politico | John McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an
engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as
director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy
had forced out Dulles following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust
Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. McCone had one overriding
mission: restore order at the besieged CIA. Kennedy hoped his management
skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian—mostly a
stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who
had always run the spy agency—faced a steep learning curve.
After JFK’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, President
Lyndon Johnson kept McCone in place at the CIA, and the CIA director
became an important witness before the Warren Commission, the panel
Johnson created to investigate Kennedy’s murder. McCone pledged full
cooperation with the commission, which was led by Chief Justice Earl
Warren, and testified that the CIA had no evidence to suggest that Lee
Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was part of any conspiracy, foreign or
domestic. In its final report, the commission came to agree with
McCone’s depiction of Oswald, a former Marine and self-proclaimed
Marxist, as a delusional lone wolf.
But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago? Did the
onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still
rewrite the history of the assassination? Even the CIA is now willing
to raise these questions. Half a century after JFK’s death, in a
once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house
historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency
acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and
other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary”
information from the Warren Commission.
According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who
died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency,
intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at
the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet
undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most
important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its
1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of
CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots
with the Mafia.
Without this information, the commission never even knew
to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or
elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.
While raising no question about the essential findings of the Warren
Commission, including that Oswald was the gunman in Dallas, the 2013
report is important because it comes close to an official CIA
acknowledgement—half a century after the fact—of impropriety in the
agency’s dealings with the commission. The coverup by McCone and others
may have been “benign,” in the report’s words, but it was a cover-up
nonetheless, denying information to the commission that might have
prompted a more aggressive investigation of Oswald’s potential Cuba
ties.
Initially stamped “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning it was not to be shared
outside the agency or with foreign governments, Robarge’s report was
originally published as an article in the CIA’s classified internal
magazine, Studies in Intelligence, in September 2013, to mark the
50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. The article, drawn from a
still-classified 2005 biography of McCone written by Robarge, was
declassified quietly last fall and is now available
on the website of The George Washington University’s National Security
Archive. In a statement to POLITICO, the CIA said it decided to
declassify the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s
connection to JFK’s assassination,” including the still-popular
conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the
assassination.
0 comments:
Post a Comment