Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
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SECRETAgency and staying with the operation. Both of them said "This isn't going to work, it's useless."BL: This was exactly when Sam?SH: About a week before the invasion, I don't even know the date but it happened on a Sunday.BL: What was the precipitating issue that caused them to reach that?SH: Air.BL: The air strikes?SH: Yes, the cut on the air support.BL: The reduction of the air strike?SH: Yes, the reduction. It was quite clear, Jake says, and I've also talked to Hawkins now. He's a great guy, I don't know if you've ever met him? He's 80 something at the moment and he's still sharp as a tack. Anyway, it was the lack of air and Bissell said, in effect, "If you guys quit I'll just appoint two other people in your place and we'll go on anyway so why don't you stay and see what you can do to help." So he talked them back into the Agency and they stayed. But the whole point was that they are convinced and I am now absolutely that Bissell never told the President what the troops, Hawkins and Esterline, were saying, and what their opinions were in all this stuff. He never did.BL: What's your view, Sam, about why Bissell did not?SH: I think he was so imbued with the operation that he thought, as many people have said now, that he thought that Kennedy could never let it die and he'd send the troops in, he'd send the Marines in if it came to that. Plus, I think Bissell really thought he had a deal going on an assassination plot of some kind. It makes no sense that all of these things wouldn't bother him including not talking to the President again, in Rusk's
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SECREToffice on the telephone, that whole story makes nosense, makes no sense at all without an assassinationplot in the background. And the worst thing to me, andlooking at that damn report again, why they didn't say,when the President and Rusk said "Trinidad looks tooprofessional, find some other place."...At that point Iwould have just blown my stack. Bissell may not be thekind of person to blow his stack, but anyway I wouldhave blown my stack. If you want a non-professionaljob, then go pick some people off the street and do ajob. I mean, we're professionals. If you don't likewhat we are doing, fine; go get somebody else, but Iwould never have agreed to move from Trinidad to aplace that has to have an airfield on it, that's goingto take B-26's when everyone knows there is no suchplace on the bloody island. So they found a littlespot of ground near the Bay of Pigs after spending fourdays looking at the maps. That's crazy. It makes nosense at all. And why Bissell went along with all thisstuff. Again, from a purely management point of viewand organizational point of view, Bissell never usedHawkins the way he should have as a staff officer forChrist's sakes. You take your staff officer to themeetings with you. You don't know the details - youare not the guy who knows military tactics or strategy,for God's sakes. Bissell may be great at U-2'S and SR-71's, and he may have been able to put all the ships inhis head during the war, but you don't know militarytactics and strategy.MW: Hawkins was at those meetings. Hawkins came out hereabout a month ago - Lee Strickland (CIA Information andPrivacy Coordinator) had him out. Hawkins said he wasat the meetings but he wasn't allowed to talk. He saidit was agony because he just sat there and watchedBissell mangle the military aspects and he waswondering why the Joint Chiefs, some of them who werethere at the meetings, didn't speak up - why theGenerals who were advising Secretary of DefenseMcNamara didn't speak up. He found out afterward froma classmate of his (because he was a Marine - and hehad a classmate from some military class who was on thestaff of General Shoup, the head of the Marine Corps)that McNamara wouldn't allow any of them to talkeither. They were afraid; they were cowed, and theywouldn't speak up for fear they'd show up McNamara.SH: It was worse than I thought it was. This isridiculous. You don't run an operation that way.
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BL: Sam, another kind of key point in the IG report is that the DO's Chief of Operations - Dick Helms, I guess - was not involved in the Bay of Pigs planning.SH: That's right.BL: The report, rather pointedly, complains that Helms should have taken the opportunity to become involved, but that, on at least one, perhaps more than one occasion, he did not. He seemed to prefer not being involved. Is this a lesson that you all took to heart with Mongoose, and was that criticism of Helms fair? Was it accurate?SH: I think it was accurate from what I know, being somebody on the sidelines during the operation, since I was enjoying life in Tokyo at the time. When it all came through and Jake was knocking his ass off here, I know...But yes, I think Dick probably did the right thing, for a very simple reason. Somebody had to take care of the rest of the world, from a command point of view. If Bissell was spending his time on the Bay of Pigs, plus the U-2, plus SR-71, plus Corona, there isn't much time left for Bissell to worry about the rest of the world. Secondly, Helms knew his troops, the personnel more or less, in the Clandestine Service. He knew the good ones from the bad ones or the mediocre ones. That's one thing that I fault him on, in that he knew that the Division Chiefs' protective association, and the Staff Chiefs' protective association, were sending off to the Bay of Pigs operation, which they all knew about, obviously, but they were sending off their second-best, their has-beens, the guys who had stacked arms, and just kind of washing their hands of the whole thing. That's one thing, which is not in the report itself, but that's one thing that I knew, as just a case officer and having my own ears and fingers out in the wind. When we started on Mongoose, that's one thing I knew - at least I wasn't going to be involved in - is letting the Division Chiefs and the Staff Chiefs palm off on us all the cast-offs. I went to Des Fitzgerald, whom I knew very well, because I had been his Executive Officer, and I said to Des "You and the other Division and Staff Chiefs ought to be ashamed of yourselves in what you did." I said "I don't know the troops in the other Divisions and Staffs, but I do know something about the Far East Division Staffers, and you did the wrong thing. You didn't send the best troops you had. And I'm not saying you had to give them all your best troops," because there's another big world out there in addition to Cuba, there's still the
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Soviet Union, there's still China, etc....When BillHarvey came aboard I have him the same story and thesame pitch, and I said "Bill, we're going to have tocome up with better people and the way to do this isyou go to Dan Debartele"- who was then the ClandestineService Personnel Officer, the big wheel at "CareerManglement" as we called it in those days. I said "Getfrom Dan, at each appropriate GS level, GS 9's, 10's,11's, 12's, and so on, right up the line, and get fromhim from each component of the CS, Staffs andDivisions, get from him the promotion list from eachcomponent, including those that made it and those thatdidn't quite make it but they're near the middle arenear the top and they might make it the next timearound. It's from those lists that we're going to pickour people. I think we can get anybody we want to butbearing in mind there's still a big world out there andthe Soviet Union comes first, regardless of what thePresident says about Cuba." Harvey looked at me andlistened, didn't say a bloody word, and I left. Thenext day when I came back into his office he wasstacked high with personnel jackets which he had gottenfrom Dan in terms of what I had said. You go and getthe top lists of who was recommended for what, and youpick from those. In addition to that, obviously Harveyknew he wanted Ted Shackley down in Miami. He was onlya GS-14, I think, at the time he was sent down. Ithink he may have been a GS-13 for all I know. Tedknew some of the good people from the Eastern EuropeanDivision, the old EE. That's how we built a differentkind of a cadre than Jake was forced to take. He hadsome good people, there's no question about that, andthat, shown in the DDP's rebuttal to the IG report aresome of the senior officers they had, but they also hadsome guys who were not top notch. I don't have thelist in front of me now, but I remember when I showedDick Helms....From the beginning of the Mongoosenonsense, Dick Helms came over to take a look at whatwe had, and this was in December of 1961, when hesuddenly found himself being told by McCone, the newDCI, that he, Helms, was now McCone's man on Cuba.That was told to him, by McCone, at a morning staffmeeting up in the Director's office. At which, myboss, Goshen Zogby (we were still Branch 4 but it wasCuba and all the Caribbean Islands and Zog was there)our Branch Chief at a morning DCI staff meeting, wasmost unusual. But anyway, he was there and he told methe story about how Helms looked like a thunderbolt hadhit him when McCone said, "By the way you're my man onCuba." Just like that. Helms, who had stayed awayfrom the Bay of Pigs (I'm still on your question) andhe was right to do that, I think, because he wasn'tgoing to get anywhere with Bissell in charge, he knew8SECRET
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13-00000SECRETBL: But the complaint is that, I think, in the IG report, Kirkpatrick's complaint about Helms is that Helm's did not ring the alarm bells.SH: He should have. Yes, I saw that, but I don't think you can blame Helms, because he did stay away from it so he didn't know what alarm bells to ring. Is it personnel? Is it your operational approach? Is it the air field? Is it the air support? Is it the troops on the ground? What is it you want him to ring alarm bells about? He didn't know. He had no idea. I'm not trying to defend him from that point of view; maybe he should have forced his way in, which would have meant a real confrontation with Bissell. And with Allen Dulles looking the other way, Helms might not have found himself in any position to argue with anybody - he might have been out. So I think you've got to give....I think Kirk, CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, was wrong in that particular aspect. Yes, the guy who's third in line should maybe say something to the guy who's second in line, but not when it's a closed corporation. I know people who argue both ways on this one, and I have too, but I think in the end you come down, saying that somebody had to watch the rest of the world, number one. And number two, no matter what Helms would have said to Bissell about the quality of the personnel....As I was about to say, when Helms came over to Quarters I, where we were in Branch 4 for Mongoose, and I showed him the roster of the people who had been on the Bay of Pigs, literally he went down the list saying, “hhhmmm, oh no, no, NO, hhmm, no it couldn't be." I just didn't say a word. There were three people in the room, Zog and me (and Zog is dead unfortunately), and Helms. And he's going down the list of people, including those we have left, in Mongoose. Of course, why do we have them left - because nobody wanted them. Nobody wanted those extra people. And Helms said, "Is this what you have left to work with?" Zog said, "Yes sir. That's what we have left." That's when he picked up the phone. I'll tell you, it's the funniest thing. He picked up the phone, called J.C. King and said, "As of now Cuba is no longer part of WH Division. You have all the rest of the islands but Cuba is separate reporting to me." Boom. This is before Harvey comes along. This was well before. So Zog and I find ourselves a task force without calling ourselves a task force. The word Mongoose didn't come along until much later.9SECRETthat. Bissell was a one-man operator and Helms knew exactly what to expect from Tracy Barnes.
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SECRETMW: What was the impression about IG report at the time? In the trenches? There must have been rumors. What did you know about it?SH: We didn't see it. All we knew about it was that it was a bad report; that Kirk had taken the knives out and was really murdering Bissell and Jake. Nobody mentioned J.C. J.C. was off on the sidelines as far as everybody was concerned. Everybody in the room was Jake (lost words)... and I don't think Hawkins' name was kicked around much, but Bissell's name sure as hell was, and Tracy Barnes' name was kicked around as the two masterminds, with Jake getting most of the blame because he's the guy doing the work. Theoretically that's what we thought anyway. And remember that I had just gotten back from Saigon when all of this thing hit. The rumors where....sure they were there, but nobody had any facts. All we had was rumors. The rumors mostly came from the WH Division. So you had to sort of figure out whether they were really telling you what the report said, or whether they were making it up or what have you. And everyone knew there was no love loss between Kirk and Bissell in the first place.BL: Sam, another of the points the IG report makes is that the DDP did not consult with the analysts especially with regard to Castro's survivability, his popularity, the effectiveness of his security forces, and so on and they recommended that that become a standard practice before covert actions were implemented in the future. Did you all have a lot of consultation with the DI, or with ONE, through Mongoose?SH: Oh yes. There was no problem on that. Yes we did. And as a matter of fact we like to think that Sherman Kent's September 1962 estimate, the famous September NIE, when he was sure that the Soviets were not going to put missiles into Cuba, came about as a result of our prodding the DDI side of the house in terms of doing some kind of an estimate because things down there looked pretty strange. We didn't know what the Hell was going on. We said so frankly "We're getting all these crazy reports." Ted and his people were doing a fine job in providing us with all this crazy stuff that's going on in the island, and the OpaLocka - the Caribbean Admissions Center - was doing a fine job with providing us the stuff from all the refugees coming out. Everything looked like there was something screwy going on but we don't know what, literally. I don't know who it was who got a hold of DDI Ray Cline,
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13-00000SECRETto say "how about an estimate of some kind." Ray wasthe wrong guy because Ray and Sherman didn't see eye toeye on anything. But anyway the word got around, and Ithink we can take credit for prodding Sherman and hisstaff to do an estimate on all of these crazy reportsthat nobody could figure out what the hell's happening.MW: You mean the many reports from Cubans coming out ofCuba about missiles being seen here or there andeverything else.SH: Yes, there was all kinds of stuff coming out. Theywere seeing planes when no planes had arrived yet. Thereports were confusing to say the least. And somebody,without an ax to grind, like the DDI's supposed to be,had to put it together.BL: Were there cleared DI officers who knew about Mongoose,who knew why (overlapping sound) going on?SH: I don't know if we kept a record of that, but obviouslythe DDI knew; Sherman Kent knew, and I think the Cubandesk officers knew. There were enough. We weren'tplaying that kind of a game. The Pentagon did. I knowthat for a fact. The Pentagon really had Mongoosecleared officers to do things. Colonel Wright, forexample (the guy who actually pushed through the reportthat targeted the U-2), he's the guy who presented the(lost word??). We did it on the grounds that it's inour report and it would look bad if we did it. Nobodylistened to us, so we had Colonel Wright do it. He wasvery happy to do it, and he later took credit for thewhole damned thing. He never mentioned CIA in his ownbiography that he wrote about what he had done. Thereport came in he never knew where the report camefrom but a report came in! Anyway, no, we kept ourDDI counterparts pretty well informed on what the hell,not what we were doing, but in terms of what the U.S.Government was doing, so that everybody was puttingtheir shoulder to the wheel that kind of thing. Wedidn't get into the details. We later did, when, afterthe Cuban Missile Crisis, and Des Fitzgerald took over,Des actually brought down, I forget the guy's name hewas a very, very senior elder statesman of the DDI, andDes went out of channels without so much as a "By yourleave to anybody, and a lot of the troops objected, andDes made available to this gentleman the trueidentities, plus the source descriptions we used forthe assets.11SECRET
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SECRETBL: This was a DI person? Milton Brown?SH: No, it wasn't Milt. I know Milt. No it was somebody else. Gray-haired gentleman. Elderly statesman kind of thing.MW: But a Cuban expert?SH: Not really, no. He was just a good analyst and a good estimator. Anyway, Des made available everything, against every single solitary rule or procedure you can imagine. He just brought him down and said "Look, here are all of our sources, true names, ranks, positions, everything. And this is the kind of by-lines we are using for these people. You sit and look at this stuff and see if it's worth disseminating. See if it's worth putting out. We've been putting it out, but tell us. What do you think when you see it? Des did this to avoid this constant nonsense we used to get from the DDI types, which was "You can't tell us the source, so we can't really understand the information without knowing who the source was."BL: Was it Archer Bush?SH: No, that doesn't sound right.MW: When was this; when did this happen?SH: Right after Des came aboard in early 1963. After the Missile Crisis.MW: So he wanted a real (cut off)SH: He wanted a totally honest appraisal from somebody without an ax to grind. If we did it in-house and the Task Force - or the SAS, we were suddenly called - or in Miami, nobody would listen to it. You can't do it that way. And if we did it to the DDI as a whole....There are lots of arguments back and forth between DDI and DDP types, and that wasn't fair. So pick one guy who's an honest fellow - and everyone knows he's honest, he's not going to be swayed one way
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13-00000SECRETor the other - and literally stick him in a room andsay, "Here, everything, and tell me what it's like.”MW: The degree of communication between the DDP and DDI onMongoose is apparently a lot more that it was duringthe Bay of Pigs Operation.SH: Oh, much more.MW: Years ago, when I started amassing the documents thatwe put together into the Bay of Pigs collection, Iwanted to know if there was anything left in the branchover in the DI. So I called up whoever was the Cubananalyst - this would have been, probably, early 1993.I don't remember the analyst's name (I could probablylook it up), but he told me - and I don't know if thisis true or not. The folklore in the branch was thatwhoever it was that had been one of the Cuban analystswas called in the Saturday before the invasion becausethere were all these news stories about Cuban defectorpilots having bombed the air field in Havana and thenflown to Key West and here they are, they have theirplanes on the ground and now they are defecting to theUnited States and this is a big news story. He came inand wrote it up for the current publications at thetime and gave it to his editors, and at the last minutesomebody came over from the DDP and said "Wait guys,that's a covert action. Those are our planes, thoseare our pilots, those are B-26's we painted with Cubanmarkings. This is all a big hoax. You don't need tobe reporting this to the President or you're going tolook silly.” So apparently this has been handed downat the Cuban desk by word of mouth.SH: It sounds true.MW: I don't know it that's true or not. You probably knowbetter than I do.SH: It sounds true. Those things have happened. That'sone thing we made sure in Mongoose we didn't do. I cango back to another operation that I was involved inlong before we had things like Mongoose and Bays ofPigs and what have you. This is the Indonesianoperation in support of the Sumatra colonels in 1957and 1958. I personally, on my own authority....I neverchecked with Al Ulmer, who was my Division Chief, oranybody else. I happened to know the DDI/OCI person on13SECRET
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SECRETthe desk_on_Indonesia, Jeanette Marr. I knew her from OSS days. I used to call her up_and_we double-talked and I kept her fully informed of anything that might suddenly appear on the horizon without going into the details of our operation or anything like that. c. She wrote the President's Daily Brief sections on Indonesia and a guy called Cabell insisted on calling the Sumatran colonels "patriots." Everyone else in the Government called them "rebels."MW: (This was the DDCI?)SH: Cabell, yes. He was known as "Rice_and_Beans" Cabell. Same guy. He insisted on the PDB using the_word patriots. Jeanette hated it. She couldn't_do anything about it obviously - Cabell insisted. Look at the old PDB's and you'll see that they have_patriots, not rebels. We could double-talk because of patriots_and it worked fine When Mongoose came along there was no question in my mind....at least, I would have done the same thing unless Bill Harvey had said "Don't talk to them," but he never did. Bruce Cheever, who was Bill's deputy, thought you had to bring them in, too, to let them know what's going on. You don't go into details of an operation, you don't go into details of your sources. The only guy that ever did that was Des. That was 1963. His final report to Des was simply, "You guys are shooting yourselves in the foot. This information is very good, not just good but very good and you are masking it all with all these crazy by-lines. I know you can't give the true name but you can at least change the by-line somehow." This is what Des used later when he became DDP for a couple of years, to change all the by-line systems throughout the whole DDP. We started to give better descriptions of the sources. Some of these things had some benefits. But coming back to this crazy report, let me come back a second....BL: The IG report....SH: In the IG report, the thing that bothered me, too, in there, in reading the IG report was the fact that so many of the case officers if it's correct seemed to be confused as to just what the hell they were doing and why they were doing what they were doing. I don't think we ever had that in the Mongoose show. We had Ed Marelius up here in Washington as the Chief of the FI Branch. We had Seymour Bolten as head of the Covert Action Branch, PP, Psychological Warfare Branch. We