Tad Szulc

[John Simkin]

Tad Szulc is one of the few journalists who refused to become part of Operation Mockingbird. He was born in Warsaw and worked for the Associated Press in Brazil before moving to the United States in 1949. He covered the United Nations for the United Press International until joining the New York Times in 1953. He worked as a foreign correspondent and reported on a series of important events. This included the overthrow of Marco Pérez Jiménez, the military dictator of Venezuela in 1958. The following year Szulc published Twilight of the Tyrants (1959). A book about how the CIA had supported military dictatorships in the Americas. This upset the authorities as Eisenhower had awarded Marco Pérez Jiménez the U.S. Legion of Merit.

In 1961 Szulc discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency were training Anti-Castro partisans in Florida and Guatemala with the idea of invading Cuba. Szulc's article was published in the New York Times on 7th April, 1961. However, the editor removed details of the proposed invasion and the involvement of the CIA in this operation. Later, President John F. Kennedy, told the New York Times's managing editor, Turner Catledge: "If you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake."

Szulc joined forces with Karl E. Meyer to write The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster. The CIA did not approve of the book and according to their files, Szulc was described as "anti-agency" and "under suspicion as a hostile foreign agent."

Szulc also became unpopular with the communist government in the Soviet Union for his reporting of the Prague Spring. Szulc was a supporter of Alexander Dubcek and the reform movement in Czechoslovakia. On the morning of the Red Army invasion, Szulc wrote: "Czechoslovakia was occupied early today by troops of the Soviet Union and four of its Warsaw Pact allies in a series of swift land and air movements." This resulted in him being thrown out of the country on the grounds that he was taking "an interest in secret military questions."

After leaving the New York Times in 1972 Szulc wrote several books including Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (1974). I will post passages from this book later.

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

[John Simkin]

Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (1974)

Howard Hunt is not a man who believes in retirement or vacations. In the afternoon of April 30, 1970, he walked out for the last time from the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. Next morning, May 1, he was at work at his new job with the Robert R. Mullen & Company public relations firm, on Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington.

Hunt was fifty-one years old going on fifty-two, and he desperately wanted and needed employment. His constant need for money was something of a mystery to his friends and associates. His CIA pension was $24,000 and the Mullen company was paying him $24,000 a year. Dorothy, his wife, worked part time at the Spanish Embassy, where she wrote letters in English for the Ambassador. The family's income, therefore, had to be at least $50,000, which was not bad in Washington in 1970. Besides, Hunt received residual royalties from some of the forty-four novels he had published over the previous twenty-eight years.

To be sure, the family had high expenses and they lived well. The mortgage and upkeep for Witches' Island was rather high. Kevan, the younger daughter, was attending Smith college. Lisa, the eldest, had a history of illness, and medical bills must have been considerable. Earlier, both girls had attended Holton Arms, an expensive private girls' school in the Maryland suburbs not far from the Hunts' house. The family had two cars, a Chevrolet and a Pontiac. Kevan had a red Opel station wagon of her own.

The Hunts lived comfortably, then. On Howard's insistence, they dined every evening by candlelight. They were busy on the suburban Potomac cocktail circuit. Their house was full of animals-cats and dogs and birds and even, once, a small boa constrictor. By all accounts, Dorothy was a warm and loving mother to her children. She was interested in Howard's new activities. Now that he had left the CIA, he could talk freely about his work-at least for a while. Friends who visited the Hunts during weekends found them relaxed and at ease. Howard, puffing on his pipe, would fondle one of the kittens. Dorothy mixed the drinks. Much of the housework was done by a Uruguayan woman who had been with the Hunts since their days in Montevideo more than ten years earlier. All in all, it was a rather pleasing picture of a well-to-do American family, with the father embarked on a new career, the mother working but dedicated to the children and to her pursuit of horsemanship, and the kids doing well at school.

Yet things were not all that simple downtown for Howard Hunt. In the first place, he was frustrated in his job. In the second place, he craved more money. The frustration evidently came from the instant transition from a glamorous association with the CIA (so it was believed to be) to the brain-addling dullness of writing press releases and other publicity material for the Mullen firm. For this is what Hunt was doing at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, although he claimed he was a vice president of the company. As Richard Helms was to testify in the summer of 1973 at the Senate Select Committee hearings, Hunt had been given undemanding jobs at the Agency in his last two years because of his daughter's medical problems, which, Helms said, required much of his attention. Still, it was painful for Hunt to be cut off so abruptly from the CIA and from the comforting sense of belonging to an elite, even though Hunt was increasingly critical of the CIA for losing its old aplomb. Now he was an outsider in the intelligence community and a "has-been." It must have rankled. Humorously or wistfully, Hunt decorated his personal memo pad, the kind that has the owner's name at the top, with an imprinted "00?" in the right-hand corner. This play on James Bond's "007" code number, which indicated "license to kill," revealed Hunt's uncertainty over his own identity in the context of a new life.

Financially, Hunt was always "haggling" for more money, as his associates at the public-relations company reported later. When he first discussed joining the Mullen firm before his retirement from the CIA, he talked about buying into the company. Robert Rodolf Mullen, founder and chairman of the board, was in his sixties and thinking about retirement. Hunt expressed an interest in buying a share of his equity, but when the time came he seemed to have difficulties in raising the $2000 in "earnest money" which the Mullen firm required. Later, he put up an argument for an $8,000 salary increase - this would have brought up his salary to $32,000 - but the Mullen people turned him down. Hunt made noises about resigning over the money issue but never did anything about it.

Actually, the Mullen company was an interesting place for a man like Hunt to be in Washington in 1970. Robert Mullen, a veteran newspaper man, had served as director of public information for the Economic Corporation Administration between 1946 and 1948 (the latter being the year when Howard Hunt used the ECA as his CIA cover in the Paris station). It is unclear whether Mullen and Hunt met in those days, although it is possible that Mullen had some contacts with the Agency. In any event, the two references Hunt gave when he applied for the job with the Mullen company were Richard Helms and William F. Buckley. Helms was then still Director of the CIA and Buckley, an old CIA friend, was now a famous commentator. Many people around Washington believe that there is indeed such a thing as a CIA "old-boy network."

At the time of the Watergate raid and in subsequent testimony before the Senate Investigating Committee, Helms insisted that he barely knew Hunt. But there are reasons to believe that Helms was at least quite aware of Hunt's existence. For one thing, according to senior Agency officials, Helms tried hard to get Hunt the Madrid station job which Allen Dulles had promised him. For another thing, Helms kept copies of Hunt's spy novels around his office and often gave or lent them to friends and visitors.

[Rex Bradford]

Tad Szulc was also prominent in the creation of Project AMTRUNK, begun in 1963 as the effort to organize a coup in Cuba using military leaders inside the Cuban government.

A CIA memo from 1977 summarizing the chronology of AMTRUNK starts with this:

The proposal for this operation was presented to CIA by Tad Szulc, via Mr. Hurwitch, the State Department Cuban Coordinator, in February 1963. It allegedly originated with George Volsky and Dr. Nestor Moreno who referred to it as the "Leonardo Plan." Its objective was to overthrow the Cuban Government by means of a conspiracy among high-level military and civilian leaders of the government culminating in a coup d'etat which would oust both Castro and the Communists from power."

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=387880

Rex

[John Simkin]

Tad Szulc was also prominent in the creation of Project AMTRUNK, begun in 1963 as the effort to organize a coup in Cuba using military leaders inside the Cuban government.

A CIA memo from 1977 summarizing the chronology of AMTRUNK starts with this:

The proposal for this operation was presented to CIA by Tad Szulc, via Mr. Hurwitch, the State Department Cuban Coordinator, in February 1963. It allegedly originated with George Volsky and Dr. Nestor Moreno who referred to it as the "Leonardo Plan." Its objective was to overthrow the Cuban Government by means of a conspiracy among high-level military and civilian leaders of the government culminating in a coup d'etat which would oust both Castro and the Communists from power."

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=387880

Rex

Fascinating. You are definitely becoming a very useful member of the Forum.

[Rex Bradford]

Some persons in CIA were apparently highly suspicious of Szulc also, calling him a "possible foreign agent." and "the possibility that Tad Szulc might have been reporting White House policy to Castro, and the GOC and/or the Soviets all along." There was speculation that project AMTRUNK was itself conceived by the Cubans and/or Soviets. I have no idea where they got this idea.

One of the sources of this, not the only one, is a Feb 1977 CIA memo entitled "Operations to Split the Castro Regime". Relevant pages of interest are linked to below:

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...amp;relPageId=8

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...mp;relPageId=10

Rex

[Bruce Cormier]

Tad Szulc was also prominent in the creation of Project AMTRUNK, begun in 1963 as the effort to organize a coup in Cuba using military leaders inside the Cuban government.

A CIA memo from 1977 summarizing the chronology of AMTRUNK starts with this:

The proposal for this operation was presented to CIA by Tad Szulc, via Mr. Hurwitch, the State Department Cuban Coordinator, in February 1963. It allegedly originated with George Volsky and Dr. Nestor Moreno who referred to it as the "Leonardo Plan." Its objective was to overthrow the Cuban Government by means of a conspiracy among high-level military and civilian leaders of the government culminating in a coup d'etat which would oust both Castro and the Communists from power."

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=387880

Rex

This appears to be a longer version of the same memo: http://www.historymatters.com/essays/jfkme...10400-10123.pdf

[James Richards]

In the early 1960's (exact date unknown), Tad Szulc wrote an interesting piece where he revealed that the United States government had employed a high official from the Batista regime, a man named Col. Mariano Faget to screen Cuban refugees at the Opa-Locka detention center. This was supposed to weed out Castro agents.

Needless to say, many of the important anti-Castro figures were surprised to see him there. Some of them said that all Faget was interested in was operations against Batista during the revolution.

Szulc also reported how prominent exile leaders were bewildered by the continued confinement of significant anti-Castro personnel at the permanent detention camps at McAllen and Port Israel in Texas. Along with this report came the serious warning that procedures like this were turning anti-Castro fighters against the United States.

FWIW.

James

[Guest]

Tad Szulc.

Thanks to Malcolm Blunt.