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From FountainofLight.net Books Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History
Chapter 11 JOHN F. KENNEDY, JIM GARRISON AND THE CIA I've got to do something about those CIA bastards. —John Fitzgerald Kennedy Excerpt: THE HISTORICAL RECORD CORROBORATES Richard Case Nagell's view that the CIA hated Kennedy most "for planning to curb activities of spook outfits, especially CIA." Reading an April 1966 New York Times article, "C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?" Jim Garrison also registered Kennedy's profound warfare with the Agency. He circled the paragraph where Kennedy was quoted by an insider as threatening to "splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind." He also marked a sentence where Kennedy countermanded President Eisenhower, who had exempted the CIA from control by American ambassadors abroad. Kennedy reversed that, putting the ambassadors in control. By the end of 1966, Garrison was persuaded that Kennedy was murdered as a result of his struggle with the CIA, and, behind it, the Pentagon's "war machine," which was determined to have its ground war, if not in Cuba, then elsewhere. A month after Kennedy's death, former president Harry Truman expressed on the front page of the Washington Post his dismay that the CIA he created had been running a shadow government, becoming "operational." Truman de-dared that the CIA was "in urgent need of correction." (Brazenly, MlenDulles had even told a reporter to think of the CIA as "the State Department for unfriendly countries"). New York Times columnist Arthur Krock had warned of CIA malfeasance two months earlier. The CIA, Krock wrote, was a "malignancy" on the body politic. With startling prescience, in October of 1963, Krock in his outrage all but predicted the Kennedy assassination. If the United States ever experiences an attempted coup,, Krock wrote, "It will come from the C.I.A. and not the Pentagon.! Between Kennedy and the CIA there was now raging "an intra-administration war," with the CIA serving the needs of the military5 and those corporations that stood most to gain from a ground war, Liberal journalist Walter Lippmann could not help but note that the CIA was bursting the bounds of its mandate. Forty years later, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy adviser, would remark quietly to Jim Garrison's old classmate Wilmer Thomas that they had been at war with "the National Security people." That the CIA exacted its revenge on Kennedy has been an open secret since 1963. After the CIA in 1954 had overthrown President Arbenz in Guatemala, its first "solo flight" as a policy-maker, President Eisenhower recognized that the Agency was dangerously out of control. He established a "President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities." Its conclusion was that the CIA's clandestine services were "operating for the most part on an autonomous and free-wheeling basis in highly critical areas," in direct conflict with State Department policy; its recommendation was that Eisenhower fire Alien Dulles, or at the very least force him to accept an administrative deputy. Eisenhower's reward was that the clandestine services, then run by Richard Bissell, former assistant of Frank Wisner, sabotaged the May 1, 1960 foray of the U-2 flown by Francis Gary Powers. The U-2 fleet had been dubbed "RBAF," which stood for "Richard Bissell's Air Force," one more indication of CIA arrogance. The Agency lied directly to Eisenhower, insisting that should the plane be shot down, neither the aircraft nor the pilot would survive. So Bissell would lie to John F. Kennedy and insist that "failure was almost impossible" at the Bay of Pigs. Despite Eisenhower's reluctance, the CIA insisted upon a flight close to the time of Eisenhower's scheduled May 16th summit with Khrushchev, de Gaulle and Macmillan, arguing, with no discernible evidence, that this last flight was urgent. Years later, the CIA would admit in hearings before the Senate that this flight wasn't particularly necessary at all. The issue of CIA malfeasance in the failure of Powers' mission was not even raised. Eisenhower, reluctantly, had declared that the cut-off date for U-2 flights was May 1st, assuming that meant the CIA would organize the flight during the last two weeks of April. But it was on May 1 that Francis Gary Powers was sent aloft. In insisting on that one additional overflight, Bissell succeeded in making policy, which meant destroying detente and with it Elsenhower's desire to cut the country's defense budget. Rapprochement with the Soviet Union meant for Eisenhower a subsequent redirecting of the country's resources to its domestic needs. This was not to be. Powers' mission seems to have been doomed. Both the circumstantial and the direct evidence that Powers' flight was interfered with by those in charge are overwhelming. "Powers came down because his aircraft was fixed to fail," stated retired Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, who was in charge of providing military support for the clandestine services, and whose data should not be disregarded because of his speculations about a "secret team." Powers' flight was made to fail by a shortage of the proper fuel, Prouty concluded. Prouty was also alarmed that the flight violated standard procedure. Powers was laden with identification, not least a Department of Defense identification card. The U-2 itself bore identifying marks, violating a National Security Council edict. Whereas Powers should have been bearing no identity, he was possessed of enough for the Soviets promptly to announce that he was a "spy" from the United States. "That is why Powers survived and why they landed in good shape," Prouty reasoned. "'They' equals Powers and the U-2." Other evidence suggests that the CIA deliberately routed Powers into the path of nests of Soviet missiles it knew could shoot him down if he was flying too low. That Powers' top secret camera had been removed suggested that someone knew this plane was not coming home. It was a catastrophe timed to thwart the May 16th summit with Premier Khrushchev that Eisenhower hoped would cap his presidency. Seizing the high road, Khrushchev immediately demanded that Eisenhower admit he had no knowledge of the flight and fire Dulles and Bissell. The CIA had forced Eisenhower's hand, realizing that he "could not honestly say that he didn't know what was going on," Prouty writes in The Secret Team. "At the same time he had to announce to the world that he had known about the flight." "The White House and the other agencies did not so much approve the flights as hold a veto power over them," David Wise and Thomas B. Ross write in their very cautious little book, The U-2 Affair. When Eisenhower in his much-quoted farewell address warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, Prouty speculates, he had in mind his own political sabotage at the hands of the CIA in the U-2 fiasco. During the summit that failed, a trigger-happy Pentagon man even put the U.S. military on alert for ten hours, fanning the flames of Cold War belligerence Eisenhower had intended the summit to defuse. Ed Note: The web page has additional and current information which suggests reasons for the opposition to the Garrison investigation by Robert Kennedy. But to keep perspective - it was common knowledge during the Kennedy campaign in California in 1968 that Bobby intended to reopen the investigation of JFK's killing after becoming president. And that was widely believed to be the main reason for his own killing. Few believe the official story of that one as well! ****** Fair Use Notice: There is no attempt here to usurp any copyright but only to distribute useful and educational information to a non profit audience. © Copyright 2000-2008 by Fountain of Light |
