A few weeks before Helms became DDO the CIA general counsel, Lawrence Houston, put on record his opinion regarding the legal basis for covert action, admitting that “there is no statutory authorization to any agency for the conduct of such activities.” No explicit prohibition existed either, Houston added, and “some of the covert Cold War operations are related to intelligence within a broad interpretation” of the National Security Act of 1947. Examining the language of the law, the CIA lawyer specifically conceded its failure to cover paramilitary operations—the clause that read “such other duties and functions” in the act, always cited in this regard, was explicitly tied to “intelligence affecting the national security.” Thus, wrote Houston in this January 15, 1962, memorandum, “it would be stretching that section too far to include a Guatemala or a Cuba even though intelligence and counterintelligence are essential to such activities.”

  Houston’s conclusion: “Therefore, the Executive Branch under the direction of the President was acting without specific statutory authorization, and CIA was the agent selected for their conduct.”

  Defending the government’s conduct in these paramilitary operations, the CIA general counsel was reduced to arguing that “it can be said that the Congress as a whole knows that money is appropriated to CIA and knows that generally a portion of it goes for clandestine activities. To this extent we say that we have Congressional approval of these activities.” Thus the CIA’s own legal counsel saw no general mandate for paramilitary operations or political action, no specific authorization, and only the weak claim that Congress had approved by means of appropriating money. It is worth noting that a parallel argument that Congress had in effect approved a declaration of war by appropriating money for the Vietnam War would be ruled invalid by the courts.

  Larry Houston believed it was for the administration to decide what and how many Cold War activities. Prodded by Bobby Kennedy and Max Taylor, it did. Under procedures adopted after the Bay of Pigs, any project costing more than $3 million had to be approved. The CIA could conduct operations budgeted for less than $250,000 on its own. After October 1962 the Special Group expected to be appraised of every covert project.

  From the beginning of Kennedy’s presidency to the fall of 1962, according to the Special Group’s own records, it approved 550 covert operations. During the first half of 1963 it sanctioned another 23 actions (out of 35 proposed). Figures given to the congressional investigators in 1975—163 covert operations between January 1961 and November 1963, compared to 104 approved during the Eisenhower years—evidently count only activities above a certain threshold. Even so, a later internal audit found that in 1961–1962 the Special Group considered only about 16 percent of operations actually initiated.

  The gains from these activities were limited. On the one hand, Kennedy tightened his control; on the other, he brought the locus of responsibility closer to the White House. McGeorge Bundy recalls:

  In 1961 I listened with a beginner’s credulity to the arguments of the eager operatives who promoted what became the Bay of Pigs. . . . Through the next two years and more, I watched with increasing skepticism as the Kennedy Administration kept the pressure on the CIA for more and better—if smaller—covert operations.

  I think I played a small part—his own learning from experience was much more important—in President Kennedy’s growing recognition that covert action simply did not work and caused more trouble than it was worth.

  Kennedy’s demise ended the potential for a change in policy. And Mac Bundy failed to stem the rising tide of project proposals.

  But DDO Helms faced a new difficulty when Kennedy reduced the autonomy enjoyed by CIA stations. The degree of control an ambassador should have over CIA operations in his assigned country had been a touchy issue for years. The experiences of Chester Bowles in India, William Sebald in Burma, and John Allison in Indonesia illustrate the problem. Wise station chiefs kept their ambassadors informed, as Jacob Esterline had done with Tom Mann in Guatemala (when Mann had been ambassador to El Salvador), but this had been voluntary. After a 1958 interagency study, Eisenhower gave the CIA virtually complete autonomy, directing that the ambassador’s writ stopped at the station chief’s door. The spooks, not the diplomats, sat in the driver’s seat.

  President Kennedy reversed this policy. Among the PFIAB recommendations of 1961 had been one that ambassadors be fully informed of CIA activities in their countries. Kennedy agreed. State Department official U. Alexis Johnson drafted a letter for JFK’s signature, dispatched in May 1961. The Kennedy letter established a “country team” concept: CIA could sit on embassy senior councils but the ambassador would be the authority. John Kenneth Galbraith’s troubles with the CIA in India show that State’s authority still had far to go.

  As deputy director for operations, Dick Helms also had to contend with a new boss. John Alex McCone took over as director of central intelligence in November 1961. A Californian, and from outside the agency, the fifty-nine-year-old McCone opened to widespread suspicion but left with many regarding him as one of the greats. Archie Roosevelt, Kermit’s cousin, newly returned from a tour in Madrid, looked at McCone and saw in him “just the director the Agency needed at this critical point.” McCone had plentiful experience as a corporate manager, including some relevant to agency interests, such as CEO of a shipping company, but he was an engineer and entrepreneur. McCone understood power in Washington too, having been chairman of Eisenhower’s Atomic Energy Commission and an air force official during the Truman years. A self-made millionaire, he would be immune to fear of losing his job.

  Director McCone had a problem on covert operations with the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. After the Bay of Pigs the president instructed the board to monitor this aspect more closely. Allen Dulles had begun swinging the door back, telling PFIAB that he had violated secrecy rules by handing over data, but McCone tried to close the door all the way. Alex, as he liked to be called, refused to furnish data on Special Group matters, using the excuse that these were his own to pursue. Neither Jim Killian nor fellow board members accepted that the president’s panel should be denied data for inquiries on behalf of the chief executive.

  So began a fight that lasted over a year. Board staff approached McCone’s deputy, Gen. Marshall Carter, to schedule a briefing. Carter delayed. A week later he refused. The briefing, finally scheduled for June 1962, was then canceled the day before. The board received dollops of information from time to time—a presentation on Laos here, a comment on the Congo there—to placate them. McCone told Killian he had spoken to the president and JFK agreed with him. Killian shot back that he’d talk to Jack Kennedy himself. National security adviser McGeorge Bundy, a member of the Special Group in his White House capacity, agreed with Killian. On June 24 Jim Killian had dinner with Alex McCone and hammered out a compromise—the DCI would present a briefing book specially prepared by the CIA. For the first time the agency worked up a guide to ongoing covert activity.

  As it turned out, the McCone-Killian compromise was only a tactical retreat. First the CIA proposed to brief only those covert operations that involved aerial reconnaissance—one way to sort out big fry from the small fish—but when it came to the latest Cuba project, PFIAB found (because the CIA had not briefed on it) that no overall plan seemed to exist. By late 1962 the Killian Board wanted access to Special Group records. This happened in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where JFK ordered Killian to produce a specific postmortem. Director McCone could hardly resist. The CIA tried to get away with exhibiting only records on aerial surveillance of Cuba. Again on March 25, 1963, McCone told Kennedy the Killian Board reports created a misleading record that might leak and be “very damaging” to the agency. Kennedy answered that the advice of an independent board seemed invaluable to him; as for the rest, “he thought the Board’s record of discretion was excellent.” Typical of the CIA approach would be the PFIAB meeting of April 23, where Lyman Kirkpatrick asked that discussion on the Cuba operation exclude diplomat Sterling Cottrell, who headed the government’s interagency Cuba task force, because he too was not supposed to know about it.

  As PFIAB chairman, James Killian created—and his successor Clark Clifford continued—a subcommittee on covert operations. This group finally received the agency’s general briefings. The panel included Gordon Gray, returned in a new incarnation; William Langer, historian and senior CIA analyst from early in its history; and retired diplomat Robert Murphy. In early April they received Cord Meyer, chief of CIA’s International Organizations Division, a logical official to inform the group on actions in Latin America other than Cuba, which involved a good deal of labor and political work, such as the project then under way in Guyana. Bob Murphy, not impressed, told the full panel that Meyer’s presentation consisted of “light touches.” Meyer conveyed the impression that covert operations were of “such routine nature” that they did not rise to the level of importance that PFIAB “attached to covert action operations and requirements.”

  This ploy did not work. A few weeks later the Clifford Board demanded and received full data on Cuba, as they did again in June, when Clifford asked member James Doolittle to survey areas where the CIA had not implemented PFIAB recommendations Kennedy had approved. A fresh briefing in September featured CIA’s big guns, not just Meyer but Richard Helms and Des FitzGerald. In September and November John McCone at PFIAB defended the CIA’s role in South Vietnam against publicly reported charges of meddling in Saigon politics. Among other things, he denied that the agency had anything to do with the coup d’état that overthrew South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem.

  Board members became increasingly concerned about the system’s self-correcting ability. They found none. At an early meeting one member remarked how impressed he had been—possibly a result of the Bay of Pigs postmortems going on just then—with how the Special Group could monitor implementation. But then they heard Max Taylor say his group had no such capacity, a judgment seconded on another occasion by State Department Special Group member U. Alexis Johnson. Queried in September 1963 by Langer’s covert action panel, Thomas Hughes of the State intelligence unit noted that the department usually received project proposals only at the last minute, just before the Special Group had to decide on them. The CIA admitted this practice and justified it saying that McCone insisted on reviewing these documents before he would allow them out of Langley. The Clifford Board remained unhappy.

  Beyond PFIAB, McCone had problems managing the components of CIA’s far-flung intelligence empire. The covers and contacts staff had placed people in journalism, broadcasting, business, and academe. Within the Pentagon itself there were between seven hundred and a thousand “units” that supported or provided cover for the CIA, ranging from post boxes and telephones to full-scale formations with men and equipment.

  A singular headache was the array of CIA proprietaries. When McCone succeeded Dulles, preparations were already in place for the latest addition to the proprietaries, what became a complex of insurance and investment companies formed to handle contract agents’ and survivors’ benefits arising from the Cuban affair. Helms set up a Domestic Operations Division to manage the proprietaries, including this one. It also ran a program that picked up odd bits of intelligence by interviewing Americans who traveled to the denied-area countries or foreign nationals resident in the United States. An inspector general review of the unit in the mid-1960s found haphazard financial direction of the proprietaries by the division.

  Fittingly, perhaps, Tracy Barnes became chief of the Domestic Operations Division, and Howard Hunt a senior staffer. Another was Hans Tofte, who finally brought Barnes down by getting the agency in the newspapers again under dubious circumstances. A junior CIA officer, looking at an apartment Tofte offered to rent, saw secret documents in Tofte’s home and reported the security violation. Agency minders carted away several boxes of materials Tofte had taken from the office. Matters got out of hand when Tofte alleged that the security officers had stolen jewelry from his wife. He sued the CIA, with attendant negative publicity. Tofte lost the case and his job. Barnes retired soon thereafter.

  Then there was Air America. Aviation law changes in Taiwan had posed obstacles for Civil Air Transport. The CIA had already been moving in the direction of reorganization. In 1957 it created the Pacific Corporation, a Delaware-registered holding company, taking over assets of the shadowy American Airedale Corporation, then formed Air America under it in 1959. Pacific Corporation had headquarters in Washington and field offices in Taipei. Air America was the ostensibly private charter firm under its slogan, “Anything, Anywhere, Anytime . . . Professionally!” A rump CAT remained on Taiwan as a Chinese domestic airline while extensive maintenance facilities were spun off as Air Asia. Pacific Corporation held residual interests. This proprietary was massive: at its height Pacific Corporation employed 20,000 people, more than the CIA itself. Air America directly employed 5,600, up to 8,000 if support personnel are counted, and owned or leased 167 aircraft. In 1970 it averaged 30,000 flights per month. In 1973 its Pentagon contracts amounted to more than $41 million.

  Much smaller but still significant was Southern Air Transport, which grew enough to have semi-autonomous corporate divisions for Atlantic and Pacific operations. This company both owned and leased DC-6 or C-54 propeller-driven transports, Boeing 727 jets, and the civilian version of Lockheed’s C-130. One example of the shell games played here is a DC-6A aircraft (tail number N89BL) originally owned by American Airlines. In June 1960 World Airways bought the plane, leasing it the same day to Southern Air, which that day leased it on to Air America. At other times Air America lent money to Southern Air. As support for the war in Southeast Asia loomed larger, Southern Air won a $3.7 million air force contract to move cargo and passengers on interisland routes in the Pacific.

  Another important air proprietary was Intermountain Aviation. Centered at an airstrip in Marana, Arizona, northwest of Tucson, Intermountain had been formed in the late 1950s as an aircraft modification and maintenance activity, originally the Sonora Flying Service. It acquired Marana from Beiser Aviation Corporation. The base had long been a center for air force crew training, and the CIA soon used it for this as well. Once succeeding in making their first solo flights, pilots were dunked in the swimming pool that featured among the base’s amenities. Tibetan partisans went there to learn how to parachute. After the Bay of Pigs, Gar Thorsrud showed up at Marana as president of Intermountain. His chief lieutenants, Connie M. Seigrist and Douglas R. Price, had been his deputies at Trampoline in the Cuba project. Intermountain furnished the B-17 aircraft—a CIA plane first acquired for Indonesia—used in the James Bond movie Thunderball for a thrilling scene in which the spy is picked up from the sea. In 1966 more than a hundred B-26 bombers sat on the apron ready to refurbish for operations. Extending our example of CIA’s aircraft shell games, in 1967 the DC-6A previously mentioned was reregistered to Intermountain Aviation.

  Managing the proprietaries, including many more than mentioned here, was a formidable task. The CIA used a combination of interlocking boards of directors plus agency personnel working under cover. George A. Doole, a former Pan Am pilot who joined the agency in the early 1950s, is the best known. When Air America was formed, Doole became an equal shareholder with Pacific Corporation, though the majority shareholders by far were Taiwanese persons, who themselves may have been stand-ins for the agency. Headquarters management was vested in the Domestic Operations Division. On February 5, 1963, Director McCone created an Executive Committee for Air Proprietary Operations to get a handle on at least some of the empire. Lawrence Houston chaired the EXCOMAIR, which included representatives of the DO and the CIA comptroller. Houston had saved the CAT relationship by recommending it be continued back in 1956, when the 5412 Group considered liquidating the proprietary, without which Indonesia, Tibet, and Cuba would not even have been possible. Now he experienced the real headaches involved. EXCOMAIR administered the proprietaries directly, effectively taking them away from Tracy Barnes’s division.

  In 1968 the agency’s inspector general, by then Gordon Stewart, conducted a study of the air proprietaries. Although some of his own staff protested that Stewart’s criticisms went too far, it is reported—strikingly—that the CIA could not establish exactly how many aircraft it owned.

  As DCI, John McCone made no pretense to micromanagement. A California businessman, he understood that experts like Houston and Helms knew their jobs better than he could hope to. McCone gave his component chiefs much more freedom than had Allen Dulles. Richard Helms appreciated that. As DDO, Helms encouraged CIA efforts in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. By the mid-1960s Helms had almost as many people working in the DO as in the entire State Department—more than a third of CIA’s personnel. A former officer records that almost 2,000 covert action experts were on board, as against 4,200 working in espionage or other clandestine service functions. The bulk of the paramilitary people were in the Special Operations Division. The DO had about 4,800 officers in the area divisions. Far East was the largest with about 1,500, Africa the smallest with just 300 officers. Apart from the DCI’s contingency fund, the Directorate for Operations spent almost 60 percent of the CIA’s budget. A lot of that money went to pursue Washington’s vendetta against Fidel Castro.

  14

  The Secret War Against Castro

  FOR ED LANSDALE, Kennedy’s presidency became a roller-coaster ride, fraught with threat and opportunity, up one moment, down the next. Lansdale’s promotion to brigadier general, recently confirmed, was capped by suggestions that he be made the next U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. That possibility evaporated with objections variously attributed to Dean Rusk or Robert McNamara. Certainly the fifty-three-year-old warrior had his troubles with the secretary of defense. Lansdale once described the last time McNamara allowed him to deliver a brief about Vietnam: trying to give some sense of the unique character of that conflict, the secret warrior brought a sack into McNamara’s office, held it above the desk, and dumped an array of knives, pistols, punji sticks, and similar exotica on its surface. The display only scandalized the secretary of defense. But Lansdale’s forte had always been propaganda—back to advertising before World War II. McNamara’s shock proved insufficient to move him to dismiss Lansdale, so the air force general stayed on. For their part, Max Taylor and Walt Rostow failed to keep Lansdale off their mission to survey the South Vietnam situation in the fall of 1961.