by Tim Weiner
Wild Bill Donovan: Donovan began his stint as ambassador by reviving the disastrous Li Mi operation. The defeated Chinese Nationalist forces had settled into the Golden Triangle, in the hills of eastern Burma, the northern borderlands of Thailand, and the western edge of Laos. They had become an aggressive occupying force running an international opium trade. Donovan saw them as freedom fighters, and he plunged into their cause, “providing supplies while denying publicly that there was any U.S. involvement,” said Kempton B. Jenkins, then a State Department political officer in Bangkok. A sham evacuation of the Li Mi forces, overseen by Donovan, looked impressive—CIA pilots flew 1,925 men and boys out of the Golden Triangle to Taiwan—but thousands of men remained. Instead of fighting communists, they set about cornering the opium market, building refineries to make morphine, and shipping the drugs down to Bangkok. Jenkins provides a detailed look at Donovan’s liaisons with the Thai police and military. Jenkins oral history, FAOH. See also Frank C. Darling, Thailand and the United States (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1965), for a look at the beginnings of CIA involvement in the region after the Korean war. The expanding power of the CIA’s Laos station in the 1950s is well described in the FAOH oral histories of John Gunther Dean, L. Michael Rives, and Christian A. Chapman, all of whom served at the American embassy there.
“Money was no object”: Thomas oral history, FAOH.
“financing of a political party, electoral support for this party, and support for selected candidates for parliament from the party”…to continue “the leadership and control of the present ruling group” and “to ensure that the party created is successful in winning a comfortable and commanding majority in elections”: These goals are set out in the CIA’s memorandum prepared for the 303 Committee, September 28, 1965, and 303 Committee minutes, October 8, 1965. FRUS, Vol. XXVII.
The CIA had warned: On March 5, 1965, in a discussion of ongoing covert action in Indonesia, a senior CIA officer told the 303 Committee that “the loss of a nation of 105 million to the ‘Communist camp’ would make a victory in Vietnam of little meaning.” 303 Committee minutes, March 5, 1965. A separate CIA memorandum for the 303 Committee, dated February 23, 1965, lays out the developing covert-action program in Indonesia: “Since the summer of 1964, [deleted, but probably the Indonesia station and/or Colby’s Far East division] has worked with the Department of State in formulating concepts and developing an operational program of political action in Indonesia…. The main thrust of this program is designed to exploit factionalism within the PKI itself, to emphasize traditional Indonesian distrust of Mainland China and to portray the PKI as an instrument of Red Chinese imperialism. Specific types of activity envisaged include covert liaison with and support to existing anti-Communist groups…. [Ongoing covert programs include] political action within existing Indonesian organizations and institutions [and] covert training of selected personnel and civilians, who will be placed in key positions….[Among the goals is to] cultivate potential leaders within Indonesia for the purpose of ensuring an orderly non-Communist succession upon Sukarno’s death or removal from office.” The 303 Committee records are in FRUS, Vol. XXVI.
“I recruited and ran Adam Malik”: McAvoy interview with author. The documentation on the CIA’s role in Indonesia, including the December 2, 1965, cable from Green to Bundy detailing a CIA payment to Adam Malik, is in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXVI, pp. 338–380. The volume was officially suppressed by the CIA and withdrawn from circulation—but not before some copies were printed, bound, and shipped. The National Security Archive posted the relevant pages in July 2001. The author’s interview with McAvoy took place by telephone from McAvoy’s home in Hawaii. McAvoy’s crucial role as a CIA officer in Indonesia was confirmed by three of his contemporaries at the agency.
“in a clandestine setting”: Green oral history, FAOH.
“It was certainly not a death list”: Martens oral history, FAOH.
Ambassador Green later told Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey…that “300,000 to 400,000 people were slain”: Memorandum of conversation, February 17, 1967; LBJ Oval Office meeting with Adam Malik, memorandum of conversation, September 27, 1966; both in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXVI.
“I think we would up that estimate to perhaps close to 500,000 people”: Green testimony, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 30, 1967, declassified March 2007.
“We didn’t create the waves”: Green oral history, FAOH.
“deeply troubled about the leadership problem in CIA”: Bundy to LBJ, “Subject: The CIA,” citing a conversation with Clifford, January 26, 1966.
a long list of his accomplishments: Raborn to Moyers, February 14, 1966.
“totally oblivious”: LBJ to Bundy, February 22, 1966, LBJ Tapes, All cited in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, and declassified in 2004.
The committee got back to work in May: NSC memo to LBJ, March 24, 1966; undated memo for the deputy director of central intelligence, “The 303 Committee, Senior Interdepartmental Group and the Interdepartmental Regional Groups” “Coordination and Policy Approval of Covert Operations,” February 23, 1967, CIA. All cited in FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, and declassified in 2004. The 1967 document on covert action is a uniquely detailed record. It listed major covert actions to date, showing the refinement of executive control over the CIA:
Projects approved by DCI on internal authority: (1949–1952)—81—Truman Administration
Projects approved by DCI in coordination with Operations Coordination Board or Psychological Strategy Board: (1953–1954)—66—Eisenhower Administration
Projects approved or reconfirmed by Operations Coordination Board, the Special Group or 303 Committee:
Eisenhower Administration—104
Kennedy Administration—163
Johnson Administration—142
Chapter Twenty-five
“a circus rider”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 311.
“We knew then…that we could not win the war”: 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), pp. 20–22.
“This Agency is going flat out” and “the war is by no means over”: Memorandum by the chief of the Far East Division, Central Intelligence Agency, July 25, 1967, FRUS, Vol. V.
“Stop the buildup”: George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. 213–219. Allen wrote that the aim of the administration was to use manufactured intelligence for “opinion manipulation and political persuasion, with the aim of altering perceptions to make them coincide with certain notions, whether those notions were supportable by evidence or not.” The practices he identified—the falsification of secret intelligence to control public perception and to manufacture political support—may sound familiar to many Americans today. Of course, there were built-in biases in the agency’s reporting from Saigon, and these did not go unnoticed. In the summer of 1967, the question was whether Thieu or Ky would be South Vietnam’s next president. The ultimate choice lay with the Vietnamese military command. The CIA maintained that the commanders would choose Ky. State Department officers in Saigon, including John Negroponte, the future czar of American intelligence, were certain it would be Thieu. “John told me later that the last report from the CIA—still predicting Ky—was filed just at the time that Ambassador Lodge was called to a meeting with the military command at which he was told that its candidate would be Thieu,” recalled the State Department’s Robert Oakley. “CIA had had a very close relationship with Ky for a long time; so they had a bias in his favor which undoubtedly colored their reporting.” Oakley oral history, FAOH.
On September 19, McNamara telephoned the president: LBJ Tapes, September 19, 1966, transcribed in FRUS, Vol. IV.
“You guys simply have to back off,” Komer told Carver: Komer’s comments and the correspondence between Hel
ms and Carver are in a full set of declassified cables between CIA headquarters and the Saigon station covering the order of battle controversy as it happened in September 1967, CIA/CREST.
“We believe that Communist progress”: NIE 53-63, cited in Harold P. Ford, “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam,” Studies in Intelligence, 1997, CIA/CSI.
“The compelling proposition”: John Huizenga, “Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam,” September 11, 1967, CIA/CREST, with Helms’s covering memo, declassified in 2004. Huizenga was chief of the CIA’s Office of National Estimates staff, and later the director of the office.
Chapter Twenty-six
“over CIA involvement”: “Problem of Exposé of CIA Clandestine Youth and Student Activities,” undated but February 1967, CIA/FOIA.
“LBJ left me the responsibility of pulling the Agency’s scorched chestnuts out of the fire”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 345. A May 19, 1966, memo from Helms to Moyers at the White House detailing the personal and professional lives of Ramparts editors and reporters was declassified on November 13, 2006. Such reporting was arguably outside the CIA’s charter.
Since 1961, Secretary of State Rusk had been warning: Rusk had asked the Special Group to address the following problems in a December 9, 1961, memo: “I. CIA now provides certain support to private organizations of an educational or philanthropic nature. 2. These covert funds become the subject of common gossip, or knowledge, both here and abroad. 3. Covert funds draw suspicion upon the organizations concerned and, indeed, may bar them from entry into certain countries. 4. Covert funds scare away funds from other sources which do not wish to become involved with CIA-type activities or purposes. 5. In most cases, there is no need to conceal that funds are being provided by the U.S. Government. 6. Every effort should be made to move from covert to overt support…. 7. What can be done about this in connection with such organizations as (a) Asia Foundation, (b) African student activities and (c) possibly others?” FRUS, Vol. XXV. The 303 Committee, meeting on June 21, 1968, to address the Asia Foundation problem, noted that “no one can accurately predict what, if any, federal monies will be allocated” to replace the CIA’s subsidy. Nevertheless, “if there were deep sighs for the good old days of straight covert funding, they were not audible due to the hum of the air conditioner in the White House Situation Room.” FRUS, Vol. X.
“We lack adequate detail”: Memo from the Deputy Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research to the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, February 15, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII, declassified 2004.
an hour-long off-the-record conversation: Pearson’s papers are at the LBJ Library. His work appeared in more than six hundred American newspapers with a combined circulation of fifty million readers. Lyndon Johnson had a pew in the church of his heart roped off for Pearson, who had publicly supported his run for the Democratic nomination for president in 1960.
“This story going around about the CIA”: LBJ Tapes/Holland, February 20, 1967.
“an irreducible minimum”: Thomas Hughes, draft revision of NSC 5412, dated April 17, 1967, and discussed May 5, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII.
“ability to keep former employees quiet”: Russell cited in “Briefing by the Director of CIA Subcommittees of the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations,” May 23, 1967, declassified March 4, 2001, CIA/CREST.
what to do with Harvey: 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. 274 “his extreme bitterness toward the Agency”: Osborn to Earman, memorandum for the record, October 4, 1967, CIA/FOIA.
“Angleton by the mid-1960s”: Robert M. Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith, “Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence,” 1993, CIA/CSI, declassified February 2007.
“a man of loose and disjointed thinking”: John L. Hart, “The Monster Plot: Counterintelligence in the Case of Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko,” December 1976, CIA/CSI.
“Loyal Agency employees had come under suspicion”: Hathaway and Smith, “Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence,” p. 124.
“we are deluding ourselves” and “paralysis of our Soviet effort”: McCoy memos to Helms cited in Hathaway and Smith, “Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence,” p. 108.
“one scrap of supportive evidence”: Kingsley oral history interview, June 14, 1984, CIA, cited in Hathaway and Smith, “Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence,” p. 123.
“Jim was a man obsessed”: Taylor interview by Hart, in “The Monster Plot,” CIA/CSI.
“The subsequent accuracy of this prediction”: Hathaway and Smith, “Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence, p. 127.
“intelligence had a role in his life”: Helms oral history interview, April 21, 1982, cited in Hathaway and Smith, “Richard Helms as Director of Central Intelligence,” p. 143. The CIA history provides a fascinating footnote to the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967: “James Angleton found himself increasingly disturbed by the prospect of an endless cycle of war and more war in the Middle East. With this in mind he composed what those who saw it remember as an eloquent plea for some dramatic move to break through this destructive pattern. In a blind memo [to Helms, Angleton proposed] an anti-Soviet alliance consisting of Israel and some of the conservative Arab states such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The whole thing depended on urgency, Angleton continued; the longer Israel occupied the territories captured from the Arabs, the less willing Tel Aviv would be to give them up. [A deleted section of the history evidently discusses the crypto-diplomatic role played by Angleton and the Near East division chief James Critchfield in trying to create this alliance.] At this point the American State Department got wind of the scheme and vetoed any further U.S. role in the proceedings. Without the Americans as intermediaries, the arrangement crumbled. In the embittered views of Angleton and Critchfield, an opportunity of possibly historic proportions had been allowed to slip away.” Ibid., pp. 146–147.
an excruciatingly sensitive operation…code-named Buttercup: The Buttercup operation is described at length in FRUS, Vols. IV and V.
The CIA had created and run the local Communist Party: This heretofore unknown operation was described by Tom Polgar in an interview with the author.
The program, code-named Globe: The Globe operation was described in interviews with CIA officers, including Gerry Gossens.
“You have to get the infrastructure”: Helms testimony, President’s Commission on CIA Activities (Rockefeller Commission), pp. 2497–2499.
“There have been charges that it is morally wrong”: Albert R. Haney, “Observations and Suggestions Concerning the Overseas Internal Security Program,” June 14, 1957, NSC Staff Papers, pp. 11–12, DDEL.
“You can get into Gestapo-type tactics”: Amory oral history, JFKL.
“Castro was the catalyst”: Polgar interview with author.
military juntas were good for the United States: Memorandum for the director, “The Political Role of the Military in Latin America,” Office of National Estimates, April 30, 1968, LBJL. This was a formal twenty-nine-page statement by the chairman of the ONE, Abbot Smith, giving a tour of the region’s eight most recently established military dictatorships, six of which were deemed good for American interests.
“Mobutu gave me a house”: Gossens interview with author.
In a classic battle of the cold war: The capture of the CIA base chief, David Grinwis, is described in an unpublished interview with Grinwis at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Grinwis, the American consul Mike Hoyt, and two CIA communicators were held for 114 days before Belgian paratroops freed them. The battle between Che’s Cubans and the CIA’s Cubans is best told in Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 137–159.
“This can’t be Che Guevara”: Henderson oral history, FAOH.
“I am managing to keep him alive”: Rodriguez’s reporting from Bolivia is reproduced verbatim in two memos that Helms delivered to the White House on October 11 and 13, 1967, declassified in 2004 and reprinted in FRUS, Vol. XXXI, documents 171 and 172.
“Can you send fingerprints?”…“I can send fingers”: Polgar interview with author.
“Once again CIA operations”: UAR desk to Lucius D. Battle, March 16, 1967, FRUS, Vol. XVIII.
“He had been on the U.S. payroll”: Battle oral history, FAOH.
“You will be criticized”: Humphrey speech quoted in Helms transcript, Studies in Intelligence, September 1993.
“Review all projects which are politically sensitive”: Memorandum from the Deputy Director of Plans of the Central Intelligence Agency(Karamessines) to all staff chiefs and division chiefs, September 30, 1967, declassified 2004, FRUS, Vol. XXXIII.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“I’m quite aware of that”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 280.
“The Subcommittee is very much interested in the operations of various militant organizations in this country”: McClellan letter to Helms, October 25, 1967, declassified 2004, CIA/CREST.
“A Negro training camp”: Karamessines memo to White House, October 31, 1967, declassified 2004, CIA/CREST.
“I’m not going to let the Communists take this government”: “Luncheon Meeting with Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, Walt Rostow, CIA Director Richard Helms,” November 4, 1967, LBJL.