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 5:29 am

Indonesia: "Soldiers of Fortune"

THE INDONESIAN anti-aircraft fire hit the rebel B-26 and the two-engine bomber plunged toward the sea, its right wing aflame. The pilot, an American named Allen Lawrence Pope, jumped clear and his parachute opened cleanly. But as he drifted down onto a small coral reef, the chute caught a coconut tree and Pope's right leg was broken.

It was May 18, 1958, and the twenty-nine-year-old pilot had just completed a bombing and strafing run on the Ambon Island airstrip in the Moluccas, 1,500 miles from Indonesia's capital at Jakarta. It was a dangerous mission and Pope had carried it off successfully. But when the Indonesians announced his capture, Ambassador Howard P. Jones promptly dismissed him as "a private American citizen involved as a paid soldier of fortune."

The ambassador was echoing the words of the President of the United States. Three weeks before Pope was shot down, Dwight D. Eisenhower had emphatically denied charges that the United States was supporting the rebellion against President Sukarno.

"Our policy," he said, at a press conference on April 30, "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.

"Now on the other hand, every rebellion that I have ever heard of has its soldiers of fortune. You can start even back to reading your Richard Harding Davis. People were going out looking for a good fight and getting into it, sometimes in the hope of pay, and sometimes just for the heck of the thing. That is probably going to happen every time you have a rebellion."

But Pope was no freebooting soldier of fortune. He was flying for the CIA, which was secretly supporting the rebels who were trying to overthrow Sukarno.

Neither Pope nor the United States was ever to admit any of this -- even after his release from an Indonesian jail in the summer of 1962. But Sukarno and the Indonesian Government were fully aware of what had happened. And that awareness fundamentally influenced their official and private attitude toward the United States. Many high-ranking American officials -- including President Kennedy -- admitted it within the inner circles of the government, but it is not something that they were ever likely to give public voice to.

***

Allen Pope, a six-foot-one, 195-pound Korean War ace, was the son of a moderately prosperous fruit grower in Perrine, just south of Miami. From boyhood he was active and aggressive, much attracted by the challenge of physical danger. He attended the University of Florida for two years but left to bust broncos in Texas. He volunteered early for the Korean War, flew fifty-five night missions over Communist lines as a first lieutenant in the Air Force, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war Pope returned to Texas, got married, had a daughter, and was divorced. He worked for a local airline but found it dull stuff compared with the excitement he had experienced as a combat pilot in the Far East. And so in March of 1954 Pope signed on with Civil Air Transport, an avowedly civilian airline based on Formosa. He spent two months flying through Communist flak to drop supplies to the French at Dienbienphu. CAT grew out of the Flying Tigers and inherited much of its technique and swagger.

Pope found the outfit congenial. After Dienbienphu he renewed his contract, rising in three years to the rank of captain with a salary of $1,000 a month. He met his second wife, Yvonne, a Pan American stewardess, in Hong Kong. They settled down in a small French villa outside Saigon and had two boys.

Big-game hunting in the jungles of South Vietnam was their most daring diversion. Pope was ready for an even more dangerous challenge when the CIA approached him in December, 1957. The proposition was that he would fly a B-26 for the Indonesian rebels, who were seeking to topple Sukarno. A half-dozen planes were to be ferried in and out of the rebel airstrip at Menado in the North Celebes from the U.S. Air Force Base at Clark Field near Manila. In the Philippines the planes would be safe from counterattack by Sukarno's air force.

The idea of returning to combat intrigued Pope, and he signed up. His first mission, a ferrying hop from the Philippines to the North Celebes, took place on April 28, 1958. That was two days before President Eisenhower offered his comments about "soldiers of fortune" and promised "careful neutrality ... We will unquestionably assure [the Indonesian Government] through the State Department," he declared, "that our deportment will continue to be correct."

But Sukarno was not to be easily convinced. A shrewd, fifty-six-year-old politician, he was a revolutionary socialist who led his predominantly Moslem people to independence after 350 years of Dutch rule. Sukarno knew he was deeply distrusted by the conservative, businesslike administration in Washington. A mercurial leader, he was spellbinding on the stump but erratic in the affairs of state. He was also a ladies' man (official Indonesian publications spoke openly of his "partiality for feminine charm" and quoted movie-magazine gossip linking him with such film stars as Gina Lollobrigida and Joan Crawford) and has had four wives.

In particular, Sukarno was aware of Washington's understandable annoyance with his sudden turn toward the Left: he had just expropriated most of the private holdings of the Dutch and had vowed to drive them out of West lrian (New Guinea); he had requested Russian arms; and he had brought the Communists into his new coalition government.

From the start of its independence in 1949 until 1951 Indonesia was a parliamentary democracy. The power of the central government was balanced and diffused by the local powers of Indonesia's six major and 3,000 minor islands stretching in a 3,000-mile arc from the Malayan peninsula. But in February, 1957, on his return from a tour of Russia and the satellites, Sukarno declared parliamentary democracy to be a failure in Indonesia. He said it did not suit a sharply divided nation of close to 100,000,-000 people. Besides, the government could not successfully exclude a Communist Party with over 1,000,000 members.

"I can't and won't ride a three-legged horse," Sukarno declared. His solution was to decree the creation of a "Guided Democracy," It gave him semi-dictatorial powers while granting major concessions to the Communists and the Army.

The Eisenhower Administration feared that Sukarno would fall completely under Communist domination. And that, of course, would be a genuine disaster for the United States. Although its per capita income of $60 was one of the lowest in the world, Indonesia's bountiful supply of rubber, oil and tin made it potentially the third richest nation in the world. And located between the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, Asia and Australia, it commanded one of the world's principal lines of communication.

Many of Indonesia's political leaders, particularly those outside of Java, shared Washington's apprehensions about Sukarno's compromises with the Communists. And many in the CIA and the State Department saw merit in supporting these dissident elements. Even if Sukarno were not overthrown, they argued, it might be possible for Sumatra, Indonesia's big oil producer, to secede, thereby protecting private American and Dutch holdings. At the very least, the pressures of rebellion might loosen Sukarno's ties with the Communists and force him to move to the Right. At best, the Army, headed by General Abdul Haris Nasution, an anti-Communist, might come over to the rebels and force wholesale changes to the liking of the United States.

On February 15, 1958, a Revolutionary Council at Padang, Sumatra, proclaimed a new government under the leadership of Dr. Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, a forty-seven-year-old Moslem party leader and former governor of the Bank of Indonesia. A multi-party cabinet was established, with representation from Java, Sumatra and Celebes.

Sukarno declared: "There is no cause for alarm or anxiety. Like other countries, Indonesia has its ups and downs."

General Nasution promptly asserted his allegiance by dishonorably discharging six high-ranking officers who had sided with the rebels. A week later Indonesian Air Force planes bombed and strafed two radio broadcasting stations in Padang and another in Bukittinggi, the revolutionary capital forty-five miles inland. The attack, carried out by four old U.S. planes, succeeded in silencing the rebel radios.

In testimony to Congress early in March, John Foster Dulles reiterated the United States pledge of strict neutrality. "We are pursuing what I trust is a correct course from the point of international law," he said. "And we are not intervening in the internal affairs of this country ..."

On March 12 Jakarta announced that it had launched a paratroop invasion of Sumatra, and the next week the rebels formally appealed for American arms. They also asked the United States and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization to recognize the revolutionary government.

On April 1 Dulles declared: "The United States views this trouble in Sumatra as an internal matter. We try to be absolutely correct in our international proceedings and attitude toward it. And I would not want to say anything which might be looked upon as a departure from that high standard."

A week later, commenting on Indonesia's announcement that it was purchasing a hundred planes and other weapons from Communist Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslavakia, State Department spokesman Lincoln White declared: "We regret that Indonesia turned to the Communist bloc to buy arms for possible use in killing Indonesians who openly opposed the growing influence of Communism in Indonesia."

Jakarta responded angrily that it had turned to the Communists only after the United States had refused to allow Indonesia to buy $120,000,000 worth of American weapons. Dulles confirmed the fact the same day but claimed the Indonesians were rebuffed because they apparently intended to use the weapons to oust the Dutch from West Irian.

"Later, when the Sumatra revolt broke out," Dulles added, "it did not seem wise to the United States to be in the position of supplying arms to either side of that revolution ...

"It is still our view that the situation there is primarily an internal one and we intend to conform scrupulously to the principles of international law that apply to such a situation."

During the night of April 11, some 2,000 Indonesian Army troops launched an offensive against the rebels in northwest Sumatra, and at sunrise on April 18 a paratroop and amphibious attack was hurled against Padang. Twelve hours later, after modest resistance, the rebel city fell. Turning his troops inland toward Bukittinggi, Nasution declared he was "in the final stage of crushing the armed rebellious movement."

Throughout that month Jakarta reported a series of rebel air attacks against the central government, but it was not until April 30 that the United States was implicated. Premier Djuanda Kartawidjaja then asserted that he had proof of "overt foreign assistance" to the rebels in the form of planes and automatic weapons.

"As a consequence of the actions taken by the United States and Taiwan adventurers," Djuanda commented, "there has emerged a strong feeling of indignation amongst the armed forces and the people of Indonesia against the United States and Taiwan. And if this is permitted to develop it will only have a disastrous effect in the relationships between Indonesia and the United States."

Sukarno accused the United States of direct intervention and warned Washington "not to play with fire in Indonesia ... let not a lack of understanding by America lead to a third war ...

"We could easily have asked for volunteers from outside," he declared in a slightly veiled allusion to a secret offer of pilots by Peking. "We could wink an eye and they would come. We could have thousands of volunteers, but we will meet the rebels with our own strength."

On May 7, three days after the fall of Bukittinggi, [i] the Indonesian military command charged that the rebels had been supplied weapons and ammunition with the knowledge and direction of the United States. The military command cited an April 3 telegram to the Revolutionary Government from the "American Sales Company" of San Francisco. Robert Hirsch, head of the company, confirmed that he had offered to sell the arms to the rebels but said he had done so without clearing it with the State Department. In any case, he said, the arms were of Italian make and none had been delivered.

The State Department flatly denied the accusation, and the New York Times editorialized indignantly on May 9:

"It is unfortunate that high officials of the Indonesian Government have given further circulation to the false report that the United States Government was sanctioning aid to Indonesia's rebels. The position of the United States Government has been made plain, again and again. Our Secretary of State was emphatic in his declaration that this country would not deviate from a correct neutrality. The President himself, in a news conference, reiterated this position but reminded his auditors, and presumably the Indonesians, that this government has no control over soldiers of fortune ...

"It is always convenient for a self-consciously nationalistic government to cry out against 'outside interference' when anything goes wrong. Jakarta ... may have an unusually sensitive conscience. But its cause is not promoted by charges that are manifestly false ...

"It is no secret that most Americans have little sympathy for President Sukarno's 'guided democracy' and his enthusiasm to have Communist participation in his government ...

"But the United States is not ready ... to step in to help overthrow a constituted government. Those are the hard facts. Jakarta does not help its case, here, by ignoring them."

The following week, one day after the United States officially proposed a cease-fire, Allen Pope was shot down while flying for the rebels and the CIA. However, the Indonesian Government withheld for nine days the fact that an American pilot had been captured. On May 18 it announced only that a rebel B-26 had been shot down.

Nevertheless, with Pope in Indonesian hands things began to move rapidly in Washington. Within five days: (1) the State Department approved the sale to Indonesia for local currency of 37,000 tons of sorely needed rice; (2) the United States lifted an embargo on $1,000,000 in small arms, aircraft parts and radio equipment -- destined for Indonesia but frozen since the start of the rebellion; and (3) Dulles called in the Indonesian ambassador, Dr. Mukarto Notowidigdo, for a twenty-minute meeting.

"I am definitely convinced," said the ambassador with a big smile as he emerged, "that relations are improving."

But the Indonesian Army was not prepared to remain permanently silent about Pope. On May 27 a news conference was called in Jakarta by Lieutenant Colonel Herman Pieters, Commander of the Moluccas and West Irian Military Command at Ambon. He announced that Pope had been shot down on May 18 while flying a bombing mission for the rebels under a $10,000 contract.

Pieters displayed documents and identification papers showing Pope had served in the U.S. Air Force and as a pilot for CAT. He said Philippine pesos, 28,000 Indonesian rupiahs, and U.S. scrip for use at American military installations were also found on the American pilot. Pieters said 300 to 400 Americans, Filipinos and Nationalist Chinese were aiding the rebels, but he did not mention the CIA.

Many Indonesian officials were outraged by Pope's activities, and accused him of bombing the marketplace in Ambon on May 15. A large number of civilians, church bound on Ascension Thursday, were killed in the raid on the predominantly Christian community. But the government did its best to suppress public demonstrations.

Pope was given good medical treatment, and he could be seen sunning himself on the porch of a private, blue bungalow in the mountains of Central Java. Although the Communists were urging a speedy trial, Sukarno also saw advantages in sunning himself -- in the growing warmth of United States policy. Pope's trial was delayed for nineteen months while Sukarno kept him a hostage to continued American friendliness.

Late the next year, however, Sukarno found himself in a quarrel with Peking over his decision to bar Chinese aliens from doing business outside of the main cities of Indonesia. The powerful Indonesian Communist Party was aroused over the issue and Sukarno may have felt the need to placate them.

Pope was brought to trial before a military court on December 28, 1959. He was accused of flying six bombing raids for the rebels and killing twenty-three Indonesians, seventeen of them members of the armed forces. The maximum penalty was death.

During the trial, which dragged on for four months, Pope pleaded not guilty. He admitted to flying only one combat mission, that of May 18, 1958. The other flights, he testified, were of a reconnaissance or non-combat nature. Contrary to the assertion that he had signed a $10,000 contract, Pope insisted he got only $200 a flight.

The court introduced a diary taken from Pope after his capture. It contained detailed entries of various bombing missions. Pope contended it listed the activities of all the rebel pilots, not just his. He replied to the same effect when confronted with a pre-trial confession, noting that he had refused to sign it.

Asked what his "real motive" had been in joining the rebels, Pope replied: "Your honor, I have been fighting the Communists since I was twenty-two years old -- first in Korea and later Dienbienphu ...

"I am not responsible for the death of one Indonesian-armed or unarmed," he asserted in his closing plea. "I have served long enough as a target of the Communist press, which has been demanding the death sentence for me."

On April 29, 1960, the court handed down the death sentence, but it seemed unlikely that the penalty would be imposed. It had not once been invoked since Indonesia gained its independence eleven years before.

Pope appealed the sentence the following November, and when it was upheld by the Appeals Court, he took the case to the Military Supreme Court. Mrs. Pope made a personal appeal to Sukarno on December 28 during the first of two trips to Indonesia, but she was offered no great encouragement despite the prospect of improved relations between Sukarno and President-elect Kennedy.

Sukarno received an invitation to visit Washington a month after Kennedy took office. The Indonesian leader had been feted by President Eisenhower during a state visit to the United States in 1956; and he had more or less forced a second meeting with Eisenhower at the United Nations in the fall of 1960. But on most of his trips to the United States, Sukarno felt snubbed. Kennedy's invitation clearly flattered and pleased him.

The two men sat down together at the White House the week after the Bay of Pigs. The meeting went well enough, but Kennedy was preoccupied with the CIA's latest failure at attempted revolution.

During the visit Kennedy commented to one of his aides: No wonder Sukarno doesn't like us very much. He has to sit down with people who tried to overthrow him.

Still Sukarno seemed favorably disposed toward the new Kennedy Administration. The following February, during a good-will tour of Indonesia, Robert Kennedy asked Sukarno to release Pope. (Secret negotiations were then far advanced for the exchange the next week of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Soviet spy Rudolph I. Abel. And the White House was favorably impressed with the tight-lipped Mr. Pope as contrasted with Powers, a CIA pilot who talked freely about his employer.)

Sukarno's first reaction to Robert Kennedy's request was to reject it out of hand, but when the Attorney General persisted, he agreed to take it under consideration. Six months later, on July 2, 1962, Pope was freed from prison without prior notice and taken to the American Embassy for interrogation by Ambassador Jones and other officials. Then he was put aboard a Military Air Transport Service plane and flown back to the United States.

Pope was hidden away for seven weeks and the State Department did not reveal his release until August 22. Pope insisted there had been no secret questioning (such as that to which Powers was subjected by the CIA on his return from Russia). The State Department's explanation of the long silence was that Pope had asked that the release be kept secret so he could have a quiet rendezvous with his family.

Back in Miami, Pope settled down to what outwardly seemed to be a happy relationship with his family; but in December, Mrs. Pope filed for divorce, charging him with "extreme cruelty" and "habitual indulgence in a violent and ungovernable temper."

At the divorce hearing on July 2, 1963, Mrs. Pope testified that on his return from Indonesia, her husband insisted upon keeping a loaded .38-caliber pistol by their bedside, despite the potential danger to their two young boys. She also asserted that Pope had sent her only $450 since he had left her seven months before.

Mrs. Pope made no mention in the proceedings of her husband's work for the CIA. A security agent of the government had warned her that it would be detrimental to her case if she talked about her husband's missions. She did not, and Pope did not contest the divorce.

"There's an awful lot of cloak-and-dagger mixed up in this," said her Miami lawyer, Louis M. Jepeway, who otherwise refused to talk about the case. "I can understand it, but I don't have to like it."

Mrs. Pope won the divorce and custody of the children on grounds of cruelty. But she received no financial settlement because Pope was declared outside the jurisdiction of the court.

On December 4, 1962, Pope had put his things in storage -- some personal items, ten stuffed birds, four animal heads, one stuffed animal, antelope antlers and water-buffalo horns. Then he left the country to go to work for Southern Air Transport. The Pentagon described this airline as a civilian operation holding a $3,718,433 Air Force contract to move "mixed cargo and passenger loads on Far East inter-island routes." Its home address was listed as PO Box 48-1260, Miami International Airport. Its overseas address was PO Box 12124, Taipeh, Formosa.

However, when asked what sort of work Southern Air Transport did, the company's Miami attorney explained that it was a small cargo line which simply "flies chickens from the Virgin Islands."

The attorney was Alex E. Carlson, the lawyer for the Double-Chek Corporation that had hired the American pilots who flew at the Bay of Pigs.

_______________

Notes:

1. The rebels then moved their capital to Menado, which fell late in June.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:29 am

Laos: The Pacifist Warriors

Winthrop G. Brown had been Ambassador to Laos for less than three weeks when the right-wing military government, created by the CIA and the Pentagon at a cost of $300,000,000, was overthrown without a shot by a twenty-six-year-old Army captain named Kong Le.

Brown, a tall, thin, gray-haired Yankee, had been transferred from New Delhi on short notice with only a superficial knowledge of the long, tortured and expensive history of the United States experiment in Laos. Yet even a quick look convinced him that the CIA and its Pentagon allies were wrong in their assessment of the captain.

The young paratrooper and his battalion of 300 men had taken over the capital city of Vientiane in a pre-dawn coup on August 9, 1960. They had not been paid in three months and were tired of being the only fighting unit in the quasi-pacifist army of 25,000. Kong Le was personally outraged by the high-living, CIA-backed regime of General Phoumi Nosavan. He decided to strike while Phoumi and his cabinet were out of town inspecting a sandalwood tree that was to be turned into a burial urn for the late king.

The CIA and the American military mission viewed the coup with horror. They considered Kong Le to be Communist-inspired, despite his many battles against the pro-Communist Pathet Lao. But Ambassador Brown, a fifty-three-year-old former Wall Street lawyer who tried to see things with detachment and a fresh eye, was inclined to accept the American-trained paratrooper for what he purported to be: a fine troop commander who lived with his men and shared their rations; a patriot weary of civil war.

"I have fought for many years," Kong Le said. "I have killed many men. I have never seen a foreigner die."

Laos is a pastoral land, blessed with magnificent scenery -- soaring mountains, swift rivers, verdant valleys -- and populated by a strange mixture of isolated tribes alike only in their distaste for physical labor. It is the "Land of the Million Elephants," whose only cash crop is opium, and whose people are 85 percent illiterate.

Almost all Laotians are Buddhists, peace-loving by instinct and precept. In battle, to the dismay of their American advisers, they were accustomed to aiming high in the expectation that the enemy would respond in kind.

In 1960 the principal attraction of Phoumi's royal army to a recruit was the pay -- $130 a year, twice the average national income. Although United States aid had amounted to about $25 a head for the two million Laotians, military pay was about all that filtered down to the average citizen. More than three fourths of the money went to equip a modern, motorized army in a nation all but devoid of paved roads. All of this, as formulated by John Foster Dulles, was meant to convert Laos from a neutral nation, vulnerable to left-wing pressures, into a military bastion against Communism.

When the French withdrew in 1954, after a futile eight-year war with the Vietnamese Communists, a neutralist government had been organized under Prince Souvanna Phouma, a cheerful, pipe-smoking, French-educated engineer. He held power for four years, unsuccessfully struggling to integrate the two Communist Pathet Lao provinces into the central government. Then, in 1958, after Communist election gains and signs of military infiltration by the North Vietnamese, he resigned.

Souvanna was followed by a series of right-wing governments in which General Phoumi emerged as the strong-man. Finally, Phoumi succeeded in easing out Premier Phoui Sananikone, an able man with advanced ideas about grass-roots aid and Village development; he was also firmly non- Communist but he had too many independent notions for the CIA. He was replaced by Tiao Somsanith, a thoroughly pliable politician.

Phoumi then rigged the 1960 elections -- not one Pathet Lao was elected -- and settled in for a long, U.S.-financed tenure. Even Kong Le's coup failed to dim his vision of permanent affluence. He still had his army intact with him at Savannakhet in the south. And he was unshakably convinced that the United States would put him back in power. As tangible support for that conviction, Phoumi could point to the personal contact man the CIA kept by his side.

He was Jack Hazey, an ex-OSS man and former French Legionnaire whose face was half shot away during World War II. Occasionally, Hazey would be challenged for being out of step with public statements of U.S. policy. Clearly implying that he was under higher, secret orders, Hazey would retort: "I don't give a damn what they say."

The conflict between the public and secret definitions of United States policy on Laos was particularly pronounced in the summer of 1960. Shortly after Phoumi and his puppet Premier were ousted, Kong Le called back Souvanna Phouma to form a coalition government. To reduce the chances of discord, Souvanna then asked Phoumi to join the government as Vice-Premier and Minister of Defense.

Ambassador Brown dashed off a cable to Washington urging unqualified support for Souvanna's new government. [i] But the CIA and the State Department decided to hedge: they announced formal recognition of Souvanna but continued substantive support for Phoumi. The decision served to reinforce Phoumi's conviction that the CIA and the American military mission would in the end put him back in power.

Brown persuaded himself that he had the complete backing of the CIA station chief, Gordon L. Jorgensen, and the leaders of the military mission; but Washington's ambivalent policy put the ambassador in an embarrassing predicament. He tried to make the best of it by seeking out Souvanna and asking him if he had any objections to the continued support of Phoumi by the United States. No, the princely Premier replied, provided the equipment was not used against him; he would need Phoumi's army to fend off the Pathet Lao.

Brown then sent emissaries to Phoumi, assuring him that Souvanna was not scheming to deprive him of his U.S. aid and pleading with him at least to return to Vientiane and negotiate. But this man who had been highly regarded by the CIA and the Pentagon for his fighting qualities was afraid of venturing beyond his closely guarded stronghold. He had a broken line in the palm of his hand and a fortuneteller had once warned him that he would die violently. Even under maximum security he wore a bullet-proof vest during all his diplomatic dealings.

Confronted by Phoumi's intransigence, Souvanna began to despair of his ability to carry on. He called in the Western ambassadors in mid-September and warned them that he urgently needed the support of the royal army. "I am at the end of my capacity to lead," he told them.

Souvanna's government was also in dire need of rice and oil, which had been cut off by a blockade imposed by Thailand's military strongman, Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat, a close friend of Phoumi. Washington said it was entreating Sarit to lift the blockade, but the vise continued to tighten around Souvanna.

Early in October, J. Graham Parsons, former Ambassador to Laos and then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, flew to Vientiane and demanded that Souvanna sever his relations with the Pathet Lao. This amounted to a demand that the neutralist government abandon its neutrality. Souvanna refused.

Then a high-level mission from the Pentagon, including John N. Irwin, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs, arrived for secret talks with Phoumi.

Souvanna concluded that the United States was in the process of withdrawing all support from the neutralist government and again throwing its full power behind Phoumi. Early in December he made a final and unsuccessful appeal to Brown for rice and oil. In desperation, Souvanna turned to the Russians, who saw an irresistible opportunity: to achieve political dominance in Laos at a cut rate and, at the same time, to replace the Chinese as the principal Communist influence in Southeast Asia. Without delay the Soviets started an airlift from Hanoi on December 11, 1960. [ii]

Two days earlier Phoumi had ordered his troops northward; and on December 18 the royal army recaptured Vientiane. Souvanna fled to Cambodia and Kong Le retreated to the north, distributing close to 10,000 American rifles to the Pathet Lao along the way.

Phoumi quickly established a government, naming Prince Boun Oum, a middle-aged playboy, as Premier. But despite his recent military success, Phoumi failed to pursue Kong Le. Instead, he settled back into his old ways. He had never been within fifty miles of the front lines and he saw no need to break with this tradition.

The Russians, meantime, were moving in substantial amounts of weapons by air and truck. And the North Vietnamese began to infiltrate crack guerrilla troops in support of the Pathet Lao. Kong Le joined forces with them, and by early 1961 he had captured the strategic Plain of Jars with its key airstrip fifty miles from North Vietnam.

By the time President Kennedy was inaugurated, on January 20, it seemed as if only the introduction of U.S. troops could keep the Pathet Lao from overrunning Vientiane and the Mekong River Valley separating Laos from Thailand. Kennedy was so informed by President Eisenhower and Defense Secretary Thomas S. Gates, Jr., in his first Laos briefing on January 19. Eisenhower apologized for leaving such a "mess."

One of Kennedy's first official acts was to ask his military advisers to draw up a plan for saving Laos. They recommended that an Allied force, including U.S. troops, take over the defense of Vientiane under the sanction of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. The idea was to free Phoumi's army for a full-fledged campaign in the Plain of Jars.

While weighing the advice, Kennedy ordered the Seventh Fleet within striking distance of Laos and promised Phoumi substantial new support if his troops would show some determination to fight.

Early in March, however, a royal army detachment was easily routed from a key position commanding the principal highway in northern Laos. The new administration became skeptical of Phoumi at the outset.

The Allied occupation plan was further undermined when the British, French and other SEATO powers (with the exception of Thailand) balked at providing troops. In addition, the President could not obtain assurances from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that U.S. forces would be able to save Laos without resort to tactical nuclear weapons.

In a nationally televised news conference on March 23 Kennedy warned that the Western powers would "have to consider their response" if the Communist attack continued in Laos. The clear implication was that the United States was prepared to intervene with military force. But, privately, the President told Harriman that he decidedly did not want to be faced with the prospect of using troops, that he wanted a political settlement.

On April 1 the Russians, apparently wary of a direct confrontation with the United States, agreed in principle to a British proposal for a cease-fire. The next month a fourteen-nation conference on Laos was convened in Geneva. And in the only meeting of minds at their talk in Vienna in June, Kennedy and Khrushchev promised to work for a neutral and independent Laos.

By November the outlines of an agreement had been reached at Geneva: Souvanna Phouma was to be recalled to create a neutralist government including the three Laotian factions, the pro-Western royalists, the neutrals and the pro-Communist Pathet Lao.

But once again Phoumi balked. He refused to relinquish the Defense and Interior Ministries, as was decreed at Geneva. If he held out long enough, he reasoned, the CIA and the Pentagon would again come to his rescue.

President Kennedy rebuked him in private messages, but Phoumi steadfastly refused to submit. Had he not been told in 1960 that the United States was determined to have him join Souvanna's coalition? And in the end had not the CIA and the Pentagon supported him in his return to power? And, as in 1960, were not the CIA representatives still with him?

Washington was reluctant to yank out the CIA men abruptly. Precipitate action could only diminish the agency's prestige and usefulness. But Phoumi was proving so intractable that McCone, acting on Harriman's recommendation, ordered Hazey out of the country early in 1962. [iii]

Nevertheless, Phoumi's reliance on the CIA had become so firmly ingrained that he could not be budged, even after the United States cut off its $3,000,000-a-month budgetary assistance to his government in February of 1962.

That spring Phoumi began a large-scale reinforcement of Nam Tha, an outpost deep in Pathet Lao territory, twenty miles from the Chinese border. Ambassador Brown warned him personally that the reinforcement was provocative and that the royal troops were so badly deployed that they would be an easy mark for the Pathet Lao. In May, Brown's admonition proved accurate. The Communists retaliated against the build-up, smashed into Nam Tha and sent Phoumi's troops in wild retreat. Two of his front-line generals commandeered the only two jeeps in the area and fled into Thailand.

The Nam Tha rout finally convinced Phoumi that he could not go it alone; and the Pathet Lao, verging on a complete take-over, halted when President Kennedy ordered 5,000 U .S. troops to take up positions in Thailand near the Laos border on May 15.

The three Laotian factions finally agreed to the coalition government on June 11 and the Geneva Accords were signed on July 23. In October the United States withdrew the 666 military advisers assigned to Phoumi's army.

But Communist North Vietnam failed to comply with the Geneva agreement. It refused to withdraw about 5,000 troops stationed in Laos in support of the Pathet Lao. On March 30, 1963, the Communists launched a new offensive which brought much of the Plain of Jars under their control.

The United States responded predictably: the Seventh Fleet took up position in the South China Sea off Vietnam; some 3,000 troops were sent to Thailand for much-publicized war games; and Harriman flew to Moscow to confer with Khrushchev. The Russian leader reaffirmed his support for a neutral and independent Laos. He also seemed to agree with Harriman that the Pathet Lao was responsible for the renewed fighting. It was clear that Moscow had lost control of the situation in Laos to Peking and Hanoi.

At the same time, United States policy makers were becoming increasingly convinced that Laos was not the right place to take a stand in Southeast Asia. The assessment of the Kennedy Administration was that most of the country, particularly the northern regions, would never be of much use to anyone. Administration officials were fond of debunking the Dulles policy with the quip: "Laos will never be a bastion of anything." The administration felt, nonetheless, that certain areas would have to be retained at all cost: Vientiane and the Mekong Valley. But it opposed the use of U.S. troops on any large scale.

In the event the neutralist government was about to be completely overwhelmed, the official plan, as it was outlined at a briefing of Pentagon officials by Dean Rusk, called for the movement of a modest American force into Vientiane. This would be designed to provoke a diplomatic test of the Geneva Accords. Failing in that, the United States was prepared to strike against North Vietnam as dramatic evidence that the Communist forces in Laos could advance farther only at the risk of a major war.

So it was that by the start of 1964 after a decade of humiliating reverses and the expenditure of close to half a billion dollars, United States policy had come full circle: during the 1950s Souvanna Phouma and his plan for a neutral Laos had been opposed with all the power of the Invisible Government; now the United States was ready to settle for even less than it could have had five years earlier at a fraction of the cost.

_______________

Notes:

i. Later, Brown's only regret was that, restrained by a newcomer's caution, he did not make the recommendation even more strong. A key diplomat agreed: "Now we'd gladly pay $100,000,000 for that government."

ii. Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi M. Pushkin told Harriman at the Laotian talks in Geneva in 1961 that the airlift had been organized and executed on the highest priority of any peacetime operation since the Russian Revolution.

iii. Hazey was then stationed in Bangkok, where he could be called upon quickly in a crisis.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:30 am

Vietnam: The Secret War

WHEN NGO DINH DIEM was deposed and assassinated in an Army coup on November 1, 1963, a bloody, frustrating decade came to a close for the Invisible Government.

For nearly ten years the intelligence and espionage operatives of the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department had been intimately involved with Diem, attempting at every turn to shore him up as a buffer against Communism in Vietnam. But in his last months the Buddhist majority rose against the repressive policies of Diem, a Roman Catholic, and the Invisible Government was forced to reconsider its single-minded support. Now, with Diem dead, those very American agencies which had helped him stay in power for so long were accused by his supporters of having directed his downfall.

At the beginning, the Invisible Government had high hopes for Diem. In 1954, at the age of fifty- three, the pudgy five-foot, five-inch aristocrat returned to Vietnam from a self-imposed exile to become Emperor Bao Dai's Premier. He had served under Bao Dai in the early 1930s, but quit as Minister of the Interior when he discovered the government was a puppet for the French. The Japanese twice offered Diem the premiership during World War II, but he refused.

When the French returned after the war, he resumed his anti-colonial activities. He left the country in 1950, eventually taking up residence at the Maryknoll Seminary in Lakewood, New Jersey (he had studied briefly for the priesthood as a boy). He lobbied against United States aid to the French in Indochina and warned against Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese Communist guerrilla leader.

Shortly after Diem's return to Vietnam, the French Army was routed at Dienbienphu and the Communists seemed on the verge of total victory in Indochina. President Eisenhower, aware of Ho Chi Minh's popularity, [i] was looking for an anti-Communist who might stem the tide.

Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles were impressed by Ramon Magsaysay's successful campaign against the Communist Huk guerrillas in the Philippines. They thought the same tactics might work in Vietnam and requested a briefing by Edward Lansdale, an Air Force colonel who had been a key figure in the CIA-directed operation in support of Magsaysay.

Lansdale was called back from the Philippines to appear before a special panel of intelligence and foreign-policy officials, including Foster Dulles. He emerged from the meeting with a mandate from Dulles to find a popular leader in Vietnam and throw the support of the Invisible Government behind him.

Lansdale arrived in Saigon just after the fall of Dienbienphu and found political and military chaos. He canvassed the various factions in the city and the countryside and concluded that Diem alone had enough backing to salvage the situation. He met with Diem almost daily, working out elaborate plans for bolstering the regime. He operated more or less independently of the American mission assigned to Saigon, although he communicated with Washington through CIA channels (the agency maintained a separate operation with a station chief and a large staff).

Lansdale's free-wheeling activities in Vietnam provoked a mixed reaction. To some, he seemed the best type of American abroad, a man who understood the problems of the people and worked diligently to help them. He was so represented under a pseudonym in the book The Ugly American. To others, he was the naive American who, failing to appreciate the subtleties of a foreign culture, precipitated bloodshed and chaos. Graham Greene patterned the protagonist in The Quiet American after him.

Lansdale thrust himself into the middle of Vietnam's' many intrigues. In the fall of 1954 he got wind of a plan by several high-ranking Vietnamese Army officers to stage a coup against Diem. He alerted Washington, and General J. Lawton Collins, former Army Chief of Staff, was rushed to Saigon as Eisenhower's personal envoy to help Diem put down the uprising.

The coup failed, but Collins became skeptical of the stability of the Diem regime. He favored a proposal to create a coalition government, which would represent all the power elements and factions in the country. The proposal was sponsored by the French, who were maneuvering to salvage their waning influence in the affairs of Indochina.

In the spring of 1955 Diem moved against the Binh Xuyen, a quasi-criminal sect which controlled the Saigon police. He ordered his troops to take over the gambling, opium and prostitution quarter run by the Binh Xuyen. But elements of the French Army which had not yet been evacuated from the country intervened for the avowed purpose of preserving order and preventing bloodshed. Collins sided with the French and a truce was declared.

Lansdale fired off a message to Washington through the CIA channel, taking strong exception to Collins' decision. Lansdale argued that Diem's move against the Binh Xuyen had broad popular support. He also discounted the fears of Collins and U.S. Army Intelligence that Diem's troops would turn against the regime.

Collins returned to Washington for consultation, then flew back to Saigon with the impression that his views would be sustained. But in his absence Lansdale had obtained a reaffirmation of the policy of support for Diem. Furious, Collins accused Lansdale of "mutiny." But the die was cast. Assured of the complete backing of the United States Government, Diem crushed the Binh Xuyen and the other warlike sects.

Then, at Lansdale's urging, Diem agreed to hold a referendum designed to give the regime a popular legitimacy. The ballot presented a choice between Diem and Emperor Bao Dai, who had been discredited as a tool of the French. Diem polled 98 percent of the vote on October 23, 1955, and was declared President of Vietnam. His brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was established as his official political strategist.

Some measure of stability had now been achieved in South Vietnam. But Diem and Nhu refused to grant political freedom to the opposition parties, despite Lansdale's warning that the country would be plagued by conspiracy if legitimate parties were not permitted to operate openly.

Lansdale made a special trip to Washington in an effort to induce the Dulles brothers to apply pressure on Diem to institute political reforms in South Vietnam. But Lansdale failed. He was told that it had been decided that Diem provided the only practical alternative to a Communist takeover, and that he was to be supported without qualification.

Overruled, Lansdale lost his influence as the unofficial emissary of the Invisible Government in Vietnam. Thereafter, the CIA took his place as the secret link with the Diem regime. A CIA man was ordered to establish liaison with Nhu. It was the start of an intimate relationship which was to last until 1963.

During the next few years the United States committed itself increasingly to the support of the regime. More than a billion dollars in military and economic aid was provided between 1955 and 1960. But it was not until 1961 that the commitment became complete.

In the early years of Diem's role the Communist Viet-Cong conducted only a hit-and-run guerrilla campaign against him. In 1959, however, the Vietcong operations were greatly expanded. Two theories have been advanced in explanation. The official theory of the State Department was that Diem was bringing off a political and economic "miracle" and the Communists could not bear the contrast to their bad showing in North Vietnam.

Diem's critics offered a conflicting theory. They claimed the populace had become so disaffected by Diem's repression that the Communists decided the time was ripe for action. In 1960 a group of young, discontented Army officers felt the same way. They attempted a coup but Diem put them down without serious difficulty. [ii]

In any event, conditions had so disintegrated by 1961 that Diem's government was master of only a third of the territory of South Vietnam. In May of that year President Kennedy sent Vice- President Johnson to Saigon.

On May 13 Johnson and Diem issued a joint communique stating that aid would be provided for Vietnam on an expanded and accelerated basis. The United States agreed to underwrite the cost of an increase in the Vietnamese Army from 150,000 to 170,000 men, and to equip and support the entire 68,000-man Civil Guard (armed police) and the 70,000-man Self-Defense Corps.

But the Vietcong continued to advance, and in October, 1961, Kennedy sent General Maxwell D. Taylor to make "an educated military guess" as to what would be needed to salvage the situation.

Taylor recommended a greatly increased program of military aid. He also saw an imperative need for reform within the Army. He cited the political activities of the top military, failure to delegate enough authority to field commanders, and discrimination against younger officers on political and religious grounds.

Diem balked at Taylor's reforms and implied he might turn elsewhere for aid. However, on December 7 he applied for assistance, and the United States again came to his support.

No limit was placed on the aid either in terms of money or of men. In effect, the United States committed itself to a massive build-up for an undeclared war. At the same time, the administration took great precautions to keep the build-up a secret, perhaps because it violated the letter of the Geneva Accords, [iii] perhaps because of the domestic political danger if Americans were sent into another Asian war.

When the new U.S. Military Assistance Command was created on February 8, 1962, about 4,000 American military men were already serving secretly in Vietnam. However, the Pentagon refused to comment on the troop level and attempted to imply that the 685-man Geneva ceiling was still in effect.

Additional thousands of troops poured into Vietnam, but the Defense Department continued the deception until June. Then Rear Admiral Luther C. (Pickles) Heinz, who was coordinating the operation for Defense Secretary McNamara at the Pentagon, permitted press spokesmen to say that "several thousand" U.S. military men were in Vietnam on "temporary duty."

In January, 1963, McNamara provided the first official figure. In testimony before Congress he confirmed that 11,000 troops were in Vietnam. But the Pentagon quickly reverted to generalities; asked in July to comment on reports from Saigon that the troop level had reached 14,000, it said that was "about the right order of magnitude."

The Pentagon also went to great lengths to obscure the fact that U.S. military men were involved in combat -- leading troops, and flying helicopters and planes. The official view was that the Americans were in Vietnam purely in "an advisory and training capacity." Despite eyewitness reports to the contrary, the Pentagon insisted that American troops were firing only in self-defense.

Military information officers were forced to ludicrous extremes in denying the obvious. When an aircraft carrier sailed up the Saigon River jammed with helicopters, a public information officer was compelled to say: "I don't see any aircraft carrier."

There was a great deal more that was not seen. In 1961 a campaign had been quietly started to put 90 percent of South Vietnam's 15,000,000 people into 11,000 strategic hamlets or fortified villages. The program, patterned after the successful "new villages" of the British anti-guerrilla campaign in Malaya, was designed to protect the peasants against Vietcong terror.

Many claimed credit for introducing the strategic-hamlet idea to Vietnam, including Nhu, who said he launched it with the blessing of the CIA (a former CIA man ran the program for the Agency for International Development). By 1964 more than three fourths of the Vietnamese were listed as being protected by the hamlets. But many of the peasants were forced into the program against their will and many of the forts were easily penetrated by the Communists.

The Communists had also been successful in keeping open a supply route from North Vietnam. Although the Vietcong's best weapons were captured U.S. equipment, they received some additional supplies by infiltration through Communist-held Laos, which borders on both halves of Vietnam.

To cut the supply routes, the CIA decided to train the Montagnards, primitive mountain tribesmen, as scouts and border guards. They were induced to exchange their spears and bows and arrows for modern weapons, including Swedish Schneisers (light machine guns).

Between 1961 and the start of 1963 the cost of the Montagnard program rose from $150,000 to $4,500,000. The CIA achieved considerable success in sealing the border, but in the process perhaps created a Trojan horse: ten percent of the trained Montagnards were judged to be Vietcong sympathizers, and the Vietnamese, who regarded the tribesmen as subhumans, were fearful that the weapons eventually would be used against them.

The Montagnard training was carried out by the Vietnamese Special Forces, an elite corps created by the CIA along the lines of the U.S. Army Special Forces. The CIA organized the Special Forces for the regime well before the 1961 build-up and supported them at the rate of $3,000,000 a year. They were chosen for their toughness and rugged appearance. They were trained in airborne and ranger tactics and were originally designed to be used in raids into Laos and North Vietnam. But inevitably they fell under the control of Nhu, who held the bulk of them in Saigon as storm troopers for the defense of the regime.

By 1963 more than 16,000 American military men were in Vietnam. United States aid had reached $3,000,000,000, and was running at an average of $1,500,000 a day. The government declared itself confident that victory was in sight despite the popular discontent with Diem's rule.

Two Vietnamese Air Force pilots had bombed Diem's palace in February, 1962. But the State Department discounted the significance of the attack: "The question of how much popular support Diem enjoys should be considered in terms of how much popular support his opponents command. Neither of the recent non-Communist attempts [1960 and 1962] to overthrow him appeared to have any significant degree of popular support." 1

Admiral Harry D. Felt, the commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, predicted the South Vietnamese would triumph over the Communists by 1966. And only a month before Diem was toppled, President Kennedy and the National Security Council stated that "the United States military task can be completed by the end of 1965." 2

But there were skeptics. In 1963 Senator Mike Mansfield returned from a tour of Vietnam and declared: "What is most disturbing is that Vietnam now appears to be, as it was [in 1955], only at the beginning of a beginning in coping with its grave inner problems. All of the current difficulties existed in 1955 along with hope and energy to meet them ... yet, substantially the same difficulties remain if indeed they have not been compounded." 3 The GIs in the rice paddies summed it up in a slogan: "We can't win, but it's not absolutely essential to pick today to lose."

This slogan reflected the awareness of many Americans in Vietnam that Diem's popular support, always tenuous, was rapidly disintegrating. The discontent broke into the open on May 8, 1963, in Hue, Diem's ancestral home, when the Buddhists staged a demonstration against the regime's ban on the flying of their flag.

Diem's troops opened fire, killing nine marchers. And in an effort to arouse world opinion, Buddhist monks responded by burning themselves to death in the streets in a series of spectacular public protests. Madame Nhu, Diem's sister-in-law, ridiculed the suicides as politically inspired "monk barbecue shows."

Diem was warned privately that the United States would condemn his treatment of the Buddhists unless he redressed their grievances. But to all outward appearances it seemed as if the United States might be supporting the Buddhist repressions. For on August 2 Nhu sent the Special Forces in a raid on the Buddhist pagodas. Hundreds of Buddhists were jailed and scores were killed and wounded in a brutal attack by forces which many Vietnamese knew were supported by CIA money.

Immediately after the raids, Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1960, arrived in Saigon to be the new ambassador, replacing Frederick E. Nolting, Jr., who had been closely identified with the regime. Lodge quickly made it clear to Diem that the United States wanted his brother and Madame Nhu removed from power. After nearly a decade of support for the regime, the United States was reassessing its position.

Even though the CIA decided to continue its $250,000-a-month subsidy to the Special Forces during September, the funds were cut off in October. And on October 4 the CIA station chief in Saigon, John H. Richardson, was recalled to Washington at Lodge's request.

Richardson, a dapper, bald man with heavy horn-rimmed glasses, had served as the CIA's personal link with Nhu. He was also close to most of the regime's top officials, including those in the secret police. From his small second-floor office in the American Embassy, Richardson directed the agency's multifarious activities in Vietnam. A hard liner, he had little use for Diem's opponents, and was the very symbol of the Invisible Government's commitment to the regime. As long as he remained in Vietnam, it was all but impossible to convince either Diem or his enemies of any change in United States policy.

When Richardson was recalled, many took it as evidence that the CIA had been operating on its own in Vietnam in defiance of orders from Washington. But President Kennedy assured a news conference on October 9 that the "CIA has not carried out independent activities but has operated under close control." The implication was clear that Richardson's recall reflected a shift in policy, not displeasure with insubordination.

The implication was not lost on Nhu. He charged on October 17 that the CIA was plotting with the Buddhists to overthrow the regime. "Day and night," he declared, "these people came and urged the Buddhists to stage a coup. It is incomprehensible to me why the CIA, which had backed a winning program, should reverse itself."

The coup against the regime came on November 1, but it was by the Army, not the Buddhists. Diem and Nhu were assassinated. The United States denied any complicity in the coup or the deaths. But Madame Nhu, who had been in the United States bitterly attacking the Kennedy Administration, indicated her belief that her husband and brother-in-law had been "treacherously killed with either the official or unofficial blessing of the American Government ... No one," she said, "can seriously believe in the disclaimer that the Americans have nothing to do with the present situation in Vietnam."

The United States repeated its denial. But at least one distinguished American remained uneasy. President Eisenhower sought assurances on the assassinations before floating a trial balloon for Ambassador Lodge as the Republican nominee for President in 1964:

"General Eisenhower wanted to be assured on one paramount question," said Felix Belair in the New York Times on December 7, 1963. "He wanted to know of the ambassador whether anyone would ever be able to charge, with any hope of making it stick, that he had had any responsibility, even indirectly, in the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and of his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.

"Mr. Lodge was emphatic on the point. He said he had feared for the personal safety of the two men if the military coup was successful in that country. He said there was irrefutable proof that he had twice offered them asylum in the United States Embassy and that President Diem had refused the offer for them both."

What was intriguing about this account was the statement that President Eisenhower found it necessary to make an inquiry of this nature. But the former President, after all, had an intimate understanding of the tactics and workings of the Invisible Government.

_______________

Notes:

i. In his book, Mandate for Change, Eisenhower wrote: "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh."

ii. In April, 1963. at the start of the CIA's reassessment of its links with the regime, Nhu accused the agency of being involved in the 1960 uprising. But the commander of the rebels, Colonel Nguyen Chanh Thi, who fled to Cambodia, said U.S. intelligence men tried to discourage the coup and persuaded the rebels not to kill Diem.

iii. The United States did not formally subscribe to the Geneva Accords, which divided Indochina into Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam after Dienbienphu. But Bedell Smith, the delegate to the negotiations, declared the United States would abide by them. The Accords set a limit of 685 on the number of U.S. military men permitted in Indochina.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:30 am

Guatemala: CIA's Banana Revolt

WELL, BOYS," Ambassador John E. Peurifoy told his assembled staff, "tomorrow at this time we'll have ourselves a pig party."

The scene was the American Embassy on Octava Avenida in Guatemala City, and the unlikely ambassadorial quote was clearly recalled by one of the participants in the meeting. The date was June 18, 1954. The CIA's coup against the Communist-dominated regime of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman had begun. That afternoon, Colonel Carlos Castillo-Armas, a U.S.-trained Guatemalan exile, had crossed the border from Honduras with about 150 men. Now the invasion was on. It had the full advance approval of President Eisenhower.

Peurifoy, a tough but soft-spoken South Carolinian, was overly optimistic. His party to celebrate Arbenz's downfall had to be postponed for two weeks. What the CIA had planned as an overnight coup dragged on for twelve difficult days. Before it had ended, Peurifoy was deeply involved in political cloak-and-dagger maneuvering. And the President of the United States, over the objections of the State Department, found it necessary, clandestinely, to send in three more fighter planes to bailout the CIA's banana revolt.

Unlike the Bay of Pigs, the 1954 Guatemalan operation succeeded. Like Iran the year before, Guatemala was one of the CIA's early triumphs in the field of overthrowing governments. Some of those who participated have begun to say so openly.

On June 10, 1963, in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower made a little-reported but extraordinary speech. The former President for the first time conceded, for all practical purposes, that the United States had overthrown the government of Guatemala in 1954. "There was one time," he said, "when we had a very desperate situation, or we thought it was at least, in Central America, and we had to get rid of a Communist government which had taken over, and our early efforts were defeated by a bad accident and we had to help, send some help right away." 1

Eisenhower did not mention Guatemala by name, but his meaning was perfectly clear, particularly since he shared the speaker's platform with Allen Dulles, his Director of Central Intelligence.

What the ex-President was referring to was this: Four days after Peurifoy's ebullient prediction to the embassy staff in Guatemala City, Eisenhower was told that disaster had overtaken the CIA's modest air force, which consisted of a few World War II P-47 Thunderbolts. One had been shot up in action, and another had crashed. The Thunderbolts had been bombing Guatemala City to encourage Arbenz to vacate the Presidential Palace.

Allen Dulles wanted the planes replaced immediately. Henry F. Holland, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, was aghast. Providing the CIA with planes for Castillo-Armas was one thing before the invasion had actually started. But doing so now, Holland felt, would expose the United States to the hated charge of intervention in Latin American affairs. News of the President's action might leak out, Holland reasoned.

Allen Dulles, however, felt there could be no stopping now. Many months of careful preparation had gone into the Castillo-Armas invasion. Jerry Fred DeLarm, a World War II American fighter pilot who was flying one of the P-47s for the CIA, had enjoyed astonishing success in his raids on Guatemala so far.

A White House meeting was scheduled in the afternoon to discuss the question of the planes.

"Now different people, including Mr. Dulles and a member of the State Department and so on, came into my office to give their differing views," Eisenhower recalled in his 1963 speech.

"And the man [i] who opposed going any further was very vehement in his representation and he wanted no part. He thought we should stop right there, wash our hands of the thing and let it stand right there. Well, Mr. Dulles was on the other side. And when all of the views were presented, I decided we would go ahead and the orders went out [to send more planes].

"... I said to Mr. Dulles ... before I made this decision I said 'What are the chances that this will succeed?' Well, he said he thought about twenty percent. I told him later, 'If you'd have said ninety percent, I'd have said no, but you seemed to be honest.'

"He told me later, 'Well, you know, I knew that my opponent had lost the argument because he came in your office with three law books under his arm.'"

While campaigning in the 1960 and 1962 elections, Senator Thruston B. Morton, the Kentucky Republican, had spoken just as freely about Eisenhower's role in the Guatemala coup. Morton's remarks in Kentucky did not gain national attention, however, until he repeated them at a party dinner in Baltimore in February, 1963, and on a television program.

Whiting Willauer, Ambassador to Honduras during the Guatemala coup, had openly discussed the CIA's role as far back as 1961. In little-noticed testimony before a Senate Committee 2 Willauer said that after the Guatemala coup, "I received a telegram from Allen Dulles in which he stated in effect that the revolution could not have succeeded but for what I did. I am very proud of that telegram."

Then the questioning went as follows:

Q. Mr. Ambassador, was there something of a team in working to overthrow the Arbenz government in Guatemala, or were you alone in that operation?

A. There was a team.

Q. Jack Peurifoy was down there?

A. Yes, Jack was on the team over in Guatemala; that is the principal man, and we had Bob Hill, Ambassador Robert Hill, in Costa Rica ... and we had Ambassador Tom Whelan in Nicaragua, where a lot of the activities were going. And, of course, there were a number of CIA operatives in the picture.

Q. What was Mr. Dulles' involvement in that area?

A. Mr. Allen Dulles?

Q. Yes.

A. Well, the CIA was helping to equip and train the anti-Communist revolutionary forces.

Q. Would you say you were the man in charge in the field in this general area of all these operations?

A. I certainly was called upon to perform very important duties, particularly to keep the Honduran Government -- which was scared to death about the possibilities of themselves being overthrown -- keep them in line so they would allow this revolutionary activity to continue, based in Honduras.

The former ambassador was amazingly explicit in his testimony about the coup in Guatemala, a land best known to the outside world for coffee, bananas and the quetzal, which is both its national bird and the name of its monetary unit.

About 60 percent of Guatemala's population of 3,800,000 is Indian. The Indians are Mayas, descendants of the highly sophisticated culture that flourished a thousand years before the Spanish conquistadors came and ruled all of Central America from the Guatemalan city of Antigua. The rest of the population is of mixed Spanish and Indian descent. These are the ladinos. The Indians are largely illiterate; they provide a cheap labor force and have little communication with the ladinos.

Guatemala is a truly feudal state. About 2 percent of the population owns more than 70 percent of the land. For decades the most important two words in Guatemala have been la Frutera, the United Fruit Company. The American banana company owned and ran as a fiefdom hundreds of square miles of land in Bananera and Tiquisate. It was also a major stockholder in the country's railroad -- and a ready-made gringo political target.

When Arbenz took office in March, 1951, one of the first demands he faced came from coffee workers, who insisted that their minimum wages be doubled. This might seem unreasonable except for the fact that their pay was forty cents a day. The labor unions also demanded more for United Fruit's banana workers, who were paid $1.36 a day.

A bold student revolt had ousted Dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. After that, President Juan Jose Arevalo, a socialist who turned violently anti-American, paved the way for Arbenz and the Communists.

Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, a professional Army officer, was the son of a Swiss father who migrated to Guatemala and became a druggist. (It was later rather widely whispered that Arbenz himself took drugs.) As President, Arbenz in 1952 tried to do something about the country's lopsided land ownership. He pushed through a land-reform program, but, predictably, it ended with small farmers, large finca owners and the United Fruit Company up in arms.

With his high-pitched voice and bad temper, Arbenz was no crowd-pleaser. And the students, always a powerful factor in Latin America, ridiculed him. The students had an annual lampooning parade, the Huelga de Dolores (grievance strike) of which Guatemalan officials lived in horror. Not long before Arbenz's fall from power, the students paraded by with a float that showed Uncle Sam poking a Guatemalan Indian lady with a banana; Arbenz and his hypodermic needle lurked behind a Russian bear, prodding the Guatemalan lady from the other direction. It about summed up the political situation.

For the bear was loose in the banana groves, all right. To maintain his power, Arbenz turned more and more to the Communists. Just as there is debate over whether Castro started out a Communist or became one later, there has been some dispute over the political evolution of Arbenz. But there is little dispute that by 1954 the Communists were running Guatemala. They had gained a foothold and a base in the hemisphere.

Arbenz made one fatal mistake, however. He trusted the Guatemalan Army, an essentially peace- loving organization little inclined to unnecessary strife and combat. Unlike Castro, Arbenz did not penetrate the Army politically, and when he needed it most, it turned on him. Late in the game he had placed spies, popularly known as orejas (the Ears), in various Army posts, but it was too late.

He made one other big mistake -- he expropriated 225,000 acres of United Fruit's best Pacific-slope holdings. Later the Arbenz regime charged that the United States had supported the Castillo-Armas invasion to protect la Frutera's $40,000,000 investment in Guatemala.

In the era of the Cold War, keeping Soviet power and influence out of the hemisphere, and particularly out of the Panama Canal area, was far more important to Washington than old-style banana diplomacy. But certainly the seizure of United Fruit's holdings without adequate compensation forced Eisenhower to take action. And it was one more indication of the direction things were taking in Guatemala.

Although a shipment of Czech arms to Guatemala in May, 1954, was later widely cited as the reason for the CIA-organized coup, the fact is that the machinery to topple Arbenz had been set in motion long before that.

Late in 1953 John Emil Peurifoy arrived on the scene. Peurifoy, known as "Smiling Jack" around the embassy in Guatemala (although not to his face), was a small-town boy from Walterboro, South Carolina, who had enjoyed a phenomenal rise in the State Department. This may not have been unrelated to the fact that his father was once an associate of the powerful James F. Byrnes, who was a senator at the time Peurifoy landed his first job with the State Department in 1938.

Peurifoy was proud of the fact that he once ran the Capitol elevator and equally proud of his small- town background. "Why, that town was so small," he was fond of saying, "you could drive right through it and not know you had been theah."

Beneath his courtly Old South exterior, Peurifoy was tough. He had been through hard times in the depression years. He quit West Point, knocked about the country for a while, became assistant manager and cashier of the Childs restaurant chain in New York, ran the elevator in Congress, watered plants at Washington's Botanical gardens and held a variety of other odd jobs before becoming a diplomat.

He never bothered to learn foreign languages, although in Guatemala he would occasionally wave to the crowd, smile and say "Amigo!" Fresh from Greece, where he had helped shore up that country after its war with the Communists, Peurifoy was just the man to have on the scene if there was to be trouble in the land of the quetzal bird.

And there was to be trouble. It was already brewing. Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, who later became Guatemala's President, was in exile in El Salvador early in 1954. In his recent book, Ydigoras wrote:

"A former executive of the United Fruit Company, now retired, Mr. Walter Turnbull, came to see me with two gentlemen whom he introduced as agents of the CIA. They said that I was a popular figure in Guatemala and that they wanted to lend their assistance to overthrow Arbenz. When I asked their conditions for the assistance I found them unacceptable. Among other things, I was to promise to favor the United Fruit Company and the International Railways of Central America; to destroy the railroad workers labor union; ... to establish a strong-arm government, on the style of Ubico. Further, I was to pay back every cent that was invested in the undertaking." 3

By late 1953 Eisenhower had reached his decision: Arbenz must go. To implement this decision, he turned to the CIA and Allen Dulles. A plan was evolved.

Peurifoy's assignment to Guatemala was part of it. Eisenhower's election had left Peurifoy without any political backing. His diplomatic career seemed over. The CIA went to Peurifoy and persuaded him to join the operation as Ambassador to Guatemala. At first, Peurifoy was leery of the idea, but a persuasive CIA official convinced him that the operation offered him his big chance to revitalize his career. Peurifoy said yes; the CIA arranged his ambassadorial appointment. In February, 1954, Eisenhower called in a former high United States diplomat to serve as a secret civilian adviser to the operation. The President had also asked his brother, Dr. Milton Eisenhower, to join the clandestine operation, but Milton, pleading his wife's serious illness at the time, did not participate.

Henry Holland, as the State Department Latin Chief, was privy to the operation. So were the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So was Senator Thruston B. Morton, then Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations.

Although Dulles and his deputy, General Cabell, were in charge of the CIA's participation, the major immediate responsibility for carrying out the Guatemalan operation was placed in the hands of Frank G. Wisner, the Mississippi-born CIA deputy director for plans. (He was Bissell's predecessor.)

Wisner, a dedicated and hard-driving "black" operator, was an old hand in the intelligence business. In World War II he had been the OSS mission chief in Istanbul and Bucharest. He also worked for the OSS in Germany. After the war, commuting from his home in the suburbs to his Manhattan law firm, Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, seemed dull compared to the days of wartime intrigue along the Bosporus. On November 12, 1947, it was announced that Frank Wisner had been named Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.

Now, in Guatemala in 1954, what Wisner and the CIA needed was someone to serve as a leader of the coup and a focal point around which anti-Arbenz Guatemalans could rally. The man chosen was Colonel Carlos Castillo-Armas, a dapper, dedicated and ascetic-looking career officer who had tunneled his way out of prison to freedom after leading an unsuccessful revolt against Arbenz in 1950.

Castillo-Armas set up headquarters in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and with the CIA's help, began plotting to return to his homeland. A onetime classmate of Arbenz at the Escuela Politecnica, Guatemala's military school, Castillo-Armas had spent two years just after World War II at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The first evidence that the plot was afoot came on January 29, 1954, when Guatemala released intercepted correspondence between Castillo-Armas and Ydigoras.

The Guatemalan charges had a basis in fact, because the two exile leaders had been in touch and had signed a Pacto de Caballeros (gentlemen's agreement) at the border between El Salvador and Honduras. The pact provided that there would be a coup, and then free elections.

Guatemala charged that the plot was centered in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, and enjoyed the support of President Anastasio Somoza and of General Rafael L. Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. The Arbenz government also surmised that the "government of the North" had endorsed the plan.

It charged that the operation was known by the code name El Diablo (the Devil) and that training of rebels was going forward at El Tamarindo, President Somoza's plantation, at Puerto Cabezas (which became the air base for the Bay of Pigs operation seven years later) and on the island of Momotombito in Lake Managua.

The Guatemalan Government also charged that a "Colonel Carl T. Struder" who "was retired" from the U .S. Army, was training the sabotage teams. It said that arms were coming from H. F. Cordes & Company, in Hamburg, West Germany. State Department officials in Washington said they would not comment because that would "give the story a dignity it doesn't deserve."

But the training of Castillo-Armas' forces was in fact taking place on Momotombito, a volcanic island (actually the top of a volcano) which had earned its sonorous name from the sound the Indians thought it made when it rumbled. And "Tacho" Somoza, Nicaragua's President, was indeed heavily involved in the plans to overthrow Arbenz. In Nicaragua the training was directed by a CIA officer who went under the name of "Colonel Rutherford."

The most powerful military element in the coup was the CIA's air force. The handful of P-47 Thunderbolts and C-47 transports operated out of Managua International Airport. The pilots were Americans. The most dare-devil of these, as events later proved, was Jerry Fred DeLarm, a slim, short, hawk-featured man who liked to lay a .45 down on the table in front of him when talking to a stranger.

DeLarm, a native of San Francisco, was a barnstorming, adventurous flier well known in Central America. He had been flying in the area since he was nine, with his father, a pioneer pilot named Eddie DeLarm. Jerry DeLarm spoke Spanish fluently. When World War II broke out, he was flying in Panama City. During the war he shot down two Japanese Zeros over Saipan. He was discharged as a captain and shortly thereafter set up an airline in Costa Rica.

DeLarm's wife was related to Dr. Rafael Calderon-Guardia, the former President of Costa Rica. In 1948, when Otilio Ulate was elected President of that highly democratic nation, Calderon-Guardia tried to block him from taking office. In the revolt that followed, Jose Figueres battled Calderon- Guardia, and emerged as head of a victorious junta.

DeLarm fought on the losing side, for Calderon-Guardia. He flew a DC-3 rigged up with a machine gun in the co-pilot seat and another poking through the floor of the rear bathroom, for ground strafing.

After Costa Rica, DeLarm moved on to Guatemala. During the election of 1950 he took a job doing sky-writing and aerial broadcasts for Arbenz. He was promised $20,000 by the man he later helped to overthrow, and was understandably disturbed when the money did not come through after Arbenz won. That, DeLarm reflected later, was when he first began to suspect Arbenz was a Communist.

By 1954 DeLarm was flying for Castillo-Armas and the CIA. Until shortly before the invasion, he remained behind in Guatemala City, giving flying lessons and using this and an automobile dealership as cover. He had the code name "Rosebinda."

Meanwhile, events were moving in the public arena as well. John Foster Dulles and Henry Holland led the American delegation to the tenth Inter-American conference at Caracas in March. Dulles pushed for an anti-Communist resolution aimed squarely at Guatemala. Arbenz's foreign minister, Guillermo Toriello, angrily accused Foster Dulles of trying to create a "banana curtain." But the American resolution passed, seventeen to one, with Guatemala in opposition.

In May matters began moving to a climax. The CIA learned that a shipload of Czech arms, delivered through Poland, was on its way to Guatemala. The estimated 2,000 tons of rifles, machine guns and other armaments were aboard the Swedish freighter M/S Alfhem, en route from the Polish port of Stettin on the Baltic Sea.

The Alfhem operated out of Uddevalla, Sweden, and her owner was Angbats, Bohuslanska & Kusten, Inc. But Czech funds paid for a "straw charter" of the Alfhem, through the British firm of E. E. Dean in London. And the ship was taking a route to Guatemala as roundabout as its intricate charter arrangements. It sailed first to Dakar, then to Curacao, then to Honduras and finally to Puerto Barrios, on the east coast of Guatemala, where it docked on May 15.

The CIA had a difficult time tracking the arms ship across the vast Atlantic. At the time, it knew everything about the ship except its name: Alfhem. That made tracking difficult, since the freighter was playing hide-and-seek. Although the CIA had the help of the Navy, the agency lost the ship as it was going south along the African coast. It didn't catch up with the Alfhem until it turned up at dock side in Guatemala.

The State Department revealed the arms shipment on May 17. A week later the United States announced that as a countermeasure, it had begun shipping arms to Nicaragua in giant Globemaster planes. At least fifty tons of small arms and machine guns were flown in to "Tacho" Somoza.

But Eisenhower's efforts to get the Western Allies to join a quarantine on arms shipments to Guatemala met with less than a rousing success. The United States drew a protest from the Dutch when it searched the freighter Wulfbrook at San Juan, Puerto Rico. Britain refused to allow its ships to be searched.

On June 7, with the invasion date approaching rapidly, a strange event took place in Guatemala. It was disclosed that Ferdinand F. Schupp, identified as a "former deputy chief of the United States Air Force Mission" in Guatemala, had fled the country along with Colonel Rodolfo Mendoza Azurdia, the ex-chief of the Guatemalan Air Force.

The United States Embassy announced that Schupp had "resigned" his embassy post in 1952 to go into a "farming project" in southern Guatemala. Later, Schupp turned up in Guatemala City, like Jerry DeLarm, giving flying lessons. It is believed that Mendoza took off in a private plane on a seemingly routine flight and stopped off in a pasture to pick up Schupp. The two landed in El Salvador and asked for "asylum."

The CIA's air operation was drawing closer to readiness. Mendoza and Schupp had escaped to join it. A few days before Castillo-Armas crossed the border, DeLarm also slipped out of Guatemala, aboard a regular Pan American flight.

On June 8 Foster Dulles branded "totally false" Guatemalan charges that the United Fruit Company was at the heart of the dispute between Guatemala and Washington. Dulles said the Communist problem would remain even "if they gave a gold piece for every banana."

A couple of days before the invasion commenced the Secretary of State invited Thruston Morton to a White House meeting. As Assistant Secretary for Congressional Relations, Morton was aware of the CIA operation, since it had been his task to brief a few key senators about its true nature.

"You' d better come along," Secretary Dulles told Morton, "because if this thing blows up and goes wrong, you're going to have to straighten things out for us on the Hill."

Morton went along. The breakfast meeting with Eisenhower took place in the second-floor dining room of the White House. Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other aides were present, as Morton later recalled it. He said Eisenhower had asked the men around the table: "Are you sure this is going to succeed?" Told that it would, Eisenhower responded: "I'm prepared to take any steps that are necessary to see that it succeeds. For if it succeeds, it's the people of Guatemala throwing off the yoke of Communism. If it fails, the flag of the United States has failed."

It is generally agreed by the participants, however, that at no point in the invasion planning did Eisenhower ever discuss sending in United States armed forces should the CIA operation fail.

On June 18 Castillo-Armas and his small "Army of Liberation" crossed the border into Guatemala from Honduras. He drove in a battered station wagon, leading his men down the road to Esquipulas. Before dawn the P-47s had bombed San Jose, Guatemala's major port on the Pacific coast.

In Guatemala City the government announced the invasion had begun. In Washington the State Department said it had been in touch with Peurifoy. It added blandly: "The department has no evidence ... that this is anything other than a revolt of Guatemalans against the government."

Newsmen from all over the world converged on Guatemala and Honduras -- only to discover that there was no war to cover. Castillo-Armas and his Liberation Army settled down six miles over the border in Esquipulas, the site of the Church of the Black Christ, the country's major religious shrine. The strategy was to wait for the Arbenz regime to collapse. Then the invaders would march triumphantly into Guatemala City.

With the Army of Liberation bogged down just inside the Guatemalan border, "Tacho" Somoza decided to invite Ydigoras to lunch with him at the Presidential Palace in Managua to discuss the situation. "Tacho" introduced Ydigoras to "Colonel Rutherford," and added: "He is just back from Korea."

"Tacho" was standing in front of a map with pins in it showing the disposition of the Castillo-Armas columns. Four of the pins were in the shape of airplanes. The Nicaraguan President was bitterly complaining about how slowly the freedom forces were advancing.

"What kind of a crummy military school did Castillo Armas go to?" Somoza asked.

"The same one I did," Ydigoras replied mildly.

The most active of the planes represented by the pins on "Tacho's" map was that of DeLarm. On the first day of the invasion he dropped propaganda leaflets on Guatemala City, but had orders not to fire or drop any bombs. On subsequent raids on the capital, however, he bombed and strafed several targets, effectively demoralizing the government leaders.

The CIA's planes became known among the Guatemalan populace as Sulfatos -- the Guatemalan word for laxative -- because of the alleged effect their appearance had upon the Arbenz officials.

Then disaster struck the CIA's force of P-47s, when one was shot full of holes and another cracked up. On June 20 the Guatemalan Government charged in the UN that two American fliers had crash-landed in Tapachula, Mexico, after having bombed the Guatemalan city of Coban. [ii]

On the same day the Guatemalan Government was voicing its charge in the UN about American fliers, Henry Cabot Lodge, the United States Ambassador to the world organization, denied categorically that his government was behind the invasion. "The situation does not involve aggression but is a revolt of Guatemalans against Guatemalans," he stated.

It was about this time that Allen Dulles mafe an urgent appeal for more airplanes. This led to the meeting of Eisenhower, Allen Dulles and Henry Holland, whose legalistic objections were overruled.

What Eisenhower did not say in his speech relating to this incident, is that the planes had to be "sold" by the U.S. Air Force to the government of Nicaragua in order to mask United States participation, which was surfacing at the UN. As cover for the transaction, Nicaragua had to put down $150,000 in cash to purchase the planes. After some interesting financial legerdemain, Nicaraguan Ambassador to Washington Guillermo Sevilla-Sacasa managed to come up with cover payment, and the new planes were dispatched to Nicaragua. Ultimately, it was CIA money that paid for them. The planes were flown down unarmed, to be armed upon arrival.

At one point during the trouble over the airplanes, General Cabell, the CIA deputy director, learned that one of the P-47s had been shipped to Nicaragua minus a landing-gear wheel. The plane could not operate without it. The U.S. Air Force rushed the part down and the Thunderbolt flew in the invasion.

On June 24, two days after the secret White House meeting, a P-47 swooped over Guatemala City, strafed gasoline stores and knocked out a radio station. It was not, as luck would have it, the Communist station, but a Protestant missionary station operated by Harold Yon Broekhoven, an evangelist from Passaic, New Jersey.

In New York, a spokesman for the United Fruit Company said that banana harvesting was at a standstill because of the war. He said they were keeping in close touch with the company manager in Guatemala City, Mr. Almyr Bump. The spokesman added confidently: "It is classical in these revolutionary movements down there that they confine themselves to national versus national, and Americans who stand on the sidelines and keep out of the way should be in no great danger."

American newsmen were certainly in no great danger. Castillo-Armas, as New York Herald Tribune correspondent Homer Bigart reported, clearly did not want them hanging around Esquipulas. Bigart had to retreat across the frontier to Nueva Ocotepeque, Honduras, which the newsmen referred to more conveniently as "New Octopus."

Defying the Army of Liberation ban, Evelyn Irons, a correspondent for the London Evening Standard, rented a mule and loped down the road to Esquipulas. There, Castillo-Armas stopped her. He would not allow her to proceed to the front, which had by now moved to Chiquimula. Nevertheless, Miss Irons had scooped her competitors, and mule prices in Nueva Ocotepeque soared.

But under the air attack, Arbenz was losing his nerve. The defection of Mendoza, the Air Force chief, was proving to be a key factor, because it demoralized the Guatemalan Air Force. It became so unreliable that Arbenz grounded his own planes.

At the front, Arbenz' reluctant Army commanders sent back messages saying that their forces were being overwhelmed by the invaders. It wasn't true, but it had a psychological effect on Arbenz. The CIA was reading the traffic from the front, and it knew what messages Arbenz was receiving. CIA clandestine radio operators intercepted the military communications and fed back false messages on the same wave length to further confuse the situation.

On June 25 a P-47 raided Guatemala City again. On June 27 Arbenz capitulated, following a long day of maneuvering by Peurifoy. The American ambassador first met at the palace with Foreign Minister Toriello. Then he conferred with Colonel Carlos Enrique Diaz, the chief of the Guatemalan armed forces, and a group of ranking colonels. By nightfall Arbenz was on the air broadcasting his resignation. Colonel Diaz became head of the junta that took over. He made an immediate tactical error.

Diaz, whose nickname was Pollo Triste (Sad Chicken), went on the air and announced: "The struggle against the mercenary invaders of Guatemala will not abate. Colonel Arbenz had done what he thought was his duty. I shall carry on."

This would never do. Diaz was operating on the radical assumption that it was his duty to fight when his country was invaded.

Peurifoy instantly recognized that this would be a disaster. If the junta, to which the State Department's ambassador had given at least his tacit blessing, went out to fight the CIA's Army of Liberation, it would be a fine spectacle. What would Henry Holland and Frank Wisner say?

Peurifoy put on a "siren" suit, strapped a .45 to his belt, and began maneuvering to topple Diaz. The CIA, which of course wanted Diaz out, nevertheless felt that Peurifoy was making himself entirely too conspicuous for the good of the operation.

The next day Jerry DeLarm bombed Guatemala City in earnest. He knocked out the radio station (the right one) and then dropped two bombs right in the middle of Fort Matamoros, the major installation of the Guatemalan Army.

That did it. Diaz, President for one day, was ousted at the point of machine guns (according to one account) by Colonel Elfego Monzon. With two other colonels, Monzon took over as head of a new, less bellicose junta, acceptable to Peurifoy.

The war was over.

But the CIA and the State Department were worried that it might break out again at any moment. Peace talks between Monzon and Castillo-Armas were scheduled to take place in El Salvador. Washington gave Peurifoy carte blanche to bring the junta and the CIA's Castillo-Armas together.

"They want me to go over there to El Salvador," Peurifoy confided to an aide, "and knock heads together."

With the Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Gennaro Verolino, the American ambassador flew off to El Salvador for the talks. On July 2, with tearful if cautious embraces, Monzon and Castillo-Armas signed a peace pact. It left Monzon top man, but only until the junta voted formally on a chief. The deal was signed in the Hall of Honor in the Presidential Palace. Castillo-Armas then flew back to Chiquimula to convince his followers that it was not a sellout to Monzon.

The next day Castillo-Armas came home to a huge welcome in Guatemala City. He arrived not at the head of his conquering troops, however, but in Peurifoy's embassy plane.

Meanwhile John Foster Dulles addressed the United States on radio and television. He said the struggle in Guatemala exposed the "evil purpose of the Kremlin" to find "nesting places" in the Americas and added: "Led by Colonel Castillo-Armas, patriots arose in Guatemala to challenge the Communist leadership -- and to change it. Thus the situation is being cured by the Guatemalans themselves." 4

If the CIA's coup had routed Communism in Guatemala, democracy is not what followed in its wake. As its first act, the ruling junta canceled the right of illiterates to vote, thereby disenfranchising in one stroke about 70 percent of Guatemala's population -- almost all the Indians.

The junta elected Castillo-Armas as its President on July 8. In August the liberator suspended all constitutional guarantees. The ideological basis of the coup was further undercut when the chief CIA man in Guatemala quit the agency and went into the cement business there. The free election Castillo-Armas had promised when Arbenz fell turned out to be "si" or "no" vote on whether to continue Castillo-Armas as President. Castillo-Armas won.

In rapid succession, the new regime set up a Robespierre-like Committee for Defense Against Communism with sweeping police-state powers. The government took back 800,000 acres of land from the peasants, returned to United Fruit the land Arbenz had seized, and repealed amendments to a 1947 law that had guaranteed rights to workers and labor unions.

Within a week of Castillo-Arrnas' election as head of the junta, the new government announced it had arrested 4,000 persons on suspicion of Communist activity. By August it had passed the Preventive Penal Law Against Communism. This set up the Defense Committee, which met in secret and could declare anyone a Communist with no right of appeal.

Those registered by the committee could be arbitrarily arrested for periods up to six months; they could not own radios or hold public office. Within four months the new government had registered 72,000 persons as Communists or sympathizers. A committee official said it was aiming for 200,000.

Castillo-Armas was generally regarded as an honest, proud and rather simple man who genuinely loved his country. But he had a covey of advisers, and some of them were less dedicated than their chief. After the 1954 coup American gambler types began drifting into Guatemala, and certain of the liberator's lieutenants were cut in. Castillo-Armas could not bring himself to realize that some of his followers were treacherous. A gambling casino was built in which various Army officers shared a heavy financial interest with the Americans.

Castillo-Armas closed down the casino, and shortly afterward, on July 26, 1957, he was assassinated by a member of the palace guard. The crime was first blamed on Communists, then on Castillo-Armas' enemies within the government. It has never been solved.

The following year, Ydigoras was elected President and settled down for a term that was at least never dull. At one point, when rumors of official corruption were rife, he went on television with his ministers. Like a schoolteacher, Ydigoras went down the line, saying, "Now, Mr. Minister, you wouldn't steal from the treasury, would you?" One by one, the ministers said no, they certainly would not.

Another time, a newspaperman accused Ydigoras of being a viejo enclenque, or enfeebled old man. Ydigoras went on television again, repeated the charge and said: "I will show him." Then he proceeded to skip rope and juggle Indian clubs before the amazed Guatemalan audience.

Still, Ydigoras was nobody's fool. When the CIA came to him in 1960 asking for Guatemalan bases for the Bay of Pigs training, he said yes -- although fully aware that he was risking his political neck. In fact, the November, 1960, uprising (which CIA pilots helped to put down) was partly blamed on the issue of the Cuban training bases in Guatemala.

On March 31, 1963, Ydigoras was ousted by Colonel Enrique Peralta in one of the first of a series of military coups in Latin America that threatened to make a mockery of the political reforms at the base of the Alliance for Progress. Colonel Peralta's regime was recognized by Washington in less than three weeks.

If any efforts were made by Washington to save the legally elected Ydigoras government -- which had risked its future to provide bases for the CIA for the Cuban invasion -- they were certainly not effective. There is, in fact, no available evidence that any such efforts were made.

And so, a decade after the CIA's liberation of Guatemala from Communism in 1954, the lot of Guatemalans was about the same. The finca owners prospered. The 2,000,000 Indians, still largely illiterate, toiled on for wages still ridiculously low. (Eighty cents a day is considered generous in many areas of the country.) And another military junta was in the saddle.

As is so often the case, the Invisible Government had moved in, accomplished its task, and moved on. The yoke of Communism had been thrown off but in its place there remained the yoke of poverty and an indifferent oligarchy. The abysmal conditions that led to Arbenz in the first place were as apparent as ever.

_______________

Notes:

i. Henry Holland, the State Department's representative at the meeting.

ii. That same day William A. Beall, a thirty-year-old American flier from Tyler, Texas, showed up in Mexico City saying he had crash-landed his plane in the Pacific Ocean off Guatemala two days before. He had flown to Mexico City from Tapachula. Beall said two other American fliers had crashed off Guatemala a few days earlier, but had been rescued "by the United States Navy."
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:31 am

The Kennedy Shake-Up

THE CIA emerged from the coup in Guatemala with a reputation in the Invisible Government as a clever and efficient operator in Latin American affairs. And despite the agency's subsequent difficulties in other areas of the world, that reputation was essentially untarnished when President Kennedy took office in January of 1961.

When the invasion failed, however, a sharp reaction set in. A few days after the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy called in Clark M. Clifford, a Washington lawyer and close confidant who later became the chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Kennedy complained that he had been given bad information and bad advice by his intelligence and military advisers. "I was in the Pacific," said the ex-PT boat skipper. "I know something about these things. How could they have put all the ammunition in one ship or two ships?"

Referring to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the President told another visitor: "They don't know any more about it than anyone else." He vowed to shake the intelligence community from top to bottom. He was determined that the Bay of Pigs would not happen again. "One more," he stated ruefully, "will sink me."

The President then set out to gain control of the intelligence establishment and to make it genuinely submissive to his ideas and purposes. As a first order of business, he decided to conduct an extensive investigation of the Cuban debacle.

"We intend to profit from this lesson," he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 20, the day after the invasion collapsed. "We intend to re-examine and reorient our forces of all kinds -- our tactics and our institutions here in this community. We intend to intensify our efforts for a struggle in many ways more difficult than war."

At his news conference the next day, the President declined to get into details about the Bay of Pigs on the grounds that it would not "aid the interest of the United States." But he denied any desire to "conceal responsibility ... I'm the responsible officer of the government," Kennedy declared, "and that is quite obvious."

But in this moment of extreme political vulnerability, high administration officials began to point out in private post-mortems with reporters that Kennedy had inherited the Bay of Pigs idea from President Eisenhower.

On April 23, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall made the mistake of giving public voice to the administration line, and the Republicans, predictably, pounced upon him.

"Here was a plan conceived by one administration," Udall declared. "This from all I can find out began over a year ago and President Eisenhower directed it."

"Cheap and vicious partisanship," retorted Richard M. Nixon.

Kennedy stepped in quickly the next day to prevent all-out political war. He told Pierre Salinger to issue a public statement.

"President Kennedy has stated from the beginning," Salinger declared, "that as President he bears sole responsibility for the events of the past days. He has stated on all occasions, and he restates it now, so it will be understood by all. The President is strongly opposed to anyone within or without the administration attempting to shift the responsibility."

Kennedy's full public acceptance of the blame seemed to be the Republicans' price for laying off the Cuban issue, at least temporarily. In the week after the invasion, the President discussed the operation at length with Eisenhower, Nixon, Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona and Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. Eisenhower set the Republican line on emerging from an eighty-five-minute conversation with Kennedy at Camp David on April 22.

"I am all in favor," Eisenhower declared, "of the United States supporting the man who has to carry the responsibility for our foreign affairs."

Kennedy used the momentary truce to set in motion a sweeping reorganization of the Invisible Government. Even before the Bay of Pigs, he had planned a major shake-up in the hierarchy of the CIA. He had indicated to several high-ranking officials that he would put Richard Bissell in charge of the agency when Dulles stepped down.

Now, in the shadow of the Cuban fiasco, it was clear that Bissell would have to go and that the shake-up would have to be deferred for a decent interval. Dulles' resignation was not accepted until September 27, 1961. He was succeeded on November 29, 1961 by John McCone. General Cabell retired as the deputy director on January 31, 1962. He was replaced by Army Major General Marshall Sylvester Carter, [i] fifty-two. Bissell resigned as the deputy director for plans on February 17, 1962. He was succeeded by his assistant, Richard M. Helms, forty-eight. Robert Amory, the deputy director for intelligence, was shifted to the Budget Bureau to become the director of its International Division. He was replaced on May 16, 1962 by Ray S. Cline, forty-four.

The top-level shake-up at the CIA was not completed until a full year had passed. But two days after the invasion Kennedy ordered General Maxwell Taylor to head an investigation and to make recommendations for the reform of the intelligence community.

Taylor was a World War II paratroop commander who quit as Army Chief of Staff in 1959 in protest against the refusal of the Eisenhower Administration to adopt his views on conventional warfare. After the Bay of Pigs investigation, he became Kennedy's personal military adviser and, finally, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Joining Taylor in the investigation were Robert Kennedy, Allen Dulles and Arleigh Burke. It was clear that the Attorney General was to become the untitled overseer of the intelligence apparatus in the Kennedy Administration. The appointment of Dulles and Burke, holdovers from the Eisenhower Administration, was designed to gather broad political support for the shake-up and to forestall suggestions that a whitewash operation was afoot.

Kennedy moved to take an even tighter grip on the Invisible Government on May 4 when he revived the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities under a new title, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The original group had been set up by President Eisenhower on January 13, 1956, on a recommendation by the Hoover Commission. It was headed by James R. Killian, Jr., the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joseph P. Kennedy, the President's father, served on it for the first six months.

The board had disbanded on January 7, 1961, when the entire membership resigned in anticipation of the new administration. But now Kennedy called it back into existence, again under the chairmanship of Killian. [ii]

The President's instructions to the new board were to investigate the entire intelligence community, to recommend detailed changes and to make sure that the changes were carried out. The original board had met just twice a year and had been only marginally informed about intelligence activities. Kennedy ordered the new board to meet six to eight times a year and, between times, to carry out specific assignments for him at home and abroad.

The Killian and Taylor groups had scarcely begun their secret inquiries before the tenuous political truce on the Bay of Pigs began to be breached. On June 11, 1961, William E. Miller, the New York congressman and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, charged that the invasion had failed because Kennedy "rescinded and revoked the Eisenhower plan to have the Cuban freedom fighters protected by American air power."

Miller said his accusation was based on comments by Eisenhower to a group of Republican leaders. But the former President corrected him the very next day. Eisenhower denied that American air power had been approved during his time in office. He had merely stated, the general explained, that an amphibious operation could not succeed without air support of some kind.

This was the first of many confusing exchanges during the following weeks and months on the issue of air cover. Republican and Cuban exile leaders charged repeatedly that the Bay of Pigs invasion failed because President Kennedy withdrew American air cover.

The Kennedy Administration held its tongue for close to two years. But finally, in January of 1963, Robert Kennedy denied the accusation in interviews with the Miami Herald and U.S. News & World Report.

"1 can say unequivocally," he declared, "that President Kennedy never withdrew U.S. air cover. ... There never were any plans made for U.S. air cover, so there was nothing to withdraw ..." 1

And again: "There never was any promise. Not even under Mr. Eisenhower was American air cover in the picture." 2

The air-cover controversy had grown out of a massive confusion over what was included in the original air plan for the Bay of Pigs. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the original plan envisioned no need for the direct intervention of U. S. Navy or Air Force planes. Castro's air force was to have been destroyed on the ground by the CIA's Cuban exile bombers. In that event, the Cuban invaders logically would not have required aerial protection against nonexistent planes. But the President canceled the second strike against Castro's air bases. Accordingly, Castro's planes were in the air to harass the invaders on the beach and to sink the ships carrying their equipment, ammunition, fuel and communications.

The real question in the controversy is whether the invasion could have succeeded if Kennedy had not canceled the second strike. The Taylor group grappled with this question but failed to reach agreement.

Taylor and Robert Kennedy concluded that the invasion plan had been thoroughly faulty and stood no chance of success in any event. "It simply cannot be said," the Attorney General later commented, "that the invasion failed because of any single factor. There were several major mistakes. It was just a bad plan. Victory was never close." 3

Burke, on the other hand, took the position that the invasion very nearly succeeded, and probably would have if the President had not canceled the second air strike. The invasion might have worked without air support of any kind, the admiral argued, if the first air strike had not been scheduled two days in advance of the landing eliminating the element of surprise.

Dulles took a position somewhere in between. He thought success could have been achieved if all had gone according to plan (he had left Washington for San Juan at the time of the invasion with no idea that the plan would be changed). But Dulles felt the CIA and the Joint Chiefs made a mistake in not arranging for alternatives in case the second strike failed or did not come off. He thought there should have been a contingency plan to make sure the invaders got ashore with their equipment.

The Taylor committee presented its views, secretly and orally, to President Kennedy in the summer of 1961. [iii] The committee had worked for about four months, meeting secretly at the Pentagon in an office close to the Joint Chiefs' area. The group interviewed virtually everyone of significance in the Bay of Pigs invasion, including the CIA man who directed the air operations and Mario Zuniga, the Cuban Pilot who told the cover story about defecting from Castro's air force.

The committee reached more than thirty conclusions, including findings that communications were very bad and that there was an overcentralization of the operation in Washington. They also reached a meeting of minds on another crucial point. After the Bay of Pigs, there was considerable pressure within and without the government to limit the CIA to intelligence-gathering alone. It was argued that the agency was inevitably tempted to warp its intelligence estimates to justify its pet projects; and that it would be better to transfer responsibility for all clandestine operations to some other agency, possibly the Pentagon.

This argument was strenuously opposed by Dulles and Cabell. They contended that a separation of intelligence-gathering from operations would result in expensive duplication of personnel and facilities, particularly at overseas posts. They also warned that foreign agents would tend to play off one branch of the spy apparatus against the other, bidding up the price of information and confusing the evidence.

Dulles pleaded that, contrary to popular belief, no intelligence agency in the world is split into separate information-gathering and operational units. When the British set up a Special Operations Executive in World War II, he maintained, they ran into serious difficulties and had to revert to a CIA-type system.

These pleadings proved persuasive to the Taylor committee, which declined to recommend that all clandestine operations be divorced from the CIA's responsibilities. The President agreed and the CIA continued to function essentially in its old ways.

However, the Taylor group did come to the conclusion that the Bay of Pigs operation was too large and too unwieldy to have been conducted by the CIA. In the future, the CIA was to be limited to operations requiring military equipment no larger or more complex than side arms -- weapons which could be carried by individuals. In other words, the CIA was never again to direct operations involving aircraft, tanks or amphibious ships. Operations of that size were to be conducted by the Pentagon.

Put another way, the CIA was henceforth to be restricted to paramilitary operations which would be "plausibly deniable." The Bay of Pigs invasion was not plausibly deniable because it was too large and pervasive to escape the notice of alert officials, newspapermen and private citizens in a free society.

It is clear from all this that the leaders of the government had finally come to the realization that certain types of clandestine operations are incompatible with the democratic system. In a totalitarian society, where the organs of communication are tightly controlled, secret ventures can be mounted on a large scale with minimum risk of disclosure. But this is extremely difficult in an open society in which freedom of speech and the press is constitutionally guaranteed.

As Robert Kennedy emphasized, President Kennedy canceled the second air strike because "U.S. participation in the matter was coming to the surface ... contrary to the pre-invasion plan." 4

It had been expected that Mario Zuniga would get away with the tale of defection he told in Miami on the Saturday before the invasion. But a few influential newspapers and UN delegates began to express skepticism and the President felt compelled to change the military plan in an effort to conceal the fact that the United States was behind the invasion.

Immediately after the invasion failed, the President revealed his concern about the limitations imposed upon the government by the institutions of free speech and a free press. He went before the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961, with a plea for voluntary censorship.

"If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions," Kennedy remarked, "then I can only say that no war has ever posed a greater threat to our security."

But despite his chagrin and his momentary impatience with the workings of a democracy, the President had not lost perspective on the dangers of toying with fundamental freedoms.

"The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open republic," he declared, "and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it."

_______________

Notes:

i. In the Spring of 1965, President Johnson shifted Carter to be director of the National Security Agency and named Helms his successor at CIA. In June, 1966, Helms moved up again to the top spot of director of CIA.

ii. The new members were Frank Pace, Jr., former Secretary of the Army; Dr. Edwin H. Land, president of the Polaroid Corporation; Dr. William O. Baker, vice-president for research of the Bell Telephone Laboratories; Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, retired, board chairman of Space Technology Laboratories, Inc.; Dr. William L. Langer, professor of history, Harvard University; Robert D. Murphy, former Under Secretary of State and president of Corning Glass International; Gordon Gray, former head of the Office of Defense Mobilization; and Clark Clifford, who had been a leading adviser to President Truman. Clifford succeeded Killian as chairman on April 23, 1963.

iii. Late in 1962 the administration's findings were drawn up in a White Paper, prepared mainly by Roger Hilsman, then the State Department's director of intelligence and research. At the White House, Bundy and Salinger recommended that it be released to the public in January, 1963. But Robert Kennedy urged that it remain secret, and the White Paper was not released.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:31 am

The Secret Elite

THE MOST controversial of President Kennedy's moves to reorganize the Invisible Government was his appointment of John McCone as Director of Central Intelligence. The strong-willed, stern- looking multimillionaire was not of the stuff to inspire love among the bureaucrats.

"When he smiles," a CIA man cautioned, "look out."

McCone had aroused much fear and antagonism in his rise to the top in the world of business and government. Influential scientists were outraged by what they believed was an effort by McCone to have ten of their brethren fired from the California Institute of Technology in 1956.

The Caltech scientists had come out in support of Adlai Stevenson's proposal for a nuclear test ban during the presidential campaign that year. And McCone, a trustee of the Institute, retorted by accusing the scientists of being "taken in" by Soviet propaganda and of attempting to "create fear in the minds of the uninformed that radioactive fallout from H-bomb tests endangers life."

McCone denied that he had attempted to have the scientists dismissed. 1 But some remained unconvinced and still more were embittered by the blunt language of McCone's denunciation.

Outside the scientific community, many were disturbed by McCone's big wartime profits in the ship-building business. Ralph E. Casey of the General Accounting Office, a watchdog arm of the Congress, testified in 1946 that Mc Cone and his associates in the California Shipbuilding Company made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000.

"I daresay ... Casey remarked, "that at no time in the history of American business, whether in wartime or in peacetime, have so few men made so much money with so little risk and all at the expense of the taxpayers, not only of this generation but of generations to come." 2

Again, McCone denied the accusation. He insisted that the investment of California Shipbuilding -- including loans, bank credits and stock, in addition to the cash -- amounted to over $7,000,000. He also disputed Casey's profit figures as inflated. [i] In any event, he testified, the government got back 95 percent of the profits in taxes. 3

Another of McCone's business activities which provoked opposition was his long relationship with the international oil industry. During the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on his nomination in January, 1962, McCone told of his former directorship of the Panama Pacific Tankers Company, a large oil-carrying fleet, and of the $1,000,000 in stock he held in Standard Oil of California, which operates extensively in the Middle East, Indonesia and Latin America.

"Every well-informed American knows," commented Senator Joseph Clark, the Pennsylvania Democrat, "that the American oil companies are deep in the politics of the Middle East ... [and] the CIA is deep in the politics of the Middle East." 4

Clark opposed McCone's appointment on the ground that his ownership of the oil stock amounted to "a legal violation and a very unwise holding." McCone offered to dispose of the stock but the committee refused to consider it. From the tenor of the questioning it was clear that the great majority of senators was not at all disturbed by McCone's record. They were, in fact, abundantly impressed.

"I have not had the opportunity of knowing Mr. McCone well, only through reputation," said Senator Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Democrat, "but in looking over this biography, to me it epitomizes what has made America great."

The biography showed that McCone was born into a prosperous San Francisco family on January 4, 1902. He was graduated magna cum laude from the University of California with an engineering degree in 1922. That year he joined the Llewellyn Iron Works in California and, before moving into the executive suite, served briefly as a riveter, a surveyor, a foreman and a construction manager. When Llewellyn merged into the Consolidated Steel Corporation in 1929, McCone assumed a series of executive positions, including vice-president in charge of sales. In 1933 he became an executive vice-president and director.

McCone left the steel business in 1937 to form a new engineering concern, the Bechtel-McCone- Parsons Corporation of Los Angeles. This firm specialized in the design and construction of petroleum refineries, processing plants and power plants for installation in the United States, South America and the Middle East.

In 1939. when war broke out in Europe, McCone joined the Six Companies Group in the formation of the Seattle-Tacoma Corporation which built merchant ships for the U.S. Maritime Commission and the British Government. During the war McCone and his enterprises were also active in the modification of Air Force bombers for combat.

After the war McCone took over the Joshua Hendy Iron Works at Sunnyvale, California, and broadened his business interests in a dozen major corporations, including the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, Standard Oil of California and Trans World Airlines. He entered government service in 1947 as a member of President Truman's Air Policy Commission. In 1948 he became special deputy to James Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense. He prepared the first two budgets of the newly unified Defense Department and worked closely with Forrestal in his efforts to create the CIA.

McCone was named Under Secretary of the Air Force in 1950. He returned to private life the next year, but was back in the government in 1958 as the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He served in that post until the end of the Eisenhower Administration.

During his government service, McCone gained a reputation as an uncompromising supporter of John Foster Dulles' doctrine of massive retaliation, the Air Force's atomic warfare theories, and the hard-line strategy against the Soviet Union.

A member of the Roman Catholic Church, McCone was designated by Pope Pius XII as a Knight of St. Gregory and awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester. He and Clare Booth Luce served as Eisenhower's official representatives at Pope Pius' funeral in 1958.

These credentials -- particularly McCone's reputation as a hard-nosed executive who could get things done quickly and efficiently -- impressed Robert Kennedy, who had been looking around for a successor to Allen Dulles.

There had been some thought that the Attorney General might take the job himself, but this inevitably would have provoked Republican charges that the Kennedys were creating a dynasty. And it probably would have stirred up new demands for tighter Congressional control of the CIA -- a prospect which the President did not relish.

Serious consideration was given to the possibility of offering the job to Clark Clifford, who had impressed Kennedy mightily when he directed the change-over in the White House staff between administrations. But the handsome and prosperous Washington lawyer was not interested.

The President then turned to Fowler Hamilton, a Wall Street lawyer and close friend of Senator Symington. The White House was on the verge of announcing Hamilton's appointment when Kennedy encountered a series of difficulties in finding a director for the Agency for International Development (AID).

The foreign-aid job had been scheduled to go to George D. Woods, the board chairman of the First Boston Company. But Woods felt compelled to withdraw his name because of renewed talk about First Boston's implication in the Dixon Yates scandal. Kennedy then tried to fill the AID opening with Thomas J. Watson. Jr., the president of the International Business Machines Corporation. But Watson said no and the President named Hamilton as the AID director.

It was then that Kennedy decided upon McCone as Director of Central Intelligence. The decision, announced on September 27, 1961, shocked official Washington. The members of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board were stunned that Kennedy had not asked their advice in advance of the appointment; and there were further grumblings over the Caltech incident and McCone's close ties with the Republican Party. "I think," a board member was heard to comment, "that the President should have got a Kennedy man."

But that, of course, was precisely what the President did not want. After the Bay of Pigs, both Kennedy and the CIA were extremely vulnerable to political attack from the Republicans, particularly from the right wing of the party. With a conservative Republican at the head of the Invisible Government, the President, clearly, thought the political fire would be somewhat diverted.

"You are now living on the bull's eye," Kennedy said as McCone was sworn into office on November 29, 1961, "and I welcome you to that spot."

A week later, on December 6, McCone's wife died unexpectedly of a heart attack. They had been married for twenty-three years and were unusually close. McCone was grief-stricken. Allen Dulles volunteered to take care of the arrangements for flying the body back to the West Coast. On the way to the airport, McCone poured out his anguish.

"I can't go on," he told his predecessor. "I'm going to have to tell the President that I can't take the job."

"You must." Dulles replied firmly. "You owe it to the country."

McCone followed Dulles' advice and set out almost immediately on extensive tours of agency installations in Europe and Asia. His nomination came to a vote in the Senate on January 31, 1962, after a brief, bitter debate, and he was confirmed seventy-one to twelve. [ii] Two weeks earlier, on January 16, the President had outlined the new responsibilities of the Director of Central Intelligence in a letter to McCone:

It is my wish that you serve as the government's principal foreign intelligence officer and that you undertake as an integral part of your responsibility, the coordination and effective guidance of the total U.S. intelligence effort ...

As head of the Central Intelligence Agency, while you will continue to have overall responsibility for the agency, I shall expect you to delegate to your principal deputy, as you may deem necessary, so much of the direction of the detailed operation of the agency as may be required to permit you to carry out your primary task as director of Central Intelligence.


The President noted "with approval" that McCone had designated his deputy, General Carter, to sit on the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) as the CIA's representative.

"Pat" Carter had risen in the Army as a staff man. A graduate of West Point and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became a close aide to General George C. Marshall in World War II. He gained experience in international affairs as an important military figure at several wartime and postwar conferences, including the World War II summit meeting in Cairo in 1943.

Despite the broadened powers implied in the President's letter, Carter had no illusions about his position in the CIA. Kennedy had wanted to put a civilian in the deputy's job and settled upon Carter only under strong Congressional pressure for the appointment of another military man. When some of Carter's old military friends would arrive at the CIA from the Pentagon for an intelligence briefing, the general left no doubt as to who was the real boss of the agency. "Welcome," he would say, "to McConey Island."

As Director of Central Intelligence. McCone was responsible not only for the CIA but also for all of the other government agencies involved in intelligence work. McCone directed the intelligence community formally through USIB, a committee of intelligence agency representatives, which was called into session each week in a room adjacent to his top-floor office in the CIA's new building in Langley, Virginia. McCone also maintained informal supervisory contact with the principal members of the intelligence community: Army Intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as the CIA.

***

Army Intelligence

The Army G-2 is the oldest of the nation's intelligence services, with a tradition dating back to World War I. In World War II it carried off several coups: the capture intact of a high-level Nazi planning group in North Africa; the advance seizure of a map of all enemy mines in Sicily; and the capture of the entire Japanese secret-police force on Okinawa. On a bureaucratic level, it did battle with the OSS and the ambitious intelligence men of the Army Air Corps. After the war the G-2 absorbed many of the OSS operatives under a directive by President Truman. But it lost air intelligence when the Air Force was created as a separate service. The Army yielded further ground after the formation of the DIA, but retained four vital functions: ( 1) technical intelligence on the types, quantity and quality of army weapons of foreign powers; ( 2) the attache system, which tries to estimate the size, organization and deployment of foreign armies through the efforts -- mainly overt -- of Army representatives in the major United States embassies; ( 3) the Counter Intelligence Corps, which is charged with detecting and preventing treason, espionage, sabotage, gambling, prostitution and black marketeering; ( 4) the Army Map Service, which is responsible for meeting most of the government's mapping needs.

***

Office of Naval Intelligence

The ONI is the smallest of the intelligence branches of the three services. Its total complement amounted to 2,600 men in 1961. [iii] and the number has undoubtedly declined as the DIA has absorbed more and more of the service intelligence functions. The Navy maintains no separate counter-intelligence unit such as the Army's CIC. But it makes use of an attache system, and it deploys intelligence men at all of its installations, ashore and afloat. The principal mission of the ONI is to collect information on foreign naval forces. It keeps a special weather eye on the Soviet submarine fleet and compiles elaborate dossiers on the world's major beaches, harbors and ports.

***

Air Force Intelligence

The A-2 is the most mechanically sophisticated of the service intelligence operations. It employs the latest electronic gear to determine the missile, bomber, satellite and radar potential of the Soviet Union. The Electronics Division, through its Reconnaissance, Equipment and Control Branches, gathers the electronic intelligence (a separate chapter will deal with the startling advances that have been made in this field). Under a Pentagon directive in 1961, the Air Force controls all reconnaissance satellites orbiting the Soviet Union. A Target Division is responsible for sorting out the intelligence intake and maintaining a current list of potential enemy targets. It also compiles and publishes the Bombing Encyclopedia, a compendium of target information. The A-2 conducts a world-wide attache system through its International Liaison Division. It also maintains a Military Capabilities Branch and a Wargame Branch in the Threat Assessments Division of its Directorate of Warning and Threat Assessments.

***

Atomic Energy Commission

The AEC is responsible for making estimates of the atomic-weapons capabilities of the Soviet Union and other nuclear powers. Since 1948 the United States has maintained round-the-clock monitoring of the atmosphere to detect radioactive particles from atomic tests. Samples are collected by the U-2 and other high-flying aircraft. From an analysis of the samples, the AEC can determine not only the fact that atomic explosions have taken place but also the type and power of the weapons detonated. The AEC also plays an important role in assessing test-ban proposals. It carries out intensive experimentation in ways to shield atomic explosions from detection and ways to pierce the shielding devised by other nations.

Because of the law which set it up and its close relationship to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in the Congress, the AEC is one of the most independent branches of the Invisible Government. One of Eisenhower's parting admonitions to Kennedy was: "You may be able to run lots of things around here. But one of them you can't run is the AEC."

***

Federal Bureau of Investigation

As the investigative arm of the Department of Justice, the FBI is responsible, among its other duties, for catching spies. In this phase of its work --as opposed to its conventional criminal investigations -- the FBI is an intelligence agency, and as such, part of the Invisible Government. The assistant to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director sits on USIB, and the FBI has a liaison man who reports to work at the CIA headquarters in Langley every day.

Actual counter-espionage work is conducted by the FBI's hush-hush division Number 5. This is the Domestic Intelligence Division, headed by William C. Sullivan. It is in charge of espionage, sabotage and subversion cases.

In Miami, New York and Washington, there are FBI agents permanently assigned to counter-espionage. A squad supervisor is assigned to intelligence in each of the FBI's fifty-five field offices in the United States. Agents who normally conduct ordinary criminal investigations are assigned to espionage cases when necessary.

About 20 percent of the 650,000 cases investigated by the FBI in 1963 were espionage -- internal security cases, although the exact figure is classified.

"Over the years," Hoover told a House committee in 1962, "no phase of American activity has been immune to Soviet-bloc intelligence attempts. The Soviets have attempted to obtain every conceivable type of information. The targets have been all-encompassing and have included aerial photographs, maps and charts of our major cities and vital areas, data regarding the organization of our military services and their training programs, technical classified and unclassified information concerning nuclear weapons, planes, ships and submarines. Of prime interest to the Soviets is information concerning U.S. military bases, including missile sites and radar installations.

"They have probed to penetrate our most critical intelligence and counter-intelligence organizations." 5

Although Hoover did not say so, some of these penetration attempts are controlled by "Department Nine" of the KGB. This is the division of the Soviet secret police that keeps dossiers on Russian emigres.

The FBI exposed one "Department Nine" operation in Washington in 1963. It began on April 6 of that year, when a Soviet citizen arrived in the United States with papers identifying him as "Vladimir Gridnev," forty-nine, a temporary employee of the Soviet Embassy.

It was a false name. "Gridnev" was actually brought here by the KGB to try to recruit his brother, a Soviet defector employed by the CIA.

The first move in the game was made at 9:00 P.M. on April 28, when the defector returned from work to his home in an apartment house in a Virginia suburb of the capital. As he reached for his key, a voice behind him whispered his name. He turned to find his brother, Volodya, whom he had not seen for twenty-three years, and who had entered the country as "Gridnev."

They embraced and went inside to a third-floor apartment. A few moments later, there was a knock on the door. A Russian whom Volodya introduced as "Ivan Ivanovich ... his embassy "driver," entered the room. He was actually Gennadiy Sevastyanov, a thirty-three-year-old Russian agent working under diplomatic cover as an attache in the cultural division of the Soviet Embassy.

Two days later Volodya met his brother again at a bus stop in Arlington, Virginia. Sevastyanov joined them. The entire scene was filmed by the FBI with a sixteen-millimeter movie camera. The three men drove to a restaurant, where Volodya tried to persuade his brother to stay at the CIA but to work for the Russians.

Sevastyanov made the same proposal, and promised that later on he could return to his homeland and be well taken care of. On May 2 the three met once more. Sevastyanov gave the CIA man a password and other instructions for clandestine meetings. Volodya was allowed to return to the Soviet Union on May 4 -- since he was regarded by the FBI as a helpless pawn in the Soviet operation. Sevastyanov and Volodya's brother met once more on June 13.

On July 1 the State Department ordered Sevastyanov expelled from the country for trying to recruit a United States Government employee. The CIA man had cooperated with the FBI throughout.

Since 1950 a total of thirty-four Soviet and seventeen Communist-bloc diplomats have been expelled from the United States for a variety of reasons. Like Sevastyanov's activities, many of the espionage efforts of Soviet agents operating as diplomats seem bumbling and almost amateurish. There is a long record of such cases.

By contrast, Soviet "illegals" -- spies operating under deep cover -- are skilled experts and therefore much harder for the FBI to detect. They slip into the country with false documents, pass for ordinary Americans, and enjoy no embassy protection.

The FBI's counter-espionage work is concentrated within the continental United States. Although the bureau operated in the Western Hemisphere and cracked Nazi espionage rings in South America during World War II, espionage and counter-espionage abroad became the province of the CIA and the military intelligence organizations after the war. Contrary to popular belief, however, the FBI does have some agents overseas. They are assigned to American embassies, usually under the cover of "legal attaches."

The FBI had 14,239 employees in 1964 (of whom 6,014 were agents), but its budget of $146,900,000 ranked it as one of the smaller units of the Invisible Government, even though its counter-espionage work is vital to national security.

***

Bureau of Intelligence and Research

INR, the State Department's intelligence agency, is really misnamed, in the view of one of its former directors, Roger Hilsman.

"To be frank with you," he told a House Appropriations Subcommittee in 1961, "I am uneasy about this word 'intelligence' in the title of the bureau. It is, in a real sense, not really an intelligence agency as you think of the word and it does not collect as such.

"It is analysis-research and analysis is its function as an agency. [But] it has functions relating to the intelligence community. Normally, quick data comes from the other collection agencies, and from the diplomatic reporting which is not part of our bureau, but the embassies overseas."

As Hilsman indicated, INR relies upon the information of others -- the diplomatic service, the CIA, the military attaches and the published documents and maps of foreign nations. INR analyzes this information for the use of the Secretary of State and the other branches of the intelligence community.

Its main function on USIB is to make sure that the final intelligence estimates reflect the political, social and economic facts of life, as seen from the State Department's viewpoint.

The absence of cloak-and-dagger in INR is reflected in the fact that it is the only member of USIB whose intelligence budget is part of the public record. It employs about 350 persons and spends approximately $2,800,000 annually (the figures vary slightly from year to year). It produces over 16,000 pages of social, political, economic and biographic analyses each year. By its own estimate, 40 to 60 percent of the raw data for these analyses come from the diplomatic reports of United States embassies abroad. INR also makes use of the scholarly output of the universities and periodically commissions a study by the academic community. It briefs the Secretary of State every day.

INR, the FBI, the AEC and the intelligence branches of the military services represent the lesser agencies of the Invisible Government. The big ones, in terms of men, money and influence, are the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA.

_______________

Notes:

i. Senator Stuart Symington, the Missouri Democrat, also saw nothing amiss. He observed: "It is still legal in America, if not to make a profit, at least to try to make a profit."

ii. One of the nay votes was cast by Senator I. William Fulbright, the Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright said he could not vote for McCone because his committee had not been consulted about the appointment nor given an opportunity to question McCone about his views on foreign policy.

Ten days later, at three o'clock in the morning, Fulbright was roused from bed by a phone call from McCone, who wanted to inform him of the exchange of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Soviet spy Rudolf I. Abel. Annoyed, Fulbright made it clear this was not the type of consultation he had in mind.

iii. All figures on the number of persons involved in intelligence work are highly classified. But the ONI's figure slipped out through the oversight of a Pentagon censor in testimony released in 1961 by the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:32 am

The National Security Agency

PROBABLY the most secretive branch of the Invisible Government is the National Security Agency. Even more than the CIA, the NSA has sought to conceal the nature of its activities.

The CIA's functions were revealed in general outline by Congress in the National Security Act of 1947. But the NSA's duties were kept secret in the classified presidential directive which established the agency in 1952.

The only official description of its activities is contained in the U.S. Government Organization Manual, which states vaguely: "The National Security Agency performs highly specialized technical and coordinating functions relating to the national security."

Nevertheless, it is no secret that the NSA is the nation's code-making and code-breaking agency. It is impossible, however, to receive official confirmation of that obvious fact. Unlike Allen Dulles and other high-ranking CIA men who have occasionally talked to the press and on television, NSA officials have refused to grant interviews under any circumstances.

As a sub-agency of the Defense Department, the NSA is watched over by the deputy director of defense research and engineering. But the various men who have held this post have been similarly uncommunicative.

During the Eisenhower years, the job of overseeing the NSA was held by military men. The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations turned to civilians with broader scientific expertise. In 1963 the assignment was taken on by Dr. Eugene G. Fubini, a fifty-year-old Italian-born physicist.

Fubini was confirmed by the Senate without difficulty despite a challenge from Senator Thurmond, the South Carolina Democrat. During the Armed Services Committee hearings on June 27, 1963, Thurmond questioned Fubini closely on his political affiliations in Italy prior to his emigration to the United States in 1939.

Fubini admitted that he had been a dues-paying member of the GUF, the Fascist student organization in the universities. But he explained that membership was "almost a compulsory thing" in Mussolini's Italy, and that he finally left his homeland in political protest.

Fubini made it clear, to Thurmond's evident relief, that he had never been associated with Communist or Socialist movements. His biographical data also underscored the fact that he had served ably as a scientific consultant and technical observer with the U.S. Army and Navy in Europe during World War II.

After the war Fubini joined the Airborne Instruments Laboratory of Long Island, New York. He worked on several classified electronic projects and rose to become the vice-president of the company. By the time he joined the Pentagon in 1961 he was thoroughly impressed with the need for tight security. He became convinced that a mass of vital national secrets was being given to the Russians through careless public disclosure.

Fubini and his staff maintained a long list of security violations which appeared in the press and elsewhere. Prominent on the list were public statements by Defense Secretary McNamara and his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric. In their zeal to defend administration policy, notably in McNamara's television extravaganza after the Cuban missile crisis, Fubini felt his bosses were sometimes imprudent about national security.

Fubini's dedication to security was matched by the agency he inherited. The NSA's U-shaped, three-story steel-and-concrete building at Fort Meade, Maryland, is surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence ten feet high. The fences are patrolled night and day, and guards with ready machine guns are posted at the four gatehouses.

The interior, including the longest unobstructed corridor in the world (980 feet long and 560 feet wide), is similarly patrolled. The building is 1,400,000 square feet, smaller than the Pentagon but larger than the CIA's Langley headquarters. It houses high-speed computers and complicated radio and electronic gear. It is said to have more electric wiring than any other building in the world.

Special security conveyor belts carry documents at the rate of a hundred feet a minute and a German-made pneumatic tube system shoots messages at the rate of twenty-five feet a second.

The NSA headquarters was built at a cost of $30,000,000 and was opened in 1957. It contains a complete hospital, with operating rooms and dental offices. It also houses eight snack bars, a cafeteria, an auditorium and a bank. All of the building's windows are sealed and none can be opened.

Comparable precautions have been taken with NSA employees. They are subject to lie-detector tests on application and intensive security indoctrination on acceptance. Periodically, the indoctrination briefing is repeated and employees are required to sign statements that they have reread pertinent secrecy regulations.

Even so, the NSA has had more than its share of trouble with security violations. In 1960 two young mathematicians, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, defected to Russia. They held a news conference in Moscow, describing in detail the inner workings of the NSA. They were soon discovered to be homosexuals, a fact which led indirectly to the resignation of the NSA's personnel director, and the firing of twenty-six other employees for sexual deviation.

It also led on May 9, 1963 to a vote by the House, 340 to 40, to give the Secretary of Defense the same absolute power over NSA employees as the Director of Central Intelligence had over his employees. Under the legislation, which was introduced by the Un-American Activities Committee, the Secretary of Defense was authorized to fire NSA employees without explanation and without appeal if he decided they were security risks. The bill also required a full field investigation of all persons before they were hired.

The legislation was attacked by several congressmen.

Thomas P. Gill, the Hawaii Democrat, warned that the bill opened the way to "arbitrary and capricious action on the part of government administrators ... There has been much said about danger to the national security. Democracy itself is a dangerous form of government and in its very danger lies its strength. The protection of individual rights by the requirement of due process of law, which has long endured in this nation of ours, is a radical and dangerous idea in most of the world today.

"This dangerous concept is outlawed in the Soviet Union, in Red China, in Castro's Cuba, indeed, in all of the Communist bloc and many of those countries aligned with it. I think we might well ask: How does one destroy his enemy by becoming like him?"

Edwin E. Willis, the Louisiana Democrat and a member of the Un-American Activities Committee, defended the bill on grounds that the NSA "carries out the most delicate type intelligence operations of our government ... The National Security Agency plays so highly specialized a role in the defense and security of the United States that no outsider can actually describe its activities. They are guarded not only from the public but from other government agencies as well. The Civil Service Commission, which audits all government positions, is not allowed to know what NSA employees do."

If the bill was so important for the NSA, Willis was asked, why shouldn't it be applied to all other sensitive agencies?

"As to the other agencies," Willis replied, "we will have to take them one at a time."

Although the Martin and Mitchell case stirred the House to action, it was only one of several sensational security scandals to hit the NSA.

In 1954 Joseph Sydney Petersen was tried and convicted on charges of misusing classified NSA documents. He was accused of taking and copying documents to aid another nation. In the court papers the government said Petersen "copied and made notes from classified documents indicating the United States' success in breaking codes utilized by The Netherlands." The Dutch Embassy in Washington admitted it had exchanged "secret intelligence" with Petersen on the assumption that he had acted with the knowledge of his superiors.

In 1959, during his visit to the United States, Khrushchev bragged that he had obtained top-secret American codes and had intercepted messages from President Eisenhower to Prime Minister Nehru. "You're wasting your money," Khrushchev remarked to Allen Dulles. "You might as well send it direct to us instead of the middleman, because we get most of it anyway. Your agents give us the code books and then we send false information back to you through your code. Then we send cables asking for money and you send it to us."

On July 22, 1963, Izvestia published a letter from Victor Norris Hamilton, a naturalized American of Arab descent who had sought asylum in the Soviet Union. Hamilton said he had worked for a division of the NSA which intercepted and decoded secret instructions from Arab countries to their delegations at the United Nations. Hamilton claimed UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had sent a letter to the division thanking them for the information. The Pentagon admitted Hamilton had been an employee of the NSA and said he had been discharged in 1959 because he was "approaching a paranoid-schizophrenic break." (The NSA has an unusually high rate of mental illness and suicide.)

An even graver security breach at the NSA was also disclosed in July of 1963. Army Sergeant First Class Jack E. Dunlap committed suicide when he realized he had been discovered selling top-secret NSA documents to Soviet officials. Dunlap reportedly received $60,000 during a two-year period for disclosing United States intelligence on Russian weapons advances, the deployment of their missiles and troops, as well as similar information about the NATO countries.

The playboy sergeant, who had a wife and five children, spent the money on several girl friends, two Cadillacs and frequent trips to the race track. A Pentagon official described the case as "thirty to forty times as serious as the Mitchell and Martin defections."

These security violations revealed a mass of information about the NSA. And most of it was indirectly confirmed by the Pentagon in its contradictory statements on the case, and by the House Un-American Activities Committee in issuing a public report stressing the seriousness of the Martin and Mitchell defection. Out of it all a painstaking enemy analyst could have derived the following picture of the National Security Agency:

NSA was divided into four main offices. The Office of Production (PROD) attempted to break the codes and ciphers [i] and read the messages of the Soviet Union, Communist China, other Communist countries, United States Allies and neutral nations.

The Office of Research and Development (R/D) carried out research in cryptanalysis, digital computing and radio propagation. It also developed new communications equipment.

The Office of Communications Security (COMSEC) produced U.S. codes and tried to protect them. And the Office of Security (SEC) investigated NSA personnel, conducted lie-detector tests and passed on the loyalty and integrity of employees.

While the NSA was reading the secret communications of over forty nations, including the most friendly, it shared some of its secrets through a relationship between its United Kingdom Liaison Office (UKLO) and its British counterpart, the GCHQ. The NSA, at least according to Martin and Mitchell, also provided code machines to other nations and then intercepted their messages on the basis of its knowledge of the construction and wiring of the machines.

The NSA gathered its raw information through more than 2,000 intercept stations around the world. They were designed to pick up every electronic emanation and communication in the Communist bloc: countdowns at missile sites, tell-tale sounds of industrial construction, military orders for troop movements, and air defense instructions to radar installations and fighter-plane squadrons.

In addition, the NSA sent its eavesdropping equipment along on flights by the U-2 and other aircraft over the Soviet Union (until 1960) and over Communist China. Separate flights, called ELINT (for electronic intelligence) missions, skirted Communist borders, picking up the location and characteristics of enemy radar stations. Occasionally, the planes would play "foxes and hounds," feinting toward or into Soviet defenses so as to analyze the nature of the response on nearby U.S. radar screens and listening gear.

The NSA also practiced what is known in the trade as "audio surveillance" and in layman's terms as "bugging," or "telephone tapping."

It was clear that the United States had come a long way from that day in 1929 when Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson closed the "black chamber," the State Department's primitive code-breaking section, with the explanation:

"Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

_______________

Notes:

i. Codes use symbols or letter groups for whole words or thoughts. Ciphers use letters or numbers for other letters or numbers.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:32 am

The Defense Intelligence Agency

THE DIA, the newest member of the Invisible Government and the most powerful competitor of the CIA, owes its existence to the post-Sputnik "missile gap" controversy of the late 1950s.

As the Soviets demonstrated the range and accuracy of their missiles in a series of spectacular space shots, the Air Force demanded that the United States embark on a massive ICBM program of its own. Almost weekly in the period between 1957 and 1960 the Air Force went before the United States Intelligence Board to argue that the Russians were deploying hundreds of ICBMs and were tipping the military balance of power in their favor.

To substantiate the claim, Air Force photo-interpreters introduced scores of pictures taken by the U-2 spy plane, which started to fly over the Soviet Union in 1956.

"To the Air Force every flyspeck on film was a missile," a CIA man remarked scornfully. Allen Dulles, relying on the independent interpretation of the photos by the CIA's Research Division, challenged two thirds of the Air Force estimates.

USIB's meetings were dominated by long and bitter arguments over the conflicting missile estimates. The situation reflected the perennial problem of interservice rivalry. Each service tended to adopt a self-serving party line and pursue it relentlessly. At budget time each year the Air Force would see endless numbers of Soviet missiles and bombers; the Navy would detect the latest enemy submarines just off the East Coast; and the Army would mechanize a few dozen more Russian divisions.

Overwhelmed by the constant bickering, USIB and the civilian leaders of the Pentagon were anxious to find some mechanism for resolving the conflict. They turned the problem over to a Joint Study Group which was set up in 1959 to conduct a sweeping investigation of the intelligence community.

The group was composed of military men, active and retired, and career intelligence officials in the State Department, the Defense Department and the White House. It was headed by Lyman Kirkpatrick, then the inspector general of the CIA. A polio victim who was confined to a wheel chair, Kirkpatrick was often spotted overseas, pursuing his many investigations.

The Joint Study Group submitted a comprehensive list of recommendations late in 1960. One of the most important called for the creation of the DIA and for the removal of the service intelligence agencies from USIB. The DIA was to serve as the arbiter of the conflicting service estimates and to present its findings to USIB as the final judgment of the Pentagon.

The idea appealed strongly to Thomas S. Gates, Jr., the last Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower Administration. When the Kennedy Administration took office in January, 1961, Gates forcefully urged McNamara to put the recommendation into effect without delay.

McNamara was quickly persuaded of the wisdom of Gates' advice. After a thorough study of the missile-gap claims, McNamara concluded that there was no foundation in the argument that the United States was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the production or deployment of ICBMs. The study convinced him of the dangers inherent in the fragmented intelligence operation at the Pentagon. He saw great value in subordinating the service intelligence branches to a centralized agency directly under his supervision.

Accordingly, McNamara recommended the speedy creation of the DIA. But Dulles balked at the idea. Despite his many wrangles with the services, Dulles felt it was imperative that they continue to have a voice in the deliberations of the intelligence community. He feared that the creation of the DIA would lead to the elimination of the service intelligence branches from USIB.

Then the CIA would be cut off from direct access to the facts and opinions developed by the military men and would be forced to rely on whatever information the DIA saw fit to give it. Dulles was impressed with the service argument, which ran something like this:

Yes, the services have been guilty at times of analyzing intelligence from a parochial point of view. But other agencies of the government are no less susceptible to self-serving judgments. The function of USIB is to serve as a forum for all viewpoints -- even extreme viewpoints. Only then can the Director of Central Intelligence, and through him the President, arrive at comprehensive and objective assessments. Dissent should be aired at the highest possible level and not suppressed outside the orbit of presidential observation.

If the service intelligence branches were removed from USIB, the DIA would become the sole representative of the government's biggest producer and biggest consumer of intelligence. And the DIA as an agency subordinate to a political appointee -- the Secretary of Defense -- would be more vulnerable to political influences than are the services which have a semi-autonomous status by law.

Dulles was particularly worried about the possibility that the DIA would gain a monopoly over aerial reconnaissance. The Defense Department controlled the reconnaissance equipment and Dulles feared that the DIA would be tempted to hoard the photographs produced by the equipment. He was determined to prevent any such thing.

During the U-2 era, the CIA had built up a skilled corps of civilian photo-interpreters and they would surely quit if the Pentagon monopolized aerial photographs. Without interpreters, the CIA would have no way to verify Defense Department estimates. At a time when electronic espionage was bulking ever larger, Pentagon control of aerial reconnaissance could result in Pentagon dominance of the entire intelligence community.

Dulles expressed his misgivings to McNamara, who responded with assurances that the DIA would be only a coordinating body and that it would not supplant the intelligence branches of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Some of Dulles' advisers suspected that the Pentagon had covert ambitions for the DIA which were being suppressed temporarily for tactical reasons. But Dulles felt McNamara's pledge left no ground for him to oppose the DIA. He went along with the proposal. So did John McCone, then head of the AEC.

The DIA was created officially on October 1, 1961. Named as director was Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll, who had been the inspector general of the Air Force. Carroll started his career with the FBI and was a leading assistant of J. Edgar Hoover at the time he moved to the Air Force in 1947 to set up its first investigation and counter-intelligence section.

CIA men delighted in pointing out that all of Carroll's experience had been as an investigator and that he had no credentials as a foreign or military intelligence analyst. More to the CIA's liking were Carroll's two subordinates, both of whom had served with the CIA: Major General William W. (Buffalo Bill) Quinn, a former West Point football star, who was named deputy director; and Rear Admiral Samuel B. Frankel, a Chinese and Russian-speaking expert on the Communist world, who became the DIA's chief of staff.

Both of these men had worked closely with Allen Dulles. Frankel served under him on USIB. Quinn, the G-2 for the Seventh Army in Europe during World War II, acted as personal courier for the information Dulles gathered in Switzerland on Nazi troop movements. (Quinn left the DIA to become the commander of the Seventh Army in November, 1963.)

The original charter for the DIA provided that the new agency was to: (1) draw up a consolidated budget for all the intelligence units within the Pentagon; (2) produce all Defense Department estimates for USIB and other elements of the intelligence community; (3) provide representation on USIB in the person of its director; and (4) develop plans for integrating the intelligence schools run by the various services.

Although the original list of functions seemed relatively modest, an expansion of the DIA's responsibilities was clearly implied in its authorization by McNamara to provide "overall guidance for the conduct and management" of all duties retained by the individual services.

And with the inevitability of Parkinson's Law, the DIA quickly added to its domain. By 1964, when the DIA became fully operational, it had more than 2,500 employees. It had acquired 38,000 feet of Pentagon office space and had submitted a request for a separate $17,000,000 building.

It had succeeded in eliminating the separate service intelligence publications and supplanting them with two of its own; and it had launched a Daily Digest, which was viewed by the CIA as duplicatory and competitive to its Own Central Intelligence Bulletin.

The DIA had also supplanted the J-2, the intelligence staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both on USIB and in supplying information to the Chiefs themselves. It had replaced the services in the production of "order of battle" intelligence-estimates of the size and deployment of enemy forces. And it was occasionally providing information directly to the President without funneling it through USIB. The DIA did so on request in 1963 when Kennedy wanted quick intelligence on whether the Guatemalan Army would be able to handle expected Communist riots.

By 1964 the DIA's control over military intelligence had expanded to such a degree that the services were reduced to the role of providing technical information on enemy weapons, running the attache system and collecting -- but not analyzing -- raw intelligence.

Most significantly, the leaders of the Invisible Government had decided to remove the service intelligence agencies from USIB. Only a veto by President Johnson could prevent the DIA from becoming the sole military voice on the board. Allen Dulles' apprehensions were being realized.

"There is, of course, always the possibility," Dulles had observed with monumental understatement, "that two such powerful and well-financed agencies as CIA and DIA will become rivals and competitors." [1]
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:33 am

CIA: "It's Well Hidden"

THROUGH the large picture window of his immaculate private dining room atop the CIA's $46,000,000 hideaway in Langley, Virginia, the Director of Central Intelligence can watch deer and other wild life gambol in the woodland below.

When John McCone took over as CIA director in November, 1961, he must have found a glimpse of an occasional passing fawn a pleasant relief from the cares of office. He could dine, if he chose, in utter isolation and complete quiet, twenty minutes and eight miles from downtown Washington and the lunchtime hustle and bustle that is the lot of less powerful, and less secluded, bureaucrats.

As far as the eye can see, the lovely rolling hills of Virginia's Fairfax County surround the CIA building on all four sides. The Pentagon is bigger; but that colossus is easily visible from almost anywhere in the capital.

Appropriately, the CIA's concrete headquarters is invisible, an architectural diadem set in bucolic splendor in the middle of nowhere and modestly veiled by a thick screen of trees. In the State Department, which does not always love its brothers in the intelligence world, the CIA is often referred to as "those people out in the woods." And it is literally true.

Part of the reason for this is that it makes guarding the building much easier. The advantages of a rustic retreat were extolled by Allen Dulles when he went before a House Appropriations Subcommittee in June, 1956, to seek funds for the CIA headquarters. He submitted a report which said:

"Located on a 125-acre tract forming an inconspicuous part of a larger 750-acre government reservation, the Langley site was chosen as the one location, among many sites inspected in detail, most adequate for safeguarding the security of CIA's operations ... This site, with its isolation, topography and heavy forestation, permits both economical construction and an added measure of security safeguards ..."

Three years later guests, in response to engraved invitations from Dulles, attended the cornerstone-laying ceremony. Colonel Stanley Grogan, the CIA's public information man at that time, handed out a press release.

"The entire perimeter of the main part of the site is bounded by trees," it noted, "and very little of the building will be visible from the public highways."

One CIA official summed it up. "It's well hidden," he said with a note of pride.

The fact that the CIA could send out public invitations to lay the cornerstone of its hidden headquarters reflects a basic split personality that plagues the agency and occasionally makes it the butt of unkind jokes. This dichotomy pervades much of what the CIA does. On the one hand it is supersecret; on the other hand it isn't.

When Allen Dulles became the CIA director in February, 1953, the agency was housed in a ragged complex of buildings at 2430 E Street in the Foggy Bottom section of the capital. A sign out front proclaimed: "U.S. Government Printing Office."

Once President Eisenhower and his brother Milton set out to visit Dulles. They were unable to find the place. Dulles investigated the secrecy policy. When he discovered that even guides on sightseeing buses were pointing out the buildings as "the CIA," he had the printing-office sign taken down and one that said "Central Intelligence Agency" put up.

When the CIA moved across the Potomac to its Langley home in 1961, the matter of secrecy still proved bothersome. Large green and white signs pointed the way to the CIA from the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which had been extended to the new headquarters at a cost of $8,500,000. Originally, the signs were erected to guide workmen to the site during construction. After the CIA moved into the building, some of its officials felt there was no need to leave them up. As one put it: "We knew where it was."

But the signs stayed up -- for a while. As he drove to and from work each day, Robert Kennedy, who lived in nearby McLean, Virginia, would pass the signs that trumpeted the way to the CIA. One day they abruptly disappeared. In their place, there was only a small green and white marker reading "Parkway," with an arrow pointing along the highway, and "B.P.R.," with an arrow pointing to the CIA turn-off. [i]

The lack of signs causes scant inconvenience. No outsiders venture into the CIA anyhow unless they are on official business. No social visiting is allowed. A CIA employee cannot tell his wife or mother-in-law to drop in on him.

Another example of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't atmosphere surrounding the building is the way the CIA answers the telephone. Other government-agency switchboards answer with the name of their department. Although the CIA is listed in two places in the Washington telephone book, [ii] a call to the number, 351-1100, is answered by a switchboard girl who says simply, "Three five one, one one hundred." Only a few officials can be reached by name; for most, the caller must ask for the extension he wants.

Despite the atmosphere of secrecy which surrounds the building, a KGB agent trying to find the CIA headquarters would have no difficulty. He could drive to the nearest Amoco station and ask for a map of Washington, which (like most other maps) clearly identifies the CIA site at Langley. On the other hand, the Russian spy would not have to drive; he could get to the CIA from downtown Washington by taxi for $4.50. Or he could make the trip for forty-four cents on a public-transit bus, as do hundreds of the CIA's regular employees. (An enterprising few have commuted across the Potomac by canoe.)

A caller who asked the transit company for the schedule to Langley received this reply:

"Going to CIA? Buses leave at 7:12 A.M., 7:46 A.M. and 8:16 A.M., and arrive at CIA thirty-four minutes later. Returning in the evening at 4:38 P.M., 5:08 P.M. and 5:40. Have a nice trip."

If the Soviet spy were a top "illegal," as the Russians call their agents who have no embassy cover, he could check the Washington Post for a suitable location. In March, 1963, for instance, the paper carried a large advertisement for the Broadfalls Apartments in Falls Church, Virginia. Not only did the building advertise a Kelvinator refrigerator and tiled baths in every apartment, but it also headlined: "Convenient to CIA-Dulles Airport-Pentagon." And below the inviting headline, leaving nothing to chance, there appeared a map showing exactly how to get from the apartment house to the CIA.

There is such a thing as an apartment house becoming too convenient to the CIA. Early in 1963, an enterprising realtor, who owned thirteen acres adjacent to the CIA, applied to the local zoning board for permission to build apartment houses on his land. It was with a sense of growing horror that the CIA learned that from the fourth or fifth floor, residents would be able, with a spyglass, to look right into McCone's picture window and read his classified documents. Secretly, the CIA ordered the government's General Services Administration to buy up the land in the area forthwith.

What happened next is best told in the words of Dr. H. Hatch Sterrett, a physician who lived on Saddle Lane near the CIA: "The first I heard of it was when the GSA called my office and asked when they could have an appointment to arrange to take over my property. They kept saying they didn't know who wanted it or why it was wanted and that the only reason for taking it was that there was an established need for it. They said there was just no recourse, that there wasn't anything I could do about it."

The distraught physician consulted with his attorney, Samuel E. Neel, who was advised that the entire subject had been "classified." Neel persevered, and finally diagnosed it as a severe case of CIA.

The agency killed off the apartment-house project by buying up most of the land, but it finally permitted the doctor to keep his home. Under the agreement, however, the CIA can screen and reject anyone to whom he wishes to rent or sell. The reason? In the summer the CIA is invisible behind the trees. But in winter, when the leaves are gone, the CIA can be glimpsed through the branches from the Sterrett home.

The headquarters building has been a subject of some difficulty for the CIA from the outset. When Bedell Smith was head of the CIA, he requested $30,000,000 for a new building. To preserve security, the request was concealed in the budget the agency sent to Capitol Hill. When economy- minded congressmen discovered $30,000,000 with no apparent purpose, they cut it out of the budget.

Not until after Dulles had become the director did Congress, in July, 1955, finally vote the funds to begin planning and construction. Although the CIA's main headquarters at that time was the E Street complex, which had been used by the OSS in World War II, the agency was scattered about in thirty-four buildings all over Washington. An elaborate system of couriers and safeguards was needed to shuffle papers back and forth with security.

L. K. White, a CIA deputy director, told the House Appropriations Committee hearing in 1956 that by moving the agency into one building, "we will save about 228 people who are guards, receptionists, couriers, bus drivers and so forth." The CIA estimated it would save $600,000 a year by eliminating time lost shuttling between buildings.

Dulles had asked for a $50,800,000 building. The Budget Bureau slashed this to $50,000,000 and Congress finally authorized $46,000,000. [iii] Noting that construction costs had risen, Dulles testified that for $46,000,000 "we could have a very austere building" which would house only "87 percent of the people for which we had originally planned."

Dulles, of course, carefully omitted saying how many people that was. And he foiled anyone who might try to compute precisely how many people worked at Langley. Someone could attempt to do so by dividing the standard amount of office space needed by a Washington worker into the CIA building's net floor space of 1,228,100 square feet.

"Our plans," Dulles told the House Committee, "are based on an average net office space utilization per person which is considerably below the government-wide average of net office space per employee in Metropolitan Washington." [iv]

In the fall of 1961, the CIA moved in.

A visitor to the new headquarters turns off at the "B.P.R." sign at Langley and comes shortly to a ten-foot-high wire-mesh fence, which surrounds the entire CIA site. On the fence are various signs -- none saying CIA. One reads: "U.S. Government Property for Official Business Only." Another says: "Cameras Prohibited." In case anyone failed to get the message, a third sign says: "No Trespassing."

Beyond the gate is a guardhouse, but a visitor who appears to know where he is going is waved through without having to stop and show credentials. A sharp left, and the building, still half-hidden by the trees, comes into view. Finally, several hundred feet farther along, near the main entrance, the building emerges from the trees for the first time.

It is massive, grayish-white concrete, several stories high and cold in appearance. The windows are recessed and those on the lower floors are barred with a heavy mesh. Off to the right of the main entrance a separate domed structure housing a 500-seat auditorium gives an almost Martian atmosphere to the grounds.

But what strikes the visitor most of all is the complete silence outside the building. In the summertime, only the hum of the building's air conditioners and the sound of crickets and birds can be heard. In the winter, not even that. The effect is eerie. The building might be a hospital or a huge private sanitarium in the woods.

On this same site, half a century ago, Joseph Leiter, the son of a millionaire Chicago businessman, built a beautiful home and called it the Glass Palace. He and his wife entertained lavishly and enjoyed the view of the Potomac. After Leiter died in 1932, the government bought up the land. The Glass Palace burned down in 1945.

There is still glass in the CIA's concrete palace, but it is mainly on the second and seventh floors, where the outside walls are formed by continuous windows. On the grounds, there are twenty-one acres of parking space for 3,000 cars. (Dulles had asked Congress for space for 4,000.) The cafeteria seats 1,400 persons at a time.

On the roof, there are $50,000 worth of special radio antennas, a vital part of the CIA's own world-wide communication system. Deep inside the CIA headquarters is a central control room to which alarm systems throughout the building are wired. Three security incinerators, built at a cost of $105,000, gobble up classified wastepaper.

The domed auditorium outside is used mostly for training courses for junior CIA executives, and as Colonel Grogan's press release noted, it has, fittingly, "a small stage with a disappearing curved screen ..."

Inside the vast headquarters, a visitor can get about as far as the inscription in marble on the left wall --" And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. John VIII-XXXII" -- before he is stopped by a guard. He is then directed to a reception room, where he signs in. A security escort takes him where he is going, waits until he is through and escorts him back to the front door. There, just inside the airy lobby, a mammoth official seal with the words "Central Intelligence Agency" is set in the marble floor, with an eagle's head in the center. As he walked through the corridors, the visitor might have noticed that most of the doors to offices were closed and unmarked, giving the false impression of a virtually deserted building.

Like a battleship, the CIA headquarters is built in compartments. An employee in one office would not necessarily know what was happening a few feet away on the other side of the wall.

The CIA report to the House Appropriations Committee explained that this was a major consideration in the plans drawn up by Harrison & Abramovitz, the New York architects: "The new building will consist of block-type wings, readily compartmented from one another, so that specially restricted areas can be established and special security controls maintained in each section."

Among the building's special facilities is a $200,000 scientific laboratory, where the CIA perfects some of its miniaturized weapons, invisible inks, special explosives and other devices.

One of the really spooky instruments at Langley is the CIA's electronic "brain," which stores and retrieves the mountains of information that flow into the building. The CIA's library is split into four parts: a regular library of books and documents, special libraries known as "registers" which store biographic and industrial intelligence, a document center -- and the electronic brain.

The brain is called WALNUT and it was developed just for the CIA by IBM. A desired document is flashed in front of the CIA viewer by means of a photo tape robot called Intellofax.

WALNUT and Intellofax, unlike humans, are infallible. Aside from the vast amounts of classified data that come into the CIA, the agency collects 200,000 newspapers, books and other "open" material each month. The information is stored on 40,000,000 punch cards.

When a CIA man wants a particular item, be it a Castro speech or a top-secret report on Khrushchev's health, he feeds into WALNUT a list of key words -- perhaps twenty-five -- about the subject. The brain finds the right microfilmed document and photographs it with ultraviolet light. The tiny photo is then projected on the viewing machine. The whole thing takes five seconds. The CIA has also been experimenting with another brain called Minicard, developed by Eastman Kodak for the Air Force.

The CIA also has a special spy-fiction library, which it does not advertise. This library contains thousands of past and current mystery and spy stories. It should please fans of Ian Fleming, Helen MacInnes and Eric Ambler to know that the CIA makes a point of keeping up with the latest tricks of fictional spy heroes. Before Langley, the spy fiction was housed in the old Christian Heurich Brewery near the State Department.

CIA men and women lead a cloistered life. By and large they stick to themselves. Intermarriage is not unusual, the most notable recent example being the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. After his release by the Russians, Powers continued to work for the CIA at Langley. [v] He divorced his wife Barbara, and on October 26, 1963, in a quiet ceremony at Catlett, Fauquier County, Virginia, he married Claudia Edwards Downey, a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee and a CIA psychologist. Mrs. Downey, the mother of a seven-year-old girl, was said to have resigned from the CIA to become Mrs. Powers.

In Washington, a highly social city given to much partying and mixing of many diverse circles, it is remarkable how few CIA men are casually encountered on the cocktail circuit. The reason is that CIA couples give parties mostly for each other.

In bygone years, CIA employees were barred from admitting where they worked. In social situations they usually managed to hint at it anyhow. Nowadays, overt employees are permitted to say where they work -- although not to a foreign national. Those in the Clandestine Services are not, however, normally allowed to say they work for the CIA.

And cover names are used even inside the CIA. "I don't know the names of everyone I deal with at the agency," one high official confided. "We often use pseudonyms in house, in case a wire is tapped or a piece of paper gets into the wrong hands. And we never use real names in communications."

The CIA is constantly facing little problems that no other agency faces. For example, suppose an agent in the Clandestine Services breaks his arm in the line of duty. Blue Cross? Ah, but then Group Hospitalization would find out his name when he filled out the inevitable form. And for the first few years after the agency's creation, that is exactly what happened, much to the CIA's irritation. When agents were hospitalized, Group Hospitalization had to know who they were. So in 1956 the CIA canceled its contract with Blue Cross. It took its business to Mutual of Omaha, which benevolently agreed to waive the paperwork on ailing spies.

Although CIA employees are not technically under Civil Service, they qualify for the government's normal retirement provisions and their pay is equivalent to those in Civil Service. Secretaries start at GS-3, which is $3,820 a year. The director's salary is $30,000 The deputy director gets $28,500.

In 1963 McCone asked Congress to set up a better retirement system for his top people, similar to that of the State Department's Foreign Service. A House Armed Services Subcommittee heard McCone's plea in camera. Later, in 1964, Congress passed a law allowing high-ranking agents with twenty years of service to retire at age fifty. The CIAR, as the pension plan was called, would cost an estimated $4,000,000 by 1969, or $900,000 a year.

The Armed Services Committee, in approving the measure, said that "many CIA employees serve under conditions which are at least as difficult and frequently more onerous and dangerous" than those faced by the FBI and other agencies.

In a report to the House Committee, the CIA said the pension system would help it to weed out older men in the ranks. "The Central Intelligence Agency," it said, "needs to attract and retain a force of highly motivated careerists ... agency requirements demand that this group of careerists be composed of younger and more vigorous officers than are generally required in government service."

Many of the CIA's younger people are recruited off college campuses. The agency tries to select students standing near the top of their class. CIA stays quietly in touch with college deans and hires most of its research analysts this way. On every large campus there is usually someone who serves secretly as the CIA's talent scout.

At Yale, for example, during the early 1950s, it was Skip Walz, the crew coach. John Downey, who was imprisoned by Communist China in 1952, was recruited off the Yale campus in 1951. The college recruits are enrolled as CIA JOTs -- junior officer trainees. Recently, in the manner of large business corporations, the CIA quietly published a booklet, The Central Intelligence Agency, extolling the virtues of a career in the agency. The booklet's cover, in yellow, red, brown, violet and white, portrays a handsome young man with jaw on hand, pondering his future.

From every 1,000 persons considered, the CIA selects 200 for security investigation. Of this 20 percent, about 11 percent are screened out because "they drink too much, talk too much, have relatives behind the iron curtain, which may make the applicants subject to foreign pressures; for serious security reasons 4 percent of this 11 percent are screened out. These latter are individuals who have contacts that render them undesirable for service in this highly sensitive agency." [vi] What this boils down to is that 178 out of 1,000 applicants are accepted.

From the start, the CIA has employed lie detectors. The polygraph is standard equipment at the agency and all new employees take the test.

The most revealing information on this delicate subject came in a televised interview with Allen Dulles, carried by the American Broadcasting Company: 1

Q: In that connection, sir, of how great a value is the lie detector to an agency like CIA in detecting potential spies, agents and/or homosexuals?

A: In my experience in the CIA we found it of great indicative value. No one is ever convicted or cleared just on a polygraph test, a lie-detector test ...

Q: What kind of cases do you turn up most easily by using lie detectors?

A: Well, we turn up homosexual cases particularly, but not only that. There can be other weaknesses ...

Q: Almost every CIA employee had to undergo a lie detector test as a condition of employment?

A: Well, I won't say no, it is not a condition of employment. I know of people who have said they didn't for various reasons want to take the lie-detector test, and they have not been dismissed or terminated for that reason.

Q: But were they hired?

A: But generally when people come on board, the general rule is that they take the test. But it is not any formalized rule, as far as I know.

Should an applicant pass all these hurdles and be accepted by the CIA, he must sign a security agreement in which he swears never to divulge classified information or intelligence (except in the performance of his official duties) unless he is specifically authorized, in writing, by the director of the CIA. Employees are thus barred from talking about their work even after they leave the agency: they certainly cannot go out and write their memoirs about their CIA experiences.

Criticism that the CIA is an "Ivy League" institution is only partially accurate. Although the top twenty executives have always been largely from Ivy League colleges, this is not true of the agency generally. Nevertheless, a good education is highly prized. About 60 percent of the senior 600 employees at the CIA have advanced degrees, many of them Ph.D.s. This is not surprising in an agency that devotes a major portion of its efforts to research and analysis.

To satisfy the interests of its scholarly employees, the CIA publishes its own digest-sized magazine, the most exclusive magazine in the world. It can't be purchased. It is not available at outside libraries. It is called Intelligence Articles.

The magazine was begun because the CIA has so many former professors who, for the most part, cannot publish on the outside. Intelligence Articles provides an anonymous outlet for their scholarship. Like any specialized periodical, it has studies of current interest in the field, in this case, intelligence. But there is one difference: most of the articles and book reviews have no bylines.

The literary style leans toward a rather heavy prose. There is an attempt to treat on a high academic level such subjects as how to keep a double agent from being tortured and shot by the enemy. Other forms of mayhem are dealt with in a similar scholarly vein.

One issue not long ago featured an article explaining the difference between a "write-in" and a "walk-in." (Both are volunteer spies: the terms apply to the way in which they offer their services.) The article, entitled " A Classic Write-In Case," was a study of Captain Stephan Kalman, a Czech Army officer who in 1936 betrayed secrets to the German High Command until he was caught and hanged.

"The agent of an adversary service," the article begins, "or a person high in an adversary bureaucracy, if he wishes to make contact with another intelligence or security service, can choose from a number of different means. He can present himself physically as a walk-in. He can use an intermediary in order to retain some control, especially with respect to his own identity. He can send a messenger, make a phone call, or establish a radio contact. Or he can simply write a letter, anonymous or signed."

After detailing the story of Kalman's treachery, the CIA publication, under the headline "Moral of the Story," asks: "What conclusions can be drawn from the Kalman case?

... One conclusion derives from positive and negative aspects of the Czech performance with respect to security. Security applies on every echelon of command. There is no place for laxness, even if it may seem overbureaucratic and ridiculous. The application of security measures has to be executed precisely in every detail. There is no place for overconfidence in friends and old acquaintances. That Kalman, with his alien loyalties, came to be trusted with sensitive materials is evidence of such overconfidence."

A discerning CIA reader might come to suspect that, all in all, Intelligence Articles' academic objectivity leaves something to be desired. Another excerpt worth quoting in this respect is from the magazine's review of a book [vii] that presented ideas about foreign policy not at all to the liking of the CIA reviewer. For one thing, the book suggested that the CIA is ineffective.

After noting that the book was written under the pseudonym "John Forth Amory," the equally anonymous CIA reviewer concludes: "If his identity is worth a search, one might look for a fervent Jeffersonian and F. D. Rooseveltian who has some bookish knowledge of the United States Government and of big business and who entertains a particular sympathy for Indonesians, having had opportunities to discuss with them their philosophy of social change -- a neoacademic sort, probably juvenile or with development arrested at the simplistic stage, possibly an instructor in some local college course for fledgling foreign service officers."

If the CIA has its cloistered advantages for the scholar at Langley, there are hazards for agents in the field. Espionage is a dangerous business and some of the CIA's clandestine employees crack under the pressure. (Even at Langley, there are strains. One deputy director drove himself so hard, he had to be transferred to a less demanding post overseas.)

Many CIA employees, working irregular hours in odd corners of the globe, suffer from what the agency itself calls "motivational exhaustion." A CIA report to the House Armed Services Committee in 1963 explained: "This term is used to describe a gradual lessening of interest and enthusiasm of an officer as a result of impingements on his personal and family life. These stem from the transient nature of his assignments, the complications and restrictions of security requirements and intrusions on his family life."

The agency has a fairly high rate of suicides, which usually get little attention outside of the Washington newspapers. In October, 1959, for example, a thirty-two-year-old CIA employee and his wife, just back from a two-year tour of duty in Germany, jumped into the Potomac River rapids in a suicide pact.

The CIA man, James A. Woodbury, drowned, but his blond wife was pulled out. Police quoted her as saying her husband had a lot on his mind. "They wanted to put him in a psycho ward," she said, "and we figured it best to do away with ourselves." The police said Mrs. Woodbury would not elaborate on her reference to "they."

Despite the risks, CIA employees have no job security. Under the 1947 law they can be fired by the director "in his discretion" with no appeal. In at least one instance, this led to a series of embarrassing disclosures about the agency's operations and personnel.

On January 30, 1961, Dulles fired a veteran CIA intelligence officer and contact specialist named John Torpats, who then went into Federal Court seeking reinstatement. Dulles filed an answer urging the case be thrown out. In the course of it, Dulles stated that "George B. Carey," an assistant director of the CIA, had notified "Emmet Echols," the director of personnel, that Torpats was allowed to discuss his case with "Ralph Poole" and "Fred Lott," both assistants to Echols.

Torpats decided if Dulles could name names, so could he. In an affidavit filed June 30, 1961, in answer to the CIA director, Torpats said:

"In early 1956 a situation had developed in a European mission of CIA which my then area superiors, Frank G. Wisner, Richard Helms, John M. Maury, Jr., and N. M. Anikeeff, felt had been mishandled by the personnel of the mission. The mission reports were considered to be unsatisfactory in our component. My superiors felt that I could handle the problem more effectively and expeditiously and decided to send me to do it. The principal figures in this particular mission were Mr. Tracy Barnes, Mr. Thomas Parrott and Mr. Paul Losher. At the time of my separation, Mr. Barnes and Mr. Parrott were employed by the Agency in the Washington, D.C., office.

"Notice was given to the mission in April of 1956 that I was being sent over. I was given no special instructions before I left; I was to be on my own. The mission had sent a report on the problem which I later proved was incorrect. Had the mission report been followed, it would have done incalculable harm to the United States.

"When I finished my assignment, for which I received several commendations from headquarters, but before I could file my report, Mr. Barnes, on a complaint by Mr. Parrott, put me under house arrest; ordered an investigation, shipped me home; cabled charges against me to headquarters with a demand that I be fired."

The ousted CIA man then detailed a long history of his case as it dragged on through the agency bureaucracy for several years. He said one charge against him was that he had disobeyed a high CIA official in the office of the DDP "and visited a station contrary to his orders."

In addition, Torpats said, a CIA fitness report claimed he had an "inability to handle agents" and "total lack of objectivity where Estonian emigre matters are concerned." He said he was transferred out of the Clandestine Services and eventually fired.

Dulles angrily filed an answer to Torpats on July 2, citing an old Civil War case to support his contention that employees of secret services cannot air their grievances in court. Torpats, Dulles said, "understood that the nature of his work was secret, and that the disclosure of his duties and the names of fellow employees would not be in the best interest of his government. Moreover, he swore, as a condition of his employment that he would never reveal such information."

If CIA employees can go into court every time they feel they are treated unfairly, said Dulles, it would be no way to run an espionage apparatus. "Operation of the Central Intelligence Agency, with liability to publicity in this way," he said, "would be impossible." [viii]

Even CIA employees who make it to the top can look forward to little overt recognition after their long years of service. President Kennedy, speaking to CIA employees at Langley on November 28, 1961, told them: "Your successes are unheralded -- your failures are trumpeted."

President Eisenhower voiced a similar sentiment when he spoke at the cornerstone-laying at Langley on November 3, 1959. "Success cannot be advertised: failure cannot be explained," he said. "In the work of intelligence, heroes are undecorated and unsung, often even among their own fraternity."

This is not completely correct. The truth is that some CIA men are decorated. Despite the fact that he was eased out after the Bay of Pigs, for example, Richard M. Bissell received a secret intelligence medal honoring him for his years as deputy director for plans.

There was no public announcement of the award, and Bissell was not allowed to talk about his medal, to show it to anyone or to wear it. As far as the CIA was concerned, officially the medal did not exist.

The Invisible Government had awarded him an invisible medal.

_______________

Notes:

i. The "B.P.R." stands for Bureau of Public Roads, which really does have two buildings at Langley. One is a research laboratory for testing road materials; the lab also has a wind tunnel to measure the effect of breezes on suspension bridges.

ii. Under Central Intelligence Agency and under United States Government. The 1964 Washington phone book had something new -- it listed a downtown "Employment Office" for the CIA.

iii. The exact final construction cost is classified, according to a spokesman for the General Services Administration.

iv. Each worker in a government building takes up an average of about 150 square feet of office space, according to figures compiled nationwide by the GSA since 1960. On this basis, the CIA building would hold 8,187 people. However, as Dulles indicated, the space-per-worker figure can be much lower. Washington's new Civil Service Commission building has 135 square feet per worker, for example. At that figure, the CIA would house 9,097 people. Based on these space-utilization figures, some 8,000 to 10,000 people would work at the CIA headquarters at Langley.

v. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, which built the U-2 and along with NASA served as a front for the CIA, announced on November 3, 1962, that Powers had taken "a routine test pilot job" with Lockheed at Burbank, California. "It involves checking out the U-2s that are modified, maintained and overhauled," said a Lockheed public-relations spokesman. A CIA source said the same day that Powers had left the agency because "his work was finished." After the U-2 was shot down in May, 1960, both NASA and Lockheed announced that Powers was a civilian pilot employed by Lockheed. Actually, he was flying for the CIA under a $30,000-a-year contract he had signed with the intelligence agency in 1956.

vi. From a twenty-page limited circulation booklet the CIA published about itself in 1961.

vii. Around the Edge of War, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., New York, 1961.

viii. Torpats lost his case. Both the U.S. District Court and the Court of Appeals upheld Dulles.
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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

Postby admin » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:33 am

CIA: The Inner Workings

ON A WARM DAY in June of 1963, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat, dispatched a Senate page across the river to Langley with an envelope stamped: "Personal for the Director."

Church had stumbled on some information which he thought John McCone ought to have immediately. Three and a half hours later a bedraggled and distraught page returned to Church's office. He reported that he had fallen into the hands of CIA security police, who had questioned him at length about what he was up to. They released him after a few hours but would not accept the letter. Senator Church finally mailed it.

Although the Senate messenger, like most Americans, thus never got a peek inside CIA headquarters, the agency's operations are not a total mystery. It is possible to piece together a fair idea of its internal workings, and organization, as well as the techniques and methods it uses both at home and abroad.

The CIA is, of course, the biggest, most important and most influential branch of the Invisible Government. The agency is organized into four divisions: Intelligence, Plans, Research, Support, each headed by a deputy director.

The Support Division is the administrative arm of the CIA. It is in charge of equipment, logistics, security and communications. It devises the CIA's special codes, which cannot be read by other branches of the government.

The Research Division is in charge of technical intelligence. It provides expert assessments of foreign advances in science, technology and atomic weapons. It was responsible for analyzing the U-2 photographs brought back from the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1960. And it has continued to analyze subsequent U-2 and spy-satellite pictures. In this it works with the DIA in running the National Photo Intelligence Center.

Herbert "Pete" Scoville, who headed the Research Division for eight years, left in August of 1963 to become an assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was replaced as the CIA's deputy director for research by Dr. Albert D. Wheelon.

The Plans Division is in charge of the CIA's cloak-and-dagger activities. It controls all foreign special operations, such as Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs, and it collects all of the agency's covert intelligence through spies and informers overseas.

Allen Dulles was the first deputy director for plans. He was succeeded as DDP by Frank Wisner, who was replaced in 1958 by Bissell, who, in turn, was succeeded in 1962 by his deputy, Richard Helms.

A native of St. David's, Pennsylvania, Helms studied in Switzerland and Germany and was graduated from Williams College in 1935. He worked for the United Press and the Indianapolis Times, and then, during World War II, he served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy attached to the OSS. When the war ended and some OSS men were transferred to the CIA, he stayed on and rose through the ranks.

Helms' counterpart as the deputy director for intelligence in the CIA hierarchy after the Bay of Pigs was also an ex-OSS man. Ray Cline got into the intelligence business as a cryptanalyst in 1942, moving on to the OSS and the CIA. He was born in Anderson Township, Illinois, and was graduated from Harvard, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He also received his Ph.D. at Harvard and studied later at Oxford.

With the CIA, Cline served for a period as liaison man with British intelligence, the most important of the sixty-odd foreign intelligence organizations with which the CIA is linked. Before he was named the DDI, Cline ran the CIA operation on Formosa under the cover title of Directory United States Naval Auxiliary Communications Center, Taiwan.

The job of the Intelligence Division is essentially a highly specialized form of scholarship. And 80 percent of its information comes from "open sources" : technical magazines, foreign broadcast monitoring, scholarly studies, propaganda journals, and data produced by such visible branches of the government as the U.S. Information Agency, [i] the Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce [ii] Departments, and the Agency for International Development.

The Intelligence Division's function is to take the mass of information available to it and "produce" intelligence, that is, to draw up reports on the economic, political, social and governmental situation in any country in the world. The division is subdivided into three major groups: one makes long-range projections of what can be expected in crisis areas; a second produces a daily review of the current situation; and a third, established by Cline shortly after he took over, is supposed to detect the gaps in what the CIA is doing and collecting.

Cline and his subordinates pride themselves on their independence and detachment from operational problems. They maintain that they evaluate information flowing in from the CIA Plans Division on an equal basis with intelligence coming in from elsewhere in the government. They contend that they do not have any ax to grind or any vested interest or operation to protect and, therefore, that they produce the most objective reports of any branch of the government.

The most important of these reports are prepared, sometimes on a crash basis, by the office of National Estimates (ONE), which acts as the staff of the twelve-man Board of National Estimates (BNE), long headed by Sherman Kent, a sixty-year-old former Yale history professor. A burly, tough-talking, tobacco-chewing man, Kent directed the European-African Division of the OSS during World War II. Kent and his board turn out National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) and, in times of crisis, quick reports known as Special National Intelligence Estimates.

"National Intelligence Estimates," Lyman Kirkpatrick, the executive director of the CIA has said, "are perhaps the most important documents created in the intelligence mechanisms of our government ... A national estimate is a statement of what is going to happen in any country, in any area, in any given situation, and as far as possible into the future ...

"Each of the responsible departments prepares the original draft on that section which comes under its purview. Thus the Department of State would draft the section on the political, economic or sociological development in a country or an area or a situation, while the Army would deal with ground forces, the Air Force with the air forces, and the Navy with the naval forces, and the Department of Defense under the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the guided missile threat.

"The Board of Estimates would then go over the individual contributions very carefully -- sometimes very heatedly -- and arrive at a common view. Anyone of the intelligence services has the right of dissent from the view which will be expressed as that of the Director of Intelligence." 1 (This is known as "taking a footnote.")

These National Intelligence Estimates go to the United States Intelligence Board for review. Under Dulles, Sherman Kent's board generated its own studies and was under the jurisdiction of the deputy director for intelligence. One of the changes made by McCone was to bring the Board of National Estimates directly under his personal command. McCone then controlled the frequency and subject matter of NIE reports. USIB functioned as an advisory group to McCone and estimates were frequently rewritten at his direction.

The NIE was then transmitted to the President as the estimate of the Director of Central Intelligence. Ultimately, therefore, despite all this vast intelligence machinery, the end product goes to the President as the personal responsibility and personal estimate of one man.

It is in this area that the structure of the Invisible Government is the most complex. The Director of Central Intelligence is the ultimate arbiter of the vital security information, predictions and evaluations that are placed on the desk of the President. He presides over the branches of the intelligence community represented on USIB; but, as has been seen, he also heads the CIA, which is one of these branches. He controls not only the intelligence product of CIA but also the product of the entire Invisible Government. He is therefore both umpire and player, the chairman of the board and a member of it.

In addition to producing the raw material for the national estimates, the CIA also provides the President with a daily top-secret checklist of the major world crises. Copies go to the Director of Central Intelligence and to the Secretaries of State and Defense. Top-ranking men in the CIA's Intelligence Division get to work at 3:00 A.M., to read the overnight cables and compile the checklist.

During the Kennedy Administration, the checklist was presented to the President the first thing each morning by Major General Chester V. (Ted) Clifton, the chief White House military aide. Under President Johnson, McGeorge Bundy initially assumed the responsibility for the morning intelligence briefing.

Special procedures have been established to assure that the President and the three other recipients of the checklist can be reached instantly in an emergency. An Indications Center is manned twenty-four hours a day by representatives of the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department. It works under the guidance of a Watch Committee, which meets once a week to survey crisis situations and, if necessary, to recommend an immediate convening of the Board of Estimates.

Although that board no longer operates directly under the authority of the CIA deputy director for intelligence, the power of his office has been enlarged in another direction. Ray Cline was the first DDI to be informed about the secret operations of the Plans Division. Prior to McCone's rule, this was not the practice.

The CIA had been rigorously compartmented in the interests of maximum security. The agency's left hand was purposely prevented from knowing what the right hand was doing. The Intelligence Division would receive all of the covert information collected by CIA agents abroad, but it was kept in ignorance about all clandestine operations. In the parlance of the trade, all cloak-and-dagger schemes were "vest pocketed" by the Plans Division.

For example, as already described, Cline's predecessor as DDI, Robert Amory, was never told in advance about the Bay of Pigs. And there was a feeling that President Kennedy might have abandoned the operation if all of his intelligence advisers had not been sponsors and, therefore, devout advocates of the plan.

Soon after McCone took office, he decided to change the system. He set up a three-man study group composed of Lyman Kirkpatrick, General Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler, executive assistant to Governor Rockefeller, and J. Patrick Coyne, former FBI agent and executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Perhaps the most important change decided upon by McCone was his instruction to the Plans Division to keep the Intelligence Division continuously posted on all its activities. Thereafter, the Intelligence Division received "sanitized" reports (names of agents removed) on all current operations. The intelligence analysts were thus in a position for the first time to contest the special pleading of the men who were running the operations. On the basis of the large pool of information available to them from all branches of the Invisible Government, they could, recommend changes in or complete cancellation of doubtful schemes.

Although there is some interchange of personnel, a natural suspicion exists between the Plans Division, which tends to attract activists and risk-takers, and the Intelligence Division, which tends to attract academic and contemplative types.

In its political complexion, too, the CIA splits roughly along the lines of its major functional responsibilities.

"The DDI side," one veteran CIA official explained, "tends to be liberal: they're at home with people like Schlesinger and Bundy. They tend to be liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans. The other side of the house has many ex-FBI types. It tends to get more conservative people, Bissell excepted. Helms has no politics, he's just a good professional intelligence man. But there are all kinds in CIA, as you'd expect."

A frequent charge against the CIA, justified in part, is that it tends to support right-wing, military governments that it regards as "safe," ignoring more liberal elements that might, in the long run, provide a more effective hedge against Communism.

Viewed in this context, it is significant that officials in the Plans Division are considered by their colleagues to be by instinct and background more conservative than the pure intelligence analysts. It is the agents serving in foreign stations under the DDP, after all, who are most directly concerned in the field with the question of where to throw CIA support in a complex political situation.

While the work of all of these divisions is centered at Langley, the CIA also operates inside the United States in many locations and in many guises. Although few Americans are aware of it, the CIA has offices in twenty cities throughout the country. The National Security Act of 1947, establishing the CIA, stated that "the agency shall have no police, subpena, law-enforcement or internal-security functions." Since the CIA was created to deal exclusively with foreign intelligence, the question might be raised as to why it has field offices across the nation.

The answer CIA officials give is that the offices are needed to collect foreign intelligence domestically, principally from travelers returning from abroad.

The CIA operates under a number of classified directives issued by the National Security Council since 1947. NSC directive No.7 permits the CIA to question people within the United States.

The CIA's use of tourists and travelers to gather intelligence was clearly forecast in a memorandum which Allen Dulles submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1947, when it was considering the Act establishing the CIA. The memorandum is a public document. 2 It concludes:

Because of its glamour and mystery overemphasis is generally placed on what is called secret intelligence ... but in time of peace the bulk of intelligence can be obtained through overt channels ... It can also be obtained ... through the many Americans, business and professional men and American residents of foreign countries, who are naturally and normally brought in touch with what is going on in those countries.


It is not unusual for the CIA to contact Americans about to go behind the Iron Curtain as tourists. Not every tourist is approached, of course, and many decline to get involved in high-risk amateur spying.

Recently, a New York publishing executive and his wife were about to leave for Russia as tourists when a telephone call came from the CIA. Would the editor be willing to report any interesting conversations? Would he turn over any interesting pictures he might take? The couple politely declined.

In addition to approaching legitimate tourists, the agency also plants its own tourists behind the Iron Curtain, occasionally with disastrous results. On August 25, 1960, two Air Force veterans, Mark I. Kaminsky and Harvey C. Bennett, of Bath, Maine, were arrested while touring the Soviet Union.

Both men were proficient in Russian. Kaminsky, twenty-eight, taught Russian at Ann Arbor, Michigan, High School; and Bennett, twenty-six, had just graduated in Slavic studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Kaminsky was sentenced to seven years in prison by a court in Kiev. Then the Russians changed their minds and expelled the pair.

They returned to the United States on October 20. At a press conference at Idlewild International Airport, Kaminsky denied any spying, and said he had planned to write a book called The Soviet Union Talks Peace While Preparing for War. The two said they had traveled to Russia on grants of $2,000 each from the "Northcraft Educational Fund of Philadelphia." However, they were not able to describe the operations of the fund, which was not listed then or later in the Philadelphia telephone book, the National Education Association's file of foundations, The Foundation Directory, or any other standard reference list.

In a similar case in 1961, another American, Marvin William Makinen, of Ashburnham, Massachusetts, was arrested while touring Russia. Makinen, only twenty-two, had studied chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and had just completed a year as an exchange student at the Free University of West Berlin. He spoke fluent German and Finnish. He was arrested and sentenced to eight years after the Russians charged he took pictures of military installations in Kiev. The Russians said he had confessed to spying.

In February, 1962, James Donovan came within an ace of freeing Makinen in the Powers-Abel exchange. But Makinen remained in Vladimir Prison (where Powers had been held) until October 12, 1963, when he was returned to the United States in a four-way trade. [iii] Makinen had little to say to reporters when he stepped off a BOAC airliner at Idlewild International Airport just after dawn. When asked about his arrest, he replied in a low voice: "I guess it was mainly because of my confession."

Aside from tourist-contact work, there are many other types of activities operating from the CIA's twenty regional offices within the United States. In Miami and New York, the agency financed and directed Cuban refugee activities. In New York and Chicago, it may be assumed that it conducts similar activities with Eastern European anti-Communist emigre groups.

At least a few whiskers of this particular cat were peeping out of the bag when McCone testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee during hearings on his nomination on January 18, 1962.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith, the independent-minded lady from Maine, was questioning McCone:

SENATOR SMITH: It has been alleged to me, Mr. McCone, that the CIA has been or is supporting the political activities of certain ethnic groups in this country, such as the Polish and Hungarian groups; is this true, and if so, what comment do you have to make?

MR. MCCONE: I can make no comment on it.

SENATOR SMITH: Pardon?

MR. MCCONE: I could make no comment on that.

SENATOR SMITH: Is it true?

MR. MCCONE: I couldn't comment on it.

Later, Senator Richard B. Russell, the Democratic chairman, and Senator Leverett Saltonstall, the Massachusetts Republican, both powerful Congressional protectors of the CIA, attempted to smooth over the delicate and unpleasant question asked by Mrs. Smith -- but only succeeded in getting into deeper water.

***

CHAIRMAN RUSSELL: As a matter of national policy, and speaking as a citizen and not as a nominee for this position, Mr. McCone, do you see anything immoral or wrong about any agency of this government undertaking to encourage ethnic groups in this country that have brethren behind the Iron Curtain ...?

MR. MCCONE: No sir; I do not ...

CHAIRMAN RUSSELL: Our enemies are certainly trying to seek to destroy us in every possible way, appealing to all ethnic groups in any way they can get their hands on them. I do not see any reason why we should have our hands tied.

SENATOR SALTONSTALL: Will the Senator yield? I would just like to supplement what the chairman has said. Is it not true, Mr. McCone, in your understanding of the CIA, that any work on the ethnic groups in this country would not be within the province of the CIA, in any event; am I correct in that?

MR. MCCONE: I cannot answer that, Senator.

SENATOR SALTONSTALL: Perhaps that should not be answered.

***

Actually, for a decade, a $100,000,000 fund was available for this type of activity. A 1951 amendment to the Foreign Aid Act had provided the money for persons "residing in or escapees from" the Soviet Union, the satellite nations or any other Communist area of the world, either to form them into military units "or for other purposes." It drew wrathful attacks from the Soviet Union in the United Nations. In 1961 Congress repealed the amendment at the request of the Agency for International Development. Asked whether the $100,000,000 fund had ever been used for clandestine work, an AID official said: "It was never used for anything other than refugee aid after they had escaped."

The CIA's domestic field offices are also useful in obtaining intelligence from business firms that have extensive foreign operations. In addition, the offices serve as contact points with universities. The relationship between the CIA and the universities is two-way -- the CIA secretly finances research programs at some universities; in turn the universities help recruit personnel. Perhaps even more important, the universities provide a pool of expert knowledge about foreign countries upon which the intelligence agency can, and does, draw.

Despite the possible loss of academic freedom, most universities and professors have shown little reluctance to work for the CIA. The agency has been able to obtain the services of almost all of the academic institutions and individuals it has approached.

Harvard has refused to accept money for classified projects, but some of its faculty members have done research for the CIA by the simple expedient of funneling their work through the Center for International Studies at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The MIT Center, which was set up with CIA money in 1950, has adopted many of the practices in effect at the CIA headquarters in Virginia. An armed guard watches over the door and the participating academicians must show badges on entering and leaving.

The Center was founded by Walt Whitman Rostow, an economics professor who served in the OSS in World War II and later as the chief of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. In 1952 Max F. Millikan, another economist, became the director of the Center after a two-year tour of duty as an assistant director of the CIA in Washington.

In a practice which has subsequently become standard procedure at MIT and elsewhere, Rostow and his colleagues produced a CIA-financed book, The Dynamics of Soviet Society, in 1953. It was published in two versions, one classified for circulation within the intelligence community, the other "sanitized" for public consumption.

One of Rostow's subordinates at the Center was Andreas F. Lowenfeld, who became a legal adviser in the State Department under Kennedy and Johnson. Lowenfeld was questioned about his work at MIT in testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on June 12., 1962:

***

SOURWlNE (Subcommittee counsel): Were you ever, Mr. Lowenfeld, connected in any way with the CIA?

LOWENFELD: Not in any direct way. The reason that I hesitate in my answer is that I was connected with the Center for International Studies at MIT.

SOURWINE: That was during what period of time?

LOWENFELD: That was 1951-1952. And they had some kind of contract with the CIA. So that it is conceivable that I was cleared by them.

SOURWlNE: Yes.

LOWENFELD: But I never formally worked for them.

SOURWINE: Did you know that the Center for International Studies was a CIA operation?

LOWENFELD: I was never formally told, but it became apparent.

***

One of the dangers inherent in the liaison between the universities and the CIA is the opportunity it provides for Communist propagandists to question the intellectual objectivity and detachment of American scholars.

On December 21, 1963, Cyril Black, the head of the Slavic Department at Princeton, was accused by Communist Bulgaria of having acted as the CIA's contact man with Ivan-Assen Khristov Georgiev, a Bulgarian diplomat who was shot the next month as an alleged spy for the United States.

At his trial, Georgiev testified that he met repeatedly with Black, the son of the former head of the American College in Sophia, during his five-year assignment at the UN. Georgiev said he had been paid $200,000 for his services but spent it all on a series of mistresses, three of whom supposedly were flown to New York for him at CIA expense.

Professor Black denounced the accusations as a "complete fabrication." "It is so preposterous," he said, "that it should not be dignified by a detailed rebuttal." Although Black's denial was not questioned by his colleagues, the incident, nonetheless, sent a shiver of discomfort through the academic community.

The question which troubled the professors was whether the Bulgarian accusations presaged a concerted Communist campaign to discredit the growing number of their colleagues who were working for the CIA.

In addition to its links with the academic community, there is evidence that the CIA subsidizes some foundations, cultural groups and a publishing house as well.

Most Americans are totally unaware of the CIA's domestic activities. In most cases, in a particular city, there is a telephone number for the Central Intelligence Agency under the "United States Government" listings. But there is no address given for the CIA office. As at Langley, the switchboard girl at a field office doesn't answer "CIA. " She simply repeats the number.

Here is a sample of CIA listings in 1963 city telephone directories around the nation:

New York-Mu 6 5517
Chicago-De 7 4926
Los Angeles-Ma 2 6875
[iv] Boston-Li 2 8812
Detroit To 8 5759
Philadelphia-Lo 7 6764
San Francisco-Yu 6 0145
Miami-Hi 5 3658
Pittsburgh-(simply listed as "Central Intelligence" ) 471 8518
Houston-CA 8 1324
St. Louis-MA 1 6902
New Orleans-JA 2 8874
Seattle-MA 4 3288
Denver-388 4757
Minneapolis-FE 5 0811

But the listed offices are only the beginning of the story. The CIA has other offices in some United States cities in addition to its listed ones. In Miami, for example, in 1963, besides its listed number in Coral Gables, the CIA was operating as Zenith Technical Enterprises, Inc.

The CIA cover firm was listed this way in the 1963-64 telephone book:

Zenith Technical Enterprises, Inc., Univ. of Miami South Campus Perrine 238-3311

In true Ian Fleming fashion, the CIA cover office listed no precise address -- the university south campus is a big place. It can be revealed, however, without imperiling national security, that the CIA has been operating from Building 25. (Perrine, incidentally, is the home town of Allen Lawrence Pope, the pilot who flew for the CIA in Indonesia. )

The CIA has operated under at least three other commercial cover umbrellas in Miami -- the Double-Chek Corporation, previously mentioned, the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation and the Vanguard Service Corporation, which will be dealt with separately in another chapter.

The point of all this is that the CIA is not simply an agency that gathers foreign intelligence for the United States in far-off corners of the globe. [v] It is deeply involved in many diverse, clandestine activities right here in the United States in at least twenty metropolitan areas. It can and does appear in many guises and under many names -- Zenith, Double-Chek, Gibraltar Steamship and Vanguard in one city alone.

On university campuses and in the great urban centers of America, the foundation, the cultural committee, the emigre group, the Cuban exile organization, the foreign-affairs research center, the distinguished publishing house specializing in books about Russia, the steamship company, the freedom radio soliciting public contributions, the innocent-looking consulting firm -- all may in reality be arms of the Invisible Government. And these examples are not idly chosen.

Whether this state of affairs was intended by Congress when it passed the National Security Act of 1947, or, indeed, whether the Congress is even aware of those facts, is another matter entirely.

The CIA's internal, domestic activities have only rarely surfaced to cause it embarrassment. One noteworthy episode took place in Seattle in 1952. A Federal grand jury indicted a travel agent on charges that he had willfully given false information to the government to the effect that Owen Lattimore, the Johns Hopkins University Far Eastern expert, was planning a trip behind the Iron Curtain. At the time, Lattimore was under attack by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.

The Finnish-born defendant in the case, Harry A. Jarvinen, worked for the Where-to-Go Travel Agency in Seattle. Jarvinen's attorney, Gerald Shucklin, explained that his client "did make some statement at a social gathering when he was a bit tipsy and a Central Intelligence agent was there."

Jarvinen's tip to the CIA reached the State Department on May 26, 1952, and on June 11 the department issued a "stop order" barring Lattimore from leaving the country. After Jarvinen was indicted, the State Department apologized profusely to Lattimore.

But three months later the two CIA agents involved, Wayne Richardson and Miller Holland, refused on security grounds to testify in Federal Court at Jarvinen's trial. Jarvinen was acquitted.

Federal Judge William J. Lindberg sentenced the two CIA men to fifteen days in prison for contempt of court. The government, the judge noted tartly, had initiated a prosecution against a citizen with one hand and thwarted it with the other.

The two CIA agents appealed their conviction. President Truman stepped in and ended the farce by issuing full pardons to Richardson and Holland, thereby saving the country the spectacle of two CIA men doing a stretch in a Federal jail.

In March, 1954, Senator Mike Mansfield asked: "Does this incident mean that the CIA is getting into the internal security field in competition with the FBI? Does it mean that officials of this government agency can defy the courts?" Mansfield got no answers to his questions.

Overseas, the CIA operates principally under embassy cover and commercial cover. In several corners of the world the CIA operates what appear to be small business concerns but which are really covers. No subject is touchier to the agency than the question of cover, for cover is the "cloak" in cloak and dagger, the professional intelligence man's sine qua non.

On February 1, 1963, J. Edgar Hoover, testifying before a House Appropriations Subcommittee, stated that "historically, the official personnel of the Soviet bloc countries assigned to this nation, including those at the United Nations, have been used extensively for espionage purposes ...

"At the same time," the FBI director added, "the Soviet bloc intelligence services make full use of their commercial representatives, exchange groups and tourists visiting this country in their efforts to reach their intelligence objectives.

"As of January 1, 1963, there were 761 Soviet bloc official personnel in this country. They were accompanied by 1,066 dependents, some of whom are also trained as intelligence agents."

Essentially, the CIA operates the same way. In United States embassies across the globe, there is a restricted floor, or a section of the embassy, that houses the CIA mission. Each mission is headed by a station chief with several intelligence officers reporting to him. These officers in turn recruit local "agents" to collect intelligence information.

The CIA personnel are listed as State Department or Foreign Service officers. This is their "cover." In many cases, the identity of the CIA station chief is quickly known to diplomats and newspapermen -- and, of course, to their Soviet opposite numbers in the KGB and the GRU. This is in sharp contrast to the British and Soviet secret service mission chiefs, whose identities are very seldom known. In the case of the CIA, agents below the level of station chief are usually less well known outside of the embassy. Within the embassy, State Department employees usually come to know in fairly short order who the CIA people are.

The fact that the CIA operates under embassy cover is not something that the government discusses or would be expected to confirm. Very occasionally, references to it pop up in unexpected places, however.

On April 12, 1962, Navy Captain Charles R. Clark, Jr., the naval attache in the American Embassy in Havana from 1957 to 1960, was being questioned at a hearing of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee by J. G. Sourwine, the chief counsel.

MR. SOURWINE: Were there CIA people in the embassy?

CAPTAIN CLARK: Yes, sir. A considerable number.

MR. SOURWINE: Was their cover good?

CAPTAIN CLARK: I thought it was terrible. Everybody in town who had any interest in it knew who they were ... their cover was so shallow that it was very easily seen through.

MR. SOURWINE: Now, do you have knowledge of an occasion when all of the CIA people at the embassy were at a single party?

CAPTAlN CLARK: One time down there I was invited to a party ... this Cuban doctor who had operated on one of my kids was giving it ... He had almost the entire CIA staff at his home for a party one night, and I was about the only non-CIA man there and he knew that they were all CIA and worked with them as such.

***

Two years earlier, on August 30, 1960, the former Ambassador to Cuba, Earl E. T. Smith, testified before the same committee that "the chief of the CIA section" in the American Embassy in Havana was pro-Castro and that "the Number 2 CIA man in the embassy" had encouraged a revolt of Cuban naval officers in Cienfuegos in September, 1957.

"In the trial of the naval officers," Smith testified, "it came out that the Number 2 man had said that if the revolution was successful, that the United States would recognize the revolutionaries. I do not believe that the Number 2 man in the CIA intended to convey that thought. His story to me was that he had been called over to interview some men believed to be doctors, because they were dressed in white coats, and when they advised him of the revolt that was to take place, they wanted to know what the position of the United States would be.

" And he inadvertently intimated something to the effect of which I am not quite sure, that the United States might give recognition."

Smith testified he repeated all this to Batista. The American ambassador's efforts to explain to the Cuban dictator that the Number 2 CIA man in the embassy could not tell the difference between a Navy uniform and a medical white coat must have made fascinating listening.

Normally, the CIA men in the embassies are listed in the State Department Biographic Register as "attaches," "Foreign Service officers" or, frequently, as "Foreign Service reserve officers."

For example, Henry Pleasants, widely known as the CIA mission chief in Bonn, West Germany, was listed in the 1963 Biographic Register as an "attache," with "S-1" rank, meaning the highest category of Foreign Service staff officer.

Frank Wisner, the former CIA deputy director for plans, who ran the Guatemalan operation in 1954, was listed as an "attache" and an "R-1" (Foreign Service reserve officer) after he was sent to London as station chief on August 6, 1959. The 1963 Biographic Register lists "govt. ser. 48-59" for Wisner, to account for the period prior to his London assignment.

Similarly, Robert Kendall Davis, the Guatemala mission chief who set up the Bay of Pigs training camps, was listed as an "attache" and later as "first secretary" of the embassy. He, too, was carried on the State Department's rolls as a Foreign Service reserve officer.

William Egan Colby, the former CIA station chief in Vietnam, was listed as a "political officer" in 1959, and later as "first secretary" of the embassy. By 1963 he had shed his diplomatic cover and was back in Washington as the head of the CIA's Far East division.

John H. "Jocko" Richardson who became the new CIA station chief in Saigon, was listed as "first secretary" of the embassy when he arrived there after serving in Athens and Manila.

In 1961 the Russians published a 160-page propaganda book called Caught in the Act (initials: CIA) , which detailed alleged attempts by the CIA to infiltrate spies into the Soviet Union. The book also grumbled bitterly about "spy diplomats" on the staff of the United States Embassy in Moscow.

Two years later the Russians ousted five Americans from the embassy in the sensational Penkovsky spy case. Oleg V. Penkovsky was the deputy chief of the Soviet State Committee for the Coordination of Scientific Research, and very likely was also a colonel in Soviet military intelligence. At his show trial in May, 1963, he confessed passing 5,000 frames of exposed miniature-camera film, containing classified information about Soviet rockets and other secrets, to American and British agents.

The Russians charged that Penkovsky, a "money-hungry traitor who loved to dance the Charleston and the twist," would hide his information in a matchbox behind the radiator in the hallway of a Moscow apartment house at No. 5-6 Pushkin Street. He would mark a circle with charcoal on lamppost No. 35 near a bus stop on Kutusovsky Prospekt.

The Soviets said he would then telephone either Captain Alexis H. Davison, an assistant air attache at the American Embassy (who was also the embassy doctor) or Hugh Montgomery, the internal security officer.

Davison would go to the lamppost, the Russians claimed. If he found the charcoal circle it meant there was something ready to be picked up at the Pushkin Street drop. According to the Moscow version, Richard C. Jacob, the twenty-six-year-old embassy "archivist" from Egg Harbor, New Jersey, would go to the radiator and retrieve the little package. When the information was picked up, the Americans would make a black smudge on the door of the fish department of a Moscow food store (presumably after a casual purchase of a pound or two of sturgeon as cover). Then Penkovsky would know the transfer had been accomplished.

The Russians also sought to link Penkovsky to Rodney W. Carlson, the thirty-one-year-old assistant agricultural attache at the embassy, and to William C. Jones III, [vi] the second secretary.

Penkovsky, it was alleged, also passed information in a box of chocolates to Greville M. Wynne, a London businessman who was actually working for British Intelligence. Wynne supposedly got the chocolates out of Moscow by giving them to the children of a British diplomat.

The Russians convicted Penkovsky and later announced he had been executed. Wynne drew an eight-year prison sentence.

Considering the fact that no fewer than twelve Americans and British diplomats were linked, one way or another, to a serious charge of espionage, London and Washington were exceedingly quiet about it all.

But there are likely to be more spy cases involving diplomats. The Kennedy Administration, while Dulles was still the CIA director, made some efforts to reduce the number of agents operating under diplomatic cover in American embassies. But embassy cover is still central to the agency's operations.

There is a great danger in relying heavily on diplomatic cover. If relations are severed between countries, or war breaks out, then the CIA tends to be cut off from its sources of information. In January, 1961, for example, when Washington broke off relations with Havana, the CIA lost its embassy base in Cuba. Ironically, the Cubans retained two legations in the United States -- their delegation to the Organization of American States in Washington [vii] and their UN mission in New York.

CIA agents operating abroad under commercial cover pose, as the term implies, as legitimate businessmen, rather than as diplomats. Not long ago a CIA man in Washington told all his friends he was quitting the agency to go to Switzerland for Praeger books. Very possibly he was telling the truth and was really leaving the agency, but not all of his friends believed him.

A CIA officer operating overseas under embassy or commercial cover recruits "agents" locally to feed him information. The most valuable information often comes not from a trusted agent, but from the occasional highly placed defector from the opposition camp.

The most useful defector is a Communist official who can be persuaded to stay at his job, at least for a while, and transmit intelligence to the West. This is known as a defector "in place." The most prized defector of all is one who works, or who has worked, in the Soviet intelligence apparatus.

A delicate aspect of the CIA's work is the care and protection of its colony of important defectors who have fled the Communist world. In a CBS television interview [3] Dulles called defectors "one of the two or three most important sources of intelligence." He added: "When you get a man -- and we have got several -- who have worked inside the KGB, their secret service, or the GRU, their military service, it's just almost as though you had somebody inside there for a time."

Dulles estimated that the number of high-level valuable defectors who had come over to the West was "in the range of a hundred."

Not all of these Russians are "surfaced" by the CIA. Those who remain underground are protected by the agency. Some go to work for the CIA. Others are given a new identity that, hopefully, will protect them in the United States from the long arm of KGB assassins.

Recently, a resident of McLean, Virginia, near the CIA headquarters, was intrigued when an obviously Russian family moved in across the street; two huge dogs guarded the premises, and a chauffeur-driven car came to take the children to school every day. But the Russian hardly budged from his house, except to go to a neighbor's occasional cocktail party, where he would identify himself as an "historian." The "historian" was very likely a defector being kept on ice by the CIA.

Not all stories of Soviet defectors under CIA protection come to such happy endings, however. On October 21, 1952, a lieutenant in the KGB, Reino Hayhanen, entered the United States under the name of Eugene Maki and became an assistant to Rudolf Abel, the Russian master spy who posed as a mousy photographer-artist in Brooklyn under the alias of Emil R. Goldfus.

Hayhanen drank and talked too much; he was not a very good spy. Exasperated, Abel finally shipped his assistant home. Hayhanen decided his reception might be unpleasant; soon May 6, 1957, while en route to Moscow, he walked into the American Embassy in Paris and defected to the CIA.

He was rushed back to New York, where he identified Abel, which led to the arrest of the top Russian spy who had been his boss. After Abel's trial and conviction that October, Hayhanen dropped out of sight. The CIA gave him a new identity and kept him in a house in New England, guarded by a dog. Two "lawyers" who lived next door were actually CIA bodyguards almost constantly at Hayhanen's side.

But Hayhanen the defector was no drier than Hayhanen the secret agent. He continued to imbibe heavily, which made the task of the CIA bodyguards an unenviable one.

After the Bay of Pigs invasion, Attorney General Robert Kennedy wondered if there might not be some way to improve the CIA's then sagging public image. When the National Broadcasting Company suggested a television program, the Attorney General liked the idea and ordered Hayhanen temporarily released to appear on the show. [viii]

The Hayhanen interview was filmed about July, 1961, but was not shown until the following November. In the interim, word spread around the intelligence community that Reino Hayhanen was dead; the CIA's prize defector had been killed in a mysterious "accident" on the New Jersey or the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Nevertheless, the filmed NBC program was telecast, as scheduled, on November 8. Hayhanen's face was "kept dark for his own protection," David Brinkley, the narrator, said. At the close of the program, Brinkley explained that after Abel went to prison, by contrast Hayhanen "was set up in a comfortable house in the northeastern United States under the care and protection of the CIA. He came out of the security briefly for this interview and went back ... That's the end of this spy story, but we are authorized to say, indeed asked to say, that if any others like Eugene Maki [Hayhanen] care to step forward any time they will be guaranteed security, physical and financial."

The CIA definitely did not ask NBC, however, to tell its millions of viewers that they had just watched an interview with a dead man.

Like any intelligence agency, the CIA employs methods and techniques that are not normally the subject of polite drawing-room chit-chat. These techniques include sex, money, wiretapping and the use of hidden microphones.

Allen Dulles may be cited as an authority on the subject of sex-and-spying. When he appeared on ABC's Issues and Answers in June, 1963, the scandal over Britain's Secretary of State for War John D. Profumo and call-girl Christine Keeler was at its height. It had also been disclosed that Profumo and the Soviet naval attache, Captain Yevgeni Ivanov, shared Miss Keeler's favors.

Dulles offered one professional observation about the use of Miss Keeler: "I must say the question they apparently gave the young lady to ask as to when the Germans were going to get the atomic bomb was not a very penetrating intelligence question to ask."

Then this exchange took place on the television panel:

Q. Whether or not it is involved in the Profumo case, the Soviets have been known to use sex as a lure in espionage. How widespread is this? Is this something we meet repeatedly in counter-espionage work around the world?

A. I think it is world-wide. As long as there is sex, it is going to be used.

Q. Does American intelligence ever use sex as a bait to get information?

A. I don't discuss those matters very much.

Q. We at least don't use it as widely as the Soviets do?

A. No, we certainly do not. We recognize the existence of sex and the attraction of sex, though.

Four years earlier, the Russians had accused Dulles of using voluptuous women CIA agents to seduce the Soviet Olympic team at Melbourne, Australia, in 1956. The racy claim was made by the newspaper Literary Gazette.

"The American intelligence service," the paper said indignantly on April 2, 1957, "did its utmost to force upon Soviet athletes an acquaintance with young women. Its agents more than insistently importuned them to 'have a good time.'" The paper implied that the Soviet athletes scorned the temptresses and stuck to their hammer-throwing and pole-vaulting.

Another tool of the trade -- money -- is used by the CIA, as it is by other intelligence services, to pay agents, and double agents, and to buy information, where necessary. Money was no object when Dulles was hunting for Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956.

The CIA is a major purchaser of electronic listening devices and wire-tap equipment. The most famous case involving such equipment was the CIA's "Berlin tunnel," a secret wire-tap installation in a tunnel that led from a mock United States "experimental radar station" across the border into East Germany. The tap hooked into the cables of the Soviet military headquarters.

The Russians discovered the tunnel on April 22, 1956, and decided to try at least to recover some propaganda value from the CIA's coup. They invited Western correspondents to tour the underground wiretap and turned it into a tourist attraction. Three photographs and a diagram of the tunnel appear in Caught in the Act.

Sometimes there are simpler ways to intercept Soviet communications. In Montevideo, a few years ago, the Tass man was filing 1,000 words a day, attacking Washington's policies in Latin America. A CIA man had instant access to the file through the commercial cable company the Tass correspondent used. The CIA also persuaded the Montevideo chief of police to put taps on the telephones at the Soviet and Czech Embassies. For a time, the CIA monitored all their conversations. Later the police chief quit; his successor was less friendly to the CIA and the game ended.

A fascinating case of CIA wire-tapping that received far less public attention than the "Berlin tunnel" began unfolding at 1:00 A.M. on September 15, 1960, when a key turned in the door of a twenty-third-floor apartment in the Seguro del Medico Building, in Havana's fashionable Vedado Beach section.

Mrs. Marjorie Lennox, a lovely twenty-six-year-old divorcee with shoulder-length blond hair, was alone in her apartment. She was listed as a secretary in the United States Embassy in Havana. The men who entered her apartment were Castro intelligence agents. They arrested her; she was accused of being a spy and ordered out of Cuba two days later. She told newsmen who met her at Miami International Airport: "It's all so silly. I was all by my little self, practically asleep in bed, when the lights went on about one A.M. Thursday. I thought it was my maid, but these men had pistols. When I demanded an explanation they told me: 'You are a spy. We found your apartment key in a raid on a spy ring.'"

Mrs. Lennox wore a softly tailored gray suit as she chatted with reporters. Now her mobile face broke into a sweet smile. "Me a spy?" she said. "What a laugh." When a newsman asked if she had ever given her key to anyone in the United States Embassy, she replied: "I can't answer that."

The same day that Mrs. Lennox was expelled from Cuba, Havana arrested six other Americans and accused them, along with her, of being members of a spy ring that had tapped the telephone wires of the Havana office of Hsinhua, the Communist Chinese news agency. The Castro regime identified three of the Americans as Daniel L. Carswell, a forty-two-year-old "electrical engineer"; Eustace H. Danbrunt, thirty-four, a "mechanical engineer"; and Edmund K. Taransky, thirty, an "electrical engineer."

Also arrested were Robert L. Neet, who the Cubans said was an employee of the American Embassy, and Mr. and Mrs. Mario Nordio. Havana said Nordio was a dance instructor and an Italian-born, naturalized American citizen who had lived in New York City. It was also announced that Nordio had leased his apartment to Mrs. Lennox.

On December 17, 1960, a military court in Havana held a one-day trial for the three "engineers" and Mario Nordio. They were accused of setting wire taps in the Hsinhua office to learn about a trade treaty between Cuba and Communist China and about the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The prosecutor, Lieutenant Fernando Flores, asked for thirty-year prison terms for the four Americans. The defendants, dressed in blue prison uniforms, denied the charges. The "engineers" said they had been hired to repair some electronic equipment in Neet's apartment, which was located in the same building as the Communist Chinese news agency.

On January 10, 1961, the three "engineers" were sentenced to ten years in prison. Nordio was deported.

United States Ambassador Philip W. Bonsal had filed an angry formal protest over the arrest of Mrs. Lennox. He was silent about the three "engineers" and the dancing instructor, however.

There were good reasons for this. The three "engineers" were in reality on an electronic eavesdropping assignment for the CIA. Washington was particularly concerned lest the high-ranking Carswell, who knew about similar electronic operations in other parts of the world, be turned over to the Russians for questioning.

Quietly, behind the scenes, the CIA and the State Department began making efforts to free twenty- seven Americans held in Castro jails, including the three "engineers." The release was finally arranged in April, 1963, by James Donovan, who had successfully "exchanged" the Bay of Pigs prisoners for drugs and food four months earlier.

The citizenship of some of the prisoners was in doubt. The primary reason for Washington's efforts was to get the three CIA men out, and Robert A. Hurwitch, the State Department official who handled the matter, was perfectly well aware of this. It was also made clear to Donovan.

Late in April, strange things began to happen. On the night of April 22, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York commuted the twenty-years-to-life prison term of Francisco (The Hook) Molina, a pro-Castro Cuban who shot up a New York restaurant during Castro's visit to the UN in September, 1960. During the shooting brawl, Molina killed a nine-year-old Venezuelan girl, Magdalena Urdaneto, who was an innocent bystander. Rockefeller, on the assurance of the Federal Government that he was acting "in the national interest," released The Hook from the state prison at Stormville.

Simultaneously, Attorney General Robert Kennedy announced that charges had been dropped by the Justice Department against three Cubans, including an attache at Castro's UN mission, who had been arrested for plotting to blow up defense installations around New York City. The three plus The Hook were hustled out of the country by plane. They were flown from Florida to Havana as Donovan brought back the Americans from Cuba in what amounted, in effect, to a straight swap of three saboteurs and a killer for three CIA men.

When they landed in Miami, Carswell, Danbrunt and Taransky vanished. They declined to talk to reporters. And for some reason, unlike the other returnees, they would not tell the American Red Cross their destination.

_______________

Notes:

i. Donald M, Wilson, the deputy director of USIA, was asked by the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on February 21, 1963, to explain what type of contact USIA had with the State Department, the CIA and other intelligence agencies. "Very close," Wilson replied. "We have daily contact with them on a number of levels."

ii. The flow of information is sometimes both ways. In 1959, when the CIA wanted to get translations of Soviet scientific and technical journals into the hands of American scientists and technicians, the Commerce Department's Office of Technical Services agreed to serve as the channel. The procedure provided a conventional veneer for an unusual practice.

iii. Two accused Soviet spies, Ivan D. Egorov, a UN personnel officer, and his wife, Aleksandra, were traded for Makinen and the Reverend Walter Ciszek, a Jesuit priest held by the Russians for twenty-three years.

iv. The CIA got into a dispute with its Boston landlord early in 1963 after the government ruled that field offices of Federal agencies could not rent in segregated buildings. The CIA, the major tenant in the Boston building, which also housed two restaurants, insisted that the landlord insert a nondiscrimination clause into leases with all of his tenants.

v. More than 70 percent of CIA's employees are in the United States; the rest are overseas.

vi. All five Americans were declared persona non grata on May 13, 1963. The Russians claimed two other American Embassy personnel were involved in the case -- Robert K. German, second secretary, and William Horbaly, agricultural attache. They also ousted two embassy aides in October, 1962, just before the Penkovsky case surfaced publicly. They were Commander Raymond D. Smith, of Brooklyn; assistant military attache, and Kermit S. Midthun, of San Francisco, first secretary. Smith was arrested in Leningrad on October 2, carrying a tiny tape recorder, a Minox camera and high-powered binoculars. The Russians said he was photographing naval installations. The American Embassy said he was taking a walk in the park. Midthun, forty- one, was accused on October 11 of having tried to get secret data from a Soviet official. The Russians also expelled five British diplomats in the Penkovsky case.

vii. Until Cuba was expelled from the OAS in January, 1962.

viii. The Attorney General also took the extraordinary step of allowing NBC to film shots of Abel in Atlanta Prison, which were shown on the same program. At the time, the Powers-Abel swap was secretly in the making; the films may perhaps have been shown to reassure the Russians that Abel was alive and well.
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