Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  LBJ was duly impressed by the rare bull’s-eye. Helms proudly recounted for the CIA’s historians that Johnson, for the first time in his presidency, realized that “intelligence had a role in his life, and an important one at that…. This was the first time that he was really sort of jarred by the fact that ‘those intelligence fellows had some insight that these other fellows don’t have.’”

  He offered Helms a seat at the president’s Tuesday lunch—the best table in town, the highest council of the government, what Helms called the magic inner circle—alongside the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Once a week, for the next eighteen months, the CIA had what it needed most of all: the attention of the president of the United States.

  “AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF PLUMBING”

  Helms wanted to keep the secrets of the CIA under control at home. To that end, he demanded no unpleasant surprises abroad. Under the prevailing political conditions, many of the agency’s covert operations were potential H-bombs.

  In June 1967, Helms told Desmond FitzGerald to evaluate every one of the CIA’s overseas covert actions, ensure that the secrecy surrounding them was secure—and shut down every one that might blow. The agency could not withstand another public scandal or risk any more public scrutiny. The pressure on FitzGerald, on top of the onus placed upon him by the internal investigation of the Castro plots, proved too great. Five weeks later, a heart attack killed him as he played tennis with the British ambassador. Like Frank Wisner, he was fifty-six years old when he died.

  After FitzGerald was buried, Helms selected a loyal old friend to lead the clandestine service: Thomas Hercules Karamessines, Tom K. to his friends, a charter member of the CIA and the former station chief in Athens, who lived in constant crippling pain from a twisted spine. Together, in the summer and fall of 1967, they continued the worldwide review of the CIA’s covert operations. No nation on earth was neutral territory, and Helms aimed to give the agency a global reach.

  In Saigon, the CIA had just started an excruciatingly sensitive operation, approved by President Johnson, code-named Buttercup. The agency was trying to put out peace feelers to North Vietnam by returning a politically astute Vietcong prisoner of war to Hanoi with a clandestine radio transmitter, seeking to open talks at the highest levels with the enemy. Nothing had come of it. The CIA had created and run the local Communist Party in several pro-American nations—among them Panama—hoping that the parties’ leaders would be invited to Moscow and discover the secrets of Soviet doctrine firsthand. The lessons learned in the never-ending battle to penetrate the Kremlin were slim. Helms was trying to mobilize the CIA’s first worldwide cadre of deep-cover officers: spies who worked without the protection of a diplomatic passport, posing as international lawyers or traveling salesmen for Fortune 500 companies. The program, code-named Globe, had been under way for five years, but barely more than a dozen such officers were wandering the planet.

  Good operations took years to develop. “You have to get the infrastructure, get the people who have to work with you,” Helms once explained. “There is an enormous amount of plumbing to be put into the structure if it is to have any chance of success.”

  But patience, persistence, money, and cunning alone were not enough to fight communism. Real weapons needed to be placed in the hands of friendly rulers and their CIA-trained secret police and paramilitaries. President Eisenhower had created a one-size-fits-all plan called the Overseas Internal Security Program, run by the CIA in concert with the Pentagon and the State Department. The man who wrote the manifesto for the mission—“a democratic, unselfish, often unconditional approach to helping other countries to help themselves”—was the agency’s own Al Haney, the con artist of the Seoul station and the field commander of Operation Success in Guatemala.

  Haney proposed to police the world by arming America’s third-world allies. “There have been charges that it is morally wrong for the U.S. to aid undemocratic regimes to strengthen their security systems, thereby serving to entrench them in power,” he argued. But “the U.S. cannot afford the moral luxury of helping only those regimes in the free world that meet our ideals of self-government. Eliminate all the absolute monarchies, dictatorships and juntas from the free world and count those that are left and it should be readily apparent that the U.S. would be well on its way to isolation.”

  The program trained 771,217 foreign military and police officers in twenty-five nations. It found the most fertile ground in nations where covert action by the CIA had prepared the soil. It had helped create the secret police of Cambodia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand. In each of these nations, the interior ministries and the national police worked in close liaison with the CIA station. The agency also established an international police academy in Panama and a “bomb school” in Los Fresnos, Texas, which trained officers from Central and South America. Graduates included the future leaders of death squads in El Salvador and Honduras.

  It was sometimes a short step from the classroom to the torture chamber. The CIA was on “dangerous ground,” said Robert Amory, chief of the CIA’s intelligence directorate under Eisenhower and Kennedy. “You can get into Gestapo-type tactics.”

  In the 1960s, the scope of the CIA’s work expanded dramatically in Latin America. “Castro was the catalyst,” said Tom Polgar, the Berlin base veteran who served as chief of the foreign intelligence staff of the Latin American division from 1965 to 1967. “The CIA and the propertied classes of Latin America had that one thing in common—that fear.”

  “My mission was to use the Latin American stations as a means to collect intelligence on the Soviet Union and Cuba,” Polgar said. “To do that, you have to have a relatively stable government that will cooperate with the United States.”

  The CIA was backing the leaders of eleven Latin American nations—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela. Once a friendly government was in power, a CIA station chief had five paths to maintain American influence over foreign leaders. “You become their foreign intelligence service,” Polgar said. “They don’t know what’s going on in the world. So you give them a weekly briefing—doctored to meet their sensibilities. Money, definitely—that’s always welcome. Procurement—toys, games, weapons. Training. And you can always take a group of officers to Fort Bragg or to Washington—a wonderful holiday.”

  The agency held the position, duly stated in a formal estimate signed by Richard Helms, that Latin American military juntas were good for the United States. They were the only force capable of controlling political crises. Law and order were better than the messy struggle for democracy and freedom.

  In LBJ’s day, the counterinsurgency missions started by the Kennedys took root where Ike’s internal-security programs had flourished and the CIA had installed military and political allies. In 1967, through the careful cultivation of dictators on two continents, the CIA scored one of its greatest cold-war victories: hunting down Che Guevara.

  “REMEMBER, YOU ARE KILLING A MAN”

  Che was a living emblem for the soldiers and the spies of the Cuban revolution. They served in outposts as far-flung as the Congo, where the power of the strongman Joseph Mobutu was threatened by a ragtag rebel force called the Simbas, whose warriors had kidnapped the CIA base chief in Stanleyville in 1964.

  The Congo was a cockpit of the cold war, and Mobutu and the CIA worked in closest harmony. Gerry Gossens, the CIA’s number-three man in the Congo, proposed that they create a new force to fight Soviet and Cuban influence in Africa. “Mobutu gave me a house, seven officers, and six Volkswagens, and I taught them how to conduct surveillance,” Gossens said. “We set up a Congolese service reporting to the CIA. We directed them. We ran them. Eventually, with the President’s blessing, we paid their operational expenses. I got the take, vetted it, edited it, and passed it on to Mobutu.”
Mobutu got whatever he wanted from the CIA—money and guns, planes and pilots, a personal physician, and the political security of close liaison with the American government—while the CIA built its bases and stations in the heart of Africa.

  In a classic battle of the cold war, Che and his Cubans confronted the CIA and its Cubans on the western shores of Lake Tanganyika, in the heart of Africa. The agency’s forces, equipped with recoilless rifles and warplanes, attacked several thousand Simbas and about a hundred of Che’s Cuban soldiers. Under fire, Che sought new orders from Fidel. “Avoid annihilation,” el jefe maximo advised.

  Che made an inglorious retreat. On the run, he crossed the Atlantic, seeking to light the flames of revolution in Latin America. He wound up in the mountains of Bolivia, where the CIA tracked him down.

  A right-wing general, Rene Barrientos, had seized power in that desperately poor nation, backed by more than $1 million from the CIA. The money served “to encourage,” in the agency’s words, “a stable government favorably inclined toward the United States,” and “in support of the ruling Junta’s plans to pacify the country.” The general crushed his opponents with increasing force. Bill Broe, chief of the Latin American division of the clandestine service, wrote to Helms with satisfaction: “With the election of Rene Barrientos as President of Bolivia on July 3, 1966, this action was brought to a successful completion.” The CIA sent its Barrientos file to the White House. National security adviser Walt Rostow handed it to the president and said: “This is to explain why General Barrientos may say thank you when you have lunch with him next Wednesday, the 20th.”

  In April 1967, Barrientos told the American ambassador, Douglas Henderson, that his officers were tracking Che in the mountains of Bolivia. Ambassador Henderson was headed for Washington that week and he had brought the news to Desmond FitzGerald. “This can’t be Che Guevara,” FitzGerald had said. “We think that Che Guevara was killed in the Dominican Republic and is buried in an unmarked grave.” Nevertheless, the CIA sent two Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs down to join the hunt with a squad of American-trained Bolivian Rangers.

  One of the CIA’s Cubans was Feliz Rodriguez, and he sent a series of stirring bulletins from the battlefront. His messages, declassified in 2004, are the only contemporary eyewitness accounts of a confrontation long shrouded by myth. From the village of Higueras, Rodriguez radioed John Tilton, the station chief in La Paz, who relayed the news to Bill Broe and Tom Polgar at headquarters. Their reports went to Helms, who hand-carried them to the White House.

  On October 8, 1967, Che was captured after a clash with the Bolivian Rangers. He had a wound in his leg but was otherwise in fair condition. His dreams of making a Vietnam in South America had evaporated in the thin air of the Bolivian highlands. His captors took him to a little schoolhouse. Rodriguez learned that the Bolivian high command in La Paz would decide Che’s fate on the following day.

  “I am managing to keep him alive,” Rodriguez reported, “which is very hard.”

  At daybreak the following morning, Rodriguez tried to interrogate Che, who was sitting on the schoolhouse floor, his face in his hands, his wrists and ankles bound, the corpses of two Cuban compañeros beside him. They talked about the clash in the Congo and the course of the Cuban revolution. Che said that Castro had killed no more than 1,500 of his political enemies, apart from armed conflicts such as the Bay of Pigs. “‘The Cuban government, of course, executed all guerrilla leaders who invaded its territory,’” Che said, according to Rodriguez. “He stopped then with a quizzical look on his face and smiled as he recognized his own position on Bolivian soil.” Rodriguez continued: “With his capture, the guerrilla movement had suffered an overwhelming setback…. Heinsisted that his ideals would win in the end…. He had not planned anexfiltration route from Bolivia in case of failure. He had definitely decided to fail or win.”

  The high command sent the order to kill Che at 11:50 a.m. “Guevara was executed with a burst of shots at 1:15 p.m.,” Rodriguez radioed to Tilton. “Guevara’s last words were: ‘Tell my wife to remarry and tell Fidel Castro that the Revolution will rise again in the Americas.’ To his executioner he said, ‘Remember, you are killing a man.’”

  Tom Polgar was the duty officer at headquarters when Tilton called in the news that Che was dead. “Can you send fingerprints?” Polgar asked.

  “I can send fingers,” Tilton replied. Che’s executioners had cut off his hands.

  “PARAMOUNT CONSIDERATIONS MUST BE

  POLITICAL SENSITIVITY”

  There were few such triumphs to trumpet for Helms and his officers. They were outnumbered by a multitude of mistakes. “Once again CIA operations have created a major problem,” the State Department’s Egypt desk informed Luke Battle, the new assistant secretary of state for the Near East. Egypt’s ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was complaining—not for the first time, and not without cause—that the agency was trying to overthrow his government. “CIA appears to hope that these incidents can be swept under the rug,” said the message to Battle. “This should not be allowed to happen.”

  Battle knew what the CIA’s work in Egypt entailed. He had been the American ambassador when a happy-go-lucky case officer carelessly exposed the agency’s relationship with a prominent Cairo newspaper editor named Mustapha Amin. Amin had been close to Nasser; the CIA paid him for information and for publishing pro-American news reports. The Cairo station chief had lied to the ambassador about the agency’s relationship with Amin. “He had been on the U.S. payroll,” Battle said. “Bruce Odell [the CIA case officer] had been meeting regularly with Mustapha Amin. I had been assured that no funds had been exchanged in Egypt, but a photograph of such a transaction was made when Mustapha Amin was arrested.” The case made headlines around the world, prominently featuring Odell, who had worked under diplomatic cover. Amin was tried as a spy, brutally tortured, and imprisoned for nine years.

  Helms tried to build confidence in the CIA. He had hoped that President Johnson would come out to Langley, Virginia, to address the troops at headquarters in September 1967, during ceremonies marking the agency’s twentieth anniversary. But LBJ never once visited the CIA. He sent Vice President Humphrey for the ceremony, and Humphrey delivered a characteristically thumbs-up speech. “You will be criticized,” he said. “The only people who aren’t criticized are those who do nothing, and I would hate to see the Agency get in that state.”

  The CIA could not survive sustained criticism from within the government, much less from the public. It depended on secrecy to survive. When blown operations wound up in the newspapers, it eroded what faith remained in the agency.

  On September 30, 1967, Helms laid out strict new guidelines for covert action and sent them to every station. For the first time in the history of the CIA, station chiefs and their superiors were instructed to err on the side of caution. “Review all projects which are politically sensitive,” the order said. Inform headquarters of the identities of “foreign politicians, both governmental and opposition, as well as certain military leaders, on the U.S. covert payroll.” No sum of money spent on covert action was too small to report. “Our paramount considerations must be the political sensitivity of the activity and its consistency with U.S. foreign policy.”

  The flow of cash to burned-out foreign agents, third-rate newspapers, also-ran political parties, and other unproductive operations began to dry up. The number of major political-warfare operations in Western Europe began to dwindle. The CIA would stay focused on the hot war in Southeast Asia and the cold war in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

  But there was a war going on at home as well. The president had just told Helms to undertake the most politically sensitive operation of all—the job of spying on Americans.

  27. “TRACK DOWN

  THE FOREIGN

  COMMUNISTS”

  President Johnson feared that the antiwar movement would drive him out of the White House. But in the end the war itself did it.

  In October 1967
, a handful of CIA analysts joined in the first big Washington march against the war. The president regarded the protesters as enemies of the state. He was convinced that the peace movement was controlled and financed by Moscow and Beijing. He wanted proof. He ordered Richard Helms to produce it.

  Helms reminded the president that the CIA was barred from spying on Americans. He says Johnson told him: “I’m quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs.” It is likely that LBJ expressed himself more plainly.

  In a blatant violation of his powers under law, the director of central intelligence became a part-time secret police chief. The CIA undertook a domestic surveillance operation, code-named Chaos. It went on for almost seven years. Helms created a new Special Operations Group to run the spying on Americans, and he cannily hid it in the shadows of Angleton’s counterintelligence staff. Eleven CIA officers grew long hair, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe. The agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over America. Unable to draw a clear distinction between the far left and the mainstream opposition to the war, it spied on every major organization in the peace movement. At the president’s command, transmitted through Helms and the secretary of defense, the National Security Agency turned its immense eavesdropping powers on American citizens.

  Both the president and conservatives in Congress saw connections between the peace protests and the race riots rocking the United States. They wanted the CIA to prove that communists were behind them both. The agency tried its best.