423. Memorandum from Forrestal to Bundy, December 101
SUBJECT
- Police Assistance Program
From an administrative point of view, this program has not been going too well until recently. Despite the President’s directive (NSAM 177) of last August, AID did virtually nothing to set up a central administration for the police programs until early in November. The reasons are a basic lack of philosophic sympathy with the program in the regional bureaus where it is looked upon as a dangerous interference in the orderly development of their economic programs. The effect of this antipathy was reinforced by the fact that the program lacked a single head who felt responsibility for its execution.
Under the whiplash of the Attorney General’s technique of offensive cross examination in the Special Group (CI) more was accomplished in the first two weeks of November than was accomplished since last August. Byron Engle, was made head of the Office of Public Safety in AID, and has now been given more than adequate authority and responsibility to spark this program. Furthermore, he seems to me to be the kind of man who would carry the ball once he got his hands on it. There is some nervousness in the Budget and from Ralph Dungan over whether we have not gone too far in centralizing the police program; but I think that if we have erred, it has been in the right direction.
Nothing has been done, however, on the International Police Academy here in Washington; this is a matter on which we are now concentrating.
AID has also shown some resistance to “civic action”, i.e. small-scale public works carried out by indigenous military forces. Here the problem has been not only philosophical antipathy but, even more, AID procedures which are incredibly cumbersome and inflexible. [Facsimile Page 2] Some progress has been made on this front, especially in Indonesia, but it is a matter which requires constant goading on a case-by-case basis.
One of the difficulties we are having in the Special Group (CI) is that the group has moved from the stage of initiating new policies and actions in the field of counterinsurgency to the stage of monitoring the progress made on directives which were issued many months ago. [Typeset Page 1702] This is a boring procedure for some members of the group and intensely irritating for others. Nevertheless, my own feeling is that the exercise is definitely worthwhile provided we can keep the group from flying off into attempts to manage the entire foreign policy of the United States in underdeveloped countries.
- Thoughts on AID’s handling of Police Assistance Program. Secret. 2 pp. Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Meeting and Memoranda Series, NSAM 177, Police Assistance Programs.↩