Page 150 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 150 of 237

The NIE was then transmitted to the President as the estimate of the Director of Central Intelligence.
Ultimately, therefore, despite all this vast intelligence machinery, the end product goes to the President as
the personal responsibility and personal estimate of one man.

It is in this area that the structure of the Invisible Government is the most complex. The Director of Central
Intelligence is the ultimate arbiter of the vital security information, predictions and evaluations that are placed on
the desk of the President. He presides over the branches of the intelligence community represented on USIB; but,
as has been seen, he also heads the CIA, which is one of these branches. He controls not only the intelligence
product of CIA but also the product of the entire Invisible Government. He is therefore both umpire and player,
the chairman of the board and a member of it.

In addition to producing the raw material for the national estimates, the CIA also provides the President with a
daily top-secret checklist of the major world crises. Copies go to the Director of Central Intelligence and to the
Secretaries of State and Defense. Top-ranking men in the CIA's Intelligence Division get to work at 3:00 A.M., to
read the overnight cables and compile the checklist.

During the Kennedy Administration, the checklist was presented to the President the first thing each morning by
Major General Chester V. (Ted) Clifton, the chief White House military aide. Under President Johnson,
McGeorge Bundy initially assumed the responsibility for the morning intelligence briefing.

Special procedures have been established to assure that the President and the three other recipients of the checklist
can be reached instantly in an emergency. An Indications Center is manned twenty-four hours a day by
representatives of the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department. It works under the guidance of a Watch
Committee, which meets once a week to survey crisis situations and, if necessary, to recommend an immediate
convening of the Board of Estimates.

Although that board no longer operates directly under the authority of the CIA deputy director for intelligence, the
power of his office has been enlarged in another direction. Ray Cline was the first DDI to be informed about the
secret operations of the Plans Division. Prior to McCone's rule, this was not the practice.

The CIA had been rigorously compartmented in the interests of maximum security. The agency's left hand
was purposely prevented from knowing what the right hand was doing. The Intelligence Division would
receive all of the covert information collected by CIA agents abroad, but it was kept in ignorance about all
clandestine operations. In the parlance of the trade, all cloak-and-dagger schemes were "vest pocketed" by
the Plans Division.

For example, as already described, Cline's predecessor as DDI, Robert Amory, was never told in advance about
the Bay of Pigs. And there was a feeling that President Kennedy might have abandoned the operation if all of his
intelligence advisers had not been sponsors and, therefore, devout advocates of the plan.

Soon after McCone took office, he decided to change the system. He set up a three-man study group
composed of Lyman Kirkpatrick, General Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Schuyler, executive assistant to
Governor Rockefeller, and J. Patrick Coyne, former FBI agent and executive director of the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Perhaps the most important change decided upon by McCone was his instruction to the Plans Division to keep the
Intelligence Division continuously posted on all its activities. Thereafter, the Intelligence Division received
"sanitized" reports (names of agents removed) on all current operations. The intelligence analysts were thus in a
position for the first time to contest the special pleading of the men who were running the operations. On the basis