Lyman Kirkpatrick

Lyman Bickford Kirkpatrick Jr. (1916 to March 3, 1995) was an officer of the Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency who served as the Agency's Inspector General from 1953 to 1961 and as its Executive Director, later Executive Director-Comptroller, from 1962 to 1965, and who then taught political science at Brown University until 1982.^{1 2}

Early Career

Kirkpatrick was born in Rochester, New York, and graduated in 1938 from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs, where he was undergraduate chairman of the Woodrow Wilson School. He worked for the U.S. News Publishing Corporation (U.S. News & World Report) until June 1942, when he enlisted and was assigned to what became the OSS; in 1944 he went to Normandy as General Omar Bradley's briefing officer, on the staff of the 12th U.S. Army Group, and he left the Army in 1945 as a major.^{1 3} He received the Legion of Merit and five battle stars, and after a year back at U.S. News, as an editor of "World Report," he joined the CIA.^{3 4} His sister was the journalist Helen Kirkpatrick, foreign correspondent of the Chicago Daily News.^{5 1}

Kirkpatrick joined the CIA in January 1947 as chief of the domestic planning office, soon became chief of the division, then deputy assistant director under General Walter Bedell Smith and shortly afterward Smith's executive assistant in reorganizing CIA operations. In 1952 and 1953 he was hospitalized for eight months with poliomyelitis, which left him paralyzed from the waist down; he afterward traveled by wheelchair.⁴ Nicholas M. Horrock of the New York Times reported in 1977 that when he returned from the hospital Richard Helms had been appointed director of covert operations, a job Kirkpatrick had been expected to receive, and that "[o]ld agency hands believe that Mr. Helms gained the advantage at this point to rise to Director of Central Intelligence in the 1960's."²

Inspector General

The Director of Central Intelligence appointed Kirkpatrick Inspector General in 1953. He obtained approval in April 1953 for an inspection program of planned, periodic inspection of Agency components, although the Inspection and Review Staff of the Directorate of Plans kept responsibility for reviewing its own components; by mid-1954 the Inspector General's staff had grown to fifteen; in January 1955 the Director authorized him to inspect components of the Directorate of Plans independently of that staff; and by December 1959 his office had completed its first cycle of component inspections.⁶ His duties included trips to all continents and investigating the basis of charges against the CIA by Senator Joseph McCarthy.⁴ On October 4, 1960, as Inspector General, he addressed the 67th annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Washington on "Free World Police: Target for Communist Subversion."⁷

In the fall of 1959 the Bureau of the Budget proposed, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved, a study of the intelligence agencies. Kirkpatrick chaired the resulting Joint Study Group on the Foreign Intelligence Activities of the United States Government, whose members included Lieutenant General Graves Erskine of the Defense Department, Allan Evans of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, James S. Lay of the National Security Council, and J. Patrick Coyne, executive secretary of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities. The group submitted a 141-page report on December 15, 1960; the National Security Council approved most of its 43 recommendations on January 18, 1961, and the State Department's historians trace to it the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency in August 1961.^{8 4}

The Olson Investigation

Frank Olson, a Special Operations Division scientist at Camp Detrick, died on November 27, 1953, when he fell from a tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York. At a meeting at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, on November 19, LSD placed in a bottle of Cointreau by Robert Lashbrook had been served to the Special Operations Division participants; neither the chief of the Technical Services Staff nor the Deputy Director for Plans specifically authorized the experiment, which Sidney Gottlieb carried out with the approval of his immediate supervisor.⁹

On December 1, 1953, the chief of the Inspection and Review staff sent Kirkpatrick a memorandum on "Use of LSD" prepared "[p]ursuant to your request." It reported that the chief of the Technical Services Staff, Willis Gibbons, had "impounded all LSD material in CIA Headquarters in a safe adjacent to his desk" and was stopping any LSD tests under way; that only two field stations, Manila and Atsugi, held LSD, and that there was none in Germany "although Mr. William Harvey recently expressed interest in the subject"; that the CIA had furnished LSD to George Hunter White, chief of the New York District of the Treasury Department's Narcotics Division, who was "fully cleared according to Dr. Gibbons"; that Harold Abramson had experimented with the drug; and that most of the Agency's LSD came from Eli Lilly of Indianapolis, which "apparently makes a gift of it to CIA," through a mechanism Gibbons could not describe.¹⁰

According to a CIA official, the Special Operations Division participants "agreed that an unwitting experiment would be desirable"; the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities wrote that this account "directly contradicts" the recollection of Colonel Vincent Ruwet, and cited Kirkpatrick's memorandum for the record of December 1, 1953 for it. In May 1953 Helms had told a staff meeting that LSD "was dynamite and that he should be advised at all times when it was intended to use it," a statement the committee cited to the Inspector General's diary of December 2, 1953; Frank Wisner had required that the Deputy Director for Plans personally approve any use of LSD. Gottlieb testified that he remembered neither the meeting with Helms nor the Wisner memorandum.¹¹

John Marks wrote in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate that Allen Dulles personally ordered Kirkpatrick to make a full investigation, after Agency officials had first tried to make sure that no outsider would tie Olson's death to the CIA or LSD. Marks wrote that Kirkpatrick sequestered Gottlieb's LSD files, and quoted Kirkpatrick: "I brought out his stutter. He was quite concerned about his future." According to Marks, Kirkpatrick recommended some form of reprimand for Gottlieb, Gibbons and the deputy chief of the staff, James "Trapper" Drum, who had waited twenty days after Olson's death to admit that Gottlieb had cleared the experiment with him; Admiral Luis de Florez, the Agency's research chairman, sent Dulles a personal memorandum against reprimands; and Kirkpatrick went through six drafts of the letter to Gottlieb, from "exceedingly bad judgment" to "very poor judgment" to "poor judgment," after which the officers were told the letters were not reprimands and would not be placed in their personnel files.¹²

On February 12, 1954, the Director wrote Technical Services Staff officials criticizing them for "poor judgment" in administering LSD "on an unwitting basis and without proximate medical safeguards" to Olson and for the lack of "proper consideration of the rights of the individual to whom it was being administered." On the same day the Inspector General reviewed a report on Subproject Number 3 of MKULTRA, submitted by the chief of Inspection and Review on February 10, in which the same officers were quoted as stating that one purpose of the subproject was to "observe the behavior of unwitting persons being questioned after having been given a drug." The committee found no evidence that the subproject was terminated; the evidence indicated that it continued until 1963, with test subjects contacted at random in bars and given drugs in safehouses.¹³ Horrock reported that Kirkpatrick had never testified publicly about the Olson case, but that he had reportedly told Vice President Rockefeller's commission on the CIA that he had recommended that the employees involved in giving Olson the drug be disciplined. "They were not," Horrock wrote, and Kirkpatrick "later told associates he regretted not having taken a firmer stand."²

The 1957 Survey of the Technical Services Division and the 1961 Mail Review

The Inspector General's report of 1957 on the Technical Services Division, issued during Kirkpatrick's tenure, stated that "[s]ix specific products have been developed and are available for operational use. Three of them are discrediting and disabling materials which can be administered unwittingly and permit the exercise of a measure of control over the actions of the subject." The same report stated: "Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles and would be detrimental to the accomplishment of its mission."¹⁴

A 1961 review by the Inspector General's office, part of an evaluation of the Office of Security, examined the New York mail-opening project (HTLINGUAL). It found that "few of the operational leads have ever been converted into operations" for the Soviet Russia Division, and that "[t]he activity cannot be called a 'project' in the usual sense, because it was never processed through the approval system and has no separate funds." It recommended a coordinated evaluation by the Deputy Directors for Plans and Support. The Senate committee found that the project was reviewed by disinterested Agency components only twice, in 1961 and 1969.¹⁵ Horrock reported in 1977 that Kirkpatrick had testified that he knew about the illegal mail openings and that Dulles also knew of them, and that he had reportedly said the Agency was convinced that "the national security need for the mail-openings outweighed the fact that they were against the law."²

The Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation

On November 20, 1961, Kirkpatrick transmitted to John McCone, who was about to succeed Dulles, a 150-page survey of the CIA's operation against Fidel Castro, dated October 1961, with five annexes and ten recommendations. His covering memorandum stated that he had reviewed the material prepared for General Maxwell Taylor's committee and the committee's minutes, that his meeting with the top three officers of the branch the week after the landing was reported in some seventy pages, and that "there has been a tendency in the Agency to gloss over CIA's inadequacies and to attempt to fix all the blame for the failure of the invasion upon other elements of the Government." He would make no further distribution until McCone indicated whom he wished to receive copies; the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board had requested a copy so that Coyne could report on it at its December 9 meeting.¹⁶

The survey rests on interviews by the Inspector General and his representatives with about 125 Agency employees, and "contains no evaluation of or judgment on any decision or action taken by any official not employed by the Agency." It states: "The project had lost its covert nature by November 1960. ... For more than three months before the invasion the American press was reporting, often with some accuracy, on the recruiting and training of Cubans. ... Plausible denial was a pathetic illusion." Its first conclusion was that "[t]he Agency failed to recognize that when the project advanced beyond the stage of plausible denial it was going beyond the area of Agency responsibility as well as Agency capability"; others were that the Agency failed to keep national policymakers "adequately and realistically informed," reduced the exiled leaders "to the status of puppets," and entered the project without adequate boats, bases, training facilities, agent nets and Spanish speakers.¹⁷

The survey cited earlier warnings from the Inspector General's office: a June 1958 recommendation, in a survey of the Far East Division, for a high-level study of the extent to which the Agency should engage in paramilitary operations, "if any"; a January 1959 memorandum to the Deputy Director for Plans that "the Clandestine Services tends to assume responsibilities beyond its capabilities"; a 1955 survey of the Psychological and Paramilitary Operations Staff and a March 1961 survey of the Covert Action Staff, both warning against bypassing those staffs; and a July 1959 survey of the Plans directorate, which wrote that operations that "may be aimed at the overthrow of a hostile regime" require high-level liaison with the State Department and the White House, and that task forces within a single division "represent a woefully inadequate response to a problem of major national significance." The survey's first recommendation was that such an operation be carried out by a task force under a senior official "on a full-time basis, and organizationally outside the DD/P structure"; its second, that "[t]he Agency should request that such projects should be transferred to the Department of Defense when they show signs of becoming overt or beyond Agency capabilities."¹⁸

Distribution and Restriction

Twenty copies were made because, as a later memorandum in Kirkpatrick's name explained, it had been understood when the report was written that copies would go to the President's board. The only distribution was: McCone, November 21, 1961; Dulles, Deputy Director Charles P. Cabell and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell, November 24; the Inspector General; the file of the acting Inspector General; the chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, Colonel J. C. King, and Jacob Esterline of that division, November 24; and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, through J. S. Earman at the Director's request, on January 18, 1962. The remaining copies stayed in his office.¹⁹ On November 28, 1961, Cabell recorded that he had called Kirkpatrick "to state that the fact of the IG's report on Cuba should be restricted on a must-need-to-know basis," that no further copies would go out "without authority of the DCI or DDCI," that the restriction "also specifically applies to distribution to the President's Board of Intelligence Advisors," and that he had discussed "holding this report tightly" with Dulles and Bissell.²⁰

On November 22, 1961, two days after transmitting the survey, Kirkpatrick sat with Dulles, Cabell, Bissell, Helms and McCone in Dulles's office to review the plan, set by President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the White House the day before, for a committee under General Edward Lansdale on action against Cuba, which the Attorney General said would embody covert operations, propaganda and actions creating dissension within Cuba; Lansdale had proposed James H. Critchfield as the CIA's man on the committee, and Bissell offered alternate names.²¹ When McCone took office on November 29, he asked Kirkpatrick to head a study of the Director's role, his relations with the White House and other agencies, and the organization of the CIA and the intelligence community; the President's statement of January 16, 1962 on the Director's responsibilities resulted from it.²²

On December 1, 1961, after McCone said he was concerned that the survey taken alone "might give an erroneous impression as to the extent CIA is responsible for the failure of the operation," Kirkpatrick wrote that the failure "should be charged in order" to "[a]n over-all lack of recognition on the part of the U.S. Government as to the magnitude of the operation required to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime"; to "[t]he failure on the part of the U.S. Government to plan for all contingencies ... including the necessity for using regular U.S. military forces in the event that the exiled Cubans could not do the job themselves"; and to the government's unwillingness "to commit to the Cuban operation, as planned and executed, those necessary resources required for its success."²³ On December 15, 1961, Cabell wrote that a detailed comment would require noting "inaccuracies, omissions, distortions, unsupported allegations, and many erroneous conclusions," that "[n]either Mr. Dulles nor I was consulted in the preparation of the Inspector General's report," and that "[i]n unfriendly hands, it can become a weapon unjustifiably to attack the entire mission, organization, and functioning of the Agency."²⁴

McCone directed that the survey be bound with an analysis by the Deputy Director for Plans dated January 18, 1962; his January 19, 1962 letter to James R. Killian, chairman of the President's board, transmitting both; memoranda by Tracy Barnes and Kirkpatrick; and Dulles's comments of February 15, 1962, which McCone acknowledged on February 19.²⁵ On April 19, 1963, at McCone's direction and as Executive Director, Kirkpatrick took the bound report to McGeorge Bundy. His memorandum for the record states that Bundy asked for a summary, scanned the conclusions, and "commented that this was an aspect of the operation about which the President and himself had not been informed"; Bundy kept the report because the President "would probably wish to read it over the weekend," and asked whether the Brigade had been told before the landing that it would not be supported by U.S. military forces, which Kirkpatrick said he could not answer.²⁶

The survey remained classified until 1998, when the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project obtained its declassification. The CIA's own five-volume official history by its historian Jack Pfeiffer includes a fifth volume titled "Internal Investigation Report"; in 1987 Pfeiffer sued under the Freedom of Information Act for its release, and the CIA convinced the court that it could not be declassified.²⁷

Executive Director

In 1962 a panel headed by Kirkpatrick, then the CIA's Executive Director-Comptroller, recommended creating an office in the Clandestine Service to centralize and professionalize paramilitary action and contingency planning, "drawing upon Agency-wide resources for large-scale operations"; a new paramilitary division was established under a new National Security Council approval group, the Special Group (Counterinsurgency).²⁸ Under McCone's reorganization the Executive Director became the number three position in the CIA, responsible for its internal management, and in 1963 the posts of Executive Director and Comptroller were combined; the Baltimore Sun wrote in 1965 that he had been outranked only by McCone and Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter.^{22 4} The Audit Staff was transferred to the Office of the Inspector General on April 1, 1962.⁶ On January 19, 1965, as Executive Director, he informed the deputy directors that Chester Cooper, formerly assistant to the Deputy Director for Intelligence, had moved to the White House, that consultation with him "should not be discouraged," and that the deputy directors should be kept advised of such contacts.²⁹

Horrock reported in 1977 that Kirkpatrick had reportedly told the Senate intelligence committee and the Rockefeller Commission that a CIA officer complained to him in the early 1960s about being ordered to prepare an assassination attempt against Patrice Lumumba, and that, according to Horrock's sources, he testified that he had gone on record within the Agency as opposing the attempt, and that, according to some sources, he testified that he was unaware of plots against Castro and Rafael Trujillo.² The committee's published report on assassination plots records that Michael Mulroney, after Bissell asked him in 1960 to go to the Congo to kill Lumumba and he refused, made his opposition "a matter of record" with Helms and told his superior, William Harvey; the report does not name Kirkpatrick in that account.³⁰

In 1976 Kirkpatrick wrote to the Senate committee on the functions of the Inspector General; the committee quoted a former Inspector General's letter that "[i]t is necessary that the DCI fully back the Inspector General in his recommendations unless there are overwhelming reasons to the contrary," citing Kirkpatrick's letter of January 13, 1976, and noted that "[s]ince Lyman Kirkpatrick, all the Inspectors General have taken that office as their last post with the CIA."³¹

Brown University and the 1977 Nomination

In August 1965 Kirkpatrick, holder of the President's 1964 award for distinguished federal civilian service, retired from the CIA to become professor of political science at Brown University; in his spare hours he had set up the Agency's Public Service Aid Society and its Educational Aid Fund.⁴ Horrock reported that "[s]ome sources said he resigned because he no longer expected to become the director."² He taught at Brown until 1982, wrote on defense intelligence and served on several intelligence boards.¹

On July 14, 1977, senior administration officials told Horrock that President Jimmy Carter had offered Kirkpatrick the post of deputy director of the CIA and that he had accepted, the announcement to await the President's conviction that he could be confirmed "without the expenditure of large amounts of political capital." Horrock reported that members and staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence indicated he would be closely questioned about his knowledge of assassinations, drug testing and illegal mail openings, and that a prominent Democrat said he would be "more comfortable" with another choice. Kirkpatrick, reached in Rhode Island, declined to comment.² He died at his home in Middleburg, Virginia, on March 3, 1995.¹