Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman [100]
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The man with whom Millius had met returned to his office at CIA headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, and went to his office, a small space behind a sign: STATISTICAL RECONCILIATION. He sat behind his desk and perused what Millius had given him. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that the request had been initiated by the president. Millius was Jamison’s point man when it came to arranging unusual assignments at the CIA. His word was as good as the president’s, and had been since Fletcher Jamison was governor of Georgia.
CHAPTER 36
The office of Statistical Reconciliation, STAT-RECON, was tucked away in a secluded corner of CIA headquarters. Its existence went back more than sixty years under other names. Its stated mission was to analyze statistical information gathered by various agency intelligence sources. Its budget as included in the agency’s annual report to Congress was modest; its official listing on the CIA’s organizational chart showed it reporting to the chief of Statistical Intelligence. It was manned, according to staffing reports, by four people. Its current leader was the man who’d just met with Lance Millius on Roosevelt Island.
STAT-RECON was the outgrowth of a small, secret wing of the agency that came into existence in the late 1950s under the blanket term Executive Action. While the CIA was created to garner intelligence from America’s Cold War enemies, it was decided that it would also be necessary, at times, to take a more proactive stance—in other words, to “eliminate” selected enemies who posed a distinct threat to the nation’s security. The National Security Council (NSC) and its internal “Special Group,” also known as the 40 Committee, whose mandate was to “counter, reduce and discredit International Communism,” was established to oversee the Executive Action group within the CIA. These assassination attempts, either through direct action initiated by the CIA or by supportive groups within the target’s own country, necessitated establishing a clandestine operation to undertake “wet jobs,” the killing of foreign leaders—and others—when called upon to do so by the president and his top intelligence officials.
Because of its secretive nature, its operations and budgets were shielded not only from congressional oversight but from other top government officials. It functioned as a separate entity within the intelligence community, answerable to no one except the highest echelons of the CIA and NSC. There had been concern when the group was formed that because of its clandestine structure there was the possibility of perversion of its reason for existing. But that was considered a small price to pay when compared to the potential gains it could achieve.
Attempts were made on the lives of such foreign leaders as Patrice Lumumba of the Congo; Fidel Castro of Cuba; Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic; Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam; and General René Schneider of Chile. Some succeeded, some didn’t. But always these undertakings were conducted with “plausible denial” uppermost in mind.
The fear that such a secret organization within the government might be used for nefarious purposes was well founded.
In the 1950s, a small group of wealthy men, primarily oil barons from the Southwest, got together to discuss what they considered the downward path the nation was taking. At that time, the president, John F. Kennedy, had captured the American public. The White House had become Camelot; the youthful president could do no wrong in the eyes of most Americans. But the small group of wealthy men saw things differently. Kennedy’s agenda concerned them. He talked of pulling back support for the South Vietnamese government, which they viewed not only as creating an opening for a Communist takeover of Asia—the “domino effect”—but as negatively impacting the financial health of the military-industrial complex. Too, Kennedy’s failure to support the Cuban exiles and their 1961 attempt to topple