Ghosts of Langley Into the CIA’s Heart of Darkness - John Prados

[Music] [Applause] [Music] okay great so welcome to the National Spy Museum my name is Vince Houghton I'm the historian and curator here at the Spy Museum if you haven't had a chance to join us before again welcome we do programs like this a lot there's a way to find out everything that's coming up you can look in the back of the table when you first walked in to get all of our programming information or just go to our web spud website spy museum org on the 28th which is about two weeks and change from now you can join us here again for Rick Schrader who spent a long and illustrious career working for the agency that I think John is gonna say mean things about tonight no no no and he's gonna talk about really the foundation of the CIA so a little bit of an overlap but from a different perspective so what we're really looking forward to - Rick's talk to as well he's been here before and every time he comes the people who join us the visitors love what he has to say but let's talk about John Prados a little bit because he is who were gonna be hearing from tonight he's a senior fellow at the National Security Archive just down the street GW he focuses on national security affairs including Foreign Affairs intelligence and military subjects he also heads the archives intelligence documentation and the Vietnam projects so probably been busy a little if the goings going on at the archives now he has a PhD in political science specifically international relations from Columbia University is the author of more than 20 books in all along with many articles and papers a prolific writer somehow you're not 90 years old with that many books so I applaud you for that as somebody trying to pound away at my first - it's a I can understand how ridiculously amazing that accomplishment is his research has centered in the past on subjects including the National Security Council the Central Intelligence Agency the Vietnam War and analysis of international relations diplomatic and military history in a more general sense his books include the family jewels the CIA secrecy in presidential power safer democracy the secret Wars of the CIA Vietnam the history of an unwinnable war storm over Leyte the Philippine invasion in the destruction of the Japanese Navy which is his blast book before this one unless you slipped one in when I was looking and I think yeah okay good and and William Colby in the CIA the secret Wars of a controversial spy master so among his books unwinnable war keepers the keys which on the National Security Council and combined fleet decoded which intelligence the Pacific War during World War two or each nominated for the Pulitzer Prize his newest book is the ghost of Langley into the CIA's heart of darkness which came out just this week is two days ago which relates the agency's current situation I changed a word there to its founding in earlier years so kind of tracing together where we are today based on how it all started telling the story of the agency through the eyes of key figures in CIA history including some of the most use the word you're troubling covert actions around the world and I think that that's certainly the case with a lot of what we're talking about here tonight so you're not here to look at me so let me introduce to you John Prados thank you very much that was very nice and welcome tonight to talk about the ghosts of Langley now I don't want to talk for too long I want to make sure that we get a good amount of time for discussion so I'm gonna stop at a certain point and throw the floor open for questions and we'll take it from there and talk about whatever your concerns might be I am widely knowledgeable about every aspect of the Central Intelligence Agency and I'm sure we will have a vibrant discussion obviously and the title of this book ghosts is a metaphor institutions organizations they take a coloration they take an ethos from where they start and what they do and from their heroes or their villains so there are ghosts that's not to say that there aren't real ghosts in the story of the Central Intelligence Agency a CIA director William J Colby fell down I'm sorry William J Casey fell down at his desk in the middle of the iran-contra affair and died a few months later after a brain hemorrhage Emilio Americo Rodriguez I'm sure someone you haven't heard of a CIA case officer flies into Dulles Airport is on his way to Langley to headquarters to meet with higher-ups and suffers the coronary thrombosis at the airport dies in the line of duty that's in November of 1967 just a few months before that the Director of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency an officer named Desmond Fitzgerald is playing tennis in Northern Virginia drops on the court dies a couple years before that in 1965 Frank Wisner who had also been the director of operations of the Central Intelligence Agency took a shot gun to his head and killed himself none of those people are on our stars on the CIA memorial wall but there are lots of stars on the CIA memorial wall more than a hundred fifty now so at the last count so there are real ghosts in the story of the Central Intelligence Agency at a certain level you could say John F Kennedy is the CIA goes because of the sort of enthusiasm if that's the right word with which he pursued covert operations against Fidel Castro and because of the fact that he was murdered it has always been part of the swirling conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination and even part of the official investigations of the Kennedy assassination whether or not there was a Cuban government an official Cuban angle to the assassination of President Kennedy as a matter of fact it happens that only ten days before he died in Dallas President Kennedy sat down with the top brass of the CIA to review the Cuba operation and approve the next measures that they were going to take in the operation that they called Mongoose and that is only part and parcel of Kennedy's interest in this program he pushed it enough that he took it out of the regular process for CIA operational approvals he sent it to a special group he assigned his brother to ride herd over the operation when Bobby Kennedy didn't think that the operation was going strongly enough Kennedy took it out of that milieu and assigned it to another element of the National Security Council and now in 1963 he begins meeting personally with the people who undertaking this operation so you could argue that Kennedy to himself the president is one of these ghosts but let me go back to our metaphor and here I'm going to go to Sigmund Freud now Freud had he articulated a theory of what he called the uncanny the uncanny was ghosts it included ghosts and what he saw in the sensibility of people who believed in ghosts was that they took an animistic view of the universe which involved the raising of the Dead all right and here's our point of departure very much in the early days after of the Cold War the end of World War two the end of the Office of Strategic Services it was people who had been with the Office of Strategic Services in particular Allen Dulles and William J Donovan who articulated the need for peacetime intelligence agency and went after creating a Central Intelligence Agency and in this way they were in fact raising the dead so Allen Dulles is one of the characters in this book and you'll follow things that he does in the early days of the CIA our unfortunate operations director who killed himself Frank Wisner is another he's zealot the zealots at the central intelligence agencies and in intelligence were important in setting the early direction of the agency in general but covert operations in particular he was himself an OSS operative and his peak World War two experience came in Romania in Bucharest where he was the chief of SS mission that was spying out German activities in the Balkans in the last days of the war with the Romanians the desperate to make some kind of accommodation with the Western Allies so they wouldn't be stuck with the Russians the result being that the Romanians were very communicative with the Americans Wisner got excellent intelligence made close connections with the whole Romanian royal family at that time and high government officials and he was there when the Soviets clamped down and they sent many many Romanians off to the gulag to the labor camps to see whether they would survive or they would not that was a stunning experience for Wisner in Bucharest to watch the Russian death trains going off into the distance and that marked his life that made him the zealot that he became at the Central Intelligence Agency you fast forward 10 years to 1956 of course and Wisner is the Operations Director when the Russian intervention in Hungary happens it's the same thing Wisner happened to be actually cruising that was a word that agency officers used in the early years for taking a trip and gallivanting around Wisner was cruising in Europe when Hungary happened and here again he saw a reprise a raising of the dead actually of people in fact being sent to their death beds so that was a shock for him and that set up some of his later experience but between those two poles of experience were a whole series of CIA operations that zealots like mr. Wisner and dreamers like mr. Dulles supported and carried out Albania from 1949 on through 1954 the operation ultimately fell apart but four years before it did no one could hold it back in 1952 just before Christmas there was a big scandal it started in Warsaw where the Russians and the the Communist polish government arrested a whole bunch of people that they said were Western spies and secret agents and this turned into a big scandal for the CIA because there was a network but it was run by the Russians it was a false operation that was designed to trap those who might want to spy for the West within a net that was controlled by Russian security and for some days and weeks it was not even clear whether the United States would preserve diplomatic relations with the nation of Poland this of course was a big problem for the CIA a big scandal at the CIA flap as that word came to be used because the CIA had been supporting this operation they had sent millions of dollars they had sent gold they had revealed North Atlantic Treaty Organization war plans to the Polish alleged Polish resistance group so that those host spies could check on the coordinates of various geographic points that the NATO powers wanted to find out about the operations that were carried out by US intelligence at that time were approved by an interagency group that was called the Operations Advisory Committee and later the 10/2 or 10/5 panels that group one of its members was a State Department officer named Robert Joyce all right after this scandal with the Polish operations at the end of 1952 Joyce complained now this was significant for several reasons because Joyce Allen Dulles Frank Wisner and a whole series of other high CIA people in the last days of world war ii had lived together in Germany as the Allied forces advanced so they were well they were very familiar with each other they were friends and Joyce complaining at this point represented breaking ranks with the old network all right Joyce expanded his critique months after the initial complaints about what had happened in Poland he filed a more serious set of charges about CIA covert operations that they did not support American foreign policy that they were not well coordinated or controlled etc etc the idea that an insider Joyce by the way had been a member of this group that approved the operations so even more he had inside knowledge of what he was talking about the idea that an insider like this would break was very embarrassing to the high command of the CIA in early 1954 Wisner actually wrote memorandum in which he argued that the real problem of covert operations was that they had not can been given high-level guidance in other words from the president of the united states high-level guidance within the US government here is a case where the CIA begins to develop an argument and one of the theses in the ghosts of Langley book is that in situations like this arguments develop and they are used again and again sometimes in Reverse even well the next time that the CIA needs to overcome complaints and challenges all right you may know if you're familiar with this early history of the agency that in 1954 President Dwight Eisenhower ordered a committee under james Doolittle a famous wartime Air Force commander from World War two to review US intelligence operations the thing that that review was always associated with is Doolittle's judgment that the Americans had to be just as mean as the Russians to conduct the Cold War but in fact one of the purposes of Doolittle's investigation was to ascertain whether in fact presidential direction and guidance to the CIA had been sufficient or not and Doolittle concluded that it had predictably enough all right he was assisted in drawing his conclusions by the fact that at that very moment there was a CIA covert operation going on in Guatemala which overthrew the government of Howe Arbenz and lent short-term credibility to the idea that CIA operations were successful and aboveboard but a second tactic emerged during that same year of 1954 and that was the CIA itself putting out information about covert operations they brought in a reporter for The Saturday Evening Post and proceeded to tell this person lots of stuff about their Guatemala operation and the operation that they had carried out in Iran in 1953 and that for the purpose of getting good public relations from an article in the post so we go on through the 1950s and there a succession of operations that are controversial in one way or another the Hungary revolt was not actually a CIA operation except lots of people thought that it was because in 1953 there had been an uprising in eastern Germany after that uprising the United States government had reviewed its foreign policy for Eastern Europe and had proposed a policy that would encourage opposition to Soviet control and although the the policy had a provision in it that was don't support revolt if it's going to fail in other words we don't want to get caught in a very bad position here but that was a contradiction with the idea that they were going to encourage revolt in Eastern Europe so that was the existing policy when the Hungarian revolt took place and when removal took place Radio Free Europe which was a CIA operation was busily broadcasting messages of support to the revolting population in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary so it was ambiguous whether there was a CIA control here Frank Wisner struck on his cruise by what was happening in Hungary actually found himself powerless to do anything about it when the CIA when he got back to Washington and the CIA canvas what were their resources what could they use in Hungary what could they do in this crisis they found there were no plans the CIA's Hungary establishment had two operating case officers one of whom was assigned to Vienna and one to headquarters and there could not find more than seven operations officers in the entire agency who spoke Hungarian so their ability to do anything in this situation even was tightly circumscribed okay in Indonesia in 1958 where the CIA supported revolt by the Indonesian military against president Sukarno of Indonesia the United States was reduced to arguing that we did not keep track of or support mercenaries the reason we had to make that argument was because one of the CIA pilots flying b-26 bombers in support of the rebels was captured shot down and captured by the Indonesians and they found him with his px card for Clark Air Force Base and his US Air Force ID cards and other documents that clearly show that he was a pilot for air America hence for the Central Intelligence Agency proprietary okay the zealots the the impact of zealots the ghosts of zealots actually I think teach three things first that whatever you want to say about whether there's good high-level influence or instruction for the agency or not that high level instruction for the agency was opposed to in contradiction with plausible deniability which was a standard argument in regard to covert operations that you had to keep them secret in order for them to be successful second that operations that straddled legal boundaries actually had the best chance of continuing from the standpoint of an organizational officer at the central intelligence agencies whose interests were in starting and maintaining operations that would proceed into the future third that there were a concert that there was a contradictions between goals and the conventions of international behavior and norms which often got into the way of these progressive covert operations be that as it may of course there were many many operations officers at the CIA and all through this history seventy years now and among them there were stars the ghosts of the stars a star like Jennifer Matthews who was a person at head of the CIA contingent at Forward Operating Base Chapman that was destroyed in 2009 by the al Qaeda suicide bomber the Jordanian suicide bomber a star like Robert Ames who was one of the agency's prime case officers working on Middle Eastern operations and perished with eight other CIA persons in the American Embassy in Beirut in 1983 when it was car bombed a star like Tracey Barnes kind of a little bit different configuration Barnes started out with something that was called the psychological strategy board psychological strategy board was created under Harry Truman to be America's sort of cold war headquarters it was going to be above the Central Intelligence Agency and give them that high level guidance that mr. Wisner seems to have missed all right but surprise the psychological strategy board couldn't quite get itself established there was a lot of foot dragging from the operating agencies in particular from Frank Wisner x' directorate of plans which is what the the do was called in those days right Wisner kept not giving strategy board employees security clearances so they couldn't access the documents he refused to supply to supply the strategy board with material so that it had a hard time getting the raw material from which to design these strategies that it was supposedly in charge of creating with the strategy board not establishing itself well Tracey Barnes who was the staff to they're figured that he knew a sinking ship when he saw one and Barnes by the way had been a star agent for Allen Dulles in World War two when Dulles was the OSS station chief in Bern so Dulles was a CIA representative at psychological strategy board meetings and here the two ran into each other together and at a certain point Dulles made him a job offer and Whismur figured this is time to jump ship and he move over to the CIA when the agency carried out its operation in Guatemala in 54 it was Barnes who served as the kind of general manager of the field operation running between the different high-level brass guys and the field guys and in that capacity he encountered the hostility of field commanders who thought that that he was not the right guy for them all right Barnes was also a promoter of the CIA career of a Howard Hunt who later turned out to be one of the Watergate burglars and had his hands in a lot of sort of flaky business in the middle 1950s into the late 50s Barnes was sent to Europe on an overseas tour he was chief of base in Frankfurt and then station chief in London during the time he was station chief in London you know it was very controversial the British spy Kim Philby and the whole so-called Cambridge spy ring one of whose members was a person named Michael Strait who happens to be Tracy Barnes's cousin one day straight feeling guilty asks Barnes to take him to lunch and at lunch he invites Barnes to ask him questions about Cambridge in the 1930s and Russian spying and Barnes won't do it so he walks off he comes back to CIA headquarters in I think it was like 1958 maybe early 59 where he becomes the deputy to the Director of Operations at that point Richard Bissell and as in that position Barnes has the catbird seat on the organization of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba which by the way brings us full circle to what we were saying about Kennedy a little bit earlier Barnes also messes up this assignment a critical part of the Bay of Pigs operation was to convince the general public and the world that in fact what was happening was a revolt of Cubans in Cuba against Fidel Castro and one part of that was that they were going to fly a b-26 bomber of a kind that a type of aircraft that the Cuban Air Force actually flew at that time they're going to fly it to Miami and they were going to have the pilots say that he was a Cuban Air Force pilot defecting with his friends and the bombing that was going on in Cuba right at that moment was other Cuban Air Force pilots defecting with their aircraft and bombing Castro's air bases well in order to make this work the American ambassador at the United Nations Adlai Stevenson had to know what that cover story was as well as what the real story was and they send Barnes up to New York to brief ad lie about the cover story and the real story Barnes doesn't tell ad lights in the whole story so when it comes time that this issue is debated in the United Nations and the United States government has to make a statement in the United Nations Adlai Stevenson does not know that the airplane not only is not a Cuban Air Force airplane but in fact was one of the same type airplanes that the CIA had bought to use in the Indonesia bombing and that our Cuban exile pilot who was flying this plane to Miami had never fired the guns on the aircraft so that they arrived in Miami in a taped over condition that that prevented rust from developing on the gun barrels but clearly demonstrated that the plane had not been in any kind of combat the American cover story for the air strikes at the Bay of Pigs immediately fell apart and that was only one part of morphing and huge and increasing disaster in terms of the politics of it the execution of it the military operations themselves so Tracey Barnes was a CIA star as a matter of fact in 1961 the bidding at the agency was that Richard Bissell would succeed to the directorship of the CIA after Allen Dulles and Tracey Barnes would become the director of operations under him and plenty of CIA officers oriented themselves in their organizational setting with the assumption that these would be the next set of personnel changes okay how about Richard Bissell himself here's another CIA star Bissell of course was the top Field Marshal of the Bay of Pigs operation but more than that this man was the kind of sort of super manager that every organization appreciates having he was a fair-haired boy to Allen Dulles when Allen Dulles was the director of the CIA he was the fellow who supervised the development and operation of the u-2 spy plane he was also the person who gave us photographic reconnaissance because he supervised in exactly the same fashion the development of the corona program which was CIA's first spy satellite in his case the problems came from a different angle right the part of the Cuba plot was that there would be an assassination program against Castro and Bissell was the person who sort of took charge of this and had the CIA Security office enlist the Mafia on the principle that the Mafia had gambling interests in Havana so they and the CIA had a common cause in opposing Fidel and getting him neutralizing him the thing about that was number one Bissell sort of prevaricated on who knew what within the CIA he let the Security office move forward without any kind of knowledge on the part of the Operations Directorate which was actually carrying out the operation and when this got investigated by the Church Committee in the 1970s he prevaricated to the Church Committee about what he did or did not do when he was the director of operations at the agency then there's the Headless Horseman I nominate Richard Helms for the headless horseman all right in frauds theory of the uncanny of the ghosts the ghost has the tendency to repeat the same action to repeat the same activity again and again and if you look through this whole span of CIA history the one person whose fingers are in every pie is Richard Helms there's a reason why Tom powers decided to call his Helms biography the man who kept the secrets Helms is the only person whose name is on a memo that approved the CIA's program to take people's mail and cover it and photograph contents of letters which was interfering with the posts that's a criminal offense Helms is the only person who met with the sitting Postmaster General to talk about that program Helms in the knife fast forward a decade in the 1960s Helms as the sparkplug behind the mark Kaos project in which the CIA spied on American domestic citizens dissenting against the Vietnam War and when Richard Nixon who didn't like the CIA very much demanded that the CIA reduce itself by 10% and then take more cuts in budget and in personnel in the early 1970s Helms protected two Kaos operation against American citizens from any of those personnel cuts now he was also involved with the assassination talks against Castro when John McCone asked question about what was happening after the Chicago Tribune published the first article that said something about mafia involvement Helms knew to answer mccombs questions so McKown was able to get the the line from mr. Helms which meant that mr. Helms actually knew something about what was going on with this Helms of course was behind the things that the agency did in the Southeast Asian war in Laos and Vietnam he was the top operative for Kennedy in the anti-castro operation that we called Mongoose he was the chief of the Operations Directorate that acted in an American ally British Guiana to overthrow its government okay so there are these different characters and I could go on with them all night probably but I don't want to do that what I will say is this that the agency faced challenges it developed arguments to defend itself these arguments were wasted by characters like the people that I'm talking about and they move into the modern era and many of the arguments are used again and again and again for example I talked about the the Doolittle report the Doolittle report one of the arguments the CIA used to deface that was you know you're making us answer your question so much that we're not getting our jobs done okay fast-forward to the Bay of Pigs which was extensively investigated afterwards and one of the CIA's responses to Kennedy's products about why haven't you got Castro for me was well we can't pursue the Cuban operations because we're answering all your investigate since the Bay of Pigs similarly when the CIA inspector general investigated the Bay of Pigs and interviewed 125 officers about what was going on the response to the Inspector General's report most of it written by Tracey Barnes by the way was that well you never interviewed anyone fast forward now to the present day and I'll I'm passing the present day I figure we're going to talk about it but when the Senate Intelligence Committee investigates the CIA torture program and the CIA responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee what it said was well you didn't interview anybody now when the investigators for the Senate committee went to Langley in October of 2009 to interview CIA officers the agency's general counsel of the time physically blocked them from entering the office so they didn't interview anybody and then the CIA uses that as a reason to reject the intelligence committees report on CIA torture let me stop there in the 90 second brief I'll say that my analysis George Tenet tried to be an exorcist and failed and the subsequent CIA directors hold various positions as the flying dutchman or Jacob Marley's ghosts or other characters from this kind of a checkered history okay I'm ready for your questions and we have microphones for your questions the you know so much the mythology going on I just I noticed in today's paper there was some person talking about the Vietnam and it was they made a comment that Ho Chi Minh's sent a letter in 46 to Truman to you know keep the French out because Roosevelt earlier and said he was going to keep the French from going back into Indochina and then in the post typical post fashion they put in the parenthesis that the the CIA prevented Truman from seeing this which would be hard to Duke seeing at the CIA wasn't created till 47 so so you know so much what we read especially in the mainstream media is just mythology well yes that's true there's no question that but there but wait a second now there's also a difference between mythology and fake news all right yes it's true the CIA did not exist in 1946 but the Central Intelligence Group did exist and that was created by Truman also and was the forerunner the direct forerunner of the CIA starting in January of 1946 which I believe is before that letter is dated but to take your larger point absolutely that was mistaken because the recipients of the letter would have been the US Department of State and the means of transmitting the letter would have been through our Council in Hanoi who by the way was someone who was kind of opposed to Ho Chi Minh so perhaps there's a reason right there where the letter didn't get through you know so yes there's lots of silliness in the press however the evidence is used in ghosts of Langley is on CIA paper in declassified documents there's minimal use of journalistic material in this book most of it primarily for the purpose of saying that this or that leak occurred and then analyzing what happens afterward good evening I was worrying throughout your when you wrote your book came across any research about the death of William Colby I live in Charles County Maryland and he had a summer home there and I believe he died in 1996 right and there's been there was a lot of talk at that time that you know of course all the theories were proposed and whatnot I was wondering if you're throughout your research when you wrote your book you came across anything that was that differed from what was widely reported in the newspapers at the time I actually wrote a biography of Colby so let me speak from that perspective rather than from ghosts of Langley in which Colby is a very minor character I was and am still convinced that mr. Colby died of natural causes he was not spiritual away in a Soviet submarine or murdered by one of various conspirators and different conspiracies I spoke to a person who was a colleague of his on the board of a Northern Virginia Beltway bandit type company and they had been having a board meeting just a few days before Colby took that canoe ride and he says to me that he and Colby went over to the the coffee urn at the same time to get a cup of coffee during a break in the proceedings and that while they were standing there he saw a sudden you know sort of flushing Colby's place flushed something happened with his eyes he described to me this scene it was as if he had had a at that exact moment and so my interpretation of that is that Colby had a recurrence of that medical problem when he was in the canoe and at some key moments in the canoe and that's what happened surely I must have engaged in more than this hi good afternoon or good evening do you think in your research is there any shot for lack of better words of the odni do you see these same arguments come in coming back from the CIA in regards to OD Anya's attempt to bring more oversight to CIA I would say that the CIA has checkmated or checkmated is not the right it's going too far has checked ODI when the Director of National Intelligence attempted to appoint a station chief and as part of that same back-and-forth try to dictate that he could select the US intelligence service from which a station chief was drawn and the CIA rejected that gambit out of hand that that set up a rubric between the DNI and the CIA that has remained the same since so the CIA is prima Center Paris on all aspects of operations and the DNI is essentially coordinating personnel management and doing high-level estimative intelligence yes did the CIA assist Senator McCarthy and the communist sympathizer outing no actually and that was one of Allen Dulles as great moments I think at this at the agency was where and I tell this story actually in ghosts of Langley the that can do it for McCarthy appears to have been from the FBI there was a senior CIA analytical officer who was up for extending his clearance to handle nuclear weapons information a guy by the name of William Bundy and Bundy was related by marriage to Alger Hiss and had contributed money to the Defense Fund for hiss when hiss was being prosecuted as a an agent or a spy or a perjurer whatever it was that they were getting hiss for anyway Bundy tells the the security investigators that you know he made this donation this was a political donation whatever and that goes into his file and within 48 hours of him telling this to the FBI McCarthy had the information and that's when McCarthy started talking about communists at the CIA Allen Dulles listened when mr. Bundy told him this and Dulles said to him you know just get out of town for a while so Bill Bundy left and went to play golf with his dad up in Massachusetts took a little leave of absence and when McCarthy approached the CIA to demand Bundy and subpoena him Dulles said to mr. McCarthy or Senator McCarthy I'm sorry you can't talk to him the only person to see I you can talk to his me and I'm not going to go there when McCarthy tried to press this Dulles went to vice president Richard Nixon this is one of the favors that Nixon thinks that he did for the CIA up in the Watergate period and asks Nixon to help him defuse this McCarthy subpoena and Nixon was happy to do that and he did do that and a few months later Dulles went before McCarthy's committee in a more general testimony about sort of general political situations at the Central Intelligence Agency so he finessed the entire communist argument so right after the OSS was disbanded and it was transitioned to the Strategic Services Unit and then the Central Intelligence Group why is there so little information that we can find now it seems like Cold War historians sort of ignore that timeframe from 1945 all the way up until June of 1947 well that may be part of it but I think it's also a question of Records you know the the transition there was no transition okay between Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency and harry s truman x' presidency because roosevelt simply died and you swore in Truman right away so that's one piece of this so some of the record of the OSS or a lot of the record of the OSS actually belongs in the FDR library the Truman library now is the one that takes over and it's actually the one that's in charge when all of this stuff happens and Truman had a particular way that he structured his record-keeping he had something called the president's secretary and the president secretary was actually collecting records about every single foreign policy defense intelligence and security issue so this person was way over committed that's one piece of it another piece of it is that the style of record-keeping was different because they compiled records there were more like color records you know the president wore a high women's hat and carried a a wooden sword and a little thing that he staged in January 1946 when he created the National Intelligence authority right and he gave a similar hat to Sidney sours who was the new chief of the intelligence Authority and to the guy that was in charge of one of the the operating intelligence units then the photographs of that are lost you know now you may have found them but you know anyway so the style of record-keeping was different they recording the hyoomans hats not like what is said in the meeting all right the the CIA's official account of the Congressional negotiations that lead to the National Security Act of 1947 is very general in short it's only maybe 60 pages long through the whole expanse of that period and the huge importance of the creation of the CIA there's this much detail it got a little better as they went on in the later 40s and starting into the 1950s the National Security Council meetings actually have transcripts to them so somebody was taking specific notes but in this early period not so much if you went to the papers of Sidney sours who was in fact the that CIA chief there you know you'd find very little about his experience in charge of the National Intelligence Authority you know all right Wow who's gonna ask this earlier chickened out and now since nobody else has questions I will I had thought that Kennedy had let Dulles go and if so why number one and number two you mentioned the Mafia was possibly going to be used in Cuba had they been used prior to that okay let me take number two first and that is no they had not been used before that okay but I'll tell you another story that's from ghost of Langley and this predates Kennedy Eisenhower wants to get the CIA out of Washington it had all these buildings all over the place and Dulles wants a new CIA headquarters the campus quote-unquote at Langley started with this when they're moving forward and then the book contains a whole account of all the machinations that happened in getting the approval for this and all of that kind of thing as they're moving forward Dulles starts talking about having a cornerstone laying ceremony all right and his top administrative guy guy named red white or nicknamed red white says to him you don't need something like that we can just put up a plaque and Dulles says to him don't you realize there's an election coming up and after that I might not be here I might not be the director of the CIA we've got to have a cornerstone laying so that there's a stone where my name can't be erased and we can get the president to come over here and make some kind of positive remarks about the work of our agency so that's in fact what happens all right but number one it shows that in the 1959-1960 period Allen Dulles is worried about his status as the director of the CIA now given that all right you go into 1960 and in 1960 the u2 aircraft is shot down over the Soviet Union and that turns into a huge flap for the CIA Dwight Eisenhower even before Kennedy has to come out publicly and apologize for the CIA you know I take responsibility for this and it was a the stupidity of the CIA's cover story in the u2 affair that actually was the starting point for a pretty serious investigation of CIA activity and then following right on that you have the Bay of Pigs disaster so following the Bay of Pigs disaster oh and by the way you know when the Bay of Pigs happened when the director of the CIA's presence on the scene could have should have been a key command element in the forward progress of the operation Dulles actually took it upon himself to travel to Puerto Rico and go to private foundation organizations annual convention as a means of providing cover to the operation but what that meant was he was not in place to deal with the problems that happened at the Bay of Pigs as they came up so one of the big CIA arguments and this became sort of received history at the agency was the only reason that the Bay of Pigs failed is not true by the way but the only reason the Bay of Pigs failed was because Kennedy cut back the airstrikes and if we had only had the full menu of airstrikes we would have worked of course if Dulles had been there he could have asked Kennedy to reinstate the airstrikes but not being there he couldn't what happened was that Richard Bissell refused went to engage Dean Rusk Rusk would not make this decision himself he offered to let Bissell talk directly to Kennedy who happened to be in Hyannisport for the weekend and this'll said no he wouldn't make the call if Allen Dulles had been there he would have had the stature to make the call having said that I will also say the airstrikes were cut back because in part Adlai Stevenson had failed at the United Nations in part because Kennedy thought that the operation had too much visibility already and none of that answers the question of whether this small amount of airstrikes not only 44 in the entire Bay of Pigs operation would have had the claimed impact on the Cuban military forces John Prados thank you very much thank you [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

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Rating: 4.5985131 out of 5

Keywords: CIA, International Spy Museum, Langley, John Prados, Bay of Pigs, Cuba

Id: ctKSYV2nVn0

Length: 64min 44sec (3884 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2017