MEMORANDUM FOR THE FILES

From: Gregory Treverton

August 29, 1975

Subject: Kennedy Library Tape Recording of March 13, 1963 National Security Council Meeting

On this date, I listened to a portion of the tape of the March 13, 1963 meeting of the National Security Council (President present). I listened to it several times in order to check it against the Library transcript of that meeting.

The relevant portion of the statement by John McCone reads as follows:

"With respect to Cuba, the thinking in the Agency is... we have to first get rid of the Soviets'...troops, and as stated ((several words garbled)) and use every resource we have available--political, diplomatic, otherwise--to accomplish that. Once that is done, then we believe that the monolithic structure of the Castro regime can be broken up. Maybe we'll have to catalyze it a little bit. But we think that there are enough indicators of distress within the military and within his political organization so that once the Soviets are out some...military coup can be... will be brought about which will remove the Castro government, and with a strong possibility of replacing that government with a government more favorable to our interests in the Western Hemisphere. Now, this is... there's a lot of ifs connected with that, but it seems to use, after having thought about this a good deal, that some such action as that is a more probably course of action that would be successful than to try to out...to envisage an uprising on the part of the population in the absence of the military...With the military and security forces on behalf of Castro, they can very easily frustrate and defeat any civilian uprising. I think, as time goes on, that our principal problem is going to be dealing with the future of Cuba and the future of Latin America. I think the problems of the Bay of Pigs and the October incident and the missiles will disappear, and more and more attention is going to be brought on the part of the people on the Hill...is going to be...is how we're going to dispose of this problem."

Then the President speaks.