Inside the CIA (15 page)

Then President Nixon tried to use the CIA to cover up White House connections with the Watergate break-in. His aides summoned Richard Helms, then the CIA director, to
the White House. They told him that Nixon wanted him to call L. Patrick Gray, the acting director of the FBI, and tell him not to pursue some of the leads arising out of the Watergate break-in because they might reveal CIA operations or sources. Helms told the aides the story was not true, and he refused. Nixon then eased him out of the CIA, sending him to Iran to be ambassador.
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In his inept fashion, Nixon replaced Helms with James R. Schlesinger, who was not about to participate in any coverups. The revelation of the CIA’s peripheral involvement in the break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist infuriated Schlesinger. To make sure no other improper activities were going on, he issued an order in May 1973, drafted by Colby, then the CIA’s deputy director for operations, ordering employees of the CIA to report any suspicions they had that laws or the agency’s charter had been violated. The result was what came to be referred to as the “family jewels”—693 single-spaced typewritten pages, with each page or two devoted to a possible infraction.

After he had been nominated to replace Schlesinger as CIA director, Colby turned the list over to Congress, convinced that this was the proper way to handle the matter. Consistent with their hear-no-evil, see-no-evil approach, the committee chairmen with whom he discussed the “jewels” decided to keep it all quiet.

“There was a general consensus that these matters of the past should be left in the past in order that the agency could continue to do its positive work in the present and future,” Colby wrote in his autobiography,
Honorable Men.
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But a year and a half later, Seymour Hersh of the
New York Times
got wind of the story. In an effort to put it in perspective, Colby met with Hersh and wound up confirming the gist of what Hersh had developed independently about the abuses. Hersh’s front-page December 22, 1974, story, headlined, “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” opened up the CIA to two years of investigations and turmoil. While many of the items turned out not to be violations or to be
insignificant, the “jewels” contained enough dynamite to forever change the CIA and the way it does business.

According to the documents and the later investigations, the CIA had begun a program in 1952 of surveying mail to and from the Soviet Union. In 1953, it began opening some of this mail in violation of federal statutes. By 1973, the CIA was examining 2.3 million pieces of mail a year, photographing 33,000 envelopes, and opening 8,700 of them.

In 1967, the CIA established a Special Operations Group within the agency to report on domestic dissidents. The program, aptly called Operation CHAOS, resulted in the accumulation of 13,000 files, including ones on 7,200 American citizens. The documents in the files included the names of 300,000 American citizens and organizations. They had all been gathered as part of an internal security function, exactly what the 1947 act establishing the CIA had forbidden.

A third major area of abuse was the CIA’s program for testing drugs to control behavior on unwitting victims, a violation of criminal laws. Frank E. Olson, an Army civilian scientist, committed suicide on September 28, 1953, after the CIA had given him LSD without his knowledge.
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The CIA officer in charge of the experiment had not checked medical records and was not aware that Olson had had suicidal tendencies over the previous five years.
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Finally, the CIA imprisoned Yuri I. Nosenko, the KGB major who defected to the U.S. in 1964, for three and a half years simply because the agency did not believe his story that the KGB had nothing to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

“That frightened me more than anything else, the idea that an intelligence agency could secretly hold a man in prison. Habeas corpus stopped that several centuries ago,” Colby said.
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As if the illegalities were not bad enough, the ineptitude of many of the operations was astonishing. The agency’s many failed assassination attempts against Castro, its mad effort to enlist the aid of the Mafia, and its foolish attempts to embarrass Castro were prime examples.

The exposure of the agency’s activities became a watershed,
one that led to a rigorous system of oversight by Congress and generally tightened procedures within the agency to insure that it stayed within the law. Until then, subcommittees of the Senate and House armed services and appropriations committees had passed on CIA legislation. In practice, during much of the CIA’s early existence, the chairmen and a few other senior members of the two committees formed an ad hoc oversight committee that made all the key decisions. They took the position that the less they knew about the CIA’s operations, the better.
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Hersh’s exposé led to appointment of a president’s commission chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller to look into the abuses, an investigation in the Senate led by Sen. Frank Church, and a third, more partisan probe in the House led by Rep. Otis Pike, a New York Democrat, At the height of the probes, the Church Committee had 155 staff members looking into the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

“Before that [the Church investigation], supervision was virtually nonexistent,” Robert R. Simmons, a former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. “They didn’t want to be responsible for it. I consider that a failure of the Congress. If the Congress had acted sooner to extend its authority over this, some of those problems may never have occurred.”
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“Part of the problem in the early days was the oversight committees, particularly the chairmen, who were interested in the agency being as anonymous as possible, and they made this very clear,” Helms agreed. “As a matter of fact, on one occasion after he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee . . . Senator Stennis said, ‘You’re doing a great job at the agency. I haven’t seen your name in the paper in six months.’ That was his idea that you should be quiet about it.”
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Yet the CIA nearly always had partners in these bizarre activities—a president or a cabinet officer. The program to collect files on dissidents had been undertaken under pressure from President Johnson. Attorney General John Mitchell and three postmasters general had been informed of the program
to open mail. President Kennedy or then attorney general Robert F. Kennedy had either authorized or been informed of the efforts against Castro.

“All I know is Jack Kennedy and his brother were bound and determined to have us take on this effort [to get rid of Castro],” Helms said. “If you want me to take off my jacket and show you the beatings I got over that, I’d be glad to. In retrospect, it was undoubtedly a mistake; it was feckless. But they insisted that this go on.”
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Likewise, both Johnson and Nixon ordered the CIA to become involved in investigating dissidents.

“Johnson was absolutely convinced that there was foreign money and influence that caused all this student unrest,” Helms said. “No matter how you talked to him about this, he was convinced. Nixon was convinced in much the same way. They couldn’t understand that there wasn’t foreign involvement. That was how this whole thing started, to find out if this was true.”

Many of those involved in the questionable activities still defend them.

“Supporting NSA [the National Student Association] was the right thing to do overall,” Cord Meyer, a former CIA officer who directed the operation, said. “If it breeds mistrust, you have to make a choice between them. Either you are going to try to compete abroad or just hope for the best.”
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Richard Bissell, who oversaw the student operation as deputy director for operations, said, “That was a highly successful operation to combat communist-funded groups. It was not only justified but quite effective. Today I would approve of it, although it is much less necessary. It would have to be done in a different way, but I would like to see that capability reconstructed. “
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Perhaps the best case for the present system of oversight was made unknowingly by Bissell, who directed the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba as deputy director for operations. Arguing against congressional approval of covert action such as the Bay of Pigs, Bissell said that “the need for congressional notification has a suffocating effect. You have to tailor the mission to them and their staffs.”

If that is true, would not the devastating failure and loss of lives at the Bay of Pigs have been avoided if congressional approval had been required?

“If we had had to do that in the Bay of Pigs, I suspect the operation would have been called off,” Bissell acknowledged. “You could say we would be ahead, but you would do better to cancel every third operation on the principle that that way you will save some grief. You can’t run an organization on that assumption.”
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Bissell’s response is telling. It illuminates the real reason for the failure at the Bay of Pigs—arrogance. By Bissell’s reasoning, only CIA officers know what is good for the country. Elected officials may be the representatives of the people, but they have no business questioning the judgment of the CIA.

“Dickie Bissell was confident the agency could do anything,” John A. Bross, a longtime CIA hand, said.
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“In the old days, if something was doable, it often was tried. Short-term success was all they looked for,” Russell J. Bowen, a retired CIA analyst who continues to consult for the agency, said. “The fact short-term success could be long-term failure was not important to them. Guatemala was touted as a success. But Guatemala has had an unstable government ever since.”
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As might be expected, CIA officers were stung by the investigations and resented them. To many CIA officers involved in the abuses, William Colby was a traitor for helping to make the “jewels” public.

“It had always been our understanding,” Helms said, “that as long as we were testifying properly and in detail to the oversight committees, that this stuff would remain secret. So when the Church Committee hearings came along, it seemed to many of us that this was a betrayal of the understanding we had.”

“Some people disagreed with my handling of it,” Colby later recalled. “Some think it was the only way. A lot of people wish it hadn’t happened. So do I,” Colby said, meaning he wished the CIA had never engaged in the activities he felt he had to bring to light.
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“‘The CIA’s activities ten or twenty years earlier were being judged by the Church Committee based on criteria established ten or twenty years later in a political atmosphere,” Edward W. Proctor, a former CIA deputy director for intelligence, said. “Church was running for president, the House committee staff was a bunch of clowns. The Senate staff had some good people who were looking for the truth, while others were looking to make a name for themselves.”
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“It [the CIA] becomes a very tight, small family,” Robert Simmons, a former CIA officer who later became staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. “When you go overseas, you’re in a hardship post at risk. You value the support you get from your own people. So you develop an ‘us against them’ mentality. When you see Church holding up a pistol and saying, ‘Look at what the CIA is doing,’ you say, ‘Screw him.’”
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What most infuriated CIA officers was Church’s assertion—later retracted—that the agency was a “rogue elephant.” They pointed to the fact that nearly all the abuses had been approved by presidents or cabinet officers at the time. Moreover, most of the abuses had been stopped by the time of the committee hearings. The picture that most sticks in people’s minds is a photo of Church grimly holding up a poison-dart gun found at the CIA. The fact that it had never been used and had been brought to the attention of the committee by the CIA after it had been found never caught up with the picture. And because it appeared in CIA files, a description of an Army experiment to see how fast poison would spread in the New York City subway system created the impression the CIA had been running through the subways spreading poison.
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“I never believed it was a rogue elephant,” William G. Miller, who was staff director of the Church Committee and later of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. “We had a dispute about that. Church was convinced it was. I did not. I felt White Houses knew this [the abuses] all the way through.

“He came to a judgment before all the evidence was in,” Miller said. “He made that comment after looking at several
crazy cases, in which there were runaway characters. But that wasn’t the general pattern. In a sense he is right, because there were cases where cowboys ran things and were out of control. But there were very few.”

As for the fact that most of the abuses had stopped, “that was not the issue, at least not for me or for most of the senators,” Miller said. “The question was how to prevent it. What were the results, what should we do for the future?”
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In contrast to the attitudes of those involved in the abuses, CIA officers in today’s agency for the most part condemn the abuses of the past as being both unnecessary and foolish. Even when they were going on, most CIA officers were not involved in them and knew nothing about them.

Citing the plan to portray an image of Christ over Cuba, Herbert Saunders, a former CIA officer, said, “I suppose there have always been crackpots around who think good intelligence work consists of some puerile attempts to embarrass Castro. However, I don’t think that anybody would give you two cents for that approach now. In the modern world of intelligence, there is less interest in gimmicks and more in painstaking intelligence work by the traditional methods. It’s a matter of being confident in your ability.”