LETTER (Sanitized)FROM JOHN R. WOODS II

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP81M00980R000400020001-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 10, 2004
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: February 28, 1978
• Content Type: LETTER

This letter is in response to the documents retain by this
agency in connection to the assassination of President John`
F. Kennedy. This letter is to also acknowledge the receipt
of the copy of the Index, and the copies of the II photographs.
In relation to your first letter dated 26 October I977, you
stated that "we have compiled an Index, some 310 pages.
The Index I had obtained is 272 pages with the last page
beening the break-down of documents of the different U.S.
agencies. I would appreciate if you would clarify the
exact number of pages.
In regard to the Index it has help provide me with the
additional information I had requested in my first letter
to some degree. I hope the additional information will
help the CIA to locate the items I requested. -The 150
photographs taken by Kramer and Naman during their trip
in Russia in August of 1961 is mention in a ClAmemorandum
to the FBI of march 20,, 1964, and again in the Index as
.607-818 of 19 April 1964.
Concerning my statements about the reasons why the 11-
photographs should be declassified, I would appreciate
if you would inform me of which department of this agency
I should contact regarding these documents.
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 DULLES
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currency for paying for covert operations in Saigon, Pnom Phen, and
Vientiane? It sounded like a hark back to the beginning of the century,
when the British had used opium in China to buy their way in and make
the mandarins rich and the masses supine as they tightened their
colonial grip on the country. Yet the skeptics who protested that
Americans--even American intelligence agents-could never stoop so
low were confounded. It was only too true. The CIA was spreading
drugs and corruption through Asia, and the stench of evil was begin-
ning to cling to the Agency's name.
At home in the United States peoples' attitudes had begun to turn
against the Republican Party and the principles it stood for. The
gungho anti-communism of the early Dulles years was beginning to.
seep away in the twilight of the Eisenhower administration, and the
President had lost prestige over the U-2 affair. Despite his clownish
and boorish behavior in Paris, there was little disposition to blame
Krushchev or the Russians for breaking off the summit,' and a tend-
ency instead to whisper that a CIA conspiracy had sabotaged the most
promising international conference of the decade.
Whether he was slowing down or not. Allen still liked to be involved
in, or in dose touch with, the more bizarre operations in which the
Agency was engaged. He would turn up at the CIA training farm in
Virginia to watch recruits performing and sit in on the polygraph pie
detector) tests to which they and all Agency operators were subjected
at regular intervals. He was particularly shocked when one pretty girl
operative displayed obvious signs of being a lesbian, and asked why
she was still in the service when male homosexuals were dismissed,
once they were discovered.
"Because no one blackmails lesbians," said the unit officer crisply.
"Anyway, it means she never falls in love with the guys she's working
on."
"But what if she suddenly meets the right man and becomes nor-
mal?" Allen asked. "A pretty girl like that--she can't remain a lesbian
all her life."
Once his enthusiasm had been for the CIA's production of gadgetry:
b s, fleshless istols, exploding candles, miniature radios and tape
elb tart that the Soviet government had launched a space satellite to overfly M;pe
and thsi United States on the same day that Knuhduv complained of the U-.it's 8ntnt.
. ,slum hue Roma was largely ignored by both the media and the public.
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t ApproVec
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-RDP81 M00980R000400020001-5 Nau in the Trough
experiments in mind-bending drugs, portable phials of lethal viruse
esoteric poisons t t i e without trace. ens sense of hum
was 150MM When lie earnat t Re unit worling on these no
recorders. But now-he was interresed in the mote sinister A en~
A curios a noiseless gun which the committee a p uced f
fi-ningd arts smear wit , germs, or venom at enemy agents
rei ersonalities whose-existence the COX was tinding em arras
trig.
'" 'ichard Bissell was meticulous in briefing Allen in all the operatio
the Health Alteration Committee direct;
13-r. Sidney Gottlieb anti Boris h and he added to his collection
To Allen Dulles the CIA was still the knight in shining armor ridin
the white charger of the United States to the rescue of the ideologicall
in which he was engaged. Bissell had now succeeded Frank Wisner
deputy director of Plans, which meant that he was in charge of
clandestine operations; and though he was no less zealous in promo
ing them, he was a much blander personality and rather more cyni
than his predecessor.
Q?ite a few years had passed since he had scored his first success b
helping overthrow the Jacob Arbenz regime in Guatemala and sub
stituting one more amenable to the directors of United Fruit. Sinc
that time Bissell -had thought a great deal about the efficacy of sue
operations, and had begun to be dubious about the results they we
likely to achieve..
It was not that he was morally against clandestine operations or th
Agency's sponsorship of movements to overthrow Communi
regimes. But he had begun to wonder whether they were worth whil
in the long run for the welfare of the United States.
"Guatemala was a complete success in the sense that the cacti
objective was achieved," he said later. "It was done more or less a
time and on budget. But all you could hope to do in a paramilita
operation like Guatemala was to place in power a friendly individua
Whether, having placed a friendly political leader in power and havin
got rid of Communist influences, you can then turn the situatio
around in the country concerned is open to question. We got Arben
out. We substituted Armas. But I think most people would argue th
from the day he was installed nobody has been able to make much o
a success of Guatemala."
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