Shadow Warrior (47 page)

By 1967 the war had spawned a bitter, divisive debate within the United States. On the right were those who insisted that the administration was not doing enough. Goldwater Republicans and conservative Democrats, most of them southerners, were the hawks. For them, communism was an unmitigated evil, the regime in Hanoi was an extension of Sino-Soviet imperialism, and Vietnam was the keystone in a regional arch that they believed would collapse if America lost its nerve. Led by Richard Russell of Georgia and John Stennis of Mississippi in the Senate, and Mendel Rivers in the House, these super-patriots enjoyed close ties to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the entire military-industrial complex. They chafed under the restrictions imposed on the war by Lyndon Johnson, who would not allow American troops to invade North Vietnam or the US Air Force to bomb communist sanctuaries in Cambodia. The hawks demanded that the United States do whatever was necessary to win a military victory.

Acting as a counterpoint was a diverse collection of individuals and groups opposed to the war, viewing it variously as immoral, illogical, or counterproductive. The antiwar coalition included establishment figures, such as Senators J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas), George McGovern (D-South Dakota), and Wayne Morse (D-Oregon), but it gradually drew in figures who were not professional politicians or policymakers, such as civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., pediatrician and author Dr. Benjamin Spock, and heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay. There was, of course, much more to the antiwar movement than celebrity personalities. The doves even managed to invade the Colby household.

Bill Colby not only tolerated but encouraged dissent within his family. Carl, Catherine, and to a lesser extent Paul, who was only twelve in 1967, sided with most of their peers in opposing the war. Catherine, an epileptic with a severe identity crisis, and Carl, who had, to grandfather Elbridge's enragement, dropped out of ROTC, periodically harangued their father on the evils of the conflict in Vietnam. Paul recalled especially one stormy
dinner just after his father had returned from Vietnam. The war was not only counterproductive of US interests, they declared, it was also manifestly immoral. Wasn't it true that the CIA supervised secret operations that tortured and killed people? For the only time in his memory, Paul later recalled, Bill lost his temper. Red-faced, he shouted that war was brutal—it brutalized everyone who came into contact with it—but sometimes there was no alternative. He himself, he admitted, had killed men in war, even with his bare hands.
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B
y the close of 1967, the CIA had come to symbolize for many Americans all that was wrong with the US government—its values, its policies, its practices. For doves, the Agency was the evil empire, a secret society in thrall to the radical right, Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex. It would become the Great Satan in the Cold War passion play penned by liberals and radicals.

In March of that year, an article appeared in a small, muckraking California magazine
—
Ramparts
—
documenting a relationship between the CIA and the National Student Association. The student association acted as a bridge between US college students and their compatriots abroad. To Langley's consternation, the
Times
and the
Washington Post
followed with their own exposés, revealing CIA links to the AFL-CIO and the American Newspaper Guild. Americans read how the Agency had used the Ford Foundation to funnel funds to the Asia Society, and learned that the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were nothing more than CIA mouthpieces. The orgy or revelation climaxed on March 13, when future
60 Minutes
television reporter Mike Wallace stood before a large diagram depicting the flow of covert subsidies to various front organizations as part of an hour-long CBS documentary entitled “In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma.”
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In the weeks that followed, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson repeated rumors that the Agency had plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro. Outraged congressmen and senators, virtually all of them opponents of the war in Vietnam, wrote to LBJ protesting the CIA's corruption of democratic
institutions and its reckless violation of the law. The president was properly outraged and announced the formation of an investigatory body. Helms ordered his own internal investigation, and Colby was part of the team. If there were any plots to liquidate foreign leaders, Helms said, he wanted to know about them. The Far East Division head was able to report that the Agency had played no direct part in the Diem coup, or at least in the deaths of the president and his brother. News brought by Colby's compatriots was more ominous. There was Operation Mongoose, as well as Agency involvement in the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Helms ordered the results of the probe locked away as far from public and congressional sight as possible.

Much as Frank Wisner had been a victim of the Hungarian uprising, Desmond FitzGerald, deputy director for plans, was to be a victim of the
Ramparts
revelations. In addition to overseeing CIA political and psychological operations and manipulation of various cultural oganizations, he was also deeply complicit in the anti-Castro operation; indeed, on the day that Jack Kennedy was assassinated, FitzGerald had been in Paris meeting with a would-be assassin to hand over instructions and weapons. FitzGerald—bird-watcher, poetry-lover—was an enormously social animal. Richard Helms once remarked that he believed that the DDP knew everyone on the New York and Washington social registers personally.
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During the summer of 1967, FitzGerald's friends noted his unusual despondency, his sudden self-absorption, and his rundown physical appearance. On September 13, while playing mixed doubles with the British ambassador and his wife, FitzGerald collapsed and died of a massive coronary. Like Frank Wisner, Des FitzGerald was fifty-six years old when his life ended.

Helms had the president award FitzGerald the National Security Medal posthumously and then began the search for a successor. Colby was a candidate, or believed that he was. In June 1965, when Helms had been promoted to deputy director, he had launched a search for his own successor as DDP. At the time, he had called Colby in and told him, “Your time will come later.” Colby now seemed to be a likely candidate to replace FitzGerald. There was his Jedburgh pedigree; he was an Ivy Leaguer (if a liberal, middle-class one), had worked political action in Italy, had served as station chief in Saigon, and then, as Far East Division head, had run the Agency's many complex paramilitary operations throughout Asia. But he was not foreign intelligence (espionage), and Helms was. Helms was a traditionalist, believing that the primary functions of the CIA were to spy
on the enemy, to gather intelligence from every possible source, and to provide that information to policymakers. In 1967, he chose as deputy director of plans not Colby but Thomas Karamessines, a Greek American with impeccable foreign intelligence credentials. He had opened the CIA's station in Athens and then overseen its activities in Vienna. Most recently, he had served as FitzGerald's chief of operations. Helms never even discussed the DDP position with Colby. Instead, in September 1967, he summoned him to his office and suggested that he take over the Soviet and East European Division.
³

Colby tried to put the best face on the offer, choosing to view it as a move by Helms to provide him with the credentials to advance, to “shuck my stereotype as strictly a political and paramilitary operator.”
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Although he had spent the last eight years obsessed with Southeast Asia, Colby believed he had no choice but to accept. The new post would offer an opportunity to move against the “hard targets,” the military and civilian officials who held the secrets of the Soviet empire.

Years later, Colby recalled that as he prepared for his new duties, he became aware of two separate and often conflicting cultures within the Agency regarding Russia and its satellites, one in the division he was to head, and another in counterintelligence, Angleton's CI Staff. Colby's Soviet and East European Division was charged with developing sources behind the Iron Curtain, identifying and encouraging defectors, and coordinating with allied espionage operations. The CI Staff was devoted to protecting the Agency against penetration and disinformation operations by the KGB. Colby soon discovered that in its obsession with uncovering a Soviet mole, counterintelligence was not only overshadowing, but also undermining, the Soviet and East European Division.

Theoretically, CI was just another component of the clandestine services supervised by the deputy director of plans. In reality, by the mid-1960s, Angleton and his staff had evolved into an autonomous fiefdom operating outside of regular channels, reporting to the DCI only. Helms was as enamored of Angleton as Allen Dulles had been. “Do you know what I worried about the most as Director of the CIA?” he asked Ben Bradlee of the
Washington Post
several years after his retirement. “The CIA is the only intelligence service in the Western world which has never been penetrated by the KGB,” the former DCI said. “That's what I worried about.”
⁵
Angleton was the shield that Helms thought indispensable. The CI director, who was also sole manager of the Israeli desk, was a legend by the time
Helms took over. He would provide invaluable intelligence to the DCI, and through him to the White House, on the 1967 Arab-Israeli Conflict.

Counterintelligence itself was perceived to be an esoteric undertaking involving unique expertise and Jesuitical dedication. It required, or so its practitioners would have others believe, the cerebral acuity of Lord Peter Wimsy and the ruthlessness of Rasputin. Personally, Angleton delighted in his eccentricities, among which were fly-fishing, orchid-raising—a hobby requiring infinite patience—and drinking. He continued to patronize La Niçoise on Wisconsin Avenue, where lunches would frequently last from noon to 3
P.M
. Though no Bill Harvey—he of the Berlin tunnel and Bay of Pigs fame, whose alcohol consumption was legendary—Angleton would sandwich a martini or two between bourbons. Shortly after he became counterintelligence chief in 1954, Angleton set up the Special Investigation Group to look into the possibility that the Agency itself had been penetrated. He succeeded in converting his subordinates into a devoted, even fanatical band of followers not only because of ideological affinity, but also because he understood the isolation and loneliness of counterintelligence; only he was able to recognize and reward his underlings' sacrifices.
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Angleton's office at Langley reflected the man and his trade. There was a large inner chamber, its windows covered with venetian blinds that were permanently closed when the doctor was in. Angleton perched in a high-backed leather chair behind a large, executive-style wooden desk that dominated the room. “When a visitor entered Angleton's office,” his biographer wrote, “it was almost impossible to see the head of CI. His long, thin frame would be stoop-hunched behind a Berlin wall of files. Since the blinds were firmly closed, the room was always dark, like a poolroom at midday. The only light came from the tip of Angleton's inevitable cigarette and . . . his desk lamp, permanently wreathed by nicotine clouds.” The outer office featured several large black iron safes, and across the hall was a specially reinforced vault with a combination lock and an electronic keypad. Only Angleton and his secretary possessed the combinations. Here were stored the millions and millions of pages of intelligence that Angleton and his staff had gathered on KGB spies and suspected turncoats in the CIA.
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The Soviet Union and its satellites were dedicated to the destruction of the West, Angleton continued to believe. The KGB, the largest and most imposing security and intelligence apparatus the world had ever seen, was
determined to penetrate Western intelligence agencies to gather crucial data and spread destructive disinformation. Rumors of a Sino-Soviet split had been planted by the KGB to sow confusion in the ranks of its enemies. An “integrated and purposeful Socialist Bloc,” Angleton wrote in 1966, sought to foster false stories of “splits, evolution, power struggles, economic disasters, [and] good and bad Communism” to ensnare America and its allies in a “wilderness of mirrors.” The object of the communist initiative was to splinter Western solidarity and pick off the Free World nations one by one. The only protection the United States and its friends had was the counterintelligence service. Literally, Angleton believed that he and his team held the fate of Western civilization in their hands. Always in the back of Angleton's mind was the traitorous Kim Philby, the ultimate mole, his former friend and confidant.
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Just as the fictional James Bond had a license to kill, Jim Angleton, it seemed, had a license to cast suspicion. From the beginning of Helms's tenure, he had given the CI chief free rein, tolerating his secret trips abroad and his end runs around Karamessines. Like so many others, Helms seemed in thrall to Angleton. Howard Osborne, director of security, recalled “how Helms never turned [Angleton] down on anything.” Even if everyone in a meeting opposed Angleton's view, Helms always decided in favor of his CI chief. “It never failed,” Osborne declared, “no matter how senior [Angleton's] opponent.”
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By the mid-1960s, Angleton's obsession and Helms's tacit support of it had hamstrung the Soviet and East European Division's efforts to conduct espionage within the Soviet bloc, especially by recruiting defectors. To Angleton and his team, every defector was a KGB plant charged with spreading disinformation. By extension, every Soviet and East European Division officer who sought to provide bona fides for defectors was a willing or unwilling tool of the KGB. Bolstering this view were the cases of two Soviet defectors, Yuri Nosenko and Anatoliy Golitsin.