by Tim Weiner
In Saigon, the CIA’s best officers were making their own discovery. The more intelligence they gathered, the more they realized how little they knew.
But by now it hardly mattered what the CIA reported to Washington. Never had there been a war where more intelligence was placed in the hands of commanders: captured enemy documents, brutal interrogations of prisoners of war, electronic intercepts, overhead reconnaissance, field reports brought home to the Saigon station through the blood and mud of the front lines, careful analyses, statistical studies, quarterly syntheses of everything the CIA and American military commanders knew. Today an old torpedo factory not far from the Pentagon houses eight miles of microfilm, a small part of the archive of American intelligence from the war.
Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leaders of the United States told one another and the American people. The White House and the Pentagon kept trying to convince the people that the war was going well. In time, the facts on the ground would prevail.
26. “A POLITICAL
H-BOMB”
On February 13, 1967, Richard Helms was in Albuquerque, at the end of a long day touring the American nuclear-weapons labs, when a highly agitated CIA communications officer met him at his hotel room with a message from the White House: Return to Washington immediately.
A little leftist monthly called Ramparts was about to publish a story saying that the National Student Association, a well-respected worldwide group of American collegians, had for years received a generous stipend from the agency. CIA headquarters had just warned the White House that there would be a firestorm “over CIA involvement with private voluntary organizations and foundations. The CIA will probably be accused of improperly interfering in domestic affairs, and of manipulating and endangering innocent young people. The Administration will probably come under attack.”
When the story broke, President Johnson immediately announced that Nick Katzenbach, the number-two man at the State Department, would lead a top-down review of the relationships the CIA had forged with private voluntary organizations in the United States. Since Helms was the only one who knew precisely what had gone on, “LBJ left me the responsibility of pulling the Agency’s scorched chestnuts out of the fire.”
James Reston of The New York Times knowingly observed that the CIA’s links to certain unnamed radio stations, publications, and labor unions were now also in jeopardy. In short order, two decades of secret work by the CIA was laid bare.
Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom were revealed as the agency’s creations. All the influential little magazines that had flourished under the banner of the anticommunist liberal left, all the eminently respectable groups that had served as conduits for the CIA’s money and people, such as the Ford Foundation and the Asia Foundation—all were interwoven in a paper trail of dummy corporations and front organizations linked to the CIA. When one was blown, they all blew.
The radios were arguably the most influential political-warfare operations in the agency’s history. The CIA had spent close to $400 million subsidizing them, and it had reason to believe that millions of listeners behind the iron curtain appreciated every word they broadcast. But their legitimacy was undercut when they were revealed as the CIA’s frequencies.
The agency had built a house of cards, and Helms knew it. The CIA’s support for the radios and the foundations were some of the biggest covert-action programs the agency had run. But there was nothing truly clandestine about them. Ten years before, Helms had talked to Wisner about phasing out the secret subsidies and letting the State Department handle the radios. They had agreed to try to convince President Eisenhower, but they never followed through. Since 1961, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had been warning that the millions of dollars flowing from the CIA to student groups and private foundations was “the subject of common gossip, or knowledge, both here and abroad.” For a year, Ramparts had been on the agency’s radar; Helms had sent a memo to Bill Moyers at the White House detailing the political and personal behavior of its editors and reporters.
But the CIA was not the only party guilty of negligence when it came to the control of covert action. For years, the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department had failed to keep an eye on the agency. More than three hundred major covert operations had been launched since the inauguration of President Kennedy—and, except for Helms, no one then in power knew about most of them. “We lack adequate detail on how certain programs are to be carried out and we lack continuing review of major ongoing programs,” a State Department intelligence officer reported on February 15, 1967.
The mechanisms created to watch over the CIA and to invest its clandestine service with presidential authority were not working. They never had worked. There was a growing sense at the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department, and Congress that the agency had gone slightly out of control.
“WHAT THEY HAVE SPECIFICALLY IN MIND IS KILLING HIM”
On February 20, 1967, the president telephoned the acting attorney general of the United States, Ramsey Clark.
Five weeks before, LBJ and the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson had had an hour-long off-the-record conversation in the White House. Not for nothing was Pearson’s column called Washington Merry-Go-Round. He had set the president’s head spinning with a story about the Mafia’s John Rosselli, the loyal friend of the CIA’s Bill Harvey, who was the sworn enemy of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
“This story going around about the CIA…sendin’ in the folks to get Castro,” LBJ said to Ramsey Clark. “It’s incredible.” He told the tale as he had heard it: “They have a man that was involved, that was brought in to the CIA, with a number of others, and instructed by the CIA and the Attorney General to assassinate Castro after the Bay of Pigs…. They had these pills.” Every word of that was true. But the story went on. It took Johnson to a terrifying if unfounded conclusion: Castro had captured the plotters and “he tortured ’em. And they told him all about it…. So he said, ‘Okay. We’ll just take care of that.’ So then he called Oswald and a group in, and told them to…get the job done.” The job was the assassination of the president of the United States.
Johnson told Ramsey Clark to find out what the FBI knew about the connections among the CIA, and the Mafia, and Bobby Kennedy.
On March 3, Pearson’s column reported that “President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb—an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then backfired against his late brother.” The item badly frightened Bobby Kennedy. He and Helms had lunch the next day, and the director brought the sole copy of the only CIA memo tying Kennedy to the Mafia plot against Castro.
Two days later, the FBI completed a report for the president with the pungent title “Central Intelligence Agency’s Intentions to Send Hoodlums to Cuba to Assassinate Castro.” It was clear and concise: the CIA had tried to kill Castro. The agency had hired members of the Mafia to do it. Robert Kennedy as attorney general knew about the CIA plot as it unfolded, and he knew the mob was involved.
President Johnson mulled the matter over for two weeks before he ordered Helms to undertake an official CIA investigation of the plots against Castro, Trujillo, and Diem. Helms had no choice. He told the CIA’s inspector general, John Earman, to go to work. One by one, Earman called the handful of men who knew what had happened to his office; one by one, he pulled together the CIA’s files, slowly assembling a detailed account.
Secretary of State Rusk ordered the chief of the State Department’s intelligence bureau, Tom Hughes, to conduct his own independent review of the CIA’s covert operations. On May 5, Hughes sat down with Rusk and Katzenbach in the secretary of state’s chandeliered office. The three men weighed whether the president should sharply curtail the clandestine service. Hughes had come to believe that buying foreign politicians, supporting foreign coups, and running guns to foreign r
ebels could corrode American values. He proposed that the United States should cut covert action “to an irreducible minimum.” They should go forward only when “the prospective results are essential to national security or national interests; are of such value as significantly to outweigh the risks; and cannot be effectively obtained in any other way.” Rusk conveyed these thoughts to Richard Helms, who did not strongly disagree.
That same week, Helms read very carefully through the 133-page draft report of the CIA’s inspector general. It said the killers of Diem and Trujillo had been “encouraged but not controlled by the U.S. government.” But it dissected in grim detail the mechanics of the plots against Castro. “We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro,” it said. “We find people speaking vaguely of ‘doing something about Castro’ when it is clear that what they have specifically in mind is killing him.” Though the pressure had come from the highest levels of the government, the report was silent on the question of presidential authorization. The only man who could provide a definitive answer, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was busy at that moment co-sponsoring a bill raising federal penalties for the desecration of the American flag.
The report implicated every living CIA officer who had served as chief of the clandestine service—Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald—in conspiracies to commit murder. It placed a particularly heavy burden on FitzGerald. It said he had personally promised high-powered rifles with telescopic scopes to the Cuban agent Rolando Cubela, who had vowed to kill Castro, the week President Kennedy was assassinated. FitzGerald fervently denied it, but the chances that he was lying were high.
On May 10, Helms put his handwritten notes on the inspector general’s report in his briefcase and went to see the president. No record of what they said is known to exist. On May 23, Helms testified before Senator Richard Russell’s CIA subcommittee. Russell knew more than any outsider about the agency’s affairs. He was closer to President Johnson than any man in Washington. He put a very pointed question to Helms in the context of political assassination. He asked about the CIA’s “ability to keep former employees quiet.”
Helms went back to headquarters that day and made sure that every piece of paper created by the inspector general’s investigation was destroyed. He kept the sole copy of the report securely locked in his safe, where it sat untouched for the next six years.
Helms was well aware that the CIA officer who knew the most damning facts about the Castro conspiracy was the dangerously unstable Bill Harvey, who had been dismissed as station chief in Rome for chronic drunkenness but remained on the payroll, lurching around the corridors at headquarters. “Bill would show up at some meeting just crocked,” said Red White, the CIA’s executive director. “He’d drink those bathtub Martinis.” White recalled meeting in Helms’s office with Des FitzGerald and Jim Angleton in the last week of May 1967. The subject was what to do with Harvey. They eased him out of the agency with the greatest care and tried to make sure that he had a quiet retirement. The CIA’s security director, Howard Osborn, took the washed-up officer out to lunch and recorded “his extreme bitterness toward the Agency and the Director,” and his willingness to blackmail both if backed into a corner. Harvey would return to haunt the CIA before his death.
“A MAN OBSESSED”
It was a time of great professional peril for Helms. Throughout the spring of 1967, he faced another crisis at headquarters as grave as the ticking time bomb of the assassination plots. Some of his best officers had started an internal rebellion against the conspiracy theories of Jim Angleton.
For more than a decade, ever since Angleton had obtained, with Israel’s help, a copy of Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin, he had enjoyed an exalted status at the CIA. He still controlled the Israeli account and liaison with the FBI along with his crucial role as chief of counterintelligence, the man who guarded the agency against penetration from communist spies. But his vision of a “master plot” run by Moscow had started to poison the agency. A secret CIA history of Richard Helms as director of central intelligence, declassified in February 2007, reveals in detail the precise tone and tenor of Angleton’s work at headquarters:
Angleton by the mid-1960s had come to hold a set of views that, if accurate, portended grave consequences for the United States. Angleton believed that the Soviet Union, guided by as skillful a group of leaders as ever served one government, was implacable in its hostility toward the West. International Communism remained monolithic, and reports of a rift between Moscow and Peking were only part of an elaborate “disinformation campaign.” An “integrated and purposeful Socialist Bloc,” Angleton wrote in 1966, sought to foster false stories of “splits, evolution, power struggles, economic disasters, [and] good and bad Communism” to present “a wilderness of mirrors” to the confused West. Once this program of strategic deception had succeeded in splintering Western solidarity, Moscow would find it an easy matter to pick off the Free World nations one by one. Only the Western intelligence services, in Angleton’s view, could counter this challenge and stave off disaster. And because the Soviets had penetrated every one of these services, the fate of Western civilization rested, to a large extent, in the hands of the counterintelligence experts.
Angleton was unsound—“a man of loose and disjointed thinking whose theories, when applied to matters of public record, were patently unworthy of serious consideration,” as an official CIA assessment later concluded. The consequences of believing in him were grave. In the spring of 1967, they included the continuing incarceration of Yuri Nosenko, the Soviet defector who was in his third year of illegal imprisonment under subhuman conditions in a CIA stockade; a cascade of false accusations against senior Soviet division officers wrongly suspected of spying for Moscow; and a refusal to accept the word of any and all Soviet defectors and recruited agents. “Loyal Agency employees had come under suspicion of treachery solely on the basis of coincidence and flimsy circumstantial evidence,” says the secret CIA history of the Helms years. “Ongoing operations against Soviet targets had been shut down, new ones stifled, by the conviction that the Kremlin, tipped off by a mole within CIA, had doubled most Agency assets. Valuable information supplied by defectors and longtime sources was being ignored, for fear that it was somehow tainted.”
A small but determined resistance to Angleton was growing within the clandestine service. “Rather than being disinformed by the enemy, we are deluding ourselves,” a senior Soviet division officer named Leonard McCoy said in a memo that Helms first read in April 1967; he told Helms that the Angletonian mindset had created a complete “paralysis of our Soviet effort.” In May, Howard Osborn, the director of the CIA’s Office of Security, warned that the Nosenko case was a legal and moral abomination. Helms asked the deputy director of central intelligence, Admiral Rufus Taylor, to try to resolve the case. Taylor reported back that Nosenko was in no way a double agent, the CIA’s Soviet division was being torn apart, and Helms had to set the prisoner free and make some major personnel changes to clear the air.
Angleton and his staff produced almost no intelligence reports for the rest of the agency; he considered himself the ultimate customer for his work and refused to circulate his conclusions in writing. He had sabotaged station chiefs throughout Europe, undermined allied intelligence services, and poisoned the well at headquarters—all without “one scrap of supportive evidence that there ever was or ever had been” a mole inside the Soviet division, as Rolfe Kingsley, the newly appointed chief of the division under Helms, protested without avail. Helms believed, in Admiral Taylor’s words, that “Jim was a man obsessed…. Helms deplored that obsession but thought that Angleton was so valuable and so difficult to replace that his other attributes outweighed the disadvantages of that obsession.”
Despite the blighted careers, the damaged lives, and the sheer chaos that Angleton created, He
lms never broke faith with him. Why? First, as far as anyone knows, the CIA was never penetrated by a traitor or a Soviet spy during the twenty years that Angleton ran counterintelligence, and for this Helms was eternally grateful. Second, as the secret CIA history of the Helms years makes clear for the first time, Angleton was partly responsible for his greatest triumph as director of central intelligence: the CIA’s accurate call of the Six-Day War.
On June 5, 1967, Israel launched an attack on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The CIA saw it coming. The Israelis had been telling the White House and the State Department that they were in great peril. Helms told the president that this was a calculated gambit, a white lie told in the hope of winning direct American military support. To Lyndon Johnson’s great relief, Helms said that Israel would strike at the time and place of its choosing, and was likely to win swiftly—in a matter of days. The ultimate source of the confidently stated forecast was Angleton, who had gotten it from his friends at the highest levels of Israeli intelligence, and reported it directly and exclusively to Helms. His word was good. “The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms’s reputation in the Johnson White House,” the CIA history recorded. “The experience almost certainly constituted the high point of Helms’s service as Director. It also further solidified Angleton’s standing in the DCI’s estimation.”