page_title: John A. McCone
section_title: Director of Central Intelligence
hierarchical_section_title: John A. McCone / Director of Central Intelligence
caption_attribution_description: English: U.S. Delegates to the Fourth General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency photographed at Vienna, Austria, circa 1960. The delegates are left to right: Ambassador John S. Graham, Paul F. Foster, Permanent U.S. Representative to the IAEA, and John A. McCone, Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
context_page_description: John Alexander McCone was an American businessman and politician who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1961 to 1965, during the height of the Cold War.
context_section_description: After the disaster of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, President John F. Kennedy forced the resignation of CIA director Allen Dulles and some of his staff. McCone replaced Dulles as DCI on November 29, 1961.
  He married Theiline McGee Pigott on August 29, 1962, at St. Anne's Chapel of the Sacred Heart Villa in Seattle, Washington.
  McCone was not Kennedy's first choice; the President had tentatively offered the job to Clark Clifford, his personal lawyer, who politely refused and would later serve as Secretary of Defense for Lyndon Johnson), and then to Fowler Hamilton, a Wall Street lawyer with experience in government service during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Hamilton accepted, but when a problem developed at the Agency for International Development, he was shifted there. Thus Kennedy, urged on by his brother Robert, turned to McCone.
  He was a key figure in the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the Honeymoon telegram of September 20, 1962, he insisted for the CIA remain to imaginative when it came to Soviet weapons policy towards Cuba, as a September 19 National Intelligence Estimate had concluded it unlikely that nuclear missiles would be placed on the island. The telegram was so named because McCone sent it while on his honeymoon in Paris, France, accompanied not only by his bride, Theiline McGee Pigott, but also by a CIA cipher team.
  McCone's suspicions of the inaccuracy of the assessment proved to be correct, as it was later found out the Soviet Union had followed up its conventional military buildup with the installation of MRBMs (Medium Range Ballistic Missiles) and IRBMs (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles), sparking off the crisis in October when they were later spotted by CIA's Lockheed U-2 surveillance flights.
  While McCone was the director, the CIA was involved in many covert plots. According to Admiral Stansfield Turner (who himself later served as DCI from 1977 to 1981, under President Jimmy Carter), they included:
  In the Dominican Republic, the CIA had armed an assassination plot to take out President Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy wanted the project stopped because it was too soon for another debacle. The problem is that once you encourage and arm a group of highly motivated locals, you can't just turn them off. Trujillo's enemies gunned him down dramatically, though technically speaking without U.S. help.
  In Laos, the CIA backed the Hmong (then known by the derogatory name Meo) people of the highlands to fight a counterinsurgency. This set off a complicated three-way civil war that hit the Hmong hard.
  In Ecuador, the CIA helped overthrow President José Velasco Ibarra. His replacement didn't last long before the CIA turned on him, looking for greater stability and allegiance.
  In British Guiana, the CIA stirred up trouble through the labor unions to take down the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan.
  
  In Cuba, there was Mongoose, a secret campaign against Castro.
  Mccone was also involved in the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état; he was friends with ITT president Harold Geneen whose company stood to lose its Brazilian subsidiary if president João Goulart nationalized it. McCone would later work for ITT.
  McCone represented the CIA's opposition to U.S. support of a coup in South Vietnam against President Ngo Dinh Diem, but such objections were overruled by November 1963, when the State Department managed to convince Kennedy to allow the coup to proceed.
  In 1964, he was awarded the Hoover Medal.
  McCone resigned as director in April 1965, believing himself to be unappreciated by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who, he complained, would not read his reports, including on the need for full-fledged inspections of Israeli nuclear facilities. Before his resignation, McCone submitted a final memorandum regarding the war in Vietnam to Johnson, arguing that Johnson's plan of attack was too limited in scope to defeat the Hanoi regime and further asserting that public support (in the United States and abroad) for a
caption: The U.S. Representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, circa 1960. From left to right: John Stephens Graham, Paul F. Foster, and McCone.
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