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Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:31 am
by admin
The Secret Elite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

***

Army Intelligence

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

***

Office of Naval Intelligence

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

***

Air Force Intelligence

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

***

Atomic Energy Commission

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

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

***

Federal Bureau of Investigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Bureau of Intelligence and Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________

Notes:

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

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

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

iii. All figures on the number of persons involved in intelligence work are highly classified. But the ONI's figure slipped out through the oversight of a Pentagon censor in testimony released in 1961 by the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:32 am
by admin
The National Security Agency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legislation was attacked by several congressmen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________

Notes:

i. Codes use symbols or letter groups for whole words or thoughts. Ciphers use letters or numbers for other letters or numbers.

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:32 am
by admin
The Defense Intelligence Agency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There is, of course, always the possibility," Dulles had observed with monumental understatement, "that two such powerful and well-financed agencies as CIA and DIA will become rivals and competitors." [1]

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:33 am
by admin
CIA: "It's Well Hidden"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the fall of 1961, the CIA moved in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: But were they hired?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Invisible Government had awarded him an invisible medal.

_______________

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

viii. Torpats lost his case. Both the U.S. District Court and the Court of Appeals upheld Dulles.

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:33 am
by admin
CIA: The Inner Workings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SENATOR SMITH: Pardon?

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

SENATOR SMITH: Is it true?

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

MR. MCCONE: I cannot answer that, Senator.

SENATOR SALTONSTALL: Perhaps that should not be answered.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

SOURWINE: That was during what period of time?

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

SOURWlNE: Yes.

LOWENFELD: But I never formally worked for them.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAPTAIN CLARK: Yes, sir. A considerable number.

MR. SOURWINE: Was their cover good?

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then this exchange took place on the television panel:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_______________

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:34 am
by admin
The Search For Control

To maintain the CIA and the other branches of the intelligence establishment, the government spends about $4,000,000,000 a year. The exact figure is one of the most tightly held secrets of the government and it appears in none of the Federal budget documents, public or private. It is unknown, in fact, even to many of the key officials in the Invisible Government. Because the intelligence community is carefully fragmented, those in one branch find it difficult to estimate the budgets of the others.

All of the budgets are pulled together by the director of the International Division of the Budget Bureau. He is assisted by four experts, each of whom handles about $1,000,000,000 of the Invisible Government's money. One assistant checks on the National Security Agency, the second on the CIA, the third on the DIA and military intelligence, and the fourth on overhead reconnaissance.

All of the Invisible Government's hidden money is buried in the Defense Department budget, mainly in the multibillion-dollar weapons contracts, such as those for the Minuteman and Polaris missiles. The Comptroller of the Pentagon knows where the money is hidden, but so carefully is it camouflaged, even his closest assistants are unable to guess at the amount.

It is not startling, then, that even those at the very center of the Invisible Government vary in their estimates of what is being spent. In a private briefing for high-ranking military men in the summer of 1963 McCone offered a figure of $2,000,000,000 [i] and estimated that 100,000 persons were involved in intelligence work.

However, McCone appeared to be limiting his estimate to the money spent by the CIA and the other agencies on the more conventional forms of intelligence work. In addition, $2,000,000,000 is spent each year on electronic intelligence (the NSA and aerial spying). When the two forms of intelligence are included, the total budget reaches $4,000,000,000 and the personnel figure amounts to about 200,000.

It is often assumed that the National Security Council controls this vast intelligence establishment. But in practice much of the activity of the Invisible Government is never examined at NSC meetings. Nor is it disclosed to the United States Intelligence Board (which, for example, was not informed in advance of the Bay of Pigs).

The important decisions about the Invisible Government are made by the committee known as the Special Group. Although the composition of the committee has varied slightly, its membership has generally included the Director of Central Intelligence, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (or his deputy), and the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense. In the Kennedy and early Johnson Administrations, the presidential representative -- and key man -- on the Special Group was McGeorge Bundy. The others members were McCone, McNamara, Roswell Gilpatric, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and U. Alexis Johnson, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

The Special Group was created early in the Eisenhower years under the secret Order 54/12. It was known in the innermost circle of the Eisenhower Administration as the "54/12 Group" and is still so called by a few insiders. The Special Group grew out of the "OCB luncheon group." [ii] It has operated for a decade as the hidden power Center of the Invisible Government. Its existence is virtually unknown outside the intelligence community and, even there, only a handful of men are aware of it.

The Special Group meets about once a week to make the crucial decisions -- those which are too sensitive or too divisive to be entrusted to USIB. The more grandiose of the Invisible Government's operations have been launched in this exclusive arena. It is here in this hidden corner of the massive governmental apparatus that the United States is regularly committed to policies which walk the tightrope between peace and war.

CIA men generally have the Special Group in mind when they insist that the agency has never set policy, but has only acted on higher authority.

"The facts are," Allen Dulles has declared, "that the CIA has never carried out any action of a political nature, given any support of any nature to any persons, potentates or movements, political or otherwise, without appropriate approval at a high political level in our government outside the CIA." 1

To the average citizen, Dulles' statement might logically conjure up a picture of the Cabinet, the National Security Councilor some special presidential commission meeting in solemn session to debate the wisdom of a dangerous clandestine operation.

But, in fact, some decisions of this type have been made by the Special Group in an informal way without the elaborate records and procedures of other high government committees. And these fateful decisions have been made without benefit of outside analysis. Little detached criticism has been brought to bear on the natural human tendency of the leaders of the Invisible Government to embark upon ventures which might prove their toughness, demonstrate their vision or expand their power.

The "euphoria of secrecy goes to the head," as C.P. Snow, the English scientist-novelist. has observed, and the Special Group has operated in an atmosphere of secrecy exceeding that of any other branch of the United States Government.

It is apparent, then, that the two presidential watchdog committees, the Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities of the Eisenhower Administration and the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, have had great difficulty getting to the bottom of things. Both committees were composed of part-time consultants who met only occasionally during the year.

The original committee had, in fact, been established by Eisenhower in 1956 at least partly to head off closer scrutiny of the Invisible Government. In 1955 the full Hoover Commission had recommended that such a presidential committee be established. But it had also proposed the creation of a Joint Congressional Committee on Foreign Intelligence.

The Eisenhower Administration compromised. It complied with the first and more innocuous of the recommendations, but opposed the Joint Congressional Committee, which was anathema to the CIA.

The Hoover Commission's Intelligence Task Force, headed by General Mark W. Clark, had submitted a much stronger recommendation. It had proposed a single watchdog commission composed of senators, congressmen, and presidential appointees.

"The Task Force ... is concerned," its report stated. "over the absence of satisfactory machinery for surveillance of the stewardship of the Central Intelligence Agency. It is making recommendations which it believes will provide the proper type of 'watchdog' commission as a means of re-establishing that relationship between the CIA and the Congress so essential to and characteristic of our democratic form of government."

The Task Force was critical in tone: "There is still much to be done by our intelligence community to bring its achievements up to an acceptable level.

"The glamour and excitement of some angles of our intelligence effort must not be permitted to overshadow other vital phases of the work or to cause neglect of primary functions. A majority of the Task Force is convinced that an internal reorganization of the CIA is necessary to give assurance that each of these functions gets adequate attention without diversionary interest." 2

Earlier studies of the CIA had been less critical. The 1949 Hoover Task Force, headed by Ferdinand Eberstadt. a Wall Street broker, found the CIA "sound in principle," although it recommended that "vigorous efforts be made to improve the internal structure ... and the quality of its product." 3

In 1954 a special presidential study group, led by General James H. Doolittle, said the CIA was doing a "creditable job." But it detected "important areas in which the CIA organization, administration and operations can and should be improved." 4

Inbetween, Allen Dulles surveyed the CIA for President Truman prior to joining the agency. But his report was kept secret.

By 1954, substantial pressure had built up in Congress for a closer scrutiny of the intelligence community. Mike Mansfield, then a freshman senator from Montana, submitted a resolution that would have carried out the Hoover Commission recommendation by creating a Joint Committee on the Central Intelligence Agency. In its final form, the resolution called for a twelve-man committee, six from the Senate and six from the House, and for the appropriation of $250,000 for staff expenditures during the first year.

Thirty-four senators joined Mansfield in sponsoring the resolution. But by the time the proposal came to a vote on April 11, 1956, fourteen of these sponsors had reversed themselves, and the resolution was defeated, fifty-nine to twenty-seven. Thirteen of those who had changed their minds were Republicans evidently reflecting White House pressure. Many of the Democrats who voted against the resolution clearly were worried about disturbing Senator Richard B. Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and other Democratic titans who opposed the idea.

Mansfield's language in introducing the resolution was not calculated to please the conservative inner club of the Senate, which enjoyed special relations with the Invisible Government.

"An urgent need exists" Mansfield said, "for regular and responsible Congressional scrutiny of the Central Intelligence Agency. Such scrutiny is essential to the success of our foreign policy, to the preservation of our democratic processes and to the security of the intelligence agency itself ...

"If we fail to establish some sort of permanent, continuing link between Congress and the CIA, the only result will be growing suspicion ... In the first place, the whole concept of peacetime foreign intelligence operations has been alien to the American tradition ...

"Our form of government ... is based on a system of checks and balances. If this system gets seriously out of balance at any point the whole system is jeopardized and the way is opened for the growth of tyranny ...

"CIA is freed from practically every ordinary form of Congressional check. Control of its expenditures is exempted from the provisions of the law which prevent financial abuses in other government agencies. Its appropriations are hidden in allotments to other agencies ...

"I agree that an intelligence agency must maintain complete secrecy to be effective. However, there is a profound difference between an essential degree of secrecy to achieve a specific purpose and secrecy for the mere sake of secrecy. Once secrecy becomes sacrosanct, it invites abuse.

"If we accept this idea of secrecy for secrecy's sake, we will have no way of knowing whether we have a fine intelligence service or a very poor one. Secrecy now beclouds everything about the CIA -- its cost, its efficiency, its successes and its failures." 5

As the Mansfield resolution approached a vote in April of 1956, the powers-that-be in the Senate massed their forces in a counter-attack.

"It would be more desirable," Russell declared, "to abolish the CIA and close it up, lock, stock and barrel, than to adopt any such theory as that all the members of the Congress of the United States are entitled to know the details of all the activities of this far-flung organization." 6

Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, the former Democratic Vice-President, declared: "The information I received as a member of the National Security Council, in my capacity as Vice-President, was so confidential that I would lose my right arm before I would divulge it to anyone, even to members of my own family ...

"Some of the information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency and laid before the National Security Council itself was so confidential and secret that the very portfolios in which it was contained were under lock and key. The members of the National Security Council were not even permitted to take those folders and portfolios to their homes. They had to be unlocked in the presence of the other members ...

"To say that now we should establish a Joint Committee to pry into and look into secret documents, to submit them before the Joint Committee, and to make them public seems to me incredible." 7

Russell also raised the specter of critical national secrets leaking out of the Joint Committee. He contended that the very creation of the committee would increase "the hazards to the lives of those who work for the CIA, and dry up sources of information, which are vital to the national security." He insisted that the CIA was already subjected to adequate scrutiny by members of the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees. [iii]

"Although Mr. Allen W. Dulles has been before us" Russell said, "and although we have asked him very searching questions about some activities which it almost chills the marrow of a man to hear about, he has never failed to answer us forthrightly and frankly in response to any question we have asked of him." 8

Republican Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts said the CIA subcommittee met with CIA officials "at least twice a year" [iv] and that the witnesses stated their willingness to answer all questions.

"The difficulty in connection with asking questions and obtaining information," Saltonstall remarked, "is that we might obtain information which I personally would rather not have, unless it was essential for me as a member of Congress to have it." 9

Nevertheless, Saltonstall would call his close friend, Allen Dulles, from time to time to get a personal explanation of some CIA operation.

The CIA's view on whether there should be more Congressional scrutiny was stated officially in a letter to Mansfield from General Cabell on September 4, 1953. "It is our opinion," he wrote, "that, from our point of view, the present ties with Congress are adequate."

Allen Dulles agreed: "Any public impression that the Congress exerts no power over CIA is quite mistaken. Control of funds gives a control over the scope of operations -- how many people CIA can employ, how much it can do and to some extent what it can do ...

"The chairman of the House [Appropriations] Subcommittee [on the CIA) is Clarence Cannon, and a more careful watchdog of the public treasury can hardly be found." 10

Whether or not Dulles' judgment held true for other budgetary matters, the eighty-three-year-old Cannon had no great reputation on his subcommittee as a "careful watchdog" of the CIA. In fact, he was such a good friend and great admirer of Dulles that much of the secret CIA hearings during Dulles' tenure were taken up with mutual congratulations. CIA officials came armed with thick black volumes, but the other members of the House Subcommittee [v] never had time to probe deeply into the agency's activities. Some of the members displayed annoyance but could do little about it in view of Cannon's absolute control over the committee.

Nevertheless, Cannon once sought to have the CIA checked by the General Accounting Office. The request threw the CIA into consternation: should it turn him down and lose a good friend or cooperate and risk the disclosure of operational secrets? The decision was to go along with Cannon but to steer the GAO into a non-sensitive area. The auditors were taken to the facilities of the CIA's broadcast information service which monitors the radio programs of foreign countries, particularly the Communist bloc. The GAO spent a year at the foreign broadcast service, but to the satisfaction of the CIA, turned in a harmless set of recommendations.

"They can't find the side of a barn," said one contented CIA man.

GAG men were not inclined to dispute the assessment. They despaired of the practicality of auditing covert operations where, as a GAO official put it, "they payoff some guy under a rock in the desert."

Prior to 1954 the GAO kept two of its men on permanent assignment with the CIA as consultants. When a problem arose in a non-sensitive area, the CIA accountants would ask the GAO men to judge whether they were acting properly. Taking the facts as presented to them, the GAO men would then refer the problem to the Comptroller General's office for approval.

Since the procedure amounted to a certification of CIA practices without the authority to investigate them, Joseph Campbell withdrew the GAO men from the CIA when he took over as Comptroller General in 1954.

Still, the GAO continued to bump into an occasional CIA project while investigating large defense contracts. But under the 1949 law, which removed Congress' power to audit the CIA, the GAO was prohibited from looking further, even if it had suspicions that the contractor might be juggling non-CIA funds.

Congress' difficulties with the intelligence community have been matched by those of American ambassadors in foreign countries. In 1959 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee compiled a booklet of anonymous quotations from retired Foreign Service officers. One of them noted:

"Every senior officer of the Department of State and every senior officer of the Foreign Service has heard something of CIA's subversive efforts in foreign countries and probably most of them have some authentic information about CIA operations of this nature in some particular case. Unfortunately, most of these activities seem to have been blundering affairs, and most, if not all of them, seem to have resulted to the disadvantage of the United States and sometimes in terrible failure ... The situation is exacerbated by the fact that in most diplomatic and consular establishments abroad espionage agents of the CIA are stationed masquerading as diplomatic and consular officers." 11

Several ambassadors complained about being used as fronts for espionage activities. But the CIA insisted that embassy cover was essential to its work. Without the immunity accorded to diplomatic property, the CIA's codes, files and communications would not be secure. The CIA maintains its own codes and an independent communications system (as does the Pentagon through the Defense Communications Agency), and unless CIA agents choose to tell an ambassador what they are up to and what they are reporting to Washington, he has no independent means for finding out.

Friction between Foreign Service men and CIA operatives became so pronounced by the end of the Eisenhower Administration, that President Eisenhower issued an executive order in November of 1960, stating: "The several chiefs of the United States diplomatic missions in foreign countries, as the representatives of the President and acting on his behalf, shall have and exercise, to the extent permitted by law and in accordance with instructions as the President may from time to time promulgate, affirmative responsibility for coordination and supervision over the carrying out by agencies of their functions in the respective countries."

The Eisenhower order seemed, on the surface, to re-establish the ambassador's supremacy over all United States agencies operating overseas. But many were troubled by the possibility of secret "instructions" to the CIA circumventing the ambassador's authority.

When President Kennedy entered office, he took prompt action to reaffirm the powers of the State Department and the ambassadors. On May 29, 1961, Kennedy sent a letter to all ambassadors:

You are in charge of the entire United States diplomatic mission, and I shall expect you to supervise all of its operations. The mission includes not only the personnel of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, but also the representatives of all other United States agencies which have programs or activities in [name of country]. I shall give you full support and backing in carrying out your assignment.

Needless to say, the representatives of other agencies are expected to communicate directly with their offices here in Washington, and in the event of a decision by you in which they do not concur, they may ask to have the decision reviewed by a higher authority in Washington.

However, it is their responsibility to keep you fully informed of their views and activities and to abide by your decisions unless in some particular instance you and they are notified to the contrary.


The moving force behind Kennedy's letter was Chester Bowles, then Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. In the summer of 1961 Bowles set out on a round-the-world trip to explain the new arrangement. A fifteen-man team, including leading representatives of the State Department, the CIA and the AID, accompanied Bowles to seven regional meetings with ambassadors and their staffs.

Bowles told the meetings that the ambassadors were to be kept fully informed on all CIA operations and were to receive copies of all CIA messages to Washington. At each meeting the CIA men would express skepticism: What, they asked, about situations in which ambassadors do not understand the CIA's special problems?

Let us know, Bowles replied, and we'll get new ones.

Do we tell the ambassador the sources of our information? the CIA men asked incredulously. Yes, Bowles answered, the ambassador should be in a position to cross-check information if he runs across one of the informants at a diplomatic function.

The CIA appealed for permission to circumvent the ambassador in "overriding circumstances." But Bowles said no, and a year later, when he made a check of each United States embassy, he received not a single complaint or comment from the CIA. The new system, Bowles concluded, was working well.

But a different impression was gained by a staff of experts sent on a world-wide inspection late in 1962 by the Subcommittee on National Security Staffing and Operations of the Senate Government Operations Committee. The experts concluded that the Kennedy letter was a "shadow" and had not been interpreted as covering the CIA. Ambassadors were still unable to give orders to the CIA or to stop an agency operation. The only evident change was that the ambassador now appeared to be in a better position to protest about a CIA program and delay it until a decision came back from Washington.

These conclusions were watered down in the staff report published by the subcommittee in January, 1963. But the report did point out that the military services and the CIA tend to "take a restricted view of the ambassador's right to interpose himself" between them and their superiors in Washington.

And in a cautious observation that might equally have applied to the Invisible Government's relationship with the government as a whole, the report said:

"To a degree the primacy of the ambassador is a polite fiction."

_______________

Notes:

i. Significantly, many CIA officials estimate that the Soviet Union spends $2,000,000,000 a year on its spy apparatus. On the other hand, Soviet Secret Police Chief Alexander N. Shelepin estimated in 1959 that the CIA spent $1,500,000,000 a year and employed 20,000 persons.

ii. The OCB, the Operations Coordinating Board, was composed of the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the President's Special Assistant (National Security Affairs ), and the directors of CIA, USIA, and the old International Cooperation Administration. They were supposed to make sure the President's decisions were carried out in their departments. The OCB was abolished by President Kennedy in his first month in office.

iii. In the 88th Congress the CIA subcommittee in the Senate was composed of Russell, Harry Flood Byrd, Virginia Democrat, John Stennis, Mississippi Democrat, and Leverett Saltonstall, Massachusetts Republican, all members of the Armed Services Committee; and Carl Hayden, Arizona Democrat and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Milton R. Young, North Dakota Republican and Appropriations Committee member. A. Willis Robertson, Virginia Democrat and Appropriations Committee member, joined the CIA subcommittee on occasion.

iv. In a debate on August 14, 1963, Representative Walter Norblad, the Oregon Republican, said the House Armed Services Subcommittee on the CIA (of which he was a former member) "met annually one time a year for a period of two hours in which we accomplished virtually nothing."

v. In the 88th Congress they were Democrats George Mahon of Texas and Harry R. Sheppard of California, and Republicans Gerald Ford of Michigan and Harold C. Ostertag of New York.

In the House there was also a CIA subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee. It was composed of Carl Vinson, Georgia Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee; L. Mendel Rivers, South Carolina Democrat; F. Edward Hebert, Louisiana Democrat; Melvin Price, Illinois Democrat; Charles E. Bennett, Florida Democrat; George Huddleston, Jr., Alabama Democrat; Leslie C. Arends, Illinois Republican; William G. Bray, Indiana Republican; Bob Wilson, California Republican; and Frank C. Osmers, Jr., New Jersey Republican.

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:34 am
by admin
Purity in the Peace Corps

THE CONFLICT in the field between the ambassador and the intelligence operator is reflected on a larger scale in the frequent clashes in Washington between the State Department and the CIA. The uneasiness felt in other government agencies over the role of the CIA runs deeper than that, however.

This uneasiness is little known outside of the government, and it is almost never talked about. But the Peace Corps provides the best example.

During the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy had promised, if elected, to establish a Peace Corps. He kept his word, created the new agency by an executive order in March, 1961, and asked his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, Jr., to head it.

Shriver accepted, but he very quickly concluded that the Peace Corps, with its thousands of young volunteers dispersed over the globe, could well look like an all but irresistible "cover" to an intelligence agency always on the alert for new ways to disguise its people. At the same time, Shriver knew that the Peace Corps, because it would offer genuine help to the emerging nations of the world, would be an equally tempting target for Communist propaganda, which would seek at all costs to discredit it.

Therefore, Shriver privately proclaimed his determination to take every possible step to divorce the Peace Corps from even the faintest smell of intelligence work. He was well aware that even one "spy" incident involving a volunteer might destroy the Corps.

An anecdote that went the rounds of the executive suite of the Peace Corps at the time of its birth is revealing. It had the then Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, advising Shriver to "beware the three C's -- Communism, Cuties, and the CIA."

In the spring of 1961 Shriver made a trip seeking to persuade neutral nations to accept Peace Corpsmen. He discovered that the leaders of those countries were blunt in asking whether he would let the Corps be used as a cover for intelligence agents. Shriver replied just as bluntly that he was doing everything he could within the government to make sure that the CIA stayed out of his agency. He also promised to assist individual countries in any security checks they might care to make.

As early as March 16, 1961, Radio Moscow was attacking the Peace Corps as a plan for "the collection of espionage information for Allen Dulles' agency." On May 11 Tass, the Soviet news agency, sent out a dispatch in English to Europe, headlined "Peace Corps Head Shriver CIA Agent."

As a first step in his campaign to prevent the Peace Corps from becoming tarred as an instrument of Cold War intelligence-gathering, Shriver went directly to President Kennedy. "Jack Kennedy gave me his promise," Shriver later told a friend, "that there would be no CIA agents in the Peace Corps."

Upon graduating in 1949, Coffin entered the Union Theological Seminary, where he remained for a year, until the outbreak of the Korean War reignited his interest in fighting against communism. He joined the CIA as a case officer in 1950 (his brother-in-law Franklin Lindsay had been head of the Office of Policy Coordination at the OSS, one of the predecessors of the CIA) spending three years in West Germany recruiting anti-Soviet Russian refugees and training them how to undermine Stalin's regime....

Approached by Sargent Shriver in 1961 to run the first training programs for the Peace Corps, Coffin took up the task and took a temporary leave from Yale, working to develop a rigorous training program modeled on Outward Bound and supervising the building of a training camp in Puerto Rico. He used his pulpit as a platform for like-minded crusaders, hosting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela, among others.

-- William Sloane Coffin, by Wikipedia


President Kennedy followed up this verbal assurance to Shriver by issuing orders to Allen Dulles and later to his successor, John McCone, which continued in effect after President Johnson took office. In addition, Shriver met with Dulles and later with McCone and obtained their guarantee that the CIA would stay away from the Peace Corps.

But the problem was more subtle than that. Shriver's dilemma was a peculiar one, bred of the Cold War and inconceivable in the America of even twenty years before. Could he be certain that the White House attitude would be reflected all along the line? Could he be sure, for example, that a lower-echelon CIA official might not quietly attempt, despite everything, to plant agents in the Peace Corps, in the honest belief that he was acting in some higher national interest?

Shriver must have decided he could not be sure of the answers to these delicate questions, for he did not rely on presidential assurances alone. A careful screening process was set up. It was designed, of course, to catch any Communist or security risk who might try to get into the Peace Corps. But it was also designed -- hopefully -- to spot any CIA "volunteer" before he could unpack his cloak and dagger.

It might come as a jolt to most Americans to know that one agency of the United States Government feels it must protect itself against infiltration in its ranks by another agency of the United States Government. But the Peace Corps has taken elaborate steps to prevent just that.

Shriver designated William Delano, the Peace Corps' young general counsel, to ride herd on the problem and make sure no intelligence men slipped through the net. As insurance, Shriver laid down a firm rule. No one with any intelligence background, even years ago, would be accepted.

As Peace Corps officials soon discovered, there was a hitch. Openly acknowledged "overt" employees of the CIA are allowed to say so when they seek a new job. But covert employees of the CIA are not permitted to reveal it, even years later on a government job application form. They might put down the name of a commercial cover company or perhaps some other branch of the government for which they had ostensibly worked.

And a routine Civil Service check, Peace Corps officials realized, would not reveal whether applicants had been or were still covert CIA agents. Some applicants, unaware of Shriver's policy, innocently listed such past jobs as "CIA secretary, summer of 1951." They were immediately eliminated.

Others, more sophisticated, sought to fuzz their past employment by listing "U. S. Government" to cover a period of a year or two. But the would-be volunteers, in these cases, were questioned by Civil Service investigators, who naturally demanded to know more details.

One high Peace Corps official estimated that ten to twenty ex-CIA employees who had listed "U.S. Government" on their applications have been turned down since the Peace Corps began.

Screening out persons with a background in intelligence was only part of the problem. The Peace Corps also decided that it had to guard against the possibility of the CIA approaching a volunteer after he had been accepted into the Corps.

During orientation courses for volunteers, it became standard practice for a Peace Corps instructor to get up and pose the following question:

"Suppose a man asks you to have a cup of coffee with him and he identifies himself as a CIA agent. He says he doesn't want you to spy, but that he'd like you to get together with him and just chat every couple of weeks, and perhaps tell him a couple of things you've learned. What would be your reaction?"

Most of the volunteers replied they would have no part of any free-lance spying of this sort.

"Just so that no one will have any doubts about it," the instructor would then add, "if such a solicitation is made, you are to report it to the Peace Corps country representative within ten minutes, if you can get to him that quickly, because the CIA man would be defying the President's order to Dulles and McCone. Furthermore, the CIA man will be kicked out of the country faster than you can see, if you report it."

Because of this orientation, Peace Corps officials felt it was unlikely that their volunteers would be solicited to do any intelligence work. Still, one official admitted, the real problem would be "covert people trying to infiltrate. I don't see any way we can spot them. It would be a fluke. The more deliberate the attempt, the harder it would be to find."

Shriver's concern over keeping his agency "clean" was reinforced in September, 1961, when Secretary of the Army Elvis J. Stahr made a speech suggesting that an Army Peace Corps be established.

"We must plan so that we can use our tools in cold war as well as hot war and employ them anywhere in the world, " said Stahr. General Barksdale Hamlett, Army Deputy Chief of Staff, gave added details of the plan, which seemed to envision use of the Army in worthy social projects in underdeveloped countries -- but linked to paramilitary activities.

To Shriver, it smacked of precisely the sort of military and intelligence overtones he was trying so hard to avoid. Shriver objected strenuously. A high-level meeting was held at the Pentagon, attended by Stahr, Shriver, General Hamlett and a platoon of beribboned Army brass.

The generals at the meeting insisted that the Army Peace Corps would have no relation to any intelligence work. At that, Lee St. Lawrence, a Peace Corps official, spoke up. St. Lawrence had served with the Agency for International Development in Southeast Asia and was familiar with CIA operations in that part of the world.

He asked the generals to name the officers who would be in charge of the proposed "Army Peace Corps" in Southeast Asia. When they did, St. Lawrence singled out some as CIA men. He offered to reel off the names of others, but there was no need. The project was dropped.

Page ten of the eleven-paged DACOR Bulletin published in March includes a fifteen-line obituary that I read on the web, never having received one from DACOR:

Lee St. Lawrence, a retired Foreign Service Reserve Officer, died on November 23rd 2006 at a hospital near his home in Deal, Kent, England. Joseph Lee St. Lawrence was born in Massachusetts. He served in the U.S. Army Overseas between 1943 and 1946. Following his Honorable discharge, he worked as a military intelligence investigator in Paris in 1946 and as an instructor in a U.S. Government Intelligence School in Germany 1947 and 1951-1953. He returned to Paris in 1953 to serve as an interpreter translator for the U.S. Army for two years.

Mr. Lawrence joined the International Cooperation Administration, a bureau antecedent of the Agency for International Development in 1955. He was assigned to the ICA mission in Belgrade. In 1957 he was transferred to Vientiane. He returned to AID headquarters in 1960. Six years later he was posted to the AID mission in Bangkok as a regional development advisor; in 1967, he was detailed to the Embassy; in 1971 he became a counselor for regional development/economic affairs. His postings after 1974 and the date of retirement are unavailable; according to his long-time friend, Prof. Pierre Delva, he retired with ambassadorial rank. Mr. St. Lawrence moved to Deal in the 1980's. His wife, Ann St. Lawrence died in the 1980s.

He leaves his companion, Mme Corrine Baudon, of their home in Deal, and a brother (Kindness of Prof Delva)

Lee St. Lawrence: The Man Behind the Peace Corps (Excerpt), by Pierre L. Delva; Joan Campbel-Delva


But Communist attacks on Shriver and the Peace Corps continued. United States intelligence obtained, from Eastern Europe, what appeared to be a guide for satellite nations on how to phrase propaganda against the Peace Corps. The document stressed the general line that the Corps was a CIA operation and that volunteers were selected by the CIA. Peace Corps officials believed that it served as a primer for subsequent propaganda emanating from various points in the Communist world.

Certainly the Russian and Communist Chinese attacks followed a familiar pattern. In March, 1962, for example, Radio Moscow broadcast in Hindi to India: "U.S. agents are sent to Afro-Asian countries under the U.S. Peace Corps label. The plan to organize the corps was jointly prepared by the U.S. State Department, Pentagon and CIA. Director of the Corps, Shriver, is an old employee of the CIA."

Radio Peking joined in, and so did Fidel Castro. Radio Havana broadcast attacks on the Peace Corps that paralleled the Moscow barrage.

Also in Havana, the newspaper Roy warned Venezuela to "watch out" for the Peace Corps. "These Corps are land U-2s. Their mission consists in poking their noses into all places where meek rulers open the door for them."

On March 27, 1963, a Polish paper published an article attacking the Peace Corps by charging that girl volunteers were Mata Haris. It ran photographs of girls training, with the caption: "The Americans consider all means acceptable. Where other methods do not succeed, sex [i] may be very useful. Girl members of the Corps on the exercise field."

About the same time, Tass picked up the sex theme and charged that a wicked Peace Corps woman teacher in Somalia tried to teach pupils the "indecent movements" of the twist.

By the spring of 1963, United States analysts concluded that the Soviet Union, having had little success with this loud, public campaign against the Peace Corps, had embarked on a simultaneous behind-the-scenes campaign against the Corps. In Ghana, for example, the Soviet ambassador succeeded in persuading the government of President Kwame Nkrumah to impose some restrictions on the Peace Corps. And in May, 1963, the Ghanaian Times, regarded as the unofficial spokesman for Nkrumah, openly attacked the Corps as an alleged CIA tool.

There seemed no likelihood that the public attacks would stop, but their very intensity logically dictated that Shriver, more than ever, would want to keep the Peace Corps pristine. A spy incident involving a volunteer would give the Russians a propaganda field day and could possibly wreck the Peace Corps, and Shriver's political career as well.

The Peace Corps, it should be noted in fairness to the CIA, maintains it does not know of a single case in which it could be sure of an attempted infiltration by an intelligence agent seeking to use the Corps as cover.

But the fact that Shriver felt he had to take the astonishing precautions he did, speaks volumes. It reflects the atmosphere of mistrust that is felt, rightly or wrongly, by many overt officials of the United States Government toward their less visible colleagues. The distrust is not universal, however. Some unlikely departments of the government have become vehicles for secret operations of various shadings. The story of one of these begins in a house in Cuba.

_______________

Notes:

i. Actually, the Peace Corps has rather strict rules about sex. "In-service marriages of single volunteers must have the prior approval of the Peace Corps representative in charge of the project," a Peace Corps booklet warns sternly. "Approval will not be granted when the future spouse has come from the U.S. or from some other country for the purpose of marrying a volunteer ... married couples who find they are to become parents must notify their Peace Corps representative as quickly as possible."

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:35 am
by admin
A Gray Operation

Outside the high garden wall of the decaying villa in Miramar, on the outskirts of Havana, guards armed with Tommy guns patrolled back and forth.

Inside, James Donovan, the remarkable, soft-spoken New York attorney, picked up the telephone and asked the Cuban operator to put him through to a number in the United States.

He took out a black wallet, of the type that was large enough for foreign bills, and reached into an apparently empty pouch. From a concealed pocket in the wallet he pulled out a typewritten sheet of onionskin paper.

On it, down the left-hand side, were key words like "negotiations." On the right side were various phrases such as "1 am meeting with" and then a list of various people, including the name "Fidel." The sheet also contained what appeared to be a list of stocks.

By ordering his "broker" to "sell Quaker City" and by using other innocuous key words, Donovan, through his code sheet, was able to convey to the CIA men on the line in the United States the real progress of his negotiations to ransom the lives of more than 1,000 prisoners.

James Donovan was on his most important mission. He was playing for high stakes -- the freedom of the 1,113 survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The men were captives in the jails of Fidel Castro.

Donovan was a silver-haired, forty-six-year-old former OSS man, short but powerfully built. In February, 1962, on the bridge in Berlin, he had traded the Soviet master spy Rudolf Abel (whom he defended five years earlier in Federal Court) for the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Yale student Frederic L. Pryor, held on a charge of espionage by the East Germans. It was the most spectacular spy swap in the history of the Cold War.

Donovan's Cuban adventure began a few months later, early in June, 1962, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent to him a delegation of Cubans made up of survivors of the Bay of Pigs brigade and their families.

Up to that time, sixty prisoners had been ransomed for a pledge of cash, but efforts to free the rest had failed in June, 1961, when negotiations between Castro and a Tractors for Freedom Committee collapsed. The committee, sponsored by the Kennedy Administration, had been unable to reach agreement with Castro on the dictator's continually shifting offers to trade the prisoners for 500 tractors or bulldozers.

Donovan, after listening to the pleas of his visitors, agreed to become the general counsel to the group. It was called the Cuban Families Committee for Liberation of Prisoners of War, Inc., a charitable corporation that had been granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service.

On August 29, 1962, Donovan went to Cuba for his first talks with Castro. He stayed at the crumbling villa in Miramar and conferred with Castro at the Presidential Palace in Havana. He made it clear he would offer drugs and baby foods for the men, but no cash or tractors. Castro agreed to negotiate on this basis, provided the Cuban Families Committee came up with the $2,900,000 it had pledged in return for the sixty prisoners released the previous April.

Donovan returned to New York and visited John E. McKeen, the president of Charles Pfizer Company, who lived in the penthouse of Donovan's apartment building near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They called in John T. Connor, head of Merck, Sharp & Dohme, another friend of Donovan. The executives of the two drug companies offered to donate medicines to help Donovan get the men out.

The CIA separately approached the drug industry trade association, to explore the chances of large- scale donations by manufacturers.

In the meantime, Donovan had entered the political arena. On September 18, shortly after his return from Cuba, Donovan won the Democratic nomination for United States Senate. His opponent was the Republican incumbent, Senator Jacob K. Javits.

On October 2, the drug-company pledges in his pocket, Donovan returned to Havana, confident he could reach agreement with Castro. The Pfizer Company quietly began moving $2,000,000 worth of drugs in refrigerator cars to Idlewild International Airport. The United States Government began making preparations to receive the influx of prisoners in Miami.

It was on this second trip that Castro agreed to trade the men for baby foods and medicines. All was going well except for a painful attack of bursitis in Donovan's right shoulder that forced him to fly to Miami briefly for treatment.

He returned to Havana to continue his talks with Castro, but back in the United States there were charges that Donovan was seeking to make political capital out of his role as Cuban negotiator. And some members of Congress said that the United States ought not to be dickering with Castro at a time when it was asking other countries to cut off trade.

The White House refused to say whether any government funds would be used to ransom the men. It insisted Donovan was acting as a private attorney but said he was keeping President Kennedy advised of his activities. Donovan returned from Cuba on October 11.

Three days later a U-2 plane flying secretly over western Cuba took a photograph of a Soviet mobile medium-range missile site.

The Cuban missile crisis was on. The world moved close to nuclear war during the latter half of October. Against this background of tension it looked as though Donovan's chances of reaching an agreement to free the men had been shattered. He suffered a personal, although not unexpected, blow when he lost the election on November 6 to Senator Javits.

By late November the situation was this:

Donovan still had Castro's general agreement to a swap. But now in the wake of the missile crisis, the drug industry was unwilling to take the risk of donating medicines to Castro unless the Kennedy Administration made it publicly clear that the deal was in the national interest. The drug firms, already hit hard by the Senate investigation of their high prices, had no desire to bring a new wave of public disapproval down upon themselves.

On November 30 a meeting was held at the Justice Department of top aides to Robert Kennedy and officials of the Internal Revenue Service, the State Department and the CIA (including Lawrence R. Houston, the general counsel of the CIA, Donovan's CIA contact in the Powers-Abel trade). Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Assistant Attorney General Louis F. Oberdorfer represented the Justice Department. Robert Hurwitch spoke for the State Department.

The high-level meeting concluded that Castro's demand of $53,000,000 in drugs would cost only $17,000,000 at wholesale U.S. prices. It was also decided to study the tax angle involved in possible contributions of drugs by the companies. It was agreed that a memorandum would be prepared over the weekend to be ready for Robert Kennedy on Monday December 3. [i] In the meantime, a drug-industry representative was contacted informally.

On Monday morning the New York Herald Tribune published a front-page story by Warren Rogers, Jr., stating that the President felt a "moral obligation" to free the men. It was the kind of reassurance the drug companies had been looking for. Donovan's phone began to ring in Brooklyn with additional pledges of drugs from the industry.

In Washington, Robert Kennedy called on the President at the White House, and at noon the Attorney General phoned Oberdorfer to give him the green light to go ahead with the operation. The American Red Cross then agreed to accept the drugs as contributions to charity and to deliver them to Havana.

The next day Donovan slipped into Washington to confer with Robert Kennedy. On December 7 the Attorney General met with officials of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. He told the drug manufacturers that the Bay of Pigs invasion had been launched by the United States, that the plan had been started by the Eisenhower Administration and continued by the Kennedy Administration, and that both the nation and the government had a moral obligation to get the men out.

Robert Kennedy talked about the courage of forty members of the brigade who had escaped and crossed the Caribbean in an open boat. He went on to say that the United States could not directly conduct negotiations with Cuba because it would be "misunderstood" by the world and would be a diplomatic disaster if the deal failed. He said that all departments had received a list of the drugs Castro wanted and that none were considered strategic.

Finally, the Attorney General assured the companies that the sight of the returning prisoners would still any criticism of the drug companies for contributing to Castro. He made it clear that contributions were voluntary.

He then ordered Oberdorfer to devote his full time to the project. And on December 9, Robert Kennedy gave the same talk to a group of baby-food manufacturers.

Oberdorfer's office in the Justice Department became the command post for "Project X." Additional telephones were installed. A group of private attorneys, including John E. Nolan, Jr., and E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., were brought in to help. (Both later joined the administration.)

From Oberdorfer's office, the private attorneys (and two Justice Department lawyers) now began telephone solicitation of the drug companies. The Justice Department attorneys did not identify themselves as government employees, but said they were calling as representatives of the Cuban Families Committee.

The Justice Department team obtained clearances from the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Interstate Commerce Commission to permit charitable contribution of air and surface transportation to haul the drugs to Miami. The CIA, the Air Force, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare began making arrangements to receive and process the prisoners in Florida. The Commerce Department granted export licenses for the food and drugs.

During this time Donovan told the Justice Department that Castro was demanding a guarantee of full payment of the ransom; otherwise he would hold back the brigade officers until the last payment was made. Katzenbach flew to Montreal on December 14 but the Royal Bank of Canada balked at issuing a letter of credit without some formal guarantees by American banks. The Justice Department official flew back to New York. The Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York and the Bank of America agreed to participate; special meetings of their boards of directors were hastily convened to approve the plan.

To complete the financial arrangements, the Continental Insurance Company wrote out a $53,000,000 performance bond without charge, guaranteeing that the Red Cross would meet its obligations to deliver the drugs to Cuba.

Meanwhile, the drugs contributed to "Project X" by the manufacturers were flooding into Miami and creating a monster job of cataloging and bookkeeping at Opa-locka (ironically, the same CIA air base used as a jumping-off point for the Bay of Pigs trainees). The CIA provided a pharmacist, Stephen Aldrich, who helped log the drugs as they arrived in Florida.

On December 16 Donovan began his final mission. He stopped off in Washington to confer with officials and then went on to Miami, where he disappeared. The press could not find him, and with good reason.

Donovan stayed in a CIA house in Miami on December 16 and 17, telephoning to Havana. About 9:00 P.M., December 17, Donovan called Washington to say that he had arranged to go to Havana in the morning. He also reported that one of Castro's negotiators had a sick child who needed a certain medicine immediately.

Katzenbach called Walter Reed Hospital and got ten vials of the medicine. Shortly after midnight Oberdorfer, his assistant Frank Michelman, John Nolan and a CIA attorney flew to Miami from Washington, taking the medicine along.

They did not arrive at the CIA "safe house" until 5:00 A.M. on December 18. There, Donovan received a final pre-dawn briefing. Then he flew into Havana. Nolan stayed at the house, helping to man the CIA telephones. The rest of the team flew back to Washington.

Two days later Donovan returned briefly to Miami. Then he flew back to Havana, taking with him Dr. Leonard Scheele, the former Surgeon General of the United States. On December 21 Donovan and Castro signed a Memorandum of Agreement. But Castro was wary of Donovan's representations. Donovan suggested that Castro's aides inspect some of the drugs.

Shortly after midnight three Cuban Red Cross officials in olive drab flew secretly into Miami. They were met by Dr. Scheele and Barrett Prettyman, shown the supplies at Opa-locka and then taken to Port Everglades to inspect the drugs being loaded on the African Pilot, a ship donated by the Committee of the American Steamship Lines.

The Cubans then adjourned to a Howard Johnson's motel and said to Prettyman they wanted to remain for the day. It was now 5:00 A.M., December 22. Nolan and Prettyman were alarmed at what would happen if the press learned that Castro emissaries were holed up in a Florida motel. One of the Cuban Red Cross men smoked big cigars and, in his olive uniform, did not project the image of a man of mercy. Nolan and Prettyman finally prevailed on the Cubans to fly back to Havana, which they did at 9:00 A.M.

That same day the African Pilot sailed for Havana with the first shipload of drugs. Early on Sunday, December 23, Nolan and Prettyman joined Donovan in Havana. The African Pilot docked that afternoon. Castro met the ship.

The prisoner exchange seemed to be proceeding smoothly. At 5:00 P.M. the first plane left the San Antonio de los Banos airport for Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami. It landed in Florida an hour and five minutes later. All told, four planeloads and a total of 426 prisoners left Cuba by nightfall.

But, in Havana, it had become obvious to Donovan that the airlift would be halted by Castro unless the Cuban Families Committee came up with the $2,900,000 that had been pledged as ransom for the sixty wounded prisoners released in April before Donovan entered the picture.

At 2:00 A.M. on Monday, December 24, Nolan flew to Miami. He placed a 5:00 A.M. phone call to Robert Kennedy in Washington. Nolan made it clear that unless the money was raised by three o'clock that afternoon, the deal would collapse.

"What are you going to tell Jim Donovan?" Robert Kennedy asked.

"I'm going to tell him you're going to get the money," Nolan replied.

There was a pause. Then Robert Kennedy said: "Have a nice trip back."

Nolan flew back to Havana. The Attorney General called Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston, who pledged $1,000,000. Robert Kennedy also called General Lucius Clay, who was a sponsor of the Cuban Families Committee.

Clay borrowed the remaining $1,900,000 on his own signature, then solicited contributions from American business firms to cover that amount. Texaco, Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Ford Motor Company Fund each contributed $100,000.

In Cuba, that Monday, two more planeloads of prisoners were permitted to take off. Then Castro stalled.

First he staged a military air show at San Antonio de los Banos to tie up the airport. Then, about 1:00 P.M., Castro halted all flights until he received word about the money. Late in the afternoon Castro was assured the Royal Bank of Canada had deposited it in Montreal. Donovan and Castro then met at the Canadian consul's office to accept the financial guarantees.

At 9:35 P.M. the last of the planes carrying the returning prisoners touched down at Homestead Air Force Base. Aboard was James Donovan, a quiet American -- his mission accomplished.

For each of the returning prisoners, the routine was the same. Clean clothes, a meal and then a bus trip to Dinner Key Auditorium, where their families and friends were waiting. There, they marched between double lines of fellow members of Brigade 2506 as a band played the march from The Bridge Over the River Kwai.

It was Christmas Eve, 1962.

There were some people who were not content to accept the prisoner exchange as a humanitarian act arranged by a private citizen. Months later, in June, 1963, all thirteen Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee called for a Congressional inquiry into Donovan's role. They charged that many aspects of the exchange "remain baffling."

Donovan replied: "I was a private citizen acting on behalf of the Cuban Families Committee."

It was not, of course, quite as simple as that, as has been shown. Although both Donovan and the White House took this position (for reasons Robert Kennedy had explained privately to the drug industry on December 7, 1962), the fact is that no fewer than fourteen branches of the government participated in the complex deal: the CIA, the Air Force, the Departments of Health, Education and Welfare, Justice, Defense, Commerce, Agriculture, Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, the White House, Immigration, the CAB, the ICC and the State Department.

In January, 1963, the Agriculture Department gave 5,000,000 pounds of dried milk to the Red Cross for shipment to Cuba and pledged more as needed. In all, the Agriculture Department contributed a total of 35,000,000 pounds of surplus food to the prisoner exchange -- 15,000, 000 pounds of dried milk and 20,000,000 pounds of shortening.

But the administration was fearful that it would come under political attack for helping Castro. The milk and. shortening deal was played down.

Furthermore, the Agriculture Department announced on January 8, 1963, that "the Red Cross had indicated that the Cuban Families Committee expects to raise funds to reimburse the department." In other words, the government was saying that it would be paid back in cash for the surplus food.

What happened was somewhat different.

The dried milk cost the government $2,505,000 when it was bought from producers as part of the farm price support program. The shortening cost the government $3,150,000. Consequently, the government gave away commodities for which it had paid $5,655,000.

However, in calculating the value of the milk and shortening given to the Red Cross, the government figured its contribution as worth just under $2,000,000 -- the lower price the milk and repackaged shortening might have brought had it been sold by the government on the world market. Normally, the government uses the higher price that it paid to producers when it figures the value of a contribution of surplus food to charity. In this instance, it obviously sought to minimize the size of the donation because of the domestic political implications of giving anything away to Castro.

Nor was the government paid back any amount in cash for its donation of milk and shortening. Instead, in a bit of complex bookkeeping that leaves the onlooker breathless, the government accepted as "reimbursement" 4,000,000 pounds of an insecticide called Sevin. The Union Carbide Company had contributed $2,000,000 worth of the bug-killer to the Red Cross for the prisoner exchange. The Commerce Department ruled that the insecticides would be of strategic economic value to Castro by helping his sugar-cane crops.

"So the following took place: The Red Cross accepted the insecticides, then immediately turned them over to the Agency for International Development, which dispatched them to India, Pakistan and Algeria. The government accepted this as repayment for the milk and shortening. This was not quite the same as the "funds" which the Agriculture announcement had indicated would be raised "to reimburse the department."

A conservative estimate of what it cost the government to extricate itself after the Bay of Pigs would be $29,793, 000. This consists of a $20,000,000 tax loss [ii] to the government as a result of the drug companies' charitable deductions; $5,655,000 in skim milk and shortening; $4,000,000 in secret CIA payments to families of the Bay of Pigs prisoners over a twenty-month period, and $138,000 in costs to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare when the prisoners returned. (Each man got a $100 check; the other costs were clothing, housing and food.)

Because of the political risks at home of dealing with Castro, the government felt it necessary to mask its participation in the prisoner exchange both by acting through Donovan and by a certain amount of fiscal hocus-pocus. It decided that the realities of the situation were such that even an act of humanity had to be approached with the utmost political caution.

Nevertheless, Donovan succeeded and the prisoners' lives were saved. As an unexpected part of the deal, Donovan persuaded Castro not to let the Red Cross ships sail away empty. Castro began releasing thousands of refugees previously unable to leave Cuba, including over 5,000 members of the families of the prisoners.

Then in March and April of 1963 Donovan won the release of more than thirty Americans held in Cuban jails, including three CIA men. On July 3, when the last of the medical supplies reached Cuba, the American Red Cross announced that a total of 9,703 persons (including the Bay of Pigs prisoners and the Americans) had been brought out of Cuba under the agreements negotiated by Donovan.

The staggering figure of nearly 10,000 persons rescued by one man is not widely known, because the total figure received less public attention than did the dramatic return of the invasion prisoners.

In all of these missions, Donovan had the assistance of, and worked hand in hand with, the United States Government. But he was not formally a part of it. In each case, as a private citizen, he was breaking new ground in a form of intelligence diplomacy that is a unique outgrowth of the Cold War.

In the case of the Powers-Abel swap, the negotiations that culminated on the Berlin bridge began with a series of letters to Donovan signed "Hellen Abel" The writer of the letters claimed to be the wife of the Soviet spy imprisoned in the United States. The letters came from Leipzig, East Germany.

Donovan turned each of them over to Lawrence Houston, the CIA general counsel. The agency prepared an answer to each letter from "Mrs. Abel," and shipped them back to Donovan in New York, who sent them off to Leipzig. But when Donovan eventually went to East Berlin to negotiate the final details directly with the Russians and East Germans, he was technically on his own, a private American citizen with no diplomatic immunity or protection.

Donovan's missions, then, have defied any neat categorization. President Kennedy, in a letter to Donovan after the East Berlin mission, characterized them as "unique." Because of their very nature, there was public confusion over whether he acted as a private citizen or as a secret agent of the United States Government. The truth is that he was somewhere inbetween.

The government was unwilling to tell the full story of its role in the Cuban prisoner exchange, as it has been related here, because to have done so during Donovan's negotiations might have handicapped his ability to deal with Castro. And, afterward, it might have engendered too many delicate political questions. In a very real sense, the seeds of one covert operation, the Bay of Pigs, had given rise to another -- the return of the invasion brigade.

Those who sought a clear, simple explanation of whether an operation was private or governmental were bound to be disappointed in the case of James Donovan.

His rescue of the Bay of Pigs prisoners was not precisely a "black, " i.e., secret operation. Nor was it entirely "white." It might be most accurately described as a mixture of both -- truly a gray operation.

_______________

Notes:

i. The memorandum noted that some drug companies might gain a tax "windfall" by making charitable contributions to the prisoner exchange deal. An accompanying letter by Oberdorfer to Robert Kennedy pointed out that the drug companies would nevertheless insist on approval of the deal by someone at least as high as a Cabinet officer as well as "maximum protection from legislative and public criticism in two particular directions: (a) charges of pro-Communism and (b) criticism for inferences drawn from any price mark-up exposed in the transaction."

ii. The estimate of tax loss was made by Mitchell Rogovin, counsel to the Internal Revenue Service, on December 28, 1962.

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:35 am
by admin
Missile Crisis

In the summer and fall of 1962, as Donovan was negotiating with Castro to rescue the victims of one of the Invisible Government's operations in Cuba, another operation was being conducted in the airspace over the island. In utmost secrecy, the U-2 spy plane was photographing every foot of Cuban territory in search of Soviet missiles.

The U-2 had been flying over Cuba from the earliest days of the Castro regime. In 1959 a U-2 was sent over the Zapata swamps near the Bay of Pigs to check an erroneous report that missiles were being set up in the area. By 1962 two U-2s a month were being flown over the island.

That August photographs were taken of SA-2 anti-aircraft missiles being unloaded at Cuban docks. The over-flight program was stepped up and seven U-2s were sent over the island in the five weeks between August 29 and October 7. Each mission returned with new pictures of short-range SA-2 defensive missiles.

But President Kennedy, citing the information provided him by the intelligence community, insisted there was no evidence that the Russians were moving in long-range offensive missiles that could threaten the United States. Kennedy gave his assurances despite the fact that John McCone had a suspicion -- never passed along to the White House -- that the Soviets were deploying ballistic missiles in Cuba.

In testimony before the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee on March 12, 1963, McCone said he had reported this view within the CIA on August 10. "I couldn't understand," he explained, "why these surface-to-air missile sites were there, so useless for protecting the island against invasion. They must be there, in my opinion, to shield the island against observation from aerial reconnaissance."

McCone conceded, however, that his view, was based on "intuition" without "hard intelligence." And although as Director of Central Intelligence he could have ordered that his view be made the official view and reported to Kennedy, he did not do so.

McCone left Washington on August 23 to marry Theiline McGee Pigott, the widow of a rich Seattle industrialist and an old family friend. During his honeymoon cruise to Europe and his three-week stay on Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, he received daily briefing telegrams. They deepened his apprehension, and on September 7, 10, 13 and 20 he responded with telegrams expressing his mounting concern. But, again, he did not direct that the "honeymoon telegrams" be passed along to the President. They were treated as "in-house" messages and were not circulated outside the CIA.

During McCone's absence, the Board of National Estimates was asked to assess the possibility that the Soviets would station offensive missiles in Cuba. And on September 19 a National Intelligence Estimate was produced. It conceded that the Russians might be tempted to introduce the missiles for psychological reasons, particularly to impress the Latin Americans. It also alluded to the possibility that the Soviets might wish to strengthen their position in Cuba as a prelude to a move against Berlin.

Nevertheless, the Estimate stated that it was highly unlikely that offensive missiles would be sent in, because the Soviets would be deterred by their awareness of the violent reaction which such a move would provoke on the part of the United States. The chief Kremlinologists in the State Department, Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen and Llewellyn E. (Tommy) Thompson, Jr., both former ambassadors to Moscow, concurred with the Estimate. [i]

However, on September 20, the day after the Estimate was handed down, a reliable eyewitness report of an offensive missile reached Ray Cline, the CIA's deputy director for intelligence. A CIA sub-agent had spotted a missile part on a highway on September 12, but had experienced delay in getting his information out of Cuba. Missile experts in Washington, who had rejected hundreds of prior reports by Cuban refugees, concluded that the sub-agent's description checked out against the known features of Russian offensive missiles. In retrospect the CIA decided the/missile part had arrived in a shipment of Soviet cargo on September 8.

McCone returned from his honeymoon on September 26, and on October 4 an urgent meeting of the United States Intelligence Board was called. The members took a look at the "mosaic" -- a photographic panorama of the entire island of Cuba pieced together from the latest U-2 pictures. There were still no photographic indications of offensive missiles. But McCone noted that there had been no pictures of the western sector of the island since September 5. He ordered that overflights be further stepped up and concentrated on that section of Cuba.

Until that time all U-2 flights had been made by civilian CIA pilots. Now, however, the risks would be greatly increased by the expanded schedule of missions and by the presence of the anti-aircraft missiles. The CIA had concluded that an SA-2 had downed Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union in 1960, and that another had accounted for a Nationalist Chinese U-2 over Communist China on October 9, 1962. Rather than risk another U-2 incident involving the CIA, McCone agreed to McNamara's recommendation that the overflight operation be transferred to the Strategic Air Command.

During this interval, on October 10, Senator Kenneth B. Keating, the New York Republican, announced that he had confirmed reports of intermediate-range missile sites under construction in Cuba.

Four days later, early on the morning of October 14, SAC flew its first U-2 mission over Cuba and returned with photographs of mobile medium-range ballistic missiles (MMRBM) at San Cristobal, 100 miles to the southwest of Havana.

The pictures were analyzed by the photo-interpreters in Washington all the next day, and late in the afternoon the findings were reported to General Carter, McCone's deputy (McCone had left Washington earlier in the afternoon for Los Angeles to take the body of his stepson, Paul J. Pigott, who had been killed in a sports-car crash, to Seattle).

General Carroll, the director of the DIA, was next to be informed. Then Carroll took two civilian photo-interpreters to dinner at the home of General Maxwell Taylor. Joining them were Carter, and Roswell Gilpatric and U. Alexis Johnson, both members of the Special Group. When the officials had been convinced that Soviet missiles were in place in Cuba, McGeorge Bundy was notified at his home. He arranged for the photo-interpreters to report to him at the White House the following morning.

Shortly before nine o'clock on the morning of October 16 Bundy took the pictures to President Kennedy, who was in his bedroom in pajamas and robe, reading the newspapers. Kennedy quickly indicated those officials who were to be called to the White House.

At 11:45 the group, which was later to be named the Executive Committee (Excomm) of the National Security Council, gathered in the Cabinet Room for the first of a running series of meetings during the following two weeks. Present were Kennedy, his brother Robert, Lyndon Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, Gilpatric, Bundy, Taylor, Carter, Theodore C. Sorensen, the presidential adviser, Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon, Under Secretary of State George Ball and Edwin M. Martin, Assistant secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. Adlai Stevenson joined the group that afternoon. McCone was brought in immediately upon his return from the West Coast. And two Truman Cabinet members were called in later in the week: Dean Acheson, former Secretary of State, and Robert Lovett, former Secretary of Defense.

Kennedy entered the first Excomm meeting with the feeling that two choices were open: knock out the missiles with an air strike or make representations to Khrushchev.

During the next four days the Excomm weighed the alternatives, moving gradually toward a consensus that the safest course was to take the middle way: to set up a blockade and insist that the Soviets withdraw, or direct military force would be applied.

In coming to this decision the Excomm was strongly influenced by Robert Kennedy. Recalling Pearl Harbor, he opposed an air strike against the small island of Cuba. He argued that the nation might never recover from the moral outrage of the world and the shock to its own conscience.

At first, the discussion centered on the immediate problem of getting the missiles dismantled or removed. There were detailed technical analyses of what kind of surveillance and inspection would be necessary to make sure the missiles were rendered inoperable.

Stevenson was troubled that the discussion would bog down in details and that the larger problem of eliminating the Soviets from Cuba would be obscured. He reminded the Excomm that a long period of negotiation would probably follow the removal of the missiles. And he recommended that some thought be given to possible United States proposals during that period.

Stevenson suggested that once the missiles were out, the United States might propose this deal: a pull-out of all Soviet troops from Cuba in return for a promise by the United States that it would not invade the island and would withdraw its missiles from Turkey. Stevenson was aware that the administration had decided the previous year to remove the missiles from Turkey (they were Jupiter IRBMs, obsolescent, clumsy liquid-fuel rockets. The plan was to replace them with missile-bearing Polaris submarines stationed in the Mediterranean. Turkey announced on January 23, 1963, that it had agreed to removal of the Jupiters).

As the Excomm deliberated, the President went through with two scheduled campaign trips, lest their cancellation betray the secret maneuvering. On October 17 he kept speaking engagements in Stratford and New Haven, Connecticut, and on October 19 he campaigned in Cleveland, Springfield, Illinois, and Chicago. He was supposed to go on to St. Louis and Seattle that weekend, but on Saturday morning, October 20, Pierre Salinger announced that the President would return to Washington immediately because he had a cold and was running a slight temperature.

At the White House that afternoon the secret meetings continued. Kennedy approved the Excomm's recommendation that a blockade be imposed around Cuba. The decision was ratified the next day by the National Security Council. (Up to that point the Excomm had been operating without formal, statutory authority. To make its actions official, it was necessary to include the Office of Emergency Planning, one of the five statutory members of the NSC. The Office had been excluded from the previous deliberations.)

The President also arranged to go on television Monday night, October 22, to inform the nation that offensive missiles had been discovered in Cuba and that a blockade would be imposed.

All weekend long, starting the previous Thursday and continuing until the afternoon of the President's speech, the Defense Department had repeated: "The Pentagon has no information indicating the presence of offensive weapons in Cuba." [ii]

In his TV address the President emphasized that the blockade was only an "initial" step and indicated strongly that direct military force would be employed if necessary to get the missiles out.

"It shall be the policy of this nation," Kennedy added, "to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."

For the next four days the world balanced on the brink of war, watching fearfully to see if the Soviets would continue work on the missiles, attempt to run the blockade, or otherwise defy the President's ultimatum.

Finally, late in the night of October 26, a message was received from Khrushchev. It suggested he was ready to withdraw his missiles under United Nations supervision in return for a lifting of the blockade and a pledge by the United States not to invade Cuba.

The Excomm convened the next morning in a hopeful atmosphere. But the optimism was quickly shattered by a second Khrushchev message, which was made public in Moscow. It offered to swap the Soviet missiles in Cuba for the U.S. missiles in Turkey.

The members of the Excomm knew that President Kennedy would not accept such a deal. As Kennedy was later to explain privately, he felt it imperative to reject the missile swap in order to preserve the Western alliance. The Turks had opposed the removal of the Jupiters during 1962. They looked upon the missiles as symbols of U.S. determination to defend them against Russian attack.

To accept Khrushchev's deal, Kennedy reasoned, would be to confirm all the things Europe had said and suspected about the United States: that when the vital interests of the United States were at stake, Europe's interests would be sacrificed.

It was a strange and ironic situation, Kennedy conceded, since he had decided the previous year to remove the obsolescent missiles from Turkey: a future historian might question the wisdom of risking a nuclear war over missiles that the nation did not need or want.

Kennedy issued a public statement, in effect rejecting the missile swap. Then he sent off a private message to Khrushchev, ignoring the Turkey proposal and agreeing to the terms of Khrushchev's first message.

Meantime, the Excomm's apprehension deepened as reports came in, first, that an SA-2 had opened fire in Cuba for the first time, downing a SAC U-2, and second, that a U-2 had wandered over Siberia while on an "air sampling" mission near the Arctic Circle. [iii]

The first U-2 incident that day suggested to the Excomm that Khrushchev might have reversed himself overnight and decided to defy Kennedy's demands. The Excomm also realized the second incident might have suggested to Khrushchev that Kennedy was planning some type of direct military action against Russia.

The President and the Excomm waited uneasily through the night. Then, shortly after ten o'clock on Sunday morning" October 28, Moscow released the text of another message from Khrushchev to Kennedy. The Soviet leader said he had ordered a stop to work on the Cuban bases and had directed that the missiles be crated and returned to the Soviet Union. United Nations representatives would "verify the dismantling."

Kennedy hailed Khrushchev's decision and responded with an expression of "regret" for the Siberian U-2 incident, which the Russian had complained about in his letter.

The missile crisis was over. Kennedy had won perhaps the greatest triumph of the Cold War. And in the November Congressional elections the triumph was reflected in a major Democratic victory .

The crisis had cost the Republicans as many as twenty House seats, said Representative Bob Wilson of California, the chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee. He insisted that the administration had known in late September that Russian missiles were in Cuba but had delayed announcing the fact in order to go into the election in a time of crisis, when the nation traditionally rallies round the President.

Wilson said administration officials had held a secret briefing for him and other members of the CIA subcommittee in the House six weeks before the election and had disclosed that offensive missiles were then in Cuba (Wilson apparently was referring to the eyewitness report of a missile part which reached the CIA on September 20).

The administration denied Wilson's accusation, but its credibility was called into question when Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, made a series of statements which suggested that the administration might have been manipulating the facts in its official announcements.

"The generation of news by actions taken by the government," Sylvester declared on October 30 in commenting upon the Cuban crisis, "becomes one weapon in a strained situation. The results, in my opinion, justify the methods we use ... News generated by actions of the government as to content and timing are part of the arsenal of weaponry that a President has in application of military force and related forces to the solution of political problems, or to the application of international political pressure."

Sylvester went even further in a speech on December 6: "It's inherent in [the] government's right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it's going up into a nuclear war. This seems to me basic."

In order to keep a closer watch over government information, Sylvester directed that a representative of his office monitor each interview between a reporter and a Pentagon official. Alternately, the official could report the substance of the interview to Sylvester at the end of the day. The State Department instituted a similar practice, but withdrew it a few weeks later under pressure.

Critics accused the administration of "managing the news," using information as a "weapon," even lying to protect itself.

Kennedy's October triumph was further compromised when Castro refused to allow on-site inspection of the missile sites by the United Nations. The Republicans seized upon this to suggest that the Russian military buildup was continuing and that all of the offensive weapons had not been removed.

Leading the Republican attack was Senator Keating, who had gained something of a reputation as an intelligence expert by virtue of his announcement on October 10, twelve days before Kennedy's TV address, that there were offensive missiles in Cuba.

Keating issued a series of post-crisis statements, culminating in a speech on January 31, 1963, in which he said:

"There is continuing, absolutely confirmed and undeniable evidence that the Soviets are maintaining the medium-range sites they had previously constructed in Cuba ... they may have missiles left on the island and need only to wheel them out of caves ... Without on-site inspection, it is hard to see how we will ever know for sure the true missile situation in Cuba."

Keating's statement drew banner headlines across the country. And the administration had difficulty gaining public acceptance of its denials. Its failure to quiet the storm over Cuba was undermining efforts to turn the October triumph into a Cold War breakthrough.

Finally, Kennedy decided he would have to overwhelm his critics with photographic proof. The original idea was to invite the small group of reporters covering Keating to view the special briefing which had been put together for several Congressional committees. At the last minute, however, the President decided that if classified material was to be released, he might as well go the whole way. He ordered McNamara to go on nationwide television that evening -- February 6 -- and display the aerial reconnaissance photos brought back from Cuba.

The decision was reached so quickly that there was no time to check with McCone. The CIA boss would have opposed the idea on grounds that the TV show would reveal the high degree of perfection which had been achieved with the U-2 cameras (much better than those which fell into Khrushchev's hands when Powers' plane was captured in 1960).

At the time of the decision, McCone was on Capitol Hill testifying: "We are convinced beyond reasonable doubt ... that all offensive missiles and bombers known to be in Cuba were withdrawn."

A few hours later McNamara went on TV. For close to two hours the American people were exposed to some of the "blackest" secrets of the Invisible Government. Most of the briefing was conducted by General Carroll's thirty-four-year-old assistant, John Hughes. He displayed dozens of blowups of reconnaissance photos showing the Cuban missile sites first under construction and then in the process of dismantling, and finally he showed the missile equipment being put aboard ships and carried away from the island.

It was a breathtaking demonstration of the high degree of sophistication which had been achieved in electronic intelligence. But the presentation prompted two questions which were to prove embarrassing to the administration. First, no pictures were shown for the period between September 5 and October 14, raising the question of whether the intelligence community had neglected to conduct aerial reconnaissance during this period or whether the administration was suppressing pertinent photos. And second, the briefing added up to a tacit admission that there had been no photographic count of the number of missiles shipped to Cuba and, therefore, there could be no certainty that the number spotted going out represented the total arsenal.

McNamara sidestepped these problems in answering questions after the briefing. But the next day Kennedy admitted frankly to his news conference: "We cannot prove that there is not a missile in a cave or that the Soviet Union isn't going to ship next week." He noted, however, that the Soviets were aware that if any missiles were discovered, it would "produce the greatest crisis which the world has faced in its history."

The President deplored the "rumors and speculations" which, he said, compelled the administration to go on TV and disclose "a good deal of information which we are rather reluctant to give about our intelligence-gathering facilities."

As to the so-called "photo gap" between September 5 and October 4, McNamara finally explained at a news conference in February that the U-2 missions during that period "didn't relate" to the areas where the Russian missiles were found. In plain English, McNamara was saying that the CIA failed to photograph the western half of Cuba during the six weeks preceding the flight which discovered the offensive missiles.

At his news conference on March 6 Kennedy argued that it really didn't matter very much because the Soviets set up their missiles so quickly, there would have been nothing to see until a few days before October 14.

"I suppose," the President remarked, "we could have always perhaps picked up these missile bases a few days earlier, but not very many days earlier ... ten days before might not have picked up anything. The week before might have picked up something ... So I feel that the intelligence services did a very good job ... I am satisfied with Mr. McCone, the intelligence community, the Defense Department and the job they did in these days, particularly taken in totality."

But many important members of the administration were not so satisfied with the Invisible Government. They suspected that someone in the Pentagon or high in the CIA had been funneling incriminating evidence to the Republicans, possibly raw intelligence which had not yet been analyzed or brought to the President's attention. On March 25, when McCone came for one of his periodic meetings with the President, a third person, McGeorge Bundy, was included for the first time. Clearly, Bundy was there to monitor the conversation.

The Invisible Government had taken great pride in its performance during the missile crisis, only to find its achievement compromised by suspicions that it was playing politics with intelligence.

There was no denying, however, that the intelligence community had succeeded in raising the art of aerial photography to unimagined heights. The missile crisis had revealed unmistakably that automation was revolutionizing the spy business as rapidly as it was transforming American industry.

_______________

Notes:

i. After the October crisis McCone was urged to make Sherman Kent of the Board of Estimates, the scapegoat for the bad guess. But McCone refused to fire him, despite repeated reminders from the White House that the Estimate was wrong.

ii. In a speech on March 11, 1963, Salinger insisted that during the Cuban crisis "We did not lie to the American people." He went on to explain that the Pentagon spokesman who issued the denials "was not lying. He was communicating the information as he knew it." By implication, Salinger excused his own statements about Kennedy's "cold."

iii. The Russians had charged that another U-2 flew over Sakhalin Island north of Japan on August 30, 1962. The United States replied that "severe winds" might have forced the plane "unintentionally" to violate Soviet airspace. After the Powers incident, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy promised there would be no more U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union. But their pledge did not rule out flights over Cuba, other Communist countries or along the borders of the Soviet Union.

Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro

PostPosted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:36 am
by admin
Electronic Spies

"The camera, I think, is actually going to be our best inspector."
-- JOHN F. KENNEDY on television, December, 1962

"That function [inspection] can now be assumed by satellites. Maybe I'll let you see my photographs."
-- NIKITA S. KHRUSHCHEV to Paul Henri Spaak, July, 1963


THE PRESIDENT of the United States and the Premier of the Soviet Union were referring to one of the strangest secrets of the Cold War, a secret which was scarcely a secret at all. Kennedy and Khrushchev were alluding to a revolutionary tool of espionage, the camera-bearing "spy in the sky" satellite. And it was clear that neither had been fooled by the elaborate security precautions of the other.

The United States had been orbiting SAMOS spy satellites over the Soviet Union since 1961, and the Russians were known to have the capacity to track them. With similar technique and purpose the Soviets started in 1962 to send up their COSMOS satellites under the vigilant eye of the U.S. tracking system.

By 1963 aerial reconnaissance had become the most secretive operation of the Pentagon. Yet, ironically, when SAMOS was first tested in 1960, its virtues were graphically described in official pronouncements. Indeed, the electronic and optical laws upon which it was founded had long been the property of the scientific community, Russian and American alike.

Until Francis Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 over Russia on May 1, 1960, little had been disclosed about SAMOS. But a summit meeting in Paris was being held that month and the Eisenhower Administration was emphasizing its determination to keep the Soviet Union under surveillance despite the U-2 incident. Suddenly, from the depths of the Pentagon, came a spew of previously highly classified details. By following the official disclosures over the next several months, a diligent Russian analyst could easily have pieced together the following description of the remarkable satellite:

SAMOS, the name of a Greek island, was a contraction for Satellite and Missile Observation System. The project was in an advanced state of development and the White House had given it a "DX" rating, which meant it was one of the handful of Pentagon programs with the highest national priority. Still, it was to be pushed even faster on a budget of just under $200,000,000 a year.

SAMOS was designed to be operational by 1962 and to take photographs with detail equal to what the human eye could see from a hundred feet. The satellite was launched [i] by an Atlas-Agena rocket, standing ninety-five feet high, or a Thor-Agena rocket, with a height of seventy-eight feet.

The Agena, or second stage, was made by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, designers and producers of the U-2. It was that part of the rocket which went into orbit. The satellite weighed 4,100 pounds and was twenty-two feet tall and five feet in diameter. It circled the earth upright like a giant cigar, carrying a 300-to-400-pound gold-plated instrument package.

SAMOS was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, into a polar orbit from which it could photograph every nation in the world as the globe rotated under it. The camera could be shut off when the satellite was off target, thereby conserving power.

(By 1964 reliable reports indicated that a SAMOS was passing over the Soviet Union eight to twelve times, and over Communist China two to four times, every day.)

Orbits varied: some carried the satellite around the earth at an equal altitude of 300 miles; others were purposely egg-shaped so that the satellite dropped as close as 150 miles. From this height a telescopic camera with a focal length of 120 inches could photograph objects two and a half feet wide.

In April, 1959, Amrom H. Katz of the RAND Corporation, a semi-official research group for the Air Force, wrote that camera lenses with a 240-inch focal length had already been developed.

In April, 1960, Howard S. Stewart, a University of Rochester optics expert, indicated in International Science and Technology that it was possible to develop satellite cameras capable of "resolving two objects three inches apart from 125 miles up."

In February, 1964, the Air Force's Aerospace Medical Division reported that astronauts could readily spot missile bases, encampments and troop movements from 100 miles in space.

There were four types of SAMOS satellites: one carried television cameras for transmitting simultaneous pictures back to earth; a second carried conventional cameras for producing more detailed photographs that could be ejected on command and recovered in big nets strung from aircraft; [ii] a third carried both types of cameras; and a fourth incorporated eavesdropping equipment.

The fourth version was known as the "ferret." It could pick out radar and communication centers, and pinpoint missile sites by their radio guidance signals. It could also tap microwave telephone links. The SAMOS photographs could locate enemy military targets and provide instantaneous indications of troop or supply build-ups.

The reconnaissance satellite would be subject to some of the limitations of the U-2. It could be frustrated by clouds which cover 60 percent of the earth at all times. But it could provide pictures of the northern stretches of the Soviet Union that were beyond the reach of the U-2. And it would be much less vulnerable to defensive measures. SAMOS' orbit could readily be determined by Russian tracking stations, and theoretically the satellite could be destroyed by an anti-satellite missile (the United States began experimental tests with such a system in 1963) But if it were hit by a rocket, it would burn up on re-entry into the earth's atmosphere and the evidence would be destroyed. And it would be a considerably more difficult target than a U-2 flying ten times lower.

Besides, SAMOS could carry a rocket motor which, on command from the earth, would enable it to move evasively. On the assumption that Soviet spy satellites would incorporate similar devices for evasion, the Air Force started work in 1960 on SAINT (Satellite Intercept). It was to be a maneuverable satellite which would rendezvous with an enemy vehicle in orbit and inspect it by electronic means such as television. Ultimately, it was to have the capacity to neutralize or destroy an enemy satellite. [iii]

Another reconnaissance system also came into view during this period. It was MIDAS (Missile Defense Alarm System), designed to detect missile launchings with infra-red sensors. MIDAS' weight and dimensions were virtually identical to those of SAMOS. It was fired into orbit by the same rocket and it was also produced by Lockheed.

By detecting the intense heat given off by rocket exhaust during take-off, MIDAS was to provide a thirty-minute warning of enemy attack. This would double the fifteen-minute alert of BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System), a massive radar in Thule, Greenland, which would pick up an incoming ICBM halfway between launch and impact. MIDAS' infrared instruments were so sensitive that they could detect a lighted cigarette from a distance of eight miles. During one test launching the heat sensors sent out signals set off by a coffee pot on the firing pad. (MIDAS encountered a series of difficulties which ran the research and development bill up close to $500,000,000. But in May and July of 1963 the satellite succeeded in detecting missiles launched from Florida and California.)

Another satellite launched with much public fanfare in 1960 was TIROS. Its cameras were to televise cloud cover and storm conditions in order to promote better weather prediction. Such surveillance obviously could be of great value in timing SAMOS launches for moments of minimum cloud cover over the Soviet Union. [iv] But in Senate testimony in July, 1961, James E. Webb, NASA's director, denied Soviet charges that the weather satellites were for purposes of espionage. He asserted that it was perfectly lawful for satellites to be flown over foreign territory just as ships freely sail the high seas. National sovereignty extends only to air space, Webb contended, and ''as to outer space where there is no air, this is a completely open field."

The head of NASA was betraying the fears of the administration that U.S. satellites operating over Russia would be shot down by Soviet propaganda. When President Kennedy took office, he was faced with three alternatives: (1) to continue the semi-public practices of the Eisenhower Administration; (2) to shut off all official discussion and disclosures about the espionage satellites; or (3) to make the program "overt" by proposing a new "open skies" plan and submitting all satellite photographs to the United Nations.

The last recommendation was privately proposed by a group of prominent scientists at the outset of the Kennedy Administration. They argued that there was a presumption of guilt in surreptitious activities and that the Soviet Union could play upon this as justification for shooting down a SAMOS or securing a UN resolution condemning the practice. On the other hand, they contended, if the operation were placed under the UN, the Soviets would be hard-pressed to destroy SAMOS either with rockets or words.

The Kennedy Administration quickly decided that secrecy was a safer course. When SAMOS II was successfully launched on January 31, 1961 -- eleven days after Kennedy took office -- the Pentagon prohibited the release of any details about it. This prohibition soon developed into an absolute ban on any discussion of the satellite, even in areas of prior official revelation. It was thereafter impossible to obtain official confirmation that in fact SAMOS existed. Future announcements were restricted to such words as: "A satellite employing an Atlas-Agena B booster combination was launched by the Air Force today. It is carrying a number of classified test components."

Since security, if any, had long since been breached by the original SAMOS disclosures, it was clear that the administration had international political purposes in mind in its new crackdown. The likeliest explanation was that it hoped to avoid provoking the Russians into countermeasures against SAMOS. Khrushchev had known for years that the U-2 was flying over Russia, but he said nothing until his hand was forced by the Powers incident. Might he not be inclined to maintain a similar silence on SAMOS, particularly since his own satellites were the first to fly over the United States and other nations?

The answer was quick in coming. SAMOS II was hardly off the pad before the Russians protested. Their complaint, which was formally carried to the United Nations in March, 1962, was summed up on December 3 of that year by Platon D. Morozov, the Soviet delegate to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

"Such observation," he said, "is just as wrong as when intelligence data are obtained by other means such as by photography made from the air. The object at which such illegal surveillance is directed constitutes a secret guarded by a sovereign state and, regardless of the means by which such an operation is carried out, it is in all cases an intrusion."

The standard reply of the United States was that a nation's sovereignty extends only to the air space above it. Officials noted that in the first three years of the space age neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had claimed its territorial sovereignty was infringed by satellite overflights. In the absence of protest or international agreement to the contrary, these officials maintained that a common law had been established, giving any nation the right to orbit satellites over another.

On January 13, 1962, the United States asserted formally that this freedom of movement in space had been endorsed by the UN General Assembly in its unanimous resolution the previous month on "international cooperation and the peaceful uses of outer space."

The resolution stipulated that international law and the United Nations Charter were to apply to outer space and that celestial bodies were not to be subject to national appropriation. The United States interpreted this as a contradiction of the Soviet argument that SAMOS violated national sovereignty.

To demonstrate its sincerity in subscribing to UN supervision of space, the United States pledged, shortly after the UN Space Registry was established in February of 1962, that it would list all of its satellites.

From time to time knowledgeable space watchers in the United States and Europe noted, sometimes in print, that more objects were in space than had been reported to the UN. Playing upon the deep secrecy surrounding the SAMOS program, the Russians alleged that the United States was concealing some of its launches.

These allegations imposed a nasty dilemma upon the United States Government. If it were to dispose effectively of suggestions that it was cheating, it would have to open up the SAMOS firings to much greater publicity. But this would run counter to the basic policy decision not to provoke the Russians.

Or the United States could publicly produce evidence that the unlisted objects in space were of Soviet origin. But this would expose the fact that the United States possessed a vast electronic network which kept a precise watch on all Soviet space operations. And the CIA and the Pentagon were opposed to providing the slightest help to the Russians in compromising the network.

Their opposition was twofold. First, if it were officially admitted that the United States was eavesdropping along the Iron Curtain, nations providing the clandestine facilities might be subjected to severe Russian pressure, as they were after the U-2 incident.

The second argument was expressed in a news conference on December 6, 1962, by Arthur Sylvester: "We are trying to keep intelligence [secret], not only what we gather but how we gather it ... We know that lots of things that two years ago we assumed our adversaries had, they did not have. We know this by what they're spending money to get. What we are trying to do in this field is to make it as difficult as possible for them. We are trying not to wrap it up, put it on a silver platter and hand it to them. We are trying to make them spend as much time and effort as we have to."

Defense Secretary McNamara was particularly jealous of the secrecy policy. He was incensed when Hanson Baldwin, the military-affairs analyst of the New York Times, disclosed in June, 1962 -- clearIy on the basis of SAMOS reports -- that the Soviets were erecting concrete storage "coffins" for their ICBMs. McNamara was disturbed that Baldwin's report might have given the Russians an indication of the excellence of SAMOS. He apparently did not comprehend that he himself had exposed SAMOS' effectiveness when he announced the month before that the United States was in a position to locate and destroy Soviet missile sites.

Arrayed against McNamara and the secrecy policy were those in the State Department who saw great propaganda value in destroying the myth that the Soviets could do no wrong in space and that they had suffered fewer failures than the United States. This viewpoint prevailed in September, 1962, when the government claimed that in the two previous years the Russians had failed in five attempts to reach the planets -- two to Mars and three to Venus.

In trying to substantiate the claim, the fears of the CIA and the Pentagon were realized. A Pandora's box of black electronic arts was opened. Out of it came revelations of a world that was unknown to the vast majority of Americans, if not to the Soviet leaders.

The United States had detected the Russian space failures through a surveillance system known as SPADATS (Space Detection and Tracking System). It was a complicated network of electronic fences, stretching across the United States, and sensitive radios and radars hidden along the perimeter of the Soviet Union. The network was so effective that no Soviet rocket could get off the ground without its being known within a few minutes at the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs and at the CIA and the White House.

The first point of detection was a radar and communications system in the Middle East. It was centered in Turkey at small Black Sea towns such as Zonguldak, Sinop and Samsun. There, powerful radars and listening gear monitored the countdowns and rocket launchings at the main Soviet missile sites near the Aral Sea.

The radars, which went into operation in 1955, could reach at least 3,000 miles. The scope of the listening gear was suggested by an advertisement which slipped uncensored into Aviation Week on February 25, 1963:

Modern electronic counter-measures are an important deterrent and intelligence tool for the military services. "Ferreting" ECM systems -- for the detection, location and analysis of foreign electromagnetic radiation associated with radar, missile command and communications -- are a demonstrated capability of Babcock's military products division, where operational ferreting systems are in production ...


Another indication of the potential of the eavesdropping equipment got out the following month. Senator Barry Goldwater, a general in the Air Force Reserve, disclosed that an "electronic ear," operating in planes off Cuba, was so sensitive that it could pick up the sound of various machines to the point of detecting a small generator in operation.

At the same time, the Pentagon was perfecting super-range "over the horizon" radar and the Air Force had installed highly sensitive atmospheric pressure gear which could provide instantaneous indications of a Soviet missile launching.

After a rocket had been detected by the Middle East system, it would next be picked up by the BMEWS radar in Greenland, which kept watch over the Arctic, or by the large saucer-like radar at Shemya in the Aleutians, which tracked Soviet test rockets as they flew out over the Pacific.

The third point of detection and the most precise was NAVSPASUR (Naval Space Surveillance System), an electronic fence stretching from Georgia to Southern California. Transmitters in Alabama, Texas and Arizona created the fence by sending out a beam of radio signals which were deflected back to one of four receiving stations when an object passed through them.

By running the angles of deflection through a massive computer at Dahlgren, Virginia, it was possible to determine a satellite's orbit, position, size and weight (NAVSPASUR was so sensitive that a piece of wire one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter was detected in 1960 when it separated from a U.S. satellite). It was also possible to calculate the exact time and place of launch and predict the future path of the satellite.

Many officials felt that too much was being revealed about these secret electronic systems. Nevertheless, NASA continued until April, 1963, to list Soviet launchings in the Satellite Situation Reports it issued twice a month.

Then there was an abrupt and unexplained return to the previous practice of secrecy. The House Information Subcommittee sought an explanation, but NASA spokesmen said all they knew was that the tracking system was controlled by the Pentagon, which refused to release the information.

This prompted the subcommittee's chairman, John E. Moss, the California Democrat, to observe: "The taxpayers certainly should not be called upon to spend billions of dollars on our space programs without being given all the facts necessary to make an intelligent judgment as to whether we are behind, ahead, or at least keeping pace with, Russian space efforts."

Despite the fact that the policy of secrecy was perpetuating a false image of United States inferiority in space, the administration held to its practice of suppressing the truth about Soviet failures. Despite the fact that nuclear test-ban negotiations were threatened by public ignorance of the elaborate array of U.S. detection devices, the administration refused to embark upon even a modest program of education.

It was a strange anomaly, indeed. The United States was seeking to hold its tongue about secrets that were no longer secret to the Russians. In November, 1962, the Soviets, indicating their complete awareness, dropped their long-standing demand for a ban on spy-in-the-sky satellites. This opened the way to a United States-Soviet agreement on the peaceful uses of outer space. Why the Russian about-face? Electronic experts suggested the Russians were developing a spy satellite of their own and did not wish to be inhibited by international prohibitions on such devices.

Khrushchev's son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei, the editor of Izvestia, seemed to substantiate this theory in a speech in Helsinki, Finland, on September 2, 1963.

"One Western paper," Adzhubei said, "has published a picture taken of Moscow by a satellite from a height of 750 kilometers [about 465 miles] in which the Izvestia building is plainly discernible. We do not publish pictures of this kind, but I believe that we could print a similar picture of New York taken by one of our satellites."

_______________

Notes:

i. SAMOS I failed to achieve orbit on October 11, 1960. SAMOS II was a success on January 31, 1961.

ii. In July, 1963, the Outstanding Unit Award was presented to the 6593 Test Squadron at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. The Air Force said the squadron had achieved 70 percent success in its capsule recoveries.

iii The project proved much more complicated than SAMOS, however, and in 1962. its operational date was extended to 1967 at the earliest.

iv. Dr. S. Fred Singer, director of the National Satellite Weather Center at Suitland, Maryland, declared in a speech on February 20, 1963 that TIROS had been so used to plan U-2 flights over Cuba during the missile crisis in October, 1962.