One day just before Christmas 1971, as Norma, Dan, and I were about to leave the apartment to go to the beach at Hua Hin, we decided to call Scott. We finally got through and it was good to hear his voice. I jokingly said, “Why don’t you come on back?” He responded, “Oh, if I only could.” Taken by surprise, I asked if he really meant it. He said, “Yes, things are different than I thought, and I’d like a second chance.”
“Great!” I yelled. “I can’t do anything for a few days, but as soon as we get back from Hua Hin, I will make arrangements here.” We wished him a merry Christmas, and those few days at Hua Hin were filled with the joyful anticipation of getting our older son back.
Two weeks later he arrived at Don Muang Airport. The change in him was obvious. He was well-dressed, his hair was shorter, and he was in good spirits. Over the next few months he earned excellent grades in school. He met a young girl whose father was serving as the State Department representative in Bangladesh. Scott and Lisa became close friends and years later, after both had graduated from top universities, they married. It was only then that Scott told me that our talk in the car the day he had left Thailand had helped him to turn his life around.
From the time of my arrival in Thailand I had felt pains in my back and the back of my thigh that were growing progressively worse. On a doctor’s recommendation, I had exercised daily for a year to alleviate the pain and to build up the muscles of my stomach, compensating for the back’s weakness. The pain grew so intense that sometimes standing at a cocktail party was intolerable. Sweat would break out all over, I would feel faint, and I would have to sit down or pass out.
I visited doctors at the Fifth Field Hospital and the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital. All diagnosed the problem as a deteriorating spinal disk that only exercise would help. Sleep became almost impossible, as every movement woke me up. In the morning I would lie on my back contemplating how best to get dressed in a way that would cause the least pain.
Promotions to GS-14 were announced. I was not promoted as Shackley and his assistant in Saigon had guaranteed the year before. The lack of sleep, the physical pain, the mental agony came together, and my pent-up anger burst out. Over the next few days I composed a long, bitter memorandum explaining all that had happened to me—the circumstances surrounding my suggestion about the surveys, the failed intelligence, the broken promises. I let out all the anger, the frustration, the disappointment, the disbelief, and the disgust. I routed the memo to the chief of station, who called me in and sympathetically suggested that I present my grievances to the touring inspector general, Gordon Stewart, who was on a pre-retirement trip around the world that is traditional for super-grade bureaucrats. To justify the expense of this trip, he went through the motions of work, not expecting any major problems like mine to be presented to him.
A couple of days after sending him a copy of my memorandum, I was sitting in the cafeteria when my secretary ran up to me and said, “The inspector general wants to see you right now!” I went upstairs to his office. He angrily looked up from my memorandum on his desk and said, “Shut the door, sit down.”
From here the meeting got worse. He said, “I have read your memorandum, and after consultation with the chief of station, I am putting you on probation.”
Hardened by previous experiences, I was not surprised. I looked at him and asked, “Haven’t I followed the correct procedure in bringing these problems to you? If so, why am I being put on probation?”
He waffled and gagged and finally admitted that I had followed correct procedure. “Nevertheless you are on probation,” he said, “and the chief of station wants to talk to you at 10 tomorrow morning.”
The next day the chief of station, a tall handsome man in his early fifties who let his secretary run the station, told me to sit down. He was visibly upset and acted so strange that I soon realized that he had the office bugged, hoping to catch me in some indiscretion.
He began uncertainly explaining his position while glancing furtively at his hidden microphone. He said, “There comes a time in the careers of some Agency case officers when they can no longer function as members of the team. You seem to have reached that stage, and I am now placing you on special probation. I will be watching you closely for the next three months.”
He did not explain what would happen to me if I didn’t measure up, but I was not too worried as he was such a weak man that I felt he would never fire me. I was right, for later I found out that no one in Headquarters had heard about my probationary status. The chief, or more likely his secretary, did write a telepouch to Headquarters suggesting that I needed counseling.
The back pains became intense, and a doctor at the Fifth Field Hospital told me to stop exercising and then return to see him. The next day I couldn’t get out of bed. I finally crawled downstairs in my pajamas and lay in the back of the car while Norma drove me to the hospital.
After a series of new tests the doctor said I had a ruptured disk. He and a Thai doctor, a specialist who was the King’s private doctor, scheduled an operation to remove the disk. But Norma insisted that I be returned to the States for the operation.
The trip back to Washington was a nightmare of confusion. The hospital in Bangkok gave me a large supply of Valium to keep me relaxed, and the medic told me to drink booze to further numb my pain—a combination that is now regarded as almost fatal. By the time the plane arrived in Honolulu I was flying high from martinis and pills. All passengers had to disembark to go through customs. I could not walk straight and kept veering to my right, jostling and bumping into people.
The customs inspector, a young woman, was conscientious and somewhat officious. Norma, recognizing the danger, tried to push me back while she handled everything, but I resisted. At one of the inspector’s questions I exploded. We argued vehemently, while Norma kept trying to shove me away. The chief of customs came over. He probably had been forewarned that a CIA medical evacuee was on the plane, and he took over and gave us an immediate okay.
My daughter Jean and her husband Joe met us at Washington’s Dulles Airport and took me directly to Georgetown Hospital. The doctors injected dye into my spinal column and discovered that the disk the Bangkok doctors were going to remove was okay, but another was ruptured. The operation was performed immediately, and fortunately it was a success.
13. LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
WHEN I returned to work after the back operation and several months of recovery, I checked in with East Asia (formerly Far East) division’s personnel management officer, whom I shall call Blacky. He was a heavy-set Boston politician, a ward-healer, a cynic—he jokingly called the Saigon station Disneyland East—who adjusted his views to the prevailing operational winds in the division. He had received the telepouch from Thailand recommending that I be given counseling. “What the hell happened out there?” he asked.
I outlined briefly some of my problems and told him that I had left a full memorandum on the subject with the personnel officer back in Thailand. Blacky said he would send for a copy.
“In your reassignment questionnaire you said you wanted to get out of the Operations Directorate and into the Intelligence Directorate,” he said. “I shopped your file with Intelligence but they weren’t interested, so now I’ll shop it around here.”
Later when he received the memo from Bangkok station, his attitude changed radically. For in the memo I accused Shackley—soon to become Blacky’s boss as division chief—of deliberate misrepresentation. Concentrating only on the issue of the promotion and ignoring all the other points in the memo, Blacky asked, “Who told you you were going to get promoted? They can’t do that.”
Blacky put out the word that I was a malcontent and wrote two critical memoranda for my personnel file. Naturally all East Asia branch offices turned me down for jobs. I finally was given a temporary assignment working on a research project in the basement in an out-of-the-way records office where elderly ladies shuffled through ancient files. The assignment was designed to hu
miliate me. One other division outcast joined me in the Langley Siberia. We had little in common except our misery, but it was good to have someone join me in cursing the Agency.
While in exile I composed a memorandum to William Colby, who had assumed the job of executive director comptroller of the Agency. I outlined how the Agency’s intelligence in Vietnam was grossly flawed and cited a few books and studies that backed up my opinions about the composition of the communist movement. I attached copies of my earlier recommendation to the suggestion and achievement awards committee and proposed that the Agency take corrective action. I did not expect, nor did I receive, an answer from him. After a few days I forgot about it, but Colby apparently didn’t. James Schlesinger, newly appointed as CIA director, was about to circulate his directive ordering all Agency employees to notify him of inappropriate or illegal Agency operations. The response to this request became known as the “family jewels.” Just before Schlesinger’s request circulated, I found myself going back overseas, amazingly enough, to Thailand on extended temporary duty. I never received Schlesinger’s directive, and when I returned to Headquarters and found out about it, the deadline for actions on it had passed. I had been gotten out of town so my embarrassing story would not get on the list of “family jewels.”
East Asia division finally placed me as its referent (representative) to the international communism branch (ICB) of the then infamous counterintelligence staff of the Directorate for Operations, which had just been decimated by James Schlesinger’s firings. It was not a place from which to launch a new career. I remained with the Agency because all other options seemed closed. I needed the money, and I knew I might soon qualify for early retirement.
As the East Asia division referent I had virtually nothing to do. The lack of a real job gave me time to wallow in my woes. Everything now angered me. I openly laughed at the serious pronouncements made by Agency leaders, pointing out the fallacies beneath the rhetoric. The regular employees of ICB did not know what to make of me.
The next four years I spent in that assignment seemed like a prolonged confinement in the lower levels of Dante’s hell. But I did think and observe and study. I ended up learning a great deal about communism and about the Agency.
All I was required to do at ICB was to review incoming material: Agency, State Department, and military cables, newspapers, and communist publications. Cabled intelligence reports covered general worldwide political developments. We selected the most relevant of these for inclusion in a daily clipboard that circulated to all officers. Communist publications received included English-language newspapers and journals and the United States Information Agency’s daily booklets containing transcripts of communist radio broadcasts. Other material routed to ICB consisted of a booklet of daily news clippings and copies of The Washington Post and The New York Times.
One of the first things I noticed was that CIA intelligence reports and news reports were frequently similar. Sometimes a newspaper article preceded the intelligence report; sometimes the intelligence report came first; sometimes the two arrived simultaneously. Completeness of detail and accuracy of observation showed the same mixed results. Occasionally and ominously, a cabled intelligence report was identical to a newspaper item. My review of that variegated source material over the four years spent with the ICB indicated that the CIA, apart from its vast covert operations, had transformed itself largely into a government news service reporting only that information which justified those covert operations. In reporting on host country political developments, it not only competed with news correspondents, but also with State Department officers who through their official contacts possibly were more qualified to gather information on developments in the local government. To me, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the CIA transforming itself into a government news service was that its true intelligence-gathering and analytical functions were relegated to distant secondary importance.
The Agency had hundreds of people working in various capacities in the world’s news media from executives to stringers. Through them it disseminated propaganda designed to shape world opinion. Unfortunately there was no mechanism that prevented that disinformation from contaminating and spoiling the CIA’s own information files. In my experience with ICB, where we had unusually widespread access to propaganda themes, I often read cabled instructions from Headquarters to the field on articles or themes to be placed by our local agents in foreign newspapers. Occasionally I could recognize and separate out the CIA-generated articles from others, but more often it was impossible to tell positively whether an item was genuine or planted. Many articles that I kept and filed, that served as background for studies I wrote, later turned out to be CIA propaganda.
As an example of this kind of disinformation operation, during the Cultural Revolution in China, the Agency’s huge radio transmitters on Taiwan broadcast items as if they were continuations of mainland programs. Their broadcasts indicated the revolution was getting out of hand and was much more serious than it actually was. These broadcasts were picked up by the Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service and included in its daily booklets of transcriptions from the mainland. From there the information was picked up by other offices of the Agency and reported as hard intelligence.1
Planting a weapons shipment in Vietnam in February 1965 to prove outside support to the Viet Cong was another classic Agency disinformation operation. As noted earlier, after a staged firefight the shipment was “discovered,” and the American press and the International Control Commission were called in to see the “proof.” That event was picked up and replayed in a State Department White Paper. Immediately after the White Paper was published, President Johnson sent Marines into Vietnam. The U.S. military apparently believed the Agency disinformation and began patrolling off the shores of South Vietnam, looking for other shipments.
Here was a dangerous cycle. Agency disinformation, mistaken as fact, seeped into the files of U.S. government agencies and the CIA itself. It became fixed as fact in the minds of employees who had no idea where it had originated. That cycle in part created the disaster of Vietnam, especially when the Agency could not see through its own propaganda. That cycle continues today in El Salvador. The State Department, using documents “found” in El Salvador as its basis, issued in early 1981 a White Paper “proving” outside assistance to those opposed to the murderous government. Policymakers, the news media, and the Agency itself apparently believed these documents were real. Policy and public opinion were then molded on that assumption. Fortunately, some members of the public and the press are more skeptical now than they were during the Vietnam War, and the El Salvador White Paper was exposed in several publications, including The Wall Street Journal, as a sham.2 I suspect, though I cannot prove it, that those documents on which the White Paper was based were forged and planted by the CIA.
Although I had been in the CIA for 20 years, I really never had attempted to understand communism on its own terms. Instead I relied on United States news organizations and CIA reporting for information about communist movements. This was true of everyone in the CIA. The limited two-year tours, the reliance on Agency “inside” information, and the prevailing fiercely anti-communist atmosphere all tended to give a distorted, one-sided view of any situation.
Early in my assignment to ICB a garrulous, friendly, energetic man in his late forties, whom I shall call John, contacted me. John had handled one of the Directorate for Operations’ illegal domestic projects.3 He had recruited, briefed, trained, and indoctrinated young American university students and used them to infiltrate leftist organizations on U.S. campuses. In what is called a “dangle operation,” the students were to build up leftist credentials at home, so that when they were sent overseas by the Agency they would appear to foreign Communist parties to be genuinely leftist—good bait. These parties then might recruit them or confide in them. While building their leftist credentials in the United States, these young students were asked by John to gather inform
ation on U.S. leftist organizations—an activity then expressly forbidden by law.
John was now on the staff of East Asia division and wanted to brief me on his theories concerning the Sino-Soviet split. John would corner me and pitch his weird theories, but he was such a likable person I could not object. I found out that John knew more about Soviet and Chinese communism than almost anybody else in the Agency, and had a broad knowledge of communist terminology. Using primarily the dialectical methods and themes of Mao Tse-tung’s brief thesis, “On Contradiction,” John tried to convince me that the Chinese and the Soviets had secretly agreed to split in order to lull and conquer the rest of the world.
I liked to bait John. I asked him, if the Russians and Chinese were involved in a huge conspiracy, why had they been fighting each other on their border. “Everybody asks about that,” he responded, “but you know the deception is more important than the fighting. So what if a few soldiers get killed if they can convince the rest of the world that they have really split? What’s the loss?”
Deadly Deceits Page 22