John A. McCone - Director of Central Intelligence

Director of Central Intelligence

After the disaster of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, president John F. Kennedy forced the resignation of the CIA director Allen Dulles and some of his staff. McCone replaced Dulles on November 29, 1961.

He was a key figure in the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the Honeymoon telegram of September 20, 1962, he insisted that the CIA remain imaginative when it came to Soviet weapons policy towards Cuba, as a September 19 National Intelligence Estimate had concluded it unlikely that nuclear missiles would be placed on the island. (The telegram was so named because McCone sent it while on his honeymoon in Paris, France, accompanied not only by his bride, but by a CIA cipher team.)

McCone's suspicions of the inaccuracy of this assessment proved to be correct, as it was later found out the Soviet Union had followed up its conventional military build up with the installation of MRBMs (Medium Range Ballistic Missiles) and IRBMs (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles), sparking off the crisis in October when they were later spotted by CIA's Lockheed U-2 surveillance flights. This correct judgement be McCone has been attributed to his innate scepticism of Soviet intentions, which have been described as 'a visceral mistrust'. His background in engineering and business may also have been a factor. Knowing the difficulty and expense that the Soviets would have incurred installing a SAM umbrella to include areas of no tactical significance, McCone could have reasoned that the consensus view at the time (that the military reinforcement of Cuba was merely intended to make it a harder target for the US to attack) was unlikely.

While McCone was DCI, the CIA was involved in many covert plots, including ones involving Laos (with the Hmong), Ecuador, Brazil, and Cuba. He apparently disapproved of Operation Mongoose, the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. He would later tell DCI Stansfield Turner that the CIA actions in Chile were the work of Richard Helms, who didn't tell McCone what he was doing. However he was involved in the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état; he was friends with ITT president Harold Geneen whose company stood to lose its Brazilian subsidiary if president João Goulart nationalized it. McCone would later work for ITT.

McCone represented the CIA's opposition to U.S. support of a coup in South Vietnam against President Ngo Dinh Diem, but such objections were overruled by November 1963, when the State Department managed to convince Kennedy to allow the coup to proceed.

McCone resigned from his position of DCI in April 1965, believing himself to be unappreciated by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who he complained, would not read his reports, including on the need for full-fledged inspections of Israeli nuclear facilities. Upon his resignation, McCone submitted a final policy memorandum to Johnson arguing that Johnson's expansion of the war in Vietnam would arouse national and world discontent before it brought down the North Vietnamese regime.