Shadow Warrior (65 page)

John Huizenga, chairman of the board, fought Colby, arguing that abolition of the Board of National Estimates, which comprised individuals from within and without the Agency, would compromise the independence of the intelligence product. But Colby insisted, and Huizenga retired. Colby later recalled that he could not have done without the new
national intelligence officers, particularly as he spent more and more time testifying before congressional committees. “They would call me late in the evening or show up at my desk early in the morning with some development they had plucked out of the reams of material flowing through Langley and say that it presented an unforeseen danger or a novel aspect of a complex problem.”
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As coordinator of the NIOs, Colby selected George Carver, his former case officer in Saigon, who had risen to become the DCI's special assistant for Vietnam (SAVA). The analysts were appalled. Like Colby, Carver had very little experience on the espionage or analytical side. “Carver was a true believer,” Jenonne Walker observed, “and more important, he was an operator, not an analyst. It is just human nature that if you are working your heart out twenty hours a day on a policy that you believe passionately is essential to the national interest, you will believe it will succeed because it must succeed.” In the early days, the analysts engaged in a lot of self-censorship, telling the DCI, and through him, the White House, what they thought he wanted to hear. Walker would assure them that Colby did not want them to pull their punches, but they would say, “Yeah, he says that, but he fired John Heisinger [the longtime and very distinguished head of the analytical branch] and promoted George Carver. That tells us what he really wants.” Colby himself addressed the problem during a question-and-answer session with top management. “There is much confusion over the two words, ‘policy support,'” he said. “Our mission is to support the policy makers, not the policy of the makers.” But here was the crux of the problem. He had appointed a man, George Carver, who, like himself, was an operative, a person who was used to committing completely to whatever project he was involved in, emotionally and psychologically; it was frequently impossible for such a man to stand back and question the assumptions upon which their operations were based. How much more difficult to do so working for men like Nixon and Kissinger.
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Colby wanted the CIA's product to matter, and for that to happen, he believed, the Agency's daily intelligence reports had to reach key policymakers directly and concisely. To this end he created the
National Intelligence Daily
, which presented the newest secrets in newspaper format, enabling consumers to scan headlines and read in depth only those stories of direct concern to them. “It became the journal with the smallest circulation (about 60), the largest reporting staff (the whole intelligence community),
and the worst advertising in the world (none, because the content was highly classified),” Colby later quipped.
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The old National Intelligence Estimates had focused almost exclusively on strategic and military issues; Colby wanted more breadth. He thus established two offices within the Directorate of Intelligence: the Office of Economic Research and the Office of Political Research. Those concerned with national security had long been aware that trade policies, strategic reserves of natural resources, and other economic factors, as well as long-term political trends, were of vital concern, but Colby believed that the new CIA had to give these topics more institutional visibility.

Colby would never abandon his faith in the value of human intelligence (HUMINT), but he was no Luddite either. He worked diligently to get up to speed on “the machine spies,” as Richard Helms once dubbed them. By 1973, a lion's share of the intelligence community's budget was going into reconnaissance satellites and aircraft, ground stations, and ships at sea with highly sophisticated sight and sound monitoring devices. When Colby came on board as DCI, the Nixon administration was considering a new generation of spy satellite called KH-11. The United States already had equipment that could take detailed photographs, even at night, of the most discrete targets. The problem was how to transmit the images back to earth. Pre-KH-11 satellites transported their photographs physically by means of film capsules embedded in tiny reentry vehicles. The technique was fraught with problems. The planes sent to recover the capsules sometimes could not locate them; periodically, vehicles together with their film cargos burned up on reentry; and a satellite only could carry a finite number of capsules. There was the famous story of a satellite photo capsule accidentally landing in the steppes of Central Asia. When CIA agents tracked it down, they found that a reindeer herder had discovered it first, taken it apart, uncoiled the rolls of film, and used them to decorate his yurt. The KH-11 would solve the problem by means of a revolutionary process: pictures would be digitized on board the satellite and then read out to a ground station with the proper radio equipment. The development cost for KH-11 was enormous for that time, around $1.8 billion. Colby played a key role in securing congressional funding for what would become the mainstay of America's satellite surveillance system.
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The principal obstacle to Colby's plans for making the CIA the go-to intelligence agency for policymakers, and rendering it more accountable
and thus acceptable to Congress and the American people, was Henry Kissinger. The former professor's reach sometimes exceeded his grasp. His success was largely due to his ability to exploit Nixon's insecurities, his skill at manipulating the bureaucracy, his ability to cultivate the press (he spent roughly half of every day talking to journalists), the personal relationships he had established while running his Harvard international seminar, and his penchant for claiming credit for the achievements of others. Détente with the Soviet Union, for example, had begun during the last months of the Kennedy administration and continued apace under Johnson. But without Nixon's iron-clad anticommunist credentials and the courage to risk them, the openings to Communist China and the Soviet Union could never have taken place. Like virtually all of his predecessors, Kissinger was an Atlanticist: “The Atlantic area is the key to our security,” he declared in a meeting with the Joint Chiefs. “If we think that by competing in the Third World we can do anything but bring about the destruction of the Western World, we are wrong.”
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Another key to Kissinger's success as a bureaucratic politician and a diplomat was a talent for making the straightforward complex and convincing those around him that only he could master the situation. His monologues during National Security Council meetings and his conversations with Nixon and, later, President Gerald Ford were dense, domineering, and generally nonsensical; the latter discussions focused far more on personalities than on policy—so-and-so is a bastard, this faction is out to get us (me), you don't understand the situation, he would tell Ford. During Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty negotiations in Moscow in the fall of 1974, Kissinger sent Ford a long memorandum including such observations as “Brezhnev enjoys power. . . . Like many Russians, Brezhnev is a mixture of crudeness and warmth. . . . He eschews Khrushchevian excursions into profanity. Brezhnev prides himself on being a sportsman.” Unlike his predecessors McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow—men who, like Kissinger, came to the National Security Council with broad learning but little experience—Kissinger did not limit himself to ensuring that the president was kept thoroughly informed on key issues. He saw himself much as William Henry Seward did during his early days as secretary of state in the Lincoln administration: as president for foreign policy. From 1969 through 1972, Nixon taught him otherwise, but with the coming of Watergate, Nixon's eventual resignation, and Ford's accession, Kissinger's
dream came true. His meetings with Ford were sometimes painful, with the national security adviser cum secretary of state lecturing his chief as if he were an ignorant schoolboy.
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Kissinger was especially warm personally with those he was about to manipulate to his own advantage. When Kissinger and Colby breakfasted together on June 18, 1973, Henry was gracious, complimentary, even reassuring. The two recalled their meetings in Vietnam. Demonstrating some insight into the new DCI's personality, Kissinger observed that US support for the coup against Diem had been a mistake. “We should never overthrow friendly governments,” he said. Thinking that Colby was a Helms protégé, Kissinger expressed his regret over the latter's firing. Why hadn't he and Helms come to him when the White House was pressuring the Agency over Watergate? Because Kissinger was not involved, and Langley did not want to involve him, Colby replied. The dance continued. The national security adviser expressed the hope that Watergate “had not shaken CIA so that it might become subject to the same kinds of leaks that occur in other agencies.” Kissinger did not know how much the CIA knew—about the fact that he had ordered wiretaps on members of his own staff and select journalists, for example—but his role in the war on Allende, among other things, could be clearly documented. Colby said he did not think Watergate had undermined security at the Agency, although the purge that had begun under Schlesinger (at Kissinger's and Nixon's behest) was causing some problems. Kissinger assured the new DCI that he looked forward to a long and productive relationship with him. Several things had to be made clear, however; Kissinger was to be the CIA's sole conduit to the White House. Moreover, he did not want policy recommendations made through the manipulation of information. (“That our analysis clearly bring out alternative interpretations and possible developments and that he not be subjected to any consensus language,” as Colby put it.) Finally, Kissinger made it clear that Sino-Soviet relations were and would remain his top intelligence priority.
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Unfortunately, Colby's determination to be a good soldier caused him initially to let down his guard with Kissinger. (In this he was not alone. Kissinger thoroughly charmed J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, convincing him that he, Henry, was the light contending with Nixon's dark.) “He [Colby] came in saying we must have the confidence of the White House,” Jenonne Walker recalled, “[that] the
most important thing is to have the confidence of the White House. He had no idea of what it would take to gain the confidence of the Kissinger White House, which was to be a toady.” He would quickly learn.
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Soon after becoming DCI, Colby was approached by top-level analysts complaining that Kissinger's team was cutting him, and consequently them, out of the information loop. Colby investigated and found that their charges were true. “Kissinger's direct links to the Soviet hierarchy, his negotiations with the North Vietnamese and, of course, his dazzling dances through the Middle East,” Colby wrote, “all were reported in the most secret of channels with no copies coming to Langley.” Colby went to Kissinger and complained. He recalled that Henry then allowed him to see his latest cables, but that access proved to be temporary. Colby caved. “I confess that I agreed with his action,” he said in
Honorable Men
. “After Marchetti and Agee, I felt I could no longer say that it was inconceivable that anyone in CIA would be guilty of an information leak.” He subsequently told the analysts to do the best they could with what they had and let Kissinger and the president use the reports as they wished.
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Jenonne Walker recalled that the daily briefings Colby provided to the president “became tips on how to make policy work rather than prodding policymakers to reexamine the premises of policy.” Appeasement was not always the best course with the academic turned policymaker. After Nelson Rockefeller became Gerald Ford's vice president in 1974, the CIA did an assessment of world opinion that was overwhelmingly positive. One report quoted a foreign journalist who observed that because of their prior relationship, Rockefeller's ascendancy would surely enhance Kissinger's influence. For some reason, the national security adviser took umbrage at this. Kissinger called Colby on the phone and read him the riot act. “Bill's secretary took notes on calls—and this was absolutely foul and vile: ‘If you allow criticism of me, I will ruin you.'”
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Colby was further marginalized as an adviser and policymaker when Kissinger, as secretary of state, named one of his protégés, William Hyland, to head State's intelligence division. Hyland had been an expert on the Soviet Union in the CIA's Office of National Estimates before he became a National Security Council staffer under Kissinger. As his assistant for intelligence, Hyland accompanied Kissinger to key meetings in Moscow and elsewhere. In addition, Hyland was present at a number of top decisionmaking meetings at the White House from which Colby was excluded. A State
Department official subsequently observed that “when Kissinger says ‘Bill is doing a great job,' he is usually referring to Hyland and not to Colby.”
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The irony was that to the extent there was a philosophy behind Kissinger's foreign policy, Colby was in tune with it. The DCI recalled in his memoir that as he became more confident in his knowledge of the intricacies of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, “I found myself increasingly supporting Kissinger's efforts to keep the process of détente moving ahead with the comparatively cooperative Russian leadership then in power, and increasingly impatient with the Pentagon's insistence that all concessions be made by the Soviets.”
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From 1969 onward, SALT had been pummeled by hawks on the right, led by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, as well as by a group on the left led by Senator Henry “Scoop”Jackson (D-WA), the “senator from Boeing.” Shortly after his accession to the post of secretary of defense in 1973, Schlesinger became a prisoner of the Pentagon and a hardliner on SALT. Kissinger and Ford wanted to keep the ball rolling in hopes of signing a new, more comprehensive arms control agreement and in the process enhancing Ford's chances of winning the 1976 presidential election. To this end, Kissinger arranged for a Ford-Brezhnev summit meeting on arms control in Vladivostok for November 1974.
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