Shadow Warrior (59 page)

Despite the best efforts of Angleton and Helms, the existence and activities of the Ober group were generally known within the CIA by the time Colby became executive director. Consequently, he was in a position to respond to the concerns of the younger generation of CIA officers who were worried that the Agency was spying on the domestic antiwar movement. In truth, he shared their alarm. The avalanche of criticism, the invariable suspicion with which nearly all Americans then viewed the Agency, could not be ignored. “The CIA, it seemed obvious to me, was in very real danger of ultimately being crippled as an effective weapon in the
defense of the nation's security if not in fact threatened with being destroyed outright,” he later wrote. The only alternative, he remembered thinking, “was to lift as much as possible that thick cloak of secrecy that had traditionally veiled the Agency and its operations from the scrutiny . . . of the public at large.”
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Perhaps Bill Colby experienced an epiphany as early as 1972; perhaps not. What is clear is that he had long believed that the culture of super-secrecy and compartmentalization that pervaded the Agency, the culture of Jim Angleton and to a degree Richard Helms
—
The Man Who Kept the Secrets
, as he was later called in a book title—was counterproductive of the CIA's overriding mission: to win the Cold War. But in 1971—1972, Colby, hovering on the fringes of power, had to tread lightly.
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On March 12, 1972, a copy of a book-length manuscript entitled
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
turned up at Langley. The author was a sixteen-year veteran of the Agency named Victor Marchetti. He had resigned in 1969, having become increasingly disenchanted with the CIA's unaccountability, with covert operations that in fact were secret wars, with Angleton's counterintelligence empire, and with MH/Chaos. He had already published
The Rope Dancer
, a novel mildly critical of the Agency. Langley paid little mind. A number of former Agency officers, from Allen Dulles to E. Howard Hunt, had written books centering on US intelligence, and no harm had been done. But
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
was a concise, thorough, nonfiction description of the CIA and its activities. It even included a detailed description of “The Farm,” the Agency's training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia.

Immediately, Helms summoned his top advisers. Colby and General Counsel Lawrence Summers advised against seeking criminal prosecution of Marchetti and his coauthor, John Marks, a disillusioned intelligence officer in the State Department. True, Marchetti and Marks, like all intelligence personnel, had signed an agreement to keep secret any and all classified information they encountered in their jobs. But a trial would force disclosure of secrets beyond their knowledge and generate a tidal wave of bad publicity. What Colby and Huston suggested—the course that was eventually followed—was that the CIA enforce in civil court that part of the secrecy agreement that compelled employees to allow the Agency to vet articles and books before their publication to ensure that they did not include official secrets. Marchetti and his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, refused,
and the case went to trial. At John Ehrlichman's direction, the Justice Department pitched in to help. The CIA won on appeal and secured 168 deletions from the manuscript. Knopf went to press with the resulting product, marked by heavy black redactions showing where and how much material the Agency had suppressed.
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Colby was for more transparency and accountability, but he did insist that the CIA had an unconditional right to keep secret its “sources and methods”—accounts of specific cases and the names of the operatives involved. When Philip Agee, acting from the juridical safety of the United Kingdom, published an account of his days in Latin America as a CIA officer in which he described cases and named names, Colby denounced him as a traitor.

On June 10, 1972, Colby learned that John Paul Vann had been killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. While carrying out his duties as executive director, Colby had kept an eye on the seemingly endless conflict in Southeast Asia, and he continued to sit on the Agency's Vietnam task force. His decision to recommend Vann to Abrams as the overall US authority in II Corps had paid off in spades. On March 30, 1972, 200,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, supported by tanks and artillery, had crossed the demilitarized zone. The communists laid siege to Quang Tri City in I Corps, and within a month, it fell. As one column moved on to Hue, another advanced on Kon Tum in the Central Highlands. If the North Vietnamese could capture Kon Tum, Plieku and the entire Highlands would fall, and South Vietnam would be cut in two. Defending Kon Tum were the 22nd and 23rd ARVN Divisions under Lieutenant General Ngo Dzu, a particularly inept officer. As the North Vietnamese Army advanced, Dzu froze, unable to even give orders to fire on the enemy. Vann assumed command and rallied the South Vietnamese in a successful defense of the city. He emerged as the chief American hero in the so-called Easter offensive, hailed by both Americans and South Vietnamese as a decisive victory. His death came shortly after the campaign ended, during a routine helicopter flight from Pleiku to Kon Tum. Colby took the news hard. His son, Paul, remembered him watching TV accounts of Vann's life while getting quietly drunk.
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John Vann was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on June 16, 1972. The red brick chapel near the entrance was the site of a gathering of eagles—establishment journalist Joe Alsop, Edward Lansdale, Senator Ted Kennedy, and a host of other soldiers and
public figures. At the insistence of Vann's widow, Daniel Ellsberg, now considered a turncoat by many in the room, was seated with the family. The front doors of the chapel swung open, and the flag-draped coffin bearing Vann's body entered, flanked by eight official pallbearers, four soldiers, and four civilians. Among them were Generals William Westmoreland and Bruce Palmer. Bill Colby and Bob Komer headed up the civilian contingent. Komer delivered the eulogy. “I've never met one among the thousands of men who served with or under John who didn't admire him,” Komer proclaimed. “He educated and inspired a whole wartime generation of Vietnamese and Americans—as our teacher, our colleague, our institutional memory, our hair-shirt, and our friend.”
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It was a wrenching experience for Colby. He had thought Vann headstrong, at times his own worst enemy, but his devotion to Vietnam, his bravery, and especially his commitment to the “other war” were unquestioned. Colby thought his friend too impatient with the military governments that came and went in Saigon—indeed, too impatient to be a decent imperialist. In truth, Colby valued others who worked for him—such as Frank Scotton and Ev Bumgardner—more than he did Vann. But Vann could say what Colby could not, especially to the US military and to American journalists like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, regarding the shortcomings of the South Vietnamese government and military.

On June 17, 1972, the day following Vann's funeral, Colby was abruptly shaken from his reveries about his friend and the ongoing drama in Southeast Asia by news that five men had been caught red-handed burglarizing the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. All five had ties to the CIA.

In late 1971, G. Gordon Liddy, a former Agency operative and member of the Plumbers team that had broken into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, joined the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) as counsel to its finance committee. In January 1972, in the office of Attorney General John Mitchell, with White House counsel John Dean present, Liddy had proposed a fantastic scheme of harassment against the Democratic Party, including wiretaps, kidnappings, and hijackings. Mitchell rejected the scheme—not because it was illegal and unethical, but because it was too expensive; the estimated price tag was $1 million. But in late March, Mitchell, who had stepped down from his post at the Justice Department
to head CREEP, approved a plan for bugging the Democratic National Committee (DNC), providing Liddy with $10,000 to finance the operation. CREEP, and probably President Nixon, wanted to be privy to DNC chairman Larry O'Brien's campaign strategy.

In April 1972, Liddy hired E. Howard Hunt and James W. McCord Jr., two former CIA agents who had been part of the Plumbers, to spy on the opposition. They, in turn, retained several Cuban exiles, veterans of the Bay of Pigs and subsequently Agency operatives within the Cuban exile community. Hunt, who had been chief of station in Uruguay in the 1950s, was a Cold War romantic and the author of several mediocre spy novels, a man whose reach frequently exceeded his grasp. Following several bungled attempts, the team succeeded in bugging O'Brien's office. When one of the devices failed, the burglars returned to replace it.
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Early on the morning of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a night watchman at the Watergate office and apartment building, made his usual rounds. Upon finding the door lock to the office of the DNC taped shut, he alerted the police, who arrived in time to apprehend McCord and four of the Cubans. Among the items found on the suspects was a check to McCord signed by Howard Hunt.
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Hunt, who was monitoring the break-in from a nearby motel room, notified Liddy at CREEP headquarters. In a panic, Liddy began shredding documents, but the damage had been done. That evening, Richard Helms's phone rang. It was Howard Osborn, the CIA chief of security. He told the DCI of the break-in; the five burglars all had ties to the Agency. Helms knew, of course, that Hunt had gone to work for the White House as a “security consultant” a year earlier.

“Is there any indication that we could be involved in this?” Helms asked.

“None whatsoever,” Osborn replied.

It was significant that Helms had to ask the question. The DCI recalled in his memoir that he immediately contacted L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI, who had been nominated by Nixon to be Hoover's permanent replacement. Helms assured the acting director that despite the burglars' past ties to the Agency, Langley had had nothing to do with the break-in. “You might want to look into the relationship of John Ehrlichman, the President's domestic policy advisor, with McCord and Hunt,” Helms remembered saying. “He'll be familiar with the circumstances in which Howard Hunt was hired for work at the White House and with McCord's job on the Committee to Re-elect the President as well.” Gray,
Helms recalled, seemed “unresponsive.” His antennae aquiver, the DCI on the Monday following the break-in appointed Colby to head the effort to keep the Agency's skirts clean.
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Colby later recalled that he knew he was headed for dangerous waters. Who to trust? The media was in a CIA feeding frenzy, with Congress waiting in the wings. The White House was another shark-infested body of water. And then there were Angleton and Helms. The CIA director would later claim that Angleton had nothing to do with MH/Chaos. That was a lie, and Colby knew it. Angleton's worldview, his KGB paranoia, would have made him most amenable to spying on dissidents, foreign connections or not. Helms had authorized Chaos and represented the CIA on the IEC, the White House–created interagency committee to investigate foreign links to domestic radicals. In 1971, he had personally signed off on a CIA medical evaluation of Ellsberg.

Then, shortly after Colby received his marching orders from Helms, Karl Wagner, the executive assistant to the deputy director, drew him aside and said that he had some information that might be useful. He recalled that about a year earlier, Hunt had contacted General Robert Cushman, who was then deputy director of the CIA, and asked him for Agency assistance in an operation he was working on. Shortly thereafter, Ehrlichman had called Cushman and told him that the White House expected full cooperation from the Agency. In the days that followed, Hunt requisitioned, among other things, false identification papers, a wig, and a camera hidden in a tobacco pouch. All of these devices were subsequently utilized in the Plumbers' break-in into the offices of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. As far as the Nixon White House was concerned, Cushman, a retired Marine officer—like General Vernon Walters, who replaced him—was its man in the CIA. Ehrlichman had had no compunction about contacting him directly. But Cushman had sense enough to activate the telephone recording machine in his office. When Hunt's demands escalated—he told Cushman to have his former secretary transferred from her job in the Paris station and placed at his disposal—the deputy director went to Helms, and Hunt was rebuffed. Or at least that was the story Helms told. Again, he had authorized the medical profile of Ellsberg and was an active member of the IEC. Dick Ober's countersubversive team was still in full operating mode. In the end, Colby decided he had no choice but to trust his boss.
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When Wagner was finished with his tale, Colby escorted him to the director's office. After Wagner told Helms what he knew, the three decided to keep the information to themselves. A decision was necessary because on the Monday following the Watergate break-in, the Alexandria, Virginia, office of the FBI had begun peppering Colby with questions about links between the burglars and the Agency. Colby might not have to volunteer the Cushman-Hunt encounter, but he did have to explain what had already been revealed—that Hunt and McCord were former employees, and that one of the second-story men, Eugenio Martinez, was then on a $100-a-month Agency retainer to report on the activities of Cuban exiles. In addition, Colby confirmed that the Mullen Company, which Hunt was using as cover, was a public relations firm that in the past had put CIA overseas operatives on its payroll. Shortly thereafter, articles on Martinez and the Mullen Company, described as “a CIA front,” appeared in the national press. With the Alexandria office leaking like a sieve, Colby decided that in the future he should communicate directly with FBI headquarters in Washington.
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