A few days after the Yom Kippur War broke out in October 1973, six Gulf states raised the price of oil some 70 percent. Soon afterwards, Saudi Arabia declared an embargo on oil sales to the United States. The reaction in Washington was prompt and vociferous. Those of us as far away as Tehran were hard pressed to make diplomatic ends meet. As ambassador I was asked to have Iranian oil provided to the U.S. naval force in the vicinity of Bandar Abbas and permission for Navy aircraft to use a nearby air base for its P-2 aircraft. It took some doing but the Shah came through. He also sent his energy minister to Saudi Arabia to ask the Saudis to call off the embargo, to no avail.
In the mid-seventies the Shah funded a deluge of orders for billions of dollars worth of high-performance U.S. aircraft. Both State and the Department of Defense were concerned about the impact this would have on relations throughout the area. The more informed Iranians and even the clergy were outspoken in protesting the Shah’s insistence on pushing through what seemed to be a senseless expenditure. But in 1980, when Saddam Hussein’s army finally did march into Iran, it was this expensive equipment that kept Iran and the mullahs from losing that long, bitter war.
In spring 1976, Cynthia and I decided it was time to begin to think about leaving Iran and government service. It would be a wrench leaving many friends and a fascinating country, but we had had enough of diplomatic life. Also, I wanted to leave before the November election to be sure that my departure would not be taken as refusal to serve under the next president, whoever he might be. Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, had scheduled a visit to Iran, and I thought that might be the time to inform him of my plans.
“Strenuous for everyone but Henry,” is the only way to describe an official visit by Secretary of State Kissinger. His energy was inexhaustible. At 11 p.m., after a day of end-to-end meetings with foreign statesmen, local dignitaries, American ambassadors summoned from their nearby posts, and a diplomatic dinner party, Henry would summon a secretary or two, and begin to dictate a blizzard of official communications. By breakfast, he would again be up and at it. Only Henry’s relentless humor and good nature forestalled a complete collapse of the embassy staff, the upper brackets of Tehran’s officialdom, and the diplomatic corps. In the hectic hubbub of events, Henry agreed to my plan to resign in the fall, although the actual announcement was to be made only on the eve of the presidential election.
In the time since I left Iran, I’ve often reflected on how so many things went wrong in the later years of the Shah’s rule. However important a figure he was in the Middle East, the Shah was burdened with one considerable drawback. Iran is predominantly a Shiite entity in an Arab world dominated by Sunnis. This had the effect of isolating Iran and the Shah from the rest of the contemporary Moslem world. The Shah was determined to modernize Iran. In doing so, he neglected to develop a political system that would accommodate the changes and development while also providing for the improved well-being of the largely illiterate and impoverished general population.
The gap between the educated, wealthy minority and the other thirty million Iranians widened. There was no structure between the upper brackets of the Iranian government, business, and social worlds. Students returning from a university education abroad could not find work. Corruption was rife, foreign businesses flourished, and entrepreneurs fattened on profits which never trickled down to the working class. In suppressing dissidence and active resistance to the Shah’s rule, Savak, the Iranian security and intelligence service, inflicted its power ruthlessly. I was never sure whether the Shah knew the extent of Savak’s brutality. In time, it was obvious that the Shah was becoming increasingly autocratic and isolated from the population.
Foreign businessmen flooded Tehran. Few had any knowledge of the country; fewer could speak a word of Persian. James Bill, then a professor of Iranian history at the University of Texas, pointed out to Cynthia that the New York Times index from 1965 to 1975 contained 195 references to Iran—that is, 32 fewer than to Ethiopia, a country of significantly less world importance. By the time I left Tehran it was becoming clear that Iran was headed for serious trouble. It began with widespread demonstrations and rioting in 1978 and exploded in January 1979 when thousands gathered in Tehran to denounce the Shah and to force him into exile. The man who had effected such major changes in his thirty-seven-year rule found himself without a constituency.
Cynthia and I left Tehran in December 1976. Ironically, the only time we got to ride in the ambassador’s traditional big black Cadillac, with the flag flying from the front fender, was on the way to the airport at the end of my tour in Iran.
In November 1979 the U.S. embassy in Tehran was attacked and occupied by revolutionary groups. The negotiations for the release of our embassy personnel failed, and President Jimmy Carter launched what seemed to me a desperate scheme for a military team to break into the embassy compound, free the prisoners, and fly them all to safety. When I was first in Tehran as ambassador, I had reviewed and, to various degrees, changed the security of our buildings there. In the ensuing three years, I became familiar with every aspect of the physical security of the embassy compound—from the locks on doors, to the vaulted areas, to the exits, emergency and otherwise. In the planning for the desperate (in my opinion, impossible) operation, which with a sad loss of life foundered in the desert without reaching Tehran, none of the White House tacticians thought to ask me a single question.
In 1979, Cynthia and I went openly but discreetly to visit the Shah late in his confinement at a New York hospital. He was already ill with cancer and had been allowed entrance into the United States only after considerable ugly negotiation. His bitterness was apparent. He could not understand why the United States had abandoned him, and had permitted everything that he had done to be undone by the mullahs. I could find no easy response when, propped up in bed, the ashen Shah asked, “Why did you do this to us?”
As we continued to talk, Cynthia asked, “But why did you leave Iran?” Without hesitation, the Shah said, “To avoid bloodshed—that is the difference between a king and a dictator.”
The Shah died in July 1980 in Egypt, where he had kindly and courageously been granted political asylum by President Anwar Sadat.
*Thalweg is the diplomatic term for the world’s maritime borders.
Chapter 42
—
UNZIPPING THE AGENCY
It appeared to me that James Schlesinger, my successor as DCI, came to office with firm instructions from Nixon: Jim was to shake up the Agency, trim it down, and rid it of what Nixon perceived to be the existing regime of anti-Nixon Georgetown dilettantes and free-range liberals. Aside from presumably making CIA a more effective service, this was also to make the Agency a more responsive element of the Nixon administration. Nixon appeared to be convinced that the Agency had shaped itself into a gentlemen’s club dominated by the senior members of the plans directorate—in effect, as one writer reported it, my “Praetorian Guard.” More recently, in browsing through some of the post-Nixon memoirs and the White House tapes, I found reason to believe that in his more eccentric moments, Nixon also imagined using the Agency for domestic covert action operations.
The number of senior CIA staff whom Nixon might have classified as upper-bracket society gentry was no greater than any other element of the foreign policy establishment in the United States. A few of our ancestors may have waded ashore in the seventeenth century—someone should have reminded Nixon that dukes and their duchesses rarely emigrate—but most of us were the offspring of the immigrants who disembarked in the centuries that followed. Others were born abroad. Nixon’s suspicions notwithstanding, Ivy Leaguers did not dominate the Agency establishment; there was a proportionate number of state university, private, and community college graduates.
There is no doubt that some of the Agency personnel were at the least reserved about Nixon and his administration. The Agency was not, however, universally “anti-Nixon,” and the average was probably not much different from that of any
other segment of the Washington foreign policy establishment. More to the point, and personal domestic political preferences notwithstanding, there is only one president at a time, and we all had worked for each in turn—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Despite President Nixon’s suspicions, until the Watergate break-in and the failed cover-up, neither Nixon nor his associates were treated any differently from their predecessors.
As the debris from the Watergate cover-up continued to fell his appointees, Nixon was forced to shuffle and restaff his administration. Among the changes mandated by the various resignations and firings, Nixon named James Schlesinger to replace Elliot Richardson as secretary of defense on May 17, 1973, and on the same day turned CIA over to the deputy director, William Colby. For the record, James Schlesinger served as DCI for four months—from February 2 to June 2, 1973.
Colby’s promotion to DCI was announced at the time of Schlesinger’s transfer to the Defense Department, but he was not sworn in until early September. This meant that General Vernon Walters, the deputy director, was acting DCI from May until Colby’s formal swearing-in sixteen weeks later. Legal niceties notwithstanding, Dick Walters eased himself to one side, and Colby functioned as DCI from the time his appointment was announced. In the twilight of the Nixon era, Colby’s swearing-in was simply forgotten until on a visit to California, Dick Walters reminded the President of the oversight.
Jim Schlesinger, a tough and aggressive executive, was not a stranger to intelligence organizations in Washington. In 1971, when Schlesinger was still serving as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Nixon had ordered him to make an extensive examination of the national intelligence community. Schlesinger also worked at the Rand Corporation as director of strategic studies, and had been chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission for the three years before he joined CIA. During his brief tenure as DCI, Schlesinger moved to make changes in the organization and operations of the Agency. It was in this period that some one thousand employees, a significant number of them from the operations element—now called the Directorate for Operations (DO)—were fired, retired, or caused to resign. The abrupt and unnecessarily callous dismissal of so many of the staff had the obvious effect on the spirit of all concerned. The bond between the CIA management and personnel—an essential element in the security of any intelligence agency—was seriously damaged.
Some of the discharged employees were eligible for retirement and pension. Others were not. Some of those who left took with them a store of language, operational skills, and area knowledge which, even with their possibly diminished energy, might usefully have been retained—if necessary by some contrived “on the shelf” arrangement. Intensive foreign language study has always been neglected in the United States. The situation has improved, but even today, when Spanish is heard in many areas of this country, fluent Spanish-speaking college graduates are in short supply. In operations, intelligence production, research, and estimates activity, prospective recruits with a command of the languages spoken throughout Eastern Europe, Asia, the Arab world, the Far East, and the sub-Saharan Africa areas are much more difficult to find.
Schlesinger’s seventeen weeks as DCI coincided with a series of embarrassing public disclosures ranging from the negligible charge of training Tibetan guerrillas in Colorado in an alleged violation of the CIA charter forbidding operations within the United States,* to having supplied operational equipment that was used by White House operatives Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI employee, to burglarize the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Ellsberg was the Department of Defense official who leaked the highly classified Pentagon Papers to the press. My deputy, Marine Corps General Robert Cushman, who authorized handing over the equipment, had failed to ask what use the Nixon operatives planned to make of it. (He also neglected to inform me.) When Judge Matthew Byrne, conducting Ellsberg’s trial, was informed that the defendant’s phone had been tapped and his psychiatrist’s offices burglarized, he declared a mistrial. Ellsberg walked free.
Under intense presidential pressure, the Agency had also overstepped its charter in preparing psychological/medical profiles of Ellsberg. These at-a-distance studies of various foreign, political, and intelligence figures had proved a useful extension of the routine diplomatic and military reporting. Although I think the Agency was the only element of the government to have developed this particular technique, and despite the fact that Ellsberg had disclosed a mass of Top Secret material, some of it touching on CIA, I should have insisted that the White House find someone in the medical or academic community who might have attempted such an assessment.
Neither Schlesinger nor Colby had any knowledge of Ehrlichman’s demand that the operations support material be provided to Howard Hunt. (It was only when Hunt’s demands for exotic operational devices escalated that General Cushman informed me, and further cooperation was refused.) Colby’s previous assignments would not have given him access to anything as remote from his previous responsibilities as knowledge of the Ehrlichman-Hunt problem, nor the White House demand for the Ellsberg profile. Had Jim Schlesinger asked during either of our two thirty-minute meetings, I would gladly have disclosed this and any other aspect of CIA-White House relations of interest to him. (It is now my understanding that Jim had asked the White House to respect the originally scheduled date for my retirement—my sixtieth birthday, March 30. Had this been done, Schlesinger and I would have had ample time for whatever discussions he might have wanted.)
As it was, Schlesinger and Colby were blindsided, and Jim reacted vigorously to the newsbreak which came two days before his appointment as secretary of defense. As DCI, he issued an order, recommended and written by Colby, for all senior Agency officers immediately to report any current or past activity that “might be construed to be outside the legislative charter” of the Agency. In addition to the senior officers, the DCI’s order directed “every person presently employed by the CIA” to report on any such activity as might be known. Former employees were also solicited to report their recollection of any such past activity.
The making-a-clean-breast intent of this directive, surely the first in intelligence history, is abundantly clear: to make certain that nothing like it ever happens again. Less clear was the standard to be used in judging the activities which might fall legally beyond the Agency’s legislative charter. The National Security Act of 1947 was deliberately cast in terms vague enough not to offend the elements of Congress and the public who might be shocked at the thought of the United States admitting that it was arming itself with a national intelligence service. Colby’s directive left it to CIA employees, present and past, to decide which activity might conceivably be illegal, unjustified, improper, or perhaps distasteful. It is difficult to believe that the members of any of the world’s foreign intelligence services might be able to decide precisely the activity that fell legally within their national charter—even if such a charter might exist.
The directive was so broadly phrased that it risked inciting disgruntled employees, as well as those who might have grudges to settle, to step forward. As Cord Meyer expresses it, “Very few human institutions in this world, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Boy Scouts, could survive in good working order” after suffering such an instruction.*
The result was a 693-page collection of allegations by employees from entry-level clerks to the most senior staff officers over a period of twenty-five years. Someone dubbed the resulting documents the “Family Jewels.” The term was a corruption of OSS usage. While in Switzerland during World War II, Allen Dulles kept the data on his most sensitive sources and German contacts in a book-size looseleaf binder. The only member of the station who had access to it was Allen’s personal secretary. Senior officers were briefed that in any emergency, the notebook was to be the first document destroyed. The individuals cited in the book were known within the station as the “Crown Jewels,” and the notebook was referred to as the “Family Jewels.” Allen’s rage,
had he been alive to learn that the term had been turned upside down by one of his successors, might well have blown the roof off the Agency’s new building.
Colby did not inform President Nixon or, later, President Ford of this explosive collection. This neglect is in sharp contrast to his briefing of the Senate and House committees on the data a year before the document first leaked.
Another astonishing fact is that in the sour atmosphere prevailing in post-Nixon Washington, it took fifteen months—and a headline article in the December 22, 1974, New York Times—for this bundle to explode. Within five weeks, three separate federal government investigative groups were established. First off the mark was a bipartisan commission formed by President Gerald Ford on January 4, 1975. The group was chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported by seven distinguished private citizens, including Ronald Reagan, John T. Connor, C. Douglas Dillon, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO, and Erwin Griswold, former dean of Harvard Law School.
This blue-ribbon group was “to determine whether the CIA has exceeded its statutory authority … [and] determine whether existing safeguards are adequate to preclude Agency activities that might go beyond its authority and to make appropriate recommendations.” President Ford notes in his memoirs that he also wanted to avoid “unnecessary disclosures [that] could cripple the agency’s effectiveness, lower its morale and make foreign governments extremely wary about sharing vital information with us.”* This perceptive and well-stated objective failed largely through DCI Colby’s single-handed thrusting of highly sensitive, classified data upon the Rockefeller Commission and subsequent congressional investigating committees.
A Look Over My Shoulder Page 51