THE NOTORIOUS Cuba project had been a crossover operation, a CIA covert action begun under one president and continued by another. There are lots more. Tibet, of course. Another, a tragic page from the history of Africa, took place in Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo, with the arrival of independence. This American operation occurred against a backdrop of intense political strife and Belgium’s residual colonial ambitions.
Trouble swiftly followed independence day, June 30, 1960. The Belgians had done as little as possible to prepare the Congolese, to the extent that, for example, there were a mere thirteen college graduates and no African officers in the Congolese army. The basic strategy conceded independence but ensured that Belgians would be needed to operate all Congolese institutions. The Belgian commander of the Congolese army, Gen. Emile Janssens, hammered home the point at a meeting with African soldiers where he wrote on a blackboard “avant independance = apres independance.” The colonial relationship would endure.
After just five days the Congolese army revolted against their Belgian officers at Thysville, ninety miles from the capital. There, at Camp Hardy, a main base of the army, the Force Publique, the Belgians were locked up. Frantic stories of rapes, looting, and unrest in army units in Elisabethville and the capital, Leopoldville, sparked concern. A day of panic in Leopoldville occurred on July 8. Both the British and the French embassies evacuated some personnel. Several thousand Europeans fled across the Congo River to Brazzaville in the Congo Republic. Then rebel armed boats blocked the river.
The revolt naturally triggered a response by the infant government of the Congo. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba attempted to restore order. He dismissed General Janssens, then all Belgian officers in the Force Publique, more than eleven hundred of them, promoting native soldiers to replace them. Lumumba, chief of the Mouvement National Congolais, was a young radical, a charismatic black of pan-African sentiment and one of the Congo’s few college graduates. In May 1960 elections, Lumumba’s party had won thirty-five seats to become the largest in the parliament and the only one with deputies elected from most provinces. The Belgians preferred to avoid a Lumumba cabinet, but the government inevitably coalesced around the largest party.
While the popular Lumumba had a following, the army revolt allowed the Belgians to present his government as ineffective and to intervene with Belgian paratroops on July 10 to restore order. In various attempts to obtain countervailing assistance, Lumumba and Congolese President Joseph Kasavubu appealed for United Nations protection, the cabinet asked for American help, and Lumumba requested Soviet assistance. The United Nations, with Eisenhower’s support, passed a resolution to assist the Congo. A UN security force that would eventually amount to nineteen thousand troops from thirty different European, Asian, and African nations deployed to the Congo. The maneuvers for foreign support drew the United States and the Soviet Union into the local situation, in effect bringing the Cold War to Africa.
Washington had little if any knowledge to make the choices it did. It did not know that Lumumba had made a deal with an American mining company before his appeal to the Soviets. Perhaps naively, Lumumba believed the deal cleared the way for him to request Russian help too. The United States did not know that the Congolese independence movement, two years before Lumumba, had already solicited Moscow’s aid and that the Russians had said no—a decision that rose to the Politburo level and was made by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The U.S. embassy in Leopoldville obtained the overwhelming majority of its information (90 percent by some estimates) from Belgian sources, who protected their own interests. Americans relied upon those few Congolese conversant in French. No one at the embassy spoke Limbashi, the tribal language of the Force Publique.
Lawrence Devlin, the CIA’s station chief in Leopoldville, is a case in point. On the day of independence, living with his wife in Paris, Devlin knew little of the Congo. For a time he had been assigned to Brussels, introduced to a few of the people involved (according to one source Devlin met Joseph Mobutu when that gentleman worked in Brussels as a press spokesman). He spoke French, and that was it. Headquarters ordered Devlin to the Congo by fastest available means. He arrived in Leopoldville to be detained by Congolese soldiers, who handed the CIA man a pistol and made him play Russian roulette for their amusement. That scene became Devlin’s initiation to the Congo. The CIA station, nonexistent at first, was then fashioned from personnel pulled from wherever. By September the station chief had just three case officers, all temporary duty, one from the Middle East, the others seconded from the Far East Division.
Similarly the CIA base at Elisabethville (today Lubumbashi) had just one officer, John Anderton, plus a communications man. Much too senior, Anderton had headed large CIA stations and just returned from a long tour in the Far East. But Ike had taken Allen Dulles aside at a cocktail party and asked if he had someone at Elisabethville—he did not. Allen told Ike he did. The CIA had to cover Dulles’s affirmation. Anderton had been assigned simply because he was available and spoke French. The base had no networks or agents.
Washington did not like Lumumba and encouraged opposition, especially from the more moderate President Kasavubu. American diplomats in Leopoldville reported negatively on Lumumba’s initiatives. Policy hardened rapidly after Devlin cabled on August 18 that both the embassy and his station believed the Congo to be experiencing a “CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER GOVERNMENT.” In Washington that day, President Eisenhower told the National Security Council that there could be no question of one man forcing the United Nations (and the United States) out of the Congo. Ike’s declaration, it should be noted, came within hours of his final go-ahead on the Cuba project. His wording struck NSC staffer Robert H. Johnson as something like a presidential order for an assassination. A week later Gordon Gray reminded the 5412 Group of the need for vigorous direct action in the Congo.
The DO’s Africa Division, barely a year old at the time, looked toward its first big operation. Chief Bronson Tweedy, his wartime background in naval intelligence with later CIA service in Bern, Vienna, and London, stood ready to go. “Brons” in his time had coordinated a few covert actions with the British but, like Devlin, knew nothing of Africa. He crafted what the CIA called Project Wizard, which began as a political action to neutralize Patrice Lumumba. Tweedy anticipated Devlin’s “classic takeover” message with one reporting that he had begun to seek approval for a covert operation. Bissell answered Devlin immediately after the president’s NSC outburst, sending instructions plus permission to proceed.
Patrice Lumumba’s appeal to the Soviet Union actually occurred on August 21, three days after Washington’s decision.
In a fresh cable on August 26, following Gray’s exchange with 5412, Director Dulles declared that Lumumba’s removal had become an urgent objective. The phrase “in high quarters” in that cable would have been understood by CIA officers as a reference to the president. Usually such cables were reviewed by the relevant deputy director. Preparing to testify before investigators of the Church Committee in 1975, Richard Bissell, shown a copy of this dispatch, was astonished to see that it had been released by Richard Helms, not himself. In fact Bissell had been on vacation; Helms had sent it in his stead. In his memoirs Bissell recalls his return to duty, when Allen Dulles explained that he had written the cable, just after a meeting where Eisenhower and his advisers had explored the subject at length.
Bissell met with Tweedy about planning a murder using poison, and with CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb about neutralizing an unnamed African leader. Brons assumed Bissell had authority to issue these orders. The division chief set up a special security compartment, “PROP,” for all information on the operation. CIA scientist Gottlieb descended on Leopoldville (today Kinshasa) in late September, slugged in cable traffic as “Joe from Paris,” or “Joseph Braun” (and pseudonymously called “Joseph Scheider” by the Senate investigators), another in the sudden influx of agency officers. Gottlieb came bearing exotic poison and a plan to murder Lumumba, separate from and in addition to Project Wizard, itself quickly approved by the 5412 Group. As with the Castro plots, senior participants have denied any presidential connection with assassinations in the Congo, but the Senate investigation amply demonstrates that, approved or not, this plotting actually happened.
Larry Devlin remained in the dark about the scheme, though for more than a month it had been plain that the agency wished to get rid of Lumumba. Devlin mulled this over with David W. Doyle, one of his case officers. Doyle suggested using a high-powered rifle with telescopic sight, pointing out a couple of the CIA men were crack shots. By Doyle’s account the whole idea infuriated Devlin, a good Catholic, who regarded it as completely immoral. Doyle believes Devlin rejected the Washington-hatched assassination plots, but he lacks direct knowledge—in September Devlin sent Doyle forward to Katanga to replace Anderton at Elisabethville.
David Doyle could not arrive in Katanga soon enough for the base chief. Anderton’s files turned out to consist entirely of his demands to be relieved.
Devlin (“Victor Hedgman” to the Church Committee) got direct orders to prepare for the arrival of someone who would identify himself fully with instructions that must be carried out, and to mention this operation to no one. This is consistent with the station chief rejecting the Lumumba murder plot earlier. Gottlieb was the person referred to. Two days before Gottlieb’s arrival, Allen Dulles sent another personal cable to the station. Not taking Gottlieb’s word, Devlin queried Quarters Eye—nothing in his training or experience had prepared him for a murder order. Asking about the authority, Devlin was told the order came from the president. Fifteen years later he told congressional investigators that he promptly received confirmation. Devlin mentioned shooting as an alternative. He stalled, threw up obstacles—his assets were not good enough, an “airtight op” would be impossible, he would need to use one of the station’s most sensitive agents. By then it was early October. The agent swore himself ready to help but was lukewarm to the plot. Meanwhile the aged poison lost its potency. A CIA officer tossed the stuff into the Congo River (there are also reports it remained sealed in a safe in the CIA station). Gottlieb left on October 5. Bronson Tweedy finally cabled Devlin that he would send a “third country national operative.” Headquarters also thought about sending a senior agency officer on direct assignment for this mission—a CIA James Bond—or a commando group to snatch Lumumba.
The Africa Division did in fact send a senior officer to Leopoldville in October 1960. Justin O’Donnell (“Michael Mulroney” in the Church Committee report) told congressional investigators that Dick Bissell asked him to go to kill Lumumba. O’Donnell rejected the mission for the same reasons as Devlin. He also suggested that such a conspiracy hatched in Washington would be a federal felony. O’Donnell went, but only to attempt to draw Lumumba out of his security envelope so that someone else might have a chance at him.
Richard Bissell and Bronson Tweedy both denied having any recollection of these events. Both, however, took the tack that such things could have happened, their memories simply were poor. When this investigation took place Bissell was sixty-six years old, Brons Tweedy fifty-one. (Allen Dulles could not be interviewed—he had died in 1969.)
In 1960, as Americans made up their minds about Lumumba, the Belgians continued to occupy parts of the country, notably Katanga province with many of the Congo’s most valuable mineral resources. Urged by the Belgians, Katangese politician Moise Tshombe attempted to secede with his province. The slow arrival of the UN force allowed the Katanga secession to bring the Congo to the brink of civil war.
Political cleavages deepened in September when President Kasavubu fired Lumumba’s cabinet, using Katanga as justification. The Americans had made their choice—the 5412 Group approved covert financial support for Kasavubu on September 1, four days before this constitutional coup. Lumumba reacted by attempting to dismiss the president, creating an impasse resolved only when parliament annulled both actions.
Joseph Mobutu would be the wild card. A former journalist, army noncommissioned officer, and member of Lumumba’s party, the twenty-nine-year-old Mobutu became an instant “colonel” after the army revolt. Lumumba installed him as chief of staff. American diplomats and CIA officers, especially Larry Devlin, cultivated Mobutu for weeks. On September 14 Mobutu launched a military coup, declaring his intent as “neutralizing” Kasavubu, Lumumba, and all the politicians for the rest of the year. Two Project Wizard local assets featured in the structure with which Mobutu replaced the cabinet, and another became Congolese security chief. When former CIA aide Victor Marchetti wrote in the early 1970s that in the Congo the agency had bought and sold politicians, he was exactly correct. On October 6 Quarters Eye cabled Devlin that it had new plans for Project Wizard, to include “ARMS, SUPPLIES AND PERHAPS SOME TRAINING TO ANTI-LUMUMBA RESISTANCE GROUPS.” On October 27 the 5412 Group okayed another $250,000 fund to drum up support for Mobutu. A month later the moguls of the secret war made the further decision to arm the Mobutu forces.
Lumumba became the prime target. Mobutu hoped to supplant him with American help. Allen Dulles favored any solution that excluded Lumumba, whom he regarded as a “harrowing” figure, undoubtedly “bought” by the Communists. At the CIA a branch formerly responsible for DO activity in several African lands suddenly became the Congo task force, led by Edward O. Welles, a gung-ho secret warrior who had fought alongside the British in the Balkans and Middle East and in the Special Boat Service. There is no available, open evidence as to Welles’s knowledge of the CIA’s targeting of Lumumba. But on November 21 the third-country national, still known in agency lore only by his cryptonym, QJ/WIN, arrived in Leopoldville to participate in the plot. Before he could get to work the situation changed.
Weeks earlier Lumumba had asked for UN protection, and the UN created an envelope around Government House that amounted to incarceration. Frustrated by oppressive security, Lumumba escaped, aided by sympathetic guards. He made for Stanleyville in Orientale province, evading other UN troops. But he never arrived. Slowed by rain, unable to resist the crowds in every village who demanded he speak to them, the leader found himself critically delayed. Surveillance reports from CIA evidently aided in his capture on December 1 by Mobutu forces. On December 12, Moishe Tshombe declared his secessionist state in Katanga. QJ/WIN left the Congo in late December, but not before the slapstick touch of another CIA asset, WI/ROGUE, attempting to recruit him for an attempt against Lumumba.
The degree of CIA complicity in the consequent murder of Lumumba remains disputed. Not so the Belgian role. They too played the game of states, and Brussels had huge stakes in the Congo, especially in Katanga. By official account Belgian intelligence services spent $6 million to destabilize Lumumba’s government. They marked Lumumba a liability and conspired against him. Researcher Ludo De Witte pieced together so much of the Belgian story in the 1990s that publication of his book forced both a government inquiry and a parliamentary investigation. In February 2002 the Belgian government issued an official apology, accepting moral responsibility in Lumumba’s death and establishing a democracy fund in his memory. The United States has taken no such action.
Lumumba was brutally beaten, then killed, on January 17, 1961. The CIA payroll included the Congolese official who signed the arrest warrant. Lawrence Devlin told the Church Committee that the station had close connections to “several sources” who knew the truth about Lumumba because they made the decisions, but that those people had not acted under CIA direction. The cable traffic reveals that the agency had current information on Lumumba’s condition and movements in captivity during January 1961. The cables also show that Devlin feared an imminent coup in Lumumba’s favor, making action urgent. Moved by plane, Lumumba was diverted in mid-flight to Katanga—Moise Tshombe, formerly a Lumumbist, had switched sides. Base chief David Doyle observes that the Katangese leader above all was a “realist.” Opportunist might be a better description.
Doyle expresses himself as frustrated at Lumumba’s sudden materialization on the Elisabethville scene, imprisoned or not, beaten or not. When Doyle learned of the leader’s presence, apparently two days later, he sent Devlin this dispatch: “THANKS FOR PATRICE. HAD WE KNOWN HE WAS COMING WE’D HAVE BAKED A SNAKE.” The cable mistakenly noted that there were no plans to liquidate Lumumba.
The base chief missed the entire play on the unfortunate Congolese leader’s death, and Doyle worried he would be sacked. But the message to Devlin apparently appealed to Allen Dulles’s sense of humor. A political cartoon arrived in a pouch from Ed Welles: it showed two Texans baking a snake. Doyle then realized he would be safe.
Not so Patrice Lumumba. The nationalist had been tortured and killed the night after landing at Elisabethville. Belgian officers and Katangese officials participated. Several Belgian soldiers were actually in the firing squad, and Belgian officers with command of Katangese police and security forces did nothing to countermand any of these actions. Stories of CIA people, such as Devlin, driving around with Lumumba’s body in the trunk of their car appear apocryphal.
A few days later John F. Kennedy became thirty-fifth President of the United States. For almost a month after that, the Congolese leader’s fate remained the best-kept secret in the Congo. JFK reacted with shock and anguish when he learned of Lumumba’s death on February 13. Only two days before that the 5412 Group—now Kennedy’s Special Group—had granted another half-million dollars for the Congo project.
Dealing with Patrice Lumumba had taken months. Exorcising his ghost in the Congo required years of fighting, never to be fully accomplished.
Kennedy’s State Department advisers proposed an activist role. The CIA, left out, protested to McGeorge Bundy. Allen Dulles sent Bundy a letter on February 5 warning that the agency’s views had not been taken into account. Bundy reassured Dulles: President Kennedy, well aware of the circumstances, would ensure the CIA a hearing. Arthur Schlesinger relates that JFK saw the UN in the Congo as filling a power vacuum, in the absence of which there would be a Soviet-American confrontation. That view hinged on a certain analysis of Soviet motives. The young president had an opportunity here to shift from the Eisenhower policy, removing the Cold War context and crafting an African New Deal. Officials held divided views—even within State, Africa Bureau people generally favored a softer approach than the Europeanists—and a “Katanga Lobby” existed in Congress and among the public. But JFK approved the activists’ program. Backing Leopoldville would be framed as supporting reunification of the Congo, no doubt more palatable to newly independent African states but no different in substance from Eisenhower’s approach. The road to democracy in the Congo did not lie through Washington.
Mobutu’s ban on political activity expired with the new year. Soon Kasavubu announced a new prime minister and cabinet while Mobutu remained the strongman. This uneasy coalition prevailed for five years—the figurehead Kasavubu plus a succession of prime ministers—until Mobutu emerged from the shadows with a coup that established his open domination. Cyrille Adoula, most prominent of the cabinet heads, would take the heat for the suppression of Katanga. In typical Congolese fashion, the emergence of Adoula automatically alienated other factions and stimulated more separatist movements.
The scale of the Congo project necessitated close cooperation between the CIA and the U.S. military. The effort was massive: by May 1961 the air force had lifted 20,000 UN troops and 6,000 tons of equipment; the navy had brought in another 5,000 UN troops while taking home 2,600. Assistance to Leopoldville included eighteen helicopters, ten C-47 aircraft, and five larger C-119s. At its full stride the CIA burned money at a rate of a million dollars a day. Adoula received substantial agency support.
Washington attained its goal—a friendly government in Leopoldville—but the price amounted to disintegration of the country. With creation of yet another secessionist regime in southern Kasai province there were no less than four “nations” in the Congo. The U.S. role became one of reinforcing Leopoldville until the UN forces or the Congolese army could reunite the land. The UN peacekeeping force came under criticism as a cat’s paw for the Americans.
Intelligence reporting clearly showed the portents: the Belgians both intransigent and engaged, with their own angle to play; the Mobutu-Adoula faction hoping to divert secessionists with temporary alliances while enlisting the UN to disarm Tshombe, after which Mobutu’s own troops could clean up; the European nations uneasy with the international measures taken. For many months CIA analysts—perhaps kept in the dark by the DO—failed to perceive Mobutu’s power, consistently identifying Adoula as the main Congolese player. In weekly tracking reports on events the analysts followed the separatist “nations,” constantly featuring Adoula as the instigator of Leopoldville’s maneuvers to take them down.
One element that helped keep Mobutu in the background is that his Congolese National Army would not fight. Or, more properly, that the army was riven by the same crosscutting loyalties of tribe and clan that afflicted Congolese politics, with the result that it was often the instrument of secession rather than the solution to national disintegration. Katanga got most of the attention in the world’s eye while the CIA turned its gaze elsewhere. Specifically the agency feared Antoine Gizenga, who laid claim to the mantle of Lumumba. Gizenga had visited Russia and studied in Prague, impressing Washington as Moscow’s man in Africa. He led a secessionist regime in Orientale province, based in Stanleyville.
Gizenga’s “nation” fell to a combination of CIA action, the man’s own ineptitude, and Adoula’s maneuvers. The agency soon appreciated that Gizenga’s key weaknesses were money and arms. He bought the loyalty of “Gizengist” units of the Congolese military with weapons and cash, making backing critical. Reports were that Gizenga had the best-paid army in the Congo. The CIA discovered the Russians were sending Gizenga cash—in U.S. dollars—and weapons. Washington deliberated on blocking the flow. On June 8 the Special Group considered an action proposal. Allen Dulles warned of political dangers while State and the Pentagon favored moving ahead. Mac Bundy concluded he had to take the issue to the president. Kennedy approved.
Gizenga’s arms deliveries were disrupted by the agency cleverly and successfully. The CIA knew that Czechoslovakia had begun sending merchant vessels to the Sudan—unusual in that almost all Soviet Bloc trade had previously gone to West Africa. The CIA also knew that much of the tiny Czech merchant fleet consisted of ships transferred by Beijing, with Chinese crews and possibly secretly under Chinese control. Beijing had taken a very friendly position toward African independence movements, especially in the Congo. The Sudan associated itself closely with Egypt’s Nasser, who the CIA estimated wanted to play a leading role in Afro-Asian circles and favored Gizenga in the Congo. Sleuthing established that a Czech ship, probably one of the Chinese-crewed vessels, was carrying a cargo of arms to the Sudan ultimately bound for Gizenga. Washington considered asking the Sudan to embargo the shipment but, given the Nasser connection, rejected that approach in favor of public exposure. With some judicious payoffs in Port Sudan, the crane unloading the Czech-flag vessel slipped as it carried the second pallet, spilling crates all over the dock. Some broke open to scatter Soviet-made rifles everywhere. The shipment, consigned as Red Cross refugee aid, was revealed as weapons. The Sudanese confiscated all of it, halting Gizenga’s arms supplies.
Meanwhile in Cairo, where Gizenga maintained an office, the CIA discovered a Russian plan to send the Congolese $1 million in U.S. currency. Agents were able to learn the itinerary of the courier Gizenga sent to pick up the money. Larry Devlin arranged a surprise—again in the Sudan. Thanks to more bribes the courier, carrying a third of the cash in a suitcase, was summoned for customs inspection in Khartoum. Terrified, he contrived to leave the suitcase in a bathroom. The CIA recovered it, making a profit on the operation. Gizenga’s difficulties were greatly magnified. When his soldiers began holding up tribesmen to get their money, “Gizengist” sentiment diminished rapidly.
Adoula supplied the next maneuver, getting Gizenga to accept the offer of a vice premiership in the government, apparently without thinking through the politics of this deal. This connection with the Leopoldville government tarnished Gizenga’s Lumumbist credentials and enabled Adoula to demand his presence in the capital. Gizenga went on the lam instead, disappearing from Stanleyville, living for weeks in the bush so no official papers could be served on him, virtually halting his political activity. A fall 1961 conference where Gizenga had hoped to form a new national party flopped as a result, and Adoula was able to get the national assembly to vote to summon Gizenga to the capital.
The next phase of this struggle was overshadowed by events in Katanga. Mobutu’s troops failed in an attempt to take the province outright. In September came an outbreak of fighting between Tshombe’s Katangese troops and UN forces. This led to a forgotten chapter in the sordid story of the Congo, the death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who came to mediate. The secretary general, a Swede, worried about events and the degree to which the UN seemed compromised by taking sides in this strife. On one leg of his shuttle, Hammarskjöld was to meet with Moishe Tshombe. Approaching the airfield at Ndola (just across the border, in what is now Zambia) on September 17, the secretary general’s DC-6B aircraft crashed, killing Hammarskjöld and thirteen others. Subordinates believed that Katangese mercenaries shot down the plane. Since the Belgian Union Miniere financed much of Tshombe’s mercenary force at the time, this conclusion again implicates the Belgians. Others insist the aircraft crashed due to mechanical failure and maintenance faults.
Tshombe had beaten Mobutu’s troops thanks to his Western mercenary force and a jet fighter that gave him aerial superiority over Katanga. President Kennedy reluctantly issued an order that the United States would supply jet aircraft if they could not be gotten elsewhere, but Washington was saved from that escalation when Sweden and India sent planes of their own. Incidents between Tshombe troops and the UN multiplied. An uneasy truce lasted some weeks. Now CIA’s Bronson Tweedy came to Katanga for a personal survey. He and Jim Doyle, longtime friends (their fathers had been at Princeton together), helped put out a fire burning a train filled with ammunition whose explosion might have destroyed much of Elisabethville. A December Special National Intelligence Estimate found that the question of reintegrating Katanga had become so critical as to threaten the Adoula government.
Almost simultaneously the truce collapsed as the UN went on the offensive. At the critical moment Tshombe was away on a trip to Paris and Brazil, where he went for a conference of the Moral Rearmament movement—unwittingly observed by CIA’s political operatives. Washington sent C-130 transports to move UN reinforcements to Katanga. Tshombe’s troops and mercenaries fought a pitched battle for Elisabethville and were largely driven from the city, but the UN was unable to secure much more than its headquarters, the airfield, and other major installations. A fresh political accommodation would be negotiated among the UN, Tshombe, and Adoula. Tshombe disputed and violated its terms for many months. Amid the horror of Katanga, Mobutu and Adoula took advantage to arrest Antoine Gizenga, whom they sent to jail. The Soviet media protested. In January 1962 UN forces captured Gizenga’s capital at Stanleyville. Within the year, in the topsy-turvy of Congolese politics, the national assembly would be demanding Gizenga’s release.
In an April 1962 television interview, former CIA director Allen Dulles admitted that his CIA and the United States had overestimated the degree to which the Russians had involved themselves in the Congo. The premise of the entire venture had been mistaken.
The Katanga stalemate continued for more than a year. A Special National Intelligence Estimate prepared at the agency in May 1962 found the reintegration of Katanga essential to the future of the Congo but the obstacles to action unchanged. That November the State Department’s intelligence unit filed a lengthy research memorandum that made no judgment on the wisdom of military action but warned against abandoning the United Nations. The UN came up with a reintegration plan, but Tshombe stalled, then rejected it. In December, with Kennedy’s National Security Council Executive Committee, the fabled EXCOM, discussing Congo at the same meetings where it considered the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy demanded a fresh assessment of UN military capability in the context of a new U.S. “Operating Plan for the Congo.” Only a week later fighting broke out between UN forces and the Katangese. Tshombe’s secessionist state collapsed. In his turn he too went to prison. But, as Cord Meyer explained to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board on April 15, 1963, the CIA’s project in the Congo continued. The messy Congolese affair boiled on.
The Cuban operation represented the summit of a certain type of paramilitary action. The Congolese project showcased a new style of combined CIA-military activity. The frantic era of the OPC and the early CIA were gone. Paramilitary plans in Frank Wisner’s time frequently involved grand schemes carried out against foreign governments. Kennedy’s administration brought a shift toward operations in collaboration with established governments, aimed at real or imagined domestic enemies. There were still exceptions, of course, the Guyana project among the most prominent. The failure in Cuba contributed to the change of emphasis, demonstrating anew the resilience of target governments. Yet the change was in the wind before the first frogmen stepped ashore at Playa Girón, propelled by a shift in view at the top level of the U.S. executive.
National security policy during the Eisenhower administration combined CIA’s active paramilitary campaigns with a “New Look” military strategy that was radical in a different way. Ike’s policy rested upon the enormous power of nuclear weapons, the assumption that future wars would be nuclear, and a desire to maintain the American economy, which Eisenhower felt could not grow in the face of large military budgets. Thus his rigid and often arbitrary ceilings on defense spending. With atomic power emphasized, the ceilings required reductions elsewhere. These could only come from conventional forces. The Eisenhower period witnessed cutbacks in the army and Marine Corps. Many opposed Ike’s policy, especially the army brass. One chief of staff resigned over the issue. With notable exceptions, other army generals also opposed the New Look, but Ike carefully satisfied the navy and air force, appointing Joint Chiefs chairmen who supported him. The army argued in isolation.
The CIA was the one shop with a common interest in the army’s limited-war capability. Paramilitary operations were limited wars, possible contingencies for the employment of conventional force. As early as 1955 the CIA commissioned a study, Project Brushfire, of the political, psychological, economic, and sociological factors that affected “peripheral wars.” The Center for International Studies, under economist Max Millikan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted the study. Brushfire became one of a series of research contracts that CIA gave the MIT institute, which it had originally funded. On his copy of an information memo regarding Brushfire, Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs chairman commented, “I think the answers are so plain that it is a waste of money.”
When Eisenhower in early 1958 ordered a policy review on limited war versus full-scale conflict, the CIA wanted to be involved. John Foster Dulles sought to discourage brother Allen’s participation, saying the agency should be concerned with intelligence questions, not “operational” ones. Director Dulles allowed himself to be mollified by promises that the CIA would be permitted into operational aspects on some later occasion.
Further limited-war studies followed, and the CIA contributed, but its interests were scarcely known outside government while army officers trumpeted their opposition to the New Look to whomever would listen. The most prominent army spokesman was chief of staff Gen. Maxwell Taylor. Specifically, Taylor asserted that a strategy of massive nuclear retaliation could not counter “brushfire” wars, and that a strategy of “flexible response” could meet conflict at any level of intensity. At the CIA, which saw paramilitary action as a rung on the conflict ladder, the secret warriors undoubtedly cheered. But at the White House, Eisenhower gave short shrift to Taylor’s views. The general retired to write a book that advocated forces to meet the full spectrum of contingencies, brushfire wars as well as big ones.
No doubt Tracy Barnes, agonizing over the Bay of Pigs, paid little attention when a letter crossed his desk on the last day of that disaster. From James E. Cross at the Institute for Defense Analysis, the missive commented on what Barnes had said about another CIA initiative, a study group on the deterrence of guerrilla warfare. Cross believed that officials already understood this problem; they had to be told how to make the most of assets in threatened areas. The study group had held a couple of working meetings. A draft paper on limited war, written by the CIA’s Jim Critchfield, already sat on desks at Quarters Eye. Both Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell read it before the landing at Playa Girón, and it received other circulation at CIA as well. One of Critchfield’s recommendations provided for a survey of assets for unconventional warfare and paramilitary operations. All this moved fast precisely because the CIA, in building bridges to the new president’s inner sanctum, had seen Kennedy’s deep interest. Like two comets on intersecting trajectories, the rise of Maxwell Taylor would coincide with JFK’s demand for action on counterinsurgency.
After the Bay of Pigs failed, the inadequacy of efforts in the field of low-intensity warfare were glaringly evident. Fears that Russia would encourage “wars of national liberation” heightened concerns about the need to deter guerrilla warfare. Kennedy wanted someone to answer a Khrushchev speech on these conflicts and settled on his self-professed man of ideas, Walt W. Rostow, then the deputy national security adviser. By mid-June both the president and NSC staff were working over the proposed text of a presentation Rostow would make at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Two weeks later President Kennedy approved a directive providing for a government-wide evaluation of paramilitary requirements. This led to a top-secret summer study that combined the themes of deterring guerrilla warfare, limited war, counterinsurgency, and paramilitary operations. Walt Rostow watched this exercise closely. Another sparkplug, the study’s formal chairman, was Richard Bissell.
In early July a luncheon took place at CIA where Bissell set the direction for his policy review. He told Rostow, and Bissell’s initial overview paper borrowed heavily from Walt’s speech text, very well known once Rostow gave the talk at Fort Bragg. At the Pentagon, Ed Lansdale also prepared a paper, the first of several, which recited in bald numbers the staffing levels in special warfare units. In mid-July Allen Dulles reported that CIA had begun coordinating with Lansdale on future paramilitary requirements.
Closely watched at the White House, Bissell’s study became almost his swan song with the CIA. In contrast to pre-Cuba days, he now listened hard to what the White House had to say. From the NSC staff, Robert Komer suggested language for portions of the report, while from Maxwell Taylor’s staff Col. Julian Ewell, the general’s éminence grise, soaked up Bissell’s comments and gave back Taylor’s responses. Bissell’s paper grew odd tentacles in successive drafts over the fall of 1961. Presenting an update on covert action procedures to Kennedy’s recreated Killian Board, Bissell suddenly spoke of regaining public confidence in CIA covert action by revealing the existence of the Special Group, much as Eisenhower had once revealed the Killian Board itself.
At another point Bob Komer did a summary of Bissell’s paper in which he inserted the recommendation to vest high-level authority in the Special Group, which Taylor headed. That measure did not appear in Bissell’s original, which his assistant John Bross distributed on November 21. Although Komer assured Bissell that his summary changed nothing in the paper, he told his boss, McGeorge Bundy, “I took advantage of Walt’s imminent departure [Rostow would leave the NSC staff for the State Department] to press for what I think is the most logical solution, i.e., to tag Taylor and the Special Group with this task.” Bissell let this pass without comment.
Everyone had an agenda. Walt Rostow wanted to center U.S. thinking about dissident movements and insurgencies within the framework of stages of economic growth. The CIA deputy focused his interest on the agency’s role in such events. As Bissell put it,
A general problem in threatened underdeveloped countries is that of developing and strengthening the basic governmental and social institutions that are prerequisites to modernization. In some cases, as in the Congo, the local leadership is responsive to the need for change but lacks the background and competence to take needed steps on its own. In other cases, a frustrating and exasperating problem in countries severely plagued by Communist political and military subversion . . . is the reluctance—bordering on blind obstinacy—of the governmental leaders to admit the need for reform. In both cases the traditional and internationally accepted tools of government-to-government diplomacy . . . are unlikely by themselves to provide the guidance or the resources to achieve the reforms and changes essential to winning broad-based popular support for the national regime. In such situations the broad range of covert action measures available to us offers our best and only chance of increasing our leverage and achieving needed changes in time.
Bissell foresaw a “suitable covert operational methodology” that would involve “funding and guidance channels of bona fide private international or regional organizations,” particularly labor, youth, farm, or veterans groups; confidential relationships with local political leaders (“non-attributably backstopped”); and covertly funded consultants to local regimes.
There could also be a CIA role strengthening internal security and defense. “Offensive countermeasures” would be “primarily intended as spoiling operations,” including cross-border operations. With a finely honed sense of the dangers inherent in this, the paper admitted such tactics would become “almost unpredictably dangerous” if the adversary believed there existed a possibility he or she might be overthrown or lose territory. And, “The advantage is lost if an offensive operation against the aggressor is conducted in such a manner as to compel him to regard it as a formal act of war.” A further important theme—which fed back to Walt Rostow’s advocacy—was that “public expression would be given to the rationale.”
On December 8 the final counter–guerrilla warfare task force paper contained Dick Bissell’s statement of the techniques the Kennedy administration imagined would make the world safe for democracy. It also met Robert Komer’s agenda, saying, “Because of its responsibilities in directly related fields and because the agencies chiefly concerned are already represented on it, expansion of the mandate of the NSC Special Group seems the most effective way to carry out this function.” The Special Group would designate threatened countries, and for each of them Washington would form a task force to ensure optimal use of resources.
Richard Bissell’s last act would thus be to move Kennedy to reorganize his machinery for covert action. In fact the Special Group talked over the Bissell report on December 14. General Taylor formalized the early ad hoc procedures, drafting a directive that JFK approved on January 18, 1962. Because there has been confusion about Kennedy’s leadership of the secret war, this structure is worth underlining: The president established the Special Group (CI)—the abbreviation stood for “counterinsurgency”—to formulate plans on guerrilla warfare matters, in any country so designated. The existing Special Group—formerly the 5412 Group—on Cold War matters continued (the nomenclature had now been reversed: “5412” became the insider jargon). A third Special Group also appeared, the Special Group (Augmented). The difference was that Max Taylor chaired the 5412 Group existing since Harry Truman’s day while Bobby Kennedy skippered the Special Group (Augmented), identical save for his addition and its specific focus on Cuba.
Maxwell Taylor had been a paratrooper. In the army in his time, paratroopers were considered a military elite—thoroughly modern and flexible officers. Solidly cast in this “Airborne” mold, Max Taylor was unusual, just as Kennedy thought. More typical were the army officers who throughout the 1950s hindered the development of Special Forces. The Tenth Special Forces Group had been in place at Fort Bragg since June 1952. In September 1953 it was supplemented by the Seventy-seventh Group, which remained in the United States while almost eight hundred men of the Tenth Group deployed to western Germany, where they occupied an old German army base at Bad Tolz in Bavaria. This expansion coincided with the return of the Korean War veterans, a major source of Special Forces recruits. Subsequent growth slowed to a snail’s pace as anxious army generals preserved conventional units as best they could within the New Look budgets. Preoccupied with adjusting to nuclear war, the brass had little time for advocates of unconventional warfare.
The German deployment became the first giant step. At Bad Tolz the Tenth Special Forces planned for partisan campaigns in Eastern Europe and showed what they could do in NATO maneuvers. Detachments sent from the United States to other nations to help in training inaugurated a Special Forces role that has endured ever since. A permanent presence in the Far East began in 1956 when provisional teams went to Hawaii, then to Okinawa. In June 1957 this became the First Special Forces Group. Special Forces began missions to Laos as early as 1959, and in 1960 they appeared in South Vietnam, training Vietnamese rangers at the invitation of President Ngo Dinh Diem.
A wave of disillusionment swept through Special Forces, as at the CIA, when Eisenhower took no action during the Hungarian revolt. The unconventional warfare experts also smarted from their encounters with the army bureaucracy, which banned the wearing of Special Forces’ semi-official headgear, the green beret. Dedication was a valued attribute in a Special Forces soldier, but a person needed a lot to stay in the teams at that time. By 1960 Special Forces groups had tripled but amounted to only about two thousand troops, fewer than the personnel spaces the army had allocated in its 1952 decision to maintain a single unconventional warfare unit.
As military formations go, a Special Forces “group” represented something new. One component, an administrative base, served the needs of many distributed teams, called “operational detachments.” From group headquarters a C Team provided control and intelligence support for a large area while a B Team did the same for a region. The operational detachment was the A Team. These had a wide range of skilled experts for technical and medical services and combat leadership. The basic concept called for an A Team essentially leading a large partisan force or providing a training cadre. Special Forces recruited experienced officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), selected only the best, and then cross-trained team members in several of the required skills. During the 1950s this was quite necessary since many of the teams had but a fraction of their authorized complements.
The notion of Special Forces commands for regions and countries, with A Teams for field forces, clearly aimed at organizing resistance to an adversary’s military advance or occupation. The essential function, similar to the CIA’s stay-behind nets, was to harass and disrupt. But because of the expertise of their members, the A Teams were also highly suited for the training mission and for command of friendly irregular units within friendly territory. The latter became a key task in counterinsurgency. Here Special Forces at last found the role that sustained it through the Vietnam era and after.
This only became evident later. Good fortune came to Special Forces with the election of John F. Kennedy. Within days of JFK’s inauguration one of the president’s NSC staff, Walt Rostow, began questioning the adequacy of army training for war against guerrillas. Special Forces already ran counterinsurgency courses at its headquarters in Fort Bragg. These emphasized the economic, social, political, and psychological origins of war. Special Forces seemed to be on top of the subject, and President Kennedy saw a major role for Special Forces’ knowledge in “brushfire” wars.
A few months later Rostow went to Fort Bragg to address the students of the Special Warfare Center, his speech approved by Kennedy. Rostow’s speech put guerrilla war in the context of global underdevelopment, a sort of crisis of modernization. Although Rostow commended the students for reading Lenin, Guevara, and Mao Zedong, he insisted that guerrilla war dated to long before the Russian Revolution. “Guerrilla warfare,” as Rostow put it, “is not a form of military and psychological magic created by the Communist.” Rather, “we confront in guerrilla warfare in the underdeveloped areas a systematic attempt by the Communists to impose a serious disease on those societies attempting the transition to modernization.” America’s central task would be “to protect the independence of the revolutionary process now going forward.” Guerrilla warfare “is powerful and effective only when we do not put our minds clearly to work on how to deal with it.”
Kennedy perceived Special Forces to have done just that. Rostow returned to Bragg in late 1961, this time accompanying the president on a personal tour of the Special Warfare Center. Its commander, Brig. Gen. William Yarborough, took a calculated risk and greeted Kennedy wearing the proscribed green beret. The president came and saw, spoke supportively, and helped Special Forces gain new impetus. On April 11, 1962, JFK released an official message to the army, calling the green beret “a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom.” Henceforth Special Forces would be known as Green Berets, with official regulations to govern their size and color and how they should be worn. In a remarkable expansion of the franchise, decades later the entire U.S. Army clamored for berets of their own and now wear this headgear in varied colors and devices.
From the beginning of Kennedy’s presidency a rapid expansion of Special Forces occurred. In March 1961 the army doubled the number of units. Now groups specialized geographically—the Tenth Group for Europe; the First for Asia; a new Eighth Group for Latin America; and Third and Sixth groups for Africa and Middle East assignments. The Seventy-seventh Special Forces Group became the Seventh. Authorized strength doubled to fifteen hundred soldiers per group. Psychological warfare units also increased, in early 1965, to three battalions and two companies plus detachments. By November 30, 1964, the strength of army special warfare units stood at more than eleven thousand.
In Germany the Tenth Group retained its mission of infiltrating the Soviet bloc. The theater war plan, OPLAN 10-1, according to revelations in the British press, in 1962 provided for the Tenth Group to disperse into forty-nine guerrilla warfare zones throughout Eastern Europe. Its A Teams were each credited with the ability to mobilize a partisan battalion every month, for a potential resistance force of almost eighty thousand within six months, according to the estimates of the Special Operations Task Force Europe.
In its concentration on behind-the-lines wartime activity, the Tenth Group became an exception. Green Berets working other areas of the globe focused more on counterinsurgency and military assistance. The future looked bright. “For the first time in United States history,” said army spokesmen in an informational publication, “this [guerrilla organizing and psychological warfare] capability has been made available before it is needed. Through it the Army now has one more weapon which can be applied with discrimination in any kind of warfare.”
There were air force special forces too. These provided support, especially airlift. The air force called its approach to special forces the “air commando” concept. An “air commando” unit contained a little bit of everything—medium and light transport aircraft plus fighter-bombers. The same unit could supply partisans, make air strikes in their support, and maintain physical contact by flying light planes onto small airstrips. The ARC wings had continued the tradition, but the air force had abolished them. Had the Khampa partisans possessed such capabilities in Tibet, the PLA might never have been able to overcome them.
Air commandos were eclipsed in Eisenhower’s budget-conscious air force. Faced with expensive bomber and missile programs, little interest remained. Tactical commanders were preoccupied with their transition to supersonic jet fighters. Even air transport leaders had bigger ticket programs like the C-130 Hercules or the large jet C-141 Starlifter. The air commandos fell nebulously somewhere among the functional responsibilities of the various air force commands.
Despite all obstacles, a start was made in the late 1950s with the formation of a small, secret organization within the service. As with the army, Kennedy galvanized the air force. In March 1961, responding to instructions that each service examine how it could contribute to counterinsurgency, air force headquarters ordered the Tactical Air Command to create an experimental counterinsurgency unit along air commando lines.
Very soon thereafter, on April 14, 1961, the air force activated the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron under Col. Benjamin H. King at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The unit based its planes at nearby Hurlbut Field. Initially they included sixteen C-47s, eight B-26s, and eight T-28 Texans, propeller-driven training aircraft converted to carry bombs or rockets and machine guns. Nicknamed the “Jungle Jim” unit, the 4400th began with 350 airmen and the dual mission of training indigenous aircrews and participating in combat.
Meanwhile, for top-secret airlift missions over longer distances the Military Airlift Command established special E-Flights in certain of its C-130 squadrons. The unit for the Far East, for example, was E-Flight of the Twenty-first Troop Carrier Squadron on Okinawa, formed in late 1961 with four or five C-130s, already involved in the Tibet operation.
In April 1962 the air force dispensed with euphemisms and reactivated its First Air Commando Squadron, a formation that traced its lineage directly back to March 1944 in Burma. The squadron later expanded to a wing, supplemented by more combat crew training squadrons, a combat support group, and, at Eglin, the Special Air Warfare School. All these capabilities were controlled by a Special Warfare Division at USAF headquarters. Long before this stage arrived, the original Jungle Jim unit had gone into action in Southeast Asia.
Changes also came within the Pentagon. The Office of Special Operations transformed itself after the Bay of Pigs. Although OSO representatives such as Ed Lansdale had raised objections to the Cuba project, the Joint Chiefs were apportioned some blame in the failure. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, none too happy, wanted streamlining. Graves Erskine ran a tight ship, but perhaps there was just too much work for a single office.
At that time the OSO truly functioned as an intelligence focal point. It handled liaison and everything else from allocating forces to covert projects, to military personnel for detached service at CIA, to cover arrangements, to Pentagon participation in reconnaissance satellite development. McNamara was told that he did not really need a special assistant for these matters. Suddenly, the day after the final defeat of the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, most of the OSO personnel were reassigned to other military tasks.
Some OSO officers feared that Lansdale might take over the special assistant’s functions. After all, he had been deputy to General Erskine and one of the foremost proponents of counterinsurgency. But there were questions as to whether Lansdale knew much about satellites and other technical intelligence issues.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff set the stage in late July 1961 when they asked for guidance on peacetime support to the Central Intelligence Agency. An existing agreement from 1957 now seemed obsolete. The officers need not have worried. When OSO disappeared, McNamara assigned its technical responsibilities to the director of defense research and engineering. Under his August 7 directive, deception responsibilities went to a special planning office within the navy. Lansdale retained a small staff to handle only special activities. On September 12 Lansdale defined the terrain in a paper to the Chiefs and all the service secretaries: routine matters could be handled by those already assigned to liaise between the military and CIA, but anything requiring policy discussion or major participation would go to his office.
Some credit Erskine with achieving this division of tasks. A new unit, the special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities (SACSA) is what finally emerged. In any case, Ed Lansdale did not succeed to the OSO empire. Pulled into a renewed Cuba adventure, Lansdale disappeared. A Marine general had headed OSO, and now another Marine became SACSA. With an eye cocked toward the White House, the Marine Corps gave the post to an officer who had served with Jack Kennedy in the South Pacific during World War II, Maj. Gen. Victor “Brute” Krulak. Jack Hawkins came back from the CIA to become his assistant. Both were skeptical of the covert operations that followed the Bay of Pigs, especially Hawkins. But on counterinsurgency SACSA proved very active, and Maxwell Taylor’s Special Group (CI) made sure it stayed that way. Army civilian executive Joseph A. Califano, Jr., came to think Krulak’s nickname very well chosen.
Dick Bissell had been an enthusiastic supporter of counterinsurgency, leading the 1961 summer study. His successor, Richard McGarah Helms, was not so much so. A professional from the espionage establishment, Helms had been poised for this job for a decade. He had been the go-to guy for spies, heading the division that covered Germany during creation of the CIA-Gehlen Organization alliance and the heady years of that country as base for penetration missions behind the Iron Curtain. He had dutifully played second fiddle to Wisner, then Bissell. Now Helms began the meteoric rise that took him to the top of the CIA in the span of a few years. Despite his proclivities, in the process Helms would preside over a peak in the secret war, the years from Kennedy to the Nixon-Kissinger era.
Helms took over an expanding DO but one inflicted with self-doubt. Already a stream of defectors had begun to sow fears of a Russian mole at a high level within the CIA. And there were the covert action failures—which nevertheless did not impede the growth of DO capabilities. The directorate remained the largest component of the agency, a thousand stronger than when Ike took office, spending 54 percent of CIA’s budget. An extra thousand CIA personnel supported DO’s work. Field stations in Africa increased by half between 1959 and 1963, reflecting the rise of Tweedy’s Africa Division. Impelled by Cuban projects, personnel in the Western Hemisphere Division grew 40 percent between 1961 and 1965. After that the focus would shift to Southeast Asia.
A few weeks before Helms became DDO the CIA general counsel, Lawrence Houston, put on record his opinion regarding the legal basis for covert action, admitting that “there is no statutory authorization to any agency for the conduct of such activities.” No explicit prohibition existed either, Houston added, and “some of the covert Cold War operations are related to intelligence within a broad interpretation” of the National Security Act of 1947. Examining the language of the law, the CIA lawyer specifically conceded its failure to cover paramilitary operations—the clause that read “such other duties and functions” in the act, always cited in this regard, was explicitly tied to “intelligence affecting the national security.” Thus, wrote Houston in this January 15, 1962, memorandum, “it would be stretching that section too far to include a Guatemala or a Cuba even though intelligence and counterintelligence are essential to such activities.”
Houston’s conclusion: “Therefore, the Executive Branch under the direction of the President was acting without specific statutory authorization, and CIA was the agent selected for their conduct.”
Defending the government’s conduct in these paramilitary operations, the CIA general counsel was reduced to arguing that “it can be said that the Congress as a whole knows that money is appropriated to CIA and knows that generally a portion of it goes for clandestine activities. To this extent we say that we have Congressional approval of these activities.” Thus the CIA’s own legal counsel saw no general mandate for paramilitary operations or political action, no specific authorization, and only the weak claim that Congress had approved by means of appropriating money. It is worth noting that a parallel argument that Congress had in effect approved a declaration of war by appropriating money for the Vietnam War would be ruled invalid by the courts.
Larry Houston believed it was for the administration to decide what and how many Cold War activities. Prodded by Bobby Kennedy and Max Taylor, it did. Under procedures adopted after the Bay of Pigs, any project costing more than $3 million had to be approved. The CIA could conduct operations budgeted for less than $250,000 on its own. After October 1962 the Special Group expected to be appraised of every covert project.
From the beginning of Kennedy’s presidency to the fall of 1962, according to the Special Group’s own records, it approved 550 covert operations. During the first half of 1963 it sanctioned another 23 actions (out of 35 proposed). Figures given to the congressional investigators in 1975—163 covert operations between January 1961 and November 1963, compared to 104 approved during the Eisenhower years—evidently count only activities above a certain threshold. Even so, a later internal audit found that in 1961–1962 the Special Group considered only about 16 percent of operations actually initiated.
The gains from these activities were limited. On the one hand, Kennedy tightened his control; on the other, he brought the locus of responsibility closer to the White House. McGeorge Bundy recalls:
In 1961 I listened with a beginner’s credulity to the arguments of the eager operatives who promoted what became the Bay of Pigs. . . . Through the next two years and more, I watched with increasing skepticism as the Kennedy Administration kept the pressure on the CIA for more and better—if smaller—covert operations.
I think I played a small part—his own learning from experience was much more important—in President Kennedy’s growing recognition that covert action simply did not work and caused more trouble than it was worth.
Kennedy’s demise ended the potential for a change in policy. And Mac Bundy failed to stem the rising tide of project proposals.
But DDO Helms faced a new difficulty when Kennedy reduced the autonomy enjoyed by CIA stations. The degree of control an ambassador should have over CIA operations in his assigned country had been a touchy issue for years. The experiences of Chester Bowles in India, William Sebald in Burma, and John Allison in Indonesia illustrate the problem. Wise station chiefs kept their ambassadors informed, as Jacob Esterline had done with Tom Mann in Guatemala (when Mann had been ambassador to El Salvador), but this had been voluntary. After a 1958 interagency study, Eisenhower gave the CIA virtually complete autonomy, directing that the ambassador’s writ stopped at the station chief’s door. The spooks, not the diplomats, sat in the driver’s seat.
President Kennedy reversed this policy. Among the PFIAB recommendations of 1961 had been one that ambassadors be fully informed of CIA activities in their countries. Kennedy agreed. State Department official U. Alexis Johnson drafted a letter for JFK’s signature, dispatched in May 1961. The Kennedy letter established a “country team” concept: CIA could sit on embassy senior councils but the ambassador would be the authority. John Kenneth Galbraith’s troubles with the CIA in India show that State’s authority still had far to go.
As deputy director for operations, Dick Helms also had to contend with a new boss. John Alex McCone took over as director of central intelligence in November 1961. A Californian, and from outside the agency, the fifty-nine-year-old McCone opened to widespread suspicion but left with many regarding him as one of the greats. Archie Roosevelt, Kermit’s cousin, newly returned from a tour in Madrid, looked at McCone and saw in him “just the director the Agency needed at this critical point.” McCone had plentiful experience as a corporate manager, including some relevant to agency interests, such as CEO of a shipping company, but he was an engineer and entrepreneur. McCone understood power in Washington too, having been chairman of Eisenhower’s Atomic Energy Commission and an air force official during the Truman years. A self-made millionaire, he would be immune to fear of losing his job.
Director McCone had a problem on covert operations with the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. After the Bay of Pigs the president instructed the board to monitor this aspect more closely. Allen Dulles had begun swinging the door back, telling PFIAB that he had violated secrecy rules by handing over data, but McCone tried to close the door all the way. Alex, as he liked to be called, refused to furnish data on Special Group matters, using the excuse that these were his own to pursue. Neither Jim Killian nor fellow board members accepted that the president’s panel should be denied data for inquiries on behalf of the chief executive.
So began a fight that lasted over a year. Board staff approached McCone’s deputy, Gen. Marshall Carter, to schedule a briefing. Carter delayed. A week later he refused. The briefing, finally scheduled for June 1962, was then canceled the day before. The board received dollops of information from time to time—a presentation on Laos here, a comment on the Congo there—to placate them. McCone told Killian he had spoken to the president and JFK agreed with him. Killian shot back that he’d talk to Jack Kennedy himself. National security adviser McGeorge Bundy, a member of the Special Group in his White House capacity, agreed with Killian. On June 24 Jim Killian had dinner with Alex McCone and hammered out a compromise—the DCI would present a briefing book specially prepared by the CIA. For the first time the agency worked up a guide to ongoing covert activity.
As it turned out, the McCone-Killian compromise was only a tactical retreat. First the CIA proposed to brief only those covert operations that involved aerial reconnaissance—one way to sort out big fry from the small fish—but when it came to the latest Cuba project, PFIAB found (because the CIA had not briefed on it) that no overall plan seemed to exist. By late 1962 the Killian Board wanted access to Special Group records. This happened in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where JFK ordered Killian to produce a specific postmortem. Director McCone could hardly resist. The CIA tried to get away with exhibiting only records on aerial surveillance of Cuba. Again on March 25, 1963, McCone told Kennedy the Killian Board reports created a misleading record that might leak and be “very damaging” to the agency. Kennedy answered that the advice of an independent board seemed invaluable to him; as for the rest, “he thought the Board’s record of discretion was excellent.” Typical of the CIA approach would be the PFIAB meeting of April 23, where Lyman Kirkpatrick asked that discussion on the Cuba operation exclude diplomat Sterling Cottrell, who headed the government’s interagency Cuba task force, because he too was not supposed to know about it.
As PFIAB chairman, James Killian created—and his successor Clark Clifford continued—a subcommittee on covert operations. This group finally received the agency’s general briefings. The panel included Gordon Gray, returned in a new incarnation; William Langer, historian and senior CIA analyst from early in its history; and retired diplomat Robert Murphy. In early April they received Cord Meyer, chief of CIA’s International Organizations Division, a logical official to inform the group on actions in Latin America other than Cuba, which involved a good deal of labor and political work, such as the project then under way in Guyana. Bob Murphy, not impressed, told the full panel that Meyer’s presentation consisted of “light touches.” Meyer conveyed the impression that covert operations were of “such routine nature” that they did not rise to the level of importance that PFIAB “attached to covert action operations and requirements.”
This ploy did not work. A few weeks later the Clifford Board demanded and received full data on Cuba, as they did again in June, when Clifford asked member James Doolittle to survey areas where the CIA had not implemented PFIAB recommendations Kennedy had approved. A fresh briefing in September featured CIA’s big guns, not just Meyer but Richard Helms and Des FitzGerald. In September and November John McCone at PFIAB defended the CIA’s role in South Vietnam against publicly reported charges of meddling in Saigon politics. Among other things, he denied that the agency had anything to do with the coup d’état that overthrew South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem.
Board members became increasingly concerned about the system’s self-correcting ability. They found none. At an early meeting one member remarked how impressed he had been—possibly a result of the Bay of Pigs postmortems going on just then—with how the Special Group could monitor implementation. But then they heard Max Taylor say his group had no such capacity, a judgment seconded on another occasion by State Department Special Group member U. Alexis Johnson. Queried in September 1963 by Langer’s covert action panel, Thomas Hughes of the State intelligence unit noted that the department usually received project proposals only at the last minute, just before the Special Group had to decide on them. The CIA admitted this practice and justified it saying that McCone insisted on reviewing these documents before he would allow them out of Langley. The Clifford Board remained unhappy.
Beyond PFIAB, McCone had problems managing the components of CIA’s far-flung intelligence empire. The covers and contacts staff had placed people in journalism, broadcasting, business, and academe. Within the Pentagon itself there were between seven hundred and a thousand “units” that supported or provided cover for the CIA, ranging from post boxes and telephones to full-scale formations with men and equipment.
A singular headache was the array of CIA proprietaries. When McCone succeeded Dulles, preparations were already in place for the latest addition to the proprietaries, what became a complex of insurance and investment companies formed to handle contract agents’ and survivors’ benefits arising from the Cuban affair. Helms set up a Domestic Operations Division to manage the proprietaries, including this one. It also ran a program that picked up odd bits of intelligence by interviewing Americans who traveled to the denied-area countries or foreign nationals resident in the United States. An inspector general review of the unit in the mid-1960s found haphazard financial direction of the proprietaries by the division.
Fittingly, perhaps, Tracy Barnes became chief of the Domestic Operations Division, and Howard Hunt a senior staffer. Another was Hans Tofte, who finally brought Barnes down by getting the agency in the newspapers again under dubious circumstances. A junior CIA officer, looking at an apartment Tofte offered to rent, saw secret documents in Tofte’s home and reported the security violation. Agency minders carted away several boxes of materials Tofte had taken from the office. Matters got out of hand when Tofte alleged that the security officers had stolen jewelry from his wife. He sued the CIA, with attendant negative publicity. Tofte lost the case and his job. Barnes retired soon thereafter.
Then there was Air America. Aviation law changes in Taiwan had posed obstacles for Civil Air Transport. The CIA had already been moving in the direction of reorganization. In 1957 it created the Pacific Corporation, a Delaware-registered holding company, taking over assets of the shadowy American Airedale Corporation, then formed Air America under it in 1959. Pacific Corporation had headquarters in Washington and field offices in Taipei. Air America was the ostensibly private charter firm under its slogan, “Anything, Anywhere, Anytime . . . Professionally!” A rump CAT remained on Taiwan as a Chinese domestic airline while extensive maintenance facilities were spun off as Air Asia. Pacific Corporation held residual interests. This proprietary was massive: at its height Pacific Corporation employed 20,000 people, more than the CIA itself. Air America directly employed 5,600, up to 8,000 if support personnel are counted, and owned or leased 167 aircraft. In 1970 it averaged 30,000 flights per month. In 1973 its Pentagon contracts amounted to more than $41 million.
Much smaller but still significant was Southern Air Transport, which grew enough to have semi-autonomous corporate divisions for Atlantic and Pacific operations. This company both owned and leased DC-6 or C-54 propeller-driven transports, Boeing 727 jets, and the civilian version of Lockheed’s C-130. One example of the shell games played here is a DC-6A aircraft (tail number N89BL) originally owned by American Airlines. In June 1960 World Airways bought the plane, leasing it the same day to Southern Air, which that day leased it on to Air America. At other times Air America lent money to Southern Air. As support for the war in Southeast Asia loomed larger, Southern Air won a $3.7 million air force contract to move cargo and passengers on interisland routes in the Pacific.
Another important air proprietary was Intermountain Aviation. Centered at an airstrip in Marana, Arizona, northwest of Tucson, Intermountain had been formed in the late 1950s as an aircraft modification and maintenance activity, originally the Sonora Flying Service. It acquired Marana from Beiser Aviation Corporation. The base had long been a center for air force crew training, and the CIA soon used it for this as well. Once succeeding in making their first solo flights, pilots were dunked in the swimming pool that featured among the base’s amenities. Tibetan partisans went there to learn how to parachute. After the Bay of Pigs, Gar Thorsrud showed up at Marana as president of Intermountain. His chief lieutenants, Connie M. Seigrist and Douglas R. Price, had been his deputies at Trampoline in the Cuba project. Intermountain furnished the B-17 aircraft—a CIA plane first acquired for Indonesia—used in the James Bond movie Thunderball for a thrilling scene in which the spy is picked up from the sea. In 1966 more than a hundred B-26 bombers sat on the apron ready to refurbish for operations. Extending our example of CIA’s aircraft shell games, in 1967 the DC-6A previously mentioned was reregistered to Intermountain Aviation.
Managing the proprietaries, including many more than mentioned here, was a formidable task. The CIA used a combination of interlocking boards of directors plus agency personnel working under cover. George A. Doole, a former Pan Am pilot who joined the agency in the early 1950s, is the best known. When Air America was formed, Doole became an equal shareholder with Pacific Corporation, though the majority shareholders by far were Taiwanese persons, who themselves may have been stand-ins for the agency. Headquarters management was vested in the Domestic Operations Division. On February 5, 1963, Director McCone created an Executive Committee for Air Proprietary Operations to get a handle on at least some of the empire. Lawrence Houston chaired the EXCOMAIR, which included representatives of the DO and the CIA comptroller. Houston had saved the CAT relationship by recommending it be continued back in 1956, when the 5412 Group considered liquidating the proprietary, without which Indonesia, Tibet, and Cuba would not even have been possible. Now he experienced the real headaches involved. EXCOMAIR administered the proprietaries directly, effectively taking them away from Tracy Barnes’s division.
In 1968 the agency’s inspector general, by then Gordon Stewart, conducted a study of the air proprietaries. Although some of his own staff protested that Stewart’s criticisms went too far, it is reported—strikingly—that the CIA could not establish exactly how many aircraft it owned.
As DCI, John McCone made no pretense to micromanagement. A California businessman, he understood that experts like Houston and Helms knew their jobs better than he could hope to. McCone gave his component chiefs much more freedom than had Allen Dulles. Richard Helms appreciated that. As DDO, Helms encouraged CIA efforts in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. By the mid-1960s Helms had almost as many people working in the DO as in the entire State Department—more than a third of CIA’s personnel. A former officer records that almost 2,000 covert action experts were on board, as against 4,200 working in espionage or other clandestine service functions. The bulk of the paramilitary people were in the Special Operations Division. The DO had about 4,800 officers in the area divisions. Far East was the largest with about 1,500, Africa the smallest with just 300 officers. Apart from the DCI’s contingency fund, the Directorate for Operations spent almost 60 percent of the CIA’s budget. A lot of that money went to pursue Washington’s vendetta against Fidel Castro.