Obviously authorization of any plot to assassinate must come from the WH but the limitations placed upon Belin made it impossible to provide those specific when and who details. Given the mid-1959 timing of the "go-ahead" to discuss with Roselli, does anyone think the "Pres in waiting" Nixon was not all over this thing?
From Belin's Report (Rockefeller Commission 1975)
Bissell states that plans were developed to assassinate Lamumba and Sukarno. No assassination plans would be
undertaken without authorization outside the Agency.
With respect to Castro??Therefore, the CIA, with
appropriate authorization, undertook the development of an operation in support of Cuban exiles seeking to overthrow the Castro Government, the culmination of which became the Bay of Pigs disaster in April 1961.?
Also the CIA supported a late 1959 attempt against Castro via snipers.
The Castro assassination attempts originated under the Eisenhower administration.
There are other comments in the Belin Report that back up the obvious.....any such action (ie. assassination) must have WH approval of some sort even allowing for plausible denial.
And this gives a clue as how there was a dual mechanism for dealing with issues, some under the larger NSC and others by a select smaller group.
"An examination of several of the major foreign policy problems that confronted the Eisenhower administration reveals that the NSC system was used to
manage some and was virtually bypassed in others. When the question involved a policy debate between departments with strongly-held, contending positions, as it did in the case of the debate between the Departments of State and Defense in 1956(1957 over whether to introduce a more modern generation of weapons into Korea, the NSC process focused debate and produced an agreed decision after discussion of three draft policy papers.
Crisis situations, however, such as the Suez crisis of 1956, the off-shore island crises of 1955 and 1958, and the Lebanon crisis of 1958, were typically managed through telephone conversations between Eisenhower, Dulles, and other principal advisers, and through
small meetings with the President in the White House, normally involving Dulles and other concerned advisers. Eisenhower sometimes used trusted NSC staffers to serve as an intermediary to gain information outside the chain of command as he did with Colonel Goodpaster during the Quemoy crisis in 1955."
Therefore the assassination discussions would have been via a select group and not the NSC or associated committees. This explains the comments of Dillon mentioned earlier. he was not "in the loop".
"C. Douglas Dillon, a member of this Commission, stated that while he served as Under Secretary of State from June 1959 until early January 1961,
he heard no discussion of assassination attempts against anyone, except discussions which occurred in late July or early August of 1960 at a meeting at the Pentagon which covered a great variety of matters in which "...a question regarding the possibility of an assassination attempt against Lumumba was briefly raised. The CIA representative indicated that the Agency did not undertake this sort of operation. This ended consideration of this subject."
