BLESSED WITH a perfect background for an internationalist, Richard McGarrah Helms could have been a diplomat, a banker, or a military officer. His maternal grandfather, an international banker, lived in Basel, Switzerland. His father had been an executive with the Aluminum Company of America. But Helms chose to be a spy. Born on Philadelphia’s Main Line, as a boy Helms lived in New York City and New Jersey. Herman Helms saved the family the horrors of the Great Depression by cashing out of the stock market before the crash, affording Helms opportunities denied to many among his generation. Herman and Marion Helms wanted their children to have an international education and moved them to Europe, just as Dick finished his junior year at a private high school. Helms summered in France, spent a year at the Swiss prep school Le Rosey, then another at a German gymnasium in Freiburg. Skiing, soccer, and crew soaked up his time, and much of the rest was spent trying to understand geometry taught in French or Latin taught in German. Helms needed a tutor for the Latin, given that Williams College, the family school, required four years of the language but the gymnasium did not teach it. After a late bout with chicken pox—acquired during a family trip to Italy—Helms arrived at Williams in the fall of 1931.
Aside from inducing the college to accept his dual major in English and history, Helms learned a lesson for later life. As editor of the newspaper he wrote an editorial advocating ending both the Latin requirement and compulsory attendance at chapel. The world crashed down then, with demands he be expelled for expressing such heresy. Helms had been an excellent student—he would graduate magna cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa key—and survived this confrontation. No doubt the memory of his Williams experience helped him in certain CIA controversies.
But the spy life came later. Richard Helms wanted to be a journalist or lawyer. He toyed with Harvard Law School but instead took a job with the United Press in London. His later assignment to Berlin led to an unforgettable lunch in 1936 with Adolf Hitler and other Nazi luminaries. Helms also saw the nadir of journalism—being scooped by the rival Associated Press on reporting the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg. And he covered the Olympics where American athlete Jesse Owens won the two-hundred-meter dash. Helms hoped to have his own newspaper one day and left the United Press to learn the business end of journalism with the Indianapolis Times, where he became advertising manager. While in Indianapolis he married Julia B. Shields, recently divorced from the founder of one of the larger grooming products firms of the day.
World War II brought a sea change for Dick Helms as for so many others. A former United Press boss, now with the OSS, asked Dick to join him, but nothing came of that. Helms volunteered for the naval reserve and ended up at Harvard after all—as an officer trainee. Detailed to the navy’s anti-submarine warfare staff, after just a few weeks Helms was simply detached to the OSS one Sunday morning. Two weeks of training, assignment to the OSS planning unit, and long hours monitoring the counterintelligence program from Washington led Helms to do everything he could to get into the field. In early 1945 that finally happened when he went to London, where William J. Casey led OSS efforts to penetrate Germany. Dick Helms never returned to journalism.
The London job opened Helms to the inner sanctum of operations, bewitched him, and brought him to his life’s work. He shared an apartment with Casey and became the spy’s spy, a master of clandestine espionage in Europe, for which education and experience equipped him perfectly. He soon moved to Paris with Casey, continuing the work. By the end of the war, Helms was an established expert on Germany. When OSS sent a mission into the defeated nation, Helms went along. Allen Dulles, supposed to head the unit, stayed in Switzerland to wind up affairs there while his deputy focused on management, leaving Dick Helms the key field officer. Helms met many who became towering figures in the CIA, including not only Dulles and Casey but Walter Bedell Smith, Frank Wisner, Gordon Stewart, Peter Sichel, Rolf Kingsley, and such fellow travelers as Robert Joyce, intelligence officers and diplomats who played major roles in the agency’s covert actions.
Like many of them, Richard Helms stayed on when the OSS became the Strategic Services Unit, and then through its meanderings until it emerged as the Central Intelligence Agency. Already in a senior position, Helms rose to become the CIA’s staff chief, then division chief for Germany, responsible for a major theater of the secret war. He only went on to greater glory. By the 1950s Helms had a reasonable expectation of selection as chief of the Directorate for Operations, but then Allen Dulles passed him over for Wisner. Helms served as chief of operations. Active and engaged, Helms told a group of officers, “My job is to hold an umbrella over you fellows and catch the crap so you can get on with your operating.”
When it became impossible for Wisner to continue as DDO, Dick Helms, who had already twice acted in that position, held the strongest claim to the job, but Dulles selected Richard Bissell instead. The spy maven thought of resigning. Near the end of his life, Dulles told Helms that not making him DDO had been his worst mistake. Dulles’s choice reflected Eisenhower’s predilection for covert operations. But after the Bay of Pigs, the man who kept the secrets could not be denied.
In early 1962 the forty-nine-year-old Helms, affable and precise, became deputy director for operations in his own right. In the Congo, Laos, South Vietnam, and South America, Helms showed he could play the covert action game as well as anyone, and he ably seconded John McCone in this pursuit. The CIA director sometimes took Helms to meetings at the White House, and at one of these he introduced the DDO to the president.
With Lyndon Johnson, John McCone never achieved anything like the rapport he had had with Jack Kennedy. Johnson remained slightly suspicious. A man of the Senate, LBJ probably resented how McCone threw his weight around on Capitol Hill in 1963, at the time the Senate debated an arms-control agreement (the Partial Test Ban Treaty), staking out a political position and even lending CIA analysts to those who believed as he did. McCone’s penchant for policy advice also irked Johnson. LBJ increasingly cut out face time in the Oval Office, which annoyed McCone. By early 1965 John McCone, at loggerheads with LBJ over Vietnam and access, had had enough. That April he quit.
A few days later Johnson aide Marvin Watson telephoned Helms at Langley and asked him over the next morning. The Secret Service ushered Richard Helms into the Oval Office, and when LBJ got off the telephone he announced to the startled spook that John McCone had resigned. President Johnson appointed Vice Admiral William F. Raborn as successor. But Raborn, a Navy rocket specialist, knew nothing whatever about intelligence. Johnson wanted him backed up by someone with real knowledge of the agency’s work. Richard Helms was that man. On April 28, 1965, he became deputy director for central intelligence.
Returning from the LBJ Ranch after the appointments were announced, the president told Helms that he and Raborn were to shake up the agency. LBJ must have liked what he saw. Little more than a year later, when Johnson decided he wanted no more of Red Raborn, he elevated Dick Helms. Raborn displeased LBJ in a different way, by doing what the president asked and keeping away from him. The CIA director was not helped by a low-level campaign of guttersniping from agency people and their allies, annoyed at this neophyte on the Seventh Floor. President Johnson named Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor as DDCI. “I thought he had the personality of a dead mackerel,” an LBJ lieutenant was later quoted as saying of Helms. “But he certainly had the respect of the president.”
Johnson appointed Helms on June 18, 1966. Ten days later the Senate confirmed him, and he was sworn in on June 30. One of the longest-running tenures of any director of central intelligence began that day.
Helms became the first CIA director to have to deal with a major flap over CIA domestic activity. Allen Dulles and his predecessors had had problems with paramilitary operations abroad, or with the agency’s perceived intelligence failures, but it would be on Helms’s watch that domestic activities attracted attention and quickly made waves. The unraveling can be said to have begun in the spring of 1966 with publication in the New York Times of articles on U.S. intelligence. Both the CIA and the White House were forewarned about the series by some of the people the reporters spoke to. The agency even sent out an all-hands cable instructing stations how to respond to local questioners. When the Times began publishing, stations reported back what parts of the stories were getting the most attention in their countries. The CIA subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee asked for and received an agency briefing on the articles. Most of the material dealt with older chestnuts: the power of secret intelligence in general, the Bay of Pigs, the Congo, and so on; but there were hints of other issues. Probably most important, the stories challenged some Americans who were involved with certain CIA secret activities.
Key here were the officers of the National Student Association (NSA). Nongovernment and nonpartisan, the NSA functioned as an umbrella group of mainly student organizations at various colleges. The agency’s International Organizations Division had seen the NSA as a counterweight to Soviet-sponsored youth groups in the 1950s. Although sensibilities had changed, impelled especially by growing opposition to the Vietnam War, the NSA had remained active in the cultural Cold War. Into the 1960s the CIA paid for NSA international activities, arranged for its offices in the Dupont Circle section of Washington (the group had a rent-free fifteen-year lease for space on S Street, Northwest), and contributed to the upkeep of its senior officials. The CIA also funded summer seminars for student leaders and used them to spot talent for recruitment. By some accounts, agency cash, channeled through friendly foundations, amounted to $3.3 million. Even at the time this information surfaced, membership dues accounted for just $18,000 of an $800,000 NSA budget. After 1962, when CIA’s International Organizations Division merged into its Covert Action Staff, that unit ran the student project.
Later investigation established that the CIA had made operational use of some of the students on their foreign sojourns. One, on an NSA scholarship as an exchange student in Poland, had to be pulled out for fear he would be picked up as an American spy. More frequently the agency simply asked students to keep a watchful eye during their trips and tell what they had seen.
By 1965 NSA leaders were uncomfortable with the CIA relationship. The press revelations of 1966 soured them still more. Shortly before the Times series on the CIA, NSA president Phil Sherburne told his director of development, Michael Wood, of the CIA’s role. Not all were witting—Cord Meyer of the Covert Action Staff made sure of that, monitoring NSA elections, revealing agency backing only to the association president and its vice president for international affairs. When Wood learned of the connection he was scandalized. He first tried to replace the CIA money, contacting Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who did some fund-raising but had little success. Association officials attempted to dissuade Wood, who saw their pleas as bribery. Wood then told others at NSA of the CIA connection and began talking to the San Francisco–based magazine of political commentary, Ramparts. The magazine had already raised eyebrows at Langley with an exposé reporting that the CIA had hired Michigan State University to furnish assistance to the South Vietnamese police. Very much against the Johnson administration and strongly anti-war, Ramparts saw the opportunity to make a powerful statement against covert action by revealing the CIA-NSA links. Subsequent events would test Helms’s umbrella theory of management.
The Johnson administration became perfectly aware of this brewing cauldron of trouble. By May 1966, within a month of the Times revelations, Director Helms sent the White House information about Ramparts and its editor, Robert Scheer. The White House wanted more, and Helms initiated an investigation of the magazine’s alleged Communist ties, using its own files and those of the FBI. There were none to find. The agency reluctantly reported this to national security adviser Walt Rostow.
Cord Meyer, whose name appeared in the ensuing flap, writes of this almost as if he were an innocent bystander implicated by NSA’s irresponsible young radicals. In fact the CIA, before the event, acted preemptively to limit the damage. A special assistant to the deputy director of operations, ordered to pull together the data on Ramparts, progressed to schemes to wreck the magazine. Langley considered asking the Internal Revenue Service to audit Ramparts’s tax returns but dropped that idea. Edmund Applewhite, a seventeen-year agency veteran of literary bent, who had once worked with Buckminster Fuller, coordinated these schemes for the DO. Applewhite told a later interviewer, “I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. . . . We were not in the least inhibited by the fact that the CIA had no internal role in the United States.” Later Applewhite was promoted to deputy inspector general of the CIA and decorated with the Intelligence Medal of Merit.
In early January 1967 Langley picked up rumors in New York publishing circles that a Ramparts piece on the agency and the National Student Association, written by Marcus Raskin, had been scheduled and would focus on CIA subversion of American youth—hardly an image in the democratic mold. About the same time the agency intercepted a letter from an unknown organization, probably contrived, mailed from Vienna, still a spy haven. The letter alleged that the CIA employed someone in the coordinating secretariat of the International Student Conference in Brussels, with purloined documents from secretariat files that seemed to substantiate the charge. The NSA was a Conference affiliate. This permitted Langley counterspy James Angleton to assert that the entire matter was a Soviet disinformation plot. Had CIA followed Angleton’s advice it would have been even less prepared for the coming storm.
Instead Cord Meyer instructed James Kiley, his case officer for the NSA, to turn off the money spigot. At least the agency would be able to deny a current relationship.
On Monday, February 13, Director Helms was in Albuquerque after a long day of inspections. With CIA weapons experts, Helms had gone west to visit the Nevada nuclear test site and Los Alamos, where the bomb designers held sway. Now he got a White House cable ordering him back to Washington immediately. Helms drily writes that this became “one of my darkest days.”
Aides quickly found that there were no commercial flights available, and it took an hour to arrange through Air Branch for a proprietary, possibly Intermountain Aviation, to send an aircraft to take Helms to the capital. On the long flight the DCI pondered how he might have offended Lyndon Johnson, or what else could be wrong. Doubt festered when the White House took hours to return the call Helms put in as soon as he reached his Seventh Floor office. Helms, who liked a scotch before dinner, must have needed several that day.
In fact Helms had done nothing to trigger this episode. Rather, it marked the onset of the Ramparts flap. A week earlier presidential political aide Douglass Cater had been sitting in his White House office when his phone, too, rang. In that case it had been National Student Association president W. Eugene Groves seeking an appointment. Cater, one of the original founders of the NSA—a couple of dozen student idealists who began with a conference at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1940s—followed the group with interest. Now he expected some declaration on Vietnam. Instead Groves told Cater that Ramparts had gone to press with its article. As soon as the man left, Cater dictated a note to President Johnson.
Then the phone rang again, the direct line from the president.
“Well, aren’t you the lucky one,” LBJ drawled. “You let that fellow come into your office and lay a big, fat turd right in your lap.”
Cater well knew what portended here. He had been an addressee on CIA memoranda about Ramparts and Robert Scheer the previous summer, and had himself written papers that circulated within the White House. As a former NSA member he could also see the implication of the charges of student complicity with the agency. Cater rushed in to see the president; Johnson glowered impatiently. Cater argued they ought to use the week left before Ramparts hit the newsstands to prepare a response. Cater made private inquiries and determined that NSA funding had been approved by the Psychological Strategy Board, and that “no one raised a warning or monitored the runaway growth of this enterprise.” Other details of White House activity remain obscure, but the summons to Helms came the day before the flap began—when Ramparts discussed its findings in full-page ads in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and front-page stories in both newspapers covered the issue. As soon as that happened, the State Department held a press conference and confirmed the essence of the charges, as acting secretary Nicolas de B. Katzenbach had explained to LBJ he would do. Reporters caught up to Allen Dulles and asked about the CIA funding. Dulles replied the money had been well spent.
President Johnson never held a White House meeting on how to proceed, allowing the agency to dangle on a limb, but Richard Helms acknowledges that the student association flap was a CIA problem “from start to finish.” LBJ now instructed the agency to cease all subsidies to youth or student groups and ordered a policy review of CIA relationships with educational and private voluntary organizations. Helms read in the newspaper that he would be a member.
Like the Taylor Board after the Bay of Pigs, the 1967 policy review group was no impartial, objective panel. Its members were Helms, Nicholas Katzenbach, who had actually coordinated the public response, and John W. Gardner, the secretary of health, education, and welfare. They met in Katzenbach’s office, Helms and Gardner on a sofa, the acting secretary behind his desk. Helms recalled sharp debate and occasional frost but no hostility. In five weeks they hammered out a policy that the United States halt all such covert assistance but develop a fresh initiative to support worthy groups openly. The National Student Association would be the sole entity mentioned in their report, which noted that “no useful purpose would be served by detailing any other CIA programs of assistance to private American voluntary organizations.” Of course an equally vulnerable target, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, lay behind that language.
Helms chafed at the order to desist from aid to all organizations, but he understood the rationale and believed they had headed off a full-scale congressional investigation by these measures. He would nonetheless be called to testify. Georgia Senator Richard B. Russell, a member of the CIA subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, took some of the wind out of the storm when he revealed that he had known all along and approved of the CIA subsidies.
Gene Groves dismissed the Katzenbach Report as a whitewash, but he nevertheless faced NSA members, demands that he be impeached for the CIA link. Doug Cater came to his own conclusions: “Secrecy has a self-destructive potential which cannot stay the long course, especially when pitted against this country’s passion for publicity.” When the secret warriors took umbrage at revelation of the Laotian war, they had already had two years in which to learn the very lesson then repeated.
Exposure of the CIA role in the National Student Association marked not the end but the beginning of controversy. The agency had no one to blame but itself for what happened next. The media jumped enthusiastically into the fray. Further news stories about the NSA connection obliged Gene Groves to make declarations he would have preferred to avoid while others positioned themselves around the debate. As soon as reporters began to delve into the NSA-CIA relationship they uncovered the bigger story. The foundations that Langley had used to fund the NSA were the same that served as its conduit to the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe. This bit of sloppy tradecraft left two key CIA political action projects vulnerable to discovery by inquiry into the student group. Worse, the cat was already out of the bag: eight foundations CIA used had been publicly identified in congressional hearings several years earlier.
Embarrassed at the time, Langley had not done enough to alter its arrangements. One of Cord Meyer’s subordinates, the chief of his program evaluation group, had pushed for more secure channels but accomplished little. Thus reporters who followed leads to the foundations financing the students almost immediately found CIA donations to Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and other projects. Soon the papers were filled with diagrams tying the Central Intelligence Agency to a variety of ostensibly private institutions—not just the “radios” but cultural groups, the Asia Foundation, and more. Langley had been funneling $10 million a year into labor, youth, and cultural activities overseas. This was major blown cover.
Cord Meyer, who had a tin ear for the politics of intelligence, regarded what happened as an act of unilateral political disarmament but is silent on his role in the tradecraft failure.
The truth is that the Radio Free Europe link had already begun to fray. The astonishment of PFIAB members when they learned of CIA and Radio Free Europe has already been recounted. No doubt knowledge of links to Radio Liberty (RL) had a similar impact. These were huge entities with costs to match—a special assistant to Helms put the annual expense for RFE/RL at $30 to $35 million, with the agency footing 90 percent. Each year RFE held a big fund-raising drive, relying on donated space and air time for advertising, in which Americans were told that without their contributions, efforts to encourage democracy in Eastern Europe could be crippled. Presidents supported these campaigns at CIA’s behest. John F. Kennedy hosted and spoke at a White House luncheon for the RFE campaign on October 25, 1963, his remarks prepared by Cord Meyer, who wanted Kennedy to say that RFE redressed an “imbalance” between a Free World entirely open to Communist propaganda and a Soviet Bloc “largely closed to information and to Western thought.” What Meyer did not wish to say openly had equal significance: a section heading for JFK’s remarks, “Capitalizing on Communist Dissension”—which could have revealed RFE’s CIA propaganda mission—had been crossed out and replaced with “Source of Bloc Information.”
In November 1964 Meyer negotiated dates with Mac Bundy for President Lyndon Johnson to appear at a similar event. At Langley, Meyer and Helms assumed that Johnson supported the radios. But LBJ became restive at participating even before the 1967 meltdown. Some months earlier another of these events got onto his schedule without, as he saw it, his agreement. Because the commitment had been made, LBJ kept it, but on December 20, 1966, Johnson sent Director Helms a note instructing him: “Please take steps to make sure that I don’t get committed on any fund raising projects in the future.”
Then came the Ramparts affair and its further revelations. Under the Katzenbach guidelines the administration moved to sever ties with Radio Free Europe. The CIA wanted to provide RFE/RL a large final payment, but this did not erase the flap potential. On May 5 White House media specialist Robert E. Kintner informed the president that ABC News now had the goods on CIA-RFE and intended to use them. Kintner forwarded a paper from Helms that mentioned CIA’s idea of a golden parachute, which would at least eliminate current funding problems. The CIA argued that the radios were not really private voluntary organizations like the National Student Association but were agency proprietaries working under CIA control—a complete negation of the arguments used to solicit public donations. When the news appeared, CIA’s Radio Free Europe connection garnered wide attention. By November the president had had his fill. After one of his Tuesday Lunches, LBJ spoke privately with Dick Helms.
“I won’t fund those radios of yours any longer,” Johnson declared.
The CIA director, completely flustered, reacted. “You can’t do that!” Helms replied. Aghast at his trespass of decorum, Helms stood mute, then began reciting reasons why the radios were so important. After a few minutes LBJ interrupted and said he would go along if Helms got congressional cooperation without any White House assistance. Helms took on the job.
It took weeks to line up friendly legislators, apprise them of the situation, and enlist their support. Helms then informed President Johnson. It did not hurt that Georgia Senator Richard B. Russell, a close friend of LBJ’s, became one of the strongest backers. The RFE/RL issue consumed almost the entire Special Group meeting on December 15. Using a concept of “surge funding,” the CIA proposed to give the radios enough to last through mid-1969. One unusual aspect concerned how the radios should handle their tax liability with the Internal Revenue Service with their covert CIA income now in the open. The secret war wizards also wanted to preserve the CIA’s role setting policy for the radios. How that could be maintained once Langley no longer funded them remained unclear.
So a new era dawned for the radios. Helms testified for the budgets before the CIA subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He encountered opposition from the chairman, Louisiana Democrat Allen Ellender, skeptical of the effectiveness of broadcasts into Russia, but Senator Russell and other supporters carried the day.
Toward the end of 1968 the PFIAB urged Johnson to push for congressional support of one or more publicly financed institutions that would take care of the “radios.” The crunch came in 1969 when funds were depleted. The last Johnson budget contained new money, but the president cut it, intending to present the lowest overall request possible. Public fund-raising that year, fueled by $20 million in advertising, netted a mere $100,000. The administration of Richard Nixon, with Henry A. Kissinger as national security adviser, were unwavering Cold Warriors and had no qualms about funding. The CIA money did not disappear after all. By this time U. Alexis Johnson, returned to Washington as undersecretary of state, sat on the Nixon administration’s Special Group. He recalls hard work as the group kept track of the “CIA Orphans,” as he calls them, and sent budget proposals to Congress. Johnson believes the Special Group agencies “could have been more aggressive in persuading the Congress to fund some of these programs overtly.”
The Ramparts flap marked a sea change for the agency, ending Frank Wisner’s fabled Wurlitzer. Two years later Cord Meyer went to London as chief of station, his service rewarded by Dick Helms with the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. In 1972 Robert H. Dreher, who had been the CIA’s sparkplug on Radio Liberty, went into retirement.
In January 1971 New Jersey Senator Clifford Case proposed legislation creating a Board for International Broadcasting to oversee the radios. For the first time a government official, not merely the media, acknowledged the CIA link to the radios. Case pointed out that the agency had put several hundred million dollars into RFE/RL without Congress ever formally considering the expenditure. The Case proposal provided $30 million for 1972 and temporary policy guidance from the State Department until the board became established. Hearings before Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee featured repeated testimony from Alex Johnson. Fulbright remained suspicious of the radios as propaganda outlets but could find no malfeasance or other grounds to build an opposition to the legislation, which passed later that year. A funding proposal in March 1972 gave the radios $36 million for that year. The international board finally materialized at the end of 1973.
The 1967 controversies fed public concern about the U.S. government’s use of covert operations and its control of intelligence in general. Eisenhower had established what had now become the PFIAB, and he called it a watchdog group, specifically to head off congressional efforts to substitute a formal oversight mechanism for the secret subcommittees. Failure at the Bay of Pigs led Kennedy to tighten executive controls, but his measures were invisible to the public. Dick Bissell had suggested surfacing the Special Group and describing its role, which would have replayed Ike’s strategy of the fifties, but that idea went nowhere.
Until the New York Times series in 1966, Langley had followed a strategy of attempting to discredit or minimize public discussion of intelligence issues, particularly those regarding covert operations, while promoting its own achievements. Shortly after the Bay of Pigs, author Andrew Tully published a book that portrayed the agency favorably. His work contained information that must have come from Langley, no doubt to counteract the negative publicity from the Cuban failure. The major exposés of the CIA that emerged during that period, Haynes Johnson’s The Bay of Pigs and David Wise and Thomas B. Ross’s The Invisible Government, both in 1964, were each the subject of high-level agency deliberations on how to neutralize them. The director of central intelligence discussed the Wise and Ross book directly with the president.
Perhaps it is not surprising that those few academics and observers who followed intelligence at the time stood for greater openness and oversight. As early as 1958 Harry Howe Ransom had gone on record in favor of a joint congressional committee. Paul W. Blackstock, in his 1964 book The Strategy of Subversion, renewed the debate. Both argued that oversight had become necessary. Blackstock viewed controls as helping legitimate intelligence, part of a process to counteract the dangers of blowback from these activities.
Congress had its own concerns, and some of its members listened to the public debate. In particular, Senators Eugene McCarthy, Mike Mansfield, and J. William Fulbright became active in a renewed drive for oversight. McCarthy introduced legislation for several years running. His best chance came in 1966 on the heels of the Times series. Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, summoned top legislators to discuss the bill in late May. The legislation to create a Senate oversight panel had been favorably reported out of committee. Mansfield wanted to avoid a fight on the Senate floor. Bill Fulbright offered the compromise of setting up another secret subcommittee under the Foreign Relations Committee. If the private citizens who comprised PFIAB could be told all about secret operations, he insisted, why did the Foreign Relations Committee remain out of the loop?
Richard Russell rejected any subcommittee, and the CIA remained strongly opposed to all oversight formulas. President Johnson’s national security adviser told him of the impasse early in June. Mansfield and minority leader Senator Everett Dirksen met with LBJ on June 2. The president resisted broadening CIA reporting to the Senate. Mansfield developed a further compromise that added a couple of members of the Foreign Relations Committee to existing CIA subcommittees. Significantly, LBJ assigned his political aide Harry C. McPherson, Jr., to handle this, not national security adviser Walt Rostow or the NSC staffer on intelligence, Peter Jessup. McPherson asked Johnson to stay out of the matter.
Although advised to steer clear, LBJ, like Eisenhower, worked behind the scenes for the status quo. As early as the fall of 1965 a presidential directive reaffirming the role of PFIAB had been prepared, which, as McGeorge Bundy put it, “we plan to use . . . as appropriate with Congressional leaders when there is any question about our effective supervision of the Intelligence Community.” The paper proved useless when the issue actually arose, because Fulbright and others were angry precisely because PFIAB was being given material denied to Congress. When NSC aide Rostow, who replaced Bundy, told Johnson that an unhappy Fulbright did not understand why Foreign Relations should be denied access, the president scrawled across the bottom of his copy of the report, “Because they leak!”
LBJ backed up the strong opposition of DCI William F. Raborn. A few weeks later, when Richard Helms succeeded to the top job at CIA, advice continued to flow from White House political assistant Bill Moyers. The strategy worked out in meetings and phone calls between McPherson and Senator Russell involved watering down the McCarthy resolution, which lost its provisions for a staff and a budget and action by a certain date, and became merely an addition to the existing secret subcommittee. In response to a further letter from Fulbright, the CIA again refused information to the Foreign Relations Committee. Russell came out strongly against the bill, and once Russell and McPherson determined they had the votes to defeat it, they insisted on bringing it up for a vote. With Dirksen’s Republican minority plus the weight Russell threw into the scales, Senator McCarthy’s resolution was defeated by a vote of 61 to 28 that July. To mollify proponents, Russell invited Fulbright and the ranking Republican member of his committee to sit with the secret subcommittee the following year when the CIA went to Capitol Hill for a detailed presentation on Laos. Richard Helms later became a good friend of Senator Eugene McCarthy.
Following this episode, the CIA’s contacts with Congress increased somewhat: between 1965 and 1974, on the average, the Senate Armed Services Committee received three briefings a year; the Senate Appropriations Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, four. Congressional attitudes were still lackadaisical. The House unit held no meetings at all in 1971 or 1972, while in 1967 the CIA appropriation breezed past both House and Senate after a single legislator visited Langley to observe a rehearsal of the budget presentation.
The CIA took advantage. In 1966 Helms went to Capitol Hill with his deputy director for science and technology and a collection of fancy spy gadgets, successfully deflecting discussion of real issues. Similarly Helms gave the following advice to his special assistant on Vietnam affairs, George Carver, before Carver’s first appearance on the Hill: “Don’t waffle, don’t ramble and don’t guess. When you’re getting into an area you feel you can’t discuss, you tell them. But you also tell them as succinctly as possible the answer to the question they asked. Not the question they should have asked.”
“Oversight” thus remained entirely in the hands of the PFIAB. Clark Clifford’s panel concerned itself primarily with efficiency, not legality. Many of its inquiries during LBJ’s last years concerned aircraft shoot-down incidents in which, as in the U-2 episode, planes had blundered into foreign airspace. Its most prominent postmortem would be that done after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The group did one study of intelligence organization—too late for LBJ to do anything about it—during Johnson’s final months. On covert operations this report said, “the group believes that . . . procedures for the initiation and control of covert operations by the appropriate policymakers are now both effective and flexible,” but warned this would change if permitted to “become a formal ritual.” The report found improving secrecy the basic task since most covert operations that failed had been exposed, and often “highly adverse political consequences at home and abroad” flowed from such revelation. Thus, “If in years past the assessment of the feasibility of secrecy had been more accurate many of the covert activities that were ultimately compromised would not have been initiated and others would have been terminated earlier.” These were pious words indeed in view of the observation a couple of pages later that “it is rarely possible to keep large operations secret for long if at all, and their compromise is usually dramatic.” The ultimate conclusion was that covert operations should be restricted to those that offered substantial chances for success, in which “the government [is] prepared to accept the consequences of compromise.”
By the 1960s a concern with secrecy had supplanted the previous dedication to plausible deniability in discussions of covert action. The presidential advice quoted here is representative of a wide array of CIA and other government commentaries. The Bay of Pigs, the Congo, and other events had effectively eroded plausible deniability, resulting in a stand for a general assertion of secrecy.
The people who made the choices, of course, were the members of the 303 Committee, LBJ’s renamed Special Group. Secretary of State Dean Rusk may not speak for all the principals who participated as secret war managers, but his remarks are eyebrow-raising. “I look back with chagrin at my performance as a statutory member of the National Security Council charged with overseeing CIA activities,” Rusk wrote in 1990. LBJ sometimes called them together, but that happened when their surrogates on 303 could not agree. The secret war, Rusk believes, should have been a focus for “we permanent NSC members—not our substitutes.” Rusk himself never asked to review either, nor did the principals ever draw up the agendas or stop to review “what was actually being done, rather than just consider items placed on the agenda.” The former secretary of state decided that control ought not to be left to subordinates or congressional committees: “We learned the hard way.”
In actuality the 303 Committee’s approach had not changed since Kennedy’s day. If anything, Lyndon Johnson practiced covert techniques even more enthusiastically. Between November 1963 and February 1967 the 303 Committee approved 142 covert action proposals, an average of 5.25 per month. That compares to 4.8 approvals per month from Kennedy’s Special Group. During the decade beginning in 1965 some 32 percent of approved covert actions were for election support in foreign countries, 29 percent for media or propaganda activity, and 23 percent for paramilitary operations or arms transfers, the remainder for assorted projects.
The Central Intelligence Agency professed to believe executive control was strong. According to a February 1967 agency memorandum:
The policy arbiters have questioned CIA presentations, amended them and, on occasion, denied them outright. The record shows that the Group/Committee, in some instances, has overridden objections from the DCI and instructed the Agency to carry out certain activities. . . . Objections by State have resulted in amendment or rejection of election proposals, suggestions for air proprietaries, and support plans for foreign governments. . . . The Committee has suggested areas where covert action is needed, has decided that another element of government should undertake a proposed action, imposed caveats and turned down specific proposals for CIA action from Ambassadors in the field.
This is a carefully circumscribed description, one that suggests more restraint than actually exercised, as the following will show. In addition, the language indicates a fair amount of tinkering with proposals. That represented an effort to bring sound management to covert action, but, as noted elsewhere, it also brought responsibility that much closer to the president.
Although this narrative has detailed a welter of 303 Committee meetings (including those of its predecessors) on a variety of subjects, all pertain to specific covert actions, and while the totality clearly conveys the extent to which this NSC unit managed the secret war, it fails to convey the breadth and depth of the work. A quick survey of 303 business will aid in understanding its importance.
One staple of the work was the joint reconnaissance program. Each month the officials responsible for spyplanes, satellites, De Soto patrols, and assorted other technical collection programs listed the missions planned and placed it before the 303 Committee. Significant modifications were also considered. When President Johnson wished to reveal the existence of the CIA/air force supersonic reconnaissance plane OXCART (SR-71) in 1964, the Special Group pondered that proposal. In 1967 when the CIA wanted to use OXCART over North Vietnam (“Black Orchid”), the group considered that too. No one hesitated to dictate alterations. At a November 1967 session, for example, the 303 Committee changed the date for one “Burning Sun” collection mission and modified the closest point of approach to enemy territory planned for another. Peripheral flights around Cuba, missions over North Korea, electronic intelligence “tickler” flights against the Soviet Bloc, the resumption of De Soto patrols after the Gulf of Tonkin, the Liberty and Pueblo affairs—all concerned the 303 Committee. The project to place nuclear-powered detection gear in the Indian Himalayas to monitor Chinese weapons development came before 303, as did the continuation of U.S. intelligence ground stations in Iran, Pakistan, and Ethiopia. The group did not deal in espionage.
From the beginning of 1967 through May 1968 the 303 Committee handled five proposals for specialized use of submarines, seven for the U-2, eight for OXCART, five for other aviation assets, and eight for scientific or technical collection programs, most in the Far East.
During the Vietnam War the 303 Committee approved similar monthly program proposals for OPLAN 34-A pressures against North Vietnam as well as for cross-border patrols into Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. In connection with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, former NSC staffer Francis Bator recently reminded the author that it would have been a 303 Committee responsibility to ensure that, unless intended, there was no conflict between the 34-A attacks along the North Vietnamese coast and the De Soto patrol taking place at the same time. Records are still not available to answer that question.
The Special Group also monitored implementation of covert programs. In the six months through mid-1968, for example, 303 considered eighteen different status reports on assorted covert actions. During that period there were no fewer than thirty requests for project renewals. A former member who had served on the Special Group told a Council on Foreign Relations symposium in January 1968 that the 303 Committee had been notably deficient in reviewing ongoing projects. These figures seem to bear out that observation.
Several of the status reports to 303 concerned Guyana. In March 1967 the CIA proposed a new covert operation to influence the next election there. The 303 Committee approved the plan on April 7. This included monthly payments to Forbes Burnham, ostensibly to help him with party organization. Delmar Carlson, by this time ambassador, met directly with Burnham as early as that June, and the record of their conversation shows they explicitly discussed how overseas votes in the election would be manipulated, even to the numbers of votes for different parties that Burnham would allow. The record indicates that Washington had a say in this. The United States tried, without success, to moderate Burnham’s behavior. The 303 Committee could have halted the money flow. It did not. Between 1962 and 1968 the CIA spent more than $2 million on Guyana capers. In December 16, 1968, elections Burnham’s party won an absolute majority in the Guyanese parliament.
Approving the consolidated budget for covert operations, an annual exercise, always generated heat. A special issue in the summer of 1966 was the degree to which the White House Bureau of the Budget—Bob Amory, the former CIA man, was chief examiner—could involve itself in the details of the projects, and 303 engaged Amory in protracted negotiations. But the bureau was Lyndon Johnson’s budget traffic cop, and this exchange could end only one way.
White House matters arose time and again with PFIAB inquiries. Some Special Group meetings with the board have already been recounted. In the summer of 1968 the PFIAB asked what 303 procedures prevented it from simply being a rubber stamp. Clearly the board aimed to discover how well 303 reviewed projects, what it learned from this, and what was the practical effect. Judging from Dean Rusk’s comment, the answer could not be flattering.
Specific issues preoccupied the 303 Committee from week to week. In November 1967 the group immersed itself in forward planning for the CIA Laos program through 1969. Ramparts and other 1967 controversies did not entirely close off youth initiatives—in March 1968 the 303 members authorized CIA to run an operation at the World Youth Festival to be held in Bulgaria that summer. A month later the Special Group, back on Vietnam, considered a move to expand CIA’s Provincial Reconnaissance Units. Over the seventeen months beginning in January 1967 the committee dealt with twenty-three projects for Africa, thirty-three for Latin America, fifteen for Europe, fourteen for Asia, and two for the Middle East. 303 rejected a half-dozen. According to a 303 memo to PFIAB, the paucity of Middle East projects followed from the Six-day War, whose aftermath precluded the political action projects that had formed the bulk of CIA’s effort in the region.
Sometimes 303 matters were kicked upstairs to the president. In the 1967 controversies over CIA funding, for example, these items first came before 303. That July, Rusk signaled his desire to bring one to LBJ’s Tuesday Lunch national security meetings. As Dick Helms pointed out to Walt Rostow, Rusk worried about the fallout in Congress if the operation were blown, not the project itself or its objectives. That December Nick Katzenbach told 303 that Rusk “had not been overcome with enthusiasm” for Operation Night Bolt, a scheme to send SEALs to reconnoiter Haiphong harbor. Walt Rostow agreed to take it up at the next Tuesday Lunch.
An illustration of the 303 process exists in the matter of CIA political action in Italy. This program came before the 303 Committee in June 1965. In two meetings that month the Special Group considered another year’s subsidy. Complicated by Italy’s multiparty political system, making necessary a welter of CIA approaches to different groups, sometimes with cross-cutting interests, the secret war managers decided to go ahead. Mac Bundy expressed his private doubts to President Johnson, who demanded a review of the Italian program. Early in August Bundy reported back that JFK had thought the payments excessive, that CIA political action specialists believed the United States was not getting its money’s worth, and that subsidies had been declining for that reason. There had been a spike upward in 1963, an Italian election year. But the subsidies were nevertheless significant, and Italians had been telling CIA contacts they needed a lot more. Bundy recommended funding what the 303 Committee had already approved, with the CIA to tell Italian politicians they would not get more unless they could show the money was really needed and could be used effectively.
When the program came up for renewal in 1966, American diplomats in Italy told Alex Johnson, State’s 303 representative, that another election was coming and could be especially important. Proposals before 303 actually provided a cut of one-third. Efforts were made to structure subsidies so they went to specific recipients for specific activities in support of U.S. objectives. The committee restored the money on the understanding that CIA subsidies would be phased out after the election and disappear by 1968. The 303 Committee approved final subsidies on August 22, 1967. In all, between 1958 and 1968 the CIA’s leading Italian recipients received some $26 million, with another $11.3 million going to other political parties. Total cost of CIA political action in Italy from the 1948 elections to the termination of the program added up to $65.1 million.
Even on a set of projects the secret war managers wanted to eliminate, it had taken three years and a lot more money to close them out. The parallels to the golden parachute arrangements made with the students, the radios, and the Asia Foundation are evident. Proponents could always resort to the argument that CIA assets left in the lurch would be unable to fulfill Washington’s objectives or, worse, might turn against the United States. It remained easier to initiate covert actions than to terminate them, even with tough management. Any weakening and a project would reappear on the Special Group agenda, as happened with Italy. Lyndon Johnson’s successors encountered the same basic dynamics.
Lyndon Johnson had been a president with a passion for domestic policy. Proud of instituting the social programs he called the Great Society, LBJ viewed foreign affairs as problems that came with his job. He was keenly disappointed with the Indochina war, which absorbed ever greater time, energy, and the economic resources he preferred to invest in domestic programs, not to mention the idealism of American youth, which might have transformed the nation. The growth of controversy and opposition to the war ultimately cast a pall over Johnson’s political future. In the spring of 1968 the president decided he would not run for reelection. The strongest candidate in the resulting free-for-all, and the victor in the November elections, was Richard Milhous Nixon.
Like Johnson, Nixon stood ready to use the full potential of his office, even to seize power for it. This has led observers to term these years the era of “the imperial presidency.” Unlike LBJ, Nixon was primarily interested in foreign policy. He was also suspicious of the bureaucracy and wanted policymaking centered in the White House. Paradoxically, though Nixon preoccupied himself with details he wished to be seen as above the policy fray. This made his choice of staff crucial, especially the adviser for national security and his NSC staff. For his purposes, Nixon’s selection of Henry A. Kissinger as security adviser proved inspired. Adept at maneuvers and at fighting in the political alleyways of Washington, Kissinger, a former Harvard professor, became the operator Nixon wanted.
Nixon’s dominance of American foreign policy would be outlasted by Kissinger’s, in the end by two and a half years. At the outset, however, there was no question as to Richard Nixon’s primacy. His remarkable comeback became the prelude to an increased global role for the United States.
From his eight years as vice president under Eisenhower, Nixon had acquired a broad understanding of covert action. He now took command of ongoing projects in Southeast Asia, initiating new ones there, in the Near East, and in Latin America.
Although Richard Nixon learned much of what he knew about leadership from President Eisenhower, there were fundamental differences between the two. Ike tried to be subtle, to work with a hidden hand. Nixon preferred dramatic decisions yielding sensational results. Also, whereas Eisenhower used covert action extensively, Nixon’s efforts here proved somewhat more restrained. In Vietnam, Richard Nixon’s program remained robust. In 1969, for example, a major 303 Committee issue, on which Nixon repeatedly prodded Kissinger and Helms, was CIA initiation of fresh psychological warfare efforts in North Vietnam. But growing controversy, not least over the secret war in Laos, held Nixon back. Covert operations would be initiated elsewhere, however, and Nixon’s reticence about starting them did not prevent him from demanding extravagant results.
Nixon’s proclivities were reinforced by a group assembled by old line Wurlitzer-man Franklin A. Lindsay. Out of the business for years now, at least directly (he became head of the Itek Corporation, a prime contractor for equipment used in U.S. spy satellites), Lindsay took up the reins again briefly in 1967–1968 to lead a study group on the utility of covert operations, their work relevant to whomever might win the elections of 1968. That happened to be Richard Nixon. Under the aegis of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, Lindsay’s group included old warhorses Richard Bissell and Lyman Kirkpatrick, former officials Abram Chayes and Adam Yarmolinsky, and such academics as Samuel P. Huntington, Richard E. Neustadt, Lucien Pye, Roger D. Fisher, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Max Millikin. The group finalized its report in December 1968 and gave it to Henry Kissinger’s transition team.
Dispensing with traditional plausible deniability, the Lindsay group advised the president to concern himself directly with covert operations. In a passage that no doubt resounded for Kissinger, the report advised Nixon to assign a senior aide with direct access to the president to oversee all covert operations. Kissinger in fact got that task in his role as national security adviser. The Lindsay group viewed Richard Helms as an effective CIA director and saw no need to change leadership at Langley—again the course Nixon adopted. On the other hand, it felt the DCI should be enjoined to say “no” more frequently when proposals did not seem viable.
No immediate program changes seemed necessary, except that the group pushed hard for public funding of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. In general the Lindsay report found that covert operations had little capacity to achieve important objectives and were best suited to tactical situations for short-term gains. Costs included the danger that Americans would see their country as engaging in “dirty tricks” abroad, the weakening of American constitutional checks and balances through their being bypassed in these activities, and damage to the international system from the evident U.S. disrespect for the legitimate interests of other governments: “The character of such secret intervention makes it difficult for the United States to justify it and reconcile it with the general principles of international behavior for which we stand.”
Whether these activities were exposed or not, there were risks and costs, the Lindsay report concluded. And it affirmed, as had previous reviews, that large-scale operations rarely remain secret. Nevertheless a major reason to engage in these activities remained the need to do things covertly. The cautious approach here was quite evident. In a 1974 survey ranging over the many examinations of intelligence through the years, the CIA characterized the Lindsay report as concluding there was no need of additional supervision, simply stricter internal controls. Langley’s own study for the new administration made out covert operations as “designed to discredit the prestige and ideology of International Communism and reduce its control over any areas of the world, and conversely to strengthen the orientation toward the U.S. of the peoples of the free world.”
Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms may have been gratified by the Lindsay group’s recommendation that President-elect Nixon keep him on, but in truth the Helms’s appointment was a done deal. After his first transition meeting with Nixon at the LBJ Ranch, Lyndon Johnson pulled Helms aside and told him that Nixon had asked and that he, Johnson, had commended Helms as an effective spy boss. Later Nixon summoned Helms to New York’s Hotel Pierre for a lookover. Henry Kissinger, already with the president-elect, had known Helms since the Berlin crisis of 1961 and seconded the recommendation. Although Nixon did not announce his selection until December 18, from mid-November Helms knew he would be continuing at the CIA.
Nixon reappointed Helms, but president and chief spook were never comfortable together. Richard Nixon’s memoirs say nothing of his opinion on Helms, but there are numerous disparaging comments in Nixon’s conversations recorded on tape. Helms had met Nixon as far back as the Hungarian uprising, when he briefed the vice president before Nixon’s visit to Austria. They did not cross paths again until now. Helms had no illusions: reappointment, he writes, “did not shake my longstanding impression of Nixon’s antipathy for the agency.” Kissinger records that Nixon suspected Helms of being close to circles that included some of his worst critics. That may be true, but in fact there were few people with whom Nixon was comfortable, Kissinger included.
The president intended to keep the CIA at arm’s length, initially even excluding its director from his National Security Council meetings. Reminded that, by law, the DCI advised the Council on intelligence, Nixon relented enough to permit Helms to brief the NSC, after which he was to leave. That clumsy procedure left the principals without answers to any question they thought up after Helms’s departure, and lasted fewer than two months. Nixon smoothed the rough edge by inviting everyone on the NSC to lunch with him after their next meeting. Helms then entered the fold, never knowing whether the president had merely forgotten his previous dictum. Later Helms learned that Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, whom Nixon needed and dared not cross, had issued an ultimatum that the DCI be included. But Kissinger demanded that all CIA material—intelligence, operations, anything—go to the president only through him.
Nixon continued to hold against Helms and the Central Intelligence Agency what he fancied had been their responsibility for his loss of the 1960 election against John F. Kennedy—Langley’s supposed leak to Kennedy on Bay of Pigs plans—and he acted against the agency where possible. Nixon forced the CIA to reduce its overseas staff, eroding its covert capability, and he cut the agency’s budget. Later Nixon demanded that the CIA declassify documents on the Diem assassination and the Bay of Pigs which the president thought might discredit political opponents. When Helms refused, it became another black mark against him and the agency.
But on the afternoon of March 7, 1969, Nixon helicoptered to Langley with Helms to address senior officials of the CIA in the agency’s large, dome-shaped auditorium, “The Bubble.” As is common in such ceremonial pep talks, the president painted the role of the CIA in the most glowing terms. “I look upon this organization,” Nixon declared, “as not one which is necessary for the conduct of conflict or war, or call it what you may, but in the final analysis . . . one of the great instruments of our Government for the preservation of peace, for the avoidance of war, and for the development of a society in which this kind of thing would not be as necessary, if necessary at all.”
Referring to the “call it what you may” war, Nixon said: “I think the American people need to understand the need for this foreign policy option.”
But there was little hope by 1969 that the public attitude toward covert operations would be as permissive as when Nixon had been vice president, before the Bay of Pigs, the Congo, Vietnam, the National Student Association, Radio Free Europe, and so on. The 303 Committee approved continued funding for selected Soviet emigré groups and activities early in the Nixon administration. Then came the Green Beret murder case in Vietnam and revelations of the Laotian secret war. In October 1969 Kissinger issued a directive in Nixon’s name requiring covert actions normally approved by the 303 Committee to be reviewed every year. Two months later, extending Kennedy’s and Johnson’s practice, Nixon reaffirmed that ambassadors were the leaders of the U.S. missions in their countries, to be kept in the picture on all CIA activities.
As became the standard in the Nixon White House, the president’s men then kept ambassadors, and much of the rest of the government, in ignorance of what the chief executive had in mind. Thus in opening relations with the People’s Republic of China, for example, Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, his deputy, made a series of 1971 secret trips to prepare Nixon’s way for a ceremonial visit to Beijing a few months later.
The China secret affected CIA directly. In December 1971 Beijing suddenly released Richard G. Fecteau, one of the agency officers captured back in 1952, as a goodwill gesture. Langley had no idea why this happened, and the second CIA prisoner, John T. Downey, stayed in jail, though with a reduced sentence. When the CIA learned of Nixon’s China trip it begged for help on its other prisoner. At the time Downey’s mother, ill, had little chance of surviving until the man’s sentence ran out. Meeting with Chinese leader Zhou Enlai on February 25, 1972, Nixon indeed mentioned Downey. Zhou commented optimistically on a possible release, though he noted the absence of precedent for this between nations with no diplomatic relations. Nothing happened. By November Downey’s mother had been confined to an old-age home. NSC staff asked Nixon to revisit the issue. The president used a news conference to admit publicly for the first time that Downey and Fecteau had been CIA officers and apologize for their presence in China. Beijing released John Downey in March 1973.
For more than two decades, since the inception of covert operations in Harry Truman’s time, it had been assumed that a certain duplicity went with the territory. This formed the essence of the concept of “plausible deniability.” But the rationale had always been to prevent knowledge of the actions becoming available to the targets, in the case of minor endeavors, or the American public in larger ones. No one ever intended to deny information to leaders in the U.S. government. Propelled by the growing controversy over covert operations, however, Nixon and Kissinger contrived to do exactly that, elevating duplicity to a virtual management principle. Since the inception of the technique, the problem of controlling covert operations had been a thorny one. We have seen the efforts of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Nixon too made his changes. According to Kissinger, the change came because the 303 Committee had been identified in a 1969 news story.
In fact the reconstituted NSC Special Group expanded to include the attorney general John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s close friend and former law partner. Undoubtedly Mitchell joined the Special Group as a personal watchdog to keep an eye on Kissinger, whom Nixon did not entirely trust. Other Special Group members saw little reason for his inclusion. Mitchell rarely spoke at meetings and instead played with his pipe.
Nixon formalized the change on February 17, 1970, in National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) 40. The Special Group became the 40 Committee. The NSDM also rescinded NSC-5412/2 with its anti-Soviet rationale. Instead Nixon’s directive stated, “I have determined that it is essential to the defense and security of the United States and its efforts for world peace that the overt foreign activities of the U.S. Government continue to be supplemented by covert action operations.”
Under NSDM-40 the Special Group was to approve “all” major and politically sensitive covert action programs and the joint reconnaissance schedule, and to review covert programs annually. The review requirement responded to criticisms of the Johnson-era 303 Committee and represented one of the few substantive changes in NSDM-40. To fulfill CIA’s role, at Langley the DO’s Missions and Programs Staff developed the justification and objective memoranda for 40 Committee approval. This staff also became the center for operational planning. A reorganized covert action staff also replaced the previous one in the area of political and psychological operations.
Having carefully set up this framework, Nixon and Kissinger proceeded to ignore it. The most frequent occasions for 40 Committee meetings became those for project review. U. Alexis Johnson, back on the group again, writes, “It is true that during the Nixon administration the President and CIA bypassed the Committee on sensitive topics.” When Nixon gave his first go-ahead on covert arms to Cambodia, he ordered Kissinger to say nothing to the 40 Committee. At the very same time the Special Group had on its plate a similar clandestine arms initiative, to supply rifles to the King of Jordan, so this was not a matter of excluding a certain type of activity. Everyone from the Special Group to the secretary of state lived in ignorance of the Chile initiative called Track II, even though the group considered almost two dozen other aspects of covert action in Chile. Similarly the 40 Committee would not be consulted on the project shortly to be described, a paramilitary effort among the Kurds of Iraq.
Among decisions that can be traced to the 40 Committee, those on collection figure prominently. Overhead and satellite reconnaissance targeting, submarine incursions into foreign territorial waters, and the Glomar Explorer’s attempt to raise a Soviet missile submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean were discussed by the 40 Committee. A project to spend $10 million to influence the Italian elections in 1972, much like the budgets approved for Chile, went through the full approval process, by then pretty much routinized. Another routine function was the approval of subsidies to certain foreign leaders—reportedly half a dozen were on the CIA payroll, including King Hussein of Jordan. Thus it came as no surprise when secret-war managers were asked to approve $20,000 to be handed to President Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who had received certain documents (believed forged) impugning American motives and threatened to break relations with the United States. The 40 Committee was used on everyday decisions but not for the big plays.
Henry Kissinger chaired the 40 Committee. He set the meetings and agendas, assisted by a single CIA staffer. Only principals could attend; Henry was the ultimate arbiter. The first official manual on covert operations, prepared by the CIA in 1972, observed that only about a quarter would be considered by the 40 Committee. Excluded were not only many minor, unimportant operations but virtually all the major, sensitive ones.
One technique Kissinger used to minimize the committee’s impact was to have as few meetings as possible. He liked to poll by telephone on the dubious theory members had better uses for their time. Beyond the question of what could be more important than running the nation’s covert action program, it cannot have escaped notice in the Kissinger NSC that phone calls permitted fewer records to be kept, and allowed Kissinger to take on other officials one by one. Avoiding meetings also prevented the kind of give-and-take that would have allowed officials to realize what was going on. In 1972 the 40 Committee met only once. In 1973 and 1974 it adopted more than three dozen decisions without meeting to discuss any actual covert action program.
The essential activity became focusing covert activity more tightly on exact foreign policy goals. In Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, action continued on something like the old scale, but across the board, spending declined in most geographic and functional areas. Mostly due to Vietnam, the cost of paramilitary operations reached a peak in 1970, but after 1972 it declined even in the Far East. By 1973 the CIA director could report that only 5 percent of the agency’s budget was spent for covert action. At the same time a relatively high proportion of projects—over a quarter—were defined as major operations. How Kissinger supposed the 40 Committee could review every major operation every year without ever meeting can only be imagined.
The Special Group had never been so moribund. This might not have been so costly had other oversight mechanisms functioned more effectively. They did not. The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which Nixon reconstituted by executive order on March 20, 1969, remained the sole alternative. Maxwell Taylor, the first chairman, was in declining health and left after about a year, succeeded by Adm. George W. Anderson, under whom PFIAB became decidedly more political. In the style of the Nixon White House, PFIAB members like lawyer Franklin B. Lincoln, Los Angeles Times magnate Franklin D. Murphy, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and former diplomat Robert Murphy took their concerns directly to the president. In the six years of Nixon’s presidency the board met with the president only eight times. Nixon sometimes convened smaller groups, but at his behest, not theirs. A senior PFIAB official recalls that the board exercised no watchdog function. An NSC staffer of the period observed that in her experience, in two and a half years across the hall she never saw the door open to PFIAB’s suite in the Old Executive Office Building.
The board retained some classy, dedicated members, in particular Gordon Gray, William O. Baker, and Edwin H. Land, who worked selflessly and hard, but they labored in isolation. Gray headed a small subcommittee on clandestine collection. Baker and Land continued to focus on technical issues. Possibly PFIAB’s greatest achievement during this period came in their area, where Baker and Land fought for a next-generation photographic satellite with digital readout capability, opposed by the air force.
Governor Rockefeller headed the subcommittee on covert operations, and there is little indication he ever saw one he did not like. Bob Murphy once suggested assassinating Ho Chi Minh—the CIA rejected that out of hand. (Murphy often played the devil’s advocate, saying things just to see how people would respond.) The aged Ho died late in 1969. Agency officers were highly critical of Murphy. Some said, in a play on the title of his memoir, that Murphy was a warrior among diplomats. Admiral Anderson, a nitpicker, went after the CIA on its Soviet estimates, which he regarded as insufficiently alarming, and put his effort into writing alternative, more somber, papers. Staff thought Anderson’s presence a bad influence. Later additions to the board included California governor Ronald Reagan, who seems to have left no tracks; scientist Edward Teller, very active but held in contempt by Baker and Land; and Texas governor John Connally, who propelled PFIAB into its first-ever study of economic intelligence collection and had powerful influence on the president.
Richard Helms dealt straightforwardly with the board. Typically PFIAB staff would tell Helms before a board session about the nature of the meeting, and the CIA director would come prepared to discuss the subject. Helms showed up with a single aide, in stark contrast to the military, whose generals appeared with full entourages. Henry Kissinger and Gen. Alexander M. Haig usually sat in on PFIAB’s meetings with the president. Kissinger, or sometimes the board’s executive secretary, prepared information papers for Nixon before the meetings.
Richard Nixon used the board for chores that might have little to do with intelligence. Early on the president assigned PFIAB to assess the Russian-designed AK-47 assault rifle against the American M-16. Later tasks included examining the capabilities of the Soviet SA-7 “Strella,” a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, or commenting on a U.S. sale of tanks to Turkey. There would be a six-month-long study of the intelligence failure on North Vietnamese supply shipments through Cambodia. Sometimes Kissinger made the assignments, but he carefully emphasized that he acted for the president. In June 1970 Nixon met the board, opening with a long soliloquy on foreign policy in the Middle East, then asked PFIAB to make an East Asian inspection trip and render a report in the style of those that British consultant Sir Robert Thompson had supplied to Nixon about Vietnam. The board did just that and had one of its smaller group meetings with the president on July 18. Admiral Anderson had focused on military affairs, Gordon Gray on intelligence, Frank Murphy on pacification issues, and Robert Murphy on political matters.
Board executive secretary Gerard P. Burke accompanied the group on this trip. A National Security Agency officer with long service as chief of staff to Gen. Marshall Carter, a good friend of Max Taylor’s, Burke came to PFIAB as deputy to J. Patrick Coyne, whom he then replaced. Burke’s experience had been in the missile intelligence field, and his initial purpose was to give the board depth on its review of the Soviet estimates. Now Burke was pulled into everything. For a time he felt himself virtually commuting to Vietnam since that subject came up at every single PFIAB meeting.
During the 1970 tour Burke sat by the window as board members talked to Lon Nol in Cambodia, and he took notes when they spoke to Souvanna Phouma in Laos. They visited Long Tieng and saw Vang Pao’s Hmong army. Enormously impressed that a war directed by a few CIA field hands seemed to be working while the one led by all the generals in Vietnam looked like a lost cause, Burke appreciated the incredible mess. But there was little time—or staff—to study the issues well on those ten-countries-in-ten-days inspections. The group was unable to look into the Phoenix Program. Gordon Gray studied drug use by American soldiers in South Vietnam, yet the PFIAB remained entirely unaware of drug running by U.S. allies in Laos. A year later, Burke recalls, the board never heard of and did not see the CIA inspector general’s report on the Laotian drug traffic.
The talking points that Kissinger prepared when the PFIAB group returned indicate the White House interest here. Nixon, aside from Vietnam, should ask whether Lon Nol really commanded or if he reflected the confidence of ignorance. As for Indonesia, where PFIAB had met with Suharto and his intelligence chiefs, Kissinger wanted Nixon to ask “On Cambodia, did he [Suharto] emphasize the importance of Indonesia’s maintaining its appearance of neutrality? Or did he emphasize the need to save the Lon Nol government?” Clearly Nixon’s intent here had been to use PFIAB to feel out Suharto’s willingness to engage more deeply as surrogate for the United States in Cambodia.
A May 1972 meeting record shows the board in its more traditional role. Nixon apologized for not meeting PFIAB more frequently. Their conversation touched on the Soviet estimates, on net assessment, on overhead reconnaissance, human intelligence collection, and on economic intelligence. Nixon asked the board to study the capabilities of U.S. versus Russian conventional weapons. Covert operations were nowhere in the conversation. At this very moment Nixon had resumed pressing the CIA for covert action against Hanoi while the agency had moved into high gear on a paramilitary initiative with the Kurds in Iraq.
Any potential the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board might have had as an oversight mechanism on covert operations was vitiated by the Nixon administration’s Machiavellian secrecy. For example, at one point Kissinger himself asked the PFIAB to examine the situation in Chile, where the socialist Salvador Allende had just been elected president, to see whether the CIA had failed to propose measures that might have prevented this. Yet Kissinger then refused the board access to 40 Committee minutes and NSC records that would have shown covert actions had been approved and carried out. The PFIAB review ended right there.
In another instance Gordon Gray supervised an inquiry into U.S. counterintelligence. Closely watched by both the CIA and FBI, Gray ran a full-spectrum review, including visits to key overseas facilities, without encountering the deleterious impact of the hunt for alleged Soviet “moles” that had been tearing apart the CIA for years. Gray’s report contained no criticism whatever of Langley counterspy James J. Angleton, the operator behind the witch hunt. The CIA blackout of PFIAB necessary to achieve that result must have been massive.
After leaving the board, Robert Murphy chaired a presidential commission on the U.S. government and foreign relations. The commission’s overview volume, in its discussion of intelligence issues, included remarks about PFIAB immediately following its conclusion that the president’s role remained crucial: “We believe the Board should play a larger role—the steady, external and independent oversight of the performance of the foreign intelligence community as a whole.” Nelson Rockefeller, who chaired another presidential commission in the mid-1970s, also reported that the board’s role should be strengthened. These were commentaries on their experience with PFIAB during the Nixon years.
Meanwhile Richard Nixon lost his ability to wield power even as he concentrated it in the Oval Office. “Watergate” is an ugly name from the Nixon years, a product of his 1972 reelection campaign. It is important to the CIA because of the participation of Bay of Pigs veterans, not only Cuban exiles like Bernard Barker but CIA officers like Howard Hunt. Agency security specialist James W. McCord, Jr., like Hunt, collected his paycheck at the White House. When the public learned that the CIA had helped Hunt’s White House schemes, had prepared certain psychological profiles of Americans at the request of the White House, and that virtually the same Watergate cast had carried out illegal break-ins on White House instructions, the CIA knew it had a major political problem.
Most troublesome of all, Nixon tried to use the agency to shut down the FBI’s investigation. Langley resisted, but whatever it had or had not done, the inquiries and the drawn-out investigation were certain to damage the agency. Richard Helms designated Executive Director William E. Colby as point man for Watergate matters. Director Helms, during his final months, and Gen. Vernon A. Walters, who held the post of DDCI from 1972 to 1976, spent a great deal of time defending the CIA from White House demands or the Watergate investigation and others that succeeded it.
Watergate, and especially the CIA’s refusal to enlist in the White House political cover operation, provided grist for Nixon’s reflexive antipathy for Richard Helms. By September 1972 the president was telling his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, that Helms had to go. Nixon also spoke of cutting the CIA back by as much as 40 percent. A couple of weeks after Nixon’s victory in the November election he summoned Helms to Camp David. The spy anticipated budget business and armed himself with the usual briefing papers. Instead Haldeman ushered Helms into the presidential presence and Nixon, after awkward small talk, broached his desire for fresh faces. The conversation turned to Helms’s future, and the two agreed on the CIA director’s suggestion that he be appointed ambassador to Iran. Helms recounts that he has no idea why that country popped into his head. He left believing he had won a single concession: the move would be delayed until the end of March 1973, when Helms reached the agency’s mandatory retirement age.
Bob Haldeman records in his diary for November 20, 1972, the fateful day at Camp David, that Helms recommended either Bill Colby or Tom Karamessines as his successor. Except for the Teheran appointment, none of what Helms discussed that day would come to pass. Rather, in early February 1973, among other appointments, Nixon announced his selection of James R. Schlesinger as director of central intelligence. The president had reached outside the agency. And the accelerated dismissal of Helms, which barely gave the departing director time to arrange a farewell ceremony, Haldeman attributed to simple error.
Nixon-era covert operations proceeded despite this political infighting. One nation to feel the weight of Nixon’s covert option was Iraq, especially the Kurds in Kurdistan in the north of the country. This secret war essentially involved the United States doing a favor for the Shah of Iran.
The Kurds were a nomadic people, a loose confederation of some forty tribes who earnestly desired nationhood. They were spread out across the borders of five countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. As early as 1948 a CIA estimate observed, “The mountain tribes known as the Kurds are now and will continue to be a factor of some importance in any strategic estimate of Near East affairs.” Periodically, Kurds had fought the Turks, Iraqis, and Iranians in quest of their freedom—sarbasti in the Kurdish tongue. Shortly after World War II, Kurds cooperated with the Russians to set up a short-lived tribal “republic” in northern Iran. After a 1958 coup in Baghdad, the Iraqi government began cutting back Kurdish autonomy. The tribes took the field in a partisan war in which long campaigns alternated with cease-fires. Mullah Mustapha Barzani, a tribal potentate since 1945, led the main forces. Finally, from sheer exhaustion, in early 1970 the Iraqis and Kurds reached a settlement.
Peace might have reigned except for Iran. The Iranians were engaged in several border disputes with Iraq, including an acrimonious one over the international boundary in the Tigris River, which had changed course in such a way as to put the main shipping channel used by the Iraqis into an area claimed by Iran. The Shah of Iran feared the end of the Kurdish war would bring more direct confrontation between Iran and Iraq. He stirred up trouble for the Iraqi government—by then in the hands of Saddam Hussein. The shah offered money and weapons for Kurds to resume their fight. Dissatisfied with Saddam’s implementation of the 1970 settlement, outraged by an assassination attempt against Barzani, the Kurds were tempted but also distrusted the shah. Barzani would consider the shah’s offer only with a U.S. guarantee that Iran would not cut off the Kurdish resistance. In March 1972 Jordanian King Hussein forwarded Barzani’s request for the guarantee to Nixon.
Teheran had already made two overtures to Washington, and concern grew when a high-level Soviet delegation visited Iraq that April and reached an arms deal with Saddam. In May Nixon and Kissinger made an official visit to Iran, immediately after the Moscow summit where the first strategic nuclear arms agreements with Russia were completed. In Teheran, John B. Connally, another Nixon political associate, told the shah that Washington could help the Kurds. The CIA handled the American side through its station in Teheran.
Kissinger set up the U.S. apparatus for the Kurdish secret war. He records Washington’s goals as raising the costs to Baghdad of controlling Kurdistan, improving Kurdish bargaining power, and convincing Saddam to respect his Kurdish minority as well as Iranian security concerns. Kissinger military aide Col. Richard A. Kennedy met with the CIA and one of Barzani’s sons on the Kurds’ requests. A staff assistant, Alfred L. Atherton, Jr., became the NSC staff focal point. Nixon signed the authorizing directive on August 1. No 40 Committee meeting took place to analyze the project.
At first the Nixon directive provided for covert support of $5 million. The CIA provided $1 million worth of captured Soviet weapons and ammunition, and it remains unclear whether this formed part of the budgeted program or, like the initial CIA arms to Cambodia, occurred off the books. British covert aid also figured. The Israelis were helping the Kurds too, and had been since 1965. Together the three countries funded the secret war at a level of $1 million a month. These involvements were dwarfed by that of the shah. Armed with this assistance, the Kurds raised a hundred thousand partisan troops called peshmerga, a larger force than Mustapha Barzani had ever fielded. They engaged large Iraqi forces, including more than ninety thousand regular troops with twelve hundred tanks and two hundred guns, plus auxiliaries. By October the CIA could report that the Kurds were engaging much of the Iraqi army.
In 1973 the secret war intensified, along with demands for money. That March the CIA proposed an increase—one of James R. Schlesinger’s few moves on the covert action front—which Kissinger backed and Nixon approved. Kissinger reports the shah’s covert aid at about $30 million, and Iran began giving the Kurds heavy artillery as well.
Then the Iraqis joined other Arab states against Israel in the October 1973 “Yom Kippur War.” Two Iraqi armored divisions and parts of two infantry divisions deployed into Syria, almost half of Baghdad’s forces. Henry Kissinger’s description of this intervention is of a piece with much of his writing: in his first volume of memoirs Kissinger puts the Iraqi expeditionary force at one division, about a third of its size. In his last volume, published long after the history of the October war had been well documented, Kissinger reduces the Iraqi force to a single brigade, a small fraction of the actual. Kissinger in fact argues that restricting the size of Saddam Hussein’s force in the October war was an important achievement of the covert operation with the Kurds. But Baghdad clearly discounted a Kurdish offensive at the time of the war. Seeking to take pressure off their own front in Syria, Israeli advisers told the Kurds that now was the time for a big attack on Saddam. Barzani thought this a good idea and asked Washington about it. The CIA opposed any move. On October 16, 1973, Kissinger instructed the CIA director to tell the Kurds not to attack. Barzani relented. Kissinger’s response thus flew in the face of his claimed achievement.
In the spring of 1974 the Iraqis launched a new offensive against the Kurds from more advantageous positions seized a year earlier. Barzani asked for new aid: $180 million to achieve Kurdish autonomy, or twice that amount to build an infrastructure to support independence. Even the lesser amount exceeded the entire CIA covert operations budget at the time. The CIA director—by then Dick Helms had gone to Iran as ambassador, Schlesinger had left, and William E. Colby was the boss—argued against any increase in aid to the Kurds. Kissinger viewed Colby as an isolated voice among a multitude who agreed the Kurds would be unable to defeat the Iraqis at prevailing levels of support. Kissinger asked Ambassador Helms and deputy national security adviser Gen. Brent Scowcroft to develop an alternate proposal, and they came back with a figure of $8 million. Another $1 million in overt refugee aid completed the U.S. package. The British and Israelis (together contributing about $7 million a year) maintained their assistance. Helms helped convince the shah to double his aid to $75 million.
Kissinger accuses the CIA secret warriors of dragging their feet on the program while acknowledging that this moment in fact provided the opportunity for a real review of the policy. Kissinger admits he was too preoccupied with other issues to focus. Barzani and the Kurds, Henry writes, were poor guides, exuberant one moment but warning of defeat the next. The shah, dangerously, had gone to the extent of sending auxiliary troops into Iraq to fight in peshmerga uniform. Then Director Colby warned that Barzani’s headquarters and best supply route to Iran were being threatened by Iraqi advances. Colby advised cutting back—the CIA had already given the Kurds almost $20 million, including more than 1,250 tons of weapons and ammunition. Rather than rethink the program, Kissinger cooked up a deal with the Israelis, who were happy to exchange Russian weapons they had captured in the October war for new American ones, to the tune of another $28 million.
Under unrelenting military pressure from Saddam Hussein’s forces, by early 1975 the Kurds were in trouble. By now Washington estimated that only Iranian military intervention could save them, and that course would require at least two divisions of troops and cost $300 million. The shah had no intention of doing that. In February 1975 he began negotiating a border settlement with Saddam.
For the shah the Kurds were but a single card to play. Teheran and Baghdad bridged some of their differences, leading to a modus vivendi in March. Simultaneously the shah halted his aid, stopped free passage for CIA arms shipments, and closed his borders to Barzani’s peshmerga. The next day the Iraqis began a full-scale offensive.
On March 10 the Kurds sent CIA an anguished appeal: “OUR PEOPLE’S FATE IN UNPRECEDENTED DANGER. COMPLETE DESTRUCTION HANGING OVER OUR HEAD. NO EXPLANATION FOR ALL THIS. WE APPEAL YOU AND U.S. GOVERNMENT INTERVENE ACCORDING TO YOUR PROMISES.” Barzani also sent a personal letter to Kissinger, by now secretary of state in addition to his White House post: “We feel . . . that the United States has a moral and political responsibility toward our people who have committed themselves to your country’s policy.”
Arthur Callahan, Teheran station chief, in forwarding the Kurdish appeals, desperately asked if Langley had been in touch with Kissinger’s office. He warned, “IF [THE UNITED STATES] DOES NOT HANDLE THIS SITUATION DEFTLY IN A WAY WHICH WILL AVOID GIVING THE KURDS THE IMPRESSION THAT WE ARE ABANDONING THEM THEY ARE LIKELY TO GO PUBLIC. IRAN’S ACTION HAD NOT ONLY SHATTERED THEIR POLITICAL HOPES, IT ENDANGERS [THE] LIVES OF THOUSANDS.” Kissinger made no reply. Callahan had not only offered options for a response but argued it was the right thing to do. He was left holding the bag. In Kissinger’s version the station had all along sided with headquarters in resisting escalation and now succumbed to feelings of guilt. As many as 200,000 Kurdish refugees poured into Iran, many of them to be forcibly repatriated. None were admitted to the United States.
Pressed on the abandonment of the Kurds, a senior U.S. official famously retorted, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.” Columnist William Safire became the first to identify this callous official as Henry Kissinger.
In retrospect Kissinger calls the public’s horror over our sordid role in this covert action disaster “another of those episodes in self-flagellation.” But this had nothing to do with narcissistic atonement for the exuberant optimism of the 1960s, as Kissinger goes on. He himself concedes that the pros and cons of the operation “seem much more balanced than they did at the time,” and that “we probably should have analyzed more carefully the disparate motives of the anti-Iraqi coalition together with the consequences of one of the partners jumping ship.” The truth is the Kurdish paramilitary action was pure realpolitik, and it rose and fell on considerations that had nothing to do with the Kurds or their desires for independence and democracy. Indeed, realpolitik was and remained at the heart of U.S. maintenance and development of covert action capabilities.
This period became a time of change for the secret warriors. James Schlesinger, a defense analyst with no intelligence experience other than his work on a management study for Nixon in 1970–1971, first replaced Richard Helms. Schlesinger moved over to secretary of defense after only five months at Langley, but in that short time he presided over important changes.
Within the agency itself, Schlesinger tried in a more measured way to fulfill the president’s expectations for cutbacks. Convinced that much of the dead wood lay in the Directorate for Operations, the DCI concentrated there. Personnel began to fall as about a thousand officers were retired, asked to resign, or fired. Many of these people were paramilitary specialists. The actual reduction amounted to about 7 percent, not the 40 percent Nixon once spoke of. The covert action budget had been in decline since Laos funding had been taken away from the CIA and given to the Pentagon. The old Directorate for Plans disappeared, becoming, more appropriately, the Directorate for Operations (DO). Thomas Karamessines went into retirement with his colleague and friend Richard Helms, replaced as DDO by Bill Colby, and, when Colby swiftly moved up to the top job, by William Nelson, a Colby protégé.
Another change begun by Helms continued under Schlesinger, to be completed by Colby. This was the reorganization of the air proprietaries. A DCI directive in 1972 ordered that Air America be maintained only through the end of the Indochina war, that Southern Air Transport be sold and its Pacific Division immediately liquidated. The CIA divested Air America in stages. The firm E-Systems, a Texas corporation, bought Air Asia, the massive Taiwan maintenance facility. Air America planes and other assets were sold off one by one. By 1975 the parent Pacific Corporation had been reduced to eleven hundred employees. Final disposition of Air America was completed by mid-1976. The CIA expected to realize $20 million from the transactions.
A former owner of Southern Air Transport bid for the corporation and offered $5.6 million. Helms approved the sale during his last month as DCI, and the Southern Air board concurred. But other air freight companies objected, and one offered $7.5 million. Schlesinger rejected this bid. As acting director, Colby ordered final liquidation on July 31, 1973, but the former owner made a further counteroffer. The sale closed on the last day of 1973. There were later repercussions when the owner himself then liquidated Southern Air, violating a contract clause against windfall profits. The CIA sued and won a judgment of $1.3 million, in the course of that litigation admitting its ownership of Southern Air Transport. Ultimate losers were the SAT employees whose jobs evaporated.
The CIA also liquidated Intermountain Aviation in 1973, selling its airfield complex to Evergreen Aviation Corporation. In a clever touch, agency lawyers retained the same Phoenix firm that first took the Miranda case to trial for the legal work on the sale. Because Evergreen continued to do the same kinds of work as its predecessor, including for the CIA, it had never been clear that this was not simply a fresh agency proprietary cover. Evergreen invested some $24 million in the Marana base over the next decades, turning it into the largest aircraft storage facility in the world.
Meanwhile William E. Colby received the nod to follow Schlesinger as director of central intelligence. During Colby’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Old West–style “Wanted” posters sprouted on walls all over Washington. This mimicked a technique used in the Phoenix Program. The posters featured an ace of spades—used by Americans in Vietnam to connote death or killing—within which was a sketch of Colby’s face. The DCI made sure that CIA’s Office of Security did nothing about the posters.
Bill Colby’s agency still had a global reach. But storm clouds were already gathering. The accumulating revelations of CIA actions over the years, many of them controversial, built public concern about the Cold War functions of this agency. For years the public remained quiescent, sedated by the assurances of presidents that the CIA acted in America’s name to support its democratic values and combat the Russians on Cold War battlefronts. Mostly Americans had let it go at that. But the seeds that would bring those happy assumptions crashing down had already been sown. Not only could they not be recovered, but the reaping was about to begin. Colby took over at just that moment, September 1973, and the unraveling began in Latin America.