The headline in the New York Times morning edition for Sunday, December 22, read: “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” The story described CIA activities undertaken in the course of MH/Chaos and cited various scholars on their legality or illegality. Hersh informed his readers that the contents of the story had been confirmed by a “high government official,” and that MH/Chaos had been lodged in counterintelligence.
Paul Colby later recalled that his dad had decided to spend that Sunday at home with the family. It was snowing, and father and son walked to the corner to get the Times from a vending machine. Bill opened the paper, read the front page, folded the paper, and carried on the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. Paul told the story to demonstrate his father’s calm under fire, but he may have had reason to be calm. The Hersh story had given him cover in his firing of Angleton, and it undercut to a degree Kissinger’s ongoing effort to get Colby and the CIA to take the fall for various misdeeds of the Nixon administration.27
In his memoir, Colby recalled that he did not immediately foresee the huge flap that the Hersh article would cause. The Agency had been the subject of negative headlines before, and the ensuing outcry had quickly died down. Taken in context, the CIA’s misdeeds were few and far between. If the Agency avoided the mistakes of the Watergate scandal—seeking to “distance” itself from the situation, thus arousing suspicion and eliciting charges of a cover-up—the crisis would pass. Colby decided to speak frankly and openly to Congress and the media (excluding sources and methods ) and reiterate that nothing akin to MH/Chaos was going on at present—indeed such things had been explicitly prohibited by the Agency’s leadership—and would not transpire in the future. And in fact, in the two or three days following publication of the Hersh article, the media hesitated. There were no substantive follow-up stories on Monday or Tuesday, and when Hersh published again it was largely to quote his own article: “A New York Times story reported . . . ”28
Hersh had won a Pulitzer for his story on My Lai, but he had an unsavory reputation. “Hersh’s technique is to wear down reluctant sources through tenacious pursuit by phone—often badgering, terrorizing, insulting,” wrote a colleague. “I don’t know of anyone other than Don Rickles who can be as disgustingly insulting, yet have the right touch for getting someone to respond.” He did not feel constrained, as did some of his colleagues, by concerns about national security. “He was at a seminar at the Naval War College,” CIA officer David Phillips recalled, “and one of the guys stood up and said, ‘Mr. Hersh, if it were wartime and you found out about a troop ship sailing out of New York, would you break that information?’ He said, ‘You bet.’ That’s Hersh.” Some suspected that the editorial board at the New York Times, having been repeatedly scooped by the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal, was making a mountain out of a molehill. There was certainly no question about the rivalry. Hersh, Times executive editor A. M. Rosenthal once said, “is like a puppy that isn’t quite housebroken, but as long as he’s pissing on [Washington Post editor] Ben Bradlee’s carpet, let him go.”29
For its part, the White House sensed the advent of a major scandal. In his memoir, Kissinger observed that the Hersh story had the effect of tossing “a burning match in a gasoline depot.” When Colby called the White House that Sunday afternoon, he could feel the heat. What the hell was going on? Deputy National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft asked. Was there more to come out? Another aide advised Colby to call the president, who was then on board Air Force One en route to a ski vacation at Vail, and fill him in. In due course, Colby had the White House operator put him through. As explicitly as he could over an unsecure circuit, the DCI attempted to bring Ford up to speed. “Mr. President,” he said, “on the story in the Times this morning I want to assure you that nothing comparable to the article’s allegations is going on in the Agency at this time.” The material in the Hersh article was a distortion, and “all misdeeds of the past had been corrected in 1973.” Ford thanked him and asked for a report. Upon landing at Vail, the president was besieged by reporters badgering him for comment on the Hersh article. He merely repeated what Colby had told him—that the Agency was not currently engaged in domestic spying or illegal activities of any other kind. He had asked Kissinger as his national security adviser to secure a report on the matter from the DCI.30
The White House was understandably stunned that this was the first it had heard of the “family jewels.” When asked about the omission later, Colby said, “I never really thought about it. . . . I think I didn’t think of it because Schlesinger was still in charge, and he didn’t think of it. I asked him about it one time and he said something to the effect that, ‘Oh, hell, with that bunch of characters down there.’ So it was almost as though he had made a decision not to brief them.”31 Once he was in the saddle, Colby declared, he kept treating the issue as an internal matter. That the thought of briefing the president’s men never crossed the DCI’s mind is doubtful. He was dealing initially with the Nixon White House, which was in the process of trying to shift the blame for Watergate to the CIA, and during both the Nixon and Ford administrations with a national security adviser who was determined to marginalize the Agency. Why give the enemy bullets with which to fire at you?
By December 24 Colby had his report ready. It hit the high points of Operation MH/Chaos and then noted that the break-ins, surveillance of US citizens, and electronic bugs cited in Hersh’s article had nothing to do with MH/Chaos. The report went on to describe those operations and attempted to justify them. “There are certain other matters in the history of the Agency which are subject to question,” Colby warned.32
The cover letter and report had to go to Kissinger first. As soon as he received a copy, the national security adviser/secretary of state summoned the DCI. Colby had heard through the grapevine that Kissinger had been extremely critical of him—“making caustic comments about me,” as Colby put it—for the previous two days. Kissinger was afraid of being linked to the Huston Plan for illegal spying on domestic “radicals” and to Allende’s overthrow in Chile. As soon as the Hersh story broke, he had contacted Helms in Tehran using a backchannel. “This is an issue that’s not going away,” Kissinger declared, and ordered Helms home from Iran to help with damage control. Both men were convinced that Colby was Hersh’s primary and only source.33
What else is there? Kissinger asked Colby. Colby handed him a document summarizing the family jewels. The CIA was linked to various assassination plots, especially the conspiracy to kill Castro, which also involved contacts with the Mafia. There were drug experiments on Americans, the Agency’s involvement in the Huston Plan, and Angleton’s imprisonment and torture of Yuri Nosenko. Kissinger thumbed through the report hurriedly, Colby recalled, but when he came to the section on assassinations, he stopped and read. Their meeting over, Kissinger hand-carried Colby’s report to Ford in Colorado. “I have discussed these activities [the ‘certain other matters’ mentioned in Colby’s cover letter] with him, and must tell you that some few of them clearly were illegal, while others—though not technically illegal—raise profound moral questions,” he memoed Ford. “A number, while neither illegal nor morally unsound, demonstrated very poor judgment.”34
Bill and Barbara had planned a family ski trip to Pennsylvania during the Christmas holidays, but in view of the emerging crisis over the Hersh article and the family jewels, Bill had opted to stay behind in Washington. He anticipated being summoned to Vail to be part of the team that was strategizing over damage control. What he hoped, he recalled in his memoir, was that the president would release his report verbatim—he had made sure that all of the material in it was declassified—and that it would stand as the administration’s defense. But that was not to be; nor was Colby to be included in the decisionmaking process. The two things were related.
In Vail, Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, his assistant, decided on a cours
e of action. They considered doing as Colby wished, releasing the report and thus making it the White House’s own. But that would saddle the Ford administration with the sins of past administrations. The president and his advisers decided to name an “independent Blue Ribbon Panel” composed of distinguished Americans and chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate past CIA misdeeds and recommend reforms.35
Meanwhile, Colby grew increasingly uneasy. “The silence from there [Vail] was deafening,” he later observed. The Ford administration was circling the wagons, and apparently he was to be left outside to deal with the hostiles by himself. “I felt very lonely,” he recalled. “I decided that if I would have to fight the problem out alone, I at least would be free to use my strategy to save intelligence and not have to defer to every tactical move concocted in the White House.”36
The die was cast.
18
DANCING WITH HENRY
Henry Kissinger’s and Bill Colby’s frames of reference and modi operandi could not have been more different. Kissinger, the academic turned diplomat, was secretive when he did not have to be, trusting only himself and a few subordinates. He was a master at deception, loved complexity for complexity’s sake, and cared little about legal or constitutional niceties. Kissinger was skilled at acquiring and exploiting the influence he gained through personal relationships and cultivation of the media. Philosophically, he was a conservative internationalist with a Metternichian commitment to realpolitik. Like Metternich, the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation, he tended to confuse stability with the status quo. Colby was relatively simple by contrast—not simple-minded, but straightforward—often to a fault. He preferred friendship and trust in acquiring assets rather than threats and blackmail. He loved the clandestine world and covert operations because of the opportunity they provided for creativity. Colby was a liberal internationalist with all of the missionary baggage that went with the philosophy.
Colby’s son John described his father’s mindset well: “Up to 1973, [he] was less an intelligence professional than a special ops, covert action kind of guy. Here’s a mission; go do it.” First it was the Nazis, then the communists. In Italy he knew what to do, what was right. In Vietnam, the situation was murkier, but he pressed ahead. The problems he faced as DCI were more complicated. “In each case,” John observed, “he looked at the situation, at his values and his perception of the national interest, and acted. If he believed in the value of intelligence and covert action—which he did all his life—then he was going to act to preserve it.”1
Protecting the national security when confronted by totalitarian regimes bent on world domination meant frequently choosing the lesser of two evils—the Ngo brothers and Thieu over Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Sukarno over the PKI in Indonesia, Pinochet over Allende in Chile. In a perfect world, it was the responsibility of Americans and others who enjoyed the blessings of constitutional government, the rule of law, and respect for individual rights to take action to prevent gross abuses of human rights. He would throughout his life speak out against ethnic cleansing, whether it involved Nazi crimes against the Jews and Gypsies or Serbian campaigns against Balkan Muslims. He spoke of “an international conscience” and the duty of the international community to take action “even by overstepping longstanding prohibitions against intervening in the offending nation’s ‘internal affairs.’” The notion of an “international conscience” was, of course, absolutely foreign to Henry Kissinger.2
In Honorable Men, Colby claimed that during the Christmas holidays, while he was cooling his heels at Langley, Larry Silberman called him in. The deputy attorney general, who had acted as a go-between for Colby with Hersh during the Glomar Explorer episode, said that he had read the original New York Times article. “What else have you boys got tucked away up your sleeves?” he is said to have asked the DCI. Colby told him what he had told the president. “Tell me, did you turn over that list [the family jewels] to the Justice Department?” Silberman asked. After Colby said no, Silberman advised him that in withholding information concerning possible illegal action, the DCI himself was open to prosecution for obstruction of justice.3
The meeting may or may not have taken place. What is certain is that on December 31, Colby and CIA general counsel John Warner paid a visit to Silberman’s office. According to Silberman, it was Colby who contacted him, not vice versa. Colby began by describing the management style of Richard Helms—based on “compartmentation”—comparing it to spokes on a wheel with Helms as the hub. Much had transpired in the Agency without the left hand knowing what the right was doing. Colby then summarized the “family jewels,” including Operation MH/Chaos and other activities mandated by Ehrlichman, Huston, and their underlings; the Nosenko imprisonment; various wiretaps and break-ins; “personal surveillances” of Jack Anderson and other journalists; the mail-intercept program; the testing of experimental drugs on unwitting persons; and the fact that the CIA had “plotted” the assassination of foreign leaders, including Castro, Trujillo, and Lumumba.4
By January 3, 1975, Ford, Kissinger, and their staffs were back from Vail and ready to move on the family jewels matter. By this point, the White House had in its collective hands a report from Silberman on his meeting with Colby. He informed the president that the Justice Department had not yet decided “whether any of the items are prosecutable or appropriate for prosecution.” The president should also be aware that as a result of another report from DCI Colby, former director Richard Helms might be indicted for perjury. Therefore, the White House should either avoid discussing possible CIA misdeeds with Helms or read him his rights if it did.5
At noon, President Ford, with Philip Buchen, counsel to the president, and Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger’s deputy, met with former DCI and now secretary of defense James Schlesinger to discuss strategy. Schlesinger endorsed the decision to distance the White House from the Colby report and to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate possible CIA wrongdoing. At 5:30 P.M. it was finally Colby’s turn to meet with Ford, Scowcroft, and Buchen. “I think we have a 25-year-old institution which has done some things it shouldn’t have,” he began. He went over the charges in Hersh’s article and then discussed some others, but not all the items on the “skeletons list,” as he termed the family jewels. “We have run operations to assassinate foreign leaders,” he declared. “We have never succeeded.” Then, “A defector we suspected of being a double agent we kept confined for three years.” The president pressed him to say who approved the various shady operations. Some occurred under the leadership of Dulles and Mc-Cone, but most were during Helms’s watch and carried out by James Angleton and Richard Ober, the man in charge of Operation MH/Chaos, he said. Ford then instructed his DCI as to how the matter would be handled. First, the CIA would be told publicly to obey the law; second, the president would announce the formation of a panel of luminaries to investigate past misdeeds. And he would suggest that Congress establish a joint committee to carry out its own investigation. Meeting over.6
The following day found Kissinger in high dudgeon. “What is happening is worse than in the days of McCarthy,” he exclaimed to Ford and Scowcroft. “He [Colby] has turned over to the FBI the whole of his operation. Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. . . . What Colby has done is a disgrace.” It was his own blood that Kissinger was worried about. “The Chilean thing—that is not in any report,” he noted, but that was because Colby was going to use it to “blackmail” him. Should he fire the DCI? Ford asked. Not until the investigation was over, Kissinger said, and then the president should move in someone of “towering integrity.”7
Shortly afterward, Ford met with Helms, who had flown back from Tehran. The president assured him of his admiration. “I automatically assume what you did was right, unless it’s proved otherwise,” he told the man who kept the secrets. Helms declared that “a lot of dead cats will come out,” and if they did, he would sling some of his own. Still later in the
day, Ford met with Rockefeller to discuss the makeup of the blue-ribbon panel. Kissinger, who had once advised Rockefeller when he was governor of New York and had benefited enormously from his patronage, was present at this meeting. “Colby has gone to Silberman not only with his report but with numerous other allegations,” Ford told Rockefeller. “At your request?” the latter asked. “Without my knowledge,” the president responded. “Colby must be brought under control,” Kissinger interjected.8
On January 6, the White House announced the formation of what became known as the Rockefeller Commission. The body included, in addition to the vice president, California governor Ronald Reagan; former secretary of commerce John T. Connor; retired army general Lyman Lemnitzer; Edgar F. Shannon Jr., a former president of the University of Virginia; former Treasury secretary Douglas Dillon; the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland; and former solicitor general Erwin A. Griswold. Ford, who had served on the Warren Commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding JFK’s assassination, suggested David W. Belin, Warren’s assistant counsel, as executive director of the commission’s staff. It was a suggestion that he and Kissinger would live to regret.
The Rockefeller Commission’s charge was carefully drawn, its charter limited to probing the CIA’s alleged misdeeds in the domestic arena—Operation MH/Chaos, the mail-intercept program, and spying on journalists. Colby did not say so at the time, but he recognized that the Rockefeller Commission would not suffice. “The atmosphere in the nation had far too radically changed—in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate—for the Executive Branch to get away . . . with keeping the cloak-and-dagger world of intelligence strictly its own prerogative and affair,” he subsequently wrote.9
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