A key advisor warned President John F. Kennedy after the disastrous invasion of the Cuba pig bay in 1961 that the agency behind it, the CIA, had become too powerful. He proposed to give control of the State Department of “all clandestine activities” and to break the CIA.
The page of the special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. describing the proposal was part of the newly public equipment In documents related to the assassination of Kennedy published this week by the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States. The same goes for Schlesinger’s declaration that 47% of the political officers of American embassies were controlled by the CIA.
Some readers of the equipment previously retained in the note of 15 pages of Schlesinger consider it as proof of mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA and a reason why the CIA would not at least make Kennedy safety a high priority before His assassination In Dallas on November 22, 1963. This paid new attention Thursday to a theory of several decades on which JFK killed – which the CIA contributed to it.
Certain scholars, historians and scriptwriters of Kennedy said that they had not seen anything in the 63,000 pages of material released under a prescription from President Donald Trump who undermines the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, A marine defector and on the unique time of the Soviet Union was a alone shooter. But they also say that they understand why skeptics revolve towards theory.
“You have this young charismatic president with so much potential for the future, and on the other side of the ladder, you have this waif, Oswald, 24, and he does not balance you. You want to put something heavier on the Oswald side,” said Gerald Posner, whose book, “Case has closed”, details the proof that Oswald was a man armed with Lone.
The first “big event” in the United States to generate conspiracy theories
But Jefferson Morley said that the newly released equipment is important for the “JFK affair”. Morely is vice-president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for the files related to the assassination, and editor-in-chief of the JFK Facts blog, and he rejects the conclusion that Oswald was “a nut alone”.
Morley said that even with the release of 63,000 pages this week, there is even more unprecedented equipment, especially 2,400 files that the FBI said that he had discovered after Trump made his order In January and the equipment held by the Kennedy family.
Kennedy was killed on a Visit to DallasWhen his procession finished his parade journey in the city center and the gunshots sounded from the Texas school custodian building. The police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself from the perch of a sniper on the sixth floor. Two days later, Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, killed Fatallly Oswald on a live prison transfer program on television.
“It was the first major event that led to a series of events involving conspiracy theories that left the Americans believing, almost permanently, to constitute them so often that they should not pay particular attention,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Politics Center of the University of Virginia and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century”.
The Porcs bay fiasco invites a service note
Morley said that Schlesinger’s memo provides “the history of origin” of mutual distrust between Kennedy and the CIA.
Kennedy had inherited the Pork Bay Plan of his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, and was according to less than three months when the operation was launched in April 1961 as a secret invasion to overthrow the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Schlesinger’s memo was dated June 30, 1961, just over two months later.
Schlesinger told Kennedy that all operations have passed with the US State Department instead of allowing the CIA to largely present operations offered almost as accomplished tasks. He also said that in some places, such as Austria and Chile, much more than half of the Embassies’ political officers were controlled by the CIA.
Ronald Neumann, a former American ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said most of the American diplomats were now “non-CIA” and, in most places, ambassadors do not automatically recover to the CIA.
“The heads of the CIA station also have an important function for ambassadors, because the head of the station is generally the head of intelligence to a position,” said Neumann, adding that ambassadors see a CIA station leader as providing valuable information.
But he noted: “If you enter the fields where we were involved in secret operations to support wars, you will have a different image. You will have a picture that will differentiate from a normal embassy and normal operations.”
A proposal for the CIA breeze which has not concluded
Schlesinger’s memo ends with a previously expurgated page which sets out a proposal to give control of secret activities to the State Department and divide the CIA into two agencies signaling separate subsecretaries from the State. Morley sees him as an answer to Kennedy’s anger about the pig bay and something that Kennedy was seriously considering.
The plan has never been materialized.
Sabato said Kennedy “simply needed the CIA” in the conflict of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and its allies like Cuba, and a huge reorganization would have embarrassed intelligence operations. He also said that the president and his brother, the American prosecutor Robert F. Kennedy, wanted to oust Castro before JFK re -elected in 1964.
“Let us remember that a good percentage of secret operations aimed at Fidel Castro in Cuba,” said Sabato.
Timothy Naftali, auxiliary professor at Columbia University who wrote a book on the presidency of JFK, reduces the idea of tensions between the president and the CIA which lasts until the death of Kennedy. On the one hand, he said, the president has used secret operations “greedily”.
“I find that the more we get details on this period, the more likely it seems that the Kennedy brothers control the intelligence community,” said Naftali. “You can see his imprint. You can see that there is a system by which he directs the intelligence community. It is not always direct, but he directs it.”