Free Legacy of Secrecy by Lamar Waldron Page B

career CIA man. As the Deputy Director for Plans, Helms
    was essentially the highest-ranking operations official in the CIA. In
    other words, Helms focused on covert operations instead of on the
    budgetary, personnel, publicity, and Congressional-oversight issues
    the CIA’s top two officials had to deal with in addition to their main
    functions of gathering and evaluating intelligence.
    Helms had not been involved with the Bay of Pigs, which is one rea-
    son he was promoted to Deputy Director for Plans after JFK had forced
    those who were responsible to leave the CIA. McCone was a wealthy
    industrialist and former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, with
    no intelligence experience. General Carter’s background was in the
    military. The only other official technically above Helms was Lyman
    Kirkpatrick, formerly the CIA’s Inspector General, who had delivered
    a scathing report about the CIA’s performance during the Bay of Pigs.
    Kirkpatrick had been a rising star in the CIA until he was stricken with
    polio in the previous decade which left him confined to a wheelchair.
    By 1963, Kirkpatrick was in a newly created position called Executive
    Director, but he had little active role in covert operations. Essentially,
    that left Helms free to do whatever he wanted, with little or no effective
    oversight. With thousands of agents and operatives around the world,
    it usually fell to Helms to decide which operational reports addressed to
    the CIA’s Director should actually be brought to McCone’s attention.
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    LEGACY OF SECRECY
    Officially, the CIA’s roles in the JFK-Almeida coup plan were limited
    to getting US intelligence assets into Cuba and assisting the officially
    sanctioned exile leaders: Harry, Artime, Ray, Menoyo, and Varona. As
    part of helping Harry Williams, the CIA also carried out several opera-
    tions approved by Bobby and JFK. As described shortly, these included
    handling the initial payment of $50,000 to Almeida through a foreign
    account, and maintaining surveillance on Almeida’s family after they
    had left Cuba on a pretext for another country. The CIA’s role in assisting
    Artime was much bigger, and included helping him set up and supply
    exile camps in Central America, since any exile operations by Bobby’s
    leaders were supposed to be based outside the US. The CIA’s support
    for Artime eventually topped $7 million, and was handled under the
    code name AMWORLD. While JFK was President, support for Artime’s
    small hit-and-run raids, as well as the lesser backing for those of Ray,
    Menoyo, and Varona, was not intended to have any serious effect on
    Castro. For JFK and Bobby, it was intended mainly as a way to deniably
    support seemingly “autonomous” exile groups that were really under
    their control. The exile leaders’ role was really to have their own way to
    get into Cuba for the coup, so they could be part of the new provisional
    government with Almeida.
    Even within the CIA, AMWORLD was an unusually secret operation,
    and many of those who knew about it saw it only as a way for the United
    States to offer Artime clandestine support; they didn’t know about
    Almeida and the upcoming coup. For example, Desmond FitzGerald,
    the patrician blue blood who reported directly to Helms as his Chief
    of Cuban Operations, was fully aware of the JFK-Almeida coup plan,
    and Bobby had introduced FitzGerald to Harry at Bobby’s Hickory Hill
    estate. However, FitzGerald’s assistants apparently didn’t know about
    Almeida, and were thus confused about why the US was secretly fun-
    neling so much money and support to Artime. With so much secrecy
    surrounding the JFK-Almeida coup plan and AMWORLD, officials like
    Helms and FitzGerald found ways to keep other secrets even from their
    own superiors.34
    The secrets Hoover was keeping from the Kennedys pale beside those
    being kept by Richard Helms. Not only was Helms deceiving JFK and
    Bobby, he was also withholding crucial information from CIA