by Tim Weiner
“Do you think there was, or could have been, a CIA conspiracy to remove you from office?” Nixon’s friend and former aide Frank Gannon asked him a decade later.
“Many people think so,” Nixon responded. “The CIA had motive. It was no secret that I was dissatisfied with the CIA, with its reports and particularly with their appraisals of Soviet strength and our other problems around the world…. I wanted to get rid of some of the deadwood and so forth. And they knew it. So they had a motive.”
“Do you think they feared you?” Gannon asked.
“No question about it,” Nixon replied. “And they had reason to.”
On November 21, Nixon offered the CIA to James Schlesinger, who accepted the president’s offer with pleasure. Nixon was gratified “to put his own man in—I mean one that really had R.N. tattooed on him—which was Schlesinger,” Helms said. Schlesinger’s orders—like Casey’s at State—were to turn the place inside out. “Get rid of the clowns,” the president kept commanding. “What use are they? They’ve got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers.”
On December 27, the president dictated a memo laying out the mission. Though Kissinger wanted dominion over American intelligence, “Schlesinger must be the man in charge,” Nixon said. If Congress ever “got the impression that the President has turned all intelligence activities over to Kissinger all hell will break loose. If on the other hand I name the new Director of CIA Schlesinger as my top assistant for intelligence activities, we can get it by the Congress. Henry simply doesn’t have the time…. I have been bugging him and Haig for over three years to get intelligence reorganized with no success whatever.” It was a strong echo of Eisenhower’s final burst of anger at the end of his presidency, his fuming at his “eight-year defeat” in his battle to whip American intelligence into shape.
In his last days in office, Helms feared that Nixon and his loyalists would ransack the CIA’s files. He did everything in his power to destroy two sets of secret documents that could have ruined the agency. One was the paper trail of the mind-control experiments with LSD and many other drugs that he and Allen Dulles had personally approved two decades before. Very few of those records survived.
The second was his own set of secret tapes. Helms had recorded hundreds of conversations in his executive office on the seventh floor during the six years and seven months that he had served as the director of central intelligence. By the date of his official departure on February 2, 1973, every one had been destroyed.
“When Helms left the building, all the troops jammed the headquarters entrance for his departure,” said Sam Halpern, then the top aide at the clandestine service. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Everyone knew we were in for a bad time after that.”
31. “TO CHANGE THE
CONCEPT OF A SECRET
SERVICE”
The collapse of the CIA as a secret intelligence service began on the day Helms left and James Schlesinger arrived at headquarters.
Schlesinger spent seventeen weeks as director of central intelligence. In that time, he purged more than five hundred analysts and more than one thousand people from the clandestine service. Officers serving overseas received unsigned coded cables informing them that they were fired. In response, he received anonymous death threats, and he added armed guards to his security detail.
He named Bill Colby as the new chief of the clandestine service, and then he sat him down to explain that it was time “to change the concept of a ‘secret service.’” The dawn of technocracy had arrived, and the day of the old boys who had been at the game for twenty-five years was done. “He was hyper-suspicious of the role and influence of the clandestine operators,” Colby recounted. “He felt the Agency had become complacent and bloated under their domination, that indeed there were far too many of these ‘old boys’ around the place doing little more than looking after each other, playing spy games, and reliving the halcyon past.”
The old boys argued that every aspect of the CIA’s work overseas was part of the struggle against the Soviets and the Red Chinese. Whether you were in Cairo or Kathmandu, you were always fighting Moscow and Beijing. But when Nixon and Kissinger clinked glasses with the leaders of the communist world, what was the point? Peace was at hand. The president’s policy of détente was sapping the cold-war élan of the clandestine service.
Colby quickly undertook a survey of the CIA’s capabilities. A decade before, half the CIA’s budget had gone to covert operations. Under Nixon, that figure now was falling below 10 percent. The recruitment of new talent was flagging, and the war in Vietnam was the cause. The political climate was not conducive to the hiring of bright young college graduates; an increasing number of campuses barred CIA recruiters by popular demand. The end of the military draft meant a halt to the processions of junior officers rotating into the CIA’s ranks.
The Soviet Union remained close to terra incognita for American spies. North Korea and North Vietnam were blanks. The CIA bought its best information from allied foreign intelligence services and from third-world leaders whom it owned outright. It was most effective on the peripheries of power, but those were the cheap seats, with obstructed views of the global stage.
The Soviet division was still paralyzed by the conspiracy theories of Jim Angleton, who remained in charge of American counterintelligence. “Angleton devastated us,” said the CIA’s Haviland Smith, who ran operations against the Soviet target in the 1960s and 1970s. “He took us out of the Soviet business.” One of Bill Colby’s many unhappy duties was to figure out what to do with the alcoholic spycatcher, who now had arrived at the conclusion that Colby himself was a mole for Moscow. Colby tried to persuade Schlesinger to fire Angleton. The new director demurred after he got the Briefing.
In his dark and smoky office, Angleton took the new boss on a fifty-year trip, back to the beginnings of Soviet communism, into the elaborate sting operations and political manipulations that the Russians ran against the West in the 1920s and 1930s, through the communist double-agent operations and disinformation campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, winding up with the surmise that the CIA itself had been penetrated at or near the highest levels by Moscow in the 1960s. In short, the enemy had breached the CIA’s defense and burrowed deep within.
Schlesinger bought the Briefing, entranced by Angleton’s guided tour of hell.
“OUTSIDE THE LEGISLATIVE CHARTER OF THIS AGENCY”
Schlesinger said he saw the CIA as “the central intelligence agency—small ‘c,’ small ‘i,’ small ‘a.’” It had become nothing more than “some component of the NSC staff” under Kissinger. He intended to hand it over to Deputy Director Vernon Walters while he dealt with the spy satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office, the electronic-eavesdropping colossus of the National Security Agency, and the military reports of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He intended to serve in the role he had imagined in his report to the president—as the director of national intelligence.
But his grand ambitions were shattered by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the White House. “The Watergate affair began to take over almost everything else,” Schlesinger said, “and the desires that I had at the outset gradually were inundated by simply the necessity of protecting, arranging for the salvation of the Agency.”
He had an unusual sense of how to save it.
Schlesinger thought that he had been told everything that the agency knew about Watergate. He was shocked when Howard Hunt testified that he and his Plumbers had ransacked Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office with the technical assistance of the CIA. A review by the agency of its own files turned up a copy of the film it had developed for Hunt after he cased the office. Further review disclosed the letters to the CIA from Jim McCord, which could be read as a threat to blackmail the president of the United States.
Bill Colby had jumped behind enemy lines with the OSS. He had spent six years supervising the killing of communists in Vietnam. He was not easily impressed by merely verbal violence. But h
e found Schlesinger’s rage awesome. Fire everyone if you have to, the director ordered, tear the place apart, rip out the floorboards, uncover everything. Then Schlesinger drafted a memo to every employee of the CIA. The note was one of the most dangerous decisions a director of central intelligence had ever made. It was the legacy he chose to leave:
I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency.
I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call…and say that he wishes to tell me about “activities outside CIA’s charter.”
The CIA’s exceedingly vague charter was clear on one point: the agency could not be the American secret police. Yet over the course of the cold war the CIA had been spying on citizens, tapping their telephones, opening first-class mail, and conspiring to commit murder on orders from the White House.
Schlesinger’s order was dated May 9, 1973, and effective immediately. That same day, Watergate began to destroy Richard Nixon. He had been forced to fire his palace guard, and only General Alexander Haig, the new White House chief of staff, remained. Hours after the order was issued, Haig called Colby to inform him that the attorney general was resigning, the secretary of defense was taking his job, Schlesinger was leaving the CIA for the Pentagon, and the president wanted Colby to be the next director of central intelligence. The government was in such disarray that Colby was not sworn in until September. For four months, General Walters was the acting director and Colby the director-designate—an awkward state of affairs.
Colby was now fifty-three years old, with thirty years behind him in the OSS and the CIA. He had been an avatar of covert action all his adult life. Throughout the spring of 1973, he had been forced to serve as Schlesinger’s hit man, summoning his fellow officers and handing them their walking papers. In the midst of all this, his eldest daughter, in her midtwenties, had wasted away and died from anorexia. On May 21, Colby sat down and began to read the initial compilation of the crimes of the CIA, which eventually ran to 693 potential violations. The Senate’s public hearings on the Watergate case had opened that week. The news of Nixon and Kissinger’s wiretapping of aides and reporters broke. The appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the crimes of Watergate was announced.
All his life, Colby had been a deeply devoted Roman Catholic, a man who believed in the consequences of mortal sin. He now learned for the first time that day of the plots against Fidel Castro and the central role of Robert F. Kennedy, the mind-control experiments and the secret prisons and the drug tests on unwitting human guinea pigs. The CIA’s wiretapping and surveillance of citizens and reporters did not offend his conscience; clear orders from three presidents stood behind them. But he knew, given the tenor of the times, that if these secrets leaked the agency could be ruined. Colby locked them up and set about trying to run the CIA.
The White House was falling apart under the crushing weight of Watergate, and it sometimes seemed to Colby that the CIA was crumbling too. It was often a good thing that Nixon did not read the intelligence the agency provided him. When the holy days of Yom Kippur and Ramadan coincided in 1973, Egypt went to war against Israel and drove deep into Israeli-held territory. In striking contrast to its solid forecasts of the Six-Day War in 1967, the CIA had misread the gathering storm. “We did not cover ourselves with glory,” Colby said. “We predicted the day before the war broke out that it was not going to break out.”
The agency had assured the White House, a few hours before the war began: “Exercises are more realistic than usual. But there will be no war.”
32. “A CLASSIC
FASCIST IDEAL”
On March 7, 1973, President Nixon met in the Oval Office with Tom Pappas, a Greek American business magnate, political fixer, and friend of the CIA. Pappas had delivered $549,000 in cash to the 1968 Nixon campaign as a gift from the leaders of the Greek military junta. The money had been laundered through the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. It was one of the darker secrets of the Nixon White House.
Pappas now had hundreds of thousands of dollars more to offer the president—money to buy the silence of the CIA veterans jailed in the Watergate break-in. Nixon thanked him profusely: “I am aware of what you’re doing to help out,” he said. Most of it came from members and supporters of “the colonels”—the Greek junta that seized power in April 1967, led by George Papadopoulos, a recruited CIA agent since the days of Allen Dulles, and the KYP’s liaison to the agency.
“These colonels had been plotting for years and years,” said Robert Keeley, later the American ambassador to Greece. “They were fascists. They fitted the classic definition of fascism, as represented by Mussolini in the 1920s: a corporate state, uniting industry and unions, no parliament, trains running on time, heavy discipline and censorship…almost a classic fascist ideal.”
Greek military and intelligence officers had worked in concert with seven successive station chiefs in Athens. They had a great friend in Thomas Hercules Karamessines, the Greek American chief of the clandestine service under Richard Helms, and they always had believed that “the Central Intelligence Agency was an effective and relatively direct route into the White House,” said Norbert Anschutz, the ranking American diplomat in Athens during the 1967 coup.
Yet the colonels had taken the CIA by surprise. “The only time I saw Helms really angry was when the Greek colonels’ coup took place in 1967,” said the veteran analyst and current-intelligence chief Dick Lehman. “The Greek generals had been planning a coup against the elected government, a plan we knew all about and was not yet ripe. But a group of colonels had trumped their ace and acted without warning. Helms had been expecting to be warned of the generals’ coup, and when a coup occurred, he naturally assumed it was this one, and he was furious.” Lehman, who had read the overnight cables from Athens, “tried to cool Helms off by pointing out that this was a different coup, which we had no line on. This was a new thought.”
Official American policy toward the colonels was cool and distant until the inauguration of Richard Nixon in January 1969. The junta used Tom Pappas, who had been working with the CIA in Athens for twenty years, as a courier to slip cash into the political coffers of Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew—the most powerful Greek American in the history of the United States. The payoff reaped benefits. Agnew came to Athens on an official visit. So did the secretaries of state, defense, and commerce. The United States sold tanks, aircraft, and artillery to the junta. The CIA’s Athens station argued that the arms sales to the colonels “would bring them back to democracy,” said Archer K. Blood, a political officer at the American embassy. That was “a lie,” Blood said—but “if you said anything critical about the junta, the CIA would explode in anger.”
By 1973, the United States was the only nation in the developed world on friendly terms with the junta, which jailed and tortured its political foes. “The CIA station chief was in bed with the guys who were beating up the Greeks,” said Charles Stuart Kennedy, the American consul general in Athens. “I would raise issues of what would amount to human rights, and this would be discounted by the CIA.” The agency “was too close to the wrong people,” Kennedy said. “It seemed to have undue influence over the Ambassador,” an old friend of Richard Nixon’s named Henry Tasca.
In the spring of 1974, General Demetrios Ioannidis took over as the leader of the junta. He had been working with the CIA for twenty-two years. The agency was Ioannidis’s sole contact with the government of the United States; the ambassador and the American diplomatic establishment were out of the loop. Jim Potts, the CIA station chief, was the American government, insofar as the junta was concerned. The agency had “a major asset in Athens. They had a relationship with the guy who ran the country, and the
y didn’t want it disturbed,” said the State Department’s Thomas Boyatt, the Washington desk officer responsible for Cyprus.
“CONNED BY A PISS-ANT GENERAL”
Cyprus, an island forty miles off the coast of Turkey and five hundred miles from Athens, had been divided and conquered by Greek and Islamic armies since the days of the prophet Muhammad. The Greek colonels had a deep hatred for the Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios, and an abiding desire to overthrow him. The American deputy chief of mission in Cyprus, William Crawford, had gotten wind of their scheming.
“I went up to Athens with what I considered proof positive that they were going to pull the whole house of cards down,” he remembered. “I was told by our chief of station in Athens, Jim Potts, that that was just absolutely impossible. He couldn’t agree with me: these people were friends with whom we’d worked for thirty years, and they would never conduct anything so foolish.”
By 1974, Tom Boyatt became convinced that the CIA’s friends in Athens wanted to do away with Makarios. He drafted a cable to Ambassador Tasca in Athens. Go talk to General Ioannidis, it said. Tell him—“in words of one syllable that even he will understand”—that “the United States strongly opposes any efforts by any element of the Greek government, overt or clandestine, to mess around in the Cyprus situation.” Tell him that “we particularly oppose any efforts to overthrow Makarios and install a pro-Athens government. Because if that happens the Turks are going to invade, and that’s not good for any of us.”
But Ambassador Tasca had never spoken to General Ioannidis in his life. That role was reserved for the CIA station chief.
On Saturday, July 12, 1974, the State Department received a cable from the CIA station in Athens. Rest assured, it said. The general and the junta were not doing anything to overthrow Archbishop Makarios. “So, all right, we’d had it from the horse’s mouth,” Boyatt recounted. “I went home. And about 3:00 a.m. on Monday morning, I got a call from the Ops Center at the State Department, and the person said, ‘You better get in here.’”