One of the most distinguished aspects of David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard is that it shows just what conflicts led to the termination of Allen Dulles by President John Kennedy.  In his milestone biography of Dulles, Talbot showed that the prevailing wisdom, that it was only the Bay of Pigs, was likely incomplete. There were two other crises going on around the same time that multiplied Kennedy’s doubts about being able to live with Dulles as CIA Director.

Talbot had a book translated into English from the French which described Kennedy’s tense and worried reaction to the Secret Army Organization (OAS) attempt to overthrow President Charles DeGaulle. The OAS was a group of military veterans who violently disagreed with DeGaulle’s decision to grant the former French colony of Algeria its independence.  That disagreement led to several attempts to assassinate DeGaulle.  It has been proven beyond any serious doubt that the CIA was knowledgeable and complicit in these plots.  Even a friendly source for the Agency, Andrew Tully, admitted such was the case.( CIA: The Inside Story, pp. 48-49, 54; also NY Times, 4/29/61, and The Nation 5/20/61)

The OAS actually attempted an overthrow in Paris in April of 1961, the same month as the Bay of Pigs operation. As Talbot notes, Allen Dulles had a rather lengthy history of antagonism with the French president. And DeGaulle suspected the coup plotters were acting with the knowledge and support of the Agency. (Talbot, pp. 413-14)

As the overthrow attempt began to materialize, Kennedy phoned Herve Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington.  He assured him that he had nothing to do with the attempt.  But he qualified that by saying “…the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.” (ibid, p. 418) But he made a public pledge :” In this grave hour for France, I want you to know of my continuing friendship and support as well as that of the American people.” (Talbot, p. 419) Kennedy even offered miliary support, which DeGaulle declined. Due to superb leadership by DeGaulle and the loyalty of the French people who arranged themselves into militias, the coup failed.  But as early as 3 months into his presidency Kennedy understood that Dulles was up to things that the president did not endorse.

But there had already been a suggestion of that two months earlier.

As Richard Mahoney noted in his excellent book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, before the 1960 election, Kennedy asked Averill Harriman if he should openly endorse the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. (Mahoney, p. 59) Belgium had titularly set Congo free, the largest and one of the richest countries in sub-Sahara Africa. Lumumba’s party had won the elections in May of 1960 under a constitutional plan.  In June, Lumumba began to form his government. On June 23^rd Lumumba gave his first public speech promising national unity, the sovereignty of the will of the people and a neutralist foreign policy.  (Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies, p. 55) Lumumba’s ascension, and the hopes he had of making Congo a model for Africa, did not last long.

Neither Belgium, England, or France wanted Congo to be free from European imperialism. Especially in the Katanga region, the richest area of the huge country.  So they encouraged  and paid Moise Tshombe to lead a breakaway state.  The Belgians still in country helped recruit mercenaries for Tshombe’s army. (Kwitny,p. 55) But there was a fourth antagonist to Lumumba: the USA. Allen Dulles was aware of the European scheming to break off Katanga months before it happened. (John Newman, Countdown to Darkness, p. 153) Dulles quickly joined the anti-Lumumba forces which now mushroomed. The Belgians dropped paratroopers, and Katanga declared itself a separate state. Lumumba did what he had to do:  he went to the UN and Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, and also to the Russians. When this happened, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville now said that Congo, as had been the case in Cuba, was experiencing a classic communist takeover. (Newman, p. 223) When that cable arrived in Washington, President Eisenhower instructed Dulles to begin assassination efforts against Lumumba. (Newman, p. 227)

By September 1960, the CIA had three agents in Leopoldville assigned to kill Lumumba. These were Sidney Gottlieb, master of poisons; and two mercenaries code named WIROGUE and QJWIN, part of the ZR Rifle assassination program. But Hammarskjold’s deputy, Rajeshwar Dayal, protected Lumumba by placing him under house arrest. But when Lumumba decided to escape and make his way to his political base in Stanleyville, the CIA changed tactics. The Agency now monitored his progress and cut off his escape routes. He was captured and sent to Katanga. (Newman p. 295) He was executed by firing squad and his body soaked in sulphuric acid. This was the sorry end to the first democratically elected leader of a post-colonial nation in sub-Sahara Africa.

As historian John Morton Blum noted in his book Years of Discord, from the cable traffic, it appears the CIA was consciously encouraging Lumumba’s murder to occur before Kennedy’s inauguration. (p. 23) Which it did by three days. Yet, Dulles did not inform Kennedy of the murder.  This happened almost a month later when ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, called Kennedy while a White House photographer was taking pictures of the president with his children. The famous picture taken at the time epitomizes the difference between Dulles and JFK. Kennedy’s face is torn with sorrow and he has his hand over his eyes.  It was so inconsequential to Dulles that he did not even deign to inform his commander in chief.

The third event in this sequence of Dulles/Kennedy conflict is, of course, the Bay of Pigs operation. I will not go into it in any detail since it has been written about so often.  I will just state that due to the belated discovery of Dulles’ 1965 notes on an article he was going to pen on the subject, he knew that the operation was doomed. He had planned on Kennedy salvaging the project with direct American intervention once he saw it failing. Kennedy declined. While Dulles was writing a draft of the article, he told his editor Willie Morris, “That Kennedy, he thought he was a god.” (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition pp. 47-48)

This segues into the main topic. Attorney General Robert Kennedy was part of the Taylor Commission, the White House inquiry into why the operation was such an abject failure. After some acute questioning of Dulles, he realized what the director’s secret agenda had been: direct American intervention. Yet, just about a week before the operation, this is something JFK had specifically said he would not do. (ibid)

Once Bobby Kennedy realized that Dulles had deliberately deceived the president, he decided Allen had to go.  But since Dulles was so well established, RFK realized that he needed to have another icon with which to counter him. Joseph Kennedy had served on what was the forerunner to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He told his son that he knew of a blistering but suppressed report written by Robert Lovett and David Bruce about Dulles and his mismanagement of the CIA. Somehow, RFK got hold of the 1956 Bruce-Lovett Report. He copied pages and took copious notes from it.

Today, there are three main sources on this watershed report: Peter Grose’s Gentleman Spy, Arthur Schlesinger’s  Robert Kennedy and His Times,  and Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes.  The last features several pages of the actual report in an appendix. Incredibly, some of the report is still redacted. Lovett and Bruce were very upset that Dulles had let the CIA become a covert action agency rather than an intelligence gathering one. But further, the covert actions were largely done through unvouchered funds which could not be traced. And the approval for such actions was pretty much pro forma. The governance of the operation was done by the Agency until its conclusion.  After the fact, the National Security Council was then briefed in an off the record oral report done from a biased point of view. Finally, there was almost never any cost or liability for failure.

The report also states that paramilitary operations and psychological warfare were done in consultation between the CIA and the foreign head of state. Sometimes, that foreign head of state was the opposition which the CIA had brought to prominence. Often, the ambassador was out of the loop.  Which means there was a split in American policy. Which allowed the foreign head of state to play off one power center against the other. People in the State Department and diplomatic corps were thus left without full knowledge of what American policy was. Bruce and Lovett wrote that they had heard complaints about this directly from people at State.

For instance, the CIA had covertly influenced local news media, labor groups, political figures and other activities abroad. Again, this led to differences of opinion between the CIA and State Department. And Dulles did not really care who was running these operations or what their political judgment and orientation was. Thus strange things were bound to occur due to the accent on themes suggested from headquarters. (Author’s Note: This idea clearly presages what happened in the case of Lumumba.)

Lovett and Bruce asked: what impact did these CIA operations have on our present alliances?  What will that impact be tomorrow?  They then built to this  peroration:

We are sure that the supporters of the 1948 decision to launch this government on a positive psychological warfare and paramilitary 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, have any detailed knowledge of what is going on.

Bobby Kennedy brought in former Secretary of Defense and Under Secretary of State Lovett twice.  Once to testify before the Taylor Commission, and once in consultation with the president. Lovett had not one kind  word for what Dulles had done with the Agency. But in 1956 the Bruce-Lovett report was ineffective since Eisenhower was under the influence of John Foster Dulles. (Schlesinger, pp. 477-78) But now, after being lobbied by his brother, President Kennedy decided the whole top level of the CIA had to go: Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans  Richard Bissell.

Bobby Kennedy went even further.  He called in Secretary of State Dean Rusk and asked him if there was any other member of the Dulles family still in their employ. Rusk said yes, Allen’s sister Eleanor. She was thus terminated also. (Leonard Mosley, Dulles, p. 473-74) It is interesting to note that it was Eleanor who stopped the cooperation of her brother with editor Willie Morris on the Bay of Pigs article for Harper’s magazine. (Ibid, p. 479)

Let us close with some comments on the first incident studied, the plots to kill DeGaulle. Recall, Kennedy complained to the French that he was unaware at times of what the CIA was doing. But, as shown above, they had a role in OAS murder plots and the overthrow attempt. When DeGaulle returned from Kennedy’s funeral he said to his information director that Oswald was simply part of a front.  A trial would have been very bad and people would have talked.  Therefore they brought in a clean up man, “supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory!”

The French president then said that this was all hogwash. It was “Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out.  Better an injustice than disorder.”  He then predicted:

But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence…..In order to not lose face in front of the whole world.  In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know.  They don’t want to find out.  They won’t allow themselves to find out. (Talbot, pp. 567-68)

There was one thing left out of this perceptive summation.  The man who Kennedy terminated would then serve on the commission inquiring into his death.  Not just that, Dulles would be the single most active member of that dubious body. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pp. 85-87)

After all, thanks to Kennedy, he didn’t have a job.

12 Comments