JFK (69 page)

McCarthy and Smith,
Protecting the President
(New York: Morrow, 1985). Morrow, 1985

From
The Warren Report
, by the Associated Press.

The speaker was Mrs. William Bundy, daughter of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, wife of Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy, and sister-inlaw of McGeorge Bundy, whom Acheson had wanted Kennedy to make secretary of state. Actually, Kennedy had listened to his old Harvard mentor, William Yandell Elliott, rather than Acheson, and had chosen Dean Rusk in place of Bundy, whom he brought into the White House as his national security assistant. For this service, Rusk provided Elliott with an office in the Department of State not far from his own; on the otherwise bare walls of that office hung a framed, one-page letter on White House stationery saying, “Thank you for introducing me to Dean Rusk.” It was signed by John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

This sensational trial was known as the Medina trial, taking its name from the judge Harold S. Medina. It was held in federal court in 1948 and lasted more than nine months.

McNamara had little experience with service distinctions and tried to take army money as well as navy funds for this procurement. The army persuaded him to leave them out of this matter.

Such work neither began nor ended with the Kennedy administration. An article in the
Washington
Post on February 18, 1986, reported that U.S. representative Mike Synar had gone to see the top-secret Northrup Stealth aircraft. At the hangar, Congressman Synar noted, “They had put up this big chart which showed all the states where Stealth work was being done.” That was the Goldberg/McNamara concept dressed in Reagan garb.

Before the Monday following this decision, the entire suite of offices that had developed the maps and data for the Goldberg study had been totally vacated and the staff transferred—moved completely out of the Pentagon building.

Leonard Lewin,
Report From Iron Mountain
(New York: Dial Press, 1967).

James D. Barber,
The Presidential Character
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972).

Theodore Sorensen,
Kennedy
(New York: Bantam Books, 1965).

The absence of Dulles and the ineffectiveness of his deputies, Gen. Charles P. Cabell and Richard Bissell, are described in this book as “a breakdown of leadership.” One must keep in mind, however, that this apparent “breakdown” may well have been intentional. Our so-called national policy on “anticommunism” has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of Castro and his “Communist threat,” just as it has continued to do in Central America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East.

My office was only a short distance from the rooms in the Pentagon used by the Cuban Study Group. I had worked with the CIA on anti-Castro activities since January 1, 1959. I knew almost all the men who had been called to meet with the study group. Many of them would wait in my office until they were called; many came back following their testimony and interrogation. One comment was general among them all. Their words were, in effect: “That group is highly charged with the presence of strong individuals. But the most intense man there is the one who sits in a straight-backed chair, separate from the others, and never says a word.” That man was Bobby Kennedy. It was well known that he returned to the White House each day to discuss developments with the President and his inner circle; but nothing on the record gives any indication that he ever broke the stranglehold the CIA had on that investigation or that he ever became aware of being in the grip of its velvet gloves.

As noted in an earlier chapter, following the President’s formal approval at midday of the landing plan, which included an air strike by four B-26 aircraft to destroy Castro’s remaining three T-33 jet trainers on the ground, the air strike had been canceled.

The entire anti-Castro campaign was fraught with intrigue. De Varona was one of the four Cuban exiles who, after flying from the American Legion convention in Detroit, where Nixon had spoken in August 1960, to Washington, had gone directly to the offices of then senator John F. Kennedy in the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. From Kennedy’s office they all went to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. Kennedy had been in personal touch with de Varona and the others all through this period. This adds another element to the value of de Varona’s testimony before the Taylor group.

Those three aircraft, Castro’s last combat-capable aircraft, were the T-33 jet trainers that had been spotted by a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, parked wingtip to wingtip on an airfield near Santiago and were the target of the four B-26 aircraft that were to have been launched from the CIA airbase at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. Had that strike been flown as approved by the President, the jets would have been destroyed and the invasion would have been successful. Castro would have had no air force. The Brigade on the beach could have countered Castro’s attacks along the narrow approach causeways while its own substantial air force of hard-hitting B-26 aircraft operated from the airstrip the Brigade had already captured on the beach.

It was Allen Dulles himself who revealed that the U-2 had not been shot down as the Soviets and the rest of the world had believed. Although Dulles revealed this information in sworn testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, May 31, 1960, the same month in which the crash landing occurred, his testimony was not released until 1982 and generally has been ignored by the American press.

His revelation was staggering; however, no one has ever fully investigated the possibility that this flight, launched in direct violation of President Eisenhower’s order that there be no overflights before the summit conference, might have been ordered covertly by a small but powerful cabal that intended for it to fail and thereby to cause the disruption of the summit conference. Based upon a number of other strange events related to this particular flight, there is a strong possibility that this could be the case.

I worked in the same office with General Lansdale at that time. Those in the Office of Special Operations and the Office of the Secretary of Defense were certain, from what they had heard firsthand, that Lansdale would be named the next ambassador to Saigon.

The director of the Joint Staff was the senior permanently assigned officer in the then four-hundred-man office that supported the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Wheeler went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he held for some six years.

I was the first chief of the Office of Special Operations and continued in that office until 1964, while Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer and, later, Gen. Maxwell Taylor were the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

One of the reasons Eglin Air Force Base was selected for this program was that a major CIA air facility had been established there a few years earlier and had become the worldwide center for CIA air-operation activities, excluding the U-2 program and those within the Air America proprietary airline infrastructure.

This program was said to have been developed under the leadership of George Ball in the Department of State.

In addition to this memorandum, there was NSAM #56, “Evaluation of Paramilitary Requirements,” and NSAM #57, “Responsibility for Paramilitary Operations.” Each of these was signed and distributed in the normal manner by McGeorge Bundy for the President.

Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831. Prussian officer and military strategist.

The Joint Staff is the unit that supports the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time of which I am writing (1961) there were some four hundred people in this unit.

I was the pilot of a VIP aircraft used during these conferences by the British and Americans, and as pilot of this plane I carried the Chinese delegation from Cairo to Tehran for that meeting. Actually, Chiang Kai-shek and May Ling, who had been in Cairo, went to Tehran, and I believe they traveled on Roosevelt’s plane. I flew their staff of delegates only.

Although no relation to the previously mentioned Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, Gen. Richard G. Stilwell was a friend and close associate of Vinegar Joe’s son, Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell, Jr., and a close associate of Lansdale.

It may be difficult, or at least unusual, for the inexperienced reader to see in such a structured report its real and far-reaching significance. I shall provide an important example:

Just before the election of John F Kennedy, on November 8, 1960, Gen. Edward G. Lansdale and I flew to Fort Gordon, Ga., to pick up elements of the Civil Affairs and Military Government curriculum, which was then used as the basis for drafting the new curriculum for the Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg.

At that time, we were both assigned to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. By late 1960, this Mutual Security Program report had filtered down from the Eisenhower White House, without comment but with the weight of apparent approval. As a top-level document of great potential, it then became fundamental to the development of the new Special Warfare curriculum as it was rewritten and merged with the material from Fort Gordon.

Because the Fort Bragg curriculum had the blessing of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, contained elements of a White House report, and was supported by the CIA, this whole layer of apparent authority became the Special Warfare and Special Air Warfare doctrine for dealing with Third World nations—particularly with Vietnam.

There were no specific approvals of all of the above. The author has no evidence or recollection that any of this was ever discussed with the Congress or with the Department of State. Yet, on the basis of these policy statements, evolved from the writings of Mao, among others, the U.S. Army had more or less defined a new Cold War role for military forces.

With this presentation the reader is getting a rare and unusual view of the inner workings of our government as it pertains to the development and utilization of the military in Cold War operations. This is exactly what is being done today in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa.

(Note for researchers: I have been able to acquire a copy of this report, “Training Under the Mutual Security Program,” May 15, 1959. It appears, complete, as Appendix 3 of my earlier book,
The Secret Team.

This was run by the CIA-sponsored Saigon Military Mission, described in detail in earlier chapters. It was part of “Operation Brotherhood,” an organization managed by CIA-run Filipino leaders under the aegis of the International Junior Chamber of Commerce.

Intelligence gleaned from paid native informers always reported massive buildups everywhere. These native sources in intelligence never saw starvation-crazed refugees; they always saw what they were being paid to see. Every refugee area was another regiment of Vietcong. General Hunger was General Giap, and Communists were abroad in the land. After all, even the “intelligence source” was a shrewd businessman. He was a creation of the American CIA, and the CIA was running the war, with a checkbook, in 1960-61, as it had been since 1945.

Ike’s hopes for détente were crushed by the CIA’s U-2 spy-plane incident of May 1, 1960, as described earlier.

The reader should note the similarity of this stage of the process to that which the Reagan administration promoted on behalf of the Contras in Central America during the eighties.

For full details on the Bay of Pigs fiasco, see earlier chapters.

New York Times,
April 25, 1966.

One of Robert F Kennedy’s sons is named Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.

OSS, the forerunner of the CIA .

This is a secret and secure means of direct communication. The chief agent in a country would have a direct line to CIA headquarters, bypassing every other channel of the U.S. government.