CIA Autonomy
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By mid-1963 President Kennedy was well into several initiatives that were moving covert military operations away from the CIA, and personnel in the CIA Directorate of Operations were not happy with that direction. JFK had already transferred covert operations against North Vietnam to the Army and 1962 had seen the multi-agency Mongoose program against Cuba – with the CIA strictly in a support role. By the summer of 1963 JFK was looking at several options, including turning covert Cuban operations over to the military (if he determined to return to that tactic), exploring a totally autonomous offshore Cuban exile initiative with AMWORLD, and even pursuing the possibility of some sort of political accommodation with the Castro regime if Castro was willing to break from the Soviets.
The President had taken a number of measures to ensure oversight and control of CIA operations against Cuba, requiring sabotage projects to be proposed and reviewed in detail. The Special Group Augmented was also tasked with increased oversight of all covert operations. However we have reason to suspect that control was not nearly as complete as intended.
We have indications that the CIA, in particular the Directorate of Plans/Operations was still capable of acting acting quite autonomously, certainly at the level of JMWAVE activities – which included infiltration, exfiltration, intelligence collection and limited support for the few on- island resistance groups still rumored to exist. The extent of that operational autonomy can illustrated in one particular operation which came to be designated as TILT.
I’ve written about TILT before but my friends David Boylan and Bill Simpich continue to dig up documents which provide further insight – and a dramatic illustration of how JFK could indeed be isolated from extremely risky field activities. In the case of TILT, a mission which if it has come out as planned, would literally have shaken his administration to the core, very possibly shattering JFK’s chances for reelection.
Amazingly TILT did not even have its roots within the CIA, it evolved over a matter of months, based on rumors of Soviet missile technicians who had defected to a resistance group inside Cuba – individuals willing to reveal that Soviet ballistic missions and atomic warheads remained inside Cuba. Ultimately the rumor came to the attention of two powerful individuals highly critical of Kennedy’s actions on Cuba, William Pawley and James Eastland. Background on the project can be found in Chapter 1 of Someone Have Talked or at the following link:
https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKtilt.htm
William Pawley, had a long history with the CIA, including acting as a special advisor to President Eisenhower on the performance of the Agency. He also had close personal connections to senior CIA officers such as J.C. King, Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, Ted Shackley, Chief of Station at JMWAVE and Marshall Carter, CIA Deputy Director. In regard to the reports of Soviet defectors inside Cuba, Pawley approached both Shackley and Carter, offering his own resources and asking for JMWAVE support in extracting them.
Ultimately the operation evolved into a rather complex mission including multiple boats, a PBY type plane, a set of totally unvetted Cuban exile volunteers led by Eddie Bayo and the personal involvement of William Pawley, John Martino, Richard Billings of LIFE Magazine and a LIFE photo journalist.
None of the Cubans were cleared through standard CIA security protocols or given operational approval. And from a security standpoint, having two LIFE magazine employees recording the mission – as well as the implication that the information and ultimately the Russians would be passed on to Senator Eastland’s committee – is totally outside the boundaries of standard CIA practice.
Yet as the following documents reveal, it all happened and the mission was signed off on by various operations personnel including Deputy Director Marshall Carter and COS Shackley. Indeed the chief of the Cuba project, Desmond Fitzgerald was also read into the program at a certain point.
Incredibly, there is no sign that approval went above these individuals, to the Director of the CIA and certainly not to the Special Group Augmented, RFK or the President himself. The Operations staff at JMWAVE acted totally autonomously in supporting the mission, treating it as an intelligence collections effort, risky but within their mandate. The political implications of success were studiously avoided in the written exchanges among all parties.
https://www.maryferrell.org/php/jfkdb.php?field=subjects&value=BAYO-PAWLEY+RAID
I’ve written about the TILT mission itself in great detail, providing both action and after action reports by Rip Robertson (Rutherford) and David Morales. The mission itself failed, with the officers in charge determining they had essentially been scammed, with Bayo using them simply to get a well-armed resistance team into Cuba.
Perhaps most amazingly, even the most basic security cleanup was not done, with the LIFE photographer simply walking off with his film. It didn’t go into LIFE itself, but did later appear in a soldier of fortune magazine – which is why you can see it yourself in the following photos.
http://www.larry-hancock.com/photos/p-ch01/Tilt1.jpg
http://www.larry-hancock.com/photos/p-ch01/TILT2.jpg
All of which suggests that a great deal more autonomy within CIA field operations than the President realized, or that anyone within among the JMWAVE field personnel appear to have questioned.
