In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy issued a new directive designating the committee as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Board, and empowering it to advise the President “with respect to the objectives and conduct” of covert actions, including “highly sensitive covert operations relating to political action, propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, escape and evasion, subversion against hostile states or groups and support of indigenous and anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world,” according to a Top Secret December 1, 1963, report on PFIAB’s genesis, prepared for Lyndon Johnson after the Kennedy assassination.
Among the PFIAB’s duties was to monitor the efforts of the “Special Group,” a senior interagency committee made up of representatives of U.S. national security agencies which acted as the high command for the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administration’s secret foreign policy. Between January 1961 and the fall of 1962, the Special Group—which was also known as the 5412 Committee for the room number it met in—approved approximately 550 covert operations, most of which were shared with the PFIAB in some detail. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, President Kennedy appointed his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to chair an even more elite “high command” of covert operations—the Special Group (Augmented), which determined major covert programs, among them, Operation Mongoose, targeting Cuba.
According to Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi, Associate Professor of Instruction in international affairs at the University of South Florida and a research fellow at the National Security Archive, the PFIAB and Special Group minutes provide a distinct and unique history of covert operations: “These documents shed light on the inner workings of the U.S. government’s covert action high command: their motivations, priorities, frustrations, and determination to employ political violence, economic sabotage, and large sums of money to intervene in the internal affairs of countries the world over.”
THE DOCUMENTS
Document 1
CIA, Minutes of Special Group Meeting, Top Secret, August 25, 1960
Aug 25, 1960
Source
National Archives, JFK Assassination Records, 2025 release, Doc ID: 157-10014-10100
In 1975, NSC staffer Robert Johnson revealed to members of the Church committee that President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba during an NSC meeting in early August 1960. Other members of the Eisenhower administration disputed Johnson’s account. The minutes of this Special Group meeting from late August 1960 suggest that such an order was in the minds of the CIA high command. Amid discussion of “operational lines” then being followed “in mounting an anti-Lumumba campaign in the Congo,” national security adviser Gordon Gray “wondered whether the plans as outlined” by the CIA were sufficient to unseat the Congolese prime minister, saying that “his associates had expressed extremely strong feelings on the necessity for very straightforward action” against Lumumba. “It was finally agreed that planning for the Congo would not necessarily rule out ‘consideration’ of any particular kind of activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba,” according to the summary.
