TESTIMONY OF CLARK M. CLIFFORD
Originator: ROCKEFELLER COMMISSION
Document date: 03/17/1975
Document type: TESTIMONY

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JFK Assassination System

Identification Form

Agency Information

Date:

8/27/201

AGENCY : ROCKCOM

RECORD NUMBER :

178-10002-10103

RECORD SERIES: TESTIMONY

AGENCY FILE NUMBER: CLIFFORD, CLARK M. MARCH 17, 1975

Document Information

ROCKEFELLER COMMISSION

ORIGINATOR :

FROM:

TO :

TITLE:

TESTIMONY OF CLARK M. CLIFFORD

Released under the John F. Kennedy

Assassination Records Collection Act of

1992 (44 USC 2107 Note). Case#:Nwy

66327 Date: 12-14-2022

DATE:

PAGES:

SUBJECTS :

03/17/1975

8

CLIFFORD, CLARK M.

ANTI-CASTRO ACTIVITIES

BAY OF PIGS

PFIAB

KENNEDY, JOHN F

CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS

CIA

DOCUMENT TYPE: TESTIMONY

CLASSIFICATION: Top Secret

RESTRICTIONS: IB

CURRENT STATUS: Redact

DATE OF LAST REVIEW: 07/02/1993

OPENING CRITERIA:

COMMENTS :

Excerpts from Clifford's testimony, pages 1588,1589,1593-95, 1599.

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ORIGINAL

178-10002-10103

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PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION

ON CIA ACTIVITIES

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Marck 17, 1975

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CONTENTS

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TESTIMONY OF:

Clark M. Clifford

Laurence R. Houston

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1588

the next eight years of President Eisenhower's Administration.

There were some strengthening acts, as far as unification

were

concerned, under President Eisenhower which I think were

exceedingly desirable. I do not know of any legislative

action during those eight years regarding the intelligence

community.

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Then my next relationship to this subject came in

the spring of 1961. President Kennedy was then President,

and he phoned and asked that I come over. And I went over

at once. It was just after

the Bay of Pigs, and in all of

the years I had known him I had never seen him as serious as

he was on that occasion. The substance of his comment was

that he had just had a major disaster and he said that the

reason for the Bay of Pigs being such a catastrophe was one,

he said -- and this is in effect -- I made the wrong decision;

two, I made it because I had the wrong advice; three, I got

the wrong advice because the facts upon which the advice was

based were wrong; and the facts were wrong because our

intelligence was faulty.

He indicated that he had been informed that as soon

as the invading group reached the shores of Cuba that the

people would rise up against Castro, they would be down on the

beaches tossing roses at our men, and then they would

triumphantly march through the streets of Havanna.

Well, it

was a real tragedy, and he said that' I cannot endure another

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PHOTOCOPY

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one.

He said I could not survive another disaster of this

kind.

So he said I am creating an intelligence board, and

he had already talked to Jim Killian of MIT and he said I am

making him the head of the board and I have gotten some

scientists and

some military men

and others, and I want this

board first to investigate, I want them to investigate all of

the foreign operations of the CIA, and. I want you to recommend

changes that will improve that operation.

So that the Vice President can pick up the theme,

PHOTOCOPY

I had gone through, Governor, the earlier phases of my

experience with the intelligence operation, and then I had

gotten through down to the fact that I was away for a

number of years during the Eisehhower Administration, and now

I had gotten down to the spring of 1961 when President Kennedy

called and told about the disaster that had befallen him at the

FORD

Bay of Pigs. And he said that I must not have that happen

again. He said I was startled and shocked at the fallacies

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in the intelligence information that we received, and I

want

to take whatever steps I can to improve it.

So he appointed the President's Foreign Intelligence

Advisory Board, which you are thoroughly familiar with because

of, your service upon it. We met at the time, met with him,

and he told us of the seriousness which he attached to the

function of the Board. He issued a directive at the time to

the military services

and to the CIA and other

government

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great contributions to that. We had two very fine men, Dr.

William Baker of the Bell Laboratories, and DI. Ben Lamb

of Polaroid. They worked very closely, and the Board

encouraged them, got all the money from the President that they

needed. We improved that a lot. We also got a great deal of

information in what is known as SIGINT, COMINT, ELINT and

RADINT -- signal intelligence, communications intelligence,

electronics intelligence and radar intelligence. The NSA has

spotters all through the world and they pick up all of the

radio signals that go out, and when the Soviets launch a

test missile we follow it from its inception, we follow its

whole flight, we determine whether it was successful or not.

We know down to the day almost the degree of success

that the Russians have had in MIRVing their missiles. All of

that is very valuable. I remember being in

and going into a room and here sat three

hundred

one time

all of them with those great puffy earphones on, and all they

were doing was monitoring any kind of signal that came out of

China. And it is very good. You pick up troop movements,

you pick up plane flights, you pick up missiles tests. None

of it is quite as good, of course, as having the Deputy

Premier being a CIA operative, but we are pretty well going

to have to give up that thought. We thought, the Board did,

that we could penetrate Cuba, and we gave a lot of time to

that. At no time did I ever hear anybody

suggest that Castro

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was going to be assassinated, or that there was any planeto

assassinate Castro. But we

were concerned about Cuba.

President Kennedy was concerned about Cuba. We wondered

whether or not there might be something going on between

Cuba and the Soviet Union as later did. And I guess, I think

I can

remember six or seven teams who were wonderfully well

trained and sent to Cuba at various times, landed at various

locations, and every one of those teams were rolled up: Not.

one of them endured. And the reason is that Castro set up an

extraordinarily effective counterintelligence system. That

is, he has a head of Counterintelligence, and in each

PHOTOCOPY

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province, he has a deputy, and under that man in each town

or

each city or hamlet there is another top man and then in each

block there is a man, or in each precinct, and then in each

block, and if

the block is a large block, even down to two

or three sections, and their main job is intelligence.

FORD

It exists in the towns, it exists out in the country,

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and if a stranger puts his face in Cuba today, in twenty-four

hours I think this person is apprehended and he is brought in

for interrogation.

So, we have to find other means and other means were

found. You will remember that Cuban-U.S. confrontation that

came later, and the presence of the Soviet offensive missiles

in Cuba being discovered by our satellite type intelligence.

We photographed ships at sea with devices on theii deck, very

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carefully covered, and we covered the unloading of them, we

kept flights going all of the time, because cloud covers

sometimes interfere with it, until we had absolutely irrefu-

table evidence that the Soviet Union had offensive missiles

in Cuba.

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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 lof 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.

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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

of a joke on the Board. Ambassador Robert Murphy, for whom

we all had the greatest respect and a great fondness,

wondered why the CIA could not do in Ho Chi Minh. He did not

think it would be too difficult a task,. and every now and then

he brought it up and said, I can't understand why that can't

be done, but it was something of a humorous bit after awhile,

but that's the only time I ever remember it coming up, and on

no serious occasion did the Board very suggest action of that

kind, nor were we ever informed that any effort of that kind

was made, nor was it even being considered.

When the teams were sent to Cuba over a period of

some: two years and were rolled up, their function was not to

commit any assasinations. Their functions were to make an

effort to establish an intelligence base in Cuba that would

be effective and help us to know what was going on in Cuba,

being only 90r miles from our shore.

MR. BELIN: But you indicated earlier that sometimes

in the intelligence community that the people who were super-

vising know what the people who are being supervised tell

them.

Is that a fair characterization of what your earlier

statement was?

PHOTOCOPY

FROM THE GERALD R.

MR. CLIFFORD: I think so. I think we knew then that

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