Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (11 page)

In the
hearing room, overseeing the testimony for the CIA and making sure no secrets
were released to the public, was Richard Helms, who would later go on to become
the agency's director. Years later, he would look back on the testimony and
say: "They were all sworn. Knowing what they knew and what actually went
on, if it isn't perjury I don't understand the meaning of the word."

Richard
Helms had reason to be interested in the perjury over the U-2. In 1977 he was
convicted in federal court and sentenced to two years in prison for a similar
offense. Questioned by the chairman of the same Senate committee about the
CIA's involvement in a coup in Chile, he lied to Fulbright and claimed there
was none. Although Helms would later assert that his oath of secrecy to the CIA
permitted him to lie to Congress, federal judge Barrington D. Parker strongly
disagreed. Telling Helms, "You now stand before this court in disgrace and
shame," the judge went on to ridicule his claim that lying to Congress to
protect secrets was acceptable.

If public
officials embark deliberately on a course to disobey and ignore the laws of our
land because of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and belief that there
are earlier commitments and considerations which they must observe, the future
of our country is in jeopardy.

There are
those employed in the intelligence security community of this country . . . who
feel that they have a license to operate freely outside the dictates of the law
and otherwise to orchestrate as they see fit. Public officials at every level,
whatever their position, like any other person, must respect and honor the
Constitution and the laws of the United States.

Despite
his stern lecture, Parker suspended Helms's sentence and added a $2,000 fine.

Although
Fulbright treated the president's men with kid gloves and Eisenhower's role
never emerged, there was great bitterness within the administration over the
hearings. Dulles told Herter that he was "very disturbed" by the
action, then added, like a gangster in a Mafia movie: "We should have kept
our mouths shut."
[1]

At NSA,
the implications of the latest intercepts were clear. Cuban bomber pilots were
now being trained within the Soviet bloc.

On January
19, 1961, Washington was caught in the icy grip of the coldest weather in
memory. Carpenters, bundled like Inuits, hammered away on the grandstand for
the next day's inauguration. An artist carefully dabbed white paint on the last
few stars surrounding the great seal emblazoned on the presidential reviewing
box. Opposite, in the White House, two men took their places at the highly
polished table in the Cabinet Room. Dwight David Eisenhower, looking tired, sat
for the last time in the tall leather chair from which he had led so many
momentous discussions over the past eight years. With the Cold War still as
frozen as the rows of stiff rosebushes outside his tall windows, Eisenhower's
early dream of amity with Russia was dashed.

Seated
beside the president was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, tan and youthful. Like a
storeowner whose family business has been seized by the bank, Eisenhower
briefed his successor on a wide assortment of pending business. Oddly, although
sitting on his desk were the plans for a massive, highly secret U.S.-sponsored
invasion of Cuba, primed and ready to go within weeks, Eisenhower barely
mentioned the island during the lengthy foreign policy briefing. The subject
came up, in a sort of by-the-way manner, only during a discussion concerning
Laos: "At the present time," Eisenhower said, "we are helping
train anti-Castro forces in Guatemala." He added, "It was the policy
of this government to help such forces to the utmost."

In his
last hours as president, Eisenhower issued what sounded to his successor like
an order. "In the long run," he insisted, "the United States
cannot allow the Castro Government to continue to exist in Cuba." At
almost that same moment, across the river in the Pentagon's Gold Room, the
Joint Chiefs had come to a decision of their own. The only answer, Joint Chiefs
chairman Lyman L. Lemnitzer concluded, was for an all-out U.S. military invasion.
War.

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Early on
the morning of January 20, 1961, Washington lay buried beneath half a foot of
freshly fallen snow, as if sleeping under a down comforter. The nation's
capital had been pounded by a juggernaut of Arctic cold and freezing
precipitation that had rolled over the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.
Throughout the region, schools, business, and factories were shut down, and
airports diverted inbound flights. It was the coldest winter in a
quarter-century.

By
daybreak, the military began their takeover. From Fort Belvoir, a heavy armored
division of more than a hundred snowplows, front-loaders, dump trucks, and road
graders crossed into the city to attack the ice and heavy drifts. A cordon of
one hundred troops, wearing red brassards, began taking positions around the
Capitol Building. A thousand more troops stretched out along Pennsylvania
Avenue, and sixteen ambulances were positioned at key locations to care for
anyone injured.

In a
temporary military command post set up on the corner of East Executive and
Pennsylvania Avenues, Northwest, Army Major General C. K. Gailey directed the
invasion. Through the lazy, swirling snow, heavy transport vehicles rumbled
across bridges over the Potomac and headed toward Capitol Hill. On the backs of
the long trucks were Pershing missiles with warheads as pointed as
well-sharpened pencils. Convoys of tanks, howitzers, and armored personnel
carriers followed. Thousands of soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines checked
their weapons and assembled at designated locations near the White House.
Codewords were assigned: Red Carpet for the radio network, Blueberry for the
closed-circuit television network, Battery for the assembly areas, and
Greenland for the dispersal areas.

From the
broad front windows of Quarters 1, the official residence of the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer watched as his military
quietly took over the nation's capital. Lemnitzer had perhaps the best view in
all of greater Washington. The house was perched atop a steep hill on Fort Myer
in Arlington, Virginia. As he stood in his living room, on the highly polished
parquet floor, a taupe overcoat covered his formal blue uniform and a white
scarf hid his four-in-hand tie. Nearby, framed by an American flag and the
official flag of the Chairman, hung an oversize oil painting of the general,
appearing serious and in command. Below him, the city looked like a child's
snow globe, shaken to produce a cascade of gentle snowflakes over the great
monuments, all within view. In the foreground the Potomac River, gray and
frozen, wrapped the city like a silver ribbon on a belated Christmas present.
Beyond, he could clearly see the massive white dome of the Capitol, where his
official limousine was waiting to take him.

In just a
few hours, John Fitzgerald Kennedy would be inaugurated as the thirty-fifth
president of the United States. Unbeknownst to the public, the ceremony would
largely be a military operation. In addition to his Secret Service contingent,
the new president would be guarded by a cordon of two dozen military men
surrounding the Presidential Box, and as he traveled to the White House, an
escort of military vehicles would lead the way.

To some
who watched the tanks and missiles roll through the city in preparation for the
inaugural parade, the idea of an actual military takeover was appealing. Just
below the surface, it was a dangerous time in America. For many in the
military, the distrust of civilian leadership ran deep, to the point where a
number of senior officers believed that their civilian leaders had been
subverted by international communism. It was a belief exacerbated by the
election of Kennedy, a socially liberal Democrat. "The presence of a
benign and popular General of the Army in the White House had a calming
influence on people and kept the Rightists' audiences small," said one
account at the time. "John F. Kennedy's election buttressed their worse
fears."

On U.S.
military bases around the world, senior officers were spreading fear that
card-carrying Communists were in place in high offices throughout the federal
government. Among these officers' key targets was Earl Warren, Chief Justice of
the U.S. Supreme Court. During a televised meeting of Project Alert, a
right-wing anti-Communist group, Colonel Mitchell Paige, a retired Marine Corps
Medal of Honor winner, told the TV audience that Chief Justice Warren should be
hanged.

Even
before the election, some senior officers attempted to indoctrinate their
troops into the "correct" way to vote. One of those was Major General
Edwin A. Walker, who was stationed at the U.S. Army base in Augsburg, West
Germany, home to a key NSA listening post. In October 1960, as his soldiers
were preparing to send home their absentee ballots, Walker counseled them to
first consult the voting guide of the archconservative Americans for
Constitutional Action. Walker, who considered himself a
"superpatriot," even set up a special hot line for troops to call to
get "guidance" in voting. In addition, Walker would frequently
address his soldiers and their dependents on the perils of Communist subversion
and pass out John Birch Society propaganda. A newspaper circulated to the
troops in Germany,
The Overseas Weekly,
charged that Walker had called
Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman "definitely pink" and
journalists Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Eric Sevareid
pro-Communists.

At Fort
Smith, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a series of "strategy-for-survival"
conferences took place. Those attending were told that "your
Representative in this area has voted 89 per cent of the time to aid and abet
the Communist Party." Major General William C. Bullock, the area
commander, persuaded the Little Rock Chamber of Commerce to sponsor a similar
meeting in the state capital. At the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida,
Project Alert showed the film
Operation Abolition,
which depicted
student protests against the rabid anticommunist House Un-American Activities
Committee as entirely Communist-inspired and Communist-led.

Within
weeks of the inauguration, retired vice admiral Ralph Wilson, chairman of the
U.S. Maritime Board, would find himself in trouble for a proposed speech to the
American Legion advocating an American invasion of Cuba. "It seems in this
Administration," he complained, "that you can't talk about limited
war or Cold War or the realities of the Russian menace."

The
atmosphere led some to thoughts of a possible military coup. Inspired by the
tension between the far-right generals and the new administration, writers
Fletcher Knebel and Charles Waldo Bailey II began drafting an outline for a
novel. Eventually entitled
Seven Days in May,
it would focus on a
military takeover led by a right-wing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(played in the filmed version by Burt Lancaster) who was convinced that a
liberal president (Fredric March) was turning soft on America's enemies.

At 10:25
Lemnitzer entered his official limousine, a black elongated Cadillac with fins
the shape of sabers, for the brief ride to the Capitol Building. Often
described as bearlike—more for his powerful shoulders and booming voice than
for his five-foot-eleven-inch frame—the four-star general had a solid,
scholarly look about him. "Studious, handsome, thoughtful-looking,"
said one newspaper. Nevertheless, he had completed only two years of college at
West Point, because of the need for officers during World War I. But by the
time he was rushed out of the military academy, the war had ended. Over the
years Lemnitzer gained a reputation as a planner; during World War II he served
as an aide to General Eisenhower in London and later joined General George
Patton during the Sicilian campaign. Eisenhower looked on Lemnitzer as his protégé,
appointing him first Vice Chief of Staff and later, in 1957, Chief of Staff,
the top job in the Army.

Finally,
with only a few months to go in office, Eisenhower named Lemnitzer to the
highest-ranking position in the Armed Forces. "The most important military
job in the world was taken over last week by Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the new
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," said an editorial in the
Los
Angeles Times.
Two days before the inauguration, the chairman held a
luncheon for Eisenhower in Quarters 1. "He thoroughly enjoyed
himself," Lemnitzer wrote to his daughter. By then, according to one
observer, Lemnitzer's regard for Eisenhower "bordered on reverence."
In Lemnitzer, Eisenhower would have a window into the next administration.

Following
a meeting with Robert S. McNamara, newly named by Kennedy to be the next
secretary of defense, Lemnitzer passed on to Eisenhower a hot piece of inside
information. Kennedy, he said, might have decided to name retired general James
M. Gavin secretary of the Army. The idea outraged Eisenhower. Gavin had retired
in a huff, upset over Eisenhower's space policies, and had then written a book
critical of the administration. Three other generals also left and then wrote
about various policy disagreements. Eisenhower was so furious at the criticism
that he ordered his Joint Chiefs Chairman to look into whether he could recall
the four men to active duty and court-martial them. Such an action would have
been unheard of, if not illegal.