The Last Vice Chairman
Jay Reid's connection to the Operations Coordinating Board
“Any attempt to unravel the chain of command of the Secret Team and more explicitly, of the intelligence community, must take into consideration that it is not what it seems to be and it is not what it was supposed to be. Certain of the most important activities which occur are so concealed within security wraps and so disguised within the intricacies of the special usage of language, such as ‘peacetime operations’, that the uninitiated and inexperienced person has no way to interpret what he finds.”1
Now that readers have an understanding of the Jay Reid case, I will begin to pull back the aperture to look at the people, places, and travel patterns that are critical to uncovering the details of Jay’s classified relationship with the CIA.
This process will, by necessity, require close examination of complex, and at times disturbing, historical events. I will try to introduce the various segments first at a high level before drilling down into the details.
First published in 1972, L. Fletcher Prouty’s The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World remains a seminal work on the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1955, Prouty, then serving as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, was promoted to the role of Focal Point Officer, responsible for creating an office that would manage Air Force logistical support of the CIA. In 1960, he moved over to the Office of Special Operations in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In that role, he attended all defense department meetings related to the Agency.
Because Prouty held higher security clearances than everyone in the CIA, he was never forced to sign a secrecy agreement. As a result, after he left government service, and so long as he did not share classified information, he was able to write and speak freely about how covert operations work at the highest levels.2
Although the CIA went to great lengths to keep the public from reading The Secret Team, the book has nonetheless had an enormous impact, especially in the research community, over the five decades since it was first published.
One of the most important passages in The Secret Team speaks to the systemic construct of American covert operations, and the lasting impact of corrupting influences on the control measures therein (emphasis added):
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, recalling a discussion he and [President John F.] Kennedy had about the Bay of Pigs, said, “This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power that these groups had. These various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies?”
…Can any president learn about, comprehend, and then believe what he has learned about this whole covert and complex subject? Can any president see in this vast mechanism, in which there is so much that is untrue and hidden, the heart and the core of the real problem? Will any president be prepared to confront this staggering realization when and if he uncovers it? Is this perhaps the great discovery which President Kennedy made, or was about to make? It is not just the CIA and the DoD that are involved. It is also the FBI, the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], elements of State and of the Executive Office Building, NSA [National Security Administration] and the hidden pulse of secret power coursing through almost every area of the body politic. It extends beyond governmental business into the academic world, and certain very influential sectors of the press, radio, TV, papers, magazines, and the publishing business. Before any president can rule this covert automatic control system, he must find out it is there - he must be aware of the fact it exists - and he must devise some means to dissolve its concealed activity. President Kennedy made a valiant attempt to effect control over this system with his directives NSAM [National Security Action Memoranda] 55 and 57, as a start. If he had more actively utilized the NSC system, and if he had structured a really strong and effective Operations Coordinating Board [OCB], he might have had a chance to grasp control of some segments of this intra-governmental cybernetic machine.
Understanding what happened to the OCB, arguably the most important government board in American history, is central to unraveling Jay Reid’s mysterious ties to the U.S. intelligence community.
Evolution of the Operations Coordinating Board
Prouty provides a nice summary of the reason why the OCB was created (emphasis added):
When the NSC [National Security Council] was established, it was realized that if such an eminent body of men made decisions and then directed that they be carried out, they would not necessarily be in a position to see that someone actually did carry them out. Therefore, provision was made for an Operations Coordinating Board, which would see that the decisions of the president and his council were carried out. This was effective only as long as the NSC was directing activity. The OCB would require that the NSC staff would keep a record of decisions in duplicate, and the board would ride herd on these decisions and see that they were done. It had trouble doing this when CIA was just getting its proposals “authorized” …This was exactly what Allen Dulles wanted.3
As originally conceived, the CIA was not intended to be a major force in covert operations. In fact, it was only supposed to engage in special operations as directed by the NSC.
However, over the course of the 1950s, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles chipped away at this directive.
He moved his own people throughout the government, infiltrating all major departments and agencies:
There are CIA men in the Federal Aviation Administration, in State, all over the DoD, and in most offices where the CIA has wanted to place them. Few top officials, if any, would ever deny the Agency such a service.4
Dulles was patient with the people he placed in these positions. Prouty writes, “He would move them up and deeper into their cover jobs, until they began to take a very active part in the role of their cover organizations.”5
Dulles was resourceful, but he was not a master strategist:
It was not his technique to lay deep plans and to use all these resources in pursuit of these plans. Rather, it was his game to continually call upon the vast and continuing resource of secret intelligence to supply him with input data, with the raw events that he could then toss upon the keyboard to sound their own chords across the field of foreign relations.6
By the late-1950s, rather than wait for the NSC to hand down a directive, the CIA began taking advantage of the adulterated NSC system to secure the necessary approvals by establishing fates accompli:
To anyone not knowing the process, it would then appear that the…message in question would have been properly staffed to the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff], and all services, when in reality it had simply been to all of the CIA control points in those offices. The real military would not have seen it…Emboldened by knowledge of the fact that they had properly touched base with all parties and offices concerned, the Secret Team would then go ahead with the project, on the assumption that no one had said not to go ahead with it after having been advised…The NSC found itself in the position of doing no more than “authorizing“ activities of the CIA rather than “directing” them.7
A sudden death and an opening on the OCB
Fred M. Dearborn, Jr. was the first person appointed to serve as Special Assistant to the President for Operations Coordination and Vice Chair of the OCB. When Dearborn died suddenly in early 1958, an opening emerged on the OCB. Karl Harr, Jr. moved over from the Pentagon to fill the vacated position.
Controversy struck later that year when Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s powerful chief of staff, was forced to resign after the public learned that he had accepted gifts from a businessman and old friend who was under federal investigation.
Although Eisenhower made a number of staff changes following Adams’s departure, Harr, “who with previous experience in the State Department and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, had become the Vice Chairman of the Operations Coordinating Board,” kept his job.8
Harr, a Rhodes Scholar and lawyer by training, was just 35 years-old when he joined Eisenhower’s staff. Despite his relative youth, Harr had longstanding relationships with many NSC principals from his time practicing corporate law in New York and his previous stops in the federal government.
In 1960, Eisenhower expanded Harr’s job portfolio (emphasis added):
January 13, 1960
Dear Mr. Harr:
I have today designated Mr. Gordon Gray, Chairman of the Operations Coordinating Board, vice Mr. Robert D. Murphy. Under this new arrangement I will look to Mr. Gray to give impartial and objective leadership and guidance for the work of the OCB as well as the work of the National Security Council and its Planning Board.
Within the framework of your duties as my Special Assistant, you are requested henceforth to make a special contribution to two major areas of the Operations Coordinating Board's work in addition to continuing to discharge your responsibilities with respect to the normal work of the OCB. The first of these is in taking the lead in initiating new proposals to the Board for actions within the framework of national security policies in response to opportunity and changes in the situation. The second is in placing particular emphasis on seeing that Board actions implementing national security policies contribute fully to the climate of foreign opinion the United States is seeking to achieve in the world.
You will, of course, continue as Vice Chairman of the OCB and I will expect you to continue to present OCB reports to the National Security Council as you have been doing since your appointment as my representative on the Board in March 1958.
Sincerely,DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Effectiveness of the OCB
Eisenhower valued the OCB and attempted to strengthen it through executive order in 1957. Part of this process involved creating the position that first Dearborn, and later Harr, would occupy.
At its peak, soon after the reorganization, the OCB was operating at a high level and was seen as achieving its purpose.
Eisenhower had been precise in his administrative practices. He had made great use of the National Security Council and of implementing support of the Operations Coordinating Board. His decisions were the product of open and free discussion in the NSC chambers; and then having been made those decisions were followed up by the OCB to assure their proper accomplishment within the government.9
There were mixed opinions about the OCB’s effectiveness in the final years of Eisenhower’s second term.
Those who served on the Board at that time felt that the late-1950s were the peak efficiency years for the OCB, and perhaps that is true.
A declassified counterterrorism document from the 1980s highlighted this sentiment in summarizing the covert operations board structure under Eisenhower.
If we concede the point that in the late Eisenhower years the OCB worked “quite effectively”, that still leaves us with the question: For whom did it work effectively?
By 1959 there were almost no restraints. This permitted the CIA to avoid entirely the scrutiny of the OCB and to work outside the continuing monitorship of that board. In effect, by 1959 the Agency was able to run operations itself as it saw fit.10
Kennedy, who took office in 1961, moved away from the NSC system. He tried to create a new, centralized control mechanism. The weakness of the new system, however, was that it afforded the DCI too much power because it relied too heavily on relatively few high-level checks.
By the time Kennedy became president, he was led to believe that the NSC was unimportant, one of those Eisenhower idiosyncrasies, and that he could do without it. If he could do with the NSC, he certainly could do without the OCB (since it could be shown that the OCB was not able to perform its job properly because it was unable to find out what the Special Group [another board-like entity] had approved, there was no reason for OCB either).
Without either of these bodies in session, the DCI was able to move in as he desired, with very little effective control from any council member. This was a major change brought about by a kind of evolution and erosion. It was certainly a downgrading process; but the trouble was that all too few people had any realization of what had taken place, and those who had were either with the CIA or the Secret Team, and they were not about to tell anyone.11
The ties that bind
The fate of the OCB is central to uncovering Jay Reid’s relationship with the CIA because Karl Harr and Jay were cousins. Karl’s mother and Jay’s father were siblings.
Karl, seven years younger than Jay, grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, just down the road from Montclair, where Jay spent his formative years.
For most of his adult years Karl was a resident of Chevy Chase, Maryland, which, again, was just minutes away from where Jay lived in Bethesda.
Sources close to the family confirmed that Jay held Karl in very high esteem, even if the two families were not known to socialize.
Karl Harr is an extremely important piece to this puzzle.
I suspect he is also the most dangerous one.
Sixty-four years after President Kennedy shuttered the OCB, and its last Vice Chairman returned to the private sector, I will seek to answer the following questions:
Who was Karl Harr?
Where did his interests lie?
For whom did he work?
In doing so, I hope to shed more light on Jay’s unacknowledged or classified association with the CIA.
Prouty, L. Fletcher. The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World. Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY, 2011. Pg. 172
Ibid. Pg. ix-x
Ibid. Pg. 342-343
Ibid. Pg. 306
Ibid. Pg. 306
Ibid. Pg. 317-318
Ibid. Pg. 342
Eisenhower, Dwight D. Waging Peace: The White House Years, A Personal Account 1956-1961. Doubleday & Company, Inc. New York, NY, 1965. Pg. 320
The Secret Team, Pg. 470
Ibid. Pg. 404
Ibid. Pg. 343-344