by Tim Weiner
In the end, that is exactly what Helms did, erasing a key passage of the CIA’s most important estimate on Soviet nuclear forces in 1969. Once again, the agency was tailoring its work to fit the pattern of White House policy. His decision to go along with the White House “did not sit well with the Agency analysts,” Helms recorded. “In their view, I had compromised one of the Agency’s fundamental responsibilities—the mandate to evaluate all available data and express conclusions irrespective of U.S. policies.” But Helms would not risk this battle: “I was convinced we would have lost the argument with the Nixon administration, and that in the process the Agency would have been permanently damaged.” His analysts complained about the suppression of dissent and the failure to learn from past mistakes. But no plan to improve the analysis of Soviet capabilities and intentions came forth.
The CIA had been studying spy-satellite reconnaissance photos of the Soviet Union for eight years now, looking down from space and putting together a jigsaw puzzle of the Soviet military. The agency was working on the next generation of spy satellites, to be equipped with television cameras. Helms always had believed that gadgets were no replacement for spies. Nevertheless, he assured Nixon that they would give the United States the power to make sure that Moscow complied with agreements reached in SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks then under way in Helsinki.
But the more raw data the CIA obtained on the Soviet military, the less clear the big picture became. Nixon rightly criticized the agency for having underestimated Soviet nuclear firepower in the 1960s; he pounded the agency on that account throughout his presidency. The result of that pressure is now evident: for thirteen years, from Nixon’s era to the dying days of the cold war, every estimate of Soviet strategic nuclear forces overstated the rate at which Moscow was modernizing its weaponry.
Nixon nonetheless relied on the CIA to subvert the Soviet Union at every turn—not just in Moscow, but in every nation on earth.
“The President called Henry Kissinger and me into the Oval Office after the NSC meeting today for what turned out to be a 25-minute discussion of a variety of subjects, including SALT, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, and black operations,” Helms recorded in a March 25, 1970, memo. “With respect to black operations, the President enjoined me to hit the Soviets, and hit them hard, any place we can in the world. He said to ‘just go ahead,’ to keep Henry Kissinger informed, and to be as imaginative as we could. He was as emphatic on this as I have ever heard him on anything.” Encouraged by this rare moment of presidential attention, Helms “took this moment to hit hard on the point that I felt strongly the United States should give up nothing which constituted a pressure on the Soviet Union or an irritation to them without exacting a specific price in return.” He promised the president a new array of proposed covert actions against the Soviets.
Only one paragraph of the paper Helms sent to the White House the next week caught Nixon’s eye.
Helms reviewed the work of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty—a twenty-year investment of more than $400 million—and the power of the radios to keep the fires of dissent alive behind the iron curtain. He detailed the work of Soviet dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose words had been played back to the Soviet Union by the CIA. Thirty million people in Eastern Europe heard Radio Free Europe, and Soviet citizens did their best to tune in Radio Liberty, though Moscow was spending $150 million a year jamming their signals. In addition, the Free Europe and Liberty organizations had distributed two and a half million books and periodicals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the late 1950s. The hope was that words, on the air and in print, could promote intellectual and cultural freedom.
All that was good—but it was also old hat to Nixon. What captured his imagination was the CIA’s ability to swing elections.
“There have been numerous instances when, facing the threat of a Communist Party or popular front election victory in the Free World, we have met the threat and turned it successfully,” Helms reminded the president. “Guyana in 1963 and Chile in 1964 are good examples of what can be accomplished under difficult circumstances. Similar situations may soon face us in various parts of the world, and we are prepared for action with carefully planned covert election programs.” That was more like it. Money and politics were subjects close to Nixon’s heart.
“THE ONLY WAY TO GO WAS THE OLD WAY”
The agency had secretly supported politicians in Western Europe throughout the cold war. The list included Chancellor Willy Brandt of Germany, Prime Minister Guy Mollet of France, and every Christian Democrat who ever won a national election in Italy.
The CIA had spent twenty years and at least $65 million buying influence in Rome and Milan and Naples. In 1965, McGeorge Bundy had called the covert-action program in Italy “the annual shame.” Yet it went on. Foreign powers had been meddling in Italian politics for centuries; Washington was following “in the tradition of what the fascists, the communists, the Nazis, the British, and the French had done before,” said Thomas Fina, the American consul general in Milan under Nixon and a veteran of American intelligence and diplomacy in Italy. The CIA had been “subsidizing political parties, withdrawing money from political parties, giving money to individual politicians, not giving it to other politicians, subsidizing the publication of books, the content of radio programs, subsidizing newspapers, subsidizing journalists,” Fina noted. It had “financial resources, political resources, friends, the ability to blackmail.”
Nixon and Kissinger revived that tradition. Their instrument was the CIA’s Rome station and the extraordinary ambassador Graham Martin.
Kissinger called Martin “that cold-eyed fellow,” and he meant it as a compliment. “He obviously admired somebody who could be as ruthless in the exercise of power as he could be,” said Martin’s chief political officer in Rome, Robert Barbour. Other American diplomats found Martin shadowy and strange, “slippery as a cold basket of eels.” Martin had converted Marshall Plan funds to CIA cash at the American Embassy in Paris twenty years before. He had worked closely with the CIA as ambassador in Thailand from 1965 to 1968. No American diplomat was more deeply enamored of covert operations.
Nixon thought he was terrific. “I have great personal confidence in Graham Martin,” he told Kissinger on February 14, 1969, and with that, the machine was in motion.
Martin’s appointment as ambassador in Italy was the handiwork of a wealthy right-wing American named Pier Talenti, who lived in Rome, where he had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the 1968 Nixon campaign among his friends and political allies. That opened the door to the White House. Talenti went to see Colonel Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Kissinger’s military aide, to deliver a warning that the socialists were on the verge of taking power in Italy and a proposal that a new American ambassador was needed to counter the left. He named Martin, and his message went right to the top. Martin had persuaded Nixon and Kissinger that “he was just the man, because he was tough as nails, to bring about a shift in Italian politics,” said Wells Stabler, his deputy chief of mission in Rome.
“Martin decided that the only way to go was the old way,” said Stabler, who became a reluctant participant in the revival of American covert action in Italy. Beginning in 1970, after receiving formal approval from the Nixon White House, Martin oversaw the distribution of $25 million to both Christian Democrats and Italian neofascists, Stabler said. The money was divided “in the back room”—the CIA station inside the palatial American embassy—by “the Ambassador, myself, and the station chief,” Stabler said. “Some was given to the parties, some to individuals. Sometimes the station chief or myself would recommend something, but it was the Ambassador who would give the approval.” The station chief was Rocky Stone, the veteran of the Iran coup and the blown attempt to overthrow Syria, who had come to Rome after three years as chief of operations for the Soviet division.
Stone handed out about $6 million to the mainstream Christian Demo
crats. Millions more went to committees that pushed “ultraconservative policies” in the party, Stabler said. And millions more went to a far-right underground.
The money, as Martin had promised, transformed the political face of Italy. The man he backed, Giulio Andreotti, won an election infused with the CIA’s cash. But the covert financing of the far right fueled a failed neofascist coup in 1970. The money helped finance right-wing covert operations—including terrorist bombings, which Italian intelligence blamed on the extreme left. It also led to the worst political scandal in post-war Italy. Parliamentary investigations found that General Vito Miceli, the chief of the Italian military intelligence service, had taken at least $800,000 of the CIA’s cash. Miceli was jailed for trying to take over the country by force. Andreotti, the most durable Italian politician in decades, spent the last years of his life fighting criminal charges, including murder.
The CIA’s days of buying political influence in Italy finally ended when Graham Martin left Rome to become the next—and the last—American ambassador to South Vietnam.
“WE ARE CONSCIOUS OF WHAT IS AT STAKE”
Throughout 1969 and 1970, Nixon and Kissinger focused the CIA on the secret expansion of the war in Southeast Asia. They ordered the agency to make $725,000 in political payoffs to President Thieu of South Vietnam, manipulate the media in Saigon, fix an election in Thailand, and step up covert commando raids in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
In a bleak dispatch on the eve of a world tour that took Nixon across Southeast Asia, Helms told the president about the CIA’s long war in Laos. The agency “maintained a covert irregular force of a total of 39,000 men which has borne a major share of the active fighting” against the communists, he reminded Nixon. They were the CIA’s Hmong fighters, led since 1960 by General Vang Pao. “These irregular forces are tired from eight years of constant warfare, and Vang Pao…has been forced to use 13-and 14-year-old children to replace his casualties…. The limits have largely been reached on what this agency can do in a paramilitary sense to stop the North Vietnamese advance.” Nixon responded by ordering Helms to create a new Thai paramilitary battalion in Laos to shore up the Hmong. Kissinger asked where it would be best to bomb Laos with B-52s.
While their clandestine war in Southeast Asia intensified, Nixon and Kissinger made plans for a secret rapprochement with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. To clear the way to China, they strangled the agency’s operations against the communist regime.
Over the past decade, in the name of combating Chinese communism, the CIA had spent tens of millions of dollars parachuting tons of weapons to hundreds of Tibetan guerrillas who fought for their spiritual leader, His Holiness Tenzen Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. When Allen Dulles and Desmond FitzGerald briefed Eisenhower on the operation in February 1960, “the President wondered whether the net result of these operations would not be more brutal repressive reprisals by the Chinese Communists.”
Ike approved the program nonetheless. The agency set up a training camp for the Tibetan fighters in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It had paid an annual subsidy of some $180,000 directly to the Dalai Lama, and it created Tibet Houses in New York and Geneva to serve as his unofficial embassies. The goal was to keep the dream of a free Tibet alive while harassing the Red Army in western China. The results to date had been dozens of dead resistance fighters, and one bloodstained satchel of invaluable Chinese military documents seized in a firefight.
In August 1969, the agency requested $2.5 million more to support Tibet’s insurgents in the coming year, calling the 1,800-man paramilitary group “a force which could be employed in strength in the event of hostilities” against China. “Does this have any direct benefit to us?” Kissinger asked. He answered his own question. Though the CIA’s subsidy to the Dalai Lama continued, the Tibetan resistance was abandoned.
Kissinger then scuttled the remains of the CIA’s twenty-year mission to conduct clandestine operations against China.
The commando raids of the Korean War had dwindled down to desultory radio broadcasts from Taipei and Seoul, leaflets dropped on the mainland, fake news planted in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and what the agency described as “activities worldwide to denigrate and obstruct the People’s Republic of China.” The CIA kept working with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in his doomed effort to free Taiwan, unaware that Nixon and Kissinger had plans to sit down with Chairman Mao and Prime Minister Chou En-lai in Beijing.
When Kissinger finally sat down with Chou, the prime minister asked about the latest Free Taiwan campaign: “The CIA had no hand in it?”
Kissinger assured Chou that “he vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA.”
“They have become the topic of discussion throughout the world,” Chou said. “Whenever something happens in the world they are always thought of.”
“That is true,” Kissinger replied, “and it flatters them, but they don’t deserve it.”
Chou was fascinated to learn that Kissinger personally approved the CIA’s covert operations. He voiced his suspicions that the agency was still subverting the People’s Republic.
Kissinger replied that most CIA officers “write long, incomprehensible reports and don’t make revolution.”
“You use the word revolution,” Chou said. “We say subversion.”
“Or subversion,” Kissinger conceded. “I understand. We are conscious of what is at stake in our relationship, and we will not let one organization carry out petty operations that could hinder this course.”
That was the end of that. The CIA was out of business in China for years to come.
“DEMOCRACY DOESN’T WORK”
The CIA fought on every front to shore up the war in Vietnam. One of its bigger efforts came to fruition three weeks after President Nixon took office. In February 1969, covert action created the appearance of democracy in Thailand.
A military junta had ruled Thailand for eleven years, and tens of thousands of American troops readied for battle against Hanoi at Thai military bases. The dictatorship did little to support the notion that Americans were fighting for democracy in Southeast Asia.
The CIA’s election operation, code-named Lotus, was a straight-cash campaign first conceived by Ambassador Graham Martin in 1965, approved by President Johnson, and reaffirmed by President Nixon. The CIA station in Bangkok coaxed the junta toward holding a ballot; the generals kept putting them off. Finally the agency pumped millions of dollars into the politics of Thailand in 1968 and 1969; the cash financed the apparent transformation of the uniformed military into a ruling party ready to stand for elections. The CIA’s bagman was Pote Sarasin—Thailand’s ambassador to the United States from 1952 to 1957, the head of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization from 1957 to 1964, and the leading civilian front man for the ruling junta.
The election came off and the ruling junta won handily. But the rulers grew impatient with the trappings of democracy. They soon ended the experiment, suspending the constitution and disbanding parliament. Pote Sarasin reassumed his position as the civilian face of martial law on the night of the bloodless coup, and he brought the generals to explain themselves to their friends at the American embassy in Bangkok that evening. They said they respected the principles of democracy and had tried to put them into action. But they said “it was clear that in Thailand today democracy doesn’t work.”
The CIA’s covert action had been the thinnest veneer. “There should be no change in Thai relations with the U.S.,” Kissinger told Nixon after the coup. “The leaders of the Revolutionary Council are in fact essentially the same ones with whom we have been dealing all along,” he said. “We can anticipate that our programs in Thailand will continue without interruption.”
“GET THE CIA JERKS WORKING”
In February 1970, the president urgently ordered the agency to get going in Cambodia. After a year of planning, his secret bombing campaign against suspected Vietcong targets in that technically neutral nation was set to begin on March 17. American B-52s woul
d drop 108,823 tons of bombs on six suspected communist camps that the CIA and the Pentagon had identified—incorrectly—as North Vietnam’s hidden command center.
Helms was trying to lay the foundations for a new CIA station in Cambodia when the nation’s right-wing prime minister, Lon Nol, seized power. The overthrow came on the day that the secret bombings began. The coup shocked the CIA and the rest of the American government.
“What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?” Nixon thundered.
“Get the CIA jerks working on Cambodia,” he commanded. He told Helms to ship thousands of AK-47 automatic rifles to Lon Nol, to print a million propaganda leaflets, and to spread the word throughout the world that the United States was ready to invade. Then he ordered the CIA to deliver $10 million to the new Cambodian leader. “Get the money to Lon Nol,” he insisted.
Nixon had demanded an accurate tally of the arms and ammunition flowing to the enemy through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. The agency had been working on the question for five years without success. Nixon suggested that the arms flow could be cut off if the CIA bribed the right Cambodian generals. Helms demurred on practical grounds—the generals were making millions off the arms trade and the agency did not have the funds to buy or rent their loyalties. The argument did not impress the president. At a July 18, 1970, meeting with his foreign intelligence advisory board, Nixon savaged the agency’s performance.
“CIA had described the flow of materials through Sihanoukville as only a trickle,” he said. In fact, the port was providing two thirds of the communist arms in Cambodia. “If such mistakes could be made on a fairly straightforward issue such as this one,” he asked, “how should we judge CIA’s assessments or more important developments?”