Washington Decoded

The JFK Files: Cuba, Kennedy, and the Cold War

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By Max Holland

 

    Just when you thought you deserved a respite, here comes the thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. More than 450 books and tens of thousands of articles have been published, and numerous documentaries and feature films produced, about November 22, 1963. Yet this anniversary will yield a bumper crop of offerings in every medium.

    The persistent disbelief attached to the Warren Report, the ceaseless re-examinations, have to be grounded in unfinished business, some yearning that goes well beyond narrow questions such as whether all pertinent government documents have been released. In a letter to The New York Times, William Manchester skillfully identified this unrequited need last year. The author of The Death of a President wrote:

There is an aesthetic principle here. . . . If you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.

A conspiracy, of course, would do the job nicely.

    If great events demand great causes, as Manchester argues, thirst for a conspiracy will never be slaked. As he stands, Oswald is unequal to the task of assassinating a president who, fairly or not, is sometimes rated higher than Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. But perhaps this anniversary ought to be an occasion to re-examine that imbalance, if possible, adjust the scales, and make the assassination coherent. In addition to marking thirty years, this November is the first major anniversary since the geopolitical rules changed and exaggerated passions and fears abated. Its more than possible that our understanding of the assassination, like so much else, has been obscured by cold war exigencies. New documentary evidence, not only about the assassination but also about Kennedy’s Cuba policy, has been released, and principal officials are talking, some after a long silence.

    In his first Weekly published after the assassination, I.F. Stone wrote a passionate and piercing column on the fallen president entitled “We All Had a Finger on That Trigger”:

Let us ask ourselves honest questions. How many Americans have not assumed--with approval--that the CIA was probably trying to find a way to assassinate Castro? How many would not applaud if the CIA succeeded? . . . Have we not become conditioned to the notion that we should have a secret agency of government--the CIA--with secret funds, to wield the dagger beneath the cloak against leaders we dislike? Even some of our best young liberal intellectuals can see nothing wrong in this picture except that the “operational” functions of [the] CIA should be kept separate from its intelligence evaluations! . . Where the right to kill is so universally accepted, we should not be surprised if our young president was slain.

    Drawing a rhetorical, unproven connection between the cold war mindset and Oswald’s stunning act was vintage Izzy Stone. With virtually every American still in shock, it took a journalistic dissenter to hold up the assassination against a backdrop of political violence contributed to by the United States. In retrospect, I.F. Stone was closer to understanding the context of the assassination than almost anyone at the time.

    The full story is a bipartisan one. The Eisenhower administration was hardly shy about subverting unsympathetic Third World regimes, and uncounted soldiers and civilians died during CIA-backed shadow wars and coups in the 1950s. But ostensibly adverse trends apparent in 1959 raised a new question: If thousands of deaths were acceptable, why not the murder of particular persons? It might be a less costly way to nip unfriendly regimes in the bud or oust a pro-Western but repressive ruler who might engender a Communist takeover. “Executive action,” the assassination of actual or potential leaders deemed inimical, was added to the CIA’s bag of covert tactics. In fragmented and frequently violent Third World polities, executive action appeared quite feasible, the rewards worthwhile, the risks tolerable.

How Moscow Undermined the Warren Commission

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By Max Holland

 

    The Warren Report has never been impeached, yet conspiracy theories persist, nay thrive, after 40 years. It’s fair to ask why.

    The most important reason remains the factor that spawned wild speculation in the first place, namely, the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald two days after the Kennedy assassination by a self-appointed vigilante named Jack Ruby. The assassination was a horrific act, yet one that the American public would have eventually come to terms with had Oswald — a politicized sociopath, akin to Timothy McVeigh — ever received his day in court.

    But the right to due process is so cherished by Americans that when this ritual is denied, ineradicable doubt flourishes no matter how damning the state’s case.

    The unavoidable corollary of disbelief is that Washington was, at a minimum, uninterested in catching the real culprits. It’s no coincidence that polls consistently have shown that public trust in the US government began declining in 1964. Among those who believe in a conspiracy, the most widely accepted theory is that elements of the US government, most conspicuously the CIA, were complicit in gunning down the 35th president in broad daylight.

    How is it that Americans have come to embrace a conspiracy theory that reads like a script written by the KGB, the CIA’s mortal Cold War adversary? Well, it turns out that Moscow’s relentless propagation of that virulent theory and its prevalence here are no mere coincidence. One of the more amazing stories to seep out of the former Soviet empire is the role Moscow played in exploiting Americans’ psychological vulnerability after the assassination, and in preying on their devotion to due process. We can piece together this concerted effort only now with the release of documents from Soviet archives — some disclosures authorized, some not. Taken together, they prove that the KGB played a central, pernicious role in fomenting the belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s assassination.

    The first inkling of an aggressive KGB posture is revealed in a document gratuitously cited by Boris Yeltsin in his 1994 memoir. In a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union dated November 23, 1963 — when Oswald was still alive — KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny recommends publishing in a “progressive paper in one of the Western countries,” an article “exposing the attempt by reactionary circles in the USA to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, [i.e.,] the racists and ultraright elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence and terror in the United States.”

    Two months later, R. Palme Dutt, the Stalinist editor of a  Communist-controlled British journal called Labour Monthly, published an article that raised the specter of CIA involvement without offering a scintilla of evidence. “[M]ost commentators,” he wrote, “have surmised a coup of the Ultra-Right or racialists of Dallas. That may be; but the trail, if followed up seriously, seems to reach wider . . . on the face of it this highly organized coup (even to the provision of a ’fall guy’ . . . and rapid killing of the fall guy while manacled in custody, as soon as there appeared a danger of his talking), with the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of authorities, bears all the hallmarks of a CIA job.”

    Five months later, in June 1964, a freelance journalist named Joachim Joesten posited a strikingly similar analysis in his book Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? Following a chapter on “Oswald and the CIA,” Joesten asserted that the agency was beyond presidential control and bitterly opposed to Kennedy’s policy of “easing the Cold War.” It has long been a matter of record that Joesten’s book was the first published in the United States on the subject of the assassination. Until the notes of a former KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin were published in 1999, however, it was not known that Joesten’s publisher, the small New York firm of Marzani & Munsell, received subsidies totaling $672,000 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s.

    These early efforts to implicate the CIA met with little apparent success. But the KGB kept on trying and finally hit the jackpot once a relatively unknown New Orleans district attorney named Jim Garrison took a sudden interest in the assassination in late 1966. The word “dupe” has long been out of favor, but that’s precisely what Garrison turned out to be after he arrested Clay Shaw in March 1967 and charged him with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy. Owing to a clever piece of KGB disinformation planted in Paese Sera, a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, Garrison came to believe that in Shaw he had apprehended an important “CIA operative.” And on the basis of this deception (again, revealed by KGB archivist Mitrokhin), Garrison constructed an entire conspiracy edifice, ultimately arguing that the CIA had plotted the assassination-coup d’etat in concert with the military-industrial complex — again, because Kennedy was allegedly easing up in the Cold War.

    If Garrison’s persecution of Shaw hadn’t been genuine, and tragic, the whole episode would be risible. It wasn’t. Garrison altered forever the parameters of Americans’ nagging doubts, though that transformation went largely unnoticed at the time. Before the spring of 1967, not even the Warren Report’s harshest critics dared suggest the government itself was involved. Within the space of a few weeks, Garrison single-handedly legitimated the fable of CIA complicity. Not even Shaw’s exoneration in 1971 was sufficient to offset the insidious notion planted by the KGB and unwittingly nurtured by Garrison. After receiving an inadvertent assist from the Watergate and intelligence hearings of the mid-1970s, the KGB could justifiably claim, by the end of the decade, that owing to its “active measures,” more Americans believed in its conspiracy theory (or some variation thereof) than in the findings of the Warren Commission.

    This preposterous allegation of CIA involvement might have faded with time but for a chance encounter in a Havana elevator between the publisher of Garrison’s 1988 memoir and a powerful Hollywood director named Oliver Stone. In JFK, Stone reconstructs Jim Garrison’s edifice so painstakingly that 88 minutes into the movie, the KGB disinformation resurfaces. Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) hands Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) the Italian newspaper clipping, and the implication is created that Shaw was a “contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Arguably, Stone’s 1991 movie is the only American feature film made during the Cold War to have, as its very axis, a lie concocted in the KGB’s disinformation factories.

    If and when the archives of the Communist Party’s “sword and shield” are fully opened, the KGB’s indispensable role in propagating the lie of CIA involvement will take its place among other triumphs of Russian deception, such as the infamous Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Until then there is only this sobering thought, long an axiom of professional intelligence officers: We are never truly deceived by others; we only deceive ourselves.

This article first appeared in The Washington Post, 22 November 2003
© 2003 by Max Holland

A Cold War Odyssey: The Oswald File

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By Max Holland

    The story of how the Soviet Union was maneuvered into releasing normally privileged information about Lee Harvey Oswald  to the US government is a little-known but important insight into the tense aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination.

     The person most responsible for persuading the Kremlin to relax its usual strictures was Moscow’s own ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. By doing so, Dobrynin defused a highly charged situation, just one year after the missile crisis. Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union for more than two years prior to the assassination, and had recently expressed a desire to return. This episode also revealed why Dobrynin would become such a durable and invaluable presence in the American capital, lasting through six administrations.

    This article was originally published in the Cold War International History Project ’s Bulletin, Winter 2003/Spring 2004 issue. Click here to read the entire article.

    Postscript: In 2006, a Moscow television station was reportedly preparing the first-ever Russian documentary about Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina.

Private Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy:William Pawley and the 1954 Coup d’État in Guatemala

By Max Holland

    As a wealthy American businessman and former ambassador, William Pawley was a key actor in PBSUCCESS, the CIA covert operation that brought down the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954.

    The anti-Arbenz rebels, led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, could not have defeated the Guatemalan army on their own. The key to a successful coup was getting the army to act on their behalf, and in this regard, control of the air was vital. Pawley, owing to his knowledge of Latin America and experience in aviation, played a central role in ensuring that the rebels enjoyed air superiority during their move against the president. At a more abstract level, Pawley exemplified the role non-governmental actors played in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The “state-private network,” as it has been dubbed, remains a rich vein for scholarly investigation. 

    This article originally appeared in Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Fall 2005), and may be purchased from MIT Press by clicking here.

The Mind of Somoza

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By Max Holland

    Ensconced in his bunker in the heart of Managua, a tall, middle-aged man with a pencil-thin mustache and receding hairline is confounding his political opponents, the US government and the mass media. Every segment of Nicaraguan society – from dirt-poor campesinos to wealthy industrialists – is strongly opposed to el hombre (as Somoza is called by many Nicaraguans who won’t say his name because they fear it brings bad luck). The US government would like nothing better than his resignation to forestall the possibility of “another Cuba,” yet Somoza shows no signs of obliging the North Americans, who have always been his greatest supporters.

    His departure, imminent in the media’s premature obituaries a month ago, is much less predictable now that he has opened negotiations with a broad opposition coalition that represents all but his armed opponents, the Sandinistas.

    The president/dictator is negotiating with a three-man delegation representing fifteen opposition groups. The stated purpose is to reach a peaceful resolution of the crisis, a term which to the more conservative groups means Somoza’s departure, and to his more radical opponents includes also the confiscation of his ill-gotten property and even some basic restructuring of the political system.

    But Anastasio Somoza Debayle won’t go. To understand why – and how – he keeps his stranglehold over Nicaragua, one must begin with the National Guard. Recent events showed that sheer force is all Somoza has left, but everyone agrees that as long as that force – meaning the Guardia – remains loyal, Somoza’s presidency is relatively safe. But how can Somoza retain that loyalty? After all, Nicaragua is a small country of little more than 2 million people and therefore many of the soldiers have bombed, strafed, and shelled their own neighborhoods, if not their own relatives.

    The technique for keeping the Guard loyal has been handed down from generation to generation in the Somoza dynasty: in return for security, the Guardsmen receive special privileges and upward mobility. That has always worked, but the problem of the present Somoza may lie in convincing the Guard that only a Somoza can deliver these benefits.

    The National Guard is kept in line by manipulating historic divisions within the Nicaraguan elites. Four or five family names appear everywhere in the political and economic life of the country. Some call themselves Liberals and follow Somoza; others are in the Conservative Party. Throughout the Somoza dynasty, and for a long time before, struggles for power and wealth have taken place among these factions. The poor majority has simply been ignored.

    Moreover, the traditional oligarchs’ disdain for the Somozas is visited on the Guard itself, and the Somozas have shrewdly capitalized on it. They have been godfathers to the Guard while insulating and alienating it from the general populace. As Somoza recently explained, “We are fighting a battle here, my friend [with] a well-to-do group that doesn’t want people who are going up on the ladder. The Guard doesn’t get admitted to the country clubs, or the better schools. They are trying to push the Guard down in the gutter. We are trying to uplift their status, socially, economically, intellectually.”

    Somoza “uplifts” the Guard by providing them with a standard of living far above that of the average Nicaraguan. They have separate schools, hospitals, stores and residential areas. And the higher a Guard officer rises, the more lucrative his profession becomes as he gets to partake of the many “business” opportunities that open up, from plain smuggling to mass transit monopolies.

    Even with all these incentives to loyalty, Somoza is watchful of the actual military command in the Guard. According to Richard Millett, an American scholar who has written a book on the subject, only about 20 percent of the Guard are combat troops, and command of these forces is exercised directly by the Somoza family or by a very few trusted associates. As Millett points out, that is why the Guard dealt with the September uprisings one city at a time, rather than in a single coordinated attack.

    It may also help to explain how Somoza retains control of a country in which all classes revolted against him in a national uprising. But it does not account for his staying and waging war against his country under conditions that have persuaded other dictators to take their millions and run.

    The truth seems to be that Somoza sees no distinction between his own welfare and that of Nicaragua. And even before his serious heart attack last year many observers noted the difficulty many Nicaraguans had in imagining life without a Somoza in charge. The family has been in command for forty-two years, and about 75 percent of the population is below 40 years of age.

    Somoza’s attitude toward his vast holdings typifies his failure to distinguish between himself and Nicaragua. A US envoy once wrote of the previous Somoza that “he sees in democracy only a device for the easy domination of his country, with abundant opportunities for plunder to the strains of the national anthem.” The same can be said about his son, whose fortune is estimated at $400 million to $500 million. His determination to profit from every kind of business has spawned an apparatus of graft that can hardly be called a government.

    Yet Somoza sees it quite differently. He considers himself the prime mover behind Nicaragua’s capitalistic development, an investor who takes the risks and therefore deserves the profits. There is a certain perverse logic to his view. While enumerating his fortune, most stories neglect to point out that half of the seventy or so entities Somoza owns are nearly bankrupt, poorly managed and wasting money. Some are surviving only thanks to favored tax or tariff treatment, and it would be wiser to write them off as bad investments. But Somoza will insist on maintaining a losing venture on the undeveloped Atlantic Coast, for example, for what he considers “national” reasons. He believes, somehow, that he is performing the same function as a Rockefeller or Howard Hughes, and his admiration for such Americans and what they represent is unrestrained.

    Anastasio Somoza’s warped nationalism and ego-centrism have been woven into his life ever since he began to be groomed for the presidency at the age of 7, forty-five years ago. It is said that he is the only West Point graduate to receive an entire army as a graduation present. Since then he has been surrounded by a legion of sycophants who strenuously avoid bearing bad tidings. This explains why Somoza still maintains, and believes, that the majority of Nicaraguans support him. If he ever has doubts, they are quickly stilled by his advisers.

    Somoza’s self-deception, together with his still unchallenged power over the Guard, makes prediction easier than usual – at least as to what he will try to do. There have been threats to his family in the past, but the negotiations that followed them always left the dynasty intact after superficial concessions. He will try that game again. But if the opposition now dealing with him keeps this record in mind, it will reject his proposals and the talks will break down. Somoza will be trying to split the opposition front and persuade the more conservative elements to go along with his “reform” proposals and thus recreate a shaky consensus of the elites. But this time, after the city-busting brutality of his Guard’s military actions, the opposition to Somoza is angrier and more widespread than every before. It may not be possible to patch things up.

    The present negotiations are being watched over, to some degree, by a three-nation committee of observers including the United States, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. Not outside power can be the arbiter of events in Nicaragua, least of all this country with its shameful record there. But the United States should implement a policy of positive non-involvement in Somoza’s tortured country by at least withdrawing our military mission and stopping any connection with the Guard. The policy of the United States and the OAS should be bent toward ending the violence and suffering that will last until the day when Somoza and Nicaragua are no longer inseparable.

This article first appeared in The Nation, 4 November 1978
© 1978 by Max Holland

A Luce Connection:Senator Keating, William Pawley,and the Cuban Missile Crisis

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By Max Holland

 

    Documentation from unexpected sources sheds new light on an old mystery that seemed unresolvable: how did Senator Kenneth Keating allegedly learned about the emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba before the Kennedy administration did?

    The new archival evidence not only reveals the intricacies behind this long-standing question, but also provides valuable insights into U.S. intelligence operations against Cuba in the early 1960s; the making of U.S. foreign policy during the Kennedy administration; and the rich opportunities for research about the Cold War in the four million pages of documents gathered under the John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992.

    This article originally appeared in Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Fall 1999), and may be purchased from MIT Press by clicking here.