*3I knew Mitchell slightly, having interviewed him a few times, and was surprised when he showed up with two of his lawyers for a late lunch in downtown Washington amid his 1974 Watergate trial on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. I nodded at him but left the group alone until the end of his meal. The lawyers had departed, and Mitchell was signing a credit card bill—clients always seem to pay for lunch with their lawyers—when I sat down. Mitchell had a terrible reputation, based on his fervent support for Nixon, but he was hard to dislike. I asked how it was going. He tore off the credit card receipt, wrote something on its back, folded it, handed it to me, and said, “This will tell all you need to know in life, kiddo.” I waited until he left the restaurant before looking at the note. It said, “Next time take the Fifth.” He was convicted the next year on all counts and spent nineteen months in jail, the only senior Nixon administration official to do so.
· FIFTEEN ·
The Big One
My December 22, 1974, story about the CIA’s domestic spying was the most explosive of my years at The New York Times. It carried a startling headline that ran across three columns on the front page that Sunday:
HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED
IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES,
OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS
The story produced widespread public dismay and anger over the CIA’s spying at home, as well as two major congressional investigations that uncovered further evidence of wrongdoing, but the congressional pressures for reform were outmuscled by the new Ford administration, managed by Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, his deputy, who were intent on protecting the Agency. The CIA is still doing today what it has done in secret around the world since the end of World War II.
None of this, however, diminished the hard work, patience, and inside help I had chasing the illegal spying story, and how deeply I was able to delve inside the Agency in doing so. The best way—that is, the least self-serving way—to tell the story is to let the CIA itself do it.
In 1993 a CIA historian and analyst named Harold Ford, who began his career in covert operations, published a secret history of William Colby’s controversial career as CIA director in the Watergate years. Ford’s work was declassified in 2011 but, like many such histories, attracted little attention. Ford, whom I did not know, included an eleven-page chapter on me in his history that began with quotes from Ray Cline, a longtime CIA officer who served in the Kissinger era as the State Department’s director of intelligence: “I like Sy in a way. He’s an arrogant son-of-a-bitch….He’s one of those whimsical, skeptical iconoclastic fellows who’s interested in a good story and has a shrewd nose for people and events and who’s doing his thing.”
Ray, who passed away in 1996, shared my views about Kissinger’s machinations and the CIA’s monumental stupidity in spending seven years, from 1967 to 1974, spying on American citizens inside the United States in direct violation of its charter. I’d like to believe, from Ford’s nonjudgmental and surprisingly detailed account of my reporting, that he also saw value in what I had done in tracking down a most secret internal CIA compilation—known internally as the “family jewels”—of illegal activities. Here’s how Ford began his account:
Hersh’s charges against the CIA did not suddenly drop from the clouds at the end of December 1974. Behind his indictment of the Agency lay months of journalistic effort. Suspicious at first that CIA had participated in illegal actions related to Watergate, Hersh’s search expanded once he began to get scraps of information about the CIA’s “family jewels.” Hersh’s allegations were based largely on the “family jewels” compilation [of wrongdoing] that DCI James Schlesinger [Colby’s predecessor as director] had ordered in the wake of May 1973 Watergate revelations.
As far back as November 1972, Hersh had told House intelligence subcommittee chairman Lucien Nedzi that he had information that the CIA was engaged in “extensive domestic operations.” [I had cited this issue, among others, at the time in the note about potential stories that Max Frankel ignored.] In February 1973 DCI Schlesinger learned that Hersh was working on an article for the New York Times that was apt to expose sensitive intelligence operations….In March, Hersh asked for an interview with Schlesinger but was refused. In May, however Schlesinger did order all CIA officers to report whether the Agency was now, or had been in the past, involved in any illegal activities. This was the first of several steps taken by Schlesinger and Colby to draw up what became the “family jewels” list….That listing ran to a startling 693 pages of possible violations of or at least questionable activities in regard to the CIA’s legislative charter.
That autumn, soon after becoming DCI, Colby learned that Seymour Hersh was making inquiries about past CIA operations and instructed all CIA deputies not to honor Hersh’s requests for an interview….For some months after that all was fairly quiet concerning Hersh’s inquiries [I was reporting then on CIA operations in Chile] until that journalist telephoned Colby on 9 December 1974 to tell him that he was now embarked on a wholly different undertaking—a big news story on past illegal operations within the United States….Later that same day, Colby informed House oversight Chairman Nedzi of this conversation and learned that Hersh had seen the Congressman that afternoon with the same story.
At this point, Ford’s history noted that two highly respected CIA officers—the current head of the CIA’s clandestine service, the famed “dirty tricks” directorate, and one of his processors—told Colby that I had telephoned them to warn that I was prepared to write about the domestic spying and cite James Jesus Angleton, the famed head of counterintelligence, as the officer in charge of violating the CIA’s charter and the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which barred unreasonable searches. On December 18, Ford wrote, “Hersh began to turn the screws. ‘I figure I have about one-tenth of 1 percent of the story which you and I talked about,’ he warned in a phone note he left for Colby, ‘which is more than enough, I think, to cause a lot of discombobulation, which is not my purpose. I want to write it this weekend. I am willing to trade with you. I will trade you Jim Angleton for 14 files of my choice. I will be in my office at the Times in 30 minutes.’ ” [Emphasis in original.]
Ford could not make sense of my facetious telephone message, which was understandable because Colby and I had talked more than once on his unlisted telephone at home, which apparently had no recording device, about the danger posed by Angleton. Angleton was a fabled character inside the CIA for his belief that the Russians had completely penetrated the Agency and for his willingness to investigate anyone, especially Soviet spies who had defected. The domestic spying operation was his baby, and he and a deputy named Dick Ober met frequently with Richard Helms, a Colby predecessor, for guidance and support. I had gone to Angleton with my information, and he had stunned me—not by denying all, but by offering to make a trade: If I dropped the story, he would tell me in great detail about current spy operations in North Korea and Russia. He was drinking heavily at the time, and his offer to trade secrets for my silence, whether the secrets were true or not, was inappropriate and, if true, treasonous. I gleaned from Colby’s horrified response that he saw the danger in such loose talk, especially if one of the operations was still ongoing; Angleton was attempting to buy me off by betraying his fellow agents.
It got worse. I telephoned Angleton again as I was writing the December 22 story—it ran seven thousand words, enough to fill a newspaper page of type—and this time he insisted that he’d had nothing to do with the domestic spying. The program was Ober’s responsibility. I found Ober at home and told him what Angleton had said. Ober was far from an innocent—he’d been involved in the illegal spying on Americans since the program began in 1967—but I knew from a superb source that it was Angleton who was considered the chief actor in the operation. In any case, Ober denied any knowledge of CIA domestic operations. A few hours later he called me back and ma
de it clear that Angleton indeed was the boss. (In all of this back-and-forth, Colby, as the CIA director, and Ober, who was still undercover as a clandestine officer, understood without saying that I was not going to quote them by name.) By this time, I was getting sympathetic to Colby because it was becoming clear to me how much Angleton and Helms despised Colby and were working against him because Colby was intent on coming clean about the extent of CIA domestic spying. He did so knowing the risks. Angleton was known for his closeness to Helms, who had been fired by Nixon in late 1972 but kept inside the tent by the President, who appointed him ambassador to Iran. I knew from someone who worked with Helms that the CIA director had destroyed many files before leaving for Tehran. As I learned more about the Agency, I’d become convinced that Nixon’s responsibility for the Watergate break-in was, perhaps, merely a footnote to the real criminality of my government.
Harold Ford noted that Colby did not return my call on December 18. Instead he telephoned Nedzi, who had been talking to me about suspected CIA abuses for more than a year, something Colby apparently did not know. The conversation was taped, and it is priceless:
NEDZI: I talked with him [Hersh] a short time ago, and I guess that is about the message [regarding my sardonic offer to Colby to trade Angleton for fourteen CIA files]. Who is Jim Angleton?
COLBY: He is the head of our counterintelligence. He is kind of a legendary character. He has been around for 150 years or so. He is a very spooky guy. His reputation is one of total secrecy and no one knows what he is doing. We know what he is doing, but he is a little bit out of date in terms of seeing Soviets under every bush.
NEDZI: What is he doing talking to Hersh?
COLBY: I do not think he is. Hersh called him and wanted to talk with him, but he said he would not talk with him.
NEDZI: Sy showed me notes of what he said and claims he [Angleton] was drunk….There is a bit of a problem for you….All of a sudden a guy [Hersh] is telling things about…that meeting we had in which you briefed me on all the—he used the same term, incidentally, “jewels.”
COLBY: Hersh did?
NEDZI: Yes.
COLBY: I wonder where he got that word. It was used by [only] a few people around here.
Ford adds that on the same day “Hersh got through to Colby on the phone, telling him he was writing a story that would come out on Sunday, 22 December….Colby took the fatal step and agreed to see Hersh.”
I liked Colby well enough—reporters always like officials who take our calls—but there was no way I was going to indicate to him how much I knew in our meeting, which took place early on Friday morning, December 20. It was a given that any interview in Colby’s office would be taped, but that was not a concern; there was no way I would compromise a source, and I was only interested in CIA operations, or any intelligence activities, that were stupid or criminal. In Ford’s account of what he depicted as “a fateful meeting,” I gave Colby a partial summary of what I knew and said I was planning to write about the Agency’s long-standing “massive” domestic operations against the antiwar movement and other dissidents. Colby, wrote Ford, “realizing that this story was a garble of the ‘family jewels’ list that the CIA itself had compiled…sought to correct and put in perspective Hersh’s exaggerated account….‘What few mistakes we made in the past have long before this been corrected.’…There the matter rested for the moment. Or so Colby thought. He clearly believed he had pulled the teeth of the forthcoming article.”
Ford did not attempt to interview me for his historical paper. If he had, I’m sure I would have told him that I did not understand how Colby could not know that I had far more information than he assumed; I had interviewed many people inside the Agency who had been appalled about the domestic spying and other activities for years, but only chose to do something about it after Dick Helms was fired by Nixon. I knew Colby as a tough-minded CIA operative who had been in charge of the CIA’s cold-blooded Phoenix assassination program during the Vietnam War, when more than twenty thousand civilians in South Vietnam were murdered after being accused—often falsely—of ties to the Vietcong or North Vietnamese.
Self-delusion was not in Colby’s makeup, so I assumed. He knew from Nedzi that I knew the very secret in-house word for the files dealing with illegal domestic activities. Ford cited a series of taped conversations at the time between Colby and Larry Silberman, the deputy attorney general, that made it clear, or should have, that I was getting inside information—lots of it. I knew Silberman and respected him as an honest officer of the law and had briefed him long before writing the December 22 article about what I had found out. No one at the CIA had bothered to inform the Justice Department, or the White House, about the smoking bombs contained in the “family jewels,” or about the fact that I was hot on the story. Did Colby truly believe that my information was exaggerated?
In a later chapter of his history, Ford recounted a conversation Colby had with Silberman in late December, a few days before my article was published, to see whether a decades-earlier agreement that gave the CIA the right to determine for itself whether to report a crime was still in force. Silberman was dismissive, as Ford wrote. “Come on, Bill,” he said. “You’re a lawyer. You know better than that.” Twenty-five years of CIA connivance and criminal activity without worry was abruptly washed away. Silberman also gave Colby a sharp warning about how deeply inside the Agency I had gone. Colby’s meeting with Silberman had been on December 19. Two days later, in another taped telephone conversation, Silberman told Colby what he had not said earlier, Ford wrote, “that Hersh had phoned to tell him in advance of Colby’s meeting with Silberman on the 19th.”
COLBY: I am absolutely staggered that he knew that I was going to see you.
SILBERMAN: The SOB has sources that are absolutely beyond comparison.
COLBY: He knows more about this place than I do.
Of course Colby knew that was not so, but my December 22 exposé cited seven different categories of sources, without naming one. I mentioned an individual who was involved in the initial CIA inquiry into domestic spying; past and present CIA officials; high-ranking American intelligence officials (not in the CIA); one official with close access to Colby; men with firsthand knowledge of the CIA domestic activities; CIA officials who began waving the “red flag” inside the Agency; and a former high-level aide who worked closely with Dick Helms in the executive offices of the Agency. I can name one of them now—Bob Kiley, who died at the age of eighty in August 2016 of Alzheimer’s disease. Kiley, among the brightest of the young men who worked closely with Helms in his heyday as CIA director, was a Notre Dame graduate who joined the Agency in 1963 and worked undercover with student groups for Dick Ober until he joined Helms’s personal staff. By 1970, when he resigned in dismay from the Agency, he was the manager of intelligence operations for the CIA and Helms’s executive assistant. There were few secrets at the time that Kiley did not know, or could not know. He moved to Boston and began working for the then mayor, Kevin White. In 1975, Kiley, now a deputy mayor, was assigned to reorganize Boston’s troubled mass transit system. He did so successfully and was recruited in the early 1980s to do the same for the New York transit system. His continued good work there led to an appointment overseas in 2001 as London’s first commissioner of transit. He was widely publicized for his success in getting results in all three cities.
I was introduced to Bob in 1972 by a mutual friend who worked for Mayor White. I decided to talk in public about my longtime relationship with him—initially as a reporter but later as a friend and confidant—after being asked by his wife, Rona, to give a eulogy for him at a memorial service at the University Club in New York a few months after his death. His two grown sons had never been able to get much information about his days in the CIA, and I thought they ought to know something about why he quit the Agency and why he chose to help me. My sense of the man—he never discussed his reasons for leaving—was that he belie
ved deeply in America and in the Agency, but he did not believe in the Vietnam War and the Agency’s role in domestic spying. As I said at the service, “I did not need Bob Kiley to tell me secrets. I had plenty of those, but I needed someone to give me context—to tell me who were the good guys on the inside and what programs were worth keeping secret.” He and I shared many late-night dinners in Boston.
There were others with long ties to the Agency who also helped me during the two years I worked on the story. It was the quality and integrity of my sources that enabled me to have the confidence to tell Colby on Friday, December 20, that I would be in print on Sunday. I had yet to write a word.
Abe Rosenthal knew I was at work on what I assured him was a great intelligence story, but it was not until I spent time with Colby on the twentieth that I telephoned Abe from a pay phone near the Agency to say it was about CIA spying inside America and I had enough from Colby to start writing. Abe ordered me, as I knew he would, to get to the office and get to work. I promised I would get the story done before leaving the office that night, and he said he would alert the weekend editors to expect a strong story about the CIA for the Sunday edition.
Reporter Page 25