The Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA)
that was established in September 1947. Its role was to evaluate intelligence
reports and coordinate the intelligence activities of the various
government departments in the interest of national security. Richard
Bissell joined the CIA and was placed in charge of the Directorate
for Plans, an organization instructed to conduct covert anti-Communist
operations around the world. His deputy was Richard
Helms, who had successfully mounted a mount a massive convert
campaign against the Communist Party during the post-war elections
in Italy.
The Directorate for Plans
was responsible for what became known as the CIA's Black Operations.
This involved a policy that was later to become known as Executive
Action
(a
plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power).
This including a coup d'état that overthrew the Guatemalan
government of Jacobo
Arbenz in
1954 after he introduced land reforms and nationalized the United
Fruit Company.
Other political leaders
deposed by Executive Action included Patrice
Lumumba of the Congo, the Dominican
Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, General
Abd al-Karim
Kassem of Iraq and Ngo
Dinh Diem,
the leader of South Vietnam. However,
his main target was Fidel
Castro who had established a socialist government in Cuba.
In March I960, President
Dwight
Eisenhower of
the United States approved a CIA
plan to overthrow Castro. The plan involved a budget of $13 million
to train "a paramilitary force outside Cuba for guerrilla action."
The strategy was organised by Bissell and Helms. An estimated 400
CIA officers were employed full-time to carry out what became known
as Operation Mongoose.
Sidney
Gottlieb of the CIA Technical Services Division was asked to come
up with proposals that would undermine Castro's popularity with the
Cuban people. Plans included a scheme to spray a television studio
in which he was about to appear with an hallucinogenic drug and contaminating
his shoes with thallium which they believed would cause the hair in
his beard to fall out.
These schemes were rejected
and instead Bissell decided to arrange the assassination of Fidel
Castro.
In
September 1960, Richard
Bissell and
Allen W. Dulles, the director of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), initiated
talks with two leading figures of the Mafia, Johnny
Roselli and
Sam
Giancana.
Later, other crime bosses such as Carlos
Marcello,
Santos
Trafficante and Meyer
Lansky
became involved in this plot against Castro.
Robert
Maheu, a veteran of CIA counter-espionage activities, was instructed
to offer the Mafia $150,000 to kill Fidel
Castro. The advantage of employing the Mafia for this work is
that it provided CIA with a credible cover story. The Mafia were known
to be angry with Castro for closing down their profitable brothels
and casinos in Cuba. If the assassins were killed or captured the
media would accept that the Mafia were working on their own.
The
Federal
Bureau of Investigation had
to be brought into this plan as part of the deal involved protection
against investigations against the Mafia in the United States. Castro
was later to complain
that there were twenty ClA-sponsered attempts on his life. Eventually
Johnny Roselli and his friends became
convinced that the Cuban revolution could not be reversed by simply
removing its leader. However, they continued to play along with this
CIA plot in order to prevent them being prosecuted for criminal offences
committed in the United States.
When John
F. Kennedy replaced
Dwight
Eisenhower as
president of the United States he was told about the CIA
plan to invade Cuba. Kennedy had doubts
about the venture but he was afraid he would be seen as soft on communism
if he refused permission for it to go ahead. Kennedy's advisers convinced
him that Fidel
Castro was an
unpopular leader and that once the invasion started the Cuban people
would support the ClA-trained forces.
On April 14, 1961, B-26
planes began bombing Cuba's airfields. After the raids Cuba was left
with only eight planes
and seven pilots. Two days later five merchant ships carrying 1,400
Cuban exiles arrived at the Bay
of Pigs. The attack was a total failure. Two of the ships
were sunk, including the ship that was carrying most of the supplies.
Two of the planes that were attempting to give air-cover were also
shot down. Within seventy-two hours all the invading troops had been
killed, wounded or had surrendered.
In February, 1962, the
FBI became aware of this CIA
assassination plot on Fidel
Castro. When
Robert
Kennedy, U.S. Attorney General,
found out about these plots
in Febuary 1962, he was furious. He turned against Richard
Helms for
not telling him of the plots, and for using the same gangsters he
was trying to prosecute. However, Kennedy did not bring an end to
the operation. Instead he insisted that he was kept informed about
the development of the project.
In April 1962, William
Harvey took control of the ZR/RIFLE
project. He told Johnny Roselli that
Santos
Trafficante and
Sam Giancana had to cease involvement
in the project to kill Castro. Ted
Shackley, the
new head of JM WAVE, also began to play
a more important role in planning the assassination.
Eventually Johnny
Roselli and his friends became convinced that the Cuban revolution
could not be reversed by simply removing its leader. However, they
continued to play along with this CIA plot in order to prevent them
being prosecuted for criminal offences committed in the United
States.
In February, 1963, William
Harvey
was removed as head of the ZR/RIFLE
project.
Harvey was now sent to Italy where he became
Chief of Station in Rome. Harvey was convinced that Robert
Kennedy had
been responsible for his demotion. A friend of Harvey's said that
he "hated Bobby Kennedy's guts with a purple passion".
On
22nd November, 1963, President John
F. Kennedy
was
assassinated. Rumours began to circulate that gang bosses such as
Johnny
Roselli,
Santos Trafficante, Carlos
Marcello
and Sam
Giancana,
were involved in the crime.
Some CIA agents such as David Atlee Phillips,
William Harvey and David
Morales were
also implicated in this conspiracy.
In 1970 it seemed that
Salvador Allende and his Socialist Workers'
Party would win the general election in Chile.
Various multinational companies, including International Telephone
and Telegraph (ITT), feared what would happen if Allende gained control
of the country. Richard Helms agreed to
use funds supplied by these companies to help the right-wing party
gain power. When this strategy ended in failure, Nixon ordered Helms
to help the Chilean armed forces to overthrow Allende. On 11th September,
1973, a military coup removed Allende's government from power. Allende
died in the fighting in the presidential palace in Santiago and General
Augusto Pinochet replaced him as president.
In 1975 the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee began investigating the CIA. Senator Stuart Symington
asked Richard Helms if the CIA had been
involved in the removal of Salvador Allende.
Helms replied no. He also insisted that he had not passed money to
opponents of Allende.
Investigations by the CIA's
Inspector General and by Frank
Church and
his Select
Committee on Intelligence Activities showed that Hems had lied
to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They also discovered that
Helms had been involved in illegal domestic surveillance and the murders
of Patrice Lumumba, General
Abd al-Karim
Kassem and Ngo
Dinh Diem.
In 1977 Helms was
found guilty of lying to Congress and received a suspended two-year
prison sentence.
Open
Debate on the Kennedy Assassination
(1)
Jacobo
Arbenz, speech after he had been deposed as leader of Guatemala
in 1954.
They have used the pretext of anti-communism... The truth is very
different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of
the fruit company and the other US monopolies which have invested
great amounts of money in Latin America and fear that the example
of Guatemala would be followed by other Latin countries... I was elected
by a majority of the people of Guatemala, but I have had to fight
under difficult conditions. The truth is that the sovereignty of a
people cannot be maintained without the material elements to defend
it.... I took over the presidency with great faith in the democratic
system, in liberty and the possibility of achieving economic independence
for Guatemala. I continue to believe that this program is just. I
have not violated my faith in democratic liberties, in the independence
of Guatemala and in all the good which is the future of humanity.
(2)
Harry S. Truman, Washington Post
(21st December, 1963)
For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has
been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational
and at times a policy-making arm of the government... I never had
any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into
peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and
embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable
to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has
been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted
as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue and a subject
for cold war enemy propaganda.
(3)
Chauncey
Holt was interviewed
by John Craig,
Phillip Rogers and Gary
Shaw for
Newsweek magazine (19th October, 1991)
There may be certain
types of assassination that they're good at, but other types they're
not. So they enlisted the better known names, Giancana, Roselli, in
Operation Mongoose. And you had Edward Lansdale, and William King
Harvey, all the guys who became legends. And there is no use in expounding
on their careers and how they got involved in this.
Also, one
of the lesser known people involved in this was Peter Licavoli. Licavoli
was a confidant, close to both Giancana and Roselli. And he had a
ranch in Tucson, Arizona. It was very nicely placed and had a landing
strip on it. So he was involved in Mongoose because of the location
(of his ranch), and it was a nice place to have meetings and they
had meetings there. His involvement in Mongoose was a marginal type
thing.
I really don't
think that Roselli or Giancana or Maheu ever were all that serious
about knocking off Castro. They wanted to get some leverage against
the government. They were trying to deport Roselli, the were chasing
Giancana all over the landscape and they were willing to use anything
they could to actually give them an edge.
(4)
Leroy
Fletcher Prouty, The
Secret Team (1973)
The Secret Team (ST)
being described herein consists of security-cleared individuals in
and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered
by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and who react to
those data, when it seems appropriate to them, with paramilitary plans
and activities, e.g. training and "advising" - a not exactly
impenetrable euphemism for such things as leading into battle and
actual combat - Laotian tribal troops, Tibetan rebel horsemen, or
Jordanian elite Palace Guards.
Membership on the Team,
granted on a "need-to-know" basis, varies with the nature
and location of the problems that come to its attention, and its origins
derive from that sometimes elite band of men who served with the World
War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under the father of them
all, General "Wild Bill" William J. Donovan, and in the
old CIA.
The power of the Team
derives from its vast intragovernmental undercover infrastructure
and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual
funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including
foreign and domestic publishing houses. The Secret Team has very close
affiliations with elements of power in more than three-score foreign
countries and is able when it chooses to topple governments, to create
governments, and to influence governments almost anywhere in the world.
Whether or not the Secret
Team had anything whatsoever to do with the deaths of Rafael Trujillo,
Ngo Dinh Diem, Ngo Dinh Nhu, Dag Hammerskjold, John F. Kennedy, Robert
F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and others may never be revealed,
but what is known is that the power of the Team is enhanced by the
"cult of the gun" and by its sometimes brutal and always
arbitrary anti-Communist flag waving, even when real Communism had
nothing to do with the matter at hand.
At the heart of the Team,
of course, are a handful of top executives of the CIA and of the National
Security Council (NSC), most notably the chief White House adviser
to the President on foreign policy affairs. Around them revolves a
sort of inner ring of Presidential officials, civilians, and military
men from the Pentagon, and career professionals of the intelligence
community. It is often quite difficult to tell exactly who many of
these men really are, because some may wear a uniform and the rank
of general and really be with the CIA and others may be as inconspicuous
as the executive assistant to some Cabinet officer's chief deputy.
(5)
Richard
Bissell,
Reflections of a Cold Warrior (1996)
(The Mafia-connection aspect) did not originate with me - and I had
no desire to become personally involved in its implementation, mainly
because I was not competent to handle relations with the Mafia. It
is true, however, that, when the idea was presented to me, I supported
it, and as Deputy Director for Plans I was responsible for the necessary
decisions.... Sheffield Edwards, the director of the Agency's Office
of Security - and his deputy became the case officers for the Agency's
relations with the Mafia. Edwards was frank with me about his efforts,
and I authorized him to continue... I do not recall any specific contact
with the Mafia, but Doris Mirage, my secretary at the time, does...
I hoped the Mafia would
achieve success. My philosophy during my last two or three years in
the Agency was very definitely that the end justified the means, and
I was not going to be held back. Shortly after I left the CIA, however,
I came to believe that it had been a mistake to involve the Mafia
in an assassination attempt. This is partly a moral judgment, but
I must admit it is also partly a pragmatic judgment.
(6)
Leroy
Fletcher Prouty, An
Introduction to the Assassination Business (1975)
Assassination is big business.
It is the business of the CIA and any other power that can pay for
the "hit" and control the assured getaway. The CIA brags
that its operations in Iran in 1953 led to the pro-Western attitude
of that important country. The CIA also takes credit for what it calls
the "perfect job" in Guatemala. Both successes were achieved
by assassination. What is this assassination business and how does
it work?
In most countries there
is little or no provision for change of political power. Therefore
the strongman stays in power until he dies or until he is removed
by a coup d'etat - which often means by assassination...
The CIA has many gadgets
in its arsenal and has spent years training thousands of people how
to use them. Some of these people, working perhaps for purposes and
interests other than the CIA's, use these items to carry out burglaries,
assassinations, and other unlawful activities - with or without the
blessing of the CIA.
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