plan was to curtail the island's beer supply by creating a bottle shortage.

In Boston, Sumner Smith maintained he was not sure whether or not he was still a director of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation. Smith, explaining his family's ownership claim, said that he had foreclosed a mortgage on the island that had been acquired years ago by his father, the late Charles Sumner Smith. Smith said he had since transferred ownership of the island to his four children, and that they in turn had leased the land to Gibraltar for operation of the radio station.

A telephone call was placed to the Vanguard Service Corporation consultants, in Miami late in 1963. "Vanguard Service," said the girl who answered. Roger Butts then came on the line. Mr. Butts explained that Radio Swan was now Radio Americas and was "currently in operation."

"It is a privately owned commercial station operating on Swan Island," he said.

"What happened to the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation?"

"Vanguard is leasing from Gibraltar Steamship on a profit basis. Gibraltar leases from Sumner Smith."

Mr. Butts identified himself as the "vice-president" of Vanguard. "The president and treasurer is Mr. William H. West, Jr., Mr. James Hollingsworth of Palm Beach is the vice-president and Richard S. Greenlee is the secretary."

Mr. Butts was asked how the station was supported. After a long pause he replied: "By income from sponsors."

A call to George O. Gillingham, the public information chief for the Federal Communications Commission, brought this response to an inquiry about the Swan Island station: "It's still operating. We do not license this station. Try the State Department."

Gillingham said yes, the FCC does license stations broadcasting from the United States or its possessions. That is the law of the land. "We don't license government stations," he added.

Was he saying that this was a government station then?

"No, no, no!" the FCC man said. "We don't know what it is. All we know is that it's operating."

_______________

Notes:

i. The boat service is operated by Hamilton Bras., Inc., a Honduran company, according to the State Department brochure.

ii. Most recently in Geographic Report, No. 4, February 7, 1963, The Geographer, Department of State. It should be understood that the State Department claimed U.S. sovereignty over the Swan Islands; this did not mean private individuals could not own property on the island, as the Smith family claimed it did. The State Department brochure on the islands said that a letter from Sumner Smith, dated February 19, 1956, "states that he, as agent, represents certain owners."

iii. There was no listing for Radio Swan.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:38 am

The 1960 Campaign -- And Now

UNKNOWN to the American people, the Bay of Pigs invasion plan played a crucial role in the 1960 presidential campaign.

Despite the fact that millions of persons watched the four televised debates between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, the voters went to the polls without knowing the secret reasons for the public positions the candidates took on Cuba. Behind the scenes, on both sides, there was deep concern over the pending CIA invasion.

To understand the secret drama that unfolded inside the Nixon and Kennedy camps in 1960 over the planned invasion, one must go back to a tradition that began in 1944.

In that year, wartime intelligence reports were made available to Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate, by President Roosevelt. Mr. Dewey received similar information in 1948. In 1957. President Truman made CIA data available to General Eisenhower and to Adlai Stevenson.

In 1956, following what by now had become an established custom, Eisenhower arranged CIA briefings for Stevenson. And in 1960 Eisenhower sent identical telegrams on July 18 to Kennedy and to Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, offering them "periodic briefings on the international scene from a responsible official in the Central Intelligence Agency ... Because of the secret character of the information that would be furnished you," said Eisenhower "it would be exclusively for your personal knowledge."

Kennedy and Johnson accepted Eisenhower's offer. On July 23 Allen Dulles, then Director of Central Intelligence flew to Hyannis with two aides, James Brooke and Gate Lloyd. The CIA men arrived in an Aero Commander that had the markings of a private plane. Brooke and Lloyd carried secret papers in two slim dispatch cases.

In a two-and-a-half-hour conversation at Senator Kennedy's summer home, on the brick terrace overlooking Nantucket Sound, Dulles briefed the Democratic presidential candidate on what Kennedy described afterward to reporters as "a good many serious problems around the world." Kennedy said these had been discussed "in detail' and indicated particular emphasis had been placed on Cuba and Africa.

On July 27 Dulles flew to the LBJ Ranch in Texas and remained overnight to brief Johnson. Dulles briefed Kennedy once more during the campaign, on September 19.

A few days after this second briefing, in a reply published on September 23 to a series of questions from the Scripps Howard newspapers, Kennedy said: "The forces fighting for freedom in exile and in the mountains of Cuba should be sustained and assisted ..." [2]

Then, on October 6, in Cincinnati, Kennedy delivered his major speech on Cuba. "Hopefully," he said, "events may once again bring us an opportunity to bring our influence strongly to bear on behalf of the cause of freedom in Cuba." Meantime, he called for "encouraging those liberty-loving Cubans who are leading the resistance to Castro." [3]

These sentiments were making the Nixon camp increasingly edgy. Nixon and his aides did not know exactly how much, if anything, Kennedy knew about the invasion plan. They did not know if Dulles had told him about it. They certainly did not want the Democratic candidate to be able to claim credit for an invasion that might be launched by a Republican President. It was President Eisenhower, after all, who had ordered the CIA to arm and train the exiles in May of 1960. Nixon and his advisers wanted the CIA invasion to take place before the voters went to the polls on November 8.

A top Nixon campaign adviser later privately confirmed this. He explained that Nixon was hoping for an invasion before the election because "it would have been a cinch to win" the presidency if the Eisenhower Administration -- in which Nixon was the Number 2 man -- had destroyed Castro in the closing days of the campaign.

The best documentation of this is an article by Herbert G. Klein, press secretary to Vice-President Nixon during the 1960 campaign. On March 25, 1962, writing in the San Diego Union, of which he was the editor, Klein revealed what had been going on behind the scenes in the Nixon camp in 1960. It was a candid and most interesting news story that did not gain the wide national attention it merited:

"From the start of the 1960 campaign many of us were convinced that Cuba could be the deciding issue in a close election. Certainly, in retrospect, it was one of the decisive factors in what was the closest presidential election of modern history ...

"Only four of us on the Nixon staff shared the secret that refugees were being trained for an eventual assault on Castro and a return to Cuba. We had stern instructions not to talk about this, and, despite many temptations, we protected security by remaining silent.

"For a long time, as we campaigned across the country, we held the hope that the training would go rapidly enough to permit the beach landing. The defeat of Castro would have been a powerful factor for Richard Nixon ...

"But the training didn't go rapidly enough for a pre-election landing ..."

Klein also wrote that a pre-election Cuban invasion would have made it possible to reveal during the campaign that Nixon had written a confidential memo in 1959, analyzing Castro as "either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline." [i] Klein added that Nixon had urged a tough policy on Cuba "which led to the training of refugees."

While the Nixon people were hoping the invasion would take place any day, that was exactly what the Kennedy strategists hoped would not happen. They were receiving persistent, and disturbing, reports that some kind of Cuban exile operation was in the works. The reports of invasion training were picked up from several sources, including alert members of the press.

In mid-October, Andrew St. George and Hank Walker went to Florida to shoot pictures for Life magazine of Cuban exiles training to invade their homeland. The Kennedy campaign staff heard about this assignment. While in Miami, St. George received several telephone calls from William Attwood, a member of Kennedy's speech-writing staff. [ii]

Attwood was calling St. George for information on the state of training of the Cuban exiles. According to St. George, Attwood expressed concern that the Republicans would try to launch an invasion of Cuba before election day. St. George said the question, apparently, in the mind of the Kennedy aide was not whether there was to be an invasion, but when.

St. George told Attwood that there seemed little possibility of an immediate invasion, judging by the state of readiness of the exiles. This word was passed on to Robert Kennedy, who was managing his brother's campaign. At one point, there had been discussion among Kennedy strategists of the possibility of the candidate's giving a speech anticipating the invasion that seemed to be brewing, and thereby neutralizing its political effect. The idea of a formal speech was dropped, however, when investigation showed there was little possibility that an invasion could be launched before election day.

However, the Cuban issue was not dropped completely. On October 20 the Kennedy and Nixon campaign trails crossed in New York City, where both were preparing for their fourth and final televised debate the following night. That afternoon, newsmen accompanying the Democratic candidate were alerted for an important statement by Kennedy. The release was delayed, and when mimeographed copies finally arrived at the pressroom in the Biltmore Hotel, it was after 6:00 P.M. On the very last page these key words appeared:

"We must attempt to strengthen the non-Batista democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, and in Cuba itself, who offer eventual hope of overthrowing Castro. Thus far these fighters for freedom have had virtually no support from our government." [4]

At the Waldorf-Astoria, eight blocks away, the effect on Nixon was immediate and explosive.

A year and a half later, in his book Six Crises, Nixon wrote that when he read Kennedy's Biltmore statement, "I got mad." Nixon went on to say that the "covert training of Cuban exiles" by the CIA was due "in substantial part at least, to my efforts," and, that this "had been adopted as a policy as a result of my direct support." Now, Nixon felt, Kennedy was trying to pre-empt a policy which the Vice-President claimed as his own.

Nixon wrote that he ordered Fred Seaton, Interior Secretary and a Nixon campaign adviser, "to call the White House at once on the security line and find out whether or not Dulles had briefed Kennedy on the fact that for months the CIA had not only been supporting and assisting but actually training Cuban exiles for the eventual purpose of supporting an invasion of Cuba itself.

"Seaton reported back to me in half an hour. His answer: Kennedy had been briefed on this operation."

Kennedy, Nixon continued, was advocating "what was already the policy of the American government -- covertly -- and Kennedy had been so informed ... Kennedy was endangering the security of the whole operation ...

"There was only one thing I could do. The covert operation had to be protected at all costs. I must not even suggest by implication that the United States was rendering aid to rebel forces in and out of Cuba. In fact, I must go to the other extreme: I must attack the Kennedy proposal to provide such aid as wrong and irresponsible because it would violate our treaty commitments." [5]

The next night, during their fourth debate from the ABC TV studio in Manhattan, Nixon hopped on the Kennedy proposal as "dangerously irresponsible." He said it would violate "five treaties" between the United States and Latin America as well as the Charter of the United Nations.

The Nixon camp was elated. All the next day, as the Republican candidate barnstormed through eastern Pennsylvania, members of the Nixon staff let it be known that they felt Kennedy had finally made a serious error.

That night, October 27, in the crowded gymnasium at Muhlenberg College in Allentown; Nixon attacked:

"He [Kennedy) called for -- and get this -- the U. S. Government to support a revolution in Cuba, and I say that this is the most shockingly reckless proposal ever made in our history by a presidential candidate during a campaign -- and I'll tell you why ... he comes up, as I pointed up, with the fantastic recommendation that the U. S. Government shall directly aid the anti-Castro forces both in and out of Cuba ...

"You know what this would mean? We would violate right off the bat five treaties with the American States, including the Treaty of Bogota of 1948. We would also violate our solemn commitments to the United Nations ..." [6]

Kennedy was campaigning in Missouri and Kansas that day. By the time he reached Wisconsin the next day, he was feeling the heat of the Nixon attack.

In North Carolina, Adlai Stevenson, campaigning for Kennedy, was alarmed at Kennedy's stand on Cuba. Stevenson had spoken at Duke University on October 21, and now he was at his sister's plantation in Southern Pines, North Carolina. He placed a long-distance call to Kennedy in Wisconsin. When he got through, Stevenson warned that the statement urging aid to the exiles could develop into a political trap for Kennedy if he were elected. He expressed strong opposition, and urged the Democratic standard-bearer to back off slightly from his New York statement.

In their conversation, Kennedy seemed embarrassed about the statement and implied it had been issued without adequate clearance. He told Stevenson he would pull back from it, and regain a safer position. Accordingly, Kennedy dispatched a telegram to Nixon that day in which he said he had "never advocated and I do not now advocate intervention in Cuba in violation of our treaty obligations." And he said no more about aiding Cuban exiles.

Three days later, the October 31 issue of Life appeared with St. George's and Walker's pictures of Cuban exiles in training.

The campaign was now rushing to a climax. On November 2 Kennedy had his last CIA briefing, this time from General Cabell, rather than from Dulles. Kennedy had requested this briefing in order to be brought up to date on any last-minute international developments.

The CIA deputy director flew to Los Angeles and talked with the candidate aboard the Caroline, Kennedy's Convair, during a flight from Los Angeles to San Diego. The two men were alone in the rear compartment of the plane. Cabell left Kennedy at San Diego.

In March of 1962, when Nixon charged in his book that Kennedy had been briefed about the Cuban invasion and had deliberately endangered its security, the White House issued an immediate denial, which was backed up by Allen Dulles. Pierre Salinger said Kennedy "was not told before the election of 1960 of the training of troops outside of Cuba or of any plans for 'supporting an invasion of Cuba.'" Nixon's account was based on a "misunderstanding," Salinger said. Dulles' campaign briefings had been general in nature, he added. He said Kennedy was first informed of the Cuban operation when Dulles and Bissell came to see him in Palm Beach on November 18, 1960, ten days after the election. [iii]

Dulles, too, attributed Nixon's version to "an honest misunderstanding ... My briefings were intelligence briefings on the world situation," he said. "They did not cover our own government's plans or programs for action, overt or covert." [7]

And in fact, Nixon did not explain how Seaton, by telephoning the White House, had learned what had transpired between Kennedy and Dulles. He did not say to whom his adviser had talked. Seaton has declined to shed any further light on this. "It was an appropriate White House official, a man who would be in a position to get the answer," was all that he would say. "It certainly was not the White House janitor." [8]

In fact, Seaton talked to Brigadier General Andrew J. Goodpaster, the White House staff secretary and President Eisenhower's link with the CIA. But there is no indication that Goodpaster checked with Dulles, or that Nixon or Seaton ever checked with Dulles directly.

Exactly what transpired during Dulles' briefings of Kennedy -- the nuances, the inflections, Dulles' precise words when the question of Cuba arose -- these will never be known for certain, since the meeting was top-secret and unrecorded. The same applies to General Cabell's briefing aboard the Caroline November 2.

But there is some evidence that Kennedy did not want to be told about operational matters -- such as the Cuban invasion -- because of the very fact that this might limit his freedom of action.

In any event, Nixon's dispute with Kennedy and Dulles over who told what to whom missed the point. Regardless of the content of the CIA briefings, the Kennedy camp had learned informally from other sources that an exile invasion was hatching.

The candidates for President of the United States were allowing their campaign strategy and public positions to be influenced by a secret operation of the Invisible Government. (All three major issues debated in the closing days of the 1960 campaign were related to clandestine operations. First, there was Cuba. Second, there was the issue of Quemoy and Matsu. Third, the question of whether President Eisenhower should have "apologized" to Khrushchev after the U-2 flight of Francis Gary Powers in order to save the Paris summit meeting.)

The point is that as a by-product of operations of the Invisible Government the electoral process -- the very heart of democratic government -- was being confused and diluted.

In the case of the Cuban invasion, both candidates were concerned about a secret plan of which the electorate knew nothing. In choosing the man to fill the most powerful elective office in the world, the voters were basing their decision, in part, on misleading statements.

As has been noted, one candidate, Vice-President Nixon, confessed considerably later that he took a false public position during the campaign, exactly the opposite of his true feeling, in order, he said, to protect the CIA invasion plan.

But the minions who watched Nixon and Kennedy argue the Cuban issue on television had no way of knowing that the facts were being distorted or suppressed.

This is not to suggest that the invasion plan should have been announced on nationwide television. But it does seem reasonable to ask how the voter can make an informed choice when a candidate is not telling the truth, for whatever laudable patriotic motivation.

Those who argue against tighter controls over the secret branches of the government are fond of making the case that the American system already has enough built-in safeguards. The people elect a President and place their faith in him. During his term in the White House, he is free to run the government, including its secret machinery, as he sees fit. But if the voters dislike how he is running the country, they can turn him out of office in four years. For during every presidential election campaign, the great issues are debated, there is a full public accounting and the people can look, listen and make their intelligent choice.

So the argument goes. What happens to this theory, however, when the electoral process becomes so enmeshed in the tentacles of the Invisible Government that a candidate tells the voters he stands for one course of action, when he really believes just the opposite? Obviously, the electoral process itself is fundamentally weakened. That is what happened in 1960, and there is no reason to think it could not happen again.

When the public positions of candidates for President are shaped (or reversed) by secret operations which the voters are not entitled to know about, something has happened to the American system, and something for ill.

The Invisible Government participated in the presidential campaign of 1960. It was unseen, but there. It provided a valuable lesson for future presidential campaigns.

_______________

Notes:

i. In April, 1959, after a long meeting with Castro in his office in the Capitol, Nixon drafted a confidential memo for the White House, the CIA and the State Department. Key excerpts said: "As I have already indicated, he was incredibly naive with regard to the Communist threat and appeared to have no fear whatever that the Communists might eventually come to power in Cuba ...

"My own appraisal of him as a man is somewhat mixed. The one fact we can be sure of is that he has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally. He seems to be sincere, he is either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline -- my guess is the former and as I have already implied, his ideas as to how to run a government or an economy are less developed than those of almost any world figure I have met in fifty countries. But because he has the power to lead to which I have referred we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction."

ii. After the election, Attwood was named Ambassador to Guinea, and in February, 1964, he became Ambassador to Kenya.

iii. Immediately after the election, Dulles went to Eisenhower and urged that the full details of the Cuban invasion plan be laid before the President-elect. Eisenhower authorized Dulles to do so, and the CIA chief, with Bissell, flew to Palm Beach for the November 18 meeting.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:38 am

Conclusion

THE PRIMARY CONCERN of the men who drafted the Declaration of Independence was the consent of the governed. By the mid-twentieth century, under the pressures of the Cold War, the primary concern of the nation's leaders had become the survival of the governed.

The Invisible Government emerged in the aftermath of World War II as one of the instruments designed to insure national survival. But because it was hidden, because it operated outside of the normal Constitutional checks and balances, it posed a potential threat to the very system it was designed to protect.

President Truman created the nucleus of the Invisible Government when he signed the National Security Act of 1947, giving birth to the CIA. He has asserted that he conceived of the CIA primarily as a coordinating and intelligence-gathering aid to a modern President who needed concise, centralized information on which to base national policy. But by 1963 the intelligence apparatus had taken on dimensions which Truman said he had never anticipated.

"With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda ... in their name-calling assault on the West," he wrote, "the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people ...

"There are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I ... would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can properly perform in that special field -- and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

"We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it." [1]

In effect, Truman was lamenting the damage to national prestige caused by such special operations as the U-2 affair of 1960, the Bay of Pigs, and the episodes in Indonesia, Burma, Laos, Vietnam and elsewhere.

Yet the Plans Division, which conducts the CIA's special operations, was established in 1951 under President Truman. And it was under Truman that Allen Dulles came to Washington to be the first director of that division. Since Truman could not have been unaware of these events, the real question is whether the operational activities of the CIA have grown to a size and shape that Truman had not intended when he signed the 1947 Act.

Has the dagger, in short, become more important than the cloak? Certainly, in the years since 1951, secret operations have grown greatly in size and number. When they have gone awry -- and some have gone sensationally awry -- they have brought notoriety to the CIA.

Nevertheless, CIA officials have insisted that the majority of these operations have been successful. However, there have been a large number of known failures. There is only one logical conclusion, if one is to accept the CIA's claim to a high percentage of success: that the total number of secret operations has been much greater than is supposed even in knowledgeable circles.

As in the case of the Bay of Pigs, some of these operations have become so big that they cannot be practicably concealed or plausibly denied. In other instances, clandestine activity has turned loose forces which have proved uncontrollable. Around the world, the CIA has trained and supported elite corps designed to maintain internal security in pro-Western countries. But these police units have sometimes become a source of acute embarrassment to the United States, notably in Vietnam, where CIA-financed special forces raided the Buddhist pagodas.

Despite these wide-ranging clandestine activities, and despite the importance, the power and the vast sums at the disposal of the CIA and the other agencies of the Invisible Government, there has not been enough intelligent public discussion of the role of this secret machinery.

In general, critics of the CIA have been hobbled by a lack of sure knowledge about its activities. By and large, their criticism falls into three categories: that the CIA conducts foreign policy on its own, that it runs its affairs outside of presidential and Congressional control, and that it warps intelligence to justify its special operations.

There is a sophisticated notion that the problems raised by a hidden bureaucracy operating within a free society can be resolved by limiting the CIA to intelligence gathering and setting up a separate organization to conduct special operations. The argument is that when the two functions are joined, as they are now, the intelligence gatherers inevitably become special pleaders for the operations in which they are engaged.

There is little question that this has happened in the past and that it poses a continuing, basic problem. But the difficulty is that an agent who is running a secret operation often is in the best position to gather secret information. A CIA man involved in intrigues with the political opposition in a given country will very likely know much more about that opposition than an analyst at Langley or even the ambassador on the scene.

If the CIA were to be prohibited from carrying out secret operational activity and that task were to be turned over to another agency, it might be necessary to create another set of secret operatives in addition to the large number of CIA men already at work overseas. Such a situation would probably reduce efficiency, raise costs and increase the dangers of exposure. The Taylor committee grappled with the problem after the Bay of Pigs and came to the conclusion that the present arrangement is the lesser of two evils.

This problem, as important and complex as it may be, is secondary to the larger question of whether the CIA sets its own policy, outside of presidential control. While this accusation contains some truth, it, too, is oversimplified.

There are procedures which call for the approval of any major special operation at a high level in the executive branch of the government. The public comments of Eisenhower on Guatemala and Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs demonstrated that they not only approved these operations, but took part in the planning for them.

However, many important decisions appear to have been delegated to the Special Group, a small and shadowy directorate nowhere specifically provided for by law. But because the Special Group is composed of men with heavy responsibilities in other areas, it obviously can give no more than general approval and guidance to a course of action. The CIA and the other agencies of the Invisible Government are free to shape events in the field. They can influence policy and chart their own course within the flexible framework laid down by Washington.

In Costa Rica, for example, CIA officers did not see fit to inform the State Department when they planted a fake Communist document in a local newspaper. In Cairo, "Mr. X" slipped in to see Nasser ahead of the State Department's special emissary. In the Bay of Pigs planning, the CIA men selected the political leadership of the Cuban exiles.

Yet because of the existence of the Special Group and a generalized mechanism for approving operations, intelligence men have been able to claim that they have never acted outside of policy set at the highest level of the government. In short, even when a clear policy has been established, a President may find it difficult to enforce. Presidential power, despite the popular conception of it, is diffuse and limited. The various departments and agencies under his authority have entrenched sources of strength. They cannot always be molded to his will.

In his relations with the Invisible Government, the President's problems are compounded. He cannot deal with it openly and publicly. He cannot bring to bear against it the normal political tools at his disposal. He cannot go over the heads of the leaders of the Intelligence community and appeal to the people.

A President operates under a constant awareness of the capacity of disgruntled members of the Invisible Government to undercut his purposes by leaking information to Congress and the press. During the deliberations leading to the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy obviously realized the political dangers of canceling a plan to overthrow Castro which had been brought to an advanced stage by a Republican administration. Similarly, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, White House officials suspected that someone high in the CIA was attempting to undermine the President by providing the Republicans with information.

This suspicion reflected the fact that the Invisible Government has achieved a quasi-independent status and a power of its own. Under these conditions, and given the necessity for secret activities to remain secret, can the Invisible Government ever be made fully compatible with the democratic system?

The answer is no. It cannot be made fully compatible. But, on the other hand, it seems inescapable that some form of Invisible Government is essential to national security in a time of Cold War. Therefore, the urgent necessity in such a national dilemma is to make the Invisible Government as reconcilable as possible with the democratic system, aware that no more than a tenuous compromise can be achieved.

What, then, is to be done?

Most important, the public, the President and the Congress must support steps to control the intelligence establishment, to place checks on its power and to make it truly accountable, particularly in the area of special operations.

The danger of special operations does not lie in tables of organization or questions of technique, but in embarking upon them too readily and without effective presidential control. Special operations pose dangers not only to the nations against which they are directed, but to ourselves. They raise the question of how far a free society, in attempting to preserve itself, can emulate a closed society without becoming indistinguishable from it.

The moral and practical justification for secret operations has been stated simply by Allen Dulles, who said the government felt compelled to "fight fire with fire." The implication was that the CIA could justifiably respond in kind to the unscrupulous practices of the Soviet espionage machine. It could mirror the opposition.

"Today," Dulles has observed, "the Soviet State Security Service (KGB) is the eyes and ears of the Soviet State abroad as well as at home. It is a multi-purpose, clandestine arm of power that can in the last analysis carry out almost any act that the Soviet leadership assigns to it. It is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries. It is an aggressive arm of Soviet ambitions in the Cold War." [2]

A free society has difficulty in adopting such practices because of its moral tradition that the end does not justify the means. It must proceed with caution, alert to the danger of succumbing to the enemy's morality by too eagerly embracing his methods.

Special operations should be launched only after the most sober deliberation by the President, acting upon the broadest possible advice. This counsel should come not only from those within the intelligence community, but from responsible officials with a wider viewpoint. Operations such as those at the Bay of Pigs and in Indonesia involved the potential overthrow of a foreign government. They amount to undeclared war. They should be launched only when the alternative of inaction carries with it the gravest risk to national security.

If, nonetheless, it becomes necessary to undertake a secret operation, it is imperative that the long- range repercussions be weighed fully in advance. The consequences of failure must be faced. Was it worth running the risk of national humiliation in attempting to overthrow Castro? Was it worth running the risk of permanently alienating Sukarno by supporting his enemies?

Equal consideration must be given to the problems that would result from the success of a special operation. Is the United States prepared to assume responsibility for the economic and political conditions growing out of a successful CIA-supported revolt? How much is really accomplished, in such cases as Guatemala and Iran, if a pro-Communist government is removed, but the conditions which permitted Communism to make inroads in the first place are restored?

It is a delusion to think that the problems of United States foreign policy in a complex world can be resolved by the quick surgery of a palace coup. The intelligence and espionage technicians, who have a natural affinity for such activist solutions, should never be allowed to dominate the deliberations leading to secret operations. Nor should they be permitted exclusive control of the conduct of operations in the field.

Both Eisenhower and Kennedy directed that the ambassador be in charge of all United States activities in a foreign country. It is essential that this theoretical supremacy become a reality. An ambassador should never be put in the position of a William Sebald in Burma. If he is to maintain the respect of the government leaders with whom he is dealing, he must be kept informed about American clandestine activity. If circumstances dictate a covert policy that conflicts with the avowed policy of Washington toward a given country, the ambassador must know about it.

Congress should also be kept informed. Under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to act as a check upon the activities of the executive branch. Traditionally, the Senate has given its "advice and consent" to major commitments in the sphere of foreign affairs. But in its relations with the Invisible Government, Congress has all but voted away its rights. It knows relatively little about what goes on in the $4,000,000,000-a-year intelligence complex for which it appropriates the money.

The CIA subcommittees in the House and Senate are controlled by the most conservative elements in Congress, men who are close personally and philosophically to those who run the Invisible Government. These subcommittees are now heavily weighted with legislators whose field of competence is military affairs. They should be reorganized to encompass men with a wider view and expert knowledge of foreign affairs. Men such as Senator Fulbright (who foresaw the perils of the Bay of Pigs with such clarity) should not be purposely excluded from Congressional surveillance of the intelligence apparatus.

The shadowy subcommittees should be replaced by a joint committee, including men from both the House and Senate. There is no reason why secrets should leak in any greater degree from one formal committee than from the present group of informal subcommittees. There has not been any leak of classified data from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.

Although the need for greater Congressional control is apparent, both President Eisenhower and President Kennedy resisted it as an infringement upon their executive power. They established a veneer of outside control by creating advisory boards of private citizens. This produced an anomalous situation. Selected private citizens are privy to secrets of the Invisible Government, but the elected representatives of the people are denied any meaningful knowledge of the intelligence machinery.

Congress is not only ignorant of operations overseas, but it has been denied information about the increasing involvement of the Invisible Government in domestic activities. The mandate to gather and analyze intelligence has been broadened into a justification for clandestine activities in the United States.

Clearly, some foreign intelligence can be gathered at home, but no rationale has been offered for a broad spectrum of domestic operations: maintenance of a score of CIA offices in major cities; the control of private businesses serving as CIA covers (such as the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation and Zenith Technical Enterprises, Incorporated); academic programs (such as the Center for International Studies at MIT); and the financing and control of freedom radio stations, publishing ventures and of exile and ethnic groups.

There should be a thorough reappraisal by private organizations and by the universities of the wisdom of their ties to the Invisible Government. There is a real danger that the academic community may find itself so closely allied with the Invisible Government that it will have lost its ability to function as an independent critic of our government and society. The academic world should re-examine its acceptance of hidden money from the CIA.

These unseen domestic activities of the CIA have become disturbingly complex and widespread. To the extent that they can be perceived, they appear to be outside the spirit and perhaps the letter of the National Security Act. No outsider can tell whether this activity is necessary or even legal. No outsider is in a position to determine whether or not, in time, these activities might become an internal danger to a free society. Both Congress and the Executive ought to give urgent attention to this problem.

In a free society attention should be given as well to the increasing tendency of the American Government to mislead the American people in order to protect secret operations. For example:

U-2: "There was absolutely no-N-O-no deliberate attempt to violate Soviet airspace. There never has been." -- Lincoln White. State Department spokesman.

Bay of Pigs: "The American people are entitled to know whether we are intervening in Cuba or intend to do so in the future. The answer to that question is no." -- Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Indonesia: "Our policy is one of careful neutrality and proper deportment all the way through so as not to be taking sides where it is none of our business." -- President Eisenhower.

Missile crisis: "The Pentagon has no information indicating the presence of offensive weapons in Cuba." -- Department of Defense.

Guatemala: "The situation is being cured by the Guatemalans themselves."-- Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Bay of Pigs fliers: "Unfortunately, at present neither CIA nor any other government agency possesses the slightest pertinent information on your son's disappearance." The White House.

Misleading statements related to covert operations have even distorted the electoral process, as was demonstrated in the presidential campaign of 1960.

It seems reasonable to suggest that there be fewer righteous declarations and less public misinformation by the government and, perhaps, more discreet silence in difficult circumstances.

The secret intelligence machinery of the government can never be totally reconciled with the traditions of a free republic. But in a time of Cold War, the solution lies not in dismantling this machinery but in bringing it under greater control. The resultant danger of exposure is far less than the danger of secret power. If we err as a society, let it be on the side of control.

"It should be remembered," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1819, "that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also."
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:40 am

Notes:

1. The Invisible Government


1. Speech by Allen W. Dulles at Yale University, February 3, 1958.

3. Build-Up

1. The entire text of the memorandum was published for the first time in Fulbright of Arkansas, a collection of speeches and papers by Senator J. W. Fulbright. Robert B. Luce, Inc., Washington, 1963.

5. The Case of the Birmingham Widows

1. Interview with Robert F. Kennedy, in U.S. News & World Report, January 28, 1963.

6. A History

1. Article by Harry S. Truman, syndicated by North American Newspaper Alliance, in the Washington Post, December 22, 1963.
2. Memorandum by Allen W. Dulles, contained in Hearings, National Defense Establishment, PP. 525-28; Senate Committee on Armed Services, 80th Congress, 1st Session on S. 758, 1947.
3. New York Times, May 28, 1949.
4. Interview with Allen Dulles, "Meet the Press," National Broadcasting Company, December 31, 1961.
5. New York Herald Tribune, April 16, 1948. See also New York Times of the same date.
6. New York Herald Tribune, June 27, 1950.
7. Truman, Harry S., Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 331. Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York, 1956.
8. Ibid., p. 372.
9. Dulles. Allen W., The Craft of Intelligence, p. 166. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., New York, 1963.
10. Interview by Eric Sevareid, "CBS Reports: The Hot and Cold Wars of Allen Dulles," Columbia Broadcasting System, April 26, 1962.
11. Dulles, Allen W., The Craft of Intelligence, p. 224. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1963.
12. Hearings, The President's Proposal on the Middle East, p. 446; joint meeting of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Senate Committee on Armed Services, 85th Congress, 1st Session, February 1, 1957. See also pp. 174-75. January 15, 1957.
13. Dulles, Allen W., "The Craft of Intelligence," article in Britannica Book of the Year, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1963.
14. The report cited by Mansfield had appeared in an editorial in the Washington Post, January 9, 1953.
15. Hearings, Events Incident to the Summit Conference, p. 124; Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 86th Congress, 2nd Session, testimony by Secretary of Defense Thomas S. Gates, June 2, 1960.
16. Television interview with Allen Dulles by David Schoenbrun, Columbia Broadcasting System, August 18, 1963.
17. Hearing, Francis G. Powers, U-2 Pilot, Senate Committee on Armed Services, 87th Congress, 2nd Session, March 6, 1962. The interview cited in the footnote was taped by Mr. Clarke on March 12, 1962, during the home-town reception for the U-2 pilot in Pound, Virginia.
18. Statement Concerning Francis Gary Powers, Central Intelligence Agency, March 6, 1962. This document was made public by Representative Carl Vinson, D., Ga., chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, in advance of Powers' public testimony the same day before the Senate Committee on Armed Services.
19. Dispatch by Walter Sullivan, New York Times, July 23, 1954

10. Vietnam: The Secret War

1. State Department situation paper, April 11, 1963.
2. White House statement, October 2, 1963.
3. Fifth Report, Senate Study Mission, February 24, 1963.

11. Guatemala: CIA's Banana Revolt

1. From a speech to the American Booksellers Association, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963. The former President later related the incident in the first volume of his presidential memoirs. See Eisenhower, Dwight D., Mandate for Change, Vol. I, The White House Years, PP. 420-27. Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York, 1963.
2. Hearings, Part 13, pp. 865-66; Senate Internal Security Sub. committee, Committee on the Judiciary, 87th Congress, 1st Session, testimony by Whiting Willauer, July 27, 1961.
3. Ydigoras, Miguel y Fuentes, with Mario Rosenthal, My War with Communism, PP. 49-50. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963.
4. Speech to the nation by John Foster Dulles, June 30, 1954. New York Herald Tribune, July 1, 1954. 382. 1.

12. The Kennedy Shake-Up

1. Interview with Robert F. Kennedy, in U.S. News 6 World Report, January 28, 1963.
2. Interview with Robert F. Kennedy by David Kraslow, in Miami Herald, January 21, 1963.
3. Ibid.
4. Interview with Robert F. Kennedy, in U.S. News 6 World Report, January 28, 1963.

13. The Secret Elite

1. Senate Committee on Armed Services, Hearings on the nomination of John A. McCone, January 18, 1962.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Congressional Record; January 30, 1962.
5. House Subcommittee on Appropriations, testimony by J. Edgar Hoover, January 24, 1962.

15. The Defense Intelligence Agency

1. Dulles, Allen W., The Craft of Intelligence, p. 47. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1963.

16. CIA: "It's Well Hidden"

1. "Issues and Answers," American Broadcasting Company, June 30, 1963.

17. CIA: The Inner Workings

1. Kirkpatrick, Lyman, Military Review, May, 1961.
2. Memorandum by Allen W. Dulles, contained in Hearings, National Defense Establishment, pp. 525-28; Senate Committee on Armed Services, 80th Congress, 1st Session on S. 758, 1947. Television interview with Allen Dulles by David Schoenbrun, Columbia Broadcasting System, August 18, 1963.

18. The Search for Control

1. Dulles, Allen W., The Craft of Intelligence, p. 189. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1963.
2. Intelligence Activities, A Report to the Congress by the Commission on Organization of the Executive Blanch of the Government, June 29, 1955.
3. National Security Organization, A Report to the Congress by the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, January, 1949.
4. Report to President Eisenhower by a special study group, October 19, 1954. The group included William D. Franke, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; Morris Hadley, New York attorney; William D. Pawley, former Ambassador to Brazil.
5. Congressional Record, March 10, 1954.
6. Ibid., April 11, 1956.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., April 9, 1956.
10. Dulles, Allen W., The Craft of Intelligence, p. 261. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1963.
11. Compilation of Studies on United States Foreign Policy, 86th Congress, 2nd Session, prepared under the direction of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate.

23. Black Radio

1. Speech by John Richardson, Jr., the president of the Free Europe Committee, to the New York State Publishers Association, Albany, N.Y., January 30, 1963.
2. Dulles, Allen W., The Craft of Intelligence, p. 155. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1963.
3. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 23, 1958.
4. Associated Press dispatch filed by Relman Morin in Cairo, in the Washington Post, August 15, 1958.
5. Broadcast by Miklos Ajtay, by Radio Free Europe to Hungary, November 3, 1956. This is one of several scripts of broadcasts during the Hungarian revolt made available to the authors by RFE.
6. Michener, James A., The Bridge at Andau, p. 257. Random House, Inc., New York, 1957.
7. All of these excerpts are from The Revolt in Hungary, A Documentary Chronology of Events Based Exclusively on Internal Broadcasts by Central and Provincial Radios. Pamphlet published by Free Europe Committee, New York.

24. CIA's Guano Paradise

1. Mrs. Crowell's account, from which this and the following quotations are taken, appeared in the Falmouth Enterprise, July 6, 1962.

25. The 1960 Campaign -- and Now

1. New York Herald Tribune, July 19, 1960.
2. Freedom of Communications, Part Ill, p. 432; The Joint Appearances of Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, Presidential Campaign of 1960, Senate Committee on Commerce, 87th Congress, 1st Session.
3. Freedom of Communications, Part I, p. 515; The Speeches of Senator John F. Kennedy, Presidential Campaign of 1960, Senate Committee on Commerce, 87th Congress, 1st Session.
4. Ibid., p. 681.
5. Nixon, Richard M., Six Crises; PP. 354-55. Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York, 1962.
6. Freedom of Communications, Part I, pp. 710-11; The Speeches of Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, Presidentia1 Campaign of 1960, Senate Committee on Commerce, 87th Congress, 1st session.
7. Both the Salinger and Dulles quotes are from the New York Herald Tribune, March 21, 1962.
8. New York Herald Tribune, March 25, 1962.

26. A Conclusion

1. Article by Harry S. Truman, syndicated by North American Newspaper Alliance, in the Washington Post, December 22, 1963.
2. Dulles, Allen W., The Craft of Intelligence, p. 86. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1963.
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