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The CIA released 19,000 pages of classified briefings on the major events that shook the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies.
Despite the seriousness of the topics, the intelligence points were written to be highly casual.
In 1961, the CIA debuted a new type of confidential intelligence report for President John F. Kennedy, a daily morning briefing surveying the threats facing the country so top secret that it was kept even from his second-in-command.
The CIA says it was directed that “under no circumstances” should it be delivered to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, likely due to political rivalries between the two.
The detail is just one of many surrounding the key intelligence briefing the President receives each morning – known first as the President’s Intelligence Checklist, abbreviated as PICL, and then later as the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB – that were shared in the CIA’s declassification Wednesday of an unprecedented number of documents related to the briefing book.
The 19,000 pages of released briefings contain details of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War and other major events that shook the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies from 1961-1969. Portions of the briefs still remain redacted.
Despite the seriousness of the topics, the intelligence points were written to be highly casual, calling details, for example, “sketchy” and, in one instance, describing a Polish ambassador who defecated on himself after being trapped in a car.
“A mob kept the Polish ambassador in his car for 10 hours, causing him to ruin both his clothing and the upholstery,” the brief states. This language is radically different than the formal briefs President Barack Obama receives today, according to the CIA.
“Today’s PDB in many respects is unrecognizable from what it was in the Kennedy and Johnson years,” said CIA Director John Brennan at the document release event at the Lyndon B. Johnson library in Austin, Texas. “Back then, the articles were full of colorful language and personal asides that would never make it past a PDB editor today.”
Still, the documents offer insight into a time of high alert for the U.S, including when the nation was at the brink of war with the Soviet Union.
The hysteria surrounding Soviet missiles deployed to Cuba, known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, played out like a counting exercise in the pages of the daily intelligence reports Kennedy received.
“(M)ore SAM (surface to air missile) sites along the north coast,” reads the brief from Oct. 9, 1962. “They will close one of the few remaining gaps in missile coverage of the island.” Two days later, the briefing refers to “two more surface-to-air missile sites, making a total of twenty. At least some, possibly many of these sites could now be operational, but we are not sure of this yet.” Then an additional missile site was discovered more than a week later. Oct. 23, 1962: “We can now account for 33 missiles and 23 launchers.”
One note from that initial brief detailed “Soviet ICBM shot aborts” and informed Kennedy that an intercontinental ballistic missile test “either failed immediately after launch or was canceled at the last minute.”
Just a couple of months later, the PICL documented the initial steps taken by communist East Berlin to build the Berlin Wall that would separate it from West Berlin. On Aug. 17, 1961, a section of the report titled “The Situation in Berlin” details “floodlights” being installed, along with “mazes of concrete stanchions and permanent fences.”
The President’s Daily Brief was born under the Kennedy administration in June of 1961, when President Kennedy saw the need for a single intelligence product after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba earlier that year. The administration was concerned important information was being missed due to the many different and dense intelligence reports available at the time.
In a 1998 internal CIA interview with the document’s creator, Richard Lehman, Lehman said he was asked by the Kennedy administration to create “something that will have everything in it that is worth the President’s attention,” with the specification that it “fit it into a breast pocket so that the President could carry it around with him and read it at his convenience.”
Created in just a few days, the document had initially been called the President’s Intelligence Checklist, abbreviated as PICL and dubbed the “pickle.” The first PICL was delivered to Kennedy at his weekend retreat near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia on June 17, 1961.
Kennedy sat down to read it next to the swimming pool, perched on the diving board, according to Brennan, who recounted the story of that first delivery. The document contained 14 short intelligence briefs, no more than a few sentences in length, that were complimented by notes and maps. One note from the initial brief detailed “Soviet ICBM shot aborts” and informed Kennedy that an intercontinental ballistic missile test “either failed immediately after launch or was canceled at the last minute.”
Brennan, who was a presidential briefer in the 1990s, said Kennedy sent word that he was pleased with the contents.
“The aide contacted the officers at the CIA who had written it and said, ‘so far so good,’” according to Brennan.
A few months later, the PICL updated the president on the state of Berlin, Germany, documenting the initial steps taken by communist East Berlin to build the Berlin Wall. On Aug. 17, 1961, a brief details “floodlights” being installed, along with “mazes of concrete stanchions and permanent fences.”
Kennedy only received the briefs for two years before being assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. On that day, the PICL was dedicated to Kennedy. “For this day, the Checklist Staff can find no words more fitting than a verse quoted by the President to a group of newspapermen the day he learned of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba,” the page reads. “Bullfight critics ranked in rows Crowd the enormous plaza full; But only one is there who knows And he’s the man who fights the bull.”
Johnson was updated with information on Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, three days after Kennedy’s assassination. The PICL confirms press reports that Oswald traveled to Mexico City, where he visited both the Cuban and Soviet embassies on Sept. 28, 1963. “He was trying, we are told, to arrange for visas so that he could travel to the USSR via Havana. He returned to the US on 3 October.”
The PICL was replaced by the President’s Daily Brief in 1964, a year after Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson’s term began.
Lehman recalled in the CIA interview that the PICL “didn’t appeal to him (Johnson) the way it did to Kennedy” and described Johnson as “not that much of a reader.”
But the CIA retooled the document in part to catch Johnson’s attention and separate the report from what Johnson viewed as a Kennedy product, renaming it the President’s Daily Brief.
The PDB was similar to the PICL in its concise points on national security issues, but it went further with longer one- or two-page analyses on certain topics. The new brief was a success and was said to have been read “avidly” by Johnson.
By 1968, Johnson read about the Vietnam War almost daily, with attacks by North Vietnam on the south, known as the Tet Offensive, featured prominently. At the beginning of the wave of attacks, on Jan. 30, 1968, the PDB chronicles “sharp fighting” that seemed to catch the intelligence agencies off-guard.
“Information is still sketchy on what is happening around the other cities and bases hit by the well-coordinated and unprecedented Communist offensive,” reads the briefing. “Designed for maximum psychological impact, the Communists concentrated on showing they could shoot their way into major populated areas, particularly provincial capitals.”
Mentions of the Soviet Union dominated the documents, showing up in 80 percent of the briefings over that period. Intelligence reports on Vietnam followed in importance, with mentions in 70 percent of the briefings. During the Johnson administration, developments in Vietnam were reported on almost daily and peaked in 1965 after the U.S. began an extensive bombing campaign in North Vietnam and again in 1968 with the Tet Offensive.
Publishing the daily briefings was a 24-hour process and still is today. Kennedy liked to read the brief at his desk when it arrived at the White House in the morning. Johnson initially preferred to receive the PDB late in the afternoon so he could read it in bed. He later asked to see the PDB at 6:30 a.m. before he began reading the morning newspapers.
Unlike today, the CIA did not brief the president on the intelligence document; instead, Kennedy and Johnson were normally briefed by senior members of the National Security Council, in most cases the national security adviser.
Today the PDB is delivered using a secure mobile device and includes interactive links with video features and other multimedia components. Obama receives the PDB on a tablet.
CNN’s Jim Sciutto contributed to this report.