Eisenhower did not oppose the CIA's covert action projects; he only wanted to be
protected from the consequences of their failure or exposure. Gray's primary task, in the
guise of `` oversight '' on all U.S. covert action, was to protect and hide the growing mass
of CIA and related secret government activities.
It was not only covert projects, which were developed by the Gray-Bush-Dulles
combination; it was also new, hidden structures of the United States government.
Senator Henry Jackson challenged these arrangements in 1959 and 1960. Jackson created
a Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery of the Senate Committee on
Governmental Operations, which investigated Gordon Gray's reign at the National
Security Council. On January 26, 1960, Gordon Gray warned President Eisenhower that a
document revealing the existence of a secret part of the U.S. government had somehow
gotten into the bibliography being used by Senator Jackson. The unit was Gray's 5412 Group '' within the administration, officially but secretly in charge of approving covert action. Under Gray's guidance, Ike |`was clear and firm in his response' that Jackson's
staff not be informed of the existence of this unit [emphasis in the original]. ''@s1@s7
Several figures of the Eisenhower administration must be considered the fathers of this
permanent covert action monolith, men who continued shepherding the monster after its
birth in the Eisenhower era:
Gordon Gray, the shadowy assistant to the President for national security affairs,
Prescott Bush's closest executive branch crony and golf partner along with Eisenhower.
By 1959-60, Gray had Ike's total confidence and served as the Harrimanites' monitor on
all U.S. military and non-military projects.
British intelligence agent Kim Philby defected to the Russians in 1963. Philby had gained
virtually total access to U.S. intelligence activities beginning in 1949, as the British secret
services' liaison to the Harriman-dominated CIA. After Philby's defection, it seemed
obvious that the aristocratic British intelligence service was in fact a menace to the
western cause. In the 1960s, a small team of U.S. counterintelligence specialists went to
England to investigate the situation. They reported back that the British secret service
could be thoroughly trusted. The leader of this `` expert '' team, Gordon Gray, was the
head of the counterespionage section of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board for Presidents John Kennedy through Gerald Ford.
Robert Lovett, Bush's Jupiter Island neighbor and Brown Brothers Harriman partner,
from 1956 on a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Lovett
later claimed to have criticized--from the `` inside ''--the plan to invade Cuba at the Bay
of Pigs. Lovett was asked to choose the cabinet for John Kennedy in 1961.
CIA Director Allen Dulles, Bush's former international attorney. Kennedy fired Dulles
after the Bay of Pigs invasion, but Dulles served on the Warren Commission, which
whitewashed President Kennedy's murder.