Page 65 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 65 of 237

Robert Amory, the brother of the writer Cleveland Amory, and a former Harvard Law School professor. A tall,
dark-haired man, he had intelligence and combat experience in World War II. He became the CIA's deputy
director for intelligence in 1953.

This was the group which led the CIA during its period of greatest expansion in the 1950s. But even before this, it
was evident that the agency was involved in a wide range of activities in many parts of the world.

1948: Bogota

Only six months after the CIA had come into existence, it found itself under fire for what would become a
familiar complaint over the years -- alleged failure to predict a major international upheaval. In this case, it was
the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the popular Liberal Colombian leader, on April 9 on a street in Bogota.
The shooting touched off the "Bogotazo," two days of bloody riots that disrupted the Ninth Inter-American
Conference and greatly embarrassed Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who headed the American delegation.
Marshall blamed the riots on Communist agitators.*

The post-mortem had its strange aspects. In the first place, expecting the CIA to forecast an assassination, is, in
most instances, to endow it with supernatural powers. There are limits to what intelligence can predict. In the
second place, Admiral Hillenkoetter, hauled before a House Executive Expenditures Subcommittee on April 15,
read the text of secret CIA dispatches into the open record for the first and only time in history. This action, which
raised hackles at the time, would, if done today, cause pandemonium.

The admiral maintained that although the Communists seized on Gaitan's assassination, the Colombian leader was
slain in "a purely private act of revenge" by one Jose Sierra. The CIA chief said Gaitan, as an attorney, had just
successfully defended in a murder trial the killer of Sierra's uncle.

Hillenkoetter testified that, furthermore, the CIA had predicted trouble at Bogota as far back as January 2. Then
he dropped a bombshell. He charged that a March 23 CIA dispatch from Bogota, warning of Communist
agitation, was withheld from Secretary Marshall by Orion J. Libert, a State Department advance man in Bogota,
acting with the support of Ambassador Willard L. Beaulac.

The CIA dispatch, dated March 23, said:

Have confirmed information that Communist-inspired agitators will attempt to humiliate the Secretary
of State and other members of the United States delegation to the Pan-American conference upon
arrival in Bogota by manifestations and possible personal molestation.

Have passed this information on to the Ambassador and other interested embassy personnel with the
request that full details on the arrival of delegation be submitted to this office for transmission to local
police, who are anxious to give maximum possible protection ...

Advanced delegate O. J. Libert, who has been apprised of above, does not consider it advisable to
notify the State Department of this situation, since he feels adequate protection will be given by police
and does not want to alarm the delegates unduly. [5]

Hillenkoetter then placed a whole sheaf of top-secret dispatches into the record, telling in some detail of
Communist plans to disrupt the conference. Possibly Hillenkoetter was egged on by the fact that a few hours
before he testified, Truman had told a news conference that he was as surprised as anyone about the riots in
Bogota. He had, said Truman, received no advance warning. The government had received information that there