1961 JFK disbands and replaces the CIA with something better

[oscssw]

Aug 13, 2022 7:12:58 GMT lordroel said:

Okay lets keep this thread focus on the 1961 JFK disbands and replaces the CIA with something better and not what the cIA did ore did not do as we might end up with current events which will force me to move ore close this thread.

I wholeheartedly back, our leader lordroel's, very wise order.   This ATL idea is far too intriguing not to explore it thoroughly.

Unfortunetaley, at 70,  William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan who created and led the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA during World War II, is too old for the job.   How about one of his younger senior OSS executives for the job?

Got to research this more after I deal with Bismarck.

[oscssw]

You folks are going to unjustly think I have started drinking early today. well I have not but I will not blame you for thinking so after you read my idea.

I submit, for your consideration, James Maurice Gavin,Lieutenant General USA (Ret.) His WW II combat record is out standing, at the age of thirty-seven, he was on the fast track to becoming Army Chief of Staff.
In 1958, however, he abruptly resigned from the army following disputes over the development of ballistic missiles. The Arthur D. Little research company in Massachusetts offered him a lucrative salary and a vice presidency, a job that gave him access to a new group of political leaders, such as those surrounding Senator John F. Kennedy, who was running for U.S. president in 1960. Gavin became an adviser to Kennedy's campaign—contributing significantly to it's success.

After Kennedy's election, Gavin was asked to serve as ambassador to France, the idea being that a soldier with his credentials would be able to work with Charles de Gaulle president of France. Relations with France were prickly. The USA was concerned that France would not cooperate in international affairs. There was considerable evidence that the CIA was involved in covert ops that opposed French interests; making Gavin's job a real bitch.

Gavin's relations with de Gaulle were stiff at first but grew more cordial as a general trust developed. The U.S. State Department, headed by Dean Rusk, was alarmed by Gavin's brash estimates of the French view toward granting Algerian independence and exclusion of Great Britain from the common market.

Gavin saw the Kennedy administration as a vehicle for dramatic change and, personally, as a vehicle for his ideas. Kennedy's assassination was a tragic blow. The rise of Lyndon Johnson was a double blow to Gavin's hopes for change. The escalation of America's role in the Asian war whetted Gavin's appetite for dealing with the issue of keeping "limited" wars contained. He saw immediately that the policies of Johnson and his advisers would enlarge the war until it became unmanageable. He spoke out against saturation bombing, which he felt simply hardened resistance. He suggested the creation of secure enclaves of U.S. troops in strategic areas to support the South Vietnamese, whom, he thought, had to be trained to fight their own war. Withdrawal of U.S. forces was always a consideration to Gavin, and he rejected the notion of domino Communist expansion as a naive perception of Asian politics.

Gavin challenged conventional government and military thinking in the 1960s and sacrificed his career in defense of his beliefs regarding the direction of defense spending and military intervention in Southeast Asia. Despite his limited early education, he was a creative military and social thinker who used his corporate status to prevail upon government to listen to his ideas concerning effective use of American influence on Europe and on undeveloped nations.

I really think he is an excellent choice to replace Ike's Dog robber Smith as head of CIA. His orders from JFK, with the consent of the congress, would be to vet it's leaders and personnel for removal, quickly dismantle the CIA, smoothly transition it's necessary functions to whatever organization(s) replaces it or back to the Uniformed Services and the State Dept.

He had the proven command track record, a successful, if short, high level business experience and was the right temperament to break the mold and build something new and functional. His grasp of strategic matters was excellent and he was a war hero at a time when that really meant something. He was also not an ass licking political wh0re in uniform. Yup I think he is worth looking closely at.

Now I will have my first drink of the day a beer with my lunch, followed by a cigar. .

[miletus12]

1. Vance led to that idiot, Noriega (in a US prison for a while on drug charges and weapons smuggling.), then they did a Curly Shuffle on him as they usually do on a CIA stoolie who  to squeals. It was an unnecessary imperialist war since we had a setup in perpetua to begin. The Chinese are in Panama running the canal. If war comes, we will have to shut them down and that5 is unnecessary bloodshed on top of unnecessary bloodshed.

2. Singapore was the right way. What Cook told Blair was the wrong way. See 1. 
    

[lordroel]

Aug 13, 2022 20:39:10 GMT miletus12 said:

1. Vance led to that idiot, Noriega (in a US prison for a while on drug charges and weapons smuggling.), then they did a Curly Shuffle on him as they usually do on a CIA stoolie who  to squeals. It was an unnecessary imperialist war since we had a setup in perpetua to begin. The Chinese are in Panama running the canal. If war comes, we will have to shut them down and that5 is unnecessary bloodshed on top of unnecessary bloodshed.

2. Singapore was the right way. What Cook told Blair was the wrong way. See 1. 
    

I assume this post belongs in this thread as it mentions the CIA.

[oscssw]

shadow007 just let me know if I'm stealing your thunder and I'll bow out and let you get on with the job.

Here is some food for thought friends. Please note I see the Nixon Reforms of 1972 under James R. Schlesinger as the transition model for what I think Gavin should do under JFK, only the ATL end game as suggested byshadow007 is an entirely different US Intel system/agency/return to the pre CIA ways.

Idea for Creating a C.I.A. Grew Out of Pearl Harbor By David Binder Special to The New York Times Dec. 26, 1974

WASHINGTON, Dec. 25—American political and military leaders created the Central Intelligence Agency after World War II as a needed instrument of global power.

The concept had its origin in the failure of American intelligence services to coordinate signals warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. As early as 1944, Gen. William J. Donovan, chief of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, proposed establishment of an agency to centralize intelligence efforts.

Yet the real impetus came from the decision of President Truman in 1946 that the United States must shoulder new responsibility as a major world power and should counter what was seen to be a menacing expansionist challenge by the Soviet Union.

A Truman Step In 1946

Mr. Truman established a National Intelligence Authority in 1946 and, under it, a Central Intelligence Group—the forerunner of the C.I.A. But genuine centralization of United States intelligence was still years away.

The Central Intelligence Agency was formally chartered under the National Security Act of 1947.

The United States was already engaged in sporadic undercover political operations against Communist forces at the time in Germany, Greece and Italy. But the operations were initially conducted from the Department of State under Frank G. Wisner, a former O.S.S. officer.

“Until 1950 nothing much was accomplished,” Ray S. Cline, a retired C.I.A. official, recalled. “It was sort of a floundering period.” But Mr. Cline, who served as C.I.A.'s Deputy Director of Intelligence from 1962 to 1964, acknowledged that the agency “developed a commitment to political operations” overseas at the very outset.

By early 1951 the C.I.A. had acquired a manpower of about 5,000 and its influence was rapidly spreading around the world and through the Washington bureaucracy. It was a period of adventurism and of some embarrassing defeats.

Together with Britain's secret intelligence service, the C.I.A. began a series of small invasions of Albania—by sea and by air — in the expectation of sparking an overthrow of the Communist leadership in Tirana. Nearly all of the invaders were captured.

Soon the agency was supervising the operations of another anti‐Communist force—11,000 Chinese Nationalist troops—on the eastern frontier of Burma. The C.I.A. was also parachuting spies onto the Chinese mainland and the Ukraine to make contact with other anti‐Communists.

In Western countries, mainly in Italy, France and Germany, the C.I.A. was secretly sponsoring scores of anti‐Communist political parties, newspapers, radio stations, trade unions and even student groups.

The double aim was, in the words of an old C.I.A. man, “to prevent Communist takeovers, such as occurred in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and where possible to push the Communists back.”

Efforts Are Merged

But grave shortcomings had emerged in the C.I.A. attempt to conduct the clandestine collection of intelligence separately from activist political operations. “They tended to cross each other up,” said an agency veteran.

To eliminate rivalries, Walter Bedell Smith, the director from 1950 to 1953, merged the clandestine collection operations with the covert operations. Mr. Wisner was brought over from the State Department. This was the birth of what the C.I.A. called its clandestine services.

In addition, Mr. Smith and his deputy, Allen W. Dulles, placed new emphasis on the analysis of intelligence and on longer range estimates of enemy potential. Mr. Smith inaugurated an Office of National Estimates under the Harvard historian, William Langer.

The office soon became the apex of the intelligence community, a group of 10 seasoned military men and academics whose job was to sift through masses of intelligence data and make detached judgments on major foreign developments in terms of the national interest.

In the nineteen‐fifties, the C.I.A. also developed largescale intelligence service industries, both in purely technical fields and in social‐political enterprises.

Dummy Groups Set Up

It financed establishment of two huge radio stations—Radio Free Europe for broadcasts to East Europe and Radio Liberation (later Radio Liberty) for powerful transmissions to the Soviet Union. It set up dummy foundations, dummy companies, dummy public relations firms and dummy airlines. It placed agents in American student organizations and trade unions—all with a view to assist in penetrating foreign countries.

On the technical side, the C.I.A. sponsored development of a whole range of reconnaissance and monitoring equipment, among which was the high altitude U‐2 spy plane. Starting in 1956, the U‐2s ranged with impunity over the Soviet Union, China and later Vietnam and Cuba bringing back telltale photographs of missile sites and other military installations.

When Mr. Dulles succeeded Mr. Smith as Director, he persuaded President Eisenhower to accept the C.I.A. as a national service reporting directly to the White House, with its estimates being considered essential elements of the policy‐making process.

It was the U‐2, however, that caused Mr. Eisenhower one of his greatest embarassments. One of the spy planes was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 on the eve of the President's intended summit meeting with the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev. The Administration at first denied that the craft was a spy plane, and then President Eisenhower acknowledged that it was and accepted responsibility for the flight. That was the beginning of an unmasking of dozens of C.I.A. operations that had been conducted more or less in secrecy —including the 1954 toppling of a Communist oriented government in Guatemala.

Defect Disclosed

The militant anti‐Communist motivation of the United States Government continued undiminished into the Kennedy Administration, which allowed the C.I.A. managed invasion of Cuba to go ahead in April, 1961.

Its total failure revealed a serious defect in the C.I.A. structure—the men responsible for analyzing and estimating intelligence were kept in ignorance of plans for covert operations like the abortive Bay of Pigs landings.


This was remedied under the new Director, John A. McCone, who saw to it that the analysts and estimators were consulted about covert political actions.

But the Cuba invasion disclosed another disturbing trend in United States policy‐making: the tendency to allow relatively modest undercover intelligence operations to balloon into large military actions.

It went that way in Indochina, from Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia, and the C.I.A. bore most of the public blame.

“The C.I.A. should have been doing rifle‐shot operations, not full scale military operations,” Mr. Cline observed ruefully. Still, he recalled the McCone years from 1962 to 1966 as “a period of peak performance” by the C.I.A.

There were C.I.A. voices then, among the analysts, warning against a deeper American involvement in the Indochina conflict. But President Johnson listened less and less to them and more and more to his military advisers.

A decline in the C.I.A.'s access to the White House set in, and its role in policy formation continued to wane under Pres‐ ident Nixon. The agency's product remained much the same. But its customer had changed.

President Johnson simply did not like the gloomy assessment of the Vietnam war outlook given him by the agency. President Nixon was determined to end involvement of United States forces in the Indochina conflict and did so through consultations with the parties involved rather than with his intelligence advisers.

Mr. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, continued to rely on the technical data assembled by the C.I.A., especially for the conduct of strategic arms talks with the Soviet leadership. But they were hardly interested in the traditional intelligence estimates of the C.I.A.

In late 1972, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger agreed on a major reform of the C.I.A. The President appointed James R. Schlesinger to replace Richard Helms as director and clean out the agency.

In his few months as director, Mr. Schlesinger forced the retirement or resignation of more than 1,000 of the 15,000 C.I.A. employes. His successor, William E. Colby, a graduate of clandestine services, proceeded with a structural reform in 1973, abolishing the old Office of National Estimates system.

The structural changes were demoralizing for many C.I.A. old timers. But worse still was series of revelations throughout 1973 and 1974 that the agency had been involved in some questionable and even criminal operations in the domestic politics of the United States. These included the following:

¶The use of C.I.A. equipment and former C.I.A. agents to break into the Watergate head quarters of the Democratic party.

¶The Nixon Administration's alleged use of C.I.A. operatives to monitor activities of political dissidents—a task nominally the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

¶The assignment of the C.I.A. to train more than 50 American police officers, including 14 from New York, in clandestine arts.

All these activities were in apparent violation of the C.I.A.'s original charter and mission barring it from internal security effort.

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“We were good and secret and highly motiviated until 1965,” Mr. Cline remarked. “Now the C.I.A. is in the open and it looks bad.

“I am concerned because the idea is being skillfully promoted that subversion is a C.I.A. invention,” Mr. Cline concluded, “whereas it is a doctrinal policy of the Russians.