The Schlesinger Memo: JFK v CIA
by James DiEugenio
As everyone who studies the presidency of John F. Kennedy knows, the seminal moment in his education about the treacherous ways of Washington occurred rather early. It was in April of 1961 with his ill-fated decision to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. As many commentators have said, the president had no real enthusiasm about this operation. And even CIA Director Allen Dulles admitted as much. (Destiny Betrayed, by James DiEugenio, second edition, p. 36) When White House advisor Arthur Schlesinger asked the president what he thought about the plans for the operation, Kennedy pithily replied that he thought about it as little as possible. (ibid)
Due to this reluctance, the CIA–in the persons of Dulles and Director of Plans Dick Bissell–had to entice Kennedy into going along with their concept. Therefore, they told him that Fidel Castro’s popularity was diminishing, that only 20 % of the public supported him, and that many native Cubans thought his regime would soon fall. The capper was this: if a rebellion would begin, the vast majority of the militia units would defect. (Peter Kornbluh, Bay of Pigs Declassified, pp. 294-95)
But even with that, Kennedy decided to put the decision up for a vote of his advisors. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara described the scene in his memoir. As Kennedy went around the table, only one person dissented from approval. And that person was not even a member of the administration–it was Senator William Fulbright. (Robert McNamara, In Retrospect, pp.25-27) But everyone else, the Joint Chiefs, members of the National Security Council, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and McNamara himself, all endorsed it. In fact, McNamara had passed a note to Kennedy saying that the Pentagon predicted that, even if the attack did not succeed, it would lead to Castro’s downfall.
Needless to say, everyone but Fulbright was wrong. But what made it even worse was this: the CIA had deceived Kennedy. The truth was that Dulles and Bissell knew the operation would not succeed. This was first discovered by Attorney General Robert Kennedy as part of the White House inquiry into the debacle helmed by General Maxwell Taylor. In his interrogation of Allen Dulles, RFK was simply stupefied at some of the answers to his questions. For instance, if the initial assault failed, the fallback plan was for the brigade to resort to guerilla tactics. The problem with this was that when the AG went to one of the Cubans involved in the training for the operation, Manolo Ray, he said they had no training at all in those kinds of maneuvers. But further to have resorted to that, the brigade would have had to retreat into the hills, which were about 80 miles away through swampland. (Michael Morrisey, “The Bay of Pigs Revisited,” at Mary Ferrell Foundation)
From his experience questioning Dulles, Bobby Kennedy suspected his brother had been snookered. He decided that Dulles had to go. So he consulted with his father, Joseph Kennedy, and discovered that Robert Lovett and David Bruce, two scions of the Eastern Establishment, had tried to dispose of Dulles years earlier. RFK brought in Lovett to join him to talk about what Dulles had done both to the Agency in general, and to him personally regarding the Bay of Pigs. (DiEugenio, pp. 48-50). President Kennedy not only terminated Dulles, but also Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell.
II
Bobby Kennedy was correct about the subterfuge. Many years later scholar Lucien S. Vandenbroucke discovered notes that Dulles had made concerning an article that he was going to pen for Harper’s about the Bay of Pigs. It turns out that Dulles understood that the project was fey. But what he was banking on was that Kennedy would intervene with American might rather than face a humiliating defeat. (Diplomatic History, Fall, 1984) When Vandenbroucke published the article, Bissell replied in a letter. The architect of the plan said that he and Dulles, “had allowed Kennedy to persist in misunderstanding about the nature of the Cuban operation.”
It’s clear that the president was convinced by his brother and Lovett. He said as much to his longtime friend Paul Fay. He confided that, when he first came into office, he was shocked at what poor judgment the military had shown. Being a former Navy man, as was Fay, he looked up to high officers. He assumed they had earned their stature by wise judgment and honest achievement. He now thought he was wrong. And he would not instinctively follow their advice in the future. Alluding to the Bay of Pigs, he said:
They wanted a fight and probably calculated that if we committed ourselves part way and started to lose, I would give the OK to pour in what was needed. (Paul Fay, The Pleasure of His Company, p. 189)
At this point we should note that Schlesinger wrote that it was Dulles’ assurances that the brigade could go guerilla that ultimately convinced Kennedy to put the operation to a vote. (A Thousand Days, p.257) It is also through Schlesinger that we know about the Lovett-Bruce report, since he found it among Robert Kennedy’s papers when he was writing his biography of RFK.
This is all pertinent to the complete declassification of the 16-page Schlesinger memo that he wrote up for JFK in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. As David Talbot wrote in his book about Allen Dulles, Schlesinger saw the capsizing of that operation as an opportunity to “bring the CIA under presidential control, which neither Truman nor Eisenhower had been able to do.” (The Devil’s Chessboard, p.438) As a former OSS operative, Schlesinger thought he was the man to provide Kennedy with the plan to do so.
Schlesinger decided to strike while the iron was hot. He wanted to propose something before any kind of official committee loyal to Dulles performed an apologia. As he wrote to Kennedy in the aftermath of the disaster, “It is important, in my judgment, to take CIA away from the Club.” (Ibid) In that regard, Schlesinger had reservations about Taylor managing the White House inquiry into the operation. To him, he was not the kind of crusader who would capitalize on the president’s initial response to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces.” (Talbot, p. 439)
Although Kennedy stayed with Taylor for the analysis of what had gone wrong, Schlesinger convinced the president that he was the right choice to pen a reorganization plan for the Agency. He told JFK that he served in the OSS during the war, and had been a CIA consultant since. He would not call himself a professional, but an experienced amateur. (ibid)
According to David Talbot, Schlesinger took the job quite seriously. He consulted with senate liberals like George McGovern, and a mysterious CIA whistle-blower who told him, “The Central Intelligence Agency is sick.” He also collected critiques from left-of-center journals like The Nation and The New Republic. He handed the memo to the president on June 30th. Before President Trump’s executive order, we only had the memorandum in partly censored from. We now have the whole memo, unredacted.
III
Schlesinger began his statement by saying that the CIA had simply been caught in too many overseas disasters. They had used up their allowed quota in that area. He then wrote that the problem as he saw it was “the autonomy with which the Agency has been permitted to operate.” He then got more specific as to the causes:
- An inadequate doctrine of clandestine operations
- An inadequate conception of the relationship between operations and policy
- An inadequate conception of the relationship between operations and intelligence.
Schlesinger said that this autonomy, and the resultant three shortcomings, were the result of lack of input from the State Department.
When the CIA began the State Department looked on this new venture with suspicion and renounced the opportunity to seize firm control of CIA operations. It did not, for example, try to establish any effective system of clearance for CIA activities; and some ambassadors frankly preferred not to know what CIA was up to in their countries. (p. 2)
He then noted that after 1953, when the Director of CIA—Allen Dulles– and Secretary of State—John Foster Dulles– were brothers, this made the problem even worse. (This was, if anything, an understatement.) As a result, the CIA began to grow in stature and reach. CIA paid better and also Allen Dulles had protected his employees from McCarthy’s witch hunts. This resulted in the employment and assignment of several capable and independent-minded employees. Thus began the more active role the CIA played in foreign policy.
Schlesinger now comments that by the time State realized just how potent the CIA had become, the cat was more or less out of the bag. The CIA had assumed control over clandestine intelligence collection and operations, and even in the realms of political reporting and diplomatic conduct. (p. 2) Therefore with this non-supervision, the CIA developed a set of parallel functions to State and even Defense. That is it had its own political desks, and “ in effect, its own foreign services”. Schlesinger added “it even has its own air force.” (p. 3). With its large budget, “The contemporary CIA possesses many of the characteristics of a state within a state.” (ibid)
This power had been augmented by the fact that “there is no doctrine governing our conduct of clandestine operations.”(p. 3). As a result, the CIA has used the standard that if the communists do it, then we must do it, a sort of “fighting fire with fire” ethos. At this point, Schlesinger observed that those in power have not thought through this dilemma of how to maintain an open society alongside covert activities. Since America maintained freedom of speech and press, they could comment on the covert actions of the CIA. He now stated that covert activity was allowable when it did not corrupt the principles of a free society.
Schlesinger categorized some areas of CIA activity and to its relationship to the problem he had outlined. Going up the ladder from intelligence collection, to espionage, to covert action. The last he found most objectionable. And he cogently wrote that such operations which relied
…on the suppression of news, of lying to congressmen and journalists, and on the deception of the electorate should be undertaken only when the crisis is so considerable that the gains really seem to outweigh the disadvantages.
The author then said, these problems are co-existent with the size of the operation. (As this writer would comment, obviously the Bay of Pigs would be a prime example of this.) Schlesinger warned that before such an operation is launched the case for its overwhelming necessity must be made. (p. 4).
IV
Schlesinger went on to observe that the above was not the only consideration. Another important aspect was that CIA activities should be “subordinate to US foreign policy.” Which they had not been. (p. 5) And this could be a problem at any level of Agency activity, including recruiting double agents. Because the proposed target might be leading the CIA into a trap. And since the Agency does these things by itself, the ramifications of failure are a blow to the State Department, who were unsuspecting. Schlesinger argued that State, along with the ambassador, should be informed of the possible approach and they should be able to measure the risks and rewards, and hold ultimate veto power over the operation. (p. 5)
Schlesinger now addressed a problem he himself encountered during the Bay of Pigs operation. Namely, that State had not cleared and did not even know who many of the operatives were. And in that operation, the CIA recruited many Cuban exiles of questionable character. (p. 6). In this memo, he refers to his experience of going down to Florida at Kennedy’s request and observing that representatives of the Cuban Revolutionary Council had been detained by Operation Forty operatives, a group of thugs with their own secret agenda who were running parallel to the main operation. This might be the first time the rubric had been used in White House memoranda. Schlesinger implies that these types of men would never have been cleared by State. (For a fuller discussion of what Schlesinger knew about Operation Forty, see DiEugenio, pp. 50-52)
Since the CIA considered itself more or less independent of State, the latter did not find itself aware of many covert actions until they were about to be launched. Therefore this gives these projects their own momentum of inevitability. This makes the advocate appear tough and realistic and the man with reservations legalistic and soft. (p. 7). The inescapable outcome is that the CIA was creating policy. Yet this was something that Allen Dulles himself said at the inception of the Agency should not be done: “The Central Intelligence Agency should have nothing to do with policy.” (p. 7). Here, Schlesinger mentioned in passing the attempted overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958, which was exposed as a CIA operation. Schlesinger strongly urged that this system be revised so that State can exercise control over covert actions which impact their policy.
Schlesinger now addressed an issue that had been partly censored before the Trump order. It is a subject he called “The Controlled American Source”. Today we call it the use of CIA employees acting under State Department cover, many of them in foreign embassies with diplomatic titles. Schlesinger pointed out that the Agency has nearly as many employees overseas under these covers as actual State Department employees. (p. 7) Again this was something Dulles had warned against. In the Dulles-Correa-Jackson report of 1948, the authors wrote that this practice should be kept at a minimum and the CIA should find its own covers to lessen reliance on State. The reverse had happened. And at some embassies, in certain sections, the number of CIA people outnumbered the actual State Department employees. (p. 8). And at times the higher-up CIA people advocate for different policies than State; Schlesinger mentioned Laos as an example. What made it worse was that these CIA people had access to the local presidents and/or prime ministers.
The memo also mentions Paris as another example of this trend. There were 128 CIA people in that embassy and the Agency occupied the top floor of the building. They tried to dominate conversations with certain important political personalities. (p. 8). So far from weening itself off of this usage, the Agency was now committed to it for overseas cover. Schlesinger noted the obvious dangers in all this and strongly recommended it be curtailed. (p. 9)
V
Kennedy’s advisor now turned to the subject of paramilitary warfare. He began by saying, “There is almost no CIA function more peculiarly dependent on the political context than paramilitary warfare.”(p. 9) Schlesinger warned of a situation that Kennedy was familiar with: when the opposition has the support of the populace, it is much more difficult to defeat. (p. 10) So Schlesinger pointed out that this kind of low-level fighting needed a political goal for it to be successful. And he quoted a leader familiar with all this, Mao, to back up this idea. Schlesinger concluded that this type of warfare “cannot be considered as primarily a military weapon. It is primarily a political weapon….” (ibid)
He then pointed out how the British model for policy control worked. There, they kept “clandestine activity under strict Foreign Office control.” (p. 11) He then recommended this system for adaptation in the USA. He warned JFK about the problem that State might be reluctant to do so. He wrote that they had to overcome “inbred habits of diffusion, negativism and delay and to take a firm and purposeful grip on the situation.” (p. 12) He also pointed out that in the British system, clandestine collection of intelligence is done by the intel service. But the analysis and estimating part was in the Foreign Office. In America, the CIA did both.
Schlesinger said that it was Dulles himself who argued for this method back in 1947. Dulles said that facts should not be blinded by policy. The presidential advisor countered with the argument that if one is too much in favor of a covert action, one will select intelligence to support that operation. Which we have seen, and as Schlesinger wrote, was very much the case with the Bay of Pigs project. What was needed was an analysis by a joint group of authorities familiar with the aim of the project but not directly involved with it.
In conclusion, Schlesinger states that what he was proposing was “a fairly drastic rearrangement of our present intelligence set-up.” (p. 14) He was also pleading for a stronger role for the State Department. He even suggested changing the name from CIA to National Information Service. (p. 15) And each and every covert activity would need to be cleared in advance by the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Intelligence. (p. 15). He also suggested changing the responsibility for collection and interpretation of data. He would retitle this to the Foreign Research Agency.
David Talbot pointed out that Schlesinger sent rough draft copies of the memo to future Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, diplomat Chip Bohlen, and speechwriter Ted Sorenson. Once it was sent to the White House, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy was a recipient, the Dulles forces began to organize a counterattack. Maxwell Taylor argued against it by saying this was no time for major surgery since it would hurt morale. On the same grounds, Taylor also argued against changing the title. (Talbot, p. 440)
Two weeks after his memo was submitted, RFK told Schlesinger that his reorganization plan was on hold until they could find a proper candidate to helm the plan. That man ended up being Fowler Hamilton. Hamilton was a Wall Street lawyer, a former prosecutor in FDR’s Justice Department, and was also a bombing analyst in the Army Air Force. Schlesinger thought he was qualified. But the reaction to Fowler was very strong. So Kennedy turned to Republican John McCone.
Schlesinger was quite disappointed in this choice. He protested that he was the wrong man for his plan: “He sees the world in terms of a set of emotion-charged stereotypes.” (Talbot, p. 441). Schlesinger was correct on this. But some of the reforms that he had recommended came to pass: Kennedy issued orders that ambassadors should lead foreign policy in foreign countries. He also requested that the Joint Chiefs be more vigorous and direct in advice to him on paramilitary projects like the Bay of Pigs. Third, that all paramilitary operations be presented to a Strategic Resources Group which would appoint someone to run the operation. (DiEugenio, pp. 52-53)
But Schlesinger’s bold and reformist plan more or less died when Fowler was rejected. Kennedy apparently did not want a full-fledged internal battle on his plate at the time. So he settled for a piecemeal reform plan. It took the 9-11 disaster for an office superseding the CIA to be created: the Director of National Intelligence. But the very fact that JFK commissioned such a study, that he seriously entertained it, and that he had someone in mind to man it, tell us how opposed he was to what Dulles had created, represented, and run. And how it had all combined to create the Bay of Pigs debacle, or what he called, “the worst experience of my life.” (DiEugenio, p. 52)
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