by Jim Marrs
By 1947, the CIG’s staff had grown to nearly 2,000, with about one-third operating overseas. But it continued to be only one of several intelligence organizations. This 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 renaming the War Department 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 stated:
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 and just two months after a still-controversial crash at Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico—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, much of this off the books and handled through the little-known Exchange Stabilization Fund of the Treasury Department, 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.
In 1948, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was created by the National Security Council as a covert psychological and paramilitary operations unit under Frank Wisner. By 1951, the OPC had run afoul of so many US laws and policies it was merged into the CIA and was known thereafter as the CIA’s Department of Plans. However, any attempt at curtailing such activities was thwarted by the appointment of Allen Dulles as the new director.
By 1955, the CIA contained more than 15,000 employees, not including thousands of foreign assets and contract agents. In addition to its enormous secret budget—often disguised as portions of other US 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 merely a security force for big business, more concerned with American corporate investments than with true national security issues. 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. John Moors Cabot, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, was a major United Fruit stockholder. And CIA director Allen Dulles had been president of United Fruit, while his predecessor as CIA director, General Walter Bedell Smith, soon would become a United Fruit vice president.
One reason the CIA succeeded in becoming a world-class force was the relationship of its longtime 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 clearly violated both the agency’s charter and US laws. One agency endeavor—the search for effective brainwashing and behavior-modification methods—is especially chilling.
The Manchurian Candidates
The fact that German rocket scientists were brought to the United States after World War II under Project Paperclip to become the leaders of the US 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 US 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.
Such programs to alter minds formed the basis of a 1959 book by Richard Condon titled The Manchurian Candidate. Later a movie that reportedly was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorites, the book concerns an American soldier captured in Korea who is brainwashed into becoming a remote-controlled killer for the purpose of assassinating a US presidential candidate.
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 agency officials gave to a mobster in the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Interestingly, one of the two CIA field stations that were involved in MK-UL-TRA and had quantities of both LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and other chemical mind-altering agents was at Atsugi in Japan, the same station where Lee Harvey Oswald served as a Marine radar operator and apparently was involved in undercover operations.
Since the CIA has admitted that its most convenient source of mind-control guinea pigs were “individuals of dubious loyalty, suspected agents or plants, subjects having known reason for deception, etc.,” one must wonder whether Oswald may have been part of a mind-altering program of the agency—if in fact there was one. 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.
In the summer of 1963, Oswald entered the office of New Orleans assistant district attorney Edward Gillin. He was asked to take a seat but instead choose to stand in front of Gillin’s desk. Oswald proceeded to question Gillin about a new drug called LSD. After spending almost an hour extolling the virtues of the drug as one that would affect the social and economic history of the world for the next two hundred years, Oswald said he wanted to try some and wished to know if it was legal (which it was at that time). Thinking his visitor was a bit crazy, Gillin suggested Oswald visit the police chemist with his query but advised he take nothing without consulting a doctor first. Gillin never saw Oswald again until recognizing him on TV accused of killing the president.
The exact nature of Oswald’s relation to any CIA mind-control program likely will never be known. According to John Marks, author of The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” Gottlieb, upon retiring 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, told 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 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 professional assassins from the mob, the CIA, or the military and thrown a scapegoat to the public.
For all the myths that have arisen about CIA prowess, the actual history of the agency reveals as many glaring errors as victories.
Agency analysts failed to foresee the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, the collapse of communism, or the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
One CIA officer deeply involved in the Cuban operations, including the Bay of Pigs, was William Harvey, who established and managed the CIA’s infamous “Executive Action” program of calculated assassinations code-named ZR-RIFLE. Referring to Harvey’s program, president Lyndon Johnson once commented, “We were running a damn Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean.”
It is in this area—assassination plots—that the US intelligence community in general, and the CIA in particular, have created serious suspicions in the minds of researchers regarding possible complicity in the death of President Kennedy.
CIA-Mafia Death Plots
In September 1963, CIA officers again tried to hatch an assassination plot against Castro—this time using a Cuban government official named Dr. Rolando Cubela. His CIA code name was AM/LASH.
An unofficial Cuban minister, Cubela had contacted the CIA some two years earlier and offered to defect. The agency had persuaded him to remain in place as a valuable conduit of inside information.
This time, meeting in a São Paulo, Brazil, safe house, Cubela startled his CIA contacts by offering to assassinate Castro if he had the support of the US government. This offer was sent to Desmond FitzGerald, a personal friend of Robert Kennedy and one of the CIA officials in charge of Operation Mongoose, that covert operation to bring down Cuba’s communist government.
Despite cautions from CIA counterintelligence that Cubela might be a Castro agent testing US government intentions, FitzGerald ordered that Cubela be told that his offer to eliminate Castro was under consideration at the “highest levels.” This strange story has been related in both Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald by Edward Jay Epstein and The Kennedys by John H. Davis.
Toward the end of October Cubela made an extraordinary demand. He wanted personal assurance that the Kennedy administration actively supported his plan to kill Castro. On October 29, again against the advice of counterintelligence, FitzGerald personally met with Cubela and assured him that once Castro was gone, the Kennedy administration would support a new Cuban government. But when Cubela asked for a rifle with telescopic sights and the means to deliver poison, FitzGerald declined to discuss such specifics. Another meeting with Cubela was set and on that day, the CIA case officer supplied Cubela with a poison ballpoint pen. Cubela was told the rifle and some explosives would be delivered to him soon. Ironically, Cubela received his assassination tools from the CIA on November 22, 1963.
Although no documentation of the AM/LASH plot has survived, some senior CIA officials now claim that the plot did have the support of both Robert Kennedy and his brother. Since both are now dead, there’s no real way to know, plus the animosity of certain CIA officers toward the Kennedys should be kept in mind when evaluating this charge.
It was the knowledge of AM/LASH, however, that caused consternation among CIA officials when Castro made certain public statements concerning assassination plots. While attending a reception in the Brazilian embassy in Havana, Castro told an Associated Press reporter, “Kennedy is the Batista of our time and the most opportunistic president of all time.” Castro went on to warn against “terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders,” adding, “United States leaders should think that if they assist in terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” This warning has for years been used to support the theory that somehow Castro had learned of the CIA plots against him and, in retaliation, sent assassins after Kennedy. But since Castro didn’t catch Cubela until 1966, it is unlikely that AM/LASH was the impetus of his 1963 remarks.
While the CIA’s Mongoose program continued in Florida, similar operations were being conducted in New Orleans, long a hotbed of Cuban exile–CIA activity. One of the centers of this activity was the shabby three-story office building at 544 Camp Street, a connecting point for the CIA, the FBI, anti-Castro Cubans, and Lee Harvey Oswald.
New Orleans
Within days of Kennedy’s assassination, the FBI in New Orleans questioned David Ferrie, who denied any knowledge of the assas
sination. The FBI agents let him go, apparently unaware of Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol connection to accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald or to New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. Neither apparently did the agents know that Ferrie had been working for Detective Guy Banister in the summer of 1963.
Whatever information Ferrie gave the FBI will never be known, since the interview was classified and locked away on orders of J. Edgar Hoover and in 1976, the National Archives reported that Ferrie’s original statement was missing from its collection of assassination documents.
Both Ferrie and Banister were well connected with the Cuban exiles living in New Orleans. As a contract agent for the CIA, Ferrie claimed to have flown on hazardous missions into Cuba, including landing there on the night of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Ferrie’s role as CIA agent was confirmed in 1975 when Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director, stated that during high-level CIA meetings in 1969, CIA director Richard Helms disclosed that Ferrie and other figures in the Garrison investigation had indeed worked for the agency in aiding the anti-Castro Cubans.
Banister investigator Jack Martin and others have told investigators through the years of contact between CIA contract agent Ferrie and Oswald during 1963. Martin said he suspected that Ferrie “had taught Oswald how to purchase a foreign-made firearm.”
According to Beverly Oliver, the “babushka lady,” Oswald and Ferrie were even seen together in Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club shortly before the assassination.
Delphine Roberts also claims that Oswald and Ferrie were associates. She said that on one occasion Ferrie even took Oswald to an anti-Castro guerrilla training camp outside New Orleans “to train with rifles.” Once she saw Oswald handing out pro-Castro literature on a New Orleans street. Her boss, the rabid anticommunist Banister, reassured her, “Don’t worry about him. . . . He’s associated with the office.” Roberts later said, “I knew there were such things as counterspies, spies and counterspies, and the importance of such things. So I just didn’t question them.”