The relationship was first limned in the author's New York Times article, "CIA Supported Japanese Right in '50s and '60s," October 9, 1994. That article had its origins in a struggle then ongoing between the CIA and the State Department over the release of a volume of The Foreign Relations of the United States covering Japan in the 1960s. Twelve years later, in July 2006, the State Department belatedly acknowledged that "the U.S. Government approved four covert programs to try to influence the direction of Japanese political life." The statement described three of the four programs. It said that the Eisenhower administration authorized the CIA before the May 1958 elections for the Japanese House of Representatives to provide "a few key pro-American and conservative politicians" with money. It said the Eisenhower administration also authorized the CIA "to institute a covert program to try to split off the moderate wing of the leftist opposition in the hope that a more pro-American and 'responsible' opposition party would emerge." In addition, "a broader covert program, divided almost equally between propaganda and social action," sought to encourage the Japanese people to embrace the ruling party and reject the influence of the left. The deep relationship with the rising politician and future prime minister Kishi was not acknowledged. FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXIX, Part 2.

After Japan fell, the American occupation led by General MacArthur purged and imprisoned right-wing militarists such as Kishi and his allies. But things changed after George Kennan was sent to Japan in 1948 by Secretary of State Marshall to try to persuade MacArthur to change his views. An example of MacArthur's policies could be seen on the docks of Osaka, where dismantled machinery from Japanese industries was being greased, crated, and shipped at great expense to China as part of a war reparations program. Americans were paying to take Japan apart and support China at the moment it was being overrun by the communists. Kennan argued that the United States should move as fast as possible from the reformation of Japan toward its economic recovery. This about-face required an end to MacArthur's purges. It meant that accused war criminals such as Kishi and Kodama would be released. It led to their recruitment by the CIA and the eventual restoration of powerful leaders, business cartels, internal security forces, and political parties.

"The U.S. should do what it can to encourage effective conservative leadership in Japan," said the Operations Coordinating Board, in a report to the White House dated October 28, 1954, and declassified fifty years later. If the conservatives were united, they could work together to control Japan's political life, the board said, and "to take legal measures against Communists, and to combat the neutralist, anti-American tendencies of many of the individuals in Japan's educated groups." This is precisely what the CIA did from 1954 onward.

The CIA provided $2.8 million in financing: Japanese conservatives needed money. The American military needed tungsten. "Somebody had the idea: Let's kill two birds with one stone," said John Howley, a New York lawyer and OSS veteran who helped arrange the transaction. The Kodama-CIA operation smuggled tons of tungsten out from Japanese military caches into the United States and sold it to the Pentagon for $10 million. The smugglers included Kay Sugahara, a Japanese American recruited by the OSS from an internment camp in California during World War II. His files, researched by Howard Schonberger, a University of Maine professor writing a book nearly completed at his death in 1991, described the operation in detail. The proceeds were pumped into the campaigns of conservatives during Japan's first post-occupation elections in 1953. Howley said: "We had learned in O.S.S., to accomplish a purpose, you had to put the right money in the right hands."

"He is a professional liar": "Background on J.I.S. and Japanese Military Personalities," September 10, 1953, National Archives, Record Group 263, CIA Name File, box 7, folder: Kodama, Yoshio.

"Strange, isn't it?": Dan Kurzman, Kishi and Japan: The Search for the Sun (New York: Obolensky, 1960), p. 256.

"It was clear that he wanted at least the tacit backing of the United States government": Hutchinson oral history, FAOH.

"if Japan went Communist": MacArthur interview with author.

Kaya became a recruited agent: The records of Kaya's relationship with the CIA are in the National Archives, Record Group 263, CIA Name File, box 6, folder: Kaya, Okinori.

"we ran it in a different way": Feldman interview with author.

Chapter Thirteen

"He would heft them and decide": Lehman oral history interview, "Mr. Current Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

NSC 5412/2: "Directive on Covert Operations," December 28, 1955, DDEL.

The division was dysfunctional: "Inspector General's Survey of the Soviet Russia Division, June 1956," declassified March 23, 2004, CIA/CREST.

"'indict the whole Soviet system'": Ray Cline oral history, March 21, 1983, LBJL.

His interference created a split signal at Radio Free Europe: The radios' director, OSS veteran Bob Lang, complained about "the intrusion in each and every element of our affairs" by Wisner and his lieutenants. The CIA's Cord Meyer, the division chief in charge of Radio Free Europe, said he felt "pressure to distort the purpose of the radios."

Vice President Nixon argued: NSC minutes, July 12, 1956, DDEL; NSC 5608/1, "U.S. Policy Toward the Soviet Satellites in East Europe," July 18, 1956, DDEL. Under the auspices of the Free Europe program, the CIA already had floated 300,000 balloons containing 300 million leaflets, posters, and pamphlets from West Germany into Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The balloons carried an implicit message: the Americans could cross the iron curtain with more than tin medals and radio waves.

"CIA represented great power": Ray Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars, Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), pp. 164-170.

"dead wrong": NSC minutes, October 4, 1956, DDEL.

Dulles assured Eisenhower: Memorandum of conference among Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, and acting secretary of state Herbert Hoover, Jr., July 27, 1956, DDEL; Eisenhower diary, October 26, 1956, Presidential Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, document 1921; Dillon oral history, FAOH; deputies' meeting notes from October, November, and December 1956, CIA/CREST.

"wishful blindness": The state of Wisner's operations in Hungary is described in two clandestine service histories: The Hungarian Revolution and Planning for the Future: 23 October-4 November 1956, Vol. 1, January 1958, CIA; and Hungary, Volume I [deleted] and Volume II: External Operations, 1946-1965, May 1972, CIA History Staff, all declassified with deletions in 2005.

"Freedom or Death!": Transcripts of Radio Free Europe programs, October 28, 1956, in Csasa Bekes, Malcolm Byrne, and Janos M. Rainer (eds.), The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002), pp. 286-289.

"terrible mistakes and crimes of these past ten years": "Radio Message from Imre Nagy, October 28, 1956," in Bekes, Byrne, and Rainer, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, pp. 284-285.
Few knew that Wisner had more than one frequency to fight with. In Frankfurt, the Solidarists, the neofascist Russians who had worked for the CIA since 1949, began broadcasts into Hungary saying an army of exile warriors was heading for the border. They sent their message in the name of Andras Zako, who had served as a general in the fascist wartime Hungarian government and ran an Iron Cross outfit called the League of Hungarian Veterans. "Zako was the very model of an intelligence entrepreneur," Richard Helms noted. He had sold millions of dollars' worth of fabricated intelligence to every major American military and intelligence service from 1946 to 1952. The general had earned the rare distinction of a "burn notice," a worldwide CIA order barring him from doing business with the agency.

Reflecting on the CIA's decision to amplify and beam back the low-wattage broadcasts of Hungarian partisans--using its own frequencies to broadcast their pleas for violent struggle against the Soviets--John Richardson, Jr., the president of Radio Free Europe, said: "The freedom fighters would be telling the folks whatever they wanted to tell them and whatever they'd believe. Then RFE would pick that up and rebroadcast it. That was, I think, the single most serious mistake that was made." Richardson oral history. FAOH.

"What had occurred there was a miracle": NSC minutes, November 1, 1956, DDEL.

"the promise that help would come": William Griffith, Radio Free Europe, "Policy Review of Voice for Free Hungary Programming" (December 5, 1956), in Bekes, Byrne, and Rainer, The 1956 Hungarian Revolution, pp. 464-484. This document constitutes an official acknowledgment of a fact long denied by the CIA: that RFE implied or stated to its Hungarian listeners that help was on the way. RFE's Hungarian desk was purged after Griffith's detailed but self-absolving report. Two years later, its voice had changed. It inaugurated a hugely popular and truly subversive program that captured the popular imagination: a rock 'n' roll show called Teenager Party. See also Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 95-104; and George R. Urban, Radio Free Liberty and the Pursuit of Democracy: My War Within the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 211-247.

"headquarters was caught up in the fever of the times": Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 128.

a fresh but false report from Allen Dulles that the Soviets were ready to send 250,000 troops to Egypt: Eisenhower diary, November 7, 1956, DDEL.

"near a nervous breakdown": William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 134-135.

"revved up": John H. Richardson, My Father the Spy: A Family History of the CIA, the Cold War and the Sixties (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 126.

"We are well-equipped": Director's meeting, December 14, 1956, CIA/CREST.

Bruce's personal journals: Bruce's journals are at the University of Virginia. They show that as the American ambassador in Paris, Bruce had heard through the grapevine in June 1950--on a day he lunched with Allen Dulles--about "the horrible possibility" that he might be asked to become director of central intelligence. Walter Bedell Smith took the job instead.

His top secret report: Though the report from the president's board of intelligence consultants has become known as the "Bruce-Lovett report," its style clearly shows that David Bruce wrote it. The investigation team was Bruce; former secretary of defense Robert Lovett; and a former deputy chief of naval operations, retired admiral Richard L. Conolly. Until recently, the only evidence of the existence of the report was a set of notes taken by the historian Arthur Schlesinger from a document now said to have disappeared from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library. The declassified version of the document--long excerpts from a collection of Eisenhower-era intelligence reports compiled for the Kennedy White House after the Bay of Pigs--appears here for the first time in book form, with abbreviations spelled out for clarity, typographical errors corrected, and the CIA's deletions noted.

The conception, planning and, even on occasion the approval itself [deleted] of covert operations, enormously significant to our military and foreign policies, is becoming more and more exclusively the business of the CIA--underwritten heavily by unvouchered CIA funds. (This is only the inevitable result of the structure, system and personalities concerned with the initiation and conduct of such operations.) The CIA, busy, monied and privileged, likes its "King-making" responsibility (the intrigue is fascinating--considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from successes--no charge is made for "failures"--and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!).

Although these extremely sensitive, costly operations are justifiable only insofar as they are in support of U.S. military and foreign policies, the responsible long-range planning and sustained guidance for these, which should be forthcoming from both the Defense and State Departments, appear too often to be lacking. There are always, of course, on record the twin, well-worn purposes of "frustrating the Soviets" and keeping others "pro-western" oriented. Under these almost any psychological warfare and paramilitary action can be and is being justified [deleted].

Initiative, and continuing impetus for psychological warfare and paramilitary operations, for the most part, reside in CIA. And, once having been conceived, the final approval given to any project (at informal meetings of the Operations Coordinating Board inner group) can, at best, be described as pro forma.

Upon approval, projects in most instances pass to the management of the CIA and remain there to conclusion. Since these operations are so inextricably interwoven with (and, on occasion, dictate the course of) our other foreign policy operations, it would appear they should have not only the prior approval of the National Security Council (rather than OCB) itself, but also the continuous surveillance of that body.

As a matter of fact, in most instances, approval of any new project would appear to comprise simply the endorsement of a Director of Central Intelligence proposal, usually without demurrer, from individuals preoccupied with other important matters of their own. Of course there is a preliminary (CIA proprietary) staffing of each project and an eventual (after the fact) reporting of its results to the NSC--but even after this report is rendered orally by the Director of Central Intelligence on an "off the record"--and on a naturally understandable, biased basis.

Psychological warfare and paramilitary operations themselves, at any one time, whether through personal arrangement between the Secretary of State and the DCI (deciding between them on any one occasion to use what they regard as the best "assets" available) or undertaken at the personal discretion of the DCI, frequently and in direct and continuing dealings between CIA representatives and the heads of foreign states [deleted]. Oftentimes such dealings are in reality only the continuation of relationships established at a time when the foreign personalities involved may have been "the opposition." (It is somewhat difficult to understand why anyone less than the Senior U.S. Representative [i.e., the Ambassador] in any country should deal directly with its Head in any matter which involves the official relationships of the two countries.) One obvious, inevitable result of this is to divide U.S. foreign policy resources and to incline the foreigner--often the former "opposition" now come into power (and who knows with whom he is dealing)--to play one U.S. agency against the other or to use whichever suits his current purpose [deleted].

A corollary to this is the exclusion of responsible American officials from knowledge they should have to properly discharge their obligation. (It has been reported by people in its intelligence area that there is great concern throughout the State Department over the impacts of CIA psychological warfare and paramilitary activities on our foreign relations. The State Department people feel that perhaps the greatest contribution this board could make would be to bring to the attention of the President the significant, almost unilateral influences that CIA psychological warfare and paramilitary activities have on the actual formation of our foreign policies and our relationships with our "friends.")

CIA support and its maneuvering of local news media, labor groups, political figures and parties and other activities which can have, at any one time, the most significant impacts on the responsibilities of the local Ambassador are sometimes completely unknown to or only hazily recognized by him.... Too often differences of opinion regarding the U.S. attitude toward local figures or organizations develop, especially as between the CIA and the State Department.... (At times, the Secretary of State-DCI brother relationship may arbitrarily set "the U.S. position.")

...CIA is in propaganda programs [five lines deleted, probably dealing with the agency's financing of dozens of magazines, journals, publishing houses, and the Congress of Cultural Freedom] which are difficult to identify as part of the responsibilities assigned to it by Congress and the National Security Council....

The military expects that it will be responsible for the conduct of unconventional warfare (and there is difference of opinion here as to the extent of that responsibility); it is not quite sure who will be responsible for other psychological warfare and paramilitary operations in time of war--or how (or when) the responsibilities for them will be distributed.

Psychological warfare and paramilitary operations (often growing out of the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being) today are being conducted on a world-wide basis by a horde of CIA representatives [deleted] many of whom, by the very nature of the personnel situation [deleted] are politically immature. (Out of their "dealings" with shifty, changing characters their applications of "themes" suggested from headquarters or developed by them in the field--sometimes at the suggestion of local opportunists--strange things are apt to, and do, develop.)

Fortunately in some instances, unfortunately in others, the results of many of these operations are comparatively short-lived [seven lines deleted]. If exposed these operations couldn't possibly be "plausibly denied"--indeed it would seem to be utterly naive for anyone to think that the American hand in these operations is not only well known to both local country and Communist Party officials, but to many others (including the press)--and in derogation of the specific caveat contained in NSC [orders that the American role in covert operations remain unseen].

Should not someone, somewhere in an authoritative position in our government, on a continuing basis, be counting the immediate costs of disappointments (Jordan, Syria, Egypt, et al.), calculating the impacts on our international position, and keeping in mind the long-range wisdom of activities which have entailed the virtual abandonment of the international "golden rule," and which, if successful to the degree claimed for them, are responsible, in a great measure, for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? What of the effects on our present alliances? Where will we be tomorrow?

We are sure that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive psychological warfare and paramilitary program could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it. No one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, have any detailed knowledge of what is going on. With the world situation in the state it is today now would appear to be the time to engage in a reappraisal and realistic adjustment of that program with perhaps some accompanying "unentanglement" of our involvement, and a more rational application of our activities than is now apparent.

"a strange kind of genius": Ann Whitman memo, October 19, 1954, DDEL.

Chapter Fourteen

"If you go and live with these Arabs": NSC minutes, June 18, 1959, DDEL.

"a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action": Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Officer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 444-448.

few CIA officers spoke the language: "Inspector General's Survey of the CIA Training Program," June 1960, declassified May 1, 2002, CIA/CREST; Matthew Baird, CIA Director of Training, "Subject: Foreign Language Development Program," November 8, 1956, declassified August 1, 2001, CIA/CREST.

"the 'holy war' aspect" and "a secret task force": Goodpaster memorandum of conference with the president, September 7, 1957, DDEL. Eisenhower's hopes for military action to protect Islam against militant atheism and his meetings with Rountree to orchestrate secret American military aid to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon were recorded by his staff secretary, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, in memos dated August 23 and August 28, 1957, DDEL.

"These four mongrels": Symmes oral history, FAOH.

Frank Wisner's proposal: Frank G. Wisner, memorandum for the record, "Subject: Resume of OCB Luncheon Meeting," June 12, 1957, CIA/CREST. The memo says that "Wisner pushed need for across-the-board assistance to Jordan," in addition to CIA support. "The Agency is strongly in favor of getting Saudi Arabia and Iraq to put up as much as they can."

"Let's put it this way": Symmes oral history, FAOH.

"a likeable rogue": Miles Copeland, The Game Player (London: Aurum, 1989), pp. 74-93.

"ripe for a military coup d'etat": Dulles in NSC minutes, March 3, 1955. The best account of the CIA's work in the region is Douglas Little, "Mission Impossible: The CIA and the Cult of Covert Action in the Middle East," Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5, November 2004. Little's essay is a tour de force based on primary documents. Copeland's memoirs are strong on atmosphere but untrustworthy on telling details unless independently confirmed by scholarship like Little's.

A document discovered in 2003: The British document describing the joint CIA-SIS plot against Syria was discovered by Matthew Jones and detailed in his monograph "The 'Preferred Plan': The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957," Intelligence and National Security, September 2004.

"The officers with whom Stone was dealing": Curtis F. Jones oral history, FAOH. "We were trying to overcome more than the Rocky Stone episode," Jones said. "For example, we had financed arms purchases by Armenians who buried them in Syria"--until Syrian intelligence dug up the arms caches and broke up the underground battalion.

"particularly clumsy CIA plot": Charles Yost, History and Memory: A Statesman's Perceptions of the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 236-237.

"some soul-searching" and "pulling the strings": Deputies' meeting, May 14, 1958, CIA/CREST.

"caught completely by surprise": Gordon oral history, FAOH.

"the most dangerous place in the world": NSC minutes, May 13, 1958, DDEL.

"We have no evidence that Qasim is a communist": CIA briefing to NSC, January 15, 1959, CIA/CREST.

"The only effective and organized force in Iraq": Deputies' meeting, May 14, 1959, CIA/CREST.

another failed assassination plot: In 1960, Critchfield proposed the poisoned handkerchief. Helms endorsed it. So did Bissell. Dulles approved. All believed they were carrying out the wishes of the president of the United States.

"We came to power on a CIA train": Sa'adi quoted in Said Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (New York: St. Martin's, 2001). Aburish was a committed Ba'athist who broke with Saddam and chronicled the brutality of his regime. He gave an instructive interview to Frontline, published on the Web site of the PBS documentary series(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/ aburish.html). "The U.S. involvement in the coup against Kassem in Iraqin 1963 was substantial," he said. "There is evidence that CIA agents were in touch with army officers who were involved in the coup. There is evidence that an electronic command center was set up in Kuwait to guide the forces who were fighting Kassem. There is evidence that they supplied the conspirators with lists of people who had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success. The relationship between the Americans and the Ba'ath Party at that moment in time was very close indeed. And that continued for some time after the coup. And there was an exchange of information between the two sides. For example it is one of the first times that the United States was able to get certain models of MiG fighters and certain tanks made in the Soviet Union. That was the bribe. That was what the Ba'ath had to offer the United States in return for their help in eliminating Kassem." James Critchfield, who orchestrated the operation as the Near East chief of the clandestine service, said to the Associated Press shortly before he died in April 2003: "You have to understand the context of the time and the scope of the threat we were facing. That's what I say to people who say, 'You guys in the CIA created Saddam Hussein.'"

Chapter Fifteen

"measures by this Government that would cause the fall of the new regime in Indonesia": NSC minutes, September 9, 1953, DDEL.

"a tremendous hold on the people; is completely noncommunist": "Meeting with the Vice President, Friday, 8 January, 1954," CIA/DDRS.

"There was planning of such a possibility": Bissell testimony, President's Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), April 21, 1975, Top Secret, declassified 1995, GRFL.

"all feasible covert means": NSC 5518, declassified 2003, DDEL.

"a number of political figures": Bissell oral history, DDEL.

"God, we had fun": Ulmer interview with author.

fire-breathing cables: CIA report summaries, "NSC Briefing: Indonesia," February 27 and 28, March 5 and March 14, and April 3 and 10, 1957; CIA deputies' meeting, March 4, 1957; CIA estimate, "The Situation in Indonesia," March 5, 1957.

"Sumatrans prepared to fight": "NSC Briefing: Indonesia," April 17, 1957; CIA chronology, "Indonesian Operation," March 15, 1958, declassified January 9, 2002. All CIA/CREST.

"attempt to find out State Department policy on Indonesia": Director's meeting, July 19, 1957, CIA/CREST.

"subversion by ballot": F. M. Dearborn to White House, "Some Notes on Far East Trip," November 1957, declassified August 10, 2003, DDEL. Dearborn personally reported on his trip in a face-to-face meeting with Eisenhower on November 16, according to the president's diary. CIA, "Special Report on Indonesia," September 13, 1957, declassified September 9, 2003, DDEL. "Indonesian Operation," March 5, 1958, CIA/CREST.

Al Ulmer believed: Ulmer and Sichel interviews with author. In the summer of 1957, Ulmer sent out a call to clandestine service officers to monitor Sukarno during his annual jaunt on a chartered Pan Am jet to Asia's most exclusive bordellos. The fruits of his mission were limited to a sample of Sukarno's stool for medical analysis, obtained by the chief of the Hong Kong station, Peter Sichel, with the help of a patriotic Pan Am crew in the CIA's pay. In the absence of knowledge, all evidence was germane.

"beyond the point of no return": NSC minutes, August 1, 1957, DDEL.

"utmost gravity": Deputies' meeting, August 2, 1957, CIA/CREST.

"the dismemberment of Indonesia": Cumming Committee, "Special Report on Indonesia," September 13, 1957, declassified July 9, 2003, DDEL. At this time, Ambassador Allison accepted a summons to come over to the presidential palace for an informal chat. Sukarno wanted Eisenhower to come to Indonesia, to see the country for himself, to be the very first head of state to visit the lovely new guest house he was building on Bali. When the cold rejection from Washington arrived two weeks later, Allison handed it over with a shudder: "I literally saw Sukarno's jaw drop as he read President Eisenhower's letter. He couldn't believe it." Allison's views and quotations cited in this chapter are in John M. Allison, Ambassador from the Prairie, or Allison Wonderland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 307-339.

Eisenhower ordered the agency: The language of the order is printed in the CIA's chronology, "Indonesian Operation," March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST.

Wisner flew to the CIA station in Singapore: CIA records show two trips to the region in the fall of 1957 and the spring of 1958. Wisner sought to make sure that the State Department knew as little as possible about his covert-action plans. The minutes of the director's meeting on December 26, 1957, say that he had meetings scheduled with State Department officials set for December 30 "concerning the Indonesian situation. Mr. Wisner expressed the hope that these discussions could be fairly well limited to policy matters rather than permitted to slice over into operational matters."

The CIA's Jakarta station: "Indonesian Operation," March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST. The paramilitary operation is detailed in Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, Feet to the Fire: CIA Covert Operations in Indonesia, 1957-1958 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), pp. 50-98. The background of the political-warfare programs is in Audrey R. Kahin and George M. T. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).

"sons of Eisenhower": Office of U.S. Army attache, Jakarta, to State, May 25, 1958, cited in Kahin and Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy, p. 178. The CIA asked the Pentagon to help find more English-speaking Indonesian Army officers who wanted to seize power with the CIA's assistance. Memo to Allen W. Dulles from Major General Robert A. Schow, the army's intelligence chief, February 5, 1958.
The responses should have given the Americans some pause. General Nasution, the professional military officer who led the Indonesian Army and stayed loyal to the government, assured the U.S. Army attache in Jakarta, Major George Benson, that he already was purging every suspected communist from any position of influence. Lieutenant Colonel D. I. Pandjaitan, an Indonesian military attache based in Bonn--and a Christian, his American counterparts noted--proclaimed: "If the U.S. knows of any Communists, let them tell us, and we will have them removed.... We will do anything except shoot Sukarno or attack the Communists without proof of illegal actions on their part. In our country now we cannot arrest Communists just because they are Communists; we will remove them"--and here the colonel stabbed at the air as if holding a knife--"if they step out of line." Memorandum of conversation with Indonesian army officers, date unclear but probably early 1958, declassified April 4, 2003, CIA/CREST.

Foster said he was "in favor of doing something": JFD telephone call transcripts, DDEL.

"the United States faced very difficult problems": NSC minutes, February 27, 1958, DDEL.

"It was a very strange war": NSC minutes, April 25, 1958, DDEL.

"any operations partaking of a military character in Indonesia": NSC minutes, April 14, 1958, DDEL. John Foster Dulles, memorandum of conversation with the president, April 15, 1958, DDEL.

"I enjoyed killing Communists": Pope interview with author.

"almost too effective": NSC minutes, May 1, 1958, DDEL.

"stirred great anger": NSC minutes, May 4, 1958, DDEL.

"it could not be conducted as a completely covert operation": "Indonesian Operation," March 15, 1958, CIA/CREST. Incredibly, Allen Dulles pleaded poverty as the reason for the failed mission. The CIA needed at least $50 million more in its covert action budget, he told Eisenhower: "We were quite thin in our resources to meet situations such as that in Indonesia." 152 "They convicted me of murder": Pope interview with author. Sukarno waited two years before putting Pope on trial. The CIA pilot was held at a summer resort on the slopes of Mount Merapi, where his guards took him hunting and gave him every chance to escape. He calculated this as a plot, a way for the government to turn a strapping blond, blue-eyed American prisoner over to the Communist Party of Indonesia. After four years and two months of captivity, he was set free in July 1962 at the personal request of the attorney general of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy. He went back to flying for the CIA in Vietnam for the rest of the 1960s. In February 2005, at age seventy-six, Al Pope was awarded the Legion of Honor by the government of France for his role in the resupply of besieged French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

"glaring mix-up": Director's meeting, May 19, 1958, CIA/CREST.

favorable to the United States: "NSC Briefing: Indonesia," May 21, 1958, declassified January 15, 2004, CIA/CREST.

"The operation was, of course, a complete failure": Bissell oral history, DDEL.

"Dissident B-26 aircraft shot down": "NSC Briefing: Indonesia," May 21, 1958, CIA/CREST.

He came back from the Far East in June 1958 at the edge of his sanity, and at summer's end he went mad: But Wisner had been demonstrably unsound since late 1956, and so had the clandestine service. Paul Nitze, a good friend who had worked closely with Wisner as Kennan's successor at the State Department, observed that "the upshot of the strains of that Hungarian episode and the Suez episode were more than Frank could bear and he had a nervous breakdown after that. I think that the difficulties[at the clandestine service] began after Frank had a nervous breakdown.... They began after Frank was no longer competent to run it." Nitze oral history, HSTL. Wisner suffered through "a very hard time" during his treatment, Dulles wrote to his old deputy director, Bill Jackson, in December 1958. "I hope it will not now be many weeks before he is out of the sanitarium." Allen Dulles papers, declassified February 13, 2001, CIA. At the time, electroshock was "used for a variety of disorders, frequently in high doses and for long periods.... Many of these efforts proved ineffective, and some even harmful." See "Report of the National Institute of Mental Health Consensus Development Conference on Electroconvulsive Therapy," Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 254, 1985, pp. 2103-2108.

"at a loss": Director's meeting, June 23, 1958, CIA/CREST.

"We had constructed": Smith cited in Douglas Garthoff, "Analyzing Soviet Politics and Foreign Policy," in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett(eds.), Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union CIA/CSI, 2003.

a report from his intelligence board: "Subject: Third Report of the President by the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities" and memorandum of conference with the president [by the board], December 16, 1958, CIA/DDEL. At this meeting with the president, former defense secretary Robert Lovett "reinforced the views of the Board that the present organization is weak by citing the example of Indonesia," read the top secret minutes of the meeting. "Mr. Lovett pointed out by way of general summary that we have two basic ways of obtaining reliable information, through gadgets and through individual secret agents. It is in this latter field, the secret agents, that he feels we will obtain our best information.... We are not good in this field and we should get better."

"our problems were getting greater every year": Dulles, minutes of senior staff meeting, January 12, 1959, CIA/CREST.

Chapter Sixteen

Richard Bissell became the chief: Bissell's ambitions for the CIA were great; the obstacles against them were greater. He told his senior officers that his mandate was to merge the "Hot War plans and Cold War capabilities" of the United States--to make the CIA more sword than shield in the battle against the Soviets. He created a new division, Development Projects, that allowed him to run covert action programs out of his hip pocket. He saw the CIA as an instrument of American power no less potent--and much more useful--than the nuclear arsenal or the 101st Airborne Division. "Mr. Bissell's Remarks, War Planners Conference," March 16, 1959, declassified January 7, 2002, CIA/CREST.

Bissell knew the agency was dangerously short on the talent needed to achieve his goals. His own "sheer brilliance," said one of his top assistants, Jim Flannery, "could not overcome the fact that the clandestine service is basically people." Flannery quoted in Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 320.

Bissell immediately ordered his division chiefs to "identify substandard employees and dispose of them." He wanted an "unrelenting and constant" culling of the herd. "Look beyond the case of inefficiency or wrongdoing," he instructed his underlings. "Identify and terminate those employees who are not carrying, can not, or will not carry their fair share of the work." Richard Bissell, "Subject: Program for Greater Efficiency in CIA," February 2, 1959, declassified February 12, 2002, CIA/CREST.

A detailed internal survey of the CIA's clandestine service in November 1959 showed the source of Bissell's concerns: the recruitment of talented young officers had dwindled while the ranks of the mediocre and middle-aged swelled. "A very considerable percentage" of the CIA's officers soon would be at least fifty years old; they were the World War II generation, and in three short years they would start retiring en masse after twenty years of military and intelligence service. "There is a strongfeeling of frustration widespread among the best Clandestine Service officers which has its origin in the Agency's apparent inability to solve the manpower problem," the internal CIA study showed. That problem remains unsolved today. "Subject: A Manpower Control Problem for the Clandestine Services Career Program," November 4, 1959, declassified August 1, 2001, CIA/CREST.

A secret CIA history: Unless otherwise noted, quotations and citations on the CIA and Cuba in this chapter are taken from the CIA's clandestine history of the planning on the Bay of Pigs operation: Jack Pfeiffer, Evolution of CIA's Anti-Castro Policies, 1951-January 1961, Vol. 3 of Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, CIA, NARA (hereinafter cited as Pfeiffer).
Pfeiffer was named the CIA's chief historian in 1976; he retired in 1984 and spent a decade thereafter unsuccessfully suing the CIA to release this work. His three-hundred-page history turned up in the National Archives in June 2005, unearthed by Professor David Barrett of Villanova University.

Jim Noel: Noel quoted in Pfeiffer. Ambassador William Attwood, who served as President Kennedy's personal back channel to Castro in the summer of 1963, remembered: "I was in Cuba, in '59, and I met CIA people there whose main sources were members of the Havana country club.... They didn't get out among the people." Attwood oral history, FAOH.

Al Cox: Cox quoted in Pfeiffer.

Robert Reynolds: Reynolds made the remark to the author and several other reporters attending a conference on the Bay of Pigs in Havana in 2001.

"a new spiritual leader": Quoted in Pfeiffer.

"Though our intelligence experts backed and filled": Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace: The White House Years: 1956-1961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), p. 524.

"the elimination of Fidel Castro": Authorship of the memo may be credited to J. C. King, then finishing his ninth year as chief of the Western Hemisphere division. The editing by Dulles is in Pfeiffer.

"anybody with eyes could see": Unless otherwise noted, quotations from Jake Esterline in this book are from videotaped interviews with Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive or from Esterline's remarks at transcripts of conferences on the Bay of Pigs conducted at the Musgrove Plantation in Georgia in 1996. The Musgrove conference is in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

"The Dripping Cuban": Helms and the dripping Cuban are in Pfeiffer. "Helms completely divorced himself from this thing. I mean absolutely!" Dick Drain, chief of operations for the Cuba task force, recounted. "The third time that he said, 'You know I have nothing to do with this project,' I said, 'Well, Mr. Helms, I don't want to be fatuous about this, but I wish to Christ that you did because we could use your expertise.' He said, 'Hahaha...yes...well, thank you very much,' and that was the end of that. He avoided the thing like the plague."

It had four: Raymond L. Garthoff, "Estimating Soviet Military Intentions and Capabilities," in Gerald K. Haines and Robert E. Leggett (eds.), Watching the Bear: Essays on CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, CIA/CSI, 2003.

"provocative pin-pricking": Goodpaster memo, October 30, 1959, DDEL.

"the lie we told about the U-2": Ike made the remark to journalist David Kraslow; it is cited in several sources, including David Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973).

"Bissell probably believed": Michael Warner, "The CIA's Internal Probe of the Bay of Pigs Affair," Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1998-1999, CIA/CSI.

should be eliminated: The evidence that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba dead is overwhelming. "The President did want a man whom he regarded (as did lots of others, myself included) as a thorough scoundrel and a very dangerous man, got rid of," Bissell said later in an oral-history interview for the Eisenhower presidential library. "I have not the slightest doubt that he wanted Lumumba got rid of and he wanted it badly and promptly, as a matter of urgency and of very great importance. Allen's cable reflected that sense of urgency and priority." NSC secretary Robert Johnson's testimony on Eisenhower's order to kill Lumumba at the NSC meeting on August 18, 1960, and Devlin's quoted testimony on his orders coming from "the President" were given to investigators for the Church Committee. Devlin testified on August 25, 1975; Johnson testified on June 18 and September 13, 1975. On the murder of Lumumba, see "Conclusions of the Enquiry Committee," a thousand-page parliamentary report published by the government of Belgium in December 2001. See also NSC minutes, September 12 and 19, 1960, DDEL. Steve Weissman, former staff director, House of Representatives subcommittee on Africa, granted the author an illuminating interview on the structure of the covert operation in the Congo; see also Weissman's "Opening the Secret Files on Lumumba's Murder," Washington Post, July 21, 2002. After the killing, Nikita Khrushchev had a conversation with the American ambassador in Moscow, who reported in an eyes-only cable to Washington: "With respect to Congo K said what had happened there and particularly murder of Lumumba had helped communism. Lumumba was not Communist and he doubted if he would have become one." FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. X, document 51. Moscow nonetheless established the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University for students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the KGB used it as a rich recruiting ground. But Soviet intelligence would never return to the Congo under Mobutu, who personally staged a mock execution of the last Soviet intelligence officer he expelled from the capital.

The CIA delivered $250,000: Personal testimony on the payoffs to the CIA's allies in the Congo comes from Owen Roberts, later a U.S. ambassador under President Ronald Reagan. Roberts was the ranking expert on the Congo at the State Department's intelligence and research bureau in Washington in 1960. He had served for two years in the Congolese capital and was the first American foreign service officer who knew all the new leaders personally. He was working on a book-length study of the country financed by the CIA in 1960, and he served as the escort officer when Prime Minister Lumumba, President Joseph Kasavubu, and eighteen of their ministers visited Washington and the United Nations, where the general assembly convened in September 1960. "The CIA made some payoffs, I know," to the Congolese delegation at the United Nations, Ambassador Roberts said. Roberts oral history, FAOH.

"We had made a major effort": Bissell interview in Piero Gleijeses, "Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House, and the Bay of Pigs," Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 27, 1995, pp. 1-42.

"a tired old man": Lehman oral history, "Mr. Current Intelligence," Studies in Intelligence, Summer 2000, CIA/CSI.

"worth the risk": "Report from the Chairman of the President's Board of Intelligence Consultants" and "Sixth Report of the President's Board of Consultants," January 5, 1961, DDEL; "Report of the Joint Study Group," December 15, 1960, DDEL; Lyman Kirkpatrick, memorandum for director of central intelligence, "Subject: Summary of Survey Report of FI Staff, DDP," undated, CIA/CREST; NSC minutes, January 5 and 12, 1961, DDEL.

"I reminded the President": Gordon Gray, memorandum of meeting with President Eisenhower, January 18, 1961, DDEL.

"an eight-year defeat" and "a legacy of ashes": Memorandum of discussion at the 473rd meeting of the NSC, January 5, 1961, DDEL; memorandum from Director of Central Intelligence Dulles, January 9, 1961 (Dulles claiming that he had "corrected deficiencies" in the clandestine service and that everything there was "now satisfactory"); memorandum of discussion at the 474th meeting of the NSC, January 12, 1961, DDEL(Dulles saying that American intelligence was "better than it ever had been," that creating a director of national intelligence would be "illegal," and that such a director would be "a body floating in thin air"). The declassified NSC minutes, published in 2002, are not verbatim notes, but they preserve the president's anger and frustration. All are collected in FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. XXV, released in March 7, 2002.

PART THREE

Chapter Seventeen

"Senator Kennedy asked the President's judgment": "Transfer: January 19, 1961, Meeting of the President and Senator Kennedy," declassified January 9, 1997, DDEL.

"He had his torture chambers": Dearborn oral history, FAOH. This is a remarkably candid interview.

"The great problem now": RFK notes cited in Church Committee report.

The worst that could happen: Unless otherwise indicated, the reconstruction of the Bay of Pigs invasion in this chapter is drawn directly from The Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. 10, Cuba, 1961-1962, declassified in 1997, and its microfiche supplements, published in 1998, Vol. 11; Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, 1962-1963, declassified in 1996, and its 1998 supplements; and Jack Pfeiffer, Evolution of CIA's Anti-Castro Policies, 1951-January 1961, Vol. 3 of Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, CIA, NARA. Quotes from Jake Esterline are from the Musgrove conference transcript, in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

another blown operation: The station chief who tried to buy off the government was Art Jacobs, Frank Wisner's law school friend and gatekeeper in the early days of the CIA, a diminutive man known in those days as Ozzard of Wiz. "We had a bandit down in Singapore, a cabinet minister who was on the CIA payroll," remembered Ambassador Sam Hart, then a political officer at the American embassy in Malaysia. "One night they had him wired to a polygraph in a safe house.... The Singapore M-5 burst in on the safe house and there's this cabinet minister wired to the polygraph." Hart oral history, FAOH. The subsequent letter from Rusk read: "Dear Mr. Prime Minister: I am deeply distressed...regret very much...unfortunate incident...improper activities...very serious...reviewing activities of these officials for possible disciplinary actions."

could not launch air strikes: Cabell and Bissell, memorandum for General Maxwell D. Taylor, "Subject: Cuban Operation," May 9, 1961, JFKL, DDRS.

The president said he was unaware that there were going to be any air strikes on the morning of D-Day: FRUS, Vol. XI, April 25, 1961 (Taylor Board).

"The time has come for a showdown": Robert F. Kennedy to the president, April 19, 1961, JFKL, cited in Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 97.

"Mr. President, I stood right here": The aides were Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, and their accounts are, respectively, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), and Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).

an instrument of government he had disdained: President Kennedy had torn out the wiring in the White House for governing the use of secret power. Eisenhower had exerted the presidential power through a rigorous staff system, like the army's. Kennedy had tossed it around like a pigskin at a touch football game. Days after taking office, he had abolished the president's panel of intelligence consultants and the Operations Coordinating Board. They were assuredly imperfect institutions, but they were better than nothing, which was what John Kennedy had built in their place. The post-Bay of Pigs meeting of the NSC was the first serious roundtable discussion of covert action in the Kennedy administration.

"I'm first to recognize": Dulles quoted in "Paramilitary Study Group Meeting"(Taylor Board), May 11, 1961, declassified March 2000 and available online at http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB29/06-01.htm.

"take the bucket of slop": Smith quoted in "Paramilitary Study Group Meeting" (Taylor Board), May 10, 1961, NARA.

"He leaves an enduring legacy": Bissell, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 204. Bissell came to believe he had left the CIA with "a legacy that has still not been put to rest historically and perhaps never will be." In secret testimony declassified in 1996, Bissell gave this assessment of the CIA's clandestine service: "In part because of my own failings and shortcomings, by the late '60s the Agency already had, I thought, a rather lamentable record.... Reviewing the whole range of different kinds of covert operations--they involved propaganda operations, paramilitary operations, political action operations, and the whole range--the Clandestine Service is not the place where one would expect to look for professional competence." Bissell said that basic skills in military affairs, political analysis, and economic analysis had not been developed at the CIA. The agency had become nothing more than a secret bureaucracy--and a "very sloppy" one at that. Bissell testimony, President's Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), April 21, 1975, GRFL.

"and unmistakable self-confidence": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 195.

"not a man that people were going to love": James Hanrahan, "An Interview with Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. 'Red' White," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 1999-2000, CIA/CSI.

McCone tried to get the big picture: On his worldwide tour to meet the troops, at the Far East station chiefs' retreat at the mountain resort of Baguio in the Philippines in October 1961, McCone chose a new deputy director to serve as the CIA's chief intelligence analyst: Ray Cline, then chief of station in Taipei.

There were more than a few operations that McCone and the Special Group knew little or nothing about: Division chiefs such as J. C. King, who had served a decade under Dulles, thought nothing of running operations as they saw fit. McCone also never knew that his appointment had set off an internal rebellion at the agency. "I, for one, underestimated the strength of the opposition in the second and third levels of CIA," McGeorge Bundy told the president. "Some very good men are disquieted." Robert Amory, the deputy director of intelligence, called McCone's appointment "a cheap political move." Other foes within the CIA feared McCone would sacrifice the agency to the young lions at the White House. Still others at the clandestine service were unhappy at an outsider's coming to power.

"The President explained": McCone memo, November 22, 1961, FRUS, Vol. X. 182 "a 'cloak and dagger' outfit": McCone memorandum for the file, January 13, 1964: "I have felt, and expressed myself to the late President Kennedy, to President Johnson, and to Secretary Rusk and others, that the DCI and CIA image must be changed. Its basic and primary responsibilities by law are to assemble all intelligence, analyze, evaluate, estimate and report such intelligence for the benefit of policy makers. This function has been submerged and CIA has been consistently referred to as a 'cloak and dagger' outfit whose activities involve (almost exclusively) operations designed to overthrow governments, assassinate Heads of State, involve itself in political affairs of foreign states.... I wish to attempt to change this image." FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXXIII, document 184. McCone was "a man who believed he had two hats: one hat was running the Agency, and the other hat was as one of the President's policymakers." Richard Helms oral history, September 16, 1981, LBJL. McCone said he consistently argued that the CIA "had through the years been subordinated to operational activities"--and "this had to be changed." McCone memo, "Discussion with Attorney General Robert Kennedy," December 27, 1961, CIA/CREST. He drafted and received a written understanding that he would be "the Government's principal intelligence officer." JFK to McCone, January 16, 1962, CIA/CREST.

"You are now living on the bull's eye": David S. Robarge, "Directors of Central Intelligence, 1946-2005," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2005, CIA/CSI.

"Berlin was a sham": Smith interview with author.

"operations in East Germany were out of the question": Murphy, CNN Interactive chat transcript, 1998, available online at http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/guides/debate/chats/murphy/.

The agency was all but out of business: Murphy to Helms, "Subject: Heinz Felfe Damage Assessment," February 7, 1963, declassified June 2006, CIA.

"the top priority": Helms to McCone, January 19, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

"Of the 27 or 28 agents": McCone memo, "Discussion with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, 2:45 P.M., 27 December 1961," FRUS, Vol. X.

the Catholic Church and the Cuban underworld: Lansdale to McCone, December 7, 1961, FRUS, Vol. X.

"Ed had this aura around him": Esterline, Musgrove transcript, Politics of Illusion, p. 113.

"Let's get the hell on with it": Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 205.

"he wanted fast answers": Elder statement to Church Committee investigators, August 13, 1975, declassified May 4, 1994.

"it would meet with the president's approval": The question of whether president Kennedy authorized the CIA to kill Castro can be answered, at least to my satisfaction. In 1975, Bissell testified to the presidential commission led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller on the question of presidential authorization of assassinations by the CIA.

Rockefeller questioned Bissell:

Q: Any assassination or assassination attempt would have to have the highest approval?

A: That's correct.

Q: From the President?

A: That is correct.

"mad as hell": Houston to the historian Thomas Powers: "Kennedy was mad," Houston said. "He was mad as hell.... He was not angry about the assassination plot, but about our involvement with the Mafia." Powers, "Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks," Atlantic Monthly, August 1979.

"no question in my mind that he did": Helms interview with author. This seems to me to settle the question of JFK's authorization, taken together with Bissell's testimony and the overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence. The counterargument is that John Kennedy would never have done such a thing, and that argument has worn very thin.

"why shouldn't they kill yours?": The full context of Helms's observation is worth reproducing, now that the CIA is back in the business of targeted killings. "Let's leave aside the notion of theology and the morality of all good men for just a moment," he said in 1978. "Leaving that aside, one comes smack up against the fact that if you hire someone to kill somebody else, you are immediately subject to blackmail, and that includes individuals as well as governments. In short, these things inevitably come out. That is the most compelling reason for not getting involved. But then there is an ancillary consideration. If you become involved in the business of eliminating foreign leaders, and it is considered by governments more frequently than one likes to admit, there is always the question of who comes next.... If you kill someone else's leaders, why shouldn't they kill yours?" The question was very much on Helms's mind after November 22, 1963. Helms interview with David Frost, 1978, full transcript reprinted in Studies in Intelligence, September 1993, CIA/CSI.

"CIA was suffering" and "morale was pretty well shattered": McCone oral history, August 19, 1970, LBJL. McCone recounted his first meeting with President Kennedy, when he was offered the job as director of central intelligence: "[JFK said]: 'Now, there are only four people besides Allen Dulles that know that we are having this discussion: Bob McNamara and his deputy Roswell Gilpatric, and Dean Rusk, and [Chairman of the Senate Atomic Energy Committee] Senator Clinton Anderson.' And he said, 'I don't want anybody else to know about it, because if these liberals. o.b.'s that work in the basement of this building hear that I am talking to you about this, they'd destroy you before I can get you confirmed.'" McCone oral history, April 21, 1988, Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley.

"accident-prone"..."alcohol-addicted"..."something should be done immediately to restore morale in the Agency": Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., "Report of the Task Force on Personnel Management in CIA," July 26, 1962, CIA/CREST; Kirkpatrick's handwritten notes from an August 6, 1962, Executive Committee meeting on the report, CIA/CREST.

1,300 Cuban refugees: Harvey to Lansdale, May 24, 1962, CIA/DDRS

"forty-five men": Lansdale to Special Group (Augmented), July 5, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

"Can CIA actually hope to generate such strikes?": Lansdale to Harvey, August 6, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

Chapter Eighteen

John F. Kennedy walked into the Oval Office and switched on the brand-new state-of-the-art taping system: Direct quotations in this chapter are drawn from the recently transcribed Kennedy White House tapes, unless otherwise cited. The tapes, McCone's newly declassified memos, and more than one thousand pages of internal CIA records create a rich mosaic of the daily life of the agency in the summer and fall of 1962. The White House tapes from July 30 through October 28, 1962, are compiled in Timothy Naftali, Philip Zelikow, and Ernest May (eds.), The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, 3 vols. (New York: Norton, 2001), produced by the Miller Center of Public Affairs. The cited McCone memos are from three sources: FRUS, CREST, and DDRS. The internal CIA records were obtained by the author from CREST.

The return on these investments: Two years after this Oval Office conversation, Goulart was overthrown, and Brazil was on the road to a police state. Bobby Kennedy had gone to Brazil to see the situation for himself: "I didn't like Goulart," he said. The 1964 coup backed by the CIA led to the first in a series of military dictatorships that ruled Brazil for the better part of twenty years.

McCone had given the go-ahead: The director drew a distinction in his own mind between a coup in which there might be a bloodbath and a targeted assassination attempt against a head of state. One was moral, the other was not; a coup in which a president was killed might be deplorable, but not reprehensible.

On August 10...The subject was Cuba: Almost every record of this meeting has been destroyed, but fragments were painstakingly reassembled by State Department historians from the files of the director of central intelligence: "McCone maintained at the meeting that the Soviet Union had in Cuba an asset of such importance that 'the Soviets will not let Cuba fail.' To prevent such a failure McCone expected that the Soviet Union would supplement economic, technical, and conventional military aid with medium-range ballistic missiles, which they would justify by reference to U.S. missile bases in Italy and Turkey.... [T]he issue of the assassination of Cuban political leaders came up during the discussion. According to an August 14 memorandum from Harvey to Richard Helms, the issue was raised during the meeting by McNamara.... On April 14, 1967, McCone sent a memorandum from his retirement to Helms, who had become Director of Central Intelligence, in which he wrote of the discussion at the August 10 meeting: 'I recall a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime, including Castro. I took immediate exception to this suggestion, stating that the subject was completely out of bounds as far as the USG and CIA were concerned and the idea should not be discussed nor should it appear in any papers, as the USG could not consider such actions on moral or ethical grounds.'" FRUS, Vol. X, editorial note, document 371. McCone first raised the question of nuclear weapons in Cuba at a March 12, 1962, Special Group meeting: "Could we now develop a policy for action if missile bases are placed on Cuban soil?" FRUS, Vol. X, document 316. But on August 8, 1962, only two days before delivering his first warning that Soviet missiles would be sent to Cuba, McCone had told a gathering of twenty-six Republican senators that he was "positive that there were no missiles or missile bases in Cuba." "Luncheon Meeting Attended by the DCI of Senate Republican Policy Committee," August 8, 1962, declassified May 12, 2005, CIA/CREST.

"If I were Khrushchev": Walter Elder, "John McCone, the Sixth Director of Central Intelligence," draft copy, CIA History Staff, 1987, partially declassified and released in 1998.

"the Soviets were going to be Number One": Ford quoted in John L. Helgerson, "CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates," May 1996, CIA/CSI.

"They had charts on the wall": Ford cited by the author, The New York Times, July 20, 1997.

"I went to see President Kennedy": Jagan interview with author.

"the United States supports the idea": "Interview Between President Kennedy and the Editor of Izvestia," November 25, 1961, FRUS, Vol. V. 192 "a really covert operation": Schlesinger memo, July 19, 1962, FRUS, Vol. XII.

time to bring matters to a head: Memo to Bundy, August 8, 1962.

The president launched a $2 million campaign: The author laid out some of its consequences in "A Kennedy-C.I.A. Plot Returns to Haunt Clinton," The New York Times, October 30, 1994. The article touched on the struggle over the declassification of the government records about the covert operation. In 2005, the State Department published the following "editorial note" in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXXII: "During the Johnson administration, the U.S. Government continued the Kennedy administration's policy of working with the British Government to offer encouragement and support to the pro-West leaders and political organizations of British Guiana as that limited self-governing colony moved toward total independence. The Special Group/303 Committee approved approximately $2.08 million for covert action programs between 1962 and 1968 in that country. U.S. policy included covert opposition to Cheddi Jagan, the then pro-Marxist leader of British Guiana's East Indian population. A portion of the funds authorized by the Special Group/303 Committee for covert action programs was used between November 1962 and June 1963 to improve the election prospects of the opposition political parties to the government of Jagan's People's Progressive Party. The U.S. Government successfully urged the British to impose a system of proportional representation in British Guiana (which favored the anti-Jagan forces) and to delay independence until the anti-Jagan forces could be strengthened."

e note continued: "Through the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States provided Forbes Burnham's and Peter D'Aguiar's political parties, which were in opposition to Jagan, with both money and campaign expertise as they prepared to contest the December 1964 parliamentary elections. The U.S. Government's covert funding and technical expertise were designed to play a decisive role in the registration of voters likely to vote against Jagan. Burnham's and D'Aguiar's supporters were registered in large numbers, helping to elect an anti-Jagan coalition. Special Group/303 Committee-approved funds again were used between July 1963 and April 1964 in connection with the 1964 general strike in British Guiana. When Jagan's and Burnham's supporters clashed in labor strife in the sugar plantations that year, the United States joined with the British Government in urging Burnham not to retaliate with violence, but rather to commit to a mediated end to the conflict. At the same time, the United States provided training to certain of the anti-Jagan forces to enable them to defend themselves if attacked and to boost their morale.

"Following the general strike, 303 Committee-approved funds were used to support the election of a coalition of Burnham's People's National Congress and D'Aguiar's United Force. After Burnham was elected Premier in December 1963, the U.S. Government, again through the CIA, continued to provide substantial funds to both Burnham and D'Aguiar and their parties. In 1967 and 1968, 303 Committee-approved funds were used to help the Burnham and D'Aguiar coalition contest and win the December 1968 general elections. When the U.S. Government learned that Burnham was going to use fraudulent absentee ballots to continue in power in the 1968 elections, it advised him against such a course of action, but did not try to stop him."

"the most dangerous area in the world": Memorandum of conversation, June 30, 1963, Birch Grove, England, "Subject: British Guiana." Participants included President Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Ambassador David Bruce, McGeorge Bundy, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Lord Home, and Sir David Ormsby-Gore. FRUS, Vol. XII.

"all about the dirty tricks": Naftali, Zelikow, and May, The Presidential Recordings. Later that day, the president read aloud from the doctrine paper, a classic of geostrategic gobbledygook: In the interests of U.S. national security seek to replace local leadership with indigenous leaders who are more amenable and sympathetic to the need for eliminating the breeding areas for dissension...seeking to insure that modernization of the local society evolves in directions which will afford a congenial world environment for fruitful international cooperation and for our way of life. "That's a lot of crap," Kennedy said scornfully. "'For our way of life.'"

On August 21, Robert Kennedy asked McCone: RFK argued for a "Remember the Maine" incident--a staged attack on Guantanamo--at this meeting and continued to advocate it during the missile crisis. McCone memo, August 21, 1962, in "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992; McCone memo on McCone-JFK meeting, August 23, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X, document 385.

"How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?": Naftali, Zelikow, and May, The Presidential Recordings. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI went to interrogate Baldwin and to tap his home telephone. Baldwin was a graduate of the naval academy who had resigned his commission in 1927, worked as a military analyst for The New York Times since 1937, won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Guadalcanal and the western Pacific in 1943, and was a dependably pro-military voice in the pages of the paper. His sources at the Pentagon were first-rate. After his visit from the FBI, the shaken Timesman told a colleague in a conversation taped by the bureau on the night of July 30: "I think the real answer to this is Bobby Kennedy and the President himself, but Bobby Kennedy particularly putting pressure on Hoover." A transcript of that conversation was on the attorney general's desk the next day. The president's foreign intelligence advisory board met with John Kennedy the following afternoon and told him that Baldwin's work was a grave danger to the United States. "We would suggest," said James Killian, the author of the 1954 "surprise attack" report under Eisenhower, "that the Director of Central Intelligence be encouraged to develop an expert group that would be available at all times to follow up on security leaks...a team available to him operating under his direction." Clark Clifford, a member of the board and a drafter of the CIA's charter in the National Security Act of 1947, when he served as Harry Truman's White House counsel, urged President Kennedy to create "a full-time group that is working on it all the time" at the CIA. "They can find out who are Hanson Baldwin's contacts," Clifford said. "When he goes over to the Pentagon, who does he see? Nobody knows now. The FBI doesn't know. But I think it would be mighy interesting." Clifford's many friends in the Washington establishment would have been appalled at this skulduggery. Congressional hearings in 1975 laid responsibility for the taps solely on Attorney General Kennedy and the FBI--not President Kennedy and the CIA.

"I would be only too happy": McCone to Kennedy, August 17, 1962, declassified August 20, 2003, CIA/CREST.

"an understandable reluctance": McCone, "Memorandum for: The President/The White House," February 28, 1963, JFKL.

"Put it in the box and nail it shut" and "universal repugnance": "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992.

"who wants to start a war?": "IDEALIST Operations over Cuba," September 10, 1962, CIA/CREST.

The photo gap: The whys and wherefores of the "photo gap" are in Max Holland, "The 'Photo Gap' That Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2005, CIA/CSI.

195"I never knew his name": Halpern in James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh(eds.), Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).

"a considerable discussion (with some heat)": "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992.

"'Massive activity'": "Minutes of Meeting of the Special Group (Augmented) on Operation Mongoose, 4 October 1962," declassified February 19, 2004, CIA/CREST; McCone memo, October 4, 1962, FRUS, Vol. X.

"The near-total intelligence surprise": The report survives in a 2001 declassified excerpt in an editorial note in FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. XXV, document 107, and a 1992 version in "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992, pp. 361-371.

"Those things we've been worrying about.": McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 395-396.

"Damn it to all hell and back": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 208.

"we had also fooled ourselves": Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 27.

Chapter Nineteen

"The president flicked on his tape recorder": Until 2003 the question of what was really on the White House tapes was still a hot dispute. After four decades, what really happened, and who said what to whom, has been settled by a reliable transcript, the result of more than twenty years of labor by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library's historian, Sheldon Stern.
Conventional wisdom contends that the crucible of the Cuban missile crisis transformed John and Robert Kennedy, making a brilliant leader out of a callow commander in chief, converting young Bobby from hawk to dove, and changing the White House from a Harvard seminar into a temple of wisdom. It is in part a myth, founded on an inaccurate and falsified historical record. President Kennedy fed favored journalists with poetic but palpably untrue stories. Robert Kennedy's posthumously published book on the crisis contains inventions and made-up dialogue, repeated by otherwise reliable historians and the loyal circle of Kennedy acolytes.
We now know that the Kennedys distorted the historical record and concealed how the crisis was resolved. And we now can see that where they plotted a path out of the crisis, they were as often as not following a course charted by John McCone. See Sheldon Stern, Averting "The Final Failure": John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). This chapter relies on Stern's transcriptions and McCone's declassified memos, except where noted.

Thinking of the Mongoose missions: Carter, "16 October (Tuesday)/(Acting DCI)," declassified February 19, 2004, CIA/CREST; "Mongoose Meeting with the Attorney General," October 16, 1962; "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992; Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, One Hell of a Gamble (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 227-228.

The six single-spaced pages of notes: McCone, "Memorandum for Discussion Today," CIA/CREST; untitled McCone memo; and "Talking Paper for Principals," all dated October 17, 1962, declassified March 5, 2003.

"opinions had obviously switched": Presidential recordings, October 19-22, JFKL.

"the course which I had recommended": McCone memos, October 19-22, 1962, CIA/CREST. A formal meeting of the National Security Council was held in the Oval Room of the Executive Mansion at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 20. The meeting was not taped, but Cline's briefing notes and handwritten scribbles survive, as does the formal record of the NSC's note taker, Bromley Smith. Cline's notes are in "CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis," CIA/CSI, 1992.

"there was no such deal ever made": McCone oral history, April 21, 1988, Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley.

"he's a real bastard, that John McCone": This snarl was caught on tape on March 4, 1963, presidential recordings, JFKL. It was first reported by the historian Max Holland, author of The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (New York: Knopf, 2004), and recounted in his monograph "The 'Photo Gap' That Delayed Discovery of Missiles in Cuba," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 4, 2005, CIA/CSI.

McCone had tried to put a leash on Mongoose: McCone's actions are reflected in the tapes of the 10 a.m. meeting on October 26, his memos, and the FRUS record of the meeting. The tape transcript is fragmentary. On October 30, "Mr. McCone stated that all MONGOOSE operations must be held in abeyance until this week of negotiations is over." Marshall Carter, memorandum for the record, October 30, 1962, declassified November 4, 2003, CIA/CREST. Covert operations planned and conducted against Cuba during and after the missile crisis are detailed in FRUS, Vol. XI, documents 271, 311, 313, and 318-315.

the final mission to kill Fidel Castro: The plot is outlined in the 1967 CIA inspector general's report to Helms, declassified in 1993. J. S. Earman, Inspector General, "Subject: Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro, 23 May 1967," CIA. Quotes and citations in the following paragraphs are drawn from the report. John McCone never found out about the last plot as it unfolded. But he came close. On August 15, 1962, a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times telephoned CIA headquarters, asking about connections between the notorious Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana, the CIA, and the anti-Castro Cubans. The word went up to McCone, who asked Helms if this could possibly be true. In response, Helms handed over a three-page single-spaced memo from the CIA's chief of security, Sheffield Edwards. It recorded that RFK had been briefed on May 14, 1962, about "a sensitive CIA operation" conducted against Fidel Castro between August 1960 and May 1961, involving "certain gambling interests" represented by "one John Rosselli of Los Angeles" and one "Sam Giancana of Chicago." The attorney general knew those names very well. The memo never mentioned assassination, but its meaning was clear. Helms handed it to Mc-Cone with his own covering note: "I assume you are aware of the nature of the operation discussed in the attachment." McCone became intensely aware in the four minutes it took to read it. He was furious beyond words.
That may be why Helms never troubled to tell him about the new assassination plot that FitzGerald was leading--or about who was in charge of the plotting. In 1975, Helms told Henry Kissinger that Bobby Kennedy had "personally managed" more than one assassination attempt against Fidel Castro. Kissinger and Ford, memorandum of conversation, January 4, 1975, GRFL.

Chapter Twenty

"We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it": JFK Tapes, November 4, 1963, JFKL. The recording, worth hearing, is available online at http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1963_1104_jfk_vietnam_mem oir.html.

"I was part and parcel of the whole conspiracy": Conein's 1975 testimony to Senate investigators was declassified in September 1998. All quotations in this chapter from him are taken from that transcript. Born in Paris in 1919, Conein was sent to Kansas City to live with an aunt, a French war bride, in 1924. He raced to enlist in the French Army when World War II erupted in 1939. When France fell in 1940, he made his way to the United States and wound up in the OSS. In 1944, based in Algiers, he was dropped into occupied France to rendezvous with the Resistance. With France liberated, the OSS sent him to southern China to join a French-Vietnamese commando team assigned to attack a Japanese port in northern Vietnam. He formed an attachment to Vietnam. The affair ended badly for both.
Conein awaits his biographer. Stanley Karnow, the historian and author of Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), spent seventy hours interviewing him, but abandoned the project after deciding his subject was beginning to resemble Somerset Maugham's fictional spy Ashenden, a man so consumed by espionage that he cannot sort out his cover stories from the story of his life. "He was out of his time," Karnow said. "He was the swashbuckling soldier of fortune--the guy who has ceased to exist except in fiction. A marvelous storyteller. Whether the stories were true or not was beside the point. They were almost always almost entirely true."
The author wrote Conein's obituary, "Lucien Conein, 79, Legendary Cold War Spy," The New York Times, June 7, 1998.

"do what you can to save South Vietnam": Rufus Phillips oral history, FAOH.

"a flashpoint": John Gunther Dean oral history, FAOH.

a new Lao government: The decision to try to buy a new government was made after Allen Dulles warned President Eisenhower that "we had a good deal to fear in the 1959 general elections" in Laos, and the president replied "that it would be a serious matter if any country such as Laos went Communist by the legal vote of its people." NSC minutes, May 29, 1958, DDEL. The CIA's own analysts reported: "The Communist resumption of guerrilla warfare in Laos was primarily a reaction to a stronger anti-Communist posture by the Laotian government and to recent US initiatives in support of Laos." Special National Intelligence Estimate 68-2-59, "The Situation in Laos," September 18, 1959, declassified May 2001, CIA/CREST.

"The suitcase contained money": John Gunther Dean oral history, FAOH.

a roulette wheel: James interview with author.

"That was the real go-ahead": William Lair oral history, Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, Texas Tech University, interview conducted by Steve Maxner, December 11, 2001. Used with the kind permission of Mr. Maxner and the archive.

double its tribal forces in Laos and "make every possible effort to launch guerrilla operations in North Vietnam": The latter order is in the Pentagon Papers, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), p. 18. The former is in a Special Group memo reprinted in FRUS, Vol. XXVIII: "The genesis of this program stems from high level U.S. Government approval in late 1960 and early 1961 [for] CIA [to] enlist tribal support to fight communism. The main effort in this program has been development of the Meo, the largest non-Lao ethnic group in Laos.... As authorized by the Special Group in June 1963, this program has expanded to a present force of approximately 19,000 armed Meo guerrillas (23,000 authorized) engaged in village defense and guerrilla activities against the Pathet Lao."

"the ignorance and the arrogance": Richard L. Holm, "Recollections of a Case Officer in Laos, 1962 to 1964," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2003, CIA/CSI.

"the activisits were all for a war in Laos": There was a great debate inside CIA headquarters about the wisdom of a war in Laos. "The Agency was very badly split," said Robert Amory, Jr., the deputy director of intelligence from 1953 to 1962. "The activists were all for a war in Laos. They thought that was a great place to have a war.... Fitzgerald was very strong forit." Amory was not, and he soon resigned, but not before he helped draft President Kennedy's first major national television address, on the subject of Laos, on March 23, 1961. The president could not or would not pronounce the nation's name correctly; he thought no one would care for a country called "Louse." He said LAY-os was threatened by communist forces within and without, including combat specialists from North Vietnam. "Its own safety runs with the safety of us all," he told the nation. "In real neutrality, observed by all. All we want in Laos is peace, not war."

The Americans sent to Vietnam had an equally profound ignorance of the country's history and culture: Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1941-1960, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. x, xi. "Added to this propensity to try to make something out of nothing was an American ignorance of Vietnamese history and society so massive and all-encompassing that two decades of federally funded fellowships, crash language programs, television specials, and campus teach-ins made hardly a dent," Spector wrote. "Before the United States sets out to make something out of nothing in some other corner of the globe, American leaders might consider the historical and social factors involved."

"They had everything they wanted": Neher oral history, FAOH.

Project Tiger: The author described the fate of the CIA's Vietnamese agents in "Once Commandos for U.S., Vietnamese Are Now Barred," The New York Times, April 14, 1995. Hanoi's double-crossing of the CIA from 1961 to 1963 is definitively detailed in Richard H. Schultz, Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1999). Schultz, director of international security studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, conducted extensive oral history interviews and reviewed declassified documents for the book.

"We harvested a lot of lies": Barbour oral history, FAOH.

In October 1961, President Kennedy sent: The sprawl of the CIA's paramilitary forces in the region at the time was impressive, as detailed by General Lansdale in a report to the White House. In Vietnam, CIA officers commanded 340 South Vietnamese soldiers of the First Observation Group, created by the agency in 1956 and trained to kill Vietcong infiltrators in the south, the north, and Laos. From Taiwan, Civil Air Transport, the CIA airline, flew hundreds of missions a year in Laos and Vietnam; the Chinese Nationalist army and the CIA trained hundreds of Vietnamese to serve as paramilitary officers. In Thailand, Bill Lair's own paramilitary forces stood at 550 trained Thai officers. At Fort McKinley outside Manila, the CIA ran a sprawling school for Filipino soldiers to fight communism throughout Asia. Hundreds more trainees from all across the region were being sent to the CIA base on the island of Saipan.

"the sending to Vietnam of some U.S. military forces": That secret was very deep indeed. The author obtained a unique copy of Taylor's full and uncensored report to the president from the CIA's archives in September 2005. It was the personal copy of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Charles Pearre Cabell. Cabell had highlighted the sentence and written in the margins of his copy, To CIA readers: This concept must be kept very secure. CPC.

"Nobody liked Diem": Robert F. Kennedy oral history, JFKL, collected in Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (eds.), Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 396.

"Diem himself cannot be preserved": Telegram from the Department of State to the embassy in Vietnam, Washington, August 24, 1963, 9:36 p.m., FRUS, Vol. III.

"I should not have given my consent to it": JFK Tapes, November 4, 1963, JFKL.

the president had ordered Diem ousted: On Saturday evening, August 23, 1963, when JFK decided to topple Diem, the news from Vietnam was grim. South Vietnamese commandos trained by the CIA were killing Buddhist protestors, the president's daily brief from the CIA that morning noted, and "Nhu told a U.S. source yesterday that the generals recommended the imposition of martial law. [Nhu] denied this amounted to a coup, but warned it could become one if Diem vacillated or compromised on the Buddhist issue." FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. III, document 271. If Kennedy read this, he would have been encouraged to approve the Hilsman cable authorizing a move against Diem. The history of the Hilsman cable has been well established by declassified State Department records in the FRUS Vietnam series. McCone told Dwight Eisenhower that the president's casual approval of the uncoordinated cable was "one of the government's greatest errors" to date--a high standard. The former president was furious. Where was the National Security Council? What was the State Department doing running coups? McCone replied that Kennedy was surrounded by "liberals in his government who want to reform every country" in the world. Well, Eisenhower shot back, who appointed those damned liberals? The old general "expressed much concern over the future of the United States." McCone memo, "Conference with Former President Eisenhower," September 19, 1963, DDEL.

Helms handed the assignment to Bill Colby, the new chief of the CIA's Far East division: It is a terrible irony that Colby--who in a 1982 oral history for the LBJ Library said that "the overthrow of Diem was the worst mistake we made"--may well have planted a seed for it in an August 16, 1963, memo to Helms, Roger Hilsman at State, and Michael Forrestal at NSC. It weighed the chances for a "successful coup d'etat" and noted that "assassination may be an integral part of projected coups or may be done in hope that something better will somehow emerge from the resulting chaotic situation."

"songs they may sing": Colby cited in Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/ vietnam/epis1.hmtl. Ford was for many years a senior CIA analyst on Vietnam.

At the White House, Helms listened: Helms was at the White House meeting at noon on August 29, 1963, with the president, McNamara, and Rusk, among a dozen other top officials. The note taker recorded that Ambassador Lodge had already instructed the CIA's Rufus Phillips "to tell the Vietnamese generals that the U.S. Ambassador is behind the CIA approach." The message to the generals was that the CIA, the embassy, and the White House spoke with one voice. "The President asked whether anyone had any reservations about the course of action we were following," and Rusk and McNamara did. The president then decided that "Ambassador Lodge is to have authority over all overt and covert operations" in Vietnam. A personal, eyes-only cable went out to Lodge reserving presidential command over those covert operations. Memorandum of conference with the president, August 29, 1963, National Security file, JFKL. Lodge's job was to make sure that the American hand would not show. "I received my instructions from Ambassador Lodge," Conein testified. "If they were cabled instructions, he had a very good habit of not reading something. He would fold a piece of paper and what pertained to you for instructions, he would let you read that, and that alone, so you didn't know who was sending it or where it came from.... 'Those are the instructions, do you understand them?' 'Yes, sir.' 'All right, go carry them out.'" On the president's desire for secrecy, see Bundy to Lodge, October 5, 1963, FRUS, Vol. IV.

"CIA has more money; bigger houses than diplomats; bigger salaries; more weapons; more modern equipment": The clash between Lodge and Richardson is poignantly recorded in John H. Richardson, My Father the Spy: AFamily History of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Sixties (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

Lodge decided he wanted a new station chief: Specifically, he wanted General Ed Lansdale, the ugly American. Absolutely not, said McCone, who had "no confidence in him at all. They could replace Richardson if Lodge wants it but not someone from the outside." Memorandum of telephone conversation between the secretary of state and the director of central intelligence, September 17, 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, document 120.

"exposed him, and gave his name publicly to the newspapers": RFK oral history, JFKL; Guthman and Shulman, Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words, p. 398. The burning of a station chief by an ambassador was unprecedented in the history of the CIA. McCone sent a four-page briefing paper to President Kennedy the day before the president had a scheduled press conference on October 9, 1963, defending the CIA against the fury Lodge's leaks had set in motion. "You will undoubtedly be asked about CIA's role in Vietnam," McCone wrote. "The criticism which has found its way into hundreds of news articles and editorials is seriously eroding the spirit of this organization which I have now spent two years trying to rekindle." The president hewed closely to McCone's briefing in his answers to the press.

"We were fortunate": Tran Van Don, Our Endless War (San Francisco: Presidio, 1978), pp. 96-99.

"against the assassination plot," "supporting assassination," and if I were the manager of a baseball team: Church Committee, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report, U.S. Senate, 94th Congress, 1st Session, 1975.

"a complete lack of intelligence," "exceedingly dangerous," and "absolute disaster for the United States": McCone memos, "Special Group 5412 Meeting," October 18, 1963, and "Discussion with the President--October 21," CIA/CREST. See also Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers.

"We should not thwart a coup": Lodge to Bundy and McCone, October 25, 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, document 216. By then it was too late. On October 29, McCone, Helms, and Colby arrived at the White House for a 4:20 p.m. meeting with the president, his brother, and the entire national-security team. Colby presented a detailed military map showing that Diem's strength and the coup leaders' forces were evenly divided. So were the president's men. The State Department was in favor, the military and McCone opposed. But the White House had set in motion a force it could not stop.

"money and weapons": Don, Our Endless War, pp. 96-99.

"Diem looked at me quizzically and said, 'Is there going to be a coup against me?'": Phillips oral history, FAOH.

The coup struck on November 1: Conein's account here comes from his declassified Church Committee testimony; the cable traffic is reproduced in FRUS. Conein said that Nhu had arranged with the military commander of the Saigon military district to stage a fake Vietcong uprising in Saigon. The plan included the assassination of key American officials. Nhu then planned to send troops from the commander's contingent to put down the fake revolt and save Vietnam. But the commander told the coup plotters about Nhu's plans. As Conein put it, the rebel generals "double bumped" Nhu: when the real coup began, Nhu thought it was his fake coup. According to the Church Committee, Conein passed three million piasters ($42,000) to an aide of General Don's late on the morning of November 1 to procure food for the coup forces and to pay death benefits for those killed during the coup. Conein said in his testimony the sum he took from his house was five million piasters, or about $70,000. Colby said it was $65,000.

the president leaped to his feet and "rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay": General Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares: A Memoir (New York: Da Capo, 1990), p. 301. The White House-Saigon cables cited in this passage are reprinted in full in FRUS, Vol. IV.

"'Hey, boss, we did a good job, didn't we?'": Rosenthal oral history, FAOH.

Chapter Twenty-one

In 1975, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (hereinafter the "Church Committee") convened under the chairmanship of Senator Frank Church. Its investigators demanded and received depositions taken in secret, and later took limited public testimony. The work of lasting value was in the secret files.

This chapter is based in part on recently declassified testimony delivered by senior CIA officers--among them Richard Helms, John Whitten (identified by the alias "John Scelso"), and James J. Angleton. They gave secret depositions to the Church Committee in 1976 and to a follow-up investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 (hereinafter "HSCA"). Helms, McCone, Angleton, and others also testified before the Rockefeller Commission created by President Ford in 1975. The release of these transcripts twenty and twenty-five years after the fact sheds new light on what the CIA was thinking after the assassination, on its own investigation of the killing, and on its failure to fully inform the Warren Commission.

The depositions were declassified between 1998 and 2004 under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act passed by Congress in 1992. Many have been published on a CD-ROM as Assassination Transcripts of the Church Committee, available online at http://www.history-matters.com. The work of the CIA's John Whitten investigating the Kennedy assassination for the agency was located at the JFK Library by the journalist Jefferson Morley in his research for a forthcoming biography of the Mexico City station chief Win Scott. He graciously shared copies with the author in 2006. That work is hereinafter cited as "Whitten report."

"I'm sure glad the Secret Service didn't catch us": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 227-229.

"What raced through my mind": LBJ, telephone conversation with Bill Moyers, December 26, 1966, LBJL. Many of Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes related to the Kennedy assassination have been collected, edited, annotated, and published by Max Holland in The Kennedy Assassination Tapes (New York: Knopf, 2004). Citations from that work are hereinafter "LBJ Tapes/Holland."

"Tragic death of President Kennedy": Helms, A Look over My Shoulder, p. 229.

"Mexico had the biggest and most active telephone intercept operations in the whole world": Whitten deposition, 1978.

"CIA had no sources": Whitten report, undated but December 1963, CIA/JFKL.

he was enraged: McCone's 11:30 p.m. meeting on November 22, 1963, included Deputy Director Carter, Richard Helms, and the agency's chief administrative officer, Red White, who recorded in his office diary that McCone had taken General Carter and "'wire-brushed' him thoroughly, had expressed himself as being most dissatisfied with the way the Agency was being managed." L. K. White diary, November 23, 1963, CIA/CREST.

"the most bitter feelings": Whitten gave his professional biography and described his run-ins with Angleton in both his 1976 and 1978 depositions; the quotation is from the latter.

"His having been to the Cuban and Soviet embassies": Helms deposition, August 9, 1978, House Special Committee on Assassinations. Top Secret, declassified May 1, 2001.

McCone...broke the news of the Cuban connection: McCone memo, November 24, 1963, CIA/CREST; LBJ and Eisenhower conversation, August 27, 1965, LBJ Tapes/Holland.

"this assassin": LBJ to Weisl, November 23, 1963, LBJ Tapes/Holland.

He had talked face-to-face: The innocent explanation was that Soviet intelligence officers in Mexico City were filling their cover roles as visa officers by day, just as CIA officers did in embassies worldwide. In a memoir, the Soviet intelligence officer Oleg Nechiporenko said he first overheard and then witnessed Oswald pleading for a visa in his barely passable Russian. He appeared to want to go to Cuba to save both himself and Fidel Castro from the forces of American intelligence: "Oswald was extremely agitated and clearly nervous, especially whenever he mentioned the FBI, but he suddenly became hysterical, began to sob, and through his tears cried, 'I am afraid...they'll kill me. Let me in!' Repeating over and over that he was being persecuted and that he was being followed even here in Mexico, he stuck his right hand into the left pocket of his jacket and pulled out a revolver, saying, 'See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life.'" Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him (Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane, 1993).

The station sent headquarters a list: The sequence of events, first raising the question of whether Cubela might be a double agent, is reconstructed in "The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Performance of the Intelligence Agencies," Church Committee staff report, 1975, declassified in 2000.

Dulles immediately called James Angleton: Angleton deposition, 1978, HSCA.

"Helms realized that disclosing the assassination plots would reflect very poorly on the Agency": Whitten testimony, 1976.

"We were treading very lightly": Helms testimony, August 1978, HSCA.

"gross incompetency" and "a direct admission": Hoover and DeLoach cited in "The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy." This secret Senate staff report, declassified in 2000, twenty-five years after it was conducted, found that the evidence "tends to impeach the process by which the intelligence community provided information to the Warren Commission." It concluded: "There is doubt as to whether these agencies can ever be relied upon to investigate their own operations and their own performance in critical situations."

"Dozens of people were claiming that they had seen Oswald here, there, and everywhere": Whitten testimony, 1976.

"We would have seen it more sharply": This and all other quotations from Angleton in this chapter are from his deposition before the HSCA, October 5, 1978, declassified 1998.

"I'd like to talk to you": Mark told of his encounter with Nosenko, a previously unpublished account, in a State Department oral history, FAOH.

Much was lost in translation: For example, Nosenko said an army sergeant at the American embassy in Moscow whom he identified as a spy for the KGB worked as "a code machine repairman." This later came out in English as "a mechanic," as in garage mechanic. When Nosenko tried to correct the record, he was accused of changing his story.

"a great deal had gone wrong on his watch": A formal acknowledgment of that fact finally appeared in 2006. See "The Angleton Era in CIA," in A Counterintelligence Reader, Vol. 3, Chap. 2, pp. 109-115, available online at http://www.ncix.gov/history/index.html.

the CIA threw Nosenko into solitary confinement: The case was chronicled years later by two senior CIA officers: Richards J. Heuer, Jr., "Nosenko: Five Paths to Judgment," Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1987, CIA/CSI; and John Limond Hart, The CIA's Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002), pp. 128-160.

"I recognized we couldn't keep him in durance vile": Helms interview, Studies in Intelligence, December 1993, CIA/CSI.

seven major studies of the case: In 1976, the CIA's John Limond Hart was called out of retirement to re-investigate the Nosenko case. Hart had uncovered the deceptions of his predecessor as the chief of station in Seoul, Al Haney, nearly a quarter century before. He had gone on to a distinguished career--chief of station in Saigon, chief of foreign intelligence collection in China and Cuba, and chief of operations for Western Europe. He had known Angleton since 1948, when they served in Rome together--when the CIA won the Italian elections, the cold war was new, and Angleton still sane. The two men sat down for a four-hour interview on the case of Yuri Nosenko in 1976. When Hart read the transcript the next day, the words made no sense at all. "Perhaps because of his legendary thirst," Hart wrote, "Angleton's muddled mind by then had become a grab bag of haphazard minutiae, much of it totally irrelevant." Hart pronounced the Nosenko case "an abomination," the worst thing he had ever encountered in a lifetime of intelligence work. Hart, The CIA's Russians.

Chapter Twenty-Two

"a goddamn bunch of thugs": LBJ to Senator Eugene McCarthy, February 1, 1966, available online at http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1966_0201_lbj_mccarthy_vietnam.html. LBJ expressed his "divine retribution" theory--"that because President Kennedy had been in a sense responsible for Diem's demise, he in turn was assassinated himself," as Richard Helms remembered--at a December 19, 1963, meeting with Mc-Cone, Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald. LBJ repeated this to Hubert Humphrey, who would be his vice president; Ralph Duggan, a White House aide; and Pierre Salinger, a Kennedy press secretary.

"The Attorney General intended to stay on": McCone memo, "Discussion with the President, 13 December--9:30 a.m.," declassified October 2002, CIA/CREST. McCone's memo continued: "I explained to the President that I had told Bobby he could not bring back the intimacy of the relationship with the President which he had had with his brother because that was a blood relationship, not an official relationship. A type of relationship which is seldom found between brothers and never found between officials, either in business or government." It was not found between the new president and his attorney general. Bobby could not stand to be in the White House with Johnson. "He's mean, bitter, vicious--an animal in many ways," he said a few months later, in the April 1964 oral history, for the Kennedy Library.

"'change the image of the CIA'": McCone memos, December 28, 1963; January 13, 1964; and February 20, 1964. The president was worried about his own image. He was discomfited by the publication of The Invisible Government, the first serious best seller examining the CIA and its relationship with the White House. It revealed the existence of the Special Group, the committee of top CIA, State, Pentagon, and White House men who approved covert action--and it made clear that presidents ultimately controlled those secret missions. The chairman of the Special Group, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, thought it might be best to change its name. After rejecting suggestions from his staff--among them "the Invisible Group"--he issued National Security Action Memorandum 303, changing the name to the 303 Committee.
The committee's declassified records show that the CIA undertook 163 major covert operations, slightly fewer than five each month, under President Kennedy. Under President Johnson, 142 new major covert operations were launched through February 1967, slightly fewer than four each month. The members' deliberations often were pro forma. In the course of a few spring days in 1964, they approved a shipment of arms for the military coup that overthrew the government of Brazil--"we don't want to watch Brazil dribble down the drain while we stand around waiting for the next election"--and sent an extra $1.25 million to swing the presidential ballot in Chile--"no problem, since we could get more if needed." President Johnson rarely sought the details of such decisions, though they had the imprimatur of his office.

"extremely worried": McCone memo, "DCI Briefing of CIA Subcommittees of Senate Armed Services and Senate Appropriations Committees, Friday, 10 January 1964," declassified December 15, 2004, CIA/CREST; Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available online at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/vietnam/epis1.html. "The President should be informed that this is not the greatest thing since peanut butter": McCone, Helms, and Lyman Kirkpatrick cited in William Colby, memorandum for the record, "Meeting on North Vietnam," January 9, 1964, CIA/CREST.

"highly dissatisfied": McCone memos, April 22 and 29, 1964, and October 22, 1964, CIA/CREST; the latter also appears in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, document 219. It is worth quoting, for it shows that President Johnson and John McCone had never had a substantial conversation about the CIA: "On 22 October I prepared to depart with Mrs. McCone to attend the funeral of Herbert Hoover, Sr. I was called by the White House and advised that the President requested specifically that we accompany him.... While traveling with the President I was able to discuss a number of matters with him. The principal items were: The President stated that he did not know too much about CIA's organization.... I emphasized the objectivity of the organization, the fact it had no parochial 'axe to grind' in any field most particularly those relating to foreign policy and defense policy. The Agency looked upon its responsibility as that of collecting intelligence by every possible means and evaluating our own intelligence and that gathered by all other Community members carefully and objectively. The President asked the size of the organization. I told him our budget was about [deleted] and said we had about [deleted] employees. He asked about the future outlook. I said that I thought the organization was pretty well shaking down, the five-year forecast indicated no increases in personnel and the increases in the budget were minimal and attributable largely to the wages and salary increases and other escalations. I said this resulted from very careful management and that we hope to 'hold the line' unless new tasks were assigned to the Agency. This would necessitate additional people and money. The President asked what part of our budget went for operational activities such as political action, paramilitary, etc., and I said about [deleted]. This was the first opportunity I have had to discuss the Agency with the President. I thought he was interested and impressed." McCone memo, "Discussion with the President--22 October 1964," emphasis added.
McCone tried to make the president pay attention to the fact that the fate of nations could turn on a successful trick of espionage. He had a couple of stories to tell, the best of which was this: a young station chief by the name of Clair George, posted in Bamako, Mali, one of the world's most obscure capitals, got a tip from a member of the host government in 1964. The African official said he had heard from a diplomat at the Chinese embassy that Beijing would conduct its first nuclear test in a matter of weeks. The report went straight to CIA headquarters. An early spy satellite looked down on the preparations at the test site in China. Mc-Cone personally took charge of the analysis. "We knew what they were doing," he recalled in an oral history for the LBJ Library. "Hard intelligence."
McCone told the White House and American allies that the Chinese would test a nuclear weapon within thirty to sixty days: "And on the thirty-first day they exploded the bomb. They made a prophet out of me." This intelligence coup began with news from nowhere--the capital of Mali. After that, Clair George was a made man. Twenty years later he became chief of the clandestine service. But McCone had far too few such success stories.

the new Defense Intelligence Agency: The DIA was "a perfect example of how not to create a government agency," said Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served as its vice director in the mid-1970s before running the NSA and serving, briefly, as deputy director of central intelligence. Bobby R. Inman, "Managing Intelligence for Effective Use," Center for Information Policy Research, Harvard University, December 1980.

"take NRO and shove it": Transcript of telephone conversation between Director of Central Intelligence McCone and the assistant secretary of defense, February 13, 1964, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004.

a highly detailed confession: Robert J. Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964," Cryptologic Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4/Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2000/Spring 2001, declassified November 2005. The quarterly is an official and highly classified NSA publication.

the American destroyers sent a flash message that they were under attack: Eight hours later, President Johnson asked McCone: "Do they want a war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?" McCone answered: "No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attacks on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride."

"McNamara had taken over raw SIGINT": Ray Cline oral history, LBJL.

"shooting at flying fish": Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish."

Chapter Twenty-Three

"Vietnam was my nightmare": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 309-311.

"our ignorance--or innocence": Helms oral history, September 16, 1981, LBJL.

"'Coward! Traitor! Weakling!'": LBJ quoted in Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 251-252.

"Counterinsurgency became an almost ridiculous battle cry": Amory oral history, JFKL.

"What we needed...were people who could shoot guns": Robert F. Kennedy oral history, May 14, 1964, JFKL, collected in Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (eds.), Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 310. President Kennedy established the Special Group (Counterinsurgency) on January 18, 1962, under National Security Action Memorandum 124. RFK led it--despite McCone's warning that it would be "an embarrassment for Bobby if it became known the Attorney General was running dirty tricks in favor of the counterinsurgency committee"--and created a great grab bag of worldwide programs in its name.

"Our Counterinsurgency Experiment and Its Implications": De Silva to Colby, undated, forwarded from Colby to McCone via Helms ("Subject: Saigon Station Experiment in Counterinsurgency"), November 16, 1964; with Marshall Carter's covering memo ("McCone's War"), declassified May 29, 2003, CIA/CREST.

"if South Vietnam fell": "DCI Briefing for CIA Subcommittee of House Appropriations Committee, December 5, 1963," declassified March 15, 2004, CIA/CREST.

"VC may be the wave of the future": McCone cited in Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available online at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/vietnam/epis1.html.

"the Vietcong use of terror": Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 220-254.

The corruption of intelligence: George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 188-194.

"My world turned to glue": De Silva, Sub Rosa, p. 256.

"There must be somebody out there that's got enough brains": LBJ Tapes, March 30, 1965, 9:12 a.m., LBJL.

"increasing pressure to stop the bombing" and "mired down in combat in the jungle": McCone memos, April 2 and 20, 1965, LBJL. See also Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers.

"Let me tell you about these intelligence guys": Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 566. The source of this story was Richard Helms. Helms remembered it vividly as Johnson's statement to John McCloy at a dinner in the White House residence. It certainly sounds like LBJ.

Chapter Twenty-Four

"light the fuse": LBJ Tapes/Holland, April 2, 1965.

"close up the place and give it to the Indians": Carter, memorandum for the record, April 2, 1965, CIA, FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004.

"Now, I need you," Lyndon Johnson said: Transcript of telephone conversation between President Johnson and Admiral Raborn, April 6, 1965, 4:26 p.m., FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004, LBJL.

"Our CIA says": LBJ Tapes, April 30, 1965, 10:50 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.

"You don't think CIA can document it?": LBJ Tapes, April 30, 1965, 5:05 p.m.

"It was tragic": Ray Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), pp. 211-212.

"Poor old Raborn": James Hanrahan, "An Interview with Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. 'Red' White," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 1999/2000, CIA/CSI.

"If you ever decide to get rid of him, you just put that fellow Helms in there": Transcript of telephone conversation between the president and Russell, 8 p.m., September 14, 1965, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004, LBJL.

"You think that we can really beat the Vietcong out there?": LBJ Tapes, July 2, 1965.

"as invisible as possible": William Lair oral history, Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, Texas Tech University, interview conducted by Steve Maxner, December 11, 2001. Used with the kind permission of Mr. Maxner and the archive.

"We saw some of our young guys killed": Lilley oral history, FAOH.

Colby was disheartened: Colby to Helms, August 16, 1966, FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVIII. The memo describes Colby's impressions during his October 1965 tour.

"No one was talking theory here": The Shackley account is from his posthumous memoir, written with Richard A. Finney, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA (Dulles, VA: Potomac, 2005).

"an exemplary success story": Memorandum from the Central Intelligence Agency to the 303 Committee, September 8, 1966, FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVIII, document 248.

Wild Bill Donovan: Donovan began his stint as ambassador by reviving the disastrous Li Mi operation. The defeated Chinese Nationalist forces had settled into the Golden Triangle, in the hills of eastern Burma, the northern borderlands of Thailand, and the western edge of Laos. They had become an aggressive occupying force running an international opium trade. Donovan saw them as freedom fighters, and he plunged into their cause, "providing supplies while denying publicly that there was any U.S. involvement," said Kempton B. Jenkins, then a State Department political officer in Bangkok. A sham evacuation of the Li Mi forces, overseen by Donovan, looked impressive--CIA pilots flew 1,925 men and boys out of the Golden Triangle to Taiwan--but thousands of men remained. Instead of fighting communists, they set about cornering the opium market, building refineries to make morphine, and shipping the drugs down to Bangkok. Jenkins provides a detailed look at Donovan's liaisons with the Thai police and military. Jenkins oral history, FAOH. See also Frank C. Darling, Thailand and the United States (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1965), for a look at the beginnings of CIA involvement in the region after the Korean war. The expanding power of the CIA's Laos station in the 1950s is well described in the FAOH oral histories of John Gunther Dean, L. Michael Rives, and Christian A. Chapman, all of whom served at the American embassy there.

"Money was no object": Thomas oral history, FAOH.

"financing of a political party, electoral support for this party, and support for selected candidates for parliament from the party"...to continue "the leadership and control of the present ruling group" and "to ensure that the party created is successful in winning a comfortable and commanding majority in elections": These goals are set out in the CIA's memorandum prepared for the 303 Committee, September 28, 1965, and 303 Committee minutes, October 8, 1965. FRUS, Vol. XXVII.

The CIA had warned: On March 5, 1965, in a discussion of ongoing covert action in Indonesia, a senior CIA officer told the 303 Committee that "the loss of a nation of 105 million to the 'Communist camp' would make a victory in Vietnam of little meaning." 303 Committee minutes, March 5, 1965. A separate CIA memorandum for the 303 Committee, dated February 23, 1965, lays out the developing covert-action program in Indonesia: "Since the summer of 1964, [deleted, but probably the Indonesia station and/or Colby's Far East division] has worked with the Department of State in formulating concepts and developing an operational program of political action in Indonesia.... The main thrust of this program is designed to exploit factionalism within the PKI itself, to emphasize traditional Indonesian distrust of Mainland China and to portray the PKI as an instrument of Red Chinese imperialism. Specific types of activity envisaged include covert liaison with and support to existing anti-Communist groups.... [Ongoing covert programs include] political action within existing Indonesian organizations and institutions [and] covert training of selected personnel and civilians, who will be placed in key positions....[Among the goals is to] cultivate potential leaders within Indonesia for the purpose of ensuring an orderly non-Communist succession upon Sukarno's death or removal from office." The 303 Committee records are in FRUS, Vol. XXVI.

"I recruited and ran Adam Malik": McAvoy interview with author. The documentation on the CIA's role in Indonesia, including the December 2, 1965, cable from Green to Bundy detailing a CIA payment to Adam Malik, is in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVI, pp. 338-380. The volume was officially suppressed by the CIA and withdrawn from circulation--but not before some copies were printed, bound, and shipped. The National Security Archive posted the relevant pages in July 2001. The author's interview with McAvoy took place by telephone from McAvoy's home in Hawaii. McAvoy's crucial role as a CIA officer in Indonesia was confirmed by three of his contemporaries at the agency.

"in a clandestine setting": Green oral history, FAOH.

"It was certainly not a death list": Martens oral history, FAOH.

Ambassador Green later told Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey...that "300,000 to 400,000 people were slain": Memorandum of conversation, February 17, 1967; LBJ Oval Office meeting with Adam Malik, memorandum of conversation, September 27, 1966; both in FRUS, 1964-1968, Vol. XXVI.

"I think we would up that estimate to perhaps close to 500,000 people": Green testimony, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 30, 1967, declassified March 2007.

"We didn't create the waves": Green oral history, FAOH.

"deeply troubled about the leadership problem in CIA": Bundy to LBJ, "Subject: The CIA," citing a conversation with Clifford, January 26, 1966.

a long list of his accomplishments: Raborn to Moyers, February 14, 1966.

"totally oblivious": LBJ to Bundy, February 22, 1966, LBJ Tapes, All cited in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, and declassified in 2004.

The committee got back to work in May: NSC memo to LBJ, March 24, 1966; undated memo for the deputy director of central intelligence, "The 303 Committee, Senior Interdepartmental Group and the Interdepartmental Regional Groups" "Coordination and Policy Approval of Covert Operations," February 23, 1967, CIA. All cited in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, and declassified in 2004. The 1967 document on covert action is a uniquely detailed record. It listed major covert actions to date, showing the refinement of executive control over the CIA:

Projects approved by DCI on internal authority: (1949-1952)--81--Truman Administration

Projects approved by DCI in coordination with Operations Coordination Board or Psychological Strategy Board: (1953-1954)--66--Eisenhower Administration

Projects approved or reconfirmed by Operations Coordination Board, the Special Group or 303 Committee:

Eisenhower Administration--104

Kennedy Administration--163

Johnson Administration--142

Chapter Twenty-five

"a circus rider": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 311.

"We knew then...that we could not win the war": Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 20-22.

"This Agency is going flat out" and "the war is by no means over": Memorandum by the chief of the Far East Division, Central Intelligence Agency, July 25, 1967, FRUS, Vol. V.

"Stop the buildup": George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 213-219. Allen wrote that the aim of the administration was to use manufactured intelligence for "opinion manipulation and political persuasion, with the aim of altering perceptions to make them coincide with certain notions, whether those notions were supportable by evidence or not." The practices he identified--the falsification of secret intelligence to control public perception and to manufacture political support--may sound familiar to many Americans today. Of course, there were built-in biases in the agency's reporting from Saigon, and these did not go unnoticed. In the summer of 1967, the question was whether Thieu or Ky would be South Vietnam's next president. The ultimate choice lay with the Vietnamese military command. The CIA maintained that the commanders would choose Ky. State Department officers in Saigon, including John Negroponte, the future czar of American intelligence, were certain it would be Thieu. "John told me later that the last report from the CIA--still predicting Ky--was filed just at the time that Ambassador Lodge was called to a meeting with the military command at which he was told that its candidate would be Thieu," recalled the State Department's Robert Oakley. "CIA had had a very close relationship with Ky for a long time; so they had a bias in his favor which undoubtedly colored their reporting." Oakley oral history, FAOH.

On September 19, McNamara telephoned the president: LBJ Tapes, September 19, 1966, transcribed in FRUS, Vol. IV.

"You guys simply have to back off," Komer told Carver: Komer's comments and the correspondence between Helms and Carver are in a full set of declassified cables between CIA headquarters and the Saigon station covering the order of battle controversy as it happened in September 1967, CIA/CREST.

"We believe that Communist progress": NIE 53-63, cited in Harold P. Ford, "Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam," Studies in Intelligence, 1997, CIA/CSI.

"The compelling proposition": John Huizenga, "Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam," September 11, 1967, CIA/CREST, with Helms's covering memo, declassified in 2004. Huizenga was chief of the CIA's Office of National Estimates staff, and later the director of the office.

Chapter Twenty-six

"over CIA involvement": "Problem of Expose of CIA Clandestine Youth and Student Activities," undated but February 1967, CIA/FOIA.

"LBJ left me the responsibility of pulling the Agency's scorched chestnuts out of the fire": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 345. A May 19, 1966, memo from Helms to Moyers at the White House detailing the personal and professional lives of Ramparts editors and reporters was declassified on November 13, 2006. Such reporting was arguably outside the CIA's charter.

Since 1961, Secretary of State Rusk had been warning: Rusk had asked the Special Group to address the following problems in a December 9, 1961, memo: "I. CIA now provides certain support to private organizations of an educational or philanthropic nature. 2. These covert funds become the subject of common gossip, or knowledge, both here and abroad. 3. Covert funds draw suspicion upon the organizations concerned and, indeed, may bar them from entry into certain countries. 4. Covert funds scare away funds from other sources which do not wish to become involved with CIA-type activities or purposes. 5. In most cases, there is no need to conceal that funds are being provided by the U.S. Government. 6. Every effort should be made to move from covert to overt support.... 7. What can be done about this in connection with such organizations as (a) Asia Foundation, (b) African student activities and (c) possibly others?" FRUS, Vol. XXV. The 303 Committee, meeting on June 21, 1968, to address the Asia Foundation problem, noted that "no one can accurately predict what, if any, federal monies will be allocated" to replace the CIA's subsidy. Nevertheless, "if there were deep sighs for the good old days of straight covert funding, they were not audible due to the hum of the air conditioner in the White House Situation Room." FRUS, Vol. X.

"We lack adequate detail": Memo from the Deputy Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research to the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, February 15, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004.

an hour-long off-the-record conversation: Pearson's papers are at the LBJ Library. His work appeared in more than six hundred American newspapers with a combined circulation of fifty million readers. Lyndon Johnson had a pew in the church of his heart roped off for Pearson, who had publicly supported his run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1960.

"This story going around about the CIA": LBJ Tapes/Holland, February 20, 1967.

"an irreducible minimum": Thomas Hughes, draft revision of NSC 5412, dated April 17, 1967, and discussed May 5, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII.

"ability to keep former employees quiet": Russell cited in "Briefing by the Director of CIA Subcommittees of the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations," May 23, 1967, declassified March 4, 2001, CIA/CREST.

what to do with Harvey: James Hanrahan, "An Interview with Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. 'Red' White," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 1999/2000, CIA/CSI. 274 "his extreme bitterness toward the Agency": Osborn to Earman, memorandum for the record, October 4, 1967, CIA/FOIA.

"Angleton by the mid-1960s": Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," 1993, CIA/CSI, declassified February 2007.

"a man of loose and disjointed thinking": John L. Hart, "The Monster Plot: Counterintelligence in the Case of Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko," December 1976, CIA/CSI.

"Loyal Agency employees had come under suspicion": Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 124.

"we are deluding ourselves" and "paralysis of our Soviet effort": McCoy memos to Helms cited in Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 108.

"one scrap of supportive evidence": Kingsley oral history interview, June 14, 1984, CIA, cited in Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 123.

"Jim was a man obsessed": Taylor interview by Hart, in "The Monster Plot," CIA/CSI.

"The subsequent accuracy of this prediction": Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence, p. 127.

"intelligence had a role in his life": Helms oral history interview, April 21, 1982, cited in Hathaway and Smith, "Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence," p. 143. The CIA history provides a fascinating footnote to the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967: "James Angleton found himself increasingly disturbed by the prospect of an endless cycle of war and more war in the Middle East. With this in mind he composed what those who saw it remember as an eloquent plea for some dramatic move to break through this destructive pattern. In a blind memo [to Helms, Angleton proposed] an anti-Soviet alliance consisting of Israel and some of the conservative Arab states such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The whole thing depended on urgency, Angleton continued; the longer Israel occupied the territories captured from the Arabs, the less willing Tel Aviv would be to give them up. [A deleted section of the history evidently discusses the crypto-diplomatic role played by Angleton and the Near East division chief James Critchfield in trying to create this alliance.] At this point the American State Department got wind of the scheme and vetoed any further U.S. role in the proceedings. Without the Americans as intermediaries, the arrangement crumbled. In the embittered views of Angleton and Critchfield, an opportunity of possibly historic proportions had been allowed to slip away." Ibid., pp. 146-147.

an excruciatingly sensitive operation...code-named Buttercup: The Buttercup operation is described at length in FRUS, Vols. IV and V.

The CIA had created and run the local Communist Party: This heretofore unknown operation was described by Tom Polgar in an interview with the author.

The program, code-named Globe: The Globe operation was described in interviews with CIA officers, including Gerry Gossens.

"You have to get the infrastructure": Helms testimony, President's Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), pp. 2497-2499.

"There have been charges that it is morally wrong": Albert R. Haney, "Observations and Suggestions Concerning the Overseas Internal Security Program," June 14, 1957, NSC Staff Papers, pp. 11-12, DDEL.

"You can get into Gestapo-type tactics": Amory oral history, JFKL.

"Castro was the catalyst": Polgar interview with author.

military juntas were good for the United States: Memorandum for the director, "The Political Role of the Military in Latin America," Office of National Estimates, April 30, 1968, LBJL. This was a formal twenty-nine-page statement by the chairman of the ONE, Abbot Smith, giving a tour of the region's eight most recently established military dictatorships, six of which were deemed good for American interests.

"Mobutu gave me a house": Gossens interview with author.

In a classic battle of the cold war: The capture of the CIA base chief, David Grinwis, is described in an unpublished interview with Grinwis at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Grinwis, the American consul Mike Hoyt, and two CIA communicators were held for 114 days before Belgian paratroops freed them. The battle between Che's Cubans and the CIA's Cubans is best told in Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 137-159.

A right-wing general, Rene Barrientos, had seized power: The details of the CIA's covert actions in support of Barrientos from 1962 to 1966 are in FRUS, Vol. XXXI, documents 147-180, declassified 2004.

"This can't be Che Guevara": Henderson oral history, FAOH.

"I am managing to keep him alive": Rodriguez's reporting from Bolivia is reproduced verbatim in two memos that Helms delivered to the White House on October 11 and 13, 1967, declassified in 2004 and reprinted in FRUS, Vol. XXXI, documents 171 and 172.

"Can you send fingerprints?"..."I can send fingers": Polgar interview with author.

"Once again CIA operations": UAR desk to Lucius D. Battle, March 16, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XVIII.

"He had been on the U.S. payroll": Battle oral history, FAOH.

"You will be criticized": Humphrey speech quoted in Helms transcript, Studies in Intelligence, September 1993.

"Review all projects which are politically sensitive": Memorandum from the Deputy Director of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency(Karamessines) to all staff chiefs and division chiefs, September 30, 1967, declassified 2004, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII.

Chapter Twenty-seven

"I'm quite aware of that": Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 280.

"The Subcommittee is very much interested in the operations of various militant organizations in this country": McClellan letter to Helms, October 25, 1967, declassified 2004, CIA/CREST.

"A Negro training camp": Karamessines memo to White House, October 31, 1967, declassified 2004, CIA/CREST.

"I'm not going to let the Communists take this government": "Luncheon Meeting with Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, Walt Rostow, CIA Director Richard Helms," November 4, 1967, LBJL.

"any direction other than their own": "International Connections of U.S. Peace Groups" and Helms cover letter to the president, November 15, 1967, declassified April 2001, CIA/CREST.

next to no intelligence on the enemy's intent: On February 16, 1968, Helms met with the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He said American intelligence on the Tet offensive had failed first and foremost "because of the lack of penetration of the Vietcong." FRUS, Vol. VI.

"Westmoreland doesn't know who the enemy is": "Notes of the President's Luncheon Meeting with Foreign Policy Advisors," February 20, 1968, FRUS, Vol. VI. Though some historians and memoirists have given the CIA analyst George Carver great credit for changing LBJ's mind about the war in the weeks and days before his decision to stand down, the CIA's leading Vietnam historian, Harold Ford, wrote that the influence of Carver and the CIA "was clearly less than that of many other forces above and beyond the inputs of CIA's intelligence: the shock of the Tet offensive itself; the sharply rising tide of antiwar sentiment among the Congress and the public; the candid, very grim post-Tet assessments given by JCS Chairman Earle Wheeler, Paul Nitze, and Paul Warnke; and the sudden defections of Clark Clifford and most of the other 'Wise Men' who had previously backed Johnson's war effort. Nonetheless, to these causes of the President's change of heart must be added the late-March assessments given him by State and CIA officers."

PART FOUR