The names of Richard Nixon and Richard Helms were not often linked in public. Helms was admired inside Washington, largely unknown outside of the capital. He was not a target of the antiwar movement. He rarely met the president alone. Their relationship was discreet. Nixon wanted Mitchell to have better intelligence on the antiwar movement, which was growing more militant as Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy reduced American casualties without ending the war. Helms supplied timely intelligence from the CHAOS operation, but that did not satisfy the White House.
Mitchell summoned Helms to his office in January and February 1970 to discuss what the White House delicately referred to as “inadequacies in domestic collection.”1 Helms, the spymaster from the Main Line, and Mitchell, the bond lawyer from Queens, did not have much rapport. “Mitchell was less than expansive at the best of times,” Helms said. Mitchell sometimes sat in on meetings of the interagency committee that approved CIA covert operations. Helms found him “shadowy,” sometimes asking questions, sometimes remaining ominously silent. Mitchell sized up Helms as “capable but devious.” Chuck Colson, it was said, would “run over his grandmother” to serve Nixon. “Helms,” Mitchell gibed, “would knock off his grandmother.”2
Eager to please, Helms offered help on the question of foreign support. The Agency had found no significant foreign funding or influence in the antiwar movement since Helms launched CHAOS in the summer of 1967. There were foreign contacts, however, that caused concern, if not heartburn. Eight Weathermen leaders had traveled to Cuba in the summer of 1969, where they met with representatives of the Viet Cong and North Korea.3
The threat was declared. In December 1969, the Weathermen convened a “national war council” in Flint, Michigan, with the purpose of avenging the murder of Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, who was killed in a predawn police raid. Initially depicted as a gun battle, the raid was actually an assassination. It fulfilled the letter and spirit of the August 1967 memo from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that launched the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, in which Hoover called for the “neutralization” of black leaders. On December 4, 1969, the Cook County and Chicago police delivered, killing Hampton in his bed.4
What more could the Agency do on domestic threats? Helms was hamstrung by the obdurate Hoover. In a fit of pique, the FBI director, now seventy-five years old, had suspended all face-to-face meetings with CIA employees because of a perceived slight by Helms.5 Without the FBI, the CIA did not have a partner for surveillance operations in the United States. Helms could offer the take from Operation CHAOS but not much more.
For Nixon, it was just one goddamn excuse after another. The president would never fire Hoover, still a personal hero, so he had to appease him. Nixon told Haldeman he wanted to meet with the FBI director once every three months. He assigned young Tom Huston, one of his sharpest and most conservative aides, to come up with a plan to centralize the collection of domestic intelligence in the White House. Huston, all of twenty-eight years old, summoned Helms to a meeting in his office to explain exactly what Nixon wanted. The courteous director, sharing the president’s concern, was glad to oblige.
Still, there was no pleasing the president. The Agency remained a favorite target of Nixon’s barbs. In mid-March 1970, Cambodian prime minister Lon Nol, backed by the country’s small army, ousted long-reigning monarch Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who went into exile. The coup came as a complete surprise to Nixon. The CIA had given him no indication there might be a change of government in South Vietnam’s neighbor. “What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?” he asked Secretary of State Bill Rogers.6
Helms knew the geopolitical complexities. Prince Sihanouk had kept his rural kingdom out of the war in neighboring Vietnam with ever-shifting alliances and tactics. Like Nixon, Sihanouk was perhaps too crafty for his own good. For money, he allowed the North Vietnamese communists to use Cambodian territory to ship war material into South Vietnam. To keep communists out of his government, he relied on Lon Nol, the pro-American commander in chief of the Cambodian military. When Nixon secretly authorized “Menu,” a series of B-52 bombing raids on North Vietnam’s depots in Cambodia in May 1969, Sihanouk did not protest. The communists, in turn, stepped up their infiltration and pressured the prince to break with the United States. Fearing Sihanouk would capitulate, Lon Nol staged a coup. Now the deposed prince was in Beijing, denouncing the Americans as imperialists, and the White House had an unexpected crisis on its hands.
Kissinger was irked. It was not until the day of Sihanouk’s ouster that the Agency circulated a report that riots encouraged by Lon Nol were precursor to a coup if Sihanouk did not go along with a more pro-American policy.7 For Helms, the failure to predict the coup was not exactly surprising given that the Agency did not have a station in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. But he was not one for excuses. He would support the president.
Nixon decided denying the North Vietnamese a free hand in Cambodia would relieve pressure on South Vietnam. He supported Lon Nol’s effort to add ten thousand men to the Cambodian armed forces,8 “a poorly led wisp of an army,” in the words of Neil Sheehan, the New York Times correspondent in Saigon. Sheehan thought it was a “lunatic exercise” to throw the Cambodians into battle against the experienced communist forces. But Nixon was desperate to buy time for his “Vietnamization” strategy, and he turned to his CIA director for help.9
“I want Helms to develop and implement a plan for maximum assistance to pro-US elements in Cambodia,” the president told Kissinger. And he wanted to keep the plan secret, just as he had sought to conceal the bombing of Cambodia. “Don’t put this out to 303 [the interagency committee that approved covert operations] or the bureau bureaucracy [of the State Department]. Handle like our [Menu] airstrikes.”10
The president not only wanted to bolster Lon Nol, who didn’t seem capable of holding off the communists, he also wanted to invade Cambodia and eliminate North Vietnam’s Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), which managed the communist war effort in the south. Taking inspiration from George Patton, the brash general of World War II, Nixon dreamed of striking a heroic decisive blow.
The Agency’s analysts were skeptical. Nixon and Kissinger assumed COSVN was an organization that was housed in a building or a base that could be bombed to good effect. The CIA believed COSVN was more like a team of officials who moved around in trucks and whose ability to function might not be curtailed by bombing. The effect of a U.S. invasion, concluded the Agency’s Office of National Estimates, would be neither permanent nor crippling to the North Vietnamese. Helms didn’t pass the study to the White House, prompting an unusual protest. A group of analysts circulated a petition inside the Agency criticizing Helms’s decision as a betrayal of the agency’s ideal of speaking truth to power.
Helms briefed Nixon and Kissinger on the escalating North Vietnamese attacks in Cambodia. The government in Phnom Penh could not long survive, he said.11 The National Security Council considered three options: doing nothing, the preferred course of Secretary of State Rogers and Defense Secretary Laird. Kissinger’s recommendation was to attack the sanctuaries with South Vietnamese forces only. The third option—using whatever forces were necessary to neutralize the two biggest bases—was favored by the Joint Chiefs and by Helms.12
“He felt that we would pay the same domestic price for two operations as for one,” Kissinger recalled, “and the strategic payoff would be incomparably greater in the two-pronged attack.”13 At a time when most of Nixon’s cabinet openly or privately opposed expanding the war, Helms urged him on.
When Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia in a nationwide TV address on April 30, 1970, his tone was apocalyptic.
“My fellow Americans,” Nixon declared, “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without.
“If, when the chips are down,” he went on, “the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
The antiwar movement that Nixon and Mitchell thought they had contained back in the fall surged again. College campuses erupted in protests. Panicky National Guardsmen shot four students dead at Kent State University in Ohio. Police killed two more at Jackson State in Mississippi. Another huge crowd descended on Washington. The image of a “pitiful helpless giant” was all too apt for a nuclear superpower wasting blood and treasure on a brutally ineffectual war against a resilient peasant army while tormented internally by the bitter division of its people.
Helms knew the Vietnam venture was misbegotten, on the grounds that intervening in a country as alien to the United States as Vietnam (or Cambodia) required at least a ten-year commitment. “In a decade, the operatives might achieve command of the necessary languages and the desired in-country familiarity with the cultures and terrain,” he wrote in his memoir. Failing such a commitment, his credo was as cautious as it had been since before the Bay of Pigs. “Do not intervene on the ground unless prepared to make an all-out effort. And do not count on a secret intelligence agency being able to pull political folly away from the blaze.”14
The United States had never made that commitment in Vietnam, much less Cambodia. Washington’s “all-out effort”—resisted by JFK, embraced by LBJ, and extended by Nixon—never broke the communists’ will to keep fighting to liberate their country from foreigners. Yet when Nixon and Kissinger expanded the war into Cambodia, repeating all the mistakes Helms warned about, the director endorsed the policy.
“Many found the casting of another nation into the furnace morally abhorrent,” wrote Neil Sheehan.15 Not Helms. He agreed with his friend Stewart Alsop, who wrote in his weekly column for Newsweek that the president was guilty of a half measure. Nixon wasn’t tough enough, it seems.16 Sometimes Helms spoke truth to power, but when it came to Cambodia, power was his truth. Nixon appreciated that.
Howard Hunt knew this day was coming. He had imagined it in the opening scene of his 1967 thriller One of Our Agents Is Missing, which took place outside the Langley headquarters.17
“Peter Ward pushed through the heavy glass double doors, tugged his tweed cap lower on his forehead and turned up the beaver collar of his off-white raincoat. He went down the broad stone steps and followed the walk around to the visitors parking area, gusty wind wetting his face with mist.
“Behind the wheel of his leased Spyder he started the engine and gazed rebelliously at the impersonal façade of the CIA’s headquarters building, eyes lifting to an expanse of lighted curtained windows on the seventh floor that marked the domain of Deputy Director Avery Thorne. Peter had come from an hour’s conference with Thorne, with results that far from pleased him.”
In February 1970, Hunt had just come from an hour’s conference with Deputy Director Tom Karamessines, with results that ended his twenty-year career at the Agency.
The problem was Hunt’s passion about the Bay of Pigs. Paul Gaynor, chief of the CIA office known as the Security Research Service (SRS), learned from a source in the publishing industry about the circulation of a pseudonymous unpublished memoir about the Bay of Pigs operation titled “Give Us This Day,” written by one “Edward J. Hamilton,” purportedly a longtime Agency employee.18 “A review of the first few pages of the manuscript clearly show this to be the work of E. Howard Hunt,” an aide reported to Gaynor.
As a component of the Office of Security, SRS was responsible for counterintelligence as it applied to CIA staff employees. It was, in the words of journalist Jim Hougan, “a tabernacle within the inner sanctum.” Gaynor was a former brigadier general in the army with long experience in counterintelligence and interrogation. He had managed the BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE programs in the early 1950s, which evolved into the notorious MKULTRA mind-control program. He was reputed to maintain a “fag file” of known or suspected homosexuals whom he could bar from government employment. He also coordinated many of the domestic spying activities associated with Operation CHAOS.19
Gaynor gave the manuscript to Walter Pforzheimer, curator of the Agency’s Historical Intelligence Collection, the man who had uncovered the true name of “David St. John” five years before. Pforzheimer confirmed Hunt’s authorship, telling Gaynor that the manuscript was “the most comprehensive story of a CIA operation that has ever been written for publication to my knowledge.… It far exceeds in detail anything written on the Bay of Pigs.”
Hunt’s manuscript was favorable to the Agency. “The villains of the piece,” said Pforzheimer, “are certain liberal figures in the Kennedy Administration (Schlesinger, Goodwin and Stevenson) and to some extent the President himself. In his concluding chapter, the author’s bitterness is undisguised against those in the Administration and the press who took the opportunity of the Bay of Pigs incident to attack and denigrate CIA.”
Hunt recounted returning from Havana in March 1960 with the recommendation that “Castro be assassinated before or coincident to the invasion.” Such comments, Pforzheimer warned, “would be unfortunate if published, in view of current charges in the press of various CIA ‘assassinations.’”20
Gaynor was irate. He went straight to Tom Karamessines, who called Hunt in for an explanation. Facing two stern men, Hunt weaseled. He said he knew nothing about such a manuscript, then he admitted he had written it for his own personal interest. Gaynor interrupted. They had information that the manuscript had been reviewed and rejected by two publishers, Gaynor said. A third publisher, Walker & Company, was known to have seen the manuscript in the last two weeks. Hunt finally fell silent. The well of his prevarication had run dry.
Karamessines cited the dangers of publishing such an outspoken manuscript. He didn’t need to spell out the details. If a CIA officer published a book saying the Agency had tried to kill Castro, the liberals on Capitol Hill would raise holy hell. The press would sensationalize it. The communists would love it. What was he thinking? Karamessines ordered Hunt to retrieve all copies of the manuscript.21
Gaynor wasn’t satisfied. He asked his Office of Security colleague, Jim McCord, to investigate how Walker & Company had obtained the manuscript. McCord was a natural choice. He had served as Gaynor’s deputy at SRS from 1959 to 1963. They were not social friends, but in the office they had a “close working relationship,” Gaynor said. He described McCord as “a quiet religious man, deeply devoted to his family, totally patriotic.”22 McCord did not know Hunt at the time. They would not meet for two years. In the meantime, McCord investigated his future partner in crime for flouting agency rules.23 And so one Howard Hunt fiasco would beget another.
Hunt counted on Helms. Back in January, the director had given Hunt his blessing to retire as soon as he found another job.24 Hunt assured Helms that everything was under control. “Paul Gaynor tells me he is retrieving the pirated Ms. copy from Walker & Co,”25 he wrote in a note on government stationery. Hunt had alienated more than a few colleagues at the Agency. Helms was his trump card, and he played it to good effect.
“Dick Helms came to the rescue in the spring of 1970,” the relieved Hunt recalled, “agreeing to allow me to retire early and recommending me to the public relations department of several large companies.” In his autobiography, Hunt made no mention of his unauthorized shopping of “Give Us This Day,” or Karamessines’s dressing down, only the happy ending. “Eventually I was hired by Robert Mullen, former press aide to President Eisenhower,” he wrote.26 The Robert Mullen Company was a global public relations firm that collaborated with the CIA.
Why Helms, a stickler for correct behavior, indulged the wayward Hunt again and again is a mystery of male bonding. Perhaps the attraction of opposites was felt: the buttoned-up Helms taking vicarious pleasure in the antics of his brash buddy. Maybe, like Castro and Cubela at the onset of the Cuban revolution, they shared “the bond of the beginning.” They had gone to war as young men, and that would also count for something between them. In any case, for Helms, a man of tidy arrangements, the Mullen Company position was practical. Hunt might still be useful, albeit in a new capacity.
To a biographer, Helms murmured he had only seen Hunt “infrequently” in the 1960s, which hardly did justice to Helms’s indulgence of Dorothy’s spying or his promotion of the Peter Ward books or the wedding gifts from Howard. When an incredulous congressman asked in 1973 if Helms had really written a job recommendation for Hunt, by then a convicted burglar, Helms claimed he could not recall doing so. He knew the man mostly from his file, he implied. “There was nothing about his record which would stop me from saying ‘Here is a man who writes very well,’ because he does write very well,” Helms explained. “This was a public relations job.”27
That was sort of true, but not very. The position that Helms arranged for Hunt was, in fact, a cover for secret activities. The Mullen Company had served the Agency since 1963 when it helped set up the Committee for a Free Cuba, the CIA’s response to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. When Robert Bennett, son of Utah senator Wallace Bennett, bought the company in 1971, he was introduced to the firm’s case officer, Martin Lukoskie. The Mullen Company was especially useful to the Agency because it handled Washington business for the Hughes Tool Company, a CIA contractor controlled by Howard Hughes, one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Helms needed to keep current on the troublesome Bob Maheu, the spook with solid gold cuff links, who now held a senior position in the Hughes organization. The Agency “was considering utilizing the Mullen Hughes relationship for a matter related to a cover arrangement in South America and to gather information on Robert Maheu” said one Agency memo.28 So the Mullen Company where Hunt now worked served Helms in two sensitive matters: Bob Maheu and the Hughes organization.
Hunt’s perch at the Mullen Company was arranged by Francis O’Malley of the Central Cover Staff, which maintained the false identities of Agency operatives. To congressional investigators O’Malley explained that he maintained contact with Hunt because he became “instrumental in discussing several aspects of the cover operations” at the firm. Hunt, in turn, relied on O’Malley for assistance as needed: finding a retired CIA secretary, locating an experienced lockpick, and selecting a security firm that could do electronic countermeasures to detect wiretapping.
Hunt still had a collaborative relationship with the Agency after he retired, not that he was entirely trusted. “Mr. Hunt was in the habit of making glib comments which were not necessarily accurate,” O’Malley said. He added, he “was sure Mr. Hunt had lied to him on a number of occasions.”29
All in all, the hapless spy novelist had moved on in life rather smartly. On the day Nixon announced the Cambodia “incursion,” Hunt sat for his exit interview at the Agency. He disclosed that his new job might involve travel to the Mullen Company offices in London and Tokyo. He checked in with Tom Karamessines, who told him to “stay in touch.”30 He did just that.
To formalize the Agency’s new relationship with Hunt, the Central Cover Staff needed to grant him a security clearance. The staff’s chief wrote a memo to Karamessines saying that the Office of Security “believes you have an interest in Mr. Hunt and is unwilling to grant a clearance to CCS without being assured you do not have an overriding interest or objection.”
Karamessines, of course, had an interest in Hunt. He was his agent, and more to the point, a friend of the director’s, a trusted and daring operative whose action orientation more than compensated for his sometimes questionable judgment. Hunt received the clearance.31
A public relations job indeed. Hunt was retired from the CIA yet “aware of two cover placements” at the Mullen Company.”32 He had no formal connection with the Agency but remained in contact with Karamessines, who had been his case officer since 1963. Hunt didn’t have formal operational duties for the DDP, but he was available for sensitive, deniable undercover missions. Like his alter ego Peter Ward, Howard Hunt had become an odd job man for the boss he admired, the director who was gaining favor in Richard Nixon’s White House.33
The collaboration of Richard Nixon and Richard Helms deepened in the summer of 1970 as the agile director accommodated himself to the president’s vision of a stepped-up campaign against domestic radicals.
Nixon was enraged, baffled, confounded, and mystified by what his country had become. The young men with long hair, the Negroes with their Afros, the girls without bras, the casual use of drugs, the noisy rock music. Laugh-In was one thing. He had nothing against young people, but this so-called counterculture was a menace. The American people had chosen him because he was like them. Responsible. Hard-working. God-fearing (not that Nixon often saw the inside of a church). He depicted himself working for the “Silent Majority” against the noisy minority, the insolent longhairs, the pusillanimous liberals, the ungrateful blacks, and, by God, he would prevail.
The threat was real. “Terrorists caused no fewer than 174 major bombing and bombing attempts on campus in the school year 1969–70,” Nixon wrote in his memoir. “… With as many as a thousand estimated members, the Weather Underground [the new non-sexist name of the Weathermen] separated into secret floating commando type units. As with the Black Panthers, there was no way of knowing where or how they were going to strike.”34
“Now that this season of mindless terror has fortunately passed,” Nixon went on, “it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to convey a sense of the pressures that were influencing my actions and reactions during this period. I turned for assistance in my effort to the various intelligence agencies. Working together, they developed a program to counter revolutionary violence.”35
The program, drawn up by Tom Huston, authorized the intelligence agencies to expand domestic surveillance with increased powers of wiretapping, burglary, and use of informants. The Huston Plan, as it became known, was a Nixonian vision that went momentarily into effect in the summer of 1970 and then vanished, though not for lack of support from Helms.
Huston’s plan created a new interagency Intelligence Evaluation Committee, based in the White House. Representatives of the FBI and the national security agencies would be granted a host of new powers to investigate, surveil, and harass the antiwar and black nationalist movements, reporting to the president’s staff every week or two. Nixon would finally have the apparatus he wanted in order to put down the leftist threat. Helms had no objection, as long as certain CIA equities were respected.
In June, Nixon seized the moment. He summoned Helms, Hoover, Admiral Noel Gayler, director of the National Security Agency, and General Donald Bennett, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to a meeting in the White House. It was no routine get-together. Shocked by the convulsion that followed the invasion of Cambodia, the president felt he had to fight back against the enemies of the state. In his diary, Haldeman called it a “historic meeting,” one “generated by [the president’s] complete dissatisfaction with the results of intelligence gathering.”36
In the Oval Office, Nixon and Hoover sat side by side in front of the fireplace under Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, with the FBI director glaring at the president. Helms sat attentively to the president’s left, opposite Admiral Gayler. Nixon, with typical awkward indirection, barely spoke of the protests and bombings that animated his action. He did mention meeting the president of Venezuela and complained of black militants who exported revolution to the Caribbean. He suddenly turned to Hoover and asked if he had any problems with Huston’s plan.
Hoover said no, but his body language spoke otherwise. As always, the FBI director was tightly packed into a blue three-piece suit. Helms had cultivated him over the years, requesting meetings, sending memos, flattering relentlessly, all with indifferent success. Hoover did not defy Nixon, even though he had no intention of going along with this scheme. Nixon asked Helms the same question. Any problems? Helms said no.
Nixon told the security chiefs that Hoover would head the new Intelligence Evaluation Committee with deputy FBI director William C. Sullivan, chief of the Internal Security Division, in charge of day-to-day operations. Because Sullivan was close to counterintelligence chief Angleton, he was acceptable to Helms.37 Angleton served as the CIA’s representative to the working group. Dick Ober, chief of the CHAOS operation, sat in as an observer at the first meeting. The Agency’s interests were protected, and the president’s purposes served. “The heart of the matter,” said Helms, was to “get the FBI to do what it was not doing.”38
Key to the plan was Nixon’s intention to formally ease existing controls on the government’s right to engage in wiretapping, burglary, and surveillance in national security matters. In late June, men gathered at Hoover’s office for a final review of Huston’s recommendations. The CIA’s contribution was a paper titled “Definition of Internal Security Threat-Foreign,” which addressed only the slight foreign connections of the antiwar movement.39
Hoover then used the meeting to teach his bureaucratic rivals a lesson. The FBI director read the text of Huston’s plan aloud, adding a dissenting footnote to each major point, stating the FBI’s reservations about the proposed change. Did the other directors have any objections? Helms, Gayler, and Bennett could not object. This was what the president wanted. They endorsed the plan with Hoover’s footnotes. It was now on paper. The CIA, NSA, and DIA favored the expansion of surveillance of Americans. The FBI did not. Helms recognized a bureaucratic master at work. He leaned back in his chair and winked at Huston, as if to say, If you think you are going to outmaneuver J. Edgar, think again.40
On paper, the Huston Plan had unanimous approval. Huston gave Haldeman the intelligence chiefs’ recommendation that the president remove all restraints on methods of intelligence collection. Huston prepared a directive for Nixon’s signature that formally ordered the termination of restrictions on mail opening and break-ins (termed “black-bag jobs”) to address perceived national security threats. The order also loosened constraints on electronic surveillance and sanctioned increased intelligence gathering on college campuses.41
Helms went along to get along. It was Mitchell and Hoover who objected. Mitchell hadn’t even been told about the centralization of intelligence in the White House until Huston’s draft directive arrived on the president’s desk in late July. Mitchell was disturbed at the scope of the plans. Looking ahead to 1972, Mitchell planned to run Nixon’s reelection campaign. Leaks from inside the bureaucracy had bedeviled the White House from the first days of his administration. What if this domestic spying operation leaked before the election? Mitchell advised the president not to sign. Without Nixon’s signature, Hoover refused to participate.
The Huston Plan, in existence for five days, expired on the spot. There was no agreement and no Intelligence Evaluation Committee.42
“The president was strongly in favor of it,” Helms told journalist James Rosen. “He was constantly stating that the FBI was not giving sufficient support to these matters, and that this was something that ought to be done. But once Mitchell got to him, that was pretty much the end of it,” he said. Helms’s tone implied Easy come, easy go.43
Huston Plan or no, the Nixon administration carried out a robust spy program aimed at American dissidents, complete with coordinating committees to fine-tune the surveillance. How ongoing Agency practice differed from the abandoned Huston Plan is not easy to discern in hindsight. Helms and the other Agency chiefs who signed on to Huston’s plan didn’t think they needed new powers. What they required was a formal justification for what they already wanted to do.
None of the FBI or CIA surveillance programs were curtailed when the Huston Plan fell apart. Indeed, the FBI, even with Hoover’s apparent opposition, loosened restrictions on recruiting informants, widened the scope of watch lists to catch radical fugitives, and reinstituted a mail-opening program. At the CIA, the demise of the Huston Plan did not affect Operation CHAOS, which continued full bore. As Huston put it, “All these things that were in the plan were all on every intelligence agencies’ [sic] desirable list, you know, and had been for a very long time.”44
As evidenced by his wink, Helms was just as amused as he was disappointed by Hoover’s objections. He shared Nixon’s desire to act aggressively, but, like Hoover, he didn’t care to put such a policy in writing.45 When it came to the legality and constitutionality of the Huston Plan, Helms did not exhibit the civil liberty sensitivities of Hoover and Mitchell, reactionaries not known for their constitutional nuance.
Nixon noticed. When the president had a nasty assignment that fall, he summoned the director to the Oval Office.