Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  The “monkey business” of CIA station chiefs like Earl Williamson was hardly covert action. “There is throughout Latin America a growing sensitivity…to allegations of CIA intervention in Latin affairs,” wrote a State Department intelligence analyst in March 1970. “The sensitivity is especially acute in Chile.”

  If the agency delivered money, guns, and intelligence into the hands of coup plotters throughout the cold war, so did the Soviets. If the agency mounted covert operations that led to the death, imprisonment, and torture of innocent civilians, the enemy did it too. American cash bought elections all over the world, and the Kremlin had its own black bags. But America’s backyard was tough terrain for Moscow. “Latin America is a sphere of special U.S. interests,” the KGB chief and future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov wrote during the Nixon administration. “We must remember this. Our policy in Latin America must be cautious.” Andropov quoted in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p .77.

  One of the few was Chile, where the CIA saw a red threat rising: Unless otherwise noted, citations and quotations about the operation in this chapter are taken from a collection of CIA records declassified between 1999 and 2003, available online at http://foia.state.gov/SearchColls/CIA.asp. See also Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: New Press, 2004).

  a political-warfare program: The CIA’s files give the flavor of part of the covert campaign to swing the 1964 election. In a July 21, 1964, memo to the 303 Committee, the CIA proposed an additional $500,000 to defeat Allende. The money would permit Eduardo Frei Montalva, the Christian Democrat, to “maintain the pace and rhythm of his campaign effort”—and allow the CIA to meet any “last minute contingencies.” On July 23, 1964, the 303 Committee approved the proposal. In a memo to McGeorge Bundy, the CIA’s Peter Jessup said, “We can’t afford to lose this one, so I don’t think there should be any economy shaving in this instance. We assume the Commies are pouring in dough, we have no proofs. They must assume we are pouring in dough; they have no proofs. Let’s pour it on and in.” Secretary of State Rusk briefed LBJ on the Chilean election at an NSC meeting on September 1: “It looked as if a victory for the non-Communist forces in Chile would come up in the election 4 September, partly as a result of the good work of CIA; and this development would be a triumph for democracy and a blow to Communism in Latin America.” With $300,000 allocated for the defeat of Allende in 1970, the CIA was probably outspending the KGB two-to-one in Chile. Soviet intelligence archives suggest that Allende got at least $50,000 from Moscow and $100,000 in Soviet funds laundered through the Chilean Communist Party. The trouble with Allende, in the Kremlin’s eyes, was that he was a bourgeois socialist, a parlor pink, not a real communist.

  senior representatives of the Vatican: The relationship between the CIA and the Holy See has been profound since 1947, but it remains deeply obscured. The singular “Report on CIA Chilean Task Force Activities, 15 September to 3 November 1970,” slipped out and illuminated this small facet.

  “posters were printed, news stories planted”: Richard Helms with Williamv Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 400. Helms in his memoir calls Chile (before 1970) “a small democratic country.” An old joke in British journalism (before 1970) proposed that the world’s most boring headline would be: “Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Dead."

  “I had never seen such dreadful propaganda”: Edward M. Korry remarks, Centro de Estudios Publicos, Santiago, Chile, October 16, 1996. Published in Estudios Publicos, Spring 1998.

  “Kendall went to Nixon”: Helms interview with Stanley I. Kutler, July 14, 1988, Wisconsin Historical Archives, box 15, folder 16, cited with the kind permission of Professor Kutler.

  “Mr. Helms, he said, “you already have your Vietnam”: Polgar interview with author.

  Track One was political warfare: And it was supplemented by hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American multinational ITT, which had vast holdings in Chile. The money was delivered with the guidance of the CIA and at the suggestion of a member of ITT’s board of directors—John McCone.

  “Anyone who had lived in Chile”: Phillips testimony, Church Committee, July 13, 1975, declassified 1994.

  “flavor their final assessments”: Haig to Kissinger, December 7, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. II, document 220.

  “the key left-wing dominated slots under Helms”: Nixon to Kissinger, November 30, 1970 [Haig cited in footnote], FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. II, document 216, declassified December 21, 2006.

  “a major overhauling”: Haig to Kissinger, December 7, 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. II, document 220.

  “Nixon railed against the CIA”: Shultz oral history in Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober, Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 83. This book is an invaluable resource, as is the Strobers’ oral history of the Reagan administration.

  “A meat-ax approach could be disastrous”: K. Wayne Smith to Kissinger, “Presidential Meeting with OMB on Intelligence Budget,” December 21, 1970, FRUS, Vol. II, document 221. Nixon continued to press for deep cuts and radical changes at the agency. “I want a real shakeup in CIA, not just symbolism,” he told Kissinger on January 21, 1971, in a written note. FRUS, Vol. II, document 224.

  He had made his reputation at the Nixon White House: Schlesinger was one of a quartet of men who rose to power by slashing the government at Nixon’s bidding: Thus ran the path to power for the four Nixon men who led the Pentagon for twenty-two of the thirty-three years from 1973 to 2006. All four came to share the president’s contempt for the Central Intelligence Agency.

  • Caspar Weinberger, Schlesinger’s boss at the budget office, went after the welfare state under Nixon. A decade later he doubled the Pentagon’s spending as Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary.

  • Donald Rumsfeld whacked at the war on poverty for Nixon at the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1975, he succeeded Schlesinger at the Pentagon, becoming the youngest secretary of defense in history.

  • Dick Cheney, a budget-cutting congressman in his day, succeeded Rumsfeld as President Ford’s White House chief of staff, then succeeded Weinberger as secretary of defense in 1989. He is at this writing the vice president of the United States and the viceroy of secret government operations.

  • Rumsfeld returned as secretary of defense under the second Bush administration—the oldest secretary of defense in history, presiding over an establishment that spent half a trillion dollars a year.

  ending the Vietnam War on American terms: A typical Nixon review of the CIA’s performance in that role followed his command for a worldwide propaganda campaign in support of the renewed bombing of North Vietnam. The agency’s “performance in the psychological warfare field is nothing short of disgraceful,” Nixon wrote in a memo to Kissinger and Haig on May 19, 1972. “It produced not much more than a mouse. Or to put it more honestly, it produced a rat…. I do not simply blame Helms and the CIA. After all, they do not support my policies.

  “There is no evidence that the intelligence community”: James R. Schlesinger, “A Review of the Intelligence Community,” Top Secret, March 10, 1971, declassified with deletions in 1998, CIA/NARA. The report stressed ideas that were central to the abolition of the office of the director of central intelligence after 9/11: the DCI presided over warring republics, not a confederation of states. His authority over the empire of intelligence beyond the CIA was nonexistent. Schlesinger suggested the creation of a new office: a director of national intelligence, with real authority over all the tribes and fiefs. The time was not ripe for open debate about the CIA. It would be thirty-three years before the idea was embraced and enacted.

  “the most controversial gutfight”: Haig to Kissinger, with attachment from Kissinger and Shultz to Nixon, “Review of the Intelligence Community,” March 2
7, 1971, FRUS, Vol. II, document 229. The fight led to the creation of a National Security Council Intelligence Committee—led, of course, by Kissinger—that was supposed to take over the management of American intelligence. The committee met for the first time on December 3, 1971. It did not reconvene in 1971 or 1972.

  The president directly ordered Helms to hand over control: Memorandum by President Nixon, “Organization and Management of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Community,” November 5, 1971, FRUS, Vol. II, document 242. Helms forced Deputy Director Cushman out for two reasons. First, to protect the agency from Richard Nixon; second, because of the untoward support Cushman had given to the CIA veteran and soon-to-be-incarcerated Watergate plumber E. Howard Hunt. Helms sent a frosty note to Nixon on December 3, 1971, the day that the aforementioned NSC Intelligence Committee convened. “I attach hereto a copy of the kind of delegation of authority to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence which would seem to be in keeping with your directive,” it said. “When General Cushman’s replacement is sufficiently indoctrinated, I will sign such a paper for him.” That replacement, General Vernon Walters, entered on duty six months later—May 2, 1972. The issue soon was overtaken by events set in motion by Howard Hunt and the Watergate affair.

  “The CIA isn’t worth a damn”: Nixon comments at July 23, 1971, White House budget meeting, cited in The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House, The Complete Multimedia Edition, CD-ROM, Sony Electronic Publishing, 1994, entry for July 25, 1971. Nixon kept up the pressure for a purge over the next year. “One department which particularly needs a housecleaning is the CIA,” he wrote to Haldeman on May 18, 1972. “The problem in the CIA is muscle-bound bureaucracy which has completely paralyzed its brain and the other is the fact that its personnel, just like the personnel in State, is primarily Ivy League and the Georgetown set rather than the type of people that we get into the services and the FBI. I want a study made immediately as to how many people in CIA could be removed by Presidential action…. I want action begun immediately, through [budget director Caspar] Weinberger, for a reduction in force of all positions in the CIA in the executive groups of 50 percent. This reduction in force should be accomplished by the end of the year so that we can then move to get in some better people. Of course, the reduction in force should be accomplished solely on the ground of its being necessary for budget reasons, but you will both know the real reason and I want some action to deal with the problem.

  “placing stop and go buttons on the machinery”: Phillips testimony, Church Committee.

  Chapter Thirty

  Nixon…bugged the White House: Between February 16, 1971, and July 12, 1973, President Nixon secretly recorded more than 3,700 hours of his meetings and conversations with voice-activated hidden microphones at the White House and Camp David. He made the decision, in part, to preserve a record to protect him against the inevitable memoirs of Henry Kissinger.

  Nixon blamed Kissinger for the decision to wiretap White House aides to stop press leaks. “Henry ordered the whole goddamn thing,” the president told his press secretary, Ronald L. Ziegler, on May 14, 1973. “He ordered it all, believe you me. He was the one who was in my office jumping up and down about, ‘This and that got out.’ I said, all right, investigate the sons of bitches,” the president said, his voice rising to a shout. “And he read every one of those taps. He reveled in it, he groveled in it, he wallowed in it.”

  trying to stop leaks to the press: Of course, no president was above a little leaking when it suited him, as the following conversation shows. The topic of the “Helms report” was India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, whom Nixon referred to as “that bitch,” and whose leadership was the subject of a top secret study Helms had delivered to the White House:

  Transcript of conversation, December 6, 1971, 6:14–6:38 p.m., FRUS, 1969–1972, Vol. E-7, declassified June 2005.

  Nixon: Incidentally, that Helms report—give me a copy of that. I’m going to put it out to the press. Put the whole goddamn thing out…. I want that report of Helms put into the hands of acolumnist who will print the whole thing. Now I want you to get it out…. Now that’s the way they play it. That’s the way we gotto play it. You don’t agree?

  Kissinger: Yes, I agree….

  Nixon: Just be sure to get it yards away from the White House.

  Kissinger: Right. I’ll get that done today.

  “a unique character”: Sam Hart oral history, FAOH.

  “He described the mission as national security”: Barker oral history in Gerald S. Strober and Deborah Hart Strober, Nixon, An Oral History of His Presidency (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 217.

  “he was in fact doing some things for the President”: The conversation was recorded at CIA headquarters; the tape was later obtained by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and the transcript is in the National Archives. 319–20 “an operation which the CIA knew nothing about”: Walters oral history in Strober and Strober, Nixon: An Oral History, p. 60. Walters, who spoke nine languages, had served as a staff assistant to President Eisenhower and an interpreter for Ike, Vice President Nixon, and senior State Department and Defense Department officials in the 1950s. He had been the army attaché and liaison to the CIA in Italy from 1960 to 1962 and in Brazil, where he helped foment a military coup, from 1962 to 1967. As defense attaché in France from 1967 to 1972, he was instrumental in the negotiations before and during the Paris peace talks. Nixon had been an admirer ever since Walters helped save him from an angry mob during a trip to Caracas in 1958.

  “Dick, are you still up?”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 3–5.

  “We are going to catch a lot of hell”: Colby quoted in Strober and Strober, Nixon: An Oral History, p. 312.

  “We could get money anyplace in the world”: Helms interview with Stanley I. Kutler, July 14, 1988, Wisconsin Historical Archives, box 15, folder 16, cited with the kind permission of Professor Kutler. In this interview, Helms recounted a conversation illustrating how close his new deputy director came to cooperating with the demand for hush money. Before his third and final meeting with Dean at the White House, Vernon Walters turned to Helms and said, “Look, suppose I give in. The worst that can happen is that I get fired, or I have to resign.” Walters had no understanding of the situation, no grasp of the fact that the agency was in the utmost danger. “He had been around for six weeks. He didn’t know what was going on,” Helms said. “He probably didn’t even know that the Agency had unvouchered funds.

  ” Helms’s biographer, Thomas Powers, wrote at the end of the 1970s that “the CIA’s role in Watergate is going to be a subject of debate for the rest of time.” Watergate’s leading chronicler, Stanley Kutler, wrote at the start of the 1990s that the agency’s role “seems destined to remain shadowy.” The record now is far clearer. The employment of six former CIA men in the Watergate break-in was part of the Nixon administration’s habit of running clandestine operations out of the White House. Nixon tried to use the CIA to contain the FBI. He succeeded, very briefly. Helms and Walters complied with the president’s order to go along with the cover-up for sixteen days at most. The cover-up would have worked if Helms had risked all. It failed because he valued the CIA more than he valued Richard Nixon.

  Kissinger proposed replacing Helms with James Schlesinger: FRUS, Vol. II, document 284, editorial note.

  “Very good idea”: November 10, 1972, entry in The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House, The Complete Multimedia Edition, CD-ROM, Sony Electronic Publishing, 1994.

  “to ruin the Foreign Service”: White House Tapes, conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, Oval Office, November 13, 1972, National Archives.

  “to tear up the Department”: November 21, 1972, entry in The Haldeman Diaries.

  “Look, Mr. President”: Helms interview with Kutler.

  “a CIA conspiracy to remove you from office?”: Transcript of Nixon inter
view with Frank Gannon, Walter J. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia, available online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/media/collections/ nixon. Gannon interviewed Nixon for nine days in 1983; full transcripts were published in 2002.

  “one that really had R.N. tattooed on him”: Helms interview with Kutler.

  “They’ve got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers”: John L. Helgerson,

  Getting to Know the President: CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates, 1952–1992 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1995). Nixon had more than doubled the actual personnel at headquarters..

  “Schlesinger must be the man in charge”: White House Tapes, Oval Office, December 27, 1972. In this taped memo, Nixon emphasized “the need to improve quality as well as reduce quantity of top intelligence people in the CIA itself. The CIA, like the State Department, is basically a liberal establishment bureaucracy. I want the personnel there cut in at least half—no, at least by thirty-five to forty percent—and I want a definite improvement insofar as attitudes of those in CIA with regard to our foreign policy.”

  “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house”: Halpern oral history in Ralph E. Weber, ed., Spymasters: Ten CIA Officers in Their Own Words (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), p. 128.