JFK Files: Revelations from the Covert Operations High Command

Washington, D.C., April 7, 2025 - Just six months before the 1964 military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart in Brazil, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Plans Richard Helms briefed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on CIA clandestine operations in South America’s largest country. “[CIA] is carrying out covert action in the labor movement and CIA believes that Communist control can be weakened,” he advised board members who monitored intelligence operations on behalf of President Kennedy, according to a fully declassified summary of the September 10, 1963, Top Secret briefing posted today for the first time by the National Security Archive.

Helms and his deputies also updated the PFIAB on the status of covert actions and regime-change operations in other targeted countries. In Cuba, the CIA was shifting “from external raids to internal sabotage operations,” running ten “black” operations per month, and targeting “dissident Cuban elements,” among them Cuban military officers. In British Guiana, the CIA secretly financed a 79-day general strike to destabilize the elected government of Cheddi Jagan, funneling money for the strikers through the AFL-CIO. CIA plans to organize an exile force against Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier were foiled when Juan Bosch, president of the Dominican Republic, refused to let the agency use his country as a base of operations.

The Top Secret White House memorandum titled “Board Panel on Covert Action Operations” was declassified, uncensored, as part of the 80,000 pages of Kennedy assassination records released in March. Numerous other PFIAB records were included in the release, along with the unredacted minutes of the “Special Group”—the elite interagency committee that vetted and approved U.S. covert operations around the world. The National Security Archive is posting a special selection of these unique records today.

New Details and Revelations

Unredacted, the documents add considerable detail to the history of previously reported covert programs, including intelligence sources and methods, specific expenditures, agent identities, and the names of collaborating nations, intelligence agencies and foreign officials. In some cases, the declassified documents reveal operations that were not previously known. Among the key details and revelations contained in the documents:

** In Cuba, the CIA listed 108 covert agents and assets on the island in 1963, including “friendly diplomatic personnel” in foreign embassies in Havana. Sixty agents targeted Cuban shipping, and there were “31 penetrations of Cuban installations abroad,” according to a report to the PFIAB. CIA staff in Washington and Miami devoted to overthrowing the Castro government totaled 384 individuals. Among the other assets were 83 contractors, 525 foreign nationals (the majority of them Cuban exiles), 45 agents in overseas posts, and 12 analysts in the Agency’s intelligence division working on Cuba.

** Regarding British Guiana, the documents confirm CIA collaboration with the British intelligence service, MI6, to finance and sustain labor unrest and a protracted general strike to undermine the elected government of Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan. Minutes of an April 25, 1963, Special Group meeting noted that “CIA was instructed to look into this and jointly with MI6 take such action as might be indicated as desirable to ensure the continuation of the strike.” At a PFIAB meeting at the White House after the strike ended, CIA Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Helms reported that the Agency had “worked out with [AFL-CIO union leader] George Meany a program of CIA financial support ($435,000) to the strike under the cover of ‘AFL-CIO contributions’” and that “A CIA cover representative ran the strike program.” The documents also strongly infer that CIA director John McCone met with MI6 official James Fulton in Paris to discuss this joint operation to overthrow the Jagan government.

** In Chile, the CIA provided Christian Democrat candidate Eduardo Frei with $750,000 in March 1964 and another $1.25 million in May 1964 to finance his campaign for the presidency. At a June 5, 1964, PFIAB meeting at the White House, Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms warned the board that “the coming Presidential elections there on September 13 are viewed with serious concern” given the prospects of a victory by Socialist candidate Salvador Allende. Helms stressed that it was essential to act; if Allende won, he warned, “the constitutional-minded Chileans would accept a regularly elected Communist as President and would not take coup action to put him out of office.”

** Regarding Congo, the Special Group meeting minutes add new details on the CIA role in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba. Five months prior to Lumumba’s assassination, CIA officer Thomas A. Parrott informed the Special Group that the agency had developed “broadly three (or as Mr. [DCI Allen] Dulles later described them ‘2 ½’) operational lines that we are following in mounting an anti-Lumumba campaign in the Congo.” These included: operations through the chief advisor of the Christian Trade Unions; the planned attempt of a Socialist politician to arrange a vote of no confidence in Lumumba; “and a brand new contact with an alleged leader of certain independent labor groups”—the latter a likely reference to Cyrille Adoula, the CIA’s chosen candidate to replace Lumumba once he was removed.

** On Haiti, the Special Group meeting minutes reveal that CIA plans to depose dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, whose dynastic regime was energizing the rise of the left, were compromised by resistance from the new president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch. The CIA had been building an exile force to invade Haiti from the DR, but Bosch, according to one document in mid-1963, “has now decided that he is unwilling to allow such an [Haitian] exile force to use his country as a base for military operations against Duvalier.” The CIA’s chief for Western Hemisphere operations, Colonel J.C. King, then informed members of the Special Group that “everyone concerned with the project agrees that Duvalier must be removed in some manner or other” but that the current plan is “unworkable.” (Bosch subsequently became the target of Lyndon Johnson’s decision, in April 1965, to invade the Dominican Republic and install a compliant regime through U.S. military force.)

The selection of documents posted today also includes a series of intriguing PFIAB recommendations and proposals, among them:

• That the CIA consider the proposal (made to the PFIAB by representatives by the Israeli Intelligence and Security Service) “extended CIA-Israeli coordination of intelligence activities in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere.”
• That the CIA explore the feasibility in Japan “of intensifying covert actions against the sizeable and effective influence of Communists among Japanese intellectuals, educators, and students.”
• “That the National Security Agency make an on-the-scene technical review of CIA’s covert Communications/Electronics Intelligence collection efforts in Behshahr, Iran, to ensure maximum technical use of this strategically-positioned activity against Soviet missiles and satellite operations.”

The PFIAB and Special Group

Among the documents posted today is a lengthy chronological compilation of memoranda and minutes of PFIAB meetings during President Kennedy’s 1000 days in office that includes a short history of the special board of White House advisors on intelligence matters. The impetus for the board was a recommendation by the Hoover Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch to create a “Watch Dog Committee” on intelligence matters, made up of members of Congress and “public-spirited citizens.” To preempt the creation of an outsider supervisory committee, in February 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an Executive Order creating the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities.

In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy issued a new directive designating the committee as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Board, and empowering it to advise the President “with respect to the objectives and conduct” of covert actions, including “highly sensitive covert operations relating to political action, propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, escape and evasion, subversion against hostile states or groups and support of indigenous and anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world,” according to a Top Secret December 1, 1963, report on PFIAB’s genesis, prepared for Lyndon Johnson after the Kennedy assassination.

Among the PFIAB’s duties was to monitor the efforts of the “Special Group,” a senior interagency committee made up of representatives of U.S. national security agencies which acted as the high command for the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administration’s secret foreign policy. Between January 1961 and the fall of 1962, the Special Group—which was also known as the 5412 Committee for the room number it met in—approved approximately 550 covert operations, most of which were shared with the PFIAB in some detail. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, President Kennedy appointed his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to chair an even more elite “high command” of covert operations—the Special Group (Augmented), which determined major covert programs, among them, Operation Mongoose, targeting Cuba.

According to Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, Associate Professor of Instruction in international affairs at the University of South Florida and a research fellow at the National Security Archive, the PFIAB and Special Group minutes provide a distinct and unique history of covert operations: “These documents shed light on the inner workings of the U.S. government’s covert action high command: their motivations, priorities, frustrations, and determination to employ political violence, economic sabotage, and large sums of money to intervene in the internal affairs of countries the world over.”