51 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
---
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category: "Key Figures"
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tags:
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- Person
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- CIA
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- ColdWar
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- StandardOil
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- LatinAmerica
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- Nuclear
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- Israel
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summary: "Industrialist and director of central intelligence from 1961 to 1965 who clashed with Kennedy over covert operations, sat on ITT's board while a consultant to the agency, and offered Helms a fund against Allende."
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born: 1902-01-04
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died: 1991-02-14
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location: San Francisco, California
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created: 2026-06-12
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updated: 2026-09-21
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alias:
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- John A. McCone
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---
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John A. McCone (1902-1991) was an American industrialist who served as Director of the [[CIA]] from 1961 to 1965, appointed by President [[John F. Kennedy]] after the [[Bay of Pigs invasion]] and retained into the [[Lyndon B. Johnson|Johnson]] administration. A former director of [[Standard Oil|Standard Oil of California]] and a wealthy engineering contractor, he brought a corporate and oil-industry orientation to the Agency that repeatedly set him at odds with Kennedy and aligned him with the [[Nelson Rockefeller|Rockefeller]] network's interests in [[Latin America]].[^1]
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### Conflicts with Kennedy
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Though Kennedy's appointee, McCone diverged sharply from the president. He lent CIA analysts to Senator [[John Stennis]]'s effort to defeat Kennedy's nuclear test-ban treaty, secretly supplying expertise to help Stennis argue against ratification. As a former large stockholder and director of Standard Oil of California, he was reported to have differed with Kennedy over the president's threat to reduce the oil-depletion allowance, a change estimated to cost the oil companies some $280 million a year. He had also disliked Kennedy's July 1961 recommendation to the [[President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board]] to break up the CIA, and the directives making the military responsible for large covert operations, and he had favored [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] in Vietnam.[^2]
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After the assassination of President Kennedy, Attorney General [[Robert Kennedy]] confronted McCone directly, asking, "Did the CIA kill my brother?" McCone assured him it had not, claiming ignorance of the Agency's assassination plots mounted after the Bay of Pigs.[^2]
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### Shaping Johnson's Latin America Team
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Under Johnson, McCone helped reorient US policy toward the hemisphere around figures congenial to corporate and Rockefeller interests. He urged Johnson to bring [[Thomas Mann]] back from the Mexico City embassy to replace assistant secretary of state [[Edward Martin]] and to take over the [[Alliance for Progress]] from [[Teodoro Moscoso]], and he recommended returning [[Robert B. Anderson]], a Rockefeller business associate from the Eisenhower years, to a leading role in the Alliance. The effect was to staff the administration's Latin America apparatus with men attuned, in Colby and Dennett's phrase, "to the prerogatives of American business."[^3]
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### ITT and Chile
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After leaving the CIA in 1965, McCone joined the board of the [[International Telephone and Telegraph|International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation]] (ITT). In 1970, working to prevent the election of [[Salvador Allende]] in Chile, McCone offered the CIA $2 million to finance an effort to stop him, connecting the corporate and intelligence campaigns against the Chilean left that the [[Rockefeller Brothers Fund]]'s earlier rural-education programs in Chile had been designed to undercut.[^4]
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### Atomic Energy Commission
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John A. McCone was a wealthy Republican businessman from [[California]] who served as chairman of the [[Atomic Energy Commission]] (AEC) and later as Director of the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]]. In December 1960, he leaked information to *New York Times* reporter [[John W. Finney]] about [[Israel]]'s secret nuclear reactor at [[Dimona]], expressing anger that Israel and [[France]] had "lied to us" about its purpose.[^5]
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McCone's leak was his parting shot as AEC commissioner, as he announced his resignation shortly after. He was committed to nuclear nonproliferation and was aware that the [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]] administration was nearing its end, making it an opportune time to act. He was also frustrated by the constant Israeli lying about Dimona.[^5]
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McCone was regularly briefed on the Israeli nuclear program after replacing [[Lewis L. Strauss]] as AEC commissioner in July 1958. As AEC chairman, he was a member of the U.S. Intelligence Advisory Committee, the top-level group at the time. He was labeled by some as anti-Semitic due to his actions, but there was no known basis for such allegations; he was simply dead set against any nuclear proliferation and offended by the Israeli and French deception.[^5]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: Central Intelligence Agency, "John A. McCone," Directors of Central Intelligence. https://www.cia.gov/legacy/headquarters/directors-of-central-intelligence/; Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, *Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon*. HarperCollins, 1995. Ch. 27.
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[^2]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 27.
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[^3]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 27; Ch. 28.
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[^4]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 41.
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[^5]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy*. Random House, 1991. Chapter 6, 7.
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