Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  As he familiarized himself with the ins and outs of his new position, Colby came to realize what his colleagues at Langley already knew—Richard Nixon did not like or trust the CIA. Kissinger later wrote that the president believed that the Agency was “a refuge for Ivy League intellectuals opposed to him.”6 Aside from the fact that Nixon thought the CIA, like the State Department, consisted of men and women who considered him their educational and social inferior, he blamed Langley for his defeat in the 1960 presidential election. The CIA, he was convinced, had created false data showing that the Soviet Union had gained strategic nuclear superiority over the United States—the so-called “missile gap.” In addition, Nixon and his men believed that the analytical branch’s consistently pessimistic reports on the course of the war in Vietnam—the bombing was not working; pacification was largely an illusion; the military governments in Saigon were incorrigible; enemy strength would grow no matter what the United States did, short of annihilating North Vietnam—proved that the Agency was full of antiwar liberals. Despite all this, however, Nixon had asked Helms to stay on as DCI. LBJ had recommended him as nonpartisan and disinterested, and Nixon was aware of the respect Helms commanded in Congress on both sides of the aisle.

  Helms had heard rumors of Nixon’s attitude toward the Agency, and his suspicions were soon confirmed. Word came to him that the president did not like and therefore did not read the “Daily Briefings” that had provided primary intelligence sustenance to presidents since Harry Truman. Shortly after it was announced that Helms would stay on, Kissinger called him in and told him that all intelligence would pass through the national security adviser to the president. Moreover, in a break with precedent, Helms was to present the Agency’s summary report to the National Security Council and then retire. Melvin Laird subsequently intervened to bring the DCI back into the inner circle, but Helms would continue to feel like an outsider. And in truth, he was.

  The struggle between the White House and the CIA’s analytical branch that had developed in the wake of Sputnik—Nixon blamed his loss in 1960 on the “missile gap” that he believed the CIA had fabricated—continued after Nixon became president, but this time, ironically, he charged the Agency’s brain trust with underestimating rather than overestimating Soviet strategic capability. By 1969 the Soviet Union had developed a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the SS-9, whose payload, American intelligence suspected, was equipped with the first multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs). The Defense Department and the White House declared that the ability of the enemy to unleash up to sixty warheads per rocket, independently targeted, gave Moscow strategic superiority and the ability to deliver a “first strike,” a knockout blow that would leave the United States defenseless. Nixon and Kissinger had Laird go to Congress and request billions of dollars for an antiballistic missile (ABM) system. In the hearings that followed, the CIA refused to back the administration. The Agency said the Soviets clearly did not possess the technology to provide each warhead with a guidance system. Moscow was not planning a first strike; the enemy’s so-called “hardened silos” were not, as the Pentagon claimed, impervious to existing US missiles. Laird was furious. “Where,” he demanded, “did CIA get off contradicting Nixon’s policy?” Kissinger was equally outraged. The Agency was undercutting his efforts to create a giant bargaining chip—an ABM system—for use in the forthcoming Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) negotiations with Moscow. Helms recalled of Nixon, “He would constantly, in National Security Council meetings, pick on the Agency for not having properly judged what the Soviets were going to do with various kinds of weaponry. He would make nasty remarks about this and say this had to be sharpened up.”7

  Nixon and Kissinger denigrated covert operations—unless they were operations that they initiated and controlled. Soon after his return from Vietnam, Colby began to hear rumors of a major top-secret campaign controlled and directed by the White House but carried out by the CIA to prevent the election of Salvador Allende Gossens to the presidency of Chile. Many of Colby’s friends and colleagues were involved in the operation, and the situation in Chile seemed in some ways to parallel that of Italy during the 1950s. Fearing the spread of Castro-style communism to the mineral-rich Andean nation, the United States had funneled aid to noncommunist political parties throughout the 1960s. In 1964, the Agency provided some $3 million to secure the election of President Eduardo Frei and his fellow Christian Democrats. Unlike many other Latin American nations, Chile’s modern history was characterized by respect for constitutional processes and an apolitical military.

  During his generally successful six years in office, Frei worked to ameliorate the plight of the poor and bring about a greater degree of economic and social justice. Nevertheless, by 1970 there was still a wide gap between rich and poor, and Chile’s economy continued to be dominated by US corporations such as International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), Anaconda Copper, and General Motors. Chile’s 1970 presidential election, with Frei ineligible for another term, evolved into a three-cornered affair featuring National Party candidate Jorge Alessandri Rodriguez on the right, Radomiro Tomic Romero representing the left wing of the Christian Democrats, and Salvador Allende, the candidate of the Marxists and similar factions, on the left. In the midst of the campaign, the Agency produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Chile warning that if Allende was elected, he could “take Chile a long way down the Marxist-Socialist road . . . [creating] a Chilean version of a Soviet-style East European state.”8 His opposition to capitalism was implacable, and his regime would certainly move to nationalize major foreign businesses. There were, in addition, rumors that Allende would consider leasing a Chilean port to Cuba as a base for its navy. Helms warned Kissinger, who as national security adviser chaired the 303 Committee, that if Allende was going to be stopped, the Agency would have to be given the green light to aid noncommunist candidates. The DCI recalled that neither Kissinger nor Nixon displayed much interest at that point.

  On September 4, Allende won the election with a razor-thin margin—39,000 out of 3 million votes cast. He garnered 36.3 percent of the vote, with his nearest rival, Alessandri, polling 34.9 percent.9 Suddenly Chile had the White House’s attention. Nixon was angry and a bit frightened, Helms recalled. It was all the CIA’s fault, he groused to Kissinger, who agreed with him but argued that there was still time. Because Allende had received a plurality rather than a majority, he would have to have the approval of the Chilean Congress.

  On September 15, Nixon summoned Helms. “In a conversation lasting less than 15 minutes,” Kissinger recalled, “Nixon told Helms that he wanted a major effort to see what could be done to prevent Allende’s accession to power. If there were one chance in ten of getting rid of Allende, we should try it; if Helms needed $10 million he would approve it. Aid programs to Chile should be cut; its economy should be squeezed until it ‘screamed.’ Helms should bypass [US ambassador Edward] Kory and report directly to the White House.” The no-holds-barred effort to prevent Allende from taking and holding office—known as Track II—was to be kept secret not only from the State Department but also from the Defense Department and the 40 Committee (the new name for the 303 Committee). Helms later claimed that he was dubious all along about the chances of stopping Allende—and the wisdom of even trying. The record shows little hesitancy, however. “If I ever carried a marshal’s baton in my knapsack out of the Oval Office, it was that day,” Colby remembered him saying. “All of us were aware,” one participant later observed, “that in such a short period of time, no matter what other techniques we might try, what we were talking about, basically, was a military coup.” There was not a moment to be lost. The Chilean Congress would vote on October 24.10

  Helms set up a Track II task force at Langley. Agency-generated propaganda subsequently appeared throughout Latin America and in a number of European countries comparing the situation in Chile with the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. A Track II team member journeyed to
New York to enlist ITT’s aid in destabilizing the Chilean economy. Four undercover agents arrived in Santiago and established contact with known anti-Allende officers in the military. Chief among these was Brigadier General Roberto Viaux, who had been retired following an abortive coup attempt against Frei in 1969. He asked for money and guns, receiving some of both, and a coup was scheduled for October 9 and 10. The takeover was called off by the Agency, however, because it seemed to have no prospect of success. It is clear that the United States dissociated itself from Viaux not because it considered him unfit, which he probably was, but because it thought he could not succeed. “It is a firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup,” Deputy Director of Plans Tom Karamessines cabled Henry Hecksher, chief of station in Santiago.11

  Increasingly, anti-Allende forces within Chile saw General René Schneider, army chief of staff, as the principal obstacle to a successful coup. The men around Viaux informed Agency operatives that they intended to kidnap Schneider. On October 22, Viaux’s men tried to seize the army chief; he was wounded trying to escape. On October 24, Salvador Allende received 153 of the 195 votes cast in the Chilean Congress. Schneider died the next day, and on the day after that, President Frei and president-elect Allende stood side by side at the general’s funeral. Allende assumed office on November 3, but the CIA would continue its efforts to undermine him.12

  “Track II, of course, was well in the past by the time I became Executive Director,” Colby later wrote, “and indeed for a considerable time I knew nothing of it in accordance with the President’s directive that it be handled in the utmost secrecy.”13 But Colby, as comptroller, oversaw the budget, and it was hard to keep secrets in the gossip-ridden halls of Langley. Eventually Colby learned of the Chilean operation, and in general he approved. He would later write that Agency money went overwhelmingly to centrist parties, and that Allende’s faction was clearly Marxist-Leninist and pro-Castro. He passed over Schneider’s death as a casualty of war, collateral damage that the CIA would have avoided if it could have. Colby and the CIA as a whole had become supersensitive to the charge of assassination. In 1967, in the wake of the Ramparts article, Jack Anderson had reported rumors of a CIA plot against Castro’s life. Colby, as Far East Division chief, had been part of the internal investigation ordered by the White House into rumors that the Agency had been complicit in the deaths of the Ngo brothers. He had duly certified that the Agency had had no role in the killing of Diem and Nhu. When Colby returned from Vietnam to become executive director in 1971, assassination was again a hot topic, something he learned firsthand during the Phoenix hearings. Despite the fact that the killing of enemy operatives, political and military, lay at the very heart of terrorism and counterterrorism, Colby had convinced himself that no component of CORDS, including the CIA-run PRUs, had engaged in assassination as a policy.

  In late 1971, Parade magazine, read by millions of Americans as an insert in their Sunday newspaper, declared that the CIA was the only agency of the US government authorized to carry out assassinations. Colby was incensed. “I knew from personal experience that the Agency was not engaged in assassinations in Vietnam,” he wrote in his memoir. “Indeed, quite to the contrary, it had been my specific directive as head of CORDS that, for both moral and practical reasons, assassinations were strictly prohibited.”14 He decided to write a sweeping rebuttal, but then hesitated. Perhaps there were activities that he was not aware of. Angleton’s counterintelligence division was a little shop of horrors, and there might be others in the highly compartmentalized CIA. He began to check around. Castro was still alive, but that did not mean that there had not been a conspiracy to eliminate him. Gradually, the details of Operation Mongoose began to emerge. A compatriot on the African desk assured Colby that the Agency was not involved in the killing of Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba, at least not directly. Colby learned that the Kennedy administration had very much wanted Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo out of the way, but his death in 1962, like General Schneider’s in 1970, had not been at the hands of CIA agents. Instead of issuing the flat denial to Parade that he originally planned, Colby decided to slam the proverbial barn door. He prepared a directive to all CIA personnel stating that “CIA would not now or in the future engage in, stimulate or support assassinations in any way.” Helms duly signed it.15

  In the fall of 1971, White House aide John Ehrlichman asked the DCI for documents on the Bay of Pigs, the Diem assassination, and the death of Trujillo. President Nixon, it seemed, wanted to use them to smear the Democratic Party in general and the Kennedy administration in particular. In October, Helms duly delivered the material, but he warned that its publication could open a can of worms that would gnaw away at more than one administration. The White House held off, but in the meantime Colby and Helms issued their backside-covering directive.16

  According to Colby’s memoir, by late 1971 younger officers in the CIA were increasingly concerned about the reputation of the Agency. The CIA had become the whipping boy of not only the antiwar left but also the mainstream media. Every conceivable evil was laid at Langley’s door. In 1964, investigative journalist David Wise had published his widely read Invisible Government. Thus was born what would become America’s favorite conspiracy theory: the comings and goings of presidents and congressmen, the nominating conventions and their platforms, the public debates over foreign and domestic policy, the very edifice of national government was just a front behind which a coterie of powerful and unscrupulous men pulled the levers of power, manipulating politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists at will. They protected their secrets at all costs, Wise wrote. The young men and women who came to Bill Colby in confidence told him that the notion of a secret surveillance state run by the CIA and FBI might not be so far from the truth. “Young analysts, computer operators and operations officers,” Colby recalled, “were all aware that a most secret project was lodged in that most secret of Agency crannies, the Counterintelligence Staff, and that it had a great deal to do with the antiwar movement.”17

  When the CIA was established in 1947, its supporters had had to overcome widespread fears that the new Agency would become an American Gestapo, prying into the lives of American citizens. Consequently, the CIA’s charter forbade it from “police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions.”18 But the Doolittle Report, commissioned by Eisenhower and issued in 1954, had warned that the United States faced a ruthless enemy that would stop at nothing to undermine the Western democracies. If Washington and its allies did not fight fire with fire, it would lose the Cold War.

  In 1952, during the waning days of the Truman administration, the CIA had begun secretly opening and examining all mail postings between the United States and the Soviet Union. At La Guardia, and subsequently at a secure vault at Federal Building 111 at JFK International Airport in New York, every piece of mail passing between the two countries was examined for bits of information that would aid in the war on communism. The super-secret mail-intercept program was run first by the Directorate of Plans, but in 1955 was transferred to Angleton’s CI shop. The move was a logical one, given Angleton’s philosophy. Every Soviet citizen—whether student, scientist, journalist, or diplomat—was fully vetted by the KGB. Indeed, many Russian students who studied in the United States later returned as professional spies. Every Soviet citizen resident in or visiting the United States was, in the view of counterintelligence, a KGB agent by definition. In the beginning, that was true. In 1954, Allen Dulles and his deputy director for plans, Frank Wisner, briefed the incoming Eisenhower administration on the mail-intercept operation, and that process was repeated through the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon presidencies. Colby was aware of the existence of the program; he believed that the potential for revelation and scandal outweighed the program’s value to intelligence and counterintelligence operations, and in his usual low-key manner he had said so. All to no avail.19

  In 1967, the CIA got into the domestic spying business in a big way
. The antiwar protests and urban rioting that wracked the country were driving President Johnson to distraction. He could understand neither the Vietnam protest nor the Black Power movement. Didn’t the nation’s youth, both black and white, understand that he was one of them, the author of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, federal aid to education, national health care, and the war on poverty? The violence sweeping the nation’s ghettoes was indeed appalling. Between 1964 and 1967, 75 separate urban riots had erupted across the nation from Detroit to New York to Los Angeles, resulting in 88 deaths and property damage estimated at $664.5 million. This chaos had to be the work of subversive elements. “I’m not going to let the Communists take this government and they’re doing it right now,” Johnson declared in one of his periodic rants. “I’ve got my belly full of seeing these people put on a Communist plane and shipped all over this country,” he exclaimed to Rusk, McNamara, and Helms at a White House meeting on November 4. Johnson directed the DCI to obtain proof positive that the violent antiwar protests and urban violence were the work of foreign agents. Helms warned the president that investigation of domestic dissident groups was a potential violation of the CIA’s charter. “I’m quite aware of that,” Helms recalled LBJ saying. “What I want is for you to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs.”20

  Having expressed his reservations, Helms became an enthusiastic supporter of the operation code-named MH/Chaos. “I established the unit,” the DCI later told an interviewer, “because it seemed to me that since this was a high priority in the eyes of the President, it should be a high priority in the Agency.” In his view, the CIA was an instrument of the executive branch, a tool that the president could wield at his discretion. If challenged, Helms could quote the clause in the 1947 National Security Act that stated that the director of central intelligence could perform “such additional functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the national security council may direct.”21