-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- from: http://www.prouty.org/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.prouty.org/">The Col. L. Fletcher Prouty Reference Site</A> ----- Understanding The Secret Team Part III Allen Dulles: Forging a Government of Reaction Ratcliffe: I'd like to get into a more general subject here that is certainly central to discussing the rise and growth of Central Intelligence Agency and the Secret Team, in the person of Allen Dulles. You write at one point that Allen Dulles, "was a counterpuncher and a missionary. He was a meddler. He thought that he had the right and the duty to bring his pet schemes into the minds and homes of others, whether they were wanted or not."[1] I'd like you to discuss in general terms the mind of this man Allen Dulles. Why do you think he felt he had the right to do all these things and how do you think he justified this in his own mind? Prouty: As a young man (just graduated from Princeton, I believe), he went to Paris with the Wilson peace conference group right after World War I. That is a pretty rich way for a young college graduate to begin his work in international affairs. And I'm sure that the experience had much to do with the rest of his life. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were both senior directors of the biggest law firm in New York City at the time, Sullivan & Cromwell. Their earlier work of course made them very valuable to that international law firm, and also brought them into the law firm's business throughout the world. The way in which they handled business on the international scale was very much shaped by their experience with Sullivan & Cromwell. The Sullivan & Cromwell offices had the major U.S. legal contacts in Germany during Hitler's period. We couldn't say they were essentially pro-Nazi, but they didn't close their offices in Germany until well after the start of World War II. The fact that they were still there during the war became quite an embarrassment to the U.S. government. To think that here we were, very anti-Hitler, anti-Axis, and yet this major U.S. law firm was still operating there. This law firm was in a sense dominated by these Dulles brothers, whose idea of international affairs and international business was shaped by the law firm's clientele and by their own global activities. At the same time, John Foster Dulles was either a founder of the World Council of Churches or one of its major guiding spirits. Whenever he was not in the government or otherwise assigned to some mission, he traveled all over the world as a principal spokesman for the World Council of Churches. Now I make no brief for the Dulles Brothers view of the churches or of their religion. I think it was Episcopalian really, but I'm not sure. But this was the platform upon which the Dulles brothers spoke many, many times around the world. And in that sense they turned their political views, their financial views, their diplomatic views into an essentially missionary spirit. They felt that wherever they went they were bringing the word of the United States -- the word of capitalism, free trade and what have you, around the world with them. This was very true in the period right after World War II, and may have had something to do with Truman's selection of Allen Dulles to study the intelligence agency with Jackson and Correa because, if anyone was accustomed to international affairs, intelligence activities, covert activities (because of his OSS experience), Allen Dulles certainly was. Put these all together and, regardless of the individual himself or his family relationships (which were strong, of course, because both his brother and sister were strong in the State Department), you produce a person (called Allen Dulles) who is a missionary, a diplomat, a financier, a lawyer -- a really unusual individual for this period. Then you bring him into the government as the Director of Central Intelligence, and he calls upon all this background and associates. >From my experience with him (which for seven or eight years was rather considerable), you could feel this power in the man. This was the way he worked. He felt that he had a perfect right to preach capitalism as he saw it, or anticommunism as he saw it, throughout the world. It was people like Allen Dulles who really created the North/South confrontation which was actually East/West between communism, but North/South with regard to Third World countries, where either they should shape up with us or else they were declared "communist." There's no black in the middle, no area in the middle where they could ignore them. There's no neutral. In the old days, India tried very hard to be a neutral country. And this Dulles system just wouldn't permit them to be neutral. They had to be communist or they had to be capitalist, one way or the other. This is the nature of Dulles. When you worked with him, it was either communism or the West. You can't describe precisely these things, but it's in all the literature since World War II. It's in everything we were doing. The Agency was motivated along those lines. Especially as you saw Dulles move into these things that we were talking about, through his ability to control the morning briefings, guiding the government along this reactive channel. Because when Dulles became the Director of Central Intelligence one of the first things he did in the Agency was to abolish the DDA. We've talked about the DDS, the support and the logistics; we've talked about DDP, the clandestine operation; and of course DDI was the Deputy Director of Intelligence, which is the ordinary intelligence business. But the CIA had had a DDA. DDA was administration, planning, management. He abolished that. He saw no use for it. If he saw no use for management, planning, administration -- that role in the Agency -- then you can see that what he was going to do was let his eyes and ears (his intelligence area, his covert area) find things to do and then do that, whatever it was. So he would react to things. And with that system that he applied, he brought it into the entire government. After several years, the government itself was becoming a government of reaction. This is the main point about having a CIA in a government like ours that makes it very dominant: It assumes the title without even trying -- because it's easy to respond with a reaction. If you get punched, you punch back. That's easy. This is Mr. Dulles in a nutshell. And his shadow having fallen over the government for so many years has created a government which does react rather than respond dynamically. This is very true in this decade of the eighties in our government, and I think it is this straitjacket that Kennedy was trying to remove from the office of the Presidency. Kennedy was definitely making moves to rid the government of this reactive motivation. Of course he fired Dulles in late 1961, that was the first step. Ratcliffe: But after he was elected he didn't yet see what would happen until something like the Bay of Pigs came along to make him wary of such a reactive straitjacket. Prouty: I think Kennedy, having great confidence in his own ability, realized that he didn't have to fight the ten rounds of the championship bout all at once. He'd take them in order. He lined up the program that he saw through his first four years as a chance to begin to really take over the government in his name and in what he wanted to do. Then during his latter four years he planned to make moves that would set the course of our history for many, many years. And of course, as a lot of people have pointed out, he had Bobby in the wings and Teddy in the wings and then their children in the wings. They would have had a Kennedy Dynasty for years. At least, that's one way to look at it. But I think Kennedy rebelled against this business of the reaction to things. He wanted to do some things. This of course put him in direct conflict with Allen Dulles and with the CIA and with that method of operation, which really dated back to Walter Bedell Smith. Walter Bedell Smith is the one who started the pre-briefings shortly after he had been appointed DCI by Truman. So we must not say that this was truly Dulles' origin. This is important for historians. They should go back a little further and see that Walter Bedell Smith -- who was Eisenhower's closest confidant during World War II, who left that job to become Ambassador to the Soviet Union (which is quite an unusual assignment for a General), and then came directly back from being the Ambassador to the Soviet Union to being the Director of Central Intelligence -- should not be overlooked for the enormous role that he played. Then he stepped down from being the DCI to become the deputy to John Foster Dulles at the Department of State so that Allen Dulles could move into the slot in the DCI. I would not say that the Dulles brothers formed all this themselves. I would say that Walter Bedell Smith and his associates, including Eisenhower, had a lot to do with all of this evolutionary process. Ratcliffe: Even though it was Truman, in 1950, who recalled Bedell Smith from Moscow to take over the CIA, once this was the hue and cry in the country about how we'd been caught with our pants down in Korea when the invasion happened. Prouty: That is a part of the greater problem of how the whole country -- how the whole world rolled over from the alliances of World War II into the Cold War (World War III/Cold War) of being anticommunist and Pavlovian anticommunist, unreasonable anticommunism: everything that we didn't like was communist right away -- anything the Soviets did was against the West. And to create that direct opposition right out of the ashes of World War II, and for what most people would say were very unreasonable reasons. Nothing that had been done in Moscow changed this. They had been our partners in war and all of a sudden we were opposed to them. But I don't want to leave anyone with the idea that this began solely with Dulles. Dulles perfected it of course. Dulles was the epitome of the person that fit that role, but he was not the first man. Bedell Smith was ahead of him. Dispersion of the OSO, Creation of the Office of SACSA Ratcliffe: We've discussed briefly before, your office -- the Office of Special Operations -- being transferred in either late '61 or early '62 out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and into the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I'd like your ideas about the importance and significance of this change with the concurrence of your office being transferred from OSD to the Joint Staff and how, to quote you directly, "as a progression of this first move, the Joint Staff created an office called the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities, or SACSA."[2] Prouty: There had been an Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, ever since its establishment in 1947-48 under Secretary Forrestal. That office was there to take the directives from NSC that had to do with covert operations and translate them into Defense Department action. When Kennedy was elected, General Erskine had been working on an Eisenhower-directed study to establish, in the Defense establishment, a Defense Intelligence Agency. It was quite apparent that, although the CIA existed, it did not emphasize military intelligence gathering adequately for the intelligence careerists and professionals in the military. They felt that a common Defense establishment (DIA) would improve the military intelligence area. In many ways it would counterbalance the CIA for their own benefit. General Erskine, the long-time head of the Office of Special Operations, is the one who wrote that study. When that study was concluded after Kennedy's inauguration -- and I believe almost on the day of the Bay of Pigs exercise, if I remember the date it seemed to me it came on almost the identical day -- it was approved by Secretary McNamara, shortly after the General had given it to him. Shortly thereafter General Erskine, who had then been in the Pentagon for more years than any other Assistant to the Secretary had ever been there, retired. The question for McNamara then was: Should he retain OSO as it had been and try to put another man in there, or should he divide it into other functions? First of all, OSO was responsible for the overview of NSA. In the technical world that had developed in those latter years, with satellites, U-2's and SR-71's and all that, much of that work had moved over into what we called DDR&E (the Deputy of Defense for Research and Engineering). So that area of responsibility was transferred from OSO to DDR&E. That took away one big role from OSO. Another function in the Office of the Secretary of Defense that had moved was ISA (International Security Agency), and much of their role was in connection and coordination with the State Department. So that responsibility, which had been in OSO, was moved to ISA. Then you get to this area of Special Operations (the support of the clandestine activities). The active work that was required for this task, for the most part took place in the services. But the three services had always been running each office independently. During the five years I ran that office in the Air Force, there was an Army counterpart and a Navy counterpart, and although we worked together frequently, it was more or less an ad hoc arrangement. We worked together, like for the Bay of Pigs, because we had to. It was a necessity. But we didn't work together on policy matters or on budget matters, which are so important. Each service did that independently. So I was called in by General Wheeler (who at that time was the Director of the Joint Staff; this was a couple of years before he became the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and asked what I thought about bringing the Special Operations function into the JCS. And of course I immediately approved it because I saw the rest of the OSO office going. In fact, they had gone and I had the only office left there, with a functional job but with no title. My boss General Erskine had gone. General Lansdale was doing some special work for Deputy Secretary of Defense, Mr. Gilpatric, and was making trips to not only Vietnam but to Central America at that time (which for Lansdale was quite a new thing). I told General Wheeler that I thought it would be a fine move to set up Special Operations under the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to create an office that would unify the work of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force (including the Marine Corps). General Wheeler agreed with that and arranged a meeting with Mr. McNamara. When we went up to see him, Mr. McNamara said, `I will take care of getting the increase in the manning allotments for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (which were limited to 400) sufficient to create this office, and you can go ahead and set up the office.' So I moved from the physical area of the Secretary of Defense downstairs to the JCS area. An Army officer was assigned to my office, along with one or two staff, and a Navy officer, along with one or two staff. We had probably eight or ten people. And we established the Special Operations branch of what became SACSA -- the Office of the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities. The SACSA development was very interesting. Nothing had existed in the Joint Staff like that before. This was a "Special Assistant" to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities: two roles that are not traditionally prime military roles. But during the Vietnam era they became extremely important. This function brought with it another very important office that you hear little about, and that's the office that handles Cover and Deception. Deception is a very important type of Special Operation. You create things that you want to have discovered that are wrong: so that Moscow would think we had a gun that worked the way it worked and it didn't work, or a rocket that worked the way it did and it wouldn't work, or that we sent people to some place to do a job that they'd think we were going to do and we were never going to do it. This is important because when we set up the Bay of Pigs -- on account of Deception, if the Russians found out about that or if Castro found out about it -- they wouldn't know whether that was Deception or whether we were going to do it. Deception is an extremely important function, rarely talked about. I don't know of anybody who's ever written about it properly. And at the same time that my office was moved to the Joint Staff to unify Special Operations for the services, the men who had been working for years in Deception unified their office in the same area. In fact, they were right next door to me, and we used to work together quite a bit because it was important that we do that to have Deception effective throughout the military services. This left the basic function, called counterinsurgency which developed from the Special Forces (from the Green Berets and from that doctrine). This was a move by the military to get into an area of CIA activity, especially in Laos and Vietnam. And the other side, the Special Activities part of SACSA, was simply to cover -- like saying "and so forth" -- to cover anything else that was coming up of an unusual nature. These transfers started with an Army General, General Craig, who stayed only about a month or two in the job as Chief of SACSA. His problem was that, being a straight-line Army general, he had difficulty making objective decisions regarding either CIA or Special Forces, and the Air Force's Special Air Warfare units, and so on. Whereas a neutral general might have been able to make decisions more easily. In that period of time, because they were very formative decisions, they moved to another man. The interim man after that was another Army general, who had considerable experience with Special Forces but was called for another job by the Army. So he stayed about two months. Finally they brought in a Marine major general, Victor Krulak. Krulak was ideal. He had no biases with respect to this function. He was straight Marine Corps, and, as far as he was concerned, Special Forces, Special Air Warfare, the Navy Seal teams, all of that and the CIA's work -- as he said, `That's just an offshoot of the Marine Corps, so I know all about that stuff.' He was good. What was new to him was the Deception work and the Special Operations work. We worked closely together for years and that function developed accordingly. DOD Adoption of a Counterinsurgency Role in the late Eisenhower Years The counterinsurgency role has been identified with Kennedy. I think the better way to read it would be that the counterinsurgency role was coming into the Defense Department from the CIA. It was either a matter of their getting into it or the CIA was going to overwhelm them. And it bloomed during the Kennedy period. Pretty good proof of that is that although the Special Forces center at Fort Bragg is called the Kennedy Center, it actually had its inaugural first class during the Eisenhower period. In fact, it was Mr. Douglas, Deputy Secretary of Defense, who went down there to inaugurate the school and the first classes. I was down there with him, so I know the date for sure. The Kennedy Center was not really the Kennedy Center; it was operating earlier than Kennedy's election. Which shows that counterinsurgency and that kind of thing did not begin with Kennedy. It began before Kennedy. Ratcliffe: You mention further on, "The important thing to understand is that the much-heralded office of SACSA had very few military responsibilities. It was almost entirely CIA oriented."[3] This brings up this whole question of direction -- not only the importance to the Secret Team in general of an office like the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities, but besides General Krulak -- there's this situation of Maxwell Taylor coming back into the government after leaving in a huff. He resigned in 1958?, '59? -- during the Eisenhower administration. He was the Chief of Staff of the Army -- and left in a huff because of disagreements. Taylor wrote a book called The Uncertain Trumpet, which you indicate you felt very strongly was fronting for this idea of "flexible response." But more directly the whole linchpin of counterinsurgency as being this new form of operations that apparently, as you indicate, was more to increase the scope of CIA operations than to, in effect, do what it did -- which was to change the military's posture from a traditional military fighting stance to this sort of counterinsurgency focus or intent. Prouty: The shift from Eisenhower to Kennedy, first of all, as far as the bureaucracy was concerned, was most unexpected. The Pentagon was all ready for Nixon just like, as we see today, the Reagan-Bush era -- it was expected. The bureaucracy was ready for Bush to come in and simply keep things going. We had the same feeling in 1960. And those of us at that time in the Pentagon could see that everything was moving toward a Nixon continuation of most of the Eisenhower program -- with some differences and with a strong bent towards CIA, as Nixon had in those days. That didn't happen. And yet the infrastructure was all in place. The "Special Forces" increase at Fort Bragg was in place. The Navy Seal teams were already in place. I had opened up a big base for the CIA at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, and we had moved CIA aircraft down there in 1959, a year before the election. We had the Air Commandos established and stationed right next to Eglin, at Hurlbert Air Force Base. Everything was already in place. There wasn 't anything the Kennedy administration could do to change that. As a result there had to be some top echelon to govern, or to direct, their activities. But SACSA was not a command situation. What SACSA did was provide the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the information necessary so they would understand the functional employment (or they would be able to make use of the functional employment) of these rather large organizations which were in existence around the world. NSAM 55 -- JFK's Attempt to Get CIA out of Clandestine Operations With the arrival of Kennedy, the first thing that had to be gotten out of the way was this Bay of Pigs operation. We've discussed that. After the Bay of Pigs, he asked General Taylor to make a review of the Bay of Pigs and write up for him what he thought his administration should know about that kind of operation in the future. He wanted to get the CIA out of that business. The Taylor "Letter To The President" -- and I must emphasize that every word of that letter had the approval of the other members of Kennedy's Cuban Study Group (meaning Allen Dulles, Admiral Burke and Bobby Kennedy -- Bobby Kennedy most importantly) -- the Taylor "Letter" really moved the Kennedy administration closer to counterinsurgency. Because what Kennedy did -- and this was one of the most significant acts of the Kennedy era, of the Kennedy 1000 Days -- was that he took the precise words of this Taylor Report (this Taylor/Burke/Dulles/Kennedy report) and made them into a National Security Action Memorandum, which was a Directive from the White House. It was NSAM No. 55 and it was accompanied by two essential follow-on NSAMs, 56 and 57 -- all three of which contained the language of the Taylor "Letter." They were not new creations by somebody else, they were the language of the Taylor "Letter."[4 ] Among other things, NSAM 55 directed that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Joint Staff, be "the Advisors to the President in peacetime as they would be in wartime." Most people who are not familiar with the full meaning of that don't realize that, in time of war, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the No. 1 Advisor to the President, the Commander in Chief. Not the Secretary of Defense, not the Secretary of State, nobody else -- the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs -- that's the law. When Kennedy said, "You are my advisor in peacetime as you would be in wartime," he is saying to the Chairman, `You are my Advisor for clandestine operations, and all the other operations being carried out in peacetime.' He not only put that in words, but the very technique he used to deliver it to the Chairman was impressive. I can't help but remember that, because NSAM 55 was delivered to me in an envelope from the White House and I was the one charged with the responsibility of briefing it to the Chairman. It arrived in my hands from the White House and no notation on it whatsoever that a copy had gone to the State Department, to the Secretary of Defense, to the Director of Central Intelligence -- nobody. I had never seen a paper like that from the White House before, i.e. with a single addressee. It's just not protocol. It isn't what we do. But Kennedy wanted to emphasize -- by writing this letter directly to General Lemnitzer and saying "You are my Advisor in peacetime as you would be in wartime" and let the other men find out the next day from copies (which we of course made immediately) -- that this was what the President had done. I can't overemphasize the shock -- not simply the words -- that procedure caused in Washington: to the Secretary of State, to the Secretary of Defense, and particularly to the Director of Central Intelligence. Because Allen Dulles, who was still the Director, had just lived through the shambles of the Bay of Pigs, had sat through all the hearings that were presided over by Maxwell Taylor when they reviewed the Bay of Pigs and now he finds out that what Kennedy does as a result of all this is to say that, `you, General Lemnitzer, are to be my Advisor'. In other words, I'm not going to depend on Allen Dulles and the CIA. Historians have glossed over that or don't know about it. That NSAM No. 55 was more important during the Kennedy era than anything else except the assassination. In fact it may have caused a major move toward that deadly decision. It said more about Kennedy's plans for the government of the United States than anything else he had signed his name to at least until NSAM 263 in October '63. This is where the Kennedy administration put its print on what it intended to do with clandestine operations. Chairman of the JCS: Exit Lyman Lemnitzer, Enter Maxwell Taylor It didn't work exactly as he intended it, because of some of the people involved. General Lemnitzer was not a Cold Warrior. After I had briefed General Lemnitzer, he said, "Prouty, put that in the file. We'll think about it." He was not about to put that up on a pennant and march around the city with it. He was not going to be the government's Cold Warrior. But, he would be if directed. He would perform his duty as he had always done. But he did not fit the role of the Cold Warrior. The next factor was that his replacement as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was Maxwell Taylor, the man who wrote that crucial directive. Here was Maxwell Taylor writing NSAM 55, the President approving NSAM 55, putting his name on it and making it a White House Directive, and then that Directive sitting in the office with Maxwell Taylor, in the job that he intended to create for himself. Therefore the Maxwell Taylor review of the Bay of Pigs problem became the Mein Kampf of the Maxwell Taylor era in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Just like the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report of 1949 being the Mein Kampf of the CIA. Anyone who studies Kennedy's role leading up to Vietnam and as far into Vietnam as he went before he died, must keep in mind that he's the one who said the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was to be his Advisor in Cold War. Now of course, being an Advisor in Cold War is not exactly the equal to being a Commander in a Cold War, but it leads directly toward that function. This was a major change, at least in the way things had been going during the Eisenhower-Dulles era, as we moved into the Kennedy and McCone era. McCone replaced Allen Dulles within a few months. Bissell was released, General Cabell was released, and they started off with a new group of people in the CIA. I cannot emphasize enough how important NSAM 55 was in the Kennedy "1000 Days," and also how important it is to realize that most historians have omitted it completely in their studies of the Kennedy legacy. It gives a completely different view of Kennedy's objectives. Several people have printed that Kennedy told Mansfield, among others, that he was going to "break the Agency into a thousand pieces." But he had already broken it. With NSAM 55 he had already told Allen Dulles, `I don't need you as my Advisor.' That's explicit. People need to think about that because that was important. That's where the SACSA organization came in, ready-made, with people who had a lot of experience. For instance, the Navy representative in my office Captain John Bowell had been one of the founders of the Navy Seal team concept. The Army assistant was equally qualified and, among others, there was Al Haig, and people like that. They were not just people brought in casually. They were experienced. Without delay the Army work at Fort Bragg began to increase into the predominant number of Green Berets that we saw later in the Vietnam War. So we're dealing here with a period that was most interesting. Much of this moved forward like a glacier, with the Bay of Pigs to sharpen Kennedy's attention, and then his action right away to `Get Even!' and to take over control: `I'm not going to have another Bay of Pigs.' He put the JCS in charge of Cold War activities and removed the CIA from the scene. This was his plan, to be fully implemented during his second term after the 1964 elections. However, there was one problem. Kennedy knew or found out that, Maxwell Taylor was not exactly his hip-pocket Cold Warrior. Maxwell Taylor had prior understandings with CIA. And characteristically, he wanted to dominate that field himself. He visualized himself operating in somewhat the way Allen Dulles had. Or, another way to put it was, he was not your conventional military man at that time. In fact, here's a personal observation on that. A Lemnitzer JCS meeting was a friendly, efficient, well-managed meeting with a thorough discussion of each subject. A Maxwell Taylor JCS meeting was quiet; Taylor delivering the subject and then there was almost no discussion. He'd say, `Any more on that, gentlemen?' No. `Next subject.' It was just like a meeting in a funeral parlor. It's hard to understand exactly what that meant. But for those of us sitting in the second row and listening to the Chiefs under Taylor after we had spent so many years listening to them under Lemnitzer, it became clear that Maxwell Taylor did not represent the typical military man at that time. So what Kennedy may have hoped to achieve may not have been successful because of the individuals involved. Taylor was not the right man to do that. Kennedy planned to move on that later. This all gets quite complex. This era can't be studied enough if anyone wants to understand the Kennedy legacy. The central point here is that it was not Taylor who stayed on to fight the Vietnam war. It was Wheeler. Had it worked the way Taylor wanted it to work, he would have stayed on throughout the Vietnam War and become the military leader (and he hoped victor) of the Vietnam War. Because as Chairman he would have Westmoreland and Abrams and all those people working for him. I think that's what he thought his role would be. Ratcliffe: So your sense then of this: perhaps if Taylor had retained the Chairman's position of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and been able to, in effect, reside over a victory he would have seen be implemented through the use of counterinsurgency warfare tactics. Prouty: During World War II he was a paratroop leader. In other words, he was more like the old Army would say, a cavalryman. He was a man ready to adapt new tactics and to fight new kinds of war, and Taylor would have moved in that area. In an era of hydrogen bombs and satellites and all that sort of thing, it may be that he was the last of a dying breed, just like the old horse cavalryman . . . that's exactly where I started in the late thirties. Bay of Pigs Post-Mortem and the Dynamics of Personality: Allen Dulles, Maxwell Taylor, and Bobby Kennedy Ratcliffe: This is right to the point in terms of Taylor coming in to the government: he was on this Bay of Pigs post-mortem committee. You write about Allen Dulles' role in the committee, set up by Kennedy, arranging . . . for witnesses who would provide background briefings of the new Agency drift into counterinsurgency. The broad plan for counterinsurgency as a marriage of the CIA and of the U.S. Army had been laid down during the months of the Eisenhower administration. It remained for its proponents, mostly men of the ST, to sell it to the Kennedy team. . . . Throughout this complex process, his [Allen Dulles'] primary target for conversion to the CIA was General Maxwell Taylor. Here was the right man at the right time for Allen Dulles' exploitation and for use of the ST.[5] We have then described Taylor coming in and perhaps having his own ideas and hopes or ambitions for how he could move up. And you have written in the book that Bobby Kennedy had been very taken by this man Taylor, and apparently in his talks each night, going back to talk to his brother, must have conveyed this sense of his fascination and interest in Taylor to John Kennedy. Then in effect, somehow, Kennedy doing just what (in the way you seem to write) Dulles would hope he would do -- which was to bring Taylor into the White House, to bring him in first as the Special Assistant to the President for Counterinsurgency? Prouty: No, Military Assistant. Ratcliffe: Military Assistant. And then being promoted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Was it in effect, that by that point the inertia of "the right man at the right time" being something Kennedy then picked up on and somehow fell for it? Prouty: Not quite in that view. Remember, Eisenhower had been in the White House for eight years, and he had followed Truman following WWII. That was a long period of time with everything going in generally the same "Post WWII-type" direction. Then Kennedy came on the scene and initiated a much different course in the ways of the Government. A good example of this was the way he handled the post-Bay of Pigs investigation with his appointment of the Cuban Study Group. Kennedy put Allen Dulles, Adm. Arleigh Burke, Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Bobby Kennedy together in one room. He could not have created a better group for that purpose. In some respects, they were opponents on almost every score. Then when you add to this his sheer genius of calling in the former Director of Central Intelligence, Gen. Eisenhower's long-time European aide and the first post-war Ambassador to Moscow, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith as premier witness, his choices for this important Cuban Study Group review could not have been better for his purpose. This worked for Kennedy. His mind could assimilate this. Smith tipped the scales in JFK's favor. This is a good example of where Kennedy's years of Congressional experience, which I am afraid many historians have discounted, paid off in a big way for him. People have forgotten that Jack Kennedy had been in Washington as a member of Congress since the 1946 as both a Member of the House and of the Senate; and had grown up in the Court of St. James as the son of Joe Kennedy, the powerful and wily U.S. Ambassador. That's an education! With these Cuban Study Group choices he was getting ideas and testimony from the experts. Allen Dulles' role in this Group was that he was the only man there who could make up the witness list. I had worked with many of those people for years. At that time their hearing room was only a few doors down the hall from my office in the JCS area. That area of the Pentagon is composed of little narrow hallways with no windows outside. Many of the witnesses would come in and sit in my office and have a cup of coffee until they were called into the room. I began to notice who the men were that they were calling. Some of them had not worked on the Bay of Pigs; they were old-time Dulles implants from years back who might have had some peripheral assignment with the Cuban Brigade, but not basically. What Allen Dulles and the Agency were doing was using this opportunity to sit there every day with Bobby Kennedy, and every day with Maxwell Taylor to do some basic orientation. It was heavy; and it paid off in some important ways. When you read sections of their Report to the President you'll realize that this type of indoctrination went all the way back to Dulles' old Dulles-Jackson-Correa philosophy. Dulles had a very willing hand in Maxwell Taylor, who had gotten out of the Government in a "huff" during his Eisenhower years. Now, with this new Kennedy group immersed in the Bay of Pigs problem, it was Taylor's opportunity to move in, and he did just that. He got friendly with Bobby -- in fact one of Bobby's children is named Maxwell Taylor Kennedy. Bobby was very influenced by Taylor, and Dulles was influencing Taylor from his side. Arleigh Burke, a rather stoic individual, did not join too much in the conversation but saw the sense of humor of the whole scene, and just sat there. I knew Arleigh Burke quite well -- he's the finest Chief of Naval Operations the U.S. Navy ever had and a very competent person in his own right. But he had no ax to grind in this committee. He simply tried to keep things honest. As this interrogation progressed, it went longer than we ever expected. Allen Dulles saw that he was becoming effective in this business of indoctrinating Bobby Kennedy and Maxwell Taylor. It appears to me that Bobby Kennedy saw both sides of this. He was no neophyte. He went along with some of this listening to everything that Allen Dulles said, but at the same time I think the Kennedys had decided that Allen Dulles was through. I think they had also decided that Taylor was a strong man, that they would stay with him. He would be in their control. He would not be out of control as Dulles might have been. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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