Posted on 01/15/2014 10:24:56 AM PST by RetiredArmy
JFK Assassination: One Month After JFK’s Murder, Former President Harry Truman Called For Abolishing The CIA
One month to the day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, former President Harry Truman recommended that the U.S. abolish the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In an op-ed column published in the Washington Post on Dec. 22, 1963, Truman never linked the CIA to President Kennedy’s murder, but the timing of the explicit and strongly worded column and complaint implied a connection.
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment,” Truman wrote. “It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.”
Truman continued:
“This quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue -- and subject for cold war enemy propaganda,” the former president wrote.
Truman: No Distant Observer
Truman was no distant, uninformed public policy professional when it came to the CIA: In July 1947, then-President Truman signed into law the legislation that created the agency, which replaced the former U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
In 1944, William J. Donovan, the OSS’ creator, suggested to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the nation should create a new, centralized organization/agency directly supervised by the president -- "which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies."
Donovan also proposed that the new agency should have authority to conduct “subversive operations abroad.”
In December 1963, Truman articulated in no uncertain terms what he thought of the CIA’s covert operations dimension:
Truman said they should “be terminated.”
Later, in 1964, Truman would reiterate his call for removing covert operations from the CIA in a letter to Look magazine -- underscoring that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities” when he signed the legislation creating the institution.
Further, Truman is not the only high-profile U.S. public official to call for the abolition of the CIA’s operational activities. Former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., wanted to abolish the agency and transfer its intelligence functions to appropriate existing U.S. government departments. For example, weapons intelligence would be under the U.S. Department of Defense, political intelligence under the State Department and non-public economic intelligence under the Commerce Department.
What’s more, placing intelligence gathering and covert operations in separate government institutions helps prevent the government’s covert operations wing from influencing or distorting the intelligence-gathering wing’s reports to support its own goals. This separation addresses the inherent or at least potential conflict-of-interest problem that occurs when one institution is home to both research and operations functions.
Equally significant, placing the covert operations function in the U.S. Department of Defense would give the president more direct oversight of those operations than if they remain with the CIA. In other words, covert operations as part of the U.S. DOD -- whose secretary of defense regularly speaks with the president -- would improve their visibility and accountability via more-frequent policy reviews. It would also make it harder for an improvisational or rogue/unauthorized group in the department to create a “shadow operation” -- literally, an unauthorized covert foreign policy or para-military policy.
Truman: An Agency For Intelligence-Gathering Only
The risk of the potential creation of covert operations and para-military policies not authorized by and hidden from the U.S. president is at the core of Truman’s Dec. 1963 complaint about the CIA: By that point, the CIA had created numerous covert operations, missions and projects -- the sort of “strange activities” in which Truman never intended the CIA to get involved.
In other words, to Truman in Dec. 1963, the CIA was an agency that had run amok, and although the former president could have called for the end of the CIA’s operational duties at any time, the fact that he timed his complaint to be published one month after the JFK assassination is significant. At minimum, Truman’s column is an expression of his concern about a CIA that had strayed far from its creators’ intent. At maximum, Truman’s column -- published when a stunned nation was still grieving and exhibiting shock and confusion over JFK’s death, and as suspicions of a plot reverberated across America -- is one of the earliest expressions of doubt concerning the government's official narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and unaided to assassinate President Kennedy.
Further, the year-later release of the Warren Commission’s report on the JFK assassination -- which concluded that Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy with three rifle shots, and that Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald two days after Oswald’s arrest -- did little to dispel public concern that the report was implausible and unconvincing. In the months and immediate years that followed, assassination researchers would rebuke the Warren Commission for its grossly slipshod investigation procedures -- particularly for failing to collect 100 percent of the evidence, and for failing to analyze evidence it had collected -- and for other serious violations of basic protocols for criminal investigations.
Those doubts by the American people and by assassination researchers about the lone-gunman conclusion would increase in 1978, when a second investigation, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), concluded that President Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a plot/conspiracy. However, the committee was unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy.
Making Public JFK Assassination Files Held By The CIA Would Clarify Much
Further, as noted, Truman’s complaint is not an indictment of the CIA in the aftermath of the tragedy that occurred in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963 -- one of the darkest and most ignominious days in the nation’s history -- a day that changed the trajectory of both U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
That said, the U.S. intelligence community in general, and the Central Intelligence Agency specifically, could resolve many of the questions/anomalies that form the mystery at the center of this case -- and fill in the dozens of gaps left by the Warren Commission -- by making public more than 1,100 classified files related to the JFK assassination.
In particular, when made public, the classified files -- of CIA Officer George Joannides; CIA Officer David Atlee Philips, who was involved in pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald; Birch D O’Neal, who as counter-intelligence head of the CIA, opened a file on defector Oswald; and the files of CIA Officers Howard Hunt, William King Harvey, Anne Goodpasture, and David Sanchez Morales -- will help the nation determine what really happened in Dallas, who Oswald was and how the CIA handled Oswald’s file.
However, the CIA says the Joannides’ files and the files of the CIA officers -- which the Agency said are “not believed relevant” to the JFK assassination -- must remain classified until at least 2017, and perhaps longer, due to U.S. national security. But the CIA’s national security claim has never been independently verified, according to JFKFacts.org Moderator Jefferson Morley.
Morley v. CIA – An Attempt To Obtain The Full Truth
Morley is the plaintiff in the ongoing Morley v. CIA suit, which seeks to make public Joannides’ classified files.
In Morley’s suit, his attorney has responded to the CIA’s latest brief, on the issue of court fees. Having won on appeal twice, Morley argued that the standard practice of the U.S government paying court fees for a successful appeal should apply. The CIA countered that the litigation has not generated any significant new information, and therefore the government should not have to pay the court fees. The issue is now in the hands of U.S. Judge Richard Leon.
It must be underscored that, to date, there is no smoking gun or incontrovertible evidence of a plot or conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, but there is a pattern of suspicious activity, along with a series of anomalies and a commonality of interests among key parties, that compel additional research and the release of non-public documents.
Further, the CIA probably is not covering up some tectonic, systemic crisis-triggering secret about the assassination of President Kennedy, or even evidence of a colossal Agency operational failure that would prompt the American people to call for a dismantling of the national security state apparatus.
However, until all of the JFK assassination files are made public, the pattern of suspicious activity, anomalies, and commonality of interests, along with the observations of the investigators and public officials -- including former President Harry Truman's Dec. 1963 call for the elimination of the CIA’s operational duties -- form a preponderance of evidence that strongly suggest that -- at minimum -- the American people do not know the full truth regarding the assassination of President Kennedy, and that the Agency is hiding something.
Laying it out that way, wow, he really made some serious enemies and pissed off a lot of people.
I don’t want to seem like I’m idealizing the guy, either. I’m no fan of the Kennedy clan. Hell, the drunken sot Chappaquiddick Ted couldn’t croak fast enough for me.
But at the very least, JFK wasn’t a communist piece of crap like most dems are today... and it just - galls the hell out of me - that it could be pulled off like that, so easily.
And I remember reading somewhere about all of the eyewitness deaths that occurred shortly afterwards as well. Murder upon murder... and gotten away with, apparently.
I was three when it happened, so everything I know of it, has been basically what we’ve found out over the intervening years. Also read Manchester’s “Death of a President” and “They’ve Killed The President” when I was a teen.
It’s just one of those things where I’d like to see some justice done.
Are you sure about that?
2) The rifle couldn't be perfectly sighted in using the scope (i.e., thereby eliminating the above overshoot completely) without installing two metal shims (small metal plates), which were not present when the rifle arrived for testing, and were never found.[64] Frazier testified that there was "a rather severe scrape" on the scope tube, and that the sight could have been bent or damaged. He was unable to determine when the defect occurred before the FBI received the rifle and scope on November 27, 1963.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_rifle
Yes he certainly had lots of enemies. But who but the government could falsely autopsy results? I don’t think the mob or Castro has his brain, only the government knows where it is.
And after they allowed that, they turned him into a piece of trash with the all of the alleged sex scandals. I remember thinking that wow, I am supposed to hate this guy now.
Rest assured they will not get away with it. God is on the throne and he sees everything.
You know, sometimes I think that too... but as I’ve gotten older, I’m of the mindset that I’d rather see outright bastards pay dearly for treachery than wait for “celestial justice”...
And a few times they did pay... Mussolini getting strung up upside down; Hitler doing the gasoline shake and bake outside the Bunker; Lenin croaking; Stalin croaking; Trosky getting the axe; Mao croaking; Che getting a whole bunch of holes blown through him... Khomenie getting spun out of his casket by grief-crazed sand fleas... Ceausescu getting a whole bunch of holes blown through him... Kaddafi and his lunacy being extinguished. Saddam Hussein getting hanged.
That’s justice.
Hundreds of thousands of murdered souls, and the bastards of the world just go on murdering more. But once in a while, you get to witness some of the bastards getting their well-deserved rewards at the hands of their would-be victims.
Waiting for some ethereal version of justice... I just can’t go there anymore. It’s not enough for me. Maybe some day, it will be, but not now.
Welcome to Free Republic, by the way, in case no one told you.
I read an interesting book somewhere that pretty much debunked the universal myth of the omnipotent CIA with their devilish cunning manipulating the world with their evil trickery and instead pointed out that the CIA hardly achieved one damn thing that helped American interests anywhere on the planet.
They propped up the wrong governments, funneled billions of dollars to crooks and incompetents, utterly misread the situation on the ground, took at face value whatever BS their “allies” in their theater of action told them and never foresaw any of the world-changing events that occurred in the decades after their formation.
They assumed the Soviet Union would last indefinitely, indeed they described East Germany as the world’s ninth largest economy right up until the Wall fell, they didn’t anticipate the rise of Islamism, missed out on the warning signs prior to the Korean War, the Yom Kippur War and the first Gulf War, had no idea about what was going on in the Arab Spring, screwed up the Vietnam War magisterially, etc etc.
I guess if you think of them less as super-spies with James Bond like powers and think of them more as paper shufflers who have a nice cosy berth in the government it all becomes clearer.
Do you know by any chance what the Marksmanship categories are for the Marine Corps? (as in what they were in ‘61-’63/Oswald) I believe he was labeled a “marksman” which I thought was the lowest level.
We won the Cold War.
Yeah, they had some systemic weaknesses that really contributed to some major screw-ups. Like you say, they were a bureaucracy, so they were subject to the same problems as all bureaucracies, like middle managers pushing their own agendas without much restraint, and groupthink getting in the way of better ideas.
And their “allies” that you talk about, well a lot of them were the same types who turn out to be habitual police informants. Drug dealers, thieves, drug addicts, etc. At least the police know to take everything the informants say with a grain of salt, but I don’t think the CIA had that wariness built up.
Thanks — answers my question. He was a Marksman with an inferior rifle. From Top down: Expert, Sharpshooter, Marksman.
Although he qualified in 1956 as Sharpshooter by the end of career in 1959 he had dropped to Marksman and no evidence that he practiced anywhere in the ensuing years. (Unless in Russia, ha ha)
The scope was offline but it wasn’t bad enough to keep the marksmen from hitting their targets at distances approximating Kennedy’s distance from Oswald. And it’s possible that the scope was sighted better before Oswald disposed of it in his rush to leave the Depository- the scrape on the scope tube could be a sign of that.
The rifle tests are described in this section of the Warren Report. You’ll want to read pages 444-447. It’s a PDF file. They had three men test the rifle, mostly using the scope but once with the iron sights.
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/pdf/WH3_Simmons.pdf
Physics tells the story of conspiracy or not. Watch the headshot. Energy is transferred to an object in the same direction it is moving. In this case, right to left...........NOT down and rear to front...
It is two shots in six seconds, when you consider the clock starts with the first shot. Easily done.
Get your facts straight. The Bullet was not pristine and it was in Connally’s thigh, not from Kennedy’s stretcher.
“...Get your facts straight....”
I’ll make a note of it.
Can you take 3 shots in 6 seconds?
Thank you for citing the difference!
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