One Saturday morning in the early fall of 1975, Bill Colby, accompanied by two dark-suited security men, entered the back of a George Washington University auditorium. The distinguished classicist Bernard Knox, one of Colby’s Jedburgh comrades-in-arms, was lecturing on Sophocles’ Antigone. The title character was a young woman, the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, who defied the edict of her uncle, King Creon, by burying the body of her brother, who had led an enemy assault on his own city-state. In her eyes, she had done the honorable thing, but Creon condemned her to death. The gods sided with Antigone and reproached Creon. He, in turn, repented and went to free Antigone from prison, only to find that she had committed suicide. Creon’s son, Haemon, who was in love with Antigone, then killed himself upon discovering her body. So, too, did his mother, appalled by the injustice of it all. The name Antigone was interpreted by many scholars to mean “unbending.” You picked the appropriate lecture to attend, Knox remarked to his old friend after class. “Oh, I knew what you were going to talk about,” Colby replied.40
On the evening of October 31, 1975, on CBS Evening News, Daniel Schorr revealed that the CIA, earlier in the year, with the Shah of Iran’s approval, had been running a covert operation to help Kurdish tribesmen in their rebellion against the Iraqi government. “The operation had been described to the Pike committee only a few days before,” Colby wrote in Honorable Men, “so there was very little doubt in any one’s mind where the press had got hold of it.”41 The next morning, he went by the White House to discuss with Jack Marsh and others stratagems for keeping the Church Committee from issuing its report on assassinations and to commiserate over the irresponsibility of the Pike Committee. Shortly thereafter, Colby caught a plane for Jacksonville, Florida, where he was to discuss intelligence matters with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Sadat was so enthralled with journalist Barbara Walters, however, that Colby never got his audience.
When Colby returned to Washington that night, there was a message from Marsh waiting for him. He was to be at the White House at 8:00 sharp the next morning. When he arrived, the West Wing was deserted; there was no sign of the foreign policy team Colby had expected to see. He was ushered into the Oval Office. As soon as Ford mentioned his intention to shake up his national security team, Colby realized that his tenure as DCI was over. He immediately offered his resignation. Ford accepted it and offered Colby the post of ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He said he would have to talk to Barbara. Ford confided that he was bringing George H. W. Bush back from China, where he was serving as ambassador, to run the Agency.
On his way out, Colby ran into James Schlesinger going in. He wasn’t the only one being fired that day. Kissinger and Ford had had enough of the defense secretary’s plotting against SALT II and his criticism of détente. The press later referred to the twin firings as the “Halloween Massacre.” To undercut speculation that he was nothing more than Kissinger’s lap dog, Ford announced that he was relieving Kissinger of his duties as national security adviser, though he would still be secretary of state. Kissinger’s replacement would be Brent Scowcroft, his longtime deputy.
The first thing Bill did was call Barbara. The couple was scheduled to attend Mass at a Benedictine church where their sons had gone to school; instead, they received Communion at the parish church nearest their house and then began calling family and friends to break the news. Jenonne Walker later said that Colby knew from the outset of the family jewels crisis that he could not survive as DCI. Nevertheless, he was hurt and angry. “There goes twenty-five years just like that,” he remarked to his wife when he arrived home. “He was pissed,” Christine Colby, who was still in high school, later recalled.42
Bill and Barbara quickly decided that the NATO job was a dead end. He had the White House operator patch him through to Air Force One and so informed Ford, who was on his way to Miami for a dinner with Sadat. Dan Schorr called to check whether rumors he had heard of the twin firings were true. They were, Colby replied. “Colby, on the phone,” Schorr subsequently wrote, “sounds as shaken as I’ve ever heard him.” Late in the day, the Colbys paid a visit to the Schlesingers to commiserate. The newly ousted defense chief smiled at Bill and remarked, “It looks like Dick Helms outlasted both of us.”43
Colby’s firing precipitated a minor firestorm on Capitol Hill. Church called a press conference and, his voice quavering, declared that the decision to dismiss the DCI was just another part of a Watergate-style cover-up. “There seems to be a whole pattern developing of trying to thwart the committee’s work and suppress its findings.” At the time, the Church Committee was preparing its report on assassinations, and the White House was pulling every string to see that it was not made public. Church told reporters that there was no chance that the document would be suppressed. Other critics accused Ford of trying to politicize the CIA’s top spot. Wasn’t the president ignoring “the requirement that this be a non-partisan position?” a reporter subsequently asked White House press secretary Ronald Nessen, pointing out that George Bush was a former chair of the Republican National Committee.44
Kissinger and Ford had not thought matters out very well. It would be weeks, if not months, before Bush was ready to take over at Langley. Ford was scheduled to make a four-day visit to Beijing in December, and he wanted no changing of the guard at the American embassy there until after his trip. Even after Bush returned home, it would take time to have him confirmed. If Colby departed immediately, Vernon Walters would become acting DCI. The confrontations between the executive branch and the select committees were reaching a climax, and the White House did not want a man who had been tainted by the Watergate scandal to be chief spokesman for the intelligence community. According to Colby, it was Vernon Walters who pointed out the dilemma to the White House. This was probably not the case, but Walters did act as a go-between during the ensuing negotiations. Colby said he would agree to stay on, but he was scheduled to testify before various committees for at least the next six weeks, and he did not intend to be a mere pawn. Walters conveyed the message, and on Wednesday, November 5, Ford called Colby to the Oval Office once again.
Gracious as always, Colby took the initiative. “Mr. President, I don’t want to make this in any way difficult. I am fully prepared to stay on until George Bush can get here, but the DCI serves at the pleasure of the President. In order to be effective he must have the President’s full authority to act.” Ford readily concurred and asked Colby if he wanted him to put it in writing. Colby said no. In his subsequent press release announcing that Colby would stay on, the president emphasized that during this period the DCI would act with “the full authority” of the President.45
The Halloween Massacre unfolded in the midst of the Ford administration’s increasingly frantic effort to block publication of the Church Committee’s report on assassinations, an effort in which Bill Colby played a leading role. On October 21, Colby had written to Ford arguing that release of the report would do irreparable damage to the foreign policy of the United States and threaten “the lives and livelihood of a number of officers of this Agency.”
The Church Committee document examined in detail five alleged CIA plots to assassinate foreign leaders, in some cases naming names and in others re-creating scenarios that would enable foreign intelligence agencies to easily identify individuals. If the Church Committee were allowed to publish the results of the assassination investigation and its related probe into covert action, the CIA would in the future find it almost impossible to persuade citizens of foreign countries to cooperate with it, the DCI said. Some ten days later, Colby and Kissinger refused to testify at a public hearing that the Senate select committee had scheduled on Chile. Frustrated, Church reminded the White House that it was the president who had ordered the Rockefeller Commission’s assassination materials to be turned over to the Senate committee. Yes, Ford replied, but not with the intention of having them made public. On November 2, just hours before Colby’s firing, the Church Committee voted unanim
ously to approve the assassination report. But when members balked at making it public, Church threatened to resign. The committee then compromised by deciding to let the Senate as a whole decide.46
On November 19, Colby held only the second open press conference by a DCI in the CIA’s history. He outlined the dire consequences to follow if the assassination report was released. Behind the scenes, the Agency pleaded for the deletion of eleven names. The committee agreed to only one—Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had been involved in the preparation of the poison designed to do away with Lumumba—but only because he had gone to court. Schorr learned the identity of some of the people whom Colby had hoped to shield from exposure, among them Robert Maheu and Johnny Roselli. “When you work with the Mafia and promise to try to protect them,” Schorr observed in his diary, “I guess you have to go down the line with them.” On the 20th in a closed-door session, the Senate refused to block the assassination report’s release, but it would not approve its publication, either. That same day, on his own authority, Church released the results of the investigation, nine months after Dan Schorr had reported on the matter and six months after the Rockefeller Commission had suppressed its conclusions.47
The Church Committee’s interim report on assassinations cleared the CIA of killing anyone, but it found that the Agency had tried and failed to assassinate Castro at least eight times, employing everything from toxic diving suits to syringes disguised as ballpoint pens. It also found that the CIA had acquired and dispatched an unnamed “lethal substance”—poisoned toothpaste—to the Congo to be used to eliminate Patrice Lumumba, but his enemies had killed him before US operatives could execute their plan. In three other cases, the CIA had encouraged the murders of foreign leaders—Rafael Trujillo, General René Schneider, and Salvador Allende—but was not complicit in their deaths. Washington had facilitated the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, but did not advocate his assassination. But who was more to blame, the presidents or the CIA “rogue elephant”? The report equivocated.48
Shortly after releasing the report, Church filed papers with the Federal Election Commission to create an “exploratory” Church for President Committee. In February 1976, President Ford would issue an executive order—“Restrictions on Intelligence Activities”—declaring, “No employee of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” In a 1978 Playboy interview, Bill Colby would observe that the Ugandan people would be morally justified in assassinating their brutal ruler, Idi Amin, and that if asked, the CIA would be justified in aiding such an effort.49
Meanwhile, the White House and the CIA had asked that they be allowed to review a draft of the Pike Committee report prior to its release. When it arrived the last week in October, President Ford and his advisers were appalled. The document was a litany of CIA failures substantiated by the Agency’s postmortems, but without any mention of the spy agency’s successes. More ominously, it contained specific information on covert operations in Iraq, Angola, and Italy. Shortly thereafter, portions of the report began leaking, and in the days that followed the trickle became a deluge. In a speech to the United States Navy League in October 1975, Colby asked rhetorically, “Is our intelligence to become mere theatre? Will it be exposed in successive re-runs for the amusement, or even amazement, of our people rather than being preserved and protected for the benefit of us all?”50
Even as leaks about the Pike Committee’s report were occurring, it issued subpoenas for new material, including intelligence reports on the Soviet Union, Portugal, and the Cyprus crisis; decision memoranda of the 40 Committee; and documents on Russian compliance with nuclear arms control agreements. Both Colby and Kissinger dug in their heels, and on November 16, Ford claimed executive privilege. On that same day, the House select committee voted 10–2 to cite Kissinger for contempt of Congress. Ford’s advisers told the president that they were not at all sure that the White House would win in the courts, and Kissinger, though likely to win, did not want to risk a contempt vote in the House. Ford proposed a compromise—a State Department official would read from the subpoenaed documents, but they would not be made available to committee members directly. Pike quickly accepted. His committee was deeply divided, and he sensed that the support he had in the House as a whole was crumbling. Then came the crowning blow.51
On December 23, 1975, Richard S. Welch, the CIA’s chief of station in Athens, and his wife attended a Christmas party hosted by Ambassador Jack Kubisch. Both men were new to their jobs, two of the most difficult US posts in the world. In 1967, a group of neo-fascist colonels had staged a coup and seized power in Greece. They installed George Papadopoulos, who had been on the CIA payroll off and on since the 1950s, as president. Relations between Washington and Athens were cold during the Johnson administration but improved dramatically under Nixon. By 1973, the United States was the only nation in the developed world on friendly terms with the junta, which regularly jailed and tortured its political foes. By the time Welch and his family arrived, anti-American sentiment in Athens was reaching a fever pitch. Ever since the Agency had first established a presence in Athens, the chief of station had lived rather conspicuously in the same large house. “I had made arrangements for him to go into a different residence and to live in a different part of town, to try and help conceal who he was and to give him some cover,” Kubisch later said. Welch refused. When the Christmas party at the ambassador’s house broke up, the chief of station and his wife drove the few blocks to their CIA villa in the fashionable suburb of Palaio Psychiko. Parked in their driveway was a small car containing four people. Three got out, pulled Welch from his auto, and shot him three times in the chest with a .45. This was the first assassination of a station chief in the history of the Agency.52
Welsh’s murder made the front page of newspapers across the United States. In still another press conference, Colby praised Welch and implied that he was a victim of the anti-CIA hysteria that was gripping the nation. More specifically, he pointed the finger at Counterspy, the magazine of an organization called The Fifth Estate. Among its members were disgruntled former CIA employees, including Philip Agee, as well as a number of anti-Vietnam War activists. In its winter 1974–1975 issue, Counterspy had listed Welch as the CIA chief of station at Lima, Peru. The magazine, whose chief financial angel was author Norman Mailer, was hardly repentant. “If anyone is to blame for Mr. Welch’s death,” the publication declared, “it is the CIA that sent him to Greece to spy and intervene in the affairs of the Greek people.” Soon afterward, Counterspy’s winter 1975–1976 issue hit the stands. It quoted Agee as saying, “The most effective and important systematic efforts to combat the CIA that can be undertaken right now are . . . the identification, exposure, and neutralization of its people working abroad.”53
Welch was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on January 6, 1976. Ford, Kissinger, and Colby attended. “The funeral was a rare and glittering tableau of the American national security establishment,” wrote Laurence Stern in the Washington Post, “with several generations of diplomats and spies gathered on the grassy slopes of Arlington to pay tribute to Welch and the institution he served.” “Welch in death may have started the rollback that President Ford, Secretary Kissinger and the whole CIA seemed unable to accomplish,” Daniel Schorr commented on CBS Nightly News. In 2002 a member of the radical Marxist organization 17 November (or 17N, for the date of an uprising in 1973) confessed to playing a role in Welch’s murder and named his accomplices. But the statute of limitations had run out.54
On January 15, President Ford, riding the backlash that followed in the wake of Welch’s murder, wrote Otis Pike, forbidding him to publish the details of various CIA covert operations. Colby called on the chairman to observe the terms of the “Colby compromise,” but Pike insisted that it applied only to the release of specific documents, not to the committee’s final report. With the committee’s mandate set to expire on January 31, its staffers and a CIA team headed by Mitchell Ro
govin negotiated frantically over specific deletions. Pike accepted some Agency redactions but rejected 150 others. The House select committee approved its report on January 23, but on the 29th the chamber as a whole voted 246–124 against releasing the document.55
By then, however, much of what was in the report had already leaked to the press. On February 13, the Village Voice published the results of the Pike investigation in their entirety. It listed the CIA’s six most conspicuous “failures,” released material on the 40 Committee that proved decidedly unspectacular, and dealt with some ongoing CIA covert operations. Ironically, the Pike report was an indictment of the presidency rather than the CIA. In his testimony before the committee, in an effort to deflect attention from himself, Kissinger had given the coup de grace to plausible deniability when he declared that every single covert operation carried out in recent years had been approved by the White House. “All evidence in hand,” the committee report declared, “suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the assistant to the president for National Security Affairs.” It was soon revealed that the source for the Village Voice article was Daniel Schorr. CBS immediately fired him, and the House subsequently cited him for contempt.56
There were those within and without the media who took the position that the family jewels flap was a product of post-Watergate journalism. “Had Seymour Hersh not written his CIA domestic surveillance stories for The New York Times in December 1974 (indeed, had not The Times seen fit to splash the first story across five columns of page one headlined ‘Massive Surveillance’),” wrote Timothy Hardy, a Rockefeller Commission staffer, “there seems little doubt that there never would have been a Rockefeller Commission, a Pike ‘Report,’ a Church committee. . . . Hersh, and Hersh alone, caused the President, and then Congress . . . to make intelligence a major issue of 1975.”57
Shadow Warrior Page 58