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History As It Happens
The JFK Files
00:58:55
The release of nearly 80,000 declassified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, revealed nothing new about the murder itself. Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin, and he acted alone. However, the...
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- [00:01]
Peter Kornbluh
History is defined by the names that.
- [00:03]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Stand the test of time.
- [00:04]
Peter Kornbluh
Names that inspire, unite, and lead. Now it's your turn to create a.
- [00:09]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Lasting legacy with a Dot Vote domain.
- [00:12]
Martin DeCaro
Whether you're running for office, driving change.
- [00:14]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Or rallying support, a Dot Vote domain ensures your name is as memorable as.
- [00:19]
Peter Kornbluh
Those in the history books. Visit GoDaddy.com, type in your name, dot.
- [00:24]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Vote, and secure a web address that stands out. Claim your place in history with dot.
- [00:28]
Martin DeCaro
Vote history as it happens. April 1, 2025 the JFK files Cuban.
- [00:37]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
People have not yet spoken their final piece. But there are from this sobering episode useful lessons for us all to learn. The United States has committed no aggression against Cuba, and no offensive has been launched from Florida or from any other part of the United States. It is the strongest wish of the people of this country, as well as the people of this hemisphere, that Cuba shall one day be free again. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. Two priests who were with President Kennedy say he is dead.
- [01:15]
Martin DeCaro
Some 80,000 pages of declassified documents released by President Trump related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy do not verify any conspiracy theories about who killed him. They do reveal fascinating details about what the CIA was doing during those years as the Cold War entered its third decade. Assassinating foreign leaders, backing coups, meddling in elections, even breaking into the French embassy. Crimes committed in secret, supposedly for the benefit of the free world. That's next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:48]
Peter Kornbluh
We have an executive order ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations.
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Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Of President John F. Kennedy. A lot of people are waiting for.
- [01:57]
Martin DeCaro
This for a long, for years, for.
- [01:59]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Decades, and everything will be revealed.
- [02:02]
Peter Kornbluh
The files include documents from the CIA and fb, illegible handwritten notes and diplomatic cables. These JFK documents have been declassified now largely in full, pursuant to this special law, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records act, that was passed after a movie. The movie was very powerful and at the end of the movie, a scroll came up saying that there was like 5 million documents, pages of documents that were still secret in the early 1990s, almost 30 years after the Kennedy assassination. And this literally outraged the Americans. American public.
- [02:41]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official.
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Martin DeCaro
November 22, 1963.
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Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
President Kennedy died at 1pm Central Standard Time.
- [02:52]
Martin DeCaro
Almost from the moment Walter Cronkite broke the news. Some Americans were convinced President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy and they did not believe the conclusion of the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was the assassin who actually fired.
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Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
The shots that killed Kennedy. Why did Ruby shoot Oswald? Was there a conspiracy? Were right wingers involved? This committee labored 10 months, took testimony from hundreds of witnesses, then brought forth a document close to a thousand pages.
- [03:23]
Martin DeCaro
Just months later, the first book alleging a conspiracy was published. Who Killed Kennedy? By Thomas Buchanan. Now, 62 years later, the conspiracy theorists might be disappointed that their zany ideas were not confirmed by the release of almost all the remaining documents related to Kennedy's assassination. Under a 1992 law that was passed because Oliver Stone's JFK fueled the idea that the CIA killed the American President.
- [03:53]
Peter Kornbluh
We'Ve come to know it as the magic bullet theory.
- [03:56]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
The magic bullet enters the President's back, headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees. It then moves upwards in order to leave Kennedy.
- [04:06]
Martin DeCaro
You know, I can remember watching that movie. I was maybe 16 or 17 and I didn't realize scenes like this one were bologna. Kevin Costner playing New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. He meets a mysterious character known as X, played by Donald Sutherland. They're sitting on a park bench on the National Mall.
- [04:24]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Those of us who'd been in Secret Ops since the beginning knew the Warren Commission was fiction. But there was something, something deeper. Uglier. I knew Allen Dulles very well. I bring.
- [04:35]
Martin DeCaro
Well, if you're looking for conspiracy theories here, you have come to the wrong podcast. We're dealing with facts which when it comes to the CIA, are often so jaw dropping they could come from a movie script. So about the newly released documents. They include the rest of the famous Schlesinger memo, now fully unredacted. It reveals that when Kennedy took office, 47% of the political officers serving in the United States embassies were CAS intelligence agents working under diplomatic cover known as controlled American sources. And we'll talk more about that in a moment with Peter Kornblue and Arturo Jimenez. Bacardi and I will share their latest articles on the Kennedy files posted on the website for the National Security Archive in my weekly newsletter. You can sign up@historyasithappens.com and by the way, the National Security Archive is not affiliated with the federal government. It's a non profit research organization on the campus of George Washington University. It's dedicated to declassifying secret government documents. So back to the Schlesinger memo. It came about because of the Bay of pigs fiasco in April 1961.
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Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Cuban revolutionary troops such as these have invaded Castro's leftist island fortress, reportedly rallied. The United States has committed no aggression against Cuba and no offensive has been launched from Florida or from any other part of the United States. While we could not be expected to hide our sympathies, we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces of this country would not intervene in any way. But let the record show that our restraint is not inexhaustible. Should it ever appear that the inter American doctrine of non interference merely conceals or excuses a policy of non action. If the nations of this hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments against outside communist penetration, then I want it clearly understood that this government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations which are to the security of our nation.
- [06:57]
Martin DeCaro
Kennedy was so angry about the humiliating failure to invade Cuba, Kornblue says he set in motion a secret set of deliberations on breaking up the intelligence, espionage and covert action functions of the CIA and subordinating its operations to the State Department. Kennedy tasked one of his top White House advisors, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. As well as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the high level team of wise men who monitor the intelligence community on the President's behalf, to consider this option to break up the CIA again. That is Peter Kornblue writing for responsiblestatecraft.org and I'll share a link to that article too. And that is what we're going to talk about here today. The JFK files are filling important gaps in our knowledge of the past. Covert operations authorized by US Presidents undertaken by the CIA, often with catastrophic consequences for other countries and for the United States, for our democracy. Excessive secrecy is not compatible with an open democracy. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders talked a lot about defending the free world while using the CIA to topple democratically elected leaders or to meddle in elections to stop leftists from winning. Our guests today have spent decades delving into these stories, the kind of stories governments usually want to keep secret. Arturo Jimenez Bacardi teaches at the University of South Florida. He is an expert in international relations, global governance and foreign policy. Peter Kornblue has worked at the national security archives since 1986. He directs the Archives, Chile and Cuba Documentation Projects. Peter Kornblu, welcome to the show. It's an honor to have you.
- [08:38]
Peter Kornbluh
It's a pleasure to be here.
- [08:40]
Martin DeCaro
And Arturo Jimenez Bacardi, welcome.
- [08:42]
Unnamed Guest
Thanks for having us.
- [08:44]
Martin DeCaro
I've been reading the National Security Archives website for many, many years. It's fascinating material, but I think when I first started to read it years ago, I assumed that it was part of the federal government. It isn't despite its name, it sounds like it is.
- [09:00]
Peter Kornbluh
Can I just tell a little anecdote to start? You know, the name, the National Security Archive, has been an issue for a long, particularly an issue when we're in Latin America. And it sounds like, you know, a government agency. In fact, it sounds like the library of the Central Intelligence Agency. And so at one point, we had a T shirt that had the slogan on it, documentos o muerte. Documents or death. So that we would show everybody that we were not the government, obviously. And our whole effort was to push the government to be more transparent, to give us the history, let us know what was done in our name, but without our knowledge. And that is basically the mantra of the National Security Archive, to put an end to secrecy that's not warranted and make sure the world public knows what the United States is doing and what other governments are doing as well.
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Unnamed Guest
Especially if I give a talk in Latin America, sometimes I get some stares and looks, and I say, we're the other nsa, the one that's not. Not affiliated with the US Government.
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Martin DeCaro
You know, I wonder sometimes if Americans understand why there is that level of suspicion. People in other countries are more familiar with what the United States has done to them than American citizens. We're going to get to that. Historians, scholars, researchers, journalists have to fight like hell to get documents declassified and released if ever. Do either of you remember in your careers anything like this where nearly 80,000 documents, or really the remaining 1% from the JFK file. Right. Because the previous 99% of the 6 million pages had already been made public. But still, we're talking about an enormous number of documents here that the government under Donald Trump. I don't praise him very often, but he just said, here, go at it.
- [10:48]
Unnamed Guest
These documents are out there in large part because of a law that was passed by Congress. And there have been similar laws that essentially mandated the systematic declassification of a number of different documents. So at the end of the year, I this set that's going to come out with the National Security Archive on CIA covert operations during the Truman administration, during the founding era of the CIA. And a lot of the documents in those files, I was able to get them, along with the late John Prados from another act of Congress that dealt with forcing the US Government to declassify any files that related to Nazi war criminals or collaborators or Japanese war criminals and collaborators. And part of the controversy was that the CIA in that early Cold War period supported and had ties with organizations that during World War II, had close ties, if not coordination with Nazi Germany or Italy and that kind of stuff. So it's not completely unprecedented. Sometimes this happens, and hopefully it'll be a model to follow for. For the future.
- [11:56]
Peter Kornbluh
Yeah, let me just reiterate that point. You know, these JFK documents have been declassified now largely in full, pursuant to this special law, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records act, that was passed after a movie. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account.
- [12:21]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
For the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Conley.
- [12:24]
Peter Kornbluh
But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further the war, Warren Commission.
- [12:29]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Spector. One of the grossest lies ever forced.
- [12:36]
Peter Kornbluh
On the American people. A movie by Oliver Stone called jfk, A conspiracy theory movie came out. It was a movie about a prosecutor in New Orleans, Jim Garrison, who decided that the CIA and the FBI had killed Kennedy and was going to persecute this person and that person, his investigation and his prosecution utterly fail. He harassed and persecuted a bunch of innocent people. But the movie was very powerful. And at the end of the movie, a scroll came up saying that there was like 5 million documents, pages of documents that were still secret in the early 1990s, almost 30 years after the Kennedy assassination. And this literally outraged the American public. How could this incredibly important moment of our history, murder of the President, the young, handsome President of the United States, still be under such secrecy 30 years later? And the phone calls, the number of phone calls that went to Congress, literally led senators and congressmen to pass this law just to make sure that everything came out. To pass a law that said everything has to come out, basically, no redactions, with a few exceptions. And that's how we got this law. It's taken all these years since 1992 to finally get the documents. Yes, Trump ordered the final release of the tidbits of snippets of top secret information that has been withheld all this all these years. But really, it's the law itself that created a foundation for these documents to come out unredacted and uncensored in this way.
- [14:09]
Martin DeCaro
I love that movie. When I first saw it, I was a teenager. Oliver Stone, the Academy Award winning director, I think I believe that movie. When I watched it again, I was a teen, so you can forgive me, I was like, wow, who's been withholding all this information? When you learn something for the first time, especially when you're a kid, it's now gospel all of a sudden. Oliver Stone has been known to stretch the facts, to put it nicely there. But yes, you're right. The movie was an impetus here. And I just want to ask one question about the assassination. Because we're going to move on to more important things. I'm not interested.
- [14:41]
Peter Kornbluh
Go kill jfk.
- [14:42]
Martin DeCaro
Yes, I am not interested in all these conspiracy theories. These 80,000 documents. They don't change the conclusion. Right.
- [14:50]
Peter Kornbluh
We can say a couple of things. One is hundreds of people are reviewing these documents. We've tried to go through them as systematically as we can. Nothing has shown up that advances any conspiracy theory or changes the official history as we know it about Oswald acting alone. There's some documentation that could give us a sense of his motivations. Perhaps there's CIA investigation documents that kind of eliminate other actors that were accused of being behind the assassination, like Fidel Castro in Cuba. But these documents, I think, for history's sake, are going to be viewed more for what they've told us about CIA covert operations around the world than about what they really told us about the Kennedy assassination itself.
- [15:35]
Unnamed Guest
Yeah, I agree with Peter, and I think I've seen some of the notes on or some of the comments that some people have made that perhaps they're not fully trained in doing historical research and seem to be misinterpreting some of the documents. So, for instance, if there's a rumor that maybe Fidel Castro is involved or the Soviets are involved or the Israelis are involved and the FBI has to investigate that, it doesn't mean that it's a fact. Right. It just means that it was a rumor that was there at the time and some authority had to investigate it. But people don't seem to understand the broader context of some of these documents. I haven't seen any kind of smoking gun or anything that would change my mind from the official versions of the JFK assassination. Whereas, on the other hand, where you do have just some incredible material, as Peter noted, is on CIA covert operations. So in those cases, you have incontrovertible evidence where CIA CIA directors are saying, we need to get rid of the President of Haiti or we need to get rid of the Prime Minister of British Guiana, and so on. And so that's the kind of smoking gun evidence that you want to find. We have thousands of files that speak to that. And so hopefully, as Peter notes, this JFK release will be remembered for the insider view that it's giving us into a lot of CIA covert operations that we knew about, but also potentially some new avenues of research for other covert operations that we didn't have a lot of details on.
- [17:07]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, well, we know it's hard to convince a conspiracy theorist to drop their conspiracy because to them a lack of evidence is actually just evidence that more things are being hidden.
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Unnamed Guest
I will say there. So in defense of those conspiracy theorists is I think, part of the problem that is a cost of extreme government secrecy.
- [17:26]
Martin DeCaro
Yes.
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Unnamed Guest
So when everything in the US Government seems to be a secret and there's so much over classification. After the 911 Commission, several individuals noted that everything from Dianne Feinstein, who was never very critical or was a proponent of the CIA. I mean, she noted that she believed that about half of the documents that the US Government classifies should not be classified. And other members of that Commission noted that 90% of documents that the US government classifies should not be classified. And so what happens when you have this over classification? Some of the costs are that people lose trust in government and people are more receptive to those kinds of conspiracy theories, not just in the United States, but also around the world. Right. And so I think that it's important that members of Congress and the executive branch that are the ones that control classification decisions, they should start thinking of not just the cost of transparency, but also the very heavy cost of excessive secrecy to having an informed public to conspiracy theories and all that kind of stuff.
- [18:32]
Peter Kornbluh
And that's a precedent that the JFK law and the release of these documents sets. It proves that we can release the full history of the past and it's not really going to have a deleterious effect on our national security. One would hope that it would advance the confidence and trust in government. But, you know, conspiracy theorists are so forceful now, and there's a whole, you know, wave of misinformation and disinformation going on around the world. You know, that has nothing to do with secrecy. It just has to do with misinformation. And so it's just a very difficult process. But, you know, documents are extremely important for the sake of history and for the sake of. Of public debate over current policy. So we're going to continue to push for transparency and governance.
- [19:15]
Martin DeCaro
That's a fair point. And I can understand why the CIA and intelligence agencies don't want unre exacted documents to be released because of the names of operatives. But, you know, if somebody is dead or if the events we're talking about are 60 or 70 years old. Right. It is a funny thing. Some people are willing to believe crazy conspiracy theories like the CIA murdered Kennedy. But over the years, when I've talked about or debated American foreign policy with friends or family members. They don't want to hear about things that did happen, like the CIA toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, or Eisenhower wanted Lumumba and Congo to be murdered. Peter, I'll begin with you as I read your piece for responsible statecraft on the Schlesinger memo and some of the revelations in there. 47% of US political officers stationed around the world were actually CIA personnel under diplomatic or other coverage. Why was the United States so heavily reliant on the CIA in its diplomatic postings?
- [20:25]
Peter Kornbluh
The CIA gained quite a bit of strength, huge budget, operating in the darkness, without any real accountability to other departments, with very little coordination with other departments of the U.S. government. You know, it's been cast as a rogue elephant. That was a famous expression, a rogue actor, by Senator Frank Church.
- [20:46]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
The committee does not believe that the acts which it has examined represent the real American character. They do not reflect the ideals which have given the people of this country and of the world hope for a better, fuller, fairer life. We regard the assassination plots as aberrations.
- [21:11]
Peter Kornbluh
But in fact, the vast majority of CIA history shows that presidents ordered the CIA to do these things. Yes, Kennedy had complaints about what the CIA told him and did and didn't do at the Bay of Pigs. But in the end, Kennedy gave them the authority after Eisenhower had given them the authority to invade Cuba. So in the end, the CIA acted on instructions from the White House more than it acted independently. And spying is famously called one of the oldest professions in the world. And the CIA expanded its encroachment in other departments using the State Department, USAID, commercial attaches, political officers, and then non undercover operatives as well. So it was a vast web of espionage and that's how it did its job, and it's still doing its job.
- [22:07]
Unnamed Guest
What that number is also indicative of is just how much the US Government was depending on covert action to be a major part of its foreign policy. And we get into these questions of why was it that the US Government thought it was so important to carry out some of these actions in secret and who they wanted to hide that information from. And we can get into those discussions. The only thing I would add to Peter on this, the Church Committee's famous quote as to whether the CIA is a rogue elephant. So I agree that these documents and other documents do make it quite clear that the CIA did have authority from higher up, cops, presidents and so on and so forth. But in My work. I've described this phase of the CIA, this early phase of the CIA from 1947 to 1975, as a lawless phase. And the reason why I describe it as lawless is because the CIA itself, their own lawyers, the CIA General Counsel, concluded that they did not have any legislative authority to carry out forward actions or sabotage missions or paramilitary operations. And furthermore, whenever the CIA would decide to carry out an operation that might be legally dubious, like assassinating a foreign leader or an operation that might potentially violate international law or domestic law, let's say domestic law, and spying on students or civil rights activists, but international law and meddling in the internal affairs of other states, like intervening in elections, the CIA was either not consulted or when they raised concerns that indeed they might run counter to international law, the lawyers were simply ignored. And so, to me, if you don't include the Department of Justice, with the exception of rfk, because he was Kennedy's brother, but in other cases, if you don't include the Department of Justice, if you ignore the lawyers, if you don't ask these legal questions, if you don't include Congress and notify Congress of these actions in a systematic manner, and if you yourself conclude that Congress has not given you any authority to carry out covert actions, I consider that to be a lawless phase and so a rogue elephant. Maybe not because they have presidential authority, but it certainly raises a lot of legal concerns as well as ethical concerns.
- [24:30]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
We have been victimized by excessive secrecy, not only with respect to the failure of the Congress in the past to exercise proper surveillance over intelligence activities, but also excessive secrecy has created this kind of mischief within the executive branch. Here we have a case where the very methods of secrecy concealed for five years an act of insubordination within the CIA that came to light only by the happenstance. Mr. Colby, the present director, asked the Agency, if they please, wouldn't tell him what's been going on. That's wrong.
- [25:15]
Martin DeCaro
Well, Allen Dulles, the brother of John Foster Dulles, he was a cowboy in these early years. Arturo, you mentioned the paramilitary operations. Peter, these were fiascos.
- [25:26]
Peter Kornbluh
I mean, fiascos. Too gentle a word. These were murderous, violent acts of aggression that ended up killing a lot of people. Thousands, depending on what we're talking about. These major operations obviously were conducted with White House authority, but they were put forth by the CIA when really they shouldn't have been.
- [25:47]
Martin DeCaro
And sometimes the State Department wasn't aware. For instance, the Bay of Pigs invasion.
- [25:51]
Peter Kornbluh
You know, the very highest level of the State Department probably was aware that there was going to be this paramilitary invasion. But not only was the State Department as a whole not aware, but then the analytical side of the CIA itself wasn't aware. So you had the specialists were themselves were not consulted. And as Arthur Schlesinger pointed out in this memo to Kennedy that we're talking about on CIA reorganization, that the experts were excluded and nobody was there. There wasn't, as he put it, a son of a man to stand up and sit and ask the hard questions. Nobody made the kind of counter argument against the possibility that this was a terrible plan and would bring about disaster in every aspect.
- [26:31]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
We intend to re examine and reorient our forces of all kinds, our tactics and our institutions here in this community.
- [26:40]
Peter Kornbluh
In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, it was dubbed the perfect failure because literally everything that could go wrong went wrong.
- [26:46]
Martin DeCaro
You know, I started by asking how did the United States wind up so reliant on the CIA of all the tools it has to project its power and defend its interests across the world? And as I read part of the Schlesinger memo, it made me think of the following, and I'd like to hear both of your thoughts on this. You know, after 1945 and the UN charter, the US like all nations in the world, was supposed to embrace the sanctity of borders or the inviolability of borders and universal human rights. But in the Cold War, the CIA served an important role. It could pursue US interests in secret with some level of deniability, so Washington could publicly or officially maintain that it was still respecting national sovereignty and human rights, while in reality secretly it was subverting them as it contested the Cold War. Like the CIA was a tool around the international. The rules based international order.
- [27:43]
Unnamed Guest
Yeah, I think that's right. So Michael Posnansky has an excellent book on this on why does the US Government sometimes use covert action as opposed to overaction. He makes a very similar argument to the one you just made. And Indeed so Article2.4 of the UN Charter makes it very clear that it prohibits member states from either the use or the threat of force to intervene either in the territorial integrity or the political independence of another state. And there's other treaties that go even beyond that. So for instance, the US is also a member of the Charter of the Organization of American states. And Article 19 of the OAS Charter prohibits any state from intervening either directly or indirectly in the internal affairs for whatever reason of another member state. When you see some of the policymakers when they're deciding whether to overthrow the Cuban government, either overtly or covertly, or whether they're trying to change and overthrow the government in British Guiana. You do have a lot of policymakers that mention international law explicitly as a concern, that they're concerned that if the United States were to overtly overthrow these governments, say like the US did during the dollar diplomacy phase in the early 20th century. Right. Those laws, those international laws didn't exist yet. And so the US would just send in the Marines to overthrow the government of Cuba or the Dominican Republic or Haiti.
- [29:11]
Martin DeCaro
Hawaii too. Hawaii just annexed Hawaii. So go ahead.
- [29:15]
Unnamed Guest
You know, the Philippines, you name it. And so in those cases, you didn't have the UN Charter, you didn't have the charter of the Organization of American States. And so it's a lot of those states, like Latin America, played a major role in trying to change international law so that the political independence of these weaker states would be hopefully, maybe respected by these great powers. And the US was kind of trapped diplomatically and agreed to join the charter of the oas. But then they still want to overthrow governments, right? Or they still want to meddle in the internal affairs of other states. But now they have to take into consideration potential reputational costs. So what happens if the US government is caught trying to overthrow the Cuban government and then the Cuban government decides to make a speech before the world at the United Nations General Assembly? And in the middle of the Cold War, when you're also trying to win hearts and minds, if you look like a cold blooded imperialist power, you're going to suffer some reputational costs. And so this is one of the reasons why the CIA got so much work. Because the US government is trying to keep a number of key audiences essentially ignorant or in the dark of what the US is doing, including the international community, including allies that might take human rights and the independence of states more seriously, but also the American public, because there's a lot of Americans, of course, that are against intervening in the domestic affairs of other states that are aghast to imperialist type policies. And so if the American public would know about these secrets, about supporting brutal dictatorships, about overthrowing democracies, about supporting individuals that carry out gross human rights violations, there probably would be an uproar. And so secrecy and covert action helps the US government be able to do a lot of these controversial actions that they probably would have more difficult time doing if they tried to do them overtly.
- [31:05]
Peter Kornbluh
In the lexicon of covert operations, this is called, you know, plausible denial. And the idea that the president and high Officials can simply say, oh, we're not really doing that. But in practical terms, particularly when it came to massive paramilitary operations like the CIA wanted to do and tried to do and did in Cuba, you know, you. You had something that really couldn't be hidden, even though both the agency operatives and officials in Canada himself deceived themselves into thinking it could be. And then it wasn't. And that has been the case. I would say almost every five years. There's a covert operations scandal in our contemporary history because U.S. officials don't seem to appreciate the lesson that you can't keep these operations secret and they do cause reputational harm and they do outrage the American public. But they're easy to do because the orders are given in the dark. There's no vetting of that discussion. Congress doesn't evaluate really the merits of what's being done. There's no public debate. A president or a high official just. Or the CI director himself just says, let's go do this out in the dark. And that continues the tradition which is going to keep on going of these kinds of covert operations. And you can bet your bottom dollar there's going to be a CIA scandal soon enough because there is one almost every five years.
- [32:34]
Martin DeCaro
This is what Eisenhower called his legacy of ashes, which is also the title of Tim Wiener or Weiner, Tim Weiner's great book, Legacy of Ashes. Eisenhower was worried about leaving this terrible legacy to his successors. Of course, it was Eisenhower who gave the okay to topple Arbenz and topple Mossadegh. And he was also involved in the. In what was going on in the Congo in 1960 with Patrice Lumumba.
- [32:58]
Unnamed Guest
Presidents are very inconsistent with how they view the CIA. President Truman is also very famous for writing an op ed once he's no longer president where he's trying to warn the American public that he didn't intend to approve or to give the CIA the authority to start meddling in the affairs of a bunch of other states and how some of those actions are counterproductive to US national interests. A very famous op ed similar to some of Eisenhower's concerns. But then when you look at the documents when they were presidents or when they're in the middle of these decisions, they're the ones that are approving all these operations, Right? They're the ones that are pushing for all these operations. And I think part of it might be, as Peter was noting, that secrecy makes it very easy to abuse your power and maybe to not think of some of the larger consequences of what you're unleashing.
- [33:55]
Martin DeCaro
Because what's easier, going to the American people, going to Congress asking for a declaration of war, and having to send X number of troops to another country, or giving the okay in secret to have some operatives bring some bags of money and some guns to another country to get rid of their ruler? I mean, it's the latter that's easier, even though it has disastrous consequences for those countries, let alone the U.S. well put.
- [34:20]
Peter Kornbluh
All right.
- [34:21]
Martin DeCaro
Well, I have a question for you, Peter Kornblue. It is about the Schlesinger memo. Already by 1960, 61 in the Bay of Pigs, Schlesinger writes this memo, and now we have it fully unredacted, where he's suggesting to Kennedy how to reorganize the CIA. Because he says, listen, if you keep doing this stuff and it keeps blowing up in our face, we will expose contradictions between our government's professions and performance. As we've been discussing, you know, our value are one thing, but the way we're behaving is another way. What did Schlesinger want JFK to do to the CIA? What were his proposed changes?
- [34:57]
Peter Kornbluh
Well, let me say a couple of things. One is that Arturo and our late colleague John Prados actually put this memo of Schlesinger CIA organization up on the website of the National Security Archive over six years ago. Most of the document has been available for everybody to read because of their work for many years. What we have now is unredacted version, the page and a half that focused on what the CIA called controlled American sources, that is undercover CIA operatives working in diplomatic posts around the world. That has now been fully released. The quote that you have cited about performance versus principles is actually from a different Schlesinger document. It was the first memo he wrote to Kennedy about what to do about the CIA after the Bay of Pigs. And it was written at Kennedy's behest. Kennedy had asked Schlesinger to look into how the British have organized their intelligence services and how that their intelligence services relate to the rest of the British foreign policy establishment. And Schlesinger had actually gone to Europe, Europe and to England after the Bay of Pigs. He'd come back and written a very strong memo to Kennedy saying how alarmed all of the European leaders were about the invasion at the Bay of Pigs and how bad it was for US Policy. It wasn't just that the covert operations had been exposed. It was the United States aggression against this little island of Cuba for no real apparent reason. And that was the first memo he wrote about the European kind of response, but then he wrote a second memoir analyzing the British intelligence system. And in there, he did write about the whole issue of the fact that covert operations, and particularly what he called special operations, the larger paramilitary type operations, they just weren't going to be in keeping with the American public's principles and the values of the American public. And therefore US Officials are going to have to lie about them every time they happened. And as Schlesinger predicted, those lies wouldn't stay secret. Those lies would be exposed as lies.
- [37:10]
Unnamed Guest
And that would, as Richard Helms learned. As Richard Helms learned with his congressional testimony of Chile, where he was found in contempt of Congress for lying to.
- [37:20]
Peter Kornbluh
Congress, sure, but just all of the United States declarations about standing for democracy and then being exposed for having sent the CIA into Chile where the President had been democratically elected, and, and getting him overthrown, and then embracing a military regime instead of a democratic future for Chile. So this is what Schlesinger was predicting back in 1961. We've had this experience again and again and again.
- [37:46]
Martin DeCaro
The policy of the United States is not to torture. The President has not authorized it, he will not authorize it, but he has done everything within the corners of the law to make sure that we prevent another attack on this country.
- [37:59]
Peter Kornbluh
Well, unfortunately, at that point, Kennedy didn't go with his inclination to break up the CIA and the CIA as we know it and redistribute its operations and intelligence gathering and analytical functions to other parts of the US Government. And we've had the CIA basically doing the same thing again and again and again.
- [38:17]
Martin DeCaro
Well, why not? Why didn't JFK take this opportunity?
- [38:20]
Peter Kornbluh
You know, I'd be interested in Arturo's evaluation of that. We don't have the documents. Don't say why he didn't.
- [38:27]
Martin DeCaro
I mean, because these things would have been done maybe differently, but maybe the same way, just under different departments.
- [38:33]
Peter Kornbluh
And I have my theories. I'm curious about Arturo's.
- [38:36]
Unnamed Guest
Well, I mean, Kennedy for the three short years that he was in power, I mean, he was going from crisis to crisis. He had a lot on his plate. The broader point, I think, is why have reforms to the CIA been very slow and when they do happen, very limited? I did study the Church Committee in quite a bit of detail. And so the Church Committee, which was set up in 1975 to try to investigate alleged illegal CIA activities, but also counterproductive actions and all that kind of stuff, at the end of those hearings, they recommended what was called the Big CIA charter or intelligence community charter?
- [39:15]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
Well, it's a bill that would set up a permanent oversight committee, bipartisan committee with a rotating membership, so that it would not be preempted by the agencies that it is to oversee with sufficient authority both to keep the secrets that are legitimate and to investigate and expose wrongdoing when it occurs.
- [39:39]
Unnamed Guest
And that original legislation was over 400 pages long, and it was going to limit and prohibit by law a lot of certain CIA activities, including assassinations, for example. The thing that's important to understand is for every Arthur Schlesinger that's out there that wants to rein in the powers of the CIA, there's also a number of individuals that are defending the CIA and don't want to see any kind of reforms. Right. Like a Richard Helms, for instance, who would then become Director of CIA. And so there's a lot of pushback and there's a lot of going back and forth. And so what happened during the Church committee days is even though there was a lot of movement towards having this intelligence charter, the final law that was passed several years later went from 400 pages to 12. And that's because a lot of defenders of the CIA didn't want to include in the final legislation prohibitions on assassination and things like that. And also the President at the time would then say, well, Congress, you don't need to pass a law. I'll pass a, an executive order. And so then President Ford passed an executive order prohibiting assassinations. But of course, the problem with executive orders is that the President can.
- [40:53]
Peter Kornbluh
We have two Schlesinger memos and we have some discussion at the President's high level group, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But we don't really have the pushback from the CIA and the documents arguing this and that about the CIA. And I think you have to remember that, that Kennedy had only been President for a few weeks when this whole discussion was going on. And he also faced the fallout from the Bay of Pigs fiasco and being told, and I think sensing that this was going to embolden the Soviets and Nikita Khrushchev to challenge him as a young, inexperienced President even more, shaking up the CIA and kind of delays and voids that that would create for covert operations and intelligence gathering. And everything the CIA was doing just didn't seem that appetizing at that, you know, particularly dangerous moment. And he did something that was rather extraordinary. He basically put his brother in charge of covert operations. His brother was Attorney General of the United States. The juxtaposition of having the person who's supposed to uphold the top person upholding the laws of the United States, being the basically quasi chieftain of covert operations around the world, which is basically murder and mayhem and, and criminal activities, is pretty extraordinary.
- [42:13]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, yeah. I just spoke to Ken Hughes on a recent episode about the Knicks and Enemies list. Ken, who works for the Miller center at the University of Virginia, is researching a book right now on Operation Mongoose and he is learning that Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General, also wanted to do false flag operations in order to justify an invasion of Cuba.
- [42:32]
Peter Kornbluh
Well, that's not a surprise to Arturo and myself.
- [42:35]
Martin DeCaro
A surprise to me.
- [42:36]
Peter Kornbluh
Operation Mongoose, but I should just say the National Security Archives, one of its great achievements almost 30 years ago was a Freedom of Information case that I was very heavily involved in getting the vast majority of Operation Mongoose documents declassified. That's one of the reasons we have so many documents and know so much about what Operation Mongoose was really about.
- [43:00]
Unnamed Guest
Peter is absolutely right that we don't have specific details yet in these files as to what Kennedy's views were about reforming the CIA. But it can also be maybe speculating a little. Arthur Schlesinger was also very critical and opposed certain covert operations that President Kennedy would later be in favor of. So for instance, in meddling, in trying to undermine Cheddi Jagan and British Guiana, Schlesinger also sent some memos where he was very concerned about that operation. Whereas President Kennedy, the documents that we have, and they're not all, they haven't all been declassified, including four presidential tapes that are still secret on British Guiana, was much more in favor of this. Another famous case would be the overthrow of Diem in Vietnam, where there are several members of the administration led by William Kobe, the CIA Far east division chief, and McCone, the director of CIA, who were opposed to overthrowing Diem. But Kennedy on this position, he's all over the place. At times he's in favor of the coup, at times he's concerned, and so on and so forth. And so just because someone like Schlesinger has these concerns and is making these recommendations to the President, doesn't mean that the President himself might be completely on board with the recommendations.
- [44:19]
Martin DeCaro
Since you brought up Ngo Dinh Diem Arturo in Vietnam, Diem assassinated just a couple of weeks before, before Kennedy himself was assassinated. My understanding of that, and you both would know better than I, is that while Kennedy didn't give the explicit order, when he did find out, of course he had already signaled that he'd be okay with removing Diem, maybe not assassinating and murdering him, but getting him out of power. But when he found out that this operation or the Vietnamese generals were going to do this, he didn't stop them.
- [44:49]
Unnamed Guest
So President Kennedy didn't authorize the murder of Diem, but there was discussion that if there was going to be a coup, a general led coup against Diem and his brother knew that it was highly likely that violence would be used. That caused pause then. The other thing that's complicated about the Diem is that there's technically two coup operations, conspiracies. One takes place in August of 1963 and then Diem is finally overthrown, I think on November 1, 1963. And so in October there's another conspiracy. And so Kennedy is very, I'll say he's very bullish and in favor of trying to overthrow Diem in the August coup. But then when that fails, he kind of has second thoughts. And he's also, he's thinking about the Bay of Pigs and he's very concerned about, well, what happens if we try to overthrow Diem and the US hand is revealed, which is highly likely, and then Diem is still there or something happens. He still is in favor in my interpretation of the documents, but he, he's more cautious and he wants to. He makes it clear to those individuals that are in, in Vietnam, like Lodge, for instance, the, the US Ambassador that he reserves the right to change his mind at the last minute. And then at the last moment things take on a life of their own. And there's all this controversy about the role of Conan, who is a CIA contract officer and anyway, and I'm working on an article right now.
- [46:17]
Martin DeCaro
Oh, cool. I don't mind going down the, the GM rabbit rabbit hole, but I do know that Kennedy recorded a voice memo that exists to this day. The audio where he regrets what happened to Zem.
- [46:28]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
I was shocked by the death of Zim and new I'd met Zim with Justice Douglas many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a 10 year period he held his country together, maintain its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent.
- [46:52]
Martin DeCaro
So when people learn that the CIA has been messing around in other countries and that we're in what was called the Third World, now called the Global south, they say, oh well, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Why was the CIA so active in France? Peter, you have a new piece out at the National Security archive. The French Embassy being broken into. Robert Kennedy ordering the FBI be kept in the dark about CIA theft of documents. What was going on in France, which is a US Treaty ally.
- [47:20]
Peter Kornbluh
This was an episode that didn't go on in France.
- [47:23]
Martin DeCaro
It went on in Washington D.C. oh, my bad. Sorry about that. Go ahead.
- [47:26]
Peter Kornbluh
Target was the French Embassy at the corner of Kalorama and 16th Street.
- [47:32]
Martin DeCaro
That's not far from where I live, but go ahead.
- [47:34]
Peter Kornbluh
Yeah, a beautiful old building. I don't think the embassy is there anymore, but I mean, this is a whole part of the early 60s lore of CIA operations. Apparently the CIA counterintelligence chieftain James Engleton decided that there were a number of foreign embassies that were spying on the United States and that we needed to step up our operations against them and know what they were doing. In the case of the embassy of France, there apparently was some intelligence that they had obtained the CIA believed was bad and we needed it back. Something out of a movie.
- [48:12]
Martin DeCaro
You could just ask for it, right? You could ask for the information or you can break in to the embassy.
- [48:19]
Peter Kornbluh
The CIA, we've learned from these documents, which is really incredible. You know, the CIA had moles and assets and contacts and, you know, riddled throughout all of embassy landia in Washington. And in some cases, when they wanted to spy on embassies, they simply had one of their moles, just like in the movie, bring in a little microphone and unscrew a lamp or hide it in a corner or whatever they did. And. And other times they literally broke in and again, like the movies show, and planted these listening devices in very obscure places. And this happened in the French embassy. They did an operation against the Chilean embassy in the early 1970s, et cetera, et cetera. But I do think that people are surprised when the United States intelligence services start targeting their own allies. And we've learned from these documents that we targeted the French, that we were spying on the Israelis, et cetera, et cetera. It's very, very interesting history and thank.
- [49:15]
Martin DeCaro
You for correcting me there on the location of where that took place.
- [49:19]
Unnamed Guest
So to go beyond the counterintelligence operations with Peter was focusing on. So the CIA did carry out what's called a political action program in France and in Italy against two allies since the late 1940s. Peter and I, we found these documents now that give details on some of the specific funds that the CIA gave to Italian Christian Democratic Party members and members of the Socialist Party as well in Italy. And similar operations were taking place in France and part of the concern that the CIA had dating back to the 1946 French elections, the Communist party in France, which was a legal party and had a significant base of support, right. So the communist parties in Finland, in France and in Italy were three of the strongest communist parties in Europe. And so the US was always concerned about those parties political strength growing. And so the CIA would provide assistance and psychological warfare to, you know, meddle in these elections and make sure that the parties that the US preferred had a better chance of dominating French and Italian politics.
- [50:37]
Martin DeCaro
Democracy. Unless you elect communists. Trujillo. Rafael Trujillo. It's been known for some time that he was assassinated and that the CIA was involved in that. I was looking at the documents that were released by the Trump administration. I did not read the entire document. It's rather lengthy, but the beginning of it, it's just very matter of factly typed out. Rafael Truillo, the Dominican dictator, was assassinated at about 10pm on the night of May 30, 1961. It was his custom to visit one of his mistresses at his ranch in San Cristobal about once a week. On most of his travels, he rode in a Chrysler with bulletproof glass and with security guards riding in accompanying cars. He departed from this practice on his periodic trips to San Cristobal and substituted a highly stereotyped pattern of action. After his nightly walk, he dismissed his companions, changed into a khaki uniform, and set out for San Cristobal in an unescorted 1957 Chevrolet, always driven by the same chauffeur. So that's where they got him. The Chevy was intercepted and the assassin doping fire on him and the driver. What's new about these documents about the Dominican dictator? What should we take away from this?
- [51:52]
Unnamed Guest
The case in the Dominican Republic is interesting in part because it is one of those cases where we know that the US Government, the CIA, essentially destroyed a lot of documents. And that's part of the reason why there's a lot of interest in this. I highly recommend. There's a book that just came out last year by Luca Trenta called the President's Kill List, which is a history of CIA sponsored assassinations. And he has an excellent chapter on Trujillo. What you're referring to is this CIA inspector general report that had already been out in the public for several years, but there are certain sections that were finally unredacted. And so the details that we now know are more about, say, a CIA go between that the agency used to transfer weapons to some of the dissidents. Against Trujillo, the would be assassins. We also know additional details of this. The Perrys had this little supermarket that were also go betweens the US government providing rifles to some of these anti Trujillo elements.
- [52:56]
Martin DeCaro
So they name names, listen, the documents.
- [52:58]
Peter Kornbluh
Name names, they name places like this little supermarket that CIA agents and intermediaries and coup plotters all would come and I guess talk in the aisle or pass weapons in the aisle or whatever. I mean, the colorful nature and the color these details is what completes the story. And this is a story that was told using this very document by the church committee literally 50 years ago. So you could basically read the story and we've known the story for 50 years. But there's two things here. Now we have these little tidbits of details that complete the kind of history on the ground. But also, and I think this is what's so extraordinary, the three of us are talking about this and your podcast audience are talking about this. You know, we're remembering and revisiting this history precisely because finally we do have the entire document, even though for, you know, five decades we've already known most of what it says.
- [53:59]
Martin DeCaro
How do you approach the following issue? Sometimes debates swing from like one extreme to the other. The CIA is this all powerful organization that, you know, almost had magical powers to be able to overthrow any government in the world and get its way to the other end of that spectrum is, listen, we had a cold war to contest. The Soviet Union was wrong too. And the CIA always worked with people inside these countries who wanted to overthrow their own governments.
- [54:27]
Peter Kornbluh
The CIA is a multifaceted and gigantic institution, most famous of all of our national security agencies that are supposedly operating to protect our national security. In the case of the CIA, and you know, again, at the direction of president after President, that has not always been the case. And the fact of the negative impact on American values, American principles, kind of the character of our society, that is not factored in as a security issue when it should be. But the CIA is a multifaceted agency. It gathers intelligence, it has a scientific wing, a technological wing, analyzes the intelligence. It has a whole analytical wing that it gathers and it conducts covert operations and often more murderous, larger scale operations as well. And there's a role for some of these functions in our current dangerous world. The question is accountability, supervision, and an agency that reflects the real values of America as a society. And those are the issues around which the debate takes place. But what's I think interesting from our point of view is obtaining documentation that shows that the debate has played out inside the walls of the White House in the past, and these arguments have been raised by aides who are right there, like Arthur Schlesinger. Declassified documents and revisiting this history allow us to take the historical words and actions of actors in this history from the past and use them to continue that debate and discussion today over what the correct role and representative role of United States covert operations and US Foreign policy should be in our society in the present day.
- [56:26]
Martin DeCaro
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And if my safety as an American citizen, if our security is so important, why should everything be kept secret from us then as to how the government is doing these things, that would probably would have been a better way of phrasing my question, Arturo.
- [56:40]
Unnamed Guest
Yeah, and I think also it's important to note that sometimes the way that the US Government justifies its secrets is because it argues that, well, we don't want the Soviets to know, or we don't want want the Chinese to know. And they have intelligence agencies, and they also spend billions of dollars trying to figure out what the US Is doing. And typically they actually have a pretty good idea of what the US Is doing. And the CIA knows this. So what a lot of scholars argue is that one of the primary audiences that the US Government is trying to keep in the dark isn't so much the Soviet Union, because there's this assumption and understanding that the Soviet Union knows that the CIA is involved in Laos or knows that the CIA is involved in Chile. But it's the American public which gets to Peter's broader point. That the part of the really important thing about clarifying the historical record and hopefully making the present government more transparent, the need to have an informed public and the need to be able to hold the government accountable for abuse.
- [57:46]
Arturo Jimenez Bacardi
You've said in the past that waterboarding, in your opinion, is torture, and torture is a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions.
- [57:54]
Unnamed Guest
Do you believe that the previous administration sanctioned torture? What I've said, and I will repeat, is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I. I do believe that it is torture. I don't think that's just my opinion. That's the opinion of many who have examined the topic, and that's why I put an end to these practices. I am absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do. Not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values in ways that were consistent with who we are.
- [58:55]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens. Is it possible to tariff Canada into becoming a U.S. well, it was tried once before. Spoiler it didn't work. We're going to travel back to the late 19th century and the McKinley tariff next as we report History as it Happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign up@historyasithappens.com.