“You know, Dick,” he said, “for some time now, there’s been something I’ve wanted to say.” Dulles reached for a match to relight his pipe; I wondered how many hundred—perhaps a thousand—times I had watched him lend emphasis to a conversational point by using his pipe as an actor might to ensure he had focused the audience’s attention.
“Before it’s too late,” he said, “I want you to know that I think my not giving you the DDP job was my greatest mistake.”
It was the last chance we had to speak. No matter how succinct the message, I was deeply touched.
Dulles died in January 1969.
*Facing Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 106.
†America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1988).
Chapter 36
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PRESIDENT NIXON
Four days after his election, Richard Nixon proposed a meeting with President Johnson to sound out any pressing problems and to give some of Nixon’s staff a notion of how things were arranged within the White House. It was mid-afternoon when Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, General Earle “Bus” Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I gathered in the Cabinet Room to wait for LBJ and the President-elect.
Dean Rusk took charge. “Mr. Nixon is coming by himself—no aides. We’d best deploy ourselves so that he doesn’t find himself alone on one side of the table.” With this, he signaled Bus and me to sit on either side of the chair which he reserved for Nixon. I took the seat on Nixon’s left. LBJ and the President-elect arrived promptly.
Dean opened the meeting by asking, rather boldly I thought, if the President-elect had yet chosen a secretary of state. Nixon shook his head. “No, but I’m obviously thinking about it,” he replied. “I can assure you that there’s no lack of aspirants. It may also interest you all to know that even Scotty Reston is among them.” At the time, James Reston, chief of the New York Times Washington Bureau, was one of the best-known newsmen and political pundits in the country. The notion that he had signaled interest in being secretary of state seemed completely out of character. Whatever Nixon’s purpose in dropping this bit of information, the result was five sets of simultaneously raised eyebrows and a moment of surprised silence. Dean brought us back to reality by opening a discussion of problem number one, Vietnam. Nothing surprising was raised and the meeting was soon adjourned.
As I was gathering my papers, LBJ stuck his head back into the room and said, “Wait here, I want to talk to you.” I sat down, opened my briefcase, and tried to concentrate on some of the documents. No use, my attention was elsewhere. I had logged my share of time in Washington, had known President Kennedy, and had spent a great many hours face-to-face and on the telephone with President Johnson. Despite this experience, I have never shaken what I suppose may be an adolescent feeling of awe in the presence of a president. My reaction is compounded of respect and admiration: respect for a man who for at least four years, twenty-four hours a day, bears such responsibility; and admiration for the political skill that won him the office and must shape so many daily decisions. In history, no more than a handful of men have had a fraction of such power. For me, sitting for thirty minutes alone in the Cabinet Room, waiting to be called into the Oval Office, was not conducive to concentrating on a sheaf of papers, Top Secret or otherwise.
My reverie was broken when an aide beckoned from the secretary’s office which connects the Cabinet Room to the Oval Office. LBJ was standing. “Sorry to keep you waiting but I wanted you to know that Nixon has for the second time asked me about you. I told him, ‘Helms was a merit appointment, I’ve no idea how he voted in any election and I have never asked what his political views are. He’s always been correct with me and has done a good job as director. I commend him to you.’ ” LBJ walked to his desk before saying, “That’s it, Dick.” As I thanked him, LBJ picked up the telephone and eased himself into the handsome leather chair. I slipped out the side door to the Oval Office, again wondering how many hours a day LBJ spent on the telephone.
Four days later, I was summoned to a meeting with Nixon. Unlike the previous three transition teams that had taken offices in Washington, the Nixon group had chosen quarters on the thirty-ninth floor of the Hotel Pierre in New York City. This was inconvenient for the rest of us, but from the President-elect’s point of view, it was presumably far enough away from LBJ’s staff to avoid any unsupervised fraternization. To make sure that Nixon and his staff were kept completely in the daily intelligence loop, R. Jack Smith, the DDI (deputy director for intelligence), was to remain temporarily in New York. He would handle the daily briefings and assume responsibility for the highly classified documents involved.
H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, was surprised when Jack told him that security regulations required the Top Secret data to be kept in a vaulted area under twenty-four-hour guard. Haldeman, whose manners were as bush as his brush haircut, directed Jack to an unfinished room in the cellar of the nearby American Bible Society building. An Agency security team did the necessary refitting.
I arrived at the Pierre on schedule, and in a few minutes a Secret Service man ushered me into the suite Nixon was using as his office. He greeted me with a smile and handshake, and introduced me to John Mitchell, who was standing nearby. We sat down, Nixon and Mitchell side by side, across a coffee table from me. After a passing reference to the White House meeting, Nixon said he had heard well of my performance as DCI and that he wanted me to stay on. He added that he would also ask J. Edgar Hoover to remain and commented that the previous administrations’ practice of keeping these two appointments out of the political arena was sound. I remarked that I thoroughly agreed with that policy.
Nixon then asked me to keep silent until the official announcement was made. Mitchell, who was already flagged as the likely attorney general, remained silent throughout our brief meeting. We shook hands all around and I departed, using a freight elevator to avoid the photographers and reporters staked out in the hotel lobby. Our meeting was on November 14. It was not until December 18 that the announcement was made.
I was pleased to be reappointed, but it did little to shake my longstanding impression of Nixon’s antipathy to the Agency. Within a few days, another straw in the wind drifted across my desk. In the course of a phone call, Jack Smith told me that Nixon did not appear to be reading the President’s Daily Brief—the single most important daily intelligence publication. Worse, if he were reading it, he apparently didn’t like it.
In Washington, the weeks following the election of a new president and the appointment of his cabinet and other advisors can best be described as “fraught,” particularly in the minds of those who overnight might find themselves out of a job. My dictionary offers various definitions of “fraught” ranging from the archaic “freighted with or loaded” to the more pertinent “bearing promise or menace.” In respect to the incoming Nixon administration, the Washington atmosphere seemed more fraught than usual.
I had first met Nixon, then Vice President, in November 1956 at the time of the Hungarian revolution. Allen Dulles and I briefed him before he left Washington for Vienna. Nixon was preparing to represent President Eisenhower at a meeting concerning aid for the Hungarian refugees then flooding into Austria. Our second meeting came when as Presidentelect, Nixon visited Washington to meet President Johnson. In the course of one of their sessions, LBJ summoned me and said, “I want you to be sure that Mr. Nixon gets all of the intelligence you are giving me, starting right now.”
One of the first adjustments the Agency makes at the advent of a new administration is the shaping of a daily Top Secret intelligence summary to the specific needs and wishes of the incoming president. President Truman had initiated what he called his daily newspaper—a summary of the most important cable and dispatch traffic and intelligence reporting of the preceding twenty-four hours. This Top Secret document was also circulated throughout the government to
the high-ranking officials involved in foreign and defense policy. In various formats, with but slight substantive changes, this document continued through the Eisenhower administration.
By the time President Kennedy settled in, he realized that the White House was so burdened with information from State, the Pentagon, and the Agency that there was a risk that some vital intelligence might never reach the top of the appropriate in-tray. JFK asked for a single, concise summary of the most important “all source” reports from the intelligence community. The result was a daily document that included summaries of all the most highly classified and sensitive intelligence of the preceding twenty-four hours.
At the time, the highest security classification was known as Top Secret/Code Word. In practice, the slug—as we called it—“Top Secret/Code Word” was followed by a noun, so scrupulously chosen that even the most intuitive intruder could not associate a glimpse of the code word with the subject matter it protected. In my day there were a dozen or more of these tightly compartmented classifications of information. Aside from the President and a few others—usually the secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor—no other government official was automatically cleared for “all source” reports. The lesser recipients of specific code word data had to have a clearly established “need to know” the substance of the compartmented report. Compartmentation, as we called it, is one of the most effective means of protecting sensitive data. Even today, I hesitate to pick a typical code word to illustrate the system. As surely as Heaven gave us little green apples, it would be my luck to pick a five-letter noun that is in current use.
At the outset, the JFK briefing was known as the “President’s Intelligence Check List,” otherwise, PICL—pronounced “Pickle” by those involved in preparing the document. In time this evolved into the “President’s Daily Brief,” otherwise the “PDB.” As I recall it, President Eisenhower had wanted his daily summary at reveille. JFK liked to read the Pickle on arrival at his desk. President Johnson wanted the PDB in late afternoon and often read it in bed. Neither Jack Smith nor I was ever sure how often Nixon even glanced at his PDB.
The Top Secret/Code Word daily briefings that JFK shared with the secretaries of state and defense were hand-carried to each recipient by a Directorate for Intelligence officer who was prepared to answer any questions the reader might have. With the exception of the President, the officer courier was required to wait—slow or preoccupied readers notwithstanding—until the recipient had read the document before carrying it back to the Agency vault. Clumsy indeed, but efficiency and security are absolutely incompatible concepts.
One Sunday morning, the precious few recipients of the PDB were startled when the New York Times Magazine section featured a photograph of LBJ, propped up in bed, reading the PDB with the Top Secret/Code Word slugs plainly to be seen. Presumably to the dismay of the New York Times’s KGB readership, the Agency security office managed to change all the Top Secret/Code Word slugs by Sunday lunchtime.
When in 1965 I stepped up to be deputy director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Raborn, who was not familiar with any of the Agency personnel, left the choice for my replacement as deputy director for plans to me. I was in no rush to fill the job, and wanted to be sure that the new DDP could function on his own while I was concentrating on the elements of the Agency that were relatively new to me. In time the choice narrowed to Thomas Karamessines, who was my deputy as DDP, and Desmond FitzGerald, then a division chief. Within the plans directorate there were so many differences between the score or so of most senior offices that an outsider might well wonder whatever activity brought such an odd bunch together. That said, there was no difference more vast than that separating Tom Karamessines and Des FitzGerald.
Des was gifted in every sense of the word. He was very bright and operationally aggressive—not to say dashing. Hail Citizen Nixon: Des was also a full-fashioned charter member of the East Coast establishment. There were times when I was convinced that Des was on first-name terms with everyone ever mentioned in both the Social Register and Who’s Who. He was also an exception to the OSS legacy of officers, most of whom, because of their World War II experience, might be described as “Eurocentric.” Des’s military and early Agency experience was in Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. His most recent command responsibility was in Latin America with an emphasis on Cuba, the area of keen interest to the Kennedy administration. This put Des in contact with his friend President Kennedy.
Thomas H. Karamessines, or Tom K, as he was universally known within the Agency, was cut from different cloth.* Tom was born on Staten Island, the son of Greek immigrants. He worked his way through Columbia University and Columbia Law School in the days before the war when tuition fees were hard to come by. In 1941 he signed on as a deputy assistant attorney under Thomas E. Dewey, who was then heading what was known as a “racket busting” office in New York City. One of Tom’s fellow lawyers was William Rogers, later secretary of state.
When Tom enlisted as a private soldier in 1942, his background and fluent Greek brought him to OSS. He was assigned to counterespionage in X-2 and commissioned. He remained in the military as a major on assignment to SSU until CIA was formed. Tom was short, not quite stocky, had jet black hair, and was rarely seen without his pipe. Soft-spoken, unobtrusive, and extremely perceptive, he was an excellent judge of people and had a keen operational sense. We worked closely together, and he had my confidence.
At the time, my guess was that the corridor gossips were betting on Tom as my choice to be deputy director for plans. It was perhaps typical of Des and Tom that while Tom never raised the possibility of promotion with me, Des came into my office to make a straight-from-the-shoulder bid for the job. This notwithstanding, Des was my choice, and Tom remained in place as deputy to the DDP.
I could not suppress the memory of my reaction when I was Frank Wisner’s deputy and Allen Dulles chose Dick Bissell rather than me as Frank’s replacement. It was typical of Tom K that he never gave the slightest indication of his disappointment.
Des FitzGerald had scarcely served a year as DDP when in July 1967 he collapsed on a tennis court. His sudden death, quite possibly hastened by his strenuous wartime service in the Pacific, was a severe loss.
The shock that followed was still being felt when I appointed Tom K to replace Des.
It was not until late January 1969 that Tom Karamessines, Cord Meyer, then Tom’s deputy, and I were called to the White House for our first formal briefing of President Nixon. We met in the Cabinet Room. Henry Kissinger, fully established as national security advisor, sat at Nixon’s side. I had first met Henry when he came to Washington to study an aspect of the Berlin problem. We were not together long enough to become acquainted, but Henry came across as the thoughtful, well-informed Harvard professor that he was. We did not meet again until Nixon appointed him national security advisor. It occurred to me then that Nelson Rockefeller might have suggested the appointment to Nixon.
We gave the President an overview of our most productive operations, and closed with a discussion of the more risky activity. In passing, I noted that the most important operations are not necessarily the most chancy. Nixon appeared affable, and was quick to ask pertinent questions. As we gathered our papers and were making our way from the office, the President—in what I later realized was a rare jovial moment—called out, “But don’t get caught!”
The full irony of that advice came home to us some thirty months later when a band of President Nixon’s private operatives were themselves caught in the Watergate premises of the Democratic National Committee.
My first substantive meeting with Henry as national security advisor came on the heels of the session with the President. Henry spoke first, advising me of Nixon’s edict that effective immediately all intelligence briefings, oral and otherwise, were to come through Kissinger. All intelligence reports? I asked. Yes. National Intelligence Estimates? Henry nodded, and went on to explain that Nixon also w
anted me to leave the National Security Council meetings immediately after my weekly intelligence roundup. I was not to be present during the policy discussions that followed.
By the time Nixon stepped into the White House, I thought I had more fully fathomed the reasons for his negative attitude toward the Agency. Nixon was, and remained, convinced that an element in his losing his first presidential election was the data he thought Allen Dulles slipped to Senator Kennedy alleging that there was a sizeable gap between the U.S. and USSR missile capability. The allegation was false, but Nixon was not to be dissuaded. A more rational reason for some of Nixon’s antipathy was his negative reaction to Allen Dulles’s enthusiasm for advocating policy positions in meetings with President Eisenhower and his staff. This is one opinion that Nixon and I shared: the DCI must refrain from taking sides in policy debates. CIA’s most important responsibility is to present the President with the best possible data on which decisions can be made. The unvarnished intelligence and the National Estimates of its importance must be presented accurately, no matter whether the material supports the incumbent administration’s policy or not.
Another aspect of Nixon’s attitude appears to have come from deep within his personality. He seemed to dislike and distrust persons who he suspected might not put personal loyalty to him above all other responsibilities. This obsession sometimes seemed combined with deep suspicion of people Nixon thought might consider themselves his social superior. Nixon never appeared to have shaken his early impression that the Agency was exclusively staffed by uppity Ivy Leaguers, most of whom lived in Georgetown and spent every evening gossiping about him at cocktail parties. The explanations for these attitudes, which in some cases seemed to blind his judgment, is best left to board-certified medical specialists.
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 46