by Tim Weiner
In 1967, America’s ghettoes had become war zones; seventy-five separate urban riots wracked the nation, resulting in 88 deaths, 1,397 injuries, 16,389 arrests, 2,157 convictions, and economic damage estimated at $664.5 million. Forty-three people had been killed in Detroit, twenty-six in Newark. Rage filled the streets of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Cincinnati, Dayton, Cleveland, Youngstown, Toledo, Peoria, Des Moines, Wichita, Birmingham, and Tampa. On October 25, Senator John McClellan, an Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote to Helms seeking evidence that the Soviets were running the black-power movement in the United States. “The Subcommittee is very much interested in the operations of various militant organizations in this country,” the senator wrote.
McClellan said that Moscow had created “an espionage or sabotage school in Ghana, Africa, for colored people” and that Americans had served as instructors. “Purportedly these teachers came from somewhere in California,” the senator wrote. “It would be most helpful to the Subcommittee if the identity of any American teacher who returned to the United States were known as well as the identity of any student…. Your cooperation in this matter will indeed be appreciated.”
The clandestine service cooperated. On October 31, 1967, Tom Karamessines sent a raw and unconfirmed rumor from a Miami Cuban to the White House. “A Negro training camp” had been established at a beach near Santiago de Cuba where “Negroes were being trained for subversive operations against the United States,” the report said. “Their courses included English which was being taught by Soviet instructors.” It continued: “Their subversive activities against the United States would include sabotage in connection with race riots directed at bringing a Negro revolution in the United States.” It said that “150 Negroes are involved in the training program and some have already arrived in the United States.”
Lyndon Johnson was enraged. “I’m not going to let the Communists take this government and they’re doing it right now,” he told Helms, Rusk, and McNamara during a ninety-five-minute rant on a Saturday afternoon, November 4, 1967. “I’ve got my belly full of seeing these people put on a Communist plane and shipped all over this country. I want someone to carefully look at who leaves this country, where they go, why they are going.” This last remark was aimed pointedly at Helms.
But the CIA never found a shred of evidence that linked the leaders of the American left or the black-power movement to foreign governments. Helms took this unhappy fact to the president on November 15, 1967. He reported that while the CIA suspected that some members of the American left might have ideological affinities with Moscow or Hanoi, no evidence showed “that they act under any direction other than their own.” Lyndon Johnson ordered Helms to intensify the search. It produced nothing beyond a continuing violation of the CIA’s charter.
For millions of Americans, the war came home every night on television. On January 31, 1968, 400,000 communist troops hit almost every major city and military garrison in South Vietnam. The attack came on the first night of Tet, the lunar new year, and the enemy laid siege to Saigon and the major American bases at Hue and Khe Sanh. On February 1, television and still cameras captured the Saigon police chief as he executed a Vietcong prisoner in cold blood with a pistol shot to the head. The assault went on and on. Though the American counterattack was overwhelming—100,000 tons of bombs fell around Khe Sanh alone—the shock of the surprise attack was a devastating psychological defeat for the United States. Helms concluded that the CIA could not have predicted the Tet offensive because it had next to no intelligence on the enemy’s intent.
On February 11, 1968, Helms pulled all his Vietnam experts together at headquarters. All but one of them—George Carver, still an optimist, though not for long—agreed on the following points: General Westmoreland, the American commander in Saigon, had no coherent strategy. It was useless to send more American troops. If the government and the army of South Vietnam did not pull together and fight the enemy, the United States should get out. Helms sent George Allen back to Saigon to assess the damage and to meet with President Thieu and Vice President Ky. Allen found the army of South Vietnam shattered and the two leaders at one another’s throats. American soldiers were unable to defend the nation’s cities; American spies were panicked and demoralized. Hanoi had won its greatest political victory since 1954, when it handed the French their final defeat at Dien Bien Phu.
Helms personally gave the president the deeply pessimistic conclusions. They destroyed all but the last of LBJ’s enormous political will.
On February 19, as Hanoi mounted a second wave of Tet attacks, the president spoke privately with Dwight Eisenhower. The next day, at the Tuesday lunch at the White House, Helms listened as the president described the conversation.
“General Eisenhower said that Westmoreland carries more responsibility than any general in the history of this country,” LBJ recounted. “I asked him how many allies he had under his command during World War II. He said, including U.S. and allied troops, he had about five million. I told him General Westmoreland had 500,000 men, so how could he say that Westmoreland had the greatest responsibility of any American general? He said it was a different kind of war and General Westmoreland doesn’t know who the enemy is.”
At last Lyndon Johnson understood that no strategy could survive the failure of intelligence in Vietnam. The United States could not defeat an enemy it could not understand. A few weeks later, he announced he would not seek re-election as the president of the United States.
PART
FOUR
“Get Rid of the Clowns”
The CIA Under Nixon and Ford
1968 to 1976
28. “WHAT THE HELL
DO THOSE CLOWNS DO
OUT THERE IN LANGLEY?”
In the spring of 1968, Richard Helms had good reason to fear that his next boss would be either Robert Kennedy or Richard Nixon. As attorney general, Kennedy had abused the powers of the agency. He had commandeered the CIA and treated Helms with cold disdain. As a candidate, or as a commander in chief, he would be threatened by the secrets in the agency’s files. Helms was truly shocked when the senator was murdered on the campaign trail in June. But he was not truly saddened. For the rest of his life, Helms bore lasting scars from the lashings Kennedy had laid on him.
Richard Nixon was another problem altogether. Helms knew how deep his resentments ran. Nixon thought the agency was filled with eastern elitists, knee-jerk liberals, Georgetown gossips, Kennedy men. It was an open secret that Nixon held the CIA responsible for the greatest disaster in his life: his defeat in the 1960 election. He was convinced—wrongly—that secrets and lies leaked by Allen Dulles had helped John Kennedy score crucial points in the televised presidential debates. In his 1962 memoir, Six Crises, Nixon had written that if he had been elected president, he would have created a new organization outside the CIA for carrying out covert operations. It was an open threat to cut out the agency’s heart.
On August 10, 1968, Nixon and Helms met for their first long talk. The president had invited the candidate down to the LBJ Ranch in Texas, fed him steak and corn on the cob, and drove him around the ranch in an open convertible. Then he turned to Helms for a tour of the world: the confrontation between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, Castro’s continuing support for revolutionary movements, and finally the secret peace negotiations between the United States and North Vietnam.
Nixon turned directly to Helms with a pointed question.
“Do they still believe we have lost the war?” he asked.
“The North Vietnamese are convinced they won after Dien Bien Phu,” Helms said. That was the last thing Nixon wanted to hear.
Three days after winning the election, Nixon placed a call to LBJ. “What do you think about Helms?” he asked. “Would you continue him?”
“Yes, I would,” Johnson replied. “He’s extremely competent. He’s succinct. He tells you as it is, and he’s loyal.”
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That was high praise. After a year and a half dining at the president’s table, Helms had won LBJ’s confidence and earned a reputation in Washington as a consummate professional. He believed that the CIA, after twenty years, had developed a cadre of analysts with unique expertise on the Soviet threat and a clandestine service capable of conducting espionage without getting caught. He saw himself as a loyal soldier in the service of his president.
Helms would soon find out the cost of that loyalty.
“INCURABLY COVERT”
“Richard Nixon never trusted anybody,” Helms reflected twenty years later. “Here he had become President of the United States and therefore chief of the Executive branch, and yet he was constantly telling people that the Air Force in their bombings in Vietnam couldn’t hit their ass with their hand, the State Department was just a bunch of pinstriped cocktail-drinking diplomats, that the Agency couldn’t come up with a winning victory in Vietnam…. On and on and on…. ‘They are dumb, they are stupid, they can’t do this, and they can’t do that.’”
At the White House in January 1969, a few days into the new administration, Helms sat in tense silence at lunch as Nixon picked at his cottage cheese and canned pineapple. The president ripped into the CIA while his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, listened attentively. “I haven’t the slightest doubt,” Helms recalled, “that Nixon’s carping affected Kissinger.”
The president-elect and the Harvard man had discovered they were kindred spirits. “Both were incurably covert, but Kissinger was charming about it,” observed Thomas Hughes, the director of the State Department’s intelligence bureau. “Both were inveterate manipulators, but Nixon was more transparent.” They had reached an understanding: they alone would conceive, command, and control clandestine operations. Covert action and espionage could be tools fitted for their personal use. Nixon used them to build a political fortress at the White House, and Kissinger became, in the words of his aide Roger Morris, the acting chief of state for national security.
As a preemptive act of self-protection, Helms had created a committee of Wise Men called the Covert Operations Study Group to report to the president-elect on the value of the clandestine service—and to protect it from attack. The group was led by Franklin Lindsay, once Frank Wisner’s right-hand man, housed at Harvard, and convened in secret; its foremost members were Richard Bissell and Lyman Kirkpatrick. It included half a dozen Harvard professors who had served the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. Three of them were close enough to their colleague Henry Kissinger to know he would be the next president’s national security adviser no matter who won the race, for Kissinger had simultaneously served both Nixon and Humphrey as a confidential consultant. Neither man ever considered anyone else for the job.
The Covert Operations Study Group’s secret report was dated December 1, 1968. One of its recommendations particularly pleased Kissinger: it said the new president should give one senior White House official responsibility for watching over all covert operations. Kissinger would not merely watch them. He would run them.
The report urged the new president to “make it very clear to the Director of the CIA that he expects him to say ‘No’ when in the Director’s judgment a proposed operation cannot be done.” Nixon never heeded that advice.
“Covert operations can rarely achieve an important objective alone,” the report continued. “At best, a covert operation can win time, forestall a coup, or otherwise create favorable conditions which will make it possible to use overt means to finally achieve an important objective.” Nixon never understood this principle.
“An individual, a political party, or a government in office can be seriously injured or destroyed by exposure of covert assistance from CIA,” the report said. “On balance, exposure of clandestine operations costs the United States in terms of world opinion. To some, exposure demonstrates the disregard of the United States for national rights and human rights; to others it demonstrates only our impotence and ineptness in getting caught…. The impression of many Americans, especially in the intellectual community and among the youth, that the United States is engaging in ‘dirty tricks’ tends to alienate them from their government,” the report continued. “Disclosures in this atmosphere have created opportunities for the ‘New Left’ to affect a much wider spectrum of political opinion than otherwise would have been the case. The United States has been in the forefront of those nations concerned with expanding the rule of law in international affairs. Our credibility and our effectiveness in this role is necessarily damaged to the extent that it becomes known that we are secretly intervening in what may be (or appear to be) the internal affairs of others.” Nixon and Kissinger willfully ignored all these ideas.
“It is our impression that CIA has become much too ingrown over the years,” the report concluded. “Nearly all of the senior people have been in the organization on the order of 20 years…. There also is a strong tendency toward isolation and inwardness…a lack of innovativeness and perspective.” This much Nixon believed. He set out to infiltrate that inner circle. He began by naming Marine Lieutenant General Robert Cushman, who had been his national security aide when he was vice president, as the deputy director of central intelligence under Helms. Cushman’s mission was to spy on America’s spies for the president.
Eager to curry favor with the president-elect, the CIA sent Nixon the same daily intelligence summaries that Lyndon Johnson had received. They piled up unread in a safe at Nixon’s suite on the thirty-ninth floor at the Pierre Hotel in New York. The stack grew for a month, until Kissinger sent word in December that Nixon would never look at them. He made it clear that from now on anything the agency wanted to tell the president would have to be channeled through him. Neither Helms nor anyone else from the CIA would ever see Nixon alone.
From the start, Kissinger exerted an ever-tightening control over the CIA’s operations. In 1967 and 1968, the CIA’s overseers at the 303 Committee had lively debates over the course of covert action. Those days were gone. Kissinger dominated every other member of the committee—Helms, Attorney General John Mitchell, and the number-two officers of the State Department and the Pentagon. It became a one-man show. During a thirty-two-month stretch, the committee technically approved nearly forty covert actions but never once actually convened. In all, more than three quarters of the covert-action programs of the Nixon administration never were considered formally by the committee. The black operations of the United States were approved by Henry Kissinger.
In 1969, as is well known, the president wiretapped private citizens to stop news leaks and to control the flow of information inside the government. His national security adviser went beyond that: Kissinger also used the CIA to spy on Americans, a fact that heretofore has escaped the attention of history.
After the antiwar movement called for a monthly national moratorium, a one-day suspension of American business as usual, Helms received an order from Kissinger to spy on its leaders. Recorded in the office diary of Robert L. Bannerman, a senior staff member in the CIA’s Office of Security, the memo was titled “Dr. Kissinger—Information Request.”
“Dr. Kissinger levied a request as to what information we have on the leaders of the groups that conducted the moratorium on Vietnam,” the CIA memo reads. “After consideration this request was relayed to [deleted] who agreed to be the focal point for this report and work on this report was conducted over the weekend.” This was not merely a continuation of Chaos, the CIA’s ongoing search for sources of foreign support for the antiwar movement. It was a specific request from the president’s national security adviser for CIA files on American citizens.
The record reflects no hesitation on the part of Richard Helms. Since 1962, three successive presidents had ordered the director of central intelligence to spy on Americans, regardless of the CIA’s charter. Nixon believed that all presidential action is legal in the realm of national security. If the president does it, he said, it is not ille
gal. Among his successors, only George W. Bush fully embraced this interpretation of presidential power, rooted in the divine right of kings. But it was one thing for a president to issue such an order, and quite another for an unelected official to do so in the president’s name.
“HIT THE SOVIETS, AND HIT THEM HARD”
Nixon and Kissinger operated at a level of clandestinity beyond the CIA’s. When they dealt with the enemies of the United States—negotiating in secret with the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese—the CIA knew little or nothing about it. There was a reason for that: the White House disbelieved much of what the CIA’s experts said about the forces of communism, especially the agency’s estimates of the military might of the Soviet Union.
“I don’t mean to say that they are lying about the intelligence or distorting it, but I want you fellows to be very careful to separate facts from opinions,” Nixon told Helms at a June 18, 1969, National Security Council meeting.
“The fact is that the intelligence projections for 1965, 1966, 1967, and 1968—and I’ve seen them all—have been up to fifty percent off in what the Russians were going to have—and on the low side,” Nixon said. “We have got to start with fact, and all the facts, and reach the conclusions on the basis of hard fact. Is that understood now?”
Nixon was outraged when the agency argued that the Soviets had neither the intention nor the technology to launch a knockout nuclear first strike. That conclusion came in a flurry of formal estimates on Soviet strategic forces, all of which Nixon rejected. “Useless,” he wrote in the margins of a memo from Helms on Moscow’s nuclear capabilities. “A superficial mindless recitation of what we know from the daily press.” The CIA’s analyses flew in the face of Nixon’s plans to build an antiballistic missile system—the prelude to the Star Wars fantasies of the future. “Whose side is the Agency on?” was the way Helms remembered the White House argument. “In other words, ‘Let’s all get together and trim the evidence.’”