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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