20050101 JOHN MCCONE AS DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE 1961-1965, Part 2 of 2

• Document Type: FOIA
• Keywords: MCCONE JOHN|CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
• Collection: John McCone as Director of Central Intelligence, 1961-1965
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 0001262737
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 256
• Document Creation Date: November 12, 2015
• Document Release Date: April 17, 2015
• Case Number: EOM-2006-00016
• Publication Date: January 1, 2005

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PART 2 OF 2
EO 13526 1.4(c)<
54 "Memorandum of Conference with President Kennedy," 22 July 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, VII, Arms Control and Disarmament, 831; McCone calendars, entries
for 24 and 31 July 1963; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Discussion with Governor Rockefeller...31 July 1963," McCone Papers, box 9, folder 5; Elder,
"McCone as DCI (1987)," 179; "Editorial Note," FRUS, 1961-1963, VII, Arms Control and Disarmament, 865-66; "Statement of Position of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff on the Three-Environment Nuclear Test Ban Treaty," 12 August 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, Arms Control; National Security Policy; Foreign Eco-
nomic Policy: Microfiche Supplement, doe.
55Giglio, 218; Parmet, 311-16; Firestone, 87-89, 110-13, 123ff.; Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 909-13; Philip J. Briggs, "Kennedy and the Congress: The
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1963," in John E Kennedy: The Promise Revisited, 38-50; Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban, chap. 20; Mandelbaum, 180-81;
"Editorial Note," FRUS, 1961-1963, VII, Arms Control and Disarmament, 886. (U)
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that might compromise agents or technical systems. Prevent-
ing such revelations was one of the main reasons McCone
insisted that the United States not rely on intelligence as a
substitute for comprehensive on-site inspections to verify
Soviet compliance. In comments at meetings of the Com-
mittee of Principals during 1964, he addressed details of con-
ducting those inspections?including the wording of phrases
pertaining to them in subsequent protocols. He wanted to
avoid giving the Soviets more chances to violate the spirit of
the treaty by taking advantage of ambiguous language in its
letter.
"Sttcw.?vi
Confronting the Main Adversaries (I): The Soviet Union (U)
President Kennedy put McCone on a committee that
reviewed proposed American tests to ensure they conformed
to the provisions of the treaty. He continued in that func-
tion after Lyndon Johnson became president. The other
members were Rusk, McNamara, Seaborg, Foster, Maxwell
Taylor, and Jerome Weisner, the White House science
adviser. This responsibility drew on McCone's nuclear
expertise and was not directly related to his role as DCI. For
instance, in February 1964 he argued against conducting an
underground excavation test under the PLOWSHARE pro-
gram because it might release radioactive debris in detect-
able quantities. By his reading, the treaty permitted only
fully contained tests. McCone's interpretation of the agree-
ment was questionable, but President Johnson decided for
political and diplomatic reasons to suspend the proposed
explosion. As Bundy advised the president, "You don't want
the Russians accusing you of breaking a treaty [in an elec-
tion year]." The AEC did not conduct the test until Decem-
ber." (U)
A leadership change in Moscow in October 1964 dis-
rupted activity on arms control for a while. Until the politi-
cal situation in the Kremlin stabilized, McCone cautioned
ACDA Director Foster, the United States should not raise
the issue of nuclear disarmament. He believed the Soviet
policy elite was so preoccupied with internal politics and
relations with the Eastern European satellites that it could
not discuss the issue meaningfully. On one occasion during
this period, McCone uncharacteristically spoke theoretically
about how disarmament would have a long-term beneficial
effect on the Soviets. In comments reminiscent of Eisen-
hower's censure of the "military industrial complex," the
DCI opined that if Soviet industry was redirected to make -
consumer products instead of "the sterile goods of war," the
Soviet people "would be more affluent, they would have
more tact, they would move away from their sterile society
and into a different type of society." He thought Washing-
ton and Moscow might even consider exchanging intelli-
gence on each other's capabilities as one of several steps
toward ending the arms race. For the DCI, the problem was
getting the superpowers to agree on the essential first step?
a verification system that really worked. 59)
The largest Soviet underground test yet, on 15 January
1965, fortified McCone's suspicions about Moscow's will-
ingness to observe the treaty's limits. Just a few days after the
DCI told a congressional committee that through all of
1964 the Soviets apparently had not violated or taken advan-
tage of loopholes in the treaty,
I At a later meeting of the
Committee of Principals, McCone "was particularly strong
in his feeling that this was...a test ban violation," according
to Seaborg, and evidently wanted the US government to say
so explicitly in a press release. Instead, the administration
took a more subdued approach, merely announcing that the
detonation had occurred while quietly asking the Soviets for
an explanation. When news of the test appeared before the
official announcement, an irate President Johnson chastised
McCone, Ball and McNamara for the unauthorized disclo-
sure, which he feared might derail further arms control
efforts. Johnson, wrote Seaborg, was "direct and vociferous
"NSAM No. 269, "Procedure for Approval of Certain Nuclear Tests," 31 October 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, VII, Arms Control and Disarmament, 898-99; Abram
Chayes (Department of State legal adviser) memorandum to U. Alexis Johnson, "White House Meeting Today Concerning Project Sulky," 7 February 1964, NSAM
No. 282, "Project Sulky," 11 February 1964, and "Editorial Note," FRUS, 1964-1968, XI, Arms Control and Disarmament, 13-15,153-54. (U)
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in his complaints" to them "as the leaks had involved their
departments" and "must be stopped." The administration
concluded a few weeks later that the explosion was part of a
PLOWSHARE experiment
McCone's initial reaction to the test was
hasty and overdrawn, bespeaking his unmitigated distrust of
Soviet intentions." X
"No other accomplishment in the White House gave
Kennedy greater satisfaction," presidential speechwriter
Theodore Sorensen wrote soon after the test ban treaty was
ratified. Averell Harriman concluded years later, however,
that it had been a hollow achievement. "When you stop to
think of what the advantages were to us of stopping all test-
ing in the early 1960s when we were still ahead of the Sovi-
ets[,] it's really appalling to realize what a missed
opportunity we had." Yet while McCone was AEC chair-
man and DCI during the years the test ban was being dis-
cussed, he never advocated using a treaty to freeze the US
nuclear advantage. One foreseeable consequence of the US
government not having done so soon became a reality. The
treaty forced testing underground, allowing the Soviets to
develop, produce, and deploy even deadlier weapons. As
noted earlier, they quickly seized the opportunity. The treaty
also would have scant impact on the problem of prolifera-
tion, in the judgment of the Intelligence Community. "[IN
India, Israel, Sweden or other technically competent nations
show as much determination to develop such weapons as
have France and China, the types of pressure which the
USSR and the US have been willing to use to date against
potential proliferators would probably not be successful," an
October 1964 NIE stated. Meanwhile, the Johnson admin-
istration continued sending proposals for a comprehensive
test ban treaty to negotiators in Geneva. The effort would
not bear fruit until 1968, when the United States and the
Soviet Union signed the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of
Nuclear Weapons.6)14
Taunting the Bear: Anti-Soviet Covert Actions (U)
During McCone's tenure, CIA's covert action operations
against the Soviet Union were redirected outward, just as its
espionage activities were, and for the same reasons.
?Transcript of McCone testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee, 11 January 1965,60, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 19; Kirkpatrick memorandum
about DCI meeting with PFIAB on 4 February 1965, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 19, folder 382; Seaborg, "Notes of Meetings," 19 January 1965, FRUS, 1964-
1968, XI, Arms Control and Disarmament, 170-71; Glenn T. Seaborg with Benjamin S. Loeb, Stemming the Tide, 221-25..,*
Cl Sorensen, Kennedy, 836; Gregg Herken, Counsels ofWar, 185; NIE 4-2-64, "Prospects for a Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Over the Next Decade," 21 October
1964,2; Seaborg, Stemming the Tide, chaps. 18-23.>c
]Jerni-Annual
1963 Report of the Central Intelligence Agency to the I residents Poreign Intelligence Advisory Board, I October 1,102?_11 ivIarch
,34*
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Confonting the Main Adversaries (I): The Soviet Union (U)
The Monolith Cracks (U)
The split between the Soviet Union and the PRC was one
of the salient factors in US policy toward those countries
during the early 1960s.74 Moscow and Beijing's mutual hos-
tility had multiple causes rooted in history, ideology, and
national interest. These sources included the two countries'
longstanding rivalry over territory in central Asia, their con-
test for leadership of the international communist move-
ment, ideological differences over the nature of Marxism,
personal antagonism between Khrushchev and Mao Zedong,
and the resentment of Chinese rulers over what they
regarded as inadequate Soviet aid, always begrudgingly given,
and the Soviets' tepid support of the PRC in its dispute with
the Republic of China on Taiwan. By 1963, after Moscow
declined to help Beijing in its border dispute with India in
1962 and compromised with Washington over the missiles
in Cuba, the estrangement was public and complete. The
two regimes had become, in Ambassador Charles Bohlen's
paradigm, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks of the com-
munist world!' While McCone was DCI, assessments by
CIA and the Intelligence Community that the split was wide
and enduring contributed to the Kennedy administration's
decision to exploit it?to drive the communist powers fur-
ther apart by effecting a detente of sorts with the Soviet
Union while isolating the PRC internationally as a dangerous
revolutionary force. CIA?notwithstanding McCone's
uncertainties about the severity of the split?helped execute
the policy through various covert endeavors. (U)
CIA analysts first began describing differences between
the Soviet Union and the PRC in 1952. During the rest of
the 1950s, the Agency's judgments about the split, although
not uniform, went further than the rest of the community
in concluding that Sino-Soviet solidarity was eroding?
especially after Stalin's death in 1953.76 Coordinated com-
munity assessments were more guarded. An NIE in 1954 set
the general tone for the next several years:
Communist China is more an ally than a satellite of
the USSR. It possesses some capability for indepen-
dent action.. .We believe that despite potential sources
of friction between the two powers arising from occa-
sional conflicts of national interests, the cohesive
forces in the relationship will be far greater than the
divisive forces throughout the period of this estimate
[mid-1959].
Such judgments paralleled those of most policymakers
downtown, who until around 1960 thought conclusions
about a schism were, in former CIA analyst Harold Ford's
words, "based heavily on tea-leaf interpretations of what
Soviet and Chinese media were saying." Bilateral disputes
were over tactics, not strategy, and would come and go as sit-
uations changed; animosity was highly personalized between
Khrushchev and Mao, and thus transient; and fundamental
agreement on the basic point continued?the West, and
especially the United States, was the prime enemy who
would be vanquished through socialist revolution!' (U)
Events in 1960 and 1961?the Kremlin's sudden with-
drawal of advisers from the PRC, and Khrushchev's denun-
ciation of Mao and his foreign proxies?provided the
definitive proof of grave discord that had been missing. As
Sir Percy Cradock, a senior member of the US-UK Joint
Intelligence Committee, has aptly written, "All this marked
a new stage of the struggle: secret family quarrels, with indi-
" General information in this section comes from: Goal on H. Chang, Friends and Enemies, chap. 7; Rosemary Foot, The Practice of Power: U.S. Relations with China
since 1949, 115-34; Harold P. Ford, "Calling the Sino-Soviet Split," Studies 41, no. 4 (1997): 41-55; idem, "The Eruption of Sino-Soviet Politico-Military Prob-
lems, 1957-60," in Raymond L. Garthoff, ed., Sino-Soviet Military Relations, 100-113; Hilsman, To Move a Nation, 340ff; Peter Jones and Sian Kevill, comps.,
China and the Soviet Union, 1949-84, chaps. 3-5; Noam Kochavi, "Washington's View of the Sino-Soviet Split, 1961-1963: From Puzzled Prudence to Bold Exper-
imentation," /6-NS 15, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 50-79; Alfred D. Low, The Sino-Soviet Dispute, chaps. 1-7; Constantine Pleshakov, "Nikita Khrushchev and Sino-
Soviet Relations," and Chen Jian and Yang Kuisong, "Chinese Politics and the Collapse of the Sino-Soviet Alliance," in Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The
Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945-1963, 226-94; and Donald S. Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961. The Pinyin transliteration system for
Chinese names has been used except in direct quotations or titles of documents. (U)
75 James C. Thomson (Department of State) memorandum to Harriman, "Secretary's Policy Planning Meeting, January 2,1962; Discussion of the Sino-Soviet Con-
flict and US Policy," 12 January 1962, FRUS, 1961-1963, Jall, Northeast Asia,177 . (U)
76 Much of CIA's early analysis on this subject was produced under the aegis of the Sino-Soviet Studies Group in a special set of papers called the "Esau Studies?an
allusion to the feuding brothers Jacob and Esau in the Book of Genesis. ONE, ONI, the Senior Research Staff on International Communism, and FBIS also pre-
pared many assessments of aspects of Sino-Soviet relations during the 1950s and early 1960s. (U)
77NIE 11-4-54, "Soviet Capabilities and Probable Courses of Action Through Mid-1959," 15 September 1954, CIA's Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1991, 46;
Ford, "Calling the Sino-Soviet Split," 42. (U)
"151;CII
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rect abuse and the occasional sound of muffled blows, were
succeeded by open disagreement and public polemics. The
West now had something to bite on......
When this assortment of open source and secret informa-
tion was collated and examined, a new analytic line rose to
dominance in the community during McCone's years as
DCI: the competing interests of the communist powers
overrode their ideological affinities and made their differ-
ences irreconcilable. "There is still one Communist faith,"
stated an estimate in August 1960, "but there are now two
voices of Communist authority.... The Sino-Soviet relation-
ship is not a Communist monolith." ONE chief Sherman
Kent wrote McCone in late 1961 that
the Sino-Soviet conflict is at bottom a clash of
national interests. While each professes devotion to
Communist unity, each seeks to mobilize the entire
world Communist movement in the service of its own
aims.... Barring a radical change in Chinese outlook
or leadership, we now believe that the chances of a full
break in party relations between the two during the
next year or so have increased very substantially.
"S inn-Soviet relations are in a critical phase just short of an
acknowledged and definitive split," an NIE in early 1962
concluded. "There is no longer much chance of a funda-
mental resolution of differences." A year later, an NIE fore-
cast that "the Chinese will almost certainly continue.. .to
expand their influence at Soviet expense.... A formal schism
could occur at any time." In 1964, the sense of the commu-
nity was that Sino-Soviet relations might vacillate some-
what, but "the rift is so deep and the national interest of
each party so heavily engaged that there is virtually no
chance of reconciliation under the present leaders. The
international movement may now be on the eve of a formal
split." "Soviet leaders appear to have concluded that they
will be locked in a severe struggle with China for a pro-
tracted period," went another estimate that year, "[and they
will] pursue their own interests.. .despite the cost of...con-
sequent fracturing of the international movement.' (U)
Assessments such as those ran contrary to the traditional
thinking of some senior CIA officers?mainly longtime stu-
dents of communist theory and Soviet affairs in the DDP
and the DI?and, at least for most of the time, of DCI
McCone. Like most members of the US national security
establishment, McCone had believed for many years that
the Soviet Union and the PRC were steadfast allies. To
McCone, the early evidence of a split was too sketchy, too
inferential, too contrary to continued signs of cooperation.
As AEC chairman, McCone told the NSC in 1960 that he
"took the schism.. .with a grain of salt," noting how fer-
vently the Soviets supported China's application for UN
membership and representation at meetings of the Interna-
tional Atomic Energy Agency." (U)
As DCI, despite briefings such as the one from Kent
quoted above, McCone maintained his skepticism. In 1963,
he told the NSC that he did not think the "very great" dif-
ferences between the communist superpowers were "very
deep" or that a "final break" would occur. Inside CIA,
McCone urged Agency analysts not to become fixed to their
latest judgments and to look at and weigh carefully all evi-
dence of either reconciliation or rupture. "[W]e must study
the indicators with great care and great objectivity and not
be influenced by a preconceived conclusion in this matter."
Current assessments about a schism?for example, the DI's
statement in July 1963 that "[w]e can.. .expect an acceler-
ated emergence of two competing and hostile Communist
world centers, with accompanying disruption of world
Communism"?must not become the new conventional
wisdom. With the nation's vital interests at stake in several
" Percy Cradock, Know Your Enemy, 167-68; Helms memorandum to Carter, "Inquiry from Senator Russell Relative to Sino-Soviet Dispute," 31 July 1963, DDO
Files, Job 78-02958R, box 3, folder 9>i*,
79 Ford, "Calling the Sino-Sovict Split," 42-50; Kochavi, "Washingtori's View of the Sino-Soviet Split," 54-57; NIE 100-3-60, "Sino-Soviet Relations," 9 August
1960, FRUS, 1958-1960, XIX, China, 1950-1960,704; Kent memorandum to McCone, "An Appraisal of Soviet Intentions," 21 December 1961, CIA's Analysis of
the Soviet Union, 1947-1991,72,74; NIE 11-5-62, "Political Developments in the USSR and the Communist World," 21 February 1962, FRUS, 1961-1963,V
Soviet Union, 375; NIE 13-63, "Problems and Prospects in Communist China," 1 May 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, XXII, Northeast Asia, 366; NIE 10-2-64, "Pros-
pects for the International Communist Movement," 10 June 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, XXX, China, 62; FRUS, 1964-1968, XIV Soviet Union, 24. The change in
community analysis occurred quickly once it began. Only three months before NIE 11-5-62 was published, a special estimate concluded that a rupture in relations
would be counterproductive for both communist powers, and therefore was unlikely. SNIE 13-3-61 "Chinese Communist Capabilities and Intentions in the Far
East," 30 November 1961, FRUS, 1961-1963, XXII, Northeast Asia, 173-74. The assessments of the JIC underwent a similar evolution. Craddock,
Know Your Enemy, 225-33. (U)
'Editorial note about 464th NSC meeting on 20 October 1960, FRUS, 1958-1960, XIX, China, 730. (U)
254
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areas affected by a split between the communist powers-
arms control, regional controversies, possible US-Soviet
conflict in Berlin and elsewhere-"hard facts and positive
information" were needed more than ever." Jef
-"Sttrlia.Td
Confronting the Main Adversaries (I): The Soviet Union (U)
McCone saw some convincing reasons why both Mos-
cow and Beijing would set aside their differences-not the
least of which was the struggle against their shared American
enemy-and he questioned whether Khrushchev was acting
as if a split really had occurred. In the premier's discussions
with Harriman in Moscow during the test ban negotiations
in July 1963, for example, McCone thought Khrushchev
was telling the United States that the communist powers'
dispute could be straightened out. The DCI noted that
Khrushchev said he would still assist China and had not
mentioned abrogating their mutual defense treaty.
"Frankly," McCone told his senior analysts,
I have been alarmed over what he said to Harriman,
and I fail to give the very great optimistic, hopeful
turn to the events of the last two weeks which are
being carried around by some in Washington. Except
for Mao's statement which seemed to draw the color
line, yellow and black versus white, we don't seem to
have very much to pin our hopes on, except for a lot
of polemics."X
One bit of controversial information that McCone and
most Agency analysts considered but dismissed was the
assertion of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn that the Sino-
Soviet split was part of a massive disinformation plot-a
"strategic deception"-orchestrated in Moscow. After coun-
terintelligence chief James Angleton told PFIAB in 1962
about Golitsyn's idea, CIA officers had assured the board
that there was no evidence for the defector's idiosyncratic
assessment. Nonetheless, upon hearing from Golitsyn per-
sonally, McCone ordered a panel of Agency specialists on
the Soviet Union and China to study the question again.
His action did not indicate that he accepted the defector's
theory. Rather, he seems to have regarded Golitsyn's inter-
pretation as additional intelligence that Agency estimators
should factor into their judgment on the nature and extent
of the rift. The panel of experts-dubbed the "Flat Earth
Committee" by detractors of Golitsyn's "handler," Angle-
ton-concluded, in line with previous CIA assessments,
that the defector's theory was unsupportable, and thereafter
McCone did nothing else to lend credence to it. (The
Golitsyn case and McCone's relations with Angleton are dis-
cussed in Chapter 13.)83
At least in analytical terms, McCone maintained a "prove
it" attitude about the split throughout his directorship. In
1964, he told the NSC about new clandestine information
that indicated the Sino-Soviet schism was deeper than the
countries' public statements suggested. He further noted that
the Soviets had deployed more troops along the Chinese bor-
der, and that allies of Beijing, such as North Korea, were cas-
tigating Moscow for "deviationism." In early 1965, however,
he told a congressional oversight committee that Khrush-
chev's ouster in October 1964 eliminated a major irritant
between the two countries. Moreover, he testified, "[C]ertain
defense treaties [between Moscow and Beijing] are still in
existence.. .they have not abrogated those, and.. .until some
such move as that takes place[,] it is a little hard to take the
position that the rupture is irreparable.""
McCone's reservations about Sino-Soviet tensions did
not lead him to order the reconsideration of community or
Agency assessments, as he had in one instance with Viet-
nam, nor to temper CIAs covert activities to exploit the dif-
81 Bromley Smith, "Summary Record of the 516th Meeting of the National Security Council," 31 July 1963, FRUS, 1961-63, XE/I, Northeast Asia, 373; CIA mem-
orandum, "Implications of the Sino-Soviet Rupture for the US," OCI No. 1585/63, 18 July 1963, MORI doc. no. 262441; McCone untitled memorandum to
i,111 FRIA' IcK1-101-cl V Stmiat r Ininn (341
" McCone memorandum to Cline an Kent, "This afternoon's briefing of the NSC," 31 July 1963, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 5; DCI Morning Meeting Min-
utes, October 17, 1964," ER Files, job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 348. As it turned out, the PRC regarded the test ban treaty as a grievous sellout that threatened
to cripple its own nuclear program.
8) [Bronson Tweedy (former DDP,
o ticcr),i Anatoity iviumayiovicn onisyn view, c I Lill oruuy t u. d ,w, , .--y interview by I
i k , -, ,
l2 June 1984, 24; Kirkpatrick memorandum to Helms and Cline, "Group to Consider the Implication ...- i.,.,....-. Courses of Action in Connection withtffe
it. oping Situation Between Moscow and Peking," Action Memorandum No. A-266, 8 July 1963, DDO Files, Job 78-02958R, box 2, folder 8; Tom Mangold,
Cold Warrior, 85-86, 89-91; David Wise, Molehunt, 114; Carter untitled memorandum to Golitsyn, 28 May 1962, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 1>iic
Summary Record of National Security Council Meeting No. 525, April 2, 1964," National Security Files, NSC Meetings 1964, LBJ Library; McCone, "Memo-
randum for thc Record...Discussion with Rusk, September 12th[, 19641," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 13; "Soviet, Peking Worlds Apart, McCone Says," Wash-
ington Evening Star, 15 November 1964, McCone clipping file, HIC; transcript of McCone testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee, 11 January 1965,
48, 88, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 19).
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ferences between the communist powers. The Agency's
operational initiatives supported an overall administration
policy designed to fall somewhere between, in Dean Rusk's
words, "tinkering...as though we were playing with toys"
and "retreat[ing] behind the business that 'well, we ought
not to [try to widen the rift] anyhow.? The Department of
State directed all US missions to treat the Sino-Soviet con-
flict in ways that would highlight the "inconsistency [in]
relations" between the two countries, "deny communists [a]
monopoly in interpreting their problems," and "counter
communist efforts [to] paper over [their] serious differences
and therefore maintain [the] fiction of non-existent mono-
lithic unity." The long-range purpose of the administration's
efforts was clear from President Kennedy's comment at a
press conference in December 1962: "We would be far
worse off?the world would be?if the Chinese dominated
the Communist movement, because they believe in war as
the means of bringing about the Communist world....
[W]e are better off with the Khrushchev view than we are
with the Chinese Communist view, quite obviously." US
policy, aided by CIA's operations and informed by its analy-
ses, preferred the Soviet Union over the PRC.' (U)
On the analysis side, CIA's response to the communist rift
showed the timeliness and responsiveness that characterized
the DI's work under the direction of McCone and Cline.
The latter was perhaps the most forceful advocate inside the
Agency of the view that the Sino-Soviet split was deep and
permanent. He effectively managed the DI's production on
the issue so that it comprehensively addressed current devel-
opments, responded to customer requests, investigated high
impact/low probability scenarios, and conducted retrospec-
tive reinterpretations of events in the communist world dur-
ing the past several years. Policy-relevant analyses included
anticipating the regional impact of the schism, especially on
Japan, and examining the probable response to US actions to
promote pluralism in Bloc countries. DI research on or
communist and leftist sarties hel ed the DDP
on e ey ? pro ucts on t e
split and often relayed their content to senior policymak-
ers?without
The Johnson administration started out continuing its
predecessor's conciliatory approach to Moscow and isolating
Beijing, and using CIA to carry out the clandestine aspects
of that "divide and conquer" policy. However, Agency activ-
ities became mired in the uncertainties of the war in Viet-
nam. If the Communist Chinese were the principal backers
of North Vietnam, did it make sense for the United States to
further antagonize them by accentuating the schism, thus
inducing them to step up their aid to Hanoi? If the North
Vietnamese were Soviet proxies, would US rapprochement
with Moscow drive Beijing to increase its support of the
North as a way to irritate the Soviets? If the two communist
powers were both helping Hanoi against their common cap-
italist/imperialist enemy, did that mean that the split
remained deep enough to exploit through covert and other
means? If the split still existed, would massive American
85Transcript of Rusk news conference, 10 December 1962, quoted in Kochavi, "Washington's View of the Sino-Soviet Split," 68; State Airgram 5667, 22 November
1962, ERUS, 1961-1963, Northeast Asia, 350 n. 1; Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John E Kennedy, 1963,900. (U)
"Cline memorandum to Kirkpatrick, "DD/I Inventory of Work Bearing on Implications of Sino-Soviet Rift," 5 August 1963, DDO Files, Job 78-02958R, box 1,
folder 21. Among several vehement expressions of Cline's view on the split, see his memorandum, "Sino-Soviet Relations," 14 January 1963, ERUS, 1961-1963,
XXII, Northeast Asia, 340.
256
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military action against North Vietnam mend it by uniting
the East against the West, or widen it by forcing the Soviets
to choose between the tangible benefits of "peaceful coexist-
ence" with the United States and its revolutionary kinship
with the Vietnamese communists? As the Johnson adminis-
tration wrestled with these questions, CIA's covert activities
in exploiting Sino-Soviet tension made little headway in
McCone's last year.
Khrushchev's Ouster and Intelligence Failure (U)
Tir-14
Nikita Khrushchev (U)
Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev fell from power
on 15 October 1964 in what
CIA called "a carefully
planned and skillfully exe-
cuted palace coup" prompted
by "a long accumulation of
grievances and dissatisfaction
with his leadership." His
replacement by a "collective
leadership" from the Polit-
buro caught the US govern-
ment off guard. The
Intelligence Community had
been aware of the problems besetting the Soviet leader and
had noted "friction and jockeying" in the Kremlin inner cir-
cle. For example, assessments in mid-1963 noted that
Khrushchev confronted an array of difficulties?a stagnant
agricultural sector, a restless intelligentsia, a collection of res-
tive satellite countries beleaguered by worsening political and
economic difficulties, Politburo discontent over his handling
of the Cuban missile crisis and relations with Communist
China?and that "his predominance [in the Soviet leader-
ship] has diminished somewhat." McCone himself told an
official audience around the same time that domestic and
foreign concerns were critical enough to restrain Soviet
""Ltilkt+i
Confronting the Main Adversaries (I): The Soviet Union (U)
adventurism. The community, however, had not foreseen the
emergence of a coalition of rivals strong enough to bring
Khrushchev down. Its last forecast of the premier's durability,
in early 1964, concluded that his "internal position is now
probably stronger and his freedom of action apparently
greater than a year ago.""
McCone was embarrassed by this collection and analysis
lapse on the most important international leadership issue of
the time. The DCI himself learned about Khrushchev's
removal in a telephone-call from Moscow either on the 15th
or the 16th. "[W]hat appeared to have happened came as a
complete surprise to me and to almost everybod else," he
said in a confidential briefing.
Wit out
hare evi ence, t e an ysis cou s on y specu ate on the
meaning of the Kremlin's "cryptic" announcement and posit
"indications" that the ex-premier had not stepped down vol-
untarily. Subsequent assessments of Khrushchev's departure
were full of conditionals and qualifiers ("appears to have," "if
these were," "seemed," "best guess") that showed that the US
government's Kremlinology was little more than ill-informed
conjecture. This relative ignorance of internal Soviet politics
showed glaringly in an unenlightening Agency analysis that
the new Soviet leaders "would be either less troublesome or
more dangerous to the West." In an apparent effort to put
the best light on the intelligence failure, McCone publicly
claimed a few weeks later that Khrushchev's opponents "did
not themselves believe they had the strength to remove him
until they had assembled" in Moscow on 14 October and
were just as surprised as anyone else when their plot suc-
ceeded the next day." 1:1(
"OCI, "Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership" and "Top Soviet Leadership," Current Intelligence Weekly Review, 20 April 1962 and 19 April 1963, FRUS, 1961-
1963, 1/,- Soviet Union, 407,669-70; NIE 11-63, "Main Trends in Soviet Foreign Policy," 22 May 1963, ibid., 687-89; McCone comments to Army War College
National Strategy Seminar, 11 June 1963, ibid., 704-5; numerous OCT analyses on Soviet leadership issues during 1963-64 in HS Files, Job 00-01588R, box 4;
OCI, "The Coup Against Khrushchev," Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, 23 October 1964,1, Office of Russian and European Analysis (OREA) Files, Job 80-
00341A, box 8, folder 1; CIA memorandum, "Soviet Policies and Problems on the Eve of the Moscow Negotiations," 3 July 1963, cited in Bird, The Color of
Truth, 249; NIE 11-63, "Main Trends in Soviet Foreign Policy," 22 May 1963,5-7; NIE 11-9-64, "Soviet Foreign Policy," 19 February 1964, DI memorandum,
"The Coming Struggle for Power in the USSR," 19 March 1964, and OCI Memorandum, "Khrushchev at 70: An Appraisal of His Leadership Style," 17 April
1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, XII% Soviet Union, 25,43-44,59-64.X
"McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting with General Eisenhower...," 30 October 1964, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 13; McCone OH, 21;
OCT Memorandum, "Soviet Leadership Developments," Current Intelligence Digest, 16 October 1964,1, OREA Files, Job 80-00341A, box 8, folder ; CI Mem-
orandum, "Implications of Khruslichev's Downfall," 17 October 1964, and DI Memorandum No. 2051/64, "Khrushchev's Fall and Its Consequences," 22 October
1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, XIV, Soviet Union, 137ff., 148ff.; Richard Corrigan, "McCone Calls Nikita's Fall Big Surprise," Washington Post, 15 November 1964,
McCone clipping file, HIC.*
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CHAPTER 10
Khrushchev probably fell from power, McCone
explained to the NSC two days after the fact, because of his
erratic behavior and inconsistent public statements, his
flawed leadership that contributed to the Sino-Soviet split
and tensions with the Warsaw Pact countries, and his advo-
cacy of reallocating resources toward consumers and away
from heavy industry and the military. The DCI had to con-
cede that CIA analysts knew little about the relationship
between the two Soviets now running the Kremlin, Alexei
Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev, but he doubted that their
power-sharing arrangement would last long and predicted
that one of them, or possibly a third figure, would emerge as
both premier and first party secretary?as Khrushchev had
after Stalin died. McCone anticipated no sharp shifts in
Soviet foreign policy in the near term and later told a Senate
oversight committee that the leadership change seemed to
be having the salutary effect of making Moscow suspend its
subversion efforts in the Third World." X
The sense of the Intelligence Community was the same.
In estimates McCone approved during the first part of
1965, the community forecast that Soviet actions abroad
would follow the lines of the previous two years. A collective
leadership, with its inherent power struggles, was more
prone to policy fluctuations, but the new Soviet rulers were
unlikely to seek confrontation with the West or, on the
other hand, to make significant concessions to it. Risk aver-
sion, not adventurism, would be their watchwords."
What To Do Next? (U)
The inadequate information and tentative analyses about
the Soviet leadership typified American intelligence on the
Soviet Union during McCone's tenure. The community was
getting better at strategic weapons assessments because of
CORONA,\
/led to?at times?speculative analysis,
making it harder for the Johnson administration to devise a
well-founded Soviet policy. (U)
The administration saw Khrushchev's ouster as an oppor-
tunity to move toward detente with the Soviet Union, but
McCone did not believe a change was warranted. Speaking
almost as a lone voice in the senior policymaking circle, he
argued in late 1964 and early 1965 that with Brezhnev,
Kosygin, and their comrades preoccupied with internal
maneuvering and keeping control over the Bloc countries,
new initiatives that might ensnare' the United States in
unexpected problems or create openings for Soviet ripostes
should be avoided. Because the US strategic and political
position was so much stronger than the Soviets', the admin-
istration ought not to do anything?including back-channel
feelers?that would help them inadvertently. McCone's col-
leagues criticized this view as "Eisenhowerish," however, and
it went against the administration's belief that Moscow's pre-
dicament might make it more receptive to diplomatic over-
tures. Washington, according to this line of reasoning,
would be shortsighted to let matters drift when so many
issues of mutual interest?nuclear weapon,, Cuba, China,
Third World conflicts?needed attention.
2
In the closing months of McCone's directorship, Viet-
nam intruded into the superpower relationship, causing seri-
ous estrangement. The two sides' actions reinforced one
another. The new Soviet leaders reengaged their country in
Indochina through diplomatic contacts and affirmations of
support to local communists, and the Johnson administra-
tion escalated the war through bombing and troop deploy-
ments. The Soviet Union's moves did not surprise
Washington. Even before the administration's military
actions, the Intelligence Community had forecast that Mos-
cow?largely out of reluctance to surrender the field to
Beijing?would become more active in the region. The
Soviet government, however, was more willing to antagonize
the United States (and the PRC) over Vietnam than Ameri-
can analysts had believed." (U)
"Cline, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting of an Executive Group of the National Security Council, 16 October 1964," and McCone, "Memorandum for
the Record.. Meeting in Cabinet Room. .16 October 1964," FRUS, 1964-1968, XIV- Soviet Union, 124-26; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Meeting
of the National Security Council... 17 October 1964," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 10; transcript of McCone testimony to Senate Armed Services Committee,
11 January 1965,91, ibid., box 3, folder 19. Two years earlier, CIA had identified Brezhnev and Kosygin as possible successors to Khrushchev. OCI, "The Khrush-
chev Succession," Current Intelligence Weekly Review, 19 October 1962, FRUS, 1961-1963, V; Soviet Union, 538-39.'06c
'David Klein (NSC) memorandum to Bundy, "Discussion on Things Soviet at CIA Last Night," 7 January 1965, and NIE 11-9-65, "Main Trends in Soviet For-
eign Policy," 27 January 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, XIV Soviet Union, 206-7,215-16; NIE 11-4-65, "Main Trends in Soviet Military Policy," 14 April 1965,1-2.
McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Meeting with Mr. James Donovan-10 December 1964," McCone Papers, box 2, folder 14; Klein memorandum to
Bundy, "Discussion on Things Soviet at CIA Last Night," 7 January 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, XIV; Soviet Union, 207-8
258
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By McCone's departure in April 1965, the brief period of
"peaceful coexistence" was over. Throughout his dealings
with Soviet affairs in the 1950s and 1960s, McCone
doubted whether such a condition, by that name or any
other, ever could have been established. After all, peaceful
coexistence, as its architect Khrushchev had said, "is the
form of struggle appropriate to the present epoch!'
McCone was consistently realistic about the Soviet Union's
long-range intention of winning that struggle against the
West. He, CIA, and other members of the community, how-
"SEPE.1461B4
Confronting the Main Adversaries (I): The Soviet Union (U)
ever, misjudged the means Moscow would use and the level
of determination it would possess?most notably, when
they doubted that it would seek nuclear superiority during
the next several years. That inaccurate forecast stemmed
largely from insufficient intelligence about the "main adver-
sary," which in turn led to erroneous assumptions about
Soviet strategic intentions. Despite improvements in human
and technical collection while McCone was DCI, that gap
in knowledge persisted for years. (U)
"NIE 11-9-65, "Main Trends in Soviet Foreign Policy," 27 January 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, XIV; Soviet Union, 32; OCI report, "The Soviet Union Since Khrush-
chev," SC No. 00665/65A, 9 April 1965, ibid., 278; SNIE 11-11-65, "Soviet Attitudes Toward the US," 26 May 1965, ibid., 289. (U)
" Department of State, Policy Planning Council, "Soviet Policy in the Light of the Vietnam Crisis," 15 February 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, XIV; Soviet Union, 249.
(U)
"Sttscagi
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""t`E.C411.17
Confronting the Main Adversaries (II): The People's
Republic of China (U)
president Kennedy continued Eisenhower's "two Chi-
nas' policy for dealing with the People's Republic of
China and the Republic of China.' The approach
treated them as separate states, striking a balance between
their interests and containment of the communist regime in
Beijing through regional alliances, diplomatic pressure, and
military assistance to the Nationalist government on Tai-
wan. For example, the Kennedy administration refused to
support the designs of ROC President Chiang Kai-shek to
return to the mainland through military invasion, while at
the same time it worked to prevent PRC admission to the
United Nations. Despite Chiang's insistence that deteriorat-
ing conditions inside China (such as a catastrophic famine
in 1961) presented the best opportunity yet for military
strikes or large-scale paramilitary operations, Kennedy
abided by his statements during the 1960 campaign and
would not condone such tactics. (He conveyed his position
to the PRC through a back channel in Warsaw.) Nor would
he go to war over what he regarded as insignificant pieces of
real estate in the Taiwan Strait?the islands of Quemoy,
Matsu, and the Pescadores, causes of recurrent tension since
the 1950s. (U)
On the ROC's side, the presiden sup-
ported small harassment operations a and,
and in the case of UN membership, he went further than his
predecessor in siding with the ROC by secretly pledging to
use the US veto in the Security Council to prevent the
PRC's entry. A good deal of the administration's sufferance
of the Nationalists resulted from its fear of the powerful
China Lobby and its allies in Congress. More broadly,
Washington's hardline policy toward the PRC was but one
aspect of the general posture of toughness it struck toward
communists worldwide. (U)
Kennedy generally regarded Mao Zedong's China as a
greater threat to global peace than the Soviet Union?as an
undisciplined revolutionary state committed to spreading its
virulent brand of communism to the Third World, and
CHAPTER
11
especially Southeast Asia. Mao, the president declared in
August 1963, led a "Stalinist" government that "has called
for.. .international war.. .to advance the final success of the
Communist case." Beijing's actions had produced "a more
dangerous situation than any we have faced since the end of
the Second World War."' The danger grew more pro-
nounced as Beijing developed nuclear weapons and grew
further estranged from Moscow; it might be tempted to
assert its influence over the communist world by brandish-
ing its strategic weaponry. Yet, intelligence on the PRC's
intentions and capabilities was sketchy, increasing the likeli-
hood that US policymakers, working without sufficient
knowledge, might provoke a confrontation with grave inter-
national consequences. (U)
The Unclear Intelligence Picture (U)
For John McCone and CIA, this situation called for
intensifying collection on military and political targets and
devising covert actions to weaken Beijing's hold on the
mainland and subvert its stature among developing nations
and foreign communist movements. McCone?strongly
anticommunist, politically connected to the China Lobby,
and personally acquainted with Nationalist leaders?wanted
the Kennedy administration to be firm with the PRC. Com-
menting on a Department of State policy paper in 1962, he
wrote: "It seems a little bland.., to recommend only the very
long term policy of avoiding provocation and hoping things
will be better after Mao and his colleagues.. .die.... This
strikes me as simply adopting an attitude of hopefulness
rather than facing up to what may be much more pressing
short term strategic convulsions in Asia thrust on us by the
Chinese Communists."' Historically, however, US policy-
makers had perceived that of the two "main adversaries,"
Communist China posed the lesser threat. Moreover, the
PRC, although designated a Priority National Intelligence
Objective for several years, in reality had only recently
emerged as a target distinct from the Sino-Soviet Bloc.)*(
I See the Appendix on Sources for references to materials on US policy toward the "two Chinas" in the 1960s that were consulted in this work. The Pinyin translit-
eration system has been used for Chinese names and places except in direct quotations, titles of documents, and references to Nationalist leaders. Similarly, Taiwan
and Taiwan Strait are used rather than Formosa and Formosa Strait, names that have fallen into disuse since the 1960s. (U)
2 American Foreign Polity: Current Documents, 1963, 752. (U)
McCone letter to Rusk, 25 May 1962, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 29, folder 23.)c
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Consequently, a signifi-
cantly smaller proportion of
CIA's clandestine and analyti-
cal resources was dedicated to
the Communist Chinese target
than to the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe.
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Rally of Mao supporters in the PRC (U)
HUMINT and TECHINT (U)
The PRC was an even harder target than the Soviet
Union because CIA access to potential intelligence sources
was more limited and controlled. The PRC was not admit-
ted to the United Nations until 1971, and the United States
did not open a diplomatic mission in Beijing until 1
973
Lay, vol. 6, 761; Helms memorandum to Kirkpatrick, "Fiscal Year 1964 Foreign Intelligence Plans and Programs," 9 May 1962, DDO Files, Job 78-02888R, box
I, folder 25; Annual Report Jr FY 1964, 31-32 and tables following 4; fiemorandum to Helms, "Five Year
Plan?Intelligpce Collection and Political Action against China in the next rive tears..., December 1965, DDO Files, Job 78-03805R, box 1, folder 22
t"CIA and China in the Time of Mao," unpublished manuscript (19991 39 cony in HS Pilec Tp 1964 FF flivicinn ,1 int'YJ2l',n Cl
' Lay, vol. 6, 7461.1; USIB, Critical Collection Problems Committee, material on the PRC, ICS Files, Job 82R00370R, box 2, folder 3...1%
262
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Confronting the Main Adversaries (II): The People's Republic of China (U)
Stra$1,11.
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264 25TtanZ:
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"Stitsizz,
Confionting the Main Adversaries (II): The People's Republic of China (U)
Assessments (U)
CIA analysis of the PRC during McCone's tenure
remained the stepchild it had been in the 1950s. Since the
middle of that decade, most assessments of China appeared
in the context of Sino-Soviet relations, tensions over Tai-
wan, and possible renewed hostilities in Korea. The DI paid
relatively little attention to internal Chinese affairs. Policy-
maker interest in the PRC as a discrete issue subsided fur-
ther around 1960 after the Soviet Union ended military aid
and Mao's "Great Leap Forward" failed.3k
Personnel allocations in the DI for PRC-related accounts
during McCone's tenure are less clear than with the Soviet
Bloc because many officers worked in components dealing
with the Far East overall or in functional elements whose
geographic responsibilities are not readily apparent from
available sources or whose staff temporarily shifted assign-
ments to China affairs when needed.
Lacking broad knowledge of political, economic, and
military matters in the PRC, CIA and Intelligence Commu-
nity analysts produced assessments that, although logical
and thoughtful, did not advance insights that gave more
than episodic help to US policymakers. Early in McCone's
tenure, the estimates' conclusions were substantially more
moderate than the policies they were meant to inform. In
mid-1962, for example, while the administration was raising
fears of Chinese belligerence during another tempest in the
Taiwan Strait, USIB published a forecast that "over the next
few years Communist China will follow relatively conserva-
tive and rational policies of the kind recently instituted."
Three years later, however, with more intelligence in hand,
community analysts reached judgments that were more
hardline: Beijing would move more forthrightly to eject
Western influence from Asia and supersede Moscow as
leader of the communist world. Chinese foreign policy "in
some ways resembles an international guerrilla struggle,
which attempts to wear down the enemy's strength by
attacking the weak points"?a metaphor that, given what
was occurring contemporaneously in South Vietnam, did
not inspire confidence that US policy toward the PRC
would succeed.15X
Beijing's Nuclear Puzzle (U)
As in previous years, US policymakers during McCone's
directorship took the most interest in the PRC when its
nuclear weapons program was an issue. The key intelligence
question McCone and the community had to answer was:
When will the Communist Chinese test their first nuclear
device? The PRC's strategic weapons program began in
1955 when Mao?amid a dispute with the United States
and the ROC over some offshore islands?authorized a full-
scale development effort. Three years later, with major
/As early as
December 1960, CIA forecast that the PRC probably would
detonate its first nuclear device in 1963. In April 1962
nalysts concluded that the
first test most likely would occur in early 1964.16
Intelligence and estimates on these subjects found a ready
audience downtown. That was especially so by early 1963,
when President Kennedy told his national security policy-
makers that he regarded PRC acquisition of nuclear weap-
TThe Development of Strategic Research at CIA, 1947-1967," 317..Ni
"SNIE 13-3-61, "Chinese Communist Capabilities and Intentions in the Far East," 30 November 1961, FRUS, 1961-1963, )XII, Northeast Asia, 172; NIE 13-4-
62, "Prospects for Communist China,' 2 May 1962,2; NIE 13-9-65, "Communist China's Foreign Policy," 5 May 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, )00( China,169.164.
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ons as "probably the most serious problem facing the world
today." "The President was of a mind," Bundy informed
McCone, "that nuclear weapons in the hands of the Chinese
Communists would so upset the world political scene it
would be intolerable to the United States and the West."
The PRC's stature in Asia would rise, as its neighbors looked
to it as a model of economic development and as a regional
power broker. As discussed in the previous chapter,
Kennedy's concern that Mao's revolutionary regime would
join the nuclear club was the impetus behind his drive for a
test ban treaty throughout the year.17K
McCone was determined to prevent an intelligence fail-
ure like that of 1949, when the timing of the Soviet Union's
first atomic test caught the United States by surprise.' His
service as chairman of the AEC prepared him for this issue;
his familiarity with nuclear technology shows clearly in his
writings and statements on the subject as DCI
mcuone directed his deputies in
January 1963 to undertake an all-out, all-source collection
effort against the PRC. The Chinese nuclear threat, he
noted, was "foremost in the minds of the highest authority
and therefore should be treated accordingly by CIA....
There should be no hesitation on the part of CIA to recom-
mend any and all types of clandestine activities directed
toward the securing of additional information" about
Beijing's nuclear program. X
The new intelligence gave community analysts more
assurance that their earlier forecasts were accurate; in July
they again predicted that the PRC's first nuclear test most
likely would occur in early 1964 at the soonest but they
conceded that it could happen before.
The conditionality of the SNIE's
"john Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb, passim; Foot, chap. 7; Peebles, CORONA Project, 223-24; NIE 13-60, "Communist China," 6 Decem-
ber 1960,13; NIE 13-2-60, "The Chinese Communist Atomic Energy Program," 13 December 1960,3-4,18-23; NIE 13-2-62, "Chinese Communist Advanced
Weapons Capabilities," 25 April 1962,3-4.,X
17 McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Meeting between DCI and Mr. Bundy...," 11 January 1963, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 4; Chang, chap. 8.>(
'Sources for this paragraph and the next are: McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting between DCI and Mr. Bundy...," 11 January 1963, McCone
Papers, box 2, folder 4; Kirkpatrick memorandum to Helms, Cline, and Scoville, Action Memorandum No. A-161, "All-out Intelligence Effort against Communist
China," 11 January 1963, Helms memorandum to McCone, "Ideas on Clandestine Collection Against Communist China," 24 January 1963 Colby memoranda to
Helms, "Ideas on Clandestine Collec a," 14 February 1963,
and "Progress in Clandestine Collec ion A ainst Communist hi
tme of Mao "31-3
IColby memorandum to Helms, "Progress in ciandestme Collection Against Communist China, and
and Lhina in the lime of Mao,
memorandum to Helms, "Preliminary Study of Nuclear Targets on the China Mainland," 21 June 1963, DDO Files, Job 78-02958R, box 1, folder 10;
ol. 6, Append. F, tab 4; McCone untitled memorandum to Carter about requirements OR Chinese nuclear weapons, 31 October 1964, McCone Papers, box
,J, oruLr 5..)?
CIA
266
,E?44E.,17
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Confronting the Main Adversaries (II): The People's Republic of China (U)
judgments was well justified. The document incorrectly
reported the discovery of a plutonium production reactor
and inaccurately predicted that China would not have
enough weapons-grade uranium 235 before 1966 (it did so
by early 1964).2?A,
Overt and Covert Reactions (U)
Gripped by uncertainty and fearful of the consequences
of Chinese nuclear success, the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations considered diplomatic, military, and clan-
destine steps to impede or halt the PRC's program.
Throughout 1961-63, President Kennedy and senior offi-
cials proposed to their Soviet counterparts?without suc-
cess?ideas for joint US-Soviet action against Beijing.
20SNIE 13-2-63, "Communist China's Advanced Weapons Program," 24 July 1963,1-2. Some of the flaws in the community estimates during the early 1960s?
principally single-outcome forecasting and a failure to gauge Chinese technical skills and determination?are discussed in Willis C. Armstrong et al., "The Hazards
of Single-Outcome Forecasting," Studies 28, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 57-70, reprinted in H. Bradley Westerfield, ed., Inside CIA's Private World, 238-54.,>(
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/
..?????".
268
1.tE414.1/
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"st?4241,/
Confronting the Main Adversaries (II): The People's Republic of China (U)
The First Test: Forecasts and Follow-Up (U)
Imagery was the key source. Relying on satellite and
aerial photography?the former benefiting from improved
camera resolution and larger film supplies on each mis-
sion?community analysts by mid-1964 had identified five
suspect installations and concluded that two of them, Pao
tou and Lop Nor, were the most likely sites for the first test
explosion. Lop Nor attracted special attention after
CORONA photography showed construction of a tower
that could hold a bomb. In July, McCone told President
Johnson that the community could not foretell when the
Chinese would detonate a nuclear device but that the pres-
ence of those installations in various stages of assembly and
operation indicated that PRC scientists had overcome at
least some of the problems caused by the Soviet cutoff of
technical assistance in 1960. The president suggested that
U-2 photography would give more precise information, but
McCone and Rusk advised against such a mission on techni-
cal and diplomatic grounds. \
With intelligence gaps remaining on such a sensitive sub-
ject, community analysts were circumspect. A special esti-
mate issued in late August 1964, "The Chances of an
Imminent Communist Chinese Nuclear Explosion," noted
that while Lop Nor was being readied for a test, a shortage
of plutonium suggested that one would not occur until after
the end of the year. Some members of the community dis-
agreed with that judgment?the 15th anniversary of the
founding of the PRC, 1 October 1964, had been suggested
as a possible date?but no representative took a footnote.
Two scientists who advised CIA on strategic issues
told McCone that Agency analy
screwing up oy assuming the Chinese device had to use
plutonium, not uranium, and thus would take longer to
prepare. Perhaps, having heard that opinion, McCone was
bolder in his forecasts when he met with Western European
heads of government in September, saying the Chinese may
conduct a test within 30 to 60 days. At this point, McCone
changed his mind about sending a U-2 over Lop Nor, but
Rusk and Bundy countered that the consequences of losing_
a plane were too great to justify the risk.
With a Chinese test drawing nearer, McCone and other
officials in the community advised the president that the US
government could prevent the PRC from achieving a propa-
ganda victory and avoid being blamed for another intelli-
gence failure by announcing that the administration already
knew a test would occur soon. Such a statement would, as
one American diplomat said at the time, "reassure neighbor-
ing countries that the US was watching and aware." Johnson
agreed, and Rusk told the press on 29 September that "for
some time it has been known that the Communist Chinese
were approaching the point where they might be able to det-
onate a first nuclear device." This announcement marked
the first time that information derived so evidently from sat-
ellite imagery had been made public. Meanwhile, CIA
...???????'
'McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Discussion with the President [and Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy] ...5 October [1964]...," McCone Papers, box 6,
folder 9; Burr and Richelson, "A Chinese Puzzle," 46; SNIE 13-4-64, "The Chances of an Imminent Communist Chinese Nuclear Explosion," 26 August 1964,
CORONA: America's First Satellite Program, 239-44; Michael R. Beschloss, ed., Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson's Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965,43; Senior
Review Panel memorandum to DCI William Casey and DDCI John McMahon, "Study of Intelligence Judgments Preceding Significant Historical Failures," 16
December 1983, ER Files, Job 86B00269R, box 11, folder 72; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Discussion with Rusk, 12 September 1964," and "Mem-
orandum of Discussion at Luncheon, 15 September [1964,]" McCone Papers, box 2, folder 13; record of conversation between McCone and UK Prime Minister Sir
Alec Douglas Home, 21 September 1964, Richard J. Aldrich, ed., Espionage, Security and Intelligence in Britain, 1945-1970, 107-8; Bundy untitled memorandum
about meeting with Rusk, McNamara, and McCone on 15 September 1964, ERGS, 1964-1968, XXX, China,94.
It?44.61/
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continued planting stories in Asian media designed to mini-
mize the psychological and political impact of a Chinese
test, and the Department of State told US embassies in the
region to prepare material for use in overt propaganda and
official statements.
At this key juncture, President Johnson and his national
security advisers ruled out a preventive military or paramili-
tary strike." The president, who had not evinced the same
anxiety over Chinese nuclear weapons as his predecessor,
maintained his policy of avoiding confrontation with
Beijing. His attitude to the PRC's nuclear threat was that, in
his words, "different dangers require different policies and
different actions" than toward the Soviet Union. Over the
preceding several months a consensus had developed among
administration policymakers that Beijing's acquisition of a
nuclear capability would not change the status quo in East
Asia enough to justify military action. Attacks on mainland
strategic sites while the United States and the PRC were not
fighting each other would be politically and militarily risky
and might cause the Chinese to increase their support to
North Vietnam. PRC reprisals against Taiwan also could
not be ruled out. In any case, damaged facilities would be
rebuilt, leaving the United States with a Hobson's choice of
attacking again or acquiescing in embarrassment. (U)
Accordingly, the administration judged that intensifying
current policies and programs was the best way to contain
the Communist Chinese threat. Those steps included con-
tinuing (but futile) efforts to enlist Moscow in diplomatic
moves against Beijing. Some officials still considered mili-
tary and paramilitary options, including an overt, nonnu-
clear airstrike by the US or ROC air forces, covert ground
attacks using American and Nationalist agents inside China,
and sabotage operations by airdropped ROC commandos.
The last scenario was deemed the most workable and
received "serious analysis" at the time, according to a con-
temporary document, but did not go forward because it had
several prominent flaws beyond the likely diplomatic fall-
out. Details about target facilities were not known for cer-
tain, the Soviet Union probably would not support the
action, and the destruction of Chinese stocks of fissile mate-
rial would be only temporary. With the efficacy of attacks
far from assured and with the election less than two months
away, President Johnson?running on a "peace platform"
against Republican hawk Barry Goldwater?was not about
to order military action inside the PRC. McCone agreed
that the timing for attacks was wrong just then but said the
US government should not categorically rule out a preemp-
tive strike. (U)
CORONA photographs of Lop Nor taken on 8 October
removed any doubt that the first Chinese test would occur
within days.' Beijing had grounded all aircraft near the site,
removed workers and equipment from the com ound, con-
structed bunkers and instrument platforms
On the 16th, a
atomic bomb exploded there. because the community a
followed the prior events so closely and the US government
had announced that the test was imminent, its political
28 McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Discussion with the President [and Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy]. .5 October [1964]..." McCone Papers, box 6,
folder 9; Elder, "McCone as DCI (1973)," 1289; Burr and Richelson, "A Chinese Puzzle," 46; idem, "Whether to 'Strangle the Baby in Its Cradle," 89-90; Depart-
ment of State Airgram CA-43 to US Embassy in Bangkok et al., "Status of Program to Influence World Opinion with Respect to a Chinese Communist Nuclear
Detonation," 20 July 1964, on National Security Archive Web site at www.gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB38, doe. 14; Chester Bowles (US Ambassador to
India) letter to Bundy, 16 September 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, xxv South Asia, 153; McCone memorandum about meeting with Helms, 8 September 1964,
McCone Papers, box 2, folder l3.\11
29 Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Department of State, Policy Planning Council, "An Exploration of the Possible Bases for Action Against the Chinese
Communist Nuclear Facilities," 14 April 1964, and "The Implications of a Chinese Communist Nuclear Capability," c. April 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, )00(
China, 39-40,57-58; Bundy untitled memorandum about meeting with Rusk, McNamara, and McCone on 15 September 1964, and Komer untitled memoran-
dum to Bundy, 18 September 1964, ibid., 94,96-99; Burr and Richelson, "Whether to 'Strangle the Baby in Its Cradle," 76-88; Robert H. Johnson (Department
of State, Policy Planning Council) memorandum, "A Chinese Communist Nuclear Detonation and Nuclear Capability...," 15 October 1963, Rusk memorandum
to the president, "Items for Evening Reading," 1 May 1964, Johnson memorandum, "The Chinese Communist Nuclear Capability and Some 'Unorthodox'
Approaches to the Probability of Nuclear Proliferation," 1 June 1964, and Johnson memorandum to Henry Owen (Department of State), "Thursday Planning
Group Discussion of 'Communist China and Nuclear Proliferation," 2 September 1964, on National Security Archive Web site at wvvw.gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/
NSAEBB/NSAEBB38, does. 10,12,13, and 15; Shane Maddock, "LBJ, China, and the Bomb: New Archival Evidence," Society for Historians of American Foreign
Relations Newsletter 27, no. I (March 1996): 1-5; Chang, chap. 9; Warren I. Cohen, America's Response to China, 191-92; Nancy B. Tucker, "Threats, Opportuni-
ties, and Frustrations in East Asia," inWarren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf, eds., Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World, 99-115; Gaddis, Strategies of Containment,
211. (U)
'Sources for this paragraph and the next arc: Donald Chamberlain (OSI) memorandum to Carter, "Estimated Imminence of a Chinese Nuclear Test," 15 October
1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, China, 107-8; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting of the National Security Council. .17 October 1964," and
Cline, 'Memorandum for the Record.. Meeting of an Executive Group of the National Security Council, 16 October 1964," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 10; Pee-
bles, CORONA Project, 226-27; Burr and Richelson, "Whether to 'Strangle the Baby in Its Cradle," 91-92; Armstrong et al., "The Hazards of Single-Outcome
Forecasting," 246; Seaborg, Stemming the Tide, 112_17; Journals of Glenn Seaborg, vols. 7-9, entry for 16 October 1964,254.X
270 I/
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impact was muted. As Ray Cline later
said, the administration had "pretty
well prepared the world for expecting
this event [without] becoming unduly
alarmed by it." The White House
released a statement, composed well in
advance, that minimized the accom-
plishment.X
In retrospect, the community's main
misjudgment was presuming that
because the weapon would be pluto-
nium-based, the Chinese would not be
able to test a bomb as soon as they did.
Instead, by developing a uranium-
based device first, the Chinese were
able to "join the atomic club" sooner
than expected. (They did not explode a
plutonium-based nuclear device until
June 1967.) Moreover, Beijing's ability
to develop fissile material on its own,
rather than acquiring it from the Soviets, suggested that the
proliferation problem was more serious than anticipated.
Despite indications that a second test might occur soon
after, the administration continued its display of calm confi-
dence.'
Confronting the Main Adversaries (II): The People's Republic of China (U)
The days of mid-October were fairly frantic for McCone,
with the Chinese test coming right after Nikita Khrush-
chev's ouster as Soviet premier. The DCI participated in a
flurry of briefings of policymakers and congressional leaders.
He assured the NSC that Beijing would not have a sophisti-
cated delivery capability for many years and that it was not
then developing intercontinental missiles.
Washington Post
he failure of that high-priority mission put
Mc one in an embarrassing situation. According to
DDS&T Albert Wheelon:
I had counseled McCone and [President] Kennedy
that it was a long way in, and I was not sure we could
make it. Air Force Brigadier General and Director,
Office of Special Activities [OSA], Jack Ledford and I
were at a Christmas party at McCone's house on a
snowy night. McCone dragged us into his study to
say, "I just want to reiterate to you two how important
The conclusions of a proliferation task force convened in December bolstered the policy. Headed by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, and
including Allen Dulles, John J. McCloy, and George Kistiakowsky, the panel considered several options for curtailing the spread of nuclear weapons, among them
attacking the PRC's strategic weapons facilities. In the end, it advised the resident to use diplomatic means instead. The administration also continued to spurn
recurrent Nationalist Chinese proposals CO attack the mainland in fore cut to brief President Chiang Kai-shek 10 days after the PRC's test, heard such
a plan from the ROC leader, who displayed "a rather intense feeling of rustranon and anxiety." NSAM No. 320, "Task Force on Nuclear Proliferation," 25 Novem-
ber 1964, and "A Report to the President by the Committee on Nuclear Proliferation," 21 January 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, XI, Arms Control and Disarmament,
126,173-82; Burr and Richelson, "Whether to 'Strangle the Baby in Its Cradle," 93-94; US Embassy Taipei cable no. 347 to Department of State, 24 October
1964, on National Security Archive Web site at www.gwu.edui-nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB38, doe. 20. (U)
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As usual, I went to the morning meeting and asked
Ledford to come with me. John McCone walked in
and looked around the room with those blue eyes of
his and said, "Who authorized that mission?" I said
[to myself], "Well, today is as good a day as any to
quit this outfit." I responded, "I have a piece of paper
with your signature, and Mac Bundy's and Bob
McNamara's, and Dean Rusk's on it, telling me to do
it." DDCI Carter, said, "That's right, sir, you ordered
that mission." One could have heard a pin drop in
that room. McCone closed his book, got up, and
left...The subject was never mentioned again.' (U)
Throughout the post-test period, NRO continued its
accelerated schedule of satellite launches to monitor devel-
opments at existing Chinese sites and to look for new ones.
A little over two weeks after
c one e t e gency, te PRC exploded its second
atomic device.341Sk
272
..511"64LTh
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"STERZ,11/
Confronting the Main Adversaries (II): The People's Republic of China (U)
35
agan a perations gainst Ta,n an ma, un er at ast ta. in me overt coon ccomp is ments p ? ugust 3,
es, HS/CSG-675, Job 83-00036R, box 4, folder 17; Fitz.Gerald memorandum to Meyer, "Briefing Material on Covert Action Operations Against Communist
China," HS/CSG-309, 28 February 1961, ibid., box 2, folder 9; Meyer memorandum to McCone, "CIA's Covert Action Program," 26 November 1963, ibid., box
10 Folder 1 5. An >,,,1 Report for FY 1965, 113-14; Colby memorandum to McCone, "Covert Action Program Against Communist China," 3 July 1963
memorandum to Meyer, "Comments on C/FE Memo to DIP of 29 May 1963," 3 June 1963, DDO Files, Job 78-02958R, box 1,
andum to Helms, 11 September 1963, DDO Files, Job 79-07173A, box 1, folder 2;
ite House ac groun paper, "Visit o C inese Minister o e ense iang C in ptem r 21-28, 1965: Bac
groun ? aper... . onsu a ns Concerning Possible Action Ag,Linst the Mainland"; Helms memorandum to Bundy, "Covert Exploitation of Sino-Indian
Hostilities," 15 January 1963, DDO Files, 78-02958R, box 3, folder 15. 7/41)
Sttliwzi
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S.6.1W.,11
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'.:71tERC.T.t/
Confronting the Main Adversaries (II): The People's Republic of China (U)
Still an Enigma (U)
As American involvement in Vietnam increased during the
early Johnson presidency, policymakers put more pressure on
CIA to improve its collection against the PRC. Following
along lines McCone had laid out, USIB in mid-1965 reaf-
firmed the need for the Intelligence Community to develop a
collection and analytical prowess against the PRC "commen-
surate with that against other highest priority targets."
Progress was halting, however. Secretary of State Rusk spelled
out the persistent problem in late 1965: "The difficult policy
decisions and judgments we make concerning Peking are con-
tinually handicapped by insufficient information on its capa-
bilities, intentions, actions, and strategy." The turmoil of the
Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s only made the Chinese
target harder to work against, and collection efforts ended the
decade in disarray. Despite efforts to fill the intelligence gap
made during the tenures of McCone and his immediate suc-
cessors, China was "still an enigma" in 1970, the Agency
reported to PFIAB. Real advances in collection and analysis
had to await the PRC's emergence in the early 1970s from its
self-imposed isolation.4><
_Helms memorandum to DIDP, DDI, and DDS&T, "Review of Intelligence Activities Against Com-
m mist ins..., i es, o 800 580R, box 19, folder 386; Annual Report of the Central Intelligence Ageng to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
(fir Fiscal Year 1970), 25, ER Files, Job 80B01086A, box 3.*
l'ECALT
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"Et RC4/
McCone and the Secret Wars (I): Espionage and
Covert Action (U)
ajohn McCone's management of CIA's clandestine activ-
ities was conditioned on three facts. First, unsteeped in
the argot and methodology of espionage and counter-
intelligence, he was more interested in analysis and
technical collection than in secret operations. (One COS
recalled that during McCone's introductory tour of stations
and counterpart services in Europe in late 1961, the DCI
asked him, "What, exactly, is a double agent?")' Second,
nothing in McCone's background endeared him personally
or professionally to careerists in the DDP. His years of fed-
eral service notwithstanding, he had not traveled in the same
social circles as the elite Easterners and OSS veterans at the
top of the operations hierarchy, and he was regarded as more
of an "outsider" by the Clandestine Services than by other
Agency components. (U)
Third, after the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy White House
was determined to control covert actions far more closely than
when Allen Dulles was DCI. The bureaucratic changes the
administration instituted for overseeing covert actions left the
DCI with a reduced role in them?a limitation McCone
worked to surmount. The administration created a simpler
NSC apparatus than its predecessor used and gave more
authority to the Special Group to plan and review CA opera-
tions. The Special Group, in turn, set up two subgroups: the
Special Group Augmented, which directed efforts to topple
Fidel Castro, and the Special Group Counterinsurgency,
which by late 1962 oversaw secret projects in nearly a dozen
Southeast Asian and Latin American countries. Authority
over covert action was concentrated in the hands of Robert
Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy, and, through much of 1962, the
president's military adviser, Maxwell Taylor. CINs indepen-
dence decreased further in 1963 when the White House
directed it to seek approval for all covert actions costing more
than on a "cost and risk" basis. Before then, station
and ivision c iefs had approval authority except in sensitive
cases, which they referred to the ADDP, the DDP, or the
CHAPTER
12
DCI, who decided whether to raise a project with one of the
Special Groups. (Espionage operations were exempt from this
outside review and authorization).2
McCone's lack of familiarity with clandestine operations
and predilection for technology and analysis, along with the
administration's close management of covert actions, meant
that the new DCI's approach to managing the DDP would
be more "hands off" than it would be with analysis and sci-
ence and technology. He had no interest in being and no
brief to adopt Allen Dulles's role as the "Great White Case
Officer." McCone's DDP, Richard Helms, characterized
McCone generally as "a very good manager.. .a quick
study...a man with a firm hand." In the realm of clandes-
tine activities, that meant the DCI delegated day-to-day
responsibility to the respected and canny Helms, counting
on his "chief operations officer's" experience in espionage
and counterintelligence, keen political sense, and skepticism
about covert action to restrain gung-ho operators, conspira-
torialists, and other overly zealous Cold Warriors. At the
same time, McCone became well-versed in operational
details when he needed to be, insisting that his deputies reg-
ularly inform him about large or politically sensitive
projects. For example, he routinely met with Helms after the
morning staff meeting for a private briefing on close-hold
operations, and he expected the Watch Office to notify him
of developments in clandestine operations. Thus prepared,
he would intrude himself in those activities, formally or
informally, to whatever extent he or the White House
deemed necessary.
3,1;8f
Like most "manager-reformer/outsider" DCIs, McCone
valued technical collection over traditional espionage, but
unlike some later representatives of that type (such as James
Schlesinger and Stansfield Turner), he did not denigrate
HUMINT. Even though McCone spent much more of his
time on overhead reconnaissance than field operations, he
235. (U)
2 Anna Karalekas, "History of the Central Intelligence Agency," in The Central Intelligence Agency, 63, 79, 82-83- De artment of State, "US Covert Actions
and Counter-Insurgency Programs," in FRUS, 1964-1968, XXIV, A la xliii?xliv; Parmet, 213-14; Ranelagh, 411; The 1963 pronouncement on
covert action approval modified procedures Allen Dulles had instituted in June 1960, by lowering the money threshold y nd requiring White House (not
just DCI) authorization. Dulles memorandum to DDCI, DDP, and DDS, "Approval of Clandestine Service Projects, 1 60, HS Files, Job 83-000739R,
box 5, folder 2)
3 Helms/McAuliffe OH, 1; Carter-Knoche OH, 79; Cline memorandum to Helms, "Operational Information for Watch," 14 May 1964, DDI Files, Job
89T01385R, box 1, folder 4)
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recognized that "spies in the sky" had significant limitations
and must be used in conjunction with the recruitment and
exploitation of well-placed, reliable human sources. Just as the
CORONA program was gaining momentum, he cautioned
senior Agency managers not to become transfixed by that
achievement. "While satellite photography represents the
best, and probably the most dependablek] information avail-
able to us," he wrote to Helms, "we should be careful that we
do not depend solely and exclusively on this source." The
Soviets could deceive the satellites easily and inexpensively,
McCone believed, so he urged the DDP to "exert every possi-
ble effort" to collect HUMINT on Soviet missile sites. In the
aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, in which aerial recon-
naissance had proved vital, the DCI warned the Intelligence
Community against "drifting into a frame of mind that high-
level photography is all we need, that it will show everything
that must be seen." Without balanced collection, intelligence
services "run the risk of tnaking a serious error."'
Despite the Bay of Pigs fiasco, McCone neither chose nor
was required by the White House to restructure or downsize
the olitically weakened DDP.
addition, the Kennedy administration's pus or and
counterinsurgency operations in the Third World, where it
had the greatest interest in containing communist influence,
kept the Western Hemisphere, Far East, and Africa Divi-
sions very bus
Changes to the Clandestine Services (U)
McCone instituted or endorsed readjustments in the
ways DDP staffs and area divisions did business. The
changes were intended to impose greater policy oversight,
administrative rationality, operational effectiveness, and cost
consciousness
As chairman of USIB, McCone knew what requirements
had been levied on CIA stations, and, as DCI, he could fol-
low how collectors acted on them inside the Agency. When
apprised of situations that hampered the DDP's ability to
fulfill the community's needs, he sought remedies. In some
cases, the stations used clandestine assets to acquire informa-
tion that could be obtained overtly. McCone urged staff-
and division-level managers to screen requirements more
carefully in order to allow case officers to make the best use
of their assets. The DCI also worked with his counterpart at
DIA, Gen. Joseph Carroll, in finding ways to limit bureau-
cratic conflicts and duplication of collection by DDP and
military intelligence components.
/Some improvements were
McCone memoranda to Carter, 22 May 1962, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 5, and 11 December 1962, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 4)For
6 Helms memorandum to McCone, "CIA Representation Abroad," 10 April 1962, DDO Records, Job 78-07173A, box 1, folder 1; Annual Report for FY 1965,
charts after 1; Kirkpatrick, "Memorandum for the Record...DCI's Presentation to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, 26 June 1963," and "Memo-
randum for the Record... DCI Meeting with President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board... 13 September H9631," DDO Files, Job 78-03805R, box 3, folder
12A; Kirkpatrick, "Memorandum for the Record... Meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, 4 February 1965," CMS Files, Job 92B01039R,
box 7, folder l31.-
278
.SECe.13.V.Z
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SCELT7
McCone and the Secret Wars (I): Espionage and Covert Action (U)
instituted in but problems in Vietnam persisted as
the US military presence there expanded.7>t
To enable CIA to conduct more effectively the paramili-
tary operations the White House wanted, McCone ratified
establishment of the Special Operations Division (SOD) in
July 1962. An internal survey conducted at the time
McCone became DCI identified deficiencies in personnel,
logistics, research and development, and management of the
Agency's paramilitary programs and capabilities. One of the
study's findings was that activities were so complex, exten-
sive, and expensive that they needed to be centralized.
Accordingly, SOD was created through a merger of th
Df the former Development Projects ivi-
sion and the SOD
became a self-contained unit that planned and ran lanc., sea,
and air operations. It also proved more effective at getting
the area divisions to use their expertise than had been the
case under the previous arrangement, largely because it now
had its own resources.8.1*<
McCone and his senior executives confronted a large
Domestic Operations (U)
In the domestic collection area, McCone?acting on rec-
ommendations of the Kirkpatrick Working Group and
DDP officer C. Tracy Barnes?in 1962 authorized the
establishment of the Domestic Operations Division
management problem with the
which directed a far-flung network or aviation cover compa-
nies the A ency used to support field operations.
following up on an recommendation that
greater control be exercised over them, McCone in February
1963 approved DDCI Carter's establishment of an Execu-
tive Committee for Air Proprietary Operations (ExCom-
Air), chaired by the general counsel. Eventually the DCI
himself would review all major new projects and capital
expenditures for the air proprietaries.9X
By
then, McCone?who appreciated ork on science,
technology, and nuclear issues?was persuaded that it
would be most effective as a collection unit for the DI rather
than as a support unit for the DDP. Friction between
and the FBI was minimized by proscribing the
from counterintelligence activity,
former
:aused recurrent tensions
between the two organizations that were unresolved when
McCone stepped down.Ilik
Karamessines untitled memorandum to Chief, FI Staff, 9 May 1963, DDO Files, Job 78-02958R, box 2, folder 2; McCone untitled memorandum to Carter,
20 July 1962, McCone Papers, box 1, folder
"Status of Agency Paramilitary Posture and Capabilities," ca. April 1962, HS Files, HS/CSG-1875, Job 83-00036R, box 3, folder 8; 213X
9
IVleyer memorandum to Helms, "Policy Coordination
Status or covert Action I ro)ects, to January 1963, tab U, VDU Piles, Job /8-02958K, box 1, folder 19; Carter memorandum to Chairman, ExComAir, "Func-
tions and Responsibilities of the ExComAir," Action Memorandum No. A-268, 2 August 1963, and Helms memorandum to DDP division and staff chiefs, "Clan-
destine Services Air Activities," 16 October 1963, HS Files, HS/CSG-2164, Job 83-00739R, box 5, folder 2; Kirkpatrick Diary, vol. 5, entry for 18 April 1963;
'Air America, 1946-1972," History Staff Miscellaneous Historical Studies No. MISC-9, vol. 5, 392-93)?
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With one politic
sensitive organization-t e eace orps-McCone contin-
ued a strict "hands off" policy. "While Communist propa-
gandists will always allege that the Peace Corps is used for
intelligence activities," he wrote to President Johnson, "I
remain determined that no opportunity be afforded them to
establish any justification for their allegation." Accordingly,
CIA would not employ any Peace Corps personnel until two
years after they left that agency.12)k
Mail Opening and Drug Testing (U)
McCone's former associates disagree over how engaged
he was with two of CIA's most notorious clandestine opera-
tions inside the United States: examining mail sent to and
from the Soviet Union (HTLINGUAL),13 and testing LSD
and other mind-altering drugs on unwitting American sub-
jects (MKULTRA)." According to the Church Committee
in 1976, no Agency documents show that McCone knew of
the mail opening program, and McCone's testimony to that
effect was consistent with the statements of James Angleton
of the CI Staff and Howard Osborn, former head of the
Soviet division and the Office of Security. McCone and
Executive Assistant Elder have said the reasons he did not
know CI Staff was reading American and Soviet mail were
that HTLINGUAL was a small operation in place since
LDCI assistant) memorandum to Bross, "Deputies' Meeting, 26 December 1961 "Action Memorandum No. 2, Bross memorandum to McCone,
12 January 1962, ntitled memorandum to McCone, 23 January 1962, Ear-
Ion 19 February 1962, McCone apers, ox 2, folder 1; Bross memorandum to Archibald Roosevelt
memorandum to Bissell, "Deputies' Meeting, 25 January 1962," Action Memorandum No. 4, DDO
man memorandum concerning McConc meeting with
(CA Staff), "Deputies Meeting, 25 January 1962," and
Files, Job 78-02888R, box 1, Folder 34.Nt
l'FitzGerald, "Memorandum of Conversation.. .Meeting with David Rockefeller," 27 March 1962, DDO Files, Job 78-02888R, box 1, folder 9; McCone letter to
22 January 1963, DDO Files, Job 78-02958R, box 1, folder 5; numerous entries of meetings with US businessmen on McCone
catenctars, 1-13 Hies, Jou u.3-ut/J4R, box 8, folder 10; DCI Directives 2/3 and 2/8, both effective 25 July 1963, DCI Files, Job 86T00268R, box 2, folder 12;
McCone letter to President Johnson, 24 August 1964, DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3, folder 12. Former Peace Corps personnel could work for Agency propri-
etaries under two conditions: "the employing or using activity must not be engaged in covert activities" and the employee "must not be engaged directly by, or receive
direction from, CIA." CA Staff Notice No. 20-18,1 April 1964, DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3, folder 12.
In early 1952, CIA-with the concurrence of the US Post Office-began scanning the exteriors of letters sent from the United States to the Soviet Union. During
the first three years of the operation, Agency security officers occasionally opened some letters without Post Office knowledge. In late 1955, James Angleton, head of
the CI Staff, took over the program and proposed that CIA review all mail to and from the Soviet Union that went through, New York and open about two percent
of the letters (approximately 400) monthly. Richard Helms, then the Chief of Operations in the DDP, approved this phase of the program, which began in early
1956. HTLINGUAL was terminated in 1973. For brief periods, US mail to and from Cuba and Communist China was examined under similar programs. US Sen-
ate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 7 vols. (hereafter Church Committee Report), vol. 3,
567-624; Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, Report to the President (hereafter Rockefeller Commission Report), chap. 9; Fischer, 98-99. (U)
I4 Prompted by reports that the Soviets were experimenting with "mind-control" substances, CIA began investigating the intelligence applications of mind-altering
drugs in the late 1940s. The project, called BLUEBIRD, initially worked on developing countermeasures to interrogation techniques using drugs. In 1951, a larger
project named ARTICHOKE looked into the operational use of unconventional interrogation methods, including drugs and hypnosis. Reports that the Chinese
had "brainwashed" prisoners during the Korean War gave further urgency to these inquiries. From 1953 on, the Agency's efforts were combined with similar under-
takings by the US military, as well as research on behavior modification and poisons, into an umbrella program managed by the DDP's Technical Services Staff (later,
the Technical Services Division). Rockefeller Commission Report, 226-28; "Behavioral Drugs and Testing," CIA memorandum prepared for Rockefeller Commission,
11 February 1975, ER Files, Job 79M01476A, box 10, folder 187; Church Committee Report, vol. 1,387-422; US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Sub-
committee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification,
passim; 01-04; John 0. Marks, The Search the 'Manchurian Candidate'; passim.
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McCone and the Secret Wars (I): Espionage and Covert Action (U)
1952, was never presented to the DCI for renewal, was not a
line item in the Agency budget, and did not produce any-
thing worth bringing to McCone's attention. Richard
Helms, on the other hand, has said that HTLINGUAL "was
well known to John McCone, even though he denies ever
having known about it." McCone's careful attention to
CIA's role in the investigation of Kennedy's assassination
supports Helms's assertion. Some of the information the
Agency developed on President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Har-
vey Oswald, came from examinations of his mail under
HTLINGUAL, and it seems implausible that the DCI
would not have been told, even in passing, about the pro-
gram after the assassination (see Chapter 14). Furthermore,
DDCI Carter was told in February 1965 that congressional
inquiries into mail surveillance might touch on HTLIN-
GUAL, and it seems unlikely that he would not have fore-
warned the DCI about the details of such a potentially
damaging controversy. The preponderance of evidence indi-
cates, therefore, that McCone most likely was aware of at
least part of the program?the mail examinations if not the
openings?possibly by late 1963 or early 1964.15>e
Similarly, recollections differ about the surreptitious drug
tests.' The evidence indicates that McCone not only knew
about them but disapproved of them sufficiently to order
their suspension. According to the Church Committee
report, McCone did not learn all the details of MKULTRA
until Helms?possibly in anticipation of a critical IG report
on the program?informed him in mid-1963. According to
Helms, McCone raised no objection to unwitting testing at
the time. McCone testified to the Church Committee, how-
ever, that no one had told him about the project in a way
that "would have turned on all the lights." 1:Scr
Some confusion might have arisen in McCone's mind
over the nature and scope of the MKULTRA program.
MKULTRA technically was only an accounting device used
to designate a broad range of investigations into human psy-
chology and behavior managed by DDP's Technical Services
Division under Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Work with pharmaco-
logical and biological agents was only part of the program,
and most of the money was
spent on prosaic and largely
ethical psychological tests,
literature surveys, and
chemical analyses (most of
which took place in Ameri-
can universities and
research institutions with-
out CIA's sponsorship
made known). The most
troubling aspect of MKUL-
TRA was the administra-
tion of psychotropic drugs
to unwitting subjects in
what were called "normal
Sidney Gottlieb (U)
life settings"?which included hospitals, prisons, and safe-
houses
I nese tests, aitnougn rew in number and relatively inexpen-
sive, represented a key facet of MKULTRA. Any formal
briefing given McCone on the overall project presumably
would have explained the program's very broad, and mostly
benign, scope and glossed over the details of the secret
experiments. N?
After the IG in 1963 recommended closing the safehouses
in San Francisco and New York, McCone suspended testing
on unwitting subjects but put off a final decision on the pro-
gram as a whole. During the next year, Helms recommended
to Carter (as acting DCI) that blind testing be resumed.
Helms warned that "an apparent Soviet aggressiveness in the
field of covertly administered chemicals" was "inexplicable
and disturbing" but that the Agency's "positive operational
capability to use drugs is diminishing, owing to a lack of real-
istic testing." The experiments, Helms believed, could not be
validated without unwitting subjects. He also worried that
"decreasing knowledge of the state of the art.., results in a
waning capability on our part to restrain others in the intelli-
gence community (such as the Department of Defense) from
pursuing operations in this area." However, Carter?who told
his own deputy in late 1963 that "I am scared to death of this
`5 Chu mittee Report, vol. 3, 581; Elder JOH, 9; McCone letter to Elder, 21 January 1975, ER Files, Job 79M01476A, box 14, folder 316;
Helms
H, 1; John Newman, Oswald an the , 283-87; DCI morning meeting minutes for 24 February 1965, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder
349.
16Sources for this paragraph and the next two are: Church Committee Report, vol. 1, 401-02, 406; notes of Carter meeting with Knoche on 18 November 1963, ER
Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 3; Kirkpatrick Diary, vol. 5, entry for 29 November 1963; Earman, "Summary of Inspector General's Report of Inspection of
MKULTRA," 26 July 1963, and "Memorandum for the Record.. .MKULTRA Program," 29 November 1963, MORI doc. nos. 146197 and 146165; Helms mem-
orandum to Carter, "Testing of Psychochemicals and Related Materials," 17 December 1963, Carter untitled memorandum to Helms, 24 December 1963, Helms
memorandum to McCone (signed by Carter), "Sensitive Research Programs (MKULTRA)," 9 June 1964, Knoche untitled memorandum to Elder, 23 July 1964,
and Helms memorandum to McCone, "Unwitting Testing," 9 November 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 18, folder 8; McCone calendar entry for 13 Novem-
ber 1964 (meeting with Carter, Helms, Earman, and Gottlieb); DDCI Daily Log, 2 December 1964, ibid., box 13, folder 10.)%
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one"?ordered the suspension continued, pending the DCI's
decision. Carter also refused to endorse the use of non-Amer-
icans in the tests. McCone took no further action, which
effectively killed what would become MKULTRAs most con-
troversial aspect.NC
The Wall of Separation (U)
McCone encountered resistance from senior DDP man-
agers when he tried to increase DI participation in opera-
tional planning but
interdirectorate cooperation naa unprovea ny tne end of his
tenure.17
Wisner's Breakdown (U)
McCone's circumspect handling of the delicate problem
of the venerated Frank Wisner's psychological decline went
some way toward allaying DDP concerns that this brusque
stranger from the business world would be insensitive to the
morale and loyalty of the closed Clandestine Services com-
munity. Wisner was CINs premier covert operations officer
during its first decade.' He was an OSS veteran who had
headed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the US
government's covert action arm, from 1948 to 1951 and had
I8Robert Amory, the DDI at the time of the Bay of Pigs, later expressed the 'If only you'd asked me" resentment many analytical officers felt about being cut out of
planning for the operation:
I was never in on any of the consultations either inside the Agency or otherwise.... At least on paper I knew more about amphibious warfare than anyone else
in the Agency. I had made 26 assault landings in the South Pacific, Southwest Pacific and so on?and of about the same size, many of them, as the Bay of
Pigs. Whereas the Marine they had advising them had made one.. .and that was Iwo Jima, which was three divisions abreast.
Andrew, 261. (U)
'Information on Wisner comes from his official personnel file nd Thomas, The Very Best Men, chaps. 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 21.
282 SEER.E.T4
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become DDP before OPC
merged with the Office of
Special Operations, which
ran espionage operations,
in 1952. Wisner was a bril-
liant, energetic, and fervid
anticommunist, commit-
ted to rolling back the
Soviet Union on all fronts,
but especially in his own
area of expertise, Eastern
Europe, through an
agglomeration of paramili-
tary, political, propaganda,
and psychological opera-
tions dubbed "the mighty
Wurlitzer.".?iik
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McCone and the Secret Wars (I): Espionage and Covert Action (U)
Frank Wisner (U)
and senior officers, McCone temporarily took Wisner on as
a special assistant, after which he would resign and become a
consultant to the DCI and DDP on operations. McCone
and his deputies placed few demands on Wisner. After Wis-
ner left the Agency in August 1962, he wrote some reports
on intelligence and political topics, working out of an office
in the old East Building. He spent most of his time running
his farm, managing his investments, collecting Greek arti-
facts, and reviewing books on espionage. In March 1965, he
sent a letter to McCone conveying his distress that NBC
Television was planning to run a documentary on CIA that
contained "inaccuracies, distortions, and...ugly myths,
many of which are of demonstrably communist origin."
McCone politely agreed with Wisner, but he had already
done his share of complaining to magazine publishers and
network producers. McCone did not see Wisner again. In
October 1965, Wisner had another breakdown and killed
himself.'
Liaison Activities (U)
Lastly, McCone fulfilled his duties as the US govern-
ment's top-ranking intelligence "diplomat" through dozens
of meetings with high-level foreign leaders and liaison repre-
sentatives overseas and at Headquarters. He took 10 busi-
ness trips outside the United States during his tenure?five
to Western Europe, three to Southeast Asia, and two to
Latin America?and he held policy and intelligence discus-
sions with heads of government, cabinet ministers, service
chiefs, and military commanders. On these trips, McCone
was highly conscious of status and protocol, preferring to
deal only with officials of commensurate rank and to discuss
only the most important bilateral intelligence topics.
According to Helms, who accompanied the DCI several
times, McCone was so accustomed to dealing with the top
level of leaders in the United States and foreign countries
that he did not seem to think meeting relatively junior for-
eign officers for operational discussions was time well spent,
despite the benefits to the liaison relationship. He did not
want trips to include successions of courtesy calls and a
social whirl of parties and sightseeing. Instead, he insisted
they deal with official matters of substance, and be sched-
uled for maximum efficiency and thoroughly documented.
As a gesture of appreciation to helpful foreigners, McCone
instituted a practice he had followed in the private sector of
sending birthday greetings to people overseas who worked
closely with the Agency. He enjoyed at least cordial relations
with the major Western and Asian services, except for
France's. Relations with the French had been poisoned by a
KGB defector's charges that the Soviets had riddled the
French government with agents (see Chapter 13).21X
'Wisner letter to McCone, 12 February 1962, ER Files, Job 80R01676R, box 32, folder 9; Wisner letter to McCone, 4 July 1962, Elder, "Memorandum for the
Record on Conversation Between Mr. McCone and Mrs. Frank Wisner," 21 June 1962,
and McCone, "Memorandum of Discussion with Frank Wisner on July 10,1962," McCone Papers, box 5, folder 7; Carter Lo--
ii?...ilorandum, 7 September 1962, ER Files, Job 80R01676R, box 13, folder 5; DDCI Daily Log, 3 October 1962, ibid., box 13, folder 9; Thomas, The Very
Best Men, 315-20.
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Covert Action and Intelligence Policy (U)
Befitting his roles as intelligence director and presidential
adviser, McCone deeply involved himself in numerous high-
profile covert action programs that were important elements
of the Kennedy administration's national security policy.'
The administration regarded covert political operations as
essential weapons in the struggle against the Soviet Union
and the PRC for influence in the Third World. That predis-
position, combined with longstanding bipartisan support
for such activities and Allen Dulles's active patronage of
them, meant that McCone did not need to "sell" the
Agency's CA capabilities to the nation's new policymakers.
McCone, along with the chairman of the JCS, the dep-
uty secretary of defense, the under secretary of state for
political affairs, and the president's national security adviser,
was a member of the NSC's Special Group (renamed the
303 Committee in 1964), which usually met twice monthly
to review and authorize covert action proposals.' The Spe-
cial Group was, as Richard Helms later described it, "the
mechanism that was set up... to use as a circuit breaker so
that these things did not explode in the president's face and
that he was not held responsible for them." During the
Kennedy administration, the S ecial Grou
reconfirmed
? a...rove or
alone. Sensit v- ? ? ? ? as a o ave ones approval
(or, in McCone's absence, the DDCI's) before they were
submitted for Special Group consideration. The DCI met
weekly with Carter, Elder, Helms, CA Staff chief Cord
Meyer, and appropriate DDP division representatives to
review the plans.24 McCone required proposals to include a
budget statement indicating if the funds were available in
the area division or the directorate, or if some adjustment of
accounts or further congressional authorization were neces-
sary. In mid-1962, the DCI assurecIPFIAB that, in a not-so-
subtle contrast with his predecessor's sometimes haphazard
approach, "all covert action programs are now handled in an
orderly, correct manner.".X,
McCone did not, however, descend to the field-level
management in which Dulles reveled. Instead, he remained
at the policymaking stratum, helping formulate the goals
and outlines of the larger or more potentially problematic
covert actions and monitoring their execution. He left their
implementation to his expert deputies, Helms and Meyer.
Over the course of his directorship, McCone tended increas-
ingly to submit only large CA proposals and sensitive elec-
tion operations for Special Group review. Otherwise, he let
the DDP operate under prior directives when its responsi-
bility and authority were clear. (Those lower-profile projects
were vetted with the local ambassador or with Department
of State leadership.) In late 1963, however, McCone
directed the DDCI to undertake what would now be called
a "zero-base" review of all CA projects-then numbering
"McCone calendars; DCI trip files in McCone Papers, box 5, folders 1-4, and box 8, folder 11; Helms/McAuliffe OH, 1; DDP staff meeting minutes, 17 May and
22 June 1962, and Helms memorandum to McCone on guidance to stations concerning DCI trips, 11 July 1962, DDO Files, Job 78-02888R, box 1, folder 40;
DDP divisions' memoranda of important contacts' birthdays, ibid., folder 28..?,*).
'2 Sources for the first three paragraphs of this section are:LD1213; Meyer memorandum to McCone, "CIA's Covert Action Program," 26 November 1963, HS
Files, Job 83-00036R, box 10, folder 15; Meyer memoran 1elms, "Policy Coordination Status of Covert Action Projects," 16 January 1963, DDO Files, Job
78-02958R, box 1, folder 19; "Covert Action Briefing Data, Total CA BudeetFY 1964-67"; Michael Warner, "Sophisticated Spies: CIA's Links to Liberal Anti-
Communists, 1949-1967," II1C9 no 4 (Winter 1996)? 429;
NSAm iNo. 2/, 28 J une 1961, I-RU5, 1...161-1,)6i, VIII, National 3ecurtly .voitcy, 112; cnurcn commit-
Iltrgetz .(13 ILIJIllat1071 i ton, I )); nicter memorandum to DDCI, DDP, and Chief/CA Staff, Action Memorandum B-9,22 May 1962, ER Files, Job 80B01676R,
box 2, folder 6; Kirkpatrick memorandum to DDP, DDI, DDR, and DDS, "Preparation of Material and Briefings for the 5412 Group," 18 June 1962, DDO Files,
Job 78-02888R, box 3, folder 16; DDP staff meeting minutes, 17 and 31 May 1962, ibid., box 1, folder 40; Helms, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Meeting on
CA Matters with the Panel of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board," 25 July 1962, McCone Papers, box 13, folder 2; Helms memorandum to Carter,
"Covert Action Project Funds, FY 1964 and FY 1965," 4, in "Covert Action Project Funds FY 1964 and FY 1965 (With Historical Perspective, December 1947-
January 1964)"; Annual Report for FY 1964, budget chart after 4, and Annual Report for FY 1965, budget chart after 1; McCone untitled memorandum to Carter, 13
December 1963, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 3; CIA memorandum, "Coordination and Policy Approval of Covert Operations," 23 February 1967,
HS Files, Job 03-01724R, box 4, folder 7; Church Committee Report, vol. 1,52,56-57; Jessup H, 20; Elder/McAuliffe 0H2, 14. Early in 1962, the
International Or anizations Division (I0) mer ed into the CA Staff, and Cord Me er, head of Ju, became chief of the combined unit.
'After the existence of Special Group 5412 was disclosed in the book The Invisible Government in 1964, it was renamed the 303 Committee. Jessup memorandum
to Bundy, "Proposed Name Change for Special Group (5412)," 19 May 1964 and NSAM No. 303, "Change in Name of Special Group 5412," 2 June 1964, FRUS,
1964-1968, Organization and Management of U.S. Foreign Policy..., 451-53; "Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 4 June 1964," McCone
Papers, box 1, folder 7)
24This procedure did not preclude standard informal coordination with other agencies, nor did it apply to Directorate of Research, Task Force W (MONGOOSE),
or counterinsurgency activities. The latter two were handled by the Special Group Augmented and the Special Group Counterinsurgency, as described in previous
chapters. (U)
284
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'Et FifcI-79
McCone and the Secret Wars (I): Espionage and Covert Action (U)
to determine which activities warranted Special
Group reauthorization. Of the Projects the DCI
approved for Special Group discussion, those examined
below illustrate aspects of McCone's leadership, including
his roles in formulating foreign policy, contacting the busi-
ness community, taking on bureaucratic rivals, sensing polit-
ical and diplomatic concerns, and keeping ties to the
Kennedys.
Latin America (U)
"Latin America required our best efforts and attention"
because it was "the most dangerous area in the world," Pres-
ident Kennedy said in 1963. Most foreign policy problems
"paled in comparison with the prospect of the establishment
of a Communist regime" in the Western Hemisphere. In the
decade preceding the Kennedy presidency, 13 Latin coun-
tries had undergone violent or extra-constitutional changes
of government. The new administration-fearing that the
impoverished and oppressed masses of the region would
embrace leftist panaceas-undertook a two-track approach
to encourage economic development and social reform.
Overtly, a Marshall Plan-style initiative called the Alliance
for Progress provided billions of dollars in foreign aid and
technical expertise, and the US military ran training and
assistance programs for local armed forces and security ser-
vices.
Helms told his statt in early 1962 that it is imperative to
realize the extent to which WH [Division] is the 'wave of
the future" for the Agency."Jel
McCone underscored the point with three direct actions.
He ordered a full IG survey of WH Division for presenta-
tion to him in the first week of his tenure. He participated
in regional COS conferences in 1962 and
1963. Lastly, he approved a
McCone closely followed the Agency's CA operations in
Chile-the second largest set of such projects in the Western
Hemisphere after Cuba.' The US government had long
regarded Chile as an exemplar of democracy and capitalism
in a region largely run by juntas and hacenderos, and the
country became the showcase for the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations' nonviolent efforts to combat Latin radical-
ism. Those initiatives in Chile included both large amounts
of overt foreign aid-more dollars per capita than to any
25 Memorandum about President Kennedy's meeting with Ambassador to Peru J. Wesley Jones, 25 January 1963, memorandum about Kennedy's meeting with UK
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, 30 June 1963, and Kennedy untitled memorandum to Rusk, 29 October 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, XII, American Republics,
159, 609, 880; DDP staff meeting minutes, 5 April 1962, DDO Files, Job 78-02888R, box 1, folder 40; Barber and Ronning, Appendix A..4iSt
2" Meyer memorandum to McCone, "CIA's Covert Action Program," 26 November 1963, HS Files, Job 83-00036R, box 10, folder 15; Helms memorandum to
McCone, "CIA Civic Action Activities in Latin America," 26 April 1963, DDO Files, Job 78-02958R, box 1, folder 15; McLean, vol. 1, xi.x, vol. 2, 239, 245, 263;
Knapp, 216; Meyer memorandum to Elder, "Covert Action Project Funds, FY 1964," 2 December 1963, HS Files, Historical Study MISC-13.5, folder "CA Policy
Planning Documents"; 1962 Western Hemisphere chiefs of station conference materials in McCone Papers, box 8, folder 11; J.C. King memorandum to McCone,
"Western Hemisphere Division Comments on the Covert Intelligence Annex (III) to the South America Assessment Team Report," 16 March 1962, DDO Files, Job
78-02888R, box 3, folder 10; "Covert Action Project Funds, FY 1964 and FY 1965," tab 4.
27 The principal sources for this discussion are:
T.F. Schmidt, "Election operation in k_,nite, 8tuates JD, no. "1 iWinter 11): z1J-425, cnne--3peciai Gioup actions in appenaix to
Covert Action Project Funds FY 1964 and FY 1965"; William V. Broe (DDP) memorandum to Helms, "U.S. Government Involvement in 1964 Chilean Elec-
tion," 6 November 1970, ER Files, Job 80R01284R, box 7, folder 11; Peter Jessup (NSC), minutes of Special Group meetings on 19 December 1963, 1, 12, and 14
May, 21 August, and 11 September 1964, McCone Papers, box 1, folders 6 and 7; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record. Discussions with President Johnson,
December 27th{, 19631," ibid., box 6, folder 6; King memorandum to McCone, "Political Action Program in Chile," 3 January 1964, DDO Files, Job 80-01690R,
box 1, folder 24; King memoranda to McCone, "... Agency Action for the 4 September 1964 Chilean Presidential Election," 19 and 27 March 1964, ER Files, Job
80R01580R, box 18, folder 370; CIA memorandum to Special Group, "Support for the Chilean Presidential Elections of 4 September 1964," 1 April 1964,
National Security Council/303 Committee Files, Subject Files/Chile through 1969, LBJ Library; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Minutes of the Meeting
of the Special Group, 30 April 1964," McCone Papers, box 1, folder 7; Church Committee, Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate. Volume 7. Covert Action, Appendix A, "Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973," 151-64, 204; CIA, "CIA
Activities in Chile," 18 September 2000, posted on CIA public Web site at www.internet.cia/cia/publications/chile, 2-3, 5; FRUS, 1964-1968, X20G, South and
Central America; Mexico, docs. 245-277 on 545-608; Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World, 109-16; Paul E. Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in
Chile, chap. 2; idem, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976, chap. 3..4,61
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nation except Vietnam
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memoran-
urn in 1962 declared that
"We are not prepared to risk a
Socialist or FRAP [Frente de
Accion Popular] victory, for
fear of nationalization of U.S.
investments.. .and the proba-
bly Communist influence in a
Socialist (or FRAP) govern-
ment." If the FRAP won the
presidency in the September
1964 election?a distinct
possibility, given the slump-
ing economy and feuding
among the nonsocialist parties?it would be the first time in
history that an avowedly Marxist government gained power
in an independent country through democratic processes.
US policymakers believed a socialist regime in Chile would
give the Soviet Union a satellite in Latin America that
potentially was more useful than Cuba for starting a radical
"chain reaction" in unstable countries in the region, includ-
ing Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia.'
organizations. After the Dem-
ocratic Front began falling
apart and the FRAP showed
alarming strength in local
elections in 1963 and early
1964, the Special Group
approved the Agency's reori-
entation toward the Chris-
tian Democratic candidate,
Eduardo Frei Montalvo.
Salvadore Allende campaigning
McCone and the Special Group/303 Committee
reviewed and approved a succession of DDP proposals to
prevent a leftist?most likely Salvadore Allende de Gos-
sens?from becoming president of Chile in 1964.
p esi
e ec ion project a one cost near y mi ion. McCone and
the Special Group initially agreed to DDP proposals to give
money to the Radical Party (actually a moderate organiza-
tion), the Christian Democrats, and the governing Demo-
cratic Front coalition, as well as to anti-Allende civic
in 1964 (U)
McCone at first ques-
tioned the wisdom of the shift in resources. He noted that
Chilean business interests seemed less concerned about the
election's outcome than the US government and that the
Christian Democrats' platform had some of the same poli-
cies as that of the Socialists. The Special Group decided,
however, that the expenditures were vital, as many observers
gave FRAP candidate Allende (who received Soviet and
Cuban funds) a fair chance of winning and embarking on
policies of nationalization, land reform, and other "progres-
sive" measures. When the ballots were counted, Frei had
won 56 percent of the vote?the first absolute majority in
any Chilean presidential election since 1942. The magni-
tude of his victory was widely regarded as a popular repudia-
tion of communism.
'Although McCone shared this interpretation, he did not try to sway Agency estimators, who judged in late 1963 that the FRAP's chances for victory had slipped.
NIE 94-63, The Chilean Situation and Prospects," 3 October 1963, 1-2.>
286 "I're.REZ,
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"STERETJ
McCone and the Secret Wars (I): Espionage and Covert Action (U)
3? Jessup minutes of Special Group meetings on 20 April, 1 and 12 May, and 11 September 19 ne Papers, box 1, folder 7; transcript of McCone telephone
conversation with Ball, 7 May 1964, ibid., box 10, folder 6; transcript of McCone meeting wit 1 May 1964, ibid., box 7, folder 10; Broe memorandum to
Helms, "U.S. Government Involvement in 1964 Chilean Election," 6 November 1970, ER i es, oh 80R01284R, box 7, folder 11; King memorandum to
McCone 15 May 1964, ibid., Job 80R01580R, box 18, folder 365; Elder memorandum to DCI William Colby, "Special Activ-
ities," in .1-amity Jewels- compendium, 459; Annual Report for FY 1965,117 ?18. ( //N )
"E?43LT/,
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'"Li'LWK,
"Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Warner, Hearts and Minds, 47-63,70-71;
art' 1967 Ramparts and Associated Exposures," April 1967, 3-8,11, HS Files, HS/CSG-i ZOO, Job di-UUO.50K, box 0, tomer 10)?
nemorandum to Kirkpatrick
Hnurcn Lornmittee Report, vol. 1, 192;
306 StE14,21
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McCone and the Secret Wars (I): Espionage and Covert Action (U)
Some senior officials in the new Kennedy administration,
particularly in the Department of State and the Bureau of
the Budget, worried that a "cultural U-2 incident" might
result from the "real hazard" of the increasingly thin cover of
the funding network and that important foundations might
be embarrassed by disclosure of their CIA ties. These early
worries produced no action, however, owing to indifference
at the top. The president and the attorney general appar-
ently saw no need to reform the funding of the Agency's CA
programs and did not ask then-DCI Allen Dulles to reply
substantively to questions about the funding network that
Dean Rusk had posed in early 1961. Following the White
House's lead, the Special Group declined to impose serious
changes on individual CA projects or the scope and empha-
ses of covert action as a whole during an NSC audit in
August 1961. Accordingly, when McCone took over as
DCI, "higher authority" had not flagged the covert subsidy
situation as a serious problem he needed to address."
During the next two years, Agency officers jousted over
the issue but did not seek resolution at a level high enough
to engage the DCI even indirectly." OGC, Cover and
Commercial Staff, and the now reorganized CA Staff
exchanged many interoffice communications?the lawyers
warning of the danger that official and journalistic probes of
American tax-exempt foundations posed to the Agency's
covert funding network, the operators giving assurances that
they had quietly handled similar problems before and trying
to keep OGC out of the day-to-day running of the network.
These discussions replicated what had occurred among
administration officials: vague high-level concerns eliciting
from program managers a combination of nonchalance,
bureaucratic defensiveness, and partial solutions to narrowly
construed difficulties.
Compartmentation limited the extent to which Meyer's
CA Staff could implement the mandate it received from the
new DDP, Richard Helms, to impose tighter controls on the
sprawling network. In mid-1962, Helms had ordered the
new CA Staff to create 2
to survey all covert actions,
amass central data
files on
projects, and recommend improvements to both operations
and overall procedures. Despite this effort, neitheiior
would comprehend how vul-
nerable the Agency was until too late. Making the situation
worse was Meyer's failure to indicate to the DDP or DCI,
even as late as early 1964, that something was amiss. Despite
compartmentation, Meyer knew about security problems
from OGC, and he met with McCone regularly about other
CA projects. He chose, however, to handle the issue from
his limited vantage point, without informing the DCI and
top Agency management. Even when McCone dealt with
CA funding matters in the cases of
he did so in response to specific
developments and not because he was aware of a larger secu-
rity problem.><
Accordingly, McCone was incensed when he first heard
about the covert funding dilemma on 31 August 1964,
when Rep. Patman in open session of Congress identified a
cut-out and seven other funding facilities (the so-called
"Patman Eight") the Agency used in some CA projects. Pat-
man, who had started investigating one of CIA's foundation
cut-outs earlier in the month, had grown dissatisfied with
the Agency's lackadaisical responses to earlier, private
requests for confidential information. Acting DCI Carter
(McCone was on vacation) and senior IRS officials tried to
placate Patman, who thought he had been "trifled with,"
and convinced him not to reveal anything else about the
operations. The media already had the main story, however,
and McCone first heard about the flap in news reports. At
his staff meeting on 1 September, he vented his anger over
Patman's revelation and the failure of operations managers
to alert him and other senior officers about a controversy
that had been building for three weeks. Without naming
"Memorandum for the Record... Minutes of Special Group Meeting, 9 February 1961," 9 February 1961, and Bundy memorandum to David Bell
(bureau of the Budget), "Questions arising from CIA support of certain activities," NSAM No. 38, 15 April 1961, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 19, folder 14;
Meyer, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting pursuant to NSAM No. 38 re Overt Financial Support for Certain CIA Activities...," 29 June 1961, CCS Files,
Job 78-04100R, box 1, folder 1; Meyer, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Meeting with Bureau of the Budget and State Department Officials on 5 May re NSAM
No. 38," 9 May 1961, DDO Files, Job 78-01450R, box 4, folder 9; CA Staff/ 3riefing book for PFIAB meeting on 13 April 1967, HS
Files, HS/MISC 13.7, especially 61-62, 104, 154, 156; Warner, Hearts and Minas, J.
"Sources for this paragraph and the next are:
warner, nearts ana Niznas, 0)?(3/,
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CHAPTER 12
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names, he declared that "it was inexcusable that a matter
this sensitive and which has absorbed the staff since 10
August, was not brought to the attention of higher levels in
the Agency until it was too late and the damage had been
done." In McCone's mind, his deputies had violated the
implied executive contract he made with them: In exchange
for receiving substantial administrative independence, they
must keep him fully informed of their activities and warn
him of potential problems. The scenario must have seemed
to McCone like a small-scale repeat of the Cuban missile
crisis, when he had also returned from a holiday to find a
huge mess, which his subordinates, in his judgment, had
mishandled.")
Early that afternoon, McCone personally had to explain
the debacle to President Johnson, by then already disgrun-
tled with the DCI and the Agency over Vietnam (see Chap-
ter 15). McCone seems to have tried to shift the blame to
Patman by stressing the "great damage" that the publicity
would produce, rather than to admit that CIA's missteps
had caused the difficulty in the first place. When the presi-
dent asked him what the Agency intended to do, he could
only reply rather feebly that "there was little we could do
except keep quiet" and find other ways to fund the Agency's
covert action clients.' As a hard-driving manager accus-
tomed to working with plans and projections, McCone
must have had difficulty admitting to his superior that the
organization he had been picked to run effectively had failed
at a basic executive responsibility: developing alternatives for
administering sensitive programs when they ran into trou-
ble.V
McCone immediately put Agency officials to work repair-
ing the damage." DDCI Carter unsuccessfully approached
the editor of the Washington Post about delaying an editorial
criticizing the Agency's use of foundations. Cover Staff
stopped using the "Patman Eight" foundations, and Patman
was persuaded to rein in an aggressive committee consultant
who wanted to investigate all of them. CIA:s Legislative
Counsel got permission to review and edit the transcripts of
the Patman committee's open hearings. McCone told Meyer
to prepare a comprehensive study of the CA funding process.
The review concluded that sudden shifts in payment mecha-
nisms would cause more problems than they would solve but
that minor adjustments should be explored. Meyer also
chaired a high-level internal study group that proposed use-
ful procedural fixes but still operated under the tacit premise
that future embarrassing leaks, while inevitable, would
emerge slowly and sporadically and could be controlled.
According to Elder, when McCone told the CA Staff to find
another way to finance some of its activities, the officers
"saluted loyally... [and] probably gave it an honest try[] but
they simply couldn't find another way to do this."
This disposition against a major overhaul became the
consensus within the Agency and the administration.
McCone did not reject out of hand Rusk's suggestion in
September 1964 that the Agency could handle many so-
called covert actions through overt sources such as AID, but
other administration principals were inclined to leave well
enough alone. After hearing Meyer present his postmortem
in late October, some members of the 303 Committee
expressed vague unease with CIA's use of foundations for
cover, but overall the policymakers agreed that the Agency
had no other choice. With minor modifications in train and
the Patman investigation under control, the furor over fund-
ing subsided during McCone's remaining months as DCI.
He took no further interest in it because he was preoccupied
"US House of Representatives, Hearings befire Subcommittee No. I on Foundations, Select Committee on Small Business, Eighty-Eighth Congress, Second Session...;
"Probe Told CIA Funds Go Through Foundation," Washington Evening Star, 31 August 1964, "Patman Says CIA Gave Money to a Foundation in `Secret' Pact,"
New York Times, 1 September 1964, "Fund Called CIA `Conduit," Baltimore Sun, 1 September 1964, and "Hearing Looks Into CIA Role In Tax Probe of Charity
Fund," Washington Post, 1 September 1964, Intelligence?General clipping file, box 3, HIC; Carter, "Memorandum for the Record ...A-DCI Meeting with Repre-
sentatives Patman and Roosevelt-31 August 1964," ER Files, Job 80601676R, box 13, folder 16; Warner DH, 32-34; DCI morning meeting minutes
for 1 September 1964, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 348;
warner, rwarrs ana ivanas, oo?uv.
92 McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with the President-1 September 1964, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 9..k
'Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Warner, Hearts and Minds, 71-73;
Harter memorandum about conversation with Altred Enencuy wasnington ost), z eptemoer 1,uq, ER
rues, Job 2SULSOIO/OK, box Ii, rouser so, warner memorandum about Carter and Warner meeting with Patman and Harry Olsher, 2 October 1964, Political and
Psychological Staff Files, Job 68-00608R, box 1, folder 19;
rid "Memorandum for the Record.. Meeting with
abs B?D, with attached Meyer menwianuurn,
McCone, Thunding Covert Operations," OGC 64-3887,14 October 1964, CCS Files, Job 78-04100R, box I, folder 7; Working Group on Covert Funding, min-
utes of meetings on 1 and 8 October, 3 and 21 December 1964, ibid. folders 1 and 7. Elder) DH, 11-12; McCone, "Memorandum of Discussion with Sec-
retary Rusk," 1 September 1964, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 5; causes and Lessons of February 1967 Ramparts and Associated
Exposures," 14; Meyer, "Memorandum for the Record.. Appearance Jetore the JUJ committee," 5 November 1964, McCone Papers, box 1, folder 7. For a warn-
ing flag that Eastern elite opinion had shifted against the Agency on the funding issue, see the New York Times editorial "Misusing C.I.A. Money," 4 September
1964,28
308 "5"te44,1/
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-!trft,K4
McCone and the Secret Wars (I): Espionage and Covert Action (U)
with Vietnam and other issues and was planning to leave
Langley anyway. When he resigned, an attitude of quies-
cence prevailed as the threat of a massive security breach in
the subsidy system seemed less likely. Reality would strike
hard two years later when Ramparts published its expos?ot
McCone as Operations Overseer (U)
Most critics of the Intelligence Community, during
McCone's directorship and today, do not question the need
for the United States to conduct espionage against foreign
adversaries. The usual complaint is that CIA and its coun-
terparts do not collect enough foreign secrets?that they do
not deploy enough clandestine agents against the right tar-
gets and rely excessively on technical collection. Except
when intelligence assets are compromised and diplomatic
embarrassment results, controversies over HUMINT opera-
tions generally are confined to the community and deal
mostly with competition for resources and debates over the
proper mix of spies and satellites. McCone took part in his
share of such discussions, but he left clandestine collection
mainly to DDP veterans he believed he could trust. Given
his unfamiliarity with field tradecraft, he was wise to do so,
and for the most part, his deputies rewarded his confidence.
(U)
Then, as now, covert action was the more problematic
activity for the DCI because it crossed the boundary between
intelligence activity and foreign policy implementation. Even
some experienced intelligence practitioners question whether
CA should be the responsibility of an agency whose primary
missions are collection and analysis. Involving CIA in politi-
cal action and paramilitary activities, the argument goes, gives
the Agency a stake in policies that inhibits its ability to inform
decisionmakers objectively. For McCone, inclined as he was
to serve simultaneously as the president's chief intelligence
officer and as a foreign policy formulator, that conflict of pur-
pose did not arise. He took seriously his responsibilities as a
member of the Special Group/303 Committee, for, also then
as now, covert action stood to get CIA?and the DCI?in
more difficulty than any other intelligence activity. With the
notable exception of the 1964 funding flap, and to the extent
that he could influence developments in the CA area,
McCone continued the programs he assumed from Allen
Dulles, implemented new ones suggested by the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations, and kept the Agency, and himself,
out of trouble.
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McCone and the Secret Wars (II):
Counterintelligence and Security (U)
J
ohn McCone had more experience in counterintelli-
gence and security when he became DCI than in espi-
onage and covert action. He had overseen the security
practices of his shipyards during World War II, and as
chairman of the AEC, he was entrusted with protecting
some of the country's most sensitive secrets and was familiar
with the investigations of Soviet atom spies. This firsthand
background with intelligence attacks made McCone very
security conscious and, amid the many counterintelligence
events of the early 1960s, willing to give the Agency's coun-
terintelligence professionals?especially CI Staff chief James
Angleton?a large measure of latitude. McCone respected
Angleton's intellect and admired his tenacity, but he did not
have a close working relationship with the reclusive and sus-
picious spy hunter. They met alone only about a dozen
times and around 30 times in total during McCone's 41
months at Langley. They apparently never lunched together
at Headquarters. Angleton found other ways to engage the
DCI more informally?occasionally dropping by McCone's
Northwest Washington residence in the early evening.NL
Some journalists have por-
trayed McCone as beguiled by
Angleton, who supposedly
took advantage of the DCI's
innocence of the secret world
to spin captivating theories
and pursue shadowy projects.
Given McCone's personality
and management style, how-
ever, he hardly was susceptible
to manipulation or willing to
tolerate Angleton's supposed
"no knock" privilege. Rather,
the DCI kept himself informed
James Angleton (U)
of, and,
as
appropriate,
CHAPTER
13
involved himself in, important counterintelligence develop-
ments?such as high-level Soviet defections, suspected pen-
etrations of the Intelligence Community, and sensitive
liaison relationships. Otherwise, he let Angleton, who
reported to Richard Helms, run counterintelligence largely
as the two saw fit. In the area of community security, in con-
trast, McCone was much more engaged. He responded
quickly to compromises and instituted procedures to reduce
the likelihood of breaches. Like DCIs before and since,
however, he could not stop enterprising journalists from
gaining access to classified material.N
Penetrations and Deceptions (U)
The extent to which McCone allowed Angleton to shape
his perception of counterintelligence affairs was most evi-
dent in the case of Anatoliy Golitsyn?a middle-ranking
KGB officer who defected to the United States in December
1961. After initially providing a trove of useful intelligence,
Golitsyn made sensational allegations about Soviet "moles"
and deception and caused years of disarray in several West-
ern services. Golitsyn was the first KGB staff officer to
defect to the West since 1954. According to Walter Elder,
"Angleton represented [Golitsyn] to McCone as being quite
special, and McCone was intensely curious."' At the time he
came to the West, Golitsyn claimed his information was too
important to tell to any American except the president, the
attorney general, and the DCI. Golitsyn's CIA handlers put
him off for awhile, but?not assuaged after two meetings
with Robert Kennedy and playing on the Agency's fear that
he might "go on strike"?he wangled an interview with
McCone in July 1962. Golitsyn set the tone for their rela-
tionship in his third sentence by complaining that "I had
expected that our meeting would take place earlier." The
McCone calendars. Angleton also went on fishing trips with DDCI Carter. Carter untitled memorandum to McCone, 29 April 1963, ER Files, Job 80B01676R,
box 13, folder 2; author's conversation with Mary Carter O'Connor (Carter's daughter), 4 June 1998.
Man old, 56, citing interview with 'Elder on 26 June 1989. Details about Golitsyn's biography, defection, handling, and allegations are in his operational fil
[Bronson Tweedy,) "Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn," J Useful open-source accounts o t e
case are: Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post-War Defectors, chap. 11; mangoia, cnaps. u?ru; wise, motenunt, chap. 3; David C. Martin, Wilder-
ness of Mirrors, 108-15,148-50 et seq.; Thomas Powers, "The Riddle Inside the Enigma," New York Review of Books, 17 August 1989, reprinted in Powers, Intelli-
gence Wars, 109-25; Riebling, chap. 9; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrolchin, The Sword and the Shield,177 , 184-85,367-68,405.
The defection and treatment of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko and the internal "molehunt" that Golitsyn's allegations set off will be discussed respectively in the next
two chapters. The Nosenko case is closely related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the large-scale molehunt did not begin until toward the end of
McCone's tenure. (U)
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DCI tried to mollify Golitsyn by stressing the importance of
his information, soliciting his views on Soviet internal affairs
and foreign policy, and assuring him that "[Nide do not want
to do anything at all, and will not do anything at all, that
will be embarrassing to you or restrictive to you." (McCone
noted elsewhere around this time that Golitsyn was "tem-
peramental and difficult to handle and at times resentful of
our tactics.") At this first encounter, the defector proposed
organizing anti-Soviet counterintelligence and counterpro-
paganda initiatives with other Western services. McCone
was receptive and directed Helms and the CI Staff to work
with Golitsyn on developing his project.'.
McCone met with Golitsyn 10 more times--on several
occasions alone?during the next 27 months and arranged
for Golitsyn to see Robert Kennedy again because, Elder
recalled, "[he] was acting like a prima donna and his ego
needed soothing." The former KGB officer used some of
these meetings to describe Moscow's purported strategic
deception program?which included dispatching false defec-
tors to discredit him?and to solicit McCone's support for a
$15 million organization to study the Soviet regime and the
KGB. During a luncheon in the DCI's private dining room
in mid-December 1962, McCone heard Golitsyn expound
his theories that Khrushchev's de-Stalinization policy was a
myth, that the Soviet Union's purported "splits" with the
PRC and Yugoslavia were actually deception operations, and
that the Cuban missile crisis was a propaganda ploy. At
another meeting in late November 1962, after Golitsyn
accused Agency officers of assorted improprieties toward
him, McCone "stood up to him somewhat angrily and
demanded proof," which the defector never provided.W
McCone and Golitsyn's CIA and FBI handlers put up
with the defector's arrogance and irascibility for a time,
because he appeared to provide sensitive information corrob-
orating previous reporting and leads to other potential
sources.' Elder has characterized the thinking of McCone,
Helms, Angleton, and the management of the DDP's SR
Division at the time: "Golitsyn was threatening to go out in
the world on his own. We felt he was the best defector we
ever had. His potential was at least the best.... Besides, no
one put the case to McCone that he should not see
Golitsyn." Even a critical study prepared by the post-Angle-
ton CI Staff in 1976 described Golitsyn's substantiated intel-
ligence as "a tremendous collection... [with] invaluable
insights.. .some of it was highly significant."/
Golitsyn's report-
ing, extensive in its own right, soared in value in the absence
of other comparable HUMINT.
3 "Golitsyn," 20; memorandum to 13 July 1963, Golitsyn cCone, "Memorandum for the
File... Discussion wiiii iiie miortiey 'erierai. . .7 December 196 ,'' McCone Papers, box 2, folder 1; transcript o c one meeting with Golitsyn and Helms,
9 July 1962, DDO Files, Job 78-02888R, box 1, folder 34. Golitsyn saw the attorney general again in November 1962 because he was dissatisfied with his dealings
with McCone. The DCI thought Golitsyn might settle down if he met with the FBI but could not convince J. Edgar Hoover to see him. The FBI chief refused to
violate his personal policy of not meeting with defectors, agents, or criminals and believed Golitsyn wanted an interview "simply on the basis of ego." Helms, speak-
ing for the DCI to the FBI liaison to CIA, Samuel Papich, noted that the attorney general had said "one should play up to the ego of an individual such as
[Golitsyn],? but Papich (and Hoover) were unmoved. In February 1965, Bureau counterintelligence officials reported to Hoover that Golitsyn was too caught up in
his theories to be trusted, and may even be a fabricator. In July 1965, Hoover ordered all official Bureau contact with the defector to cease. Helms, "Memorandum
for the Record.. Mr. Hoover and' " 16 October 1962, McCone Papers, box 13, folder 2; Hoover letter to Helms, 6 October
1964, DDO Files, Job 78-0304111, uox 1, lower 1%; mangoia, ,o, o/ citing interviews with Elder on 11 August 1988 and 26 June 1989; "Golitsyn," 32,58. The
Agency clarified policies in defector handling and instituted some new ones as a result of problems with Golitsyn. Karamessines memoranda to Carter, "General Pol-
icy of Defector Handling" and "Special Handling of Defectors Whose Information is Predominately CI in Nature," 7 June 1962, DDO Files, Job 78-02888R, box
1, folder 4. McCone was more directly involved when USIB made further modifications regarding treatment of defectors from hostile services after irregularities
arose with handling Golitsyn's "nemesis," Yuri Nosenko, in 1964.
"441
Mangold, 67 citing interview with Elder on 11 August 1988; McCone calendars for 1962-64. Helms, "Memorandum for the Record..uncheon
Conversation," 17 December 1962, McCone Papers box 13 folder 7; "Golitsyn," 26-7:jmemorandum to McCone, "Interrogatio
14 December 1962, with attachmentv e luncheon
memorandum, Interrogation 11 December 1962, ER Files, Job
25U1301 / )OX 19, folder 2
5 According to documents smuggled out of the former Soviet Union by ex-KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB thought Golitsyn's defection was extremely dam-
aging, forcing it to suspend dozens of operational contacts. The service put Golitsyn's name on its "hit list" of traitors. Andrew and Mitrokhin, 184-85,367. (U)
6 GRU officer Oleg Penkovskiy was still in place, but he reported mostly on Soviet strategic and military subjects. (U)
312
SETITrr7
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McCone and the Secret Wars (II): Counterintelligence and Security (U)
McCone and the DDP also
used Golitsyn as an analytical
resource on the Soviet Union
during and after the Cuban
missile crisis. In October
1962, the CI Staff had
Golitsyn assess probable
Soviet reaction to President Kennedy's speech imposing a
quarantine on Cuba. Golitsyn thought Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev would go to the brink but then step
back, knowing he could not win concessions in Berlin with-
out a war he was not prepared to start. In mid-January
1963, the DCI asked Golitsyn to evaluate Moscow's appar-
ent failure to anticipate Washington's reaction to the deploy-
ment of offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba. Golitsyn
presented his views in a hastily arranged interview with the
CI Staff's chief analyst, Raymond Rocca. He judged that the
Soviet maneuver was political, not military; Khrushchev had
intended to force the West to negotiate over Berlin and
other issues and to sow dissension among Western allies.
According to Golitsyn, the Soviets had calculated all along
that eventually they would have to remove the missiles, but
they were willing to pay that price to make diplomatic gains.
They did, however, misjudge how fast and how far the con-
frontation would escalate. Golitsyn's assessment tracked
generally with McCone's and probably enhanced his credi-
bility with the DCI.
By early 1963, however, McCone's curiosity about
Golitsyn was satisfied, at least temporarily, and officers in
SR Division?already weary of Golitsyn's incessant and
increasing demands?had concluded that he had nothing
else useful to offer. He had passed on almost all of his first-
hand knowledge, and he now purveyed new information
largely from "analysis" of operational material US and for-
eign services gave him. ADDP
Thomas Karamessines went so
far as to write that "there is no
question... that we allowed the
defector to blackmail us into
control...no defector, irrespec-
tive of his value, should be
allowed to place us in that
position." Except for Angleton
and the CI Staff, there was lit-
tle resistance at Langley when
Golitsyn accepted an invita-
tion from Britain's MI-5 to
help it hunt Soviet agents in
London. Golitsyn had wanted to move to the United King-
dom for several months, having, according to Elder, "real-
ized he had run out of credit here. Furthermore, he realized
we were not going to bankroll his $15 million project to
bring down the Communist Parry of the USSR." After que-
rying the British, McCone approved the relocation. Angle-
ton wanted Golitsyn back, however, and may have contrived
(through a leak to a British tabloid) to force him out of
England. After Golitsyn returned to the United States in
August, McCone and Helms accepted Angleton's unprece-
dented proposal to take on the defector as a counterintelli-
gence adviser completely under CI Staff control. McCone
appeared to agree with Helms that this troublesome and
seemingly intractable case?which still seemed to have
potential counterespionage benefits?would be best han-
dled outside SR Division lest it disrupt regular espionage
operations.
Golitsyn soon was back in McCone's office elaborating
on the Soviet "master plan": the Sino-Soviet split was bogus,
concocted by Moscow; the KGB had penetrated the
Agency's Soviet division (with an agent codenamed "Sasha");
McCone sent an urgent EYES ONLY cable
to
asking him to
"Golitsyn," 55; Mangold, 56 citing interview with Elder on 26 June 1989; McCone, "Memorandum on Counterintelligence Activities," 20 July 1962, and An le
rlights of Counterintelligence Information Obtained from Anatoliy Mikhaylovich GOLITZYN," 18 July 1962, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 2.
SR Division) untitled memorandum to Helms on Golitsyn and Nosenko cases, December 1965, 9, DDO Files, Job 89-00395R, box 4, folder 75
Karamessines memorandum to Carter, "Reactions to President Kennedy's Speech and Comments on Cuban Crisis by Soviet State Security Defector Anatoliy
Mikhailovich Golitzyn," 24 October 1962, DDO Files, Job 78-02888R, box 1, folder 15; Helms memorandum to McCone, "Soviet Estimate of U.S. Reactions on
Cuba" with attachments, ibid., Job 78-02958R, box 1, folder 16. It is not known if Golitsyn tailored his conclusions to impress McCone. He might have heard that
administration officials were carping at McCone for proving them wrong about the missile deployment, and, with his characteristic penchant for manipulation and
self-promotion, he could have seen an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the DCI..4
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respond to each of the allegations, later para-
phrased his reply as, "No. No. No. No. And no." With those
assurances, the DCI did not follow up on Golitsyn's
claims.'
9 "Golitsyn," 26,28-29,31,58-59d History of CI Staff," 64-68; Karamessines memorandum to CI Staff, "The Damage Report on the Felfe Case, and Les
sons for the Future" 2 February 196-1?uurc) Files Job 78-02958R, box 1, folder 22; Mangold, 68-81, quote from interview with Elder on 26 June 1989;
igel West, The Circus: MI5 Operations, 19
85, 85, 112-14. because r,olitsyn provided intelligence anout a number or countries, berore tnis tir7ri-e-:14WE Divisions and the CI Staff handled him jointly.
Golitsyn had patrons but his information did not prove
very useful to them II MC rung 11111. 1,10 luitigi, spy 111 C1111C1 131111b/1 JCI nut. pl,v1vumy nalvvvn 1-11,1.11 VV0.., ma ? result of Golitsyn's information.
"Golitsyn," 77; Michael Smith, New Cloak, Old Dagger, 68-69; West, chap. 5 passim. The disarray within the British secret services that Golitsyn contributed to is
described in Torn Bower, The Perfect English Spy, chap. 12, and West, chaps. 7-9.451
1? "Golitsyn," 31,35-36; memorandum on MC ne-Golitsyn meetings on 23 August and 4 September 1963, Golitsyn
"History of Cl Staff," 178-
Ylangold, 86 citing interview n 15 May 1989. Golitsyn also met with Attorney General Kennedy?tor the last time?to detail his theories.X.%
314
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White House Damage Control: The Profumo Affair (U)
McCone?evidently for reasons of national security,
diplomacy, domestic politics, and friendship with the
Kenned s?took what
ater described as an inordinate interest in a for-
eign sex and espionage scandal that brought down a British
government. The principals in the episode were the British
secretary of state for war, John Profumo; a Soviet naval
attache and GRU officer, Yevgeny Ivanov; and a teenage
English prostitute, Christine Keeler, who was servicing both
men. Publicity about Profumo's infatuation with Keeler
broke in October 1962, when she sold her story to a Lon-
don tabloid. Profumo disputed everything she said about
their relationship and tried to suppress news coverage. His
denial of impropriety to the House of Commons in March
1963 soon was shown to be false, causing a public furor over
possible breaches of security. In early June, Profumo admit-
ted to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that he had lied.
He then resigned from the Cabinet. Macmillan?whose
government had already been shaken by several other coun-
terintelligence contretemps and had reached its nadir of
public support?convened an official inquiry, which con-
cluded that the Profumo-Keeler-Ivanov link had not dam-
aged British national security.' McCone later agreed with a
British official's characterization of the affair as "more of a
bedroom farce [than] serious espionage." At the time, how-
ever, the DCI declared that "this matter [is] of great concern
to highest authority," and Walter Elder said it caused "great
excitement" at Langley and the White House. As it
unfolded, the scandal revealed deep anxiety about its poten-
tial for compromising secrets and embarrassing the Kennedy
administration.'
Three US angles to the Profumo Affair?US-UK diplo-
matic relations, possible compromises of US intelligence
secrets, and some of John Kennedy's private indiscretions
before he was elected president?explain McCone's "inordi-
nate interest" in the scandal and his participation in
"s-e-efirezz,
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high-level meetings with FBI and Department of Defense
and Department of State officials about it in mid-June
1963." The diplomatic context in which the episode
unfolded was the so-called "special relationship" Kennedy
and Macmillan enjoyed as leaders of the Atlantic commu-
nity and the two most powerful countries in NATO. In
keeping with the president's interest in affirming and pro-
tecting that political bond, McCone would have wanted to
discover anything that might weaken or discredit it.
1 he hrst concerned fleeting and innocuous contact between
one of Keeler's friends and ambassadors David Bruce and
Charles Bohlen at a high-society function to which all had
been invited. Kennedy apparently already knew about the
incident, probably from Bruce, and seemed unconcerned.
'Giglio, 268; Parmet, 115-16; Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril, Honeytrap, 121 et seq.; Philip Knightley, An Affair of Statn Anthony Summers, Official and
Confidential, 305-9; Alistair Home, Harold Macmillan. Volume II: 1957-1986,471-97. The extent of Macmillan's political disgrace is trenchantly summarized in a
telegram from Ambassador David Bruce to the president and secretary of state; see FRUS, 1961-1963, XIII, Western Europe and Canada, 1132-34. The scandal's
impact on British-Soviet relations, and Ivanov's role as a disinformation agent during the Cuban missile crisis are summarized in Scott, Macmillan, Kennedy and the
Cuban Missile Crisis, 102-12l
i-valioyo own account, portraying himselt as a brilliantly
successtul operator who ensnared Frotumo and tried to blackmail the Royal Family, is I he IVakeel 3py. Keeter gives her version in the pulpish Scandal and the more
thoughtful The Truth At Last: My Story. Some British intelligence officials thought the whole business was a Soviet political action operation designed to discredit
their government and did not take the espionage element too seriously.
e other counterintelligence episodes that damaged Macmillan's reputation included Soviet penetrations of the Admiralty, the conviction of George Blake in 1961,
and the defection of Harold "Kim" Philby in 1963. Conon Molody (alias Gordon Lansdale) was a Soviet illegal who ran the Portland spy ring, so named because it
collected secrets from the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland, England. The ring's members included Morris and Helen Cohen (alias Peter and Helen
Kroger), who were Soviet atomic spies in the United States until 1950. They fled the country the day Julius Rosenberg was arrested and arrived in England in 1954.
Molody and the Cohens were convicted in March 1961. William John Vassall, a clerk in the Admiralty, stole secrets for the Soviets until his arrest in September
1962. He was sentenced the same day that President Kennedy announced the Cuban missile crisis. Philby and Blake are too well known to require discussion here.
All the above cases are conveniently summarized in Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage, 72-73,128-29,341,433-36,
446,574. The discomfiture they caused the Macmillan government is well described in Home, 456-67. (U)
summers and Vorni, 2)1, 204; Rnigtaley, 20D?b. benJamin braaiee, =tor or me wasnington _rose and a Kennedy connaante, said tne
president devoured every word written about the Profumo case" and "ordered all further cables from Bruce on that subject sent to him immediately" Bradlee, 230.
23McCone calendars, entries for 19-21 June 1963; Alan Belmont memoranda to Clyde Tolson (both FBI) about McCone meetings with McNamara and DIA direc-
tor Joseph Carroll on 20 June 1963, FBI Freedom of Information Act file on Profumo, No. 65-68218, on FBI Web site at www.foia.fbi.gov/bowtie. (BOWTIE was
the FBI's codename for Profumo.) There is no record in McCone's papers about his meeting on 20 June with McNamara and Hoover?the only time he ever met
with them together.)
24 Gene Grove "Outcry Grows; Queen Won't See Profumo," New York Post,7 June 1963, Profumo clipping file, HIC;
Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot,
Lust of Knowing: memoirs of an Intelligence Officer, 469-7u; Krugritiey,
25 Sources for this naragraoh and the next are.
rircnibaid. Roosevelt Par
McCone, "Memorandum for the
Record...liriet Meeting with the resident.. .21 June 19 , and Memorandum tor the Record...Discussion with the 1restdent, Secretary McNamara, General
McKee (USAF)...," 19 June 1963, McCune Papers, box 6, folder 4; Elder memorandum to Bundy, "Ward-Keeler Case," 21 June 1963, with attachment, ER Files,
Job 80B01676R, box 19, folder 5; Kirkpatrick Diary,,zol. 5, entry for 21 October 1963; Summers and Dorril, 247-49,251; Roosevelt, 469-70; Hersh, The Dark
Side of Camelot,
318
"NECALT/
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McCone and the Secret Wars (II): Counterintelligence and Security (U)
>c
The timing of the possible Air Force security breach
helps explain some of the worry it caused in Washington.
The early 1960s were proving to be one of the worst periods
in Western counterintelligence history, with numerous inci-
dents indicating serious problems inside several services: the
defections of three NSA officers to the Soviet Union in
1960; the arrests of George Blake, the Portland spy ring, and
John Vassal! in Britain during 1961-62; the discovery of
Soviet penetrations of the West German intelligence service
in 1962 and the Swedish military in 1963; the arrest of a US
Navy yeoman, attached to the US Navy headquarters in
London with top secret and special NATO clearances, in
September 1962 for spying for the GRU; "Kim" Philby's
defection to Moscow in January 1963; the indictment of a
Soviet spy ring in July 1963 in New York on charges of steal-
ing US military secrets; and the investigation of Sgt. Jack
Dunlap, an NSA courier and probable GRU penetration at
Ft. Meade. This succession of cases prompted several official
inquiries into the US Intelligence Community's security
practices and heightened the administration's and the DCI's
wariness about further incidents.'
President Kennedy's reputed personal connection to the
Profumo affair became a potentially messy diplomatic and
public relations issue for the administration?and, it
appears, for McCone, whose role as the president's chief
intelligence officer now took on an unprecedented aspect.
The scandal broke in the United States just as the adminis-
tration was showcasing the Anglo-American relationship.
The New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post mis-
takenly reported that US intelligence services had uncovered
Profumo's indiscretion and tipped off their British counter-
parts. Second, and far worse from the White House's per-
spective, the New York Journal-American claimed that one of
"the biggest names in American politics" who held "a very
high elective office" had been involved with the Keeler
ring.' The White House was alarmed because just before
and after the 1960 presidential election, John Kennedy
allegedly had had assignations with one or two of Keeler's
friends. The administration?not to mention Her Majesty's
Government?would be humiliated if news of the presi-
dent's purported encounters with some of the same women
in Britain's sex-for-secrets imbroglio appeared just after he
made a state visit there. In late June, Robert Kennedy sum-
moned the Journal-American reporters to his office to con-
firm that they were referring to his brother during the 1960
campaign and pre-inaugural period, and to demand that
they reveal their sources. They refused. Soon after, the attor-
ney general threatened the paper with an antitrust suit, and
it dropped its coverage of the affair.")
Given McCone's friendship with Robert Kennedy?the
chief protector of the president's reputation?and his
responsibility as DCI for assessing the security damage of
the Profumo episode, it seems likely that McCone knew the
truth about John Kennedy's past link to the Keeler circle,
used CIA resources to find out what the and the FBI
had uncovered about it, and passed on what he learned
o the attorney general. President Kenne ys
tee ess encounters with women of dubious note?a Mafia
moll (Judith Exner) and a suspected East German agent
(Ellen Rometsch), among others?were widely known in
official and unofficial Washington at the time and already
had caused difficulties for the administration. With
McCone's official duties and his intimate connections to the
At a meeting with McCone, Gen. Carroll, and Alan Belmont of the FBI on 20 June 1963, McNamara said he felt like he was sitting on a bomb in this matter as he
could not tell what would come out of it." The airmen told Air Force investigators that they had met Keeler in nightclubs but were not sexually involved with her or any
of her friends. The airmen eventually were cleared. D.J. Brennan memoranda to William Sullivan (both FBI), 20 and 26 June 1963, Belmont memorandum to Tolson,
20 June 1963, and Hoover memorandum to Tolson et al., 27 June 1963, FBI Profumo FOIA file. The three NSA defectors were Bemon Mitchell, William Martin, and
Victor Hamilton. The Navy yeoman was Nelson Drummond, who was convicted in August 1963. The Swedish military officer was air attach?tig Wennerstrom,
posted to Washington. Dunlap committed suicide before he was charged with espionage. Polmar and Allen, 176,179,356,372,592; Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, 177-
200; Lawrence P. Jepson II, The Espionage Threat, DOS-2400-219-88,17-18. A contemporary look at some of these counterintelligence incidents was given in "Who's
Spying for Whom? World Puzzle and a Shake-up," US News and World Report, 29 July 1963, Intelligence?General clipping file, box 3, HIC.NZ,
'Some observers speculated at the time that the FBI may have been the source of the Journal-American story on 29 June 1963 by James Horan and Dom Fraser,
"High U.S. Aide Implicated in V-Girl Scandal." That Hearst-owned newspaper was stridently conservative and anti-Kennedy, had ties to the FBI dating to the
McCarthy era, and had run stories on the British side of the scandal. (U)
29 Giglio, 268-69; Parmet, 115-16; Hilty, 251-52; Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, 392-93; Knightley, 206; Summers and Dorril, 67-70,196-204; Thomas,
Robert Kennedy, 254; Stanley Grogan (OPA) untitled memorandum to Helms, 7 June 1963, DDO Files, Job 78-02958R, box 2, folder 16. Kennedy met with Mac-
millan the second week of June; the Journal-American story ran on the 29th.16),
SEfoR.F.1/.
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president's family, it is not surprising that he would have the
Agency quietly find out all it could about any American
involvement in the scandal?partly for diplomatic and secu-
rity reasons, but also in large measure to aid the White
House in squelching a particularly ill-timed scandal. In part
because of the DCI's apparent assistance, "once again Bobby
handled a presidential lapse," one of John Kennedy's biogra-
phers has written. No American officials were tied to the
Keeler ring, and later that summer US intelligence services
concluded that the Profumo incident had not damaged
American security interests. Despite all the attention he paid
to the Profumo-Keeler episode at the time, however,
McCone professed to have "no recollection" of it when
questioned during the 1980s.30
..Itik
"The Last of the Romanovs" (U)
McCone had to help contain the security and political
damage from another runaway counterintelligence case, that
of Col. Michal Goleniewski
Gole-
niewski was one ot the West's most valuable CI sources dur-
ing the Cold War, but his role as a useful asset ended when
he became mentally deranged. He was a Polish intelligence
officer who worked as a KGB mole in his own service
Goleniewski had psychological problems, however, that
emerged fully after he defected?notably his fanciful claim
to be the last Russian tsarevich and heir to the Romanov
name and fortune. Seized by this delusion and resentful at
the treatment CIA officers had given him, Goleniewski
stopped cooperating with debriefers in 1963, holed up in
his New York apartment, refused to return a handgun the
Agency had given him, and began writing long, rambling
letters to US government officials?among them the chair-
man of the House Immigration Subcommittee, the presi-
dent, the attorney general, the FBI director, and the DCI.
CIA renegotiated Goleniewski's contract in his favor in
October 1963, and, when that incentive failed, took the
opposite tack and suspended it in early 1964.3*
Soon after, Goleniewski's story appeared in the press,
with the New York Journal-American taking the lead in pub-
licizing "what looms as a greater scandal than the famous
Alger Hiss case." Goleniewski made sensational public
charges about KGB penetrations of the US government: at
least 19 employees were Soviet spies, including four at CIA,
a dozen at the Department of State (most posted to the
embassy in Warsaw), and three scientists working on classi-
fied projects; the Agency had lost more than $1 million in
'Summers and Dorril, 249-50,253,257-60; Giglio, 268-69; Parmet, 116; Elder memorandum to McNamara, "Ward-Keeler Case," 20 June 1963
onymous memorandum, "The PROFUMO Case," undated but probably summer 1963, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 5. Robert Kenne y a so receive
in ormation about the scandal from the FBI. See, e.g., C.A. Evans (FBI) memorandum to Belmont, "Christine Keeler[,] John Profumo...," 24 July 1963, FBI Pro-
fumo FOIA File 65-68218. In contrast to the Profumo affair, the attorney general evidently did not enlist McCone in helping contain two other potential scandals:
the president's encounters with Rometsch, a capital "party girl" suspected of working for the East German Stasi; and his affair with Mary Meyer (the estranged wife
of CA Staff chief Cord Meyer), whose diary describing their relationship was acquired (and, in some accounts, destroyed) by Angleton after her murder during a rob-
bery. Given the potential intelligence angle in the Rometsch case, it may seem odd that Robert Kennedy did not involve McCone. Her relationship with the presi-
dent, however?unlike Keeler's with Profumo and Ivanov?was purely personal. Summers, 309-12; Burleigh, 246-49.
e vest open-source account of the case is in
Martin, rness o Mirrors, 95-99,103-6. Go eme s is version appears in uy ? c ar s, mperta gent: e oleniewski-Romanov Case. Walter Phorzheimer,
curator of the HIC, summarized the book in a memorandum to senior Agency managers, "New Book: Imperial Agent: The Goleniewski-Romanov Case by Guy Rich-
ards," 10 November 1966, MORI doc no. 297931 >4%.
32 "Goleniewski Case," 13-19,24-26;
(EE Division) memorandum to Helms
um to McCone,1
Senate Committee Subpoena, Marc an
"Memorandum for the Record?Goleniewski Case,"
78-03805R, bo
to McCone,
Colonel Mic
moran um or t e eco
and
memoran-
Service of
Houston,
arc , i. i.., o ?er anonymous i e memoran um, c a o erne s c. pri , ibid., Job
1; "Defector Here Says He Is Son Of Czar," New York Times, 16 August 1964,54, Goleniewski clipping file, HIC; Helms memorandum
etter to Director of Cen ? igence, dated 24 January 1964," 18 February 1964, McCone memorandum to Bun ' utenant
WSKI," 17 March 1964, emorandum to Carter, "FBI Interview with Robert Speller," 10 March 1965, and emo-
randum to Carter, "Possible Publication of Mr. Guy c ar. Book Entitled 'The Goleniewski Story," 24 August 1965, ER Files, Job 80R015 folder
202; DDCI Daily Log, 16 July 1964, ibid., Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 10.
320 .L?EfiLT,L
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McCone and the Secret Wars (II): Counterintelligence and Security (U)
operational funds in Vienna that wound up in the hands of
communist organizations; and lax security practices guaran-
teed that more enemy agents remained undiscovered. This
counterintelligence cause c?bre caught the attention of the
House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee. The latter subpoenaed
Goleniewski, but he refused to appear, pleading illness. (He
later accused CIA of preventing him from testifying by
keeping him under detention in a New York safehouse.) The
defector's story was widely reported and prompted many
editorials urging the US government to tighten security. A
vituperative anticommunist member of the House Un-
American Affairs Committee, John Ashbrook (R-OH), took
to the floor to denounce the government for harboring sub-
versives and covering up Soviet espionage in the United
States. An eight-year-old list of over 800 security risks at the
Department of State was retrieved from the files and
resulted in a number of personnel investigations there and
the recall of several employees from Warsaw.33XL
Amid this public row, the Agency's relationship with
Goleniewski degenerated further, as did his mental condi-
tion. The defector berated CIA to his FBI contacts, spurned
the ministrations of DDP officer George Kisevalter (perhaps
the Agency's most experienced handler of defectors), and
pressured CIA to restore his contract by threatening legal
action and full disclosure. He went ahead and told his tale
on a radio talk show in New York and cooperated with a
headline-seeking book project on the Romanov mystery
written by the Journal-American reporter responsible for the
outlandish stories published so far.34X
McCone first got involved in Goleniewski's case in mid-
1963 when he approved a special financial and security
arrangement?much of it already set in place?and Agency
sponsorship of a private congressional bill to grant citizen-
ship to Goleniewski. The defector had written to McCone
in April complaining about his treatment and threatening to
tell the White House about his situation. The DCI spoke to
Goleniewski, whom he regarded as a "psychopathic case,"
but he thought the Agency should take extra measures to
ensure the defector's physical and financial security in recog-
nition of his past value as a counterintelligence source.
McCone also had to assuage the irate chairman of the
House Immigration Subcommittee, Michael Feighan (D-
OH), who was sponsoring the citizenship bill without
knowing either all the details of the case or the Agency's pro-
cedures for dealing with private legislation for defectors.
The DCI and other CIA officers persuaded Feighan to
encourage Goleniewski to be more cooperative. That
approach did not work. Goleniewski went public several
months later, and the congressman took his side in the dis-
pute, at least until the Romanov fantasy eclipsed the CI
aspect.35)64(
As the situation unfolded, McCone kept the White
House, Congress, and USIB informed, and oversaw how
Carter, Helms, and General Counsel Lawrence Houston
managed the increasingly difficult case. A new CIA angle
briefly arose in January 1965 when
Herman Kimsey, publicly
contended that the Agency possessed finger and sole prints
and dental charts that corroborated Goleniewski's claim to
royal lineage. McCone also had to deal with some residual
antipathy from the FBI, which CIA had kept out of the
Goleniewski case until after the Pole arrived in the West.
One unexpected benefit from the problems with Gole-
niewski was a series of improvements in the Agency's defec-
tor handling procedures.'...X
Overall, McCone and his deputies made the best of a
bizarre situation that was imploding at the same time CIA
had to cope with unprecedented public and media criticism
and the DCI's relations with the White House were growing
more tenuous (see Chapter 15). By placating a recalcitrant
asset, keeping members of the Intelligence Community
apprised of the case's problems, and anticipating the conse-
quences of adverse publicity, McCone and CIA executives
minimized political damage to the Agency while enabling
Besides the sources cited above, see also the many news articles in the Goleniewski clipping file, HIC. The tone of the Journal-American stories is conveyed in these
representatively lurid headlines: "US Secret Agencies Penetrated by Reds"; "4 US Envoys Linked to Red Spy Sex Net"; "CIA Hiding Red Defector From Probers";
and "Where Reds Put Spies" (2-5 March 1964). The source of these reports is unknown, but the Agency's IG attributed the leak to "congressional circles." "Gole-
niewski Case," 18.)Eit
David Wise, "HR 5507, a Prize Defector, Now the Boomerang," New York Herald Tribune, 8 March 1964, and transcripts of Guy Richards and Goleniewski inter-
views on Barry Farber talk show on WOR Radio, New York, 30 March and 10 August 1964, Goleniewski clipping file, HIC. (U)
35 "Goleniewski Case," 13; memorandum to McCone, "Background Material on for Meeting with Representative Michael A. Feighan...,
12 August 1963, DDO Files, ,o-02958R, box I, folder 8; transcript of McCone meetin wiui 1eigii.ln, Murphy, and others, 23 August 1963, McCone Papers,
box 7, folder 5; H.R. 5507, Private Law 88-59, "An Act for the Relief of Michal Goleniewski," 28 August 1963, Congressional Record?House, 3 March 1964, 4113.
-Frew;
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US and Western services to exploit Goleniewski's knowledge
effectively. (U)
Persistent Suspicions about Francis Gary Powers (U)
McCone undertook a vigorous-perhaps heavy-
handed-inquiry into the U-2 incident involving Francis
Gary Powers immediately after the Soviets released the cap-
tured pilot in a prisoner exchange in February 1962.'7
McCone believed that more lay behind the shootdown in
May 1960 than either Powers would admit or most techni-
cal evidence indicated. Personal and patriotic sentiments,
institutional interests, and security concerns motivated
McCone's energetic quest for an answer, and, when one he
deemed satisfactory was not forthcoming, they drove his
vindictive actions against the pilot.)
Francis Gary Powers on trial in Moscow in 1960 (U)
Influencing McCone's aversion to Powers was his knowl-
edge that some senior Agency and community officials had
always doubted Powers's story. Just after the incident, CIA
officers told journalists that Soviet antiaircraft missiles could
not reach as high as the Kremlin claimed they had and that
the plane had suffered a flameout or other malfunction that
caused it to drop within range of Soviet air defenses and
fighters. Then-DCI Allen Dulles gave that evaluation to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 31 May 1960 and
the following month to C.L. Sulzberger of the New York
Times, who noted in his diary that
Dulles is sure Gary Powers was not shot down at nor-
mal altitude (about 70,000 feet). The U-2, when it
reaches rarefied altitudes, tends to get a flameout. We
think Powers glided down to try and restart his motor.
He was then shot down around 30,000-40,000 feet.
Present Soviet defenses don't go above 60,000 feet. We
think Powers parachuted.
According to a secret Department of State report in June
1960, the U-2 debris displayed in Moscow's Gorky Park was
in much better condition than would have been expected
had it been damaed by a missile and then plunged nearly
r
13 miles to earth.
n October 1960, the 1-'131 began a
full investigation of Powers and his family, exchanging infor-
mation with CIA well into 1961. The Bureau's conclusion
about Powers's loyalty was redacted from documents
released in his FBI FOIA file, but McCone would have been
privy at least to the content of the unexpurgated originals.
Other information in Powers's file indicates that the Bureau
remained suspicious toward him.38.3X
36 Helms memorandum to Carter, "Inspector General's Review of the Handling of the Defector Michal GOLENIEWSKI," 11 June 1964, an emoran-
dum to Carter, "Possible Publication of Mr. Guy Richards' Book Entitled 'The Goleniewski Story," 24 August 1965, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 9, tolder 202;
"Ex-CIA Official Claims Polish Defector to Be Son of the Last Czar," Washington Daily News, 19 January 1965, and "Defected Polish Spy Can Prove He Is Son of
Czar, Ex-CIA Man Says," Los Angeles Times, 20 January 1965, Goleniewski clipping file, HIC. The Agency terminated Goleniewski's contract in late 1965 but con-
tinued to him a small annuity memorandum to Helms, 13 December 1965, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 9, folder 202;
memorandum to Raborn, Michal N. Goleniewski," 6 September 1965, appendix to Poianc: rxternai operations,
voo eniewski persisted with his Romanov claims until he died in 1993. Guy Richards took up the search for the missing tsarevitch and had two books about it
published in the 1970s, The Hunt fir the Czar and The Rescue of the Romanovs. Recent investigations have thoroughly discredited Goleniewski's contention. William
Clarke, The Lost Fortune of the Czars, chap. 10.A,
37The exchange of Powers for Soviet spy Rudolph Abel, conducted in Berlin on 10 February 1962, was almost fully negotiated before McCone became DCI, and he
did not express an opinion on it.X
38 CIA memorandum, "Operational Hypothesis of Events of Downed U2C Aircraft," 26 May 1960 (marked "Coordinated with USAF"), HS Files, Job 90T00782R,
box 1, folder 3; "Statement by Mr. Allen W. Dulles...to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 31 May 1960," 12, DCI Files, Job 98B01712R, box 1, folder 7;
Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: The U-2 Affair, 355-56,359; Riebling, 155-58; OGC Files, Job 86-00168R,
box 3, folders 1944 45, and Job 82-00451R, box 4, folders 162-64; Powers's FB1TOIA file No. 105-87346, HS hies, Job 03-01724R, box 8, folder 9; Pocock, Dragon
Lady, 50-51. Intelligence from Oleg Penkovskiy apparently did not factor into McCone's thinking about Powers. The defector's account of the shootdown, includec in
the first material he gave the Agency in 1960 did not specify the altitude of Powers's U-2 when it was hit. Schecter and Deriabin, 6-7,118-19; Penkovslciy, The Pen-
kovskiy Papers, 355-57
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McCone and the Secret Wars (II): Counterintelligence and Security (U)
So did many Americans. Instead of returning home to a
hero's welcome, Powers faced a barrage of criticism. Newsday
asked whether he was "A HERO OR A MAN WHO
FAILED HIS MISSION?" A US senator said "I wish that
this pilot who was being paid thirty thousand dollars a year
had shown only ten percent of the spirit and courage of
Nathan Hale." An American Legion official called Powers "a
cowardly American who evidently valued his own skin far
more than the welfare of the nation that was paying him so
handsomely." The president of the Fund for the Republic
opened a study of the decline of character in the United
States by asking, "Should we be alarmed by the difference
between the behavior of Airman Powers and of Nathan
Hale?"' (U)
McCone, sternly moralistic and patriotic, shared these
sentiments and must have found Powers's public apology at
his trial?"I am deeply repentant and profoundly sorry"?
especially hard to take.' The widely published photograph
of Powers with his head slumped to his chest, probably
taken during a moment of fatigue and despondency, never-
theless was seen by many Americans as a symbol of craven
collaboration and no doubt set badly with the DCI. Beyond
his personal feelings, McCone may have sensed that the
Agency's reputation might suffer if he did not try to make
Powers pay a price for seeming to cooperate with the enemy.
He may also have wanted to deter other reconnaissance fly-
ers from placing survival over national security and giving
the Soviet Union more propaganda victories. (U)
Unresolved counterintelligence and security questions
added to McCone's animus toward Powers. Since mid-1960,
both CIA and the FBI had investigated leads and theories to
explain the loss of Powers's U-2. These included a break in
communications security that could have allowed the Sovi-
ets to monitor transmissions between pilots and the U-2
control base in Adana, Turkey; sabotage of the aircraft in
and hijack-
ing ot the spyplane by a purported special Soviet intelligence
unit codenamed Molniya ("lightning" in Russian). Soviet
interest in acquiring a U-2 was well known in the commu-
nity, and, farfetched as it sounded, the hijacking theory at
least had the merit of resolving the dispute over the U-2's
altitude when it was damaged. Although the Soviets claimed
it had been flying at 70,000 feet, the consensus of US intel-
ligence officials at the time was that Soviet antiaircraft mis-
siles could not reach it. That meant that either the U-2 had
lost power and dropped within the missiles' range or that it
was forced down some other way?according to the Molniya
theory, because Soviet operatives had somehow drugged
Powers.4' (U)
Another, more likely, possibility troubled McCone as
much: Powers had defected and perhaps even had been a
Soviet agent with the mission of delivering a U-2 behind the
Iron Curtain. Former' DDCI John McMahon?at the time
a high-ranking official in the U-2 program?has said that
just after Powers was shot down, McCone thought the pilot
had defected. Nothing McCone had learned since May
1960?including a favorable CIA security review of Powers
that he probably saw or knew about?had changed his
mind. A defection would have partly explained some of the
U-2 incident's anomalies: Powers's failure to use his ejection
seat, which would have set off the aircraft's camera-destruct
mechanism; the relatively good condition of the wreckage;
Powers's reportedly comfortable treatment while in prison;
and?from a counterintelligence standpoint, probably the
most disquieting improbability?his emergence relatively
unscathed from what experts considered an unsurvivable
freefall and parachute drop from an extreme height. As the
former director general of Britain's Royal Air Force medical
service publicly commented at the time:
It is utterly impossible for a pilot to bail out [at that
altitude] without using ejection equipment. He would
be destroyed instantly by the slipstream and air pres-
sure. Should he survive this, he could not last more
than 45 seconds without the oxygen equipment
attached to the ejection seat, and the 50-below cold
would make life impossible.42>?,
According to Lawrence Houston, McCone
suspected that Powers a
flown his plane to a lower altitude and then parachuted
before Soviet missiles shot it down. The fact that, as Hous-
ton put it, "we [CIA] were getting slightly different stories"
from Powers during intensive debriefings by technical and
operations officers in February 1962 made McCone even
" Beschloss, Mayday, 351; James J. White, "Francis Gary Powers?The Unmaking of a Hero, 1960-1965," unpublished manuscript (1974), 7, copy in History Staff
files. (U)
' Powers made the statement on the advice of his Soviet defense counsel. (U)
4' Riebling, 156-57; Beschloss, Mayday, 358; Peter J. Huxley-Blythe, "What About U-2 Mystery?" [December 1960] in Powers FBI FOIA file. (U)
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more skeptical. Of course, McCone did not want the
Agency's suspicions of Powers to leak out. Just after Powers
was released, a journalist asked the DCI whether the pilot
was a defector. McCone responded, "[O]f course a small
segment of people in the U.S. may think so, but there was
nothing so far that would give credence to that belief." The
DCI did not hint that he was in that "small segment of peo-
ple."".
McCone disagreed with the findings of the CIA damage
assessment team that debriefed Powers for two weeks after
his repatriation and largely exonerated him. That was the
same team that had met in the summer of 1960 to estimate
what Powers knew about the overflight program and could
have told Soviet interrogators. After the 1962 debriefings,
the team concluded that Powers's disclosures had caused
much less harm than previously thought and indicated it
was satisfied with his behavior in captivity'
At Houston's suggestion, McCone quickly convened a
board of inquiry to consider whether the US government
should charge Powers with dereliction of duty. The board's
members were retired federal judge E. Barrett Prettyman,
the chairman; John Bross from the DDP; and Lt. Gen.
Harold Bull, a consultant to ONE. McCone directed the
board to answer three questions: Did Powers fulfill the terms
of his contract with CIA? Did he conduct himself in captiv-
ity as a patriotic American should? Did the Agency's man-
agement of the U-2 program need improvement? The
Prettyman panel spent nine days reviewing a large body of
information,
testimony from 23 witnesses, including Powers,
military personnel associated with him, and medical experts;
a film of Powers's trial;
and photographs of the U-2 's wreckage
an an analysis of them by the plane's builder, "Kelly"
Johnson of Lockheed. In a 14-page letter to McCone, the
board stated its conclusions: "[T]tle evidence establishes
overwhelmingly that Powers's account was...truthful...that
throughout this incident Powers acted in accordance with
the terms of his employment and instructions and brief-
ings...and that he complied with his obligations as an
American citizen." Accordingly, Powers was entitled to back
pay of approximately $52,000. Around the same time, a
group of Air Force experts, convened by the secretary of the
Air Force at McCone's request, supported Johnson's analysis
(and Powers's description) that a nearby explosion could
have broken off the aircraft's wings.45)?
McCone was unconvinced and kept looking for reasons
to penalize Powers. His concerns about Powers's supposed
misjudgments and possible security breaches came through
clearly in questions he posed to Houston just after reading
the Prettyman report. McCone wanted to know if Powers
could have been in touch with outsiders after he received the
mission brief; if Soviet aviation activity during the flight was
unusual, suggesting the Soviets already knew about it; and if
Powers's actions after his plane was damaged made it harder
for him to activate the destruct mechanism. Houston's
respective answers were: possibly, apparently, and probably
not. With President Kennedy's assent, McCone reconvened
the Prettyman board to reconsider the only evidence that
'John McMahon oral history interview by ,_Chantilly, VA, 4 December 1997,32 (hereafter McMahonC1H); Riebling, 157-58; Fulton
n im
Lewis, "Washington Report," 24 August 19 so, ows r r IA
00'
Several reports about Powers's private contacts, suggesting that he might have defected, were all found to be provocations. For example, CIA had determined by Sep-
tember 1960 that a British report that the Soviets had recruited Powers in late 1959 was false. An Agency counterintelligence officer called the information "the last
checkable lead on any reference to disloyalty on the part of Powers." It is not known if McCone was aware of the report or the evaluation.
(March 1972), 208; memorandum to Bissell, 26 eptem er 19 0, D 0 ? its, o -00352R, box 1, folder 11.N
For Soviet versions ot the shootdown?from an air defense analyst who prepared the technical questions used in Powers's prison interrogations, and from Khrush-
chev's son?that corroborate Powers's account, see Alexander Orlov, "Russia, 'Hoe Front of the 'Cold' War," Geopolitical Forecasts: Past, Present, Future (1997), FBIS
Translated Text FTS19981007000076,27-33; and Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, 365-83.X
43 Beschloss, Mayday, 356-57 citing interview with Houston on 17 January 1983; Grogan untitled memorandum, 12 February 1962, McCone Papers, box 8, folder 1.451
'Pedlow and Welzenbach, 183-84; Grogan untitled memorandum, 12 February 1962, McCone Papers, box 8, folder 1. X,
45 Pedlow and Welzenbach, 184-85; Houston memorandum to McCone, "Board of Inquiry for Francis Gary Powers and Terms of Reference," ER Files, Job 80B01676R,
box 22, folder 2; McCone directive concerning Board of Inquiry, 19 February 1962, ibid.; memorandum to Houston, "Summary of Events?Board of
Inquiry Task Force," ibid., folder 1; Prettyman, Bross, and Bull letter to McCone, 27 February 1962, ibid., fo der 2; Board of Inquiry debriefing of Powers,
Job 84B00459R, box 1; Beschloss, Mayday, 35 . . , The U-2 Spyplane, 242-43; Johnson, Kelly: More Than MU Share of
Wh 17-18;
23. Powerss contract with CIA provided for him to continue receiving his pay under the terms of the Missing Persons Act whire-rre-cVas in prison.
rner memorandum to Dulles, "Continuance of Pay of Francis G. Powers," OGC 61-1454,24 August 1961, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 34, folder 13...K.
324
""esitfzi
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contradicted Powers' testimony
McCone and the Secret Wars (II): Counterintelligence and Security (U)
In early March 1962, the Agency issued a public state-
ment?approved by McCone?that seemed to accept Pow-
ers's version of the shootdown. The pilot had "lived up to
the terms of his employment...and...his obligations as an
American"; "no evidence has been found" of Soviet espio-
nage activity (i.e., Powers did not try to defect) or of sabo-
e. On the Prettyman board's conclusion
he statement said:
Some information from confidential sources was avail-
able. Some of it corroborated Powers and some of it
was inconsistent with parts with Powers's story, but
that which was inconsistent was in part contradictory
with itself and subject to various interpretations. Some
of this information was the basis for considerable
speculation.. .that Powers' plane had descended grad-
ually from its extreme altitude and had been shot
down by a Russian fighter at medium altitude. On
careful analysis, it appears that the information on
which these stories were based was erroneous or was
susceptible to varying interpretations. The board came
to the conclusion that it could not accept a doubtful
interpretation in this regard which was inconsistent
with all the other known facts.,:k
The statement, however, did not dispel completely the
impression that Powers somehow had done something
unpatriotic. For Powers and his supporters, the devil was in
its nuances and omissions. The statement did not declare
unequivocally that, in the Agency's judgment, his disclo-
sures to the Soviets had not harmed national security, nor
did it vouch for what Powers claimed he had and had not
told his captors. Also, the Agency withheld other, more sen-
sitive findings favorable to Powers. Consequently, at a Sen-
ate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in early March
1962, one of the members asked McCone, "Don't you think
he is being left with just a little bit of a cloud hanging over
him? If he did everything he is supposed to do, why leave it
hanging?" McCone declined this opportunity to endorse the
Prettyman Board's findings, to acknowledge that Powers had
concealed secrets while in captivity, or to officially absolve
him. Powers appeared at an open hearing of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, chaired by longtime Agency
ally Richard Russell, and won praise from the members and
generally favorable press coverage. In April, the Air Force
reinstated Powers?a decision in which CIA, the Depart-
ment of State, and the White House concurred?and Lock-
heed hired him as a test pilot the following December.*
The swing in public sentiment toward Powers must have
irked McCone, who then took other steps against him. In
late June 1962, the DCI decided that commercial publica-
tion of a book by Powers about the shootdown "would be
harmful to Powers and not in the best interests of the
Agency" and sent the general counsel and a high-ranking
DDP officer to dissuade the pilot. They reported that after
discussing the matter with Powers, "he was reluctantly
receptive to our guidance." Powers wrote to McCone, how-
ever, that he might reconsider writing a book later. In April
1963, the DCI awarded the Intelligence Star to all American
U-2 pilots except Powers, and he may have advised Presi-
dent Kennedy not to meet with Powers, even though a year
before the president had welcomed two captured Air Force
reconnaissance pilots released by Moscow.' N
The Agency's investigation into John F. Kennedy's assassi-
nation gave McCone further reason to wonder about Pow-
ers. Lee Harvey Oswald was stationed at a U-2 base in Japan
during 1957-58, before he defected to the Soviet Union in
46McCone and Houston memoranda, 28 February 1962, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 22, folder 2; McCone, "Memorandum of Discussion with the President...Feb-
ruary 28, 1962...," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 1; Prettyman, Bross, and Bull letter to McCone, 27 February 1962, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 22, folder 2>4...
"'CIA, "Statement Concerning Francis Gary Powers," ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 22, folder 2; Pedlow and Welzenbach, 185; Pocock, Dragon Lady, 52. Accord-
ing to Iohn McMahonI
mcmanon J1-1,
"CIA, "Statement Concerning Francis Gary Powers"; White, "Powers," 17; Pedlow and Welzenbach, 185; Beschloss, Mayday, 352-54; George C. Wilson, "Powers'
Capitol Testimony Adds Little to Knowledge of U-2 Affair," Aviation Week and Space Technology, 12 March 1962, 317, Powers clipping file, HIC; David Wise and
Thomas B. Ross, The U-2 Affair, chap. 15. A DDP regulation authorized captured U-2 pilots to disclose their Agency affiliation. The pilots were never ordered to
commit suicide if they were about to be captured. The Senate committees did not release many of their exculpatory findings about Powers.>c
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1959, and speculation arose that he had divulged technical
information about the U-2 program that would have helped
the Soviets shoot down Powers's aircraft. By May 1964, CIA
had concluded that Oswald did not have access to such
information. After that possibility was discounted, McCone
thought he had another reason to suspect that Powers had
done something wrong.' (U)
Toward the end of his directorship, McCone appears to
have decided to wash his hands of the Powers matter. In
March 1965, he approved awarding the pilot the Intelli-
gence Star. Two days before McCone stepped down, DDCI
Marshall Carter presented Powers with the award, which
bore the year 1963 engraved on the back.' /W
Improving Community Security (U)
The rash of counterintelligence and security incidents
involving US citizens that erupted in the early 1960s
required strong action from McCone in his capacities as
DCI and chairman of USIB. Including those cases men-
tioned above, over a dozen US government personnel, most
of them in the military or from NSA, were implicated in
espionage activity for hostile services during 1961-65.5'
Much of the response to those specific incidents was han-
dled by the organizations in which the perpetrators worked.
Members of USIB also took broader steps at the community
level to tighten and rationalize interagency security. N,
McCone's statutory responsibilities for protecting sources
and methods did not grant him specific authority to imple-
ment rules outside CIA, but he tried to rectify that situation
through bureaucratic means.' He made substantial progress
in overcoming agencies' jealous protection of their preroga-
tives and in encouraging them to recognize their mutual
interests. Three of his first accomplishments along those
lines were bringing to closure protracted negotiations over a
system of uniform security control markings and procedures
for disseminating and using intelligence, having USIB pro-
mulgate policies for exchanging counterintelligence and
security information among member agencies, and estab-
lishing consistent counterintelligence and security practices
at installations overseas)
The DCI's main instrument was the Intelligence Board
Security Committee (IBSEC), established in 1959 but ener-
gized during his tenure. Under the chairmanship of either
the DCI or CIA's director of security, IBSEC also imple-
mented PFIAB's recommendations for changes in security
practices following the Dunlap case.54 Those recommenda-
tions included imposing stricter standards for personal con-
duct (especially "abnormal sexual activity"); developing
'Helms memorandum to Carter, "Telephone Call From the Attorney General," 29 May 1962, DDO Files, Job 78-02888R, box 3, folder 8; Powers letter to
McCone, 6 July 1962, and Carter untitled memorandum, 7 July 1962, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 16, folder 330; Kirkpatrick, Executive Memorandum 19,
"Writings by Francis Gary Powers," 27 June 1962, ibid., Job 80B01676R, box 1, folder 10; memorandum to Houston, "Francis Gary Powers," 6 July
1962, HS Files, Job 03-01724R, box 1, folder 6; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record, u iect: pecial Group Meeting-5412-26 April 1962," McCone
Papers, box 2, folder 2; McCone letter todpn7sident, 3 March 1962, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 30, folder 4; CIA, "Statement Concerning Francis Gary Pow-
ers; White, "Powers," 18, 22; Warner H, 27-28; Pedlow and Welzenbach, 185-86..X
According to John McMahon, Robert Kennedy asked McCone to pressure Powers not to write a book about the shootdown. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross were
about to have The U-2 Affair published when they heard that Powers was going to write his own story. They did not want any competition and complained to the
attorney general, who in turn told McCone that it was inappropriate for the pilot to write anything. McMahor H, 33. Kennedy's intervention notwith-
standing, the DCI had his own motives for keeping Powers quiet. Powers eventually told his version in Operatt ht (1970),
The book does not mention McCone, and there are no references to it in
iis papers.N.,
"Helms memorandum to Hoover, "Lee Harvey Oswald's Access to Classified Information about the U-2," 13 May 1964, MORI doc. no. 272226. (U)
'Pedlow and Welzenbach, 185-86; Beschloss, Mayday, 397; Polmar, Spyplane, 144-45; Carter untitled memorandum to McMahon, 27 March 1965, ER Files, Job
80R01284A, box 25, folder 1; "CIA Honors U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers," Los Angeles Times, 5 May 1965, 5, Powers clipping file,
On 1 May 2000, 40 years after Powers was shot down and captured, and 23 years after he died in a helicopter accident, the Air Force awarded him the Distinguished
Flying Cross and the National Defense Service Medal. "US Finally Honors U-2 Spy Plane Pilot Gary Powers," Reuters story no. a3399, 1 May 2000. (U)
52 Jepson, 41-42; Stan A. Taylor and Daniel Snow, "Cold War Spies: Why They Spied and How They Got Caught," kr./VS 12, no. 2 (April 1997): appendix A;
USIB Security Committee, annual report for FY 1964, 14 September 1964, CMS Files, Job 93B01 114R, box 2, folder 19)c%
"Sources for this paragraph and the next are:
Patrick L. Carpentier, "Security as an Intelligence Community Concern," Studies 10, no. 4 (Fall
1966): 60-61; Annual Report fir FY 1965, 106; IBSEC annual reports for 1962-65, CMS Files, Job 93B011 14R, box 2, folder 19; DCI Directive No. 1/7, "Con-
trols for Dissemination and Use of Intelligence and Intelligence Information," 21 February 1962, ICS Files, Job 91B01063R, box I, folder 15; Robert L. Banner-
man (Director of Security) memorandum to IBSEC members, "Implementation of Recommendations of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
Resulting from the Dunlap Case," 28 July 1964, ibid., folder 8.X.
326
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"stic444.1z)
McCone and the Secret Wars (II): Counterintelligence and Security (U)
more intense security indoctrination programs (including
counterintelligence case studies); and resolving any doubts
about a suspect employee in favor of protecting national
security. After a former NSA cryptanalyst, Victor Hamilton,
defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, IBSEC oversaw the
response of community components in coordinating
medical, security, and personnel information during appli-
cant and employee investigations.K
Because military personnel committed most of the anti-
US espionage uncovered in the early 1960s, McCone sought
to tighten security procedures for servicemen in community
organizations that fell under his purview as DCI. In practical
terms, he could do little about NSA, which answered to the
secretary of defense, and the military services' intelligence
components were even farther from his reach. After the Dun-
lap case broke in the summer of 1963, McCone pointed out
in a memorandum to Secretary of Defense McNamara how
successful CIA's security procedures had been and com-
mended them to the Pentagon. One entity he could deal
with more directly was NPIC. He wrote to McNamara that
he had determined that all Department of Defense employ-
ees assigned to NPIC would be investigated and processed as
CIA personnel were, including the taking of a polygraph.
The secretary of defense said he was anxious to begin poly-
graphing new military assignees at NSA but foresaw prob-
lems if that were done to Pentagon personnel currently at
NPIC. McCone and McNamara therefore agreed that all ser-
vicemen detailed to NPIC in the future would be "fluttered"
by the Agency's Office of Security.55X
McCone made less progress in establishing uniform per-
sonnel security standards throughout the community.
Expanding the scope of security investigations was expen-
sive, and the DCI historically did not have responsibility for
designating access to classified defense-related material. Dis-
cussions among community organizations about standards
for access to sensitive compartmented information dragged
on for the rest of McCone's tenure. In addition, unfavorable
comments from several congressional committees about
using the polygraph on federal employees made it hard for
McCone to incorporate the device more extensively in
screening community personne1.56Nt
Unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the
media became a growing problem during McCone's direc-
torship as journalists took a more adversarial approach
toward the national security establishment in general and
CIA in particular. McCone was sensitive to unfavorable
publicity and "leaks," and he instituted many internal inves-
tigations into news stories that appeared to be based on clas-
sified information. These time-consuming inquiries almost
always proved fruitless. The journalists had First Amend-
ment protection, and their government sources were excep-
tionally difficult to uncover because so much intelligence
was so widely disseminated within the community. Among
numerous examples, two stand out as fair illustrations of the
challenge McCone and USIB faced. (U)
Kirkpatrick, "Memorandum for the Record.. DCI Meeting with President's Foreign IntahEence_Aebtisory Board, 13 September [1963]," DDO Files, Job 78-03805R,
box 3 folder 12A. McCone me-norandum to McNamara, 11 October 1963,
ivremoranaum 1-1-`04 Jecurity clearances for military personnel assigned to NPIC
56
Mrkpatnck memorancium to Lawrence IS.. White, Action
21 October 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 2, folder 4.)lia.
&E.C.E.E.1/
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McCone was willing to go along with another, more dras-
tic, approach to preventing leaks?one identified in the so-
called "Family Jewels" report of 1973 as among the most
troubling of the Agency's questionable domestic activities.'
"Project MOCKINGBIRD" was, according to the report, "a
telephone intercept activity.. .conducted between 12 March
1963 and 15 June 1963... [that] targeted two Washington-
based newsmen [Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott] who, at the
time, had been publishing news articles based on, and fre-
quently quoting, classified materials of this Agency and oth-
ers, including Top Secret '62 The
Office of Security, then under Sheffield Edwards, ran
MOCKINGBIRD. According to Walter Elder and a security
officer who worked on the operation, Edwards received his
orders from McCone, who agreed (under pressure from the
attorney general) to authorize the wiretaps of the journalists'
homes and office. Because their main source(s) appeared to be
Si The "Family Jewels" report was a compendium of possibly illegal CIA activities that James Schlesinger ordered OIG to compile soon after he became DCI in Feb-
ruary 1973. It included details of domestic spying, drug resting, mail opening, and assassination planning, some of which went on during McCone's tenure. Press
disclosures of some of the report's contents precipitated investigations into CIA operations by the Rockefeller Commission and special congressional committees led
by Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike.
328 BfTi
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Ithetik.zi
McCone and the Secret Wars (II): Counterintelligence and Security (U)
in the Department of Defense, McCone had Elder brief
McNamara and the director of DIA. (An employee in ONE
was regarded as the most likely leaker inside the Agency.)
Besides the DCI and Elder, only three other Agency managers
supposedly knew about MOCKINGBIRD?DDCI Carter,
Executive Director-Comptroller Kirkpatrick, and General
Counsel Houston. (A few security personnel who processed
the take from the wiretaps also were witting.))Lict
MOCKINGBIRD did not identify Allen and Scott's spe-
cific sources, but it helped reveal the journalists' methods
and many of their contacts outside CIA and the Pentagon,
including members of Congress and their staffers, adminis-
tration officials, and current and former federal employees.
By showing how far well-connected Washington newsmen
cast their reportorial nets, the operation underscored how
difficult it was to catch leakers en flagrante delicto. Surveil-
lance of Allen and Scott was suspended after a few months,
and MOCKINGBIRD was terminated, just after McCone
left Langley."
The Man Who Protected the Secrets (U)
The several-year outbreak of counterintelligence and
security incidents that began in the late 1950s and contin-
ued through McCone's tenure was the worst the Intelligence
Community faced until the "decade of the spy" in the
1980s. The cases arose at a politically inopportune time for
the DCI, charged as he was after the Bay of Pigs with prop-
erly managing CIA's clandestine activities and preventing
operational embarrassments. Some of the counterintelli-
gence and security episodes that came to term during his
tenure resulted from mistakes and oversights committed
before, but as the incumbent, McCone had to accept
responsibility for them. He generally handled the controver-
sies appropriately, avoiding undue publicity, allaying policy-
makers' concerns, and instituting useful preventatives at the
community level. Perhaps as important, he appreciated his
own limitations in the counterintelligence field, and, except
for cases that were especially sensitive or that disrupted liai-
son relationships, he left CI matters to more experienced
lieutenants. That said, while he was willing to entertain the
maxim that "no intelligence service can for very long be any
better than its counterintelligence component," he did not
blithely accept unfounded ideas from even as vaunted an
intellect as James Angleton. (U)
On the debit side, McCone's relative inexperience with
counterintelligence probably made him defer too much to
his operations deputies, Helms and Angleton. Had McCone
given the Golitsyn defection more direct attention, some of
the early problems it caused internally and with sister ser-
vices might have been avoided or attenuated. The forbear-
ance McCone and his deputies exhibited toward that
difficult case said more about the Agency's poverty of Soviet
intelligence sources than anything else. Some espionage
operations that hostile services began or kept running in the
early and mid-1960s went undetected even when CIA's
counterintelligence capabilities arguably were as keen as
they ever would be. Lastly, McCone did not recognize that
the Agency's CI efforts were too focused on European prob-
lems and Soviet operations while the Cold War?including
the one fought in the shadows?was fast becoming a multi-
polar, truly global conflict. Serving under two activist
administrations, he helped the Agency take espionage and
covert action into new theaters. Counterintelligence at CIA,
in contrast?perhaps reflecting its bureaucratic culture of
compartmentation and secrecy, and the idee fixe of Angle-
ton?remained parochial, inbred, and unadaptive during
McCone's directorship. (U)
"'Sources for this section are: Project MOCKINGBIRD synopsis and Elder memorandum to Colby, "Special Activities," 1 June 1973, "Family Jewels" report, 21,
457; Project MOCKINGBIRD summaries submitted to the Rockefeller Commission, March 1975, ibid., box 10, folders 182 and 216; Bannerman memorandum
to McCone, "Articles by Robert Allen and Paul Scott...," 5 March 1963, with attached memorandum from USIB Security Committee to USIB, "Protection of
Intelligence Sources and Methods: Articles by Robert Allen and Paul Scott," 1 March 1963, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 8, folder 168; Rockefeller Commission
Report, 164; Church Comniittee Report, vol. 2, 102-3. McCone was not questioned about MOCKINGBIRD when he testified to the Church Committee.,*
"Soon after he became DCI, McCone had a run-in with over an article they wrote about
purportedly gave at the White House to congressional leaders in late 1961 or early 1962. The DCI insisted no sucn briefing took place, but tuck to the story.
McCone told public affairs chief Stanley Grogan that "[c]his fellow is lying to you... and we can nail him if we get cooperation from the Wifi?Hte ouse." When he
met with the reporters in late March 1962, the DCI charged th relessness and irresponsibility in several of their articles?including ones about
alleged communists working at CIA, and misjudgments of ONE agreed to check anything they wrote about CIA with Grogan or McCone in the
future. Untitled file memorandum about McCone meeting with rogan, un ate ut early 1962, and Grogan untitled memorandum about McCone meeting with
on 20 March 1962, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 8, folder 168. McCone's effort in 1964 to quash the book by investigative reporters David Wise
and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government, is discussed in Chapter 16.,?,
"'"Ers13417i
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Death of the President (U)
J
ohn McCone and Lyman Kirkpatrick, the Agency's
Executive Director-Comptroller, met with PFIAB
through the morning of 22 November 1963. The
main topic of discussion was CIA's image problem,
which McCone attributed to hostile journalists. The DCI
planned to fly to California that afternoon for the Thanks-
giving holiday and, before leaving, over lunch, wanted to
talk about the PFLAB meeting with his senior deputies. He,
Kirkpatrick, Richard Helms, Albert Wheelon, Ray Cline,
and Sherman Kent were eating in the French Room, a small
space next to the director's office, when Walter Elder dashed
in and cried out, "The president's been shod" X
McCone turned on the television, watched the news bul-
letins, phoned the attorney general at his nearby home, and
said, "I'm going to Hickory Hill to be with Bobby."' The
DCI made his call before the overloaded Washington-area
telephone system went down 30 minutes after the first news
from Dallas. He remembered wondering on the short drive
to the Kennedy house "who could be responsible for a thing
like this. Was it the result of bigotry and hatred that was
expressed in certain areas of the country, of which Dallas
was one? Was this an international plot?" (U)
While McCone was with Robert and Ethel Kennedy in
their second floor library, the attorney general answered the
phone, listened briefly, and then said, "He's dead." McCone
recalled feeling shock, disbelief, profound sadness, and great
concern for the country. A few minutes later, he and Robert
left the house and walked around the lawn, speaking pri-
vately. One of the numerous phone calls to interrupt them
was from Vice President Lyndon Johnson in Dallas. After
expressing his condolences, Johnson told Robert that the
assassination might be part of a worldwide plot and indi-
cated that he probably should be sworn in right away. The
attorney general was initially taken aback but then agreed,
CHAPTER
14
found out the appropriate procedure from the Department
of Justice, and informed the presidential entourage in Dal-
las. He wanted to fly there right away, but McCone said that
would take too long and suggested instead that the slain
president's body be brought to Washington as soon as possi-
ble. Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base that
evening, and John Kennedy's body was taken to Bethesda
Naval Medical Center for an autopsy. Meanwhile, the con-
trovers over who had killed him, and why, had already
begun.
Initial Fears of a Conspiracy (U)
McCone returned to Headquarters at around 1530, sum-
moned the CIA Executive Committee, asked the Intelli-
gence Community's Watch Committee to convene at the
Pentagon, issued orders for all stations and bases to report
any signs of a conspiracy and to watch all Soviet personnel,
especially intelligence officers, for indications that the Soviet
Union was trying to take advantage of the disarray in Wash-
ington. The immediate reaction at Langley, as elsewhere in
the US government, was to suspect that a foreign, probably
communist-directed, effort to destabilize the United States
might be underway. Richard Helms recalled that "[v]e all
went to battle stations over the possibility that this might be
a plot?and who was pulling the strings. We were very busy
sending messages all over the world to pick up anything that
might indicate that a conspiracy had been formed to kill the
President of the United States?and then what was to come
next." One of the first cables was the following message
Helms sent to all CIA stations overseas:
Tragic death of President Kennedy requires all of us to
look sharp for any unusual intelligence developments.
Although we have no reason to expect anything of a
Sources for this introductory section are: Clifford, 378; Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 339, n. 25; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 608-9; Peter Collier and
David Horowitz, The Kennedys: An American Drama, 395; C. David Heymann, RFK: A Candid Biography of Robert E Kennedy, 345-47; William The
Death of a President, 256-57; Richard Helms interview in "Kennedy Remembered," Newsweek 102, no. 48 (28 November 1983): 75; KirkpatricH,
28; McCone calendars, entry for 22 November 1963; transcript of McCone interview with William Manchester, 10 April 1964, McCone Papers, ox , o er 8;
Kirkpatrick Diary, vol. 5, entry for 22 November 1963; Beschloss, The Crisis Years, 672 citing interview with Helms; author's conversation with Helms, 16 April
1998. For once at the onset of a crisis, McCone was at Langley while Marshall Carter was away (quail hunting at the Farm). Bamford, Body of Secrets, 132.1514C
2 Robert Kennedy was holding a luncheon meeting on organized crime with two Department of Justice officials when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called to tell
him that the president had been shot. Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power, 383; Heymann, 345. (U)
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It?141.11,
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particular military nature, all hands should be on the
quick alert at least for the next few days while new
president takes over reins.' (U)
In addition, McCone
directed that a special
cable channel be estab-
lished so that all traffic
related to Lee Harvey
Oswald?arrested in Dal-
las soon after the shoot-
ing?went to a central
repository, and he sent a
to Parkland Hospital,
where John Kennedy had
been taken for emergency
treatment, to coordinate
activities with the Secret
Service and the FBI. After
the Secret Service
obtained a graphic film of
the assassination taken by
an amateur photographer named Abraham Zapruder,
McCone had NPIC officers analyze the footage (particularly
the time between shots) and prepare briefing boards for the
service.'
Lee Harvey Oswald (U)
Photo: UPI/Bettman
Some senior Agency officers looked into possible KGB
involvement. The chief of the DDP's SR Division, David
Murphy, framed the essential question the day after: "[W]as
Oswald, wittingly or unwittingly, part of a plot to murder
President Kennedy in Dallas as an attempt to further exacer-
bate sectional strife and render the US government less
capable of dealing with Soviet initiatives over the next year?"
Also on the 23rd, Mexico City station reported that less
than two months earlier, Oswald had met with a KGB
officer possibly from the Thirteenth Directorate?responsi-
ble for assassination and sabotage?at the Soviet embassy in
Mexico City. Headquarters officers speculated on
24 November that "[a] lthough it appears that he [Oswald]
was then thinking only about a peaceful change of residence
to the Soviet Union, it is also possible that he was getting
documented to make a quick escape after assassinating the
President."' (U)
The Agency's inability to locate Nikita Khrushchey right
after the assassination especially alarmed McCone and his
deputies. The Soviet premier's apparent absence from Mos-
cow could have meant that he was in a secret command cen-
ter, either hunkering down for an American reprisal, or
possibly preparing to strike at the United States. "We were
very high in tension about any indicators which would sup-
port such a theme," Helms said. "It became manifest within
24 or 48 hours, however, that this was not the case.'
Beschloss, Crisis Years, 672 citing interview with Helms; DIR 84608, 22 November 1963, MORI doe. no. 47694. (U)
Knoche memorandum to Robert R. Olsen (Senior Counsel, Rockefeller Commission), 29 April 1975, 14, MORI doc. no. 350496; CIA, The History of the
National Photographic Interpretation Center; 1963-1993, 21; David R. Wrone, The Zap ruder Film: ReframingJFK's Assassination, 28-29. NPIC had difficulty com-
puting the exact time of exposure of the frames on Zapruder's film because the camera he used was sprin -wound, which caused the timing of the frames to vary
slightly from the standard of 18 per second. IA had opened counterintelligence and security files on
Oswald in early November 1959 after it was notified of his defection to the Soviet Union. Uswald's as opened in December 1960 to contain cables, news
clippings, and other material accumulated in response to an inquiry from the Department of State snout a list of 12 American defectors in Soviet Bloc countries;
Oswald's name was on the list. Helms memorand.um to J. Lee Rankin (Warren Commission), "Information in CIA's Possession Regarding. Lee Harvey Oswald Prior
to November 22, 1963," 6 March 1964, MORI doe, no. 48392; House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), draft report, "Lee Harvey
Oswald Was Not Associated as an Agent or in [Any] Other Capacity with the CIA," undated but c. mid-1978, CIA JFK Assassination Records, box JFK24, folder
46; Newman, 54-58; material in Lee Harvey Oswald clipping file, folder 1, HIC.N
Tennent H. Bagley (SR Division/CI Branch) memorandum to Karamessines, "Cable from Chief, SR Division, re Possible KGB role in Kennedy Slaying,"
23 November 1963, MORI doe, no. 263529; Bagley memorandum to Karamessines, "Contact of Lee OSWALD with a member of Soviet KGB Assassination
Department," 23 November 1963, MORI doe, no. 48326; DIR 84920, 24 November 1963, MORI doe, no. 25518. (U)
CIA did not establish that the Soviet with whom Oswald met, Valeriy Kostikov, was from the KGB's "wet affairs" department. According to transcripts of their tele-
phone conversations :hey only discussed Oswald's request for a visa. By early 1964, the Agency had concluded that
Oswald's contact wiry than a grim coincidence...." Bagley untitled memorandum about Kostikov, 27 November 1963,
MORI doe. no. 378020; Helms memorandum to Rankin, Valeriy Vladimirovich KOSTIKOV," 16 January 1964, MORI doe, no. 367204; Hoover memorandum
to Helms, "Valeriy V. Kostikov...," 15 September 1964, MORI doe, no. 270452; CI Staff, "Summary of Oswald Case Prepared for Briefing Purposes Circa
10 December 1963," MORI doe. no. 48723. Oleg Nechiporenko, one of the KGB officers in Mexico City during Oswald's trip there, has recounted the Soviets'
dealings with him in Passport to Assassination. (U)
One of the Agency's star Soviet defectors, Peter Deriabin, wrote a lengthy memorandum a few days after the assassination arguing that Oswald was a KGB agent who
either was dispatched to kill Kennedy or was sent to the United States on another mission and then committed the murder on his own. Deriabin contended that the
Kremlin would have accomplished several objectives by eliminating Kennedy. Among them were removing the West's preeminent Cold Warrior from the scene; con-
straining US covert actions against Cuba, which would be stigmatized as acts of vengeance; and divertine the Soviet people's attention from domestic problems.
Deriabin's conjectures did not find touch of an audience at Headquarters. Deriabin memorandum to (SR Division/CI Branch), "Comments on Presi-
dent Kennedy's Assassination," 27 November 1963, MORI doe, no. 393150. (U)
332
5C-E aft
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news of the assassination dee ly
shocked their leaders and made them fear US retaliation.
For some time after the assassination, and particularly
following Oswald's murder on the 24th, Agency leaders
would not rule out a domestic or foreign conspiracy?the
latter possibly involving the Soviet Union or Cuba. A Head-
quarters cable on the 28th stated that "[wle have by no
means excluded the possibility that other as yet unknown
persons may have been involved or even that other powers
may have played a role." On 1 December, the station in
Mexico City, where Oswald had visited the Soviet and
Cuban consulates a few weeks before the assassination, was
told to "continue to follow all leads and tips. The question
of whether Oswald acted solely on his own has still not been
finally resolved." Two weeks later, Headquarters told the sta-
tion to "continue watch for...evidence of their [Soviet or
Cuban] complicity..." McCone suggested two possible cul-
prits if Oswald had not acted alone. "Castro's been so fright-
fully intemperate in some of his talks," he told a senior
Pentagon official, and "it would be within his capability if
he thought he could get away with it, I think. Khrushchev,
no. On the other hand, I don't know how completely
Khrushchev controls the KGB." If either theory proved
credible, Helms remembered, "[w]e could have had a very
nasty situation. What would be the retaliation? A startled
America could do some extreme things.......' X
Besides determining whether an international crisis was
imminent, Agency officers also tried to find out as much as
they could about Oswald. Mexico City station reported on
the 22nd that he had been at the Soviet and Cuban embas-
sies in the Mexican capital during late September-early
-re?4
Death of the President (U)
October. Most of the assassination-related information
about which McCone briefed President Johnson, McGeorge
Bundy, and Dean Rusk during the next week concerned the
Oswald-Cuba connection. On 23 November, McCone
apprised the president and Bundy of the station's trace
results. Later in the day, the station reported that the Mexi-
can police had arrested a Mexican national working at the
Cuban consulate who supposedly talked to Oswald in Sep-
tember. That evening, McCone told Rusk about all these
developments. On the 25th, a Nicaraguan walk-in to the
US embassy in Mexico City said that when he was in the
Cuban consulate in mid-September, he heard Cubans talk
about assassination and saw them give Oswald money.
Within a few days, however, this alarming report was shown
to be a fabrication. McCone discussed the incident with the
president and Bundy on 30 November and 1 December.
Between 23 November and 5 December, the DCI briefed
Johnson on assassination developments and other intelli-
gence matters every day but two?in varying measures, to
communicate news about the investigation, to demonstrate
how CIA was involved in it, and to create a bond with the
new president
McCone also participated in two rituals surrounding
John Kennedy's death. On Saturday the 23rd, he went to
the White House to pay last respects to the president, and
on Monday the 25th, he attended the state funeral at St.
Matthew's Cathedral in Washington. That morning, CIA
and the FBI received numerous reports that attempts would
be made to assassinate foreign leaders invited to the funeral.
McCone personally told one of the supposed targets, French
President de Gaulle, about the threats against him. Fifty-
eight CIA security officers joined the detail at the funeral,
along the route of the procession, and at Arlington
6 Kirkpatric H, 29; Helms interview in "Kennedy Remembered," 75. Khrushchev had reappeared by the morning of the 23rd, when he met with US
Ambassador oy o er. oscow Embassy cable to Secretary of State, EMBTEL 1759, 23 November 1963, HS Files, Job 03-01724R, box 2, folder
The Soviet Union immediately tried to dispel notions that it was behind the assassination. Less than 15 minutes after Kennedy's death was announced, the TASS news
service issued a bulletin that rightwing extremists in the United States were responsible. Eastern European stations picked up and spread the story. According to former
KGB officer Oleg Kalugin, who was stationed in New York at the time, "the Kremlin leadership was clearly rattled by Oswald's Soviet connection." KGB Headquarters
sent "frantic cables...ordering us to do everything possible" to quell suspicions of Soviet involvement in Kennedy's death. "We were told to put forward the line that
Oswald could have been involved in a conspiracy with American reactionaries displeased with the President's recent efforts to improve relations with Russia.... [T1he
message we were to convey was clear: `Inform the American public through every possible channel that we never trusted Oswald and were never in any way connected
with him." Moscow tried to play down Oswald's tie to the Soviet Union by insinuating that he was a Trotskyite or a Marxist of some undetermined sort, and not a "real"
communist. Walter Elder recalled thinking that the Soviets' denials were too scripted; "it was almost like they were reading from a manual." Reviewing the early Soviet
"line" on the assassination a few months later, Agency analysts suggested that "the charge against the extreme right was perhaps a 'conditioned reflex'.... Hoodwinked by
its own preconceptions and wishful thinking[,] the Kremlin almost inevitably concluQled that President Kennedy had been struck down by his most radical right-wing
opponents." Other Soviet publications further confused the picture by 'propagating assorted conspiracy theories. Izvestia, the government newspaper, and Red Star, the
array periodical, speculated that organized crime was involved, while Pravda, the Communist Party organ, and Nedelya, a news magazine, proposed that Oswald was not
the assassin. Media in satellite countries disseminated those notions also. Oleg Kalugin with Fen Montaigne, The First Directorate, 58; Elder quoted in Evan Thomas,
"The Real Cover-Up," Newsweek 122, no. 46 (22 November 1993): 76; CIA memorandum to the Warren Commission, "Rumors About Lee Harvey Oswald," 23
March 1964, 2-3, 6, 8, MORI dot. no. 355927; Armand Moss, Disinformation, Misinformation, and the -Conspiracy" to Kill JFK Exposed, 16-17, 23-26. (U)
DIR 85655, 28 November 1963, DIR 86064, 1 December 1963, and DIR 88680, 13 December 1963, CIA JFK Assassination Records, box JFK36, folder 39; tran-
scrikaf McCone conversation with Brockway McMillan, 27 November 1963, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 7; Helms quoted in Thomas, "The Real JFK Cover-Up,"
78.
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Cemetery. Later that day, the DCI went to a reception for
visiting dignitaries hosted by President Johnson at the
Department of State.lc
Because of their relationship, McCone had frequent con-
tact with Robert Kennedy during the painful days after the
assassination. Their communication appears to have been
verbal, informal, and, evidently in McCone's estimation,
highly personal; no memoranda or transcripts exist or are
known to have been made. The DCI no doubt passed on to
the attorney general the same information about Oswald,
the Soviet Union, and Cuba that he gave to Johnson and
other senior administration officials. In addition, because
Robert Kennedy had overseen the Agency's anti-Castro
covert actions-including some of the assassination plans-
his dealings with McCone about his brother's murder had a
special gravity. Did Castro kill the president because the
president had tried to kill Castro? Had the administration's
obsession with Cuba inadvertently inspired a politicized
sociopath to murder John Kennedy? In 1975, according to
one of the Warren Commission's lawyers, McCone
said he felt there was something troubling Kennedy
that he was not disclosing.... McCone said he now
feels Kennedy may very well have thought that there
was some connection between the assassination plans
against Castro and the assassination of President
Kennedy. He also added his personal belief that Rob-
ert Kennedy had personal feelings of guilt because he
was directly or indirectly involved with the anti-Cas-
tro planning.
As head of CIA when much of that planning took place,
McCone also might have had such feelings. A distraught
Kennedy even had McCone affirm that the Agency itself
was not involved in the assassination. When New Orleans
district attorney Jim Garrison made that allegation in 1967,
Kennedy was prompted to recall that soon after the assassi-
nation he had asked McCone "if they [the Agency] had
killed my brother.... I asked him in a way he couldn't lie to
me, and [he said] they hadn't.' (U)
Managing CIA's Part in the Investigation (U)
The FBI took the lead in the federal investigation of Pres-
ident Kennedy's murder. CIA supported the Bureau by
obtaining information from clandestine and liaison sources
outside the United States and from foreign contacts inside,
principally in the Cuban refugee community in Florida.
The Agency concentrated first on Oswald's activities in
Mexico City in September and October 1963, and then on
his residency in the Soviet Union during 1959-62 and his
possible ties to Soviet intelligence. Within a week, Head-
quarters received about Oswald and for-
warded them to the White House, the FBI, the Department
of State, and the Secret Service. After 29 November, CIA
also began assisting the Warren Commission's inquiry.' (U)
CIA memorandum, "Summary of Relevant Information on Lee Harvey Oswald at 0700 on 24 November 1963," MORI doc. no. 48657; McCone memoranda
dated 23 and 24 November and 2 and 3 December 1963, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6; McCone note to Bundy, 28 November 1963, ibid., box 8, folder 1; Birch
D. O'Neal (CI Staff) untitled memorandum about Nicaraguan source, 26 November 1963, MORI doc. no. 378043; DIA 85089, 26 November 1963, DIR 85258,
27 November 1963, DIR 86063, 30 November 1963, MEXI 7289, 7 December 1963, and DIR 87666, 7 December 1963, MORI doc. nos. 263758, 12962,
356157, 47986, and 274952; DIR 86064, 1 December 1963, CIA JFK Assassination Records, box JFK36, folder 39; Church Committee JFK Assassination Report,
24, 27-30; McCone telephone conversation with President Johnson, 30 November 1963, Taking Charge, 78; McCone calendars, entries for 23 November-5
December 1963. The bogus Nicaraguan walk-in was just one of many false sources that US intelligence services had to evaluate right after the assassination. As
Headquarters officers noted in a cable to Mexico City station, "We and other agencies are being flooded by fabrications on the [Oswald] case from several conti-
nents, some originating with people on the fringes of the intelligence business. Such fabrications are not usually done for money, but out of sickly fancy and a desire
to get into the intelligence game. DIR 85616, 27 November 1963, MORI doc. no. 47629..K
Also on 23 November, OCI prepared a special edition of the President's Intelligence Checklist, dated the 22nd and bearing this dedication: "[flu honor of President
Kennedy[,] for whom the President's Intelligence Checklist was first written on 17 June 1961." These were the only contents of that memorial issue:
For this day, the Checklist Staff can find no words more fitting than averse quoted by the President to a group of newspapermen the day he learned of the
presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous plaza full;
But only one is there who knows
And he's the man who fights the bull.
President's Intelligence Checklist, 22 November 1963, HS Files, Job 03-01724R, box 2, folder 9; see also Andrew, 10 of photograph section. (U)
9 McCone calendars, entries for 23 and 25 November 1963; James J. Rowley (Chief, Secret Service) letter to McCone, 9 December 1963, ER Files, Job
80B01676R, box 29, folder 14; transcript of McCone interview with Manchester, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 8; Manchester, 575.,84,...
1? David W. Belin, Final Disclosure: The Full Truth About the Assassination of President Kennedy, 217; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 616 citing Walter Sheridan (Depart-
ment of Justice) oral history interview, 12 June 1970. Early intercepts of Cuban diplomatic communications indicated that Havana was mystified about Kennedy's
killing. Bamford, Body of Secrets, 133. (U)
"Anonymous CIA memorandum, "What collection requirements were issued to the field with regard to Kennedy's assassination?," undated, MORI doc. no.
476431; report, "We Discover Lee OSWALD in Mexico City," 13 December 1963, MORI doc. no. 48683, 6. (U)
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As DCI, McCone's role between the assassination and
the release of the commission's report 10 months later was,
in his words, "to see that the investigation and the review of
the CIA's relationship, if any, with Oswald were thoroughly
studied and all relevant matters conveyed to the Warren
Commission." According to Helms, McCone's function was
"see[ing] to it that sufficient manpower and funds and other
resources of the Agency were put to work in support of the
Warren Commission and the FBI." McCone "cer-
tainly...maintained a continuing and abiding interest in
these proceedings" but turned over daily management of the
Agency's assassination-related activities to Helms, who kept
the DCI, the DDCI, and the executive director informed.
McCone's calendars indicate that after a flurry of meetings
and discussions during the two weeks following Kennedy's
death, he settled back into a routine schedule with his usual
concentration on Intelligence Community affairs and for-
eign policy issues.'
Helms, in turn, designated the chief of the Mexican
branch in WH Division, John Whitten, to run CIA's initial
collection and dissemination efforts, and an officer in the CI
Staff's Special Investigations Group, Birch O'Neal, to han-
dle liaison with the FBI. After Whitten issued a report in
December on Oswald's activities in Mexico City, Helms?at
James Angleton's request, according to Whitten?shifted
responsibility for Agency support for the FBI and the War-
ren Commission to the CI Staff. Helms did so for three rea-
sons: Whitten's paper was not regarded as quality work; the
assassination investigation had a counterintelligence ele-
ment; and Angleton's sho provided a tightly controlled
channel of communication.
The CI Staff's chief analyst, Raymond Rocca, was the
Agency's senior point of contact for day-to-day business
related to the assassination. When needed, other Agency
officers?notably Helms and the top managers in the SR
and WH divisions (David Murphy and J.C. King, respec-
tively)?dealt directly
with the commission
and the FBI. According
to Rocca, the CI Staff
concentrated on Soviet
leads while WH
worked the Cuban
angle. McCone evi-
dently had no problem
with this bureaucratic
arrangement or with
any other part Of
Helms's management
of CIA's role. "[I]f he
had been dissatisfied,"
Helms observed later,
"he would have made
his dissatisfaction
clear[] and I wouldn't
have forgotten it."13X
,EC.414,14
Death of the President (U)
Raymond Rocca (U)
The shift of responsibility to the CI Staff also had the
potential benefit of improving CIA coordination with the
FBI, which had long dealt with Angleton's unit. Agency-
Bureau relations had grown tense after the assassination
because of jurisdictional disputes. Early on, McCone tried
to assure J. Edgar Hoover that the FBI was in charge of the
investigation and that CIA would be as helpful as it could
be. In a short telephone conversation on 26 November, the
DCI took almost every available opportunity to conciliate
the bureau chief:
I just want to be sure that you are satisfied that this
Agency is giving you all the help that we possibly can
in connection with your investigation of the situation
in Dallas. I know the importance the President places
on this investigation you are making. He asked me
personally whether CIA was giving you full support. I
I'McC tie deposition to HSCA, 17 August 1978 (hereafter McCone HSCA deposition), 5-6, HS Files, Job 03-01724R, box 4, folder 11; HSCA Hearings, vol. 4,
11,57.
HSCA Hearings, vol. 4, 11, vol. 11, 57, 475-77; James Angleton deposition to HSCA, 5 October 1978, 76ff., and Raymond Rocca deposition to HSCA, 17 July
1978, 6 passim, HS Files Job 03-01724R, box 4, folder 11 (hereafter Angleton HSCA deposition and Rocca HSCA deposition); anonymous CIA memorandum,
"CIA Personnel Involved in Oswald Case during Existence of Warren Commission," undated, IvIORI doc no 287755? Ro7a memorandum, "Conversation with
David W. Belin, 1 April 1975," MORI doe, no. 404002; kiemorandum to Angleton, Inaccuracies and Errors in Draft of
GPFLOOR Report," undated but c. 1 January 1964, MO . . 269997. Rocca did not recall meeting with wici?one during the post-assassination period.
Rocca HSCA deposition, 27..X
The Agenc assassination inquiry was a major test of its data retrieval capabilities?particularly the computerized name-trace system developed for it by IBM and
known as which combined punch cards and microfilm. In his appearance before the commission, McCone encouraged federal agencies to computerize
their recor aci nate investigations. "The ystem," unpublished manuscript (June 1998), copy on file in the History Staff; Jeremiah
O'Leary, "McCone Claims Computers
in nvesti ations, v ashington Evening Star, 5 October 1964, Al, JFK Assassination clipping file, HIC; Director-
are of Operations, Information Management Staff History of Applied Technology" (May 2001), 21-22, 65)i.
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said that they were, but I just wanted to be sure from
you that you felt so.... [Y]ou can call on us for any-
thing we have.... I think it is an exceedingly impor-
tant investigation and report[,] and I am delighted
that the President has called on you to make it.'(
Despite McCone's ingratiating diplomacy and the CI
Staff's liaison role, relations between the two agencies wors-
ened during the postassassination period. The Bureau's four-
volume report, issued in early December, did not mention
CIA, referred to just two pieces of information that the
Agency had provided, and contained much material that
CIA officers had not seen before but that was germane to
their own inquiries, such as extensive information on
Oswald's stay in the Soviet Union. In mid-December,
Hoover voiced suspicions that McCone had questioned the
Bureau's investigative abilities and might have leaked derog-
atory information to the press. The FBI director concurred
with a deputy's recommendation that a "firm and forthright
confrontation" be held with the DCI for "attack[ing] the
Bureau in a vicious and underhanded manner characterized
with sheer dishonesty." Sam Papich, the FBI liaison to CIA,
met with McCone on 23 December to discuss a private alle-
gation that the Agency was claiming it had uncovered evi-
dence that Oswald was part of a conspiracy?specifically,
that he had received money in Mexico City in September as
prepayment for killing John Kennedy. McCone then "had
endeavored to leave the impression with certain people that
CIA had developed information not known to the Bureau
and, in essence, made the Bureau look ridiculous." Accord-
ing to Papich, the DCI became "very visibly incensed and
left the impression that he might at any moment ask [me] to
leave." McCone then denied that he had talked to any jour-
nalist about the assassination and had not been critical of
the FBI's handling of the investigation, but that he had told
President Johnson about the original report on Oswald in
Mexico City. The encounter with Papich "left [McCone] in
an angry mood."' (U)
That dispute soon was superseded by recurrent problems
over information sharing between the Agency and the
Bureau. Not only did "a certain amount of pride of owner-
ship" inhibit CIA-FBI communication, according to
McCone, but senior Agency officials took issue with the
Bureau's uncoordinated disclosures of information to the
public and to the Warren Commission, which became the
premier entity investigating die Kennedy assassination. In
December, they were particularly concerned that release of
the FBI report on the assassination would compromise sen-
sitive CIA surveillance operations against the Soviet embassy
in Mexico City by revealing that the Agency knew about
Oswald's visit there. In mid-January 1964, Helms asked
Hoover to direct his officers not to pass CIA-originated
information to the commission without first obtaining
clearance and coordination from Langley. Further animosity
arose when the two organizations reached opposite conclu-
sions about the bona fides of a KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko,
who claimed to have seen Oswald's KGB file compiled while
the American was in the Soviet Union. A disagreement over
CIA's plan to ask defectors it handled to review FBI infor-
mation was resolved when the Bureau agreed to allow such
vetting as long as its own sources were protected and the
Agency did not retain any original reports.'
Dealing With the Warren Commission (U)
Meanwhile, McCone and CIA had to work out a modus
vivendi with the Warren Commission. Lyndon Johnson at
first opposed creation of a presidential panel to examine the
killing.' He preferred to let the FBI and Texas law enforce-
ment authorities quietly handle the matter. With rumors
Riebling, 202-3 for examples of CIA-FBI conflict; transcript of McCone-Hoover telephone conversation, 26 November 1963, McCone Papers, box 10, folder 4Nrs.
D.J. Brennan memorandum to W.C. Sullivan (both FBI), "Relations with Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)," 23 December 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald FBI FOIA
File No. 62-80750-4186; ---nemorandum to McCone, "Screening the FBI Report on the Oswald Case," 6 December 1963, MORI doc. no. 15959; David
Hess, "Documents Reveal F 61.-u:A Clash," Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 December 1977: 3A; Jeremiah O'Leary and James R. Dickenson, "Assassination Sparked Bitter
FBI Quarrels," Washington Star 8 December 1977, Al. (U)
"McCone HSCA deposition, 50; semorandum to Helms, "Plans for the [Oswald] Investigation," 11 December 1963, MORI doe, no. 48728; Helms
memorandum to Hoover, "Assassination or i resident John Fitzgerald Kennedy," 14 January 1964, MORI roe no 278018. Helms memorandum "Meering with
Chief Justice Warren," 31 January 1964, MORI doe. no. 379972. At the time Oswald was in Mexico City,
IA, "Comments on Book V, SSC Fii at rv..pui 1, 2"C .11ZI/C3li5ULLVII Uj we nsjttJsL,tutw,t U]
aent Aenneay. erformance of me intelligence Agencies ,August i si i, ab F, 1-3, CIA JFK Assassination Records, box JFK36, folder 11.
17 Sources for this paragraph and the next are: McCone untitled memorandum, 24 November 1963, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6; transcripts of Johnson's conver-
sations with Hoover, Joseph Alsop, James Eastland, Abe Fortas, Richard Russell, John McCormack, Charles Halleck, and Gerald Ford on 25,28, and 29 November
1963, Taking Charge, 31-34,46-47,49-52,58-72; Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point, 26-27; Thomas, "The Real Cover-Up," 87; Max Holland, "The Key to
the Warren Report, American Heritage 46, no. 7 (November 1995): 57; Ted Gest and Joseph P. Shapiro, "JFK: The Untold Story of the Warren Commission," US
News and World Report, 17 August 1992: 28-35; Walter Pincus and George Lardner Jr., "Warren Commission Born Out of Fear," Washington Post, 14 November
1993, JFK Assassination clipping file, HIC; Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination ofJFK, 404. (U)
336
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already swirling that some sort of communist, rightwing, or
underworld plot was involved, he did not want a lengthy,
public inquiry that might produce explosive "revelations"
and create pressure on him to act precipitously At most, he
thought, a Texas-based, Texan-run investigative board
should be convened.' (U)
The president changed his mind as the idea of a blue-rib-
bon committee caught on with pundits and politicians after
Jack Ruby shot Oswald in Dallas police headquarters and
inspired fears of a broad conspiracy and questions about the
competence of Texas authorities. Now that Oswald would
never be brought to trial, Johnson calculated that a presi-
dentially appointed panel of distinguished citizens stood the
best chance of preempting potentially demagogic state and
congressional probes that might highlight Oswald's links to
the Soviets and Cubans, feed other conspiracy theories, or
reach contradictory conclusions. "This is a question that has
a good many more ramifications than on the surface," the
president said, "and we've got to take this out of the arena
where they're testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this
and did that and chuck us into a war that can kill
40,000,000 Americans in an hour." The public sentiment
that troubled Johnson was reflected in a Gallup poll taken
only a week after the assassination; just 29 percent of those
surveyed believed Oswald had acted alone. (U)
Accordingly, in Executive Order 11130 issued on
29 November, Johnson announced the formation of the
President's Commission on the Assassination of President
Kennedy. It was a seven-member, bipartisan board compris-
ing the chief justice of the United States, Earl Warren; two
members each from the Senate and the House of Represen-
tatives, Richard Russell, John Sherman Cooper, Hale Boggs,
and Gerald Ford; and two prominent former government
officials, banker-diplomat John McCloy and former DCI
Allen Dulles. The president later called them "men who
were known to be beyond pressure and above suspicion."
"Se?44Th
Death of the President (U)
The panel was empowered to conduct a full and indepen-
dent inquiry and enjoyed a broad national mandate. Its
members saw their function as bringing their collective
experience and reputations to calm the shaken populace?
or, in McCloy's words, to "lay the dust... [and] show the
world that America is not a banana republic, where a gov-
ernment can be changed by conspiracy." Other state and
federal investigations quickly left the scene.' (U)
During the next several months, the commission went
about what the chief. justice called "a very sad and solemn
duty," reviewing reports, requesting information from state
and federal agencies, staging reconstructions, receiving testi-
mony, and preparing its findings. In September 1964, it
released an 888-page report; two months later it followed up
with 26 volumes of supporting transcripts and exhibits. It
concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin
and found no evidence that he or his killer, Jack Ruby, were
part of a domestic or foreign conspiracy. The report?
described by the New York Times as "comprehensive and
convincing," with its facts "exhaustively gathered, indepen-
dently checked out, and cogently set forth"?had the reas-
suring effect the White House and the commission had
sought. After its release, 87 percent of the respondents to a
Gallup poll believed Oswald alone had shot Kennedy.' (U)
Under McCone's and Helms's direction, CIA supported
the Warren Commission in a way that may best be described
as passive, reactive, and selective. In early 1965, McCone
told the Department of Justice that he had instructed
Agency officers "to cooperate fully with the President's
Commission and to withhold nothing from its scrutiny,"
and, through October 1964, CIA provided it with 77 docu-
ments and prepared 38 reports of varying lengths in
response to its taskings. That cooperation, however, was
narrower than those numbers might suggest. CIA produced
information only in response to commission requests?
most of which concerned the Soviet Union or Oswald's
"Johnson displayed his anxiety over conspiracy rumors on the night after the assassination. White watching NBC's television news broadcast, he started talking back
to anchormen Chet Huntley and David Brinkley: "Keep talking like that and you'll bring on a revolution just as sure as I'm sitting here." Nancy Dickerson, Among
Those Present, 96. Senior American diplomats were working to instill calm in both the United States and the Soviet Union. The US ambassador in Moscow, Foy
Kohler, warned American leaders about "political repercussions which may develop if undue emphasis is placed on the alleged 'Marxism' of Oswald.... I would
hope, if facts permit, we could deal with the assassin as 'madman' with [a] long record of acts reflecting mental unbalance rather than dwell on his professed political
convictions." At the same time, Ambassador-at-Large Llewelyn Thompson urged Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan to tone down Soviet rhetoric
about reactionary capitalists. Pincus and Lardner, "Warren Commission Born Out of Fear," 2; George Lardner Jr., "Papers Shed New Light on Soviets, Oswald,"
Washington Post, 6 August 1999, JFK Assassination clipping file, HIC. (U)
"Executive Order 11130 and White House press release, both dated 29 November 1963, Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John E
Kennedy (hereafter Warren Commission Report.), 471-72; Johnson, Vantage Point, 26; Grose, 543; Bird, The Chairman, 549. (U)
Edward Jay Epstein, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, 46; Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within, 111; Max Holland, "After Thirty
Years: Making Sense of the Assassination," Reviews in American History 22, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 203. The chief justice offered his own bland rendering of the com-
mission's work in The Memoirs of Earl Warren, chap. 11. The 26 volumes of evidentiary material are cited herein as Warren Commission Hearings. (U)
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activities while he was outside the United States?and did
not volunteer material even if potentially relevant?for
example, about Agency plans to assassinate Castro. Helms
told the House of Representatives' Select Committee on
Assassinations in 1978 that he "was instructed to reply to
inquiries from the Warren Commission for information
from the Agency. I was not asked to initiate any particular
thing." When queried, "[Tin other words, if you weren't
asked for it you didn't give it?," Helms replied, "That's
right."2' (U)
Examining the assassination in a different political cli-
mate, the Senate's Church Committee concluded in 1976
that the Agency's inquiry was "deficient" in examining
Oswald's contacts with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups
before the assassination, and that senior CIA officials
"should have realized" that the Agency's Cuban operations
"needed to be considered" by the commission. In 1979, the
House assassinations committee levied a similar criticism:
"The CIA acted in an exemplary manner in dealing with the
Warren Commission regarding its narrow requests for infor-
mation. In another area, that of Cuban involvement and
operations, the CIA's actions might well be described as
reluctant."' (U)
Transactions between the Agency and the commission
were channeled through Helms but were conducted
between the CI Staff?mainly by Angleton, Rocca, Arthur
Dooley, and Thomas Hall?and the commission's counsel
or staff. SR Chief Murphy and his counterintelligence depu-
ties, Tennent Bagley and Lee Wigren, also worked with the
commission. Requests for information were rarely raised to
the DDP or DCI level. Helms met with commission per-
sonnel only five times between January and June 1964. This
limited degree of high-level communication resulted largely
because most of the commissioners, with whom McCone
would have dealt for protocol reasons, did not participate
much in the investigation and left most of the work to staff-
ers. No documentary evidence indicates whether McCone
ordered the circumscribed approach on his own or at the
White House's behest, but DDCI Carter has recalled that
McCone said he would "handle the whole [commission]
business myself, directly"?including, presumably, establish-
ing, or at least ratifying, the chain of command and degree
of responsiveness. Moreover, the DCI shared the adminis-
tration's interest in avoiding disclosures about covert actions
that would circumstantially implicate CIA in conspiracy
theories, and possibly lead to calls for a tough US response
against the perpetrators of the assassination. If the commis-
sion did not know to ask about covert operations against
Cuba, he was not going to give them any suggestions about
where to look."...
McCone himself had few personal dealings with commis-
sion members or staffers before he testified to the panel in
mid-May 1964. In December 1963, he discussed with Sen.
Russell the Nicaraguan walk-in to the US embassy in Mex-
ico City who proved to be a fabricator. In January 1964, at
McCloy's request, he wrote to President Johnson and sug-
gested he encourage Chief Justice Warren to speed up the
commission's pace. In April, he gave some commission
members and staffers a tour of the facilities at Headquarters
where assassination-related information was retrieved,
stored, and microfilmed, and he demonstrated the proce-
dures the Agency followed in responding to commission
requests. The DCI later said the chief justice seemed "quite
satisfied" with what he saw. In May, McCone discussed with
Warren and McCloy the need for the commission to refute
conspiracy theories even if doing so gave them unwarranted
publicity. "If your report doesn't dispose of it [the "second
gunman" scenario] point by point, your report is a white-
wash," he warned McCloy. Also in May, the DCI discussed
his upcoming testimony before the commission with its
general counsel, J. Lee Rankin. Rankin told him the subjects
McCone letter to Nicholas deB. Katzenbach (Deputy Attorney General), 24 February 1965, and CIA memorandum, "List of Unpublished and Partly Published
Documents of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy," undated but c. January 1965, MORI doc. nos. 362072 and 398897; CIA
memorandum, "Chronological Listing of Items Prepared by SR/Cl/Research on the Oswald Case and Delivered to the Warren Commission," 5 May 1965, MORI
doc. no. 404227; HSCA Hearings, vol. 11, 58, 67. (U)
22 Church Committee JFK Assassination Report, 6-7; HSCA Report, 253. Under the "protection of sources and methods" rubric, CIA eliminated references to its tech-
nical operations in Mexico City in material passed to the commission (see DIR 90466, 20 December 1963, MORI doc. no. 299967), and did not mention the cor-
respondence of Oswald and his relatives that it covered or opened under the CI Staff's HTLINGUAL program (see below). (U)
' Knoche memorandum about DCI morning staff meeting on 19 December 1963, ER Files, Job 80B01580R, box 17, folder 345; "CIA Personnel Involved in
Oswald Case During Existence of Warren Commission," undated, MORI doc. no. 287755; Rankin letter to McCone, 16 November 1964, MORI doc. no. 272436;
Helms untitle andum to Rocca about contacts with the Warren Commission, 22 June 1966, MORI doc. no. 507320; author's conversation with Helms,
28 May 1998; vol. 1,71-78; Carter-Knoche OH, 23; Ed Cray, Chief Justice, 420-22X%
338
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he would be asked about?mainly "your
knowledge about Oswald being an agent or
informer... [and] your knowledge of any con-
spiracy, either domestic or foreign.',24
One reason for all this attention to con-
spiratorialists was that the ideas of one of the
earliest of them, Thomas Buchanan, were cir-
culating widely by the time McCone testified
to the commission. Buchanan, an expatriate
American communist and former reporter
for the Washington Evening Star, had pub-
lished articles in the French periodical
lapress and produced a book, Who Killed
Kennedy?, based on them in May 1964. The
book's thesis, which anticipated many criti-
cisms of the commission's findings, con-
tended that a second gunman had fired on
Kennedy from the Grassy Knoll because the
windshield of the presidential car had a small
hole in it. Only that scenario, Buchanan
argued, would explain the anomalies regarding the bullets'
paths, the timing and locations of the wounds on Kennedy
and Texas Governor John Connally, and the contradictions
between the emergency staff at Parkland Hospital in Dallas
and the doctors who performed the autopsy on the presi-
dent's body at Bethesda Naval Medical Center. USIA and
the Department of State worried about the wide circulation
Buchanan's assertions had received in the foreign press. A
mutual friend of the DCI and the chief justice, Fleur
Cowles Montague-Meyers, lived in England and had
warned McCone that Buchanan was effectively making his
case for a rightwing conspiracy on British radio and televi-
sion shows. McCone arranged for Warren to talk to her so
the chief justice could best position the commission to
respond to Buchanan's charges.'N'
"St-esrat
Death of the President (U)
The Warren Commission presents its report to President Johnson. (U)
Photo: Bettmann/CORBIS
McCone does not appear to have had any explicit, special
understanding with Allen Dulles, the commission member
who worked closest with CIA, that aided the former DCI in
steering the inquiry away from controversial Agency opera-
tions. McCone later denied that Dulles was the Intelligence
Community's protector on the commission, and the latter
declined a suggestion from the panel's head lawyer that he
?`serve as CIA file reviewer" for the commission. Dulles did,
however, advise Agency officers of the questions his fellow
commissioners most likely would ask. As the only commis-
sion member who knew about the Agency's "executive
action" operations, Dulles seems to have taken on this pro-
prietary responsibility himself. (It is not known if he told
any commissioners in private about CIA's plots to kill Cas-
tro.) He worked through Helms, Rocca, Murphy, and other
Transcript of McCone-Russell telephone conversation, 2 December 1963, McCone Papers, box 10, folder 4; McCone correspondence to Johnson, 9 January
1964, cited in Bird, The Chairman, 550; transcript of McCone-Rankin telephone conversation, 12 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 10, folder 6; HSCA Hearings,
vol. 11,480; Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 5,122; McCone calendars, entry for 16 April 1964; McCone HSCA deposition, 9; transcripts of McCone-Warren
and McCone-McCloy telephone conversations, 4 and 18 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 10, folder 6; CIA memorandum, "Records Briefing of Chief Justice War-
ren," 16 April 1964, MORI doc. no. 270242
25
/In addition, the Soviet publication
New Times hyped published critiques of the Warren Commission report and recycled the speculations ot sundry conspiracists that appeared in Western media
"FIG Murder: Sowers of Doubt," Newsweek, 6 April 1964, and "JFK: The Murder and the Myths," Time, 12 June 1964, JFK Assassination clipping file, HIC
able to Chiefs of Certain Stations and Bases, Book Dispatch 5847, "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report," 4 January 1967, MOR
no. cwis Lapham (CA Staff) memorandum to McCone, "Thomas Buchanan's Articles and Book on the Assassination of President Kennedy," 16 April
1964, MORI doc. no. 380036; Karamessines memorandum to McCone, "Plans for British and French Publishing Firms to Publish the Thomas Buchanan Articles
on Assassination of President Kennedy," 20 April 1964, MORI doc. no. 270237; "Oswald Called Dupe ins Plot on Kennedy," New York Times, 8 May 1964: C5;
transcripts of McCone-Warren and McCone-McCloy tele hone conversations, 4 and 18 May 1964. McCone Paners hp): 10, folder 6; transcript of McCone meet-
ing with Papich, 19 May 1964, ibid., box 7, folder 10; 29-31,93-95,103-21,144-49; 237-38. No available information indicates
that McCone ever thought there were two gunmen; cf. c esinger, Robert Kennedy, 616. Most of me best-selling conspiracy books appeared after McCone left CIA,
so he did not have to answer their charges officially.K.%
Th'EGALT,
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Agency officers and, as was the case with other commission-
ers and staffers, did not need to deal with McCone
directly.' The DCI's calendars and logs of meetings and
telephone conversations for the period the commission
existed do not show any contacts with Dulles, and McCone
recalled talking to Dulles "very infrequently" during that
time?perhaps mainly at social functions of the capital elite
that they frequently attended. The two men "were not on
the best of terms" then, according to Angleton. Their per-
sonal relations notwithstanding, McCone and Dulles both
wanted to draw the commission's attention away from CIA
and encourage endorsement of the FBI's conclusion soon
after the assassination that a lone gunman, uninvolved in a
conspiracy, had killed John Kennedy. The DCI could rest
assured that his predecessor would keep a dutiful watch over
Agency equities and work to keep the commission from
pursuing provocative lines of investigation, such as lethal
anti-Castro covert actions.".
McCone and Helms spent about two hours before the
commission on 14 May 1964. They answered questions
about the Agency's information on Oswald, and evidence of
a conspiracy behind the assassination, including Soviet or
Cuban involvement. The DCI testified that
[w]e had knowledge of him [Oswald], of course,
because of his having gone to the Soviet Union.. .put-
ting him in a situation where his name would appear
in our name file. However...Lee Harvey Oswald was
not an agent, employee, or informant of the Central
Intelligence Agency. The Agency never contacted him,
interviewed him, talked with him, or received or solic-
ited any reports or information from him, or commu-
nicated with him directly or in any other manner. The
Agency never furnished him with any funds or money
or compensated him directly or indirectly in any fash-
ion, and Lee Harvey Oswald was never associated or
connected directly or indirectly in any way whatsoever
with the Agency.' (U)
Although literally true, McCone's statement was incom-
plete. A former CIA employee, who worked in the Foreign
Documents Division of the Soviet component of the DI,
told the House assassinations committee in 1978 that in
1962 he reviewed a report on the Minsk electronics plant
where Oswald worked while in the Soviet Union. The
report, according to the officer, came from CINs
field office and was sourced to a former Marine who had
defected and was employed at the plant. The record does
not indicate if McCone knew of this report and its sourcing
chain and chose not to tell the Warren Commission (pre-
sumably to conceal an embarrassing but, in the context of
the assassination itself, irrelevant link between the Agency
and Oswald); if witting CIA officers did not tell him about
it (possibly for the same reasons); or if it was forgotten, not
located, or not connected to Oswald.29.
26 Dulles had several contacts with the Agency soon after the commission was set up. By mid-December 1963, he had asked the DI for a summary of world reaction to
the assassination, requested an Agency secretary, sought advice from Lawrence Houston on the selection of the commission's lawyers, and spoken to the Office of Medi-
cal Services about Oswald's psychological condition. In January 1964, Dulles?apparently provoked by press criticism that the commission had been slow to get started,
according to Angleton?asked CIA to suggest questions to be included in an official letter to the Soviet government. Knoche memorandum about DCI morning staff
meeting on 19 December 1963, ER Files, Job 80B01580R, box 17, folder 345; Howard P. Williams (Warren Commission) memorandum to Rankin, "Meeting with
Representatives of CIA, January 14,1964," MORI doe, no. 48366; Bagley memorandum to Murphy, "CIA Work in Support of the Warren Commission," 16 January
1964, MORI doe, no. 404021; Helms memorandum to Rankin, 21 January 1964, with attached questions for the Soviet government, MORI doe, no. 48370>c
McCone HSCA deposition, 19; Angleton HSCA deposition, 97; Rocca untitled memorandum to Helms about Dulles-Rankin correspondence, 23 March 1964,
MORI doe, no. 353885; Murphy memorandum to Helms, "Discussions with Mr. Allen W. Dulles on the Oswald Case," 13 April 1964, MORI doe, no. 367363
(the routing slip bears Iffelins's note, "I have also discussed these matters with Mr. Dulles and along similar lines"); Grose, 544-56,559-60.>0%
28 Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 5,120-21,123,128-29; "Affidavit of John A. McCone," 18 May 1963, Commission Exhibit 870, ibid., vol. 17,866. Before
the DCI testified to the COMMISSI011, Agency and Bureau officers reviewed J. Edgar Hoover's testimony and possible statements by McCone to ensure that there were
no conflicts between the two directors' positions. CIA officers also prepared a briefing paper for McCone. The paper included guidance on assuring the commission
that the Agency had disclosed all information it had on Oswald, and that allegations of CIA ties to Oswald probably were Soviet-sponsored disinformation. The
DCI also was advised that, to protect sources and methods, he should not answer on-the-record questions about Oswald's activities in Mexico. The commission's
chief counsel and a few staffers already had received such information "on a highly restricted basis." Church Committee JFK Assassination Report, 46-49; "Briefing for
Presentation to President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy," 14 May 1964, MORI doe, no. 425251; Sullivan memorandum to A. H. Bel-
mont (FBI), "James Angleton...," 13 May 1964, record no. 157-10008-10110, NARA/JFK Assassination Records. By the time he testified, McCone had already
had one interview about the assassination?in mid-April with author William Manchester, whom Jacqueline Kennedy had retained to write an account of her hus-
band's death. In February, following accusations from Marguerite Oswald that CIA had "set up [her son] to take the blame" for the assassination, McCone stated
publicly that Oswald "was never directly or indirectly connected with CIA." Washinaton Evenino Star 13 February 1964 Oswald clionini, file HIC (U)
340
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In addition, the Agency had acquired information "from"
Oswald without his knowledge through CI Staff's mail-cover
and mail-opening program, codenamed HTLINGUAL. As
noted in Chapter 12, McCone may not have been aware of
that project before the assassination, but insofar as Oswald
had been on the target list (because of his former defector
status), it would be surprising if the DCI were not told about
the program after 22 November. If not, his subordinates
deceived him; if he did know about HTLINGUAL reporting
on Oswald, he was not being forthright with the commis-
sion?presumably to protect an operation that was highly
compartmented and, if disclosed, sure to arouse much con-
troversy. Moreover, no information in Oswald's correspon-
dence suggested he was a threat to the president, so the
commission had no "need to know" about it.' (U)
On a possible Soviet or Cuban role in the assassination,
McCone told the commission:
I have no information.., that would lead me to believe
or conclude that a conspiracy existed.... We made an
investigation of all developments after the assassina-
tion which came to our attention which might possi-
bly have indicated a conspiracy, and we determined
after these investigations, which were made promptly
and immediately, that we had no evidence to support
such an assumption.
McCone said the Agency had investigated Oswald's trip to
Mexico City but found no evidence he had a relationship
with Soviet intelligence or the Cuban government, or that
his travel was related to the assassination. The DCI's state-
ments about Oswald and the KGB were based in part on SR
Division's conclusion in December 1963 that Oswald was
-rAr.z/
Death of the President (U)
not a Soviet assassin. That report stated that although there
were "several rather fascinating inconsistencies, loose ends,
and unanswered questions about Oswald," his extensive
pro-Castro activity and contact with the Soviet embassy in
Mexico City violated a longstanding KGB prohibition on its
overseas agents having contact with domestic communist
parties or Soviet legations. Furthermore, there was no evi-
dence that the KGB had selected and specially trained
Oswald for an "executive action" mission, as was its standard
practice.' (U)
After the full extent of CIA's regime-change operations in
Cuba was revealed during the 1970s, congressional and
journalistic attention focused more on what McCone and
the Agency had not told the Warren Commission?particu-
larly about the plots to kill Castro. To many observers, and
some CIA officers as well, these activities clearly seemed rel-
evant to the Kennedy assassination and to the commission's
investigation, yet in 1964 Agency officials concluded that
they were not. When the House committee asked McCone
in 1978 if CIA had withheld from the commission informa-
tion about the Agency's plots to kill Castro to avoid embar-
rassment or an international crisis, McCone replied: "I
cannot answer that since they (CIA employees knowledge-
able of the continuance of such plots) withheld the informa-
tion from me. I cannot answer that question. I have never
been satisfied as to why they withheld the information from
me." He said he assumed Dulles, who was DCI when the
plots originated, would have told the commission about
them. When asked if the Agency had provided the commis-
sion with information about covert action, McCone replied
in the negative, stating that a "public commission" could not
receive such material.'..<
" CIA memorandum, "Response to HSCA Request of 15 August 1978, Item 3," 38fE, MORI doc. no. 425365; CIA memorandum, "HTLINGUAL Items Relating
to the OSWALD case," 1 May 1964 MORI doc. no. 339017; Angleton memorandum to Papich, "HUNTER Report #10815," 26 November 1963, MORI doc.
no. 364172; T.K. Chalmers lnanager of HTLINGUAL) memorandum, "Progress Report, 1962-1963," c. April 1964,
MORI doc. no. 285779; Newman, )4?)0, L2,/?L2i, Loi?t5/. j-J)
3 Memorandum, "Additional Notes and Comments on the Oswald Case," 11 December 1963, MORI doc. no. 340976. The DCI also
testile t sat tie Agency had no information that Jack Ruby was connected to pro- or anti-Castro Cubans. (U)
d
Soon after the commission released its report, two American journalists who often wrote "investigative" articles on intelligence affairs, Robert S. Allen and Paul
Scott, accused CIA of deception for not turning over to the commission a "national intelligence estimate warning that it is Kremlin policy to remove from public
office by assassination Western officials who actively oppose Soviet policies." Allen and Scott were both right and wrong. The "estimate" actually was an interim
study called "Soviet Strategic Executive Action" produced in October 1961. The Agency did not give it to the commission and instead provided a more detailed and
more current product, "Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping," dated February 1964. The Office of Security investigated the leak to Allen and Scott and
reported to McCone that although the news story was "a serious compromise of a highly sensitive document.., damage to clandestine sources and methods would be
nominal." In response to an Agency query, a Warren Commission lawyer said "no one [there] was excited about the Allen-Scott ?iece and to forget it." Robert S.
Allen and Paul Scott, "Secret Report Under Wraps," syndicated column in Northern Virginia Sun, 22 October 1964; Office of Security) undated
memorandum to McCone, "Possible Unauthorized Disclosure (Article by Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott...)," and occa memoran urn to Helms, "Comment on
Allen and Scott Article...," 27 October 1964, with notation on attached routing sheet, CIA JFK Assassination Records, box JFK13, folder 238. (U)
32 HSCA Hearings, vol. 11, 483; McCone HSCA deposition, 10, 11, 16, 49; Scott D. Breckinridge (OIG) memorandum, "McCone Depositions for HSCA,"
21 August 1978, MORI doc. no. 306061; Elder memorandum, "Mr. John A. McCone's Deposition to Mr. Robert Genzman, Staff Counsel for the House Select
Committee on Assassinations," 22 August 1978, MORI doc. no. 448986%.
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McCone's answer was neither frank nor accurate. By the
time he testified to the commission in May 1964, he had
known about the Mafia plots to kill Castro for nine months,
but he chose not to mention them. (As indicated earlier, it is
unclear whether he ever knew about the AMLASH assassi-
nation operation.) Moreover, McCone's reference to the
commission about "an investigation of all developments
after the assassination which came to our attention which
might possibly have indicated a conspiracy" (emphasis
added) precluded providing details about earlier covert
actions that might have seemed pertinent.' (U)
McCone judged that he should defer to the DDP's
assessment that the plots to kill Castro had no bearing on
the Kennedy assassination, and?consistent with the
Agency policy of only giving information on request and the
"need to know" principle?did not tell the commission
about them. In his mind, the evidence showed Oswald was
guilty, and the national interest would not be served by fas-
cinating but fruitless examinations of unrelated covert activ-
ities. Principles of plausible deniability and compartmen-
tation would be violated; ongoing operations would be
compromised; and sensitive sources and methods would be
revealed. Publicity about the US government's regime-
change efforts in Cuba would give the communists an
unprecedented propaganda windfall that they could exploit
for years and probably would have evoked strong condem-
nation from the international community. By withholding
information on "executive action," the DCI could preserve
Agency equities and avoid leading the Warren Commission
toward a false conclusion about Oswald and Cuba.' (U)
McCone's reasoning fit into the consensus that had
quickly developed in the highest levels of the US govern-
ment after the assassination that the public needed to be
convinced that Oswald was the lone gunman and that an
international or extremist conspiracy had not killed an
American president. As Deputy Attorney General Nicholas
Katzenbach wrote to presidential assistant Bill Moyers on
26 November:
The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the
assassin; that he did not have confederates who are
still at large.... Speculation about Oswald's motiva-
tion ought to be cut off, and we should have some
basis for rebutting the thought that this was a Com-
munist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is say-
ing) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the
Communists.... We need something to head off pub-
lic speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong
sort." (U)
McCone was convinced that neither the Cubans nor the
Soviets had sought revenge against John Kennedy, largely
because SIGINT had disclosed the stunned reactions of
Cuban and Soviet leaders to Kennedy's death. ("They were
frightened, and we knew that," a commission staffer
remarked afterward.)' Once he concluded that Oswald had
no current connection with Moscow or Havana?and he
did not believe the commission needed to know how that
determination was made?McCone presumably saw no rea-
son to raise what he regarded as peripheral, distracting, and
unsettling subjects like plots to kill Castro. (U)
However defensible the DCI's rationale might have
seemed in 1964, it came under harsh criticism later. In
1976, the Church Committee concluded that "concern with
public reputation.. possible bureaucratic failure and embar-
rassment...the extreme compartmentation of knowledge of
sensitive operations... [and] conscious decisions [by senior
CIA officials] not to disclose potentially important informa-
tion" kept the commission from knowing all it should have.
According to the House assassinations committee in 1978,
the commission "failed to investigate adequately the possi-
bility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President," in part
OIG, "Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro," MORI doc. no. 334698, 69-70. The Agency personnel assigned by Helms to assist the commission were not
witting of the AMLASH operation. Officers of the DDP's Special Affairs Staff who knew of the assassination plots were never in touch with the commission. The
House assassinations committee concluded that "the only person who knew of these plots and was in contact with the Warren Commission was Richard Helms."
HSCA Hearings, vol. 11, 58, 67; HSCA Report, 4, 253. (U)
34Angleton, however, told the House assassinations committee in 1978 that the Intelligence Community "did not have the capabilities" in 1963-64?such as "a
code break or a defector?to determine whether or not Cuba was involved. "Top Spy's Testimony on Murder of JFK," Newsday, 20 June 1997, A3. (U)
"Church Committee JFK Assassination Report, 23. Critics of the Warren Commission often have cited Katzenbach's memorandum as proof of a high-level effort, in
assassination scholar Max Holland's words, to "put the machinery of government into gear to make the lone-deranged assassin story a convincing one" and reach "a
pre-cooked verdict." More plausibly, however, Katzenbach?who has acknowledged that his language was less than artful?"advocated a process that would put
rumor and speculation to rest, because [after Oswald's death] a purgative trial had been rendered impossible." Max Holland, "The Docudrama That Is JFK,"
Nation 267, no. 19 (7 December 1998): 28. (U)
"Holland, "After Thirty Years," 209; Pincus and Lardner, "Warren Commission Born Out of Fear," 1. (U)
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because of the limited way the Agency cooperated with it.'
In the long term, the decision of McCone and Agency lead-
ers in 1964 not to disclose information about CIA's anti-
Castro schemes might have done more to undermine the
credibility of the commission than anything else that hap-
pened while it was conducting its investigation. At the time,
however, McCone felt the need for clarity and closure all the
more acutely because while the commission was going about
its business, CIA and the FBI were feuding over a sensa-
tional counterintelligence case whose outcome could have
destroyed the consoling sense of finality that the DCI and
other US leaders were working so hard to fashion. (U)
The Nosenko Incubus (U)
No counterintelligence matter of McCone's tenure was so
fraught with potential for conflict as the defection of KGB
officer Yuri Nosenko in early 1964 and the ensuing contro-
versy over his bona fides. By claiming to know about the
KGB's dealings with Oswald, and by extension a Soviet role
in the Kennedy assassination, Nosenko became potentially
the most important defector in history. The conclusions of
several senior operations officers that Nosenko was a disin-
formation agent led McCone to approve Nosenko's deten-
tion and hostile interrogation, beginning a protracted,
much-debated, and ultimately futile three-and-a-half-year
effort to "break" him. The harsh treatment of the seemingly
valuable intelligence source is only explainable by CIA sus-
picions that Nosenko was lying when he said the Soviets
were not involved in killing Kennedy. "That made the
Nosenko case so extraordinary and so different from all the
others," Richard Helms has said. "Otherwise, we wouldn't
have done all the things we ended up doing." Moreover,
McCone's relationship with Robert Kennedy assured that
the DCI would be responsive to the attorney general's urg-
ing that the Agency learn the truth about Nosenko and
Oswald, and perhaps ren-
dered him even more
inclined than usual to let
the professionals in the
DDP do what they thought
was necessary to answer the
crucial question: Did Mos-
cow order the murder of the
president? An affirmative
answer could have been a
casus belli for the United
States.' (U)
When he first contacted
CIA in Geneva in June Yuri Nosenko (U)
1962 during a disarmament
conference, Nosenko was a mid-level officer in the KGB's
Second Chief Directorate, which was responsible for coun-
terintelligence and security. He was the Agency's first source
on the structure and personnel of the directorate to have
actually worked in it. He provided useful leads about Soviet
agent and technical operations against US and British tar-
gets inside and outside the Soviet Union, agreed to work as
an agent in place, and said he would reestablish contact the
next time he was in the West. In late January 1964,
Nosenko returned to Geneva and met with CIA officers.
When asked if he knew about any Soviet role in the assassi-
nation, he claimed to have been the KGB officer assigned to
Oswald's case when the American defected to the USSR in
1959. According to Nosenko, the KGB had decided Oswald
was unstable and unintelligent and declined to have any-
thing to do with him. Furthermore, Nosenko said, he had
participated in Oswald's application for a visa to return to
Russia in 1963, and he had been assigned to review
Oswald's file after the assassination. If Nosenko was telling
the truth, his information would dispel suspicions that Mos-
cow had some part in President Kennedy's murder. Nosenko
Death of the President (U)
Church Committee JFK Assassination Report, 7; HSCA Hearings, vol. 11,67-69. For its part, the commission was deferential and trusting toward CIA. Staffers tater
said that their impressions of the Agency in 1964 predisposed them to believe it was telling the whole truth. G. Edward White, Earl Warren: A Public Life, 198. (U)
38 Mangold, 151-52 citing interview with Helms on 23 May 1989. (U)
Nosenko was not the only communist bloc defector to come to the United States soon after the Kennedy assassination with information about Oswald that seemed
to exculpate a US adversary. In early May 1964, a "well-placed" Cuban "in close and prolonged contact with ranking officers" of Castro's intelligence service reported
that Oswald had been in touch with Cuban operatives "before, during, and after" he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City in late September and
early October 1963. The defector?codenamed AMMUG/1 and described as "very reliable" and "highly sensitive?did not know specifically whether the Cuban
government had used Oswald in any capacity, but his reporting about the surprise with which Castro and Cuban intelligence officers reacted to news of the assassi-
nation indicated that Havana was not involved in it. CIA passed on the defector's information to the Warren Commission in mid-May. A commission staffer
remarked that the panel "was winding up its investigation" and "saw no need to pursue this [Cuban] angle any further." Unlike Nosenko, AMMUG/1 was deemed
bona fide?"an operational gold mine," according to Raymond Rocca. CIA blind memorandum, "... Debriefing of Cuban Source.. OSWALD Case," 5 May 1964,
MORI doc. no. 363778; Helms memorandum to Rankin, "Role of the Cuban Intelligence Service...," 15 May 1964, MORI doe, no. 426655; Harold F. Swanson
(WH Division) memorandum to Rocca, "...Debriefing of AMMUG-1...," MORI doe, no. 515131; Dooley memorandum to Rocca, "Lee Harvey OSWALD,"
19 June 1964, MORI doe. no. 470087; Swanson memorandum to Director of Security, "AMMUG-1," 23 June 1964, MORI doe, no. 515150; Rocca memoran-
dum to Helms, "AMMUG/1 Information on Lee Harvey OSWALD," 11 May 1964, MORI doe, no. 377826. (U)
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also told his Agency contacts that he wanted to defect. In
early February 1964, after he said he had been recalled to
Moscow, he was exfiltrated to West Germany. A week after
his arrival, McCone ordered Nosenko brought to Washing-
ton as soon as possible because the Soviets were publicizing
the case. At the time, Nosenko was the highest-ranking
KGB officer to fall into CIA's hands.',,r
Between Nosenko's two encounters with CIA, however,
serious doubts about his bona fides had arisen in SR Divi-
sion and CI Staff and extensive questioning following his
defection seemed to support those suspicions.' Some of
Nosenko's leads could be regarded as "giveaways" or "feed
material" because CIA and the FBI already knew about
them or because the cases were inactive or low-grade;
Nosenko gave inconsistent or inaccurate descriptions of his
personal history; anomalies in his information about the
KGB were identified; he provided what seemed to be "pat"
information on subjects he had no reason to know about,
while claiming to be unfamiliar with topics he should have
known about; and he did not show what was regarded as a
defector's "normal" concern for his family and his future.'
His contention that Soviet intelligence had had no opera-
tional interest in Oswald seemed implausible, considering
the American had been stationed at an airbase in Japan
involved in U-2 missions. Oswald's comfortable living con-
ditions in Minsk, his marriage to the niece of a Soviet army
intelligence officer, and the circumstances of his return to
the United States could be interpreted as suggesting that he
had ties to the KGB. None of Nosenko's information about
Oswald and the KGB could be confirmed independently;
nor would Nosenko, a counterintelligence officer, necessar-
ily be able to say without reservation whether the KGB's for-
eign intelligence component had or had not recruited a
particular individual. Also, it appeared too serendipitous
that of all the thousands of KGB officers in the world, one
who had had direct contact with the Oswald case three sepa-
rate times would seek to defect so soon after the assassina-
tion with information exonerating Moscow.
Perhaps the most important factor in the Agency's think-
ing was the claim of an earlier defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn,
that Moscow would send provocateurs to discredit him and
divert attention from the search for moles inside CIA and
other Western services. Golitsyn had labeled Nosenko as a
disinformation agent in 1962, and James Angleton, David
Murphy, and Nosenko's case officer, Tennent Bagley?who
at first thought Nosenko was genuine?agreed. Nosenko's
reappearance 19 months later had potentially monumental
consequences. With the United States still suffering from a
national trauma, the Warren Commission inquiry underway,
and the Cuban missile crisis barely a year old, the Agency
had to determine whether the KGB had dispatched a false
defector to hide the fact that Oswald was a Soviet-sponsored
killer. As Helms testified in 1978, "[i]f it were shown that
Oswald was.. acting as a Soviet agent when he shot President
Kennedy, the consequences to the United States...and...to
the world, would have been staggering.")
McCone's deputies kept him apprised of the Nosenko
case from the day in early February 1964 when the KGB
officer said he had been recalled to Moscow.' The DCI, in
turn, passed on news of developments to the White
House?especially to Robert Kennedy, who, according to
Helms, was the driving force outside the Agency behind the
decisions to extract the truth from Nosenko. From the first,
39Murphy memorandum to Helms, "OSWALD Case," 28 January 1964, MORI doc. no. 404019; Angleton memorandum to Hoover, "Yuri Ivanovich
NOSENKO, Espionage?Russia," 28 April 1964, MORI doc. no. 367167; FBI memorandum, Special Agent in Charge/Washington Field Office to Director, "Lee
Harvey Oswald, 4 March 1964 Nosenko FBI FOIA File No. 65-68530, section 2. CIA CIC Job 94-01306R, box 4, contains several key Agency and Bureau docu-
ments Amu- Nosenko? John Hart formerl SR Division), "The Monster Plot: Counterintelligence in the Case of Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko";
Nosenko and An Examination of the Case a ist Yuriy Nosenko"; "Why Nosenkos a ant?and-
wny it matters ; and FBI, "'Norman i\
one o r e Bureau's codenames for osenkolater abridged his so-ca e t ousand pager" (it actually was around
m pi 7 ...
900); the shorter version was circulated internally in February 1968 as "The Examination of the Bona Fides of a KGB Defector: Yuriy I. Nosenko," MORI doc. no.
306324. HSCA Hearin nd vol. 12, 475-644, contain much information on Nosenko derived from the House assassination committee's inquiry
into his case. See also memorandum, "NOSENKO Case," 14 January 1969, DDO Files, Job 89-00395R, box 4, folder 75; and
vol. 2, 353-5 ? .. ? , c unts ot Nosenko's defection, see the Appendix on Sources.iK
'Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Hart, "Monster Plot," 13-16, 199; memorandum to Sullivan, "Yuri Nosenko," 11 February 1964, D.E.
Moore (FBI) memorandum to Sullivan, "Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko," 14 February , IA memorandum, "SAMMY: Conclusions and Recommendations,"
17 February 1964 (SAMMY was the FBI's first codename for Nosenko), FBI Special Agent in Charge/Washington Field Office to Hoover, "Lee Harvey Oswald,"
4 March 1964, Sullivan memorandum to Belmont, "Yuri Nosenko, Espionage," 2 April 1964, Nosenko FBI FOIA File, sections 1 and 6; HSCA Hearings, vol. 4, 21.
.1X0'
'I Statistically, at least, the value of Nosenko's information appeared questionable at first. A tally of the leads he provided, compiled in the spring of 1964, showed
that out of 157 cases (63 concerning US citizens and 94 involving foreigners), 104 (52 in each category) were already known or suspected, unproductive or not yet
active, lacked access to classified information, or could not be investigated because Nosenko's knowledge was vague or ambiguous. Nosenko FBI FOIA File, section
5. (U)
42McCone had no role in authorizing any operational or compensation arrangements for Nosenko after the Russian's first contact with CIA in 1962. Otherwise, the
record does not indicate what, if anything, McCone knew about the case before 1964.><
344 "ST614,,LT/
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McCone received essentially all evaluations of Nosenko's
bona fides from skeptics, including ADDP Thomas
Karamessines, Angleton, Murphy, and Golitsyn, but he
appears initially to have tried to keep an open mind. Possi-
bly he took early warnings about Nosenko as a standard
caveat about any defector. In mid-February, he told Rusk he
was inclined to believe Nosenko. After hearing about the
results of further questioning, however, the DCI told the
president that "the Soviet's performance and action were so
different from any other defector case that our suspicions
had been aroused."43A
The breadth of Golitsyn's information about Soviet intel-
ligence activities and CIA officers' faith in it added to
Nosenko's difficulty in establishing his veracity. McCone,
Helms, Angleton, and SR Division managers thought the
balance weighed heavily in Golitsyn's favor. Even without
his information about Oswald, Nosenko would have had a
hard time proving himself. Contributing to McCone's
uncertainty was Hoover's conclusion?based largely on a
trusted KGB source (codenamed FEDORA) the FBI had at
the United Nations and the Bureau's own interviews with
Nosenko?by early March that Nosenko's information was
"valid and valuable" and that he was a genuine defector.
Angleton, however, thought FEDORA was a plant because
he corroborated supposedly inaccurate information from
Nosenko and therefore must be part of the same deception.
At about the same time, in early March, McCone and CIA
felt pressure from the Warren Commission after Hoover
unilaterally revealed to the commission what the defector
had said about Oswald?which supported the Bureau's con-
clusion that he was a deranged killer acting alone. With the
DCI's permission, Helms told the commission that the
Agency had serious reservations about Nosenko and asked it
to "await further developments."44.Nr
To resolve the uncertainty about Nosenko, McCone in
early April 1964 accepted the recommendations of Helms,
Angleton, and Murphy that the defector be confined and
interrogated until broken. (Agency officers had suspended
informational debriefings of Nosenko a month before.) CIA
Lareftsii;i
Death of the President (U)
detained Nosenko under the terms of an "exclusion and
parole" agreement with the Department of Justice executed
in 1955. The agreement gave the Agency authority to exer-
cise over defectors "control of a kind and degree it believes
consistent with the internal security needs of the United
States." The documentary record does not indicate what
McCone knew about the austere conditions of Nosenko's
year-long detention at an Agency safehouse
. (Twelve of the 16 months of the Russian's con-
finement there were during McCone's tenure.) Helms does
not recall that McCone ever asked for details of the inquiry,
and the DCI does not appear to have been fully aware of
much of the dubious logic and inappropriate pro-
cedures upon which the case against Nosenko rested.
Assured by his senior operations and legal officers that the
Agency was handling Nosenko lawfully and in ways they
believed stood the best chance of revealing the truth,
McCone let the hostile interrogation run its course. There is
no reason to doubt that he would have accepted then the
argument Helms made to congressional investigators a
decade-and-a-half later to justify the severe treatment of
Nosenko:
[T]his became one of the most difficult issues... that
the Agency had ever faced. Here a President of the
United States had been murdered and a man had come
from the Soviet Union, an acknowledged Soviet intelli-
gence officer, and said his intelligence service had never
been in touch with this man [Oswald] and knew noth-
ing about him. This strained credulity at the time. It
strains it to this day.... You are damned if you hold a
fellow too long and treat him badly.. .and you are
damned the other way if you have not dug his teeth
out to find out what he knows about Oswald.45
McCone soon received further impressions about Nosenko
from the FBI and Golitsyn that reinforced his approval for
having the defector interrogated. In May 1964, the FBI's liai-
son officer to the Agency, Sam Papich, told McCone that
some Bureau officials "are very much concerned and recog-
nize that [Nosenko] could be a plant." "[H]is story has held
43Karamcssines memorandum about (Nosenko's first cryptonym; he was later called I, 3 February 1964, DDO Records, Job 78-
07173A, box 1, folder 2; McCone calendars, entries tor 10 and 11 February 1964 showing meetings wit Ang eton andl tran-
script of McCone-Golitsyn meetinv 11 February 1964, McCone Papers box 7, folder 7; Mangold, 150 citin interview with hider on 11 August 1988; Angleton
HSCA deposition, 49-50;I Nosenko and _Annex 2 hronology," 21; Rockefeller Commission Report,
170; McCone, "Memoran&sm ror me Necora...utscussions with Se setary rwsx, is =lebruary 1 c one Papers, box 2, folder 10; McCone, "Memoran-
dum for the Record... Meeting with the President-20 February 1964?Alone," ibid., box 6, folder 7
4' Hart, "Monster Plot," 24,198; Riebling, 210-16; Wise, Molehunt, 148-53; "Notes for DDCI,? 5 March 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 10;
Rankin letter to Helms, 6 March 1964, MORI doe. no. 399794; Angleton memoranda to Hoover, both titled "Sammy," 14 and 16 December 1964, Nosenko FBI
FOIA File, section 12; Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, 19-21,41-42.K
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up-but the cases are peanuts-no real significance. The
other leads that he gave us-many of them were known to
us.... [The Soviets] have not suffered at all by what he's given
us." McCone told Papich that CIA would not decide on
Nosenko one way or the other unless the Bureau agreed with
its judgment. In June, Golitsyn-after reading files on
Nosenko and listening to tapes of his debriefings-reaffirmed
his prior assessment that Nosenko was a false defector." In
July, Golitsyn told the DCI that he disputed Nosenko's expla-
nation of GRU asset Pyotr Popov's arrest in 1959. Nosenko
said KGB security caught a CIA officer mailing a letter to
Popov. Golitsyn insisted, however, that Nosenko's account
was intended to divert the Agency from the penetration agent
who had tipped off the Soviets.'
The Warren Commission's patience with the Agency over
Nosenko had worn thin by mid-June, when it asked
McCone for a definitive assessment of Nosenko's credibility.
McCone had Helms tell Chief Justice Warren that CIA
thought Nosenko might be a dispatched agent and to advise
the commission that his information should be suppressed.
One important concern the Agency had was the embarrass-
ment that would result if the commission's report included
material from a source later shown to be a controlled Soviet
agent. Warren later told McCone that the commission had
accepted CIA's advice. In addition, at least three times in
July, Agency officers (including Helms, Murphy, and Bag-
ley) told the commission that Nosenko might be a KGB
plant. Those sessions settled the question; the FBI's debrief-
ings of Nosenko remained closed in the commission's files
and did not contribute to its conciusions.48XL
During the last 12 months of McCone's directorship,
CIA officers subjected Nosenko to at least 160 hours of hos-
tile interrogation and an untallied amount of what was
termed "neutral" questioning. According to Helms, the DCI
did not follow the case closely at this stage but expected to
be informed of major developments. Otherwise, once the
Warren Commission formally concluded that Oswald had
acted alone, McCone showed no further interest in pursuing
the Nosenko aspect of the assassination.49.,
Meanwhile, the case remained unbroken. In January
1965, CIA determined that Nosenko-who had not
changed his story about Oswald and the KGB-was being
deceptive but still could not ascertain why. When McCone
left Langley, the Office of Security had nearly completed
preparations for placing Nosenko in a specially built deten-
tion facility
The USIB Executive Committee approved this phase of the
Agency's handling of Nosenko, although it was not given
details of the defector's treatment. There is no record that
45 Hart, "Monster Plot," 199; memorandum from Chid Onerarional Sipport Division to Acting Chief, Support Branch, "Subject: AEFOXTROT," 12 May 1964,
CIA JFK Assassination Records, box JFK38 folder 77 (Office of Security) memorandum to Special Agent in Charge/District Field Office, "Emer-
gency Instructions Regarding Custody of su July s964, ibid.; Nosenko case summary in ER Files, Job 79M01476A, box 10, folder 228, tab 5;
author's conversation with Helms, 20 May 1998; fiscA Hearzngs, vol. 4, 12, 31; Murphy memoranda, "Yuriy I. Nosenko, Briefing of DCI," 2 April 1964, "Discus-
sion with Deputy Attorney General on Nosenko Case," 2 April 1964, and "Discussion with State Department Officials on the Nosenko Case," 6 April 1964, Soviet-
Eastern Europe [SE] Division Files, Job 89-00395R, box 4, folder 63; Houston memorandum to Director of Security, "Parole Status of Defectors," OGC 64-0903,
3 April 1964, and Houston memorandum, "Nossenko [sic] Case," 3 April 1964, CIA JFK Assassination Records, box JFK38, folder 22; Immigration and Natural-
ization Act, Public Law 82-414, Section 212(d)(5), 8 United States Code 1182; Helms testimony before HSCA, 22 September 1978, HSCA Hearings, vol. 4, 21;
Nicholas P. Stoiaken (Office of Security/Interrogation Research Division) memorandum to Murphy, "NOSENKO, Yuriy Ivanovich," 8 April 1964, MORI doe, no.
286774>it
46 Golitsyn heard of Nosenko's defection from Angleton just after it occurred, and on 11 February told McCone that he could help evaluate the new arrival if he read
the files. McCone concurred, and Nosenko's file was added to others that Golitsyn had started to read the previous November. Golitsyn could protect himself by
debunking Nosenko, but it is not evident in the record how much McCone, Helms, Angleton, and others factored that self-interest into their evaluations of the two
defectors..X
'Transcript o
Angleton and
1964, McCone
apers,
ing with Papich, 19 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 10; Hart, "Monster Plot," 200; transcript of McCone meering with
1 February 1964, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 7; "Golitsyn," 36-38; transcript of McCone meeting with 6 July
folder 11. The chronology of Popov's compromise is complicated, but it is fair to say
irst cast suspicion on Popov, who was later found to be carrying the CIA letter. Misnanalea rzu surveillance or Joviet operatives
whom opov had reported, 1 opoy s own poor security practices, and reporting from the KGB's assets in the Vienna police and its agent in MI-6, George Blake, con-
tributed to his compromise. The case is thoroughly recounted in former DDP officer William Hood's book, Mole>50c.
"Mu memorandum to Helms, "Warren Commission Query Regarding Nosenko," 18 June 1964, MORI doe, no. 354911; Helms, "Memorandum for the
Record...Talk with Chief Justice Earl Warren," and McCone letter to Warren, both dated 24 June 1962, McCone Papers, box 13, folder 2; Helms memorandum to
President Johnson, 22 March 1968, ibid., box 11, folder 5; Wigren memorandum to Murphy, 8 July 1964, MORI doe, no. 277735; Bagley memoranda, both titled
"Use of Nosenko Information in Warren Commission Report," 17 and 28 July 1964, and Murphy memorandum to Helms, "Discussion with Mr. Dulles re the
Nosenko Information on Oswald," 8 July 1964, MORI doe. nos. 344453, 344452, and 370732; Riebling, 217 citing interview with Helms on 4 February 1992;
Epstein, Legend, 47-48; Grose, 550-51.N
49 Hart, "Monster Plot," table following 103..2C
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McCone knew or asked about the mechanics of this much
more grueling (and ultimately fruitless) phase of the investi-
ga tio
As journalist David Wise pointed out in the late 1970s,
there were several permutations to the question of Nosenko's
authenticity, most of which were not considered by
McCone or any senior Agency officer after the Kennedy
assassination.' First, as conventional wisdom at CIA ran
until the late 1960s, Nosenko could have been a false defec-
tor with a false story about Oswald and the KGB. Second,
Nosenko might have been a real defector who had made up
a story about Oswald to make himself a "bigger catch." The
inaccuracies and exaggerations in his story were reevaluated
later as consistent with the penchant of defectors to embel-
lish their biographies, access, and knowledge. (U)
Third, Nosenko could have been a genuine defector with
accurate information. The FBI believed Nosenko in 1964,
and CIA concluded a few years later that his information
about Oswald was accurate. Lastly, Nosenko might have
been a controlled agent sent to the United States to report
truthfully that the Soviets had nothing to do with Oswald or
the assassination. Moscow miscalculated, however, in think-
ing the US government would find that story more believ-
able if it came through clandestine channels from a
"defector" with an attractive resume. (U)
As DCI, McCone never freed himself from the "zero
sum" paradigm to which SR Division and CI Staff were
wedded: Golitsyn was good, so Nosenko must be bad. The
"stsg,zzi,
Death of the President (U)
empirically-minded McCone judged that enough facts
existed to support that deceptively simple conclusion. As in
other counterintelligence matters?an area in which he did
not display much intellectual creativity?he deferred to
trusted deputies. In 1978, McCone told the House assassi-
nations committee that he thought Nosenko was bona fide
after all. He did not say what led him to that conclusion,
but he may have been reflecting the Agency's revised view of
Nosenko.52 Reliable KGB information shows that both
defectors were genuine?an apparently elementary conclu-
sion that intellectual rigidity and bureaucratic obstinacy
kept McCone and a significant number of senior Agency
officers from reaching."*
Loose Ends (U)
In late September 1964, President Johnson appointed
McCone to a four-man committee to advise on implement-
ing the Warren Commission's recommendations for improv-
ing presidential security. The commission had proposed that
an assassination attempt, an assault against, or kidnapping
of a president or vice president should constitute a federal
crime; that a cabinet-level committee or the NSC assume
the responsibility of reviewing and overseeing presidential
protection programs; that the FBI and the Secret Service
improve their investigative and intelligence capabilities; and
that interagency cooperation and information sharing on
security matters be promoted. Others on the presidential
committee were C. Douglas Dillon, the secretary of the trea-
sury, who served as chairman; Nicholas Katzenbach, the
51(j\)osenko's interrogation, 8 July 1964, CIA JFK Assassination Records, Miscellaneous Files, box 8, folder 4; CIA (probably
titled memorandumprreobaubnlyAngieton)mein o Murphyorantdum,,Age aboutndafor
FBI-CIA Discussion of the Status of NOSENKO and Related Cases," 9 December 1964, Nosenko FBI FOIA File, section 13; Helms memoranda to Director/DIA
and Director/Department of State/INR, both titled "Yuriy Ivanovich NOSENKO," both dated 22 January 1965, McCone Papers, box 13, folder 3; Moore memo-
randum to Sullivan "Sammy, Espionage?Russia," 14 September 1964, and Angleton memorandum to Hoover, "Sammy," 18 September 1964, Nosenko FBI FOIA
File, section 11.
Nosenko was held rom August 1965 until October 1967, when, at DDCI Rufus Taylor's direction, the Office of Security (OS) took over his case.
OS officer Bruce Solie handled the "clean slate" investigation. Using an analytical methodology that tended to explain away inconsistencies and inaccuracies in
Nosenko's story?the converse of the approach that SR Division and CI Staff had taken?Solie concluded that Nosenko's detractors had not proven their argument.
("Hit is not considered that based on all available information a conclusion that Nosenko is or is not a bona fide defector can be incontrovertibly substantiated at this
time.") Nosenko was then released under supervision, resettled, compensated, and hired as a contractor. [Bruce Solie,] "Yuri Ivanovich NOSENKO," OS 801441/A,
19 June 1967, MORI doc. no. 306305, quote on 7; Nosenko case summary in ER Files, Job 79M01476A, box 10, folder 228; Breckinridge letter to G. Robert
Blakey (Chief Counsel, HSCA), 1 September 1978, with attached answers to questions, MORI doc. no. 25880; Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, Rich-
ard Helms As Director of Central Intelligence, 1966-1973, 107-13; documents in folder "Yuri Nosenko," DCI Files, Job 80M01048A, box 5, folder 94,4
'David Wise, "Epstein's Thesis' Hints of KGB Entanglements," Washington Star, 23 April 1978: G5. Wise's article was referring to Edward Jay Epstein's book Leg-
end: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. (U)
52 McCone HSCA deposition, 44,?.16?
53KGB archivist Vasili Mirrokhin's smuggled material includes damage assessments conducted after Golitsyn and Nosenko defected. Both men reportedly were put
on a list of "particularly dangerous traitors" to be "liquidated." Oleg Kalugin claims that he was among the dozens of KGB officers stationed overseas who were
ordered home after Nosenko defected. Andrew and Mitrokhin, 184-86,367-68; Kalugin, 59. (U)
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CHAPTER 14
acting attorney general; and McGeorge Bundy, the presi-
dent's national security adviser. Each member had an assis-
tant from his agency to do the staff-level work; McCone's
aide was DDP officer John Mertz.% (U)
The Dillon Committee met seven times through the fall
and winter and held discussions with J. Edgar Hoover,
James Rowley, the chief of the Secret Service, and Kermit
Gordon, head of the Bureau of the Budget. The DCI
attended only four of the meetings but took an active part in
the deliberations when he did. He suggested that a presiden-
tial assassination statute contain an "informer clause" similar
to those in other federal criminal laws; he thought a high-
level interdepartmental standing group should be estab-
lished to periodically review presidential protection; and he
regarded surveys of buildings at sites of scheduled presiden-
tial visits as "tremendously wasteful" uses of manpower. As
when he testified before the Warren Commission, McCone
again pressed for federal agencies to make greater use of
what was then called "automated data processing" technol-
ogy to collate information on presidential security. He
brushed aside objections that returning Rowley to his previ-
ous job as head of the Secret Service's White House detail
would cause personal and public relations difficulties. "The
best approach would be to select the best available man as
Chief of the Secret Service, after which Mr. Rowley would
be required to 'fall into line' or otherwise become a casu-
alty." McCone recommended Michael J. Murphy, Commis-
sioner of the New York City Police Department, to either
replace Rowley or assume a new White House position
supervising the service.' (U)
The Dillon Committee reported to President Johnson in
late January 1965 and released a version of its findings to
the public in early February (as intended, it had completed
its work in time for the next session of Congress to consider
its recommendations). Contrary to the Warren Commis-
sion, McCone and his fellow members concluded that the
Secret Service should retain primary responsibility for presi-
dential protection and remain in the Department of the
Treasury. Despite President Johnson's decision not to
support any increase in the Secret Service budget?in keep-
ing with his government-wide economy drive?the com-
mittee called for a 57 percent increase in service personnel,
improved training, and augmented resources. The members
also encouraged the White House to seek legislation prohib-
iting shipments of firearms in interstate commerce except
between federally licensed dealers or manufacturers. In other
areas, the committee echoed Warren Commission proposals,
calling for a federal assassination and kidnapping statute
(with an informer rewards provision) covering the president
and vice president; expansion of Secret Service agents' inves-
tigative and arrest powers; establishment of a cabinet-level
group to oversee presidential protection; and improved
cooperation among federal agencies and with state and local
law enforcement departments. Several of the recommenda-
tions that McCone and his fellow committeemen made
were soon adopted.% (U)
One of McCone's missions as DCI was to keep CIA out
of operational controversies, so it is ironic that, as a private
citizen, he later gave information to the House assassina-
tions committee that rekindled charges that the Agency had
hidden its supposed clandestine relationship with Oswald.
In May 1977, columnist Jack Anderson (citing the commit-
tee's files) wrote that Antonio Veciana, in the 1960s a mem-
ber of the anti-Castro commando group Alpha 66, had told
congressional investigators that in Dallas in August 1963, he
had met with Oswald and a CIA officer who used the name
"Maurice Bishop." Anderson's story, which the Agency
54 Department of the Treasury press release, "President's Committee on Warren Report Holds First Meeting," 29 September 1964, HS Files, Job 03-01724R, box 3,
folder 10; Anthony Lewis, "Panel Takes Up Warren Report," New York Times, 30 September 1964, Warren Commission clipping file, HS Files, HS/HC-627, Job
84B00389R, box 7, folder 6; transcript of C. Douglas Dillon press conference, 30 September 1964, MORI doc. no. 373518; Warren Commission Report, 454-68. (U)
McCone calendars, entries for September 1964?January 1965 (including a working luncheon with Chief Justice Warren in late November); Gordon Chase (NSC)
memorandum, "Meeting on October 13,1964 of the President's Committee on the Warren Report," 15 October 1964, MORI doc. no. 399844; John Mertz mem-
orandum, "Meeting of President's Committee on the Warren Report, 13 October 1964," MORI doc. no. 340773; Mertz memorandum, "Meeting of the President's
Committee on the Warren Report, 24 November 1964," MORI doc. no. 401990; Mertz memorandum, "Meeting of the President's Committee on the Warren
Report, 8 December 1964," MORI doc. no. 340762; McCone letter to Dillon, 20 November 1964, NARA/JFK Assassination Records, record no. 176-10020-
10002. President Johnson soon scotched the idea of removing Rowley or creating a presidential security overseer, but he did agree to promote the service's director
from the General Schedule to the Executive Schedule as part of an overall "upgrade" of the agency. (U)
56 Mertz memorandum to McCone, "President's Committee on the Warren Report...," 7 January 1965, MORI doc. no. 336749; "Report of the President's Com-
mittee on the Warren Report," 2 February 1965, MORI doc. no. 340760. Later in 1965, Congress passed a law that made assassination or kidnapping of, assault on,
or conspiracy to harm the president or vice president a federal crime. The Secret Service's budget for FY 1966 was increased 33 percent from three years before; its
complement of agents was expanded 50 percent to 600; and its overall staffing was increased by over half to 920. Serving under the renamed director (the title
"chief" was abandoned as archaic) were four new assistant directors, including one in charge of all protective security details, and another responsible for intelligence
affairs. Servicing the latter was an overhauled, expanded, and automated research bureau that shared information with CIA, the FBI, and other government entities
stall levels. Michael Dorman, The Secret Service Story, 253-55; Frederick M. Kaiser, "Presidential Assassinations and Assaults," PSQ 11, no. 4 (Fall 1981): 552;
Philip H. Melanson, The Secret Service, 91. (U)
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described in an internal report as "a mixture of some fact
and a great deal of fiction," did not hold up. A review of
CIA records found no reference to Maurice (or Morris)
Bishop as a true name, pseudonym, or alias; the Agency
never supported Alpha 66; and Veciana was registered as a
contact of the US Army, not the Agency.' (U)
The House committee picked up the Bishop "lead" and
questioned McCone about it in August 1978. McCone
recalled a "Maurice Bishop" and believed the man was an
Agency employee, but did not know where he worked or
what his duties were. CIA management became concerned
that the former DCI's statement, even though in context
offhand and imprecise, would call the Agency's credibility
into question. Scott Breckinridge of the Office of Legislative
Counsel met with McCone in early October and brought
along photographs of all past and present CIA employees
with the surname of Bishop. After hearing that the Agency
had no record of a Maurice or Morris Bishop, McCone
declined to look at the photographs and said he must have
been mistaken when he gave his deposition. He said that the
name had come up along with a dozen or so others after five
hours of questioning and that although Maurice Bishop
?`rang a bell" with him, he might have been thinking about
someone else. Breckinridge informed the House commit-
tee's chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, in mid-October that
"Mr. McCone withdraws his statements on this point." Nei-
Death of the President (U)
ther the identity, nor even the existence, of "Maurice
Bishop" has ever been established.' (U)
A Conspiracy in the National Interest? (U)
Although criticism of the Warren Commission intensi-
fied and conspiracy theories proliferated through the 1960s
and 1970s, McCone did not alter his view about Oswald's
guilt over the years. He told the House assassinations com-
mittee in 1978 that he knew of no evidence that would tie
Oswald to the KGB, Cuba, or CIA. Had a hostile country
been involved, he said, it would have provided Kennedy's
killer with an "escape hatch"?for example, a visa such as
Oswald had tried to get from the Soviets and Cubans in
September 1963. When asked about Jack Ruby's possible
role as an "eraser" sent to "rub out" Oswald, McCone
replied that the circumstances surrounding that second
murder "were so bizarre and unpredictable that it was
impossible to detect a rational plot." Besides Nosenko's
bona fides, the only matter on which McCone had changed
his mind was concealing information about CIA's involve-
ment in plots to kill Castro. With almost 15 years of hind-
sight, he said that the Agency should have told the Warren
Commission about those schemes. He did not explain why
he thought differently then. Possibly he believed that greater
candor in 1964 could have helped attenuate the damage
57 Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, "Odd CIA Activity in Dallas in 1963," Washington Post, 6 May 1977: C11; George L. Cary (Legislative Counsel) memorandum
to DCI Stansfield Turner, "Recent Activities in Dallas, Texas, Concerning the Domestic Contact Division (DCD),' OLC 77-1816, 6 May 1977, MORI doc. no.
384905; John H. Waller (OIG) memorandum to Turner, "Jack Anderson 6 May 1977 Column...," 10 May 1977, MORI doc. no. 449056; HSCA Hearings, vol.
12, chap. 3. According to Gaeton Fonzi, the investigator for the House committee who has focused on this Oswald-Bishop-Veciana angle more than any other assas-
sination writer, Bishop was "the secret supervisor and director of all [of] Veciana's anti-Castro activities.., the man who had suggested the founding of Alpha 66 and
guided its overall strategy. Bishop not only directed the assassination attempt on Castro in Cuba in October 1961, he also engineered the plan to kill Castro in Chile
in 1971. Bishop had the connections to pull strings with the US government and get the financial support needed.... [He and Veciana] worked together for thirteen
years." Fonzi, The Last Investigation, 125. The only persons named either Morris or Maurice Bishop in CIA files were, respectively, l
l
- land the leader of a radical political party in the country ot l.,renada.
Scott Breckinridge letter to Blakey, 8 September 1978, MORI doc. no. 449113. Breckinridge, of the Office of Legislative Counsel, speculated to a House investiga-
tor that "Bishop could be a representative of the US Army. Breckinridge memorandum, "Discussion with HSCA Investigator on Maurice (Morris) Bishop," OLC
78-5300/1,6 October 1978, MORI doc. no. 449056. As described in Chapter 6 of this work, CIA supported several Cuban exile groups working to remove Castro
from power, but Alpha 66 was not among them. (U)
" Blakey letter to Breckinridge, 16 August 1978, MORI doc. no. 387344; Breckinridge memorandum, "Morris Bishop," OLC 78-5307, 20 September 1978,
MORI doc. no. 344570; Robert W. Gambino (OS) memorandum to Breckinridge, "Agency Employee with the Surname of Bishop," OS 8 2678/A, 29 September
1978, MORI doc. no. 305484; Breckinridge letter to Elder, 2 October 1978, MORI doc. no. 501968; Breckinridge memorandum, "Meeting with Former DCI
McCone," OLC 78-5300/2, 9 October 1978 MORI doc. no. 365461: Breckinridge letter to Blakey, 19 October 1978, MORI doc. no. 344565. The House com-
mittee also questioned a retired 'bout Maurice or Morris Bishop. ;aid he recalled a colleague at Headquarters in the
early or mid-1960s who went Ly war atlas. w nen mown use same set of photographs that was prep red for met one however, he could not identify the officer. He
suggested that the composite sketch that the committee showed him looked I e a former ehief of his
final posting id not bring him into contact with Alpha 66 However, 1erired in 1967 and his
of NTH
Division also were meisooned as possibly being the real-life "Bishop"---] I F,sitive identification has ever
been made. The House committee concluded that "it appears reasonable that an association similar to the alleged Maurice Bishop story actually existed...[blut
whether Veciana's contact was really named Maurice Bishop, or if he was, whether he did all of the things Veciana claims, and if so, with which US intelligence
agency was associated, could not be determined." HSCA Hearings, vol. 10, chap. 3 (quote on 52); Breckinridge memorandum, "Meeting with
OLC 78-4078/3, 19 October 1978, MORI doc. no. 300195; Breckinridge memorandum, )LC 78-4078/4, 19 October
. no. 305487; Fonzi, 408. The Bishop business was resurrected on NBC's television news magazine plogiaiii, .1113211e Edition, on 5 February 1992, which
divulged souse of the contents of the House committee's theretofore secret files?including McCone's statements. (U)
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that the Agency's reputation suffered during the "time of
troubles" in the 1970s.59 (U)
Despite the prominence that many conspiratorialists
have given to CIA in their speculations about who killed
President Kennedy and who has concealed "the truth," they
do not accuse McCone of participating in any murder plot
or coverup. Even the most fervent critics of the "lone gun-
man" and "single bullet" theories who posit Agency respon-
sibility for the assassination blame rogue operatives below
the senior executive echelon. At most, McCone has been
accused of concealing inconvenient or embarrassing facts
about CIA's clandestine activities or contacts that might
lend credence to theories that Cuba or the Mafia were
behind Kennedy's death, or that the Agency had a secret
relationship with Oswald.' (U)
McCone did have a place in a "benign cover-up," or what
also has been termed "a process designed more to control
information than to elicit and expose it."61 The protective
response by McCone and other US government officials was
inherent in the conflict between the Warren Commission's
stated purpose?ascertaining the facts of the assassination?
and implied in its mission?defending the nation's security
by dispelling unfounded rumors that could lead to destruc-
tive international conflict. The DCI was complicit in keep-
ing incendiary and diversionary issues off the commission's
agenda and focusing it on what the Agency believed at the
time was the "best truth": that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as
yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John
Kennedy.' Max Holland, one of the most fairminded schol-
ars of these events, has concluded that "if the word 'conspir-
acy' must be uttered in the same breath as 'Kennedy
assassination,' the only one that existed was the conspiracy
to kill Castro and then keep that effort secret after Novem-
ber 22nd."63 In that sense?and that sense alone?McCone
may be regarded as a "co-conspirator" in the JFK assassina-
tion "cover-up." (U)
39 McCone HSCA deposition, 13-14; Elder memorandum, "Mr. John A. McCone's Deposition to Mr. Robert Genzman, Staff Counsel for the House Select Com-
mittee on Assassinations," 22 August 1978, MORI doc. no. 448986; Breckinridge memorandum, "McCone Depositions for HSCA," 21 August 1978, MORI doc.
no. 306061. (U)
63See the Appendix on Sources for a discussion of this literature. (U)
6' Pincus and Lardner, "Warren Commission Born Out of Fear," 1. (U)
62Such reasoning might explain McCone's request to the Department of Justice in January 1965 that it not exempt the 77 documents the Agency provided to the
Warren Commission from the 75-year disclosure period mandated for investigative agencies. He argued that "national security outweighs any other consideration"
and that the documents should be withheld for the full period. Katzenbach letter to McCone, 8 February 1965, and McCone letter to Katzenbach, 24 February
1965, MORI doe. nos. 404279 and 363957. (U)
63 Holland, "After Thirty Years," 203. (U)
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Working With a New Boss (I): McCone,
LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
On the morning of 23 November 1963, John
McCone directed Executive Assistant Walter
Elder to tell President Lyndon Johnson's secretary
that the DCI would be at the White House at 0900 to give
the scheduled intelligence briefing to the president)
McCone did not routinely participate in this activity, but
he wanted to establish rapport with Johnson, whom he did
not know well, and impress upon him CIA's indispensable
role in providing information and analysis to the White
House.
The DCI and R. Jack Smith, director of OCI, met
Johnson as he came into McGeorge Bundy's office at about
0915. For the next 15 minutes, surrounded by clattering
typewriters, ringing telephones, and a din of voices, they
exchanged compliments and expressions of support, after
which the DCI, according to Johnson, "led me on a tour of
the troubled globe," went over the President's Intelligence
Checklist, and answered a few questions. McCone recalled
that the president's mood "was one of deep distress over the
tragedy, and grave concern over how to get his arms around
the problems that confronted him, [and] some concern
about how to properly handle the men in the organization
whose competence he recognized but also whose allegiance
was to President Kennedy." Smith remembered that the
president's mind soon began to wander. "Beside the com-
pact, trim McCone, [Johnson] looked massive, rumpled
and worried. He had no interest whatever in being briefed,
and after some inconsequential chatting, he turned back
into Bundy's office. We had no way of knowing it, but we
had just witnessed a preview of McCone's future relation-
ship with Lyndon Johnson."X
Adjusting Personal and Bureaucratic Relationships (U)
McCone had worked with Lyndon Johnson only sporad-
ically in the past. They had first met in the late 1940s while
CHAPTER
15
McCone was on the Air Policy Commission and serving as a
special assistant to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. At
the time, Johnson was in the House of Representatives and,
after the 1948 election, in the Senate. While McCone was
under secretary of the Air Force during 1950-51, he over-
saw Korean War procurement and dealt regularly with
Johnson, then the chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee's Preparedness Subcommittee. By the time
McCone became head of the AEC in 1958, Johnson was
majority leader of the Senate and worked on legislation
related to atomic energy McCone did not meet with
Johnson as vice president outside of NSC meetings and
other White House briefings, and the two men had not
talked with each other since several months before President
Kennedy's assassination. (U)
Until his sudden elevation to the presidency, Johnson's
experience with intelligence was marginal and skewed. He
had received a few classified briefings in the Senate as chair-
man of the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee and
as majority leader, but neither the Kennedy White House,
Allen Dulles, nor McCone made much of an effort to keep
him informed after he became vice president. Johnson, in
turn, distrusted the Agency, believing that it had conspired
with his political opponents to deny him the presidential
nomination in 1960 and that its principal officers were
Kennedy loyalists. He paid little attention to CIA products.
As vice president, his office received the Current Intelligence
Bulletin, a less sensitive daily publication than the PICL,
which President Kennedy did not want distributed outside
his immediate circle of advisers. In any event, Johnson pre-
ferred to receive information verbally or through the media,
savored the VIP and diplomatic gossip he heard from
J. Edgar Hoover, and did not relish delving into estimates
and analyses.3X
1 McCone H, 1-3,13-14; Knoche untitled memorandum, 23 November 1963, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 345; McCone calendars, entry
for 23 No 963>ig%
2 McCone OH, 17; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Discussion with President Johnson, November 23rd...," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6;
Knoche u lemorandurn, 23 November 1963, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 345; Johnson, The Vantage Point, 22; Smith, The Unknown
CIA, 163; John L. Helgerson, Getting To Know the President, 69-70. McCone and Smith did not meet Johnson in the Oval Office because the new president had not
yet relocated from his suite in the Executive Office 13ui1ding.X
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In the short term at least, McCone had the president's
attention.' After their initial encounter, the DCI said he
would continue briefing Johnson personally and "will see to
it that [he] breaks down the commonly held view that it is
somehow 'immoral' for the DCI to be seen publicly per-
forming in such a role." In the two weeks or so after the
assassination, McCone visited the White House almost
every day, updating the new president on trouble spots
around the world and apprising him of covert action and
technical collection pro-
grams. Privately telling
McCone that "he had the
greatest confidence in me
personally," Johnson asked
the DCI not to confine him-
self to intelligence matters
but come to him personally
with policy suggestions?spe-
cifically mentioning that he
was dissatisfied with the
advice he was receiving on
Vietnam, Cuba, and nuclear
issues.)
ship with the president was far from cordial. The DCI
recounted for the president some personal talks he had had
with the attorney general, including the latter's uncertainty
about his role in the new administration.' (Over time,
McCones close relationship with Robert Kennedy would
compound the difficulties the DCI was having with the
president.) In subsequent meetings in Washington and at
the LBJ Ranch, McCone and Johnson discussed non-intelli-
gence subjects such as the federal budget, the US military
presence in Europe, and the
president's first State of the
Union Message. (The DCI?
perhaps with his own "over-
alls-to-riches" success story in
mind?suggested that the
speech contain some refer-
ence to the individual's per-
sonal responsibility for
poverty and its alleviation.)
McCone with President Johnson (U) Photo: LBJ Library
Soon after taking office,
the president told McCone
that he "intended to call upon me for a great many activities
which would be different from those of the past." One that
Johnson specified, serving as a political emissary to promi-
nent Republicans on domestic economic issues, was old hat
to McCone, and he continued to brief and consult Gen.
Eisenhower regularly. That the president at first regarded
McCone as a trustworthy insider and objective counselor is
clearly shown by his request that the DCI help him with
some delicate personnel matters, including cabinet, senior
policymaker, and ambassadorial appointments. Johnson also
used McCone as a source of information about the inten-
tions of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, whose relation-
All this "face time" with
the chief executive soon
proved to be a mixed bless-
ing. McCone found himself
drawn deeper into affairs that
were peripheral or counterproductive to his mission as head
of the Intelligence Community. Scarcely a week after the
transition, he complained to his senior deputies that
Johnson often tasked him "with matters of no direct rela-
tionship to CIA and of possible damage to DCI relation-
ships with SecDef and SecState." As a first step to avoiding
these distractions, McCone decided to change procedures
for White House briefings, dispensing with daily sessions in
lieu of weekly NSC meetings where he would brief on cur-
rent intelligence only, try to steer clear of policy discussions,
and "give the President [the] benefit of give and take with
his top advisers."'
OH), 8; Knoche untitled memorandum, 23 November 1963, ER Files, Job 80001)00K, box 17, folder 345; McCone, "Memorandum for then, 69-70; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 616; Richard Helms oral history interview by Washington, DC, 4 April 1969 (hereafter Helms/
ecor. ..Discussion with President Johnson, November 23rd...," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6; Andrew, 309-11,313-14; Freedman, U.S. Intelligence and the
Soviet Strategic Threat, 42-43. A few days after the assassination, Johnson called Hoover "my brother and personal friend" and said "I've got more confidence in your
judgment than anybody in town." Tilting Charge, 58,)k
Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Knoche memorandum about DCI morning meeting on 24 November 1963, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder
345; McCone memoranda of discussions with the president on 28 and 30 November 1963,13 and 29 December 1963, and 5 and 6 January 1964, McCone Papers,
box 6, folders 6 and
5 For details on the Johnson-Kennedy relationship, see Michael W. Schuyler, "Ghosts in the White House: LBJ, RFK, and the Assassination ofJFK," PSQ17 , no. 3
(Summer 1987): 503-18; Paul R. Henggeler, In His Steps, 61-64,73-91,175ff.; Jeff Shesol, Mutual Contempt; and LBJ versus the Kennedys: Chasing Demons, the
History Channel, 17 November 2003. (U)
" alter Elder, annex to memorandum about DCI morning meeting on 2 December 1963, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 345; Carter-Knoche OH, 13-
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IttrE-44
Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
Even with that rationing of contact, McCone wore out his
welcome. Although he was purveying highly sensitive infor-
mation, his access to Johnson diminished as time passed. The
DCI misinterpreted the president's predilection for informal
policy discussions as an indication that he preferred to receive
intelligence information regularly and verbally. Richard
Helms recalled, however, that Johnson "finally got bored,
closed the door, and that was the end. He just didn't want to
do it any more. You couldn't make him do it any more." Wil-
liam Colby, who frequently accompanied the DCI to White
House briefings on Vietnam, has recalled that "McCone's
pressures for direct access to LBJ aroused the President's pro-
tective instincts against being pushed, and he was not
impressed with McCone's efforts to dazzle him."W
McCone had assessed his principal consumer inaccu-
rately. The president preferred reading short memoranda to
listening to formal briefings. The DCI's "crisp, concise sen-
tences, spoken in his usual brisk manner, fell on deaf
Johnsonian ears," according to R. Jack Smith. After a profes-
sional lifetime of running affairs his way, McCone did not
adjust to the fact that he and Johnson operated differently.
The DCI, accustomed to a hierarchical corporate environ-
ment, was used to listening to prepared staff recommenda-
tions at structured meetings and then making a decision,
and assumed any chief executive?especially a newcomer to
the job?would operate the same way. Instead, the presi-
dent, steeped in traditional "old boy" politics, preferred to
talk over issues casually with friends and associates in relaxed
settings and work out a "deal." McCone, according to
Walter Elder and Ray Cline, had a much easier time work-
ing with the "presidential" Kennedy?the long-range, stra-
tegic thinker?than the "congressional" Johnson?the
political tactician.' McCone later noted that while Kennedy
used to insist on seeing him for a weekly recap and forecast
of trouble spots, Johnson only wanted to see him if some
intelligence matter warranted immediate attention. Nor did
Johnson, after a few months, invite McCone's increasingly
dissonant thoughts on policy, preferring to rely on the more
compliant (and far more powerful) Dean Rusk and Robert
McNamara. R. Jack Smith has written that
Nile president's chief intelligence officer must have
ready access to the president if he is to carry out his
mission effectively. Moreover, it must be comfortable
access. Both men must feel easy, confident of the
other's support.... It cannot be legislated or com-
manded. It is the product of personal chemistry and
compatibility of mind.
Mutual comfort, ease and confidence, and good personal
chemistry never characterized McCone's relationship with
President Johnson.A
McCone and others inside and outside CIA have over-
stated his lack of access to Johnson, but even if the quantity
of contacts remained reasonably high, their quality declined.
According to White House records, between 22 November
1963 and 25 April 1965, the DCI met with the president 89
times and spoke to him by telephone 14 times?or more
than one direct contact per week. The average was higher
under Kennedy, however, and not only did the frequency
decline after mid-1964, but McCone increasingly saw
Johnson only as a participant in meetings of national secu-
rity advisers and less often one-on-one.IA
The DCI failed to persuade the president of the value of
personal intelligence briefings and by early 1964 was com-
plaining to Bundy about not seeing Johnson. At Bundy's
suggestion, McCone raised the subject of access at a private
meeting with the president that April (the scheduled topic
was Eisenhower, not intelligence). Johnson, presumably
forewarned that McCone was "disturbed" at "not seeing
very much" of him, replied that he was available anytime;
"all [McCone] had to do was call up." McCone said he had
tried to do so several times recently without success.
Johnson then noted that he had been very busy of late, that
the DCI was welcome to bring special matters to his atten-
tion, but that he "did not wish to be briefed just for the pur-
pose of being briefed"; he found the PICL "perfectly
adequate" and went over it carefully. After their meeting,
Johnson?probably assuming that McCone had griped to
other officials about not getting into the Oval Office?sig-
naled to the DCI that the matter was closed. At an NSC
HelnisE?OH, 36; Colby, Lost Victory, 182.X
McCone admired Johnson's political acumen, however. In an off-the-record discussion with journalist James Reston, he said, It amuses me, you know, I go out
west and he's got this kind of a hayseed reputation. I tell my friends.., now listen, this guy's no hick.. .he's had more experience than any man that's ever been Presi-
dent of the United States." Transcript of conversation with Reston, 9 September 1964, 19, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 11...,*
9 Smith, Unknown CIA, 163-64; Elder/McAuliffe 0H2, 2; Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars, 201; McCone =OH, 18.,7Mij
I? Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy 146; McCone calendars (which list 63 meetings); Helms/McAuliffe OH, 3>c
"Set-iwzi,
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CHAPTER 15
President Johnson reading the new President's Daily Brief(U)
Photo: White House
meeting following their talk, the president announced that
he had just received a "thorough briefing" from the DCI
and then asked if McCone had any intelligence matters to
raise with the NSC?implying that those had been the sub-
ject of their just-concluded interview. McCone later noted
for the record that "my discussion with President Johnson
did not involve an intelligence briefing" (his emphasis).
McCone tried again a few months later, offering to meet
with the president at any time to discuss intelligence matters
and give him "the full benefit" of Agency expertise. Johnson
did not respond. Not until 11 months into Johnson's term
did McCone have a private opportunity to discuss purely
Agency affairs?organization, budget, personnel?rather
than the clandestine activities that supported the adminis-
tration's diplomatic and military undertakings:1N'
McCone tried, with more success, to impress Johnson
with CIA's analytical contributions by adjusting the format
of Agency publications to suit the president's preferences.
Johnson probably was disinclined to read the PICL?a
product tailored for his predecessor who had denied it to
him?and the backgro under-likequality of the first
issues prepared for him may have seemed insulting.
(He did, however, expect his senior staff to read it.)
Moreover, whereas Kennedy preferred to see the
presidential publication in the morning, and
enjoyed a sprinkling of chattiness and humor in it,
Johnson wanted a more sober product to peruse in
the evening when he did most of his reading. Get-
ting feedback on the content remained difficult
during the transition. Kennedy would jot com-
ments on his copy or call Cline, Smith, or even jun-
ior officers to discuss stories that had not appeared
in the PICL, but obtaining comments from
Johnson was practically impossible. After awhile, he
tended not to read the publication. A presidential
aide told a senior DI officer that "if we [CIA] can't
penetrate this sort of wall.. we'll just have to try
something else." In January 1964, the biweekly
President's Intelligence Review a summary of the
preceding PICLs?premiered at the White House.
Johnson's military aide, Gen. C.V. Clifton, said the
president?"a painfully slow reader" who "just can-
not afford the time to digest a daily book"?thought the
Review was "very valuable" and wanted it "kept up without
chanEe
He also had NIEs give more attention to alternative,
less probable scenarios as well as the outcomes that the com-
munity considered most likely.'
Later in 1964, McCone and senior DDI officers decided
that there was little use in producing a publication that the
president read infrequently. The DCI accepted R. Jack
Smith's suggestion that the most graceful solution was to
stop publishing the PICL and prepare a new publication
that conformed as much as possible to Johnson's work hab-
its. After the 1964 election, the Agency dropped the PICL
and the Review, and on 1 December, the first issue of the
President's Daily Brief (PDB) arrived at the White House.
The president read it, liked the new format, and wanted
publication to continue. As Johnson became more deeply
involved in foreign affairs?especially tactical developments
"McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Breakfast Meeting at the White House-22 April 1964," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 8; idem, "Memorandum for
the Record.. Meeting with the President.. .24 July 1964," ibid., folder 9; idem, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Discussion with the President-22 October 1964,"
ibid., folder 10; idem, "Memorandum for the Record... Discussion with President Johnson.. .29 Apr. [19641...," ibid., folder 8.)160
12 Helgerson 74-76.12,,,I,mh 477. Cline cpr,fr cf,;ar /Ind ctInInvc 781
354
,
l'EERCZQ
-29
; editorial notes in PREIS; 1964-1968, )0(X111, Organization and Management of
y,inc iumcipation of Foreign Crises," ibid., 438-40>i<
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"St,11.6Th
Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
in Vietnam?his interest in CIA's daily products grew.
>c
"Got Lots of Troubles" (U)
"Is it more dangerous," a despondent Lyndon Johnson
confided to his senatorial mentor, Richard Russell, in late
May 1964, "to let things [in Vietnam] go as they're going
now, deteriorating every day... than it would be for us to
move in?.. .1 don't see any other way out of it." After only six
months in power, the president and many officials in his
administration were feeling frustrated over the fact that, as
McNamara later wrote, he had "inherited a god-awful mess
eminently more dangerous than the one Kennedy had
inherited from Eisenhower." During the Kennedy presi-
dency, the number of US military personnel in South Viet-
nam had grown from 875 to over 16,000, but when
Johnson took office, their usefulness seemed doubtful. The
junta of South Vietnamese generals that had ousted Ngo
Dinh Diem in November 1963 was struggling with its new
governmental responsibilities, and its members with each
other. Counterinsurgency efforts were put on hold. Crony-
ism, corruption, and incompetence persisted at the high lev-
els of the Saigon regime, which was widely regarded as an
American puppet. '4,v
Despite these difficulties, President Johnson pledged to
his top Vietnam decisionmakers two days after taking office
that "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be
the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China
went." To Johnson, who felt bound politically to carry on
T-Telaercnn 75-77
his predecessor's policy, the alternatives were clear. As he
told a reporter, "There's one of three things you can do
[about Vietnam] .... You can run or you can fight, as we are
do in', or you can sit down and agree to neutralize all of it,
but nobody's gonna neutralize North Vietnam.... [S] o it
really boils down to one or two decisions: gettin' out or get-
tin' in." His first directive on Vietnam, issued on 26
November 1963, declared his intention to persist. "It
remains the central objective of the United States in South
Vietnam to assist the people and government of that coun-
try to win their contest against the externally directed and
supported Communist conspiracy." He expected consensus
among his advisers and demanded that they be as dedicated
to this task as he was. "Don't go to bed at night until you
have asked yourself, 'Have I done everything I could to fur-
ther the American effort to assist South Vietnam?" Pri-
vately, though, the president realized the quandary he was
in. "I feel like one of those [Texas] catfish," he confided to
his press secretary, Bill Moyers. "I feel like I just grabbed a
big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of
it."15 (U)
Different Men, Different Views (U)
McCone devoted more attention to Vietnam than to any
other national security issue during the last 18 months of his
directorship, and policy disputes over how to fight the war
clouded his relationship with Johnson. The conflict's intrac-
tability only strengthened the president's determination to
defeat the Vietnamese communists without a major military
commitment that would derail his domestic policy agenda.
This resolve, combined with Johnson's lack of interest in
CIA activities, as well as other personal and bureaucratic fac-
tors, made McCone's dealings with the White House so dif-
ficult that by late summer 1964 he had decided to resign the
following year. Meanwhile, during the remainder of his ten-
ure, CIA assisted the US military's expanded role in the
clandestine war against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong,
7,1?
"Transcript of Johnson-Russell telephone conversation on 27 May 1964, Taking Charge, 363 (including the quote in the section heading); McNamara, In Retrospect:
The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, 101. Two CIA papers prepared for McCone give a good overview of the postcoup situation: Chester L. Cooper (ON
to McCone " - 6 . 6 December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, IV Vietnam, August?December 1963, 680-84; and
memorandum to McCone, "Various Aspects of the Post-Coup Situation in South Vietnam," 1 ecem
, o er one may so have seen a report from Saigon station, TDCS DB-3/658,497, "Situation Appraisal as of 14 December
1963," 16 December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, IV Vietnam, August?December 1963, 711-13. For references to literature on the Johnson administration and Indo-
China, see the Appendix on Sources..X
NSAM No, 273, 26 November 1963, and McCone, "Memorandum for the Record of a Meeting, Executive Office Building...November 24, 1963...," FRUS,
1961-1963, IV Vietnam, August?December 1963, 636-38; Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant, 99-101. (U)
0
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and undertook its own covert initiatives with a mixed record
of success. (U)
What role McCone and CIA would have in the new
administration's policy toward Vietnam was unclear in the
beginning. McCone's early contacts with the president on
Vietnam were amicable and candid. During the transition,
Johnson sought McCone's advice on several sensitive policy
and personnel matters related to the issue, such as who
could best lead South Vietnam or which US advisers and
ambassadors would be best suited for working on the prob-
lem. Johnson at first seemed to appreciate McCone's experi-
ence and insights, and the DCI was flattered by the
presidential solicitations. McCone sensed a difference, how-
ever. After a meeting on 24 November 1963, he wrote: "I
received...the first 'President Johnson tone' for action as
contrasted with the 'Kennedy tone.' Johnson definitely feels
that we place too much emphasis on social reforms; he has
very little tolerance with our spending so much time being
`do-gooders'...."16 (u)
Changes that President Johnson made in his administra-
tion's foreign policy making processes further diminished
McCone's stature. Largely as a bureaucratic gesture, the pres-
ident instituted an ostensibly more orderly and formal style
of decisionmaking than had prevailed in the Kennedy
administration. At the same time, however, he tightly con-
trolled a parallel collection of loosely structured arrange-
ments where the "real" decisions were made. Johnson
dispensed with the discursive NSC meetings that Kennedy
had favored, expected cabinet officers to be fully in charge of
their respective policy domains, and elevated the role of the
Department of State in framing and executing US foreign
policy. Partly to prevent leaks about policy disputes, he used
the NSC mainly as a briefing forum and a ratifier of deci-
sions. The Special Group Counterinsurgency, another
Kennedy administration creation, met less frequently under
Johnson and did not deal with Vietnam; the full Special
Group and a new interagency coordinating committee took
over its work.' Johnson preferred to address difficult
national security issues in more intimate surroundings out-
side the NSC?ones analogous to the cloakroom manipula-
tions he engaged in as party chief in the Senate. Foremost
among these were the Tuesday Lunches that he began host-
ing in February 1964. Rusk, McNamara, and Bundy were
the charter members of that most elite of dining clubs. The
president also had a "kitchen cabinet" of colleagues and cro-
nies from Texas and Washington from whom he often
sought private counsel.' (U)
Overall, these changes emphasized the status of Rusk,
McNamara, and Bundy, and reduced McCone's informal
avenues of access and influence to the White House. He had
good personal relations with Rusk, but he never got along
that well with Bundy, and he was still fighting with
McNamara over bureaucratic and policy matters. Not sur-
prisingly, the DCI attended only six of the 27 Tuesday
Lunches held between late February and late September
1964, when they were suspended for the election campaign.
He attended none after they resumed in March 1965.19 (U)
McCone directly felt Johnson's penchant for hands-on
management when the president intruded himself in the
selection of a new chief of station in Saigon.' On
2 December 1963, Johnson wrote to the DCI about a per-
manent successor to John Richardson, who had been with-
drawn but not yet replaced formally. Either bring in a "top-
notch man," the president directed McCone, or "promote
the man on the spot." He asserted personal control over the
appointment, telling the DCI that he awaited a nomination
from among the Agency's "best and most experienced."
McCone had intended to have Richardson's replacement
start the following June,
but the presi-
'6McCone, "Memorandum for the Record of a Meeting, Executive Office Building... November 24,1963...," FRUS, 1961-1963, IV Vietnam, August?December
1963, 637. (U)
'Established by NSAM No. 280 on 14 February 1964, the Vietnam Coordinating Committee was headed initially by William Sullivan, Rusk's special assistant for
Vietnam affairs. FRUS, 1964-1968, 1, Vietnam 1964, 26 is. 2,79-80. (U)
"George C. Herring, "The Reluctant Warrior: Lyndon Johnson as Commander in Chief," in David L. Anderson, ed., Shadow on the White House, 87-112; Robert
Dallek, "Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam: The Making of a Tragedy," DH 20, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 147-62; David M. Barrett, "Secrecy and Openness in Lyndon
Johnson's White House: Political Style, Pluralism, and the Presidency," Review of Politics 54, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 72-111; Schoenbaum, 412-14; Shapley, 276-78,
283; George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam, 6-9,13-14,22-23; Paul y Hammond, LBJ and the Presidential Management of Foreign Relations, 7-9; Brands, The
Wages of Globalism, 5-13,20-23; David Humphrey, "Tuesday Lunch at the Johnson White House: A Preliminary Assessment," DH 8, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 82,86;
Henry E Graff, The Tuesday Cabinet, introduction; Prados, Keepers of the Keys,148-51; John P. Burke and Fred I. Greenstein, How Presidents Test Reality, 135; Dean
Rusk oral history interview by Washington, DC, 28 July 1969,25, transcript at LBJ Library. (U)
19McCone calendars, entries for May?September 1964. Of all his advisers, the president was most impressed with McNamara. "That man with the Stacomb in his
hair is the best ache lot," he remarked after the first meeting of the Kennedy cabinet. He also was fond of Rusk, who he boasted "has the compassion of a preacher
and the courage of a Georgia cracker. When you're going in with the Marines, he's the kind you want on your side." There are no such presidential encomiums
recorded about McCone. Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson's War, 81; Brian Van de Mark, Into the Quagmire, 11. (U)
356
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Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
dent wanted the COS position filled right away. On the rec-
ommendation of William Colby, McCone chose Peer de
Silva, De Silva, an
Army counterintelligence officer with the Manhattan
Project in World War II, joined the Agency in the early
1950s
Before he left for Saigon,
McCone took him to the White House to meet the presi-
dent. Dc Silva recalled McCone's advice to him beforehand:
For God's sake, remember what's been happening here
recently?President Kennedy has been assassinated,
President Johnson is new in the White House, and the
Vietnam problem is getting worse every day. [Ambas-
sador Henry Cabot] Lodge is becoming more and
more obstreperous and Johnson wants no more prob-
lems out there as there were between Lodge and John
Richardson; remember all of these things when we go
to the president's office tomorrow.,ir
At their meeting in the Oval Office, President Johnson
assured de Silva of his full support but reminded him that
one of his primary missions was to get along with Lodge,
and not to forget that 1964 was an election year. At the
same time, McCone warned Johnson that Lodge "would
destroy de Silva if he opposed his assignment, or did not like
him, or wished to get rid of him." The president said he
would "communicate most emphatically" with the ambassa-
dor to prevent that, but McCone replied that Lodge "was
absolutely unconscionable in matters of this kind...he had
resorted to trickery time and time again during the Eisen-
hower administration and.., never failed to use the newspa-
pers in order to expose an individual or block an action."
Johnson averred that he "would exercise the full power of his
office to keep Lodge in line," but he would not go so far as
President Johnson's NSC in 1964. McCone is at the far end of
the table. (U) Photo: LBJ Library
to remove the ambassador, as McCone wanted, lest he
antagonize the Republicans.'.
More than anything else, it was CIA's dissent from the
administration's policy and its forecasts about Vietnam that
estranged McCone from Johnson. McCone summarized
their differences in a postretirement interview: "I disagreed
with McNamara and others who said they could see the
light at the end of the tunnel. We in the CIA didn't see any
light at the end of the tunnel, and we had a very pessimistic
view which was sharply resented by everyone right up to
President Johnson." McCone set the analytical tone for his
relationship with Johnson over Vietnam just two days into
the new presidency by delivering a bleak assessment at a
meeting of the senior Vietnam policy group (the president,
Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, and Ball). Speaking
immediately after Lodge sanguinely described the prospects
for the post-Diem regime, McCone reported that the Viet
Cong had stepped up activity since the 1 November coup
and were preparing to exert severe pressure; that the coup
leaders were having trouble organizing a government and
'Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Johnson untitled memorandum to McCone, 2 December 1963, FR US, 1961-1963, IV,. Vietnam, August?December
1963, 651; [McCone,] blind memorandum for the president, n.d., EA Division Files, Job 78-00597R, box 1, folder 8; McCone, "Memorandum for the
Record...IvIeeting with the President...6 December 1963," and "Memorandum for the Record...Discussion with the President...December 7th[, 1963]...,"
McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6; "CIA IG Report on Vietnam," 39-41, OIG Files, Job 74B00779R, box 1, folder 2; Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of
Intelligence, 201, 203-4, 206-7; Ahern CIA and the Generals, 13,1?
Lodge wanted the acting chief ?romoted to chief and told McCone in no uncertain terms that he neither needed nor wanted a new COS. Peer de
Silva, who was present at this g the DCEs December trip to Saigon, recalled that McCone, "[w]earing a tight little smile.. .mused that unless the
ambassador really had cause for refusing my assignment, he, as director, felt he must insist on my assuming the position...." Lodge letter to McCone, 3 December
1963, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 5; de Silva, 211.
2I President Johnson?perhaps with McCone's admonitions about Lodge in mind?told the ambassador that "there must be the most complete understanding and
cooperation between you and him [the COS].... I am concerned not only to sustain effective cooperation, but to avoid any mutterings in the press. I look to you all
to ensure the complete absence of any backbiting and the establishment and maintenance of a relationship of genuine trust and understanding at all levels." Johnson
telegram to Lodge, CAP 63633, 7 January 1964, FRUS, 1964-68, I, Vietnam 1964,3. The prideful Ambassador did not take kindly to being so instructed and
responded peevishly to McCone's subsequent request that he protect de Silva's certainly cannot take responsibility for keeping any man's name out of the
press who works for the US government in Vietnam.., n fact the whole arrangement is still somewhat obscure to me...."
Embassy Saigon cable to Headquarters, SAIG 3085, 13 , excerpted port on Vietnam,' 41.*
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securing help from civilian officials; and that counterinsur-
gency operations were at a standstill. The DCI concluded
that he could see few reasons for optimism.'N,
"McCone's position throughout this period," journalist
Thomas Powers has aptly written, "was the one least conge-
nial to Johnson: a strong conviction of the importance of
victory, combined with deep pessimism about how we were
doing, ending with a claim that only strong measures might
recover the situation.... McCone went further than most. In
one meeting after another he insisted that if the United
States was going in, it had to go in all the way." The presi-
dent initially respected McCone's frankness and even agreed
with the DCI on some points. For example, he likewise
thought Lodge "had made a great blunder in disposing of
Diem" and said "in the most emphatic way that he felt the
appointment of Lodge was a serious mistake," McCone
wrote after a private meeting at the White House in late
November 1963.23.1:iie
Eventually, Johnson tuned the DCI out, to the detriment
of CIA. Indicative of the president's attitude about the
Agency was the following story he told at a private dinner
(as recounted by Richard Helms):
Let me tell you about these intelligence guys. When I
was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie.
I'd go out early and milk her. I'd get her in the stan-
chion, seat myself and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk.
One day I'd worked hard and gotten a full pail of
milk, but I wasn't paying attention, and old Bessie
swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of
milk. Now, you know, that's what these intelligence
guys do. You work hard and get a good program or
policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail
through it.24 (U)
Nor did McCone have any personal advocates inside the
Johnson White House. He dealt with much the same
national security contingent as he had under Kennedy, and
his relations with them, strained since the Cuban missile cri-
sis, did not improve. Evidence of the DCI's outsider status
was a clever but caustic memorandum that McGeorge
Bundy wrote to President Johnson about him in May 1964.
Bundy and Clark Clifford, the head of PFIAB, had agreed
on "the ideal method of keeping John McCone really happy
about the level of his contact with you: Golf" McCone,
Bundy wrote, "is an energetic and agreeable golfer," has
"more free time" than either Bundy or Clifford, and "can
pay his own Burning Tree greens fee."' (U)
While McCone drifted to the periphery of White House
discussions of Vietnam, he retained some authority over
war-related intelligence activities as chairman of USIB.
Southeast Asia became a preoccupation of USIB during the
Johnson presidency, the subject of action once a week on
average. McCone and the other board members spent about
a third of their time on the issue dealing with special esti-
mates; one fourth on SIGINT and other clandestine intelli-
gence about North Vietnamese violations of the Geneva
accords; one fourth on overhead reconnaissance require-
ments; and one sixth on other special studies handled by
USIB committees and subcommittees. The estimates, which
McCone scrutinized before signing, were often discussed at
5.2G.J.A. O'Toole, Honorable Treachery, 491 citing interview with McCone on PBS documentary Secret Intelligence, broadcast in 1989; McCone, "Memorandum for
the Record.. South Vietnam Situation," 25 November 1963, FRUS, 1961-63, IV, Vietnam, August?December 1963, 635-37; idem, "Memorandum for the
Record.. Discussion with President Johnson, 28 November 1963...," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6; Johnson, The Vantage Point, 43
ss Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 165-66; "Memorandum for the Record... Discussion with President Johnson, 28 November 1963...," McCone Papers,
box 6, folder 6. McCone attributed Johnson's antipathy toward Lodge to conflicts they had while in the Senate.X
Johnson's abiding bitterness over Diem's ouster was evident more than two years later in taped Oval Office conversations. To Sen. Eugene McCarthy, he paraphrased
the coup proponents' words as "He was corrupt and he ought to be killed," and then said, "So we killed him. We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs
and assassinated him. Now, we've really had no political stability [in South Vietnam] since then." Right after, he said much the same thing to Maxwell Taylor: "They
started out and said, 'We got to kill Diem, because he's no damn good. Let's.. .knock him off.' And we did.... That's exactly where it [Vietnam's downhill slide]
started!" Conversations with McCarthy and Taylor on 1 February 1966, quoted in James Rosen, "What's Hidden in the LBJ Tapes," Weekly Standard, 29 September
2003,12. If Johnson thought that CIA had been the Kennedy administration's "agent" in eliminating Diem, he may well have blamed it?and McCone?for at least
some of his problems. (U)
24Robert M. Gates, "An Opportunity Unfulfilled: The Use and Perceptions of Intelligence at the White House,' Washington Quarterly, Winter 1989: 42. (U)
25Bundy memorandum to the president, 1 May 1964, Memos to the President (McGeorge Bundy), vol. 4, National Security File, LBJ Library. The DCI and the
president played golf once, on 24 May 1964. McCone calendars, entry for 24 May 1964.)<
McCone may have brought on some of this ribbing by being oversensitive about his "hall file" in the White House. In January 1964, for example, he discussed with
the US government's chief financial officer, Bureau of the Budget director Elmer Staats, the relatively trivial question of outfitting his official car to prevent the driver
and security officer from overhearing his confidential conversations. President Johnson already knew about the matter, and McCone worried that someone else in
the White House or the Cabinet would seize on it to accuse him of "taking advantage because of a free hand with our budget." The DCI offered to buy the type of
vehicle he wanted and donate it to the government, but Staats indicated t acre were better ways to handle the situation. Transcript of McCone telephone conversa-
tion with Staats, 11 January 1964, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 4.
358
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principals' and deputies' meetings?particularly those that
considered possible consequences of US actions. Although
he did not always agree with the bottom-line judgments of
the analyses he approved, the DCI did not intervene in the
estimative process during 1964-65 (as he had in that one
regrettable instance in 1963).26X
The Intelligence Community machinery McCone over-
saw as USIB chairman functioned well on the Vietnam issue
during the Johnson administration. Requirements were sat-
isfied, and assessments were produced in a timely fashion.
BNE and the DI had little apparent impact on policy and
strategy decisions, however, because not enough of CIA's
senior consumers?most significantly, the president?were
listening, or if they were, they did not want to hear what
they were being told. Ray Cline has written that "[a]s the
Vietnam war became more worrisome, Johnson retreated
more and more from orderly reviewing of evidence and sys-
tematic consultation.... Intelligence did not have a place at
the table"?at least not the sort that McCone brought. Ana-
lysts' conclusions clashed with policymakers' geopolitical
and ideological conceptions of international communism,
their judgments of Moscow's and Beijing's intentions, their
anxieties over perceptions of US prestige and power, and, as
November 1964 drew near, their interests in securing
Johnson's election. Regardless of how well the community
performed, the president was still dissatisfied and frustrated
with it. With three wire service tickers and three television
sets in his office, and copies of the major American daily
newspapers nearby, he did not often see what value the intel-
ligence services added to the information mix. "I thought
you guys had people everywhere, that you knew every-
thing," he complained to McCone, only half in jest, "and
now you don't even know anything about a raggedy-ass little
fourth-rate country. All you have to do is get some Chinese
coolies from a San Francisco laundry shop and drop them
over there and use them. Get them to drop their answers in
a bottle and put the bottle in the Pacific." The DCI, not
known for his sense of humor, did not appreciate the jibe.'
(U)
McCone at a Vietnam policy meeting in the White House (U)
Photo: LBJ Library
Epiphany in South Vietnam (U)
In the last weeks of 1963, a perplexed and troubled Presi-
dent Johnson sought to penetrate the many uncertainties
about the new regime in Saigon and its ability to reinvigo-
rate the war against the communists. To this end, he dis-
patched a factfinding mission in mid-December, headed by
McNamara and including McCone, Bundy, William Colby,
Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Victor Krulak from the Depart-
ment of Defense, and William Sullivan from the Depart-
ment of State. During three busy days of briefings,
meetings, working meals, and receptions, the DCI saw the
principal figures on the Military Revolutionary Committee
that governed South Vietnam?the leader of the coup
against Diem, Gen. Duong Van Minh ("Big Minh"); the
prime minister; the ministers of defense, foreign affairs, and
internal security; the chief of military security; and some
senior military commanders, including Gen. Nguyen
Khanh, who would lead his own successful coup in January.
McCone also met with Ambassador Lodge and MACV head
Gen. Paul Harkins and toured parts of the Mekong River
delta region southwest of Saigon, where the Viet Cong
insurgency had made substantial gains during 1963.28>4%
Beneath the diplomatic niceties, comforting words, and
assurances of support and progress-to-be-made, McCone
found the "ground truth" to be disconcerting. A few
'Lay, vol. 5,78-79)Kr
27 Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 81-83; Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars, 201-2; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 512. (U)
a Details on McCone's trip are in several meeting memoranda in McCone Papers, box 3, folder 5; "Report by [USIB] Chairman on Trip to South Vietnam," USIB-
M-203,23 December 1963, ICS Files, Job 82S00096R, box 2, folder 3; and de Silva, 209-11. For accounts by other principals on the trip, see the reports by Kru-
lak, Sullivan, and McNamara in FRUS, 1961-1963, IV, Vietnam, August?December I963,721-35.N
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sentences from his report to the president capture his down-
beat assessment:
There is no organized government in South Vietnam
at this time. The Military Revolutionary Committee
(MRC) is in control, but strong leadership and
administrative procedures are lacking....
The lack of an outstanding individual to lead and
absence of administrative experience within the MRC
are ominous indicators....
The political stability of the new government under
the MRC is subject to serious doubt....
The military government may be an improvement
over the Diem-Nhu regime, but this is not as yet
established and the future of the war remains in
doubt....
The VC [Viet Gong] appeal to the people of South
Vietnam on political grounds has been effective....
The ability of the GVN [government of Viet Nam] to
reverse this trend remains to be proven....
[T]here are more reasons to doubt the future of the
effort under present programs and moderate exten-
sions to existing programs.. .than there are reasons to
be optimistic about the future of our cause in South
Vietnam." (U)
While on the trip, McCone learned how distorted and
incomplete US intelligence reporting had been?particularly
that coming through military channels. Policymakers already
were aware of problems with the amount, accuracy, and
timeliness of intelligence about the Viet Cong, but McCone's
concerns were different in degree and kind. "It is abundantly
clear," he told the president, "that statistics received over the
past year or more from GVN officials and reported by the
US mission on which we gauged the trend of the war were
grossly in error." There was "no excuse for the kind of report-
ing" that had understated difficulties in Long An Province
near Saigon, he complained to Lodge. In a letter to Rusk
soon after his return, McCone noted that South Vietnamese
province and district chiefs had "grossly misinformed" field
officers of the MAAG (MACV's forerunner) and the US
Observer Mission, and that American civilian and military
officials could not audit the reporting.'
In these and other remarks, McCone attributed the intel-
ligence failings to US officials' dependence on liaison report-
ing, not to distortions in American reporting or assessments,
or to bad field management of collection. He was aware that
the US military had few reliable, independent sources and
that it was inclined to "politicize" its reporting and analysis.
Moreover, Lodge had been limiting the station's clandestine
contacts with South Vietnamese officials. At this time dur-
ing the policy debate in Washington, and with a new presi-
dent just installed in office, however, McCone evidently
thought it wiser to blame the ousted Diem regime for any
intelligence shortcomings rather than MACV and the
embassy. Lacking full authority over the entire US intelli-
gence bureaucracy, the DCI's ability to address the inade-
quacies of the military departments was limited in any
event. X
To rectify the situation from CIA's end, McCone pro-
posed dispatching a group of what he called "our 'old South
Vietnamese hands" to independently examine the reporting
system, which had failed to show the Saigon government's
political weakness in the field.' These veterans from the DI
and the DDP, many plucked from distant posts for the
assignment, were instructed to spread out over the country-
side and reacquaint themselves with official, unilateral, and
personal contacts, bypass the normal reporting processes,
and discern the true lay of the land. The team (codenamed
ross-checked reports from existing sources and
eve Opel new methods to corroborate data. "This has not
McCone, "Highlights of Discussions in Saigon, 18-20 December 1963," 21 December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, IV Vietnam, August?December 1963, 736-38.
McNamara, in contrast to his rosy public presentiments, in private made a similarly discouraging evaluation. "The situation is very cisturbing," he reported to the
president. The new government of Gen. Minh was "indecisive and drifting." "Current trends, unless reversed in the next 2-3 months, will lead to neutralization at
best and more likely to a Communist-controlled state." "The situation has in fact been deteriorating in the countryside since July to a far greater extent than we real-
ized because of undue dependence on distorted Vietnamese reporting. The Vietcong now control very high proportions of the people in certain key provinces, par-
ticularly those south and west of Saigon." McNamara memorandum to President Johnson, 21 December 1963, ibid., 732-33. (U)
Hilsman memorandum to Rusk, "Viet-Nam," 5 December 1963, and McCone, "Highlights of Discussions in Saigon, 18-20 December 1963," FRUS, 1961-1963,
IV Vietnam, August?December 1963, 676,737; Colby, "Memorandum for the Record... Presidential Meeting on Vietnam, 21 December 1963," and McCone, "Memo-
randum for the Record... Discussion with Ambassador Cabot Lodge... [18 December 1963,]" 21 December 1963, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 5; McCone letter to
Rusk, 7 January 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 5-6. McCone's trip did not improve his relations with Lodge, who he told the president was "devious."
Despite what Lodge had said about not seeking the Republican nomination for president. McCone did not believe the ambassador would set aside his political ambitions
and remain in Saigon. McCone memorandum, "Discussion with the President.. December 21, 1963," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6..k.
360
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been CIA's role in the past, as intelligence of this type has
come through military channels," McCone wrote the presi-
dent. "However[,] I believe the next few months are so criti-
cal that information covertly developed will complement
reporting we receive through the other channels.".N,
At first McCone's idea was not well received at the Penta-
gon, where McNamara insisted that the survey group's mem-
bership be expanded to include officers from the
Departments of Defense and State. McCone?recognizing
that conflicts in reporting were inevitable, given that progress
in the war was not quantifiable?nonetheless pointed out
that MACV's excessive optimism and the embassy's pessi-
mism threw reporting out of balance, and that the US mili-
tary's intelligence assets in the South were inadequate and
mismanaged. The JCS also complained about inconsistent
and incomplete intelligence, so it went along with the survey
team idea with the proviso that it would not develop a sepa-
rate collection and reporting system. When the CIA repre-
sentatives submitted their evaluation of field intelligence in
mid-February, MACV commander Harkins criticized some
of the judgments as too harsh. Such independent assess-
ments, he added, risked "misleading the national decision
process by forwarding information not coordinated and
cleared with other elements of the US reporting mechanism
in Vietnam." Two improvements came out of the surve
team exercise: the South Vietnamese national police,
established prisoner interrogation centers in
each province:
Another Government, Another Debate (U)
After returning from Saigon, McCone predicted that
"another coup or even another thereafter might occur" in
South Vietnam. He was right both times (although he did
not forecast either date). On 30 January 1964, after scarcely
three feckless months in power, Gen. "Big Minh" was
ousted in a bloodless putsch led by Gen. Nguyen Khanh?
inaugurating months of leadership instability in Saigon. The
US government was aware of the plotting two days before,
but Khanh did not tell the embassy of his plan until just
before it was executed. According to William Bundy, at the
time the assistant secretary of defense for international secu-
rity affairs, Khanh's coup "was most definitely not antici-
pated or stimulated by any American."32X
McCone heard about the coup on the 30th while travel-
ing in Western Europe and was not pleased. He had been
decidedly unimpressed with Khanh when they met during
the DCI's trip to South Vietnam in June 1962, and nothing
he learned about the general afterward made him think dif-
ferently. Khanh, McCone recalled, was "pretty slick" and left
him with "a feeling of insecurity...a very uncertain feeling."
In addition, as he learned more about the circumstances sur-
rounding the coup, McCone came to believe that the
embassy and MACV had kept information from the
Agency. He later wrote that US officials in Saigon ahead of
time had "a clear indication that Khanh meant action. Why
was it not reported by MACV, Lodge, or CAS [Controlled
American Source, a cover name for CIA] not
informed?... [W]hy was the COS excluded from the play
even after the Lodge reporting telegram went out?" "The
remaining scenario of events," McCone concluded, "leaves
doubt as to whether we [US intelligence agencies] were alert
to the indicators, analyzed them for their effect on US pol-
icy and attempted to direct them." In short, the Khanh
coup was an intelligence failure through and through.33><
Si Sources for this paragraph and the next are: McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Memorandum of meeting with Joint Chiefs of Staff," 17 January 1964,
McCone Papers, box 2, folder 10; idem, letter to President Johnson, 23 December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, IV; Vietnam, August?December 1963, 736; idem, mem-
orandum to Rusk, "Subject: Covert Spot Check of Counterinsurgency Reporting in Vietnam," 9 January 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 4, folder 7; Michael
Forrestal (NSC) memorandum to Bundy, "Reporting on the Situation in South Vietnam," 8 January 1964, FRUS, 1964-68, I, Vietnam 1964, 7-8; Colby, Honor-
able Men, 222; Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 44-45; George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam, 168-73;
Colby memorandum, "Meeting on North Viet Nam-7 January 1964," EA Division Files, Job 78-00697R, box 1, folder 7.f
32 Colby, "Memorandum for the Record.. Presidential Meeting on Vietnam, 21 December 1963," McCone Papers, box 3, folder 5; "Operational Reporting on Gen-
eral Khanh Coup...," early February 1964, and "Chronology of Events Leading up to Coup in Saigon...," 3 February 1964, ibid., folder 6. US officials reacted to
Khanh in sharply varied ways. Under Secretary of State Ball called him "one of the best of the generals, both courageous and sophisticated"; Lodge and Harkins con-
sidered him "cool, clear-headed, [and] realistic," "a tough, able military leader"; and Colby thought he was perceptive and courageous. On the other hand Maxwell
Taylor depicted Khahn as "a skillful or unscrupulous croupier in the political roulette as played in Saigon," and the Agency's veteran Vietnam officer
said he was manipulative and chronically dishonest. A more balanced station assessment of March 1964 described Khanh as a moody loner with intelligence anti
energy. Blair, 108; Marshall Green (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs) memorandum to Rusk, "The New Vietnamese Coup," FRUS, 1964-
1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 44; Forrestal untitled memorandum to the president, 30 January 1964, ibid., 43; Ahern, CIA and the Generals, 20; Taylor, Swords and Plow-
shares, 329.11(,..
33McCone untitled memorandum, 9 March 1964, McCone Payers, box 3, folder '8; transcript of McCone interview with Rowland Evans and Stewart Also 3 Feb-
ruary 1965, ibid., box 9, folder 2: Bird, The Color of Truth, 273; Ahern, CIA and the Generals, 15-18
(HA 1.1_= Report on Vietnam," 46-49,F4116%.
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To get objective assessments of the unsettled situation in
South Vietnam, McCone had Agency officers conduct two
reviews, and took a second trip to the country in March.
Executive Director-Comptroller Kirkpatrick and COS de
Silva did one of the assessments, and the abovementioned
special survey team did the other. De Silva, writing in Feb-
ruary, predicted that the "gradual abrading of the popular
will to resistance? would destabilize the Saigon government
unless countered by South Vietnamese military victories.
Kirkpatrick was "shocked by the number of our (CIA) peo-
ple and of the military, even those whose job is always to say
we are winning, who feel that the tide is against us." He
added that the Viet Gong's superior intelligence capabilities
were a major factor in their success, and that unless commu-
nist infiltration into the South from Laos and Cambodia
was curtailed, "this entire pacification effort is like trying to
mop the floor before turning off the faucet." Around that
time, the urvey team submitted the first of two
reports to t he initial one depicted a scene of gen-
eral deterioration, with the Viet Cong gaining headway, the
South Vietnamese leadership ineffective, and counterinsur-
gency programs in disarray.'.
Soon after receiving the above reports, McCone went to
Saigon. Senior administration officials were not enthusiastic
about his trip, but McNamara and Taylor already were trav-
eling there, and no good reason could be given why the DCI
should not go as well. Moreover, he was not about to let
Agency equities go unprotected during a Pentagon VIP tour
whose main purpose was to convey Washington's endorse-
ment of Khanh. McCone could not be said to be going with
an open mind. A few weeks before, he had commented that
the last special estimate dealing with South Vietnam (dated
12 February) was not sufficiently negative, and just before
he left he wrote that "the situation is worse now than it was
in December...I am more pessimistic of the future of the
American cause in South Vietnam than [before]......35,1K
Little that McCone saw or heard there during six days in
early March would have changed his viewpoint. On the
Vietnamese side, he met with Gen. Khanh and his military
lieutenants; Gen. Minh, now the figurehead chief of state;
and the vice prime ministers or ministers in charge of for-
eign affairs, economics, interior affairs, and cultural and
social affairs. He did not receive what he thought were con-
vincing answers to questions about increased enemy activity,
or about the Saigon government's abilities to conduct suc-
cessful "clear and hold" operations and to win the allegiance
of the estimated 50 percent of the population that did not
care who won the war. A report from the earn
about intelligence and operational problems was notably
discouraging in that regard. Perhaps the bluntest conclusion
the DCI heard came from the Australian colonel who
headed his country's advisory team: "We are being asked the
wrong question. When someone asks 'can the war be won,'
the answer is 'certainly, yes'; but if someone asks 'will the
war be won,' the answer is 'very probably, no.'"36><
When the Pentagon party returned, McNamara submit-
ted to the president a trip report that included a dozen pol-
icy recommendations founded on the premises that South
Vietnam was too important to let fall to the communists
and that current difficulties could be overcome. Besides
increases in nonmilitary aid and military materiel,
McNamara proposed that the US government underwrite
an expansion of the South Vietnamese army and the cre-
ation of a counterguerrilla force, authorize Saigon's forces to
engage in "hot pursuit operations into Laos, and have the
South Vietnamese air force prepared to launch retaliatory air
strikes across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on 72 hours
notice and full-scale air raids (along with US aircraft) on
'Attachment to Elder memorandum to Rusk, "Appraisal of the Conduct of the War in Vietnam," 10 February 1964, and Helms memorandum to Rusk, 18 Febru-
ary 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, 1, Vietnam 1964, 65-66, 84-86. Also around this time, BNE produced a special estimate containing the dire conclusion that "unless
there is a marked improvement in the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces, South Vietnam has at best an even chance of withstand-
ing the insurgency menace during the next few weeks or months." SNIE 50-64, "Short-Term Prospects in Southeast Asia," 12 February 1964, 1.X
3 5 Carter, "Memorandum for the Record.. Special Group (5412) Meeting... 13 February [1964]," McCone Papers, box 1, folder 8; Carter untitled memorandum,
15 February 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 16; McCone memorandum, USIB-M-311, 12 February 1964, ICS Files, Job 82S00096R, box 2, folder
4; McCone, "Memorandum on Vietnam," 3 March 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968,1, Vietnam 1964, 122. President Johnson told the Joint Chiefs on 4 March that "we
must make General Khanh 'our boy' and proclaim the fact to all and sundry. [The President] wants to see Khanh in the newspapers with McNamara and Taylor
holding up his arms." Taylor, "Memorandum of a Conversation Between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President.. .March 4, 1964," ibid., 129. The DCEs above-
cited memorandum on Vietnam included other negative judgments such as: "the prospects for a strong government are not bright.... The problem of reversing the
(downward military] trend is formidable.... [T]here has been submersion of bad news and an overstatement of good news.... [O]ur military operations in South
Vietnam have not been as successful as we assumed up to last December. I think the whole concept has to be reviewed." McCone, "Memorandum on Vietnam,"
3 March 1964, ibid., 121-24.>(?.4
"McCone untitled memorandum, 9 March 1964, "Notes on briefing at MACV Conference Room on 9 March [1964]," and "Notes on Meeting at US
Embassy...9 March 1964...," McCone Papers, box 3, folder 8; "Memorandum of Conversation...Meeting with Colonel Francis P. Serong,
11 March 1964...,"
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Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
30 days notice. McNamara circulated a draft of the report
among the trip participants. Hoping for consensus but
anticipating disagreement, he allowed dissenters to take
footnotes.' (U)
McCone took five. In the last?the longest and most
important?he concurred with McNamara's proposals but
called them "too little too late." He recommended instead a
six-point program that would have significantly escalated
the level of armed conflict and US involvement in Southeast
Asia. For example, whereas McNamara's carefully hedged
program of Cambodian border control emphasized that
operations across the border should depend on the state of
relations with Cambodia, McCone recommended that Gen.
Khanh insist upon an immediate meeting with Prince Siha-
nouk to develop a joint border clearing program. If Siha-
nouk should refuse, McCone stated that Khanh, with US
assistance, should "stop all traffic on the Mekong River to
and from Cambodia, destroy Viet Cong installations in
Cambodia, and authorize ARVN to engage in hot pursuit
across the Cambodian border." In addition, McCone rec-
ommended that Nationalist Chinese troops be introduced
into the delta?a proposal so unacceptable that Taylor
warned that if it were put to the Joint Chiefs, they would
unanimously oppose it.38*
President Johnson did not want policy feuds among his
advisers to be publicized, so at a meeting of the Vietnam
principals to discuss McNamara's draft, he told the secretary
of defense and the DCI that he hoped they could settle their
differences. He deplored the fact that if such a split arose at
an NSC meeting with a few dozen participants, it would
immediately leak to the press. McNamara stated that his
and McCone's judgments could not be reconciled. At that
point, McCone decided to withdraw from the field as a pol-
icy adviser on Vietnam. "[A]s far as I was concerned," he
told Johnson, "I would not advance my views at an NSC
meeting unless specifically requested by the president for the
simple reason that such matters as military and foreign pol-
icy were beyond my competence as Director of Central
Intelligence." He had commented on McNamara's paper
and expressed his thoughts to the president because he was
asked to, but from now on, he said, he would confine him-
self to intelligence issues. At the next NSC meeting,
McCone gave a terse summary of current developments and
said nothing more.',X,
The Intelligence War: The Southern Theater (U)
The administration's war policy review in early 1964
ended with the issuance of NSAM No. 288 on 17 March?
a document that was "minimal in the scale of its recommen-
dations at the same time that it stated US objectives in the
most sweeping terms used up to that time," according to the
Pentagon Papers. The directive ordered the implementation
of the specific proposals in McNamara's report. There were
four possible courses of action at this point, President
Johnson told the NSC: "more war' against the DRV [North
Vietnam] which is undesirable; pulling out, which is unde-
sirable; neutralization, which is impractical and conse-
quently undesirable; and the course outlined [in the report]
which is the only real alternative." The comprehensive pol-
icy entailed, among other objectives, providing economic
assistance to the South Vietnamese peasantry, training an
offensive guerrilla force, augmenting the regular South Viet-
namese army, increasing military aid, and revitalizing the
Strategic Hamlet Program. The policy also called for clan-
destine activities conducted by CIA and US Special Forces.
McNamara forecast that "if we carry out energetically the
proposals he has made, Khanh can stem the tide in South
'McNamara memorandum, "McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam," 5 March 1964, and memorandum to the president, "South Vietnam," 16 March
1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 133, 153-67. (U)
3' McNamara memorandum, "McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam," 5 March 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 155, 157, 164, 166; McCone,
"Memorandum for the Record... Meeting with the President.. .To discuss South Vietnam report," 13 March 1964, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 8. Several times as
DCI, McCone raised the idea of using Nationalist Chinese troops?in previous years referred to as "unleashing Chiang Kai-shek." William Bundy later noted that it
was "a bug with McCone." Ray Cliru was the other Agency champion of deploying "ChiNat" forces. FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964,
126 n. 3; Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Polzgmakers, 55; Langguth, Our Vietnam, 286. Gen. Chiang thought he could best assist the United States and South Vietnam
by airdropping (from US planes) up to 10,000 Nationalist guerrillas into the PRC's southwestern province to promote an anticommunist resistance movement and
disrupt Chinese supply lines into Indochina. FRUS, 1964-1968, 5 Vietnam 1964, 247 n. 4. McCone thought that Nationalist troops might be useful on the Chi-
nese mainland, but he did not support such grandiose ideas in Vietnam. Two hardliners on the JCS?the commandant of the Marine Corps, Lt. Gen. Wallace
Greene, and the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Curtis LeMay, agreed with McCone's criticism of McNamara's report. Greene wrote that its recommendations "offer
little more than a continuation of present programs," and LeMay advocated attacking Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia and North Vietnamese supply lines in
Laos. FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 149-50 n. 3 and 243 n. 3.N4
McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Meeting with the President.. .To discuss South Vietnam report," 13 March 1964, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 8;
Colby, "Memorandum for the Record.. National Security Council Meeting, 17 March 1964," ibid.; "Summary Record of the 524th Meeting of the National Secu-
rity Council... March 17, 1964...," FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 170,1!?
_71.L.94,11
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Vietnam, and within four to six months, improve the situa-
tion there."' Ar
McCone's CIA was active in carrying out the administra-
tion's policy despite the loss of paramilitary responsibilities
under Operation The Agency's clandes-
tine enterprises during 1964 divided into two categories:
pacification, political action, and es iona e o erati n
in the South,
ome or tnese undertakings were already underway when
the NSAM No. 288 policy was promulgated and were sub-
sumed under it. US officials thought the change in govern-
ment in Saigon would create a more hospitable environment
for operations. The "Big Minh" regime had objected to
sending Agency officers and US advisers into the countr
side below the provincial or re imental levels
The Agency's pacification program emphasized political
action and propaganda and often experimented with varia-
tions on earlier projects.' As indicated by the gradual
replacement of the term "counterinsurgency" with "pacifica-
tion," the focus shifted from repressive action against the
Viet Cong to mobilizing the Buddhist-Confucian lowland
peasantry to side with the Saigon government against the
insurgents. The Census-Grievance and Aspiration Program
was designed to attract the political loyalty of villagers by
providing an outlet for their complaints on which the gov-
ernment would try to act quickly. It had an intelligence pay-
off as well: during interviews, peasants often identified
communist cadre. Counter-Terror Teams (later renamed Pro-
vincial Reconnaissance Units) provided a measure of physical
security by taking the war into Viet Cong safe areas with
raids, ambushes, and "psywar" ploys. Advanced Political
Action Teams and Armed Propaganda Teams (later called Peo-
ple's Action Teams and Revolutionary Development Teams),
like the communists, lived, ate, slept, and worked in the
countryside to assert the government's presence and demon-
strate its benevolent intentions. These units, eventually
comprising up to 40 men, provided services to villagers and
protected them from the insurgents until they were able to
defend themselves. By mid-1964, more than 1,200 people
in 17 of South Vietnam's 43 provinces were involved with
CIA-directed political action teams.)K,
The Agency's success with pacification depended largely
on the commitment of the provincial government and the
efficiency with which the indigenous bureaucracy delivered
on its promises. CIA's pacification projects had to compete
for attention from local officials?they ran alongside a
much larger effort by the Saigon government to assert its
control in rural areas through a reactivated Strateaic Hamlet
Program?
coning to "i iam o y, t e pro-
grams?particularly the People's Action Teams?were more
effective at neutralizing and eliminating the Viet Cong
infrastructure than at supplanting it with "positive local
political institutions to prevent VC reinfiltration and sub-
version." As he later wrote, they "showed inconclusive
results because they were imposed from above...rather than
built from below by local efforts" (his emphasis). The
projects accomplished enough, however, that Ambassador
Maxwell Taylor and MACV commander William Westmo-
reland (who replaced Lodge and Harkins, respectively, dur-
ing the summer) recommended in August 1964 that they be
expanded. McCone did not involve himself much in discus-
sions about the pacification program and left its develop-
ment and implementation in the hands of the DDP?
especially FE Division Chief Colby, who recalled that the
DCI "was inclined to come directly to me" on Southeast
Asian matters. CIA's pacification initiatives were marginally
NSAM No. 288, "Implementation of South Vietnam Programs," 17 March 1964, and "Summary Record of the 524th Meeting of the National Security Coun-
cil...March 17,1964...," FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 171-73; The Pentagon Papers 3,3; Colby, "Memorandum for the Record.. National Security Coun-
cil Meeting, 17 March 1964," McCone Papers, box 3, folder 8.A
" Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, 133; Kahin, 189-90; Lodge telegram to Rusk, 21 January 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964,30-31.
?fic
"This overview draws on Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, chaps. 7-9; Annual Report for FY 1964, 137; FE Division, "Chronology of CIA
Involvement in Vietnam Paramilitary Programs," 2 June 1975, EA Division Files, Job 81-00336R, box 6, folder 21; de Silva, chaps. 20-21; Colby, Honorable Men,
231-34; and Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, 209-12. CIA operations had to be coordinated with the rest of the Country Team, and other elements of the US
Mission, especially the military, often participated in them. In addition, Agency officers worked in conjunction with a medley of civic action, safety, development,
assistance, and "self-help" programs that overt US agencies administered. See Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, 214-20
364
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Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
effective, ably run, and uncontroversial, and so did not
require McCone's attention.43>e
The same was true with Saigon station's unilateral politi-
cal action and intelligence collection activities. They
included cultivating and maintaining assets
using local me la to is-
number of well-placed
seminate propaganda; running a
sources
The stations priority espionage target was the
Viet Cong political apparatus: provincial committees and
subcommittees, and leaders and members of local guerrilla
and terror squads. Overall, Colby recalled,
CIA's political contacts and unilateral penetrations did
provide some useful insights into the major political
developments on the Saigon scene, but as most of
these took place in full public view anyway and at
such a dizzying pace, they were almost as well reported
in the press and by the embassy, leaving the Agency
very little to add.... What's more, the Agency's efforts
to work with Vietnamese intelligence services to
improve coverage of the Communists in the country-
side were almost totally frustrated by the rapid
replacement of the leadership of such services with
every change in government, and the preoccupation of
the new appointees with the much more proximate
danger of yet another coup.4*"
As with other hard targets, technical means?overhead
reconnaissance -proved relatively
more effective than human sources at collecting intelligence
on the Viet Cong. Since 1962, CIA had flown many U-2
missions over South Vietnam and parts of Laos and Cambo-
dia to photograph Viet Cong activity. McCone reminded
the principals, however, that imagery collection faced seri-
ous limitations in a guerrilla war. He pointed out that, even
with daily coverage, much insurgent activity was undetect-
able from the air. Except for truck convoys, Agency photo-
interpreters had not been able to track enemy infiltration
into the South regularly and accurately. By April 1964, in
any event, imagery targets shifted from strategic reconnais-
sance to discern communist intentions, to tactical support
of counterinsurgency operations as the Viet Cong stepped
up attacks on villages and ARVN positions.45>r
'Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, 181; Colby memorandum to McCone, "Implications of Saigon Staooki%Experiment in Counterinsurgency,"
24 November 1964, EA Division Files, Job 78-00597R, box 1, folder 9; Colby, Honorable Men, 224, and Lost Victory, 121.
4' FE Division memorandum, "CIA Political Actions in South Viet Nam," 16 December 1964, EA Division Files, Job 78-00597R, box 1, folder 13; de Silva, 216;
Dale Andrade, Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War, 46; Colby, Honorable Men, 226, 229-34; Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era,
"Peter Jessup (NSC), "Minutes of the Special Meeting of the Special Group, 24 February 1964," McCone Papers, box 1, folder 7; Pedlow and Welzenbach, 230)S
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CHAPTER 15
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The Intelligence War: Taking It to the North (U)
The Agency's worldwide collection program against
North Vietnam, instituted in 1959, had deficiencies that
came to McCone's attention at a USIB postmortem on a
special estimate in April 1964. The estimate had stated that
"[f]irm information about North Vietnam is extremely
sparse. Accordingly, analysis... is extremely difficult."
produced very
unspectacular results, l.,olby wrote at the time. The DDP
attributed the intelligence gap to North Vietnam's isolation
and tight security. A former operations officer with long
experience in East Asia recalled that "[o]f all of the denied
area targets at the time [the early 1960s] to include the
USSR, PRC, GDR [East Germany], North Korea.. .1
believed North Vietnam was the most difficult target." Not-
withstanding those formidable difficulties in the field,
McCone ordered CIA officers to do what they could to
improve reporting.'
MACV directed and controlled this ambitious agenda
and created an unconventional warfare unit, euphemistically
called the Studies and Observations Group (SOG), to carry
out the US military's assignments.
President Johnson
approved the program on 16 January 1964, and it went into
effect on 1 February. In mid-March, it was assimilated into
McNamara's policy recommendations that were promul-
gated as NSAM No. 288. OPLAN 34A became the weapon
the administration used to take the war to the North with-
out overcommitting the United States militarily during an
election year. As Maxwell Taylor wrote at the time, "It is
quite apparent that [the president] does not want to lose
South Vietnam before next November nor does he want to
get the country into war." Johnson, McNamara recalled, was
"grasping for a way to hurt North Vietnam without direct
military action."
'SNIE 14.3-64, The Outlook for North Vietnam," 4 March 1964; Colby memorandum to Helms, "Comments to DCI on Memorandum Titled 'North Viet-
nam: Intelligence Deficiencies," 29 April 1964, and McCone letter to Hughes, 29 April 1964, CMS Files, Job 82R00370R, box 5, folder 27; Shultz, 15,>c
"Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Bundy untitled memorandum to the president, 7 January 1964, Taylor, "Memorandum of a Conversation Between
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the President.. March 4, 1964," and Taylor memorandum to McNamara, "North Vietnam Operations," 19 May 1964, FRUS, 1964-
1968, 1, Vietnam 1964, 4,129,338-40; Shultz, 37-40, 281-90, 299-301, 319-22; Conboy and Andrade, 90-96; Tourison, chaps. 5-8; McNamara, 103. CINC-
PAC began concerted planning for unattributable hit-and-run raids against North Vietnam, to be carried out by South Vietnamese commandos trained by US mil-
itary in May 1963. The Joint Chiefs approved a draft, OPLAN 34-63, in August?September; that plan was discussed in November in
Honolulu. Uepartment ot Defense, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967, vol. 3, appendix IV-C-2-a, 2. (U)
366 .54C.?EL17/
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"Kftgg,F.Z./)
Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
CIA had turned over its agent infiltrations to the US
Army under
Within its own bailiwick, CIA airdropped
17,265,000 leaflets, 215,000 newspapers, 23,950 gift kits,
and nine deception kits into the North between 1 February
and 1 July 1964. A black radio operation, suspended during
the November 1963 coup, was resumed in April 1964 and
by July broadcast around six hours a week. In May 1964,
the overt Voice of Freedom radio station went on the air
seven to eight hours a day from Hue, just south of the
DMZ,
10
avow a tepeat 01 S laKCOVel 01 1./ z operations over
Cuba during the missile crisis, he circulated?with Bundy's
approval?a memorandum reaffirming CIA's authority for
U-2 flights over most denied territory or covert flights over
friendly territory. 52
In Special Group meetings, McCone argued for granting
CIA blanket approval for photographic overflights of Laos
Bundy and Vance objected,
citing the need for at least the appearance of US compliance
with the Geneva accords. The DCI contended that "we had a
single war on our hands in the entire area and we should not
a Because of the problems CIA had experienced with Colby recommended that McCone not object if the Pentagon wanted them. The
DCI took the advice. Colby memorandum to McCone, ratuarc Lommittee raper on North Vietnam Operations," 4 January 1964, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box
16, folder 342.A,
5'Tourison, 124, and chaps. 5-8 passim; Annual Report for FY 1964, 138; John L. Plaster, SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam, 24-26.
184-85; Shultz, 68-69.X
5' Shultz, 44,132-33,284,304-5; Conboy and Andrade, 95-96; Ahern, "The Way We Do Things," 85...X
52 Elder, "McCone as DCI (1973)," 1348-51; Pedlow and Welzenbach, 230-31; Vance memorandum, "U-2 Reconnaissance in SEASLA," 9 February 1964, and
Carter memorandum to McCone, "U-2 Reconnaissance in the Far East," 23 February 1964, DCI Files, Job 98B01712R, box 1, folder 9; Carter, "Memorandum for
the Record.. Special Group (5412) Meeting...13 February [1964]," and McCone memorandum, "Meeting of Special Group.. .24 February 1964," McCone Papers,
box 1, folder 8; Jessup, "Minutes of the Special Group Meeting, 13 February 1964," and memorandum to Rusk, McNamara, and McCone, "U-2 Reconnaissance in
SEASIA," 3 March 1964, ibid., folder 7. By White House directive, the Air Force would fly overt U-2 missions over all of South Vietnam, Cambodia within 30 miles
of South Vietnam, North Vietnam within 30 miles of South Vietnam or the coast, and the Laotian panhandle. CIA would fly covert U-2 missions over the remainder
of North Vietnam and Laos. Bundy untitled memorandum to Rusk, McNamara, and McCone, 1 March 1964, DCI Files, Job 98B01712R, box 1, folder 3...X?
-r5rffirwitt1-7`
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n't?44E.114'
CHAPTER 15
be so sensitive that we tied our own hands in fightin this
war," but the others' diplomatic sensitivities prevailed."
From the inception of OPLAN 34A, McCone held little
hope for its success.54 He believed that the missions were too
limited; that the Viet Cong were already too well established
in the South for Hanoi's support to them to be influenced
by "pinprick" operations; and that the record of evious
missions since mid-1962 was poor.
e power o t
government was t e crucia variable, the DCI insisted.
Unless it established a firm hold in the countryside, expand-
ing clandestine operations in the North would be pointless
because the Viet Cong "in all probability...would ultimately
take over" the South.
It seems obvious to me that unless the Khanh govern-
ment is strengthened...carrying the action into North
Vietnam would not guarantee victory.... [I]f the
Khanh government remains fragile.. .and we are con-
tinually confronted with coup plotting and.., if the
resentment of [the] American presence increases, then
it appears to me that carrying the war to North Viet-
nam would not win the war in South Vietnam and
would cause the United States such serious problems
in every corner of the world that we should not sanc-
tion such an effort,"N
McCone did not accept the arguments of Rusk and
McNamara that OPLAN 34A demonstrated American
resolve. By this time, he had had enough of signals and sym-
bols and did not want Agency resources squandered on ges-
tures. What was needed, he contended, was a "more
dynamic, aggressive plan" that would reinvigorate the strate-
gic hamlet program, expand pacification efforts, launch
cross-border attacks against Viet Gong havens in Laos and
Cambodia, and undertake other political and diplomatic
initiatives. Nonetheless, although he thought that "no great
results are likely from this kind of effort," he joined
McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy in recommending that the
president approve OPLAN 34A. He had said his piece, and
More Dark Clouds (U)
McCone soon had more reason to disagree with the
Johnson administration's emerging policy of gradually carry-
ing the war to the North. During 7-9 April, he took part in
a war game called SIGMA 1-64 that was intended to project
how the conflict would develop over the next decade." (He
had suggested the objective to the Joint War Games Agency
in January when the idea of playing a Vietnam game had
been discussed.) Designed by the RAND Corporation,
" McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Special Group Meeting on 23 April [19641...," and "Memorandum for the Record...303 Committee
Meeting...24 September [1964]...," McCone Papers, box 1, folder 8.)64g..
'Sources for this paragraph and the next are: Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 46-47,49-50,52-53; Colby memorandum to McCone, "OPLAN 34A:
Accomplishments During Phase I (1 February-31 May 1964)," McCone Papers, box 1, folder 8; McCone memorandum, "Discussion with Secretary McNamara
and General Taylor...," 29 February 1964, ibid., box 9, folder 5; Colby "Memorandum for the ' -c. . ? ? ?? ?7 January 1964," and
McCone, "Memorandum From the
President's special Assistant tor National security Affairs (Bundy) to the President," 7 January 1964, and McCone, "Memorandum on Vietnam," 3 March 1964,
FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964,4-5,125-27; Colby memorandum to McCone, "Krulak Committee Paper on North Vietnam Operations," 4 January 1964,
ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 16, folder 342.)K.,
5 5 McCone later made his argument in more colorful terms to his friends Henry and Clare Boothe Luce: if South Vietnam were not strong enough to take retaliation
from the North, it risked "being clawed to death by the northern monster in its dying gasps after the heart had been struck." McCone, "Memorandum for the
Record.. Luncheon Meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Luce. .12 June 1964," McCone Papers, box 2, folder 1 1
56Though McCone did not say so, he also may have objected to the political calculations that were factored into White House decisions to limit US involvement in
Vietnam during an election year. President Johnson expressed that thinking in a secretly recorded conversation with McGeorge Bundy in March. In response to the
Joint Chiefs' urgings that the United States "get in or get out" of Vietnam?a position very much like the Da's?Johnson told Bundy privately that he was only a
"trustee" president, and that "I got to win an election...and then...you can make a decision. But in the meantime let's see if we can't find enough things to do to
keep them off base and stop these shipments that are coming in from Laos, and take a few selective targets to upset them a bit without getting another Korea opera-
tion started." Transcript of Johnson conversation with Bundy, 4 March 1964, Taking Charge, 267. (U)
5 7 SIGMA I-64 is described in most detail by another participant, William H. Sullivan of the Department of State, in his memoir, Obbligato: 1939-1979: Notes on a
Foreign Service Career, 178-81; see also Bird, The Color of Truth, 276-77; John Prados, Pentagon Games, 62-63; Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 57-58;
Krepinevich, 133-34; Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 460-62; Helms memorandum to McCone, "War Game on South Vietnam," 24 March 1964, ER
Files, Job 80R01480R, box 16, folder 342. Sullivan, who played the commander of North Vietnamese forces, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, misdates the game as taking
place in the spring of 1963. McCone did not participate in the first Vietnam war game held during his directorship, SIGMA 1-62 in February 1962, which pitted a
US team against a Viet Gong enemy. (Cf. Henry L. Trewhitt, McNamara, 222, which confuses the 1-62 and 1-64 games.) He was scheduled to take part in a coun-
terinsurgency war game at the Pentagon in late October 1963, but his records do not indicate that he did. Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Pol-
itics in the Vietnam Era, 125-26; McCone calendars, entries for 24,28, and 30 October 1963..,k
368 SEERE,14
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Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
SIGMA 1-64 was a command post exercise in which the
players were divided into two teams?Blue (the United
States and South Vietnam) and Red (North Vietnam and
the Viet Cong)?each with a policy and an action element.
McCone headed the Blue Team's policy group, and his Red
Team counterpart was Maxwell Taylor; they layed Lyndon
Johnson and Ho Chi Minh, respectively.
deputy chief of FE Division, and Chester Cooper o ONE
were the other CIA players in McCone's group; four other
FE and ONE officers played on the action and control ele-
ments.X
The rules for SIGMA 1-64 called for Taylor's team to use
guerrilla strategy and tactics, exploit weaknesses in conven-
tional military doctrine, accept heavy casualties, and under-
mine democratic processes by using propaganda and
deception. As the game progressed, military and political
conditions in South Vietnam worsened, and McCone's team
found its options shrinking to two unpromising alternatives:
major escalation of conventional warfare or de-escalation
and eventual withdrawal. The former risked Chinese inter-
vention and repetition of the Korean War, and the latter
would seriously damage America's credibility and prestige.
By the end of the exercise, steady escalation and the use of
massive US air power north of the DMZ had not changed
either the tactical or the strategic picture. The foundation of
current administration policy was thus called into question:
Attacking the North did not save the South. In the game,
even though the United States eventually deployed 500,000
ground troops and a large contingent of air and naval forces
over a period of several years, the communists overran most
of Laos and controlled most of the South Vietnamese coun-
tryside. Their infrastructure remained intact despite severe
losses in manpower, and they had overextended and demor-
alized the ARVN. US policy had severe domestic repercus-
sions as well. Antiwar agitation arose on American
campuses, and Congress prepared to oppose the administra-
tion's handling of the war. (U)
According to William Sullivan of the Department of
State, who led the Red Team's action element, McCone
"concluded that his organization [the Blue Team] ought to
call it quits and cut its losses."
The experience of that game made him a dove on
Vietnam then and forever more. He felt that its pro-
jections were accurate and that the shadows they cast
before them should be heeded as real. He did not like
what he foresaw if the US engagement in Vietnam
continued down that predictable path.
That observation is not entirely accurate, for McCone
would soon advocate a much heavier conventional aerial
and clandestine assault against North Vietnam and the Viet
Cong. It is correct to say, however, that the game hardened
his opinion that the United States must do what it needed
to win the war, or it should pull out and leave the struggle to
the South Vietnamese. (U)
One insight McCone did not take away from SIGMA
1-64 was that heavy bombing of North Vietnam would not
force it to stop supporting the communist insurgency in the
South. In a review of the game, two CIA participants told
the DCI that "[n]o data have as yet been brought to bear
which convince us that bombing the DRV could be
expected to have any greater effect on the capabilities and
will of the enemy than was the case with the French against
the Viet Minh, a decade ago, or the US against North
Korea." McCone had very different views on the efficacy of
air power and would soon become, after Air Force Chief of
Staff Curtis LeMay, the strongest voice in the administra-
tion for bombing Hanoi into submission (see Chapter 17).58
>4;(
Just after SIGMA 1-64 was finished, the DCEs special
intelligence survey team submitted its second report. Wash-
ington and Saigon, the Dfficers concluded, had
made progress in developing counterinsurgency programs,
but both the US and South Vietnamese military remained
fixed on conventional methods of warfare, and bureaucratic
inertia and disarray at the middle and lower levels of the
Saigon government were stifling initiative and innovation.
58
and Harold P. Ford (ONE), "Memorandum for the Record.. Comment on the Vietnam War Games, SIGMA I-64...," DDO Files, Job 78-
03041R, box 1, fiJder 9. The record does not indicate whether McCone shared LeMay's criticism that SIGMA 1-64's rules had artificially limited the Blue Team's
ability to use air power. The outspoken general's objections caused enough controversy that the Pentagon decided to replay the game in September 1964. Even with
greater weight and flexibility given to the Air Force, SIGMA 11-64 produced similar results and reinforced doubts concerning heavy bombing of the North. McCone
was invited to participate in the game and showed up for one session. Walter Elder has said that McCone "hated all war games" and grudgingly participated out of
"innate snobbery when he learned that the other seniors would be there." Prados, Keepers of the Keys, 205-6; Krepinevich, 133-34; Bird, The Color of Truth, 277;
Karnow, 399-400; Thomas B. Allen, War Games, chap. 10; McCone calendars, entry for 10 September 1964; Earle G. Wheeler (Chairman, JCS) letter to McCone,
1 August 1964, and i )=Memorandum for the Record...Comments on SIGMA 1 October 1964, DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3, folder 8; Ford, CIA
and the Vietnam Po , 67. McGeorge Bundy also criticized SIGMA 1-64, saying it had been "quite crude" and "probably moved too fast" to simulate reality.
Colby memorandum, "Meeting on North Vietnam-30 May 1964," EA Division Files, Job 78-00697R, box 1, folder 7.
Hirelafj,(.1
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CHAPTER 15
The survey team recommended that the administration
increase US advice and support for intelligence collection,
political and civic action, and psychological warfare pro-
grams, and that disparate paramilitary forces be combined
and more tightly administered. McCone urged his deputies
to "button up" the team's work by moving its proposals
ahead to the NSC's Vietnam Coordinating Committee,
with the presumption that two of its key members, Sullivan
and NSC official Michael Forrestal, would endorse them.
That was done-and the ideas went no farther. The Coun-
try Team viewed CIA warily, and the Pentagon dismissed
Agency suggestions for better utilizing regular forces."
In early May 1964, Gen. Khanh's unexpected proposal
that South Vietnam go on a war footing, evacuate Saigon,
and break relations with France (because Charles de Gaulle
had been advocating "neutralization") prompted an urgent
meeting at the White House with the president, Rusk,
McNamara, Taylor, McGeorge Bundy, and McCone. They
decided that McNamara, Taylor, Forrestal, and William
Bundy should go to Saigon to deal with this sudden devel-
opment. No one suggested including McCone, and his offer
of intelligence support (in the form of William Colby) was
not accepted. The secretary of defense returned at mid-
month to report the bleak news that chaos reigned in South
Vietnam. Viet Cong attacks had intensified, and the Khanh
government had lost control of more territory despite
improvements in counterinsurgency operations. To stabilize
the dramatically deteriorating situation, McNamara pro-
posed a large increase in Saigon's regular and paramilitary
forces, which in turn would require another sizable incre-
ment in American support.60)K
President Johnson did not want to widen the war signifi-
cantly, but he was willing to take some risks. How would
Hanoi and Peking react, he asked the principals, if he autho-
rized retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam, as Gen.
Khanh wanted? Taylor did not think the communists'
responses would amount to much, but McCone sharply dis-
agreed. He warned that neither the North Vietnamese nor
the Communist Chinese could be expected to sit passively
while the war's tempo and scope increased drastically. In a
brief private meeting on 16 May, the DCI told the president
that, at his direction, CIA's most experienced analysts had
prepared a comprehensive assessment and concluded that
the state of affairs in the South was grave. More American
economic and military aid to Saigon would not solve the
fundamental problem-Khanh's failure to create a strong
and stable government. At other meetings, McCone advised
that there was now at least an even chance that, by the end
of the year, both Vietnam and Laos "would be very difficult
to save" unless strong action was taken directly against
North Vietnam. Committing US ground troops would be a
political blunder, however, because "[Ole American public
are fed up with adventures such as the Korean War and
would not stand for another one." Instead, air attacks
"would be more decisive...and possibly conclusive," and the
public would accept them. "If we go into North Vietnam,"
he told the NSC, "we should go in hard." In taking this bel-
ligerent position, the DCI differed with most of his Viet-
nam specialists in the DDP, DI, and ONE, who continued
to insist that the war would be won or lost in the South, and
that the best hope for victory lay in improving Saigon's
political and military performance.61)4(
emorandum to McCone, "Special Report of the CIA Special Survey Tea ion to Vietnam," 13 April 1964, McCone untitled memorandum to
April 1964, and emorandum to Helms, "The Two Reports on ecommendations," 15 April 1964, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box
16, folder 342. MACV co Harkins thought the survey team's February report mixed old information and unevaluated observations, went beyond its area of
responsibility, and would confuse policymakers. Harkins cable to Taylor, MAC 665, 21 February 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 100-102. Lodge was
more ingratiating when he met with the team in early March. Intelligence Survey Team memorandum to COS, "1st Meeting with the Ambassador," 8 March 1964,
McCone Papers, box 3, folder 8. COS Peer de Silva cabled Headquarters that the team's "presence on the Vietnamese scene was looked upon with some suspicion
and considerable wariness by American elements here, principally MACV and to a certain extent the Embassy.... All were relieved and noticeably friendlier when
the team departed." SAIG 5751, 13 April 1964, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 16, folder 342X
65Documents 136-38 and 140-42 in FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 284-96; Cooper memorandum to McCone, "Comments of Saigon LimDis Cable
2108," McCone memorandum, "Discussion at Luncheon Meeting[,] 5 May [19641...," Colby memoranda, "Presidential Meeting on Vietnam-6 May 1964," and
"Memorandum for the Record... Report by Secretary McNamara-14 May 1964," McCone Papers, box 6, folder
McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...NSC Meeting...15 May [1964]...," and "Memorandum for the Record...National Security Council Meeting-
16 May 1964," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 8; "Notes Prepared by the Secretary of Defense...May 14, 1964," "Memorandum Prepared by the Directorate of
Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency," 15 May 1964, "Summary Record of the National Security Council Executive Committee Meeting...May 24, 1964...,"
SNIE 50-2-64, "Probable Consequences of Certain US Actions with Respect to Vietnam and Laos, 25 May 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 322-27,
336, 370, 378-80; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion at Dinner at the White House.. .May 24th[, 19641...," McCone Papers, box 3, folder 10;
Cooper memorandum to McCone, "The Military Effectiveness of Aerial Strikes on PL/DRV Targets in Laos,' 30 May 1964, ibid.; "CIA IG Report on Vietnam,"
56-60; Ford, CIA anti the Vietnam Policymakers, 62.>41
370
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?SeCialtra
Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
McCone joined almost all of the administration's senior
Vietnam policymakers at a conference at CINCPAC head-
quarters in Honolulu during the first week of June for an
extensive discussion of the whole situation in Southeast
Asia.62 Despite all the talk, no major policy decision was
made. A proposed action plan involving graduated military
pressures, culminating in limited air attacks against North
Vietnam, went unapproved. McCone spoke infrequently
during the three days he was there. When he did, he reiter-
ated his grim view of events and prospects, in contrast to the
more upbeat Lodge and Westmoreland. He disagreed with
McNamara about the value of "surgical" bombing. The sec-
retary of defense thought such attacks would convey the
desired signal to Hanoi whether the targets were destroyed
or not. McCone thought the passage of a congressional reso-
lution supporting military action would deliver a much
stronger message and be an "enormous deterrent" to the
North Vietnamese.A
The conference ended inconclusively, with US depart-
ments and agencies essentially being told to do what they
were doing, only a bit more and better. "At best,"
McNamara wrote to the president, during the next three to
six months, "the situation will jog along about as it
is... [and] it may continue to deteriorate slowly." A follow-
on meeting of Vietnam advisers, which McCone attended,
made little additional progress, and without a plan to esca-
late the war, the administration for now dropped the idea of
getting Congress' formal approval for future military action.
The president wanted to keep Vietnam out of the upcoming
campaign. He had no intention of abandoning South Viet-
nam, but he would not expand US involvement, either. For
now, the current policy would continue, as would planning
for a wider war in the near future.64>;,,
McNamara's forecast proved accurate. During the next
several weeks, the South Vietnamese army won a few minor
battles but did not seize the initiative in repelling more fre-
quent Viet Cong attacks. Buddhists, Catholics, and students
resumed antigovernment activity. Rumors of coups swirled
continuously in Saigon. Gen. Kha_nh, uneasy and insecure,
publicly urged the United States to "march to the North"
and complained about the new ambassador, Maxwell Tay-
lor, appointed in late June. Taylor reported in August that
"the best thing that can be said about the present Khanh
government is that it has lasted six months and has about a
50-50 chance of lasting out the year...." In the meantime,
North Vietnam mobilized its own forces for war, accelerated
the transformation of the Ho Chi Minh Trail from a web of
jungle pathways into an intricate logistical network, and
prepared regular army units for infiltration into the South.
As of late summer 1964, the administration's policy of grad-
uated pressures against the North and increased support for
the Saigon government was demonstrably inadequate.65X
The Tonkin Gulf Incidents: A Sign of the Times (U)
McCone's forthright criticisms of US policy in Southeast
Asia were even less welcome now than in previous months,
and his assessment of the first Vietnam crisis of the Johnson
62 Sources used on the conference are: documents 187-89,192-93,201,210, and 214 in FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964,412-33,440-46,461-64,487-92,
300; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Observations and Agreed Actions at Honolulu Meetings...," 3 June 1964, and William Bundy, "Memorandum for
the Record...Tuesday Afternoon Session in Honolulu, June 2,1964, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 11; McNamara, 121-22; Dallek, Flawed Giant, 143-46. The
main participants at the Honolulu conference, besides the DCI, were McNamara, Taylor, Rusk, William Bundy, Forrestal, Westmoreland, Lodge, and Adm. Harry
Felt, the CINCPAC.X
63 General Counsel Lawrence Houston had advised McCone that the 1954 and 1962 Geneva protocols on Vietnam and Laos, respectively, did not sanction most of
the military moves the administration was considering, and even if the SEATO treaty permitted them, he believed that it was politically unwise for the United States
to engage in direct combat in Southeast Asia without congressional authorization. McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Meeting of the Executive Committee
with the President...," 6 June 1964, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 9; Colby, "Memorandum for the Record.. White House Meeting on Southeast Asia, 6 June
1964," DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3, folder 12; Houston memorandum to McCone, "Legal Aspects of the Southeast Asia Situation," 8 June 1964, ibid., box
3, folder 11; Elder, "McCone as DCI (1973)," 851-54. At the White House's behest?one of the rare times it used him for that purpose?McCone met with sev-
eral members of Congress after the Honolulu conference to determine whether a resolution would pass. He got an unenthusiastic reception. McCone, "Various Dis-
cussions Concerning a Joint Resolution by Congress in Connection with Southeast Asia," 24 June 1964, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 11.1,4
"McGeorge Bundy recalled the frustration he and other advisers felt about the president's reluctance to confront the Vietnam issue during the pre-election period.
"He was extremely careful...you couldn't get a decision out of him." Quoted in Dallek, Flawed Giant, 148. (U)
'Taylor cable to Rusk, SAIG 377,10 August 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 657 memorandum to
McCone, "Station Relations with Ambassador Taylor," 28 July 1964, with attachments, Mc one Papers, box 3, miner IL; Allem, Lin GULL4 Generals, 23-24;
"CIA IG Report on Vietnam," 74; Colby, Lost Victory, chap. 10 passim; Kahin, chap. 8 passim. McCone judged that the change in ambassadors gave CIA an oppor-
tunity to improve its standing at the embassy, especially if the Agency counterattacked against other US officials who had made it look bad:
I do not think we should pull any punches in laying OUL the failures of Lodge to utilize the Station properly, the damage done by "blowing" covert
assets.. .and the fact that MACV plumbered up a lot of very good work on the part of the station as a result of ... I want to demonstrate to
Taylor a willingness to do anything and everything to put the show on the road and give them support and I co not want to pro ect anyone, including Gen-
eral Taylor himself, from past errors.
McCone memorandum to Helms, 26 June 1964, McCone Papers, box 9, folder
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CHAPTER 15
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presidency?the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of early August
1964?had no evident influence on administration policy.66
On the afternoon of the 2nd, three North Vietnamese
motor torpedo boats attacked the US Navy destroyer Mad-
dox 30 miles off the coast. The Maddox was in international
waters at the time, but earlier it had been several miles inside
the 12-mile limit claimed by
Hanoi, conducting an
ELINT mission as part of a
series of patrols, code-
named DESOTO, that the
US Navy had run in the
Tonkin Gulf since Febru-
ary. The Maddox and US
Navy aircraft from a nearby
carrier sank or disabled two
enemy vessels. The next day,
accompanied by another
DESOTO ship, the destroyer C. Turner Joy, the Maddox
continued its clandestine collection mission and again sailed
close to the North Vietnamese coast.X'
tion plan, OPLAN 37-65, that incorporated OPLAN 34A
as a continuing covert program.X
McCone was on the West Coast when the first incident
occurred and did not return to Washington until the 4th. In
the meantime, President Johnson kept CIA out of the loop.
He did not ask any Agency
officer?not Acting DCI
McCone at an NSC meeting ab
incident (U)
On the night of the 4th, the US ships reported that
enemy PT boats were firing on them. Despite subsequent
confusion on the scene and in Washington about what, if
anything, had happened, President Johnson?who chose to
respond to the first attack only with a diplomatic protest?
decided on the 5th to retaliate by sending US planes to
bomb several North Vietnamese offshore naval installations
and an oil depot. These airstrikes were the United States'
first overt punitive attacks on North Vietnam. The presi-
dent went on national television late that evening to justify
his action: "Aggression by terror against the peaceful villag-
ers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggres-
sion on the high seas against the United States." He then
called on Congress to approve the grandly labeled "Joint
Resolution to Promote the Maintenance of International
Peace and Security in Southeast Asia." Soon known as the
Tonkin Gulf Resolution, it authorized the president to use
whatever military force he judged necessary against the Viet-
namese communists. Seized by a sense of crisis, Congress
passed the resolution on the 7th with only two dissenting
votes. Also that day, the JCS approved a new military opera-
out the first Tonkin Gulf
Photo: Bettmarm/CORBIS
Carter, DDP Helms, FE
Division Chief Colby, DDI
Cline, or Vietnam Working
Group chairman Cooper?
to attend his first meeting
with key Vietnam advisers
just hours after the North
Vietnamese attack on the
2nd. He did, however, sum-
mon several lower ranking
military intelligence officers (he later called them "experts in
technical intelligence") to help interpret intercepted North
Vietnamese radio messages. At this stage, the president was
treating the matter as purely military. Agency officers did
not participate in any meetings on the Tonkin Gulf inci-
dents until McCone gave his first direct advice to Johnson at
a luncheon meeting on the 4th, attended also by Rusk,
McNamara, Vance, and McGeorge Bundy. He told Johnson
that he "favored a dynamic action because the NVN's
[North Vietnamese] had committed an aggressive act of war
against us. We were the victims." He urged a forceful
response even though he and others in the administration
knew that Hanoi may have been retaliating for OPLAN
34A raids by American-trained South Vietnamese maritime
commandos on targets in North Vietnam on 30 July.
McCone concurred with McNamara's proposal that US
forces attack four North Vietnamese naval bases, but he
added that the president should seek a congressional resolu-
tion authorizing the military action, as Eisenhower had dur-
ing the Lebanon crisis in 1958.67
At an NSC meeting early that evening, however,
McCone expressed strong reservations about the rationale
on which Johnson was basing his decision to launch a retal-
iatory air strike. When the president asked him if the North
660n the Tonkin Gulf incidents, in addition to the previously cited sources on the Johnson administration and Vietnam, see also Hanyok, chap. 5; Edwin E. MoIse,
Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, passim; Johnson, American Cryptology, 515-23; Bamford, Body of Secrets, 293-301; Prados, Hidden History of the
Vietnam War, chap. 6; Bird, The Color of Truth, 285-89; McNamara, chap. 5; Edward J. Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald, The United States Navy and the Vietnam
Conflict. Volume II, chaps. 14-15; Touripn, chap. 10; and "Memorandum to the Director... Review of the 2 and 4 August Incidents in the Tonkin Gulf," 8 August
1964, McCone Papers, box 8, folder 1.A.c,
372 ITSIZEJ7/
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"StriRc.i4c,,
Working With a New Boss (I): McCone, LBJ, and Vietnam (U)
Vietnamese wanted to provoke a war by attacking US Navy
ships, McCone replied:
No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to
our attacks on their offshore islands. They are
responding out of pride and on the basis of defense
considerations. The attack is a signal to us that the
North Vietnamese have the will and determination to
continue the war. They are raising the ante.
President Johnson and his advisers did not believe Hanoi
would be so foolhardy as to challenge the formidable naval
power of United States and would not have retaliated for
OPLAN 34A missions because they had been so ineffective.
McCone, however, judged more accurately that North Viet-
nam's leaders saw the US warships in the Tonkin Gulf as an
opportune target for telling Washington that they would
not stand for clandestine violations of their country's sover-
eignty and would not be deterred from pursuing their long-
range goal of unifying Vietnam under their control. At a
briefing of the congressional leadership at the White House
immediately afterward, the DCI was disturbed at Rusk's
"evasive" answers that "left the impression that there was no
serious overt [US] attack north of the 17th parallel but
merely some covert espionage and sabotage operations"?in
short, that the North Vietnamese action was totally unjusti-
fied. "I concluded that the meeting would break up with a
misunderstanding... [and] I concluded that the group must
be fully informed." McCone?apparently without consult-
ing the president?then proceeded to tell the legislators
about the extensive US program of clandestine operations,
including the raid on 30 July that he believed prompted the
North Vietnamese attack on the Maddox on 2 August.")
Within a few days, McCone had cause to question the
intelligence on which the administration was acting.
Presumably the
DDI, whom PFIAB had summoned for an interview, first
told McCone what he was going to say, especially given that
the board's chairman, Clark Clifford, was a bureaucratic
rival and personal antagonist of the DCI. McCone did not
tell the White House about Cline's reservations, which were
far from conclusive. On 8 August he read another internal
assessment although
fragmentary and ambiguous, it was "highly suggestive that
action against the DESOTO patrol was contemplated."
President Johnson knew that meaning was
debatable and did not hear that CIA had any qualms about
them until the 10th, when Clifford told him what Cline had
said. It was a moot point. By then, Johnson had his congres-
sional mandate and was not going to undercut his policy by
publicly questioning whether the North Vietnamese really
had launched a second attack. There was nothing for
McCone to gain by raising the issue, either. As presidential
aide Walt Rostow would later observe about the Tonkin
Gulf episode, "We don't know what happened, but it had
the desired result."69X
Johnson, Vantage Point, 113-14; editorial notes in FRUS, 1964-68, I, Vietnam 1964, 590, 608-9; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record. Luncheon at the
Mansion.. Discussion re retaliation for the attack on the Maddox," 4 August 1964, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 9.
Summary Notes ot the Jtith Meeting of t e National ecunty ugust , ?
for the Record.. .NSC Meeting?August 4t14, 1964] ..." with attachment, "Probable North Vietnamese and Chinese Communist Reactions to Certain US Reprisals
Against North Vietnam," and "Memorandum for the Record... Meeting of the Leadership.. .4 August 1964," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 9. On the 3rd,
McNamara and Rusk had briefed members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees on the OPLAN 34A missions and the DESOTO
patrols. McNamara, 131-32; "Editorial Note," FRUS, 1964-68,5 Vietnam 1964, 600..14?
?'MoIse, 197-99? Llo C' Papv 13,4,-, vndon 1ohncon and the Wars for Vietnam 137-38. Karnow 373-74, 376; McNamara, 135.
tonnie E. Ford, "Secret Army, Secret War, Recent Disclosures an
the Vietnam War: The Significance of American 34 Alpha and 1,E$O1U Operations with Regard to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution," 16-NS 11, no. 2 (April 1996):
,
In October, McCone told? PFIAB about the "dangerous situation? in which "top policy officials grabbed onto fragments of raw intelligence
e the information had been evaluated in the light of the total information available and relevant.... Policy officials should make use of the
evaluating machinery which is at hand." PFIAB, "Minutes of Board Meeting of October 1 and 2, 1964," PFIAB record no. 206-10001-10000, PFIAB Records,
NARA. NSA historian Robert Hanyok (in Spartans in Darkness) has established conclusively that SIGINT showed there was no attack on the 4th. A few days later,
the president privately admitted his own doubts about what had happened that night. "Hell," he told an adviser a few days later, "those dumb stupid sailors were just
shooting at flying fish." Karnow, 374.X
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Out of Favor (U)
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President Johnson had secured congressional and public
support for his Vietnam policy, and with the November
election approaching, he resisted pleas for launching an air
war over North Vietnam. He had his legislative resolution,
his approval rating had jumped from 42 to 72 percent, and
85 percent of the American people supported the punitive
airstrikes. Not surprisingly, he chose to continue the gradual
escalation of the US role in the war. "Johnson got involved
in his quagmire in Vietnam," McCone later observed,
"because he couldn't make up his mind to win the war. It
was my philosophy... [that you] don't get in a war if you can
avoid it, but if you get in a war, then win it. And then settle
the issues afterwards." Still, neither McCone nor other like-
minded officials in the administration?at this time,
McGeorge Bundy, Rusk, Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs,
and Walt Rostow?could persuade the president that all-out
bombing of the North would save the South.' (U)
By then, McCone had already sounded out the president
about how much he was wanted in the administration. At a
meeting in mid-June, the DCI suggested that it was time for
him to leave. According to Walter Elder, Johnson "waved
this aside, stating that he wanted McCone to remain, cer-
tainly until after the election."' To maintain the facade of
unity among his advisers and avoid giving his partisan oppo-
nents an issue, he would not let his Republican DCI resign
so soon before the campaign. For his part, McCone did not
want to give the GOP candidate, Sen. Barry Goldwater, any
help. Despite the DCI's conservative views, partisan loyal-
ties, and disagreements with the president, he showed little
enthusiasm for Goldwater's candidacy for personal and pro-
fessional reasons.' For the time being, McCone was in a
bureaucratic limbo?on the outside of the White House
looking in, relegated to the lesser function of purveyor of
classified information, without a major place in Vietnam
strategy debates. He had to wait for a more auspicious
moment to disengage from his increasingly troubled rela-
tionship with Lyndon Johnson.X
70IvIcCone/McAuliffe OH, 32, 35, 51. (U)
7' Elder, "McCone as DCI (1986)," chap. 10, 51)fc
McCone agreed with a journalist's characterization of the GOP's nominee as "lazy" and noted that when Goldwater was in California during the convention, "[h]e
didn't do anything.... He was up to the Bohemian Grove Ian elite retreat in the redwood forests outside San Francisco], he was out boating, and every picture you
would see he hadn't shaved." Transcript of conversation with Reston, 9 September 1964, 24, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 11. Also, after President Johnson directed
that presidential candidates receive intelligence briefings, Goldwater snubbed CIA on the grounds that knowing classified information might "gag" him when he
wanted to speak about national security issues. He received top-secret DIA briefings, however, in his capacity as a major general in the Air Force Reserve "Goldwa
ter?Secret Penta .on Briefin New York Herald Tribune lc
374
larts4gzi
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-"iiec4krzth
Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs
under Johnson (U)
Vietnam and the satellite reconnaissance programs
took up more of John McCone's time than any
other issue in the 17 months he served as President
Johnson's DCI. He spent a fair share of his workday on a
variety of other CIA and Intelligence Community concerns,
however. Some of them have been discussed earlier; a few
other prominent ones will be examined in detail in this
chapter. In the operational area, McCone was most actively
engaged with Cuba, the most important target of covert
action outside Southeast Asia at that time. The most trou-
blesome counterintelligence and security matter he dealt
with was the search for a Soviet penetration agent inside
CIA. In addition, he worked hard to improve the Agency's
public image and reputation at the White House and to
manage its business on a reduced budget. Lastly, McCone
continued his efforts to administer community affairs effi-
ciently and to avoid intelligence conflicts with the Pentagon
at a time when the Vietnam war was straining CIA's rela-
tions with the military.X.
Easing Up on Castro (U)
President Johnson and his principal adviser on Latin
American policy, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann,
followed the Kennedy administration's anticommunist, pro-
business approach, which sought to prevent social upheaval
by encouraging economic development. They modified it,
however, under the so-called Mann Doctrine by deempha-
sizing political reform and overtly accepting military dicta-
torships as long as they maintained order and contained
subversion. The Alliance for Progress, for example, became a
conventional aid program and lost the "social justice" con-
tent of the Kennedy administration.' (U)
"What can I do about Cuba that won't get me in trou-
ble?" Lyndon Johnson asked his national security advisers
soon after succeeding to the presidency. "The answer is lit-
CHAPTER
16
tie," McGeorge Bundy admitted to a colleague afterward,
"but he [Johnson] needs to be taken up and down the hills
we've all been on so many times." At first, the new president
took a Kennedyesque hard line toward Castro. He told
McCone in late November 1963 that "the Cuban situation
was one that we could not live with," that the administra-
tion "had to evolve more aggressive policies," and that he
looked to CIA for "firm recommendations." Accordingly,
the DCI and the other members of the NSC's Special
Group authorized CIA to develop among Cuban exile
groups the capability to stage air attacks against targets on
the island. At the same time, the Agency continued to iden-
tify military dissidents, build espionage nets, disseminate
propaganda, and prepare commando strikes on economic
facilitiesk
Events soon after President Kennedy's death might have
driven Johnson into an even more confrontational policy
toward Cuba than his predecessors.
In November 1963 the Venezuelan government discov-
ered a large cache of Cuban-origin weapons and explo-
sives on a farm in the northwestern part of the country
(see Chapter 6). The discovery led CIA to conclude
that there was now "solid evidence" for a "conclusive
case" that Havana was trying to subvert neighboring
pro-US governments.
During 9-13 January 1964, anti-US riots involving
more than 30,000 people in several cities in Panama left
four US soldiers and 24 Panamanians dead, nearly 300
people wounded, and more than $2 million in property
destroyed in several cities. Local communists and Cas-
tro supporters agitated openly during the period, pre-
References to literature on the Johnson administration and Latin America are in the Appendix on Sources. (U)
McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Meeting at his residence with President Johnson...," 29 November 1963, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6; FRUS,
1961-1963, XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, 901-2; Joseph A. Califano (General Counsel, Department of the Army) memorandum to McNamara et al.,
"Meeting with the President on Cuba.. December 19, 1963," Office of the Secretary of Defense Files, FRC 330-77-131, Misc. 63-65; CIA memoranda, "Sugges-
tions for Additional Administration Statements on Cuba to Stimulate Anti-Castro Action on the Part of Dissident Elements in the Cuban Armed Forces,"
9 December 1963, "Cuba?A Status Report," 12 December 1963, and Desmond FitzGerald (DDP/Special Affairs Staff), "Meeting at the White House[,]
19 December 1963," FR US, 1961-1963, X1X11X11, Cuba 1961-1962; Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath; American Republics: Microfiche Supplement, docs. 723,
725, and 733; FitzGerald memorandum to McCone, "Considerations for US Policy Toward Cuba and Latin America," 9 December 1963, MORI doe, no. 209969.
-*Jr.
"STC-fiLlf
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CHAPTER 16
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sumably contributing to the president's belief that the
riots were Castro-inspired.'
? In February, after the Coast Guard seized four Cuban
fishing boats in US waters off the Florida Keys, Castro
retaliated by cutting off the water supply to the US
Naval Base at Guantanamo. Americans at the facility
were in no danger because a contingency plan existed
for having tankers shuttle water from Florida while base
residents conserved supplies.
Notwithstanding these events, President Johnson chose a
slow and cautious approach to Cuba that stressed multilat-
eral diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions, and he
played down secret warfare.' The new strategy was to isolate
Cuba politically and commercially while quietly exploring
signs that Castro wanted a rapprochement-under terms set
in Washington.Nt
At the new administration's first comprehensive discus-
sion about anti-Castro operations, in mid-December 1963,
the president postponed any sizable covert projects to desta-
bilize the Cuban regime, although he continued to approve
small-scale covert actions to keep US operatives busy and
hopeful, even though Johnson thought they were "hypocrit-
ical and ineffectual." For the first few months of 1964, the
Special Group approved a number of espionage and logistics
missions into Cuba but rejected or tabled all sabotage pro-
posals. "[T]he pressure [from the White House] for boom
and bang stopped," recalled Samuel Halpern, the senior
officer on the DDP's Special Affairs Staff, which was run-
ning the covert operations.' Johnson had several reasons for
this shift. He wanted to distance himself from the Kennedy
administration's more adventurous policies. He did not
want to antagonize the Soviet Union, incite a military clash
with Havana, or derail US efforts to have the OAS punish
Cuba for supplying arms to Venezuelan insurgents. Johnson
also may have feared provoking Cuban attempts on his life,
having concluded soon after Kennedy was assassinated that
pro-Castro Cubans were responsible.)L
Johnson's caution would frustrate McCone. In Decem-
ber, in NSC discussions about responses to the discovery of
the arms cache in Venezuela, McCone opposed a diplomatic
initiative and a plan to shadow and search suspect vessels.
He thought contraband-bearing ships could too easily evade
surveillance and believed diplomatic efforts would probably
give Castro "reason to laugh in about three months' time
over [their] ineffectuality." The DCI did not specify what he
thought the administration should do about Cuban support
to regional subversives.6X
Discussion of the cutoff of water to the Guantanamo
Naval Base, added to strain between McCone and the presi-
dent. According to CIA, Castro wanted to highlight what he
regarded as an American "policy of aggression" and show the
Cuban people and other Latin Americans that he could
insult the United States with impunity. El jefe maxim? did
not, however, want to spark a military conflict; according to
CIA reporting, he cut off the water because it was the least
provocative of three contemplated reactions to the fishing
boats' detention-one of which was shooting down a U-2.
As McNamara observed, "From a military point of view,
3 The violence ensued after American students raised the US flag by itself at a high school in the American-controlled Canal Zone in defiance of a Zone administra
don order that both the US and the Panamanian flags fly at civilian institutions. SNIE 84-64, "The Short Run Outlook in Panama," 11 March 1964 4-5;
1111C111gl ICC repo' L UN 1)01 z., U,ii.itg1UU1U iiiiouiiau&sii on WC UOiuei L.lasiles (ii 5 yanualy..., to Januaty 17W-1, .1,71,,JrU CLOG. no.
449049; Walter Ltaeber, The Panama Canal, 106-11; Alan McPherson, "Courts of World Opinion: Trying the Panama Flag Riots of 1964," DH 28, no. 1 (January
2004): 83-112; FRUS, 1964-1968, rOCT South and Central America; Mexico, docs. 367-77 on 770-800.,,c
William 0. Walker III, "The Johnson Administration and Cuba," in H.W. Brands, ed., The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson: Beyond Vietnam, 61,66-67; Dallek,
Flawed Giant, 53; Gordon Chase (NSC), memorandum of meeting with the president on Cuba, 19 December 1963, and NSAM No. 274, "Cuba-Economic
Denial Program," 20 December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, 904-10; Carter, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting with
the President on Cuba. .19 December 1963," and FitzGerald, "Meeting at the White House[,] 19 December 1963," FRUS, 1961-1963, X/XI/X1I, Cuban Missile
Crisis and Aftermath: _Microfiche Supplement, doe. 733; Helms, "Memorandum for the Record.., NSC Standing Group Meeting...10 December 1963," DDO Files,
Job 78-02958R, box 3, folder 12; "P view on Cuba," New York Times, 9 December 1963, Western Hemisphere-Cuba clipping file, box 2, HIC;
Dean Rusk oral history interview by Washington, DC, 2 January 1970, pt. 2,8-10.A.
5 Carter, "Memorandum for the Record.. Disarmament Meeting on 18 January 1964 at the White House," ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 14, folder 1; "Excerpts
from Memorandum for the Record of 31 January 1964...Meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board...," CMS Files, Job 92B01039R, box 7,
folder 131; Breuer, 225-40; Thomas, The Very Best Men, 309 citing interview with Halpern; minutes of Special Group meetings on 9 January, 13 and 27 February,
and 2 April 1964, McCone Papers, box 1, folder 7,44
6 Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World, 107-8; "Editorial Note," FRUS, 1961-1963, XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, 896; Rusk memorandum to the
president, "Venezuelan Announcement of Cuban Origin of Discovered Arms Cache," 27 November 1963, "Circular Telegram from the Department of State to
Posts in the American Republics," DEPTEL 1016,4 December 1963, "Record of Actions by the National Security Council Standing Group," 10 December 1963,
FRUS, 1961-1963, XII, American Republics, 352-55; FRUS, 1964-1968, 'OGG, South and Central America; Mexico, docs. 3-23 on 8-64; CIA memorandum, "Arms
Traffic in the Caribbean Area, 1963," 18 May 1964, MORI doe, no. 12097,1,5; Helms, "Memorandum for the Record.. .NSC Standing Group Meeting. .10
December 1963," McCone Papers, box 13, folder 2; "OAS to Examine Caracas Charges Against Havana," New York Times, 4 December 1963, "OAS Group Finds
Cuban Aggression Against Caracas," New York Times, 25 February 1964, Western Hemisphere-Cuba clipping file, box 2, HIC..K
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we're in no trouble... [but f]rom a political point of
view.., it's dynamite." The legal aspect of the dispute posed
no problem?Florida courts would handle it?but the prin-
cipals split over what other action to take. McNamara and
JCS chief Taylor wanted to dismiss all Cuban employees at
Guantanamo immediately; Robert Kennedy and McCone
disagreed, arguing that a mass firing was an overreaction
that would hurt the wrong people. The DCI added that it
might prompt similar actions against Americans working
overseas and that without the economic benefits derived
from the base employees' salaries, the Cuban government
might make an issue of the paltry rent the United States
paid each year (only $3,000) for the facility. Instead,
McCone proposed that "we go in now and cut the water
pipes and say that we don't want Castro's water." President
Johnson told McNamara that he "couldn't understand
McCone. He's pretty hard-nosed, and I just couldn't find
out where he was." The president wanted a firmer response
and decided that the local workers should be fired. "We're
going to make our base independent of Cuba," he told Sen.
Richard Russell. The spat petered out in a few weeks. The
Florida courts released the fishermen-36 went home and
two stayed in Miami?and Castro offered to turn the water
back on, but by then the US commander at Guantanamo
had had the pipe into the base removed/
Despite concern on the NSC in early 1964 that the
immediate threat Castro posed was being overblown, the
administration launched a massive diplomatic and propa-
ganda campaign in the region, involving CIA assets, to
ostracize Cuba. It succeeded; in July 1964, the OAS voted
15-4 to call on member states to break relations and impose
economic sanctions on Cuba. (U)
McCone Takes a Stand (U)
McCone saw no point in persisting with tentative ap-
proaches. If the administration was too concerned about
"noise" to let CIA carry out and take responsibility for a full
range of covert actions, "it is not worth proceeding at all,"
he told his senior deputies in January 1964. Underlying
McCone's irritation was his bleak view of Cuba's prospects
unless the administration adopted a more belligerent policy.
He was "convinced that Castro had turned the cor-
ner...would very probably grow stronger... [and] was con-
ducting himself in a manner and carrying out provocative
acts which had been declared.., totally unacceptable to the
United States." He told the Special Group that the adminis-
tration's Cuban program was "in complete disarray," and
that the current and proposed list of covert actions "gave
Castro maximum grounds for righteous indignation with-
out really accomplishing anything"?partly because "many
times.. .we have had to stand down actions of this type [eco-
nomic sabotage] in order to avoid raising the noise level."
The DCI accordingly "felt that all prohibitions and self-
imposed restraints, such as the use of US territory for train-
ing of personnel, launching of provocative acts, etc., could
be declared void."
I concluded we had one of two courses to follow:
either we move in on Castro in the most aggressive
possible way, accept attribution and destroy him by
acts of violence short of war or including war if neces-
sary, or, as an alternative, live with him in the hope
that [P]rovidence might take care of the situation.... I
felt the latter was a big gamble.
McCone advised that the United States should undertake
this new "dynamic action" after warning Khrushchev and
Castro and informing the American people. Speaking for
the White House, however, Robert Kennedy said it was
futile to discuss what CIA would do until the president and
his advisers made the fundamental decision about whether
to live with Castro or pursue his downfall.UK
Before the White House decided on its policy, McCone
had a flash of insight that foiled a Cuban disinformation
operation and delivered a strong blow to the Cuban econ-
omy. In early April 1964, he noted reports that Castro was
scheming to drive up the price of exported sugar?on which
it depended for hard currency?by trying to create the
CIA Watch Office cable to White House Situation Room, 6 February 1964, MORI doc. no. 98088; Helms memorandum to McCone, "Current Thinking of
Cuban Government Leaders," CSDB-3/659,871, 5 March 1964, MORI doc. no. 361968; FitzGerald, "Memorandum for the Record.. Meeting at the White
House[J 7 February 1964," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 7; OCI, "Cuba and the US Naval Base," Current Intelligence Weekly Summaiy, 14 February 1964, 15-16,
MORI doc. no. 125099; Jack Valenti (White House aide), "Notes on Meeting in Cabinet Room.. February 7, 1964," National Security File, Office of the President
File, LBJ Library; CIA Intelligence Information Cable, "Cuban Government Policy Regarding the Guantanamo Naval Base," 18 February 1964, MORI doc. no.
98094; transcripts of Johnson conversations with McNamara on 6 February and Russell on 7 February 1964, Taking Charge, 227-28; transcript of Johnson conver-
sation with McNamara on 7 February 1964, Recordings and Transcripts, Tape F64.12, Side A, PNO 3, LBJ Library; Bundy untitled memorandum to the president,
6 March 1964, National Security Files, Country File, Cuba, Overflights, Vol. 1, January 1964?January 1965, LBJ Library; Brands, The Wages of Globalism, 41-42;
"Johnson and Aides Map Action on Cuba," Washington Evening Star, 7 February 1964, and "US Halts Flow of Funds to Cuba at Guantanamo,' New York Times, 8
February 1964, in Western Hemisphere?Cuba clipping file, box 2, HIC.Ik
311/
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impression that Cuba's next sugar crop would be small
because of hurricane damage. McCone suggested that CIA
put out an unattributable story exposing the scheme. When
additional evidence of Cuban manipulation accumulated
during the month
epartment of State organized brief-
ings and releases of sanitized information that received wide
media play. The disclosures caused sugar prices to plummet,
and they stayed low for several months. Later in the year,
McCone remarked that he was "particularly intrigued with
the difficulties the Cubans are having." His idea had cost
Cuba tens of millions of dollars, a substantial share of its
foreign exchange.A
McCone could win no converts to his all-or-nothing
position on the Cuban covert action program. By April
1964, the administration?increasingly preoccupied with
Vietnam and reluctant to upset the Soviet Union?decided
to stop Agency-controlled sabotage raids and have CIA con-
centrate on intelligence collection. At a White House review
of Cuban operations, McCone described for the president
the stark alternatives available to him: deciding whether the
United States wanted "to bring about the eventual liquida-
tion of the Castro/communist entourage and the elimina-
tion of the Soviet presence from Cuba," partly through
large-scale clandestine operations, or to "rely on future
events of an undisclosed nature which might accomplish
that objective." The DCI contended that the sporadic
achievements in sabotage did not test the covert program
fairly. He quoted from an Agency operational plan, prepared
almost a year before, which stated that "unless all the com-
ponents of this program are executed in tandem, the indi-
vidual courses of action are almost certain to be of marginal
value.... This is clearly a case where the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts." McCone met resistance from the
principals. Secretary of State Rusk spelled out the potential
diplomatic problems that "noisy" sabotage operations would
cause; McNamara said the covert program "has no present
chance of success"; and Bundy noted that because develop-
ments inevitably would force the administration to turn the
operations on and off again, a comprehensive and rigorous
program such as McCone urged was not feasible:*
In effect, the president and his advisers abandoned the
Kennedy objective of ousting Castro and instead sought to
harass and contain him. This was a return to the approach
used in phase one of Operation MONGOOSE two years
before: espionage, economic warfare, and independent sabo-
tage operations by exile groups. The Special Affairs Staff,
under Desmond FitzGerald, drew up a comprehensive col-
lection program using expatriate sources, infiltration agents,
liaison contacts, legal travelers, refugees, and port watchers.
Training exiles for sabotage missions continued as well,
although the likelihood that the administration would
DCI morning meeting minutes, 15 January 1964, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 346; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with Sec-
retary Rusk...," 6 February 1964, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 10; idem, "Memorandum for the Record.. Meeting of 5412 Group," 27 February 1964, and
Carter, "'Memorandum for the Record.. Special Group (5412) Meeting.. .on 13 February [1964]," ibid., box 1, folder 8; CIA memorandum, "Spectrum of Courses
of Action With Respect to Cuba," 21 February 1964, MORI doc. no. 98089. FitzGerald outlined ClAs proposed program in "Review of Current Program of Covert
Action Against Cuba," 27 January 1964, National Security Files, Country File, Cuba, Intelligence, Covert Program, January 1964?June 1965, LBJ Library.
9 Karamessines memorandum to FitzGerald, "Cuban Sugar," 9 April 1964, follow-on memoranda from WH Division to Meyer and Helms, 14 and 27 April and 13
May 1964, and Karamessines untitled memorandum to FitzGerald, 10 September 1964, DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 1, folder 14; vol. 2, 285-86.
"The DCI may be interested in knowing of all actions" the US government took to carry out the ploy, Helms wrote about a report summarizing it, 'since he sparked
this move."X
FitzGerald, "Memorandum for the Record... Meeting at the White House[d 7 April 1964... Review of Covert Program directed against Cuba" and attached mem-
orandum by McCone dated 8 April 1964, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 8.X
378
refic4i
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"se*Azzi
Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs under Johnson (U)
approve any such raids steadily diminished.' Through the
first half of 1964, the administration had grown more skep-
tical about backing militant exiles and warned them against
staging unauthorized attacks. Policymakers concluded, how-
ever, that withdrawing support and severing connections
just then was impractical and unwise. The assorted anti-
Castro factions were having difficulty obtaining money
from non-US sources, and intensive surveillance by US
authorities was hampering their freelance operations. At
least for now, the administration decided that cutting off
backing to the largest recipients-Manuel Artime's Move-
ment to Recover the Revolution (MRR) and Manolo Ray
Rivero's Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE)-would elimi-
nate a potentially useful weapon against Castro. X
As the autonomous groups' utility diminished, however,
the Special Group chose to phase out the official relation-
ship. By June 1964, McCone told visiting journalists that
"no exile activities are permitted which violate neutrality
laws [,1 such as taking off for a raid from United States
soil."' The MRR, the Agency's favorite, mounted several
raids from third countries-which "the United States Gov-
ernment neither encourages nor discourages," McCone
said-but had its subsidy cut after it created an interna-
tional controversy in mid-September by mistakenly attack-
ing a Spanish ship. Meanwhile, the JURE built a dismal
record that included "violations of the rules of 'auton-
omy'...major errors in judgment, and.. .lack of success,"
according to the Department of State. Manolo Ray "has car-
ried out his projected operations ineptly and carelessly...he
1
has failed in a humiliating and noisy way."4 McCone
thought the exiles' activities would still be useful if brought
under greater US control, but the Special Group was too
jaded toward them to agree, and the DCI conceded that
Artime was "less and less responsive to persuasion [and]
constituted a persistent menace." The last raid by either
group, an unauthorized MRR attack on a fuel depot,
occurred in February 1965, and Artime's organization began
disbanding soon after. (Truly autonomous groups-notably
Alpha 66 and its spin-off, Commandos L-continued to hit
economic targets such as oil facilities, sugar mills, and facto-
ries, despite American interdiction efforts.)
'Sources for this paragraph and the next are: FitzGerald, "Chronology of Concept of Autonomous Operations...," late July 1964, and Jessup, "Memorandum for
the Record...Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 30 July 1964," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 9; FitzGerald memorandum, "A Reappraisal of Autono-
mous Operations," 3 June 1964, Bay of Pigs: 40 Years After, tab 7, doc. 32; CIA memorandum to the 303 Committee, "Financial Support to the Autonomous Group
Headed by Manuel Artime," 16 July 1964, ibid., doc. 33; Thomas, The Very Best Men, 309; Corn, 111-15; Rodriguez and Weisman, 139, 143; "Exiles Raid Cuban
Port, Attack Mill," Washington Post, 14 May 1964, and "US Warns Exiles Not to Raid Cuba," Baltimore Sun, 15 May 1964, Western Hemisphere-Cuba clipping
file, box 2, HIC; "Cuba: Playing for High Stakes," Newsweek, 1 June 1964, Tad Szulc, "Guerra!'-Still the Word in Miami," New York Times Magazine, 5 July 1964,
United Press International wire service reports A24 and A25 17 September 1964, "Exiles Here Discontinue Cuba Raids," Miami News, 13 March 1965, ibid., box
3; HSCA Hearings, vol. 10, 67, 78-79, 140; HS/CSG-2677, HS Files, Job 85-00664R, box 8, folder 2; Helms, "Memorandum for the
Record... Luncheon with Time Officials," Zn June 1504, mccone Papers, box 13, folder 2; Carter, "Memorandum for the Record.. .303 Committee
Meeting.. .24 September [1964] ...," ibid., box 1, folder 8; Jessup, minutes of 303 Committee meetings on 18 June, 2, 9, and 30 July, 24 September, 12 November,
and 3 December 1964, ibid., folder 7; "Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 7 January 1965," and CIA memorandum to the 303 Committee, "Status of
Termination of Manuel Artime's Autonomous Paramilitary Group," 22 March 1965, Department of State, INR/IL Historical Files, 5412 Special Group/303 Com-
mittee Records, January-June 1965; Paterson, "Fixation with Cuba" in Kennedy's Quest for Power, 153; Karamessines untitled memorandum to Lawrence K. White
(Executive Director-Comptroller), 19 October 1967, ER Files, Job 80R01284A, box 10, folder 2; transcrint of McCone, testimony to Senate Armed Services Com-
mittee, 11 January 1965 75-76 Mr,Cone Papers, box 3, folder 19; Chase memorandum to Bundy, "l Cuba," 8 February 1965, National Security
Files, Country Files, Vol. III, Memoranda December 1964-November 1965, LBJ Library.)
'3 The administration also tried to scotch assassination planning by the exiles. President Johnson told McCone and Bundy to inform the attorney general that US law
enforcement agencies were to prevent such plots from being carried out. Helms memorandum to McCone, "Plans of Cuban Exiles to Assassinate Selected Cuban
Government Leaders," 10 June 1964, MORI doc. no. 455856; U. Alexis Johnson's notes of 303 Committee meeting on 18 June 1964, Department of State, INR/
IL Historical Files, 5412 Special Group/303 Committee Records. (U)
14 John Crimmins (Department of State) memorandum to U. Alexis Johnson, "Continued Assistance to Manolo Ray's JURE...," 18 June 1964, Department of State,
INR/IL Historical Files, 5412 Special Group/303 Committee Records. Emblematic of the group's propensity to blunder was an embarrassing incident in early June
1964, when a British Navy destroyer intercepted Ray and several associates off the coast of the Bahamas while they were on an infiltration mission to Cuba. The party
had stopped on a deserted island to make final preparations when the patrolling British vessel appeared nearby. Ray and some of his team tried to escape in a launch, but
US military planes-unaware of whom they were shadowing-aided the British in capturing the Cubans. Ray and his compatriots were brought to Nassau and fined on
charges of bringing firearms into British territory. They denied that the Agency had any part in their plan. "Ray Regrets 'Delay," New York Times, 7 June 1964, Drew
Pearson radio report, "CIA, Air Force 'Tangle' Over Cuba," WTOP Radio, 13 June 1964, "The Visible CIA," Nation, 22 June 1964, and "Cuba War: Story of a Raid
That Failed," New York Herald Tribune, 5 July 1964, Western Hemisphere-Cuba clipping file, box 3, HIC; Albert E. Carter memorandum to Thomas Hughes (both
Department of State), "ARA-Agency Meeting of June 3, 1964," Department of State, INRJIL Historical Files, ABA-CIA Weekly Meetings, June 1964. (U)
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Like its predecessor, the Johnson administration sought
back-channel diplomatic opportunities to complement its
not-so-silent war against Castro. The president hoped that
quiet contacts would "keep Castro's temperature and the
Caribbean noise level at a low pitch between now and [the]
November [election]," a senior NSC staffer wrote in early
1964. At the same time, the administration held out few
hopes that an accommodation with Havana was likely?
largely for the same domestic political reasons. In the post-
assassination climate, given Lee Harvey Oswald's Cuban
connections and the new president's need to prove his met-
tle against Castro, Johnson could not risk appearing "soft"
on Cuba. Still, the president did not use Kennedy's death, a
Soviet-Cuban trade agreement, or Moscow's pledge to aid
Cuba if the United States invaded it, as pretexts for ending
the unofficial approaches.' (U)
Neither did Castro. A week after the Kennedy assassina-
tion, he put out feelers through the same back channel he
had used before: his United Nations representative, Carlos
Lechuga; his personal aide, Rene Vallejo; and an American
journalist, Lisa Howard. CIA reported in February 1964
that, according to a high-ranking Cuban official, Castro
"sincerely desires to enter into negotiation with the United
States." Soon after, Howard brought back from Havana a
startling offer from the Cuban leader:
Please tell President Johnson that I earnestly desire his
election to the Presidency in November.... [I] f there is
anything I can do to add to his majority (aside from
retiring from politics), I shall be happy to cooper-
ate.... I know that my offer of assistance would be of
immense value to the Republicans?so this would
remain our secret....
If the President feels it necessary during the campaign
to make bellicose statements about Cuba or even to
take some hostile action?if he will inform me, unof-
ficially, that a specific action is required because of
domestic political considerations, I shall understand
and not take any serious retaliatory action.
The White House did not officially respond to this message,
so the hands-off diplomacy continued for several months. In
the early summer, Cuban representatives asked the Spanish
government to act as a mediator but got no reaction from
Washington. In an interview with the New York Times in
July, Castro offered to stop supporting Latin revolutionaries
if the United States halted exile attacks against Cuba. Lastly,
Ernesto "Che" Guevara's visit to the United Nations in
December prompted other indirect contacts between the
two governments. The Johnson administration did not
reach a consensus on what steps to take next, however, and
its intermittent pursuit of detente with the Cuban regime
stalled. 7 (U)
As when the Kennedy administration dabbled in behind-
the-scenes diplomacy, McCone adamantly opposed any
agreement that would help Castro stay in power. He does
not appear to have been aware of the Cuban leader's offer to
"help" Johnson in the upcoming election, but he undoubt-
edly would have denounced the idea as fantastical and polit-
ically disastrous if publicized. In October 1964, McCone
strongly disapproved when James Donovan, the lawyer who
negotiated the ransoming of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, pro-
posed secretly meeting with the Cuban leader. McCone
already had told Rusk that "CIA would oppose approaching
Castro for any purpose except to threaten him if he tam-
pered with our U-2's." The DCI justified this refusal to talk
by noting that the DDP was convinced that Castro could
not remain in power for more than 12 to 18 months. "We
would rather keep tightening the squeeze on him" than give
Castro some indication that he could bargain with Washing-
ton.18,k
''The atrophying of the Agency-controlled exile program, and the effect that the administration's distraction with Vietnam had on Cuban Field operations, are
described in Ayers, chaps. 13-15. See also Carbonell, 250-51. (U)
?Walker, "The Johnson Administration and Cuba," 69-70, 75-76; Kornbluh, 12-15; Chase memoranda to Bundy, "Cuba?Item of Presidential Interest," 25
November 1963, "Bill Atrwood Activities," 2 December 1963, and "Bill Atrwood's Activities," 3 December 1963, and William Attwood (special adviser to the US
United Nations delegation) memorandum to Adlai Stevenson (US Permanent Representative to the United Nations), "Latest Cuban developments for your talk
with the President," 9 December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath, 890-91, 897-900, 904. In a speech to the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 13 December, Premier Nikita Khrushchev declared that "revolutionary Cuba will not remain defenseless if the
aggressive militaristic circles of the USA attack it." The Moscow-Havana trade agreement was signed on 21 January 1964 but had been announced earlier. Ibid., note
to doc. no. 387, 902. (U)
'Chase memoranda to Bundy, "Bill Attwood Activities," 2 December 1963, and "Bill Attwood's Activities," 3 December 1963, and William Attwood memoran-
dum to Stevenson, "Latest Cuban developments for your talk with the President," 9 December 1963, FRUS, 1961-1963, XI, Cuban Missile Crisis and Aftermath,
897-900, 904; Associated Press wire service report, "Cuban Leader Offered LBJ Help in '64 Campaign," 20 August 1999, story no. a748, Nexis 99-12549594;
Helms memorandum to McCone, "Current Thinking of Cuban Government Leaders," CSDB-3/659,871, 5 March 1964, MORI doc. no. 361968; Castro message
to Johnson, 12 February 1964, on the National Security Archive Web site at www.gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB18/09-01. (U)
380
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Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs under Johnson (U)
McCone later advised Bundy that instead of entertaining
the idea of rapprochement with Castro and Khrushchev, the
administration should "signal" them that "dire conse-
quences" would ensue if a U-2 were shot down over Cuba.
For months, the DCI had been concerned that the Soviets'
probable turnover of control of surface-to-air missile sites to
the Cubans in 1964 raised the odds that a U-2 might be
shot down (he presumed Castro's soldiers were more "trigger
happy" than Moscow's men). The U-2 flights were essential
for finding out what the Soviets were doing in Cuba
Some administration officials wanted
to use satellites in place of U-2 flights, but McCone pointed
out that unpredictable weather, fixed orbits, and resolution
capabilities limited their effectiveness against the Cuban tar-
get. He had the use of other platforms examined-drones,
balloons, and the A-12-as well as the idea of mounting a
satellite camera on an aircraft flying oblique routes. None of
those options was adopted.'
In one of his last exegeses on Cuba, McCone suggested
that even though Castro remained in power, US policy over-
all had succeeded in marginalizing his regime. "Cuba still
belongs to Castro," he told a Senate oversight committee in
January 1965, notwithstanding major American expendi-
tures since 1960 to create a viable dissident movement. That
was only one aspect of the US government's campaign to
isolate Havana, however, and McCone believed that Wash-
ington had dealt Havana several hard blows by forcing the
Soviet Union to withdraw offensive nuclear weapons from
Cuba, publicizing Castro's attempts to subvert neighboring
governments, and coordinating an international embargo
on the island. In marked contrast to the fears that US poli-
cymakers expressed just a few years before, the DCI stated
confidently that as of early 1965, Cuba "does not represent
any real threat to the security of the United States."20..4**)C
McCone was not as sanguine about the rest of Latin
America, however, and supported embarking on a more
energetic clandestine and counterinsurgency program in the
region. At the last SGC meeting he attended, on 8 April
1965, he told the members that the "dangers" south of the
border required "positive, concerted and prompt action."
"[T]here is evidence that a policy decision has been made
[in Moscow] to conduct a more aggressive campaign not
only in Latin America, but everywhere." At the DCI's
behest, Desmond FitzGerald outlined for the SGC a general
plan of intelligence collection, training of local security and
police services, clandestine interdiction, and deployment of
paramilitary strike forces and conventional military units.
After hearing CIA's presentation, the SGC called for a full-
scale review of communist subversion in Latin America and
the effectiveness of current US counterinsurgency programs
and for an examination of new ways to assist the security
efforts of regional governments.
In a final pronouncement on covert action that he gave a
few weeks before leaving office, McCone told Rusk that nei-
ther the United States nor its allies were properly organized
to combat Soviet- and Chinese-instigated insurgency.
McCone said Moscow and Beijing were exploiting the
nuclear stalemate to "pursue an aggressive program of politi-
" McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussions with Secretary Rusk, 11 February 1964...," McCone Papers, box 2, folder 10. Presumably to better sup-
port his policy prescription, McCone relied on the DDP's assessment of Castro's durability instead of the consensus of DI analysts-enunciated in an August 1964
NIE-that Castro would likely retain control for several years. NIE 85-64, "Situation and Prospects in Cuba," 5 August 1964. See also CIA Memorandum, "Staying
Power of the Castro Regime," No. 1601/64, 2 July 1964, 1: "The appeal of Castro's revolution is wearing thinner, but Castro himself retains firm control over the
instruments of power... there will be further erosion of popular support for his regime over the next year or two.. however, we think the chances of an overthrow of
the regime or of a major uprising against it during this period will remain slim." HS Files, Job 03-01724R, box 3, folder 8.116(
SNIE 85-4-63, "Soviet
ranster or the Surtace to Air missile system to Luba, 18 December 1963, and Ji?Jlt, 8 -2-64, Likelihood ot an Attempted Shoot-Down of a U-2," 2 May 1964;
McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with Secretary Rusk-11 October 1964," and "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with McGeorge
Bundy-13 October 1964," McCone Papers, box 2, folder 12; idem, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Discussion at National Security Council meeting.. .2 May
1964, ibid., box 6, folder 8; idem, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Meeting at the White House...," 19 November 1964, ibid., folder 10; PFIAB, "Minutes of
Board Meeting of June 4, 1964," 11, PFIAB record no. 206-10001-10013, and "Minutes of Board Meeting of October 1 and 2, 1964," 29, PFIAB record no. 206-
10001-10000, PFIAB Records, NARA. McCone earlier had advised the president that aerial surveillance of Cuba was so essential that taking out the SAM sites had
to be considered if they fired at the U-2s. "The President remarked that this would then mean war{,] and I responded that certainly the destruction of the SAM sites
would mean war, that the degree of escalation could not be determined in advance. I stated that this was the most ominous situation that confronted us in Cuba in
the immediate future. The President made no comment." McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.., Discussions with President Johnson at the Johnson
Ranch.,. December 27th[, 1963,1" McCone Papers, box 6, folder
'Transcript of McCone testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, 11 January 1965, 103, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 19X
Si C. G. Moody Jr., "Minutes of the Meeting of the Special Group (CI)...April 8, 1965," McCone Papers, box 1, folder 9.)(
"srewadi
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cal action, subversion, and insurgency" using proxies
throughout the Third World?as the Soviet Union was
doing in Latin America with Cuba. He urged that the SGC
be revitalized so that it could formulate a coherent program
that would involve all relevant US civilian and military
agencies as well as US allies in Western Europe, South
America, and the Far East. Rusk agreed with McCone's
assessment, but nothing was done for the rest of the DCI's
tenure. Within a few months of McCone's departure, com-
munity analysts judged that "Castro's hold on power is firm"
and that "there is virtually no chance of his overthrow in the
foreseeable future. "2
The Molehunt Widens (U)
The Kennedy assassination and the defection of KGB
officer Yuri Nosenko three months later gave new urgency
to the CI Staff's hunt for the Soviet mole that KGB defector
Anatoliy Golitsyn alleged had burrowed into the Agency.
McCone was put in the position of authorizing one of the
most internally divisive security activities CIA ever under-
took. The argument connecting the assassination and the
defection hinged on the uncertain reliability of Nosenko's
assertion that the KGB had had no interest in Lee Harvey
Oswald when he defected to the Soviet Union during 1959-
62. Nosenko's bona fides had not been established at that
point and consequently, Soviet complicity in the killing of
John Kennedy could not be ruled out. If the Kremlin had
gone so far as to murder the president, it almost certainly
would attempt to manipulate the investigation to conceal its
involvement. To do so, the Soviets would use the same well-
placed asset inside CIA that Golitsyn had described earlier
as part of their "strategic deception" program. In addition to
purveying disinformation and reporting on how the US
government was reacting to the deception, the mole would
support the credibility of a false defector sent to report that
Oswald had no tie to the KGB. Nosenko suddenly
appeared, with an unverifiable legend covering the years
Oswald was in the Soviet Union, supposedly having no con-
tact with the KGB. As Golitsyn had warned, some of
Nosenko's information on Soviet intelligence activities con-
tradicted his own reporting?including that about a mole.
The all-too-convenient timing of this second defection rein-
forced James Angleton's suspicion that Moscow had pene-
trated the Agency, and gave the CI Staff chief more reason
to pursue Golitsyn's leads about the elusive "Sasha."' (U)
For more than two years, McCone had known about
Golitsyn's claim that a Soviet mole was inside Langley, and
he stayed abreast, through Helms and Angleton, of the most
important aspects of the investigations of individual officers
during 1962 and 1963.24 McCone did not accept Golitsyn's
more extreme allegations?
-but by mid-
1964 he believed the threat of penetration was serious
enough to warrant a systematic examination of the most
plausible leads with the FBI. Feeding McCone's suspicions
were continuing revelations of Soviet agents in Western
intelligence services and investigations or arrests of several
Americans suspected of or found to be spying for Moscow.
After hearing Golitsyn allege that at least five Agency staffers
and contractors, and possibly as many as 30, were KGB
agents, McCone discussed the matter with J. Edgar Hoover
in mid-October. That must have been a tough act of intelli-
gence diplomacy, as Hoover was perturbed that the Agency
had let Golitsyn
sources?notably
Nosenko. Nonethe ess
codenamed HONETOL
"Anatoliy")."
e of the Bureau's best Soviet
because they agreed with
iscussion resulted in a project
(a compound of "Hoover" and
From November 1964 until McCone left the Agency five
months later, the HONETOL inquiry was run by a six-man
committee that included three officers from each organiza-
tion.' Angleton and l of the CI Staff and
of the Office of Security represented CIA; Assis-
tant Director William Sullivan, liaison officer Sam Papich,
and counterintelligence chief Donald Moore were the FBI's
members. The CI Staff's Special Investigations Group under
did the Agency's share of the work. senior
CIA officers were investigated, and f those were closely
nMcCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Discuss on with Secretary Rusk...," 18 March 1965, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 16; NIE 85-65, "Cuba," 19 August
1965, 1..?0:
'David Robarge, "Moles, Defectors, and Deceptions: James Angleton and CIA Counterintelligence," Journal of Intelligence History 3, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 40-41.
(U)
24The most thorough classified treatment of the molehunt is Open source treatments,
which rely heavily on interviews with ex-Agency employees a6u uetlassineo documents, are Marigold, chaps. 1/, 15, 20; Wise, Molehunt, chaps. 12-15; Martin, Wilder-
ness of Mirrors, chap. 9, and Riebling, chap. 11.1ist
382
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Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs under Johnson (U)
scrutinized. McCone kept up with the general outlines of
the molehunt but let Helms, Angleton un CIA's
part in it without supervising them close
y.
Interagencles over resources soon impeded
HONETOL. as said that McCone would have been
willing to "go to the mat" with Hoover to keep the joint
activities going, but the DCI chose to expend his energies in
his latter days on other issues such as Vietnam and NRO.
After five meetings of the HONETOL committee between
November 1964 and February 1965, the FBI concluded
that Golitsyn was "a disruptive individual, seized with the
overall theory of penetration and not above fabricating to
support his theories," and the joint investigation ended. No
mole was found at CIA during McCone's directorship.2.7N,
Burnishing the Agency's Image (U)
During the first several months of the Johnson adminis-
tration, McCone became noticeably more sensitive that
CIP.'s popular image as a derring-do organization was losing
its glamour and becoming a political liability to him and the
Agency. He believed that Allen Dulles and some Kennedy
administration officials had built up CIA's covert action
capability at the expense of other functions, such as espio-
nage and analysis?so much so, he told the president, with
some overstatement, that "my contribution.. .was impaired,
travel is difficult, [and] visiting foreign countries is practi-
cally an impossibility[,] all to the end [that] neither the DCI
nor the Agency were serving the President as effectively as
they could." Johnson agreed, telling McCone that he
"wanted to do everything possible to get me out of the cloak
and dagger business... [and] was tired that a situation had
been built up that every time my name or CIA's name was
mentioned, it was associated with a dirty trick." Instead, the
president preferred to emphasize CIA's reporting and esti-
mating functions and minimize public attention to its secret
operations."*
Although the alluring "spymaster" persona was ill-suited
to a staid, blue-suit executive like McCone, he had difficulty
shedding it at a time when James Bond books and movies
captivated millions of people and US intelligence services
spent billions of dollars on clandestine activities. Warning
his senior deputies in December 1963 that "the year ahead
will be a rough one for CIA," the DCI grew more worried
about the Agency's image as his relationship with the presi-
dent worsened. By avoiding embarrassing disclosures and
fashioning a less controversial reputation for the Agency,
McCone hoped to retain his and CIA's influence in the
media-obsessed Johnson White House.29>t
McCone launched this public relations offensive in Janu-
ary 1964 by informing his senior staff of his "desire to create
an image' of CIA" that emphasized its "statutory responsi-
bility" for analysis and support to policymakers rather than
clandestine operations that critics portrayed as improper,
ineffective, and unauthorized. "This is entirely wrong, both
with respect to the activity and the coordination and con-
'Transcript of McCone-Golitsyn meeting, 11 February 1964, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 7; transcript of McCone meeting with Golitsyn, Helms, and Angleton,
16 July 1964, ibid., folder 11; "Golitsyn," 38;j ndex of DCI meeting memoranda, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 12; Riebling, 221-26. The most
significant case of Soviet penetration of a Western service reve ed around this point in McCone's directorship was Colonel Stig Wennerstrom, a senior official at the
Swedish Ministry of Defense. Between mid-I963 and mid-1964, at least five cases of Soviet espionage by US military personnel and a defense contractor had
resulted in arrests or were under investigation. CIA graphics, "Key Soviet Agents, Defectors, and Illegals, 1945 to the Present," product no. 562361 3-77 and "Key
Soviet Agents and Illegals, 1945 to the Present," product no. 575590 4-78, copies in History Staff; Jepson, 41-42; Taylor and Snow, appendix.
26 Sources for this paragraph and the next are: "Golitsyn," 38;
Riebling.N?
In July 1965, Hoover ordered the Bureau to break off contact with Golitsyn, but the molehunt continued at CIA, with the defector remaining the key source of
information. Most of the investigations of wrongly accused officers occurred after McCone left. Golitsyn was correct that the Soviets had a mole in the Agency, but
he turned out not to be as senior or as damaging as feared. \
Wright, 203; West, 107ffiZtie
and the above-cited portions of the books by Wise, Mangold, and
"McCone memoranda about discussions with the pre dent on 7 and 27 December 1963, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 6; idem, memorandum about meeting
with the president on 20 February 1964, ibid., folder 7.^
' Carter memorandum to Kirkpatrick, Clint, and Helms, 30 December 1963, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 19, folder 7; DCI morning meeting minutes for
16 December 1963, ibid., Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 345...K
'5CiCaLif
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trol, and I wish to attempt to change this image." McCone
wanted this effort carefully managed to prevent a recurrence
of the "CIA press conference" flap described in Chapter 10.
After that incident, McCone
established a public relations
committee under the chair-
manship
of Lyman
Kirk-
patrick,
with Ray
Cline,
Richard
Helms,
and
Paul
Chretien of OPA as mem-
bers. He charged the com-
mittee with reviewing and
approving all Agency activi-
ties with the media, includ-
ing press notices and
background briefings. He
further directed CIA not to
publicly circulate estimates,
analyses, and reports in its
own name and instead to
coordinate information
releases with the Depart-
ment of State and the White
House. Otherwise, he
declared, "I wish absolutely
no contact whatsoever, no
comments, no discussions
with the press except with my
personal authorization.'
In addition to instituting
the image enhancement cam-
paign, McCone fought back
at the Agency's critics in
Congress and the media. In a
private moment of extreme
pique, he told a long-time supporter, Sen. Stuart Syming-
ton, that "I am not going to stand for a lot of sons of bitches
like your friend [Sen. Eugene] McCarthy.. .who want to
destroy the thousands of people here and what this organiza-
tion does...." "Either I am going to get this thing stopped[,]
by Goa] or I am going to resign and go out and fight for
this organization." After venting to Symington, McCone
relaxed a bit and agreed with the senator that a better
approach would be to pass
intelligence information to
CIAs allies on the Hill?such
as Symington, Thomas
Dodd, John Stennis, and
Henry Jackson?and
approach them about using
the material in speeches
defending the Agency.31)
A contemporary depiction of the "cloak and dagger" image of
intelligence that McCone sought to dispel (U)
A scene from the movie The Adventuress
Two months later,
McCone set up what in effect
was a media "watch commit-
tee." He told Marshall Carter
"to get a group together
whose job it will be to devote
constant effort and atten-
tion, on a daily basis, to the
task of positioning ourselves
better to refute, promptly and
effectively, false accusations
levied against the Agency in
the press and in the Con-
gress." McCone "attached
great urgency" to this effort.
Members of the task force
were drawn from the DDP,
the Offices of Legislative
Counsel and General Coun-
sel, BNE, OCI, and the CI
Staff. The group initially
compiled the eight or ten
principal charges usually lev-
ied against CIA and then prepared rebuttals for dissemina-
tion to the media and Congress as the occasion arose."
McCone vividly displayed his defensiveness about CIA's
image by the outrage he felt over the book The Invisible Gay-
30 "Memorandum for the File... Recent CIA Publicity," and "Memorandum: Handling of Publicity," 13 January 1964, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 10;
McCone memorandum to CIA Executive Committee, "Agency Relations with News Media," 16 January 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 1, folder 13. In a let-
ter to the chairman of PFIAB, Clark Clifford, McCone partly blamed Chretien for the "press conference" foul-up, describing the recently appointed public affairs
chief as being "not as sensitive to the tricky problem of press relationships as a more experienced press officer might have been." McCone letter to Clifford, 16 Janu-
ary 1964, CMS Files, Job 92B01039R, box 7, folder 122.2E4-
31Transcript of McCone telephone conversations with Symington and Dodd, 5 and 18 February 1964, McCone Papers, box 10, folder 5. James Reston of the New
York Times similarly suggested to Helms that the Agency try to alleviate reporters' instinctive suspicion of secret agencies by providing them with unattributable
information. Doing so, Reston advised, would give journalists a sense that CIA was "attempting to be cooperative." Helms memorandum, "Talk with Mr. James
Reston...," 27 January 1964, McCone Papers, box 13, folder 2.Ar
384
-SCEligte
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Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs under Johnson (U)
ernment by journalists David Wise and Thomas B. Ross.
After learning of plans for its publication in mid-1964, he
and several senior lieutenants orchestrated an aggressive
damage-preemption and damage-control campaign to sup-
press and discredit the book, which sharply criticized CIA
and the DCI. This effort at nonlegal prior restraint would
be the Agency's most forceful ever against anyone other than
former employees.' McCone's reaction contrasted markedly
with his tempered response to CIA: The Inside Story by
American journalist Andrew Tully, which appeared two
years before. At that time, the DCI opposed having an
Agency officer publicly rebut Tully's book, which at its worst
was only mildly disapproving and left some readers
impressed with the scope and scale of CI.A's enterprises. He
judged that refuting the book only would draw attention to
it, stimulate sales, and further damage CIA." By 1964,
however, McCone had become much more thin-skinned
about criticism of CIA, wanted to prevent injury to the
Agency's standing within the administration, and believed
that The Invisible Government contained many more harm-
ful allegations and revealed far more sensitive information
than Tully's work.
Wise, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Her-
ald Tribune, and Ross, a correspondent for the Chicago Sun-
Times, were among the first prominent practitioners of
"investigative journalism" and already were notorious at
Langley for their 1962 book The U-2 Affair, about the
shootdown of Francis Gary Powers's spyplane. The Agency's
in-house publication, Studies in Intelligence, described that
"expose" as "another of the recent spate of books which pur-
port to reveal the inside story of secret operations and which
gain some credence as authentic while intermingling fact
and fiction without distinguishing between them."' Two
years later, Wise and Ross followed up with The Invisible
Government, which contained over 350 pages of extensive
detail about CIA covert actions in Latin America, Southeast
Asia, and Europe; the workings of NSA and DIA; and the
Kennedy administration's national security apparat. The
book was more than just reportage, however; it argued that a
secret cadre of officials from the White House, the Depart-
ments of Defense and State, and the Intelligence Commu-
nity ran American foreign policy without accountability to
Congress and the public. "[T]his shadow government is
shaping the lives of 190,000,000 Americans.. .out of public
view...without the knowledge of our elected representa-
tives," according to Wise and Ross.' (U)
The book was not flattering to McCone personally
("When he smiles,' a CIA man cautioned, 'look out.'"), but
what especially riled him was the premise of the title: that
the NSC's entity for reviewing covert actions, known as the
Special Group or the 303 Committee, was, in his words, "a
sinister and powerful organization existing outside the chan-
nels of authority." McCone believed that to achieve their
purpose of discrediting covert action, Wise and Ross had to
attack the Special Group/303 Committee, and to do that,
they had to target the DCI by depicting him as the behind-
the-scenes leader of the US government's hidden foreign
policy elite. As one of the Agency's internal reviews phrased
the authors' contention, "the organization set up to control
CIA's covert action mission has become a prisoner of John
McCone and CIA, head and heart of the 'invisible govern-
ment." Besides that ominous-sounding thesis, the informa-
tion in the book, the DCI wrote, was "dramatized in a most
slanted manner," and, whether it had been published previ-
ously or not, "the assembly of all of it under one cover"
caused "great damage" to the United States by giving its
adversaries fodder for their propaganda.'X,
McCone further contended that tell-all books like The
Invisible Government were ahistorical and conceptually
DCI morning meeting minutes for 5 February 1964, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 346; Karamessines memorandum to Angleton, 5 February 1964,
"Refutation of False Accusations Against CIA in the Press and in the Congress," DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 1, folder 19. In December 1963, McCone had his
deputies look into planting letters in American newspapers to rebut criticisms of CIA. DCI morning meeting minutes for 16 December 1963, ER Files, Job
80R01580R, box 17, folders 345. McCone's mounting antagonism toward the press had definite limits, however, and did not induce him to violate the Agency's
charter. For example, he refused a Johnson White House request that CIA maintain files on nearly two dozen newspaper columnists. DCI morning meeting minutes
for 5 February 1964 (cited above).N,
"The Agency did not take such concerted action against an author again until in the early 1970s, when it twice went to court to prevent ex-officer Victor Marchetti
from publishing a magazine article, and to force him to remove classified information from a book he was writing. The two cases upheld the legitimacy of the secrecy
agreement CIA requires employees to sign. See John S. Warner, "The Marchetti Case: New Case Law," Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 1-12. The Agency had no
such leverage to use against Wise and Ross, and US espionage statutes had not been invoked against the media. (U)
34McCone memorandum to Sherman Kent, 5 October 1962, McCone Papers, box 1, folder 14.X
35 John S. Warner, review of The tb-2 Affair, Studies 6, no. 3 (Fall 1962): A45. (U)
'6 Wise and Ross, The Invisible Government, quote from the dust jacket. (U)
"Wise and Ross, The Invisible Government, profile of McCone on 192-97, quote on 192; McCone untitled memorandum, 5 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 2,
folder 11; Paul Chretien, "Report on the Wise and Ross Book, The Invisible Government," 10 May 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 14..,>k
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flawed. They portrayed the Agency's energetic use of covert
action in the past as the current reality, whereas in relative
terms CIA was now more heavily involved in collection and
analysis than ever before-in good measure because of his
own initiatives. Lastly, McCone believed that Wise and Ross
had deceived him. After meeting
with them about their book in
August 1963, he invited them
back to discuss their work with
him as it progressed, and
requested that they submit the
manuscript for a fact-check and
security review. They did neither,
and as recently as late April 1964,
Wise saw the DCI but did not
mention the by-then-completed
book.'
Consequently, an infuriated
McCone tried to prevent the pub-
lication of The Invisible Govern-
ment. First, he needed to show
that the book seriously harmed the
nation's security and was so rid-
dled with errors that it should not
be foisted on an unwitting public.
Armed with a "bootleg" copy of
the uncorrected galley proofs, he
convened an Agency task force-
with members drawn from the
DDP, DI, and DS&T, the Office
of Security, NIPE, the IG, the
General Counsel and Legislative
Counsel, BNE, and OPA-to scrutinize the book for mis-
takes, security compromises, and legal violations. The OPA
staff conducted a separate, more detailed content analysis.
McCone also directed that every Agency officer mentioned
in the book comment on the accuracy of the references about
him.39,1K
The task force and OPA inquiries found that The Invisi-
ble Government contained over 200 "significant inaccura-
cies" and at least 120 "significant security disclosures" of
cover organizations, clandestine personnel, operational
details, or component functions-half of them revealed for
the first time, and one-tenth of
them previously known but still
considered sensitive. Overall, the
two studies concluded, the book
represented more of a public rela-
tions problem than a breach of
security. The OPA analysis stated
that:
[ILLS STAR LING .; N Di LIRflri, BO
.;
FIRST FUL \t'( (J
lER IC A'S INTELLIC \IC N
APPAR NFU'S -AN INVISH ;A
wrr-i-1 THE CIA AT rrs CEN
DUCTS THE :lCLANDESI'INE P ICIES
By the authors of THE U-2 AFFAIR
DAVID WISE and THOMAS B. ROSS
Cover of the first edition of The Invisible Govern-
ment (U)
secrets.... [It] will
American people..
C/A.4o..zs;
The cumulative impact of
the old material combined
with the new, presented in a
low-keyed setting that has
the aura of authenticity, and
under the guise of two cru-
sading writers taking on an
undemocratic organization,
will do untold harm to the
Agency, at home and
abroad.... [T]he Commu-
nists will certainly use this
book to discredit CIA
throughout the world....
[T]he book is in a class by
itself in being the most
accurate of its kind ever in
stripping bare the Govern-
ment's most closely guarded
further discredit us among the
[and] contribute to the decline of
The task force suggested exerting quiet pressure on the
book's publisher to halt publication or remove sensitive ref-
38 McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with New York Times.. .29 June 1964," McCone Papers, box 2, folder 11; McCone, "Memorandum for the
Record.. Discussion with the President, 20 May [19641...," ibid., box 6, folder 8; transcripts of McCone telephone conversations with Gardner Cowles (Look), J.H.
Whitney (New York Herald Tribune), Robert D. Loomis (Random House), Robert Manning (Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs), and David Wise, 5, 7,
and 11 May 1964, ibid., box 10, folder 6; McCone letter to Cowles, 7 May 1964, and transcript of McCone meeting with Wise and Ross, 15 May 1964, ibid., box
7, folder 10; McCone letter to Loomis, 5 May 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 14; PFIAB, "Minutes of Board Meeting ofJune 4, 1964," 16, PFIAB
record no. 206-10001-10013, PFIAB Records, NARA.X
McCone untitled memorandum, 5 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 11; Parrott, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting with the DCI," 4 May 1964,
Chretien memoranda to McCone, "Task Force on The Invisible Government," 4 May 1964, and "Report on the Wise and Ross Book, The Invisible Government," 10 May
1964, and Knoche untitled memorandum to Carter, 6 May 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 14; DCI morning meeting minutes for 6 May 1964, ibid.,
Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 347; several task force memoranda in History Staff Miscellaneous Studies, No. MISC 13.14, "The Invisible Government."
?
"Chretien memoranda to McCone, "Task Force on The Invisible Government," 4 May 1964, and "Report on the Wise and Ross Book, The Invisible Government,"
10 May 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 14.N
386
.tr?41?
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Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs under Johnson (U)
erences and using covert assets and sympathetic journalists
to secure unfavorable reviews. No one thought legal action
against the authors was justified, although McCone sug-
gested that the writer of another book with the same title
"be advised very discreetly to bring suit" against Wise and
Ross for copyright infringement. Some task force members
thought that because so many facts in The Invisible Govern-
ment had already appeared in open sources, the Agency's
options were limited and that questioning only some points
would be misinterpreted as confirming the rest. Richard
Helms, however, wanted the Agency to take a tough
approach, writing to McCone separately that publication of
The Invisible Government should be stopped if possible.
"This book is a classic case of the whole being a far more
damaging security erosion than the individual parts which
compose it." It was, Helms believed, based on a "philosophy
[that] is equivalent to saying that our activities should not
exist." The Office of Security tried to find out if Wise and
Ross had contacted current or former Agency employees
during their research, but, as had been determined in previ-
ous cases of this sort, the book's information was so widely
held throughout the Intelligence Community that specific
sources could not be identified.4IX
After the substantive review of The Invisible Government
was done, McCone took several steps to get it spiked or
revised. He forewarned the president of the book's potential
for harm and suggested that Johnson refute the "shadow
elite" notion at a press conference. According to McCone,
"the President expressed regret that the book was published
[and] discouragement over the license of government offi-
cials with the press, but didn't seem to know what to do
about it." With the media starting to snipe at the adminis-
tration over Vietnam, Johnson did not want to get into a
First Amendment wrangle with journalists and publishers-
least of all with CIA as the focus. The DCI tried to convince
Look not to serialize the book because it contained "totally
and maliciously distorted" interpretations and "philosophi-
cally...is just as screwy as it can be." "[It] gives to the Soviet
propagandists and people like [Ghanaian president Kwame]
Nkrumah and [Indonesian president] Sukarno and people
like that just a speech for every night." Look's publisher,
Gardner Cowles, thought McCone was "unduly agitated"
about material that had already appeared in print but
allowed Helms to review the second installment (the first
had already run) and suggest deletions.'N
McCone and Carter also complained about The Invisible
Government to its publisher, Random House, and to the
publisher of the newspaper that employed Wise, the New
York Herald Tribune. To the former, McCone passed on-
no doubt agreeing with-the purported observation of
Dean Rusk that "if the author wrote a memorandum put-
ting everything that's in that book and delivered it to the
Soviet Embassy, we could put him in jail for life...."
McCone called and met with Wise and Ross to convince
them to correct errors and remove statements "that would
be damaging to the national interest," and he considered
having the Agency buy all copies of the first edition if the
publisher agreed to some deletions. The authors stood by
their work, and the president of Random House, Bennett
Cerf, replied that he would be glad to sell the first printing
to the Agency, after which he would order another edition
printed, and then another, and so on. CINs pressure on the
publishers had no effect. The book came out unchanged
and soon rose to the top of the best seller lists-a "gold nug-
get" for Wise and Ross, as McCone had feared.'.
After The Invisible Government was published, McCone
acted to gauge and limit its effect. Acting on prior instruc-
tions, DDP stations and bases avoided giving the book fur-
ther publicity or credence by attacking it; when feasible,
discouraged its publication, sales, and distribution in their
host countries; planted or stimulated critical reviews in local
41DCI morning meeting minutes for 27 May 1964, ER Files, -lob 80R01580R box 17 folder 347; Helms memorandum to McCone, "The Invisible Govern-
ment," ibid., Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 14 memorandum of meeting with Thomas Mann, 10 June 1964,
DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3, folder 11. /vr-4,,one neneveci, out conia not prove, mat Wise and Ross got much of their information from CIA's rivals in the
Department of State and Department of Defense. Transcript of McCone telephone conversation with Sen. Leverett Sakonstall, 20 May 1964, McCone Papers, box
10, folder 6,1kgr
42McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Discussion with the President, 20 May I19641...," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 8; transcripts of McCone telephone
conversations with Cowles, 5 and 11 May 1964, ibid., box 10, folder 6. Look ran the serialization in its 16 and 30 June 1964 issues (vol. 28, no. 12, 37 et seq., and
no. 13,77 et seq.),,?
4.3Transcripts of McCone telephone conversations with Whitney, Loomis, Manning, and Wise, 5, 7, and 11 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 10, folder 6; Knoche unti-
tled memorandum to Kirkpatrick, 6 May 1964, Cowles telegram to McCone, 6 May 1964, and McCone letter to Cowles, 7 May 1964, ibid.; transcript of McCone
meeting with Wise and Ross, 15 May 1964, ibid., box 7, folder 10; Helms memorandum to McCone, "Meeting with Mr. Gardner Cowles," 12 May 1964, DDO Files,
Job 78-03041R, box 2, folder 12; Carter memorandum about conversation with Loomis, 8 May 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 16; David Wise, The
American Police State, 198-99; McCone untitled memorandum, 5 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 11. The original edition of The Invisible Government
appeared in June 1964; by September, it was in its fifth printing and had reached the number one or two spot on the most important best seller lists; and a paperback ver-
sion was published in July 1965. Walter Pforzheimer memorandum to Chretien, "The Invisible Government," David Wise book review file, folder 1, History Staff.)(
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media; and reported communist-sponsored attempts to
exploit it. McCone had copies and a critique of the book
given to all members of CIA's congressional oversight com-
mittees, and had OPA create a central repository of foreign
and domestically published material in which Agency per-
sonnel and activities were identified or compromised. Sev-
eral months later, McCone asked BNE for an account of
how other countries had used The Invisible Government for
political or intelligence advantage. Nkrumah reportedly was
"much impressed" by it; Sukarno had ordered copies sent to
his cabinet; and Pakistani president Ayub Khan was
"shocked" and hoped nothing such as the book described
was going on in his country. In the American press, accord-
ing to OPA, two-thirds of the negative coverage stressed that
CIA was out of control and a threat to democracy, while
one-third played up Agency ineptitude. In addition,
McCone declared that "I want to attack the book in the
reviews" and had a statement drafted that would serve as the
basis for critiques by CIA contacts in the media and the
publishing industry. A few of those Agency-generated
appraisals eventually appeared.444X,
All these Seventh Floor fulminations only made the situ-
ation worse. They antagonized CIA contacts in journalism
and publishing, and contributed to the increasingly adver-
sarial relationship between the US government and the
media over national security issues. In addition, McCone's
misdirected determination to prevent CIA from getting bad
press resulted in more negative coverage, not less. Not sur-
prisingly, the "spiking" story leaked, resulting in First-
Amendment-invoking headlines such as "McCone Tried to
Stop New Book" and "Furious McCone Wages War on
Book." McCone inadvertently had added a new twist to
Wise and Ross's tale: CIA not only was sinister, but also
undemocratic.45 (U)
After several months, McCone's ire abated. Although he
strongly believed that The Invisible Government had hurt the
national interest, he concluded that its overdrawn premise
about (in his words) a "monstrous, uncontrolled, secret
action group" undercut the author's credibility. From the
standpoint of the DCI and the Agency, it would have been
better if he had reached that conclusion sooner and followed
his previous policy of media disengagement, letting what-
ever hue and cry the book caused to subside on its own. In
his judgment, however, at that time in that administration, a
more combative stance was called for. Moreover, media
savvy was not a forte of his. As it turned out, McCone and
the Agency wasted their indignation: There was no sign that
The Invisible Government affected the White House's regard
for him and CIA one way or the other.tk
Despite that experience, McCone stayed in the media
fray as exposes of CIA multiplied. One of the more discom-
fiting among them was The Bay of Pigs: The Leaders' Story of
Brigade 2506, by Haynes Johnson of the Washington
Evening Star, which appeared in mid-1964. Written with the
collaboration of leaders of the anti-Castro resistance, it con-
tained a startling allegation that seemed to substantiate the
"invisible government" idea and caused McCone to order an
internal investigation into the source of the leak. According
to Johnson, a CIA field officer known as "Colonel Frank"-
true name told members of the Agency's
Cuban proxy briga e t at his superiors at Langley had
directed him to disobey administration orders to suspend
the landing at the Bay of Pigs. With the Wise-Ross book
selling so well, McCone could not allow the charge that CIA
would contravene a White House command to go unrebut-
tecl.47 (U)
The in-house inquiry that McCone convened found no
evidence that then-DCI Allen Dulles, then-DDCI Charles
" DCI morning meeting minutes for 4 and 15 June and 9 September 1964, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 17, folders 347 and 348;
both titled "Adverse Publicity... The Invisible Government...," 28 May and 24 July 1964, DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3,
o Deputy Directors et al., Action Memorandum No. 392, "Centralization of Information on Published References to Agency Activities and Personnel,"
19 June 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 2, folder 3; transcript of telephone conversation between Carter and McCone, 6 June 1964, and Chretien memoran-
dum to McCone, "Press References to The Invisible Government," ibid., box 13, folder 14.1**
45Associated Press wire service report, 9 June 1964, copy in DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 2, folder 14; "CIA Effort to Censor Book Told; Publisher Tells of Calls
from McCone, Aide," Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 9 June 1964, "Furious McCone Wages War on Book," Miami Herald, 14 June 1964, and "McCone Tried to
Stop New Book on CIA; Attempt to Hold Up Magazine Articles Is Also Disclosed," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 18 June 1964, OPA Files, Job 81-00468R, box 9, folder
3; and numerous similar press reports in Wise book review file, folder 3. (U)
McCone's order about how securely BNE's analysis of The Invisible Government should be handled suggests that he believed the only thing worse than an expose was a
leak about an official investigation of an expose. He wanted the BNE report treated as "a most confidential and privileged in-house document... [that) should not be dis-
closed to anyone outside of the immediate small group in the Agency....rIlhe article is commendable, but could do irreparable damage to the Agency in connection
with its relationship with depress and the public if improperly handled." McCone untitled memorandum to Carter, 23 June 1964, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 5.K
'Carter untitled memorandum to Helms, 8 January 1965, and McCone letter to Tom Braden, 25 February 1965, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 16, folder 4; tran-
script of McCone meeting with Joseph Alsop, 13 March 1965, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 3; Wise, American Police State, 199-200; Charles E. Valpey (pseud.),
review of The Invisible Government, Studies 8, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 106-96?.
388
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Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs under Johnson (U)
P. Cabell, or any other senior Agency official ordered partic-
ipants in the Bay of Pigs operation to ignore specific direc-
tives or general policy guidance. denied under oath
that he said what the book claimed he had. However,
according to the inquiry, some Agency field officers thought
the incident Johnson recounted
very likely had occurred because
"Colonel Frank had shown him-
self to be a wild man quite capa-
ble of making the statements
attributed to him." The investiga-
tion attributed discrepancies in
participants' recollections to per-
sonal misim-pressions, overzeal-
ous attempts to inflate morale,
and language difficulties.
McCone told PFIAB in June that
the inquiry "turned up only an
instance or two where in the heat
of the operations statements were
made to the effect that the opera-
tion was ready and nothing could
make it fail." Despite the
Agency's fears?which the flap
over The Invisible Government
probably intensified?The Bay of
Pigs did not create much of a
stir."
McCone involved himself
with another piece of journalism
about the Bay of Pigs around this
time?a proposed article by
Mario Lazo, a prominent Cuban
exile writer, in Reader's Digest. At the DCI's request, Helms
showed Lazo's draft to McGeorge Bundy and said CIA was
"anxious to see an end to these pieces which simply con-
trived to keep waving a 'bloody shirt' we would like to see
buried." The DDP told Bundy that Kirkpatrick was going
to try to get Lazo to withdraw the manuscript because its
sympathetic tone toward CIA might suggest that the Agency
was involved in its preparation. After reading the draft,
Bundy said, "If you can knock off
the article by a telephone call or
by a meeting with the author,
fine. If not, I do not propose that
we take any further action. After
all, this article is no worse than
others which have appeared."
Bundy's response suggests the
White House did not believe that
CIA's image was as easily tar-
nished as McCone thought, or
that the costs of regularly intrud-
ing into the publishing process
outweighed the benefits.'
BY HAYNES JOHNSON
WITH MANUEL ARTIME, JOSE
ERNEIDO OLIVA AND ENRIQ
PEREZ SAN ROMAN,
UE RUIZ-WILLIAMS
Dust jacket of the first editi
on of The Bay of Pigs (U)
Nevertheless, on two occasions
in mid- to late-1964, McCone
dealt with two potentially trou-
blesome articles in Time. In early
June, the periodical told of an
alleged CIA operation against
Cuba launched from Miami.
Soon after, McCone met with
Time-Life publisher Henry Luce,
who had heard that the DCI was
"very annoyed" with Time's
"totally false" story that the
Agency had supported an infiltra-
tion attempt by the Cuban exile
group JURE led by Manolo Ray Rivero. With the adminis-
tration sharply reducing its support to the anti-Castro expa-
triates, claims that the Agency was still working with them
47 Johnson wrote that "[Colonel] Frank never said who [in the Kennedy administration] opposed the invasion.... He did say that if he received the order to stop the
invasion, 'I have also orders from my bosses, my commanders, to continue anyway." The Bay of Pigs, 76. The back of the book's dust jacket promised that the bri-
gade's commanders would "reveal the whole truth about... [the CIA's] secret plans to countermand White House decisions." One of the Agency's journalistic con-
tacts, Charles Murphy, advised OPA that he thought The Bay of Pigs was "more destructive" to the Agency than The Invisible Government. Johnson presented
credible detail about a well-known operational failure, whereas "a good deal" of what Wise and Ross wrote was "preposterous." Murphy letter to Stanley J. Grogan,
14 May 1964, MORI doc. no. 31068. (U)
48
memorandum to Helms, "Investigation of Certain Allegations Made in the Book, 'The Bay of Pigs," 28 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 4,
fouler is; ritzGerato memorandum to Helms, "Haynes Johnson Book 'Bay of Pigs," 13 May 1964, DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 2, folder 12; Kirkpatrick review
of The Bays Pigs, Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 1964): 105; PFIAB, "Minutes of Board Meeting of June 4, 1964," 16, PFIAB record no. 206-10001-10013, PFIAB Records,
NARA.
49 Helms, "Memorandum for the Record.. Meeting with Mr. Bundy re Lazo Manuscript," 22 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 13, folder 2; Kirkpatrick memoran-
dum to McCone, "Discussion with Dr. Mario Lazo Regarding His Potential Article for the Reader's Digest...," 21 May 1964, Lyman Kirkpatrick Collection, Section
C, NARA,Xs.
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"on the side" could be politically explosive. Drawing from a
memorandum prepared by WH Division, McCone per-
suaded Luce to "investigate [the article] thoroughly." The
story stood, but in spite of its "rogue agency" theme, it did
not capture the interest of the White House, and the DCI's
records do not indicate any follow-up on the matter.51k
Another Time piece in October 1964 hit closer to home.
CIA reportedly had conducted field investigations on several
of the president's closest aides (Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti,
George Reedy, and Walter Jenkins) before granting them a
special clearance. Concerned that Johnson would think the
Agency had insulted his trusted advisers or perhaps even
thought they might be security risks, McCone wrote to the
president directly about his "distress" over the Time story.
He tried to assure Johnson that CIA had never considered
investigating the aides, and that he had ordered the clear-
ances issued to them. McCone added that he could only get
the Time writer to admit that the source of information was
not a CIA employee. No detectable sentiment issued from
the White House?indicating again that McCone was far
more anxious about the Agency's public relations than he
needed to be." .1t<
Besides trying to induce writers and publishers to modify
or withdraw unfavorable books and articles, McCone also
contemplated legal action against them if a strong enough
case could be made. He took some encouragement from a
New York State Supreme Court decision in 1964 that
enjoined the movie production company Twentieth Cen-
tury-Fox from showing the comedy film John Goldfarb,
Won't You Please Come Home? because it misappropriated the
name of the University of Notre Dame and thereby discred-
ited the school. The court placed a similar injunction on the
publishers of the book on which the movie was based.
McCone told the Agency's general counsel to obtain a full
record of the case and follow the appeals "as it might be that
law is being made.. .which will be extremely useful to us in
restraining authors, as well as TV and motion picture pro-
ducers in the improper use of CIA for monetary benefits."
Agency records do not indicate if any legal action resulted
from McCone's idea while he was DCI.52 (U)
Along with trying to curtail journalists' discussion of
CIA, McCone ordered Agency executives "to reduce press
contacts to an absolute minimum" and named "controver-
sial figures [in the media] who should be avoided alto-
gether." The strategy that McCone, Helms, Chretien, and
John Bross of NIPE developed in early 1965 for dealing
with NBC's proposed documentary on CIA put that atti-
tude into practice. In February 1964, NBC had broadcast a
White Paper program on the Bay of Pigs affair that criticized
the Agency, so the DCI and his deputies were on their guard
when they heard that the network was preparing another
documentary about CIA.53 They decided that the Agency
would not collaborate officially on the program (including
not allowing filming on the Headquarters compound) but
would afford "unofficial, unattributable" assistance to NBC
in making contacts and organizing information. Current
CIA managers would encourage former officers such as
Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell to appear on the program
or provide background interviews. Helms wrote that "[t]his
is the only device open to us for keeping the show from
being overloaded with commentary from such critics as
David Wise... [or] Andrew Tully...." (McCone declined to
be interviewed; he cited his policy against speaking in pub-
lic, and disingenuously claimed that because he "was not so
sure that the hostile attitudes toward the Agency were seri-
ous or were hurting [it]," there was no point in him appear-
ing on television.) Lastly, CIA permitted two Chinese
defectors to be interviewed, and arranged for the release of
U-2 photographs during the Cuban missile crisis and of the
Soviet Union before 1960. "Since such material
[aerial photography] has been used on TV before," Helms
wrote, "it can hardly be regarded as a violation of security
and would do much to get into the program an aspect of
intelligence collection which is dramatic and effective."54
McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Luncheon Meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Luce...12 June 1964," and FitzGerald, "Memorandum...Manuel Ray [and]
Time Magazine Article of 12 June 1964," McCone Papers, box 2, folder 11.."-t
'McCone letter to President Johnson, 20 October 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 4, folder 16.):44
52McCone untitled memorandum to Carter, 18 December 1964, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 5. The movie finally opened in March 1965. Reviews in the Wash-
ington Daily News and the Wishington Post, 31 March 1965, OPA Files, Job 88-0I365R, box 2, folder 5. (U)
53 Like Haynes Johnson's book, the White Paper program caused scant controversy outside Langley. JMWAVE reported, for example, that it had no problems dealing
with its Cuban expatriate assets after the telecast, even though the program concluded that trying to oust Castro was futile. The station thought, however, that it
might temporarily have trouble recruiting new exile operatives. WAVE 1813, 11 February 1964, OPA Files, Job 88-01365R, box 2, folder 6.164,
" Numerous memoranda by Chretien and during December 1964?February 1965, OPA Files, Job 88-01365R, box 2, folders 5 and 6; DCI
morning meeting minutes for 27 January t YO), rues, joo outk01580R, box 17, folder 349; Helms memorandum to McCone, "Proposed NBC TV Program,"
27 January 1965, ibid., Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 6.
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NBC broadcast the program, The Science of Spying, on 4
May 1965, less than a week after McCone stepped down.
The mistitled documentary had a narrower scope than
Agency executives had thought, dealing only with CIA
covert actions in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Tibet, the
Congo, Cuba, and Laos. It carried interviews with Dulles,
Bissell, and Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Dulles defended the
Agency as a vital weapon in the Cold War, and Bissell noted
that it only carried out missions that the White House
assigned it. McCarthy complained that CIA had usurped
Congress' warmaking power by toppling governments at the
president's behest. The program showed much "local color"
footage but apparently no material that the Agency pro-
vided. CIA observers concluded that the damage the show
inflicted "lies not in security breaches but in the editorial
slant and misrepresentations" made through "clever [film]
splicing" and "artful editorializing."
McCone did not make any recorded comments about
The Science o S in or the effectiveness of CIA's approach
toward it. of the CA Staff?one of the officers
most invo ved in developing the Agency's media strategy?
concluded, however, that "we probably devoted too much
time and thought to the program." In the future, "[w]e need
a subtle, patient, and carefully planned effort to see that we
do get occasional positive treatment by TV and other
media."' McCone's methods?reactive, defensive, and fre-
quently hostile?were proving to be ill-suited for the emerg-
ing era of greater public accountability and journalistic
scrutiny. ltk
In addition to this carefully controlled media contact,
McCone?partly at the White House's suggestion, partly on
his own initiative?lifted his self-imposed embargo on out-
side appearances and met with selected individuals and sym-
pathetic groups in controlled settings. In September 1964,
the president asked McCone to travel to major US cities and
meet with business leaders, publishers, and other prominent
private citizens to discuss Cl/Vs views on world events and
"disclose in a discreet manner [its] methods of operation, its
competence, etc." Johnson believed "showing the flag"
would offset unfavorable public comments about the
Agency, particularly those emanating from Capitol Hill.
The DCI "agreed to undertake this mission" and during the
next several months met with journalists and corporate exec-
utives somewhat more often than before?to what effect is
unclear.57,K
Additionally, in late 1964, McCone attended two outside
awards ceremonies and delivered remarks at each about
international affairs and intelligence issues. He gave his first
public speech as DCI on 14 November at the Catholic Uni-
versity of America, when he accepted the Cardinal Gibbons
Medal for lifetime service to the Catholic Church. He used
the occasion to defend CIA against some of the most com-
mon charges leveled against it, to recount some of its fore-
casting successes, and to describe the state of the communist
world and the Soviet threat. After accepting the Herbert
Hoover Medal from the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers on 2 December, he made some general comments
about world events. These appearances generated no unfa-
vorable publicity and, in a small way, appear to have helped
put a more benign face on the Agency, at least in some quar-
ters."
Tightening the Pursestrings (U)
After President Johnson decreed an economy drive
throughout the federal government in November 1963,
McCone directed CIA managers to review their programs
and budgets thoroughly and propose cutbacks within 90
days. He also wanted fitness reports for executives at the
rank of chief of station (or the stateside equivalent) and
above to include attention to economy as a job element. He
55Script for The Science of Spying, NBC News, 4 May 1965, and CIA memoranda, "Content Analysis of NBC Presentation The Science of Spying," 11 May 1965, and
"Fact Sheet on NBC-TV's Science of Spying," 19 July 1965, OPA Files, Job 88-01365R, box 2, folder 24. The program's sole sponsor, B.E Goodrich, cancelled its
commercials shortly before airtime. The company claimed that the broadcast might "do harm to the government of the United States." The precipitous move
evoked unfounded suspicion that CIA or the Johnson administration had pressured Goodrich into withdrawing its sponsorship. "A Hassle Over 'Spying' Documen-
ta ," New York Herald Tribune, 6 May 1965, ibid.,/14
emorandum, "NBC TV Show, 'The Science of Spying'...," OPA Files, Job 88-01365R, box 2, folder 50144,
'McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting with the President-30 September [1964]," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 9; McCone calendars, entries for
November 1964?April 1965,Nr
58 McCone speech at the Catholic University of America, 14 November 1964, McCone Papers, box 5, folder 17; "McCone Awarded Hoover Medal," New York
Times, 4 December 1964, McCone clipping file, HIC. In May 1964, McCone gave a brief talk about the Agency at a dinner of the Papal Knights of Malta, but the
function was private, and his remarks went unreported. McCone speech files, McCone Papers, box 5, folder 17. For undisclosed reasons, McCone declined Helms's
and Karamessines's recommendation that he meet with prominent American publishers at an off-the-record off-site to discuss the Agency's mission and activities and
the intelligence and political threats it faced. Karamessines untitled memorandum to Helms, with attached routing sheet, DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 1, folder
18)41
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gave his top administrative lieutenants, Carter and Kirk-
patrick, the primary responsibility for developing and carry-
ing out the frugality measures, which were encouraged by
hallway posters admonishing Agency employees to keep in
mind that "The dollar you save may be your own!" The cut-
backs included a hiring freeze; a curtailment in expansion of
some programs in communications, photo interpretation,
paramilitary operations, SIGINT collection, and research
and development; and a reevaluation of personnel ceilings,
overseas activities, and service and support functions. High-
overhead areas such as aircraft and communications opera-
tions were to be managed more carefully. By DCI decree,
the Agency had to use competitive fixed-price contracts
wherever practical instead of sole-source or cost-plus-fee
contracts. If the latter were necessary, incentives were writ-
ten in for contractors to keep down costs.(
McCone watched the economizing process carefully with
his businessman's eye. Although he was pleased with the
early results, he told Carter to "examine 'old Spanish cus-
toms' and eliminate [them] where possible," and urged his
deputies that "no effort [should] be spared to expedite [the]
attainment" of new budget and personnel ceilings. "[If any
Directorate wanted to do something more than they were
doing," he wrote, "they would have to absorb it within their
own hide, and if they wanted to take on new responsibili-
ties, they would have to give up something at the bottom
priority level." He specifically expressed his dissatisfaction
with the cost-effectiveness of the DDP, telling Kirkpatrick
that, judging from what it produced, it was too big.'
McCone and his deputies at CIA met the president's
economy goals without impairing the Agency's ability to ful-
fill its core missions of intelligence collection, analysis, and
warnin? After six months, Kirkpatrick reported that a pro-
ould be saved through numerous
elt-tightenings, especially reducing and real-
locating personnel, closing facilities, and streamlining pro-
duction.
When McCone left
Langley, CIA was putting into action what would be known
later by the catch-phrase "doing more with less."61>c,
Improving Community Management (U)
To the end of his tenure as DCI, McCone strived to be a
true director of the Intelligence Community, looking for
better ways to carry out his responsibilities as its overseer
and to improve coordination among its constituent depart-
ments. As of mid-1964, he was still dissatisfied with his abil-
ity to manage it. In his view, parochialism and short-
sightedness persisted. He valued CIA's role as a counter-
weight to policy-driven diplomats and worst-case warfight-
ers, and although he lauded individual community officials
(such as the director of DIA, Gen. Joseph Carroll), he had
little good to say about how the armed services ran their
intelligence operations.
[B]ecause the military insist on a policy of rotation of
personnel[,] you don't and you can't get the profes-
sionalism in the military intelligence organizations
that you get here [at CIA]. And an added factor.. is
that traditionally within the military the intelligence is
rather low in priority...the fellows out of the bottom
third of the class go over there....
Military attaches, he claimed, were chosen "for being per-
sonalities rather than brains...and they usually like to get
one that's got both a pretty and a rich wife.... As a result
we've got a lot of attaches scattered around the world who
"President Johnson, "Memorandum for the Heads of Departments and Agencies," 30 November 1963, McCone untitled memorandum to Carter, 4 December
1963, Carter memorandum to senior CIA managers, "President's Memorandum on Government Economy" Action Memorandum A-319, 6 December 1963,
McCone letter to Kermit Gordon (Director, Bureau of the Budget), 13 December 1963, Kirkpatrick memorandum on "Economy Poster," Action Memorandum A-
337, 23 December 1963, and Carter untitled memorandum to Kirkpatrick, 24 December 1963, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 7, folder 7; DCI morning meeting
minutes for 3 December 1963, ibid., Job 80R01580R, box 17, folder 345; McCone memorandum to Carter, "Agency Procurement Activities in Fiscal Year 1964,
15 October 1964, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 5. Johnson's government cost-cutting was part of his deficit reduction plan, which in turn was a tactic to help get a
tax cut bill through Congress.)K
6?McCone memorandum to senior Agency managers, "Economy Measures," Action Memorandum A-411, 18 August 1964, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 7,
folder 7; McCone untitled memorandum to Carter, 4 December 1963, ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 7, folder 7; Kirkpatrick Diary, vol. 6, entry for 4 August
1964..*
6' Kirkpatrick memorandum to McCone, "Report on Economy Measures Within CIA for the Period Ending 31 March 1964," 6 May 1964 (with McCone's hand-
written comments), ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 7, folder 7; Bross memorandum to McCone, "Funding of Intelligence Community Programs," 4 February 1965,
CMS Files, Job 92B01039R, box 7, folder 129; "Total CIA Obligations, 1947-1977," ER Files, Job 79M01476A, box 1, folder 12; "Full-Time Permanent Person-
nel, 1950-1977," ibid., Job 79M00467A, box 2, folder 242
392
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are the best damn dancers in the
military, but......62X
McCone considered two
answers to the problem of com-
munity disunity. One was to cre-
ate an assistant secretary of
defense for intelligence who
would superintend the collec-
tion and analysis activities of all
military intelligence entities.
McCone believed that establish-
ing this office would alleviate
many of the bureaucratic con-
flicts between the DCI and the
Pentagon and permit better
management of tactical intelli-
gence. The other idea was to
give the secretary of defense
operational responsibility for the
military elements in the commu-
nity?
ST*Ria./
Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs under Johnson (U)
The US Intelligence Board in April 1965 (U)
while making the DCI the "executive agent" of all
national intelligence resources?CIA, NSA, NRO, NPIC,
and FMSAC. McCone saw some virtue in severing the
DCI's "intimate relationship" with CIA so that he could
more effectively guide the entire community, but he recog-
nized that the director's dependence on the Agency for staff
support and nondepartmental analysis made that arrange-
ment unworkable. He compared the British and West Ger-
man intelligence bureaucracies and concluded that the latter
offered a much better model for the United States. In Brit-
ain, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee was
separated from operations, which severely limited his value
to the prime minister
CIA and DIA worked well together by 1965, so McCone
did not give their relations much attention during his last
months at Langley. He had received evaluations of DLA's
performance from Agency officers who chaired the principal
USIB committees and from the heads of the directorates.
rThe
McCone.63.,*-
chief was more of a DCI than
'Transcript of McCone meeting with Sir Kenneth Strong, 4 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 9.>1.4
McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Discussion with Mr. Clark Clifford... 14 July 1964," FRUS, 1964-1968, XXXIII, Organization and Management of
U.S. Foreign Policy..., 463-64; McCone memorandum concerning meeting with CIA and Bureau of the Budget, 9 October 1964, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 12;
transcript of McCone meeting with Fubini, 16 November 1964, ibid., box 9, folder 1.X.
*St Eir*EZ/
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CHAPTER 16
McCone continued meeting weekly with USIB, which
was as busy during Johnson's administration as it was during
Kennedy's. Vietnam, Laos, the Soviet Union, and the Mid-
dle East were the main topics of national estimates and spe-
cial assessments. As discussed in earlier chapters, the board's
committee structure and responsibilities were changed and
new procedures for handling compartmented information
and defectors were instituted under McCone's chairman-
ship. The Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance submit-
ted the most reports of any committee-representing one
half of the board's output-a reflection of the surging
growth of technical means in the national intelligence effort.
Among his final significant actions as head of the commu-
nity, McCone issued several new DCI Directives: a charter
for the Critical Collection Problems Committee, an impor-
tant vehicle for integrating all-source collection on "hard
target" countries and problems; terms of reference for the
USIB Watch Committee and National Indications Center,
charged with warning of imminent Sino-Soviet Bloc hostili-
ties; and procedures for rationalizing production of nuclear,
guided missile, space, and economic intelligence.65X)
In the area of technical security, McCone found an
arrangement ripe for the sort of consolidation he had
effected elsewhere, but serious information compromises
had to be uncovered before the situation was improved. In
1956, the NSC had set up a Special Committee on Techni-
cal Surveillance Countermeasures a delayed reaction to
the discovery in 1952 of a sophisticated listening device
concealed in the Great Seal of the United States hanging in
the American ambassador's office in the embassy in Mos-
cow. The committee had achieved some measure of interde-
partmental coordination, but as an NSC entity, it was too
awkwardly positioned between USIB and community com-
ponents to set policy effectively. The NSC abolished the
committee in late 1964-ironically, after discoveries of
Soviet audio penetrations of the US embassies in Moscow
and Warsaw indicated that the current system needed fixing
urgently.66 In its stead, McCone, with the assistance of
USIB, was charged with responsibility for coordinating
technical surveillance countermeasures, and a new commit-
tee was set up for that purpose. Placed inside the now-effi-
ciently running machinery of USIB that McCone helped
develop, the Technical Surveillance Countermeasures Com-
mittee was able to translate national requirements into
action-precisely what had been missing in the previous
countermeasures program. Within CIA, McCone told
DDS&T Wheelon to mount a major counter-audio
research and development program.'
McCone took an especially keen interest in the prepara-
tion of the last annual reports on the community and CIA
that were written for PFIAB during his tenure. After closely
reviewing early versions, McCone had the community
report revised and the "sterile, uninspiring" Agency sum-
mary redone from scratch. He wanted the reports to
reflect the activities of the community and of CIA
accurately and comprehensively and to bring out to
the fullest extent the positive accomplishments of the
65 Lay, vol. 5, 14-15, 20-23, 25; Bross memorandum to McCone, "Actions Taken to Improve Effectiveness of Intelligence Effort of the Government as a Whole,"
15 April 1964, CMS Files, Job 92B01039R, box 7, folder 122; DCID No. 2/2 (New Series), "Charter for Critical Collection Problems Committee (CCPC),"
DCID No. 1/5 (New Series), "Terms of Reference, Watch Committee of the USIB," DCID No. 3/3 (New Series), "Production of Atomic Energy Intelligence,"
DCID No. 3/4 (New Series), "Production of Guided Missile and Astronautics Intelligence," DCID No. 3/1 (New Series), "Production and Coordination of Foreign
Economic Intelligence," all effective 23 April 1965, DCI Files, Job 86T00268, box 2, folder 12.4144
66
LLhe Department of State had difficulty connecting spec'
conc
cow had not used most of it. Because embassy security was the responsibility of the Department of State, McCone and CIA avoided criticism. Moscow Embassy
EMBTEL 3311,29 April 1964, Department of State DEPTELs 3499 and 3577, 19 and 24 May 1964, Robert Bannerman (Director, CIA Office of Security) mem-
orandum to USIB Security Committee, "Preliminary Damage Assessment of the Technical Surveillance Penetration of the US Embassy, Moscow," 1 June 1964, and
Department of State, "Estimate of Damage to US Foreign Policy Interests (From Net of Listening Devices in US Embassy Moscow)," 2 October 1964, FRUS,
1964-1968, X1-1! The Soviet Union, docs. 30-32, 35, 47; Bannerman memorandum to Kirkpatrick, "Meeting of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board
on 4 June 1964," DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3, folder 12; Max Frankel, "In Moscow, Walls Have Ears (40)," New York Times, 20 May 1964, Nosenko clipping
file, HIC; Bannerman memorandum to Kirkpatrick, "Briefing of Baker Panel, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board," 11 May 1964, and CIA memoran-
dum, "Replies to Inquiries of Special Panel on Audio Countermeasures, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board," 14 May 1964, CMS Files, Job
92B01039R, box 7, folder 124; PFIAB, "Minutes of Board Meeting of June 4, 1964," 3-7, 13, PFIAB record no. 206-10001-10013, PFIAB Records, NARA.Nr
6
"Security Program of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1941-68. Volume I," 205; idem, "Security Program of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1941-68.
o ume II," pt. 2,261-65; idem, "Security Program of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1941-68. Volume VI: Technical Security," Support Services Historical Series
No. OS-6 (May 1972), 78-80, 118-20, 123-24; NSAM No. 317, "Audiosurveillance and Countermeasures Problems Within the Intelligence Community,"
15 November 1964, DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3, folder 10; DCID No. 1/12 (New Series), "Technical Surveillance Countermeasures Committee,"
23 December 1964, DCI Files, Job 86T00268, box 2, folder 12; Lay, vol. 5, 72-75; Wheelon memorandum to McCone, "First Progress Report on Counter Audio
Research and Development," 24 June 1964, CMS Files, Job 92B01039R, box 7, folder 124.4k-
394
-!'tiefirfah
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"IEGALT?/
Working With a New Boss (II): Intelligence Affairs under Johnson (U)
community and the agency. Also[,] I wish the
[A]gency report to reflect the competence, the experi-
ence, the intellectual background of the organization,
the care with which security matters are handled, par-
ticularly personnel security, and the skill and profes-
sionalism involved in operational undertakings.
Also I wish the report to deal in depth with the
importance, the value, and the contribution to US
policy which emanates from our current intelligence
reports and our BNE estimates.... Finally, I want to
"call the glass of water half full instead of half empty"
at all times.
The CIA report, McCone said, in particular should detail
the Agency's achievements in science and technology issues,
stressing its responsiveness to PFIAB recommendations and
its successes in connecting technical collection to analysis. It
should discuss successful recruitments of agents in place as
well as productive handling of defectors?by way of under-
scoring the DDP's "active" espionage efforts and downplay-
ing slightly the prominence of "passive" collection through
walk-ins. Finally, the report should indicate the influence of
estimates on policy and the rationalized procedures by
which they were requested and produced.' NI-
McCone's attitude toward these reviews suggests that he
regarded them almost as valedictory statements on his direc-
torship, and his final opportunity to educate US officials on
the Agency's accomplishments and indispensability. Within
the confines of their format?responses to specific questions
from PFIAB?they favorably evaluated the community's
accomplishments during his tenure.? They do more than
recite achievements and state challenges. They are testa-
ments?albeit in bland bureaucratese?to McCone's sense
of leadership, implicitly giving his prescription for what a
DCI should be and do. Reading them leaves little sense that
at the time they were being prepared, the Vietnam conflict
was causing McCone to despair of his relations with the
White House and that his time at Langley was nearing its
" McCone undated memorandum to Carter, "Annual Reports on DCI Community Activities and the Central Intelligence Agency for the PFIAB due October 1,"
McCone Papers, box 9, folder 5; Kirkpatrick Diary, vol. 6, entry for 14 September 1964..,<
Annual Report Pr FY 1965. For a precis in a similar vein by McCone, in response to a presidential request to heads of all departments and agencies, see McCone
letter to the president, 3 December 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, XXXII', Organization and Management of US. Foreign Policy..., 475-78-K
'Step, Ezi
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Itc44,1z
The Saga in Southeast Asia Continues (U)
During his final nine months as DCI, John McCone
tried, with no more success than anyone else in the
Johnson administration, to solve the United States'
Vietnam conundrum: how to fulfill security commitments to
an anticommunist ally that seemed unable or unwilling to
bear its share of the burden, without undertaking a costly,
open-ended military involvement that risked either confron-
tation with the major communist powers or a humiliating
stalemate, defeat, or withdrawal. As DCI and a member of
the NSC, McCone contributed to the formulation of US pol-
icy in Vietnam and to CINs role in carrying it out. Though
regarded as a "hawk" on military issues, his views actually fell
well within the mainstream of administration thinking until
he was near the end of his tenure, when he advocated a full-
bore aerial assault on North Vietnam. By then he was outside
the White House inner circle, and his influence on Vietnam
matters was insignificant throughout the closing period of his
directorship. (U)
Meanwhile, the clandestine war against North Vietnamese
encroachments into Laotian territory, which had expanded so
substantially during McCone's time as DCI, was fully subordi-
nated to the larger struggle between Hanoi and Saigon. Presi-
dent Johnson stepped up US paramilitary activities in Laos to
interdict North Vietnamese infiltration into and operations
against South Vietnam. The purpose of supporting the Hmong
and other tribal forces in Laos changed. It was no longer an
effort to uphold the Geneva agreements and secure Laotian
neutrality but had become an operation to harass the North
Vietnamese. Developments in Vietnam would determine the
success or failure of the covert actions CIA and US Army Spe-
cial Forces conducted with America's Laotian tribal proxies. (U)
The Laotian Sideshow (U)
The transformation of the CIA-originated clandestine
counterinsurgency in Laos into a conventional military
CHAPTER
17
operation moved ahead during 1964.1 The United States
kept resupplying the royalist and neutralist armies, and the
Hmong force grew steadily in size to 17,000 (with expan-
sion to 23,000 authorized). The Pathet Lao launched suc-
cessful campaigns in central Laos and on the Plain of Jars in
early and mid-1964. The Hmong again saw action in a tac-
tical role during the summer offensive and for the first time
received support from US combat aircraft. (CIA-recruited
American civilians, directed by Agency case officers, flew
some of the missions;
American use of other
tribal fighters in the central and southern regions of the
country increased. The NSC's Special Group, on which
McCone sat, in June 1964 approved a plan, submitted by
the JCS,
n addi-
tion, other CAA and Special Forces operations continued,
including cross-border reconnaissance missions launched
from South Vietnam into Laos along the "Ho Chi Minh"
Trail (codenamed , and development of safe
areas and staybehin nets. e Agency resisted the Army's
attempts to increase the size of the roadwatcher units and to
use them in tactical operations. CIA insisted on, and
retained, full control of the activities of Laotian irregulars.
14*<
Around the same time, the governing tripartite coalition,
led by the neutralist Souvanna Phouma, fell apart in spite of
US support after a military putsch in April 1964 failed and
the communists withdrew from the government.' In
August, CIA judged that the situation in Laos "is so fragile
that it could crumble in any of many ways," such as a Pathet
Lao counteroffensive or a rightist coup. Souvanna
Phouma?regarded as almost everyone's second choice to
Overview information for this section comes from Ahern, Undercover Armies, chaps. 9-10; FRUS, 1964-1968, )0(VIII, Laos, 1-363.X,
2 "Covert Action Briefing Data: Laos?Summary of Counterinsurgency Program: Authorizations," June 1965; CIA memorandum, "Status of Lao Paramilitary 3ary;
m Pro-
gras," 7 August 1964, and Colby memorandum, "National Security Council Meeting-29 April 1964," EA Division Files, Job 78-0 older
7 May 1964, ibid., folder 2 memorandum, "Briefing of Lieutenant General Joseph F. Carroll on Operation in
entra Laos," 16 April 1964, ibid., lower ; memoranaum, "CAS Paramilitary Assets in Laos," 14 August 1964, ibid., Job 78-01 ox older 9.*
For an Agency assessment of the coup attempt, see OCI Memorandum, "Background of the 19 April Rightist Coup in Laos," OCT No. 1124/64,22 April 1964,
FRUS, 1964-1968, 1GWILL, Laos, 59-61. McCone was displeased that CIA had not forecast the putsch more precisely. Minutes of DCI morning meeting on
20 April 1964, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 127, folder 347.)<
,E.643,EZ
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CHAPTER 17
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run the country-eventually reestablished some measure of
control, and in early 1965 Gen. Phoumi Nousavan-at one
time the Agency's favored leader-fled to Thailand. The
battlefield situation became much more active in early 1964
and then stabilized, falling into a seasonal rhythm of engage-
ment and withdrawal-the "seesaw war," one writer has
called it-that persisted for most of the decade. The struggle
pitted 50,000 Laotian regulars and over 23,000 CIA-backed
guerrillas (Hmong, Yao, and Kha) against perhaps 20,000
Pathet Lao fighters and about 11,000 North Vietnamese
soldiers.4 In December 1964, the US Air Force began
bombing communist strongholds in Laos (Operation BAR-
REL ROLL)-which was in addition to missions already
being flown by the Lao air force and the US Air Force and
Navy-and a few weeks later the Ho Chi Minh Trail also
was targeted. The bombing raised the spirits of the Laotian
tribal fighters but had little tactical or strategic effect. In
early 1965, North Vietnam reinforced its troops in northern
Laos and along the Trail in preparation for its next dry-sea-
son offensive.*
As the US military presence in Vietnam slowly expanded
during 1964, McCone worried that the Johnson administra-
tion might be drifting into a commitment to send ground
troops into Laos to disrupt Hanoi's campaign against South
Vietnam. Speaking as a policy adviser with insights into
Republican Party thinking, he told McGeorge Bundy in
June 1964 that deployment of US forces in Laos "would
cause consternation throughout the country...not one per-
son in 50 favored such [a] commitment." Even "hardboiled
spokesmen" of strong action against the North Vietnamese,
such as Sen. Barry Goldwater and former Vice President
Richard Nixon, wanted the American presence in Laos lim-
ited to airstrike personnel and materiel. In the DCI's judg-
ment, congressional reaction to sending ground troops to
Laos would be "infinitely more violent" than the debate over
a congressional joint resolution supporting the current Viet-
nam policy.6X
At the same time, McCone urged the administration not
to make any concessions to the Pathet Lao, battlefield con-
ditions notwithstanding, and to insist that the Laotian com-
munists abide by all the terms of the 1962 Geneva accords.
The United States had to resist North Vietnam's "salami"
tactics against both Laos and South Vietnam, tactics that
were part of its "plausibly deniable' scheme" to "weaken the
will to resist among the anti-Communists in Southeast Asia
so that the whole fabric will collapse, leaving the United
States nothing to fight with or for." The Johnson adminis-
tration must adhere to a consistent, forward-looking policy,
especially because international pressure probably would
force it to attend another conference in Geneva, where it
would be placed at a diplomatic disadvantage. (Informally
to Robert McNamara, McCone said the United States
should "move to Geneva from a real position of strength
with the US fleet pointing at Haiphong. The Secretary of
Defense agreed.") Otherwise, the DCI told the president,
"there was a grave danger of us 'sliding down the slippery
slope' on day-to-day decisions and that we did not have a
full scenario of actions in view of the military effort that was
now being made."'
The reflex to retaliate when the Pathet Lao shot down a
US reconnaissance aircraft early in June 1964 exemplified
McCone's point. McNamara thought that the administration
must stop "talking tough and acting weak," but Marshall
4 In a cable from Vientiane in mid-May 1964, Ambassador Leonard Unger expressed the sense of frustrated resignation that most US officials in Laos felt at the
time:
[O]ur sorry position remains what it always has been.... PL [Pathet Lao] backed by Viet Minh can launch successful push at time and place of their choos-
ing[,] with friendly forces' capability of successfully resisting limited. If we have to live with the situation, and we do unless we want to risk Souvanna's quit-
ting or his and our being caught in violations of the Geneva accords, best we can do is to work thru Meo, Yao, etc., to take advantage of PL extending their
lines of communication and harass their rear, hopefully causing them to pull back or at least to halt any drive that they may have in mind with the objective
of reaching to or almost to Mekong...
Embassy Vientiane to Department of State, 13 May 1964, DDO Files, Job 78-01389R, box 1, folder 8)4(
5 Joseph Scott (Department of State) memorandum to the Special Group, "Report of the Subcommittee on United States Support of Foreign Paramilitary Forces,"
17 January 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, )0CVIII, Laos, 3; CIA analysis prepared for Chester Cooper (NSC), August 1964, "Editorial Note," ibid., 251; JCS memoran-
dum to McNamara, "Operations in Laos," JCSM-I050-64, 17 December 1964, ibid., 307-9; Colby memorandum, "Meeting of Principals on Vietnam-
19 December [1964,]" ibid., 309; Embassy Saigon cable to Department of State, EMBTEL 2073, 7 January 1965, ibid., 313-15; Cooper memorandum to Presi-
dent Johnson, "Developments with Respect to Laos," 22 January 1965, ibid., 318; INR memorandum to Rusk, "Communist Buildup in Southern Laos May Be
Precautionary," 27 January 1965, ibid., 323-24; SNIE 10-65, "Communist Military Capabilities and Near-Term Intentions in Laos and South Vietnam," 4 Febru-
ary 1965, ibid., 332; NSAM No. 328, 6 April 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January-June 1965, 539; CIA memorandum, "Status of Lao Paramilitary Pro-
grams," 7 August 1964, EA Division Files, Job 78-01412R, box 2, folder 3...>(
6 McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting of the Executive Committee with the President...," 6 June 1964, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 9..1%),
7 Colby, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting on Laos-18 May 1964," DDO Files, Job 78-03041R, box 3, folder 11; McCone, "Memorandum for the
Record...National Security Council Meeting-19 April 1964," FRUS, 1964-1968, )0CVIII, Laos, 46; "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting on...June 7th,
[1964,] with the President...," ibid., 149-50; "Summary Record of [NSC] Meeting," 10 June 1964, ibid., 174*
398
"Sreisg.zz
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Carter (speaking for the DCI) objected that a reprisal would
be "out of sequence" and serve no longer range plan to
improve the American position in Laos. Instead, McCone
agreed only that the aerial reconnaissance missions should
have fighter escorts authorized to return fire if attacked. The
president, however, approved an airstrike against a Pathet Lao
artillery site.' (U)
After late November 1964, CIA's covert war came under
tighter control with the arrival of a new ambassador to Laos,
William H. Sullivan. Sullivan had been W. Averell Harri-
man's principal deputy during the negotiations in Geneva.
"[C]onsidered brilliant by most and tyrannical by many,"
according to a recent history of the Laotian conflict, Sulli-
van had instructions to scrutinize all clandestine activities in
country. The confrontation soon became known as "Mr.
Sullivan's War." The popular image of the omniscient,
omnipotent ambassador?as conveyed in Assistant Secretary
of State William Bundy's remark that "[t]here wasn't a bag of
rice dropped in Laos that he didn't know about"?is over-
drawn, as Sullivan had no command authority over US mil-
itary resources needed to support the Laotian irregulars.
However, the ambassador carefully managed the American
role in the covert war to maintain the appearance that the
United States was adhering to the 1962 agreements. He
resisted MACV's attempts to launch operations from South
Vietnam using the local fighters it had taken over from CIA
under he did not want MACV's Studies
and Observations Group using Laos as a staging point for
infiltrations into North Vietnam; and he did not permit the
Agency to recruit guerrillas from the Hmong living in the
North. His expectations for operations against the Ho Chi
Minh Trail were modest: "[a] little intelligence scouting,
with luck a little sabotage,
Sullivan believed that CAA operations in
the Panhandle had the best chance to succeed of any US-
supported ground activity in Laos. In other regards, the
Agency often found itself in a secondary role, brokering
31:tfor.vi
The Saga in Southeast Asia Continues (U)
relations between Washington, the embassy, MACV, and
the Agency's tribal proxies to ensure that the latter got what
they needed to fight the communists.' (U)
With Sullivan now overseeing covert operations, and
with Laotian affairs subsumed under the Vietnam conflict,
McCone largely withdrew from the issue for the rest of his
directorship. Any complaints he had about the convention-
alizing and bureaucratizing of the clandestine war in Laos,
and CIA's loss of operational independence there, do not
appear in the record. The DCI probably realized that after
a similar Pentagon takeover of paramili-
tary operations in Laos was inevitable, and by this late date
he was tired of fighting the military bureaucracy. Speaking
privately to Secretary of State Rusk, however, McCone ques-
tioned whether the US government was properly organized
to conduct counterinsurgency Too many departments were
involved, some were not discharging their responsibilities
properly, and the diminution of the Special Group Counter-
insurgency's role was hampering White House management
of the disparate programs whose objective was to combat
communist-supported insurgencies.1?
loon atter Mcone
resigned, BNE assessed that the communists were unlikely
to stir up the military situation in Laos. Since the Geneva
agreements, they had achieved their main objective there:
gaining control of the border regions for use in infiltrating
men and material into South Vietnam:1X,
"That Bitch of a War" (U)
Political and military conditions in South Vietnam wors-
ened during the late summer and early fall of 1964, but the
administration put off hard choices about the war until after
the November election:2 McCone and CIA analysts grew
more worried that instability and Viet Gong successes in the
"Summary Record of the 533rd Meeting of the National Security Council," 6 June 1964, McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Meeting of the Executive
Committee with the President...," 6 June 1964, and Bromley Smith (NSC), "Memorandum of Conference with President Johnson," 8 June 1964, FRUS, 1964-
1968, XXVIII, Laos, 141-44, 152-60. (U)
Undercover Armies, 280-82; Conboy and Andrade, 140-41; Embassy Vientiane cable to Department of State, EMBTEL 1726, 23 April 1965, FRUS,
1 68, XXVIII, Laos, 361. Sullivan reflected on his ambassadorial service in his memoir, Obbligato: 1939-1979,208-27. The Johnson administration regarded
Sullivan's abilities highly. McGeorge Bundy credited the "resourceful" ambassador with blocking "an unusually foolish coup" in late January 1965 "by getting a tipsy
Australian technician to cut some [radio] wires" and preventing the plotters from communicating with their comrades. Bundy memorandum to the president,
"News of the Day," with attachments, 31 January 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, J0(1/111, Laos, 325-28. (U)
10 McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Discussion with Secretary Rusk...18 Mar 65," McCone Papers, box 2, folder 16.XT
SNIE 58-65, "Short-Term Prospects for Laos," 5 August 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, XXVIII, Laos, 380-84; Colby memorandum to DCI William Raborn,
"Request for Release from Reserve for Contingencies to Fund CIA Operations in Laos in Fiscal Year 1965," 1 June 1965, DDO Files, Job 78-02805R, box 1, folder
22.X
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South might prompt the Saigon government to negotiate
with Hanoi. In September, he told the NSC and congres-
sional leaders of the rising influence of southern "neutralist"
factions that favored talks, and of signs of increasing anti-
American sentiment in South Vietnam. Taking issue with
Rusk's conjecture that the communists' restraint after the
Tonkin Gulf raid suggested their wariness and flexibility,
McCone contended that Hanoi and the Viet Cong believed
the war was going well and that their guarded reaction was
tactical; intelligence reports indicated that they were tempo-
rarily shifting to political efforts to exploit divisions between
southern Catholics and Buddhists. Further concessions by
the regime to the Buddhists would further alienate the
Catholics. "The schism between the rival interests is deepen-
ing and could easily precipitate a civil war unless the United
States is able to exercise a moderating influence and per-
suade the differing parties... to patch up their differences for
the duration." McCone held out little hope for that, how-
ever. Like McNamara, he believed that "we can squeeze
through between now [late September] and the next several
weeks... [but] after the election, we've got a real problem on
our hands." The situation was worse than under Diem,
McCone believed, and if Gen. Nguyen Khanh used force to
suppress opposition, as the DCI thought some officials in
Washington would encourage him to, then the South Viet-
namese leader would be through. Sen. Richard Russell, the
Agency's staunchest ally in Congress, informed the president
in early November that "I told John McCone he ought to
get somebody to run that country [who] didn't want us in
there.... Then.. .we could get out with good grace. But he
didn't take me very seriously."13)?
As the United States' chief intelligence officer, McCone
was especially distressed at inadequacies in collection on
Viet Cong operations?especially the failures of the South
Vietnamese civilian and military services to detect prepara-
tions for terrorist attacks.
What concerns me is [the] lack of detailed current
intelligence on VC locations, activities, and operations
which make possible recurrent and discouraging
ambushes. I am at a loss to understand how VC forces
can assemble in battalion size or greater in geographic
areas or in the vicinity of communities which are pre-
sumably held by government elements without some
advance knowledge of the presence of VC being com-
municated to the authorities. I am at a loss to under-
stand how a battalion size attack could occur four
miles from the Saigon airport without a civilian infor-
mant communicating a warning. In sum, where are
the Vietnamese Paul Reveres? Obtaining info of this
type seems to me to be the responsibility of the Viet-
namese civilian and military [services] and I raised the
question as to whether they are properly organized,
trained, and motivated, and whether the friendl so
ulation is in support. I do not believe that
or MACV can do this, but we must see that it is one
and done efficiently by the Vietnamese.
McCone attributed the collection gap to "fear, apathy and
discontent among the population," and noted that intelli-
gence operations in South Vietnam in general suffered from
the same disarray that beset military and political activities.
1 he United
states soon paid the price of this collection failure. On
1 November, two days before the election, the Viet Cong
attacked the American airbase at Bien Hoa, killing five
Americans, wounding 76, and destroying 27 of 30 aircraft.
This was the first time the guerrillas had targeted a US
installation. No warning had been received, even though
Viet Cong fighters had infiltrated the surrounding area in
recent weeks. The administration decided not to retaliate
immediately; "we are inevitably affected by [the] election
timing," Dean Rusk wrote.14
'The section heading is taken from Johnson's comments to historian Doris Kearns about the political dilemma he found himself in over Vietnam:
I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved?the Great Society?in order to get involved
with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs... [a]ll my dreams.... But if I left that war and
let the Communists take over South Vietnam... there would follow in this country an endless national debate?a mean and destructive debate?that would
shatter my presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy.
Quoted in Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 251. For secondary materials regarding Vietnam during the latter months of McCone's director-
ship, see the Appendix on Sources. (U)
McCone memoranda of meetings with the NSC and the congressional leadership gin 9 September 1964 and with the president and his national security advisers
on 14 September 1964, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 9; Reaching for Glory, 41, 137.A.k.
" "Notes for DDCI, 14 September 1964," ER Files, Job 80B01676R, box 13, folder 10; "Excerpts from Memorandum for the Record of 5 October 1964...Discus-
sions by DCI with the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.. .2 October 1964," CMS Files, Job 92B01039R, box 7, folder 131; documents on the Bien
Hoa attack in FRUS, 1964-1968, 1, Vietnam 1964, 873-82>r
400
"SrEiRL.17
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Another collection lapse, this time involving North Viet-
namese infiltration into the South, became evident soon
after the Tonkin Gulf incidents. President Johnson asked
McCone why North Vietnam had not reacted strongly to
US retaliatory airstrikes. McCone said Hanoi was waiting
and watching and probably calculated that the political
unrest in the South benefited it for the time being. Actually,
unbeknownst to CIA, the US military, or the South Viet-
namese, North Vietnam had been preparing to deploy
troops to the South for several months. In September, the
first full combat units of the North Vietnamese army began
to move down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. CIA did not report
the movements until December:5 (U)
During late 1964 and early 1965, McCone was involved
in a dispute over collection of statistics on enemy infiltration
that foreshadowed the controversy analyst Samuel Adams
was to have a few years later with DCI Richard Helms.
MACV recently had submitted new figures showing that
Viet Cong and North Vietnamese infiltration into the
South was up 250 percent. USIB sent a team to Saigon in
mid-November to evaluate the numbers, which information
then available in Washington could not corroborate. The
team confirmed the much higher figures. McNamara and
Rusk "expressed great dissatisfaction" with the revision.
They thought critics of the administration's policy in Viet-
nam would charge that the new numbers were contrived to
justify military action. McCone ordered the USIB contin-
gent to stay in Saigon until further notice and directed
Agency officers to thoroughly review all CIA reporting and
estimates about infiltration, with special attention to how
affected collection and what influence the
Pentagon and the secretary of defense had had on estimates.
McCone wrote that "I am sure [this subject] will assume
very major proportions over the next few weeks, and there-
fore I want a thorough and careful research job done." New
assessments of Viet Cong strength by CIA, DIA, and the
Department of State in early 1965 substantiated the upward
trend; the revised figure of 50,000 to 100,000 was 50 per-
cent higher than previous MACV estimates. McCone attrib-
uted the increase to MACV's customary underestimation of
the enemy and to bureaucratic delays in reporting informa-
tion on new communist units. A surprised McNamara
replied that if the higher figures were true, "we were 'simply
"StiteftE44
The Saga in Southeast Asia Continues (U)
outmanned." At that point, the discrepancy was subordi-
nated to assessment of the impact of the ROLLING
THUNDER bombing program on enemy manpower
movements, and McCone did not deal with the matter
again.16,1K
Throughout the latter part of 1964, CIA analysts pro-
duced a succession of downcast assessments that McCone
approved and used in briefings and discussions with policy-
makers. He did not try, as he had in 1963, to modify their
tone or prognoses. Not only did he agree with their judg-
ments, but he apparently believed that, now more than ever,
the administration needed to hear the dismal truth. In Sep-
tember, CIA estimators concluded that "the signs of deterio-
ration are so many and so clear.. .that the odds now favor a
continuing decay of South Vietnam will and effectiveness in
coming weeks, sufficient to imperil the political base for
present US policy and objectives in South Vietnam." In
October, ONE described continued political and military
deterioration and saw few prospects for improvement.
Agency officers William Colby and George Carver indepen-
dently weighed in with similar conclusions. A Saigon station
assessment in December 1964, drafted by George Allen,
detailed intensifying enemy activity, declining ARVN effec-
tiveness, eroding government influence in the countryside,
and persistent disunity and instability in the leadership in
Saigon. Allen's report was not coordinated with other mem-
bers of the US mission, so in early 1965 the administration
asked for a composite view. In February, Ambassador Max-
well Taylor approved a joint CIA-MACV estimate only after
deleting discouraging forecasts from the outgoing cable. The
station sent the original, bleaker analysis to Headquarters,
where analysts used it when working on later assessments.
After intelligence reporting in early 1965 indicated that
Hanoi had dispatched entire combat units (up to division
size) to South Vietnam, the above scenario repeated itself. In
the spring, the mission drafted a gloomy assessment; the
ambassador deleted the worst news from the outgoing cable;
and the station sent the full text to Langley for analysts'
use.
CIA's in-house assessments of Vietnam between mid-
1964 and mid-1965 mostly were on economic subjects and
came from the DI's Office of Research and Reports. ORR
"Bundy, "Memorandum of a Meeting, White House.. September 9, 1964...," FRUS, 1964-1968, L Vietnam 1964, 754; Moise, 251. (U)
161VIcCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Discussion with Secretary McNamara on 16 November 1964," and "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting on
11124/64?Secretaries Rusk, McNamara, Ball, McGeorge Bundy, General Wheeler, McCone, and William Bund ' McCone Papers, box 2, folder 14; McCone,
"Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with Secretary McNamara-18 March 1965," ibid., folder 16; 31N
ItC-41.11
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SE?13,c-ri
CHAPTER 17
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THAILAND
1965
AREAS OF COMMUNIST
AND GOVERNMENT
TERRITORIAL CONTROL
GOVERNMENT
COMMUNIST
NEITHER
SOUTH CHINA
SEA
analyzed scenarios of economic interdiction against the
North (concluding, for example, that a naval blockade prob-
ably would not work); examined the logistical infrastructure
of North Vietnam and the mechanics of its infiltration of
men and materiel into the South; and studied the economy
of Viet Cong-controlled areas of the South (judging that the
enemy obtained most of its supplies locally). In more direct
support of military operations, ORR worked with targeting
intelligence and conducted damage assessments after
ROLLING THUNDER began in March 1965. As the anal-
yses accumulated, McCone and CIA were unalterably cast
in the role of bearers of bad news?news that further
estranged him and the Agency from the administration,
while reinforcing its disposition to pursue victory in Viet-
nam.18AL
What To Do Next (U)
Administration officials agreed with CIA that conditions
in South Vietnam had gotten much worse but decided that
the United States must find a way to prevent a large scale
political and military collapse there. With a landslide elec-
tion win behind him, and with his frustration over the war
mounting, President Johnson was willing to entertain more
venturesome options to buttress the Saigon government.
Policy discussions during late 1964, to which McCone and
other senior Agency officers contributed, focused on tac-
tics?what to do?rather than strategic issues?was Viet-
nam vital to US interests; could the United States achieve its
objectives there; would the region fall to the communists
without American intervention? The most important venue
for deliberation in this period was an NSC working group
headed by Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy and
including members from the Departments of State and
Defense, the JCS, the NSC, and CIA (Harold Ford from
ONE). The president convened the group in early Novem-
ber to prepare a comprehensive new assessment for the prin-
cipals to discuss. During the next few weeks, it established
the policy framework that the administration followed for
most of the balance of McCone's tenure.' (U)
The Bundy Working Group reached a consensus that the
United States must undertake a gradually escalating pro-
gram of military actions, including airstrikes against the
North, as a way to coerce Hanoi into negotiating. That
approach, referred to as Option C in the group's report to
the president, was deemed preferable either to continuing
current military efforts (including reprisals against "terror-
ist" attacks) while seeking a diplomatic settlement on any
acceptable terms ("Option A"), or quickly starting a "sys-
17SNIE 53-64, "Chances for a Stable Government in South Vietnam," 8 September 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 742-46; CIA memorandum,
"Deterioration in South Vietnam," 28 September 1964, attachment to Carter letter to Bundy, same date, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 16, folder 342, recast as
SNIE 53-2-64, "The Situation in South Vietnam," 1 October 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968,1, Vietnam 1964, 806-11 (the quoted language was not in the published
estimate); Bruce Palmer Jr., "US Intelligence and Vietnam," Studies 28, no. 5(1984): 34-35; Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 65-66,73-74; Allen, None so
Blind, 185-88,193-94.A
"McGeorge Bundy told President Johnson that he thought some of the Agency's analysis "was a shade blue, not quite a balanced account." He attributed that qual-
ity to "a little bit loll covering their flanks, making sure that they are the ones that are giving the gloomy news first." Reaching for Glory, 42. (U)
'The Bundy Working Group is discussed in David Kaiser, American Tragedy, 355-59,362-70; Van de Mark, 26-29,31-35; Bird, The Color of Truth, 293-95; and
"Editorial Note," FRUS, 1964-1968, 5 Vietnam 1964, 886-88. (U)
402
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tematic program of military pressures" against a full range of
North Vietnamese targets ("Option B," also called "a
hard/fast squeeze"). The latter was considered too risky, rais-
ing the likelihood of Chinese intervention. US officials
offered several reasons for stepping up American military
activity: to boost South Vietnamese morale, to give the
Saigon government a "breathing spell" from communist
attacks, to interdict infiltration of Northern supplies and
manpower, to compel Hanoi to stop supporting the Viet
Cong and begin talking (McCone's rationale), or just to "do
something" so the United States would not "lose" Viet-
nam?especially after China exploded its first nuclear device
in October and raised its power profile in the Asian region.
Option C, according to Bundy's group, had the advantage
of flexibility:
The whole sequence of military actions would be
designed to give the impression of a steady, deliberate
approach, and to give the US the option at any time
(subject to enemy reaction) to proceed or not, to esca-
late or not, and to quicken the pace or not. Concur-
rently, the US would be alert to any sign of yielding by
Hanoi, and would be prepared to explore negotiated
solutions that attain US solutions in an acceptable
manner." (U)
The Bundy Working Group circulated drafts of its pre-
scription among senior administration officials. After
McCone received his copy, he asked several high-level sub-
ordinates review it. DDI Cline, FE Division chief Colby,
Abbot Smith of ONE, and R. Jack Smith, head of OCI,
judged that the North Vietnamese most likely would not
relent under gradual escalation and that the administration
should not count on the Saigon government becoming
strong enough to resist the communist insurgency.21$4
In its final form, as approved by the president on
7 December, Option C would be implemented in two
phases. Starting in early December, covert operations and
aerial reconnaissance flights north of the DMZ would be
intensified, and communist infiltration routes inside Laos
The Saga in Southeast Asia Continues (U)
would be bombed (BARREL ROLL). After 1 January, an
escalating series of aerial attacks against North Vietnam
would commence. (U)
McCone questioned the efficacy of this incremental
approach, but he had not yet decided what he thought the
administration should do. His thinking was in transition,
driven by growing concern over the shakiness of the Saigon
government. In September, he had agreed with the low-key,
reactive policy then under consideration?reprisals against
Viet Cong terror attacks
ind the Navy's D.L.SU.I. 0 patrols, and limited South
ietnamese air and ground operations against the Ho Chi
Minh Trail. He believed that a sustained air campaign north
of the DMZ would be too dangerous to undertake then
because the government of South Vietnam was too weak to
respond to the increased insurgent activity that might result.
In addition, Communist China would likely augment its
assistance to North Vietnam.' (U)
At the same time, McCone was realizing that the Khanh
regime probably was unsalvageable. Three leadership
changes had occurred between mid-August and early Sep-
tember, and several more would follow by early 1965?
prompting Chester Cooper, an ONE officer on detail to the
NSC, to remark later that "Khanh and [Gen. Duong Van]
Minh checked in and out of their offices in the Presidential
Palace like traveling salesmen at a commercial hotel." A dis-
tinct note of despair sounded in McCone's private com-
ments about the fate of the South. In early October, he told
Ambassador Sullivan, "I often wonder if what is really
involved here is an erroneous concept that we in this coun-
try, by pouring in thousands of people and a hell of a lot of
money, could train them [the South Vietnamese] and
encourage them and inspire them to fight." "You almost
have to say that the outlook is hopeless," he lamented to
some journalists several weeks later. "Mou just hang onto a
little thread of hope that this government put together by
this Council of Elders will take form and will get off the
ground, and with civilian leadership and with Khanh devot-
NSC Working Group, "Courses of Action in Southeast Asia," 21 November 1964, William Bundy memorandum to Rusk, "Issues Raised by Papers on Southeast
Asia," 24 November 1964, Bundy memoranda of NSC Executive Committee meetings on 24 and 27 November 1964, NSC Executive Committee, "Position Paper
on Southeast Asia," 2 December 1964, and Johnson untitled memorandum to Rusk, McNamara, and McCone, 7 December 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968,1, Vietnam
1964, 916-29,938-45,958-60,969-74, 984; The Pentagon Papers 3, 678. (U)
'I Cline et al. memorandum to McCone, "Critique of the (Bundy) Vietnam Working Group Papers," 21 November 1964, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 15X
'McGeorge Bundy memorandum to the president, "Courses of Action for South Vietnam," 8 September 1964, and memorandum of meeting at the White House,
9 September 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 746-50. On Communist China's growing political and material support for North Vietnam during this
period, see Zhai, chaps. 5-6. (U)
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CHAPTER 17
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ing himself to the military there might be some improve-
ment. But that's an awful thin hope, I believe."23,X1
Those reservations notwithstanding, McCone joined the
consensus on Option C, at least temporarily. By late
November, he thought that if the administration started
heavily bombing the North, the American public and the
United States' allies would react with "anger, sorrow, and
disgust." Any aerial attacks in retaliation for Viet Cong ter-
rorism must target their infiltration and supply infrastruc-
ture (lines of communication and depots, for example) and
keep collateral damage to an absolute minimum. The DCI
also thought that "going big" risked reuniting the commu-
nist world, then in some disarray because of the Sino-Soviet
split. He doubted, however, whether the Viet Cong insur-
gency could be brought under control quickly even if North
Vietnam stopped supporting and directing it. He told the
principals that the residual communist threat in the South
was "much greater and much more difficult" than the upris-
ing the British faced in Malaya in the early 1950s and "infi-
nitely more serious" than the Hukbalahap rebellion that the
United States helped the Philippine government quash a few
years later. It would take the United States 10 years and
major military and economic assistance to South Vietnam
to stamp out the Viet Cong, he contended.A
A Fork in the Road (U)
"By the end of January [1965]," historian George Her-
ring has written, "the major argument against escalation [the
Saigon government's failure to govern] had become the most
compelling argument for it." The administration aban-
doned the concept of securing stability in the South before
expanding US military involvement in the North and
instead saw escalation as the preferred way of achieving
some measure of political order in Saigon. Heavy bombing
above the DMZ and deployment of American combat
forces in the South, in William Bundy's words, "would have
some faint hope of really, improving the Vietnamese situa-
tion." In late January, McGeorge Bundy and McNamara
informed the president that "[b]oth of us are now pretty
well convinced that our current policy can lead only to a
disastrous defeat.... The time has come for harder choices":
either negotiate a way out, or use whatever military force is
needed to prevail. Just over a week later, Bundy returned
from South Vietnam to report that "[t] he prospect in Viet-
nam is grim. The energy and persistence of the Viet Cong
are astonishing." "[W]ithout new US action defeat appears
inevitable.... There is still time to turn it around, but not
much." The United States needed to adopt a policy of "sus-
tained reprisal.., against any VC act of violence to persons or
property." Air and naval attacks on North Vietnam must be
gradual and related to the military struggle in South. "The
object would not be to 'win' an air war against Hanoi," but
the operations nonetheless would be continuous to exact the
maximum political value. "Even if it fails, the policy will be
worth it." There was little alternative, recalled Chester Coo-
per, who accompanied Bundy. "There was a general disposi-
tion after we were there for a few days to feel that...either
we had to get out or do something more than we were
doing."' (U)
McCone came to that conclusion a bit sooner, having
advised the president and the secretary of defense some
weeks before that the United States had no chance of
accomplishing its objectives unless it substantially increased
airstrikes against the North and began low-level ground
actions to check enemy infiltration into the South. Well into
1964, the DCI had doubts about how effectively massive air
attacks on the North would hamper the communist insur-
gency in the South. Eventually, however, like other key
administration policymakers, he stopped worrying as much
Cooper, 246-47; transcripts of McCone meetings with Sullivan, 1 October 1964, and John Steele and Hedley Donovan, 17 November 1964, McCone Papers,
box 9, folder 1.X.
'McCone memorandum, "Problems of Courses of Action?South Vietnam," 26 November 1964, McCone Papers, box 3, folder 15; McCone, "Memorandum for
the Record.. Meeting on 11/24/64?Secretaries Rusk, McNamara, Ball, McGeorge Bundy, General Wheeler, McCone, and William Bundy," ibid., box 2, folder
14. The immense difficulty that the United States and South Vietnam faced in suppressing the communist insurgency was violently underscored yet again on
Christmas Eve 1964, when scar bomb exploded in Saigon outside the Brinks Hotel where US military officers lived. The attack killed two Americans and wounded
58 other persons. McCone advised the president against retaliating because Viet Cong culpability was too hard to prove. "Memorandum of Briefing of President
Johnson...December 28, 1964," McCone Papers, box 5, folder 5.1(kit
'George C. Herring, America's Longest War, 127-28; William Bundy memorandum to Rusk, 6 January 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January?June 1965,
32; McGeorge Bundy memoranda to Johnson, "Basic Policy in Vietnam," 27 January 1965, and "The Situation in Vietnam," 7 February 1965, ibid., 95-97,174-
85; Cooper oral history interview at LBJ Library, quoted in Mann, 393. Ambassador Taylor's field reports typified the mood of administration officials at this time.
On 6 January, for example, he wrote that "lwle are faced here with a seriously deteriorating situation characterized by continued political turmoil, irresponsibility
and division within the armed forces, lethargy in the pacification program, some anti-US feeling which could grow, signs of mounting terrorism by VC direcdy at
US personnel and deepening discouragement and loss of morale throughout SVN." FRUS, 1964-1968,11, Vietnam, January?June 1965, 13. CIA analysts agreed; a
special estimate in February judged that "US political leverage (in South Vietnam] appears to be at a low point.' SNIE 53-65, "Short-Term Prospects in South Viet-
nam," 4 February 1965, ibid., 143. (U)
404
"5E6E.E.11.
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about the strength of the Saigon government and decided
that the best approach was to go all out with Option B. The
South would not, and probably could not, save itself, so the
United States had no choice but to "go big" against the
North. Even if a viable government were established in
Saigon, the DCI said, the United States "could not win the
way we were going" and must take "more dynamic
action.. .a systematic series of attacks...starting in the south
sector of North Vietnam and...work[ing] toward the
north... [a] strike every day or at least every second
day.. regardless of what the Soviets say or what the Chinese
Communists say or what anybody else says."' (U)
In taking that position, McCone differed with several
senior Agency officers who advanced unsolicited opinions
about the effect bombing would have on the North. Will-
iam Colby thought expanding the war might cause a con-
frontation with Beijing. The head of FE Division's Vietnam-
Cambodia branch bluntly called bombing a "bankrupt"
move. Peer de Silva, the COS in Saigon, believed an air
campaign would only provoke Hanoi into sending more
troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Ray Cline thought US
bombing would at best only buy time for South Vietnam.
Lastly, Harold Ford told McCone directly that US policy in
Vietnam was "becoming progressively divorced from reality"
and that the "brave, resourceful, skilled, and patient" com-
munist enemy would not be beaten into negotiations.
"[T]he chances are considerably better than even," Ford
wrote, "that the US will in the end have to disengage in
Vietnam, and do so considerably short of our present objec-
tives." McCone did not respond to this litany.' (U)
Instead, the DCI justified his view strategically with the
domino theory, to which he steadfastly held despite ()NE's
judgment that it was untenable. McCone told the Senate
Armed Services Committee in January 1965 that "if we
pulled out of Vietnam.. .there would be a serious deteriora-
tion in Southeast Asia, and I think it would extend to Cam-
bodia, to Laos, to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.... [lit
The Saga in Southeast Asia Continues (U)
would mean the acceleration of the communist movement
throughout Southeast Asia." The reason was that the con-
flict in Vietnam "is no civil war. This is a straight Commu-
nist-directed guerrilla effort designed to remove the free
thinking people of South Vietnam from any position of
authority and take it over for Communism." That was why
establishing a stable, popularly based government in the
South was so hard. The communists were gaining control of
more rural areas "not because [the peasants] are embracing
the purposes of Communism, but because they are just war
weary and tired and they just don't want to be shot at when
they are out in the rice fields and will compromise almost
everything to avoid that.'
McCone's belief in the utility of heavy bombing probably
drew on two experiences. As a member of the President's Air
Policy Commission during 1947-48, he heard testimony,
read reports, and participated in discussions on the decisive
importance of air power in World War II. While he was
under secretary of the Air Force during 1950-51, SAC's doc-
trine of strategic air power, so forcefully expounded by its
commander, Gen. Curtis LeMay, dominated US policymak-
ers' thinking on the subject. In addition, the Korean war had
provided to some observers a real world lesson in the effect
an aerial onslaught could have on an adversary's will to resist.
With the ground war at an impasse and covert operations
accomplishing nothing, heavy bombing of military and civil-
ian targets was the only way to take the war to the enemy.
Many Americans believed that large-scale bombing of dams
in North Korea in the summer of 1953 had forced the Com-
munist Chinese and North Koreans to stop their diplomatic
obstructionism and last-minute terrain grabbing and agree to
a truce. The Air Force chief of staff in 1953, Gen. Hoyt Van-
denberg, summed up the attitude when he warned senior
officers at the Air War College to "keep our eye on the goal
of air power, which is to knock out the ability of a nation to
fight." By the early 1960s, the Air Force's doctrine writers
had outlined a role for strategic aircraft in low-intensity con-
flicts?a theory with which McCone agreed. To him, a stra-
McCone, "Addendum to MR on Meeting w/President on 22 Oct 64," dated 26 October 1964, National Security Council File, Meetings with the President 4 Jan-
uary 1964-28 April 1965, LBJ Library; transcript of McCone interview with Rowland Evans and Stewart Alsop, 3 February 1965, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 2;
McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Meeting of the National Security Council...," 8 February 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January?June 1965,
193,195-96. (U)
27 Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 73-76. (U)
McGeorge Bundy, "Memorandum of a Meeting, White House...September 9,1964...," FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 752-53; McCone, "Memorandum
for the Record.. Discussion with the President re South Vietnam," 3 February 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January?June 1965, 130; Carter, "Memoran-
dum for the Record.. Telephone Conversation with Mr. McCone on 6 November 1964," and McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with Secretary
McNamara on 16 November 1964," McCone Papers, box 2, folder 14; McCone testimony to Senate Armed Services Committee, 11 January 1965,69,73,83,
104-105, ibid., box 3, folder 19. In early February, McCone similarly told PFIAB that "both the North Vietnamese and the ChiComs think that the war is in hand
from their point of view," and that "there was abundant intelligence which says that Thailand would be next." Kirkpatrick memorandum, "Meeting of the Presi-
dent's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board," 4 February 1965, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 19, folder 382...K
11.c44,14
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McCone's military recommendation for Vietnam: strategic bombing (U)
Photo: US Air Force
tegic air campaign, run without regard for immediate tactical
considerations, was essential for countering an externally
supported insurgency of the scope that the Viet Cong were
waging in South Vietnam." (U)
Some policy realism also contributed to McCone's advo-
cacy of using strategic air power against the North. President
Johnson would not pull the United States out of Vietnam,
so the DCI argued for what he judged to be the most effec-
tive use of America's military capabilities?one that would
exploit its technological superiority and economic resources
while avoiding the commitment of a large ground force to a
land war in Asia. South Viet-
nam as a proxy force was too
weak to resist the Viet Cong,
and covert operations across the
DMZ could not help except
very marginally. Massive air
attacks against the North, how-
ever, would shift the arena of
military combat from the
South, where the position of
Washington and Saigon was
weakest, to the North, where
the leadership in Hanoi would
risk having its economy
destroyed unless it capitulated.
Capping the argument, Agency
analysts had told McCone that
such bombing would not elicit a
major military response from
North Vietnam's communist
allies, and the Intelligence Com-
munity had judged that Hanoi
probably would respond to
intense American airstrikes by
ordering the Viet Cong to temporarily suspend attacks in
the South. Accordingly, "I'd go win this one," the DCI told
the president. "I'd do whatever was necessary to win it."'
(U)
McCone's advocacy of heavy bombing moved him out-
side the administration consensus and made him seem like a
hawkish counterpart to the solitary "dove" in the Vietnam
policymaking circle, Under Secretary of State George Ball?
whose persistent argument for withdrawal and negotiation
has led one biographer to label him the president's "in-house
hair shirt." This McCone-Ball analogy is largely accurate.
'Mark Clodlelter, The Limits of Air Power, 17-19, 23, 35-36; Conrad C. Crane, American Abpower Strategy in Korea, 1950-1953, 159-63; Robert F. Futrell, The
United States Air Force in Korea, 1950-1953, 666-79; idem, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, 1907-1984, vol. 1,
291-304,335-51,419-67 passim, vol. 2, chaps. 1-2 passim; Thomas C. Hone, "Strategic Bombing Constrained.: Korea and Vietnam," in R. Cargill Hall, ed., Case
Studies in Strategic Bombardment, 488-90; Moody, 158-66; Donald J. Mrozek, Air Power and the Ground War in Vietnam, 17-24; ORR, "Historical Notes on the
Use of Air Power as a Weapon of Interdiction," CIA/RR ER 66-8, May 1966,29,32, HS Files, Job 03-01724R, box 4, folder 6. What McCone had in mind was the
use of "strategic air warfare," defined by Air Force doctrine writers as
Air combat and support operations, designed to effect, through the systematic application of force to a selected series of vital targets, the progressive destruc-
tion and disintegration of the enemy's war-making capacity to a point where he no longer retains the ability or will to wage war. Vital targets may include key
manufacturing systems, sources of raw material, critical material, stockpiles, power systems, transportation systems, communication facilities, concentrations
of uncommitted elements of enemy armed forces, key agricultural areas, and other such target systems.
Moody, xi, n. 5. (U)
McCone memorandum to the president, "Probable Communist Reactions to Certain US or US-Sponsored Courses of Action in Vietnam and Laos," 28 July
1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 586; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. .Discussion with The President re South Vietnam," 3 February 1965,
ibid., II, Vietnam, January?June 1965, 130; SNIE 10-3-65, "Communist Reactions to Possible US Actions," 11 February 1965, ibid., 244-50; transcript of McCone
interview with Edward Weintal (Newsweek), 19 March 1965, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 3. The Department of State dissented from the community's October
1964 assessment, holding that Hanoi more likely would send its own troops into Laos and South Vietnam. The dissent proved correct. Palmer, 33-34. (U)
406 "SttigpE,
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The only prominent decisionmakers to agree with the DCI
were the JCS, but even they were divided on the issue in
private. Despite the popular stereotype that they were anx-
ious to blast North Vietnam to rubble, the service chiefs dis-
agreed on the utility of an all-out bombing offensive against
the North. None of them doubted that the United States
would enjoy air superiority north of the DMZ or that
bombing would inflict serious damage on enemy military
and economic targets. Only the Air Force and the Marine
Corps, however, believed that a sustained campaign of heavy
bombing would force Hanoi to suspend support for the Viet
Cong. The Army and Navy were unconvinced. Despite
these disagreements, however, and to present a united front
to the White House and the public, the service chiefs kept
their doubts about strategic bombing off the record and rec-
ommended using the US bomber arsenal in an escalatory
way (Option C). In that context, the hawk McCone was
almost as alone on his own limb as the dove Ball was on
(U)
President Johnson, who had no historical experience with
heavy bombing, resisted using it all-out against North Viet-
nam. In September 1964, he declined to authorize an
intense aerial attack on the North; McGeorge Bundy wrote
at the time that "in [the president's] judgment the proper
answer to those advocating immediate and extensive action
against the North was that we should not do this until our
side could defend itself in the streets of Saigon." As late as
December 1964, he complained to Ambassador Taylor that
"[elvery time I get a military recommendation[,] it seems to
me it calls for large-scale bombing. I have never felt that this
war will be won from the air."' (U)
By mid-February 1965, however, the president moved
toward a more aggressive posture. Lethal Viet Cong attacks
against American facilities at Pleiku and Qui Nhon and
another change in government in Saigon in mid-February
"5"C"C.1:41.7
The Saga in Southeast Asia Continues (U)
forced him to concede that there probably never would be
enough order in the South to justify waiting to intensify
military action. "Johnson's highest priority for Vietnam"
then, according to historian Robert Dallek, "was to settle on
a well-defined, consistent policy that held out prospects of
ending the conflict and convincing people that he knew
what he was doing." He told his advisers that he "had kept
the shotgun over the mantel and the bullets in the basement
for a long time now," but "cowardice has gotten us into
more wars than response has." In the president's judgment,
limited, sustained bombing, escalated according to how
Hanoi reacted to it, stood some chance of forestalling both a
communist victory and a divisive domestic debate?the lat-
ter almost assured if he ordered a ground offensive. But
Johnson was still planning to practice "flexible response"
and not deliver the full force of American air power. "We
face a choice of going forward or running," he declared.
"We have chosen the first alternative. All of us agree on this,
but there remains some difference as to how fast we should
go forward."" (U)
The president's decision on 13 February to begin ROLL-
ING THUNDER marked a turning point in US policy,
despite his claim that "we seek no wider war." A campaign
of regular bombing attacks went well beyond the "tit-for-
tat" reprisal strikes that had been the practice since the
Tonkin Gulf affair. The scope and intensity of the bombing
would increase gradually, use of napalm was authorized, and
pilots could strike alternative targets without prior approval
if they could not reach their original destinations. Over 100
US and South Vietnamese aircraft?the largest number
used on one day up to then?flew the first missions on
2 March against an ammunition depot and a naval base. In
April alone, 3,600 sorties hit fuel dumps, bridges, muni-
tions factories, and power plants across the DMZ. "The air
war," writes George Herring, "quickly grew from a sporadic,
halting effort into a regular, determined program."' (U)
'I David L. Di Leo, George Baa Vietnam, and the Rethinking of Containment, 125; Palmer, 32-33; Buzzanco, 171-72,193-94; JCS memorandum to McNamara,
"Courses of Action in South East Asia," 23 November 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968,1, Vietnam 1964,934-35. (U)
32 McGeorge Bundy, "Memorandum of a Meeting, White House...September 9,1964...," FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 751; Johnson telegram to Taylor,
CAP 64375,30 December 1964, ibid., 1058. (U)
3' Colby memorandum for the record, "White House Meeting on Vietnam, 6 February 1965," FRUS, 1964-1968, IL Vietnam, January-June 1965, 159-60; Dallek,
Flawed Giant, 248,254-55; Clodfelter, 51-52,58-64. The Viet Cong attack on the US Army barracks at Pleiku on 7 February, which killed eight Americans and
wounded 126, "pulled the rug out from any sitting and waiting," according to Chester Cooper. Cooper oral history at LBJ Library, quoted in Mann, 393. In retali-
ation, the president ordered 154 US and South Vietnamese aircraft to bomb four North Vietnamese army barracks in the southern panhandle. Documents 76-81 in
FRUS, 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January-June 1965, 155-72. On 10 February, Viet Cong guerrillas bombed a hotel housing US soldiers in Qui Nhon; 23 were
killed and more than 20 were wounded?the most American casualties in any such incident in Vietnam so far. Documents 95,97-99,106 in ibid., 212,214-25,
236-37. A succession of leadership changes in Saigon in mid-February, culminating in Khanh's resignation on the 21st, did nothing to end the political malaise in
the capital. The holdover civilian cabinet had little authority and no ambition, and popular enthusiasm for the war effort continued to wane. (U)
'4 Department of State telegram to Embassy Saigon, DEPTEL 1718,13 February 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January-June 1965, 263; Herring, Amer-
ica's Longest Wzr, 129-30. (U)
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A Final, Futile Push (U)
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To McCone, ROLLING THUNDER was no solution.
Instead, he regarded it as just the kind of graduated, reac-
tive, politically calculated approach that he never thought
would work in Vietnam. "We must not lose sight of our
purpose," he told the NSC, "[which is] to help [the] South
Vietnamese win freedom from Communist aggression....
[This goal] should not be compromised for collateral rea-
sons." Tentativeness had been the problem with US policy
in Vietnam since 1961, McCone contended. By moving in
American military forces gradually without a defined pur-
pose, "kin some ways we lifted the responsibility for the sit-
uation off the shoulders of the South Vietnamese, but we
didn't provide the muscle to put it on our own shoulders."
This incremental approach left the United States vulnerable
to the charge that it was practicing "just another form of
colonialism" and was not truly interested in preserving
South Vietnam's right of self-determination. McCone con-
ceded that strategic bombing might cause North Vietnam to
launch a "burst operation" against the South to quickly
defeat its army, topple its government, and force out US
troops. He thought, however, that if Hanoi judged that the
bombing was threatening its economy, it would curtail guer-
rilla operations in the South "and wait for a sunny day, mak-
ing some pretense at negotiations." He told the president
that most USIB members agreed with that conclusion, espe-
cially if airstrikes were flown more often than planned under
ROLLING THUNDER and hit targets above the 19th par-
allel in the heart of North Vietnam.35)k
McCone opposed deploying US ground troops to South
Vietnam and did not want the administration to use Viet
Cong attacks on American facilities there to justify doing so.
Disagreeing with the Pentagon's conclusion that US installa-
tions in the South could not be protected from guerrilla
raids without sending a large contingent of combat troops,
he directed the DDP to develop a plan for establishing
informant networks around American bases to serve as "Paul
Reveres" if the Viet Cong tried to launch attacks like the one
on Pleiku. He feared that if the joint US-South Vietnamese
intelligence apparatus could not discover such activity
nearby, a bigger surprise?North Vietnamese or Chinese
intervention, or a massive Viet Cong uprising, for exam-
ple?might occur. The shock undoubtedly would produce
calls from inside and outside the administration for a big
buildup of ground forces. McCone consequently charged all
departments represented on USIB to step up collection
efforts against North Vietnamese targets and to give "the
closest attention... to every available indicator, no matter
how tenuous." As DDCI Carter passed on McCone's direc-
tive to the Agency, "We all need to remain cool and objec-
tive but... [y]ou can't afford to ignore any report, no matter
how wild it may seem.. .It is absolutely essential that the
analysts state their requirements... [and] be in the closest
touch with collectors...."'
The Intelligence Community's mixed record of working
the North Vietnam target indicated how formidable a task
the DCI was asking it to perform.
twice as many communist
prisoners of war were under interrogation at any given time
than in the previous year, more aerial reconnaissance mis-
sions were being flown, and COMINT and HUMINT
reporting had increased somewhat in volume if not in qual-
ity. The Agency had little success, however, at inducing
defections by Viet Cong or North Vietnamese army person-
nel or in debriefing travelers to the North, and much report-
ing through US military channels was either redundant or
unreliable.)
CIA's other clandestine activities in Vietnam offered little
to hearten McCone during this time, either.
so the Agency's pacification
programs?the Folitical Action, Counter Terror, and Cen-
sus Grievance Teams?languished. The CIA-run propa-
ganda program was still "penny-ante," according to a senior
'McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting of the National Security Council...," 8 February 1965, McCone Papers, box 6, folder 11; transcript of
McCone interview with Evans and Alsop, 3 February 1965, ibid., box 9, folder 2; McCone memorandum to the president, "Communist Reactions to US Air
Attacks on North Vietnam," 13 March 1965, and "Memorandum for the Record.. .Discussion with Secretary McNamara-18 March 1965," FRUS, 1964-1968,
11, Vietnam, January?June 1965, 437, 459.-K
36 McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... Meeting of the National Security Council...," 8 February 1965, and "Memorandum for the Record.. Meeting at the
White House, 10 February 1965...," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 11; McCone memorandum to chairman of USIB Critical Collection Problems Committee,
"Review of Resources for Intelligence Coverage of Indications of Possible Intervention in South Vietnam by Communist Forces," with attachment, 25 February
1965, CM Files, Job 82R00370R, box 5, folder 28; Knoche, "Memorandum for the Record," 26 February, with attachments, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 16,
folder 341.X
408
"IttiitiE44
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FE Division officer at the time; "there are insufficient con-
sideration, insufficient personnel and insufficient funds
devoted to psychological endeavors." Moreover,
McNamara's interest in OPLAN 34A faded in 1965 once
US bombing began and US ground forces landed. In his
judgment, the struggle had become a conventional conflict,
and what he later called the "trifling efforts" of
MACV-SOG could contribute little to its success. istori-
ans Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade have summarized
this line of reasoning: "Rather than spending months pre-
paring for the insertion of a sabotage team armed with a few
rockets, American planes could now rain down thousands of
times more explosives during a single afternoon."'
The NSC still wanted to use the "quiet option," however,
so in response to its request, McCone submitted a much
expanded covert action plan to complement the strategic
bombing of the North that he was pressing the administra-
tion to undertake. Drafted by the DDP, the 12-point pro-
posal included extending support to political, labor, farmer,
and student groups; expanding political action teams in dis-
puted areas; organizing Montagnard self-defense units and
assisting local partisan groups; expanding harassment teams in
Viet Cong-held territory; and developing irregular elements
to locate, infiltrate, and seize enemy communications sites.
The plan, McCone advised the president, would "improve
the viability of the [Saigon] government.. .promote cohesion
within the South Vietnamese military structure...encourage
[the] South Vietnamese people to support their government
and...participate more actively in the defense of their coun-
try" McGeorge Bundy thought CIA's proposal "should be
explored urgently." The administration adopted some aspects
of the Agency plan, but,
The Saga in Southeast Asia Continues (U)
assigned implementation of most of
them to Army Special Forces. When Bundy raised the idea of
recreating CINs defunct Civilian Irregular Defense Groups,
McCone demurred. "[I] t was probably too late... the effort
had gone past the point of no return...[and] more or less
eroded away" The embassy and MACV opposed the pro-
gram then and would do so now zould not
be reversed. When Bundy asked McCone if he had told the
president about the problems with the turnover, the DCI said
he had not because "it would be construed as 'bureaucracy
and parochialism." Bundy chided him for that reasoning,
saying "it would be too bad to lose the game out there and
then have us say 'If you'd only done it our way we wouldn't
have lost." Asked if that was fair to the president, McCone
simply replied that "the decision had been made and could
not be reversed."'
In his last month as DCI, McCone made several
attempts to persuade Johnson and his Vietnam policy cote-
rie not to let the United States get drawn into a slowly esca-
lating conflict, especially on the ground. His basic point in
this final effort was the same as before: Hit the enemy fast
and hard with devastating aerial firepower to make them
immediately feel the cost of a protracted struggle and scare
them to the negotiating table. ROLLING THUNDER as
currently implemented, he told the NSC, was having little
or no effect on the North Vietnamese. "Hanoi remains
unconvinced that they [sic] cannot win out militarily They
are not yet ready to negotiate." He did not oppose commit-
ting ground troops, only a piecemeal engagement unsup-
ported by a major escalation of the air war?particularly
massive airstrikes north of the DMZ.' (U)
Clandestine missions under OPLAN 34A and the US Navy's DESOTO patrols, briefly suspended after the Tonkin Gulf incidents in August 1964, had resumed
in September under NSAM No. 314. After another supposed North Vietnamese attack on US destroyers in the Gulf on 18 September, President Johnson halted the
DESOTO patrols. Later that month, the 303 Committee decided to review monthly mission plans under OPLAN 34A to avoid conflicts such as had occurred in
late July and early August when sabotage attacks and ELINT patrols had overlapped. NSAM No. 314 (untitled), 10 September 1964, and Bundy memorandum to
the president, "The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, September 18," in FRUS, 1964-1968, I, Vietnam 1964, 759, 778-81; Jessup, "Minutes of the Meeting of the
303 Committee, 24 September 1964," and Carter, "Memorandum for the Record...303 Committee Meeting...24 September [1964,]...," McCone Papers, box 1,
folder 7,4.
'Ahern, CIA and the Generals, 31-33; memorandum to Elder, "Mr. Rowan's Memorandum for the President...," 18 March 1965,
McCone Papers, box 3, folder 17; Shultz, Jul, .L.1; Lonny and Andrade, 141.N
?McCone letter to the president, 31 March 1965, with attached Helms memorandum to McCone, "CIA Proposals for Limited Covert Civilian Political Action in
Vietnam," same date, Bundy memorandum, "Key Elements for Discussion...," 1 April 1965, McCone untitled memorandum to Carter, 1 April 1965, and NSAM
No. 328 (untitled), 6 April 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, IL Vietnam, January?June 1965,494-97, 508, 512-14, 538; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Dis-
cussion with Mr. McGeorge Bundy...," 19 March 1965, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 16.Ar
The Agency's proposal was one of several multifaceted plans that US military and civilian officials developed around then. When Ambassador Taylor was faced with
implementing a 21-point military program, a 41-point nonmilitary program, a 16-point US Information Service program, and CIA's 12-point program, he cabled
McGeorge Bundy that US policy seemed to be fashioned "as if we can win here somehow on a point score." Quoted in Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, The
Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, 117. (U)
The day before McCone presented the covert action plan, a Viet Cong car bomb exploded outside the US embassy, killing two Americans and 20 Vietnamese and
wounding 200 persons. A CIA secretary was among the dead, and COS Peer de Silva was partially blinded. McCone arranged for a special medical evacuation flight
for injured Agency personnel that took them nonstop from the Philippines to California. De Silva, 265-70; Johnson, The Right Hand of Power, 432-35. (U)
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CHAPTER 17
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By then, policymakers knew McCone's refrain by heart,
and the president was losing confidence and trust in him.
Recently in private, Johnson had described him as someone
"that might get offboard later" and should be
"view[ed] ...very carefully." The president, despite his own
doubts about the war ("I don't see any way of winning";
"there ain't no daylight in Vietnam"), was set on his course.
Convinced that overwhelming air power could not prevail
("[a]irplanes ain't worth a damn") and that American
ground forces must be sent in, he tuned out McCone, who
believed just the opposite. With criticism of the administra-
tion's limited airstrikes already emanating from some quar-
ters of Congress, the media, and the public, and with the
president needing to keep political support for his far-reach-
ing domestic program, McCone's more belligerent position
was untenable anyway. The DCI seemed to know this. As
political dissent and social discontent grew inside the
United States, he realized that the United States would get
caught in a contradiction if it went all out to defend South
Vietnam from falling to communism. America was trying to
be "a shining beacon to the world... [but] unless we look
inwardly and straighten up some of the problems here, as
long as we have a situation so deteriorating... [a]s long as
we've got these race problems, as long as we've got crime, as
long as we've got the youth problems.. .we can't serve as that
beacon."' (U)
McCone persisted, judging that the harm Vietnam's fall
would cause to US national interests outweighed other con-
siderations. After a meeting of the NSC on 1 April 1965, at
which Johnson approved a gradual escalation of airstrikes
against the North and an active combat role for US troops
in the South, McCone circulated a memorandum to Rusk,
McNamara, Bundy, and Taylor in which he argued vigor-
ously that the measures were too little, too late. The "slowly
ascending tempo" of bombing had not improved the situa-
tion on the ground but had made the communists more
intractable and increased the likelihood of Soviet or Chinese
aid to North Vietnam. If the airstrikes did not achieve mea-
surable results soon, the administration would face growing
domestic and international pressure to call them off.
"[T]ime will run against us.. .and I think the North Viet-
namese are counting on this." A large but ultimately fruit-
less commitment of US ground forces appeared almost
inevitable to the DCI unless the administration changed
tactics.
I think what we are doing is starting on a track which
involves ground force operations which, in all proba-
bility, will have limited effectiveness against guerril-
las.... [F]orcing submission of the VC can only be
brought about by a decision in Hanoi. Since the con-
templated actions against the North are modest in
scale, they will not impose unacceptable damage on
it.... [O]ur proposed track offers great danger of sim-
ply encouraging Chinese Communist and Soviet sup-
port of the DRV and VC cause if for no other reason
than the risk for both will be minimum.... We will
find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle in
a military effort that we cannot win, and from which
we will have extreme difficulty in extracting our-
selves.... [I]f we are to change the mission of the [US]
ground forces, we must also change the ground rules
of the [air]strikes against North Vietnam. We must hit
them harder, more frequently, and inflict greater dam-
age. Instead of avoiding the MiGs, we must go in and
take them out. A bridge here and there will not do the
job. We must strike their air fields, their petroleum
resources, power stations and the military com-
pounds. This...must be done promptly and with min-
imum restraint.' (U)
McCone strongly disputed McNamara's proposal in
mid-April 1965 that US bombing stay at its current level
41"Summary Notes of the 550th Meeting of the National Security Council," 26 March 1965, McCone, "Memorandum for the Record... NSC Meeting," 21 April
1965, and BNE memorandum, same date, FRUS, 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January?June 1965, 482-83, 580, 593, 595. On 6 April, the JCS concurred with CIA
that the bombing campaign had not curtailed North Vietnamese military activities significantly. Gen. Earle Wheeler (chairman, JCS) memorandum to McNamara,
"Over-all Appraisal of Air Strikes Against North Vietnam 7 February 1965 to 4 April 1965," ibid., 535-37. McCone never indicated?probably because it was
beyond his area of responsibility?how many ground troops he thought the United States needed to deploy in Vietnam, but evidently he thought the 82,000 called
for in the Pentagon's schedule in late April was not enough. Department of State telegram to Embassy Saigon, DEPTEL 2397, 22 April 1965, ibid., 602. (U)
'Reaching fir Glory, 186, 194, 213; transcript of McCone interview with Evans and Alsop, 3 February 1965, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 2. Johnson's suspicion of
McCone's connections to the Kennedys showed in January 1965 when he complained that the late president's loyalists were accusing him of using the DCI to blame
John Kennedy for the Vietnam stalemate. "[T]hey have these little parties out at Georgetown.. .they had a party last night.. and the Kennedy crowd decided that I
had framed up [sic] to get [the] Armed Services [Committee] in the Senate to call McCone to put the Vietnam War on Kennedy's tomb. And that I had a conspiracy
going on to show that it was Kennedy's immaturity and poor judgment that originally led us into this thing." McCone did not make such a statement to the com-
mittee during his January 1965 appearance. Reaching for Glory, 157. (U)
4-) McCone untitled memorandum to Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and Taylor, 2 April 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January?June 1965, 522-24. In his
memoir, President Johnson selectively quoted the parts of this memorandum in which McCone endorsed heavy bombing?implying that the DCI approved of
ROLLING THUNDER?while omitting those that expressed his opposition to an American role in the ground war. Johnson, The Vantage Point, 140. (U)
410
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and more US ground troops be
sent to the South. (The first
3,500 Marines had landed near
Da Nang on 8 March, and more
Marines, authorized to conduct
offensive operations, deployed
to Hue in April.) The secretary
of defense said increased deploy-
ments were necessary to protect
US forces already there and to
release South Vietnamese troops
to fight elsewhere. According to
the DCI, McNamara's plan
changed the purpose of the air-
strikes on the North. Instead of
being the principal means of
forcing Hanoi to negotiate, they
would become just another tactic of harassment and inter-
diction. McCone argued that the communists could absorb
present damage, that economic targets in the North must
also be hit, and that US ground force deployments must be
part of a coordinated strategy to intensify pressure against
the North on all fronts. Lacking such a strategy, the United
States would face a "slow...deliberate...progressive" com-
munist buildup that "would always confront us with an
increasing demand for men, increasingly serious problems,
and increasing casualties." The Johnson administration had
several strategic options in Southeast Asia to choose among
in early 1965, some more politically feasible than others.
McCone's preferred course may have been no more likely to
succeed than the few that were considered, and there was no
"Et.sca-/
The Saga in Southeast Asia Continues (U)
Marines land near Da Nang in March 1965. McCone
advised against waging a conventional ground war in
Vietnam. (U)
compelling historical case in
favor of unlimited bombing.
The most that can be said
with certainty about the
approach he promoted is that
the Johnson administration
never tried it.44)tc
On his final day as DCI,
28 April 1965, McCone gave
President Johnson a letter
summarizing his views on the
drawbacks of limited air-
strikes, the tenacity of the
communists in achieving their
long-term goals, and the
likely political and diplo-
matic consequences of failing to achieve progress soon. "I
am not talking about bombing centers of population or kill-
ing innocent people," he assured the president. "I am pro-
posing to 'tighten the tourniquet' on North Vietnam so as
to make the communists pause to weigh the losses they are
taking against their prospects for gains. We should make it
hard for the Viet Cong to win in the south and simulta-
neously hard for Hanoi to endure our attacks in the north."
After hearing McCone make his case one more time,
Johnson "accepted the letter and placed it on his desk with-
out comment." McCone concluded his dealings with the
administration on Vietnam by observing afterward: "I per-
sonally feel this is as far as I can go or, for that matter, as far
as the Agency should go in this matter."45X
"McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...NSC Meeting-20 Apr 65," and "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting of the NSC Executive Committee-
22 Apr 65," McCone Papers, box 6, folder 11.)6?.
President Johnson authorized the deployment of two more Marine battalions and a Marine air squadron on 6 April in NSAM No. 328. The NSAM also directed an
increase in logistics forces in preparation for larger ground deployments, and expanded the mission of US forces from base security to include active combat. NSAM
No. 328 was highly secret, distributed only to Rusk, McNamara, and McCone?the minimum needed to carry it out. The president warned them to avoid "prema-
ture publicity" about the new deployments and mission. Implementation "should be taken in ways that should minimize any appearance of sudden changes in pol-
icy, and official statements on these troop movements will be made only with the direct approval of the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of
State." "illhese movements and changes should be understood as being gradual and wholly consistent with existing policy." NSAM No. 328 (untitled), 6 April
1965, FRUS 1964-1968, II, Vietnam, January?June 1965, 537-39. (U)
45McCone letter to the president and "Memorandum for the Record... Discussion with the President alone...," both dated 28 April 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, II,
Vietnam, January?June 1965, 613-15. McCone?with his successor, Adm. William Raborn present?made the same points to Rusk, who deflected the suggestion
by saying that McNamara, Bundy, and he had considered the Das views but decided to hold to the present course. McCone, "Memorandum for the Record...Dis-
cussion with Secretary Rusk...," 27 April 1965, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 16. The day McCone stepped down, Sherman Kent prepared a memorandum for the
president, with which OCI and FE Division concurred, supporting the basic points of McCone's 28 April letter. Kent, "Comment on Mr. McCone's Views of 28
April 1965," DCI Files, Job 80R01580R, box 16, folder 341,4%.
McCone's continual pressure for heavier bombing of the North had one unintended effect within the Johnson administration: convincing Clark Clifford to oppose
continued escalation. In May 1965, President Johnson asked Clifford to read a private letter in which McCone argued that putting more troops on the ground
required a big increase in airstrikes. According to Clifford, "the powerful internal logic of McCone's arguments helped me clarify my thinking," and he advised the
president against sending more ground forces to Vietnam. Clifford, 409-10. (U)
1C-r.12,Q
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Transition (U)
J
ohn McCone's frustrations as Director of Central
Intelligence mounted so substantially during the first
several months of 1964 that by mid-year he had
decided to resign?perhaps imminently. Throughout
his professional career he had been used to controlling the
organizations he was responsible for, and he was not accus-
tomed to answering to overseers or to competing for influ-
ence with equally assertive rivals while wrestling with
seemingly insoluble problems. He had captained his engi-
neering and shipbuilding enterprises largely as he had seen
fit, and at the Department of the Air Force and the AEC he
had wielded command over focused organizations dealing
with a relatively narrow range of issues and activities and a
limited constituency of patrons and interests. As DCI, in
contrast, McCone lacked formal authority over most of the
massive and diffuse intelligence bureaucracies that he nomi-
nally directed, and he did not secure the political resources
in the White House and Congress that would have enabled
him to exercise the power he sought. He reportedly told an
aide: "I've been trying to get [President] Johnson to sit down
and read these papers [the Agency's annual estimates of
Soviet strategic intentions]. When I can't even get the Presi-
dent to read the summaries, it's time for me to leave.' (U)
In addition to these institutional and political limita-
tions, McCone gave several specific reasons for resigning.
His influence in policymaking circles was declining at the
same time public criticism of CIA was reaching new levels of
intensity. The "frightful" and "sickening" Invisible Govern-
ment episode, as he described it, particularly disheartened
him. He confided to a congressional friend in May 1964
that "I took this job over to try and build it [CIA] up and if
the attitude around town is to try and knock it down.. .1
have got a wonderful home in Pasadena and I am not going
to stay here for 30 minutes [more]." A few weeks later, he
told President Johnson for the first time that he wanted to
step down soon, saying that he believed he was getting too
old to run a large government agency. Speaking in confi-
CHAPTER
18
dence to a trusted journalistic contact several months later,
McCone outlined the bureaucratic and political aspects of
the job that dissatisfied him.
[T]here's a great many facets [sic] of this job that are
quite out of character with me.... I like to be able to
discuss what fm doing more freely than I can... and
I'm very, very sensitive to a responsibility for an
agency and for the work of a lot of dedicated men and
then have them beaten up unmercifully, and unfairly,
and incorrectly, and be unable to answer back.... This
is the kind of thing that wakes me up at 3:00 [in the
morning]...some of the things that are said are just
absolutely incredible.
Lastly, McCone wanted to devote more attention to his
business interests, which since the late 1950s he had run in
his spare time, and to his and his wife's personal lives.2><
The Search for a Successor (U)
McCone recalled that his initial offer to resign in mid-
1964 "changed the intimacy of the relationship [with Presi-
dent Johnson] .... I could feel it in a hundred ways." Despite
their personal and policy differences, however, the president
tried to dissuade the DCI. To avoid creating any political
problems for the administration, McCone agreed to stay on,
but only until after the November election. In October, he
apparently thought he was being rehabilitated. The presi-
dent asked McCone to accompany him to Herbert Hoover's
funeral in New York on the 26th. According to a CIA offi-
cial who worked with the DCI, he "was as excited as a kid
with a new toy." Johnson's gesture was a partisan calculation,
however; he figured that as the administration's most promi-
nent conservative Republican, McCone should appear at the
funeral of the doyen of the GOP's Old Guard. Despite the
lengthy discussion the DCI and the president had while
Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 167. Helms recalled McCone saying several times that one of the reasons he left the government was that he did not get to
see the president enough and did not feel that he had enough influence in the White House. Helms OH, 8. (U)
2 Transcripts of McCone telephone conversations with Robert Lovett and Sen. Leverett Saltonstall, 19 and 20 May 1964, McCone Papers, box 10, folder 6; tran-
script of McCone meeting with Joseph Alsop, 13 March 1965, and interview with Edward Weintal (Newsweek), 19 March 1965, ibid., box 9, folder 3.Nt
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'Tnit"E?444
CHAPTER 18
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traveling, the trip did not lead to a warming in their rela-
tions.'
Afterward, Johnson did not try very hard to find a suc-
cessor to McCone. In mid-December, the DCI reminded
the president that he had offered his resignation six months
before and had agreed to stay only past the election. It was
time to think about a new DCI, he told Johnson. Rumors of
McCone's departure were circulated in the press, along with
names of possible successors (including Roswell Gilpatric,
Cyrus Vance, Nicholas Katzenbach, Maxwell Taylor, Paul
Nitze, and Henry Cabot Lodge). McCone complained that
the president "hasn't done a damn thing about it [replacing
him]?except he talks to Clark Clifford during lunch some
days."'Nr
At a meeting with Johnson in late February 1965, the
DCI took the initiative by submitting a list of 15 candidates
and telling the president when he would be leaving. Johnson
replied that he had four names under consideration (he did
not say which) and would decide soon. In the meantime, he
wanted McCone to remain until 1 May. The DCI replied
that 1 April or earlier would suit him better. As a compro-
mise, the president proposed that McCone stay until the end
of April but feel free to be away from Langley as much as his
personal business required. CIA was efficiently organized and
well-managed, and Marshall Carter had run it well in
McCone's absence before, Johnson remarked.5*,
Who did McCone think should succeed him? He
believed an intelligence professional probably would be best
suited for the job. He did not want the White House to
demean the position of DCI by filling it with a patronage
appointment like "some hotshot businessman or chairman
of the Democratic National Committee in the State of Col-
orado." Nor did he think a military commander, unless pos-
sessed of unusual abilities, experience, and independence
would be appropriate because CIA might become "a tool of
the Pentagon." He doubted that an experienced civilian
public servant with aspirations to become secretary of
defense, secretary of state, or ambassador to a major Western
European country would want to risk tarnishing his reputa-
tion by serving in the controversy-ridden post. Accordingly,
although he personally preferred an outsider?intitially Gil-
patric, then Acting Attorney General Katzenbach?
McCone recommended Richard Helms ("superb") and Ray
Cline ("a man of very great intellectual capacity"), with,
according to Walter Elder, a nod toward Helms. McCone
thought Lyman Kirkpatrick, the executive director and
comptroller, would be "a hell of a good manager" but that
his disability would diminish his influence and convey an
image of reduced vitality. ("[E]very time an emergency is
called...when the cameras are around at the White House
doors, if the Director of Central Intelligence has to pull
himself into a wheelchair...I think that would be bad.")
Regardless of his successor's resume, McCone believed the
new DCI must have a very close relationship with the presi-
dent?"that if the President was home at eleven o'clock at
night and got to worrying over some development in South
Vietnam, or what[ever], would call him up and say, 'Jump
in your car and come down here and sit beside me on this
bed, because I want to talk about this before I go to
sleep'"?in short, just the opposite of what McCone had
with Johnson.
Much of the search for McCone's successor was con-
ducted by PFIAB Chairman Clifford and John Macy,
former head of the Civil Service Commission, who joined
the White House in late 1964 as a presidential "talent
scout." Besides the intelligence careerists, Clifford and Macy
considered defense establishment pillars such as Taylor and
Gilpatric. McCone told McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk
that picking Taylor "would be very damaging" because of
the general's long history of conflict with the Agency
While 1 knew Taylor
well and tavorably, McCone said, "no appoint-
ment...would be more harmful to the Agency...." Other
names floated in the press included Joseph Carroll, the
director of DIA, and William Bundy, the assistant secretary
3 Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 167; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with the President-22 October 1964," McCone Papers, box
6, folder 10; transcript of McCone interview with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 26 February 1965, ibid., box 9, folder 3441
4 Transcript of McCone interview with Schlesinger, 26 February 1965, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 3; Elder, "McCone as DCI (1987)," 366-67; Robert J. Dono-
van, "John McCone Resigns as CIA Director," Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1964, McCone clipping file, HIC.Xit,
5 Transcript of McCone meeting with Alsop, 13 March 1965, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 3; Elder, "McCone as DCI (1987)," 373746k.
6 Bromley Smith (NSC) memorandum to the president, "Your meeting with John McCone today...," 17 November 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, .,30CX111, Organiza-
tion and Management of U.S. Foreign Polity..., 475; transcripts of McCone interviews with Schlesinger, 26 February 1965, and Weintal, 19 March 1965, McCone
Pa ers box 9, folder 3; transcript of McCone interview with Rowland Evans and Stewart Alsop, 3 February 1965, ibid., folder 2; Helms/McAuliffe OH, 9; Elder/
H, 12; Elder/McAuliffe OHI, 35; Elder, "McCone as DCI (1987)," 373-74>C
414
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of state for Far Eastern affairs. As of mid-March, McCone
said he still did not have the slightest idea whom the presi-
dent had in mind. At the end of the month, he recalled
some years later, Johnson called him and talked about a
retired US Navy admiral named William Raborn. In early
April, however, Johnson was still privately vetting new
names, such as Burke Marshall,
an assistant attorney general con-
cerned with civil rights, and
David Bell, the director of AID.'
>I(
Like almost everyone else at
CIA, McCone was stunned to
hear on 11 April that Johnson
had selected Raborn. The admiral
was a party loyalist from Texas,
had managed the Polaris subma-
rine program, and enjoyed good
rapport with Congress. At his
staff meeting the following morn-
ing, McCone's voice and counte-
nance evidenced his displeasure,
although he did not comment on
the appointment. Several years
later, he termed Raborn?with
whom he had worked when the
AEC was involved in nuclear-
powered submarines?"an unfor-
tunate choice... thrown into a job
he wasn't really equipped for....
[Alt no time would I have consid-
ered him for that post." McCone observed that the DCI
"[hadl to be kind of an operational manager and play some-
Transition (U)
requiring "a different kind of mentality" from that of "a
hard-driving, technical man" like Raborn. Beyond the
White House's lack of consultation and Raborn's apparent
unsuitability, McCone had reason to take the admiral's
nomination as a personal slight. As intelligence historian
Christopher Andrew has noted, "[b]y appointing Raborn,
Johnson showed that he rejected
McCone's style of leadership and
was more interested in curbing
the CIA's independence than in
improving the quality of its intel-
ligence. He saw in Raborn a reli-
ably compliant DCI whose
administrative efficiency would
ensure that the [A]gency did not
rock the presidential boat."'
McCone and Adm. William Raborn (U)
During the brief transition,
McCone took Raborn on cour-
tesy calls around Langley and
Washington to introduce the
admiral to CIA officers, adminis-
tration officials, and congres-
sional overseers. The DCI also
brought Raborn to some morn-
ing staff meetings to acclimate
him to the daily flow of business
at the Agency. Meanwhile,
McCone's work pace slowed as he
prepared to step down. He sat for
his official portrait, attended an
Agency farewell dinner for him
vern Club, received the National
president, and said goodbye to
and Carter at the City Ta
Security Medal from the
what the role of a college president"?responsibilities Robert Kennedy.*
Powers The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 167; Emmette S. Redford and Richard T McCulley, White House Operations, 138; transcript of McCone meeting with
nd William Colby, 14 May 1963, McCone Papers, box 7, folder 3; McCone, "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with Mr. McGeorge
. arch 1965, and "Memorandum for the Record.. Discussion with Secretary Rusk...," 18 March 1965, ibid., box 2, folder 16; transcript of McCone
interview with Weintal, 19 March 1965, ibid., box 9, folder 3; Kirkpatrick Diary, vol. 5, entry for 5 December 1963; Carter-Knoche OH, 15-17; Richard Reston,
"Katzenbach Considered for Next CIA Director," Los Angeles Times, 22 January 1965. and "The Search for Someone to Fill the Cloak," Time, 9 April 1965,
McCone dipping file, HIC; McCone DH, 22; Reaching for Glory, 266.
Elder, "McCone as DCI (1987)," 377; Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secre Smith, The Unknown CIA, 164; transcript of McCone meeting with Charles
Tillinghast (TWA), 13 April 1965, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 4; McConeMe H, 22-23; Andrew, 324. President Johnson offered the DCI job to Raborn
in a telephone call on 6 April 1965. He told the admiral that he wanted someone w om the secretary of defense respected, who had "seasoned judgment," and who
could work well with Congress. The president made it clear to Raborn, however, that the appointment was temporary, while Richard Helms?who would be pro-
moted to DDCI?was groomed for the directorship. Helms, Johnson told Raborn, was "a young, attractive fella' who needed "some training and some seasoning"
before rising to the top spot. Transcript of Johnson telephone conversation with Raborn, 6 April 1965, FRUS, 1964-1968, =II, Organization and Management
of U.S. Foreign Polity..., 496-97. Two days later, Raborn telephoned the president and accepted the appointment...
9 John Warner, "Memorandum for the Record...Meeting with Members of CIA Subcommittee of House Appropriations," and "Memorandum for the
Record... Meeting with Representatives Rivers and Hebert of the CIA Subcommittee of House Armed Services," 13 April 1965, McCone Papers, box 2, folder 16;
McCone calendars, entries for 12-28 April 1965; McCone untided memorandum to Raborn, 23 April 1965, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 3, folder 67.AL
-S-LitRizz
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CHAPTER 18
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Richard Helms speaks at the farewell dinner for McCone and Carter on 26 April 1965.
(U)
McCone met with President Johnson alone for the final
time as DCI on the day of Raborn's swearing-in, 28 April
1965. McCone reiterated his belief that the president
needed to receive personal intelligence briefings and not rely
only on written reports, and he recommended that Raborn
brief attendees of the Tuesday Lunches. Johnson agreed and
indicated that he would work out some arrangement.
McCone then urged the president to give to Raborn a letter
like the one John Kennedy issued in January 1962 affirming
the DCI's leadership of the Intelligence Community and
role as the president's chief intelligence adviser. Johnson "felt
this would be in order," and subsequently discussed the sub-
ject with McGeorge Bundy:*
Leaving the Oval Office, McCone joined a large CIA del-
egation at Raborn's installation ceremony at the White
House. As President Johnson lauded his new DCI, "tears
were coursing down [the admiral's] crimson cheeks and
forming tiny drops at the point of his
chin," R. Jack Smith recalled. McCone's
reaction to his successor's public display
is unrecorded. That afternoon, the now-
former DCI hosted a luncheon for USIB
and the following day left for California.
After President Johnson received the first
briefing from Raborn, he made it clear
that their relationship would not be like
the one he had had with McCone. The
president ended their meeting by saying
in exasperation, 'And, I'm sick and tired
of John McCone's tugging at my shirt
tails. If I want to see you, Raborn, I'll
telephone yourli*C
A Public Retirement (U)
The limitations of Raborn's leadership
soon became the stuff of corridor legend
at Langley. An anonymous Washington
wit summed up the Agency's recent his-
tory by observing that "Dulles ran a
happy ship, McCone ran a tight ship,
and Raborn runs a sinking ship." Perhaps out of fear that
the admiral's substantive and managerial shortcomings
would undo much of what he thought he had accom-
plished, McCone continually offered the DCI unsolicited
advice on intelligence policy and administrative matters
large and small. His business interests (as chairman of the
Hendy International Company and as a member of several
corporate boards) brought him to the East Coast regularly,
and two or three times during his first year of retirement he
came by Headquarters to counsel the reluctant Raborn. On
those occasions, the Agency provided McCone with services
customarily given to former directors, including a limousine
and an intelligence briefing.' (U)
R. Jack Smith, then the DDI, was the hapless victim of
McCone's hard-charging habits during one visit. Suffering
from a bad cold, Raborn told Smith that he did not want to
see McCone or anyone else and left the DDI to "handle the
I? McCone letter to Johnson, 26 April 1965, and McCone memorandum, 'Discussion with the President alone on 28 April 1965...," FRUS, 1964-1968, =II,
Organization and NIanagettient of US. Foreign Policy..., 500-502. McCone and Johnson did not discuss the crisis in the Dominican Republic that was about to
erupt. Nt
'1 White Hoilse_press release, 28 April 1965, McCone clipping file, HIC; Smith, The Unknown CL'!, 166; McCone calendars, entries for 28 and 29 April 1965;
Helms, 294.,,X
'Andrew, 324; Smith, The Unknown CIA, 176-77. McCone sold his interest in Hendy International in 1969. (U)
416
"STE44.1/
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problem." Meeting McCone at Dulles Airport, Smith said
neither Raborn nor Helms was at Langley and that the car
would take the former DCI downtown. Without respond-
ing, McCone directed the driver to go to Headquarters.
After they arrived and had taken the elevator from the exec-
utive garage to the seventh floor, Smith tried to steer his
guest to his offices, but McCone turned toward the DCI
suite, and, writes Smith:
sailed into the Director's outer office at flank speed
and without breaking stride opened Admiral Raborn's
closed door and walked through. The Admiral sat at
his desk...clutching a piece of Kleenex. Before he even
sat down, McCone had already said, "Admiral, there
are a couple of things I want to take up with you." I
stood behind him silently indicating my helplessness.
As I retreated in chagrin I met Dick Helms coming in
the doorway, and my defeat was complete. As I
explained to both men later, I could not have stopped
John McCone from confronting Admiral Raborn that
day except by a hard tackle below the knees." (U)
At other times, McCone conveyed to Raborn his
thoughts on "the very serious erosion of public confidence
in CIA because of unwarranted attacks which unfortunately
go unanswered"; suggested opportunities for the admiral to
request intelligence studies and streamline the reporting
process; proposed that the DCI portraits and autographed
photographs of the presidents be moved to more visible
locations; and offered to help Raborn deal with a proposed
investigation of CIA by the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee. In 1966, he urged Raborn to travel to Vietnam, as
he himself had twice, to get a firsthand look at the political,
military, and intelligence situation there." (U)
The Agency retained McCone as a consultant until 1973.
In 1966, he worked with CIA in responding to a request
from the New York Times that he review a draft article criti-
SCPC.40.7/
Transition (U)
cal of the Agency. He recommended that the Times not run
the report and then proposed many editorial changes, some
of which were made. According to Harrison Salisbury of the
Times, "McCone's intervention had not weakened the series;
it had reinforced it because his views had been tested and
the stories rechecked and strengthened in the light of his
observations." McCone also periodically offered advice to
then-DCI Richard Helms. In 1967, for example, he briefed
Helms on Mideast oil matters and asked him to pass on to
the administration an idea for establishing a buffer zone
between Egypt and Israel. Helms disagreed with the concept
and presumably did not convey McCone's notion to the
White House.15X
In 1973, McCone asked CIA to terminate his consul-
tancy after his involvement in the Agency's covert action in
Chile in 1970 came under congressional scrutiny.' In mid-
1970, the US government again mobilized clandestine
resources to keep the perennial socialist candidate, Salvadore
Allende, from winning the Chilean presidential election.
Also again, American business leaders offered corporate
money to CIA for use in supporting Allende's opponents.
This time the group of concerned executives and industrial-
ists included McCone. Since 1965, he had been a member
of the board of directors of International Telephone and
Telegraph (ITT)-a sure target for nationalization under an
Allende government because of its extensive economic and
political influence in Chile. Through his contacts with
Helms, McCone set in motion a series of discussions
between ITT and CIA about the Chilean election. On his
own initiative, McCone met with Helms several times dur-
ing May and June 1970 to discuss the situation. According
to Helms, McCone seemed to think the Agency could
repeat its successful intervention in 1964 when he was DCI
and was dissatisfied that CIA was not mounting a massive
covert operation this time. McCone pressed Helms to send
an Agency representative to talk with ITT's chief executive
officer, Harold Geneen. In a meeting in mid-July with Will-
"Smith, The Unknown CIA, 176-77. (U)
"McCone letters to Raborn, 25 October 1965 and 20 January and 7 May 1966, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 3, folders 67 and 68. (U)
''McCone c:rsonriel file no. 35335, Office of Personnel Files; White untitled memorandum to Raborn, 9 May 1966, ER Files, Job 80R01580R, box 4, folder 82;
Helms briefing notes and letter to McCone, 21 July 1967, McCone Papers, box 11, folder 3; McCone letter to Raborn, 13 May 1966, ER Files, Job 80R01580R,
box 3, folder 67; Harrison E. Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, 522-26; McGeorge Bundy memorandum, "Briefing by Mr. John McCone on the Importance of
Middle East Oil to the United States," 29 June 1967, FRUS, 1964-1968, =UV," Energy Diplomacy and Global Issues, 452-56,61c.
"Sources for this paragraph and the next are: McCone-Colby correspondence, 19 June and 2 July 1973, ER Files, Job 80M01066A, box 14, folder 23; Hathaway
and Smith, 84-85,91; Richard Helms oral history interview by Robert M. Hathaway, Washington, DC, 15 June 1983,4-5; Church Committee Hearings, Volume
Covert Action, Appendix A, "Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973," 166-72,205; US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Multinational Cor-
porations, The International Telephone and Telegraph Company and Chile, 1970-71, 2-6,9-10,16; Robert Sobel, ITT The Management of Opportunity, 307,312-
13; Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State of ITT, 269, 276; Eileen Shanahan, "McCone Defends I.T.T. Chile Fund Idea," New York Times, 22 March 1973, and
"McCone Says Memos on Chile Authentic," Washington Post, 31 March 1972, McCone clipping file, HIC.>?,...
"StrmEiii
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jam Broe, then head of WH Division, Geneen offered to
give CIA a "substantial" fund (later calculated at $1 million)
to pass along to Allende's principal opponent. Broe
declined, citing the US government's prohibition against
backing a specific candidate, but he encouraged ITT to pro-
vide the money directly to the campaign. Company repre-
sentatives, guided by CIA advice, eventually passed
approximately $350,000 to the National Party. McCone
presumably was witting of these activities. je,Fs'r
At the ITT board of directors' monthly meeting in early
September 1970, just after Allende won a plurality of the
popular vote, Geneen told McCone privately that he would
put up $1 million of ITT's funds to support any US policy
to build opposition to Allende before the Chilean legislature
voted on the president in November. (Under the Chilean
constitution, when no candidate won an absolute majority
in the plebiscite, the Congress would select a president from
the two candidates with the most votes.) McCone concurred
with the idea and a few days later met with Helms and the
national security adviser, Henry Kissinger?both members
of the NSC's 40 Committee, successor to the Special Group
and the 303 Committee?to convey ITT's offer. Kissinger
said he would get back to McCone if the administration had
a plan, but McCone said Kissinger never did. Later in Sep-
tember, as the second phase of the election drew nearer, CIA
proposed a large-scale program to disrupt the Chilean econ-
omy as a way of encouraging Christian Democrats to vote
against Allende or, failing that, to undermine the new gov-
ernment. The DDP, Thomas Karamessines, telephoned
McCone to request his approval of the scheme, but McCone
did not think the plan would work and so informed
Geneen, who decided not to take part in it. CIA eventually
spent between $800,000 and $1 million to influence the
vote, which Allende won.
McCone does not appear to have had any part in subse-
quent US efforts to destabilize Allende's government, which
fell in a military coup in 1973. When questioned at the time
by Sen. Frank Church about CIA-ITT activities toward
Chile, McCone said he "would personally be very dis-
tressed" if a foreign government or corporation tried to
influence a presidential election in the United States. He tes-
tified that ITT intended the money it placed in Chile dur-
ing the election as economic aid, prompting incredulous
senators to note how inconsequential the amount was when
compared to official US assistance of $1 billion. McCone
did not persuade the legislators that ITT's intentions in
Chile or its dealings with CIA were as innocuous as he
claimed, but he did not incur any sanction for either his
actions or his testimony:7 (U)
McCone took part in other public affairs not related to
intelligence during the late 1960s and early 1970s. President
Johnson had placed him on a committee studying the feasi-
bility of a supersonic transport aircraft, and he stayed on the
panel following his resignation. His business experience and
contacts and his knowledge of the OXCART's development
was useful to the committee's work. (The US government
decided in the early 1970s, however, not to develop an SST.)
After race riots broke out in Los Angeles's Watts District in
the summer of 1965, McCone?a lifelong resident of Cali-
fornia?headed a committee appointed by Governor
Edmund G. Brown to investigate urban violence and racial
relations in the United States. The committee tried to allo-
cate blame for the riots evenhandedly and proposed an
agenda of economic and educational programs targeting
urban minorities. Two years later, President Johnson
appointed McCone to an 18-member committee to deter-
mine how business and labor resources could be mobilized
to attack poverty in the inner cities. McCone made over-
tures to the new Nixon administration in 1969, and in one
instance discussed PFIAB with the president. During
Nixon's second term, McCone served on the general advi-
sory committee of the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency." (U)
In November 1976, McCone was called to testify before a federal grand jury hearing evidence about Richard Helms's perjury before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in 1973. McCone wrote to then-DCI George Bush that he "had little recollection of discussions that took place.. several years ago.... I was something
less than the most informative witness and, at times, was concerned that the jury might think I was 'stonewalling' which was not the case." McCone letter to Bush,
18 January 1976, ER Files, Job 79M00467A, box 2, folder 21. (U)
I'McConelMOH, 20; transcripts of McCone meetings with 1 and 13 April 1965, McCone Papers, box 9, folder 4; Rob-
ert M. Foge son, comp., The Los Angeles Riots; Wallace Turner, "McGone Hews lane1 or is to tuoy suots on Coast," New York Times, 20 August 1965, Robert B.
Semple, "U.S. Panel Named to Attack Slums," ibid., 4 June 1967, Peter Hart, 'Watts Commission Will Publish Findings," ibid., 31 October 1965, "Nixon Taps 4
Advisers," Oakland Tribune, 1 October 1973, McCone clipping file, HIC; Elder memorandum to Helms, "Meeting with Mr. McCone," 26 May 1969, McCone
Papers, box 11, folder 7. During the 1966 gubernatorial campaign in California, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan said that, if elected, he would put McCone in
charge of a committee to investigate campus unrest at the University of California. McCone had been on the university's Board of Regents and, as mentioned in
Chapter 1, was concerned about student and faculty radicalism there. After he took office, Governor Reagan did not establish the committee. Lou Cannon, Reagan,
148; Bill Boyarsky, Ronald Reagan: His Life and Rise to the Presidency, 96. (U)
418
"Stroszy
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As the Agency's relations with
Congress and reputation with the
public deteriorated in the early and
mid-1970s, McCone decided that
CIA must retreat from some of its
traditional positions on openness and
oversight. The scandals surrounding
the Agency had so damaged its
image, he concluded, that major
changes were needed to end the criti-
cism and restore confidence in it. In
1972, he endorsed a bill to require
the Agency to distribute estimates to
Congress and regularly report to the
House and Senate committees on
foreign affairs as well as the usual
oversight committees. In 1975,
McCone suggested to the Rockefeller
Commission that PFIAB be strength-
ened, that a joint congressional over-
sight committee be established, and
that CIA's name be changed (because
it "is so tainted.") Later that year, he
volunteered to apprise the Pike Committee?the House of
Representatives' investigative committee, chaired by Rep.
Otis Pike (D-NY)--of some of the Intelligence Commu-
nity's accomplishments. He told Vice President Nelson
Rockefeller that "I think I'd better go talk to this man Pike.
He's off the reservation." Pike replied that he was not inter-
ested in hearing about the Cuban missile crisis again and
never met with McCone. In addition, McCone proposed
the creation of an interagency subcommittee of the NSC
that would monitor all CIA activities, not just covert action.
In public testimony to a Senate committee in 1976, he
repeated his call for the creation of a join congressional over-
sight committee.19,
"."1_7K-Fizzzi
Transition (U)
McCone at the groundbreaking ceremony for the New Headquarters Building in
May 1984. Also pictured are his former executive assistant, Walter Elder (1); Will-
iam Raborn (c); James Schlesinger and William Colby (r). (U)
At the same time he was espousing these ideas, which
contradicted positions he had taken as DCI, McCone
defended the Agency in two widely circulated publications.
His essay on "Foreign Intelligence in a Free Society" in the
Encyclopedia Britannica yearbook for 1976 explained in
objective terms why intelligence collection and analysis "is
an indispensable service for any government having even the
most elementary international associations." He made the
same case, with a slightly sharper pen, in a TV Guide article
in early 1976, "Why We Need the CIA." In both pieces, he
recognized that "changes must be made to extinguish...crit-
icism [and] to restore confidence... [in] an on-going,
dynamic foreign intelligence service."' (U)
McCone's participation in CIA and intelligence affairs
lasted into the 1980s. He was one of the few ex-Agency offi-
cials who supported President Jimmy Carter's controversial
nomination of Theodore Sorensen, John Kennedy's speech-
writer, to be DCI. While a member of the NSC Executive
Committee during the Cuban missile crisis, he had been
particularly impressed with Sorensen's abilities. McCone
served on the Citizens Advisory Committee on Cuba, which
President Carter had convened after the so-called "discov-
ery" of a Soviet army brigade in Cuba in 1979. He joined
'Thomas B. Ross, "McCone Backs Bill to Give Congress CIA Reports," Chicago Sun-Times, 28 March 1972, and Reuters wire service report no. 1436,10 October
1975, McCone clipping file, I-IIC; Elder untitled memorandum of McCone meeting with Rockefeller Commission staffers on 17 April 1975, OIG Files, Job
80B009 IDA, box 25, folder 11; Elder/ OH, 45; McCone testimony to Senate Committee on Government Operations, 26 January 1976, Oversight of U.S.
Government Intelligence Functions: Hearings Before the Committee... ,189><
McCone, "Foreign Intelligence in a Free Society," Britannica Book of the Year: 1976, 241-42; idem, "Why We Need the CIA," TV Guide, 10 January 1976,6-10.
McCone donated his $500 honorarium for the Britannica article to the Agency's education fund. McCone letter to William Colby, 24 September 1975, ER Files,
Job 80M01066A, box 1, folder 6. (U)
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CHAPTER 18
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that impressive coterie of "senior statesmen"?the other
members were McGeorge Bundy, Brent Scowcroft, John
McCloy, Sol Linowitz, David Packard, Dean Rusk, William
Rogers, Henry Kissinger, Roswell Gilpatric, George Ball, W.
Averell Harriman, Nicholas Katzenbach, and James
Schlesinger?in spending a day at CIA Headquarters ques-
tioning Agency officers about the nature of the supposed
deployment and examining old intelligence reports. The
panel concluded that the unit had been in Cuba since the
missile crisis and that the Intelligence Community had lost
track of it sometime during the preceding 16 years.
McCone, presumably more defensive than the others about
CIA's lapse, appears to have tried to implicate the Soviet
Union in some sort of indiscretion and said the United
States should "take steps to rectify the situation"?though
he did not specify what.' (U)
During the Reagan administration, McCone served on
the President's Commission on Strategic Forces (also known
as the Scowcroft Commission), which recommended ways
to reduce American vulnerability to a first strike. In inter-
views for books and newspapers, he tried to set the record
straight about CIA during the contentious directorship of
William Casey. (On his trips to Washington, McCone often
stopped by Headquarters to see the DCI.) In 1982, the
Agency gave McCone the William J. Donovan Award in
recognition of his contributions to the intelligence profes-
sion and, Casey said in his speech, of McCone's service as a
"citizen statesman and.. .citizen soldier." In 1987, President
Reagan presented him with the Presidential Medal of Free-
dom, the highest honor the US government can bestow on
private citizens. The following year, McCone was named
honorary chairman of the advisory board of the National
Intelligence Study Center, a private information clearing-
house for intelligence scholars. He also was a trustee of the
Monterey Institute of International Studies in California
during this period.' (U)
By the end of the decade, McCone's health was failing.
On 14 February 1991 at the age of 89, he died of a heart
attack at "Blue Stars," his home in Pebble Beach, California,
overlooking Carmel Bay. He was buried nearby at the Car-
mel Mission.' (U)
'Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, 348, n. 9; Clifford, 637-38; Prados, Keepers of the Keys, 405; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the
National Security Adviser, 1977-1981, 350-52. (U)
'Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, 115; Kevin Howe, "Ex-CIA Boss McCone, Now Retired,
Keeps His Eye on the Spy Business," Monterey Peninsula Herald, 27 May 1982, 'Former Chief of C.I.A. Honored by O.S.S. Members," New York Times, 22 May
1982, and "10 to Receive Freedom Medal," USA Today, 23 June 1987, McCone clipping file, HIC; Herbert E. Meyer, comp., Scouting the Future: The Public
Speeches of William J. Casey, 270-71; CIRA Newsletter 12, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 34-35; Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene 8, no. 2 (1989): 1. (U)
23 Glenn Fowler, "John A. McCone, Head of C.I.A. in Cuban Missile Crisis, Dies at 89," New York Times, 16 February 1991: sec. I, 15; Myrna Oliver, "John A.
McCone, 89; Helped Establish CIA," Los Angeles Times, 16 February 1991:A34. (U)
420
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A DCI for His Times (U)
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., historian and adviser to Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy, wrote the first assessment of
John McCone as DCI in early 1965, before
McCone resigned. The evaluation holds up well, almost
40 years later. McCone, Schlesinger concluded, was a "cau-
tious, realistic, and self-effacing" director who
repaired morale within the Agency, instituted mea-
sures to keep the CIA and himself out of the newspa-
pers...restored its relations with the State Department
and the Congress, if not altogether with the Depart-
ment of Defense...declin[ed] to allow his own views
to prejudice the intelligence estimates... [and] showed
a fair-mindedness which shamed some of us who had
objected to his appointment.
Just after McCone died in 1991, then-DCI William Web-
ster described the sixth director as "sharp, tough, and
demanding...a highly effective and widely respected leader."
In 2004, then-acting DCI John McLaughlin?noting simi-
larities between the straits CIA found itself in after the Bay
of Pigs debacle and the intelligence controversies of Opera-
tion Iraqi Freedom?described the way McCone handled
himself inside what President Kennedy called the "bull's
eye:"
He would lead an Agency that was, for the first time
in its history, under intense scrutiny and criticism....
If McCone was at all uneasy about the challenges
before him, he did not let it show. With the confi-
dence and decisiveness of an experienced manager, he
learned what he needed to know?and he learned it
fast.... He was a leader suited for a tough business in a
tough time. (U)
McCone was the right DCI for the times?the manager
and leader CIA needed desperately in the early 1960s, when
the Agency faced an uncertain future in the wake of the Bay of
Pigs humiliation. A president other than Kennedy may well
have decided to put a submissive bureaucrat in charge with
orders to downsize or dismantle it; even Kennedy, the dynamic
cold warrior, briefly thought of doing so. He could not envi-
"Pttrlii.1./)
EPILOGUE
sion winning the Cold War without CIA, however, and
needed a DCI like McCone to make sure the administration's
clandestine arsenal was used as effectively as possible. (U)
McCone fulfilled the Kennedy administration's expecta-
tions and more than ably completed the missions he was
assigned. He brought his lengthy experience in business and
government, his keen intellect, his political sophistication,
and his forceful personality to bear on CIA's manifold
administrative and political problems. He restored balance
to the Agency's activities by reemphasizing its preeminent
missions?collecting secret foreign intelligence and provid-
ing strategic warning and analysis to US policymakers?and
keeping close watch over CA operations. Except for minor
imbroglios over covert actions and information disclosures
with Congress and the media, he kept CIA out of public
controversy. When McCone left Langley 42 months after
his appointment, the Agency and the Intelligence Commu-
nity were in far better shape to conduct their business than
when he arrived. (U)
Like Walter Bedell Smith, McCone was an archetype of
the "manager-reformer/outsider" DCI, and he showed that a
career as a Washington insider is not essential to running the
community effectively. There are, of course, limits to how
far a DCI can live apart from the capital scene and still be
successful. James Schlesinger and Stansfield Turner demon-
strated that point, and they did not help themselves with
their arrogance and hostility toward clandestine operations.
A DCI who, like McCone, comes from beyond Washington
determined to make changes, has political skills and connec-
tions, appreciates the community's bureaucratic culture, and
enjoys the support of the president, can accomplish much in
making the intelligence services major contributors to
American foreign policy. (U)
The watchwords of McCone's directorship were produc-
tivity, efficiency, and accountability. These he tried to
achieve through centralization and the appointment of
trusted and experienced subordinates. He eschewed man-
agement systems and models, and he did not proliferate
sub-bureaucracies. He convened working groups and special
Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 429; "Statement from Judge William H. Webster on John McCone," 15 February 1991, HS Files, Job 03-01742R, box 6, folder 9;
"A/DCI McLaughlin Congratulates New SIS Officers," What's News, no. 1325, 3 August 2004. (U)
let l'ICTO7
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panels to address specific issues but disbanded them after
they finished their assignments. McCone thought that intra-
mural competition?which he distinguished from offices'
efforts to complement each other's activities?was corrosive,
especially at lower levels. He wanted lines of authority,
responsibility, and function clearly defined from the top
down. Striving to be a true D/CIA, McCone brought more
authority into the Office of the DCI and put trustworthy
and knowledgeable insiders in charge of the key operations
and directorates. They kept him fully informed through
morning staff meetings and the reenergized DCI Executive
Committee. (U)
McCone accomplished most of the internal managerial
goals he set for himself. Despite his reputation as a hard-
headed executive, he played the bureaucratic game adepdy,
knowing that as an outsider he could not run CIA by sev-
enth floor edict. After 30 years in the private sector and the
US government, he knew the difference between acting
decisively and acting precipitously. Cognizant of the cultural
differences within the Agency, he did not?as did Stansfield
Turner and John Deutch?bring in a cadre of former associ-
ates to populate the upper echelon, nor did he try to run a
unique government organization by business school para-
digms. He realized that CIA had some singular specialties
and let the career experts practice them. (U)
Externally, McCone had more difficulty. Probably his
biggest misstep in community affairs was his initial handling
of the dispute with the Department of Defense over run-
ning NRO. The controversy was clear evidence that the
DCI?then wielding command authority over only one-
sixth of the community's resources?did not direct some-
thing called "central intelligence." When adjustments of the
traditional CIA-Pentagon joint management of NRO
became necessary, McCone negotiated away too much
administrative and budgetary authority to the Pentagon,
wrongly counting on personal relationships to offset the
bureaucratic disadvantage in which he left CIA. He soon
entered an interagency slugfest to regain the ground he had
surrendered, in an effort that took up more of his time than
any issue except Vietnam. (U)
Two of McCone's signal accomplishments as DCI came
in the areas of science and technology and analysis. With his
engineering background and previous work at the Pentagon
and the AEC, he was almost ideally equipped to lead the
community early in a revolution in technical intelligence.
McCone's centralization of CIA's scientific and technologi-
422
G?411
cal activities into a new directorate enabled him to mobilize
Agency resources more efficiently and added to CIA's influ-
ence in this increasingly important aspect of the commu-
nity's work. He not only understood many of the design
intricacies of the new overhead systems, but he knew
enough about the politics of the military-industrial complex
to be able to preserve for CIA a major role in the National
Reconnaissance Program. A less combative or less knowl-
edgeable DCI almost certainly would have been far less
effective at protecting the Agency's interests in the new era
of technical collection?arguably the community's most
vital contribution to Cold War intelligence. (U)
McCone also raised the prominence of intelligence analy-
sis in the national security decisionmaking process. For
intelligence analyses to be influential?let alone be read at
all?they had to answer the questions the policymakers were
asking. It was not enough to tell them what CIA thought
was important. McCone regarded relevance, accuracy,
objectivity, and timeliness as the keys to making intelligence
analysis worthwhile. Except for the Vietnam special estimate
in 1963, he kept his policy role from influencing his super-
vision of the community's analytic efforts. He was an empir-
icist who could be, and many times was, argued out of a
judgment by facts or compelling logic. To him, the estima-
tive process existed to inform policymakers, not to press a
case or plead a cause. (U)
McCone did not win all his bureaucratic fights, but he
established the authority of the DCI as the US government's
national intelligence officer. He came to Langley with a
"vision" of how the community should be run and worked
assiduously to bring it to fruition. When he prevailed, he
did so largely by building respect for himself and his ideas
across organizational lines, even if he was often hard to work
with. His reputation for integrity and candor served him
well in interdepartmental and congressional settings; few
officials or legislators ever accused him of being devious or
playing political games. From McCone's time on, the DCI
would be regarded (even if at times only formalistically) as
director of central intelligence, not just director of CIA.
Later DCIs?for reasons of personality or politics?were
more passive in carrying out their duties or served under
presidents who were indifferent or hostile to CIA. Nonethe-
less, McCone ensured that when a president who cared
about intelligence took office and appointed an activist
DCI, the Agency and the community would be well pre-
pared to serve both. (U)
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In the early 21st century debate over intelligence reform,
many of McCone's views would resonate. A "McCone per-
spective" would involve giving more power to the DCI?
making the position a true director of the Intelligence Com-
munity, with authority over the programs, budgets, and per-
sonnel of all intelligence agencies, and answerable to the
president. McCone attempted to make himself a "chairman
of the board" of "Intelligence, Inc." in a way that resembles
current proposals to establish a national intelligence director
with the statutory authority to coordinate all activities of
community "operating companies" such as CIA, NSA, and
NRO. McCone most likely would have regarded that
reform as far more preferable to creation of large interagency
centers combining operations and analysis on specific issues
or decentralization of authority over intelligence affairs to
purely civilian and military departments under their own
directors reporting to cabinet secretaries. McCone would
also have endorsed giving the DCI command authority over
"national" or "strategic" intelligence agencies, leaving
"departmental" and "tactical" components?INR, DIA, and
the other military and civilian intelligence offices?under
their respective cabinet secretaries. (U)
At the same time that McCone demonstrated the impor-
tance of being close to the White House, he revealed the
risks of trying too hard to be close. As Richard Helms?a
very different type of DCI?observed,
Each President has to be dealt with by a Director
according to his personality and according to his way of
doing business.... Every President is going to do his
business the way he wants to do it. You say, well, he
should discipline himself, but they never do. They do it
exactly the way they want to do it. Even if you convince
them that they ought to do it differently, they'll never
do it for more than twice differently, and then they go
back to the way they wanted to do it before.... The
notion that a Director should constantly see[,] and be
in the presence ofli the President is not necessarily true.
As a matter of fact, he can become an irritant.... You
either adjust your production to the man you have in
the office or you're going to miss the train.'
...S41`6134:4.1
A DCI for His Times (U)
McCone came on too strong with Lyndon Johnson in the
early weeks of their relationship. With uncharacteristic
obtuseness, he failed to adapt his approach to suit the new
president's preferences. Then he compounded his error by
constantly caviling about the administration's policy in Viet-
nam. In short, McCone almost argued himself out of a job.
His disputatiousness and unconcealed dissatisfaction helped
bring on the appointment of William Raborn, who knew
little about foreign affairs and was chosen mostly because he
would not bother the president. (U)
Almost as important for an institution's history are the
features of a leader's style that his successors choose not to
emulate. Richard Helms, for one, learned by McCone's neg-
ative example. During his seven-year directorship, he con-
sciously fashioned his management approach to reduce the
DCI's policy profile and to avoid bureaucratic battles.
Unlike McCone, Helms did not believe the DCI could or
should "wear two hats" and that if any director was bold
enough, as McCone was, to take on the secretary of
defense?by many measures the second most powerful offi-
cial in Washington after the president?he was sure to lose.
Instead, the DCI's role in this more quiescent conception is
mainly to "keep the game honest"?to "be at the table" at
the pleasure of the president with the facts and objective
analysis?while avoiding pointless and self-defeating skir-
mishes over turf and prestige and staying out of policy dis-
cussions as much as possible.' (U)
Most of McCone's followers adopted Helms's approach,
but neither style alone has guaranteed success. The DCI's
standing and accomplishments have depended substantially
on whether the president?because of ideology, politics, or
something else?is suspicious of or uninterested in intelli-
gence and whether the national security adviser functions as
the president's chief intelligence officer (as did Henry Kiss-
inger and Zbigniew Brzezinski). Most DCIs have been
unable to influence those variables. On occasion, however,
with the right conjunction of world events, personalities,
and political needs, a DCI has reached the top of the
national security apparatus. John McCone occupied such a
place. (U)
Helms0H, 34-36.X
See David Robarge, "Richard Helms: The Intelligence Professional Personified," Studies 46, no. 4 (2002): 35-43. (U)
5?421.,1/
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Appendix on Sources
""STC4EZ/i
This appendix contains annotated citations for key sources on major topics discussed in the book. (U)
Intelligence Studies and Intelligence History (U)
Essential bibliographies for the historian of intelligence
and DCIs are:
? Paul W. Blackstock and Frank L. Schaf Jr., Intelligence,
Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Operations: A
Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale, 1978);
? James D. Calder, comp., Intelligence, Espionage, and
Related Topics: An Annotated Bibliography of Serial Jour-
nal and Magazine Scholarship, 1844-1998 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1999);
? Marjorie W. Cline, Carla E. Christiansen, and Judith
M. Fontaine, eds., Scholar's Guide to Intelligence Litera-
ture: Bibliography of the Russell J. Bowen Collection (Fre-
derick, MD: University Publications ofAmerica, 1983);
? George C. Constantinides, Intelligence and Espionage:
An Annotated Bibliography (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1983);
? John J. Dziak, Bibliography of Intelligence Literature, 4th
ed. (Washington, DC: Defense Intelligence School,
1976);
? Robert Goehlert and Elizabeth R. Hoffmeister, eds.,
The CIA: A Bibliography (Monticello, IL: Vance Bibli-
ographies, 1980);
? William R. Harris, Intelligence and National Security: A
Bibliography with Selected Annotations (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1968);
? Hayden B. Peake, The Reader's Guide to Intelligence Peri-
odicals (Washington, DC: NIBC Press, 1992);
? Neal H. Petersen, American Intelligence, 1775-1990:A
Bibliographical Guide (Claremont, CA: Regina Books,
1992);
? Walter Pforzheimer, ed., Bibliography of Intelligence Lit-
erature: A Critical and Annotated Bibliography of Open
Source Intelligence Literature, 8th ed. (Washington, DC:
Defense Intelligence College, 1985);
? Myron J. Smith, The Secret Wars: A Guide to Sources in
English. Volume I: Intelligence, Propaganda and Psycho-
logical Warfare, Resistance Movements, and Secret Opera-
tions; Volume II: Intelligence, Propaganda and
Psychological Warfare, Covert Operations, 1945-1980;
Volume III: International Terrorism, 1968-80 (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1980-81).
The most comprehensive Web site on intelligence is Loyola
University's homepage on "Strategic Intelligence"; its
address is www.loyola.edu/dept/politics/intel.html. (U)
Helpful surveys of the literature of intelligence are:
? Gary W. Allen and Anthony]. Ramienski, "A Survey of
Intelligence Literature," Military Intelligence 12, no. 2
(1986): 54-56;
? Russell]. Bowen, "The Quality of Intelligence Litera-
ture," Studies in Intelligence 34, no. 4 (Winter 1990):
33-35;
? John Ferris, "Coming in from the Cold War: The His-
toriography of American Intelligence, 1945-1990,"
Diplomatic History 19, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 87-115;
? John Lewis Gaddis, "Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold
War Origins," Diplomatic History 13, no. 2 (Spring
1989): 191-212;
? Raymond L. Garthoff, "Foreign Intelligence and the
Historiography of the Cold War," Journal of Cold War
Studies 6, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 21-56;
? "A Guide to Further Study," in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
and Andrew Lownie, eds., North American Spies: New
Revisionist Essays (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1991), 241-53;
? Roger Hilsman, "On Intelligence," Armed Forces and
Society 8, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 129-43;
? David H. Hunter, "The Evolution of Literature on
United States Intelligence," Armed Forces and Society 5,
no. 1 (November 1978): 31-52;
? Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, "The Historiography of the
CIA," Historical Journal23, no. 2 (June 1980): 489-96;
? Mark M. Lowenthal, "The Intelligence Library: Quan-
tity vs. Quality," Intelligence and National Security 2, no.
2 (April 1987): 368-73;
? Neal H. Petersen, "Intelligence Literature of the Cold
War," Studies in Intelligence 32, no. 4 (Winter 1988):
63-72;
? Marc B. Powe, "The History of American Military
Intelligence: A Review of Selected Literature," Military
Affairs 39, no. 3 (October 1975): 142-45;
? Bradley F. Smith, "An Idiosyncratic View of Where We
Stand on the History of American Intelligence in the
Early Post-1945 Era," Intelligence and National
Security 3, no. 4 (October 1988): 111-23. (U)
IE6111?Z
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425
!"1"t11?4.1.
Appendix on Sources
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For those who prefer visual media, espionage, covert
action, and counterintelligence receive regular treatment on
American and British television. US cable networks such as
the History Channel, the Learning Channel, and the Dis-
covery Channel have broadcast numerous documentaries on
intelligence that include discussions of some DCIs. Some of
the programs are fairly breathless in tone, but others are
solid in substance. In 1999, the British Broadcasting Com-
pany produced an excellent series called The Spying Game
that handled several complicated intelligence operations
with sophistication and insight. An earlier BBC effort, a
1992 serialization of John Ranelagh's sweeping history of
CIA, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), was equally good. (U)
Directors of Central Intelligence (U)
As indicated in the introduction, the literature on the
DCIs is extensive. Allen Dulles (DCI during 1953-61) has
received more attention in print?including two full-length
biographies and an extensive, once-classified, study of his
directorship?than any other DCI. See especially:
? H.W. Brands Jr., "Allen Dulles and the Overthrow of
Clausewitz," in Brands, Cold Warriors: Eisenhower's
Generation and American Foreign Policy (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988), 48-68;
? Kenneth J. Campbell, "Allen Dulles: An Appraisal,"
Studies in Intelligence 34, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 35-41;
? Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994);
? Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the
Origins of the CIA (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1992);
? Wayne G. Jackson, "Allen Dulles as DCI," 5 vols.,
unpublished manuscript HRP 91-2/1, CIA History
Staff, 1973, in Record Group 263, National Archives
and Records Administration, College Park, MD;
? Leonard Mosley, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen
and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network (New
York: Dial Press, 1978);
? Neal Petersen, ed., From Hitler's Doorstep: The Wartime
Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles, 1942-1945 (Univer-
sity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996);
? James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington,
DC: Regnery, 1999).
426 7t.
Dulles provided his own reflections on Cold War operations
and analysis in The Craft of Intelligence (New York: Harper
and Row, 1963). (U)
After Dulles, William Casey (1981-87) and Richard
Helms (1966-73) have been written about more compre-
hensively than the other DCIs. Casey has been the subject
of two books?Joseph E. Persico, Casey: From the OSS to the
CIA (New York: Viking Press, 1990), and Bob Woodward,
VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1987)?and numerous articles, most
relating to the Iran-Contra affair and covert actions of the
Reagan administration. A perceptive analysis of Casey's lead-
ership is Joseph Lelyveld, "The Director: Running the
CIA," New York Times Magazine, 20 January 1985: 16-28,
50-51. Casey's denouement is recounted in James
McCullough, "Personal Reflections on Bill Casey's Last
Month at CIA," Studies in Intelligence 39, no. 5(1996): 75-
91; and David Halevy and Neil C. Livingstone, "The Last
Days of Bill Casey," Washingtonian 23, no. 3 (December
1987): 174-77,238-45. (U)
One of the most insightful books about CIA, Thomas
Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and
the CIA (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), is more a his-
tory of the Agency than a biography of Helms. His director-
ship is covered a bit episodically in a classified study by
Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, Richard Helms
As Director of Central Intelligence, 1966-1973 (Washington,
DC: CIA History Staff, 1993). See also David Robarge,
"Richard Helms: The Intelligence Professional Personified,"
Studies in Intelligence 46, no. 4 (2002): 35-43; and Thomas
N. Bethell, "The Spy Who Went Out in the Cold: The
Problem of Choosing Wars Wisely," Washington
Monthly 12, no. 3 (March 1980): 28-41. Helms wrote a dis-
creet memoir (with William Hood), A Look Over My Shoul-
der: A Lifi in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York:
Random House, 2003).K
Scholarship specifically on the remaining DCIs is not
substantial. (Titles about John McCone are discussed in the
Introduction, and accounts of the DCIs in more general
works about CIA are not included here.) The early direc-
tors?Sidney Souers (1946), Hoyt Vandenberg (1946-47),
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Roscoe Hillenkoetter (1947-50), and Walter Bedell Smith
(1950-53)--are discussed in:
? Arthur Darling, The Central Agency: An Instrument of
Government to 1950 (State College: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1990);
? Danny D. Jansen and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, ed., "The
Missouri Gang and the CIA," in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
and Andrew Lownie, eds., North American Spies: New
Revisionist Essays (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1991), 122-42;
? Sara L. Sale, "Admiral Sidney W. Souers and President
Truman," Missouri Historical Review 86, no. 1 (October
1991): 55-71;
? Phillip S. Meilinger, Hoyt S. Vandenberg: The Lift of a
General (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1989);
? Charles R. Christensen, "An Assessment of General
Hoyt S. Vandenberg's Accomplishments as Director of
Central Intelligence," Intelligence and National
Security 11, no. 4 (October 1996): 754-64;
? Arthur B. Darling, "DCI Hillenkoetter: Soft Sell and
Stick," Studies in Intelligence 13, no. 1 (Winter 1969):
33-56;
? Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith As
Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950?February
1953 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1992);
? Kenneth J. Campbell, "Bedell Smith's Imprint on the
CIA," International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence 1, no. 2 (1986): 45-62;
? and James Hanrahan, "Notes on
the Early DCIs," Studies in Intelligence 33, no. 1 (Spring
1989): 27-33. (U)
William Colby's life is chronicled in John Prados, Lost
Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), and his eventful
tenure receives thorough treatment in a classified work by
Harold P Ford, William Colby As Director of Central Intelli-
gence, 1973-1976 (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff,
1993). Colby's dismissal of the Agency's controversial coun-
terintelligence chief James Angleton is provocatively inter-
preted by one of Angleton's journalistic acolytes, Edward Jay
Epstein, in "The War Within the CIA," Commentary 66,
no. 2 (August 1978): 35-39. Colby wrote a fair-minded
memoir, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1978) and a somewhat tendentious
account of the Vietnam War, Lost Victory: A Firsthand
"E"EigL.TI)
Appendix on Sources
Account of America's Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam
(Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989). Xiit
Besides the above-mentioned sources on Casey, there are
relatively few works on the DCIs after Colby. George Bush's
single year at Langley (1976-77) is noted in Herbert S.
Parmet, George Bush: The Lift of a Lone Star Yankee (New
York: Scribner, 1997), chap. 12, and Nicholas King, George
Bush: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), chap.
12. Two articles look at Bush's short-lived experiment in
competitive analysis on the Soviet threat: Robert C. Reich,
"Re-examining the Team A-Team B Exercise," International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 3, no. 3 (Fall
1989): 387-403; and Richard Pipes, "Team B: The Reality
Behind the Myth," Commentary 82, no. 4 (October 1986):
25-40. Bush included some documents from his director-
ship in his memoir-anthology, All the Best, George Bush: My
Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York: Scribner,
1999). (U)
After James Schlesinger (1973), Stansfield Turner (1977-
81) probably generated more contention per capita than any
DCI, but his directorship has not been studied in detail.
Some of his management ideas are critiqued in Benjamin F.
Schimmer et al., "The Slow Murder of the American Intelli-
gence Community," Armed Forces Journal International 116,
no. 3 (March 1979), 50-54; and Edward Jay Epstein, "Who
Killed the CIA: The Confessions of Stansfield Turner,"
Commentary 80, no. 4 (October 1985), 53-57. Turner pro-
vided an account of his tenure and his prescriptions for
intelligence in Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985). (U)
Preliminary attempts at evaluating William Webster
(1987-91) are Mark Perry, "The Case Against William
Webster," Regardie's, January 1990: 90-95; and Loch K.
Johnson, "DCI Webster's Legacy: The Judge's Self-Assess-
ment," International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence 5, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 287-90. The "polit-
icization" issue that beset the directorship of Robert Gates
(1991-93) is analyzed in H. Bradford Westerfield, "Inside
Ivory Bunkers: CIA Analysts Resist Managers' Pandering,"
International Journal of Intelli gence and Counterintelligence 9,
no. 4 (Winter 1996-97): 407-24 (part 1), vol. 10, no. 1
(July 1997), 19-55 (part 2). Gates's pre-DCI career is the
subject of David Callahan, "Robert Gates: Bush's Man at
Langley," Foreign Service Journal 68, no. 12 (December
1991): 14-21. Gates describes his years in the national secu-
rity establishment in From the Shadows: The Ultimate
Fec
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Appendix on Sources
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Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold
War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). (U)
An institutional overview of CIA during the Clinton
administration, with brief reference to the three DCIs who
served in it (R. James Woolsey, John Deutch, and George
Tenet), is Christopher M. Jones, "The CIA Under Clinton:
Continuity and Change," International Journal of Intelli-
gence and Counterintelligence 14, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 503-
25. On Woolsey (1993-95), see John Prados, "Woolsey and
the CIA," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 49, no. 6 (July?
August 1993): 33-38; James W. Danan, "Mr. Woolsey's
Neighborhood," Air Force Magazine, April 1994: 44-47; J.
Douglas Orton and Jamie L. Callahan, "Important 'Folk
Theories' in Intelligence Reorganization," International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 8, no. 4 (Win-
ter 1995): 411-29; and David Halberstam, War in a Time of
Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Scribner,
2001), 191-93,243-44. (U)
The directorships of Deutch (1995-97) and Tenet
(1997-2004) are too recent to have received other than
journalistic treatment. For an interesting examination of
how Deutch handled a major controversy, see Abraham H.
Miller, "How the CIA Fell Victim to Myth Posing as Jour-
nalism," International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence 10, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 257-68. Deutch's
post-CIA security problems are discussed, in the context of
his fractious directorship, in David Wise, "What the Spy-
master Knew," Talk Magazine, November 2000: 25-31, and
Thomas Powers, "The Whiz Kid vs. the Old Boys," New
York Times Magazine, 3 December 2000: 98-110. (U)
Tenet's and CIA's relations with Congress are the focus
of Chuck McCutcheon, "CIA's Role in Afghan War Restores
Tenet's Image on Hill," Congressional Quarterly, 2 February
2002, on-line edition. Tenet's role in formulating counter-
terrorism policy after the 11 September 2001 attacks by Al-
Qaeda is detailed in Bob Woodward, Bush At War (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). Woodward also recounts
Tenet's involvement with Operation Iraqi Freedom in Plan
of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). Antitheti-
cal analyses of Tenet's leadership before his resignation are
provided by Spencer Ackerman and John Judis, "The Oper-
ator," New Republic 229,22 September 2003: 18-22,27-
29; and Bill Powell, "How George Tenet Brought the CIA
Back from the Dead," Fortune 148, no. 8 (13 October
2003): 129-38. (U)
428
"Teefirrad
Covert Actions against Cuba (U)
The policy context for the Kennedy administration's
campaign against Castro is detailed in Bruce Miroff, Prag-
matic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John E Kennedy
(New York: David McKay, 1976), 110-42; and Stephen G.
Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John E
Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999),
previewed as "Controlling Revolutions: Latin America, the
Alliance for Progress, and Cold War Anti-Communism," in
Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Kennedy's Quest for Victory: Ameri-
can Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1989), 106-22. (U)
Operation MONGOOSE has been extensively examined
in the following published sources:
? Taylor Branch and George Crile III, "The Kennedy
Vendetta," Harper's Magazine 251, August 1975: 49-
63;
? David Corn, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's
Crusades (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), chap.
4;
? Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos,
and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), chap. 17;
? Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, "One Hell of
a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964
(New York: WW Norton, 1997), 142-48,156-58;
? Warren Hinclde and William W. Turner, The Fish Is
Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro (New
York: Harper and Row, 1981), 110-23,131-33;
? Herbert S. Parmet, JFK The Presidency ofJohn E
Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1983), 218-21;
? Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard
Helms and the CIA (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987),
170-81;
? Gus Russo, Live By the Sword: The Secret War Against
Castro and the Death of JFK (Baltimore: Bancroft Press,
1998), chap. 2;
? Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His
Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 474-80;
? Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The
Early Years of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995), chap. 20.
Most of these works also cover the Kennedy administration's
post-MONGOOSE covert actions against Cuba. (U)
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The Cuban Missile Crisis (U)
More has been written about the Cuban missile crisis
than any other episode of the Cold War. Most works about
it published before 1990 are listed in Lester H. Brune, The
Missile Crisis of October 1962: A Review of Issues and Refer-
ences (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1985), 83-143;
Arthur Gillingham and Barry Roseman, comps., The Cuban
Missile Crisis (Los Angeles: Center for the Study of Arma-
ment and Disarmament, California State University, 1976);
and Neal H. Petersen, American Intelligence, 1775-1990: A
Bibliographical Guide (Claremont, CA: Regina Books,
1992), 252-55. (U)
Useful synopses of the episode are:
? Barton J. Bernstein, "Cuban Missile Crisis," in Bruce
W. Jentleson and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Encyclope-
dia of US Foreign Relations, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), vol. 1, 387-96;
? G.J.A. O'Toole, The Encyclopedia of American Intelli-
gence and Espionage (New York: Facts On File, 1988),
144-49;
? Thomas Parrish, The Cold War Encyclopedia (New York:
Henry Holt, 1996), 74-76;
? Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Spy Book: The
Encyclopedia of Espionage (New York: Random House,
1997), 148-51;
? Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in
the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 310-19. (U)
Works since 1990 draw on newly declassified materials in
the United States and abroad and on the recollections of an
international cast of participants and their associates. The
principal titles include:
? Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision:
Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York:
Longman, 1999);
? Barton Bernstein, "Understanding Decisionmaking,
U.S. Foreign Policy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,"
International Security 25, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 134--
64;
? Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and
Khrushchev, 1960-1963 (New York: HarperCollins,
1991), chaps. 15-19;
"STEK..TV
Appendix on Sources
? James G. Blight, Cuba On the Brink: Castro, the Missile
Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1993);
? James G. Blight, The Shattered Crystal Ball: Fear and
Learning in the Cuban Missile Crisis (Savage, MD: Row-
man and Littlefield, 1990);
? James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous
Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Mis-
sile Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2002);
? Dino Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the
Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Random House,
1991);
? Dino Brugioni, "The Invasion of Cuba," Military His-
tory Quarterly 4, no. 2:92-101; ed. James A. Nathan,
The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited (New York: St. Mar-
tin's Press, 1992);
? Robert Divine, "Alive and Well: The Continuing
Cuban Missile Crisis Controversy," Diplomatic
History 18, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 551-60;
? Max Frankel, High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy,
Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York:
Random House, 2004);
? Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos,
and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), chaps. 18-24;
? Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, "One Hell of
a Gamble": Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-
1964 (New York: WW Norton, 1997), chaps. 9-15;
? John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold
War History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), chap. 9;
? James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John E Kennedy
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), chap. 8;
? Bernd Greiner, "The Soviet View: An Interview with
Sergo Mikoyan," and replies by Raymond L. Garthoff,
Barton J. Bernstein, Marc Trachtenberg, and Thomas
G. Paterson, Diplomatic History 14, no. 2 (Spring
1990): 205-56;
? Anatoli I. Gribkov and William Y. Smith, Operation
AlVADYR: US and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban
Missile Crisis (Chicago: edition q, 1994);
? James H. Hansen, "Soviet Deception in the Cuban
Missile Crisis," Studies in Intelligence 46, no. 1 (2002):
49-58;
James G. Hershberg, "The United States, Brazil, and
the Cuban Missile Crisis," in two parts, Journal of Cold
War Studies 6, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 3-20, and no. 3
(Summer 2004): 5-67;
"Steschli
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Appendix on Sources
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? Roger Hilsman, The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Struggle
Over Policy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996);
? Intelligence and National Security, special issue on "Intel-
ligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis," 13, no. 3
(Autumn 1998);
? Tony Judt, "On the Brink," New York Review of Books,
15 January 1998: 52-59;
? Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Cre-
ation of a Superpower (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2000), chap. 6;
? Richard Ned Lebow, "Domestic Politics and the Cuban
Missile Crisis: The Traditional and Revisionist Interpre-
tations Reevaluated," Diplomatic History 14, no. 4 (Fall
1990): 471-92;
? Carlos Lechuga, In the Eye of the Storm: Castro, Khrush-
chev, Kennedy and the Missile Crisis, trans. Mary Todd
(Melbourne, FL: Ocean Press, 1995);
? David T. Lindgren, Trust but Verifi: Imagery Analysis in
the Cold War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press,
2000), chap. 3;
? Mary S. McAuliffe, "Return to the Brink: Intelligence
Perspectives on the Cuban Missile Crisis," Society for
Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter 24,
no. 2 (June 1993): 4-18, and response by Samuel
Halpern, "Revisiting the Cuban Missile Crisis," ibid.,
March 1994: 1-8;
? Gil Merom, "The 1962 Cuban Intelligence Estimate: A
Methodological Perspective," Intelligence and National
Security 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 48-80;
? Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower,
Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957-1963 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1997);
? James A. Nathan, ed., Anatomy of the Cuban Missile Cri-
sis (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001);
? Thomas G. Paterson, "When Fear Ruled: Rethinking
the Cuban Missile Crisis," New England Journal of
History 52, no.1 (Fall 1995): 12-37;
? "Roundtable Review: FRUS on the Cuban Missile Cri-
sis" (containing articles by Raymond L. Garthoff
["Documenting the Cuban Missile Crisis"], Jorge I.
Dominguez, ["The @#$%& Missile Crisis"], and
Philip Zelikow ["American Policy and Cuba, 1961-
19631 , Diplomatic History 24, no. 2 (Spring 2000):
295-334;
? Len Scott and Steve Smith, "Lessons of October: Histo-
rians, Political Scientists, Policy-Makers, and the Cuban
Missile Crisis," International Affairs 70, no. 4 (1994):
659-84;
430
""tsica/
? Sheldon M. Stern, Averting "The Final Failure": John E
Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003);
? Robert S. Thompson, The Missiles of October: The
Declassified Story of John E Kennedy and the Cuban Mis-
sile Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992);
? Robert Weisbrot, Maximum Danger: Kennedy, the Mis-
siles, and the Crisis of American Confidence (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 2001);
? David A. Welch, "Intelligence Assessment in the Cuban
Missile Crisis," Queen's Quarterly 100, no. 2 (Summer
1993): 421-37;
? Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests: The
United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
? Mark J. White, The Cuban Missile Crisis (London: Bas-
ingstoke, 1996);
? Mark J. White, "New Scholarship on the Cuban Mis-
sile Crisis," Diplomatic History 26, no. 1 (Winter
2002): 147-53. (U)
Classified accounts of the crisis focusing on CIA and
NSA are:
? Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, The
Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance:
The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974 (Wash-
ington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1992), 199-
211;
? Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the
Cold War, 1945-1989. Book II: Centralization Wins,
1960-1972 (Ft. Meade, MD: National Security
Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 1995), 317 ?
32.
Essential compendia of official documentary sources are:
? Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban
Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Docu-
ments Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002) (this col-
lection is posted, along with several interpretive articles
and a thorough chronology, on the Web site of the
National Security Archive at www.gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/
nsa/cuba_mis_cri.);
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? David L. Larson, ed., The "Cuban Crisis" of 1962:
Selected Documents, Chronology, and Bibliography, 2nd
ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986);
? Mary S. McAuliffe, ed., CIA Documents on the Cuban
Missile Crisis, 1962 (Washington, DC: Central Intelli-
gence Agency, 1992);
? The National Security Archives' microfiche collection,
The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: The Making of US Pol-
icy;
? Two volumes in the Department of State's Foreign Rela-
tions of the United States series for 1961-63: Volume X,
Cuba 1961-1962 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1997) and Volume XI, Cuban Missile
Crisis and Aftermath (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1996). (U)
NSA has posted several dozen declassified SIGINT docu-
ments, along with a useful synopsis of its crisis-related activ-
ities, on its Web site at www.nsa.gov/docs/cuba/archive.
Those materials are discussed in David Alvarez, "American
Signals Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis," Intelli-
gence and National Security 15, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 169-
76. (U)
Other Web sites with good documentary collections and
links are the Cold War International History Project,
www.cwihp.si.edu; Mount Holyoke College, "Documents
Relating to American Foreign Policy: The Cuban Missile
Crisis," www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/cuba; ThinkQuest,
"14 Days in October: The Cuban Missile Crisis,"
vvww.library.advanced.org/11046/briefing; and Yale Univer-
sity School of Law, www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplo-
macy/forrel/cuba. (U)
John Kennedy's secret recordings of many of the meet-
ings of the NSC ExComm during the missile crisis have
become both an indispensable resource for scholars and a
matter of disputation. Two edited collections of transcripts
of those recordings have been published:
? Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The
Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban
Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997);
? Ernest R. May, Philip D. Zelikow, and Timothy Naf-
tali, eds., The Presidential Recordings: John E Kennedy:
The Great Crises, 3 vols. (New Jork: W. W. Norton,
2001); vol. 3 covers the missile crisis and includes an
audiovisual CD-ROM. (U)
Appendix on Sources
The significance of omissions and inaccuracies in both of
these editions, as well as the utility of recordings vis-a-vis
other primary sources, are thoroughly examined in several
articles:
? Robert Dallek, "Tales of the Tapes," Reviews in Ameri-
can History 26, no. 2 (June 1998): 333-38;
? James N. Giglio, "Kennedy on Tape," Diplomatic
History 27, no. 5 (November 2003): 747-50;
? David Greenberg, "The Cuban Missile Tape Crisis: Just
How Helpful Are the White House Recordings?," Slate,
22 July 2003, on-line version at Slate.msn.com/id/
2085761/#sb2085838;
? Mark Atwood Lawrence, "The Kennedy Tapes," Presi-
dential Studies Quarterly 32, no. 4 (December 2002):
810-14;
? Robert J. McNamara, "A Near Miss," Reviews in Ameri-
can History 32, no. 2 (June 2004), 262-66;
? Sheldon Stern, "The 1997 Published Transcripts of the
JFK Cuban Missile Crisis Tapes," Presidential Studies
Quarterly 30, no. 3 (September 2000): 586-93;
"Response to Zelikow and May," ibid., no. 4 (Decem-
ber 2000), 797-99; "What JFK Really Said," Atlantic
Monthly 285, no. 5 (May 2000): 122-28; and the
appendix to Averting the "Final Failure";
? Terry Sullivan, "Confronting the Kennedy Tapes: The
May-Zelikow Transcripts and the Stern Assessments,"
Presidential Studies Quarterly 30, no. 3 (September
2000): 594-97; "Reacting to Zelikow and May," ibid.,
no. 4 (December 2000): 800-801;
? Philip D. Zelikow and Ernest R. May, "The Kennedy
Tapes: Past and Future," Presidential Studies
Quarterly 30, no. 4 (December 2000): 791-96. (U)
Southeast Asia (U)
CIA's "covert" war in Laos is starting to receive the schol-
arly attention it deserves, but the existing bibliography
remains much shorter than that for the Vietnam conflict.
General information on the political and military situation
in Laos and CIA operations there, relevant to McCone's
directorship, is available in:
? Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy, eds., Laos: War
and Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1970),
139-212;
? Thomas L. Ahern Jr., Undercover Armies: CIA and Sur-
rogate Warfare in Laos, 1961-1973 (Washington, DC:
'31E6,41/,
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Appendix on Sources
?
?
?
?
?
?
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Center for the Study of Intelligence, a forthcoming
classified study), chaps. 1-9;
Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: US.
Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New
York: Free Press, 1977), 128-47,158-62;
Douglas S. Blaufarb, "Organizing and Managing
Unconventional War in Laos, 1962-1970," Report R-
919-ARPA, prepared for Department of Defense,
Advanced Research Projects Agency (n.p.: RAND Cor-
poration, January 1972) (declassified December 1980);
Timothy N. Castle, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam:
US. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955-
1975 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 1-
80;
CIA, "Chronology of Significant Events in Laos, Janu-
ary 1960-October 1963," History Staff Files, HS/
CSG-277, Job 83-00036R, box 2, folder 2;
William Colby (with James McCargar), Lost Victory: A
Firsthand Account of America's Sixteen-Year Involvement
in Vietnam (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989),
chap. 12;
Kenneth Conboy with James Morrison, Shadow War:
The CIA's Secret War in Laos (Boulder, CO: Paladin
Press, 1995), 3-161;
Chester L. Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Viet-
nam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), 170-72,182-
91;
"Air America, 1946-1972," CIA
Miscellaneous Historical Studies No. MISC-9, vol. 5,
339-419, copy in History Staff files;
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1961-1963, Volume )0(I1/,' Laos Crisis (Washing-
ton, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994), 1-530;
Arthur J. Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of
Neutralization (New York: Praeger, 1964), 58-199;
Arthur J. Dommen, Laos: Keystone of Indochina (Boul-
der, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 40-89;
Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong,
the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 69-
112;
Kenneth L. Hill, "President Kennedy and the Neutral-
ization of Laos," Review of Politics 31, no. 3 (July 1969):
353-69;
Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of For-
eign Policy in the Administration of John E Kennedy
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 91-155;
432
*Stt.414:17
? Noam Kochavi, "Limited Accommodation, Perpetu-
ated Conflict: Kennedy, China, and the Laos Crisis,
1961-1963," Diplomatic History 26, no. 1 (Winter
2002): 95-135;
? Usha Mahajani, "President Kennedy and United States
Policy in Laos, 1961-1963," Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 2 (September 1971): 87-99;
?
?
?
?
?
Herbert S. Parmet, JFK The Presidency of John E
Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1983), 132-55;
John Prados, Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon
Covert Operations from World War II through Iranscam,
rev. ed. (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 261-71;
Keith Quincy, Harvesting Pa Chay's Wheat: The Hmong
and America's Secret War in Laos (Spokane: Eastern
Washington University Press, 2000);
Christopher Robbins, Air America (New York: G.P. Put-
nam's Son's, 1979), 103-48;
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John E
Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Miff-
lin, 1965), 323-34;
Richard H. Shultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi:
Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and
Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1999), chap. 6;
R.B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam
War: The Kennedy Strategy (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1985), 259-75;
Charles A. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere: American
Policy Toward Laos Since 1954 (Boston: Beacon Press,
1972), 1-154,194-221,332-47;
Hugh Toye, Laos: Buffer State or Battleground (London:
Oxford University Press, 1968), 103-97;
Peter S. Usowski, "Intelligence Estimates and U.S. Pol-
icy Toward Laos, 1960-63," Intelligence and National
Security 6, no. 2 (April 1991): 367-94;
Roger Warner, Shooting at the Moon: The Story of Amer-
ica's Clandestine War in Laos (South Royalton, VT:
Steerforth Press, 1996), 1-51,124-66;
Edmund E Wehrle, "A Good, Bad Deal': John F.
Kennedy, W. Averell Harriman, and the Neutralization
of Laos, 1961-1962," Pacific Historical Review 67, no.
3 (August 1998): 349-77. (U)
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Useful overviews of the Vietnam conflict during the time
McCone served in the Kennedy and Johnson administra-
tions are:
? Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization
ofthe War in Vietnam (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982),
chap. 3;
? Vaughn D. Bornet, The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983), chap. 4;
? H.W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson
and the Limits of American Power (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), chap. 8;
? John P. Burke and Fred I. Greenstein, How Presidents
Test Reality: Decisions on Vietnam, 1954 and 1965 (New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1989), chaps. 6-9;
? Philip E. Catton, Diem's Final Failure: Prelude to Amer-
ica's War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2002);
? Chester L. Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Viet-
nam (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1970), chaps. 8-11;
? Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His
Times, 1961-1973 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 97-106,143-56,238-62;
? William J. Duiker, United States Containment Policy and
the Conflict in Indochina (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1994), chaps. 8-9;
? Harold P. Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers:
Three Episodes, 1962-1968 (Washington, DC: CIA
History Staff, 1998), 40-84;
? Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos,
and Vietnam, (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), chaps. 33-40;
? Lloyd C. Gardner, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and
the Wars for Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995),
chaps. 6-9;
Leslie H. Gelb with Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Viet-
nam: The System Worked (Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution, 1979), chaps. 3-4;
? William C. Gibbons, The US Government and the Viet-
nam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relation-
ships, 4 parts (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1984), Part 11 (1961-1964), chaps. 1-6;
? James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John E Kennedy
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 239-54;
? David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New
York: Random House, 1969), chaps. 16-25;
? David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire: America
and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era, rev. ed. (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988);
Snsizzz/
Appendix on Sources
George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United
States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2nd ed. (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), chap. 3;
? Gary R. Hess, "Commitment in the Age of Counterin-
surgency: Kennedy's Vietnam Options and Decisions,
1961-1963," in David L. Anderson, ed., Shadow on the
White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, 1945-
1975 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 63-
86;
? Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of For-
eign Policy in the Administration of John E Kennedy
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 413-523;
? Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson's War: America's Cold
War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968 (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1996), chap. 4;
? Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassi-
nations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003);
? George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became
Involved in Vietnam (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1987), chaps. 5-11;
? David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and
the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2000), chaps. 3-14;
? Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Pen-
guin Books, 1984), chaps. 7-12;
? Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978), 18-49;
? Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for
Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), chaps. 3-11;
? Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America's Descent into
Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 2001), chaps. 17-28;
? Herbert S. Parmet, JFK The Presidency of John E
Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1983), 326-36;
? William J. Rust, Kennedy in Vietnam (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985);
? Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His
Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 701-27;
? Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John E
Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Miff-
lin, 1965), 536-50,981-98;
Thomas J. Schoenbaum, Waging Peace and War: Dean
Rusk in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), chap. 14;
Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United
States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), chaps. 5-7;
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Appendix on Sources
? Orrin Schwab, Defending the Free World: John E
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and the Vietnam War, 1961-
1965 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), chaps. 1-5;
? Robert Shaplen, The Lost Revolution (New York: Harper
and Row, 1965), chaps. 7-10;
? R.B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam
War: The Kennedy Strategy (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1985), chaps. 2,4,9-12,14,16,18,20;
? Wallace J. Thies, When Governments Collide: Coercion
and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964-1968
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), chaps.
2-3;
? B. Hugh Tovar, "Vietnam Revisited: The United States
and Diem's Death," International Journal of Intelligence
and Counterintelligence 5, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 291-312;
? Brian Van de Mark, Into the Quagmire.. Lyndon Johnson
and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), chaps. 1-6. (U)
Some of the later literature on the war is reviewed in
Gary R. Hess, "The Unending Debate: Historians and the
Vietnam War," Diplomatic History 18, no. 2 (Spring 1994):
239-64. (U)
US Policy toward the "Two Chinas" (U)
Good overviews of US policy toward the People's Repub-
lic of China and the Republic of China, as it affected
McCone's tenure, are:
? Warren I. Cohen, America's Response to China: A History
of Sino-American Relations, 3rd ed. (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1990), 187-91;
? James Fetzer, "Clinging to Containment: China Policy,"
in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Kennedy's Quest for Victory:
American Foreign Policy, 1961-1963 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 7;
? Rosemary Foot, The Practice of Power: U.S. Relations
with China since 1949 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press,
1995), chaps. 2-8;
? Robert Garson, "Lyndon B. Johnson and the China
Enigma," Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 1
(January 1997), 63-80;
? Robert Garson, The United States and China Since
1949: A Troubled Affair (London: Pinter Publishers,
1994), chap. 4;
434
"IrISQL1.7
Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of For-
eign Policy in the Administration of John E Kennedy
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), chaps. 22-24;
Noam Kochavi, A Conflict Perpetuated: China Policy
During the Kennedy Years (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2002);
Leonard A. Kuznitz, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy:
America's China Policy, 1947-1979 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1984), 85-109;
Kevin Quigley, "A Lost Opportunity: A Reappraisal of
the Kennedy Administration's China Policy in 1963,"
Diplomacy and Statecraft 13, no. 3 (September 2002):
175-99;
Arthur Waldron, "From Nonexistent to Almost Nor-
mal: US-China Relations in the 1960s," in Diane B.
Kunz, ed., The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: Ameri-
can Foreign Relations During the 1960s (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 224-28. (U)
Key policy documents are in the Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume
)XII, Northeast Asia (Washington, DC: Government Print-
ing Office, 1996); idem, Foreign Relations of the United
States, 1964-1968, Volume XXX, China (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1998); and idem, Foreign
Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volumes XXII/
XXIV Northeast Asia, Laos: Microfiche Supplement (Washing-
ton, DC: Department of State, 1997). Dean Rusk records
Kennedy's domestic political calculus of China policy in his
memoir As I Saw It (New York: WW. Norton, 1990), 282-
84. (U)
The Kennedy Assassination (U)
It is a historiographical oddity that an event of such Zeit-
geist-altering proportions as the Kennedy assassination has
received so little rigorous attention from academics. Instead,
in an intellectual corollary to Gresham's Law, bad scholar-
ship has driven out the good and even the mediocre. Jour-
nalists of assorted reputations, legal advocates,
sensationalizers, political extremists, and so-called "indepen-
dent researchers" (i.e., buffs and freelancers) preempted the
field from historians as the assassination became, in histo-
rian Christopher Lasch's apt phrase, "a rich field for the
unchecked play of fantasy." (Lasch, "The Life of Kennedy's
Death," Harper's Magazine, October 1983: 32.) One of the
few scholarly treatments of the killing itself is Michael L.
Kurtz, Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination from
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a Historian's Perspective (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1982). The conspiracist literature, in contrast, is volu-
minous, numbering over 2,000 books and thousands of arti-
cles and tracts that range enormously in reliability. Useful
reference works about this corpus are:
? Anthony Frewin, comp., The Assassination of John E
Kennedy: An Annotated Film, TV; and Videography,
1963-1992 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993);
? James N. Giglio, comp.,John E Kennedy: A Bibliography
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 335-53;
? DeLloyd J. Guth and David R. Wrone, comps., The
Assassination of John E Kennedy: A Comprehensive His-
torical and Legal Bibliography, 1963-1979 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). (U)
For an early assessment of the assassination literature that
still holds up, see Calvin Trillin, "The Buffs," New Yorker
43,10 June 1967: 41-71. A more recent analysis is Robert
Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy
in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2001), 105-48. Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The
Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collec-
tive Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) is
an interesting examination of how journalists' "first draft of
history," and their subsequent reworkings of it, have shaped
what we "know" about the assassination. (U)
Recent exemplars of the principal plot theories, with the
alleged perpetrators discernible from the titles, are:
? G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings, Fatal Hour: The
Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime
(New York: Berkeley Books, 1992);
? L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot
to Assassinate John E Kennedy (New York: Birch Lane
Press, 1992);
? William W. Turner and Warren Hinckle, Deadly Secrets:
The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination
ofJEK (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992). (U)
John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll
and Graf, 1993); Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New
York: Thunder Mouth's Press, 1993); and Philip H. Melan-
son, Spy Saga: Lee Harvey Oswald and US Intelligence (New
York: Praeger, 1990), try to demonstrate that Oswald was an
operative for CIA and/or the KGB. Many other books with
mild to ardent conspiracist perspectives have been published
during the past 10 years. (U)
Appendix on Sources
The most thorough open source accounts of Yuri
Nosenko's defection and treatment are:
? Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds: Soviet Post-
War Defectors (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1988), chap. 12;
? Edward Jay Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee
Harvey Oswald (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978), 3-50,
257-74;
? John Limond Hart, The CIA's Russians (Annapolis,
MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003), chap. 3;
? Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The
CIA's Master Spy Hunter (London: Simon and Schuster,
1991), chaps. 12-13;
? David Martin, Wilderness ofiVIirrors (New York: Harper
and Row, 1980), 153-78. (U)
In Legend, Epstein posited the intriguing but unsubstan-
tiated theory that the Soviets recruited Oswald when he was
a Marine Corps radar operator at Atsugi Airbase in Japan to
steal secrets about the U-2, which flew missions from that
installation. After Oswald returned from the Soviet Union
to the United States, the Soviets constructed a legend of him
as a disillusioned defector to explain why he was in Russia
and to conceal his intelligence activities. The Soviets never
intended for him to kill John Kennedy, but when he did,
they dispatched Nosenko as a false defector to corroborate
the legend and, by inference, exonerate the KGB. Nosenko's
bona fides, in turn, would be reinforced by another Soviet
disinformation agent, who had volunteered him-
self to the FBI two years earlier in New York City but
remained under Soviet control. The objective of these tactics
was to have Nosenko testify before the Warren Commission
that the KGB files he had seen showed that Oswald never
had any connection with Soviet intelligence. Epstein elabo-
rates on elements of his interpretation in "The War of the
Moles: An Interview with Edward Jay Epstein," New York,
27 February 1978: 28-38. Legend and Martin's Wilderness of
Mirrors represented the two sides of the public debate over
Nosenko that started in the late 1970s when Agency and
Bureau officers began telling their anonymous versions of
the still-officially-secret story. Martin's reading of the
Nosenko affair deals much less with the assassination and,
based heavily on unattributed interviews with James Angle-
ton's opponents in CIA and the FBI, is far more critical of
the Agency's long-time CI chief and its handling of
Nosenko, Golitsyn, and counterintelligence in general. (U)
4tki+1C-40
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Appendix on Sources
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Several books on the Nosenko-Golitsyn controversy are
reviewed in Cleveland C. Cram, Of Moles and Molehunters:
A Review of Counterintelligence Literature, 1977-92, CIA
Center for the Study of Intelligence Monograph CSI 93-
002 (October 1993). Nosenko's knowledge of Oswald is
well summarized in Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey
Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (New York: Random
House, 1993), 46-56. CIA officer Richards J. Heuer Jr.
incisively examines the flaws in the analysis of Nosenko's
case in "Nosenko: Five Paths to Judgment," Studies in
Intelligence 31, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 71-101, declassified and
printed in H. Bradford Westerfield, ed., Inside CIA's Private
World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal,
1955-1992 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995),
379-414. The allegation that Angleton ordered Nosenko's
incarceration has been disproved in Samuel Halpern and
Hayden Peake, "Did Angleton Jail Nosenko?," International
Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 3, no. 4 (Win-
ter 1989): 451-64. A recent analysis of the Nosenko case,
and Angleton's approach to CI generally, is David Robarge,
"Moles, Defectors, and Deceptions: James Angleton and
CIA Counterintelligence," Journal of Intelligence History 3,
no. 2 (Winter 2003): 21-49. (U)
Latin America and the Johnson Administration (U)
On Johnson, Cuba, and Latin America generally during
McCone's directorship, see:
? Vaughn D. Bornet, The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983), 172-74;
? H.W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson
and the Limits of American Power (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 30-61;
436
SEERfLII)
? Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His
Times, 1961-1973 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 91-92;
? Philip Geyelin, Lyndon B. Johnson and the World (New
York: Praeger, 1966), 64-70;
? Walter LaFeber, "Thomas C. Mann and the Devolution
of Latin American Policy: From the Good Neighbor to
Military Intervention," in Thomas J. McCormick and
Walter LaFeber, eds., Behind the Throne: Servants of
Power to Imperial Presidents (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1993), 166-203;
? Jerome Levinson and Juan de Ohis, The Alliance That
Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 87-88;
? Edwin Lieuwen, Generals vs. Presidents: Neomilitarism
in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1964), 142-43;
? Thomas G. Paterson, Confronting Castro: The United
States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
? Joseph S. Tulchin, "The Promise of Progress: U.S. Rela-
tions with Latin America during the Administration of
Lyndon B. Johnson," in Warren I. Cohen and Nancy
Bernkopf, eds., Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
218-22;
? William 0. Walker III, "The Johnson Administration
and Cuba," in H.W. Brands, ed., The Foreign Policies of
Lyndon Johnson: Beyond Vietnam (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 1999), chap. 4;
? William 0. Walker III, "Mixing the Sweet with the
Sour: Kennedy, Johnson, and Latin America," in Diane
B. Kunz, ed., The Diplomag of the Crucial Decade:
American Foreign Relations During the 1960s (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60-62. (U)
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This section is UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY in its entirety.
This bibliography contains references to classified works, but the titles (prepared before portion-marking
had become a requirement) are unclassified. The entries for classified works or names of collections of clas-
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Printing Office, 1962.
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