In the three editions of Someone Would Have Talked, I presented sources
and circumstantial evidence
suggesting that certain CIA officers instigated a joint action against
President Kennedy — using
individuals, networks and assets which had previously been used in a series
of efforts to eliminate
Fidel Castro and senior members of his regime. Anecdotal evidence, including
remarks by certain
senior CIA officers suggests that action evolved through the activities
of individuals within the CIA’s
Department of Plans (Operations).
What Someone Would Have Talked, some 480 pages in its most recent (2010
paperback) edition does
not do is to provide a full picture of the culture and conditions which
could allow such an act to be
instigated by CIA personnel and then not be exposed by an Agency investigation.
In essence that
work deals with “what happened‚“ rather than “how could something like
that happen?†In other
words, how can you take a position that CIA officers were involved and
yet maintain that it was not
an act of the Agency as a whole?
The only way to respond to that question is to engage in a historical
study of how political assassination
evolved within the Central Intelligence Agency. How did it start, how was
it conducted (how will
you recognize it when you see it), who gave the orders, and perhaps most
importantly‚ who were
the people actually involved in such actions as political assassination
and even on a grander scale,
“executive action†of senior political leaders during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
While many of those questions were quite mysterious for a considerable
time, much detailed research
is now available (including that of various Congressional investigations
of the 1970’s) as well as a host
of actual documents on the subject of Agency political assassination (many
of the documents are quite dry and still “crypted†with code words
and agency name crypts, which have only recently become
known). Equally important, only in the last decade have biographies and
oral histories on some of the
key Agency personnel have allowed much deeper insights into internal social
networks as well as the
sorts of dialogs which really made things happen inside the shadow world
of covert operations — the
things that never showed up in memos, were obfuscated with agreed upon
“agency speak†and often
were never sanctioned with as a designated project (which meant waiving
normal agency internal
security procedures and virtually all oversight), in other words, the way
such things were done under
“extreme deniabilityâ€.
To properly address such a subject, it is necessary to present background
on the Agency as well as
the personalities of certain of its inner circle covert personnel. It’s
also necessary and to trace the
development of a “culture†which viewed murder as simply another tactic
— justified by a variety of
national security concerns. In this study we will examine a culture which
considered any perceived
weakness in the face of Communist expansion as being equivalent to treason;
a culture in which an
obsession with national security could and did override all other moral
and legal constraints. It’s not
a particularly pretty story and it will be necessary to “wade†into it
in some depth, but I feel that the
rader will will learn a good deal about the Agency, and about American
cold war history. A great deal
of it will be new; it certainly was to me, even after a decade of working
on the subject.
