Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 6]
-6-LANSDALE: He was one of a planning group who were planning the operation, but he wasn't the chief, and I can't recall the guy's name offhand.O'BRIEN: Oh well, maybe when you get the transcript back,LANSDALE: Maybe som O'BRIEN:you can. How about from some of the other places.C.) Mann, ILANSDALE: Yes, but initially it was all CIA. They borrowed some military personnel to help with the planning early on, earlier, but they were people who had been attached to CIA for temporary duty on other matters, and they hadn't come in initially for this specific planning. In December, when the planning had obviously started coming in with a beach landing and so on, the way it turned out, I urged at that point to get military planning in on the thing. I was worrying about it. As a matter of fact, Allen Dulles brought his planners to a policy meeting, a policy group meeting, and they were explaining the concept and my questioning was such that Allen Dulles pleaded with me not to spoil the plan at an early
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 7]
-7-stage. I remember General (Lyman L.) Lemnitzer was sitting in the meeting. He was chairman of the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) at the time, and he backed up my urging them to get some military planning in on that.After that, and then the JCS set up a special section to plan along with the (Central Intelligence) Agency on that. And who the hell headed that?O'BRIEN: This is yet in the Eisenhower administration.LANSDALE: This is all back in 1960. This was still in the early planning stage. This was before training or anything like that was put forward.When the JCS got into the act, I asked to be disassociated with the project. I was rather critical of the concept, and it was just too clumsy and overt, and a poor-planned feeling.O'BRIEN: Alot of people have knowledge of this, by the end of the Eisenhower administration throughout government.LANSDALE: I don't know how widespread it was. There were key executives that were knowledgeable, there was a small group in the JCS that was
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 8]
-8-knowledgeable, and there was a planning group at CIA, but I don't think it went beyond that. I don't know how far it was known, but I thought it was rather closely held.O'BRIEN: You don't know whether the presidential candidates ... at all, do you?LANSDALE: Ye ...ey were. There was a very definite no, wait a minute the candidates, no, I don't think they were. As a matter of fact, it was still in a rather nebulous stage shifting over in early November. I think somebody told me, if I recall correctly, that the concept was in the form of a memo in CIA about August, so this would be well after the candidates had been nominated and so on. I imagine that it was held by two or three people inside the CIA at the time. At least, the rest of us certainly didn't know it. I forget exactly when I first heard it, but it would be possibly October, but it might have even been November, by the time I heard about it. As I say, I heard about it when it was surfaced with the inner circle of our administration executives.
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 9]
-9-O'BRIEN: Well, I suppose you had some conversations with Dulles and with Bissell and some of these people about it.LANSDALE: Yes.O'BRIEN: What's their feeling? You already discussed king you to sort of hold your criticism...LANSDALE: Well, Bissell definitely felt the same wayo Bissell was a very hard-working, intense person, almost high-strung type of individual. He became rather impatient with my questioning of the changed concept when it took place. I thought Initially if they had the correct personnel and they had a correct reading of dissent inside of Cuba, that was a fair chance to do something. My only concern at the time was: did the CIA have the Americans who could work with such a situation? I just didn't know of any, but I was assured that there were such Americans, but I'm not certain that there were.O'BRIEN: Did you question the kind of intelligence that was coming out about Cuba and the expected reaction of Cubans to an invasion and the
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 10]
-10-reaction to Castro in general?LANSDALE: Just in very general terms. : I didn't haveenough concrete and specific informationmyself that was separate from theirs. Mostof the intelligence take at the time, avail-able inside the U.S. government, was prettycolored with this dissatisfaction and state-ments of it. So I had no real way ofdetermining the accuracy or inaccuracy of it.Some of the adjectives used in describing thisin briefings to us alerted me a little bit.It just sounded too much like a sales job ona viewpoint. I'd question that, whether thatwas an accurate thing, so this is about as faras I went.O'BRIEN: How does a guy like Douglas react? Do yourecall?LANSDALE: Well, he approved of the plan, so he and theothers at the policy level approved of goingahead with it and developing it. I was hisadvisor on this thing (That was my staff job),and I told him to be certain to get the JCSto give it a real hard scrutiny and to come
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 11]
-11-up with details of whether it could succeedor not. That was my last advisory role withhim. I was taken off advising on the projectafter that, actually by my own request becauseI was apparently causing too much trouble andrks of progress.O'BRIEN: ....'s the reaction of the Joint Chiefs, peoplelike Lemnitzer, towards this? Is there aninstitutional rivalry or bureaucratic rivalryhere in their minds?LANSDALE: Somewhat, somewhat. It was a little bit asthough, well, somebody's going to be playingBoy Scouts, so this isn't really rivalry.They had a difficult time taking this reallyseriously. Later, I know, when the JCS gotin on the actual planning of this, they becamemuch more serious on it because they had ashare of it.O'BRIEN: Well, do you get involved in the informingof McNamara and Gilpatric about this? Do youget any way of sensing what their reactionsare on first being informed?LANSDALE: No. They had apparently known by the time I
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 12]
-12-met them, I didn't get in on that. The oneperson who has a view of their reactions [William P.]would probably be Bill Bundy, (William P.Bundy) who I know at the time was discussingthis with them.O'BRIEN: Did you have ... Bundy and his f... at that point?LANSDALE: Yes, This was a little out of Bundy's field.He was always trying to figure out what thechances were, the percentages of win or loss.He was low and I hadn't known the final planon this thing, and Bundy did, and he asked mewhat I thought. I told him, well, if the JCSguarantees something, you can take it 10 percentlower than that and go along with it. I'm notsure that they know a clandestine operation,but they'd sure know a military landing, whetherit would succeed or not. Given some of theunknowns in this thing, I say that by 10 percentand go along with the figure." Well, apparentlythey had given it a high chance of success,the JCS had, because Bundy said, "Well, you meanit's going to succeed then?" I said, "Well, I
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 13]
-13-O'BRIEN: don't know." I gathered that he felt it wouldsucceed.O'BRIEN: Well, then you are pretty much out of touch with it until it actually comes off You LAN'S BALE: That's Righto O'BRIEN: didn't get into any of the changes in the plans there at all?LANSDALE: No. I left at around the first of December, '60. I really didn't follow it from then onO'BRIEN: Eid anyone come to you from the Agency or from State or from the White House, as far as that goes, and attempt to seek an independent judgement on your partyour background and all, on successLANSDALE: No.O'BRIEN: How about the noise level on this? Obviously you're out of it, but is there much talk about it that is sort of filtering down in Defense a merge and the people that are around you that really have no need to know and direct involvement?LANSDALE: I wasn't aware.of it. There might have been, but I have no knowledge of that.O'BRIEN: When the thing the operation actually begins and the landing has taken place, do you come
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 14]
-14-into it again at that point at any time?LANSDALE: No.O'BRIEN: You do become involved in Cuban affairs at alater time.LANSDALE: Later, yes.O'BRIEN: When do you have any-thing with the [Maxwell] Taylorcommittee which makes the inquiry about it?LANSDALE: I met with them once, and they weren't interestedwith the Bay of Pigs. They were interestedin the decision-making process, of making ofpolicy, and asked me if I had any ideas onhow better the President could be served inthe policy decisions and arriving at them.The thing was, right at that moment, McNamarahad previously asked me for the same thing,and I had come up with a proposal for himwhich he put to Kennedy. I just told themwell, I had some ideas but I had given themto somebody else, and I was skeptical of theboss anyhow and this was on putting togethertask forces. The Kennedy administration hadeliminated a bureaucratic boondoggling thing
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 15]
-15-O'BRIEN: OCB? (Operations Coordinating Board)LANSDALE: Yes, the OCB I pointed out that the one good thing about it was that the principals met for lunch and I said the rest of it's for the birds, but to get men in who are talking to are held responsible by him for managing men, money, and material and so on, who can understand the problem well enough around the lunch table to have one secretary or deputy secretary, or under secretary say, well, we'll take care of that, and so on, was a good way of doing business, and with the president's own national security man sitting in on it, going back and telling him this is going to happen for these reasons, why, it was a good control mechanism. So essentially all I told the Taylor people and told McNamara in my paper was that this function had been eliminated, along with cutting out alot of dead wood, and there was some live wood, How about restoring the live wood? This essentially was what my proposition was with the task force,
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 16]
-16-of getting the people most concerned withsomething who could operate for thepresident, and having them get together andhelp form the policy, get the president'sapproval, and they were the same ones whothencould staimmediately.Mot to create another bigBureaucratic thing. And of course, after theyfirst tried this, it rapidly started becoming :a big bureaucratic thing. The task forcesthat were later set up were just big staffssitting in different buildings. It wasalmost like OCB again, not quite, but it gotout of hand. Anytime you try to change thegovernment around, it seems to come right backin form again and close ranks on it. But thatwas all I did with the Taylor group. Inciden-tally; in that inquiry into the Cuban bit wasthe first time that I met Robert F. BobbyKennedy. For some reason or other, I didn'tconnect him personally with the pictures ofhim and so on, on Tg, and I wondered what theyoungster was doing sitting in the meeting
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 17]
-17-O'BRIEN: talking so much.Was he pretty tough?LANSDALE: Well, he wasn't tough. He was the most ineter-ested of anyone in the room there of what Iwould say on things and plague me with manyquestions.O'BRIEN: How were his questions? Was he fairly naiveabout the problems?LANSDALE: Now, this was on problems questions of how thegovernment would operate at a decision level,and they weren't naive at all. He had a verygood understanding. He was very much concernedabout his brother's getting good service in theway of information and full details and alternatives and so on, on a policy decision.O'BRIEN: Well, if you, you-know, in that period rightafter the Bay of Pigs--of course you had a lotof contacts and friendships in other places outside the Pentagon. LANSDALE: Yes. O'BRIEN:What kind of an impact did the Bay of Pigs have, let's say over inthe Agency, and State Department, and in Defense,and in the White House?
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 18]
-18-LANSDALE: It was a traumatic experience at top levels throughout of the government. I think it affected President Kennedy more than any other single thing. It was almost a taboo subject if you were going in to do business and to get an approv:n something over even hinted Such vuban affair. It was an intensefully sore subject among all of these people. I felt that almost all of the key executives in the administration must have dreamt about it at night or something, and during the daytime working hours they just didn't even want to contemplate it. And yet they were honest enough people that they knew they had to face up and look at it and would do so, but it was an extremely emotional subject with them, very much so.O'BRIEN: Well, in terms of the Agency, there's a number of programs and, of course, involvements in operations that they have. Do you see any shift in these, any attempt on the part of the Defense Department to move into some of these areas which they felt were traditionally theirs
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 19]
-19-rather than the Agency. I guess what I'm trying to say is, can you see any decline in the Agency in decisions?LANSDALE: Yes, I think so. I'm not certain that it was the military as such. It might have been the encouragement of some of the military who were somewhat interested but wouldn't really have expressed the interest unless they were directly asked and there always had been some feeling of unease. I think would be the best word to describe it-among the military about any clandestine operations. They felt that once it got over into guerrilla type of operations or anything that would involve a military subject, that it would be far better to let the military establishment of the U.S. handle it. But that would be sort of a dinner-coctail party type of a gambit on their part, rather than sitting and planning and so on of "We must grab some of this," Even though among themselves they talked that way. They didn't express it in terms of their attendence at policy councils or even in
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 20]
-20-talks with people like the Secretary of Defense or the civilian, executive side of Defense. On this, I think that McNamara himself probably started thinking initially that this was a military operation and just to be more efficient and effective, the military should take over such things. I imagine that he talked that way to some of the military people that were seeing him from the JCS, and the Chiefs, and from the intelligence community, the military intelligence community. I know that DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] got its great start under McNamara, and I feel almost certain, I've got a strong hunch, that the Bay of Pigs and the misreading of the temper of the people in Cuba gave McNamara great impetus in setting that up initially.So it actually, wasn't a military ambition to set up a rival intelligence agency to CIA, though there had been tremendous rivalry between the military service intelligence agencies and the CIA and had been right along from the initiation of CIA originally. But this was sort of a business rivalry, and it was
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 21]
-21-sort of dealing with them, of categories of work, and where the boundary lines of who did what on the thing, and this is where their jealousies and emotions and everything would come up over almost nitpicking of boundary lines of who would do what. It wasn't a thing of "we'll do it all, and you go out of business"--that feeling hadn't come up--but after the Bay of Pigs, the DIA and its creation, a lot of the people in that who were civilian employees, Defense Department employees, had an idea, "We can do a better job than CIA," and in a much wider field than the service intelligence agencies have done.O'BRIEN: Are there enough skilled and competent people around, in the universities and the military, to staff all the intelligence agencies: the NSA (National Security Agency), DIA, CIA, and organizations? Are there enough people, or are these operations just simply too big at this point?LANSDALE: They might be too big. The need to know things is a very elastic bit. I'm certain that the chief executive of the United States,
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 22]
-22-in whose name these works are accomplished,would have no idea that he would ever désireto know some of the things that they're workingon very hard you discover whole buildingsand all sorts of equipment busily accumulatingfacts would say, "I can'tstates ever needing to know someof that and yet he would hesitate, given theworld today and the technological advances andeverything, it's very hard to say what you needto know and what you don't. Given this sort ofa gray shading of the end objectives on thisthing, it's very difficult to say whether you'vegot too big an establishment or not.O'BRIEN: Do you ever take this question up, or is thisquestion ever raised in the administration by thecivilian people in DOD [Department of Defense]or the White House, with you?LANSDALE: Not with me. No. My theme on overseas operationswas reiterated enough so that it was known bya number of people, and I always felt that it was alwaysmore efficient and effective to have a verysmall group working and to choose them with very
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 23]
-23-great selectivity and go for a handful of highly qualified people rather than a large group of Americans charging overseas someplace. This went for intelligence as well as diplomatic - and other economic work, and so on. I used to point out the embassies--for example, behind the Iron Curtain--that would get dessimated by being *TNT'd* and so on in Eastern Europe, for example, it would happen that would wind up with an ambassador and two or three people left in an embassy, and their work would increase in quality, and their representing U.S. interests would seem to improve tremendously when that would happen.O'BRIEN: Does the fact that you get this reputation, mainly out the writings of guys like [Eugene] Burdick and Graham Greene, does this affect you in any way in your relations with the bureaucracy?LANSDALE: Yes. It made life rather difficult. With much of the work I had to do in Washington, I came back from a lot of operations abroad and went up into policy-forming levels in
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 24]
-24-Washington almost immediately, and into facing people who were very sensitive on my presence abroad initially. Since I didn't just stick in a regular military category but would get over into their own subject matter, this made them very uncomfortable and I can understand it while it happened, but it was carried to too great an emotional length. At times I would suggest certain individuals be sent to look into a situation in a given country and would arrange their transportation and so on and I would get backing throughout the U.S. government for this thing and have an individual approved by the Secretary of State as well as Defense and up at the White House and so on, but would set up a means of communicating back so that we would get reports back. There would be times when these individuals would show up in a country, and the first time they sent a message to me, the ambassador would ask them kindly to leave the country, to get out of there, just because of my name. I was apparently the enemy to some of these
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 25]
-25-people. One of my assistants was traveling between Thailand and Saigon, and there was a coup going on in Saigon at the time, and his plane, which was Air France, put down--commercial flight--in Phnom Penh, in Cambodia, and the military attaché very kindly picked up this guy and several other Americans from the plane and found a place for them to stay until they could get another flight out of Phnom Penh. He asked this lad of mine where he'd worked, and he said, "In the Pentagon"-- he was a civilian employee--and he mentioned that he worked for me, and the attaché got all excited, called the ambassador, and he was given two hours to come out of the country.[Laughter] All he was doing was looking for a place to sleep at night, so it became very 'emotional and very silly, and detrimental to the U.S. For example, once in Indonesia, in meeting our folks around the embassy in Djakarta, I had spotted an assistant army attaché, who was the one American, along with one of the economic mission guys--there were
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 26]
-26-two Americans who were not only best known by the Indonesians but were respected, and there was an affection there, and I have, told the ambassador at the time, afterwards, make real use of these people the Indonesians believe them, and there's some antipathy towards the U.S., but they make an exception to these two and they're just invaluable-but the army man was extremely close to the general staff of the Indonesian army. I went on some visits to members at their homes of the Indonesian General staff, and this lad who was tall and blond--a Nordic type, if you will--would go in, and the small brown Indonesians (would) and their families welcome him like a long lost uncle or brother or something. The children would run up and jump in his arms and climb all over him, and he was Uncle "something" to them.So later, when the Soviets start moving in SAMs [surface-to-air missile] missile sites into Indonesia and the U.S. needed to know what sort of antiaircraft armaments were going in our embassy couldn't get the answers to it.
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 27]
-27-I suggested that we get the State Defense sponsorship and send this one fellow who is a lieutenant-colonel over and just let him stay a week or so. He'd go right in and talk to his old friends, and they'd probably tell him what the Soviets were up to. He arrived there the Indonesian general staff took him out and showed him these sites and asked him what he thought of them and so on the first day he was there. That night he got back, and wrote out a radio message and asked the ambassador to send it to me, at which point our ambassador told him to leave the country.O'BRIEN: Now, this was [Howard P.] Jones?LANSDALE: That was Jones, yes And he said, "Well, let me put that in the message" so I just asked the Department of State, to please let Jones know that you're sponsoring this guy, too,..and there might be some more things that he finds out that you need to know as much as we do. So they told Jones just to sit back
[176-10030-10085.pdf — page 28]
-28-and let him do that.We have some wonderful Americans, and this was what I was trying to do to find out which Americans have not only our interests at heart but were enough interested in foreign countries to be to understand and have really would be serving the best interests of other countries in things. I'd far rather see one man get in on something like that than send a whole team in with all sorts of things and sort of aggravate a situation, than do something rather simple.O'BRIEN: Almost sensitivity training .LANSDALE: Incidentally, along these lines, I've got a good story for your account.O'BRIEN: Great.LANSDALE: About the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, McNamara came back from a meeting at the White House one day and asked me to provide the means for President Kennedy to talk to the Cuban people on TV. How the hell did I know how to do that? He told me that he wanted to do it within the next twenty-four