Shadow Warrior
Page 46
Colby began his tenure by renaming the Directorate of Plans. It would now be the Directorate of Operations to more accurately describe what the branch did. He established a committee under Cord Meyer, his deputy, to come up with the best method for achieving the personnel cuts Schlesinger wanted. At that time clandestine services employed 6,000 to 7,000 of the Agency’s total of 17,000 officers; no less than 85 percent of its officers had been on the job for more than twenty years. Colby began with the oldest, arranging for retirements, or, if that was not possible, demotions. But soon there was no choice but to fire. “It wasn’t long,” Colby recalled in his memoir, “before a phone call from me cast a chill over any recipient.” Those affected attempted to push back. Senior people leaked stories to the press. Schlesinger was hauled before the House Armed Services CIA subcommittee and asked if he was trying to destroy the very agency he commanded. At one point the DCI summoned rebellious staff members to his office and in their presence phoned Nixon. The firings were going to cause a public flap and bad publicity; there might even be lawsuits, he told the president. Nixon made it clear that Schlesinger had his full support. From that point on, organized opposition to the purge began to die down. When the dust had cleared, Schlesinger and Colby had pared somewhere between 1,000 and 1,800 individuals from the Agency’s staff, between 7 and 10 percent.54
One person whom Colby expected to go but did not was James Jesus Angleton. Colby made no secret of the fact that he thought Angleton’s super-secret mode of operating; his huge, invasive staff; and his obsession with communist moles were drags on the Agency. He recommended to the DCI that the longtime head of counterintelligence be eased out. But Schlesinger refused. Like his predecessors, the new director was intrigued with Angleton’s “undoubted brilliance,” as Colby put it. And he did not want to be the first DCI caught with a major mole in his operation. There was also a shared hardline anticommunism between the two. Schlesinger would not agree to ground Angleton, but he allowed Colby to clip his wings. During the Schlesinger-Colby purge, CI lost 80 percent of its staff. The team that ran MH/Chaos was gutted. Angleton was stripped of his role as liaison with the FBI. And then there was the super-secret mail-intercept program. Colby claimed in his memoir that neither he nor Schlesinger knew about the program until shortly after Colby became head of plans, when the postal inspector informed Langley that he would not continue what was clearly an illegal activity without a presidential directive. Colby visited the law library and, assured that the CIA’s opening of correspondence between the Soviet Union and the United States was indeed a violation of the law, went to Schlesinger and recommended that the program be terminated. This, in turn, led to a confrontation with Angleton in the director’s office. Since the inception of the mail-intercept program, CI had been the sole recipient of the information it produced. Appeal to Nixon, Angleton demanded; obtain the presidential order. Schlesinger refused, but with a view to saving a portion of Angleton’s face, he decreed that the program be “suspended” rather than terminated.55
In mid-April 1973, Catherine Colby died. She was twenty-three years old. Upon his return from Vietnam, Colby had bought a house on Briley Place off of Massachusetts Avenue in Bethesda. “It exuded suburbia,” his daughter-in-law, Susan, recalled, “that parochial mentality that is so Catholic middle class. It was next to a church and he could park his family there.” The backyard was encircled with a chain-link fence; Bill bought Barbara a dog to patrol it. Catherine had actually seemed to be making some progress. The Phoenix hearings and the public slander that followed had been hard on her, but the anorexia that had set in after a trip to Israel had begun to abate. She had gained some weight, and in March she had signed up to take the civil service exam. To calm her nerves, Catherine took medication the night before the test. Carl, two years younger, heard commotion in her room and rushed in to find that his sister had choked on her own vomit. He gave her CPR, but without success. At that point, Bill appeared. There was nothing either man could do. John Colby recalled that his father was weeping when he telephoned to break the news. Nixon sent a letter of condolence, and Schlesinger kept company with Bill and Barbara the entire day of the funeral.56
A tour of the Agency’s overseas outposts offered some distraction from the tragedy of Catherine’s death. Colby met the Middle East station chiefs in Athens, journeyed through Austria and West Germany to check on Agency operations there, and traveled to Bangkok to see old friends from the Far East (now East Asian) Division. While in Bangkok, Colby read in the newspaper that during Daniel Ellsberg’s trial on theft and conspiracy charges for revealing the Pentagon Papers, it had come to light that E. Howard Hunt, using equipment borrowed from the CIA, had broken into the offices of Ellsberg’s Los Angeles–based psychiatrist. Hunt and his fellow Plumbers had been after damaging material that could be furnished to Langley’s medical branch as it prepared its “psychiatric profile” of Ellsberg. Colby recalled that when the FBI had inquired about Hunt’s relationship with the Agency during the Watergate investigation, he had seen prints of some film Hunt had given to Langley’s technicians to develop. They were grainy but showed the exterior of offices with the names of two physicians etched on a plaque. Colby had ordered the film turned over to the FBI, but he did not realize its significance until he read the account of the Ellsberg trial.
Rural spy rendezvous with family cover, Sweden, 1950s
(The Colby Family Collection)
Clare Booth Luce, US Ambassador to Italy and WEC intimate
(The Colby Family Collection)
In St. Peter’s Square, Rome, 1950s
(The Colby Family Collection)
Barbara and Clare Luce, Rome
(The Colby Family Collection)
Barbara and other members of Saigon’s elite, Cercle Sportif, Saigon, 1960
(The Colby Family Collection)
1960 Coup, Saigon, from the Colbys’ upstairs window
(The Colby Family Collection)
The Colby family’s farewell to President Ngo Dinh Diem, Saigon, 1962
(The Colby Family Collection)
Colby goes native?
(The Colby Family Collection)
Colby, the American proconsul
(The Colby Family Collection)
Colleagues
(The Colby Family Collection)
Ambassador Colby, DEPCORDS
(The Colby Family Collection)
Colby wanted poster, Washington, DC, 1972
(CIA Library)
Colby presents to the Ford foreign policy team
(Gerald R. Ford Library)
Back at Langley, Colby went immediately to see Schlesinger. He had assured the DCI that he had told him everything about the Agency’s involvement or noninvolvement with Watergate. To Colby’s relief, Schlesinger declared that he assumed that Colby was as much in the dark on the burglary of the psychiatrist’s office as he was. Nevertheless, the DCI was in one of his cold rages. What other ticking time bombs were being concealed within the clandestine services? They would tear the place apart and “fire everybody if necessary” to find out. At Schlesinger’s direction, Colby drafted a memo to all officers, ordering them to reveal any knowledge of activities that were illegal, beyond the scope of the CIA’s charter, or both. In a separate communication, Colby, also at the DCI’s direction, invited ex-employees to come forward as well.57 Schlesinger’s insensitivity to the simple dictates of politics and psychology was never more apparent than in this particular move. A letter from Colby, the man who wielded the axe, inviting them to confess any sins of the past! What were the chances that some ex-officers were going to volunteer any information they had to the press as well as to the Agency? The DCI asked Colby to supervise the compilation of wrongdoings, putting the inspector general and his staff at his disposal.
Colby had to tread a fine line. He was part of the past himself, a CIA old-timer. He did not want to appear disloyal to Helms, but he did not want to be associated with previous misdeeds, or with efforts to sweep them un
der the rug. Colby was in due course told about the letters from James McCord to the Agency warning that the White House staff, led by Charles Colson, had embarked on a campaign to blame Watergate on the CIA, arguing that it was part of an Agency plot to do in President Nixon. Before Colby could notify Schlesinger, another of his lieutenants told him of the McCord missives. The DCI was furious: “His anger had to be experienced to be believed,” Colby later recalled. “For the first—and only—time I feared that Schlesinger had become suspicious that I too, as an old Agency hand, was trying to keep secrets from him.” But Colby was allowed to get on with his assigned task.58
By the time the last officer had come forward, the inspector general had compiled a list of “potential flap activities” that ran to 693 pages. The “family jewels,” as one wag would term them, included domestic spying via MH/Chaos; the mail-intercept program; the Agency’s contacts with Hunt and the other members of the Plumbers team; its cooperation in the scheme to frame Daniel Ellsberg; surveillance of journalists as part of the effort to identify the source of leaks within the government; experiments with mind-altering drugs, which had led to the suicide of one CIA officer; and various assassination plots in which the CIA was directly or tangentially involved.59 Colby remembered thinking that the list, covering the entire twenty-five years of the Agency’s existence, wasn’t really so bad, especially in light of what he knew about the NKVD, MI-6, and other intelligence shops. Indeed, the White House had found the CIA so uncooperative in its campaign of dirty tricks that it had had to form its own “intelligence group,” the Plumbers. But the United States, unlike the United Kingdom, had no Official Secrets Act. The public mood, recently so enamored of James Bond, 007, with a license to kill, was in an ugly and unforgiving mood. Colby concluded—and Schlesinger concurred—that for the sake of the American intelligence community, the family jewels should be kept locked away.
16
ASCENSION
On May 9, 1973, Colby received an unexpected call from Alexander Haig, who had replaced Haldeman—at last a casualty of Watergate—as White House chief of staff. There was going to be a cabinet reshuffle. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst was going to have to resign because of Watergate, and President Nixon intended to replace him with Secretary of Defense Elliott Richardson. James Schlesinger would move to the Pentagon. “And the President wants you to take over as Director of the CIA, Bill,” Haig concluded.1
Colby was stunned. He had thought heading the clandestine services would mark the culmination of his career in the Agency. He had met Nixon only once, and that was in Vietnam during a formal occasion. True, his son John had been roommates at Princeton with Edward Cox, the young man who had married Nixon’s daughter Patricia, and each would serve as a groomsman in the other’s wedding, but that was hardly sufficient to explain the decision to tap Colby for DCI. Whatever the case, Colby finally blurted out that he was honored and promised to do his very best.2
On one level, Nixon respected Colby. Bill had conducted himself as a professional in Vietnam, showing no hint of partisanship. Nixon had not only sent a letter of condolence to Colby following Catherine’s death but had also written him a personal note on February 20, 1973, on the occasion of the return of American prisoners of war from North Vietnam. “As I saw our POWs come off the plane at Clark Field,” the president wrote, “I was never so proud to be an American. This would not have been possible had it not been for those—like you—who served America with such dedication.” Most important, perhaps, the White House needed an apolitical figure who could pass muster with Congress without causing a major partisan flap. Finally, Schlesinger and others had assured the White House that Colby would be a good fit.3
But at bottom, Nixon and Kissinger considered Colby a bureaucrat, a political nonentity who could be easily controlled and from whom they had nothing to fear. Colby had absolutely no constituency outside of the CIA, an entity on which the White House had declared war. They must have known that selecting the former Jedburgh would be controversial within the Agency, given his relative lack of experience with the intelligence side and the fact that he had acted as hatchet man for Schlesinger and the White House, but they did not care. Nixon and Kissinger wanted someone who would carry out orders even when they went against his principles. Colby would be to Nixon what Colin Powell would be to George W. Bush, Suffolk to Henry VIII. As for Kissinger, his mentors, Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck, had been their own spymasters. He would never trust someone he could not control. “In retrospect, I must admit, there was something disconcertingly casual in the process of elevating me to the top CIA job,” Colby wrote in Honorable Men.
Colby, along with Schlesinger and Richardson, attended the next scheduled cabinet meeting, where their nominations were to be announced. Just before the names were read, the president leaned over and spoke to Haig. The chief of staff scribbled on a piece of paper and passed it to Colby. “Did you have any connections with Watergate that might raise problems?” it read. Colby looked at Haig and shook his head no. What the hell was that about? Colby thought. If the president had doubts, he should have raised them earlier. What if Colby had said yes? Was there some kind of implied threat in the query? Perhaps Nixon still went through periods of actually believing that Watergate was some sort of CIA plot to get him. Shortly thereafter, a group of Bill’s friends sent him a telegram: “Congratulations, one of ours finally made it. [Signed] Nell Gwyn.” Nell Gwyn had been an illiterate prostitute, the mistress of Charles II—a sordid commoner who had made good.4
The four-month interregnum between Colby’s nomination and his swearing-in was awkward, to say the least. As DCI-designate, Colby was recognized as the decisionmaker, but he did not yet hold the title of director. In Washington, titles were everything, Colby later observed. Fortunately, the acting director was Vernon Walters, who had an easygoing personality and no further ambitions in the intelligence field.
There was unfinished business to attend to. Colby and Schlesinger had decided that the family jewels had best be kept locked in a safe. But they did feel compelled to consult with the Agency’s congressional watchdogs. Led by Senators J. William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield (D-MT), a group in Congress had since the mid-1960s been trying to wrest control of CIA oversight from the southern hawks who had traditionally dominated the process. In the Senate, Richard Russell and John Stennis and in the House, F. Edward Hebert (D-LA) and L. Mendel Rivers (D-SC) had fought them tooth and nail. But with the coming of the Second Reconstruction and the tidal wave of disillusionment that swept the country in the course of Vietnam and Watergate, protectors of the national security state had been placed on the defensive. Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were admitted to the CIA oversight body, while in the House, Hebert had appointed Lucien Nedzi, a liberal Democrat from Michigan, to chair the intelligence subcommittee. The DCI-designate duly made the rounds.
Unlike the other solons Colby visited, Nedzi was not so sure that skeletons should be kept in the closet. Wouldn’t most of the secrets come out eventually, he asked Colby? Wouldn’t it be better for the Agency to come clean voluntarily sooner than to be forced to fess up later? Colby was not unsympathetic. He recognized that the days when Langley could go about its business without any outside accountability were over. The mood of the country had changed. Many in the media and Congress saw the CIA more as a potential threat to civil liberties than a protector. Colby recalled that he was more than just resigned to a new era of accountability. “I considered it correct in our Constitutional democracy,” he wrote. But he pleaded with Nedzi to let the past bury the past and the future deal with the future. “The shock effect of an exposure of the ‘family jewels,’ I urged, could, in the climate of 1973, inflict mortal wounds on the CIA and deprive the nation of all the good the Agency could do in the future.” Nedzi agreed, and Colby, breathing a sigh of relief, hoped that the matter had been closed.5
The problem was that the Watergate scandal was just beginning to gather steam in 1
973, and as long as the break-in continued to be the subject of daily headlines and televised hearings, the CIA was going to be dragged through the mud. The trial of the Watergate Seven got underway in January 1973. Five of the defendants pleaded guilty; two underwent a jury trial and were convicted. On March 23, the day scheduled for sentencing, presiding judge John J. Sirica read a letter from James McCord admitting that he had been acting on orders from the White House and that he and the others had been pressured to keep quiet. During the months that followed, federal prosecutors, Judge Sirica, and the Senate Watergate Committee worked in tacit alliance. Meanwhile, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, fed information by FBI official W. Mark Felt—known to the public at that time only by the moniker “Deep Throat”—kept the public abreast of events in the pages of the Washington Post. All the while, Nixon continued to approve the payment of hush money to Hunt and the other Plumbers.
Then on the advice of his lawyer, White House counsel John Dean came clean before the Watergate Committee, admitting to and describing the cover-up. On April 30, the president went on national television to announce that there had indeed been a conspiracy to conceal the facts about Watergate, but that he was in no way involved. Then followed Nixon’s firing of Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Dean. As a condition of his confirmation, Attorney General–designate Elliott Richardson was forced to name a special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. When Dean revealed the existence of a secret taping system in the Oval Office, a yearlong battle ensued between the White House and the Watergate Committee over control of the potentially incriminating recordings.