Don Bohning and the CIA Options

[John Simkin]

Don Bohning graduated from the Dakota Wesleyan University in 1955. He spent two years in the United States Army before attending the American Institute for Foreign Trade in Phoenix. He also did graduate work at the University of Miami.

In 1959 Bohning joined the Miami Herald staff in 1959 as a reporter. Five years later he became a foreign correspondent for the newspaper. Over the next 36 years he reported from every independent country in the Western Hemisphere. This included the overthrow of Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana and the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.

Bohning has also written extensively about the Bay of Pigs and the attempts to remove Fidel Castro from power in Cuba. This had included carrying out interviews with CIA officials, Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins.

Don Bohning, who retired from the Miami Herald is the author of the book, The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965 (2005).

In her book, A Farewell to Justice, Joan Mellen argues that Bohning was CIA asset AMCARBON 1.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbohning.htm

[David Talbot]

In his review of my book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Don Bohning asserts that I take a “starry-eyed” view of the Kennedys. But Bohning comes to this conclusion because he has chosen to view this historical chapter through his own prism – that of his CIA sources. In the interests of full disclosure, Bohning – or Washington Decoded editor Max Holland – had a duty to reveal that Bohning was named in declassified CIA documents as one of the Miami journalists whom the CIA regarded as an agency asset in the 1960s. But neither Bohning, nor Holland in his editor’s note, disclosed this pertinent information.

A CIA memo dated June 5, 1968 states that Bohning was known within the agency as AMCARBON 3 -- AMCARBON was the cryptonym that the CIA used to identify friendly reporters and editors who covered Cuba. (AMCARBON 1 was Bohning’s colleague at the Miami Herald, Latin America editor Al Burt.) According to the agency memo, which dealt with New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination, Bohning passed along information about the Garrison probe to the CIA.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...mp;relPageId=2)

A follow-up agency memo, dated June 14, revealed that “Bohning was granted a Provisional Security Approval on 21 August 1967 and a Covert Security Approval on 14 November 1967 for use as a confidential informant.”

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...amp;relPageId=1

A declassified CIA memo dated April 9, 1964 explained that the CIA’s covert media campaign in Miami aimed “to work out a relationship with [South Florida] news media which would insure that they did not turn the publicity spotlight on those [CIA] activities in South Florida which might come to their attention...and give [the CIA’s Miami station] an outlet into the press which could be used for surfacing certain select propaganda items.”

While researching my book, I contacted Bohning to ask him about his reported ties to the CIA. Was he indeed AMCARBON 3? “I still do not know but… it is possible,” Bohning replied in one of a series of amicable e-mails and phone calls we exchanged. “There were several people in the Herald newsroom during the 1960s who had contact with the CIA station chief in Miami.”

Bohning took pains to explain that he was not a paid functionary of the CIA, insisting he was simply a dutiful reporter working every source he could as he went about his job. And, as I wrote back to him, I’m fully aware that agency officials – looking to score bureaucratic points with their superiors – could sometimes make empty boasts that they had certain journalists in their pocket. I also told him that I understood that many journalists, particularly in those Cold War days, thought it was permissible to swap information with intelligence sources. But in evaluating a journalist’s credibility, it is important for readers to know of these cozy government relationships. The fact that Bohning was given a CIA code as an agency asset and was identified as an agency informant is a relevant piece of information that the readers of Washington Decoded have a right to know.

Even more relevant is that, over the years, Bohning’s journalism has consistently reflected his intelligence sources’ points of view, with little or no critical perspective. Bohning’s book, The Castro Obsession, is essentially the CIA’s one-dimensional view of that historical drama, pure and simple, down to the agency’s self-serving claim that it was the Kennedys’ fanaticism that drove the spy outfit to take extreme measures against the Castro regime. Bohning’s decision to invoke former CIA director and convicted liar Richard Helms’ conversation with Henry Kissinger, another master of deceit, as proof that Robert Kennedy was behind the Castro plots speaks for itself.

In Bohning’s eagerness to shine the best possible light on the CIA, he goes as far as to attempt to exonerate David Morales – a notorious CIA agent whose hard-drinking and violent ways alienated him not only from many of his colleagues but from his own family, as I discovered in my research. Among my “thin” sources on Morales were not only those who worked and lived with him, but his attorney, who told more than one reporter that Morales implicated himself in the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers.

In discussing my “tendentious” view of the CIA’s dissembling on the Bay of Pigs operation, Bohning seeks to exculpate disgraced covert operations chief Richard Bissell, the architect of the fiasco. Bohning writes that he doubts Bissell lied to JFK about the doomed plan’s chances for success. And yet this is precisely the way that the Miami Herald, Bohning’s own newspaper, covered the story when the CIA’s internal history of the Bay of Pigs was finally released in August 2005. “Bissell owed it to JFK to tell him” the truth about the Bay of Pigs plan, the newspaper quoted a historian who had studied the CIA documents. But “there is no evidence that he did.” Bohning too was quoted in the Herald article, and his view of Bissell was decidedly less trusting than it is in his review of my book. “Bissell seems to have had a habit of not telling people things they needed to know,” Bohning told the Herald.

Bohning’s pro-CIA bias also compels him to brush aside former Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi’ strong suspicions of a CIA involvement in the assassination. It is true that the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which found evidence of a conspiracy in its 1979 report, did not include the CIA in its list of suspects. But Bohning stops conveniently short of what has happened in ensuing years. After Washington Post journalist Jefferson Morley revealed that the CIA’s liaison with the committee, a veteran agent named George Joannides, had withheld information about his own connection to Lee Harvey Oswald from the committee and undermined its investigation in other ways, a furious G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel of the committee, retracted his earlier statement that the agency had fully cooperated with the Congressional investigation. Instead, said Blakey, the CIA was guilty of obstruction of justice. Blakey told me, as I reported in my book, that he now believes that Mafia-linked “rogue” intelligence agents might have been involved in the assassination. In short, these developments have bolstered Fonzi’s earlier suspicions.

Bohning criticizes me for accepting the credibility of a source named Angelo Murgado, a Bay of Pigs veteran aligned with the Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime – and as Bohing concedes, a minor figure in my book. But Bohning provides no evidence that Murgado’s story about investigating suspicious activity in the Cuban exile world for Bobby Kennedy is false. The exile community is known for its flamboyant internal disputes. Bohning solicits comments about Murgado from his own corners of this world and chooses to accept their validity. But many of the sources in the anti-Castro movement that Bohning has cultivated over the years have their own dubious pasts and shady agendas. I was forthright with my readers about Murgado’s drawbacks as a source, including his criminal record, which Bohning presents as if he’s revealing it for the first time. I tried to put Murgado’s statements in their proper context and allow readers to make their own conclusion. But Bohning is rarely as transparent about his sources and their motivations in his Cuba reporting.

Bohning is equally selective in rejecting Howard Hunt’s late-hour confessions about Dallas. Until the final years of his life, Hunt – a CIA veteran of the anti-Castro wars and the notorious ringleader of the Watergate burglary team – took a view of the Kennedy assassination that was espoused within agency circles in his day, i.e., that JFK was the victim of a Havana and Moscow-connected plot. This Communist plot theory of the assassination was rejected by the Warren Commission (whose work Bohning continues to find persuasive), as well as investigators for the Church Committee and the House Assassinations Committee, as well as most reputable researchers. But Hunt’s unfounded charges about a Communist conspiracy never landed him in hot water with critics like Bohning. It was only when Hunt broke ranks to implicate members of the CIA – and himself – in the crime that Bohning felt compelled to heatedly question his credibility.

Unlike his earlier charges, Hunt’s allegations of a CIA connection to Dallas were based on what he claimed was first-hand, eyewitness evidence. Hunt told his son, St. John, that he was invited to a meeting at a CIA safe house in Miami where the plot to kill Kennedy was discussed, and he implicated himself in the plot as a “benchwarmer.” It is true that during his career, Hunt did indeed act as a CIA disinformation specialist, and he might have had inexplicably devious reasons for fingering former colleagues like Morales, as well as himself, in the crime. And his son, St. John, did indeed once lead a roguish, drug-fueled life, as he has freely told the press and as I reported in my book. But I have seen the confessional notes written in the senior Hunt’s own hand, and have heard his guarded confessions on tape – as have other journalists. The authenticity of this material is undisputed. So, despite his colorful past, St. John’s character is not the central issue here. It’s the material that his father himself left behind as his last will and testament. Bohning has no reason to dismiss Howard Hunt’s sensational allegations out of hand – other than his blind faith in CIA sources who still stick to the party line on Dallas. While Hunt’s confessions are clearly not the definitive word on the subject, they are at least worthy of further investigation on the part of serious, independent journalists and researchers.

But when it comes to the subject of the CIA’s secret war on Cuba – an operation that Robert Kennedy, among other knowledgeable insiders, believed was the source of the assassination plot against his brother – Don Bohning is an obviously partisan chronicler. Again and again Bohning has chosen to present the CIA in the most flattering light and its critics in the most negative. I accept Bohning’s insistence that he was not a CIA stooge. But he should stop acting like one.

[William Kelly]

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs094.html

MIAMI HERALD
Posted on Sun, Mar. 20, 2005





The Castro Obsession
Cuban exiles, the CIA and a secret war:
A new book focuses on a post-Bay of Pigs
program to get rid of Castro
BY DON BOHNING

[/size][size="4"]This is taken from ''The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965'' (Potomac Books, 2005). The chapter entitled ''Miami: Perpetual Intrigue'' is excerpted here.

For South Florida, first Mongoose [codename for the post Bay of Pigs U. S. covert anti-Castro program] and then the Cuban Missile Crisis only intensified a frenzied decade that began in the mid-1950s, when Castro's 82-member guerrilla band landed in southeastern Cuba. Mongoose contributed to an already-substantial population of CIA agents, Cuban exiles, wannabe soldiers-of-fortune and assorted other adventurers either involved -- or wanted to be -- in the secret war against Castro. Then the missile crisis came to make Miami the hottest spot in the Cold War -- apart from the three capitals involved -- and further fuel the perpetual intrigue simmering beneath the city surface.

An alphabet soup of Cuban exile groups numbering in the hundreds had sprung up, each trying to outdo the other in anti-Castro militancy. More than one such organization had no more members than the leader who announced its existence. To fuel fund-raising, they called press conferences and issued war communiqués proclaiming actions against Cuba that most often never occurred. Stirring an already boiling pot was JMWAVE, codename for the secluded headquarters of the CIA's frontline command post in Washington's ''back alley'' war against Castro.

For JMWAVE, its activities were to reach a peak in late 1962 and early 1963 leading up to, and during, the missile crisis and its immediate aftermath. Functioning under the cover of Zenith Technical Enterprises, JMWAVE operated from Building 25 at the University of Miami's secluded South Campus, a former U.S. Navy installation. Ted Shackley, a rising CIA star, was in charge as station chief from early 1962 through mid-1965. Some 300-to-400 agents toiled under Shackley's leadership, making JMWAVE the largest CIA station in the world after the headquarters in Langley, Va.



<FONT face=Arial size=4>With its estimated $50 million a year budget in 1960s dollars, the CIA station's economic impact on South Florida was tremendous. CIA front companies numbered ''maybe 300 or 400 at one time or another .

[William Kelly]

http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs094.html

MIAMI HERALD
Posted on Sun, Mar. 20, 2005


The Castro Obsession
Cuban exiles, the CIA and a secret war:
A new book focuses on a post-Bay of Pigs
program to get rid of Castro
BY DON BOHNING

This is taken from ''The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965'' (Potomac Books, 2005). The chapter entitled ''Miami: Perpetual Intrigue'' is excerpted here.

For South Florida, first Mongoose [codename for the post Bay of Pigs U. S. covert anti-Castro program] and then the Cuban Missile Crisis only intensified a frenzied decade that began in the mid-1950s, when Castro's 82-member guerrilla band landed in southeastern Cuba. Mongoose contributed to an already-substantial population of CIA agents, Cuban exiles, wannabe soldiers-of-fortune and assorted other adventurers either involved -- or wanted to be -- in the secret war against Castro. Then the missile crisis came to make Miami the hottest spot in the Cold War -- apart from the three capitals involved -- and further fuel the perpetual intrigue simmering beneath the city surface.

An alphabet soup of Cuban exile groups numbering in the hundreds had sprung up, each trying to outdo the other in anti-Castro militancy. More than one such organization had no more members than the leader who announced its existence. To fuel fund-raising, they called press conferences and issued war communiqués proclaiming actions against Cuba that most often never occurred. Stirring an already boiling pot was JMWAVE, codename for the secluded headquarters of the CIA's frontline command post in Washington's ''back alley'' war against Castro.

For JMWAVE, its activities were to reach a peak in late 1962 and early 1963 leading up to, and during, the missile crisis and its immediate aftermath. Functioning under the cover of Zenith Technical Enterprises, JMWAVE operated from Building 25 at the University of Miami's secluded South Campus, a former U.S. Navy installation. Ted Shackley, a rising CIA star, was in charge as station chief from early 1962 through mid-1965. Some 300-to-400 agents toiled under Shackley's leadership, making JMWAVE the largest CIA station in the world after the headquarters in Langley, Va.

With its estimated $50 million a year budget in 1960s dollars, the CIA station's economic impact on South Florida was tremendous. CIA front companies numbered ''maybe 300 or 400 at one time or another . . . we had three or four people working on real estate to manage those companies designed to hold properties,'' said Shackley. ''We could only use properties for short periods of time. We couldn't stay in any one place very long.'' The properties included marinas, hunting camps, merchant shipping, airlines, a motel, leasing and transportation firms, exile-operated publishing outfits, ''safe houses'' strung throughout the area and, of course, Zenith Technical Enterprises. The station itself had more than a hundred cars under lease. It ran the third largest navy in the Caribbean, after the United States and Cuba. Shackley estimated there were up to 15,000 Cubans ``connected to us in one way or another.''

The tenor of the times and the threat next door contributed to a tolerant and even cooperative atmosphere by South Florida residents toward JMWAVE activities. ''There was, first and foremost, a great deal of patriotism in South Florida,'' recalled Shackley. ``When we needed things, we were dealing with people who had a memory of the Korean War and World War II. There was a strong anti-Castro feeling among Americans. And the influx of Cubans in late 1961 and early 1962 were the cream. What's important to understand is that it made it easy to work in that environment, a pro-government environment. I can't remember going to a businessman and asking him for cooperation who was not pleased to cooperate with the government and help.''

When authors David Wise and Thomas B. Ross blew the Zenith cover and identified it as a CIA front in the June 16, 1964, edition of Look magazine, the agency promptly changed the station's cover name to Melmar Corporation and went about business as usual from the same location.

`GOOD TENANT'

Gene Cohen, University of Miami vice president and treasurer at the time, denied knowing that Zenith was a CIA cover. ''As far as we're concerned, the university is leasing space to an organization we consider a good tenant which pays rent promptly,'' said Cohen. ''There's nothing to indicate a connection with the CIA.'' As the still nave young reporter who spoke with Cohen and wrote the story appearing in The Miami Herald, the author's typed notes show that Cohen added ''off the record'' that it probably wouldn't have made any difference if the university did know Zenith was a CIA operation since ''we're all on the same side,'' reflecting a near universal South Florida attitude at the time.

Maybe Cohen didn't know, but University President Henry King Stanford certainly did, said Shackley. ``He knew who we were and what we were doing. I would meet him occasionally but only when we had a problem. I didn't see him often.''

While JMWAVE was by far the biggest, it was neither the first nor the only CIA presence in Miami. That distinction belonged to Justin F. ''Jay'' Gleichauf, who arrived shortly after Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled into exile on New Year's Day of 1959. Gleichauf told his story more than 40 years later in an unclassified CIA publication. ''I had no inkling [when Batista fell] that within two weeks I would be in Miami as head -- and sole staffer -- of a newly authorized office of the Domestic Contacts Division in the Directorate of Intelligence,'' he wrote.

Gleichauf opened an overt CIA office at 299 Alhambra Circle in Coral Gables. Its basic function was to be a Cuba ''listening post.'' To aid his effort, Gleichauf listed a CIA number -- but no address -- in the phone book and passed out business cards with his home number, resulting in calls from ''a motley collection of weirdos'' as well as some irate Castro supporters.

There was ''something like 700 exile groups,'' recalled Gleichauf. ``One guy was head of something called AAA, and claimed they had 5,000 men under arms. They were ready to go as soon as they got the green light, . . . [they] made a lot of promises. It turned out to be completely ineffectual. It was all bull. The green light was money. It was a racket, one guy and his brother-in-law, and existed only on paper.''

From his arrival in January 1959, Gleichauf did double duty for the CIA on the overt and covert side until the spring of 1960, when President Eisenhower authorized the operation that evolved into the Bay of Pigs. Shortly after the authorization, a CIA colleague from the Clandestine Service joined him in Miami to open the Western Hemisphere Division's new Forward Operating Base (FOB). His duties were to coordinate ''all support, training and preparatory activities for operations against Cuba,'' according to a heavily censored and undated CIA review of the Miami Station declassified in 1995.

Bob Reynolds arrived to head the covert office in September 1960 and left a year later. The office, too, was initially in Coral Gables with ''very thin cover,'' although Reynolds said he did not recall the address nor did he think it was then named JMWAVE.

COVERT OFFICE MOVED

By the time Reynolds departed Miami in the fall of 1961, the Bay of Pigs had failed, with planning for a new covert campaign against Castro already underway. Before his departure, Reynolds said he arranged to relocate the covert office from Coral Gables to the old Richmond Naval Air Station, the University of Miami's secluded South Campus.

Shackley left Miami in June 1965, after beginning the scale-down of what had been the frontline command post for the secret war. A further substantial cutback and reorganization of JMWAVE was underway by late 1966. ''Many covert entities were terminated and personnel reassigned,'' according to the Miami Station review.

By early 1968, ``it became apparent that as a result of sustained operational activity in the Miami area over a period of years the cover of the Miami Station had eroded to a point that the security of our operations was increasingly jeopardized.''

The decision was made to deactivate JMWAVE and replace it with a smaller operation ''which would be better able to respond to current needs.'' By then, CIA personnel at the station -- still operating under commercial cover -- had been reduced from a peak of some 400 to 150.

The new station began operation, this time under official cover with about 50 persons, in August 1968 at a U.S. Coast Guard facility in what then was described as a ''run-down'' part of Miami Beach.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/...us/11172242.htm

================================================================



Posted on Sun, Mar. 20, 2005





Q&A with Don Bohning


[/size]

[size="4"]Herald: The book focuses on Operation Mongoose. What was that?

[size="4"]Don Bohning: It was a post-Bay of Pigs covert program to get rid of Castro, officially approved by President Kennedy Nov. 3, 1961. It was not an exclusive CIA operation, and included the Departments of Defense, Justice and Treasury and the U.S. Information Agency. Its nominal chief was Gen. Edward Lansdale, but Bobby Kennedy was the real director. Mongoose effectively ended a year later with the Cuban missile crisis.

Herald: Why was that an important period?

DB: First, the atmospherics that accompanied Mongoose contributed to the Soviet decision to install missiles in Cuba, fearing another U.S. invasion. And second, because in order to resolve the missile crisis, Kennedy gave Moscow a no-invasion-of-Cuba pledge.

Herald: What impact did it have on Miami?

DB: Several, among them a considerable economic impact. The CIA station at the UM South Campus at the time grew to be the largest in the world, outside the agency's Langley headquarters.

Herald: What impact did it have on Cuba?

DB: There is no doubt that, first, the Bay of Pigs, and then Mongoose, helped consolidate Castro's control of Cuba.

Herald: What lessons from that period could the U.S. government apply to the current situation with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez?

DB: I would say don't jump to conclusions, although in the case of Castro there was probably more reason to be worried about Fidel because by late 1959 he was clearly allied with the Soviet Bloc. Today there is no Soviet Bloc or Cold War, so Chávez is more of a nuisance than a threat.

Herald: After Mongoose the CIA was perceived as a rogue agency, out there trying to kill Castro with Mafia hit men and exploding cigars. Do you think that in 10-20 years we'll see the CIA accused of rogue actions in the war on terror?

DB: This question reflects a widely held but, I think, erroneous view of the CIA's actions at the time. Anybody who has read the documents and interviewed many of the people involved will see that the CIA was carrying out the general policies of Eisenhower and Kennedy to get rid of Castro.

The possible exceptions are the various assassination plots against Fidel, which span more than the Mongoose period. While there is no evidence that either Eisenhower or the Kennedy brothers had knowledge of the plots, most CIA people I spoke with were convinced that Bobby, at least, knew about and encouraged them while maintaining ``plausible deniability.''

As for the CIA being accused down the road of running rogue operations in the fight against terrorists, I would doubt it since it's already quite evident that the CIA is and has been doing what the administration ''neo-cons'' want done.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/...us/11172249.htm

This post has been edited by William Kelly: Aug 7 2007, 01:42 AM

[Joan Mellen]

In the interest of "full disclosure," Mr. Talbot had a "duty" to report to readers that I described Don Bohning's designation as AMCARBON-3; his relationship with the CIA; and his reporting to the CIA on the Garrison investigation in "A Farewell to Justice," published in 2005. Credible scholars (as distinct from plagiarists) acknowledge information that has already been reported by others. I know for a fact that a mutual acquaintance pointed out to Mr. Talbot that I discussed Bohning and the CIA in my book.

It is amusing to me to make common cause with Don Bohning, whose work leaves something to be desired. But Mr. Talbot's complaints seem to be a case of the pot calling the kettle black.