Release of 1961 plan to break up CIA revives JFK conspiracy

A key adviser warned President John F Kennedy after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 that the agency behind it, the CIA, had grown too powerful. He proposed giving the State Department control of "all clandestine activities" and breaking up the CIA.

The page of Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr's memo outlining the proposal was among the newly public material in documents related to Kennedy's assassination released this week by the US National Archives and Records Administration. So, too was Schlesinger's statement that the CIA controlled 47% of the political officers in US embassies.

Some readers of the previously withheld material in Schlesinger's 15-page memo view it as evidence of both mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA and a reason the CIA at least would not make Kennedy's security a high priority ahead of his assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963. That gave fresh attention Friday to a decades-old theory about who killed JFK — that the CIA had a hand in it.

Some Kennedy scholars, historians and writers said they haven't yet seen anything in the 63,000 pages of material released under an order from President Donald Trump that undercut the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Marine and onetime defector to the Soviet Union, was a lone gunman. But they also said they understood why doubters gravitate toward the theory.

“You have this young, charismatic president with so much potential for the future, and on the other side of the scale, you have this 24-year-old waif, Oswald, and it doesn't balance. You want to put something weightier on the Oswald side,” said Gerald Posner, whose book Case Closed details the evidence that Oswald was a lone gunman.

But Jefferson Morley said the newly released material is important to "the JFK case". Morely was vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, and editor of the JFK Facts blog, and he rejected the conclusion that Oswald was "a lone nut".

Morley said that, even with the release of 63,000 pages this week, there was still more unreleased material, including 2400 files that the FBI said it discovered after Trump issued his order in January and material held by the Kennedy family.

Kennedy was killed on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building. Police arrested Oswald, who had positioned himself at a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later, Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner, fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer broadcast live on television.

"It was the first big event that led to a series of events involving conspiracy theories that have left Americans believing, almost permanently, that their government lies to them so often they shouldn’t pay close attention," said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century.

Morley said Schlesinger's memo provides the "origin story" of mutual mistrust between Kennedy and the CIA.

Kennedy had inherited the Bay of Pigs plan from his predecessor, President Dwight Eisenhower, and had been in office less than three months when the operation launched in April 1961 as a covert invasion to topple Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Schlesinger's memo was dated June 30, 1961, a little more than two months later.

Schlesinger told Kennedy that all covert operations should be cleared with the US State Department instead of allowing the CIA to largely present proposed operations almost as accomplished tasks. He also said in some places, such as Austria and Chile, far more than half the embassies' political officers were CIA-controlled.

Ronald Neumann, former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said most American diplomats now were "non-CIA", and in most places, ambassadors did not automatically defer to the CIA.

"CIA station chiefs also have an important function for ambassadors because the station chief is usually the senior intelligence officer at a post," Neumann said, adding that ambassadors saw CIA station chiefs as providing valuable information.

But he noted: "If you get into the areas where we were involved in covert operations in supporting wars, you’re going to have a different picture. You’re going to have a picture which will differ from a normal embassy and normal operations."

Schlesinger's memo ended with a previously redacted page that spelt out a proposal to give control of covert activities to the State Department and to split the CIA into two agencies reporting to separate undersecretaries of state. Morley saw it as a response to Kennedy's anger over the Bay of Pigs and something Kennedy was seriously contemplating.

The plan never came to fruition.

Sabato said that Kennedy simply "needed the CIA" in the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies such as Cuba, and a huge reorganisation would have hindered intelligence operations. He also said the president and his brother, US Attorney General Robert F Kennedy, wanted to oust Castro before JFK ran for reelection in 1964.

"Let’s remember that a good percentage of the covert operations were aimed at Fidel Castro in Cuba," Sabato said.

Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who was writing a book about JFK’s presidency, discounts the idea of tensions between the president and the CIA lasting until Kennedy's death. For one thing, he said, the president used covert operations "avidly".

"I find that the more details we get on that period, the more it appears likely that the Kennedy brothers were in control of the intelligence community," Naftali said. "You can you can see his imprint. You can see that there is a system by which he is directing the intelligence community. It's not always direct, but he’s directing it."