The Dulles Debate -- Assassination COO? Back-Up Patsy?

[Cliff Varnell]

There is a widely held view promoted by such authors as David Talbot and James DiEugenio that only Allen Dulles had the connections and motivations to pull off the Kennedy assassination.

Paul Brancato and I have had a productive debate over this issue, which deserves its’ own thread.

On the “Freeport Sulphur” thread I cited The Corson Scenario (emphasis added)

Joseph Trento, The Secret History of the CIA, pgs 334-5:

<quote on>

Who changed the coup into the murder of Diem, Nhu and a Catholic priest accompanying them? To this day, nothing has been found in government archives tying the killings to either John or Robert Kennedy. So how did the tools and talents developed by Bill Harvey for ZR/RIFLE and Operation MONGOOSE get exported to Vietnam? Kennedy immediately ordered (William R.) Corson to find out what had happened and who was responsible. The answer he came up with: “On instructions from Averell Harriman…. The orders that ended in the deaths of Diem and his brother originated with Harriman and were carried out by Henry Cabot Lodge’s own military assistant.”

Having served as ambassador to Moscow and governor of New York, W. Averell Harriman was in the middle of a long public career. In 1960, President-elect Kennedy appointed him ambassador-at-large, to operate “with the full confidence of the president and an intimate knowledge of all aspects of United States policy.” By 1963, according to Corson, Harriman was running “Vietnam without consulting the president or the attorney general.”

The president had begun to suspect that not everyone on his national security team was loyal. As Corson put it, “Kenny O’Donnell (JFK’s appointments secretary) was convinced that McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, was taking orders from Ambassador Averell Harriman and not the president. He was especially worried about Michael Forrestal, a young man on the White House staff who handled liaison on Vietnam with Harriman.”

At the heart of the murders was the sudden and strange recall of Sagon Station Chief Jocko Richardson and his replacement by a no-name team barely known to history. The key member was a Special Operations Army officer, John Michael Dunn, who took his orders, not from the normal CIA hierarchy but from Harriman and Forrestal.

According to Corson, “John Michael Dunn was known to be in touch with the coup plotters,” although Dunn’s role has never been made public. Corson believes that Richardson was removed so that Dunn, assigned to Ambassador Lodge for “special operations,” could act without hindrance.

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On May 31 Paul posted:

<quote on, emphasis added>

Cliff - thanks for posting these excerpts. I've read them before. For me it does not document the allegations. I'm not saying it didn't happen. What is clear to me is that the change of station chief was instrumental. Would that not implicate Army Intelligence? Lodge was high ranking Army reserve, I think Major General. I recognize that we are not really privy to the workings of power at the highest levels, and that guys like Lemnitzer or Helms or Dulles may be acting on instructions from Bundy or Harriman. I still suspect however that Harriman himself is not the real culprit. I don't think we will ever see an order in writing that proves Corson's claim. If you have been able to document Corson's claim that Harriman ordered the change in CIA station Chief I'd love to see it.

<quote off>

Lodge ordered it.  Am I privy to possible communications between WASP kingpin Henry Cabot Lodge and WASP kingpin Averell Harriman? No.

It's not my scenario -- it's the Corson Scenario, which challenges the claim that only Allen Dulles could marshal the top notch death squad required to whack Kennedy.

On June 1 Paul Brancato posted:

<quote on>

… Btw, did you see the info on Prescott Bush inviting Dulles to dinner after he was fired as CIA chief, a dinner to which Dulles brought his successor John McCone? I mention it because I know for sure that you know of the deep connections between Harriman and Dulles, and Prescott Bush, and Clarence Dillon, etc.

<quote off>

On June 4 Paul posted to Chris Newton:

<quote on>

Do you agree with Varnell that Dulles was approaching senility and was a back up patsy? I'm more interested in his relationships with Prescott Bush and Harriman.

<quote off>

Robert Lovett was a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, a Skull and Bones man.

Prescott Bush was a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, Skull & Bones man.

Averell Harriman of Brown Brothers Harriman, Skull and Bones.man.

Harriman and Lovett were life-long friends and allies – their Dads worked together running the Union Pacific Railroad.

But on the subject of Allen Dulles there was a major disagreement: Lovett wanted Dulles fired, while Harriman/Bush wanted him kept on.

Joe Kennedy wanted Dulles fired, and he put his son under the wing of Robert Lovett and within a year Dulles was gone.

Why the divide between these life-long allies?

Harriman/Bush were in on the drug trade and used those State-Department-upsetting CIA operations cowboys for gun/dope running?

As to Allen Dulles being a back up patsy – I have lots of questions to ask adherents to the “Dulles COO Scenario” as to the Bay of Pigs.  It’s easier to view Dulles in the context of back- up-patsy-hood if one views his role in the BOP fiasco as that of a patsy.

Talbot describes him as hopeless checked out during the BOP operation – as if that were some multi-dimensional chess move!

Why did Dulles go to Puerto Rico instead of Quarters Eye over the invasion weekend?

 

Edited June 13, 2017 by Cliff Varnell

[Michael Clark]

I'll first point out out that the COO vs. Patsy scenario is a non-sequitor; one situation does not necessarily follow from the negation of the other. There are other options.

 

I am currently of the mind that the juggernouhgt that cultivated the assassination more resembles a spider than a snake. Moreover the legs of the spider served vastly different functions including: Execution, cover-up, messy cover-up and passive-aggressive functions. Another analogy I have been entertaining is a comparison to xylem and phloem. The point is that some of these legs would only function and be culpable in one direction, while other legs function in the reverse; 0r more precisely, pre and post asssassination. Foreknowledge is another factor but, at this point, I am pretty sure that JFK, himself, was flying on a wing and a prayer.

Right now I am seeing Dulles as being part of a phloem leg, part of the cover-up. Yet as we see all over this case, people are a hairs breath from being implicated in one way, or multiple ways. I think Dulles' proximity to some execution operatives (xylem spider legs) forced him to have no doubt as to what he needed to do  for the cover-up (as a phloem spider leg).

If Dulles was getting Dull in his old age, that would not recommend him for a position in the planning or execution of the plot, but it would or could recommend him as a point man for an operation which was meant to fail, the mission of truth and justice. Incompetence and culpability,  pre-requisites for a lead position on the WC.

Cheers,

Michael

Edited June 12, 2017 by Michael Clark

[Paul Brancato]

My opinion is that Dulles was powerful enough. I appreciate Cliff's detailed and nuanced opinions, and his characterizations of our communications. And I understand that Dulles was part of a power structure, not a lone wolf. But back up patsy goes too far in my opinion. Cliff - would you share your source on the Harriman/Lovett split on Dulles? I've never read it anywhere.

[Chris Newton]

4 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

quote off>

On June 4 Paul posted to Chris Newton:

<quote on>

Do you agree with Varnell that Dulles was approaching senility and was a back up patsy? I'm more interested in his relationships with Prescott Bush and Harriman.

<quote off>

Cliff,

I agree that Harriman, Bush & Co. are equally suspicious as Dulles and Angleton. But, like John Newman, I think J.J. Angleton was the coup's "inside man" in the CIA and I have difficulty separating Angleton from Dulles. Would JJA keep his "Georgetown Set" best bro' in the dark?

I also don't doubt that Dulles was mentally incapacitated near-about his demise but I don't see any indication of that in the WC Executive transcripts. Dulles seems perfectly lucid to me in those sessions.

[Roger DeLaria]

4 hours ago, Michael Clark said:

I'll first point out out that the COO vs. Patsy scenario is a non-sequitor; one situation does not necessarily follow from the negation of the other. There are other options.

 

I am currently of the mind that the juggernouhgt that cultivated the assassination more resembles a spider than a snake. Moreover the legs of the spider served vastly different functions including: Execution, cover-up, messy cover-up and passive-aggressive functions. Another analogy I have been entertaining is a comparison to xylem and phloem. The point is that some of these legs would only function and be culpable in one direction, while other legs function in the reverse; 0r more precisely, pre and post asssassination. Foreknowledge is another factor but, at this point, I am pretty sure that JFK, himself, was flying on a wing and a prayer.

Right now I am seeing Dulles as being part of a phloem leg, part of the cover-up. Yet as we see all over this case, people are a hairs breath from being implicated in one way, or multiple ways. I think Dulles' proximity to some execution operatives (xylem spider legs) forced him to have no doubt as to what he needed to do  for the cover-up (as a phloem spider leg).

If Dulles was getting Dull in his old age, that would not recommend him for a position in the planning or execution of the plot, but it would or could recommend him as a point man for an operation which was meant to fail, the mission of truth and justice. Incompetence and culpability,  pre-requisites for a lead position on the WC.

Cheers,

Michael

Just my opinion, I think Dulles would have gone straight to his short-list and passed word to Ed Lansdale, much like he and John Foster used to. 

[Kirk Gallaway]

I agree Cliff, this certainly goes deeper than Dulles or Angleton. The CIA at that time was really just an enforcement arm for American multi national corporate/ financial interests.

But one thing worth putting on Cabot's resume that I've never heard you or anyone else ever mention on this forum is that Henry Cabot Lodge was Richard Nixon's running mate in 1960.

Pretty heavy duty tickets in 1960 when you compare some of the running mates now, Mike Pence, Tim Kaine, Sarah Palin..

 

P.S. Hey Cliff, Today, Warriors in 17, if you know what I mean.

Edited June 12, 2017 by Kirk Gallaway

[Jeffrey Reilley]

9 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

 

 

P.S. Hey Cliff, Today, Warriors in 17, if you know what I mean.

Reference to tonight? 

If they don't win tonight, they won't win 6 or 7 either. 

Believeland is everywhere ?

[Joe Bauer]

I don't recall seeing in print or hearing in interviews, any major JFK researchers taking a firm yes or no stance on the Dealey Plaza 11,22,1963 photo purported to show Ed Lansdale walking by the police escorted "Tramps" which Fletcher Prouty clearly believed was him.

If this photo is truly of Landsdale, then wouldn't his presence there in the middle of the crime scene be a powerfully convincing indication as to his major involvement in it's planning and execution?  Of course it would. And wasn't this operational aspect of covert action his forte?

So who did Lansdale answer to at that time and right after?

Was the suspected Lansdale Dealey Plaza photo ever analyzed by credible identification experts? Or has no one ever committed the time and money to that endeavor?

My own take ( admittedly totally untrained ) on that well known photo and comparing it to every photo of Lansdale I could find on the internet tells me it is him. Of course I am swayed by Fletcher Prouty's interview take on this and his letter from Victor Krulak's also affirming his belief that the photo does indeed show Lansdale. 

Edited June 12, 2017 by Joe Bauer

[Roger DeLaria]

1 hour ago, Joe Bauer said:

I don't recall seeing in print or hearing in interviews, any major JFK researchers taking a firm yes or no stance on the Dealey Plaza 11,22,1963 photo purported to show Ed Lansdale walking by the police escorted "Tramps" which Fletcher Prouty clearly believed was him.

If this photo is truly of Landsdale, then wouldn't his presence there in the middle of the crime scene be a powerfully convincing indication as to his major involvement in it's planning and execution?  Of course it would. And wasn't this operational aspect of covert action his forte?

So who did Lansdale answer to at that time and right after?

Was the suspected Lansdale Dealey Plaza photo ever analyzed by credible identification experts? Or has no one ever committed the time and money to that endeavor?

My own take ( admittedly totally untrained ) on that well known photo and comparing it to every photo of Lansdale I could find on the internet tells me it is him. Of course I am swayed by Fletcher Prouty's interview take on this and his letter from Victor Krulak's also affirming his belief that the photo does indeed show Lansdale. 

Joe,

I happen to believe Prouty and Krulak that it is Lansdale, they knew him very well. Lansdale wore an Air Force uniform, but according to Prouty I read somewhere, he was really working for the CIA, answering to Dulles. Even though Dulles was out at that point, I don't know that matters much, as I think a lot of the old Asia hands were very loyal to him. Look at what Lansdale orchestrated in Vietnam, moving 1mil + Vietnamese and creating that whole mess. 

Here's a letter from Prouty.org from Prouty to Garrison with a lot of of good info.

March 6, 1990 

Dear Jim, 

It is amazing how things work, I am at home recuperating from a major back operation (to regain my ability to walk); so I was tossing around in bed last night...not too comfortable...and I began to think of Garrison. I thought, "I have got to write Jim a letter detailing how I believe the whole job was done." 

By another coincidence I had received a fine set of twenty photos from the Sprague collection in Springfield, Mass. As the odds would have it, he is now living just around the corner here in Alexandria. Why not? Lansdale lived here, Fensterwald lives here, Ford used to live here. Quite a community. 

I was studying those photos. One of them is the "Tramps" picture that appears in your book. It is glossy and clear. Lansdale is so clearly identifiable. Why, Lansdale in Dallas? The others don't matter, they are nothing but actors and not gunmen but they are interesting. Others who knew Lansdale as well as I did, have said the same thing, "That's him and what's he doing there?" 

As I was reading the paper the Federal Express man came with a book from Jim, that unusual "Lansdale" book. A terrible biography. There could be a great biography about Lansdale. He's no angel; but he is worth a good biography. Currey, a paid hack, did the job. His employers ought to have let him do it right. 

I had known Ed since 1952 in the Philippines. I used to fly there regularly with my MATS Heavy Transport Squadron. As a matter of fact, in those days we used to fly wounded men, who were recuperating, from hospitals in Japan to Saigon for R&R on the beaches of Cap St Jacque. That was 1952-1953. Saigon was the Paris of the Orient. And Lansdale was "King Maker" of the Philippines. We always went by way of Manila. I met his team. 

He had arrived in Manila in Sept 1945, after the war was over, for a while. He had been sent back there in 1950 by the CIA(OPC) to create a new leader of the Philippines and to get rid of Querino. Sort of like the Marcos deal, or the Noriega operation. Lansdale did it better. I have overthrown a government but I didn't splash it all around like Reagan and Bush have done. Now, who sent him there? 

Who sent him there in 1950 (Truman era) to do a job that was not done until 1953 (Ike era)? From 1950 to Feb. 1953 the Director of Central Intelligence was Eisenhower's old Chief of Staff, Gen Walter Bedell Smith. Smith had been Ambassador to Moscow from 1946 to 1949. The lesser guys in the CIA at the time were Allen Dulles, who was Deputy Director Central Intelligence from Aug. 1951 to Feb. 1953. Frank Wisner became the Deputy Director, Plans (Clandestine Activities) when Dulles became DDCI. Lansdale had to have received his orders from among these four men: Truman, Smith, Dulles, and Wisner. Of course the Sec State could have had some input...i.e. Acheson. Who wanted Querino out, that badly? Who wanted HUKS there? 

In Jan 1953 Eisenhower arrived. John Foster Dulles was at State and Gen Smith his Deputy. Allen Dulles was the DCI and General Cabel his deputy. None of them changed Lansdale's prior orders to "get" Querino. Lansdale operated with abandon in the Philippines. The Ambassador and the CIA Station Chief, George Aurell, did not know what he was doing. They believed he was some sort of kook Air Force Officer there...a role Lansdale played to the hilt. Magsaysay became President, Dec 30, 1953. 

With all of this on the record, and a lot more, this guy Currey comes out of the blue with this purported "Biography". I knew Ed well enough and long enough to know that he was a classic chameleon. He would tell the truth sparingly and he would fabricate a lot. Still, I can not believe that he told Currey the things Currey writes. Why would Lansdale want Currey to perpetuate such out and out bullxxxx about him? Can't be. This is a terribly fabricated book. It's not even true about me. I believe that this book was ordered and delineated by the CIA. 

At least I know the truth about myself and about Gen. Krulak. Currey libels us terribly. In fact it may be Krulak who caused the book to be taken off the shelves. Krulak and his Copley Press cohorts have the power to get that done, and I encouraged them to do just that when it first came out. Krulak was mad! 

Ed told me many a time how he operated in the Philippines. He said, "All I had was a blank checkbook signed by the U.S. government". He made friends with many influential Filipinos. I have met Johnny Orendain and Col Valeriano, among others, in Manila with Lansdale. He became acquainted with the wealthiest Filipino of them all, Soriano. Currey never even mentions him. Soriano set up Philippine Airlines and owned the big San Miguel beer company, among other things. Key man in Asia. 

Lansdale's greatest strategy was to create the "HUKS" as the enemy and to make Magsaysay the "Huk Killer." He would take Magsaysay's battalion out into a "Huk" infested area. He would use movies and "battlefield" sound systems, i.e. fireworks to scare the poor natives. Then one-half of Magsaysay's battalion, dressed as natives, would "attack" the village at night. They'd fire into the air and burn some shacks. In the morning the other half, in uniform, would attack and "capture" the "Huks". They would bind them up in front of the natives who crept back from the forests, and even have a "firing" squad "kill" some of them. Then they would have Magsaysay make a big speech to the people and the whole battalion would roll down the road to have breakfast together somewhere...ready for the next "show". 

Ed would always see that someone had arranged to have newsmen and camera men there and Magsaysay soon became a national hero. This was a tough game and Ed bragged that a lot of people were killed; but in the end Magsaysay became the "elected" President and Querino was ousted "legally." 

This formula endeared Ed to Allen Dulles. In 1954 Dulles established the Saigon Military Mission in Vietnam...counter to Eisenhower's orders. He had the French accept Lansdale as its chief. This mission was not in Saigon. It was not military, and its job was subversion in Vietnam. Its biggest job was that it got more than 1,100,000 northern Vietnamese to move south. 660,000 by U.S.Navy ships and the rest by CIA airline planes. These 1,100,000 north Vietnamese became the "subversive" element in South Vietnam and the principal cause of the warmaking. Lansdale and his cronies (Bohanon, Arundel, Phillips, Hand, Conein and many others) did all that using the same check book. I was with them many times during 1954. All Malthuseanism. 

I have heard him brag about capturing random Vietnamese and putting them in a Helicopter. Then they would work on them to make them "confess" to being Viet Minh. When they would not, they would toss them out of the chopper, one after the other, until the last ones talked. This was Ed's idea of fun...as related to me many times. Then Dulles, Adm. Radford and Cardinal Spellman set up Ngo Dinh Diem. He and his brother, Nhu, became Lansdale proteges. 

At about 1957 Lansdale was brought back to Washington and assigned to Air Force Headquarters in a Plans office near mine. He was a fish out of water. He didn't know Air Force people and Air Force ways. After about six months of that, Dulles got the Office of Special Operations under General Erskine to ask for Lansdale to work for the Secretary of Defense. Erskine was man enough to control him. 

By 1960 Erskine had me head the Air Force shop there. He had an Army shop and a Navy shop and we were responsible for all CIA relationships as well as for the National Security Agency. Ed was still out of his element because he did not know the services; but the CIA sent work his way. 

Then in the Fall of 1960 something happened that fired him up. Kennedy was elected over Nixon. Right away Lansdale figured out what he was going to do with the new President. Overnight he left for Saigon to see Diem and to set up a deal that would make him, Lansdale, Ambassador to Vietnam. He had me buy a "Father of his Country" gift for Diem...$700.00. 

I can't repeat all of this but you should get a copy of the Gravel edition, 5 Vol.'s, of the Pentagon Papers and read it. The Lansdale accounts are quite good and reasonably accurate. 

Ed came back just before the Inauguration and was brought into the White House for a long presentation to Kennedy about Vietnam. Kennedy was taken by it and promised he would have Lansdale back in Vietnam "in a high office". Ed told us in OSO he had the Ambassadorship sewed up. He lived for that job. 

He had not reckoned with some of JFK's inner staff, George Ball, etc. Finally the whole thing turned around and month by month Lansdale's star sank over the horizon. Erskine retired and his whole shop was scattered. The Navy men went back to the navy as did the Army folks. Gen Wheeler in the JCS asked to have me assigned to the Joint Staff. This wiped out the whole Erskine (Office of Special Operations) office. It was comical. There was Lansdale up there all by himself with no office and no one else. He boiled and he blamed it on Kennedy for not giving him the "promised" Ambassadorship to let him "save" Vietnam. 

Then with the failure of the Bay of Pigs, caused by that phone call to cancel the air strikes by McGeorge Bundy, the military was given the job of reconstituting some sort of Anti-Castro operation. It was headed by an Army Colonel; but somehow Lansdale (most likely CIA influence) got put into the plans for Operation Mongoose...to get Castro...ostensibly. 

The U.S. Army has a think-tank at American University. It was called "Operation Camelot". This is where the "Camelot" concept came from. It was anti-JFK's Vietnam strategy. The men running it were Lansdale types, Special Forces background. "Camelot" was King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table: not JFK...then. 

Through 1962 and 1963 Mongoose and "Camelot" became strong and silent organizations dedicated to countering JFK. Mongoose had access to the CIA's best "hit men" in the business and a lot of "strike" capability. Lansdale had many old friends in the media business such as Joe Alsop, Henry Luce among others. With this background and with his poisoned motivation I am positive that he got collateral orders to manage the Dallas event under the guise of "getting" Castro. It is so simple at that level. A nod from the right place, source immaterial, and the job's done. 

The "hit" is the easy part. The "escape" must be quick and professional. The cover-up and the scenario are the big jobs. They more than anything else prove the Lansdale mastery. 

Lansdale was a master writer and planner. He was a great "scenario" guy. It still have a lot of his personally typed material in my files. I am certain that he was behind the elaborate plan and mostly the intricate and enduring cover-up. Given a little help from friends at PEPSICO he could easily have gotten Nixon into Dallas, for "orientation': and LBJ in the cavalcade at the same time, contrary to Secret Service policy. 

He knew the "Protection" units and the "Secret Service", who was needed and who wasn't. Those were routine calls for him, and they would have believed him. Cabell could handle the police. 

The "hit men" were from CIA overseas sources, for instance, from the "Camp near Athena, Greece. They are trained, stateless, and ready to go at any time. They ask no questions: speak to no one. They are simply told what to do, when and where. Then they are told how they will be removed and protected. After all, they work for the U.S. Government. The "Tramps" were actors doing the job of cover-up. The hit men are just pros. They do the job for the CIA anywhere. They are impersonal. They get paid. They get protected, and they have enough experience to "blackmail" anyone, if anyone ever turns on them...just like Drug agents. The job was clean, quick and neat. No ripples. 

The whole story of the POWER of the Cover-up comes down to a few points. There has never been a Grand Jury and trial in Texas. Without a trial there can be nothing. Without a trial it does no good for researchers to dig up data. It has no place to go and what the researchers reveal just helps make the cover-up tighter, or they eliminate that evidence and the researcher. 

The first man LBJ met with on Nov 29th, after he had cleared the foreign dignitaries out of Washington was Waggoner Carr, Atty Gen'l, Texas to tell him, "No trial in Texas...ever." 

The next man he met, also on Nov 29th, was J. Edgar Hoover. The first question LBJ asked his old "19 year" neighbor in DC was "Were THEY shooting at me?" LBJ thought that THEY had been shooting at him also as they shot at his friend John Connally. Note that he asked, "Were THEY shooting at me?" LBJ knew there were several hitmen. That's the ultimate clue...THEY. 

The Connallys said the same thing...THEY. Not Oswald. 

Then came the heavily loaded press releases about Oswald all written before the deal and released actually before LHO had ever been charged with the crime. I bought the first newspaper EXTRA on the streets of Christchurch, New Zealand with the whole LHO story in that first news...photos and columns of it before the police in Dallas had yet to charge him with that crime. All this canned material about LHO was flashed around the world. 

Lansdale and his Time-Life and other media friends, with Valenti in Hollywood, have been doing that cover-up since Nov 1963. Even the deMorenschildt story enhances all of this. In deM's personal telephone/address notebook he had the name of an Air Force Colonel friend of mine, Howard Burrus. Burrus was always deep in intelligence. He had been in one of the most sensitive Attache spots in Europe...Switzerland. He was a close friend of another Air Force Colonel and Attache, Godfrey McHugh, who used to date Jackie Bouvier. DeM had Burrus listed under a DC telephone number and on that same telephone number he had "L.B.Johnson, Congressman." Quite a connection. Why...from the Fifties yet.? 

Godfrey McHugh was the Air Force Attache in Paris. Another most important job. I knew him well, and I transferred his former Ass't Attache to my office in the Pentagon. This gave me access to a lot of information I wanted in the Fifties. This is how I learned that McHugh's long-time special "date" was the fair Jacqueline...yes, the same Jackie Bouvier. Sen. Kennedy met Jackie in Paris when he was on a trip. At that time JFK was dating a beautiful SAS Airline Stewardess who was the date of that Ass't Attache who came to my office. JFK dumped her and stole Jackie away from McHugh. Leaves McHugh happy???? 

At the JFK Inaugural Ball who should be there but the SAS stewardess, Jackie--of course, and Col Godfrey McHugh. JFK made McHugh a General and made him his "Military Advisor" in the White House where he was near Jackie while JFK was doing all that official travelling connected with his office AND other special interests. Who recommended McHugh for the job? 

General McHugh was in Dallas and was on Air Force One, with Jackie, on the flight back to Washington..as was Jack Valenti. Why was LBJ's old cohort there at that time and why was he on Air Force One? He is now the Movie Czar. Why in Dallas? 

See how carefully all of this is interwoven. Burrus is now a very wealthy man in Washington. I have lost track of McHugh. And Jackie is doing well. All in the Lansdale--deM shadows. 

One of Lansdale's special "black" intelligence associates in the Pentagon was Dorothy Matlack of U.S. Army Intelligence. How does it happen that when deM. flew from Haiti to testify, he was met at the National Airport by Dorothy? 

The Lansdale story is endless. What people do not do is study the entire environment of his strange career. For example: the most important part of my book, "The Secret Team", is not something that I wrote. It is Appendix III under the title, "Training Under The Mutual Security Program". This is a most important bit of material. It tells more about the period 1963 to 1990 than anything. I fought to have it included verbatim in the book. This material was the work of Lansdale and his crony General Dick Stillwell. Anyone interested in the "JFK Coup d'Etat" ought to know it by heart. 

I believe this document tells why the Coup took place. It was to reverse the sudden JFK re-orientation of the U.S. Government from Asia to Europe, in keeping with plans made in 1943 at Cairo and Teheran by T.V. Soong and his Asian masterminds. Lansdale and Stillwell were long-time "Asia hands" as were Gen Erskine, Adm Radford, Cardinal Spellman, Henry Luce and so many others. 

In October 1963, JFK had just signalled this reversal, to Europe, when he published National Security Action Memorandum #263 saying...among other things...that he was taking 1000 troops home from Vietnam by Christmas 1963 and ALL AMERICANS out of Vietnam by the end of 1965. That cost him his life. 

JFK came to that "Pro-Europe" conclusion in the Summer of 1963 and sent Gen Krulak to Vietnam for advance work. Kurlak and I (with others) wrote that long "Taylor-McNamara" Report of their "Visit to Vietnam" (obviously they did not write, illustrate and bind it as they traveled). Krulak got his information daily in the White House. We simply wrote it. That led to NSAM #263. This same Trip Report is Document #142 and appears on page 751 to 766 of Vol. II of the Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papers. NSAM #263 appears on pages 769-770 (It makes the Report official). This major Report and NSAM indicated an enormous shift in the orientation of U.S. Foreign Policy from Asia back to Europe. JFK was much more Europe- oriented, as was his father, than pro-Asia. This position was anathema to the Asia-born Luces, etc. 

There is the story from an insider. I sat in the same office with Lansdale, (OSO of OSD) for years. I listened to him in Manila and read his flurry of notes from 1952 to 1964. I know all this stuff, and much more. I could write ten books. I send this to you because I believe you are one of the most sincere of the "true researchers". You may do with it as you please. I know you will do it right. I may give copies of this to certain other people of our persuasion. (Years ago I told this to Mae Brussell on the promise she would hold it. She did.) 

Now you can see why I have always said that identification of the "Tramps" was unnecessary, i.e. they are actors. The first time I saw that picture I saw the man I knew and I realized why he was there. He caused the political world to spin on its axis. Now, back to recuperating. 

L. Fletcher Prouty 
 

[Joe Bauer]

Prouty's sure that Lansdale was the man behind the event.

And Prouty's connection to Mae Brussels is interesting.

Edited June 12, 2017 by Joe Bauer

[Chris Newton]

21 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

“Kenny O’Donnell (JFK’s appointments secretary) was convinced that McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, was taking orders from Ambassador Averell Harriman and not the president. He was especially worried about Michael Forrestal, a young man on the White House staff who handled liaison on Vietnam with Harriman.”

I think the most damning piece of evidence concerning McGeorge Bundy was the date on the draft of NSAM-273. There was no way JFK was going to OK NSAM-273 therefore the draft has the stench of foreknowledge.

[Martin Blank]

You ask: "So how did the tools and talents developed by Bill Harvey for ZR/RIFLE and Operation MONGOOSE get exported to Vietnam? Kennedy immediately ordered (William R.) Corson to find out what had happened and who was responsible. The answer he came up with: “On instructions from Averell Harriman…. The orders that ended in the deaths of Diem and his brother originated with Harriman and were carried out by Henry Cabot Lodge’s own military assistant.”

 

The CIA got involved in  Vietnam in 1950 as CIA officers moved to French Indochina as a part of the legation of the United States in the city of Saigon. After their arrival, CIA involvement expanded to a new large base in Hanoi.  I doubt Harvey had a monopoly on these methods and skills.

 

you say:

Harriman/Bush were in on the drug trade and used those State-Department-upsetting CIA operations cowboys for gun/dope running?

 

remember what gary underhill said: 

Only hours after Kennedy was shot, CIA agent Gary Underhill left 
Washington, D.C., and drove to the home of friends on Long Island, N.Y. 
Underhill says he fears for his life and he must leave the country. 
"This country is too dangerous for me. I've got to get on a boat.Oswald 
is a patsy. They set him up. It's too much. The bastards have done 
something outrageous. They've killed the president! I've been listening 
and hearing things. I couldn't believe they'd get away with it, but they 
did.They've gone made! They're a bunch of drug runners and gun runners-a 
real violence group.I know who they are. That's the problem. They know I 
know. That's why I'm here.''

 The friends offered Underhill sanctuary but he left, never to return. 
Six months later, he was dead, a "suicide.'' The bullet was in his left 
temple. Underhill was right-handed.

[Cliff Varnell]

23 hours ago, Michael Clark said:

I'll first point out out that the COO vs. Patsy scenario is a non-sequitor; one situation does not necessarily follow from the negation of the other. There are other options.

Point taken.  I changed the title to avoid a false dichotomy.

23 hours ago, Michael Clark said:

I am currently of the mind that the juggernouhgt that cultivated the assassination more resembles a spider than a snake. Moreover the legs of the spider served vastly different functions including: Execution, cover-up, messy cover-up and passive-aggressive functions. Another analogy I have been entertaining is a comparison to xylem and phloem. The point is that some of these legs would only function and be culpable in one direction, while other legs function in the reverse; 0r more precisely, pre and post asssassination. Foreknowledge is another factor but, at this point, I am pretty sure that JFK, himself, was flying on a wing and a prayer.

Right now I am seeing Dulles as being part of a phloem leg, part of the cover-up. Yet as we see all over this case, people are a hairs breath from being implicated in one way, or multiple ways. I think Dulles' proximity to some execution operatives (xylem spider legs) forced him to have no doubt as to what he needed to do  for the cover-up (as a phloem spider leg).

I posit another possibility for his motivation to cover-up the crime -- the Dulles-Bancroft-Paine connections left him open to hostile scrutiny.

Like LBJ, Dulles was vulnerable to suspicion.

23 hours ago, Michael Clark said:

If Dulles was getting Dull in his old age, that would not recommend him for a position in the planning or execution of the plot, but it would or could recommend him as a point man for an operation which was meant to fail, the mission of truth and justice. Incompetence and culpability,  pre-requisites for a lead position on the WC.

 

Agreed.

[Cliff Varnell]

18 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

I agree Cliff, this certainly goes deeper than Dulles or Angleton. The CIA at that time was really just an enforcement arm for American multi national corporate/ financial interests.

But one thing worth putting on Cabot's resume that I've never heard you or anyone else ever mention on this forum is that Henry Cabot Lodge was Richard Nixon's running mate in 1960.

Pretty heavy duty tickets in 1960 when you compare some of the running mates now, Mike Pence, Tim Kaine, Sarah Palin..

 

P.S. Hey Cliff, Today, Warriors in 17, if you know what I mean.

I'll resume posting some time after the game...Dub Nation's in the house!

[Cliff Varnell]

20 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

My opinion is that Dulles was powerful enough. I appreciate Cliff's detailed and nuanced opinions, and his characterizations of our communications. And I understand that Dulles was part of a power structure, not a lone wolf. But back up patsy goes too far in my opinion. Cliff - would you share your source on the Harriman/Lovett split on Dulles? I've never read it anywhere.

https://cryptome.org/0001/bruce-lovett.htm

Center for the Study of Intelligence Newsletter

Spring 1995 Issue No. 3

The Elusive ``Bruce-Lovett Report''

Judging by the number of presidential and congressional commissions, panels, boards, and committees formed to study CIA's mission and purpose, one could conclude that the Agency is one of the most studied of all federal agencies. The best known studies are closely identified with their principal authors or sponsors. Hence we have the "Church Committee'' report (1976), the "Schlesinger'' report (1971), and the "Dulles-Jackson-Correa'' report (1949). The final product of the ongoing Presidential Commission to study the future of the intelligence community will undoubtedly be remembered as the "Aspin Commission'' report.

These reports make fascinating reading as well as invaluable sources for the CIA History Staff. The Staff recently ran across a reference to another item, the so-called "Bruce-Lovett'' report, that it would very much like to read -- if we could find it! The report is mentioned in Peter Grose's recent biography Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles [excerpts below]. According to Grose, two American elder statesmen, David Bruce and Robert Lovett, prepared a report for President Dwight Eisenhower in the fall of 1956 that criticized CIA's alleged fascination with "kingmaking'' in the Third World and complained that a "horde of CIA representatives'' was mounting foreign political intrigues at the expense of gathering hard intelligence on the Soviet Union.

The History Staff decided to get a copy of the report and see what the two former diplomats had really said. The first place to look was the CIA files on the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA). Bruce and Lovett had been charter members of this blue-ribbon panel. There was no reference to such a report. We then checked with the Eisenhower Library and National Archives, which holds the PBCFIA records, but came up emptyhanded. The Virginia Historical Society, the custodian of David Bruce's papers, did not have a copy either.

Having reached a dead end, we consulted the author of the Dulles biography, Peter Grose. Grose told us that he had not seen the report itself but had used notes made from it by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger for Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (1978) [excerpts below]. Professor Schlesinger informed us that that he had seen the report in Robert Kennedy's papers before they were deposited at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. He had loaned Grose his notes and does not have a copy of these notes or of the report itself.

This raises an interesting question: how did a report on the CIA written for President Eisenhower in 1956 end up in the RFK papers? We think we have the answer. Robert Lovett was asked to testify before Gen. Maxwell Taylor's board of inquiry on the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation. Robert Kennedy was on that board and may have asked Lovett for a copy of the report. But we do not have the answer to another question: where is the "Bruce-Lovett'' report? The JFK Presidential Library has searched the RFK papers without success. Surely the report will turn up some day, even if one government agency and four separate archives so far haven't been able to find it. But this episode helps to prove one of the few Iron Laws of History: the official who keeps the best records gets to tell the story.

 

---

Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 1978.

[pp.455-458]

Eisenhower, reluctant to commit conventional armed force, used the CIA as the routine instrument of American intervention abroad. Covert-action operators, working on relatively small budgets, helped overthrow governments deemed pro-Communist in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), failed to do so in Indonesia (1958), helped install supposedly prowestern governments in Egypt (1954) and Laos (1959) and planned the overthrow and murder of Castro in 1960.

Congress and the press looked on these activities, insofar as they knew about them, with complacency. Only one group had grave misgivings and informed criticism: expressed, however, in the deepest secrecy. This, improbably, was the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, created by Eisenhower in 1956 and composed of unimpeachably respectable private citizens.

Almost at once the board had appointed a panel, led by Robert Lovett and David Bruce, to take a look at CIA's covert operations. "Bruce was very much disturbed," Lovett told the Cuba board of inquiry in 1961. "He approached it from the standpoint of 'what right have we to go barging around into other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?' He felt this was an outrogeous interference with friendly countries. . . . He got me alarmed, so instead of completing the report in thirty days we look two months or more"³⁸

The 1956 report, written in Bruce's spirited style, condemned

the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being. ... Busy, moneyed and privileged, [the CIA] likes its "King Making." responsibility (the intrigue is fascinating -- considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from "successes" -- no charge is made for "failures" -- and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!).

Bruce and Lovett could discover no reliable system of control. "There are always, of course, on record the twin, well-born purposes of 'frustrating the Soviets' and keeping others 'pro-western' oriented. Under these almost any [covert] action can be and is being justified." Once having been conceived, the final approval given to any project (at informal lunch meetings of the OCB [Operations Coordinating Board] inner group, can, at best, be described as pro forma." One consequence was that "no one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on," With "a horde of CIA representatives" swarming around the planet, CIA covert action was exerting "significant, almost unilateral influences . . . on the actual formulation of our foreign policies . . . sometimes completely unknown" to the local American ambassador. "We are sure," the report added, "that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive [covert] program could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it." Bruce and Lovett concluded with an exasperated plea:

Should not sumeone, somewhere in an authoritative position in our government on a continuing basis, be . . . calculating . . . the long-range wisdom of activities which have entailed our virtual abandonment of the international "golden rule," and which, if successful to the degree claimed for them, are responsible in a great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? . . . Where will we be tomorrow?³⁹

In December 1956 the full board passed on to Eisenhower its concern about "the extremely informal and somewhat exclusive methods" used in the handling of clandestine projects.⁴⁰ (Among those signing this statemem was another board member, Joseph P. Kennedy. "I know that outfit," the ambassador said after the Bay of Pigs, "and I wouldn't pay them a hundred bucks a week. It's a lucky thing they were found out early.")⁴¹ In February 1957 the board pointed out to the White House that clandestine operations absorbed more than 80 percent of the CIA budget and that few or the projects received the formal approval of the so-called 5412 Special Group, the National Security Council's review mechanism. The CIA's Directorate of Plans (i.e., covert action), the board said, "is operating for the most part on an autonomous and free-wheeling basis in highly critical areas." All too often the State Department knew "little or nothing" of what lhe CIA was doing. "In some quarters this leads to situations which are almost unbelievable because the operations being carried out by the Deputy Director of Plans are sometimes in direct conflict with the normal operations being carried out by the Department of State."⁴²

. . .

The board pressed its campaign in 1959 and 1960. Allen Dulles made minor organizational changes. In 1959 the 5412 Special Group began for the first time to meet regularly.⁴⁷ The board was not satisfied, then or later. When Dulles, Bissell and J. D. Esterline briefed the board late in 1960 on the Cuban project, its members, Lovett particularly, registered dismay, especially over the manner in which the planning was being administered.⁴⁸ In its last written report to Eisenhower, in January 1961, the board said grimly: "We have been unable to conclude that, on balance, all of the covert action programs undertaken by CIA up to this time have been worth the risk or the great expenditure of manpower, money and other resources involved. In addition. we believe that CIA's concentration on political, psychological and related covert action activities have tended to detract substantially from the execution of its primary intelligence-gathering mission. We suggest, accordingly, that there should be a total reassessment of our covert action policies."⁴⁹ "I have never felt," Lovett told the Cuba board of inquiry, "that the Congress of the United States ever intended to give the United States Intelligence Agency authority to conduct operations all over the earth."⁵⁰

The Board of Consultants had no visible impact. Allen Dulles ignored its recommendations. Eisenhower gave it no support. But its testimony demolishes the myth that the CIA was a punctilious and docile organization. acting only in response to express instruction from higher authority. Like the FBI, it was a runaway agency. in this case endowed with men professionally trained in deception, a wide choice of weapons, reckless purposes, a global charter, maximum funds and minimum accountability.

[Schlesinger's notes 38-50 not yet available.]

 

---

Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, Peter Grose, 1994.

[pp. 444-48]

Eisenhower, however, did not let Hoover's broader concern drop. One weekend late in 1955 a presidential helicopter flew Allen to Gettysburg, where Eisenhower was recuperating from his heart attack, so the two men could have an uninterrupted -- and unrecorded -- chat as they drove back together to Camp David. The president's latest idea, he informed Allen, was to name a high-level board of distinguished but discreet private citizens to keep an ongoing monitor on intelligence operations. Allen had no choice but to agree, probably assuming that he could manage this group as he had all the others that had looked in upon the unfamiliar plays of the Great Game. The President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities held its first meeting with Eisenhower on January 24, 1956.³²

__________

32 Diary series, Nov. 1955, folders 1 and 2; DDE personal, 1955-56 folder 2, Eisenhower Library.

Under the persistent leadership of James Killian, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the consultants set upon their charge with unexpected diligence. They tackled the problems still plaguing CIA relations with the military intelligence services and sought to nudge the civilian director into a more forceful role in the bureaucratic confrontations that Allen always sought to avoid. They examined the various directives guiding the work of the intelligence services and the status of CIA representatives in relation to the American ambassadors in foreign capitals. Inevitably they turned to the psychological and political warfare programs, which they found to be consuming much of the agency's resources: more than half of CIA personnel and over 80 percent of the budget were said to be dedicated to clandestine operations. Killian delegated two of his consultants, Robert Lovett and David Bruce, to investigate yet again Allen's covert action programs, the 10/2 operations against vicious communism.

Nothing about Lovett and Bruce could have upset Allen as he assembled his defenses against this latest inquiry into matters he preferred to keep hidden from outsiders. Both men were of the Eastern Establishment and had been privy to the 10/2 concept from the start. Lovett, a partner in the investment banking firm of Brown Brothers Harriman and a protege of Henry Stimson in the War Department during World War II, was a sophisticated Wall Street colleague of Allen's and an old hand at political warfare.

As for David Bruce, he was among Allen's oldest and closest friends. His older brother had been a classmate at Princeton, and as a young diplomat in Paris, Allen had helped the younger Bruce get his first job in diplomacy, as a courier to the Peace Conference. Bruce was not yet part of the elite diplomatic club of Bern and Paris, but in Calvin Coolidge's Washington he and Allen spent countless bachelor weekends together while Clover and the girls were escaping the summer heat. Independently-wealthy, Bruce had remained in the diplomatic profession after Allen went off to make money on Wall Street.* Pressures of time and distance had separated the two friends in recent years, but Allen had little reason to doubt Bruce's reliability in assessing the sensitive matters that had become so central to his, and CIA's, preoccupations.

__________

* To Bruce had gone the post of ambassador in Paris that Allen himself had briefly hoped for in 1948.

Allen could hardly have been more wrong in his nonchalance. Lovett later recalled that Bruce "was very much disturbed" as he started looking into the CIA; he asked, presaging the questions of generations to come, "What right have we to go barging around into other countries, buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?" As Lovett reported:

We felt some alarm that here was an extremely high-powered machine, well endowed with money, and the question was how could any Director of Central Intelligence navigate, fly, drop the bomb, get back and say what he had seen and everything else. . . . The idea of these young, enthusiastic fellows possessed of great funds being sent out in some country, getting themselves involved in local politics, and then backing some local man and from that starting an operation, scared the hell out of us.³³

__________

33 Lovett in the subsequent Taylor Board of Inquiry, May 11, 1961; the transcript of this session remains classified, though the bulk of the ensuing report has been made public. Aurthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., found a copy of the secret manuscript in the Robert Kennedy Papers before they were deposited at the John F. Kennedy Library under restricted access; see his Robert Kennedy, p. 455.

If any living man was capable of measuring how far Allen had drifted from his beginnings as a cautious and judicious diplomat, it was David Bruce. "He got me alarmed," Lovett said, "so instead of completing the report in thirty days we took two months or more."

The 1956 Bruce-Lovett report on covert action stands decades later as the most sweeping official assault on the CIA's propensities to dabble in the politics and social frameworks of other lands. "We are sure that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive [psychological and political warfare] program could not possibly have foreseen the ramifications of the operations which have resulted from it. No one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day-to-day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on."³⁴

__________

34 The Bruce-Lovett report is still tightly classified; the reference staff of the Eisenhower Libary told me they have no knowledge of such a document. Once again, it was only because of Professor Schlesinger's unrestricted accesss to the Robert Kennedy Papers that these excepts can be published. I am grateful to him for providing me with the note he took from this rich file of intelligence matters. His own discussion of the report is in Robert Kennedy, pp. 454-57.

Covert actions were in the hands, Bruce and Lovett asserted, of "a horde of CIA representatives (largely under State or Defense cover), . . . bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being." In a particularly cruel dig at Allen's penchant for favoring his special proteges, they added that "by the very nature of the personnel situation" many of these CIA men were "politically immature." Mindful of recent experiences in Iran and Guatemala, they concluded:

The CIA, busy, monied and privileged, likes its "kingmaking" responsibility. The intrigue is fascinating -- considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from "successes" -- no charge is made for "failures" -- and the whole business is very much simpler than collective covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods! . . . There are always, of course, on record the twin, well-born purposes of "frustrating the Soviets" and keeping others "pro-Western" oriented. Under these, almost any [psychological and political] action can be, and is being, justified.

As a general salvo, this would have been quite enough to rivet attention. But then Bruce and Lovett plunged without mercy into specifics. For any given project, they said, final pro forma approval from outside the agency came only at informal luncheon meetings. "In most instances, approval of any new project would appear to comprise simply the endorsement of [Allen's] proposal, usually without demurrer, from individuals preoccupied with other important matters of their own." The two intrepid investigators did not hesitate to raise the personal circumstance that even Eisenhower chose to resist, the fact that Allen and Foster were, after all, brothers, in a relationship of unique access and mutual trust. "At times, the Secretary of State/DCI brother relationship may arbitrarily set 'the US position,' . . . whether through personal arrangement between the Secretary of State and the DCI (deciding between them on anyone occasion to use what they regard as the best 'assets' available) or undertaken at the personal discretion of the DCl." They elaborated on the grievance of State Department professionals, frustrated careerists in diplomacy who could seldom get Foster's attention in the office.

The State Department people feel that perhaps the greatest contribution this Board could make would be to bring to the attention of the President the significant, almost unilateral, influences that CIA [covert] activities have on the actual formulation of our foreign policies. . . .

CIA support, and its maneuvering of local news media, labor groups, political figures and parties and other activities, are sometimes completely unknown to or only hazily recognized by [the local ambassadors]. . . . It is somewhat difficult to understand why anyone less than the senior U.S. representative. . . should deal directly with [the head of a foreign government]. . . . One obvious, inevitable result is to divide US foreign policy resources and to incline the foreigner, often the former "opposition" now come to power (and who knows with whom he is dealing) to play one US agency against the other, or to use whichever suits his current purpose.

The report concluded with a call for '''unentanglement' of our involvements, and a more rational application of our activities than is now apparent."

Should not someone, somewhere in an authoritative position in our government, on a continuing basis, be counting the immediate costs of disappointments, . . . calculating the impacts on our international position, and keeping in mind the long range wisdom of activities which have entailed our virtual abandonment of the international "golden rule," and which, if successful to the degree claimed for them, are responsible in a great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? What of the effects on our present alliances? What will happen tomorrow?

The Bruce-Lovett report was submitted in top secrecy the autumn of 1956, just as the triple crises of Suez, Hungary, and Foster's illness were smothering the agendas of harassed policymakers. Though its immediate effect was thus muffled, its impact endured, anticipating the charges of an "invisible government," the criticisms of irresponsible procedures and inept personnel that would resound against the CIA in the eras of Watergate in the 1970s and the Iran/Contra deception of the 1980s. To be sure, other branches of the agency -- the National Estimates staff, the intelligence collection operations, and such -- emerged relatively unscathed, even praised. But the centerpiece of Allen's CIA, the "Plans" Directorate for Cold War covert action, was mercilessly exposed to the scrutiny of Eisenhower's top policymakers.

Allen's first reaction, at a moment of policy and personal crises, was as muffled as his friends' assault, but when the full board of consultants under Killian adopted the Bruce-Lovett report at the end of the year, he responded with a deft diversionary tactic. He was considering, he told the president in January 1957, hiring one of Eisenhower's trusted military colleagues to manage intelligence administration and collection, so he himself could concentrate on covert action programs. Eisenhower muttered merely that he would prefer it the other way around, and Allen dropped the idea. Goodpaster told historian Michael Beschloss years later that the president realized he had to make a choice; "if he wanted Dulles to stay, he wasn't going to be able to force this upon him. At that point, he decided it would be better to have Dulles stay, and keep the pressure on him."³⁵

__________

35 Memorandum of conversation, Jan. 17, 1957, diary series, Eisenhower Library; Beschloss, Mayday, p. 133.

 

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