Shadow Warrior (64 page)

Nixon and Kissinger watched these developments with growing alarm. The Track I and, to an extent, Track II campaigns to destabilize Chile politically and economically continued. In August 1972, the 40 Committee approved another $i million for Chile's opposition parties, bringing the total for the Allende period to $6.5 million.
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New coup plots began to materialize by the end of 1972. The CIA station in Santiago kept in close touch with all anti-Allende factions, including the
military, but there was no effort to provide aid or even promises of US support. The consensus within the 40 Committee was that the Chilean military would launch a coup sometime in the near future and that it did not need help from the CIA to succeed. On September 10, 1973, an emissary from a group of high-ranking military officers appeared at CIA offices in Santiago. He informed the station chief that an assault on the Presidential Palace would take place the next day and asked for US support. After checking with headquarters, the chief of station informed the coup emissary that the United States would not interfere in what was a purely internal Chilean matter. With Agency personnel limiting themselves to reporting events, the attack on the palace got underway, as predicted, on the 11th. Presidential guards, who, incidentally, had been trained by the Cubans, fought fiercely, but they were quickly overwhelmed. Allende refused offers of safe passage and, following an eleventh-hour radio broadcast from the palace, allegedly placed a rifle under his chin and blew off the top of his head.
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Chilean leftists claimed that the military fabricated this account, and that Allende had actually been assassinated with the assistance of the CIA. But the coup plotters who were present stuck to their story. Allende's death has been a subject of controversy ever since. The Nixon administration and the CIA insisted the United States had nothing to do with Allende's demise. In any case, democracy would not return to Chile for more than twenty years. The military regime that took control following the coup, under General Augusto Pinochet, would become one of the most notorious rightwing dictatorships in a region where rightwing dictatorships were standard fare. The new government suspended the National Congress, outlawed labor unions and political parties, and established one of the most feared secret police organizations in the world—the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, or DINA. Thousands of leftists were imprisoned indefinitely, interrogated, and tortured. “Methods employed,” according to an International Commission of Jurists report in 1974, “included electric shock, blows, beatings, burning with acid or cigarettes, prolonged standing, prolonged hooding and isolation in solitary confinement, extraction of nails, crushing of testicles, sexual assaults, immersion in water, hanging, simulated executions . . . and compelling attendance at the torture of others.” Those considered most subversive disappeared entirely.
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Colby would have preferred a different outcome—the election of someone like Frei, for example. But he believed that anything was better than Allende. “If you support some authoritarian leader against a Communist threat,” he later remarked to an interviewer, “you leave the option that the authoritarian state could become democratic in the future. With the Communists, the future offers no hope. . . . Pinochet is not going to conquer the world. Nobody is worried about Pinochet.” Colby's experiences with the “closed societies” he had encountered following the outbreak of the Cold War had led him to believe that communism was the worst of all totalitarian systems. For the most part, his fellow Americans shared that view. But they were less and less willing for the United States to intervene in a Third World country to stop communism's spread. An October 29, 1973, Harris Poll reported that fully 60 percent of the American people believed that the CIA should not have tried to destabilize the Chilean government; only 18 percent approved.
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Bill Colby may never have expected to be named DCI, but, like every other senior officer in the CIA, he had thought extensively about the role of the office of director—its mission, methods, and responsibilities. The philosophy that Colby brought to the fourth floor at Langley was an extension of the philosophy he had embraced as a Jedburgh, political officer in Italy, chief of station in Saigon, Far East Division chief, and DEPCORDS. He was still a true believer. People joined the CIA, he observed in a 1976 oral history, because they were patriots. The Agency, like the armed services and the US Foreign Service, was dedicated to the safety and welfare of the country.
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It was fitting that as Colby took the reins at Langley, preparations were being made to raise a statue of Nathan Hale in the courtyard. Although he was American intelligence's first martyr, Hale was certainly not a role model for future spooks, Colby observed in his maiden speech to Agency personnel. He had volunteered for espionage duty at the last minute; he had a very weak cover story; he had little training and no secret writing or other gimmicks; and when he was captured, his reports were in his shoe. Not only was he apprehended by the British, but the information he sought—where on Manhattan Island General Howe planned to land—had already reached his superiors by another route. But Hale was to be valued not for his expertise or his success, the new DCI declared, but for his
motives, his courage, and his willingness to sacrifice for his country. “We may not, God willing, need to demonstrate physical courage,” Colby told his comrades, “but in the intelligence profession we will be required to show moral and intellectual courage.”
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But patriotism was a hard thing to define in an era that featured the Sino-Soviet split, Washington's openings to Moscow and Beijing, and spreading American disillusionment with its government in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. Colby, like George Kennan, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, wanted to contain communism until it either collapsed from its own internal contradictions or evolved into something nonthreatening to the rest of the world. He continued to believe that the best way to fight Sino-Soviet imperialism was to subsidize the anticommunist left. He would dispatch John F. Devlin, deputy director of political research at the CIA, to the 1974 American Historical Association Conference to recruit. In his pitch, Devlin made it clear that all were welcome, including Marxists. Of course, Colby still believed that the best defense was a good offense. He may have abandoned the notion that the Western democracies could train and equip freedom fighters within communist hard targets to overthrow their respective governments, but he was still committed to covert action, both military and political, in disputed areas. In terms of the Soviet Union, Colby viewed intelligence gathering in much the same way the advocates of mutually assured destruction viewed the arms race. There was his telling comment to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev during his June 1973 visit to Washington: “The more we know of each other the safer we both can be.”
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As it had in the past, Colby's approach put him on a collision course with the men who kept the secrets—Helms, Angleton, and the whole counterintelligence culture. The extreme compartmentalization that had characterized the CIA under his predecessors, Colby believed, had visited a number of evils on the Agency. It had crippled the CIA's ability to fight the Cold War. It had kept Langley from producing the best, most informed, most integrated intelligence products for the nation's policymakers. There was only one component of the CIA charged with an unconditional need-to-know, and that was CI. This had given primacy to the mole hunters, defining the Cold War as the CIA vs. the KGB rather than the United States and its allies versus Moscow, Beijing, and their allies. The obsession had been with protecting against penetration rather than with penetrating.
Ideologically, this meant that the Agency had sometimes been dominated by anticommunist hardliners, conservatives who preferred monarchists and fascists not only to communists, but to socialists as well. Compartmentalization had also led to the abuses, mild though they were in Colby's eyes, that were in the process of destroying what was left of Congress's and the American public's confidence in the CIA.

Colby longed for an Official Secrets Act similar to the one in Britain that made it a crime to reveal classified information and that protected MI-6. He continued to battle Victor Marchetti and Philip Agee—the former CIA officers who were attempting to out the Agency in print—working through the courts to censor their publications in order to protect sources and methods as well as publicly denouncing their disloyalty. If Agee were a member of a foreign service, there was no doubt what would happen to him, Colby told an interviewer; “He'd be shot.” But he was not going to have a US Official Secrets Act, and he knew it. The CIA was an American intelligence agency, Colby told a college audience, not MI-6, not the KGB, not the Chinese communist apparatus. But what did that mean? It was no small question. Upon how he answered it might hinge the very existence of the Agency and the security of the country.
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Colby soon came to recognize that the National Security Act of 1947 and constitutional requirements aside, the world of 1974 was very different from the world of 1947. From the time of his return from Vietnam to become executive director, he had cultivated close ties with rising young officers in the Agency. That trend would continue when he became DCI. “We make no effort to get out in front of Congress,” one of his protégés wrote him in a memo during the spring of 1974. “We concentrate on trying to preserve what we have, and as a consequence look what we are becoming. Twenty-five years have been devoted to immunizing and insulating CIA as an institution, and its population as individuals, from the evolutionary and riotous changes that have engulfed the society at large. . . . We don't look for ways to make change, we search exhaustively for ways to prevent it. . . . Maybe intelligence shouldn't serve the Executive Branch exclusively. . . . Maybe the principle of separation of powers shouldn't apply to intelligence.” Colby agreed—with the first part, at least. If the CIA was to weather the gathering storm, there would have to be sweeping reforms.
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What the new DCI envisioned was an integrated team that would turn out the best possible intelligence product and report frankly to Congress
on its activities, excluding sources and methods. Indeed, he promised as much in his confirmation hearings: if the Agency were to survive, “it has to conform with [
sic
] the laws, the standards, and the customs of our country,” he proclaimed. “It has to retain the confidence of the American government and the American people.”The family jewels were missteps of the past; under Schlesinger, and then on his own, he had issued edicts prohibiting any and all Watergate-type actions, assassinations, and other wrongdoing. Perhaps most important, the CIA would no longer keep secrets from itself. “The way to solve the problem of the baronies and the separate lives of the different elements of the Agency,” he told an interviewer, “is more and more to pull the experts in their different fields into direct contact with each other. Don't scare them by having them feel that he [
sic
] can't possibly talk to somebody in another Directorate because it is a little bit worse than talking to the KGB.”
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What Colby was suggesting was revolutionary, subversive, and absolutely counter to the culture of secrecy that pervaded intelligence operations across nations and across time. Compartmentalization equaled security. Limiting information to those with a need-to-know kept it out of the hands of moles, those who could be compromised, the careless, or those with a personal grudge against an individual or an agency. Not only Angleton but the vast majority of spooks trusted only those they had to—and then very reluctantly. Colby's timing may have been necessary, but for the keepers of the secrets, it could not have been worse. With leaks springing up everywhere, the DCI was getting ready to call for more disclosure.

Ever the liberal, Colby began his tenure as DCI by signaling a new openness, a new sense of collegiality. “When I was abroad, at various stations, when I was Chief of Station and then when I was Chief of the Division,” he told an interviewer, “I spent a great deal of time worrying about the individual members of the organization that I was part of; I tried to step in and help them with their problems. I tried to correct them and encourage them to solve their problems rather than to discipline them as a way of getting changes made.” His office, in deliberate contrast to Angleton's, was open and light-filled; his assistant, Jenonne Walker, and the division heads were free to come and go. “Senior people from across the Agency felt very comfortable coming up—they would check with his secretary—and would walk in,” Walker recalled. Colby made a point of lunching in the general mess and sitting with junior officers. He launched an
equal opportunity program to bring more blacks into one of the most segregated agencies in Washington and to help female employees break the glass ceiling. Not all was wine and roses; he had spent much of the previous year firing people, and that trend, at the insistence of the White House, would continue.
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In truth, despite his goodwill and good intentions, Bill Colby—driven in part by events but in part also by his personal prejudices—would do more to divide and demoralize the CIA than any of his predecessors. One of the few things the former Jedburgh had in common with the Nixon White House was a prejudice against the Directorate of Intelligence. Colby had no experience on the analytical side; his time had been spent in the clandestine services. To remedy this imbalance, he named Jenonne Walker as his assistant. Walker was a ten-year veteran of the Office of National Estimates, specializing in Western Europe. Colby then proceeded to do away with the venerable Board of National Estimates, whose reports (National Intelligence Estimates) had been the coin of the intelligence realm for twenty-five years. The board, Colby later wrote, had developed a certain “ivory tower mentality” and had become even more isolated in reaction to the denigration of its product by the Pentagon and the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy team. Colby wanted to be the funnel through which intelligence flowed to policymakers. It was he who had to participate in top-level meetings, conduct briefings, and take responsibility. The NIE process took place independently of the DCI. Abolition of the board freed up twelve senior-level positions in the Agency. Colby used those slots to create twelve national intelligence officers (NIOs) who would report directly to him on the major issues the country faced, whether it was China, arms control, Vietnam, or the Middle East. Each officer was limited to one assistant and one secretary “so that they could identify totally with my position and not develop a role of their own,” as Colby later put it. He saw the special assistant for Vietnamese affairs as a model, comparing it favorably with other arrangements where he had been faced by a whole “roomful of China experts” when he would have preferred to have dealt with one individual.
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