Final_Judgment

172 A Little Unpleasantness [111]
JFK and the CIA, what, in fact, was ultimately the assassination of the
American president.
The family biographers of Chicago Mafia boss, Sam Giancana, who
participated in the infamous CIA-Organized Crime plots against Fidel
Castro (which we will examine in more detail in Chapter 11) report that
Giancana was very much aware that the CIA was unhappy with the
Kennedys. "Within the CIA, the dismay at having been betrayed by both the
President and attorney general, as well as the President's open promise to
dismantle the intelligence agency's power, soon turned to hatred, creating a
ripple effect that would blacken the moods of the men [Giancana] dealt with
in his covert operations. These men expressed their outrage at the Bay of
Pigs operation along with their fear that Kennedy now posed a very real
threat to the CIA's continued autonomy, perhaps its very existence." 303
KENNEDY MOVES AGAINST THE CIA
In his best-selling, Plausible Denial, in which he pinpoints the CIA's
role in the JFK assassination conspiracy, veteran JFK assassination
investigator Mark Lane commented on the CIA's move against the
president:
"If the CIA operatives, officers, and former officers believed that the
defense of their Agency and their nation required the elimination of President
Kennedy because he was about to dismantle their organization, one could
comprehend, while neither accepting nor condoning their viewpoint, that
their concept of self-defense required them to use deadly force. Most relevant,
therefore, is not what Kennedy was or was not about to do vis-à-vis the
CIA, but what the leaders of the Agency believed he might do.
"John F. Kennedy made it clear that he planned to destroy the CIA. The
New York Times reported on April 25, 1966, under a subheadline,
'Kennedy's Bitterness,' that 'as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came
home to him, [Kennedy] said to one of the highest officials of his
Administration that he wanted 'to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and
scatter it to the winds.'
"He clearly was not suggesting a modest legislative proposal or
executive order to modify or reform the organization. The total destruction
of the Agency was his apparent objective." 304
CONTROLLING THE CIA
Lane points out that Kennedy's preliminary actions against the CIA had
already been set in motion and that the president was very clearly moving
toward ultimate evisceration of the agency.
"[Kennedy] dealt with the CIA through the implementation of a threepoint
emergency program designed to control the agency. He fired its most
culpable and powerful leaders, he appointed a high-level committee, the
Cuban study group, to investigate the misdeeds of the organization so that
he might determine what additional short-range limitations were required