The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United

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

Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:20 pm

PART III: The CIA: How It Is Organized

Chapter 11: The Dulles Era Begins


The old, pastel yellow brick east building on a hill overlooking Foggy Bottom, on what is now the site of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Watergate Buildings, was just the place for the scent of pipe tobacco and the quiet shuffle of worn leather slippers. The high-backed chair and elongated office were also right for its new tenant. Allen Dulles moved into a place that already seemed to bear his trademarks and characteristics. Unpretentious as the East Building was, it seemed right for a daily stream of jet-black, chauffeur-driven limousines to pull up the hill, over the winding narrow driveway, and then down into the garden circle where no more than three or four cars could stop at any one time. Typically, the VIP cars pulled over onto the grass to permit the little old bottle-green buses to shuttle from one hidden CIA building to another. All these buses seemed at some part of their wanderings to find their way past the home of Mr. Dulles, as though anyone who worked for him should be kept aware of the fact that he was sequestered somewhere up there on the dim second floor overlooking the Potomac.

The Agency had a good chance of being secret without making much effort. Either by design or by a hand-me-down procedure, the CIA inherited the most motley group of buildings imaginable. Someone in the General Services Administration with a real sense of humor must have made out the CIA allocation in the Greater Washington area. At the north end of the Fourteenth Street (Rochambeau) Bridge and to the north of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where not less than 70 -- 80 percent of all tourists who scramble through Washington each year find their way, there is a red brick building that looks like part of a converted stable. The Agency was in there. Further north on Sixteenth Street, across from the Statler-Hilton Hotel and next door to Washington's own Gaslight Club, is another nondescript building, not too far from the Soviet Embassy. CIA was there. On Connecticut Avenue, in what is now the heart of the business district, there used to be a building that had floors that sagged so much that tenants shuddered each time a big truck went by down below. CIA was in there. CIA was crammed into every one of the fairly well kept, but seriously overcrowded World War II Tempo Buildings along the south side of the Reflecting Pool east of the Lincoln Memorial Across the parkway, near the cherry tree Tidal Basin, in buildings named "Alcott" and "Barton" for their World War II Army WAAC tenants, the CIA was tucked in too. In fact, the CIA was so scattered that there was scarcely a part of Washington that did not have CIA offices hidden away. And of course, it was very simple for anyone who wished to find out where the Agency was to follow the little green buses, which trundled all day long in never-ending circles, some clockwise and some counter-clockwise, from building to building.

Things like this did not bother Allen Dulles. It is entirely possible that he never found out where all of his agency was anyhow. Such details were not for him. As a matter of fact, one of the first things he did when he became the Director was to abolish the office of the Deputy Director of Administration. In a city renowned for its bureaucratic administration and its penchant chant for proving how right C. Northcote Parkinson was, Mr. Dulles' first act was more heretical to most Washingtonians than one of Walter Beedle Smith's first actions -- the one in which he told the McCarthy hearings that he thought there might well be Communists in the Agency Washington -- was not as upset about the Communists as it was to learn that a major agency of the Government had abolished Administration. Mr. Dulles took the view of the intelligence professional, that it was much more dangerous and therefore undesirable to have all kinds of administrators acquiring more information than they should have, than it was to find some way to get along without the administrators.

While the public was mulling over that tidbit from the CIA, the real moves were being made inside the organization, where no one could see what was going on. The Deputy Director of Intelligence, strengthened by the addition of the current Intelligence organization and other such tasks, was to be responsible for everything to do with intelligence, and more importantly, was to be encumbered by nothing that had to do with logistics and administration. This was the theory. In practice, the DD/I has a lot of administrative and support matters to contend with as does any other large office. However, as much of the routine and continuing load as could be was set upon the Deputy Director of Support.

At the same time, the new and growing DD/P (the special operations shop) was similarly stripped of all encumbrances and freed to do the operational work that Dulles saw developing as his task. This left the DD/S (Support) with a major task. He was responsible for the entire support of the Agency, support of all kinds, at all times, and in all places. At the head of this directorate for many, many years has been the most unsung hero of the Agency and perhaps its ablest deputy, L. K. White. He is better known as "Red" White, a former Army colonel and a most able manager and administrator. He has made things work.[1]

The CIA as an intelligence agency offers no unusual elements on most counts. It is pretty much what it seems to be. Special operations has been exposed one way or another so many times that there is not too much guesswork about its role. But researchers have been unable to work their way into what it really is that makes the Agency what it is today. This distinctive characteristic is its superior logistics support. If an agent working in Greece needs some Soviet-built rifles of a certain vintage to equip some agents for a border or cross-border assignment, all he has to do is get his request to the station chief. He will in turn put it on the Agency line direct to Washington, where DD/S will process it. Within hours, one of their men, posing as an Air Force man in "X" country, will leave his office and drive out with an Air Force pickup truck to a small building on the far side of the base. There he will unlock a wire-anchor fence, then step unto a "go-down" storage tunnel until he comes to a row of heavy boxes. There he will look for a special mark that describes the guns he wants.

He will drive, with the nondescript box, across the field to another building, where a normal-looking Air Force supply office is located. In what looks like the usual supply room and storage area, he will find a shop filled with special tools and machinery. In short order, he will have the guns unpacked, removed from the heavy coatings of cosmolene and lead foil, and in an hour or so these guns will have been repackaged and labeled "P-84 Wing Tank" or some such cover name. Then an Air Force transport plane on its way to Naples and Athens will take this boxed "Wing Tank" to the Air Force Military Assistance Advisory Group section at the military airfield outside of Athens. There an Air Force MAAG man will take the box and see that it gets to its destination. That same day a small single engine plane will fly low over a remote, mountainous site and gently airdrop that box onto a set of camouflaged panels that mark the site for the trained pilot.

Nothing is difficult for the DD/S. The above order and action are examples of the routine. What was not routine was the establishment and maintenance of the system that made that possible. Someone had to get those special guns into the hands of the CIA in the first place. Then an elaborate global network of supply and support bases had to be established, not only as functional bases, but also with the double role of looking like one kind of facility and doing the important task of another.

A closed World War II airfield in England, once the home of an American fighter wing, was found to be an ideal site for DD/S operations. The Navy is "Prime" (the U.S. military department assigned the task of working with the British on all matters pertaining to the support and housing of Americans on the British Isles) in England. The Agency asked the Navy to establish some reason for asking the British to permit the limited reopening of this base. The CIA and the Navy agreed on their cover story and then met with the British, who of course were told the real reason for the request, but also were expected to maintain the cover story.

With some small show of normalcy, the British reopened the base. The most obvious evidence that the base had been reopened in that country neighborhood was the appearance of British uniformed guards at the gates on a twenty-four-hour basis. The Navy set up a "supply facility". It had a real U.S. Navy base designation. The base commander arrived in uniform, and his staff and enlisted men followed soon after. The base hired local British people, some as secretaries and others to run the kitchen and other facilities. In actual practice, the base had not a single real Navy man. All of those at the base were CIA men carefully accredited to the Navy and sent overseas as naval personnel.

The base gradually was loaded with "Navy" equipment, and at the proper time it was announced that the Navy was going to maintain some highly classified gear at the base in addition to the regular items and that certain buildings would be off-limits to all unauthorized personnel, British and American. By that time DD/S had a major storage and maintenance site in a most convenient and secure location.

If anyone knew that this site had been created for more than met the eye, he might note that it was not far from the huge operating base of the U.S. Air Force Air Resupply and Communications Wing that was assigned to England. The Agency site would actually be a satellite base to the huge Air Force operation with which it was linked. It is this formula that has made it possible for the CIA, with the appearance of only a little in the way of support and logistics on its own, actually to command boundless equipment, manpower, and facilities, including aircraft from the ever ready and always eager Air Force sister unit. The law and the directives and the other limits that have been put upon the Agency in an attempt to keep it out of major operations seemed to most observers -- and in this business there were few witting observers -- to be working well; but for the knowledgeable, the Agency was fast becoming, by the mid-fifties, a major peacetime power.

It was in 1955 that the then new Senator Mansfield, among others, attempted to get a law through the Congress that would establish a strong watchdog committee to oversee the CIA. One of the principal reasons this law did not pass was that such CIA stalwarts as Senator Russell and Senator Saltonstall affirmed that there was no need for such committees. The Congress, in their words, needed no more committees than it had at that time. They went on to say that they were always informed about everything the Agency was doing and that they could see no reason why the whole Congress should be brought in on such things when there was no need whatsoever for such action.

I have worked closely with Senator Saltonstall, and many others who were on those committees, and except in rare instances, they never knew that the CIA was so huge. They knew how big the CIA was within the bounds of the "real" or intelligence organization; but none of them knew about its tremendous global base capability, and what is much more important, none of them knew the intricacies of the Agency's supporting system that existed in the name of the Army Special Forces and the Air Force Air Supply and Communications Wings. Again there will be some who say, "Oh yes, Senator John Doe visited that base, and he saw this, and he was told that the whole business was highly classified. He said he knew what it was." Such things usually can be said, and such things may have happened; but no one man or no one group of knowledgeable men had ever had the opportunity to see the whole picture. As I have heard Senator Saltonstall say, "Now don't tell me about that classified material. What I don't know about it won't hurt me." That has been a general attitude on Capitol Hill. In discussions I have had with responsible committeemen on the Hill, I have found this to exist as recently as September 1971. This situation has not changed much. There are no Congressmen and no Senators who really know about the Agency and about what the Agency is doing.

As a result of the war planning role of the CIA, it was easy for the CIA planners to enter in the plans of all armed forces, requirements for wartime equipment, vehicles, aircraft, and facilities that had to be earmarked and stockpiled for use by the Agency in the event of war. Once such requirements were listed in the war plans they could be requisitioned along with all the other war-plan material. This meant that the cost of this equipment would be worked into the military budget, and then in due time each item would be purchased and delivered to the advance base site where war plan material was stockpiled. Warehouse after warehouse of "military equipment" is stored in the Far East, in Europe, and throughout the United States for the eventual use of the CIA. The cost of this material and of its storage, care, and conditioning is inestimable.

To handle all of this material the Agency has large bases in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Okinawa, Japan, Panama, and the United States. These supplies are kept in good shape, and reconditioned and rotated in stock with those that are used. Thus, whenever a requirement arises, the Agency has what it needs or can get what it needs from other sources.

Some of the war-plan equipment has a brief shelf-life, which requires that it be exchanged, used, or at least rotated with items in service. The Agency does not have sufficient demand for some of these things to permit it to keep up with such practices, so it has worked out rotation schedules with the services to let them have what it has in storage and then to get new replacement equipment when it is available. Also, the Agency has become a stopgap source of supply when something is needed as for a military assistance project or some other such emergency. As the years passed and as the Agency's "military" role became more a matter of custom and generally accepted, Agency military cover units became so deeply covered that their neighboring military units did not know, or forgot, that the unit near them was not a regular military unit. By that time, requisitions from these CIA units were as readily acceptable as any others and the units became easily self-supporting without any Agency funding input.

There are so many CIA cover units in the military that no accounting system can keep up with all of them. The military System also permits easy requisitioning between the services. As a result, an Army unit may requisition from a nearby Navy or Air Force unit and vice versa. A Navy CIA cover unit, for example, will requisition from an army or Air Force unit that will never question the right of that unit to draw the supplies it wants, but will simply make out cross-servicing accounting tickets and file them. The service that gave up the material will gather the supply tickets at its supply centers and then, depending upon how sophisticated its accounting system is and upon the instructions it may have received from its CIA Focal Point Office, it will either turn them in for reimbursement or pay them itself and forget about it. At all staff meetings on the subject, the CIA will protest that it pays all bills that are presented for reimbursement by the DOD and other agencies of the Government. This may be true, but the important thing is that few of the other government offices ever sort out all of these cats and dogs to the point where they are able to tally them up and render meaningful statements. As a result, the CIA gets millions of dollars of equipment each year without any attempt to collect on the part of the losing organization.

After World War II and, more importantly, after the Korean War, the military services had counted millions of dollars worth of surplus equipment in storage. One of the biggest tasks of the military logistics branches was to find some legal way to get rid of this surplus, most of which was new and unused. The laws that governed the disposal of such material required that it be made available first to the other services. Materials not wanted by the other services would then be offered on the basis of a priority list to other government agencies and departments, to state and local governments, colleges and universities, and so on, until any remaining surplus would be put up for public sale or auction.

The CIA found that it could beat this system easily by setting up certain cover units that appeared to be military units. These cover units would requisition copies of the surplus lists, would go over them carefully, and then would claim the items in the quantities desired and take delivery of them at some service base, where they would be prepared for transshipment to a military facility under CIA control. In this manner, or through variations of this method, the CIA was able to stockpile mountains of equipment.

Some of the variations on this system were rather subtle. For example: If a country that had certain elements who were working with a U.S. military unit that was really a CIA organization wanted certain items of military equipment not authorized by the mutual aid program or other such assistance plans, it might in the normal course of business ask the men in the unit what they could do to help. The unit would pass this word on to the CIA station chief, who would contact the DD/S staff to see if the equipment desired could be obtained, perhaps through surplus.

The DD/S would alert one of its cover units, and they would screen the surplus lists to find the items. In most cases, they would find them or they would find that the Army could be persuaded to list the needed number of those items as surplus, as long as they knew that they were going to be cross-requisitioned by the "Air Force", and as long as they had thus been assured that the items would not slip past the surplus lists and reach public sale. Thus the CIA would get what it wanted, free and in the quantity it wanted. They would be delivered to the CIA's own military cover supply depot and from there they would be processed to the overseas unit. All packaging, crating, and shipping would be kept within military channels and would be paid for in most instances by the military, since it would not know that the two units, the gaming one and the shipping one, were both cover units. In due time, the equipment the foreign government wanted would arrive at the "military" unit there, and that government would either have the use of the equipment or would be given the equipment as soon as transfer arrangements could be made.

It takes a lot of study of these processes and a lot of familiarity with the system to clarify how it works and how these things can happen without an exchange of funds. However, it would be incorrect and unwise to attribute to the CIA the idea that the Agency improperly uses the cover system to acquire valuable equipment without properly paying for it. It would be equally incorrect and unwise to create the idea that the military services do not account properly for the equipment they have on their inventory rosters. In normal cases, the military is quite precise about transfer of property, and there is seldom more than an occasional malfunction in the supply system. Also, the CIA has been scrupulous when it has been possible for it to pay for, by reimbursement, any equipment that the military services have furnished and for which it has been billed. The breakdown comes in the application of secrecy. Few supply people in the huge defense supply organizations know that the CIA has military units, and most of them, if they thought that the CIA was involved with some shipment, would never say a word to anyone about it. Then when the statement drawn upon a cover unit that was unfunded was not paid properly by the transfer of funded sums, the supply agency would simply pay it off from some available account rather than break security. They may be wrong to do this; but they choose this rather than taking a chance on exposing a CIA activity that might be important.

On the other hand, the CIA will state at the time they requisition items of equipment that they will pay all bills rendered. In some cases, they have put money in what amounts to an escrow account so that the DOD may draw against it. However, again the existence of such funds is usually cloaked in security, and it is seldom that the account is drawn upon. I knew of millions of dollars in such accounts that were never used, and they were lost to both organizations as they returned unclaimed to the general treasury. There is a feeling that "it is all for the Uncle anyhow", so why account for such transactions.

This may be all very well and may be a suitable reply; but when one reflects that the President and the Congress had taken great precautions to preclude the growth of an operational agency and to do this by prohibiting the Agency from building up just such supplies of equipment, this whole process becomes more important on that score than it does from the point of view of the money involved. The CIA was not supposed to have money, men, materials, or global facilities. The ease with which the Agency got around these restraints was remarkable, and it explains why so few knew at the time it was being done. One of the only tried and tested methods by which any government can control its subordinate organizations is through the purse-strings. When an organization finds ways to get around the restraints of money control and grows from within in a parasitic manner, it becomes very difficult for the usual controls to operate. Add to this the thick screen of security that has kept most of the other normal review authorities from seeing what the Agency was doing, and it is not too surprising to find that neither Congress, the President, nor the American people had realized that by 1955 the ClA had become, right before their eyes, the largest and most active peacetime operational force in the country.

Some of these actions worked in strange ways. And some of these actions were subject to the same irregularities that plagued the rest of the operations that were kept from the eyes of the public and from the controls normal to an open government. The irresponsible step in from time to time and get away with things that would be discovered in normal activities.

At one overseas base heavily involved in air activities in support of the Agency and of the foreign nationals the Agency was assisting, there were a number of aircraft of doubtful ownership commingled with other aircraft that were on "loan" from the Air Force. These aircraft were flown and maintained for the most part by a civilian facility that had the appearance of being a civilian contract carrier; but there were also a number of Air Force and Navy personnel with the unit in various capacities. The primary base unit was under Navy cover and had been for years, as a result of an earlier mission. With such a mix of personnel and equipment it was all but impossible, and certainly impractical, to attempt rigid controls in the manner customary on a real military base.

One of the planes assigned to this unit was a small transport aircraft common to all three services and built by the Beech Aircraft Corporation. This plane was flown by the officers of the staff and was used for shorter administrative flights. One of the pilots who flew it regularly came in to land in a bad crosswind one day and momentarily lost control of the plane after it had touched the ground during landing, in what is called a "ground loop". He recovered in time to keep from doing very much damage and no one was hurt. The plane needed minor repairs to be as good as new. However, this pilot, who also had maintenance authority at this conglomerate base, ordered that the plane be hauled out behind the main hangar and covered with a large protective tarpaulin. It was left there for months, and unknown to others on the base, a report was filed to Washington that it would cost more to fix the plane than it was worth; so the plane was scheduled for what the military calls "salvage". This means it is put up for sale to the highest bidder for scrap, or whatever.

No one on this base, which was primarily managed by the CIA, gave this a thought, and after a while the plane was not even missed. During this time the pilot, a major who was actually a career CIA employee serving in his Air Force reserve grade, was transferred back to an assignment in Washington at CIA headquarters. He had not been there long when he located the paperwork on that plane and made a bid in his own name and that of a friend to purchase the plane for scrap prices. Since no one else even knew where the plane was (and even if they had they would not have wanted to go to that remote place to get it) and of course, since any other bidder would have believed that the plane was a total loss, there were no other bidders. The major bought the plane in a perfectly legal maneuver.

He then applied for a brief vacation. Dashing back to the overseas station, where he was well known, he arranged with the local maintenance crews to have the plane fixed at very little expense to himself, and in no time he and his friend shipped it back to the United States. Their profit on the deal was many times more than the actual money they had invested, and no one ever knew about it because all of the records had been kept in highly classified channels. Secrecy can be used for many purposes, and this was just one of the uses to which it can be put by those of the team who know how to get away with it.

Emboldened by this success, the same man arranged a few years later to be the project officer on a rather large air operation in Antarctica. He and his companions worked up a team that was going to accomplish some very special work on that remote continent. They had two Air Force twin-engined transport aircraft heavily modified and modernized, and then got together millions of dollars' worth of special electronic and photographic equipment. They filled the planes with equipment and still had so much left over that they had to have the Air Force fly it to Panama, where it caught up with the Navys regular shipments on the way to McMurdo Sound. They had this priority-classed equipment put aboard, even at the cost of off-loading some of the Navy's own equipment.

Everything was brought to Antarctica, where these men established their own base satellited upon the Navy from McMurdo Sound. Whereas most of the Navy's supplies for Antarctica are either ship-borne via the Panama Canal or airborne from Christchurch, New Zealand, this group flew down the coast of South America to Argentina, and then took off from there, with elaborate assistance from the Argentine navy.

After their project had been completed for the year, they reported that one of the planes could not operate because of some sort of engine trouble, and that since the dangerous trip back with only one plane would be too hazardous, they planned to leave both aircraft and all of their equipment cached in the Antarctic. All personnel were flown out by the Navy and returned to the United States. It just happened by coincidence nearly one year later that a U.S. military officer stationed in Argentina reported the arrival of a civilian who was working with contacts in the Argentine navy to see if arrangements could be made, privately, to bring those planes out of Antarctica. This chance tip was followed up, and it was learned that the same man had decided that if he could get away with one plane, he might as well try to get away with two much larger aircraft and with the millions of dollars' worth of equipment, which was, in his mind, fair salvage somewhere on the ice cap of Antarctica. With the excellent cooperation of the Antarctic project officers on the White House staff and with the support of the Navy, all of this equipment and the planes were recovered and returned to service.

These are special cases and do not reflect upon the system so much as they do upon the actions of a few individuals. The problem is that the U.S. Government is not properly constituted to deal with such actions when they are cloaked in heavy security wraps, and the incidence of such happenings is far greater than it need be, since in most cases there should not have been any security over any of the projects. The cost of allowing the ST to operate in secrecy is high.

There are a number of aircraft that have been completely scrubbed of all usual identification, and they are operated by the services for the CIA. For those unfamiliar with the complexities involved in maintaining aircraft, it will be worth a partial explanation to show what problems arise. The huge radial engines on these large transports are all carefully marked with serial numbers, decals, and other special identifications, which are so coded and catalogued that the men who do the heavy maintenance on them in the major depots of the services can work from drawings and instructions that are in turn coded to match the engine series involved. When engines are made non-attributable, for CIA use, all of these markings are removed or changed. This means then that only certain crews can work on these engines, and they have to be cleared to know that the aircraft are special.

Sometimes, something will happen to an engine when the plane is far from its regular base. In such instances, a message is sent to the nearest Air Force base commander, and he is told to fly a maintenance crew there to get the engine and to "melt", or destroy it. Instead of working on the engine and revealing that the plane and its intended mission were classified, a costly engine is destroyed. Then that engine must be replaced by another identical non-attributable engine before the plane can continue its flight.

Sometimes things will happen to the plane itself. The Air Force had a number of special aircraft in Europe that had been converted to use for certain classified projects, although from outward appearances they were perfectly normal four-engine transports. One time, one of these aircraft had a simple nose-wheel problem. It should have been an easy thing to have it worked on at the base and returned to fight operations. However, some of the simpler maintenance work had been turned over to native teams. One such activity was the repair of nose wheels. To keep this problem from the natives, a CIA crew chief took a torch and cut several of the main electric cables in the plane, then grounded it for serious maintenance problems. He thought that this would get him the authority to hire an American contract crew that could work on the nose wheel as well as on the cables.

Since the inspection report showed very severe damage to the plane, the reviewing authority in the United States would not authorize a team to fix the plane, and instead ordered it to be salvaged. In the salvaging process, the alert CIA had one of its civilian units bid for the plane, and in a short time it was back in the air, in good shape, as the property of a civilian airline, which put it to work in its own interest and incidentally for the CIA whenever requested. This could be called an inadvertent windfall. But in any event, it was very costly and had it not been for the security measures that made the whole thing unwieldy, the damage could have been repaired easily and the Air Force would still be flying that plane.

By the late nineteen-fifties, the CIA logistics system had all it could handle all over the world. It could deliver such unit shipments as forty thousand arms by airdrop in the period of a few days or it could send aircraft and helicopters into Laos and move tens of thousands of Meo tribesmen from one part of the country to another with ease. By that time, the CIA had no less than eight hundred to one thousand units, all cover units within the DOD. This was a huge and intricate system.

The Agency did not man all of the units. Many of them were no more than a telephone number with someone to answer the phone and give information or receive calls. If, for example, a group of military personnel from a foreign country were passing through Washington on their way home after a school on a Military Aid Program quota, and they had been told to get in touch with a certain contact, they could call a number in Washington and their contact would answer the phone and tell them where to meet him, where they were to stay, and so on. If a defector had been flown to the States, was living in some safe house, and was not permitted to leave unless he was escorted for his own safety, he could call a certain number in Washington and ask for a certain military officer, who would give him instructions of one kind or other.

Some of these "phone-drop" organizations were used for nothing more than to requisition supplies from another service. The supplying service would never know that the requisitioning outfit did not really exist. Of course, the Agency would go through the details of making certain that the units it was using were listed in the supply catalogues, in the regular military postal catalogues, and in other normal references.

Other units were manned with many people and served as active training units, storage sites, or operational facilities of one kind or another. In such cases, the manning would be either all Agency in the cover of military, or Agency and military blended together, or it might be all military supporting the Agency. In the latter case, the unit might be an Air Force Squadron that had aircraft and other equipment maintained in readiness complete with well-trained crews ready to fly out for the Agency on any of a great number of special missions. Everything possible would be done to make it appear to be a real Air Force unit.

Few people, even among those who are supposed to know all about the Agency's relationship with the DOD, have ever known exactly how many such units exist, and what is more important, what these units really do.

One day back in 1960 or 1961, it was necessary for me to brief the chairman of the JCS on a matter that had come up involving the CIA and the military. Such briefings, when they have been put on the regular agenda of the day, take place in a sort of reverse pecking order. Each item that comes before the Chiefs is briefed by its staff-supporting office from the least sensitive to the most highly classified. On this day there were a number of briefings on all sorts of subjects. The room where the Chiefs met was full and the anterooms were packed with briefing teams. One by one the teams were called in to give their briefings. As they finished, they would be dismissed, and if the Chief of any given service had any of his top-level staff there with him, he might dismiss that officer along with the briefers. (Sometimes, when one service is briefing, a Chief of another service will want to have one or more of his senior assistants there to hear the briefing with him.) As a result, as the briefings progress from least classified to most highly classified, the whole group begins to thin out. This is done with a very precise control, verging on the ritualistic.

Finally, the briefings on atomic energy matters, missiles and space, and other highly classified matters took place. Then the Chiefs began to hear some of the more closely held intelligence matters. The last item was the one that pertained to the CIA operational information. As I was ushered into the room I noted that everyone was leaving except the chairman and the commandant of the Marine Corps. The chairman was General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, and the commandant was General David M. Shoup. They were close friends and had known each other for years.

When the primary subject of the briefing had ended, General Lemnitzer asked me about the Army cover unit that was involved in the operation. I explained what its role was and more or less added that this was a rather routine matter. Then he said, "Prouty, if this is routine, yet General Shoup and I have never heard of it before, can you tell me in round numbers how many Army units there are that exist as "cover" for the CIA?" I replied that to my knowledge at that time there were about 605 such units, some real, some mixed, and some that were simply telephone drops. When he heard that he turned to General Shoup and said, "You know, I realized that we provided cover for the Agency from time to time; but I never knew that we had anywhere near so many permanent cover units and that they existed all over the world."

I then asked General Lemnitzer if I might ask him a question. He said I could. "General," I said, "during all of my military career I have done one thing or another at the direction of a senior officer. In all of those years and in all of those circumstances I have always believed that someone, either at the level of the officer who told me to do what I was doing or further up the chain of command, knew why I was doing what I had been directed to do and that he knew what the reason for doing it was. Now I am speaking to the senior military officer in the armed forces and I have just found out that some things I have been doing for years in support of the CIA have not been known and that they have been done, most likely, in response to other authority. Is this correct?"

This started a friendly, informal, and most enlightening conversation, more or less to the effect that where the CIA was concerned there were a lot of things no one seemed to know. It ended with those two generals asking me about matters that they had unwittingly participated in during earlier years that they had never been told about.

It was amazing, very basic, and very true that a great number of operations, some of them quite important in terms of foreign policy, and usually involving one or more foreign nations, had taken place in the guise of military activities when in reality they were not. Since the military had been used for support purposes, first in the context of war planning and later for more open and more active roles, as the CIA and the ST became more powerful and bold, the military had continued to believe that whatever it had been asked to do must have been sanctioned from above by someone.

This brings us back to the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report. One of the major undertakings of that report was to place the CIA quietly within the structure of the entire U.S. Government, ostensibly to obtain more complete secrecy when necessary. For example: It was necessary for the CIA to arrange for aircraft to enter the country quite frequently without the usual customs check that all military aircraft must undergo. In the earlier years the CIA would arrange directly or through State or Defense to have customs waive inspection of a plane with classified cargo or carrying a defector or on some other highly classified mission. Then, when such things had become more or less commonplace, the CIA would politely offer to provide a few men to work with the regular customs personnel to take the burden for such activity from them. This was the way it was put in the first place, and the customs office would gratefully accept the assistance. The CIA would go through all the necessary steps to get authorization for increasing the manpower allocations in the customs service by the number of men it planned to put there and then to make arrangements to reimburse the customs office for the payroll and other costs of the office.

This latter step would always be taken, because it would be best for the customs office to go through all of the normal motions of paying these men, including promoting them and paying for their travel or other usual expenses, so that their assignment would appear to be completely normal to all others in the office. Then, by special accounting procedures that would take place in the main office, the CIA would reimburse the Treasury Department for the money involved.

In the beginning this would all be done with elaborate open-handedness, even to the point where the new agency men would receive training and other prerequisites of the job. However, as the years passed, most of this procedure would be forgotten, and few would recall that those special assignments had even originated with the Agency. Accountants who had known how to transfer the funds would have been transferred themselves, and the Treasury Department might no longer bill for the costs involved. But the Agency men would stay on, their replacements would be carefully fitted into the manning tables, and few would even notice that they were there.

This has happened quite extensively in a great many places all throughout the Government. There are CIA men in the Federal Aviation Administration, in State, all over the DOD, and in most other offices where the CIA has wanted to place them. Few top officials, if any, would ever deny the Agency such a service; and as the appointive official departed, and his staffs came and went, the whole device would be lost with only the CIA remembering that they were still there.

Many of these people have reached positions of great responsibility. I believe that the most powerful and certainly the most useful agent the CIA has ever had operates in just such a capacity within another branch of the Government, and he has been there for so long that few have any idea that he is a long-term career agent of the CIA. Through his most excellent and skillful services, more CIA operations have been enabled to take place than can be laid at the feet of any other, more "legitimate", agent.

This was the plan and the wisdom of the Dulles idea from the beginning. On the basis of security he would place people in all areas of the Government, and then he would move them up and deeper into their cover jobs, until they began to take a very active part in the role of their own cover organizations. This is how the ST was born. Today, the role of the CIA is performed by an ad hoc organization that is much greater in size, strength, and resources than the CIA has ever been visualized to be.

There is another facet to this type of organization that has had a major impact upon the role of secret operations in this Government. With the spread of the influence of the CIA into so many other branches of the Federal Government, the agents found it very easy to make friends and win willing disciples in their new surroundings. There is a glamour and allure to the "fun and games" of Agency work that appeals to many people, and they go out of their way to provide support above and beyond what the CIA has ever asked for -- or thought to ask for.

As a case in point, consider the U-2 project. The Lockheed Company came up with the plane, but the Air Force knew it could not use it in peacetime and thought that it might be able to get it into use by offering it to the CIA. The CIA picked up the idea and operated the whole project, provided -- and this was a major "provided" -- the Air Force paid for it and actively supported it with men, material, and facilities. A proposal that began as a plan to get a new aircraft on the production line for Air Force reconnaissance purposes thus became a project to get the plane flying for CIA photographic intelligence purposes. As the photographs began to come in, the input data from them began to dictate new operations that arose not from some foreign policy or national planning staff, but from intelligence sources. Intelligence input began a cycle that supported intelligence itself. A new machine, which required more and more support of its own actions, was born within the Government.

By the time of the Bay of Pigs operations, the CIA was part of a greater team, which used the Agency and other parts of the Government to carry out almost any secret operation it wanted. By that time this organization had the equipment, the facilities, the men, and the funds to carry out clandestine operations that were so vast that even on the basis of simple definition they were no longer truly secret, nor could anyone hope that they might be.

The availability of supplies and facilities made it possible for all of this to come about. The growth of the CIA and of the greater ST has resulted more from the huge success of the DD/S side of the Agency than from either the DD/P or the DD/I. When Allen Dulles had abolished the DD/A (Administration) he had put nearly everything that was not intelligence and that was not secret operations into the DD/S division. The DD/S became responsible for the function of budget and comptrollership; for personnel and for the special personnel function that is most important in the Agency, personnel cover; for communications; for research and development including that very special Agency shop that is responsible for the development of all of the very special gadgets and other devices so important to the trade of intelligence; for transportation; for facilities -- a special resource so vast that few people even know 50 percent of what exists; for supply, and for maintenance.

Many of these functions, which are normal to any major enterprise, take on special meaning in the CIA. In fact every one of these general headings has buried somewhere deep in its staff special arrangements that make the Agency what it is.

Research and development is a most interesting enterprise as carried on by the CIA. For example, let us say that the CIA has a modified aircraft that it flies along the border of the Iron Curtain, or for that matter anywhere it wants to listen to electronic traffic. This monitoring airborne system is as sophisticated as the military can make it, and in many instances the CIA has been able to have even the newest military system modified to give it some special characteristics of particular use to the Agency.

In the normal pursuit of its mission, the plane cruises at altitude on a prearranged course and listens to every thing that it hears on all wavebands. After the flight, the plane lands at its Air Force home base, and the tapes it made during flight are immediately taken from the racks on the plane, sealed in shipping containers, and put on the first jet to Washington. Within twenty-four hours these tapes are processed in a special readout laboratory that might involve computerized read-out as well as human listening. As a result of this process, there might be found a certain signal that appeared as perhaps no more than a bit of static on some normal-appearing carrier wave. More detailed study of this signal reveals that it is unlike the usual static and that there is a chance that this split-second blip is something special; but there is no known system for interpreting such a signal.

A review of other tapes made in the same area might reveal that similar blips have been occurring on some of them. The CIA takes this up with the Air Force experts who designed the system and through them learns that the equipment was designed by a certain team working for a well-known manufacturer of electronic equipment. The Air Force, of course, has a contract with this manufacturer. The CIA goes to the manufacturer under the guise of the Air Force and asks what might be done to identify and if possible to read out the blips.

The manufacturer agrees to take on the problem as an overrun to the original development contract with the Air Force. The Agency people, known to the manufacturer only as Air Force people, agree. In due course, the manufacturer finds a scientist at Stanford who has experimented with a remarkable tube that seemed to promise some solutions to the problems involved. A subcontract is let, and further work is done on the tube. Finally, the manufacturer is able to demonstrate a receiver that is able to find these blips, which are actually hidden at all wave channels, and to get them recorded on tape. They are now able to get this new equipment to stretch these blips to the right length in terms of sound waves, and before long these blips are shown to contain decipherable data.

Now the development contract is terminated, and the receivers are put into production, also on the Air Force contract. As things turned out, the Air Force is able to use some of these fabulous sets itself, and it increases the production order. By this time, a small development project to which the CIA had agreed to contribute about sixty thousand dollars had grown into a total development project of more than one million dollars, with a long manufacturing and procurement contract on top of that.

The important thing in situations like this is that through this method, even when it was used honestly and properly, the services can pay out millions for the Agency without realizing it. Most of the Air Force intelligence and electronics technicians involved in this case -- which though hypothetical, has its basis in fact -- were not also procurement experts and had no experience in the intricacies of such financial matters. As a result, they went along thinking someone else was taking care of the money. The Agency went along, protesting that if someone sent them the bill, they would pay it. The bills were rarely if ever sent.

Such actions soon became known, and others who want work done for other reasons find the way to use this same technique. To cite a case: An Army project officer who had trouble getting his service to approve a new gun that he had been shown by a manufacturer found that a fellow officer, on a classified project, was interested in it. They demonstrated the new gun to a group, much as if it were a real Army demonstration. The manufacturer, willing to do anything to sell his new weapon, participated fully in these demonstrations and tests. He may have thought it odd that the tests had been scheduled at the Army Chemical Warfare station at Fort Detrick instead of at the Aberdeen Proving Ground where most tests are usually held; but he was selling, not asking questions, so he eagerly went along. After the tests at Detrick, there were meetings in a special section of the office of the Secretary of Defense, located near the office of the Deputy Director for Research and Engineering (DDR&E). The DDR&E representative was a prominent career civilian who had recently been made head of that office after a long tour of duty in the Office of Special Operations, where CIA matters were usually processed. In other words, this man was less an engineer than a special operations man; and he was less an Army or military counterpart than he was an Agency collaborator.

At this meeting, there were many Army officers, and there were Air Force officers. There may have been Marine and Navy officers, and there were many civilians. The manufacturer's representatives could not be faulted if they believed that they were selling their new weapon to a most highly qualified group. In fact, the main sponsor of the weapon, an Army Lieutenant Colonel in uniform, gave all appearances of being the Army representative, which he was not. The meeting ended with a consensus that the gun should be purchased in trial numbers by the Air Force for security reasons "for use by the Air Force Air Police units". Later, the Air Force did purchase tens of thousands of the new weapons, and they disappeared into the security-covered inventory of the CIA. This is a part of the story of the M-16 rifle of questionable repute in the Vietnam operations.

With the passage of time, the Agency has become more adept at getting any supplies and support it needs and in getting them supported, stored, and transported. (The story of the Agency transportation capability will be told later.) All military equipment is controlled by an elaborate supply system, and the funds that are required to develop, procure, and maintain this vast store of equipment all over the world are detailed in the budget. Anyone can easily make a case for occasional errors in such a vast system. There have been those who, along about budget time every year, show how the Air Force has purchased $.15 nuts and bolts for $28 each, how the Navy has procured 5,400,000 shrimp forks, and how the Army has been paying three times as much as the Navy for a common hospital blanket. In spite of all of this, the logistics services of the military establishment do an amazing job, and no military services in the world have ever had the support that they have provided. It is within this fabulous system that the CIA logistics experts, most of whom are retired military personnel themselves, have learned to create miracles.

There is on the books of Congress and in the Law of this country an old bit of legislation called the Economy Act of 1932. It remains in force, as amended. In theory, it is simple and important. During the early years of the depression it was found that a considerable amount of money could be saved if the Congress would permit the various departments and agencies of the Government to trade among themselves when one had a surplus that the other wanted. It used to be that each department had to keep rigid accounting of what it had and that it could not transfer what it had to another department. This Economy Act, among other things permits one department, say Agriculture, to let the Army, for example, buy desks that it may have in excess for a price to be agreed upon by both departments. This law has worked well, and it has permitted savings among all parts of the Government.

Early in its history, the CIA looked at this law and found that it could be used for some interesting purposes. The CIA might like to purchase some equipment that it could not afford or more likely, that it did not want anyone in the Government to know it had acquired. It would have one of its people, most likely "covered" in some other department, meet with the owning department and sound it out about the purchase, "in accordance with the provisions of the Economy Act of 1932, as amended". Usually, the Agency would know beforehand that the equipment was available and that the selling department would practically give it away. The Agency would then conclude the action and buy this material with funds of the department under whose cover it had entered into the agreement.

In certain cases, the buying department would require the Agency to reimburse it for the cost of the transaction; but increasingly this became a doubtful process. At other times, the CIA would approach another department, through a cover cut-out, to an office where it also had another cover arrangement.[2] These offices, bickering with each other as separate departments, would arrive at an agreement that they would actually staff through other sections to make it appear to be scrupulously legal and authentic, and then the CIA would end up with what it wanted without the expenditure of any funds.

Even the retelling of some of these arrangements sounds ridiculous, and the reader may be excused for wanting to believe that this could not have happened. Not only have things like this happened; but some that are even more portentous. The Agency will go to any ends when it has convinced itself that it is doing so on the grounds of security. The Agency, at the constant reminder and conditioning of Allen Dulles, always believed that anything it did was all right as long as it was carrying out the will of Congress to protect its secret sources and methods.

After decades of logistical endeavors of all kinds and of all types, the Agency has acquired more than enough in hardware, in facilities, in transport and warehousing to perform all the peacetime operations it could ever dream of. And if it should come up with a specially large project, it would easily supply itself from within the hoards of other departments and agencies. To the Agency, cost is no barrier. When things can be delivered by air, they are delivered by air, regardless of cost differential. When equipment can be obtained new, it is purchased new rather than surplus, when new is available. It is not so much that the Agency was always that way; but it became spoiled, because since Louis Johnson's time, just before the Korean War, there has not been a Secretary of Defense who really concerned himself with the cost of supporting the CIA. There has not been a Secretary who knew enough about what the CIA was really doing to believe that the volume of material warranted concern over the cost. So the Agency found its pipe attached to the boundless sea, and it learned to make the most of just letting it flow in.

The same can be said of the Congress. There are no members of the House or the Senate who have ever contemplated in anywhere near exact amounts the great volume of men, money, and materials the Agency has been able to acquire and to expend without observation by those normally charged with that responsibility. The Agency excuses its own actions on the basis that it employs these methods secretly for the good of the country; thus, it does not have to expose its sources and methods as it requests men, money, and supplies in the usual manner. Once the Agency has become accustomed to this form of rationalization, there are no limits to what it and its peripheral operators will be perfectly willing to do "for the good of the country" and for the cause, always unquestioned, of anti-Communism.

_______

Notes:

1. The Agency makes a specialty of covering its people with code names as they travel around the world. Thus the message traffic will he gibberish to most people when a list of names of the Agency's key men appear. Many years ago, "Red" White and another executive from Mr. Dulles' office made an extended trip through the Pacific. They were given code names just before they left. Some genius in the cover department gave "Red" White the code name "Ballew". As he traveled from station to station it was "Red, White, and Ballew", like the flag.

2. A cover cutout is some device or process that has been set up to circumvent or otherwise bypass normal procedure so that the connection with the CIA cannot be discovered in the normal course of business.
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:23 pm

Chapter 12: Personnel: The Chameleon Game

An Australian scientist waiting at the counter of the Military Air Transport Service passenger service desk at 3: 00am felt ill at ease in these unfamiliar surroundings. He had been assured that his travel through to Washington had been arranged and that he would be met when his plane arrived from Manila at Travis Air Force Base in California. All he had in the way of instructions was a small note that said, "Major Adams will meet you upon arrival at Travis. If he should not be there, call him by base telephone, number 12-1234." The WAF on the other side of the counter could find no Major Adams listed anywhere in the Travis telephone book; but she volunteered to ring that number anyhow. A sleepy voice answered, "Special Support Squadron, Airman Jones speaking." The contact was made. "Airman Jones" appeared shortly at the passenger service desk in civilian attire and announced himself as Major Adams. The Australian had met his contact and would soon be on his way to South San Francisco airport for his commercial flight connection to Washington.

In Washington he was met again by another contact and spent two or three days at a hotel where from time to time he met various scientists and their companions. They discussed with him the meetings he would attend in Rotterdam, then later in Moscow, to join with the world's top radio astronomers in observing the latest massive antennas that were being used in Europe and in the Soviet Union. Nothing in the United States approached the sophistication of the Soviet equipment, and the Australians were far ahead with their own work. After a few days with his new friends in the scientific world, with whom he met on the basis that they were from the National Science Foundation, the Australian flew to Europe and thence to Moscow. In Europe he had more meetings with American scientists, and after the Moscow meetings he willingly discussed the advanced equipment and techniques he had seen and worked with there. He even talked about a totally new antenna concept of his own for which he hoped to get funds in Australia and which had been enthusiastically accepted by the scientists in Europe and Russia as a great advance over present fixed-parabola technology.

In return for free air travel and other amenities, this Australian had been willing to spend time with American scientists whom he knew or knew of and with certain of their friends and fellow workers. He was unaware of the fact that among those "fellow workers" were CIA personnel eager to learn all they could about the technology of the Russians. Advanced radio antenna work used in astronomical observations could, with minor changes, also be used in radar antennas for an advanced air defense system.

The recruitment of personnel for such special and fleeting requirements is one of the many skills of the Personnel Division of the CIA under the leadership of the DDIS. It is another of the logistics functions of that Directorate that performs major miracles for the CIA and even for the ST.

In the beginning, when a new organization is formed in the Government, such as HEW (Health, Education and Welfare), HUD (Housing and Urban Development), and others, it is customary to flesh out the unit with staff and resources from other organizations assembled for that purpose. Since the CIA was a totally new organization, this normal process could not be relied upon to build a professional staff in the period of time required for the Agency to become effective. Former OSS alumni from World War II were pulled in from wherever they were at the time and they were augmented as rapidly as possible by personnel from other units within the Government who had the special training for intelligence type of work. This meant that the FBI was "raided" to the point that its director called upon the DCI to ask that such raids be halted. Many other early personnel came from World War II military resources of all kinds. The straight-line intelligence personnel went into DD/I and a large number of logistics specialists went directly into the DD/S.

It was startling to see them take on new life as they began to realize that they no longer worked under the routinered tape and restraints of the military service in which they had been trained. Men who had fought to keep supply levels up to authorized quotas now found that they could exceed quotas with abandon. Men who had watched budget figures year after year to build little caches to take care of essential needs found that they could draw upon funds that never seemed to run out. The same was true for personnel needs, for transportation, and for communications. It was not long before the Agency was quite adequately manned, and wherever there were shortages, it was able quite easily to find military personnel who would voluntarily accept an assignment. As a result, thousands of military men served with the Agency from its inception.

This turned out to be fortunate. No long range organization can prosper with most of its employees in the same general age bracket. The Agency, having been born in the immediate postwar era, inherited people who were generally in the same age group. The men at the top and the men in lesser jobs all were about the same age. This meant that as the years rolled on, the openings at the top would be few and the log jam of those in lower grades would be terrific, stifling career development. The overhead of "disposable" military personnel helped clear up this problem. Therefore as all personnel, military and civilian, rose to higher positions, there became fewer of these higher positions. The military could be returned to their services and the overhead easily weeded out, leaving room for the more senior careerists. This helped, but it was not a total solution.

The Agency put into operation a Junior Officer Training program (JOT) something like an ROTC program. In fact, JOT drew many of its men from the college ROTC resources. As these men filtered into regular jobs they replaced military men who went back to their parent services. Meanwhile, the Agency pushed an "early-out" retirement program and other projects to clear up the age-bound overhead.

This had an interesting and perhaps unintentional bonus effect. A large number of men who had served with the Agency as volunteers had rotated back to their own military services, and in some cases, back to other government departments to pursue other tasks. However, the lure of "fun and games" is great, and most of these men still retained much of the old desire to play the intelligence game. The Agency found itself with willing alumni in all parts of the Government, and they made use of these men in every way possible.

This can be illustrated in the Pentagon Papers since that is an available source of names and other statistics. A quick survey of the Pentagon Papers as published by The New York Times reveals a random listing of military officers of general and admiral rank, all of whom in one way or other took part in the early activities in Vietnam. Some of them served with the Agency for a number of years and went back and forth from Agency assignments to military assignments. And in most cases the military assignment was simply an Agency cover assignment under which they served at the direction of CIA superiors. It is a most important fact that most of the political and military leaders of Asian countries from Korea to Pakistan could easily be sympathized with for not being able to discover whether the "military" officers with whom they were dealing were military or were CIA. Most of the generals mentioned in the Pentagon Papers were involved in CIA activities while they were in Southeast Asia and were not under the operational control and direction of the DOD.

When Marshall Sarit of Thailand met with an American Army general to discuss the buildup of the Thailand border patrols on the Laos border, he may have believed that he was talking with a U.S. Military officer and that the results of their talks were going to be achieved with the direct assistance of the U.S. military. He had no way of knowing that the results of his talks were going to be carried out by "U.S. military" under cover who were working under the direction and operational control of the CIA. The same can be said for such talks with Somanna Phouma and Phoumi Nosavan in Laos and for Generals Thieu and Ky in Vietnam. The Diem regime, far back in those early and formative days of the Vietnam operations, never did know who they were talking with, and Ngo Dinh Diem had to rely upon the few real American friends he had, such as Ed Lansdale, a bona fide U.S. Air Force general, but also a man who worked solely for the CIA for more than a decade. Diem could unravel some of the deals he became involved in by calling his friend Lansdale in Washington; but he could not get similar help from the contacts he had in Saigon. The string of generals who appeared in Saigon from 1954 through 1964 -- who were really not generals - would have been enough to confuse anyone. In fact, real generals stayed away from Saigon for fear of being labeled "CIA" by their contemporaries back in Honolulu or Washington.

The other side of the coin was equally significant. Military men found the CIA an easy means to promotion. As a result, they longed to get more of that valuable duty. Men who would have retired as majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels found that the CIA was the easy road to generals' stars. There are a great number of generals, even up to the full four-star rank, who would never have made that grade, and who never would have made general at any level had it not been for their CIA assignments and the role they played in the development of the Vietnam operations. There were a great many of these men; this force alone has had a considerable impact upon the nature of Vietnamese events and upon the escalation of activities in Vietnam back in the days when small but catalytic events propelled the early actions into a massive campaign.

The same thing was happening in Washington. As men who served under Allen Dulles went out into other parts of the Government -- into the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Rand corporation, certain key university jobs, into select businesses and major foundations -- Dulles found that he had a massive instrument upon which he could orchestrate events as he wished. It was not his technique to lay deep plans and to use all of these resources in pursuit of these plans. Rather, it was his game to continually call upon the vast and continuing resource of secret intelligence to supply him with input data, with the raw events that he could then toss upon the keyboard to sound their own chords across the field of foreign relations.

This may sound a bit weird at first telling; but how else can anyone explain the random series of events that has happened in the names of foreign affairs and anti-Communism since 1955? All personnel who had trained with the Agency had learned enough about its ways, its freedoms, and its ability to circumvent normal bureaucratic red tape, and were somewhat spoiled. Later, when they had gone out into other departments and agencies of the federal government, they would find themselves, at times, frustrated in their everyday activities. They tended to return to their Agency affiliations and found that they could still get things done through Agency channels. They also served as Agency conduits for things which the Agency wanted done where they now worked. This developed a loose but effective network, with tentacles that reached out in all directions.

There was a group that was utilized as airline operators. They went into various countries such as Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan, Laos, Vietnam, and many others and worked to establish airlines, many of which ostensibly were national air carriers. These airlines were put together by common interests, part civilian business and part clandestine operations. In such cases secrecy was not really very deep; but it was used to shield the identity of the interests concerned from other parties in the U.S. The host government certainly knew who was behind the airlines, and they knew that there was more money being spent than was coming in through commercial revenues.

These airlines and their supporting bases, which in many countries were relatively costly enterprises, became increasingly modern. They began with what were called World War II surplus aircraft, such as the old C-46 and the C-54. Then they began to get hand-me-down Constellations and DC-6 and DC-7 aircraft, which had been the backbone of the U.S. airline fleet before the advent of jet transports. Most of these countries did not have the pilots and other personnel essential to the operation of modern aircraft, so the Agency cover units filled these spaces. Soon, national pride dictated that these airlines have the finest modern equipment in order that their neighbors would not outshine them. It was not long before a number of these small and impecunious airlines began to flaunt their new jets before the public, from Manila to Tehran.

These operations all began as modest havens for personnel who had been affiliated with the Agency or who were still with the Agency but gave the appearance of having left. By 1960 the CIA had grown very large in comparison with the figures that had been projected and with the figures that various controlling authorities thought the Agency had. By the time of the Congo problems and the uncertainties of other emerging African nations, the CIA had not less than forty stations scattered all through that continent, all of them very active and all of them manned with everything from U.S. military to non-attributable civilians of all kinds. The agency that Harry Truman thought would be his quiet intelligence arm had become a vast organization, which no one could control for the simple reason that the Agency was no longer the finite organization that had been created by law and then built with properly appropriated funds. It was now a tremendous force, using its own funds as an ante to open the big game, and then playing the big game with money belonging to most of the rest of the Government.

In the Government, people (or as the bureaucratic euphemism goes, "bodies") are controlled by the appropriation and then authorization of funds. Thus, any Government organization is permitted to have precisely so many people; and to exactly control that number of people, the Congress appropriates only enough money to pay that number and no more. This is usually an effective method of control, provided measures to evade them are not cloaked in security. When the Air Force had the problem of manning the vast space center at Cape Canaveral, it found that it did not have sufficient people for the task but that it could get funds for the maintenance of that huge and fast-growing complex. So the Air Force obtained enough funds to contract the operation and maintenance of that base. Thus several companies bid for the job of operating the big space center, and Pan American Airlines was awarded the contract. By this device the Air Force could man a huge complex, with money and not with people. There are many obvious advantages of this method of performing a housekeeping task.

The Agency witnessed the simplicity and effectiveness of this action and began to use it for its own ends. It would transfer funds to another department of the Government, and in return it would get people. Thus the Army, for example, could truthfully say that it had perhaps forty-two people in the Military Advisory and Assistance Group (MAAG) in Athens, and yet any visitor to the MAAG offices in Athens could easily see that there were more than one hundred people working throughout that big building. As a matter of fact, some visiting Senators noticed this and commented on it. They were told, with a straight face by the local MAAG officials, that the Army did have only forty-two people there and that they would be glad to have the Department of the Army in Washington furnish the Senators with an exact accounting of those people. This satisfied the visitors, and upon their return to Washington they were given audited figures from the U.S. Army, certifying to the fact that the Army had spent no more than "X" dollars on personnel in Athens and therefore could not have had more than forty-two people there.

This is an old story. There are military bases that have been closed by the services. The records, based upon money audits, show that the bases are in fact closed, yet the base had been reopened by the service concerned with CIA funds and for CIA support purposes. There is a small but uniquely self-contained Army base near Washington that was closed in such a manner years ago. It is still open, and it is so active that it has a very lively housekeeping function, including a PX and commissary that services not only the special CIA elements on the base but a select group of senior retired military and naval personnel who live in baronial luxury in the adjacent horse country.

There is also a massive Army post that has been closed many times. No news is ever published to show that it has been opened; but there is always a fanfare when it is closed. This huge, forested reservation is one of the best hunting preserves in the Washington vicinity, and it is frequented by noble parties of ranking military and other high government officials who travel to their shooting sites on an old Army railroad in quaint old cars -- in real luxury attained by few people short of Hugh Hefner and the Onassis set.

There was a time when the late Senator Harry Byrd, father of the present Senator, used to have to intervene on behalf of a few of his select clientele, because he kept receiving letters and telephone calls about bombs and other explosives bursting at a "closed" U.S. Navy station. The Senator had these messages sent to the Honorable Secretary of the Navy, who in turn would pass them to the Chief of Naval Operations and thence on to the proper authorities in the Norfolk area. Time after time the Navy would reply to the good Senator that there were no explosives being detonated in the area and that the base in question was closed and secured by a proper guard force.

This exchange of correspondence went on for about three unpleasant cycles, until the Senator felt that he should bring it to the attention of the Secretary of Defense. Thus started an investigation that finally brought a harried naval officer to the Office of Special Operations at the Secretary of Defense level to ask if by some chance there might be some highly classified activity going on at that "closed" Navy base that the Navy did not know about. It was found that the Agency was in fact doing some demolitions and explosives training with a special group of foreign agents whom they did not want to expose at the Special Forces training site at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Agency was taking these men, from time to time, from Fort Bragg to this abandoned Navy base where it had set up some special training for them. Then the Office of Special Operations asked the Agency to move its training to another site, the Navy was given a polite but obtuse answer, from this the Navy wrote apologies to the Senator, and eventually things were settled graciously with the Senator's constituents.

These things, of course, are not earthshaking and are not too different from similar uncoordinated activities that can happen in any large operation. But the Agency had acquired the power to carry out such activities in spite of restrictions and in spite of other plans and policy. It was not just the one MAAG in Athens in which Agency people were hidden, but it was almost every MAAC all over the world. In fact, wherever the military might have some small out-of-the-way outpost in a foreign country where the Agency might wish to install one of its people, it would not take long before the position would be assigned to the Agency so that it could have its own man there. In many countries, the vast Military Air Transport Service network (now military Airlift Command, or MAC) would have only two or three men to handle landing and take-off requirements for a few planes a week. Such small pockets of men in remote places and with little apparent activity became havens for CIA personnel. And when activity grew in such locations, as it inevitably did, the Agency would make funds available to the parent service for more bodies, and the manning would be increased to provide for an invisible military expansion. Later auditing of the strength of the service involved would never show the increase. The Agency would never have to show the increase either, because all it had done was expend dollars and this would not be questioned.

One of the things Allen Dulles achieved shortly after the submission of this report to President Truman was the approval of an amendment of the National Security Act of 1947. The amendment was passed in 1949. Among other things, it gave the CIA much more latitude in the expenditure of and accounting for its authorized funds. As a result, all the DCI had to do was to personally certify that the money had been spent properly, and there would be no further review. It was not thought at the time that money such as this would be used to make major changes in the personnel strengths of supporting Government departments. This device was used, however, and it permitted vast expansion of CIA manning-strength in the guise of other Government department jobs. All of this went without review and audit.

By the time the Agency was ready to participate in an operation as large as the Indonesian campaign of 1958, it had the resources to open foreign bases, to create an entire supporting Tactical and Transport Air Force, and to demand the services of naval supporting forces. A former World War II air base on a remote Pacific island was reopened and put into commission, and a whole fleet of aircraft was put into major overhaul bases in the States to create an attack force of substantial capability. A rather considerable Air Transport force was able to deliver deep into Indonesia tens of thousands of weapons and the ammunition and other equipment necessary to support such a force, all by airdrop. The CIA had become a major power by 1958 and was ready to enter the world arena as the core of the greatest peacetime operational force ever assembled.

By this time the Agency was not working alone. It was getting the willing and most active support of other elements of the Department of Defense and from the White House and parts of the Government. It was becoming a broad-gauge ST. The CIA was being diverted from its original role by the actions of men who took their motivation from the substance of secret intelligence inputs and turned them into response activities as large as many overt military campaigns. Yet, for all of this, they covered their work in deep security, which of course was a false security, and veiled their true intentions and actions from the rest of the Government, and especially from those whose normal task and responsibility it would have been to carry out such actions had they been so directed by proper policy and authority.

In 1949 the Congress enacted what is called The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, which restated the powers and duties of the CIA as they had been in the National Security Act of 1947, and added some interesting paragraphs concerned primarily with money and personnel. By 1949 it had become apparent that a great number of the personnel assigned to the CIA would be military personnel and that this situation would continue. Thus the new Act spelled out the terms and conditions of such assignments and did this in a manner that would not appear to expose or compromise the system; yet the whole procedure appears in clear text within the law. The clear text is written as though it were a description of the duties of the DCI or of the DDCI only; however, it is actually applicable to all military personnel on duty with the Agency:

(2) . . . the appointment to the office of Director, or Deputy Director, of a commissioned officer of the armed services, and his acceptance of and service in such office, shall in no way affect any status, office, rank, or grade he may occupy or hold in the armed services, or any emolument, perquisite, right, privilege, or benefit incident to or arising out of any such status, office, rank, or grade. Any such commissioned officer shall, while serving in the office of DCI, or DDCI, continue to hold rank and grade not lower than that in which serving at the time of his appointment and to receive the military pay and allowances (active or retired) as the case may be, including personal money allowance payable to a commissioned officer of his grade and length of service for which the appropriate department shall be reimbursed from any funds available to defray the expenses of the CIA. He also shall be paid by the CIA from such funds an annual compensation at the rate equal to the amount by which the compensation established for such position exceeds the amount of his annual military pay and allowances.

(3) The rank and grade of any such commissioned officer shall, during the period in which such commissioned officer occupies the office of DCI or DDCI, be in addition to the numbers and percentages otherwise authorized and appropriated for the armed services of which he is a member.


This is a most important feature of CIA personnel policy. Note that the law states that "the appropriate department shall be reimbursed from any funds available to defray the expenses of the CIA." The CIA is authorized to use money to buy people, and as long as they have the money, they can add people. This is one reason why few people really know how many personnel the Agency has; and why even these few may not know exactly, because so many of the cover people have been lost within the labyrinth of the total Government.

Another key phrase is that in Paragraph 3, wherein it states, "The rank or grade of any such of commissioned officer shall . . . be in addition to the numbers and percentages otherwise authorized . . . for the armed service . . . " The military services, as other departments and agencies of the Government, are bound precisely to certain total personnel strengths and to the percentage of rank and grade throughout those totals. This is an exact amount, and one that must be maintained and accounted for at all times. However, the CIA is not so bound. Thus the services are permitted to provide as many personnel as the CIA requests and can pay for, to the extent that the services simply deduct those totals by rank and grade from their own strict manpower ceilings. As a result, the services encourage certain personnel to join the CIA, and certainly do not discourage them from leaving the roles of the services for that purpose. In a sense, the more the better. Some five thousand or ten thousand military personnel in the CIA are just that many less for the military budget to account for and just that much more strength for the CIA, which it accounts for by "reimbursement". The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 further underscores this bookkeeping device in favor of the CIA in the following manner:

Par 403j. CIA: appropriations; expenditures.

(a) Notwithstanding any other provisions of law, sums made available to the Agency by appropriation or otherwise may be expended for purposes necessary to carry out its functions, including (1) personal services, including personal services without regard to limitations on types of persons to be employed . . . (2) supplies, equipment, and personnel and contractual services otherwise authorized by law and regulations, when approved by the Director.

(b) The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of Government funds; and for objects of a confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature, such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the Director . . .

Not only, then, is the CIA not required to account for the number and grade of all of its people by virtue of the fact that it is authorized to use money to buy people, without regard to other law; but as we see in these latter phrases, the CIA is not required to account for the money it spends either. In 1949 this was a reasonable piece of legislation. The reader may judge for himself whether this same reasonableness applies today and tomorrow.

There is another portion of this Act that touches upon another special facet of the personnel policies of the CIA. It states that "Whenever the Director, the Attorney General and the commissioner of Immigration shall determine that the entry of a particular alien into the United States for permanent residence is in the interest of the national intelligence mission, such alien and his immediate family shall be given entry into the United States for permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws and regulations or to the failure to comply with such laws and regulations pertaining to admissibility: provided, that the number of aliens and members of their immediate families entering the United States under authority of this section shall in no case exceed one hundred persons in any one fiscal year." The common basis of understanding of the provisions of this paragraph is usually given as an allowance made for a valuable defector or official who might not otherwise be able to come into the country for such illegal reasons as that he was patently a Communist or at least a native and citizen of a Communist country. Certainly, in arranging for such defections the DCI and his agents must be able to guarantee to the defector that he and his family will be accepted permanently into the United States.

This is the surface reason for this portion of the law. However, we discuss it here in this chapter on personnel because there are many more "illegal" aliens brought into the country who have been recruited as agents than there are defectors. In one sense of the words, "illegal alien" and "defector" may be about the same thing. However, there cannot be much confusing the roles of defector and agent. Most defectors would not submit to becoming active agents and to going back into the world of clandestine intrigue. However, many men serve the United States who are, in a sense, totally citizens of the world. These men are technically United States citizens by virtue of the application of the above cited law, but they also have been given "citizenship" in other countries as cover. These are extremely intricate ploys that require considerable time, money, and effort to maintain, as well as the dedicated daring of the men so occupied. Some of these men are pilots, navigators, and members of other highly specialized professions, and the least of them would titillate a true-life James Bond on most scores.

They are, of course, but a nucleus of a greater segment of the Agency. There are a great number of non-U.S. citizens who work for the Agency in many capacities. Filipinos, for example, appear in the wake of so many CIA operations, including the Bay of Pigs and many Indochina projects, because there are a large number of skilled Philippines citizens in the regular or contract employ of the Agency.

With such a variegated personnel congregation, the CIA has been given very special authority with respect to retirement. This, too, is spelled out in plain language in the CIA Act of 1949, some of which has the same double meaning as the bits which we have dissected above. Retirement is a special thing for the "deep" Agency employee. If by circumstance any such employee must retire for reasons of health or other infirmity, the Agency is burdened to assure that whatever attention and treatment he may get will at no time result in disclosures that might occur during anesthesia, treatment by drugs, or during other periods when the principal might not be in full control of his mental processes. Furthermore, the CIA must remain concerned about the locale in which such people choose to retire, to assure that they are not unduly exposed to dangerous influences. The not-too-infrequent problems with alcohol and even hard drugs place a special burden upon the Agency. All of these men have been involved in many highly classified matters. All of them have at one time or another been "on the black box(polygraph)", and all of them have been debriefed; but these are no more than the routine precautions that a large government agency can take. Much more remains that must be done. A thorough debriefing may underscore the zones of deep security; but it cannot erase memories, the activity of the brain, and the area of human weaknesses. As more and more men reach retirement age, these problems are increasing. One solution for a great percentage of this problem lies in the area of rapid, effective, and continuing declassification of those numberless episodes that certainly have no reason to be classified. As with so many other things, unnecessary security measures crop up as an artificial generator of problems, whereas many of the problems would go away if unnecessary classification could be ended.

The remaining special characteristic of CIA personnel activity is that which is known in the trade as "cover". Except for the true and overt intelligence employee and other strictly administrative and service types, all Agency employees live under some form of cover. The great majority live out their days with the Agency as Department of Defense employees. Many others have other common cover, that cover which is essential for no more than their credit cards, driver's licenses, and other public documents, just so they will not have to say that they are employed by the CIA.

From this base, the vast intricacies of cover become manifold as the nature of the individual's work increases in areas of high specialization and security. Sometimes, cover is changed, and the man must go through a transition period and develop a whole new character, as when he may have served as a Navy man at one station and then must become an Army man at another. Such situations are rare, because of the ease with which such cover is blown with the passage of time.

Some of the deepest and most total cover exists right inside the U.S. Government itself. Some of the most buried of CIA men have been employed by other departments and agencies for years, and only a few know any longer that they are really CIA. This is a special use of cover, but the CIA gets more per capita benefit from these men than from any others of the profession.

There are other deep cover personnel all over the world; but their existence and occupation is not the subject of this book. That they are there is enough. Some of them exist to assure that others in precarious positions can exist, and the rupture of the thin thread that supports them all is fraught with personal danger to them and their networks. These men are a part of the trade, and all countries know about the profession.

Many people have tried to estimate the total personnel strength of the CIA. This is categorically a useless objective pursued by amateurs. First, there are the open, professional intelligence people. Next there is the vast army of support personnel, many of whom are buried as deeply as the "fun and games" types; upon them depends the success of the clandestine side of the house absolutely. This is a very large group, and it is certainly not all within the structure of the Agency. Then there is the DD/P (the Directorate of Plans) and all that it encompasses. In most respects, this operation is the largest by far, and in certain aspects the border between where DD/P begins and DD/S ends is seldom clear.

Add to all of this the great supporting structure behind both DD/P and DD/S, such as that which exists in Air America and other corporate subsidiaries of the worldwide Agency, and this will include tens of thousands of non-U.S. personnel. For example, Air America alone has no less than four thousand employees in Thailand and not less than four thousand more in Taiwan as of 1972.

Beyond these fringes, there are additional thousands of CIA camp followers. There are members of the business world who enroll themselves or who have become enrolled for various reasons in the lure of "fun and games"; there are people from the academic world, the publications field, and so on. And since the limits of the CIA personnel rosters are really only the limits of how much money that Agency can put its hands on, even the groupings herein set forth simply serve to give evidence of what surrounds us. Would anyone wish to conjecture whether the CIA has been on the moon?
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:25 pm

Chapter 13: Communications: The Web of the World

Perhaps the greatest achievement of modern times is the communications revolution. Time and distance are all but obliterated by the speed and totality of worldwide communications networks -- even outer space networks. We have witnessed a man stepping onto the moon in the full view of live and instant television. We have listened to the President as he placed a call to the men on the moon and talked with them, just as you and I would talk to other men. As this is being written, a satellite laboratory is speeding through uncharted space on its way to the planet Jupiter and beyond. All of these wonders of physical science and of man's ingenuity are in the hands of the ST. The intelligence community has absolutely unlimited communications power, and there is literally no place to hide from it.

The Russians may wish to test fly a new bomber. To do this, they must arrange an intricate communications system between the crew, the instruments in the plane, monitoring airborne aircraft and other stations. The CIA and its sister agency, the NSA, will hear the communications support of the flight and will interpret all of the coded information almost as easily as the Russians themselves who are monitoring it. The Russians will orbit a satellite with intricate and complicated telemetering equipment aboard, designed only for their own ears. The long antenna of the CIA/NSA, among others -- United States and foreign - will monitor this satellite and read it out with ease directly proportional to the skill, technology, and energy they have invested in such things.

A small group of men will meet secretly in a room to discuss the overthrow of a government or to make plans to meet the agent of a foreign power. They will have with them an expert, trained in the high skill of electronic debugging. He will have checked their room and tested the telephone; yet every word they say will be recorded by a gang-monitor at a central switch belonging to the telephone company where all conversations, on any line, being made by anyone with any telephone in that huge network can be monitored with ease.

Soviet messages transmitted by a special device that varies its transmission frequency often and unexpectedly and that has the ability to send a long message in the briefest "squirt" of time will be monitored and recorded accurately. Massive all-wave and all-frequency band receivers with high-speed scanning capability have the means to capture the "squirt messages" and then to draw them out until they are intelligible enough to be turned over to the computers for decoding.

Even infrared signals, sound signals, and earth vibrations, such as are caused by railroad trains and mining operations, are recorded and translated into intelligence. The hum of high energy transmission lines carrying various loads gives indications of peak periods of line usage. There are no secrets.

As Norbert Wiener said years ago, " . . . society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it"; and " . . . development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part." And he adds, " . . . the theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical, is a chapter in the theory of messages."[1]

In these modern times it may be added that the theory of control of governments is also another chapter in the theory of messages. That organization that controls the communication system will have in its power the ability to control the government. One of the greatest attributes of the communications system is its use in the development of feedback, the ability to generate future action -- usually response -- by the sensing of inputs from past performance. The total communications system makes it possible for the intelligence organization to collect and then to grade a great volume of information and to cull from this, those bits that will be made into the daily briefing and the essence of the current intelligence portfolio.

More than anything else, it is this tremendous communications system that makes the Agency operational system what it is. From all over the world, messages of all kinds pour in from agents buried in all sorts of places and making all sorts of contacts. From all over the world, small bits of information gleaned from all kinds of instrumental communications equipment and advanced sensors feed information back into the centers of collection. Behind all of this, there are action officers who evaluate and process the bits that are culled and selected from the gross input from all sources.

Whenever one of these action officers discovers something special, he will do his best to see that it is brought to the attention of his superiors. The system is so constructed that such data moves rapidly from the lower, gaining echelon, to the middle management areas where it is again weighed and evaluated. If the information survives this first sorting process, the action officer will be directed to go back to his source, whether it is mechanical or human, to seek further information to enhance the first bits. The occupational characteristic in this whole operation is that the action begins with the receipt of information. What happens afterwards is generally re-action. The message input becomes a control mechanism itself. The area of interest may build rapidly and require response in hours, or it may cover a period of months or even years. With each round of traffic the overall pattern begins to shape itself, and gradually the little projects become big ones. Then more and more people are put on the job, and responsibility for project development is moved higher and higher up the chain of command, until finally it will be considered for some sort of major action directly under the control of the DD/P and his senior staff.

The fact that information is sought and pursued effectively must not be overlooked or ruled out. When certain events take place, experience teaches that others may follow, and the intelligence machinery will be set in motion to look for such things. This is particularly true in long-range projects. In modern manufacturing, it is impossible to assemble things like television sets or motorcycles without a system of marking and coding the parts so that they may be assembled properly in any plant having that know-how; and so that spare parts may be ordered that will fit the original set properly. Modern manufacturing requires that parts and major assemblies be marked for cost control and inventory purposes. In many instances the marking and coding systems used are very sophisticated. Thus, if a Japanese solid-state transistor radio is put together using "Ten Nines" germanium (the element of germanium pure to .9 to the tenth power), the tiny transistors will be marked with a code that proves they are the genuine product and that they are of that quality.

This not only signifies that the transistors are a quality item; but it also indicates that the Japanese manufacturer has reached that level in the state-of-the-art that permits him to make and use such superior materials and techniques. The same is true for alloys, tolerances, and other things that are essential to quality work. Thus, if an agent buys several television sets in a foreign country and takes them apart to study them, he will find all of the subassemblies, down to tiny bits, coded and marked. If in the process he should find some novel, rare, or extremely precise technique, he will look further into the production methods of that factory and of that country to see what this means.

In a country like the Soviet Union with a highly developed nuclear program and a superior missile and space manufacturing capability, it is to be expected that every so often new telltale discoveries will be made by finding some little item in an exported product that signifies a technological achievement, and perhaps even a new breakthrough. It is almost impossible for any sophisticated manufacturing system to conceal such developments once they have gone into mass production. Furthermore, serial numbers that usually accompany the marking program will show development serially, and one item acquired in an Asian country may carry one series of numbers that link with others found in a Latin American country. Reconstruction of the series which the codes, markings, and numbers reveal will give a quite accurate indication of rate of production, among other things.

From such leads, the system then puts its agents to finding out whether these new metals, techniques, or ideas have developed from the space program, from weapons systems work, or what. The communications system feeds all of this back, and agents all over the world are coordinated in their development of this information speedily and accurately, as if they were assembling some massive jigsaw puzzle.

So all communications bits are not just happenstance; but the distinction usually lies in the difference between intelligence collection and special operations. Since it is our objective to look more closely into the operational efforts of the ST, it is then more in character to see the communications network as a great machine that continually feeds bits of action information into a system that is prepared to respond whenever the "communist-inspired subversive insurgency" button is pushed.

The ambassador to any foreign country is by Presidential appointment the senior official and representative of the Government of the United States. In peacetime, before World War II, his role was relatively uncomplicated, and most of the work done by the ambassador and his staff had to do with the processing of visas and taking care of traveling dignitaries and businessmen. Since World War II, the role of the ambassador has become much more complex. He is still the senior representative of his country, but now he may have with him in the country of his appointment a senior military officer and perhaps even a UN command with U.S. military components. He will have a senior CIA station chief, and he will have many other government officials, such as those from the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Agriculture, and other agencies.

In spite of all of this, the Ambassador is still supposed to be the head of the country team, and all other Americans are supposed to be under his control. Special arrangements have been made where military units have active roles within that country as a part of larger organizations such as NATO. Troops move in and out of the country, and he is informed about such things but he rarely enters into any official contact with them. With the CIA, things are different, although they protest in public that they are always subservient to the ambassador. One of the areas this is most noticeable in is communications. The ambassador has communications channels directly from his post to the State Department. The ambassador has the authority to contact the Secretary of State directly, and some ambassadors, like Galbraith in India, find reason even to contact the President directly. These are exceptions and certainly not the rules of the game.

When an ambassador communicates with State, his messages are received by the geographical-area desk responsible for his country. From there they are processed to the Secretary, Under Secretaries, and wherever else they need to go. Much of this routine is a protocol, which has developed over the years, and much of it is dictated by true security precautions, which demand that diplomatic matters be handled with secrecy and discretion.

In accordance with these practices, the other members of the embassy, such as the labor attach and the agricultural experts, all utilize the embassy communications channels and then rely upon the Department of State to make distribution for them in Washington to their own departments. The same is true of military attach traffic. And in many cases embassy channels may carry certain CIA traffic. But this is not the limit of the CIA capability. In every country the Agency station chief has access in one way or other to direct communications contact with the CIA in Washington and when necessary he has direct contact to the DCI.

The global U.S. military system is without question the most massive, the most powerful, and the most capable communications system in existence. However, the best and most efficacious system in the world belongs to the CIA. In making this statement, allowance should be made for the capability of the National Security Agency, but that is more or less a part of the military system and need not be explored here. The CIA is able to cover the entire world, not like a blanket, but like a rapier. There is no place it cannot reach out to get to an agent or to a busy station chief on its own secure facilities. In doing this, the Agency makes use of all kinds of communications; some are considered rather old and crude but effective, and others are highly sophisticated.

Early in its buildup the CIA obtained the services of one of the military's top communications giants, General Harold McClelland. General McClelland began with a typical military base system and then let brains and technology run their course. He died in 1966 and left behind a superior system and the men to operate it.

When a U-2 is thousands of miles away and all by itself over hostile lands, it is tracked silently by sensitive devices that provide assurance that it is still in operation and on course to a hidden destination. When an agent has made a contact in Istanbul or Koforidua he is able, if he so arranges, to be continually in contact with a back-up agent, either to record his conversation or to provide directions and advice for other activities that may arise. Agents may have effective radios built inconspicuously into a suit coat, antenna and all, and they have motoring pickups (bugs) of fantastic capability and design. But above all this, the most important communications are provided all the time between the station chief -- the man who is the prime mover in any given area and his boss in Washington.

One of the most radical things about the CIA network is that it does not have to go through any intermediate echelons. In State, the ambassador goes through the desk man, and woe befall the ambassador who tries to avoid that simple and red-tape structure. In the military the commanders overseas must go through their in-between military joint command chiefs in addition to the various levels of their own service echelons. Not so with the CIA station chief. When he wants to contact the DCI or the DD/P, he gets on the transmitter and he gets his man. Communications travel with the speed of light; yet many of the finest systems in existence are slowed down by the necessity of going through channels and then of decoding, review action, and encoding for retransmittal. The Agency avoids most of this on its essential traffic. The Agency may have a man who works day and night in a full-time military assignment in India; but when that man has something to send to the CIA, he gets it out through his station chief right to Washington, and none of the military channels will ever see it. The same applies to the ambassador.

There are protests from time to time, and the Agency, for its own bureaucratic well-being, will retransmit a "clear" message by way of State channels or military channels to make it appear that a given wire of the same date and time group was transmitted properly. But when the chips are down, the "hot" message, the one that really got the action done, would have been transmitted by Agency circuits first.

Of course, the reason given for all of this is to provide security over its sources and methods. The same old chestnut appears every time and is swallowed by most of official Washington year after year. There are cases when security for just that reason is essential, but for every one of those occasions that are true and fully justifiable, there are perhaps ten thousand or a hundred thousand times when such security has not been the case, and the CIA separate and direct channel has been used for Agency reasons alone.

For example: There have been times when the Agency wanted to get something done in a certain country but the staff in Washington felt that is should be done on the basis of some agent input of one kind or other and its relationship to other information they had or wanted to use. However, the man in the field, not realizing that Washington wanted it done in a certain manner, did not come up with the exact language the Agency needed to present the idea to the Special Group for action. The Agency would find itself in a position not unlike a player in the parlor game of charades. It was making all the suggestive moves, but the unwitting partner was not getting the idea. On such an occasion the CIA is not averse to getting on its own secret system and canning a message to its contact in the distant country and saying explicitly, "Send us this message with information copies to the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the White House," and to anywhere else where they wish to make an impression. Then when they call the meeting, which they planned to do all along, they can say, for instance, "Gentlemen, we have a message which we understand you all have too, that leads us to believe there is grave trouble on the borders of India." All the other Government conferees especially gathered on the basis of top secret clearances and the need to know would agree that the situation looked grim. Perhaps the Army representative would say, "Yes, we have that message and we have several more from our attach, who says that trouble has been brewing for some time and that the Indian army may need help on the border." The White House might concur by pulling out its sheaf of copies of the attach traffic which also supported the idea that the Indian army was in trouble on the border.

At such time the Agency would ask everyone to look at his copy of message Number 123 from New Delhi Embassy on such a date. That message would say that the trouble on the border was severe; however the group having the problem was the border police and not the army. Since border police assistance would fall under the jurisdiction of the Agency and not the U.S. Army, the Agency would propose that the assistance given to the Indians should be clandestine police support, under the cover of a Military Aid Program project accelerated because of the border problems. Everyone else would have his portfolio of messages and would be convinced that the ClA's view of the situation was correct. The Group would agree that the MAP project should be set up and that the aid delivered should be turned over to the CIA representatives and that the training program should be under CIA operation and direction.

Superior and independent communications makes all the difference in the world at times like these. There are other times when an operator on a special project has the means to communicate with his headquarters in Washington independently of other channels. In such cases, this operator will at times bypass not only the ambassador and military hierarchy, but he may even bypass his own station chief. All of this is excused on the grounds of security and expediency. In some cases the station chief has become incensed over such actions; but, as in the case of the baseball player arguing with the umpire, his anger seldom got him very far. One of the most famous of these differences occurred in the Philippines when Ed Lansdale was operating with Magsaysay, and the station chief, who was on excellent terms with Magsaysay himself, was not aware of some of the operations that Lansdale and his Filipino cohorts had set in motion.

Other instances have arisen where the ambassador and his CIA counterpart have come to grief over message traffic that the ambassador learned of somehow and then demanded from State and CIA in Washington an explanation of what was going on in his country. Such things were more important in the earlier days. As the CIA and the ST have become stronger there are not so many surface problems. Most ambassadors and most military commanders do as the Congress has been doing; they bury their heads in the sand and hope that the peacetime operation will go away so that they will not have to know a thing about it.

When the question "what to do with Trujillo in the Dominican Republic" arose, a great proportion of military and of diplomats in the Department of State defended him. They maintained that Trujillo may not have been the ideal ruler of his country and that his strong one-man government was oppressive and diabolical; but at the same time, he was anti-Communist in the extreme when anti-Communism was supposed to be the epitome of good sense and good character regardless of all else. Why should anyone want to dispose of such a staunch anti-Communist? But several factions converged in the Trujillo case. It became known to those who would overthrow him that if they took action against this island strongman, the United States would not lift a finger.

During this period, there were reports coming from military channels, from diplomatic channels, and from CIA channels. All of these reports came together in Washington in meetings of the highest order, and the fate of the Trujillo regime hung in the balance. It became evident that the United States would not do anything and that the policy would be that if such an overthrow took place, the United States would not support anyone and would not back anyone. However, it also became evident that the United States would not support Trujillo, nor would it warn him or move to protect him. It is this factor that makes a coup d'état possible. It is not so much positive action; it is the understanding that there will be no support of that regime in power by the United States once the uprising begins.

Although the Pentagon Papers do not provide all of the insight, it becomes clear that the Diem regime was toppled not so much by anything the United States did as by the fact that we did nothing. It is this exposure to his enemies that seals the fate of a government leader, as certainly as if the trigger were pulled from the embassy.

One of the key elements in all of these situations is the ability of the Agency to have its own message traffic quickly and deftly in hand while the other major communicators are going through their channels.

In the broad sense, communications involves much more than the means of transmitting messages. In this broad sense the ST has even greater weapons to employ. Even the fastest message system and the most direct routing and processing will not assure supremacy unless the men at both ends of the system are experts and unless they are able to act with the information they have. Here is where the ST excels and where it shows its superiority. An agent in a foreign country can send a message by a select channel with security coding that keeps the information from everyone who does not have the proper clearance and the need to know. This assures that very few people will get that message in the first stage of handling. The basic message will go to a control office in the CIA, and an information copy may go to cleared parties in the White House, State, and Defense. The men who receive these messages in those other departments may very well be CIA personnel who are in cover assignments. This means then that the State, White House, and Defense copies are still in the hands of Agency personnel, even though the record will show that they have been properly transmitted to the other addressees. Thus the control has not been lost, and delivery of these messages will be in strict compliance with and in timing with what the ST wants.

This is why so many messages that have been made public in the Pentagon Papers appear to be part of Pentagon, or more specifically, JCS activity, when in reality this traffic was between Saigon and the Agency, with the information copy being delivered to the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA). This section in the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was manned, for the most part, by military personnel. They did have some normal military functions but most of their work was involved with the support of the CIA. In this capacity they would control communications coming to the Joint Staff and in turn coordinate them with counterpart ClA-support offices in the office of the Secretary of Defense, or to a Focal Point office in each of the military services. During the period described, the OSD offices were those of Bill Bundy, General Lansdale, and others, in such places as the Directorate of Research and Engineering.

To anyone not knowing the process, it would then appear that the Saigon message in question would have been properly staffed to the OSD, JCS, and all services, when in reality it had simply been to all of the CIA control points in those offices. The real military would not have seen it. In cases where action was to follow, it would be up to those persons who received such messages to call them to the attention of the Secretaries and Chiefs of Staff involved. This would be done with care, and yet these senior men seldom had all of the facts and all of the background to be able to see what really was under way since they would be seeing these messages piece by piece and rarely as a whole. Emboldened by knowledge of the fact that they had properly touched base with all parties and offices concerned, the ST would then go ahead with the project, on the assumption that no one had said not to go ahead with it after having been advised.

This was one of the major steps forward taken by Allen Dulles as a result of his report. It looked like a small thing, and it was applied bit by bit; but once the NSC found itself in the position of doing no more than "authorizing" activities of the CIA rather than "directing" them, the roles began to turn 180 degrees, and the ST became the active party. When the NSC was established, it was realized that if such an eminent body of men made decisions and then directed that they be carried out, they would not necessarily be in a position to see that someone actually did carry them out. Therefore, provision was made for an Operations Coordinating Board, (OCB), which would see that the decisions of the President and his Council were carried out. This was effective only as long as the NSC was directing activity. The OCB would require that the NSC staff keep a record of decisions in duplicate, and the Board would ride herd on these decisions and see that they were done. It had trouble doing this when CIA was just getting its proposals "authorized".

When the NSC was divided into a small and elite Special Group for the purpose of working with the CIA on matters that were from time to time clandestine, the task of the OCB became more difficult because of the cloak of security. Still, the OCB tried to keep up with such decisions, if by no other means than to require "blind" progress reports. But when the NSC, through the Special Group, simply sat and listened to outside proposals and then permitted or authorized actions that were highly classified and highly limited by need to know, the role of the OCB became impossible to perform. This was exactly what Allen Dulles wanted. His report had stated that he should be able to initiate operations and to take his proposals directly to the President, and that the President or an authorized representative would then approve what the DCI brought to him. He had not been given that authority by the law, and he could not have done it under Truman because Truman used the NSC and OCB differently from what Dulles visualized. But year by year during the Eisenhower Administration he worked to erode the NSC-OCB pattern until he was able to work through the Special Group 5412/2 almost without interference. Part of his success was due to his effective control of communications, which made it appear all the time that projects had been thoroughly staffed in all parts of the Government concerned and that the approval of the NSC (Special Group) was merely a formality.

By the time Kennedy became President, he was led to believe that the NSC was unimportant, one of those Eisenhower idiosyncrasies, and that he could do without it. If he could do without the NSC, he certainly could do without the OCB. (Since it could be shown that the OCB was not able to perform its job properly because it was unable to find out what the Special Group had approved, there was no reason for OCB either.) Without either of these bodies in session, the DCI was able to move in as he desired, with very little effective control from any Council member. This was a major change brought about by a kind of evolution and erosion. It was certainly a downgrading process; but the trouble was that all too few people had any realization of what had taken place, and those who had were either with the CIA or the ST, and they were not about to tell anyone.

In concluding our review of this function of the CIA communications system, it would be a mistake to overlook what is perhaps the heaviest source of volume. The CIA monitors electronic signals all over the world, and it gathers so much of this that it is practically swamped with taped information. However, it does a most excellent job in keeping its ear to the traffic of the world. There can be little question that an enlightened system of listening can pick up about all of the information any country would ever need, to keep itself well informed of what any other country is doing. In this day and age, almost all major parts of the Government and of industry must utilize and depend upon electronically transmitted messages and data transfer. All of this can be monitored, and even if it is in code it can be read sooner or later. This is one task of the Agency, and it is a major part of its role and responsibility to coordinate all national intelligence.

Perhaps no other function of the Agency so clearly demonstrates the dual nature of the CIA more than does communications. In the intelligence business, communications is absolutely essential to make bits of information available to the collection center. However, by its very nature, the more capacity the communications system has and the more information bits it handles the more it tends to degrade the value of the information. The Agency receives so much information every day that the great proportion of it is never seen, never processed, and never analyzed . . . and most likely should not be.

On the other hand, in this flood of information there is always the good chance that much is intentional deception and gibberish. Just having the information does not insure that it is worth anything. In this country in particular, information on almost anything is becoming something that has a price and can be bought and sold; yet even this does not ensure that it has value.

From the other point of view, a high-caliber communications system makes it possible for the center to go out to all of its outposts and agents with instructions seeking certain information of value. This is certain to produce the best input, since the return product will be what is sought and not some random article. One of the greatest needs of an intelligence system is to know what it is looking for, along with all of the technical know-how in the organization. "Know what" is so much more valuable than know-how.

But, as we said above, communications brings out the duality of the agency. While agents all over the world are seeking information, the operator is always looking for that choice morsel of data that can be used for another operation. In all of the material flashed over the communications network, there are those special bits and pieces -- border trouble between two countries, a political slaying, an uprising in a remote village, a student riot on an urban campus -- that provide fuel for clandestine operations. Such things provide the "fun and games" people with the fuel for their fires.

When the Agency wishes to pursue one of these leads, it flashes the word back to get more information. It may activate a dormant agent network to see what further information can be acquired. If the situation warrants, agents may be flown in quickly to where the action is. A planeload of guns may be moved to a border area for early airdrop if called for; and so it goes. To the clandestine operators, communications is the lifeblood of the whole business.

One thing is common to both sides. They always wish to keep their information secret. As we have seen, there are many reasons for secrecy, and many of them have little to do with real secrecy -- which would keep the information, or the fact that we have it, from the enemy. But both parties should keep in mind that information is a continuing process. The dissemination of all information, all secrets, is only a matter of time. There is no "first line of defense" for the brain. Any idea conceived by one brain and known to a few more is bound to be general information in a short time. The purpose of secrecy is self-defeating. It is much more important for us to have adequate knowledge than it is for us to try to keep some other country from that knowledge. More harm is done every day by keeping essential information from those who should have it than ever is done by those whom we say we are trying to keep from getting it. If more experienced military men had known about the Bay of Pigs operation, it either would not have happened, or if it did, it would have had a better chance of success. On the other hand, the very people whom the cloak of secrecy was supposed to keep from knowing about the operation, ostensibly the Cubans and the Russians, knew all they needed to know about it.

The best communications system in the world is certainly a tremendous asset for any intelligence organization; but in the hands of those who wish to use its information for the creation and promotion of clandestine operations it is another one of those facilities that lead to the type of problems described by President Truman and Arnold Toynbee.

_______

Notes:

1. The Human Use of Human Beings, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1954.
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:26 pm

Chapter 14: Transportation: Anywhere in the World -- Now

In moonlight so clear that the high Himalayas could be seen one hundred miles away, an Air Force C-130 transport few over the multinational border region of Laos, Burma, and China. In the cargo compartment a small, highly skilled team of Tibetan Khamba tribesmen huddled quietly beside the heavy airdrop pallets that lined the center compartment. Under a dim light in the forward part of the huge cargo area, four Agency men played nickel-and-dime poker while they sipped hot coffee from the plane's airborne kitchen hotplate. The crew peered into the darkness at brilliant stars guiding them on into the vast remoteness of Western China. From time to time the navigator was busy taking star shots to verify the electronic navigation signals he was getting, but which were growing dimmer and less reliable as each hour passed.

The Operations officials of the Agency had directed that the crew fly as low and as close to the horizon as they could with safety, so that that their radar profile would be obscured by ground clutter. This same low pattern played havoc with long-range navigational signals from remote sites. But this gave the experienced crew little concern. The C-130 was in fine shape, the four turboprop engines purred in their sleek nacelles, and fuel flow was well within the flight-plan parameters. Precise navigation at this point was essential only to verify wind conditions and to warn if major shifts in strength and direction might have an impact upon total effective range. They knew that this mission was going to demand all the range the C-130 had, and a little more. The target for the airdrop of the Khambas and the black cargo was in the vicinity of Koko Nor, deep in the outback of unknown China.

A trainload of olive-drab Gl six-by-six U.S. Army trucks had been delivered to a siding in North Carolina. A crew of men had worked for days unloading the trucks and towing them to a small remote dockside facility for loading onto an old, World War II front-loading landing craft. Another old, but newly shipshape, vessel lay at anchor, ready to shove off for the south as soon as the last shipment of trucks had been hoisted aboard. Both ships, with skeleton crews, slipped out of the port quietly and ran southward to Puerto Rico, where they would await orders to join the small armada bound for an unknown beach in the Bay of Pigs region of western Cuba.

The temperature sometimes reached 125 degrees, perhaps even 135 degrees, in the scorching sunlight of northern Libya. The jet fighters lining the runways shimmered in the ever-present mirage that hung over the concrete runways. Men fueling these planes wore heavy gloves, in spite of the intense heat, to protect themselves from burns. Far across this huge base in the remote area reserved for rockets and other armament, a few low outbuildings were the only evidence of a below-ground ammunition and arms cache of a most unusual nature. A steady stream of trucks had been weaving back and forth all day from the huge C-124 transport planes to this dump area to unload heavy cases of guns. These were not the usual World War II leftovers. These were British Enfields, French guns, and most important, they were a good mix of guns from Iron Curtain countries, picked up from many sources, including war-captured booty from the Israeli campaign in the Sinai Desert.

The common thread through all of these anecdotes is the fact that in every case the Agency was operating in its own interest with transportation provided by the military forces. The aircraft belonged to the U.S. Air Force. The trucks and the special flatbed rail carriers were provided by the U. S. Army. And the ships that made the run to Cuba had been U.S. Navy equipment, refitted for use in that operation. The Agency has ready access to all kinds of transportation all over the world in the global transportation system of the Department of Defense. This great network gives the Agency the opportunity to carry out its work behind the screen of regular military movements. This saves the CIA the problem of covering the bulk of its movements, and it saves a tremendous amount of money. Again, this is money that the Agency usually protests it will gladly reimburse to the prime agent of the DOD, provided it is billed for it. Most shipments made by the CIA through the military networks are made to and from Agency cover units using military designations. The cost therefore is not identifiable unless a knowledgeable person intercepts the shipment. This is not likely, because the Agency will protest and the top echelons of the service will support it that the high classification of the shipment precludes such identification. Thus the bulk airlift of tons of guns, which would mean nothing to military shipping clerks, travels without charge under the guise of secrecy.

Much military shipment is made by contract airlift. During the peak Vietnam operation years, the total of military-purchased contract-airlift averaged three quarters of a billion dollars per year. With the CIA responsible for a $1 billion a year "pacification" program in Vietnam, it can be seen that the Agency's share of that airlift could have been appreciable; yet the chances are very good that no one ever knew just which shipments were Agency shipments and what to charge for them or how to collect reimbursement for them. When one reflects upon the early days of the CIA and upon the serious precautions taken to assure that the CIA would not grow beyond the size of a small, truly special operations capability, it is most significant to remember how all of this was done and how it has become such a normal and accepted practice today that at times even the U.S. Army has moved into certain operations under the cover of the CIA.

When the CIA leaves the realm of the DOD and must strike out for itself into non-military areas and into areas where military relationships must be abandoned, it is able to use its own funds to provide its own first-class transportation to meet the situation. Most Agency personnel going overseas do so under one form of military cover or other, and as a result they travel on military aircraft or military contract shipping. This includes their household goods and other equipment as well. But there are times when CIA personnel cannot travel as military personnel, and then they travel as ordinary civilians and utilize all other means available.

In foreign countries, the CIA procures fleets of indigenous vehicles to be able to pass more easily among the population among whom they will be working. It would be unwise for some man, attempting to be inconspicuous in Istanbul, to be seen driving around that crowded city in a new Buick or Chrysler. More than likely, the Agency will see that he has a Volkswagen or Renault, and perhaps one that is a few years old. In like manner, the Agency purchases civilian aircraft and boats of various types and sizes, to meet other special requirements. I have known of CIA personnel traveling in dog-sled parties and in sleek civilian business jets.

The Agency does not want for transportation anytime, anywhere, and of any type, and they get so much of it free or for so little relative cost that what they need over and above the bulk military support, their own funds are more than adequate to provide. The Agency has a very large and special fleet of its own equipment, most of which is covered as commercial equipment. At the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA used landing ships of World War II origin, which it had purchased from surplus sources and then refitted for the occasion. In other water moves, the CIA has used special Norwegian-built high speed boats, and it has used small, light canoes. In such instances, the Agency mans these vessels with its own personnel, and augments the agent cadre with experienced men when necessary. Where the Agency excels in this business is with its many clandestine airlines, which are scattered throughout the United States and around the world. The most famous of these is Air America.

Air America, the airline of the flying mercenaries, conjures up stories true and imagined, real and unreal, of the Dragon Lady and Terry and the Pirates and of deep, secret missions into rebel-held territory in countries from faraway Asia to Latin America. Air America, Incorporated, is a worldwide operation, chartered in Delaware and listed solidly in Dun and Bradstreet. Its main offices are within a few hundred yards of the White House, on Washington's posh Connecticut Avenue, and it numbers among its directors many famous names, including several former Navy admirals who have at one time or other been Commanders in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC). Air America is a most important adjunct of the CIA.

When the travel to Mecca is heaviest with the devout Moslems involved in the hadj, a nondescript old transport aircraft will shuttle pilgrims across the Arabian desert. When summer travel peaks in Europe and thousands of students hire charter planes to take them to an international peace festival in Munich, among these available planes will be aircraft belonging to Air America and flying under one of its countless cover, subordinate companies. If the Agency wishes to make a clandestine cargo drop in some out-of-the-way place like Burma, Pakistan, or Indonesia, a perfectly normal appearing commercial transport aircraft will find itself on business through and around that area for a while, until any suspicion that might be aroused has died down; then on one special flight it will open its rear cargo door and para-drop the supplies, equipment, and perhaps agents over the selected target zone.

The men of Air America are legendary, from the incomparable "Earthquake" McCoon, who lost his life over Dien Bien Phu in an unarmed C-119, to nameless and faceless Chinese and Anzacs, who have flown for Air America on flights that would make fiction accounts tame by comparison.

In the middle nineteen fifties, it became necessary to resupply Agency outposts deep in Laos. The usual DC-3 or C-46 from World War II surplus stockpiles required too much runway for some of these rugged areas. Helicopters lacked the range and load-carrying ability required. The CIA turned to light planes and worked with the native tribesmen to clear landing strips deep in the forested valleys of Laos. For a short time these strips were useful, until their adversaries found them and showered them with gunfire from the surrounding mountainsides.

Air America came in and selected landing sites in the most precarious positions. It had become expert in the use of a small, special plane used by the Air Force Special Air Warfare squadrons and by the Army Special Forces troops. This plane was called the L-28, or commercially, the Helio Courier. It was as rugged as a Jeep and could land and take off in remarkably short distances. This ability to land and take off in short distances is not by itself sufficient to commend an aircraft to this special use. Almost any light plane can, with a big engine, take off or land from short distances. However, once that same plane is in the air, if it does not have superior control surfaces and other slow flying characteristics designed for really slow-speed control in the air, it will be lethal in regular service. The Agency learned this the hard way when it and the United States Information Agency (USIA) missions attempted to use other aircraft that seemed able to do the job and were a little cheaper. More than 50 percent of those planes crashed in the first year of use. Meanwhile, the Air America planes and experienced crews actually operated from fantastically short and crude airstrips, which had been cleared by the natives on top of the ridge lines of the high, forested mountains of Laos. Even today, the flight handbook for pilots in Southeast Asia speaks of two categories of landing grounds in Laos -- regular and Helio. Air America and the rugged Helio have made an unheralded and unequaled record all over Laos.

Air America is not a small unseen company. At two bases alone, one in Thailand and one in Taiwan, it has more than four thousand employees at each. To live its cover as a commercial airline, it flies regular routes and is a major contract carrier airline competing with other airlines of the world for flying business and for aircraft maintenance work.

Years ago, when pilots and ground-crew men of the old Chennault Flying Tiger groups decided to stay in China and to form an airline there, CAT Airlines, the forerunner of Air America and others of that time, operated all over the mainland. They bought a fleet of World War II surplus C-46 cargo aircraft and set up a big maintenance facility at a Chinese mainland airport. As the fortunes of war drove them from one base to another, someone decided to put the maintenance facility on board a big war surplus ship. Finally, with the defeat of the forces under Chiang Kai-shek, this shop with its facilities and stockpile of equipment sailed to Taiwan and anchored beside a dock in Tainan. There this most unusual aircraft maintenance facility performed maintenance for a fast-growing and very busy fleet of planes for many years.

One could walk through that ship absolutely amazed at the beehive-like activity on board. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Chinese worked in that ship on stages, rather than floors or decks, joined by narrow catwalks. Many of those workers worked in small basket-like spaces, barely large enough for a small Chinese. Parts and materials were brought to them and poured into each work space as through a funnel. The worker would finish his special task and then drop the part through a short chute, where it would end up for the next worker to do his part. The whole operation worked on a sort of force-of-gravity basis, with the finished item falling out at the bottom, ready for an alert runner to carry it to the packaging room. Whole sets of aircraft engine spark plugs would be specially treated and then placed into a big slab of plank, drilled out specially to accommodate just enough plugs for a certain type of engine, e.g., twenty-eight plugs for a 14-cylinder engine. This was done so mechanics would not have to check plugs; they simply removed all of them and put in a whole set of new plugs, while the old ones would be returned complete to the shop.

Even instruments were rebuilt, and as they were, the faces and decals were changed to have Chinese or English markings, as required. There were propeller shops and wheel shops. Planes could be completely rebuilt from this one facility. As a matter of fact, the CIA had obtained master transparent film slide sets of the aircraft manufacturers parts and supplies kits, and for such planes as the DC-6. Air America could make every part just about as well as Douglas Aircraft. The ClA justified this irregular and perhaps illegal operation on the basis that it was working with sanitized engines and aircraft and that it could not put such items back in the supply line of the services. As a result, instead of buying from Douglas, through the services, it simply made the parts in its Tainan facility. It is entirely possible that complete small aircraft were made in this manner and that Air America or its subsidiaries ended up with more aircraft in operation than it had had in the first place.

This technique is "justified" by the nature of air registry, which precludes the availability and even the existence of "extra" aircraft. Every aircraft built and flown must be registered. Once it has been registered, that serial number stays with it for the rest of its existence. Therefore, if the Agency wishes to remove all traces of identity and ownership from an airplane in order to make it plausibly deniable, it must also arrange to cover that plane in the registry. This is done in many ways, one of which is to assemble an extra plane from the parts available. To begin with, the CIA may be able to salvage a destroyed aircraft and have it declared discarded. Then from the frame or some other essential part it will rebuild the plane from parts not having any serial numbers at all. This method must be used with larger aircraft; but the Tainan facility had the capability to build smaller aircraft from scratch, just by assembling spare parts, many of which it would have made itself right at the plant.

With this splendid maintenance organization, the Agency faces the necessity to assure it sufficient business to be able to live its cover as a commercial establishment. At this date and time it is doubtful that the cover of Air America is of any real value. Certainly, anyone who needs to know by now knows all about Air America; but in any event, such a plant and all that equipment cannot be permitted to stand idle. As a result, Air America and its subsidiary maintenance components bid actively for commercial airline contracts and especially for U.S. military contracts. It is this military business that actually supports Air America. This is true also in the airline passenger and cargo business.

Air America has a fine record, and on the basis of experience and service it is at least the equal of other contract carrier airlines that bid for U.S. military airlift. However, since the Agency has a proprietary interest in Air America, the CIA feels that the services should give the airline every opportunity to bid, and everything else being equal, the opportunity to be selected for contracts up to the minimum income level the Agency holds is essential to keep the airline in business and give it the added capacity to support ST activities when called upon.

There was a time when contract carrier bidding was very competitive because the Pacific airlift had been cut back and there was very little to go around. After a few cycles of bidding, other airlines noted that Air America was getting business steadily, even if not in large volume. One new and most enterprising contract airline president flew into Washington and presented his views to the proper authorities in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and in the Air Force. At every turn he was assured that the bidding had been perfectly legal and correct, and that Air America was getting no more than its share and that Air America had made valid low bids. This man had heard some stories about Air America's pedigree, stories that were very easy to come by in any bar in Hong Kong where Air America pilots were very popular; so he went into town and hired a lawyer. As his good fortune and, no doubt, his good sense would have it, the lawyer he retained was a knowledgeable individual who among other things had served as Secretary of the Air Force.

Accompanied by this gentleman, the airline president returned to the Pentagon and held a brief meeting with certain aware officials there. By the time they left the Pentagon, this airline had the promise of a contract in the Pacific. The contract saved that airline from lean years, and it would be nice to be able to leave the story there with a happy ending.

Actually, once that airline president had learned the trick, it was only inevitable that he would resort to that game again and again. Middle-level executives and appointive officers in the Pentagon rotate and move on after brief terms. With each generation of new faces someone sooner or later would be confronted by the same "pirate" airline president with the same story. Each time, the heavy cloak of security had kept the new man from knowing the antecedents of the case; so he would have to seek help and advice from the staff. Inevitably he would be told, "Do anything you can to placate the man. That subject is highly classified, and we can't let legal action compromise the real facts in the case." As a result, the president would get his contract again and again. Because he knew that, he had all the high cards in the deck. Today that contract carrier advertises as one of the largest and most successful in the business, and its very successful leader has done very well with his secret formula.

What was involved here was not such a lot of money; but it is indicative of a great weakness in this sort of a system. What works in one case works in countless others. It is a sort of blackmail predicated on not breaking security, and no real consideration is given to whether the security is worth the price or not. This same type of "security blackmail" exists in many forms. If a government does not get the Military Aid Program material it thinks it should get, it will put pressure on the CIA liaison people, telling them it will have to stop supporting a reconnaissance unit or some radar installations, or some similar threat. Then CIA puts pressure on the MAP staff and gets the additional material for them, or may even get it out of its own resources of stockpiled military material. Or, as in the case of the Bay of Pigs operation, the governments that assisted Guatemala and Nicaragua either kept what they "found on base" or bargained for more. This upset other assistance plans because other countries claimed the right to more equipment based upon a balanced formula, security or not.

We see other applications of such blackmail, as in the case of the ransom paid to Castro for the Cuban invaders. This figure in money and heavy equipment as well as in medicine has been quoted as being $53 million or more. It seems pertinent to note that so much money and equipment was paid willingly for captured Cubans and as far as we know, not one cent has been offered, except by certain private citizens, for the release of our own prisoners of war in Indochina.

After the adventure in Indonesia, considerable amounts of equipment and preferential purchasing rights were paid to the Government of Indonesia as a sort of compensation for that misadventure.

In the case of the airline president above, he has made a success of this technique, which has been exceeded only by the success of Air America itself. This is now a very large and honorable company directed and managed by some very able men. It is the excellence and superiority of the men on the logistics side of CIA who have made the Agency look good year after year in spite of some of the problems created by the more adventuresome operators. As Air America has become quite overt, respectable, and above-board, it in turn has had to be the cover unit for much really deep operational work. It has the capacity and the know-how, and it certainly has the people, to perform aircraft support for almost any operation that can be conceived.

In fact, it is organizations such as Air America that show how the Agency could have done things from the beginning, if it had not turned so quickly to the soft touch in the Department of Defense. If the early opportunists had been content to perform truly clandestine missions of a size and expectation that would have had the chance to remain clandestine, then the CIA might have managed to live within its charter and to have limited its operational efforts to those actually in support of intelligence, instead of becoming a vast international operational force. It was the broad-gauge goals set by the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report and the exploitation of the war-planning largesse of the military that launched the Agency upon a runaway operational activity, which resulted finally in the Indochina venture.
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:32 pm

Chapter 15: Logistics by Miracle

Historians attribute to Napoleon the statement that armies move on their stomachs. In actual practice, it may have worked the other way around. The army's stomach may have been what made the General move. When the great Genghis Khan captured and pillaged a city, his army ate well for a while. However, when the food began to run low Genghis Khan was already looking for the next city to capture. Historians may attribute his conquests to a vast imperial effort; but objective analysis may reveal his sweeping across the cold and hostile land-mass of Asia was due more to the need to feed the growing horde of men behind him than to any other one incontestable factor.

It is logistics that permits armies to move. When the British Army sat at El Alamein holding the Rommel advance at bay, their failure to attack was more a function of logistics than it was of tactics. Montgomery and his great assistant, Alexander, knew all too well that once the army moved, it would be absolutely dependent upon a flow of supplies that must remain unbroken all the way to Tunis. They were not about to give the order to move until that flow of supplies was assured.

When Patton broke out across the fields of France in his dash for the Rhine and the destruction of the German armies, his fate lay in the hands of General J. C. H. Lee, Eisenhower's logistics chief, more than it did in his tactical wizardry.

And so it has been with the CIA. The important thing about the logistics system of the Agency is not that it has so much and that it can do almost anything it wants with its horn of plenty; but that it has achieved this position without specific authorization and quite generally without the knowledge and approval of the rest of the Government, especially Congress. The ultimate control over any agency of the Government lies in the purse-strings that are held by Congress. Yet the Agency grows and grows, and Congress seems to have little to do with it and to know little of what it has created. Of course, everyone knows that the CIA has a fleet of aircraft, tens of thousands of people, ships and trucks, overseas facilities, weapons of all types in vast quantities, and almost limitless funds. Almost anyone, especially any member of Congress can say, "I certainly am aware of the fact that the CIA has secret overseas facilities." And another can say, "I know that the CIA is mixed up with Air America, the contract carrier airline, in some manner or other." Another might add, "I have visited overseas capitals and I have found that the CIA had a number of people there under cover assignments." And some other Congressman might even say that he has heard that the Agency gets plenty of money through various secret channels from other Government sources.

The Agency likes to conceal the fact that it has so much under heavy security wraps. Whether these facts are concealed for real security reasons, or whether they are concealed simply to keep them from the eyes and ears of Congress and of the American public is the big question. Actually, the CIA prefers to keep its wealth under security so that all Americans, including the members of Congress, do not know how much it has and how it got it. There is a very good chance that the other nations of this world have a much better idea of what the CIA has in their countries than we do in this country. They make it their business to know, and we do not. We have just let it happen before our eyes without ever making a real investigation of the facts. If everyone else in the world knows, why shouldn't we? If Greece is the locale of one stockpile and they know what is in it; and if Turkey, Iran, and Jordan all have stockpiles in their countries and know what they contain and where they are, what makes someone here think that they do not talk to each other and compare notes? As a matter of fact, they not only compare notes, they use each other's knowledge to improve their own game. The only ones who don't know what the CIA has in Greece, Turkey, Iran, and Jordan are the American people and their representatives in Congress.

And for all those Congressmen who know about the Agency, there are none who can say that they know all of the things the Agency has of all kinds. Each Congressman may have a smattering of knowledge of some of the things that the Agency has. But the CIA has achieved this vast wealth in manpower, money, and materials, as well as facilities all over the world, without the knowledge of the rest of the Government. This means that the rest of the Government does not know about it in total -- all in one place, as in Congress.

Undoubtedly, someone from the CIA and perhaps from the executive branch of the Government may say, "That is not exactly right. We are fully aware of the total inventory of the Agency. We are aware of its manpower resources and of its goods all over the world, and we have an inventory of its facilities and installations, including those in foreign countries." Certainly, there is no need to doubt or to question such a blanket statement of faith. Somewhere there must be a fairly accurate total of what the CIA is supposed to have; but at that point one will be confronted with the tautology, "This inventory of the Agency lists everything the Agency has; therefore, everything that the Agency has is listed in this inventory."

For the CIA, the idea of property takes on a new meaning. Any other agency of the Government that wanted to use one hundred trucks would have to buy one hundred trucks or make some arrangement with another agency of the Government, or with a private organization, to acquire the trucks. And that agency would have to show in its budget the expenditure of a certain amount of its funds for the purchase or lease of the hundred trucks. In other words, its utilization or ownership of property could be verified and accounted for by reviewing or auditing its appropriated funds. The CIA can use and the CIA can acquire and "own" one hundred trucks without any budgeted fund transaction at all.

The CIA has the authority, or at least it is given the authority by other Government agencies, to create cover organization within other parts of the Government. This is one of the key tasks that the old Dulles-Jackson-Correa report set out for the Agency. Having once created such units, the CIA is then able to use those units as though they were real elements of the covering organization and to do with them pretty much what it pleases. So if the CIA wants to use one hundred Army trucks, it may have one of its Air Force cover units (it could use an Army unit; but it is easier to use cross-service channels to conceal such a transaction) duly and properly requisition the trucks. In response to this order, the Army will furnish, and write off, the trucks to the Air Force. However, the Air Force won't really know that one of its units, a cover unit, has acquired these trucks; so the Air Force will not pick them up on its inventory. The trucks are then in a sort of never-never land. They are "owned" by an Air Force cover unit that the CIA has the authority to direct, and those trucks will be used as the CIA wishes and for as long as the CIA wishes. There have been cases where the CIA turned around and transferred such property to another country in a sort of a CIA-MAP project all of its own.

In this manner, only one of numerous variations, the Agency has acquired countless mountains of material, which it stockpiles, uses, loses, gives away, and just plain warehouses all over the world. Even the Agency doesn't know what it all is and where it all is. No one in the Government really knows how much the Agency has. A corollary of this statement is that the Agency has been able to stockpile money in a somewhat similar manner, because if it had money to buy trucks and then was never billed for them, it still has those funds to spend elsewhere.

With these funds that the CIA has stockpiled for its own use, it develops areas beyond those in the realm of the military and other regular branches of the Government. The Agency has a wonderful little shop called "TSS". Few know what TSS really means; but it probably means something like "Top Secret Stuff". This shop makes all kinds of James Bond trinkets. It is the place where they design briefcases that will not burn, that will blow up if someone attempts to open them the wrong way, and that will put out long spidery legs if they are released by the agent who is carrying them. And it is the shop that puts a full-blown tape recorder into a Zippo lighter case or a ladys lip-rouge container.

The TSS shop works on all kinds of unusual and very special weapons, and it works with chemicals that can perform all manner of special tasks. It has the finest bugging devices available and the very best debugging facilities. TSS goes out into industry and has things made without telling the people who have made them what their uses will be. At one time for photographic purposes the Agency wanted to develop a brilliant floodlight that could be carried on the wing-tip of an airplane in a pod. This light required so much energy to operate it that the normal electrical supply of the aircraft could not ignite it properly. The Agency then developed, with the help of a private corporation, a generator driven by a propeller attached to the pod. This small propeller was so efficient that it could drive a generator for the floodlight to illuminate an entire area below the plane.

Although this was a splendid development, it was found that in a tactical situation the worst thing you could do was to send a plane into a hostile situation lit up like the sun. This would be an easy target for ground gunners. The next step was to synchronize the light and the camera shutter to the point that the flash would be so brilliant and so brief that an unwitting ground party would not realize it had blinked.

This created new problems; a whole new automated photographic and lighting system had to be developed. This was done, and Agency aircraft can now approach targets in the dark, even at times in an engine-out or engine-idling glide for silence, and take high-speed pictures without anyone on the ground knowing that they have been photographed. TSS was also able to make another advance in aerial photography. The U-2 had proved that it could fly across denied or unwitting territory without notice or without danger from attack because of its speed, altitude, and range. It was also a relatively small radar target. However, at the flight altitude at which the U-2 operated, any normal aerial camera was being pushed to its limits. The camera lens had to focus on the target area and put what it saw on film as precisely as possible. At some point the lens became better than the film paper. This meant that the image that the lens put on the paper was finer than the grade and grain of the paper. Therefore the process of enlarging such pictures and then enlarging them again and again became limited, not because the lens could not accurately transmit the image but because the paper itself had a grain structure that began to break down the detail after a certain amount of enlargement. By working on this problem, TSS and its corporate research associates were able to create a means by which enlargement could be carried so far, for example, that it could distinguish between an oval table or a roundtable of about four feet in diameter from the operational altitude of the U-2, or even higher.

This became a most useful facility in the days of the U-2; but it had not reached the zenith of its utility until the Agency went into space. Now the Spy-in-the-Sky orbital laboratories park out in space at about 110 miles mean altitude and take very valuable pictures of the earth's surface on predetermined schedules or on signals. For example, such pictures of the Chinese atomic energy facilities clearly delineate between dry drying flats and moist drying flats. The continuing variations give a fairly accurate estimate of the rate of activity at the facility.

These developments have led to policy problems that this country has not faced up to primarily because so few people really know about them. They are hardly secret from our enemies, and for that matter they are not secrets from our friends. They are the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves in order that secret operations may be continued in the hands of the ST. For example, Secretary of Defense Laird has made a strong case before the Congress on behalf of the development of the B-l supersonic bomber, which the U.S. Air Force states it will need for the defense of the country in the decade of the eighties. As a function of his presentation to Congress, Mr. Laird gave information about a Soviet supersonic bomber, which he said had already been built and flown. As a result of the impact of this information, he drew the conclusion that the United States must get on with a project to build a bomber that would be equal to or even better than the Soviet bomber. In support of what he had been saying about the Soviet bomber he gave sufficient details of that new plane to artists to permit them to arrive at a suitable pictorial representation of it. A copy of this artists' conception of the Soviet bomber appeared in an issue of Time magazine and was used in that periodical as the basis for a strong article in support of a crash program to build an American supersonic bomber without delay. This whole process, which most Americans will recognize as a familiar pattern used for submarines, super-carriers, and for missiles, is intended to make everyone believe that we are behind the Russians and that we must catch up; we must close the bomber gap.

To the tune of an opening request for $11 billion, Congress is supposed to vote for production of this bomber based on the information given in limited fashion and upon a poor picture of an alleged flying aircraft. When the stakes are so high and so costly, it is time that the intelligence community and the DOD give up this facade of secrecy. Everyone knows that the intelligence community uses cameras of great ability and that they use orbiting laboratories from which photographic canisters are dropped for recovery and development. And everyone knows that these orbiting laboratories take pictures of Soviet territory and of any other territory desired. None of these things would be done if the pictures were not excellent and if they were not getting an excellent product. Therefore, if the intelligence community has hard information about a bomber, which includes photographs of that bomber, why should it not show the actual pictures of that bomber to Mr. Laird, to the President, to the Congress, and most of all to the American public and to the whole world? What possible case can be made for keeping such things secret, especially when they are asking for $11 billion? Is the reason they do not show these pictures to Congress the fact that they do not have these pictures? And if they do not have the pictures, why not? Is it because they have been unable to find the bomber and to get a picture of it outside its hangar? Or perhaps their conjecture about the bomber is a bit premature, and the bomber is perhaps only on the Soviet drawing-boards, like too many American bombers?

Of course, there are technical problems. An orbiting photographic laboratory can only take a useful picture of such a bomber at certain optimum times in its orbiting periodic cycles. And an orbiting lab can be tracked by the Soviets, and they can hide the bomber whenever they know a satellite, suspected of being a photographic type, is due to fly by. But, by the same token, there are tactical things the intelligence community can and should be doing to get such pictures anyhow. They are not established to get second-best pictures or none at all. If the long ears of electronic intelligence and of other sensors tell us that the Russians are flying a new supersonic bomber, then there are other ways of getting its picture and of getting so much concrete information about it that we do not have to depend upon incomplete data. This is what an intelligence agency should be for, instead of a lot of other things that it would rather be for.

Such frankness openly discussed and openly aired would give up nothing to our enemies and would in the long run improve the total program. It would be most helpful and it would save billions of dollars. However, so many of these things that the wonders of U.S. industrial capability have developed for the CIA and for its TSS, have been kept under wraps -- not so much because some form of security has been established that makes this reasonable and correct, but because the security shield leaves room for maneuvering when the ST needs to create a story that intelligence, for the time being perhaps, cannot actually support. Furthermore, if the huge spy satellite program were to be brought out in the open as a routine technical achievement, which it is, it might better be operated by NASA or one of the services than by an element of the intelligence community.

Much could be said for the merits of the TSS side of the Agency. The ability of the intelligence community to develop truly remarkable equipment and to extend the reach of surveillance and knowledge has been really magnificent. However, just as one would like to commend the community for having done something well, one realizes that the human factor has crept back in and beclouded the issue again by throwing up artificial barriers about these developments and by keeping them under wraps so that the controlling members of the "big game" may be able at one time or another to spring facts as surprises and at other times to spring surprises with or without the facts; and no one anywhere will be in a position to know otherwise, including, as President Truman has said, the very President and Commander in Chief.

What is so miraculous about the Agency's logistics system is that it has grown to such tremendous proportions in spite of the fact that the NSC directives specifically stated that the CIA should not have the men, money, or materials to pursue operations unless and until the CIA had been directed to carry them out by the NSC in the first place. During the early nineteen fifties, the Council was in the process of issuing a directive revision and an updating of the old NSCID 10/2 -- which would authorize the CIA to carry out special operations when directed by the NSC. A copy of the original draft of this directive used to be in the files of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the paragraph that pertained to what might be called the "logistics plan" of this directive had been carefully and elaborately annotated in plain handwriting. The handwriting was that of the President, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wanted to make it so certain that the Agency could not acquire the logistics base for regular operations that he wrote into this directive his own stipulations.

When the final draft was published, these stringent stipulations were still there, and they required that whenever the Agency was directed to carry out a special operation, it would be instructed as a function of the same decision of the NSC, to request assistance from one Government agency or another, and that this assistance would be granted from "time to time" and would not be kept by the Agency for use from one operation to another. In other words, Eisenhower prohibited the CIA from stockpiling material for clandestine operations.

This philosophy ran at cross-purposes to the course laid down for himself and for his agency by Allen Dulles. Even though his brother was Secretary of State and his friend Ike was in the White House, he found ways to erode and to get around these stipulations. His report had said that a central intelligence agency should have the power to combine the secret intelligence function and the secret operation function under one official -- the DCI. He was getting closer and closer to having the authority to carry out special operations; but to go all the way he must have the logistics. This is why the early war planning role of the Agency had been so important and then later why the Army Special Forces and Air Force Air Resupply and Communications Wing concepts had proved so opportune. With ready resources such as these all over the world, Dulles never lacked for equipment, facilities, and personnel. On top of this, he was greatly aided toward his goal by the zeal and initiative of the services themselves. They practically fought with each other to see who could provide the Agency with the most at the lowest cost, or for nothing at all.

It was this latter phase of developments that moved the CIA into a position of sufficiency. By the time of the mid-fifties, so many military men had been rotated through the Agency and had been retained as ardent disciples of Allen Dulles that the military services were shot through with men who were even more zealous for the CIA than some of its own people were able to be. When the Agency had not figured out some way to get something it wanted, or when in its own straight-laced manner -- and there were some straight-laced people in the Agency -- it could not bring itself to suggest that one of the services should do this or that, it frequently happened that a general or other ranking individual, still carried away by the "fun and games" fervor of his Agency tour, would set up procedures whereby the agency would get exactly what it wanted. In a sense, the whole U-2 program was an outgrowth of such zeal.

Gradually and with security-concealed movement, the Agency advanced toward its goals, and the glacier-like progress was reinforced by the assurance that in its relationship with the DOD the CIA would never lack for logistics support. During the later part of the fifties, the Agency began to set up storage facilities of its own in many foreign countries. Most this equipment was labeled for war-plan-directed utilization and was otherwise concealed as 'military' property. By 1955 the Agency was ready to try for the big game, and by 1955 knew that it had the equipment to move out. Although the directives had not been changed in that respect, no one noticed the movement of the glacier as it slid along toward Dulles-inspired goals. And by 1955 the Agency was more than the CIA -- by that year the quiet intelligence arm of the President had been diverted into a vast operational organization and its direction had passed from the limited control by the DCI to the ST.
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:34 pm

PART IV: The CIA: Some Examples Throughout the World

Chapter 16: Cold War: The Pyrrhic Gambit


BY THE SUMMER OF 1955 THE CIA had grown to the point where it was ready to flex its wings in areas in which it had never before been able to operate and in ways that would test its intragovernmental potential. The first wave of Army Special Forces support of CIA war-planning initiatives and of U.S. Air Force Air Resupply and Communications activity had waned following the Korean War; yet the major overseas base structure that the CIA had been able to establish under the cover of those units remained. Border flights, leaflet drops, and other Iron Curtain sensing operations were under way both in Europe and Asia; but the CIA had no major projects that it could call its own.

The Agency believed that it had the means and the requirement for advanced operations, which it would support on its own initiatives. One of the first of these would be a worldwide airborne capability for electronic intelligence, radio transmission surveillance, photographic and radar intelligence, and other related activity. TSS had developed many things that could be put to work, and the overseas base structure that the DD/S had created under the "war planning" cover was more than adequate to support operations.

A small team of Air Force officers, some real Air Force officers who were on Agency assignment, and other CIA career personnel who operated under Air Force cover, met with U.S. Navy personnel to make arrangements for the purchase of seven new navy aircraft, known as the P2V-7. The P2V was not a new plane. It had been developed shortly after World War II, and the original model at one time held the world record for straight-line unrefueled long-distance flight. The "Dash Seven" model had, in addition to its two large reciprocating engines, two small T-34 Westinghouse jet engines. These small jet engines gave the plane a powerful jet-assisted take-off capability and a burst-of-speed capability, if such should be needed in any hostile situation. The airframe was rugged and proven, and Navy support facilities were available all over the world. Also, adequate cover for this plane was possible because it was slated to be given to many foreign countries as part of the Military Assistance Program. This meant that if one should happen to be lost on a clandestine mission, the United States could disclaim any connection with the flight on the hopeful assumption that whatever country found the wreckage in its backyard would be unable categorically to say whether it came from the United States or from one of several other countries.

The gross weakness of this type of cover is readily apparent. Any target country, such as China, eastern European satellites, or the Soviet Union, would scarcely even consider that these specially equipped aircraft had been launched on such a mission by Greece, Taiwan, or Japan, even if they did have some P2V-7s as part of their MAP. Furthermore, the appearance of any aircraft of this type in the inventory of any country would be made the subject of an attach report, and any worthwhile military intelligence system would have reported within days the existence of the exact number of such aircraft. Therefore, if one did show up as wreckage in a denied area, all that country would have to do to verify any cover story release would be to check its records against what it knew to be there and determine if a plane had in fact been lost. The loss would be readily apparent.

Such rather simple abuses of cover would usually lead one to conclude that the exploitation of cover was no more sincere than most other security devices, and that it had been designed just to play the secrecy game in this country, whether it had any merit vis--vis the world of Communism or not. But in any case, this is the way it all was done.

This latter point, about cover itself, was always made a subject of prime importance by the Agency. Wherever the planes would be operated, they would have to have insignia and special serial numbers; nothing stands out more than an unmarked plane. And they would have to operate as part of some parent, or cover, organization. To be effective cover, these numbers and insignia could not be picked out of thin air. The CIA cannot operate aircraft of its own with a CIA insignia on them. This was one of the prime considerations during the first meetings with the Navy.

Discussions went well up to the point of getting the Navy to agree to provide the worldwide support and cover this operation would require. The Navy could see that if anything ever went wrong with the program, if any one of these planes ever crashed or was shot down over denied territory, it would be the Navy that would have to bear the brunt of the exposure. The Army and Air Force already had a history of going along with the CIA; but the Navy, a service that has created a much stronger sense of tradition, was willing to help; however, it was never willing to "become involved". For a while this impasse brought the P2V-7 negotiations to a standstill.

Finally, the "Air Force" people in the CIA decided that they could find no other suitable aircraft and that they would have to find some other way to get this project going, utilizing their original choice, the P2V-7. They asked for a meeting with the Air Force. It took place sometime in August or September of 1955. It was finally agreed that the CIA would make arrangements with the Navy for the production and purchase of the planes and that they would be delivered to the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force had agreed, at the insistence of the CIA, to try to establish an adequate support program for these Navy aircraft.

Such a support project is not easy. The Air Force had aircraft with similar engines; but everything else about them was different. The Navy maintenance and supply manuals were completely different, and the Air Force might just as well have been supporting a completely new type of aircraft. Parts procurement, which would have to be done with Lockheed, the manufacturer, would require that either the Air Force requisition all parts from the Navy and then have the Navy go to Lockheed, or the Air Force would have to set up a separate supply channel itself to Lockheed. In either case it would be complicated. It is as difficult to support seven aircraft of a new and distinct type as it is to establish procedures to support seven hundred. It would have been easier for the Air Force to have set up a line for seven hundred.

All of these things were worked out, and the CIA "Air Force" officers became the project officers at the Lockheed plant. The seven planes were given production numbers along with the regular Navy production orders, and the project was well under way. Air Force pilots were selected for training in these planes, and Air Force maintenance and supporting men were sent to Navy schools to learn how to maintain these planes. All of these men were eventually informed of the special nature of the project and that the CIA was involved. This meant that all of these men had to be assigned to the CIA and that they were all volunteers for the project.

It was necessary to designate one Air Force base as the prime station for these new planes, for their maintenance and for the basic supply stockpile. At the same time the CIA Air Operations staff and the DDS Air Support staff had come to the conclusion that CIA air activity had reached the point where it should be consolidated on one major base rather than spread out all over the world as it had been. Also, the operational missions of the Agency had reached a level that required worldwide capability instead of local European or Asian capability. The Air Force and the CIA agreed to bring all of this together at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. In terms of real estate, this was the largest base in the Air Force, and all kinds of special operations could be set up at Eglin without becoming apparent to others.

Also this was the Air Force proving ground, and it was customary to find there aircraft of all types from all services, undergoing operational training exercises. That base was an ideal location for such an organization as the CIA would have once it had been assembled. Agreement upon the CIA base at Eglin facilitated the support of the P2V-7s. They would go to Eglin also. However, there were differences, and there were problems.

One of the things the project officer on a regular Air Force procurement program is responsible for is to see that new aircraft stays within the limits of design specifications and that it does not "grow" in the process. If the design weight was to be eighty thousand pounds, then the project officer must see that it does not begin to exceed that weight as it is developed. This problem of growth usually arises as the result of the addition to the airframe of other components that are to be part of the plane's armament and electronic (avionics) packages. This was not quite the problem with the CIA plane because it would not have armament; but because this project had been shrouded in security classification, the usual specialists who would have been monitoring the work on these planes were not permitted to work on the P2V-7s, and the Agency had its own men on the job. Later in the development of the CIA version of the P2V-7, it was found that the plane had taken on a lot of weight and that if all of the extra gadgets and other components that TSS and other "users" had been adding to the plane were to be put on board, these planes would never be able to get off the ground.

As a result, many of these parts had to be redesigned, and all sorts of compromises and Rube Goldberg schemes were devised to package these additional items. For example, one group of the Air Operations shop wanted the plane to have a very modern leaflet drop capability. A huge device, which took up all of the space in the bomb-bay compartment, was designed. It looked something like an oversized honeycomb. Tens of thousands of leaflets could be stacked in small compartments, and then when the bomb-bay doors were opened and special motors activated, leaflets would be peeled off each honeycomb section and distributed like a computer-programmed snow storm. This was an excellent idea, and the leaflet spreader worked like magic; but it could not possibly be permanently attached to the plane. It was too heavy and it was too cumbersome. It would have meant that many of the other gadgets that were being planned would have to be left off.

This started some internal hostilities in the Agency. To pay for this P2V-7 project, the CIA Air Operations staff had put together the requirements of several offices of the Agency and had pooled their funds. This was all right for the purchase of the plane; but it was not a reasonable solution for a working arrangement. Every shop that had contributed to the purchase of the P2V-7 felt that it had a proportionate right to put equipment aboard the plane. However, all equipment requirements do not divide themselves into equal packages by weight, and some of these minor "piggyback" accessories began to overload the plane. There was no one in a clear position of authority and know-how sufficient to overrule each claimant. As a result, a number of non-operational concessions were made, and each P2V-7 grew like Topsy.

This is not an uncommon problem, and as we shall see later, this overgrowth of technology and the lack of restraint placed upon highly classified projects -- because the normal "restrainers", the men whom on normal projects would have known how to deal with such problems, were precluded by security measures from knowing what was going on -- caused many projects to go wrong and many others to grow and expand far beyond the original idea.

To accommodate this problem with the P2V-7, the manufacturer and the augmenting-equipment manufacturers reached the conclusion that most of the extra equipment would have to be modularized and made detachable. In this way, the plane could be configured for one set of targets on one flight and for another set the next time. Even with this compromise, certain elements of every system had to be permanently installed, and by the time the planes became operational, they were always overweight.

(At this very same time the CIA bad won approval for the U-2 project, and the Agency was hard at work with its Air Force supporting elements, getting that major program under way. This meant another large Lockheed project on top of the P2V-7 package. The CIA and the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation have always been especially close. At one time, the CIA was working closely with one group of Navy specialists and with two groups of Air Force personnel, all of them aided by highly skilled technical representatives from the Lockheed Corporation. As Allen Dulles had planned, the CIA would be able to grow operationally by spreading itself into other parts of the Government and into industry and by making itself the catalyst for each project, which to the uninitiated would seem to be a project of the host service and not of the CIA.)

Meanwhile, special crews were being trained at Navy bases from Whidby Island in Washington to Jacksonville, Florida, and support personnel were being made familiar with Navy supply catalogues and procedures. Finally the day came when these special planes could be flown to Europe. Some operated out of Weisbaden, Germany, for several years, and others went to Taiwan. Eglin Air Force Base became the logistics support base for their worldwide operational mission.

These unusual aircraft served many purposes and many masters. They possessed an advanced low-level photographic capability. They were an operational test bed for highly specialized electronic intelligence border surveillance work. They were perhaps the first operationally successful carriers of the new side-looking radar system, and they had that novel and most effective leaflet scattering system. On top of all that, someone had insisted that they have the capability to drop supplies or personnel, so a hatch had been cut in the underside of the plane, which could be opened in flight for that specialized purpose.

It was not so much the success or failure of the P2V-7 project that is important. The real issue is that after 1955 the CIA had reached the point in its development at which it was prepared to take on major global operational missions on its own using -- not just requesting support of -- the vast resources of the DOD for its own ends. This was a major turning point in the process that had begun with the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and that had been moved forward by such other events as the Dulles Report of 1949. By l955 the CIA had progressed from its assigned role as the "quiet intelligence arm of the President" to become the major operational center of power within the military and foreign policy infrastructure of the Government of the United States. The P2V-7 project was another step on the way and was positive evidence of that stage of development.

The important thing was not the size of the project itself or of the CIA operation relative to the gross size of the DOD. Rather, it was the fact that the CIA project was an active operation. It was in a sense a major part of the battle of the Cold War.

Thus the fact that only seven P2V-7s or a few squadrons of U-2s were involved was not the real measure of the impact of the ST. It was the fact that the ST was operational anywhere in the world, fully supported by any element or elements of the DOD and its supporting industrial complex that the CIA needed for its "fun and games". Thus the Western World versus the Communist World Cold War was made increasingly more real because the ST was actively, though clandestinely, engaged.

There was a French colonel in the nineteenth century named DuPicq who wrote that battles -- the great early battles of history -- were not quite the massive, total confrontations that historians have portrayed them to be. On the contrary, they were the close-up hand-to-hand clashes of the few men who were on the contiguous perimeter of opposing forces. Although sixty thousand men may have been arrayed on one side confronted by eighty thousand of the advancing enemy, the only men actually engaged at any one time were those in the front line, and then only those that formed part of the front line who actually came into physical contact with their counterparts and adversaries. Thus it was the task of the general, the man on the white horse, to see that more of his men were in position to engage -- face to face, hand to hand -- the enemy that were on the other side. Yet, the shoulder-to-shoulder mass combat of that time meant only so many men could effectively be crammed into a given area at the same time, and this would roughly be equal for both sides. It was at this juncture that tactics and training began to decide the course of the battle. As men in the front fell others directly behind them had to move into the fray. As the course of battle ebbed and flowed the well-trained, disciplined army would seize the initiative at every turn, not so much demonstrating superior power as superior training, equipment, and morale. Thus the fates of nations and empires rested not so much on huge armies as upon the shoulders of a few men engaged on the perimeter of the battle zone.

In that type of combat, before weapons with longer range -- spears, bow and arrows, and then guns -- the battle was won on the perimeter by small circles of men face to face, locked in deadly combat, with no choice but to go forward or die, until each adversary fell before the physical onslaught. This was essentially a battle of total attrition, with the victory going always to that force that outlasted the foe. Victory was total. It was won by annihilating the vanquished.

In a certain sense this is how the Cold War is being fought. It is all too inevitable that the two greatest powers on earth should oppose each other. General Motors has its Ford; Macy's has Gimbel's, and in nature, positive has negative. Major forces always oppose each other. This is normal. Even without the incessant reminder of real or imagined, actual or potential Cold War, a massive contest would inevitably exist between the United States and the USSR in all areas of contact. We should not lose all sense of proportion as a result of this realization, any more than they should. This confrontation is a fact of life. Thus the battles, large and small, of the "war" are the local face-to-face skirmishes between small, often unnoticed, elements on both sides. These battles may be social, economic, athletic, political, religious, and military. And no matter how large or small, how deadly or insignificant, there is only one way to tally up the score in the won-and-lost column. It is the same way one scores in chess. The game is won by not losing. As in chess, luck plays no part; the loser loses his own game. The winner is simply the man who is there at the end.

Thus the Cold War is a massive, totally grim game of attrition. The loser will be the one who has dissipated all of his resources; the winner will be the one who remains with his force relatively intact. The great and terrible truth is that in this type of warfare the loser may be the victim of deadly attrition brought about as a result of his own futile actions, as much as or even more than by actions of an enemy. Consider the battles of the Cold War all waged against the enemy, Communism. In the Berlin airlift, for example, there may have been a sort of local victory; but in the true measure of victory in the war between the great powers it was the United States that paid very heavily and the USSR that made little more than verbal onslaughts. On the scale of relative total attrition the United States went down and the USSR went up. In this type of scoring, the "up" is relative.

Or look at the score of the massive special operation into the rebellion in Indonesia. Again the battle was waged against Communism. The cost to the United States was very great, much greater than most people realize because so much of what actually took place was concealed quite effectively from the American people, although it was not unknown to the Indonesians, the Chinese, and the Russians, and for that matter, to any other country that chose to know. As a result of that costly Cold War battle, again the attrition of the United States was considerable and that of the USSR was negligible.

The Bay of Pigs was another such major battle. We made a great investment in resources and in our world prestige. Russia's contribution was again little more than words, and they were more the words of Castro than of the men in the Kremlin. Even after the gross failure of this battle, the United States lost further in the tribute it paid in the sum of more than $53 million for the release of the Cuban patriots who had been captured by Castro. It might be pointed out here that it is not so much monetary and other costs of such a secret operation that are important as it is the fact that like the battles of old, it is the ratio -- in the Cuban operation, $53 million to zero -- which is so deadly.

This has been the scoring for the Cold War almost all the way along. When Krushchev no more than threatened western Europe with medium-range rockets after the outbreak of the Suez attack in 1956, he set off a flurry in this country to create a weapon that up to that time had never been considered essential. This led to the hasty and fruitless development of the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on those rockets, and except for their bonus payoff as power systems for certain space projects, the Jupiter, Thor, and Polaris (original model) programs were all hasty tributes to the Cold War threat. Again United States attrition was in the billions of dollars and the USSR loss was little more than the bluster of an angry Krushchev.

The Cold War has been fought along the perimeter of the zones of Communism and of the Free World, along what is called the Iron Curtain, the Northern Tier, and the Bamboo Curtain. In a very special sense, it has been fought, like ancient wars, by those few who actually brush against the hot spots. If anything was ever a better example of the futility of this type of conflict than the operation in Indochina, which has taken place during the past two decades, it would be hard to find. Here again the contribution of the United States, the terrible attrition of our national wealth, prestige, manpower, and money has been stupendous. It is really unparalleled in the history of warfare. One nation has lost so much and its stated adversary has lost and contributed so little. The United States has lost more than fifty-five thousand men and the USSR has lost none. The United States has lost more than $200 billion and perhaps much more if the gross cost is included in this total, and the Soviet Union has lost a few billions at the most -- only enough to assure that we would not lose heart and leave. Unless there is an early realization of these significant facts and with it a major change in the course of events in this country, this massive conflict may well be the last one of this stage of civilization. By all indications now, it is moving on relentlessly to a conclusion of doom for the United States. As in a terrible human chess game, the loser is giving up all of his men as a result of his own errors, and the winner is doing little more than waiting out the game and keeping up the relentless pressures.

This is why it is so important to see how the early small-scale contests between the operational forces under the direction of the ST began to stir the sleeping giant of the Defense Department into an ever-ascending crescendo of Cold War activity. With such minor events as the worldwide program of the P2V-7 and all that it involved, with the much more significant U-2 program escalating from its first tenuous border excursions to that final flight by Gary Powers in May of 1960, the ST was preparing itself for other operations, each one larger and grander than the one that came before. And each time, as the ST prepared a new operation, it was the catalytic force that spurred the passive, counter-punching military establishment further into the quagmire of massive attrition.

By 1958 things had gone so far along these lines that the CIA was able to get itself involved in its most ambitious foreign operation. Contact had been made with an attach from Indonesia in Washington. This is not an unusual thing, and the CIA, the Department of State, and the Defense Department are frequently in contact with foreign individuals and groups who believe, selfishly in most instances, that with the help of the United States they can take over their own Communist oriented government. In the case of the Indonesian attach, the CIA was willing and ready to sound him out further, because it believed the removal of Sukarno from power in Indonesia would return that major Asian nation to the non-Communist family of nations. The "anti-Communist" war cry looked especially good there.

Rebel leaders from one end of the Indonesian island chain to the other were encouraged to organize and to plan a major rebellion against Sukarno.

Meanwhile, the CIA prepared for its most ambitious peacetime operation. A headquarters was established in Singapore, and training bases were set up in the Philippines. An old World War II airfield on a deserted island in the southwest Pacific was reactivated, and other airstrips on remote Philippine territory were prepared for bomber and transport operations. Vast stores of arms and equipment were assembled in Okinawa and in the Philippines.

Indonesians, Filipinos, Chinese, Americans, and other soldiers of fortune were assembled in Okinawa and in the Philippines also, to support the cause. The U.S. Army took part in training the rebels, and the Navy furnished over-the-beach submarine back-up support. The Air Force provided transport aircraft and prepared the fleet of modified B-26 bombers. The B-26 is a light bomber in modern terms, but it had been fitted with a nose assembly for eight 50-caliber machine guns. This is a power-packed punch for this type of warfare. A small fleet of Korean War B-26s was prepared, and a number of covert crews were assembled to fly them.

In the beginning, rebellion broke out in various parts of the island chain, and loyalist forces were forced to deal with them one at a time. While the Indonesian army, under the command of General Nasution, began an attack upon the rebels on the main island of Sumatra it seemed that the rebel cause would be victorious on the other islands.

However, the inability of the rebels to win decisive victories and to enlist the aid of neutrals or of the regular forces of the Government turned the war back gradually in favor of the loyalist army. The struggle was protracted, and the CIA threw everything it had into the attack. Tens of thousands of rebels were armed and equipped from the air and over the beach, but at no time were the rebels ever able to take the offensive.

Meanwhile, the U.S. ambassador in Jakarta had the difficult task of maintaining the semblance that the rebels were acting on their own, and that the United States was not involved. As if to strengthen his hand, the Chief of Naval Operations, then Admiral Arleigh Burke, sent his chief of intelligence to Jakarta right at that time, as much as if to say that certainly there was no U.S. military involvement in these attacks. It was an unusual rebellion, with the CIA doing all it could to help the rebels and with the overt U.S. Government officials doing all they could to maintain normal relations. Then, during an air attack on an Indonesian supply vessel, one of the B-26 bombers was shot down. The pilot and crew were rescued. The pilot turned out to be an American, and his crew was mixed from other nations. This American, Allen Pope, had in his possession all kinds of routine identification documents, including a set of U.S. Air Force orders that proved beyond any doubt that he was an active U.S. Air Force pilot. The only choice left for the Indonesians was to assume that he was either a U.S. Air Force pilot flying for the USAF, or that he was a U.S. Air Force pilot flying in support of the rebels clandestinely at the direction of the CIA.

Things had not been going well, and other CIA assistance had been compromised. It was not long before rebel activity was limited to remote areas where government control had never been strong in the first place. General Nasution continued a mop-up campaign, and the rebellion came to an end.

There were many who asked, when Allen Pope came up for trial in Jakarta, how it happened that a man who was flying clandestine missions could have been carrying so much and such complete identification with him. Why had he not been subjected to a search and other controls that would have assured that he would have been stateless and plausibly deniable if captured? These same questions were asked after Gary Powers had been captured in the Soviet Union after his U-2 had landed there in 1960.

The usual procedure requires that the aircraft, and all records that might ordinarily have been aboard the plane, and all other airborne materials be sanitized before the plane is used on any clandestine mission. A considerable amount of money had been spent by the Air Force to assure that these B-26 aircraft had been sanitized and that all airborne equipment was deniable.

At the forward base where Allen Pope and the other pilots were operating, the CIA was supposed to assure that all crew members were sanitized. This required that they enter a crew room, strip naked, and then be examined by proper authority. From that room they would enter another bare room, where nothing but the flight clothes they would wear would be available. All personal effects and other identification would be removed and left in the first room. From this second room the crew would be driven directly to their aircraft.

However, all crew members, as all other members of the human race, have a strong sense of survival, and they know very well that if they are captured and declared to be stateless, they will then have no legal means to appeal to the United States or to any other nation and they will be shot as spies in accordance with custom. On the other hand, if they are captured and can prove beyond doubt that they are American, then they become valuable pawns in the hands of their captors. The nation that has captured them can deal privately with the U.S. Government in a form of top-level international blackmail. The lives of the men involved becomes of minor importance by that time to both countries compared to the advantages that the capturing country can wring out of the loser with the threat of exposure of the facts of the case. This is the key factor in the present prisoner-of-war problem with Hanoi. Those prisoners, many of whom were captured under unusual circumstances in accordance with the compacts signed in Geneva, have become a much more valuable asset to the Government of Hanoi than what might be called the usual prisoner of war, as in World War II.

With this in mind, it can be said that every agent takes precautionary measures on his own to see that he has some identifying material with him if he can possibly get away with it. It is entirely possible that the crew of the captured B-26 had their identification hidden in the plane and that they retrieved it once they were in the air. This must have been the case because the official reports from the base where they had departed on that mission stated that they had gone through the inspection process outlined above. In spite of all this, the Indonesian Government was able to produce at Allen Pope's trial copies of his recently-dated Air Force orders, which had transferred him to the Philippines. They had his Air Force identification card and a current post exchange card for Clark Air Force Base Manila, and such other documents. There could be no doubt in their minds that Allen Pope was a current Air Force pilot and that he was flying in support of the rebels and for the CIA. Such evidence is all that is needed to expose the hand of the United States and to lay this Government open to pressures.

Students and researchers of subsequent action in Indonesia may have noted that the Pope case and all that it exposed has cost this Government heavily in the years that followed. Although Pope had been captured in 1958, it remained for Bobby Kennedy, during the Administration of President John F Kennedy, to complete some of the remaining "payoff".

The Indonesian campaign was no small matter. It marked the entry of the CIA into the big time. Its failure also marked the beginning of a most unusual career for the CIA. It seemed that the more the CIA failed, the more it grew and prospered. As a direct and immediate result of this failure, the Eisenhower Administration made a searching review of what had happened. Unlike the Bay of Pigs investigation three years later, this review was not made in public and it was not as gentle on the main participants. The leader of all CIA activity in Southeast Asia at the time of the Indonesian action was Frank Wisner. He was then the Deputy Director of Plans for the CIA. He had gone to Singapore himself to head the operation rather than delegate this important task to someone else. Wisner was relieved of duty with the Agency, along with several other top officials, and the whole team that had worked on that program was broken up and scattered to the four winds of Agency assignments.

This brusque action by Eisenhower, although properly justified, led to certain events that have left their record upon history. The activist in the Eisenhower Administration who had gone along with Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner on this campaign was the Vice President, Richard M. Nixon. Also the man who wielded the cudgel when it came time to clean house was the same Richard Nixon. In the government civil service 'safe haven', it is one thing to censure and to wring hands; but it is an entirely different matter actually to fire someone and release him from the protective cocoon of government service. Since the Indonesian campaign was, technically anyway, highly classified, most other government workers did not know why all of these 'nice people' had been fired, and since they were cool to Nixon anyhow, they arose in unison to damn him when he ran for President in 1960.

This in turn led to other events of some magnitude. When Eisenhower directed Allen Dulles to brief Kennedy and Nixon equally during the campaign, Dulles had briefed each of them according to his idea of what each needed to know. He knew that Nixon was up to date on such things as the anti-Castro campaign, so he did not have to go into detail on that with him. And when he briefed Kennedy, he gave the same briefing, being strictly fair and equal. This meant that Kennedy had not been briefed as fully on the anti-Castro plans as Eisenhower might have thought desirable. Allen Dulles was able to report, when challenged, that he had briefed them both equally and that he had not gone into the detail of the covert Cuban campaign (later Bay of Pigs - this will be discussed in detail later). However, other CIA officials at a level well below Allen Dulles did see to it that Kennedy knew all there was to know about the anti-Castro campaign and everything else that might help him in his bitter and strenuous campaign against Nixon.

Thus Nixon, who carefully observed the limits of security, was at a considerable disadvantage, and Kennedy, who could take the stance that he was not "officially" aware of classified things of that nature, could use anything he chose against Nixon. The assistance that he got across the board from the multi-million-civil-servant reservoir of good will easily proved sufficient to tip the scales of that very close election in favor of John F. Kennedy. It is interesting to see how proper action at the time of the Indonesian debacle backlashed against the man who carried it out as a member of the NSC.

With one Deputy Director of Plans gone and with the Agency scrambling to find something to do after it had withdrawn from the area in Indonesia, Allen Dulles turned his attention to the U-2, which had become operational on a grand scale. He made the director of the U-2 program the new Deputy Director of Plans for the Agency, thus promoting Richard Bissell to the highest clandestine operations spot in the U.S. Government.

Meanwhile, the P2V-7 project continued to grow and to operate on a worldwide scale, as did the U-2 project. The Agency also got itself involved in lesser activities all over the world. It was active in Iran and in Ethiopia. It stepped up its work in Laos and Thailand, and it was actively supporting the Chinese Nationalists in their penetration operations into the mainland. Then, in May of 1959, the Agency found itself again involved in one of those totally unexpected catastrophes that seem to occur when least expected and least desired.
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:36 pm

Chapter 17: Mission Astray, Soviet Gamesmanship

HIGH OVER EASTERN TURKEY, THE BIG PLANE tossed fitfully in the turbulent air. Scattered snow-white cloud formations billowed above to thirty-five and forty thousand feet. In the brilliant sunlight and clear air between the clouds the crew could see the distant shores of Lake Van. At Lake Van they would turn to the southeast to cross near Lake Urmia and then on to Tehran. All was going well, and they expected to be in Tehran on schedule or perhaps a little early. The navigator was new in this remote area of the world, but he had noted that the winds were picking up, and he had alerted the pilot to watch for the turn at Lake Van: "You know, if you miss it we'll be in Russia."

Five men were up front in the pilot's compartment, and the others were in the empty cabin, relaxing. One young crew member, enjoying his first visit to the Near East, was taking pictures out of the right side of the plane. He noted one particularly high peak rising all by itself from the knot of mountains around it. The plane was cruising at about nineteen thousand feet, yet this lone majestic peak seemed almost to reach that altitude. Then it was lost from sight because of a cloud and he waited for his next chance to take another picture.

In front of them the pilot saw that they were getting quite close to the big lake, and he was preparing to turn as soon as he reached its near corner. On this highly classified mission, none of them wanted to take any chances of being too close to the Soviet Union. If what was in the heavy briefcases in a tail compartment of the plane ever fell into the hands of the Soviets, the work of many years with the U-2 in the Near East would be exposed, and the participation of those friendly Northern Tier countries would be compromised.

As Lake Van dipped under the nose of the big transport the pilot took the plane off of autopilot, gently banked it to the right, and set a course along the international airway for Tehran, which should have brought him just to the east of Lake Urmia. As he was busy realigning the autopilot he noticed far ahead, under the base of the cumulus clouds, what looked to be the shore of Lake Urmia just about where it should be, slightly to his left. Still thinking of the Soviet Union, he gave the knobs that controlled the autopilot an extra twist to bring the big bird that much more onto the safe side.

The young airman in the rear of the plane was able to get another good view of the big mountain now, off to the right rear, and was preparing to shoot another picture when he saw the first MIG coming up fast on their wing tip. When he saw another MIG and that undeniable Red Star on the big, high slab tail which is the distinguishing feature of the MIG, he dashed up to the cockpit and called to the pilot. At about that time they all could hear the "thutt-thutt-thutt" rapid fire of the MIG's cannon. With MIGs riding just off the right wing tip, the pilot had no choice but to detach the autopilot and veer slightly to the left. Then his co-pilot noticed the Russian pilot motioning them downward. He told the pilot, who cut the power a little and continued to bank left. In this maneuver they began to come full circle, and just as they thought they might be able to slip into a nearby cloud the whole plane shuddered and the men in the cabin saw the left inboard engine burst into flames. Another MIG flying just under their belly had given them a convincing burst of fire in the left engine nacelle.

Without waiting, five of the nine men on board donned parachutes, jettisoned the big main door as soon as the pilot decompressed the cabin air pressure, and bailed out. All of these men landed safely but were burned by flying droplets of molten metal coming from the burning engine. The other four men had no choice but to stay with the plane. With the MIGs flying only a few feet off their wing tips, they gently let the burning plane settle toward the fields below. It was then that the pilot noted a small unfinished airstrip in the farm land. He leveled off and eased the plane toward the only safe haven he could see. As he approached this small landing strip, he noticed that the grass was leaning toward his line of flight and that wind in the few small trees indicated that he would be landing downwind. This meant a fast landing on a small strip; but he did not dare to pull the plane up and try again. He could see the flames in the white-hot inboard engine, and he knew that the wing would fold up and drop off in a few more minutes. He cut his power, dropped the gear, and dropped full flaps, all as fast as he could, and drove the big plane into the ground, planning to bring it to a halt with brakes and luck.

The plane stopped skidding, far out into the field, beyond the end of the unfinished runway. It had been a rough landing, but they were on the ground. Now they had to get out of the plane right away. Because of the tail wind, the fire around the engine was blowing forward and had begun to engulf the entire wing and cockpit area in billowing smoke. The fuel tanks in the outer wing would be the next to go -- and that would be some explosion. The four men on the plane didn't wait to put the ladder down from the cabin doorway which was about nine feet in the air. They swung from the emergency rope and slid to the ground, then ran away from the plane as fast as they could. As they ran they saw smoke billowing above the plane. The MIGs swirled above them as much as to say, "Stand where you are. We're watching." Just as they stopped running they saw where the five parachutes had settled to the earth a few miles away. All nine men had landed. All nine wondered where they were.

In Washington I had just been home for about an hour and had started a charcoal fire in the backyard. The steaks were ready, and my wife and I were finishing a drink on the patio when the telephone rang. My young daughter answered the phone and then called to me, "Mr. White wants to speak to you, Daddy." I picked up the phone, and Mr. White turned out to be General Thomas D. White, then the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force. He did not want to discuss the subject on the telephone, but suggested that I go directly to Allen Dulles house and do whatever I could to help him with a grave problem that had arisen.

In a few minutes I was on the way to Mr. Dulles' home. I pulled into his driveway just before dark, and as I walked through the house to his study I noted four men finishing a tennis match on the court in the rear of the house. Allen Dulles had on a vee-necked tennis sweater with white tennis shorts and peaked hat. He quickly introduced me to Dick Bissell and some of the others who were there and then began to tell me about their problem.

American newsmen in Moscow had been saying that a USAF aircraft was down somewhere in the Soviet Union. This report had been coming in from Moscow for more than eighteen hours. No one had been able to confirm or deny it. The President wanted an answer one way or the other without fail. A check of all Air Force aircraft showed that none were missing and that none were known to be anywhere near the Soviet Union. The other services and all other operators of large transport aircraft that might have been in that area were checked. No aircraft were missing. Quiet requests had been made to the CIA station chiefs in other countries to see if there might have been a foreign plane of a U.S. made type that could have gone down in the Soviet Union. For eighteen hours all of these checks had proved to be fruitless; yet the story from Moscow persisted. It was apparent that the Russians knew more than they had released, and that they were letting someone stew over the problem. A picture of a four-engined aircraft was given to the press and had been radio-photographed to the States. It showed a large plane burning in the last stages of destruction. About all that was left was the towering tail section. (Since the wind had blown from the rear, the fire had burned the front and the wings where the fuel cells were located and had left no more than the high tail section.) This gave little to work on; yet it was quite obviously the tail of a DC-6 or military C-118.

After I talked with them for a while and listened to all of the news they had, I excused myself and went to the Pentagon. In my office there was a top secret safe with a special card file on a great number of the seven-thousand-odd men who worked with me all over the world in special activities that were generally related to the support of the CIA. It consisted of a code of names, numbers, and other information that was indispensable. I took this box of cards and went down into the basement of the Pentagon, to the Air Force Command Post. This is one of the finest communications centers in the world. The duty officer authorized me to enter and to take over one of the telephone positions there on a matter of urgency.

In a few minutes I had reached the home, in Germany, of an Air Force officer who might be able to tell me about a C-118 aircraft that was not in the Air Force inventory and which might be the one that was missing. The plane I was looking for was one that belonged to the CIA itself and one of two considered to be Mr. Dulles' personal planes. I had called this officers' home in Germany by private commercial lines to bypass the military center in Frankfurt. There would be time for them later.

It was about four in the morning then in Weisbaden when the phone was answered by the housekeeper. The officer was not home. I asked where he was and learned simply that he had gone on a flight. This was part of the answer I needed. I called another Air Force officer, one who was a cover type. He told me that the plane was away on a trip. I stopped him there and asked him to go immediately to headquarters and to call me from there on the secure scrambler telephone.

About twenty minutes later the security phone rang, and he told me that General Cabell, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, had arrived in Germany a few days earlier in the special C-118. He had authorized a CIA/Air Force crew to take the plane on a very highly classified and important flight to Tehran and Pakistan. Cabell had gone on to England in a smaller plane, and the nine Agency men had taken the big plane to Cyprus, then to Adana, Turkey and thence to Tehran. He was advised to get the names of the nine men involved while I called Adana.

The next call was to the duty officer at Adana. He was asked to check the records there for the C-118. After a few moments he said that no C-118 had come through Adana on the day in question. He was asked to check again and to query the operations office people even if he had to wake them up one at a time. The plane must have gone through there. Fortunately, he started his search by talking with the weatherman on duty. He had been on duty when the C-118 had left Adana. The meteorologist remembered the crew and the plane. Still they could find no record of the flight. Finally, the duty officer checked the on-duty operations officer to see if perhaps he had held out the clearance papers for that flight. This did the trick. A few minutes after I had gotten the complete crew list from my contact in Germany, a call from Adana came in, stating that the pilot of the C-118 had told the operations officer not to file the clearance he had made but to hold it. This was done frequently on such black flights, and it accounted for why no one had missed the plane. Ordinarily, any overdue Air Force aircraft would be the subject of an alarm and search within one hour after its last report of position. The people at Adana did not know where the plane was going and the people at Tehran did not know that it was expected; so once the plane -- this plane of all planes -- had taken off, no one had monitored the flight at all. Its singular disappearance had gone completely unnoticed, even to the extent that it was not included on the Air Force master inventory or on the DOD master list of all military aircraft.

Having pieced this much together, I called Allen Dulles on the direct line to his home and told him that the plane we were looking for was General Cabell's plane, but that Cabell was not aboard. Within minutes, even at that hour, he was on the phone to his brother, who in turn passed the word on to the White House.

After a few hours rest, I drove back into town and stopped at Allen Dulles' house, picked him up and went to Foster Dulles' house, where we met the Secretary of Defense, at that time Neil McElroy, and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Thomas D. White. The CIA had confirmed that nine men were on the plane, that it had left Adana for Tehran, and that the men had with them aboard the plane some most highly classified material in heavy briefcases. There was nothing to do but announce that a military transport aircraft on a routine trip had been blown off course on its way from Adana, Turkey, en route to Tehran and that it had landed in the Soviet Union south of Baku. At that time we knew no more than that, and we did not know that the plane had been shot down. The Secretary of State picked up the direct telephone to the White House and spoke with the President. The 'official' version of the story was released with the hope that there would be no necessity to elaborate further. However, this would depend upon the identification carried by the crew members and on whether or not the classified materials and other items that might have identified the CIA would be uncovered.

It was not long before the Russians released the story that the big plane had violated its airspace and that MIG fighters had forced it down as it attempted an escape maneuver, by firing a warning burst into the left wing. What we did not know at the time was that the pilot and other crew members had mistaken Lake Sevan for Lake Van. This meant that a greater than expected tail wind had blown them off course to the left and at the same time had put them ahead of schedule. Because of the clouds they missed Lake Van, and with Lake Sevan in sight they felt no concern. They were sure they were on the right course. The CIA had utilized a crew for this flight who did not know the area well, and confusion is not uncommon for a new crew in a strange place. Then, with Lake Sevan as their mistaken turning point they did see water ahead, which looked like Lake Urmia. Not being familiar with Lake Urmia, a larger lake, they mistook the distant shoreline of the Caspian Sea for Lake Urmia and thought all was well. Actually, on this windblown course, they were well inside the Soviet border, somewhat south of Baku,

The key to their mistake was discovered later, when all of the crewmen were questioned and the young airman in the cabin who had been taking pictures told us about the huge mountain off to their right. That was Mount Ararat, over sixteen thousand feet in altitude and the highest peak in the area. Mount Ararat should have been far on their left, and they should have turned to the southeast before they ever got near Ararat. When the airman revealed that he had photographed Mount Ararat through the right window -- looking to the south -- before the turn, and then had seen it again through the same right window after the turn -- thus to the east -- it became indisputably clear that the plane had passed north and then well to the east of Mount Ararat. This was far off course and over Soviet territory.

Another thing we did not know was that as the men in their parachutes were descending they all realized that they were carrying considerable identification, including reference to their USAF "cover" unit that might have compromised them; so they began to clean out their pockets and tear up all they could while going down. Later, they learned that Russian farmers noticed this hail of bits and pieces and that the local police had rounded up scores of people, located most of this evidence, and reassembled it during their captivity in Baku.

Another thing that became evident from the selected pictures the Russians chose to release was the fact that the C-118 did not burn completely; the part that remained after the tail-wind landing was the entire rear of the plane -- where the classified briefcases were. Tests on such briefcases had shown that they could sustain considerable heat and some flame without appreciably damaging the documents inside. The chances were very good that the entire classified cargo had been recovered intact.

This may have saved the men from lengthy captivity. Knowing that they were doing nothing more than transporting briefcases, and that most likely they were little more than a crew and not true agents, the Soviets may have reasoned that it was better to release the men early. That would imply they really believed the men were simply transport crewmen, and it would lead us to attempt to find out how much the Russians might have gained through the unscheduled gratuity of the briefcases. The men were held for nine days, and during this time they were questioned continually. The Russians learned all they needed to know and then let the crew go without too much delay.

One episode stands out clearly and supports the idea that they knew quite well exactly what they had captured. Aboard was an Air Force colonel and the senior officer of the USAF cover unit in Weisbaden, Germany. He was a real Air Force officer and his cover assignment was deep; but not so deep that he would have had great value to the Russians. However, they did not wish to miss any chances. After a few days in Baku the Russians approached the colonel and told him that since he was the senior officer and since it had become obvious to them that he was simply the commander of a transport unit -- his cover story -- they saw no need to have him attend the strenuous interrogations in which the other men were involved. In fact, they suggested that he might enjoy a few days fishing on the Caspian. They also told him that they had located a teacher who happened to be there on his vacation and that this teacher could speak English.

The colonel accepted this offer, and for several days he joined this male teacher on hiking and fishing trips. During this time they talked alot about the United States. It seemed that the teacher had been in Washington during World War II and that he had been a member of the Russian Lend Lease staff. The teacher was able to lead the conversation into many fields, and the colonel thought it best to speak unrestrainedly in order to establish a comfortable relationship that might help all of them to gain their release. However, upon retrospection the colonel did realize that the teacher seemed to have a most excellent insight into current American policies and practices; but in his zeal to win his cooperation the colonel tried to answer what seemed to be simple questions, even when they led at times into some areas that put a little pressure on secrecy.

When the men were released nine days after they had been shot down, a special team had been sent to the Iranian-Soviet border to provide transportation to get them back to Germany without delay. In Germany the men went through lengthy interrogations designed to be somewhat superficial so that they might let their guard down. Then when they were flown to the United States they were put through a program of intense and highly professional interrogation by teams of well-trained FBI, CIA, and military men. It was the Washington debriefing that uncovered the Mount Ararat fix, the location of the briefcases, and the fact that they most probably were not destroyed; this debriefing also developed the "school teacher" angle further. By about the fifth day of debriefing, the combined FBI and CIA team[1] was able to lay a set of pictures on the table before the colonel and with apparent ease show him several very good pictures of the "school teacher". This "vacationing school teacher" was none other than one of the top intelligence men of the Soviet Union. He had been with the Russian staff in Washington during the Lend Lease period in World War II. The very fact that this man himself participated in this mild interrogation on the shores of the Caspian made it quite clear that the Russians had found out that they had made a big catch in the capture of this one plane.

This whole incident in some ways presaged the U-2 affair and in some ways offered clues to other events that followed. The CIA was getting to the point where it took operational matters into its own hands. There was no reason whatsoever why the highly specialized and sanitized C-118 should have been used on a mission close to the Soviet border. Any Air Force aircraft could have been used. Certainly the Russians combed the remains of the plane and found a number of odd features, among them totally unsanitized and "unmarked"[2] component parts.

There was no reason whatsoever to utilize an inexperienced CIA crew on this flight, when the Air Force had a number of crews that were very familiar with the Gordian Knot area of remote Turkey. Actually, there is an effective radio beacon homer at the southern tip of Lake Van, and an experienced crew would have used it properly. For example, the navigator on this CIA crew had not been in this area before and another navigator who was with him had not been there for a very long time.

Perhaps the most damaging oversight, which must have confirmed for the Russians that they had caught a pretty special breed of fish, was that the CIA used unnecessary secrecy with respect to fight clearances of the plane. There was no good reason why the plane, which looked just like a regular Air Force plane, should not have used the customary landing and take-off clearances that all Air Force aircraft use the world over. This would have assured that the flight would have been monitored. Under such regulations the Air Force would have noted the silence of that plane within thirty minutes, and in any case within one hour after its last contact with a ground station. This is standard procedure. Had this been done, a search would have been started right away. Then the Secretary of State and the President would not have had to deny that a plane was missing for a full eighteen hours, while the Russians knew all that time exactly what had taken place. They had the men, the plane and the briefcases. It might be added that a normal part of an Air Force clearance requires confirmation that the crew is competent and has been over the route recently.

Failure of the entire U.S. Government to respond to the reported loss of this aircraft certainly signaled to the Russians that this plane must have been on a special mission, if nothing else did. One year later this same thing happened when the U-2 was lost. At first the United States did not know just where the U-2 had been lost. Then, when it was realized that it was down in Russia, it was assumed that the pilot was dead; so a cover story was used, only to have Krushchev blow it up when he surfaced a live pilot and a nearly whole aircraft, both in Soviet hands.

It goes without saying that the CIA compounded the problems of this incident by permitting a most highly secret cargo to be entrusted to this plane and crew, when it could have set up a more secure and less casual means of transportation even if it had used a normal commercial air carrier. Such disregard for real professionalism, in favor of a growing dependence upon its new-found strength, independence, and size, became more marked as the years passed.

_______

Notes:

1. Headed by the same James McCord later to gain notoriety in the 1972 "Watergate" affair.

2. Industrial components are marked with special numbers, codes and other identifying inscriptions. A thorough intelligence system classifies these things and can gain considerable information from such data. (More later.)
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:38 pm

Chapter 18: Defense, Containment, and Anti-Communism

A DECADE HAD PASSED SINCE JACKSON, DULLES, AND Correa had submitted their report to President Truman. Allen Dulles, a lawyer trained in the ways and traditions of the law, may well have been familiar with the famous concept of Dicey on "Law and Opinion". "The opinion," according to Dicey, "which changes the law is in one sense the opinion of the time when the law is actually altered; in another sense it has often been in England the opinion prevalent some twenty or thirty years before that time; it has been as often as not in reality the opinion not of today but of yesterday."

With a simple twist that quotation can be made to apply to the eventual outcome of the Dulles report. What he wanted and what he planned to do as a result of his work and his study in 1948 -- fully expecting that Thomas E. Dewey would be elected President and that he would then become the DCI -- had all come about anyhow by 1959. The opinion and hopes of yesterday had all but become the law of the day. If this was not entirely true as early as 1959, it was under way in the glacier-like movement of covert events, as we shall see in the next chapter, and by the winter of 1961 the new Kennedy Administration thought that the methods being used and exploited by Allen Dulles and the ST were, in fact and in practice, the law.

Dulles was the DCI, and his agency had grown to great strength and great power and influence in the Government. As a result of the intelligence oversight at the start of the Korean War, we have seen how his immediate predecessor had been able to turn that gross mistake into an advantage and to establish the concept of the Current Intelligence Estimate, and following that success, to develop the practice of the daily report to the President. Exploited as it was during the following seven years, this device became a most effective tool in the hands of Allen Dulles. By playing on what he called "security", he had been able to limit the National Security Council's working control of the CIA to a small, friendly, and hand-picked Special Group, which instead of "directing" the CIA from "time to time", had easily fallen into the practice of convening its meetings simply to put the stamp of approval on proposals made by the CIA for almost any Secret Intelligence-generated Peace-time Clandestine Operation. By 1959 there were almost no restraints. This permitted the CIA to avoid entirely the scrutiny of the OCB and to work outside the continuing monitorship of that board. In effect, by 1959 the Agency was able to run operations itself as it saw fit.

During this same decade Allen Dulles had been able to accomplish his goal to join within one organization the two power-packed elements of Secret Intelligence and Secret Operations. Dulles knew that when he could combine Secret Intelligence and Secret Operations, he could bring them together under conditions of his own choosing to create a force of unequaled power. By the time he had created an agency, which by bypassing all of the barriers of the law and of the NSC, and with the men, the money, and materials sufficient to carry out any operation anywhere in the world, he knew that he had succeeded in turning the tables completely. He was, for all intents and purposes, in control of the foreign policy and clandestine military operational power of the United States for combat in the Cold War. In this sense the vast military establishment, including much of its industrial supporting complex, had become his orchestra. By 1960, after Eisenhower had seen his hopes and dreams of peace crushed by the untimely disaster of the U-2 flight, he warned of this power and of its abuse.

During this formative decade Dulles had positioned CIA personnel and Agency-oriented disciples inconspicuously through out the Government and in many instances had positioned the CIA throughout the business world and the academic community as well. It will be recalled that many of the new Kennedy team came from some of these founts of power, such as The Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In fact, there were few places where the CIA had not taken advantage of covert positions, at home and abroad, for the ostensible purpose of gathering intelligence, and for the undercover purpose of making it possible for the CIA to mount any operation it chose to direct.

As in the case of the wayward C-118, the support of the rebellion in Indonesia, the paramilitary activities in Laos, and other such activities in Tibet, by the time the Agency had reached this position of power it had become somewhat insensitive to the usual and ordinary restraints that normally apply to covert operations. The Agency lost a plane, compromised a crew and the U-2 operations, and exposed its hand in Indonesia. But instead of halting such risky and fruitless operations, it ordered more planes and looked for more "subversive insurgents to counter". It was this attitude and this type of activity that led to many controversial events that have plagued this Government during the second decade of the CIA.

To understand why the CIA has become so controversial, one must understand its motivations and one must understand what happens when things are done clandestinely -- and by this we mean clandestinely within the Government of the United States. Recall that we pointed out how World War II ended with Truman's abolishing the OSS and demobilizing the military as fast as possible. Recall what is more important, that the great war against Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo had been won with the help of the Russians. No matter how anyone may feel about the ideological distinction between the Soviet Government and the United States, the incontrovertible fact is that the Russian people fought the might of Germany on their doorstep, and those people, with our material help as a factor, utterly destroyed the great German war machine. Those of us who have seen the destruction and havoc caused in Russia by that war can vouch for the fact that no conflict in history has ever been so massive and so total.

Then, with victory it was only realistic to have some feeling still for the people of Russia who had given so much to the common cause during that war. And from this feeling there arose in our Government the official view, stated on many occasions by the Secretary of State, among others, that we must establish peace in this world with the Russians and with all people, and that we must not do anything that would divide the world into armed camps and divisive forces. While the official spokesmen of this Government were pledging their faith in the United Nations and in the "one world" of 1946, only one short week passed until the aging Lion of Britain stood up on that platform in Missouri with President Truman beside him and uttered the great cry of the weak, "Beware!" Here in the greatest country on earth, with the greatest victory ever achieved in a major war, with armed forces equipped with the most advanced technology and production know-how, and with all of this increased by an unbelievable order of magnitude because of the possession of the atomic bomb and the proven means to deliver and detonate it, we were being told to beware of that other ally whose ideology we did not like, but certainly whose strength and even whose intentions could scarcely have been dangerous in that era.

But with that cry others were given heart. General Donovan, the Dulles brothers, and many others, including Clark Clifford, preached the doctrine of containment. Even in those days they saw the Soviet danger as a military threat against the United States. How could they support that openly? Even George F. Kennan, then in Moscow, warned of the Soviet danger; but the great distinction was that he saw Russia as a political threat; and the threat that he saw was, more correctly, that the Marxists expected that the United States would crumble in spite of itself. Their threat was not so much what Communism would do to us as what they expected we would do to ourselves. In other words, the Marxists felt that all they had to do was maintain the political pressure, and we would crumble under the weight of our own weaknesses.

Then, behind the curtain of secrecy, the Donovan, Dulles, and Clifford element began to win the day. No longer did the President stand behind his Secretary of State on that declaration that "we shall do nothing to divide the world into blocs." But now he listened to the counsels of the frightened and the weak as they rigged first the Iron Curtain, then the Truman Doctrine, with its shield over NATO, Greece and Turkey, on to the Northern Tier, and then to the Bamboo Curtain. By the end of 1947 the entire military establishment of this great country was technically, semantically, and philosophically reduced to an uncertain and cowering defensive posture. From this position it became dependent upon the eyes and ears and mentality of the intelligence community to tell it what was going on in the rest of the world and where the next threat was coming from. From that day to this, this country has been engaged in the most massive war of attrition ever fought.

By now, the terrifying truth of the matter is that in this last great total war we have been wiped out in every battle. There is no sense in trying to rate the intangibles such as, "We have made friends in Greece" or "We did pretty well in the Congo." The facts are that even though we say that we are engaged in a war with Communism, which at some point inevitably must mean Russia, we have paid all the losses in tens of thousands of men, hundreds of billions of dollars, and prestige beyond measure. On the other side, the Russians have done exactly what Kennan said they would do -- preside over our own demise and demoralization. In a war of attrition, the winner is he who holds his own position while his adversary wastes away. Whether the loser wastes away as a result of strategic moves on the part of the winner, or as a result of his own miscues is of no concern to the historian. All the historian will note is that like the dinosaur, the loser will become extinct in spite of the fact that he seems at the time to rule the world.

The shocking fact is the growth of the power of secret and clandestine actions. The legislators and the Administration that passed into law the National Security Act of 1947, and with it created the CIA, were the same men who most staunchly protested against and denied to the Agency the right to become involved in clandestine operations. Yet it was patently inevitable that the creation of such an agency would lead to its exploitation for just such purposes.

As the National Security Act visualized, the NSC might "from time to time direct" the Agency to carry out a clandestine operation and no more. Congress expected that there would be clandestine operations; but they saw them only as those operations which the highest echelon of the Government would plan and direct. On the other hand, as General Donovan and Allen Dulles had proposed, the very success of Secret Intelligence would from time to time create its own requirements for subsequent clandestine operations for no more reason than that the intelligence input had detected something somewhere. The legislators knew that clandestine operations would grow out of the findings of Secret Intelligence whether or not there was any national plan or policy to carry out in the first place. This is why the Donovan-Dulles-Clifford school of thought requires the existence, real or imagined, of a constant enemy -- Communism. With the constant enemy, every bit of Secret Intelligence that reveals the existence of Communism is its own reason for the development of an operation. Then the counterpunch becomes the action of a machine, not of minds.

Recall the area covered with sprung and set mousetraps we have mentioned before. The traps are there, covering every inch of the floor and every avenue of entree. All the master of the house has to do is wait until a trap has snapped. Then when one trap snaps it most likely activates others, which in turn activate others until all the traps go off. While all of this is going on, the master of the house comes to one preordained conclusion -- there are mice in the house and at least one of those mice has just entered his domain. His "machine" is ready to do the rest.

Throughout this period these were two opposing views. The 1st saw requirements for clandestine operations arising only after and as a result of planning and policy -- in other words, from a position of confidence and strength; the second saw such requirements as an inevitable result of and response to the product of Secret Intelligence -- or from a position of weakness uncertainty, and re-action. In either case, the resort to the use of clandestine operations would be an extremely serious business.

By 1959 there had taken place a rather sinister refocusing of such operations themselves. As we have said earlier, the impetus behind the creation of the CIA came from concern over the gross failures of intelligence during World War II and worry over the possibility that the Soviet Union might acquire the atomic bomb. When the CIA first started, it concentrated its limited efforts in those primary areas of interest in the heartland and contiguous periphery of the Soviet Union. The CIA in those days worked right along with the military as the military establishment developed its "new generation" war plans. As a result, all early targeting of the CIA was directed upon the Soviet Union as a military adversary and on the Iron Curtain countries as part of the primary target area. In other words, the CIA and the military were deeply committed to the "containment" philosophy and dedicated to the encirclement of the Soviet Union and the Communist world.

This action on a continuing basis taxes the counterpuncher severely. He must be always on the alert, always geared for maximum action, and unhesitatingly diligent lest the enemy make a move. The war of attrition was already beginning to take its toll, even in those early years. It would be impossible to maintain a posture of massive retaliation day after day, forever, and then to maintain an alert air defense force, as well as a total intelligence effort supporting both. The whole "defensive-posture system" needed to find some way to maintain its apparent vigilance, but in such a manner that would permit it to relax now and then.

By the end of the decade of the fifties the CIA had found a way to do this and at the same time to make it appear that it was as much in the center of the fray as ever. It began to find Communism in other areas. Rather than devoting all of its time and energies to the Soviet Union and its neighbors, the CIA began to see "problems" in the territories of our friends. By that time the CIA had spread itself all over Africa, Europe (that part that is in the Free World sector), Latin America, and Asia (again the part that is Free World). The CIA spent less and less time concentrating on Russia and its zone of influence and more and more time looking for the influence of Russia and the influence of Communism in our own back yard. As the host nations, among them most of our friends, became increasingly aware of this intrusion, often an unwitting one, they became more and more concerned over the foreign policy and activity of the United States because it was clothed almost everywhere in the black cloak of espionage and clandestine operations. This had become a serious problem. In time this intrusion looked as ominous and sinister as the possibility of Communist intrusion itself.

The change in the very character and traditional nature of this country bothered our friends. Historically, the United States has always professed to be an open society. This government is of the people, and since the power was in the hands of the people, there has always been a majority who believe there is no need for limiting that power. Even as Franklin D. Roosevelt had assumed more and more power, first to fight a terrible depression and then to fight the greatest war in history, few people believed that this usurpation of power by the President was anything more than evidence of the fact that this power was after all being used for the good of the public. Certainly, the American Dream in the minds of most foreigners, at least until 1960, seemed to mean that we lived in an open society and that the power in the hands of the Government was limited to that which could best be used for the good of all citizens.

But with the advent of the Truman Doctrine we heard the new voice of those who had taken the defensive. "The language of military power is the only language," it said in part, and "the main deterrent to Soviet attack on the United States, or to attack on areas of the world . . . vital to our security, will be the military power of this country." This was something Americans had always believed, whether they had in mind Russians, the Red Coats of the British, or the Blitzkrieg forces of Hitler. But then this traditional policy changed: "In addition to maintaining our own strength the United States should support and assist all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the USSR." And then, "as long as the Soviet Government adheres to its present policy the United States should maintain military forces powerful enough to restrain the Soviet Union and to confine Soviet influence to its present area."

In 1947, as a part of the Truman Doctrine, this was the way the idea of containment was planted as a seed in the minds of the American people. This was followed by such things as the Marshall Plan and then the worldwide Military Assistance Programs of various kinds. What had begun as a plan to contain Russia and Communism with strong military force became not a barrier against Russia itself, but a creeping encroachment upon the sovereignty and territory of our own friends. Whether they wanted them or not, we have kept military forces on the soil of our friends for more than thirty years, and there is no end in sight. But even more important, we have developed in more than forty countries strong clandestine and paramilitary forces far more dangerous to the internal welfare of those countries than encroachment of Communism, which is supposed to be the reason for the existence of such action. And these covert forces exist. The "Communism" they are there to guard against is for the most part no more than an interpretation of intent.

Whether one believes in the inviolability of national sovereignty as the supreme power among nations -- unlimited, inalienable, indivisible, absolute, and the very essence of a state -- or whether one believes that sovereignty is an antiquated idea, its great importance in the community of nations cannot be disregarded. If the whole concept of sovereignty were to be abandoned, we would of necessity have to fill the void. We would then face the fact that we are dealing with raw power, and what is important in the nature of power is the end it seeks to serve and the way it serves that end. Whether we accept the concept of absolute sovereignty or whether we see a complex world riddled throughout with power centers and other binding, uncontrollable forms of human relationships, we must realize that these rights, in no matter what form, imply certain duties, such as the duty of non-intervention in the affairs of other nations and the duty to respect the rules and customs of international law. Forcible intervention, which was in less civilized times rather common in the relations of states, is now no longer either condoned or justified and is almost always met with violent condemnation, except where crimes have been committed or where international interests of great importance are endangered.

As this nation turned to a broad though quiet and generally covert campaign of worldwide anti-Communism, it pressed its military forces, economic forces, and its intelligence arm upon this group of more than forty countries. At the same time, it turned from the real Communist states such as Poland, Hungary, and others on the periphery, not to mention the heartlands of Russia and China. Thus the struggle took place in remote areas of the rim-land along the traces of the Iron Curtain. The struggle was hidden from the view of most Americans and from those countries where there was no activity at that time; but not from the countries that were active, such as the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, or Iran -- and certainly these actions were not hidden from the awareness of the Soviet Union. Although we may have cloaked an activity on the border of India in deepest secrecy, who in India and who in Russia would believe that such activity was being supported and directed by anyone else than the covert peacetime operational forces of the United States?

If the Dalai Lama is spirited out of Tibet in the face of an overwhelming Chinese army of conquerors, are the Chinese going to think he found his support in heaven? If the disorganized rebels on the scattered islands of vast Indonesia are suddenly armed with great quantities of modern and effective weapons, including transport aircraft to airdrop such weapons and the bombers to support their attacks, are the Indonesians and the Soviets going to be fooled for even one day by "secrecy" that is supposed to keep them from knowing where this all came from?

The entire position and policy of the United States Government turned to the defensive. It abandoned its position of real leadership in favor of creating a vast intelligence organization and the mightiest peacetime armed force of all time to react to and respond to the activity, real and imagined, of the men in the Kremlin. And we became totally dependent upon the inputs of intelligence from any and all sources, generally quite random, to activate this great force in what, by the time the Kennedy Administration came upon the scene, had come to be called "counterinsurgency".

By this time the entire might of the U.S. military had become a reservoir and magazine operating in support of the operational machinations of the ST and its paramount force, the CIA. Even though at first impact this may appear to be a totally unrealistic picture in terms of the disproportionate ratio of strength of the two organizations, it comes into focus when we consider the analysis by Colonel DuPicq. That is, the only forces that are in combat are those actually on the perimeter -- even on the three-dimensional perimeter as was Gary Powers in his U-2 and these forces not only bear the brunt of the action, but they make the victory or the defeat.

Now a small CIA operation in Laos, for example, involving only a few hundred CIA personnel, real and contract, and a few hundred more or a few thousand U.S. military in support, may seem too small an effort to support the statement that the entire might of the U.S. military existed in support of the ST. But if the ST activity becomes a runaway action, such as it did in Indochina, it is inevitable that the few hundred, and then a few thousand, all too easily became five hundred thousand.

Thus, in those crucial ten years, the clandestine activities of the CIA were redirected from those originally aimed at the Soviet Union and its neighboring states to the many nations of our friends, in which we saw the "rampant", dangerous forces of "subversive insurgency". And today they have been even further directed, along with other powerful arms of secret power, to seek the sources of subversive insurgency within this country itself. All during this refocusing of direction, the ST has increased its utilization of secrecy in order to keep the host nation from knowing what was gong on. Throughout this complex series of operations the Agency went out of its way to keep this information from the Congress and from the people of the United States. There is no doubt that the people of Taiwan, of the Philippines, of France, and of many other countries know more about what the CIA has been doing during the past twenty years than we do here in the United States.

Even as Congress debates whether or not it should be given more intelligence information by the CIA it can be seen that those august men are again being misled by the turn of events. Should Congress rule that the CIA must brief it on current intelligence matters, it will find itself more and more enslaved by the system, just as the President has been by the current intelligence briefings which are his frequent diet. Not only will the CIA then take over the daily indoctrination of key members of Congress, but it will also place them under the "magic" of its security wraps. Every day it briefs the Congress, in whole or in part, it will warn that what they are hearing is Super Red-Hot, Top Secret and that now that they have heard it, they must not mention it to anyone. Then, to provide them with a reasonable alibi, since most of those men have an occupational proclivity for free and easy speech, the CIA will provide them with suitable cover stories. Day after day they will hear about happenings around the world, as the ST wants them to hear about them, and day after day they will have less and less time to hear about real world events from any other source. Thus their own ideas and knowledge of the outside world will decrease from day to day. Then to finish what this process does not accomplish, consider what the day-by-day pabulum of cover story after cover story can do to otherwise intelligent and wholly rational men.

The record is full of the names of men appointed to high office who have come under the influence of the daily dosage of current intelligence. Look what it has done to them. At whose doorstep did men like Robert McNamara, John McCone, Earle Wheeler, Maxwell Taylor, and countless others learn about Vietnam. Their briefings came directly, or at the most once removed, from CIA sources, whether they were "in house" CIA men like Tracy Barnes and Desmond Fitzgerald, or "across the river" CIA men like Bill Bundy, Ed Lansdale, and Bill Rosson.

The course of these events did not just happen as a random or natural development. It was guided, sometimes quite deliberately, by the early work of Clark Clifford, or later by such relatively chance events as those that took place during the latter part of the fifties. It may be worthwhile to trace a course of events that played quite a role in this period just before the election of John F. Kennedy to the office of President.

In 1956, just before the Arab-Israeli War, the British, with Selwyn Lloyd in the Foreign Office, and the French, with Guy Mollet, had made covert plans to help the Israelis against Nasser for their own interests. Naturally, General Dayan wanted to defeat and roll back the Egyptians, and the British and French were more than willing to help re-establish some form of control over the Suez and to relieve Arab pressures on Algeria. These three interested partners planned in secret to strike at Egypt, defeat the Egyptian army, and depose Nasser. A French undercover unit of navy commandos disguised as Arabs was in Cairo for the express purpose of killing Nasser. All of this hinged upon careful timing and secrecy. Neither Britain nor France informed John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, of their plans. As events progressed, Dulles played on this lack of formal coordination heavily, assuming the role of an unwitting and appalled outsider. However, Allen Dulles was providing Foster with all the information he needed in the form of regular and most revealing high-altitude U-2 pictures and other ferret-type intelligence. These revealed the arrival and off-loading of the French and British shipping in Haifa and the subsequent removal of these ships to pick up allied forces in Cyprus for the next phase of the operation.

As is frequently the case in such pressure situations, the partners got concerned about one another's sincerity and reliability, and they all knew that the CIA has long eyes and ears. Or perhaps Dayan had been tipped off that Dulles knew what was going on. For whatever reasons, Dayan jumped off against the Egyptians with crushing air attacks about forty-eight hours ahead of the joint plans. This locked the British and French into the action and called their hands. Dayan swept across the desert. Since the Egyptian air force had been utterly destroyed on the ground, he received little opposition from the unprotected Egyptian ground forces. The French navy commando elements operating under the skillful direction of the youngest admiral in France, Admiral Ponchardier, moved in swiftly to do away with Nasser. French and British forces steamed across the Mediterranean at top speed to join the action. It was certain that Nasser would be knocked out in a short time.

At this point several strange things happened. John Foster Dulles, seeing all this before him and knowing, despite his technical protestations, exactly what was taking place, demanded that the British and French stop where they were and ordered Dayan to a halt. Over the other horizon, Krushchev thundered that if the attack did not stop he would hurl missiles at all hostile targets in Europe. With pressure from Dulles, from Krushchev, and with the vociferous opposition of the Labor Party in England to contend with also, Selwyn Lloyd and Guy Mollet submitted. They called their troops to a halt. The magnificent plan, which might have done much to change the course of history during the past fifteen years, was shattered. This Suez affair has perhaps been one of the most unfortunate episodes of the past twenty-five years. It prevented the British from re-establishing an enlightened control over the Canal, and it created a situation that made further French action in North Africa untenable. And it has led to fifteen years of unrest on the Arab-Israeli border, not to mention what the weight of its failure had upon events in the Far East. One other thing that came out of this odd situation had a tremendous impact upon the United States.

The United States Army at that time had been going downhill since its glorious days in World War II and its slight though unsatisfactory resurgence in Korea. Then, in the pre-Sputnik era the Army had assembled a team around Werner von Braun in an attempt to regain some of its lost glory in space. Just at this time, Maxwell Taylor, the Army Chief of Staff, heard Krushchev's threat to hurl rockets across Europe, loud and clear. He and his staff sat down without delay and computed that this meant that the Russians must have in operational weapons delivery system that could deliver a warhead effectively about 1,750 miles. This was derived from the computation of the average distance from Russian launching sites to all European capitals. Using this as their battle cry, they set up a great clamor for an Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile with about l,800 miles range. The IRBM battle was under way to win supremacy for the Army over the Air Force and the Navy in the new missile and space era.

In the clamor of this battle the Suez crisis was nearly forgotten while the U.S. Army and the Air Force fought it out in the halls of Congress and before the eyes of the unwary public. The Army came up suddenly with an IRBM called the Jupiter and the Air Force with its own Thor. Actually there was very little difference between the two. In fact, they both utilized the same rocket motor and many other common components. However, the battle was on not only for the Jupiter or the Thor; but to determine which service would have the primary responsibility for IRBM warfare. Behind the scenes those who were in the know were aware that the Army and the Air Force were puppets for much more serious contenders.

All of the services were joined in a struggle that really involved the most powerful segments of the vast military-industrial combine. The war was not so much about which service would be supreme in the missile business; but it was about whether the great American automobile industry would get the majority of missile contracts or whether the powerful aviation industry would get these contracts. The Navy joined in the fray later and quietly, on the coattails of the steel industry and the conventional munitions makers, with its Polaris system. (The prime contract was through Lockheed for the missile structure; but the whole system was dependent upon submarines and submarine base support and with a solid propellant system that would utilize vast quantities of explosives, which would mean huge contracts for the munitions industries.) Forces were joined, and Maxwell Taylor was at the forefront, leading his Army contenders and fronting for the automobile industry. At that time the Secretary of Defense was the former president of General Motors, Charles Wilson. The ensuing decision from which there could be no escape was not for him to avoid or to make. How could a pre-eminent auto maker rule against his industry? On the other hand, how could he rule against aviation and its powerful industry? With every practice missile shot, the tensions mounted, and Maxwell Taylor was demanding a decision. He saw this as essential to the automobile industry, which had always been the friend of the Army; but he saw it more as a chance to spur his old commanding general, now his Commander in Chief, into making a decision in favor of the Army. This was something Eisenhower had not done for a long time.

Finally Eisenhower finessed the decision by accepting the resignation of Secretary of Defense Wilson and appointing a man from the soap industry, Neil McElroy of Proctor and Gamble, to make this decision. After more study and after working out a more or less acceptable compromise on the business front, McElroy ruled against Maxwell Taylor and his Jupiter crowd. This, along with other decisions that had made the Army the least of the three armed forces, weighed heavily on General Taylor. By 1959 he announced that he would resign from the Army before the expected termination of his assignment as Chief of Staff. On the first of July 1959 General Lyman L. Lemnitzer succeeded Maxwell Taylor as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.

This was a most important time. We have discussed how the Agency had grown in size and in capacity so that it had become involved in a really major campaign in Indonesia and in the U-2 global operation. While the CIA grew the Army declined in strength as John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower shaped the world for a grand move toward lasting peace based upon the recognition of the power of nuclear weapons and upon the realization that because they were so powerful no reasonable nation would employ them. Even this was not enough. President Eisenhower was embarked upon a crusade for peace. He had mobilized his Administration with but one objective: to leave as a lasting monument enduring peace. However, there were many small clouds on the horizon.

Castro had come to power in Cuba, and he posed a threat to Latin America. Eisenhower went to Acapulco to meet with the President of Mexico and to win assurance that Mexico understood the Castro menace. De Gaulle had become President of France and had embarked upon a new era, with the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle was occupied with Algeria, which was then a losing cause as a result of the failure to defeat Nasser, and he had little time to work on matters other than French problems. There was continuing trouble in Laos; and each time it flared up the country would authorize more CIA activity and little else.

Early in 1959 the Dalai Lama had been forced to leave Tibet as the Chinese Communists swept across that barren country. This fantastic escape and its major significance have been buried in the lore of the CIA as one of those successes that are not talked about. The Dalai Lama would never have been saved without the CIA.

In the spring of 1959, John Foster Dulles resigned, and shortly thereafter he died of cancer. His successor was Christian Herter, who became Eisenhower's greatest ally in the quest for a permanent peace. At the same time, the Chinese Nationalists and the Chinese Communists worked each other over with aircraft and artillery in a contest for the offshore islands of Matsu and Quemoy. But even this sporadic hostility forecast no real problems for the peace offensive.

President Eisenhower sent his Vice President, Richard Nixon, to Russia to meet with Krushchev and to make arrangements for the impending summit meeting. It was at this time that Nixon and Krushchev engaged in the now famous "Kitchen Debate". Then Eisenhower himself went to London and Paris, and by late September he and Krushchev reported that they had "reached an understanding designed to relieve world tensions." Not long after that Eisenhower further reduced the role of the Army by ordering the transfer of all remaining Army ballistic missile programs to NASA. During November, the United States and the USSR announced "a joint nuclear research program", and a few days later, another joint announcement, this time by the United States, United Kingdom, and the USSR confirmed an agreement "on details of a control organization to be set up, with the signing of the nuclear test-ban treaty".

Then, in December President Eisenhower left on an eleven nation, three-week trip to Europe, Asia, and Africa. For a man of his age, who had suffered through a series of near-fatal heart attacks, this was a major undertaking designed to carry him further toward the pinnacle of his lifelong goal of lasting peace. Everywhere he went he was widely acclaimed. He drew the biggest crowd ever assembled in New Delhi, India. Looking back at such events in the light of present times and conditions makes one realize how far the situation has deteriorated since that time. In those halcyon days, whenever the President of the United States visited a foreign capital tremendous crowds of friendly people gathered to do him honor. Now, fourteen years later, this is not the case. The Vietnam war has done much to destroy the American Dream.

When Eisenhower returned, the Government announced in a most unusual and significant move a planned series of summit talks to be convened in Paris in late April and early May of 1960. Summit talks have seldom if ever been announced so far in advance, at least not in public and with so much prospect for real success. On Christmas Day of 1959, Krushchev accepted the invitation, and on New Year's Eve the date for the greatest summit meeting of all was set for May 16, 1960.

Since the collapse of the Indonesian campaign and the serious compromise brought about by the loss of the CIA C-118 aircraft, Allen Dulles had kept the Agency at a low profile. He had lost one of his closest lieutenants with the departure of Frank Wisner in the aftermath of the Indonesian effort. Although neither the Indonesian incident nor the C-118 loss had broken through security bounds enough to expose the CIA, as the Bay of Pigs episode was to do a few years later, he knew and President Eisenhower knew that the Agency had survived two close calls by the slimmest of margins. However, 1959 and 1960 were not quiet years. The CIA and Allen Dulles had a way of surmounting disaster and coming up ahead.

As 1960 began, two great pressure groups collided. President Eisenhower was steering his Administration to the climax of its final term in office. Everything done during the early months of 1960 was dedicated to the task of establishing a foundation for an era of peace and prosperity. The ultimate summit meeting was to be the prelude to his tour, his visit to Moscow and to other capitals of the world on his crusade for peace.

Although all mankind hoped for peace and few would oppose the noble objectives of the aging President, there were still those of the 'fear Communism' school who believed that the Kremlin could never be trusted, in spite of its public willingness to join with President Eisenhower and other leaders. Elements of this underground faction not only raised the banner of anti-Communism, but lived by it and traded upon its power. They played upon the baser motivation of fear that is in all elements of human society. For them it is easier to move men by that method than to attempt it by more noble means. This under ground faction gained strength from three major areas. The Maxwell Taylor school of Army dissidents, along with their powerful industry collaborators, openly opposed the Eisenhower doctrine of military and foreign policy supported by "massive retaliation", and they distrusted the peace offensive.

Another group -- ostensibly Army, Air Force, high-level Office of the Secretary of Defense and Executive Office Building (White House) personnel -- was working quietly on a vast education and reorientation program of civic action, nation-building, and such other ideas, which were in reality a cover for the extension of covert activities of the ST into the countries served by the Mutual Security Program and such other assistance projects. The regular military assistance program countries were the primary targets. The military cover personnel and their civilian disciples worked on this project with the zeal and energy of dedicated missionaries in support of a new and vital religion. (This is the subject of the following chapter.)

The third group was made up of the hard-core CIA and ST elite activists who were increasingly prepared and able to wage clandestine counterinsurgency anywhere in the world with forces of any size, at any time, and in response to intelligence inputs of all kinds and characteristics. For example, the inputs did not have to be anti-Communist when it did not suit the team. They could see danger to this country in almost any situation. The sudden dislike of the Latin dictator Trujillo certainly had nothing to do with anti-Communism, but he went the way of all "enemies" on charges of a special nature, just as Ngo Dinh Diem did in 1963.

Over the years this group had begun by defining the Soviet Union and World Communism as the enemy. Then it had pressed the idea of global containment of the world of Communism. Having built the wall from Norway on the North Sea to Turkey on the Black Sea, and from Iran on the northeast slopes of the Gordian Knot to India and Pakistan on the high Himalayas, and then on along the tenuous northern borders of Burma, Laos, and the 17th parallel in Vietnam, it began the cultivation and indoctrination of the idea that the real danger lay in the spread of Communism into the peripheral countries by means of subversive insurgency and support of wars of national liberation. To complete this fear-of-Communism syndrome, this movement contained a strong element that saw Communism and Communist subversion seeping into and permeating almost every area of the United States.

One of the greatest non-elective, non-ruling power forces of all time is this anti-Communist fanatic group, which rips through to the very heart and soul of the nation, playing upon fear and ignorance for its own selfish and in many cases ignorant, fear crazed interests. More harm has been done from l947 through 1972 to the United States and the world by this rabid and ruthless element than the Kremlin could have hoped to have accomplished itself by any other means short of nuclear war.

This combination of power elites did win its tremendous underground struggle against the peacemakers led by President Eisenhower when the U-2 reconnaissance spy-plane flown by Francis Gary Powers crash-landed in the heart of the Soviet Union only two weeks before the Paris summit conference. Powers' flight was a most unusual event. It was not part of the regularly scheduled series of routine U-2 operations. It was launched and directed by a small cell of inner elite for reasons which may never be possible for anyone to determine. If by any chance the thought had ever occurred to the four men who launched it that the failure of this relatively unimportant flight would completely wreck and vitiate all of the hopes and plans of the Eisenhower Crusade for Peace, they could not have chosen a more effective method or time to have done it. The very fact that what was done could have been done so easily according to a sinister plan, not an accident or Soviet act, serves only to fuel the thought that it might have been done on purpose. Such a simple thing as failure to supply the plane with sufficient hydrogen for the flight could have resulted, just as it did, in the certain flame-out of the engine and the subsequent failure of the mission -- or success of the mission, depending upon the secret intent of those who dispatched it.

This trend of thought is intriguing, because scarcely had the U-2 crashed into the daisy fields of central Russia than all three power groups mentioned above leaped into the void created by the demise of the Eisenhower initiative, to power a ground-swell upon which the Nixon campaign foundered and the Kennedy team rode to victory. The interesting part of all of this, even the ominous part, was that the ground-swell had started even before the collapse of the peace crusade and the summit conference. It would lead an observer, at least one who was very close to the inside activity, almost to believe that there is a great force somewhere that does not want to see a peace crusade succeed; or, to put it in active terms, that wants to promote professional anti-Communism and all that the term has come to mean during the past inglorious decade in Vietnam.
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:41 pm

Chapter 19: The New Doctrine: Special Forces and the Penetration of the Mutual Security Program

THE MILITARY ASSISTANCE PROGRAM HAD BEEN modestly launched as aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947. It was expanded to include military aid to NATO, Iran, Korea, and the Philippines in 1949. Since 1951 it has been absorbed into the annual Mutual Security Act, which is an omnibus legislative enactment covering military aid, developmental aid, technical assistance, and a contingency fund. Over the years, military assistance has been provided to more than forty countries, and in most, if not all of these arrangements, the CIA has been a key factor.

According to the U.S. Army, it is a basic tenet of American foreign policy that Soviet piecemeal aggression must be stopped wherever it occurs so that the balance of power will not shift to the Communists. The most obvious means of carrying out this policy is providing military assistance to our allies so that they will be able to defend themselves. It is further postulated that a recipient's capacity to contribute significantly to resisting active aggression is maximized by building up adequate standing forces and arsenals, and secondly, that the recipient's capacity to maintain internal order and to control subversion is emphasized.

The Army states that there are various goals for the Military Aid Program, depending upon the country and the general region in which it exists. "Aid to Asia is intended to help Asiatic recipients resist internal subversion and perhaps to a more limited extent to resist open aggression." As an internal matter, the Army looks at Military Aid as a program that "straddles the areas of responsibility of the Department of State and of the DOD . . . The development of the MAP involves many agencies."

The program in each country was developed and is controlled by a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). The CIA places both military and civilian personnel within these MAAG offices. In some places the number of Agency personnel exceeds the number of military personnel who were assigned. Of course, if the Agency or the DOD were queried about this by a member of Congress or other Government official, they would deny the existence of these people and justify their denial on the basis that the agents in the MAAG had been "declared to be military" by some paperwork cover, usually kept in a highly classified file back in Washington, in the Agency and the service concerned. Thus they could say, "Yes, everyone in that MAAG is a member of the military establishment." But the truth requires them to add, "and some of them are really CIA employees who are military simply as a function of a cover arrangement." However, they never add that, and no one ever asks them in those specific words.

The important thing about the Military Assistance Program is that it brought with it some new definitions of the role and responsibility of the armed forces of the nation. In the first instance, these definitions seemed quite correct and served to make the Military Assistance Program more meaningful to Americans. However, as the years passed and the MAP work became routine, and as these earlier doctrines became part of the "military language" for both countries involved -- the United States and the host country -- they began to produce subtle changes in the role of the U.S. military. This led to a very sophisticated form of direct intervention in the internal affairs of the forty host countries, and in some cases, it resulted directly in the separation of that nation's armed forces from its political control through practices that will be explained. In this sense the elaborate statements of mission of the mutual security programs are a refined cover story. The military assistance program becomes the means by which the ST may, whenever it finds or suspects "communist-inspired subversive insurgency", increase its role in the armed forces and political organizations of the host country until the trouble becomes an outbreak of open hostility. Thus the "fireman" becomes the man who sets fires rather than the one who puts them out.

One source of this doctrine was the Civil Affairs School at Fort Gordon, Georgia. This Army school dates back to World War II, when it was the training ground for the Civil Affairs and Military Government (CAMG) program. It was the function of those specially trained men to go into countries like Italy and France, which had been under German military domination for several years, and to assist with the rebuilding of the local government in the wartorn areas. As a result, these men had been trained in political functions more than in the military tactical profession. Their record in World War II was outstanding, and after the war the school, although cut back as was most of the military, continued, prospered, and found a new life in working up a curriculum based upon the post-strike phase of a nuclear war. It was in this phase of work that the CAMG school and its doctrine played so prominently into the hands of the CIA by underscoring the potential of the Agency during peacetime for establishing contact in denied areas and for setting up clandestine contacts with the agent, underground networks that would be established. This led the CIA into the war planning function of all major military headquarters, and from its success with this, into its logistics buildup.

It was not unusual, then, to find the CIA returning to the Civil Affairs School during another trying period in an effort to breathe new life into Agency operations, which had been seriously curtailed after the Indonesia fiasco of 1958. MAP was an ideal place for the Agency to operate. As we have said, the CIA had by 1959 become well entrenched in all parts of the U.S. Government. Through MAP, the Agency now was able to establish itself quietly in up to forty foreign countries in ways that its usual civilian and diplomatic cover would not permit. All assistance programs needed recruiting and the CIA volunteered to take over the task of helping the services with recruiting in the host country. If some Iranians were to be selected to attend an electronics course in the United States for six months, someone had to select the men who would go. MMG military personnel who had been selected for their assignments, usually on the basis of their tactical and professional background, were not generally well informed about the people with whom they would be working. The Agency supplied men who spoke the languages of and wherever possible were experts on the host country and who already may have had underground contacts there. They were ideal, then, to take over the responsibility and the chore of selecting the men from the host country who would go to schools in the United States.

This gave the Agency a valuable tool for exploitation. Whereas the MAAG may have looked upon this selection in purely professional terms, the CIA looked upon it in political and rather pragmatic terms. The Agency knew well that any Iranian selected to go to the United States for six months, with extra pay and other allowances such as the ability to purchase a new U.S. automobile at low "diplomatic" prices, was going to leap at the chance to go. Thus if the selection were made wisely the Agency could make some valuable contacts and friends in that country. Needless to say, many of the men who reported to the electronics school didn't know the first thing about electronics and didn't care.

The CIA parleyed these contacts into close friendships in these countries and became in many instances very close to the chosen recipients of "military aid". The next thing was to cultivate the soil in order that both the military and the Agency would benefit from these windfall relationships. This was done by carefully relating the Military Assistance Program to the old slogan, anti-Communism."

The Civil Affairs School curriculum, which was to provide background information on the Military Assistance Program, began with an elaborate summary of a course called "Communist Techniques of Aggression". It laid the groundwork for reflexive anti-Communism by telling all students that "local Communists gradually took over [these countries] under the threat of the military domination of the Red Army at their border," and went on to tell them "how important a tool military power is for shaping men's minds in conditions of conflict short of open warfare." It further characterized the kind of Communism they were talking about by saying, "Diplomacy is the classic means of carrying out relations between nations, and hence is not a typical Communist technique . . . the Russian embassy in a foreign country is always used as the center of espionage activity in that country." Then, as the text became more specific in terms of areas of the world where the United States might have an interest, it took into consideration the problem in Vietnam before Dien Bien Phu: "The French did not dare to form an armed force of members of the indigenous population for fear that it would defect to the Communists." This made good instruction as far as the Army was concerned in those formative days. It sugar-coated the cover story. But as we know, the French did try to Vietnamize their war just as we have been trying to Vietnamize ours.

After many more pages of "analyzing" Communism and Communist techniques, the Army lesson goes on to say that in taking over governments, the Communists seek to control "the key positions. . . the Ministry of Defense, which controls the Army, and the Ministry of Interior, which controls the Police. "It adds that the Russians carry on espionage with a worldwide organization: "The information they seek is not only military intelligence but also reports on political and social matters which will guide the Kremlin in its worldwide planning. . . ."

In doing this, the lesson insists that the espionage network operates completely separate from other foreign channels of the Soviet high command, and that "the ambassador, who is the nominal head of the legation, may not even be permitted to set foot in parts of his own embassy."

This legitimate curriculum on the subject of Communism and its ways has been, over the years, lifted almost in its entirety and neatly inserted into other curricula that were used to train United States and foreign nationals how they should operate in a peacetime operation situation; in other words, "Do as they do." When men have been taught that this is the way the enemy does it and the only way we can defeat the enemy at his own games is by copying and emulating him, then it becomes easy to insert into the normal training programs bits and pieces of this doctrine. After years of hearing this material used at first for clandestine orientation and later for less than clandestine operations, these ideas begin to seem right in our own service.

One area with which American servicemen had been totally unfamiliar was what is called the paramilitary organization. A course in such organization has become very formative in the indoctrination of a new generation of military and their civilian counterparts, along with the tens of thousands of foreign military and civilians trained in MAP projects. The following is an official U.S. Army definition of paramilitary forces as extracted from a standard lesson guide.

"We Americans are not very well acquainted with this type of organization because we have not experienced it in our own country. It resembles nothing so much as a private army. The members accept at least some measure of discipline, and have military organization, and may carry light weapons. In Germany in the 1920's and early 30's the parties of the right and the Communists had such organizations with membership in the hundreds of thousands. It is readily apparent what a force this can be in the political life of a country, particularly if the paramilitary forces are armed, when the supremacy of the Army itself may be threatened."


In the beginning these lessons were used to train forces to go out and work with the native forces of other countries, and in many of these other countries the U.S. Army role was submerged and covered in the CIA mechanism. The CIA, rather than train the legitimate army of a host country, would train the paramilitary force to create a structure within the country that could balance the army or even overthrow it.

In many cases the CIA would work with the national police rather than with the paramilitary forces. The results were the same. The thinking as stated by the U.S. Army in this doctrine was that with U.S. guidance and help, the politico-military actions of the [host] armed forces can be decisive in building strong, free nations, with governments responsive to, and representative of, the people." This was the doctrine, but it would be most difficult to find a single case of the armed forces of any such nation being truly representative of, and responsive to, the people. In most cases the situation has been exactly the opposite.

Even as far back as the mid-fifties the U.S. Army doctrine, had a strong overtone of CIA assistance and was preaching "pacification". Pacification, as it is carried on in South Vietnam, can be shown to date back to the Fort Gordon course, where it was taught that "the operational doctrine for the take-over of zones evacuated by the [rebels] was known as Pacification." The doctrine adds, "The two largest pacification campaigns [in Indochina] were undertaken in the early months of 1955, in Camau in the far south and in Quang Ngai-Binh Dinh provinces of the central coast region . . . As a result of good planning, training, and operations by the military, effective government and security were quickly established in the pacification areas, much of the war torn economy was rehabilitated, and the Communist organizations left behind were revealed by the population, along with a great many hidden caches of arms and equipment." This was the U.S. Army lesson guide of 1959-l960 about minor operations in 1955, which by now has been proved to have been so terribly wrong.

Remember, this was the doctrine the school was teaching key people who eventually became the MAAG officials in forty foreign countries. This was also the basic doctrine used to rejuvenate the long dormant U.S. Army Special Forces program. As it continued, it wandered far from its original theme of Communist cold war techniques to talk more about American activity and specifically the type of activity that was most unconventional for the American Army, the use of civilians, foreign nationals, and foreign military in U.S.-sponsored, third-country projects that were essentially clandestine, as extracted from U.S. Army lesson guides.

"During the pacification campaigns, the Vietnamese army learned to work closely with two notable civilian organizations, which are worth mentioning here as an indication of teamwork employed to bring stability to a free nation. The organizations were 'Operation Brotherhood', involving the International Jaycees, and the Vietnamese Government's 'Civic Action' teams. These two organizations of volunteers brought high morals and ideal, unselfish spirit to the campaigns . . . 'Operation Brotherhood' was originally staffed by Filipino volunteers. . . ."

Looking at this with the hindsight of ten to fifteen years of bitter experience in Vietnam, one wonders at the real meaning and intent of such subject matter. As the lesson continues it states that the same Filipinos' Operation Brotherhood was operating in Laos, then it discusses similar projects in Burma. Before leaving the subject of pacification, this Army lesson guide quotes a French officer in Algiers: "The pacification authority cannot be the old one, for the mayors and civilian councilors and some French Moslems, preoccupied with their own interests, are regarded with suspicion by the vast majority of Moslems." The conclusion was that the army must throw out the old regime, the old ways, the old customs, and come up with new villages, new pioneer spirit. "The army turned itself into a social revolutionary forces in the same way that the Chinese Red Army had done during the struggle with Chiang Kai-shek. Every army command started a far-reaching scheme for full civilian employment." In other words, the local army was the new order, and the U.S. Army was being indoctrinated and trained by CIA instructors to do the same thing.

This was heady doctrine for an Army that had just seen its Chief of Staff retire in disgust after what he had termed unfair treatment for the U.S. Army by the JCS, the Secretary of Defense, and the Commander in Chief himself. Finally, the lesson guide with this potent doctrine got to the real subject it had in mind when it started talking about Communist techniques. It ended with a long treatise on the Military Assistance Program. It set forth as an objective of this program, "First, a recipient's [of U.S. military aid] capacity to contribute significantly to resisting active aggression is maximized by building up adequate standing forces and arsenals. [And in this context this doctrine meant paramilitary and police forces as much as it meant military forces.] Second, the recipient's capacity to maintain internal order and to control subversion is emphasized . . . Aid to Asia is intended to help Asiatic recipients resist internal subversion and, perhaps to a more limited extent, to resist open aggression."

Before this indoctrination concluded, it made the key point that MAP "straddles the areas of responsibility of the Department of State and of the DOD . . . The development of the MAP involves many agencies."

This very long (twenty-nine pages) typewritten, single spaced, doctrinal lesson guide was the work of key men dedicated to the reconstruction of the U.S. Army along lines being visualized by General Maxwell Taylor in his book, The Uncertain Trumpet. While he was writing about his problems with the Eisenhower Administration regarding the army and the other services, and while he was outlining his thoughts in terms of what he called "A New National Military Program of Flexible Response", a team of strong-willed and opportunistic men was plowing up new ground for the U.S. Army. This was to nurture the seeds planted by the Army and the CIA along with powerful assistance from the other services and such other places as the Executive Office Building at the White House and from the Department of State.

This Civil Affairs curriculum was taken from Fort Gordon without the knowledge of the intervening next higher command at the Continental Army Command headquarters at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and was brought into the Pentagon where a select team of CIA-experienced officers and civilians worked it over into the new curriculum for the U.S. Army Special Forces school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

At the same time, action directly related to the above-mentioned projects was taking place at the highest levels of government. A special Presidential committee had been formed early in 1959 to study "Training Under the Mutual Security Program" and to "provide instruction [to recipient countries] in concepts or doctrine governing the employment of the military instrument, in peace and in war." The Presidential committee's report went on to note that "the committee's principle concern -- and consequently the subject of this paper -- is that training objectives have been so severely circumscribed, so inadequately related to the full sweep of our own national interests and of the recipient countries as well." Early on, the committee reported, "The International Cooperation Administration has yet to recognize the potential of the MAP training base for the furtherance of technical assistance objectives." In other words, this committee was laying it right on the line that the Government should be stepping into the Mutual Security program with "military" training, including the development of paramilitary capability in the recipient nations. The only way this could be carried out would be to mount clandestine operations in every country where this was to apply. By this period the CIA knew that it was ready, equipped, and in a position to do this in any "counterinsurgency-list" country, as it had been digging its way firmly into the MAP since the earliest days of the Greek and Turkish aid programs.

The Agency did not take any chances with this vital, to the CIA interests, report. Like the report from Fort Gordon that was being worked on by a team of CIA-experienced officers and civilians, the authors of this report of the President's committee were also CIA-experienced, but not known to be by those with whom they were working. They were under cover within the White House itself! Both primary authors of this report, although recognized throughout this period only as an Army general and an Air Force general, had served for many years with the CIA and then for many more years in service assignments directly supporting the CIA. After they wrote these formative and most influential documents, both of these generals saw considerable service in Southeast Asia, all in conjunction with the CIA. By 1959 and 1960 the CIA was so well entrenched in the Government -- and for that matter in the governments of the some forty recipient nations -- that it could pull the strings even as far up as in Presidential committees. Once a report as important as this one had appeared, with the imprimatur of the Executive Office Building, the rest of the road was clear sailing. Even Presidents themselves would not question its validity. Actually, its authors were frequently called to the White House as Presidential advisers on such matters.

Early in this detailed thirty-three page report the committee made a key point. It stated that the new training programs would "reflect substantial increases over previous years." The latter included a first entry into the undergraduate study field. Meanwhile, the geographic emphasis of the International Educational Exchange Service shifted away from Europe to the underdeveloped countries. Note that the ST was turning from the direct confrontation of the Communist bloc to the softer underbelly of the underdeveloped world for its action. The Agency and the military had established their positions in and around the recipient countries, and now they were going to exploit those positions at will.

One begins to find the term "subversive" sprinkled throughout these and other related reports. Many have thought that the "subversive insurgency" doctrine was an outgrowth of the Kennedy era. It came to the surface during Kennedy's Administration; but Kennedy and his young, inexperienced staff inherited the whole idea of subversive insurgency and the role of counterinsurgency from this inside dissident group that had begun to surface toward the end of Eisenhower's term, after the U-2 affair and the destruction of the summit conferences. It should be pointed out that this was not a doctrine endorsed by Eisenhower, although the Deputy Secretary of Defense at the time did find himself in the position of unwittingly putting his blessing on some of the activities crucial to the beginning of this new movement.

A broad hint at the new rationale came near the heart of the report itself:

It is not enough, however, to restrict leadership inputs to United States norms. Except in specifically defined circumstances, our Armed Forces have no operative responsibilities within national frontiers; conforming generally to the precepts of Western democracies, they are not an integral part of the mechanism for maintenance of law and order. The prevailing concept is expeditionary -- an instrument of latent power, unentangled domestically, ready for projection abroad should the exigency arise. Not so for the great bulk of the forces of the new nations. Their role has additional dimensions and their missions are actual as opposed to contingent. They are a key element in the maintenance of internal security and are largely determinant of whether stability or instability characterizes the routine of government. The Officer Corps is perforce deeply involved in domestic affairs. Those who lead, or are destined to lead, must acquire qualifications and attributes beyond the criteria which identify the successful commander in combat.


More important, tens of thousands of Americans served in the MAP programs, which openly taught and practiced this doctrine. To them, this was the only military they knew, and this was the teaching they received. This was American doctrine, not Communist. Recall that more than three million Americans have been rotated through Indochina during the operations there since 1954 most of these men know only the Army of this doctrine. The impact of this dogma and doctrine, and of these changes in traditional military philosophy, has been tremendous. It is beyond estimate and comprehension at this time. It certainly relates to a considerable degree to the problems that exist in the generation of returned veterans that had not existed before, especially with so many Special Forces Green Beret veterans in our municipal and state police forces.

We said earlier that this doctrine proposed that the CIA assisted in the selection of trainees from the recipient countries. This same proposal was framed in the President's Committee report, and it was cloaked in the following language so that the uninitiated would not be aware of it: "MAP can assist in the identification of officers who should be trained for key responsibilities in the civil sector." Since the CIA was well placed in the MAP, it frequently became the function of the Agency to select these officers "for duty in the civil sector." This was usually unknown to the officers so selected, at first. However, on occasion the Agency did share some of its plans with some of the recruits. In this manner men like Nguyen Cao Ky of South Vietnam and many others who have become quite prominent around the world, got their first real training and made firm friends with American acquaintances. For example, Ky became a fast friend of an Air Force officer who years later "happened" to be in Vietnam when the government was overthrown. He was in a senior position, able to suggest to Ky that he should step forward and assume control. Many of these contacts were of long duration, and the ST saw to it that they remained so. General Loan, the infamous police chief of Saigon, had been so selected for a course at M.I.T.

Of course, things did not always work out smoothly. One afternoon at about 4:00pm in Vientiane, Laos, the "U.S. Army" contact man with Kong Le[1] left him with a promise to meet later at the officers club. Within two hours Kong Le was leading a Pathet Lao column against the government. Of course, his troops were called "Pathet Lao" because they were the opposition. There was little evidence that Kong Le ever embraced Communism, even the brand of Communism attributed to the Pathet Lao. It was not too long after that when news reports had Kong Le back at the head of "Neutralist" forces marching against the Pathet Lao into the Plaines de Jarres. Kong Le, like so many others, had received U.S. training and CIA indoctrination.

Another part of the President's committee report continued, "The stakes for which we contend justify attention to every possibility to improve the competence and influence the orientation of the officer corps of these nations. The attach personnel should be so instructed; and the special efforts involved [this means the Agency efforts] in securing Presidential determinations [this is a cautious reference to the NSC approval required for training in the U.S. or third countries accepted]." There could be little question that the intent of this project was to direct the efforts of the Agency and the entire ST effort toward the orientation' of friendly countries to bring about political, social, and economic ends.

Even in the beginning it was contemplated that this program would be massive. Before the document had been put into final form and readied for approval, it said: "A price tag attaches to any such concept -- one must think in terms of several hundred million dollars over the next few years." Remember, this was more than a decade ago, and several hundred million dollars was a lot of money. It was spent, and much more with it; and yet this was always a quiet project and generally unmentioned in routine budget activity e.g., as a good case in point, the Fiscal Year 1972 budget for the Pacification Program in Vietnam, a program directed by a senior CIA official, amounted to $1 billion.

As this massive report continued it veered away from nonmilitary training and got down to the real purpose of its existence. In a section headed "New Roles for the Military", it said:

"In the past year, a number of informed and thoughtful observers have pointed out that the MAP supported military establishments throughout the less developed areas have a political and socio-economic potential which if properly exploited, may far outweigh their contribution to the deterrence of direct military aggression . . . armies are often the only cohesive and reliable non-Communist instrument available to the fledgling nations.

It is not enough to charge armed forces with responsibility for the military aspects of deterrence; they represent too great an investment in manpower and money to be restricted to such a limited mission. The real measure of their worthiness is found in the effectiveness of their contribution to the furtherance of national objectives, short of conflict. And the opportunities therefore are greatest in the less developed societies where the military occupy a pivotal position between government and populace. As one writer has phrased it . . . properly employed, the army can become an internal motor for economic growth and social-political transformation."


At this time almost everywhere in the Government the word was going around that the only real stabilizing, honest, and useful force in these underdeveloped nations was the army. It could be trusted, it was disciplined, and it would keep and hold the country safely within the Western world. These were nice words, and there might have been an army or part of an army like that somewhere; but few armies anywhere, especially in the underdeveloped countries, were much more than brutal and corrupt forces. In fact, many armies are simply poorly trained groups of desperate men, beggars and bandits who have no other recourse than to submit to military service for a little food for themselves and their families. In most countries the army is the most corrupt sector of the government, and as one group governs another plots its downfall only so they can share the loot for a while.

The type of army this study describes is more like the armies pictured in Communist manuals. The Russian army and the Peoples Army of China are depicted in just the terms that are used in the paper of this Presidential committee. It is a glorious and appealing and totally unreal concept. Anyone can look around the world at countries under the control of their armies, and he will find brutalized nations under generally corrupt and backward leadership.

The report continued to try to win enthusiastic support for this new role for the foreign policy of the United States. In describing the role of the local army, it said: "The maintenance of internal security constitutes a major responsibility of these armed forces, whether assigned directly or not." In other words, if this role were not given to the army, it was suggested that the army would take it over. This is in conflict with the fact that most of the nations under consideration have nationwide national police forces whose traditional role is the maintenance of internal security.

Naturally, this philosophy led to many outbreaks in these recipient countries. The MAP-trained army began to take over the internal security role and got into trouble with the national police and with those national leaders responsible for the national police. This situation brought about friction, which frequently broke out as civil war, and of course there was nothing to do but to declare that the national police were the forces of subversive insurgency; thus the head of Communism was reared. Once these labels had been affixed, the United States would join the army's side with the banner of anti-Communism flying.

The writers of this document saw this in the offing, since they noted, "There must be comprehension of the complex nature of the subversive forces at play and of the variegated methods of Communist attack." It is almost as though the training of firemen should dwell more on the setting of fires rather than on extinguishing them.

The report goes on to say:

"Here is the ultimate test of the armed forces. Their role, in the countries under discussion, is unique. They are at once the guardians of the government and the guarantors that the government keeps faith with the aspirations of the nation. It is in their power to insure that the conduct of government is responsive to the people and that the people are responsive to the obligations of citizenship. In the discharge of these responsibilities, they must be prepared to assume the reins of government themselves. In either capacity -- pillar or ruling faction -- the officer corps, at least, must possess knowledge and aptitudes far beyond the military sphere."


These are interesting words and interesting ideas. Burma has been ruled for years by a general. Is all well in Burma? Trujillo was in a sense the personification of this model. Who would like to have lived under the rule of Rafael Trujillo? What of the oppression in Greece at the present time under the leadership of some of the very men who received the same training exemplified in this Presidential report? Is Greece a better place to live in today because its officer corps had been trained by the MAAG in "knowledge and aptitudes beyond the military sphere"?

The report of the President's committee was unclassified. The ST frequently does this when they wish to utilize a paper freely with foreign nationals and with others who may not at the time possess Government clearances. It further underscores the fact that the ST makes use of administrative security simply as a device to meet its own ends. In this case, it was easier and much simpler to control this paper by a hand-to-hand technique than to control it by the usual classification. This was also done with the paper quoted nearer the beginning of this chapter, the "Lesson Guide", U.S. Army.

These papers, too, were circulated among those who would be properly impressed by their high-level imprimatur. At the same time, when General Taylor was working on The Uncertain Trumpet and coming up with his new National Military Program of Flexible Response, and the Agency was quietly working to rekindle the U.S. Army Special Forces program along the lines of the Civic Action curriculum, the ST was gradually getting more and more involved in subversive identification projects throughout the soft spots of the Free World.

All of this was going on while President Eisenhower was doing everything he and his Administration could to prepare for the fulmination of his two terms of office with the crusade for peace which would begin with the summit conference in Paris in May 1960. Early in January 1960, Krushchev pledged not to renew nuclear testing unless the United States did. At about the same time, the United States, England, and Russia resumed discussions at Geneva to find ways to limit or stop nuclear weapons testing. Russia announced that it was demobilizing 1,200,000 men from its armed forces. By the end of the month Eisenhower made a statement, which has taken on special meaning in later years, "there will be no reprisals against Cuba or intervention in its internal affairs." This was the President's official position, and it was the position he emphasized within the government where certain anti-Castro actions were being planned. It was not President Eisenhower who laid the plans for what later was to be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

During February the President made another statement in which there were some of the seeds of the later Vietnam problem: "The United States would consider it intervention in the internal affairs of the Americas if any power denied freedom of choice to any republic in the Western Hemisphere." Note that it has been this "denial of the freedom of choice" slogan that has become a battle cry in South Vietnam as one of our reasons for being there.

As the time for the summit conference approached, Eisenhower spread more oil on the waters. Secretary of State Herter pledged that the United States would not resume altitude flights in the Berlin Corridor. The Russians and East Germans had objected violently to certain high-altitude flights previously. At about the same time Eisenhower, as if to underscore his position as a lame duck, announced his endorsement of Richard M. Nixon as the Republican candidate for President. Eisenhower made this early announcement for many reasons, none of which, perhaps, was more important to him personally than to assure the world that he was attending the summit conference as a totally nonpartisan President interested solely in the welfare of the whole world.

Then a last minute round of visits, reminiscent of the bowing and scraping in a classic minuet before the main dancing begins, took place. Krushchev went to Paris to visit De Gaulle. Macmillan came to Camp David to visit Eisenhower. De Gaulle came to Washington for a last visit before the summit. De Gaulle went back to Europe and visited with Macmillan. Seldom have the chiefs of state made so many planned visits and so many formal announcements prior to a major event as took place during the month before the scheduled meeting. Then, as if to allay any other fears, Under Secretary Dillon announced, "Summit agreements will not abandon Berlin."

Everything was in readiness. It was hard to discover anyone in government not vitally concerned with preparations for this most magnificent meeting, and the hand of the President was evident in all arrangements. This was to be the crowning achievement of a long life devoted to outstanding public service. Seven years of work dedicated to this goal drew to a close as an eventful April ended.

On the first of May the Russians gathered in Red Square, as they have since the revolution, for their annual show of military might. Krushchev was on the majestic podium, along with all of the Soviet hierarchy. However, the man who was supposed to be at his right, Marshal Rodion Y. Malinovsky, was late.

The great festival had begun. All of Russia cheered its leaders, and all of Russia wished them well, for peace at last seemed to be in the Spring air. Then Marshall Malinovsky arrived at the side of Krushchev, and there was a hasty discussion. Without any delay, the Marshall delivered an impassioned speech on the theme of vigilance. He knew, and at that time Krushchev knew, that the spy-plane U-2, with Francis Gary Powers at the controls, had crash-landed in Russia at Sverdlovsk.

Seldom if ever in the history of man had an event of such importance occurred more dramatically. In the following two weeks the course of world history was drastically altered as the hopes and plans of a crusty, earthy son of mother Russia and of a courageous, gallant, and dedicated son of the Great Plains of America were shattered.

_______

Notes:

1. Captain Kong Le of the Royal Laotian army had been given special training by the U.S. Army, which included familiarization with CIA supporting activities. Later he broke away from his U.S. friends and led a revolt against the government.
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Re: The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the Un

Postby admin » Sat Apr 30, 2016 10:43 pm

Chapter 20: Krushchev's Challenge: The U-2 Dilemma

AS THE GLOW OF SUNRISE ILLUMINED the snowcapped peaks of the Western Himalayas, the pilot moved the throttle lever to full power and the heavily laden plane began a lazy roll down the long runway at Peshawar. The engine whined, the rate of acceleration was slow, and with each unevenness of the runway the long downward sloping wings dropped up and down, unable to come to life at that slow speed. And then, with more speed, the wings began to fly. They rose and steadied, the flopping and oscillation dampened out, and they strained to lift the heavy plane into the air. Just before the runway ran out, one last light bump, gentle as the tiptoe leap of a ballet dancer, lifted the plane into the air, and it was instantly transformed into a thing of beauty -- a graceful long winged jet.

As speed built up and wheels were retracted the plane sped through the pre dawn haze. The pilot eased the flaps up into the wings and began to climb toward the mountains. High above and to the left was the historic Khyber Pass. On course, there was a pink tinged twenty-five thousand foot peak, and further to the right was Godwen Austen, over twenty-eight thousand feet, wearing its perennial white plume. The jet was so heavy that the pilot swung it into a lazy turn inside the valley to spiral up and out, gaining altitude as he went, until he was above that famous path of the conquerors through the Khyber and nearly level with the twenty-five thousand foot mountain top. Kabul the capitol of Afghanistan, lay below; to the right, Tadzhik, the first major city inside the Soviet Union, lay ahead with Tashkent beyond. Border crossing was made at Kirovabad in a climb to sixty thousand feet. The sky was clear and dark blue -- the sky that only the small band of jet pilots know the world around. At this altitude the weather, whatever weather there was, was a remote thing, noticed only as patches of white cloud below, obscuring the ground. At cruising altitude the cockpit air system had cleared out all moisture, and the canopy was clear and brittle. Visibility was almost limitless. The pilot was a lone soul above the world, above all normal environment, under a simple, burning sun, and tuned to the even silence of the engine and the slow, mushy responsiveness of the controls in the near vacuum of the atmosphere at that height.

In the still early morning at Peshawar, the operational team had just finished flashing their message to Washington: "Puppy 68" was off and on his way to Norway via Sverdlovsk. The watch officer in the special U-2 control office in downtown Washington got that word shortly after 8:30pm on the evening of April 30. Dick Bissell, the Agency man in charge of the U-2 project, was notified immediately. Then, in short succession four other men were called. One by one they heard the same information, "Puppy 68 is away." President Eisenhower was at his favorite retreat, Camp David, with Prime Minister Macmillan of Great Britain, putting the finishing touches on plans for the summit conference. De Gaulle had just left Washington, and Macmillan and De Gaulle were scheduled to meet again in Paris on May 5. All was well with the world. The aging men who had led the world through World War II and then through the bitterness of the Cold War were preparing to culminate their long efforts in a great summit conference and then, one by one, lay down Krushchev's Challenge: the mantle of government to a new generation who would reap the benefits of peace -- hopefully true and lasting peace.

The fate of the world hung in the balance somewhere between these earnest plans for peace and the miles remaining ahead of that U-2 as it neared Sverdlovsk. This was not the normal U-2 flight. Much was made of the fact that the pilot had with him a vial (needle) of poison; so that rather than expose his native land to charges of willful violation of the air space and sovereignty of the Soviet Union, he could silence himself in death. The code of the spy. Yet little was made of the antithetical fact that the pilot also had a parachute which would save his life. Much was made of the fact, afterwards, that this was a "civilian" aircraft and that it was flown by a "civilian" pilot. Yet this pilot had been permitted to carry with him on this flight his military identification card, complete with name and picture, along with a pocketful of other identifying cards, all of which easily placed him at military installations, in military instrument flight schools, and on military facilities just days before the flight. He was hardly a deniable spy.

Much was made later of the fact that Air Force Captain Powers had resigned from the Air Force and that he was a civilian employee of the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was technically a civilian: But his records were still held by the Air Force, and had he chosen, he could have returned to the Air Force without loss of pay, seniority, and promotion status.

Furthermore, the number of identification items that he had with him made it clear that he was less a true civilian and more a civilian cover spy pilot. He was in the same mold as Allen Pope in 1958, who was captured by the Indonesians, and of the Air Force crew that was shot down in Armenia also in 1958. By that time the Russians had plenty of evidence to know that "civilian" pilots belonged to the CIA by way of the U.S. Air Force.

This course of events had more impact upon the United States than upon the Soviet Union. The U.S. Government made much of the fact that the U-2 was an "unarmed civilian aircraft" and that it was flown by a civilian. However, in his book, The Craft of Intelligence, Allen Dulles makes much of the fact that operation of such sophisticated aircraft could scarcely have been kept a secret. It wasn't! As he wrote, "Sooner or later, certainly this would have leaked out." Since this was so certain, then why did the U.S. Government have to give out untrue cover stories? And why did they have to permit Powers to carry so much identification when it would have been better to limit the leak as much as possible? Even if he had died, they would have had all the information they needed. How did it happen that they broke with policy procedures for that special flight by letting him take off loaded with incriminating evidence that proved he was a U.S. spy pilot? Who was it who wanted this special U-2 flight on May 1, 1960, two weeks before the summit conference, to fail and then to become so glaring an admission of guilt when it did fail that it would inevitably doom the summit conference along with it? The incidence of these things, too many things, give weight to the thought that this flight was intended to be something rather special.

Nothing was said that all clandestine operations personnel, and especially the select coterie of U-2 pilots, were required to submit to a complete inspection before takeoff, which included the removal of all clothes and other personal effects and the issue of sanitized, non-identifiable clothing and equipment sufficient only for the flight. Neither pilot nor plane were sanitized on this flight as was required on other flights.

But these are only details that came up after the flight. The special question about this flight and this plane and this pilot was, "Who sent him out in the first place? What was this flight supposed to gain that could have been worth one particle of what it lost?" The Secretary of State, in attempting to justify the flight and as the official spokesman for his Government, said, "Conditions at a latter season would have prevented obtaining very important information. There is never a good time for a failure of an intelligence mission. We believe it unwise to lower our vigilance because of these political negotiations." Then the following three reasons for operating this flight were given:

"1) Clear skies had been forecast, which meant clear pictures.

"2) May 1 for the Russians is something like the Fourth of July for Americans. It is a national holiday that honors the solidarity of the working class. In Moscow it is the occasion for a display of armed might in a mammoth parade that winds past the Kremlin where high Soviet officials, including Krushchev, watch the troops and material go by from a reviewing stand. It was felt in Washington that the Soviet vigilance might have relaxed on May 1 because of the holiday, that perhaps radar and antiaircraft crews would be celebrating to the detriment of their defenses.

"3) The CIA had intelligence that a new Soviet rocket twice as large as anything produced by the USA would be on its launching pad for a May Day test. The launching pad, it was known, was at a new missile base near Sverdlovsk industrial complex and noted that the launch points were domed rather than following the herringbone pattern of the older Russian ground-to-air missile sites."


For some reason almost everything about this flight was different, and for some reason it had to go at precisely the time when it would cause the most alarm if it failed. A careful rereading of the objectives of this flight fails to confirm them to be of sufficient significance to override the natural precautions that should have been taken, especially since every top official in the Government knew how important the summit conference was to the President. And only high level officials - or knowledgeable ST members -- could have launched that flight. All of the regular launch authorities certainly knew that they were under strictest orders to do nothing that would jeopardize the success of the conferences.

Flights such as this one from Pakistan, Turkey, and Norway were tracked by U.S. radars and other sensitive tracking equipment. The plane did not have to maintain total silence. After all, anything the long range radars from peripheral areas could track from hundreds of miles away the Russians air defense system could track from twelve (the flight altitude) to a few hundred miles. The Soviets would know the plane was there; as we learned later, they knew of almost every flight during the previous four years. They had tracked and forced down countless U.S. aircraft in preceding years. It has been known for decades that Soviet radar is as good as or better than ours. They tracked the U-2 planes, but could not reach them at their extreme altitude. So the U-2 could communicate, not in the usual manner, but with flash, or "squirt", coded transmissions at predetermined times. In spite of the rather strange way in which the news of the loss was announced, there is no reason why we should believe that some authorities in this country did not know that it had occurred, and perhaps they knew exactly why it went down. Yet they ordered the administrator of NASA to give out an unreasonable cover story, which even said the plane had come from Turkey.

When the plane went down, its signals faded and it was lost from tracking radar. The engine had stopped, and Powers was gliding the plane down from its extreme altitude, which was so high that the air's oxygen content was insufficient to support combustion. The normal combustion of the jet engine at that altitude had to be assisted by the infusion of a trace of raw hydrogen from a small liquid hydrogen cryogenic storage bottle. If by some chance the engine either coughed itself out, or if something happened to this slight hydrogen supply and the engine flamed out, it could not be restarted at that altitude. The pilot would have had no recourse other than to let down and see if he could restart the engine at some lower altitude. The evidence that the engine would not restart even at thirty thousand feet indicates that the trouble was most likely hydrogen deficiency and not a normal fuel flameout. Had it been a simple flameout and had there been plenty of hydrogen, the engine should have restarted, as others had in similar circumstances.

When the plane did not restart, Powers was forced to let it continue to spiral toward the earth, and then at a safer altitude either bail out (a high altitude bailout is dangerous and violent) or continue on down to the ground. Actually, some of the early pictures of the U-2 showed an aircraft that was relatively undamaged, when one considers that the Russian story was that it was hit by a rocket in the air and then crashed into the ground. We may never really know whether Powers parachuted because he was hit by Russian rockets or gunfire or whether he parachuted simply to leave a plane that was doomed to crash anyhow. The elaborate pictures of the plane, which the Soviets released at the trial, show neither bullet damage nor rocket fragment damage, although at that point neither would be important; the plane was going to come down. If it had not been on the way down, neither rockets nor bullets would have been able to bring it down in those days.

Those who had been watching the progress of the flight from Washington control soon learned that the U-2 had dropped from surveillance, and they may have received coded information that gave them solid clues as to why the plane did come down. After all, space technology had reached the point by that time that ground tracking stations could tell every minute change and environmental perturbation on a remote nose cone. There was no reason why anyone should expect that the U-2 tracking system was not at least as good as that. Nose cones transit the Soviet Union all the time and are monitored all of that time. The U-2 was most likely monitored in the same manner. Therefore, it was not long before the alerted officials in Washington knew that Gary Powers was down somewhere in Russia.

In spite of this firm knowledge they instructed the CIA to say nothing. By this time the President had returned to his Gettysburg farm, and Secretary of State Herter was in Turkey, continuing his rounds of talks prior to the summit conference. As far as Eisenhower and Herter were concerned, all was well, and the conference was a short two weeks away.

In the belief and the hope that the crash had been unobserved and undiscovered by the Russians, Allen Dulles suggested that the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, T. Keith Glennan, release a preprepared cover story. Glennan reported that a high altitude weather research aircraft on a flight from Adana, Turkey, was missing and that "it might have accidentally violated Soviet air space." At that time he added that these aircraft were special U-2 high altitude planes and that they were essential to the space program. It was believed that this frankness would take some of the heat off the flight, especially if the Russians should ever find the wreckage and report it.

This was the initiative Krushchev had been waiting for. On the fifth of May, five long days after the plane had landed, he reported that an American plane had been shot down over Russian territory. He gave no more detail than that, although he did harangue about American war-mongers, and those Americans who remembered, recalled that the Russians had shot down that innocent U.S. Air Force transport aircraft in June 1958. It began to look as though the barbaric Russians were being trigger-happy again and that they had shot down another innocent weather plane.

Those who knew the real fate of the U-2 remained silent, and those who did not went through the paces like automatons. The official spokesman of the State Department, Lincoln White, came out immediately after Krushchev's remarks and repeated Glennan's story, and again claimed innocent action on the part of the "disabled" pilot. On the same date, the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow reported that he had picked up some cocktail party gossip in Moscow that implied that the American pilot had been captured and that he was in good health. The 1958 incident was being repeated almost to the line, and hopes began to rise that this "mistake" would be no worse than the last one.

Then, on May 7 Krushchev moved in for the kill: "Comrades, I must let you in on a secret". "When I made my report I deliberately refrained from mentioning that the pilot was alive and safe and that we had the remnants of the plane. We did this deliberately, because had we given out the whole story, the Americans would have thought up another version." He then went on to give the whole story in detail. However, he stopped short of accusing Eisenhower of knowing that the flight had been ordered over the Soviet Union. It is entirely possible, in fact it is most probably the whole truth, that Eisenhower did not know that the U-2 had been dispatched on that fateful flight. Krushchev offered him an out when he said, "I am prepared to grant that the President had no knowledge of a plane being dispatched to the Soviet Union and failing to return; but that should alert us still more."

The Russian Premier was ready to say, "We are so close to the summit and to peace. I am ready to accept that this was a cruel and terrible provocation made by others without the knowledge of the American President." Let the President stand up and say that he had no knowledge of this flight, and then back up his statement by firing Allen Dulles, Dick Bissell, and those other four men who had pressed so hard for this flight. This was the challenge and that was the price. There was still a chance that Ike could have his long dreamed of summit conference; but now he would have to pay the price. Thus Eisenhower was put to the biggest test of his entire career. Could he clean house? Could he rid the country of those who, as Harry Truman said, "had diverted the CIA to become the center of foreign intrigue" or would he have to bend to their might and their cunning and see his dreams shattered in a cold and cruel awakening? Many years later it was President Richard M. Nixon who said, "When you inherit a nightmare . . . " -- and that was as far as he went with his thought. President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs had the same nightmare. President Eisenhower had come within two weeks of achieving not only the goal of an aging President who had given his entire adult life to his country; but of realizing the hope of the entire country for a lasting and hopeful peace.

No one will ever know just why he turned down Krushchev's gambit. No one will ever know why he decided to back the ST at a time when it had permitted his plans to be shattered. Did he simply believe that his course was the only honest way out and that someone in his Administration had made an innocent mistake; or did he succumb to a greater pressure?

It was not only the U-2 that had trapped him. The ST had armed and equipped a major force of tens of thousands of Tibetans high beyond the Himalayas; it had thousands of Cubans under arms and in training all over the North American continent, from the Canal Zone to many sites in the United States it was deeply entwined in the politics and economy and rebellions of Africa; and already the United States, which had seldom seen armies in its own streets, was becoming accustomed to the roar of heavy trucks and the march of feet in embattled inner cities. Did Eisenhower really have a choice? Could he just fire Allen Dulles and a few of his top lieutenants and clean house that simply? He knew that he could not. Those other men who had seen to it that all the little things fell into place and that the U-2 had gone aloft on that precise day were men of the ST, and wiping out Dulles and his staff would not touch them. Furthermore, it was one thing to have the power to see that the U-2 was not stopped from going on a rather routine flight; but it was an entirely different matter to be able to assure that it would come down in the very center and heart of the Soviet Union.

The men responsible for this flight were highly competent and they knew, for instance, that if the all important hydrogen bottle was only partly filled they could count upon the plane's corning down as certainly as if they had only partly filled its tanks with fuel. But fueling was a routine chore done by men who always know the plane must be full; and a pilot knows that he must check the tanks and the caps. Also, on the U-2 you can just about tell how full it is by seeing how much the heavily loaded wings droop when the plane is on the ground. Hydrogen starvation was much more subtle.

As Ike pondered his dilemma it no doubt flashed through his mind how all of these pieces began to fit together. He had heard a little about the training of Cuban exiles. He had heard something of the Tibetan flights and of the training of Tibetans in the United States for deep paradrop missions into far northwest China. He knew of the troubles in Africa, and he knew how inner city problems were welling up in the United States. But he had put all this aside as small matters in comparison to the importance of his great crusade for peace. It is quite evident that these thoughts preyed upon his mind. On May 9 he authorized Secretary Herter to say, "In accordance with the National Security Act of 1947 the President has put into effect since the beginning of his Administration directives to gather by every possible means information required to protect the United States and the Free World against surprise attack and to enable them to make effective preparations for their defense. Under these directives, programs have been developed and put into operation which have included extensive aerial surveillance by unarmed civilian aircraft, normally of a peripheral character, but occasionally by penetration."

To underscore what the Secretary had said and to confirm what had been on his mind, the President himself said: "As the Secretary of State pointed out in his recent statement, ever since the beginning of my Administration I have issued directives to gather, in every feasible way, the information required to protect the United States and the Free World against surprise attack and to enable them to make effective preparations for defense." He was putting together in his own mind all of the bits and pieces of the big puzzle. He had been trapped by his own ST, and all of the things they had been doing now made a pattern.

The United States and the world were not going to have peace; they were going to enter a generation or perhaps even more of numbing cold war in which the inputs of random secret intelligence would provide evidence of subversion throughout all the countries of the free world and the United States would react by attacking subversive insurgency wherever it was discovered.

Now Eisenhower could see what his old comrade in arms, Maxwell Taylor, had meant by his new "National Military Plan Of Flexible Response." There is much more meaning in those words than anyone would suspect at first reading. It would have been enough for Maxwell Taylor to suggest a new national military plan; but this was not the idea. He meant that from now on the country would be mobilized in an increasing frenzy to the tune of another trumpet, which called for a military plan of flexible response to Secret Intelligence alarms and cries of subversive (Communist) insurgency.

All of these things took on a new meaning and a totally new warning. The President may have realized that he was not really in charge of events, and he could not honestly say that he didn't know what was going on; yet he had never seen the picture in its totality before. There was no other way out. President Eisenhower did the only thing he could. He announced to the world that he had known about the flight and that it had been his sole responsibility as Commander in Chief of the United States.

With that, Krushchev had no choice but to face the same facts, his way. How could he hope to reach a peaceful settlement and meaningful agreements with a President who was admitting to the world that at the very time he had been speaking peace he had been plotting overflights and the invasion of the territorial integrity of not only the Soviet Union, but of China and Tibet and Cuba. Krushchev had no alternative either. All hope for a successful summit conference had gone. The leaders of the world attended the conference individually but all was lost. With this great disaster the fifteen year search for a peaceful settlement in a world menaced by the atomic bomb came to an end. Vietnam lay ahead.
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