Ray McGovern | Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA ?
In the past I have alluded to Panetta and the Seven
Dwarfs. The reference is to CIA
Director Leon Panetta and seven of his moral-dwarf predecessors—the ones who
sent President Barack Obama a letter on Sept. 18 asking him to “reverse Attorney General Holder’s
August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA
interrogations.”http://tinyurl.com/my4jc5
Panetta reportedly was also dead set against reopening the
investigation—as he was against release of the Justice Department’s “torture
memoranda” of 2002, as he has been against releasing pretty much anything at all—the
President’s pledges of a new era of openness,
notwithstanding. Panetta is even older than I, and I am aware that
hearing is among the first faculties to fail. Perhaps he heard
“error” when the President said “era.”
As for the benighted seven, they are more to be pitied than
scorned. No longer able to avail themselves of the services of
clever Agency lawyersand wordsmiths, they
put their names to a letter that reeked of self-interest—not to mention the
inappropriateness of asking a President to interfere with an investigation
already ordered by the Attorney General.
Three of the seven—George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael
Hayden—were themselves involved, in one way or another, in planning,
conducting, or covering up all manner of illegal actions, including torture,
assassination, and illegal eavesdropping. In this light, the most
transparent part of the letter may be the sentence in which they worry: “There
is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation
will remain narrowly focused.”
When asked about the letter on the Sunday TV talk shows on
Sept. 20, Obama was careful always to respond first by expressing obligatory
“respect” for the CIA and its
directors. With Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation, though, Obama did
allow himself a condescending quip. He commented, “I appreciate the
former CIA directors wanting to look out for
an institution that they helped to build.”
That quip was, sadly, the exception to the
rule. While Obama keeps repeating the mantra that “nobody is above
the law,” there is no real sign that he intends to face down Panetta and the
Seven Dwarfs—no sign that anyone has breathed new life into federal prosecutor
John Durham, to whom Holder gave the mandate for further “preliminary
investigation.” What is generally forgotten is that it was former Attorney
General Michael Mukasey who picked Durham
two years ago to investigate CIA ’s
destruction of 91 tapes of the interrogation of “high-value detainees.”
In any case, do not hold your breath for findings from Durham
anytime soon. Holder appears in no hurry. And President
Obama keeps giving off signals that he is afraid of getting crosswise with the CIA —that’s
right, afraid.
Not Just Paranoia
In that fear, President Obama stands in the tradition of a
dozen American presidents. Harry Truman and John Kennedy were the only
ones to take on the CIA
directly. Worst of all, evidence continues to build that the CIA
was responsible, at least in part, for the assassination of President
Kennedy. Evidence new to me came in response to things I included in
my article of Dec. 22, “Break the CIA in
Two.” http://tinyurl.com/yl46gl5
What follows can be considered a sequel that is based on the
kind of documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts positively lust.
Unfortunately for the CIA
operatives who were involved in the past activities outlined
below, the temptation to ask Panetta to put a SECRET stamp on the documentary
evidence will not work. Nothing short of torching the Truman Library
might conceivably help. But even that would be a largely feckless
“covert action,” copy machines having long since done their thing.
In my article of Dec. 22, I referred to Harry Truman’s op-ed
of exactly 46 years before, titled “Limit CIA
Role to Intelligence,” in which the former President expressed dismay at what
the Central Intelligence Agency had become just 16 years after he and Congress
created it.
The Washington Post published the op-ed on December 22, 1963 in its early
edition, but immediately excised it from later editions. Other media
ignored it. The long hand of the CIA ?
Truman wrote that he was “disturbed by the way CIA
has been diverted from its original assignment” to keep the President promptly
and fully informed and had become “an operational and at times policy-making
arm of the government.”
The Truman Papers
Documents in the Truman Library show that nine days after
Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sketched out in handwritten notes what he
wanted to say in the op-ed. He noted, among other things, that the CIA
had worked as he intended only “when I had control.”
In Truman’s view, misuse of the CIA
began in February 1953, when his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, named Allen
Dulles CIA Director. Dulles’
forte was overthrowing governments (in current parlance, “regime change”), and
he was quite good at it. With coups in Iran
(1953) and Guatemala
(1954) under his belt, Dulles was riding high in the late Fifties and moved Cuba
to the top of his to-do list.
Accustomed to the carte blanche given him by
Eisenhower, Dulles was offended when young President Kennedy came on the scene
and had the temerity to ask questions about the Bay of Pigs
adventure, which had been set in motion under Eisenhower. When
Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S.
combat forces, Dulles reacted with disdain and set out to mousetrap the new
President.
Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were
discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S.
Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that
was virtually certain to require the use of U.S.
combat forces. In his notes Dulles explains that, “when the chips
were down,” the new President would be forced by “the realities of the
situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit
the enterprise to fail.”
Additional detail came from a March 2001 conference on the Bay
of Pigs , which included CIA
operatives, retired military commanders, scholars, and
journalists. Daniel Schorr told National Public Radio that he had
gained one new perception as a result of the “many hours of talk and heaps of
declassified secret documents:”
“It was that the CIA
overlords of the invasion, Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Richard Bissell had
their own plan on how to bring the United States
into the conflict…What they expected was that the invaders would establish a
beachhead…and appeal for aid from the United
States …
“The assumption was that President Kennedy, who had
emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by public
opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots. American
forces, probably Marines, would come in to expand the beachhead.
“In fact, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA
covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed,” added Schorr.
The “enterprise” which Dulles said could not fail was, of
course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed
operations to assassinate him, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with
little or no attention to what the Russians might do in
reaction. Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak; fired Dulles and
his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion in April 1961; and
told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA
into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
The outrage was mutual, and when Kennedy himself was
assassinated on November 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman that the
disgraced Dulles and his outraged associates might not be above conspiring to
get rid of a President they felt was soft on Communism—and, incidentally, get
even.
In his op-ed of December
22, 1963 Truman warned: “The most important thing…was to
guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the
President into unwise decisions.” It is a safe bet that Truman had
the Bay of Pigs fiasco uppermost in mind.
Truman called outright for CIA ’s
operational duties [to] be terminated or properly used
elsewhere.” (This is as good a recommendation now as it was then, in
my view.)
On December 27, retired Admiral Sidney Souers, whom Truman
had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a “Dear Boss”
letter applauding Truman’s outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA
“a different animal than I tried to set up for you.” Souers
specifically lambasted the attempt “to conduct a ‘war’ invading Cuba
with a handful of men and without air cover.”
Souers also lamented the fact that the agency’s “principal
effort” had evolved into causing “revolutions in smaller countries around the
globe,” and added:
With so much emphasis on operations, it would not surprise
me to find that the matter of collecting and processing intelligence has suffered
some.”
Clearly, CIA ’s
operational tail was wagging the substantive dog—a serious problem that
persists to this day. For example, CIA
analysts are super-busy supporting operations in Afghanistan
and Pakistan ;
no one seems to have told them that they need to hazard a guess as to where
this is all leading and whether it makes any sense.
That is traditionally done in a National Intelligence
Estimate. Can you believe there at this late date there is still no
such Estimate? Instead, the President has chosen to rely on he
advice of Gen. David Petraeus, who many believe will be Obama’s opponent in the
2012 presidential election.
Fox Guarding Henhouse?
In any case, the well-connected Dulles got himself appointed
to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of
JFK’s assassination. Documents in the Truman Library show that he
then mounted a targeted domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any
future airing of Truman’s and Souers’ warnings about covert action.
So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext
to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence ,
Missouri . On the afternoon of April 17, 1964 he spent a half-hour
trying to get the former President to retract what he had said in his
op-ed. No dice, said Truman.
No problem, thought Dulles. Four days later, in a
formal memo for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA
General Counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction,
claiming that Truman told him theWashington Post article was “all wrong,”
and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”
No doubt Dulles thought it might be handy to have such a
memo in CIA files, just in case.
A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so,
because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it. In a
June 10, 1964 letter to the
managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his
critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA
to get involved in “strange activities.”
Dulles and Dallas
Dulles could hardly have expected to get Truman to recant
publicly. So why was it so important for Dulles to place in CIA
files a fabricated retraction. My guess is that in early 1964 he was
feeling a good bit of heat from those suggesting the CIA
might have been involved somehow in the Kennedy
assassination. Indeed, one or two not-yet-intimidated columnists
were daring to ask how the truth could ever come out with Allen Dulles on the
Warren Commission. Prescient.
Dulles feared, rightly, that Truman’s limited-edition op-ed
might yet get some ink, and perhaps even airtime, and raise serious questions
about covert action. Dulles would have wanted to be in position to
flash the Truman “retraction,” with the hope that this would nip any serious
questioning in the bud. The media had already shown how co-opted—er,
I mean “cooperative”—it could be.
As the de facto head of the Warren Commission,
Dulles was perfectly positioned to exculpate himself and any of his associates,
were any commissioners or investigators—or journalists—tempted to question
whether the killing in Dallas might have been a CIA
covert action.
Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA
operatives have a hand in killing President Kennedy and then covering it
up?
The most up-to-date—and, in my view, the best—dissection of
the assassination appeared last year in James Douglass’ book, JFK and the Unspeakable. After
updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more
interviews, Douglass concludes the answer is Yes.
This article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com.
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