Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  Angleton’s paranoiac mind-set cast a pall on efforts to use information from defectors. At the same time, he created suspicions about anyone who had anything to do with Soviets, damaging the CIA’s efforts to recruit agents. Angleton refused to believe that there was a split between the Chinese Communists and the Soviets even after soldiers from both sides had killed each other. He insisted on believing Anatoliy M. Golytsin, a KGB officer who defected in 1961, when all the evidence showed that Golytsin tailored his stories to suit Angleton’s preconceptions.

  Angleton was convinced that debriefing defectors would somehow contaminate the CIA by revealing the agency’s secrets. In fact, the questions asked of defectors are what anyone would expect to be asked, based on the defector’s status and access. They give away no secrets at all. The fact that the CIA asks a defector if there are any moles in the agency, for example, does not necessarily mean the CIA has a clue that one actually exists.*

  According to Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior, Angleton sat on tips about major spies in foreign countries because they came from an FBI source code-named NICK NACK rather than from his favorite defector, Golytsin. NICK NACK was an officer with the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, who had temporarily been posted to New York and other locations in the early 1960s and again in the early 1970s.

  When Angleton’s successors uncovered the files years later, NICK NACK’s tips led to the arrests of former Swiss air defense chief Jean-Louis Jeanmaire in 1976, and in 1978 of members of a spy ring in France led by Serge Fabiew. Because the FBI immediately passed some of NICK NACK’s information directly to the British, his leads had already led to the conviction of Frank Bossard, a former British Royal Air Force officer working as an engineer in guided-missile research in the Air Ministry of the War Department.47

  If any other CIA officer or FBI agent had suppressed such information, he would almost certainly have been fired and would probably have faced a criminal investigation as well.

  Beyond his ineptitude, Angleton presided over some of the worst abuses later exposed by the Church Committee, including the CIA’s programs for opening mail between the U.S. and Soviet-bloc countries and for compiling files on dissident Americans. Besides exceeding the CIA’s charter, neither of these programs ever developed any information of any value: no Soviet spies were ever uncovered as a result. Nor did the CIA find any foreign involvement in the antiwar movement during the 1960s. Much of what Angleton did was not only a waste of time, it was foolish. For example, after Ramparts exposed in 1967 that the CIA was funding the National Student Association, Angleton prepared lengthy analyses of the themes in Ramparts articles.

  In an attachment to a memo he sent to the FBI, Angleton wrote that the magazine had hardened “from a New Left organ to an outlet for standard Soviet propaganda.” He based this on the percentage of times certain themes appeared in the magazine’s articles—how many times they said the United States was “sick,” for example; how many times they said the present U.S. government was fascistic; how many times the magazine said the Catholic Church was reactionary and hierarchical; and how many times the publication said the FBI and CIA were “evil.”48

  The fact is, for all the harm Angleton did by closing off potential sources of information, ignoring tips, abusing the rights of Americans, and unfairly accusing CIA employees of consorting with the enemy, Angleton never did catch a spy. During Angleton’s tenure, Karl Koecher, a Czech intelligence service officer, became a CIA employee and was given sensitive translating tasks. It was Koecher who compromised Aleksandr D. Ogorodnik, a high-ranking Soviet diplomat then working for the CIA. Yet Angleton never had a clue about this major spy case within his own agency.

  The author interviewed Angleton in April 1987, a month before he died, and brought up the subject of Koecher. All along, there really had been a mole in the CIA, one who had been hired a year before Angleton was forced to retire and who had later done great damage to the agency. While totally lucid, Angleton showed no interest in the case. For Angleton, it seemed, it had all been a game: Koecher was not the mole he was seeking. Since he was not his mole, Koecher was of little interest to him.49

  Before the Church Committee hearings, the CIA underwent little outside scrutiny and could easily lose sight of its mission. Operations took on a life of their own, and art was pursued for art’s sake. Angleton was a prime example of that danger—an amateur who was allowed by a string of CIA directors to wreak havoc within the agency. In contrast, the FBI is held accountable by the courts when it develops an espionage case against a suspect. That means it must deal in the real world of evidence and facts, and the goal is always clear—to put spies in jail. Before a case ever gets to court, it is reviewed by the Justice Department. In the face of outside scrutiny, an amateur is quickly detected.

  When he became CIA director, William Colby realized Angleton was doing far more harm than good.

  “You will now leave, period,” Colby told Angleton in December 1974.50 Angleton died on May 11, 1987.

  For all his faults, Angleton was a brilliant, gracious man, a poet and a grower of orchids, who still has a following among some retired CIA officers of his era. His greatest contribution was obtaining through Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 denouncing Joseph Stalin for his criminal cruelty and misgovernment.51 But within the modern CIA, Angleton has virtually no defenders.

  “I think there were a number of things done under Angleton that should not have been done,” a recently retired operations officer said. “Watching students, keeping lists of names, opening mail. He ran his own little world and got away with it somehow.”

  Counterintelligence under Angleton was “more of a suspicion-building program rather than a shield, which it should be and which it certainly is today,” William Webster said at a final breakfast meeting with reporters who cover intelligence, just after he announced his retirement from the CIA in 1991.52

  But it would be unfair to single out Angleton for blame. Most of the abuses he engaged in had been approved by CIA directors at the time and even attorneys general of the U.S. Nor was counterintelligence the only area where those abuses occurred.

  8

  The Rogue Elephant

  ON JUNE 17, 1972, BURGLARS BROKE INTO DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington. A security guard called the District police, who promptly arrested the burglars. As their story unraveled, it turned out most of the participants in the break-in had some sort of CIA connection. James McCord had retired from the CIA’s Office of Security in 1970. E. Howard Hunt had retired the same year from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Bernard Barker had been recruited by the CIA when he was in the Cuban police, and he later worked for Hunt when Hunt was in the CIA. He stopped working for the agency in 1966. Eugenio R. Martinez had been a CIA contract employee and was still on the CIA’s payroll when the break-in occurred.53

  As it turned out, the CIA knew nothing about the breakin. But the connections to the agency fueled suspicions that the agency was out of control. Because of the growing mistrust of the government because of its handling of the Vietnam War, these suspicions received more credence than they might otherwise have. The suspicions had begun in 1967, when Ramparts magazine revealed that the CIA had been providing funds to the National Student Association. The money was to be used to help the student group prevent takeovers of international youth organizations by communists. Unlike opening mail and infiltrating dissident groups, supplying money to domestic organizations was not a direct violation of the CIA’s charter. Supporting an American organization did not mean the CIA was engaging in “internal security functions.” But the funding did raise the specter of the agency trying to influence America rather than the overseas targets it was supposed to sway. Moreover, it raised suspicions both in the eyes of foreigners and of Americans that U.S. institutions might have dual allegiances—one to their directors or trustees and one to the CIA.

  In t
he long run, the broader corruption of American institutions posed a greater threat to American freedoms than whether communists gained a foothold in an international youth organization. Ultimately, it was America’s image as a land of freedom that was most effective in influencing nations torn between communist and democratic factions.

  In response to the Ramparts exposé, President Johnson appointed a three-man committee headed by former attorney general Nicholas de B. Katzenbach to look into the problem. It recommended that such funding be cut off. Presidents have since specifically reaffirmed the policy.

  Later Watergate investigations revealed even more troubling links to the CIA. The CIA had supplied Howard Hunt with a wig, a camera, a speech-altering device, and false identification papers, including a driver’s license, to be used during Hunt’s break-in at the offices of Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist, in September 1971. The Nixon White House had ordered the illegal break-in to learn more about Ellsberg’s involvement in leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

  Then President Nixon tried to use the CIA to cover up White House connections with the Watergate break-in. His aides summoned Richard Helms, then the CIA director, to the White House. They told him that Nixon wanted him to call L. Patrick Gray, the acting director of the FBI, and tell him not to pursue some of the leads arising out of the Watergate break-in because they might reveal CIA operations or sources. Helms told the aides the story was not true, and he refused. Nixon then eased him out of the CIA, sending him to Iran to be ambassador.54

  In his inept fashion, Nixon replaced Helms with James R. Schlesinger, who was not about to participate in any coverups. The revelation of the CIA’s peripheral involvement in the break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist infuriated Schlesinger. To make sure no other improper activities were going on, he issued an order in May 1973, drafted by Colby, then the CIA’s deputy director for operations, ordering employees of the CIA to report any suspicions they had that laws or the agency’s charter had been violated. The result was what came to be referred to as the “family jewels”—693 single-spaced typewritten pages, with each page or two devoted to a possible infraction.

  After he had been nominated to replace Schlesinger as CIA director, Colby turned the list over to Congress, convinced that this was the proper way to handle the matter. Consistent with their hear-no-evil, see-no-evil approach, the committee chairmen with whom he discussed the “jewels” decided to keep it all quiet.

  “There was a general consensus that these matters of the past should be left in the past in order that the agency could continue to do its positive work in the present and future,” Colby wrote in his autobiography, Honorable Men.55

  But a year and a half later, Seymour Hersh of the New York Times got wind of the story. In an effort to put it in perspective, Colby met with Hersh and wound up confirming the gist of what Hersh had developed independently about the abuses. Hersh’s front-page December 22, 1974, story, headlined, “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years,” opened up the CIA to two years of investigations and turmoil. While many of the items turned out not to be violations or to be insignificant, the “jewels” contained enough dynamite to forever change the CIA and the way it does business.

  According to the documents and the later investigations, the CIA had begun a program in 1952 of surveying mail to and from the Soviet Union. In 1953, it began opening some of this mail in violation of federal statutes. By 1973, the CIA was examining 2.3 million pieces of mail a year, photographing 33,000 envelopes, and opening 8,700 of them.

  In 1967, the CIA established a Special Operations Group within the agency to report on domestic dissidents. The program, aptly called Operation CHAOS, resulted in the accumulation of 13,000 files, including ones on 7,200 American citizens. The documents in the files included the names of 300,000 American citizens and organizations. They had all been gathered as part of an internal security function, exactly what the 1947 act establishing the CIA had forbidden.

  A third major area of abuse was the CIA’s program for testing drugs to control behavior on unwitting victims, a violation of criminal laws. Frank E. Olson, an Army civilian scientist, committed suicide on September 28, 1953, after the CIA had given him LSD without his knowledge.56 The CIA officer in charge of the experiment had not checked medical records and was not aware that Olson had had suicidal tendencies over the previous five years.57

  Finally, the CIA imprisoned Yuri I. Nosenko, the KGB major who defected to the U.S. in 1964, for three and a half years simply because the agency did not believe his story that the KGB had nothing to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

  “That frightened me more than anything else, the idea that an intelligence agency could secretly hold a man in prison. Habeas corpus stopped that several centuries ago,” Colby said.58

  As if the illegalities were not bad enough, the ineptitude of many of the operations was astonishing. The agency’s many failed assassination attempts against Castro, its mad effort to enlist the aid of the Mafia, and its foolish attempts to embarrass Castro were prime examples.

  The exposure of the agency’s activities became a watershed, one that led to a rigorous system of oversight by Congress and generally tightened procedures within the agency to insure that it stayed within the law. Until then, subcommittees of the Senate and House armed services and appropriations committees had passed on CIA legislation. In practice, during much of the CIA’s early existence, the chairmen and a few other senior members of the two committees formed an ad hoc oversight committee that made all the key decisions. They took the position that the less they knew about the CIA’s operations, the better.59

  Hersh’s exposé led to appointment of a president’s commission chaired by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller to look into the abuses, an investigation in the Senate led by Sen. Frank Church, and a third, more partisan probe in the House led by Rep. Otis Pike, a New York Democrat, At the height of the probes, the Church Committee had 155 staff members looking into the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

  “Before that [the Church investigation], supervision was virtually nonexistent,” Robert R. Simmons, a former staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said. “They didn’t want to be responsible for it. I consider that a failure of the Congress. If the Congress had acted sooner to extend its authority over this, some of those problems may never have occurred.”60

  “Part of the problem in the early days was the oversight committees, particularly the chairmen, who were interested in the agency being as anonymous as possible, and they made this very clear,” Helms agreed. “As a matter of fact, on one occasion after he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee . . . Senator Stennis said, ‘You’re doing a great job at the agency. I haven’t seen your name in the paper in six months.’ That was his idea that you should be quiet about it.”61

  Yet the CIA nearly always had partners in these bizarre activities—a president or a cabinet officer. The program to collect files on dissidents had been undertaken under pressure from President Johnson. Attorney General John Mitchell and three postmasters general had been informed of the program to open mail. President Kennedy or then attorney general Robert F. Kennedy had either authorized or been informed of the efforts against Castro.

  “All I know is Jack Kennedy and his brother were bound and determined to have us take on this effort [to get rid of Castro],” Helms said. “If you want me to take off my jacket and show you the beatings I got over that, I’d be glad to. In retrospect, it was undoubtedly a mistake; it was feckless. But they insisted that this go on.”62

  Likewise, both Johnson and Nixon ordered the CIA to become involved in investigating dissidents.

  “Johnson was absolutely convinced that there was foreign money and influence that caused all this student unrest,” Helms said. “No matter how you talked to him about this, he was convinced. Nixon was convinced in much the same way.
They couldn’t understand that there wasn’t foreign involvement. That was how this whole thing started, to find out if this was true.”

  Many of those involved in the questionable activities still defend them.

  “Supporting NSA [the National Student Association] was the right thing to do overall,” Cord Meyer, a former CIA officer who directed the operation, said. “If it breeds mistrust, you have to make a choice between them. Either you are going to try to compete abroad or just hope for the best.”63

  Richard Bissell, who oversaw the student operation as deputy director for operations, said, “That was a highly successful operation to combat communist-funded groups. It was not only justified but quite effective. Today I would approve of it, although it is much less necessary. It would have to be done in a different way, but I would like to see that capability reconstructed. “64

  Perhaps the best case for the present system of oversight was made unknowingly by Bissell, who directed the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba as deputy director for operations. Arguing against congressional approval of covert action such as the Bay of Pigs, Bissell said that “the need for congressional notification has a suffocating effect. You have to tailor the mission to them and their staffs.”

  If that is true, would not the devastating failure and loss of lives at the Bay of Pigs have been avoided if congressional approval had been required?

  “If we had had to do that in the Bay of Pigs, I suspect the operation would have been called off,” Bissell acknowledged. “You could say we would be ahead, but you would do better to cancel every third operation on the principle that that way you will save some grief. You can’t run an organization on that assumption.”65

  Bissell’s response is telling. It illuminates the real reason for the failure at the Bay of Pigs—arrogance. By Bissell’s reasoning, only CIA officers know what is good for the country. Elected officials may be the representatives of the people, but they have no business questioning the judgment of the CIA.