Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  The following month, in January 1973, Helms learned of his imminent firing by Nixon. He had refused to turn over to Nixon a report ordered by Lyndon Johnson in 1967 by CIA’s inspector general on all the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Helms feared that Nixon would use the report to blackmail the CIA further into compliance on Watergate. Rumors would abound later that before his more stately resignation and reassignment to a plush ambassador’s post, Helms struck a deal with Nixon. In fact, on January 22, 1973, Helms did order all the tapes destroyed in the CIA’s central taping facility at Langley. The tapes related not only to McCord and Watergate, in direct violation of Senator Mike Mansfield’s request that the CIA should retain all “evidentiary material” pertaining to Watergate, but to records of the CIA’s illegal activities, including assassinations and Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind-control experiments.14

  Shortly thereafter, Nixon announced that Helms was leaving the CIA to become ambassador to the Shah of Iran, who literally owed his throne to a CIA coup.

  Atomic Energy Commission chairman James Schlesinger was Helms’s replacement. A well-respected outsider, he offered corporate management skills that Helms had little interest in developing.

  Schlesinger started out by beefing up Clandestine Services, transferring to it one of the Intelligence Directorate’s most coveted assets, the Domestic Contract Service (DCS). This CIA branch overtly collected intelligence from American businessmen, missionaries, and scholars who were returning from abroad; now travelers might not even be informed that they were dealing with the CIA, which would incorporate the DCS into a network of contacts in business, foundations, academia, and church missions. This was the kind of decompartmentalizing for efficiency’s sake that Nixon expected of Schlesinger.

  What Nixon never expected—or learned—was that Schlesinger also attempted to reconstruct the records that Helms had destroyed, including those on the CIA’s involvement in Watergate. On May 2, 1973, Schlesinger sent a memorandum to CIA personnel inviting them to give him information on all past CIA operations they considered “questionable activities.” More than 690 pages came in, a devastating inventory of the most secret secrets, evidence of high crimes and illegal operations. It came to be known within the Agency as “the Family Jewels.”

  The report based on these revelations covered “those activities that are or might be illegal or that could cause the Agency embarrassment if they were exposed,”15 activities so sensitive that they should be “most closely held.”

  Schlesinger did not send the report to the White House. With Watergate growing, as White House Counsel John Dean later put it, “like a cancer on the presidency,” Richard Nixon was not the type of man to be given a loaded gun. Instead, Schlesinger urged top leaders of the Operations Division’s old-boy network to close down or limit programs that were in violation of the CIA’s charter. These programs included CHAOS (the Agency’s operations against dissenting American citizens), mail opening, and the National Security Agency’s cable interceptions and military surveillance of civilians.

  Schlesinger’s new policy did not mean that covert operations were being scaled down, however. Schlesinger had not appointed William Colby, the former head of the Phoenix mass assassination program in Vietnam, as deputy director to oversee Clandestine Services for that to happen. CIA case officers who had penetrated the Chilean military, for example, continued monitoring and encouraging the progress of the military’s plans for a coup, while providing financial support for strikers and other forms of destabilization of the government. That September, their efforts brought forth ghastly fruit when thousands of Chileans, including President Allende, were murdered.

  In the cabinet reshuffling that accompanied the Watergate crisis and that incidentally coincided with charges of the CIA’s involvement in the coup in Chile, Schlesinger was moved to the Department of Defense, vacating the director’s seat for Colby. Nixon had every reason to believe that Colby, who for the last six months had overseen CIA operations in Chile, would perform well for him in the current hot spots: Southeast Asia, Latin America, and even Watergate. Colby was outside the tweedy Eastern Establishment and was socially isolated from traditional networks of power in the intelligence community. Like Nixon, Colby was a connoisseur of the art of dirty tricks. Finally, he seemed a man more of action than of ideas.

  At first, it appeared that Colby was exactly that, carrying forward the structural changes in the CIA started by Schlesinger that met Nixon’s and Kissinger’s need for the quick, concise intelligence analysis. But if Colby had a field officer’s nearsightedness and a penchant for “sound bite” analyses, he also had a genuine concern for the survival of those under his command. With the Watergate scandal mushrooming, growing larger than the president himself, Colby grew increasingly worried that the CIA would be engulfed by revelations of government improprieties. He decided to brief the chairmen of the congressional oversight committees on the CIA’s domestic spying. But he continued Schlesinger’s policy of withholding the Family Jewels report from Nixon, battening down the hatches until Watergate’s hurricane had passed. Then, after Ford was safely installed in the White House and after trying to placate Kissinger by forcing the former head of the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate, Ray Cline, to resign in an effort to plug leaks, and after firing the CIA’s longtime counterintelligence chief, James Angleton, for resisting détente with the Soviet Union, Colby took the offensive. His aim: to shape public opinion about the CIA with a series of unprecedented, ostensibly candid, interviews on the CIA’s past covert operations and on its use of paid American journalists.

  Colby knew that these stories were breaking, and he hoped he would have time to scale down the Agency’s use of paid reporters before the story broke; by then he hoped to be able to preserve the most important of the Agency’s propaganda assets by converting them into a network of freelancers, stringers, and editors at smaller news sources. This way he would also be able to deny plausibly to editors of major news sources that CIA operatives were on their staffs. Colby would succeed by the time his successor, George Bush, announced that the CIA would stop contracting with accredited correspondents, giving the appearance of reform without its substance. But to preempt congressional investigations, he also had to open the door to other queries. In the year of Watergate, this inevitably led back to the Plumbers Unit.

  On December 18, 1974, E. Howard Hunt had testified before Senate investigators on his participation in CIA’s Domestic Operations Division, including spying on Americans and CIA funding of publishers.

  On December 22, 1974—only three days after Nelson took his oath of office on the same family Bible he had used four times before as governor, swearing to uphold the Constitution’s covenant between the government and the people—Seymour Hersh released the results of a two-year New York Times investigation.

  The report created a furor. What the CIA did overseas was one thing; what it did in the homeland was quite another. The thought that dirty tricks were being brought home to roost caused an outcry. The nation’s nerves were already raw from presidential abuses of authority.

  Gerald Ford was jarred loose from his skis in Vail, Colorado, and pleaded ignorance. He would find out immediately, he pledged, and called Colby demanding information. Colby was ready. He merely affixed a cover letter to the Family Jewels report and handed it to Kissinger to give to the president. Ford read the cover letter that denied any current or massive illegal activities and reported likewise to the press. But Hersh had discovered too much for that denial to be believed.

  In Hersh’s New Year’s Eve story, “the Bay of Pigs thing” resurfaced with potentially astounding implications: “The Times reported Sunday that the new domestic unit was formed in 1964 but Mr. Hunt recalled that it was assembled shortly after the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. Many Agency men connected with that failure were shunted into the new domestic unit.” Hunt placed the date of its founding in 1962, before, not after, the Kennedy assassination, and noted t
hat Helms was strenuously opposed to its establishment.16 Who, then, ran this secret operation of Bay of Pigs veterans? According to one source at the Defense Intelligence Agency, such operations fell within the domain of the Clandestine Services’ chief of the Western Hemisphere Division: Nelson Rockefeller’s old friend from CIAA days in the Brazilian Amazon, Colonel J. C. King.

  Four days later, after an even more sensitive oral briefing by Colby in the White House, President Ford announced that he was appointing Nelson Rockefeller to head an eight-member “blue-ribbon” commission (including Nelson’s old friend and coinvestor in Belgian Congo properties, C. Douglas Dillon) to probe the CIA’s illegal operations in the United States.

  THE DAY OF THE FOXES

  The Rockefeller Commission on CIA Abuses* spent six months investigating. In June 1975 Nelson issued a report.

  The report was clearly designed to protect the CIA by recommending changes that everyone already knew were needed, while defending certain secret practices (including keeping files on Americans) and, in so doing, raising the public’s threshold of tolerance. Nelson’s immediate problem was William Colby. Colby believed that loyalty to the CIA required him to win over the media with more candor than Nelson thought appropriate. When Colby showed up on the first day of the hearings on January 13, Nelson warned him not to reveal all.17

  He recommended keeping secret what in some cases even Colby thought unnecessary.

  But Nelson had personal, not just official, reasons for secrecy. As Eisenhower’s undersecretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and then as his special assistant on Cold War strategy and psychological warfare, Nelson knew about many of the CIA’s covert actions, including the mind-control experiments (which were funded partly through HEW) and assassination plots. Indeed, as chairman of the National Security Council’s Special Group, he was briefed on all covert operations and would have had to approve some of the most questionable ones, including coups and assassinations abroad and continuing mind-control experiments at home.18

  President Ford was particularly interested in having Nelson “look into this assassination business.”19 Nelson understood the implications immediately. He already knew about the attempts on Castro’s life and the theory that such attempts had backfired on Kennedy in Dallas. “This was another way of chopping my head off and of getting me out there where I was the one who was putting the finger on the Kennedys, see, as chairman of the committee. Also getting me into an impossible hole because I happened to know this thing had been investigated a good many times and there was a lot of very interesting leads.”

  Faced with Nelson’s threat to resign, Ford dropped his insistence on a written report on this specific subject. But the investigation would go forward. Nelson began assembling the case for a Castro-Kennedy assassination link. “We got this information and we put it together and it was hot.” When he had enough, he decided to confront Senator Edward Kennedy with a classified document to see if he could shake more secrets loose.

  “Look, Teddy, this is being looked into informally,” he recalled telling the last Kennedy brother. “Can you remember your brother talking about this because this isn’t meant to embarrass anybody, [but] it can be embarrassing. I want you to know what we are doing and what is going on so that it isn’t being done behind your back.”

  Nelson’s attempt at candor won him nothing. “I only have vague recollections about this document. I talked about this maybe once or twice up at Hyannis Port,” Kennedy responded.

  Unable to find any evidence that proved the Kennedys had ordered the CIA to try to kill Castro, Nelson gave up the investigation. Avoiding having to report “got the President off the hook, got me off the hook, got it right where it belonged: in the Congress.”20

  Despite Nelson’s claim that he was sticking to the commission’s original mandate to investigate only the CIA’s domestic activities, some activities that bore on operations overseas were addressed in Nelson’s report, but in a highly contained and selective manner.

  The CIA’s illegal cooperation with the NSA in monitoring phone conversations by narcotics traffickers between Latin America and the United States in 1973 was considered a worthy target for criticism; the CIA’s ties to American cocaine traffickers operating between the United States and Colombia were not.

  The CIA’s support for the activities of the Cabinet Committee on Narcotics Control, including investigations abroad, was reported; the involvement of the CIA’s Air America in the transport of the very Southeast Asian heroin that the committee was so concerned about (and ultimately reported the futility of trying to stop) was not.

  The CIA’s use of domestic police was discouraged; the CIA’s training of Latin American police was not.

  Nixon’s abuse of the CIA on such matters as access to files and equipment, Watergate, and requisitioning more than $33,000 from the CIA to pay for White House responses to mail on the Cambodia invasion was fair game. The CIA’s conspiring with mobsters and Cuban exiles in the United States to assassinate the Cuban head of state was not. Neither was the CIA’s abuse of the names of President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy after the missile crisis to continue these assassination attempts illegally and without authorization.

  While taking a properly critical tone and making some sound structural and procedural recommendations to correct the most glaring errors of process and of the government’s line of authority, Nelson, in most cases, projected confidence in the Agency’s claim that the abuses had been stopped and reforms had already been enacted, including a prohibition against assassinations of foreign leaders. He did not mention the CIA’s unauthorized storage of curare, cobra venom, shellfish poison, and other toxins and biological weapons, in direct violation of President Nixon’s executive order of February 1970 to destroy the stockpiles. Among the scientists collaborating with the CIA in the illegal storage of these biological weapons were four scientists at Rockefeller University.21

  The Rockefeller Commission’s report on the CIA’s mind-control experiments was allegedly limited by Helms’s destruction of the records; however, some 1,600 documents would be found at the CIA within three years. Nelson’s only hint of the scope of the mind-control programs was in two sentences: “The drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means of controlling human behavior. Other studies explored the effects of radiation, electric shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and harassment substances.” Now, assured Nelson, HEW’s guidelines were in place.

  Because the Vietnam War had inspired questions about its escalation after John Kennedy’s death and Ford was under pressure to reopen the investigation of Kennedy’s assassination, Nelson also had to confront allegations of the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. He handled it masterfully, rebutting only the most outlandish conspiracy theories and ignoring the substantive criticisms and allegations of the CIA’s involvement in a postassassination cover-up of facts related to the assassination. His conclusion was predictable, given the presence of David Belin, former Warren Commission counsel, as staff director and the fact that President Ford had been a member of the Warren Commission: the Warren Commission, he affirmed, was right.

  Just as Nelson was involved in containing revelations on the CIA’s past violations of law, he was contemporaneously involved as vice president in a new cover-up of the CIA’s actions during the final days of the Vietnam War—as well as of the Agency’s launching of a new secret war in oil-rich Angola. The CIA was again utilizing tribal differences between contending sides to prosecute a bloody civil war. This effort to overthrow Angola’s leftist government would continue for over a decade, leaving the country in ruins and its people facing famine.

  Nelson tried to put his CIA investigation behind him, displeased as he was with Colby’s candor before the congressional committees. Needless to say, his report did not seriously address the CIA’s MKULTRA and MKSEARCH mind-control experiments or even mention the Agency’s assassination attempts or t
he role played in both by one key witness: Colonel J. C. King.

  THE UNTIMELY DEMISE OF J. C. KING ET AL.

  CIA Director Schlesinger’s order in 1973 to cease the MKSEARCH program meant closing down the Amazon Natural Drug Company (ANDCO), including its plant-collection houseboat; its laboratory in Iquitos, Peru; and its Washington, D.C., office. Nevertheless, King took two years to comply with the order.

  The laboratory compound where King had hosted his dinner parties and organized plant-collecting expeditions up the Amazon’s tributaries was finally sold in 1975 to one of King’s employees, Dr. Sidney McDaniel.22 And ANDCO was dissolved that December.

  King continued to haunt the Amazon, according to some reports. Residents of Leticia, the Colombian port on the Amazon where Mike Tsalickis had aided King’s operation, remembered seeing King there in 1976; the register of a local hotel indeed recorded “Mr. and Mrs. King.” But there was really no way of telling if this Mr. King was the elusive former chief of CIA’s Clandestine Services in Latin America; King had seldom allowed himself to be photographed. What was known, however, was that he had been called before congressional investigators in July 1975 to answer questions about the CIA’s assassination plots.

  In 1967, King had been questioned by the CIA’s inspector general. He insisted that he had only limited knowledge of a plan to assassinate Castro. By 1975, when he was questioned by Rockefeller’s commission, he could remember nothing at all, even when confronted with documents confirming his part in the earliest National Security Council (NSC) and CIA deliberations and actions involving Castro and Rafael Trujillo. Yes, an NSC document indicated that he had targeted Castro for assassination as early as 1959, but he had no recollection and “denied that the Castro underworld plots originated with him.”23 Yes, another document recorded him asking Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubbottom if the United States would be willing to provide sniper rifles to kill Trujillo (Rubbottom had answered yes), but this question did not ring any bells either.24