Are
Presidents Afraid of the CIA?
By
Ray McGovern
December 29, 2009 |
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 Aug. 24
decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations.”
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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. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “CIA Torturers Running
Scared.”]
Panetta is even older than I, and
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 lawyers and 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 Sunday
TV 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 the CIA’s destruction of 91 tapes of the interrogation of
“high-value detainees.”
Durham had scarcely been heard from
when Holder added to his job-jar the task of conducting a preliminary
investigation regarding the CIA torture specialists. These are the ones whose
zeal led them to go beyond the already highly permissive Justice Department
guidelines for “harsh interrogation.”
Durham, clearly, is proceeding with all
deliberate speed (emphasis on “deliberate”). Someone has even suggested —
I trust, in jest — that he has been diverted to the search for the money and
other assets that Bernie Madoff stashed away.
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."
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 blowing up the Truman Library might help some.
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 Dec. 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’s 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 explained 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.”
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 Nov. 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 Dec. 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 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 Dec. 27, 1963, 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.”
“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 its substantive dog — a serious problem that persists to this day.
Fox
Guarding Hen House
The well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination.
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 small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize
any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s 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, Dulles 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 the Washington 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, columnists were asking 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 hit pay dirt 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’s book, JFK
and the Unspeakable.
After updating and arraying the
abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes the
answer is Yes.
Ray
McGovern now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During a 27-year career at CIA,
he served under nine CIA directors and in all four of CIA’s main directorates,
including operations. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).
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