On June 5, the White House discussed what in the Rockefeller Commission report should be released and what should not. Belin and his staff pushed strongly for inclusion of the assassination material: “The omission of these findings will be viewed as a cover-up and will cast doubt upon the rest of the report.” But Kissinger was adamant in his opposition to any mention in the report of plans to kill foreign leaders. A presidential commission admitting to assassination plots would be a disaster for US foreign policy, he declared. “Not since I have been here,” he said, “has there been anything even thought of. There was the killing of the Chilean Chief of Staff, but we had dissociated from that group when we heard they were plotting to kidnap him.” The assassinations were a “phenomenon of the Kennedys,” he asserted, and advised Ford to “cover-up a little for Kennedy.” Ford was persuaded. “I am not going to second guess my predecessors,” he declared. “If Church wants to, let him. The Kennedys will get him.”4
The report of the Rockefeller Commission was released on June 10. To the surprise of many observers, it was not a whitewash. The Times editorial board called the report “a trenchant, factual and plain-spoken document.” “The Rockefeller Report is in,” declared Newsweek, “and [it] found the agency guilty of nearly every serious allegation against it.” There was nothing, however, on assassinations. “The Commission staff began the required inquiry,” the document said, “but time did not permit a full investigation before this report was due.” At a press conference the day before the release, President Ford announced that he was ordering all of the commission’s assassination materials turned over to the Church Committee.5
Perhaps the most sensational family jewel exposed by the Rockefeller Commission was that concerning the drug experiments the CIA had conducted on individuals without their knowledge or permission in the 1950s. On July 17, a week after the commission issued its report, the surviving family of Dr. Frank Olson notified Colby that it was filing a wrongful-death suit against the Agency. Olson, a biochemist, had been a civilian employee of the US Army working on a cooperative effort with the CIA at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The task assigned to the team was to investigate the effects of mind-altering drugs on human behavior. On November 19, 1953, CIA personnel slipped a large dose of LSD into the drinks of Olson and other members of the group without their knowledge. By the time he was informed some twenty minutes later, Olson was hallucinating—experiencing “side-effects,” as the CIA report on the matter termed them. He was rushed to New York for treatment by Dr. Harold Abramson, “a consultant to the agency on drug-related matters.” Abramson prescribed hospitalization, but before Olson could be admitted, the terrified biochemist crashed through the closed window of his upper-floor hotel room and plunged to his death.
The CIA general counsel subsequently ruled that Olson had died from “circumstances arising out of an experiment undertaken in the course of his official duties for the U.S. Government.” From 1953 through 1975, the family received survivor’s benefits, but his family was never told the truth concerning his death. Colby recalled that he knew of a fatality connected to the drug research program, but he was “shocked and shamed” to learn of the circumstances. President Ford met with the family at the White House and issued a public apology. Colby followed suit and at the president’s direction had the CIA’s lawyers settle the family’s claims. The press pounced on the story.6
In the early summer of 1975, in anticipation of his private confrontation with the White House over whether to cooperate with Congress, as well as his public one with the Church and Nedzi Committees over which CIA activities should be kept secret and which should not, Colby hired a personal lawyer. His choice was inspired—Mitchell Rogovin of the powerhouse Arnold and Porter law firm in Washington. The genius of the selection was that Rogovin had made his name as a civil liberties lawyer; for the previous twenty-five years, he had waged an almost constant war against the political establishment. A good friend of journalist Seymour Hersh, Rogovin had helped Common Cause successfully sue the Committee to Reelect the President, forcing the disclosure of Richard Nixon’s campaign financing schemes. When John Warner, CIA’s chief counsel, contacted Rogovin, he was representing the Institute for Policy Studies in its suit against former Nixon administration officials, including Kissinger, for wiretapping. Larry Silberman, whom Colby consulted, thoroughly approved: “Bill wanted a Democratic lawyer. He was a savvy operator.” Rogovin was struck with Colby’s sincerity; it seemed to him that the DCI was battling a corrupt political establishment, that Colby genuinely wanted an intelligence agency that conformed to the Constitution and obeyed the law. Throughout the summer and fall, the short, stocky forty-four-year-old attorney would be constantly at the DCI’s side, advising him and mediating between him and committee staffs.7
On May 13, 1975, Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger met with Colby to set the ground rules for dealing with the Church Committee. Kissinger quoted Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson: “The golden word of intelligence is silence. More can be lost by saying too much, too soon, than by saying too little, too slowly.” In regard to past covert actions, the DCI should brief Church and Tower only in order to get them to appreciate the extreme sensitivity of much of the information. The purpose of this initial limited briefing “will be to induce the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member to impose limitations on the further investigation of the subjects covered.”The national security adviser seemed oblivious to the fact that most of the cat was already out of the bag.8
Colby made his first appearance before the Church Committee on May 21. “All the questions were on assassination and it was like ‘when did you stop beating your wife,’” he subsequently reported to the White House. He tried to put covert action in historical context, he said, and pointed out how little the Agency had been involved in would-be assassinations. He had pressed the committee to acknowledge “the delicacy of the problem,” but had had no luck. One of the members had asked Colby if the Agency killed its own, referring to the Green Beret incident in Vietnam in which a double agent had been murdered in cold blood. No, the DCI had replied, noting that President Ford had given strict orders to the federal government to have nothing to do with assassinations. Church had wound up the proceedings by observing that what was needed was a law prohibiting the killing of foreign leaders in peacetime. Those in the Oval Office were stunned. “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation,” Kissinger interjected during a meeting with Scowcroft and Schlesinger, “to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassinations.”9
As the Church Committee hearings got underway, the CIA’s reputation was approaching its nadir. A 1975 Gallup Poll registered an approval rating for the Agency of only 14 percent. Among college students, who constituted the Agency’s prime recruiting pool, the figure stood at 7 percent.10 But the US Senate was far from unanimous in its views on America’s spies and their handlers. There were conservatives on both sides of the congressional aisle, such as Barry Goldwater and John Stennis, who continued to see the CIA as one of the nation’s primary weapons in the ongoing struggle against international communism. Once they recognized that both Democratic and Republican presidents would be tarred with the assassination brush, mainstream politicians like Howard Baker (R-TN) and Church himself began to advocate restraint.
In addition, many of the most strident antiwar activists—those who had previously denounced the CIA as an instrument of the imperial presidency—were enthusiastic supporters of détente. Some, such as J. William Fulbright, had been captivated by Henry Kissinger and the openings to Moscow and Beijing. The two men developed what Fulbright thought was a personal as well as a professional relationship. Early on, Kissinger had cultivated the Foreign Relations Committee chair by showing deference to his views and appearing to confide in him. Thus it was that Fulbright, the author of The Arrogance of Power, published a 1975 article in the Columbia Journalism Review urging journalists to abandon what he called their “inquisition psychology.” What t
he American people required, he wrote, was “restored stability and confidence.” The accusations against the CIA might be true, “but I have come to feel of late that these are not the kind of truths we most need now,” he added.11
In contrast to the Senate, the House was not interested in reform but rather sought a “thorough housecleaning” of agencies that had violated the law. The House Select Committee on Intelligence (different from the permanent subcommittee that Lucien Nedzi chaired) included five harsh critics of the CIA, including the ubiquitous Michael Harrington, three hardline defenders, and only one moderate. House Speaker Carl Albert named as chairman of the committee Otis Pike, a conservative Democrat and longtime representative of his Long Island district. Rather than being sanctimonious like Church, Pike was irreverent; he was also abrasive and confrontational. There was in him, however, a genuine concern that over the years Congress had gradually ceded its prerogatives to the executive branch, thus making abuses such as Watergate possible. Under his leadership, the House committee decided to focus on the answers to three questions: How much did the intelligence community cost the taxpayer? How effective was it? And what risks did its activities pose to the constitutional and political health of the country? Colby would view the Pike Committee with deep suspicion, sensing, as he later wrote, that the majority was determined to do a “hatchet job on the Agency.”12
Harrington and Pike were not the only openly hostile House members that Colby had to deal with. Twice, on March 5 and then again on June 25, the DCI was called before the Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, chaired by the flamboyant and iconoclastic congresswoman from New York, Bella Abzug. Abzug had discovered that the CIA had included her name in its reports from Paris about visitors to the Vietnamese communist delegation, and she was furious. Colby had to endure a “day-long tongue-lashing,” he later recalled, but kept his composure and held his ground. At one point he told Abzug “that if she visited such people abroad [North Vietnamese], such enemies of the United States, there was no way that I was going to keep her name out of our records.” When Abzug declared at the second session that she had the right to call and compel testimony from anyone she chose, Colby quietly responded that she did not, and he would fight any effort to compromise the Agency’s sources and methods.13
During the summer and fall of 1975, the DCI was forced to visit the Hill several times a week to testify. His colleagues marveled at his equanimity. “He looked like he had just been home for lunch and a nap,” Deputy Director Vernon Walters remarked after one particularly contentious session. “Bill Colby could be doing a talk show on television with a mad dog chewing his leg off under the table and you would never know it,” remarked longtime friend Stan Temko. In a 1976 interview with Colby, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked, “What could shake your icy imperturbability? You never do show your emotions, do you?”
“I am not emotional,” he replied. “I admit it. Just a few things bother me. For instance . . . when I was nominated and some people put posters around Washington. . . . They called me a murderer. And my children had to live with that. But it didn’t really bother me. Oh, don’t watch me like that. You’re looking for something underneath which isn’t there. It’s all here on the surface, believe me.”14
While the House tried to get itself in order, the Church Committee honed in on the assassination issue. It was the most sensational of the family jewels and the one most certain to garner headlines day after day. But the members of the committee immediately sensed a minefield. Both Democratic and Republican administrations were implicated. Idealists worried that the public’s faith in the presidency and the federal government in general—already weakened by Vietnam and Watergate—would be further eroded. The simplest thing to do was to blame the Agency rather than the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon White Houses.
The concept of plausible deniability proved convenient to the task. This was a catch-22 that allowed the leaders of the intelligence community to shield political leaders from potentially embarrassing operations. Plausible deniability was one of the reasons why Eisenhower had set up the 5412 Group in 1955. That body, which morphed into the 303 Committee and then the 40 Committee in 1970, served the purpose of preserving the president’s deniability while maintaining some White House control over Agency operations.15 In this regard, there was a telling exchange between Republican senator Charles Mathias of Maryland and Richard Helms during the latter’s testimony before the Church Committee:
“Let me draw an example from history,” Mathias offered. “When Thomas Becket was proving to be an annoyance, as Castro, the King said who will rid me of this man. He didn’t say to somebody, go out and murder him.”
“That is a warming reference to the problem,” Helms replied.
“You feel that spans the generations and the centuries?”
“I think it does, sir. . . . I think that any of us would have found it very difficult to discuss assassinations with a President of the U.S. . . . We all had the feeling that we’re hired to keep those things out of the Oval Office.”16
Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, and Eisenhower after the downing of the U-2, had refused to hide behind plausible deniability—to the detriment of US foreign policy, some critics said. In his testimony before the Church Committee, Colby took the position that the CIA was and always had been an instrument of the president. He claimed that he had always been opposed to plausible denial and observed that it had become “outmoded and contentious in today’s environment.” Church and his colleagues took the easy way out, however. Following one meeting, Church told the press that the committee had not found any evidence “that would directly link the CIA involvement in this kind of activity with the President of the United States.” The CIA, he subsequently observed, could be compared to a “rogue elephant on a rampage.”17
On June 19, the night before he was to testify before the Church Committee, Sam Giancana, the Mafia figure who had been linked to the CIA plot to assassinate Castro, was murdered. The press went berserk. Senator John Tower (R-TX), who presided over hearings on the 20th, declared: “The committee, of course, notes with interest that Mr. Giancana was done away with.” Colby, who testified later in the day on Phoenix, was cornered by reporters as he left the Capitol building and forced to deny that the CIA had anything to do with the former Mafia boss’s murder.18
In contrast to its Senate counterpart, the Pike Committee was determined to trace CIA wrongdoings directly to the White House and to force a constitutional confrontation if the executive branch did not agree to give up all its secrets to Congress. Though a Democrat, Pike, a World War II bomber pilot and supporter of the Vietnam War, was not a liberal in the George McGovern–Michael Harrington vein. Like Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), he was genuinely concerned with constitutional issues, such as separation of powers and checks and balances. He believed that Congress had failed in its duty to hold the White House accountable for its actions. As the House investigation began, Pike made no secret of the fact that he was convinced that the CIA had committed misdeeds and blunders that it was trying to cover up, and that the cover-up was being aided and abetted by the White House.
In his usual “come, let us reason together” mode, Colby called Pike and set up a meeting to work out ground rules for the upcoming investigation. The DCI quickly learned that, unlike Church and Rockefeller, Pike was not interested in compromise. The CIA had no right to withhold any document from the committee, he informed Colby. He refused to accept a classification system or to compel his staff to sign secrecy agreements. The chairman subsequently told a staff member: “Don’t bring back anything the agencies want you to have; just get what they don’t want you to have.” A few days after their meeting, Pike wrote the DCI a sarcastic letter: “It’s a delight to receive two letters from you not stamped ‘Secret’ on every page. . . . You are concerned with the concept of ‘need to know’ and I am concerned with the concept of ‘right to know.’” Representative James Johnson (R-CO) set the tone f
or the relationship between the committee and the Agency when he told Seymour Bolten, chief of the CIA’s Review Staff (the team Colby had assembled to decide which documents should be provided to Congress), “You, the CIA, are the enemy.” Colby was appalled, particularly because he viewed the committee staff as a “ragtag” collection of “immature and publicity-seeking . . . children.” Deputy Director for Intelligence Edward Proctor recalled that “a Pike committee staffer came to my office to interview me. She had on blue jeans that had been cut off at the calf and shredded, and she was barefoot.” A more neutral observer, Church Committee counsel F.A.O. Schwarz Jr., observed that the Pike staff thought “they alone possessed virtue. They were all true believers.” Colby feared that the Pike Committee would sensationalize at every opportunity and leak like a sieve. His fears were soon borne out.19
To help it prepare for hearings, Langley supplied Pike and his colleagues with a document listing the family jewels. The staff quickly began searching the document for gems that had not already been mined. A nugget, if not a jewel, soon appeared. One of the staffers discovered that over the years the Agency had detailed officers to various other bureaus and departments to act as liaisons. The sole object, Colby wrote in his memoir, was to enable the CIA to learn the ways of sister bureaucracies in order to better cooperate with them. Every agency head was aware of the officer’s mission and identity, he claimed. Nevertheless, in 1973, Colby had issued an order terminating the liaison structure because, in a few “questionable” instances, the officers’ activities “could be construed as involving the Agency in domestic activity [spying].” The wording of Colby’s directive was unfortunate: the CIA “will not develop operations to penetrate another government agency, even with the approval of its leadership.”20
Shadow Warrior Page 56