by Tim Weiner
Schlesinger reported that the cost of intelligence was soaring and the quality shrinking. Seven thousand CIA analysts swamped with data could not sort out the patterns of the present. Six thousand clandestine-service officers could not penetrate the high councils of the communist world. The director of central intelligence had no power to do anything except run covert action and produce intelligence reports that Nixon and Kissinger rarely read. The agency could not support Nixon’s global ambitions—opening the door to China, standing up to the Soviets, ending the Vietnam War on American terms. “There is no evidence that the intelligence community, given its present structure, will come to grips with this class of problems,” Schlesinger concluded.
He proposed the most radical reshaping of American espionage since 1947. A new czar to be known as the director of national intelligence would work at the White House and oversee the empire of intelligence. The CIA should be dismembered and a new agency invented to carry out covert action and espionage.
Haig, who had set the idea in motion, wrote a memo that it would be “the most controversial gutfight” undertaken in American government in memory. The problem was that Congress had created the CIA and it would have to play a part in its rebirth. This Nixon could not abide. It had to be done in secret. He ordered Kissinger to spend a month doing nothing else but making sure it happened. But Kissinger had no stomach for it. “I prefer to sit on it,” he scribbled on Haig’s memo. “I have no intention to bleed over it.”
The long battle ended a year after Allende came to power. The president directly ordered Helms to hand over control of the CIA to his deputy director—Nixon’s hired gun, General Cushman—and assume the role of figurehead emperor of American intelligence. Helms parried that deadly thrust with a deft riposte. He put Cushman in a freeze so deep that the general pleaded for a new billet as the commandant of the marines. The number-two job stayed open for six months.
With that, the idea died, except in the mind of Richard Nixon. “Intelligence is a sacred cow,” he raged. “We’ve done nothing since we’ve been here about it. The CIA isn’t worth a damn.” He made a mental note to get rid of Richard Helms.
“THE NATURAL AND PROBABLE CONSEQUENCES”
The subversion of Salvador Allende went on. “Track Two never really ended,” the CIA’s Tom Karamessines said, and his notes from a December 10, 1970, White House meeting reflected what was to come: “Kissinger, in the role of the devil’s advocate, pointed out that the proposed CIA program was aimed at supporting moderates. Since Allende is holding himself out as a moderate, he asked, why not support extremists?”
That is precisely what the agency did. It spent most of the $10 million authorized by Nixon sowing political and economic chaos in Chile. The seeds sprouted in 1971. The new chief of the Latin American division, Ted Shackley, back at CIA headquarters after chief-of-station stints in Laos and South Vietnam, told his superiors that his officers would “bring our influence to bear on key military commanders so that they might play a decisive role on the side of the coup forces.” The new Santiago station chief, Ray Warren, built a web of military men and political saboteurs who sought to shift the Chilean military off its constitutional foundation. And President Allende made a fatal mistake. In reaction to the pressure placed upon him by the CIA, he built a shadow army called the Grupo de Amigos del Presidente, or the Friends of the President. Fidel Castro backed this force. The Chilean military could not conscience it.
Almost three years to the day after Allende’s election, a young CIA officer in Santiago by the name of Jack Devine, who many years later became the acting chief of the clandestine service, flashed a bulletin that went straight to Kissinger, whom Richard Nixon had just nominated to be secretary of state. The cable said the United States would within minutes or hours receive a request for aid from “a key officer of the Chilean military group planning to overthrow President Allende.”
The coup came on September 11, 1973. It was swift and terrible. Facing capture at the presidential palace, Allende killed himself with an automatic rifle, a gift from Fidel Castro. The military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet took power that afternoon, and the CIA quickly forged a liaison with the general’s junta. Pinochet reigned with cruelty, murdering more than 3,200 people, jailing and torturing tens of thousands in the repression called the Caravan of Death.
“There is no doubt,” the agency confessed in a statement to Congress after the cold war ended, “that some CIA contacts were actively engaged in committing and covering up serious human rights abuses.” Chief among them was Colonel Manuel Contreras, the head of the Chilean intelligence service under Pinochet. He became a paid CIA agent and met with senior CIA officials in Virginia two years after the coup, at a time when the agency reported that he was personally responsible for thousands of cases of murder and torture in Chile. Contreras distinguished himself with a singular act of terror: the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier, who had been Allende’s ambassador to the United States, and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt. They were killed by a car bomb fourteen blocks from the White House. Contreras then blackmailed the United States by threatening to tell the world about his relationship with the CIA, and blocked his extradition and trial for the murder. There was no question at the agency that Pinochet knew and approved of that terrorist killing on American soil.
The Pinochet regime held power for seventeen years. After it fell, Contreras was convicted by a Chilean court of the murder of Orlando Letelier and served a seven-year sentence. Pinochet died in December 2006 at age ninety-one, under indictment for murder and with $28 million in secret bank accounts abroad. At this writing, Henry Kissinger is being pursued in the courts of Chile, Argentina, Spain, and France by survivors of the Caravan of Death. When he was secretary of state, the White House counsel gave him fair warning that “one who sets in motion a coup attempt can be assessed with the responsibility for the natural and probable consequences of that action.”
The CIA was incapable of “placing stop and go buttons on the machinery” of covert action, said Dave Phillips, the Chilean task force chief. “I thought that if there were a military coup, there might be two weeks of street fighting in Santiago, and perhaps months of fighting and thousands of deaths in the countryside,” he testified in secret to a Senate committee five years after the initial failure of Track Two. “God knows I knew I was involved in something where one man might get killed.”
His interrogator asked: What is the distinction that you draw between one death in an assassination and thousands in a coup?
“Sir,” he replied, “what is the distinction I draw from the time I was a bombardier in World War Two and pushed a target button, and hundreds and perhaps thousands of people died?”
30. “WE ARE GOING
TO CATCH A LOT OF
HELL”
Under President Nixon, secret government surveillance reached a peak in the spring of 1971. The CIA, the NSA, and the FBI were spying on American citizens. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were using electronic eavesdropping and espionage to keep tabs on Kissinger. Nixon, improving on the work of Kennedy and Johnson, had bugged the White House and Camp David with state-of-the-art voice-activated microphones. Nixon and Kissinger wiretapped their own close aides and Washington reporters, trying to stop leaks to the press.
But leaks were a spring that never failed. In June, The New York Times began publishing long excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, the secret Vietnam history commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara four years before. The source was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon whiz kid whom Kissinger had hired as a consultant to the National Security Council and invited into Nixon’s California compound at San Clemente. Kissinger raged at the release, sending Nixon into a greater fury. The president turned to his domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, to stop the leaks. He assembled a team called the Plumbers, led by a very recently retired CIA officer who had played prominent roles in Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs.
Hunt flew down to Miami to see his old Cuban American companion Bernard Barker, who was selling real estate, and they talked beside a monument to the dead of the Bay of Pigs. “He described the mission as national security,” Barker said. “I asked Howard who he represented, and the answer he gave me was really something for the books. He said he was in a group at the White House level, under direct order of the President of the United States.” Together they recruited four more Miami Cubans, including Eugenio Martinez, who had run some three hundred seagoing missions into Cuba for the CIA and remained on a $100-a-month retainer from headquarters.
On July 7, 1971, Ehrlichman telephoned Nixon’s spy inside the CIA, the deputy director, General Cushman. The president’s aide told him that Howard Hunt would be calling him directly and asking for assistance. “I wanted you to know that he was in fact doing some things for the President,” Ehrlichman said. “You should consider he has pretty much carte blanche.” Hunt’s demands escalated—he wanted his old secretary back, he wanted an office with a secure telephone in New York, he wanted state-of-the-art tape recorders, he wanted a CIA camera to stake out a break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills, and he wanted the CIA to develop the film. Cushman belatedly informed Helms that the agency had given Hunt a set of disguises: a red wig, a voice-altering device, fake personal identification. Then the White House demanded that the agency produce a psychological profile of Daniel Ellsberg, a direct violation of the CIA’s charter against spying on Americans. But Helms complied.
Helms pushed Cushman out of the agency in November 1971. Months went by before Nixon found the perfect candidate: Lieutenant General Vernon Walters.
General Walters had been conducting secret missions for presidents for the better part of twenty years. But Helms had never met him before he arrived as the new deputy director of central intelligence on May 2, 1972. “I had just come from running an operation which the CIA knew nothing about,” General Walters recounted. “Helms, who had wanted someone else, said, ‘I’ve heard about you; what do you know about intelligence?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been negotiating with the Chinese and the Vietnamese for three years, and I smuggled Henry Kissinger into Paris fifteen times without you or anybody else in the Agency knowing anything about it.’” Helms was duly impressed. But he soon had cause to wonder about his new deputy’s loyalties.
“EVERY TREE IN THE FOREST WILL FALL”
Late on Saturday night, June 17, 1972, Howard Osborn, the chief of the CIA’s Office of Security, called Helms at home. The director knew it could not be good news. This is how he remembered the conversation:
“Dick, are you still up?”
“Yes, Howard.”
“I’ve just learned that the District police have picked up five men in a break-in at the Democratic Party National Headquarters at the Watergate…. Four Cubans and Jim McCord.”
“McCord? Retired out of your shop?”
“Two years ago.”
“What about the Cubans—Miami or Havana?”
“Miami…in this country for some time now.”
“Do we know them?”
“As of now, I can’t say.”
“Get hold of the operations people, first thing…. Have them get onto Miami. Check every record here and in Miami…. Is that all of it?”
“No, not half,” Osborn said heavily. “Howard Hunt also seems to be involved.”
Hearing Hunt’s name, Helms drew a deep breath. “What the hell were they doing?” he asked. He had a fair idea: McCord was an expert in electronic eavesdropping, Hunt was working for Nixon, and the charge was wiretapping, a federal crime.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, Helms tracked down the acting director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray, at a hotel in Los Angeles. J. Edgar Hoover had died six weeks before, after forty-eight years in power. Helms told Gray very carefully that the Watergate burglars had been hired by the White House and the CIA had nothing to do with it. Got that? Okay, good night then.
Helms convened the daily 9 a.m. meeting of senior CIA officers at headquarters on Monday, June 19. Bill Colby, now the CIA’s executive director, the number-three man, remembered Helms saying: “We are going to catch a lot of hell, because these are formers”—that is, former CIA men—and “we knew they were working in the White House.” The next morning, The Washington Post placed the responsibility for Watergate at the door of the Oval Office—although, to this day, no one really knows if Richard Nixon authorized the break-in.
On Friday, June 23, Nixon told his brutally efficient chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to call Helms and Walters into the White House and order them to wave off the FBI in the name of national security. They agreed to play ball at first—a very dangerous business. Walters called Gray and told him to stand down. But a line was crossed on Monday, June 26, when Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, ordered Walters to come up with a large sum of untraceable hush money for the six jailed CIA veterans. On Tuesday, Dean repeated the demand. He later told the president that the price of silence would be $1 million over two years. Only Helms—or Walters, when Helms was outside the United States—could authorize a secret payment from the CIA’s black budget. They were the only officials in the American government who could legally deliver a suitcase with a million dollars in secret cash to the White House, and Nixon knew it.
“We could get money anyplace in the world,” Helms reflected. “We ran a whole arbitrage operation. We didn’t need to launder money—ever.” But if the CIA delivered the cash, “the end result would have been the end of the Agency,” he said. “Not only would I have gone to jail if I had gone along with what the White House wanted us to do, but the agency’s credibility would have been ruined forever.”
Helms refused. Then, on June 28, he fled Washington for a three-week tour of intelligence outposts in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, leaving Walters as the acting director. A week went by. Impatient FBI agents started to rebel against their orders to stand down. Gray told Walters he would need an order in writing from the CIA calling off the investigation on national-security grounds. Both men now understood the risks of a paper trail. They spoke on July 6, and shortly thereafter Gray called the president at his retreat in San Clemente. “People on your staff are trying to mortally wound you” by manipulating the CIA, he told Nixon. An awful silence followed—and then the president told Gray to go ahead with the investigation.
Shortly after Helms returned from his trip in late July, Jim McCord, awaiting trial and facing five years in prison, sent a message through his lawyer to the CIA. He said the president’s men wanted him to testify that the Watergate break-in was an agency operation. Let the CIA take the rap, a White House aide told him, and a presidential pardon would follow. McCord responded in a letter: “If Helms goes and the Watergate operation is laid at CIA’s feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert. The whole matter is at the precipice right now. Pass the message that if they want it to blow, they are on exactly the right course.”
“EVERYONE KNEW WE WERE IN FOR A BAD TIME”
On November 7, 1972, President Nixon was re-elected in one of the great landslides of American history. He vowed that day to run the CIA and the State Department with an iron hand in his second term, to destroy them and rebuild them in his imag
e.
On November 9, Kissinger proposed replacing Helms with James Schlesinger, then the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. “Very good idea,” Nixon responded.
On November 13, he told Kissinger that he intended “to ruin the Foreign Service. I mean ruin it—the old Foreign Service—and to build a new one. I’m going to do it.” He settled on an inside man to do the job: the OSS veteran and champion Republican fund-raiser William J. Casey. In 1968, Casey had importuned President-elect Nixon to make him director of central intelligence, but Nixon handed him the chair at the Securities and Exchange Commission instead, a cunning decision that cheered corporate boardrooms across America. Now, in Nixon’s second term, Casey would be named undersecretary of state for economic affairs. But his real assignment was to serve as Nixon’s saboteur—“to tear up the Department,” Nixon said.
On November 20, Nixon fired Richard Helms in a short, awkward meeting at Camp David. He offered him the post of ambassador to the Soviet Union. There was an uncomfortable pause as Helms considered the ramifications. “Look, Mr. President, I don’t think that would be a very good idea, to send me to Moscow,” Helms said. “Well, maybe not,” Nixon replied. Helms proposed Iran instead, and Nixon urged him to take it. They also reached an understanding that Helms would stay on until March 1973, his sixtieth birthday, the formal retirement age at the CIA. Nixon broke that pledge, a pointless act of cruelty. “The man was a shit,” Helms said, faintly shaking with rage as he told the story.
Helms believed to his dying day that Nixon fired him because he wouldn’t take a dive on Watergate. But the record shows that Nixon resolved long before the break-in to jettison Helms and gut the CIA. The president actually believed that Helms was out to get him.