THE SUMMIT CONFERENCE OF 1960: AN INTELLIGENCE OFFICER'S VIEW

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 00604106
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 19
• Document Creation Date: September 12, 2023
• Document Release Date: July 31, 2023
• Case Number: F-2023-00035
• Publication Date: December 1, 1972

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STUDIES IN
INTELLIGENCE
ettiGev
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4411,-Ftrreigre-Dissern-
Assignment: Paris
THE SUMMIT CONFERENCE OF 1960:
AN INTELLIGENCE OFFICER'S VIEW
Sherman Kent
There was to be a gathering "at the Summit"�so the world learned
late in 1959.1 The Four, President Eisenhower, Prime Minister
Macmillan, President de Gaulle, and Chairman Khrushchev were to
come face to face and take up the major problems which troubled
the relations between their states. General de Gaulle would be the
host; the Elysee palace in Paris would be the place; and Monday,
16 May, would be the day when the principals would meet for their
first discussion.
In the past, the Directors of Central Intelligence had offered as a
matter of course the Agency's support to US delegations participating
in high-level international conferences. On this occasion, Mr. Allen
Dulles came forward again, and the President accepted. I received
the honor of heading the Agency's liaison on the .spot.
For the benefit of the few uninitiated, the words "intelligence
support" meant that the Agency would. gather itself to keep the
President and his principal lieutenants up to the minute on significant
world developments. It also meant that the Agency with the coopera-
tion of the community would stand ready to service special
requirements.
In actual practice this sort of enterprise involved a few simple
administrative decisions such as the designation of an officer at
Headquarters to round up all-source intelligence that was relevant
and worthy of transmittal and to put it on the wire. He was to be
Huntington Sheldon (the Director of OCI), with Thomas Patton
assisting. In the larger sense it involved everyone in the Agency who
was in a position to contribute anything to the success of the
delegation. And finally in the narrower sense again, it involved the
little group in Paris�in this case, three professionals and two
1 New York Times, 31 December 1959.
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Summit 1960
secretaries.2 One of them was to call at 7:30 a.m. at the President's
place of business, meet with a presidential aide, deliver the material,
comment on it orally if such seem. ed appropriate, and then ask if the
Agency could help with any specific intelligence problems that he
had in mind.
The "material" of the last sentence consisted in large part of what
Mr. Sheldon and Mr. Patton sent from Headquarters. It was dis-
patched so as to start coming into the Paris commo shack early in the
morning. In addition, there might be special messages from overseas
stations which were alert to serve directly should need arise. There
was also the highly important material from the FBIS, which its
London office forwarded. This consisted of relevant worldwide
coverage, including the texts of broadcasts from the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe which the BBC had monitored, plus the FBIS's
expert quantitative analysis of Moscow's foreign and domestic news-
casts. Lastly, there was that morning's Paris press and radio news.
Some of this material needed no editing at all, some of it a good
deal. But none of it could be relayed to the President and his advisers
in the exact form in which we received it. Hence at a minimum it
had to be retyped. Before we gave a copy to the ladies, however, we
did the obvious rearranging, striving for what we felt to be a rational
order. Thus for example, if an FBIS item further illuminated something
from more sensitive material, we would put the two together; we
would put up front items which we knew would be of highest local
interest; we would add captions and take other small editorial
liberties.
The performance of exactly these duties in a foreign capital was
new to all five of us. So as to learn the trade in advance of the
President's arrival, we met in Paris on Thursday, 12 May. Next
morning we undertook our first dress rehearsal. And a good thing,
too, for had it been for keeps it would have been a disaster. We ar-
rived at the Chancery at about 5:30 a.m.; the full decrypted text was
not available for another thirty minutes. Moreover, it had arrived in
2 This was a larger force than normal, probably because four of the five were
already in Europe. Robert Matteson, a member of the Board of National Estimates
was on TDY to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Since that Conference
suspended operations for the duration of the Summit, Matteson and the two ladies,
Mrs. Ann Mann and Miss Susan Rowe, who were also on duty in Geneva, could be
spared. The second professional, John Whitman of the ONE Staff, was on an overseas
assignment with the analysts in the
(In case anyone refers to this article for planning intelligence support for another
conference, let him realize that there was no fat on this T/O. We all worked long hours�
and could indeed have kept still another sister fully occupied.) (b)(1)
(b)(3)
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a sequence which forbade the final typing of any part until we had it
all. Ours was a firsthand and woeful realization of what I had heard
from predecessors in this sort of mission (notably from Osborn _Webb
in London, whom I'd seen on my way. through and who was even then
in mild shock from a recent experience in the role). What was clear was
that Mr. Sheldon's people would have to start sending earlier, that they
would have to alter the ordering of items within the message, and
most importantly for us, at least, that we would have to be at the
office by 3:30 a.m, if we were to make our 7:30 a.m. delivery time.
Next morning there we were. Everything worked, including a
simulated delivery from the Chancery down in the Place de la
Concorde to the Residence on the Avenue d' Iena not far from the
old Trocadero, which would be Mr. Eisenhower's White House
abroad. We were in business. -
I should explain to the reader who does not know Paris that there
is no good way to get from the Chancery to the Residence. All
practicable ways are likely to necessitate the transit of the ten acres
of traffic bedlam which staggeringly belie the name Concorde. Once a
driver had navigated it, he still had before him the fiercely competitive
array of speedsters and trucks down the Quai of the Seine's right bank
until he could fight free up the hill to his destination. One should
allow twenty to thirty minutes for the trip taken in relatively peaceful
hours and almost any amount of time during what the French call the
"hours of affluence." -
As to the delegation which President Eisenhower led, it was
formidable. Counted as official members thereof were: Mr. Herter,
the Secretary of State; Mr. Merchant, the Undersecretary of State
for Political Affairs; Mr. Kohler, the Assistant Secretary of State for
European Affairs, and Brigadier General Goodpaster, the Staff Secre-
tary to the President. Senior advisers were:. Mr. Gates, the Secretary
of Defense, Mr. Bohlen, the Special Assistant to the Secretary of State,
Mr. Achilles, the Counsellor of the State Department, and Ambassa-
dors Houghton (France), Thompson (USSR), and Whitney (UK).
There was also Mr. Haggerty, the press secretary to the President.
Parenthetically, Mr. Gates had not been among those of the first list,
but was added when one heard that Khrushchev was fetching along
his own Minister of Defense, Marshal Malinovski.3 Back in Washing-
3 I mention the "why" of Mr. Gates' attendance because an important observer
in Paris picked up from a French source who had gotten it from a Soviet source that
Malinovski went to Paris when the Russians heard that Mr. Gates would be there.
The report of the observer is a matter of official record. The evidence of its incorrect-
ness is, however, impeccable.
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(b)(1)
(b)(3)
ton the principal officers of the executive branch were Vice President
Nixon, acting Secretary of State Douglas Dillon, and acting Secretary
of Defense James Douglas; with all due respect�the second team.
Mr. Eisenhower arrived at Orly at 9:30 Sunday morning on
15 May and went straight to Ambassador Houghton's residence. From
that moment until well into Monday, that was where the principal
business of the US delegation focused. To be sure, Mr. Herter had
received rights to Ambassador Houghton's own office in the Chancery
and other visitors got office or desk space there while the regular
embassy staff doubled up. I mention this to make clear that the
delegation which used the Chancery but seldom was not absent be-
cause of any inhospitality. Its members had to be close to the chief
and no one in his right mind would have taken up his station in the
Chancery unless he had a personal helicopter at standby.
Needless to say, Mr. Dulles's little group was not in the Residence.
We had ample office space access to an auto
and driver, and supposedly, I, at least, had been identified with the
Secret Service men who controlled the entrance to the Residence. My
first delivery of the mail had been set for 11:30 Sunday morning. I
arrived in good time, made it through the security barriers, met
General Goodpaster, and delivered the package with some oral com-
ments. Although he could scarcely have had time to be aware of the
international pulse as it throbbed in Paris, I nevertheless inquired if
he had any special problems which we of the Agency could help him
with. Of course he had one; so had the President and every other
knowledgeable and sensible human except Nikita Sergeivitch and a
handful of his Russian colleagues. They did not have it for they alone
had the answer. The question in essence was the central one about the
probable Soviet stance at the morrow's meeting. More explicitly,
General Goodpaster asked for our thoughts regarding Soviet objectives
in their recent exploitation of the U-2 incident and what we thought
Khrushchev thought he could likely get from the Summit conference.
Just in case the answers to these questions seem, in hindsight, to
have been obvious, they were not. Surely no student of international
affairs would have put the chances of Khrushchev's permitting the
conference to be a productive exercise as better than say 10 to 20 per-
cent, but by the same token no such student would have put the
chances at zero. If Khrushchev was not going to play at all, why had
he talked the way he did between his announcement of the shoot-
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down of the U-2 and 15 May, a matter of a week and a half? Why
was he in Paris at all? In fact, why had he got there two days early,
on Saturday, 14 May? There were plenty of things in Khrushchev's
plans, and one could and did estimate that a precipitate breakup of
the conference would by no means further them all. For example,
such a course would not necessarily assure further friction among the
western allies�in fact there were significant odds that it would have
a unifying effect�nor could it be counted upon to further Soviet aims
related to Berlin, the GDR, and the wide area of disarmament.
These and other considerations had occupied the US intelligence
4 On 5 May Khrushchev opened the first session of a meeting of the Supreme Soviet.
In his remarks he let go at the U-2 intrusion, calling it a direct provocation, and
threatening retaliation. However, at the end of his speech he tempered the blast refer-
ring to his commitment to the Leninist principle of peaceful coexistence and to his
intention to spare no. effort at the Paris meeting to reach agreement.
Again, on 7 May on two occasions, one in his remarks to the adjourning Supreme
Soviet and the other at an impromptu press conference, he came down hard on the
"espionage" aspects of the flight and the Soviet government's sense of outrage, but
said nothing to indicate that the USSR was not going through with the meeting in
Paris.
A few days later, 10 May, our government received the Soviet official protest which
was couched without reference to the Summit. On 11 May at an exhibit of the wreck-
age of the U-2 aircraft in Moscow, Khrushchev again spoke with some violence, but
noted only his government's intention to take the issue before the U.N. Security
Council and, in the event of U.S. obstruction, to the General Assembly. Nothing was
said of Paris. The next day Tass glossed these remarks in such a way as to assure that
the Soviet government felt that the Summit conference should take place as planned.
In retrospect it may be that Khrushchev himself had chosen to play the incident in
relatively low key. Not so his more militant colleagues, among whom would have been
the Soviet military led by the Defense Minister, Marshal Malinovski. The overflight�
especially its predecessor flights, which the US government in its statement of 7 May
said had been going on for four years�were a profound professional affront to them in
the way they reflected the shortcomings of Soviet Air Defense. To this historian it
seems probable that sometime in the week following 5 May, the hard liners triumphed
over Khrushchev's personal preference. Witness to their victory (if such was really
the case) may have been the decision to put Marshal Malinovski on the Paris-bound
delegation and the drafting of the harsh statement which Khrushchev carried with him
to use in Paris. More about this statement later on.
Some added substance is given to the above hypothesis in the memorandum of
conversation (which took place in 1969) between Khrushchev and A. McGehee
Harvey (Life, 18 Dec. 1970, p. 48B). According to Dr. Harvey, Khrushchev in speak-
ing of the U-2 incident said, "Things (i.e., his ideas about having 'our two countries
live together peacefully and compete economically not militarily'), were going well
until one event happened. From the time Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over the
Soviet Union, I was no longer in full control." Maybe I am reading too much into this,
but one cannot escape the striking difference between Khrushchev's posture of, say,
5 May and that of 14 May when he arrived in Paris with the famous document in his
pocket. This much of a change of mind usually occurs with a deal of outside help.
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-SEC-1+E-T� Summit 1960
community for days, and General Goodpaster, if not Mr. Eisenhower
himself, had read two memos prepared by the Board of National
Estimates which our Director had sent to the White House. What
General Goodpaster meant that morning was a desire for any further
lucubration on the matter.
We arranged that I would call again at 5:30 p.m. Sunday and in
his absence leave the day's news with his colleague, Major John
Eisenhower or with their secretary Miss Alice Boyce. The delivery
after that one would be Monday morning at 7:30.
I returned to the Chancery with the requirement, which Whitman
took in hand. Matteson and I, with Whitman, went over it amending
it here and there ("picking at it" would be the author's phrase).
Then rather than pass it on our own cognizance, I cabled it to Head-
quarters, telling of its point of origin and soliciting speedy comment.
By that hour and largely unanticipated by the President and his
close advisers�not to mention their CIA liaison man�Khrushchev
had made something of a surprise move, which as it turned out, cast
the Summit into oblivion. He had initiated a meeting with de Gaulle
(the fact of the meeting was no secret) for 11:00 a.m. that very Sunday,
and at just about the moment I was taking note of General Good-
paster's intelligence requirement, Khrushchev was formally apprising
de Gaulle of the Soviet government's attitude towards the U-2
incident and the next day's meeting of the Four. He did more than
this, he left with de Gaulle an aide memoire in French 5 which ran to
upwards of a dozen pages.
With this piece of business done, he went on later in the day
(4:30 p.m.) to a meeting which he had arranged with Prime Minister
Macmillan, whom he favored with a reading of the same text. He
left no aide memoire behind this time.
When later queried as to why he had omitted the President on this
round of visits, he replied that the President had not indicated a desire
to see him. This was, of course, a piece of diplomatic evasiveness, for
the French and British official record will show that neither de Gaulle
nor Macmillan had "indicated an interest" and that Khrushchev had
himself initiated both visits. In short, the omission of Mr. Eisenhower
from his calling list was a part of the Soviet Summit strategy.
There are probably some unimportant details about these meetings
as yet undivulged by the French and British governments; there is
nothing secret about Khrushchev's message. He delivered it for the
5 U.S. Senate, Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Events Relating to the
Summit Conference, 28 June 1960 (Report No. 1761, p. 14).
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third time at Monday's meeting of the Four at the Elysee 6 and gave
it to the press.
You can read all of it on page 15 of the New York Times for 17 May
1960. What de Gaulle had seen and what Macmillan had heard on
Sunday is one of those pieces of classical communist prose which leaves
us children of the western tradition not only uncomprehending of the
art form but unaware of any group in the world other than dutiful
members of the CPSU fo whom it would communicate clearly and
forcefully. In its web of lusterless invective and tedious repetition the
more important of its two central points is pretty well obscured. The
first point comes through all right; it was that the Soviet government
was outraged at the U-2 intrusion. The second and more notable
matter lumbered into view in mid-course and was to the effect that
Khrushchev would not discuss the substantive issues of the Summit's
agenda until the President of the United States undertook three ac-
tions; condemn the provocative act which Khrushchev's aide memoire
ascribed to the US Air Force; guarantee that the US would refrain
from such acts in the future; and punish the individuals responsible
for the U-2 operation.
Sometime between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. that Sunday the French
foreign secretary reached a ranking member of the US delegation by
phone, informing him that the French government had in hand a
highly important document which it wished to pass to the President.
One of our bilingual senior career officers hastened to the Quai D'orsay
and received the document�which was, of course, the aide memoire
which Khrushchev had just left with the President of the French
Republic. There was a delay while the Quai sought out a xerox
machine that would work and it was 2:00 p.m. before the officer
reached Mr. Eisenhower in the Residence. What he had was a dozen or
so pages of French which he speedily read aloud in English. In such a
fashion did the President learn what the Soviet position was and that
it was unlikely to change before the Monday meeting.
While these momentous events were going on, Mr. Dulles' liaison
with the delegation, wholly unwitting, fell to preparing the intelligence
6 What he read on Monday was the 2600 or so words which he had communicated
to the French and British plus a last 400 words which he had husbanded as a sort of
dessert. This is the passage in which he canceled his invitation to Mr. Eisenhower to
visit the Soviet Union. One may be fairly certain that it was prepared as an integral
part of the long blast but withheld from de Gaulle and Macmillan, lest Mr. Eisen-
hower, learning of it from them would choose to stay away from the Monday meeting.
If this had happened, then Khrushchev would have denied himself a forum which
he eagerly sought. As it was, Mr. Macmillan, on Monday, made a determined but
fruitless effort to get Khrushchev to delete it from his hand-out to the press.
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materials which were to be delivered to General Goodpaster at 5:30
that afternoon. At the Residence a great busyness engulfed the delega-
tion. The President had a meeting at 2:30 p.m. with de Gaulle,
Macmillan, and Chancellor Adenauer (who was there as a highly
concerned chief of government, but of course not a formal participant)
and then another at 6:00 p.m. at the Elysee with de Gaulle. and
Macmillan alone. Those of the President's advisers not attending the
meetings were discussing the situation, what courses they would
recommend to the President, and the text of the statement he should
be prepared to make at the next day's meeting.
The fundamental question was exactly what Khrushchev intended
and what he would settle for. Did he really intend to break up the
meeting unless he got satisfaction on all three of- his points or would
he accept something less? Of one thing everyone was certain and that
was that if Khrushchev himself were to call in the press or leak to it,
or if any of those witting of the content of his statement let it leak,
then any glimmer of hope of salvaging anything would instantly dis-
appear. The publication of the detail of the ultimatum would almost
certainly make a Khrushchevian retreat from the letter of it impossible.
Just as certain was Mr. Eisenhower's unwillingness to yield anything
on Khrushchev's first and third points (the repudiation and punish-
ment points) and his willingness merely to restate the US position
with respect to the second: namely, that the U-2 flights had been
suspended and would not be resumed.
In these circumstances all those privy to the matters at hand
dropped into a deep and impenetrable silence. Within a few hours of
Khrushchev's visit to de Gaulle that Sunday morning, small groups
of confidential advisers to the French, British, and American chiefs
had seen the document or knew its content; a bit later Chancellor
Adenauer and his intimates learned about it. This would make at
least twenty�maybe as many as fifty�non-Soviet men and women,
and if you count the Russians in Paris and back in Moscow, the figure
would be much higher. For almost twenty-four hours not so much as a
syllable nor a hint of a syllable seems to have leaked from this inner
group. The how and why of this remarkable achievement of security
is worth a moment's consideration.
Look first at the Russians. It is highly likely that in their calcu-
lations they had pretty-well counted on the President's refusal to
accept the three points of their ultimatum. In short, they were pre-
pared for a breakup of the Summit but wanted it to take place in a
way which, inter alia, would maximize the global impact of the posi-
tion that they were taking. This was that of a peace-loving people
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outraged by the American provocative violation of their national
sovereignty. Khrushchev's long statement, which in its full text
ended with the personal affront to Mr. Eisenhower (the abrupt and
public withdrawal of the invitation to visit the Soviet Union), would
clearly have its maximum impact throughout the world if launched
from the august forum of the Four. It would also permit Khrushchev
to show his fellow countrymen how he personally was settling his
private score with the President. (Khrus.hchev's important enemies
at home, thoroughly upset by the meeting at Camp David, had been
pointing to the U-2 incident as characteristic of the true attitude of
President Eisenhower and cutting away at Khrushchev for having
been the dupe of American perfidy.) Thus, having decided to come to
Paris at all, the Soviets had compelling reasons to guard the state-
ment themselves and hope that those to whom they communicated
it would do the same.
Within the American delegation there was a full awareness that
although the odds favoring any kind of substantive discussion at the
Summit were short indeed, they would drop to zero with a premature
revelation of the Soviet position. If the Khrushchev statement should
hit the Monday morning press, the President would find it impossible
to come to the meeting scheduled for 11:00 a.m. But so long as there
was hope to salvage something, the Americans chose to cling to it.
They were a very close-lipped group. Without intending to derogate
their abilities to keep a secret, let me observe that they had going for
them the fact that the day was Sunday and that, for the most part,
they were closely secluded within the security of the Residence. Any
need that one of them might have felt to enlarge the circle of the
witting could not have been done casually. It would have taken some
quite purposeful doing.
One cannot escape the suspicion that within the American delegation
there was operative still another factor which made the secret the
easier to keep. This was that the delegation dould have subconsciously
come to consider itself the self-contained exemplar of the executive
branch, if not a representative slice of the US Government. There is
at least one slug on an outgoing cable from Paris that tends to bear
out the hypothesis: the original text was addressed to the "Under
Secretary [of State]," the "Under" is crossed out and supplanted by the
word "Acting." In these circumstances who was there back in
Washington who had a compelling need to know?
I suspect, obviously without knowing, that some, at least, of these
same forces were operable upon the French and British officials privy
to the inside story. Mr. Macmillan's passionate concern to have the
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meeting and his faith in it as a touchstone to peace would surely have
dampened any British urge to talk out of school. Chancellor Adenauer
and his associates were as silent as those more intimately concerned?
And so a graveyard secrecy enveloped all these doings of great
importance and enveloped them totally well into Monday.
At least one member of the American delegation worried over the
decision to confine the news to the little circle in Paris. Mr. Gates
began to be concerned about the possible military implications of a
breakup of the Summit in the atmosphere of Khrushchev's bellig-
erency. Some time later, he owned that the thought of the Pearl Harbor
attack, coming as it had in the middle of negotiations, had crossed his
mind.8 Early in the evening, after hearing Mr. Macmillan brief the
President on his session with Khrushchev and getting Mr. Macmillan's
gloomy forecast for the morrow, he went back to his hotel, picked up
his White House phone and talked directly to the Acting Secretary of
Defense, James Douglas. He told Mr. Douglas that he felt that the
prudent thing to do was to have the Armed Forces assume some alert
basis which, in his judgment, would include notifying the Headquarters
of the principal commands and communications and intelligence facili-
ties. How much of the substantive background of his concern he
communicated is not known, but, at a guess, it was probably de
minimis. From other sources it is clear that he spoke in deepest
confidence and urged that his message be rigorously held within the
need-to-know category.
Having made the call, he returned to the Residence and immediately
reported his action to the President who approved it. He also
informed Mr. Herter. In Washington, meanwhile, Mr. Douglas con-
ferred with General Twining, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and together they decided the technical meaning which they would
apply to Mr. Gates's oral instruction. They checked out the techni-
--------
7 Shortly after the breakup of the Conference there was a rumor that someone
in the German delegation had talked to the German press. If he did, there is no trace
in the major German newspapers for Monday, 16 May. I am inclined to doubt the
rumor, although I was enough concerned at the time to ask for (and get) a full canvas
of press utterances for the critical day. Adenauer himself is reported to have said to
someone "Khrushchev seems to be in a bad mood" and this piece of very mild news
reached the press. See The Washington Post, 16 May 1960, p. 1.
8 See Report of the [Senate] Committee on Foreign Relations, already cited, p. 132.
"Senator Wiley. 'When it was decided to have the alert�[you] had in mind, did you
not know what the condition of this country was at the time of Pearl Harbor . . . ?'
Secretary Gates. 'I certainly did.'
Senator Wiley. 'During negotiations?'
Secretary Gates: 'I did, indeed!' "
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calities of their decision with Mr. Gates 9 and at about nine p.m. local
time sent forth the word.
Mr. Gates's request for a passing of the message on a strict
need-to-know basis may have been observed to the letter. But a good
many people had to be involved willy nilly, and the need-to-know
injunction got several interpretations.
� On the one hand, within the Pentagon itself, it was so well
observed that no formal notice was passed to the Watch Committee
and its National Indications Center. This sort of omission is something
to which we in intelligence are highly sensitive, and with justification.
We know that an operational order of this sort when carried out, is
bound to light up lights in, say, the Soviet watch mechanism and
consequently find its resonances in the change of posture of Soviet
strike and defense forces. Once this change in their posture begins to
take place, our on Watch mechanism picks up the indicators, and
not knowing the first cause, innocently passes the warning word to
our own operations people. What happens from there on can be serious;
usually it is not, but as far as our calling is concerned, the thing which
had already taken place was a small nightmare of unprofessionalism.
In the case at issue, our own Watch did not have long to wait to
get the news in unclassified form. For the exemplary security within
the Pentagon did not hold throughout the land. The alert caused
ripples at SAC and ADC bases which could not be concealed, if indeed
the commanders tried. The base commander at Lowry AFB, for ex-
ample, in his search for two missing pilots got in touch with the local
police who in turn went to a Denver TV station asking that the follow-
ing be put on the air as a "military order": "All fighter pilots F-101
and fighter pilots F-102�attention Captain Singleton and Lieutenant
Griffin. Code 3 alert. Hotcake one and Hotcake six scramble at
Lowry immediately."" The TV station obliged and, if you can believe
it, in these very words. The Captain and the Lieutenant were not
alone in getting the message, nor for that matter were they lonesome
in the scramble. A vast number of nervous fellow citizens got it that
night on the radio and TV and scrambled, and next morning even more
got it in the press." It was still front page news for the morning
papers of Tuesday, 17 May. The Watch Committee had been well
served--if a bit late.
9 There is some confusion as to the chronology of Mr. Gates's activities and the
written record will do little to abate it. What I have written above is based upon the
testimony of Mr. Gates himself.
10 The Washington Post, 17 May 1960, P. 1.
11 See inter alia, The Washington Post, 16 May 1960, p. 1.
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SECRET Summit 1960
Some twelve hours after Mr. Gates's message and almost coinci-
dental with the gathering of the Four at the Elysee, Mr. Herter re-
quested that a short and pessimistic prognosis be sent to the Acting
Secretary, Mr. Dillon. This message was destined to a wider, but still
closely circumscribed, audience.
Such were the guarded snippets of news communicated to Wash-
ington of possible thunder on the left. Perhaps I flatter myself, but
who should be in a much better position to feel the effect of the
miraculously tight security than Mr. Dulles's man in Paris? There
he was well within a mile of the action and part of a group con-
tinuously tapped into the multiform resources of the world's best
intelligence service, and he might just as well have been eyeless in Gaza.
For the balance of the day, while the American delegation went
about its pressing business, while the President and Secretary Herter
had meetings with the other western heads, Matteson, Whitman, the
ladies, and I were back in the all but tenantless Chancery putting
together the late Sunday afternoon package. We had not yet had
Washington's comment on our memo of the morning, nor had we any
other information which dealt with the heart of the President's
problem. When I arrived at the Residence at 5:30 p.m., neither Gen-
eral Goodpaster nor Major Eisenhower was present. I left the material
with Miss Boyce, who, if she knew what was going on, confined
herself to an amiable "thank you." And so back to the Chancery to
lock up and have a last confab with the stalwarts of commo.
Monday, 16 May--Summit Day--began as we had planned it,
well before 4:00 a.m. There was the cable of general news from
Mr. Sheldon and a few- other items in the special category, a few cables
from stations in Europe, the FBIS material, and a full set of the
morning's Parisian newspapers. There was also the answer to General
Goodpaster's request. The Office of National Estimates with the aid
of knowledgeable analysts from other Agency components had gone
over our draft, and Mr. Dulles had come to the office to study,
discuss, and amend it before dispatch. It added little to the substance
of previous estimates, but its last paragraph, particularly its last
sentence for which Mr. Dulles was personally responsible, saved a
bit at least of intelligence's bacon. The paragraph was of the "much-
will depend" breed. In this case much would depend upon what
Khrushchev learned from his preliminary soundings in Paris. The last
sentence noted that those on the spot would be in a better. position to
draw conclusions than those afar. As you have seen, indeed they
were and indeed they had drawn some pretty sound conclusions.
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Summit 1960
With all the materials in hand I made for my 7:30 appointment,
and once again found General Goodpaster and Major Eisenhower
away from their office. Miss Boyce, of course, remained the soul of
discretion and I left the premises as innocent as at the moment of
arrival, When time permitted, General Goodpaster went through
the package, and I am grateful that in our subsequent meetings he
politely refrained from teasing about the scuttle of dubious coals I
had delivered to Newcastle.
Thirty minutes later�I learned the big news�then some twenty
hours old�in the Chancery's front yard from a foreign service officer
who had spent most of Sunday with his chief and others of the
delegation. Then inside the building, I received a much fuller account
from a friend who had been even closer to the center of things. I
hurried to our office, almost as embarrassed at the realization of my
failure as I was unhinged by the news and sent off an "Op-Im, Eyes
Only" to Mr. Dulles. Long after, I discovered that even so the Director
of Central Intelligence was probably the first official in Washington
to receive word on the .events of Sunday and how the prospects for
Monday's meeting were very decidedly on the glum side.
Our luck improved that Monday, as I had chance encounters which
Sunday's manning pattern of the Chancery and the role of the
Residence had denied me.
According to a prior agreement of the principals, the first meeting
of the Four was to take place at the Elysee at 11:00 a.m. Monday.
It was to be a session devoted to procedural matters. As is all too well
known, this is as far as the conference got: Khrushchev took the floor
and read his statement with its three conditions, he concluded with
the final uncivil paragraphs in which he withdrew the invitation to
Mr. Eisenhower to visit the USSR. The President followed with a
much shorter statement in which he reiterated an American position
which both he and Secretary Herter had already made with respect to
U-2 flights: "In point of fact these flights were suspended after the
recent incident and are not to be resumed . . ." he said. On Khrush-
chev's other two points he had no words. These two statements opened
a free discussion (three languages were used which required double
translations) which finally ended with Khrushchev reminding all that
the meeting just about to conclude was not the beginning of the
Summit, but merely a preliminary on procedural matters. The
adjournment was officially clocked at ten minutes before 2:00 p.m.
Shortly thereafter I had the good fortune to meet an officer who had
been present at the debriefing of the President and a bit later
Matteson and I encountered someone who had been at the Elysee.
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Summit 1960
1
Our message to Mr. Dulles was short to be sure, but it hit almost all
of the main points and I trust beat the press. (The Soviets released
the full Khrushchev statement soon after the meeting.) Such were the
minor grandeurs of Monday after the miseries of the Sabbath.
As I have gone along, I have tried to imply a lesson or two for
intelligence in the experiences of this intelligence officer. There is
left the matter of grasping the most important one firmly and giving
it a bit of gratuitous pointing-up.
Here it is. Any international conference where our President heads
the US delegation is highly likely to include all his top echelon
experts and advisers in the relevant area of foreign affairs. In such
circumstances there will probably develop the subconscious feeling
which I have ascribed to the .Summit that the requirement to keep
Washington informed is not all that urgent. Aftei. all, the normal
information cables written from the site of lower level conferences are
written in the hope that they will be read by the Secretary in Foggy
Bottom or the President in the White House. When these two are in
the next room, a lot of the motivation to inform home base will have
evaporated. To follow on: if, as in the case in Paris, the price of a
leak was the sure and sudden foundering of the whole enterprise,
those on the inside would be scrupulous in their observance of the
need-to-know principle. It is my confident estimate that if General
Goodpaster had perceived a problem whose solution could be forwarded
by an appeal to intelligence, he would have summoned his liaison and
told all that was necessary to service the requirement. In this particu-
lar case the problem was one in which intelligence was far less well
informed than the policy officers on the spot. Before intelligence
could be expected to produce any useful wisdom on the matter, it
would first have to be filled in by the very people it was supposed
to enlighten. The built-in deterrent to such a procedure should be
obvious to even the most incorrigible intelligence devotee, a fortiori
when you pause to think that the President had right there in the
Residence two of our country's reigning sovietologists (Bohlen and
Thompson), and another half dozen wise and experienced general-
purpose advisers. Why would he go beyond them for an estimate of
Khrushchev's real rock bottom position?
No matter the delegation's esteem for intelligence; when it came to
making this sort of intelligence estimate, its members were quite
naturally their own intelligence officers. Furthermore, they knew full
well that if perchance intelligence through some arcane source had
achieved a full and confirmed view of Khrushchev's intentions, they
could count on intelligence to give without prompting.
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Summit 1960 SECRET
Some future intelligence officer at another Summit may not have the
misfortune to have the big events played out on a Sunday, when his
opportunities for informal talk are materially reduced. But suppose
this future event is scheduled for the middle of the week and the
intelligence officer does become privy to the inner secret. It may be
that his informant in telling him will at the same time bind him not to
communicate a word of it beyond the premises. I can only say that I
am happy that I .was spared this situation.
Epilog:
Among the lessons of the Paris meeting was one which. at first
glance seems of a lesser orddr. In fact, however, it bears on a prickly�
and ever-present�intelligence problem: the care and handling of
raw intelligence.
Among the many security men of four nations deployed to guard the
persons of the Four, was a small group inside the Elysee palace itself.
These men waited in an antechamber outside the conference room.
Their duties involved the security of the room and, as well, escort
service to the principals as the latter walked (still within the building)
to their cars. When the meeting broke up, the Russian delegation,
escorted by General de Gaulle and the Russian security men, left first.
Soon after their departure, Mr. Eisenhower and Mr. Macmillan came
out of the conference room into the antechamber to await General
de Gaulle's return. It was at this moment that one of the security men
clearly heard Mr. Eisenhower make a remark not easily forgotten. It
was "I don't care, my hands are clean, my soul is pure." General
de Gaulle had returned from escorting the, Russians to the door just
in time to overhear it. It was speedily put into French and the
General "nodded full agreement."
Our witness was a well-trained officer, and when his immediate
duties were done he reported them in a memo to his superior and
gave appropriate emphasis to the President's utterance.
The document not only does credit to the accuracy of his ear, but
also to that of the President. For what the latter said was not
something of his own composition nor was it remotely related to the
status of his own hands and soul. Rather was it a direct quote from
none other than Khrushchev himself who had proclaimed it a few
minutes back to the other three in an emotional passage. He was in
the process of resisting de Gaulle's and Macmillan's effort to salvage
the Conference and driving on to reexpress his and his government's
sense of outrage at the U-2 reconnaissance. Part of the passage went:
"If there had been no incident we would have come here in friendship
and in the best possible atmosphere . . . Our rocket shot the thing
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-8E-C-RE-T- Summit 1960
down. Is this good friendship? God is my witness that I come with
clean hands and a pure soul."
What is the lesson? Clearly the witness was not at fault; he did his
assigned job (the security detail) flawlessly: nothing ill befell Mr.
Eisenhower, and furthermore he volunteered a very interesting and
informative report about what he saw and heard in these few moments
in the presence. There was no way that he could possibly have known
that Mr. Eisenhower was quoting Khrushchev unless he had also
heard what one fancies must have ben Mr. Eisenhower's introductory
words, These--if uttered�had been said before our witness had tuned
in. The witness did no speculating about what such remarks might
have been, and a good thing too, for there was only the slightest
chance that he would have been on the right track. Anything of this
sort that he might have added on his own cognizance would have
deepened the fog. So one important lesson that our witness had
already learned and one that needs no special mention here-is the rule
that says when you are reporting, report your observations as
exactly as you can, and if you feel compelled to interpolate your own
speculations, be sure to label them as such.
The larger lesson is of course the very familiar one about "raw
intelligence" and its dissemination to the wrong people. Generally
speaking the wrong people are consumers, and the more highly placed,
the wronger. The right people, those dark figures who enjoy the jus
primae noctis over intelligence reporting, are in the first instance the
"reports officers." It is probably because one of them held this memo
up or confined its distribution to narrow limits that its colorful,
quotable, and grossly erroneous message did not go forward and on
into the fan. Not that we do not know the rules about raw intel-
ligence, but it is good for all of us to have their rationale spelled out
in a case such as this.
Play "suppose" for a minute. Suppose that Khrushchev had used
a paraphrase of one of his intemperate remarks like "we will bury
you." Suppose our witness had caught this one as he had caught the
original out of context and reported it as if Mr. Eisenhower were
addressing it to his British colleague. Then suppose there were a leak
to an irresponsible newsman who worked for an irresponsible daily.
Can you not see the headline: "Eisenhower swats British"? The le-ad
sentence would have struck forth: "Today President Eisenhower told
Prime Minister Macmillan 'we will bury you.' The two were emerging
from the Summit's conference room when Mr. Eisenhower, flushed and
clearly in a somewhat emotional state, was heard to remark to his
British opposite number . . ."
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Summit 1960
A new legend would have been born--and a mighty disconcerting
one for us and our cousins. No matter what the denials and explana-
tions, the story would lurk on at the friction points of our special
relationship, where it would do no good whatever.
Far out? Really not too far._Let us remember that dissemination of
raw intelligence done in good faith has upon occasion brought us to
grief. Our consumers who continuously ask for raw intelligence ought
to understand that our. reluctance is principally in everyone's
interest--their's included.
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CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM
RELEASE AS SANITIZED
isy-rf
...apatite*. 001111{ OOP
TITLE: The Summit Conference of 1960:
An Intelligence Officer's View
AUTHOR: Sherman Kent
VOLUME: 16 ISSUE: S.E. YEAR: 1972
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