At the conference table, LBJ read our estimate and asked if all present had read it. We had. After one more glance at the report, the President, peering over his reading glasses, went around the table again, asking each of us in turn if we agreed with the assessment. We did. LBJ then ordered General Wheeler and me to review the assessment and, in his words, “scrub it down.”
There was only one change in our “scrubbed” assessment. After checking the original data and the latest reports, we shaved three days from the original estimate and concluded that the war might end within seven days. There remained another critical question: when would the war begin?
On the first of June, a senior Israeli official visited my office. I had known him for some time, and we met whenever he was in the United States. As I reported to President Johnson the following morning, my visitor had hinted that Israel could no longer avoid a decision. Israel’s restraint, he felt, was the result of U.S. pressure and might have cost Israel the advantage of a surprise attack. Such an attack, he seemed to suggest, was likely to come quite soon. Unlike the pessimism stressed in the material Israeli representatives were circulating in the United States, my friend stated quite clearly that although Israel expected U.S. diplomatic support and the delivery of weapons already agreed upon, no other support was expected or likely to be requested.
In passing this information to the President, I added my own conviction that this visit was a clear portent that war might come at any time, with no advance warning. Three days later, Israel launched its preemptive attack. All told, we had presented the boss with a tidy package.
It was 3 a.m. on June 5 when I was roused by a call from the CIA Operations Center. Israel had launched its preemptive attack. Israel, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were at war. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) had picked up open broadcasts that Israeli aircraft were attacking Egyptian warplanes on airfields in Egypt. I alerted Jim Critchfield, chief of our Near Eastern operations division, and Jim Angleton, who, in addition to his counterintelligence responsibility, handled some Israeli matters.
President Johnson had kept the congressional leaders informed of the situation as it developed, and was clearly impressed by the Agency’s performance.
Throughout the six days of war, President Johnson held daily meetings in the Cabinet Room with a group of Near East experts, and Dean Acheson and Abe Fortas—neither of whom held any official position. In the midst of one meeting, LBJ suddenly fixed his attention on me in my usual seat at the end of the long table. “Dick,” he snapped, “just how accurate is your intelligence on the progress of this war?”
Without having a moment to consider the evidence, I shot from the hip, “It’s accurate just as long as the Israelis are winning.” It may have sounded as if I were smarting off, but it was the exact truth, and it silenced the table. Only an amused twitch of Dean Acheson’s mustache suggested his having noted my reasoning.
One of the most disturbing incidents in the six days came on the morning of June 8 when the Pentagon flashed a message that the U.S.S. Liberty, an unarmed U.S. Navy communications ship, was under attack in the Mediterranean, and that American fighters had been scrambled to defend the ship. The following urgent reports showed that Israeli jet fighters and torpedo boats had launched the attack. The seriously damaged Liberty remained afloat, with thirty-four dead and more than a hundred wounded members of the crew.
Israeli authorities subsequently apologized for the accident, but few in Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified as an American naval vessel. Later, an interim intelligence memorandum concluded that the attack was a mistake and “not made in malice against the U.S.” When additional evidence was available, more doubt was raised. This prompted my deputy, Admiral Rufus Taylor, to write me his view of the incident. “To me, the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the Israelis knew that Liberty might be their target and attacked anyway, either through confusion in Command and Control or through deliberate disregard of instructions on the part of subordinates.”
The day after the attack, President Johnson, bristling with irritation, said to me, “The New York Times put that attack on the Liberty on an inside page. It should have been on the front page!”
I had no role in the board of inquiry that followed, or the board’s finding that there could be no doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty. I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack.
The next crisis in the Six Day War came early Saturday morning, June 10, when President Johnson summoned me urgently to the White House Situation Room. Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin had initiated contact on the “hot line” that supposedly linked the Kremlin directly to the White House. In those days, the White House Situation Room was in the basement, which meant that the President had to go outside, walk along the open colonnade from the Mansion to the West Wing, and continue down the stairs to the basement. The communications equipment—phones, Teletype machines, and cipher apparatus—was ranged along the hall outside the Situation Room.
At the time, and unlike the Hollywood versions of situation rooms, there were no flashing lights, no elaborate projections of maps and photographs on a silver screen, or even any armed guards rigidly at attention beside the doorway. The room itself was painted a bleak beige and furnished simply with an oval conference table and an assortment of comfortable chairs.
As I settled into my chair, Bob McNamara leaned over to give me some background. Some minutes after he reached his Pentagon office—as usual at 7 a.m.—there was a call from the Pentagon War Room. “Chairman Kosygin is on the hot line waiting to communicate with the President.” “Why call me?” Bob asked. “Because the hot line terminal is here in the Pentagon,” the duty officer replied.
The “hot line” is not a telephone as it has been described in the press. It is a dedicated Teletype device through which enciphered telegraph messages can be exchanged between the incumbent head man in Moscow (at that time the chairman of the Council of Ministers) and the President in Washington. The system was established on the heels of the Cuban missile crisis when it was realized that such a means of rapid communication was a prudent precaution. The hot line had never been used, and none of the officials most concerned remembered that it had been installed in the Pentagon rather than in the White House Situation Room. Bob had ordered Kosygin’s message patched to the White House and directed the immediate relocation of the cipher device.
Kosygin’s message was indeed threatening. As President Johnson describes it in his memoir, the prime minister said a “very crucial moment” had arrived, and spoke of the possibility of an “independent decision” by Moscow. Kosygin foresaw the risk of a “grave catastrophe.” Unless Israel unconditionally halted operations within the next few hours, the Soviet Union would take “necessary actions, including military.” The Russian also charged Israel with “ignoring all Security Council resolutions for a ceasefire.”*
For the next few minutes, each of us who had any knowledge of Russian checked the translation of Kosygin’s message. Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, home briefly from his post in Moscow, said, no doubt about it, the translation was accurate. There could be no question that the prime minister had used the word “military” in the context of “necessary actions.” The room went silent as abruptly as if a radio had been switched off.
The President pushed aside his unfinished chipped-beef breakfast and left. Dean Rusk and his deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, departed for the State Department. Tommy Thompson, Bob McNamara, and I remained at the conference table. After taking another look at the translated message, McNamara said, “Why not send the Sixth Fleet closer to the war areas—say a hundred miles offshore—instead of leaving it in orbit in the middle of the Mediterranean as it is now?” Ambassador Thompson nodded and pointed out that Moscow would surely view this move as a signal that the United States was not about to back down, and the un
publicized fleet movement would allow Kosygin to ease off without any chance of public embarrassment. I supported McNamara’s recommendation by noting that the Russian “fishing trawlers,” disposed as always within sight of the Sixth Fleet, would signal Moscow the moment it was apparent that the aircraft carriers and support ships were on the move.
The door opened and the President came back. McNamara outlined his proposal. After a few moments’ contemplation, Lyndon Johnson nodded agreement, but did not say a word. McNamara picked up the phone with a direct line to the Pentagon. President Johnson later wrote, “There are times when the wisdom and rightness of a President’s judgment are critically important. We were at such a moment. The Soviets had made a decision. I had to respond.”*
It seemed impossible to believe that five years after the missile confrontation in Cuba, the two superpowers had again squared off, and that the Sixth Fleet, fully armed, would now move toward the battle and, not incidentally, closer to the Soviet warships already in the eastern Mediterranean.
There is something uniquely awesome about the moment a fateful decision is made. Tension in the room is taut as a violin string. One feels a visceral physical reaction. Our voices were so low we might have been speaking in whispers. Even the temperature in the room seemed to have chilled. Only the fact that each of us, the President included, had actions to take eased the stasis.
It was the world’s good fortune that the hostilities on the Golan Heights ended before that day was out.
A few hours after the firing ceased, Jim Angleton and Jim Critchfield came to my office with an imaginative proposal they had roughed out. Critchfield had come up with the idea when an urgent cable from Jack O’Connell, our man in Jordan, sought our intervention with the Israelis after bombs had been dropped close to King Hussein’s palace. This message was slipped to the Israelis and there were no further air attacks threatening King Hussein in Amman.
At the time, our reporting led us to believe that Moshe Dayan, who had been named Israeli defense minister days before the outbreak of war, was anxious to “undo the damage” caused by Jordan’s intervention on the side of Egypt and Syria, and thought it much in Israel’s interest to reestablish a stable relationship with Jordan. He also seemed to believe that an exchange with King Hussein in the existing circumstances might produce an accord of lasting value. With Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in political and economic disarray, there also seemed a possibility that the USSR might seize that moment to step into the Near East in a purposeful manner. As a counter to this possibility, Dayan might have recognized an opportunity to build an anti-Soviet alliance of Israel and the conservative Arab states of Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Critchfield suggested that we pass this informal observation to the White House and State Department. I agreed, and Critchfield arranged to take it directly to McGeorge Bundy at the White House. Mac Bundy, President Johnson’s national security advisor until resigning in late 1966, had been called back to the White House by the President as a temporary advisor during the six-day crisis. Bundy agreed to discuss the proposal with Nicholas Katzenbach at State.
The following morning, Katzenbach joined Mac Bundy for a meeting with Critchfield and Angleton in the Executive Office Building. Both Katzenbach and Bundy agreed that King Hussein was not prepared politically or legally for any such meeting. In the circumstance, they said, the Agency was to refrain from any follow-up discussions.
I thought at the time that this was a mistake, and I believe that events since have confirmed the possibility that in the prevailing atmosphere, secret negotiations involving the exchange of land for substantive peace treaties might have been productive. At no time, however, did I or any CIA officer argue against the State Department and White House decision.
The long-standing question of whether or not Israel has nuclear weapons and the gear to employ them did not play a significant role in the assessments made during this conflict. For my part, I had no reason to doubt that Israel has a nuclear capability. The notion that any nation less fearsomely armed can push Israel into the sea is, in my view, nonsense.
Threaded through my years at the Agency was the issue set forth in the book Israel and the Bomb.* Avner Cohen, an Israeli citizen, undertook prodigious research in the United States and Israel to lay out what he believes to be the history of Israel’s success in “going nuclear” under the guise of “nuclear opacity.” He writes: “Nuclear opacity has been Israel’s way of coping with the tensions and problems attending the possession of nuclear weapons.… Nuclear opacity is a situation in which a state’s nuclear capability has not been acknowledged, but is recognized in a way that influences other nations’ perceptions and actions.”
In fact, the Agency’s tracking of Israel’s progress in this area was done in an appropriate fashion throughout the relevant time between 1950 and 1970. There is no need to underline the difficulty of establishing what was being done at the installation built at Dimona in the Negev. To use ambassador Chip Bohlen’s often-quoted all-purpose trope, it was “like trying to catch a fart with a mitten.” CIA was criticized for many alleged intelligence failures in my time, but this one never occurred. The top policymakers were kept adequately informed, and reacted positively to the Agency’s efforts and coverage. It was no small chore to avoid leaks or mistakes in working on a matter so sensitive in view of the domestic and international politics involved. This is borne out when one notes that no responsible member of the U.S. government has ever felt it advisable to divulge facts on any explicit material regarding these matters. In sum, we did the job and were able to avoid the political pitfalls.
*The Rare Art Traditions (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).
*The Unknown CIA (Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1989, p 179.
*The Vantage Point (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 302.
*Ibid.
*Avner Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
Chapter 31
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ARE THE LIGHTS ON?
Some months after my retirement, I had lunch with a colleague, a friend from OSS days and the former chief of a European station. He asked if I remembered an urgent cable sent in mid-1968 flagged with a code word marking it as a sensitive message on Vietnam, and addressed to him personally at his post in Europe. I reminded him that on any day in that turbulent year, a handful of such cables might have crossed my desk.
“It was an urgent, Top Secret query, a one-liner, no background at all,” he said. I shook my head.
“I know damned well it was from you,” he said. “Nobody else would send a cable like that to a station as far from Vietnam as I was.” He paused. I waited.
“There was just one question: ‘Are the lights on in Hanoi?’ ”
It came back to me and, in a way, the incident seemed to catch the feeling of that long decade.
John McCone (and Allen Dulles before him) considered his role as DCI to fall within the circle of policymaking, and took an active role in both the Kennedy and early Johnson eras. In contrast, I was convinced that my job as DCI was one of support, and I participated in policy discussions only when they involved action in the specific intelligence areas assigned to the Agency. At the Tuesday lunches and other lesser policy gatherings, my role was to keep the game honest. Policy advocates occasionally tend to overstate—or ignore—relevant data. I remained on the sidelines as policy discussions developed, and spoke up only when information crept into the dialogue which seemed to be at odds with the facts as I knew them.
The discussions in which I most often participated concerned the various pacification programs under way in South Vietnam. The Agency had been directed to provide liaison officers to beef up these far-ranging programs at the village, district, and province levels. These officers—many of whom volunteered for service in Vietnam—came from field posts all over the world, and although removed from Agency command, remained my responsibility. Few had knowledge of anything Vietnamese, and the most useful language any had to offe
r was fluent French—fortunately the second language in that former colony. As the war went on, English overtook French as the foreign language of choice.
At the usual Tuesday lunch, we gathered for a sherry in the family living room on the second floor of the White House. If the President, who normally kept to a tight schedule, was a few minutes late, he would literally bound into the room, pause long enough to acknowledge our presence, and herd us into the family dining room, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. Seating followed protocol, with the secretary of state at the President’s right, and the secretary of defense at his left. General Bus Wheeler sat beside the secretary of defense. I sat beside Dean Rusk. Walt Rostow, George Christian, and Tom Johnson made up the rest of the table. It was probably a day after President Johnson had reluctantly agreed to a heavy bombing of the electric grid supplying power to the Hanoi area that I sent the cable to my friend.
LBJ never allowed the waiters to clear the table until the substantive talk had finished. On some days, the President would simply push his dishes aside to make room for the briefing charts and aerial photographs General Wheeler would fish from his briefcase. The discussions covered a wide range, but the emphasis was almost always on Vietnam. Opinions would vary on whether a proposed target was so close to populated areas that civilian casualties might result. Were the bombings around Hanoi and Haiphong damaging enough to North Vietnam’s supply and distribution system to warrant the risks involved?
The selection of bombing targets while sitting safely in that comfortable dining room was a sobering experience. President Johnson was intensely aware of his responsibility for the pilots flying these missions. I learned that he would often go alone to his office in the West Wing of the White House in the middle of the night to find if there had been losses.
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 37