Shortly after the original Hersh stories appeared, the respected Washington Post investigative reporter Walter Pincus wrote that “no series of news stories since Watergate has had so quick an impact on government, while generating so much discussion among journalists as the Hersh pieces.” Like many other reporters of that time, Pincus had long used CIA personnel as sources of information for news stories; they were usually the best-informed Americans about any particular foreign situation. It was well known that the Agency sometimes solicited and received information from newspeople and used jobs in the industry as cover. Pincus, a friend of Hersh’s, went on to show how Hersh and his editor, A. M. Rosenthal, had manipulated the scarce information they had—and had tricked Bill Colby into confirming information that they did not have—into a story that was at the least exaggerated and then helped prompt an investigation. Indeed, the first solon to demand a congressional probe was Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), whom Hersh had called seeking comments on his initial story. “Like it or not, he [Rosenthal] and his counterpart in The Washington Post are participants,” Pincus declared. “The front page story selections set an agenda for government.” In early 1976, shortly after the Pike report came out, Clare Boothe Luce observed to President Ford, “The press has arrogated to itself the right of secrecy . . . [and] no one else can have it.”58
As George Bush prepared to return to the United States and face confirmation hearings, Colby did everything he could to ease the transition. “We have arranged a suitable office here and will organize secretarial, transportation, etc.,” he cabled Bush, then en route from Beijing. Colby’s own office staff and the Agency’s senior officers would be at his service. “Also certainly would fully brief you on on-going ballgames with Senate and House Select Committees and, of course, the substantive business of intelligence.” Bush replied that it would probably be best for him not to take up residence before his confirmation, but he gladly accepted the offer of consultations. After his arrival, the DCI-designate met almost daily with Colby and the deputy directors. “Bill Colby . . . has been extraordinarily thoughtful to me,” Bush wrote President Ford.59
The Senate confirmed Bush as director on January 28, 1976; two days later, Colby received him and President Ford at Langley. The past and future DCIs were waiting at the entrance to the Agency’s auditorium and greeted Ford as he pulled up in his limousine. The three then entered the great hall, where CIA employees had assembled. Colby began: “Mr. President and Mr. Bush, I have the great honor to present to you an organization of dedicated professionals. Despite the turmoil and tumult of the past year, they continue to produce the best intelligence in the world.” He was treated to a standing ovation.
Following the swearing-in, the three emerged from the auditorium, but instead of accompanying Ford and Bush into the main office building, Colby inconspicuously walked away from them to the visitor’s parking lot, where Barbara’s rather dilapidated Buick Skylark was waiting. Ripples of applause followed him. An unassuming man making an unassuming exit. “It was an ending,” wrote Laurence Stern in the Washington Post, “that would have done justice to George Smiley, the antihero of spy novelist John Le Carre: understated and not without its ironies.”60
Shortly thereafter, journalist Neil Sheehan visited Langley and, viewing the portraits of past directors, was struck by the contrast between the ones of Bill Donovan and Bill Colby. “It was an interesting line . . . from Donovan, the somewhat flamboyant corporation lawyer/general to Colby, the self-effacing servant of the state, dressed in a business suit as Donovan was dressed in a warrior’s garb.”61 In truth, there were far more similarities between Donovan and Colby than differences. Both were warriors and covert operations addicts. And, like Donovan, Colby would remain closely associated with the CIA long after he had officially departed its ranks.
21
EPILOGUE
In the aftermath of his ouster as DCI, Bill Colby’s most immediate concern was how to make a living. He had his pension from the Agency, but that would not suffice. He started a small law firm—Colby, Bailey, Werner & Associates—but also did work for the Washington firm of International Business-Government Counsellors, Inc. (IBC), doing risk analysis, that is, assessing the political stability of various nations on behalf of potential investors. He advised development projects in the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, and did the same for Japanese businesses wanting to invest in the United States. He would write two books and numerous articles. Though it brought him little remuneration, Colby would continue to be involved with his beloved CIA for the remaining twenty years of his life. Indeed, he became a central figure in what one journalist termed “the wars of the CIA,” with Colby at the head of one faction, and James Jesus Angleton and Richard Helms the standard-bearers for the other. The split was personal, but it was also political and ideological, pitting opponents of Soviet-American détente against its supporters, disciples of the counterintelligence culture versus its critics, and political conservatives against liberals.
The chickens of the early Cold War and the Colby-Angleton feud were coming home to roost. In various interviews and speeches, Angleton charged that Colby’s decimation of CI, along with a new emphasis on détente, had opened the door to a horde of KGB agents in the West. Responding to charges by the gossip tabloid National Enquirer that there were no fewer than twenty-three Soviet agents working at the United Nations, Angleton told the Washington Star that “it’s amazing . . . but that’s a characteristic of this whole thing of détente. The Soviets have become very brazen about their spying and the FBI is having trouble keeping an eye on them. I don’t think the FBI even has enough men to keep all KGB agents in this country under surveillance.”1
Then followed two books from the Angleton-Helms camp, one—Orchids for Mother—fiction, and the other—Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald—nonfiction. The first, written by Aaron Latham and published in 1977, featured a CIA novice who was captivated by an Angleton character in all his orchid-growing, fly-fishing, poetry-reading glory. Eccentric though he might have been, the character based on Angleton, Francis Xavier Kimball, was dedicated and prescient, a man able to penetrate the schemes of the KGB. The character representing Colby, Ernest O’Hara, was a colorless bureaucrat, jealous of Kimball, and quite possibly a communist mole. In the climax, Kimball/Angleton set himself up to be assassinated by O’Hara/Colby and his henchmen, revealing the villain for what he was. The second book, Legend, by Edward J. Epstein in 1978, was a study of the Kennedy assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald’s role in it. Epstein got the title from Angleton, who had written that “in the field of intelligence, a legend is an operational plan for a cover, or a cover itself, depending on the mission.” The implication was that Oswald was living a legend at the time he shot Kennedy. He had not really returned from his sojourn in the Soviet Union disillusioned, but was acting as an agent of the KGB.2
According to Epstein’s book, Soviet agents had managed to penetrate both British and American intelligence, including the CIA and the FBI, and flooded the West with pseudo-defectors, including Nosenko, to spread disinformation. The lie of lies was Nosenko’s claim that the KGB had disassociated itself from Lee Harvey Oswald and had had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination. Epstein alleged that at the time Nosenko was telling his story—a tale that Angleton and Golitsin never bought—a Soviet agent operating out of the United Nations (code-named “Fedora”) had vouched for Nosenko with the FBI. Angleton’s man, Golitsin, not Nosenko, was the real defector; it was his version of events, not Nosenko’s, that was true. Epstein’s book ended with the firing of Angleton and most of the counterintelligence staff, and readers were left with the impression that there was a major mole burrowing away within the CIA. In a subsequent interview, Epstein was asked if he thought there was a Soviet spy working within American intelligence. “He hasn’t been caught yet, and it is entirely conceivable that one was planted,” he replied. Did Angleton really know who the mole was? “Angleton refused to say, but o
ne of his ex-staff members,” Epstein said, “told me with a wry smile, ‘You might find out who Colby was seeing in Rome in the early 1950s.’” One reviewer wrote, “Angleton’s point of view fills the book [Legend] just as orchids now fill Epstein’s New York apartment.”3
In 1978, Simon and Schuster published Honorable Men, Colby’s memoir, which he coauthored with Peter Forbath. In it Colby described his life and made the case against Angleton and the whole culture of counterintelligence. A reasonable vigilance for moles was necessary, the former DCI maintained, but in his paranoia Angleton had allowed counterintelligence to paralyze the CIA’s efforts to gather intelligence on what was going on within the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. During the book tour that followed publication, Colby told an interviewer in Atlanta: “The KGB is something to be evaded, not to be mesmerized by. . . . For the CIA and the KGB to chase each other around like two scorpions is of no particular value to anyone.” Angleton was not going to take this lying down. As a result of Colby’s purge of CI, he declared, “there is tremendous [foreign espionage] going on and the bureau [FBI] and agency [CIA] simply do not have the assets in counterintelligence to contain them.” Furthermore, he told a reporter, “the whole Colby ego trip is a hornswoggle on the American public.”4
Thomas Powers, a journalist who was in the midst of writing a laudatory biography of Richard Helms, panned Honorable Men and raised the Colby-as-mole issue again. “Some CIA people” had looked him in the eye and told him, he said, that “Colby’s decisions as Director of Central Intelligence were completely consistent with those one might expect of an enemy agent.” Shortly afterward, Colby remarked ruefully to another interviewer, “Have you heard? . . . The latest story about me is that I’m the ‘mole.’ You know, on the side of the Russians.”5
With Colby and Angleton at pen’s point, the feud became entangled in the burgeoning debate over the SALT II agreement, with Colby siding with the “SALT sellers,” as he put it, and Angleton with the “SALT shakers.”
In January 1977, Jimmy Carter had succeeded to the presidency—having defeated Gerald Ford the previous November—and named Admiral Stansfield Turner to replace George Bush as DCI. Although Turner proceeded to cut Agency personnel by an additional 25 percent, and Langley censors brought suit against Colby for allowing a French edition of Honorable Men to be published without their approval (he agreed to pay a $10,000 fine), Colby got on well with Turner and the Carter administration in general. He was attracted by the White House’s combination of toughness toward the Soviets on the issue of human rights and support for nuclear disarmament. He, like the president, seemed not to be bothered that the first policy impeded progress on the second.
Six days after his inauguration, Carter informed Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev that he was deeply committed to détente. Carter had been an ardent supporter of the 1972 SALT I agreement, which had placed numerical limitations on different types of strategic missiles. The treaty was scheduled to expire in October 1977, and Carter desperately wanted to negotiate a new pact that would go beyond merely maintaining exit levels and mandated cuts. At the same time, the administration issued repeated calls for Moscow to stop persecuting dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov and to allow the free emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel. The Kremlin, of course, regarded the whole human rights campaign as an unwarranted attempt to meddle in Russia’s internal affairs. Despite the ill will arising from Carter’s castigation of Moscow over its treatment of dissidents and Jews, the two sides managed to sign an agreement on June 18, 1979. SALT II was the first nuclear arms treaty that assured real reductions in the strategic nuclear forces of both sides, imposing a maximum of 2,250 weapons. American and Soviet negotiators also agreed to severe restrictions on the development and deployment of American cruise missiles and the Russian Tu-22M “Backfire” bomber, which the Pentagon believed could be modified to attack the United States.
SALT II was anathema to conservatives and liberal hawks, such as Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. Angleton, now chair of the Security and Intelligence Fund—an organization dedicated to the resurrection of the clandestine services within the intelligence community—led a chorus of voices proclaiming that SALT II was unverifiable. Colby and Turner had gutted the Agency, rendering it incapable of keeping tabs on the treacherous Soviets, treaty opponents charged. In August 1978, a young CIA watch officer, William P. Kampiles, had been arrested and accused of selling an ultra-secret KH-11 spy satellite manual to the KGB. The FBI subsequently discovered that seventeen other KH-11 manuals were missing. In the midst of the negotiations on SALT II, Richard Helms weighed in. “The Kampiles case raises the question of whether or not there has been infiltration of the US intelligence community or government at a significant level,” he told the Washington Post. In that same month, May 1979, an article in Penthouse charged that more than 2,000 KGB agents were working out of New York using jobs at the United Nations as cover. “A large percentage of the KGB force operating from the United Nations,” the magazine declared, “is known [to be] officers in Department V—the KGB elite specializing in murder, terrorism, and sabotage.” SALT shakers cited other evidence to indicate that US intelligence had been so compromised that a new arms control agreement could not be safely negotiated with the Soviets. Topping things off was the death of CIA officer/consultant John Arthur Paisley.6
On the moonlit night of September 23, 1978, Arthur Paisley vanished into the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. His 31-foot sloop Brillig, named from Lewis Carroll’s famous poem “Jabberwocky” in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, was found run aground under full sail the next morning. Paisley had bought the vessel in 1974 following his retirement from the CIA, where he had worked as an expert on Soviet nuclear capabilities. A week later, on October 1, Paisley’s bloated, decomposing body was discovered floating in the bay, a 9-millimeter gunshot wound in the back of his head and weighted divers’ belts around his waist. The corpse was duly delivered to Maryland’s chief medical examiner, but for seventeen days it went unidentified; the examiner looked high and low but could not come up with a set of fingerprints that would match. Finally, the hands were severed from the body and delivered to the FBI, which identified the corpse as Paisley’s. The body was then cremated in a CIA-approved funeral home outside of Washington, DC. Langley strongly suggested that the death was a suicide, but the Maryland State Police later concluded that the cause of death was “undetermined.”
Investigative reporters pounced on the Paisley story and discovered, among other things, that the deceased had originally been recruited by Angleton, had become a specialist on Soviet strategic research and deployment, had learned Russian in order to study Soviet technical journals, and had become one of the few men privy to the sources and methods of acquiring intelligence on Soviet nuclear developments. He was one of the agents Angleton had summoned to debrief Nosenko, and once Nosenko was cleared of charges that he was a Soviet double agent, in 1968, the two men had become friends. Paisley had also been deeply involved in the KH-11 spy satellite program, and when the Brillig washed ashore, journalist Tad Szulc noted ominously, it carried sophisticated communications equipment. It seems that the CIA had rehired Paisley as a consultant to work on nuclear arms verification matters some two years after his retirement. Speculation, of course, was rampant. Some said Paisley was the long-sought-after mole; others said he was a brilliant analyst who had been done in by the mole. All of the SALT naysayers agreed that the ability of the United States to monitor the Soviet nuclear arms industry, and hence verify SALT II, had been hopelessly compromised. On March 9, 1979, Scoop Jackson took to the floor of the Senate to announce that he might not vote for the disarmament agreement.7
In an article entitled “Verifying SALT,” published in Worldview, Colby made the case for the SALT sellers. The CIA and the KGB both had agents busily at work gathering information on each other’s arms programs, he wrote. That was probably a good thing. The notio
n that the Soviets could cheat in any meaningful way was absurd. US technology was equal to none. The Agency and other intelligence entities might miss something here and there, but any major violation of the treaty would be detected. “The question is this,” he declared: “Are we pettyfoggers looking for absolute evidence for some little variation—a quarter of an inch on the side of an absolute scale—or are we interested in the protection of our country and the ability to make an agreement to move ahead to these kinds of new restraints that will help us as well as the Soviets?” He appealed to the naysayers to see the arms control debate in a larger context—the ongoing effort by the two major protagonists to ease tensions to the point where the Cold War could be ended. Stansfield Turner wrote to congratulate the former DCI on his Worldview article. “You make the case eloquently for expanding the scope of the debate,” he said. “I hope I can induce others to see it your way.” SALT II was never formally ratified by the Senate, although its terms were honored by both sides until 1986, when the Reagan administration disavowed the agreement, accusing the Soviets of massive violations.8
In the midst of the debate over nuclear disarmament, the anti-Angleton forces launched a new offensive. In 1979, DCI Turner hired Cleveland Cram, former station chief in Ottawa and one of the men upon whom CI had cast suspicion, to investigate the Angleton–Kim Philby connection. How could this supposed super-spy have been taken in so completely by the British traitor? In his report, Cram observed that Angleton had been “less than successful” in protecting the CIA from penetration by enemy agents. The following year, David Martin, a reporter for Newsweek, published Wilderness of Mirrors, which, à la Bill Colby, portrayed Angleton not as sleuth extraordinaire but as a tragic figure whose paranoia and mole-hunting destroyed his career. In his book, Martin revealed that in 1974, a member of Angleton’s own staff had accused him of being a mole. Colby, who was DCI at the time, had dismissed the notion as just another manifestation of the overactive imaginations that pervaded CI.9
Shadow Warrior Page 59