A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Although I knew what LBJ’s answer would be, I asked when he wanted the material.

  President: “As quick as you can. Tomorrow sometime.… Make it simple.… It ties down 500,000, 300,000, 100,000.… Number two … it costs them 5000 trucks, destroyed or damaged … and how many drivers are lost.… what I want to see is what it costs them … and if we do stiffen their resistance, say so.”

  I said that I understood and would put it in the simplest terms.

  President: “I’m going to be talking to a little group and I want that stuff right at hand.”

  “If I have it by five tomorrow afternoon is that time enough?”

  President: “Yes.”

  And so it went, day after day.

  —

  I’ve been asked what a typical day was like during those turbulent months. In retrospect there were no typical days; only the atypical days come to mind. I recently unearthed a note scribbled on August 20, 1968. After checking my cable boards, the day started with a staff meeting in the conference room across the hall from my office. There followed a tour of the newly reorganized, and vitally important, Records Integration office. As I got back to my own premises, I found Dick Lehman, the chief of the Current Intelligence staff, waiting. He would not have arrived unannounced unless something had broken in the world press.

  “The UPI ticker is carrying a bulletin that the top Soviet brass, civilian and military, are meeting in Moscow today. This time of year, they are usually on vacation in the Black Sea area. Something is up.”

  I signaled Elizabeth Dunlevy to rejigger my schedule.

  “We have to wonder,” Lehman said, “whether they are deciding to invade Czechoslovakia.”

  For several days, we had been monitoring the extensive maneuvers the Warsaw Pact forces had undertaken in East Germany.

  “The distance from the maneuver area to the Czech border is just a skip and a jump,” Lehman said. “I’ve alerted the Watch Committee.”

  I told Dick that I would mention this to the President at the Tuesday lunch that day. After checking to make sure that the newsbreak had reached everyone, I called George Carver to update me on the last twelve hours on Vietnam. Czechoslovakia notwithstanding, Vietnam was likely to be LBJ’s first question to me.

  Dean Rusk, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Bus Wheeler, and LBJ’s aide Tom Johnson were sipping sherry when the President charged into the room and made a beeline for Dean Rusk. They moved out of earshot to the big bay window and stood whispering. After a few minutes we moved into the family dining room. LBJ held forth on domestic unrest and the lack of military progress in Vietnam until I could find an opening to report on what CIA thought was going on in Moscow.

  The President cut me short. “Dick, that Moscow meeting is to talk about us.” Without another word, LBJ reverted to Vietnam. I hadn’t the slightest idea what the President meant, but kept my peace.

  The luncheon meeting ended as usual, with LBJ and Bus Wheeler huddled over maps and choosing bombing targets. Dean and I remained observers during this ritual. The moment the President left the room, I jumped from my chair and buttonholed Tom Johnson, who had taken notes. “What in hell is going on?” We stepped back from the table, as the others left the room.

  Tom looked a bit uneasy, but said, “This is absolutely Top Secret Code Word, and you’re not to say anything, or give a hint of knowing anything, but there’s to be a joint announcement with the Soviets tomorrow on Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).”

  This was not entirely news to me, but I nodded politely and asked if Tom had written my comment on the likely invasion of Czechoslovakia into the record. He had, and I went off to the Pentagon for a long meeting on the National Reconnaissance Office, an outfit then so secret that its name was only declassified twenty years later.

  That evening I was dining at Normandy Farms, on the outskirts of Washington, with Cynthia McKelvie, whom I hoped shortly to marry, when my call gadget went off. The Warsaw Pact forces and Soviet tanks had rolled across the Czech border. The Prague Spring was over. LBJ had summoned a meeting at the White House at 10 p.m. We finished dessert, and I dropped Cynthia at her apartment before arriving at the White House and making my way to the Cabinet Room.

  Clark Clifford, secretary of defense, greeted me with, “What did Dubcek do that caused the invasion?”

  “It wasn’t what he did, it was what he didn’t do,” I said. This was a rather glib response to the complicated political issues raised by the Prague Spring rebels who wanted to overturn communism and to whom Dubcek had offered some support rather than, as Moscow assumed, outright suppression.

  As soon as we assembled, LBJ briefed us on his earlier meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, and the Soviet explanation of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Dobrynin’s excuses got short shrift. We began immediately to discuss canceling the announcement on the strategic arms talks scheduled for the next morning, and to determine how the incident might be kept from leaking to the press. This effort was successful. LBJ persuaded the Soviets to keep the decision to postpone the scheduled talks to ourselves at least until a more fortuitous time to make the announcement.

  It was well past midnight before I began the drive back to Chevy Chase.

  *James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 684.

  *Honorable Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 245.

  *Ibid., p. 272.

  Chapter 33

  —

  OFF CAMPUS

  I‘ve never been particularly bothered by superstitions, but must admit that one of my darkest days as DCI came on February 13, 1967. With two Agency specialists, I had flown out to Las Vegas for a meeting with members of the Atomic Energy Commission and the opportunity to visit some of the atomic energy-related laboratories and plants. By the close of an exhausting day, we had moved along to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was at the door to my hotel room when I glimpsed an agitated young communications officer rushing along the hallway. There was only one heavily sealed message in his briefcase. It was from the White House, and eerily succinct: “Return to Washington immediately.”

  It took fifteen minutes to determine that no commercial flights were available, and an hour for one of the Agency local contractors to slip me onto the company’s private plane. The seemingly endless flight gave me ample opportunity to rack my memory for a trace of whatever pending crisis or flap might have prompted LBJ’s urgent demand. A security officer met me at the airport, but once back at my desk it was another few hours before the White House returned my telephone call. All LBJ wanted was to be sure that I would be in my chair when an article in what Time magazine called the “little known, left-leaning, monthly journal, Ramparts” hit the newsstands. The magazine’s full-page newspaper advertisements promised a candid exposé of CIA’s role in supporting the National Student Association (NSA)—“a case study in the corruption of youthly idealism” and alleged proof of how the Agency “infiltrated and subverted the world of American student leaders.”

  The pending exposé did not come as a total surprise. In early January the Agency had obtained copies of a “gray” letter, and attached documents circulated by a heretofore unknown organization allegedly based in Vienna. In Agency jargon, a “gray” KGB letter made little effort to cloak the fact that it had been sent by any source other than a transparently notional organization. In contrast, a “black” letter was usually printed on the forged or stolen letterhead paper of a government organ or a bona fide civilian organization which in most circumstances had no idea it was being used in a propaganda campaign. In the Vienna mailing, the covering letter editorialized on the alleged fact that a CIA agent was active in the offices of COSEC (the Coordinating Secretariat of the International Student Conference) headquarters in Brussels. Copies of memoranda allegedly taken from the COSEC offices appeared to document the presence of the CIA agent and charged him with directing the activity of the student movement.

&nb
sp; The use of forged or other documents in black and gray mailings was a familiar KGB technique. At the highest level, KGB operations of this nature were based on forged, highly classified documents allegedly written and circulated by senior White House, Department of State, Pentagon, or CIA officials. It was invariably possible to show errors in these otherwise carefully prepared forgeries, but as always the sensational charges lived longer than even the best proofs that the documents were false. The COSEC mailing alerted us to the presence of a Soviet sympathizer or, perhaps, agent within the secretariat, but did not attract any significant notice in the various newspapers to which it was addressed.

  It was on the heels of this mailing that we learned that one of the NSA officers knowing of our financial support had, in a complete lapse of judgment, casually informed Michael Wood, an unwitting NSA member, of the Agency’s funding arrangements. Subsequent efforts to contain the young man’s reaction to the dreadful fact that his government was providing financial assistance to youth and students intent on curbing Soviet influence in the democratic world were to no avail. Wood was determined to hand his story to Ramparts magazine.

  The stress of the war in Vietnam had already caused enough policy differences between the NSA leadership and the Agency for both sides to consider an amiable parting of the ways. There was no ill feeling on either side, and, given time, our parting would have been quiet and unremarked. But Wood’s decision was not to be swayed. It would have been difficult to imagine a more cockeyed and distorted picture of the Agency’s relationship with the NSA than that published by Ramparts.

  As the incident blazed, I was reminded of a quotation attributed to Lenin at the time the New Economic Program was getting under way. In response to a question of why the Soviet Union should be trading with the democracies, Lenin remarked, “Don’t worry, Comrade, when the time comes they’ll supply the rope we hang them with.”

  I assumed that President Johnson would summon a meeting to cope with the coming Ramparts publication and what promised to be an international fracas. But LBJ left me the responsibility of pulling the Agency’s scorched chestnuts away from the fire, and never expressed an opinion on how he might have preferred me to do it. I had no quarrel with his decision. It was an Agency problem from start to finish.

  A day after the New York Times reported on the Ramparts story, the newspaper quoted LBJ’s announcement that he had instructed CIA to cease all aid to youth and student groups, and that he had called for a review of all other Agency-funded anti-communist programs housed in nongovernment organizations. This prompted the Times reporter to speculate that CIA was also providing secret aid to “anti-Communist publications, radio and television stations and labor unions.” This alerted the media to the probability that other CIA secrets were still in the closet. The most important Agency covert action programs had been in existence for some two decades, and were to varying degrees known to many members of Congress and numerous State Department and Pentagon officials, as well as several editors and other high-ranking executives in the publishing world. None of these activities had previously suffered any significant Western media exposure. No matter—the hunt was well and truly on.

  Frank Wisner and I had several times discussed the necessity of phasing out CIA support to these projects in favor of replacing our secret underwriting with open funding from private organizations and perhaps some semi-official government sources. We both agreed, as Frank was fond of saying, “to find some words” which would convince the President that the time had passed when it was possible for the Agency to shield its relationship with these well-established organizations. Because other seemingly more urgent problems took precedence, we failed to follow through. So much for the adage against fixing things that aren’t yet “broke.”

  Before the public uproar abated, the three operations that represented the most long-lived successes of the Agency’s Cold War covert political action were at issue. Each of these operations had achieved goals that went well beyond the optimistic objectives that decorate many initial operational proposals. To differing degrees, each gained foreign policy objectives which at the time could not have been achieved if openly supported by the United States. The scope of these programs encompassed a wide—often left-of-center—spectrum of Western political opinion. The net effect showed dramatic evidence of the strength of democracy in contrast to the false face the USSR was presenting through its front organizations in the West.

  The most ambitious of these operations, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, established rallying points for non-communist left intellectuals, provided for political conferences and seminars, and established more than a score of publications, the most important of which was the influential monthly magazine Encounter. Two other operations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, beamed timely, unvarnished news and sophisticated political analysis, respectively, to Eastern Europe and the USSR, while offering useful employment for émigré and defector political figures and intellectuals. Covert support to the National Student Association enabled young American activists to counter Soviet domination of the worldwide youth and student political activity, and provided scholarships at U.S. universities for hundreds of Third World students. These activities ran effectively until the Ramparts disclosures rocked the Agency, Congress, and media.

  During the inception of these programs, I was fully occupied as the division chief responsible for operations in Central Europe. It was when I stepped up to be Frank Wisner’s chief of operations and deputy that I shared with him the supervision and daily control of these and other CA operations. My initial concern was to tighten the security practices protecting our support of these operations. This was a relatively simple matter in contrast to the considerable problem of covering the sources through which funds were being funneled into the organizations. In the earliest days, and in the rush to respond to the administration’s insistence that the Agency get quickly onto the field which the Soviets had dominated for years, mistakes were made.

  The most critical error was in inadvertently allowing a linkage in the sources of the funds that were provided to the various organizations the Agency was authorized to support. On examination, it was apparent that the compromise of one such channel would almost certainly contaminate another, and in sequence another, and another. But by the time I focused on this, there seemed more risk in attempting to dismantle the existing channels than in slowly phasing them out in favor of open funding from private organizations with some overt government support. I banned any expansion in the use of the existing funding mechanisms, but it was a mistake not to have insisted on the Agency beginning at once to make the necessary changes.

  Even now that the battle is over, the notion that supplying no-strings-attached funds that would allow American student volunteers to take on Cominform apparatchiks at the height of the Cold War does not meet a rational definition of corrupting or subverting anyone’s “youthly” idealism. At the time, the Ramparts exposé struck me, as it does today, as an irresponsible and self-serving bit of “gotcha” journalism. When the Agency initiated these programs, covert action was the only alternative to abandoning the fight against Soviet political subversion in Europe and throughout the Third World. By 1947, the USSR had achieved effective control of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and the Baltic states. In February 1948 a political coup replaced the Czechoslovak democratic government with a Communist dictatorship. In Italy, the Communist Party and the associated leftist elements appeared strong enough to vote themselves into power in the national elections scheduled for April 1948. The French Communist Party was expected to exceed the 28 percent of the vote it had mustered in the 1949 elections. By 1950 the USSR had also established and was secretly supporting a panoply of well-conceived international front organs.

  This dismal political picture was further darkened by the success the Soviet Union was achieving in penetrating, influencing, and, in some cases, controlling foreign institutions ranging from organized labor to univers
ity students, and even to a semblance of Boy Scouts. Beyond this, almost any Western political or social cluster with a grievance, a “peace” banner, or merely an empty purse could hope to partake of the Kremlin’s funding in return for accepting the political direction provided by the Cominform and KGB.

  In the USSR and Eastern Europe, where membership was less than optional, the well-funded youth and student organizations were directed by overage leaders striving to make a place for themselves in the Communist hierarchy. (Before he was named KGB chief, Aleksandr Shelepin served as Komsomol chairman—in effect, the Soviet youth leader.) The French and Italian youth movements were thoroughly penetrated and subjected to the direction provided by party members. In the Third World, many student organizations were loudly pro-Soviet. Funds were readily available for travel, and handpicked, well-coached delegates were positioned to help dominate international conferences and rallies.

  The National Student Association was founded in 1947 by a group of American students who had been shouted down by communist activists running the 1946 World Student Congress in Prague. The NSA remained loosely associated with the communist-dominated International Union of Students until the communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the brutal squelching of student protest caused a complete rupture. NSA was represented on some three hundred college campuses, and squeaked along on dues payments and minimal contributions from private foundations—the climate for tax-deductible contributions to any possibly left-of-center youth organization having been poisoned by the rant of extreme right-wingers.

  After his graduation in 1949, one of the NSA activists joined the Agency. Before he had finished training, he approached the covert action staff and underlined the scope and effectiveness of the Soviet youth and student activity. A project was prepared, White House approval was granted, and the appropriate senators were briefed on our plan to underwrite—in large part—specific NSA expenses with Agency funds funneled through private foundations. The NSA blossomed.