An insight into the CIA's lack of accountability

Many consider the Central Intelligence Agency among the most secretive organizations in the United States government. Such an organization's secrecy is understandable, considering its role in collecting intelligence worldwide. However, this secrecy has also enabled it to commit various atrocities worldwide under the guise of national security.

Among the atrocities that the Central Intelligence Agency is confirmed to have perpetrated are Project MKUltra, the Central Intelligence Agency's program of human experimentation aimed at mind control using psychedelic drugs, Operation Ajax, the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953, and the Phoenix Program, the program to neutralize the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong by abducting, torturing, and assassinating civilians accused of supporting communist Vietnamese forces, among others. However, many continue to express shock when the Central Intelligence Agency's critics make accusations regarding the agency's alleged culpability in other atrocities. Among the most controversial allegations directed at the agency is its alleged role in assassinating prominent Americans who stand in the way of the goals of the political establishment.

When it comes to prominent Americans allegedly assassinated for standing in the way of the goals of the political establishment, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy often comes to mind. On November 22nd, 1963, an assassin's bullet killed President Kennedy while he was riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Over the decades, the long list of unanswered questions surrounding this presidential assassination has fueled speculation that it was the political establishment and their enforcers in the Central Intelligence Agency who were responsible for the killing of the American president.

Such unanswered questions surrounding the death of President Kennedy include why the Warren Commission, the commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, concluded that the shots that killed the president were fired from the sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository even though numerous witnesses claimed to have seen smoke from a grassy knoll in the northwest corner of Dealey Plaza, why the Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone even though Oswald was killed by a local nightclub owner named Jack Ruby before he could provide any helpful insight as to the details surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy, and why debris fields of blood, bone, and brain matter from President Kennedy traveled in two different directions, among other questions. Just as important as these unanswered questions surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy are the various events that transpired throughout his presidency up until his assassination. After all, these events may illuminate why many believe the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for Kennedy's assassination.

Among those who would have had the most motives and the most means to have President Kennedy assassinated was none other than Allen Dulles. He served as the first civilian director of the Central Intelligence Agency prior to resigning in the wake of the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Dulles demonstrated a remarkable capacity for callousness in his position at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Before serving as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen and his brother, the future Secretary of State John Dulles, were partners of Sullivan and Cromwell, a corporate law firm in New York. Their clients included Krupp Steel and IG Farben, which produced the Zyklon B poison used in Nazi extermination camps. The Dulles brothers would go to great lengths to cover up their collusion with the Nazis, going so far as to shred captured Nazi records.

At the end of the Second World War, Allen Dulles used his position as an Office of Strategic Services station chief in Bern to secure the escape of large amounts of Nazi war criminals. As part of Operation Sunrise, a series of secret negotiations between representatives of Nazi Germany and the United States to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy, Dulles personally snuck Schutzstaffel officers Karl Wolff and Walter Rauff to freedom. After being placed in an apartment in Rome by the Strategic Services Unit, Rauff escaped and ended up in Chile, where he became an advisor to Augusto Pinochet's brutal secret police.

Eventually, Dulles would help create the Office of Policy Coordination, which Frank Wisner would head. It was at the Office of Policy Coordination that they would use millions of dollars in stolen Nazi loot to fund anti-Communist operations. They also employed Nazis and Nazi collaborators for propaganda and covert operations.

In 1949, Allen Dulles co-authored the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report, which was critical of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was established due to the National Security Act of 1947. The report was a factor in President Truman's decision to name Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith as the new director of central intelligence. Smith recruited Dulles into the Central Intelligence Agency to oversee the agency's covert operations as deputy director for plans, a position he held from January 4th, 1951, to August 23rd, 1951, when he was promoted to deputy director of central intelligence.

After Dwight D. Eisenhower's election in 1952, Smith shifted to the Department of State, and Dulles became the first civilian director of central intelligence. Under Dulles, the Central Intelligence Agency assisted Britain's Secret Intelligence Service in overthrowing the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after Mosaddegh nationalized massive British oil holdings in Iran. Following this, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was installed as the leader of Iran, and it was under his rule that Iran's secret police, the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State, would work with the Central Intelligence Agency to create a security apparatus that tortured many Iranians unjustly accused of disloyalty.

The year after the overthrow of Mosaddegh, the Central Intelligence Agency under the leadership of Dulles would overthrow another government. Before 1950, the United Fruit Company owned almost every mile of railway throughout Guatemala, the entire telephone system, and the only port on the Atlantic coast. It was also the single largest landowner in the country.

The Dulles brothers had close ties to the United Fruit Company. As partners of Sullivan and Cromwell, they arranged deals for the United Fruit Company. With such close ties between the Eisenhower administration and the United Fruit Company, it would come as no surprise that it was under the Eisenhower administration that the Central Intelligence Agency would overthrow the Guatemalan government after its president, Jacobo Arbenz, proposed land reforms that were considered a threat to the interests of the United Fruit Company.

Following the overthrow of Arbenz, the United States installed a colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas as the new leader of Guatemala, thus turning the Central American country into a military dictatorship. As part of this regime change operation, the Central Intelligence Agency provided military officers with manuals on how to carry out political assassinations, and they even went as far as to provide a list of targets to be eliminated. The list grew to nearly ten percent of the adult population of Guatemala.

In the final days of President Eisenhower's second term, the 1960 presidential election took place, with John F. Kennedy defeating Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon. To appease the Republicans still in the federal government, Kennedy would allow Republicans like J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles to remain as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency directors, respectively. Dulles would undermine Kennedy's foreign policy immediately.

Before Kennedy got into office, Dulles had been conspiring with the Belgians to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Under Dulles, the Central Intelligence Agency would provide intelligence to the military forces loyal to the Central Intelligence Agency-backed future dictator Joseph Mobutu. Following the coup, Lumumba would be executed by firing squad.

Kennedy would not find out about Lumumba's death for weeks after the murder. Kennedy's politics were seen as too different from those of the Republicans, who still had a strong hold over the Pentagon and Langley. The establishment came to resent Kennedy over these ideological differences.

Years after Kennedy's assassination, H.R. Haldeman was the White House chief of staff under President Nixon. Haldeman is best known for his role in the Watergate scandal, as he was convicted of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. In his post-Watergate book, The Ends of Power, Haldeman describes conversations with Nixon that were all recorded in what is known as the Watergate tapes.

In the Watergate tapes, Nixon is heard trying to keep his team of conspirators from talking about the affair. Specifically, Nixon expressed a desire to ensure Central Intelligence Agency officer E. Howard Hunt was quiet due to his role in operations such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In one conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, Nixon instructs Haldeman on how to blackmail the Central Intelligence Agency into telling the Federal Bureau of Investigation to drop its Watergate investigation. In this conversation, Nixon states, "Of course, this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there's a hell of a lot of things, and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves." Later in the conversation, Nixon tells Haldeman to say that "the president believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again." Haldeman would later clarify these remarks in his memoir when he wrote that in Nixon's references to the Bay of Pigs, he may have been referring to the Kennedy assassination.

The Bay of Pigs Invasion was launched on April 17th, 1961, to oust Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro, from power. Fidel Castro came to power following a revolution against the island nation's American-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Shortly after coming to power, Castro oversaw agrarian reforms and the nationalization of industries owned by American citizens, much to the chagrin of the American government.

The oil embargo the United States imposed on Cuba made tensions worse. The resulting economic fallout caused Cuba to turn to America's rival at the time, the Soviet Union, for petroleum. As relations between the United States and Cuba deteriorated, plans for Castro's overthrow were drafted.

Operation Zapata was the operation that would become known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Though it was drafted while Eisenhower was still in office, the Kennedy administration launched it after Dulles manipulated Kennedy into launching the invasion. On April 17th, 1961, CIA-trained Cuban exiles attacked Cuban shores in a poorly executed amphibious landing.

By the end of the operation, most of the CIA-backed rebels would be killed or captured, and the United States had been thoroughly humiliated on the world stage. The plan had been flawed from the beginning on purpose as the military and the CIA wished to use the failed invasion to usher in a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. Admiral Arleigh Burke went so far as to go behind Kennedy's back to position naval destroyers and Marine battalions off the shores of Cuba.

The military and the CIA also hoped that Kennedy would further assist the plan with air support, to which Kennedy refused. The fiasco that resulted from the Bay of Pigs Invasion caused Kennedy to distrust the CIA. Following the invasion's failure, rumors emerged within the CIA that Kennedy would commence a reduction in force, with Kennedy even being rumored to have said he wished to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

Ultimately, Kennedy forced Dulles to resign as director of central intelligence. Dulles was not one to take being crossed kindly. On the topic of the atmosphere at the CIA at the time, Daniel Ellsberg, who later became famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers, stated, "There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles. Not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup — I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous."

When the elderly E. Howard Hunt, the CIA operative referenced by Nixon in the Watergate tapes, believed he was dying; his son Saint John visited him at his home in Miami. It was there that Saint John asked his ailing father to open up about his activities as an intelligence operative before he passed away. Saint John never believed his father's story of where he was when Kennedy was assassinated.

Though E. Howard Hunt had testified to Congress that he was in Washington D.C. when President Kennedy was killed; Dorothy, the mother of Saint John, told her son that his father was actually in Dallas at the time of the assassination. After asking his father about the matter for years, E. Howard Hunt finally obliged. Saint John would fly to South Florida to have his last conversations with his dying father.

Hunt told his son that in 1963, he had been invited to a secret meeting attended by numerous CIA operatives connected to the agency's anti-Castro operations. These included future Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis and David Morales. Morales was the chief of operations at the largest CIA station in Miami, JMWAVE.

The operatives were gathered to discuss an operation, but Hunt realized quickly that the operation was the assassination of President Kennedy. According to Hunt, Morales and Sturgis referred to Kennedy's assassination as "the big event." Morales is said to have told Hunt that he had been picked for the operation by Bill Harvey, a CIA officer who oversaw many assassination plots against Castro and who had also served as chief of station in Rome.

According to Harvey's deputy in Rome, F. Mark Wyatt, when the news broke about Kennedy's assassination, Harvey's reaction indicated that he had prior knowledge of an assassination plot against Kennedy. In addition, Wyatt also claimed that Harvey traveled to Dallas in November of 1963.

Furthermore, the prosecutor for the House of Representatives committee that investigated Kennedy's assassination from 1976 to 1978, Dan Hardway, stated, "I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963, we considered Harvey to be one of our prime suspects from the very start. He had all the key connections — to organized crime, to the CIA station in Miami where the plots against Castro were run, to other prime CIA suspects like David Phillips. We tried to get Harvey's travel voucher and security file from the CIA, but they always blocked us. But we did come across a lot of memos that suggested he was traveling a lot in the months leading up to the assassination."

Additionally, there are doubts as to whether or not the shots that killed Kennedy were Lee Harvey Oswald's. The telescopic sight on the rifle allegedly used by Oswald was installed for a left-handed shooter. During the Warren Commission, Oswald's brother John testified that Lee was right-handed. Also, when Sebastian Latona, a fingerprint expert with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dusted the alleged murder weapon for fingerprints, he was unable to develop any. Perhaps most convincing that Oswald was not the one who fired the shot that killed Kennedy is the fact that both surgeons who operated on Kennedy believed the president to have been shot in the front as well as the rear and that both surgeons reportedly came under intense pressure to remain quiet about their observations.

Equally as suspicious as the circumstances surrounding Kennedy's assassination is the immediate aftermath of the event. Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby two days after being arrested for Kennedy's assassination. Some believe that Ruby killed Oswald as a means of silencing him.

The Warren Commission would be established to investigate Kennedy's assassination. The individual whom future CIA director Richard Helms recommended that Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, appoint to the Warren Commission to prevent any agency secrets from getting out was none other than Allen Dulles, to which Johnson agreed. One of the individuals who would have had the most motives and the most means to have President Kennedy assassinated was now one of the commissioners investigating the assassination. The investigation was tainted from the start.

With this, the question of whether or not the Central Intelligence Agency assassinated President Kennedy remains. Based on the evidence presented in this article, it would seem to many as though it is both possible and plausible that the agency's elite would have had the motivation and the means to eliminate a figure like Kennedy as he became something of a thorn in the side of both the CIA as well as the establishment as a whole. However, assuming that the CIA indeed assassinated Kennedy, who is to say there have not been more prominent Americans whom this shadowy organization has neutralized for daring to stand in the way of the establishment's objectives?

Republished from Grant Klusmann's Substack, with thanks!