Plots Written in Disappearing Ink

THE CIA

After six months, 11,000 pages of testimony and more than 100 witnesses, the select Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders last week yielded a report that eerily replicated the shadowy world of its subject matter. Words like "ambiguity," "deniability" and "euphemism" flicker over the record. Yes, said the committee, "the United States was implicated in several assassination plots." No, the U.S. never carried out an execution of a foreign leader.

But responsibility for the attempts is written in disappearing ink. Nowhere could the committee establish that a U.S. President had authorized an international hit. The CIA agents involved almost always acted in the belief that they were sanctioned by higher authority -even "the highest authority" -but as North Carolina Democratic Senator Robert Morgan noted: "We have been able to establish neither responsibility nor innocence."

The committee's conclusions in the five cases under investigation:

The Congo's Patrice Lumumba. The committee did find evidence to permit "a reasonable inference that the plot to assassinate Lumumba was authorized by President Eisenhower." In any case, in the fall of 1960, two CIA officials were asked by superiors to assassinate Lumumba. Poisons were sent to the Congo and some exploratory steps were taken toward getting to him, but nothing came of that plot. Quite separately, in early 1961, Lumumba was killed by Congolese rivals. "It does not appear that the U.S. was in any way involved in the killing."

Cuba's Fidel Castro. At least eight times between 1960 and 1965, the CIA plotted to kill Castro. American underworld figures and Cubans hostile to Castro were enlisted. The CIA gave them encouragement, as well as lethal pills and doctored cigars, but obviously the plots failed.

The Dominican Republic's Rafael Trujillo. Some CIA agents knew that Dominican dissidents, who had enjoyed U.S. support, intended to kill the despot. The Americans supplied them with three pistols and three carbines. There is "conflicting evidence" as to whether the weapons were knowingly supplied for an assassination and whether any of them were used when Trujillo was shot down in May 1961.

South Viet Nam's Ngo Dinh Diem. The assassination in November 1963, although it was part of a coup that was started with some U.S. support, was "a spontaneous act... and was carried out without U.S. involvement or support."

Chile's General Rene Schneider. In October 1970, Schneider, commander in chief of Chile's army, was killed while resisting a kidnaping attempt. President Nixon in September had ordered the CIA "to play a direct role in organizing a military coup in Chile to prevent [Salvador] Allende's accession to the presidency," and the kidnaping was viewed as an indispensable and unavoidable element in that coup. As it happened, the CIA five days before had withdrawn its support of the particular group that pulled off the kidnaping that resulted in the general's death, but it could as easily have happened earlier. There is no evidence, however, of an American plan to harm Schneider.

The report is an extraordinary document to have issued from a branch of the Government of a superpower, and it is a fund of sometimes chilling, sometimes ludicrous lore. It reveals that on Nov. 22, 1963, the day John Kennedy was killed in Dallas, a high-ranking CIA officer named Desmond Fitzgerald was meeting in Paris with a Cuban secret agent known as AM/LASH to offer him a poison pen outfitted with a hypodermic needle. As a long-secret CIA report said, "It is likely that at the very moment President Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a Cuban agent and giving him an assassination device for use against Castro."

The committee found that the CIA was thoroughly conned by the Mafia. The agency promised the Mob a fee of $150,000 for Castro's murder, and even passed along some lethal pills to the supposed killer outside the Boom Boom Room of Miami Beach's Fontainebleau Hotel. But the Mafia never did anything to try to kill Castro. Apparently the Mafia men involved were simply stringing the CIA along to gain its protection against FBI interference in the U.S.

In some ways, the committee report is a kind of self-portrait of baffled and frustrated investigators. As it says: "The picture that emerges from the evidence is not a clear one." Assassination plots could be disguised to ensure "plausible deniability" for those higher up. Said the committee: "The custom permitted the most sensitive matters to be presented to the highest levels of the Government with the least clarity." There was also the danger of "floating authorization." Thus Richard Helms, CIA director from 1966 to 1973, testified that as deputy director he had not informed incoming Director John McCone (1961-65) about the use of Mafia characters in the Castro plots. As Helms told the committee, Allen Dulles, McCone's predecessor, had approved the plan and further authorization was unnecessary.

Heroic in War. In some cases, the Americans made the mistake of thinking they could indefinitely control dissident groups that they were supporting. The U.S. had encouraged the plotters against Diem, but then changed course. On Oct. 30, 1963, just before the coup, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge cabled Washington that he was unable to halt it. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense William Bundy cabled back from Washington: WE CANNOT ACCEPT CONCLUSION THAT WE HAVE NO POWER TO DELAY OR DISCOURAGE A COUP. Three days later, Diem was murdered.

In its conclusion, the committee sounds a never-again note. But it acknowledges some of the moral ambiguities that are involved in so sensitive a subject as foreign policy murders. What is inexcusable in peacetime becomes heroic in war -and not all intelligence operatives easily recognize the difference between the two. In wartime, it is surely justifiable to plot against, say, Hitler. Would it have been right for Americans to try to kill him in 1936? The committee, however, draws a firm distinction between wartime and peacetime assassination attempts. It recommends a law that would make it a criminal offense for anyone, including a President, to engage in assassination plots against a foreign official in peacetime.

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