Shadow Warrior (70 page)

When the story broke, the press rushed to Angleton's house in North Arlington. Daniel Schorr was first to ring the doorbell. “A groggy-looking man in pajamas opens the door,” Schorr later wrote of the encounter. The journalist asked to come in, and Angleton admitted him. “It looks like the home of a somewhat disorderly professor,” Schorr recalled, “books in many languages, memorabilia of Italy and Israel, a worn rug, pictures of wife and two sons. But no preparations for Christmas.” For the next four hours, Angleton rambled on about the fiction of a divided communist camp. Holding up a picture of Yasser Arafat at Lenin's tomb, the former counterintelligence guru cited it as proof that the Palestinian leader was a KGB colonel. He then related the details of his firing.

Later that day, dressed in his black overcoat and fedora, Angleton emerged from his house to face the cameras and answer questions. He was so unsteady that he appeared drunk, Schorr wrote, but the journalist thought Angleton was shell-shocked rather than inebriated. Whatever the case, James Jesus Angleton would regain his balance. Bill Colby's longtime adversary had become a bitter and dangerous enemy.
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Meanwhile, Colby knew that Hersh was going to publish a major story on the family jewels, but he did not know how extensive it would be. The reporter's ability to acquire information was uncanny. On December 21, Larry Silberman called the DCI: the acting attorney general recalled that Hersh had told him that Colby was coming to see him, Silberman, about Helms's possible perjury even before the meeting took place. “I am absolutely staggered that he knew that I was going to see you,” Colby said. “The SOB has sources that are absolutely beyond comparison.” Jenonne Walker, Colby's assistant, later recalled that Hersh seemed to know more about the Agency's secrets than she and Colby did.
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The headline in the
New York Times
morning edition for Sunday, December 22, read: “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War
Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” The story described CIA activities undertaken in the course of MH/Chaos and cited various scholars on their legality or illegality. Hersh informed his readers that the contents of the story had been confirmed by a “high government official,” and that MH/Chaos had been lodged in counterintelligence.

Paul Colby later recalled that his dad had decided to spend that Sunday at home with the family. It was snowing, and father and son walked to the corner to get the
Times
from a vending machine. Bill opened the paper, read the front page, folded the paper, and carried on the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. Paul told the story to demonstrate his father's calm under fire, but he may have had reason to be calm. The Hersh story had given him cover in his firing of Angleton, and it undercut to a degree Kissinger's ongoing effort to get Colby and the CIA to take the fall for various misdeeds of the Nixon administration.
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In his memoir, Colby recalled that he did not immediately foresee the huge flap that the Hersh article would cause. The Agency had been the subject of negative headlines before, and the ensuing outcry had quickly died down. Taken in context, the CIA's misdeeds were few and far between. If the Agency avoided the mistakes of the Watergate scandal—seeking to “distance” itself from the situation, thus arousing suspicion and eliciting charges of a cover-up—the crisis would pass. Colby decided to speak frankly and openly to Congress and the media (excluding sources and methods ) and reiterate that nothing akin to MH/Chaos was going on at present—indeed such things had been explicitly prohibited by the Agency's leadership—and would not transpire in the future. And in fact, in the two or three days following publication of the Hersh article, the media hesitated. There were no substantive follow-up stories on Monday or Tuesday, and when Hersh published again it was largely to quote his own article: “A
New York Times
story reported . . . ”
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Hersh had won a Pulitzer for his story on My Lai, but he had an unsavory reputation. “Hersh's technique is to wear down reluctant sources through tenacious pursuit by phone—often badgering, terrorizing, insulting,” wrote a colleague. “I don't know of anyone other than Don Rickles who can be as disgustingly insulting, yet have the right touch for getting someone to respond.” He did not feel constrained, as did some of his colleagues, by concerns about national security. “He was at a seminar at the Naval War College,” CIA officer David Phillips recalled, “and one of the
guys stood up and said, ‘Mr. Hersh, if it were wartime and you found out about a troop ship sailing out of New York, would you break that information?' He said, ‘You bet.' That's Hersh.” Some suspected that the editorial board at the
New York Times
, having been repeatedly scooped by the
Washington Post
during the Watergate scandal, was making a mountain out of a molehill. There was certainly no question about the rivalry. Hersh,
Times
executive editor A. M. Rosenthal once said, “is like a puppy that isn't quite housebroken, but as long as he's pissing on [
Washington Post
editor] Ben Bradlee's carpet, let him go.”
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For its part, the White House sensed the advent of a major scandal. In his memoir, Kissinger observed that the Hersh story had the effect of tossing “a burning match in a gasoline depot.” When Colby called the White House that Sunday afternoon, he could feel the heat. What the hell was going on? Deputy National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft asked. Was there more to come out? Another aide advised Colby to call the president, who was then on board Air Force One en route to a ski vacation at Vail, and fill him in. In due course, Colby had the White House operator put him through. As explicitly as he could over an unsecure circuit, the DCI attempted to bring Ford up to speed. “Mr. President,” he said, “on the story in the
Times
this morning I want to assure you that nothing comparable to the article's allegations is going on in the Agency at this time.” The material in the Hersh article was a distortion, and “all misdeeds of the past had been corrected in 1973.” Ford thanked him and asked for a report. Upon landing at Vail, the president was besieged by reporters badgering him for comment on the Hersh article. He merely repeated what Colby had told him—that the Agency was not currently engaged in domestic spying or illegal activities of any other kind. He had asked Kissinger as his national security adviser to secure a report on the matter from the DCI.
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The White House was understandably stunned that this was the first it had heard of the “family jewels.” When asked about the omission later, Colby said, “I never really thought about it. . . . I think I didn't think of it because Schlesinger was still in charge, and he didn't think of it. I asked him about it one time and he said something to the effect that, ‘Oh, hell, with that bunch of characters down there.' So it was almost as though he had made a decision not to brief them.”
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Once he was in the saddle, Colby declared, he kept treating the issue as an internal matter. That the thought
of briefing the president's men never crossed the DCI's mind is doubtful. He was dealing initially with the Nixon White House, which was in the process of trying to shift the blame for Watergate to the CIA, and during both the Nixon and Ford administrations with a national security adviser who was determined to marginalize the Agency. Why give the enemy bullets with which to fire at you?

By December 24 Colby had his report ready. It hit the high points of Operation MH/Chaos and then noted that the break-ins, surveillance of US citizens, and electronic bugs cited in Hersh's article had nothing to do with MH/Chaos. The report went on to describe those operations and attempted to justify them. “There are certain other matters in the history of the Agency which are subject to question,” Colby warned.
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The cover letter and report had to go to Kissinger first. As soon as he received a copy, the national security adviser/secretary of state summoned the DCI. Colby had heard through the grapevine that Kissinger had been extremely critical of him—“making caustic comments about me,” as Colby put it—for the previous two days. Kissinger was afraid of being linked to the Huston Plan for illegal spying on domestic “radicals” and to Allende's overthrow in Chile. As soon as the Hersh story broke, he had contacted Helms in Tehran using a backchannel. “This is an issue that's not going away,” Kissinger declared, and ordered Helms home from Iran to help with damage control. Both men were convinced that Colby was Hersh's primary and only source.
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What else is there? Kissinger asked Colby. Colby handed him a document summarizing the family jewels. The CIA was linked to various assassination plots, especially the conspiracy to kill Castro, which also involved contacts with the Mafia. There were drug experiments on Americans, the Agency's involvement in the Huston Plan, and Angleton's imprisonment and torture of Yuri Nosenko. Kissinger thumbed through the report hurriedly, Colby recalled, but when he came to the section on assassinations, he stopped and read. Their meeting over, Kissinger hand-carried Colby's report to Ford in Colorado. “I have discussed these activities [the ‘certain other matters' mentioned in Colby's cover letter] with him, and must tell you that some few of them clearly were illegal, while others—though not technically illegal—raise profound moral questions,” he memoed Ford. “A number, while neither illegal nor morally unsound, demonstrated very poor judgment.”
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Bill and Barbara had planned a family ski trip to Pennsylvania during the Christmas holidays, but in view of the emerging crisis over the Hersh article and the family jewels, Bill had opted to stay behind in Washington. He anticipated being summoned to Vail to be part of the team that was strategizing over damage control. What he hoped, he recalled in his memoir, was that the president would release his report verbatim—he had made sure that all of the material in it was declassified—and that it would stand as the administration's defense. But that was not to be; nor was Colby to be included in the decisionmaking process. The two things were related.

In Vail, Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, his assistant, decided on a course of action. They considered doing as Colby wished, releasing the report and thus making it the White House's own. But that would saddle the Ford administration with the sins of past administrations. The president and his advisers decided to name an “independent Blue Ribbon Panel” composed of distinguished Americans and chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate past CIA misdeeds and recommend reforms.
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Meanwhile, Colby grew increasingly uneasy. “The silence from there [Vail] was deafening,” he later observed. The Ford administration was circling the wagons, and apparently he was to be left outside to deal with the hostiles by himself. “I felt very lonely,” he recalled. “I decided that if I would have to fight the problem out alone, I at least would be free to use my strategy to save intelligence and not have to defer to every tactical move concocted in the White House.”
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The die was cast.

H
enry Kissinger's and Bill Colby's frames of reference and modi operandi could not have been more different. Kissinger, the academic turned diplomat, was secretive when he did not have to be, trusting only himself and a few subordinates. He was a master at deception, loved complexity for complexity's sake, and cared little about legal or constitutional niceties. Kissinger was skilled at acquiring and exploiting the influence he gained through personal relationships and cultivation of the media. Philosophically, he was a conservative internationalist with a Metternichian commitment to realpolitik. Like Metternich, the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation, he tended to confuse stability with the status quo. Colby was relatively simple by contrast—not simple-minded, but straightforward—often to a fault. He preferred friendship and trust in acquiring assets rather than threats and blackmail. He loved the clandestine world and covert operations because of the opportunity they provided for creativity. Colby was a liberal internationalist with all of the missionary baggage that went with the philosophy.

Colby's son John described his father's mindset well: “Up to 1973, [he] was less an intelligence professional than a special ops, covert action kind of guy. Here's a mission; go do it.” First it was the Nazis, then the communists. In Italy he knew what to do, what was right. In Vietnam, the situation was murkier, but he pressed ahead. The problems he faced as DCI were more complicated. “In each case,” John observed, “he looked at the situation, at his values and his perception of the national interest, and acted. If he believed in the value of intelligence and covert action—which he did all his life—then he was going to act to preserve it.”
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Protecting the national security when confronted by totalitarian regimes bent on world domination meant frequently choosing the lesser of two evils—the Ngo brothers and Thieu over Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Sukarno over the PKI in Indonesia, Pinochet over Allende in Chile. In a perfect world, it was the responsibility of Americans and others who enjoyed the blessings of constitutional government, the rule of law, and respect for individual rights to take action to prevent gross abuses of human rights. He would throughout his life speak out against ethnic cleansing, whether it involved Nazi crimes against the Jews and Gypsies or Serbian campaigns against Balkan Muslims. He spoke of “an international conscience” and the duty of the international community to take action “even by overstepping longstanding prohibitions against intervening in the offending nation's ‘internal affairs.'” The notion of an “international conscience” was, of course, absolutely foreign to Henry Kissinger.
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