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Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board


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16 hours ago, Larry Hancock said:

On the Cuban missile crisis related FIB concerns, its important to remember that the FIB was one of a series of similar groups established over time to allow brainstorming and even contentious discussion of how America was responding to the existential world communist threat - all of them  designed to thrash issues around and give the President an education before he personally engaged in final decision making.  That was a conceptual approach begun under President Truman and continued under Eisenhower - during an era before the emergence of what has been called the "operational presidency" where communications and access to information tended to demand less dialog and more military like decision making by Presidents.  It was the Cuban Missile Crisis which actually demonstrated that all the structured brainstorming and dialog on policy might become moot under certain circumstances.

Following the BOP, JFK and of course RFK treated the challenge of Castro and Cuba as something very special, almost a personal challenge. To that extent certain of the existing policy groups were minimized and special groups focused on Cuba or Cuba and Laos (from a covert operations perspective) came to be in the drivers seat. Given operational security the FIB was probably frozen out but during the next couple of decades a number of the practices of the immediate post-war period were going to change.  Its amazing when you study the Guatemala project and compare it to the new Cuba projects (AMTRUNK, AMLASH,AMWORLD of 1963/64).

Things would change even more in the future...take a look at the Wiki on the FIB and see what happened to it beginning under George Bush. And of course take a look at today's headlines to see how far such practices can ultimately fall.

One of the things I noticed was that the FIB was only meeting once a month, or even every other month. The Cuban Missile Crisis called for decision making on a day to day or even moment by moment basis. The Intelligence Board was just too unwieldy for that.

 

I've also been reading about the Anatoliy Golitsyn defection. France trying to steal our nuclear secrets, and how much the French SDECE was compromised by the KGB and whether those secrets were being passed along to the Russians. In these FIAB minutes, I've seen lots of concern with the John Dunlap case, but, so far, not much on Golitsyn. It could be buried in all those sections that are redacted.

 

Steve Thomas

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