Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (39 page)

By 1947, the CIG's staff had grown to nearly two thousand, with about
one-third operating overseas. But it continued to be only one of several
intelligence organizations. This was changed on September 15, 1947,
when Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the national
Security Council (NSC), the Air Force as a separate branch of the services,
and the Department of Defense, uniting the Departments of the Army,
Navy, and Air Force. With little notice, this act also created the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), giving the United States its first full-blown
peacetime intelligence service.

In later years, Truman was to state:

I never had any thought . . . when I set up the CIA, that it would be
injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in a
part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the
President has been so removed from its intended role.

Under the National Security Act-passed in the heat of the growing
anticommunist hysteria sweeping the United States-the CIA was responsible only to the National Security Council, which was headed by the
President, effectively giving the President absolute control over the new
agency.

The CIA had its own budget and was authorized to hire and train its own
personnel. Yet the same restrictions of the old CIG remained-no clandestine or paramilitary operations and no internal spying.

However, a catch-all phrase had been included in the CIA's charter that
stated the Agency could perform "such other functions and duties related
to intelligence affecting the national security as the NSC may from time to
time direct."

Utilizing this phrase-and with the blessings of the National Security
Council-the CIA in 1948 became active in suppressing Communist influence in the national elections in Italy. This marked the beginning of the
Agency's career of meddling in the affairs of other nations.

In 1949, the Central Intelligence Act was passed, exempting the CIA
from all laws requiring the disclosure of "functions, names, official titles,
salaries and number of personnel employed by the Agency" and allowing the director to spend money from its secret budget simply by signing
vouchers.

Now operating with secret funds and with the vague authority of " . . .
other such functions and duties related to intelligence .. ." the CIA began
to flex its muscles. Victor Marchetti, a former executive assistant to the
CIA's deputy director, wrote:

From those few innocuous words the CIA has been able, over the years,
to develop a secret charter based on NSC directives and presidential
executive orders, a charter almost completely at variance with the
apparent intent of the law which established the Agency. This vague
phrase has provided the CIA with freedom to engage in covert action,
the right to intervene secretly in the internal affairs of other nations. It
has done so usually with the express approval of the White House, but
almost always without the consent of Congress, and virtually never with
the knowledge of the American people.

By 1955, Allen Dulles was director of the CIA, now more than fifteen
thousand strong not including thousands of foreign agents and contract
employees.

In addition to its enormous secret budget-often disguised as portions of
other U.S. government budgets-the CIA created a number of wholly or
partly owned properties, or "fronts," to provide cover for clandestine
operations.

These fronts included airlines, import-export companies, "high tech"
firms, advertising agencies, foundations, and many others. And these were
not dummy businesses. In most ways they operated normally, generating
additional money to fund Agency operations. Using these fronts, the CIA
channeled money to academic, labor, youth, and cultural organizations.

Many foreign leaders-such as King Hussein of Jordan, Archbishop
Makarios of Cypress, Luis Echeverria of Mexico, and Willy Brandt of West
Germany-have been named as recipients of CIA funds over the years.

It has been charged that the CIA, whose leaders have been drawn from
the highest circles of business and wealth in the United States, often has
been more concerned with American big-business investment than with true
national security questions. For example, in 1953 the popularly elected
prime minister of Iran, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, whose government
had nationalized the oil industry, was overthrown in a coup initiated by the
CIA. The CIA man in charge of that operation was Kermit Roosevelt, who
later became vice president of Gulf Oil. Gulf Oil benefited greatly from the
new Iranian political situation.

On June 18, 1954, a CIA-financed right-wing coup in Guatemala overthrew the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, which had
nationalized the property of United Fruit Company. Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles's law firm had written the United Fruit contracts with Guatemala in the 1930s. Assistant secretary of state for Inter-American
Affairs John Moors Cabot was a major United Fruit stockholder. And CIA
director Allen Dulles had been president of United Fruit, while his predecessor as CIA director, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, was soon to become a
United Fruit vice president.

One reason the CIA succeeded in becoming a world-class force was the
relationship of its long-time director, Allen Dulles, with his brother John
Foster Dulles, the secretary of state. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross,
authors of The Invisible Government, wrote:

Uniquely, they embodied the dualism-and indeed the moral dilemma-of
United States foreign policy since World War II.. . . Foster Dulles
reflected the American ethic; the world as we would like it to be. While
he took this position, his brother was free to deal with nastier realities,
to overturn governments and engage in backstage political maneuvers all
over the globe with the CIA's almost unlimited funds. He was, as Allen
Dulles once put it, able to "fight fire with fire" . . . it was under Allen
Dulles's stewardship that the CIA enjoyed its greatest expansion, particularly in the field of government-shaking secret operations overseas.

And during the time the Agency was expanding and initiating its activities across the globe, few Americans had ever heard of the organization.
The Agency's anonymity was largely the product of a timid news media.
Former CIA director William Colby wrote: "The press, by and large,
willingly accorded the CIA a privileged position among government agencies and refrained from inquiring into and reporting on its activities as a
self-imposed act of patriotism."

"Patriotism" and "national security" were the watchwords of the CIA
and other intelligence organizations and were used effectively to keep
secret a multitude of sins and questionable activities. Some CIA activities
were clearly in violation of both the Agency's charter and United States
laws. One Agency endeavor-the search for effective brainwashing and
behavior-modification methods-is especially chilling.

The way that German rocket scientists were brought to the United States
after World War II to become the leaders of the U.S. space program is
well documented. Not so well known is how German experimentation with
mind control also was continued in America after the war.

Although U.S. judges at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials sentenced
seven German scientists to death for their part in human experimentation in
the concentration camps, their research material was forwarded to the OSS
and their work was continued. With the creation of the CIA. this work became part of the Agency's behavior-modification program, first called
BLUEBIRD, then later changed to ARTICHOKE.

By 1954, the ARTICHOKE program was part of the CIA's Technical
Services Staff (TSS), which also provided the Agency with weaponry,
disguises, gadgets, forged documents, and codes. ARTICHOKE teams
usually consisted of a psychiatrist, a drug expert, a technician, and a
hypnotist, who sometimes posed as a polygraph operator.

The CIA was not alone in attempting to develop brainwashing techniques. The Navy in 1947 began a top-secret program, named Project
CHATTER, designed to develop a truly effective truth serum.

Such programs to alter minds formed the basis of a 1959 book by
Richard Condon entitled The Manchurian Candidate. The book, later a
movie that reportedly was one of John F. Kennedy's favorites, concerned
an American soldier captured in Korea who is brainwashed into becoming
a remote-controlled killer for the purpose of assassinating the president of
the United States.

On April 13, 1953, the CIA mind-control program-including "covert
use of biological and chemical materials" proposed by Richard Helms and
managed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb-was authorized by Director Dulles under
the overall name MK-ULTRA. Under MK-ULTRA, the CIA went beyond
mind-control experimentation to develop deadly toxins capable of killing
without leaving a trace. One such toxin was later used in pills given by Agency
officials to a mobster in the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Also in 1953, the CIA, with Dulles's approval, spent $240,000 to
purchase LSD. LSD (D-lysergic acid diethylamide) had been discovered
by a Swiss doctor in 1943 and was believed to be a potential mind-control
substance. Back in America, samples of LSD were later sent to various
universities staffed by scientists on the CIA payroll. Some of these schools
included the University of Minnesota, Harvard, University of Washington,
Baylor University, and the University of Maryland. However, LSD did not
accomplish what the Agency experts had hoped-a means to extract
information and service from individuals. In fact, even staunch CIA
officals who took the drug experimentally found their perceptions altered
in unusual ways.

Author John Marks, who made a major investigation into CIA mindcontrol experiments, quoted a CIA official who took LSD:

... you tend to have a more global view of things. I found it awfully
hard when stoned to maintain the notion: I am a U.S. citizen-my
country right or wrong . .. You tend to have these good higher feelings. You are more open to the brotherhood-of-man idea and more
susceptible to the seamy sides of your own society . . . I think this is
exactly what happened during the 1960s, but it didn't make people more
Communistic. It just made them less inclined to identify with the U.S.
They took a plague-on-both-your-houses position.

In one documented case, a CIA official named Frank Olson was given
LSD without his knowledge by Gottlieb in 1953. Olson was driven psychotic by the drug and a few days later killed himself by crashing through
a tenth-floor window of a Washington hotel. Olson's family was not told
the truth about his death until 1975, when reports gathered by the Rockefeller Commission studying CIA abuses appeared in the news media.

Interestingly, one of the two CIA field stations that was involved in
MK-ULTRA and had quantities of both LSD and other chemical mindaltering agents was Atsugi in Japan, the same station where Lee Harvey
Oswald served as a Marine radar operator and apparently was mixed up in
undercover operations.

Since the CIA has admitted that their most convenient source of mindcontrol guinea pigs were "individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents
or plants, subjects having known reason for deception, etc," the question
has arisen if perhaps Oswald was part of the mind-altering program of the
Agency. In an article published in Rolling Stone, the authors claim to have
contacted a Marine from Oswald's unit who said he participated in some of
the LSD experiments.

The exact nature of Oswald's relation to the CIA mind-control program-if
there was one-will likely never be known. According to Marks, Gottlieb,
upon his retirement from the Agency in 1973 and with the agreement of
Helms, destroyed what they thought were the last remaining documents on
MK-ULTRA.

Since Oswald may have taken a mind-altering drug; since his killer,
Jack Ruby, was to tell Dallas police he had no recollection of shooting
Oswald; since Sirhan Sirhan, the presumed assassin of Robert Kennedy,
still claims he can't remember what happened in the Ambassador Hotel,
and since a San Quentin psychologist, Dr. Eduard Simson, proclaimed
that Sirhan had been "programmed" by drugs, hypnosis, or both, the
possibility of mind control in the JFK assassination-while admittedly
unlikely-cannot be totally ruled out.

But the techniques of using someone under mind control by drugs and
hypnosis as an assassin or decoy in an assassination had not yet been
perfected in 1963. It is more likely that conspirators at that time would
have resorted to a less sophisticated method-they would simply have
hired the mob.

For all the myths that have arisen about CIA prowess-the actual history
of the CIA reveals as many glaring errors as victories.

Agency analysts failed to foresee the 1967 Arab-Israeli War or the 1968
Tet Offensive in South Vietnam. They also failed miserably in appreciating the popular sport enjoyed by Fidel Castro at the time of the ill-fated
Bay of Pigs Invasion.