The Bay of Pigs also badly tarnished the once golden public image of the CIA. “Suddenly, the Agency appeared to be, not an elite corps of slick, daring James Bond operatives,” remembered William Colby, “but rather a collection of bunglers, launching harebrained escapades and leading men uselessly to their death.”40 Congressmen who had expressed their complete confidence in secret executive measures to prosecute the Cold War now demanded greater legislative oversight; even as establish-mentarian a voice as Senator J. William Fulbright’s was among those raised in criticism of the Agency. Newspapers that had formerly printed nothing but praise for the CIA began lobbing brickbats instead (a notable exception being the conservative
The new, dissident mood also spread into the Agency itself. True, many of the liberals in charge of covert operations responded to questioning of their activities by hardening their anticommunist stance. Cord Meyer, for example, once the golden boy of world federalism, now described by one observer as “a gray man with a gray suit and gray hair,” was so dogmatic in
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his Cold War orthodoxy that he would harass fellow guests at Georgetown dinner parties who failed to display the same degree of ideological fervor.
(A variety of factors have been blamed for this transformation in Meyer’s personality, among them the trauma of his 1953 loyalty investigation, the paranoid influence of James Angleton, and a series of ghastly personal tragedies that included the murder in mysterious circumstances of his former wife, Mary Eno Pinchot.)42 Others, however, dismayed by the excesses that were being committed in the name of democracy, broke away from the Cold War consensus and became whistle-blowers, thereby establishing a precedent for the sensational exposés by former intelligence officers that would dominate headlines about the CIA during the early 1970s.
One such dissident was Paul Sakwa, the IOD officer who had dared to challenge Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown’s conduct of covert labor operations in the late 1950s. In 1959, Sakwa was transferred to the Vietnam desk of the Far East Division, where he rapidly realized that the United States was “locked into a disaster of our making” which would only “become worse.”43 Shortly after the launch of the Kennedy administration in 1961, Sakwa began communicating his concerns to sympathetic liberals in the White House, including his friend from Americans for Democratic Action, Arthur Schlesinger. When Schlesinger encouraged him to commit his thoughts to paper, Sakwa produced a long memorandum for the president under the title “CIA: Problems of a Clandestine Agency.” “Inter-agency struggles, internal political conflicts, and an over-extended involvement in foreign policy operations . . . have made some men giddy with power and imbued with self-righteousness,” reads this document, now filed among Schlesinger’s White House papers at the Kennedy Library in Boston. “About half the present operations are useless if not counter-productive, or just plain not worth the expense.”44 When Meyer, the likely inspiration of the jibe about self-righteousness, learned of Sakwa’s actions, he was furious. Not only had a junior officer gone over a superior’s head outside the Agency, Sakwa had also usurped Meyer’s function as CIA liaison with the White House. (Meyer’s links with JFK
went back to 1945 when they had attended the UN’s founding meeting at San Francisco together. The two men’s relationship had soured by the early 1960s, however, possibly as a result of an affair between the president and Meyer’s wife, Mary Pinchot. In March 1963, Meyer recorded in his di-
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ary his puzzlement about JFK’s “strange competitiveness” combined with
“a curiosity and interest in my private life that I find un-explainable.”45