THE CIA documents are printed in a crisp typeface dating to the era when the “Mad Men” in advertising liked brands to look macho. Each cover sheet bears the words “For the President Only — Top Secret”. Inside are pages of terse typewritten paragraphs.
There is a haunting quality about three of them. With little fanfare the CIA has declassified its last intelligence briefing to President John F Kennedy before his assassination. It shows that the world’s trouble spots look much the same today as they did 52 years ago.
The president’s intelligence checklist for November 21, 1963, was probably delivered to him in Houston or Fort Worth. He spent the last full day of his life immersed in a bitter Democratic party feud in Texas. But even there the distant thunder from far-off lands demanded his attention.
The top priority on Kennedy’s checklist was a coup in Iraq and a power struggle between the Iraqi military and the Ba’ath party.
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War was raging in Yemen. In Turkey, rival parties squabbled over a coalition while the army threatened to take power.
The Cold War loomed over it all. Russian jets had violated Iranian airspace and shot down a civilian plane. Meanwhile, the CIA was trying to work out what the Communist Chinese were up to.
In Congo, racked by violence, the big man of the day was dithering over whether to throw out the Soviet and Czech embassy staff.
“However, his people managed on Tuesday afternoon to corral and hog-tie the Soviet counsellor and press attaché before they could eat up all the incriminating papers in their possession,” the anonymous briefer told Kennedy.
In those days Albania was a defiant outpost of Marxist purity allied to China. “The Albanians are on record as preferring to eat grass rather than kowtow to the West, but they are not above eating Chinese wheat acquired from western sources,” the briefing said. The president liked a touch of wit. Perhaps he chuckled before he turned in that night.
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The next day Kennedy was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald while his motorcade drove through downtown Dallas.
The second document is the president’s intelligence checklist prepared on the day of his death. It must have been drafted in Washington some time after 1.20pm on November 22, when Kennedy’s faithful aide, Kenneth O’Donnell, walked into a hospital room in Dallas and told the vice-president, Lyndon Baines Johnson: “He’s gone.”
Even at this distance in time you can sense the shock. Collecting itself, the agency paid a poignant tribute to its fallen commander-in-chief. Instead of intelligence items, each of the checklist’s three pages carried only one paragraph.
They read: “In honour of President Kennedy for whom the president’s intelligence checklist was first written on June 17, 1961.
“For this day the checklist staff can find no words more fitting than a verse quoted by the president to a group of newspapermen the day he learnt of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.
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“Bullfight critics ranked in rows / Crowd the enormous plaza full; / But only one is there who knows / And he’s the man who fights the bull.”
According to the John F Kennedy library, the words were those of a bullfighter, Domingo Ortega, translated by the English poet Robert Graves. We do not know where or when Kennedy, who was an intellectual magpie, discovered them. They remind us of his finest hour.
For 13 days in 1962 the superpowers stood on the brink of nuclear war. The Russians secretly shipped nuclear missiles to Cuba. Hawks urged Kennedy to invade the island. He opted for a blockade and secret diplomacy. A deal was done. For those of us who were small children at the time, our parents breathed again.
What of the bull? We now know from Soviet archives that Fidel Castro and his sidekick Che Guevara (whose romantic features adorned a million student bedrooms) had urged Moscow to fire the nuclear missiles if the Americans launched a conventional invasion.
Shaken, Nikita Khrushchev wrote back to say that this would be “the start of a thermonuclear world war”. No doubt the Cuban people would die heroically, he observed, “but we are not struggling against imperialism in order to die”. Whenever you see a cuddly old Castro shaking hands with the Pope, just remember that this is the man who would have put an end to us all.
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As far as we know, no American president before or since has played for higher stakes. It was Kennedy operating at maximum cool — the dry, confident performer we see in grainy television news conferences, the strategist recorded on White House tapes calculating every risk, the war hero wary of gung-ho generals. No wonder the coldest warriors at the CIA paid him homage.
The third document is dated November 23, 1963. The CIA prepared its first checklist for President Johnson, who had been sworn into office on board the aircraft carrying Kennedy’s body back to Washington.
The list is an eerie foretaste of his presidency. It ranked an escalating crisis in Vietnam as the top concern. The number of armed attacks “designed more for their psychological impact than for immediate military gain” was up by more than 50%. The South Vietnamese regime was purging officers and struggling to harness support for the war.
There was one touching aside: the CIA thought it worth mentioning a by-election in Dundee West in which the Labour party won an increased majority, leading it to push for an early general election in Britain.
These three historic documents are among more than 2,400 papers recently declassified under the Freedom of Information Act. Most are heavily redacted to protect material still sensitive more than half a century later.
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Nowadays Barack Obama is the first president who gets his daily intelligence briefing with a swipe of his tablet. The technology has moved on but Russia, Iran, rogues and nukes are all in there, I expect. The only person who really knows is the man — or the woman — who fights the bull.