Shanet

[Jim Root]

Shanet

Do you have a copy of NSC Directive 10/2? If so could you post a copy and any backround info you may have.

Thanks,

Jim Root

Edited December 21, 2004 by Jim Root

[Shanet Clark]

Shanet

Do you have a copy of NSC Directive 10/2?  If so could you post a copy and any backround info you may have.

Thanks,

Jim Root

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I have read the National Security Council Directives of the Carter Years Only, What date is this {ten slash two} ?

I am familiar with NSC Directive 1947, the old CIA charter, that Carter and Clinton (and Reagan and Bush I) failed to re-charter. [rechartering is going now under NID]

Lloyd Cutler was the person responsible for the attempted CIA re-charter in the aftermath of the Church Committee investigations, like today, it was the overwhelming consensus of the Senate and the public to reform the CIA and it never really happened. You can see the bogging down in the late 1970's in the Carter Library documents I reviewed, and I believe Lloyd Cutler was an advisor to Clinton who kept him informed on the political history of the CIA reforms, and advised Clinton to avoid action. Carter was ill served by the civilian agency leadership in the struggle with the other branches.

The NSC Cable directives I have personally seen involve events from 1977-1979 and generally concerned nuclear proliferation, Taiwan and human rights in the foreign policy. Probably the most anomylous and strange document in the un-numbered Presidential Foriegn Policy Directive Memo file that I saw was a letter from Jimmy Carter to Vice President Mondale, Secretary of Defence Harold Brown, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezhinski and the Secretary of State that President Carter's advisor, Hamilton Jordan, was to be at all subsequent National Security Council sessions as a Presidential advisor on national security.

One of the SIGNAL events (pun) of the late 1970s Jimmy Carter era reforms was the firing of 800 case officers within a single rapid moment by CIA Director Stansfield Turner. Turner fired the covert intelligence informant runners and lost a ground game in favor oh high tech satellite and photograph and signals interception capacity. Stansfield Turner's decision to fire and really decimate the CIA on the ground in favor of satellite and signal systems (whether you agree with it or not) is still being quietly played in this current debate about Goss, the new NID, the satellites versus the ground game, and the failures of 9/11 carried a unique political power.....to force Bush to partially acquiesce as his stalking horses on the right foundered slowly. And changes will be made.

The important Presidential Papers in my seminar stemmed from these Lloyd Cutler Re-Charter Agency 1978-79 Boxes, and the Ford Library materials on Colby, Kissinger, Rockefeller and Phil Buchen. The Ford Papers on the Executive Order of 1976 reforming, mildly, post-vietnam and post-watergate intelligence capacities, that's the information in the seminar paper. Carter's vice-president also carried a special portfolio for intelligence, and Mondale took the oversight conclusions of the Church Committee to the Democratically controlled House and Senate, and these reforms were never fully committed too, observed or allowed to become the culture of power in the years subsequent to 1978.

I will consult published sources on ten slash two nsc.d

Edited December 21, 2004 by Shanet Clark

[Jim Root]

Shanet

This is what I know.....

National Security Council Directive 10/2, "National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects," dated June 18, 1948, assigned to the CIA the responsibility to "conduct covert operations," including "direct action, including sabotage ... assistance to underground movements ... [and] guerrillas."

In 1948, Directive 10-2 formally authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations, which were defined as those "which are so planned and executed that any US [sic] Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US [sic] Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them." See National Security Council Directive 10-2, § 5, June 18, 1948

Oswald in Russia?????

Would be interesting to read the exact verbage as an insight to what the framers of the CIA etc. (McCloy) had in mind at the time of the inception of this NSC.

Jim Root

Edited December 22, 2004 by Jim Root

[Shanet Clark]

Yes Jim these are disturbing and irregular executive orders, in a democratic republic, serious constitutional and tactical difficulties emerge immediately.

Heres a site on order 5412, this confirms all that.

This special group committee, the intelligence oversight board for the president really, is a twin of the visible National Security Council, and its heir was the PFIAB

Heres an internet posting on the 5412. pretty straightforward boilerplate >>

National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations

The following comes from "The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part I, 1945-1961," prepared for the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, by the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1984. Declassified in 1977, NSC 5412 is located at the National Archives, RG 273. Also important to note here is the wording that defined "covert operations." ______________________________________________________________

NSC 5412, "National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations," which continued to be the U.S. Government's basic directive on covert activities until the Nixon administration's NSC 40 in 1970, began with this statement of purpose:

The National Security Council, taking cognizance of the vicious covert activities of the USSR and Communist China and the governments, parties and groups dominated by them . . . to discredit and defeat the aims and activities of the United States and other powers of the free world, determined, as set forth in NSC directives 10/2 and 10/5 [of the Truman administration], that, in the interests of world peace and U.S. national security, the overt foreign activities of the U.S. Government should be supplemented by covert operations. . . . The NSC has determined that such covert operations shall to the greatest extent practicable, in the light of U.S. and Soviet capabilities and taking into account the risk of war, be designed to

a. Create and exploit troublesome problems for International Communism, impair relations between the USSR and Communist China and between them and their satellites, complicate control within the USSR, Communist China and their satellites, and retard the growth of the milltary and economic potential of the Soviet bloc.

b. Discredit the prestige and ideology of International Communism, and reduce the streneth of its parties and other elements.

c. Counter any threat of a party or individuals directly or indirectly responsive to Communist control to achieve dominant Power in a free worid country.

d. Reduce International Communist control over any areas of the world.

e. Strengthen the orientation toward the United States of the peoples and nations of the free world, accentuate, wherever possible, the identity of interest between such peoples and nations and the United States as well as favoring, where appropriate, those groups genuinely advocating or believing in the advancement of such mutual interests, and increase the capacity and will of such peoples and nations to resist International Communism.

f. In accordance with established policies and to the extent practicable in areas dominated or threatened by International Communism, develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations and ensure availability of those forces in the event of war, including wherever practicable provisions of a base upon which the military may expand these forces in time of war within active theaters of operations as well as provision for stay-behind assets and escape and evasion facilities.

NSC 5412 defined "covert operations" as ". . . all activities conducted pursuant to this directive which are so planned and executed that any U.S. Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, such operations shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda, political action; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition; escape and evasion and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states or groups including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillias and refugee liberation groups; support of indigenous and anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world; deceptive plans and operations; and all activities compatible with this directive necessary to accomplish the foregoing. Such operations shall not include: armed conflict by recognized military forces, espionage and counterespionage, nor cover and deception for military operations." To approve and coordinate most covert operations, (some were required to be approved by the President) NSC 5412 established what became known as the 5412 Committee, also given the nonspecific title, the Special Group, to reduce chances of exposure. (In 1964, after the term "Special Group" became known, the Group was called the 303 Committee. In 1970, it was renamed the 40 Committee.) The 5412 Committee and its successors consisted of the Deputy Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, and the Director of the CIA, with the latter serving as the Group's "action officer." In 1957, the Chairman of the JCS also became a member.

[2] Section 403, paragraph d of the National Security Act of 1947, which defined the powers and duties of the CIA:

Section 403. Central Intelligence Agency

(d) Powers and Duties

For the purpose of coordinating the intelligence activities of the several Government departments and agencies in the interest of national security, it shall be the duty of the Agency, under the direction of the National Security Council--

(1) to advise the National Security Council in matters concerning such intelligence activities of the Government departments and agencies as relate to national security;

(2) to make recommendations to the National Security Council for the coordination of such intelligence activities of the departments and agencies of the Government as relate to the national security;

(3) to correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security, and provide for the appropriate dissemination of such intelligence within the Government using where appropriate existing agencies and facilities: PROVIDED, That the Agency shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal-security functions: PROVIDED FURTHER, That the departments and other agencies of the Government shall continue to collect, evaluate, correlate, and disseminate departmental intelligence: AND PROVIDED FURTHER, That the Director of Central Intelligence shall be responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure;

(4) to perform, for the benefit of the existing intelligence agencies, such additional services of common concern as the National Security Council determines can be more efficiently accomplished centrally;

(5) to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.

(Members, this is Carte Blanche, and the progenitor of million suffering abuses.)

[Jim Root]

Shanet

The 1948 NSC 10/2 created the Office of Policy Co-Ordination headed by Frank Wisner and required that the "Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them."

By the way I believe that Edwin Walker, during the Greek Civil War, was acting under the 10/2 provision.

What is the date on NSC 5412?

Jim Root

[Shanet Clark]

Shanet

The 5412 directive and committee was apparently a mid 1950s arrangement.

The 1948 NSC 10/2 created the Office of Policy Co-Ordination headed by Frank Wisner and required that the "Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them."

Wisner is certainly an anomolous character in the democratic tradition. His web of Cold War contacts underpinned a worldwide resurgence of Post-War sanitized anti-Soviet Nazis. The rocket scientists and intelligence "resources" swept intothe US under corporate and institutional cover, OPERATION PAPERCLIP, was all Wisner's baby...

Here's some more "boiler plate" a conventional US State Department History of the NSC...it is highly suggestive of our particular approaches, I believe.

STATE DEPT HISTORY OF NAT SEC COUNCIL:

In 1949, events reinforced the need for better coordination of national security policy: NATO was formed, military assistance for Europe was begun, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb, and the Communists gained control in China. The Department of State seized the opportunity to review U.S. strategic policy and military programs, overcoming opposition from Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and his allies in the Bureau of the Budget. Initially sidestepping formal NSC channels, State won approval of an ad hoc interdepartmental committee under its Policy Planning head, Paul Nitze. Their report, NSC 68, was submitted directly to Truman in February 1950, who sent it to the NSC for a cost analysis. An NSC committee authorized to consider costs and broader implications of NSC 68 began its work, but before it could be completed the Korean war broke out.

The war in Korea dramatically changed the functioning of the NSC under Truman. Thereafter the Council met every Thursday and the President attended all but 7 of its 71 remaining meetings. Truman limited attendance to statutory members plus the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the JCS, the Director of Central Intelligence, two special advisers (Averell Harriman and Sidney Souers), and the NSC Executive Secretary.

The Secretariat was retained, but the Staff and the Consultants were eliminated in favor of a Senior Staff--Assistant Secretary level or higher(supported by Staff Assistants. Truman reiterated that the NSC was to be the channel for all important national security recommendations. During the first year of the Korean war, the NSC came as close as it ever did under Truman to fulfilling that role. Nonetheless, Truman still looked outside the formal NSC mechanism for advice and recommendations, relying on the NSC as much for staffing and coordination of interdepartmental views as for primary recommendations.

Truman made additional structural changes in the NSC in late 1950 and in 1951. He directed the head of the newly-created Office of Defense Mobilization to attend NSC meetings and then made him a member of the Senior Staff. With the Mutual Security Act of 1951, the newly-created Director for Mutual Security (Harriman) became a statutory member with the right to appoint a Senior Staff member. The Bureau of the Budget sent a representative to some Senior Staff meetings. In 1951, the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), made up of the deputies at State and Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, was created to coordinate the response to Soviet unconventional Cold War tactics. The PSB worked closely with the NSC in managing America's covert psychological counterattack. In his retirement President Truman denied any responsibility for "cloak and dagger operations" but it was during his Presidency that covert intelligence operations in support of foreign policy objectives was undertaken on an ever broadening scale. The NSC's first action (NSC 1/1) authorized covert action in the Italian elections. The formal institutionalization of covert actions was established as NSC 4 in December 1947, and NSC 10/2 of June 1948.

During Truman's last year, the Council and the Senior Staff met less frequently and NSC activity abated. Much interdepartmental planning on the NSC books was never completed by the end of the Truman administration. During this period, the NSC reflected Truman's sense of frustration as a lame-duck President caught in a stalemated war.

Eisenhower Administration, 1953-1961

Under President Eisenhower, the National Security Council system evolved into the principal arm of the President in formulating and executing policy on military, international, and internal security affairs. Where Truman was uncomfortable with the NSC system and only made regular use of it under the pressure of the Korean war, Eisenhower embraced the NSC concept and created a structured system of integrated policy review. With his military background, Eisenhower had a penchant for careful staff work, and believed that effective planning involved a creative process of discussion and debate among advisers compelled to work toward agreed recommendations.

The genesis of the new NSC system was a report prepared for the President in March 1953 by Robert Cutler, who became the President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. Cutler proposed a systematic flow of recommendation, decision, and implementation that he later described as the "policy hill" process. At the bottom of the hill, concerned agencies such as State and Defense produced draft policy recommendations on specific topics and worked for consensus at the agency level. These draft NSC papers went up the hill through the Planning Board, created to review and refine the recommendations before passing them on for full NSC consideration. The NSC Planning Board met on Tuesday and Friday afternoons and was composed of officials at the Assistant Secretary level from the agencies with permanent or standing representation on the Council, as well as advisers from the JCS and CIA. Hundreds of hours were spent by the Board reviewing and reconstructing proposed papers for the NSC. Cutler resigned in 1958 in exhaustion. The top of the foreign policy-making hill was the NSC itself, chaired by the President, which met regularly on Thursday mornings.

The Council consisted of the five statutory members: the President, Vice President, Secretaries of State and Defense, and Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization. Depending on the subject under discussion, as many as a score of other senior Cabinet members and advisers, including the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the JCS, and the Director of Central Intelligence, attended and participated. The agenda included regular briefings by the Director of Central Intelligence on worldwide developments affecting U.S. security, and consideration of the policy papers advanced by the Planning Board. The upshot of the discussions were recommendations to the President in the form of NSC Actions. The President, who participated in the discussion, normally endorsed the NSC Action, and the decision went down the hill for implementation to the Operations Coordinating Board.

President Eisenhower created the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) to follow up on all NSC decisions. The OCB met regularly on Wednesday afternoons at the Department of State, and was composed of the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Directors of CIA, USIA, and ICA, and the Special Assistants to the President for National Security Affairs and Security Operations Coordination. The OCB was the coordinating and implementing arm of the NSC for all aspects of the implementation of national security policy. NSC action papers were assigned to a team from the OCB for follow-up. More than 40 interagency working groups were established with experts for various countries and subjects. This 24-person staff of the OCB supported these working groups in which officials from various agencies met each other for the first time.

The President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, a post held under Eisenhower by Cutler, Dillon Anderson, William H. Jackson, and Gordon Gray, oversaw the flow of recommendations and decisions up and down the policy hill, and functioned in Council meetings to brief the Council and summarize the sense of discussion. The Special Assistant was an essential facilitator of the decision-making system, but, unlike the National Security Adviser created under Kennedy, had no substantive role in the process. The NSC staff managed by the Special Assistant grew during the Eisenhower years, but again had no independent role in the policy process.

President Eisenhower had great confidence in the efficacy of covert operations as a viable supplement or alternative to normal foreign policy activities. The seeming clear success of the operations to overthrow Iranian populist leader Mossadegeh in 1953 and the left-leaning President Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 was not without their crisis moments in the White House. In 1954 NSC 5412 provided for the establishment of a panel of designated representatives of the President and the Secretaries of State and Defense to meet regularly to review and recommend covert operations. Gordon Gray assumed the chairmanship of the "5412 Committee" as it was called, and all succeeding National Security Advisers have chaired similar successor committees, variously named "303", "40", "Special Coordinating Committee," which, in later Presidential administrations, were charged with the review of CIA covert operations.

President Eisenhower also created the position of staff secretary with the responsibility to screen all foreign policy and military documents coming to the President. While Colonel Andrew Goodpaster held this position, he tended to eclipse the Special Assistant for National Security.

The strength of the NSC system under Eisenhower was that it provided for regular, fully-staffed, interagency review of major foreign and national security issues, culminating in discussion and decision at the highest level of government. The resulting Presidentially-approved NSC papers provided policy guidance at every level of implementation. Eisenhower felt that the regular policy discussions kept his principal advisers fully informed, in step with one another, and prepared to react knowledgeably in the event of crisis. His commitment to the system was such that he chaired every Council meeting he could attend (329 of a total of 366). The NSC meetings, including prior briefings and subsequent review of NSC Actions, constituted the largest single item on his weekly agenda.

Secretary of State Dulles, on the other hand, had reservations about the NSC system. He was the strongest personality in the Eisenhower Cabinet and jealously guarded his role as principal adviser to the President on foreign policy. He had constant, direct access to the President and did not feel that some of the most sensitive issues should be discussed in groups as large as were involved in most NSC meetings. He drew a sharp line between the NSC policy review process and the day-to-day operations of foreign policy, which he maintained were the province of the Department of State. Dulles and his deputies were not comfortable with the scope the NSC review system gave to Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, another strong figure in the Cabinet, to intrude budgetary limitations into policy considerations. And Dulles successfully resisted a proposal to substitute the Vice President for the Under Secretary of State as chairman of the OCB, arguing that such a change would impinge on his role as principal adviser to the President on foreign policy.

Critics of the Eisenhower NSC system have argued that it was inflexible, overstaffed, unable to anticipate and react to immediate crises, and weighed down by committees reporting in great detail on long checklists of minor policy concerns. The most thorough critique of the system emerged from the hearings conducted in 1960(1961 by the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, known as the Jackson Subcommittee for its chairman, Senator Henry Jackson. Cutler and NSC Executive Secretary James Lay testified in support of the effectiveness of the system, but their testimony was offset by that of former Truman administration officials such as George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and Robert Lovett. They argued that foreign policy was being made by a passive President influenced by a National Security Council rendered virtually useless by ponderous, bureaucratic machinery. Basically, they argued, the NSC was a huge committee, and suffered from all the weaknesses of committees. Composed of representatives of many agencies, its members were not free to adopt the broad, statesmanlike attitude desired by the President, but, rather, were ambassadors of their own departments, clinging to departmental rather than national views. To make matters worse, critics added, the NSC system by its very nature was restricted to continuing and developing already established policies and was incapable of originating new ideas or major innovations. The critics suggested replacement of the formal, "over-institutionalized" NSC structure with a smaller, less formal NSC which would offer the President a clear choice of alternatives on a limited number of major problems.

Eisenhower was certainly not a passive President, dominated on foreign policy and national security issues by his Secretary of State. In fact, Eisenhower was actively in command of his administration, and the NSC system met his instincts and requirements. There is substance in the criticism that the Eisenhower NSC became to some extent the prisoner of a rigidly bureaucratic process, but the criticism misses the point that Eisenhower and Dulles did not attempt to manage fast-breaking crises or day-to-day foreign policy through the NSC apparatus. An examination of several of the major foreign policy problems that confronted the Eisenhower administration reveals that the NSC system was used to manage some and was virtually bypassed in others. When the question involved a policy debate between departments with strongly-held, contending positions, as it did in the case of the debate between the Departments of State and Defense in 1956(1957 over whether to introduce a more modern generation of weapons into Korea, the NSC process focused debate and produced an agreed decision after discussion of three draft policy papers.

Crisis situations, however, such as the Suez crisis of 1956, the off-shore island crises of 1955 and 1958, and the Lebanon crisis of 1958, were typically managed through telephone conversations between Eisenhower, Dulles, and other principal advisers, and through small meetings with the President in the White House, normally involving Dulles and other concerned advisers. Eisenhower sometimes used trusted NSC staffers to serve as an intermediary to gain information outside the chain of command as he did with Colonel Goodpaster during the Quemoy crisis in 1955. There was great similarity between this process of crisis management and that adopted by subsequent Presidents, such as Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, except for the fact that the ad hoc meetings in the Eisenhower White House did not involve a National Security Adviser as a substantive participant. And in the event that aspects of crisis management depended on contact with the critical man-on-the-spot, as it did in 1958 when Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy was dispatched to Lebanon to attempt to defuse the crisis, his instructions came from the Department of State and he reported to the Secretary of State rather than directly to the White House, as became the practice during the height of the Vietnam conflict.

When Eisenhower briefed President-elect Kennedy on the NSC system, and when Gray briefed his successor McGeorge Bundy, they emphasized the importance of the NSC machinery in the management of foreign policy and national security affairs. They might have been more persuasive had they pointed to the fact that the NSC system was essentially limited to policy review and was not used to manage crises or day-to-day foreign policy.

Kennedy Administration, 1961-1963

President Kennedy, who was strongly influenced by the report of the Jackson Subcommittee and its severe critique of the Eisenhower NSC system, moved quickly at the beginning of his administration to deconstruct the NSC process and simplify the foreign policy-making process and make it more intimate. In a very short period after taking office, the new President moved to reduce the NSC staff from 74 to 49, limit the substantive officers to 12, and hold NSC meetings much less frequently while sharply curtailing the number of officers attending. The Operation Coordination Board was abolished, and the NSC was, at the President's insistence, pulled back from monitoring the implementation of policies. The coordination of foreign policy decisions was ostensibly left to the State Department (and other agencies as necessary).

McGeorge Bundy's appointment as the President's National Security Adviser inaugurated this position as it has essentially continued down to the present. The definition of Bundy's responsibilities and authority unfolded and grew during the Kennedy presidency. Bundy's considerable intellectual and bureaucratic abilities as well as close personal relationship with the new President contributed much to evolution of the National Security Adviser position and the new role of the NSC. In a letter to Senator Jackson in September 1961 Bundy sought to define the early relationship sought with the State Department.

". . . the President has made it very clear that he does not want a large, separate organization between him and his Secretary of State. Neither does he wish any question to arise as to the clear authority and responsibility of the Secretary of State, not only in his own Department, and not only in such large-scale related areas as foreign aid and information policy, but also as the agent of coordination in all our major policies toward other nations."

The Department of State's apparent failure effectively to coordinate the administration's response to the Bay of Pigs crisis in early 1961 led to a series of measures aimed at providing the President with better independent advice from the government. It also sparked the NSC process to reenter the arena of monitoring the implementation of policy. The most important step in this direction was the establishment of the Situation Room in the White House in 1962. The Sit Room, located next to Bundy's office in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, was directly linked to all the communication channels of the State Department and the Department of Defense, as well as to some of the channels of the CIA. The Sit Room allowed the President and his foreign affairs advisers to keep abreast of all the cable traffic from overseas posts. More than anything else, the Sit Room allowed Bundy and his NSC staff to expand their involvement in the international activities of foreign affairs community and become, in essence, "a little State Department."

As National Security Adviser, Bundy divided his work with his Deputy, Walt Rostow (and later Carl Kaysen). While Bundy dealt with the immediate day-to-day crises and the range of European affairs, Rostow focused upon long-term planning with a particular concentration on Latin American affairs. Kaysen focused upon foreign trade and economic affairs matters that became increasingly important in the latter part of the Kennedy Presidency.

In addition to Bundy and the NSC staff, President Kennedy reached out still further for foreign affairs advice. Early in 1961 the President appointed General Maxwell Taylor to serve as his military representative and provide liaison with the government agencies and defense and intelligence establishments on military-political issues confronting the administration. Taylor in effect took up the role filled by Admiral Leahy in the Roosevelt White House. General Taylor advised the President on military matters, intelligence, and Cold War planning and paid special attention to the continuing Berlin crisis and growing difficulties in Indochina. The Taylor(Rostow mission to Indochina at the end of 1961 and the resulting report led to military decisions on aid to South Vietnam and the entry of the United States into the Vietnamese quagmire. Taylor had a very personal connection with the President and was not replaced in 1962 when he left. But in 1962 Kennedy appointed former State Department Under Secretary Chester Bowles to serve as his Special Adviser on Foreign Affairs. Bowles had not survived conflicts with Secretary of State Rusk and his appointment to the White House was partly compensatory. His brief was seemingly intended to be the development of policy toward the Third World, but after a year he left Washington to become Ambassador to India.

The NSC continued to meet during the Kennedy Presidency, but far less frequently than had been the case under his predecessor. It met 15 times during the first 6 months of 1961, then averaged one meeting a month for the rest of his Presidency, reaching a total of 49 meetings. "Much that used to flow routinely to the weekly meetings of the Council is now settled in other ways, Bundy reported in September 1961. Some of the NSC activities were taken up by a smaller, more select body called the Standing Group. This small NSC coordinating panel was chaired by the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and included the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Bundy. It considered a wide range of foreign affairs issues at 14 meetings the last of which was in August 1962. The Standing Group resumed in April 1963 with Bundy as its chairman and with the added membership of the Attorney General, the Chairman of the JCS, the Under Secretary of the Treasury, the Director of USIA, and Administrator of AID. It also met 14 times during the remainder of the Kennedy Presidency.

END US GOVERNMENT HISTORY.

Sorry that is so long, but that is interesting documentation, in an oblique way.

Edited December 22, 2004 by Shanet Clark

[Jim Root]

Shanet

If Oswald had been used by the Office of Policy Coordination in 1959 (and/or beyound) would, in your opinion, a cover-up of his (Oswald's) activities within the Warren Report be mandated by a 10/2 type senario?

Jim Root

[Shanet Clark]

Yes. That is always a good approach. Ask what steps the government would take under its own directives under certain circumstances. If TWA 800 had been shot down by a small US NAVY OFFRANGE missile what would the official government line have been?

It would have been the line they ultimately took, that no crime was committed.

They have to cover it up, its in the Charter.

Edited December 22, 2004 by Shanet Clark

[Jim Root]

Shanet

I knew I could count on you. Your ability to locate all that documented information so quickly is greatly appreciated!

It supports my senario of Oswald as a shooter who had a motive, not a lone nut. Motive was, to reveal to the American public what was really going on. It explains why Oswald was so adament about having Abt as the one attorney that could argue his case. It also explains why Oswald had to die, to keep plausible deniability plausible.

It still leaves the question of who knew where Oswald was working and who put the motorcade past that place. The number of people starts to get very small.

Some interesting points:

The most thorough critique of the system emerged from the hearings conducted in 1960(1961 by the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, known as the Jackson Subcommittee for its chairman, Senator Henry Jackson. Cutler and NSC Executive Secretary James Lay testified in support of the effectiveness of the system, but their testimony was offset by that of former Truman administration officials such as George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and Robert Lovett. They argued that foreign policy was being made by a passive President influenced by a National Security Council rendered virtually useless by ponderous, bureaucratic machinery. Basically, they argued, the NSC was a huge committee, and suffered from all the weaknesses of committees.

Kennan, Nitze and Lovett were all three McCloy friends and/or appointees. they argued for tighter control by a much smaller, I will call them, "power elite." Kennedy went along with these suggestions.

President Kennedy, who was strongly influenced by the report of the Jackson Subcommittee and its severe critique of the Eisenhower NSC system, moved quickly at the beginning of his administration to deconstruct the NSC process and simplify the foreign policy-making process and make it more intimate.... Early in 1961 the President appointed General Maxwell Taylor to serve as his military representative and provide liaison with the government agencies and defense and intelligence establishments on military-political issues confronting the administration. Taylor in effect took up the role filled by Admiral Leahy in the Roosevelt White House. General Taylor advised the President on military matters, intelligence, and Cold War planning

The man in the know, General Taylor advised the President on military matters, intelligence, and Cold War planning. Within the Kennedy administration he had access to the complete menu of available information and information is power, something Taylor relished! The McCloy men helped to tighten the control and Taylor was the benificiary. Interesting.

President Eisenhower also created the position of staff secretary with the responsibility to screen all foreign policy and military documents coming to the President. While Colonel Andrew Goodpaster held this position, he tended to eclipse the Special Assistant for National Security.

Goodpaster is the person who got Eisenhower's approval for the doomed Powers U-2 flight.

Eisenhower sometimes used trusted NSC staffers to serve as an intermediary to gain information outside the chain of command as he did with Colonel Goodpaster during the Quemoy crisis in 1955.

General Edwin Walker was on the scene as well during this Quemoy crisis sent by

Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor.

Thanks again for the supporting information,

Jim Root