Cuban Invasion Authority

The Central Intelligence Agency will shortly swim across the Potomac to immure itself in an immense new building, where the controllers of its anywhere from 8 to 18,000 men and its any where from $1 to $2 billion budget will sit comfortably protected from regulation by the demands of national security. They will not be entirely safe from scrutiny, however, for at last Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Robert Kennedy have been instructed to examine an extremely serious problem that involves the CIA intimately: the organization of the U.S. "paramilitary" effort.

The Cuban invasion, whose forces the CIA clearly helped to train, arm, and finance, has made it clear that Allen Dulles' agency has since its creation in 1947 assumed a function quite distinct from that of the ordinary intelligence service. No longer does it simply gather information and make recommendations to the National Security Council. Despite the repeated insistences of Dulles to the contrary, it has begun not only to rival the State and Defense Departments as advisors to the President, but to make policy on its own.

The British, who avoid the problem by restricting Military Intelligence 6's role to espionage and other fact-collecting duties and leaving policy and operation to the Special Operations Executive, have recently pointed out some of the dangers in the American single-body approach. The CIA's system leads to inefficiency, they claim, because it does not permit the delay necessary for digestion and analysis of intelligence before action is taken. They are generous; the CIA is actually open to more severe assaults. It has taken advantage of a position of secrecy to violate an ancient rule of espionage: never take the word of an interested party. Its agents apparently picked their favorites in Laos, where they relied heavily on the advice of men the U.S. supports, and in Cuba, where they failed to ensure that Manuel Ray, the rebels' best saboteur, was informed that an attack was to be launched. And on the basis of a reputation that no one is allowed to question they persuaded the President to decide (against the advice of Rusk, Bowles, and Stevenson) to carry through plans for Cuba that they themselves had started.

Here, in short, is an appalling administrative weakness in the Executive branch, and it is interesting but of little comfort to speculate that Eisenhower created it. Quite possibly it was he who let the CIA establish and maintain its flourishing autonomy through his unwillingness to provide a distinct chain of command. But never mind that now; President Kennedy has concluded that it would be useless as well as unwise (the agency director has many friends on the Hill) to permit his investigators to revive attacks on the freres Dulles.

The general method that reform of paramilitary operations ought to adopt is certainly obvious enough. Before the CIA becomes thoroughly ensconced in its splendid new quarters on the Virginia side of the river, it will have to learn that its only job is to do research. A body already exists to fulfill the policy-making function of the British Special Operations Executive; it is of course the National Security Council, the only Executive organ lofty enough to be entrusted with operations planning. The intelligence decisions of the time are far too important to be left to the secret agents.