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JFK Files: Revelations from the Covert

Operations High Command

Special Group and PFIAB Meeting Minutes Provide

Dramatic View of CIA Operations
Top Secret Briefings Describe Clandestine
Operations in Brazil, Chile, British Guiana,

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Haiti, Italy, Japan, and Congo, Among Other

Targeted Countries

Published: Apr 7, 2025

Briefing Book #: 890
Edited by Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
and Peter Kornbluh

For more information, contact:

202-994-7000, or
[email protected]
[email protected]

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Washington, D.C., April 7, 2025 - Just six months before the 1964 military
coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart in Brazil, Deputy
Director of Central Intelligence for Plans Richard Helms briefed the
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on CIA clandestine
operations in South America’s largest country. “[CIA] is carrying out covert
action in the labor movement and CIA believes that Communist control can
be weakened,” he advised board members who monitored intelligence
operations on behalf of President Kennedy, according to a fully declassified
summary of the September 10, 1963, Top Secret briefing posted today for
the first time by the National Security Archive.

Helms and his deputies also updated the PFIAB on the status of covert
actions and regime-change operations in other targeted countries. In Cuba,
the CIA was shifting “from external raids to internal sabotage operations,”
running ten “black” operations per month, and targeting “dissident Cuban
elements,” among them Cuban military officers. In British Guiana, the CIA
secretly financed a 79-day general strike to destabilize the elected
government of Cheddi Jagan, funneling money for the strikers through the
AFL-CIO. CIA plans to organize an exile force against Haitian dictator
François “Papa Doc” Duvalier were foiled when Juan Bosch, president of the
Dominican Republic, refused to let the agency use his country as a base of
operations.

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The Top Secret White House memorandum titled “Board Panel on Covert
Action Operations” was declassified, uncensored, as part of the 80,000 pages
of Kennedy assassination records released in March. Numerous other PFIAB
records were included in the release, along with the unredacted minutes of
the “Special Group”—the elite interagency committee that vetted and
approved U.S. covert operations around the world. The National Security
Archive is posting a special selection of these unique records today.

New Details and Revelations

Unredacted, the documents add considerable detail to the history of
previously reported covert programs, including intelligence sources and
methods, specific expenditures, agent identities, and the names of
collaborating nations, intelligence agencies and foreign officials. In some
cases, the declassified documents reveal operations that were not previously
known. Among the key details and revelations contained in the documents:

** In Cuba, the CIA listed 108 covert agents and assets on the island in
1963, including “friendly diplomatic personnel” in foreign embassies in
Havana. Sixty agents targeted Cuban shipping, and there were “31
penetrations of Cuban installations abroad,” according to a report to the
PFIAB. CIA staff in Washington and Miami devoted to overthrowing the
Castro government totaled 384 individuals. Among the other assets were 83
contractors, 525 foreign nationals (the majority of them Cuban exiles), 45
agents in overseas posts, and 12 analysts in the Agency’s intelligence
division working on Cuba.

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** Regarding British Guiana, the documents confirm CIA collaboration with

the British intelligence service, MI6, to finance and sustain labor unrest and
a protracted general strike to undermine the elected government of Prime
Minister Cheddi Jagan. Minutes of an April 25, 1963, Special Group meeting
noted that “CIA was instructed to look into this and jointly with MI6 take
such action as might be indicated as desirable to ensure the continuation of
the strike.” At a PFIAB meeting at the White House after the strike ended,
CIA Deputy Director for Plans, Richard Helms reported that the Agency had
“worked out with [AFL-CIO union leader] George Meany a program of CIA
financial support ($435,000) to the strike under the cover of ‘AFL-CIO
contributions’” and that “A CIA cover representative ran the strike
program.” The documents also strongly infer that CIA director John McCone
met with MI6 official James Fulton in Paris to discuss this joint operation to
overthrow the Jagan government.

** In Chile, the CIA provided Christian Democrat candidate Eduardo Frei

with $750,000 in March 1964 and another $1.25 million in May 1964 to
finance his campaign for the presidency. At a June 5, 1964, PFIAB meeting at
the White House, Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms warned the board
that “the coming Presidential elections there on September 13 are viewed
with serious concern” given the prospects of a victory by Socialist candidate
Salvador Allende. Helms stressed that it was essential to act; if Allende won,
he warned, “the constitutional-minded Chileans would accept a regularly
elected Communist as President and would not take coup action to put him
out of office.”

** Regarding Congo, the Special Group meeting minutes add new details
on the CIA role in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba. Five months prior to
Lumumba’s assassination, CIA officer Thomas A. Parrott informed the
Special Group that the agency had developed “broadly three (or as Mr. [DCI
Allen] Dulles later described them ‘2 ½’) operational lines that we are
following in mounting an anti-Lumumba campaign in the Congo.” These
included: operations through the chief advisor of the Christian Trade
Unions; the planned attempt of a Socialist politician to arrange a vote of no
confidence in Lumumba; “and a brand new contact with an alleged leader of
certain independent labor groups”—the latter a likely reference to Cyrille
Adoula, the CIA’s chosen candidate to replace Lumumba once he was
removed.

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** On Haiti, the Special Group meeting minutes reveal that CIA plans to
depose dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, whose dynastic regime was
energizing the rise of the left, were compromised by resistance from the
new president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch. The CIA had been
building an exile force to invade Haiti from the DR, but Bosch, according to
one document in mid-1963, “has now decided that he is unwilling to allow
such an [Haitian] exile force to use his country as a base for military
operations against Duvalier.” The CIA’s chief for Western Hemisphere
operations, Colonel J.C. King, then informed members of the Special Group
that “everyone concerned with the project agrees that Duvalier must be
removed in some manner or other” but that the current plan is
“unworkable.” (Bosch subsequently became the target of Lyndon Johnson’s
decision, in April 1965, to invade the Dominican Republic and install a
compliant regime through U.S. military force.)

The selection of documents posted today also includes a series of intriguing

PFIAB recommendations and proposals, among them:

• That the CIA consider the proposal (made to the PFIAB by

representatives by the Israeli Intelligence and Security Service)
“extended CIA-Israeli coordination of intelligence activities in Latin
America, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere.”
• That the CIA explore the feasibility in Japan “of intensifying covert
actions against the sizeable and effective influence of Communists
among Japanese intellectuals, educators, and students.”
• “That the National Security Agency make an on-the-scene technical
review of CIA’s covert Communications/Electronics Intelligence
collection efforts in Behshahr, Iran, to ensure maximum technical use of
this strategically-positioned activity against Soviet missiles and satellite
operations.”

The PFIAB and Special Group

Among the documents posted today is a lengthy chronological compilation

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of memoranda and minutes of PFIAB meetings during President Kennedy’s

1000 days in office that includes a short history of the special board of White
House advisors on intelligence matters. The impetus for the board was a
recommendation by the Hoover Commission on Organization of the
Executive Branch to create a “Watch Dog Committee” on intelligence
matters, made up of members of Congress and “public-spirited citizens.” To
preempt the creation of an outsider supervisory committee, in February
1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an Executive Order creating
the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities.

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.”

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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.

Document 2
White House, “Minutes of Meeting of January 30, 1964,” [The President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Meeting with President Lyndon B.
Johnson], Top Secret, January 30, 1964
Jan 30, 1964
Source: National Archives, JFK Assassination Records, 2025 release, Doc ID:
206-10001-10002

This lengthy compilation of records about the PFIAB was prepared for the
benefit of President Johnson who met with the board chairman on January

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30, 1964. The document includes a brief history of the PFIAB, a full
chronology of the minutes of PFIAB meetings during the Kennedy
Administration, and a list of the 170 recommendations that the PFIAB had
made to President Kennedy

Document 3
CIA, “Minutes of Meeting of the Special Group, April 25, 1963,” Secret/
Eyes Only, April 25, 1963 [with April 26 Memorandum for the Record
attached]
Apr 25, 1963
Source: National Archives, JFK Assassination Records, 2025 release, Doc ID:
104-10306-10024

This memorandum reveals previously unknown details of the joint CIA-MI6

covert regime-change operation against Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana.
Among other new information is that the CIA estimated it would need
$10,000 per day to sustain a general strike against the Jagan government
and that U.S. officials believed it would be worth the price if Jagan were
eventually overthrown. Covert political action programs in Italy and the
Congo are also discussed.

Document 4
CIA, “Minutes of Meeting of the Special Group, 20 June 1963,” Secret,
June 20, 1963
Jun 20, 1963
Source: National Archives, JFK Assassination Records, 2025 release, Doc ID:
104-10306-10024

CIA, NSC and State Department officials at the Special Group meeting
discuss a series of programs and proposals on intelligence operations in
Southeast Asia and covert action in Cuba, Haiti and elsewhere. The Special
Group agrees on a political action program to overthrow Haitian president
François Duvalier, even though the chief of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere
division, J.C. King, voices his concern about who will replace him after he is

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deposed. “Colonel King, in support of the paper's recommendations, said

that in his opinion we have no feasible alternatives but to cooperate with
[Dominican Republic President Juan] Bosch in attempting to unseat Duvalier,
and that if this is not done, we are likely to end up with a far worse
situation.”

Document 5
CIA, “Minutes of Special Group Meeting, July 18, 1963,” Secret, July 18,
1963
Jul 18, 1963
Source: National Archives, JFK Assassination Records, 2025 release, Doc ID:
104-10306-10024

In this meeting, the Special Group grapples with major obstacles in its covert
plan to overthrow the Duvalier regime. Agency officials have been trying,
but has so far failed, to convince Dominican Republic President Juan Bosch
to allow them to use that country as a staging ground for an exile force that
would invade Haiti and depose Duvalier—the same modus operandi used
against the Arbenz government of Guatemala in 1954, when the CIA
organized a small band of rebels in Honduras. CIA officials say the plan is
not working in Haiti because, “It has been demonstrated that these exiles
are of very little use, because of insecurity, lack of cohesive purpose or of
adequate leadership, etc.” Another newly revealed detail in the 2025
declassification of this record are U.S. efforts to leverage U.S. military aid to
persuade “the Pakistani government to go along with expansion of special
intelligence facilities in that country.” It was agreed that the “best
approach” was to make clear that U.S. military assistance was dependent on
“the maintenance and expansion of U.S. intelligence facilities at Peshawar.”

Document 6
White House, PFIAB, “Board Panel on Covert Action Operations,” Top
Secret, September 10, 1963
Sep 10, 1963

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National Archives, JFK Assassination Records, 2025 release, Doc ID:

Source:
206-10001-10016

This revealing record of the September 10, 1963, PFIAB meeting summarizes
CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms’ briefing on covert operations
in British Guiana, Haiti, Italy, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba and Vietnam. In Cuba, CIA
operations were undergoing “a shift from external raids to internal
sabotage operations,” running ten “black” operations per month, and
targeting “dissident Cuban elements,” among them Cuban military officers.
In British Guiana, the CIA has secretly financed a 79-day general strike to
destabilize the elected government of Cheddi Jagan, funneling money for
the strikers through the AFL-CIO. In Italy, the CIA has clandestinely financed
the Christian Democratic party “to the tune of $1 million in the campaign
leading up to the June elections (plus $600,000 to other political elements in
Italy).” The CIA planned to continue such covert funding to foster “the
establishment of a center-left government coalition.”

Document 7
White House, PFIAB, Covert Action Panel Meeting 6/5/64 (Discussion
with Secretary, Special Group, et al.),” Top Secret, June 5, 1964
Jun 5, 1964
Source: National Archives, JFK Assassination Records, 2025 release, Doc ID:
206-10001-10014

At what appears to be a special meeting between Special Group

representatives and the PFIAB, the board members are not only briefed on
specific operations in Cuba, Chile, Laos and elsewhere, but also on the
general work of the Special Group. According to the minutes, “most of the
covert actions considered by the Special Group are CIA proposals, although
other members suggest actions; for example, State Department brought up
for discussion the matter of supplying arms in Tangayika. “The State
Department is considered to serve as the ‘conscience’ of the Special Group
in its consideration of proposed covert actions,” the PFIAB members are
told.

The document also reveals that around half of all the covert actions they
considered by the Special Group pertained to overhead reconnaissance
missions: “During the current year some 23 of 39 proposals were favorably
considered by the Group. About 50 per cent of the covert actions coming

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before the Special Group are carried out by the Joint Reconnaissance Center
(JRC) of the JCS, in the aerial reconnaissance field. Since January 1, the Group
has approved actions with respect to Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos,
Panama; Chile, Congo, Angola, Tibet, Zanzibar, and China, among others.
For example, the April 29, 1964, meeting included discussions of the Chilean
elections; Cuba; a JRC forecast of peripheral missions; and reconnaissance
coverage from India of a Chinese Communist test range.”

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