--- alias: - John A. McCone born: 1902-01-04 category: Key Figures created: 2026-06-12 died: 1991-02-14 location: San Francisco, California 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. tags: - Person - CIA - ColdWar - StandardOil - LatinAmerica - Nuclear - Israel updated: 2026-09-22 --- John A. McCone (1902-1991) was an American industrialist who served as Director of the [CIA](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/) from 1961 to 1965, appointed by President [John F. Kennedy](/people/john-f-kennedy/) after the [Bay of Pigs invasion](/events/bay-of-pigs/) and retained into the [Johnson](/people/lyndon-b-johnson/) administration. A former director of [Standard Oil of California](/organizations/standard-oil/) 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 [Rockefeller](/people/nelson-rockefeller/) network's interests in [Latin America](/places/latin-america/).[^1] ### Conflicts with Kennedy 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 differed, according to Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, 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](/organizations/presidents-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](/people/ngo-dinh-diem/) in Vietnam.[^2] After the assassination of President Kennedy, Attorney General [Robert Kennedy](/people/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] ### Shaping Johnson's Latin America Team 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](/programs/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] ### ITT and Chile After leaving the CIA in 1965, McCone joined the board of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT). In 1970, working to prevent the election of [Salvador Allende](/people/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](/organizations/rockefeller-brothers-fund/)'s earlier rural-education programs in Chile had been designed to undercut.[^4] ### Atomic Energy Commission John A. McCone was a wealthy Republican businessman from [California](/places/california/) who served as chairman of the [Atomic Energy Commission](/organizations/atomic-energy-commission/) (AEC) and later as Director of the [CIA](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/). In December 1960, he leaked information to *New York Times* reporter [John W. Finney](/people/john-w-finney/) about [Israel](/places/israel/)'s secret nuclear reactor at [Dimona](/places/dimona/), expressing anger that Israel and [France](/places/france/) had "lied to us" about its purpose.[^5] 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 [Eisenhower](/people/dwight-d-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] McCone was regularly briefed on the Israeli nuclear program after replacing [Lewis L. Strauss](/people/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] [^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. [^2]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 27. [^3]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 27; Ch. 28. [^4]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 41. [^5]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy*. Random House, 1991. Chapter 6, 7.