Francesco/who-killed-jfk huggingface dataset:
[176-10030-10168.pdf — page 1]
SANITIZED MK.99.41.12/00.Oral History InterviewwithEDWARD G.Gwen-D. LansdaleJuly 11, 1970Alexandria, VirginiaBy Dennis J. O'BrienFor the John F. Kennedy LibraryO'BRIEN: I think a logical place to begin in anything like this is just simply with the question, when did you first meet President Kennedy, or Senator Kennedy, if you met him before he was President?LANSDALE: I don't recall meeting him before he was Presidente. The first meeting was/ I believe, the first Saturday following the inauguration, whatever date that was. I was called into a meeting in the White House by [Robert S.] McNamara. It was a meeting, on, actually, on a report that I had written for [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. It was sort of a I'm not sure
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-2-that it was, NSC (National Security Council)meeting, but it was comparable to that withthe personnel that were attending. There wereseveral Secretaries: Defense, State, and hisNational Security people were there.O'Brien: Did you have much contact with McNamara and [Roswell L.]Gilpatric, members of the incoming administra-tion, before they actually assumed office?LANSDALE: Just before, that is, a day or so before. I'dbeen in Vietnam for a brief visit and got backjust before the inaugural, maybe two or threedays, and at that time both McNamara andGilpatric were in Defense getting briefed fortheir new jobs. I met them at that time.The outgoing Deputy Secretary of Defense askedme to start working with Gilpatric, and so Igot Gilpatric rather than McNamaraO'BRIEN: This is Douglas.LANSDALE: Douglas, Jim Douglas (James H. Douglas)O'BRIEN: How is Douglas to work with, while you're withhim? Is he a pretty sympathetic person?LANSDALE: Yes, very much so, very much so He was theone, actually, who wrote the orders and back-
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-3-stopped my visit to Vietnam, and back-stopped it principally so that I could takea look at some of the political factors aswell as economic, military, and psychologicaland everything else. This, frankly, took aconsi......canding on his part that because my views weren't alwayspopular in other parts of the governmentI gathered that there was some opposition tomy going out, and he insisted on it..O'BRIEN: I'd like to come back to that. I wonder ifwe could go on to talk about one of the majorproblems, which is Cuba. When is the firsttime that you hear about the Bay of Pigsinvasion, not the Bay of Pigs, but the plans?LANSDALE: Sometime in the fall of sixty. I think thatI heard of it about the first time that itinner g-was brought up to the inter policy group ofthe Eisenhower administration. I was theDeputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense,at the time, for Special Operations and usedto accompany the Deputy Secretary, who was amember of the inter policy group, to most ofinner
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-4-the meetings that the had. When Allen Dulles(Allen W.-Dulles) st raised the notion tothis innerthe Senate group. I was present at the meetingas an AssisteO'BRIEN: What is the thinking about it at that time?What kind of operation is it basically a guerilla operation at this point?LANSDALE: Initially, it was. Initially, it was very different than the way it turned out. It was based on a premise that many people in Cuba were very unhappy with the Castro administration and the way it was turning away from the initial revolutionary objectives and the capture of the revolutionary movement by the Communist Party, which surprised many of the supporters of Castro as a guerilla and as revolutionary action. So the thought was to back a number of the Cubans who either had been supporters of Castro or were very unhappy, were still resident in Cuba, and to cause some overturn at the time.The change of plan towards the Bay of Pigs gradually, thing evolved fairly fragilely and apparently there was a planning group and CIA (Central
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-5-Intelligence Agency) who were working on this initial plan who started thinking in military invasion terms. I suspect that they were doing that because some of the Cuban military and military types, that is, very militant,as were coming out of Cuba as refugees, and they suddenly saw a windfall of man power and started thinking in other terms of use of them. But this change was, the changed plan towards the Bay of Pigs thing, was well under way in the inner circle and thinking of CIA by December of '60, very definitely so.O'BRIEN: Who were some of the inner circle people at this point, do you recall?LANSDALE: Let's see. (Pierre B.) Salinger, of course. Dick Bissell. (Richard M. Bissell) was the overall chief of the group.O'BRIEN: Tracy Barnes, was he in it at that time?LANSDALE: Tracy was an assistant to him, but how far actually detailed planning, I have my doubts that he was.O'BRIEN: How about Broe, William Broe?
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-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 son 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
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-7-stage. I remember General (Lyman L.) Lemnitzer was sitting in the meetingHe 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 the ....ent among our policy of 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 stages. 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 governmentLANSDALE: 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
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-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 of 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.
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-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.Csking you to sort ofhold your criticism..LANSDALE: Well, Bissell definitely felt the same way.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
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-10-reaction to Castro in general?LANSDALE: Just in very general terms. : I didn't have enough concrete and specific information myself that was separate from theirs. Most of the intelligence take at the time, available inside the U.S. government, was pretty colored with this dissatisfaction and statements of it. So, I had no real way of determining the accuracy or inaccuracy of it. Some of the adjectives used in describing this in briefings to us alerted me a little bit. It just sounded too much like a sales job on a viewpoint. I'd question that, whether that was an accurate thing, so this is about as far as I went.O'BRIEN: How does a guy like Douglas react? Do you recall?LANSDALE: Well, he approved of the plan, so he and the others at the policy level approved of going ahead with it and developing it. I was his advisor on this thing! (That was my staff job), and I told him to be certain to get the JCS to give it a real hard scrutiny and to come
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-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
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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 F.Bundy) who I know at the time was discussingthis with them.O'BRIEN: Did you have ... Bundy andhis 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 lossHe 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
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So-13-O'BRIEN: don't know." I gathered that he felt it would succeed.O'BRIEN: Well, then you are pretty much out of touch with it until it actually comes off. LANS DALE: That's Right to O'BRIEN: You 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 on DoesO'BRIEN: Find 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 part for your 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 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
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-14-into it again at that point at any time?LANSDALE: No.O'BRIEN: You do become involved in Cuban affairs at a later time.LANSDALE: Later, yes.O'BRIEN: When do you have any- with the (Maxwell) Taylor committee, which makes the inquiry about it?LANSDALE: I met with them once, and they weren't interested with the Bay of Pigs. They were interested in the decision-making process, of making of policy, and asked me if I had any ideas on how better the President could be served in the policy decisions and arriving at them. The thing was right at that moment, McNamara had previously asked me for the same thing, and I had come up with a proposal for him which he put to Kennedy. I just told them Well. I had some ideas but I had given them to somebody else, and I was skeptical of the boss anyhow and this was on putting together task forces. The Kennedy administration had eliminated a bureaucratic boondoggling thing
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-15-O'BRIEN: and what the hell was that called?OCB? [Operations Coordinating Board]LANSDAIE: 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 went 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, in it and how about restoring the live wood? This essentially was what my proposition was with the task force,
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-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'whocould then immediately.Not to create another bigbureaucratic thing. 9/ And of course, after theyfirst tried this, it rapidly started becominga 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. Incidentally; 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 TV and I wondered what theyoungster was doing sitting in the meeting
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-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 I would say on things and plague me with many questions.O'BRIEN: How were his questions? Was he fairly naive about the problems?LANSDALE: Now, this was on problems questions of how the government would operate at a decision level, and they weren't naive at all. He had a very good understanding. He was very much concerned about his brother's getting good service in the way of information and full details of alternatives and so on, on a policy decision.O'BRIEN: Well, if you, you know, in that period right after the Bay of Pigs--of course you had a lot of contacts and friendships in other places LANSDALE: Yes. O'BRIEN: outside the Pentagon. What kind of an impact did the Bay of Pigs have, let's say over in the Agency, and State Department, and in Defense, and in the White House?
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-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 ever even hinted Such Cuban affair. It was an intensefly 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
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-19-rather than the Agency. I guess what I'mtrying to say is, can you see any decline inthe Agency influence in the Agency in decisions?LANSDALE: Yes, I think so. I'm not certain that it was well the military as such. It might have been the Ike McNamara personally and his 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 type of 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
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-20-talks with people like the Secretary of Defense or the civilian, executive side of Defense. [^9] 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.[^9] 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
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-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: Indeed 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,
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-22-in whose name these works are accomplished,would have no idea that he would ever desireto 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
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-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 of the writings of guys like [Eugene] Burdick and Graham Greene, does this affect you in any way in your relations with the bureau- cracy?LANSDALE: Yes. It made life rather difficult. With much of the work that I had to do in Washington, I came back from a lot of operations abroad and went up into policy-forming levels in
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-24-Washington almost immediately, and into facingpeople who were very sensitive on my presenceabroad initially. Since I didn't just stickin a regular military category but would getover into their own subject matter, this madethem very uncomfortable and I can understandit while it happened, but it was carried totoo great an emotional length. At times Iwould suggest certain individuals be sent tolook into a situation in a given country andwould arrange their transportation and so onand I would get backing throughout the U.S.government for this thing and have an individualapproved by the Secretary of State as well asDefense and up at the White House and so on,but would set up a means of communicatingback so that we would get reports back. Therewould be times when these individuals wouldshow up in a country, and the first time theysent a message to me, the ambassador wouldask them kindly to leave the country, to getout of there, just because of my name. I was.apparently the enemy to some of these