You can’t please all of the people all of the time. Or so the English poet, John Lydgate, remarked, in a turn of phrase adapted and popularised by Abraham Lincoln.
Conspiracy theorists were certainly disappointed recently by the absence of evidence pointing to a second smoking gun in the final release of 80,000 pages of US government records related to the Kennedy assassination. In contrast, intelligence historians working on the history of US covert operations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were surprised and delighted to see important Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) records, White House documents, minutes of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board meetings, and National Security Council files made public for the first time in an almost complete and unredacted form.
Taking South Asia as a case in point, the Kennedy assassination documents open a fascinating window into American intelligence operations in India and activity targeting Indian citizens within the United States. New granular perspectives on the scale, scope and objectives of operations undertaken by US intelligence agencies in the Indian subcontinent (encompassing election interference, regime change; paramilitary activity; imagery intelligence [IMINT]; and signals intelligence [SIGINT]) promise to radically revise our current understanding of America’s Cold War intelligence interventions in the world's largest democracy.
On the question of scale, Cold War American diplomats frequently complained that the CIA’s presence was too large, too obvious and, consequently, oftentimes counterproductive. Ambassador Mary Seymour Olmsted, who served in New Delhi in the early 1960s, recalled that “CIA was very, very active there [India]. I know Ambassador [Chester] Bowles, for example, had some real reservations about their activities, feeling they were adding to the corruption of the country”.
It is revealing that the Kennedy assassination files contain a memorandum sent to Kennedy by his aide, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, in June 1961, that states that 47 per cent of political officers serving in US embassies abroad were Controlled American Sources (CAS) supporting CIA work in some form. In Paris, 123 diplomats in the US Embassy had some affiliation with the CIA. In Chile, 11 of the Embassy’s 13 'political officers' were CIA staff. Overall, the CIA had almost as many officers serving overseas under official cover – some 3,700 to 3,900 personnel – as the State Department employed as legitimate foreign service officers (FSOs).
The CIA itself, the Kennedy assassination records confirm, was sensitive to the pitfalls of acknowledging the existence of its stations around the world. In November 1995, David Cohen, then CIA Deputy Director of Operations, argued against confirming the locations of stations because doing so “would be a political embarrassment to the host government and would threaten ongoing sensitive operations and liaison relationships.” In the case of India, specifically, Cohen was particularly averse to transparency. “Public acknowledgement of a station in India would be a problem for the U.S. Government,” he insisted. “U.S. and India foreign relations are always delicate; the Indian Government is very sensitive to perceived slights to its national sovereignty, and public acknowledgement of a station would prove embarrassing to the Indian Government, which in turn could ask that the station be closed. If the station were closed or significantly downsized, it would affect many important intelligence collection operations."
Back in 1965, the New York Times’ correspondent in India, Tony Lukas, discovered that the CIA did its best to operate "very much on the hush-hush". In contrast to the more overt presence that the CIA adopted in other parts of the world, such as the Congo, Lukas found that, in India, it went to “great efforts to pretend that it doesn’t exist". The CIA’s attempt to mask the ever-greater numbers of its officers seconded to the US Embassy faintly amused the journalist, who found little difficulty in identifying US intelligence personnel. The CIA’s determination to keep its presence in India out of the public spotlight was made abundantly clear after he published a “light yarn” in his newspaper. Lukas’ report referenced the emergence of a "protest movement" amongst American diplomats, led by an unnamed CIA official, against plans to cull some ducks that had taken up residence in a pool within the US Embassy compound. Within days of the story’s publication, Lukas was summoned to the Embassy by the resident press attaché and tersely informed that he risked being declared persona non grata (‘PNG-ed’) by the local CIA station chief. “I was told,” Lukas advised his superiors back in New York, “that I had gravely compromised the agency’s security here... What, I asked incredulously, had I done? The answer: I had informed the Indians that the C.I.A. was operating out of the Embassy".
Further glimpses emerge from the Kennedy assassination records of the CIA’s post-war efforts to manipulate Indian national elections through “political action operation[s]”. Such activity was opposed by several US Ambassadors and, foremost amongst them, Kennedy’s man in New Delhi, the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Before taking up his post in India, Galbraith was briefed by Richard M. Bissell Jr., the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans. The Ambassador was unimpressed by the Agency’s “various spooky activities” in the subcontinent and determined to stop them. Specifically, Galbraith was “appalled and depressed” to learn of the CIA’s plans to spend a sum, “well into the millions [of dollars]” to bankroll the election expenses of pro-Western Indian politicians and subsidize local anti-communist newspapers and magazines. Such activity, Galbraith concluded, would not decisively influence Indian opinion. It was, however, likely to leak into the public domain, damaging India’s relation with the United States and compromising the Ambassador.
Galbraith had little success in curtailing CIA operations in India, in part because the Agency could point to achievements in containing communism in South Asia. In 1957, following the election of a communist administration in the southern Indian state of Kerala, the Agency worked through local labour unions, and alongside India’s ruling Congress Party, to destabilise and remove the regional government. The Kennedy assassination records reveal nothing about events in Kerala. They do, however, shed significant new light on a joint CIA and MI6 covert operation from 1963 that was initiated with the objective of removing a left-leaning government headed by Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana. Intriguingly, details of planning undertaken by the CIA and MI6 that related to British Guiana and, specifically, the emphasis it placed on using compliant labour unions to sow discord, initiate strikes, and foment economic and social unrest, closely align with earlier events in southern India. Whether the Agency drew on its experience in South Asia whilst planning subsequent covert action in Latin America remains unknown. The possibility, nonetheless, is intriguing.
Additional snippets of information disclosed in the Kennedy records relate to CIA paramilitary training provided to Indian forces subsequent to New Delhi’s brief border war with China in 1962; confirmation that India’s premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, was read into an extensive programme of CIA support extended to India’s intelligence agencies; and tensions between Langley and New Delhi over the terms on which U-2 reconnaissance flights targeted at Chinese missile ranges and nuclear facilities could be staged through India.
Aside from covert action, the Kennedy records offer an enlightening human perspective on Cold War intelligence collection in the context of non-aligned India. Reports produced by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field offices inside the United States confirm the extent to which the CIA utilised American businesspeople to accumulate economic and political intelligence on India. Likewise, new insights are provided on the domestic activities of the CIA’s San Francisco base, and how it was used to recruit local consular officials as assets, including representatives of the Government of India. Notably, under the direction of a senior CIA officer using the alias Cecil J. Klobukar, between the late 1960s and the early 1970s the Agency enjoyed considerable success in exploiting San Francisco’s diplomatic community as a source of high-grade intelligence. The effectiveness of its base in San Francisco was attributed by the Agency to the experience and expertise of Klobukar. Klobukar was in fact James A. Noel, a seasoned four-decade Agency veteran who been inducted into the secret world by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II. Before being posted to San Francisco, and easing his way into retirement, Noel distinguished himself during tours of Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Ecuador, and Cuba. Between September 1961 and July 1966, he completed two consecutive stints as CIA Head of Station in Madrid. Tasking a senior and accomplished intelligence officer, boasting a strong track record of agent recruitment, with running its San Francisco base evidently assisted the CIA to leverage foreign diplomats in the United States as valuable sources of intelligence.
As noted, while historians have welcomed an opportunity to learn more about the role secret statecraft played in shaping American foreign policy during the Cold War, not everyone celebrated the release of the Kennedy assassination records. Some observers have criticised the Trump administration’s decision to dispense with established protocols surrounding the redaction of information identifying intelligence sources and methods. One has lambasted an approach to enhanced transparency that, it is argued, will make it harder for the Agency to recruit and retain human sources in future, and that rides roughshod over a moral commitment to protect the identity of agents in perpetuity. Only time will tell if revealing so many of America’s Cold War intelligence secrets will hamper a current drive by the CIA and MI6 to recruit Russians or will compromise the very public efforts by the CIA to lure members of the Chinese Communist Party to spy for the United States.
Equally, by leading the way in declassifying a treasure-trove of historic intelligence material, Washington has inadvertently challenged others, and not least its British ally, to embrace transparency. Presently, a blanket retention of MI6 records applies, some of which date to 1909. Faced with the release of a tsunami of US Cold War intelligence files, some of which, as mentioned, detail MI6’s role in joint covert action enterprises, one wonders how much longer the British state can maintain the line that safeguarding sources and methods demands absolute secrecy.
Some cynics have contended that Britain’s aversion to greater transparency in intelligence matters is predicated less on a duty of care to agents and operations past and present, and more about maintaining the prestige, power and mystique of a secret world that has witnessed its fair share of disasters. Keith Jeffrey’s magisterial authorised history of MI6 could be taken as a case in point. By ending in 1949, just after the glories of World War 2 and Ultra, the most comprehensive and reliable account that we have to-date of British external intelligence avoids engaging with the squalor and scandal of the Cambridge Five, the ineptitude surrounding George Blake, and debacle of Suez. In fairness, not all recent British intelligence history has been regressive. Christopher Andrew’s authorised history of MI5 and Michael Goodman’s soon to be two-volume history of the Joint Intelligence Committee both address more contemporary fare.
Nevertheless, the consequences of Britian, and many inside the Global South, retaining records and acquiescing in the evolution of intelligence history along Americentric lines isn’t merely problematic for historians striving to reconstruct a secret Cold War. It has real world implications for policymakers. Few would argue that Washington or London has evidenced an especially impressive record of retaining and harnessing institutional memory, national security focused or otherwise. Fifty years has now passed since America’s “Year of intelligence”. Perhaps the present incumbent of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has got one thing right, albeit for the wrong reasons. Pulling back a curtain that shrouds the secret world a little further and demonstrating that the release of intelligence records previously deemed off limits will not induce the sky to fall is, perhaps, no bad thing.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing, after all, for intelligence historians to be able to balance American accounts of CIA covert action in India, British Guiana, the Congo, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere, with Vauxhall Cross’s perspectives, and those of indigenous intelligence actors. Doing so might even produce better policy.
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