The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill by Mitchell Greg

Author:Mitchell, Greg [Mitchell, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101903858
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-10-17T22:00:00+00:00

Later that day Kennedy met with his United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, who had just returned from meeting with European leaders. Stevenson reported that nearly everyone privately opposed the reunification of Germany, the Nazi era still fresh in their minds. Kennedy wondered why none of the leaders ever came out against a reunited Germany in public. Then he analyzed Nikita Khrushchev’s desire to unify Berlin with the Allies removed, musing, “I don’t blame him for wanting to get us out of Berlin….They have the Wall, they have this country that’s always disturbed as long as there’s Berlin.” But there was one catch: “The problem is that our getting out of Berlin would be disastrous to us.”

—

The CBS tunnel coverage might have been quashed, but a quite different media outrage continued to occupy the President’s attention: the leak exploited by Hanson Baldwin in the New York Times, and how to discourage others like it. Kennedy had forwarded his intelligence panel’s plan to monitor journalists to CIA director McCone and others, and expected action to “protect our intelligence and our intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.” The tap on Baldwin’s phone, meanwhile, remained active, but the White House had made no explicit threats against Baldwin or the Times, so the newspaper’s publisher decided to forgo a major piece on the FBI’s probe.

At the request of the White House, an FBI official met with top Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell to discuss what the bureau had found so far in its investigation (over 125 interviews) of the Baldwin leak. The FBI had been providing O’Donnell with excerpts from the phone taps, which were passed on to the President. It was O’Donnell who finally had something of interest for the FBI: “The President and [I] have figured out that the finger of suspicion seems to point to one man.” Kennedy wanted the suspect reinterviewed by the FBI, for this man had denied it previously. The President advised: Don’t tell him that it was my idea to investigate him further.

The suspect? None other than Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric. Number two at the Pentagon, he knew enough to provide the key information Baldwin had published, and he had met the reporter in D.C. on July 17. Exposing him must have been difficult for Kennedy. Unlike most others at high levels in this administration, Ros Gilpatric, born in 1906, had been handpicked by the President. A former corporate attorney, Gilpatric had served as under secretary of the Air Force in the early 1950s. Now the FBI would have to talk with Gilpatric again.

On the evening of August 22, President Kennedy met with CIA director McCone and General Maxwell Taylor at the White House. The meeting opened with an update on the new CIA office created by JFK’s intelligence panel to control leaks. As per JFK’s recommendation, high-level staffers who had access to sensitive material would now have to write up a memo on every contact with the press and submit it to their superiors.

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