“At the time of his removal, Neale had been affiliated with the Bazo Corporation [the ranching operation] for over eight years, and for at least four of those years ICA had in its possession sufficient information to warrant an investigation which ... would have turned up the basic facts.
“It was congressional intervention that precipitated the Guinane investigation”—the final investigation that brought about Neale’s resignation.
“All employees of ICA seem to know, without being specifically instructed,” the subcommittee report went on, “that the preferred policy of the agency, and the Embassy in this instance, is to brush this sort of instance under the rug, with a quiet ‘resignation’ or ‘retirement.’”
“Although the old office of Personnel Security and Integrity in ICA was primarily responsible for the ineffective investigation in the Neale case, its successor, OIGC, did not perform with any more credit in a related matter.”
The ICA had used “executive privilege” to cover up its failures for several years. Instead of learning from past failures, the agency continued its negligence with full confidence that “executive privilege” could hide the failures from Congress, the General Accounting Office and the public.
The details of the scandals had not been known to President Eisenhower, nor had he known of the incredible laxity in the investigative units in the ICA. However, by promoting a secrecy cloak for the investigators of ICA he had allowed the ICA to hide the major defects in a vital part of an agency administering approximately 4 billion dollars a year.
CHAPTER XVII
A Pending Problem for JFK
In its first year, the Kennedy administration had tackled the problem of secrecy with noble thoughts and brave deeds. President Kennedy could not have spoken more clearly on the need for open government in a democratic society. Moreover, he had followed up his words with stringent action by overruling Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the one occasion when the State Department had tried to hide records behind a claim of “executive privilege.”
Chairman Edward Hebert said that his Armed Services subcommittee was receiving better co-operation than it had ever received from the Defense Department. Hebert had talked with President Kennedy and been assured that the administration felt it needed the help and prodding of a committee of Congress to cut the billions in wasteful defense spending.
The investigations by Chairman Porter Hardy were proceeding on the same note of co-operation, and the Virginia Democrat said he was “hopeful that it will continue.” Chairman Hardy’s subcommittee had a number of investigations of foreign aid under way, and he believed that some of these investigations would be a real test of the sincerity and consistency of the Kennedy administration stand on “executive privilege.”