Inside the CIA (14 page)

Operating from the sixth floor of the old CIA building in McLean, the counterterrorism center today has some two hundred CIA employees. In addition, ten people are detailed from other agencies, including the FBI, NSA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Defense Department. Among other things, the center lists terrorist organizations and threats on a computer system available to other government agencies. Known as Desist, the system is manned twenty-four hours a day.

The counterterrorism center coordinated the government’s investigation of the destruction of Pan Am 103, the plane that exploded four days before Christmas, 1988, over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 passengers and crew members on board. With the help of other agencies and countries, the CIA determined that high-ranking Libyan officials, including the brother-in-law of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, ordered the bombing of that plane and a French jumbo jet that exploded in midair in 1989. The bombings were believed to be in retaliation for the 1986 bombing of Tripoli by U.S. warplanes.
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In preventing terrorism, the counterterrorism center operates behind the scenes. If a known terrorist is traveling, the
CIA passes the word to each country on his itinerary. The countries either refuse to allow the terrorist to enter or if he is a fugitive, have him arrested. The CIA’s role rarely comes out.

Several years ago, the CIA proposed to the State Department that it threaten to expose the fact that countries such as Hungary were helping to subsidize the operations of Abu Nidal’s terrorist organization by allowing it to set up companies that traded with Hungary. It later turned out that Hungary had also given refuge to an international terrorist known as Carlos in 1979. The State Department agreed to the plan, which entailed drawing up a “white paper” detailing Hungary’s complicity. The plan worked.

“We discovered we had a new weapon—the threat of publicity,” a former State Department official said. “In every case, it worked. . . . We got cooperation.”

“We’ve taken terrorism from the late 1970s, when there were more than one hundred incidents a year, with several casualties and deaths, to the point where it is
de minimis
domestically, including foreign groups operating in the U.S.,” Oliver (Buck) Reveil, a former associate deputy director of the FBI, said.
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This is due, in part, to the counterterrorism center.

The coordinated approach has been so successful that William Webster set up two additional centers, one to combat narcotics and one to coordinate counterintelligence. A third center to combat proliferation began in September 1991, under Acting CIA Director Richard J. Kerr. Headed originally by Howard Hart, a ruddy-faced former operations officer, the counternarcotics center consists of several hundred CIA employees who work in windowless offices in the basement of the new CIA headquarters building. The staff includes photo interpreters, political analysts, operations officers, and technicians. In addition, representatives of each intelligence organization and federal law enforcement agency in the government are detailed to the center for two-year terms.

The center collects information about narcotics trafficking so it can be used by law enforcement agencies to help obtain arrests and convictions. With the aid of satellites, the center
tracks drug shipments on the high seas and pinpoints laboratories and fields where the coca and other drug-related plants are grown. It then passes the information to local law enforcement agencies so they can take action. Until the Gulf War, the counternarcotics center was one of the largest users of satellite time in the CIA.

Like the other two centers, the CIA’s counterintelligence center is a community-wide function. Originally headed by Gardner R. (Gus) Hathaway, a former chief of the Soviet/East Europe Division and a former Moscow station chief, it concentrates on countering efforts by hostile intelligence services to thwart and penetrate the CIA within the U.S. and particularly overseas. Its function overlaps to some degree with the Office of Security, which is charged with protecting the agency and its secrets.

Within the modern CIA, the approach that James Angleton brought to counterintelligence is a bad memory. There is a misconception that counterintelligence officers need to be a different breed—suspicious to the point of being paranoid. Often, this outlook is referred to as a “counterintelligence mentality.” This is pure malarkey. People who catch spies need to be no more and no less suspicious than people who catch murderers, bank robbers, or white-collar criminals. To be effective, any professional investigator must bring a balanced approach to his job.

Angleton’s paranoiac mind-set cast a pall on efforts to use information from defectors. At the same time, he created suspicions about anyone who had anything to do with Soviets, damaging the CIA’s efforts to recruit agents. Angleton refused to believe that there was a split between the Chinese Communists and the Soviets even after soldiers from both sides had killed each other. He insisted on believing Anatoliy M. Golytsin, a KGB officer who defected in 1961, when all the evidence showed that Golytsin tailored his stories to suit Angleton’s preconceptions.

Angleton was convinced that debriefing defectors would somehow contaminate the CIA by revealing the agency’s secrets. In fact, the questions asked of defectors are what anyone would expect to be asked, based on the defector’s status
and access. They give away no secrets at all. The fact that the CIA asks a defector if there are any moles in the agency, for example, does not necessarily mean the CIA has a clue that one actually exists.
*

According to Tom Mangold’s
Cold Warrior,
Angleton sat on tips about major spies in foreign countries because they came from an FBI source code-named NICK NACK rather than from his favorite defector, Golytsin. NICK NACK was an officer with the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, who had temporarily been posted to New York and other locations in the early 1960s and again in the early 1970s.

When Angleton’s successors uncovered the files years later, NICK NACK’s tips led to the arrests of former Swiss air defense chief Jean-Louis Jeanmaire in 1976, and in 1978 of members of a spy ring in France led by Serge Fabiew. Because the FBI immediately passed some of NICK NACK’s information directly to the British, his leads had already led to the conviction of Frank Bossard, a former British Royal Air Force officer working as an engineer in guided-missile research in the Air Ministry of the War Department.
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If any other CIA officer or FBI agent had suppressed such information, he would almost certainly have been fired and would probably have faced a criminal investigation as well.

Beyond his ineptitude, Angleton presided over some of the worst abuses later exposed by the Church Committee, including the CIA’s programs for opening mail between the U.S. and Soviet-bloc countries and for compiling files on dissident Americans. Besides exceeding the CIA’s charter, neither of these programs ever developed any information of any value: no Soviet spies were ever uncovered as a result. Nor did the CIA find any foreign involvement in the antiwar movement during the 1960s. Much of what Angleton did was not only a waste of time, it was foolish. For example, after
Ramparts
exposed in 1967 that the CIA was funding the National
Student Association, Angleton prepared lengthy analyses of the themes in
Ramparts
articles.

In an attachment to a memo he sent to the FBI, Angleton wrote that the magazine had hardened “from a New Left organ to an outlet for standard Soviet propaganda.” He based this on the percentage of times certain themes appeared in the magazine’s articles—how many times they said the United States was “sick,” for example; how many times they said the present U.S. government was fascistic; how many times the magazine said the Catholic Church was reactionary and hierarchical; and how many times the publication said the FBI and CIA were “evil.”
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The fact is, for all the harm Angleton did by closing off potential sources of information, ignoring tips, abusing the rights of Americans, and unfairly accusing CIA employees of consorting with the enemy, Angleton never did catch a spy. During Angleton’s tenure, Karl Koecher, a Czech intelligence service officer, became a CIA employee and was given sensitive translating tasks. It was Koecher who compromised Aleksandr D. Ogorodnik, a high-ranking Soviet diplomat then working for the CIA. Yet Angleton never had a clue about this major spy case within his own agency.

The author interviewed Angleton in April 1987, a month before he died, and brought up the subject of Koecher. All along, there really
had
been a mole in the CIA, one who had been hired a year before Angleton was forced to retire and who had later done great damage to the agency. While totally lucid, Angleton showed no interest in the case. For Angleton, it seemed, it had all been a game: Koecher was not the mole he was seeking. Since he was not
his
mole, Koecher was of little interest to him.
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Before the Church Committee hearings, the CIA underwent little outside scrutiny and could easily lose sight of its mission. Operations took on a life of their own, and art was pursued for art’s sake. Angleton was a prime example of that danger—an amateur who was allowed by a string of CIA directors to wreak havoc within the agency. In contrast, the FBI is held accountable by the courts when it develops an espionage case against a suspect. That means it must deal in
the real world of evidence and facts, and the goal is always clear—to put spies in jail. Before a case ever gets to court, it is reviewed by the Justice Department. In the face of outside scrutiny, an amateur is quickly detected.

When he became CIA director, William Colby realized Angleton was doing far more harm than good.

“You will now leave, period,” Colby told Angleton in December 1974.
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Angleton died on May 11, 1987.

For all his faults, Angleton was a brilliant, gracious man, a poet and a grower of orchids, who still has a following among some retired CIA officers of his era. His greatest contribution was obtaining through Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 denouncing Joseph Stalin for his criminal cruelty and misgovernment.
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But within the modern CIA, Angleton has virtually no defenders.

“I think there were a number of things done under Angleton that should not have been done,” a recently retired operations officer said. “Watching students, keeping lists of names, opening mail. He ran his own little world and got away with it somehow.”

Counterintelligence under Angleton was “more of a suspicion-building program rather than a shield, which it should be and which it certainly is today,” William Webster said at a final breakfast meeting with reporters who cover intelligence, just after he announced his retirement from the CIA in 1991.
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But it would be unfair to single out Angleton for blame. Most of the abuses he engaged in had been approved by CIA directors at the time and even attorneys general of the U.S. Nor was counterintelligence the only area where those abuses occurred.

O
N
J
UNE
17, 1972, B
URGLARS BROKE INTO
D
EMOCRATIC
N
ATIONAL
Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington. A security guard called the District police, who promptly arrested the burglars. As their story unraveled, it turned out most of the participants in the break-in had some sort of CIA connection. James McCord had retired from the CIA’s Office of Security in 1970. E. Howard Hunt had retired the same year from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Bernard Barker had been recruited by the CIA when he was in the Cuban police, and he later worked for Hunt when Hunt was in the CIA. He stopped working for the agency in 1966. Eugenio R. Martinez had been a CIA contract employee and was still on the CIA’s payroll when the break-in occurred.
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As it turned out, the CIA knew nothing about the breakin. But the connections to the agency fueled suspicions that the agency was out of control. Because of the growing mistrust of the government because of its handling of the Vietnam
War, these suspicions received more credence than they might otherwise have. The suspicions had begun in 1967, when
Ramparts
magazine revealed that the CIA had been providing funds to the National Student Association. The money was to be used to help the student group prevent takeovers of international youth organizations by communists. Unlike opening mail and infiltrating dissident groups, supplying money to domestic organizations was not a direct violation of the CIA’s charter. Supporting an American organization did not mean the CIA was engaging in “internal security functions.” But the funding did raise the specter of the agency trying to influence America rather than the overseas targets it was supposed to sway. Moreover, it raised suspicions both in the eyes of foreigners and of Americans that U.S. institutions might have dual allegiances—one to their directors or trustees and one to the CIA.

In the long run, the broader corruption of American institutions posed a greater threat to American freedoms than whether communists gained a foothold in an international youth organization. Ultimately, it was America’s image as a land of freedom that was most effective in influencing nations torn between communist and democratic factions.

In response to the
Ramparts
exposé, President Johnson appointed a three-man committee headed by former attorney general Nicholas de B. Katzenbach to look into the problem. It recommended that such funding be cut off. Presidents have since specifically reaffirmed the policy.

Later Watergate investigations revealed even more troubling links to the CIA. The CIA had supplied Howard Hunt with a wig, a camera, a speech-altering device, and false identification papers, including a driver’s license, to be used during Hunt’s break-in at the offices of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist, in September 1971. The Nixon White House had ordered the illegal break-in to learn more about Ellsberg’s involvement in leaking the Pentagon Papers to the
New York Times.