amt. 28 ray) ae GI! Phone (Area 202) 544-6000 10° 11 12 13 WARD & PAUL 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 el Re £5 24 410 First Street, S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003 25 “TOP-SECRET carefully covered, and we covered the unloading of them, we kept flights going all of the time, because cloud covers ee sometimes interfere with it, until we had absolutely irrefu- table evidence that the Soviet Union had offensive missiles in Cuba. Thereafter, it seems to me that the Foreign Intel- ligence Advisory Board maybe the last two or three years I was on it, it seemed to me we had done about what we could do to take care of the large areas ‘of important operations, and then I thought to’ some extent, the last two or three years, that our efforts. did not produce much. I left the Foreign Intelligence Board at the beginning of 1968 when I went over — to the Pentagon. ; ; MR. BELIN: That was to become Secretary of Defense? MR. CLIFFORD: Yes. And there in the Pentagon I had- some contact with the intelligence community, not too much. That is handled mainly by the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He gets the daily briefings and then sifts them through and informs the Secretary of those items that are of immediate moment. I did set a meeting a week with a representative of the CIA and he came over, we had a set time, Thursday mornings at 10:00 o'clock, and he came over and we kept that every time I was in town, and I got an hours briefing, so that I kept ‘up closely with that. I felt that was reasonably valuable. We were not getting good intelligence from Vietnam. HW 55355 Docld:32204959 Page @ AN Se PB Q Be QIvWaaS AHL NOYA AdODOLOHA
_ Phone (Area 202) 544-6000 1 that you never heard of any attempt at assasination plots. & || that might be planned by the CIA if any were planned? ° _ MR. CLIFFORD: No, at no time. We had something 4 of a joke on the Boatd. Ambassador Robert Murphy, for whom 5 we all had the greatest respect and a great fondness, 6 wondered why the CIA could not do in Ho Chi Minh. He did not 7 think it would be too difficult a task, .and every now and then 8 he brought it up and said, I can't understand why ‘that can't 9 ||. be done, but it was something of a humorous bit after awhile, LO ‘put that's the only time I ever remember it coming up, and on ‘li no serious occasion did the Board ::very suggest action of that WARD & PAUL 15 somet:itwo years and were rolled up, their function was not to 16° commit any assasinations. Their functions were to:make an 19 effort to establish an intelligence base in Cuba that would 12 kind, nor were we ‘ever informed that any effort of that kind 13 was. made, norvwas it even being considered. 14 When the teams were sent to Cuba over a period of ~ 18 be effective and help us to know what was going on in Cuba, 24 statement was? 410 First Street, S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003 HW 55355 Docld:32204959 Page 9 19 being only 90iimiles from our shore. 25 MR. CLIFFORD: I think so. TOP SECRET 20. MR. BELIN: But you indicated earlier that sometimes . 21 in the intelligence community that the people who were.-super- 22 _vising know what the people who are being supervised tell 23 them. Is that a fair characterization of what your earlier I think we knew then that ANVdGIT GuoOd. °aY GTWYAD AHL WOUd AdOd0LOHa