The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  Thus John F. Kennedy's national security adviser, a former Harvard dean of faculty, acknowledged that shortly after taking office he had discussed expanding the CIA's capability for political assassination with the CIA's director of covert operations, who was then, as reported by the committee, in charge of a major clandestine effort to assassinate three unwanted foreign leaders. Yet this extraordinary admission attracted no significant attention when made public by the Senate in November 1975. Bundy's testimony might have been given more importance if the Washington press corps had known that Bundy had a long-standing tie to the Central Intelligence Agency---a tie that suggested he was far more of an insider than was generally assumed.

  Bundy's name came up in surprising fashion in 1994, during an interview for this book with Lawrence Devlin, a former CIA station chief in the Congo, who retired from the agency in 1974. "Do you know who tapped me on the shoulder for the agency?" Devlin asked. "Bundy. He was a secretary of the Council on Foreign Relations [in New York City]. He flew in to see me." Devlin, a World War II veteran, was attending Harvard on the GI Bill when he was approached in 1949 by a professor who asked "if I was looking for a job." Devlin and three other candidates were invited to the professor's office to discuss working for the newly formed CIA. "And then," Devlin remembered, "McGeorge Bundy showed up, giving each of us a pep talk. He offered me a job, and negotiated the level of entry." Years later, Devlin said, during a policy argument at the White House in the Johnson administration, Bundy plaintively asked Devlin, "How did you get recruited in the agency?" His reply, Devlin said, made the national security adviser laugh: "You recruited me."

  After his meeting with Bissell in early January 1961, Bill Harvey had no illusions about what ZR/RIFLE and executive action were supposed to accomplish. He immediately scheduled a meeting with Bissell's scientific adviser, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who could produce a lethal virus or poison on demand. In an interview for this book in 1994, Gottlieb told me that Harvey said, "I've been asked to form this group to assassinate people and I need to know what you can do for me." Harvey kept notes of that meeting, too---notes he did not turn over to the CIA's inspector general in 1967---and they indicate that the meeting with Gottlieb took place on January 25, 1961, five days after Kennedy's inauguration. The two men specifically discussed Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo as potential targets. Harvey's notes show that he and Gottlieb talked of assassination as a "last resort" and as "a confession of weakness." On the next day, Harvey met with Arnold Silver, the CIA's experienced station chief in Luxembourg, with whom he had worked closely in previous operations. Harvey's notes show that he and Silver talked about recruiting agents for the ZR/RIFLE program---men who could be trusted to kill and say nothing. There was much talk of security and the need not to put anything in writing: "No other agencies. No project on paper.... Never mention word assassination."

  The intense secrecy inside the American government did not prevent word of the Bissell-Harvey enterprise from traveling throughout organized crime circles. Sometime that winter, Joe Bonanno, the retired Mafia boss of New York City, volunteered his services to the CIA. Doris Mirage, Bissell's secretary, recalled in an interview for this book that Bonanno "was always calling on the outside line" in Bissell's office. "Bissell wouldn't take the call and I had to deal with the guy myself." At one point, Mirage said, Bonanno managed to get a handwritten letter delivered directly into Bissell's office, presumably with the help of someone working at the agency. "I got the letter from Bissell's out file," Mirage said. "He was a terrible writer. The letter said that he'd do what [Bissell] wanted him to do." She understood, Mirage said, that Bonanno was offering "to kill Castro." She didn't know where to file the letter, she added. "So I kept it."*

  In the fall of 1961, Harvey was assigned to what became known as Task Force W, the CIA component in a get-Castro squad that was assembled by the White House. He spent much of the next year and a half plotting to overthrow and kill the Cuban leader---and growing increasingly frustrated about the constant pressure to do so from Robert Kennedy. Harvey's animosity toward the attorney general grew with each failed assassination attempt. It was Harvey's frustration, apparently, that led to a breach of his rules about never talking out of turn. At some point he told a valued colleague, Samuel Halpern, the executive officer of Task Force W, what no one in the CIA would ever tell Congress: that Jack Kennedy had personally authorized Richard Bissell to set up ZR/RIFLE before his inauguration. "After the election," Halpern recalled in one of his many interviews for this book, "Kennedy asked Bissell to create a capacity for political assassination. That's why Harvey set up ZR/RIFLE."

  As Kennedy entered office, the Third World---such countries as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the Congo---was the new Cold War battleground. "Now the trumpet summons us again," Kennedy declared in his famed inaugural address, "not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle year in and year out." The president's new twilight war against Soviet communism was being waged through surrogates all over the world. A few days earlier, Soviet officials had made available the text of a January 6 secret speech by Nikita Khrushchev in which the Soviet premier described the importance of "just wars" of national liberation; it was must reading for the president-elect. "These wars, which began as uprisings of colonial peoples against their oppressors, developed into guerrilla wars," Khrushchev said. "The Communists support just war of this kind wholeheartedly and without reservation." With nuclear war no longer acceptable, support for guerrilla war was now the only "way of bringing imperialism to heel."

  Historian Michael Beschloss noted in The Crisis Years, his 1991 study of the Khrushchev-Kennedy relationship, that much of what Khrushchev said on January 6 had been said by him before, and was intended as a rejection of hard-liners in Moscow and Peking, with their hotheaded talk of all-out nuclear war. Eisenhower was unruffled by the speech, Beschloss wrote, because he had come to understand that with Khrushchev "tough talk usually substituted for action." Khrushchev undoubtedly thought he was reassuring the West by renouncing nuclear armageddon, Beschloss added, but "he did not realize the extent to which Kennedy might take the timing and content of his address as a provocation and test of a new young President."

  To Kennedy, the speech was a challenge. Once in office, he sent copies to key members of his administration with a memorandum stating, "Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.... Our actions, our steps should be tailored to meet these kinds of problems." Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense, told an interviewer years later that the speech was "a significant event in our lives."

  The hottest surrogate war at the time Kennedy took office was in the newly independent Congo. Belgium had left its colony poorly prepared for self-rule, with fewer than twenty college graduates in the entire country and the army still controlled by white officers. When Congolese soldiers mutinied and violence broke out, reports reached the West of white civilians killed and nuns raped. Belgium flew in paratroopers to protect its citizens. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba requested and received intervention by the United Nations to drive out the Belgians, then accepted Soviet military aid to retain the breakaway province of Katanga. Officials in the Eisenhower administration were convinced the Congolese premier was a dangerous radical who would be difficult to dislodge. He was all the more threatening to Washington because he had wide popular backing: in May 1960 his political party, the Mouvement National Congolais, won more seats in the nation's new parliament than any other party. The U.S. response, as Kennedy was well aware, had been to order the CIA to assassinate Lumumba.

  The focal point of the American effort was the CIA's technical services division (TSD), whose scientists were asked to produce a lethal virus or poison that could be put into Lumumba's food, or perhaps his toothpaste. The men running the TSD did not flinch; it was not their first such assignment.

  Earlier in 1960, the TSD had created a poisoned handkerchief that was
mailed with the approval of the agency's top management to the home of General Abdul Karim Kassem, the military strongman of Iraq. Kassem had seized power in a bloody coup and, to the dismay of the United States, immediately restored diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and lifted a ban on the Communist Party in Iraq. Sidney Gottlieb came up with the idea of infecting a handkerchief and mailing it to Iraq via the CIA station in New Delhi, India. "It was not an assassination," Gottlieb told me in an interview. "They [the CIA's Near East division] just wanted him to get sick for a long time. I went to Bissell and he said go ahead." Others in the agency saw it differently. One senior officer, in an interview for this book, revealed that the men running the Near East division were interested in getting rid of General Kassem permanently. "Why else would we authorize such a drastic action?" It is not known whether the handkerchief ever reached Kassem, or anyone in his immediate family who chanced to open the package. The general was executed by a firing squad in Baghdad, in 1963.

  The trusted Dr. Gottlieb also played a major role in creating a CIA assassination kit, containing needles, rubber gloves, gauze masks, and lethal biological materials. In mid-September of 1960, Richard Bissell ordered Gottlieb to the Congo, with his kit, and authorized him to tell Lawrence Devlin, the station chief in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville), that he was to use the poison or any other feasible means to murder Lumumba. Before leaving Washington, Gottlieb told me, "I did ask Bissell, 'Was this our idea?' The answer was that it came from 'the highest source'"---President Eisenhower. Devlin acknowledged in a 1994 interview for this book that there were enormous risks in plotting to murder Lumumba. "Had I been caught [in such planning], every white person in Kinshasa would have died." Gottlieb, Devlin added, "was just a mule in the affair, as was I."

  Lumumba, aware of the price on his head and pursued by rival Congolese factions, shrewdly placed himself in the protective custody of the United Nations forces. The CIA's goal, contrary to the high-flowing rhetoric from Washington about the sanctity of UN involvement, became to flush Lumumba out of his UN sanctuary somehow and leave him at the mercy of his political opponents in Katanga Province, who were funded by Belgian mining companies seeking return of their colonial holdings.

  The official American policy in the Congo did not change with Kennedy's election. "From the start," Arthur Schlesinger wrote in A Thousand Days, "the new President had a simple and constant view: that, unless the United Nations filled the vacuum in the Congo, there would be no alternative but a direct Soviet-American confrontation." The same point was made in Kennedy, by Ted Sorensen, who described the United Nations as the "chief channel" of JFK's policy for restoring an independent, peaceful, and noncommunist Congo. "The Kennedy Congo policy was largely an extension of the Eisenhower policy," added Sorensen.

  The unofficial American policy---the bloody one being attempted by the CIA---was not changed after Kennedy's victory at the polls, and was made official after his inauguration. Bill Harvey and his colleagues had every reason to believe that the authorization for ZR/RIFLE signaled Kennedy's endorsement of the policy of murdering foreign leaders.

  In mid-January 1961, Lumumba was persuaded to leave United Nations protection. He was seized by opposition troops, taken to Katanga Province, and murdered sometime between January 17 and early February. The precise role of the CIA in his demise is not known, but cables made available to the Church Committee conclusively showed that the CIA's men in Africa understood that Lumumba would be murdered once he left his UN sanctuary. President Kennedy was not asked a single question about Lumumba's death in his televised news conferences in 1961.

  The efforts to assassinate Trujillo were far less complicated. The Dominican leader was a brutal and repressive dictator; the Church Committee concluded in 1975 that both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had repeatedly "encouraged the overthrow of his regime by Dominican dissidents." Trujillo was seen throughout Latin America as an American protégé---which, indeed, he had been during the 1940s and early 1950s---and the fear was that if his inevitable overthrow was not orchestrated by Washington, the country might fall into the hands of pro-Castro, procommunist radicals.

  In August 1960 the Eisenhower administration formally broke diplomatic relations with the Trujillo regime, withdrew most of its diplomatic personnel, including the CIA station chief, and closed its embassy. Henry Dearborn, an American foreign service officer, stayed behind as consul general and de facto CIA station chief. Dearborn met with dissident groups and became increasingly outspoken in his view that no effort to overthrow the regime could be successful unless accompanied by the assassination of Trujillo; he filed cables expressing that view to the State Department, for distribution to government offices throughout Washington. Dearborn was explicitly talking about murder, and he was not reproved for doing so; he was merely urged to confine his reporting---and his recommendations---to more secure CIA communication channels. In December 1960, amid intense plotting for the murder of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, the Eisenhower administration approved a plan put forward by Richard Bissell, which called for supplying anti-Trujillo forces with weapons and bombs with electronic detonators. The policy did not change with Kennedy's inauguration on January 20; Henry Dearborn stayed on the job and continued to file cables full of assassination talk.

  At this point Joe Kennedy and the Palm Beach social circuit intervened. Joe Kennedy was friendly, in the way that rich men have friendships with journalists, with a gossip columnist named Igor Cassini, whose brother, Oleg, a New York fashion designer, was supplying Jacqueline Kennedy with couturier evening wear at no cost. Igor Cassini, who wrote under the name Cholly Knickerbocker, was an excellent golfer who shared the Kennedy interest in beautiful women; he also was married to a daughter of Kennedy neighbor Charles Wrightsman. In February 1961, according to documents made available to the New York Times a year later in the Dominican Republic, Cassini approached Joe Kennedy and proposed that the two of them work to open a line of communication between the new president and Trujillo. At the time, Cassini had been offered a public relations contract for $150,000 a year by the Trujillo regime. Cassini, in an interview for this book in 1996, claimed that he discussed the pending contract with Joe Kennedy and was told, "It might be a mistake for you." Cassini took the contract anyway.

  Just what Joe Kennedy sought---or got---for his role in the affair will never be known, but his son the president subsequently approved a secret meeting between Trujillo and, on behalf of the administration, Robert D. Murphy, a former Eisenhower administration official. Cassini accompanied Murphy on the trip, which took place just as the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed. Trujillo agreed to Murphy's visit, according to documents published in 1962 by the Times, in the hope that it would lead to a meeting at sea or in Florida with either Joe or Jack Kennedy. One of the documents reported that Murphy and Cassini knew "from confidential talks with the eldest Kennedy that the President had already decided to act favorably in the Dominican case, even going over the heads of the adverse opinion in the Department of State." The White House, embarrassed after the Times account by the clear evidence that Joe Kennedy could insert himself at will into the administration's foreign policy, issued a statement denying that the president had any plans to meet with Trujillo. The press took the denials at face value, and the incident blew over within a few days with no serious questions raised about Joe Kennedy's involvement. The mess was left for Bobby Kennedy to clean up, and he employed the same tactic that was used to neutralize Skinny D'Amato of Las Vegas after he was overheard on an FBI bug bragging about his help in West Virginia. Igor Cassini was indicted in 1963 by the Justice Department for failing to register as a foreign agent.*

  In the spring of 1961, Jack Kennedy made his own secret attempt to intervene with Trujillo. Senator George Smathers of Florida, Kennedy's pal from his days in Congress, told the Church Committee in 1975 testimony that Kennedy asked him to see Trujillo and raise "the possibility of his relinquishing his power and moving out." Smathers made his case
, failed to move Trujillo, and spent two pleasant days visiting with the dictator. "He was a very, very interesting character," Smathers testified. "He pulled out a .45 pistol and he laid it right out on the desk, pointed right at [me], and we started talking.... The next thing I knew he was assassinated." There is nothing in the record to indicate the president's purpose in agreeing to the Murphy and Smathers missions, but the obvious question is this: Were Jack Kennedy and his father giving Trujillo a chance to get out before it was too late?

  Trujillo continued on the executive action assassination list. In early April 1961, with the approval of Bissell and the White House, authorization was granted for a second set of weapons and ammunition---a first set had gone in February---to be sent by diplomatic pouch to the Dominican Republic, for relay to the dissidents.

  Washington's attitude, not surprisingly, underwent a dramatic change following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17; three days afterward, Dearborn was admonished to keep tight control of the matériel. One CIA cable cited by the Senate committee noted that the decision to keep the weapons from the dissidents was "based on judgment that filling a vacuum created by assassination now bigger question than ever view unsettled conditions in Caribbean area." Trujillo was murdered, nonetheless, on May 30, 1961, by a group of dissidents who, a later CIA study determined, had received American weapons earlier in the year. The White House, eager to avoid any taint of involvement, ordered all intelligence personnel immediately withdrawn from the Dominican Republic. The State Department, according to the Senate committee, "cabled the CIA station ... to destroy all records concerning contacts with dissidents."