ARRB vs. FRUS Part 4, Smoking guns?

      Are the two McCone memoranda of his conversations first at Lyndon Johnson's house on the night of November 28, 1963, and then two days later at the White House "smoking guns?"  They have never been made public in full. FRUS quotes from a few sentences about Cuba, but what else was said?  Did McCone tell President Johnson about the AMLASH operation? The totality of the evidence says he did, but clearly the memoranda, which were not provided the ARRB, need to be made public.

       To set the stage for understanding McCone's meetings, one must remember Johnson had only been president for six days before the first meeting.  He was overwhelmed by taking on the presidency. Oswald had been murdered. There had been a state funeral for Kennedy with dignitaries from around the world coming to Washington. Johnson had to decide how to investigate Kennedy's assassination. Earlier in the day of the November 28 meeting, the CIA and FBI had been in a spat about the specious allegations of Gilberto Alvarado, who claimed to have seen Oswald being paid $6,5000 in the Cuban consulate in Mexico City on his visit there. By the time of the nighttime meeting, however, McCone had been told there was nothing to the allegations. For his part, Johnson had made the decision to announce the next day that he was creating the Warren Commission.

      Thus, it would seem that this meeting at LBJ's house would be the first time McCone could give Johnson his unofficial, no-holds-barred, take on the assassination. At Johnson's request, McCone had been giving him the daily CIA briefings on world events in person, in place of the agency's practice of providing Kennedy written briefings, the so-called "daily check list." So McCone had already been briefing Johnson on general intelligence issues at the White House.  

       The likelihood is that nine days earlier Kennedy had approved giving Cubela assassination weapons, as I will explain, and that McCone told this to Johnson at their November 28 meeting, but the public will never know as long as McCone's memoranda are kept secret at the CIA. Of course, McCone might not have committed such a sensitive matter to paper, but this would not have been in character. Besides, the fact that the document was not identified for the ARRB, even though it clearly should have been, and that the CIA did not want me to see it when I was on the Church Committee, suggests the CIA had reasons not to make it public. 

      The near-certainty that McCone told the president about the AMLASH operation in the meeting at LBJ's house is based on what McCone says in his memorandum of the meeting with the president and Bundy two days later on November 30. Johnson asked "what are we going to do in Cuba," McCone implied an invasion.  He referenced three of Kennedy's previous statements of policy.  The most recent were Kennedy's remarks at a press conference on November 20, 1962, at the end of the Missile Crisis.  He made what became known as the "no invasion" pledge.  In exchange for the Russians removing their missiles and aircraft from Cuba, Kennedy implied that the United States would not invade the island -- provided Castro did not try to export the Cuban revolution to other Latin American countries:  "[I]f Cuba is not used for the export of aggressive Communist purposes, there will be peace in the Caribbean. And as I said in September, 'We shall neither initiate nor permit aggression in this Hemisphere.'"

       Not everyone in the administration wanted President Kennedy to go this far.  The matter had been discussed at a National Security Council meeting earlier in the day at which the President had stated his view:  "The President asked where the question of our no-invasion assurance stands. In the light of what Khrushchev has agreed to do, if he does not get our assurances he will have very little. We should keep the assurances informal and not follow up with a formal document in the UN."  His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, disagreed, but the President overruled him: "The Attorney General expressed his opposition to giving the assurance informally. We would be giving away a bargaining counter because Khrushchev is not insisting on having formal assurances. The President restated his view that Khrushchev would be in a difficult position if he gave us something and got nothing in return. We do not want to convey to him that we are going back on what he considers our bargain."

      At the time, of course, the Kennedys were basking in the glory of a clear victory in the Missile Crisis, and they were not about to prolong the confrontation with the Soviets. Richard Helms in his book, A Look Over My Shoulder, writes that after the Missile Crisis, the Kennedys were always bringing up the subject of whether Castro was behaving himself though, and they demanded "hard evidence."  By early fall 1963, the CIA had convinced the Defense Department to come up with a contingency plan for an invasion. The ongoing AMLASH operation contemplated that Cubela would organize a coup and that the United States would step in militarily if needed to ensure success. 

      On November 12, 1963, the President met with all the major players, McNamara, Rusk, Robert Kennedy, Army Secretary Cyrus Vance, Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor, and the full complement of Cuban specialists from the CIA as well as McCone and Helms.  FitzGerald outlined the coup plan.  But then, according to a memorandum of the meeting, almost as an afterthought, Bundy asked about a supposed Cuban arms cache recently discovered in Venezuela.  Was Castro exporting the revolution? Someone, probably the President, said that the Department of Defense should concentrate on catching Castro "red-handed" in delivering arms to communists in Latin America.  The subtext was obviously that hard evidence of this would vitiate the no-invasion pledge.

      Thus, a week later, November 19, 1963, Helms, according to his book, called on the Attorney General along with CIA desk officer Hershel Peake.  Peake carried the hard evidence, a Belgian-made FAL rifle found in the arms cache in Venezuela and photographs.  The CIA could prove it had been shipped through Cuba.  An FAL, pictured below, was an assault rifle, the AK-47 of its day, and a favorite of Fidel Castro during the revolution in Cuba.

       Robert Kennedy called his brother, the President, and within half an hour, Helms and Peake were in the Oval Office, showing him the weapon and the photographs. Helms observed that the Secret Service hadn't prevented him from walking into the Oval Office carrying the case with the rifle in it.  Kennedy joked in response, yes, it gave him a feeling of confidence [in Secret Service protection].  

       CIA memoranda that have been made public, included in an earlier post on this blog, are dated the same day, November 19, and say that giving Cubela the sniper rifles and poison pen or dart pen, which he had been requesting, was finally approved.  Whether the approval came before or after the meetings with the Kennedys isn't known, but it seems highly likely that Kennedy approved or said something to make Helms decide to go ahead.  As noted in an earlier post, Ted Shackley, and others, said rifles with telescopic sights were consider "assassination weapons" by the Cubans. Pictured below is a high-powered Remington rifle of a type which the CIA considered giving Cubela.

       Presumably, Helms told all of this to McCone by the time of the latter's November 28 meeting with Lyndon Johnson, and this is why the arms cache came up at the November 30 meeting.  According to the FRUS's quote from McCone's memorandum of the second meeting, "then I showed the evidence that proved absolutely that arms had been imported into Venezuela from Cuba."  Did McCone carry the rifle into the White House like Helms had done with Kennedy or just photographs?  Regardless, it is impossible to construct a scenario in which McCone would not have told Johnson about Helms's November 19 meeting with Kennedy, about the decision to give Cubela sniper rifles, and about the CIA meeting with Cubela in Paris at the very moment Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Just a day earlier, Johnson had announced creation of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination. The Commission would find that Oswald had killed Kennedy with this model of the Italian-made Carcano rifle with telescopic sight, so rifles would obviously been on Johnson's and McCone's minds.

      The CIA's failure to identify the two McCone memoranda to the ARRB looms large.  Are they "smoking guns," not in the sense of altering the Warren Commission findings but rather in impeaching the entire process. Did Lyndon Johnson know all of this, and yet send the commission off on a fool's mission without it?  Similarly, why did Richard Helms not tell anyone about the November 19 meeting but put it in his book, which was released after his death. Was he, ever the spy, leaving a clue?  He testified twice before the Rockefeller Commission, six times before the Church Committee, and several more times to the House Assassinations Committee and was questioned about the events repeatedly, yet he never volunteered that he had met with President Kennedy on the same day the CIA approved giving Cubela assassination weapons. That the CIA has not been forthcoming is manifest.

 

     

     

      

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ARRB vs. FRUS Part 3

      The examples given in the first two posts on this subject are not the only instances of where the CIA gave State Department historians access to secret documents for the FRUS that apparently were not given the ARRB. 

       But while FRUS may be a supplement to the JFK documents at the National Archives, it is not a substitute for them. As the examples of the McCone memoranda demonstrate, FRUS may contain only snippets from the underlying document. Another problem is that while the FRUS may mention a document, the document itself may be omitted as classified, and there is no process for later reviews. There are glaring omission as well. President Kennedy's November 18, 1963, speech to the Inter-American Press Association in Miami was a major foreign policy pronouncement.  He called the Castro government a barrier that had to be removed.  Desmond FitzGerald wrote key parts which were intended by the CIA as message to Cubela and cohorts that the President supported them.  But the speech isn't mentioned in FRUS. And finally, the FRUS suffers from the same flaws as the ARRB. Unless historians at State are given access to material, they can't include it in FRUS.  The best example of this is the audio tape at the Kennedy library in Boston of the August 15, 1963, meeting with President Kennedy at the White House.  In attendance from the CIA were McCone, Helms, Bruce Cheever, and William Colby, who was responsible for CIA operations in Vietnam. Eighteen minutes are deleted from the tape as secret.  The library's listing says the subject was "British Guiana." That seems unlikely.  British Guiana hardly commanded the attention of so many high level CIA officers.  But this underscores the problem.

       

      The FRUS is published under statutory authority of 22 USC 4351 et seq. That law requires the Secretary of State to insure publication not later than 30 years after the event. Hence, FRUS on the Kennedy administration were completed in the 1961-1963 time frame, overlapping the ARRB's existence. Interestingly enough, the FRUS law contains an injunction on the historians that is not found in the JFK records act:  "Editing principles.  The editing of records for preparation of the FRUS series shall be guided by the principles of historical objectivity and accuracy. Records shall not be altered and deletions shall not be made without indicating in the published text that a deletion has been made. The published record shall omit no facts which were of major importance in reaching a decision, and nothing shall be omitted for the purpose of concealing a defect of policy. 22 USC 4351(b), emphasis added.

      

ARRB vs. FRUS Part 2

      Jeremy Gunn, staff director of the ARRB, persuaded the board to include CIA operations against Castro as "assassination records" because of the obvious, chronological connection between those operations and Kennedy's murder. Thus, records from the Church Committee on assassination as well as CIA records on its covert operations against Cuba were considered subject to disclosure. Nonetheless, the CIA didn't identify Director McCone's briefing of Lyndon Johnson about CIA Cuban operations to the ARRB, and so a key document was not made public at the National Archives.

      In 1997, however, while the ARRB was wrapping up its work, State Department historians were given access to two of McCone's memoranda of what he told LBJ for the FRUS series on U.S. policy towards Cuba in 1962-63.  The historians didn't make the entire memorandum public. Instead, they quoted a small part in the "editorial" comment below. 

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      381. Editorial Note On November 28, 1963, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone met with President Lyndon Johnson at Johnson’s residence for approximately 30 minutes. According to McCone’s memorandum for the record, November 29, the discussion on Cuba was as follows: 

      “The President then turned to Cuba. He asked how effective our policy was and what was the future of Cuba. He asked how effective the economic denial program was and how we planned to dispose of Castro. He said he did not wish any repetition of any fiasco of 1961, but he felt that the Cuban situation was one that we could not live with and we had to evolve more aggressive policies. He looks to us for firm recommendations. In this connection we should prepare a briefing and also we should study carefully various courses of action.” (Central Intelligence Agency, DCI/McCone Files, Job 80-B01285A, DCI Meetings with the President, 23 November-31 December 1963) 

       On November 30 McCone again met with President Johnson with McGeorge Bundy also present. The meeting lasted for approximately 1-1/2 hours and according to McCone’s memorandum for the record, December 2, the discussion on Cuba was as follows: 

      “The President again raised the question of what we were going to do in Cuba. Bundy advised that a policy meeting was scheduled for Monday, time not set, to discuss Cuban policy. I pointed out to the President the statements of President Kennedy on September 5th, September 13th, and November 20th, 1962 and then I showed the evidence that proved absolutely that arms had been imported into Venezuela from Cuba. I stated that most positive efforts should be made immediately to secure complete OAS agreement on a course of action which would involve a series of steps ranging from economic denial through blockade and even to possible invasion, but that it must be OAS action, otherwise it would involve confrontation with Khrushchev. I stated that if the action was a Hemispheric action I didn’t see that the USSR could do much about it. The President agreed but decided to await the policy meeting on Monday.”

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     The memo is notable for several things.  First, Lyndon Johnson said he wanted "more aggressive policies" than Kennedy's. It's hard to imagine what could be more aggressive than Kennedy's plan for a coup. What is more, in three weeks, Johnson reversed himself completely, warning the CIA on December 19, that someday it would have to answer for what it had been doing in Cuba. Second, his directive to McCone to prepare a briefing on various courses of action is undoubtedly what led FitzGerald to make oblique reference to the AMLASH operation in the document that led me to ask the CIA in 1976 for McCone's memoranda of his meetings with Johnson. Third, the first of these meetings took place at Johnson's house, The Elms, with no one else present. McGeorge Bundy was at the second, the next day. McCone apparently showed Johnson and Bundy the same Belgian FAL rifle, or at least a photo of it, that the CIA had found in an arms cache in Venezuela, a weapon Richard Helms had taken to Kennedy at the White House on November 19 as hard evidence of Castro's exporting the revolution to other Latin American countries. Since November 19 was the day the CIA decided to give Cubela the assassination weapons he had been requesting, it is inconceivable that McCone would not mention the AMLASH operation to Johnson in talking about the arms cache. Fourth, the FRUS editorial indicates that this was but one document from McCone's files on his meetings with Johnson from November 23 to December 31, 1963.  Only a few were given the ARRB.  State Department historians saw these two but the ARRB did not. Finally, in 1967 in a recorded phone conversation, John Connally told Johnson that reporters were telling him that Castro had Kennedy murdered in retaliation for assassination plots against him. Johnson responded that the allegations jogged his memory about "requests that were made of me back there right after I became president." He seemed to be saying that he was told about plans to assassinate Castro right after Kennedy's murder.

      When I as writing Murder, Inc., I emailed State Department historians in 2014 and asked for entire copies of McCone's two memoranda.  They replied:  "Unfortunately, we no longer have copies of the documents associated with that editorial note as backup documents for FRUS volumes are not permanent records."

      In short, some of the most significant Kennedy assassination records, McCone's memoranda of his meetings with President Johnson in the weeks after the assassination, were not given the ARRB and have not, to this day, been made public.

      Here is the typed version of LBJ's daily calendar for Nov. 28.  The McCone meeting is not listed, presumably because it was at Johnson's house.

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ARRB vs. FRUS Part 1

     This is the first of four posts about differences between the  records the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) -- and hence the National Archives -- got from the CIA pursuant to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 and the records State Department historians got from the CIA in preparation of the Foreign Relations of the United States histories (FRUS) that they  publish. As you will read, State Department historians had access to a highly significant JFK assassination record that was not turned over to the ARRB and National Archives. Moreover, not even the historians, apparently, were given access to a second possibly important assassination record.

      As the Church Committee was winding down and under deadline to get its report on the Kennedy assassination completed, I was concerned that although the committee had taken sworn testimony from 1963 CIA Director John McCone, it did not have memoranda of any meetings with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson about the AMLASH operation with Rolando Cubela.  McCone and the CIA were notorious for writing such memoranda.

      In this regard, I was puzzled by a memorandum Desmond FitzGerald prepared that summarized what Johnson should be told about Cuban operations, saying Cuban dissidents had been given general and specific assurances of support. President Kennedy's speech of November 18, saying Castro was a barrier to be removed, seemed such a specific assurance. Indeed a copy of the speech as it was reported by the NY Times was given to Cubela at the November 22, 1963, Paris meeting, and he was told the CIA wrote the speech.  This was true.  

     Lyndon Johnson had been kept out of the loop on Cuban operations when he was vice president. For this reason, I thought the CIA surely briefed him about the AMLASH operation after President Kennedy's death.  When I questioned FitzGerald's security officer about why there were no written records of such a briefing, he explained that such a sensitive matter, i.e. providing Cubela assassination weapons, would never be put in writing for the president.  Too many eyes would see it. In fact, he added, it probably would be conveyed by McCone to LBJ when no one else was present.  

     Therefore, I made a written request of the CIA for access to whatever papers the CIA had prepared for briefing Johnson about Kennedy's Cuban policy, e.g., FitzGerald's papers, and for memoranda of any of McCone's briefing of LBJ.  Below is the CIA's response.  It is NARA 157-10005-10402.  The letter from Walter Elder, the CIA's liaison to the committee, was addressed to committee staff director, William Miller.  The CIA denied  me access.  Among the reasons given was that some unnamed Church Committee staffer was once given access to the records.  (This doesn't mean he or she read them).  It was too late in the Church Committee's life to pursue the matter.

     In short, in 1976, when I asked to see memoranda of CIA Director McCone's briefings of Lyndon Johnson about Cuba after the assassination,  the CIA denied the request, saying someone else had looked at those memoranda.  But there was and is no record of who that person was or what he or she saw.  And even if he was allowed to see memoranda of McCone's briefings, he didn't acquire a copy for the Church Committee files. Indeed, there is no proof, other than Mr. Elder's assertion, that the Church Committee reviewed the memoranda.