Washington Decoded

Bundy on Bundy: JFK’s National Security Adviser Listens to the Cuban Missile Crisis Recordings

 

 

 

By Sheldon M. Stern

 

    In the nearly three decades since the declassification of the secret recordings of the Cuban missile crisis ExComm meetings, I have often been asked if the recordings add anything vital to our grasp of that singular event. The answer is irrefutable: yes!

    That question also led me to wonder whether any of the key ExComm participants ultimately learned anything from the recordings. The tapes were not declassified until 1996 and by then most ExComm survivors were quite elderly. However, years earlier, McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security, received clearance from the National Archives to listen to still-classified tapes from the first day (Tuesday, 16 October 1962) and also from the pivotal last day (Saturday, 27 October 1962).

    One afternoon in the 1980s I was surprised to see Bundy, then in his sixties, preparing to eat a meal in the Kennedy Library staff lunchroom. I introduced myself as the JFK Library historian, and explained that I had previously listened to the missile crisis tapes all the way through to the November lifting of the naval quarantine. Bundy looked incredulous at first, but after I alluded briefly to my background (Harvard PhD) he seemed more interested and at ease. Eventually, he acknowledged that he having difficulty identifying some speakers and I offered to help. Bundy had, of course, worked with these ExComm members and it almost seemed presumptuous for me to tell him who was talking. I explained, however, that when a speaker did not have a distinctive or familiar voice, I had compared it to other tape recordings on which the speakers were clearly identified, enabling me to recognize the voices of Paul Nitze, Roswell Gilpatric, John J. McCloy, U. Alexis Johnson, and several others. If the Boston twang of the Kennedy brothers occasionally made them difficult to distinguish, I was usually able to examine the context of the discussion to determine whether the president or attorney general was speaking.

    Bundy and I spent six absorbing hours in the classified national security vault listening to the October 27th tapes. He had been, the recordings proved, a consistently tough and outspoken critic of the president’s views—which was, of course, his job as White House national security adviser. He knew that JFK did not wish to be surrounded by sycophants. Bundy was also the only participant who openly questioned the president’s judgment and decisions by frequently using the personal pronoun “I” to explain what “I myself would do” in this situation—leading the president to respond impatiently, “I want everybody to understand it, Mac, if you don’t mind.”[1]

    “There may be an advantage,” Bundy suggested in his memoir, “in combining in one account what I know as a participant and what I have since learned from the work of others and from my own study.” These formerly top-secret recordings thoroughly document Bundy’s distinctive role during the ominous October 27th meetings—revised and corrected by the startling new evidence on these scratchy, low fidelity, but irreplaceable and indispensable recordings.[2]

    The most widely-read book about the crisis has been Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days. It has never been out of print; created the interpretive paradigm for the crisis; and inspired several documentaries and two Hollywood films. Yet many of its key conclusions have been exposed as flatly untrue by the tapes. RFK appears to have chosen to settle personal scores with argumentative participants like Bundy—accusing him “of strange flip-flops . . . . First, he was for a [missile] strike, then a blockade and then for doing nothing . . . because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of an air strike . . . without prior notification, along the lines of Pearl Harbor.” He also claimed that Bundy “had been irresolute or weak-willed.”[3]

    The decisive moment of the crisis arrived on Friday evening, October 26, when Khrushchev sent a lengthy, emotional message to Washington. He insisted that the missiles in Cuba were defensive and proposed removing them in exchange for a US pledge not to invade the island. The next morning the ExComm was stunned to learn about an entirely new offer, made publicly on Moscow Radio, to remove the Cuban missiles if the US removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The president immediately asked what negotiations had taken place with the Turks, noting that he had been considering such a move since the first day of the crisis. Bundy urged JFK not to soften his resolve and asserted that “I would stick to the terms in the Friday letter.” The president insisted that world opinion would back the trade—because “it will look like a very fair trade . . . . you’re going to find a lot of people thinking this is a rather reasonable position.” “That’s true,” Bundy conceded, but “privately we say to Khrushchev: ‘Look, your statement is very dangerous . . . You’d better get straightened out . . . . The current threat to peace is not in Turkey—it is in Cuba.’ JFK countered, “They’ve got a God[damn] . . . they’ve got a very good proposal, which is the reason they’ve made it public.”

    Bundy soon reported that he had contacted the US ambassadors to France and NATO “who confirmed that the “knockdown of the Cuba-Turkey link” had been well-received by the allies. No such inquiry had been explicitly authorized by the president at the ExComm meetings, yet JFK did not comment on or make an issue of Bundy’s potential brush with insubordination.

    “It’s one thing to stand them down,” Bundy repeated, “to reduce the likelihood of a Soviet attack on Turkey . . . . It’s quite another thing to trade them out.” But Kennedy countered again that “most people will regard this as not an unreasonable proposal, I’ll . . . tell you that!” Bundy remained unconvinced: “But what ‘most people’ Mr. President?” JFK shot back, “I think you’re gonna have it very difficult to explain [Kennedy often fractured grammar in tense moments] why we are going to take hostile military action in Cuba . . . when he’s saying, ‘If you get yours out of Turkey, I’ll get ours out of Cuba.’ I think you’ve got a very tough one here. Let’s not kid ourselves”—a remark he repeated three times. “I don’t see why we pick that track,” Bundy persisted, “when he’s offered us the other track in the last twenty-four hours.” JFK cut him off, “Well, he’s offered us a new one! . . . in fact, all these matters can be discussed if he’ll cease work [in Cuba].” Then the president paused dramatically for about six seconds before concluding bleakly, “And then where are we? . . . if that’s part of the record, then you don’t have a very good war.” “NATO may be firm now,” he warned, in language evocative of his letters home during World War II, but “we all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow.”

    “I myself,” Bundy pronounced again, would send back word that they have to do better than this public statement . . . and get [Khrushchev] back to where he was last night. JFK recommended requesting an emergency Sunday meeting of the NATO council. “No,” Bundy countered, “I would not do it tomorrow, Mr. President, myself!” JFK ignored him, reiterating that “time is running out . . . . It’s got to be finessed. We have to finesse [Khrushchev].” The national security chief remained convinced that NATO would conclude that “we were trying to sell out our allies for our interests. It’s irrational, and it’s crazy, but it’s a terribly powerful fact.”

    The tapes confirm that Kennedy was convinced that the Soviet premier would not, and could not, return to his Friday proposal after moving on to a tougher public position on Saturday. RFK and special assistant Ted Sorensen urged the president to send a letter to persuade Khrushchev to return to the Friday proposal. Kennedy agreed to send it, but his indifferent tone suggests no confidence in that idea; he referred to the letter as “this thing.” JFK was certain that political pressure around the world would make it impossible for Khrushchev to swallow an offer he had abandoned.

    Some readers may be wondering about the so-called “Trollope Ploy”—a scheme designed to assist the administration in concealing the truth about the secret deal that ended the crisis. Thirteen Days credits RFK with the idea. JFK, however, phoned former presidents Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover on Sunday and lied about the deal, insisting that he had pressured Khrushchev back to the Friday proposal. Ike was impressed: “this is a very conciliatory move he’s made”—the “Trollope Ploy” before it had a name.[4]

    Bundy’s memoir largely ignored his abrasive and officious exchanges with the president. That regrettable decision deprived historians and the public, before the tapes were available, of unique evidence and insight into the personal, emotional, and human realities of these discussions. (The possibility that Bundy acted as ExComm “devil’s advocate” is effectively belied by these taut, quarrelsome recorded clashes.)

    Bundy stood by the 1962 US line that “the crisis was brought on” by Khrushchev. “We have a list of sabotage options, Mr. President,” which included removing Castro. “I think it would need your approval . . . . Post-Castro Cuba, is the most complex landscape.” JFK concurred that Khrushchev had “initiated the danger . . . he’s the one playing God, not us.” These covert US schemes, kept secret from the American people, were no secret to the USSR and Cuba, and help explain Khrushchev’s gamble to protect Cuba with Soviet missiles.

    The international political appeal of Khrushchev’s Saturday message, Bundy reluctantly agreed, had negated the first proposal “Yet, in the end,” he concluded, “President Kennedy not only chose that [public] course but recognized the importance of giving it clear [public] priority over any effort to persuade the Turks” to accept a missile trade. In fact, this was a shrewd and devious half-truth. JFK never expected the ploy to succeed—a fact Bundy well understood. Yet the president used the Friday letter gambit (as he had done in the call to the former presidents) as a public cover story to conceal the behind-the-scenes Turkey-Cuba trade.

    Bundy was impressed by the contributions of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who resisted the missile trade during the meetings, but also shared the president’s aversion to allowing “an intransigent position on these unwanted weapons stand between his country and the safe removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba . . . [which] was worth many times any possible cost.”
Bundy’s own judgment, a quarter century later, echoed both JFK and Rusk:

   Kennedy’s understanding of the political power of Khrushchev’s second letter made him pessimistic about the prospect of success in returning to the first . . . .  Twenty-five years have passed, and I find myself less impressed by my own insistence on the reality of NATO sentiment than I am by the president’s unwavering recognition that the basic interest of all concerned was to find a peaceful end to the crisis and that the Turkish missiles, whatever the opinions of allies, did not justify bloodshed in Cuba.[5]

 

Sheldon M. Stern was John F. Kennedy Library Historian from 1977-2000. He had the unique opportunity to hear and evaluate all the Cuban missile crisis recordings two decades before they were declassified. He is the author of Averting the Final Failure: JFK and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (2003);  The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (2005); and The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths vs. Reality (2012).

 

[1] Sheldon M. Stern, “The Selective Memory of McGeorge Bundy,” in The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Myths vs. Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 119-128.

[2] McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988) 391.

[3] Sheldon M. Stern, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: The Real JFK White House Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Len Scott and R. Gerald Hughes, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015) 204-224.

[4] Stern, “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 134-147.

[5] Bundy, Danger and Survival, 430, 436.

©2024 by Sheldon M. Stern

Before Hiroshima & Nagasaki

 

The First Atomic Bomb: The Trinity Site in New Mexico
Janet Farrell Brodie
University of Nebraska Press. 318 pp. $60

By Kay Matthews

 

    The First Atomic Bomb is a deeply researched history of the weapon developed by the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and tested at the Trinity site in the Tularosa Basin on 16 July 1945. Dubbed “the gadget” by the scientists and workers who manufactured it during the last years of World War II, it was identical to the second bomb dropped on Japan—aka “Fat Man,” a plutonium implosion bomb detonated over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. Three days earlier, “Little Boy,” a Uranium-235 fission bomb, had exploded over Hiroshima.

    The book begins with an overview of the policies, people, and places that contributed to the Trinity explosion and its complicated aftermath, which is helpful for readers unfamiliar with the history of the bomb. The Manhattan Project, a thirty-five month endeavor that cost of enormous cost (estimated at $21.6 billion in 1996 dollars), brought together the scientists, most famously Robert Oppenheimer, and the military, General Leslie Groves, but also an “industrial and engineering construction effort” of thousands of workers—civilian and military—all over the country that somehow managed to maintain a curtain of secrecy until the bombs were dropped over Japan.

    Brodie’s focus on the workers—not scientists—who helped make “the gadget,” and her knowledge of previous scholarship familiar to many New Mexicans, are impressive. In Chapter Two, “Dispossessions,” she details the stories of Tularosa Basin residents who were forced to relocate after the Trinity site was chosen for the bomb test, mostly Anglo and Hispano ranchers. They were inadequately compensated and never allowed to return post-Trinity for complex of reasons, including the expansion of the nearby Alamogordo Army Base (which became Holloman Air Force Base), and the White Sands Proving Ground (which became White Sands Missile Range).

    To put this in context, Brodie devotes a subsection of the chapter to the history of land conflict in New Mexico and references the work of writers who have documented the displacement of both Native American and Hispano populations in the long history of the territory’s journey towards statehood. Historian Malcolm Ebright’s book, Advocates for the Oppressed, documents the confrontations between wealthy Hispano families and Natives over control of valuable irrigable land. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, Roots of Resistance, provides an analysis of how a succession of conflicting land tenure patterns and practices dispossessed and disenfranchised the indigenous people of New Mexico. Historian David Caffey documents the inability of the United States legal system to justly adjudicate Hispano and Native land grants.

    While Brodie provides a detailed description of the day of the Trinity test in this first section, the bulk of the book is divided into two main sections: 1) building of the site; and 2) post-test events regarding disposition of the site, the afterlife of Trinity radiation, and historical preservation.

Choosing the Site

    Then Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes instructed General Groves that no Native American tribes or reservations should be displaced in choosing the site. Yet many Hispano and Anglo farmers and ranchers would be forced to leave, as noted above. In choosing the uppermost portion of the infamous Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man’s Journey) basin, part of the Camino Real trail from Las Cruces to Socorro, they figured they had secured as much isolation and secrecy as possible. The workers who came to build the site from Los Alamos and the army—military police, construction workers, engineers (SEDs), technicians, and the scientists in charge—worked under brutal wind and heat conditions. Brodie notes that despite an integrated work force at LANL—Native Americans and Hispanos—there are no records that reveal how many people of color worked at the Trinity site (ditto for women).

    After the successful explosion, technicians and workers stayed at the site to clean up and conduct additional experimentation while the military provided security. They all wore radiation-detecting dosimeter badges, but as Brodie jumps back and forth in time over the post-explosion years, the haphazard nature of the cleanup and status of the site becomes obvious.

    A telling example is that of the handling of the trinitite, or the “semi-glossy agglomerations” from sand thrown into the air by the blast that fell to the ground around the site (and that people took home as souvenirs). There was little agreement about its radioactivity, whether it should be removed, or be preserved as part of White Sands National Monument, until finally the Atomic Energy Commission, which took civilian control of the Trinity site, hired a contractor to scoop it up and bury it. No records of that removal were kept, however, and confusion remained as to where and how it was buried. Brodie attributes the general lack of records on post-Trinity activities to the pressures to ready the bombs for use in Japan.

    Post-bomb control over the Trinity site was complicated by its location within the Alamogordo Army Base and the rapidly expanding White Sands Proving Ground. In the build up to World War II and especially post war, New Mexico became the outdoor laboratory for more than nuclear weapons. Public lands were withdrawn for bombing ranges, fighter pilot practice, and missile testing. Competing requests from the US army, air force, and navy expanded the military presence in New Mexico, which now hosts four massive military bases ranging from 50,000 acres to 3,200 square miles.

    Brodie devotes a chapter to the radioactive fallout from Trinity, something New Mexicans are all too familiar with as a “nuclear sacrifice zone”: Los Alamos National Laboratory; the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP); uranium mining and milling (impacting Native pueblos); and a proposed temporary nuclear reactor waste storage facility. LANL workers and miners were finally compensated under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program and Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) of 1990. But compensation for nuclear test “downwinders” was limited to those residents of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona—not New Mexico Trinity site downwinders. In research at the National Archives Brodie found that two items from a folder labeled “Secret: Classified Information. National Security Information” had been pulled from the file but their labels remained, addressing “Disposition of Alamogordo Test Area” and “Disposition of Holloman.” Both documents were pulled in the 1990s, just as the RECA act was promulgated. Brodie questions whether this information was censored to prevent the likelihood that the Trinity downwinders would be included in RECA.

    Amendments to RECA law over the past few years have added eligibility to additional geographical areas but despite the intense lobbying of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, the act continues to exclude them (the act includes only those government employees who were present at and after the explosion). Brodie ends this chapter with another reference to a work of New Mexico scholarship, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico by Jake Kosek. He found that many New Mexicans suspect, rightly or wrongly, that scientists who collected data about Trinity radiation were also responsible for hundreds of cattle mutilations in the 1970s and 1980s, using the soft tissue to test radiation levels!

    Just as complicated as military control over the site was the National Park Service’s (NPS) attempt to preserve the Trinity site as a national monument. The fact that the White Sands National Monument, a magnificent desert field of gypsum dunes was already wedged between the Alamogordo Air Base and White Sands Proving Ground may have contributed to the enthusiasm. The monument superintendent, Johnwill Faris was disabused of his hope that it could coexist with the military when the air base took over the monument’s water supply and condemned surroundings lands (Johnwill Faris’s son lives in Santa Fe and corrected Brodie’s spelling of his father’s name: Johnwill, not Johnwell). But the monument survived and is now a National Park. No such luck for a Trinity National Monument.

    Brodie quotes a NPS bureaucrat: “I believe that this country should not establish a national monument to commemorate a bomb—any more than we would want to commemorate the use of poison gas.” After much squabbling and the advent of new federal rules that affected NPS designations, the Trinity site was listed as a National Historic Landmark in the Federal Resister of Historic Places on 15 March 1972.

    Kudos to a writer who, despite a few minor mistakes on place and people names, wrote a book that is meticulously researched and sensitive to the people of New Mexico, whose lives have been forever impacted by the nuclear weapons industry since that fateful day in 1945.

Kay Matthews lives on a farm in El Valle, New Mexico and works as a freelance journalist and publisher of La Jicarita, an online journal of environmental politics. An earlier version of this review appeared in La Jicarita in July.

©2023 by Kay Matthews

Christopher Nolan’s Forthcoming “Oppenheimer” Movie: A Historian's Questions, Worries, and Challenges

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By Barton J. Bernstein

 

I think we should not attempt a plan [to develop the weapon for radiological warfare] unless we can poison [enough] food to kill a half a million men.
                   J. Robert Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, 25 May 1943[1]

I can hardly believe my eyes when I saw a news release said to be quoting Oppenheimer, and giving the impression that there is no radiological hazard [in the A-bombed Japanese cities]. Apparently all things are relative.
                   Radiologist Dr. Robert S. Stone to Lieutenant Colonel Hymer L. Friedel[l], 9 August 1945[2]

[C]redible evidence exists which tends to show that Dr. Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party [in 1941] . . . This evidence [because of the source employed] is not available for use in court.
                    Assistant Attorney General Charles B. Murray to Attorney General James P. McGranery, 12 November 1952[3]

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer said [in his speech] that he has ‘no doubts’ [that the US‘s] development of the H-bomb was the right course.[4]
                    Palo Alto Times, April 1960

The people who know nothing [about Oppenheimer] are going to get the wildest ride [in the “Oppenheimer” film]. . . they need to know, because, you know, he’s the most important man who ever lived.
                    Christopher Nolan[5]

 

    The forthcoming “Oppenheimer” film, on the once- famous J. Robert Oppenheimer, reportedly received a large budget for the 2023 movie—about $100 million for the making, and about $100 million for the marketing. Directed by Christopher Nolan, whose earlier films have reportedly grossed more than $5 billion, the movie is likely to be a blockbuster.

    Rather ironically, it is likely to rival the “Barbie” film at the box office. Some critics, undoubtedly, will discuss American culture in the framework suggested by the two very different movies. “Barbie” has multiple, and profitable, product tie-ins with various items and firms. Such could not reasonably be the case for the “Oppenheimer” film, dealing heavily, as it does, with nuclear weapons.

    A widely admired director, Christopher Nolan has won laurels for his work, and his movies are often used as models in film-making classes. His “Oppenheimer” film was voted by a Hollywood critics group as among the most awaited summer movies. It is scheduled for release on July 21. It has already been discussed in various publications, and the publicity blitz may be near. The “Oppenheimer” film is apparently in many ways a joint project by Nolan with his wife, Emma Thomas, who served as the producer. “She’s the best producer in Hollywood, without question,” according to Nolan.[6]

    Nolan’s new movie is starring the gifted Irish actor, Cillian Murphy, as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was often described, and greatly celebrated, as “the father of the atomic bomb.” The cast includes, among others, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, head of the A-bomb project, Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chief and Oppenheimer foe, and Emily Blunt, as Kitty (Katherine) Oppenheimer, Robert’s wife. It is a distinguished cast.

    It’s revealing to read in some newspapers, as part of the Hollywood-generated publicity, of the committed preparation by the hard-working Cillian Murphy for his central role in “Oppenheimer.” Murphy stated, as the New York Times reported in Murphy’s words, “We are going into this guy’s [Oppenheimer’s] head, you have to be immersed in the essence so strongly that you carry the audience with you.”[7]

    The movie reportedly leans heavily on a major and justifiably well-respected, but sometimes also dismayingly flawed, book on the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the wartime and early postwar Los Alamos laboratory, later headed the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), and became in 1947 the longtime director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[8]

    After Oppenheimer’s impressive wartime work directing the secret Los Alamos laboratory in developing the two kinds of atomic bombs, he became, in the postwar period for a near-decade, an influential adviser on the US’s nuclear-weapons and related defense policy. Aside from the iconic Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer was probably the best known, and generally the most respected, US-based scientist.

The Cuban Missile Crisis: Once More Unto the Breach

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The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game
Theodore Voorhees, Jr.
University of Michigan Press. 380 pp. $85

 

[Editor’s disclosure to readers: In 2017, the author, Theodore Voorhees, Jr. contacted the reviewer, Sheldon M. Stern, one of the most prominent scholars of the Cuban missile crisis, and asked Stern to read his manuscript-in-progress. Stern concluded that the work added an important and fresh perspective to Cold War scholarship, offered limited editorial advice, and then, together with Professor Martin Sherwin, assisted in finding a receptive university press.]

 

 

By Sheldon M. Stern

 

    The standard view of the Cuban missile crisis is engraved in our historical memory. My own books reflect that outlook, describing those iconic thirteen days as the most dangerous episode of the nuclear era and the thirteenth day, October 27, 1962, as the most perilous twenty-four hours in human history. That view is so widely shared in missile crisis literature that it was startling to read a book in which that interpretation was all but relegated to the status of “the conventional wisdom.”

    Theodore Voorhees, Jr., senior counsel at the Washington, DC law firm of Covington & Burling LLP, concludes “that much of the Cold War rhetoric the leaders employed was posturing and that neither had any intention of starting a nuclear war.” Voorhees begins by dissecting the October 1961 confrontation along the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie when some sixty Soviet and US tanks faced each other “across a tense Cold War border.” His conclusion, however, is that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were personally determined to avoid escalation. Indeed, in a matter of hours, they maneuvered to assure that the confrontation evaporated without violence or casualties.

    One year later, a vastly more dangerous crisis arose when US surveillance aircraft discovered that the Soviets had secretly placed medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba. How Voorhees asks, did the rival leaders resolve the crisis “with lightning speed?”[1]

An Industrial Saga Marred by Conspiracy-Mongering

 

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Meryle Secrest
The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World’s First Desktop Computer
Alfred A. Knopf. 304 pp., $30

 

By Richard Drake

 

    An award-winning author of a dozen biographies, Meryle Secrest in her most recent book examines the rise and fall of a great Italian industrial family, the Olivettis of Ivrea in the Piedmont region.

    Camillo Olivetti, an assimilated Jew born in 1868, was named for the Italian liberal statesman Camillo Cavour. Trained as an electrical engineer, he founded a typewriter company in 1908 that would become one of the most amazing economic success stories of the twentieth century. For a capitalist entrepreneur, he developed unusual political interests and attachments. Camillo embraced the moderate reform version of socialism espoused by Filippo Turati, a founder of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892. 

Camillo Olivetti in the 1930s

    He became friends with Turati, served as a Socialist member of the Ivrea communal council, and wrote articles   that appeared in the Party’s daily Turin newspaper, Il Grido del Populo (The Cry of the People). In his factory, he intended to create a humane work environment for his employees.

    Camillo’s enlightened reform ideas would become dramatically augmented and realized when leadership of the company passed to his son Adriano whose mother, Luisa Revel, was a Waldensian Protestant. Founded as an ascetic movement by Peter Waldo in the twelfth century, the Waldensians were declared by the Roman Catholic Church to be heretical and endured harsh persecution. They later became part of the Calvinist tradition.

    Adriano, one of the most fascinating Italians of his time, dominates Secrest’s narrative almost from the beginning of the book. Though dead for sixty years, he continues to be a subject of recurrent interest in Italy. A large Italian-language scholarly and popular literature is devoted to him. In the English-speaking world, however, the extraordinary life and legacy of this international celebrity businessman and social thinker have been largely forgotten. Secrest’s errors and far-fetched conclusions mar her account, but it is to be hoped that The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti will help to counteract this forgetfulness.

A Theory Too Far

 

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James H. Johnston
MURDER, Inc.: The CIA Under John F. Kennedy
Potomac Books. 343 pp. $32.95

 

Johnston responds to Colhoun’s review here.

 

Colhoun’s rebuttal to Johnston here.

 

 

By Jack Colhoun

 

 

    “Did his [President John Kennedy’s] pursuit of freedom for Cuba lead to his paying the ultimate price?” former Church Committee lawyer James Johnston asks provocatively in his book MURDER, Inc.: The CIA Under Kennedy.

    Johnston tries to make the case that when Cuban leader Fidel Castro learned the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was plotting to kill him, he retaliated by assassinating President Kennedy. One of the sources Johnston relies on most heavily in constructing this narrative is Edward P. Morgan, a well-connected Washington attorney and former chief inspector in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Johnny Rosselli

    Morgan learned about the Castro retaliation narrative from his client Johnny Rosselli, the principal liaison with the Agency during the peak years, 1960-1963, of the alleged CIA-Mafia plots. Rosselli’s primary job at the time was representing the interests of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in Las Vegas, making Rosselli friends with such top Vegas entertainers as Frank Sinatra, Joe E. Lewis, and Louis Prima.[1]

    In late 1966, Rosselli hired Morgan to represent his interests in Washington. Morgan planted the seeds of the Castro retaliation scenario in an information operation that involved key officials and lasted several months. Morgan began the effort on 13 January 1967 by briefing journalist Drew Pearson. Together with Jack Anderson, Pearson wrote the “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” a column syndicated in The Washington Post and 600 other newspapers. Pearson, eager to pursue Morgan’s stunning information, conveyed the gist of Morgan’s account to President Lyndon Johnson within a matter of days.[2]

    Three days after telling the president, Pearson contacted his good friend Chief Justice Earl Warren, former head of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Pearson advised Warren that what Morgan had told him challenged the Warren Commission’s conclusion that there was no evidence linking Lee Harvey Oswald to a foreign conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. As Warren listened he paced about in “distress.” The chief justice subsequently passed Morgan’s information to James Rowley, chief of the Secret Service, who, in turn, informed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.[3]

    The Castro retaliation information blitz instigated by Morgan soon culminated in the first public disclosure of the top-secret CIA-Mafia assassination plots. In early March 1967, Pearson and Anderson not only broke the story of the conspiracy to assassinate Castro in two successive columns, but also suggested that former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, now a Democratic senator from New York, had been deeply involved. According to Pearson and Anderson, one of the plots approved by the attorney general “possibly backfired” against his brother the president.[4]

    Morgan discussed Rosselli’s Castro turnaround allegations with the FBI in an interview in March 1967. “The [CIA-Mafia assassination] project almost reached fruition when Castro became aware of it and arrested a number of suspects,” Morgan told the FBI. “By pressuring captured suspects he was able to learn the full details of the plot against him and decided `if that is the way President Kennedy wanted it, he too could engage in the same tactics.’ Castro thereafter employed teams of individuals who were dispatched to the United States for the purpose of assassinating President Kennedy,” Morgan asserted.[5]

    While provocative and superficially logical, Johnston’s Castro retaliation thesis, adopted from Morgan, rests on a shaky foundation. The first problem is that the original source was Mafioso Johnny Rosselli. Considerable evidence in the declassified records of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection (JFKARC) at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, calls into question Rosselli’s Castro retaliation allegations—beginning with the Mafioso’s own stunning about-face on the issue he promoted for a decade.

 

Bombshell or Dud? Earle Cabell’s CIA Connections

 

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    We have an opportunity to redeem ourselves when the president pays us a visit next month. Whatever our political affiliation, whatever our political choice, the presidency of the United States is the world’s highest office, and the man who holds it should be accorded the highest respect possible. But good behavior is not enough. This cancer on the body politic must be removed. There is a precedent Dallas can remember with pride. When the Ku Klux Klan in the early twenties barreled through the South, Dallas was the Southwest hate capital of Dixie. But men and women of good will were ashamed. They saw their shame turn into courage. They stood against this whirlwind of hate, repudiated it, and saw it fade and die. What has been done once, can and must be done again.

–Earle Cabell on the Adlai Stevenson incident[1]

 

 

By Steve Roe

 

 

    Last July, the National Archives began releasing previously withheld and redacted documents from the JFK Assassination Records Collection at the National Archives.

    Two documents attracted the attention of John Newman, a prominent conspiracy theorist looked upon favorably by Oliver Stone. Both concerned Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas on 22 November 1963, who was subsequently elected to Congress in 1964.

    Although Cabell had not figured in Newman’s conspiracy theorizing about CIA involvement before, suddenly, on the basis of these two documents, the mayor was promoted to leading culprit—although neither Newman nor others enthusiastic about the revelation ever bothered to explain exactly what Cabell’s alleged role was. Guilt by loose association (with the CIA) was sufficient to insinuate that Cabell was now a key cog in the conspiracy.[2]

    One of the two documents was a standard “Secrecy Agreement” with the CIA that Cabell signed on 17 October 1956. The agreement stated that Cabell might possibly receive information regarding CIA operational matters and bound him not to reveal this information publicly. The other document was a standard “201” personality file that the CIA opened on Cabell on 23 May 1957. A 201 file is nothing more or less than information about the subject of the file. It might contain personal information; information about operational matters; or anything else related to the subject, including newspapers clippings.  

 

Left to right: Earle Cabell, with his brothers Charles and Ben in 1951. Photograph used with permission of the Dallas Public Library.

    The aspect that cemented Cabell’s alleged role in a conspiracy, according to Newman’s innuendo, was the fact that Earle Cabell’s brother, Charles Pearre Cabell, had been deputy director of the CIA under Allen Dulles from April 1953 to January 1962. Theorists have long been aware of this public coincidence, of course, and have speculated in the past that Dulles and Charles Cabell ostensibly conspired against JFK because they were forcibly retired from the CIA following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961. In this sense Newman—and the conspiracy website Who.What.Why., which was the first to report this “major revelation”—are merely picking up an old, threadbare tale and attempting to give it a sinister new life. Earle Cabell did not conspire merely out of some misplaced sense of fraternal solidarity with Charles, you see. He did so because he was also an agency asset.[3]

    Even though Newman offered not a scintilla of proof that Cabell interfered in the motorcade route—or in any other aspect of what was supposed to be a brief presidential visit to Dallas—questions naturally arise. Who exactly was Earle Cabell? And how did he ever come to need or receive a security clearance from the CIA?

    To answer that question, it’s useful to put Cabell in context by understanding his family background and career arc.

 

Angleton Unrevealed

 

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Click here for Morley’s response to this review.

 

Click here for Robarge’s rejoinder to Morley.

 

Click here for Morley’s response to Robarge’s rejoinder.

 

Click here for Robarge’s 2nd rejoinder.

 

 

 

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

Jefferson Morley

St. Martin’s Press. 336 pp. $27.99.

 

By David Robarge

 

    Readers who pick up The Ghost, hoping finally to have a comprehensive and objective treatment of James Angleton, the Agency’s long-time, shadowy, and controversial chief of counterintelligence, will be sorely disappointed.

    What they will find is an erratically organized account of most of the key events in Angleton’s life, along with an agglomeration of often badly sourced suppositions, inferences, allegations, and innuendoes frequently cast in hyperbolic or categorical language.

    The Ghost displays the most prominent shortcomings of journalistic history: reportage substitutes for cohesive narrative, with vignettes and atmospherics stitched together with insufficient discernment among sources. One of Morley’s more dubious ones—an anonymous blog post with no citations, from which he pulls an outlandish quote—inadvertently provides an insight into what his ulterior motive in writing The Ghost appears to be: “This is not about who James Angleton was so much as what James Angleton had to be” (emphasis in the original).[1]

    In pursuit of a story he seems to have already written in his mind, Morley manipulates historical facts, engages in long leaps of logic, and avoids inconvenient contradictory evidence and interpretations to produce yet another superficial caricature of a deeply complicated personality.

 

Questionable Logic

    The most problematic feature of The Ghost is Morley’s penchant for reaching grandiose conclusions based on sketchy or no evidence, contorted reasoning, or unfamiliarity with intelligence processes and the history of the events in which he places Angleton. To cite just three from among numerous instances:

• Morley overstates Angleton’s part in the Italian election operation—he hardly was its “miracle worker.”
• No persuasive evidence shows that Angleton had a “supporting role” in the MK/ULTRA project, that he “help[ed] give birth” to it, or that he “pursued the use of psychoactive drugs for intelligence work,” other than a brief relationship Angleton had with a colleague who worked on the program.
• An Israeli diplomat is alleged to have been “Angleton’s man in Havana.” But they met only a few times, and the diplomat declined Angleton’s request to contact CIA agents in Cuba.[2]

    Morley’s highly dubious rendering of the Kennedy administration’s policy toward Cuba, and Angleton’s involvement with it, is more troublesome. For starters, the United States did not have “two divergent Cuba policies” represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “engineered provocation” plan called NORTHWOODS and the White House’s “autonomous operations” using Cuban exiles, possibly in conjunction with the assassination of Castro.[3]

    The administration’s policy was what it did, not what was said in meetings or written about in plans and memoranda. NORTHWOODS was never carried out, and the CIA’s integrated covert action program codenamed AM/WORLD became the focus for the rest of Kennedy’s presidency. Morley later asserts that Angleton stressed Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cuban ties so the White House would activate NORTHWOODS, but he presents no evidence besides Castro’s suspicions, which corroborate nothing.

 

Who Needs Soviet Propaganda?

 

The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government
David Talbot
Harpers. 686 pp. $29.99

 

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 By David M. Barrett

 

    A key indicator of where David Talbot is going in his portrait of CIA Director Allen W. Dulles comes from his treatment of C. Wright Mills and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

    Mills was a Columbia University sociologist whose 1956 book, The Power Elite, caused a minor sensation in the seemingly placid ‘50s. Liberal and conservative scholars alike depicted the American political process as a balancing act among competing interests, which included big business, organized labor, farmers, and professional groups. But Mills, as Talbot notes approvingly, did not believe such a perspective was “adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works.” Instead, Mills posited a Marxist-lite critique that presented governance in the United States as an elaborate conspiracy theory of unaccountable elites. He argued that corporate, military, and governmental leaders worked hand-in-glove solely to enrich and empower themselves and the institutions they headed, and cast doubt on the belief that the United States was some version of a democracy.

    How did presidents—America’s nominal leaders—fit into this system of elite control? According to the Millisian analysis, Eisenhower’s prime directive was to preserve an elite that benefited from a “permanent war economy.” That would seem to be at odds with Ike’s famous parting shot, in which he warned Americans that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist . . . . Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Perhaps that portion of Eisenhower’s nationally-televised farewell address from January 1961 was a gaffe, which Michael Kinsley famously defined as a politician accidentally telling the truth.

    Much more often, according to Talbot, President Eisenhower acted the role of an amiable dunce who followed the diktats of the power elite. Ike had been “a peace-loving warrior” during the great global conflict of the previous decade, but by the time he sought the presidency in 1952 he was an “aging general,” well-meaning perhaps but subject to manipulation and oftentimes just plain clueless. He obligingly took orders from the “Dulles-Dewey group” (a combination brain trust and bank consisting of future CIA Director Allen, his brother and future Secretary of State John Foster, and former GOP presidential nominee Thomas Dewey). These were the men, for example, who “tapped [Richard] Nixon for vice president.”[1]

    Unfortunately, as in so many episodes related in the book, the true story is at odds with Talbot’s invented version. After the GOP convention nominated Eisenhower, Herbert Brownell, Ike’s campaign manager (who would become attorney general), told Eisenhower the time had come to select a running mate. After ruminating for awhile, the nominee handed his short list to Brownell, who then consulted leading Republican pols, including Dewey, but not the Dulleses. How Nixon got picked is recounted in an exhaustively researched new book about Eisenhower and Nixon, The President and His Apprentice, by Irwin F. Gellman.[2]

    Talbot goes on to assert that during the eight-year Eisenhower presidency, no one in the administration—not even Ike himself—matched the Dulles brothers in power. In particular, the president is depicted as knowing shockingly little about what Allen Dulles and the CIA were up to, while lacking the intelligence and energy to insist on knowing. These portraits of Ike and the Dulleses are a graphic novel (comic book) rendering of the national and international politics of the 1950s, and not in a good way. The charge that Eisenhower was an amiable dunce is an old and political one, dating back to the time he was still in office. Eisenhower was so popular and scandal-free that Democrats had little choice but to claim he was more interested in playing golf than running the country. While researching The CIA and Congress, the majority of which dealt with the Eisenhower era, I saw some episodes of an out-of-touch Ike, especially during the last few years of his White House tenure, which were illness-plagued. But there was more frequent evidence of a shrewd political figure. It may be going a tad too far to claim that Eisenhower’s was a “hidden-hand” presidency, a revisionist  argument political scientist Fred Greenstein first put forward in 1982. But the five-star general surely was not a cipher.[3]

    Talbot’s book, of course, really purports to be an expose about Allen Dulles’s directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency. Here there are serious problems, rooted in a number of bad choices by the author. Among them:

The Myths of Kim Philby

 

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A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
Ben Macintyre
Crown. 384 pp. $27

 

By Jefferson Flanders

 

 

    In A Spy Among Friends, author Ben Macintyre portrays Harold A. R. “Kim” Philby as a charming, glamorous double agent, a Marxist Scarlet Pimpernel, able to confound British and American intelligence officials even after his complicity as a Soviet spy should have been apparent to all. The New York Times named A Spy Among Friends one of the top 50 non-fiction books of 2014, and it has been praised by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Walter Isaacson, and David Ignatius, among others.

    While the book is an entertaining read, Macintyre’s account of Philby as the Perfect Mole is deeply flawed. A Spy Among Friends perpetuates several myths: it misstates how Philby was viewed by the intelligence communities in Britain and the United States; it downplays the critical role of the FBI and the VENONA intercepts in exposing Philby and his fellow “Cambridge Five” spies; and it ignores perhaps Philby’s most significant “great betrayal”—the role that he and his fellow agents, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, played in passing American military plans to Moscow during the Korean war.

    Macintyre centers his narrative around Philby’s friendship with fellow MI6 official Nicholas Elliott, a story suggested by John le Carré (aka David Cornwell) as one worthy of telling; le Carré accordingly contributes an afterword to the book.  Yet this angle, allegedly the “best untold spy story of the Cold War” according to Macintyre and le Carré, isn’t particularly compelling. Elliott was a rather conventional, clubbable intelligence officer whose main claim to fame was believing in Philby until his friend’s guilt became impossible to deny. Rather than thinking for himself, Macintyre simply doubled-down on le Carré’s rendering of the Philby saga. Le Carré is famously invested, of course, in the symbolic importance of Philby-as-Master-Spy, elusive betrayer of a decadent Establishment. The famous fictional mole at the Circus, Bill Haydon, was a thinly-veiled stand-in for Philby in le Carré’s celebrated novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

 

The Legend of Philby’s Charm

    It’s true that many within Philby’s insular, hard-drinking Oxbridge circle succumbed to what Macintyre calls his “golden charm,” and were shocked when the truth emerged. Graham Greene, who worked with Philby during the Second World War, never abandoned his hero-worship of Philby, even visiting him in Moscow after he defected.

    But that was not how Philby was universally perceived. Others in British intelligence weren’t as entranced. Senior MI6 official Patrick Reilly, for example, objected strenuously to the idea of Philby as future head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) when it was proposed in the early 1950s. “I’m not particularly sensitive,” Reilly later explained,  “but it was the only time in my life when I felt, ‘There is something wrong with this fellow.’”[1]

Who Interrogated American Electronic Warfare Specialists in North Vietnam During the War?

 

The Riddle of the Task Force Russia 294 Report

 

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By Merle L. Pribbenow

 

    During the course of Senate hearings more than two decades ago, a major controversy erupted around allegations that a small number of Vietnam-era American prisoners of war (POWs) might have targeted by the Soviets for interrogation/exploitation—namely, POWs who had specialized in highly technical operations such as electronic warfare and electronic intelligence-gathering activities. It was even alleged that some POWs may have been spirited away to the Soviet Union so that the Soviets could take advantage of their technical knowledge and expertise. Yet, despite the sensational testimony before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIAs in the early 1990s, and a number of books and articles published on the subject, in the end public debate subsided among all but the most fixated POW/MIA activists.[1]

    Ironically, one of the most telling documents surfaced after the controversy was all but over. In June 1994, just one year after the Select Committee on POW/MIAs issued its final report, an American investigator conducting interviews in the former Soviet Union obtained a  remarkable document from a former Soviet air defense officer who had served in North Vietnam for a year (1966-1967) as a senior advisor to the North Vietnamese Air Defense Command. The investigator was working for Task Force Russia (TFR), a Department of Defense organization formed in the early 1990s to find information about American personnel missing in action (MIA) from the Korean, Vietnam, and Cold Wars. And the document he uncovered consisted of several pages of hand-written notes from the retired Soviet officer’s personal notebook that recorded the  results from the interrogation of Americans captured from two US aircraft shot down over North Vietnam in February 1967. The aircraft were an EB-66C, an electronic reconnaissance/electronic counter-measures aircraft that conducted long-range electronic jamming of North Vietnamese air defense radars, and an F-105F “Wild Weasel” aircraft assigned to locate and attack North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites using sophisticated anti-radar Shrike missiles. The EB-66C had been shot down on 4 February 1967 and the F-105F on 18 February 1967; three of the six EB-66C crewmen were captured by the North Vietnamese, as were both of the F-105F crewmen.[2]

    The notebook covered only 15 days in February 1967, and was just a small part of a massive journal that the Soviet officer had kept during his two-year tour in North Vietnam. The Soviet officer told the TFR investigator that he had destroyed all the other portions of his journal at the end of his tour; this particular notebook had survived purely by chance. Even then, the officer refused to give the entire notebook to the American investigator, agreeing to part only with those pages that described the take from the interrogation. The pages were translated into English and disseminated to Pentagon analysts as the “Task Force Russia 294” report or TFR 294. Eventually the translated TFR 294 document and associated cables describing the investigator’s interviews with the source were declassified and posted on a Library of Congress website where they became available to the general public.[3]

    The pages do not provide the names of the US airmen who underwent interrogation, or the identity/nationality of the interrogator. But in the initial interview of the Soviet officer and during several follow-up interviews, the Soviet officer insisted that the information had been given to him by the North Vietnamese in response to questions that the Soviets had submitted. The Soviet officer further claimed that neither he nor other Soviet officers were ever allowed to participate in interrogations of American POWs.

Washing White

 

The Nation Persists in Espionage Denial

 

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By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

 

    Few issues have generated as much scholarly dishonesty as the study of communism and, more recently, the revelations from once-closed Cold War archives about Americans who spied for the Soviet Union.

    In 2003 we published In Denial, which discussed how an embarrassingly large number of academics denied, minimized, avoided noticing, or, the last resort, justified Soviet espionage against the United States as well as such Stalinist mass murders as the Great Terror and the Katyn massacre. It was bad enough that such deplorable history was written prior to the 1990s. But our outrage was prompted by the sad spectacle of supposedly trained historians continuing to distort evidence from Russian and East Bloc archives that contradicted their biases.[1]

    And it still goes on. One conclusion we have reached is that many of those who continue to write historical nonsense about Soviet espionage and communism are not consciously dishonest. It is not a matter of their knowing the truth and lying about it (although there is some of that). More frequently, we are dealing with intellectual “true believers,” ideological zealots who are mentally incapable of accepting or processing information that undermines their historical world view. To use a metaphor coined by the historian Aileen Kraditor, it is as if they wear special glasses that can only see what conforms to their world-view. Information that contradicts their fiercely held view is denied, explained-away, or, most often, simply ignored.

    A recent example of espionage denial is James M. Boughton’s review of Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods, published in The Nation magazine. A former Indiana University professor and historian of the International Monetary Fund, Boughton has long denied that Harry Dexter White ever cooperated with Soviet espionage; a section of In Denial was devoted to exposing his fallacious arguments. Similarly, The Nation has a long history of refusing to accept that such left-wing icons as White, Alger Hiss, or Julius Rosenberg could be guilty as alleged. Not until 1995 did it offer a concession about Rosenberg, although even then it resisted the claim that he was a major atomic spy. While The Nation has published letters-to-the-editor objecting to its distortion of history, such communications cannot lay out in detail just how mendacious its authors are and how much evidence they ignore.[2]

RFK OK’d Sabotage Against Cuba in November 1963; Overruled by JFK

 

 UPDATED

 

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By Max Holland

 

    Ever since the Church Committee’s investigation of the intelligence community in the mid-1970s—if not earlier—it has been well known that Robert F. Kennedy was deeply involved in the Kennedy administration’s efforts to subvert and overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro. RFK regularly attended meetings of the so-called Special Group of the National Security Council, which directed and coordinated US policy toward Cuba, including most covert operations. And as Harris Wofford observed in his 1980 book, Of Kennedys and Kings, within the Special Group the attorney general

was the driving force behind the clandestine effort to overthrow Castro. From inside accounts of the pressure he was putting on the CIA to “get Castro,” he seemed like a wild man who was out-CIAing the CIA.

    Still, extant records specifying RFK’s direct involvement are few and far between.

    One of seven documents released by the National Archives in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, however, is an EYES ONLY memo that reveals Robert F. Kennedy personally signed off on a sabotage operation against Cuba in November 1963.

   

 The November 1963 document released to Judicial Watch is a brief, one-page proposal for a “low-key sabotage operation” with the plan to be accomplished by a commando group on or about 8 November 1963. Using demolition charges and incendiaries, the commandos were to destroy a pier and warehouse on the northern coast “as part of our continuing long-range program.”

   Sterling J. Cottrell, the coordinator of Cuban affairs, submitted the sabotage proposal to Robert Kennedy on November 4. The next day, the operation was one of several items discussed at a special meeting of the Special Group (SG), which included RFK; McGeorge Bundy, the president’s national security adviser; John McCone, CIA director; Richard Helms, CIA deputy director for plans; U. Alexis Johnson, deputy undersecretary of State for political affairs; Cyrus Vance, secretary of the army; Dr. Albert “Bud” Wheelon, CIA deputy director for science & technology; Colonel Ralph Steakley of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Bruce Cheever, deputy to Desmond FitzGerald, the head of the CIA’s Special Affairs Staff, which ran espionage, paramilitary, and other intelligence operations against Castro.

    Cheever presented the proposal, which had been given the designation No. 3111, to the Special Group. The SG tentatively approved the operation along with two others: No. 3112, a sabotage operation directed against a sawmill located in northern Oriente province; and No. 3115, which involved the infiltration of a radio operator to provide communications for a “ratline,” an emergency escape route for Agency assets and agents in Cuba.

    At the conclusion of the November 5 special meeting, Mac Bundy put all three operations in a “fail safe ” status. They were to proceed as planned “pending concurrence in each case by higher authority ”—meaning until the president himself signed off on them. The next day, however, President Kennedy disapproved all Cuban operations scheduled to run before November 12. Thus, only one of the three operations, No. 3115, received presidential sanction.    

    In the mid-1990s, the November 4 document was one of seven identified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) as “assassination-related” and contained in the papers of Robert F. Kennedy. But none of the seven were released, according to the ARRB, by the time it ceased operating in September 1998. Records in the RFK papers required the express permission of an RFK Donor Committee before they could be released. As of January 2011, according to an internal memo from the John F. Kennedy Library, the seven documents remained closed because the RFK Donor Committee “never formally ruled to open them.” However, after Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit it turned out that six of the documents were in fact open to the public because copies of them existed in files not controlled by the Donor Committee. They had already been released and were available in the JFK Assassination Records Collection at the NARA II facility in College Park, Maryland.  Only the document cited above had not been made part of the Assassination Records collection.

    The Judicial Watch lawsuit was filed subsequent to a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act request by Washington Decoded’s editor Max Holland. Upon notification that all seven documents were open to researchers, the lawsuit was dropped. Nonetheless, further steps are being taken to ensure the availability of all government records in the RFK papers that are related in any way to the JFK assassination.

 Villanova Professor David M. Barrett, a member of Washington Decoded’s editorial board, provided the documents about what happened to proposed operation No. 3111.

©2013 by Max Holland

The Missile Crisis, Harvard-Style

 

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By Max Holland

 

     The 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis in October 2012 is being commemorated with documentaries, conferences, and new books. Several educational institutions are also making primary sources and other historical materials available for educators on websites—among them the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

    The “For Educators” link on the site ranks Graham T. Allison’s book, Essence of Decision, (first published in 1971; second edition, 1999, with Philip Zelikow) number one on its list of Top 10 books on the subject. Essence “continues to be the definitive analysis of the decision-making that prevented a nuclear catastrophe,” according to the August 6 press release launching the website. There is no question but that Essence has been one of the most widely read books about the missile crisis—a political science best-seller—and extraordinarily influential. But what does it signify to call a book “the definitive analysis?” And does Essence merit that distinction and the number one ranking?

McCone's Telcon Gaffe

 

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 By David M. Barrett & Max Holland

 

    No matter how controversial the use of drones to kill al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders in Afghanistan or Pakistan may be, historians in the future won’t have to struggle over ambiguous, fragmentary evidence about who ordered them. Everyone understands it was President Barack Obama.

    It wasn’t always so clear-cut.

    In stark contrast, a half-century later there is still a lingering controversy over whether  the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro (and some other Third World leaders) were ever authorized by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. By the CIA’s own admission, we do know the Agency was involved in attempts to kill/overthrow Castro as the leader of Cuba. But the doctrine of plausible deniability meant there was no paper trail—an express order—traceable from the CIA back to the Oval Office. Consequently, various defenders of these presidents have often claimed (the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. comes to mind) that it was unthinkable that President Kennedy would ever have given an order to “eliminate” Castro. More objective observers, noting the cold-blooded qualities required of and sometimes displayed by presidents, consider it entirely likely that in some cryptic, unrecorded way, Eisenhower and Kennedy did tell their heads of the Central Intelligence Agency to do so.[1]

    Curiously, since it was the CIA that attempted to kill Castro in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, the question of whether its directors authorized those attempts might seem more easily answered. Indeed, evidence is reasonably clear that Allen W. Dulles, who served Eisenhower as director of central intelligence (DCI) for eight years and then Kennedy for nine months, sanctioned such operations.[2]

    The record regarding John A. McCone, whom Kennedy appointed as DCI in the autumn of 1961, has been unclear and even bizarre. Specifically, is it possible that the CIA carried out assassination plots without his approval or even in the face of his disapproval? It seems an absurd proposition if not a very disturbing one. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961, in which Washington failed, in almost the most humiliating way possible, to overthrow Castro, some critics blamed the president for not authorizing sufficient air support for the Cuban exiles organized by the CIA to carry out the operation. Kennedy then chose McCone to succeed Dulles precisely because McCone had a widespread, well-deserved reputation as an aggressive, capable administrator and a ferocious Cold Warrior. He was also a Republican who might well have been Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense had the GOP won the 1960 election. As Kennedy once privately observed to his brother Robert, the selection of McCone was “useful.”[3]

     Nonetheless, when evidence of the CIA assassination plots surfaced publicly a decade and a half later, the retired McCone insisted he had not known of any such plans. McCone advocated many aggressive actions against the Cuban leader’s regime, but claimed to have feared excommunication from the Catholic Church if he even discussed, much less approved, assassination plots. Yes, he recalled, a few colleagues in the Kennedy administration had occasionally made passing remarks about getting rid of Castro, but he had always squelched those suggestions.[4]

    A Senate select committee headed by Frank Church (D-Idaho) in the mid-1970s investigated, among other things, assassination plots from the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Several CIA and other Kennedy administration officials had vague memories of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara raising the idea at a 10 August 1962 meeting, and McCone was supposed to have fiercely objected to the topic being discussed. Yet the official, detailed notes from that meeting do not show the topic being raised, and McNamara and other key officials who were there claimed to recall no such conversation.[5]

    Former DCI Richard M. Helms, who served as the deputy director of Plans (covert operations) under McCone, chose not to illuminate Church committee members about the particulars of that August 10 discussion. But on the general question of whether McCone knew of assassination plots carried out by the CIA while he was DCI, Helms stated that McCone “was involved in this up to his scuppers . . . I don’t understand how it was he didn’t hear about some of these things that he claims he didn’t.”[6]

   Now, however, new and dispositive evidence is available derived from a meeting held eleven days later. We recently found notes from a  cryptic telephone call McCone made to Secretary of State Dean Rusk on 21 August 1962, notes that have sat unnoticed for years in a box at the National Archives. They support the claim that while McCone opposed any open discussion of assassination proposals, he was witting and did not oppose the efforts as a matter of principle.

J. Robert Oppenheimer:

A Spy? No. But a Communist Once? Yes.

 

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By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

 

    The relationship of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to communism and Soviet espionage has been a controversial subject since 1954, when the decision of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to decline renewal of his security clearance put the issue firmly into the public arena. Journalists and historians addressed the issue repeatedly in the decades that followed. Nothing fueled the liberal/left critique of the so-called “national security state” more than the supposed excesses of the US government in the Oppenheimer case, save the cases involving Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.[1]

    But while the emotional level, even shrillness, of the debate continued, the substance of the argument became increasingly stale and repetitive; there was little new evidence to clarify the ambiguities of the matter. In the last two decades, however, new evidence has emerged that, while not resolving all ambiguities and still leaving a number of details unclear, nonetheless allows confident answers to the question of whether Robert Oppenheimer was a Communist and a spy. It demonstrates that he had, indeed, been a Communist but had not been a spy.

    We addressed the issue of Oppenheimer’s involvement in Soviet espionage in “Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets on Soviet Atomic Espionage,” which critiqued and rejected the claims in books written by former KGB officer Pavel Sudoplatov and journalists Jerrold and Leona Schecter that Oppenheimer consciously assisted Soviet espionage and did so in a substantial way. This essay reviews the evidence indicating that Oppenheimer was a secret member of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), joining at some point in the late 1930s and actively participating in a secret Party faculty unit at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939, 1940, and 1941. Secondly, it critiques the conclusion of Oppenheimer biographers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin that he was never a Communist. Finally, it discusses the evidence indicating that in early 1942 he quietly left the Party, coinciding with, and likely connected to, his formal recruitment into the Manhattan atomic bomb project.[2]

Arthur J. Goldberg and the Reds in the OSS

A Soviet Espionage Cable Redacted, Revealed, and Confirmed

 

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By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

    In 1995 the National Security Agency (NSA) began releasing World War II telegraphic cables between Soviet intelligence agencies in Moscow and their American stations. These cables, totaling more than 5,000 pages, were deciphered by the NSA’s “VENONA” project and are indisputably one of the richest documentary sources on Soviet espionage in the United States.[1]

    One minor annoyance in the exploitation of the VENONA cables has been the NSA’s decision to redact some names and passages, particularly in footnotes written by Agency analysts. The pattern of redactions suggested that the NSA blacked out the names of individuals involved in Soviet espionage whenever they cooperated under questioning by the FBI, or when the identification of the real name behind a cover name was somewhat less than certain.

    There was, however, one puzzling and prominent exception to the pattern of redactions being confined to the footnotes: VENONA cable 1354. Dated 22 September 1944 and sent from the chief of the KGB station in New York to headquarters in Moscow, this message discussed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), American WWII’s foreign intelligence agency. Here is the two-page cable as released by the NSA:


    Such an extensive redaction of the actual text of the Soviet message can be found nowhere else in the more than 3,000 cables released by NSA.

Jane Fonda and Her Friendly North Vietnamese Intelligence Officer

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By Merle L. Pribbenow

    Last month, actress Jane Fonda published an article on her website titled “My Trip to Hanoi.” In the article Ms. Fonda tried to explain her two-week visit to Hanoi during the summer of 1972—and by doing so, dispel all the “slanderous” internet rumors and accusations of “treason” that have been made against her because of her actions during that trip.

    Why address this old controversy now? Because a few days earlier, the television shopping network QVC, after receiving many protests, had abruptly canceled a scheduled appearance by Ms. Fonda to promote her new self-help memoir. So the article was intended to set the record straight. The Oscar-winning actress did offer an apology of sorts (really more of an excuse than an apology) for the famous photograph of her manning a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. But the bulk of the article was a defense of the trip and her motivations.

    No one but Ms. Fonda can know what her true motivations were, but it is clear that the North Vietnamese exploited her for their own propaganda purposes. She would have been an idiot, which clearly she is not, to have assumed that they would try to do anything less.

    One of the strongest charges lodged against Ms. Fonda has been that she was acting as a North Vietnamese agent when she took these actions, and therefore was guilty of treason. If that was the case, then she would presumably have been acting under instructions from a North Vietnamese official, probably a North Vietnamese intelligence officer. The next logical question, then, is whether Ms. Fonda had contacts with North Vietnamese intelligence.

Seeing Red in the Caribbean

 

Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs

By Jim Rasenberger

Scribner. 480 pp. $32

 

Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War  in the Caribbean

By Alex von Tunzelmann

Henry Holt and Company. 449 pp. $30

 

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By Don Bohning

    Both these authors reach more than a half century back into American history to produce books that are as relevant today as they would have been in the late 1950s and 1960s, when the events  they describe occurred.

    The books are set against the backdrop of America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union, which was at its zenith at the time. The memory of the late Joe McCarthy, the far right-wing senator from Wisconsin who saw a Communist under every tree, was fresh and very raw. His witch hunt for alleged Communists and Communist sympathizers during the early 1950s still had conservatives and liberals alike trembling that they might be the next target of McCarthy-style vitriol.

    Rasenberger focuses exclusively on the Bay of Pigs, the ill-fated attempt to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro that originated under President Eisenhower, continued under President Kennedy, and ended in a disastrous failure. Von Tunzelmann, a British author, focuses her attention on the Caribbean and the impact the Soviet Communist threat—real or perceived—had on US policy vis-a-vis that region.

    Unfortunately, von Tunzelmann’s adds little to a new understanding of events. She relies heavily on earlier research by others (she cites more than 200 works in her bibliography), but does not exploit the vast amount of new information available at the National Archives since passage of the 1992 Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. Nor does she cite more recent articles and books  drawn from these primary documents. Of the two books, Rasenberger’s is by far the more readable and well-researched, recounting events that led to the failed 1961 effort to overthrow the first Soviet satellite in the Western Hemisphere.

The Spy Who Never Came In from the Cold

 

Red Conspirator: J. Peters and the American Communist Underground

By Thomas Sakmyster

University of Illinois Press. 280 pp. $50

 

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By Murray Seeger

 

     He entered the country in 1924, a Hungarian Jew and veteran of the Austro-Hungarian Army in the Great War. His name was Sándor Goldberger and he was a Communist. When he had applied for a visa at the U.S. embassy in Prague, he concealed his Jewish origins and claimed he was a medical doctor. An immigration officer caught both lies but no matter. Goldberger gained admittance, and overcame one of the major obstacles to his becoming the leader of Communist conspiratorial activities in the United States in the 1930s.

    Within days of his arrival, Goldberger filed the first papers toward naturalization and found his way to the headquarters of the Hungarian Federation of the Workers Party in Yorkville, the Hungarian-German neighborhood on the upper East Side of New York City. A short man with a broad physique, he could easily have been mistaken for a neighborhood pharmacist. He worked for eight months painting faces on dolls and then was taken on as a full-time agent of the Hungarian branch of the Communist Party-USA.

    As József Péter, as he was now known, the new agent worked from Chicago, selling subscriptions to the Hungarian-language party newspaper, Új Előre, and enlisting members into the Hungarian Federation. The campaign was hardly a success; in 1925, there were 550 members in the Midwest industrial belt and four years later there were only 205, mostly in Cleveland, the largest Hungarian community in the United States.

    Péter was undaunted; he was a true believer who amazed his new friends with his ability to argue a hard ideological line. But he was also charming and ingratiating, and eventually party sachems promoted him to be national secretary of the Hungarian Federation and editor of Új Előre. He gained more attention by consolidating the printing of all party papers, including the Daily Worker, in the building on Union Square that became party headquarters. This efficiency so impressed then-Party Secretary Jay Lovestone that Péter was made an alternate member of the Central Committee.

Agee’s Archive: The Truth Unredacted?

 

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By Murray Seeger

 

    Philip Agee, the most notorious defector from the covert service of the Central Intelligence Agency, is coming home after living without a country for three decades. Agee died in Havana in January, 2008, at the age of 72. Now, his papers have been given to the Tamiment Library at New York University and will be open for public examination next April.

    The library announced that the 20-linear-foot collection was donated by his widow, Giselle Roberge Agee, a German national and former ballet dancer. “We have an international reputation  as a repository documenting the history of left politics and the movement for progressive social change,” Michael Nash, the associate curator, said.[1]

    Included in the papers, according to the press release, are “legal records, correspondence with left-wing activists, mainly in Latin America, and others opposed to CIA practices and covert operations; papers relating to his life as an exile living and working in Cuba, Western and Eastern Europe; lecture notes, photographs and posters.”

    While Agee’s life and career represent a small entry in the history of the Cold War, there are many parties interested in what these papers may contain. The first question will be, did Agee purge his files of the most damaging evidence of his perfidy as a secret agent? He took pride in revealing the identities of thousands of his former colleagues and their contacts in foreign countries with assistance of the Cuban and Soviet intelligence services.

    Perhaps these papers contain information that will encourage the CIA to open its files about Agee’s undercover work and his activities after he left the agency in 1969. And, perhaps, the agency will produce evidence documenting one of the most damaging accusations against Agee: that he exposed a circuit of Polish Army officers who were supplying information to the West.

    I have both personal and professional interests in these secrets because Agee was at the center of the strangest  incident in my career as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. I never met Agee in person, but I learned a great deal while writing  a story about him that was mysteriously buried by my editors.

Why Did I. F. Stone Sidestep the Hiss Case?

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Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from a longer essay entitled “I. F. Stone: Encounters with Soviet Intelligence,” which appears in the Summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies. To read the entire essay click here.

By Max Holland

    Any reconsideration of I. F. Stone should specifically address how he viewed the Cold War spy and loyalty controversies—or chose not to—even if one accepts a minimalist interpretation of Stone’s brushes with Soviet intelligence.

    Stone often commented about the cases that rocked the country in the late 1940s and were responsible for the repression, fear, and culture of conformity that he repeatedly decried. Most frequently, Stone wrote in passionate defense of government officials, high and low, who had been unfair targets of smears and leaks, sometimes when their real crime was to have opposed a powerful congressman on a point of policy. One such occasion was the March 1948 attack by Representative J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ), chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, on a government physicist named Edward U. Condon. (Condon had been a prime mover in asserting postwar civilian control over nuclear energy, which Thomas had bitterly opposed). In the summer of 1949, Stone wrote a stinging series of articles in defense of Condon, all of which roundly attacked J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for compiling the innuendo that Thomas had used in his blundering effort to destroy the outspoken physicist, who also happened to be Stone’s friend.[1]

    The case in which Stone became the most personally involved was the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—but not during their sensational trial, when he stayed uncharacteristically silent. Because he did not want to “play into the hands of reaction,” he eschewed the “shrill, hysterical and mendacious” propaganda campaign that insisted the Rosenbergs were completely innocent and victims of a heinous government frame-up. Instead, he attempted to sit on the fence: “we just don’t know” whether the Rosenbergs are guilty or innocent, Stone wrote.[2] When he did become fully engaged, it was to crusade against the great and unfair disparity between their death sentences and the limited prison terms meted out to others convicted of nuclear espionage.[3]

    Although Stone mainly railed against the injustices that occurred, he was also prone to discounting the significance of a given spy case and insisting that the truly bad actor was some element of the US government. That was the line of argument he employed when the first spy case, involving a foreign policy journal called Amerasia, broke in June 1945. Stone was quick to suggest—falsely—that the prosecution was the work of a “reactionary clique” inside the State Department, which, among other things, was scheming to save Japan from decisive defeat so that it could be preserved as a bulwark against Soviet socialism.[4] Four years later, in a similar vein, Stone hammered on the theme of FBI misconduct during the first trial in the Judith Coplon espionage case, until her own appearance on the witness stand proved disastrous to her credibility.[5] Decades later, he disingenuously suggested that Victor Perlo, his former source at the War Production Board, had been unjustifiably “purged” from the federal government. “Now he would have been a sitting duck if he was passing any secrets,” Stone observed. “But the government never laid a finger on him.”[6]

Cold War Origins

When did the cold war really begin?

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By Sheldon M. Stern

    It has often been argued that the ideological and geopolitical conflict between the former Soviet Union and the United States began not in 1945, but in 1917-18. Ostensibly, Washington’s congenital antipathy to the Bolshevik revolution—as evinced by an “American invasion” (or “intervention”) that targeted the new regime in Russia—planted the seeds of the cold war by generating a Soviet anger and distrust of the United States that was wholly justified. From this perspective, the US decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan in 1945 was not even the opening salvo in the cold war because US responsibility for the conflict was already manifest during the waning months of World War I.

    This general argument can be found in the work of academic historians like William Appleman Williams and has been popularized in the writings of Noam Chomsky.[1] It has also become casually accepted fare in some state high school US history standards, as I discovered while conducting a survey several years ago.[2] A leading college-level textbook as well, published by a prominent historian in 1995, noted that before the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, President Woodrow Wilson had already “ordered the landing of American troops in the Soviet Union.” These forces “soon became involved, both directly and indirectly, in assisting the White Russians (the anti-Bolsheviks) in their fight against the new regime.” Lenin “survived these challenges, but Wilson refused to recognize his new government, nevertheless. Diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were not restored until 1933.”[3]

    But do such accounts adequately convey important aspects of US-Soviet relations from 1918 to 1933?

    For one, the military intervention in Russia was not exclusively or even primarily American. Britain, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Poland, Romania, and Serbia also put troops in Russia in 1918. Indeed, Poland (12,000), Greece (24,000), Czechoslovakia (50,000), and Japan (72,000) inserted far larger forces than the United States (9,000).[4] The Bolsheviks, it must be remembered, had made a separate peace with the Kaiser’s government in March 1918 and had withdrawn from the war. A month later, a German division landed in Finland and was within striking distance of the port of Murmansk as well as the strategic Petrograd-Murmansk railway. The Western allies shared a justifiable concern that the Germans would seize substantial arms depots and strategic port cities in Russia. Britain, in particular, put pressure on President Wilson to send US troops with the aim of halting, or at least slowing, the potentially decisive transfer of German forces to the Western front. So in July, Wilson dispatched 9,000 troops to the Archangel-Murmansk area. The president did not regard US intervention in Russia to be an act of war, but rather an effort to help the Russians extricate themselves from German domination.

    To be sure, it wasn’t the first US move in opposition to the new revolutionary regime in Moscow. Wilson had already sanctioned covert aid to anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia before the US troops were sent, and for the same strategic reason, to keep Germany fighting on two fronts. Because of Wilson’s public support for national self-determination, these secret commitments, as historian David Foglesong concluded,

evaded public scrutiny and avoided the need for Congressional appropriations. … Trying to avoid actions that would blatantly contradict liberal democratic ideals, Wilson and other U.S. officials did everything they felt was practicable to accelerate the demise of Bolshevism…. [Nevertheless] the small U.S. expedition and the many shipments of supplies to anti-Bolshevik forces were enough to provoke dissent at home and resentment in Soviet Russia, but not sufficient to secure the goal of a reunited democratic Russia.[5]

    Wilson also persisted in measures that could be termed anti-revolutionary. He opposed seating Soviet Russia at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and supported the plan by Herbert Hoover, director of the American Relief Administration, to send food to anti-Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region. Yet, these half-measures failed to bring down Bolshevism and only exacerbated “the fears of hostile encirclement and foreign subversion that buttressed the Soviet government for seven decades.”[6] Still, neither Soviet leaders at the time nor anyone else characterized the eleven-nation 1918 intervention as an “American invasion”—at least not yet.

    Ironically, an exclusively American intervention in Russia did begin soon after the withdrawal of US troops in 1920. The Bolshevik policy of forcibly seizing food from often rebellious and starving peasants, combined with drought and pestilence, resulted in a massive famine by 1921, one that ultimately cost 5 million lives and threatened the survival of Lenin’s government. Soviet authorities reluctantly permitted the internationally-renowned writer Maxim Gorky to issue a public plea for food and medicine. The United States, fortunately,

had ready for action an extraordinarily efficient volunteer relief organization, designed for just such emergencies and possessed of equipment, experienced personnel, and some funds for current operations in Europe. The American Relief Administration [ARA], under Herbert Hoover, was world famous for its work in Belgium and twenty-two other countries. Hoover, although he took a very dim view of communism, promptly answered with an offer to bring food, clothing, and medicine to a million Russian children.[7]

      Hoover even persuaded Congress, barely a year after the Red Scare, to appropriate $20 million for Russian famine relief—an astonishing achievement given that the United States did not even have diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia. By 1923, the ARA had distributed more than half a million tons of food which reached over 10 million people a day. In addition, eight million Russians were inoculated against deadly diseases, and scores of hospitals were restocked with 1,300 sets of surgical instruments and tons of medicines and medical supplies which saved the lives of millions of Russians.[8]

    There was a politico-economic edge to ARA’s altruism. Hoover undoubtedly hoped that the ARA’s work would persuade the Russian people to abandon communism for a democratic/capitalist system. “It was only natural,” he believed, that ARA relief would, “by spreading goodwill, serve to promote US economic interests.” Yet he had also recognized that Soviet officialdom was already suspicious and could easily turn obstructionist. Consequently, Hoover had instructed ARA representatives not only to avoid political activities, but to abstain from even discussing politics.[9]

What Did LBJ Know About the Cuban Missile Crisis? And When Did He Know It?

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By Max Holland and Tara Marie Egan

    Writing in August 2007 about the major candidates’ credentials, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum concluded that it’s questionable whether foreign policy experience is essential for anyone aspiring to the presidency. Exhibit A in her argument was Harry Truman, and Exhibit B was Lyndon Johnson.

. . . it’s far from obvious that any specific kind of experience has ever helped a president make good calls. . . . Lyndon B. Johnson had held national office for years before becoming president, but he still couldn’t cope with Vietnam.[1]

    Applebaum’s implication was that Johnson did not absorb the right lessons while serving as John F. Kennedy’s vice president, even though one of the greatest teaching tools of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, occurred during President Kennedy’s watch 45 years ago.

    But what if Johnson was not permitted to learn the right lessons, which would have had to begin with an accurate understanding of what had happened? What if Johnson was purposely denied important knowledge? What if Johnson thought he had drawn the right lessons, but actually was trying to replicate a manufactured illusion?

    The most reliable guide to Johnson’s innermost thoughts is the secret tape recordings that he made as president. While sketchy on the subject of the missile crisis—there are only a few references on the tapes over a period of years—enough can be gleaned from them to confirm that Johnson was never privy to the true history of the missile crisis. False history led to mistaken lessons, including a belief in the efficacy of calibrated force, which helped prevent Johnson from seriously entertaining the concessions necessary for a negotiated political solution to the Vietnam War, the supreme crisis of his presidency.

    The conscious exclusion of Johnson from the truth goes far beyond the superficially parallel situation that occurred when Harry Truman succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt. In that case, Truman’s ignorance of the Manhattan Project, and of the mounting problems with the Soviet Union, was not at all purposeful. Roosevelt’s conduct of foreign policy was shambolic by nature, and excluding Truman from important knowledge was not calculated. Anyone who had been vice president under FDR would have been excluded.

    By contrast—and what is especially striking about Johnson’s case—is that not only was LBJ deliberately shut out as vice president, but the tape recordings show that he was still in the dark years after he became president, when he was presumably entitled, and urgently needed, to understand the knowable truth behind Kennedy’s spectacular success.[2] Top presidential advisers, of course, are generally loath to share the secrets of one administration with another administration, even of the same political party. But in this case, an additional and powerful reason for keeping Johnson ignorant was the shadow cast by Robert F. Kennedy over the entire Johnson presidency. Men who had stayed on to serve LBJ as they had served JFK—Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy—were already regarded, by the late president’s brother, as insufficiently loyal. Had one of them shared JFK’s biggest secret with Johnson, the leaker surely would have been fingered and his indiscretion regarded as unpardonable.[3]

 

Circles within Circles

    Out of the 12 regular members of the fabled ExComm, four were not privy to the secret codicil that helped end the October 1962 missile crisis, namely, the explicit guarantee that America’s Jupiter missiles in Turkey would be quietly removed following a Soviet withdrawal of offensive missiles from Cuba. The ExComm members denied this knowledge were General Maxwell Taylor, C. Douglas Dillon, John McCone, and Lyndon Johnson.[4]

    President Kennedy presumably excluded Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because the chiefs had expressed unwavering opposition to any linkage between the missiles, surreptitiously emplaced in Cuba, and the Jupiters, openly sited in Turkey. Treasury Secretary Dillon was also denied knowledge of the settlement terms, probably because he was a prominent Republican (Dillon had served as under secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration) who had argued vigorously against a deal involving the Jupiters.

    John McCone was a Republican, too. But not even the fact that he was director of central intelligence (DCI) and energetically supported withdrawal of the obsolete Jupiters, if it facilitated getting the Soviet missiles out of Cuba, was sufficient for his admittance into the president’s inner circle.[5] McCone’s exclusion was the height of irony.[6] Yet since President Kennedy was intent on keeping every Republican, from Dwight Eisenhower on down, in the dark about the true terms of the missile crisis settlement, he could hardly confide in McCone, who regularly briefed the former president on national security matters.[7]

    Finally, John Kennedy also decided, quite deliberately, to shut out Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat and the second-highest officeholder in the land. There was a tinge of irony in Johnson’s exclusion, too. Like any consummate politician, Johnson valued one quality—loyalty—above all else, and since he expected it, he gave it in return. Though bitterly disappointed at the meager responsibilities given him by the Kennedy White House, Johnson had been a team player since January 1961. In word, deed, and appearance, he had been completely loyal, airing all of his private differences over policy (and he had some) with the president alone, and dutifully following the president’s lead in any group larger than the two of them.[8]

    Hardened Washington columnists, some of whom had known Johnson for decades, were keenly aware of the indignities and humiliations he suffered as vice president. Johnson was the uncouth Texan who simply didn’t fit, ridiculed behind his back as “Uncle Cornpone” for his accent and manner. Yet LBJ amazed these columnists with his self-discipline, for he refused to be a source of political dirt or information about the administration’s internal machinations. Still, not even LBJ’s repeated demonstrations of fidelity had been sufficient to overcome the Kennedys’ distrust of Johnson, and in Robert Kennedy’s case, intense and ineradicable dislike.

    In the days following the discovery of the Soviet missiles on October 15, Johnson had played an ambiguous, even contradictory, role at the ExComm meetings—that is, when he chose to speak at all, which was not often.[9] When JFK specifically solicited Johnson’s opinion on October 16, the first day of deliberations, the vice president expressed the view that the offensive elements of the Soviet buildup were intolerable for domestic political reasons. The administration simply had to remove the threat, by force if necessary, and regardless of whether America’s allies approved.[10]

    As the ExComm’s discussions turned to the crucial question of whether to impose a blockade or take more violent action, however, LBJ went missing in action, albeit through no fault of his own. The impending off-year election meant Johnson had been booked to make a long campaign swing. Because the administration did not want to signal Moscow that its missiles had been sighted in Cuba, it was decided to keep LBJ on the political hustings as if nothing were untoward.[11]

    On the evening of Sunday, October 21, when Johnson finally made it back to Washington, the president directed DCI McCone to brief the vice president on everything that had transpired, including the controversial decision to impose a blockade.[12] Johnson initially expressed disagreement with the policy that had been developed  in his absence. As McCone recorded in his memo of their conversation,

The thrust of the vice president’s thinking was that he favored an unannounced strike rather than the agreed plan which involved blockade . . . . He expressed displeasure at “telegraphing our punch” and also commented the blockade would be ineffective because we in effect are “locking the barn after the horse was gone.”[13]

    But McCone had also briefed Dwight Eisenhower that morning, and when the DCI informed Johnson that the former president opposed a surprise attack, and was willing to accept the military handicap that came with imposition of a blockade, Johnson reluctantly changed his position to favor the quarantine. Few people exercised as much influence on Johnson’s judgment as Eisenhower did when it came to matters of national security.

    Once the crisis became public on October 22, Johnson attended every ExComm session thereafter, though his return hardly seemed to matter. Johnson may have been sticking to his “general policy of never speaking unless the president asked [him],” and behaving as he thought a vice president should—which was to agree in public with whatever the president decided, or at least mimic his leanings.[14] Still, when JFK specifically asked Johnson for his opinion, LBJ chose to remain silent and withdrawn. Befitting his shrunken status, and discomfort with all the “Harvards” in JFK’s inner circle, LBJ repeatedly declined to offer a strong opinion during several meetings, particularly when the president was in attendance.[15] As one ExComm participant later noted, “I attended two of those ExComm meetings when Johnson was there, and, to tell you the truth, I can’t even remember what he said, or if he spoke at all.”[16]

    Johnson only began to assert himself during the critical ExComm meeting on Saturday, October 27, which began at 4 PM and lasted for more than three hours.[17] Just after the ExComm heard the unsettling news that a U-2 had been downed by a Soviet surface-to-air missile, Johnson insinuated that unless there was a firm response, the public would soon perceive the administration as backing away from the strong position enunciated in President Kennedy’s October 22 speech to the nation. (This observation instantly evoked a testy response from Johnson’s nemesis, Robert Kennedy). Moments later, however, Johnson gently chided those who immediately wanted to take out a SAM site in retaliation, calling them “war hawks.”[18]

    Overall, LBJ seemed to favor a negotiated solution to the crisis, though he also came down on both sides of the key issue of linkage. At one point he criticized Robert McNamara’s stiff opposition to a missile swap, arguing that the Jupiter missiles were “not worth a damn” anyway. Minutes later, LBJ likened an outright trade to appeasement, asserting that it would be tantamount to dismantling the containment edifice Washington had painstakingly built over the past 15 years.[19]

    There was every reason to believe, from the totality of what Johnson said, that he would have genuinely supported Kennedy’s gambit: to make the trade, so long as the Soviets agreed to keep it secret. But when the president convened a rump ExComm session on October 27, after the regular one broke up and just before RFK’s evening meeting with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Johnson was purposefully excluded from the trusted inner circle.[20] Only those present were to know about the explicit assurance and “no one else.”[21] Thus, Johnson was left unaware of the genuine settlement terms which were offered that Saturday night, and hastily accepted by Nikita Khrushchev the next day.

    At the time, of course, keeping Johnson at arm’s length was a trifling consideration, one that mostly reflected the White House’s lack of esteem and trust in LBJ. Perhaps it was feared that because Johnson was still very close to Richard B. Russell, his Senate mentor, he might be incapable of “disinforming” the Georgian, who was highly critical of the administration’s handling of Castro’s Cuba.[22] The notion that Johnson would have to contend with the legacy of the missile crisis appeared very unlikely, for LBJ seemed like a relic from a by-gone political age. Johnson himself was practically the only person who believed he might be a viable candidate for the 1968 Democratic nomination. In two months’ time, when The Saturday Evening Post would publish an “exclusive” account of the missile crisis—one that was widely (and correctly) viewed as the administration’s preferred version—LBJ would not be mentioned in the article at all, the only regular member of the ExComm to be so slighted.[23]  He had ceased being a person it was important to notice.[24] 

    In little more than a year, though, LBJ became the first president forced to grapple with JFK’s storied handling of the missile crisis. Because of the ostensibly authoritative Saturday Evening Post article published in December 1962, the crisis had become quickly encrusted with legend and lore, an “eyeball to eyeball” confrontation with Moscow that abruptly ended when Khrushchev blinked. According to this Hollywoodized version, Kennedy’s resoluteness, restraint, and controlled escalation of force prompted Moscow to capitulate, and no one demonstrated more wisdom and foresight (aside from the president) than Robert F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, the standard-bearer of liberal Democrats, Adlai Stevenson, was depicted as an appeaser, and Lyndon Johnson, of course, was nowhere to be found. This vigorously propagated image, of “wonderfully coordinated and error-free ‘crisis management,’” was generally swallowed by the media.[25] The president’s 1963 assassination subsequently added the luster of martyrdom to the narrative, making it all the more difficult, if not almost blasphemous, to try to discern the truth.

Learning the Wrong Lessons

    As Stanford Professor Barton Bernstein, a leading missile crisis scholar (and member of Washington Decoded’s editorial board), was the first to point out in 1992, the myth of the missile crisis settlement created an enormous burden of expectation for Lyndon Johnson, one that could never be actually met.

What influence, analysts may profitably speculate, did the widespread belief in Kennedy’s great victory in the missile crisis play as President Johnson struggled on, even against the counsel of advisers, for his own triumph in Southeast Asia in 1966-1968? Might he have felt psychologically, and even politically, more free to change policy if he had known, along with his fellow Americans, the truth of the October 1962 secret settlement?[26]

    This burden, it must be pointed out, was also one that Johnson was peculiarly—almost uniquely—ill-suited to shoulder, given his deep-seated insecurity and the barely concealed attitude of many Kennedy loyalists, most notably the attorney general. Their view was that Johnson was an undeserving successor, even a usurper, who occupied the White House temporarily, and only because of a terrible accident.[27]

    Of course, as he succeeded Kennedy in office, Johnson knew that several elements of Kennedy’s “finest hour” were sheer puffery, if not downright wrong. Having participated in the ExComm meetings, LBJ well knew (as the Kennedy tape recordings underscore) that the deliberations had not been coolly analytical, closely argued, and rational at all times, but rather, “desultory, spastic, and often inchoate,” in Bernstein’s words.[28] LBJ also recognized, undoubtedly, that Adlai Stevenson had been unfairly and maliciously depicted as advocating a “Munich,” when his only sin was that he had dared to be the first adviser to suggest a missile swap. Johnson, lastly, was also cognizant of Operation MONGOOSE, and surely realized the instrumental role that provocative covert action had played in precipitating the crisis. (Under Johnson, in fact, CIA-led efforts to subvert Castro would be all but terminated even as Castro’s efforts to subvert other countries in the hemisphere were ratcheted up).

    Yet unbeknownst to Johnson, other elements that he believed were true were, in fact, false. The most critical fact about the missile crisis settlement—the reality that Kennedy had claimed toughness, but cut a private deal—was not beyond Johnson’s ken, because such deal-making was hardly foreign to him. Still, he did not know such subterfuge had been employed here. Instead, LBJ labored under the false impression that American power, when expertly applied, could force a Communist leader bent on “nuclear blackmail” to back down and become pragmatic.[29]

    What made this false narrative doubly crippling for Johnson were some of his own tendencies. LBJ was an overbearing, controlling personality in the first place, prone to micro-managing a war if he had the misfortune of getting involved in one. The ExComm experience, even though LBJ knew it had not been seamless, probably encouraged President Johnson’s worst instincts (and here, he was undoubtedly aided by McNamara’s technocratic bent). The fact that Johnson kept intact the national security team assembled by Kennedy, so as to prove continuity with JFK’s policies, also exacerbated matters. It has long been known that Johnson was unduly awed by Kennedy’s brainy advisers. LBJ’s unspoken presumption was that the same men who were at Kennedy’s side in October 1962 would surely see Johnson through to a similar, unmitigated victory, regardless of the differences. And if they could not, conversely, that suggested something LBJ did not want to countenance: that the only real difference was in the president who led this assemblage of the best and the brightest. In a similar vein, Johnson may have been too reluctant to buck the counsel of the holdovers even when his gut instinct told him to do so. After all, these were the same men who had guided Kennedy to his spectacular victory.

    Of course, had Johnson had a more accurate understanding of the missile crisis’ true history, he still would have had to contend with the false analogies and “lessons” that were rife in public.[30] The explicit and implicit comparisons with his predecessor’s success in Cuba began with the Gulf of Tonkin incidents in the late summer of 1964, and grew in intensity as Vietnam began to overshadow everything else.[31] The inevitable juxtaposition was seldom put as crudely, however, as it was in December 1964. With the situation in Vietnam rapidly deteriorating following President Ngo Dinh Diem’s violent ouster, Washington Post columnist Joseph Alsop, a leading hawk, directly raised the missile crisis analogy. For Lyndon B. Johnson, Alsop wrote,

Vietnam is what the second Cuban crisis was for John F. Kennedy. If Mr. Johnson ducks the challenge, we shall learn by experience about what [it] would have been like if Kennedy had ducked the challenge in October, 1962.[32]

Alsop’s remark sparked outrage in Johnson, whereas if he had been privy to the truth, the column might have been received with a shrug, or a caustic remark about Alsop’s ignorance.[33]

    In February 1965, when LBJ stood at the first crossroads with respect to Vietnam—whether to send in ground forces or not—at least one aide, Bill Moyers, suggested to the president that he reconstitute ExComm, or something very much like it.[34] Probably no realization about the missile crisis would have been sufficient, at this juncture, to overcome Johnson’s sense that like all Cold War presidents, his mettle and resolve were being tested by the Communist powers.[35] Occasionally, Johnson articulated his reluctance to commit U.S. troops to a Southeast Asian sinkhole. But he knew what happened to presidents when a country was “lost” to communism—indeed, he feared the person leading the charge against him would be Robert Kennedy, claiming that LBJ had “betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam.”[36] Moreover, because of the way Washington had connived in Diem’s overthrow in November 1963, a decision with which Vice President Johnson had vehemently disagreed, LBJ apparently felt a deep obligation to re-stabilize South Vietnam.[37] 

    Yet by early 1966, once it was apparent that U.S. power was not having the desired affect, accurate knowledge of the missile crisis end-game might have persuaded Johnson to be more ruthless or cynical in his efforts to achieve a face-saving settlement. The literature on Johnson’s peace feelers suggests that he was not really prepared to concede South Vietnam after a decent interval, unlike his successor in the White House—or as LBJ’s predecessor might have done, had he lived to deal with the consequences of his policy.[38]