John Alexander McCone (January 4, 1902 – February 14, 1991) was an American businessman and government official who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1961 to 1965, during the height of the Cold War.

Background

John A. McCone was born in San Francisco, California, on January 4, 1902. His father ran iron foundries across California, a business founded in Nevada in 1860 by McCone's grandfather. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, beginning his career in Los Angeles' Llewellyn Iron Works.

He also worked for ITT. In 1946, the General Accounting Office implied that McCone was a war profiteer, stating that McCone and his associates of the California Shipbuilding Corporation had made $44 million on an investment of $100,000. McCone's political affiliation was with the Republican Party.

Director of Central Intelligence

thumb|right|The U.S. Representatives to the [[International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, circa 1960. From left to right: John Stephens Graham, Paul F. Foster, and McCone.]]

After the disaster of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, President John F. Kennedy forced the resignation of CIA director Allen Dulles and some of his staff. McCone replaced Dulles as DCI on November 29, 1961.

He married Theiline McGee Pigott on August 29, 1962, at St. Anne's Chapel of the Sacred Heart Villa in Seattle, Washington.

McCone was not Kennedy's first choice; the President had tentatively offered the job to Clark Clifford, his personal lawyer, who politely refused (Clifford later served as Secretary of Defense for Lyndon Johnson); and then to Fowler Hamilton, a Wall Street lawyer with experience in government service during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Hamilton accepted, but when a problem developed at the Agency for International Development, he was shifted there. Thus Kennedy, urged on by his brother Robert, turned to McCone. He was not informed by the CIA of everything they were doing, despite being the Director of Central Intelligence. For instance, he was never told about mafia involvement in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. He only found out about it in August 1962, when a Chicago Sun-Times reporter rang CIA headquarters asking if such plots had occurred. Nor was he told about the CIA's domestic surveillance program, HTLINGUAL.

McCone was a key figure 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, Theiline McGee Pigott but by a CIA cipher team.

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 buildup 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.

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, McCone received a call from the President's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, asking McCone to come and see him. When he arrived, McCone was asked if the CIA had killed his brother. Kennedy later stated he asked this question "in a way that McCone couldn't lie to me, and they [the CIA] hadn't". McCone kept information from the Warren Commission, which had been set up to investigate President Kennedy's assassination. He never informed the commission about CIA assassination plots against Castro or the mafia's participation in these plots.

While McCone was DCI, the CIA was involved in many covert plots; according to Admiral Stansfield Turner (who himself later served as DCI from 1977 to 1981, under President Jimmy Carter), these included:

McCone was also involved in the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état; he was friends with ITT president Harold Geneen whose company stood to lose its Brazilian subsidiary if president João Goulart nationalized it. McCone would later work for ITT.

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. Before his resignation, McCone submitted a final memorandum regarding the war in Vietnam to President Johnson, arguing that Johnson's plan of attack was too limited in scope to successfully defeat the Hanoi regime; he further asserted that public support (in the United States and abroad) for any effort in North Vietnam would erode if the plan went unchanged:

In 1975 he testified before the Church Committee on CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro.

Other

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.

In the 1970s, he helped found the Committee on the Present Danger.

In 1987, McCone was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan.

Death

John A. McCone died on February 14, 1991, of cardiac arrest at his home in Pebble Beach, California. He was 89 years old.

Honors and awards

  • McCone Hall at the University of California, Berkeley campus is named in McCone's honor.
  • McCone Hall at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (formerly the Monterey Institute) is named in honor of McCone and his wife, Theilline. McCone served on the Board of Trustees here.

McCone was portrayed in several different docudramas about the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Keene Curtis in the television production The Missiles of October (1974) and Peter White in the theatrical film Thirteen Days (2000). In the biographical television film Path to War (2002), he is played by Madison Mason. In the 2020 film The Courier, he is played by Željko Ivanek. In the film X-Men: First Class (2011) he was played by Matt Craven. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and its sequel, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops feature an unnamed DCI modeled physically after McCone.

See also

  • Bechtel Corporation

Notes

References

  • Chapters 7–8, and pp. 321–322.
  • Constructing Cassandra : the Social Construction of Strategic Surprise at the Central Intelligence Agency, 1947- 2001 https://catalogue.kent.ac.uk/Record/764718
  • Annotated Bibliography for John A. McCone from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
  • Papers of John A. McCone, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
  • Guide to the John A. McCone Papers at The Bancroft Library
  • Announcement of the Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
  • FBI files on John McCone
  • John McCone biography by chief CIA historian David Robarge

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