by Tim Weiner
Helms himself came to fear the consequences of Nosenko’s incarceration. “I recognized we couldn’t keep him in durance vile, as we had, against the laws of the United States,” he said. “Lord knows what would happen if we had a comparable situation today, because the laws haven’t been changed, and I don’t know what you do with people like Nosenko. We sought guidance from the Justice Department at the time. It was clear that we were holding him in violation of the law, but what were we to do with him? Were we going to release him and then a year later have it said, ‘Well, you fellows should have had more sense than to do that. He was the whole key to who killed President Kennedy.’”
The CIA sent another team of interrogators to question Nosenko. They determined that he had been telling the truth. He was finally freed five years after his defection, paid $80,000, given a new identity, and placed on the CIA’s payroll.
But Angleton and his circle never closed the case. Their search for the traitor within the CIA ripped the Soviet division apart. The mole hunt began by pursuing officers with Slavic surnames. It went up the chain of command to the Soviet division chief. It paralyzed the CIA’s Russian operations for a decade, into the 1970s.
For twenty-five years after Nosenko’s defection, the CIA struggled to write the last chapter of his story. In all, it conducted seven major studies of the case. Nosenko was convicted, exonerated, and re-indicted until a last judgment was levied by the CIA’s Rich Heuer at the end of the cold war. Heuer had started out as a firm believer in the master plot. But then he weighed the value of what Nosenko had given the United States. The Russian spy had identified, or produced investigative leads on, some 200 foreigners and 238 Americans in whom the KGB had displayed interest. He had fingered some 300 Soviet intelligence agents and overseas contacts, and roughly 2,000 KGB officers. He had pinpointed fifty-two hidden microphones that the Soviets had placed in the American embassy in Moscow. He had expanded the CIA’s knowledge of how the Soviets sought to blackmail foreign diplomats and journalists. To believe in the master plot, it was necessary to take four things on faith: First, that Moscow would trade all that information to protect one mole. Second, that all communist defectors were agents of deception. Third, that the immense Soviet intelligence apparatus existed solely to mislead the United States. And last, that an impenetrable communist conspiracy lay behind the Kennedy assassination.
For Richard Helms, the case remained an open book. Until the day that the Soviet and Cuban intelligence services turned over their files, he said, it would never be laid to rest. Either the killing of John Kennedy was the work of a deranged drifter with a cheap rifle and a seven-dollar scope, or the truth was more terrible. As Lyndon Johnson said toward the end of his presidency: “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.”
22. “AN OMINOUS
DRIFT”
The covert operations of the Kennedys haunted Lyndon Johnson all his life. He said over and over that Dallas was divine retribution for Diem. “We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him,” he lamented. In his first year in office, coup after coup wracked Saigon, a shadowy insurgency started killing Americans in Vietnam, and his fear that the CIA was an instrument of political murder festered and grew.
He now understood that Bobby Kennedy wielded great authority over covert operations. He saw him as a sworn rival for the presidency. At an Oval Office meeting with John McCone on December 13, 1963, Johnson asked bluntly if and when Kennedy would leave the government. McCone said that “the Attorney General intended to stay on as Attorney General, but it was not clear to what extent the President wished him to become involved [with] intelligence work, NSC problems, counterinsurgency matters.” The answer soon became clear: Bobby’s days as the whip hand of the clandestine service were over. He departed seven months later.
On December 28, McCone flew down to the LBJ Ranch in Texas for breakfast and a briefing after a trip to Saigon. “The President immediately brought up his desire to ‘change the image of the CIA’ from a cloak and dagger role,” McCone recorded. The director could not have agreed more. The agency’s only legal role was to gather, analyze, and report intelligence, McCone said, not to mount conspiracies to overthrow foreign states. Johnson said “he was tired of a situation that had been built up that every time my name or CIA’s name was mentioned, it was associated with a dirty trick.”
But Lyndon Johnson lay awake at night, trying to decide whether to go all-out in Vietnam or get out. Without American support, Saigon would fall. He did not want to plunge in with thousands of American troops. He could not be seen to pull out. The only path between war and diplomacy was covert action.
“NOBODY CAN RUN THE INTELLIGENCE BUSINESS”
In early 1964, McCone and his new Saigon station chief, Peer de Silva, had nothing but bad news for the president. McCone was “extremely worried about the situation.” He thought that the intelligence data “on which we gauged the trend of the war were grossly in error.” He warned the White House and the Congress that “the Viet Cong are receiving substantial support from North Vietnam and possibly elsewhere, and this support can be increased. Stopping this by sealing the borders, the extensive waterways, and the long coastline is difficult, if not impossible. The VC appeal to the people of South Vietnam on political grounds has been effective, gained recruits for their armed forces, and neutralized resistance.”
Project Tiger, the Saigon station’s two-year paramilitary program against North Vietnam, had ended in death and betrayal. Now the Pentagon proposed to begin again, in concert with the CIA. Its Operations Plan 34A was a yearlong series of covert raids intended to convince Hanoi to give up its insurgency in South Vietnam and Laos. The centerpiece was another set of airborne operations to drop intelligence and commando teams into North Vietnam, along with maritime assaults along the coast. The raiders would be South Vietnamese special-forces soldiers, supplemented by Nationalist Chinese and South Korean commandos, all of them trained by the CIA. McCone had no confidence that the attacks would change Ho Chi Minh’s mind. “The President should be informed that this is not the greatest thing since peanut butter,” he advised.
Under orders, the agency turned its network of Asian paramilitaries over to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Group in Vietnam. Helms warned against “an ominous drift” that was pulling the CIA away from espionage and toward a role as a conventional military support staff. The agency’s executive director, Lyman Kirkpatrick, foresaw “the fragmentation and destruction of CIA, with the clandestine service being gobbled up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” These were prophetic fears.
In March 1964, the president sent McCone and McNamara back to Saigon. The director returned to tell the president that the war was not going well. “Mr. McNamara gave a very optimistic view that things were pretty good,” McCone said in an oral history for the LBJ presidential library. “I had to take the position that as long as the Ho Chi Minh Trail was open and supplies and convoys of people could come in there without interruption, that we couldn’t say things were so good.”
That was the beginning of the end of John McCone’s career as director of central intelligence. Lyndon Johnson closed the door to the Oval Office. Communication between the CIA and the president was limited to a twice-weekly written report on world events. The president read it at his leisure, if and when he wanted. On April 22, McCone told Bundy that he was “highly dissatisfied over the fact that President Johnson did not get direct intelligence briefings from me as was the custom with President Kennedy and had been the Eisenhower custom.” A week later, McCone told LBJ that “I was not seeing very much of him, and this disturbed me.” So Johnson and McCone played eight holes of golf together at the Burning Tree country club in May. But they did not have a substantial conversation until October. The president had been in office for eleven months before he asked McCone how big the CIA was, what it cost, and precisely how it could serve him. The director’s advice was rarely heard and rarely
heeded. Without the president’s ear, he had no power, and without that power, the CIA began to drift into the dangerous middle passage of the 1960s.
McCone’s split with McNamara over Vietnam revealed a deeper political fissure. Under law, the director of central intelligence was the chairman of the board of all American intelligence agencies. But the Pentagon had fought for two decades to make the director play second fiddle in the discordant band that people were now calling “the intelligence community.” For six years, the president’s board of intelligence advisers had suggested that the director should run the community and let a chief operating officer try to manage the CIA. Allen Dulles had adamantly resisted the idea and refused to pay attention to anything but covert action. McCone kept saying he wanted to get out of the cloak-and-dagger business. But in 1964, the CIA’s clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds of the agency’s budget and 90 percent of McCone’s time. He wanted to assert his statutory power over American intelligence. He needed authority commensurate with his responsibility. He never received it. The Pentagon undermined him at every turn.
Three major branches of American intelligence had grown up over the past decade. All three were under the director’s titular leadership. That power existed only on paper. The director was supposed to oversee the National Security Agency, the increasingly gigantic global electronic-eavesdropping arm of American intelligence. The NSA had been created by Truman in 1952 at the urging of Walter Bedell Smith after the crushing surprises of the Korean War. But the secretary of defense was in charge of its money and power. McNamara also controlled the new Defense Intelligence Agency, which he had created after the Bay of Pigs with the intent of coordinating the jumble of information produced by the army, the navy, the air force, and the marines. Then there was the National Reconnaissance Office, born in 1962 to build spy satellites. In the spring of 1964, air force generals tried to seize control of the billion-dollar-a-year program from the CIA. The power grab fractured the fragile reconnaissance office.
“I am just about ready to tell the Secretary of Defense and the President they can take NRO and shove it,” McCone thundered. “I think the thing I should do is call up the President and tell him to get a new Director of Central Intelligence…. The bureaucrats in the Pentagon are trying to screw things up so that nobody can run the intelligence business.”
McCone tried to resign that summer, but Lyndon Johnson ordered him to remain at his post until at least election day. The war in Vietnam was now on in full, and the appearance of loyalty was utmost.
“SHOOTING AT FLYING FISH”
The war was authorized by the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, rammed through Congress after what the president and the Pentagon proclaimed was an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam on American ships in international waters on August 4. The National Security Agency, which compiled and controlled the intelligence on the attack, insisted the evidence was ironclad. Robert McNamara swore to it. The navy’s official history of the Vietnam War calls it conclusive.
It was not an honest mistake. The war in Vietnam began with political lies based on fake intelligence. Had the CIA been working as its charter intended, if McCone had fulfilled his duties under law as he saw them, the false reports might not have survived for more than a few hours. But the full truth did not come out until November 2005, in a highly detailed confession released by the National Security Agency.
In July 1964, the Pentagon and the CIA determined that the OPLAN 34A overland attacks begun six months before had been a series of pointless pinpricks, just as McCone had warned. The United States stepped up commando raids at sea, under the leadership of the CIA’s Tucker Gougelmann, a battle-scarred marine who many years later became the last American to die in the war in Vietnam. To bolster his forces, Washington increased its surveillance on the North. The navy had started a program of eavesdropping on encoded enemy communications—the technical term is signals intelligence, or SIGINT—under an operation code-named Desoto. Those missions began inside a black box, the size of a cargo container, lashed to the deck of a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam. Inside each one were antennas and monitors operated by at least a dozen officers of the Naval Security Group. They listened in on North Vietnamese military chatter, and the data they collected was decrypted and translated by the National Security Agency.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff sent the USS Maddox, under the command of Captain John Herrick, on a Desoto mission with orders to “stimulate and record” North Vietnam’s reactions to the commando raids. The Maddox had orders to stay eight nautical miles off the mainland and four knots off the coastal islands of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. The United States did not recognize the international twelve-mile limit in Vietnam. On the last night of July and the first night of August 1964, the Maddox monitored an OPLAN 34A attack on Hon Me Island, off the central coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. It tracked the North’s counterattack, watching Soviet-made patrol boats armed with torpedoes and machines guns gathering off the island.
On the afternoon of August 2, the Maddox detected three of the boats approaching. Captain Herrick sent a flash message to fellow commanders of the Seventh Fleet: he would fire on them if necessary. He requested help from the destroyer Turner Joy and the fighter jets of the carrier Ticonderoga. Shortly after 3 p.m., the Maddox fired three times at the North Vietnamese patrol boats. The shots were never reported or acknowledged by the Pentagon or the White House; they maintained that the communists shot first. The Maddox was still firing when four navy F-8E jets blasted the patrol boats, killing four sailors, heavily damaging two of the ships, and winging the third. Their communist captains fled and hid in coastal inlets, awaiting orders from Haiphong. The Maddox had sustained one bullet hole from a machine gun.
On August 3, President Johnson proclaimed that American patrols would continue in the Gulf of Tonkin, and the State Department announced that it had sent its first-ever diplomatic note to Hanoi, warning of the “grave consequences” of “further unprovoked military action.” At that hour, another provocative OPLAN 34A maritime mission was dispatched to sabotage a radar station off the North Vietnamese coast, on the island of Hon Matt.
Then, on the stormy night of August 4, the American captains of the destroyers, the commanders of the Seventh Fleet, and their leaders in the Pentagon all received an urgent alert from onshore SIGINT operators: the three North Vietnamese patrol boats encountered off Hon Me Island on August 2 were returning. In Washington, Robert McNamara called the president. At 10 p.m. in the Gulf of Tonkin, 10 a.m. in Washington, the American destroyers sent a flash message that they were under attack.
The radar and sonar operators aboard the Maddox and the Turner Joy reported seeing ghostly blotches in the night. Their captains opened fire. The NSA report declassified in 2005 described how “the two destroyers gyrated wildly in the dark waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, the Turner Joy firing over 300 rounds madly,” both ships taking furious evasive maneuvers. “It was this high-speed gyrating by the American warships through the waters that created all the additional sonar reports of more torpedoes.” They had been firing at their own shadows.
The president immediately ordered an air strike against North Vietnamese naval bases to begin that night.
Within an hour, Captain Herrick reported: “ENTIRE ACTION LEAVES MANY DOUBTS.” Ninety minutes later, those doubts vanished in Washington. The NSA told the secretary of defense and the president of the United States that it had intercepted a North Vietnamese naval communiqué reading: “SACRIFICED TWO SHIPS AND ALL THE REST ARE OKAY.”
But after the American air strikes against North Vietnam had begun, the NSA reviewed the day’s communications intercepts. There was nothing. Every SIGINT eavesdropper in South Vietnam and the Philippines looked again. Nothing. The NSA reexamined the intercept it had handed to the president, double-checking the translation and the time stamp on the original message.
Upon review, the message actually read: “WE SACRIFICED TWO COMRADES BUT ALL AR
E BRAVE.” The message had been composed either immediately before or at the moment when the Maddox and the Turner Joy opened fire on August 4. It was not about what had happened that night. It was about the first clash, two nights earlier, on August 2.
The NSA buried this salient fact. It told no one. Its analysts and linguists looked a third time, and a fourth time, at the time stamp. Everyone—everyone, even the doubters—decided to stay silent. The NSA’s leadership put together five separate after-action reports and summaries between August 5 and August 7. Then it composed a formal chronology, the official version of the truth, the last word on what happened out in the Gulf of Tonkin, the history to be preserved for future generations of intelligence analysts and military commanders.
In the process, someone at the NSA destroyed the smoking gun—the intercept that McNamara had shown to the president. “McNamara had taken over raw SIGINT and shown the president what they thought was evidence of a second attack,” said Ray Cline, then the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence. “And it was just what Johnson was looking for.” In a rational world, it would have been the CIA’s task to take a hard look at the SIGINT from the Gulf of Tonkin and issue an independent interpretation of its meaning. It was no longer a rational world. “It was too late to make any difference,” Cline said. “The planes had been launched.”
As the NSA’s November 2005 confession says: “The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack had happened. So a conscious effort ensued to demonstrate that the attack occurred…an active effort to make the SIGINT fit the claim of what happened during the evening of 4 August in the Gulf of Tonkin.” The intelligence, the report concluded, “was deliberately skewed to support the notion that there had been an attack.” American intelligence officers “rationalized the contradictory evidence away.”