by Tim Weiner
“the most bitter feelings”: Whitten gave his professional biography and described his run-ins with Angleton in both his 1976 and 1978 depositions; the quotation is from the latter.
“His having been to the Cuban and Soviet embassies”: Helms deposition, August 9, 1978, House Special Committee on Assassinations. Top Secret, declassified May 1, 2001.
McCone…broke the news of the Cuban connection: McCone memo, November 24, 1963, CIA/CREST; LBJ and Eisenhower conversation, August 27, 1965, LBJ Tapes/Holland.
“this assassin”: LBJ to Weisl, November 23, 1963, LBJ Tapes/Holland.
He had talked face-to-face: The innocent explanation was that Soviet intelligence officers in Mexico City were filling their cover roles as visa officers by day, just as CIA officers did in embassies worldwide. In a memoir, the Soviet intelligence officer Oleg Nechiporenko said he first overheard and then witnessed Oswald pleading for a visa in his barely passable Russian. He appeared to want to go to Cuba to save both himself and Fidel Castro from the forces of American intelligence: “Oswald was extremely agitated and clearly nervous, especially whenever he mentioned the FBI, but he suddenly became hysterical, began to sob, and through his tears cried, ‘I am afraid…they’ll kill me. Let me in!’ Repeating over and over that he was being persecuted and that he was being followed even here in Mexico, he stuck his right hand into the left pocket of his jacket and pulled out a revolver, saying, ‘See? This is what I must now carry to protect my life.’” Nechiporenko, Passport to Assassination: The Never-Before-Told Story of Lee Harvey Oswald by the KGB Colonel Who Knew Him (Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane, 1993).
The station sent headquarters a list: The sequence of events, first raising the question of whether Cubela might be a double agent, is reconstructed in “The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Performance of the Intelligence Agencies,” Church Committee staff report, 1975, declassified in 2000.
Dulles immediately called James Angleton: Angleton deposition, 1978, HSCA.
“Helms realized that disclosing the assassination plots would reflect very poorly on the Agency”: Whitten testimony, 1976.
“We were treading very lightly”: Helms testimony, August 1978, HSCA.
“gross incompetency” and “a direct admission”: Hoover and DeLoach cited in “The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” This secret Senate staff report, declassified in 2000, twenty-five years after it was conducted, found that the evidence “tends to impeach the process by which the intelligence community provided information to the Warren Commission.” It concluded: “There is doubt as to whether these agencies can ever be relied upon to investigate their own operations and their own performance in critical situations.”
“Dozens of people were claiming that they had seen Oswald here, there, and everywhere”: Whitten testimony, 1976.
“We would have seen it more sharply”: This and all other quotations from Angleton in this chapter are from his deposition before the HSCA, October 5, 1978, declassified 1998.
“I’d like to talk to you”: Mark told of his encounter with Nosenko, a previously unpublished account, in a State Department oral history, FAOH.
Much was lost in translation: For example, Nosenko said an army sergeant at the American embassy in Moscow whom he identified as a spy for the KGB worked as “a code machine repairman.” This later came out in English as “a mechanic,” as in garage mechanic. When Nosenko tried to correct the record, he was accused of changing his story.
“a great deal had gone wrong on his watch”: A formal acknowledgment of that fact finally appeared in 2006. See “The Angleton Era in CIA,” in A Counterintelligence Reader, Vol. 3, Chap. 2, pp. 109–115, available online at http://www.ncix.gov/history/index.html.
the CIA threw Nosenko into solitary confinement: The case was chronicled years later by two senior CIA officers: Richards J. Heuer, Jr., “Nosenko: Five Paths to Judgment,” Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1987, CIA/CSI; and John Limond Hart, The CIA’s Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002), pp. 128–160.
“I recognized we couldn’t keep him in durance vile”: Helms interview, Studies in Intelligence, December 1993, CIA/CSI.
seven major studies of the case: In 1976, the CIA’s John Limond Hart was called out of retirement to re-investigate the Nosenko case. Hart had uncovered the deceptions of his predecessor as the chief of station in Seoul, Al Haney, nearly a quarter century before. He had gone on to a distinguished career—chief of station in Saigon, chief of foreign intelligence collection in China and Cuba, and chief of operations for Western Europe. He had known Angleton since 1948, when they served in Rome together—when the CIA won the Italian elections, the cold war was new, and Angleton still sane. The two men sat down for a four-hour interview on the case of Yuri Nosenko in 1976. When Hart read the transcript the next day, the words made no sense at all. “Perhaps because of his legendary thirst,” Hart wrote, “Angleton’s muddled mind by then had become a grab bag of haphazard minutiae, much of it totally irrelevant.” Hart pronounced the Nosenko case “an abomination,” the worst thing he had ever encountered in a lifetime of intelligence work. Hart, The CIA’s Russians.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“a goddamn bunch of thugs”: LBJ to Senator Eugene McCarthy, February 1, 1966, available online at http://www.whitehousetapes.org/clips/1966_0201_lbj_mccarthy_vietnam.html. LBJ expressed his “divine retribution” theory—“that because President Kennedy had been in a sense responsible for Diem’s demise, he in turn was assassinated himself,” as Richard Helms remembered—at a December 19, 1963, meeting with Mc-Cone, Helms, and Desmond FitzGerald. LBJ repeated this to Hubert Humphrey, who would be his vice president; Ralph Duggan, a White House aide; and Pierre Salinger, a Kennedy press secretary.
“The Attorney General intended to stay on”: McCone memo, “Discussion with the President, 13 December—9:30 a.m.,” declassified October 2002, CIA/CREST. McCone’s memo continued: “I explained to the President that I had told Bobby he could not bring back the intimacy of the relationship with the President which he had had with his brother because that was a blood relationship, not an official relationship. A type of relationship which is seldom found between brothers and never found between officials, either in business or government.” It was not found between the new president and his attorney general. Bobby could not stand to be in the White House with Johnson. “He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways,” he said a few months later, in the April 1964 oral history, for the Kennedy Library.
“‘change the image of the CIA’”: McCone memos, December 28, 1963; January 13, 1964; and February 20, 1964. The president was worried about his own image. He was discomfited by the publication of The Invisible Government, the first serious best seller examining the CIA and its relationship with the White House. It revealed the existence of the Special Group, the committee of top CIA, State, Pentagon, and White House men who approved covert action—and it made clear that presidents ultimately controlled those secret missions. The chairman of the Special Group, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, thought it might be best to change its name. After rejecting suggestions from his staff—among them “the Invisible Group”—he issued National Security Action Memorandum 303, changing the name to the 303 Committee.
The committee’s declassified records show that the CIA undertook 163 major covert operations, slightly fewer than five each month, under President Kennedy. Under President Johnson, 142 new major covert operations were launched through February 1967, slightly fewer than four each month. The members’ deliberations often were pro forma. In the course of a few spring days in 1964, they approved a shipment of arms for the military coup that overthrew the government of Brazil—“we don’t want to watch Brazil dribble down the drain while we stand around waiting for the next election”—and sent an extra $1.25 million to swing the presidential ballot in Chile—“no problem, since we could get more if needed.” President Johnson rarely sought
the details of such decisions, though they had the imprimatur of his office.
“extremely worried”: McCone memo, “DCI Briefing of CIA Subcommittees of Senate Armed Services and Senate Appropriations Committees, Friday, 10 January 1964,” declassified December 15, 2004, CIA/CREST; Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available online at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/vietnam/epis1.html. “The President should be informed that this is not the greatest thing since peanut butter”: McCone, Helms, and Lyman Kirkpatrick cited in William Colby, memorandum for the record, “Meeting on North Vietnam,” January 9, 1964, CIA/CREST.
“highly dissatisfied”: McCone memos, April 22 and 29, 1964, and October 22, 1964, CIA/CREST; the latter also appears in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, document 219. It is worth quoting, for it shows that President Johnson and John McCone had never had a substantial conversation about the CIA: “On 22 October I prepared to depart with Mrs. McCone to attend the funeral of Herbert Hoover, Sr. I was called by the White House and advised that the President requested specifically that we accompany him…. While traveling with the President I was able to discuss a number of matters with him. The principal items were: The President stated that he did not know too much about CIA’s organization…. I emphasized the objectivity of the organization, the fact it had no parochial ‘axe to grind’ in any field most particularly those relating to foreign policy and defense policy. The Agency looked upon its responsibility as that of collecting intelligence by every possible means and evaluating our own intelligence and that gathered by all other Community members carefully and objectively. The President asked the size of the organization. I told him our budget was about [deleted] and said we had about [deleted] employees. He asked about the future outlook. I said that I thought the organization was pretty well shaking down, the five-year forecast indicated no increases in personnel and the increases in the budget were minimal and attributable largely to the wages and salary increases and other escalations. I said this resulted from very careful management and that we hope to ‘hold the line’ unless new tasks were assigned to the Agency. This would necessitate additional people and money. The President asked what part of our budget went for operational activities such as political action, paramilitary, etc., and I said about [deleted]. This was the first opportunity I have had to discuss the Agency with the President. I thought he was interested and impressed.” McCone memo, “Discussion with the President—22 October 1964,” emphasis added.
McCone tried to make the president pay attention to the fact that the fate of nations could turn on a successful trick of espionage. He had a couple of stories to tell, the best of which was this: a young station chief by the name of Clair George, posted in Bamako, Mali, one of the world’s most obscure capitals, got a tip from a member of the host government in 1964. The African official said he had heard from a diplomat at the Chinese embassy that Beijing would conduct its first nuclear test in a matter of weeks. The report went straight to CIA headquarters. An early spy satellite looked down on the preparations at the test site in China. Mc-Cone personally took charge of the analysis. “We knew what they were doing,” he recalled in an oral history for the LBJ Library. “Hard intelligence.”
McCone told the White House and American allies that the Chinese would test a nuclear weapon within thirty to sixty days: “And on the thirty-first day they exploded the bomb. They made a prophet out of me.” This intelligence coup began with news from nowhere—the capital of Mali. After that, Clair George was a made man. Twenty years later he became chief of the clandestine service. But McCone had far too few such success stories.
the new Defense Intelligence Agency: The DIA was “a perfect example of how not to create a government agency,” said Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served as its vice director in the mid-1970s before running the NSA and serving, briefly, as deputy director of central intelligence. Bobby R. Inman, “Managing Intelligence for Effective Use,” Center for Information Policy Research, Harvard University, December 1980.
“take NRO and shove it”: Transcript of telephone conversation between Director of Central Intelligence McCone and the assistant secretary of defense, February 13, 1964, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004.
a highly detailed confession: Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4/Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2000/Spring 2001, declassified November 2005. The quarterly is an official and highly classified NSA publication.
the American destroyers sent a flash message that they were under attack: Eight hours later, President Johnson asked McCone: “Do they want a war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?” McCone answered: “No. The North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attacks on their off-shore islands. They are responding out of pride.”
“McNamara had taken over raw SIGINT”: Ray Cline oral history, LBJL.
“shooting at flying fish”: Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Vietnam was my nightmare”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 309–311.
“our ignorance—or innocence”: Helms oral history, September 16, 1981, LBJL.
“‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’”: LBJ quoted in Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 251–252.
“Counterinsurgency became an almost ridiculous battle cry”: Amory oral history, JFKL.
“What we needed…were people who could shoot guns”: Robert F. Kennedy oral history, May 14, 1964, JFKL, collected in Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (eds.), Robert Kennedy, in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 310. President Kennedy established the Special Group (Counterinsurgency) on January 18, 1962, under National Security Action Memorandum 124. RFK led it—despite McCone’s warning that it would be “an embarrassment for Bobby if it became known the Attorney General was running dirty tricks in favor of the counterinsurgency committee”—and created a great grab bag of worldwide programs in its name.
“Our Counterinsurgency Experiment and Its Implications”: De Silva to Colby, undated, forwarded from Colby to McCone via Helms (“Subject: Saigon Station Experiment in Counterinsurgency”), November 16, 1964; with Marshall Carter’s covering memo (“McCone’s War”), declassified May 29, 2003, CIA/CREST.
“if South Vietnam fell”: “DCI Briefing for CIA Subcommittee of House Appropriations Committee, December 5, 1963,” declassified March 15, 2004, CIA/CREST.
“VC may be the wave of the future”: McCone cited in Harold Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers, 1996, CIA/CSI, available online at http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/vietnam/epis1.html.
“the Vietcong use of terror”: Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), pp. 220–254.
The corruption of intelligence: George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 188–194.
“My world turned to glue”: De Silva, Sub Rosa, p. 256.
“There must be somebody out there that’s got enough brains”: LBJ Tapes, March 30, 1965, 9:12 a.m., LBJL.
“increasing pressure to stop the bombing” and “mired down in combat in the jungle”: McCone memos, April 2 and 20, 1965, LBJL. See also Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers.
“Let me tell you about these intelligence guys”: Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 566. The source of this story was Richard Helms. Helms remembered it vividly as Johnson’s statement to John McCloy at a dinner in the White House residence. It certainly sounds like LBJ.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“light the fuse”: LBJ Tapes/Holland, April 2, 1965.
“Now, I need you,” Lyndon Johnson said: Transcript of telephone conversation between President Johnson and Admiral Raborn, April 6, 1965, 4:26 p.m., FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004, LBJL.
“Our CIA says”: LBJ Tapes, April 30, 1965, 10:50 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.
“You don’t think CIA can document it?”: LBJ Tapes, April 30, 1965, 5:05 p.m.
“It was tragic”: Ray Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), pp. 211–212.
“Poor old Raborn”: James Hanrahan, “An Interview with Former CIA Executive Director Lawrence K. ‘Red’ White,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 43, No. 1, Winter 1999/2000, CIA/CSI.
“If you ever decide to get rid of him, you just put that fellow Helms in there”: Transcript of telephone conversation between the president and Russell, 8 p.m., September 14, 1965, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004, LBJL.
“You think that we can really beat the Vietcong out there?”: LBJ Tapes, July 2, 1965.
“as invisible as possible”: William Lair oral history, Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, Texas Tech University, interview conducted by Steve Maxner, December 11, 2001. Used with the kind permission of Mr. Maxner and the archive.
“We saw some of our young guys killed”: Lilley oral history, FAOH.
Colby was disheartened: Colby to Helms, August 16, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXVIII. The memo describes Colby’s impressions during his October 1965 tour.
“No one was talking theory here”: The Shackley account is from his posthumous memoir, written with Richard A. Finney, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA (Dulles, VA: Potomac, 2005).
“an exemplary success story”: Memorandum from the Central Intelligence Agency to the 303 Committee, September 8, 1966, FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXVIII, document 248.