America’s premier intelligence service has an essential design defect.
By Chad NAGLE
Amongst the most recent redactions lifted on files associated with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy housed at the National Archives are 2 lines in a fifteen-page memorandum from presidential assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.–“TOPIC: CIA Reorganization”– written in June 1961 at Kennedy’s demand. In the memo, Schlesinger proposes “a relatively drastic rearrangement of our current intelligence set-up.” Although nearly a page-and-a-half stays redacted, just recently disclosed text includes the title sentence of the blocked-out section: “3. The Controlled American Source (CAS) represents a specific aspect of CIA’s encroachment on policy-making functions.”
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now hypothesize on the unfavorable results of an institution of U.S. intelligence that may represent only part of the CIA’s use of public funds. Investigative reporter Jefferson Morley, a historian of President Kennedy’s assassination, describeson his Substack website, JFK Facts, that a “Regulated American Source” is “any organizational entity at a U.S. mission that might be construed as an intelligence organization under cover.” To put it simply, a CAS is an organizational “property” of American intelligence run covertly inside another country.
Schlesinger describes the CAS in another section of the memo (on teaching), questioning just “whether the overdoing of CAS is not starting to damage other activities of the government.” The author probably lacked detailed details on these possessions, their places worldwide or their budgets, but the White House might have briefed him on organization. Whatever the case, perpetual redaction of the CAS area is thought-provoking at minimum.
Kennedy’s ask for counsel was prompted by a failed attempt the previous April to get rid of Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro from power. JFK had openly presumed responsibility— as the “accountable officer of the government” while noting that “success has a hundred daddies and defeat is an orphan”– however independently felt he had been tricked into authorizing an operation planned before he took workplace. Hardliners in the national-security apparatus had actually wanted to carry out the strategy under President Richard Nixon. But when Nixon lost narrowly in 1960, the CIA needed to proceed without the active cooperation and guidance of Eisenhower’s pugilistic vice president.
According to a variation of the episode, advocates of the intrusion ensured Kennedy that the Cuban individuals would rise up en masseand overthrow Castro as soon as a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles arrived on the beach. Privately, this version goes, the CIA knew this would not occur however presumed Kennedy would authorize a full-blown invasion at the l lth hour, including air support, rather than allow the operation– referred to as the Bay of Pigs intrusion– to collapse. When he refused, he made enemies far beyond the three males he eventually let go in November: CIA Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Strategies (later renamed Operations) Richard Bissell.
Schlesinger’s memo is among the more eloquent documents in the “JFK Collection,” and the CIA evidently thinks about the still-redacted section extremely sensitive. It has reportedly asked the President to hide it from public view. Still, the published sections are extremely revealing. The intro states:
The argument of this memorandum is that CIA’s problem can be traced to the autonomy with which the agency has actually been permitted to run which this autonomy is due to 3 primary causes: (1) an inadequate teaching of private operations; (2) an insufficient conception of the relationship between operations and policy; (3) an inadequate conception of the relationship in between operations and intelligence.
On “CIA Autonomy,” Schlesinger counsels increased State Department control but notes the popular timidity of that federal ministry in assuming a supervisory function (“some ambassadors frankly preferred not to understand what the CIA depended on in their countries”).
For its part, CIA has actually developed an entire series of functions paralleling currently existing functions of the State Department, and of the Defense Department too. Today it has its own political desks and military staffs; it has in result its own foreign service; it has (or has had) its own fight forces; it even has its own flying force. Its yearly budget plan has to do with [blank] times that of the State Department. The modern CIA possesses much of the characteristics of a state within a state. [focus included]
In the “Doctrine” section, he notes the possible periodic requirement to “subsidize newspapers, politicians and companies in other nations,” but that “corruption of the political life of another country is not an obligation to be gently presumed,” and “I question whether CIA has not done too much of this for the joy of it.” Up until now has such suspicion established among our citizenry, now social media influencers contemplatea host of negative books about Russia in print thanks to CIA aid.
Among the most intriguing areas of Schlesinger’s report, entitled “Operations and Intelligence,” includes a short analysis of the British system, hinting that it might provide a model.
“Under the British system, private collection is delegated to the Secret Intelligence Service,” he composes. “The research, analysis and estimating function is located in the Foreign Workplace Research Department.”
He contrasts this with America, where “CIA has obligation for both private collection and research study and analysis,” suggesting a conflict of interest, because, “where in Great Britain the Foreign Workplace plays the collaborating role in the intelligence field, in the United States that function has actually been assumed by CIA.” Dulles himself, notes Schlesinger, overtly supported this plan.
In 1947, Dulles wrote that “the correct judging of the scenario in a foreign nation” required details to be “processed by a firm whose duty it is to weigh truths, and to draw conclusions from those facts” without the facts or conclusions being “warped” by policymakers who are “most likely to be blind to any truths which might tend to show the policy to be faulty.”
Schlesinger rebutted Dulles’s viewpoint as follows:
Exactly the very same argument can be utilized with equal impact against the incorporation of the research and estimate function in CIA– i.e., if intelligence is too closely gotten in touch with operations, then those committed to a specific operation will tend to select out the intelligence which confirms the operation.
He then went on to identify the presumption that the “intelligence branch” (analysis) of the CIA was never even notified of the existence of “the Cuban operation” (Bay of Pigs), which the “Workplace of National Estimates was never ever asked to talk about the presumption, for instance, that discontent had actually reached the point in Cuba where an effective landing operation would provoke uprisings behind the lines.” The failure of the invasion was therefore rooted in the “self-contained” nature of a company in charge of monitoring itself. It now appears, by the time JFK started taking the initial steps toward reform, it was too late. Dulles’s views won, and the CIA established the method it did, leading many to presume the conspiratorial explanation that President Kennedy was murdered for trying to put Pandora back in its box.
The Schlesinger file is “assassination related” due to the fact that events subsequent to November 22, 1963, resulted in the ex post factocharacterization of main files. In December 1963, former President Harry S. Truman published an op-edin theWashington Postrequiring the CIA to be defanged or taken apart, mentioning as an issue the same “autonomy” Schlesinger had examined in his memo. Encouraged by JFK’s assassination, Truman began composing his piece nine days after it took place. As the CIA had actually emerged under his presidency, the prospective impact on popular opinion was significant.
By the time Truman began putting pen to paper, previous CIA chief Allen Dulles had actually currently handled to get himself selected to the really governmental commission assigned to examine the assassination itself. During that query, Dulles desperately tried to convince Truman to publicly withdraw his December article. When he failed, he lied to the CIA’s general counsel, saying Truman had actually disavowed it. Truman publicly repeated his messagein June 1964.
Recent document releases reveal that no fewer than four Mexican presidents were linked to U.S. intelligence. Did the “corruption” Schlesinger pointed out, so manifest in America’s most populous neighbor, withstand regardless of CIA control of Mexican institutions or due to the fact that of it? Considering that 1961, Mexico has actually graduated to formal multiparty nation-statehood, a not-insignificant reform. Yet crowds of migrants still routinely attempt to leave the place, most going north. Has a historically unaccountable CIA– with its CAS entity– added to the existing crisis?
As a citizenry, we should understand if a quality of the CAS recognized back in 1961 has actually been material to severe diplomacy abuses. Historically, such abuses have consisted of wasteful and unsuccessful interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Today, the causes of our pricey, open-ended involvement in Ukraine are suspect. All of it makes public interest in transparency over prospective institutional representatives of “blowback” within our national-security state more compelling day by day.