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John Alexander McCone (January 4, 1902 - February 14, 1991) was an American businessman and politician who served as Director of Central Intelligence during the height of the Cold War.
McCone was born in San Francisco, California, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. A prominent industrialist, McCone also served for more than twenty years as a governmental advisor and official. Most importantly, he was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1958 - 1961) and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (1961 - 1965).
According to journalist Seymour Hersh, in December 1960, while still Atomic Energy Commission chairman, McCone revealed CIA information about Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons plant to the New York Times. Hersh writes that President John F. Kennedy was "fixated" on the Israeli nuclear weapons program and appointed McCone CIA director in part because of his willingness to deal with this and other nuclear weapons issues - and despite the fact that McCone was a Republican.[1]
He was a key player in the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the Honeymoon telegram of September 20, 1962, he insisted that the CIA remain imaginative when it came to Soviet weapons policy towards Cuba, as a September 19 National Intelligence Estimate had concluded it unlikely that nuclear missiles would be placed on the island. (The telegram was so named because McCone sent it while on his honeymoon in Paris, France, accompanied not only by his bride, but by a CIA cypher team as well.)
McCone's suspicions of the inaccuracy of this assessment proved to be correct, as it was later found out the Soviet Union had followed up its conventional military build up with the installation of MRBMs (Medium Range Ballistic Missiles) and IRBMs (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles), sparking off the crisis in October when they were later spotted by CIA's Lockheed U-2 surveillance flights.
McCone resigned from his position of DCI in April 1965, believing himself to be unappreciated by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who he complained, would not read his reports, including on the need for full-fledged inspections of Israeli nuclear facilities.[2] Upon his resignation, McCone submitted a final policy memorandum to Johnson arguing that Johnson's expansion of the war in Vietnam would arouse national and world discontent before it brought down the North Vietnamese regime.citation needed
Throughout his career, McCone served on numerous commissions that made recommendations on issues as diverse as civilian applications of military technology and the Watts riots.[3]
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Notes
- ^ Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, 72-73, 105, 120.
- ^ Seymour Hersh, 151.
- ^ Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots; John McCone, Chairman, Warren M. Christopher, Vice-Chairman (1965-12-02). "Violence in the City -- An End or a Beginning?". Retrieved on 2007-04-06.
References
- McCartney, Laton (1988). Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World. New York: Simon & Schuster. OCLC 17300223. ISBN 0671474154.
- Andrew, Christopher (1995). For the president's eyes only: secret intelligence and the American presidency from Washington to Bush. New York: Harper Perennial. OCLC 31377151. ISBN 0060170379. Chapters 7–8, and pp. 321–322.
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